Behind the Scenes in Pope Wars

 

By Gary Berg-Cross

Pope Benedict XVI official retirement has generated quite a bit of ink slinging and chat.  Part of it is about the internal political struggle for the next Pope and yes what the retired Pope will be about. Along with that I learn that in papal retirement a new title is the academic sounding “Pope Emeritus” and that his tweets as @Pontifex are being deleted. Much of what I’ve learned comes from Stephen Colbert & his Colbert Report which deconstructed events as pope; “disimpopinated,” or having a “popendectomy.

What will happen to the vestments worn by Pope Benedict XVI? Colbert’s speculation: the vestments will be shipped to third-world countries, just like the T-shirts of losing Super Bowl squads. And in his retirement ceremony his favorite T-shirt (old # 16) would be lifted to  rafters at the Vatican ala Michael Jordan.

More interesting to me, much more enlightening was a bit of his history provided by Matthew Fox, currently an Episcopal priest but formerly a Dominican Friar & theologian. Fox and Pontifex Bennie crossed paths in a pre-Pope phase of Ratzinger’s career.  Fox was silenced by then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 as a result of his famous book "Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality Presented in Four Paths, Twenty-Six Themes, and Two Questions, (2000)". In 1988, Fox had written a public letter to Cardinal Ratzinger entitled "Is the Catholic Church Today a Dysfunctional Family?", which was subsequently widely disseminated by the National Catholic Reporter. Soon after, Cardinal Ratzinger issued an order forbidding Fox to teach or lecture for a year.  Things went downhill from there and well Fox is no longer in Bennie’ RC church and has moved on to other pastures.

What I was fascinated to hear about was a later work by Fox called: The Pope's War: Why Ratzinger's Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved.

In this book Matthew Fox provides some insights from his 12-year, up-close-and-personal battle with Ratzinger, and traces what he sees as some historical roots of RC Church degradation. At the time he wrote this Benedict XVI was mired in several crisis as Pope. But what I didn’t know about was something that goes back to the 80s and then Ratzinger's attack on various Catholic theologians.  

Fox describes several apparently "lay" organizations, Opus Dei, Legion of Christ, and Communion and Liberation, who represent papal cults within the Catholic Church, and their charismatic founders who have their own histories of pedophilia and abuse. It's quite a disturbing story of how a primary goal of John Paul's and Ratzinger's attack on Catholic theologians was to destroy the vibrant liberation theology movement in the developing sector of the globe. It is a movement Fox likes and characterizes as "the most vibrant and justice-oriented movement on the planet after the Civil Rights movement.” 

In their attack on liberation theology, it turns out that the Paul and his right-hand man in the CDF, Ratzinger, worked closely with the CIA under President Reagan. This is one of the claims Fox documented in The Pope's War. -  John Paul II with Ratzinger’s aid undertook a systematic dismantling of liberation theology movement by bishops sympathetic to the movement and replaced them with their own conservative guys. Some are around to vote for the next Pope.  Shades of the Supreme Court!

Why was the Reagan administration an ally?  Well they were fighting “communists” in Latin America.  They wanted to weaken liberation theology since it provides some intellectual scaffolding for revolutionary thinking and “liberation” efforts. The Reagan strategists solicited the pope’s help. They gave John Paul lots and lots of cash to boost the solidarity effort in Poland. And in exchange, according to Fox’s reports, they got commitment on the part of the papacy, to help destroy liberation theology.

