Hypocrisy, hypocrisy everywhere nor any drop to drink

Social and cultural liberals love to invoke the hypocrisy of abortion foes when it comes to the death penalty, war, torture, environmentalism, etc. Apparently, it's hypocritical to see a difference between a constitutionally protected right of a private individual to execute innocent, defenseless human life and the constitutionally protected right of the state to execute convicted, adult humans who have intentionally committed heinous crimes against the innocent. And it's hypocrisy to notice a difference in the way death row convicts get due process of law, but human embyros don't. It's also hypocrisy to note that the death penalty kills at most in the low three-figures per annum while abortion kills over one million per annum.

Who knew there's no difference between abortion and death penalty? And who knew that hypocrisy flows only in one direction: if you think abortion is wrong, then to treat death penalty or war or torture ANY differently makes you a hypocrite; but if you think death penalty or war or torture is wrong, then to favor abortion rights is perfectly A-OK. Who knew hypocrisy only applies to pro-lifers?

No one ever acknowledges, however, that the accusations of hypocrisy against pro-lifers can come from social conservatives on the flip side as well. If you're against Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a constitutionally protected right, you must needs be opposed equally to Lawrence v. Texas, which made sodomy in the privacy of one's home a constitutionally protected right. And in the six years since that decision, have we seen a massive effort from social conservatives to topple it? Ask any pro-life Catholic whether they care to see Lawrence overturned and most will think of their local St. Lawrence parish before a SCOTUS decision.

Oh, the hypocrisy of these pro-lifers. They're not fooling anyone about their social-conservative bonafides. They're no different than the social liberals who want to ban guns and religion.

Would any social liberals care to join this non-existent chorus faulting pro-lifers for not being equally opposed to Lawrence v. Texas?

Center-of-Attention Liturgy

Narcissists come in both homo- and heterosexual versions. They are attracted to the clergy, because they can be the center of attention and manipulate other people. Within the clergy, they tend to rise to the top, because they want more attention and more opportunity to manipulate people.

And so the People of God get archbishops like Weakland and Sanchez. And children are abused and die. ~Leon Podles

Nothing to see here, people. Addiction to versus populum liturgy has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Velimirovic didn't respect Spanish Catholicism much

Fascinating 1916 critique of church history don Adolf von Harnack by St. Nikolaj Velimirovic, by way of Ora et Labora:

Christianity is founded upon a drama and not upon a science; therefore its growth and development are dramatic and not scientific.

Proto-Balthasarian? St. Nikolai would probably have a lot of critical things to say about von Balthasar's theodramatics, but it's still noteworthy that both affirm the dramatic nature of Christian faith in contrast to the scientific or positivist mindset of the modernist heresy.

The killed and martyred kings, princes, bishops, priests and laymen from these [Orthodox] countries will not be ashamed before the martyrs from the Coliseum.

I do wish Catholics acted as if their every decision were made looking the holy martyrs unblinkingly in the eye -- another useful feature of icon veneration.

Roman Catholicism in Spain came through its test very badly. Before the Islamic invasion, and after it for a long time, the Christian population showed itself inferior to the Moors, in work, in justice, in progress. But to the honour of Roman Catholicism I must say that it stood the test very well in Croatia and in Hungary in its struggle against Islam. German cathedral Protestantism failed in its test. It is destroyed as a religion, it exists only as an archival science. It ceased to be what Christianity really sought to be--a drama; it is transformed into an indifferent scientific medium for reading, exploring, classifying, comparing, criticising. It is no more a living, dramatic being--no more the serving, ruling and suffering Christ. There is very little heroic or divine in it!

I have no idea specifically what about Spain, Croatia, and Hungary St. Nikolai is talking about, but the question he's answering is an important one. What does the Church's response to persecution and opposition by the princes of this world say about its members and their understanding of the true faith?

