Francis decrees Vatican child protections

Yesterday, Pope Francis issued a motu proprio (papal executive decree, apparently available only in Italian at the time of this posting) establishing rules for the protection of children and vulnerable adults in Vatican City and Vatican diplomatic missions around the world.  While the Vatican and its embassy presence constitute only tiny patches of the worldwide presence of the church, this decree is considered significant because it is Francis's first official act on this topic following last month's Vatican summit on the protection of children.  While many of the key provisions will sound familiar to Americans, there are some interesting differences.

Two Different Takes on the "Women Church World" Kerfluffle

I'm sure everyone has read by now that  "...on March 26, Scaraffia and the all-female staff and board of Women Church World announced that they had resigned their posts, claiming that they felt "surrounded by a climate of mistrust and continual delegitimization" and that the Vatican was "returning to the antiquated and dry custom of choosing from above, under the direct control of men, women considered trustworthy."  This is from Jamie Manson's article in The National Catholic Reporter.
I have to confess that up until now I had never heard of Women Church World, and didn't know that L' Osservatore Romano had a women's section.  At first I felt righteous indignation at what seemed blatant sexism.  But something tugged at my memory bank.

History bites...and chews.

The role of a border between the two Irelands (Republic and the North) is a major issue in the Brexit catastrophe. Fintan O'Toole has a brief account in the Washington Post, here excerpted...

“In a classic case of the return of the repressed, the question the supporters of Brexit refused to address has come back to haunt them. Theirs was a dream of a simple, once-and-for-all escape from the past 46 years of history. Britain would erase the recent past, in which its destiny has been intertwined with that of its continental neighbors, and begin a new and glorious story. But there is another history, one in which Britain has been entwined, for many centuries, with an even closer neighbor, Ireland. That story cannot be erased. And the impossibility of escaping from it has, in the end, made Brexit itself impossible.

Brexit and "Braos"

This article by Andrew Stuttaford in National Review isn't arranged in FAQ format, but it's as good a primer on recent Brexit-related events in Parliament as any I've seen so far.  And a mildly sardonic and witty read.  E.g. John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, is described as "a somewhat Napoleonic figure, minus hat and achievements".   Stuttaford's prediction, offered without a surfeit of confidence: "Brexit will still take place: The how and the when remain a mystery."

Cool statistic

I did this in my head, so don't take it to the bank, but just looking at the monthly numbers archived posts here at NewGathering, it seems there have been over 600 posts.  Many of them have been excellent, and nearly all of them have been thought-provoking.  Not bad for a small community set up in haste when dotCommonweal suddenly was dropped down the memory hole.  I want to express my gratitude to David, Gene, Jack and the others who had the commitment and passion to see that our old community had a place to meet.  I'm grateful to all of you, including whatever lurkers are hanging out there.  Thank you.  And may God continue to bless this place.

Facing up to Ourselves.

Farhad Majoo, once a tech columnist for the NYTimes, has been give a slot on the op-ed pages.    He has some bracing after-thoughts about the Mueller Report. Perhaps his opinions are not completely accurate, and they are not easy to contemplate, but they point to the bigger reasons about how and why Trump got elected, and why we shouldn't blame Putin and his fuzzy bears.

"There was no collusion. The president was not a Manchurian candidate. And we can’t lay the blame for this whole thing on Vladimir Putin.....Indeed, the truest horror in Mr. Mueller’s finding is that we did not need Mr. Putin to be pulling the strings. We know now that under our shambolic democracy, a man as unfit as Mr. Trump really can legitimately acquire all the terrifying powers of the presidency without being controlled by a foreign puppet master."

He comes to his conclusion: "From here, the story of 2016 looks rather straightforward: Mr. Trump was the corrupt, misbegotten choice of a citizenry mired in partisan mistrust, seething with racial grievance, informed by a beleaguered and fracturing news media, and laboring under an economic and political system that had long ceased functioning for all but the wealthiest of its citizens."

A nice Lenten meditation.

Religious order abusers and dioceses

Last week's release by victims' attorneys of the names of alleged priest abusers in the Chicago Archdiocese brought into sharper focus the question of religious order priests doing diocesan work, and how abuse complaints against the religious order priests have been handled.

Maybe I'm a doormat

 I just returned Monday evening from a college visit with one of my children (last of the high-schoolers in our family).  We drove for many hours on Sunday, arriving at our destination late in the evening, and checked into a hotel for the night.  After going through the usual check-in rigmarole and wheeling our luggage to the room, we flopped on the twin queen beds and watched college basketball on the room's television for a little while to unwind.

