Sermons, Integrity and Richard Nixon

If you google "sermon illustrations" and "love your enemies," you will pretty quickly come across this anecdote:

Hubert Humphrey was a former vice-president of the United States. When he died hundreds of people from across the world attended his funeral. All were welcome, but one – former President Richard Nixon, who had not long previously dragged himself and his country through the humiliation and shame of Watergate. As eyes turned away and conversations ran dry around him Nixon could feel the ostracism being ladled out to him.

Then Jimmy Carter, the serving US President, walked into the room. Carter was from a different political party to Nixon and well known for his honesty and integrity. As he moved to his seat President Carter noticed Richard Nixon standing all alone. Carter immediately changed course, walked over to Richard Nixon, held out his hand, and smiling genuinely and broadly embraced Nixon and said “Welcome home, Mr President! Welcome home!”

The incident was reported by Newsweek magazine, which wrote: “If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, it was that moment and that gesture of love and compassion.”*

Great story, right?  Turns out it may be almost true.

We weren't sure at first.

We found the story repeated verbatim here, here and here.  The verbatim part makes us suspicious, since preachers are notorious for passing around the same old stories, with little concertn for pesky old factuality.The last source is Maxie Dunnam's Irresistible Invitation, published in 2010; further research finds that Dunnam has been telling this story at least since his 1998 This is Christianity.  So ... did Dunnam clip this little tidbit out of a newsmagazine, or find it somewhere else?  The question is made harder to answer by the fact that  Newsweek's archives are owned by The Daily Beast, but have not been digitized or made available to anybody except Beast employees.

There is an alternate version of the story that is easy to trace.  Remember that Humphrey and Nixon were political rivals, and the 1968 election was one of the closest and hardest fought in history.  After Watergate, Nixon's reputation was at an ebb so low it may be hard for young people to imagine.  He was hated, reviled, shunned by virtually the whole of the Establishment.  And then, in 1977, his old rival developed urinary cancer.

Then-Senator Dave Durenberger tells the rest of the story, in the Congressional Record (2 May 1994):

When my predecessor in this office -- the Honorable Hubert H. Humphrey -- was dying of cancer in Lake Waverly, MN, he called former President Nixon and asked him to attend his -- Humphrey's -- funeral. 

Humphrey knew that the funeral was not going to be long in coming -- and he arranged that Richard Nixon be received at that ceremony with the full honor due to a former President. Young people who watched the TV coverage of President Nixon's death and funeral -- coverage that I understand was generally positive in tone -- might find nothing remarkable in this. But back in 1977, the scars of the Watergate scandal were far from healed. Many of Senator Humphrey's liberal colleagues -- and even a substantial number of moderates and conservatives -- viewed Nixon as deserving a state of permanent disgrace.

Hubert Humphrey demonstrated true nobility of character by making his historic gesture to President Nixon. He realized that whether you share Nixon's views or no,you have to recognize his value to public life. Humphrey had known Nixon for decades -- and knew that ostracizing Nixon would hurt America's future more than it would help.

Today, let us continue in the tradition of my distinguished predecessor. Let us join Hubert Humphrey in recognizing that all public-spirited Americans, whatever their ideology, have a constructive role to play in building our country's future.

Ah.  Now that is a beautiful story, and -- when you subtract the political blather -- a better preaching illustration as well.

Larry King tells a shorter but compatible version in his 2009 memoir, My Remarkable Journey.  In King's version, which he says he heard from Humphrey, it was Nixon who called Humphrey, in the hospital, on Christmas Eve.  (With a rope?)

But in neither Durenberger's version nor King's is there any mention of Jimmy Carter.  For a while, we thought that the homiletic version was a fabrication.  But then we found a 1994 article in The New York Review of Books, which tells the story of how Nixon fought his way back from ignominy.  And lo and behold, it cites Newsweek's 19 May 1986 issue, on the cover of which a victorious Nixon appeared, under the proud headline "He's Back!"  The Newsweek story begins:

Suddenly he [Nixon] was in the room, and the conversation died. As Howard Baker tells it, Richard Nixon “looked like he was four feet tall, all shrunk up in himself and gray as a ghost.” It was January 1978, in Baker’s Senate office, where the notables were mustering for Hubert Humphrey’s memorial service in the Capitol Rotunda. “Nobody would get near him. Nobody would talk to him. The hush lasted until President Jimmy Carter walked over, shook Nixon’s hand and welcomed him.

If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, that was it.

This version was shortened for use in a 1999 sermon by Arthur Ferry.  Ferry glosses a little, saying that Carter welcomed Nixon "back to Washington."  Ferry also adds the words "humanity and compassion," attributing them -- wrongly -- to Newsweek.  The supposed quotation, "Welcome home, Mr. President," occurs in neither Newsweek nor Ferry. 

The version published by Maxie Dunnam and often copied by other preachers is less faithful to Newsweek than the one in Ferry's sermon.  Dunnam turns "humanity" to "love," and adds the "Welcome home, Mr. President." We thought at first that Dunnam had copied from Ferry, but perhaps he has simply strayed further from a common source.  Still, if Newsweek is to be trusted, the Dunnam/Ferry version is largely accurate, apart from some dialogue and editorial moralizing.  The dialogue seems likely to be Dunnam's creation.

We prefer Durenberger's version, with its emphasis upon Humphrey's kindness rather than Carter's. In any case, the earliest telling -- Newsweek's -- comes almost a decade after the fact, and should be treated with some caution.

We shouldn't care about this.  As readers now know, we at the Egg have no more integrity than Nixon himself.  But still, we do think it is better for everyone, and especially for the credibility of the Gospel, when the stories in sermons are demonstrably true.

"The Vicar of Snark"

GetReligion has a droll piece on Pope Francis, arguing that the press has wrongly painted him as a nice guy, when in fact he sometimes says mean things.  In contrast, the piece argues, Benedict actually was a nice guy.

The lede is sheer genius.  It offers this example of Papa F. denouncing journalists:

Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia, which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

"Oh, my, my," shouts GR in the voice of the SNL Church Lady. " Did the Pope just call journalists a bunch of shit-loving shit-eaters?  Or was it somebody else?  Like maybe ... Satan?"

They go on to argue that Bergoglio is really just a meanie who says these terrible things, unlike that kindly old Dr. Ratzinger.  But the argument fails from the outset, because GR misses the obvious fact, which its article then goes on to prove with further examples:  Francis is a funny man.

Acerbic, sure.  But funny.  The Week, from which our title is borrowed, says he is "practically an insult comic," and offers some jolly examples.  When annoyed, Francis has referred to people as "querulous and disillusioned pessimists," "museum mummies," "priest-tycoons".  They don't mention the most famous, the reference in Evangelii Gaudium to "self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism."  (Zuhlsdorf will sell you a mug with those words printed on it.) Best of all, Francis has called the Vatican hierarchy "the leprosy of the papacy."

No, it's not vintage Don Rickles.  But in context, it's all pretty good.

Perhaps it is because we spend so much time reading Reformation-era polemical writing.  Or perhaps it is that we secretly prefer Dorothy Parker to Dorothy Day.  But we find this sort of stuff refreshing.

Of course, we also thought that Benedict's much-derided Regensburg lecture on the use of force in religion was a delightful, if poorly timed, example of donnish provocation.  Maybe we're just soft on popes in general.

Anyway, GR is trying to counteract what it perceives as a lefty effort to soften Bergoglio's image, by arguing that he says unkind things about people he doesn't like -- including (heaven forbid!) journalists.  Because the article insists on contrasting him to his predecessor, this winds up looking like a gentler form of the Bergoglio-bashing we have already seen from Rorate Caeli & Co.  This misses the point somewhat.

