Letting Go

I tried.  I really did.  But I’m done trying, at least for now.

Eight or nine years ago, Catholicism beckoned to me and I answered the call of the Catholics Come Home program, initiated to attempt to bring “lapsed” Catholics back into the fold.  And I made a good effort for a long time.  Regular Mass attendance.   Active in the men’s club.  Catholic Charities Board.   Regular attendance at Lumen Christi Institute (center for Catholic thought at the University of Chicago) programs.   I had gone a long way toward reconciling with the Catholic Church.

But Pope Francis’s leap into politics and economics initially caused me to hit the “pause” button.  While I understood that Jesuits emphasize social justice, Francis often used the language of Hugo Chavez, not just to criticize greed and avarice and promote a duty to assist the poor, but to attack capitalism itself.   He followed with pronouncements on climate change, immigration, and terror.  I cooled by connections with the Church when Pope Francis asserted that the love of money drives terrorism, which told me that Francis understood neither capitalism nor Islamic terrorism.  Francis, the globalist social justice warrior had no inhibitions of taking direct shots at America and, in particular, Donald Trump, criticizing Trump when our immigration policies resulted in the separation of children from their illegal immigrant parents.    But social justice warriors have a particular vulnerability that almost always sinks them in the end and that is irony.   They almost always get hoisted on their own petards and Francis is no exception.

But now we have yet another eruption of sex abuse scandals, and worse, the nuncio Archbishop Vigano is alleging that Pope Francis knew about Archbishop McCarrick’s abuse and reversed Pope Benedict’s sanctions against him.  Perhaps the worst of the cabal that is now scrambling incoherently to do damage control is our own Cardinal Cupich, head of the Chicago Archdiocese and named by accuser Vigano as having his career advanced by the notorious Bishop McCarrick.   Cupich brushed the burning controversy aside, asserting “the Pope has a bigger agenda.  He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church.  We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this. “  He accused the Pope’s accuser’s of “not liking him because he is Latino,” echoing the tone deaf tack taken by Elizabeth Warren when questioned about the murder of Mollie Tibbets (“so sorry you lost your daughter to our policies, but we have REAL problems to deal with”).  Cupich in a tweet implored his followers to attend the program at the Illinois Holocaust Museum entitled “Denial.”  With that, Cupich turned himself into a sad, maddening parody.

I asked a friend what he would have said a couple of years ago if I would have told him that the Pope would make Donald Trump look good.   At least Trump tried to keep his monkey business by good old fashioned American capitalist methods---through contract and buying it in a free exchange.   And it didn’t involve kids or anyone in the power structure underneath him. 

It turns out that perhaps I was not a lapsed Catholic but it is the Catholic Church that has lapsed.

So I’m making it official.   I am leaving the Church once again.  Will it be for good this time?   Who knows, but I cannot be part of this crew that now stands opposite of much of what I believe.  It is one thing for the leader of the Church to espouse warmed over Marxism.   It is another thing entirely to gloss over the sexual predators in your inner circle.   I’m not closing the door forever, but the Catholic Church will need to demonstrate to me that it is serious about reform before I will consider returning.   Pope Francis’s letter last week suggests that it is not.

What should Pope Francis do?  It’s clear that the Church is in crisis.   Francis’s best bet is to look to …. well, Donald Trump as a model.   Francis (and I’m sure many of the Cardinals and Archbishops) despises Trump and all that he stands for.  But a Trumpian approach has a lot that the Church could use right now.

• Trump is unafraid to cast off people that have outlived their usefulness.  He dropped Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon like hot potatoes early in his presidency.    The Vatican needs to churn many in the inner circle in a highly visible bloodletting to signal that the conspiracy of silence has ended.  No cushy retirements like Cardinal Law’s.  The perpetrators and their aiders and abettors need to be outed, humiliated and scorned…. publicly.   And Francis must be one of them.

•  Trump understands brand.  Trump’s businesses are all about personal brand and he is well versed in it.   Moreover, he knows exactly how to brand others and make it stick.  “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Little Rocketman” have forever branded those people.  Catholicism has a great brand.  It is a worldwide brand and the Vatican needs to stop the damage, rebuild it, and use it.  It is the Yankees of religions.  And at a time of diminishment of religion and churchgoing in the West, it is needed now more than ever. 

