John L Allen Jr's blog

Arguably the most influential sports book of the decade, and almost certainly the most controversial, was 2003's Moneyball by Michael Lewis. It exposed a dirty little secret that baseball's best minds already understood: the categories that shape judgments about the game are often badly flawed.

Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister in the late 1950s and early 60s, is famously credited with perhaps the best reply ever when asked by a reporter what might throw a government into tilt: “Events, my dear boy, events.”

His point that was that the best-laid plans often founder on the shoals of unforeseen events – an insight that applies to the fine art of futurology every bit as much as politics. A case in point comes this week from the Philippines, where the bioethics office of the Filipino bishops’ conference has announced that it will not oppose the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to solve a persistent rice shortage in Asia.

In The Future Church, I take up the subject of GMOs. I note that while the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Sciences has been strongly GMO-friendly, Catholic leaders in the global south have been more critical:

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

Calling hunger “the most cruel and concrete sign of poverty,” Pope Benedict XVI today told a special summit of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization that “opulence and waste are no longer acceptable when the tragedy of hunger is assuming ever greater proportions.”

The pontiff called for urgent action to combat world hunger, to protect the global environment and to rethink lifestyle choices in the West in his address to the Food and Agriculture Organization, which is based in Rome.

Benedict’s decision to visit the Rome headquarters of FAO, rather than to insist that participants in the summit travel across town to the Vatican to be received in audience, was seen as a sign of the importance the pontiff attaches both to the issue of hunger and to the institution of the United Nations.

Americans who have spent any time in Catholic circles in Europe have likely been subjected to some clucking about our alleged political myopia. Even the most doctrinally conservative European Catholics often lament what they see as an obsession in America with abortion, and an over-identification of the American church with the political right.

Case in point: Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich, an old friend of Benedict XVI who was tapped in 2007 to lead the pontiff’s former archdiocese, recently gave an interview to the Italian magazine 30 Giorni in which he complained that American neo-cons may be strong on the life issues, but they too often end up, in his words, “reducing Christianity to a religious ideology propping up the market economy.”

As a rule of thumb, I don’t respond when people go on-line to offer either criticism or praise of something I’ve written, or something I've said on TV or radio. I’ve already had my say, and anyway, the focus ought to be on the story rather than the story-teller.

Recently, however, I tossed a throw-away line about blogs into the middle of a column on an unrelated topic. That line made the rounds, and some people either still wonder what I meant (in which case they’ve asked for clarification) or they’re pretty sure they know what I meant (and some in that crowd want an apology.)

Since this subject indirectly connects to some of the themes in The Future Church, I thought I’d take it up briefly here.

Passage of the Stupack Amendment in the House of Representatives, applying existing bans on federal funding for abortion to any new government health programs, has left pro-choice activists fuming. The primary villains of the piece, in their eyes, are the Catholic bishops of America.

The Associated Press has a story today quoting Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority to the effect that the bishops “dictated” the outcome, and that it’s “totally inappropriate … blatant interference between church and state.” In a similar vein, Rep. Diana DeGette, a pro-choice Democrat from Colorado, said, “No one group should get to dictate the outcome of legislation in Congress … I don’t think one group should be given veto authority over what we do.”

One can obviously debate the merits of the bishops’ role, but for now I want to put this story to a different use: As an object lesson in the hazards of predicting the future.

Trying to get a handle on the future of Catholicism is, of course, the raison d’être of The Future Church, which makes the caution I'm about to deliver all the more topical.

I’m a big baseball fan, making me part of the core audience for TV’s “MLB Network” that launched last January. One of my favorite shows is called “Prime 9,” featuring a run-down of the nine best center fielders of all time, the nine biggest home runs, and so on. The show’s motto is, “Designed to start arguments, not settle them.”

If I had to choose a slogan for my new book The Future Church, I’d probably end up with something a lot like that.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

One of Europe’s most influential prelates, and someone widely viewed as close to the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI, has come out swinging against American “neo-cons” and in defense of a strong social welfare state.

Ironically, this critique of laissez faire capitalism comes from a bishop named Marx.

Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising made the comments in an interview with the prestigious Catholic journal 30 Giorni, published in its September issue. Marx, 56, is widely expected to become a cardinal in the near future. He was appointed by Benedict XVI in 2007 to head the archdiocese once led by the pope, while he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

In the new interview, Marx reflects on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguing that what was needed after the collapse of Communism was a “morally alert market economy, oriented towards global welfare,” but that instead what has prevailed is “radical capitalist ideology.”

Marx charges that what he calls “turbo-capitalism” has led “to a deterioration in the daily situation of millions of people.”

BY JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

Almost three weeks after announcing plans to welcome Anglicans who want to become Catholics, the Vatican today released a legal blueprint for the creation of new structures for these potential converts. According to an apostolic constitution and complementary norms issued this morning, those structures will have wide latitude to incorporate elements of Anglican tradition – though not latitude without limits.

Pointedly, a Vatican statement released this morning insists that permission to have married priests in these new structures does not betoken “any change in the church’s discipline of clerical celibacy.”

The apostolic constitution, titled Anglicanorum Coetibus (“On Groups of Anglicans”) was released today in Rome by Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Among the highlights:

Much has been made lately of Pope Benedict XVI's apparent lenience for "cafeteria Catholicism" on the right. Two developments have fed the perception: talks between the Vatican and the Society of St. Pius X, the "Lefebvrites," who broke with Rome in protest of liberalizing currents after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65); and new structures to allow Anglicans to become Catholic while preserving their heritage, with the most likely takers being conservative Anglicans opposed to homosexuality and women's ordination.

Despite the ennui of too much time in airports and hotel rooms, I usually try to accept whenever I'm invited to give a talk someplace. That's partly because I get paid, but there's also a less mercenary motive. Like a stand-up comic, I've learned that there's simply no substitute for a live audience. It hard-wires me into what real people are thinking -- what stirs their curiosity, what their hopes and fears are, what leaves them cold or makes their blood boil.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

If there's one big idea that seemed to surface at the nearly monthlong Synod for Africa in Rome, it was a call to take women more seriously -- in society, and also in the church. In keeping with the candor exhibited throughout the synod about the church's need to confront its own failures, the bishops called for, among other things, new structures to foster decision-making authority by women in the church.

Read the full story: Women may come out winners in the Synod for Africa

This week's big Vatican story is obviously the decision to create special structures, called "personal ordinariates", to welcome Anglicans seeking to join the Catholic church. In some reports, the move was touted as a bold gambit to end the schism that began with the English Reformation in the 16th century -- a dubious bit of spin, given that the actual number of Anglicans likely to sign up for one of these ordinariates will almost certainly be quite small.

When the dust settles, the centuries-long breach between Rome and Canterbury will remain intact.

Read the full story here: What the Vatican's welcome of Anglicans means

In my column last Friday, I wrote about Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's top officer for ecumenical relations, presenting his new book Harvesting the Fruits on Oct. 15.

Although the Vatican conducts dialogues with all three main branches of Christianity -- the Orthodox churches, the churches of the Reformation, and the Pentecostal and Evangelical movements -- Harvesting the Fruits focuses on the Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans and Reformed churches.

When Kasper was asked last about rumors that the Traditional Anglican Communion, a breakaway bloc of conservative Anglican churches, might soon be incorporated into the Catholic church, he seemed to want to play down the impact of such a move on Anglican-Catholic relations.

"We are not fishing in the Anglican lake," Kasper insisted. "Proselytism is not a policy of the Catholic church."

That said, Kasper added that "if in conscience some [Anglicans] want to become Catholics, we cannot shut the door."

Married priests to be part of the deal in new 'personal ordinariates'

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

In a move with potentially sweeping implications for relations between the Catholic church and some 80 million Anglicans worldwide, the Vatican has announced the creation of new ecclesiastical structures to absorb disaffected Anglicans wishing to become Catholics. The structures will allow those Anglicans to hold onto their distinctive spiritual practices, including the ordination of married former Anglican clergy as Catholic priests.

Those structures would be open to members of the Episcopal Church in the United States, the main American branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion. American Episcopalians are said to number some 2.2 million.

Read the full story here: Vatican reveals plan to welcome disaffected Anglicans

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

A strong call for the cancellation of Africa’s external debts came yesterday from Cardinal Bernard Agré of Ivory Coast, who insisted that such a move would be “no longer an act of charity, but of justice.”

