Wall's Paper

A New World

2012-02-08T08:35:00.003-06:00

A short story

By Jacob Wall

Ten years ago, an unusual little piece ofmaldoing slipped its way into the computer system. It danced past firewalls andantivirals, right into Iran’s fuel enrichment plant. Much as a master ofespionage, its presence was entirely undetected until it spun the centrifugesout 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 inthe 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 asmall piece of paper certifying my aptitude, hanging on the wall just behindme. 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 overas we stare at our computers, not a signal of something gone wrong. Similar tothose scientists monitoring Natanz those ten years ago, we see everything, yetnothing.

The interesting thing about criminals in the cyberworld is that they rarely take the form of criminals. They do not dress inleather, they do not ride Harleys, they do not beat people, and they mostlikely would help an old lady cross the street. Yet, when they sit down attheir computer, they change, they become mad scientists, and that’s whensomething bad happens – a few million disappear, a few planes crash, a fewblackouts roll across New York. It is for these reasons that everyone fromstreet 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 mydaydream 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 somethinghas gone terribly awry.

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

The United States Navy operates elevenaircraft carriers, and each one found itself under attack. However, this is notthe type of attack that carriers prepare for, this type of attack came fromdeep within. The carriers were flooding their holds with water, a verydestabilizing experience – and nobody knew why; with so much dependence oncomputers to do things for us, the captains found themselves unable toswitch to a manual control to right the ship, for there is no manual control.

The voice on the other side of the phonedemanded that we save the ships. We truly were the only ones in theworld who could, soldiers armed with guns are not capable of fighting this kindof enemy, only soldiers armed with bright minds and powerful computers can dosuch things. Sadly, these ships were far past saving. Every last US carriersank that day, taking all their men down with them - billions of dollars andthousands of lives.

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

That is precisely what I find amusing.

I do not wear leather, Ihave never ridden a Harley, I most certainly have never harmed someone, andI’ve helped the elderly across the street on a number of occasions. I wrote thevirus 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 curiousthing, 1000 lines of code and an ill-intentioned person can do so much harm.

Perhaps thescariest part is that these are weapons of anonymity, for nobody willever know it was I.

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

God can't help it

2012-02-02T13:07:00.002-06:00

Let’s have a quick look at the dusty surface of life:

We choose prison terms as the best response to antisocial behavior, although they don’t work.

We continue capital punishment, but we often kill innocent persons.

We have contempt for Congress but do virtually nothing to reform it.

Christians believe in one God but thousands of churches.

Muslims of competing traditions show little mercy toward each other.

Tolerance, an American ideal that empowered the civil rights movement and rooted out anti-semitic restrictions, dissolved into intolerance of religious customs and holidays.

Equal justice under the law is elusive, because counsel and appeals are not affordable by all.

Underneath that dusty surface is the shiny reality of a world alive in the everlasting present. There is life everywhere. It is being shaped, as a sculpture is shaped, and being reshaped by earthquakes, floods, disease and other strikes of fate.

As my 87th birthday rushes toward me I think maybe it is time to get organized. Can anyone organize all the mistakes? If I made only one a day, that’s 31,755 mistakes. If I made just one humdinger of a mistake every year, even then I’m way over quota. Most of the people I offended have preceded me, as they say, into the next life. I apologize to them wherever they are. My prayer is for mercy, not necessarily justice.

God is merciful. In fairness, God should be merciful toward all who are afflicted with miserable diseases and impulses, and those who are hungry, cold and sad. Life is so huge that a lifetime is not enough to figure it out. God permits speculation on why the infinite love of God surrounds every person, yet gives everybody space to be unloving and hateful if they choose.

The Great Prayer lays it on the line: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others. Some people do this. Some prefer the death penalty, long mandatory prison terms and other love-challenged behavior.

A friend once said that there are no sins—only mistakes. It was a wisecrack rather than a theological declaration, but wisecracks begin wisely.

Confidence in the constant love of God includes an understanding that the Eternal is not concerned with time in the way 87-year-olds are. God is, after all, the instigator of evolution. It took a long time for the Magna Carta to influence the American Bill of Rights. It was a long, stumbling step from the slaughter at Gettysburg to the Civil Rights Act.

In God’s good time it will be seen whether time means a lot or does not mean a lot. The movement of time enables us to grow in mind and spirit, to encounter sin and try to correct it. God can’t help forgiving, can’t help loving, can’t help providing the frosting on everybody’s birthday cake.

A minority sickness seeks attention

2011-12-20T07:23:00.000-06:00

Our world spends somuch of its energy and talent on wars and prisons that overcoming the numerousdestructive diseases gets a low priority. God gave us this beautiful planet,and all we do is squeeze it.

About the time I wasstarting kindergarten, President Calvin Coolidge was telling the nation that“the business of America is business.” His term ended in 1929, which one of hissuccessors might have described as a year that will live in business infamy.

In the years thatfollowed, the disease that placed Franklin D. Roosevelt in a wheelchair wasovercome. A heart was transplanted, and thousands of transplant surgeriesfollowed. Medical nightmares yielded, slowly, to medical science, and scienceis just getting started.

Calvin Coolidgetoday might say that the business of America is divided between health care andthe military. “Civilization and profits,” he once said, “go hand in hand.”Someone else might have said that civilization and prophets go hand in hand.

Health care haschanged as radically as travel. The era of horse manure in the streets hasphased into the era of oil spills and global warming, even as penicillin and21st century microsurgery have extended life. What has not changed is thescience of economics, or the will to apply it, from one depression to the next.

When my neurologistmade it official that there was a respectable reason for my dizziness, and thatthe reason was a first cousin of parkinson’s once removed, called parkinsonism,I became an instant advocate of research to heal olivopontocerebellaratrophy/multiple systems atrophy (OPCA/MSA).

This is a minoritydisease, its victims numbered in the tens of thousands while millions arestricken by cancer or AIDS. Even so, some highly dedicated medicalprofessionals and their equally dedicated lay supporters are searching for away to treat OPCA/MSA. There is no cure.

The disease is sopeculiar that it is not easily recognized. My diagnosis was made nearly adecade ago, after more than a year of examinations and tests. That’s notuncommon, nor is the likelihood that the disease was becoming active longbefore that. Doctors call it progressive. It is on the move, and I beganfollowing with a walking stick, then a cane, eventually a rollator and now apower chair.

At first there wasdizziness, which became more vigorous, along with other symptoms. Some of themare especially bemusing. For example, after I write an article I proof itmethodically in order to insert dozens of missing a’s. OPCA/MSA has takencustody of the little finger on my left hand.

It even blacks outwonderful sentences which I haven’t written yet. Sometimes I begin typing a thoughtful sentence but neverfinish, because the process of punching keys erases my thoughts before I canwrite them down. As a reader, you may have noticed that.

I always have had,and still have, a lot to say. It takes much longer to say it than it did when Iwas a rewrite man on a Hearst newspaper in a three-paper town. I’ve forgottenwhat year that was, but one of my assignments was to write about the campaignto nominate Douglas MacArthur for president.

When my 87thbirthday arrives in March I expect to be at this same keyboard, even if ittakes longer to punch each key, something like learning to set type by hand inthe 1930s.

God is classier thanCalvin Coolidge in describing the nature of civilization and profits. “For whatwill it profit a man,” asks Christ Jesus, “if he gains the whole world andforfeits his life?” And the letter of James asks “if a brother or sister isill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘go in peace,be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, whatdoes it profit?”

Eighty-plus years isa quick flick in the timeline of God’s universe. Cures, profits and wonders arealive in that universe, awaiting discovery, even as evolution awaited discovery. I’ll write morewords, but the Word itself goes on and on without a period.

This disease is progressive? So is life

2011-11-23T09:25:00.001-06:00

Written for Sharing Magazine

International Order of St. Luke

Ifvolunteers were awarded medals, my friend and neighbor Joe would have troublestanding up under the weight of them all. He’s a retiree who volunteers forlong-term duties with organized charities, while still reaching out to friendsand strangers who need help with one thing or another.

For yearsJoe has been driving me to my favorite barber shop several miles from where welive. He steers us to restaurants afterward, each one memorable, dozens of themin two counties. As soon as he walks in Joe knows the restaurant staff, and assoon as he sits down he knows diners at the next table. Joe smiles a lot, theway generous people do.

So, whenJoe phoned on Tuesday to offer me a haircut outing I didn’t like turning himdown, but another constant companion, dizziness with internal fog, kept mehome. After Joe repeated the invitation a couple of times I had to admit thatthe barbering expeditions are over, and for the same reason that I have a newpower chair to accomplish indoors what my power scooter does for me outdoors.

The ailmentneurologists call olivopontocerebellar atrophy, aka multiple system atrophy, issaid to be a progressive disease because its mischief enlarges over time. Whenit began I could still drive a car or go to a movie. With a walker I couldstill manage a church aisle. After I turned in my car keys on my 81st birthday,I still had a couple of years to shop at the supermarket and watch mygrandchildren win trophies with their teams and perform on school stages.

So far Ihave not figured out what causes this disease, but neither have the medicalspecialists. Philosophers and theologians work at it, but so far their resultshave been sort of Congressional. God makes people, not automatons or puppets.God permits every kind of condition, personality and thought. Prayer bringshealing, especially healing of isolation and self consciousness.

Healing ofOPCA/MSA will be sensational, but meanwhile any spiritual triage would suggestthat prayer and dedication are also needed elsewhere. Consider that last monthalone Chicago recorded 55 homicides, and sanctioned killing on a large scalewas reported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, here and there around Africa.Cancer, AIDS, accidents and disasters brought death in wholesale lots. There’splenty to pray about. There’s plenty to do.

When E. F. Hutton tried to buy the post office

2011-09-17T17:16:00.002-05:00

Edward F. Hutton was one of the wealthiest men of his time, serious in occupation but with a fine sense of humor. One example of that was his invitation to me to visit him and his wife at their home in Palm Beach in the late 1940s.

By that time he and Marjorie Merriweather Post had divorced, but he was chairman of General Foods and was active in companies he founded, including Wall Street’s E. F. Hutton.

I was a young labor reporter at the time, and Hutton enjoyed showing me off to his friends as a curiosity, a suspected Democrat whose personal heroes included Eleanor Roosevelt and that crowd.

When I arrived he apologized for the staffing of his mansion. It was the week of shifting 40 servants from his home in Long Island to his home in Palm Beach, and only a dozen were yet on the job in Florida.

One who was on the premises was the butler. I was given a four-room suite, which included a direct phone line to New York. In that suite, to my embarrassed horror, I found my suitcase open and empty. I should have known. The butler did it! He had unpacked my clothes, ink stains and all.

Hutton was solicitous of his untested guest the first day, when he told me that dinner with him and his wife would be informal—just black tie. Inasmuch as he was stripped down to a dozen servants, he may have appreciated my confession that I lacked a black tie and all the fabric that goes with it.

In fact, Ed Hutton and his wife were considerate hosts who told entertaining stories about life among the very rich while making me quite comfortable. Hutton told me that any yacht brochures I might come across would have been placed by his wife, who was signaling what she’d like to have for a birthday present.

He told me he had written President Roosevelt, offering to buy the U.S. Post Office from the government and run it as a profitable tax-paying entity. Good management, he said, was needed. FDR did not accept that offer. I remembered it when today’s Postal Service reported financial stress, and proposed further cuts in service.

Today the mail delivered to my home mailbox included two copies of America magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 19; two copies of Time magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 26; two copies of The Nation dated Sept. 19 and Sept. 26. In a single mail delivery there were three weekly magazines more than a week late.

Newspapers and magazines will almost inevitably complete a shift from print to online publishing. The mail service, which made it possible for publishers to turn out national periodicals in the first place, still gives identity to small communities all over the country while its own identity fades.

Preachers don't work on Sundays only

2011-09-09T14:38:00.001-05:00

Preachers don’t work on Sundays

and let others do the leading
the rest of the week

President Obama offered another elegant address to Congress, although journalists hired because of their muscular mouths had begun chomping on it even before they heard it.

Speeches are part of leadership, but leadership has to inspire between speeches.

We remember the Gettysburg Address because Lincoln was a full-time leader, not because he was a talented speechmaker.

Poor Barack Obama, like Woodrow Wilson, sees Congress as academia--but Congress sees him as academic. He attracts some of the same kinds of hostility Wilson did, but Wilson was spared prejudices that survived the defeat at Appomattox Court House. The sort who couldn’t abide John F.Kennedy because of his religion bent their knees and their conscience in false witness against Obama, claiming against abundant evidence that he belongs to one of the religions they despise. Such things matter if you’re a bigot.

Capitalism, the religion of Congress, courts and campaign funds, sustains millionaires and creates billionaires. U.S. and European banks, beneficiaries of government favors treasured by all whose business is business, have so far announced personnel cuts numbering 70,000. If you are not a capitalist, you will have to wonder why bankers have had 70,000 employees they did not need.

Their religion relives them of the familial behavior Christianity and other faiths require of their believers, the notion of brotherhood and sisterhood, of emulating the Good Samaritan. There’s no convincing way to unhire 70,000 employees in the name of Christ, or to pray for tax breaks not available to everybody.

Meanwhile, the talking journalists await the next presidential address. Any day now they’ll start telling what’s wrong with it.

St. Peter and the heavenly facebook

2011-09-04T15:23:00.001-05:00

By A. E. P. Wall

At age 4, newly enrolled in Sunday school, I learned about the crucifixion and about graham crackers and milk. My parents and I had just moved to Coudersport, Pennsylvania, 104 miles from Jamestown, N.Y., where my life began in 1925.

That Sunday night my mom and I were in the living room of our apartment, over the Gates Brothers grocery and shoe store. Windows were open, lights were on and moths were winging it around the lamps. Remembering the morning lesson I made paper crosses, bonded with homemade paste. I could have stopped there, with my plain Protestant crosses, but I found that my paste would hold a moth, with white wings almost like the ones angels wore, on the cross. This lasted until my mom noticed what I was doing, and gave me further religious instruction briefly and in a very loud voice.

It was a pretty good instruction, and maybe it is why water-boarding and other tortures seem satanic, like first century Romans killing Jesus slowly and painfully because he wouldn’t say what they wanted him to say.

That was the year I learned to read. We were strangers in town, and my parents thought I’d find playmates if they signed me up for a kindergarten operated by a remarkable educator named Rose Crane. That lady could teach. The next year I started first grade at the public school at age 5, and after a few days I was put in second grade. I was not smart, but Rose Crane was.

Something I learned was that in general kids ought not to skip grades, but be grouped by age, so they are all in synch, all ready for Little League at the same time. I also learned that a theology of moths on paper crosses would not do after age 4. But more than 80 years later I’m moved by the cross, whether it is a paper cutout, ink printed on paper, whittled from wood or crafted in precious metal. It is a pattern of wonder.

Coudersport had a population of about 3,000 when we went back to Jamestown, home to about 40,000 then, 30,000 today. I was 6, and I went to live with my grandparents, the Olmsteads, in Celoron, which is curled up next to Jamestown on Chautauqua Lake. Celoron’s population was about 700, one of whom was to become more popular than the other 699 combined. That was Lucille Ball, the I Love Lucy television superstar.

The Great Depression had walloped the whole country. My mom and dad had to take jobs where they could get them, and I was lucky in grandparents. They lived diagonally across the street from Celoron’s community church, Methodist Episcopal by denomination, and served on Sundays by a circuit riding minister who had two other congregations. My grandma prepared the communion bread, and my grandpa pulled the rope on the church bell. The minister came to our house to use the facilities. I marveled that my grandma didn’t seem to mind who heard her puffing tremulously through The Old Rugged Cross.

I was given a kids’ Bible, which was kept on a bedside table. It had lots of pictures. My favorite showed David poised to fire his slingshot at Goliath. Another favorite showed Daniel holding his own in the lions’ den. Each night when I was encouraged to read a Bible story I stared for a while at the book, wondering what was being written about me in St. Peter’s book. My Sunday school teacher had alerted me that angels kept track of everyone, and at the end of the day wrote down everything, good or bad. In 1930 nobody had yet dreamed of a Kindle or an iPad.

When I was 20 I married a Catholic girl, and after we divorced I married another Catholic girl. This was enabled by the languid process of anulment. I chaired the board of a Catholic college in Honolulu while editing a daily newspaper in Hilo, Hawaii, where I came to know many Buddhists, and to speak at Buddhist events. The president of a Mormon college on Oahu gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon, and I wrote about Jewish-Christian relations.

The little Protestant church in Celoron, the Catholic cathedral on Oahu, the Buddhist temples in Hawaii were different from each other in worship and conviction, but the people were pretty much the same. One person’s karma may be another person’s cause and effect. We all smile alike, but we don’t smile enough.

I try to remember: Don’t forget to smile. We all may be on St. Peter’s candid camera, Facebook Central.

An electric chair of my own

2011-07-08T19:11:00.001-05:00

On sunny days you can see me whirring around the neighborhood, wherever the sidewalks go, on my racy red scooter with the American flag on the front and a Chicago White Sox tag on the back.

A couple of years ago my son David and my daughter-in-law Toni bought me a four-wheel battery-powered scooter that bounces along at 5 miles an hour. It can travel up to 20 miles or so on a single battery charge.

Now my doctor has determined that I can continue to live in my own condo – even at age 86 and with an incurable disease that makes walking a risky adventure, like skating on melted ice. I can keep on preparing meals, doing laundry, using my computer and TV, writing articles and reading other people’s articles. I can do all that because I’m getting a power chair, which will get me around indoors the way my scooter does outdoors.

A power chair is more compact than a scooter. It is engineered to make narrow turns, to zig and zag. It can be pulled up to a desk or a dining table. It extends life in a way no medicine can.

My scooter came from the Scooter Store, and I’m so happy with it that I went back to the Scooter Store for a power chair. If you’re interested in a power chair for yourself or someone else, you can talk to the man who helped me. He is William Kaiser, and his phone is 800-723-4535, ext. 9465.

My only anxiety is about Tom, the cat who has shared my premises with me ever since Sally, my wife, died nine years ago. Tom is sometimes slow to yield to my rollator, a feline fault that can lead to a tall tail tale.

Do we let others pre-think our thoughts?

2011-06-06T08:28:00.002-05:00

How can I ask questions about some of the things my church does, or doesn’t, and still be a believer? Some church leaders demand total obedience, and excommunicate anyone who won’t let guardians of dogma pre-think all thoughts.

God is mind, scriptures say, but some believers answer that God no longer thinks out loud. God is love, scripture says, but some believers reply that God expels worshippers who keep raising their hands to ask questions.

Like many, I have two identifying memberships, one religious and the other secular. I’m a Christian and an American. I disagree with friends who say church rules and regulations should be accepted with head bowed, eyes closed and lips joined like a self-seal envelope -- but I agree when they say it is good to ask questions about the rules and regulations of government. Americans seldom get excommunicated from their U.S. citizenship if they ask questions, and that’s because they do ask questions.

Most of God’s human creatures do not choose their religions or nationalities, although choices are possible. Where a person is born usually establishes nationality and, typically, religion. There is one God, who permits more than one religion and more than one nation.

Like other Americans, I believe in my country even when I disagree with some of its officials, laws, courts and diplomats. I believe in my religion; when I explore its grandeur I remember how little I know, how many questions there are to ask.

Discovery is the way of life. Long-ago ancestors never heard of gravity, knew nothing of oxygen or radio waves. Some asked questions, some hushed them, fearing what they might come to know about the unknown. Thousands of centuries of discovery and questions have brought i-phones, but individual peace of mind and peace among people and nations remain as elusive as at the beginning. God is still there, but we are like the 49ers of the Old West, searching for something more negotiable than God.

Separation of Church and Sex

2011-06-04T12:56:00.006-05:00

The Bible tells what God said to favored men and women long ago, some of it repeated around campfires from one generation to the next, finally engraved in clay or written on scrolls. These inspired accounts survived the centuries, while disputes about what they mean have put thousands of religions, denominations and communities into competition with one another.

When I was a boy I liked Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, and had a simple choice between but not among them. How the world has evolved. Now I’m offered Coke, Tab, Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke and Cherry Coke, regular or diet, with or without caffeine, in bottles or in cans.

Now there are regular and diet Episcopalian churches, caffeine-free Lutherans, a choice of traditional, evangelical, liberal theologies and liturgies.

Sexuality is a common issue in all religions, no surprise because it is a fundamental mystery of human life, foundation of all emotions. Sexual practices are catalogued in creeds and laws, with severe consequences or sublime. Disregard of sex rules may, like murder, be a capital offense. These concerns, ancient as they are, remain unsolved and divisive.

