Feminism I Love to Agree With

Meeting With Catholic Movements for the Promotion of Women

Address of the Holy Father Benedict XVI at the Parish of Saint Anthony in Luanda on Sunday, 22 March 2009

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

“They have no more wine,” said Mary, begging Jesus to intervene so that the wedding-feast could continue, as was only right and fitting: “As long as the wedding guests have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast” (Mk 2:19). The Mother of Jesus turns to the servants and implores them: “Do whatever he tells you” (cf. Jn 2:1-5). Her maternal mediation thus made possible the “good wine”, prefiguring a new covenant between divine omnipotence and the poor but receptive human heart. This, in fact, had already happened in the past when – as we heard in the first reading – “all the people answered together and said: ‘all that the Lord has spoken, we will do’” (Ex 19:8).

These same words well up in the hearts of all gathered here today in Saint Anthony’s Church: a building which we owe to the commendable missionary efforts of the Capuchin Friars Minor, who wanted to provide a new Tent for the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence among his pilgrim people. To them, to those who work alongside them, and to all who benefit from their spiritual and social assistance, the Pope imparts his blessing with warm words of encouragement. I greet with affection all those present: Bishops, priests, religious men and women, and particularly the lay faithful who consciously embrace the duties of Christian commitment and witness that flow from the Sacrament of Baptism and also – in the case of spouses – from the Sacrament of Marriage. Moreover, given the main purpose of our gathering today, I extend greetings of great affection and hope to all women, to whom God has entrusted the wellsprings of life: I invite you to live and to put your trust in life, because the living God has put his trust in you! With gratitude in my heart I also greet the leaders and facilitators of ecclesial movements that have made the promotion of Angolan women a priority. I thank Archbishop José de Queirós Alves and your representatives for their kind words and for drawing attention to the aspirations and hopes of so many of the silent heroines among the women of this beloved nation.

I call everyone to an effective awareness of the adverse conditions to which many women have been – and continue to be – subjected, paying particular attention to ways in which the behaviour and attitudes of men, who at times show a lack of sensitivity and responsibility, may be to blame. This forms no part of God’s plan. In the Scripture reading, we heard that the entire people cried out together: “all that the Lord has spoken, we will do!” Sacred Scripture tells us that the divine Creator, looking upon all he had made, saw that something was missing: everything would have been fine if man had not been alone! How could one man by himself constitute the image and likeness of God who is one and three, God who is communion? “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Gen 2:18). God went to work again, fashioning for the man the helper he still lacked, and endowing this helper in a privileged way by incorporating the order of love, which had seemed under-represented in creation.

As you know, my dear friends, this order of love belongs to the intimate life of God himself, the Trinitarian life, the Holy Spirit being the personal hypostasis of love. As my predecessor Pope John Paul II once wrote, “in God's eternal plan, woman is the one in whom the order of love in the created world of persons takes first root” (Mulieris Dignitatem, 29). In fact, gazing upon the captivating charm that radiates from woman due to the inner grace God has given her, the heart of man is enlightened and he sees himself reflected in her: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). Woman is another “I” who shares in the same human nature. We must therefore recognize, affirm and defend the equal dignity of man and woman: they are both persons, utterly unique among all the living beings found in the world.

Man and woman are both called to live in profound communion through a reciprocal recognition of one another and the mutual gift of themselves, working together for the common good through the complementary aspects of masculinity and femininity. Who today can fail to recognize the need to make more room for the “reasons of the heart”? In a world like ours, dominated by technology, we feel the need for this feminine complementarity, so that the human race can live in the world without completely losing its humanity. Think of all the places afflicted by great poverty or devastated by war, and of all the tragic situations resulting from migrations, forced or otherwise. It is almost always women who manage to preserve human dignity, to defend the family and to protect cultural and religious values.

Dear brothers and sisters, history records almost exclusively the accomplishments of men, when in fact much of it is due to the determined, unrelenting and charitable action of women. Of all the many extraordinary women, allow me to mention two in particular: Teresa Gomes and Maria Bonino. The first, an Angolan, died in 2004 in the city of Sumbe after a happily married life in which she gave birth to seven children; she was a woman of unswerving Christian faith and exemplary apostolic zeal. This was particularly evident during the years 1975 and 1976 when fierce ideological and political propaganda invaded the parish of Our Lady of Grace of Porto Amboim, almost forcing the doors of the church to close. Teresa then became the leader of the faithful who refused to bend under pressure. Teresa offered support, courageously protecting the parish structures and trying every possible means to restore the celebration of Mass. Her love for the Church made her indefatigable in the work of evangelization, under the direction of the priests.

Maria Bonino was an Italian paediatrician who offered her expertise as a volunteer in several missions throughout this beloved African continent. She became the head of the paediatric ward in the provincial hospital at Uíje during the last two years of her life. Caring for the daily needs of thousands of children who were patients there, Maria paid the ultimate price for her service by sacrificing her life during the terrible epidemic of Marburg Haemorrhagic Fever, to which she herself succumbed. She was transferred to Luanda for treatment, but she died and was laid to rest here on 24 March 2005 – the day after tomorrow is her fourth anniversary. Church and society have been – and continue to be – enormously enriched by the presence and virtues of women, and in a particular way by consecrated religious who, relying on the Lord’s grace, have placed themselves at the service of others.

Dear Angolans, since the dignity of women is equal to that of men, no one today should doubt that women have “a full right to become actively involved in all areas of public life, and this right must be affirmed and guaranteed, also, where necessary, through appropriate legislation. This acknowledgment of the public role of women should not however detract from their unique role within the family. Here their contribution to the welfare and progress of society, even if its importance is not sufficiently appreciated, is truly incalculable” (Message for the 1995 World Day of Peace, 9). Moreover, a woman’s personal sense of dignity is not primarily the result of juridically defined rights, but rather the direct consequence of the material and spiritual care she receives in the bosom of the family. The presence of a mother within the family is so important for the stability and growth of this fundamental cell of society, that it should be recognized, commended and supported in every possible way. For the same reason, society must hold husbands and fathers accountable for their responsibilities towards their families.

Dear families, you have undoubtedly noticed that no human couple, alone and on its own strength, can adequately offer children love and a genuine understanding of life. In fact, in order to say to someone, “your life is good even though you don’t know what the future will bring”, there needs to be a higher and more trustworthy authority than parents alone can offer. Christians know that this higher authority has been given to the larger family which God, through his Son Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, has established within human history, namely the Church. We find at work here the eternal and indestructible love which guarantees to each of us that our life will always have meaning, even if we do not know what the future will bring. For this reason, the building up of every Christian family takes place within the larger family, the Church, which sustains the domestic family and holds it close to her heart, giving it the assurance that it is protected, now and in the future, by the “yes” of the Creator.

“They have no more wine” – Mary says to Jesus. Dear women of Angola, accept Mary as your advocate with the Lord. This is precisely how we see her at the wedding-feast of Cana: a tender woman, full of motherly care and courage, a woman who recognizes the needs of others and, wanting to help, places those needs before the Lord. If we stay close to her, we can all – men and women alike – recover that sense of serenity and deep trust that makes us feel blessed by God and undaunted in our struggle for life. May Our Lady of Muxima be the guiding star of your lives. May she keep all of you united in the great family of God. Amen.

On Declining to Attend

James Schall

A young friend of mine in Philadelphia’s St. Charles Borromeo Seminary sent me a column by Charles Krauthammer (photo) entitled “Morally Unserious in the Extreme.” Krauthammer there reacts to the President Obama’s signing the document overturning stem-cell research restrictions. Krauthammer knew that these so-called “restrictions” were, when spelled out, actually incentives for scientists to find more reasonable and ethical procedures to accomplish the very same purposes, which in fact they were doing. Most normal people recognize that “research” predicated on infant deaths has something seriously wrong with it, even if they do not know why. But evidently the president either does not or will not see this fact.

Krauthammer is withering in his analysis of the incoherence of the president’s actions and the reasoning that he presents. We are becoming used to a president who says one thing and does another. As the Canadian journalist David Warren has said, “The president declared that he is against human cloning. This was, typically for him, a rhetorical manoeuvre, belied by his deed. For what can a promise to prevent human cloning mean, when his decision opens the door wide to just such eventualities?”

Yet on life and morality issues, the president is consistent in deed. He ever ends up on the death or aberrant side of things. His record, both voting and rhetorical, all along suggested that he would. In this area, he is consistent.

But what was particularly interesting in Krauthammer’s column was the account of his being invited to the White House to witness the signing. He was on the President’s Bioethics Council, so he was familiar with the ins and outs of the issues. Krauthammer notes that George Bush had given a nationally televised speech on the stem-cell issue that was “the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president.” Mr. Obama shows little of this moral seriousness.

Krauthammer speculates on the reason why he was invited. Apparently, he (Krauthammer) does not object to using cell lines from “discarded embryos in fertility clinics.” This somewhat questionable moral position led President Obama to assume that Krauthammer might be sympathetic to the signing. If someone of that journalist’s stature were there (Krauthammer also holds a medical degree from Harvard), it would cast an aura of legitimacy over this most dubious presidential decree.

Krauthammer’s dissection of the White House’s calculation is something that particularly drew my interest. As I thought about it, the scene reminded me of something. Of course, it was the famous case in the “Apology of Socrates.” We read it every semester in my class at Georgetown. The local rulers commanded Socrates to cross to the island of Salamis to pick up a certain Leon, an admiral. He was to be returned and executed for failing his duty in a naval battle.

Athenian law required that bodies of the dead (they were not interested in stem cells in those days) were to be returned for proper burial. The episode has a kind of prophetic import. By commanding Socrates and four other gentlemen to go over to pick up Leon, the authorities sought to implicate them in the executions. Socrates’ participation would implicitly make the act seem moral.

Socrates thought the trial that had condemned Leon was illegal. Athenian citizens had to be tried individually, not in a group, as had happened in this case. When the other four came to collect him to go over to grab Leon, Socrates told them to go on. In a famous phrase, he tells us that instead “he went home.”

That is, Socrates would not participate in such an illegal act. He further states that he would have been himself killed for this refusal had the current rulers not fallen from power. So he lived a few years longer, until his next trial, the one we all know about.

Krauthammer, with no reference to Socrates in mind, says of the White House invitation, “I declined to attend.” He gives his reason: “Once you show your face at these things, you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring.” After seeing what the president signed, he added, “My caution was vindicated.”

Now I am not suggesting that Charles Krauthammer is Socrates. But in declining this presidential invitation, he is a man who stands in a certain tradition. He would prefer to stay home rather than be associated with something as morally dubious as the stem cell action. And, if I might extrapolate, this refusal is what civilization is about.

It is about Socrates’ “It is never right to do wrong.” If you refuse to go along, as Socrates eventually discovered, you pay the consequences. But in paying them, you stand for what is right, what is civilized. That is why in our current situation Charles Krauthammer’s words should be remembered: “I declined to attend.”

Rev. Fr. James Schall, S.J., is a professor at Georgetown University, and one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. This article was published originally in The Catholic Thing

The Legion in Crisis

Robert Moynihan

In February came the news that the late founder of the Legionaries of Christ had kept a mistress and had fathered a daughter -- in short, had lived a double life. Now the order he founded is in crisis. Will the Pope intervene?

What will happen now to the Legionaries of Christ? That is the question in Rome following the news in early February that the Legion’s founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado (1920-2008) had lived a "double life" for many years, keeping a mistress, perhaps using Legionary funds to support her, and fathering a daughter now reportedly 22 years old.

