Category: Controversies

This story appeared in yesterday’s WaPo. Arlington has not complied with all the requirements of the child protection policy adopted in 2002.

The audit said that Arlington has not yet launched a “safe environment” program for children to raise their awareness of inappropriate conduct by adults. It also has not been conducting proper criminal background checks on diocesan personnel who come into contact with children, relying instead on a “self-reporting method” for obtaining information, the audit said.
Catherine Nolan, the Arlington diocese’s director of child protection and safety, said that the diocese is addressing those deficiencies.

Missing from this intermediate “report card” is the fact that since the formation of the Diocese, Arlington has had no proven cases of child sexual abuse and paid no settlement money. These important fact should be included in the comprehensive report that is coming out in February. That report will contain info on sex abuse cases and settlements for each Diocese over the US for the last 50 years. Expect the spin in the media to be tremendous.

I was going to do a little comparison between the earthquake in my ancestral homeland of California and the one in Bam, Iran. (Please, no comments on the unfortunate onomatopoeia of “Bam.”) But lo, Jonah Goldberg beat me to it.
The California earthquake was somewhat smaller than the Iranian one, but killed two people instead of 30,000+. The anti-globalizers on the Left want to ensure that these disasters happen from now until the end of time. Who cares about mothers wailing for their children, or thousands of homes wiped out in a few minutes of screaming, suffocating chaos? All these things must be offered up to the god of environmental primitivism.
What do I mean by “environmental primitivism”? The anti-globalizers think that poor non-Western people are cute, so they don’t want them to change their charmingly backward ways, which are (they imagine) the way people lived before the nasty Industrial Revolution with its so-called “abundant food,” “long lifespans,” and “housing codes.” They love that poor people don’t consume much energy or natural resources, and they use “organic” methods of agriculture — which aren’t very helpful for crop yields, but they don’t use evil pesticides or fertilizers. And harvesting by hand — so darn cute!
Likewise, the stone-and-mud-brick houses of the Third World are environmentally friendly. They’re also a deathtrap during a natural disaster. But not one tree was bulldozed to make room for them.
Wealth brings medical training, healthy food, and houses that won’t crumple during an earthquake. Poverty kills, and therefore the misguided leftists who want to keep poor people poor are, in an indirect way, conspiring to make sure poor people keep dying in earthquakes, famines, and epidemics. Maybe if our brothers in the Third World promise to keep being cute somehow, the anti-globalizers would let them build their houses out of solid masonry and sheetrock?

The Irish Catholics of South Boston have won another round in court against the liberals who want to take over their St. Patrick’s Day parade.
The parade has long been full of Irish, patriotic, and Catholic displays — our parish was even represented one year by a float depicting an altar and promoting our indult Mass — so the broad-minded liberals of Boston couldn’t let that kind of institution go on. Oh, how atavistic!
For a while, they tried to force the parade organizers — a private group, mind you — to let a gay group join the parade, on the ground that the parade was a “public accommodation” and subject to anti-discrimination laws. That dispute led to lengthy court battles, the cancellation of the parade in 1994, and finally vindication.
Let’s remember, folks, to get the rhetoric right here: since we approve of the court’s judgment in Hurley vs. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, it’s to be described as a “landmark decision”; otherwise, it would have been just the opinion of some right-wing kook judge. In this case, it was a unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court: the selection of groups to participate in a parade is a form of expression, and thus a matter of free speech.
Even that, however, wasn’t enough to dissuade the leftists from their efforts, and the city last year let an anti-war group piggyback on the parade by marching at its end. So — ya gotta love the names in this case — parade organizer John J. “Wacko” Hurley and attorney Chester Darling are keeping up the fight.

Michael Novak puts Cardinal Martino’s comments in perspective, saying the bishop “has not ceased being an embarrassment to his superiors.”
The article is worth reading, as is just about everything Novak writes, but here’s the most intriguing passage:

The big Vatican news of the past month has been the major change in the way Islamic terrorism has been directly confronted, with gloves-off honesty in the Jesuit periodical Civilta Cattolica, whose pages are always cleared by the secretariat of state. Over a third of the Christians of the Middle East have been driven out during the past decade, the journal reports, and it lists many abuses by extremists, against the background of much greater tolerance in the past. It also analyzes carefully just how the extremists function in practice.

The secular Left has co-opted the slogan “war is a defeat for humanity” from Pope John Paul II, but in the original passage, you’ll see that the Holy Father isn’t saying what they think he’s saying.
He has used the words many times since, but he uttered the phrase in question almost four years ago, on January 1, 2000, and therefore could not have been speaking about the Iraqi War. He was talking about wars in general, but he enumerated legitimate reasons for war that were applicable to the original decision to remove the former Iraqi government. See the passage I highlighted below to see if that’s a fair summary.
“In the century we are leaving behind, humanity has been sorely tried by an endless and horrifying sequence of wars, conflicts, genocides, and “ethnic cleansings” which have caused unspeakable suffering: millions and millions of victims, families, and countries destroyed, an ocean of refugees, misery, hunger, disease, underdevelopment, and the loss of immense resources. At the root of so much suffering there lies a logic of supremacy fueled by the desire to dominate and exploit others, by ideologies of power or totalitarian utopias, by crazed nationalisms or ancient tribal hatreds. At times brutal and systematic violence, aimed at the very extermination or enslavement of entire peoples and regions, has had to be countered by armed resistance.
“The 20th century bequeaths to us above all else a warning: wars are often the cause of further wars because they fuel deep hatreds, create situations of injustice and trample upon people’s dignity and rights. Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile. War is a defeat for humanity.”