• Trump is unafraid to upend the status quo.  Republicans held on to free trade as a shibboleth, until Trump convinced enough people that we were getting the raw end of the deal in some instances, particularly with China.   He routinely and fearlessly defies his handlers.  “You can’t do that,” they implored about his tweeting.   “Oh, yeah, watch me.”   The Catholic Church is now in a position where Trumpian methods are called for.  That is, take bold, decisive steps to change the status quo that are certain to upset the establishment.   Let women become ordained.  Let priests marry.  Decentralize authority.   Do it and do it boldly.

• Trump understands how to directly communicate with his constituents…and his adversaries.  Right now, many of the messages coming from the Catholic hierarchy are defensive, dismissive, and self-justifying with Cardinal Cupich’s among the worst.  The Vatican needs to gain control of the messaging and this needs to happen soon.

Pope Francis has not hidden his scorn for Donald Trump and his policies and approaches. Ironically, it is a Trumpian approach that could best pull the Vatican out of this crisis.

Where does that leave me?  Frankly, I do not know.  Adrift, for now.  Do I switch and become Episcopalian, Lutheran, or Unitarian?  Do I simply sit on the sidelines and see how this unfolds?  I just know that I cannot show up every Sunday and support an organization that has ruined so many young lives that it is charged with protecting until I am convinced that real change is afoot.  Until I see bold and decisive steps in that direction, count me out.

Our Children Part II

Last March, I wrote a post following the terrorist bombing in Manchester England, which targeted mostly young girls attending a concert.   I asserted that if the West could not protect its most precious gift, its children, then it was in deep, deep trouble. (See my post Our Children, May 23, 2017 http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2017/05/our-children.html following the Manchester bombing).

Once again, I am sadly writing about the failure to protect our children and the heinous and egregious lapses of institutions that should protect them, and the inverted priorities of these structures.

Again, Pope Francis is in the spotlight (pun definitely intended as a reference to the film on topic).  Last week,  it was revealed that the Catholic Church had systematically covered up the sexual abuse of 1,000 children over 70 years with some 300 priests involved. 

I wish I could say I was shocked.  After the exposure of the massive cover-ups in the Boston Archdiocese and others worldwide, the church had announced that it put into place safeguards and a zero tolerance policy.   Francis turned his attention elsewhere—mostly criticizing the West for not doing enough on climate change, for having borders and not doing enough for Middle Eastern refugees, and criticizing capitalism generally.   He began to dial back the “zero tolerance” policy and made comments about forgiveness of these predators.  He enraged many Catholics by re-instating Fr. Mauro Inzoli (who had been defrocked by Pope Benedict for sex abuse,  and by giving the blessing at the notorious Cardinal Law’s funeral.   In a slap to victims in Chile, he accused the victims of slandering Bishop Juan Barros  for covering up abuse, and demanded proof of their claims (comments for which he later expressed regret).  The Vatican’s third highest ranking official, Cardinal Pell of Australia, is going on trial for sex crimes.

Now the issue is back with a vengeance. 

Francis is the most progressive and politically active pope in my lifetime.  And as with most progressives, Francis has exposed himself to charges of hypocrisy.   On the heels of criticizing Trump for allowing children to be separated from their parents, Francis is now faced with a crisis of his own.

C.S. Lewis, arguably the most important Christian writer and thinker of the last 100 years, wrote “Children are not a distraction from more important work.  They are the most important work.”  I argue that, especially in this time of fractured families, the most vital function of the Church and the Christian faith in general is the protection and nurturing of its children.

Instead, the Catholic Church, in a widespread way, over and over again, abused them. 

Francis responded with a letter that could have been written 5 years ago.  He expressed shame and repentance, and admitted “we abandoned the little ones.”  He admitted that the Church “delayed in applying these actions [to deal with the abuse].”   He offered little more that “prayer and fasting” as concrete actions the Church would take in the future.

We are well beyond that now.   This is a grave crisis for the Catholic Church, and a crisis often gives leadership the latitude to take immediate and radical steps to if it is to show that it is serious about this.  And symbolic moves are just as critical.   It needs to show that perpetrators of these acts and those that would cover them up will be expunged, exposed, humiliated, shamed, and where appropriate, prosecuted.   The first step needs to be a purging at the highest levels.   When the sexual abuse scandal at Michigan State came to light, its president and athletic director immediately resigned.  Pope Francis is the only person with sufficient authority to make symbolic and actual changes, and these changes need to happen now.    Following a high level bloodletting, Francis needs to make some bold initiatives, like permitting priests to marry and allowing women to become priests.   If he does not take bold and decisive steps, the Catholic Church will continue to lose members in the West, at a time when the pillar of Christianity is needed now more than ever.

