While We’re At It

• There will of course be more in these pages on the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris decision handed down by the Supreme Court this term. As is not infrequently the case, it was a close vote (5-4) but that in no way diminishes its potential, and indeed almost certain, implications for the future. Of course Zelman is an enormous boost for the proponents of parental choice in education and especially for poor families such as those in Cleveland who had previously been confined to the thoroughly rotten system of government schooling. The approval of vouchers that parents can use in any available school, including religious schools, does not mean that the battle for parental choice is won. In every state the formidable forces defending the status quo, notably the teachers’ unions, can be counted upon to obstruct educational freedom every step of the way. But with Zelman the long and dreary history of antireligious (mainly anti-Catholic) discrimination in education, based on a twisted reading of the no-establishment provision of the Religion Clause, has been, at least in principle, rejected. Therein lies the historic significance of the decision, a significance that reaches far beyond education, as important as educational freedom undoubtedly is. But, as I say, more on these matters later.

• This will come as something of a surprise to people who have known Norman Podhoretz as a writer of sharp-edged political and cultural criticism. In his thirty-five years as editor of Commentary, through hundreds of articles and a shelf of books, he has been both acclaimed and derided as a champion of polemics without apology. Now he has produced a big (almost four hundred pages) and remarkable book of a very different genre, The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are (Free Press). Not that the book is devoid of polemics, but it is more importantly a work of love that puts one in mind of what Alan Jacobs in a recent book calls the hermeneutics of love (see Public Square, June/July). In writing as an “amateur,” a lover of the Hebrew Bible, Podhoretz resumes an affair of his youth when he studied Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and, later, was a protégé of literary giants such as F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. Podhoretz has immersed himself in the vast literature, both Jewish and Christian, on the prophets, but wears his learning lightly as he speaks about the prophets in his own voice and with a sense of fresh discovery that carries the reader along on a journey through the history of Israel that combines narrative force, literary appreciation, and a bracing application of the prophetic message to our own time. Informed but not intimidated by the academic experts, Podhoretz frames the story around several arguments that some will consider controversial. First, he says that all the prophets, and indeed all the writers of the Hebrew Bible, must be understood as engaged in a war against idolatry. This he says against scholars who contend that the later (he prefers “classical”) prophets invented a monotheism unknown to the likes of Abraham and Moses. Second, he persuasively argues-against a long history of liberal interpretation-that the prophets did not pit morality against ritual or the prophetic against the priestly. Third-and this against the same liberal interpretation-the prophets do not represent a breakthrough from tribal “particularism” to “universalism.” Rather, the reality and promise of the universal is to be discovered in the particular of the Jewish people. The book concludes with a convincing description of the revival of pagan idolatries in our time, underscoring the abiding pertinence of the prophets. Regrettable in my view is the cursory dismissal of the continuing entanglement of Judaism and Christianity that has engaged the attention of both Jewish and Christian thinkers in the last hundred years (see my “Salvation Is from the Jews,’ FT, November 2001). For Podhoretz-as for many Christian thinkers in the liberal tradition he criticizes-Christianity is simply another religion based on Paul’s rejection of the law. That position raises questions of monumental complexity and importance for the identity of both Judaism and Christianity, and for the relationship between Christians and Jews, that deserve better than Podhoretz’s abrupt and apodictic rejectionism. With respect to the unbridgeable chasm between Judaism and Christianity, Podhoretz is a Jewish Schleiermacher. Nonetheless, The Prophets is a notable achievement that can be read, also by Christians, with great benefit and enjoyment. I do not remember a telling of the story that so gripped my attention since as a young seminarian I read John Bright’s A History of Israel. Incidentally, but of relevance to endless debates about translations, Podhoretz makes a strong case for the King James Version as best representing in English the nuances of Hebrew prose and poetry. Although, in light of more recent discoveries, he departs from the KJV on occasion, he comes close to suggesting that the king’s men were inspired. Of such are the many instructive charms and provocative contentions of The Prophets.

