Abby's busy; ask a bishop about sex

Launching the wire service.

© A.E.P. Wall

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

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

            Well, not all of them refuse.

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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



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



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

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

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



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

           

Impotence, passion and justice

Can there be a prescription

for character and conscience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

             

Who's there? Sounds in the night

How to Remember With No Strings Attached

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

Arthur (Ed) Wall



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time the GOP...

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New World

A short story

By Jacob Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is precisely what I find amusing.

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

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

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

God can't help it

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

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

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

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

 Calvin Coolidge today might say that the business of America is divided between health care and the 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 has changed as radically as travel. The era of horse manure in the streets has phased into the era of oil spills and global warming, even as penicillin and 21st century microsurgery have extended life. What has not changed is the science of economics, or the will to apply it, from one depression to the next.

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

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

 The disease is so peculiar that it is not easily recognized. My diagnosis was made nearly a decade ago, after more than a year of examinations and tests. That’s not uncommon, nor is the likelihood that the disease was becoming active long before that. Doctors call it progressive. It is on the move, and I began following with a walking stick, then a cane, eventually a rollator and now a power chair.

 At first there was dizziness, which became more vigorous, along with other symptoms. Some of them are especially bemusing. For example, after I write an article I proof it methodically in order to insert dozens of missing a’s. OPCA/MSA has taken custody of the little finger on my left hand.

 It even blacks out wonderful sentences which I haven’t  written yet. Sometimes I begin typing a thoughtful sentence but never finish, because the process of punching keys erases my thoughts before I can write 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 I was a rewrite man on a Hearst newspaper in a three-paper town. I’ve forgotten what year that was, but one of my assignments was to write about the campaign to nominate Douglas MacArthur for president.

 When my 87th birthday arrives in March I expect to be at this same keyboard, even if it takes longer to punch each key, something like learning to set type by hand in the 1930s.

 God is classier than Calvin Coolidge in describing the nature of civilization and profits. “For what will it profit a man,” asks Christ Jesus, “if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” And the letter of James asks “if a brother or sister is ill-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, what does it profit?”

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