Month: March 2010

The Telegraph reports:

Campaigners had hoped that after his seven page letter on Saturday to Irish victims of child abusing priests in which he said he was "truly sorry" the Pope would use his weekly sermon to apologise in public. But he failed to do so and instead he asked Roman Catholics around the world to be "indulgent towards sinners and pray to God to ask for forgiveness for our failings." He used as an example the Bible parable from John's Gospel in which Christ asks people about to stone an adulteress: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Forgiveness is vital. But before forgiveness, repentance. And sorry, Holy Father, but not many of us have condoned and fomented child rape to defend a now-indefensible hierarchy.

If the Pope had the moral standards and personal responsibility of your average CEO, he'd resign. But once again, it's interests that matter – not the church as a whole, which is us.

Andrew Brown looks for clues in the pope's letter:

Much depends here on the meaning of "properly constituted tribunals", which are not glossed in the accompanying handout. But I think they must mean the secular courts as well as the religious ones. Support for this interpretation comes from a revealing interview earlier this week with the Vatican's chief prosecutor, Mgr Charles Scicluna, who worked under Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF.

Scicluna says clearly that in Anglo-Saxon countries and in France, bishops are now instructed to report priests to the secular authorities if they are become aware of a crime (outside the confessional). This is obviously something he thinks regrettable – it is like "a parent denouncing his or her own son" he says. But it's there. He also says that in other countries, where the law does not require them to report offences to the civil authorities, the bishops should encourage the victim to report them instead.

This is a clear and welcome change of policy.

Jane Mayer effectively dismantles the massive lacunae of fact and logic in Marc Thiessen's book defending torture as the only thing that prevented a Qaeda homeland terror attack since 2001. Of course, there had been no such mainstream Qaeda attack from 1993 to 2001 either, with no recourse to torture and with intelligence enough to warn president Bush directly and bluntly that an attack was imminent:

In February, 2001, the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, called Al Qaeda “the most immediate and serious threat” to the country. Richard Clarke, then the country’s counterterrorism chief, tried without success to get Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national- security adviser, to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda. Thomas Pickard, then the F.B.I.’s acting director, has testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft told him that he wanted to hear no more about Al Qaeda. On August 6, 2001, Bush did nothing in response to a briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” As Tenet later put it, “The system was blinking red.”

Horton's comments here. Thiessen makes the usual – totally untrue – statements: that the methods seen at Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with the actions authorized by Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld (the Senate Committee begs to differ; that only one victim was subject to "inhumane" treatment – a fact denied by both the Red Cross, by countless witnesses, by photographs that were somehow not destroyed by the government, and by Bush's own prosecutor at Gitmo. The 2004 CIA report on the torture program described it as a failure, not a success; that's why it was largely ended in the last years of Bush. So was Bush endangering the nation as well?

Read the whole thing. Thiessen's book sounds like rationalization of the irrational, like the work of a criminal unable to confess or even recognize his crime, of a political hack who cannot endure a self-image as someone who really did betray the core values of his own country and the entire West – out of fear, panic, and ignorance. Well, he may need his own alternate reality to sleep at night.

But this subject is too serious not to see in the light of reality.

Jonathan Bernstein notes one of Obama's strongest qualities: his patience.

But he won. And the process indelibly branded Republicans as extremist, vulgar, shrill, nihilist, and in some well-known FNC cases, quite perfectly barmy. Frum surveys the wreckage.

Well, he lost a war, an election and now a huge-stakes legislative victory which he had promised to stop. But what I suspect really got to him was the empirically correct claim that Rove does nothing on principle and everything on politics. By ripping that mask off in public, by refusing to take Rove seriously as anything but a cynical, political propagandist, Plouffe finally found the confidence to hit him where it hurt. More, please:

After countless of institutionally-aided and -protected child-rape, the Pope sees no reason to hold anyone in a cassock, you know, accountable or responsible. Lisa Miller sounds baffled by the pope's letter to Irish Catholics. She shouldn't have been. This is like Bush conceding error. The enormity of the error is so great, confessing it would compel the man to step down.

[T]hough the Pope did concede that the church has demonstrated “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal” and said he “openly expressed the shame and remorse that we all feel,” he also continued to blame the scandal on others. No one—not bishops, priests, nuns, parents, even the faithful—themselves, escape having to bear the responsibility of this terrible burden. “I urge you,” he wrote to Catholic parents, “to play your part in ensuring the best possible care of children.” Not all parents are above reproach, of course, but this seems to me to be entirely missing the point.

One is reminded of this classic from The Onion. But Dreher gives the pope more credit:

There are plenty of very strong words in it, and a level of detail and directness that is incomparably better than the vague euphemisms Benedict's predecessor used to talk about the scandal, when he bothered to talk about it at all. Remember too that on more than a few occasions, Benedict has met with victims of pederast priests; John Paul II, for all his personal sanctity, never did. I do wish Benedict would go further, and hold select bishops more directly to account for their sins and failings, including aiding and abetting serious crimes.

John Allen addresses the bishop question:

While Benedict's letter to Ireland is striking in both tone and substance, critics will likely also point to what it does not contain. For example, there is no call for bishops who reassigned abuser-priests to resign. Although the pope calls bishops to renew their "accountability before God," he offers no new mechanisms or policies to enforce that accountability.

Seth Masket:

[W]hile I don't think tonight will have an extraordinary effect on elections in the near or distant future, I do think this will have a profound impact on public policy.  Even if this bill seems watered-down to you, realize that from this point forward, the federal government is responsible for making sure people have health insurance.  The question is no longer whether government should do it; it's whether it's doing it well enough.  I heard somewhere that the two major votes tonight were symbolic ordered that way — first they passed health reform, then they passed reconciliation to improve it.

The length of Obama's coattails.

It's the way he did it that matters:

This is what we’ve learned this year: Obama does not mind defeats if they are procedural or about others saving face. He’s happy to admit error; to give his opponents a chance to lunge at his jugular; to let opponents enjoy a day in the sun; to shave off any small stuff as long as the big stuff remains. He seems oddly impervious to personal insult: he doesn’t mind being affronted by the Chinese or humiliated by Netanyahu as long as it’s a matter of symbolism. On substance, he wants what he wants; and, on the big stuff, he has given up on nothing yet.