With this news, which was received with shock by many in the order, there are many who think the Legion cannot, and should not, survive.

The Legion’s leadership is now seeking to distance the Legion from its founder, but with great caution, knowing there has never been an order in the history of the Church that survived after repudiating its founder. At the same time, from outside the Legion, calls are multiplying for Pope Benedict XVI to take decisive action, perhaps even to suppress the order, to preserve whatever of good there is in it from destruction.

As this issue went to press, it was not yet clear what Benedict would do.

In 2006, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on May 19, after an investigation into the charges of sexual abuse made against Fr. Maciel by about 20 former seminarians, invited Fr. Maciel to retire to a life of "prayer and penitence" and not carry out his ministry in public. The accusations that Fr. Maciel had sexually abused seminarians first became public in 1997 in a report in The Hartford (Connecticut) Courant daily newspaper. In a letter to the paper, Fr. Maciel denied the allegations, saying: "In all cases they are defamations and falsities with no foundation whatsoever."

But in 2006 Fr. Maciel stepped down and went into seclusion until his death in 2008.

Now, the Legion has admitted that Fr. Maciel had a mistress, fathered a child and led a double life.

In an undated letter to the members of Regnum Christi, the Legion of Christ’s lay order, Fr. Alvaro Corcuera, Fr. Maciel’s successor at the head of the Legion, focused on the positive. Speaking of Fr. Maciel, Fr. Corcuera wrote: "On a personal level, I am grateful to him for being the instrument God used to give my entire life meaning. It is also true that he was a man, and these things that have hurt and surprised us -- and I don’t believe we can explain with our reason alone --have already been judged by God. For my part, I ask forgiveness for all this suffering. And I beg God with all my being to help us all to see it from the heart of Christ."

Father Paolo Scarafoni, spokesman at the Legionaries’ headquarters in Rome, said on February 4 that, despite the failures and flaws of Fr. Maciel, members of the order are grateful to him for having founded the order and its various ministries.

Fr. Maciel founded the Legionaries of Christ in his native Mexico in 1941. Fr Scarafoni said the Legionaries have 3,250 male members, of whom 850 are priests; about 1,000 consecrated women; and about 60,000 members of Regnum Christi, the lay branch. Asked how the Legionaries came to know about Fr. Maciel’s daughter, Fr. Scarafoni said,

"Frankly, I cannot say and it is not opportune to discuss this further."

A spokesman for the Legionaries of Christ in the US acknowledged that some aspects of Fr. Maciel’s life "were not appropriate" for a priest. "We have learned some things about our founder’s life that are surprising and hard to understand," Jim Fair, the order’s US spokesman, said February 4. Fair declined further comment on the activities of Fr. Maciel, saying only that Fr. Maciel now "stands before God’s judgment and mercy."

Fair denied rumors that the Legionaries would renounce Fr. Maciel, saying he will always be considered the order’s founder.

"It’s one of the mysteries of our faith, that someone can have tremendous flaws but yet the Holy Spirit can work through them," he said.

But in Rome and around the world, many are saying the Legion must renounce Fr. Maciel, and perhaps be dissolved altogether.

Dr. Edward Peters, an American lay canon lawyer who holds the Edmund Cardinal Szoka Chair at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan, in a February essay published on his web blog, has called on Rome to "take control of the Legion crisis."

"The immediate questions here are simple," Peters writes. "Did Maciel sire one or more children with one or more women while he was running the Legion? Did Maciel take money donated to the Legion (afoul of 1983 Code of Canon Law 1267 for starters) to pay off mistresses or to make child-support payments? Who in the Legion knew of or suspected Maciel’s sexual liaison(s)? And who in the Legion abetted such payoffs as might have been made? If the answers to these questions in turn lead to discoveries of additional canonical or civil misconduct by Maciel and others, and they very well might, so be it."

Peters then adds: "Based on everything I’ve seen so far, I do not think Legion leadership is able to conduct the kind of investigation that is necessary here, and at this point the credibility of any Legion-led inquiry would be near zero. In my opinion, the best thing for the Legion to do is to ask the Pope for an independent investigation, ‘a visitation,’ by two, at most three, prelates who really know how to get hard answers to embarrassing questions, who can see through financial obfuscations and moral rationalizing, and who are not afraid to confront ingrained, systemic denial behaviors.

"If the Legion does not ask for such an investigation, Rome should impose one without its consent. Quickly.

"One thing is sure: Rome’s handling of this crisis will itself be subject to evaluation in the public arena, so it had better be effective, and be seen to be effective."

Dr. Germain Grisez, one of America’s most respected Catholic moral theologians, the Flynn Professor of Christian Ethics at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, on February 5 wrote an "open letter" to the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi.

He suggested the Legion be dissolved and that Legionaries either join other religious orders already in existence or establish an entirely new order with a new name.

"Everyone realizes that Fr. Maciel’s double life required the complicity of associates, some of whom surely are still members of the institute, and some of whom probably are functioning as superiors. Unless those who shared in the betrayal are identified and faithful Legionaries cleanly separate from them, the latter group’s common good will not continue receiving the support of faithful Catholics, and will not be preserved... Regardless of Fr. Maciel’s subjective moral responsibility -- which only God knows -- the evidence of his objective betrayal of his commitment makes it impossible for you and other good and faithful Legionaries any longer to carry on your service and life as cooperation with him. Unless you and your confreres proceed as quickly as possible to terminate the juridical person, the Legionaries of Christ, and reorganize yourselves into a new institute, the common good you now share will begin to decompose: very few new men will join you, many in formation will leave, some professed members will separate, and the collaboration and support of the lay faithful will shrink.

"The Pope is the ultimate superior on earth of every religious institute. Only the Pope can oversee the termination of the Legionaries of Christ, the salvaging of its faithful members and other assets, and their reconstitution into a new institute.

"Therefore, if I were you, I would at once appeal to the Pope to fulfill his responsibility toward you, to appoint two or three prelates -- members neither of the Legionaries nor of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life -- as an ad hoc papal commission to conduct a thorough visitation, identify those complicit in Father Maciel’s wrongdoing and its concealment until now, and work closely with faithful, professed members in carrying out an orderly termination of the existing Institute, election of a small group to serve as founders of its replacement, and the preparation of an entirely new and reformed body of particular law for the new institute.

"Some of your good and faithful confreres undoubtedly will tell you that following my advice would violate your vow of obedience and constitute grave disloyalty to your superiors.

"Those sincere men will be mistaken. Your vow is to obey morally acceptable precepts. In the present disaster, it is, in my judgment, your grave moral duty to appeal to the Pope, as your superior, to save the common good of the faithful members of the Legionaries of Christ by terminating the present juridical person, and seeing to the formation of a new institute.

"I am sure that most who were complicit in Father Maciel’s wrongdoing were constrained by a false sense of loyalty. Do not follow their bad and disastrous example. Remember instead your responsibility to Jesus and to his Church -- to all those whose souls are still to be saved by your service and that of the members of the new foundation."

George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II and senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, in a February article entitled "Saving What Can Be Saved," said Pope Benedict needs to take a direct interest in the matter, and not leave it to to his curia.

Weigel called for a "root-and-branch" audit of "possible complicity" with Fr. Maciel’s actions "within the Legion of Christ."

He then issued this call:

"That audit cannot be conducted by the Legion leadership... It must be mandated by the Pope, and it must be conducted by someone responsible to the Pope alone--not responsible to the relevant parts of the Vatican bureaucracy, not responsible to the Cardinal secretary of state, but responsible to the Pope alone. There is simply no other way open to an accounting that will be both scrupulously honest and publicly credible...

"The Legion of Christ must be immediately put into receivership: A personal delegate, appointed by the Pope, must be empowered to take over the governance of the Legion of Christ and to conduct the moral and institutional audit required. The papal delegate would be instructed to report his findings, both interim and final, to the Pope alone, and he would be instructed to make recommendations (again, to the Pope alone) addressing the possible futures, including dissolution or dissolution-and-reconstitution, of the Legion."

It Takes Real Men to Admit Mistakes

Peggy Noonan

A Tragedy of Errors, and an Accounting

After a crash, the Marines set an example.

It is late in the morning one day last December.

A plane is in distress, it's lost one engine and now two and it's going down, and people on the ground hear the sound, look up, say, "That's going awful low," and whip out their cellphones. You could see the pictures they took later on the news.

It sounds like Chesley Sullenberger and US Airways Flight 1549, but that was five weeks later. This was the military jet that went down in San Diego; this was the story that ended badly.

Then this week it took a turn. And looked at a certain way, the San Diego story is every bit as big, and elements of it just as deserving of emulation, as Sully saving all souls when he put down in the Hudson.

It's Dec. 8, 2008, 11:11 a.m., and a young Marine pilot takes off from an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on a routine training flight. The carrier is maybe 90 miles southwest of San Diego. Lt. Dan Neubauer is flying an F/A-18 Hornet. Minutes into the flight, he notices low oil pressure in one of the two engines. He shuts it down. Then the light shows low fuel for the other engine. He's talking to air traffic control and given options and suggestions on where to make an emergency landing. He can go to the naval air station at North Island, the route to which takes him over San Diego Bay, or he can go to the Marine air station at Miramar, with which he is more familiar, but which takes him over heavily populated land. He goes for Miramar. The second engine flames out. About three miles from the runway, the electrical system dies. Lt. Neubauer tries to aim the jet toward a canyon, and ejects at what all seem to agree is the last possible moment.

The jet crashed nose down in the University City neighborhood of San Diego, hitting two homes and damaging three. Four people, all members of a Korean immigrant family, were killed -- 36-year-old Youngmi Lee; her daughters, Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months, and her 60-year-old mother, Seokim Kim.

Lee's husband, a grocer named Dong Yun Yoon, was at work. The day after he'd lost his family, he humbled and awed San Diego by publicly forgiving the pilot -- "I know he did everything he could" -- and speaking of his faith -- "I know God is taking care of my family."

His grace and generosity were staggering, but there was growing local anger at the military. Why was the disabled plane over land? The Marines launched an investigation -- of themselves. This Wednesday the results were announced.

They could not have been tougher, or more damning. The crash, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, the assistant wing commander for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, was "clearly avoidable," the result of "a chain of wrong decisions." Mechanics had known since July of a glitch in the jet's fuel-transfer system; the Hornet should have been removed from service and fixed, and was not. The young pilot failed to read the safety checklist. He relied on guidance from Marines at Miramar who did not have complete knowledge or understanding of his situation. He should have been ordered to land at North Island. He took an unusual approach to Miramar, taking a long left loop instead of a shorter turn to the right, which ate up time and fuel.

Twelve Marines were disciplined; four senior officers, including the squadron commander, were removed from duty. Their military careers are, essentially, over. The pilot is grounded while a board reviews his future.

Residents told the San Diego Union-Tribune that they were taken aback by the report. Bob Johnson, who lived behind the Yoons and barely escaped the crash, said, "The Marines aren't trying to hide from it or duck it. They took it on the chin." A retired Navy pilot who lives less than a block from the crash and had formed, with neighbors, a group to push the Marines for an investigation, and for limiting flights over University City, said after the briefing, "I think we're out of business." In a later story the paper quoted a retired general, Bob Butcher, chairman of a society of former Marine aviators, calling the report "as open and frank a discussion of an accident as I've seen." "It was a lot more candid than many people expected."

This wasn't damage control, it was taking honest responsibility. And as such, in any modern American institution, it was stunning.

