'Conjuring' belief in demons

Forty years after The Exorcist made $441 million and lodged itself in the American imagination, the latest cast-out-demons based-on-a-true-story film hit theaters this weekend. The writers and director are hoping the $20 million production called The Conjuring makes some money -- and gets some viewers seriously considering demonic realities. 

"People should never be ignorant of demonic forces and think it can't happen to them," said Chad Hayes, one of the screenwriters. 

Chad and his twin brother and co-writer Carey Hayes have been adamant about the connection between their faith and this horror film, a connection which has pretty seamlessly blended with some of the studios' promotional efforts. The film's distributor, New Line Cinema, has subcontracted with Grace Hill Media for a specific faith-market campaign. The company arranged advance screenings for faith groups, including groups of priests, and has made the writer-brothers and the real-life exorcists available to the religious press.

The people behind this film hope those who believe in demons go to theaters and watch. Chad Hayes, for example, said, "Men and women of faith should see this film because they will see the power that only God holds to overcome evil. They can be witnesses to that moment of darkness that only the power of God can defeat."

The people behind the film don't only want believers to go and see it, but one way to market it to believers it to talk about how the product will be powerful and especially spiritually useful for those who don't believe. This is part of why there's all this talk about the reality of demonic forces. It's aimed at those who like their scary narratives to teeter on the question, "is it real?," and also at those who think it is real and want to believe that such a film could transform the beliefs of others.

That evangelical message is clear enough that some reviewers are reacting to it. At Salon, the film has been dubbed "one of the cleverest and most effective right-wing Christian films of recent years," which is not framed as a compliment.

At a recent screening, the director reportedly spent some time trying to persuade incredulous critics of the film's serious intent. The final words on the screen, too, from one of the real-life exorcists involved in the real-life version of the film's fictionalized events, emphasize this point:

Diabolical forces are formidable. These forces are eternal and they exist today. The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.

Whether or not they believe in The Conjuring, marketing a movie to people who believe in demons isn't a bad idea.

For one thing, there's a good number of them. There's not a lot of really solid information on exactly how many, but one poll reported that 41 percent of Americans agreed with the the idea that demons exist, and another, which just looked at self-identified Christians, put the number at 64 percent of Christians, which is about 48 percent of the general population. That works out to more than 150 million Americans as the potential market for this marketing campaign of this movie, plus, presumably, the people they know and think might be somewhere on the edge of possible belief.

For another thing, appealing to religious audiences has paid off in recent years. There are success stories inspiring this marketing drive: The Passion of the Christ, The Blind Side, Fireproof, and others. Add the successes of faith-"infused" TV shows that have fared so well lately, Duck Dynasty, The Bible, etc., and the people who decide what movies get made are going to pay attention. And they are: At this year's Annual Faith and Values Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry, a Hollywood affair celebrating films pitched as faith-friendly and making lots and lots of money for it, marketing strategists were saying they could sell anything that is faith friendly. It was reported that in the last 21 years the number of films classified as having "at least some Christian, redemptive content" has grown from about 10 percent of the movies produced to nearly 57 percent, but there is still demand for more.

It turns out religious right's efforts to demonstrate the economic strength of conservative Christians actually worked. If not with boycotts, then with theater tickets and big buckets of popcorn.

According to Carey Hayes, "the essence of this movie is, God wins."

One could say the same of The Exorcist, of course. That's what these movies do: God wins, demons are dramatized, some segment of the audience wonders if maybe that fictionally depicted reality is really real, and others say yes, yes!, and a bunch of money is made and more such stories are put into production.

The Conjuring continued that tradition this weekend, pulling in box office receipts worth $41.5 million,  earning more than twice what it cost with just it's North American debut.

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Secular Jesus

A statue of Jesus at a ski resort is not religious, according to a federal court ruling. Or at least not religious enough to matter.

"Big Mountain Jesus," as the statue is called, has become secularized, and over the years has lost the potency it might have once had to seem like a religious message to any passersby.

In the ruling, Judge Dana L. Christensen, an Obama administration appointee, wrote that the statue is "unquestionably a religious symbol" but is not really very religious, lacking any significant symbolic power. Because, "for most who happen to encounter Big Mountain Jesus, it neither offends nor inspires."

The symbol is secular because it's impotent.

Christensen explained:

the statue does not convey any message that individuals visiting Big Mountain whether in the summer or winter might be treated more favorably or less favorably depending on their religious beliefs or affiliation.

and,

The statue's secular and irreverent uses far outweigh the few religious uses it has served. The statue is most frequently used as a meeting point for skiers or hikers and a site for photo opportunities, rather than a solemn place for religious reflection. Big Mountain Jesus is one of the last remaining remnants from the original Big Mountain Ski Resort, and many individuals in the community value its historic significance. For many, it reflects the evolution of the town of Whitefish from a lumber town to a tourist attraction .... Typical observers ofthe statue are more interested in giving it a high five or adorning it in ski gear than sitting before it in prayer.

There are other reasons for the court's ruling that the statue on land leased by the federal government does not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The Lemon test was applied, there questions about what a "reasonable observer" would infer about the relationship between church and state from the statue, issues of standing, and so on.

This aspect of the case is quite strange, though. It's come up several times now, where those who defend religious symbols in public spaces defend them on the grounds that the symbols are meaningless. You have to wonder about how the Knights of Columbus that went up to the top of the mountain to put of a statue of their Lord and Savior would feel now that that statue is official recognized as a symbol of a town's tourist economy.

Don Byrd, of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said the secularization of the Jesus statue is one reason religious people should be committed to the separation of Church and State. He writes,

The idea is disturbing that a monument to Christ can lose its religious significance, and become an appropriate government monument in the process, due to years of 'frivolity.' This line of thinking underscores why we should not allow government to co-opt religious monuments. In so doing, government doesn't honor religion, it systematically secularizes its expression.

The ruling will likely be appealed.

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American papal ambivalencies

Peter Manseau reflects on the American mass media's historically confused and contradictory relationship with the pope, at once fawning and admiring and also openly hostile:

The first time Time put a pope on its cover -- June 16, 1924 -- it tried to split the difference between the era's rampant anti-Catholicism and the 'Great Man' narratives that were then its stock and trade. Beneath an illustration depicting Pope Pius XI as bespectacled, human, and approachable (literally soft-around the edges, thanks to the artist’s light touch) there appeared words offering a decidedly more ominous message: 'No Popery!' 

[...] 

The ambivalent relationship between the leader of the Roman Catholic Church and the American media has continued ever since. There is no other job opening on earth that would receive so much attention -- despite, or maybe due to, the fact that many prominent journalists are openly hostile to the teachings of the Church.

Much of this is the legacy of the man who boldly put both a pope and 'popery' on the cover of his magazine almost ninety year ago: a Protestant missionary’s son who found himself in bed with the Church in more ways than one. For Henry Luce, there was of course the actual Catholic with whom he shared his home -- Clare Boothe Luce -- but there was also an unabashed affinity for the Olympian authority the Vatican represented, which was similar to the kind which he imagined his publications would offer each week.

