The Dish

n + 1 provides.

Addressed to Virgin Airways boss Richard Branson. Money quote about the food:

It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing.

The more we look under Peter's rock, the worse it appears. From the Memphis diocese, a court seal was just removed from the court cases dealing with sexual abuse. It shows a church routinely ignoring the past pedophile records of priesthood candidates, and even when abuse has occurred, the routine response was reassignment to other parishes. The case of Father Juan Carlos Duran is among the worst:

"I just remember him asking me in the car or asking when we are alone, 'Please, please, let me give you (oral sex),' stuff like that," said a 14-year-old boy identified as "John Doe" in a sex abuse lawsuit filed against the diocese and the Dominicans. "I can't remember the exact number of occasions, but it was multiple."

The "John Doe" case prompted The Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Daily News to file suit to gain access to court documents related to that case … The documents show that at least 15 priests have been accused of sexual misconduct over about four decades in the Memphis Diocese. Some had been accused of sexual abuse elsewhere and had been moved from one diocese to another.

A summary of the Memphis Commercial Appeal's stories on the abuse here. This extract from a deposition is pretty staggering:

Here is a deposition exchange in 2007 between attorney Gary Smith, who represented the Memphis boy and Father Rodriguez:

Smith: "Let's see if I read this right. 'No other bishop has been willing to grant him faculties for ministry. Some other dioceses within the territory of the province have been contacted. . .'"

Rodriguez: "Yes."

Smith: " '. . .All of them have rejected my requests for faculties and ministry.' Close quote. Did I read that accurately?"

Rodriguez: "Yes."

Smith: "So after Juan Carlos abused my client, you were still going around seeking faculties and ministry for him with other dioceses?"

Rodriguez: "I had to put that there to prove that there was no other option."

Smith: "Did you lie to the Pope?"

Rodriguez: "Yes."

Smith: "You did lie to the Pope?"

Rodriguez: "Yes."

First Things, the theocon-RNC journal whose editor defended Marcial Maciel to the bitter end, and piled calumnies on the reporters, such as Jason Berry, actually disparages Berry's latest report as "thinly sourced." Joseph Bottum, the Catholic Republican reactionary who used to edit the Weekly Standard's back of the book, lards up his acknowledgment that the Legion almost certainly was deeply corrupt with snark about Berry and NCR. They really do have no shame, as an FT reader helpfully notes:

[T]he absolutely dismal past of First Things in relation to Fr. Maciel and the Legion of Christ makes snark in Mr. Bottum’s post particularly inappropriate.

Jason Berry and the National Catholic Reporter were telling the truth about Fr. Maciel’s crimes at a time when the editor of First Things was participating in a campaign of calumny against the victims of Fr. Maciel’s abuse. Certainly by the time that Fr. Neuhaus published his infamous diatribe against Berry, his partner Gerald Renner, and the accusers/victims, there was enough documented evidence and public first-person testimony to persuade anyone who was not either systematically sheltered from information, willfully obtuse, or simply

not paying attention.

Most of the Regnum Christi and Legionaries of Christ faithful and the late great John Paul II were probably in the sheltered category, but the prominent conservatives who continued to flack for the Legion almost certainly qualify as willfully obtuse at best.

This is a truly shameful blot on the reputation of your fine journal. I have been told that it is unseemly to make posthumous apologies for others, so perhaps a “purification of memory” is not in order. But surely those who carry on Father Neuhaus’ legacy, including the current editor of this magazine and the public intellectuals who joined in piling on the victims, have some work to do to restore their own honor. George Weigel’s call for accountability, which though it was tardy, coming only after the Legion was already down, was a small start. There is much more to be done.

An Arkansas woman is charged with harassment:

Denise New's 16 year old son filed charges against her last month and requested a no contact order after he claims she posted slanderous entries about him on the social networking site. New says she was just trying to monitor what he was posting. "You're within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it's his account, or your account or whoever's account. It's crazy to me that we're even having this interview."

