Scary Nuns Terrify Vatican

Catherine of Siena explains
to Gregory XI why he
should move to Rome

The Vatican has always been scared of forceful nuns. Even (and perhaps especially) the three female doctors of the church made prelates nervous.

In the fourteenth century, Catherine of Siena meddled in papal politics and brought the Avignon pope back to Rome.

In the sixteenth century, Teresa of Avila survived an investigation by the Spanish Inquisition of her mystical writings (and Jewish ancestry). 

In the nineteenth century, Thérèse of Lisieux disregarded the commands of her priest and Vatican officials until the pope gave in and let her do what she wanted.

And yesterday, following a two-year investigation, 80 percent of American nuns came under Vatican fire.

The Washington Post reported that

the Vatican has launched a crackdown on the umbrella group that represents most of America’s 55,000 Catholic nuns, saying that the group was not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination. Rome also chided the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for sponsoring conferences that featured “a prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
     ... One of the groups singled out in the criticism is Network, a social justice lobby created by Catholic sisters 40 years ago that continues to play a leading role in pushing progressive causes on Capitol Hill.

Interestingly, yesterday's Post also carried a short article by Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the maligned Network. Campbell, writing in honor of Network's 40th anniversary, described the group's activities as

lobbying our elected officials to consider the needs of people living in poverty, the left-out, the marginalized in our society. We have worked on many issues of economic justice, immigration, peace building, health care reform and the environment. We have studied the adverse impact of welfare reform especially in a down economy. We have partnered with Iraqis in helping them to build lives and an economy in post-sanction, post-invasion Iraq. We have partnered with thousands of people around the country in articulating what is the common good that we seek in order to realize the promise of our Constitution.

Even as the Vatican was worrying about the self-sacrificing sisters, yet another priest was placed on administrative leave for sexual misconduct. A third article in yesterday's Post noted that

from 2004 until last year, [this priest] was director of the [Northern Virginia diocese's] Office of Child Protection and Safety, which trains church employees and volunteers to spot abuse and monitors youth activities “to ensure that all contact with young people is appropriate,” its Web site says.

Yes, every organization has its bad apples. But this particular organization, remember, is the one that did not punish Boston's Cardinal Law after his part in that city's sex scandal went public, but rather rewarded him with a cushy appointment in Rome and, last year, a lavish 80th birthday celebration.

As I understand the Gospels, Jesus had a lot in common with the nuns. He identified with the poor and spent a large percentage of his workday on health care. He sent women on apostolic missions (see Jn 4, the woman at the well, and Jn 20, Mary Magdalene in the garden). He protected children. "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me," he thundered, "it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Mt 18.6).

Apparently Jesus's priorities are very different from the Vatican's.

Want to speak up in a language the Vatican understands? Donate now to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious or to Network.

For further reading: The Vatican's latest crackdown is covered thoroughly and well by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times and by Joshua J. McElwee in the National Catholic Reporter.

THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN by Garth Stein

Book publisher's marketing department's hypothetical dream plot, 2012 version:
Jacqueline Kennedy's toy poodle, having been transformed by a vision of heaven, moves to a decrepit Provençal farmhouse, falls in love with a shih tzu, and gives birth (without anesthetics) to a litter of pleasantly diverse puppies, who, being both French and Chinese, are perfectly housebroken by age six weeks.

Occasionally while reading The Art of Racing in the Rain I wondered if author  Garth Stein ever worked in that marketing department (short answer: probably not). He sure knows how to load a book with crowd-pleasing elements:

The dog. Like Chet, the narrator of Spencer Quinn's wonderful comic detective stories, narrator Enzo is an articulate canine of indeterminate ancestry. Chet, however, is much doggier. Enzo, by contrast, is literary, culturally sophisticated, and psychologically astute--practically an Edwardian English butler. The book does not reveal whether he ever scoots his bottom on the rug.

The dad. Like Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Stein's Art has to do with values, machines, and fathers, but it is blessedly shorter and simpler than Pirsig's tome--none of those lengthy digressions about ancient philosophy that gave Zen weight but also made it harder to read.

The dying woman. Like far too many popular books, films, and songs, Racing in the Rain centers on a dying young woman--in this case, with brain cancer. When was the last time you wept for a fictional dying man? Just wondering.

The dysfunction. Like just about everything by Jodi Picoult, Racing features people in dysfunctional families fighting with, against, and for one another.

The driver. Families, love, death, parenting--would a guy read this book? Hey, let's throw in a whole lot about auto racing! Cars! Technique! Competitions! And let's make Dad a driver! Should work.

