Punditry

A week after Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated that the Obama administration’s most recent “compromise” on the HHS mandate fails to preserve the religious liberty of Catholic individuals and Catholic institutions, the president of the Catholic Health Association (CHA) stated that the proposal represents “substantial progress.” (source)

So what progress did the compromised-compromise make relating to Catholic hospitals? Well the new rules make absolutely zero changes regarding Catholic hospitals. The changes made some clarifications regarding entities run directly from a “house of worship”. So for an organization that is suppose to represent Catholic healthcare says there is “substantial progress” when there is zero progress relating to what they lobby for.

Although this is SOP for the CHA.

Throughout this sometimes challenging period, CHA has remained in constant dialogue with the leadership of the Unites States Conference of Catholic Bishops, individual Bishops who had concerns and suggestions and the Administration. We believe that our commitment to dialogue to an acceptable solution is matched by all parties and we are committed to completing resolution of this issue. (source)

Yes that “constant dialogue” with the USCCB has born so much fruit in that they have opposite characterizations of the changes made. This is the same tactic of all dissident style organizations in that “constant dialogue” means absolutely nothing.

About to be fired as assistant principal at Purcell Marian High School, Mike Moroski says he doesn’t regret voicing his support of gay marriage on his blog.

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati placed Moroski on administrative leave Feb. 4 and plans to fire him, Moroski said. He says he has hired a lawyer.

Moroski refused to take down his statements on the blog.

“I believe in Catholicism,” Moroski said in an interview. “But my conscience will not permit me to recant my statement.

“I put it up there because I really truly honestly believe it,” he added. “I’m absolutely willing to lose my job over this. The only difficult thing for me now is the students.”

Moroski, 34 who is married and lives Downtown, acknowledges that he violated the Archdiocese’s social media policy.

The contract he signs every year also requires him to “comply with and act consistently in accordance with the stated philosophy and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Moroski said he “knew the statement I was making was not in accordance with Roman Catholic beliefs,” but he does not think he violated the contract because he was following his conscience. (source)

He has since been dismissed and has lawyered-up.

Of course it will be a situation where he will demand that that Archdiocese allows him to follow his conscience, but the Archdiocese is not allowed to follow theirs.

I always have mixed-feelings about such stories as this in that while I will hopefully never support error, somebody acting on their conscience, even a badly formed one, is at least somewhat positive. When it comes to Catholic schools I think we will find more and more cases of this at least will have the effect of dissenters self-identifying themselves. The issue of same sex marriage no doubt will be a central issue in regards to this dissident self outing.

Mr. Moroski says “I believe in Catholicism”, or more likely the spirit of Catholicism like the spirit of Vatican II. A broad nebulous idea of Catholicism where you don’t have to look too closely at details. The Catholic Church is like a Mandebrot set where the closer you look the more details you see. The spirit of Catholicism is just the opposite.

I think that you would also find that if you talked with Mr. Moroski you would not find that he believes in everything the Church teaches except the sinfulness of homosexual acts. This almost always goes with a whole host of connected issues. I don’t think I have ever heard of anybody who supported homosexual acts, but condemned contraception as an intrinsic evil. The dissident treats the Church like a stack of Jenga blocks and yet thinks taking a block from the bottom has no effect on the rest. The Church’s teaching on human sexuality is consistent, because truth is always consistent. The Church’s teaching on marriage flows into so much else.

I just wished Mr. Moroski had thought to contact a spiritual director instead of a lawyer. This individualistic my conscience against the Church is pure hubris with no docility. If you are going to be “Athanasius against the world” it might be a good idea to make sure you are right first.

As for the “spirit of Catholicism”:

“Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. (Mt 7:21–22)

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. (Jn 14:15)

“He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” (Lk 10:16)

Catholics who eulogized Pope John Paul II for serving to the bitter end now praise Pope Benedict for quitting. Make up your minds.

I noticed this post from William Saletan at Slate that referenced my post in passing yesterday.