Julie Byrne, author of the forthcoming The Other Catholics, takes a look at the currents within contemporary American Catholicism that are really pretty ambivalent about the papacy -- including "Old Catholics," and also the fastest growing contingency of the American church, Latinos. She writes:

According to one recent survey fewer than three out of ten U.S. Roman Catholics says that the “teaching authority claimed by the Vatican” is “very important” to them. 

U.S. Roman Catholicism is now fully one-third Latino, and this is another group that does not simply accede to papal centrality. 

The vitality of devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother of Jesus manifested at Guadalupe, often far surpasses concerns for the pope. Especially among Mexican-Americans, who make up more than 60 percent of U.S. Hispanics, she is the living center of faith. Only half jokingly, some Latino Catholics say they are not Romans, but Guadalupeans.

The relationships that Americans -- Catholic and non-Catholic -- have to the Vatican and the papacy are much more nuanced and complicated than generally depicted. It's been pointed out that the politics of the new pope, Pope Francis, don't map neatly onto US divisions and US concerns. There's a lot confusion about what this or that signal "means," and who wins here, who loses. What's maybe more useful and more interesting, though, is to think about the ambivalences: how traditionalist Catholics, who are very authoritarian in inclination, are upset about Pope Francis; how progressive Catholics are conflicted or oppositional, both excited and dismayed by things Cardinal Bergoglio has and has not done; how the media cares very much and yet makes basic mistakes; how political conservatives are pro-papacy and treat the papacy as a defense against progressivism, and yet are uncomfortable with popes' critiques of capitalism, including Francis' participation in a statement condemning "the negative consequences of globalization and the tyranny of markets." Add to that the lapsed Catholics and ex-Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox and Episcopalians and Lutherans, those who think the papacy is the antichrist and evangelicals who talk of the pope as the leader of "global Christianity," plus the spiritual-but-not-religious who sometimes see the pope as spiritual, sometimes as religious, plus the non-religious who are nonetheless watching when the white smoke ascends from the Sistine Chapel.

There is a way in which it is true that "we" have a pope, but it involves a lot of conflicted feelings.

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Habemusnt papam

A joke: The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded. Indian warriors are on all sides and there's no way out. The Lone Ranger is panicking. He looks to Tonto and says, "what do we do know?"

Tonto says, "what do you mean 'we,' kemosabe?"

Anyway, they're saying "we" have a new pope.

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'Free exercise' of religion & the covering up of child sexual abuse

The "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment has been used for lots of things. In a lot of different ways.

It's been understood by the Supreme Court to mean that those fired for their religion still have a right to unemployment benefits, and to mean that religious institutions have the right to define "minister" any way they want, and to fire those so designated for any reason. It has been applied to protect the rights of those who sacrifice animals, and those who are required by their faith to distribute literature. The idea that government can't rightly pass a law prohibiting the free exercise of religion has been successfully used to defend those who won't salute the American flag, those who won't send their children to public schools, those who use controlled substances in their worship, etc., etc., etc.

Now Sovereign Grace Ministries, an association of New Calvinist churches led by C.J. Mahaney, are arguing that "free exercise" also means churches can't be taken to court on charges of covering up sexual abuse.

The churches, in an official press release, argue:

SGM leaders provided biblical and spiritual direction to those who requested this guidance. This care was sought confidentially, as is a right under the First Amendment. We are saddened that lawyers are now, in essence, seeking to violate those rights by asking judges and juries, years after such pastoral assistance was sought, to dictate what sort of biblical counsel they think should have been provided. SGM believes that allowing courts to second guess pastoral guidance would represent a blow to the First Amendment, that would hinder, not help, families seeking spiritual direction among other resources in dealing with the trauma related to any sin including child sexual abuse.

On these grounds, the church is seeking to have lawsuits alleging leaders protected child predators and covered-up child sexual abuse dismissed, the Associated Press reports.

According to the lawsuit, the "biblical and spiritual direction" that was offered to help families "dealing with the trauma related to ... child sexual abuse" involved a lot of covering up evidence that crimes occurred.

Sovereign Grace Ministries is accused of forcing abused children to forgive their abusers.

They are accused of disciplining those who wanted to tell legal authorities about the abuse.

And more.

According to the suit, which was filed on behalf of eight who were once children in the church:

The Church directed members to unquestioningly 'obey' the Church in all matters, including methods of parenting, place of residence and employment .... Between 1987 and the present, the Church repeatedly confronted occasions of sexual predation of children was occurring under the Church's auspices. The Church failed to alert law enforcement authorities, and failed to take any steps whatsoever to protect the children from sexual predation. Instead, the Church taught members to fear and distrust all secular authorities, and expressly directed members not to contact law enforcement to report sexual assaults. This practice has not stopped, as is evidenced by teachings as communications as recent as August 2011. On those occasions when the Church was not successful in persuading the parents of the victim to refrain from contacting law enforcement, the Church interfered with the administration of justice by tipping off the sexual predators that they had been reported to law enforcement. The Church provided sexual predators with free legal advice and counsel on how to evade accountability, and repeatedly worked with sexual predators to mislead law enforcement. The Church was willing to, and did, make false statements to law enforcement officials and in courts of law in its efforts to protect sexual predators.

The lawyers representing the people claiming they were abused and that church leaders knew about it and didn't report it are making a fairly straightforward case that being a minister does not relieve one of all legal responsibilities. On-going crimes have to be reported. People being harmed have to be protected. Dissembling on behalf of a pedophile isn't protected by the First Amendment or any amendment, and isn't a right recognized by the United States Constitution.

As the co-council explained in an interview:

You cannot participate in wrong doing regardless of your status as a pastor. They don't have the right to put people into harm's way. And they don't have the right to step in the middle and obstruct justice. So there are duties imposed by law that when you know that you have somebody who is harming people, you are not allowed to let that person keep harming people.

Sovereign Grace Ministries' lawyers, on the other hand, is making the case that "Maryland courts can’t get involved in the internal affairs of church business." They filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds on Monday. They are of course also making the argument that they are not guilty of the cover-ups of which they've been accused, and have made multiple statements about the high priority they place on the protection of children against sexual assaults. The first legal line of defense they church is using though, is the argument that even if they did cover up sexual abuse of children, the courts do not have the right to "second guess" that pastoral care.

The argument is that religious institutions are -- or ought to be -- autonomous and self-governing, and courts have no right to interfere with religious groups' internal affairs. (Arguments against "second guessing" have also been used in extra-legal contexts to quell or at least quiet critiques. See Rachel Heald Evans' piece, "How [Not] to Respond to Abuse Allegations"). According to the Associated Press, this legal argument has been defended by some legal scholars and a number of judges. Courts in the states Utah, Wisconsin, and Missouri have said the First Amendment does protect religious institutions from intruding courts.

Other experts disagree with that position. One law professor, for example, told Christianity Today that "the First Amendment is not—and shouldn't be—a defense against child abuse." Even in the cases of clergy-penitent privilege, where the law doesn't require that crimes be reported, that legal protection does not normally extend to cases of child sexual abuse.

Sovereign Grace Ministries is not the first to make this case. They're following the legal strategy laid out by the Catholic Church. In Rhode Island, a decade ago, the Diocese of Providence argued that it had a First Amendment right not to turn over documents allegedly pertaining to its own cover-up of child sexual abuse. The argument worked for more than nine years, but was then rejected by the court.