Millions believe that sex crimes involving children will result in savage and brutal eternal punishment. Countless clerics and laity who believe this are found, nevertheless, to engage repeatedly in such crimes. Sigmund, where are you when we need you? Will humankind search for the causes of such self-defeating crimes with the fervor of searches for the cure of cancer and polio, or will it just let new victims suffer and build more prisons?

Sexual misbehavior is revealed as a plague in the Roman Catholic Church, and solutions have not been found in scripture or liturgy. The Catholic Church which practically invented hospitals and universities has the power if not the purpose to lead a global search for a way to heal destructive compulsions. Some observers, however, might find it curious that men speak for greater sensitivity while dressed up in lace skirts and hats as fancy as Queen Elizabeth’s.

These men of huge spiritual commitment are required to renounce personal experience with sex, like a chef who has read recipes but never entered the kitchen.

God still speaks to those who listen and those who don’t. Prayers are conversations with God, in any language, even Latin. Coming to grips with three-letter word, Sex, leads to a four-letter word some spell Hell and some spell Heal.

Atheists and other fundamentalists

Atheists are secular fundamentalists who share the notion of certainty with religious fundamentalists. Declaring that something does not exist, never existed, and cannot exist requires absolute self-confidence, if not faith. Rigid positions observed by fundamentalists, whether they are practitioners of science or religion, close the door to further investigation and speculation.

Millions of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, along with uncounted secular fundamentalists, believe they know all there is to know about god.

Atheistic scientists who claim to know it all insist that the case is closed. They attack folks who believe in a deity, including scientists who are church members and ordained clerics. Religious fundamentalists bristle under these jibes, while less rigid believers and non-believers shrug their shoulders.

Damien and Jack in Hawaii

2011-05-10T11:27:00.003-05:00

It was not my plan to spend the night in the Molokai leper colony, especially not to spend it on a rectory sofa presided over by a grandfather’s clock that chimed the passage of each quarter-hour.

It was a blessing, in fact, to be grounded by a storm that prevented a return flight to Honolulu aboard a small prop plane. The settlement in the late 1950s had no accommodations for overnight visitors, but it had a hospitable Catholic priest.

I was there to write about Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts who began a memorable ministry to lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai in 1873. Leprosy became known as Hansen’s Disease
.
The blessing to me was to have a sense of the jet-black stillness of the night, once the generators had been turned off, and to reflect on the contrasts of waves and chimes. It was a blessing to have a few extra hours with the people who lived there and with the Sisters of St. Francis of Syracuse who lived with them, and loved them.

On May 10 the Roman Catholic Church celebrates a Mass memorial for Father Damien, now St. Damien.

I was writing for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin at that time. It was an exciting place to work. Then I became editor of the Hilo Tribune-Herald, a daily newspaper owned by the Star-Bulletin, and eventually managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. One of the pleasures of journalism is getting to know lots of people in every kind of work. When statehood came to Hawaii on Aug. 21, 1959, the Territory of Hawaii had a non-voting delegate to Congress named John A. Burns.

Democrat Jack Burns had defeated my boss, Republican publisher Elizabeth (Betty) Farrington, for the Congressional post. Burns ran for governor in 1959 but lost to William Quinn. Burns won in 1962 and served three terms as governor. We were pretty good friends, often meeting for breakfast.

We were meeting in my office at the Tribune-Herald on the Big Island when a desperate phone call told me that Betty Farrington, no fan of Burns, was unexpectedly entering the front door. Burns dashed out through the composing room and left by a back door. He was a quicker politician than I was.

We sometimes met at an early weekday Mass in Honolulu’s downtown cathedral, and we shared an enthusiasm for social justice. When Burns named me chairman of the Hawaii State Educational Television Committee, charged with creating a TV system and drafting the legislation to get it going, we made certain its use would be available to all children, whether in public or private schools. Another Burns enthusiasm was for making Father Damien one of Hawaii’s two choices for Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Both of those projects came to pass.

Jack Burns was a gifted politician, and a great man. He and Father Damien make a good team.

They both knew the agonies of sickness, the pains of others, and they knew that some issues are beyond the understanding of saints and governors.

I know I haven’t forgotten the car keys;
I don’t have a car!

Not even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew for certain whether Cairo, the southernmost town in Illinois, would survive the great Mississippi flood of 2011. Cairo is positioned at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, its survival depending on the skill of the Army Corps of Engineers in diverting water through levees deliberately breached.

Anyone flooded just below that point wouldn’t know whether the water came from one river or the other. That’s the feeling that came to me when I realized just a few moments ago that I had written a very similar story about Father Damien and Governor Burns several years ago.

Which of my rivers washed away my memory of telling that story at least once before? Was it the Ohio River of Advancing Age, or the Mississippi River of my progressing brain disease? Memory thins out at age 86, and it takes a beating from my type of parkinsonism.

If you’ve read this story before, please forgive an absent-minded journalist. My hope is that if you’ve read it before you have forgotten that you did.

Memory was not invented by Bill Gates

2011-04-11T11:16:00.004-05:00

Even though I have a brain ailment, I think my mind works the way it is supposed to most of the time. Sometimes signals get short circuited, and what started out as a step turns into a stagger. Maybe my gait controller drops off to sleep, like those air controllers in the news.

For years I've ordered things from L. L. Bean, so I was surprised to discover that this time I ordered things in the wrong size. Most mornings I brew coffee, but once in a while I feel too clumsy for it. Sometimes thoughts evaporate before I’m finished with them. This can be embarrassing, because I live with a cat, and who wants a cat to seem smarter than he is? It should be enough that he has eight more lives than I have. He never forgets the rock music of a can opener opening tuna or the crinkle of plastic being peeled off a deli sandwich pack.

Creation gave us plants and trees and other living things for sustenance, along with herbs and chemicals for treating ailments, letting them evolve with skills to apply them. Like many others with OPCA/MSA, I see it as a prod for learning about it and maybe about myself. Its meaning is still to be learned, and there’s lots of time for that.

What was I going to say next?

74 seconds of Challenger in the sky

2011-03-30T16:49:00.002-05:00

The space shuttle Challenger streaked into the Atlantic sky, then burst into a flaming flash. My wife and I were watching from the lawn in front of our home in Titusville, Florida. We looked in stunned wonder, not wanting to believe what we saw on that 28th day of January, 1986.

The pastor of Holy Spirit Church in the nearby town of Mims, where many space workers worshipped, asked me to write something to be read by the lectors at Mass on Sunday. This is it.

The Exploding Conquest

A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

From almost any point in our parish --from the lawns in front of our homes, from the windows of classrooms, from the asphalt surface of parking lots --we were able to watch the shuttle Challenger head for a new conquest of space. But just 74 seconds later the conquest exploded before our eyes, the lives of seven very special Americans disintegrated in a horror of flame.

From that moment our parish was not the same, our lawns and classrooms and even our parking lots were not the same, because the words of St. Peter's First Epistle moved out of the pages of Scripture and into our lives on a chilly January morning: "Do not be surprised, beloved, that a trial by fire is occurring in your midst."

Our Catholic faith is a religion of the future. We can understand the convictions, scientific and philosophical and perhaps religious, which inspired the seven space heroes to board the Challenger shuttle for a flight into the future. They were explorers for all of us, just as they were neighbors to all of us.

We Christians, blessed by a God of eternal life, know that we have a proper role in the world, a role that encourages us to understand the nature of the universe and to enter into that universe with confidence. We understand that even as we live each day we are dying a bit each day until we reach the final goal, which comes so unexpectedly and never quite in the manner of our own choosing, comes as it did to our neighbors Gregory B. Jarvis, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith and the shuttle commander Francis "Dick" Scobee.

It is part of our role in this world to respond to God's many gifts, using those gifts to establish within the world a measure of love, of dignity, of simple goodness. Here where we live and pray, in this part of the world known as the Space Coast, we enjoy a profound sense of the awesome power of the Almighty to engage the men and women of his creation in a course of growth, a course that leads to new horizons. We live life fully because we know that there are great wonders ahead.

Cheers for those who walk the walk

2011-03-24T13:09:00.001-05:00

From the chair in front of my computer I can see him park his car on the street. He gets out, carrying a book, and begins the long walk to my front door. Almost every Sunday Deacon Joseph Truesdale drives over from Orland Park’s St. Francis of Assisi Church to bring the Eucharist and morning prayer.

Like all Roman Catholic deacons, Joe is an ordained cleric. He’s a successful engineer, recently retired. His wife is an artist who shares his vision of service.

So many Catholic clerics have been accused of predatory crimes that the whole church is in turmoil. The energy of the church comes from the tens of thousands who serve faithfully as priests, deacons, and religious, supported by the prayers and encouragement of church members who seek forgiveness for themselves and others.

I can’t get to church, but a gifted pastor sees to it that nobody is left out. I see the same headlines you do about the misery some priests have brought upon themselves and others. The rest of the story is that the church points to heaven, but it is not heaven. When it stumbles it needs the support of all its members, the kind that’s shown by Father Edward F. Upton, my pastor, and Deacon Truesdale and many, many others.

You may have seen the television programs that feature disorder in courtrooms and legislative halls, with judges getting smacked and elected officials punching each other. Misconduct and corruption in government are disgusting, but people don’t give up their citizenship in protest. Yet some people do give up their Catholic citizenship because they think it is up to somebody else to do the work. Jesus didn’t found an institution. He established a family.

[The Church is nothing other than “the family of God.” –Catechism of the Catholic Church]

When faith takes a hit--and recovers

2011-03-01T15:25:00.000-06:00

Some close relatives and friends declare themselves atheists, and apparently feel no sense of loss. A couple of times my faith has taken a hard hit, and I felt like an airline passenger waking up from a nap to find there was nobody else on the speeding plane.

I’ve never lost my belief in God, but there was a time when we were barely on speaking terms. My taught faith became taut faith. It was God, yes; churches, maybe. Church is the body of Christ; churches are bodies of people.

Almost everybody loves Mom, and most Christians love Church. If someone finds out that an intoxicated Mom has, heaven forbid, been stealing from the poor, enabling sexual adventures, lying, cheating at cards, spreading malicious gossip and encouraging the torment of dissenters, love for that Mom would encompass pain and grief.

As a Roman Catholic I once thought that there was no other Church with a capital C. I was part of my parish church and worked as editor of The Catholic Review in Baltimore. After that I became director, and the first editor in chief, of the National Catholic News Service in Washington, D.C. After that I became editor of The New World, which became The Chicago Catholic before being renamed Catholic New World. Then I became editor of an Episcopalian periodical, and found that I was still immersed in Church with a capital C. Catholics were more numerous, but Episcopalians prayed and baked cookies more often.

John Cardinal Cody, then archbishop of Chicago, hired me also to help him write his autobiography. He planned to complete it after his retirement, but he died in office. Meanwhile I spent hundreds of hours listening to his accounts of life among the shepherds.

He told me about a special relationship with fellow Missouri native Harry Truman, about his own secret exploits in Viet Nam and about the ownership of his Chicago residence by nuns. The Truman story was somewhat true.

During a meeting in his office with Janet Diederichs, a highly regarded communications consultant, he proposed creating a new job for me as head of all archdiocesan communications, including the newspaper, television and media relations. He didn’t like it when I turned him down.

He had been a Vatican operative early in life, and there was no tougher politician in the Church. Under severe attack , he resisted efforts to remove him from Chicago, even as he held off testifying before a federal grand jury.

He was well acquainted with skeletons in Vatican closets. Three popes would have moved him from Chicago to Rome to head a Vatican office, but he knew how to stay put. He sometimes asked me to listen as he talked on the phone with his friends in Rome, such as a Vatican official who later became Archbishop of New York, or an archbishop who ran the Vatican bank while resisting Italian authorities, still a Chicagoan, still included in the Chicago archdiocesan pension plan.

Other cardinals I knew well were more careful than Cody. Cardinal Cody meant it when he said he didn’t care what anybody thought about him. His successor, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, cared a lot.

To be continued

Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month

2011-02-27T10:23:00.004-06:00

From Ed Wall:

Hang on, because March is something you never heard of. It is Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month. That may sound like a computer disease, but it is all too human.

Ataxia is a hidden tax on human life.

Atrophy is a trophy to crashed human drives, and scientists are still looking for ways to reboot.

Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) is also known as olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA), an incurable neurological ailment, a form of Parkinsonism. I was diagnosed with OPCA nearly a decade ago. It is called a progressive disease. It keeps going, nibbling at a person’s ability to walk and talk, among other things.

Here’s the media announcement prepared through the volunteer leadership of Pam Bower of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and other members of a online MSA group.

March is Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month

There are no Hollywood celebrities linked to MSA (Multiple System Atrophy)—just more than 2,300 fans known on Facebook as “Miracles for MSA,” whose goal is to draw attention to this rare, currently incurable disease. With that in mind, this group has designated March as Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month, in order to increase public awareness and encourage research activities worldwide.

Multiple System Atrophy is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects many of the autonomic body systems that people take for granted. The symptoms can occur in any combination, from loss of balance and coordination, fainting and dizziness due to severely low blood pressure, bladder and bowel issues, speech and swallowing difficulties, sleep disturbances, breathing problems, and rigidity and tremors similar to Parkinson’s disease or ALS.

“We all worked hard in our jobs and now we have to work hard to keep ahead of this disease that destroys,” said MSA patient Gene Rechsteiner, of Bakersfield, California. “My hopes are to bring awareness and educate people on how bad MSA is and finding funds for research to find a cure. The medical society needs to realize that for each MSA patient, there are at least a dozen doctors in different fields that will be treating that patient: Primary, neurology, urology, speech, PT, OT, pulmonology, fitness trainer, caregivers, just to name a few. MSA sucks. You lose your independence along with your health. There are only a couple of hours in the day that I am able to function safely. The rest of the day I have to nap, watch my blood pressure. MSA took my career. We cannot stay safely in our home. And now it is eating into our retirement. My wife no longer works in order to care for me 24/7. But we cannot give up hope.”

Previously known by such names as Shy-Drager Syndrome, sporadic olivopontocerebellar atrophy and striatonigral degeneration, MSA is not considered to be hereditary. It generally affects middle-aged men and women, advancing rapidly, with progressive loss of motor skills, eventual confinement to bed, and death. It is very rare for someone to live 15 years with MSA. There is no remission from the disease and currently no cure. The current lack of awareness of MSA leads to misdiagnosis and mistreatment, as well as misdirected research funding that could be better applied to the MSA effort.

Approximately 50,000 Americans are now reported to have MSA (possibly more). A recent epidemiological survey, reported on the European MSA Study group website, has found MSA to have a prevalence rate of 4.4 people per 100,000.

Those are the clinical facts of MSA. But they don’t begin to address the havoc the disease wreaks not only on patients but also on family members, caregivers and friends, who watch their once vibrant loved one gradually lose all those abilities once taken for granted. It is the goal of all those who have been affected in some way by this disease to draw attention to it, not only during March but also throughout the year.

“Novel research to diagnose this debilitating illness sooner and to separate it from Parkinson’s and other disease is critical for creating a better future for MSA patients,” said Dr. Anna Langerveld, who owns Genemarkers of Kalamazoo, MI. “An important first step was taken in 2009 with a pilot study to define a genetic signature of MSA in patient blood samples. The initial work was a collaboration between Genemarkers, Dr. Charles Ide of Western Michigan University and Dr. David Robertson of Vanderbilt University Medical School. Efforts have begun to design and fund a new study to extend and improve these findings. Success will require continued scientific and financial participation from all interested groups. Our passion and the data generated in the ongoing work will expand awareness of MSA, draw more scientists and physicians into our efforts, and begin to bring hope to MSA patients and caregivers.”
For more information on Multiple System Atrophy, including links to MSA organizations and research groups worldwide please visit http://www.msaawareness.org/.

To join the “Miracles for MSA” Facebook page, visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/Miracles-for-MSA/138909258573.

Should priests be both dad and father?

2011-02-10T06:20:00.004-06:00

My grandma used to tell me about the time General Grant spoke to her Uncle Ben on the battlefield. “Stand back, Benjamin, and let your gun cool.” She laughed when she told that story. She remembered stories about the family traveling by covered wagon from New England to a new home out west, in Le Roy, N.Y.

As a little kid I liked hearing her accounts of friendly Indians, of making soap, and of the casual sale of powerful drugs in the unregulated pharmacies of that time.

Attitudes change. History wins some and loses some. Those drugs are regulated now, but they are selling more briskly in alleys and neighborhoods than ever before. When I started high school at the end of the 1930s there were virtually no dealers. I was editor of the school paper. I never saw a police officer at the school. I never heard of bikes being stolen or anyone assaulted. It was a simpler time. World War II had not happened yet.

I knew that God liked me when I landed a job as a copy boy on the morning paper. When the war began, and the draft swept young reporters into the army, I was promoted to full-time reporter by my 18th birthday. My favorite beat was called night police, but I covered education, a college dropout unconscious of the irony, along with something called general assignments. I was even assigned to the copy desk, where I quickly learned to edit stories, write headlines, lay out pages and play blackjack.

Old-timers welcomed me into the late-night gambling in the news room. When I was 17 I was included in parties at the homes of reporters. After my first party, the hostess complained that I didn’t drink. She didn’t like the idea that a kid would remember everything the next day.

When I began the job I was a naïve product of a Victorian home, a calm school and lots of religion. I’d never smoked or had a drink. That’s who I was when a shapely woman reporter invited me to her home after we finished work, and it was there that she showed me the painting of herself, dressed for the shower.

A male police reporter who was showing me the ropes showed me the first porn I had ever seen. He was the first of the men on staff who wanted to demonstrate some of the facts of life to a teenager.

He explained that the paper’s policy was to publish nothing about the arrest of priests accused of committing “crimes against nature.” Anyone else could be named.

It couldn’t happen in 2011. Offering a teenager drinks, making sexual overtures, teaching him to play blackjack for money, would get newspaper staffers fired today. And no daily still protects priests. Not so almost 70 years ago.

Attitudes began to change in a hurry for Catholics closer to 50 years ago, when the enthusiasm of Vatican Council II opened church windows to modern breezes. I became editor of The Catholic Review in Baltimore in 1965. It was an exciting period. Bishop Joseph Bernardin—later the cardinal archbishop of Chicago—was general secretary of the conference of bishops in Washington, D.C. He asked me to resign as managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser to become director, and the first editor-in-chief, of the National Catholic News Service.

My assignment was to reverse financial losses, along with a loss of clients, and simultaneously to convert the daily mimeograph-and-mail operation into an authentic wire service. In the course of that I became president of the International Federation of Catholic News Agencies, which gave me an opportunity to work with Catholic journalists from many parts of the world.

Most of my friends are clergy. It’s been that way for 50 years. Sally, my late wife, knew precisely how Cardinal Lawrence Shehan liked his leg of lamb and how Columban Father John Loftus liked his lamb stew. She cooked for Bernardin and Avery Dulles, for Donald Wuerl long before he became the cardinal archbishop of Washington, for Jesuit Father Thurston Davis and often for scripture scholar Raymond Brown, S.S. There were pastors, seminarians, missionaries, educators and of course journalists at our table, with lots of conversation.

One priest was so attracted to our son during dinner that Sally and I were stunned. The good news is that our son had no idea what the friendly dinner guest had in mind. The bad news is that we didn’t speak up. We didn’t think we could jeopardize a man’s vocation when we had only our parental hunches, and no evidence. It could be frustrating, even risky, to speak up in the 1970s. The unwritten policy was to avoid embarrassment. And nobody wanted to turn in an acquaintance. Some called it tattling.

Most of the sexually active clergy Sally and I knew — whether cardinals or newly-ordained, whether in an American parish or the apparatus of the Vatican, whether gay or straight — were on good behavior. They might have been more comfortable spiritually if celibacy had been optional.

But celibacy siphons off a priest’s sense of family responsibility and all of the priest’s energies can be claimed by the church. And one other thing: The unmarried priest doesn’t have to be paid enough to cover a family’s groceries, clothes, vacations, orthodontists, health insurance and Sunday envelope offerings.

The imposition of celibacy requires men to shun God’s singularly beautiful gift, and deprives the Catholic world of children born with a valuable inheritance.

Celibacy doesn’t work, and evidence of its failures are found wherever priests become convicts, wherever church treasure becomes payouts to victims and their lawyers.

Priests are extraordinary men, offering themselves fully to God and humankind. Humanity is not well served by diminished respect for priesthood.

Whether standing back to let your Civil War musket cool off, or evading workplace predators when you’re a kid, or praying for the human rights of Catholic priests to be both dad and father, everyone has a choice, even if the choice is not to choose.

You call this a blizzard, young fella?