During the same week that the crisis broke with the Catholic Church, we learned about another massive failure to protect our children.   The body of young Mollie Tibbets was found in a cornfield in Iowa a month after her disappearance and an illegal alien was taken into custody and charged with her murder.

After weeks of caterwauling about separating illegal border crossers from their children, protests from the open borders folks, politicians like Dick Durbin vowing to work full time for “Dreamers,” and others campaigning on the abolition of ICE, one of the so-called Dreamers took one of our own and separated her from her family permanently. 

The primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens from harm, whether it be harm from foreigners or from our own citizens.   Our government’s failure to keep people out that have no legal right to be here cost Mollie her life.

And the reaction from the Left has been predictably nauseating.   Some tried to divert blame by throwing around  buzzwords from the social justice lexicon like “toxic masculinity.”   Others, like Elizabeth Warren clumsily and coldly tried to switch the topic, “I’m so sorry for the family here…BUT…we need an immigration system that’s effective; that focuses on where REAL problems are.”

Illegal aliens murdering young women like Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbets—two beautiful young women with bright futures--- ARE a real problem, Elizabeth.

The Catholic Church and our own government have had massive failures in their primary purposes.   The reaction of Pope Francis to the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the Left to Mollie Tibbets’s murder was weak, tepid and unconvincing.  In both cases, we are seeing leaders that are more dedicated to protecting their agenda and their institutions than our children.

Modern Day Abolitionist

The American Writers Museum opened a new exhibit last week: Frederick Douglass-Agitator, celebrating the life and work of Frederick Douglass.  In connection with the exhibit, the museum has lined up a series of events and speakers to honor the life of this great American.  I attended the first event, featuring Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., a direct descendant of both Douglass and Booker T. Washington.  On a beautiful, warm summer Chicago night, a night on which most people would prefer to be outside, the place was nearly full, with only an empty seat or two.

The charismatic Mr. Morris spun his connection to the legendary Frederick Douglass in a moving presentation.  Morris’s grandmother lived to be 103, and actually knew Mr. Douglass first hand.  “I touched the hands that touched the hands,” Mr. Morris proclaimed.  He went on to share anecdotes about the indominable Mr. Douglass, about his struggle for freedom, his drive to educate himself despite obstacles and actual laws that forbade educating slaves, “because they would not be fit to work in the fields.” He talked about how his mother would work the fields, walk 12 miles to see Frederick and then walk back at night to work another day just to spend time with him.  He talked about his abolitionist friends purchasing Frederick’s freedom. 

Morris reveled in his connection to both Douglass and Washington.  He told the story about his visit to Douglass’s home, where Douglass’s shoes are next to his bed stand, and how he had to fight the urge to step into his shoes.

I was captivated by Morris and his obvious pride in his lineage and his connection to this great man.   His testimony helped me think about the great stain of slavery more deeply and will propel me to read Douglass’s biography.  Morris has dedicated himself to eliminate slavery as it exists currently around the world.  His message is that American slavery was not that long ago, really, and that it exists in many forms in different places globally.

I bought a coffee table book of photographs of Douglass, for which Morris had written the afterward.  I waiting in line to get my book signed and in front of me was a middle aged, dapper African American man, who grasped Morris’s outstretched hand with both hands and pulled him close.  “He [Douglass] was right.  It’s all about education, isn’t it?”   “You bet.”  There was something about that exchange that heartened me in this crazy political climate.

Likewise, I have visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum to attend programs and to hear testimonies of the camp survivors.   As the number of actual camp survivors has dwindled with age and time, the Illinois Holocaust Museum has harnessed technology to keep them alive and relevant and has used holographic imagery that is interactive to permit virtual discussions and question and answer sessions that bring the camp experience to life.

In my own life, the oral histories of the Communist terrors have been passed down either first hand or second hand and, like the Gulag Archipelago, they have been formative in shaping my views of Communism.  I heard first hand stories of the Stalin purges, of teenagers being shot in the head in front of their friends.   Parents of my friends fled and hid in ditches and sewers.  The parents of one of my friends fled a Stalin concentration camp and were chased by guards and dogs through the woods before winding their way to America.  He was a teacher and she wrote childrens’ books, so as “intellectuals” they would almost certainly have been murdered during the deportations from Lithuania.

