The following is one author's assessment of the current sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and a one page response from another author who takes a different view. -NB
Newsweek "A Woman’s Place Is In The Church" (April 12, 2010)
By Lisa Miller
The cause of the Catholic clergy's sex-abuse scandal is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the all-male club?
Here they are, the members of history's oldest and most elite all-male club, trying to manage what began as a domestic crisis. For decades, certain priests in America, Europe, Ireland, Brazil (and God knows where else) abused—raped or otherwise molested—children and teenagers not in the frescoed halls of the Vatican but in their own backyards: on camping trips and in cars, in dormitories and confessionals. Those few boys and girls confident enough to tell their secret whispered it to the women they trusted: mothers, aunts, grandmothers. Those few women brave enough to question authority or seek justice from the bishops were hushed up and shut down. In this case Jesus was wrong: the meek did not inherit the earth. They received pious and self-serving sermonizing.
"To be sure," wrote Boston's Cardinal Humberto Medeiros to one mother incensed over the sexual abuse of seven boys in her own family, "we cannot accept sin, but we know well that we must love the sinner."
Even with a mother, Mary, at the center of the Christian story, the women of today's church have found themselves marginalized and preached to amid the interminable revelations of the sexual-abuse scandals. Their prayers to the Virgin, protector of humanity, seem to have gone unanswered.
No wonder the men now charged with damage control face such a credibility gap, a sense that they—who read apologies from teleprompters—appear insufficiently aghast at the damage done. On Palm Sunday in New York, Archbishop Timothy Dolan condemned sex abuse from his throne in St. Patrick's looking for all the world like a well-fed Fortune 500 CEO. A YouTube clip shows Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland—where 15,000 children were abused over four decades—peremptorily dismissing calls for his resignation. After a New York Times story reported that Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) failed to defrock a priest who abused 200 deaf children in Wisconsin, the pope lashed out against the news media. Faith, he said, allows one not "to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion." Time and again, the pope and his surrogates fail to convince us of their grief.
The problem is not, as so many progressives claim, the fact of their celibacy. Nor is it their costumes—the miters and capes—though these vanities do serve as reminders of the great distance between the men with power and the people without. The problem—bluntly put—is that the bishops and cardinals who manage the institutional church live behind guarded walls in a pre-Enlightenment world. Within their enclave, they remain largely untouched by the democratic revolutions in France and America. On questions of morality, they hold the group—in this case, the church—above the individual and regard modernity as a threat. We in the democratic West who criticize the hierarchy for its shocking inaction take the supremacy of the individual for granted. They in the Vatican who blast the media for bias against the pope value ecclesiastical cohesion over all. The gap is real. We don't get them. And they don't get us.
By keeping modernity at bay, though, the men who run the Catholic Church have willfully ignored one of the great achievements of the modern age: the integration of women in the workforce and public life. In America, 50 million women work full time; in the European Union that number is 68 million. Within most mainline Protestant denominations, these battles over the professionalization of women were fought—and lost—half a century ago. In Denmark, Lutheran women were granted ordination rights in 1948; in the U.S., the first female Episcopalian priest was ordained in 1976.
But in the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women and professional relationships with women—not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children. Indeed, it seems the further a priest moves beyond the parish, the more likely he is to value conformity and order above the chaos of real life.
"I see [the hierarchy] as outrageously indifferent to the welfare of children," says a fuming Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton. "For you and me this is hard to understand. It seems to us out of step with the world. But they don't want to be in step with the world."
Over and over I have heard mothers (and fathers) mourn. One parent in one room where a bishop was deciding the fate of an abusing priest would have saved countless families from a lifetime of misery. "It's a pretty good guess that we would not be in this same predicament were women involved," says Frank Butler, president of FADICA, a group of Catholic family foundations. "For sure."
It is a reforming moment, then, a time for the men of the Vatican to take the wisdom of their own words to heart. The Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s was an effort to better integrate the antique church with the modern world, and its documents overtly address the changing place of women. "The hour is coming," read the council's closing documents, "in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved. That is why, at this moment…women imbued with a spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid humanity in not falling." Pope John Paul II expounded on the centrality of women to the church in his 1988 letter Mulieris Dignitatem ("On the Dignity of Women")—even as he firmly reiterated six years later the church's refusal to consider their ordination.