2010-12-12T06:54:00.001-06:00

Do you realize there were Rockettes on stage long before there was any Rock on stage? Practically all of the girls in my online group of mostly post-cribbage folks, all diagnosed with a form of parkinsonism called multiple system atrophy or OPCA, would have been Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall if they had not been distracted by poetic marriages and kids with Guinness IQ and, up to a point, athletic talents of a Tiger.

We have traded thoughts about this during our daily emailings, we 12-steppers in the U.S. and Canada, the U.K. and Australia, wherever somebody might be addressing an incurable disease with an incurable spirit. We are the only 12-steppers whose steps, viewed from a sufficient distance, suggest a bunch of Rockettes dancing at maximum flexuosity. We have our own choreography for the 12 steps.

Today is special to the Rocker-etts as we men of a certain age are known. Today everybody is talking about our favorite subject, the weather. It is 19 F. as I write, with blustery snow and bitter cold in the forecast. If you see an excessively mature gentleman wobbling toward you today, be nice and let him tell you about the "worse day than this" he remembers. Let him tell you about shoveling coal or chopping logs.

This is like an early Christmas for us, and we know who Santa Claus is--he's the weather man. No time for checkers today!

Wisdom of the Aged made simple

2010-12-02T10:27:00.002-06:00

An American man qualifies for full Social Security benefits on his 65th birthday. Few know that after 20 years he qualifies for Unsocial Security benefits: Whatever he remembers about long-ago sports events, political arguments and his appeal to females, is good enough; it is his right to be as goofy as though he were a member of Congress.

Radio talk shows are credited with inventing the seven-second delay in broadcasting comments by callers who might be creative in the use of license-busting words of four letters and up. Actually this emulates the long-standing seven-second delay in what is said to an octogenarian and the moment the octogenarian hears it, sometimes called the in-one-ear-out-the-other syndrome. That’s why you know so few 80-year-olds named Speedy.

Dizzier than thou: MSA updated

2010-11-13T09:22:00.003-06:00

Striking me lightly on the back of my head is beyond Tom’s talent for games. He’s more likely to purr and push his furry head up for stroking, so when I’m home alone with my cat and feel that smack on the head I know what it is. My OPCA/MSA is acting up again, swinging an invisible baseball bat and stirring a swirl of dizziness like home plate dust on a windy day.

OPCA — olivopontocerebellar atrophy — has recently cut back, like Herbert Hoover hacking at a welfare budget, in the time it allows me to stand before my head starts to spin in synch with the swaying in my legs.

This has nothing to do with heights, even though my canes have gotten half an inch longer than they used to be. Either that, or I’m half an inch shorter. OPCA thought of an incredible shrinking man, and the equal opportunity shrinking woman, before Hollywood did.

Whoever asked me to write about these phases of OPCA, the progressions of a progressive disease, has probably been forgiven, although here I am, still writing updates.

OPCA is hitting below the eyebrows, at squint level. For more than 80 years I’ve been reading without ever thinking about reading. The whole point of reading is to slide into the writer’s dimension without conscious focusing, so something gets lost when the act of reading swings from automatic to stick shift.

This may be accompanied by forgetting what’s being read while it is being read, sort of in one eye and out the other. OPCA does not afflict all of its victims with identical symptoms and it does not progress at one speed for all. It is about eight years after my diagnosis, progressing from cane to rollator, that the supermarket has now become formidable.I have a new game, which is to proofread whatever I write via keyboard, inserting the letter “a” wherever it is missing. The little finger on my left hand asserts its OPCA independence by only pretending to strike the “a” key while I’m typing.

So, if you have this mysterious OPCA brainwarp, or if you’re a caregiver, this is my newest report to you. For me the best part is that I’m able to write. Now I know that, when necessary, nine fingers will do the work of ten. I know that sitting up is better than falling down, and that praying for each other is better than going it alone.

Vatican whispers fade as time goes by

2010-11-08T09:21:00.004-06:00

In photo at right, Cardinal Cody kneels between two popes -- John Paul I and John Paul II, in Rome on Sept. 3, 1978.

I held my breath while those courageous Chilean miners were squeezed one by one into a narrow tube for an uncertain ascent through solid rock. Tight spaces take my breath away, a claustrophobia that makes a closed MRI tube fearsome.

Tight situations can whip up an instant stampede in the imagination, a confused and reckless response to a jammed elevator or a tightening throat, even a burst of unwelcome memories like a sewer backing up.

Unwelcome memories are being described by victims of clerical abuse all over the world, to the annoyance of some church leaders. Until recently, such things were local. The faithful tended not to believe an accusation if they heard about it. Then came the Internet and cell phones and 24-hour news reports. Suddenly what had seemed local misbehavior was seen to be universal.

Not long after I was named director and the first editor in chief of the National Catholic News Service in 1972, a Catholic bishop was arrested on a drunk driving charge. That kind of news had been too delicate for coverage by a news agency owned by the conference of bishops. I reversed that policy, and the story was reported. There were angry complaints from some bishops and support from others, most notably support from the man who hired me, Bishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Bernardin.

Concealment of bad news was common in the church, as it was in business and government. One prominent Catholic editor said that his slogan was, “When in doubt, leave it out.” Some Catholic journalists saw their role as defending the institution, especially bishops. Others thought the Second Vatican Council triggered different expectations.

I’ve described elsewhere my employment by Cardinal John Cody of Chicago to help him write his autobiography. I interviewed him for hundreds of hours during a time when he was resisting a grand jury inquiry, refusing Vatican requests that he accept a post in the Roman curia or accept a coadjutor archbishop in Chicago, and rolling as the target of investigative reporting by a Chicago daily. It was a stunning, numbing experience to hear Cody threaten to “blow the lid” off the Holy See, where he had worked for years. It was breathtaking to be told that the pope had said Uncle, assuring Cody’s continued silence.

Cody was a product of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, when the common way to approach a bishop was to kiss his ring, when educated Catholics asked a bishop’s permission to read something listed on the Index of prohibited books. A lawsuit filed against the church could bring excommunication. Few Catholics challenged the notion that the church should be protected from scandal. There was little understanding of homosexuality, and priests who fooled around with boys were expected to shape up and ship out to a new assignment.

Most of our dinner guests at that time were priests and bishops. Some were gay, some were not. Few paid too much attention to our children, and when they did my wife and I made sure that nothing developed. We didn’t even consider making a public issue of it. When I was approached, usually during overnight events, I just backed off until Sally and I decided some decades ago that we had an obligation to report one cleric’s behavior. I told a bishop about it. After he had time to check it out, he invited me to meet with him. I felt caught in a whirlwind as the bishop began to speak: “On behalf of the Catholic Church I apologize to you...”

Sally was a leader in a church-sponsored group of gay men, all closet-dwellers in those days. She understood that most of them were attracted to other adults and had no interest in boys. She learned, too, that false accusations could destroy a person’s personal and professional life.

Maybe I was conditioned by my 1940s experience as police reporter for a daily newspaper, whose editor decided that there would be no stories about priests accused of “crimes against nature.”

When I took a course for catechism teachers around 1955, the ordained instructor said that gay penitents in the confessional were routinely forgiven, even when the confessor recognized them as regulars. Attitudes would change in the 1970s and beyond.

For a long time after Cody’s death I thought I would write the book, but not the way Cody had in mind. For one thing, I felt the caution of a reporter who knew that Cody was not given to being inconvenienced by truth. In addition, I liked the Cody who never missed Bob Hope on television, and thought I understood him. He was a pioneer in integrating schools when he was Archbishop of New Orleans. He was an early supporter of programs to help alcoholic priests.

I liked the Cody who encouraged me to buy a condo by writing a personal check as a loan to cover the down payment, but I knew he was not unlike business chiefs who use checkbooks to buy gratitude and influence. He was a sick man, and he denied that, too. His respected public relations counselor once told me that “the problem with Cardinal Cody is that there’s no Mrs. Cody.”

Around the time I turned 85, which was some years after I was diagnosed with a curious form of parkinsonism, I began to gag on memories of behavior and concealment inside the apparatus of the church. This was stirred by a burst of news reports about such events almost everywhere. When I look at my notes I can feel an emotional claustrophobia, a kind of memory choking that has no Heimlich maneuver.

It is the dizzy claustrophobia of OPCA/Multiple System Atrophy that keeps me from going to church, and not the chilling memories. I love the church, the clergy and religious, and many of the sermons. A painful side effect of triggered memories is that some friends misunderstand, thinking it is a rejection of them or of faith. The opposite is true. It is an affirmation of faith no matter what the obstacles may be.

Sometimes I think about those hermits who used to spend their time on top of poles in the desert, and I realize that although it is not my choice, it is okay to be an opca/msa hermit in a pleasant condo with computers, TV sets, radios, books and magazines, a microwave and a freezer, in frequent touch with children and grandchildren while friends include me in their prayers and emails.

I've been given needed time to blue pencil my own life, which like everyone else I began as an amateur, and try to correct some of the mistakes and to seek forgivness for them all. Having this opportunity proves God’s love. And gradual loss of memory proves God's mercy.

Termites in your brain?

2010-10-30T11:00:00.001-05:00

This morning when I flicked into a web site for folks with ataxia, and their caregivers, I accidentally opened my registration page. I seldom look at it, and so I was surprised to be reminded that I had joined the online group on December 12, 2002.

Good lord. That was almost eight years ago, just a few months after Sally, my wife, passed on to wherever wonderful people spend eternity. Earlier that year Sally and Marie, my daughter, were with me when a gifted neurologist said I had olivopontocerebellar atrophy, known to its friends, if it has any friends, as OPCA. It is a form of Parkinsonism sometimes called multiple system atrophy, or MSA.

There are any number of online sites where people with curious ailments share their feelings with each other. The one I plugged into this morning showed that I’ve posted 1,049 separate messages there. Not long after I joined I wrote a little book about OPCA. What I wrote in that book, and in most of those messages, is out of date already. And OPCA is still a mystery, incurable, progressively destructive, like a swarm of termites making themselves at home in a brain.

While I was looking at that 2002 posting I thought about how much I’ve learned about OPCA since them.

In 2002 I could still drive my grandkids to karate lessons and cheer them on in their school plays and games. I could still go to church, to a movie, to a ball game, to the library and the mall. I could board a train for Chicago and walk around the Loop with nothing more than a cane. I could walk the dog, use a broom without wobbling, talk on the phone without mumbling or gasping, get up from a chair without working out a strategy, remember my social security number and read a book for as long as I liked without falling asleep, losing my place or dropping the book.

The good part is that I remember thousands of those happy times with family and friends. I can relive the joys at any time. I have friends I would not know except for OPCA in our lives. I’ve known the patient love of my children and their children and countless friends, and the loving courtesies of strangers.

I’m not sure what it means, but God, who is Love, is there, inside that OPCA. Someday there will be a cure for OPCA, but God will still be there. I acknowledge with a smile that there’s no cure for God.

Washington's most capable leader

2010-10-25T11:07:00.002-05:00

It was at Bishop John Wright’s home in Pittsburgh that I met a personable young man about the time of his ordination to the priesthood. Now that man, still young in looks and enthusiasm as he observes his 70th birthday November 12, has been named a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI. Donald W. Wuerl was already the Archbishop of Washington.

Wuerl was a valued assistant to Bishop Wright in his native Pittsburgh. When Wright was given the red hat and made head of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, Fr. Wuerl accompanied him as secretary. He become acquainted with every aspect of church leadership, even as he wrote books and articles and looked after an ailing boss.

Cardinal Wright was a long-time friend. When he was Bishop of Worcester, Mass., he introduced me to the managing editor of The Worcester Telegram. Frank Murphy then hired me as a copy editor. Eventually Wright became the Bishop of Pittsburgh, taking with him the editor of Worcester’s diocesan newspaper, Jack Deedy. After Deedy resigned from the Pittsburgh diocesan paper to join Commonweal, Wright phoned me from a Trappist monastery he was visiting to offer me the Pittsburgh job. It was an exciting prospect. I told Bishop Wright that he would have to ask Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, my boss at the time, to release me from a contract. Shehan said No.

In 1968, when Wuerl was a member of the committee sponsoring a Pax Romana symposium in Pittsburgh, I was invited (yikes!) to be a reactor to the Jesuit theologian Fr. Bernard Lonergan and the Jesuit philosopher Fr. Martin D’Arcy.

During the years that followed I often spoke with Wuerl during visits with Wright in Rome and even in Baltimore. After Wright’s death Wuerl came to dinner at my home in Chicago, bringing the Cardinal’s red zuchetta for my son, John Wright Wall. Afterward my daughter, Marie, a college student at the time, said she had never met a priest who was so enthusiastic about priesthood.

It was like a satisfying chapter in a novel when Wuerl became the Bishop of Pittsburgh, the resident of that home where mentoring mattered.

In many ways Cardinal Wuerl reminds me of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, whose position as general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference gave him a broad view of church and opened friendships in high places. These are probably the two Americans best-prepared by experience and single-minded devotion to lead the entire church.

Separation of church and sex still elusive

2010-10-14T13:45:00.001-05:00

It would not be Christian to hold Jesus responsible for organizing the church we read about in headlines. Catholics are not alone in believing that the church was founded by Jesus, even though he cautioned that "by their fruits you shall know them.” [Matthew 7:16] Jesus should not be known by those apples. The church Jesus founded is not the one that owns a bank, but the one that sent agents out with “no purse, no wallet, no shoes.” [Luke 10:4]

Actual churches are run by humans who want to honor God and receive God’s blessings. They keep love circulating. They feed people who have all kinds of hungers, they care for the sick and frail, they encourage worship of and they educate the young.

Personal failures by the devout, especially clergy, are more shocking, if not as entertaining, as the moral collapse of athletes or public officials. In the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, members of three lay groups called attention to these figures: Some 256 of approximately 400 parishes in that archdiocese have, at some time, been served by an accused pedophile priest. The groups were Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), African American Advocates of Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse, and Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

All of nature, especially human nature, is slow to change. It is unreasonable to assume that pedophile clergy appeared for the first time around 1940. Before that there were no television shows, no computers, no Internet, no cell phones. The biggest threat to law and decorum in the schools was chewing gum and spitballs catapulted from rubber bands. It was an era of understatement.

Victims of priestly predators tended not to be believed if they talked about it. Church authorities celebrated privacy, and sexually promiscuous clerics did not turn each other in. Newspapers had little to say about—you know—the S word. The editor of one daily I worked for told police reporters not to write about the arrest of priests for what was called crimes against nature.

It did not start in 1940. These activities have very likely been constant during all of the Christian centuries and, as scripture indicates, during pre-Christian times as well.

Having been hired by the late Cardinal John Cody to ghost-write his autobiography, I recall that one of his last efforts before his death was to prevent disclosure of a scandal that crossed state lines. He spoke freely to me for hundreds of hours about the most sensitive issues, but he did not want to talk about that one. I wrote quite a different kind of book about his successor, called The Spirit of Cardinal Bernardin, a survey of Joseph Bernardin’s thinking on religion and public life. In common with all of the bishops I worked with at the time, Cardinal Bernardin understood himself to be a pastor and brother to his priests.

Some wonder how cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons, religious and laity reconcile repeated scandalous actions with their belief that defying God’s commands brings eternal punishment in hell. Why does a cardinal engage in sex with a man on a Sunday afternoon after preaching what his church teaches about sex and celibacy. How can he risk eternal punishment over and over? What does this say about his belief?

Who cares about religion when a new sex poll is out?

2010-10-04T11:50:00.001-05:00

I was very close to a woman who had been superintendent of a Methodist Episcopal church long ago, and knew that she read the Bible with total respect. She was proud of a statue of St. Francis in her garden, and taken aback when a fundamentalist Baptist neighbor denounced it. “What’s wrong with you,” the lady said, “don’t you know St. Francis is in the Bible?” Her neighbor did not question that, but still thought it was being misused by the papists.

Those two women came to mind when I read about a new poll, which disclosed a lack of religious expertise in today’s population. People by the hundreds of millions hear the Bible quoted in sermons and novels, and even read it once in a while. Who knows how many of them expect to find the Gospel of St. Francis in there somewhere? The poll probably has its facts right, without taking note of folks who identify with principles of the Bible, even though they are as confused about chapter and verse as they are about geometry. They believe in math and religion, but would flunk a test in either.

Interest in how many religious facts are understood by believers is already being shoved aside by a new report on human sexuality.

Death ends 1 chapter in a long book

2010-09-23T11:19:00.001-05:00

To refuse to die would be more than a social impertinence. It would throw off the scientific rhythm of the universe. It would toss a monkey wrench into the apparatus of the galaxies, and challenge the very mind of the creator.

Death is designed as an inevitable consequence of birth, providing needed closure for each of us. It is the kind of closure that marks graduation from high school, which is required before the graduate moves on to higher education.

Death and eternity are mysterious, not mysteries invented by Conan Doyle and not the mysteries of gene and cell exposed in laboratories like prisoners of undeclared wars. There’s the kind of death that’s examined on an autopsy table, fixed in time and place. There’s also an eternity that’s for discoveries in space and hopes about time. Jesus and Einstein speak a common language.

There could be no death without life. Life could reach no conclusions without death. The system may be a mystery, but it is part of the genius of creation. Suspense is necessary to mystery, but fear is not. Nobody remembers being born; nobody is told that birth is the leading cause of death, inevitable rather than incurable, because it is not a disease.

I guess I can say that, as a reporter, I’ve been gathering material for this article for 85 years. Life and death can be exciting. We are conditioned to make the most of life and death, or to fear them. Many never speak of death. Others deny death. I was in my teens when I first heard someone deny the permanence of life. An older woman said she hoped to God — her phrasing — that there would be no life after death. Her family, her education, her faith were all ad hoc, she hoped, and would vanish as she would vanish. I wonder where she’s living now.

During my years in Hawaii I knew many Buddhists, whose friendship included invitations to speak at Buddhist celebrations and services. I learned to appreciate Buddhist ideals and even Buddhist controversies. Buddhism has its denominations, even as Christianity and Islam and Judaism have sects and denominations. Buddhist concepts of life and death, of reincarnation and transmigration, appeal to many. I’ve known Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and other Christians, including clergy, who believe in reincarnation.

My belief in God, the Eternal, the Holy, the Triune Creator, Love itself, gives meaning to life and death. Not everyone who is offered this gift has unwrapped it. Christ Jesus gives of himself. As newspaper carriers used to call out when they had an armload of Extras to sell: Read all about it.

Because of that gift I believe in the seen and unseen. I believe in the human body, ocean waves and printed words. I believe also in gravity, radio waves, thought, love and eternity. I recognize a desire for a good life and its companion desire for a good death.

Jack Wall, my dad’s brother, was born in the 1890s with a form of paralysis that was to end his life when he was in his early teens. My dad and another of his brothers have each told me this: The family was gathered in the garden of their Liverpool home. Jack, cheerful and much loved by everyone in the family, was on his father’s lap.

Suddenly he said, “Listen. Can you hear them?” No one heard anything unusual as Jack said,“Can’t you hear them singing? Listen to the music. They’re coming; they’re coming for me.” He slumped dead on his dad’s lap. Other families have similar experiences.

Maybe it is because I’m a writer that I think of life as prose and religion as poetry. The holiness in holy scripture is poetic. That’s why myopic literalists don’t notice God’s bigness while they squint at scripture with watchmaker’s loupe and tweezers, magnifying some words and plucking at others, like links pried loose to disconnect a chain.

Death clobbered me when I was 10 years old and living in my grandparents’ house. I was called home from school, no reason given, and was barely off the streetcar when I spotted the hearse parked in front of the house. The place was swarming with people and I headed for the privacy of the basement to try to sort it out. My beloved grandma, I knew, had died while I was choosing true or false for a history teacher. I was numb, but not at a loss for words. A memorized poem was there for me,” The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

When I heard about William Cullen Bryant, a newspaperman who wrote poems, I was already primed for his “Thanatopsis.”

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of the couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Thanks, Mrs. Faulkner, Mrs. Crane, Mrs. Bracken, Mrs. Humm, Mrs. Peters and all you who taught restless teenagers with smiles and a beat.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson grabbed me as a teenager when one of those teachers opened the book to “In Memoriam” and especially to “Crossing the Bar.”

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the
boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

And then there was (and is) Walt Whitman:

At the last, tenderly.
From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the
keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the
locks—with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O Soul.

Tenderly—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)

We who love life embrace it with enthusiasm. We accept death as an element of life, if not its fulfillment, but we do not kill others.

Some deny death. Some deny life. Jesus died. Jesus lives.

Way to go, Jesus. Way to go, everyone who accepts the gift of life. The Eternal, the giver of life, doesn’t take it back.

Pope respects queens, but won't ordain women

2010-09-17T05:54:00.002-05:00

Pictures of Pope Benedict XVI and Queen Elizabeth II together in Scotland stir spiritual whirlwinds. There’s the leader of a billion or so Roman Catholics, and there’s the leader-of-record of the Church of England, defender of the faith by inheritance from Henry VIII.