The three great stains that landed on American and European soil were slavery, Nazism and Communism.  All three crushed the human spirit and all three resulted in people being hunted like animals.   It’s fine to read about these horrors in books, and we should.   But the oral histories given by people that either experienced it or have a personal connection to it are what bring them alive and keep them relevant to us, so they are not forgotten.   We need to hear these stories so we can stay vigilant against evil forces that are capable of unspeakable cruelty and stripping us of our freedoms.   We cannot leave them solely to books or digital archives.

Places like the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the American Writers Museum can and should do that for us.  I was honored and grateful to have an opportunity to meet Mr. Morris and “touch the hands that touched the hands that touched the hands.”

Trifecta

If you want to grasp how far left the Left has moved, just consider who is coming out of their youth movement as their Next Gen.   Everyone can see that the old guard is getting really old.  Hillary continues to sound like a bitter old lady.   Nancy Pelosi is now routinely incoherent.   Elizabeth Warren is near 70.  Joe Biden makes the most sense of this bunch but he is 75.  In the next group, Kamala Harris and Corey Booker are making a play for leadership.   But it’s with the young starlets, that you can see where things are headed.

A mere half dozen years ago, the anointed young star was Sandra Fluke, who made it to the DNC podium with her plea for State mandated and subsidized birth control.   She drew the scorn of Rush Limbaugh and others on the right for her assertion that the citizenry should underwrite her love life before jetting off to Europe with her boyfriend.   She briefly flirted with a senate run and has since disappeared from the public eye. 

Since Fluke’s flameout, the Left now has put forward a trifecta of young firebrands tauted as the future of the Left in politics and in the media.   Their elevation and the commonality among them tells you a lot about where the Left is headed---much farther left.

The most recent addition to the team is Sarah Jeong, who was announced as a member of the New York Times editorial staff.   Jeong was hired despite (or because of) her vitriolic anti-white, anti-male tweets.  They were so vile that when conservative Candace Owens tweeted them and substituted “black” for “white” she was immediately temporarily suspended from Twitter.  And Jeong’s racist rants were not a one-off.   There were several that occurred over a long period of time.  The New York Times justified her tweets claiming that she was merely responding to people that had trolled her---of course framing Jeong as a victim.   The truth is that the New York Times boldly and unashamedly hired exactly the kind of person with the kind of views that they wanted to hire.  Earlier this year I wrote a strong response to the op-ed of Ekow Yankah in the NYT, who said that he was going to teach his kids not to be friends with white people.   The NYT has made a decision that bigotry and hatred is a one way gate, that if it is directed at whites, particularly white males, it is fine and justifiable.   I eagerly await Jeong’s first op-ed piece claiming that Trump (or some other Republican) is a racist or a bigot.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the next young starlet of the Left.   Ocasio-Cortez, a 28 year old bartender and economics major from BU beat Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary.   Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist immediately drew the adoration of Tom Perez, who extolled her as the “future of the party” and she recently appeared with Bernie Sanders.   Her extremist positions include abolishing ICE, and providing “free” education and health care, which are clues to whether she actually attended any actual economics classes.  She spouts the standard lines about the “occupation” of Palestine and asserts that “capitalism will not always exist in the world.”     Ocasio-Cortez has yet to articulate precisely how she expects to pay for her grand plans or how they can be distinguished from Venezuela’s “democratic socialism” where people are eating their pets and dumping their children on orphanages.

It didn’t take Ocasio-Cortez long to do a photo-op with her new BFF and sister-in-arms Linda Sarsour (or as the conservative pundits have labeled her, Jihad Barbie).   Sarsour is famous for leading the Women’s March in D.C., teaching American girls how to adorn themselves with that international symbol of female subjugation, the hijab, speaking in the language of jihad, and imploring Muslims not to assimilate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThJdMXbxChs).   Sarsour openly peddles Sharia law and anti-Semitism and brands herself as a Muslim feminist (an oxymoron by definition).   Ironically while Iranian women are defying Iranian authorities by tossing their hijabs, Sarsour is peddling them here.