• Many subscribers say they read every word of every issue, but I expect that even the most zealous sometimes skip the masthead. In that event, they will have missed the news that Dr. Timothy George has joined the editorial board. Dr. George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, did both his masters and doctorate at Harvard University and is a church historian of distinction who has held important positions with the Southern Baptist Convention. He is also an invaluable partner in the ongoing project “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” He and his wife Denise have two children. We are privileged to have him on our editorial board.

• Whatever happened to the mandatum? I recognize the possibility that you have not asked that question lately, what with all the other problems afflicting the Catholic Church, but it’s a question worth asking. Recall that in 1990 John Paul II set forth a vision for the renewal of Catholic higher education in Ex Corde Ecclesiae (from the heart of the Church), and it took ten years for Rome and the American bishops to agree on how that vision was to be implemented. Part of the agreement was that people teaching Catholic theology should receive a mandatum (or mandate) from their bishop, certifying that what they say is Catholic theology is what the Church teaches. A simple matter of truth in advertising, one might think. Of course, liberal bishops balked and liberal academics railed against the alleged threat to academic freedom. This past June was the deadline set for obtaining a mandatum, but by then the bishops were caught up in the vortex of more pressing concerns. Between theologians’ objections and bishops’ reluctance to force the issue, “the mandatum will be one more thing that will disappear in the dustbin of history,” Peter C. Phan of Catholic University of America and outgoing president of the dissident Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) happily observes. It is by no means evident that, even without the scandals that have embroiled them, the bishops were very serious about the mandatum. Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati headed the committee in charge of “enforcement,” and he says, “This was thought to be, ‘Wow, the guillotine was set up in the public square, and heads will roll.’ That was never the intent.” Of course not. Compared with the moral deviations toward which many bishops have shown such tolerance, what is the academic misrepresentation of Catholic doctrine? John McCarthy, chairman of theology at Loyola University, Chicago, has even refused the repeated request of Francis Cardinal George to send him the names of theologians teaching there so that he can meet with them. “Even at the point of interviewing for faculty hiring, it’s illegal to ask a person’s religion,” says McCarthy. If you’re looking for someone to teach Catholic theology, it’s illegal to ask a candidate if he would teach Catholic theology? It would appear that Loyola Chicago is among the many schools that really do not care one way or the other, which was the reason for Ex Corde Ecclesiae in the first place. Stephen E. Fowl, chairman of theology at Loyola College in Maryland, says his department has no problem with the mandatum. “As we understand it,” he says, “what you are committing to doing is only teaching as Catholic doctrine what is Catholic doctrine, which seems to us to be primarily a matter of intellectual integrity.” He is right, but the dominant and rather odd position in the academic world of CTSA appears to be that one must choose between freedom and integrity. The bishops are not required to make public who has or has not received a mandatum, so nobody knows. The end result, it would seem, is that Ex Corde Ecclesiae is one more of the many magnificent visions set forth by John Paul II to which the American bishops, with relatively few exceptions, have turned a blind eye. It is a great and continuing sadness.

• Oh, but aren’t we wicked? Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times Book Review, discusses a really nasty novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq (pronounced WELL-beck). It’s called Platform and apparently (I have no intention of reading it) is about people who try to turn the world into a whorehouse. Shulevitz writes, “Like the dirty-minded oppositionalists who preceded him-the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Celine-Houellebecq skillfully transforms pornographic excess into social critique, and the return to normalcy into a capitulation to hypocrisy and spiritual death.” Oh, dear. Normalcy is hypocritical and stifling. There’s a fresh theme holding high promise for the revival of literature and the intellectual life, as every rebellious adolescent of the last 150 years has excitedly discovered. The New Statesman declares that Houellebecq is “the great chronicler of the moral and cultural emptiness of modern France.” Ms. Shulevitz is not about to take a back seat to France. Speaking on behalf of the moral and cultural emptiness of modern America, or at least of the New York Times, she declares that we, too, want novelists “to plumb our depths, to dredge up our excesses, to startle us into recognizing ourselves for the confused and desperate characters we have become.” Confused I’ll give her.