Catholic 'Imagination'

I've always had a problem with the so-called Catholic mystical or contemplative tradition. Having studied it in div school, I never found it very personally edifying or, more importantly, for real.

As I slowly wade through St. Silouan the Athonite by Elder Sophrony, I keep coming across insightful comments that inadvertently explain my many discomforts with Tridentine Catholicism.

The second [pattern of logismoi] applies to those who practise the first form of prayer and indulge in 'visual meditation' -- who conjure up scenes from the life of Christ or similar sacred studies. It is generally neophytes who adopt this course. With this sort of imaginative prayer the mind is not contained in the heart for the sake of inner vigilance. The attention stays fixed on the visual aspect of the images considered as divine. This leads to psychological (emotional) excitement, which, carried to an extreme, may result in a state of pathological ecstasy. One rejoices in what one has 'attained', clings to the state, cultivates it, considers it to be 'spiritual', charismatic (the fruits of grace) and so sublime that one thinks oneself a saint and worthy of contemplating Divine mysteries. But in fact such states end in hallucinations, and if one does not succumb to physical illness, at the least one continues 'bewitched' and living in a world of fantasy.

I have yet to read a Catholic anticipate and defend these concerns, whose scope reaches everything from Ignatian to Carmelite spirituality. It probably says more about my ignorance, but the current de facto sense of the faithful is that human imagination is a wonderful unalloyed good to be given free reign "in the Spirit" so long as it does not directly conflict with Catholic doctrine. I hear this Oprahesque sentiment all the time from priests, bishops, and religious. See how we tend to define spirituality legalistically and negatively, devoid of Christological substance? Christ is more often than not a foil or a guard rail to our imagination, not the purifier of the imagination.

Prof. Michael Perry is liberal Catholic scum

Laurie Goodstein's recent NY Times piece appears to be a credible, truthful, and completely believeable expose of our bishops' prior notice that pervert priests were running around murdering young souls with little fear of episcopal discipline. Her coverage doesn't tell us much we didn't already know. And it confirms my own disgust with the bishops' collective delusion and cowardice. The sanctity of their sacramental office remains the only thing we have with which to judge them. If it seems insufficient, then it is because we (lay & cleric alike) have clericalized it, bureaucratized it, degraded it, and made it small.

But leave it to our "liberal Catholic" brethren to outdo the NY Times in the cowardly anti-Catholic cheap shot department:

These are the men--the men!--whose insights regarding the complexity of human sexuality we are expected to genuflect before. Gimme a break. If women had been bishops--indeed, if mothers had been bishops--would this have happened?

He calls himself a "Catholic legal theorist" when the obvious rebuttal to this dreck -- since apparently so many out there must think likewise -- is that if children, puppies, or rocks were bishops the scandal wouldn't have happened either. If the Catholic Church or the human race didn't exist, the scandal wouldn't have happened either. And this is held out as a Catholic legal theorist's argument for women priests?

And is genuflection to the "insights" of the individuals who hold the office of bishop what we do when Catholics stand for orthodoxy? Funny, since that's quite the opposite from what I believe. I genuflect instead to the bishops' lack of personal or private insights. I bow to their conformity and conductivity to the fullness of the Apostolic teachings.

It is proof of their mindless commitment to secularist Protestant totalitarianism that liberal Catholics, instead of dealing with real suffering in a real world or a real Catholic Church, must twist everyone's suffering into a mere pretext for their own solipsistic worship of themselves and their Castro District Cosmos.

Anti-Obama fatigue

I used to love to hate Obama. Then the company started to stink. Count me in with the "disappointed but not outraged" sect of Catholics on the ND-Obama story. Podles, once again, sums up my ambivalence:

Both sides of the Obama controversy, however, demonstrate a Catholic tendency that does no good to the Church: the tendency to see everything in terms of will and obedience, that is, in the context of a voluntaristic approach to morality. Attempts to find a way in canon law to block the invitation are one sign of this attitude; but the defenses of Obama also demonstrate the influence of voluntarism.