The pope acknowledged to journalists during a flight from Rome to Scotland that the Church performed badly in handling worldwide charges that priests and religious had engaged repeatedly in criminal acts of a sexual nature.

In the shared respect of their encounter, the pope tacitly recognized that a woman may be the head, perhaps figurehead, of a Christian church. Maybe he finds it awkward to ponder the sharp loss of moral authority his church feels today in many parts of the world, while defending a priesthood that celebrates maleness if not manhood.

The pope’s church understands Mary of scripture to be the mother of God and Queen of the Universe, but unqualified for priesthood.

Catholics tend to love their church the way they love their families, faithful even when in vigorous disagreement. In many years of Catholic journalism, beginning in 1958 as a freelancer for the Hawaii Catholic Herald, I did not always live up to my own ideals. I claim that much affinity with St. Paul, an early Christian journalist who famously said to the Romans, “The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will…” [Rom. 8:19, REV]

For years most of my friends were Catholic priests and religious, and lay church staffers, and many were gay. Most, but not all, were happily avuncular with my children. One, who had baptised my child, was later accused of molesting others. A close friend in the hierarchy was mugged during a parking lot encounter with a young man, a well-known educator made passes at my son, and a bishop was accused in a paternity action. There was a time of horror when priests who were important to me and my family were painfully lost to AIDS.

Many years ago I described to a diocesan bishop some overtures from another in the hierarchy. I was alarmed in part because I knew he might be roughed up, blackmailed, arrested. He might even approach a minor, but I didn’t think he would. Responsible adults, straight or gay, do not prey on children. Sexual abuse of children and adults is observed among some heterosexual persons, some homosexual. Most people seek long-term relationships, especially in marriage.

I was managing editor of the morning newspaper in Honolulu when a long-time friend invited me to visit him, secretly, in Washington, D.C. He was Bishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Bernardin, at that time general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference and the National Council of Catholic Bishops.

The National Catholic News Service, now known as CNS, was a division of the Conference. It was in trouble, losing money, losing clients and losing respect. At the time it produced a daily news package, which was mimeographed and mailed to clients all over the world. Most were diocesan newspapers.

Bernardin asked another long-time friend, Fr. Thurston Davis, S.J., along with Robert Beusse, communication secretary for the Conference, to talk to me about the woes at the news service. Davis was the brilliant editor-in-chief of America magazine, a former Fordham dean. The three of us met in Beverly Hills, and soon afterward I was asked to fly evasively from Honolulu to Washington. Bernardin’s wish was that I fly directly to New York, then switch to the shuttle for the rest of the trip. Nobody was to know my destination, which turned out to be nothing less than the Watergate. Bernardin had a suite for the day, during which he asked me to resign as managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser and take over as director and first editor-in-chief of the Catholic news service.

My charge was to reorganize the news agency, creating a wire service to replace the mail service. And simultaneously I was to balance the budget, retrieve lost clients and handle a new union contract for employees who had become demoralized by the shaky condition of the news service.

After intense negotiations I completed an agreement with Reuters to provide a leased wire available 24 hours a day to distribute news by teletype. NC correspondents were authorized to send their articles to NC from any Reuters bureau anywhere in the world, with guaranteed delivery within 20 minutes. Vatican Radio was one of the first wire service subscribers.

It was a lonely experience. I was told that I must negotiate an agreement without any counsel from Bernardin, Davis or Beusse. The Conference took a similar hands-off position in negotiating the first contract with the American Newspaper Guild, although the labor expert Msgr. George Higgins cheerfully answered my questions about Catholic teaching on labor issues.

It was a memorable moment when the wire service formally opened with a transmission of a message from Pope Paul VI in Rome to my staff and me in Washington. The pope’s words were recorded on the perforated tape used in wire transmissions in those days, then embedded in a transparent display which was presented to me by the bishops. It is now on permanent loan at the Washington headquarters of Catholic News Service, along with the St. Francis de Sales award I received from the friends and co-workers at the Catholic Press Assn.

There’s more, of course, but this is not the time to tell it. The stern little counter on my computer screen warns that I am approaching the 1,000-word mark. That’s enough for one reading, as you will certainly agree.

The communication between queen and pope in Scotland is symbolic of gains in Catholic reporting and commentary since the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, and a reminder that the Catholic church is the oldest multi-national, run by leaders drawn from a limited pool of talent which excludes ordained women. These men seldom admit their mistakes to anyone outside the confessional. The church does not exclude gays, but it affirms biblical demonizing of non-celibate homosexual persons. Thus hypocrisy serves theology. There’s an additional concern: How do journalists stumble through millions of words online, in print and even unformed — more words than anybody can read or count – and blue-pencil them into all the news that’s fit to tint?
©A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

Even the stoned are welcome

2010-09-07T11:14:00.005-05:00

● Stephen Hawking, the respected scientist who has made a science of promoting books, indicates in “The Grand Design” that he has no personal knowledge of God and therefore God does not exist. Little kids still cover their eyes and shout, “You can’t see me!”

● An application form for an important church activity asks candidates whether they have ever done anything that might embarrass the church. The form does not ask about anything the church might have done to embarrass believers. There’s a tension between the healing love of Jesus and the institutional cover treasured by human pillars of the church. Jesus, who was excommunicated by the temple staff, challenges everyone poised to throw stones at sinners and invites them all into his church, even the stoned.

● A bishop declares that a woman religious is excommunicated by virtue of a hospital decision she okayed. Christians pray for the bishop and the nun, aware that excommunication is a failure of the church. The church pronounces itself divorced from a person with whom there is a sacramental bond, as though baptism can be annulled.

Mr. Obama: Freedom is not the issue

2010-08-14T09:14:00.004-05:00

Religious freedom is not the issue

President Obama is not the first smart person to be confused about freedom of religion. Freedom of religion guarantees that Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists and others are free to establish worship centers.

Freedom of religion does not guarantee that any religious organization can operate a public worship center anywhere. Churches, temples, synagogues, mosques and other religious edifices are lawfully limited in some residential neighborhoods, where they might contribute to unbearable traffic and parking problems for home-owners already living there. In all such cases, the religious groups have a constitutional right to choose another location, subject to standard zoning and construction laws applied equally to everyone.

Governments have involved themselves in legal disputes about the right of Christian Science parents to refuse medical care for their children, the right of other religionists to engage in polygamy, the right to expand church property in residential areas, the right of public authorities to enforce educational requirements for church-owned schools, and much more. The question of religious freedom might be affirmed or denied in such cases.

The issue in New York is not whether a Muslim center can be established. The argument concerns not whether a Muslim center may be opened, but whether it is insensitive and unneighborly to open one in a particular location.

Of course Muslims have a constitutional right to worship, to own property and to claim the same tax exemptions granted to all religious enterprises. It is grotesque to suggest that anyone who is offended by one specific location is advocating an end to religious freedom.

President Obama’s leap into the New York controversy is brave, bold and misguided. The freedom to practice religion is not the issue. This is not an argument for theologians; maybe for social scientists.

Fun and games with Jesus

2010-07-27T15:05:00.002-05:00

When I went cold turkey, cancelling home delivery of four daily newspapers all at once, I shifted my addiction into the Internet. Every morning I explore half a dozen online dailies.
If I lift the lid on the coffee maker and see dried coffee grounds I wonder how I could have forgotten, again, to toss them out after brewing yesterday’s pot. Morning moods can be stirred in caffeine. Sometimes my mood leads me straight to online newspaper Opinion columns, sometimes to News, sometimes to the crossword puzzle.
Countless Christians who are confused by the lottery of belief are sometimes drawn into a Jesus crossword puzzle, hoping that somebody can fill in the blanks and make the words real. There are more than 38,000 Christian denominations, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia. Each one has a teaching about Jesus. Some, and not just the Episcopalians, have more than one.
Most Christians are born into one of the denominations. Some stay put, some change denominations, some change to non-Christian faiths and some just give it all up. Some of my friends, smart and caring people, are enthusiastic about the Jesus Seminar, a popular kind of low-calorie Religion Lite.
My prejudices are formed by a long friendship with the late Raymond Brown, the incomparable American Bible scholar. He was a frequent visitor to our home and I visited him during his years at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. He was a Sulpician priest and I was a trustee of the Sulpician St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore.
Father Brown was unprepared for vitriolic attacks by right wing traditionalists who were shocked by his monumental book, The Birth of the Messiah. They objected to many of his books. I was honored when he asked me to help to shape his response to the ugly and uninformed accusations.
He didn’t think much of far left claims about Jesus, either, and brushed them off as not scholarly. I remembered that when I read a spritely article in America by Luke Timothy Johnson, the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta.
He recalls that “25 years after the Jesus Seminar started a new round in the historical Jesus controversy and 14 years after I tried (in The Real Jesus) to show how contemporary historical Jesus scholarship was—with some exceptions—bogus, there is still an eager audience…”
He speaks of “the desperately trivial character of much academic scholarship” today.
“Most of all, I think, congregations are truly eager to learn about the human Jesus and too often find what they hear in sermons and Sunday schools to have little intellectual substance or spiritual nourishment. They desire a grown-up faith, and the itinerant speakers appear to offer a quicker, more interesting path to such maturity than is available through traditional practices of faith. For those schooled to value information over insight, the offer of historical knowledge about Jesus seems just the ticket.”
Often, though, it offers a digression into an atmosphere of games. Instead of pondering what the reporters and commentators wrote , people are drawn into scriptural crossword puzzles, where the players fill in the blanks.

When a nun is excommunicated

2010-06-28T11:36:00.002-05:00

Religion doesn’t come out of a dictionary, and the Word According to Merriam-Webster is not holy. Yet there’s some common sense in common usage. One of the Webster definitions of Church is this: the total body of Christians regarded as a spiritual society.

And here’s the definition for Church Invisible: the entire company of those on earth and in afterlife who whether members of the church visible or not belong to the faithful for whom it is believed God has destined salvation.

Jesus dispatched his disciples to share his good news with everyone. Jesus was so obstinate about the restrictions imposed by religious authorities in the land of his birth that they excommunicated him.

A long time ago I asked Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, then the Archbishop of Baltimore and my boss, whether he withheld communion from someone who might not be eligible under the rules. Of course not, he said. How could he know the state of the person’s mind? He did not want to risk substituting his own will for the will of God.

Another American bishop looked deeply into the rules for guidance and inspiration, and announced the excommunication of a pro-life Catholic sister who had approved an exception to her hospital rules. She had agreed to a life-saving but onerous hospital procedure that saved a mother from dying in childbirth, along with her child who was beyond rescue.

In 1972, when Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was a bishop serving as general secretary of the United States Catholic Conference, he appointed me director of a division of the conference. A decade later I wrote The Spirit of Cardinal Bernardin, the first book about the life and thought of that American most approximating the leadership gifts of his long-time friend, Pope John Paul II.

On-the-job training in the meaning of Church by Cardinals Bernardin, Shehan and other ordained employers and coworkers established an appreciation of Church rules, and the necessity for them, despite their misuse and manipulation.

Chancery Office Church may be a requirement of 21st century society, but it doesn’t have a lot in common with the Jesus Christ Church.

A citizen who breaks American laws may be fined, put on probation or packed off the jail, while remaining an American citizen. But someone who breaks various Church laws may be tossed out, losing membership—call it citizenship—in the community that matters the most.

Jesus teaches about the gifts of grace and the power of forgiveness, but his words are read without conviction, perhaps because he taught forgiveness in a famous prayer instead of requiring it in canon law.

Am I the Only Listener Who Liked Obama’s Speech?

2010-06-16T15:46:00.002-05:00

I liked what I heard when President Obama spoke to the world from the Oval Office on June 15.
The next morning I switched on the radio to listen to Americans in the gulf states to voice their thanks for a big-time effort on their behalf by the president. I don't think the news reporters were able to find anybody who appreciated anything. There were complaints because the president pointed out that a more intelligent energy policy is necessary if we are to avoid more calamities like the present one.
Not long before that, the pope apologized for Catholic Church negligence in protecting children from priests who are sexual predators. If anybody thought that was a pretty good thing for the pope to do, I did not come across radio, TV, online or newspaper reports of it. Sure, people said, he apologized, but not in the right way, not soon enough, not in the proper words.
Forgiveness is sometimes seen as a chump's failure to sue.
I graduated from high school a few months before Pearl Harbor. Overnight the U.S. became a nation at war. Almost everybody wanted to help win it. Would that sudden conversion have been possible if the communications media been in 1941 what it is today? Would FDR's Pearl Harbor speech have been analyzed into mush? Would commentators point out that the U.S. had been selling scrap metal to the Japanese for a long time, and therefore the Administration was to blame for the war?
Wars come and go, but the U.S. isn't winning many of them. When I was a little kid, about 80 years ago, my mom and I walked past a group of men with gray beards and missing legs. They were Civil War vets having a morning chat. I heard my mom say, "Don't stare."
But not long afterward my parents took me to the circus, where people bought tickets in order to stare at the bearded lady. Staring is now encouraged by TV reality shows, updated versions of old-time sideshows. When I lurch like Charlie Chaplin in public people sometimes stare, and they don't know they're staring. They are the same people who open doors for me at the mall. Most people mean well.
Some accept the idea of the survival of the fittest, without considering what fitness is.
God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and has no adjustments to make, no gears to shift, when listening to a prayer offered in the name of Jesus, another prayer from the Qur=an, others from Hindu scripture. They=re all addressing the Eternal, and the Eternal hears them.
God models unity, but society celebrates diversity. God=s people clutch a blanket of separation, of pride in qualities they had no part in creating, having inherited them.
Scientists probe the universe, proclaim the possibility of life on a distant planet because, they say, the right conditions appear to be in place. There are signs of water, and water is essential to life, they tell us. Isn't it curious that men and women trained in science accept the notion that the only conceivable life in the universe has to be similar to the one the scientists live and know? They do not grant that life may have evolved differently on a sphere a million miles away, where water may have evolved into something we've never seen and cannot imagine.
Life on Earth is little understood, and has not even been examined in still-anonymous organisms on the floor of the oceans, or perhaps tracing its family tree in rock-bound caverns. Worms are living creatures, and so are cats, and so are humans. So are organisms too small to see without a microscope. They share a planet and all that comes with the planet, such as water and sunlight. Given the wide variety of living plants and animals on Earth, who can assume that life itself might have a different chemistry on another sphere?
Life is good, but humankind doesn't have a patent on it, or a proprietary formula for making it from scratch. Life is bigger than humanity, beyond anything imagined, evolving through its own resources.
When I emerged into life on March 12, 1925, Calvin Coolidge was president of the U.S., which was populated by 115,829,000 individuals. Today's population is estimated at about 308 million. The Army had no air corps, but 9,500 soldiers were assigned to the horse-drawn cavalry. Henry Ford in 1925 began to market his Model T in color. In addition to black it was now available in green or maroon. It was said that 332 foreign ships were engaged in liquor smuggling because of Prohibition.
Sometimes I wonder whether all of the OPCA/MSA symptoms are real, even when I know they are. I am very lucky to have caring family and friends, and to have a cheerful place to live, along with computers, music, books and time for meditation. OPCA/MCA changes are gradual, and that's a blessing. I've become a slow reader, but I can still read. I'm a slow eater, but I can still eat. My reflexes are slow, but they still work well enough to keep my bones intact. Distracting symptoms, meanwhile, are trying harder to get my attention.
God has not changed, but I have. A newborn kid knows its mom to be quite simple. Both mom and dad start out seeming one-dimensional and utilitarian to babes. As God's children grow older, and they spend more time hanging out with God, they know that God is their loving parent and not a magician. Then, as we get really old God enables us to talk too much, write too much and eat too much.

Prayer for a troubled church

2010-04-27T09:38:00.003-05:00

All-powerful Lord,
enable your church to reform itself,
to reject lust, greed and fear,
to honor the legacy of Christ.
Heal the sinister men and women
who betray the innocence of children
and the trust of humankind.
Let men with Napoleonic inclinations
become generals, not bishops.
Encourage, O Lord,
those who live by the Peter Principle
to live instead the Peter Apostolate.
May the holy family,
Father, Mother, Child,
be models for the ordained,
especially the weak among them,
for the Lord gave dominion
over every creeping thing
that creeps upon the earth.
Amen

Even the church is dizzy

2010-04-13T08:49:00.002-05:00

I hope you don’t mind your inclusion in the Rolodex prayers of an octogenarian, who finds it helpful to glance at the names of those who are most important to him while he holds them in prayer. The One who listens to my prayers knows your name even when my little card file is out of focus or out of reach. Day by wonderful day I give thanks for you, and ask the pardon of the Listener and you for my mostly-inadvertent failures, oversights and neglect.

God creates, then stands back and gives encouragement, sometimes like Dr. Spock with a halo instead of a hat with a cat, and sometimes like a boxing coach whose lessons include broken noses and scattered teeth. That’s why there are gaps in my smile.

The Creator has allowed me two wives, not simultaneously, three children, six grandchildren and countless friends and acquaintances, and others whose dislike for me is invincible. The Giver of life has allowed me 85 years so far. As I approach maturity I hope for a few more years to explore it, to ponder love and the denial of love, health and the absence of health. I’ll write fewer notes and letters.

The Lord of years has let me enjoy my work, but often at the expense of my family. The Teacher has let me make foolish and smart choices, has let me neglect some responsibilities and meet others, all while I taught, preached, reported, wrote, met and grew dizzy. Coincidentally, the church grew dizzily aware that large numbers of clergy had engaged in sex crimes, while church officials lied to the public and even to each other. At the same time the Catholic Church continued a painful decline in the number of priests and seminarians, and a diminished pool from which bishops are chosen.

My dizzy disease is rare and incurable, which makes it different from the dizzy instability of the churches. I sometimes feel as though I’m standing unsteadily at the edge of the Grand Canyon, only one misstep between me and a fall, but I’m never standing there alone.

Aloha, Ed

When priests make headlines

2010-03-29T17:39:00.002-05:00

An angry article in The Huffington Post, attributed to Richard Greener, asks two questions that ought to be answered.

What would be different, he asks, if men accused of sex crimes against children were not priests, but laymen, “such as janitors, security guards, maintenance workers” and others? Would the church and law enforcement agencies treat them differently?

The writers offers no evidence that they would be treated differently. Who knows how many janitors are accused of these crimes? It is not a matter of great interest to the news media. There are not many news articles updating the public on accusations against maintenance workers and security guards. Priests offer instant headlines, by virtue of their vocation, and stories about them provide any who are so inclined a blend of religious prejudice and purity.

The second question asked by the writer is this: “What does it take to make someone walk away from the Catholic Church?”

That’s like asking a citizen what it takes to make someone walk away from the USA, because of scandals and corruption involving officials of government at almost any level—police, Congress, governors, mayors. Is walking away from American citizenship the way to show contempt for American corruption?

There are jokes about people who try to be more Catholic than the Pope. But the Pope is no more Catholic than any member of the church. Every Catholic is part of the church, even as every American citizen is part of the United States. Catholics don’t “walk away” from their Catholic heritage just because they are shocked by the behavior of other Catholics. Responsible people do not “walk away” from the concerns of their family, their country or their religion. They sometimes try harder.

The Catholic Church needs the energy of its members who are committed to Christ Jesus, and to the ongoing reform of his living church. When the Vatican is perceived to neglect its pastoral mission, and leaders fail to lead, all of its members are called to pray and work for what the catechism calls “the church established by Christ on the foundation of the apostles.” It is an “assembly of the people God has called together from ‘the ends of the earth.’”

Optional celibacy for single Fathers

2010-03-27T16:13:00.001-05:00

There have been better times to be a church administrator.

In the late 1960s the Catholic Church, especially in America and Europe, was in disarray following Pope Paul VI’s rejection of modern birth control methods and attitudes.

Pope Paul VI had assembled an impressive group of theological and scientific experts to study contraception issues. Those experts reported to the pope that the traditional teaching should be significantly updated. The pope rejected their advice. The pope’s reaffirmation of traditional thou-shalt-nots for Catholic families was spelled out in July 1968 in an encyclical called Humanae Vitae, which dismayed huge numbers of lay and ordained Catholics. Some described the encyclical as choosing biology over morality.

A decade later the Catholic Theological Society of America commissioned a study of human sexuality, which said that “the Bible does not provide us with a simple yes or no code of sexual ethics.” Now, 45 years after the encyclical was published, it is supported by conservatives and largely overlooked by others.

Sometime in the mid-1960s Cardinal Lawrence Shehan appointed me to a panel he called the Abortion Committee of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. It included a noted doctor and a famous theologian. Among other things we were to develop recommendations for Cardinal Shehan and the doctor to take to Rome, where they were to serve on the papal commission.