Then I went into the bathroom to begin my bedtime ablutions, and noticed a number of things amiss:

What has Russia to do with anything? - UPDATE

 By my finger count, we now have 74 words from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign was involved. The rest of what we have is Attorney General William Barr's summary.
 The result will be headlines around the world saying: "Mueller Says: No Collusion."
 What about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election? No collusion. Yeah, but what about the Russian inter.... I spent much of last year shouting at the deliberately deaf that Mueller was not assigned to find out if Trump "colluded" with the Russians. He was appointed to find out about Russian interference, and you know.
 The possibility of coordination (not collusion) was added later.
  President Trump said that -- the interference -- never happened. Putin told him so at Helsinki. Trump cut spending on intelligence efforts to counteract future interference. Mueller said there were two "main" interference operations in 2016. Barr's summary doesn't go into much more of  that. The ever ear-wagging press doesn't care about it now because: No collusion.
 President Trump says he is fully exonerated. Barr says Mueller said he couldn't exonerate Trump on interference with the investigation. But no collusion. That's the new point.
 More than a year ago, Trump decided that, despite the original thrust of the investigation, the witch hunt was all about whether he, Trump, personally colluded with the Russians. It always has to be all about him. And now the Victorian Gentlemen will adopt his version of what it's all about and report: No collusion.
 Our long, national distraction is over, and the distractor is vindicated. -30-

 UPDATE: We have had 48 hours now, and Margaret's prediction is still holding up: "The Republicans are going to run away with this report and the Dems are going to trot twenty miles behind trying to connect the dots."
 The only thing I can think of to add to that is "brain-dead" in front of "Dems."
 Since I never see someone named Rachel Maddow, I hardly know what to think. But someone named Matt Taibbi is adding to his fame among Those Who Know by saying the media should have known that even though Trump was acting guilty as Al Capone, he did not commit treason. Everyone, meaning David Brooks and Young Douthat, now considers that a genius insight.
 Well, I saw the Putin-Trump press conference in Helsinki -- the one that was held up while they tried to break the suction bond between Trump's lips  and Putin's muscular rear end, and what I saw there was treason. Maybe not actionable. Maybe outside Mueller's jurisdiction. Maybe not even culpable because Trump would not necessarily act for treasonous reasons; it could be simple egoism. But spare me the idea that just because there was no collusion (not from lack of trying) there could have been no disloyalty to Trump's oath of office and to the United States of America.
 Who am I going to believe --Matt Taibbi and Young Ross, or my own lyin' eyes?
 We still haven't seen the Mueller report (btw), but already the Trumpoleons are using the Barr report as a springboard into another assault on Obamacare and the FBI. The brain-dead pull on their boots and call for, nay, demand, what they are not going to get, an unexpurgated edition. And while they yell, Mr. Trump tramples on. His rally Thursday should be a humdinger.

English is a great language...

...not only for Poetry but Protest!

There is a BIG demonstration in London today. The Guardian has published photos of some excellent placards. Among them:

"Fromage not Farage"
"Our Future Rests on Your Shoulders, Don't Behead Youselves!"
"Don't EUrinate on Our Future."
"I've Seen Smarter Cabinets at IKEA."
"Don't Leave Us Alone!!! Germans Against Brexit!"
"Alexa!! Cancel!"

As well as costuming and small floats.  Mrs. May is thoroughly disparaged (Let us remember this during the coming Democratic Primary's glowing praise of women politicians. And don't forget Margaret Thatcher!)

The Guardian has "Running Coverage" of the demonstration with reports and comments from the crowd.

Now what about this Mueller fellow?

Gamesmanship vs sportsmanship

 This topic comes from way out in right field, among other places, but it may have significant sociological implications. Some of the major league baseball teams now in spring training do not plan to win the pennant this year. Some even hope to finish last.

 What they will be doing has several names. Locally, “tanking” seems to be preferred. The idea is, you get rid of everybody who can play the game and use the money you save by not paying them to develop youngsters you deem have a chance to be stars of the future. You say you are “rebuilding,” but what you are doing is putting second-rate teams on the field and, especially in football, hoping to lose a lot of games so you get earlier choices in the college player draft.

 You do not, of course, cut your ticket prices as you cut the fans’ chances of seeing victories. It’s about the sport. But mostly it’s about the money. If we can turn our eyes from the great orange face for a moment, we see it’s also about our society.

