One sign of shifting opinion on Israel’s military policy is the increase in U.S. media presentation of critical or questioning news, features, and opinions about the invasion.

The NYTimes blog: The Lede has a short interesting piece on the different representations in English and Hebrew on the IDF’s web-site (Israel Defense Force–the army).

Here: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/online-two-pictures-of-the-israeli-military/?hp

And Daniel Levy who has sane and useful things to say about Israeli policy has posted an interesting set of reflections on how this should/could/might end. (Highly recommended!****)

Here: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/05/five_comments_on_the_gaza_crisis_and_what_to_do/index.php

When VP-elect Joe Biden predicted Obama would have a foreign-policy test early in his tenure, Biden was mocked. Well??!!! Someone in our household (not me) predicted it would happen and it would be the Israel-Palestinian frage. Prescient!

And this from Ethan Bonner (NYTimes) on media coverage and lack thereof:

“And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it wait in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups funded mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

“Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one, the government is seeking to control entirely the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07media.html?hp

Here’s the Rasmussen poll cited earlier suggesting the ins and outs of divided U.S. opinion on Gaza:  ”Americans Closely Divided Over Israel’s Gaza Attacks”

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/americans_closely_divided_over_israel_s_gaza_attacks

The Trib reports:

As legislators weigh impeaching Gov. Rod Blagojevich and federal prosecutors prepare to indict him on corruption charges, his acting chief of staff and a deputy governor will be keynote speakers Wednesday at an “Ethics in the Workplace” seminar for some 200 state employees.

The New York Times has a story by Abby Goodnough about Catholics resisting the closing of parishes in the Boston Archdiocese by refusing to leave. At St. Frances Xavier Cabrini church in Scituate, Massachusetts, a group of parishioners have been occupying the church in shifts since 2004. What impresses me most is the way these people have formed a cooperative community around this effort, and how much of themselves they’re willing to devote to the cause.

Many of the St. Frances holdouts describe being transformed from passive Catholics to passionate, deeply involved members of a spiritual community that they say could be a model for the future of the troubled Catholic Church.

…Since St. Frances has no priest, parishioners lead services that include everything but consecration of the host. On the Sunday before Christmas, about 50 parishioners attended a service conducted entirely by women, including two who distributed communion. The hosts had been consecrated elsewhere by a priest described… as “sympathetic.”

They may lose the fight for the building. But I hope they’ll keep what they’ve gained along the way.

Speaking of Jesus…I just got round last night to The Tablet’s fat Christmas issue, which had many fine offerings, as usual, but an especially good review by Eamon Duffy of Timothy Radcliffe’s book on the Eucharist, “Why Go to Church?” I am a fan of Radcliffe’s writing, and had heard good things about the book (as well as the fact that it was written at the invitation of Rowan Williams). But Duffy’s closer sealed the deal for me:

This is a serious but never a solemn book: not the least of its joys is the gallery of Dominican eccentrics who punctuate its pages. They include the learned but famously irritable Père Regemay, whom Radcliffe overheard in a Paris common room shouting angrily at one of his brethren, “Since I began to practise yoga I am CALM, I am CALM”. Best of all is the ancient Oxford lay brother who, when Radcliffe offered him Communion with the usual words, “The Body of Christ”, replied, simply, witheringly and with the accumulated wisdom of a long life lived eucharistically: “I know”.

Not surprisingly, priests always seem to have unfortunate stories about odd responses to offering the Body of Christ. They usually run along the lines of “Gee, thanks,” though I’m sure our clerical and/or eucharistic ministering community here has others. But as far as unorthodox goes, “I know” is a new favorite. And not so unorthodox.

According to a Jesuit spokesman in Rome, via this CNS story, the action against Fr. Roger Haight reported below is “a suspension” rather than a final punishment. The process is ongoing, as a committee of three (unnamed) U.S. Jesuit theologians study Haight’s work, with Haight’s cooperation, the article says:

“He can continue to teach, but not systematic theology connected with Christology,” said Father Giuseppe Bellucci, spokesman for the Jesuits.

“The prohibition against teaching is not a condemnation and is not definitive; a committee of Jesuits, in fact, is studying the position of Father Roger, who is willing to collaborate to clarify his positions,” Father Bellucci told Catholic News Service Jan. 5.

In 2005 the doctrinal congregation published a notification that Father Haight could no longer teach as a Catholic theologian because of “serious doctrinal errors” in his 1999 book, “Jesus Symbol of God.”

While discussions with his Jesuit superiors and between the Jesuits and the doctrinal congregation continued, Father Haight has been teaching at Union Theological Seminary, a nondenominational graduate school in New York.

Several news agencies reported in December that last summer the doctrinal congregation barred Father Haight from theological writing and from teaching anywhere, but Father Bellucci said the reports were inaccurate.

