Rev. Robert Barron, "Reading the Scandal With Biblical Eyes" (Our Sunday Visitor, April 29, 2010), offers three points, biblically-grounded and well articulated:
First, we should not be surprised that people behave badly. Second, the Church has enemies. Third, God regularly -- and sometimes harshly -- chastises his people in order to cleanse them.
[Hat tip to E.E.]
Saturday, May 01, 2010
Abp. John Favalora's retirement & Miami's 'gay cabal'
John Henry Weston, "The Official vs. the Unofficial Story of the Early Retirement of Miami’s Archbishop" (Catholic Exchange, April 30, 2010):
Miami Archbishop John Favalora announced an early retirement on April 20, only eight months before he was set to reach the normal episcopal retirement age of 75. Despite the fact that the Vatican usually only accepts early resignations for serious illness or another “grave cause,” the official explanation given by Archbishop Favalora himself says he is in “good health,” and presents no other “grave reason” for the unexpected retirement.[Hat tip to J.S.]
Meanwhile, a group of lay Catholics in the archdiocese has revealed communications that they have had with the Vatican regarding an alleged gay cabal of priests that the group claims is veritably running the archdiocese, and suggests that this situation is the real cause of the early retirement. The group says that the Vatican has investigated its claims, and found them to be well-founded....
End-of-semester cyber-phenomenon
This time of year, every year, blog hits tend to taper off radically as students approach their final exams and their term papers come due. Among the blog comments I've received today, there was one I had to edit-out because it turned out to be a solicitation from a website where desperate students can BUY term papers on nearly any subject. Sheesh ...
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Cardinal Pujats: bishop's bishop
Thomas Basil, "At Mass in Latvia" (New Oxford Review, April 2010):
Riga's basilica impressed me most, not for its 13th-century antiquity or its gleaming renovation, but for what it signals about its cardinal archbishop, Janis Pujats. Beside his cathedral's main door is a large prolife educational display, including eight photos of preborn babies in the womb. You cannot leave his cathedral without it smacking you in the face.
Cardinal Pujats was around 20 years old when the Soviet and Nazi invasions of Latvia struck. He was around age 35 when armed warfare in Latvia ended. He was around 60 when Latvia again became independent, and 70 when it voted to join the European Union. Pope John Paul II elevated him to the cardinalate in 1998. Forged under totalitarian oppression, the Cardinal seems a man utterly unfazed by postmodern progressive opinion, religious or secular.
In interviews from 2005 and 2007 posted online (here edited for brevity), Cardinal Pujats commented on a medley of topics.
On altars: "We are not hurrying to turn around the altars. When we build smaller churches, even today, I do not have the altar detached from the wall. I do not look upon it as an offense to anyone that the priest stands facing the altar to celebrate Mass."
... On confession: "In many [nations] few people go to confess their sins, but they all go to Communion. I look on this as the biggest mistake that [Vatican II] ‘reformers' have made. When they lifted the people onto their feet it was apparent to me that it would take two generations to get them back on their knees."
And most famously in 2005 on plans for Riga's first-ever gay-pride parade: "An absolute depravity. An unnatural form of prostitution. A sexual atheism more dangerous than Soviet atheism because spiritual values disappear in a swamp of sexual irregularity." In one of history's great ironies, Russia's ambassador to Latvia, Viktor Kalyuzhny, publicly thanked the Cardinal for this statement, stating on the record, "The mortality rate in Latvia exceeds the number of births. [Homosexuality] is not only a matter for the church, but that any normal individual should understand that cheating nature is impossible." Kalyuzhny told journalists that, during his meeting with the Cardinal, "he made a deep bow to His Grace, who practically alone has clearly, openly, and directly [spoken the truth]." Note that this tribute came from a successor to rulers who only recently forcibly occupied Latvia and hated the Church. (emphasis added)
What intellectual converts often experience
David Mills, deputy editor of First Things, writing in "The Anatomy of Conversion" (New Oxford Review, April, 2010), offers an interesting account of how the convert's concerns often shift from debating apologetic questions to discovering a deeper dimension of spiritual understanding. The most exemplary sentence in his entire essay is the following:
(Ignatius Press, 1983); for it really is like wading into the ocean and realizing, as you get about chest deep and could soon be well over your head, that you've been spending your whole life so far splashing about in the shallows.