The judge in that case ruled:

By no elastic stretch of the most fertile imagination can one rationally conclude that such information or any such communication deserves or merits confidentiality as expressions of religious freedom.

The church subsequently settled the suit for $13.5 million.

The next hearing in the case against Sovereign Grace Ministries is scheduled for March 8.

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Pope speaks on Dorothy Day

In his Ash Wednesday talk, a few days after his resignation, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

In November, the U.S. bishops voted unanimously to move forward with the canonization process that would recognize Day as a saint. Day is most often know for her social justice efforts, her activism, and her political radicalism. On Wednesday, though, the pope emphasized a different aspect of Day's biography:

The ability to oppose the ideological blandishments of her time to choose the search for truth and open herself up to the discovery of faith is evidenced by another woman of our time, the American Dorothy Day. In her autobiography, she confesses openly to having given in to the temptation that everything could be solved with politics, adhering to the Marxist proposal: 'I wanted to be with the protesters, go to jail, write, influence others and leave my dreams to the world. How much ambition and how much searching for myself in all this!' The journey towards faith in such a secularized environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts nonetheless, as she points out: 'It is certain that I felt the need to go to church more often, to kneel, to bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious of praying. But I went, I slipped into the atmosphere of prayer ....' God guided her to a conscious adherence to the Church, in a lifetime spent dedicated to the underprivileged.

In our time there are no few conversions understood as the return of those who, after a Christian education, perhaps a superficial one, moved away from the faith for years and then rediscovered Christ and his Gospel.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, likewise describing Day's life as a turning-away from the secular, has called her "a saint for our times."

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American evangelicals ♥ Pope Benedict XVI

One of the really fascinating stories of American evangelicalism in the 20th century is how evangelical attitudes towards Catholicism completely changed. In 1926, one of America's leading fundamentalist pastors, J. Frank Norris, attacked Catholicism and warned American evangelicals not to trust them, with sermons and articles with titles like "The Conspiracy of Rum and Romanism to Rule this Government."

Such attitudes persisted even into the 1960s. But things have changed since then. As Religion News Service notes, American evangelical leaders have responded to Pope Benedict XVI's announcement of his resignation by praising the man, and saying how much they will miss him.

Daniel Burke writes:

Just a generation or two ago, such lavish praise might have been unthinkable. During the early 1960s, evangelist Billy Graham — sometimes dubbed the Protestant pope — took heat for inviting Catholics to join his revivals. But after the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), denominational barriers fell and ecumenism prospered.  

Meanwhile, evangelicals developed an appreciation for Catholic culture, and Catholics found ready evangelical allies in the battles against secularism, abortion and gay rights.  

'One of the challenges of evangelical Protestantism as it became a political force was to find a vocabulary to talk about the role of Christian faith in a diverse, pluralistic society like the United States,' said R.R. Reno, executive editor of First Things, an interreligious journal. 'By and large, they turned to Catholicism.'

The other major factor in this cultural shift -- besides Roe v. Wade, which at first was considered just a Catholic issue that evangelicals shouldn't particularly care about -- was the Cold War, and the Catholic Church's opposition to communism.

The American religious historian Barry Hankins has written about the change in the "marketplace of ideas" that brought evangelicals and Catholics together.

Of course, there are still those out there like William Tapley, who talks about the papacy in terms of the antichrist and assorted end times prophecies. That's just an extreme fringe, though. The days of Norris-style warnings about Catholicism has passed.

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The North American papabiles

There are only a few North American names floating around in the speculation about the possible next pope, following the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on Monday. The chances that the next leader of the Roman Catholic Church will be from North America are exceedingly slim. The names that come up in this game of speculation, though, say something about the landscape, about the shape and tendencies and dispositions of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and Canada, in relationship to the Vatican.

There's little point in speculation, except as a game, but the speculation nevertheless is interesting for what it reveals about the leadership of the Catholic church. It's interesting, for that reason, to look at the three top North American names on the odd-maker's list of papabile cardinals: Marc Ouellet, previously of Quebec, Timothy Dolan, of New York, and Raymond Burke, previously of St. Louis.

There are some differences in style, temperament, and the focuses of their careers, but also some marked similarities, especially with regards to opposition to "secularism" and debates over the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.

The odds on Marc Ouellet becoming the next pope are currently at 7 to 2. That's down a bit from the days before Benedict's announcement, when they were 5 to 2, but still very, very high. Cardinal Ouellet  is actually the very best bet for pope according to those setting the odds, and Vaticanologists do consider him to be a real candidate, though not by any means a sure thing.

In fact, Ouellet himself is on record as  saying it "would be a nightmare" to be made pope, and it's possible that he could decline the papacy.

Ouellet, born in 1944, was elevated to the cardinate in 2003 by Pope John Paul II. He speaks five languages, and has good connections to Latin American cardinals, as well as Italians, who make up about 25 percent of the college of cardinals, and could conceivably draw solid support from both groups when the cardinals gather.

Ouellet's career has been as an academic. He has a doctorate in dogmatic theology, and has been a professor and rector at Catholic seminaries. He is associated with federation of theological journals named Communio, as was Hans Urs von Batlhasar and Pope Benedict XVI.

Looking through his speeches, homilies and public statements, it becomes apparent that the rapid secularization of Quebec in "Quiet Revolution" in the 1960s was significant in his intellectual formation. Ouellet has said, in his public statements, that the first mission of the leaders of the Catholic Church in the 21st century must be to respond to this secularization.

In 2001, he gave a very strong statement about what he looks for in leaders of the church. He said:

Today, especially in the context of our secularized societies, we need bishops who are the first evangelizers, and not mere administrators of dioceses, who are capable of proclaiming the Gospel, who are not only theologically faithful to the magisterium and the pope but are also capable of expounding and, if need be, of defending the faith publicly.

In his time as a primate of Canada, this issue of secularization came up in a conflict over how religion was to be taught in schools. The Supreme Court ruled that religion could only be taught in schools if it was taught neutrally, a decision that Ouellet strongly disagreed with. He argued that the so-called neutrality was actually a "dictatorship of relativism" that was "applied beginning in elementary school."

Ouellet thought that this apparent culture war skirmish was indicative of the "profound crisis shaking the foundations of European culture." He said: "A new raison d'etat imposes its law and tries to relegate the Christian roots of Europe to a secondary plane. It would seem that, in the name of secularism, the Bible must be relativised, to be dissolved in a religious pluralism and disappear as a normative cultural reference."

Ouellet said that many of the teachers in Quebec elementary schools had a "Marxist" approach, which was being masked as neutral.

This wasn't just a matter of clashing worldviews or a debate about the possibility of ideological neutrality in education, though. Ouellet held that Quebec was betraying its religious tradition with this secularization, and that the results were catastrophic. This was the theme of his first homily as archbishop of Quebec City:

Quebec languishes far from the values that gave strength and glory to its forefathers. Its will of cultural survival dramatically clashes with a very low birth rate and catastrophic youth suicides. These incomprehensible suicides tear us to pieces, and alarm us about the family situations and about the values that should give sense to their lives. Are these not the signs of the most serious loss that is striking Quebec society: the forgetfulness of its spiritual heritage, the forgetting of its martyrs and saints? But how much more should we see to the teaching of the virtues and spiritual attitudes that form the soul and the destiny of the people!

