That’s my read on the Pope’s unprecedented decision to summon all 13 American cardinals to Rome to address the current crisis. When a problem is this big, the leaders must take some responsibility. Law is the obvious candidate for removal. No, he won’t be fired. He may even hang on for months. But at some point soon, someone else will be given de facto authority over his diocese and some sinecure will be arranged to allow him to serve God in another capacity. He still obviously doesn’t get what’s gone wrong, which means he is what has gone wrong. My other fearless prediction: Vatican spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, won’t survive much longer than Law. Theologizing in public is not part of his job description. Rome, I think, may finally be getting it. A national formal policy on sexual abuse will have to be imposed; a fuller investigation will be needed; more priests will be removed. Why is the crisis this deep? Because it wounds both wings of the American Church. It wounds the conservatives, because their church is clearly run by many people who do not believe for a minute in the sexual teachings of the church, and who have batted an eyelid at sexual abuse. It wounds the liberals, because it exposes the hypocrisy and dysfunction at the heart of the hierarchy, and shows how hard it will be to get grown-ups with even vaguely healthy sexualities in leadership in the future. And neither wing can stay in the church if either resolves the problem. If liberals succeed in bringing women, married priests and open gays with partners into the priesthood, it’s hard to see how traditionalists could stay. But if the conservatives purge every gay priest, ramp up teachings against sex without procreation even further, and do so with the credibility of the current leadership, then the exodus from the pews will be massive. Given the likelihood of schism under either scenario, there will be an attempt to keep the status quo – with some amendments on sexual abuse policy. Which means, barring spectacular spiritual leadership, more of the same. In other words, the current system favors a slow death over a wrenching cure – of either prescription. Not pretty at all.
BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Larry Summers strikes me as the Ariel Sharon of American higher education. He struck me very much as a bull in a china shop, and as a bully, in a very delicate and dangerous situation.” – Cornel West, as quoted in the New York Times. Does that make West Arafat?
KRISTOF’S PUZZLEMENT: Nick Kristof, who wants us to sue Saddam Hussein, keeps scratching his head at Arab double-standards with regard to Israel. As he puts it,
Some 1,600 Palestinians have been killed since the latest round of violence erupted in the fall of 2000. In contrast, two million Sudanese have died in the ongoing civil war here, with barely anyone noticing. Likewise, Syria blithely killed about 20,000 people in crushing an abortive uprising in the city of Hama in 1982. And Saddam Hussein, who has killed more Arabs than Ariel Sharon and all his Israeli predecessors put together, is somehow a hero for much of the Arab world.
In a word, Nick, duh. Welcome, however belatedly, to reality. Kristof them rightly outlines the sense of Arab shame that fuels their rage at defeat or humiliation at the hands of the “other.” But what he doesn’t mention is something gob-smackingly obvious: anti-Semitism. If you’re a raving anti-semitic paranoiac, defeat at the hands of the Americans is one thing; but defeat at the hands of the Jews is beyond endurance. This is the pathology without which nothing that is now happening in the Arab world can be understood. I don’t know how to cure a culture of such a sickness, but I do know that in the past, only decisive and comprehensive military defeat did the trick.
DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “The Geoghan documents were his Hiroshima, the Shanley files his Nagasaki. But Bernard Cardinal Law did not follow the script and surrender.” – National Review Online’s Rod Dreher, with his usual gift for understatement.
OFF THE FENCE ON THE FENCE: Richard Cohen jumps on the Barak fence-building bandwagon. (How’s that for mixed metaphors? I’m beginning to sound like Tom Friedman). Uh oh. Perhaps it’s time for me to think about this one even further.
CHOMSKY AND BRITISH FASCISTS: Odd little catch by blogger Travelling Shoes. Who should turn up on a list of people beloved of the British Fascist Party but, er, Noam Chomsky? He’s got the right attitude toward the Jews, you see. Here’s their encomium to him on a website dedicated to the British fascist of the 1930s, Oswald Mosley.
SHARANSKY’S HALF A POINT: In an interview with Fox News, former Soviet dissident and now Israeli politician, Natan Sharansky, bracingly defends Israel’s military tactics on the West Bank. Here’s his argument:
The army spent two weeks in Jenin rooting out the terrorists, and then there was a pause in the operation. What was that pause used for? We found that it was used to booby trap buildings, and to prepare a terrorist network that resulted in the loss of 13 soldiers. We made a decision not to use bombs in the Jenin operation, not to use warplanes, but to go house to house, to avoid civilian casualties. As a result of that decision, which was made by the army and also by the cabinet, we created the situation where a terror network could be installed, and it ended up costing many more Israeli lives and also the lives of more Palestinian civilians. Now I ask you to compare that decision and the principles on which it was based to two recent wars – the war of the United States in Afghanistan, and the European war in Yugoslavia. Which culture stuck to its principles of human rights being the most important value? And yet from whom do we hear the loudest criticism? From those same Americans and Europeans.
Sharansky, it seems to me, is over-stating his case. The Americans and Europeans went to great lengths to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties in bombing both Serbia and Afghanistan. And in the first case, the intervention was in defense of the rights of a minority facing genocide; in the second, it was a matter of pure self-defense – two unimpeachable war rationales. Still, the door-to-door searching of the IDF, in difficult terrain, with snipers always around, does not seem to me to be an exercise in unthinking brutality. That makes sense. What doesn’t make moral sense to me is the bull-dozing of houses, the humiliation of Palestinian civilians, and the brandishing of victory. Read this piece in today’s Daily Telegraph, hardly a paper viscerally hostile to Israeli, and you’ll see what I mean. I agree with Paul Wolfowitz who said yesterday, “Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in great numbers as well. It is critical that we re
cognize and acknowledge that fact.” (The boos that greeted those remarks were disgraceful.) I understand the emotions behind Israel’s need to defeat terror and show resolve. But some of the excess is misguided and wrong – in terms of Israel’s image, morality, and simple political sense.
The Dish 