Leo the Great - Chalcedon (451) and the "New Adam"

The import of today’s feast is the combination of Leo’s Chalcedon and Maximus the Confessor’s Constantinople III in the Christology and consequent anthropology that has everything to do with integral human development in the Third Millennium. That is, the transition from an essentialist metaphysic of seeing the human person as “individual substance of a rational nature” to the dynamic “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself,” is due to the dynamic understanding of the Jesus Christ, the God-man as a single Being with a single (Personal) Will obeying the Father to death. It is the anthropology of priesthood and work (mediating between self and God for others). The ramifications are immense.

The text of Chalcedon (451):

“Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all teach that with one accord we confess one and the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in human nature, truly God and the same with a rational soul and a body truly man, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity, and consubstantial with us, according to human nature, like unto us in all things except sin,; indeed born of the Father before the ages according to divine nature, but in the last days the same born of the virgin Mary, Mother of God according to human nature; for us and for our deliverance, one and the same Christ only begotten Son our Lord, acknowledged in two natures, without mingling, without change, indivisibly, undividedly, the distinction of the natures nowhere removed on account of the union but rather the peculiarity of each nature being kept, and uniting in one person and substance, not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same son only begotten God Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as from the beginning the prophets taught about Him and the Lord Jesus Himself taught us, and the creed of our fathers has handed down to us.”

Two hundred thirty years intervene as the Church – not without concomitant political intrigue - tries to untangle the conundrum of how can Christ have a human will that is humanly free, and at the same time be the will of a divine Person who cannot sin. The answer is that sin is not part of true freedom. As Christ is the meaning of man, so also Christ’s freedom as man is the meaning of human freedom. This was the work of Maximus the Confessor who transcended the abstractive imagination – necessary as it is - that tends to “reify” philosophical and theological profundity. This proliferation of philosophoumena is the drawback of objectifying thought. The key consists in realizing that it is not the will as a sort of “substantialized” faculty that wills, but the person. Once philosophers talk about the will as if it were “a subsistent being,” the discourse unintentionally but tragically treats “the will” as if it were an entity in itself.

It is not. It is the tendency of the person toward the good. That realized, it becomes clear that it is the divine Person of the Logos who wills with what we call “the divine Will” and “the human will.” It is the same “I” of the Logos desire in the human mode of human willing. Hence, there is identity in the divine and the human willing which is “Personal,” the one divine Logos willing and obeying the Will of the Father to death on the Cross. This, then, is the anthropology of Redemption.

Ratzinger: “Maximus the Confessor, the great theological interpreter of this second phase of the development of the Christological dogma, illuminates this whole context by reference to Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives, which, as we already saw in Thesis 1, expresses Jesus’ unique relationship to God. Indeed, it is as if we were actually looking in on the inner life of the Word-made-man. It is revealed to us in the sentence which remains the measure and model of all real prayer: ‘Not what I will, but what thou wilt’ (Mk. 14, 36). Jesus’ human will assimilates itself to the will of the Son. In doing this, he receives the Son’s identity, i.e., the complete subordination of the I to the Thou, the self-giving and self-expropriation of the I to the Thou. This is the very essence of him who is pure relation and pure act. Wherever the I give itself to the Thou, there is freedom because this involves the reception of the ‘form of God.’”[1]

This can be made even clearer by the simpler form in which Ratzinger writes it: “The Council of Constantinople has analyzed concretely the problem of the two natures and one person in Christ in view of the problem of the will of Jesus. We are reminded firmly that there exists a specific will of the man Jesus that is not absorbed into the divine will. But this human will follows the divine will and thus becomes a single will with it, not, however, in a forced way but by way of freedom. The metaphysical duplicity of a human will and a divine will is not eliminated, but in the personal sphere, the area of freedom, there is accomplished a fusion of the two, so that this becomes not one single natural will but one personal will. This free union – a mode of union created by love - is a union higher and more intimate than a purely natural union. It corresponds to the highest union which can exist, the union of the Trinity.

