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Maybe I am stuck in a long nightmare, but I recall seeing something about this a couple of weeks back: Cardinal Raymond Burke, not content to judge the magisterial quality of a papal text, now stands in judgment of an Ecumenical Council, declaring Nostra Aetate is not a doctrinal document. Well, it sure as hell is not the menu at the local deli either. Disparaging Nostra Aetate, even a little bit, could set back what has been one of the Second Vatican Council's greatest achievements, the vast improvement of relations between Catholics and both Jews and Muslims. If the Vatican can't entice Gammarelli to make an appropriate muzzle, in scarlet watered silk of course, they should distance themselves from Cardinal Burke's outrageous comments, and the American bishops should do so too.
At RNS, Jacob Lupfer responds to the Atlantic article by Alan Jacobs. The question: What happened to Christian intellectuals? I tend to side with Lupfer, that the role of public intellectual has morphed since Niebuhr's day, so the question is more complicated than Jacobs suggests. The money quote:
Instead, conservatives congregated in institutions where they would not have to compete with secular ideas, while liberals tried too hard to blend in with fashionable academic and cultural elites.
At the American Spectator, Archbishop Blase Cupich is ID'd as the leader of the "socialist bishops." Good to know.
At the Hill, what Donald Trump's campaign thinks is behind our Catholic support for immigrants: We are looking to increase our numbers. Even if it were true, why would it be okay for Trump to work the system, and not us RCs? He should know, however, that the Catholic Church in the US is committed to helping Muslim refugees and immigrants too.