The encyclical was eventually announced to press and public by one of the commission members, Ferdinand Lambruschini, who later became Archbishop of Bologna. I interviewed him at his home, where he told me that he and Cardinal Shehan were members of the commission majority who voted against the position Paul VI finally chose.

After defiance of the new encyclical had made newspaper headlines day after day, Cardinal Shehan one day looked up from his desk and said, “Oh, to be a bishop in Ireland!” He could not have foreseen the year 2010, when Irish bishops were resigning in disgrace.

Since Shehan’s time Catholic attention to human sexuality has taken on a new edge. In the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Germany, Denmark, Brazil—well, you name it, there are numerous accusations of priestly pedophilia. Nobody knows the ultimate cost to the victims, mostly boys, or the long-term effect on the credibility of the church.

This is not a new issue, but it is newly publicized. A few decades ago a Catholic might risk excommunication by suing for damages after a fall on the church steps. Catholics didn’t sue the church. They seldom reported abuse. When I was a police reporter the paper did not consider the arrest of priests on sex charges to be suitable news for family reading, and they were not reported.

When an Italian journalist said that Paul VI was gay, virtually everyone denied the possibility that one so highly placed could ever lapse from celibacy. Since then accusers have named cardinals and bishops. Lawsuits have cost billions of dollars in settlements and fees. Some dioceses have filed for bankruptcy.

When Cardinal John Cody was Archbishop of Chicago in the 1970s, sexual activities by priests were top secret. I was a member of the Archdiocese of Chicago Finance Committee at that time, but was given no information about possible cases or costs. The cardinal was preoccupied with resisting a federal grand jury’s curiosity about other matters, while also resisting efforts to dislodge him from his post and trying to shrug off tense relations with the press.

Many of my friends are priests, bishops, deacons and religious—exceptional people, devoted to Christ and always ready to serve him. Some of these friends are gay, some are not. Some take a kind of refuge in a celibate priesthood, where nobody nags them about getting married. If celibacy were optional, like vegetarianism, the beautiful humanity of the ordained and the religious could move beyond Don’t ask, Don’t tell, without reference to gender inclinations people are born with, or to the color of their eyes, hair or skin.

Let the church, especially its clergy and religious, replace celibacy with renewal. Let the church get back to doing the things it does best, things nobody else can do.

No pill cures all critics

2010-03-23T11:27:00.001-05:00

If someone stays late in a neighborhood pub, sipping vodkas until even the bartender loses count, nobody will be surprised when the drinker speaks with a slurred tongue and walks on lurching feet. Folks who overdose on alcohol or drugs have made a choice to confound their brain, their nervous system, even their vision.

Friends may have a different problem with a neighbor who does not drink, but who walks unsteadily, sometimes mumbles, trips over invisible obstacles, even gags and chokes for no reason anybody can see. This is the neighbor with an incurable neurological disease called olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA) or multiple systems ataxia (MSA). It is not Parkinson’s, but it is a form of Parkinsonism.

Many of its victims look fine, as long as they don’t stand up. Anybody looking at them might have no idea how risky it is for them to climb a flight of stairs, how dizzying it is to walk down the hemmed-in straightness of a theater aisle, or to drive across a bridge with steel supports rising on both sides.

You can’t blame anyone for not spotting the symptoms. Most doctors practice a lifetime without ever treating a patient for OPCA or MSA. Skilled neurologists may test a patient for a year or two before reaching a correct diagnosis.

There is no pill, no medical treatment of any kind, for the cure of this disease. Doctors may prescribe something for pain or dizziness or another symptom, but there’s nothing yet for the disease itself.

One of my friends who suffers pain and severely diminished activity because of OPCA parked in a handicapped space and walked into a pharmacy. A bystander yelled obscenities at her because she didn’t look disabled to him. Not long ago I reluctantly discontinued weekly visits by a deacon because OPCA made it impossible for me to participate as I had in the past. Even this was misunderstood by people who ought to know better, people incapable of imagining how a neurological disease may affect an unlucky patient.

Someday there will be wider understanding, and less uninformed judgment. Until then, the disdain of others is just one more symptom that can’t be stopped with a pill.

Never alone in prayer

2010-03-07T10:06:00.013-06:00

This week I turn 85, and people still ask me, as they have for several years, why I moved from semi-retirement in Central Florida to northern Illinois. Actually, I may be smarter than I seem. The move placed me in a condo just one mile from seven persons I love a lot, my daughter, son-in-law and five of my six grandchildren. There was another plus I knew nothing about ahead of time.

That was a welcoming parish church, St. Francis of Assisi, and its founding father, Fr. Edward Upton. St. Francis of Assisi in Orland Park, IL, is celebrating 20 years of service and growth. My wife died about a year after we moved here, and anonymous parishioners became caring as brothers and sisters. I had been diagnosed with a rare neurological disease, and before long I had to stop going to church.

Never mind. Until this week Deacon Joseph Truesdale came to my home every Sunday with the Eucharist and morning prayer. At other times during the liturgical year the pastor came.

This curious disease I live with is progressive, which means it keeps finding new ways to be a pain in the neck or elsewhere. It has no cure. It began to interfere with my swallowing apparatus, causing a lot of anxiety and stress. It makes feet stumble and eyes blur. This form of Parkinsonism includes brain atrophy, although I have never been a member of Congress. I began having to cancel the deacon’s visit Sunday after Sunday. Now I’ve asked him to remember me in prayers, but to visit someone else.

Those of us who can’t get to a church miss the give and take of people assembled in community, but that doesn’t mean we’re left out. Spiritual communion is a union with Jesus in the Eucharist through desire for it.

In Corpus Christi: An Encyclopedia of the Eucharist, Michael O’Carroll, C.S.Sp., writes that the practice of spiritual communion “was encouraged by great authorities in the spiritual life, such as St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis de Sales. Theologically the basis was sound: spiritual communion is the expression of desire, desire directed towards the Eurcharist, preferably explicit. The source of this desire is faith in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. This desire supplies for the act.”

Many read all or part of The Liturgy of the Hours, sharing with millions of priests, religious and laity who are reading the same scripture passages and prayers.

Today the Mass is offered via television and Internet screens, and for Christians who must stay at home there are many ways to pray with others. The Liturgy of the Hours is powerful choice, in full or abbreviated forms. Sunday readings are easily available via the Internet. Those readings may draw a person into Bible browsing, illustrated in the picture, upper left, which miraculously survived 68 years in storage. Since it was taken I've discarded thick pencils in favor of thin computers, as shown upper right.

In this 21st century some Christians even poke around in sacred writings of others.

The point is: Nobody has to be alone in prayer.

God, Elton John, and Other Facts

2010-02-22T16:43:00.001-06:00

Some of the scripture readings for Lent are intended to nag. So it was no big deal when I imagined myself standing on a pinnacle, and at my side a devil offering infinity if only I would hug word processors and embrace Merriam-Webster’s Third Unabridged.

This is only one way journalists are formed, and most of the others are quite respectable. The devil who tried to entice me was too late. I’m a born journalist, and I thank the Lord for providing the ink-stained genes.

The art of journalism developed slowly. Galleries and museums and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were alive centuries before journalists chronicled the lives, loves and talents of the artists. History has no beginning, but recorded history is recent. And it gets rewritten.

The Bible’s sense of history may be more secure in the Old Testament than in the New. If only The Associated Press had been there to verify the names and occupations and ages. If only The New York Times Magazine had interviewed Jesus about his childhood, while the New England Journal of Medicine annotated his healings. There might not be 2,000 Christian denominations if journalists had recorded all the facts, and they had been assured by The New Yorker’s fact-checkers.

If Peter Jennings and the Pulitzers had talked with founders of the great religions, discussions today would be on a different level.

Journalism has never changed more swiftly than it changes now, almost with every word that’s written. Where will the words be read? Maybe on a computer screen, maybe on the apparatus of an e-book, maybe on paper. What a surprise it is to the folks who a few years ago worried that a new generation of non-readers was at hand. People now will read anything. They read telephones, laptops, Blackberries, emails and games, and at least one political star reads her hands. People have fun with words. Goodbye scrabbled brains, hello Scrabble brains.

When I write about religion I’m still a journalist, but I’m working in a largely fact-free zone. No almanac tells me what Jesus weighed, the color of his eyes or what he crafted in carpentry. Of the millions of words he spoke, all too few are known. The shortage of facts kindles the imagination, as it did for Elton John, the singer and songwriter, who claimed to know about the private life of the crucified Christ. It is said that faith is a gift from God, while some laboratory-inclined thinkers are looking for it in genes. It is as mysterious as any talent, for music, painting, religion, writing or hitting home runs.

I thank the religion professionals and volunteers who keep the churches going, and the synagogues, mosques, temples and universities. One reason their work stirs awe is that it is accomplished with few facts held in common. God is a fact I was born with, like fingers reaching for a keyboard, and not a fact like the alphabet on the keyboard, which I had to learn. I forget God at times, even as I forget that God reclaims my memory a few drops at a time.

Freedom in the Church?

2010-01-12T08:59:00.002-06:00

Condensed from Catholic Mind, November 1966. Catholic Mind was published monthly by America Press, New York. Editor-in-chief, Thurston N. Davis, S.J. I wrote this in the same year that America Press published the monumental Documents of Vatican II. The translation editor was Fr. Joseph Gallagher, who was then consulting editor of The Catholic Review, and the introduction was by Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, who published The Catholic Review. Unlike many Catholics,some of them quite formidable, I do not retain all of my 1966 opinions unchanged or even in Latin. I am still appalled, as I was in 1966, by attempts to suppress intelligent discussion of religion.

By A. E. P. Wall

Not long ago The Catholic Review published an article about an American religious sect that is neither Protestant nor Catholic. The sect figured prominently in the news at the time, and it seemed worthwhile to discuss some of its teachings – its denial of the Trinity, for example, and its preparation for a spiritual heaven severely limited to a group no larger than the readership of The Catholic Review.
We received anonymous letters insisting that we had no right, in this ecumenical age, to publish anything that anybody might consider critical of any religious group. The anonymous letter-writers, lacking the courage of their own convictions, would deny religious convictions to others.

Or, if they acknowledge the right of others to believe in something they would forbid any conversation about it. Some would suppress this right because they think any public consideration of religion is ill-mannered.

Others miss the point that it is possible for men [and women] of good will to agree on such broad principles as the need for charity and the power of prayer, while disagreeing on other vital matters, such as the validity of the Mass and divinity of Our Lord.

Two who hold opposite ideas about the real presence, about the Trinity, about the role of the blessed mother, about the virgin birth and the resurrection cannot both be right. They can be friendly, they can be enthusiastic about things they have in common and they can be dedicated to ecumenism. But on important elements of faith one is right and the other is wrong.

Devotion to the unity ideal does not compel anyone, Protestant or Catholic, to pretend that differences do not exist.

It would be a tragedy of eternal significance for a Catholic to shield his eyes from the elements of his faith in the mistaken notion that this will make him a “good guy,” an aimless but amiable semi-believer.

The church does not offer a religious smorgasbord from which a person may select the Our Father because it is in everybody’s recipe book, but reject the Assumption because it is too rich for his neighbor’s taste.

There is freedom within the church – and in some cases that freedom has been abused. There are restraints within the church – and in some cases those restraints have been abused. There is confusion today about freedom and restraints.

In the tense days early in 1941, President Roosevelt spoke to Congress about Four Freedoms. he presented these as freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. These freedoms are fundamental in the American republic, although they are not absolute.

Freedom of speech and expression do not extend to the intentional publication of the slanderous, libelous or treasonable. Freedom of worship permits a variety of beliefs, but does not provide for the advocacy in the name of religion of bigamy or perversion. Freedom from want does not license theft, and freedom from fear does not permit the extermination of one’s enemies.

Each of these freedoms is alive in the church, subject only to the teachings of Christ, his apostles and their successors, and to the laws adopted to preserve and implement those teachings. These laws are subject to review, but they are neither adopted nor amended in hasty response to the demands of columnists.

[Some suggest] a sort of TV rating system to determine which sins have become too popular to be taken seriously. They would substitute consensus for collegiality, voting booths for confessionals and the Gallup Poll for the Creed. If Christ must be rated in committee debates, if Mary must pass the same test as Miss Universe, if the Holy Spirit must be made acceptable to Planned Parenthood and the Ten Commandments ratified in an annual election, some of the goals of our time will be met.

The price will be the death, not of God, but of the spirit of God as prime mover in human hearts. We approach God through sacrifice and selflessness, and all men have the freedom to make this approach.

A faculty-student strike at Catholic University

2009-12-29T17:40:00.001-06:00

It was springtime, 1967, when trustees of Catholic University of America pushed Fr. Charles E. Curran’s name and picture into newspapers and television news programs. American Catholics, enthusiastic about their church when the Second Vatican Council concluded in 1965, were unsettled when those trustees announced that Fr. Curran’s contract to teach in the theology department would not be renewed.

A student and faculty strike began on April 19. Fr. Curran was cautious about talking to the press, and did not agree to my request—or anybody’s request -- for an interview. Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, the archbishop of Baltimore, intervened to assure Fr. Curran that I knew my trade and would probably not misquote him. Shehan had the political skills to become a cardinal; he had the commitment to conscience to become a saint.

So the interview went on. It was published in the April 28, 1967 issue of The Catholic Review and in the June 1967 issue of Catholic Mind. It is published below. In 1986 Fr. Curran was dismissed from Catholic U. as a dissident. A 1986 decision by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Josef Cardinal Ratzinger—now Pope Benedict XVI—declared that Fr. Curran was neither suitable nor eligible to be a professor of Catholic theology.

The American Association of University Professors issued a report that said, “Had it not been for the intervention of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Professor Curran would undoubtedly still be active in the [Catholic University] Department of Theology, a popular teacher, honored theologian and respected colleague.” Fr. Curran accepted a full tenured professorship at Southern Methodist University, where Catholic students are said to outnumber Methodists by a wide margin. Here’s the 1967 interview:

By A. E. P. Wall

A happily harrassed Fr. Charles E. Curran poked his head into the doorway of a fellow priest’s room [on the Washington, D.C., campus of Catholic University of America]. It was the same head that had been poking its way into millions of living rooms during the previous few days.

Fr. Curran Smiled and extended a sinewy arm. The T-shirt he wore emphasized his slender build and added to the visitor’s quick impression that he was shaking hands with a senior counselor at a boys’ camp. But it was an associate professor of moral theology who spoke.

For Fr. Curran it was the end of the first day of classes following the spontaneous shutdown of the Catholic University of America by its faculty and student body. Did it mean the end of his own active concern about changes on the campus?

“I don’t think it can be,” the 33-year-old theologian said after stepping into more familiar priestly attire. “The issues involve more than just one person.

“We’re going to have to improve the situation in many ways to allow for better communication in the area of theology itself and in the academic processes here at Catholic University.”

The words came out quietly. For Fr. Curran it was a simple statement of fact.

He had another fact in mind and he leaned forward in a massive leather chair to emphasize what he had to say. The dispute that began when Fr. Curran was told his contract would not be renewed had nothing to do, he explained, with birth control or any other doctrinal matter. None of the student or faculty strikers drew the issues in terms of obedience or disobedience to episcopal authority. The question, it might be said, was purely academic.

“The unanimous reaction of the students and the faculty,” Fr. Curran said, “is proof of the fact that the issue was not doctrinal or moral. Disputed issues do not produce a unanimous reaction.

“In this question the academic community was united. You couldn’t unite this community on birth control. You couldn’t even unite the academic community on God, because the faculty is not made up entirely of Catholics.”

The issue was academic freedom, to be exercised in harmony with university statutes. As an immediate issue it was resolved when the announcement came that Fr. Curran’s contract would be renewed and that an academic promotion had been granted.

Now, Fr. Curran said, it is time to consider some long-range relationships. “These relationships will affect theology itself and the work of all theologians in the Church,” said the popular young priest whose height—more than six feet—could not be swallowed up even by the hefty chair.

“The lines of communication—you might call them conduits—with the bishops have to be opened up,” Fr. Curran said.

He paused and then added: “This is not a revolt against authority. Ever since Vatican II we have known that authority in the Church must be exercised in new and different ways.”

Does this suggest a delegation of authority?

“No,” Fr. Curran said quickly, “let’s compare it with the way society functions today and in the past. At one time there was a monarchical form of government in most of the world. Today there is a movement toward democratic government. If you look at the structure of business today, at the corporation, you find that everybody throws in ideas and that there is little one-man rule.

“The Council told us that each one has his own role to play. This involves a dialogue and a listening process. As a practical matter it involves the opening of channels.

“I think there is a realization that authority will be exercised in a different way in the future. This is indicated by the organization of modern society, which does not operate from the top down. Each one contributes. We stimulate each other to contribute to the good of all.

“This sort of thing has to happen in the Church.”

Fr. Curran spoke of a greater participation by everyone in the Church, and he was asked whether he envisions the election of bishops by priests and the laity.

“That has been proposed,” he said, “and it is not a new idea. But frankly, let’s realize that there can be problems in elections, too.

“One of the problems of today is a unilateralism, an overly simplistic approach that leads men to say, ‘All you have to do is . . .’”

Although he doesn’t see voting as a guarantee of right action or democracy as a blanket to smother all discontent, Fr. Curran does see an opportunity for increased participation in Church affairs by both the laity and the clergy.

What about newspapers, radio and television as external communications media?

“We can’t ultimately solve all of our problems on the front page,” Fr. Curran said. “We must create a structure other than headlines.

“In the long, hard pull such structures can be difficult. The danger is that some people say we don’t need structures. We do need them, and they must be flexible, adaptable to the needs of the times.”

How did we get this way?

2009-12-26T07:21:00.000-06:00

Christians celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation, the merging of the divine and human in Christ Jesus. This revelation was ahead of its time, proclaimed by Jesus and his followers to a primitive world.

We know more about everything today. The math of Herod’s time was not the math of Einstein’s. Changes are huge in what we know about agriculture, literature, medicine, law, astronomy and everything else. That includes religion.

Many leaders and followers in religious groups insist that God allows the development of every kind of knowledge except knowledge of religion. This notion of a limited God limiting the devout in their pursuit of religion, while granting unlimited growth in every other field of human endeavor,is disabling.The evolution of religious knowledge is resisted, not merely to protect a perceived franchise but in defense of convictions which are powerfully held, even if powerfully wrong.

Jesus provided a stunning revival of divinity’s eternal, perpetual adventure in humanity, an incarnation as old as Adam,and older. Incarnation may be celebrated as an event and as a process.

It might be called, with a smile, the Inplantanation and Incarnation, the divine purpose apparent in everything that lives and grows. Evidence that living plants feel injury, move toward sunshine and respond to care has been studied by scientists for decades. Incarnation began before the beginning.

Toyland, starting in 1929

2009-12-24T16:27:00.000-06:00

At Christmas time I think of some of my favorite toys. Remember yours?

At age 4,on the last Christmas of the 1920s, I received a Lionel electric train, my dad’s choice. That same year I was given alphabet blocks with letters and illustrations on them. The only one I remember is Z for Zulu.

Age 6 brought a small cast iron truck, one of my all-time favorite toys, and space in the garden for building roads.

When I was about 8 years old I prized a toy that made lead soldiers and cowboys. The toy melted lead, which I poured into molds.

Another favorite was an electric burning tool, which burned designs and drawings into wood or leather.

A chemistry set provided hours of fun. I discovered that I could buy some of my replacement chemicals at the drug store, which was cheaper than ordering by mail.

A toy typewriter required dialing one letter at a time, and it did not know how to spell. It was succeeded by a hand-operated printing press.

A battery-powered Morse code telegraph toy, with keys for sender and receiver, allowed for the transmission of secret messages over distances of many feet.

I once envied my pal John Adams, who received 10 different titles in the Big Little Book series for Christmas. That was a whole dollar’s worth of books.

By age 11 my favorite possession was a bike, which had a speedometer. I rode it a lot and for long distances.

That period included another favorite, a small radio in my bedroom. This was before the time of FM radio and television. I heard the famous newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn report the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. I heard Adolph Hitler harangues on the rising and falling waves of sound peculiar to overseas transmissions, his strident tones bringing yells of Sieg Heil from the crowd.

--Ed

When the elderly act like the youngerly

2009-12-16T05:45:00.000-06:00

Sometime after her 80th birthday my mom asked for help with a questionnaire. The blanks she wanted to fill in were blurry and her reading glasses no longer helped. She said she had become the child and her son had become the helpful parent. In fact, little kids are just starting to grow, learn and become self-sufficient, but the elderly have stopped growing, are becoming forgetful and need help with things they’ve taken for granted. It is a time of remembered independence and unsettling dependence.