Fox argues that this is pretty well documented by people like Carl Bernstein, who had a cover story in Time magazine on it. Of course the work in Poland we see as good so there is some glow in early stories that distracts from the twinned story in South American and the stalling of the liberation movement there. Insights from the Reagan library continue to roll in as memos are discovered and you can see an interview with Mathew Fox on Democracy Now called “Fascism in the Church: Ex-Priest on ‘The Pope’s War,’ Clergy Abuse and Quelling Liberation Theology. “

Images

Original Blessings: http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/2008/11/4/293-conversation-with-spiritual-sage-matthew-fox-on-envision.html

Pope’s War: http://www.matthewfox.org/recent-work/recent-books/the-popes-war/

Liberation Theology as a Revolutionary Movement: http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/forwa10&div=27&id=&page=

Climate and Secular Change

By Gary Berg-Cross

Some important topics like secular humanism and climate change are hard to get accepted by people for one reason of another. Secular humanism has its principles, goals and core ideas laid out in the various Humanist Manifestoes.  But to many it explanations and approach aren’t satisfactory.   Part of the reason is that is an inconvenient threat to biblical and older views of the world and a God who intervenes in natural phenomena and is indispensable for salivation.

Coming to grips with climate change is another one of those difficult topics where complex, scientific evidence and reasoning comes in conflict with simpler and perhaps emotionally satisfying non-scientific beliefs. People’s immediate experience is with weather and local weather at that.  This easy understanding gets confused with climate as it in entangled with common sense and verbal habits (always a factor in discussing atheism and concepts of God too).  So people say you “can’t change the weather” (or predict it well going past 10 days) and these seem to be powerful arguments against knowing about climate change with a needed degree of certainty.  If fact they are not good arguments at all. One may predict a green house will be warmer than its surroundings even on a cold day.

You can see and example of how particular issues, often statistical in nature, get resolved  such as how much warming is going on in Antartica  see- On Edge-Pushing Statistics and Climate Basics. Statisticians like Noel Cressie have directly investigated  "Uncertainty
Quantification for Regional Climate Projections in North America" by studying the various model projecting temperature change that is projected for North America 30 years in the future (2041-2070). Regional Climate Models (RCMs) projections are run up to 60 years into the future for "small", 50 km x 50 km regions in North America.

The results including degrees of uncertainty are analyzed statistically for all regions and all four Boreal seasons. The preponderance of results throughout all of North America, as shown in the pinkish figures below is one of warming, usually more than 2°C (3.6°F). As Cressie asked, "is this hot enough for you."
 

 

 OK so there is converging and ever increasing evidence and a scientific consensus on climate change exists.  What about regular citizen's beliefs?  It's a function in part of macro weather. Following a winter of record snowfall in 2010, the public’s acceptance of climate change fell to a low of 52 percent, according to the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change (as published by the Brookings Institution). After 2011's mild winter, support jumped to 65 percent.  Still fewer think it human caused. 2012 polling conducted by the Pew Research Center suggests that a greater number of people in the U.S. are accepting the reality of climate change. 67 percent of Americans said that there is now  "solid evidence" that average global temperatures have been rising in recent decades. That's a gain of 4points over 2010 and 10 points since 2009. Yet only 42 percent say this warming is "mostly caused by human activity," according to Pew.You know, the climate always changes.. Maybe we'll have an ice age...

Recently some scientific efforts have been directed at such phenomena and understanding why belief in climate change has decreased rather than risen as more evidence has been generated. It turns out there are a variety of complex psychological, and cultural reasons for this as well as scientific.

One obvious factor is complexity of space, time and factors. There are lots of facts to consider and models to integrate since almost every aspect of our planet influences the climate –

ocean circulation,

weather patterns,

plate tectonics (over long time) and ,

atmospheric dynamics are just a start.

A change in one of these affects climate and progress has being made in modeling each although the interaction of factors with each other and the climate is still a challenge.  But like the weather everyone has something to say on the matter even if the complexity is ignored in most opinions by laymen. Psychologically we like simple answers and simplifying problems down to familiar terms.  Still understanding is possible to the literate and astute who have the time to study it.

But there is a problem with space and time. The impacts are somewhat off in the future or impacting far away space like the artic now (Super Storm Sandy being an exception which did get our attention.) . But  these demand action and costly action now. So there is a mis-match and what is being asked (see recent blog on protests) for now is some sacrifice for some hypothetical gain. What is being asked for is deferred gratification. It’s not like cleaning up a park or a polluted river. There we can often easily track responsibility for a problem and results can be quickly seen and rewards such as return of fish in river a known reward. 