The spokesman described the Vatican action as “a suspension” and added, “Father Haight is an excellent Jesuit and neither he nor anyone else is involved in a fight. The desire is simply to clarify his position.”

I’m not sure what the status of Haight’s teaching faculties is. My understanding is that he still must leave Union, even though I believe the bulk of his teaching was not related to systematic theology.

Or just pro-Palestinian? Or anti-Israel? Or are they distinctions without a difference?

As the violence continues in Gaza the prospects for a papal visit to the Holy Land, anticipated for May, grow more remote. In his weekly analysis, Vaticanista Sandro Magister lays out the case for what he says is Vatican foreign policy that continues to slant heavuly toward the Palestinians, and Hamas. The only change under Benedict XVI, he writes, is in a slightly less combative tone toward Israel. The substance remains the same:

The authorities of the Church, and Benedict XVI himself, have raised their voices in condemnation of “the massive violence that has broken out in the Gaza Strip in response to other violence” only after Israel began bombing the installations of the terrorist movement Hamas in that territory. Not before. Not when Hamas was tightening its brutal grip on Gaza, massacring the Muslims faithful to president Abu Mazen, humiliating the tiny Christian communities, and launching dozens of rockets every day against the Israelis in the surrounding area.

About Hamas and its vaunted “mission” of wiping the Jewish state from the face of the earth, about Hamas as an outpost for Iran’s expansionist aims in the Middle East, about Hamas as an ally of Hezbollah and Syria, the Vatican authorities have never raised the red alert. They have never shown that they see Hamas as a deadly danger to Israel and an obstacle to the birth of a Palestinian state, in addition to its being a nightmare for the Arab regimes in the area, from Egypt to Jordan to Saudi Arabia.

In the December 29-30 issue of “L’Osservatore Romano,” a front-page commentary by Luca M. Possati, checked word by word by the Vatican secretariat of state, claimed that “for the Jewish state, the only possible idea of security must come through dialogue with all, even those who do not recognize it.” Read: Hamas.

And in the same issue of the Vatican newspaper - in a statement also approved by the secretariat of state - the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, after decrying Israel’s “disproportionate” military reaction, reiterated the same concept: “We must have the humility to sit at the same table and listen to each other.” Not a word about Hamas and its prejudicial refusal to accept the very existence of Israel.

Magister’s analysis is clearly critical of the Vatican, to the extent that I think he skews the record somewhat. He does not highlight Israeli policies that have hurt Arab Christians, nor the absurdly difficult negotiations between Israel and the Holy See over the religious protections and tax policies and such for church properties and communities in the Holy Land. Still, Magister gets the larger picture right. Some would say the Vatican is tilting toward the Palestinians, others would say it is striking a balance. But this is a longstanding Vatican policy, since at least Paul VI. The growth of interfaith dialogue with Judaism–and Islam–complicates the political calculus. Does it change it?

Both in the transcript of its reporters’ interview with Caroline Kennedy and in the front-page story that described it on December 28th, the NY Times reproduced the verbal tic she used many times: the familiar “You know” that many people use in place of a comma in their speech. In today’s “Week in Review” section, Peter Baker’s piece makes fun of her when he writes: “Caroline Kennedy, you know, may get there on the strength, you know, of her last name.”

I don’t recall the Times including such speech-mannerisms in its reporting before, except perhaps on the sports pages. Has their policy changed? Why would they do it in the case of Ms. Kennedy?

Any thoughts on where this is going. What is the end game here?

Glenn Greenwald asks some pertinent questions:

Though the ins-and-outs of Israeli grievances and strategic considerations are endlessly examined, there is virtually no debate over whether the U.S. should continue to play such an active, one-sided role in this dispute.  It’s the American taxpayer, with their incredibly consequential yet never-debated multi-billion-dollar aid packages to Israel, who are vital in funding this costly Israeli assault on Gaza.  Just as was true for Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, it’s American bombs that — with the whole world watching — are blowing up children and mosques, along with Hamas militants, in Gaza.  And it’s the American veto power that, time and again, blocks any U.N. action to stop these wars. 

Here’s his whole post: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

This from Steve Clemons at TPM
…My friend in Israel asked me for some help on shaping questions that he might pose to various Israel pols. I shared with him some of my thoughts on what he could ask. . .particularly the question of how Israel views long term US support.

I told him that in my view America’s increasingly consequential failures to generate stability in the Middle East is like an eroding levee in New Orleans — and those levees at some point are going to fail leaving Israel quite vulnerable unless Israel and other stakeholding neighbors achieve a different equilibrium in the region. . .and soon. There is great doubt around the world in the ability of America to pursue and achieve its objectives — and this doubt has consequences for Israel’s national security calculus, whether it is acknowledging it or not….