My older friends, even those who have the same medical concerns that I have, are different from me and each other, even as we all adjust to a world of canes, wheelchairs and pills.

Several times a week I trade emails with a girl I knew in high school. We were in the same graduating class in the peaceful days before Pearl Harbor. I was in touch with several boys I knew as far back as kindergarten and one by one they disappeared, all of them. I treasure other friendships, some recent and some going back a long way.
My greatest blessing is my children and their spouses, and grandchildren. I don’t really think of them that way—as a group. Each one is precious and personal.

For all blessings I thank God, who is said to be the same now and forever, but who doesn’t seem the same as when we were introduced in the late 1920’s. When I was four years old I went to bed wondering what God was writing down about my day. It had been explained in Sunday school that God recorded every jot and tittle.

Eighty years later I go to bed after reading my Kindle, not expecting that God is noting that I broke a coffee carafe this morning. I have some inquiries of my own, such as how come there are so many wars and so many hungry people and so much sickness? Maybe that’s because I’m a journalist, always ready to uncap my fountain pen and write down what I see and hear. Even when God answers one of my questions I know there’s no point in trying to get it past the city editor.

Almost everybody offers help. It is almost impossible for someone with a walker to open a door. Someone leaps ahead and holds it open. Everybody who uses a walker in public is treated like a cardinal or a rock star, for whom all doors are opened. Neighbors offer rides, share friendship, shovel snow, carry packages, phone reminders that the garage door is still open.

There are lots of jokes about getting old, because old people can be funny, and not just when they shuffle like comedian Charlie Chaplin or when they blunder blindly like Mr. Magoo. There are wisecracks about wasting youth on the young, who don’t appreciate it, and about old age not being for sissies. But stresses begin at birth, not on the day Social Security checks begin.

Babies are cute, but grandma doesn’t have to be burped.

Lyndon B. Obama at West Point

2009-12-02T04:35:00.000-06:00

It was a little bit like listening to Lyndon B. Obama.

When President Barack Obama spoke eloquently of his goals in far-off Afghanistan that name popped into my mind—Lyndon B. Obama. Lyndon Johnson began, like Obama, earning the trust and admiration of the nation. Johnson also began his presidency as a man of high ideals. It was not his good intentions, but his rickety judgment that disrupted a generation of Americans.

While Barry Obama was smiling in his crib in Honolulu, Vice President Johnson was answering questions for journalists in an impromptu outdoor news conference a few blocks away. It is memorable for me nearly half a century later, when memory tends to be fickle, because a reporter’s cigar shed glowing ashes onto my jacket, where they continued to smolder.

Within a year or so, Johnson had become president, promising a war on poverty but drained by a war in Vietnam and the urge to escalate, like a gambler who doubles his bets each time he loses until finally he runs out of chips.

Is Obama’s idealism, which has held great promise for him and the country, blurring his judgment, which until now has been so cool? A nation in economic recession, with a creaky education apparatus, unresolved health care issues and a rusting system of highways, bridges, rail and air transport, asks such questions.

In his address at West Point, President Obama spoke of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose family home isnearby, also on the Hudson River. Roosevelt, who began his presidency in the economic gloom of the Great Depression, was commander-in-chief when bombs rained on the island that would become Obama’s home. Hindsight shows that FDR didn’t always make the best decisions, as in the scandal of Japanese-American internment camps. He did not choose to go to war. The war came to him.

President Obama has more choices than FDR, plus whatever benefit there may be in hindsight, while an anxious world wants to believe in his foresight.

Instant news

2009-11-13T10:36:00.000-06:00

Eighty years ago I watched my grandpa as he read the Jamestown Post. My grandma read Street and Smith’s Love Story magazine, while my mom was immersed in the CLSC – the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Society. I still have the diploma she was awarded at the Chautauqua Institution sometime around 1930. My dad went for detective stories.

I thought my grandpa’s choice was the best, because newspapers had comic strips. It was like learning how to play the game when, at age 4, I was enrolled in kindergarten, where Rose Crane taught me to read. Since then I’ve read every word that’s passed my eyes, beginning with signs posted in the streetcars warning that spitting was awful. It took me a while to learn that spitting may be awful, but the sign really said it was unlawful. So many words. So little time to learn them all.

Maybe it was genes, maybe it was destiny or maybe it was just plain luck that I became a newspaper reporter and editor. Maybe it was a blessing from God, like my children and grandchildren.

My life has been wrapped in newsprint.

So how come I’ve just cancelled my subscriptions to four daily newspapers?

Before that, things happened. Newspapers stopped using lead type and Linotype machines. They stopped using zinc for pictures. They even stopped using typewriters. Ways to publish the news have changed since Ben Franklin printed a page at a time.

The online newspaper editions are pretty good, and getting better. The arrival of an Amazon Kindle book machine at my house this week stirred things up. I stopped home delivery of countless pounds of paper and subscribed to two of the dailies via Kindle. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune are ready for me by 5 in the morning, and dozens of papers are reachable through Kindle and my computer.

My dad earned his living playing the pipe organ during silent movies, providing the “bells and whistles” for the celluloid dramas. As a boy I learned how to set type by hand, reaching into the right compartment for each letter without a glance. Movie and publishing methods have gotten a lot better. Thanks for the memories, Mr. Gutenberg.

What does God care?

2009-10-27T16:52:00.000-05:00

　
Religion is an ongoing investigation of the unfairness of life.

Religion looks at heroic humans who rescue strangers from floods and fires. It looks at others who murder, rape, steal and take pleasure in the pains of their victims. It looks at the brilliant and gifted, and at children born troubled. It sees the well-nourished and the starving and tries to understand why God’s standards sometimes seem to be lower than human standards

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Does God not care very much about the world and its inhabitants, or can religion discover purpose in the lapses and deficiencies of creation?

Christians celebrate centuries of sermons, liturgies, sacrifices and praise by eliminating poor boxes because they attract thieves, and spending sums of congressional dimensions to pay off victims of abuse in churches, orphanages and schools.

Those who believe that God is Love are certain that God is not Hate, even though love and hate are both evident in the world. Christians famously denounce each other for thinking outside catechisms and tenets. Christian homes are not always the cheerful centers of cooperation and forgiveness that faith might encourage. Churches have been known to explode in angry confrontations between people, lay and clerical, who despise each other in the name of God. What can be more chilling than that? It was people of religious faith who favored the death penalty for Jesus, crying out for deadly torture on the cross

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Scripture scholars, such as the late Father Raymond E. Brown, the brilliant Sulpician priest, have liberated venerable writings from some of the restraints imposed upon them by well-meaning guardians. They guarded the past, dragging their sandals as the past became the present. Customs changed, cultures developed, languages took on new meanings, but religion’s guardians kept it separate from life and froze it solid, right where it was many cultures ago. Although that attitude is described today as fundamentalist, it has little in common with fundamental, ongoing creation, symbolized as seven days by long-ago scribes, who did not lock up their scrolls after writing about the first day.

Some dispute the notion of God. Sometimes folks disbelieve in the same god, as in the gimme god of creedal capitalism, or the god who sanctions hatred, or the god whose followers have buried him in deserts past. I never figured out what God looks like, but I pray to the same Lord I've known for eight and a half decades, the Lord of all. I began those decades in a country that allowed legal discrimination against Jews, African Americans and others, discrimination which repudiated much that an earlier generation, including some of my ancestors, had fought for in a civil war. When I was young, some states prohibited interracial marriage, even as many now prohibit gay marriage. Only five years before I was born, and one year after my mother and father were married, the U.S. Constitution was amended to say: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States of by any state on account of sex."

One blessing of advanced age is its gift of perspective, of eyes that have seen members of a majority race battle in war, in legislatures and in courts to assure equal rights for all races and all persons, without reference to the gender, to the sexuality given them at birth.

Prayers never seem to get answered all at once, especially all of the "whereas" motions of the person at prayer, but somebody seems to be listening.

If the church looks hopeless...

2009-10-13T06:21:00.000-05:00

The Roman Catholic Church is the gold-and-myrrh standard by which all Christian churches are evaluated, to the considerable exasperation of those churches and to the confusion of the Romans, who have no idea where anemia comes from.

Today’s Catholic Church is not the church of your grandma, especially in the United States. Around 1960 your mom might throw out Friday’s dinner because she inadvertently dropped a forbidden meatball into the spaghetti. She may have worn herself out shopping around neighboring parishes to find a confessional with a laid-back priest who would grant absolution from the sin of birth control.

Mom sat with the kids at Sunday Mass. Dad mingled with other men just outside the church, smoking and keeping within the prescribed number of feet of the building required for technical attendance at Mass. The priest was reciting the words in Latin, with his back to the congregation, while some of the faithful were reciting the rosary and others were reading English translations in their missals.

Faith was not complicated. Folks attended Mass and avoided meat on Fridays, dropped coins into the poor box, supported the school kids who sold subscriptions to the Catholic paper. People followed the rules most of the time. Everybody knew that on the day of his ordination, Father became God’s agent, able to bring Jesus to the altar and to forgive sins, a super-person respected fervently whether anybody liked him or not. Catholics did not compliment him on his sermons because everyone knew it was presumptuous to do so, inasmuch as all sermons were worthy of praise and did not need any comment from laity. When I was a young police reporter in the 1940s I was told not to report the arrest of priests charged with something called crimes against nature. To do so would be unsuitable in a family newspaper. Just the other day a cardinal said in an interview that, after all, only a tiny percentage of clergy is convicted of crimes against children.

The Church is the world’s oldest continuous institution, older than any government, so it is surprising how quickly it changed. All of a sudden the Mass was celebrated in English and other languages familiar to worshipers. Polls revealed that Catholic reliance on birth control was about the same as the rest of the population. Priests were arrested for sex crimes against children, even in Ireland, along with bishops, archbishops, cardinals and nuns. Seminaries and convents drew fewer young men and women. It is said that the Catholic press has never had less influence. Commonweal, one of the most distinguished Catholic magazines in a country of 70 million Catholics, reported a circulation of less than 20,000.

There are still more than a billion Catholics, but after a couple of thousand years some wonder what difference a billion Catholics have made in the world. Are countries formed in the Catholic culture – Italy, Spain, Haiti, Argentina – evangelizing the world? Has Europe, like the salt Jesus mentions, lost its savor?

Why, given such questions, is the Church still the most tenacious of all institutions? Its priests are the most giving of men, surrendering themselves not to bomb people in crowded markets but to show them how to live. Some, gifted politically, become bishops, only their faces visible among yards of decorated ceremonial fabric, a so-there to gowned secular princes and Pharisees. No matter how hopeless circumstances may appear, hope is the nature of Church.

Wondering about the game

2009-10-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

In 1929, when I was four years old, carpet golf was as popular as the new talking picture shows and Lucky Strikes sold in flat-fifty cigarette tins.

My mom and dad took me to an indoor golf course, where the idea was to play a series of holes until reaching the most intriguing one, the final hole, which called for a sharp eye and determined swing. It was more interesting to a four-year-old than all the others combined, and that’s where I wanted to start.

This agitated my parents. Once a player popped a ball into the last hole it disappeared into a box. Game over, nickel spent, no refund. How interesting. I wondered what happened to the ball when it vanished, and remained more focused than my parents. While they were distracted with hole number one I managed to steer my ball into the last hole, where I heard it thump into invisibility.

I did not understand the despair of my mom and dad, because I had gone straight for the science of the game, the mystery of the vanishing ball.

The gift of life goes on for everybody until the gift of death arrives. I scarcely thought about it in a personal way until something reminded me of that disappearing golf ball, and I wondered about the next game.

Where did all the helpers come from?

2009-10-10T07:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday my beautiful daughter drove me to the supermarket, as she does every week. We each do our shopping, then she drives me home, whisks my packages into my kitchen and then goes home with her own groceries. Marie always makes me feel that life begins at 84, and that a rather exclusive ailment called olivopontocerebellar atrophy is something to be lived and explored.

Yesterday I learned a couple of things about my supermarketing. Marie acknowledged that she sometimes drops me at the store after her own busy day at work, then goes home for a shower, returns to the store and finishes her shopping just ahead of me. I had not noticed how much time I was spending in those aisles, and I was glad there was no taxi meter running.

The other thing I noticed yesterday was that other customers, strangers, occasionally offered to help me find something on the shelves or to load something from shelf to shopping cart. Why were they doing this? What was I doing to draw their friendly attention? I still have a pretty good grip on the shopping cart, which is a first class substitute for a rollator, and the supermarket is where I do my weekly walking marathon.

I guess that most life changes are as subtle as that, one day unknowingly drawing the attention of generous strangers, and realizing that your daughter’s love includes a lot of patience.

–Ed

Did you say something?

2009-09-22T11:12:00.000-05:00

I remember almost everything that happened to me during the past 80 years, with the exception of whatever happened today. My Dad had been playing pipe organs to set the mood for silent movies, and then he installed sound systems for the new talkies. Almost everybody listened to the radio in those days. Radio announcers and actors were invisible. Their audience could not see what they were doing, or whether they were frightened or smiling. What they said was it. Enunciation was in, ear-strain was out.

Sometimes I don’t hear what’s being said. People amuse themselves by watching their words go in one of my ears and come out the other. This has little to do with how loudly or gently the words are spoken, but with olivopontocerebellar atrophy, the exclusive ailment I live with, known, if not very well-known, as OPCA. My OPCA experience now includes constant and intrusive dizziness. You’ve heard of taffy pulls, and probably seen the machines that pull strands of sticky salt water taffy in amusement parks. OPCA imitates that process. I walk around as though my head is stuffed with salt water taffy.

That taffy-pull makes me pay attention when I’m walking, or reaching for things, or taking a shower. This concentration often blots out other things going on at the same time. If someone is telling me something while I’m thinking about my next step or lifting my coffee cup, there’s a chance I will listen but not hear.

On the other hand, I sometimes miss what’s being said on TV or radio because of what historians may someday record as The Great 21st Century Lip Lapse. Even some of the pros drop syllables and merge words into each other, and some directors permit actors to dissolve their most fascinating words into a whisper understood only by alert lip readers. Could this difficulty in shaping words be a consequence of advanced styles of romance? Movies and TV dramas become more competitive, shootings become more bloody, car crashes more crumpling and kisses more aggressive. The Hoover kiss has emerged, its brief vacuum perhaps reshaping the lips, tongue and voice box.

Politicians and retirement brochures speak of golden years, sometimes seeming closer rust than gold. Every year is golden, but all is not gold that Twitters.

Coming clean about grime and punishment

2009-08-22T13:10:00.000-05:00

Words were a pleasure the Victorians could display in public, an exercise of pure mind rather than impure limbs. Thus countless letters concluded with the words Your obedient servant, signed with whatever flourish could be managed without blotting the watery ink.

When I question my brain I’m always the obedient servant, obeying brain’s directions because I have no choice. Brain is in charge. It originates or vetoes all decisions. It doesn’t appear to think about them. The heart beats, a wound bleeds, the eyes blink, a lie is told, forbidden chocolate is swallowed, an angry punch is delivered, a smile appears and lunch digests without much of a thought, obedient to the brain and whatever instructions have been carried from brain stem to lower back stern by the body’s own Ma Bell network.

Talking to my brain is not like praying to God. I love God and really want to do God’s will. That requires choices. It is hard to know God’s will about killing people in a just war versus an unjust war, or even about killing prisoners when the robed priests of the judiciary turn their thumbs down versus killings authorized by government secret agents, gang bosses or other practitioners of organized grime.

This problem has been around for a long time

The apostle Paul had a problem with this, too. In his letter to the Romans, chapter 7, verses 19 and 20, he tells it this way: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

“Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

For Christians, sin is a technical word, the way heart is a technical word for surgeons and something else for Hallmark. Preachers sometimes call for punishing the sin and not the sinner, a view seldom applied to fellow preachers who are sex offenders. Paul once cited deference given to an unknown god, but if there’s an unknown devil its name is Sex, baffling and threatening to believers from the time of Eve. It is a religious mystery, but its experience is denied to the Roman priesthood. It lives on in an undercovers sort of way, especially among the laity. Some look to scientists, some to clergy, for answers.

Believers of all religions and of none feel an urge to live good lives while also, like St. Paul, pondering urges that may be disturbing. Systems of justice have no consistent way to deal with bad behavior beyond punishing the guilty in the same old ways. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work.

What does matter is strengthening the search for justice and its lesser-known twin, mercy, particularly in protecting children from sexual violence. Ireland, which not long ago was a model for religious devotions, has imploded in sex scandals of historic concern. The victims were children and most of the accused were priests, brothers and nuns.

These and hundreds of similar crimes are reported day by day, but little is understood about preventing them. Apprehending the perpetrators, who include men and women of every description and occupation, is only a beginning. It should trigger heavy-duty programs to find out what makes otherwise ordinary men and women prey on children, programs comparable to campaigns against AIDS, polio, TB and other threats.

Does anyone choose to be a despised molester of little kids? So how do they get that way? Can they be identified and helped, or will they prey on the young until they’re sent to prison and their victims live on with the horror of it?

All we know for certain is that the prospect of prison does not deter the folks who commit these crimes. That’s not enough to know about this monster behavior.

When faith is lost, where do you look for it?

2009-08-10T13:57:00.000-05:00

I like my house. I’m hooked on a heating and air conditioning system that keeps the place pleasant during blizzards and heat waves. Shelves of familiar books, a washer and dryer that always hum when we’re together, frayed favorite carpets, towels and shirts, all are plusses in this place where I’m used to the aggressive cat hair.

It isn’t as up to date as it could be, and it doesn’t have a swimming pool, but it is okay and comfortable and challenging all at the same time. It is sort of like church.

Sometimes faith gets dry, like the plants my wife left for me.

When things break down, I don’t ever think about walking away from the house and never coming back. Sometimes church breaks down, as in inquisitions, burning of witches, disdain for Christ’s example of love and forgiveness, sexual misadventures, cruelty toward the poor and the collapse of character into self-satisfaction.

Plumbing problems at home? I won’t move out. Integrity problems at church? They could provide a cover for religious anarchists, victims of neglect and spiritual loners to shed it all, but this lets a spiritual recession tumble into a great depression of the spirit.

Architects will build better houses as time goes by, and believers be better at building faith. Nothing is more real than faith, or less understood. The evolution of the created world is tediously gradual. So is the evolution of faith.

Church is described as the mystical body of Christ, unseen except in its human dimension of pulpits, pews and steeples. Faith in this visible church is a counterfeit of faith in the mystical body. To lose confidence in the pulpit is not the same as losing belief in God. Doubts come and go. The Eternal never goes.

Human faces fill empty spaces

2009-07-10T09:31:00.001-05:00

By A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

I drove all of the navigable sidewalks on my electric scooter, but the neighborhood just looked empty. When you live alone there are times when you’d like to fill up those empty spaces with human faces. While I was bumping along, watching out for cracks and crevices in the pavement, I thought about a friend I haven’t seen in 70 years. We used to ride our bikes on sidewalks like that.

My wife’s diabetes took her into medical catastrophes as painfully pointless as waterboarding. At the same time I began stumbling and fumbling, courtesy of a neurological short circuit. We sold our house, said goodbye to a quarter century of friends, and moved a thousand miles or so to be close to family. Sally’s diabetes became even more aggressive, she moved to a nursing home, and didn’t live long after that.

Anybody who makes that kind of switch at a certain age, and with a disease that will soon stop him from driving, is lucky to have family and good neighbors nearby. But long-time friends and co-workers are not there. There are no jobs. If the move is into residential suburbia, and long winters, hobbies are savored. God bless computers!

So as I steered my scooter along bike paths and sidewalks my thoughts went from Billy Anderson, my 1930s bicycle pal, to others who put some real happiness and friendship into my life. I became so caught up in it that after I went home I started writing down the names, and picturing the people in my mind.

Some were childhood pals, some were girls I dated 65 or 70 years ago, some were co-workers and a couple of them were wives (but not simultaneously).

This was fun. I tried tracking some of them down via the Internet. I’m ruling out the grouches and remembering a lot of upbeat, smiling people.

This is dandy medicine. It isn’t covered by Medicare, but then, it doesn’t cost anything. It perks up the blood and lightens the feet. It will be a permanent part of my rebuttal when a self-centered mood starts to take shape, the mood that says even the silent monks see other monks, that a cat is good but not always good enough.

There’s no patent on this idea. Just think Rewind, and look for the cheerful voices and grinning faces out of the life you’re living. Call it daydreaming, call it mentalism, call it whatever describes it for you. I call it God’s gift—bigger even than the computer.