“The Council explains this union by a saying of the Lord given in the Gospel of John: ‘I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me’ (John 6, 38). Here the divine Logos is speaking, and speaking of the human will of Jesus in the mode by which he calls his will the will of the Logos. Wit this exegesis of John 6, 38, the Council proves the unity of the subject. In Jesus there are not two ‘I’s’ but only one. The Logos speaks of the will and human thought of Jesus using the ‘I,’ because the human will has become fully one with the will of the Logos, and with it has become pure assent to the will of the Father.”[2]

The Text of Constantinople III (680-681):

“And we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will. For the will of the flesh had to be moved, and yet to be subjected to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For just as his flesh is said to be and is flesh of the Word of God, so too the natural will of his flesh is said to and does belong to the Word of God, just as he says himself: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me, calling his own will that of his flesh, since his flesh too became his own. For in the same way that his all holy and blameless animate flesh was not destroyed in being made divine but remained in its own limit and category, so his human will as well was not destroyed by being made divine, but rather was preserved, according to the theologian Gregory, who says: "For his willing, when he is considered as saviour, is not in opposition to God, being made divine in its entirety"… Therefore, protecting on all sides the "no confusion" and "no division", we announce the whole in these brief words: Believing our lord Jesus Christ, even after his incarnation, to be one of the holy Trinity and our true God, we say that he has two natures [naturas] shining forth in his one subsistence[subsistentia] in which he demonstrated the miracles and the sufferings throughout his entire providential dwelling here, not in appearance but in truth, the difference of the natures being made known in the same one subsistence in that each nature wills and performs the things that are proper to it in a communion with the other; then in accord with this reasoning we hold that two natural wills and principles of action meet in correspondence for the salvation of the human race.

Constantinople III as Key to Christological-Priestly Anthropology (“Theology of the Cross): Gift of Self

This work of Constantinople III, which views Christ, the divine Person, not as a static substance with two natures (divine and human) as accidental essences in a kind of objectivized theological “erector set,” has been the key to understanding Jesus Christ as the “New Adam” and “Last Man.” It is an understanding that takes its dynamic, the dynamic of person - the "I" found in the the experience of the the divine Person as self-transcendent. It is Trinitarian dynamic translated into a metaphysics of the image. Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes #22 proclaims that “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.” Therefore, this dynamic of the relationality of the Son to the Father is lived out through the human will and body to obedient death on the Cross. It is the full and perfect immanentization of the eschaton as the apex and goal of all human history. The supreme point of human history has already been reached, and time is granted for the integral development into that supreme achievement that is Christ.

The Being of Christ as dynamic God-man is the model for all men to actively become “priests of their own existence” (Escriva). That dynamism is personal in the sense that it is the Person who is the Agent of two ontologically distinct wills, and Who wills as one will with both (personally). Ratzinger writes:

“A theology of the incarnation situated too much on the level of essence, may be tempted to be satisfied with the ontological phenomenon: God’s being and man’s have been conjoined. This appears as the real turning-point, and in comparison with it the factual life of Jesus and his death are secondary, as it were the realization of a principle which ultimate adds nothing to the principle itself. But since it is made clear that man’s being is not that of a pure essence, and that he only attains his reality by his activity, it is at once evident that we cannot rest content with a purely essentialist outlook. Man’s being must therefore be examined precisely in its activities. If this is done, the concept of the ‘novus homo’ takes concrete shape in that of the ‘agnus innocens.’ It then becomes apparent that Jesus’ concrete reality is ‘pro me’ (and ‘pro nobis’) and for this very reason is a self-sacrificing existence in the mystery of the cross. This alone shows the wholly personal relationship to Christ, for Christ is not a great super-ego into which the I-monads are organized, but a most individual human being who looks at me personally. His relation to me is not that of a great corporate personality. He enters into a personal. Conversation of love; he has something to say to me alone, which no one else knows (cf. Rev 2. 17). Pascal’s intense piety which made him place in the Lord’s mouth the words: ‘In my agony I thought of you; I shed these drops of blood for you,’ is biblically entirely justified in view of the Pauline ‘pro me.’ Thus Christ no longer appears as a merely general form to which human existences are conformed. His exemplarity means the concrete summons to follow him, and this gives meaning to man’s cross; it calls him to share in the ‘pro me’ of Jesus Christ in a Christian ‘pro invicem’ based on the ‘cum Christo.’”[3]

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[1] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 40-41.