The day after the report I heard from a young Naval aviator in predeployment training north of San Diego. He flies a Super Hornet, sister ship to the plane that went down. He said the Marine investigation "kept me up last night" because of how it contrasted with "the buck-passing we see" in the government and on Wall Street. He and his squadron were in range of San Diego television stations when they carried the report's conclusions live. He'd never seen "our entire wardroom crowded around a television" before. They watched "with bated breath." At the end they were impressed with the public nature of the criticism, and its candor: "There are still elements within the government that take personal responsibility seriously." He found himself wondering if the Marines had been "too hard on themselves." "But they are, after all, Marines."

By contrast, he says, when the economy came crashing down, "nowhere did we see a board come out and say: 'This is what happened, these are the decisions these particular people made, and this was the result. They are no longer a part of our organization.' There was no timeline of events or laymen's explanation of how a credit derivative was actually derived. We did not see congressmen get on television with charts and eviscerate their organization and say, 'These were the men who in 2003 allowed Freddie and Fannie unlimited rein over mortgage securities.' Instead we saw . . . everybody against everybody else with no one stepping forth and saying, 'We screwed up.'" There is no one in national leadership who could convincingly "assign blame," and no one "who could or would accept it."

This of course is true, but somehow more stinging when said by a serviceman.

The White House this week was consumed by extreme interest in a celebrated radio critic, reportedly coordinating an attack line with antic Clinton-era political operatives who don't know what time it is. For them it's always the bouncy '90s and anything goes, it's all just a game. President Obama himself contributes to an atmosphere of fear grown to panic as he takes a historic crisis and turns it into what he imagines is a grand opportunity for sweeping change. What we need is stabilization -- an undergirding, a restrengthening so things can settle and then rise. What we're given is multiple schemes, and the beginning of a reordering of financial realities between the individual and the state.

The Obama people think they are playing big ball, not small ball, and they no doubt like the feeling of it: "We're making history." But that, ironically, was precisely the preoccupation of the last administration -- doing it big, being "consequential," showing history. Watch: Within six months, the Obama administration will be starting to breathe the word "legacy."

What they're up to will win and hold support, at least for a while, until the reaction.

But is it responsible? Or is it only vain?

Anyway, all honor this week to the Marines, who were very much the former, not the latter.

It's... the policies

David Warren

It is now spring; the vernal equinox was reached Friday morning. To celebrate, Barack Obama sent a video of himself to Iran.

This was one of several end-of-week media performances, as Mr. Obama went back into "campaign mode" after a break of several months. The message of the polls is that he had better start selling his policies harder, because they are showing signs of not going over very well. Moreover, the unpolled elites, including those within the Democratic Party, have started to ask questions aloud about whether their man is competent; and as we know from painful history, such uncertainties from an elite tend to "trickle down."

What the polls can't say directly, and thus perhaps the White House can't yet hear, is that the policies themselves are diminishing Mr. Obama's appeal. There are indications of this in the polls themselves, but they are subtle. On one issue after another, from bail-outs to the environment, Medicare, life issues, foreign policy, the polls now tend to confirm what this pundit and a few other incorrigible reactionaries knew from the outset: that a plurality of American voters had embraced Mr. Obama not because of, but despite the policies he was signalling. They most certainly liked the man and his "temperament," and they most certainly wanted the Republicans out. But it did not follow that they wanted their government to lurch to the left.

To my analytical mind, such as it is, they wanted Obama the man, but not Obama the agenda, except for the uplifting rhetorical bits about "hope," "change," and so forth. The idea that the man could not be separated from the agenda never fully fixed; John McCain and company actually avoided riding home on this point, once the media made clear it would be reported as "scare tactics."

Again, to my mind—and it is the only one I have with which to write this column—we would be wrong to think of Mr. Obama as an ideologue. I think he was perfectly sincere in denying that he was anything of the sort, and in claiming that he would be looking for bipartisan consensus. I also think he is sincere in proceeding with an agenda—on bail-outs, the environment, Medicare, life issues, foreign policy, etc.—that leaves most Republicans, and quite a few of the more conservative Democrats, utterly aghast.

How to explain this apparent contradiction? I'm afraid it is easy. As I mentioned during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything, except political campaigns; but worse, his background was one-dimensional.

All his life, from childhood through university through "community organizing" and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.

He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as "avant-garde." His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is. To a man like Obama, as he has let slip on too many occasions when away from his teleprompter, "Middle America" is not something to be compromised with, but rather, something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. And the proof that it can be manipulated, is that he is the president today.

It is at this point that the phenomenon known as "too clever by half" sets in. Technically, it is indistinguishable from arrogance and hubris, but it is unnecessary to stress the point. Sixty days into his first term (and I begin to doubt there'll be a second), he would seem already to have dug a hole from which no rhetorical skill can lift him.

The video to Iran is the latest catastrophe. Mr. Obama simply does not understand how his "olive branch" will be received, not only by the mullahs in Iran itself, but wherever else on the surface of the planet the United States has enemies. It "reads"—to people who do not share anything like America's aspirations—as an unambiguous confession of weakness. He has moved the American position towards Iran from offensive to defensive, for no defensible reason.

Martino Knows How to Bishop

Deacon Keith Fournier

As I read the latest news out of the Diocese of Scranton I was reminded of an experience from many years ago, after the late Servant of God John Paul had written and the Holy See released his extraordinary Encyclical letter entitled “The Gospel of Life” (Evangelium Vitae).

A very dear friend of mine, an evangelical Protestant minister who is a Champion of Life, commented to me upon reading it, “Boy, does this Pope know how to Pope!” In this instance, my reaction to Bishop Joseph Martino’s continued defense of the truth in his Diocese was “Boy does this Bishop know how to Bishop!” And further, how desperately we all need him - and others like him - as we walk through the smoke of what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, right before he was elected to the Chair of Peter, prophetically called “the dictatorship of relativism.”

The latest news out of the Diocese of Scranton concerns the Bishops’ insistence that Misericordia University, a Catholic College in his Diocese, comply with his reasonable request before he meets with them. They have not done so and want a private meeting. Our readers will recall that this Catholic University, against the Bishop’s explicit direction, sponsored through its “Diversity Institute”, an advocate of the movement among practicing homosexuals to obtain a legal equivalency between homosexual paramours and those who are married.

This activist leader came to this Catholic College campus and spoke on the very matter which raised the Bishops concerns in one of his talks. He used a Catholic platform to directly oppose the truth as taught by the Natural law, confirmed by Revelation and taught by the Magisterium of the Church concerning human love in the Divine plan. So, after the event, the Bishop requested that this University offer a public release of specific information on how it teaches Catholic morality regarding sexuality and homosexuality, and how it is adhering to the four essential characteristics of a Catholic institution of higher learning. They have not done so.

A Catholic College is not a private College with some sort of loose church affiliation. It is a Catholic College and as such it participates in the mission of the Catholic Church. In his masterful letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul calls all Christians to a "…renewal of their minds". (Romans 12:2) This renewal of the mind is the essence of the mission of a Catholic education. The Catholic University is to affirm that there is a constitutive connection between truth, freedom, education and the ability to form an authentically human and just culture. This commitment to the existence of truth characterizes the heart of the Catholic educational mission. The Purpose of a Catholic College is to teach, form and prepare students in Christ, through Christ, and with Christ, the Truth Incarnate who has been raised and continues His redemptive mission through His Body, the Church. The Church is vested with His authority to teach the truth.

In the words of the great Western Bishop Augustine: "Let us rejoice then and give thanks that we have become not only Christians, but Christ himself. Do you understand and grasp, brethren, God's grace toward us? Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the whole man. . . . The fullness of Christ then is the head and the members. But what does "head and members" mean? Christ and the Church." This living Christ still teaches in and through His Church of which the Catholic College is a member. Through the Church Christ continues his redemptive mission, a part of which is to influence human culture by orienting it toward the truth. The faithful are called to inculcate and live the truth as articulated under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by the teaching office of the Church.

One of the most important components of the mission of the Church in this age of nihilism and relativism is providing an authentically Catholic education to the next generation. It is Christ the Teacher who teaches in the Catholic College. As the late Servant of God John Paul II said so succinctly in an address to educators in 1979 "Catholic education is above all a question of communicating Christ, of helping to form Christ in the lives of others."

Bishop Joseph Martino understands this vital Catholic educational mission. He also embraces his duty as a Bishop to be the Chief teacher in his own Diocese. It is not he who is being unreasonable in this request but the University leadership which, hiding behind a misguided notion of “diversity”, seems to be promoting the very relativism that then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, warned us all of. What happened on the campus of Misericordia University is properly called a scandal. (See, CCC 2284 – 2287) We present for our readers the latest Press Release concerning this ongoing ... struggle from the pages of the recent issue of “The Catholic Light”, the official news publication of the Diocese of Scranton:

“Bishop Martino has announced that he will not meet with officials from Misericordia University until they comply with his request for a public release of specific information on how the institution teaches Catholic morality regarding sexuality and homosexuality, and how it is adhering to the four essential characteristics of a Catholic institution of higher learning.

“The Bishop, in two previous statements, has asked that this information be provided to Misericordia’s alumni and the public. He has requested that the school speak precisely, naming courses, content and even catalog numbers. The university has thus far refused to do so, instead requesting a private meeting with the Bishop.

“However, the scandal that led to the Bishop’s request was a public matter. Therefore, no meeting will be held unless Misericordia complies with the request for a public release of information.

“The issue arose when Misericordia’s Diversity Institute hosted two public presentations by Keith Boykin. In at least one of his talks, he discussed advocacy for issues such as same sex marriage, and he addressed the intersection of religion and sexuality. The Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexual behavior was not presented at the event.

“Bishop Martino stated his “absolute disapproval” of these events because the university was providing a public platform for a proponent of morality that is “disturbingly opposed to Catholic teaching.” The Bishop subsequently called on Misericordia to seriously consider dissolving the Diversity Institute. Since Misericordia has asserted that it “is committed deeply to its Catholic mission,” Bishop Martino said it is puzzling that the school would not want to assure the public that it is teaching Catholic morality and adhering to the four essential characteristics of a Catholic institution of higher learning.

“As stated in Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, these
are: 1. A Christian inspiration not only of individuals but of the university community as such; 2. A continuing reflection in the light of the Catholic faith upon the growing treasury of human knowledge, to which it seeks to contribute by its own research; 3. Fidelity to the Christian message as it comes to us through the Church; 4. An institutional commitment to the service of the people of God and of the human family in their pilgrimage to the transcendent goal which gives meaning to life.

“Bishop Martino believes the kind of information he is seeking should be easy to compile and readily available. Bishop Martino also explained his obligation to address these matters. A local bishop does not merely have a “personal position” (i.e., one which is no more valid than anyone else’s position) about the “Catholic identity” of a local Catholic college. Under the Church’s Code of Canon Law, the Bishop has a “responsibility” to evaluate and judge how all Catholic institutions in his diocese are upholding the principles of authentic Catholic identity. In particular, it is his responsibility to ensure that institutions of higher learning which desire to call themselves Catholic are zealous in teaching Catholic faith and morals.”

We invite our readers throughout the world to pray for Bishop Martino, that he would have the courage he needs, in the face of some virulent opposition, to insist that Catholic institutions act and remain Catholic. This is a Bishop who “knows how to Bishop”. We also ask our readers to pray for the leadership of Misericordia University that they will recognize the authority which is operating through their Bishop and comply with his request.

Lenten Journey Towards Truth

Cassandra Jones

New revelations of the secret life of Rev. Marcial Maciel are forcing the members of the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi, which he founded, to face that they were witnesses to a great lie.