The dharma.  Add a few grains of motivational spirituality--the cryptic mantra, "That which you manifest is before you" (huh?); the expectation of reincarnation; the belief that the mind, or the will, controls events; the valuing of the soul above the body--why, it almost sounds philosophical, yet you don't have to think very hard.

The dénouement.  May I tell you that the ending is reasonably happy? And that it takes place in Italy? What's not to like?

Well, it worked. I--and a million or so other people--liked The Art of Racing in the Rain. It's not a great book, but it's well plotted and cleverly written. Sometimes you laugh; sometimes you cry. Sometimes you laugh at yourself for being manipulated into crying. But it's a pleasant read. And it does make me wonder what my dogs are thinking.

Dear Mr. Romney: Don't lie. Care.

Dear Mr. Romney:

I am a woman. Like most other women, I am not likely to vote for you. Your unpopularity among women worries you, I know. That's no doubt why you're claiming that Mr. Obama's policies have been disastrous for women's jobs. Promoting a cynical lie, however, is not a good way to attract women's votes.

These days the word lie is thrown around too often and too loosely. Since I am accusing you of using a lie--a serious charge--let me define my terms. A lie is a statement intended to deceive. It can be nonfactual or factual; the speaker's intent is what matters. President Bush was probably not lying when he said Iraq had WMD, even though they didn't. If he believed what he said, though it was untrue, it was not a lie.

By contrast, when your press secretary tweeted that "92.3% jobs lost under [Obama} r women's," she was making a true statement. She may or may not have intended to deceive: I don't know if she paid attention to all the relevant facts before tweeting. By now, though, the facts have been checked, and you have no excuse for repeating her claim on your website. To do so is to turn truth into falsehood.

Here are the facts: The recession officially began in December 2007, while Mr. Bush was president. From that date until June 2009, six months into Mr. Obama's presidency, men lost some 5.3 million jobs while women lost about 2.1 million. This is a typical pattern, says Betsey Stevenson, a business and public policy professor at Princeton University: "In every recession men’s job loss occurs first and most, with unemployment rates for men being more cyclical than those of women’s."

My mother finished secretarial school and began her first job in 1929, the year the Great Depression hit. She managed a small office for maybe half a dozen church administrators--all male, of course. Then the stock market crashed, donations plummeted, and most of the men were let go.  Before long the only people left in the office were the president and my poorly paid 20-year-old mother.

That's how it has always worked. Men lose jobs first; women lose  jobs later. Still, with women making up 47% of the labor force (2010 figures), they "account for just 39.7 percent of the total" jobs lost from the beginning of the recession to the present. It is grossly misleading to imply that the recession was caused or worsened by Mr. Obama, and that it was harder on women than on men. You need to distance yourself from that claim, not promote it.

The recession was indeed hard on many women--and on just about everybody else except people in your income bracket, Mr. Romney. I suspect you truly believe that you are better suited than Mr. Obama to restore America's prosperity. Do you want women to give you a chance to try? Then forget about badmouthing the president. Instead, show us you care.

A lot of us, as you've pointed out, need work. How would your administration help us meet our obligations and feed our families until we find it? A lot of us, or our family members, have serious health problems. How would you help us pay for medical care? A lot of us want to strengthen our public schools. How would you improve the quality of elementary and high school education? A lot of us would like to send our children to college. How would you make higher education affordable? A lot of us are concerned about the effects of pollution on our families' health. How would you keep our food and air clean? A lot of us are getting older and frailer. How would you deal with our needs for housing and medical care?

I know that some vocal Americans believe the federal government should do just about nothing except arm our young people and send them out to kill. I know there are people who cry "socialism!" whenever the government tries to make people's lives better. Fortunately, most Americans disagree with such extremists. And yet there are honest differences between conservatives and progressives as to how the common good is best served.

Mr. Romney, if you have ways of serving the common good that you think are more effective than Mr. Obama's ways, please tell us about them. Don't worry about your supposedly stiff persona; it doesn't bother us nearly as much as it bothers the press. And don't try to scare us with lies and negative ads. That just turns us off. If you convince us that you care about us when we need help, and if you offer us solutions that will help us survive and thrive, we will listen. Otherwise, we'll vote for the candidate who does.

QUIETLY IN THEIR SLEEP by Donna Leon

This sixth installment in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series raises provocative religious and political questions. The story line leads to probability, not certainty. The context of the story - corrupt churchmen and public officials - is suggested, not offered as fact.