One thing I love about being Catholic is the both/and approach that doesn’t try to flatten all things into a decision tree with simple yes/no paths. Some try to treat prudential decisions as routes with only one path. The charge of hypocrisy assumes that in this case different people could not come to different approaches or that both paths can’t be valid. It also assumes all the variables and individual circumstances are the same in both cases.

It is easy to respect the decision of both of these popes because of our respect for them in the first place. That we realize both men took up the subject in prayer and discernment regarding first of all the good of the Church. It is certainly not hypocrisy to believe that both men choose what they perceived as the best path. Armchair poping of what people thing they would have done is their prudential assessment. It would be nice if we could load up a possible futures like we would create a virtual machine on a server. To be able to inject different decisions to see how they would turn out. Until then taking up a decision with prayerful discernment is the best we can do.

Days like this make me so wish that I was independently wealthy so I could have blogged my reaction to the Pope’s resignation and not having to go to work. That reaction has been bubbling up through me all day.

I remember when he was elected and when I first heard the word “Joseph” I was already jumping up and down and screaming for joy. Whatever the exactly opposite reaction to this is what I experienced this morning. When I first saw a reference to this on Twitter I thought surely this is typical bad media coverage, but I soon found out this was not so. I felt that buzzed feeling you have when you come close to having an accident where both your mind and body reacts.

I am both shocked and yet not surprised. There has certainly been clues to this possibly happening and I thought that just perhaps at a later date this might just be an option he might choose. That he choose it now is what mostly surprised me. It is one thing to think about such a possibility and another to see it happen. Most of my reaction was quite selfish. I felt a disturbance in the force and thought “noooooooooooo” this can’t be! I so love pretty much everything about Pope Benedict XVI. I greedily soak up everything he says and writes and so it is like a blow to have this taken away. Still you also have to wonder about what he would have written if he not become Pope and was able to retire. Perhaps we will find some of this out. There has always been a tension in him in regards to serving the Church from the time he was first appointed bishop, his years as Prefect of the CDF, and then becoming Pope. His coat of arms with the bear of St. Corbinian has been an indicator of this and he has long carried the pack for his beloved Church. To carry and to go where he did not personally choose, but to live a life of service to the Church. Yet even St. Corbinian’s bear was finally loosed to return to the forests.

I certainly won’t be second-guessing his decision. If he thought this was the best for the Church then who am I to disagree? His decision will also certainly have some influence on future Pope’s as another possible route. The path of suffering that Blessed John Paul II took was a blessing for the world and perhaps even this act of humility by the current Pope will also be in its own way. So much of the world only see the office of Pope as a power and not the weight of the world the office holder assumes.

Now once his resignation takes effect what do you refer to him as? Is it like political office where you would still refer to him as “Pope” and “Holy Father”? Or would he simply become Cardinal Ratzinger again?

I am though annoyed by all the talk of who is “papabile.” Right now I just really don’t want to talk about it. It feels in some ways like he died and speaking of his successors feels to me like having your wife die and talking about possible girlfriends. This is a silly metaphor, yet it has some validity in my own reaction. Still the Church is not a personality cult and whoever fills the shoes of the fisherman will be Peter. When Blessed John Paul II died it was Cardinal Ratzinger that I most wanted to be pope. As a convert he was the one most familiar to me and the one I admired the most. This time around I don’t really have a favorite. The fact that we had Blessed John Paul II who is arguably the greatest philosopher to be Pope followed by Pope Benedict XVI arguably the greatest theologian to be Pope will certainly be a tough act to follow. That is if the papacy was an “act” or a historical competition against previous claimants.

It is hard to believe that when Easter does come that it is almost assured that it will be with a new Pope. His resignation has led me to that Lenten feeling of loss two days early and this Lent is going to be exceptionally penitential in one dimension. The media and the talking heads are the penitential aspect I am thinking about. The collective low IQ of the media will take a logarithmic downturn over the coming month or so in regards to the conclave.