Ouellet has expressed concern that the same forces that are work in schools and in undermining European societies have also been felt within the church. Church leaders don't only need to speak the gospel to the secular world, they also need to save the church from that secularism. This is a concern, especially, in how the Second Vatican Council has been interpreted by many.

Ouellet said: "After the council, the sense of mission was replaced by the idea of dialogue. That we should dialogue with other faiths and not attempt to bring them the Gospels, to convert. Since then, relativism has been developing more broadly.”

This is not to say, however, that Ouellet simply dismisses dialogue, or is always strident in his speech, a committed cultural warrior. In one very public act as cardinal, he apologized for Catholic Church's historic failings, specifically towards women, homosexuals and minorities. Last year, in a homily in Ireland, he apologized for the church to the victims of sexual abuse by clerics. He called it a "great shame and enormous scandal," and a "sin against which Jesus himself lashed out."

On the other hand, there were previous instances where it was reported that Ouellet refused to apologize, saying the church was not yet ready for that step.

My sense, though, is that in both the cases where Ouellet engages and dialogue and those in which he opposes it come out of a consistent theological position that can be seen in his interpretation of Vatican II.

In a theological reflection on the council, he said, "Fifty years after the opening of the Second Vatican Council, we have seen that its chief inspiration was the ecclesiology of communion, which a right interpretation of the Council gradually identified and emphasized."

Ouellet said that in the "ecclesiology of communion," the church itself becomes a sacrament, which is to say that it has a very important role in the world, much of which has been secularized, a role as the carrier of grace. He said:

The Church thus becomes a sacrament [...]. As 'sign,'  she is the bearer of a mysterious divine reality that no image or analogy of this world will adequately express. As 'instrument,' she works efficaciously for the salvation of the world through her union with Christ, who associates her to his unique priesthood as his Body and Bride. The Church’s mission thus coincides with the sacramental form of the love that reveals God at work in the world, in an intimate synergy with the witnesses of the New Covenant.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, a conservative American Catholic who writes for National Review, calls Ouellet "brilliant and holy." Considering his chances to become the next pope, she notes: "He’s got a steady hand and is widely respected — and his resemblance to John Paul II in certain — even physical — ways is uncanny."

If Lopez likes any North American leader of the Catholic Church more than Ouellet, it's probably Timothy Dolan, whose chances, as of Benedict's resignation, were set at 25 to 1, though they've now dropped to 40 to 1.

According to Lopez, Dolan, born in 1950, would be a very good choice because "Everyone knows Cardinal Dolan and his media acumen and warm and pastoral heart."

Dolan has only been a cardinal for a year, but already he's the face of American Catholicism. Which means he's  charismatic, camera-ready and conservative.

He's been called a "back slapper," and a professional extrovert who loves to talk sports.

A lot of attention has been paid to Dolan's temperament and style. It can be seen as his greatest strength and weakness, in being considered for pope. Dolan was elevated to the cardinate by Benedict XVI, who, it has been said, tended to look for prelates with a certain sort of style. Benedict wanted "leaders who are basically conservative in both their politics and their theology, but also upbeat, pastoral figures given to dialogue," those who were part of the "center-right" of the American Catholic hierarchy. That means,

Bishops who are temperamentally conservative but who prefer to set a tone rather than impose penalties, who give pride of place to pro-life issues but also devote energy to other social justice concerns, who are often more invested in concrete pastoral concerns rather than political battles, and who are willing to work within the bishops’ conference as an expression of collegial relationships with other bishops.

This has been called "affirmative orthodoxy." The description suits Dolan very well.

His interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, for example, puts an emphasis on the church's "evangelical duty." He has said that Vatican II should be understood as a teaching that "refines the Church’s understanding of her evangelical duty, defining the entire Church as missionary, that all Christians, by reason of baptism, confirmation, and Eucharist, are evangelizers."

Dolan believes that, following Vatican II, because of the secularization of modern societies, evangelism is the mission of the church, "central to the life of every local church, to every believer."

This has led him to be very outspoken, politically. He has regularly made the news for his critiques of Barak Obama. He spoke out to oppose Obama's invitation to speak at Notre Dame, for example, and has been on the forefront of opposition to the Obamacare requirement that employers, including Catholic hospitals and charities, provide coverage of contraception in their employees' insurance plan.

Sometimes, his opposition has not been temperate. On one popular FOX News show, Dolan said the Obama administration was a "force trying to caricature" Catholic bishops as "bullies," and warned of a new religion "called secularism," that wanted to "duct tape" the mouths of religious people when they entered the public square.

The cardinal said that secularists, and specifically the president, were trying to erect a "Berlin wall" between church and state.

Dolan has, at other times, spoken out about what he perceives to be a pervasive anti-Catholic bias that manifests in political opposition to the American bishops. In an interview with the Associated Press, he  said, "Periodically, we Catholics have to stand up and say, 'Enough. The church as a whole still calls out to what is noble in us."

In that same interview, however, he also reached out to alienated Catholics, saying, "Please come back. We miss you. We're sorry if we hurt you. We'll listen to you. It's not the same without you."

He has also been vocal about the abuse scandals that have rocked the church, and alienated many of those Catholics he's now saying he wants back in the church. Dolan has said he is "haunted" by the fact that clerics routinely sexually abused children with impunity, and said"it is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation." He acknowledged that the church cannot yet put the scandal behind her. In 2009, he said: "We're nowhere near to admitting that, thanks be to God, we've got this behind us .... And we should be glad that we can't say that. Because it's the kind of thing that is necessitating the vigilance ... to see that it never happens again."

Some prominent conservative Catholics have said the cause of the abuse was the liberal theology creeping into the church, blaming the factions they have consistently opposed. Dolan, however, has identified the root cause of the scandal as the church's penchant for secrecy. He said, ''Mistakes were made in the past because it was a little closed, a little clandestine, and we've got to be more open, more transparent.''

Dolan has not been entirely separate from the scandal, though. When he was an archbishop, in Milwaukee, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to priests who'd been abusing children, a severance package of sorts to convince them to not fight laicization. Dolan denied doing this, but subsequent investigation showed he was involved in the pay-outs. The one time he mentioned this money, he referred to one such payment as an "act of charity" when pressed by a reporter.

Dolan's response to the abuse scandals has not defined him, though, as much as his personality and his visibility has. In the last few days, he's been on numerous media outlets discussing Benedict's resignation. He wrote about the pope's empty chair in a column in the New York Daily News in a way that could only be described as "pastoral."

As the Religious News Service notes, "Dolan’s extraordinary visibility and popularity are being cited as factors that could make him the first American with a realistic shot at being elected pope when the College of Cardinals gathers in March," but,

The same everyman exuberance that endears him to the hoi polloi can strike the stodgier College of Cardinals as sophomoric. Asked about his sense of humor, Benedict once said: 'I'm not a man who constantly thinks up jokes.' Compare that to Dolan on '60 Minutes' about arriving in New York: 'They asked me when I got here, 'Are you Cardinals, Mets, Brewers, or Yankees?' And I said, 'When it comes to baseball, I think I can be pro-choice.'