If you're tired of the showboating, johnny-come-lately parade of bishops' letters and op-eds, you'll want to read the rest. Note that, once again, Podles is an orthodox Catholic who is not so naive to accept everything that "orthodox" or "conservative" Catholics do or say in the public square as marching orders. This skepticism has become a necessary disposition for all Catholics foolish enough to follow ecclesiastical politics.

The real battle for the soul of American Catholicism is not between the Commonweal/America and First Things/Crisis Catholics. Both need to fight themselves (agere contra) a lot more. Only in asceticism does the mind find a defense against the silliness of the public square, naked or not.

I used to believe that the problem with the academic ivory tower was that the "Life of the Mind" fantasia it worships is too disembodied and abstract. But I don't think that's it. To the contrary, it's not scornful of "the world" and "the flesh" enough. If ND wants to embody Catholic intellectualism, it would impress me far more if it abandoned the boringly superficial and moralistic ideologies of tolerance, diversity, dialogue, etc., and embraced the monastery as the archetype of the intellectual life.

Asceticism, Repentance, and Eucharist -- next to that, how do we let Tolerance, Diversity, and Dialogue dominate the horizon of Catholic academia? Therein lies ND's real problem. Pro-life crusader bishops run into the same contradiction when they gesticulate more outrage over this symbolic crisis than they do over the persistence of clerical sexual predators and bureaucratic coverups under their watch.

Clergy Abuse Matters: World vs. Church

First Things has an open debate between victims' attorney Marci Hamilton and diocesan defense attorney L. Martin Nussbaum over statutes of limitation. The World: 1; The Church: 0

Philokalia Republic has a fine summary of the National Review Board's report on the staggering costs of clergy abuse for 2007 & 2008. The World: 1; The Church: 0

The World: 2; The Church: 0

Our dear hierarchy, evidently, is still hiding behind purely secular (and frankly pathetic) corporate legal and public relations strategies. It's yet more evidence that the episcopacy is still pretty confused about what exactly a bishop IS (beyond mere validity and liceity) in the post-Vatican II world. If we need any proof that neither the letter nor spirit of Vatican II is self-interpreting, how Lumen Gentium has done little to provide concrete guidance or even clarity of thought as we weather this shameful "filth" (to use Benedict's term) in our hierarchy should be plenty.

Malcolm X the Conservative

Shelby Steele is always a refreshing tonic on race matters.

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. I always secretly loved Malcolm X more than Martin Luther King Jr. because Malcolm wanted a fuller human dignity for blacks -- one independent of white moral wrestling. In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.

I've also, more often than not, found myself the oddball conservative for loving Malcolm over Martin. But Steele's WSJ op-ed for today is not really about Malcolm so much as the more fundamental problems in the GOP's metanarrative which prevent it from getting a fair hearing in an American electorate hungry for national justification and sanctification.

As a theological aside, somewhere in the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Protestant theology of redemption and eschatology got transferred from the church to the nation-state. Bleeding heart activism is the Protestant work ethic projected onto the political and social realm. What the activists always fail to question is the deification of the State.

The Papist Way

The American Papist has surged in the last year into the upper echelons of Catholic blogdom. I've been very impressed by Peters the Lesser's tenacious coverage of Church news. But it wasn't till today when I read his brief comment on the news of declining American Christianity that I came to regard him as a true Catholic "it-getter":

Folks, we have work to do. And we can start by attending to our own affairs - becoming more faithful ourselves is the first step to renewing our culture. And we must allow Christ to transform ourselves before He can transform others through us. So, know your faith, live your faith, love your faith. That's the papist way.

No ideological cant. No ultramontanist passive-aggressiveness. No whiny victimization mentality. No political camp. No traditionalist liturgical fascism. No moralistic blame games. No neocon Americanism. Just proper papism.