New circumstances forced the Legionaries of Christ the week of February 2 unwillingly to admit to the secret life of the Founder on whose person they had based their religious lives, Father Marcial Maciel, but their official response to the revelations shows them still as out of touch with the Church and the wider world as they were throughout the past decades spent telling truculent untruth on his behalf. While some Legionaries contemplate the mystery of how a sexual predator could still have done so much good in their lives, the rest of the Church lives with the consequences of his predation. The accusations against Maciel personally were never the only criticisms made of the congregation. These too must be accounted for in light of our now more complete understanding of the Founder’s life.

Several Legionary priests made public statements in the immediate aftermath, which prove to have accurately anticipated official talking points distributed to Legionaries and Regnum Christi members on February 13. These priests include Rev. Paolo Scarafoni, a spokesman in Rome, Revs. Thomas Williams and Jonathan Morris on EWTN, Rev. Owen Kearns, publisher of the Legionary National Catholic Register, and Rev. Alvaro Corcuera himself, Director General of the order.

The common position: we can only remain grateful to our Founder, who did us tremendous good, though he was a weak human instrument.. The Church’s approval of our Constitutions implies recognition of a valid charism and a continued mission. We will gather our supporters, prominent among them Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican Congregation for Religious Life, and just move on. As Scarafoni put it, “There is great peace among us… This is a period of trial, but we are forcing ourselves to carry on and overcome it and not abandon our mission….. We have received a great gift from our founder but we have also discovered that he had faults.” Apologies to Maciel’s victims are not in order because “they have surely found a way by now to receive adequate care."

The public position of course has its problems: The serenity is unrealistic.. There are Legionary priests now sobbing privately and reconsidering their very priesthood. Legionaries are privately divided about how radically to disavow the Founder. (The more generous, unsanctioned public apologies by Register executive editor Tom Hoopes and Legionary Father Thomas Berg are indications of this.) Resistance to apologizing perpetuates contempt for Maciel’s rape victims. The questions as to whether a sociopath can transmit a valid charism to a religious order, or whether a congregation can continue on with a repudiated founder, or whether the Church recognizes a charism for all time when it approves the constitutions of an order, are now being discussed by theologians and canon lawyers (if not by Cardinal Rodé).

But the Legionaries have been in the habit of speaking unrealistically, even untruthfully, about their Founder since the accusations against him first emerged publicly in 1997. And as Montaigne once wrote on lying, “Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up.” Consider the history:

After Jason Berry and the late Gerald Renner first reported the accusations in the Hartford Courant in 1997 and in the book Vows of Silence in 2004, Legionary spokesmen, including then North American territorial director Rev. Anthony Bannon, responded that Maciel had been cleared and reinstated after exhaustive Vatican investigations in 1956-59 and that the false accusations were an attack by surrogate on Pope John Paul. Not true. It turned out that the documentary evidence that underlay the defense was flawed. For one example, the alleged document reinstating Father Maciel was dated October 13, 1958, four days after Pope Pius XII died, a time when regular Vatican business was suspended.

In May 2005, the Legionaries manipulated the media with the help of friends within the Vatican. While the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has jurisdiction to investigate abuse by priests, was right in the middle of conducting an investigation of Maciel, the Legionaries released an ambiguous, unsigned fax from the Vatican Secretariat of State, which did not have jurisdiction, informing Director General Corcuera that “at this time there is no canonical process underway regarding [Father Maciel] nor will one be initiated.” Unwary journalists were misled by this into widely reporting that the Vatican had cleared Maciel. The Register trumpeted “Vatican Exonerates Legion's Founder.” This was not true.

A year later, in May 2006, the CDF did in fact discipline Maciel, suspending him from public ministry. It was to Pope Benedict’s credit to have investigated and disciplined someone whom his predecessor had privileged, but the wording, “[the CDF] decided - bearing in mind Fr. Maciel's advanced age and his delicate health - to forgo a canonical hearing and to invite the father to a reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry,” was gentle enough to allow the Legionaries to misrepresent it.

Father Kearns wrote in the Register that the discipline was not a discipline: “the Holy See decided not to conduct a canonical trial. Father Maciel is confined to a life of prayer and penance, away from any public ministry. He becomes like an accused priest awaiting trial. Only, in this case, there will be no trial.” Legionary supporter the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus wrote falsely, “It should be noted that ‘penitence’ in this connection does not connote punishment for wrongdoing.”

That summer, Legionaries portrayed Father Maciel as crucified Christ, sheep mute before the shearers, willing to imply by analogy that Pope Benedict was Pontius Pilate. Spokesman Jim Fair was quoted publicly that “he had absolutely no doubt that Fr. Maciel is innocent... and that any statements to the contrary amount to persecution of a holy man -- the kind of persecution Jesus referred to in the Sermon on the Mount when He said, Blessed are those who hate and persecute you for holiness’ sake; you shall see God.”

The press release from Legionary headquarters from Rome the day of the discipline said: “Facing the accusations made against him, [Maciel] declared his innocence and, following the example of Jesus Christ, decided not to defend himself in any way.” This too was misleading, as Father Maciel, if for the moment pleading nolo contendere, had all along defended himself through surrogates. For one example, the Legionaries in 1996 hired Kirkland & Ellis to threaten Berry, Renner, and the Courant. Then in August 2007 they hired Beirne, Maynard & Parsons to sue ReGain, a web site and message board where former Legionaries networked and freely discussed their concerns, including the charges against Maciel. The suit succeeded in taking the message board down from the web for the time being and thereby silencing Maciel’s under-resourced critics.

When Maciel died in January 2008, the simplicity of the funeral observances brought home that Father Maciel had indeed died under Church discipline: private Mass and burial in his Mexican hometown, no public mourning, no memorial cards, let alone prayer cards for his intercession in heaven. Father Kearns now writes that Maciel “died in disgrace,” but that’s not what Legionaries said at the time.

At a memorial Mass in Cheshire, Connecticut, Father Joseph Burtka, the then New York territorial director, told the assembly, “while we used to pray with Nuestro Padre, we will now pray to him since he is in heaven.” The Legionaries spun the simplicity as in keeping with Father Maciel’s wishes – he wanted his Legionaries focused on Christ and not on him and never wanted anything special for himself -- but this was untrue. He had, at some expense, prepared for himself in the Legionary church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Rome a tomb that the discipline now disallowed him to use.

Now that the Legionaries have abruptly transitioned from denying that Maciel was disciplined to speaking as if they understood that all along, they can hardly avoid going further and reconsider the boast, which he inspired them to make, that they offer the best religious formation in the Church. They must now deal openly with the many criticisms against them made by former members, bishops, and families who have found their methodology coercive and harmful.

Legionary charism and religious life has included a fourth vow never to speak ill of a superior and to report on anyone who did. Many say also that Legionary superiors have disrespected the distinction between internal and external forum. (Because seminarians and religious are potentially so vulnerable, canon law requires strict separation between superiors’ knowledge of private matters of conscience in spiritual direction and confession and of organizational matters of judgment about suitability and assignment of candidates.) Both abuses have reportedly been stopped by Vatican intervention since the 2006 discipline, but it is obvious in retrospect that they were established as Legionary practice to enable a pedophile’s control and self-concealment. So did the Founder’s secret life inform the charism, methodology, and spiritual life of his institute.

Critics have also called attention to the Legion’s coercive and manipulative recruitment tactics and poor discernment process. Legionary seminarians in the US do not carry health insurance and consequently their health care can be inadequate and based on a superior’s whim. As some former Legionary seminarians have discovered when matriculating at colleges and universities, Legionary seminary academics are simplified and uninterested in contemporary scholarly advances in humanities, philosophy, and theology. Seminarians whose reading is restricted and who are taught critical thinking poorly then fall easier prey to the mindless and uncritical idolizing of their Founder. Vendors local to Legionary houses have complained that Legionaries arrogantly refuse to pay bills or pay with a bouncing check.

Father Williams claimed on EWTN that the framed photographs of the Founder (hung ubiquitously in Legionary houses) are now being taken down. In at least one Legionary house as of the time I write, this has not happened. He also claimed that anyone is and was always free to leave the Legion at any time. Also untrue, as will attest those who have had to escape Legionary houses when the superiors were unwilling to see them go, or those who were required under obedience to surrender passports, or those who felt spiritually blackmailed by the Legionary motto, “Lost vocation, sure damnation.”

So the disconcerting question arises: what if, instead of reacting to the revelations with shock and a resolution to reform, the next generation of Legionary defenders are not willing to face and tell the truth? Will we be told who Maciel’s enablers were? Who confected the now obviously fraudulent documents on which his defense was based in 1997? Most explosively, are there victims of Maciel who remained within the order, prone then to abuse in their turn? What of those who claim to have been sexually abused in the Legion by priests other than Maciel? Is that so unthinkable now?

Maciel’s defenders always cited Matthew 7.20. Father Kearns wrote in 2006 after the discipline: “Vindication has always come, because the Judge's instructions to the jury have always been the same: By their fruits you will know them.” Father Neuhaus had based his “moral certitude” of knowing Maciel’s innocence by the fruits of his professed orthodoxy and the Legion’s impressive vocational statistics. But the argument was always circular: it excluded a priori from consideration those who were damaged by their experience of the Legion and Regnum Christi and became critics, including those who lost their faith or nearly did because in the name of Christ they had been manipulated and lied to. The accusers were always themselves fruits of the tree, even though they were not believed.

Now that they, not Maciel, have been vindicated, Matthew 7.18 comes into focus: A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. As Legionaries confront their past and face their future, it will not be easy for them to account for these words of the Lord.

For another example of the difficulty of facing the past, Father Williams said on EWTN that even while he disavows the Founder’s life, his writings remain valid expression of Legionary charism. Father Kearns wrote even after the disgrace that, “the Holy Spirit speaks to my soul through Father Maciel’s words.” It is hard for outsiders to have read, let alone evaluate, Maciel’s writings. They are not meant to be available to the wider Church, as the Legionaries demonstrated with their lawsuit against ReGain, which claimed his letters, among other materials, “proprietary, … compiled by Legion members, intended only for internal dissemination and discussion.”

But consider these passages from volumes called Envoy, which publish selections of Maciel’s letters recommended as spiritual reading to Legionaries and Regnum Christi members. They demonstrate the problem the Legionaries will have in keeping them as part of their spirituality.

Purity of heart… is so foreign to the licentiousness and cult of sex all around us that it shows clearly you are committed to follow Christ… a great measure of your apostolic fruitfulness depends on it, since to a great degree our possession of God depends on this virtue. (Vitoria 13 August 1959)

We should never lie for any reason whatsoever. It is a mortal sin when God is greatly offended by causing damage against religion, the Church or Authority, or when the name and good reputation of other people is considerably damaged… “Lips that lie are abhorrent to Yahweh” (Proverbs 12:22). (Bermuda 23 February 1962)

If you want to convince others of the value of a certain lifestyle, you will attain little or nothing if you yourself do not demonstrate your personal convictions by your actions. Such is the wisdom of the popular refrain, “Actions speak louder than words.” (Rome 1 November 1991)

These are passages of Maciel that cannot now be read with a straight face let alone serve as spiritual nourishment. Will Legionary novices, as they have in the past, continue to learn the charism from daily study of the many volumes of Cartas de Nuestro Padre? (Can they still call him “Nuestro Padre”?) Can we learn from a hypocrite to hate hypocrisy? By his own words, his impurity, lying, and hypocrisy rendered Maciel’s ministry fruitless and abhorrent to God. His own words refute the Legionary claim to recognize the good that can come even from a flawed instrument.. And if we must discard some of Maciel’s writings because they have become inconvenient, what is the criterion for choosing and keeping any of them?

