Ken Briggs's blog

The latest "Room for Debate" in the New York Times pays an indirect tribute to the National Catholic Reporter.

All five of those asked to comment on what the Vatican should do about clerical sexual abuse of children are men.

Every one of them is worthy. Each has something valuable to say. By not including a single woman in the mix, however, the Timesreflects a widespread absence of women's voices in the media's coverage of critical church debates.

Excluding women from official church councils has, of course, been standard practice in the hierarchy's exercise of rule. When the Vatican decided to investigate American nuns, for example, nuns weren't consulted in any formal sense. It was done, as usual, by fiat.

For the mainstream media largely to repeat this pattern of neglect has been irresponsible, lending credibility to a bias against women (my interpretation) and furthering it. Occasionally women are asked to join in, but not nearly often enough.

Almost overnight, Glenn Beck has become Irritator in Chief. He sends legions of left-leaning Americans into fits of apoplexy with a deft turn of phrase. His laser-tongue attacks are typically vile but his method is impeccable. He knows how to rile.

His latest poison arrow was aimed at Christians who think social justice has something to do with the Gospels. It doesn't, he declares, instructing his followers to bolt any church that sponsors such causes.

Beck hates socialiam and believes social justice is its handmaiden. Anything smacking of it it is likely in his calculus to lead to the dreadnaught of Big Government.

I'm not convinced that he is seriously targeting churches, however. Churches are not real threats, he seems to say, mostly potential ones. After all, very few parishes would be found guilty of sticking their necks out for social change aimed at justice (notable, mostly isolated exceptions, of course). Their relative silence on health care is but the latest evidence.

I write barely in advance of the witching hour when the Academy of Motion Pictures, a name more revered than the National Academy of Science, hands out its immortal trophies.

The ritual polishes off a drum roll that has lasted for weeks. If you haven't been asked whether you prefer "The Hurt Locker" to "Avatar" for best picture, you should feel socially insecure.

In case it's not crystal clear, I'm not a fan. The reason I mention it is because the Oscar season runs in rough symmetry with Lent and Easter. At the risk of concocting some direct contrasts rather than reporting on them, I'd suggest the following.

The Oscars epitomize the triumph of glamor and hubris served up by products made by their own hands in fierce competition with one another and ultimately aimed at profit.

All of which contrasts obscenely with the themes of the Christian season when such counter cultural rubrics as repentence, humility and, ultimately, self-sacrifice move through worship and practice.

The term "religious fanatic" can be applied to anyone whose strength of belief is distasteful to others. One person's saint is another's pariah.

So far as I'm aware, the term is used exclusively as an accusation, a derisive means of saying that the believer has gone too far. As such, they are thought to be at the least liable to twist your arm to win you to their convictions or to be dangerous. Some labeled as such have, in fact, done such things.

But in a society like America, where a person's religion isn't supposed to stick out too much lest it upsets the egalitarian ideal, someone can be called a fanatic simply for taking religion seriously. Those who take St. Francis or Gandhi or Mohammed as role models stand a good chance of being shoved to the margins of society because they don't know when to stop being religious, unlike most citizens who know when to quit in a pragmatic sort of way.

Back to the visitation.

I'm sure Mother Millea is a charming and cultured woman though I've never met her.

Her political skills may be somewhat lacking, however. In the fresh interview with John Allen, she tries valiantly to attain credibility for the Vatican's inexorable march toward a pre-destined ending, but her attempt falls short.

Nearly 20 years ago, the Vatican put its official stamp of approval on the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious.

It thus became the visible and formal proxy in Rome's offensive against the "modernism" of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. As such, it is the favored wedge group in Rome's campaign to replace renewal with reaction.

Accordingly, the head of the investigation of American sisters is allied with CMSWR.

Circumstantial evidence suggests much more coordination between the Vatican and CMSWR to undermine the general direction of renewal among LCWR communities. For one thing, a publicity campaign has gained momentum on the premise that CMSWR communities are flourishing becasue they are doing it "right" while those related to LCWR are failing because they have disobeyed church authority and succumbed to worldly ways.

By coincident or not, Ave Maria Press has issued a book that promotes "orthodox" practices among sisters and repudiates the basic direction of renewal.

