What were the generals thinking?

          Generals are in the news. David Petraeus, who resigned as CIA chief, and John Allen, who denies any inappropriate behavior, confirm the plain fact that emails are not private. The military heroes stimulate our thinking as we ask, What were they thinking?

          God is Mind, many priests and philosophers affirm. God is Mind, not Brain. People need brains (and feet and fingers and the bodies to which those things are attached). God doesn’t. Mind is reliable. The brain isn’t, even though it provides a place for the human mind.

          We approach God, Mind, Father, Spirit, Mother, the only way we can, through prayers and other thoughts. We don’t always recognize Mind’s answers. We pray for good health, and don’t notice that God has already given us the wholeness of loving friends and families.  
          Sometimes we make deals. I was invited to dinner at the home of a physician, his wife and their teenage children. The wife’s knife and fork stayed in place, because she ate nothing. Years before she had promised God that if one of her children survived a frightening condition she would deny herself the pleasure of sharing dinners with her family for the rest of her life. The deal concept is familiar to students at exam time.

          The mom who gave up dining with her family kept her promise, but many deals with the Almighty evaporate in the mist of resolutions, diets and exercise plans.

          Christians have offered a trillion promises to forgive others the way they want God to forgive them. It is right there in the heart of the most famous of prayers: Our Father who art in heaven…forgive us…as we forgive.

          Having lived a long time, and having offended many, I have a substantial stake in the way humans think about forgiveness.

          Accounts I hear are not reassuring. Forgiveness is scorned in families, where you might think it would have its greatest strength. Think of the moms whose unresolved anger leads them to keep their offspring away from grandparents who love them. Think of the brothers who have not spoken to each other for a decade. Such folks have immersed themselves in icy mindlessness, mocking God and committing perjury each time they mumble the Lord’s Prayer.

          Forgiveness is an enabler of reform. Cheaters, stealers, liars, gossipers, killers, persecutors and predators challenge religious believers especially to show them ways to reform and renewal. Forgiveness of offensive behavior does not erase it, but it does encourage rewriting it.

 

 

  

Billy Graham didn't need to advertise

 

 

            Billy Graham’s decision to buy full-page ads supporting the Republican candidate for president stirred  interest in the role of religion in partisan politics. The ads ran in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers shortly before the election of November 6, 2012—one day before the famed evangelist’s 94th birthday.

            The ads backed Mitt Romney in his soon-to-fail campaign to replace Barack Obama as president. This coincided with the removal of Mormonism’s identity as a “cult” in a web site of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn.

            When Billy Graham gave me  couple of hours for a depth interview in 1965 he radiated the assurance of an evangelist sharing the power of the cross of Christ. We talked in his suite at the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki, where he was preparing for a week-long Honolulu Crusade. He had recently drawn 2 million New Yorkers to his Crusade in Madison Square Garden.

            In those long-ago times he ran a mile and a half every day, played golf, swam at every opportunity. Now he’s at his long-time home at Montreat, near Asheville, N.C., at a cool elevation of 4,000 feet. He was born in Charlotte, N.C., on Nov. 7, 1918, and lived on a small farm. His parents called him Billy-Frank, but at school he chose to be known as Billy Graham.

            He has been a widely-circulated newspaper columnist, world-famous author and preacher, confidant of presidents and a noted figure on television. He didn’t need to run those ads.

 

A black Lincoln in the White House?

 

          It was a few years ago when I wrote a column about a newcomer on the national scene. The column ran in The Orlando Sentinel. Years have passed, and it all came true. The face is the same, sort of, but some of the pixels have rearranged themselves. Read on:

 By A. E. P. Wall

Special to the Sentinel

           When Barack Obama was a schoolboy in Hawaii, I was managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser, unaware that a major figure of the next century might have been surfing nearby. In the Hawaii I remember, racial identify sometimes required several hyphens (Filipino-Chinese-Hawaiian or Caucasian-Korean-Japanese). The boy with the soul of a Martin Luther King and the heart of an Abraham Lincoln might have been known as Black-Caucasian, the son of a black African father and white American mother.

          Americans are often on the move. The one-time Hawaii resident ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, where he won by a wide margin. Obama now serves alongside the venerable Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii.

          Obama would have qualified for membership in the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Honolulu in the 1950s, when men with names like Ohata, Okada and Okino were welcome participants in annual corned beef and cabbage events.

          Anybody who heard Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his hymn to democracy and the integrity that makes it work, may have wondered whether this man might make it to the White House. It took about 180 years for a Catholic to be elected, and no woman has ever been elected regardless of her race, religion or political party.

          The first African American to be elected president will be Obama or someone very much like him, someone who is proud of his race who wants to lead an interracial nation, a country in which everybody belongs to some kind of minority – the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, the Catholics, Jews, Muslims, even the Cubs fans. He’d have to win enough votes from Americans of European, Hispanic, Asian and other ancestries to get there.