Handling climate change is new and the expected rewards far off and maybe beyond our lifetime.  No matter how much we slow the growth of emissions, we may not see the benefits in the short-term. Thus, climate change activists are asking fellow citizens to sacrifice something concrete (say my investment and retirement portfolio) now for potential benefits that may not be evident for many years to come.

 

In its own way this is a bit like what secularists are asking of religious people – sacrificing some comforting habits now to avoid down sides over time. We need to have the maturity to understand the dangers of climate change and the wisdom for that may translate as a useful skill for the advancement of humanist and secular thinking too.

 

 

 

 

Images
 

The Psychology of Climate Change: http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/

Noel Cressie ergional models of climate change: http://www.stat.osu.edu/~sses/collab_warming.html

Sacrificing investments:http://grist.org/article/2009-11-05-climate-psychology-in-cartoons-clues-for-solving-the-messaging/full/

 

Religious addiction: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=flynn_27_4

 

Herman Muller records

by Edd Doerr

Herman Muller (1890-1967), Nobel laureate in 1946 for discovering X-ray mutagenesis and one of my predecessors as president of the American Humanist Association (1956-1958), was one of our most important scientists. After working in Berlin he was engaged in research in the USSR in the 1930s before narrowly escaping to Scotland when Stalin began pushing Lysenko's nonsense. He ended up after the war at Indiana University in Bloomington, my alma  mater.

Muller was much in demand as a speaker, so much so that it got in the way of his teaching at IU. Here is the story I heard him tell about this. He was on the road lecturing so much that he decided to record his class lectures and have a graduate assistant play them for his classes. One day his travels enabled him to pass through Indiana, so he drove down to Bloomington  with the intention of dropping in to see how one of his classes was doing. As he approached the lecture hall he could hear his recorded lecture being played.  When he opened the door the room was empty except for all the small tape recorders on every desk recording his lecture.

As a lecturer Muller spoke rather softly and very rapidly. If you sneezed you missed a couple of sentences. But you were spellbound.

Inconveniently Documenting Real Life

By Gary Berg-Cross

The 2013 Oscars have their big light drama with serious movie contenders like ‘Lincoln’ one at least based on a serious book (‘Les Miserables’).  Less watched, discussed or popularized are nominees in the documentary category. They lack glitz and glamour of actors on the A-list or celebrities directors (like Michael Moore). What they have are non-celebrity protagonists living our real dramas narratives.

One that has attacked some attention is called “The Gatekeepers” and is about Shin Bet - the shadowy internal security intelligence, and counter-terror operations brother agency to the Mossad. Director Dror Moreh somehow convinced 6 former living heads of the agency to conduct on-the record and pretty frank interviews along with raw footage and reenactments of dramatic historical events that are sewn together into a documentary with some power. As Newsweek noted:

To tamp down Palestinian rebellions and foil attacks on Israelis, Shin Bet operatives have regularly engaged in some unsavory measures—rough interrogations and targeted killings, to name two—all in the service of maintaining Israel’s grip over territories it captured in the 1967 war.

And this is an important part of what we heard from 6, powerful men breaking their silence as Richard Cohen noted unlike what will ever had with past CIA directors. These are 6 men spanning 1980-2011 with access to the most classified information and long experience to understand events historically.

The movies’ arc included the period of Palestinian terrorism and insurrections, the rise of the Israeli settler movement, the assassination of a prime minister, brutalities (“I think he took a rock and smashed their heads in.” )  and cover-ups. The result is what some uncomfortably call an admirable documentary that raises eyebrows if not angst as it argues for Israeli compromise as it documents errors and perhaps bad political faith. As the film voices make clear intelligence gathering has all shades of gray, wrapped in subtle situations that require nuanced understanding.  Yuval Diskin, who led Shin Bet from 2005 until 2011 as well as his former colleagues tell how their nuanced advice have been largely and repeatingly dismissed by most Israeli prime ministers.  As a group they accuse the PMs of ignoring the Palestinian territories and the peace process in favor of kicking an increasingly explosive can down the road.  To paraphrase Ariel Sharon quip, “ I love the peace process so much it hope it never ends.”