• “The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.” So says a character in Philip Pullman’s latest fantasy, The Amber Spyglass. One might note that if one is convinced Christianity is a mistake one could not find it convincing. Setting aside such quibbles, the popularity of Pullman’s overtly atheistic enterprise is worth noting and was brilliantly discussed in these pages by Sarah E. Hinlicky (“The End of Magic,” February 2002) and Daniel P. Moloney (Books in Review, May 2001). Writing in World, Gene Edward Veith notes that Pullman fans are being driven back to reading John Milton, and Paradise Lost in particular, to pick up the clues that Pullman inverts in his books. Veith expresses the hope that such readers, following in the steps of C. S. Lewis, may, despite themselves, be led to see with Milton that “Satan, for all his deceptions, turns out to be the real tyrant.” Inverting the inversion, so to speak.

• There has long been a more than modest coincidence, reaching legendary proportions in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, between aestheticism and a certain sexual bent. As with other lines of work such as hairdressing and fashion designing, those with an intense interest in liturgical niceties are thought, fairly or not, to tend toward the effete. Which is why it is-in addition to being scandalous-puzzling that the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions (FDLC) finds itself embarrassed by both its executive director and immediate past chairman being accused of doing wicked things with little boys. One hardly associates FDLC with aestheticism. On the contrary, much of what liturgical experts have done to Catholic liturgy in recent decades seems to represent a determined campaign best described as uglification. Or is a counter-aesthetic just another form of aestheticism? I’m trying to figure this one out.

• The truth is that many Catholics have stopped going to confession altogether. The attempt to change the name to the sacrament of penance and reconciliation probably didn’t help. Mothers used to say, “You’d better go to confession.” I wonder if a mother ever says, “You’d better go to the sacrament of penance and reconciliation.” But that’s probably a small factor in the neglect of the sacrament, which has been a matter of continuing concern to Rome. This May, John Paul II issued an apostolic letter, “Misericordia Dei,” stressing the significance of confession and underscoring the importance of the individual relationship between penitent and confessor. General confession and absolution, he pointed out, is reserved for cases of grave necessity, such as an imminent plane crash or troops going into battle, when individual confession is not possible. Another factor in the declining use of the sacrament, however, may seem small but I expect is very big in its effect, and I’m puzzled that I’ve never seen it mentioned in print. It is the present form of the preparatory or penitential rite at the beginning of Mass. The priest says we are to call to mind our sins and then all join in saying, “I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault,” etc. In some Mass guides, the rubric then reads, “The priest says the absolution.” Then follows a prayer that God will have mercy, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life. Is that sacramental absolution? Of course not. Not as in “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.” But for many people the preparatory rite sure looks like confession and absolution, indeed like general confession and general absolution. How odd it must seem to someone who has just gone to the sacrament of confession in preparation for receiving the Eucharist to then be invited at the beginning of Mass to confess his sins and receive what appears to be absolution all over again. I have read learned articles on the cultural, psychological, and catechetical reasons for the dramatic decline in confessions. My hunch is that a factor as big as any is that people who never go to confession mistakenly think they go to confession every time they go to Mass.

• It’s hard pickings for national identity if you’re a Canadian. In a big national survey, respondents were asked to name the most significant events in Canadian history. Forty-six percent named the creation of national health care, 29 percent chose the 1982 adoption of Pierre Trudeau’s “Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” and eight percent favored the 1972 hockey series between Canada and Russia. The most admired Canadians, past or present? The late prime minister Pierre Trudeau rates 31 percent, with three other recent politicians and hockey player Wayne Gretzky coming in at under five percent. Despite the fact that not much happens in Canada, people do feel a need to relax and they were asked about their favorite ways of doing that. Twenty percent named reading, 14 percent named watching sports, and nine percent said hanging out with family and friends. But what caught the headline in the Toronto Star was this: “Just one percent listed sex as their favorite leisure activity.” That invites a measure of skepticism. First, a book or magazine is always there for the picking up. Second, “leisure activity” connotes something that takes a lot of time. On the other hand, maybe the one percent should be taken at face value. For a people in whose history the most significant thing that has happened is the establishment of the right to get in line to see a doctor, sex may seem an imprudent excitement.