News of the death of Sister Mary Daniel Turner stirred in me sadness and gratitude.

She had given generously of her time to help me understand the joys and trials of American sisters in responding to the challenges from Vatican II.

The book she wrote with Sister Lara Quinonez, "The Transformation of American Sisters," was a staple in documenting that era. Failures on my part to grasp that period therefore couldn't be attributed to her. She had been a careful guide.

The most poignant memory, however, is the time I spent with her at the home for men off the streets of Washington, D.C., who were dying of AIDS. She had helped found the shelter.

Her work in that center epitomized what it meant to be an apostolic religious. She had forsaken comforts and entered into the suffering of human beings at the very fringe of society.

Her account of her ministry was no fairy tale of an angelic Florence Nightingale gliding unscathed among the sick and dying. To the contrary, she said she had struggled to cope with the pain and agony of poor men ravaged by disease in order to avert total emotional devastation.

If a relilgious group were to pour tons of money toward electing a Senator, that would be blasted as a blatant violation of the much-venerated "separation of church and state." It would be widely scorned as contrary to the first amendment of the Constitution which in essence struck a deal. You, religion, stay out of politics and we, government, favor no religion over another.

Until yesterday, the rough equivalent of that dividing line kept giant corporations from bankrolling political candidates. The Supreme Court's decision now allow the country's goliaths to spend whatever they want on politicians and parties that offer them the best deal. Favoritism, the very scourge that the church-state principle tries to prevent, thus becomes a staple of the electoral process, giving the biggest and wealthiest players an overwhelming advantage. All in the ludicrous name of "free speech."

If religions were permitted to do the same, to curry privileges by courting public figures, most of us would probably shudder until our teeth rattled. Yes, it happens even now, but to a limited degree. Imagine if the door were thrown open?

As Tom Fox reports on this blog, Loyola Marymount and Mt. St. Mary's college have joined the procession celebrating the example and service of American sisters.

Similar tributes have been forthcoming in the face of the Vatican's investigation of religious communities and the beliefs of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. LCWR earlier contributed its own in the form of an exhibition of the history of U.S. sisters now showing in Washington.

These honors are well deserved and often overdue. Do they also constitute a conscious effort to combat the Vatican's attempt to find fault with them? I don't know how much, if any, coordination has prompted the tributes, but it seems plausible that it does represent at least a loose coalition of desires to display a collective "character witness."

The strategy of open protest against the "visitation" has, by comparison, been used rarely. For a variety of reasons, most sisters have refrained from publicly rejecting the initiative. The most striking example has been indirect as many communities refused to comply with sections of the investigation's questionnaire.

Pat Robertson has taken the "blame the victim" mentality to a new level.

Robertson's geo-religio-political analysis of the Haitian disaster is that it's their own damned fault. He contends that the island's slaves enlisted the devil to overthrow their French colonial oppressors in 1805 and have been punished ever since.

The television preacher has played on this grandiose stage before, once famously claiming to have turned the course of a hurricane.

That episode became the stuff of stand-up comedy, but there's nothing funny about this one. If anything, it suggests that the "pact with the devil" is more a projection of his own consorting with evil. So in an odd way he may be on to something.

Robertson may still be smarting from his rebuff as a candidate for the Republican nomination. He once fancied himself the guardian of the nation's "family values" crusade when restoration of morality was all the rage. But he had to return to his 700 club sanctuary in defeat. His brain stock, and he has plenty, seems to have been invested in greater nuttiness ever since.

The near bombing of the Northwest flight enroute to Detroit has brought us back to an obsession with security which was triggered by 9/11 and has spiked many times since.

The tension makes perfect sense on the face of it. Any time a would-be bomber slips through the layers of detection lives are in danger. Questions must be asked and holes plugged.

But as 2009 fades to black, I'm also reminded that the voices calling for repairs to the system are so often shrill, hysterical and utopian. They demand the kind of perfection that the Bible counsel us to avoid lest we lose our souls.

The Bible's argument, as I understand it, is that human project, while worthy, cannot avoid lapses and failures. It is our propensity toward mistake and error that can make us realize that we find our only security in Jesus Christ. Just as St. Paul said, religious law serves us by awakening us to our imperfection and the need for divine mercy.

