Sooo wiped out. I arrived at 9pm to my hotel across from the convention center where the American Academy of Religion annual meeting is being held in Montreal, after leaving my Milwaukee apartment at 6:30am. It's been a long day. I just ate some room service food and I'm about ready to keel over. That said, though, I did enjoy the travel in many ways. My schedule has just been so busy that, even though I was being carted around the country, I felt like I sat down and was still through this day more than I have been in a long time. I worked my way through the AAR schedule for the first time, checking out sessions I might like to attend, if I can get much time away from interviews at the Job Center. Looking out the window while coming in to land at LaGuardia, I saw Lady Liberty and Manhattan for the first time since flying down the Hudson to transfer at Newark on my way back from Ireland in April 1999. I also saw part of the grounds of the 1939 World's Fair, which totally took me by surprise. Sitting in LaGuardia, waiting an hour and a half for my flight to Montreal (after an earlier four hour layover at O'Hare, the monotony of which was only broken up by a payphone call to Sophie [who nodded, apparently, more than talked], Leslie and Mom), I realized that that was my first time actually being in New York City, although I'm inclined to say it doesn't count, since I didn't actually get outside.

Cleaning out my jacket pockets of old oddments of paper, I found a flyer I had been handed with my ticket for Over The Rhine last month, and had never really seen. I was utterly dismayed to discover that last Sunday, The Swell Season played the Pabst Theatre. The Swell Season are Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the duo from the incredible film Once, which I wrote about some months back. Seeing their show would have made a good dual birthday present for Dan and Amy, Amy having gifted me with the DVD for my own birthday, some time after I had shown them my borrowed copy of the film. Anyway. Arg! Double Arg!

Starting from my departure from O'Hare, I then worked my way through the latest issue of Commonweal, the 85th anniversary issue, which was perfectly engaging. There were great book reviews to read (Eamon Duffy's latest, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, sounds fascinating, and I was almost equally intrigued by Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. The article entitled "The Tightrope: Loyalty, Independence & the Catholic Press," by John Wilkins former editory of the London Tablet, was perhaps the best thing I've read on the need for an independent Catholic press.

Sidney Callahan wrote a column about a 1973 letter from Dorothy Day which she had recently re-discovered while cleaning out her old files while moving. There was a passage quoted I found fascinating, because of certain heretic suspicions I've been harbouring the last few years. Although I was raised in a household headed by a strong woman, making me assume that ideas like "equal pay for equal work" were just matters of simple justice and common sense, and although my education had me take the arguments of ideological feminism as equally simple matters-of-fact, I have increasingly come to suspect that feminism as a school of thought caused very little of the women's revolution of the 20th century, no matter how much it took credit for it. (Not unlike the Enlightenment philosophers virtually taking credit for the scientific revolution.) The more I look at social history, the more the worldwide shift in the status and opportunities for women seems to me to have been driven by the technological shifts in the 20th century. Thus my interest to read Day, who lived through all this as a most exceptional and aware woman, write, inviting Callahan to come to New York and speak on women's lib:

I feel badly at seeing formerly happy women friends, bitter and angry at all they have suddenly discovered they have suffered. And they get angry for me for not being angry.... Isn't anger a sin?

The women's history I have been particularly working on (and may design a course regarding) is medieval women's history, as background to looking at medieval women mystics, like Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, and Catherine of Siena. Reading the great French medievalist Regine Pernoud, I was struck by how far the status of women had come by the High Middle Ages, and how much of that was quickly lost in early modernity with the embrace of Roman legal codes out of the Renaissance. But I was equally struck by Pernoud's accounts of contemporary women's resistance to these facts, and the realization that the ideological articulation of feminism in the later 20th century was willing to effectively denigrate actual women's history in order to preserve its own personal narrative as the ideological liberator of women. That's all too sweeping and over-stated, I'm sure, but that sort of thing was the first real insight that I had into 1960s-1970s feminism as not just a political or social movement, but as an ideological narrative. Of course, there is no single "feminism" any more, but it is interesting to see in Day a woman who was very much at the "cutting edge" of anything like the 20th century's movement for social justice for women, but who also recognized that period's feminist narrative as a particular narrative and declined to just sign off on the whole of it in the way most people did. Anyway, I'm so interested in the way ideas do drive events that I have to be extra-careful to watch for these other kinds of causal components in history.

Coming into Montreal, the city was all lite up, with the high-rise downtown impressively glowing like all big cities at night. I saw Saint Joseph's Oratory, all solemn and subdued on the far side of the big hill in the center of town, and remembered Chris Cox, CSC telling me my first stories of Brother Andre, back during my first year at Notre Dame, walking over to Moreau Seminary after a football game. I don't think I'll be able to make it over there, but it would be kind of flooring to see the walls lined with crutches and wheelchairs and all the tangible remains of people gifted with all the strange healings reported in his company.

Off to bed. Amen.

An interesting piece of analysis from John Allen. I'm not sure if he's right, but it's interesting nevertheless.

From Italy to Iran, voters hand the church a mandate on Islam
By John L Allen Jr
Created Jun 12, 2009

Early summer is campaign season in various corners of the world, including parliamentary races last week in the European Union and in Lebanon and today's hotly contested presidential race in Iran. Taking stock of it all, a grand irony emerges: While moderates appear to be gaining ground in the Islamic world, hardliners are on the march across the Old Continent.

Obviously the Catholic church wasn't a party to these contests, but voters from Italy to Iran may have unwittingly handed Catholicism a mandate anyway: To prevent new hostility in Europe from derailing the long-awaited rise of the Islamic center.

In news-ticker fashion, here's the rundown. The pro-Western "March 14 coalition" scored a decisive victory in Lebanon's parliamentary vote last Sunday. While it wasn't yet clear at press time how things would shake out in Iran, reform-minded challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi was giving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a run for his money. Meanwhile in Europe, traditional center-right parties got the most votes, but the biggest gains came on the far right. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islamic Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, who once called the Qur'an "fascist," finished a strong second. Like-minded parties did well in Britain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Finland and Denmark, blending skepticism about the EU with an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim message.

( Read more... )

An interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about the restoration of an urban Jersey parish. I guess this really strikes me because it plugs into much of the vision of the Church that I'm working on in my dissertation. That work has got me quite curious and concerned about how local priest are (or are not?) being trained in their seminary education to cultivate the spiritual gifts of the laity, and not just being made to focus on cultivating their own spiritual gifts. In other words, are they being made simply into leaders, or are they being made into those who will cultivate and raise up the leadership potential in those they lead, leadership potential of other sorts that the ministerial priesthood?

Rebuilding a parish, pastor comes to love people more
Jersey City, N.J.

Our Lady of Czestochowa Church was packed for the 12:30 Mass on Mother's Day. Four families waited at the rear of the church with their infants who were to be baptized. In the congregation, there were dozens of young families with young children and scores of young singles.

Fr. Tom Iwanowski looked out familiarly on a congregation whose primary membership is made up of people between the ages of 25 and 50, a demographic that most religious leaders would covet. In little more than a month he would be moving on from this community where he had arrived 14 years ago, at the request of the previous archbishop of Newark, with the simple mandate to "go and change the direction of the parish."

Change it he did.

The story of the transformation of OLC, or Our Lady of the Waterfront, both tags now popularly used to refer to the Jersey City parish, is a tale simultaneously of how disruptive change can be, of the ease with which the Vatican's attention can be turned toward relatively unimportant local matters by a vocal minority, of the professional skills and enormous work it takes to be a successful pastor today and of the arbitrary nature of Catholic existence where the character and work of a community can be undone in an instant.

That latter point was perhaps the most compelling matter the day of my visit. It hung over everything. What will happen, was the prevailing question, when Fr. Tom leaves?

The question was probably much the same for the few Poles who still inhabited the parish 14 years ago: What will happen when we get the new guy?

( Read more... )

Mom wrote and asked me about what I thought about all the controversy regarding President Obama's addressing the graduating seniors at the University of Notre Dame. I hadn't consciously articulated my thoughts until she asked, but now that I have, I thought that I would just copy it all down here. I would preface my comments by reassuring or informing anyone who found them objectionable from a Catholic perspective that I'm twice as orthodox as they are and am willing to prove it in public, internationally-televised debate, and that I can successfully do so with two glasses of wine on an empty stomach in my system, which proves both that I'm a notorious lightweight and that I am so orthodox that I'm willing to invoke Paul and foolishly boast about it because it's so true that I don't have anything to gain or to prove from it. That's my response to anyone whose most beloved rhetorical strategy is to deny the faith of anyone who disagrees with them, which has been more embarrassing in all this affair than anything having to do with the actual invitation to President Obama. So, as I wrote to Mom:

The Notre Dame thing is more irritating to me than anything else. It's a kind of short-sightedness that I find sometimes irritating or sometimes just disappointing. The same thing happened with Bush in 2001, but I don't know that that was made into such a big deal by the press, perhaps because the press felt any protest regarding Bush was part of the natural order of things. I call it short-sighted because I think it's an illusion at best that anyone would expect a President of the United States to perfectly line up with Catholic teaching. There are a number of things in the party platforms of both Democrats and Republicans that are utterly opposed to Catholic ethics, so this should be no surprise. Even someone perceived to be as politically "Right" as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, publisher of First Things, had warned those around him that they ought to always expect the Republican Party to betray them, despite the current seeming alignment of Republican interests with some of the concerns of his circle. In the same way, when you were younger, it was taken as a matter of simple fact that the Democratic Party, the party of the "little guy," was the party that Catholics and Evangelical were going to be naturally aligned with. But then came the shift of the "New Left" in the 1968-73 period when what it meant to be "Left" in the Democratic leadership underwent an astonishing ideological transformation, not least in its new hostility to religious belief and expression. The Republican Party in the late 1970s made a conscious and concerted effort to pick up the Evangelicals as a voting block, with great success. Since the 2004 Presidential election, the political Right has gone back to that playbook and has been making a major effort to do the same thing with Catholic Americans, though not with such visible success, except among some bishops who ought to be a bit more circumspect and clever about the extent to which they are being used for partisan politics.

The basic political issue, both in the Notre Dame snafu and in the past several years, is of course abortion. Because human life in particular is held to be sacred, with each human being possessing the dignity of being the image and likeness of God, a human rights ethic that has any consistency includes an opposition to abortion. This has been the case in Christian teaching since the late first century, when we see the topic first addressed explicitly, or in parallel secular ethics like in the unedited version of the Hippocratic Oath, where ancient physicians of that school swore to protect life even in its earliest stages. With respect to the sketch of the political context of this Notre Dame debate that I just gave, I have seen very little evidence that the leadership of the Republican Party is interest in pursuing the abortion issue as a priority beyond using it for the gathering of a voting block: a few rallying cries during elections, blocking the use of American funds to commit abortions overseas, sure, but nothing beyond that. There has been nothing like the forcing of the issue in the way the Abolitionists did in the lead-up to the Civil War.

The shape and nature of the argument involved in all of this has great significance. The logic used to justify the act of abortion itself, that the undeveloped fetus is not yet a "person," is a philosophical logic. That the fetus is human and is alive is a simple matter of genetics. People who debate using that language are just being sloppy. The question of "personhood," or of "humanity" as a philosophical concept, is more hazy. But Catholic ethics has increasingly become sensitive to the use of this argument through history, where invoking the debatable nature of someone else's humanity ("so-and-so isn't really human": no one has ever used this argument with regard to their own humanity) has been the justification for every other atrocity that people now repudiate. We pride ourselves on being the sort of people who would never have done that awful thing, whether against Jews, Africans, Native Americans, Cambodians, Rawandans, Sudanese, whoever. But it seems significant that the logic and the shape of the argument is the same. Catholics led the opposition to legalized abortion when it became an issue in the United States and when it culminated in the Roe v. Wade decision at the same time as that hard Secularist shift in the Left. So abortion has in many ways been popularly perceived as a particularly "Catholic" issue by those on both sides of the argument. Within Catholicism, this has become as much a "litmus test" issue as it has by those supporting the idea of a right to abortion, who throw their support behind anything even perceived to have anything to do with abortion, such as recent debates over the use of fetal stem cells in medical research. (The logic being that if any ethical qualms are shown here, it amount to becoming too close to admitting that unborn human beings have political and human rights, and so therefore no ethical concerns can be allowed to be raised on this issue. If you look at the lobbying groups supporting such research, it is abortion-rights groups that lead the way: "science" as such has very little to do with the politics.)

For those opposing President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame, the assumption is that any perceived acceptance or honouring of Obama as President is tantamount to an endorsement of his position as a supporter of abortion. This is, of course, foolish. That argument, extended logically, would imply that any recognition of the authority of the government of the United States implies an endorsement of its current policies. This is the exact opposite of what a democracy entails, of course, where everyone can cheerfully oppose the policies of their government without recourse to succession or civil war: one just has to convince their fellows to follow another course during the next general election, and thus we have revolution without bloodshed. So the basic argument against recognizing President Obama in this way falls apart. Notre Dame has recognized and received a number of Presidents over the years, every last one of which can be found to be in violation of Catholic ethical principles on one point or another. (Whether President Obama's choice of accepting the Notre Dame invitation over the hundreds of other commencement invitations he has received is driven by any particular political agenda is not a question I'll bother to consider here.)

But, say those who push this point, the abortion question is a special one: it is a fundamental crime against humanity to kill those least capable of defending themselves, depriving them of the chance to achieve any potential in their lives. They point out that John Paul II highlighted the particularly egregious nature of this act as perhaps the most fundamental violation of human rights that we have ever committed. All true. If so, that raises the question of complicity again. We are either complicit in aiding and abetting our society's support of abortion or we are not. Honouring a President who supports the idea of abortion rights, they argue, creates a tacit support that is incompatible with being Catholic. Myself, I cannot accept this argument, for the reasons described above. If their argument is true, these people are also aiding and abetting abortion by remaining citizens of the United States and by recognizing the legitimacy of this administration. To be truly consistent, their options could only be emigration, revolution, or utter non-recognition of the government in a state of permanent civil disobedience, probably no matter whose administration is currently running the show. Any position other than these seems to me to be opportunistic and disingenuous, if they have really followed their logic to its natural conclusions. That is, one that is opposed to President Obama on a more individual and personal level, and is using the abortion issue as a front for that opposition, but without being willing to follow their own logic to its natural ends. To insist that there should be this utter "line drawn in the sand" over the mere appearance of the President of the United States at the University of Notre Dame, or even the specific honouring of him for other goods shown in his life, and not to therefore question whether there is the same "line in the sand" between their Catholicism and their American citizenship is to "have their cake and eat it, too." There are a few Catholics who have been that consistent regarding issues of church and state. I do not see it happening here, which to me undermines the seriousness of the protests being raised.

The question becomes one of the greater good. Which is the greater good? To exist together in a democracy where freedom from the threat of civil war is seen as more important than even disagreement on fundamental issues of human rights such as that seen in the abortion debate, where the status of even a human being's development and acquiring of human rights is questioned? Or to exist in a country that guarantees that right to life (and all attending human rights, even those opposed by the Political Right but supported by the Catholic Church) even if guaranteeing those rights must come at the cost of the political union of the nation itself? Unless people follow their arguments all the way to the fundamental issues, which to my mind is the same thing as saying that they admit what they are really arguing about, then I think they are just wasting their time. Or worse, showing off for the cameras, whether to demonstrate to others how serious they are, or whether to reassure themselves.

So no, I don't find the people debating President Obama's presence at and honouring by Notre Dame to be persuasive. I am a Roman Catholic Christian, who has thoroughly investigated and has been convinced of the truth of the questions of that faith. I am also an American, excited by the prospect of a diverse democracy built upon a fundamental conception of Natural Law and Human Rights – the intellectual children of the Medieval Catholic universities which were then fostered by the Modern age. I am also a loyal son of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, excited by that school's distinctive gift and history of voicing Catholicism into the university, national, and international cultures of our time. The presence of the President is one more day at Notre Dame, one more person present who is in the midst of the ongoing conversation or story of their life. I was never in doubt about the Catholicity of Notre Dame, so protesting President Obama's presence does nothing to convince me any more of Notre Dame's Catholicity. I was never in doubt of President Obama's not being Catholic, so protesting his presence does not tell me or him anything that we didn't already know. The willingness of several of the prominent protesters to call Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins's Catholic faith into question over his issuing the invitation? That doesn't convince me any further of the depth of their Catholic faith. Instead, I find the moment, the conversation, the appeal to decency, logic, law, the Good – all things that are good – I find that the appeal to these sorts of things that the President and Notre Dame would be talking about, these are all aspects of God's creation, of the action of the Word and the Spirit in the world. That being the case, all that the President actually has to talk about are those things that the Catholic Church affirms, even if he has yet to make some of those connections, himself. I'm content to let that process happen, to even pray for the occasion, and to let God do any convincing necessary, having long since learned the lesson that my being loud or rude in no way assists God in this work.

President Jenkins put it entirely sensibly when he said, "We are not ignoring the critical issue of the protection of life. On the contrary, we invited him because we care so much about those issues, and we hope . . . for this to be the basis of an engagement with him," as well as adding that, "You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade, and if you cannot persuade them . . . show respect for them and listen to them." Former President Fr. Ted Hesburgh also put it well when he said the other day, "No speaker who has ever come to Notre Dame has changed the University. We are who we are. But, quite often, the very fact of being here has changed the speaker."

Hmm. And that concludes my thoughts. Sorry about the length, Mom: you asked. (And you're the Irish parent.)

Mike

Ambitious indeed. But the simple point of it not being a matter of resources as much as a matter of political will is a compelling one.

Charities head sees chance to 'remake' system
'Still possible to reduce U.S. poverty significantly in the next decade.'
Mar. 06, 2009
By Jerry Filteau, NCR Correspondent

Washington – Father Larry Snyder is an ambitious man -- not for himself, but for the poor and often voiceless Americans whom he serves as president of Catholic Charities USA.