• As you might imagine, thousands of books come through this shop, and relatively few can be considered for serious treatment, or any treatment at all. Birdwatching in Vermont, for example, didn’t stand a chance, and when the postman spotted Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Shamanism and wanted to borrow it, nobody objected. We come up with little games in making necessarily quick judgments about books. There is, for instance, the best “focus-group title.” That’s when in every part, and taken as a whole, the title reflects keen market testing. The winner this season is Martin E. P. Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. Bingo. “Happiness” is, of course, the original happy word. The qualifying “authentic” signifies that the author is aware of phony happinesses on offer. “Using” appeals to the pragmatic assumption of what ideas are for. “New” resonates with a neophiliac culture. “Positive,” of course. Who wants anything negative? “Psychology” may have only a niche appeal, but accompanied by such an armory of qualifiers, it is hoped that any skepticism will be overwhelmed. “Realize” and “Potential” may seem redundant, except that the latter is needed for the inclusion of the crucial “Your,” assuring the reader that Seligman is not going to impose anything. He only wants to help you be the wonderful person you are. “Lasting” is an implied guarantee that you will never have to buy another book like this again. As for “Fulfillment,” see above on “happiness.” Seligman and Free Press have come up with the generic title for the entire genre of self-help books, meaning books that pander to the delusion that the simply marvelous “real me” is just waiting to be released from the me of life so far. And now I expect I will hear from a reader or two who will say their lives were turned around by the book. To which I can only say, Congratulations. But you might want to give the “Lasting” a bit more time

• I suppose I must plead guilty. Jody Bottum, that incorrigibly pedantic nitpicker at the Weekly Standard, charges me with carelessness in attributing to James Joyce the statement that the Catholic Church is “Here Comes Everybody.” He notes that in Finnegans Wake Joyce does play on the initials of H. C. Earwicker-HCE-employing the phrase, “Here Comes Everybody,” but nowhere can Mr. Bottum find the phrase applied to the Church. I can’t either. Mr. Bottum complains that my apparent mistake is now being replicated “everywhere on the Internet,” which is probably something of an exaggeration. Barring a kind reader’s supplying a vindicating reference, I assume that somewhere along the line, probably years ago, I found the formulation attributed to Joyce and took the attribution at face value. So, pending further clarification, please do not use it. I am trying to be grateful to my friend Jody Bottum for depriving me of a great line.

• “We are still in the middle of the story of Roe, and no one can predict the ending.” So say N. E. H. Hull and Peter Charles Hoffer, authors of the informative Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History (University Press of Kansas). Professors of law and history, respectively, Hull and Hoffer are keenly sensitive to the cultural, religious, and rhetorical dimensions of the struggle, and note the effectiveness but also the possible perils in the pro-abortionists’ decision to bet everything on the single theme of “choice.” Roe is generally depicted as a climactic victory in the long struggle for women’s rights, but the authors note the crucial difference from other victories-the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote and the Civil Rights Act of 1964-that “brought women more fully and equally into a world that had been the preserve of men.” Roe, on the other hand, “gave to women a legal right to be different.” Abortion, by its very nature, distinguishes between men and women. “Under an old regime of law and politics exclusively male, supported by a worldview that regarded women as the inferior sex and praised the ideal woman as wife and mother, men played a major role in the abortion story. Men made laws against abortion, enforced them, then argued against them and repealed them, dictating women’s access to legal abortion. But when women got the right to abortion, men play a diminished role in the tale. Thus the abortion story, despite the absence of gender in the constitutional language on which abortion rights rest, differs from the many other stories we can tell about women’s rights in the twentieth century.” The question posed by Hull and Hoffer, although they don’t put it quite so bluntly, is whether, in the cultural churnings of coming years, women will see it as being in their interest to so radically assert their independence from men. Because that is at least doubtful, it is the case that “we are still in the middle of the story of Roe, and no one can predict the ending.”