As I read them [Catholic authors, including the Holy Father], I found that the Catholic answers were always deeper than the questions I was asking.Lest cradle Catholics rest on their laurels, this phenomenon of discovery is something that might be coveted for many of them as well, who may not have begun yet to dig deeply into the treasure troves of resources offered by their Church and her Sacred Tradition. This calls to mind that magnificent work by Christopher Derrick, That Strange Divine Sea : Reflections on Being a Catholic
(Ignatius Press, 1983); for it really is like wading into the ocean and realizing, as you get about chest deep and could soon be well over your head, that you've been spending your whole life so far splashing about in the shallows.
Hans Küng exposé (incisive, amusing)
George Weigel, "An Open Letter to Hans Küng" (First Things, April 21, 2010). Excerpts:
Well, let me add another excerpt so you can catch the spirit of the Küngean disaster (to appreciate the full extent of it, read his own open letter of April 16 linked below). Weigel writes:
A decade and a half ago, a former colleague of yours among the younger progressive theologians at Vatican II told me of a friendly warning he had given you at the beginning of the Council’s second session. As this distinguished biblical scholar and proponent of Christian-Jewish reconciliation remembered those heady days, you had taken to driving around Rome in a fire-engine red Mercedes convertible, which your friend presumed had been one fruit of the commercial success of your book, The Council: Reform and Reunion.Okay, this is the point from which the real exposé begins. Go to the link and read the rest of this solid piece of analysis. It is really more than anything a defense of the Holy Father against the unfathomably stupid insinuations of Küng.This automotive display struck your colleague as imprudent and unnecessarily self-advertising, given that some of your more adventurous opinions, and your talent for what would later be called the sound-bite, were already raising eyebrows and hackles in the Roman Curia. So, as the story was told me, your friend called you aside one day and said, using a French term you both understood, “Hans, you are becoming too evident.”
As the man who single-handedly invented a new global personality-type—the dissident theologian as international media star—you were not, I take it, overly distressed by your friend’s warning. In 1963, you were already determined to cut a singular path for yourself, and you were media-savvy enough to know that a world press obsessed with the man-bites-dog story of the dissenting priest-theologian would give you a megaphone for your views...
Well, let me add another excerpt so you can catch the spirit of the Küngean disaster (to appreciate the full extent of it, read his own open letter of April 16 linked below). Weigel writes:
What can be expected, though, is that you comport yourself with a minimum of integrity and elementary decency in the controversies in which you engage. I understand odium theologicum as well as anyone, but I must, in all candor, tell you that you crossed a line that should not have been crossed in your recent article [Küng's April 16 open letter to the world's bishops!], when you wrote the following:There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005).That, sir, is not true. I refuse to believe that you knew this to be false and wrote it anyway, for that would mean you had willfully condemned yourself as a liar. But on the assumption that you did not know this sentence to be a tissue of falsehoods, then you are so manifestly ignorant of how competencies over abuse cases were assigned in the Roman Curia prior to Ratzinger’s seizing control of the process and bringing it under CDF’s competence in 2001, then you have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously on this, or indeed any other matter involving the Roman Curia and the central governance of the Catholic Church.
... Permit me to suggest that you owe Pope Benedict XVI a public apology, for what, objectively speaking, is a calumny that I pray was informed in part by ignorance (if culpable ignorance).
Tridentine Community News
Tridentine Community News (April 25, 2010):
Congratulations Fr. Patrick Beneteau[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@stjosaphatchurch.org. Previous columns are available at www.stjosaphatchurch.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Josaphat bulletin insert for April 25, 2010. Hat tip to A.B.]
Many readers of the column have known Patrick Beneteau for a long time. As a young man at St. Joseph Parish in River Canard, west of Windsor, Patrick sensed an attraction to the priesthood, in part because of the artistic beauty of the historic church. As he studied at London’s St. Peter Seminary, Patrick grew in appreciation for traditional liturgy, and has become a familiar sight at Assumption Church. Like Pope Benedict XVI, Fr. Beneteau sees merit in both the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Mass, which is in fact the logical view of a priest in today’s Church. His bilingual skills will make him an asset to the Diocese of London, which has several parishes where Holy Mass is celebrated in both French and English.