We will be greatly relieved when people on both sides stop treating these two elderly celibate men, chosen as leaders of the same organization by basically the same group of their own friends and associates, as though they stood in radical opposition to one another.  They don't.  While they may have differences of personal style and even some theological substance, they are both self-evidently committed to the perpetuation and prolongation of  the same institution.  It's just that one is funnier than the other.  There's nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, by acting as though they were enemies, or opposites, or whatever.

So grow up, people.  Relax and enjoy the show.  He'll be here all week, and we hear the veal is good.

Luther Sells Out

This morning Last week, students at Luther Seminary learned that their dorms were going to be privatized.*

Well, sort of.  The seminary has arranged to sell two apartment buildings, which are currently used for student housing.  The purchasers have agreed to make some improvements to the property, and to allow current students to continue renting.  Their rent, students have been assured, will not increase by more than 10%.  In turn, the seminary will be able to pay off some or all of the money it borrowed from its endowment fund.

At least that's the plan.  Will the new owners turn out to be what in New York are called "Dracula Landlords," the kind who charge too much and offer too little, turning the neighborhood into a slum?  Will the improvements cost so much that, to recoup their losses, the landlords gradually edge out students in favor of some more monied class of renters?  Will they try to "flip" the building when the market turns, or begin the process of turning the buildings into co-ops?

Who knows?

We're told that there's a great deal of anxiety on the campus today, which is to be expected.  We'd be anxious, too.

To be honest, though, this could be a good thing for the seminary without being a particularly bad one for its students.  Schools, like churches, sometimes wind up in the landlord business without being particularly well-equipped for it.  It's not their core mission, and there's a pretty good argument that they shouldn't waste resources playing catch-up ball.  Since 1999, the Army has been privatizing its base housing -- getting out of residential real estate, which isn't its core mission either -- apparently with no ill effects.

We're generally cynical about maneuvers like this.  Many congregations have sold their parsonage to make a much-needed upfront buck, but then found themselves unable to compensate a new pastor for local housing.  But the situation here is different, if only because of the numbers.  Student bodies rise and shrink; maintenance costs on an apartment are relatively fixed.  A building that can house 50 people becomes a terrible strain on a school that needs housing for 25.

If congregations all over America are in a crisis, seminaries are in a worse one.  And compared to the the half-assed ideas that are being floated in the world of theological education these days -- dropping Greek and Hebrew, "terminal internships," cutting whole years out of the experience that should in theory prepare a pastor for a lifetime of ministry -- selling off a few buildings looks like genius.

_________________________________
* Thanks to Vicar Dan for the timeline correction; see his note below for information on the poor condition of the buildings at present.

Failed Politician Turns Sex Tourist in Africa

One former congressman has been arrested.  Shockingly, the others have not.

Mel Reynolds has been arrested in Zimbabwe.  He has been living there since November, apparently without filing the correct immigration paperwork.  In those four months, Reynolds has rung up a $25,000 unpaid hotel bill.

Reuters also mentions that he was found to possess pornography, which is a crime in Zimbabwe.  The report does not specify what kind of pornography we are talking about.  A few dog-eared Playboys, for example, would hardly shock most of Reynolds' erstwhile constituents.

But we don't think that's it.

Reynolds was, again per Reuters, "a rising star in the Democratic Party" until

... he was forced to resign in 1995 after being convicted of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography.

Ah.  Now we get it.

Yesterday, we'd never heard of Congressman Reynolds, perhaps for the good reason that he only served one two-year term, in the early 90s.  He has spent more time in prison than he ever did in Congress, first following a conviction for statutory rape and then following a separate conviction for bank fraud.

Ick.  Just ... ick.

It almost seems cruel to add that, in 2004, Reynolds attempted to regain his seat, the Illinois 2nd, and was crushed by the incumbent -- Jesse Jackson, Jr.  When you can't beat Jesse Jr., it's time to get out of the game.

Anyway, we point out Rep. Reynolds' problems only to observe that there is somebody, somewhere, who has less integrity than we ourselves.  Small victories, people.

We Have No Integrity!

This just in:  Father Anonymous has no integrity!

Regular readers will no doubt find this unsurprising.  Way back in 2010, we expressed our willingness to blog for money -- to shamelessly promote any product for a fee, and the right products in exchange for samples.  We mentioned a particular interest in wristwatches, books and clerical haberdashery.  (Sinn, Continuum [which is now part of Bloomsbury] and Slabbinck came in for particular mention.  These days, we'd happily take a look at some fancy camping gear as well.  Are you listening, Arc'teryx?). To our great regret, no manufacturers or distributors have actually taken us up on this offer -- yet.

But the point remains: Father A. is  sellout by nature, sadly lacking in the ascetical rigor implicit in his vocation.  Miserere nobis, Domine!

Our only comfort was the thought that this abject moral poverty was a somewhat private affair, known only to ourselves and to the minuscule coterie of regular Egg-beaters.  Imagine, then, the shame - the Kristevan horreur -- that we felt when we were called to account by no less august a community than the Facebook  ELCA Pastors' Group.

A group member offered for consideration a paragraph from our first reflection on l'affaire Justman.  It was a rather good paragraph, although we had forgotten writing it.  (Perhaps, indeed, we stole it -- that's how little integrity we have!)  Here it is:

Now, it is easy to imagine reasons that a bishop might choose to step down.  The job, especially as it has been practiced by the ELCA, is almost comically bad.  You are given great symbolic status and virtually no executive authority; you are called to manage dwindling resources in an atmosphere of panic and distrust of institutions; you are an authority among people who largely distrust authority.  Although your job title calls you to teach doctrine and administer discipline in the tradition of the apostles, your church feels more comfortable if you serve as a middle manager, giving mildly inspirational pep talks and telling a few jokes, but otherwise deferring to the halfwits they elect to lesser offices.

We will stand by those remarks.  They describe, to our mind, the extraordinarily challenging position in which ELCA bishops find themselves.  The office of bishop in the ELCA is poorly defined, and it is frankly miraculous that any of the people who hold it manage to get anything done.  By the same token,  the only real surprise when a bishop resigns is that ten others haven't resigned as well.

The same thing can be said, incidentally, of pastors.  A glance at the ELCA Model Constitution shows why.  Article 9, concerning the office of the pastor, seems to go on forever, much of its length spent assigning the pastor duties without granting any corresponding executive authority, and even more of it spent on just how to get rid of him (or her).  Lutherans have a long and complex history of interpreting the offices of pastor and bsihop, from nearly idolatrous worship of Herr Pastor to the undisguised anticlericalism of the Pietists; both constitution and parish practice reflect this history.  We are divided between our need for strong pastoral leadership and our fear of pastoral tyranny, and act on that division by both loving our pastors and seeking to destroy them.

Somebody once told us that the best example of passive aggressive behavior is the dog who jumps up to lick your face while simultaneously peeing on your leg.  There, in a nutshell, is the Lutheran approach to pastors and, except even more so, to bishops.

However, the Facebook group sees it differently.  Members read the offending paragraph as a criticism not of the office and how it is defined, but of the people who hold it.  The very first commenter claimed to have known every ELCA bishop ever, and to have seen in them models of solid leadership -- two claims that are difficult to reconcile, given what we know about the catastrophic failure of a few bishops.  Others chimed in accordingly.  The instinct to defend one's bishop, as well as one's friend, is a very good one, displaying just the sort of integrity that the Egg so prominently lacks.  We applaud it, however completely beside the point in question it may be.

Another commenter sniffed that "leadership is hard," an observation which is ... sort of what we were trying to say.

We'll say this more clearly, in case you missed it:  there are many fine bishops in the ELCA, as there are many fine pastors.  We've been privileged to know some of them.  Their presence is proof, however, of God's providence rather than of any human wisdom, because their church has given them a ridiculous job, one which could scarcely be better designed if its goal were to drive them to booze, broads, or bigger parishes -- the three customary causes of an episcopal dimission.

Anyway, back to our integrity -- or lack thereof.