And from my Arabic blogging friend, I received this note — and I should add that this guy is about as positive about “modernity” as one can find in Middle East blogging circles: “Happy new year Steve .. Though GAZA is making this new year very sad for us here .. but i’ll try to smile whenever I can .. I might stop blogging until the war finishes .. it is really hard watching death day and night so close by ..any way .. how are the 1st world countries doing ?”

I agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski that the worsening tragedy in Gaza is part of the blur we have been seeing for some time. I put a lot of the blame on Labor Party Leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak who has been itching to manage a war.

But as Brzezinski said, the Israelis and Palestinians have proven unable to rise to a level of strategic, forward-looking maturity to solve this problem and others now need to stabilize the situation, engage in a credible peace negotiation process that involves the other major Arab stakeholders, the US and Europe.

Clemons post here: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/03/watching_death_day_and_night_s/#more

J Street is the newest American-Jewish lobby; it has questioned Israel’s current military actions, and has been attacked. Here is a response–and a clue to their thinking.

http://www.jstreet.org/blog/?p=69

Juan Cole’s post today (January 4) has some helpful observations about Israel’s macro and micro wars: http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/gaza-2008-micro-wars-and-macro-wars.html

Jesuit theologian Roger Haight, whose writings on Christology, especially in his 1999 book “Jesus: Symbol of God,” led the Vatican to bar him from teaching in Catholic institutions, has received a further punishment: The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has barred Haight from writing on theology (he may continue a work in progress on Ignatian spirituality) and he is forbidden to teach anywhere, even non-Catholic institutions. That means that at the end of the coming semester Haight, who resides at America House in New York, will stop teaching at Union Theological Seminary in Upper Manhattan.

The CDF began investigating Haight, 72, in 2000, which led the Vatican’s education office to bar him from teaching at Jesuit-run Weston in Cambridge, MA. Haight began teaching at Union, a leading Protestant seminary, as an adjunct professor of theology in September 2004. A final negative verdict on Haight’s work from the CDF, reported by NCR’s John Allen in February 2005, meant the teaching ban at Catholic schools would not be lifted and Haight remained at Union.

The latest sanction takes the discipline against Haight to a new level. The news seems to have emerged first in a German Catholic news service report a few weeks ago; I saw it in a French agency report here, and the details were later confirmed for me by other church sources. Haight himself would not comment. One can only imagine what this action means to Father Haight personally, and I think even critics of the Jesuits or Haight’s work would have to give him (as well as other Jesuits, like Tom Reese) credit for the kind of obedience and graciousness that is too often overlooked in criticisms of the order.

Haight’s work has been critiqued and criticized, including in these pages by fellow theologians like John Cavadini and Luke Timothy Johnson. In a piece two years ago, Paul Lakeland defended Haight’s work. Clearly there is a legitimate range of opinion on Haight’s work, including tough questions from those who would be sympathetic to him and his larger project.

But the latest Vatican action does not address the substance of Haight’s work or provide any explanation as to what spurred the CDF to take such a drastic action now. “It appears to be purely punitive,” one Jesuit source told me. The notification was apparently issued last spring, but Haight only found out about it last summer. As usual, he has never heard directly from Rome, only through his superiors. He was not told why this action was taken, and his responses to the list of CDF criticisms during the earlier investigation have never been answered by Rome.

Some will see this as the institutional church being the institutional church, either doing what it needs to do to defend orthodoxy (or what it considers orthodoxy), or yes, doing it ham-handedly but, as Rome has always done. So don’t exaggerate, the reasoning goes: “Nothing to see here, just move along.” I also think there is a great—and unfortunate, in my mind—degree of habituation to this kind of Vatican action, which has become the norm over the past 30 years under John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. There is in some corners a kind of “Stockholm syndrome” as well, as those who work within the church fold can come to identify with their overseers. Above all, I think this extends the “big chill” not only on Catholic theology but on all kinds of discussion and debate within the church. Conservatives often see themselves as a victimized minority, but in ways large and small, I see church officials and institutions shying away from hiring or inviting to speak anyone who might run afoul of Vatican sensibilities. Religious orders and the Catholic theological community itself seem to be finding ways to accommodate this dynamic, understandably, I guess.

But I think a few points regarding the latest penalty against Roger Haight are important to make:

One is the continuing lack of any due process or the merest nod at some kind of transparency in CDF procedures. “Draconian” is an overheated word. Would “extraordinary rendition” be a more apt and contemporary analogy? No hearings, no explanations, just harsh penalties communicated by indirect means. Wasn’t this was supposed to change?