As of the date of writing this column, (transitional) Deacon Patrick was scheduled to be ordained to the holy priesthood by Diocese of London Bishop Ronald Fabbro on Saturday, April 24 at 11:00 AM.
Fr. Beneteau will celebrate his first Holy Mass according to the Ordinary Form today, Sunday, April 25 at 3:00 PM at his home parish of St. Joseph – River Canard. Portions of the music for this Mass will be provided by the Tridentine Mass Choir from Windsor’s Assumption Church, under the direction of Wassim Sarweh.
Fr. Beneteau will celebrate his first Extraordinary Form Mass this coming Thursday, April 29 at 7:00 PM at Windsor’s St. Theresa Church. It will be a sung Mass (Missa Cantata), with music again under the direction of Mr. Sarweh. A reception will follow the Mass in the downstairs Social Hall.
On Sunday, May 9, Fr. Beneteau will celebrate his first Solemn High Mass in the Extraordinary Form at 2:00 PM at Assumption Church in Windsor. Deacon Richard Bloomfield will be deacon for the Mass, and Fr. Peter Hrytsyk will serve as subdeacon. A reception will follow this Mass as well in the basement Social Hall. All are invited to these three special Masses.
We hope and pray that Fr. Beneteau will become an even more familiar face to the Latin Mass communities in Windsor and Detroit in the coming months and years.
New Pastor Appointed for St. Josaphat ClusterSt. Josaphat and St. Joseph parishioners owe a debt of gratitude to Archbishop Allen Vigneron. His Excellency has appointed one of the Archdiocese of Detroit’s best-known advocates of the Extraordinary Form Mass, Fr. Paul Czarnota, as the new pastor of the St. Josaphat – St. Joseph – Sweetest Heart of Mary cluster. In fact, this column wrote about Fr. Czarnota on April 27, 2008. As many of our readers on both sides of the border know, a high standard of administrative skill as well as support of the Tridentine Mass was set by previous pastor Fr. Mark Borkowski; these are big shoes to fill. As it turns out, it is hard to imagine a better choice that could have been made.
Fr. Czarnota is presently the pastor of a cluster of three churches near Port Huron, Michigan: Sacred Heart Church in Yale, Sacred Heart Mission in Brown City, and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in Emmett. This experience, plus his prior background as an attorney, will surely help him with the administrative challenges of running our three historic parishes.
Since his ordination in 2003, Fr. Czarnota has quietly advanced the traditional liturgy, helping out the Flint Tridentine Community at All Saints Church and initiating a weekly Extraordinary Form Mass in his present cluster at Sacred Heart – Yale. A quick peek at his parish bulletins posted on-line indicates that he recently saved, relocated, and restored an historic altar from the closed St. Helena Church in Wyandotte, thus historic church preservation matters are not unknown to him.
Fr. Czarnota’s assignment to the cluster begins on July 1, a short two weeks before the Latin Liturgy Association National Convention. He deserves our prayers in anticipation of his arrival.
Pope Benedict Celebrates Mass Ad Oriéntem Again
On Thursday, April 15, our Holy Father celebrated Mass ad oriéntem according to the Ordinary Form in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace in Rome. As our readers may recall, His Holiness celebrates an annual Mass ad oriéntem in the Sistine Chapel as well. The Pauline Chapel was recently restored, so it is doubly significant that Holy Mass was celebrated in this manner at a “new” altar.
While some of us would like to see tighter legislation on the liturgy, a picture is worth a thousand words and has its own persuasiveness. If you want to advocate the ad oriéntem posture to a priest or parishioners, you now have a variety of photos of the fine example Pope Benedict is setting for others to follow.
So You Think You Have It Tough?
Think you’ve had a rough week? Consider the following: The organizers of yesterday’s Pontifical Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC had to scramble to find another celebrant this past Wednesday. Though they had been planning this Mass for three years, prudence dictated that in light of a threatened protest, Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos not be celebrant as originally scheduled. As of this writing, another bishop had not yet been found to substitute.
With an EWTN broadcast scheduled and a packed church expected, there was no time to waste. A bishop celebrant was promised and expected. Travel plans had been made for a variety of sacred ministers required solely for a Pontifical Mass. Bishops from Europe were not likely to be an option, in light of the sold-out flights expected post-volcano. How many bishops in North America know how to celebrate a Pontifical Solemn Mass in the Extraordinary Form? Bruskewitz, Perry, and…? Can they clear their schedules at a few days’ notice? The mind reels at the pressure these volunteers were under. They have our prayers.