More Mahony baloney

I greatly admire and respect Prof. Garnett for being an outspoken orthodox Catholic lawyer. But here's an example of how corporate defense expertise can cloud one's regard of the Church as a sui generis organizational client. Garnett is more precise about the criminal statutes, but Podles gets the bigger picture. Compare and contrast.

Dr. Leon Podles:

U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien is known for novel applications of law in going after outrageous behavior. He is trying to nail Cardinal Mahoney on grounds of fraud for failing to provide honest services. It will be a difficult case. Although actions of Mahoney reek of perjury, being an accessory before the act and after the act to felony, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, he is slippery enough to escape indictment, since these charges are hard to prove.

Cardinal Mahoney, along with many bishops, did something morally wrong in inflicting known abusers on unsuspecting parishes. The problem is whether they did anything illegal. Law are made to cover only crimes that people probably commit. As an extreme example, a German helped someone commit suicide and then ate part of his body. The German courts discovered there is no law against cannibalism in Germany – no one ever thought to pass one. Similarly, no one ever thought to make it a crime to put known pedophiles in parishes with access to children, because no one thought anyone would be so depraved and hard-hearted as to do that. Our lawmakers were insufficiently acquainted with Catholic bishops.

Prof. Rick Garnett:

Putting aside the serious and interesting church-autonomy questions, this use of the wire-fraud statute strikes me (and, I gather from the news, many others) as big-time prosecutorial grandstanding and overreaching.

Hypnotic Planet

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

Tools for Obama

The hysteria over Obama's selection of Rick Warren as The Inaugural Invocationater is embarrassingly obvious as staged circus, as are most morality plays. Get the gay activist set to steam red in the face in public and Obama wins more evangelical points. The more crazy rhetoric about conservatives as fascists, anti-Semites, and all-purpose haters and Obama's appeasement policy as cowardly and backward, the better. Now we're hearing conservative pastors on TV defending Obama's virtual virtues of inclusivity and "disagreeing without being disagreeable." I heard one on FOX yesterday stating as simple fact that Obama is opposed to gay marriage. A social conservative holding Obama out to be of one mind with him without Obama ever actually committing to it! The One doesn't even need plausible deniability. Amazing. Obama once again triagulates social conservatives against social liberals and risks nothing in the process. All he needs to do is keep his mouth shut and let the two sides eat each other up. Did I say amazing?

Warren furthermore takes yet another step towards assuming the Rev. Billy Graham Chair of President-Stroking Pastoral Theology. More glory for the Kingdom! Or more glorious book sales, profits from which will of course be generously funneled to the poor dark people somewhere out there. Warren gets to chortle on TV about his new wave brand of merely Dobson/Falwell-free Christianity in the face of fuming propagandizing media attack dogs. Oh, the poor martyr, standing up to the brutal violence of imperial camera lights.

Obama gets to cozy up with the nation's First Pastor-dude who paved the way for Purpose-Driven (TM) pragmatic politics.

I can't figure out whether I should marvel at Obama's political manipulativeness or weep for how easy America is making things for him.

Cao, Jindal & Asian-American Catholics

It's officially a banner year for our rarefied demographic. Or, it's just another colorful hiccup in Louisiana politics. Then again, Louisianans seem to love keeping their political hiccups going (see Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish).

The GOP is now taking stock of the role of minority ethnic conservatives in rejuvenating the party (Jindal and Cao, as far as I know, are not products of any self-conscious marketing effort to mobilize the Asian-American electorate). Asian America might want to note how religion can sharpen that which makes AA perspectives unique in America, as well how our own captivity to elitist and materialist liberal ideologies cheapens the legacy of our forebears. Liberal Catholics might want to reassess how their "third-world liberation theologies" produce more dictators and terrorists than honest politicians like Jindal and Cao.