Two, the ban on teaching even at a non-Catholic school seems particularly broad. Is that unusual? I know the Vatican often punishes Jesuits because they can—because the Jesuits have a particular relationship to the pope (which has been harshly reiterated in recent decades) that enables the pontiff to enforce orders that might be ignored eslewhere. But Charles Curran (a diocesan priest) and others teach at places like SMU without sanction. Moreover, as Union is a Protestant institution (though with a number of Catholic students), who is the Vatican protecting from Haight?

Three, while many will just dismiss this as “business as usual,” actions like these reinforce—and it is not an unfair impression—the view that the Catholic Church is unjust, that it is not a place where one can step out of line (or even know where the line is) without receiving a blind-side smack that comes off as mean-spirited. Does every injustice, like that against Galileo, have to wait five centuries to be rectified? That won’t wash with today’s Christians. Moreover, this kind of action seems to undercut Benedict’s focus on love and charity and the beauty of the Catholic faith. Catholics and non-Catholics will measure Benedict’s words against his actions, and many will see a disparity that can only hurt his credibility (and that of the wider church) in trying to point out the failings of the world beyond the Vatican precincts.

Read NCR’s 2005 analysis of the original Haight ruling here.

As many know, the great mother church of the Society of Jesus in Rome is called “Il Gesù,” literally, “the Jesus.”

Fewer know that the article is there because the full name of the church is “Il Santissimo Nome di Gesù,” “The Most Holy Name of Jesus.”

The recent General Congregation of the Jesuits, in thoroughly Ignatian spirit, spoke of themselves as follows:

What unites us as Jesuits is Christ and the desire to serve him: not to be deaf to the call of the Lord, but prompt and ready to do his most holy will. He is the unique image of the unseen God, capable of revealing himself everywhere; and in a tantalizing culture of images, he is the single image that unites us. Jesuits know who they are by looking at him.

Two hundred years after Ignatius, the catholic Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach, shared a similar Christ-centered spirituality, indeed a “Jesus mysticism.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the Christmas Oratorio’s “Cantata for New Year’s Day, the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord.”

The narrative of the Cantata focuses on the Evangelist’s words: “and they named him ‘Jesus’.” And its concluding chorale joyfully resounds:

Jesus richte mein Beginnen, Jesus bleibe stets bei mir/ Jesus zaeume mir die Sinnen, Jesus sei nur mein’ Begier.

Jesus sei mir in Gedanken, Jesus lasse mich nicht wanken!

Jesus rule my beginning, Jesus be always at my side. Jesus direct my desire, Jesus be my only longing.

Jesus be in my thoughts, Jesus let me not be confounded.

This from one of St. Augustine’s sermons on the birth of Christ: 

 What praise must we not utter, what thanks, to the love of God! Who loved us so much that for our sakes he would be made in time through whom time was made, so that in the world he might be younger in age than many of his servants, he who in his eternity is older than the world itself, that the one who created man might become a man, that he might be created from a mother he created, that he might be carried in arms he formed, might suck at breasts he filled; that the Word without whom human eloquence is dumb might in dumb infancy wail in a crib.

See what God became for you; recognize what such great lowliness teaches, even in a teacher who cannot yet speak. Once in paradise you were so full of words that you gave names to all living things; but for your sake your Creator lay as an infant and could not even call his mother by her name. When you failed to obey, you lost yourself in a broad garden of fruitful trees; in his obedience he came into the narrowest of dwellings so that he might search for the dead by dying. Although you were a man, you wished to be God, and were lost; he, although he was God, wished to be a man so that he might find what had been lost. Human pride pressed you down so much that only divine lowliness could raise you.

Inspired by William Safire’s annual column of predictions, I have come up with my own exercise in prophetic futility, only in a deluxe Catholic version, “The 2009 Catholic Pool.” Some seriousness, some piffle, the column may do neither well, but it is well-intentioned–and safely posted over here at “Pontifications” on Beliefnet.

A sampling:

NINE: The biggest name to become Roman Catholic in 2009 will be:

a) George W. Bush;
b) Philip Seymour Hoffman;
c) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad;
d) Mel Gibson;
e) David Gibson.

TEN: The biggest name to be canonized in 2009 will be:

a) Pope John Paul II;
b) Pope Pius XII;
c) Pope John XXIII;
d) Pope Pius IX;
e) NCR’s John Allen, after he is credited with a miracle of bilocation.

I updated my post below about the NYT series on “international priests” to link to the second and third installments (today’s third and final article is here). I found all three articles fascinating — it’s a topic that can be considered from any number of angles, and it only gets more complicated as you go. Check out the multimedia components too — some great photography and audio there. (I think you need to hear the Kenyan priest’s voice to get the most out of his story!)