Beyond the New English Ordinary Form Missal: Other Issues With Approved Translations – Part 1
Tridentine Community News (April 18, 2010):
Much attention is being given in the Catholic media to the forthcoming new English translation of the Ordinary Form of Holy Mass. This column has addressed the topic as well. Overall, the new translation is a vast improvement from the previous relatively inaccurate translation that was rushed into print shortly after the promulgation of the Novus Ordo in 1970.[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@stjosaphatchurch.org. Previous columns are available at www.stjosaphatchurch.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Josaphat bulletin insert for April 18, 2010. Hat tip to A.B.]
The International Commission on English in the Liturgy, which is working with the Vatican to prepare the new Missal, is also responsible for the English translations of the Ordinary Form Roman Ritual (Book of Blessings), Pontifical, Ceremonial of Bishops, and Liturgy of the Hours. The texts it prepares are only authorized for use after the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship reviews them, suggests or requires changes, and finally approves them. ICEL then tightly enforces copyrights on the resulting texts, requiring royalties to be paid by any publisher seeking to use them.
Interestingly, the Church does not have a comparable process in place for vernacular translations of other liturgies, prayers, and rituals. The first and most pertinent example to consider is the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. The Tridentine Mass cannot be celebrated in the vernacular, but hand missals and worship aids providing English translations are essential in helping worshippers follow the Mass. However, there is no formal regulation over those translations. Each hand missal is slightly different from the next. Let us examine just where today’s translations come from.
The ReadingsThe readings are the most straightforward part. Virtually all hand missals and English readings books for use in the pulpit use texts from Bishop Richard Challoner’s 1752 revision of the 1609 Douay-Rheims Bible. Catholics commonly think of the Douay-Rheims as the “thee & thou” Bible. Sentences employing these hierarchical pronouns sound noticeably different from the modern English found in Ordinary Form Mass readings. They reflect an understanding that the members of the Holy Trinity exist at a higher plane than mankind and thus should be addressed in a most formal manner. The Douay was the de facto standard Bible used by English speaking Catholics from 1609 to 1965. Countless prayer books from that era contain supplicative, reverent prayers obviously inspired by the Douay’s hierarchical language.
The transitional 1965 Missal incorporated readings from the 1961 Confraternity Bible, an effort to blend the substance of the Douay-Rheims with more modern English phrasings and non-hierarchical pronouns.
Readings in Ordinary Form Masses are taken from the 1970 (and constantly under revision since) New American Bible in the U.S., and the 1989 (with 2008 revisions) New Revised Standard Version Bible in Canada. To the average person in the pew, the Confraternity Bible does not sound all that different from the NAB or NRSV, and thus it is mostly an historical curiosity today.
The 2007 Motu Proprio Summórum Pontíficum allows for any authorized translation to be used for the readings. Nowadays in the English-speaking world, what constitutes an authorized translation? The simplest and safest answer is, if we are to stick with rubrics from 1962 as the Motu Proprio dictates, we should stick with the Douay Rheims. It was unquestionably the dominant English Catholic Bible in 1962, and its hierarchical language is consistent with the spirit of demarcation between the sacred and secular evident in so many aspects of the Tridentine Mass. The Confraternity, NAB, and NRSV versions each come from a later era and contain more casual wording inconsistent with the Extraordinary Form ethos.
The Antiphons, Graduals, and Orations
Most, but not all, of the Antiphons (Introit, Offertory, Communion) and Graduals are taken from the Bible. The English versions of those of biblical origin are thus also generally taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible.