As Dolan himself noted, his papacy is "highly improbable," but it's significant that more than a little attention has been given to that outside chance.

The third cardinal to make the bookies' list of North American papabiles is said to have the same odds as Dolan, but his chances seem to have gotten little to no public attention. Raymond Leo Burke's odds of become pope are also currently at 40 to 1, having dropped from a slightly higher but still improbable 33 to 1 a few days ago.

It's not clear why Burke, born in 1948, the former St. Louis cardinal who heads the Vatican's supreme court, should be less talked about than Dolan in this context, except that he's less gregarious and not as well known to Catholics in the pews (though more well known in the Vatican).

Burke's most public moments have come from his denunciations of pro-choice Catholic politicians. He has regularly made very public pronouncements that Catholic politicians who are pro-choice should be denied communion. He spoke out against John Kerry in 2004, and said Ted Kennedy should be denied a church funeral when Kennedy died in 2009.

His position on this is not without support from conservative Catholics, though there's far from universal agreement on this, even among bishops who would generally ally with Burke on political issues.

The cardinal has gone further, though, and made the very unusual and controversial argument that bishops who do serve the Eucharist to pro-choice politicians should be removed, a statement for his he later apologized.

He has also said that Catholics who voted for pro-choice politicians were committing a mortal sin, a statement which he softened in a clarification, but then, in another context, seemed to reiteration just as strongly.

In 2009, he made the argument this way:

If a Catholic knowingly and deliberately votes for a person who is in favor of the most grievous violations of the natural moral law, then he has formally cooperated in a grave evil and must confess his serious sin. Since President Obama clearly announced, during the election campaign, his anti-life and anti-family agenda, a Catholic who knew his agenda regarding, for example, procured abortion, embryonic-stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, could not have voted for him with a clear conscience.

Burke has also attracted media attention when he urged that similarly absolutist lines be drawn when people who were associated with Catholic institutions made or were known to have made pro-choice statements. He argued for the discipline of a basketball coach at St. Louis Univeristy, a Catholic school, who made pro-choice statements, and opposed a fundraiser for a Catholic hospital that featured singer Sheryl Crow for the same reason.

According to Burke, he's only insisting that the church remain consistent in its witness. Regarding Crow's performance, for example, he said that it mattered that she was pro-choice even though she wasn't herself Catholic, because, "A Catholic institution featuring a performer who promotes moral evil gives the impression that the church is somehow inconsistent in its teaching."

Though many in the American Catholic hierarchy agree with Burke about these issues of moral evil and the real threat of modern secularization, Burke's tone is significantly harsher. He appears to wholeheartedly embrace the idea of a culture war, warning that Catholicism may soon be illegal, Catholic teaching will likely be outlawed, and that the struggle with secularism is a struggle to the death: "secularism will in fact predominate, and it will destroy us."

If you examine his arguments about denying pro-choice Catholics communion, however, it has less to do with secularism, per se, than with his interpretation of canon law. In fact, though Burke is clearly concerned about American politics and public life, his greater concern is "antinomianism," disregard for the law, within the church itself.

As a canon law expert, he holds that disregard for church law and "indifference toward church discipline" are at the root of the church's problems.

In a speech he gave this past summer, Burke described how he came to the realization of the depth of the problem of this antinomianism. He said:

After I began my studies of Canon Law in September of 1980, I soon learned how much the Church’s discipline was disdained by her priests, in general. When I answered the question of a brother priest regarding my area of study, the fairly consistently reaction was expressed in words like these: 'I thought that the Church had done away with that,' and 'What a waste of your time.' The usual reaction, in fact, reflected a general attitude in the Church toward her canonical discipline, an attitude inspired by the hermeneutic of discontinuity, by that sense that 'a day of sunlight' had arrived in the Church, in contrast to the darkness of what had gone before. Institutes of the Church’s law, which, in her wisdom, she had developed down the Christian centuries, were set aside without consideration of their organic relationship to the life of the Church or of the chaos which would necessarily result from their neglect or abandonment.

The "hermeneutic of discontinuity," in Burke's view, undercuts the church's claims of truth, severely damaging its witness. He believes that this idea that the church can change and does and should change is responsible for the "betrayal" of the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council in the United States. After reflecting on his experience in the 1980s, he continued:

The 'hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,' which has tried to highjack the renewal mandated by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, is marked by a pervasively antinomian culture, epitomized by the Paris student riots of 1968, and has had a particularly devastating effect on the Church’s discipline. It is profoundly sad to note, for instance, how the failure of knowledge and application of the canon law, which was indeed still in force, contributed significantly to the scandal of the sexual abuse of minors by the clergy in our some parts of the world.

In some cases, Burke seems to argue that so-called "reforms" were the cause of the sexual abuse and cover-up, though, more often, as above, he says only that it was a significant contributing factor.

Burke himself, it should be noted, has been accused of participating in cover-up of sexual abuse by priests.

Burke's own efforts have, for the most part, been aimed at a restoration restoration of the "disciplinary tradition of the church and respect of the law in the church."

As part of that restoration, he has advocated the church bring back some elements of the Tridentine mass. He doesn't think that the mass should necessarily always be done in Latin, as some traditionalists maintain, but does believe that the current liturgy should be revised, with some of the older rites reintroduced. He also wants strict enforcement of the uniformity of liturgical services, so that they really are "catholic," and do not vary from region to region and parish to parish. He has called for an official crack-down on "liturgical abuses,"which he says destroy or seriously threaten Catholic faith. 

It's no accident that Burke was put in charge of reaching out to traditionalists who have left the church over developments they see as accommodations of modernity, most notably the Society of Saint Pius X.  A number of sustained efforts were made by Benedict XVI to bring the traditionalists back into the church, despite some controversy surrounding the traditionalists, and Burke led those efforts, being both sympathetic to the traditionalists' arguments and critical of their willingness to reject authority they disagreed with. 

The cardinal has been called Benedict's top U.S. advisor, and he has been seen as the hand behind the promotion of like-minded conservatives, such as Cardinal Charles Chaput and Archbishop Salvadore Cordileone, though it's not clear if there's any merit to those speculations. Likewise, some think Burke was the one instigating investigations into the Leadership Conferences of the Women Religious, who are alleged to promote "radical feminism" and teachings contrary to the churches.

Burke's life and ministry have not been solely concerned with canon law and church discipline, though. A major accomplishment of his career has been establishing the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe on 103 acres in La Crosse, Wisc. The shrine promotes "fully authentic Marian devotion," and is a place of pilgrimage, housing hundreds of saint's relics. Burke started this when he was a bishop, in Wisconsin, but has returned as an archbishop and as a cardinal.

There's only a very outside chance that Burke will emerge from the cardinal's conclave next month as the new pope. It's likely, though, that in his role as cardinal, he will want the new pope to be someone who can lead a restoration movement in the church, bringing her back to the disciplinary tradition.