The Facebook ELCA Clergy Group has a number of distinguishing characteristics.  One is that its participants are generally on the young side, and seem not to have fully integrated all the lessons of their priestly formation.  Rather than consult a book, or -- one hopes -- their own memory of the relevant course, they seem to instinctively crowdsource every question.  Some questions are quite naturally resolved this way (e.g., "Where to buy black shirts cheap?"); others are not ("Why can't we make up our own creeds?"  "What is that poncho thing some pastors wear at the Eucharist?" "Does anybody really use Greek?")  It is a little dispiriting to watch.  Older pastors try to dispense such theological learning and practical wisdom as they are able, but generally despair quickly.  (Our biretta is permanently off to Frs. Murphy and Stoffregen, who are tireless dispensers of all that is good and true and beautiful.)

Another characteristic, common to many online discussions, is that threads often meander.  The question of where to buy shirts, for example, can easily turn into a  pissing match among those who insist on black clericals, those who champion the multicolored, and those who dismiss the whole subject as reeking of potpourri -- sorry, we meant popery.  This particular topic, which comes up every couple of months, is as theologically neutral as one can imagine, and yet it predictably preciptates a nasty exchange of self-righteous truisms.

In the case at hand, for example, the question of how Lutherans have defined the episcopal office never really got talked about, even when the OP herself tried to raise it again.  People seemed more interested in talking about how well the bishops of their acquaintance had performed -- and how evil Fr. A. was. for suggesting otherwise, even though he hadn't.

Their gravest objection seemed to be that Father Anonymous was ... anonymous.  It was this that seems to have raised the question of his integrity, although just how anonymity and integrity are connected was never made clear.

A few people muttered politely that anonymity has a long history in journalism.  (Paging Xavier Rynne! Not to mention the only newsmagazine that's actually any good.  Oh, and that gutless wonder Thomas Paine). We thank them, but the Egg is hardly journalism.  It's the periodic ramble of a prematurely senile minister, more concerned with John Donne's mystagogy, John Mason Neale's hymnody and Dick Cheney's predilection for sexual congress with billy goats than with any matters of present-day concern.

Likewise, a few faithful readers rose to our defense, and their kind words are music to our tone-deaf ears.  (Literally tone-deaf.  Can't chant a freaking note, despite the weekly attempt.)  But the truth is that our critics are right:  we have no integrity.  Our critics are right, because how could so intellectually sophisticated a group possibly be wrong?

We offer no defense; it would be pointless.  We will only observe, as we have before, that our "anonymity" is pretty thin stuff.  We adopted it, back in the innocent days of 2005, to prevent our private ramblings about sex and politics from disturbing the peace of the parish.  But over time, it has grown ever more notional.  Most regular readers know pretty much exactly who "Father Anonymous" is; quite a number have entertained him in their homes, served with him on a parish council, chatted with him over brewskis or via the Internet, prayed his eccentric version of the Daily Office.  According to the Egg's Dept. of Statistics, fully one-tenth of our readers actually gave birth to us.  (And btw, thanks for doing that, Mom.)

While it is possible to learn the notorious little cleric's secret identity with two mouse clicks, navigating from this very page, that may be too much work for kids nowadays.  (Durn entitled Millennials -- get offa my lawn!) Still, there's a com-box on every page, and we're busy but by no means bashful.  So if you want to know a guy's name, there's one tried-and-true-method, which is to ask.

But really, why bother?  This blog has no integrity.  It's certainly not a labor of love, nor an expression of care for the church and its theology.  On the contrary, we're just in it for the swag.

News from the Lessons

If you're preaching this week, here are a couple of tidbits you might use.

1)  We are now in the midst of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, an event often observed principally in the breach by American churches.

In Romania, touchingly, it was a pretty big deal.  Churches that genuinely hated each other, and had a long tradition of doing dirt to one another whenever possible, would do their best to suck it up on this one week and try to imagine what it would be like to live the way Jesus wanted them to.

Anyway, the theme of this year's Week of Prayer, "Is Christ Divided?", is taken directly from Sunday's Epistle.

2) "I will make you fish for people," the NRSV translation of Matthew 4:19, is grammatically misleading.  Jesus promises to make the fishermen into something.  And what he promises to make them is a noun, not a verb -- fishers (haliei).

This may very well matter to a preacher.  The word Jesus uses for "make" is poieso, from poiein.  It is the root of our English word "poetry," for which page Sir Philip Sidney and his dubious argument that poets make a new world which is actually better than nature's.  And when we confess in the Nicene Creed that the Father is the "maker" of Heaven and Earth, the underlying Greek is poieten.  One interpretation, then, is that when Jesus calls Peter and Andrew, he offers to make them anew -- with the implication that his mission is in fact a new creation for the whole world.

Another, less cosmic, interpretation is simply that Jesus is giving these two people a new identity.  But this is where the grammar comes in, because he is not giving them a new skill.  He is not, in other words, teaching them to evangelize; he is making them evangelists.  Spreading the Gospel, in other words, is not a thing we do; it is an expression of who are.  "Evangelist" does not describe a skill set, but an identity.  (Better yet, it describes a renewed form of human nature.  But that may be too abstract for most people.)

That said, "of people" is a better translation into modern English than "of men," since anthropos can refer to either or both sexes.

Wrong Again!

That is to say, Fr. A. has cruelly misjudged somebody, and hopes to rectify the mistake.  A few hours ago, we lumped together three accomplished scientists who were also amateur theologians -- Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and Christoph Rothmann.  Although brilliant, we proposed that all three were, theologically speaking, crackpots.

The Egg's Department of Overreaching Claims has asked us to issue a formal apology.

Based on this paper by Miguel A. Granada, it appears that Christoph Rothmann, who had studied both theology and mathematics at Luther's own university in the 1570s, was not a crackpot at all.  In his correspondence with Tycho Brahe (also a Lutheran, of course), Rothmann defended the heliocentrism of Copernicus against Brahe's hybrid geo-heliocentric theory.  But beyond that, both men, along with Melanchthon's son-in-law Caspar Peucer, attempted a task that occupied many of the finest minds of the 17th century:  to reconcile the newly powerful (because newly available) Christian Scriptures with the emerging conclusions of the natural sciences.

Both Brahe and Rothmann took for granted the reliability of the Bible.  But they differed in their understanding of just what its "reliability" entailed.  Rothmann argued for what is sometimes called God's "accomodation" of the Bible to human understanding:

Authority of Sacred Scripture is no obstacle [to heliocentrism]. It is not written solely for me and for you, but for all men; and it speaks after their capacity of understanding, as all Theologians declare in the exposition of the first chapter of Genesis. Otherwise the moon would be, against all demonstrations of geometry, greater than all other stars.... God speaks accommodating Himself to the capacity of the Hebrews.

This does not mean that God dumbed it down for us mere mortals -- well, not exactly.  It means that the Bible isn't a science textbook, and was never meant to be one.  As Granada says:

Sustained by a long line of scholars stretching from Augustine to Rheticus and Calvin in the sixteenth century, the notion of divine accommodation to common knowledge also employed by Rothmann implied that the intention of the Bible was to teach mankind in matters pertaining to God’s will and his promise of human salvation, not to impart scientific knowledge on cosmological matters irrelevant to its principal end.

This seems obvious, really, to everyone except the Creationist whackjobs in Texas (and, as it happens, to Caspar Peucer -- but that's another story).  Brahe himself embraced a limited accomodationism.  But

... Rothmann went much further [than these other scholars] in conceiving of accommodation in the most absolute of terms; he therefore excluded the possibility of any relevance of Scripture whatsoever to cosmological matters. 

Now, this is indeed a radical stance by theological standards -- certainly by 17th-century standards, and to some degree even today.  It needs to be qualified somewhat; as Granada says, for Rothmann Scripture did speak to "metascientific [and] metatheoretical questions, such as the encouragement or promotion of the quest for a scientific cosmology." In plain words, the Bible teaches us to love all truth, even when the truths it teaches are not scientific ones.