          Spirited words by Sen. Obama, delivered in Springfield, Illinois, at the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, were recalled by Jeff Zeleny, national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in an article June 26. They received less attention than they merited at the time because, Zeleny reported, the senator had barely finished speaking when the election of a new pope took over the front pages. Here’s some of what Obama said about Lincoln:

          “At a time when image all too often trumps substance, when our politics all too often feeds rather than bridges division, when the prospects of a poor youth rising out of poverty seem of no consequence to the powerful and when we evoke our common God to condemn those who do not think as we do, rather than to seek God’s mercy for our own lack of understanding – at such a time it is helpful to remember this man who was the real thing.”

          The papal election may have grabbed the headlines at that moment, but it stirred memories of Pope John Paul II. His Polish ancestry was a joy to him, and he met with men and women of Polish ancestry wherever he traveled in the world – but he was not the pope of the Poles. He was everybody’s pope. Obama can be everybody’s president.

          When I was a first-grader, 75 years ago, my hero was Lincoln. The first book I bought with the first half-dollar I earned was about Lincoln.

          When I see Sen. Obama on my TV screen I see a bit of Lincoln. That’s before the beard, of course.

 

 

 

 

Whose storm is it?

          Take a look at the folks coming out of church when the service is over. There may be lots of smiles. There may be frowns. There may be blank faces.

          Not all of those people on their knees were feeling the wonder of God from their posture of worship, surrender and subservience.

          Many embrace religion because they want God’s mercy. Their compulsion is to feel the comfort of God’s love and to pass it on. Their gossip is benign. They keep the promise they make in the Lord’s Prayer to forgive others precisely the way they want God to forgive them.

          You’ll find these people disputing the death penalty as an intrusion into the realm of the giver of life. You’ll find them favoring good schools and good health. They embrace police and military as incorruptible instruments of peace. They see Congress and the courts, city halls and the White House as agencies to make the common good honest and efficient.

          So much for the merciful, called blessed in a famous sermon.

          Some find religion to be a confirmation of their personal value as guardians of truth and behavior. They see little need to beseech God for mercy in their own exemplary lives, but the world clearly needs wardens, instructors, judges, guards, enforcers of ordinances word by word. The log in one’s own eye expands the gaze, better to see the speck of failure in others.

          These folks are at ease with their religion, protecting its purity and their own with shunning and decrees of excommunication. They remember selected words of scripture, such as “the poor you will always have with you.” So, perhaps, it is unbiblical to try to do anything about that.

          There are those who see the deadly storm called Sandy, imposing death and mayhem from the Caribbean to the coast of New England, as a punishment from the Almighty. Other pray that humankind will try harder to understand nature and how to shield it from human assaults above and below Earth’s surface.

          The religion of Jesus is tough to live. It depends upon the Christian Church to provide worship communities, to preserve and authenticate its scriptures and to tell its story. Yet the Jesus of scripture teaches prayers and practices for all circumstances, with particular caution about the behavior of organized groups. After all, his death was legal.

          After all this time, some who worship in churches are reminded of their spiritual frailty, seeking mercy for themselves and everyone else.

          Some others are reminded of their spiritual security, enjoying reassurance for themselves and punishment for those unlike themselves.

          Some of us lack the purity of definition, and share the flaws of both personalities.

         

When newspapers are just out of reach

 

A souvenir dish preserves an image of the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on March 12, 1959, the birthday of the State of Hawaii. 

 

 

 

I love newspapers the way other addicts love different pursuits in sensuality. I am aroused by front page headlines in 144 point type, especially when they shout in red ink, the kind I used to write.

 

Traveling friends have long brought me gifts from faraway places, crinkly copies of the Jerusalem Post or the Moscow Times, Le Monde or The Scotsman or maybe the Times of India, PM, or Washington Star. At age 12 I had my own subscription to the Manchester Guardian Weekly, printed on lightweight paper for transport from Britain.

 

A year or so ago I decided to go cold turkey. After all, I had managed to stop smoking a couple of decades before that, so I cancelled home delivery of four daily newspapers. The papers were reachable online, something unimagined when I was an 18-year-old police reporter. The switch from home delivery to computer screen was like changing from gourmet meals to a feeding tube, doable if not recommendable.

 

Spring arrived this year with temptations. The New York Times offered weekend delivery, Friday through Sunday, at a special rate. The Chicago Tribune had an even better weekend offer, four days including Sunday, all at a low, low cost. There were other offers, like the aroma of whiskey in the nostrils of a 12-stepper taking  step number 1, from the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Southtown. These were offers nobody with black ink in the veins could refuse. I signed up for all four.