WapPo’s Ann Hornaday 4 star  review “An unsettling true-life thriller” (“first must-see movie of the year is a riveting espionage thriller that just happens to be true.” ) suggested the most disheartening messages of “The Gatekeepers” is how many times Israeli leaders squandered opportunities to end the occupation of the West Bank or allowed illegal settlements despite a virtually guaranteed violent response. “What’s the difference between Golda Meir and [Menachem] Begin?” asks Avraham Shalom, who directed the agency from 1980 until 1986. “Nothing. He didn’t visit the Arabs. She didn’t, either.”

One broad theory as to why former Shin Beth leaders allowed the interview is that it involves growing religious influence in Israeli society. According to this view “the film is somehow the parting shot of an old secular elite in Israel, which is steadily being supplanted by another group, this one more religious and less prone to compromise. (The current Shin Bet head is religious.)” from Newsweek’s review which also included this from the film:

Carmi Gillon, who led the Shin Bet from 1994 to 1996, describes the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, where Palestinians are frequently interrogated, as so old and forbidding “that any normative person who walks in the door would be willing to admit to the murder of Jesus” just to get out of there.

Yuval Diskin, the most recently serving chief, tells of the coercive measures required to get Palestinians to snitch on their friends and even family. “[It] involves taking a person who doesn’t really like you and causing him to do things that he never thought he’d be willing to do.”

In one of the more startling moments in The Gatekeepers, Moreh reads to Diskin the comments of the late Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who wrote in 1968 that ruling over the Palestinians would effectively turn Israel into a police state, “with all that this implies for education, freedom of speech and thought, and democracy.”

It’s a long, secular look at difficult times maybe now sliding along down a road with new religious fervor added.

There is an interview with Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh on  The Gatekeepers from Democracy Now.

Standing Together: Secularists and the Religious

 

By Gary Berg-Cross

Although it wasn’t much covered in the national, corporate media thousands, perhaps 40,000 or more  people gathered in Washington, D.C. on a cold Sunday in February as part of the Forward on Climate Rally. Sponsored by 350.org and the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations it was a step to build an integrated movement. The immediate objective was to urge President Barack Obama to reject the 1,179-mile Keystone XL pipeline TransCanada application, to introduce measures to regulate carbon and take steps to mitigate the effects of climate change.

It was all there in the protest signs and their sighs of concern, anger and determination.

“We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”

Some held placards saying, "Read my lips: no new carbons," or as repeated by Bill McKibben "We're in a climate hole: stop digging."  An angry, in-your -face one read, "Don't be frackin' crazy." But most were more directly, focused and home grown,  “Act Now — Before It’s Too Late.”

 

The Huffington Post noted among the protesters were senior citizens in wheelchairs, a dad from Indiana carrying a toddler, women from a Unitarian church in Corvallis, Ore., and college students, including Florida's Molly Kampmann who was holding a picture of a pipeline with the caption: "This is why I'm hot."
Others dressed a protesting polar bears and listened to speakers who spoke of this in urgent terms that brings us together in the last seconds of the last quarter of a great and very human struggle.

There were all kinds of folk in DC to urge us to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and the first group I ran smack into were by the Metro stop on the mall. They were a happy, busy group from Christian social justice organization Sojourners ( 3333 14th St. NW, Suite 200 DC) and they were out in force.
Washington Sojourners support various progressive activities including the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Free South Africa movement, as well as opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sojourners CEO Jim Wallis spoke in 2010 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about moral recovery for economic recovery in a talk “Rethinking Values in the Post-Crisis World.” – See the transcript which includes:

 ‘The bonuses are only a symptom of a deeper erosion of societal values.’ There are new maxims, which have overtaken us, like ‘greed is good’, ‘it’s all about me’, and ‘I want it now’. Those maxims wreak havoc with economies, cultures, families and our very souls.