The non-Biblical Antiphons and Graduals, and the Orations (Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion) present a challenge: Without an authoritative English translation, there is no single source one can go to for a translation. As a result, hand missals differ in their translations of the same texts. For example, for the Second Sunday After Easter, in the Marian Missal (this author’s preferred hand missal), the Collect reads:O God, Who by the humility of Thy Son didst lift up a fallen world, grant unending happiness to Thy faithful: that those whom Thou hast snatched from the perils of endless death, Thou mayest cause to rejoice in everlasting joys. Through the same Lord.The same Collect in the St. Andrew Missal reads:O God, who by the humility of Thy Son hast raised up a fallen world, grant to Thy faithful people abiding joy; that those whom Thou hast delivered from the perils of eternal death, Thou mayest cause to enjoy endless happiness. Through the same Lord.Two hand missals that both use the same Douay-Rheims English text for biblical passages thus use similar, yet different, Douay-ish English for the non-biblical texts. Thees and thous, “we beseech thee”, “graciously hear our prayers”, and so forth, help form continuity with the Douay texts. We don’t imagine that an ICEL-like committee will form to standardize these texts. After all, these translations are not liturgical. They will never be used in the Mass. They are merely aids for the worshipper to understand the Latin that is used liturgically. Plus, there is no particular need to fix translations that are quite accurate to begin with.
Do Muslims consider Obama a Muslim?
Anyone know anything about Jim Murk, quoted in this post about why Michelle isn't permitted to accompany Barak to Muslim countries if he's a Muslim? All I know is that Murk has written two books on Islam, entitled Islam Rising: Book One: The Never Ending Jihad against Christianityand Islam Rising: Book Two: The Never Ending Jihad Against the Jews and Israel.
and Islam Rising: Book Two: The Never Ending Jihad Against the Jews and Israel.
MSNBC sees the light on heath reform
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, AP writer, "Report: Health overhaul will increase tab" (MSNBC, Politics, April 22, 2010). "Could be trouble for Democrats." No kidding. About time.
Related: "Pataki: Repeal Obamacare" (April 24, 2010).
Related: "Pataki: Repeal Obamacare" (April 24, 2010).
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Comedy Central caves to terrorism
You've heard, I'm sure, last week's episode of "South Park" depicting Muhammad was censored by the network in an act of unilateral surrender in the face of violent jihadist threats. See the editorial by the Washington Times.
[Hat tip to E.E.]
[Hat tip to E.E.]
Media's deadly ammunition of half-truths
A retired Hollywood actor and Catholic convert whom I had the honor of sponsoring, regularly sends me clippings about the Catholic sex scandals from newspapers and news magazines -- his only source of news other than television, since he fastidiously eschews the world of computers. I do not know how much help he finds from his priest in sorting out fact from fiction in the daily media onslaught. One feels considerable sympathy for our priests, who doubtless feel besieged and confused by the anti-Catholic onslaught in the media and may prefer to ignore the issue in their homilies. The result, however, is the reinforcement of an unhealthy fortress mentality, where the Faith is increasingly isolated from the issues of the day and rendered irrelevant. Legions of parishioners like my actor friend need answers. Hence, the issues must be addressed.
In the latest envelope from my friend were (1) the Newsweek article by Lisa Miller, "A Woman's Place is in the Church," carrying the banner: "The cause of the Catholic clergy's sex-abuse scandal is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the all-male club?"; (2) the Charlotte Observer syndicated column by Maureen Dowd, "Church's view of women fostered indifference toward children," in which Dowd compares her role in the "misogynistic" and woman-repressing "autocratic society" of Catholicism to the role of Saudi women, "living in a country where women's rights [are] strangled [by] an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men's club than a modern nation"; and (3) an article by Nicholas D. Kristof, entitled "A Church Mary Can Love" (New York Times), which begins with a joke about Mary having always wanted a daughter, and goes on to relate this to the sex abuse scandal in the Church: "It wasn’t inevitable that the Catholic Church would grow so addicted to male domination, celibacy and rigid hierarchies. Jesus himself focused on the needy rather than dogma, and went out of his way to engage women and treat them with respect." (Umm ... that must be why nobody warns against hell and damnation in the New Testament more than Jesus, and why Jesus gave the Great Commission in Matthew 28 to "make disciples of all nations" and "teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.")
The element of truth in the secular media's attack on the Catholic Church is specific: there have come to light, both in 2002 and more recently, cases of sexual abuse and subsequent cover-up by clergy stemming from some thirty or forty years ago. In some cases, the media are to be credited for their relentless investigation in uncovering the facts of these cases and in bringing them to light.
Beyond this, however, the secular media have unfortunately been collectively complicit in ignoring or suppressing other facts attendant to these cases, and then enlisting the yield of distorted half-truths in the service of the subsequent feeding frenzy of unbridled indiscriminate criticism the Church.