 

It was a summer of slow breakfasts and the accumulation of facts useful for a Jeopardy watcher, a summer of newsprint stacks on flat surfaces all over my home. My companion, OPCA/MSA, has let me gather the newspapers early in the morning by opening my garage door, gently steering my rollator while using a gripper mounted on a cane, like a hockey stick with a claw at the end, to pick up each paper and plunk it into the rollator basket.

 

This is no longer working very well and it won’t work at all when Chicagoland’s season becomes more Chicagolike, with snow, ice and maybe a White Christmas. Once more I’m cancelling all the newspaper deliveries, and thanking God for computers, and for the gift of evolution that carried us all from quills to Windows.

 

ArthurOchs Sulberger

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, retired publisher of The New York Times, has died at age 86. The one-time Marine Corps corporal won the hearts of countless journalists when he decided, at risk of possible arrest and fines, to publish the Pentagon Papers.

 

I had the good luck to be invited to his office, along with other members of an American Press Institute seminar at Columbia University, for a give-and-take session on journalism’s future.

 

It was the week of my 40th birthday, making me one year older than Mr. Sulzberger. He told of plans to redesign his famous newspaper, creating new sections and changing from eight narrow columns to six wider columns.

 

Times readers would not accept sudden changes, he said. So his 1965 plan was to take about a dozen years of gradual moves. Sure enough, the change was completed in 1976. Home delivery of his newspaper is one of the happy satisfactions of my retirement. God bless him and the institution he guided for more than three decades.

 

   

When the doctor's news is scary

By Ed Wall

 

The celebration is almost a secret, compared to Halloween and the Fourth of July, and I wouldn’t want you to miss it. October is the time for World MSA Day. Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) is a rare disease, experienced by fewer than 15,000 persons in the whole USA.

Given the fact that there are nearly 700,000 doctors in the USA, you might think the handful of MSA patients have hit the statistical jackpot. Not true, because not even one of those doctors has a cure for it. Not yet.

It is painful enough that the disease is progressive, but so is its name. Specialists and researchers now agree to call it MSA, but when I was diagnosed more than a decade ago my neurologist told me I had olivopontocerebellar atrophy, which he called a form of Parkinsonism. Not your grandpa’s Parkinson’s, but Parkinsonism.

Now it is known as multiple system atrophy. Nobody knows the cause, but it is usually diagnosed in men in their 50s or 60s. My diagnosis came when I was about 75. By then I had been dealing with some of the symptoms for many years, but formal diagnosis is not easy. Most doctors devote a lifetime to medical practice without ever encountering a case.

I had trouble walking straight, and began using a walking stick when I was 55 or so.

Dizziness and a Charlie Chaplin gait nudged me into using a cane, followed by a walker and a rollator, and finally a power chair.

When MSA begins to attack the nervous system, one or several symptoms appear. Victims may find it hard to chew or swallow. They develop strategies to try to avoid falls. They may stop sweating. It can be hard to keep forks and coffee cups steady, hard to talk clearly, especially on the phone. There may be tremors, aches, sleep disruption, disobedient bladders, trouble bending arms and legs and blurred vision. There may be episodes of confusion or depression.

Getting MSA is bad luck, but I’ve had the good luck of an outstanding neurologist and fine primary care doctors, all pulled together by a supportive family, friends and neighbors.

Thus, at age 87 I still enjoy life among my computers and books in a condo shared now with a feline who thinks my shuffling is just a game.

I gave up driving when I realized that if I couldn’t see straight I might not drive straight.  My nearby family includes half a dozen licensed drivers, who see to it that have everything I need. Beyond that, Orland Township provides low-cost door-to-door transportation for citizens of a certain age – beyond the age of consent into the age of the content.

I think God encourages people work out some things for themselves, so my prayer is that a smart person is close to finding a cure right now.

Meanwhile, I’d like you to know how much your relaxed and ordinary support means to a person trying to absorb the scary news about any demanding disease.

Your support for medical research is important, too, and not just on World MSA Day.

Olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple system atrophy is hard to spell and hard to pronounce. So let’s find a cure.

 

 

 

 

 

         

           

         

What makes terrorists terrifying?

Even before the Colorado movie terrorist could be arraigned in court, new laws were being explored.  Laws already outnumber prisoners maybe 1,000 to 1, but new laws will be advanced.

American justice is as good as it gets. It is shaped by centuries of crime and punishment. From earliest times lawbreakers have known they would be punished by confinement, stoning, being drawn and quartered or whipped. Yet they went right on breaking laws, generation after generation.

It is said that American taxpayers spend more per year to keep a prisoner locked up than they spend on sending a person to college. Last year The Atlantic reported that one year at Princeton cost $37,000 and one year in a New Jersey state prison cost $44,000.

Why do some cops and lawyers break laws? Why do the wealthy steal? Why do spouses stab and shoot each other? Why do some clergy defy the laws of church and state? Why do lawbreakers break the same laws, knowing the penalties, century after century?