While I was growing up, I was always aware, at least subliminally, that there were certain rare people in the little churches we went to who held the whole thing together through their faith and compassion.

Later I understood what St. Paul meant by "all the saints" he was corresponding with. They were ordinary Christians, largely anonymous and unheralded, who simply lived the Gospel.

They weren't always models of perfection. A father of a friend of mine, a man whose nature was loving, sang in the choir, led a prayer meeting, visited old people in the hospital and sometimes chased women, with what results I don't know. He was no angel but we thought he was God's UPS man.

Same with a woman who brought hope to people suffering from all sorts of mental and spiritual ills. She'd listen and minister to them with no fanfare. One day we discovered that in her role as church treasurer she'd made off with $5,000 (a tidy sum then) to bail her husband out of perilous gambling debts.

In those days, the Catholic system of sainthood was even more remote than Catholicism itself. It was a bit spooky and kind of super hall-of-famy populated by those who had just appeared to be human.

A few night ago I joined a gathering billed as a "Christmas celebration." There were good eats, including a fabulous ice cream cake shaped like St. Nick, but the main feature was the showing of "Noel," the 2004 film pegged to the season.

Among the stars of the show are Susan Sarandon, Alan Arkin and Robin Williams who does an extended cameo.

The story is a festoon of sorrows. Sarandon strains to care for her elderly, Alzheimer-afflicted mother. A young couple's marriage falls to pieces because of the husband's jealousy. A man wanders in and out of insanity out of grief for his wife. Everyone paints a canvas of bleakness.

But serrendipity comes to the rescue and almost everybody ends up is touched by an angel.

I'm fairly immune to the sappy productions; they're hard to sit through but at least they don't pretend to do much else. This one, however, was downright irritating because it starts out as a genuine human drama, then resorts to cheap answers.

The film is set in New York where Christian symbols were much in evidence. The woebegotten actors play out their agonies among them. Yet the film was otherwise devoid of religious content.

In the world of allegory, no one was better named than Oral Roberts. Everything he achieved during his 91 year life, which ended yesterday, issued from the thunder of his vocal chords.

The rest was a function of hands that reached out to heal the lines of supplicants stricken with the variety of afflictions from cancer to epilepsy. Many came away declaring that they had been made whole.

He pitched tents to call the people of his land, in and around his home base in Oklahoma, to prayer. His voice box was the equivalent of rock music's full volume. It wasn't only loud; it had emotion, color and texture.

He didn't hide these ministries under the proverbial bushel. There he was, on real-time television, preaching and healing for the world to see. A hire wire act that, whatever else it was, took plenty of courage.

Roberts is described, rightly, as "controversial" in the obituaries. He did some weird things in the name of the faith. He was big on "prosperity"; that trust in God would make you rich. He named a university after himself and stored up much grain in his barns.

The University of Notre Dame has attracted magnified, national attention twice this year.

The first was sparked by its decision to award President Obama an honorary degree. A fierce debate ensued between supporters of the decision and protesters who argued that Obama's pro-choice position on abortion should have made him ineligible.

The second cause has been triggered by the dismal performance of the football team and the subsequent firing of coach Charlie Weis. The school has moved on this issue with a kind of delicacy one might expect of a bomb squad in action.

The Obama controversy got nasty, and has repercussions. In certain respects I think it was a political move to demonstrate a type of broadmindedness that would appeal both to the Catholic mainstream and to American public's sense of toleration, real or not. But whatever the motives on either side, it was unmistakably a legitimate religious moral debate.

U.S. bishops are obviously on the offensive, in part to recoup losses in status from the sex abuse scandals, etc.The surge relies on one main weapon, the attack on abortion, and a secondary but significant drive against gay marriage. And they raise the attention-getting question: who is a Catholic? The limited focus risks making them seem narrow. As a means of regaining prestige, it has little likelihood of success. How different might their chances be if they stood behind the "consistent ethic" umbrella proposed by the late Cardinal Bernardin. How much more credibility would they gain by upholding other "pro life" causes such as erasing poverty? On the other hand, the cardinal's proposal was defeated by those who chose the narrower way.

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.