For one thing, because of the national media's own complicity in the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian subculture within society, it has studiously avoided calling the sexual abuse what it is: the homosexual abuse of teenage young men. At the bottom of the liberal media's quest for moral high ground against the scandal of sexual sinners within the Church is the masked hypocrisy of its promotion of a sexually promiscuous ethos that would countenance such national organizations as the North American Man/Boy Love Association .
For another, because of the Church's unshaken condemnation of sex outside of marriage, the media have not only reveled in exposing the hypocrisy of those clerics who were caught violating the Church's moral teaching, but also indulged in promoting the widespread impression that the Church's moral teaching and discipline itself is the uniquely pernicious cause of sexual abuse (read: sexual abuse of minors) -- and that such abuse is therefore uniquely widespread in the Church. If only the Church were not an "all male club" (Lisa Miller), an "autocratic society that repressed women" and clung to "outdated misogynistic rituals" (Maureen Dowd), so the suggestion goes, such a culture of child abuse would never have been permitted to develop.
Such incriminating suggestions have been widely permitted to pass in the media for statements of proven fact, despite the ample availability of evidence to the contrary. For one thing, as we have seen already, a 2004 special report by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights cites a study by Philip Jenkins published by Oxford showing that the percentage of pedophiles among clergy ranges up to 1.3% higher among Protestant clergy than Catholic.
For another, as George Weigel has repeatedly pointed out, the Catholic Church had already begun to address the problems of sexual abuse seriously in the early 1990s, then accelerated its efforts to discipline abusers and to create safe environments for young people throughout American Catholicism. And those measures have worked. He writes: "There are 68 million Catholics in the United States, and there were only six credible reports of the sexual abuse of a young person in the Church last year; that is, of course, six too many, but it completely falsifies the picture the press has painted of an ongoing crisis of sexual abuse and cover-up in the Catholic Church in the U.S."
For another, if the media's concern here were really for abused children, then why their deafening silence about the rampant sexual abuse of children in the field of elementary and secondary school education where women rank prominently in administrative roles? The Catholic League's Special Report cites a 1991 study by Shakeshaft and Cohan, In loco parentis: Sexual abuse of students in schools, (What administrators should know), for the U.S. Department of Education, whose findings are astounding. In their study of 225 cases of educator sexual abuse in New York City, "all of the accused admitted sexual abuse of a student, but none of the abusers was reported to the authorities, and only 1 percent lost their license to teach." Shakeshaft determined that "15 percent of all students have experienced some kind of sexual misconduct by a teacher between kindergarten and 12th grade," ranging "from touching to forced penetration." Since the publication of the Catholic League's report, Shakeshaft has released the findings of a vast study undertaken for the Planning and Evaluation Service Office of the Undersecretary, U.S. Department of Education, titled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct with Students: A Synthesis of Existing Literature on Prevalence in Connection with the Design of a National Analysis" (PDF) (2004).
These ample facts, however, are conveniently ignored by the media.
It used to be the case that one could rely on the news media to reasonably report facts, and to distinguish such reporting from editorial opinion. If the myth of pure, presuppositionless objectivity could not be sustained in the news, at least one could count on reporters -- and editors -- to be even handed and fair minded in dealing with the facts. Clearly that day is long passed. The news media have rapidly fallen into the hands of those bent on employing them exclusively as instruments of partisanship, regardless of costs in fidelity to truth. This was seen amply during the last U.S. Presidential Election. We now see it in the attacks being mounted against the Church.
The Church cannot afford to ignore these attacks. Catholic laity, for its part, cannot afford to assume that the burden of responding to such attacks should be the borne by priests and bishops alone. Such an assumption stems from a debilitating clericalism that conveniently excuses the laity from their responsibility in this battle. The Church is not just the clergy. This goes without saying. All Catholics comprise the Church. The Church is now embattled on every side by those who employ the deadly ammunition of half-truths. The battle must be met by those who care for truth.
Related: T. Matt, "Abuse of a ‘boy’ or a ‘young man’?" (GetReligion.org, April 24, 2010): "Pedophilia is very, very rare among Catholic clergy. Ephebophilia is what is taking place — overwhelmingly."