• It is simply not true that I have a position on everything. For instance, the endless wars among Lewisians waged by the partisans of Kathryn Lindskoog and Walter Hooper. It is true that I think Hooper, who presents himself as the guardian of the C. S. Lewis literary legacy, has been unseemly in exaggerating his relationship with the great man, inflating a few weeks with him in 1963, the summer before Lewis died, into what sometimes appears to be a lifetime of bosom fellowship. So I guess I have something like a position on that. And it is true that Lindskoog’s relentless pursuit of Hooper’s alleged fiddling with texts, and even forgeries, continued in her recent book Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands (Mercer University Press), seems to have an edge of fanaticism about it. But that’s just an impression, not a position. I do take the position that the Chronicle of Higher Education is right to conclude its discussion of the Lewisian contretemps with the suggestion that Lewis himself would not be surprised. In a conversation with two other writers, Lewis remarked, “Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it’s taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. And a sacred text is always exposed to the most monstrous exegesis. . . . It’s the discovery of the mare’s nest by the pursuit of the red herring.” The other writers laughed, and Lewis added, “This is going to go on long after my lifetime. You may be able to see the end of it. I shan’t.” He probably did not know that the battle over his own texts would so spectacularly confirm his prophecy.

• Neophiliacs, lovers of the new. That’s what much of our elite culture would seduce us into becoming. Chesterton called tradition the democracy of the dead. In a living tradition-whether philosophical, religious, or aesthetic-the dead are not really dead; we are aware of our living in them and they in us. Neophiliacs do not understand that. To sustain the delusion that only the new matters, they have to fake it. A cartoon pictures executives sitting around the board room table on which is a box of breakfast cereal emblazoned with the word “New!!” The chairman is saying, “What do you mean what’s new about it? The ‘New!!’ on the box is new.” Here is a news story about the Locrian Chamber Players in New York. They were established in 1994 with the guiding principle that they would never play works more than ten years old. Now they’re coming up on their tenth anniversary and panic is setting in. Works that were hot off the press in their first season are now, according to their guiding principle, slipping into the mists of antiquity. There is, for instance, Pauline Oliveros’ 1992 Sound Fishes, in which the instrumentalists wander around the room pulling sundry sounds out of the air like a fisherman catching fish. Then there is Heart Chant, an audience participation piece in which listeners are asked to feel their heartbeats and send out good vibrations. There are other “compositions” in a similar vein, but soon they will all be to no avail. They will soon be more than ten years old. “Sorry. Been there, done that.” The Locrian Chamber Players are very much like “creative” liturgical experts who encourage-no, demand-spontaneity in worship. There is no more imperious demand than the demand to be spontaneous. The most effective protection against the neophiliacs is the Church’s historic liturgy, offered “with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven,” from eternity to eternity. Augustine said of Christian truth that it is “ever ancient, ever new.” Between the ancient and the new, no decision is required. Whether in chamber music or in worship, the exclusivism of neophilia is countered by living tradition, the democracy of the dead.

• I don’t know whether I’m being suckered here or not. Pastor Russ Saltzman, editor of the Forum Letter from which I sometimes quote, is coordinating a conference on Christian sexuality to be held October 24-26 at Ruskin Heights Lutheran Church, 1081 Ruskin Way, Kansas City, Missouri 64134. He’s lined up an impressive group of Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic speakers. He tells me that people who say they learned about the conference from FT get a reduced registration fee, thereby suggesting that I owe it to our readers to let them know. So now you know. If you want to take this up with Pr. Saltzman, he can be reached at 816-761-6815.

• You know about Father Mychal Judge, the gay priest who was killed giving the last rites to fallen firefighters at the World Trade Center? No you don’t. Fr. Mychal was not homosexual, never mind, as has been endlessly repeated in the media, “openly gay.” He was a faithful celibate priest noted for his heroic service to all in need. The story of his being gay is a total fabrication of homosexual activists and their friends in the press. So says Dennis Lynch, a lawyer who was a close friend and collaborator of Fr. Mychal’s who knew him for ten years and has gone to the trouble of interviewing scores of others who worked with him closely. All of them agree that the legend of “the gay priest” is nothing but propaganda. As you might expect, there are those who persist in claiming that they know Fr. Judge was gay. I don’t know what to believe, but I have talked with Mr. Lynch and find his argument persuasive. For further information, he can be reached at deallaw@aol.com.