Rothmann, it seems, offers a reconciliation of the natural and theological sciences (or, if you must, of nature and revelation) which would make sense to many thoughtful readers even in the present day.  He and his collocutors defy the popular caricature of Renaissance scientists struggling under the yoke of a superstitious religious establishment which denounced them all as witches.  On the contrary, they appear to have embraced their religious faith with zeal -- even if it was sometimes, as befits not only scientists but all Christians -- a critical zeal.

Good Science Is Good Religion

Everybody knows that Copernicus figured out that the earth moves around the sun, that Galieo proved him right by looking through a telescope, and that the Roman Catholic Church tried to shut Galileo down because it believed, for theological reasons, that Copernicus could not be correct.

Right?  Isn't that what everybody knows?

Probably, more or less -- but if so, this is one more instance in which what everybody "knows" is not true.

An article in the current Scientific American* neatly summarizes a much more complex story.  In fact, as Dennis Danielson and Christopher Graney show, the ideas that Copernicus proposed in his 1543 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium -- although eventually proven to be true -- did not fit with the best experimental evidence available to the scientific community of his time.

In addition to the problem of how something as large as the Earth could move, a matter that would not be fully explicable before Newton's Laws of Motion, would-be Copernicans were troubled by the absence of a measurable annual stellar parallax, which suggested that the diameter of Earth's still-hypothetical orbit around the sun was, when compared to  its distance from the stars, far smaller than previously believed.  There was also serious question about the size of the stars in a Copernican system, since their (apparently, but not really) fixed width would make them vastly larger than anbody had reason to imagine.

The heliocentric model of Copernicus was directly challenged by another brilliant and heavily-funded astronomer, Tycho Brahe.  Tycho proposed a"geoheliocentric" model, in which the sun, moon and stars orbit an immobile earth, while the planets circle the sun.  He attempted to reconcile the elegance of Copernicus' calculations with the other evidence, such as it was.

Galileo's subsequent observations, such as the existence of Jupiter's moons, disproved the Ptolemaic cosmology -- but were compatible with Brahe's system.  In other words, Galileo's oservations "were not  .. understood [by contemporary astronomers] as  proof that Earth revolves around the sun."

The upshot is that it took roughly 200 years for the question of heliocentrism to be settled among scientists.  In addition to Kepler and Newton, the contributions of Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis were required.  It was not until 1838 that Friedrich Bessel measured the annual stellar parallax and George Airy "produced the first full theoretical explanation for why stars appear to be wider than they are."  So, although by the late 17th century a growing majority of scientists accepted the Copernican model, they did so, as Danielson and Graney observe, "in the face of scientific difficulties."

Danielson and Graney are interested in the large historical question of how the scientific community is,  often and rightly, reluctant to embrace radically new ideas before a significant body of observational data can be adduced to support them:

Back in [Galileo's day], those opposed to Copernicanism had some quite respectable, coherent, observationally based science on their side.  They were eventually proved wrong, but that did not make them bad scientists.  In fact, rigorously disproving the strong arguments of other was part of the challenge, as well as part of the fun, of doing science.

True, by all means.  We at the Egg have another thread to pick at in this story, though, which is the oft-misrepresented role of religion in the history of cosmology.

We have often observed that, despite the weird mythologies of Fundamentalism and Dawkinsism alike, historic Christianity has never been profoundly hostile to the natural sciences.  More often than not, the Church has been deeply and seriously engaged in reading "the book of nature," seeing in it a revelation of God's will that is comparable in majesty to, if different in kind from, the revelation offered in the Bible.  Especially in the Renaissance, the Church was an active and generous patron of science.  Galileo himself worked for the pope, and popes up to the present day have continued to employ court astronomers.

So it is no surprise that, as the models of celestial motion were debated in the 16th and 17th centuries, churchmen would take an interest in the discussion.  And this is where Danielson and Graney observe an interesting irony:

Rather than give up their theory in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence, Copernicans were forced to appeal to divine omnipotence.

They cite a Copernican named Christoph Rothmann, writing to Brahe, and arguing that in fact stellar distances could be as large as the Copernicans estimated on the grounds that God was a great king who deserved a great palace.

(Side note:  Rothmann eventually visited Denmark, studied the stars and argued cosmology with Brahe, then disappeared to his hometown to publish some now-lost theological treatises.  [He had studied theology at Wittenberg.] Brahe's famous assistant, Johannes Kepler, seems to have viewed astronomy as a largely religious undertaking.  Clearly, Newton was not the only early astronomer to be an amateur theologian.  Sadly, we know that Newton was a crackpot, and are inclined to suspect the same of Rothmann and Kepler.  Perhaps not incidentally, they were all Protestants.)

In response to the Copernicans, it was Giovanni Battista Riccioli -- both an astronomer and a Jesuit priest -- who argued, in effect, that God should be left out of the cosmological question:  "Even if this falsehood [i.e., the claim that the stars were far away to satisfy God's dignity] cannot be refuted, it cannot satisfy the more prudent men."  Again, he was defending the wrong model -- but please note this representative of a zealous religious order, and younger contemporary of Galileo, attempting to ague that scientific questions should not be resolved by an appeal to theology.

Our point here, and it is one that can never be made too often by and among people with a commitment to traditional Christianity, is that the Church is not and never has been opposed to good science, because good science -- like good religion -- is an honest inquiry into the nature of reality.  No matter what anybody tells you, there is no war between science and religion, at least from the perspective of religion.  And while the story of Galileo is very complicated, taking place in the midst of tumultuous century, it is not fair to say that the Roman Catholic Church, much less all of Christianity, and far less "religion" in the abstract, is its villain.

_______________________________
*Dennis Danielson and Christopher M.Graney, "The Case Aginst Copernicus," in Scientific American, Jan. 2014, 72-77.  The web version is behind a paywall at this writing.

Dept. of No Surprise: Tough-Guy Edition

Regular readers will recall that Father Anonymous is a great fan of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child.  (So are his wife, his mother and his father.)  Reacher is one of the great American tough-guy heroes, a comically tough ex-MP who travels the country by Greyhound, righting wrongs and moving on.  Lee Child is a Brit, but so was Raymond Chandler, to whom the books owe at least a small debt of gratitude.

Child is a great thriller writer, one of the best.  He's not a great novelist, especially -- Tolstoy need not look to his laurels.  Judged on prose style and narrative canniness, Child is better than Ian Fleming, but falls well short of Chandler.  His dialogue is good, his ploys are repetitive but often clever.  But where Lee Child excels -- where he is unsurpassed -- is at actually thrilling people.  Nobody makes our adrenaline flow like Reacher.  Hell, real danger doesn't make our adrenaline flow like Reacher

Those same regular readers will recall that, before Tom Cruise appeared as the cinematic Reacher, we expressed some doubts about how that was going to go.  Reacher is big and deadpan; Cruise is small and cocky.  He's a fine actor, but this was really a part for Nick Nolte circa 1985.

Despite our reservations, we averred that we would probably see the film.  And last night, finding ourselves between Netflix series to binge-watch, we did.

Don't make this mistake.

The Reacher movie is ... not good.

It is bad in a million different ways, some large and some small.  It seems as though the female lead, Rosamund Pike, is trying to channel a little bit of classic noir dame, maybe some early Bacall.  It's not a bad idea, but it fails; her eyes seem to pop out in every scene, and roll around in their sockets.  The real villain, one of Child's more interesting creations, is not given enough screen time.

There are some good things about the movie.  Child's original dialogue and set pieces, when they can be preserved, are still clever.  Robert Duvall hams it up magnificently as a grizzled gunnery sergeant.  There is one sequence, in which Reacher is attacked by the Three Stooges, that is some of the best comic relief we have seen in a lifetime of watching thrillers.