Facing the worst challenge to the U.S. and world economy since the Great Depression, he said in an interview with NCR, “Maybe with this opportunity to remake our economic system we can correct some of its shortcomings (that existed) before.”

I mean the fact that we had 12 percent of the people (even before the recession began) living in poverty -- was that acceptable?” he asked. “Well, I don’t think so.”

He added that even with the still-deepening U.S. and global recession today, he thinks it is still possible to reduce U.S. poverty significantly in the next decade.

In January 2007 he announced the launch of a Catholic Charities-led Campaign to Reduce Poverty in America, with a goal of cutting the number of U.S. households living in poverty in half by the year 2020.

“Our main challenge in this campaign, our first challenge, is to create the political will,” he said. “Once the political will is there, we will see a reduction.”

He compared the challenge today to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which included Catholic-led legislation establishing the Social Security System and, for the first time in history, a minimum wage for U.S. workers.

As one of the first members of President Obama’s newly formed Advisory Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Snyder said he will use that position to try to promote policies and programs protecting and supporting human dignity across the life spectrum, from advocacy for immigrants, the unemployed, the poor and the elderly to reducing abortions.

The council’s first 15 members include two Catholics and several Evangelicals who are also strongly pro-life as well as other religious and secular members who are pro-choice, he said. Snyder said he expected that another Catholic would be added as the council is brought up to its full membership of 25.

( Read more... )

Dan stopped by tonight after finishing his grading at the library. We took in a game of chess and a few glasses of sherry, which were both very pleasurable. I think we're pretty evenly matched as players, although I took the game pretty handily. I got a knight behind his right flank and ran amok for a while, and the way things played out he was never able to shore that side up, and all the momentum went my way.

It was funny that he had sent me an email this day of all days, asking if I'd be interested in a game (he'd noticed my set when he stopped by for drinks last week), because I had chess on the mind, too. I had just finally gotten around to enhancing and converting to digital files the video I shot with Brett Boessen of the January 1996 Notre Dame Folk Choir tour of the southeastern United States. In the first section, in this scene below, where I'm standing in line to board the bus at a rest stop in northern Florida where we had stopped and played for a famous hour, you can hear the Director, Steve Warner, mocking me in the background. I'm talking to a few people in line, holding J.P.'s travel chessboard, as I had started playing a game with him before we broke off to play tag with everyone. Unbeknownst to me, Steve was making a joke, having moved one of J.P.'s pieces while we were away, thus putting me in an impossible position. And so you can hear Steve in the background, saying to someone, "Oh, Mike, you're so intellectual: let's see what happens now!" (This makes me feel less embarrassed about our juvenile ragging on him in the next part of the video.) In fact, I remember sitting down on the bus and then looking at the board for the first time since picking it up, and going, "What the hell?! That can't be right!" The irony is that, for all that I was the "academic" grad student, playing chess with J.P. was and is for me always a lesson in humility: he almost always mops up the board with me, though I learn a lot from it. So, having just seen and played with this video, chess was on my mind.
Dinner with Markus on Saturday night was kind of gorgeous, marred only by Barnes feeling a bit under the weather and leaving after hors d'oeuvres. Amy had conjured up a fantastic and creative spread to keep us occupied until dinner, which we delayed until 8pm, after the kids had eaten and been put to bed. The academic talk was more reserved for this time, and the kids were herded into the kitchen for a more simple dinner. Markus had brought the kids gifts of two books, filled with great childrens-book kind of paintings, one on bears and the other on bats, and the one on bats, Bats At The Library had us especially laughing, looking at the pictures of the bats clustered around open books, while others hung upside-down, avidly straining for a view of the page.

On the ride down to Dan and Amy's, we talked directly about his research, and the current book he was working on regarding the state of contemporary Martin Luther scholarship, and shaking up some off some of its staleness in order to revive interest more broadly in just why Luther matters. Once faced with Amy's appetizers, we instead got to talking about the pluses and minuses of university education being increasingly conducted on a scientific and/or business model, I think out of some meeting Markus had had, which brought to mind some reading I had been doing in Gillian Evans's rather brilliant Academics and the Real World.

Somehow from there we got to talking about sending the kids to the German school here in town, and the language benefits for them, which then lead into a talk on how Markus's two kids were doing, with his son thinking of becoming a renaissance man of a pilot who reads The Odyssey in the original Greek and composes music on the side, and his daughter as she is on the cusp of going to university. Markus rose up in challenge to something I said and got to talking about the relative unimportance of atheism as the principle problem for theological education as much as simply the indifference we have today in a consumer society about any call for a particular way of life: that nothing has any implications for how we should live, whereas in the ancient world it was always understood that philosophy was the critical science because it intrinsically meant a way of life, and was never "just ideas." From here we spent a long time talking about liturgy, moving from liturgical and church problems in Germany to a more general conversation about what were the general benefits of liturgy: educating and inculturating the gospel, contrasts between denominations that did not stress a formal liturgy, or differences between liturgies of the Word and liturgies of the Eucharist, while I developed a point I had become aware of over the years of how I valued the liturgy's forcing me to keep moving through many moods of prayer, not letting me settle or focus on whatever my own psychological/spiritual mood happened to be in a given moment: to ease me from one spirituality or spiritual mode to another, and into the mysticism of the Eucharist.

Then we got to talking about the ongoing difficulty of transmitting the faith in our larger church communities, and how even the parish was too large a group in contemporary times to instill the kind of community it once had, particularly as in the United States there was less and less of the ethnic factor augmenting church efforts. We talked a lot about small groups, and what a force those were for spiritual development, and I certainly felt – from my university years and my dive into Evangelicalism at that time – that that had been a critical part of my formation. And so I wondered out loud about how the Catholic Church might better encourage such groups, even though that raises the complications that can come with a lack of oversight or more educated guidance at times. At this point we were also talking some about Catholics' frequent ignorance of Scripture or even their fear of it. This came up simply because small groups can be such great places for scriptural reading, learning and prayerful incorporation into a spiritual life. It came out at this point that Markus had an entire book for which he had been unable to find a publisher in Germany on humour in the lives of the saints, and how much humour was in their writings, their lives, and the outlook. We all thought he might find a publisher more easily in the States, but that would necessitate translating the entire text into English, which was a possibility he clearly did not relish. Somehow the end of our conversation before dinner, as best as I can recall it, seemed to come to a discussion about the acidity in white wine, which had less to do with where the conversation had been as it had to do with what we were drinking with our hors d'oeuvres.

Dinner was a joy, with teriyaki and Cajun styles of grilled salmon, Amy's risotto, and green beans. Dan opened a bottle of the Masciarelli Montepulciano d'Abruzzo that we will often use as our not-too-expensive red with dinner. Conversation became more family-centered, and we heard about Markus's growing up as the son of a well-known architect in Hamburg, and how that informed his feeling that his daughter might enjoy university away from FrankfurtMain where she wouldn't have to be constantly known as his daughter. We spent a phenomenal amount of time trying to figure out that the English name for a tree he was trying describe was "beech," which included a phone call to Mike's German mother before Mike hit upon the idea of grabbing Dan's massive German-English dictionary and just looking it up. I talked about Nathaniel's baptism, and conversation about books and movies worked its way in to the mix when I asked about whether there were any new additions to his list of 100 Best Books, a personal list he and a friend back home each keep, with any new additions having to be explicitly justified. The sad news was that that friend was now fading from cancer, we found out. Picking up later on the general theme of recommendations, we got to talking restaurants (capitalizing on Markus's status and knowledge as one of Germany's most famed food critics) and what new recommendations for Milwaukee he had to make, all of which I've now forgotten and will have to ask him about. By the end of the night, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about bats again, picking up off from the children's book he had given the Lloyd kids, which he now showed to Amy. And so we found ourselves sharing bat stories, which somehow morphed into sharing owl stories, particularly about the little owl that has been living in his yard for some six years. (And would that writing about, and trying to preserve some sense of all this talk was nearly as fun as the talk itself!)

When I was a teacher at Saint Joseph's High School, I can remember a long conversation I had one evening with my friend and fellow-teacher P.J. about our generation's jadedness as a spiritual problem. We had somehow gotten talking or had become aware of how our own post-1960s jaded language permeated our humour and our teaching style – that we had learned a certain world-weariness in our language that was a significant component of our wit – and that this could have unintended consequences in what we were transmitting to our students. Could we, despite our intentions, simply be passing on such a jadedness? Were we as jaded as our language implied, and what did that say about our explicit beliefs about grace, or about redemption, or about faith, hope and love: about all the Catholic and Christian perspectives that we thought we were trying to transmit to our students? Was our style of teaching and connecting in conversation with students actually undermining our explicit goals? These were some of the sorts of questions we kicked around that night as we talked.

This general memory popped back into my head as I headed into the Gesu Church Wednesday night for their Ash Wednesday Mass. I had missed the earlier Masses, and so now I was catching the last one of the day, at 10pm. Even that one had me only making it at the last minute, as I looked up at the clock after a while and found that it was time to go, go, go! And so I came through the doors and up the steps just before the opening hymn.

The place was packed. The Gesu is a very large church, and – in traditional Catholic fashion – the only remaining seats were in the front two rows of pews. Over the course of the Mass, and particularly during the penance service and administration of the ashes on the forehead, symbolizing penance, I found myself quite aware of the size and character of the crowd. It was mostly a crowd of university students, probably about 1300 of them, given what little seating remained. None of them were there because they were required to be, whether by parents or by the university itself. None of them were there because this was a particularly happy occasion. The beginning of the discipline of Lent is a moment of a spirituality that is almost diametrically opposite of what "spirituality" is usually sold as on the television: not one of personal well-being and self-satisfaction, but of a consciousness of limitation, of flaw, and of personal responsibility. It is a moment of honesty without spin: a public admission of spiritual need. And yet, for all that, it isn't a horrifically awful experience. The communal admission of sin and inadequacy also offers a sense of hope and of connection, a "we're all in this together" realization, as church spin-offs like 12-step programs have long since realized and capitalized upon.

Watching the processions move past me, both during the penance service and during the Eucharistic celebration, I was also struck by the youth and beauty of the crowd. I pass all these students every day, but there was something here about this gathering that left them half-transformed in my sight: a sort of glow of seeing them entering into the prime of their physical lives that somehow stood as both contrast to, and parallel with, the admission of their struggle with sin. This was the opposite of the picture of the Church always presented to me on the television: young, vibrant, numerous, and willing to confront their own inadequacies and hypocrisies. So here I remembered the conversation on jadedness I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, wondering how much of that had perhaps seeped back into my perspective. And of course jadedness is just that old demon Pride, dressing itself up in new clothes, but still absorbed in Self, with self-congratulation ultimately behind that knowing and world-weary pose.

I had no illusions about how many of these students here, or at any of the other half-dozen Masses earlier in the day were fully-formed Catholics: I've taught too many of them for that. But they were here. They participated. They prayed. They let themselves move into a spirituality that offered a way to wholeness only through a piercing self-awareness in an encounter with the Living God, instead of an easy way out through simple self- or mutual-affirmation. There was a cost to participating at all this day, and at some level, everyone here was willing to pay it, or to at least entertain the idea. I saw it on campus through the day, in those marked with ashes. I saw it through the city of Milwaukee: people on the bus, at the Metro Market when I was buying groceries, on the hipness of Brady Street: people marked. And in that open-ended willingness to explore reality – from the hidden flaws within the Self, to the offer of grace from a God intimately woven into all human and cosmic affairs – in that I saw something beyond my own cultural or personal pessimisms. And it was good.

Weird walking through the door and feeling my mind very firmly shift gears from the family mode I was in and back to Marquette mode. I left my sister watching Sophie putting piles of building blocks – one at a time, grouped by colour and shape – back in their big plastic box, amusing herself while doing so by sitting in the box and burying herself with them. "My OCD child." Leslie smiled, while Sophie handed out polite "Thank yous" as we handed her the blocks. All the events of the weekend: some time with the nieces as I stayed over at the way-station of Leslie and Jim's house, long talks with Dad on the drive down and back from Kentucky, and the celebrations surrounding the baptism of my newish nephew Nathaniel – all of that whirling around in my head and now being set aside as I remember I have Barnes's undergrad Augustine class to attend later this afternoon, a few letters of recommendation to write, and ACK! the 2009 Wade Lecture, Rev. Thomas Worcester, SJ on "The Modern Papacy: Between Tradition and Innovation" right at the same time as Barnes's class. So I'll have to figure out how to attend both at the same time, or some alternative.

Holy Freaking Moses! I also return to have my computer open up and tell me the news that our own Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who has only been here for a few years, has just been named the Archbishop of New York. Hello Red Hat! That's kind of huge: as the unofficial "Capital of the World," the Archbishop of New York gets more requests for aid from around the world than anyone other than the Pope: it's a huge pastoral responsibility that extends well beyond the borders of his archdiocese. Huh. I'll copy articles below.

( CNS, AP and NYT stories on Timothy Dolan being named Archbishop of New York (with the AP error headline calling him 'Msgr.' and the Times predictably calling him an 'enforcer') )

Two interesting, or even compelling, pieces on the current state of Europe. The first piece, "While Europe Slept," by Jean Bethke Elshtain, who is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, is a really striking piece about what the implications are of Europe going "post-Christian," with some intersections with the dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger recently released as The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, which I've just started reading. I also include a recent column by John Allen, modified from a lecture he gave in Dublin recently, on the current state of European Catholicism that dealt with some parallel themes. I was particularly appreciative of how he related some of what is happening in Europe to things the United States has already experienced, having been in this case a few steps ahead in the creation of an Enlightenment state that still made room for religion.

The hope of preserving the human rights tradition of Enlightenment democracy is far more tied into Jewish/Christian heritage than contemporary anti-religious dogmatic Secularism has recognized, and it is particularly compelling to hear such insights coming from atheists like Habermas or Marcello Pela in Italy as well as from Christian thinkers like Ratzinger. It is one of the most curious ironies in political philosophy that the absolutizing of an ideology of "freedom" in the mode of the New Left since the 1960s seems to actually end up destroying political freedom, reminding us once again that "freedom" is no simple reality in itself but in democratic society is in fact a difficult and complicated balance between a number of competing forces and interests.

( Read more... )

Yesterday afternoon and evening, part of my 3+ hour long conversation with my former boss, the 16th-century scholar Mickey Mattox,, lead us away from more predictable elements like Martin Luther and to the recent death of Richard John Neuhaus, the publisher of First Things, that journal of American public life in religion, culture and politics. While Neuhaus on more than one occasion drove me bananas with some glib remark, I had to always acknowledge the depth of what he regularly achieved in the pages of his journal. It is frequently referred to as a conservative or neo-conservative journal. There's some truth to that. But I'd also have to say that it's also a journal of 1960 liberalism. 1960 was so different than what "the Sixties" produced: its ecumenical union of "Protestant, Catholic, Jew" was a far cry from the anti-religious furor released by the New Left by the end of the sixties, and which continues unabated today as one of the strongest anti-intellectual bigotries characteristic of that portion of American society (the Right has its own, I know). Martin Luther King, Jr., while invoked as an icon today by the Left, would never be tolerated as he was: the Niebuhrian public Christian intellectual and preacher of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King, were he still alive, would either have had to change his tune entirely, betraying what he earlier stood for, or would have become anathema to today's Left by holding on to the core of his Christian commitments and therefore "become a conservative," even if he hadn't changed at all. More in that older mode, Neuhaus created a public space for serious discussion by writers of numerous perspectives, united in taking their subject seriously, and deeming it worth serious discussion. For all its hits and misses, that's something I have to credit to Neuhaus. And as Mickey pointed out, the personal loyalty and friendship so many people felt toward him – including people who loathed his conclusions – speaks strongly to a truly tolerant and generous human being, who didn't invoke "tolerance" simply as a tool to silence other perspectives. I had to bow to that loyalty, having never met the man himself, but recognizing what kind of person inspires such reactions.

George Weigel published a fine obituary on Neuhaus, and I thought I would jot that down in my journal for memory's sake. A great many more obituaries are linked on First Things's website.

( Read more... )

Wow: this is unexpected. First Things is one of the best journals of its kind, though I tended to find Neuhaus's own contributions the most maddening things in its pages. Nevertheless, you had to admire him for creating such an ecumenical forum.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus dead at age 72
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR., NCR Staff
Published: Jan. 8, 2009

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a leading voice of Catholic conservatism in America, and one of those rare theologians and spiritual leaders whose influence vastly exceeded the boundaries of their religious community, has died at 72.

Neuhaus slipped away Jan. 8, shortly before 10 o’clock Eastern time. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering.

A priest of the New York archdiocese and a former Lutheran minister, Neuhaus was best known to society at large as an intellectual guru of what came to be known as the “religious right.”

From the early 1970s forward, Neuhaus was a key architect of two alliances with profound consequences for American politics, both of which overcame histories of mutual antagonism: one between conservative Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals, and the other between free market neo-conservatives and “faith and values” social conservatives.

In 2005, Time magazine took the unusual step of including the Catholic Neuhaus on a list of America’s 25 most influential Evangelicals, noting that in a 2004 session with journalists from religious publications, President George W. Bush cited Neuhaus more often than any other living authority.

“Father Richard,” the president said then, “helps me articulate these [religious] things.”

To Catholic insiders, however, it was Neuhaus’ writing rather than his political activism that made him a celebrity. From the pages of First Things, the unapologetically high-brow journal he founded in 1990, Neuhaus kept up a steady stream of commentary on matters both sacred and secular.

In broad strokes, Neuhaus was an unabashed supporter of the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and his commentary was prized in Rome. John Paul, for example, named Neuhaus as a delegate to the 1997 Synod for America. Yet he was no lapdog for ecclesiastical authority; he lamented the Vatican’s opposition to the Iraq war in 2003, and early in Benedict’s papacy Neuhaus voiced “palpable uneasiness” that the new pontiff was not clamping down on what Neuhaus saw as dissent from church teaching.