No doubt we are already hearing and will be hearing constantly how the election of a new pope will change the Church. If they only pick the right guy then all those annoying doctrines well be shed like the skin of a snake and sloughed off with the shiny new skin of progress. There is a part of me that could almost with for the election of a Cardinal who would be described in political terms as a progressive and liberal. One that was a darling of dissenters. I could almost wish for this because of the fun that would ensue as the progressive pope would do no such thing. When Empress Theodora arranged the election of Pope Vigilius she thought she had a like-minded pope-in-the-pocket that she could control. When he subsequently defended orthodox theology she was not amused. Watching possible this aspect of the charism of infallibility in action might be fun as dissenter freak out over not getting what they want.

As a convert I remember feeling some jealousy before when some Catholics would be able describe the day of election of multiple popes. Now I don’t feel quite the same way that while I was glad to rack up one experience of white smoke and Habemus Papam, I would have preferred to delay by more than a decade the need of white smoke again.

Via Phil Lawler :

Sunday brought the staggering news that in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, a priest who had been convicted of groping a young man has now been appointed as co-director for the archdiocesan office of clergy formation. What could Archbishop John Myers possibly have been thinking? How could he be so utterly insensitive?

To be sure, the conviction of Father Michael Fugee was overturned on appeal. But rather than risk another trial he made a plea agreement with prosecutors and agreed to enter a counseling program for sex offenders. So a sex offender is heading an archdiocesan office. And not just any office, but an office designed to guide other priests in their spiritual formation. Is this not exactly the sort of scandal that the Dallas Charter was supposed to prevent?

An archdiocesan spokesman said that Archbishop Myers has full confidence in Father Fugee, even while emphasizing that the priest is now in a position where he does not have access to children. Does that really bespeak full confidence?

Under the Dallas Charter—the policies the American bishops approved at their June 2002 meeting in Dallas, in a panicked response to public outcry about the burgeoning scandal—a priest who is credibly accused of the sexual abuse of children should be removed from public ministry. Yet here was Father Fugee, who had been not only accused but convicted by a New Jersey jury, serving in an office of the archdiocese. It emerged that he had previously served as a hospital chaplain, with unsupervised access to children, even after the conviction. The archdiocesan review board had cleared him for ministry, as had the archbishop. The case vividly illustrates that the policies put in place by the Dallas Charter provide no reassurance at all to the faithful, if the policy-makers do not prove themselves trustworthy.

There’s more. During Father Fugee’s trial, the jury heard a statement in which the priest said that he was homosexual or bisexual. (An appeals court would later cite concerns about that statement as a reason for overturning the verdict.) So now a priest who is homosexual or bisexual, who is in a sex-offender program, is dispensing advice to other priests in Newark, and potentially dealing with the priests who are coping with similar problems. Is there any reason for confidence that he is offering mature spiritual counsel? Can we assume that he would respond properly to other cases in which priests were accused of misconduct?

The astonishment, bewilderment, and outrage that greeted the news from Newark is completely understandable; the complacent reaction from the archdiocese (“We have not received any complaints from the prosecutor’s office…”) is appalling.

Right now, one of two things is true. Either

1. The phone is ringing off the hook in the office of Archbishop Myers, as other bishops all around the country call to ask him what on earth he has done, and demand that he quickly undo it. Or…
2. Ten years into the greatest crisis the Church has faced since the Reformation, most American bishops still haven’t begun to grasp the problem.

There is no third option. And as I look at those two possibilities, I shudder to think which is more likely. God help us.

One of the repercussions of priestly sexual abuse is how to handle a sex abuser. That they be suspended and dismissed from the clerical state is certainly required. Although turning them out on the street to possible abuse others has its own problems. There could be some case made for continuing to employ them in the diocese to prevent this, but this is fraught with problems. Employing them to guide other priests in their spiritual formation is incomprehensible. Desk job or not and regardless of how much he is supervised this shows a totally tin-eared approach both as a prudential matter and the obvious scandal it would cause.

The care of even a priest who is an abuser is an important matter and maybe ideally the case would be that they would live out their lives in for example the environment of a monastery. Maybe that is rather naive and that really there is no one solution. Still the solution is certainly not employing them for priestly spiritual formation.