Father Owen Kearns has now written, “I owe my priesthood and my way of being a disciple of Jesus to Father Maciel’s guidance and spirituality, and for that I will always be grateful.” This is just the problem: whether he was a witting or an unwitting tool, his priestly ministry was coopted into that of Legionary spinmeister for years at the Register in service to the needs of a predator. Those of us who revere Pope John Paul are less grateful for Maciel’s having spattered John Paul’s reputation. John Paul will now be remembered for having honored and recommended a child molester as “an efficacious guide to youth.”

Yet the Legionaries betrayed John Paul not only in claiming his friendship in their defense and then making a fool of him, but more broadly in being oblivious to his philosophic personalism in their seminary formation and spirituality. As the vocation director of a large US congregation once said to me, the difference between us and them is that they say they love him and in private ignore Church teaching at will, while we agree with him on 95% and on the other 5% where we disagree we tell him so up front.

If the Legionaries want to become disciples of John Paul in spirit and not just in the bureaucratic approval they wangled from him, let them recognize his “personalistic norm,” that human persons are to be respected for their own sakes, not used. Let them reject, for example, Maciel’s depersonalizing words on vocational recruitment: “I hope that… the image I have always cherished of our apostolate centers becomes a reality: a fish producing ‘tank’ where fishermen can spend their time intensively and successfully harvesting.” If the Legionaries are attentive to John Paul’s words on the Areopagus in 2000: “Memory is too lofty and noble a sanctuary to be defiled by human sin... Clearly there is a need for a liberating process of purification of memory.”, let them account for the whole truth of their past, rather than admit to the minimum as circumstances require, grit their teeth, and move on with their putative charism as if nothing had happened. Do the Legionaries believe in the communion of saints? Are not all of us in the Church hurt even by what the Legionaries can still successfully conceal?

On New Year’s Day 1990, as Czechoslovakia emerged from a Communist past, Vaclav Havel spoke to the nation:

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. … I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.… We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves.

This kind of honesty would make a healthier attitude for Legionaries to adopt than Father Corcuera’s “regarding the person of our Father Founder, I cannot but recognize all the good I received through him.” If Legionaries continue to claim publicly that a sexual predator and liar led them to faith and vocation, we must wonder how authentically Catholic and Christian that faith and vocation ever was. Is their Jesus our Jesus?

Cassandra Jones is a pseudonym. The writer has worked for the Legionaries for a number of years.

Why I’m a Conservative

Ferdi McDermott

Russell Kirk (in A Reader of Conservative Thought) spells out six main features observed in reflective conservatism, since Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France at the end of the eighteenth century. Conservatism is essentially the negation of "isms" so Conservatives are not necessarily able to explain what they think and feel about life and politics. They are not ideologues; they just feel it in their gut.

Here are those six typical characteristics:

Sacred order. A sense that there are truths beyond us that bind us forever. Some things are always right and some wrong. Many call this the natural law.

Social continuity. The body politic of society is like a kind of secular church. People come, people go, but society, with all its accumulated experience lives on. Revolution, which hacks at the body politic, can end up draining the blood from its veins and diseasing society.

The wisdom of the ages. The individual may be foolish, but the species is wise. There is no point departing from established morals and ways of doing things. It would be a dangerous shot in the dark. The fact that some things have always been done a particular way is often a good argument to keep on doing them that way.

Prudence. For Plato, this is the most important virtue in a politician. That means leaders must take the long view and avoid populism. Also, because people and society are complex, solutions to their problems will rarely be simple or simplistic ones such as extremists often propose. Be careful and proceed slowly but deliberately, weighing up the lessons of history.

Love of variety. The conservative loves the multiplication of different groups, societies, orders, classes, organizations, each with its own traditions, customs and distinctive take on life. The conservative also loves natural inequality (which is not the same as injustice): some people are stronger than other others, some are cleverer than others, and so on. But that is the way it was meant to be. Equality can only be before God and before the law.

Imperfectibility. This life and the society which we inhabit, are bound to be imperfect. To suggest that we could make them flawless is a nonsense, since Adam and Eve took humanity down a different path. The rabid search for the perfect (by politicians) is the enemy of the good. Let saints seek it, by all means, and let all men find it in heaven.

Intrigued? Why not come and spend some time at Chavagnes this summer and we'll talk some more! As part of our effort to promote the knowledge and love of our great tradition of western thought, we're holding a Great Books Summer Programme at Chavagnes, France, this summer, led by Professor Anthony O'Hear of Buckingham University. He has published a book on The Great Books, just released by ISI. Professor O'Hear will be assisted by me, by my good friend Robert Asch (co-editor of StAR) and Denis Boyles a prolific American writer now resident in France, just down the road from our College. It's going to be a great 10-day cultural house party (with great French food and wine) that you'll remember for a life time. We're inviting Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Ovid, St Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Pascal, Racine and Goethe along too, so you'll be in good company. More information: www.thegreatbooks.chavagnes.info

Ferdi McDermott, founder of St. Austin Review and Principal of Chavagnes International College, France.

De Civitate Dei

James Schall

Recently, I have been reading with an undergraduate class St. Augustine’s The City of God. Augustine took about thirteen years to write it; it took us nineteen class days, reading fifty-seven pages at a clip, to read it. Anyone claiming to have read all the works of Augustine, a famous quip goes, “is a liar.” The same might be said of anyone, including Schall and his students, who says that he understands every aspect of The City of God. In English, the book is 1091 pages in the Penguin edition. Still, it requires very careful attention.

At the semester’s beginning, I told a class of about seventy students that, at least once in our lives (it is not enough, I know), we should read this remarkable book that bears the Christian title De Civitate Dei and is comparable to Plato’s Republic. The students were to look on reading it as an adventure, as great as any that they will ever undertake. But it is also a task. I asked them if they were willing to try it. I did not want to read only “parts,” the bane of academic life. Under Schall’s cold gaze, they agreed, I think, not reluctantly. With some awe, they mostly enjoyed it. Its reading is one of life’s soul-moving experiences, like reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics, or The Brothers Karamazov, or the Epistle to the Romans.

Throughout, Augustine keeps explaining to the reader the order of the book. He knows it is a difficult read, and its parts need constant repetition. At the end of Book 10, Augustine explains: “The first five books (of twenty-two) have been written against those who imagine that the gods are to be worshiped for the sake of the good things of this life, the latter five against those who think that the cult of the (Roman) gods should be kept with a view to the future life after death.”

When Augustine finishes with these dubious theses about the pagan gods, not much is left of them. The next twelve books, in blocks of four books each, are devoted to three topics concerning the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man: “I shall treat of their origin, their development, and their destined ends.”

The occasion for writing this remarkable book was a letter Augustine received from his friend Marcellus, who wanted some guidance on dealing with elite pagans. They had witnessed the sack of Rome in 411, and concluded that the angry gods allowed this devastation of the Eternal City because its religion had changed to Christianity under Constantine in 325 A.D.

Not unlike Plato’s brothers in The Republic, who, when they wanted to hear justice praised for its own sake, turned to Socrates, the one man who might be able to deal with the question, so Marcellus turned to Augustine. Augustine knew enough classical and Roman history to point out that these pagan gods had not always protected Rome. He also knew enough philosophy to see the incoherence of the salvific claim of the pagan gods.

The City of God brings up for our consideration the rise and fall of nations, of whether a “purpose” is found in secular things. Earlier Christians wanted to see secular history as providential. Augustine was quite careful here. He had, as it were, bigger fish to fry. Scripture did contain factual historical events. The City of God is full of Augustine’s examination of times and places. He knows about Caesar Augustus and Christ’s birth, the time of the Crucifixion. He is himself a Roman citizen, from one of the African conquests.

But The City of God is not about the rise and fall of nations except insofar as they provide the arena in which what really happens in history is carried out. Augustine has two sources of knowledge, reason and Scripture. He places them together in a coherent whole. Both arise from the same origin. Perhaps the most famous part of The City of God is Book 19, where he gives the 288 different philosophic definitions of happiness.

In the first chapter of Book 19, we find Schall’s favorite sentence in Augustine: “Nulla est homini causa philosophandi nisi ut beatus sit — Man has no cause to philosophize other than that he be happy.”

The City of God, briefly, relativizes all political institutions insofar as they claim to make man eternally happy, as so many do. The City of God is composed of all of those who, in the course of their lives, in whatever place or era, choose God as their end in the plan that God reveals. The city of man is composed of all those who, in their lives and thought, reject this gift. The purpose of the cosmos and our place within it is to make possible, in each particular case, that this decision be freely made.

Modern politics, science, and culture almost never mention that truth, which is why Christians have to return again and again to the thousand-plus pages of The City of God.

James Schall, S.J., is a professor at Georgetown University, and one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. This article was first published in The Catholic Thing

The Horror

David Warren

President Barack Obama has now reversed President Bush's ban on U.S. taxpayer funding for stem cell research with human embryos. "O brave new world, that has such people in it."

The Vatican and U.S. Catholic bishops have responded to Obama's order with criticism that does not go far enough. Monsignor Elio Sgreccia is quoted by Reuters from Rome: "The motive for this decision should be seen in the pressure for profits."

While there is big money behind the decision -- a bonanza of U.S. federal funding for investors in such companies as Stemcells Inc., Geron, and Cytori Therapeutics, whose shares have all shot up on the Nasdaq -- I do not think that was the central purpose of the order Obama signed.

Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia gets closer to the nerve, when he calls the decision "a sad victory of politics over science and ethics." Closer, but still not close enough, for the propaganda behind human embryonic research circumvented conventional politics. It was sold superficially by means of false hope to those who suffer from such diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. They were told that cures were being prevented by restrictions on research, when there can be no guarantees that such cures will emerge.

But more deeply, a sick juxtaposition has been presented between "science" and "religion," in which the proponents of stem cell research with human embryos have demonized their opponents as something worse than "backward" and indifferent to human suffering. This is the twilight world that C.S. Lewis brilliantly depicted in his science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength, in which the appropriators of "science" go out of their way to insult moral and religious sensibilities, hunting and hounding those who defend them. They attack the sacred because it is sacred.

This is the only possible construction on a propaganda that seeks no middle way, which will not concede that the human embryo is "human" in any spiritual, moral, or legal sense. President Obama's order made no concessions whatever to the ethicists who suggested, for instance, requiring researchers to show that their work could not be done with non-embryonic stem cells, or encouraging the development of non-embryonic alternatives.

And this, despite the fact that his order implicates every American taxpayer in the funding of acts which are an abomination to many millions of them.

The Vatican has argued that "a real democracy" must offer fundamental protection to human life at every stage, from conception to natural death. The "protection" part of this argument is absolutely coherent, for once the clear line between human and non-human is erased, there are no moral backstops.

But the "democracy" part is incoherent, and even misleading. If we go instead to the heart of the United States Constitution, we find no mention of democracy there. Quite the opposite: we find in the document itself, and throughout the writings associated with it, warnings of danger if "the people" can simply vote to overturn the moral and constitutional order. For the U.S. is to provide a government "of laws, not of men." The sanctity of human life is something that precedes democracy, and the most fundamental liberty -- life itself -- must not depend on the vagaries of polling.

The President declared that he is against human cloning. This was, typically for him, a rhetorical manoeuvre, belied by his deed. For what can a promise to prevent human cloning mean, when his decision opens the door wide to just such eventualities?

