Ken Briggs's blog

Law and Order, Dissidents Unit, starring Cardinal Francis E. George as chief enforcer, and a repertoire team of U.S. bishops.

Religion is a messy affair, and the messiness tends to take on a dialectical quality. In Catholicism, strong central control stands in tension with flexible, personal freedom. In America, where Catholicism met its first major challenge in a democratic setting, the decentralized pole has strengthened at the expense of hierarchical authority.

Cardinal George, in the first session of the annual bishops' conference, signaled that the bishops have felt the time was right to again assert their authority. He and others have demanded that Catholics affirm what the church says about major issues like abortion or quit calling themselves Catholic.

He also serves notice to Catholic publications and universities that it's time to examine whether they're worthy of the name. Already before the meeting, Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Rhode Island rebuked Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI)for disagreeing with the church on abortion rights.

To their credit, most Catholic leaders have not played the "anti-Catholic" card during the long and gruesome series of revelations of priests' sexual abuse of children. Though crimes -- and the reports about them -- have been bitter pills, bishops and other leaders have shown an increasing tendency to face them without placing the blame on factions out to get them.

Not so the new archibishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, who flashed this canard in a virolent attack on the New York Times. He lumps together three pieces -- Maureen Dowd's column critical of the nuns' investigation (full disclosure: I was quoted in it) and two that involved Laurie Goodstein, one on a Franciscan who fathered a child who's now dying and another on the Pope's welcome of Anglicans -- in a furious blog diatribe on the paper as the enemy of the Catholic church. This was after the Times turned down his bid to place the attack on the paper's Op-Ed page.

Re: Benedict XVI's offer to Anglicans. If you were of a mind to do so, could you venture to say that the terms consitute the lowest common denomination?

Some analyses of the "welcome home" party being thrown for dissident Anglicans refer to the pope's invitation as the culmination of ecumenism.

That sounds to me like calling the invasion of Iraq a product of the peace movement.

Ecumenism implies good will and mutual respect. The gallery of historic Protestant churches (silly me thinks they're actually churches) have trooped to reconciliation talks with Catholics for decades. They come up with wonderful agreements and lasting friendships. When these accomplishments get to Rome, however, they have been either called deficient or reduced in importance.

The green light to angry Anglicans is, therefore, indicative of a general disrespect Rome shows toward the rest of Christianity. The price of dialogue is capitulation to the Roman Catholic Church, pure and simple.

The Reformation churches have reason to be furious at this slap in the face. They've played the part of fools in thinking ecumenical talks meant something other than surrender.

Christians have always played one-upsmanship, of course. One group lords it over another, regions square off and disputes go on, as we know, for hundreds, even thousands of years.

This just in: the Episcopal response to Pope Benedict marketing plan to Anglicans:

Dear Benedict,

Hope this finds you in the pink of health as you prepare for the influx of Anglicans. As the Westminster cardinal and the Canterbury Archbishop said the other day, this marks the triumph of ecumenism.

Thanks a whole bunch for your special invitation to join the Roman Catholic Church. And that you'll create a sort of Ellis Island to process whole lots of us at a time. To paraphrase you, it's all for the purpose of welcoming "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free."

I would be remiss if I didn't shout out to Roman Catholics to give us a look. Hospitality goes both ways. We're open for business.

To be honest, your exiles would have to adjust to some harsh realities if they decided to sign in with us. For one thing, they'd have to go along with the ordination of women. And another. They'd have to give up a streamlined system of ruling the church that gives all the power to the (male) clergy and hierachy. No more church conventions where lay people and priests share authority. One boss.

A few days ago I expressed the wish that a Sister Survey similar to those conducted by the distinguish sister-sociologist, Marie Augusta Neal, in the years following Vatican II, could be done now to find attitudes of sisters independently in the midst of the investigation crisis.

Meanwhile, word comes that the estimable periodical, U.S. Catholic, is surveying sisters about the investigation and separately inviting readers to post their views of the probe. The general reader survey is described as a "poll." The first wave of responses showed 55 percent sharply critical of the Vatican's initiative, but after a priest filed a entry on his blog highly in favor of the process, together with a link to the magazine's site, the results tilted heavily in the other direction, 80 percent approving the probe.

The storm over Rome's investigation of American sisters makes me wish that someone of the stature of the late Sister Marie Augusta Neal were doing the kind of sister surveys for which she was renowned.

Neal, one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard, conducted all-inclusive surveys to study the influence of Vatican II's directive to U.S. sisters to renew their communities. The first was in 1966, in the wake of that call, and the second was done in 1982. Combined, they showed solid and increasing support for changes instituted by the congregations: housing, work, prayer and personal growth.

In the current turmoil, such a survey could clear up lots of confusion and misunderstanding. Perhaps there is much more of a live-and-let-live frame of mind among both conservatives and liberals. If a majority of sisters on both sides viewed religious life as a common devotion with multiple expressions, would that make a difference? What do sisters themselves think, apart from their leadership or the local bishop's attitudes or Rome's agenda? That would, of course, assume that sisters had a role in deciding their futures.

Strategies that work against themselves.

Woody Allen's appeal to excuse Roland Polanski from being forced to return to the U.S. to face sentencing on charges of raping a 13-year-old girl more than three decades ago. Allen's credibility is a bit strained. While dating Mia Farrow, he began an affair with Farrow's adopted daughter, then 21 (he was 56), and married her six years later in 1997.

As reported on NPR, the Detroit school system, in an effort to bolster attendance as a means of maximizing state funding, is awarding prizes for showing up. Top prize: a 42" flat screen television set.