Over the years, even people who disagreed with Neuhaus’ politics or theology would devour his monthly essay in First Things, titled “The Public Square,” for sheer literary pleasure. His combination of epigrammatic formulae and occasionally biting satire often reminded fans of English-language Catholic luminaries of earlier eras, such as G.K. Chesterton or Cardinal John Henry Newman.

( Read more... )

Still flattened by the flu. The Most Miserable Christmas Ever. Blech.

Just jotting down a couple news stories of interest that I noticed in the last few days. John Allen's list of the "Top 10 neglected Catholic stories of 2008" is a smart list of some of the most interesting things going on in the Catholic world, but which aren't on the short list of items that the U.S. news media gets worked up about. The second one is another story of what's turning into a longer-term interest of mine, and that's on the public use of the story of "the Galileo Affair." What grabs my interest there is just the way the incident with Galileo has become this killer propaganda item for those who want to perpetuate the idea of "science versus religion." The nonsense that's repeated as historical facts "that everyone knows" regarding the case has been so repeated and drummed into public consciousness that it has become the singlemost prominent Enlightenment anti-Christian parable. The sheer fact of how often this is cited and made a big deal of shows that its importance for people today is about today, and not about one, long-corrected historical mistake centuries past. I'm beginning to think that it would make for a pretty good popular history to write a book that traced the changes in the use of the story: as far as I can tell from the original documents, our version of "what everyone knows" today owes more to Bertolt Brecht's play Galileo than to history.

Top 10 neglected Catholic stories of 2008
Good heavens: Vatican rehabilitating Galileo

( Read more... )

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Not being "in love," whether in fiction or (alas!) in fact, and not in any of the usual ways in which we speak about love. There was a conference notice I was mailed a few months ago that quite caught my imagination, and I've not been able to get it out of my head. Syracuse University is sponsoring their third "Postmodernism, Culture and Religion" conference on the topic of love as a political notion. As a Christian, a Catholic, and in particular as a Catholic Christian theologian, I realize that I must believe that something of a "politics of love" must be possible. Certainly we see it at some level in the politics of the Church: the social justice ethics, the care for displaced populations and for our own poor and sick, for human rights of every sort, of those promoted or despised by the political left and right. But a "politics" of Love? Love as a political notion? The suspicion, of course, is that that is just being sentimental. How can you have a politics of love? Over dinner I was watching the grim realpolitik of Steven Spielburg's film Munich, and the seeming impossibility of conceiving of a politics of love in such situations brought the question back to my head.

Christian ethics flow from a notion of Who and What God is, though. Three divine "Persons" constituting One God, interpenetrating, perfect knowing and acceptance of one another, utter union of being: if this is what God is, this is what is then most fundamental about all of reality – relationship. Christian ethics of personhood, dignity and rights, all flow from that vision, as do the more secular ethics of the West today, if more by momentum than from the logic of secular presuppositions about what human beings are or what reality is. So if relationship and love are most fundamental to reality, why not to politics as well? But then, the need for politics as we understand it often has to do with human evil, with the failure of love. Is such, then, still potentially to be conceived as a politics of love?

Is this all just a lead-in to a sentimental, theological way of talking about politics? Or can we in fact use "love" as such an organizing category in a way that makes it just as "real," having just as much "teeth," as other ways of conceiving a political theory or language?

The notice, at least, is rather striking:

The Politics of Love

A constellation of internationally prominent theorists–philosophers, theologians and psychoanalysts–will gather to discuss the question of whether the concept of love can be redescribed as a political concept. Is love necessarily a private matter or does it also have a public meaning? Can love become part of a political project? In addition to an ethics or religion of love, can there be a politics of love?

[Big names in the academy headlining the conference here]

The topic of the conference was inspired by the following passage:

"People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept...The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude...There is really nothing necessarily metaphysical about the Christian and Judaic love of God: both God's love of humanity and humanity's love of God are expressed and incarnated in the common material political project of the multitude. We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing."

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 351-52.

While in Tulsa, I briefly heard word of the Friday morning death of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. I never knew Avery Dulles personally. I decided not to even consider doing my Ph.D. with him because I did not think that he would live long enough to see the process through, given his advanced age. I was startled to discover that I was known to him, as I recounted elsewhere, and was honoured by his willingness to simply inscribe his new book Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith for me, with not just his signature but even with a brief joke about my name (which I share with another – and famed – Catholic writer, for those not in the know). I had seen Dulles speak a few times, and saw him growing frail as a reed, and heard of his awful decline as symptoms of his polio robbed him of movement in his final months.

Dulles was the most famed of ecclesiologists – of theologians doing ecclesiology, the study of the Church – and therefore of particular note as I write my dissertation on ecclesiology, on Francis Sullivan, who was the other Grand Old Man of ecclesiology, though not as well known in the United States. This was because Sullivan spent his academic ministry in Rome, while Dulles was in Washington and New York, and became very well known here through both his writing and his frequent appearances on the lecture circuit. Sullivan actually served on Dulles's doctoral board in Rome, as Dulles was a latecomer to the priesthood, to the Jesuits, and to scholarship, but the two of them, along with Patrick Granfield, Joseph Komonchak, Richard McBrien, Richard Gaillardetz, William Cardinal Levada, and not least my own director, Michael Fahey, have all together made Ecclesiology a particularly American field of theological expertise. Dulles's work was prolific, and more than made up for his "late start," with his book Models of the Church probably being his most (and rightly) famed contribution to the study of the Church. I am going to miss him as a teacher, 'though he's been one from a distance. The clarity and breadth of his insight is a challenge to anyone doing this sort of work.

I include a number of articles, obituaries and recollections below the cut:

Cardinal Dulles recalled for brilliance, simplicity, kindness Catholic News Service
Cardinal Dulles dies at 90; Jesuit theologian made a cardinal in '01 Catholic News Service
Avery Dulles, 90; Prominent Catholic Cardinal, Theologian The Washington Post
Avery Dulles: Friend, Hero, Christian by James Martin, S.J. for The Washington Post
Cardinal Avery Dulles, Theologian, Is Dead at 90 The New York Times
EDIT: An unpublished interview with Avery Dulles John Allen/NCR

( Read more... )

Had a more-than-pleasant dinner out at Louise's with Meg, which we had visited back in March. Lots of catch-up, because we've been particularly unlucky in trying to catch one another: her relationship with Brian, my job stuff. She even insisted on treating me, but made no bones about the fact that she firmly intended to cash in once I landed a professorship somewhere, which of course I'll be happy to oblige, once the opportunity rolls around.

Still thinking some of Thomas Merton, and the 40th anniversary of his death, as I mentioned in the previous entry this morning. I had hoped to find that someone had posted on YouTube the film that was made at the Bangkok conference, of him speaking right before his accidental electrocution, but no such luck. I did find a clip from the 1984 film, which I possess on videotape, called Merton: A Film Biography, but that was the best of any such documentation a quick search revealed.

I have been thinking of Last Words with regard to Merton.

The last words of his journal were incidental, as one ought to expect with unexpected death, and are illuminating only in their lack of pretense or weight, kind of reminding me of the way that the "Year In Review" meme that people do in December on LiveJounal can somehow sort of sketch something real about our lives, even if is nothing of the sort of thing we would actually choose as important or illustrative of what our lives mean to us. Two days before his death, on Sunday, 8 December 1968, Merton wrote:

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In a little while I leave this hotel. I go to say Mass at St. Louis Church, lunch at the Apostolic Delegation, then on to the Red Cross place this afternoon. No mail here yet except a letter from Winifred (hippie girl at Redwoods) forwarded from Calcutta.

The last words of Thomas Merton, "Fr. Louis," in that bit of film were always striking to me, in that sort of eerie way things sound only when you look back at them. He concludes the presentation he was making with:

So I will disappear from view and we can all have a Coke or something. Thank you very much.

He had lunch with some of the company and returned to take some afternoon rest and a shower, and coming out from the shower was electrocuted by the floor lamp in the room, with its faulty wiring, and which fell on top of him, severely burning him by the time the body was felt.

At the funeral at Gethsemani, which Chrysogonus talked about with me and Erik during my first trip to the Abbey over Fall Break in October 1995, Chrysogonus had the closing words of Merton's breakthrough autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, read to conclude the service:

But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Christi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani:

That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.

Thomas Merton died 40 years ago today, electrocuted by the faulty wiring of his floor fan as he stepped out of his shower at a world-wide conference of monks in Bangkok. The National Catholic Reporter has an article commemorating Merton, which in a Left kind of way seems to magnify the tour Merton made at the end of his life, where he, as one of the West's best scholars of Asian religion, resonated deeply with the forms of Hindu and Buddhist display he encountered there, as though his Christianity were best remembered by not being mentioned, and best characterized by his open-mindedness. By way of contrast, the Wikipedia article on Merton dotes, in a kind of Right way, on the early Merton of the conversion story detailed in his bestselling The Seven-Storey Mountain, as though the deep immersion into the social justice causes of the 1960s was not a direct outgrowth of both his Christian and monastic callings.

When I was at Notre Dame, I was lucky enough to aid Lawrence Cunningham in the editing and production of the 1952-60 volume of Merton's private journals, published as A Search For Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life. It is this little-mentioned in-between period of Merton's life, extending into the 1960s, that has come to be of greater interest to me, and was fed even more by stories from Chrysogonus as he recalled his old friend and teacher at the Abbey of Gethsemani. This was the time of experiments in hermitage, in solitude, of the writing of Thoughts In Solitude and of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. It was the time of his mystical dream of a Jewish girl named Proverb and his Louisville street corner vision of Love and what is lovely in all people. It was the time of falling in love with a young nurse who had taken care of him in the hospital and of having to let that go in the face of his own true calling, but with the knowledge that he had finally become a person who could truly love another.

The caricatures of Merton – the Christian who fell into Eastern fascinations, or the Christian who left behind Christianity for true Eastern wisdom – are convenient fictions for their promoters. Merton instead recognized and actuated in himself the Second Vatican Council's mandate toward what is good in all religions in the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate; Merton was the liturgical "conservative" who took a number of relics with him from Gethsemani on his "liberal" journey through Asia. He was the Christian monk and scholar of Christian spirituality first so that he could actually be equiped to be a Westerner who could enter into Asian monasticisms, and was recognized as possessing a keener kind of insight by Easterns like D.T. Suzuki or the young Dalai Lama because he came out of a fully-formed spiritual tradition rather than being one of the more dislocated Westerners more commonly exploring Eastern perspectives. He was simply who he was: gifted, extreme, wounded, given to saying over-the-top things, but leveling them out into wisdom through editing and contemplation and prayer.

Shades of Aragorn!

Imagine having a royal who didn't see their position as merely a license to party and make their life meaningless! A constitutional monarchy that has the stones to take a moral stance and to slow down modernity's endless rush to fixate on their immediate desires as the chief of goods – I kinda gotta dig that. Case in point: he takes one stand, which is entirely his right by his legal position, and rather than slow down and take the matter as worth waiting on and thinking through as a nation and culture, his political opponent immediately moves toward altering the constitution and stripping the Grand Duke of his last political power. There's another reason to be thankful that our Founding Fathers recognized that even too much democracy wasn't necessarily a good thing, and that it's so difficult for us to alter our constitution: despite all the times such changes are proposed, it really doesn't lend itself to too many quick and fashionable changes. If our own constitution were a victim of our own last few decades of political polarization... yuck.

Der Spiegel reports on a conflict that caught my eye for both reasons of ethics and of constitutional law, as well as characterizing a cultural flaw in Modernity where ethics are simply reduced to questions of power. The fact that Der Spiegel doesn't even notice the latter problem – to which its own reporting seems to contribute – strikes me as characteristic of why the Grand Duke's veto – the power to slow down a process and provoke even more conversation – is especially important for democracy. Too bad.

Euthanasia Controversy: Grand Duke of Luxembourg Will Lose His Veto
Luxembourg's parliament looks ready to strip the Grand Duke of his last lawmaking power as a controversy over euthanasia comes to a head. One of Europe's last royals with political sway may lose his formal veto by taking a stand against a law legalizing euthanasia.

The Grand Duke of Luxembourg, who has said he would interfere with a decision by parliament, will likely be stripped of his veto in a historic decision after a heated showdown over a bill to legalize euthanasia.

Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg protested the bill and threatened to kill it next week by refusing to sign it into law.

Since parliament is expected to pass the bill, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said the Grande Duke has overstepped his role. Juncker personally opposes the euthanasia bill but says he will propose a change to the constitution to deny the Grand Duke his veto. His role by the end of 2008 could be reduced to rubber-stamping parliamentary decisions, instead of deciding whether to approve them.

"That means he will only technically enact laws," Juncker said, according to Reuters.

The euthanasia bill passed a first vote by parliament in February. It looks set to pass a second and final vote next week, but the Catholic Grand Duke announced on Tuesday -- in a closed-door meeting with leaders of Juncker's ruling Christian Socialists -- that he would refuse to enact the law.

His position tipped the tiny nation into the worst constitutional crisis in its history. The Luxembourg royal house has tried to block a decision by parliament only once before, when the Grand Duchess Marie-Adelaide refused to sign an education bill in 1912.

"I understand the Grand Duke's problems of conscience," said Juncker, "but I believe that if the parliament votes in a law, it must be brought into force."

The euthanasia bill has been controversial since 2001. It would let patients with "grave and incurable" conditions die at the hands of a doctor if they ask repeatedly to be euthanized and earn the consent of two doctors and a panel of experts. Medical and physician groups have opposed the bill, though, and so have many citizens of this traditionally Catholic nation.

It follows similar laws in the Netherlands and Belgium, where King Baudouin -- Henri's uncle -- abdicated for a day in 1990 to avoid signing a Belgian abortion law. The current Belgian king, Albert II, has signed Belgium's recent euthanasia and homosexual-marriage laws over his private Catholic beliefs.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a constitutional monarchy, and the Grand Duke is its head of state. He has indicated that he won't stand in the way of any change to the constitution.

I've been pretty completely shot all day today, and yesterday, since hearing the news of Chrysogonus' death. He's being buried right about now. Diane was a great help last night, taking me out to a late dinner down at the new place on Kinnickinnic in Bay View, Cafe Centraal, that Tim has been managing for a few months now, since it opened. So we caught up over soup and meatloaf and hot chocolate, then moved over to the bar where Tim could more easily join us in frequent pauses while watching painful moments of the Packers game. I had been listening closely to the Chrysogonus Fest recording by way of mourning for awhile, and she gave me a bit of a break for my heart by pulling me to the present for a few hours. I had a long talk with Mark yesterday, the only one of the guys who I caught on the phone when I went to pass the news on, and while also doing some good and necessary catching up, we were kind of kicking ourselves for having failed to pull off another Chrysogonus Fest last year or this summer. We could never all get free at the same time, or have enough money to take off at the same time. It was yet another one of those times where you find yourself wondering how you missed out on a friend for reasons that seemed sensible at the time. Having the utter leisure of being rich enough to not work only appeals to me when I think of taking that time and being with friends; but I suppose that if I were one of the idle rich, I wouldn't be interesting enough to visit with. I don't know. But we were just kicking ourselves for assuring one another that we could visit Chrysogonus "next year."

I found the following article through USAToday, to my surprise. I also found some entries online by bloggers that were a comfort just by giving me a little more information, or by reporting on the liturgy and vigil at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Michael Wurtz – Eternal Rest...
Bryan Sherwood – Fr. Chrysogonus Waddell, RIP
Bryan Sherwood – Keeping Vigil
Steve Taylor – Rest in Peace Fr. Chrysogonus
Steve Taylor – Sitting Vigil with Fr. Chrysogonus
Steve Taylor – The Trappist Way of Death (A blogger's account of Chrysogonus's funeral)

I had been staying at the Abbey once with Erik when one of the elderly monks had died, and we attended the funeral. The monks have – as one might expect for "Trappists," for the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance – a very stark burial, with the body being given to the grave with no trappings at all, not even a coffin. Merton, in fact, is the only monk buried in a coffin in their cemetery, because of the burning of his body during the accidental electrocution that killed him, and because of the long passage of shipping his body back from Bangkok, where he died. So I've been spending the day in my mind, revisiting the slope of the cemetery grounds, imagining Chrysogonus's body being lowered into the earth, and feeling something of that starkness inside.

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008
Chrysogonus Waddell, monk and author, dies
By Jim Warren - jwarren@herald-leader.com

The Rev. Chrysogonus Waddell, a Trappist monk, composer, author and member of the Abbey of Gethsemani for 58 years, has died. He was 78. The Rev. Waddell died Sunday at the abbey infirmary after suffering a series of strokes. He had declined life support.

The Rev. Waddell was born March 1, 1930, in the Philippines, where his father was serving in the U.S. Army. Although he grew up in an Episcopalian family, he converted to Roman Catholicism at age 19. He came to Gethsemani in 1950, arriving on a bus just like the Rev. Thomas Merton, another member of Gethsemani who became famous as a writer and thinker. Although he traveled around the world, the Rev. Waddell lived the rest of his life at the abbey. He was ordained a priest in 1958.

The Rev. Waddell held a strong interest in music from his youth, and studied for two years at the Philadelphia Conservatory. In 1962, the Trappist order sent him to Rome to further his theological studies at the Pontifical College of San Anselmo. He composed many chants and pieces of music, some of which went into a recording, Music From the Abbey of Gethsemani. It featured pieces sung by monks at the abbey, composed and arranged by the Rev. Waddell. He also adapted the traditional Gregorian chant for use in vernacular liturgy. In addition to composing music, the Rev. Waddell wrote five books and more than 175 articles. He also was an accomplished organist.

A funeral Mass will be held at the abbey at 4 p.m. Tuesday. The Rev. Waddell will be buried afterward in the cemetery on the grounds of the abbey.