Here is where "science" turns finally against itself, and becomes monstrous; where reason turns against reason, as it did in the French (and not the American) Revolution. There is nowhere to draw a coherent line, once we have allowed scientists to "experiment" on live human embryos. There was nowhere to draw a line, once the French revolutionaries decided that human life itself was less important than the utopian future of their hallucinations.

What is in a human embryo?

We are constantly told, by those who mock "the sanctity of human life," that chimpanzees share 98 per cent of our DNA. But the key instructions on brain-growing are in the remaining two per cent, as we discovered from the Human Genome Project. All neurons start from a single cell in an embryo, but the human ones are instructed to keep doubling for more rounds than any monkey, and to create in due course a brain whose cortex alone co-ordinates a billion synaptic connections, and whose overall complexity exceeds that of any object known in the entire Universe. It yields an instrument capable (according to the calculations of Edelman and Tononi) of some 10 to at least the millionth power of possible neural circuits: a number hyperastronomically beyond the total number of particles in the universe.

That is a single glimpse into what emerges from a human embryo. These numbers alone should fill us with horror at what is being done in our labs.

Trading Truth for Unity

J. Daryl Charles

It is the issue that simply will not go away—at least not in the post-Christian, post-consensus West. It is the issue that breeds a nasty recurring tendency to divide, and divide, and then divide some more. It is the issue to which (seemingly) every General Assembly, every major synod, and every Protestant mainline ecclesiastical convocation leads these days. And, it shows no signs of abating. What’s a poor bishop to do?

Happily, the answer arrives in the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic. In his essay “The Velvet Reformation,” writer Paul Elie, a senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, wishes to instruct us—as well as any “listening” church bishop out there. Elie offers a highly sympathetic look at the acute “dilemma” presently facing the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is arguably the second most influential bishop on the planet. This particular dilemma, it should be pointed out, is not the one that arose from Williams’ scandalous comments in a February 2008 address on “Civil and Religious Law in England,” delivered at the Royal Courts of Justice. Therein, it will be remembered, the Archbishop of Canterbury sought to make common cause with Muslim clerics by considering the permissibility of a “softer” form of shari’a law, a concession that, in the words of the esteemed British historian Michael Burleigh, would “wholly undermine the Common Law of England while paving the way to ‘hard’ shari’a law in the future.” Most assuredly, the Archbishop’s remarks created a major “dilemma”—one which will reverberate for decades to come, given his position as a “bishop” representing Christendom worldwide. But this conundrum, in Elie’s view, is of no major concern and decidedly secondary in nature.

The dilemma that has Elie inordinately exercised is what to do with all those Anglicans worldwide whose pent-up sexuality has been dragging the Anglican communion through tortuous deliberations, convocations, and equivocations. On Elie’s account, with Williams’ accession to the head of the Anglican communion, here finally was (and remains) a man who is “thoughtful,” “brilliant,” “forwarding-looking,” “dispassionate,” “learned”—in short, “a man for all seasons.” But Williams’ most endearing quality, in Elie’s view, is that he is “open”—by which Elie means that the Archbishop is privately waiting for the proper time to bestow his blessing on gay and lesbian members of his own communion; that proper time has simply not yet arrived.

In his replacement of the more theologically conservative George Carey in 2003, Williams represented for many the great hope of liberal religion, serving as a necessary counterpart (antidote?) to the theologically conservative and rather ethically rigid John Paul II. And indeed Williams was elected by fellow Anglican bishops on a wave of enthusiasm not unlike that which more recently would sweep Barack Obama into the White House—a source of great “hope” to those who were seeking “change” in the way that the church did business.

Of course, these days the Anglican Church, the world’s third largest communion after the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, is described—perhaps somewhat promiscuously by one of its own celebrated bishops and media darlings who resides in South Africa—as a “hugely untidy but very lovable” body. Which is like saying that some debris was spotted in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But for the moment, let us grant the euphemism: The Anglican Communion is “untidy.” Surely, it was not an accident that barely having settled in to his archbishopric in 2003, Williams was confronted with the ordination of openly gay bishop Eugene Robinson across the pond. After all, Episcopalians and Anglicans, regardless of their location, pride themselves in their “big tent” approach to communion—a communion in which there is room literally for everyone, irrespective of creedal convictions. And ever since 2003, the Archbishop has found himself in a position of mediation, like a plumber rushing back and forth in a large house to stop leakage, prevent conflict, and postpone rupture. All of this, Elie concedes in his ode to the beloved Archbishop, places Williams in an impossible position with a Communion that is teetering on the edge of schism. Nevertheless, Williams is said to be “grounded” in the conviction that by waiting, negotiating, and seeking a via media between supposed liberal and conservative “extremes,” he can somehow have it both ways. Therein, of course, lies the “dilemma.”

Not helping matters, however, is Williams’ brief but revealing 1989 address “The Body’s Grace” to the “Lesbian and Gay Christian Association” during the time when he was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford. In this address Williams poses the question “Why does sex matter?” With his answer to this question—a question that was important to the fathers of the church without preoccupying them as it does us postmoderns and many contemporary clergy—he seems blissfully unaware of the wisdom of church’s fathers themselves regarding holiness, sexual purity, and yes, happiness. Williams’ source of inspiration, alas, is lodged in a four-part work of fiction, under the title of “Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet,” which Williams describes as “full of deep analyses of the tragedies of sexuality,” “sexual disaster,” “pregnancy and an abortion,” and same-sex attraction. Commenting on the elicit sexual relations of two characters in one of the four “drainingly painful” novels, Williams concludes that even where “a frontier has been passed” (elicitly), this “has been and remains grace.” Williams’ enlightened misinterpretation of the creation story, then, proceeds accordingly: Grace is “a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.”

“Knowing yourself.” Where have we heard that before? But Williams is not merely dodging bullets; rather, he wishes to instruct us, as he did his gay and lesbian audience: “The worst thing we can do with the notion of sexual fidelity . . . is to ‘legalise’ it in such a way that it stands apart from the ventures and dangers of growth and is simply a public bond, enforceable by religious sanctions.” In other words, on Williams’ account, the public good, informed by moral and religious conviction that is rooted in creation and the imago Dei, means nothing, so long as I am “venturing” out into the exhilarating “dangers” of illicit sexual exploration.

Lest we misinterpret Williams, clarification follows: “When we bless sexual unions ... it is both wicked and useless to hold up the sexuality of the canonically married heterosexual as absolute, exclusive and ideal” (italics mine). Note the vocabulary here being employed by the leader of the world’s third largest Christian communion—“wicked and useless”—to describe a timeless norm based on (a) creation, (b) human nature, (c) biology, (d) the Church’s tradition, and (e) scriptural revelation. “Happily,” Williams intones, “there is more to Paul than the (much quoted in this context) first chapter of Romans!” This, mind you, is the future Archbishop of Canterbury speaking.

Compare these rather remarkable musings, and the tomfoolery that goes therewith, to the wisdom of the historic Christian moral tradition. One thinks, for example, of the thoughtful work of Karol Wojtyla (to become John Paul II) on human love, Love and Responsibility, published in 1960 when the present Archbishop of Canterbury was but a mere pup. With great care, Wojtyla describes the unit of truth and charity, exposing the false dichotomy that results from modern attempts to place the two in opposition. Truth will always seek to honor the dignity of the person, given the image of God within. But love will always seek to honor what is truth, since to ignore truth and embrace falsehood is to dishonor both Creator and creature.

Or, we might note the work of John Paul’s predecessor Benedict XVI, whose views regarding human nature and normative sexuality, based on the imago Dei, came in the form of the pontiff’s end-of-the year (2008) address at the Vatican—an address described by Elie as “notorious.”

Significantly, Benedict posed a rather intriguing—and quite necessary—pastoral question in his April (2008) address to the U.S. bishops who were convened in Washington, D.C., a pastoral question which the Archbishop of Canterbury might well consider himself. In the twenty-first century, how might a bishop best fulfill the call “to make all things new in Christ, our hope”? And how can he lead his people to “an encounter with the living God,” the source of that life-transforming hope of which the Gospel speaks (cf. Spe Salvi, 4)? Perhaps, Benedict concluded, the bishop needs to begin by clearing away some of the barriers to such an encounter. To be holy, not to be sexually “wanted,” as Williams intoned in “The Body’s Grace,” is to be authentically Christian.

Consider the wisdom of this statement: Not “openness” and dialogue, but “clearing away barriers”—understood as repentance and recognition of Christ’s unconditional lordship—paves the way for “an encounter with the living God.” Benedict further exhorted the bishops to lead the flock in “participating in the exchange of ideas in the public square, helping to shape cultural attitudes.”

But this “participation,” “exchange” and “shaping” will not be easy, particularly when those who speak in the name of God are themselves confused and wholly absorbed into the cultural fabric themselves. Nevertheless, it must be done.

Someone has observed that when a revolutionary group wishes to wage war on human decency, the first—and most effective—strategy is to co-opt language in the service of the cause. Surely, the rhetoric of “compassion” allows activists to capture the moral high ground. It is precisely this sort of verbal sleight-of-hand that George Orwell had in mind as he penned in 1947 a brief but highly important essay titled “Politics and the English Language”: “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” “Political language,” he noted, “is designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Activists are well aware that two obstacles prevent the wider culture from embracing “alternative” sexuality: the presence (or absence) of social stigma and the Church’s moral teaching. A moral state of affairs in which the Church’s leaders assume the same voice as the culture only confirms the truth in Orwell’s observation. When lines become blurred, it becomes necessary to re-state the obvious.

Perhaps we don’t yet fully grasp the depths to which Western societies, competing with one another to see which can jettison its religious and cultural heritage the fastest, will descend in their revolt against nature. What we can say with confidence is that this is the one issue that simply will not go away. Not because of the Church’s “old-style authoritarianism,” as Elie would have the unsuspecting reader believe, but because activists—both lay and frocked—simply will not permit it to go away.

J. Daryl Charles is a senior fellow of the Center for Politics and Religion at Union University and author of Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things.

LBJ Revisited

David R. Stokes

Lessons From Lyndon’s Successful Failure

When Lyndon Johnson was a boy growing up near the Pedernales River in the Texas hill country his parents would regularly play a record on their Victrola. But it wasn’t music.

It was William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, who was known for his charismatic oratory and populist ideals. This was one factor, though small and symbolic, in how the future president developed the ideas he would work feverishly to translate into reality during his frustrated presidency.

Though he was no Bryan when it came to having a way with words, he did give a famous speech articulating his views – and initiating a torrent of policy initiatives – just a few months after he came to the nation’s highest office following the tragic death of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Johnson was riding high in the polls and en route to a landslide election that fall, when in May of 1964 he went to Ann Arbor, Michigan to deliver the commencement address before 80,000 at the football stadium on the campus of the University of Michigan.

The past was very much in the tall Texan’s mind as he spoke that day – both distant and recent. He likely heard the scratchy but memorable words of Bryan echoing in his brain, but he also was reminded that just one year before President Kennedy had used another commencement in another place very effectively. That venue was American University in Washington, D.C. and Kennedy had talked of war and peace in a way that overshadowed the diploma distribution that day.

Always conscious of any comparison with his far more elegant and erudite predecessor, Johnson was determined to make some history of his own.

He did.