Dawkins & Chesterton

I was reading about Richard Dawkins' latest foray into Cluelessness and vaguely recalled a Chesterton quote on insanity and reason. So turning to Google, I found this:

Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic; I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

I respect Chesterton a lot, but I'm no cult follower. And here he's at his most annoying. Poets don't go mad? Maybe if all you read is Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Modernist and Beat poets aside, G.K. certainly was not oblivious to the Romantics, was he? Onto the next Google search result:

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

OK, there's the Chesterton I know and love.

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? Are they not both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"

Somebody, please give Dawkins a Chesterton book!

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Poor Dawkins. All the more so after watching him wet himself in Ben Stein's Expelled.

Interview with a Vampire Judge

The Nov08 issue of St. Anthony's Messenger has an interview with the chair of the National Review Board, Judge Michael Merz. It's an eye-roller. Eye started to gravitate upward with this section on bishops in non-compliance with the Charter:

Q. Can anything be done to compel them to participate? Is it that the eparchies do not feel that they must respond to directives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops since they represent Eastern Catholic Churches?

A. No, I don’t think it’s that. Audits are not cheap. Eparchies cover a lot of geographical territory, which makes the audits more expensive. The 2007 audit was accomplished by having one or two auditors on site in each diocese/eparchy, under the direction of the Gavin Group.

The Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, is a case unto itself. They don’t participate either in the audits or in providing data to CARA. Bishop Fabian Bruskewicz says he is observing the canonical norms, as he is obliged to do by the law. [Bishop Bruskewicz says that following the Charter is optional.] I suppose he thinks he is answerable to only the pope. Why would anyone insist on his personal prerogative when what we are dealing with is the protection of children? I don’t understand.

In my letter which accompanied this report to Cardinal Francis George, the president of the bishops’ conference, I said that Bishop Bruskewicz’s refusal to participate, “though undoubtedly within an ordinary’s canonical power, scandalizes the faithful.”

The judge makes a good distinction with Eastern-rite eparchies' logistical difficulties in completing audits and achieving compliance. But beyond that it doesn't take much for him to reveal his managerial impatience and bias. Clearly, he believes the Charter to be a near-flawless piece of ecclesiastical legislation when it's not even particular law. He doesn't distinguish between the Charter and the Essential Norms (intentionally or ignorantly?). I'm already starting to smell that "I'm a John XXIII Catholic, not a JPII Catholic" attitude. As for "scandalizing the faithful," so is moralistic politics. The Judge already starts to lose objectivity here. All positive law, especially one as hastily drafted and politically forced as the Charter, is imperfect and demands caution. I don't think we should be told that a bishop is a scandal simply for refusing to comply with the Charter. Show me, don't just tell me. Otherwise, respect the episcopal office.

Q. Was it the seminary training they had?

A. The preponderance of offenders reported in the “Nature and Scope” study are priests who were trained before Vatican II. Nobody coming out of the seminary immediately began abusing. There’s a lapse time for everybody. And we’ve got to figure out why.

That is why it is really important to do a serious social-science study of the pattern, instead of accepting people’s off-the-cuff explanations, like suggesting that the sexual revolution hit Catholic priests the same as everyone else, but 10 years later. Or suggesting this all could have been avoided if Catholic priests were allowed to marry. Or suggesting gay priests be eliminated. None of these things will explain the data we now have.

Alright. Judge Merz is now coming off the rails. First of all, it says everything that he believes more social science is what the Church needs. The Linacre Centre publishes an entire book on the effects of the Church's evaporating asceticism after Vatican II, which everyone, including the National Review Board of primarily liberal Catholics, ignored, yet Merz would lump such approaches in with all those "off-the-cuff explanations." The greatest flaw of the Review Board was that it is composed of secularized, technocratic, Americanist Catholics who know nothing about the Catholic Tradition (but presume to know everything) and who place ultimate faith, hope, and love in the triumph of Science and instrumental rationality. Judge Merz's comments here only corroborates my impression.