Looking at Burke's life and work, and Dolan's and Ouellet's, helps very little with speculations about the next pope. That these are the names that come up in such speculation, though, says a lot about Catholicism in North America, today. These are the men who are perceived to be close to the Vatican and also connected to and actively leading the churches in America. There are some real differences, especially in personality, temperament, and in the subjects they've devoted their lives to studying. There are also some strong similarities. All three understand "secularism" to be a major threat, and are, in their ministry, committed to opposing and combating that secularism.

Further, all three of the American papabiles have made the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council a central part of their ministries, and their ministries are, in some sense, about putting the correct interpretation of the council into practice. The next pope may be the first who is post-conciliar, but he, along with the American hierarchy, will likely continue to be defined by the controversies and competing interpretations of Vatican II. 

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Catholics to bishops: never mind our souls

American Catholic bishops attempted to exert their influence on the electorate, but to little effect.

Looking at the Catholic vote the day after the election doesn't reveal any significant shifts or surprises, but the results do indicate the political impotency of a Catholic hierarchy that has become very strongly identified with politics.

The American bishops didn't appear to hesitate in picking political sides in this last election. That has not always been the case, but this time the church's hierarchy leaned heavily on Catholic parishioners, making strong pronouncements about the morality of voting one way or another, clearly indication how good Catholics should cast their ballots if they cared about their souls. Picking up issues such as abortion and mandated coverage of contraception, the church's leaders issued strongly worded statements that, ostensibly, left little room for differences of opinion among the faithful.

And yet they were ignored by significant portions of the church.

One poll in the final days of the campaign put Catholic support of Barack Obama's reelection at 52 percent. An exit poll widely cited had half of self-identified Catholics saying they'd voted for Obama, and only 48 percent saying they'd supported Mitt Romney.

The bishops were spurned by sizable portions of Catholic voters, nationally and locally.

In Illinois, for example, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki wrote that voting for candidates who supported the Democratic Party platform -- which, in contrast to the Republican platform, has planks that "explicitly endorse intrinsic evils" -- puts one's soul in danger. But many, many Illinois Catholics voters just didn't seem to care.

Paprocki's message:

"I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against, but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy."

Nearly half of the Catholic voters in Illinois disagreed with or disregarded the bishop's warning. The CNN exit poll shows that 48 percent of the state's Catholic voters cast their ballot for Obama on Tuesday.

This is true other places as well: The bishops simply do not have significant influence over their supposed flocks.

In Colorado, some lay Catholics paid for a full-page newspaper ad carrying the political message of Denver's Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila. Aquila urged Catholics to do their "moral duty" in opposing Obama's health care plan, and the Heath and Human Services mandate that insurance coverage, including that offered by Catholic charities, include coverage of contraceptives.

Colorado opted to re-elect the president by about 110,000 votes, though, and many of those were the state's more than 700,000 Catholics.

There is some minor variation from state to state in the break-down of the Catholic vote, but it doesn't seem to have anything in particular to do with the efforts of statements or activism of the region's respective bishops.

In the five states with the largest percentage of Catholics, Obama actually won, and CNN's exit polls show that the Catholic voters were split between the parties:

• In Rhode Island, 59 percent of the population is Catholic, and Obama won by 29 percentage points.
• In Massachusetts, where 43 percent of the population is Catholic, only 21 percent of voters identify as conservative, and more than a quarter of those calling themselves conservative reported they voted for Obama.
• In New Jersey, 41 percent of the population is Catholic, and 45 percent of Catholics voters said they voted for Obama. The number of Catholics in New Jersey is about six times the number of votes that made up Obama's margin of victory.
• In Connecticut, 36.6 percent of the population is Catholic, and 49 percent of Catholic voters cast their ballots for Obama. The state went for the Democrats by 17 percent.
• In New York, where 37 percent of the population is Catholic, 47 percent of Catholic voters went for Obama. 

The 47 percent of New York Catholics who voted for Obama presumably did not include Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who went on television in the Spring to describe Obama's policies as "dramatic, radical intrusion of a government bureaucracy into the internal life of the church," and an attempt to silence people of faith, saying: "I think the public square is impoverished when people might be coerced to put a piece of duct tape over their mouth keeping them from bringing their deepest held convictions to the conversation."

And, presumably, the 47 percent of New York Catholics who voted for the president don't feel that they've been violently gagged by the policies of the man they voted for.

There will likely be arguments that those Catholics who didn't vote in accordance with the wishes of the hierarchy are, in some way, not really Catholic. It is true that Catholics who attend weekly mass -- the one measure of religiosity in election polls -- were more likely to vote for Romney. FOX's exit poll shows 57 percent of weekly mass-goers voted Republican, nationally. Of those who attend less than once per week, 57 percent voted for Obama.

The much more sharp division, though, seems to be between white Catholics and non-white Catholics, not the devout and the irregular church-goers.

According to a Pew poll done in October, 71 percent of Latino Catholics identified as Democrats, and 73 percent were planning on voting for Obama. They were nearly 20 percent more likely to support Obama than non-Latino Catholics. That overwhelming support didn't disappear when one measured for religiosity, either: among Latinos who attended mass weekly, more than 60 percent said they would vote for Obama. Where the so-called "God gap" is in effect with whites, it seems minimal at best with Latinos.

This support came despite what they heard in church when they were there every week, too, further demonstrating the church's lack of authority on these matters. Nearly one third of the church-going Latinos told pollsters they had heard sermons on candidates and elections, and more than half said they'd heard priests speak from the pulpit about abortion. It's not that they're not paying attention when, for example, a church includes a weekly prayer that "the federal government will be restored to its founding principles and allow religious liberty," it's just that they disagree.

Latino Catholics express a clear political preference, a preference which is not represented in their church's leadership.

As Eduardo Peñalver wrote in Common Weal today,

"the hierarchy finds itself identified more closely than ever with a single party in the United States, a party that is on the wrong side of inexorable demographic change. The result will be diminished influence for the Church in American politics and greater hostility towards requests for accommodation from the Democrats in power."

This divide isn't new, actually, as the numbers in this election more or less match those of the last few presidential races. Increasingly, though, the clash within the Catholic church is aggravated, as "Catholic leaders and Catholic voters can’t agree on what they think these Catholic teachings actually mean. Nor can they agree on how, or whether, those teachings might apply to the public square," as exemplified, quite publicly, in the vice presidential debate.

The election results raise very real questions about what it even means to talk about a "Catholic vote," given these divisions, and it undercuts the claims of conservatives who want to speak unilaterally about what "the church" supports or doesn't. It also especially demonstrates the hierarchy of the American Catholic church, try as they might, don't carry that much weight when it comes to the country's voting Catholics. 

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Biden v. Ryan on Catholicism & abortion

The vice presidential candidates -- both Catholic -- answer the question of "what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion."

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Partial & elusive truths: The aestheic values of Ron Hansen's 'Christian fiction'

Ron Hansen is a Christian fiction writer. Except, with him, the sense of "Christian fiction writer" is that he's a Christian who writes fiction and a writer who writes fiction that's informed by and shaped by his faith, not that he belongs to the genres or markets generally referred to by the term.

He has, perhaps to make that exactly that distinction, criticized the genres of Christian fiction with criticisms that are fairly broad, fairly sweeping. Hansen has said he dislikes Christian fiction because it "is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing."