In Illinois, the lawyers issue their own report on (alleged) abusers, and the Chicago Archdiocese responds

The shock waves continue to spread outward from last year's Pennsylvania grand jury report on the abuse of minors in dioceses in that state.  Attorneys General in a number of other states have followed Pennsylvania Attorney General Joshua Shapiro's lead by initiating their own investigations.  Among them was my state, Illinois; here at NewGathering, we looked at that agency's preliminary report a few months back.  The Illinois report made headlines by announcing that the Attorney General's office had identified over 500 allegedly abusive priests whose names previously hadn't been made public by Illinois dioceses; but that preliminary report did not name any of those previously-unnamed priests.

This week, a new sort of report was issued: two leading attorneys for victims of clerical abuse, Jeff Anderson and Marc Pearlman, have published their own list of priests and other Illinois diocesan employees who have been accused of abuse - and they name names.

And one of those dioceses, the Chicago Archdiocese, responded rapidly.

Primaries, expectations and media

I don't claim sufficient political aptitude to have a grand theory about this, but I want to share a couple of observations I've run across in recent days.  Both were made in articles about how the Democratic presidential primary campaign season is shaping up, and both concern the influence of media (both mainstream and social) on presidential races.

Points of dazzling light

This is my homily for this weekend, the 2nd Sunday of Lent for Cycle C.  The readings for this weekend are here.

The "Bomb Cyclone"

Pray for Nebraska. And Iowa. And South Dakota. The above picture was taken just south of our town on Friday, on US Highway 81.

The term "bomb cyclone" was used by the news media to describe what happened. I had thought it was a made-up term by Weather Channel for hype value.  I still think that.  But by whatever name you call it,  it was one mean "perfect storm".

From Indispensable to Meh

“The challenges we face are the greatest in living memory. No one person can meet them on their own. Only this country can do that.” -- Beto O’Rourke announcing Thursday that he will be another one.

Oh? Beto must not have read Andrew J. Bacevich’s article “A World without the West” in the March 22 Commonweal. I’d give you a link but, as I have mentioned, Commonweal’s computer has deemed that I no longer technically exist. Bacevich’s point is that in the post-post-Cold War world the old “West,” led by the United States and promoting democratic values, is dead. Britain followed Bush II into Iraq and decided that was a terribly crumby idea. So Britain didn’t follow Obama into Syria, nor were there any other volunteers, which caused Obama to decide that maybe that would be a terribly crumby idea to enforce his own "red line."

 Bacevich didn’t say that, despite Trumptalk, Chinese hardware will run the G5 wireless internet world. But there’s that. And there’s the former Socialist slave states of Hungary and Poland, having had a whiff of democracy, drifting back to something more familiar, like strong men backed by the police and their big mouths. But Bacevich could have noted that.

 

 O’Rourke must have been writing his announcement anthem while a very strange news story was partially unfolding. Two Boeing 737 Max 8’s crashed within five months. Boeing said the plane is safe. U.S. crash investigators said the plane was safe enough, as far as they knew, to keep it flying. For the first time in history, the rest of the world ignored what the United States and its state-of-the-art crash experts were  saying about an airplane. The rest of the world grounded 737 Max 8's, but not us.

 Then the story went from odd to spooky.

Say it ain't so, Aunt Becky!

 A burgeoning college-admissions scandal snares a couple of television celebrities, and raises questions about parenting and college.

Fasting From Television

Today is the first day of Lent for the Orthodox (as well as the Byzantine Catholics who use the Julian Calendar).  Last night at Vespers (which is the beginning of the liturgical day of Monday for those of the Byzantine tradition) the priest put aside his bright vestments toward the end of the service after announcing the beginning of Lent. At the end of Vespers he began the ceremony of mutual forgiveness by asking everyone in the congregation for forgiveness. Then each person in turn went up to embrace him and ask forgiveness of him, and then began forming a line at his right. The next person went up embraced the priest asking for forgiveness, then embraced the first person each asking each other for forgiveness, etc. During all this the choir sang the Easter Praises which like our Paschal Proclamation introduce their midnight Easter Liturgy. Those praises include the words "let us embrace each other, let us treat as brothers even those who hate us, for Christ has risen"

The Orthodox fast is very severe, almost a vegan diet.  I am glad to be a guest at their liturgies, I would not want to live their fast. However, in 2011, I proposed in a post on PrayTell blog that we fast from Television, perhaps something more difficult and more efficacious than fasting from food. Here is the post, after the break I have summarized its basic arguments without all the data.

Television, Time Use, Lent and the Divine Office

Invisible and malicious

I wrote this reflection for our parish's church bulletin this week.  The readings for this weekend are here.

The Victims' Sweepstakes...UPDATES

Now that the Democrats control the House, we are going to have serious and sustained consideration of serious and substantial policy issues.  At Last!

Oh wait! First, let's call out hatred and hateful statements. Let's pass a resolution!