Why are penalties for scurrilous behavior so uneven? The government shaped by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson became in recent times a sponsor of torture and assassination. Across the face of the Supreme Court appear the words Equal Justice Under Law, words which are mocked in Guantanamo.

Nobody knows all of the answers. Criminal studies will have to become less traditional and more scientific to find out. The best way to protect victims of crime may be to find out why the perpetrators perp. Do they get satisfaction from outwitting others? Is the attraction similar to gambling, taking a chance, betting on luck? Are there treatable sexual and emotional issues that draw otherwise ordinary people into creepy acts?

In the cities killings day by day add up quickly, sometimes quietly, without the flow of headline ink that makes mass murders so indelible.We grieve for the victims and despise the aggressors, the monsters, and we ponder ways to punish them. That’s the system. From the beginning it has neglected adequate study of criminals to find out why they do it, what’s in it for them, how prevention might be shaped.

The Myth America Pageant in Sanford, Florida

The development of a Jesus mythology, and fierce arguments about the details, interests today’s public opinion experts who observe the way news is told. Information was relayed by word of mouth in the days of Jesus, and the news anchors of the day were political and religious leaders and story-tellers, social ancestors of today’s journalists and authors.

What did Jesus say about himself? Where was he born? Did he really walk on water?

Even people who knew him well did not remember all of his words and movements the same way.

Public opinion specialists today have no trouble understanding the conflicting stories about Jesus and the earliest Christians, who had no printing presses or word processors or ball point pens, because they also track disagreements about where the president of the United States was born. They study the intellectual and religious feuds of the computer era: does global warming threaten Earth itself? Are scientists right about evolution?

Big and small, facts of the day for some are false for others. How will people a couple of thousand years from now decide between today’s true and false, right and wrong, assuming that people are still here?

The story of Jesus and his followers is accepted by hundreds of millions as a matter of faith. They accept the proofs selected by one of the thousands of Christian church denominations, and shun the claims of others. Should infants be baptized, or only adults? Is Jesus present in the Eucharist? May women be ordained?

Churches are far apart on matters of ministry. They disagree whether ministers should emulate Jesus in simplicity of dress, or project his royal power by wearing princely robes. Did Jesus tell his followers to heal the sick and visit prisoners century after century and day after day, or only while he taught?

Among the great mysteries of the human experience are the limits of communication. When everyone has access to the same information , why does one person fervently believe that a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer was unjustly arrested for the murder of an unarmed teenager, while another person is equally convinced that the arrest was just? A curious world is fascinated by this Myth America Pageant in Sanford, Florida. How the good news and the bad are communicated may be examined for bias, but the prejudice, or pre-judgment, of people hearing or reading the news is more elusive. It separates fundamentalist certainty from the detachment of the shoulder-shruggers.

Keyboard out of control

A. E. P. Wall

Bible used by my great grandparents.

             The Christian church has changed since the time of Jesus, and the Christian church has not changed.

            Those first Christians were not able to email their epistles. They knew nothing about a printing press or the great book it would someday produce, sponsored by the king of an island off the coast of France.

            They knew how to agree and they knew how to disagree. They disagreed about how much of their Jewish inheritance could be adapted. They argued about dietary laws. They argued about circumcision. Argument became an undeclared sacrament, still vigorous in the hundreds of Christian churches, traditions and denominations, which continue to divide like melting icebergs.

            Still unsettled is the question of who’s at the center of worship. Some say it is God, and the object of worship is to become more like God. That is a challenge, once you ponder what God allowed Job, Eve and any number of innocents executed in American prisons to endure.

            Others think the center of worship is the worshiper, asking favors of prosperity and health from God, who at first glance might seem to have distributed those favors randomly, with some Christians winning an impersonal game of chance and some losing. Scholars have rejected any reference to this as the bingo myth.

            I suspect that I was born with a vibrant God gene, because I have always believed in God, despite gaps in acting out that belief.

            I’ve sat in on computer chats about the name of God. I’ve heard lots of suggestions, such as the Divine, Creator, Love, Higher Power, Father, Mother, Father-Mother, a few others.  God is Just, but I pray to God as Mercy. During most of my life I have known God by familiar names, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the blessed Trinity, one God.

            My grandpa had a bunch of names. Friends called him Bill, teachers called him William, kids called him Mr. Olmstead. They were all good names, and correct, but he’s Grandpa to me. Same thing about the many names of God, who’s still God to me.

            My bingo gene card gave me loving parents of Victorian persuasion, children and grandchildren of shining character and intellect, friends with a high capacity for tolerance, all of the childhood diseases of the late 1920s, pleasure in reading and writing, a rare disease of the brain which I’ve discussed excessively elsewhere, and a belief in God which has evolved only as I’ve begun to grasp the infinity of the Infinite. God is never surprised, but God has surprises for the rest of us. Father John Loftus, an Irish Columban and close friend, was ejected from China by the Communists back in the last century. He recommended living in terms of Catholic beliefs because "even if they turn out not to be correct in all details, it is still a great way to spend your life." 