I also include here my YouTube files of two of Chrysogonus's pieces that we performed in the Notre Dame Folk Choir, where Chrysogonus was one of our contributing composers along with director Steven C. Warner. The first and most important in "Rosa Mystica," a Marian Christmas text he set to music and which I consider Chrysogonus's mystical masterpiece. While this recording does not do the performance justice, being off of a single 1997 videotape camera's microphone during the Folk Choir's Ireland tour, it still gets the idea across. And to think that this gem of a piece of music was something he had written and then put into a drawer as being of no interest to anyone, only for Steve to find it 40 years later while going through some of Chrysogonus's files with him. The other piece, also a delightful rendering, is Chrysogonus's "Unto Us A Child Is Born," a piece of 7th century chant, another Christmas text, that he re-arranged in English and for four parts. The rich theology in the text gives the lie to calling the song's original singers and writers as living in "dark ages."

Rosa Mystica
Chrysogonus Waddell, OCSO

There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu;
Alleluia.

For in this rose contained was
Heaven and earth in little space.
Res miranda [O Thing of Wonder!]

By that rose we may well see
There be One God in Persons Three,
Pares forma [Incomparable, perfect form]

The angels sang, the shepherds, too
"Gloria in excelsis Deo!"
Gaudeamus [Let us rejoice!]

Leave we all this worldly mirth,
And follow we this joyful birth.
Transeamus. [Let us cross over....]

Unto Us A Child Is Born
Chrysogonus Waddell, OCSO

Michael Wurtz, CSC, just wrote me from Rome to tell me that Fr. Chrysogonus Waddell, OCSO, just died this Sunday on the Feast of Christ the King.

Those of you who knew Chrysogonus and who had the privilege to sing his astonishing compositions, like his masterpiece Rosa Mystica, know what a loss this is. The world is a bit more dim today. The Abbey of Gethsemani, the community in which Chrysogonus lived all these years, and which was made famous by his friend Thomas Merton, has posted a brief obituary here.

I always joked that this photograph I took, during our first "Chrysogonus Fest" in 1997, was "the only known photograph of heaven." No joke.

Today's the Feast of Lewis, being the 45th anniversary of his death, as well as those of Kennedy and Huxley.

My birth certificate showed up in the mail, which was a relief. My identity remains my own for another day. So all my paperwork is in order, and my files can be put away for another decade. The day was spent digging back into Chapter 1 of the dissertation, refreshing myself with what I had done there so that I could clarify in my mind what remained to do in this next chapter. I had a headache through most of Friday, though, which was discouraging. Still, over meals I watched a few episodes of the 1965 season of The Avengers, which I had found on sale the other day for a mere dollar. I hadn't seen these since I was in junior high, when they were my first exposure to quirky British television and intrinsic British coolness, as well as the more fundamental fascinations of Mrs. Emma Peel in a leather catsuit. The music, the camerawork, the locations: it was all great fun to watch now as an adult, and to remember 1965's contradictions from a 2008 perspective – of people who moved between upscale London buildings with their modern amenities and open-fire village pubs and houses, as both being "normal." The countryside village conditions, from my eye, though, were hardly removed from what I grew up considering "camping," they were so basic. Ireland was the last of the European nations to so modernize, with a lot of folks describing to me in 1997 how different things had been just a few years earlier, and how much more prosperous everyone was feeling in that "Celtic Tiger" economy as it made fundamental changes in the popular standard of living. So watching these were both fun "spy-fi" in themselves, as well as interesting historical documents in indirect ways.

The other morning I attended Fortunate's dissertation defense with Mike and Ellen, which was quite fun because this was one defense where I already knew the material in great depth, which is not often the case in our diverse and specialized dissertations. But Fortunate is an Augustine scholar, among other Early Christianity interests, who dissertated under Barnes, and did an historical project that he nevertheless tied in interesting ways to struggles today in divisions among African Christians, offering his work as a model of an historical pattern worth trying to avoid. The rest of the committee – Zemler-Cizewski, Dempsey, Johnson and Carey – all asked potent and interesting questions from their various specialties and perspectives. Mine was the only "public" question. In my own work, touching on the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, I had been struck by the fact that, as with many Church councils, no one had ever attended a council before, since there had been none in their lifetimes. So they sort of had to make up their own way of having a council. Since Fortunate's dissertation, and the faculty conversation regarding it, was more explicit about the African cultural elements Augustine and the other African council leaders were trying to rein in or modify, I asked about any particularly African characteristics in their councils themselves that Fortunate might have noticed. Most of that conversation seemed to stay in the moral mode, as well as mentioning the African concern with universal perspective or function in the Church, which one can see back to Cyprian in particular.

"Broken Nets": Augustine, Schisms, and Rejuvenating Councils in North Africa
Fortunate Ojiako, B.A., B.Th., M.A., M.A.
Marquette University, 2008.

This dissertation studies the schisms ("broken nets" according to Augustine) [he was using the image of the story of Jesus instructing disciples where to fish, with one casting of their nets resulting in a catch that burst the nets] that bedeviled the North African Church, as well as its moral conditions during the late fourth and early fifth centuries. This study equally shows the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils. These councils sought to regenerate debased and erroneous aspects of North African customs. The sanative nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils is not only buttressed from Augustine's Letter 22, but also from the content of the conciliar decrees emanating from the North African councils. These reforms were liturgical, moral, as well as disciplinary in nature. In correcting the African Church customs, Augustine sought to align them with those of the universal church.

The trademark moral rigorism of the African Church that had dire consequence for her is likewise highlighted in this work. Rigorist views were espoused by Tertullian, Cyprian, the Donatists, and even Augustine's Catholic Church. Rigorism is also present in the consuetudo or the so-called African theology that sought exclusion for apostates and also rebaptized former heretics and schismatics. This work adumbrates that nets and broken nets were products of the time. While the Decian persecution of 251 AD gave rise to the lapsi, (and in extension Novatianism) the Diocletian persecution of 312 produced the traditores, which in turn aided the Donatist schism.

Part two of this work explores the state of the North African Church that Augustine and his cohorts sought through councils to reform. This section also examines the Cyprianic councils and the impact of customs and scriptural interpretations on the controversy in the North African Church.

The result of this dissertation will not only show the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian and Augustinian councils, but also adds its voice to those among Augustinian scholarship that see a greater need and importance of studying Augustine more from his African environment. This is not in any way an attempt to discountenance the importance of other paradigms that go a long way toward a better understanding of Augustine.

Been on a roll for hours now, reading on communion ecclesiology, in one of those delicious moods where I'm able to absorb reading and information at great length without losing concentration or ability. I don't know quite what it is that makes that easier at some times than others, but it's a good feeling. It certain helps, though, to have good texts to read. Dennis M. Doyle's Communion Ecclesiology: Vision & Versions, which I got out of the library the other day, is a marvelous example of a well-ordered and instantly-accessible book, and has been helpful for an overview of a number of different communion ecclesiologies and their developmental courses. I've been using the CDF's 1992 letter Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, which is a central text, and bouncing around both the very useful The Gift of the Church: A Textbook on Ecclesiology in Honor of Patrick Granfield, O.S.B., which Professor Fahey had us use in my seminar with him when I arrived at Marquette, and Cardinal Dulles' classic Models of the Church. So all this will lead into the final-stretch writing spurt to finish off this chapter over the next week.

Yet another job post was advertised yesterday and was forwarded to students by our new Chair, Professor Wood. This would be a delicious posting, though strangely undergrad-free in a theological graduate school, plopping me not only in the heart of a huge theological network, but also having me live in Erik's neighbourhood, which would be a ton of fun for that old friendship. I let him know about that in a note last night, and told him that if anyone asked about me, he still owed me for breaking my rib back during his graduation celebration at Notre Dame, when weaklingrecords packed a very respectable bar into his backpack and set up shop on Stonehenge at midnight after graduation. I got a funny note back from him and the whole exchange made laugh:

Here's a bit of a surprise new job ad that I just got today and for which I am now just finishing my application. If anyone asks you about me, remember: you still owe me for breaking my rib. Bastard.

Mike


That would be awesome, brother. Let me know if/when you get to come out for an interview. Your rib story reference is very timely. I was at ND this weekend for an ACE gathering and I told someone the rib story as we were passing by Stonehenge. I thought to myself, "The sad prick deserved it." ;-)

Truly,
Dr. Bastard!!!!

I do hope he remembered what I thought the funniest part of the story: when I was sitting stunned in the water and gasped out, "You broke my rib!" Bongo Bob, who had helped himself to quite a bit of the drink by this point, slurred "You wuss!" As though my rib had popped by some lack of character. Soaking wet and in some pain, I still instantly thought it was hysterical.

And lastly, a little article caught my eye, given the way I've always thought the Tao in Confucius' Analects lined up so stunningly with Jewish-Christian Logos theology – a point I've used in my Intro classes when I get to the Gospel of John.

Cardinal: Traditional Chinese wisdom contains seeds of word of God

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- For the good of Chinese society and the defense of people, the Catholic Church must engage in dialogue and work with those who defend the traditional values found in Confucianism, said Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong.

Cardinal Zen told the world Synod of Bishops on the Bible Oct. 15 that, before being written as the Scriptures and incarnated in the person of Jesus, the word of God was the force that created beauty, the universe and the human person.

And, he said, the traditional Chinese wisdom founded in and fostered by Confucianism contains the "seeds of the word" of God that the Second Vatican Council said are present in religions and cultures.

Cardinal Zen said the church in Hong Kong has developed a healthy dialogue with followers of Confucianism, aimed particularly at "trying to preserve the precious heritage of Chinese wisdom."

"If, moved by charity, we are able to instill in the younger generation the Chinese virtues of fidelity, honesty and shame, we will have helped them take a big step toward holiness," the cardinal said.

In too many instances, he said, the Chinese people are losing contact with their traditional values, as is seen in instances of corruption and attacks on human life, marriage and the family.

( Read more... )

Yesterday hit me with a bit of a wallop: just sore, achey, and wiped out – maybe the hours I'd been pulling on the application run catching up to me. I'd been giving myself one slow "off" day on the weekends, but I listened to my body and moved the schedule up to accommodate its demands. Laundry needed to be done, anyway, and that slowed me down enough to get to it. Napped a bit, too, to recharge from my "just get by" sleep of the last week or ten days. The University shifted into Fall Break mode as Wednesday came to a close, and so I'll have to shift more of my work to the apartment rather than my library carrel. Did a little bit of thinking of theoretical categories of Barnes and Ayres' "New Canon" criticism for Anthony's current encyclopedia side-project and wrote a few notes on that regard.

Began shifting gears back into pure concentration on the dissertation without all that paperwork hanging over my head. I realized that I really needed to work on "communion ecclesiology" more in my current chapter, because, in speaking of the Church in terms of "communion," that ecclesiology really tries to be as all-encompassing a theory of the Church as I've been thinking that an ecclesiology of charisms has the potential to be. So I'm reading in that direction right now, and looking in particular at the number of communion ecclesiologies that have been proposed, some of which seem to conflict with one another. It's obvious from mere observation, and has been since Paul wrote about the Church in the First Letter to the Corinthians, that the Church functions as what we today would call a unity-in-diversity. I'm wondering if communion ecclesiology, in making union (or "communion," in this case) its motif or theoretical basis, might set itself up for a problem as a theory of the Church. It seems to me a bit of a danger in trying to find a way to adequately describe the Church if we use a theoretical language that "automatically" looks at or casts matters in terms of unity: unity is more a result we see in the Church rather than a starting point, and I wonder if using communion language muddies the theoretical waters by inadvertently "assuming its conclusion" of unity. So I'm meditating on that in order to see whether the language of describing the Christian Church in terms of charisms might instead provided a more grounded theoretical language for the Church by more explicitly rooting its unity in its diverse peoples and their spiritual gifts.

I was up early today and was startled by the first light of dawn: the sky over the city was clear, but a great line of clouds were out east over Lake Michigan and the early light of the rising sun silhouetting them made the clouds look for all the world like a great range of mountains in the distance. It was like the last moments of sunset over the Tetons. I'll take the illusion: it was good to see mountains again after a few months.

Five new junior faculty positions have been listed on the American Academy of Religion website, including an ecclesiology position at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., and a history of modern Christianity position in a Religious Studies program at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The latter is a newish school, but one that very much wants to grow into a serious research institution and only has a 2/2 teaching load. So these are among new positions to think about. But the core of my prep work on the application process is (mercifully!) done and so I won't have to spend nearly so much time on all of this as I have the last few weeks.

Yesterday was the first session of this year's meetings of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, with Professor William Kurz, S.J., one of our senior biblical scholars, speaking on "Mary: Woman and Mother in God's Saving New Testament Plan," which was a theological and canon-critical reading of Mary in the New Testament, built off of, but not limited to, a historical-critical approach to the New Testament, in the manner described in his and Luke Timothy Johnson's The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation. This was a look at a forthcoming article that provoked some interesting discussion afterward, mostly on the Jewish lines typical of the Seminar, such as looking at the imagery tying Mary to the Ark of the Covenant/Mercy Seat. One thing that grabbed my attention was his addressing Luke's repeated meditations on the theme of Mary "pondering in her heart" the events of Jesus' conception, birth and life. He speculated this repeated theme as being an indication that Luke bears a Marian-inspired theology of the Incarnation, or a Marian tradition of interpretation. This was an idea I'd never heard before, particularly in contrast to the ancient tradition of Luke as an interpreter of Paul, and so I thought it would be interesting to re-read Luke with that question in mind and to see if it seems to work.

Talking with him afterward, he mentioned that he had written me a very strong letter of recommendation, reporting my gifts and reputation as a teacher as unique among graduate students. That was kind of flooring to hear words so generous, and I couldn't help but be incredibly gratified. So I certainly hope that that could help me get over the "paper hump" and to the first-stage interviews at the American Academy of Religion in Chicago next month.

Still digging away in the literature review, and being compelled to re-write tons of material as I dig deeper and learn more, constantly having to revise my earlier impressions and interpretations regarding the development of a Catholic understanding of spiritual gifts or "charisms." The idea of "charismatic" theology is more complicated to talk about today since the rise of the "charismatic" movement in the late 1960s/early 70s, and people's association of the word "charismatic" with the particular characteristics of that movement, like a Pentecostal focus on speaking in tongues, and ecstatic forms of worship. What I'm looking at is much more basic and broad: a notion of charisms, of spiritual gifts that is integrated into all "natural" human gifts and capacities and extends them to supernatural lengths. It's like in physics today when we talk about "uncertainty" and the complex relationships of chaos theory: we cannot easily quantify the extended impact of human action, and, I think, if God is in the mix, this obviously holds true for the actions of the Holy Spirit joining in with our own actions. We cannot separate the supernatural from the natural; we cannot separate the spiritual from the religious.

I had a bit of fun running into a few folks last night, to both of whom I ended up trying to explain a bit of these thoughts. Christine was over at the library as I fetched a book, back from Australia and working on her Doctoral Qualifying Exam questions. I noticed she had Coffey's Theological Studies article on "The Whole Rahner on the Supernatural Existential," and mentioned how impressive I thought that article was. I then found out that she had seen Coffey over her break, back home in Sydney, traveling to see him with her brother and meeting him for the first time. That's when I first realized that he had just retired before she arrived here. She said he seemed really eager and excited to talk the material at length, apologizing for starting to virtually launch into a full lecture. Since he retired at the height of his powers, I can imagine that he'd be really missing the classroom. I can't imagine losing that. So we talked about her DQEs and the set-up she's giving herself and some of the topics she's pursuing, and compared notes with my own experience, which of course was insane and hardly a model anyone should follow, given that four of the five topics I pursued were completely new to me and unrelated to my coursework. So she seemed jazzed and excited for the new year.

A bit later, back at the Ardmore, I ran into my neighbour Kelly on the stairs for the first time since I got back from all my travels, and apparently she was just back from some of hers, too. We got to talking a bit of compare/contrast with what I was doing now, and with her starting to look at post-doc medical-related programs after she finishes up her dental degree this year. Her boyfriend Mark, who I met earlier this summer, is in seminary and thinking of a theological career, and so she's not scared of hearing the subject as so many are. And so I tried to explain the current state of the research in a quick way, which of course was a hopeless task. But the random ebb-and-flow of the conversation was fun, and she disabused me of my conception of her field being a little more "set in stone" simply for being scientific and free of the ideological considerations I'm used to from the humanities or the social sciences. It was cool to hear new examples simply of how emerging technologies like medical modeling and record-keeping are altering even something as focused and concrete as dentistry, and I could see the thrill the creative edge of her field gave her, which made for fun chat as she's somehow both engaging and relaxing to talk with. She's on a quest to find something more hospital or even trauma-oriented to do after graduation rather than a regular practice, which would make her work much more collaborative and a continued learning experience.

The most passage from reading this evening was from Rahner’s The Dynamic Element in the Church, pp. 58-59, speaking in 1958 right to the “spiritual, but not religious” half-truth that people settle for today. He uses the word "charismatic" in the way people today mean "spiritual," and he talks about how that is integrated into, expanded by, and made far more effective by its being brought into the institutional aspects we call "religion":

The Spirit has always held sway anew in the Church, in ever new ways, always unexpectedly and creatively, and bestowed his gifts of new life. He has never abolished official authority and laws, which after all derive from one and the same Spirit, but again and again brings them to fulfillment in ways other than those expected by the “bureaucracy”, the merely human side to office, which exists even in the Church. And he has again and again brought the hierarchy and the whole institutional element to recognize this influence of the Spirit. That is not the least of his repeated miracles. The love of martyrdom was a charisma which existed side by side in the early Church with cowardice, calculation and compromise. Charismata too were the numerous waves of monastic enthusiasm which led to ever new religious communities from Anthony and Pachomius down to the many such later foundations of the nineteenth century, even if many such later foundations appear to have sprung more from shrewd, almost secular, aims and from a need for organization, than from an original impulse of the Spirit.