Wait! we have to revise it: Here comes everybody! Okay! Now, we have it.

Here's the WashPost story...mostly talking about 23 Republicans who voted against an anti-Hate statement! But wait, there are Democrats who think the resolution didn't get its priorities straight. What the Fudge!

The sweepstakes continue:  From the New York Times.

If Ms. Pelosi believed she was smoothing over divisions among Democrats, another member of leadership — Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip, gave critics a new cause with an interview.... In it, he was quoted as saying that Ms. Omar, who fled war in her native Somalia as a child and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, had more personal experiences with bigotry than those who are generations removed from the Holocaust, the Japanese internment camps of World War II and the other violent episodes of the past. “I’m serious about that,” ....[said Mr. Clyburn] “There are people who tell me, ‘Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.’ ‘My parents did this.’ It’s more personal with her. I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain.” [Lee  Zeldin, R-NY] responded, “Whip Clyburn’s comments are disgusting, making light of the Holocaust and minimizing its massive importance and impact on victims’ families, survivors, and the world.” 

And the winner is....?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan weighs in...   on the underlying issue.
UPDATE2: E.J. Dionne slices and dices the issue and mostly gets it right for people our age!

In The Bleak Midwinter

"In the bleak midwinter, frosty winds made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, 

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow..."

The scene in front of our place this morning, after I sort of, kind of, swept off the car nearest the street. This was 6 inches of fresh snow, fallen on about 8 inches of not-fresh snow. Coldest February and start of March on record; we haven't seen a thaw since Feb. 4. Something to offer up for Lent, I guess.

Hunger

Today, Ash Wednesday, is a day of fasting.  Not many of you have met me personally, but if you ever saw me, you would see right away that I haven't missed many meals in my life.  Hardly any at all.  And those that I have, I've more than made up for with extra meals.

Lent with St. Augustine

In Lent, 2008, I began to post on our late and very much lamented dot-Commonweal blog daily excerpts from the writings of St. Augustine, a practice I continued from 2011 to 2017. The passages quoted were ones that struck me for their religious and theological insights and also for their rhetorical power. Many of them were like lightning-bolts, jolting me to attention and making me wish others could share the experience. I came to think of it as a kind of spiritual alms-giving. A number of people let me know that they appreciated the effort and enjoyed encountering a different Augustine than the one they had heard of or thought they had known.
After the assassination of dot-Commonweal, I no longer had a forum for this enterprise, and I’ve missed doing it. But this Lent I thought I might try reviving the effort, posting the excerpts on my own blog, https://jakomonchak.wordpress.com/, under the category: “Lent with St. Augustine.” Some of them will be new, but many will be ones that I posted in the past, some of which I myself had forgotten....
I will welcome comments, positive or negative, expository or meditative, personal or public. In one of the excerpts I’ll send, Augustine commented on the words of the Psalmist: “Magnificate Dominum mecum”–“Magnify the Lord with me!” (Ps 33[34]:3) and said, “I don’t want to be the only one to magnify the Lord.  I don’t want to be the only one to love him, the only one to embrace him.” Augustine would certainly reject the application, but I don’t want to be the only one to appreciate Augustine.

Turn away from sin, and be faithful to the Gospel

Here in the Chicago archdiocese, where our clergy tend to be a pretty Vatican II lot, that prayer will be uttered innumerable times today by men (and some women) with blackened thumbs.

The Big Hole in the Middle

 The other day, one of Jim Pauwel's gurus, David Leonhardt of the New York Times, suggested that the Democrats would do well to take deep drafts of moderation in preparation for the 2020 election festivities. The estimable James McCrea passed the column along to his email list. I usually agree with Leonhardt, but in thiscolumn I sensed the Victorian Gentleman at work and at his worst. I briefed my disagreement, Gene Palumbo thought it would make a good subject here. And so here it is.
 First, a quick summary of Leonhardt for those who wonder if they should bother. He sees a drift to the left in the early Democratic contenders and proposes that they should run more toward the center, like Clinton (check!) and Obama (check!) and Trump (??). That , he says is what polls show voters want to see. And it is what worked in the past.
 Everything about his argument rankled me one way or another. So where to begin?

John Hickenlooper's Running

And candidate #14 has entered the ring.  Gotta love the name, if nothing else.  Actually he was a well-regarded two term governor of Colorado,  who has a master's degree in geology, and also founded a brewpub.  And as governor actually did something about gun violence.

Abortion part XXXVII [Updated]

March 2nd, 11:58 pm: I've provided a bit of additional material at the bottom of the post.

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The mother of all divisive issues seems positioned to play an important role in the 2020 presidential campaign.