Many commentators have noted the aging of the old guard of the Democratic party, citing the age of their leadership and the average age in Congress (61), and the need for young blood.  But we are now seeing what is coming up from the minor leagues--- virulently and unashamedly anti-capitalist, anti-male, anti-white and anti-Semitic.   If you want a clue as to where the Democratic party is headed, take note of the speaking and writing of  Jeong, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sarsour

Outsourcing the Erosion of First Two Amendments

The MSM and the Left went bonkers again last week when the White House barred CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins from a Rose Garden event after Collins blurted out a staccato of questions at a news conference with EC president Jean-Claude Juncker.  The subject of the press conference was the resolution of tariffs between the US and the EC but Collins refused to leave and shouted out a number of off-topic questions about Michael Cohen.   I do not agree with the White House barring her but It’s also the case that Trump is being treated by the MSM in a completely different manner than Barack Obama was.   The MSM seized on the response to the White House as yet another indication that Trump is hostile to a free press. 

Leaving aside the question of whether an independent press exists anymore, the Collins incident is an appropriate jumping off point to talk about the indirect ways in which the Left continues to violate the spirit of Constitutional guarantees.  The Left really doesn’t like the 1^st Amendment and the 2^nd Amendment.   But it has had little luck denting them directly, so it has turned to a new tactic.

It outsources it. If you can’t do it yourself, find someone to do it for you.

And it has worked.

Over the past few years, the Left has attacked religious freedom in the courts, and it is openly contemptuous of Christianity.   It has brought lawsuits against Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby and the cake bakers for not knuckling under to their demands.   But it has had a bad run of luck using the courts directly to force believers into subordinating their loyalties to the State.

But the Left has been more successful at chipping away at Constitutional protections by recruiting allies.

While the Left howled at Trump for banning the rude, out-of-line Collings, Twitter and Facebook have purportedly “shadow banned” conservatives, either curtailing where they show up in feeds, or in the case of Twitter, dropping their followers.   There have been other reports of users being flagged for “hate speech” for voicing opposition to Muslim immigration or gay marriage.  Increasingly, social media is becoming a more important platform than the MSM.   So shutting down particular points of view may carry more import than banning a single rude cub reporter.  But because the management and staff of the social media giants are merely allied with big government progressives and are not government, they are largely free to insult notions of free speech and stifle speech they don’t like.  Government can’t lay siege on free speech but others can.

It has worked wonderfully for the Left in academia.  “Safe spaces” have proliferated.  Schools have imposed “free speech zones.”   Universities have set up hot lines to report offensive speech.  They have permitted hecklers and disrupters to shut down conservative speakers.  Much has been written about on this topic, so I won’t delve deeply here.  Suffice it to say, with a few exceptions (The University of Chicago, I am proud to say, being one of them), most colleges have been willing allies in the Left’s attempt to curtail free speech rights.

Nongovernment entities have similarly stepped in to assist government impinge on 2^nd Amendment rights.   Barack Obama tried to circumvent Congress in a number of ways in his zeal to take away 2^nd Amendment rights.  He issued executive orders placing restrictions on ammunition.  He attempted to cut off financing to the arms industry by “operation chokepoint” which subjected banks that loaned money to firms in that industry to a higher level of scrutiny and possible criticism.

Obama’s leaving office didn’t end it.  Since the Parkland shooting, Dick’s has stopped selling “assault-style” weapons and destroyed the ones it had in stock.  Walmart announced that it would stop selling guns to anyone under 21 (never mind the anomaly that a 20 year old could do a tour of duty in Afghanistan and prevented from buying a weapon).   Citibank and Bank of America announced that they would no longer lend to firms in the arms industry.   Now, thought, at least we know where the Left is headed with guns.   Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens argued for the abolition of the 2^nd Amendment in a NTY op-ed piece earlier this year. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens-repeal-second-amendment.html)

In the interim, they will try to water it down with “commonsense gun control” and by enlisting their corporate partners to make it difficult to exercise the right to bear arms.

Even though Ms. Collins needs to learn some manners and something about protocol, the White House should not have banned her from the next event.   But we also need to be honest about private companies and institutions taking away rights otherwise guaranteed under the Constitution.  The same people that gripe about NFL owners punishing players for exercising their free speech rights during the national anthem are fine with Walmart and Dick’s deny citizens’ access to arms guaranteed under the 2^nd Amendment.

 Obama’s hot mic comment about people “bitterly clinging to their guns and religion” had real meaning.  While the Constitution has made it difficult to snuff out guns and religion in our society, the Left has been successful in recruiting allies to try to do it indirectly.