Is one of the priests in the story a killer?

Is another priest a child molester?

Did certain directives come from the Vatican - and if so, from whom?

Is Opus Dei a venal, murderous cult - or simply a secret society of the super-pious?

In a city where only 15% of the inhabitants attend church every Sunday, how do religious authorities get so much influence over political figures?

Normally I prefer detective stories to end with the puzzle solved, the criminal(s) brought to justice, and order at least temporarily restored. I'll make an exception for Quietly in Their Sleep (whose U.K. edition is titled The Death of Faith). Maybe that's because, to skeptics like Brunetti, Paola (Brunetti's wife), Elettra (the vice-questore's personal assistant), and me, the evidence in this story for ecclesial malfeasance ranges from persuasive to conclusive.

And maybe I resonate with this story because, although it was first published 15 years ago, it seems relevant to America's 2012 political season, with all our arguing about gay marriage and abortion and contraception and the proper role of bishops in forming public policy. These are not the issues in Quietly in Their Sleep, but our political discussions today, like the plot of this book, focus on the age-old question of just how much power religious organizations should wield in a democracy.

I am a religious person, a semi-lapsed Catholic who goes to mass (Episcopal) every week. I believe churches do an enormous amount of good in the world. I appreciate their call to high moral standards. But churches are made up of, and ruled by, human beings, and none of us is entirely trustworthy (cf. original sin). It is good to remember that Lord Acton's famous dictum, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," referred primarily to religious power.

After centuries of abuse from religious power-holders, a number of countries fought revolutions and established secular states - that is, political systems that kept church and state separate. America was the leader of the pack. Italy, by contrast, never completely separated religious and civil power. Quietly in Their Sleep describes what goes on when the two powers are in bed with each other. It's a fascinating detective story, not a political pamphlet, but now and then one of the characters' exasperation bursts forth. Here's Paola Brunetti, for example, arguing with her husband about the opt-out religious education their children are receiving in their public school:

If you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or, if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble.

___________________________________

If you're new to Donna Leon's mysteries, you might want to check my reviews of book 3, Dressed for Death, and book 4, Death and Judgment; or just start reading book 1, Death at La Fenice. Many hours of enjoyment await you: book 21, Beastly Things, was published last week.

How soon can we come up with a health-care policy that makes sense?

The U.S. Supreme Court

Maybe the Affordable Care Act is constitutional and maybe it's not. If it turns out to be constitutional, maybe it's good legislation and maybe it's not. In any case, it's looking increasingly likely that the Supreme Court, come June, will strike down at least the requirement that everyone buy health insurance. And if the mandate goes, two other requirements will most likely go with it: Once again insurers will be able to reject or refuse to renew applicants. And once again Americans with pre-existing conditions will be uninsurable.*

Let me tell you four short stories about friends of mine. These are true stories, not hypothetical examples. I have changed nothing but the names of the people involved. I am not arguing on behalf of the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. I'm just saying that all of these people had serious problems before it was passed, and some of them are doing much better now because of it.

1. John, a pastor, was married to Jane, who worked in publishing. They were well insured - until John came down with a debilitating disease. They would have to rely on Jane's insurance, even though her job was over an hour's drive from their home and John's health-care provider. Changing jobs was out of the question; no new insurer would consider adding John to their policy. So for some 10 years, Jane worked full time, commuted over two hours a day, and worked evenings and weekends as her husband's primary caregiver. When he died, she quit her job and applied for insurance on her own. Every insurer turned her down.

2. Bill and Betty have a child with a learning disorder. When he finished high school, he went to work, but the only jobs he qualifies for are low-paying, without benefits. In addition, the nature of his disorder makes it hard for him to keep a job. He has persisted, however, and he is gradually learning how to be employable. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, his parents' insurance pays for the medications that allow him to work. They wonder what he will do if his insurance is taken away.

3. Dan and DeAnn have a similar story. Their daughter, in her early 20s, had a life-threatening physical problem that was correctable by expensive surgery. Until it was corrected, she was unable to work and earn her own insurance. Before the Affordable Care Act, she would have been too old to benefit from her parents' insurance, but once the act went into effect, they were able to put her on their policy. This story has a happy ending: she has had the surgery and is doing well.