With regard to such charismatic enthusiasm for the evangelical counsels, which can only be followed through God’s grace, it must be realized that not only the first emergence of such a mentality, which, of course, nearly always forestalls or occurs apart from and indeed, to all appearance, in spite of the institutional elements in the Church, but also the institutionally organized transmission and canalization of such gifts and graces of the Spirit, belong to the charismatic component of the Church. Not only Francis but the Franciscans too are charismatics of they really live in a spirit of joyous poverty. What would Francis mean to the Church if he had not found disciples throughout the centuries? He would not at all be the man of charismatic gifts in the sense we have in mind here, but a religious individualist, an unfortunate crank, and the world, the Church and history would have dropped him and proceeded with their business. But how could he possess disciples, many disciples, who have really written into the actual history of the Church something of the ever-young grace of the Spirit, if these disciples and the soul of the poor man of Assisi had refused on principle to be faithful to this Spirit of theirs under the yoke of ecclesiastical law, of statutes, vows and obligation that derives from the liberty of love? It is precisely here that it is clear that the charismatic element belongs to the Church and to her very ministry as such. She has the courage, the astonishing and impressive courage, and many holders of office may well not realize what they are doing thereby, to regulate the charismatic element in the Church’s life, to formulate “laws” concerning it, and to “organize” this Spirit.

What a strange weekend.

Our regular gathering over at the Lloyds on Friday gave me a weird moment when Dan told me that Tim Russert had died that afternoon. I discovered Russert's Meet The Press as I began to teach at Saint Joe's, and it remains to this day on my VCR's automatic taping schedule. He stood out not just for his service in trying to be a more substantive news encounter with the political world, but he was of particular interest to my field, as well. I thought him the most important figure for American Catholic politics, and a huge figure nationally for taking the theological and spiritual seriously in national affairs. His Meet The Press sessions with major religious leaders across the spectrum were serious cultural roundtables, while the bulk of the rest of the news media would have simply panted in their anti-religious hysteria at such scenes. The panel discussion he helped lead on Catholic Politicians in the U.S.: Their Faith and Public Policy at Boston College's The Church in the 21st Century Center (which Erik surprised me with a DVD of, since I couldn't attend) was as illuminating as anything I've ever seen in speaking about religion and public affairs. He was giving the Catholic Common Ground Initiative Lecture at the end of the month, as I saw from the ads in America, and I was wishing I could attend. Just the fact that he was 58: it all added up to just more of a sense of shock than some of the more recent deaths of major figures. You just didn't assume he was going to be next; you assumed you would get years and years more benefit of his experience, enthusiasm and insight.

The rest of the night had its fun, the silliest moment being when Renée, like all the kids, having been put to bed before we started watching the half-season finale of BSG, suddenly began speaking to us over the baby monitor, which she had long since begun using as an intercom. "Momma, I'll be sad when you're gone tomorrow," which left us laughing as the show began, since Donna would be gone from all of 5am to 10am for her shift at Starbucks. But it was another thing when the same thing happened during a critical moment of the show, with Renée leaning into the microphone and us suddenly hearing, "MOMMA, I WISH YOU WERE HERE WITH ME: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE BUT I WOULD LIKE YOU TO BE; YOU DON'T NEED TO BE BUT I WANT YOU TO BE, NOT NEED YOU TO BE...." Or some seemingly-endless stream like that. Suddenly the whole living room was boiling with the tension of interrupted drama, and people were hissing, "Turn it off!" "Turn it down!" "I'm turning it down! I'm turning it down!" "What did they say?! What did they say?!" and just laughing about the whole thing. My friends certainly enjoy how cute their kids are, but even they don't always find even the cuteness to be the most convenient thing in the world....

I spent a larger part of the weekend writing an essay for a contest for America, actually, than doing dissertation work. In what seemed to me to be a response to the writings of "the New Atheists" (Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and their like, as I've noted here and there before), they were soliciting essays on the theme of "the case for God." I've always had a strong interest in apologetics, since I've been leaned on so much over the years for why I believe this whole silly thing to be true, and so I finally thought I'd throw my hat in the ring on the matter. I idly debated which of two approaches to take, and finally decided on the one that I thought had more substance, though was harder to articulate in the 2500 word limit, than the one that had more literary flair and fun (a proof for the existence of God based upon the existence of humour that I dreamt up at Notre Dame). But that seemed more potentially "fluff" to me, and as the New Atheists are more fluff writers, I thought that the serious response was the one more necessary for our times. We'll see. I'm not sure that it's the best thing I could have tried to pull off for a popular audience.

Recovering from that effort today (I had a 10+ hour writing and editing spree last night that took me into this morning), I spent some time in different parts around campus, but especially enjoying the time toward sunset while sitting by all the new roses in the Courtyard of the Fountain before the Chapel of Joan of Arc. There were various tour groups being conducted around, right up until sunset, and suddenly I heard one guide's voice behind me, saying something like, "... this is a great place to read theology. In fact, over to our right you can see my freshman Theology professor, a Notre Dame graduate and now Marquette doctoral student, hard at work and enjoying the surroundings...." I looked up to find David Kruse, one of my greats from last year, leading the group and grinning as he spoke. I saw the group laughing quietly at his "observe the beast in its natural habitat" delivery, and I complained, "I feel like I'm in a cage!," as I casually tried to hide the novel I had switched to. But they seemed a fun group, actually asking me about the two campuses in comparison, and while Notre Dame over-all beats Marquette for its beauty, which is not hard given their different locations, I have to give that spot at Marquette as being the best single "spot" between the two campuses: having an actual piece of medieval architecture like the Chapel, and the landscaping around it, beats the much vaster Basilica of the Sacred Heart, to my mind, despite everything I've enjoyed about that space. I had to pass on my thoughts about Notre Dame's team for the fall, having not given it the slightest thought until asked.

Today was my niece Grace's sixth birthday. She has, in the last few months, finally come to be reasonably comfortable in talking on the phone, but when I called her before dinner to wish her a happy birthday, she barely made a sound. Leslie said that she had been so excited last night about today and the plans for the day (a lunchtime gathering of her friends at Chuck E. Cheese's) that she woke up last night at 10pm, 2am and 4am, if I recall correctly, each time ready to start the day. So when I called she was more-or-less in a coma. Maybe I'll call again in a day or two.

I was out last night at Dan's when my brother called to let me know that he and Daniele had had an ultrasound of their first child and now knew what they were expecting, but we played phone tag through the rest of today and this evening, so I still don't know that news.

Dan and I took advantage of Amy's absence on a business trip to watch the documentary that came with my more recent DVD set of Brideshead Revisited. (This after a London Broil, a very good Cabernet whose name I've lost, toasting my man Columcille, whose feast day it was, and his putting Owen and Anna down for the night.) That turned into about as intense a discussion as we've ever had on the masterpiece (by which I mostly mean the novel, though the beauty of the miniseries is that it is a purist's filming of the novel and not really much of an "adaptation" in the way that the forthcoming 2008 monstrosity looks to be). I remember two points of particular interest. The first was our disbelief at the lack of imagination of many of the critics commenting in the documentary. They seemed to uniformly assume that Charles and Sebastian's relationship was a homosexual one, which I don't think there's any evidence of at all in the text. Where that theme does pop up, Waugh is pretty frank about it, as he would be from his own experience. But the seeming incomprehension that there can be any sort of love between men that isn't sexual – and this seemed the real issue: the reduction of all love to sex – was amazing to me. For all that one hopes that one's literary critics are liberal in the sense of having a wide experience of life, these seemed the most conservative lot – even if a "left" conservatism – that I'd ever heard.

I was further annoyed with the simple-minded Marxist or republican tendency to see all consciousness of class as reducible to the hostility to the very idea of any possible value to an upper class. Speaking as a poor kid myself, that kind of glib assumption still fell short of any open-minded experience of reality. To see Charles Ryder (or maybe more importantly Evelyn Waugh as the author) as purely engaged in a kind of envious social climbing (see again the forthcoming disaster of a movie – at least going by the trailer) is to have a very shallow view of the possibilities, even if its the most generally rewarded one. Charles sees the decline coming in the post-war years as the time of the "Hoopers": of the egalitarianism of the coming democratic republic of the United Kingdom, but an egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator. Of the mundane, or of the crude. Is that merely elitism? Hooper cannot see any sense in one family owning a place like Brideshead. Am I turning a blind eye to the miseries the rich have contributed to over the centuries? Of course not. But it's still not so simple. While the benefits of being upper class – the conveniences of wealth, the ability to acquire wider ranges of experiences through use of that wealth, or to contribute to the artistic production and collection that the wealthy sometimes do – are true benefits, they do not necessarily turn into moral excellences. They do not automatically make you a better human being. But I do think that they can make you a richer kind of better human being than being a morally excellent and wise uncultured and unlearned person. Charles, in his youthful paintings in the house, contributed to the house's beauty and began a kind of artistic nurturing of beauty in himself that could be an avenue for a spiritual experience of God later on. The Hoopers of the army scrawled pornographic graffiti onto his paintings. That's what Charles fears from the Hoopers gaining control of the world. And I don't think it's mere snobbery to say so. The cultivation of culture, like the cultivation of wealth or of power, is in itself neither a moral good or evil – but it has the potential to become either, and we shouldn't forget the former simply because we love the self-righteous feelings of denouncing the latter.

There is something to art and culture that is deeper than simply being fashion or style. There is a unity between Truth, Goodness, and Beauty – between Metaphysics, Ethics and Aesthetics. I'm not denying that these are complicated by their incarnation in human beings, nor that there aren't lesser realities that I'm here calling mere fashion or style, that are economically-driven more than anything else. But I cannot look at my culture today and insist that we don't reap what we sow when we spread out the seeds of crudity and shallowness. And again, I'm not denying the complexity of these situations in an American-conservatism "back-to-the-1950s" way, which I know is what some people would immediately try to reduce what I've said to being. There is a point to an artistic moment in the verbal crudity of a Lenny Bruce, or the artistic randomness of a Jackson Pollack. But a world full of copies of Lenny Bruce and Jackson Pollack? That's no longer making anything like the same points. I don't know: I think I was more precise when I was trying to articulate all of this to Dan last night.

Three other notes: we came to the conclusion, from seeing him discuss his part of Anthony Blanche, that Nickolas Grace is a superlative actor.

We were astounded, looking at the whole, on the makeup job done on Jeremy Irons, who truly looked like he'd aged twenty years over the series, and not like he was made up to look like he'd aged twenty years.

And then there was Diana Quick's (who played Julia Marchmain) explanation that, in trying to understand the Catholic themes of the novel, she came to the conclusion that it was fundamentally about "original sin." Not sure what this was, she got her hands on some books on the subject, written, she said, for readers who were about the age of 7. They explained everything to her, she assured the interviewer. My thought on putting an ad in Variety offering myself as a theological consultant for films came back to me.

Continued From Earlier Entry

Sunday came too early as far as we were concerned. Just the day before, with the last full day of the retreat around the corner, we were starting to dread it, observing or complaining that we had only just started to feel settled into the process or experience.

It was a quiet day to begin with, with its own look and light on Mount Moran to catch my eye. I spent some of this early time just walking and thinking through some things, and doing a bit of photography, whether of the morning light on the mountains, or of the distinctive wheel-and-horseshoe gate through which Michael and I had gone hiking southward the day before. I had noticed it with some amusement the day before, but I hadn't really seen it, in the way that makes you realize that this is something worth taking some shots of (thus pegging me as an amateur, I'm sure).

Scott had asked me earlier if I wanted to walk over to the part of the ranch where we had missed seeing the cattle being branded earlier, and I declined as I wanted to actually make sure that I had finished thinking through the thoughts I was working on, but when that was done, I set off to catch up with him, to see what there was to be seen and to enjoy some more conversation with him. When I got over that way, though, he was in the midst of a phone call with family, so I stood off a ways and busied myself with looking at the horses that were resting in the field before me. A few of those eventually took some notice of me and began walking over, while I mentally kicked myself for not thinking to bring some carrots with me in order to make friends.



We had a Sunday Mass around lunchtime to which we had invited Fran to come out to, and to bring the kids with her. Paul had been offered the chance to serve Fr. Michael at Mass, and we that that that would be a good experience for him: not just the serving, but to see that this is part of what his Dad does when he gets together with his friends. In other words, to normalize the religious and spiritual while our culture tries to privatize it and make it extraordinary in a more negative sense. I also think that it can make a different kind of impression on the imagination to see something like this sort of "kitchen table" Mass, to strip away the trappings of formality from the ritual, while leaving its core visible and present. That, too, it seems to me, can testify to the reality at the heart of Christian worship, that at anywhere and anyplace, this is about Real Life, not a pious make-believe.

I grabbed this picture as we were getting things ready, but I didn't feel quite free enough to shoot during the Mass, not that this is forbidden. If there's anything true about the Catholic Mass, it is that it is self-conscious of its own artistic nature, and it has been represented in art for centuries, as well as incorporating various arts into the dance of the liturgy. But I very much would have liked to have shot the thing, to grab the beauty in the simplicity of our service, whether of the young priest with the stole of his priesthood draped over his shoulders in ordinary clothes, of Michael playing the guitar for the service and cueing us with song lyrics on his laptop, or of just the gallery of moods and expressions going over people's faces between various prayers, songs, readings, or during the Sacrament itself.

The family stayed for lunch and a bit of chat, but then cleared out so as to let the "guy retreat" continue to be such, which was terribly cool of Frannie to be so generous and conscious of giving the space to let that happen.

As the day went on, we found ourselves clustered pretty tightly around the front porch, with a long discussion on the laity within the Church and the ability of laypeople to take the initiative in various ways. Stories were shared that dealt with certain frustrations along these lines, and I couldn't help but notice how far we still had to go in getting the basic understanding of the Church from the Second Vatican Council to take root in people's lives and visions: the reflexive language of people still seemed to speak of the Church as "them": the bishops, the hierarchy, the leadership. Gathered in Council from 1962-65, those bishops and leaders insisted that the Church was "us": the whole People of God, the laity first and foremost. That there is a formal leadership structure that gets called up out of the laity, but that the Church "belongs" to everyone, and that there was a balance to be found between lay and clerical initiative and leadership. I've spent enough time in theology, spirituality and history that I've come to just assume this to be true, but our conversations here showed me that this had still not become the common, "default" position of most people's thinking, whether lay or even clerical. In some respects, this is one of the topics of my dissertation: that there is a balance still to be worked out – both in theory and in practice – between formal offices of leadership and the leadership that is a charism: the leadership that just comes from talent, vision or calling of the Spirit, regardless of official position.

As evening drew on, we pulled out the buffalo steaks we had saved for our final feast together, serving them with baked potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, thick Texas toast, a few assorted leftovers, beer and wine. The door was left wide open so that we could enjoy the show of the setting sun and the colours it produced on its way down behind the mountains. Though we enjoyed the steaks, we had to give the buffalo burgers from the night before higher marks for pure taste. As ground buffalo, it didn't give us the problems that the steaks could, which were very thickly marbled with fat – too much so – that it became a bit of work to eat the steaks.


It was then, after dinner, as we once more sat out on the porch, now bundled more against the drop in temperature, that the conversation developed along the lines with which I opened this account some days earlier: what did we make of this "do-it-yourself retreat" in itself? As I wrote then:

Last night featured an extended discussion on the nature of this beast we had created: the do-it-yourself retreat. This was our second one: the first was in Nashville, Indiana, probably some five years ago. Some local Indianapolis Notre Dame alums who were at that one were absent at this one. This one featured the addition of Michael Wurtz, C.S.C., a friend of Kevin’s and mine from days in the Notre Dame Folk Choir when Michael was a sophomore touring Ireland and Northern Ireland with us as my and Kevin’s friendship started really taking off. Now he’s a(n almost) 31 year-old priest of four years’ experience who is starting doctoral work in Liturgy in Rome this fall. So this was a smaller group of Kevin’s friends who had gathered together so as to see what the mere dedication of a stretch of time might bring us. The do-it-yourself retreat seems to have an agenda that is set only by the free flow of conversation. The do-it-yourself retreat featured a presumption of some kind of dedication or knowledge of the faith: we were all Catholics with either degrees that touched on some aspect of the faith or with work interests and experiences that leaned in that direction. The do-it-yourself retreat does not require, but it definitely enriched, when one of the set is a priest, like Wurtz is: in this case, he no more than anyone else was leading the retreat, but being empowered to lead us in a daily Mass sitting around the dinner table was a definite plus for a Catholic group. The do-it-yourself retreat has absolutely no set activities: no trust-building exercises, no getting-to-know-one-another activities, no obstacle courses, and no schedule. The do-it-yourself retreat seemed to presume a certain level of trust and knowledge of one another, or the confidence that such knowledge, when made known, would be received in a climate of trust.

We had found this experience enriching, but I think we might have been hard-pressed to explain exactly how. But, given the earlier talk about lay initiative, we wondered whether this experience was giving us something which we ought to try to give to the Church at large. Was there something here to develop? Was there a way of explaining the "do-it-yourself retreat" so that others could have the same experience? What set it apart from just being a bunch of friends getting together and talking, eating and drinking? What made it a retreat? What could you outline in doing it, that would guarantee that others trying it would share in the experience of Catholicity which we had enjoyed in the process?

I don't know that that was a problem we solved as we talked about it. Having a priest along seemed a good move, but that would depend upon people getting over the sort of stiff clericalism that treats priests as something different, a different flesh, and not just as another one of "the guys," who also happened to be a priest. Perhaps it helped, in that sense, that some of us knew Wurtz since he was a sophomore, or that we had been in environs like Notre Dame where there were a number of young men going through the priestly discernment and formation process, so that you had a chance to get to know them well while still outside a clerical relationship. But we were all also well-prepared with developed Catholic backgrounds, whether in theology, philosophy, history, or extended and active parish life. Perhaps the do-it-yourself retreat is limited in that way, that it would presume a certain prior development among its participants, or at least among the majority of them. I suppose that's similar to one of the big questions about the modern Catholic university: how do you guarantee the Catholicity of the student experience if the majority of the faculty are not practicing Catholics?