Cruise is, as we exppected, the wrong actor for the part.  he tries hard, but his interpretation of jack Reacher just doesn't ring true.  Reacher is cocky in his own way -- he's smarter and stronger than virtually anybody he meets, and this shapes his world.  But Reacher's version of cockiness is laconic, almost lazy.  Think of vintage Robert Mitchum.  Cruise, in contrast, is energetic, feisty, visibly cerebral.  Think of vintage Tom Cruise.

Still, he's not that bad.  A world that can imagine Roger Moore as James Bond should have no trouble with Tom Cruise as Reacher.

The problems with this movie are not the actors; they are its script and its direction.  Together, they achieve dreary drabness of the picture, devoid of suspense and heavy with routine.

The most grindingly awful example -- SPOILER ALERT! -- comes about 3/4 through.  The damsel is in distress; Reacher has launched a rescue operation which is also intended to punish the villains.  He finds himself unarmed, taking on a team of professional killers with assault rifles. Needless to say, he kills most of them easily.  But then comes the most dangerous of the crew, a man Reacher especially hates.  Reacher sneaks up, puts a captured gun to the bad guy's ear and then says "Drop it."

At this point, Mother A. started screaming.  The mission isn't complete yet!  Reacher hasn't rescued the girl.  But, still, he disarms his enemy, throws down his own gun, and decides to fight hand-to-hand.  This is colossally stupid and out of character; of course Reacher can kill the guy bare-handed, but he can't control what happens to hostage in the minute it takes him to do so.  Yes, he's got a mean streak, but he's also a professional:  he focuses on the mission.

Worse yet is the fight itself.  Oh, it's choreographed well-enough.  The two heavies slug it out in a nighttime rainstorm, mud and testosterone splashing everywhere.  It should have been exciting, but it felt lifeless, dull, even familiar.

"It feels like I've seen this already," said Father A.  And then the light bulb went off over his cartoony head, and he exclaimed:  "BECAUSE I HAVE."

Yup.  This was, basically, the fight from the climax of Lethal Weapon.  Good guy throws down his gun and, in defiance of any logic whatsoever, settles score with bad guy the manly way.  Hand to hand.  In the mud.

it was stupid then, but at least it was exciting.  This time it is just dumb.  And at least Mel Gibson's Riggs was supposed to be borderline psychotic.  Reacher is eccentric but, at least in theory, coldly rational about combat.

Anyway, this movie stinks.  Not in a cool, campy way that will make it more fun in 25 years.  It stinks in a dull, uninspired way that will sink a potentially great franchise right out of dry dock.

Slow News About the Fast

A week or so before Christmas, the Lutheran World Federation asked its member churches to beginning fasting for climate change.  The fast is conceived as

a way for Lutherans to express their common faith, spiritual and ethical values; to transform the Lutheran communion; and urge national governments to be more ambitious in climate change negotiations.

Lutherans worldwide are asked to fast on the first day of each month throughout the year, leading up to the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations, which will take place in Peru next December.

This is interesting news for several reasons.  First, of course, is climate change itself -- a serious event with long-term consequences for everyone on Earth, which nonetheless remains politically volatile.

But it is almost as interesting that the LWF has responded, in part, by calling for a fast.  Needless to say, fasting has a long and largely noble tradition in both Judaism and Christianity.  It exists both as a private devotion and as a public one, undertaken collectively by the residents of a city or a nation.  Among Protestants, at least through the 17th century, it remained commonplace for leaders of both church and state to declare a public fast especially at times of war, drought or famine.  As the LWF press release observes, Luther

... called for a civil fast to “teach people to live more moderately” and for a spiritual fast prior to Easter, Pentecost and Christmas. Luther said fasting helps Christians know who they are in relation to God and their neighbors.

Fasting remains a modestly common practice among some Protestants, largely of the non-denominational sort, as well as Pentecostals.  But in our own observation, it has become quite uncommon among the principal Reformation churches -- Evangelical, Anglican and Reformed.  The idea of an Advent fast is a mere historical footnote.  Even Lent is typically honored not with the ascetical rigors of yore (and of Orthodoxy) but by a token surrender of one single earthly pleasure.  Even that is rapidly becoming the exception rather than the rule.

Of course, many Protestants have their doubts about fasting on principle.  Despite its long history, not to mention the example of Jesus himself, they worry that it seems like a legal obligation undertaken to appease or forestall God's wrath, in which case it would indeed be theologically questionable.  Perhaps that's why there's a defensive tone in the LWF release.

Is that also why we have not yet heard anything about this from the LWF's largest Western Hemisphere member church, the ELCA?

Perhaps it was simply lost in the Christmas rush. Perhaps there has been something on Twitter.  Or perhaps we just missed it.  But our search of the ELCA's news releases over the past few weeks reveals not a single word about the proposed fast for climate change.  Humanitarian aid for Syria and the Central African Republic -- check; Malaria Campaign -- check; Christmas message from the PB -- check.  Lots of other stuff on the news blog, both national and international.

But not a thing about an unusual spiritual initiative from our worldwide communion.

We hope this isn't a manifestation of some knee-jerk Pietist bias.  We hope it isn't a a capitulation to the knee-jerk "Climate change is a liberal myth" mindset still hanging on in parts of the US.  We hope, in fact, that we've just missed a thoughtful story on it, or that one is about to be published.

In any case, we personally are not likely to fast on the first of next month.  We have a potluck that night.

Waiting for the Shoe to Drop

A while back, we speculated on the mysterious behavior of Bishop James Justman, who in October took a previously unannounced "sabbatical," and resigned a little later.   While, as we pointed out, there are perfectly reasonable and non-scandalous reasons for an ELCA bishop to resign, there are also embarrassing and scandalous ones, usually involving sex or booze.

Since then, we have heard virtually nothing.  We suppose it speaks well for our readers that either they choose not to pursue gossip or that, having pursued it, they choose not to share.  Still, we're getting desperate.  Come on, Midwesterners, throw poor Fr. A. a bone!

More to the point, we imagine that the people of the East-Central Wisconsin Synod must be curious.  And unlike Father Anonymous, they have a genuine right to know what is going on.  By electing him as their bishop (twice!) they engaged Justman in a relationship of mutual trust, just as a congregation does when it calls a pastor.  Simply by dimitting -- regardless of his reasons -- Justman has brought that trust into question.  Moreover, the official silence of his synod council and officers, although surely intended charitably as a means of preserving Justman's dignity, further jeopardizes the ability of church members to trustt their leaders.

Failure of trust is, as we hope we need not say, a corrosive acid which eats away at any institution, especially one in which association is voluntary.

We have heard that there is pressure building on the synod to display a little transparency here, and that if it does, we will discover that Justman has done things he ought not have, without (for example) having committed a crime.  While embarrassing to him and possibly to other people, this is almost certainly less harmful to the church than a silence that breeds suspicion.

"A Figure of Discontinuity"

Bishop Enrico dal Covolo is the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, a position to which he was appointed by Benedict XVI.  Speaking in Guam just before Christmas, he expressed great approval of Benedict's successor -- who of course is not unreservedly admired by all of Ratzinger's friends, fans and appointees.

Dal Covolo said:

I believe that Pope Francis is a figure of discontinuity with the previous pontificate, but a very, very good discontinuity because he's pushing the Church, he's exorcising the Church from all the fears that she had in the past. 

I agree totally with these changes that Pope Francis is doing because they correspond precisely to the challenges we face today.

On one hand, it should come as no great surprise that a prominent bishop supports the Pope.  That's pretty much what you would expect.  On the other hand ....