[2] Benedict XVI, “Journey to Easter” Crossroad (1987) 101-102.

[3] J. Ratzinger, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II Herder and Herder ed. H. Vorgrimler (1966) Vol V, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” “The Church and Man’s Calling – The Dignity of the Human Person,” (1966) 160.

Fall of the Berlin Wall - November 9, 2009

Centesimus Annus

Among the many factors involved in the fall of oppressive regimes, some deserve special mention. Certainly, the decisive factor which gave rise to the changes was the violation of the rights of workers. It cannot be forgotten that the fundamental crisis of systems claiming to express the rule and indeed the dictatorship of the working class began with the great upheavals which took place in Poland in the name of solidarity. It was the throngs of working people which foreswore the ideology which presumed to speak in their name. On the basis of a hard, lived experience of work and of oppression, it was they who recovered and, in a sense, rediscovered the content and principles of the Church's social doctrine.

Also worthy of emphasis is the fact that the fall of this kind of "bloc" or empire was accomplished almost everywhere by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice. While Marxism held that only by exacerbating social conflicts was it possible to resolve them through violent confrontation, the protests which led to the collapse of Marxism tenaciously insisted on trying every avenue of negotiation, dialogue, and witness to the truth, appealing to the conscience of the adversary and seeking to reawaken in him a sense of shared human dignity.

It seemed that the European order resulting from the Second World War and sanctioned by the Yalta Agreements could only be overturned by another war. Instead, it has been overcome by the non-violent commitment of people who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth. This disarmed the adversary, since violence always needs to justify itself through deceit, and to appear, however falsely, to be defending a right or responding to a threat posed by others.⁵⁴ Once again I thank God for having sustained people's hearts amid difficult trials, and I pray that this example will prevail in other places and other circumstances. May people learn to fight for justice without violence, renouncing class struggle in their internal disputes, and war in international ones.

24. The second factor in the crisis was certainly the inefficiency of the economic system, which is not to be considered simply as a technical problem, but rather a consequence of the violation of the human rights to private initiative, to ownership of property and to freedom in the economic sector. To this must be added the cultural and national dimension: it is not possible to understand man on the basis of economics alone, nor to define him simply on the basis of class membership. Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death. At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. When this question is eliminated, the culture and moral life of nations are corrupted. For this reason the struggle to defend work was spontaneously linked to the struggle for culture and for national rights.

But the true cause of the new developments was the spiritual void brought about by atheism, which deprived the younger generations of a sense of direction and in many cases led them, in the irrepressible search for personal identity and for the meaning of life, to rediscover the religious roots of their national cultures, and to rediscover the person of Christ himself as the existentially adequate response to the desire in every human heart for goodness, truth and life. This search was supported by the witness of those who, in difficult circumstances and under persecution, remained faithful to God. Marxism had promised to uproot the need for God from the human heart, but the results have shown that it is not possible to succeed in this without throwing the heart into turmoil.

25. The events of 1989 are an example of the success of willingness to negotiate and of the Gospel spirit in the face of an adversary determined not to be bound by moral principles. These events are a warning to those who, in the name of political realism, wish to banish law and morality from the political arena. Undoubtedly, the struggle which led to the changes of 1989 called for clarity, moderation, suffering and sacrifice. In a certain sense, it was a struggle born of prayer, and it would have been unthinkable without immense trust in God, the Lord of history, who carries the human heart in his hands. It is by uniting his own sufferings for the sake of truth and freedom to the sufferings of Christ on the Cross that man is able to accomplish the miracle of peace and is in a position to discern the often narrow path between the cowardice which gives in to evil and the violence which, under the illusion of fighting evil, only makes it worse.

Nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that the manner in which the individual exercises his freedom is conditioned in innumerable ways. While these certainly have an influence on freedom, they do not determine it; they make the exercise of freedom more difficult or less difficult, but they cannot destroy it. Not only is it wrong from the ethical point of view to disregard human nature, which is made for freedom, but in practice it is impossible to do so. Where society is so organized as to reduce arbitrarily or even suppress the sphere in which freedom is legitimately exercised, the result is that the life of society becomes progressively disorganized and goes into decline.