In another context, Hansen has expanded that critique, and challenged, even, the Christianness of Christian fiction. In A Stay Against Confusion, he writes: 

"So-called Christian fiction is often in fact pallid allegory, or a form of sermonizing, or is a reduction into formula, providing first-century, Pauline solutions to oversimplified problems, sometimes yielding to a Manichean dualism wherein good and evil are plainly at war, or offering as Christianity conservative politics. We cannot call a fiction Christian just because there is no irreligion in it, no skepticism, nothing to cause offense."

Whether or not that's a fair critique of Christian fiction, it does get at the sense of the aesthetic expression of Christianity that Hansen values.

Or rather, doesn't value: Pallid allegory, sermonizing, formula and over-simplification are the negative terms. On the other side, the positive terms of his specifically Catholic aesthetic measures are more ambiguous. Not that he doesn't or hasn't articulated them, but that they're still pretty vague, even articulated, and it's just not really clear what these values would mean in the context of a novel -- or how they work out in the context of his novels.

In a PBS segment, Hansen talks about how attending mass is part of his writing process and he views his fiction as sacramental, in a certain sense, in that "It's a witness to what God is doing in the world."

Speaking specifically of how one of his better known works, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is a "witness," in this way, he says, "I wanted to have this sense of, how do you, once you've done that, how do you redeem yourself?" The PBS interviewer notes that there are allusions in the work to the Biblical story of Cain and Able, implying the work is religious at least in that sense, but asks, "Does Bob Ford really find redemption?"

Hansen says, "He doesn't, no."

That's true -- he doesn't. And it's exactly this ambiguity that undercuts the clearly articulated aesthetic of fiction that's Christian that Hansen holds.

The Assassination is a good book, but, as literature, is very open-ended, short through with ambiguities, and often rather uncertain, actually, about the possibility of redemption in human history.

Hansen holds that "Fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons." In The Assassination, though, who the models are and what they show is not at all clear.

It's not clear, for example, why Ford killed James, what his motivation was.

Ford tells himself and those around him a continually shifting set of self-justifying stories. In one late scene, the aging Ford says he killed James because he had to, because James was going to kill him. Then adds that also there was the reward money, that that was the reason. Then adds that he "thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery" and he thought he'd be hailed as a hero for killing James, and that that was why he did, because he wanted to be famous. "I thought they would congratulate me," he says, "and I'd get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn't see how it would look to people." The reader, at the end of this, does not really know why Ford killed James, nor does it seem that Ford knows either.

If anything, the text endorses the idea that the human heart is mysterious, most especially to itself.

There's good Catholic doctrine backing up that idea, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions about where, exactly, Ford went wrong. It would seem he's to be the example of immorality, of what not to do, but what he does is conflicted and confused. He idolizes James, and that seems to be the error, but then he reverses course and goes after the outlaw like an iconoclast with a hammer. And that seems to be error too. In some parts of the story he is self-aggrandizing. In others, he supplicates and grovels. He uses violence. He eschews violence. He longs for glory. He accepts his lot. He accepts abuse. He resists abuse. He snivels and whines that the universe is just slated against him, and then attempts actually to take control of his life and his fate, and both courses of action, like everything Ford does in this story, take him further and further from redemption.

The character is prone to self-delusions, and the story, told in the third person, never offers the sort of omniscient account of the assassin's real reasons that a reader could latch onto. Even at the moment it seems like the reader is being offered a good explanation, a way clear of Ford's confusion, it's then framed as, most essentially, the way Ford is justifying himself. Hansen writes, for example, that Ford

"was ashamed of his persiflage, his boasting, his pretensions, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case: that he truly regretted killing Jesse, that he missed the man as much as anybody and wished his murder hadn't been necessary."

What starts out as Ford's seeming moment of self realization, and possibly a kind of confession and moment of redemption, turns out to be only Ford offering another insufficient account of things. The moment of clarity turns out to be just another set of self-justifying delusions, more of the same shifting, shuffling confusion.

The same non-conclusion.Which, in the work, is presented as the better interpretation. It's contrasted with the cheap, false stories Americans told themselves about Ford, where

"Everything was exaggerated and magnified -- if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course the consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and stinging judgement of history -- even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning."

The same confusion is at work with the other characters. James is no less conflicted. No less confused a model or more a witness to anything clear.

This is not to criticize the ambiguity of the morality and immorality modeled by Ford. It's the character's confusion and self-delusion and subverted realizations and general messed-up-ness that make this book good.

Bob Ford is, here, human.

He's human precisely in the way that those promoting and making claims for literature would want a literary character to be. He is, that is say, human in a way that demonstrates important aspects of what it means to be human, that can show or teach readers "what it's like to be human." He has real psychological depth. It's these literary qualities of the character that make him a really terrible model for morality, though.

Because it's all so ambiguous.

In The Assassination, this is depicted again and again by contrast, as the story Hansen is telling references or repeats other stories of the era about the same situation and subject. The narrative without a clear moral or model for morality contains numerous representations of narratives with unambiguous points. These other stories are always clear. They have morals. They have pointed lessons, and the sermonizing Hansen will criticize as not really Christian in the aesthetic sense he wants to use that word, but also in the sense he'll make use of when wanting to argue for the right way for fiction to be Christian, as a "witness" and "model." Those stories that take James and Ford as models for morality, though, are consistently contrasted to the story Hansen is telling, which is about humans and the confusions of human life, priveledging complexity over the neatness of allegory. 

Hansen, one could even argue, takes the authorial position in this work as the antagonist, the opponent of the historical author who heroized Jesse James, John Newman Edwards.

Edwards was an avowed and unreconstructed Confederate who wrote up James as a folk hero, a savior and avenger of Southern whites, a model for moral resistance to the regime that freed slaves, undercut the "birthright" of white privilege, and supported the corporate interests of railroads and the burgeoning of capitalism over and against the agrarian and yeoman ideals of late fuedalism. In Hansen's account, Edwards is willfully blind to the complexities of humans and history, always casting his characters in terms of models and witnesses. Edwards writes, after the assassination, that James' only real transgression was that he "refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters." Edwards, in Hansen's novel, writes that "such a cry of horror and indignation" at the way James died "is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself."

In all this, Edwards is the prime example of the aesthetic of Christian fiction Hansen opposes, with weak and easy allegories and wrought-up sermons supplanting story. He is, however, also an example of the sort of aesthetic Hansen says he supports: Edwards is very interested in exactly the kind of "show[ing] you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life" that Hansen, though he affirms this, never really gets around to in The Assassination.

His aesthetic, in practice, in this novel, whether one considers it "Christian" or not, is different from the positive values he articulates to PBS and in essays on how fiction can be sacramental. If his work works as a witness, it's not a very clear one. If characters are supposed models from which to take lessons, Hansen failed.

It's possible, though, to put aside what he says he thinks he likes, and detect a different set of aesthetic values in The Assassination. Hansen values complexity and ambiguity. He prefers his themes oblique. He wants to render the humanness of characters, their confusions and self-contraditions, their intermingled wheat and tares. He represents them as, most essentially, born concupiscent and morally deformed and also bearing within themselves, at the same time, the divine. He values showing humans as creatures mystified by themselves, and the world as a place also thus mystified. History, for him, is best presented as a stage where humans act on their inveterate, incontrovertible belief in personal redemption and beatification -- redemption and beatification they do not easily find. 