            God’s gifts to each of us include an amount of time for this life. If there’s a formula, nobody knows what it is. I appreciate most of the 87 years I’ve been given so far, and I accept changes that come with age and experience, even though I would get out of them if I could. Ever since I bought my first typewriter at age 12 I have done a lot of my thinking through my fingertips. Now there’s a coordination problem when I punch the letters on my computer keyboard. More and more my fingers touch a key I did not choose, or touch no key at all. More and more my thoughts flicker out like candles in the wind before I get them written down. So I’m cutting back my blogs. Thank you for staying with me this far, and please don't go away.

© A. E. P. Wall

           

           

             

Abby's busy; ask a bishop about sex

Launching the wire service.

© A.E.P. Wall

           Ask a Catholic bishop to describe the Trinity and you’re likely to be told that it is a mystery.

            But ask about sex and you may be told all about it, beginning with the notion that it is generally restricted to procreation, that remarriage after divorce is a scandal, that homosexual acts are sinful, that God favors celibates even though they refuse one of his most engaging gifts.

            Well, not all of them refuse.

            Priests and religious who break their vows get little help from the church, which is stuck in the whispered sexual science of a couple of millennia ago.

            More than half a century ago I was working on the copy desk at the Worcester Telegram when the phone rang. John J. Wright, the Catholic Bishop of Worcester and future Cardinal Prefect of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, was calling from his Jaguar while he was being driven home from nearby Boston. He had heard a radio news report announcing The Pill. He asked me to read details of the news account to him, telling me that this might be the most explosive news of the time.



            He was right about many things, and he was right about the consequences of marketing the contraception pill. His Jaguar, by the way, was a gift.

            Availability of The Pill sent shock waves through the church, which was able to adapt to such things as radio, electric lights, penicillin and the printing press, but it could be stubborn about science.

            After Wright was promoted to the larger Diocese of Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s I met his brand-new assistant, fresh from the seminary. Donald Wuerl was a brilliant priest who accompanied Wright to Rome as his secretary, eventually became Bishop of Pittsburgh and now is the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington. He’s a likeable and persuasive conservative with the theological instincts of a pope.

            After he came to dinner at my home years ago, my daughter said she had never met a priest who was more enthusiastic about priesthood.



            He is securely attached to the ancient church, and an admired communicator with the skills of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin but a more traditional commitment. Both men understood the politics of advancement in the hierarchy, while accommodating their leadership to differing world views.

             Bernardin was general secretary of the conference of bishops in Washington, D.C., when he hired me as director and the first editor in chief of the National Catholic News Service, which was operating at a loss and losing clients. It provided daily news packets via the U.S Mail. My job was to balance the budget, regain lost clients and convert the operation from mail to wire. When that job was finished the conference of bishops gave me a special award as “founder of the NC wire service.”

            After Bernardin was appointed Archbishop of Cincinnati his Washington job went to his assistant, a priest. Along with others on his staff I went to his home diocese for his ordination as a bishop. He confirmed two of my children in Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption, once the home of Cardinal James Gibbons and the legendary Baltimore Catechism.  He was a frequent dinner guest in my suburban Washington home. It was numbing to discover that his interest in my sons was not limited to ecclesial responsibilities. He never touched, but his stares were on amber, hoping for a green light.



            The confrontation happened to come just as John Cody, the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, offered me a job as editor of The New World, now called the Catholic New World. I couldn’t stay in Washington with that bishop as my boss, and when I shared my concern with the president of the conference I was encouraged to leave it in his hands. This was 1976, when I still believed that God spoke through senior prelates and that the answer to all their opinions was Yes, Sir. I believed that the Catholic church was always right, even when it was wrong.

            Not all Catholics see the same thing when they look at their church. Many of the millions who have departed for other religions or for no religion see the church as a big organization with a good purpose, like Rotary International. Many others see it as the foundation of all legitimacy, not just huge and not just more permanent that any government anywhere, but the final arbiter.

            Many Catholics become so distressed by the lack of democracy and the treatment of women that they just quit. Others see their Catholicism as God-given and non-refundable, their membership in the body of Christ as more basic than national citizenship or racial inheritance. They understand bishops to be fathers and pastors to all of their priests, those whose sins are trifling and those whose sins bring horror and shame. Redemption may not be the business of a Rotary club, but it is the business of the Catholic church. A priest who goes astray is for many Catholics just like a lawbreaker sibling, loved if not admired.