Moreover, man, who was created for freedom, bears within himself the wound of original sin, which constantly draws him towards evil and puts him in need of redemption. Not only is this doctrine an integral part of Christian revelation; it also has great hermeneutical value insofar as it helps one to understand human reality. Man tends towards good, but he is also capable of evil. He can transcend his immediate interest and still remain bound to it. The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society — which possesses its own autonomy and laws⁵⁵ — can ever be confused with the Kingdom of God. The Gospel parable of the weeds among the wheat (cf. Mt 13:24-30; 36-43) teaches that it is for God alone to separate the subjects of the Kingdom from the subjects of the Evil One, and that this judgment will take place at the end of time. By presuming to anticipate judgment here and now, man puts himself in the place of God and sets himself against the patience of God.

(Attempted) MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

Archbishop Dolan’s Critique of NYT's Selective Outrage

"But if I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the Faith is at hand I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall once more be at work it will be morning"

- Hilaire Belloc Survivals and New Arrivals- (borrowed from Fr. C. John McClosky's e-mail)

Archbishop Timothy Dolan objectively makes a case that simply is not permitted to be made, i.e. that the Catholic Church is invariably singled out for outrage while equal office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases ‘internally.’”

Dolan had called for fair-play - on a level playing field - by the New York Times, and that was unconscionable. What is at stake here is the mettle of Archbishop Dolan who is now being measured by the Magisterium of the secularist media. I offer that if he continues to speak truth to power, the next move – which has already been announced – will be to dreg up and vilify him with his historic performance in St. Louis and Milwaukee. Clark Hoyt prepares us – and the archbishop – for what’s coming. Note: “(The New York Times) continues to look into the subject:”

“Dolan himself has been under that microscope. The Times interviewed him months ago about his handling of sexual abuse cases in his previous posts in St. Louis and Milwaukee, and it continues to look into the subject. It is a natural inquiry given that advocates for abuse victims, while giving Dolan credit for transparency in Milwaukee, say he did not go far enough in resolving pedophilia cases there.”

In case you’ve missed the interplay, I offer the evidence for your own perusal:

1) The Archbishop’s article that the Times would not use as an op-ed.

2) That is followed by the article by Maureen Dowd that is criticized in the Archbishop’s blog.

3) That, again, is followed by today’s (November 8, 2009) “The Archbishop’s Blog.”

1) FOUL BALL!

By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York

October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!

Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-Catholicism.

It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-Semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”

If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:

• On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”

Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.

• On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.

• Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.

• Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday. Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally?

The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.

I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

2) The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd

“The Nun’s Story”

Maureen Dowd’s Article of October 24, 2009 - NYT – op ed.

Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.

Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.

Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church.

Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.

In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!

“It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”

As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.

“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”

The nuns are pushing back a bit, but it’s hard, since the church has decreed that women can’t be adversarial to men. A nun writing in Commonweal as “Sister X” protests, “American women religious are being bullied.”

She recalls that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who heads one of the investigations, moved a meeting at the University of Notre Dame off campus to protest a performance of “The Vagina Monologues.” “It is the rare bishop,” Sister X writes, “who has any real understanding of the lives women actually lead.”

The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)

When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women.

Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Toledo and one of Bishop Blair’s flock, got a resolution passed commending nuns for their humble service and sacrifice. “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said. “Maybe people do things differently there. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will intervene.”

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3) The Public Editor – New York Times

The Archbishop’s Blog

By CLARK HOYT

Published: November 7, 2009, p. 8

LATE last month, Paul Vitello, who covers religion for The Times, wrote a lighthearted feature about a new blogger: Archbishop Timothy Dolan, installed this year to lead the 2.5 million Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York. Little did Vitello know that before the day was out, Dolan would turn his blog on the reporter and his paper, citing news articles and a column by Maureen Dowd as examples of anti-Catholicism.

Skip to next paragraph “It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime,” the archbishop wrote. He said that if you wanted examples of the church being treated unfairly, The Times had supplied four in a couple of weeks. They included Dowd’s “intemperate and scurrilous” column about the treatment of nuns by the church hierarchy and a front-page article about a priest who had fathered a son in a long-term relationship with a parishioner.