What he had to say that day – and all that followed – signaled sweeping change in how government functioned in, around, and over culture. Lyndon Johnson talked in glowing terms that day about his vision for “The Great Society.” His rhetoric did not match that of Bryan, nor his eloquence that of Kennedy, but his content was designed to pick up where another one of his heroes left off. That hero was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In a very real sense, as Barack Obama unveils – almost daily – new components of the kind of change he insists people voted for last November, the best historical comparison may not be the New Deal of 75 years ago. It could actually be what Lyndon tried to do 45 years ago. Of course, wise insiders will never admit this because it didn’t go that well for our 36th president – or the country, for that matter.

When President Johnson spoke to those gathered on that sunny afternoon he said:

“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

And, in language with a where-have-I-heard-that-before ring:

“I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings -- on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

The most dynamic era of sweeping political change in a generation began that day. Federal spending tripled over the next ten years. And it took several decades to undo the damage – Nixon started the job, Reagan accelerated it, and – ironically – Clinton finished it off.

But Santayana was so right. History ignored is often repeated.

How does all of this compare to what President Obama is attempting to do these days? Well, there are some clear and obvious similarities, but also some fundamental differences.

First, Johnson was no Obama - and vice versa. Our current president is a much better speaker than LBJ (heck, Gerald Ford was), and has charisma reminiscent of that possessed by Jack Kennedy (a trait about JFK that LBJ both resented and admired).

But charisma and speaking ability aside, Mr. Johnson was a much better personal politician than Mr. Obama – particularly when dealing with the egos, nuances, and patterns of Congress. Most historians recognize (some very reluctantly) that John F. Kennedy was good at “speechifying” but lacked the ability to get stuff done on the Hill. Johnson succeeded where Kennedy didn’t – or couldn’t.

It remains to be seen if Barack Obama can translate oratory and personal popularity into actual policy as he works with congress. Will he be strong enough to stand up to leaders in his own party? The mind fairly boggles at the idea of Lyndon Johnson being tempered by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D- Montana) or Speaker of the House John McCormick, much less by Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R- Illinois) or his counterpart in the House, Gerald Ford (R- Michigan).

The only guy who could have given Lyndon a run for his money was Sam Rayburn, but the legendary “Mister Sam” had died in late 1961.

Our 36th president was famous for what was called “the Johnson Treatment” – a method of political arm-twisting that would presumably be seen today in the same category as CIA torture. Lyndon B. Johnson was the Jack Bauer of personal politics.

Those were heady days for President Johnson who soon found himself having been elected in his own right by a landslide margin and with a decidedly Democratic Congress on his coattails, if not in his pocket. After the 1964 election, the Senate was 68-32 and the House 295-140 lopsidedly in favor of LBJ’s party.

However, the biggest difference between what Johnson attempted to do in the mid-1960s and today is that LBJ launched his sweeping change against the backdrop of a stable economy. In fact, as Randall B. Woods has written in LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, “the Great Society was conceived and implemented during a period of growing prosperity.” Yet even then, it was largely a failure and ultimately politically repudiated.

Many wonder if President Obama, for all his best intentions, is overreaching by trying to do too many things so quickly and simultaneously. The answer to this might, in fact, be found in the story of Lyndon Johnson – a man with big dreams, a good heart, and gigantic ambitions.

While Lyndon worked the system as only he could do to bring forth his vision for The Great Society, he was mired in “that war in Asia.” And when LBJ went back to his Texas sanctuary near the Pedernales upon retirement, he did so as a man stretched, broken, defeated, despised, and in ill-health. For the rest of his days – which turned out to be not so many – he fumed about how Vietnam had been an altar of sacrifice for his best hopes for this nation.

I will not try to make a connection here between Barack Obama’s goals and some war over there. But what I will say is this: It is very possible that the economy itself might be an ironic Vietnam for the 44th president.

It’s very unlikely that anyone on his team a year ago envisioned the kind of economic meltdown we have now seen. Mr. Obama has assumed the office of the presidency during difficult times. Certainly, he must feel a sense of frustration about it all. He has dreams and ambitions that are threatened by a troubled economy.

But sometimes dreams have to give way to reality. Just as Lyndon Johnson couldn’t do guns and butter to the max for too long before something had to give, so President Obama needs to consider taking a page from another famous political playbook: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

He also needs to read the fine print of history and note that LBJ lowered taxes to continue to stimulate a growing economy. Proposed by President Kennedy, but stalled in Congress, Johnson led the effort to reduce the top marginal tax rate by 20 percent in February of 1964. He knew that a growing, prosperous economy was the only realistic foundation for what he wanted to do.

If Lyndon Johnson, master politician and visionary, couldn’t really make his “new deal” work against the backdrop of prosperity – can Barack Obama in these days of economic chaos?

Probably the most telling comparison between 1964 and now is that back then polls showed that 76 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what was right. Forty years later that confidence factor is less than half.

But the fear factor is growing by leaps and bounds.

Money, Money, Money

David Warren

The U.S. budget deficit will be $1.3 trillion (U.S.) this year, by the official prognosis, and several economists think it could exceed $2 trillion. To appreciate the extent of this disaster, look at any chart of historical U.S. deficits, reasonably adjusted for inflation. They go up, they go down, from year to year, and there are even some years of surplus. But suddenly in fiscal 2009, the bottom falls out of the chart.

It should further be noted that while President Obama has declared that he will cut this deficit in half by the end of his current term, and we await the serious accounting for this, his proposals so far consist only of hitting the military budget, "streamlining government," and "taxing the rich."

What a big spender with unprecedented ambitions for expanding medicare and social services may mean by "streamlining government" we cannot guess, but the other two are worrying in themselves. The first represents a retreat from America's commitment to global security, at a crucial moment in world affairs. The last shows no appreciation that "taxing the rich" has its own economic consequences -- for such demagogic policies have had a destructive effect on national wealth (and thus on tax revenues), wherever they've been tried. No exceptions: for no economy responds favourably to punishing success, and rewarding failure.

Indeed, a U.S. government that is not wrestling hard with escalating public costs for medicare and social services cannot be serious about balancing the books. Ditto, a government contemplating any further massive bailouts. The ones we've seen have already dwarfed such expenditures as those for Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina.

We have heard a great deal of nonsense about greed in the last few months, from leftwing moralizers who blather as if greed were a foible accessible only to investors and bankers, and as if it were the sufficient explanation for everything that has gone wrong in the economy. Granted, investors and bankers are greedy, like all other human beings who are not saints. They are trying to make money. The problem wasn't their greed, however, but their reckless imprudence -- wild lending against poor collateral.

While less doctrinaire observers have noticed that this problem of recklessness stretches through much of our society -- imprudent borrowing against inflated real estate values, piling debt on credit cards, etc. -- there is a deeper problem that is not being confronted. And this is not greed so much as it is theft.

"The people" have discovered that they can vote themselves money, by the simple device of putting into office politicians like Barack Obama, who promise them cash, services, tax breaks, bailouts, and to "make the rich pay." Democracy has been degenerating into a vicious system in which wealth is transferred by the power of law from "them" to "us." That this must have a crippling effect on the creation of wealth should be perfectly obvious.

The Nanny State is hardly something new, but it seems that in this year of 2009 we have entered a new phase of it, which might be characterized as the "death spiral." The U.S. government is suddenly vomiting out trillions -- literally, trillions -- to the people who voted for it. Partly at the expense of the people who didn't; but mostly conjured from thin air.

The laws of supply and demand are laws of nature. They do not apply only to free markets, but with a special vengeance to those who try to subvert market disciplines. The effect of summoning huge quantities of dollars out of nothing is extremely well known. It leads to inflation, and when not then very painfully corrected, to hyperinflation.

Inflation, too, has been with us for some time, but seldom on the scale the U.S. is now risking. It was seen in Germany after the First World War, and in Hungary after the Second. It is currently on view in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe played Robin Hood, first by seizing the property of "the rich," and after laying waste to that, by printing banknotes with more and more zeroes on them. The current inflation rate in Zimbabwe is somewhere around one sextillion per cent (a one followed by 21 zeroes). In other words, the currency is waste paper, and by no coincidence the people are starving.

The American dollar was, like all the world's other stable currencies, once upon a time, pegged to the trading value of a fixed weight in fine gold -- 1.505 grammes, to be precise. That "traditional" dollar would thus be worth about 45 current American paper dollars. The paper dollar is no longer pegged to gold, a basket of commodities, or any other fixed store of value; the maintenance of its trading value depends entirely on the honour of politicians. That's how it lost its value. The collapse of what was left of that honour appears to me a more consequential thing than any banker's transient greed.

Reflections of a Conservative Protestant

Hunter Baker

Yesterday I published a commentary on a bad article that appeared in First Things. Today I found this other, very good observation by Hunter Baker on the state of the free markets. He states correctly that certain sectors of the market are artificially isolated from the consequences of bad moral decisions. While I agree with that, I would like to point to the results of the past presidential election.
The Bush years were marked by two economic events: he started his presidency with a recession—which he announced himself, before people on the street had any practical signs of it—and he closed with a recession that could have been avoided by simple good governance of the appropriate federal agencies. The result for us common folk: we were taken to the cleaners twice by the same band of robbers. I suppose we have to rebuild our bank accounts and wait for the remaining Bush to come and rob us again in a few years. I say NO WAY. That is why this past election punished the immoral pseudo-conservatives in the GOP. It is high time that a real party takes the helm of the Conservative cause without giving carte blanche to the greed and immorality prevalent in big businesses today. There is no point in defending traditional morality in sexual matters while, on the other hand, we practice debauchery in social, financial and economic matters. The 2008 election was the well deserved punishment for such behavior among "conservatives". The invisible hand is still at work.—Carlos Caso-Rosendi

Evangelicals and Economics

When I was a freshman in college, a woman who looked like a whole-earth hippie asked me if I had a personal relationship with Jesus. The question struck me as a strange one. Yet I found myself compelled to hear her out, and began to hang out with the young people in the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship chapter she led, even though their conspicuous use of the word “Jesus” and group prayer made me uncomfortable. Eventually, their faith became my own.

At roughly the same time, my coursework in economics exposed me to free market thought. I was completely sold. Adam Smith. Friedman. Hayek. The virtues of the invisible hand excited me as much as my growing Christian commitment.

Laissez faire was nearly a second conversion.

As a budding libertarian, I felt distaste when I saw our InterVarsity chapter leader carrying a Bible study guide on social justice. She was benighted, I thought. To me, it appeared that the race-baiters, welfarists, and union apologists played on her soft heart.When my chemical engineer father complained about management decisions at his corporation that he felt maximized managerial bonuses for short-term results while damaging the ability of the company to compete over the long run, I defensively lectured him about the spectacular built-in intelligence of markets. The right thing would be done, I argued, because doing the right thing is ultimately profitable and efficient.

Several months ago, I heard a story that forced me to give more careful thought to my views on the built-in morality of the market. A large airline on the brink of bankruptcy in 2002 asked employees to make substantial wage concessions. They agreed. The airline returned to profitability, and management acknowledged that it had the workers to thank, but in the subsequent years, instead of restoring the wage concessions, it awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives.

When pressed by reporters, the airline’s spokesman said the bonuses were necessary to retain top managerial talent. Pilots and other airline personnel could not leave because the airlines’ seniority systems would require them to start over at a new company. In effect, the workers could not easily punish the airline for failing to pay them back, so it was in no hurry to do so.

The story jarred me. Somehow, I had never applied my Christian conception of a sinful world to corporate behavior. In hindsight I realize my faith should have cautioned me against too easily deferring to the idea of the sufficiency of the invisible hand to produce justice.