Today’s Times also has a city-section article about a parish in Brooklyn that has closed, and some efforts being launched to save the building from destruction. It seems there are many people with justifiable emotional attachments to Our Lady of Loreto, but not many of them still live in the neighborhood or worship regularly at the church. I’ve never seen the church in person, but the pictures suggest a stately, beautiful building, one of those labor-of-love immigrant parishes that sprouted in the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (You can see some photos of the church and the neighborhood here.) The neighborhood has changed since then, and low-income housing — the reported plan for the ground where the church stands — would very likely be of greater service to its residents. But you can’t blame people for feeling sentimental about this piece of their history.

By the way, New Yorkers, tomorrow is the final day of the “Catholics in New York” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. Do treat yourself to a visit if you possibly can — it’s a wonderful way to gain an appreciation for the culture, the era and the people that parishes like Our Lady of Loreto represent.

Today’s New York Times has a sobering op-ed by the sober-minded Benny Morris. It should be required reading for team Obama. Here’s the ending:

Between 1948 and 1982 Israel coped relatively well with the threat from conventional Arab armies. Indeed, it repeatedly trounced them. But Iran’s nuclear threat, the rise of organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that operate from across international borders and from the midst of dense civilian populations, and Israeli Arabs’ growing disaffection with the state and their identification with its enemies, offer a completely different set of challenges. And they are challenges that Israel’s leaders and public, bound by Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior, appear to find particularly difficult to counter.

Israel’s sense of the walls closing in on it has this past week led to one violent reaction. Given the new realities, it would not be surprising if more powerful explosions were to follow.

I suspect there are some who find it especially tragic that violence has broken out in the land of Christ’s birth during the Christmas season.  Despite the fact that neither of the two parties follows the Christian liturgical calendar, many of us still cling to a vague sense that Christmas should be a time when all combatants-Christian or otherwise-lay down their arms, if only briefly.

It’s tempting to see such sentiments as a relatively harmless form of nostalgia, a recollection of a more self-confident age when, thanks to the Jesuits and the British Empire, we could think of Christianity as an enterprise on which the sun never set.  Such nostalgia, though, sits uneasily in a culture where store clerks are now so aware of the diversity of our holiday traditions that they no longer seem to know what to say after they hand us our change.

More to the point, the idea that Christmas is a “season of peace” is a form of sentimentalism that robs the Incarnation of its eschatological force.  On Sunday, we heard Simeon prophesy that the Christ child was “destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be contradicted” (Lk 2:34).  Soon we will hear that He and his parents are forced to flee their home while others are slaughtered in His place (Mt 2:16).  The feast days immediately following Christmas are the feasts of martyrs: St. Stephen, the Holy Innocents, and St. Thomas Becket.

It should not surprise us that the Octave of Christmas is soaked in blood.  As Frederick Douglas once observed, “power concedes nothing without a demand.”  We who believe that the Incarnation marks a turning point in the struggle to redeem the world also know that the present ruler of this world is not about to go quietly.  Like the French living under Nazi occupation who witnessed D-Day, we know that something fundamental and decisive has happened and that our situation is transformed, but we also know that there is much fighting and, yes, dying left to do before the end.

Our weapons in this fight will not be the weapons of the world.  Against hatred, we bring love.  Against missiles, guns, and improvised explosives we will bring prayer, fasting, and witness.   Against historical grievance and the burden of memory, we bring forgiveness and reconciliation.  Against division and polarization, we bring the worship that makes us One Body, which we offer for the life of the world.

Christmas, rightly understood, is not meant to be a brief period of refuge from the evils of the world.  It is a summons to take up the struggle against those evils.  It is a call to gird our loins and offer prayers to the One who “trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle” (Ps 144:1).  The Messiah has come! Nothing will ever be the same again.

The escalating warfare in the birthplace of the Prince of Peace may claim an unexpected casualty: Benedict’s visit to Israel this May. According to CNS, Vatican sources have said a worsening of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could alter the pope’s travel plans.

Such a visit could provide the impetus for a cessation or lessening of hostilities, but the pope has to get there first, and he is undoubtedly (well, hopefully) weighing his words carefully. From the CNS coverage of Benedict’s noontime blessing address yesterday:

“I am deeply saddened for the dead, the wounded, the material damage, and the sufferings and tears of the people who are the victims of this tragic sequence of attacks and reprisals,” the pope said.

“The earthly homeland of Jesus cannot continue to be a witness to such bloodshed, which is repeated without end! I implore the end of this violence, which must be condemned in all its forms, and a restoration of the truce in the Gaza Strip,” he said.

The pope called for a fresh demonstration of “humanity and wisdom in everyone who has responsibility in the situation.”

[snip]

The Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, told Vatican Radio Dec. 27 that the latest escalation of violence was a provocation by both sides, and showed that both Hamas and Israel were caught up in a mentality of conflict.