[Hat tip to J.M. for the 'Related' item]
In the latest envelope from my friend were (1) the Newsweek article by Lisa Miller, "A Woman's Place is in the Church," carrying the banner: "The cause of the Catholic clergy's sex-abuse scandal is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the all-male club?"; (2) the Charlotte Observer syndicated column by Maureen Dowd, "Church's view of women fostered indifference toward children," in which Dowd compares her role in the "misogynistic" and woman-repressing "autocratic society" of Catholicism to the role of Saudi women, "living in a country where women's rights [are] strangled [by] an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men's club than a modern nation"; and (3) an article by Nicholas D. Kristof, entitled "A Church Mary Can Love" (New York Times), which begins with a joke about Mary having always wanted a daughter, and goes on to relate this to the sex abuse scandal in the Church: "It wasn’t inevitable that the Catholic Church would grow so addicted to male domination, celibacy and rigid hierarchies. Jesus himself focused on the needy rather than dogma, and went out of his way to engage women and treat them with respect." (Umm ... that must be why nobody warns against hell and damnation in the New Testament more than Jesus, and why Jesus gave the Great Commission in Matthew 28 to "make disciples of all nations" and "teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.")
The element of truth in the secular media's attack on the Catholic Church is specific: there have come to light, both in 2002 and more recently, cases of sexual abuse and subsequent cover-up by clergy stemming from some thirty or forty years ago. In some cases, the media are to be credited for their relentless investigation in uncovering the facts of these cases and in bringing them to light.
Beyond this, however, the secular media have unfortunately been collectively complicit in ignoring or suppressing other facts attendant to these cases, and then enlisting the yield of distorted half-truths in the service of the subsequent feeding frenzy of unbridled indiscriminate criticism the Church.
For one thing, because of the national media's own complicity in the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian subculture within society, it has studiously avoided calling the sexual abuse what it is: the homosexual abuse of teenage young men. At the bottom of the liberal media's quest for moral high ground against the scandal of sexual sinners within the Church is the masked hypocrisy of its promotion of a sexually promiscuous ethos that would countenance such national organizations as the North American Man/Boy Love Association .
For another, because of the Church's unshaken condemnation of sex outside of marriage, the media have not only reveled in exposing the hypocrisy of those clerics who were caught violating the Church's moral teaching, but also indulged in promoting the widespread impression that the Church's moral teaching and discipline itself is the uniquely pernicious cause of sexual abuse (read: sexual abuse of minors) -- and that such abuse is therefore uniquely widespread in the Church. If only the Church were not an "all male club" (Lisa Miller), an "autocratic society that repressed women" and clung to "outdated misogynistic rituals" (Maureen Dowd), so the suggestion goes, such a culture of child abuse would never have been permitted to develop.
Such incriminating suggestions have been widely permitted to pass in the media for statements of proven fact, despite the ample availability of evidence to the contrary. For one thing, as we have seen already, a 2004 special report by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights cites a study by Philip Jenkins published by Oxford showing that the percentage of pedophiles among clergy ranges up to 1.3% higher among Protestant clergy than Catholic.
For another, as George Weigel has repeatedly pointed out, the Catholic Church had already begun to address the problems of sexual abuse seriously in the early 1990s, then accelerated its efforts to discipline abusers and to create safe environments for young people throughout American Catholicism. And those measures have worked. He writes: "There are 68 million Catholics in the United States, and there were only six credible reports of the sexual abuse of a young person in the Church last year; that is, of course, six too many, but it completely falsifies the picture the press has painted of an ongoing crisis of sexual abuse and cover-up in the Catholic Church in the U.S."
For another, if the media's concern here were really for abused children, then why their deafening silence about the rampant sexual abuse of children in the field of elementary and secondary school education where women rank prominently in administrative roles? The Catholic League's Special Report cites a 1991 study by Shakeshaft and Cohan, In loco parentis: Sexual abuse of students in schools, (What administrators should know), for the U.S. Department of Education, whose findings are astounding. In their study of 225 cases of educator sexual abuse in New York City, "all of the accused admitted sexual abuse of a student, but none of the abusers was reported to the authorities, and only 1 percent lost their license to teach." Shakeshaft determined that "15 percent of all students have experienced some kind of sexual misconduct by a teacher between kindergarten and 12th grade," ranging "from touching to forced penetration." Since the publication of the Catholic League's report, Shakeshaft has released the findings of a vast study undertaken for the Planning and Evaluation Service Office of the Undersecretary, U.S. Department of Education, titled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct with Students: A Synthesis of Existing Literature on Prevalence in Connection with the Design of a National Analysis" (PDF) (2004).