Rorate Caeli, the blog from which we have this story (and at which you can see a YouTube clip of dal Covolo speaking) reads this as an expression of ingratitude toward one's patron.  To do so seems a little short-sighted to us, as it depends upon any number of dubious assumptions (as, for example, that Francis stands in polar opposition to Benedict; that Benedict was always right and Francis therefore always wrong; that "gratitude" is best expressed as unswerving loyalty to a person rather than to the institution the person serves, and so forth).

But consider the source:  Rorate Caeli, the go-to blog for Traddie gossip, has a view of Vatican affairs as jaundiced as the most antipapal Protestant.  It seems to believe that Benedict abdicated under pressure from liberals who had engineered the so-called Vatileaks scandal, who threatened to release more embarrassing information, and who since then have determinedly purged Benedict's supporters.  So he writes:

[D]espite the amazing coincidence of the end of all "Vatileaks" rumors or threats via the media after February 2013 (indicating clearly that the Vatileakers got what they wanted, that is, the end of the Ratzinger pontificate), and all of Francis's repeated words against "gossip"..., intrigue and backstabbing are more intense in the Vatican now than at any time since the [Second Vatican] Council. 

We have no idea whether or to what degree any of this may be true.  We scarcely care; it is, after all, somebody else's hierarchy.  But it sure makes for fun reading.

There is one thing in that brief clip from dal Covolo which supports Rorate's argument, though:  the choice of the word "discontinuity."  Benedict and his supporters have used "continuity" as their rallying cry, if not indeed their organizing principle, hermenuetically and otherwise.  (This is, in our own estimate, a brilliant and inspiring move despite certain inherent limitations.)  So, when dal Covolo praises Francis for discontinuity, it is hard to imagine that some slap at Benedict, or at least Benedict's crowd, is not intended.

Needless to say, that's no real evidence for "intrigue and backstabbing," but it is still noteworthy.

The Big Chill

This is what it just have felt like, long ago, when on a pleasant spring day the tranquility of your village was interrupted by a single horseman, an arrow protruding from his blood-caked leather vest, arrived at the town well and slipped from his saddle, barely able to mouth out the message he had spent himself to deliver:  "The Mongols are coming."

That sense of a deadly and implacable force readying itself just over the horizon, moving inevitably toward you, is how we in the Old Dominion feel about the "polar vortex" that has already gripped much of the United States.

At the moment, we're warm by the standards of winter -- last night's rain washed away most of the snow, today is pleasant enough that you might skip the coat if you were only headed out for a few minutes.  Somewhere in the region, a young man is almost certainly wearing cargo shorts.  He looks like an idiot, but he's doing it, because there's always one guy like that.

He'll change his tune tomorrow.

The temperatures are expected to drop about 40 degrees F over the next few hours, to near-zero.  The wind chill will make it feel like twenty-five below.  It will still be warmer than places north and west of us, but it may be colder than the kids in our youth group have ever experienced in their lives.  Some people will discover that their homes were not constructed or insulated  to keep out that sort of cold.  Cities and larger towns will set up warming centers, but many of the people who should got to them won't.  A few people may die -- cold especially kills the old, the poor and the foolhardy.

We ourselves aren't all that concerned.  Father Anonymous grew up in a moderately cold climate, and is certainly no stranger to zero-F temperatures.  Wear layers, stay active, or stay inside by the fire.  Sadly, attendance at the Epiphany service looks to be very small, but ... well, that would probably be true on a balmier night than this.  (Hora novissima, tempora pessissima sunt, as Bernard of Morlaix so memorably put it.)

In any case, that's not what we came here to say this morning.  No, we just wanted to point out that Polar Vortex would be a great super-villain name.  Batman has Mister Freeze, the Flash has Captain Cold -- why shouldn't Green Lantern or, better yet, one of the faux Silver Age characters in Kurt Busiek's brilliant pastiche Astro City match wits with an ice-themed villain named Polar Vortex?

Oh, and one more thing.  If you could only send back one Canadian import, would it be the polar vortex -- or Ted Cruz?

New Year -- New Blog!

A few years back, we got to talking with our chum Father James of the Tonsure.  Although we were both reasonably smart guys with a taste for traditional theology, it turned out that neither of us had ever read St. Augustine's City of God.  It's just so long and ... hard.

Seriously.  You guys know how much we love St. Augustine.  We like the Confessions, we adore the sermons, we are keenly interested in his arguments against the Pelagians and (to a lesser degree) Manichaeans, his use of the Psalms to derive a description of sin as being incurvatus -- bent over toward the earth, and unable to face upward toward heaven.  We love that he is, like John Donne, one of those writers in whom sex, religion and politics are all mixed up together.

We're Lutheran, for pity's sake -- Augustine is in our blood.  But the City of God is one of those books, like the Summa or Proust or the entire shelf of Cerebus the Aardvark, that sits there, mountainous in its size and abysmal in its depth, terrifying the faint of heart and foiling the casual skimmer.  So, to our shame and sorrow, we've read about it without ever reading it.

Back in the day, we talked with Fr. James about reading it together, over the course of a year or so, sharing notes to keep each other going.  It was a promising idea, but then Father Anonymous and his family relocated to Transylvania for a few years of vampire-hunting in the Carpathians, and nothing ever came of the virtual sojourn to ancient Africa.  His continuing professional education devolved into language tutoring (and, of course, the compilation of that neat little Latin/English breviary you can purchase by clicking on the right sidebar).  His pleasure reading, during those years, consisted largely of the The Economist and some Romanian newspapers.

Now, at last, things have settled down a bit.  The Egg's publishing headquarters is located in bucolic Fauquier County, a place no New Yorker can name without lapsing into vulgarity.  The parish is busy but stable, and the obscure machinations of the Hungarian nobility are an ocean away.  We do need to make time for developing the Adventures of Purple and Nine, a cartoon which will change the world, but that will get easier come the Epiphany.

So now is our chance to climb the mountain, metaphorically speaking.  This year we, God willing and the creek don't rise, we will finally read De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, all XXII libri.

And more than that, we plan to blog the blessed thing.

Not here, though.  The Egg remains our suppressed voice, the escape valve to vent those things the congregants don't need or want to hear -- ideas about sex, politics and (pathetically) religion.  It will stay cranky, obscurantist, and first-person plural.  But Augustine deserves better treatment.  So for him, we need to adopt a tone that is gentler and more direct -- and it won't hurt to have a website dedicated solely to this particular voice and project.

To which end, we offer Most Glorious City.  It's another Blogger site, deliberately simple-looking.  Over time, we'll expand its offerings to include many, many more links to online Augustiniana.  But its only real purpose is to serve as a notebook for our reflections on the City of God.

We hope some of you will be moved to read along.  Pick up a copy (it's probably on your shelf already) and join us.  We're planning to move very, very slowly.  It may take us a year to read the whole thing.  It may take us longer.  But it should be fun.

Hauskaa Joulua!

Ah, the Feast of the Nativity.  Or as we in the trade call it, "Crunch Time."

Fr. A. has been working double duty for weeks, with no end in sight (funeral coming, then Sunday, then blessing some chalk on Epiphany).  We have been living on cookies and cold coffee for longer than we can recall.  We could really use a little Ordinary Time right now.

Still, something curious happened last night.  The cynical preacher's view of the Vigil of Christmas is that people come to hear the familiar story recapitulated, a touching fable or two, and then to light a few candles and sing "Silent Night."  Anything much different risks rebellion in the pews.

 Moved by heaven knows what imp of the perverse, we decided to take our sermon in a different direction.  It's all a blur now, but we recall sharing the semantic range of the Greek verb "symballo," digressing on the fact that "host" is the word of an army -- militia coelestibus -- and blathering on about the arrangement of Israelite forces at the Battle of Midian.  Oh, and some long-winded anecdote about providing emergency pastoral care at the DMV.

The faithful actually seemed to enjoy this -- quite a bit, apparently -- although Heaven only knows why.  A Christmas miracle!

Farewell, Furry Friend-With-Benefits

Apparently, Bigfoot porn is a real thing -- and just as we have discovered its existence, Amazon is taking it away from us.