“Hamas is a prisoner of a logic of hatred, Israel of a logic of trusting in force as the best response to hatred. They need to keep looking for a different way out, even if it seems impossible,” Father Lombardi said.

The spokesman said Israel’s attack on Gaza was notable for its intensity and the number of victims.

“Certainly it will be a very hard blow for Hamas. At the same time, it’s quite probable that there will be innocent victims, in fact many of them; hatred will increase and the hopes for peace will once again fade,” he said.

The Vatican has often been seen as tilting toward the Palestinians in terms of sympathies, and these comments seem to strike the kind of balance that will not be welcome by either side–and thus a potential complicating factor for the Vatican.

One reason Rome is seen as pro-Palestinian is that the dwindling Christian community is largely made up of Palestinian Arabs. In a sense, as in Iraq, they are caught in the middle, squeezed by both sides. This is often lost on Westerners as we sing sweet Christmas carols about that faraway manger.

That vise was exemplified by a story by Austen Ivereigh in Our Sunday Visitor of Dec. 21. The story is available online only to subscribers, but in it… Read the rest of this entry »

I thought the old saw that suicides increase during the holidays–the result, it was assumed, of isolation and despair deepened by the camaraderie ostensibly being enjoyed by everyone else–was an Urban Legend that I was the last to catch on to.

Apparently not. This story by Jim Nichols of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer is a good myth-buster, with some explanations as to how the legend got going, why it remains so durable, and why it’s not true. Nichols quotes Pat Lyden, executive director of the Suicide Prevention Education Alliance of Northeast Ohio, who says the misconception is rooted in a pervasive public misunderstanding of what triggers suicides–and, more importantly, what does not.

“Untreated mental illness, such as depression, bipolar disorder [commonly called manic depression] and anxiety disorder, are the main causes of suicide,” said Lyden, whose nonprofit organization teaches youths about warning signals.

“People, I think, expect more suicides at Christmas because they see people who have the blues, or who have loneliness,” she speculated. “But the blues and loneliness are not the same as major illness. This particular illness affects the brain, in the same way other diseases affect the heart or the pancreas or other organs.”

What remains unexplained, however, is why, according to statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics, December has the lowest suicide rate of any month of the year. Are the holidays in some way an antidote to despair? Is there a lesson there? Or just another myth waiting to be born?

Kicked out of my office (we’re moving), I spent more time working –and procrastinating –at home.  I updated my ITunes program on my home computer (which controls the loading of ipods, for those who don’t know).  And ITunes invited me to add the “genius bar” to the program, and I did.

The genius bar is basically an interior decorator for your music.  It tells you what songs you have go well together, and it suggests new songs –which you can purchase at the ITunes store– to make your collection more aesthetically complete.  (Well, not quite–it doesn’t tell you to junk your music collection altogether and develop some better taste.  If you like the musical equivalent of orange and purple plaid, it will give you more orange and purple–and maybe add a dash of pink.)

In order to access the genius bar, you need to let Apple rummage around in your ITunes folder.  I don’t care that Apple knows that I have two songs by Five for Fighting  on my ipod. At the same time, the whole thing makes me vaguely uneasy–not only the privacy thing, but the idea that they know what I like before I do.  It’s individually targeted advertising.

Anybody else have the same reaction?

The Coptic Orthodox Pope Shenuda III, that is. “Phoning it in” is, of course, slang for doing something halfway. According to an AFP news-service dispatch, the pope decided the faithful shouldn’t be phoning it in when it comes to penance. His objection was based on privacy grounds:

CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt’s Coptic pope has banned the faithful from confessing their sins to priests over the telephone because intelligence agents might be listening in, a newspaper reported on Friday.

“Confessions over the telephone are forbidden, because there is a chance the telephones are monitored and the confessions will reach state security,” the independent Al-Masri Al-Yom quoted Pope Shenuda III as saying.

The leader of the Coptic minority also said confessions over the Internet were invalid because they might be read by websurfers.

Interesting–even a question or two about why he thinks he is such a lighting rod.  He seems to have particularly gotten under the skin of somenone named John Zuhlsdorf.

Today’s New York Times has an article by Laurie Goodstein about the phenomenon of foreign priests being recruited to work in U.S. dioceses. It’s a colorful look at the ups and downs of this increasingly common arrangement, as observed in the diocese of Owensberg, Kentucky.

[Diocesan Vicar for Clergy] Father Venters has seen lows. Some foreign priests had to be sent home. One became romantically entangled with a female co-worker. One isolated himself in the rectory. Still another would not learn to drive. A priest from the Philippines left after two weeks because he could not stand the cold. A Peruvian priest was hostile toward Hispanics who were not from Peru.