What we don't know about crime is a crime

2009-07-01T12:30:00.000-05:00

By A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

The declaration that “all men [and women] are created equal” suggests more about the graceful character of early American patriots than about the intentions of a Creator.

Drawing upon English traditions and common law, the men who conceived the Declaration of Independence affirmed that everyone should have equal protection under the law. That was a revolutionary idea. It still is.

Angry revolutionaries seen on 21st century television sometimes risk their lives to challenge unjust rulers, but with more thought for the triumph of their cause than of equality for everyone, no matter what their religion or gender may be.

Men of property, planters and printers, teachers and preachers, were among the leaders of the American revolution and all they had to do was look around and see that all men were created equal to each other under English common law. Their eyes were upon each other, but they scarcely noticed their wives and daughters and sisters. Even those who were descended from indentured servants, shipped to the colonies, didn’t see slaves as equals under the law of the creator or the law of men.

Men voted for women’s rights

Many are the refinements of law, inspired by the revolution’s enthusiasm for persons more than property. Slavery was eventually abolished by white citizens who fought for emancipation. The right of women to vote was established by the only citizens who had the votes to do it--men. These were actions of a maturing society with an evolving grasp of what it means to be equal.

Whipping posts, dunking as punishment or interrogation, tormenting a prisoner in stocks, were rejected one by one. A prison cell for debt, self-defeating as it was, lost its place in the justice system.

Sending children to work in mines and factories came to an end, and children were given a status close to equality.

More recently the nation’s conscience began to unravel historic misconceptions about homosexuality. Maybe it wasn’t an ugly choice made by a disarranged mind, but instead a consequence of the way the genes lined up. Some babies were born with one sexual orientation, some with another, some were girls and some were boys, some had dark hair and some had light. Some, tragically, were born with alarming physical problems.

As people understood that being different is not the same as being unnatural, the punishment of consenting adults as criminals for engaging in homosexual activities came to a halt.

Laws to prevent two persons of different races from marrying? It seems incredible, but such laws were enforced not so long ago.

Knowing how little we know

Not even the sages of science were immune to the cramped beliefs of recent generations about criminality, sexuality and race. The smartest observers today know that most of what can be learned about these matters is still to be learned.

The United States is in the third world of justice and law, with the largest prison population on earth and disclosure that its highest officials sanctioned a return to torture as though 1776 had never been lived. Neither police nor courts, neither legislatures nor news media, know why people commit crimes. Burglary, rape, embezzlement, stabbing, cheating are predictable—but the people who do those things are not. Punishment hasn’t stopped those crimes in the last thousand years.

Shady impulses stir criminal behavior, and nobody knows much about it. Congress and state legislatures cannot even pass foolproof laws to wipe out their own institutional corruption once and for all.

People still look to secular government and to religious institutions to set rules of peace, justice and morality, and to be models of faithfulness to the rules. Instead, religion and state provide ongoing models of hope being dimmed by stress, indifference and corruption. Sexual abuse of children and adults is widely associated with churchmen, including cardinals and bishops in the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant evangelicals and leaders in other faiths.

How equal is dementia?

Religion’s adherents and converts may overcome failures, and encourage others to enrich the lives of themselves and others, but religious devotion is not expected to change qualities given to a person at birth. Religious teachings are generally presented in a “one size fits all” format, applicable to everybody in the same way. Nobody has figured out how someone who starts life with the burden of dementia, maybe an anti-social or psychosexual disorder, will absorb the golden rule as taught in Sunday school or celebrated in sermons.

Criminals cause crime, and it would be more efficient and cheaper to find out what’s nudging them and how to intervene, but it hasn’t happened. Apparently some people enjoy taking chances, pressing their luck without going to a casino, cheating on taxes and stealing from wimps. The glib claim that poverty causes crime has never been true, and its absurdity never more evident than in the arrest of billionaires for cheating themselves, their friends, the poor and the government. Prison terms are no more successful in wiping out crime than in preventing hurricanes.

Given the world’s experience with political organizations both secular and religious, campaigns, committees, letters to the editor, lawsuits and countersuits, climate change may put beaches on Pike’s Peak before justice issues are resolved. We ought to find out what really causes people to murder, steal and destroy, and how they might be drawn to healthier occupations.

Getting older? You bet your life

2009-06-19T18:38:00.000-05:00

By A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

When I was a middle-aged fan of the feathered I used to think about retiring with binoculars in another decade or two, enjoying plenty of time for birdwatching.

When I finally got around to retiring the owls were hooting at me because I had the time, but I no longer had eyes that could even spot squirrels poking at my bird feeders. My ophthalmologist recommended that I buy bigger light bulbs. The owls hooted some more.

That was a long time ago. And now, 26 years after I joined, I’ve received a renewal notice from the AARP, as the American Association of Retired Persons is known. I’m offered a choice. I can renew for 1 year, or 3 years, or 5 years. As an optimist I’m opting for 5 years, which will cover me until a bit before my 90th birthday.

A friend told me that’s a ripe old age, and I thought I’d do a fact-check on that. What makes someone ripe? One reference book says something may be called ripe when its thread-like tendrils discolor and stop growing. Check!

Another way, especially if you’re wondering about a melon, is to rap on it to see whether it sounds hollow. If it sounds hollow, it probably is ripe. There’s nothing personal about this.

Growing old is an adventure, with risks, fears and satisfactions. Old age is sometimes treated as though it were a disease all by itself. Nobody has a cure for growth, or truly wants one. Old age is the consummation of human growth. Older folks have diseases. So do a tragic number of infants, children, young moms and dads. Jesus, who died young, offers the promise of eternal life, but no personal example of aging. No further example was unnecessary because, from the time of a person's birth, there's no change in Life's expectancy of a loving and generous spirit.

In the 21st century the words of Moses to Pharaoh resonate with power many generations after they were spoken. Exodus says that Moses was 80 years old when he insisted, “Let my people go.” In Psalm 71 there’s a prayer, “So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, till I proclaim thy might to all the generations to come.”

Now that’s a positive fulfillment of advanced age—to proclaim the power of God, not necessarily from a pulpit or in a letter to the editor, but by being a living proclamation of faith. Faith is explained by catechisms, but it builds from the inside out.

New friends from old memories

2009-06-10T08:32:00.000-05:00

From the Post-Journal, Jamestown, N.Y., Sunday, June 7, 2009

By Ed Wall

Eighty years ago I watched my grandpa in his rocking chair devour the Jamestown Post, starting with the headlines and not stopping until he checked out the classified ads. I learned to read at age 4 because I wanted to know what the Katzenjammer Kids were saying in the comic strips.

Many years later the morning Post and its evening competitor merged into The Post-Journal, still printing the news, including births and deaths. I had lost touch with the family of Harold Lind, my 1930s boyhood pal in Celoron, so I wrote to The Post-Journal. I also checked listings with Ancestry.com on the Internet. Results were swift.

The Post-Journal letter was read by my pal’s nieces and nephews in Oregon, Delaware and New York. All were born after Harold’s death during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, but they knew about him.

They remember Harold’s parents, Walter and Ruth Lind, as their own dearly loved grandparents. Harold’s brother Warren died many years ago. Lady Lorna was Harold’ name for his little sister, Lorna, whose own children responded to my letter last month. Lorna died a couple of years ago. Her brother Laurel, called Larry, lives with his wife in Indiana. I remember him very well, even though I haven’t seen him in more than six and a half decades.

Larry wrote me that, thanks to the World War II GI Bill, he earned an electrical engineering degree, and worked for a major company. After retirement he spent several years as an electronic circuit design consultant.

"I remember you as my big brother’s best friend," he wrote.

I couldn’t think of a better way to be remembered.

My thanks to The Post-Journal and to all of the Linds, former Linds and near-Linds who have been in touch. Harold and I were inseparable when we were maybe 7 to 10 years old, and after my family moved away we were in frequent touch. We moved, as many did during the Great Depression. My dad, George H. Wall, was pipe organist at the Winter Garden theater and broadcast a daily program on Jamestown’s only radio station at the time, WOCL, but the national money crisis along with the advent of sound movies made it necessary to move on.
While I lived in Celoron with my grandparents, William Sheldon and Della Kinney Olmstead, I had all the children’s diseases that were standard in those days. When the doctor tacked a quarantine sign on the front door one day, allowing no visitors, I was discouraged because I heard nothing from Harold. The explanation turned out to be simple. We had picked up the same disease at the same time and were both quarantined at the same time.

We were both in uniform in 1942 when we spent Harold’s last Army leave, before he went to Texas for tank training, goofing around in New York City. I never saw him again. Harold was the kind of straight arrow, smart and upbeat, who should be remembered, and as Memorial Day approached this year I wanted to be certain he had not been forgotten.

I discovered from his relatives that there’s no chance of that.

Eyes on the dizzy button

2009-05-28T11:28:00.000-05:00

By Ed Wall

The flu is getting the headlines. Maybe that’s why nobody seems to have noticed my new disease.

It attached itself to my long-time neurological ailment, which gives me a three-martini dizziness without the calories. As one who lives alone, except for a darting trip-triggering cat with feet fetish, I was recently persuaded to sign up with Rescue Alert. I was given a button to press in case of a bone-jarring fall or any other emergency. This button is attached to a cord, which I’m supposed to wear around my neck at all times.

Yes, it is waterproof.

Now I have developed two new psychiatric disorders, which are so new they are not even listed yet in the famous directory of mental diseases.

The first one is Bosom Anxiety. Will the next hug squeeze my button and set off a false alarm chain of commotion? It is almost impossible to talk to an Episcopalian without an embrace, and I worry about that even though I live among Catholics. If I were younger than 84 I might be anxious about other bosomy button pitfalls.

The second disease is Button Envy. When I’m out and around I try not to get scowled at, or maybe arrested, as I scan the chests of strangers. I’m looking for alarm buttons, of course, and when I find them there’s a compulsion to compare. Is the stranger’s button bigger than mine? And, although I have no bias, I note its color.

I’ve played enough Solitaire. My game now is Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?

Killed in action, 1944

2009-05-24T18:54:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite radio shows in the 1940s was a quiz show spoof called It Pays to be Ignorant. A zany panel of “experts” attempted to answer the questions, such as “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” That show comes to mind today because I was just too dumb to stop looking.

For a long time I’ve been trying to track down relatives of my best pal in elementary and junior high school. I’ve visited the house he once lived in on Celoron’s Gifford Avenue, talked to our teachers and rummaged around in Ancestry files. No luck.

Harold Elof Lind was born in Jamestown, N.Y., on July 12, 1923. We lived a few blocks apart in the village of Celoron, population about 700. On frigid January days we shivered together at the top of the bridge over the railroad tracks, wearing belts and badges that marked us as official agents of the school safety patrol.

Harold had gone off to college in Albany after making a perfect score on the New York State Regents exams, and even after Pearl Harbor he was given a draft deferment. Then the European theater needed more men. Harold was drafted and quickly taught whatever he needed to know about tanks. On what turned out to be his last leave, Harold’s parents drove the two of us to nearby Westfield, where we boarded a New York Central train for Albany so we could visit Harold’s fiance. After that we continued to New York City, where we spent a couple of days just poking around. We saw “You Can’t Take It With You” on Broadway and laughed a lot.

Harold was killed in action during the Battle of the Bulge on December 14, 1944.

Each year around Memorial Day I’m especially reminded of Harold, along with others who did not come home from World War II. I had turned to the Internet to try
to connect with anybody in his family, but I found nobody. Today I tried again, because the Internet keeps getting more useful and Ancestry.com widens its reach. Today I found a connection and hope to be in touch with a cousin or a friend of a cousin.

It is amazing what you can find when you’re too dumb to stop looking. The main thing is that Harold Lind did not die at the age of 21 and disappear from memory after that.

Defensive walking avoids bumps in the night

2009-05-16T11:26:00.000-05:00

Defensive driving has kept a good many car radiators from losing their cool. It makes motorists something like Boy Scouts, whose famous motto is Be Prepared.

Defensive walking can save hips and lives when it is practiced by people who rely on canes, walkers, rollators and grab bars. Defensive drivers are alert to themselves and others. Defensive walkers are attentive mostly to themselves. Inattention can be the enabler that lets a slip, trip or tumble threaten hips, teeth and skulls.

Neurological ailments sometimes take over in a rush, and sometimes gradually. I was around 50 when I began bumping into things now and then, accumulating bruises and acquiring a walking stick. Like others who worked for a living, I tried not to make a big deal of it. My doctor had no idea what it meant. I was in my 70s before advanced medical knowledge, including new testing possibilities, brought a diagnosis of olivopontocerebellar atrophy, which my neurologist described as a form of Parkinsonism. It is known as OPCA.

By that time I was walking like Charlie Chaplin and learned to use a walker and a rollator, which is a sturdy version of a walker that’s designed for outdoor use, for walking around the block or to a neighbor’s house. I stopped driving when I was 81. It was my huge blessing that my daughter, son-in-law and five of my six grandchildren live a mile away.

Mine, like other neurological disorders, is progressive and does not yet have a cure. It manifests in some oddball ways, such as encouraging me to type hte instead of the. Dizziness and a gait with a mind of its own are constant companions.

Although it is not recognized as a sickness by psychiatrists, compulsive writing infected me long ago. This causes people to become journalists, and to continue telling stories even after they retire. This story is about defensive walking for folks who use canes. Some of the concerns are similar to defensive driving. Here are some lapses:

1. Inattention/distraction/fatigue while walking, whether at home where the terrain is familiar or someplace else. Don’t try to walk around while talking on the phone, or while chatting with somebody nearby but out of sight.

2. Poor lighting. Low-watt night lights make it cheap and easy to help guard against missteps at home. Moving around the house in the dark makes it too easy to trip over an animal or to slip on something the animal has done, or to trip over a misplaced object, maybe a broom or a chair or a shoe. I have night lights in bedrooms, bathrooms, even my living room in case I need to answer the front door or to get outside expeditiously.

3. Not bothering with gadgets. Some head for the bathroom in the middle of the night without reaching for a cane or walker. That’s not smart. After the fall it is too late to remember.

4. Hurrying. Take it easy. If it is an important phone call they’ll leave a message or call back. Don’t rush to the phone, day or night. There have to be speed limits for canes and walkers.

Accidents happen. But there’s no need to cooperate with them, to make it easy for them. They often can be avoided, and there’s only one person who can do it.

Respect life--and the Presidency

2009-05-10T11:20:00.000-05:00

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin accepted the presidential medal of freedom from President Bill Clinton in a September 1996 ceremony. He and the liberal President did not agree on the divisive question of abortion, but each respected the office held by the other.

His successor as cardinal archbishop of Chicago, and as president of the Catholic bishops’ national organization, does not see things that way. Francis Cardinal George, a learned and holy man, has nevertheless denounced the University of Notre Dame’s offer of an honorary degree to the current President of the United States .

Cardinal Bernardin chose not to step onto the political stage. He tried to persuade non-Catholic Americans to agree that abortion is always wrong. He would have been unlikely to show disrespect for the presidential office or to insist that the president’s judgments must conform to Catholic teaching.

Other Americans who are committed to secular government are not enthusiastic about making decisions of the Second Vatican Council, whether concerning abortion or other matters, binding on secular elected officials. In its Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Vatican II listed abortion and torture among “infamies” and declared that “abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”

As a lifelong advocate of protecting the unborn, I hope the Church will become more effective in persuading Catholics and non-Catholics. There is a major political dimension to this effort, and that requires cardinals and others in the Church to avoid the appearance of engaging in partisan politics.

The Church’s challenge to the President and Notre Dame suggests that although he has some reservations about abortion, that’s not a sufficient starting point. It demands total submission to Catholic beliefs.

The absurdity of this is evident in the fact that Catholics are nowhere near total acceptance of church requirements about humility, abortion, the real presence, contraception, the death penalty, just wars, racism, celibacy and the like.

Hard to ID an entire race

2009-05-05T12:14:00.001-05:00

One of several reasons to enjoy Newsweek is the back-of-the-book column called The Last Word. In recent times it has been the product of George Will and Anna Quindlen, alternating their commentaries like a pendulum swinging from one side to the other, clever observers of what’s right about the world, and what’s left.

Anna Quindlen, who said she was eight years old when John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural address, has announced that she will no longer write her column. I was thirty-six when JFK delivered that address, and understand the values of retirement. But I’m sorry that the next issues of Newsweek will not include the Quindlen touch.

An admirer might, even so, pause over her comment that “America’s opinionators are too white and too gray. They do not reflect our diversity of ethnicity and race, gender and generation.” Journalists are not alone in sometimes seeing “white” as an all-purpose definition, but it is not. “White” racists viciously opposed the civil rights movement, even as “white” legislators and judges enforced civil rights and affirmative action. Some “whites” are Republicans and adore George Will. Some are Democrats and favor Anna Quindlen. There are “white” atheists, “white” Catholics, “white” Protestants. It makes little sense to speak of “white” as though it were a political, social and moral definition.

Old-fashioned shorthand is quick, but it doesn’t always make good journalism.

The innocence of atheists

2009-04-29T09:37:00.000-05:00

There’s something breathtaking about the innocence of atheists, who claim that because they aren’t aware of God, God doesn’t exist.

A severe hearing impairment might cause someone to deny music, and to poke fun at orchestras going through an apparently silent liturgy of puffing, poking and pounding on instruments.

A faith impairment is a greater loss. Some accept it. Some are bothered that others get so much satisfaction from faith. They deny that believers have anything to believe in, because they themselves don’t.

Babies do not understand their parents, whose movements, if considered at all, are blurred in mystery. There’s the matter of diapers, middle-of-the-night burpings and making sure the baby doesn’t get tossed out with the bath water. The folks responsible for the baby’s life are there to help, whether the little squirmer understands it or not.

Some children are turned off by their parents, and some parents are humbled by their offspring. Some are turned off by God, never feeling the warm breath of divine parenthood. Some hate the God they do not know and get cranky about people who do know and love God.

For the faith impaired, the loss my cause nothing more than shoulder shrugs. Or it may cause a bitter fight against something imaginary, the imaginary God of the atheist. Atheism, like other forms of religious belief, can stimulate intolerance.

Even some who have the gift of faith will put it aside, like an unwanted birthday present from a zany aunt, and not think about it again. Like the deniers, they are loners in God’s community. The most aggressive among them want to make everyone a loner, to reshape believers into their own image and likeness.

It took millions of years for people to know about gravity. Happily, they did not float off Earth’s surface just because they hadn’t thought about gravity yet.

Maybe someday physical and spiritual impairments will just be footnotes in the textbooks of science.

—Ed

Confused columnist

2009-04-05T10:12:00.000-05:00

They are the opening words of a Chicago Sun-Times column:

“Help me here, because I’m confused.”

Neil Steinberg confirms his confusion by linking his criticism of a statement by Cardinal Francis George to the Inquisition. The infamous Spanish Inquisition was launched by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1478, dredged up as a columnist’s news peg 531 years later.

This is like attacking a speech by President Barack Obama by regurgitating the infamous American inquisition known as the Salem Witch Trials, or denouncing a contemporary Supreme Court decision by citing the court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which helped fire up the Civil War.

To cite grand errors committed by American democracy centuries ago to justify a disagreement with President Obama is absurd. So is citing painful excesses by religious fanatics of the past, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Jewish.

In my opinion Cardinal George is wrong in declaring that Notre Dame University should not have invited the president of the United States as commencement speaker because of a political disagreement. President Obama is not a Catholic and is not subject to Catholic directives. Abortion is a moral issue, and it is also indisputably a political issue. Cardinal George is right to state the Catholic teaching and to try to persuade others to accept it, but shutting off communication with the world’s most effective public official would have been described by my grandma as biting off your nose to spite your face.

But writers are behind the times if they think this has anything to do with the Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials or Dred Scott case.

The Church has failed to make the case for defending life. Where is there a consistent, ongoing, popular and effective pro-life teaching program in a Catholic diocese? There are dedicated lay, clerical and religious workers in the pro-life field who need wider, more enthusiastic support.

The church has lost much of its authority on issues relating to human sexuality. That's because of the pedophile issue, which has been exploited by people who do not like the Church. Too many bishops deal with abortion as though it is dealt with in Church law and therefore does not require explanation or a consistent teaching and public relations program. Everybody would still be puffing on cigarettes if the bishops had been in charge of the program to combat lung cancer and other tobacco ailments. In 1965 the bishops would have issued an edict against smoking. They would have excommunicated smokers. They would have refused to vote for a smoking politician. Ordinary people would continue to smoke, because edicts do not work as well as education--call it public relations--does.

Obama is not to blame for abortion. Cardinals and others in authority have failed to convince enough people. Even cardinals rely on edicts while failing to teach the sacred value of life for the unborn,for prisoners, bombed-out civilians, the untreated sick and the unfed hungry.