Q. Is that the reason for the upcoming “Causes and Context” study?

A. Yes, that’s precisely what we’re studying. The “Causes and Context” study is ongoing, but needs more funding. The bishops pledged a million dollars for this study, and have already released, I think, $400,000. There are other sources from which we are trying to raise the money. We’ve made applications to several federal agencies that would ordinarily fund studies of this kind, like the Centers for Disease Control. And we have made some requests to various foundations and individuals who are known to contribute to Catholic causes. So at present we are not expecting to have to go back to the bishops for more money.

There are few better indicators of a secularist technocrat than the belief that throwing huge sums of money at a problem is some necessary precondition for effectiveness and success. Did you catch that? We need the Center for Disease Control to help us figure out why priests rape young men. Disease control???!!! Notice also the confidence Merz accords to our 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations to do what the Church presumably cannot do. Nonprofits are another green zone in American politics for ideologues to access the reins of the Church. With the abuse scandal, secularism is digging its claws deeper into our Apostolic Church. But Judge Merz is a graduate of Harvard College and Law School, so who cares what the Fathers of the Church and their present-day representatives might have to say about these things, especially when those reps today are abandoning their own traditions and bowing the knee to the "expertise" of "lay faithful" who drool after a "democratic" Church.

I believe, however, we need to do some serious scientific study of the effectiveness of these programs. Once we’ve got the “Causes and Context” study fully funded, that will be our next research goal. We’ve had some preliminary discussions with top experts in the country about designing an effectiveness study.

The Catholic Medical Association recently denounced safe-environment training as ineffective. I found their study disappointing. All they did was a literature review of programs in public schools in the 1980s. We had offered to collaborate with them, but they were not interested in collaboration. Their review of the literature was highly selective. If you want to find out whether a program works, you test kids before they take the program and then you test kids after and you see if there is a change in their awareness and you see over time what the changes in reporting are.

Dr. David Finkelhor of New Hampshire reviewed some of the more recent studies for us [the National Review Board]. One conclusion he reached was that safe-environment training may not prevent the first incident of abuse, but it teaches kids to call abuse by its right name and it gets them to report a first instance. Then we’ll have an intervention in the abuse career of the perpetrator and get him off the street, rather than having repetition after repetition.

So not even the Catholic Medical Association (which happens to have a good reputation of respecting Catholic orthodoxy) has enough "scientific" authority and expertise for Judge Merz. More "training" and "studies show" lingo. Catholic kids are just mechanistic objects of social engineering, not souls who may be negatively affected by premature exposure to slipshod secularist models of sex ed.

Q. Should the fact that 82 percent of the victims who have reported abuse were male and 18 percent were female send up a red flag about homosexuality as being part of this whole issue?

A. Whether the flag is red or not, it’s a data point that definitely has to be considered. It is a different pattern from society at large. Typically, we know from victimization studies about child abuse outside the Church, in society at large, that girls are more likely to be abused than boys and, in addition, that boys underreport abuse. The fact that we have such a high percentage of abuse of males is definitely something that needs explanation.

In the “Causes and Context” study, we hope to figure out the extent to which this is opportunity, the extent it is sexual orientation. When we were kids, it would have been more likely our parents would have let me, a boy, go for a weekend on a camping trip with a priest they knew, than you, a girl. That’s likely to be some piece of the explanation.

Q. Are there other things which make the pattern of abuse in the Church different?

A. This is not classic pedophilia in many ways, although there’s some of that. A few of the abusers have abused lots and lots of little kids. Almost 50 percent of the offenders that we know about offended only once—or at least we know about only one offense they committed. And the bulk of the offenses are against 10- to 14-year-olds. Most true pedophiles prefer their victims younger than that.

Ahhh, a glimpse of sanity.