From held signs my first impression of the rally is that it was a but reunion of  Unitarian Universalist Church chapters. South Church Unitarian Universalist was one of dozens of chapters who had organizing buses for members who wished to attend. The First Unitarian Society of Westchester in Hastings-on-Hudson there along with allies -  Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue at Iona College in New Rochelle. 35 people, mostly students, had signed up at the college.

“There’s a very real concern and a very real eagerness for this generation to learn how to do citizen advocacy,” a Sister Kathleen Deignan said. “As the students say, this is the issue for their generation. It was indeed a millennial filled scene and full of youth. Our Task was handing out brochures about its July workshop for a Youth Plan B at GMU.  I enjoyed this mix as well as the secular-religious one They brought impassioned curiosity. It was a group of ad hoc freethinkers, bucking a naïve trend to follow a dumb consensus of inaction.  Nice birds to flock together with for obvious ideas that seem outrageous to the mislead many.

 The Interfaith Moral Action on Climate group was there and had urged members to:

 “ bring a group from your congregation to join religious communities from around our area and across the country in speaking out for creation at the Forward on Climate Rally on Presidents' Day weekend. Bring congregational banners and wear congregational T-shirts. Buddhists were there and, oh yes several of us from WASH.

I felt quite at home with good spirited folk of all kinds.  Some were from my generation and veterans of protest.  At the sight of one another we fell into easy conversation like old friends.  Some were from low-lying areas of the country bearing scared memories of Superstorm Sandy. "We're right in the path of sea level rise," said Mark Geduldig-Yactrosky of Portsmouth, Va., explaining his concern about climate change. "We're a low-lying area. We have rising oceans and subsiding lands. So that personalizes it for us."

The weather was cold but their stories were bright entertainment of the serious kind.  This wind? This is what climate change feels like, a New Yorker explained to me with charm and thoughtful cadence.

Burlington, Vt., resident Michael Ware, holding a "Stop Vermont Yankee" banner, said last year's extreme weather convinced many Americans that climate change is serious. "What will Vermont, what will any state, look like in 20 years?" he asked.

This is, as was said the most fateful battle that mankind will wage. And we do not stand fully alone as Linda Britt, who came from Ann Arbor, Michigan explained. Linda could stand others secular or religious who are grandparents like me.  We stand powerfully together when we understand what is important.

"I have six grandchildren, and I want them to have a habitable planet," Linda said.

Yes, Linda, it’s why I was there.  I was there for my/our grandkids.

Images

Chief Jacqueline Thomas, Saik’uz First Nation, speaks at the rally in Washington, DC, February 17, 2013 (Photo by Stephen Malagodi)

Children Attendees at the Feb. 17 Forward on Climate Rally. Photo by Jim Hall / Dayspring Earth Ministry

Rally photos: provide on Google Images

For my grandkids:  Collage by Gary Berg-Cross

None of Those Ashes for Me

By Gary Berg-Cross

Valentine’s day, a day of visible love, was preceded by Ash Wednesday this year - a day of humbling, visible religious affiliation used to reminder believers of people’s “dependence on God.”

But there were a few things about this 40 day AW event trending differently from past ones. For one thing on the 2013 Ash Wednesday, some priests went  mobile with SUvs into neighborhoods to offer service in a fast-based culture. It’s part of the part of a national "Ashes to Go" movement that began with an Episcopal church in St. Louis in 2007. You can get ashes outside of a church now and train stations are popular. In Baltimore:

Leta Dunham got her breakfast order to go at a Roland Avenue Starbucks Wednesday morning: a grande triple skim latte in her cup and, on her forehead, an ashen reminder that we are all destined to become dust.

Dunham was among Ash Wednesday observers who took advantage of Ashes to Go, a service offered by area Episcopal and Methodist churches at more than a dozen spots around the city and nearby counties, The practice seeks to bring the Lenten season ritual to the people, rather than waiting for them to come to church.

Transit &  Metro stops around cities' morning rush hour now offer ashes (and a prayer can be thrown in).  It’s like blue law abandonment as reluctant acknowledgment that busy Americans have less time to frequent houses of worship. So there is worship outreach coming to where the people are.