Trying to explain a rare disease

2009-04-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

Bob the pharmacist always starts with a smile, and so do his associates at my favorite prescription counter. I know they’re smart, because a pharmacy degree is among the toughest to earn. I know they want to help, because the speak up with tips and comments and they answer my questions.

One thing we don’t talk about is the missing prescription.

I pick up my bottles of pills for the heart, pills to block allergies, pills for aches and tensions, this and that — but there are no pills for what ails me because olivopontocerebellar atrophy still has no cure. It isn’t even easy to pronounce; hence its nickname, OPCA.

There are other rare diseases, and today’s afflicted are well served by the Internet. It has become almost magically simple to get in touch with others, patients and caregivers, who know about the most obscure diseases.

It is less simple to get in touch with medical specialists who are familiar with such things. Thousands of doctors may have lifetimes of experience in tens of thousands of cases without ever encountering someone with OPCA. Everybody knows what a headache feels like. Nobody who hasn’t been there knows what OPCA feels like.

People with all kinds of rare diseases post notes to each other in web sites. They belong to one of society’s least-known minorities. Here’s what some say in total frankness. I’m quoting real people, editing the words for context and to protect anonymity.

My family is clueless. I am a widow but when my husband was alive he also buried his head in the sand. People don’t realize that when I miss a social event I really can’t do it. They think I just don’t want to go.

This is one of the most common exasperations. Here’s a similar comment online.

My mother will call and go “Oh you sound sick,” in such a panicked voice that I end up comforting her. Then a few days later she will have planned a party that she will expect my husband and I to attend, which will mean driving there — spending the night and coming back the next day. Likely if I sounded sick a couple of days before, I am too sick to go; then we have the big fight that her daughter can’t come to her party. I actually found myself trying to take care of her, while I am battling an illness that has taken me from being an active athlete to a physically disabled person who has to has difficulty getting to the grocery.

There’s a Dear Abby heart in many who offer their personal counsel in the online support groups. They share observations like this one.

The people that matter the most are not always available to us emotionally. I always thought that parents, siblings, spouses, etc. “should” help with coping. Now I realize that my expectations were unrealistic. Unless I was in a counseling office with these relatives it is too much for them. Heck, it is too much for me a lot of the time, and I have the disease. I truly believe in support groups, wherever you belong, and reading lots of books and magazines about coping with a rare disease. I still struggle with specialists who understand the disease but don’t understand the person underneath the disease.

The father who upsets his adult child thinks he’s being helpful. That explains this note from one patient to others.

Every time my dad calls he says, “Wow, you sound so good today, you must feel great” ....what? Or when I see someone in my family they say something inane like “You look so good, you must be feeling good.” I could just cry. Sometimes, that is all I can do in a day is get dressed.... Invisible diseases, one neuro told me, are the worst to get family members to support. You look okay therefore you are okay in their minds.

Along with the communication problems among families and friends, there are some high points as well. Here’s the experience of one writer who shared online.

There are some friends who come over, bring lunch, laugh about the latest “news” and even take me for an outing. I have always enjoyed working with teens. The youth pastor at my church understands that I am ill and can’t always do. This year the youth Christmas party is at my house, all I have to provide is the space. I will get to enjoy a houseful of teenagers, and some good responsible youth workers, and all manner of silliness in my home. I found out that I can continue my work with teens, in a different way — we can’t go rock climbing, but I can listen when someone has a broken heart or provide a space to be that is safe. And maybe I am teaching them a bit about kindness.

Every day I get to read notes written from the heart by people whose lives might appear to be quite ordinary to their families and neighbors, because their diseases are unknown and invisible. Others punch their notes into computer keyboards accessible to their wheelchairs or beds, the effects of their diseases more evident to others.

One invisible symptom of rare invisible ailments is a particular kind of loneliness, a loneliness of frustration. Some folks begin to wonder about loose screws when their friend or relative with a rare disease tries to explain what it feels like. Who ever heard of a sore skull?

You mean a headache, says the friend.

No, it is not at all like a headache. The skull feels squeezed in a vice and the head feels full of bubbling oatmeal. Maybe it takes one to know one.

Dropping in on Obama

2009-01-25T15:20:00.000-06:00

Like Lincoln, President Barack Obama speaks the language of faith. Like Lincoln, he is not infallible. Unlke his predecessor, George W. Bush, Obama knows this.

It seems inconceivable that Jesus might embarrass Obama if he were to walk into the Oval Office, the way he might have embarrassed Bill Clinton with an intern or Richard Nixon muttering antisemitisms.

Christ Jesus teaches the values, which have no value if he has to impose them. His teachings were not recorded by Jesus. He once wrote on the ground, with his finger, while Pharisees were testing him with a question about a woman caught in adultery. (There’s no reference to a man who might have contributed to the adultery.) Christians may wonder why Jesus wrote only in the shifting impermanence of dust. Nobody knows what Jesus thinks about the way his words were written down by others.

If the incarnation is to offer Jesus as fully human, then the miracles should be (1) natural events that people might emulate; (2) dramatic events intended to provide memorable lessons; (3) important events which so overwhelmed the biblical writers that they were described in terms reflecting their awe.

In a couple of hundred words, this is pretty much the religion of Jesus:

• You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22 NRSV

• But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

• When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Pray then in this way:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you;
but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Matthew 6 NRSV

We’ve added curlecues, exclamation marks and liturgies to this. We’ve liturgized candles and incense, which were practical necessities in Bible times. We’ve built a religion industry, but few of its executive officers would be at ease in the presence of Jesus who might say something like "You judge by appearances, but I do not judge anyone."

We have produced millions of words to claim exemptions and exceptions from those couple of hundred words. We’ve been influenced by ecclesial lobbyists to accept or not accept ancient ferocities, destruction of enemies, sexual and hygienic proscriptions and other speculations about human evolution during the quick soundbite of history that’s memorialized in the scriptures.

The study of evolution suggests that we have not been at this for very long. Humankind’s spiritual dimension in just coming out of the ooze, not sure whether to swim or crawl. The best is still to come.

Inauguration: Don't forget Truman

2009-01-18T07:53:00.000-06:00

My ticket to the presidential inauguration is colorful and in good condition. Its only flaw is that I already used it, 60 years ago at the inauguration of President Harry Truman. I shivered, along with everybody else who watched the Jan. 20 ceremonies outside the Capitol. As a journalist, I noticed that arrangements had been made for the relatively new medium of television.

I was registered at Washington’s Hamilton Hotel. It seemed like a good idea to watch some of the television coverage, so I asked for a TV set in my room. I was lucky enough to get one of the few sets available. It was wheeled in and I was charged a rental fee equal to one-half of my room rate. The room was $8 - the TV was an additional $4.

The ticket entitled me to a seat across the street from the White House reviewing stand. I think I remember - 60 years is a long time - that the parade lasted for seven hours.

It was a double-decker, with thousands of marchers on the pavement and armadas of military planes overhead.

At the time, I was the 23-year-old editor of a national labor paper, and I was gung-ho for Truman. At another time, I was a reporter on a daily published by William Randolph Hearst. My assignments included dredging up comments from advocates of Gen. Douglas MacArthur for president. I covered Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy during their 1960 campaign visits to Hawaii, which had just become a state. I wrote Spiro Agnew’s biographical sketch for the Official Inaugural Program when he became vice president. That was before it was disclosed that his term as governor of Maryland had something in common with later Illinois disclosures.

While I was a journalist in Honolulu, a kid with a Kenyan dad and a Kansas mom was enrolled in a local school. After he grew up and delivered a breathtaking speech at the Democratic National Convention four years ago, I wrote a July 5, 2005 op-ed column for a Florida newspaper suggesting that Barack Obama could become president in the Lincoln mode.

I don ‘t have a ticket this time, but I have a TV set.

Is there an Oprah in your future?

2008-11-18T07:19:00.000-06:00

Finally, a solution to the auto crisis.

Executives who steered their car companies off the road should bail out, resigning to make room for success-oriented leadership.

That means putting Oprah Winfrey in charge.

Then Oprah can use the federal government’s proposed $25 billion handout to buy a million cars from the manufacturers and give them away. The companies will zing and Oprah will be free to apply her entrepreneurial talents, as Henry Ford did, to new ideas an long-term growth.

Fantasy? Yes, just like Congress.

Business chiefs out on bail

2008-11-17T11:07:00.000-06:00

Nobody’s talking about bailing out newspapers. Some want to let bankers out on bail, courtesy of taxpayers. No matter how clumsy its leaders have been, Ford and General Motors and even Chrysler have a cheering section to set them free on bail. This stirs mixed memories in folks who bought unreliable American cars. I’m thinking of the Chevrolet Impala I bought in 1965. It broke down hours after I drove it off the dealer’s property, and was towed back there for the first in a series of repairs. A Plymouth station wagon, a couple of Buicks and an Oldsmobile continued the shoddy tradition.

Reliability appeared in the form of a Toyota station wagon I bought in Hawaii decades ago, followed by other Japanese vehicles and eventually the reliable American Saturn. The U.S. auto industry is big and politically powerful, but not loveable.

The communications industry, especially its ailing newspapers, has been dishing it out for so long that nobody gives a thought to bailing it out.

Given the number of respected business schools in the United States, and the number of MBA degrees granted by American universities, a person might wonder why nobody identified the massive problems that were developing in the dysfunctional finance industry. Even now, nobody knows what to do, except to try applying billions of dollars and if that fails, see whether more billions will work somewhere else.

The republic is not lost, even though the situation is grim. Huge numbers of people who are ready and able to work have lost their jobs. The pain is personal and growing. But a spirit of optimism was stirred in the election of Barack Obama, who combines the active ingredients of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Democracy has found a leader in the nick of time.

Does God use email?

2008-11-01T13:39:00.000-05:00

Volunteer communicators for God have urged me to vote for John McCain for president because, they say, that’s what God wants.

The messengers tell me that God approves of McCain’s political position on abortion. There’s no mention of what God thinks about McCain’s decision to divorce his first wife and marry a beautiful heiress.

Announcements, usually by email, of God’s wishes at election time are more curious than convincing. There is no evidence of God’s intervention in earthly political processes.

If God becomes involved in elections, it is reasonable to wonder how Adolph Hitler was elected to office by the German people. Then there’s the election and reelection of Zimbabwe’s brutal president, Robert Mugabwe. There was no intervention in electing George W. Bush, who became an object of derision by millions who voted for him. Jefferson Davis was elected president of a Confederacy built on the backs of slaves.

Not everyone who worships God thinks that the Creator decides who will win and who will lose elections, wherever they are held. Too many scoundrels and incompetents win elections.

Certainly God is to be praised in prayer, and millions pray for the right outcome of human endeavors, including elections, visits to the doctor, rescue attempts and family disputes. But some campaigners go beyond that.

Is it blasphemy to claim God’s blessing in a partisan political campaign?

Does this show a lack of respect for Almighty God, and bring shame on the perpetrators?

I hear someone saying Amen.

Even better than being an admiral

2008-09-20T12:31:00.000-05:00

So light travels at 186,000 miles per second. How does a motorist on an interstate highway relate to that?

More figures to ponder. From Earth to the Moon the average distance is 238,855 miles. Even if you’re driving from New York City to Los Angeles, it is tough to imagine that kind of travel.

A figure like $9,667,726,106,224 is so distant from anything I’ve ever seen on my bank statement that it is almost incomprehensible. It was the U.S. national debt when I checked it online.

During a week in September the federal government made $600 billion available in Wall Street bailouts, help for storm victims and support for money market funds. It also agreed to stand behind $5 trillion in mortgages, says the Wall Street Journal.

Politicians who want to increase taxes for the rich need to take another look at their figures. An income of $200,000 or $250,000, primarily in the form of paychecks, does not a wealthy person make. Americans in that income bracket are not likely to have inherited wealth, or to have grown up rich. This is the bracket of men and women who borrowed massively for their education, worked long hours and accepted stressful occupations to earn more than their parents did. They are not the inheritors of banks, oil wells and retail chains.

There’s never been anything like the stunning increase in national debt under the Bush Administration and all of its Republican enablers.

This is money already spent, billions of it on a poorly-chosen war, by a government that neglects its homeland of aging roads, bridges, power grids and the like. This is a government that bails out banks but wrings it hands over Medicare and Social Security funding.

In response to overwhelming economic and human needs, Sen. John McCain wants to become commander-in-chief. This privileged son and grandson of admirals, educated at the great government school in Annapolis, a former fighter pilot, employed as a U.S. senator with all of its pension and health care provisions, campaigns as though the main job of the president of the United States is to be the commander-in-chief. He would, incidentally, outrank his father, grandfather and classmates.

Neither he nor Gov. Sarah Palin, his understudy to become commander-in-chief, has the temperament of a diplomat.

My grandpa instincts make me cautious about the military instincts of those two. I don’t want my grandchildren to be drafted to risk their lives in undeclared wars. Who’s more likely to get us into more wars, John McCain or Barack Obama?

2008-09-19T12:28:00.000-05:00

Scriptures may be copyrighted,
and church logos trademarked,
but patents on God are all pending

COUNTLESS CHRISTIANS affirm today, as they have for centuries, that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation. Others are less certain; it seems inconsistent with society’s impulse toward fairness and equality of opportunity. Surely, they say, God loves everyone and does not exclude non-Christians and non-conforming Christians, does not convict millions on a technicality.

Christians cherish the Bible as God’s inspired word. Belief is a gift from God.

Some who believe that God is the creator of everything, and all-powerful, are in touch
with God fairly often, through prayer. Some believe that God has never stopped inspiring Scripture.

Thus, early teachings about eating the other white meat or paying interest on a mortgage have
been recast.

Christians have long been encouraged to look for Christ in other persons. Jesus, the light
of the world, dissolves the shadows.

Christ is the way to salvation wherever he is, in the face of an American child, a Japanese
sage, an African cleric or a Tibetan monk. Fingering our computer keyboards, we celebrate
scientists and theologians who, using the tools of earlier times, advanced human life and purpose.
The first scripture scholars could not conceive of the many versions of the Bible to come, or of
copies produced by the millions, in scores of languages.

The tools of scholarly imagination are becoming as precise as the computer chip, as swift as light and as endless as space.

Thousands of churches and religions have been tempted to fence off their claims, posting
signs that say Private Property or No Trespassing. But one sun shines on everyone, felt one way
at the North Pole, another at the equator. Salvation is everywhere. Christ is already there.

Jesus won't leave us alone

2008-09-07T09:27:00.000-05:00

Jesus has a lot of people helping him out in Orland Park. When my wife died in 2002 we were newcomers, having moved here to be near our daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. Folks I had never met offered friendship and prayers.

Around that time my neurologist diagnosed an unusual disease with an unpronounceable name, Straight aisles and moving crowds took my equilibrium and made a church feel like a roller coaster.

I found out that Jesus never leaves us alone. There he was, in family, neighbors, friends, strangers. Our Lord turns a bachelor condo into a holy place when he comes here on Sundays with the deacon or another minister of communion.

Can you beat that? It is not the same as being in St. Francis of Assisi Church for Mass, because church is where Christians live out community. But if I can’t get to the mountain, that’s no big deal for Jesus Christ. While I’m looking for him, he’s looking for me through the priests, deacons, religious and laity of his church.

The word that comes to mind is Wow, which is a secular translation of Alleluia!

When news is the enemy

2008-09-05T11:34:00.000-05:00

When vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin launched her famous attack on the right of news media to report bad news, she seemed to be reflecting the George W. Bush view of the first amendment. Her GOP convention speech in St. Paul was largely written by Matthew Scully, a former Bush speechwriter, according to the distinguished journalist Don Wycliff (who is not responsible for the conclusions I draw from it).

Her words reminded me of a previous Republican governor, Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, who became Richard Nixon’s surprise vice president. Agnew is remembered for needling nattering nabobs of negativism in the news media.

While Agnew was governor of Maryland I read a news account of a press conference he had held in Annapolis, the state capital, and I disagreed with what the newspaper said that he said. I wrote a critical editorial in The Catholic Review, weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The next day my phone range. It was Agnew on the line. He said the statement attributed to him in the press, which had led to my editorial, was wrong. He invited me to breakfast the next morning to read the press conference transcript. It showed that his remarks were not accurately reporter, and I wrote a correction for my paper.

After he was elected vice president he called me again. Would I write his biographical sketch for publication in the Official Inaugural Program? My first thought that flashed through my head was of something attributed to Abraham Lincoln. When asked how it felt to be ridden out of town on a rail, he reportedly said that if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, he’d just as soon walk. I did write it, and it was published over my signature, but it had been given a public relations tuneup and had little resemblance to what I wrote.

After he was in office I asked for a depth interview and was given one. This was in his office next to the White House. Then I returned to Honolulu to be managing editor of the morning newspaper, The Honolulu Advertiser. Before long Agnew was in Honolulu, where his phone call inviting me to cocktails at the Kahala Hilton caused some chuckles in the newsroom. I wasn’t there. Whoever took the message wasn’t sure whether it was the vice president of the United States on the line, or, more likely, a prankster.

When Agnew was nominated I was in Europe. His name was no better known than Sarah Palin’s. Journalists there knew an American when they saw one in a press club, so they asked me about the unknown Agnew. The one thing I knew about him, I said, was that he was an honest man. After he was found guilty of tax evasion and resigned his office in October 1973, my European friends never again asked my opinion about anything.

Agnew’s job was to speak for what Nixon called the Silent Majority, white, conservative, middle-class voters.

Governor Palin is a more formidable anti-media crusader than Agnew was, because she has causes. Agnew had no cause beyond exploiting his role as a conservative. Palin shares biblical convictions with George W. Bush. Agnew never thought he was chosen by God.

The real pain in the neck

2008-09-05T06:55:00.002-05:00

The real pain in the neck
is not relieved by aspirin

We octogenarians ask ourselves a lot of questions because we’re running out of other people to ask. I peered down a long and familiar sidewalk in front of my condo, and asked myself whether a tree near the end of it was missing. Or whether my eccentric eyes were up to something.

Swerving off straight and narrow sidewalks, theater aisles or test lines on the floor of a neurologist’s office is one of the marks of a rare disease called olivopontocerebellar atrophy. I decided not to renew my driver’s license when familiar truss bridges, the kind with tall steel girders and beams, squeezed in on my car as I drove across.

Most of the people I know with this ailment, which we call OPCA, were not readily diagnosed. Most doctors never see a case. Some authorities say that it typically starts in men who are in their late 50’s, sometimes progressing so slowly that its symptoms look like something else. Eventually, with the help of the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a neurologist confirms an OPCA diagnosis.

The losses are not what textbook describe. Yes, there are gait problems, lurching, a tumble now and then. There’s a wispy kaleidoscope roiling around inside my head. Swallowing can be an adventure. But those are not the important losses in a long-term disease that still eludes a cure.

Grandson Matt has a baseball game. His brother Mike will be playing water polo. Katie will dance for the entertainment of family and pals. We live a mile apart, but OPCA trips me up in auditoriums with straight lines of aisles and squared-off indoor pools. Sometimes it seems like we’re a million miles from each other. Jacob lives half a continent away and comes for visits with his family, but his grandpa stays home. He might go berserk in an airplane, as he tends to do in a tubular MRA. There are no visits to family events with Jacob or his older cousins, Kristen and Dan, in the university two or three hours away. Two sons and their wives live a couple of time zones to the west, a daughter and her husband are near, and e-mail is a wonderful e-glue that helps keep folks together.

Friends, relatives and strangers are thoughtful and kind. They go on creating happy memories. They’re the medicine that turns discomfort into comfort. They overlook the fact that OPCA sometimes takes memory away, or diminishes it, or even embellishes it.

A couple of years ago I wrote a little book, The Dizzy Disease, for newly-diagnosed OPCA patients and their families. Just the other day I pulled an unfamiliar notebook out of a desk drawer. What could it be? I was astonished to find the original draft of the book, much more useful than what was published. I had written it and forgotten it. Sometimes I find an article long-stored in my computer, nearly finished but awaiting a conclusion that never came because the project just drifted away into OPCAland.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget my wedding anniversary or certain birthdays. It may take a moment to remember my phone number, but I’m able to answer Jeopardy questions and I know where everything is in the hardware store. As for that missing tree at the end of my sidewalk, it had been blown over and hauled away.

OPCA blurs some memories, erases some, and stirs up pains no prescription can wipe out. The loss that hurts most is time shared with family and friends.

Obama looked like a winner in 2005

2008-09-04T20:20:00.000-05:00

Sometime after the 2004 Democratic National Convention I wrote this article for the Orlando Sentinel. The headline: Another Lincoln in the White House?

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 identity 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 and 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. The words 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, almost 80 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.