4. Martin was a truck driver and Melissa was a secretary until a series of illnesses - heart disease, strokes,  ulcers, dementia - forced Martin to quit work and go on disability. Fortunately for him, he is a veteran with excellent health benefits at a nearby veterans' hospital. Melissa took over the full-time home care he now requires. Unfortunately for Melissa, she had no insurance and was too young for Medicare. A strong believer in self-sufficiency, she tried to ignore her arthritis and diabetes. After ten years of giving her husband excellent care, she finally turned 65 and was able to sign up for Medicare.

My stories are all about hard-working, responsible people who would eagerly buy health insurance if they possibly could. Before the Affordable Care Act, sadly, they could not. People on the left and on the right agree - the Act is flawed. But if it is thrown out, what will happen to people like my friends? What will we put in its place? And how soon can we come up with a health-care policy that makes sense?
___________________________

*If the mandate to buy insurance is struck down but these two requirements are allowed to stand, you can be sure that insurance premiums will skyrocket and the number of uninsured Americans will reach new highs.

Grammar sins: a case study

From Nicolas Poussin,
 Le Christ et la femme adultère

You know the story. A woman was caught in the act. The religious leaders grabbed her and brought her to Jesus. Are you a biblical literalist? they asked. Because if you are, shouldn't we stone her? What would Moses do?

Quick, now. What did Jesus say?

About.com's French Language website quotes his words thus: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

My inner grammarian wincing, I dashed off an email to the website's author: "That should be 'Let him who is without sin ... ' (i.e., 'Let him ... cast the first stone'; I don't think you'd be tempted to write 'Let he ... cast the first stone').

Of course she knew the difference - she herself is a grammarian. But, she said, she was just quoting the Bible, which says "Let he ...."

Actually it doesn't, at least not in the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the New American Bible, the Common English Bible, the Douay-Reims Version, or presumably any other version that uses copyeditors. Lacking a Bible at hand, she explained, she had found the verse online. Just Google it, she told me.

So I did. I am pleased to report that when I compared "Let him who is without sin" to "Let he who is without sin," correct grammar won, 3.8 million to 1.3 million.

I also learned that "Let He Who Is Without Sin" is the name of a Star Trek episode.

It's a good thing modern English tends to use only three pronoun cases (such as he, him, his). We'd never learn to speak Hungarian - it has at least 18 cases.

But hey, if you use the wrong case, I won't stone you. I'm not without sin: I refuse to say "It is I."

THE LAST DETECTIVE ... and others by Peter Lovesey

Several weeks ago one of my favorite magazine editors asked if I'd be interested in reviewing Peter Lovesey's forthcoming novel, Cop to Corpse. Yes, I said, provided I could do so from a position of ignorance--I had read none of the 11 other books in the series. OK, said the editor, but bear in mind that your readers will want to know "whether you felt motivated, by the time you’d finished this book, to go back to number 1 in the series."

Dear Reader, I'm having a hard time finding time to write the review. Not only did I feel motivated to go back to number 1, I've now also read numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8; number 9 is on my nightstand; and numbers 7, 10, and 11 are on hold at the library.

If you haven't yet met Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Avon and Somerset CID, you have a lot to look forward to. Overweight ("burly," he'd rather phrase it), abrasive, sexist, impatient with standard procedures, he does not play well with others. But he is not a climber, is willing to admit his mistakes, and doggedly pursues the truth at whatever cost. Sort of like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, but not as noir.

Not noir at all, actually. These books are about 3/4 police procedural, 1/4 comic novel. For instance, here's how Lovesey introduces his famous sleuth in book 1, The Last Detective:

In the Bristol city mortuary a body lay on a steel trolley. In profile the swell of the stomach suggested nothing less than a mountainous landscape. Or to an imaginative eye it might have been evocative of a dinosaur lurking in a primeval swamp, except that a brown trilby hat of the sort seen in 1940s films rested on the hump. The body was clothed in a double-breasted suit much creased at the points of stress, gray in color, with a broad check design--well known in the Avon & Somerset Police as the working attire of Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond. His silver-fringed bald head was propped on a rubber sheet he had found folded on a shelf. He was breathing evenly.

I'll have more to say about the detective superintendent when I write the magazine review. Meanwhile, here's a chronological list of the dozen books in this series to date. You can begin with any of them, but book 1 is not a bad place to start.

Bath, U.K., where much of the action takes place

The Last Detective, 1991
Diamond Solitaire, 1992
The Summons, 1995
Bloodhounds, 1996
Upon a Dark Night, 1997
The Vault, 1999
Diamond Dust, 2002
The House Sitter, 2003
The Secret Hangman, 2007
Skeleton Hill, 2009
Stagestruck, 2011
Cop to Corpse, June 2012