At some point, the conversation was simply tabled with no formal resolutions and we moved inside, grabbed drinks, and entertained one another with a last night of music. Michael pulled out his more serious microphone equipment and spent a bit of time warming that up. I kicked off the night with "Listen To You," a song I had written for my high school students as I left teaching in South Bend, although the lyrics are broadly applicable to friendship and leave-taking. I just rather thought that that was the mood of the moment. Kevin stayed in a very melancholy mood by playing Ellis Paul's "King of Seventh Avenue" with its startling images, and Scott added to the celebration of our time together by lightheartedly invoking the beer imagery of "Poem 62" from A.E. Houseman's, A Shropshire Lad, informing us:

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

That went over with a certain amount of laughter, particularly given the wry voice with which Scott read it.


I'm hazier about the order of things later on. At some point I know that Scott did readings of Tennyson's "The Poet" and #50 from his "In Memoriam",

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

but I couldn't say whether those were this night or earlier. I did very uptempo versions of my "Wish I May" and "The Right Dreams" with Michael playing leads and Kevin providing very snappy percussion on djembe and shaker. Michael sang two of his, "It's Only Me" and a tune from his Virtues CD called "Humility" that's always moving.

The whole thing ground to a halt as we started laughing during playback of a few songs because the music coming up proved to be an occasionally serendipitous bit of accompaniment to the DVD of Nacho Libre that had started up in Michael's laptop. Seeing Jack Black's antics in counterpoint to some of what we were singing about got us laughing and distracted enough that we decided to watch the movie, which we then all gave up on before too long, deciding we were way too tired to make it through the thing, and thus the night sort of clunked to its end.

The next morning was spent packing and cleaning, with a final Mass toward noon. Our hostess walked in on that, clearly mortified and probably not a little freaked out at the sight of a bunch of guys conducting a Mass around a dinner table, but let us know that our check-out time had been 10am. (We were now pushing noon). Since we had thought it was a noon check-out time, we were suitably embarrassed, but continued with our closing. This was perhaps the hardest piece of the retreat for me. I was praying over some things I was angry about, that I wanted to let go of before or in this Mass, and I was quietly astonished at the difference I felt afterward, almost as though the morning and afternoon versions of me thought entirely differently about matters.

We cleared out and hit the road, Kevin going off ahead of us in his Jeep so that he could make an appointment with clients, the rest of us dropping off Wurtz for his flight out of the Jackson Hole Airport and wishing him safe travels. Michael, Scott and I went into town, looked around the touristy center of Jackson a bit, let me mail off my buffalo postcard to my nieces, and then ended up going back for a Billy Burger lunch as Scott had not had the chance to taste them on Thursday. Scott hit the road after that, driving his way back to Saint Louis via Michael's place in Kansas City, and Michael and I ended up just sitting in Kevin and Frannie's front yard, enjoying the sun and the extraordinarily perfect weather we had experienced our entire time in the Hole, and talked over the experience of the last few days some more, as well as the story of our friendships with each other and with Kevin. After an hour or a little more, Michael had to return the Armada to the airport and catch his own flight out, so I gave him a big hug (which always makes me flash back to being in junior high, as Michael is a foot taller than me) and watched him drive off.

And that, I suppose, must be the very end of the Jackson Hole Retreat. I would simply curl up on the porch with my novel for a bit, waiting for Kevin and Frannie to come home from work, taking time to gabble with my goddaughter when her nanny brought her home, and here and there think about the past few days.

I remain amazed, occasionally, at the way time slips by, and in the incidental details revealed to me in the "Last Played" information in iTunes: how is it that I can love and know an album as well as I know and love U2's The Joshua Tree, only to find that I haven't played the whole thing through since apparently May of 2004?

Also of note musically, I find myself currently obsessed with a track I remember from my undergrad days at 105 Oak Street that I found on iTunes the other day: Johnny Cash joining punk band One Bad Pig for their version of his "The Man in Black." Somehow Johnny – no surprise – sounds more punk than anyone. I do wish there had been a music video made of that one.

Such weighty issues.

So. Back to the story. Continued from an Earlier Entry:

Friday, late afternoon. Sitting and thinking.

We spent some time sitting on the rise we had walked to after we couldn't go any farther with the truck. Not a lot was said there, but a number of photographs were taken. We had had some group prayer with the service before lunch, but now everyone seemed to instinctively sit apart and withdraw from one another for a bit, still as a group, but feeling that now was somehow a moment for us to try to sit with ourselves a little more consciously. That gave me the opportunity to realize something very basic about my surroundings. I was rather stunned by the silence. I live off an intersection of one of the main streets of Milwaukee, just off of the high-rise downtown, with a freshman dorm across the street from me, a bar on my first floor, and two interstate highways intersecting a few bowshots away. I suddenly realized how long it had been since I'd encountered silence that total. While I had been out to Jackson a number of times over the last few years, I had generally not been there in weather where I could just sit and enjoy being outside. This was certainly not the case in my New Years visits, and last October was still a bit crisp for such. Now, perhaps for the first time since Kevin and I had blown through in August 2000, I could just sit and take in the raw presence of the place.

Not that that was the only thing bouncing through my head. I had found myself struck by a line Wurtzy had prayed at Mass that afternoon from the prayer book, that asked God to "conquer our Babel with Your Pentecost." Not only did I think it literary and poetic, it just seemed to strike at the heart of what grace effected in us, and we brought it up a few times throughout the day, perhaps as an early theme of the retreat revealing itself. Perhaps a theme of the retreat or an effect of it that we should watch to see if it reveals itselves in our lives in the coming months, or which we should consciously try to appropriate for ourselves, which may be more likely.

We wandered down from the ridge we had perched ourselves on, Michael and Wurtzy walking down the steep slope with me and going over to peer at a bit of canyon I had seen through the trees, carved in-between our hillside and the next. Kev and Scott grabbed the truck and met us below. And we wove our way back down to the floor of the Hole, of the valley, passing the now-landed paragliders that we had seen launch when we had started on our way up.




On our way out of the Elk Reserve, we ran into a species that I still had yet to encounter in all my trips to Jackson: bighorn sheep. They were down on the floor of the valley, walking below one of the buttes, and so gave us an easy, up-close view of themselves. It's striking how different they look with or without their horns. The horns add a majesty that just wouldn't be there without them. I can't say more than that, or even justify the impression as something "objective," but it seems pretty clear to me. Perhaps it isn't just fashion that we humans are so concerned about our hair.... Anyway, we were getting momentarily back on the clock, though, with Kevin having just gotten a phone call (I don't know if there's anywhere in the wilderness of the Hole that isn't now covered for cellphone access) asking him to stop by the hospital to see one of his patients briefly, and so we just barely paused to take a look at them.




While we drove northward, Kevin and Michael, sitting in the front of the truck, carried most of the conversation, talking about their families, about being married and about their children, and comparing notes on the whole experience. I found myself a bit amused listening to them, and at the comparative quiet of the back seat, where the two single guys and the priest didn't seem to have much to add to the conversation, other than my occasional "uncle" perspectives or experiences. "So much for the single guys having all the drama," I thought. The sun began to dip and tint everything orange. Marriage and dating stayed large in the conversation as we arrived back at the cabin and moved it to the porch. Kevin is particularly combative with me on this topic, as we've always had very different approaches to dating, with him asking out lots of women and me having been selective but much more likely to have longer relationships. That I hadn't been dating anyone since the winter was a frustration for him as he thinks it's more-or-less a waste of my life for me not to get married. I said that I thought it was a bit odd for him to apparently be more frustrated by it than I was, but he also wasn't entirely up-to-date on some of that sort of thing with me, and I told him so. Plus, given the fact that I'm eager to complete the dissertation and leave the city within the next year has me a bit reluctant to do any roots-planting at this point. So I explained that while I wasn't actively pursuing anything at the moment, neither was I closing off any more "organically"-appearing possibilities as they presented themselves in my life. That seemed to mollify him for the moment, while everyone else seemed to be trying to make out why it was we were talking this way about the matter. "Man, no guys talk like you and Kevin do about these things," laughed Michael later, and I had to admit that that was possibly true. Mom used to laugh to hear me talking with Kev on the phone as we'd "process our feelings" about one thing or another. A therapist and a theologian: who knew how dangerous a conversational combination that was?

In time, we turned toward another topic of great importance: food. We decided to warm up the grill with our most basic grill foods: brauts and hot dogs. Wurtzy tried to bring some beer to a boil and cook the brauts in those for a while first, though the altitude made boiling things a bit more labourious, as he had realized when preparing the cream of tomato soup we had had with our cold cuts lunch. While the coals started burning and such preparations were underway, Wurtzy or Michael broke out some of the cigars he'd brought to share with Kevin and one another, while I positioned myself upwind so as to avoid the stench but to still enjoy the conversation. The Babel/Pentecost theme came up again as we talked about discerning things about people, and Kevin spoke excitedly about the "boundaries" thinking he had been doing of late, and the application of that concept in relationships he worked on with his clients.

There was also a certain amount of us sounding one another out on our basic ecclesiologies, it seemed, trying to get a feel for one another's approaches to understanding the life of the Church and how we each thought that that functioned or ought to. I tend to get particular on this, not just because of it being an academic specialty of mine, but also because I'm eager to break down the all-too-common "left" and "right" categories that creep their way into such conceptions from polarized politics today. I both think that those categories defeat actual thought and conversation, and am slightly anxious to make sure that I'm not dismissively identified with one or the other simple view. That was a precursor to Scott, Michael and I getting into a long talk about faith and reason. Michael held that academics have gotten out of hand with challenging the magisterium, while I thought that that was an overstatement, and too characteristic of the polemicized language being used today, and that most of the conversations in question – almost always about liturgy and ecclesiology in the Roman Catholic Church and not questions of dogma or credal content – were not only legitimate and proper under the umbrella of academic freedom but were also within the normal process of the development of doctrine. It seemed to me an easy but misleading tactic of oppositional thinkers in a given debate to invoke language of "dissent" or "challenging the magisterium" as a way of simply trying to win the argument, rather than playing it out. Scott weighed in with the position that there was room for innovation but only within the parameters of natural law & defined doctrine, and I agreed with that, arguing that that was in fact the case with most of the debates in question, even large controversies like that regarding the birth control encyclical in 1968 – that even that heated debate was properly conducted in light of those touchstones.





The sun dropped down and I was stunned by how the temperature instantly seemed to drop some ten degrees. We had been shockingly lucky in terms of the weather for our gathering, getting the best long weekend that the Hole had seen this year. Down at the bottom of the valley, it was hitting around 70 degrees each day and was fabulously clear. That was one way in which God seemed to bless us and toss us a freebie.


It was cool enough after the sun set, though, that we ate inside around the table and broke open the bottle of Six Grapes Port as part of after-dinner drinks. Michael, alas!, was vocal in his distaste for sweet dessert wines of this sort, and I'm not sure that anyone other than Kevin and I had more than a glass. That didn't stop us from finishing the bottle over the remainder of the evening, for which I assumed I would pay a brutal penalty, but, to our surprise, Kevin and both found that the wine never seemed to hit our heads through the evening, and being as light as I am, I am very aware when that happens. I can't think that two or three brauts and the rest would have been enough food to prevent that from happening. I had also had some of the exceptional honey-tasting and buttery local root beer that I'd discovered and raved about out there from the previous October, but which I had forgotten the name of. Now, having laid in a 12-bottle case of it when we grabbed our groceries, I knew that it was in fact Henry Weinhard's Root Beer: and that maybe it has magical anti-alcohol attributes that protected me from the port.




Mellow and relaxed after food, drink, and a fine day, we busted out the guitars and started revving up our instruments and voices. McGlinn began recording some material on his laptop, not yet hooking up the larger microphone assembly he had brought along, but merely just recording directly onto his Garage Band program through the little microphone built into his new iMac. To my dismay, he seemed to want to start and stop recording each song individually, which meant that a lot of the spontaneity was lost, whether in-between chatter or entire stretches of music themselves, when pressing "record" was forgotten in the moment.

I think Kevin began playing initially, this evening. He was, understandably, in a John Denver mood over the weekend, and a number of Denver's songs were forthcoming over these days, as well as some of Kevin's own. But I'm afraid that I disremember what was played Friday other than, I think, his "Indiana," which I believe Wurtz requested at some point that night. Michael and Kevin will have to supply me with their parts of the setlists, or else this account will mostly focus on my own stuff, as I am clearly consumed by my own vanity. So I hope to edit and update this material soon with further information from them, for memory's, and justice's, sakes.

Kevin's first was followed by a rather fast, maybe even edgy, version of my "Tunisian Blue" which was – to my dismay – not recorded. Scott interjected at one point with a request. Though he was not prepared to play an instrument or to write a song on the spot, he wanted to know if we would be open to hearing him read a poem from his current reading in Tennyson, and this was met with enthusiastic approval. His reading style is clear and robust, and I believe that he first hit us with "Ring Out, Wild Bells", which went over with a certain amount of approval, climaxing, I thought, in what perhaps served as another invocation for our time together:

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

It was perhaps a bit striking, though, to see that we were unprepared for lyric without melody and rhythm. I think poetry has been the art in greatest decline in both production and appreciation in the last century, and I suspect that Scott's listeners were evidence of the trend. Later I was asked to pull out "On My Way," which Kevin is fond of as it recounts our 2000 Road Trip, and we noted how some of the lines were of the road and view we had traveled up just a few hours before:

The mountains stand together
Yet each peak is alone
I rode on with my brother
And our thoughts were not our own:
Highway conversations
Past and present scenes
Hopes, fears, jokes, regrets
All that our lives might mean

We fell into the spontaneity of the scat second half of the song as easily as ever, and I was pleased and humbled by Scott and Wurtz's appreciation for the song, and so we shared a bit more of that story with them. I've missed the jams with old friends, my friends at Marquette not being musical ones in this way, and so collaborating on a tune like this with Kevin singing and Michael playing leads was purest refreshment.

Michael kicked in a bunch of pieces that night, reaching back to the Kingston Trio stuff his Dad taught him. As he recalls it, there was Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are" was something he reworked spontaneously, and then a trio of Kingston Trio pieces, with "MTA," "Where Have All The Flowers Gone," and "Tom Dooley." John Denver's "Country Roads" came up, and then Jim Croce's "Time In A Bottle." Michael rounded out the night by bringing up Denver's "Leaving On A Jet Plane" and "Annie's Song."

Perhaps the weirdest part of the evening for me was the fact that I ended up playing the djembe a number of times, and that this was even requested. Anyone who knows me musically knows that I'm what might politely be called "rhythm challenged." I get too excited and nervous, and as soon as I really start thinking about what I'm doing, my hands inevitably do something other than what I wanted them to do. But I will also say that I've improved a ton in the last ten years and can reasonably keep a beat, and with Michael dictating a simple rhythm to me here and there, I was able to offer something passable so that Kevin could play guitar or mandolin, instead. But it was definitely the other side of music for me: a robust and deeply humbling encounter with my limitations!

I remember wasting a certain amount of brain time trying to remember the opening chords of Groove Armada's "Hands of Time," which had been a song that had been on my mind of late, tying into the themes we had discussed earlier and which seemed symbolic of my frustration with the last year when I seemed to be "losing" it all to teaching and not finishing, though the irony there is that I want to finish so that I can teach, if merely for more money. But that evaded me through the time I was thinking of it, and then the mood went beyond such things.

Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the climactic musical moment of the evening was a jam and spontaneous song that will probably be remembered by the name "Dingo Dance," the recurring theme of which was the Dingo that Michael hadn't, in fact, seen in the woods the day before. The various verses largely consisted of Kevin and Michael making fun of one another and of us all, which was mostly received with laughter and egging one another on. After that, the night broke up with that laughter, like a joke that couldn't be topped. Good times.

Continued

Continued From Previous Entry:

Scott, Wurtzy and I followed Kevin and Michael in Kevin’s Jeep up to Luton’s Teton Cabins, thirty miles or so north of Jackson toward the border of Yellowstone, and a bit east of Moran, Wyoming. We laughed some as we watched Kevin swerve in and out of his lane, saying, “Ah, Kevin’s talking right now,” which was a phenomenon we had witnessed earlier. We also noted elk and deer off to the sides of the road as we drove through the darkness. But the thing that struck me the most was to see the Tetons by moonlight. It had never been terribly clear weather in any of my visits to Jackson, most of which had been in the winter. Not since Kev and I drove through in August 2000 on the famed Road Trip had it been so bright and pleasant, according to my memory. Now the Hole was largely clear of snow, except for a few shadowed areas where a drift hung on. But the mountains were still covered, almost down to their bases, giving a stark white contrast to the valley floor. By moonlight they now fairly glowed.






The cabins turned out to be pretty much everything we had hoped for: clean, well-appointed, comfortable. Even better, we were there the first weekend they were opened, with some of the cabins still boarded up for the winter. So we had virtually no other people around, as the season for such things in Jackson Hole normally began with the Memorial Day weekend. (This had complicated things for us when we were trying to find a place to rent.) We unloaded the trucks, opened a few drinks, and suddenly it seemed that all the exhaustion of the day, of only getting two hours of sleep the night before, of the travel itself – it all fell away. Instrument cases were opened, guitars and mandolin were tuned, and the first music of the weekend came forth. Nothing was recorded that night, I think, and we weren’t up terribly long as I recall. I think that was when I requested and received a flamenco guitar version of Michael’s upbeat Latin dance piece “Love,” which is one of my favourites off of his lush CD Virtues, featured at Out of the Blue Works. That was as good a musical baptism or invocation for the weekend as any we could have dreamed up. He followed that up with his ""How We All Are One."