“From a strictly personnel perspective,” Father Venters said one day over a lunch of potato soup with American cheese and a glass of sweet tea, “the international priests are easier to work with than the local priests. If they mess up, you just say, ‘See you.’ You withdraw your permission for them to stay.”

As Goodstein points out, missionary priests serving U.S. Catholics is not a new phenomenon. But in the old days you used to find them serving their own ethnic groups and immigrant communities. Now an “international priest” is likely to have very little in common with the community he serves. That can lead to humorous mixups and more serious clashes. But it can also be broadening — for me, praying the Mass with Catholics whose culture is different from my own is a profound, humbling encounter with the universal nature of the Church. It’s not always comfortable, but it is usually rewarding.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” was first performed in Leipzig during the Christmas season of 1734-35. Or at least that’s when the magnificent final version was heard. But much of the music had been heard before in other guises.

Scholars tell us that much of the music was “parodied:” Bach employing music he had already written, much of it for secular purposes, and transmuting it to the new sacred text. In many ways Bach’s art exemplifies the notion of “recapitulation,” so central to the theology of St. Irenaeus: in Christ all the good of creation is brought to fulfillment. Pointedly, Bach only used parody from secular to sacred compositions, never from sacred to secular.

The result, in the “Christmas Oratorio,” was so seamless that, as one critic writes, “the basic emotions of all the choruses and arias correspond so perfectly to the sacred text that there is no distance at all between text and music.”

The third cantata of the “Christmas Oratorio” is entitled “Herrscher des Himmels,” “Lord of Heaven.” Its narrative recounts the shepherds’ journey to Bethlehem in response to the angelic tidings. As in all the cantatas, the Gospel proclamation is punctuated rhetorically by affective application to the believer’s own spiritual quest, his or her hopes and fears.

In the third cantata, besides drawing upon some of his previous work, Bach composed a new aria specifically for the third day of Christmas, the feast of the Beloved disciple. Here are the words sung by one of the shepherds beholding the child and Mary pondering all these things in her heart:

Schliesse, mein Herze, dies selige Wunder//Fest in deinem Glauben ein.

Lasse dies Wunder der goettlichen Werke//Immer zu Staerke deines schwachen Glaubens sein!

My heart, enclose this blessed miracle firmly within your faith//Let the wonder of God’s work

Ever strengthen your weak faith!

Photo: Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Among newspaper and television news reporters, the task of doing a story about how a religious holiday is celebrated ranks only a little above doing a stakeout outside the house of a murder victim’s mother. The editors’ main purpose sometimes seems to be to prove to religious readers that, yes, we do know what day it is.

But there are occasional gems, such as Sam Dillon’s “Chinantla Journal” in The New York Times on Christmas Day, “A Mexican Celebration of Christ and Community.” The cover of the paper and the most emailed list featured a piece catching up on the doings of the Von Trapp family, but to me, this was the more inspiring Christmas story:

The Christmas season joins people with their loved ones wherever it is celebrated, but in few places, perhaps, does it unite whole villages so thoroughly in communal rituals of music and merrymaking as in rural Mexico.

For nine consecutive nights, starting Dec. 16, villages all across Mexico have been re-enacting Joseph and Mary’s biblical search for lodging. Each night’s procession, called a posada, has led townspeople, marching to the strains of a brass band, to a different home, where humble heads of household like Ms. Vargas have fed and entertained the revelers.

Santa Claus did not figure in the festivities in Chinantla, and there was no gift-giving. (Most Mexicans exchange gifts on Jan. 6, El Día de Reyes, which celebrates the wise men who took gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ child.)

What was the most meaningful Christmas story you saw in a newspaper this week?

This week the New York Times offered a few different takes on how people answer God’s call to serve the poor in the city. On Christmas Eve there was a story about the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal who live and minister in the South Bronx. (You probably know the famous Fr. Benedict Groeschel, one of the order’s founders.)

An April 2007 article (part of the NYT’s flurry of local-Catholics coverage surrounding the pope’s visit) focused on the friars’ music ministry and prolife activism, and provoked a narrowly critical series of letters scolding them for “infringing on women’s reproductive freedom.” (A later letter calmly answered those complaints — say what you will about the CFRs, but no one can credibly claim they don’t practice what they preach.) This week’s story, however, focused on some of the order’s younger members and their radical decision to live a life of voluntary poverty and Christian witness in an anything-but-contemplative neighborhood.

One of the CFRs’ ministries is a shelter for homeless men (you can get a look at it in the video supplement to the article). Another story in the Times, this one published on Christmas day, examined the complicated issues small, religiously-oriented shelters are confronting as the city improves its outreach to the homeless. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve lived in South Bend, Indiana for over a decade now, and for most of that time, we stayed on eastern standard time all year round.  We never changed to daylight savings time.  We stayed the same.  But everyone changed around us.  In the winter time, we were on New York time.  But not in the summer.  New York sprung forward in daylight saving time–we did not.  In the summer, Chicago sprung forward to meet us.  The net effect:  In the winter, we were on New York time, in the summer, we were on Chicago time. 