Agré, now 83 and retired, spoke yesterday to Vatican Radio on the margins of the Synod of Bishops for Africa. The synod is meeting in the Vatican Oct. 4-25.

According to United Nations statistics, sub-Saharan African nations still owe an estimated $200 billion in external debt, despite spending almost $14 billion annually in debt payments. The UN estimates that sub-Saharan African nations receive some $10 billion annually in foreign aid, meaning that they actually send back $4 billion more each year to affluent nations than they receive in development assistance.

Agré told Vatican Radio that they synod, currently in its recommendations-crafting phase, “should consider this problem of the cancellation of debts which fall too heavily on many peoples.”

Rome -- Earlier this week, I interviewed Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta, the lone American member of the Oct. 4-25 Synod for Africa, and asked him how many of the African bishops he already knew. He ticked off several, beginning with Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria -- but at that point Gregory stopped himself, saying, “I guess that doesn’t really count, because everybody knows Onaiyekan!”

Made a bishop at the tender age of 38, and now in full stride at 65, Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan is Africa’s superstar prelate, known around the world as the voice of his continent.

Writing from Rome this week, NCR senior correspondent John L Allen Jr. asks what does the Synod for Africa, which is two-thirds complete, means to the larger Catholic community; reports that Obama and the Vatican have joined forces on HIV/AIDS; and reviews Cardinal Walter Kasper's book on ecumenism.

Read the full column here: A roundup of this week's events in Rome

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Here’s an exercise to try sometime: Find any random cross-section of twenty people who know something about Catholicism in Africa, and ask them to tick off five names of the most impressive African bishops they know. The odds are fairly good that the name of Archbishop Charles (“Call me Charlie”) Palmer-Buckle of Accra, Ghana, will surface with some frequency.

Palmer-Buckle, 59, is taking part in the Synod for Africa as a papal appointment. A leader in peace efforts in Ghana and a veteran of the international Catholic scene through his work with groups such as Caritas Internationalis and Catholic Relief Services, Palmer-Buckle is widely considered to be among the heavyweights of his generation in the African hierarchy.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

As the Synod of Bishops for Africa reaches its midway point, its key themes seem to include empowering women (both in the broader society and the church), a perceived Western assault on the African family, globalization and it discontents (especially chronic poverty), and dialogue with Islam.

The fate of women, in particular, seems a major preoccupation.

“The synod fathers have heard the cry of women,” said Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana yesterday, noting that cry “has been echoed” by some of the women taking part in the African Synod itself.

“Women need to be recognized in society as well as in the church as active members,” he said.

Turkson, who is serving as the general secretary of the synod, yesterday delivered a speech technically known as the relation post disceptationem, or the “report after the discussion.”

Lone U.S. bishop at the Synod for Africa talks about the African experience in America, Barack Obama, health care reform, and the sex abuse crisis

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta, Georgia, is the lone U.S. bishop taking part in the Oct. 4-25 Synod for Africa in Rome. Gregory, 61, was the first African-American to be elected president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, and he led the American church through the peak period of the sexual abuse crisis from 2001 to 2004. A Chicago native, he also knows a thing or two about politics, and therefore how to handicap the dynamics in a setting such as a synod of bishops.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

A sobering wake-up call about global hunger was heard Monday afternoon in the Synod for Africa, delivered by a special guest invited to address the gathering: Senegalese diplomat Jacques Diouf, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which is based in Rome.

Diouf broke away to address the synod from an Oct. 12-13 FAO summit titled, “How to Feed the World in 2050.”

World population is projected to rise to 9.1 billion in 2050 from a current 6.7 billion, Diouf said during the FAO summit, requiring a 70-percent increase in farm production. Increases, he said, would need to come mostly from yield growth and improved cropping intensity rather than from farming more land. Urbanization, desertification, the ever-greater share of land devoted to biofuels and global climate change, Diouf said, all make opening up new cropland increasingly difficult.

Without such significant increases in productivity, he warned, a rising population will find itself staring at an “empty cupboard," with significant increases in global hunger and malnutrition.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Two of the biggest guns in African Catholicism were locked and loaded in the synod hall on Monday, and both had the same target in their sights: politicians and political parties which they blasted as corrupt and interested only in self-preservation, a problem one of them memorably described as a “cancer eating up our continent.”