In fact, "Love" is so good that I’ve just pulled it up on my iTunes on my laptop as I write (one of the benefits of having bought a much better battery for this beastie. … Actually, I have to admit, that the loud, pulsing sounds of the Memphis Horns backing this ecstatic piano is rather abrupt and incongruous with the previously-silent hillside I am perched on. And this is music that makes you want to dance, even when you’re by yourself, but if I did so here I’d probably fall a couple hundred feet, which would be no fun. I think I’m remembering why I find people with loud radios so annoying in wilderness parks. In fact, the silence here has been one of the things that I most noticed and was grateful for. Plus I’m trying to not run into buffalo or elk, and to avoid the notice of the occasional cougar that Frannie says will stray down here during the summer. Ouch: the sun just came out from behind a cloud for the first time since I set out (today has been the first overcast day since I arrived, high and grey, still above even the Grand Teton, and I suddenly feel like I’m going to sizzle like bacon as the temperature seems to leap ten degrees or more, while the black keys are in seconds almost too hot to touch….

Okay, enough of that. Took a stretchy break and eased my bum, too, while turning the music over to Mark Lang’s magnum opus “View of Heaven,” off of his CD Simplicity, while enjoying the sheer fact that I have moved in the most extraordinarly musical/mystical circle I’ve ever heard tell of. A view like this is a video that is worthy of their efforts. Rah Rah, Go Team. So: back to the story.

Friday featured us all getting up at our leisure, which is another key point of the do-it-yourself retreat: it’s restful. People did as they liked for breakfast, which we had planned as being light: bagels, fruit, juice, milk, coffee. Kev took in a thirty-mile bike ride. I woke to look out at Mount Moran and compare the actual view to the computer image I'd conjured up from Google Earth (two entries previous). People went off here and there to meditate and pray, read some, talk now and again, and we didn’t start forming any kind of consensus until the question arose of whether to have Mass before lunch. Deciding that that was the best option, we settled in around the dinner table for that wonderful sort of mixed formality and informality that I find I quite enjoy: the ancient rites of the Mass, but with the casual intimacy of friends being gathered at the table. This was only the second time I had seen Wurtz in his priestly duties, the first being Kevin’s wedding. Again, it was a splendid experience of the kind of balance found in the best of Catholicism: the intelligent reverence and reflection of a highly-educated priest, along with the generous liberty of a less-formal setting in asking for us to contribute our own reflections after his own brief homily. When we concluded, we then had a brief debate as to what to do for lunch. It was decided to go straight to our sandwich/lunchmeat reserves and so save cooking for later. We piled our blessings of food onto plates and sat outside at the picnic table across from our cabin, taking in the view of Mount Moran, which would face us throughout the week, entertaining us with its constant changes according to the light and the time of day. We spoke of places we could eyeball from where we were sitting that we could walk to, from which where we might have a clearer view of the Grand Teton itself – all of which was hidden below the ridge to our south, save only the very peak. But Kevin intrigued the group with his descriptions of a place he liked to go, Goodwin Lake. We would have to drive back to Jackson in order to get the road that would climb to the lake, but we all agreed to his recommendation, and the shared trip in the Armada was full of conversation, so it wasn’t like we were losing any time on the retreat by taking the drive. The view was to die for, anyway, and I had never driven south along the length of the Tetons during the day, so I took in that vision eagerly, noting various sights along the way, including the Turner ranch, which I had heard much of over the years, both from Doug and from the Flemings.


We drove out into the Elk Reserve, below where I’m now perched on a friendly orange and green lichen-covered boulder, and drove up a winding, occasionally terrifying gravel road with a sheer drop off below my rear right window. We paused on the way up to take a few group shots at a wide space that gave a grand view across the Hole to the Tetons, and to the cloud of smoke we had noticed on the drive down, where what looked like a considerable fire was burning over near Teton Village. We drove until we were suddenly stopped around a blind turn by a massive unmelted snowdrift that blocked the road, forcing Kevin to turn the truck around carefully, as he was blocked on one side by the upward slope and limited on the other by another drop-off. That made for some hair-raising moments while we directed him from outside, while wishing him the best of luck. We left the truck at the first wide and convenient spot and continued on foot, giving up the journey to the lake, still some miles away, but climbing up to the clear view of the Hole. (We paused so that I could take a run of photographs of Michael for a possible new album cover, featuring this absurd, partially Nacho Libre-inspired shot.) And there we simply sat with the valley and the sound of silence, with only the occasional murmur of conversation. Some photographs were taken, but it was largely just a quiet time, with the awareness that we devote far too little time to quiet, and are places where we can obtain it even more rarely.






That said, I think I’ll shut this down and enjoy it a bit myself for the last time before heading back in to the family. We’re heading over to the Rendezvous Bistro for my farewell dinner tonight, where we had been back in January 2006 with most of the rest of the Biolchini kids and I’m looking forward to simply enjoying Kevin and Frannie’s company where they can put down their work for a few minutes.

Continued

Well, McGlinn just drove off, the last of today’s travelers exiting Jackson Hole, leaving me sitting in the shade of Kev and Frannie’s front porch, just starting to wrap my mind around the last four days. It is always a strange sort of thing to attempt to summarize an especially rich period of time, like this retreat in Jackson Hole has been. But I suppose that that is just a variation on the perennial literary challenge: to reduce to words experience that is intrinsically beyond words. Was it a strong – even a great – social, intellectual and spiritual experience? Sure. Was it unreservedly so? A continual high of spiritual ecstasy? Well, no. But neither did I expect or hope it to be.

Last night featured an extended discussion on the nature of this beast we had created: the do-it-yourself retreat. This was our second one: the first was in Nashville, Indiana, probably some five years ago. Some local Indianapolis Notre Dame alums who were at that one were absent at this one. This one featured the addition of Michael Wurtz, C.S.C., a friend of Kevin’s and mine from days in the Notre Dame Folk Choir when Michael was a sophomore touring Ireland and Northern Ireland with us as my and Kevin’s friendship started really taking off. Now he’s a(n almost) 31 year-old priest of four years’ experience who is starting doctoral work in Liturgy in Rome this fall. So this was a smaller group of Kevin’s friends who had gathered together so as to see what the mere dedication of a stretch of time might bring us. The do-it-yourself retreat seems to have an agenda that is set only by the free flow of conversation. The do-it-yourself retreat featured a presumption of some kind of dedication or knowledge of the faith: we were all Catholics with either degrees that touched on some aspect of the faith or with work interests and experiences that leaned in that direction. The do-it-yourself retreat does not require, but it definitely enriched, when one of the set is a priest, like Wurtz is: in this case, he no more than anyone else was leading the retreat, but being empowered to lead us in a daily Mass sitting around the dinner table was a definite plus for a Catholic group. The do-it-yourself retreat has absolutely no set activities: no trust-building exercises, no getting-to-know-one-another activities, no obstacle courses, and no schedule. The do-it-yourself retreat seemed to presume a certain level of trust and knowledge of one another, or the confidence that such knowledge, when made known, would be received in a climate of trust.

So here we were. Five guys, three of whom were conveniently named “Michael,” along with one Scott and one Kevin. I’ll just be “me,” for convenience’s sake, with “Wurtzy” being another and “Michael” being the third, since that’s more his stage name, anyway.

Michael and I flew into Jackson together on Thursday morning from the Frontier Airlines hub in Denver. I hadn’t laid eyes on Michael in four years, since finishing up the recording of my CD Life and Other Impossibilities in Nashville, which he graciously produced. We’ve kept up with one another by phone, email, and word-of-mouth since then, but it isn’t the same. So I was tickled to see his near seven-foot frame slouched in a waiting room, poking away at a music mix on his new Mac laptop. We had a little time to catch up before boarding, which was convenient so that I could get out of the way when we arrived in Jackson Hole and let Kevin show him around for the first time. As we drove into town to drop off our stuff and Kev gave him the where-and-what’s of the town and his time in it, I just enjoyed the process of seeing Michael take it all in for the first time. We had a bit of time to kill before Wurtzy would be the next to arrive, and so we drove out to Kevin’s in-laws’ place. When Kevin and I first started kicking around the idea of having another of these retreats back when I was visiting last October, we had hoped that we could do this without housing costs by using their large spread. They were fabulously gracious in being open to the idea, but then it happened that this summer was needed for some long-delayed work on the interiors, and so staying there became an impossibility. But Kev took us up there to show it to Michael, and we had the fun of running into some small groups of buffalo along the way. When we saw the gutted state of some of the house, and the great new interiors that were being made, we certainly couldn’t help but be pleased for the family in fixing up the place. In a fun, rather juvenile mood, we took some photographs that played with the incongruity of a toilet we found sitting outside one porch, overlooking the Tetons like some inappropriate throne.



One of the touchstone events of the weekend happened shortly after, as we drove down the winding hillside road from the house and then through some small woods. Having already run into moose on the way in from the airport, some elk on their migration north from the National Elk Reserve north of town, the afore-mentioned buffalo along the road to the in-laws’, and just a few minutes earlier, a pair of buffalo on the road near the house, Michael piped right up when he saw some movement through the trees on our right. A medium-sized canine creature appeared: “Hey, look over there!” Michael cried, “Is that a dingo?!” We all looked at the thing for a moment and then I thought I saw something else, “Um… it’s got a collar and tag on….” A moment later, the animal’s blonde owner came into view, walking around a curve in the road before us, and we all busted out laughing at the absurd moment of bad “Wild Kingdom” expectations, especially of the wrong continent sort. Kevin even greeted the owner and explained what had just happened, to her indifferent reaction, which seemed perhaps more concerned with why we were in her neighbourhood. But “Dingo” became a key riff word for the rest of the weekend.

That took just long enough for us to get to the airport and to walk in through the doors just in time to see Wurtzy walk in through his gate across from us. Since he, like the rest of us who had flown in, was a wise, carry-on-luggage-only passenger for such a short trip, he spent less than 3 seconds in the airport, which is probably some kind of record. As we now only had to wait for Scott to drive into town that afternoon, we dropped off Wurtzy’s things and stopped downtown for a Billy Burger lunch at the famed Billy’s Giant Hamburgers of Jackson, Wyoming. And so now we caught up with Wurtz, and brought him up-to-date on some of our lives. He had concelebrated Kevin and Frannie’s wedding at Notre Dame in 2005, and I know that Kevin’s respect for him as both friend and priest has simply continued to grow over recent years. This was his first time in Jackson since he was a kid traveling through with his parents, and so he was enjoying a bit of the look-around as well. When lunch was done and we drove back to Kevin’s place, Scott had arrived and the party was complete. Scott was a friend of Michael’s who had attended the first retreat through that connection, and it was cool to see him being able to take part in his again. He had recently gone back to graduate school at Saint Louis University, investigating the natural law tradition in American political history and philosophy, particularly among the Founders, and so he brought that distinct vantage point into our conversations throughout the week.




During the afternoon, we went shopping for food for the weekend, and I was a bit taken aback at what was deemed necessary for five guys over four days. Now, I’ll grant that I am a comparatively light eater, the most embarrassing example of which was when my friend Amy rejected my contributing to a dinner she and Dan had prepared at their house with the response that I ate less than their two children, aged 3 and 1. And some of the guys are built considerably more solidly than I am. But this afternoon, the guys had the most over-loaded grocery cart I’ve ever seen, where Scott won the “Price Is Right” bet at the counter by predicting the closest estimate to our $550 price tag. I thought they were going too high and lost with my piddly $400 prediction. The staff somehow filled three carts with the bags full of what we had jammed into one (fruit and bread on the bottom – why are most grocery stores laid out that way?) and we started realizing that we were going to have a volume problem when we wanted to add our bags and instruments to the food. I then went next door with them where we bought $150 worth of wine, port, and beer for the four days. (There was a bit of food left over, but I think we drank everything. Bizarrely enough, after twice consuming the bulk of a bottle of port between the two of us, Kevin and I both never felt it hit our heads: I’m a notorious lightweight, and two glasses of wine are often enough to do me in, but I never felt anything of what we drank this weekend. Maybe because of $550 worth of food….)



We delayed heading out the cabin we had rented so that we could attend a Little League game for Kevin’s son Paul, and with their nanny watching little Sophia and Max, Frannie and Paul were able to join the party for dinner before we headed out that evening. So we went to my much-loved Nani’s, where the regional Italian menu for the month was Umbrian food (not Venetian, as it had said on the apparently out-of-date website when I checked), and I found myself having the best pork I’ve ever eaten, a porchetta dish that was melt-in-your-mouth delicate, but flavourful enough to make most yummy pork dishes seem dull and boiled by comparison. Wurtzy had let it slip that his birthday was coming up, and so someone breathed news of this to the kitchen, which produced the requisite pastry. We then produced the traditional song, and the festive spirit of the evening now simply had one more reason fueling it. A toast was made for the weekend itself and our gathering, and another important one was offered for Frannie’s being able and willing to give Kevin these “days off” and to take the burden of the children by herself for these days, which, as with Michael’s wife doing the same, really made this time possible. (So I hope their payback is something equally long and fun for them.)

We had rented a giant papal-white Nissan Armada when we realized how much luggage and food we were trying to fit into Kev’s Jeep and Scott’s rather small car, in which Scott had brought out Michael’s guitars and recording gear when he had stopped by Michael and Beth’s Kansas City home a few days before.

Continued

Yay! I've been somewhat running amok the last several hours. After getting to relax and to read a novel with virtually no guilt for a few days once grades were done, I've now been getting everything ready for tomorrow's trip out west. Goofy emails keep being exchanged among the guys as we all get excited for the weekend. Michael loaded up his instruments and recording equipment with Scott when Scott drove through Kansas City on his way to Wyoming yesterday. The rest of us are flying in, and I will meet up with Michael in Denver as we're on the same flight into Jackson Hole tomorrow morning. One of Kevin's clients in the Hole got a buffalo in a recent hunt and gave us a bunch of buffalo meat for the weekend, which will save on our grilling costs. Plus, saying that we're grilling "buffalo" is even more manly a word than "steak," I think. Hmm. "Buffalo steaks." Now I just have to hope that the cabin is all good.

Michael Wurtz (Five guys on the "do-it-yourself" retreat and three of us are named "Michael") is flying in in the afternoon, and I'm not sure when Scott is expected. Along with dinner at Nani's tomorrow night (they're on a Venetian menu this month), we're apparently going to take in part of Paulie's baseball game before heading north to the cabin until Monday morning.

It has been beyond fabulous to be able to start to freely socialize again. Other than the weekly dinners with the gang/BSG nights on Friday, I've not seen anyone since early March, before spring break. There was just that much prep and grading hanging over me. So I took an afternoon's stroll with Jessica downtown, around by the lakefront near the Art Museum and then into the Third Ward for dinner over at the Public Market. It was just a good chance to get some uninterrupted talk, mostly swapping autobiography, but it was also interesting for me to here her perspectives on the experience of discovering the study of Theology as something that demands a further integration into one's life – that it's not just a subject, but, properly understood, also a Way. She rightly compared it with the life of ancient Philosophy in that regard. I'm used to hearing this sort of thing as part of discussing one's past among my friends; to hear it from someone who is currently discovering what exactly it means for her was a distinct experience. I brought up the idea that there is a pursuit of wisdom as well as knowledge in this kind of field, and that that wasn't something we were much equipped for as a culture any more, and what its cost might be compared to the pop "spirituality" or "wisdom" marketed in the bookstores today.

The next day, Dan and I had intended to go hear Michael Novak and his daughter Jana speak the other night, but time was running short by the time he was ready to go. He had been trying to kill some horrific weed spread all over his lawn and Amy and I had more-or-less finished dinner with the kids by the time he got in from that. Amy and I had great fun telling one another high school horror stories while he was working, and it just became a quiet evening with the three of us hanging out, with Dan taking an hour to do some other work while Amy and I watched a new Grey's Anatomy. Quiet. Perfect. I took in BSG with the Harrises when the Lloyds took off for New Jersey, and that too was great in getting extended time with just the two of them. For me, it was like winning a prize after the long social darkness of the last two months. I played a lot of phone tag with Diane, but ended up having to make plans for after I return, since we were never able to be quite available at the same time.

And so last night found me wandering the East Side with Julie, after a brief stay at her place, talking with her and Jackie. Soon we were sipping drinks at Alterra and then splitting a sundae at Pizza World while we caught up, talking of her moving plans as she begins her doctorate in the fall at Stony Brook, of dating when you know you're moving shortly, and less weighty things.

I found myself explaining to people that there was a different feel to the end of this semester. Not teaching an Introduction, but instead a mid-level course, I not only had a larger number of majors and minors for the first time, I just found a more mature character to the group of students as a whole. While there were definitely people there who were only there for their second THEO requirement and who remained invulnerably checked out through the whole semester, I couldn't help but notice a different feel by the conclusion. The most emblematic image of this came from the number of guys who came up to me at different points in these last days and shook my hand, thanking me for the course. I had never received handshakes from students before, and I was kind of struck by the ritual or symbolism of it. It was my male students, who made up less than a third of the two courses, who did this. That I had apparently earned some distinct form of respect just struck me in a new way, as I said. I'm really just spilling words here trying to describe something I don't really understand – if there is anything to understand. Yet it created a different mood or ambiance at the end of the semester – a positive one, and one for which I was, in turn, equally grateful to my students.

This bites. But was inevitable, partially probably due to wider economic reasons, as the article mentions, and I would think to some wider social ones, too, that would de-emphasize the worth of Catholic education as such. But it was also obvious that the huge payouts in the sexual abuse cases granted by holding the whole of a diocese as accountable instead of the guilty themselves were going to be more paid by the students, the homeless, the humgry and the sick than by anyone else.

More Catholic Schools Closing Across US
Apr 12, 6:11 AM (ET)

By MATT SEDENSKY

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) - For 46 years, crime, recessions and hurricanes proved no threat to the daily ritual of St. Monica School, where the entire blue-and-white uniformed student body gathered outside each morning to join in prayer.

Come June, though, the tradition will fade away, and "amen" will close St. Monica's morning recitations for the last time. The school, a home-away-from-home for mostly minority students, will close.

As Pope Benedict XVI next week makes his first trip to the U.S. as pontiff, Catholic schools across the country, long a force in educating the underprivileged regardless of their faith, face the same fate as St. Monica.