             Such was the atmosphere I knew because of my work, which gave me many clerical friends. It was the atmosphere I knew when I was a trustee of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, chairman of the board of regents of Chaminade College (now University) in Honolulu, president of the International Federation of Catholic Press Agencies and editor of various Catholic periodicals. A close personal relationship with Bernardin led to my writing the first book about him, The Spirit of Cardinal Bernardin. Curiously, when Cardinal Cody was my boss in Chicago he drew me away from some of my responsibilities as archdiocesan editor in order to be his ghost writer for a planned autobiography.

            I was not happy about that. Cody was resisting a federal grand jury investigation at the time. He believed that church confidentiality was absolute, never subject to government probes. And he believed that as corporation sole he owned and operated the archdiocese. He once pointed to a Catholic cemetery as we drove by, saying, “I own all this.” When he offered to sign my son’s application to attend Quigley Seminary North he reassured me that he owned the school. The rector, admirably, did not see it that way and David was admitted via the usual application process, eventually graduating Number One in his class.



            Cody wanted me to live within walking distance of his residence, but not in his neighborhood of mansions—including, to his dismay, the Playboy Mansion. The No Trespassing sign in Cody’s front yard was to discourage lost tourists from ringing his doorbell, mistaking one mansion for another. When I found an ideal condo across from the Lincoln Park Zoo, a mile or less from the cardinal’s residence but in a lesser economic zone, Cody whipped out his checkbook. He wrote a check to cover the down payment and sent me to a senior bank official to arrange a mortgage.

            During hundreds of hours of interviews, Cody told me about his beliefs and commitments, even about his amazing idea to blackmail the pope. The holy father was being pressured to replace Cody as Chicago’s archbishop, but he didn’t do it. Cody also fought off a Vatican proposal to install a coadjutor archbishop.

           About the time I took on the Washington job, symptoms of the unpronounceable ailment appeared. Neither my doctor nor I recognized olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple systems atrophy, a rare disease in search of a cure. The next best thing to a cure is the kind of care I’ve been given by my family, friends, medical and church folks, along with providers of a power chair and a four-wheel scooter that eats up the sidewalks at 4 or 5 miles per hour.



             Virtually all of the gay priests I knew showed no unusual interest in my boys. There were some, including a prominent educator and a priest in my long-ago parish who invited my youngest to go camping with him. I still feel, as I did then, that the church should do more to screen candidates for priesthood and, when there are failures, it should provide professional care, just as it does for other kinds of addicts. Nobody wants to be an alcoholic or a pedophile. Nobody should assume that a gay priest is either one.

            A kind of global warming within Catholic Christianity is getting headlines, but not much corrective attention. The church spends hundreds of millions on lawyers and settlements with victims, men, women and children. It spends little on the study of human sexuality and it blinds itself to science. This is not new.

            In 1977 a study commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America was introduced with, among others, these words: “The church’s tradition is marked by an historical development extending some three thousand years… Inadequate knowledge of biology, as well as religious taboos, the tradition of subhuman treatment of women, and a dualistic philosophy of human nature have all left a distinct imprint upon Catholic thinking.”



            Back in 1968 I served on the Abortion Committee (that’s what he called it) appointed by Cardinal Lawrence Shehan. It included prominent members of scientific and theological communities. Its job was to help Shehan develop a position paper for his service on a commission appointed by Pope Paul VI. It was to address, head on, the vital question of contraception, or what the church called artificial birth control.



             In Rome Shehan voted with the majority. Paul VI rejected the Majority Report when he issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae, which was loudly rejected by countless priests and quietly rejected by the laity in general. The consequences of Paul’s rejection are widespread today, including an attitude that if one papal ruling could be so conspicuously incorrect, maybe church authority in general isn’t all that reliable.

            The church has frittered away its position of spiritual and strategic power in Europe and may be doing the same in North America. When this happens, bishops aren’t the only losers.

            Catholics for centuries have engaged in persecutions and suffered from them, have shaped education for the better and not-better, have sustained nations in worship and have lost nations, and many believe today’s turmoil is only a ripple in the Catholic centuries.



            The church did not get its start with a cross of serenity. It has been looking for a few good men longer than the Marine Corps has. Unlike the Marine Corps, it still isn’t looking for a few good women.

           

Impotence, passion and justice

Can there be a prescription

for character and conscience?

           In stable, superbly suburban Orland Park, Illinois, where I live, friendly parks and cheerful neighbors support the notion that the world is dandy and that almost everyone is an Eagle Scout at heart. Some believe this is God’s will, some believe it just happens that way.

            Anything less than perfect is noteworthy. A child lies about a missing cookie, a clumsy burglar kicks a dog, a coach seduces a child, bombs are lobbed into a crowded market, destructive drugs are sold on the street, bankers and public officials ponder new fees.