The Congregation for Religious, in its campaign to assist efforts by conservative U.S. nuns to root out Vatican II-itis in mainstream congregations, turns over the $1.1 million bill to the American bishops. This is unlikely to foster enthusiasm for the inquisition. The unintended consequence seems likely to be to thrown another log on the fire of reaction against it. My guess is that the tab will be, or already has been picked up by one of the usual wealthy Vatican backers, but a bitter aftertaste will likely remain.

Some church traditions have a long history of spotlighting "trophy" converts as a means of gaining an edge. Perhaps the most publicized competition has been between Anglicans and Catholics. The defection of John Henry Newman from the Church of England to Rome remains the biggest headline in that tug-of-war.

The reasons why followers of one church jump to another are myriad. As the great sociologist/theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, social and economic factors are among those that have loomed large: in the "Social Sources of Denominationalism" he outlined the upwardly mobile process.

Niebuhr said that American church groups were arranged in a kind of hierarchy of class and prestige. If you began life as a poor person in a fundamentalist church, your education and spunk might lift to you a higher economic group which would, in turn, incline you toward a church that reflected your new status. And so on.

In her erudite piece on the history of apostolic religious life, Sister Sandra Schneiders notes at the outset that she is writing to correct those who write "dogmatically" about the subject but have "no lived experience of or academic competence" to back up what they say.

Nothing she says points to me, who has written quite a bit about that topic, but I certainly fit the description. Obviously I've never been a sister in apostolic life nor do I consider myself a scholar of it.

On the other hand, it's perfectly legitimate to debate whether or not what I or anyone else writing about the current crisis is dogmatic, which I assume means rigid conviction untempered by reason or knowledge. That's fair game.

But her comment indirectly raises another issue: the role of the outsider.

In the sphere of spookdom, nothing compares to "666" as a creepy portent, but today's date, 9-9-09, ain't too shabby. Futurists and apocalypticists are no doubt conjuring such matters even as I type. As in, how might it portend the nature of Obama's speech?

My gratitude to Tom Fox for fetching those questions from the list of those being used to investigate American sisters. They undermine any pretense of neutrality. They are loaded with unsubstantiated, prejudicial assumptions that further highlight a punitive agenda. On a related note, the whole purgative purpose seems to me to violate the meaning of "Visitation" in Catholic tradition.

All sorts of people keep saying they have no idea why the Vatican is investigating nuns. It's conceivable, I suppose, that someone could have missed the last 40 years of strained relations between Rome and U.S. sisters, and it's true that the investigation wasn't accompanied by a large print set of objectives, but otherwise it's either disengenuous or an evasive strategy in some grander design. In any case, it's unnerving to hear people pretend the gorilla isn't in the room.

Since there remains a tendency to make big trends out of scraps of evidence, let me try another tack.

Bob's Bakery has been having a tough time of it since a health store/bagel shop opened next door.

Nonetheless, in the past year he's noticed that cinnamon doughnuts are selling better. Last year he sold a total of 15,000 doughnuts (down four percent from the previous year). However he sold 10 more of the jelly variety than the year before and 30 more cinnamon doughnuts .

If Bob were to hail this as a major trend in favor of cinnamon doughnuts his bank might have second thoughts about keeping him afloat.

The fine study of new members of religious communities by the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate is unfortunately being used to support a bogus conclusion.

Critics of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious often blame the huge drop in sisters to the Conference's promotion of liberal or "renewal" theology.

At the same time, however, under two strikingly conservative popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a prevalence of conservative American bishops, the ranks of the priesthood have dramatically thinned, a third of those born Catholic have left the church, mass attendance and confessions are down and there are fewer church weddings.

Whatever attention deficit some Catholics may think their church has suffered has been more than made up for in the past weeks. Obama at Notre Dame, the pope's social encyclical and his meeting with the president have stirred enough coverage to convince those who have felt neglected that the Roman Catholic church is back to its proper place as the true church.

Well, is this the advertised "Catholic moment" or not? The late Richard John Neuhaus told us it was coming to fill up the vacuum caused by the steely-eyed secularists who drove religion out of the public square.

Everything would come together to usher it in the golden age. The Pope, John Paul II, was hailed as a world leader who could turn countries like Poland around. The backlash against Vatican II had stiffened Catholicism's resolve to press ahead with a "clear" agenda that replaced the "confusion" of conciliar "liberals." America was allegedly losing its moral legs and spiritual anchors, making room for the certainty delivered by Catholic evangelists.

George W. Bush, whose own religious identity was foggy, save a rhetorical attachment to the evangelicals, no doubt saw the inherent conservatism of "moment" thinking as a good idea. To Neuhaus and other theocons, then, indicators read "Go" for a Catholic boom to straighten things out. The many elements would cohere. It would be U.S. Catholicism's place in the sun when the soil of American democracy would finally be receptive to the seeds of Catholic conviction.

College can be a severe moral dilemma. And I'm not referring primarily to drinking and sex. Graduation is a time when grand ethical purposes are proclaimed. There are many elements in that chorus but among them are hints about what kind of standards make life worth living.

Most students arrive the first year with a general sense of right and wrong, often etched on their memories by Sunday school and catechism. It is, from what I hear, a jumble of attitudes about society and the "good" life and at least a few of the 10 Commandments.

The ruckus over President Obama's invitation to Notre Dame's graduation is most obviously about abortion. In that sense it's a quarrel within the Catholic Church over how to treat those who differ from Catholic teaching.

But I believe there is a subplot that springs from academic politics. My instincts tell me that this might be a strategy to boost Notre Dame's reputation as a research university.

The scenario I've envisioned goes like this.