 But as the Washington Post noted a counter trend too and it is more than time to go to a church but also a reluctance to be so showy about their religion. An article called On Ash Wednesday, some faithful appear reluctant to wear belief on their foreheads notes that more people seem to be uncomfortable with showing faith in what one person called “a pompous way.” As David Kinnaman, president of Barna Group and author of several books on young Christians, noted:

The trend also stems from a fear of oppression by a secular culture and partly from a personal challenge, said. In a society questioning the very truth of God, what do you really believe? In the past, evangelism didn’t have that high a standard; you were sort of signing people up for something they already were predisposed to accept, .. Today it’s about people asking: How does that translate into real transformation? When I wear something, what is this saying about me?”

 

It’s another small part of the growing, unaffiliated Nones phenomena that the Post seems to be picking up on and has been blogged on here. Indeed one might think of it as part of broad demographic & cultural change phenomena that political parties as well a media groups are positioning themselves for.  As one deeply religious person interviewed said it, she doesn’t talk a lot about her faith at work because “some people don’t want to hear it.”

Strategically this may be part of a quiet period that is an opportunity to get a reasonable message across.  What may be needed is less reactive confrontation (such as flashing a big red A on Ash Wednesday) from  some of us.  And we need to listen to see what topics are interested to the None community. Some thoughts along this line are found in a discussion of 'None' leaders chart a path for more political, cultural power for the religiously unaffiliated. It's something that Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association has picked up on as a thoughtful, strategic stance. 

Images

Ashes to go: http://www.argusleader.com/viewart/20130213/UPDATES/130213029/First-day-Lent-marked-ashes-go-

Pew Study on Nones: http://answersforthefaith.com/2012/10/09/pew-study-on-religion-in-america-now-20-are-atheist-agnostic-or-unaffiliated/

None Nation: http://secular.org/content/nation-nones

 

 

 

 

 

Benedict's Retirement

by Edd Doerr

 Following are the thoughts I hastily put on the Washington Post's web site on Feb 12  ----

Benedict's retirement suggests these random observations, in no special order: 1. Since the death of John XXIII the Vatican has been rolling back many of the reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council. 2. The Vatican and rhe hierarchy are largely out of sync with the Catholic people over contraception, marriage, ordaining women, clerical celibacy and other issues. 3. The Vatican's stubborn opposition to family planning has caused misery for countless millions of people and has made the overpopulation and environmental problems worse. 4. The Vatican's opposition to family planning keeps the abortion rate far higher than need be. 5. The hierarchy's never-ending drive for tax aid for its private schools has done great harm to religiously neutral democratic public education in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other countries. 6. Catholic theologian Daniel Maguire noted in the Feb 12 NY Times that "There is no evidence that a papal monarchy was Jesus' idea" and that the church got "mired in obsessions [about reproductive issues] that obscure the message of justice and peace that Jesus preached." 7. One wonders what part might have been played in Benedict's retirement of the documentary film "Mea Maxima Culpa" that was shown in theaters last fall and on HBO on Feb 4, a film that explored the clergy sexual abuse scandals and followed the chain of responsibility for coverups all the way to the Vatican.

"Give me your tax dollars, but . . ."

By Edd Doerr

This letter was published in the Washington Examiner on Feb 10, 2013  ----

"Subsidized churches can't complain about regulations"

"Unlike President Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which puts the religious freedom and health of women first, Cal Thomas elevates some theological dogmas over the religious liberty and rights of conscience of the vast numbers of women of all faiths who are employed or served by church-related charities, hospitals and colleges.

"Thomas conveniently overlooks the fact that these church-related charities, hospitals and colleges are generously subsidized by taxes extracted from Americans of all faiths.

"The mantra of these church leaders seems to be: 'Give us your tax dollars, but don't even think of linking them to any regulations'.

"Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty, Silver Spring"


(BTW, Bill Keller has a great op ed on this, "The Conscience of a Corporation", in the Feb 11, 2013, NY Times.)