A senior Tory recently expressed sympathy on libertarian grounds for owners of bed and breakfasts to discriminate against gay couples in renting rooms. It was a clumsy statement but I see where the man was coming from. But the Tory attempt to win the gay vote in Britain was not helped by it. Nor will the defection of the founder of LGBTory, the wonderfully named Anastasia Beaumont-Bott:

"I feel guilty because as a gay woman affected by LGBT rights I am on record saying you should vote Conservative, and I want to reverse that," she said. "I want to go on record to say don't vote Conservative. I'd go as far to say that I'll vote Labour at this general election."

Johann Hari chronicles the "collapsing" of the Conservatives on gay outreach:

David Cameron's putative Home Secretary has just announced that he thinks B&Bs – places open for hire to the public – should, in practice, be legally permitted to put up signs saying "No Gays". How is this different to turning away black people or disabled people or Jewish people – except that Cameron would sack Grayling if he supported discrimination against them?

Meanwhile, Cameron has given two interviews to the gay press – and both have led him to tell shocking untruths, or demand the interview be stopped.

In his recent interview for Gay Times with a sympathetic former Tory researcher, Cameron offered a few tongue-tied answers defending his record – he supported the homophobic Section 28 laws until 2005, and included it in his personal election literature – before suddenly snapping that the cameras should be switched off, and adding: "Can we stop for a second?… I'm finding it… I'd almost like to start again from scratch… I'm finding the whole thing actually…" and then he petered out. No other issue has reduced him to such inarticulate stammering.

In his interview with me for Attitude, Cameron denied voting to ban gay people from having the chance to provide an adoptive home for children in care. When I showed him the vote in Hansard, he mumbled, "That's not my recollection."

The pile-on seems hopelessly unfair to me. The gay left is horrified, rather than encouraged, by the Tory party's big steps to include gay people in its party and policies. Hence this assault on p.c. grounds. I'd certainly encourage gay voters to see through this and decide on the spectrum of issues, gay and non-gay, that matter to them.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been trained in and have been practicing transcendental meditation. I don’t consider this in any way a contradiction of my faith in Christ; in fact, I think it has helped me pray more deeply and helped me get closer to the “being with God” that prayer is really all about. And that’s why the video above is so encouraging to me; it suggests I am not alone in this; and I am still enough of a Catholic to find a priest’s endorsement of this approach to be reassuring.

I wish the Catholic church actually did more to help us lay Catholics know how to pray, and reached out to other traditions of prayer and meditation to keep us Catholics more immune to the world’s often irresistible falsehoods and delusions, compulsions and addictions (including, I might note, blogging). I do believe that the lack of focus on prayer as a discipline, a daily regimen, a break in our day that compels us to remember where we are in the full scope of things … is a terrible failing of the current church. But I also believe that the church is not the hierarchy and that we lay people, and indeed priests, can and must innovate while remaining in constant touch with the ancient and deep and eternal truths of our faith.

I find meditation a very useful prelude to a more traditional mode of prayer to and with God. And the priest above helps explain exactly how and why this helps. It can center you and then allow you to focus more deeply on, say, the Lord’s Prayer, or the Hail Mary, or a scriptural passage. Getting to Mass a little early to practice meditation before the service begins is also something that has helped me focus on the eternal in this constantly ephemeral and over-charged modern present. 

I am not posting this to evangelize; that is not my role here at the Dish. I post it because a renewal of Christianity is, in my view, so desperately needed, and more airing of how this can happen, and exploration of new modes of thought and worship within our tradition, can only, I hope, help advance the debate.

“I could give a flying crap about the political process. … We’re an entertainment company,” – Glenn Beck.

It seems to me that Gordon Brown should have avoided saying he would hang on as prime minister for a full five year parliamentary term. And can you imagine an American presidential candidate saying this three weeks before an election:

He rejected the suggestion that politics had been his entire life, pointing out that he had first been ''an academic''.