This may be just as well.  Yes, it's a loss for freedom and diversity and all that -- but a victory for good taste.

Hermits for Hire!

If you're lonely at Christmas, Science Daily proposes a forgotten remedy:  pay a religious zealot to live in your garden.

Apparently, back in the 1700s, this was all the rage.  Rich people would pay a hermit to live austerely on their property, moping about in the yard, growing long beards and presumably praying a little now and then.  It wasn't about company so much as, well, decoration:

In the 18^th century, it was highly fashionable for owners of country estates to commission architectural follies for their landscape gardens, many of which included hermitages comprising of a small cottage, cave or contemplative gazebo.

Often, landowners would inhabit their hermitages with imaginary or, in some cases, real hermits.

(And yes, the imaginary ones are the origin of the humble garden gnome.)

The hermit might be engaged for a period of seven years, after which he would be paid enough money to ... retire.  Which isn't the sort of thing we imagine hermits doing, but whatevs, yo.

The expert here is Gordon Campbell, author of a nice little book on the King James Bible and also of a recent book on ornamental hermits.  Campbell explains that decoration wasn't the only motive; there was a sort of vicarious spirituality involved:

It meant that the busy CEO could outsource his melancholy, contemplative side, embodying it in a hermit for hire. The ideal of living frugally did not therefore inhibit the good life. It's a bit like bankers carving turkeys for the homeless on Christmas Day.

ELCA Bishop Resigns; Reason a Mystery

Bishop James Justman, of the ELCA's East-Central Wisconsin Synod, has resigned. (ELCA release here, Wausau Daily Herald here)  He was elected to a second term in 2012 and, following the meeting of the Conference of Bishops in October, has been on "sabbatical."  Bishop Justman cites "personal reasons" for his resignation, the sort of thing that inevitably raises the questions it refuses to answer.

In politics and big business, "personal reasons" or "to spend more time with family" are the customary whitewash for a scandal or a major screwup.  But is it the same in church circles?  We genuinely do not know.

Now, it is easy to imagine reasons that a bishop might choose to step down.  The job, especially as it has been practiced by the ELCA, is almost comically bad.  You are given great symbolic status and virtually no executive authority; you are called to manage dwindling resources in an atmosphere of panic and distrust of institutions; you are an authority among people who largely distrust authority.  Although your job title calls you to teach doctrine and administer discipline in the tradition of the apostles, your church feels more comfortable if you serve as a middle manager, giving mildly inspirational pep talks and telling a few jokes, but otherwise deferring to the halfwits they elect to lesser offices.

It is easy to imagine why one might want to quit a job like this.  But by the time most pastors are elected bishop, they have a pretty good idea what the job entails, and have declared themselves ready to take it on.  If they weren't ready to serve, they would have avoided election in the first place.  Although some, like Lower Susquehanna's Penrose Hoover, are said to accept only reluctantly, they accept nonetheless.

So why do ELCA bishops typically give up their posts?  Some, like Robert Rimbo, get a once-in-a lifetime offer to leave the blasted postapocalyptic wasteland of Detroit for Manhattan's Upper West Side.  (Likewise, Paul Stumme-Diers left Milwaukee for a parish on Puget Sound, and Craig Johnson left the Minneapolis bishop's office to serve a large congregation in the same city.)  Nothing especially scandalous there.  Some, like Paul Egertson of California, are asked to resign for principled actions which nonetheless violate church policy -- like Egertson's 1994 ordination of a partnered lesbian.  Depending upon your perspective, that's downright heroic.

But others, like Rimbo's successor Stephen Marsh, find that the stresses of their ministry make it impossible to keep their "addiction issues" -- Marsh's word -- in check.  In 2006, Michael Neils resigned as bishop of the Grand Canyon Synod and as an ELCA pastor after admitting to an adulterous liaison; other ELCA bishops -- Slovak Zion's Kenneth Zindle and South-Central Wisconsin's Lowell Mays among them -- have resigned after accusations of sexual misconduct.  And of course Mays' successor and Justman's Wisconsin neighbor Bruce Burnside, killed somebody while (allegedly) driving drunk.

The thing is that if you resign to accept a new call, you tell people about it.  Even if you resign for some pretty awful reason, like a relapse or an affair, the custom seems to be to make it public.  So what sort of reasons for a resignation are so dire that an ELCA bishop chooses not to disclose them?

Maybe we're way off base here.  Maybe these personal reasons have no moral or ethical element to them at all.  It could be that he has been diagnosed with some grave illness, or that a member of his family needs urgent attention, or some other genuinely private and personal thing.  Terrible as those may be to contemplate, forgive us for hoping that's it.

Meanwhile, we pray for Justman, his family and especially for his synod, and hope that when the story comes out it will do nothing to vindicate our worst fears.

Locutus Roma ... sed non Latine

Pope Francis has provoked a great deal of discussion with his Apostolic Exhortation entitled Evangeliii Gaudium.

We were amused to learn recently that, despite its Latin title, the document has not yet been translated into the Latin language.  Apparently popes no longer write in the official language of their kingdom, which is a disappointment but certainly no shock.  We assume that this exhortation was composed in Spanish, making its "real" title La alegria del Evangelio.

We should point out that, thanks to the late Alex Comfort, the English title -- The Joy of the Gospel -- invites a certain adolescent giggle.  (Specifically, it makes us think of naked people with lots and lots of hair.  We wish it were otherwise, but there you are.)

That's every thing we have to say about Evangeliii Gaudium today.  But while we're on the subject ....

We notice that the exhortation has, with its mild criticism of trickle-down economics, aroused the ire both of Rush Limbaugh and Peggy Noonan, with Anne Coulter no doubt waiting in the wings.

The first thing one must say, of course, is that conservative critics expressing shock at Catholic social teaching are simply ignorant.  They don't know what they are talking about.  One takes this for granted, of course, in a buffoon like Limbaugh; Noonan is a special case.  She is not so much ignorant as wilfully blind.

So impressed was she, and so impressed were many of her contemporaries, with what they perceived as John Paul II's spiritual support for Saint Ronald's Holy War on Communism -- not to mention the whole abortion thing! -- that they decided that the Roman magisterium must be on their own side in all matters political.  Crazy, right?  Yet the history of the Neoconservative movement, when it is written competently, will doubtless list the many Roman Catholics who switched their allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican one; it will also show a modest number of politically conservative converts to Catholicism.

Such was the enthusiasm for Rome among 80s-era conservatives that they seem to have skipped the drudgery of actually, well, reading things.  Had they read just a little bit, they would have discovered the strangely dichotomous presence of Roman Catholicism in 19th- and 20th-century public affairs. 

On one hand, it retained the instinctive royalism of the preceding eras, and so was happy enough to align itself not only with actual kings but also with rightist strongmen like Francisco Franco.  And, like Franco, Rome certainly did not care for Communism, with its materialistic and atheistic bent.

But on the other hand, Catholicism felt just as threatened by the emerging democratic and capitalist order of the West.  Until very late in the day, it routinely expressed doubts about democracy and religious freedom, and it is still no real friend of sexual egalitarianism.  Rightly or wrongly, the magisterium assumed that movements like this undermined its own authority, and led inexorably to the establishment of a materialism no less toxic than the Marxist-Stalinist-Maoist variety.

And why not?  Capitalism, when you think about it, emerged in the Renaissance -- just like Protestantism and, for that matter, modern forms of democracy.  They aren't the same thing, but they share a certain constituency, and nowhere (around 1900) was that constituency so concentrated as in the United States.  Thus we get Leo XIII warning about the supposed heresy of "Americanism."