             The death of Charles W. Colson, whose Watergate adventure tumbled him into prison, calls attention to his later success in prison ministry. The trial of John Edwards, former senator and contender for a presidential nomination, revives a puzzle for his family, friends and opponents alike: What went wrong? Is there a mental or spiritual vitamin tablet that wards off such behavior and energizes conscience?

           One of history’s spectacular failures of conscience affects countless priests convicted of the abuse of children. It is spectacular because it defies the teachings of all the churches, coincidentally raising questions about the clergy. If they believe what the church teaches, how can they place themselves in such eternal peril? Neither scientists nor theologians know enough about compulsions, impulses and self-destructive behavior, whether criminal or personal. One result is the pain felt by victims and their families, and another result is a costly dilution of respect for churches and schools.

             Suppose, on the other hand, that society sees the world as deeply imperfect, given to earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, firestorms and harmful temperatures while populated by humans capable of painful deceptions, contempt for the weak, prejudice against the sick, the fat, the tall, anyone of a different race or religion or political persuasion. Some might see traces of this in the Hebrew testament and other long-ago ponderings.

            Does this vision of an uncertain world support a different understanding of what’s noteworthy, what’s news? Does this focus attention on struggles to overcome weakness and failure, to make good on the consequences of greed and corruption?

            Not yet. Maybe the dozen who embarrassed the Secret Service will someday be eclipsed in the media by the thousands who do their jobs, who resist temptation or perhaps yield to less scandal-tempting temptations.

            It is understandable that lots of people want to ignore threats too agonizing to bear. To deny global warming is to reenact a childhood impulse to cover one’s own eyes and say, “You can’t see me.”

             Can the science of sex be disconnected from the sickness of sex long enough to be studied with the laboratory neutrality applied to the study of space and medicine? Sex is a factor in crimes ranging from assault to murder all over the world, and in the behavior of countless religious, sports and education personnel. Yet, society treats it as though it were merely a legal issue, as unresolved today as it was a thousand years ago. It is a science issue, too, blurred by the William Jennings Bryan code of denial.

             We have a lot to learn. We know how to build prisons but not fast enough for a growing community of drug dealers, governors, business leaders and sex offenders. We know how to inoculate children’s bodies against frightful diseases, but we don’t know how to inoculate their personality and character to protect them from making life-wrenching mistakes. We look to theology and criminal law for answers, but what we get is more questions. We let movies, TV and periodicals set our goals and define our standards.

   Orland Park residents and other accomplished suburbanites tend to respect traditional leadership and celebrate the traditions. Who knew tht even some of the traditional goal-setters might lose their way? Too many, perhaps, try to fuel their 21st century GPS navigators with 19th century whale oil.

  

             

Who's there? Sounds in the night

How to Remember With No Strings Attached

Written for the Orland Park Patch -- March 22, 2012

Arthur (Ed) Wall



Tom noticed it before I did. My cat sleeps more than I do, but more lightly, so he woke me up not long after I had gone to bed. He had heard someone in my TV room, and he didn't like that. Tom and I have lived by ourselves in an Orland Park condo ever since my wife died.

It was an alert neighbor, who noticed I had forgotten to close my garage door. He popped in to tell me about it. I thanked him, he left, I pushed the button to close the door, returned to bed and apparently sloshed the experience around in my head like the kind of dream that's still there when you wake up.

I had just celebrated in birthday, denying that my 87 candles had anything to do with the arrival of 80-degree weather. When I woke up with that garage door episode in my mind, I realized that it was time to deal with the hazards of short-term memory loss. Senior discounts may include a 20 percent reduction in memory. A 15 percent discount for eye glasses may be society's way of dealing with 20 percent loss of eyesight.

I don't get around as fast as I used to, even though I keep my power chair and scooter batteries fully charged. It is more than good luck to live just a mile from my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. I'm surrounded by good neighbors, so serene in their neighborliness that sometimes I don't even know who shoveled snow away from my door.

When there is no snow I glide around neighborhood sidewalks on my four-wheel scooter. I see other seniors, and juniors too, on wheels or on feet. A scooter will take its operator anyplace where the sidewalks go, despite the thumps from uneven walkways and the challenges of misfit mini-ramps from sidewalk to street.

There are a lot of us in Orland Park, Tinley Park and nearby areas who forget things. I don't want you to wake up some night to shouts from a good neighbor in your home, so I'll tell you what I did. I made a list of things I have forgotten at one time or another, and printed a form via my computer.

I've arranged this simple form on a half sheet of letter-size paper, so I can make a quick and easy check each night before bedtime. The things I need to check are whether outside doors are locked, the garage door is closed, the thermostat is adjusted, blinds closed, prescriptions swallowed, outside lights turned on and Tom fed.

The final issue, of course, is how to remember to fill out the memory form. If an answer to that comes in a dream, I'll let you know.

Once upon a time the GOP...