These ample facts, however, are conveniently ignored by the media.
It used to be the case that one could rely on the news media to reasonably report facts, and to distinguish such reporting from editorial opinion. If the myth of pure, presuppositionless objectivity could not be sustained in the news, at least one could count on reporters -- and editors -- to be even handed and fair minded in dealing with the facts. Clearly that day is long passed. The news media have rapidly fallen into the hands of those bent on employing them exclusively as instruments of partisanship, regardless of costs in fidelity to truth. This was seen amply during the last U.S. Presidential Election. We now see it in the attacks being mounted against the Church.
The Church cannot afford to ignore these attacks. Catholic laity, for its part, cannot afford to assume that the burden of responding to such attacks should be the borne by priests and bishops alone. Such an assumption stems from a debilitating clericalism that conveniently excuses the laity from their responsibility in this battle. The Church is not just the clergy. This goes without saying. All Catholics comprise the Church. The Church is now embattled on every side by those who employ the deadly ammunition of half-truths. The battle must be met by those who care for truth.
Related: T. Matt, "Abuse of a ‘boy’ or a ‘young man’?" (GetReligion.org, April 24, 2010): "Pedophilia is very, very rare among Catholic clergy. Ephebophilia is what is taking place — overwhelmingly."
[Hat tip to J.M. for the 'Related' item]
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Japan's lost generation
The publisher's comments on Michael Zielenziger's 2006 book, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation(rpt., Vintage, 2007), read:The world’ s second-wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Equally as troubling are the more than one million young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from society, and the growing numbers of “parasite singles,” the name given to single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children.Reading this is very sad indeed. While Japan -- where I grew up and visited last in 2005 -- still outwardly retains a clear continuity with her past, I have heard from many friends and acquaintances who continue to reside there that the younger generation has, in many respects, lost its way. If earlier generations failed to embrace the Light of Christ (less than 0.1% are practicing Christians of any kind), they at least had the sense of identity that comes from being a unique people with strong national and moral traditions informed by Confucian, Shinto and Buddhist sources. The stalwart moral character and generous spirit of the Japanese people was noted by St. Francis Xavier when he arrived there in 1549, and these traits were very much alive in the Japanese during my childhood. I would insist that they are very much in evidence still. Yet among the younger generation they have been sharply eroded, and nothing has effectively filled the void. Pray for Japan and her people. In the Lord's Providence, I am inclined to think that they are destined still to play a major role in the international community for decades to come.
In Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger argues that Japan’s rigid, tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality and the expression of self are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution. Giving a human face to the country’s malaise, Zielenziger explains how these constraints have driven intelligent, creative young men to become modern-day hermits [the term used by the Japanese is "Hikikomori"]. At the same time, young women, better educated than their mothers and earning high salaries, are rejecting the traditional path to marriage and motherhood, preferring to spend their money on luxury goods and travel.
Related: Phil Rees already reported on the phenomenon of Hikikomori back in 2002 in "Japan: The Missing Million" (BBC, October 20, 2002).
[Hat tip to A.S.]
Islamification of Brussells, Belgium
You've heard of "regime change." Something analogous, I suppose, might be called "population displacement." Citing the Belgium weekly Le Vif/L'Express, Mark Steyn writes (April 21, 2010) posts this quote: "Brussels, overwhelmingly Muslim in 20 years? It can't be totally ruled out... Today, families with children - 'Whites' and of the middle class - are leaving the 19 municipalities of the Brussels Region, attracted by the convenience and low prices of the Walloon Brabant, Flemish Brabant and Hainaut provinces. The birth rates of immigrants, which is slightly higher than that of natives, and the international immigration (mainly through family reunification), compensate for this exodus and reinforces it. In reality, Brussels is experiencing what French demographer Michèle Tribalat calls a "process of demographic substitution". One population replaces another."
[Hat tip to S.K.]
[Hat tip to S.K.]
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