Dolan originally submitted his blog post to The Times as an Op-Ed article, and I heard from readers wanting to know why it wasn’t published. David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said that his page “has never been the forum for direct responses to articles.” He suggested that the archbishop submit a letter to the editor, but Dolan declined. He told me he knew that a letter to the editor would have to be condensed and he feared that key points would be lost.

The result was the sharp blog attack on The Times from a man who was greeted in the paper six months earlier as warm, flexible and not given to confrontation. Dolan’s criticism touched a nerve with other Catholics with whom I spoke, who feel their faith is under assault in the secular world, and it raised interesting questions about what is fair to report and criticize about the leadership of a religion that is in a unique position of influence: It is both a spiritual home to a quarter of the American population, and a major institution than runs school systems, provides social services and seeks to shape public policy.

Never far from such discussions is the media’s coverage of the church’s pedophilia scandal. One of the examples Dolan cited on his blog was a front-page article in The Times about child sexual abuse in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. He said it lacked the “outrage” that he said marked coverage of pedophilia in the Catholic Church.

“Why aren’t other people under the same microscope we are?” Dolan asked me. He said child sexual abuse is a broad social problem, yet media coverage seems to focus most on Catholics.

Dolan himself has been under that microscope. The Times interviewed him months ago about his handling of sexual abuse cases in his previous posts in St. Louis and Milwaukee, and it continues to look into the subject. It is a natural inquiry given that advocates for abuse victims, while giving Dolan credit for transparency in Milwaukee, say he did not go far enough in resolving pedophilia cases there.

Times reporters defended the paper’s coverage. Laurie Goodstein, the national religion correspondent, said The Times had reported about sex abuse by clergy of many faiths but that the Catholics’ story was far bigger because there were more priests accused, more people making allegations, more legal wrangling and settlements, and a longer history. And Vitello said of his article about abuse in the Jewish community that his job was to provide information and let readers decide whether to be outraged.

Dolan seemed particularly offended by Dowd’s column, in which she wrote that the Vatican was hoping to herd nuns “back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.” She said the “über-conservative” Pope Benedict XVI, while a cardinal, had urged women to be submissive partners. She brought up issues like the pope’s conscription into the Hitler Youth, and his statement that condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

Dolan wrote that Dowd dug “deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible.” The subject she raised was legitimate, he said, but her language was more like the prejudice in Know-Nothing papers of the 1850s.

“Far from being anti-Catholic, my column was an expression of one Catholic’s anger and anguish about the moral crisis in her church,” Dowd told me. “It’s not right to call legitimate — and widely shared — complaints about the church hierarchy anti-Catholic, any more than it’s right to call opposition to the policies of a White House anti-American.”

Dolan said he was not trying to stifle dissent. “We welcome criticism of the Catholic Church,” he said. “We need it. What I’m talking about is the ‘how’ of it. Is it measured? Is it temperate?” He said Dowd was serving up “raw red meat.”

Dowd said the issues she raised went to what she sees as the pope’s extreme conservatism and his judgment. “Should I blandly express outrage at the church continuing to treat women as second-class citizens?” she asked. Bland is not what Dowd does. I thought she was well within a columnist’s bounds.

Goodstein, who wrote the article about the priest with a son, said she was vexed by the criticism from Dolan, whom she once described in The Times as a “healer bishop.” Dolan said the affair described in her story was a quarter-century old, and he wondered why it was more newsworthy than subjects like the war in Afghanistan, health care and genocide in Sudan — subjects that The Times, in fact, covers extensively. In a letter to Dolan, Goodstein said he had neglected to mention in his blog that the priest’s son, now 22, was dying from brain cancer and believed the church had failed him, while his father remained a priest.

There is an inherent tension between journalism, which is supposed to be skeptical of authority, and a church that places great emphasis on it. James Martin, a priest and an editor of the Jesuit magazine America, said that, as someone with a foot in each camp, he believes reporters at The Times work hard to get stories right, though he sometimes questions the prominence and frequency of articles about the church’s sex scandal.