Reading Christians from the past reinforces the idea that the fusion of quasi-libertarian economics with Christian ethics is not always an obvious fit. G.K. Chesterton, for example, was tremendously concerned with the dehumanizing effects of a rapidly advancing free market economy. Catholic social thought has long resisted socialism while still sharply pointing out abuses in market economies. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum is an excellent example addressing the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.”

Conservative Protestants, on the other hand, are largely absent when it comes to criticizing unfair labor practices, questionable methods of executive compensation, and other varieties of irresponsible corporate citizenship. My guess is that we tend to stay out of these areas is because we generally accept the idea that the market, left unhindered, will produce good outcomes. (I think the left feels the same way about sex.)

Experience and prudence have demonstrated that free markets are demonstrably better than other alternatives. But the problem is that we have tuned our antennae in such a way such that they pick up market problems like the promotion of hedonistic vice but do not take adequate notice of other wrongs. Thus, conservative evangelicals are quick to protest against 7-11 carrying Playboy magazine, but are slow to call to account the corporation that deals with employees in bad faith.

Without Christ this is a world in which the strong will abuse the weak, the rich ignore or exploit the poor, and those with authority seek advantages for themselves as they exercise their power. We know these things both from the Scriptures and from examining our own hearts.

If our cultural critique is to have integrity, we must simultaneously respect the market and call the corporate sector to righteousness in its business dealings. As uncomfortable as Mike Huckabee’s concerns with executive compensation made many Republicans, his words suggested a healthy willingness critically to examine corporate behavior. If we question corporations when they produce bad products like pornography and gambling operations, then we necessarily accept the notion that the logic of free markets does not insulate them from critique when they commit other types of wrongs.

Francis Schaeffer (still a model for conservative Protestants) is generally remembered as an advocate for the Christian worldview. What has often been forgotten are his strong words about American materialism. Schaeffer lauded the hippies for their diagnosis of the ills of our society. Americans, he charged, are addicted to personal peace and affluence.

For a long time my natural instinct, the one that kept me deaf to the complaints of those claiming to have been treated unjustly, has been to defend the corporate estate against all criticisms. We must not be so passive even toward a system that has provided so well for most of us. Is the answer more government? No. The answer is to consistently call for righteousness.

Hunter Baker is the author of The End of Secularism, to be published by Crossway Books in August 2009. He serves on the political science faculty at Houston Baptist University. This article was originally published in First Things.

Is Soccer Ruining America?

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

A response to a dumb tirade

This is my response to How Soccer is Ruining America: A Jeremiad, by Stephen H. Webb, some egghead that writes for First Things. His rants indented in blue for clarity.

Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it. Social critics have long observed that we live in a therapeutic society that treats young people as if they can do no wrong. Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind, no matter how many times they watch the ball going the other way. Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return.

Well. I fail to see the cause and effect here. But first some background. I played soccer steadily form age 5 until I was 28. Soccer is a British game, although it is called football in the rest of the world. The British use the word soccer to make rugby and football into one, therefore the British Soccer Association combines the players of both sports in one group. Churchill, Fleming, Montgomery, C. S. Lewis, T. E. Lawrence, J. R. R.Tolkien, John Lennon, to name a few, were soccer players. They played soccer (plus rugby, cricket, runners, etc.) and they were definitely not dumb. I have read extensively on the history of the British Empire and so far I haven't read any historian that blames their decline to the evils of soccer.

If you think there is no competition in soccer it is because you haven't looked carefully. I have played full-back and right wing and I know the sting of defeat going both ways: failing to defend and also failing to use a good opportunity to attack. There is plenty of individual responsibility (to your team, and to your girlfriend watching the game). The game is fast, strategic decisions are made in fractions of a second, team work is of the utmost importance. But to know that much, you have to know how to play. To watch soccer is entertaining—like with most sports—only if you know what's going on. Eggheads can relate to American football (a great sport, by the way) because it is slow and it gives them plenty of statistics to think about. Soccer is for fast brains, mounted on a set of fast legs, equipped with the right pair of lungs and a good heart. Don't forget the keen eyes to see and evaluate the 21 other players in the field while you run.

What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.) The linear, two-dimensional action of soccer is like the rocking of a boat but without any storm and while the boat has not even left the dock. Think of two posses pursuing their prey in opposite directions without any bullets in their guns. Soccer is the fluoridation of the American sporting scene.

Buddy, watching American football is not exactly the most exhilarating experience. In its modern form, it is played in bursts of just a few minutes or even seconds. Of course, you have to sell commercials for TV, and the constant interruptions to the flow of the game are a good opportunity to sell potato chips, and vacuum cleaners.

It is obvious that you have no idea of what's going on in a soccer game. The later American generations seem to have a problem learning new things, like the metric system. Any Bolivian mechanic can tell the difference between a .10 thread bolt and its closest SAE equivalent. He grew up managing two systems (plus the standard Spanish system of cubits and leagues) and his brain did not explode. He is not dumb. Neither are Brazilians, Argentines, Chileans, Peruvians, etc. most of them can also speak more than one language. I grew in a neighborhood where Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and other languages were used. I learned Italian as a kid and I don't even remember a time when I did not speak it. I also learned to play chess, soccer, backgammon, basketball, rugby, and a host of other sports and games. I would have learned to play American football and baseball but those sports were not popular in those places at the time. Players from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or Puerto Rico are proof that the Spanish can learn to play American games very well. When I was growing up, the only American game available to us was basketball.

Soccer is not "linear" it is three-dimensional. You have to be able to chew gum and walk down the street to understand how to

• run (1 to 5 m.p.h),
• keep the ball under control,
• look at the field ahead of you,
• look at the guy coming up behind you,
• see who is better positioned to receive your pass,
• see if your adversary's goalie is covering the goal completely,
• be able to skip the full back coming at you,
• and make sure you are not off-side

Once can hardly call it a "linear" job. And I am only describing the job of a wing or a center-forward. Full-backs and center-fielders have a lot more to do and they cannot fail.

For those who think I jest, let me put forth four points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games—and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.

Quantity is not quality. I know a 36-22 score looks like something happened during the game, but then remember that points are remembered for ages in soccer. The goal scored by Cardenas against the Celtic in 1967—a masterful shot from behind half-field that passed the goal line right at the left angle, giving Racing of Argentina, the first World Cup ever to be obtained by an Argentine club. Or that goal by Pelé that gave Brazil the World Cup in Mexico, 1970. There are many other glorious moments like that. We remember them the same way that you remember that pass by Doug Flutie when he was playing for the Patriots. Check this out.

1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal’s dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability. Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with their feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone’s face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, “Trick or Treat, smell my hands”? Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God’s wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.

Limitations are natural character builders. They teach you to exercise self-restraint. When Picasso decided to paint in one color (blue, pink) for a while, he was voluntarily restraining himself to develop his style and definition of form.

If you have the ability to restrain yourself you won't be punching or kicking walls like a brutish idiot. In the golden era of soccer, when English gentlemen played it, the game was a way to teach young men to respect the rival and win the games on wit and physical endurance, always remaining a perfect gentleman. Raising your foot over the level of the chest of your opponent is considered foul play even today. Rules, team play and gentlemanship are what soccer teaches you, and for that matter, what every sport should teach. Did Jesus taught His disciples about "destroying your opponent with insurmountable power" like you write? I must have missed that part of the Gospel.

2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes, and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.

Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables. We also spent a lot of time in the outfield chanting, “Hey batter batter!” as if we were Buddhist monks on steroids. Our chanting was compensatory behavior, a way of making the time go by, which is surely why at soccer games today it is the parents who do all of the yelling.

Comparing two very different sports and concluding that one is better is, frankly, stupid. Baseball is a wonderful sport. I would have never thought of it is as a way of "breaking kids". Joe Di Maggio seemed to me the paramount of coolness. I don't think anyone had to break him to make him the great player that he was. The bleachers behavior that you describe is nothing compared to what you hear from the fans any Sunday in England. Your comparison is dumb, insulting and uninformed.

3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery. Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.

I am not a fan of penalty shoot-outs but that is a way to untie a game when defenders and attackers are well matched. The fun is in playing, not in scoring only. Also, when a player faces a good goalie on a penalty kick, he has seven meters to place his shot (about 23 ft. for you), while the best goalie can cover about five meters. The kicker is only twelve steps away. That can be a dramatic moment, a combination of psychology, strategy and geometry that can be pretty exhilarating. Again, you have to be smart enough to know what is actually going on to enjoy it, Stephen...

4) And then there is the question of gender. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.

Your daughter should kick you for passing her bad brain genes. With a little luck she got your hair and not your dim powers of observation. Again, destroying your opponent is not a masculine business. Showing restraint in the use of force—and—being able to achieve your goals is a more preferable way of doing things. Otherwise any second century Roman could call American football players a bunch of sissies for not killing off their opponents at the end of the game. If Pelé looks feminine to you, you should see his wife. She is really good looking.

By the way: did you read St. Augustine on bloodlust? Quite a shocker he disagrees with you. He does not consider that a virtue.

Let me conclude on a note of despair appropriate to my topic. There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy, and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch. The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.

The left is enjoying its heyday in America today because of sloppy, misguided thinkers like you. I miss the days when Conservatives could listen to William F. Buckley instead to the drivel you have presented us with. By the way, good old Will grew up in Mexico and he could kick a soccer ball pretty well. I suppose that turns him in to some kind of a commie mole, according to your system of thinking.

Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and [t]elevision are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.

Soccer is of the same "foreign" origin as the music of the Star Spangled Banner, Vivien Leigh, Rolls Royce cars and Bob Hope. The fact that you cannot play or are not intelligent enough to understand it, does not constitute a national security issue. Face it, you are not exactly a quick-witted jock, bud.

I should know. I am an overworked teacher, with books to read and books to write, and before I put in a video for the kids to watch while I work in the evenings, they need to have spent some of their energy. Otherwise, they want to play with me! Last year all three of my kids were on three different soccer teams at the same time. My daughter is on a traveling team, and she is quite good. I had to sign a form that said, among other things, I would not do anything embarrassing to her or the team during the game. I told the coach I could not sign it. She was perplexed and worried. “Why not,” she asked? “Are you one of those parents who yells at their kids? “Not at all,” I replied, “I read books on the sidelines during the game, and this embarrasses my daughter to no end.” That is my one way of protesting the rise of this pitiful sport. Nonetheless, I must say that my kids and I come home from a soccer game a very happy family.

I pity your students, and your daughter too. It is pretty bad to have a jackass for a father. I bet you don't know how to dance either.

The problem with most American Conservatives lately, is their incompetence born from a long time of not having to achieve anything through effort. This country needs a nice prolonged war followed by a period of real economic depression. That will clean up the chaff and bring up real values, real thinkers, real managers, real teachers and writers who can think a subject through, instead of whining like pussies about the unfairness of things they cannot master.

What is ruining America is not soccer, it is soft-brain academicians, pharisees with no character or guts to get things done.

Notes

Stephen H. Webb is a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. His recent books include American Providence and Taking Religion to School.


Carlos Caso-Rosendi is a 54 year-old ignorant Argentine-American who used to play soccer and rugby in his youth. Since he was a little boy, he has been a fan of Boca Juniors, the many-times World Champion club from Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his lifetime he had the privilege to see many great players perform, among them the greatest soccer player of all time: Edson Arantes Do Nascimento, Pelé, the greatest right-wing ever and a gentleman, both in the soccer field and in the greater and nobler field of life. He was a real world champion, unlike others that play among themselves and call the whole thing the "World" Series. Ha!

Reactions:

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