Hansen will say, if you ask him, that fiction "helps us to know we believe," that it "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretations, seem all too secret, partial, and elusive."

In practice, though, in this book, his aesthetic seems rather to value the partial, the elusive, the truths that are not simple, so easy to turn into sermons. Whether that means his books, his aesthetic values and the fiction he writes, are more or less Christian than the genres that go by the name "Christian fiction" is probably a matter of personal tastes and definitions.

This is the alternative sense of "Christian fiction" one finds, though, in the worked-out aesthetic preferences of the faith Hansen has that shapes and informs his stories.

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'We must disagree with those prophets of gloom'

"In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former Councils everything was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty.

"We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand."

-- Pope John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church Rejoices), the opening speech of the Second Vatican Council, which began 50 years ago today.  

Pope John XXIII opens the Second Vatican Council

Vatican II documents
Vatican II hymnal
Georgetown University conference: Fifty Years after Vatican II
Pope Benedict XVI remembers the council, fifty years later
Pope Benedict XVI (mis)remembers the council, fifty years later
American Catholics remembering and reflecting on Vatican II
A 1962 editorial in a Catholic magazine on the eve of the council: Can the Council Succeed?
Karl Rahner: Notes Towards a Theological Interpretation of Vatican II
BC Butler: The historical context of Vatican II
Giuseppet Alberigo: A Brief History of Vatican II
The History of Vatican II: The effects
Walter Kasper: The continuing challenges of the hermeneutics of Vatican II
Colleen McDannel: The Spirit of Vatican II
Vatican II is still in dispute
The council as "New-Modernist Rupture" 
Supplica, a document signed by 82 scholars calling for a review and reassessment of the council.

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Fighting w/ St. Francis

[Reposted from Oct. 4, 2012]

St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is today, is one of those once-powerful religious figures who've been totally domesticated. His radicalness, his weirdness, his challenge -- it's all smothered in quaint-saint gooeyness.*

The power's still there, of course, in potential, but Francis is made safe for the world (Catholic and Protestant, religious or not). We ensure he, the saint of the garden figurine, only ever works to affirm, always so supportive.

I am not saying, here, that it's other people who do this. I'm saying you do this, unless your first response to Francis is to want to punch him.

I'm saying I definitely do this.

I'm saying there's a covered-up part of St. Francis that we cover up that would make you and me go, what the hell...?

E.g.:

"When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: 'Father, it would be a great consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like to have your consent,' Francis put him off .... '[C]are not,' he said, 'for owning books and knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.' And when some weeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis said: 'After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary; and after you have got your breviary you will sit in you stall like a grand prelate, and will say to your brother, 'Hand me my breviary.' .... And thenceforward he denied all such requests."**

The only response I can summon is, what the ...?

The weirdness and uncomfortableness of saints like Francis can be rescued and resuscitated, same as it can with the Bible, a book you're not really reading if it's not messing you up. It's possible to de-sentimentalize saints so they are challenging and personally controversial, which is to say useful.

To do so would mean, though, that rather than easy adoration, the first response to St. Francis would be to feel appalled, threatened and offended. It would mean wanting to tell St. Francis he's wrong, wanting to disagree, wanting to fight.

I mean, seriously?, he denied the monk a psalter.


*TM.
**Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P.Sabatier (Paris, 1898), 10, 13. Quoted in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.

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The bewildering denseness of an archbishop

There's an insistent denseness to the American Catholic hierarchy that I don't understand. It's baffling.  

How is it that an archbishop can, one moment, be completely cavalier about how the church knowingly put children under the care and supervision of predators, and then, the next moment, earnestly insist on the church's concern for those who were abused?

Charles Chaput, the archbishop of Philadelphia, did exactly this in an interview last week, when he spoke with the National Catholic Reporter after a "tumultuous first year on the job."

Archbishop Charles Chaput

The published interview opens with a question about the Monsignor William Lynn, who was convicted of covering up sex abuse in the Philadelphia archdiocese. Lynn is the first-ever member of the Catholic hierarchy convicted for the cover-up of abuse. He was sentenced for three to six years.

The National Catholic Reporter asked if Lynn got a fair trial.

Chaput responded:

"People will draw their own conclusions. Lawyers in this community who watched the trial, and other objective observers in the courtroom, have raised questions about the fairness of the trial and its outcome.  I do want to say this: I don’t understand the penalty that was imposed on Monsignor Lynn, and it seems wrong."

In a follow-up, Chaput was asked how the monsignor, who was recently denied bail, is doing. The archbishop said:

"I think he’s doing well considering the circumstances. To me, he seemed peaceful. He was able to articulate what he’s going through from the perspective of a person of faith. Of course, he feels that his sentence was not appropriate for what he did, so he’s suffering under that burden. I think it was very important for Monsignor to know that he has the love and spiritual support of his brother priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and he knows he has the love and support of his family and many friends. By the way, you haven’t asked, but I need to stress this: I also very much want to be available to support victims of sexual abuse by any of our clergy. I’m very aware of their suffering and my responsibility to help them. They should never be overlooked or made to feel ignored."

The deep weirdness and self-contraction and total lack of self-awareness exhibited here completely confounds. How can a man, in the space of a single paragraph, assert that the he and the Catholic Church support and sympathize with someone who protected child predators and also assert that he's "very aware" of the suffering of the abused?

If the archbishop is curious as to why the victims of sexual abuse might have been made to feel ignored, he need look no further than his own statement.

Chaput apparently does not believe cover-up sex abuse is a serious enough offense to merit three to six years in prison, and is not appalled by the idea that the monsignor's "sentence was not appropriate for what he did."

To be clear, "what he did" was essentially guard the door while priests abused children.

Monsignor William J. Lynn

What he did was place men like Father Edward V. Avery,  Father John P. Schmeer, Father David C. Sicolil, Father John H. Mulholland, Father Thomas J. Wisniewski, Father Robert L. Brennan, Father Nicholas V. Cudemo, and many, many others, in the proximity of children, even though he knew there were credible charges they had routinely abused children. What he did was serve his church and his archbishop -- one of Chaput's predecessors -- by consistently covering up for pedophile priests, making concerns about scandal, exposure, and legal liability a priority over everything else.

The question for Chaput is, what don't you understand?

Lynn's defense, according to the New York Times, was that he was following the orders of his superiors.

Which is true.

And which is apparently not a principle Chaput is interested in repudiating.

As explained by Richard Sipe, a sociologist and psychotherapist who has specialized in the mental health problems of Catholic priests and professionally testified as an expert witness in more than 50 lawsuits against the church, for the church hierarchy:

"The only virtue is obedience ... You are not beholden to charity or truth or anything else. Everything can be sacrificed to obedience."

Perhaps it's not surprising that the archbishop of Philadelphia would take this position. How he manages in his own mind to downplay and even dismiss the seriousness of covering up clerical abuse of children, though, and, at the same time, casually claim himself to be "very much" "available to support victims of sexual abuse by any of our clergy" -- it just bewilders and boggles.

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