In western New York state my great grandpa, Marcus Kinne, cheered for John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party. Fremont lost to James Buchanan in the 1956 election, but Great Grandpa Kinne (Kinney) had a winner next time.

Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant after him, were talked about as though they were family friends, although they were not, when I was a little kid living with my grandparents. Everybody I knew when I was eight or ten years old in Chautauqua County, N.Y., was a Republican.

Jamestown, my hometown, had been an active station on the underground railroad. It provided many men for the Union army. I saw a few of the Civil War veterans during Fourth of July parades. By then, 1930 or thereabouts, their marching days were only memories and they rode in open cars.

My grandparents and aunts and cousins, enthusiastic members of the party of Lincoln, would be astonished by the 2012 GOP and the social and political elitism celebrated by its presidential candidates.

When I was born the president was Calvin Coolidge. When I was a little kid, Herbert Hoover was president. After that, I became a teenager and Franklin D. Roosevelt lived in the White House. The minimum voting age was 21, so I cast my first president ballot for Harry Truman. By then my grandparents had passed on to a non-partisan realm, and never knew that the child they once nourished grew up to vote for a Democrat. In some respects the two major parties had swapped priorities.

A group has complained that some deceased Jews were baptized by strangers, who were asked to cease and desist. I have no reason to think that my grandparents and their parents have thus been baptized, and I’m certain they would not approve. But if anyone should tamper with those 19th century records, maybe they will be kind enough to change great grandpa’s party affiliation to Democrat, the current party of emancipation and benevolent reconstruction.

A New World

A short story

By Jacob Wall

Ten years ago, an unusual little piece of maldoing slipped its way into the computer system. It danced past firewalls and antivirals, right into Iran’s fuel enrichment plant. Much as a master of espionage, its presence was entirely undetected until it spun the centrifuges out of control, creating a very detectable explosion.

And so, with the creation of this virus, Stuxnet, as it was called, began a new age of warfare. One that is not waged in the real world but rather in a world of electrical pulses and signals, yet in a way that has very real world consequences.

Here I am now, some ten years later with a small piece of paper certifying my aptitude, hanging on the wall just behind me. My team and I are waiting for the next attack, the next activist, terrorist, criminal, or country to try their hand. Our eyes start to glaze over as we stare at our computers, not a signal of something gone wrong. Similar to those scientists monitoring Natanz those ten years ago, we see everything, yet nothing.

The interesting thing about criminals in the cyber world is that they rarely take the form of criminals. They do not dress in leather, they do not ride Harleys, they do not beat people, and they most likely would help an old lady cross the street. Yet, when they sit down at their computer, they change, they become mad scientists, and that’s when something bad happens – a few million disappear, a few planes crash, a few blackouts roll across New York. It is for these reasons that everyone from street gangs to clandestine government agencies employ these mad scientists, and give them the resources to do real harm, to cripple a nation, our nation.

Suddenly, my desk phone rings, awoken from my daydream I hasten to answer, and across the line I hear the news. We’ve been compromised. The word is sharp, penetrating, yet numbing; my team failed, and now something has gone terribly awry.

So much of our world is run by an intricate computer known as a programmable controller. It’s a small device that controls big things. It was, coincidentally, this type of computer that was attacked ten years ago in Iran; it was the first time that such a thing occurred, that a malware could so easily do so much damage to the real, physical world. And it was this type of computer that was under attack once more, this time on a boat.

The United States Navy operates eleven aircraft carriers, and each one found itself under attack. However, this is not the type of attack that carriers prepare for, this type of attack came from deep within. The carriers were flooding their holds with water, a very destabilizing experience – and nobody knew why; with so much dependence on computers to do things for us, the captains found themselves unable to switch to a manual control to right the ship, for there is no manual control.

The voice on the other side of the phone demanded that we save the ships. We truly were the only ones in the world who could, soldiers armed with guns are not capable of fighting this kind of enemy, only soldiers armed with bright minds and powerful computers can do such things. Sadly, these ships were far past saving. Every last US carrier sank that day, taking all their men down with them - billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

As expected, my team and I lost our jobs that day. We had let such a disaster slip right past us. Of course, this was not entirely our fault. As our logs showed, there was not a sign of the disaster until after I received the call, it was for this reason we are not in some far off military-funded torture camp.

That is precisely what I find amusing.

I do not wear leather, I have never ridden a Harley, I most certainly have never harmed someone, and I’ve helped the elderly across the street on a number of occasions. I wrote the virus that sank those ships. I carried it to work, plugged it into my computer, and ensured that it slipped past any log and any team member. It’s a curious thing, 1000 lines of code and an ill-intentioned person can do so much harm.

Perhaps the scariest part is that these are weapons of anonymity, for nobody will ever know it was I.

Jacob Wall, 15, is a high school student in Washington state.