• As you probably know by now, I think Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is one of the really important books of our time. Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Nobel Prize-winner in economics, often has very interesting things to say, but his trashing of Huntington in the New Republic is a deep disappointment. He accuses Huntington of promoting “civilizational imprisonments” that deny individual freedom. It is true that Huntington generalizes about “the Western world,” “the Islamic world,” the “Buddhist world,” and so forth, and the important question to ask about generalizations is whether they are generally true. A generalization, by definition, does not cover every individual instance, and may allow for many instances to the contrary, as Huntington’s generalizations surely do. But, in a nice piece of writing in the service of a wrongheaded criticism, Sen complains: “In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups: we belong to all of them. The same person can be an American citizen of Malaysian origin with Chinese racial characteristics, a Christian, a libertarian, a political activist, a woman, a poet, a vegetarian, an asthmatic, a historian, a schoolteacher, a bird-watcher, a baseball fan, a lover of jazz, a heterosexual, a supporter of gay and lesbian rights, and a person deeply committed to the view that creatures from outer space regularly visit Earth in colorful vehicles and sing tantalizing songs. Each of these collectivities, to all of which this individual belongs, gives her a particular identity, which-depending on the context-can be quite important; but none of them has a unique and pre-ordained role in defining this person.” All that is undoubtedly true in “our normal lives”-meaning the lives of those of us in the Western, and mainly American, world. But for an eighteen-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia? We must resist Huntington’s “civilizational imprisonment,” writes Sen. “We must insist upon the liberty to see ourselves as we would choose to see ourselves, deciding on the relative importance that we would like to attach to our membership in the different groups to which we belong.” That is an admirably representative generalization by a member of an individualistic, emotivist, Western culture, and it very nicely demonstrates the argument that Sen intends to refute. Huntington is writing about the worlds that clash against the world that Sen describes.

• What next? That was the question when the wire services moved a hot story that two Austrian bishops had agreed to ordain seven women to the priesthood. The reality fell somewhat short of the news. On July 1, on a ship moored in the Danube near Passau in southern Germany, three hundred people gathered for the ordination, so to speak, of seven women of German, Austrian, and U.S. nationality. The presiding bishop, to stretch a point, was Romulo Braschi, an Argentine priest who was excommunicated in the 1960s and went on to establish the Charismatic Apostolic Catholic Church of Jesus King, which claims thirteen thousand members worldwide. Braschi styles himself the Archbishop of Munich, Zurich, Buenos Aires, and Salvador da Bahia. The phenomenon of episcopi vagantes, or wandering bishops, is nothing new. In the nineteenth century a number of Anglicans and excommunicated Catholics received what they claimed to be episcopal orders through the “Old Catholics” of Utrecht, and promptly began ordaining with abandon. In almost any major city in the U.S. there are little ecclesiastical covens claiming to be the true Catholic Church. Back in my Lutheran days at St. John the Evangelist in Brooklyn, we were for a while visited by a Patriarch Michael who claimed to preside over the Catholic Church east of the Mississippi and in all of Asia. I thought that somewhat amusing until a young fellow who did janitorial work at the parish announced one day that Patriarch Michael had just consecrated him as Archbishop of New York, and he wanted a big raise. There is something pathetic about the ceremony on the Danube and its being proclaimed a “breakthrough” toward the ordination of women. Whatever the arguments for ordaining women, John Paul II has reiterated that the Church just can’t do it. The sacraments, including the sacrament of holy orders, belong to Christ, not to the Church, and Christ has not authorized the Church to ordain women. That is a statement of modesty and obedience, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has said it is infallible. It is not infallible by virtue of what this Pope has done, but because what he has done is in continuity with the Catholic tradition from the apostolic era to the present. Moreover-and although this is not given as a reason for the teaching-opening the door to ordaining women would almost certainly doom any prospect of reunion with Orthodoxy, which has to be the premier ecumenical concern of Rome. Perhaps the poignant attempt on the Danube will help people to understand that, however sympathetic they are to women who believe they are called to the priesthood, agitation toward that end is no more than a distraction from the movement for authentic renewal that is so urgently needed. To the credit of what used to be called the Women’s Ordination Conference in this country, most of its members seem to have given up on such agitation. Not, unfortunately, because they agree with the Church’s teaching but because they have been “radicalized” into rejecting the entire structure of the Church, priesthood and all. That is to their credit in the limited sense that it is straightforward, in contrast to the farcical fudging presided over by the putative Archbishop of Munich, Zurich, Buenos Aires, and Salvador da Bahia.