Not changing meant changing a lot–all the time.  Our television schedules changed dramatically–in the summer, prime time was 7 p.m.-10 p.m, not 8 p.m. - 11 p.m.  Restaurant reservations in nearby Michigan had to be recalibrated –they were on eastern time, and sprang forward. Friends and family members got used to us being on “Chicago time,” we went back to “New York time.” 

The only way an institution, a community, or a person can not change is if everything around them doesn’t change.  If that’s not possible, then the question beomes, how to evaluate the change that comes from not changing versus the change that comes from changing.   

 I think this applies to the Church as well. Take Latin.   The Church made Latin  its official language in a situation where most people understood it–and had a reason to understand it, given the Roman  Empire. Jerome didn’t produce the Vulgate to make the scripture more esoteric–he did it in order to make it more accessible. 

Over centuries that changed.  Only highly educated people read Latin, and only real afficionados speak it.   The Church can could decide that it will would continue to use Latin exclusively, in every aspect of its life and existence. But unless it had a  way to ensure that Latin is the common language of the people –spoken by tax collectors and prostitutes, as my friend Reginald Foster is wont to say, it can’t  couldn’t keep its use of Latin from becoming esoteric and academic.  It can’t   couldn’t keep Latin, and keep things natural.

So you’re faced with the prospect of deciding which change is worse.  You keep the language the same, but lose the immediate connection of the people with the language.  Or you change the language, and , keep the connection –with living people, but not with the past.  Or you muddle through and compromise. 

In thinking about O’Malley’s book, one of the things that the first part impressed upon me was the change foisted upon the Church whether it wanted it or not.  Modernity–was here to stay whether or not the Church went along with it.  The loss of the papal states, the increasing commitment to democracy, the liberal values of freedom of the press, freedom of speech.  What a sea change in political culture during the “long nineteenth century” –as O’Malley calls it. And what a change for the context in which the Church proclaimed the Gosepl.

Finally, my part of Indiana changed.  We now go to daylight savings time.  In some ways, the change allows us to stay the same–at least in important things, like restaurant reservations and phone calls and television schedules.  

I hope everyone had a joyful Christmas celebration with loved ones.

In a post below I mentioned the wonderful CD, from Cambridge’s King’s College Choir, of Christmas music by Benjamin Britten. One offering on the recording that I did not mention was Britten’s setting of some poems of the 18th century English religious writer, Christopher Smart.

Smart was a Cambridge scholar who three times was confined for religious “madness” — which the Britannica defines as “a mild religious mania.” (Who, then,  of those who frequent dotCommonweal can be considered “sane?”).

Smart’s “madness” notwithstanding (or because of it), he counted as friends Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith. I read the following excerpt from Smart-Britten as a sort of grace before yesterday’s Christmas dinner, since there were a number of cat-aficianados gathered around the table:

For I will consider my cat Geoffry: for he is the servant of the living God, duly and daily serving him.

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East, he worships in his way.

For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

For he knows that God is his Saviour, for God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

For I am possessed of a cat, surpassing in beauty, for whom I take occasion to bless Almighty God.

Would that we all, like Francis of Assisi and Christopher Smart, were possessed of so mild a religious mania.

Happy feast of Stephen!

O Come O Come Emmanuel - Sufjan Stevens

I have several CDs which provide musical-spiritual accompaniment in preparing liturgies and homilies during this holy season.

Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” has pride of place, as it takes me from the first days of Christmas through New Year’s Day and culminates on the feast of Epiphany. But another favorite is the King’s College Choir’s rendition of Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols.”

On this particular recording (Argo), a wonderful bonus is the young Britten’s lovely “A Boy Was Born” — a setting of mostly anonymous early English poems and hymns. Here is the text for the deeply simple “Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour:”

Jesu, Jesu, Jesu, Jesu: save us all through Thy virtue.

Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour, that Thou save us from dolour! Jesu is mine paramour: Blessed be Thy name, Jesu.

Jesu was born of a may, upon Christemas Day. She was may beforn and ay: Blessed be Thy name, Jesu.

Jesu, Jesu, Jesu, Jesu: save us all through Thy virtue.

Scandals galore, the Fall of Man, the Pope on Original Sin (as per Cathleen Kaveny’s post below)–how did it all happen? Answer: Evolution made us do it. From Natalie Angier’s science column in the NYT:

Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.

In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.

Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb.

So Bernie Madoff needs a natural lawyer. Maybe B16 could help him out?

Another good Christmas present. 

Continuity or change at V2?-Read the book!