I’m surprised that hard data on the damage the late Pope did to the Catholic church has not been readily available in the mainstream media. But here are some interesting statistics. Since 1975, the number of priestly ordinations in the U.S. declined from 771 a year to 533 last year. (In 2000, the number hit a low of 442.) When you adjust for population growth, in 1975, 771 newly ordained priests faced a Catholic population of 49 million; today, 533 emerge for a total of 64 million Catholics. Essentially, per Catholic, we saw a 50 percent drop in vocations under this Pope. No wonder that in 1975, 702 parishes had no priest; and today, over 3,000 are without a pastor. That’s quite an indictment. Globally, the picture is a little brighter, but still not encouraging. The number of parishes without priests went from 23 percent of all parishes in 1975 to 25 percent in 2000. In the U.S., weekly church attendance has slowly but innexorably declined to well below 50 percent of all Catholics. The decline in religious orders has been particularly steep: down by over 30 percent. And all this understates the crisis facing the American church, because almost half the current priesthood is over 60 – and their replacements are in shorter and shorter supply. This is the legacy of John Paul II: a church that may soon have no-one to run it. John Paul the Great? Puhlease.
POWERLINE CHOKES: So the Schiavo memo did come from Republican sources. Does Powerline concede? Barely. When your blog makes Sean Hannity look bipartisan, that’s what you’d expect. Yes, some of the original reporting was too vague. But the basic truth is that this was a GOP memo, it was crass, and it does reflect the cynical nature of many on the GOP right.
HEARTY STONERS: A marijuana-based compound could be a breakthrough in controlling heart disease. But what if these people living longer had more fun while they were at it? Time for Mr Bush to step in.
IN THE LITERARY LOCKER ROOM: “The locker room of the Fighting Illini didn’t have any fight left in it Monday night. In fact, the grief was so heavy I thought for a moment that I had left home for St. Peter’s, not St. Louis, where Illinois succumbed to North Carolina in the NCAA finals, 75-70. This particular locker room at the Edward Jones Dome, just outside of where the players would soon go to change their clothes, contained large dark wood cubicles, mostly empty, that looked almost like confessionals. Inside them, or on chairs just in front, sat young men–boys, really–staring off into space like novitiates who had lost their Holy Father. The pope was dead, and so was their season.” – Jonathan Alter, Newsweek.
WHY NOT FEDERALISM? Kansas is the latest state to put discrimination against gays into its constitution. A terrible stain but within the rights of the people of that state. Stanley Kurtz exults and points out that 18 states now have such constitutional bans against committed gay unions. Kurtz predicts 30 such anti-gay bans by 2008. But then he says this makes it all the more necessary to pass a federal amendment banning protections for gay couples in every state. Huh? Isn’t the opposite actually the case? Doesn’t state action mean federal action is less, rather than more necessary? This is surely how federalism is supposed to work. Why is it so terrible if the voters in Massachusetts or Connecticut or Vermont choose another path? (And voters have been involved. In Massachusetts, voters have punished pols who voted against marriage equality and rewarded those who supported it. The state legislature may well kill off an anti-gay-marriage amendment this year. In Connecticut and California, legislative bodies have enacted broad civil union laws, that are the effective equivalent of civil marriage.) We may well soon have a situation in which there are states that are safe for gay couples, and states that are unsafe. Gay people can move to the free states, rather as inter-racial couples moved across country to states where equality and freedom were respected. And in the process, we can see whether the gay-friendly states see marriage collapse, as opposed to the flourishing of marriage in those states which are constitutionally hostile to gays. I’m in favor of federalism. Today’s GOP right isn’t.
The Dish 