Dowd’s column? It was “over the top in mocking the pope,” he said. “Then again, she did that to Bill Clinton.” Martin said he didn’t think most Catholics appreciated reporters’ efforts to be accurate and fair. “On the other hand, I don’t think editors realize how tired Catholics are of seeing the Church portrayed through the lens of sex abuse,” he said.

I think it is hard to pick a handful of examples, as Dolan did, and make a case that The Times has been “anti-Catholic.” Along with unblinking coverage of church controversies, the paper covered his selection as archbishop extensively and for the most part warmly. Goodstein is receiving an award this weekend from the American Academy of Religion for a touching front-page series on priests from abroad serving U.S. parishes.

Could the newspaper sometimes choose a better word in a story or pay more attention to transgressions in other parts of society? Yes. Has it been guilty of anti-Catholicism? I don’t buy it.

Me: I do!

Abortion Restriction Amendment Wins Passage in the U.S. House

By Nicole Gaouette and James Rowley

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The House voted to restrict the use of federal funds for abortion, limiting access to the procedure for people who use an insurance-purchasing exchange that would be created in pending U.S. health-care legislation.

The 240-194 vote for the amendment included the support of 64 Democrats in addition to Republicans. It came as lawmakers considered a larger bill designed to cover 36 million uninsured Americans and curb rising medical costs.

“I am not writing a new federal abortion policy,” Michigan Representative Bart Stupak, who sponsored the amendment, said in floor debate tonight. The amendment will preserve the “principle of no public funding of abortion and no public funding of insurance policies that pay for abortion.”

Stupak had threatened to join with fellow Democrats to block consideration of his party’s health bill over the issue.

That prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to agree to allow the vote to clear the way for debate on the legislation.

Earlier today, Pelosi predicted her chamber would pass the most sweeping U.S. health-care changes in four decades as President Barack Obama urged Congress to “rise to this moment.”

“We will be making history with our vote,” Pelosi told reporters after she and fellow Democrats met with Obama on Capitol Hill. “We will pass health-care reform.”

Another Battle Looms

Still, a later fight over abortion looms as supporters of abortion rights vowed to oppose any final measure that included the restriction. The Senate is struggling to find consensus on its own plan and later would work with the House on a compromise, if both chambers pass their versions.

The 10-year health-care plan’s $1 trillion price tag and its creation of a government-run program to compete with private health insurers represents the biggest changes to health care since the 1965 creation of the Medicare program for the elderly. It would require Americans to get insurance, set up insurance- purchasing exchanges for people who don’t have employer-provided benefits, and provide subsidies to help people obtain coverage.

Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats voiced concern that lower-income Americans in the proposed health-insurance exchanges could use federal subsidies to pay for abortions.

On the other side, a coalition of 190 lawmakers who favor access to legal abortion say they would oppose any final measure that makes it harder for women to gain access to the procedure.

Threat to Bill

“This is an issue that emerged, with the potential of bringing down the bill,” said Representative Janice Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, in an interview. If the additional restrictions make it into the final version of the bill, “many of us couldn’t support it at the end of the day,” she said.

“To say that this amendment is a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be an understatement of a lifetime,” said Colorado Representative Diana DeGette during floor debate. It “will be the greatest restriction of a women’s right to choose” passed by Congress “in our career.”

One Democrat who favors abortion rights, however, Virginia Representative Gerald Connolly, said the Stupak amendment is “not adding new restrictions” and is only “extending existing provisions” to a new government-subsidized program.

“I don’t believe that is an unfair ask for the Pro-Life Caucus,” Connolly told reporters.

The provision -- which would force women who purchase health insurance with a government subsidy to buy a special rider for abortion coverage with their own money -- is no different than the longtime rules for federal government workers, said Connolly, who represents the Virginia suburbs of Washington.

Bigger Picture

The amendment won’t threaten the vote on the overall health-care measure because many Democrats who favor abortion rights will look at the bigger picture, said California Representative Mike Thompson.

“We all recognize it’s one step closer to providing quality, affordable health care” and “we will move on to the next step,” Thompson said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kristin Jensen in Washington at kjensen@bloomberg.net; Nicole Gaouette in Washington at ngaouette@bloomberg.net