You call this a blizzard, young fella?

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

● 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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.