Those big guns were Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier of Durban, South Africa, and Cardinal John Njue of Nairobi, Kenya. Both are widely considered among the top tier of prelates in Africa, and both have a broad regional influence – Napier especially in Southern Africa, and Njue in East Africa.

If the early days of the Synod for Africa have been marked by candor about the church’s own internal challenges, Monday the pendulum swung back in a strongly ad extra direction, focused on the broader political life of the continent. Fox Napier and Njue may not have offered any compelling new cures, but they certainly minced no words about the diagnosis.

The Synod for Africa is meeting in the Vatican Oct. 4-25.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Over and over during the first week of the Synod for Africa, speakers have stressed the diversity of situations across the continent – the contrast between the Muslim-dominated north and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, or between war-torn Congo and Sudan and zones of relative calm such as Gambia.

Nowhere do generalizations about Africa go to die as readily, however, as in Botswana.

A landlocked nation of two million in southern Africa, Botswana has long been hailed as an African success story. (Americans may be most familiar with Botswana as the setting for the novels, and now the HBO television series, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.”)

One of the most impoverished nations in Africa at the time of its independence in 1966, Botswana today boasts a stable political system and a rapidly developing market economy.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

One thread running through the Oct. 4-25 Synod for Africa has been alarm about a perceived assault on the family, and upon traditional African morality, stemming from Western non-governmental organizations and international bodies.

Archbishop Joseph Tlhagale of Johannesburg, for example, president of the Southern Africa bishops’ conference, told the synod on Oct. 8 that Africa is “under heavy strain from liberalism, secularism, and from lobbyists who squat at the United Nations.” Archbishop Robert Sarah of Guinea, currently the secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, condemned a Western “theory of gender” which he said is trying to push Africa “to write laws favorable to … contraceptive and abortion services (the concept of ‘reproductive health’) as well as homosexuality.”

For anyone curious as to what the bishops have in mind, just three words will do the trick: The Maputo Protocol.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Anyone who has ever endured the first week of a Vatican-sponsored Synod of Bishops, reading mountains of paperwork and listening to a seemingly endless cycle of speeches, will appreciate this metaphor: Whatever else it may be, a Synod of Bishops is like a particle accelerator for words.

A synod concentrates tremendous energy in a confined space, producing a collision that releases a vast amount of verbiage. Consider that the average speech given in the synod hall is perhaps 1,000 words long; with roughly 200 speeches during the first week and a half, that’s 200,000 words in speech-making alone, to say nothing of the two lengthy preparatory documents, the two weighty speeches given by the relator, and so on. Conservatively, one could estimate that each synod generates at least a million words.

Truth to be told, at least some of that language – though typically full of passion and good will – is forgotten as soon as it’s pronounced.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

As it happens, Oct. 10 is the anniversary of the death of St. Daniel Comboni, a 19th century Italian missionary who spent much of his life in Sudan. Among other claims to fame, Comboni was probably the source of more epigrammatic one-liners about the church’s mission in Africa than any other single Catholic figure, living or dead.

Memorable Comboni-isms include, “Either Africa or death,” a classic expression of his missionary drive; “Save Africa through Africa,” an early formula for the transition to self-reliance; and his famous sentiment upon approaching his death in 1881, “I wish I had a thousand lives to give for Africa.”

Interview with U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Miguel Diaz

Though neither of us realized it at the time, new U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Miguel Diaz and I met on a propitious day for Diaz’s boss, President Barack Obama. A little over two hours after our interview ended, news broke that Obama had been awarded the Noble Peace Prize. One of the first global institutions to issue its congratulations was the Vatican, which expressed “appreciation” for the choice and encouraged what it described as Obama’s commitment to “peace in the international arena,” especially nuclear disarmament.

Read the full interview here: 'We've been uprooted into a life of service'

Rome certainly has its own rhythms, which can be either charming or annoying depending upon your point of view. On the ecclesiastical scene, periods of relative calm alternate with occasional bursts of near-frenzy. This week is one of those peak moments, as even a partial run-down of what's going on will illustrate: