“[T]o live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” – Cardinal Newman.
A CASE OF SEPTEMBER 11: Peggy Noonan has a rather telling insight into Karen Hughes’ departure from the White House today. Well, certainly more telling than the tedious hand-wringings over what it means for feminism. (Short answer: nothing.) Noonan’s view is that it’s about clinging to life, in its normalcy and ease and day-dreaming:
I realized, again, that Sept. 11 had given me a case of Judith Delouvrier. Judith Delouvrier was a wonderful woman who was my friend; our boys went to school together and she was a fine mother and a happy spirit and she loved her husband and they’d just left their apartment and bought a house in my neighborhood. She had a million plans. She jumped on a plane one summer day and never came back. It was TWA 800.
It was all so impossible, so jarring, so unnatural. And in the months and years after her death, if I was walking along and saw something nice–an especially cute dog, a sweet moment between humans, a pretty baby, a beautiful pair of shoes in the window–I’d feel my usual old mild pleasure. And then I would remember that Judith couldn’t see this boring common unremarkable thing. And it made the boring common unremarkable thing seem to me more like a gift, more precious and worthy of attention and appreciation, and even love.
So Sept. 11 did to me what Judith’s death did, only deeper and newer.
I think I know what Peggy means. I discovered it in a different way, when a doctor told me almost nine years ago that I could be dead in a few years. I got a beach-shack; I wrote a book; I got a beagle; I took more time for friends and family and bike rides and late mornings with coffee and newspapers. In some ways, this giddy diversion into Shakespeare is part of the same thing. What better way to let yourself know that, even after the mind-changing moment of last September, life still goes on, that you can take time to be in a play, meet new people, try new things? Day draws near. Another one. Do what you can.
ALWAYS OUR CHILDREN: Michael-Sean Winters has a superb and measured piece in the current New Republic on the current crisis in the church (whence I purloined the thought for the day above). He gets most of it – especially the ludicrous notion that somehow the 1960s created pedophilia. But he’s really acute about how the church was unable to see sexual abuse of children except as an extension of the adult’s sexual sin:
In fact, it was the bishops’ refusal to see pedophilia from the child’s point of view – their tendency to see it as merely a sin of the flesh rather than a radical betrayal of trust – that lies at the heart of the current scandal. And that refusal has deep roots. The relevant canons (Church laws) lump pedophilia together with other sexual acts and make no consideration of the victim at all. Most people are, rightly, forgiving of sins of the flesh. But when one uses a position of authority to coerce sexual relations from a minor, or even from a young person of majority age who is nonetheless a parishioner or an underling, this is a sin of the spirit, a betrayal of all that the Church says sexual love should express–the free gift of self in equality and freedom.
Amen. And this is why celibacy is relevant to this problem. One deep understanding of sexuality that only the non-celibate laity can fully grasp is that central to the understanding of moral sexual expression – indeed, I would argue, its guiding moral center – is the notion of equality and freedom in sex. To coerce someone into sex through physical force or social power is far more immoral in my mind than having sex without procreation. But only if you have experienced sexual relationship, as opposed to simple sexual release, can you fully absorb why this is so. If the Church is to stick to its policy of universal celibacy for the priesthood, then it should at least allow lay people to exercize greater authority in determining and discussing sexual morality than is now the case. Some things have to be experienced in order to be fully internalized, and their nuances understood. And the strange, lonely, unrelated sex lives of celibate priests makes them uniquely unqualified to understand what sex in this sense actually is and how it can be best morally expressed. That’s not their fault; it’s just a function of their condition. (And don’t tell me they have no sex lives. They all have sexual fantasy, they all ejaculate, they all masturbate. Celibacy is not about not having a sex life. It’s about having as limited a sex life as you can – alone.)
CALLING THE SAUDI BLUFF: Man, I hope president Bush managed just the right mixture of defiance and politeness to Prince Abdullah in private yesterday. The usual blather that the Arab world will rise up if the U.S. doesn’t stand up to Israel is, well, the usual blather, as Bernard Lewis points out today. I have to say I think my recent piece in defense of Bush’s deft management of the Arab-Israeli crisis holds up pretty well. Pity the Arab world seems to agree with me – which might require more bluff from Bush at Crawford. The appearance of distance from Sharon is strategically useful. Meanwhile, let’s get ready for the real problem. Reuel Marc Gerecht gets it just about right (as usual) in the current Weekly Standard. This paragraph nails it, methinks:
With his decisive victory on the West Bank–and it is decisive just because Sharon did it and everyone in Israel and the Arab world knows that he will do it again–Sharon is in the process of pushing the Arab idea of coercing and dominating Israel into the distant future, beyond the immediate passions of young Palestinian men and women, who live for the present. Probably far sooner than most people imagine possible–a few years, not decades–the defeat of Israel through terrorism will become for most Palestinians what the conquest of Constantinople was for the medieval Arab world, an appealing image that no longer sufficiently inspires. When that happens, some kind of peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza will become possible.
ARE GAYS PEDOPHILES? Many Catholic rightists seem to think so, believing that purging gay priests and re-stigmatizing gays as unmentionable and sick will end the child-abuse problem. Here’s an email I just received offering a different view. I think it speaks for itself:
My brother did time for abusing a four-year-old boy. He devasted our family, did time in prison, and is still in counseling. He did a terrible thing and got off fairly lightly in my book. But if there is redemption in Christianity at least he is seeking it.
The main point of this note, though, is the nature of his sexuality. I never knew him to be gay. And he told me he is not gay. The abuse wasn’t about male or female erotic pleasure, but more about being in power and about the intimacy, however perverse. Although he is not gay, he is a loner who has a hard time in relationships. Kind of a celibate, but not by choice.
I think that Lowry is calling something a homosexual problem when it is something else – even when the abuser and abused are same sex. If a man molests a little girl, is that a manifestation of heterosexuality?
I think a gay priest in a city of any decent size can find an easy, and discreet enough sexual release, should they choose to do so. I just cannot see the abuse of children as a homosexual issue.
Seems quite simple, when you read a letter like that. And it makes the efforts of Lowry, Dreher et al that much more distressing and unfair.
AIDS STATS REVISITED: Some of you may remember my skepticism a while back of the many studies that have emerged proclaiming massive increases in HIV infection in various sub-populations in America. My quibbles were with the size of samples, the inferences drawn, and the enormous incentives for groups looking for public funds to exaggerate the scale of the crisis. None of my criticisms was rebutted, although I had to endure the usual abuse from the AIDS lobby and parts of the gay left for even raising questions. Still, I never thought that some of the studies had actually been deliberately falsified. The San Francisco Department of Public Health, which sponsored some of the studies I criticized, has now been found guilty of doing just that. The U.S. Public Health Service has now disciplined one researcher in that department for deliberately switching randomized samples to get the desired result.
The Dish 