• Oops Department. In the August/September issue I said the Cardinal Bernardin Award, which was supposed to have been given to the embarrassingly resigned Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, is closely associated with Commonweal magazine. I am informed that the award is, in fact, sponsored by the Catholic Common Ground Initiative launched by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago. On the other hand, Commonweal is very closely associated with the Common Ground Initiative.

• Political commentator Mark Shields notes that in the 2000 presidential election 14 percent of the electorate-which translates into 14.7 million voters-named abortion as the most important issue in deciding their vote. That sector of voters chose Bush over Gore by 58 to 41 percent, meaning that Bush had an advantage on the abortion issue of 2.5 million votes in an election in which Gore won the national vote by 540,000. Catholics figure very prominently in that 14 percent. Shields thinks that maybe this would give Democrats pause. Nothing doing. He writes, “In a deliberate act of political bigotry, the Democratic National Committee is daily telling Catholic voters to get lost. Do you think I exaggerate? Then go to the Democratic National Committee website. There you will find ‘links of interest from the Democratic National Committee.’ If your interests include the environment or veterans or Gay and Lesbian or Jewish-American or pro-choice or African-American, the DNC will happily suggest dozens of places for you to spend time. There is under ‘Catholic’ only one Democratic Party-endorsed site to visit: the absolutely unflinching champions of abortion on demand, Catholics for a Free Choice.”

• I’ve had my public differences with Sherwin B. Nuland, author of How We Die, which is in many respects an admirable book. (I quote it favorably in my own As I Lay Dying.) I therefore read with particular interest his review essay in the New Republic of another admirable book, The Case Against Assisted Suicide, edited by Kathleen Foley and Herbert Hendlin (Johns Hopkins University Press). Nuland rightly praises the book for, inter alia, its devastating information on legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands and its critique of official evasiveness and mendacity with respect to Oregon’s assisted suicide program. The contributors to the book, Nuland acknowledges, make a convincing case that the real moral and medical crisis in end-of-life care is the cruel neglect of palliative measures. Yet, he says, there will always be a small number of cases in which direct killing or euthanasia (which he defines as “easy death”) will be warranted. He writes, “If that is so, then society should affirm each and every such decision. And here I offer a suggestion that may seem odd, superfluous, and even antiquated. It is that final consent should be in the hands of a kind of council of elders, people in a community or institution known for their probity, wisdom, and sense of civic responsibility.” The suggestion is odd; not because it is superfluous or antiquated but because it assumes that “society” can act through a council that would, by definition, exclude those who believe that it is always and in every instance wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. At present and, please God, in the future such people are the great majority in American society. Dr. Nuland’s opposition to what is happening in the Netherlands and Oregon, and his demolition of the arguments advanced by such as the Hemlock Society, are most welcome. Regrettably, he is still hanging on to the hope for a rule that will allow “rare exceptions,” a rule that, once adopted, will smooth the way for the regime of death that he abhors.