But here's the money point:  for all its panicked fear of modernity, the Roman Catholic church never lost sight of the needs of the poor.  In fact, it seems to have believed that both the emerging economic regimes -- Communism and capitalism -- would hurt the poor.  (Not that the church had anything better to offer, mind you; nostalgia for the Middle Ages wasn't going to bring them back, and in any case the Middle Ages hadn't been a notoriously good time for the peasants.)

The key fact, though, is that in 1891, Leo issued one of the most important papal documents of the modern age.  Rerum novarum served as a thoughtful Christian response to the industrial age, and especially to the cutthroat capitalism of the Gilded Age.  While supporting the rights of property owners to use their belongings as they saw fit, it also said:

Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. 

If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.

In other words, living wages are a matter of natural law -- the very idea that, even today, Wal-Mart and the service economy in general are trying to argue against.  More than that, employers who do not offer a living wage are abusing their workers, subjecting them to "force and injustice."  Although Leo does not like strikes and wants to avoid them for the sake of the common good, he supports labor unions, worker safety, collective bargaining, and other causes then labeled "progressive."

A century later, celebrating the downfall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, John Paul II reflected on Rerum novarum in his encyclical Centesimus annus.  It's a comparatively conservative document.  The Peggy Noonans of the world no doubt read it and hear the strong condemnation of Communism and, in particular, atheism.  But we hope they also catch this:

[I]t is unacceptable to say that the defeat of [socialism] leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization.

And this:

[P]rofitability is not the only indicator of a firm's condition. It is possible for the financial accounts to be in order, and yet for the people — who make up the firm's most valuable asset — to be humiliated and their dignity offended. Besides being morally inadmissible, this will eventually have negative repercussions on the firm's economic efficiency. 

In fact, the purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavouring to satisfy their basic needs, and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society.

Get it?  A company's job isn't just to generate shareholder value; it is to provide for the basic needs of its employees, and to serve society.  If it isn't doing all those things, it is a failure.

Centesiums annus displays a particular concern for the people of the Third World -- the encyclical's own, now somewhat old-fashioned phrase.  John Paul is concerned that people in these nations are excluded from the material benefits of the more developed economies.  This concern informs the broader "economics of exclusion" of which Francis writes.

John Paul goes on to warn against the "irrational destruction of the natural environment," a form of "tyranny" which leads to destruction.  This doesn't necessarily mean he would have opposed pipelines, offshore oil rigs or fracking, but it certainly does raise the question of whether those things are compatible with the Catholic social vision.

It is obvious that the most debated sections of Evangeliii gaudium (parapgraphs 53-60) are in line with these two predecessor documents.  Like Leo and John Paul, Francis has his doubts about capitalism; like Leo and John Paul, Francis is concerned that some people are excluded from the benefit of the emerging global economy.  Like them both, he is concerned that a purely materialistic economic theory damages the social fabric and leads, ultimately, to violence.  We defy anyone to argue convincingly that all three of these men are mistaken.

And we ask that political conservatives, especially those who make much of their own Roman Catholic faith, would pay more attention to their church's now-long-standing critique of their pet economic theories.

Megyn Kelly, St Augustine, and the Gay Sasquatch

We were sitting down to translate Augustine's Sermon 184, as a pre-Christmas gift to ourselves, when we found that it has already been done, and decently.  So much the better.

Here is the text in Latin.  Here is the English translation.  The latter comes from a website devoted to "proving" that Jesus was born on December 25.  How this sermon could do such a thing is anybody's guess, as -- unfortunately -- is the original source of the translation.

Our favorite part, by far, is the second section.  It contains two passages which we may steal for our own Christmas sermon, and you may consider as well.

It begins:

Proinde Natalem Domini frequentia et festivitate debita celebremus. Exsultent viri, exsultent feminae: Christus vir est natus, ex femina est natus; et uterque sexus est honoratus. Iam ergo ad secundum hominem transeat, qui in primo fuerat ante damnatus. Mortem nobis persuaserat femina: vitam nobis peperit femina. Nata est similitudo carnis peccati, qua mundaretur caro peccati. Non itaque caro culpetur, sed ut natura vivat, culpa moriatur; quia sine culpa natus est, in quo is qui in culpa fuerat, renascatur. 

Hence, let us celebrate the birthday of the Lord with a joyous gathering and appropriate festivity. Let men and women alike rejoice, for Christ, the Man, was born and He was born of a woman; thus, each sex was honored. Now let the honor accorded to the first man before his condemnation pass over to this second Man.   (1 Cor. 15:49)  A woman brought death upon us; a woman has now brought forth life. The likeness of our sinful flesh (Cf. Rom. 8:3) was born so that this sinful flesh might be cleansed. Let not the flesh be blamed, but let it die to sin so that it may live by its real nature; let him who was in sin be born again in Him who was born without sin. 

This may speak to our own time more deeply than it did to Augustine's.  The culture of the fourth century was not awash in identity politics, as ours has been for some decades now.  One did not feel the need to defend one's sex, skin color, or sexual preference, much less to define oneself by them.  Although tribe and nation mattered very much indeed, even these had lost some of their weight within the Christian church.

Evidence for this may be found in the person of Augustine himself.  Was he a Berber?  The descendant of white people from Europe or black ones from southern Africa?  Although guesses abound, there is no certainty about his descent -- because it did not matter enough for anybody to talk about.

But our time is different.  In the past week, we have seen a national "news" broadcaster insist, on air, that she knows for a certainty the skin color of both Santa Claus and Jesus.  This is, no doubt, part of her network's annual attempt to make Christmas a bone of sociopolitical contention.  Still, these remarks are especially weird.  They're a little like trying to argue that Sasquatch is gay and John Henry Newman is straight.  Bigfoot is about as well-documented as the pole-dwelling elf.  As for Newman, well, he may have liked the ladies, but it seems improbable, we just don't know, and it hardly matters.

So to our identity-obsessed age, with its theologies splintered and divided into "conservative" or "liberal," "mujerista" or "traditionalist," Augustine speaks a sober word.  By the Incarnation of God, both sexes were honored.  Men and women, all flesh alike -- and all flesh, alike, is redeemed.  We are not divided against each other by the birth of Christ, but united and washed clean.

The sermon continues with a series of imperatives, which may conceivably mirror by design the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil:*

Exsultate, pueri sancti, qui Christum praecipue sequendum elegistis, qui coniugia non quaesistis.  .... Exsultate, virgines sanctae: Virgo vobis peperit, cui sine corruptione nubatis; quae nec concipiendo, nec pariendo potestis perdere quod amatis. Exsultate, iusti: Natalis est Iustificatoris. Exsultate, debiles et aegroti: Natalis est Salvatoris. Exsultate, captivi: Natalis est Redemptoris. Exsultate servi: Natalis est Dominantis. Exsultate liberi: Natalis est Liberantis. Exsultate omnes Christiani: Natalis est Christi.

Let's make that easier for you to preach:

• Exult, you holy youths, who, having chosen Christ as a model eminently worthy of imitation, have not sought marriage. .... 
• Exult, you holy virgins. A Virgin has brought forth for you One whom you may wed without defilement, and you can lose the One whom you love neither by conceiving nor by bringing forth children. 
• Exult, you who are just; it is the birthday of the Justifier. 
• Exult, you who are weak and ill; it is the birthday of the Saviour. 
• Exult, you who are captives; it is the birthday of the Redeemer. Exult, you who are slaves; it is the birthday of the Ruler. 
• Exult, you who are free; it is the birthday of the Liberator. 
• Exult, all Christians; it is the birthday of Christ! 

For what it's worth, Salvator might here be translated as "Healer."  Buy you get the idea, and could ring whatever changes seemed best in your own sermon.

As usual, Augustine is our contemporary here, offering us two things we are obliged to share with the faithful at Christmas:  a vision of the Gospel as a universal message, and palpable excitement about the content of that message.

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*Although if St. Augustine were here alluding to the Exsultet, it would push back somewhat our evidence for when that hymn of blessing and encouragement was introduced.