Media bias can be a rather boring subject. Although this story is a text book case in regards to how the media treated the Family Research Council shooter and how the shooter used a “hate map” from the Southern Poverty Law Center to target the FRC.

Get Religion has a comprehensive post on the subject and the comparisons from previous media treatment.

On Friday the Obama administration released another “compromise” on the HHS mandate. Unlike the previous so-called compromise this time there is actually some minor change.

The new proposal eliminated three of the four prongs of the old rule: inculcate values, and primarily hire and serve co-religionists. But it kept the fourth prong from the exact IRS code section. The change therefore does not expand who is covered to schools or hospitals: it simply makes it clear to churches that they are covered even if they serve non-co-religionists. (Source)

So the new HHS mandate is slightly less evil than the previous one. No doubt many progressive Catholics who objected somewhat to the HHS mandate will be totally fine with it now.

As it is now it means that Catholic schools, hospitals, some charities, etc still have their rights taken away. EWTN still would be forced to comply. Private employers also would have zero rights in this regard.

The HHS mandate has an understanding of rights that is totally nonsensical. Rights are something that individuals have and those individual rights are the basis for what we see as an institutional right. Houses of worship receive their rights not because they have innate rights, but are projected via the rights of individuals regarding freedom of religion. The Bill of Rights detailed personal freedoms and it is the individual that receives them and not some corporate body. No doubt I am putting this forth badly, but still the point is that individuals are the proper object of rights.

To say that an individual has free exercise of religion and then say that it doesn’t apply if they run a for profit business order is nonsense. To say that same for a non-profit company whose sole purpose is to spread the Gospel is even more non-sensical. If you can’t act on your conscience you are not free. Although the HHS mandate goes beyond just questions of religious liberty. Objections to contraception, abortion, and sterilization can be based on natural law arguments. The HHS mandate takes a battering ram to the freedom of conscience. The Obama administration has a policy view that they would ram down the throats of everybody with typical social engineering and elitist thinking. Typical of enlightened thinkers is that there is usually a reign of terror to go with it. We are suppose to be pleased that instead of “off with your heads”, it is currently only “off with your consciences.”

It will be interesting to see the USCCB’s response. Archbishop Chaput certainly is not buying it.

The scholar Yuval Levin has stressed that the new HHS mandate proposal, “like the versions that have preceded it, betrays a complete lack of understanding of both religious liberty and religious conscience.” In reality, despite the appearance of compromise, “the government has forced a needless and completely avoidable confrontation and has knowingly put many religious believers in an impossible situation.”

One of the issues America’s bishops now face is how best to respond to an HHS mandate that remains unnecessary, coercive and gravely flawed. In the weeks ahead the bishops of our country, myself included, will need both prudence and courage – the kind of courage that gives prudence spine and results in right action, whatever the cost. Please pray that God guides our discussions.

Whatever the cost is exactly right. The Obama administration would like to wear us out in time and money. They know this attack on religious freedom will not get the attention it deserves.

Immediately complying with a judge’s order, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has released the personnel files of 87 clergy accused of sexual abuse and has posted the files online.

Archbishop José Gomez, who has led the archdiocese since 2011, announced that he has relieved his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, of all administrative and public duties, and that Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry, at one time Cardinal Mahony’s vicar for clergy, has resigned from his duties as a regional auxiliary bishop.

Cardinal Mahony served as Archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985 until 2011. Until recently, Bishop Curry served as chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Catholic Education.

“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading,” Archbishop Gomez said in a statement. “The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed.”

“We need to acknowledge that terrible failure today,” Archbishop Gomez continued. “We need to pray for everyone who has ever been hurt by members of the Church. And we need to continue to support the long and painful process of healing their wounds and restoring the trust that was broken.”

• Source
• PDF of the letter

When I first saw this story last night I went through a series of reactions starting with “Finally and appropriate response.”

I already had little respect for the Cardinal and what was left was almost totally eliminated by the letter he wrote in reply to Archbishop Gomez.

“Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem.”

If only he had been trained to not cover up sexual abuse. His reply is exactly the type of thinking that led to the cover up of sexual abuse in that there is no responsibility and making decisions is hard. The problem is always because appropriate structures had not been setup. The problem and the horror of priestly sexual abuse is just something to deal with administratively, or at least this is what this attitude portrays..

What really outrages me about Cardinal Mahoney’s reply is that it displays zero sorrow for what he in fact did do. His attitude is that yeah I made mistakes and I apologized for them so just leave me alone about them now. There is really no public shame displayed in what he did and the fact is that even after this information started to come out it was business as usual for him.

Now as I said I was no fan of the Cardinal and it is easy to get caught up in what Archbishop Gomez has appropriately done. Still I find I have to look at my own reaction to this. I am experiencing too much schadenfreude and very little charity. It is quite easy to associate this story with the conservative/progressive divide when really it has nothing to do with it. Cardinal Law and Cardinal Mahoney fell on either side of this divide and yet acted roughly the same way. The types of attitudes that lead to covering up for priestly abuses transcend doctrinal orthodoxy for the most part.

One of the things that resonate about this story is the simple fact that there have been so few consequences for those who were involved in these cover ups. Once the facts of these cases came out the people involved usually going into bunker mode seeming to hope it will all pass by. Cardinal Law at least finally resigned. It reminds me of something Phil Lawler wrote on Bishop Finn wrote recently.

Having been found guilty in a court of law, and then having accepted the court’s verdict, Bishop Finn is now permanently handicapped as a teacher of the Catholic faith. The Los Angeles Times is not the first newspaper that has chosen to focus attention on his criminal conviction, nor will it be the last. Whenever he makes a public statement on a controversial issue, critics will be sure to remind us of the bishop’s troubles with the law, whether or not they are relevant to the issue at hand.

It may be unfair that Bishop Finn is now singled out as a convicted criminal, when so many other American bishops were guilty of the same offenses, and much worse, in the past. It may be unfair that the Los Angeles Times trains its editorial guns on the Bishop of Kansas City, when there is larger target at close range in Los Angeles. It may be unfair, but those are the facts. When an orthodox Catholic bishop makes a strong defense of the Catholic stand on contentious issues, the critics of Catholicism will fight back, and Bishop Finn is now vulnerable.

As much as I admire his stalwart leadership of the Kansas City diocese, I question whether Bishop Finn can act effectively as a teacher of the faith when his critics have such a handy means of impeaching his testimony. I question whether he can prosper as the leader of the Catholic community, in an increasingly hostile environment, while wearing a bulls-eye on his back.

Regardless of Bishop Finn’s past leadership I would agree with Mr. Lawler and it would be better for his diocese if he resigned.

Update:

Never mind, just more of the same. Archbishop José Gomez has issued the following clarification:

“Questions from the faithful and some members of the news media indicate that it would be helpful for me to clarify the status of Cardinal Roger Mahony and Bishop Thomas Curry.

“Cardinal Mahony, as Archbishop Emeritus, and Bishop Curry, as Auxiliary Bishop, remain bishops in good standing in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with full rights to celebrate the Holy Sacraments of the Church and to minister to the faithful without restriction.”

Via Frank Weathers I saw that aleteia had been officially launched. Now you might justifiably ask “What the heck is aleteia?” It is an effort by the Foundation for Evangelization through the Media which was founded in 2010 to respond to Pope Benedict XVI urging members of the Catholic media to proclaim the Gospel on the “Digital Continent.”

This is suppose to be an open network and a evangelization effort. The front page is mostly a news portal made up of various sections and trending topics. It appears that the content linked to on the site is aggregated by people working with aleteia to find content from Catholic news sites and blogs. This in itself is rather a major effort and the fact that this is done in five different languages certainly increases the scope. There are also articles written specifically for this site.