• When I was at seminary in St. Louis, I did some graduate work in philosophy at Washington University. The fellow who chiefly captured my attention, and, whatever his intentions, dissuaded me from viewing academic philosophy as a possible future, was a terribly clever young Ph.D. fresh out of Harvard, who, as an analyst of ordinary language, rejoiced in demonstrating that words do not mean what they purport to mean. He was very good at this. I had not thought about him in a long time until coming across this in Terry Eagleton’s memoir The Gatekeeper. In his chapter on “Dons,” he describes a “Dr. Greenway” who disillusioned him of the assumption that there is a connection between erudition and intelligence. Eagleton writes, “Greenway was certainly intelligent, but he had no more ideas in his head than a hamster. Indeed, he was not only bereft of ideas but passionately opposed to them, which struck me as a little odd for a doctor of philosophy. He did not see the need for them, any more than he saw the need for wrapping his feet in asbestos or wearing a tutu. I soon discovered that his role as a teacher was to relieve me of my ideas, as the role of a burglar is to rifle your bedroom. I would stagger into a supervision clutching a huge, unwieldy armful of them, and he would cut them briskly down to size, toss them dismissively to each side, and pack me off poor but honest.” To think of the dreary life of doing that to students year after year. I’ve long since lost contact with my Washington U. prof, but I hope he found a more honorable line of work.

• Medical doctors are under growing pressure to see more patients in less time, for less pay, and with more paperwork required. Nonetheless, the amount of charity work performed by physicians is on the increase. The number of charity hours per doctor per week rose from 6.6 to 8.8 between 1988 and 1999, according to a study done by the American Medical Association. The pro bono work takes various forms-in nursing homes, with sports teams, helping church groups, etc. Chiefly, it’s a matter of waiving or drastically reducing fees for patients who cannot pay and do not have insurance. (Not included in the hours counted is “bad debt” care, meaning when the doctor expected to be paid but wasn’t.) What does this have to do with religion, culture, and public life? I’ll think of something, but meanwhile thought you might welcome a bit of good news.

• It was a beautiful little brouhaha. A front-page story in the Times reported that the New York Board of Regents had been bowdlerizing literary excerpts on standardized tests, removing words that might be thought “insensitive.” You can’t be too careful when it comes to race, class, gender, religion, handicap, or lifestyle; somebody is sure to be offended. Writers such as Frank Conroy and Annie Dillard led the charge as Manhattan rose up in outrage against the censors in Albany. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal was only mildly amused. Those outraged by the state’s fiddling with their prose, he notes, are the very people who over the last three decades have imposed the stifling regime of political correctness. Huck Finn must go, but how dare you touch what I have written! Henninger writes: “The Regents’ goofy censorship is such a flyspeck compared to the larger ruin this movement has brought. Substituting ‘thin’ for ‘skinny’ and ‘heavy’ for ‘fat’ is merely the work of people whose minds work like almost everyone else’s now; we all carry in our heads an informal list of imagined verbal offenses. They don’t want teen testers to feel uncomfortable; we don’t want our dinner partners to feel uncomfortable. We don’t need censors; we do it to ourselves. Welcome to the East Germany of the soul.”

• We don’t want to pick on Tacoma, Washington. But a subscriber complains that the public library there does not carry FT. She thinks the citizens of that fair city are being unfairly deprived, and she is right. In Tacoma, Abilene, Braintree, and San Diego, the thing to do is to very politely point out this grave injustice. And please don’t forget college, university, and parish libraries as well. Thank you.

Sources: Adam Goodheart on travelers in Eastern Europe, New York Times Book Review, July 21, 2002.

While We’re At It: On the mandatum, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 14, 2002. Judith Shulevitz on Michel Houellebecq, New York Times Book Review, June 2, 2002. Philip Pullman on Christianity, World, June 22, 2002. Aestheticism in the liturgy, Adoremus, June 2002. Canadian national identity, Toronto Star, June 20, 2002. The story of Roe, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2, 2001. The battle for C. S. Lewis, Chronicles, July 20, 2001. Locrian Chamber Players’ neophilia, New York Times, June 11, 2002. On Fr. Mychal Judge, Culture and Family Institute, July 2, 2002. Amartya Sen on Samuel Huntington, New Republic, June 10, 2002. Austrians ordaining women, ZENIT, July 2, 2002. Mark Shields on Catholics in the electorate, ZENIT, July 24, 2002. Sherwin Nuland on euthanasia, New Republic, June 18, 2002. On “Dr. Greenway,” Times Literary Supplement, January 25, 2002. Pro bono doctors, American Medical News, June 17, 2002. New York Board of Regents’ bowdlerizing, Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2002.