Q. Is a new Church growing out of this mess?

A. I think we are making good progress. I am very encouraged in a couple of places. There are reformers saying, “We ought to watch bishops more carefully.” An important step in the right direction is serious lay involvement in the Church. The diocesan financial councilors should have been taken more seriously. Nobody in the Vatican has told the U.S. bishops, “We don’t want any more of that National Review Board—get rid of those people.” That’s a good sign.

So much for sanity. Back to "We Are Church" and "Call to Action." Not a single mention of prayer, ascetical formation, discipline, or virtue. No, lay leadership will solve all. Once the Catholic Church looks like the Episcopal or Presbyterian churches, all will be well.

Transparency in the Church has to be learned as a way of life. That is part of what Teresa [Kettelkamp, the executive director of the bishops’ Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection] meant in her cover letter to this report when she spoke about incorporating the Charter and its articles into the daily fabric of the Church.

Transparency, si; incorporating the Charter into my daily fabric, NO! Has the Charter really replaced the Breviary? Cuz if it has, then the Catholic Church is just a figment of Merz's nostalgia. Good for fodder in novels like Angela's Ashes or movies like Exorcist, not worth much else.

Is Kmiec a Pro-Life Dark Knight?

McCain made an excellent point during the Hofstra Debate comparing himself on the Breyer & Ginsberg Senate confirmations to Obama on Roberts & Alito. McCain clearly has not voted ideologically pro-life. Obama on the other hand has been nothing but ideological on judicial appointments. He lied on national TV with his cheap talk about "No Litmus Test" when everything else he's said and done on the matter testifies to the contrary. Make no mistake, Obama will only nominate Roe v. Wade absolutists to the bench in lockstep with NARAL, with one possible exception.

I've been wondering whether this is precisely how Kmiec may be trying to play the Trojan horse. Perhaps this is where Kmiec's seemingly disingenuous apologetics for Obama can serve not only his ambitions for judicial enthronement but for the pro-life agenda. The more ire Kmiec can draw from Christian pro-lifers, the more insulated he becomes from pro-choice suspicions that he is just a recruit for Carhart and the Catholic Five; and the more Obama can appear to be the bipartisan aisle-crosser by appointing Kmiec, that is, if Obama takes his own bipartisan rhetoric seriously.

The probability of success with this Dark Knight strategy is slim if not null when you consider the number of worry-free pro-choice jurists who have been waiting over eight years for judicial advancement. Then there's the problem for Kmiec of a Democratic supermajority in the Senate, which considerably devalues his strategy. The more conservative the Senate, the greater Kmiec's value to an Obama presidency. That doesn't look likely. On the other side, Dark Knight strategy has tremendous downside risk. Kmiec risks further confusion of the Catholic community on the Number One ethical issue on the Church's bulletin board. He risks ennobling Obama for being a principal architect in a Machiavellian mindgame with the electorate.

But now that an Obama presidency seems to be a foregone conclusion, Kmiec's position may be the pro-life movement's best hope. Obama clearly has no affection for those who have not coddled and played defense for him. His remarkable ability to emote temperance and generosity is a testament to his discipline. But he has been clearly frustrated by how the pro-life movement has not leaped en masse into his beneficent arms. He clearly believes he has bent over backwards to move the ball forward for the pro-life movement. He probably wonders why pro-lifers can't see it his way and chalks it up to GOP propaganda enslavement machines. He clearly does not understand how his substantive abortion activism could be seen as anything but moderate.

In other words, there's no way he's going to appoint even moderates like Roberts or Alito. Only Kmiecs have a slim shot, and only because they truly have taken fire from their original tribe for Obama. The more he can make a spectacle of himself as the sacrificial lamb who has been slain in martyrdom for the One by those mean, Pharisaical Communion-denying Bishops, the greater shall be his reward. There really is no rhyme or reason to the ridiculous arguments made by Kmiec otherwise.

But that's the problem with the Dark Knight -- there may be no public reward or vindication. Or maybe there will be. Maybe game theory is all there is to morality in this life.