If you do a search on the site you will get links to content they created along with sites they have specifically selected. Looking through various search results it looks like they have gathered together a solid set of sites that they will link to. A simple test of this showed that you can get results for the National Catholic Register, but not it’s evil twin The National Catholic Reporter. Father Z appears prominent in results and I wonder if they have weighted search results so that some of the more popular resources appear first? Apparently even my blog is on their whitelist of sites allowed in search results.

The design of the site is pleasant enough and uses a design ethic rather popular now. I like the color scheme, but I am biased since it is similar to my own. Like pretty much every site now there are social networking aspects. Commenting along with sharing information on multiple social network platforms.

Now is this site something that I would make a habit of going to? Well the answer is both yes and no. There are some flaws that I find annoying and hopefully will be fixed in the future.

For example the site has no RSS feed (at least none I could discover). I find this a major flaw as my daily travels on the web are almost totally via an app that uses my Google Reader account. I hardly ever bookmark a site since I usually don’t have to. RSS is a perfect way to keep up on news and is really mandatory for a site like aleteia. Oddly you can get an RSS feed for a comment thread on an article.

Now if I decided to visit and wanted to enter their name into the browser aleteia does not exactly roll off the tongue or the fingers for that matter. I know it is hard to find short meaningful domain names, but this is just clumsy. The fact that they don’t own the .com version of the name is doubly so.

For a site like this the thing I would be most interested in is their own content with the aggregation of Catholic sites being a secondary interest. Unfortunately they don’t make it easy to see what is their latest content. The “Most Read” section is prominent and does link to their content, but it should be easier to see fresh content. Currently the way to do this is to go to the bottom of the page and select “All Articles.”

As an evangelization effort I don’t see how this site would be appealing to people other than Catholics already interested in their faith. Matthew Warner previously had a critique when they were still in beta and some of his critique still stands. Especially this:

… my biggest concern is that the scope of this is too big. To sum it up, it’s target audience seems like it’s everyone. Which, from a marketing standpoint, means it’s for nobody in particular. Which is a difficult way to market, especially when you’re just trying to get a new, social site off the ground. Social sites are about the critical mass of the community. You go after a particular group of people and build a small community. Then expand your scope from there. Most every modern-day successful “social network” started with a relatively small, targeted niche in order to reach a critical mass before expanding. Facebook started with Harvard. Foursquare started with New York City, etc. And it’s not just big social media platforms, it’s anything that is community driven. Even your average blog is best started this way.

Then there are minor quibbles. For example the search field when the browser is at a width most people will see it says “Search within the Catholic” where “world” is cut off. Click on the search box and at times it now says the same thing in Spanish.

Hopefully they will fix some of these problems, but the problem with scope remains. I would certainly like to use it as a resource and hope it both improves and succeeds.

Archbishop Wuerl responds to the petition posted on the White House Web site to label the church a “hate group”. Here are a couple of nice snippets from a good article.

… Although these precepts may be misunderstood by many today, the fundamental vocation of the Catholic Church is to provide the witness of love and truth to the world, including offering the voice of an informed conscience. Catholics are taught to respect the fundamental, inherent dignity of every person, each made in the image of God, and to work to establish a just society. The church teaches that it is our obligation to manifest love of neighbor, to provide charitable service to others, and to promote truth, genuine freedom and authentic humanism. We work for the poor, the oppressed and the suffering, because that is what our faith teaches we must do. There is thus a positive side to being dogmatic: The teachings and works of the church advance the common good throughout civil society. Just as our dogma is constant, so is the work it commands.

… The church is dogmatic, and that is good — even if it means that the church is a sign of contradiction in the world and the object of animus and disdain. It is a positive, attractive feature that what we profess is unchanging and unchangeable — the good news of a love and truth that we are called to share with the world. It is good for Catholics and non-Catholics. Were the church to compromise its creed, if we were to simply go along with today’s secularized culture, not only would the church cease to be the church but the common good would suffer greatly.

Archbishop Wuerl calls this petition “beyond the pale” and as I noted in a previous post that the petition the White house considered “beyond the pale” was the one against Beyonce which got pulled.

“In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.” — G.K. Chesterton