About 1,267 Catholic schools have closed since 2000 and enrollment nationwide has dropped by 382,125 students, or 14 percent, according to the National Catholic Education Association. The problem is most apparent in inner cities, in schools like St. Monica with large concentrations of minorities whose parents often struggle to pay tuition rather than send them to failing public schools.

( Read more... )

Slate articles I read in the last few days, brought to my attention by friede and kesil.

( Read more... )

I'm curious to see such a major political voice as his has been venturing into these academic areas....

In Westminster lecture, Blair says faith can transform humanity
By Simon Caldwell
Catholic News Service

LONDON (CNS) -- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has spoken of his "passionate" conviction that religious faith can transform humanity for the better.

Blair, 54, a former Anglican who was received into the Catholic Church just days before Christmas, said he wanted to promote the "idea of faith itself as something dynamic, modern and full of present relevance."

He told 1,600 people gathered in London's Westminster Cathedral April 3 that faith had a "major part to play in shaping the values which guide the modern world and can and should be a force for progress."

"But it has to be rescued on the one hand from the extremist and exclusionary tendency within religion today and on the other from the danger that religious faith is seen as an interesting part of history and tradition, but with nothing to say about the contemporary human condition," he said. "I see faith and reason, faith and progress, as in alliance, not contention."

His remarks came in a lecture on the subject of "Faith and Globalization," the first in a series of six speeches hosted by the Archdiocese of Westminster on "Faith and Life in Britain."

( Read more... )

Ill. Univ. Top Cop: 'I Lost 5 People'
Muslims More Numerous Than Catholics
‘With a Few More Brains ...’ By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Students of Virginity

( Read more... )

As I'm curious to see how the very public conversion of Magdi Cristiano Allam to Catholicism plays out, particularly given the international media coverage of the event, I tossed a bunch of news stories related to it (and a few that really weren't, but sort of thematically caught my eye as I thought about these things) into the journal for keeping. Please excuse the mess.

( Read more... )

A rather provocative entry I copied over from Whispers in the Loggia, noting the incredibly public (and daring) conversion of a prominent Italian media figure from Islam to Christianity, celebrated liturgically by Pope Benedict XVI himself at the Easter Vigil at Saint Peter's. Interestingly, he issues just as bold a challenge to Christianity and to the West regarding its own claimed commitment to individual liberty. The whole thing is reminiscent of the public conversion of Marius Victorinus in Rome that so impressed Augustine in the 380s....

As previously noted, Magdi Allam -- a deputy editor of Italy's Corriere della Sera described as the Bel Paese's "most-prominent Muslim commentator" -- was baptized, confirmed and received his first Eucharist from Pope Benedict at Saturday's Easter Vigil at the Vatican.

Taking the name "Christian," Allam, 55, was revealed as one of the papal catechumens barely an hour before the liturgy began; the group of seven also included neophytes from China and the US. The Egyptian-born journalist's inclusion in the group sparked a tempest in Italy's chattering circles, some of which lamented that the highly public nature of Allam's reception into the church could be viewed in the Muslim world as a "provocation" as Benedict pursues his aim of "reciprocity" with the Islamic street.

In yesterday's edition of his paper -- Italy's largest selling daily -- and on his website, Allam wrote about his conversion.

Yesterday evening I converted to the Christian Catholic religion, renouncing my previous Islamic faith. Thus, I finally saw the light, by divine grace -- the healthy fruit of a long, matured gestation, lived in suffering and joy, together with intimate reflection and conscious and manifest expression. I am especially grateful to his holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who imparted the sacraments of Christian initiation to me, baptism, confirmation and Eucharist, in the Basilica of St. Peter’s during the course of the solemn celebration of the Easter Vigil. And I took the simplest and most explicit Christian name: “Cristiano” ["Christian"]. Since yesterday evening therefore my name is Magdi Cristiano Allam.

For me it is the most beautiful day of [my] life. To acquire the gift of the Christian faith during the commemoration of Christ’s resurrection by the hand of the Holy Father is, for a believer, an incomparable and inestimable privilege. At almost 56 […], it is a historical, exceptional and unforgettable event, which marks a radical and definitive turn with respect to the past. The miracle of Christ’s resurrection reverberated through my soul, liberating it from the darkness in which the preaching of hatred and intolerance in the face of the “different,” uncritically condemned as “enemy,” were privileged over love and respect of “neighbor,” who is always, an in every case, “person”; thus, as my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny, I was able to adhere to the authentic religion of truth, of life and of freedom.

On my first Easter as a Christian I not only discovered Jesus, I discovered for the first time the face of the true and only God, who is the God of faith and reason. My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.....

[U]ndoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert was that with Pope Benedict XVI, whom I admired and defended as a Muslim for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.

It is thanks to members of Catholic religious orders that I acquired a profoundly and essentially an ethical conception of life, in which the person created in the image and likeness of God is called to undertake a mission that inserts itself in the framework of a universal and eternal design directed toward the interior resurrection of individuals on this earth and the whole of humanity on the day of judgment, which is founded on faith in God and the primacy of values, which is based on the sense of individual responsibility and on the sense of duty toward the collective. It is in virtue of a Christian education and of the sharing of the experience of life with Catholic religious that I cultivated a profound faith in the transcendent dimension and also sought the certainty of truth in absolute and universal values....

The long years at school allowed me to know Catholicism well and up close and the women and men who dedicated their life to serve God in the womb of the Church. Already then I read the Bible and the Gospels and I was especially fascinated by the human and divine figure of Jesus. I had a way to attend Holy Mass and it also happened, only once, that I went to the altar to receive communion. It was a gesture that evidently signaled my attraction to Christianity and my desire to feel a part of the Catholic religious community.

Then, on my arrival in Italy at the beginning of the 1970s between the rivers of student revolts and the difficulties of integration, I went through a period of atheism understood as a faith, which nevertheless was also founded on absolute and universal values. I was never indifferent to the presence of God even if only now I feel that the God of love, of faith and reason reconciles himself completely with the patrimony of values that are rooted in me.

Dear Director, you asked me whether I fear for my life, in the awareness that conversion to Christianity will certainly procure for me yet another, and much more grave, death sentence for apostasy. You are perfectly right. I know what I am headed for but I face my destiny with my head held high, standing upright and with the interior solidity of one who has the certainty of his faith. And I will be more so after the courageous and historical gesture of the Pope, who, as soon has he knew of my desire, immediately agreed to personally impart the Christian sacraments of initiation to me. His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims....

I hope that the Pope’s historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves. If in Italy, in our home, the cradle of Catholicism, we are not prepared to guarantee complete religious freedom to everyone, how can we ever be credible when we denounce the violation of this freedom elsewhere in the world? I pray to God that on this special Easter he give the gift of the resurrection of the spirit to all the faithful in Christ who have until now been subjugated by fear. Happy Easter to everyone.

Dear friends, let us go forward on the way of truth, of life and of freedom with my best wishes for every success and good thing.

PHOTO: AP/Alessandra Tarantino

A meditation on Judas' betrayal on Good Friday. My friend Kevin was thinking out loud about some of this stuff, and ran a question by me. After I typed it up, I thought I might as well throw it on the Journal so that it looks like I did something today.

Why is Judas' betrayal worse then Peter's denial? I mean, in Dante's Inferno Judas is in the deepest circle of hell and Peter of course the cornerstone of our church.....


Intrinsically, I don't know that it is. I think you're right on that supposition. I mean, the anger is still probably there in the New Testament, that these guys still (rightly) blame Judas for betraying their mutual friend and teacher, and hold that against him. At least one of the gospel writers attributes his actions as stemming from demon possession, which you would think might excuse him somewhat, though perhaps one has to give themselves over to a demon, and thus can and ought to be held responsible for whatever happens as a consequence, in the way that the addict no long has much functioning will left in the matter, but did when he started down that road. And one of the writers says that Judas stole from the groups' common purse, which he kept as their money-manager, thus saying that this guy was a rogue from the beginning.

Ultimately, though, I think in a way it simply comes down to whether Judas and Peter actually had faith in Jesus as the Christ. Peter did, and repented and asked forgiveness, giving himself over to the Risen Christ, when that great event happened a few days later. Judas, it seems, did not, and thus killed himself. That may have been out of a genuine remorse: I can look at the events surrounding Judas and understand his logic in the betrayal and what happened afterward, but he didn't look to the possibility of forgiveness, maybe effectively denied it, and thus ended his own story without looking for the miracle and possibilities of grace.

Yes, I wonder about Dante's emphasis. Is Judas the worst of the worst? Even for his betrayal of Christ? I doubt it. I'm sure that under the right circumstances, I'd hand Jesus over to be crucified, too. Indeed, the theology of the New Testament and our liturgy insists on that point: he was crucified because of our sins, our violations. Dante in his sci-fi trilogy reserved the lowest circle of hell for the betrayers. And look who else was there: Brutus, betrayer of Caesar. Yet if you look to Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, Brutus' betrayal is portrayed as an act of sad, regretful heroism, where Brutus puts the good of the Republic ahead of even his own friend's life. So there have certainly been a variety of "rankings" of evil, even among great Christian artists and authors like Dante and Shakespeare. Theology tends not to rank evils or punishments in so confident a way, and maintains more of a modest silence on such things, at least in the better theology over the centuries.

But there is at least an agreement that Judas done wrong, even if it was that very betrayal that was turned into part of the mechanism of redemption. Modern artists have been somewhat more cautious with their condemnation of Judas in this way. Thus you have Judas protesting his treatment in Jesus Christ Superstar on exactly this point, that what he did was necessary to the story of redemption as we have it. In contemporary Irish poetry, Brendan Kennelly's The Book of Judas proceeds from his perspective in trying to comment upon what happened (as well as much more on betrayal in general), and it is in that vein that Bono in U2's song "Until The End of the World" from the masterpiece Achtung Baby sings the piece entirely from Judas' perspective. There is no simple excusing of Judas, I suppose, in the end by these artists, but there's also perhaps a recognition that he's not that remarkable, and is perhaps as sad a symbol for humanity as any other of our lesser lights.

One key problem that seems to lurk in many students' minds is this cultural stereotype of what I once heard CNN describe as "the eternal war between science and religion." Now, if you know anything about the history of science, not only do you know that this perceived conflict only goes back to the philosophers who proclaimed their anti-Christian agenda as "the Enlightenment," that is, about 200 years at the most, but even more absurdly that what we call "modern science" and its attendant miracles of technology are actually an intellectual outgrowth of Christian theology. Had you never had the huge assumption of the thirteenth century Scholastics that because the universe was created by a God of logic that therefore the universe had an inherent logic that could be described in the logic of mathematics, you never would gain the centuries of intellectual investment that it took to produce our basic sciences before they started paying off in the concrete results of our technology. That's all straightforward History of Science, which I first learned from a man of Hindu sensibilities, who fully acknowledged the difference between what Christian Europe could have produced from all of the more haphazard and unsystematic sciences of other cultures throughout history that didn't have the theology to make the leap of faith required to assume that there was a logic behind the universe capable of being discovered.

Since then, this was perhaps the most important essay I've ever read about science and religion, written by the evolutionary biologist from Harvard, the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould, himself an agnostic of Jewish heritage, whose popular writing on evolutionary theory has been so well received. I read his magisterial The Mismeasure of Man as a sophomore in my Racism in American Society and Culture course, and that damning history and critique of the scientific establishment's construction of "scientific racism" in the 19th and 20th centuries has stayed in my memory as a model of the power that clear scholarly writing can achieve. The similarly-powerful essay of his that I reproduce here I read in the South Bend Public Library one summer afternoon, I think, where I believe it was reprinted in an issue of Commonweal. I've thought of it quite a bit since then, and cited its thinking and its mere existence to students concerned with the matter. It popped into my head again in the shower the other day as I thought over my students' discussions on the Aristotelian revolution in 13th century Catholic theology, and I just thought to go looking for it and was pleased to be able to find it online, and indeed, to discover that it is one of his more noteworthy and much-discussed essays.

I call it the most important essay I've read on the matter not because it was particularly new in its thinking. It's not. In fact, it's main point is pretty much straightforward, long-established Catholic thinking on the matter. In fact, it's kind of amusing to admit, but I think it's important as an appeal to authority. Now, normally an appeal to authority is seen as the sort of thing that "religion" does: appeal to the authority of Scripture, or a Pope, or the Magisterium – that sort of thing. It's the kind of appeal that's used to discredit religion as not having any greater proof for its claims. In fact, though, the appeal to authority functions in most of our lives, as we are all mostly not experts in all of the fields, topics and questions that we interact with through our lives. In this case, to hear a scientist who holds great authority in his field say that there's no intrinsic conflict between science and religion ends up having much more weight for the person who has been conditioned by our culture to view religion with Enlightenment skepticism. And so I appeal to Gould's authority for this purpose, though I could cite older, more long-established theologians on the same point, or appeal simply to a logical argument on my own, laying out the evidence for my listener or reader. Yet I know that, in fact, the authority of the Harvard agnostic evolutionary biologist will have a weight that even just a glance at the pure logic of the argument will not. That's not "scientific" of even the hard skeptic, I'm amused to note, but it's the way things are.

Now, I will say that I'm not sure that I'd entirely sign off on what Gould says. I think he makes a common mistake when he says that the realm of religious thought has to do with "the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives." While that's true, I don't think it's the whole truth of the matter. There is a tendency today to reduce "religion" to ethics or morality, and maybe that business about "meaning" or "the afterlife" as well. Christianity, at least, cannot let theology be quite so limited. Gould speaks here of "nonoverlapping magisteria," or NOMA, as the principle has been abbreviated. It seems indisputable to me that "science" and theology (the quotes are simply to acknowledge the vague or popular term: theology is "science" too, after all) have different methodologies. But I also think they have the same subject and goal, to the extent that one is general enough to call their subject and goal "reality" or "truth."

Theology's task is just as much the pursuit of factual truth as is the physical sciences': it is not about imaginary stories whose goals are simply "personal" and aimed at some kind of cheap psychological "comfort." To the extent that they are both interested in the truth about reality, sciences' insights about the nature of the physical universe are key data for theology. Gould acknowledges that the fields do rub up against one another: I think that to too quickly call them "nonoverlapping" might dogmatically blind us to the necessary interactions of the two fields, and unnecessarily complicate the important task of their dialogue and collaboration. And it's a critical collaboration: one that has been destructively distorted in the past by theology interfering with science, and destructively distorted today by scientists dictating philosophical or theological conclusions under the mask of the authority of the physical sciences. Gould's essay goes a long step toward a scientific declaration of modesty that can help in restoring that balance.

Nonoverlapping Magisteria
by Stephen Jay Gould

Incongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.

At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"

A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.

Another story in the same mold: I am often asked whether I ever encounter creationism as a live issue among my Harvard undergraduate students. I reply that only once, in nearly thirty years of teaching, did I experience such an incident. A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office hours with the following question that had clearly been troubling him deeply: "I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and particularly well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing Evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and evolution?" Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.

These two stories illustrate a cardinal point, frequently unrecognized but absolutely central to any understanding of the status and impact of the politically potent, fundamentalist doctrine known by its self-proclaimed oxymoron as "scientific creationism"—the claim that the Bible is literally true, that all organisms were created during six days of twenty-four hours, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution must therefore be false. Creationism does not pit science against religion (as my opening stories indicate), for no such conflict exists. Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.

( Read more... )

I have to thank jucundushomo for giving me the heads-up on this New York Times op-ed that James Martin, S.J. turned in. Tim was right on target in knowing I'd be interested in that I have complained in times past that the official canonization process in the Catholic Church has gotten corrupted by being politicized. Certainly, I merely have to think back a few years to remember a group of rather desperate curial officials from Rome pushing through the beatification of Pope Pius IX as apparently some kind of "balance" to the (somehow also apparently) threatening beatification of Pope John XXIII. But whereas Pius is remembered in the Church more with a shake of the head (except, apparently, in the Roman curia) because of his high-anxiety attitude toward modernity and his 19th-century absolutist monarchical response to it, John XIII – who said Catholicism had nothing to fear from interaction with modernity, had much to teach it and to learn from it, and called the Second Vatican Council to that end – actually has a popular devotion within the Church, which is traditionally one of the characteristics of official "sainthood" in Catholicism. Mercifully, this kind of reduction of canonization to political partisanship is another one of those things that might be cleaned up by having a first-tier theologian like Benedict XVI in the papacy.

In many respects, this is a much more minor affair of the Church's, but I think at the same time it's still one worth paying attention to. Those we promote as models and heroes have an effect in our world, and I think this is all the more apparent in our media- and image-driven society, where far too many of those who become models for others are of a poor or shallow sort.

Op-Ed Contributor
Trials of the Saints
By JAMES MARTIN
Published: March 3, 2008

LAST month, while Americans celebrated the feast days of two secular saints, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the Vatican issued a surprising new directive calling for greater rigor in its own saint-making process. Published by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the 45-page document called for “strict adherence” to existing rules, in response to some concerns that the canonization procedures had been watered down over the last two decades.

Such criticisms are only half correct: the Vatican’s rules are actually far more rigorous than many may suspect. Still, the church could increase its credibility even further in this department with a few additional benchmarks.

During his long pontificate, Pope John Paul II beatified 1,340 people and canonized almost 500 — more than all his predecessors combined since the current procedures were introduced in 1588. John Paul also waived the traditional five-year waiting period required before the process, or “cause,” could begin for Mother Teresa, who died in 1997.

The Vatican’s new document says that some procedures had become “problematic.” As a result, local bishops are now instructed to exercise “greater sobriety and rigor” in determining which saints-to-be they send for approval to Rome. Candidates should not be promoted by small interest groups; rather, their reputation for holiness must be “spontaneous and not artificially procured.” Officials vetting the cases must be impartial, and not omit negative aspects of a person’s life. And the examination of the miracles required for canonization must make use of “all clinical and technical means.”

( The rest of my copy of the text of the Op-Ed, if you're not registered with The New York Times )