The chasm between the church's stated principles and its functional reality yawns wide. In the U.S., 60 percent of Sunday massgoers are women; thus most of the contributions to the collection plate—$6 billion a year—are made by women. And yet the presence of women anywhere within the institutional power structure is virtually nil. The number of women who hold top-tier positions in any of the dicasteries, or committees, that make up the Vatican structure can be counted on one hand. Few women retain high-profile management jobs, such as chancellor, within dioceses. And though nuns dramatically outnumber priests worldwide, they are mostly so invisible that when a group of them speaks up, as they did recently on health-care reform, everyone takes notice.
Eight years after the Boston scandals, "it's just men listening to themselves" on sex abuse, says Kathleen McChesney, the former FBI official enlisted to study and remedy the problem of sex abuse in American dioceses after 2002. "To my knowledge, there's no woman in the Vatican who's involved in sex-abuse issues."
Kerry Robinson traveled to Rome last month to talk to cardinals about promoting more women. Executive director of the National Leadership Roundtable, a group of American businesspeople who hope to bring corporate best practices to the church, Robinson, together with a group of female colleagues, hoped to make a point. "A young woman looks at the corporate world and sees that she can reach the highest levels of leadership," says Robinson. "She is frustrated at the lack of opportunities to live out her leadership in the church. The grave consequence of that is that the church becomes less and less relevant to women. And the consequence of that is that it becomes less and less relevant to her children."
"It matters," adds Robinson, "how the church is seen. Right now, it's seen as sins and crimes committed by men, covered up by men, and sustained by men. To overcome that, the church has to absolutely include more women."
Women aren't a panacea, of course. History shows that women in power can be as ruthless and self-serving as men. And the mere presence of women does not, obviously, inoculate an organization against criminality or corruption—just ask Lynndie England, who smiled for the camera as she humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, it's difficult to prove that the male-dominated atmosphere of the Roman Catholic Church creates a unique hothouse for sexual predators; and indeed, the majority of good priests throughout the world continue to care for the faithful. (The perpetrators in a few of the recent European cases have been women.) Researchers believe, in fact, that rates of abuse within the church probably compare with those of other denominations—and of youth organizations, schools, and families. It's frighteningly high. "Surveys indicate that one out of three girls experienced an unwanted sexual approach from an adult before age 18," says Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who analyzed the data from the U.S. sex-abuse cases. Among boys, she says, the rate is one in five.
Indisputable, though, is that the all-male Catholic hierarchy has responded to the crisis too slowly and—even after the revelations in the U.S.—in a way that has instinctively protected its own interests above those of the children. "The Catholic Church could have pulled these people any time they wanted and defrocked them," says the Rev. Marie M. Fortune, a minister in the United Church of Christ and founder of FaithTrust Institute, a multifaith organization aimed at ending sexual violence. "You can make a good argument that part of the problem is the hierarchy, in terms of it being a boys' club, an institution that is so ingrown and conservative and out of touch with people."
Studies show what we intuitively know: without checks and balances, insular groups of men do bad things. History professor Nicholas Syrett, author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, says studies suggest that 70 to 90 percent of gang rapes on college campuses are committed by men in fraternities. Obviously, he adds, important differences exist between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and college frats—"fraternity men are encouraged to have sex with lots of women. Clearly priests are not." But in both cases, "men are encouraged to believe that they are in positions of power for a reason…I do think if the hierarchy of the Catholic Church doesn't discipline these people because they are concerned about reputation, they create a space where those [abusing children] are led to believe that whatever they do is OK."
Richard Sipe agrees. He is a former priest who has spent the past three decades researching the sexual teachings of the church and their effects on clerical behavior. "Clergy," he says, "are a group that are very privileged in their own mind. They have a sense of entitlement. Think about it. What other culture do you know of that's all male, theoretically and practically?"
Jesus, of course, said nothing about the role women should play in his future church. As the leader of a small and radical movement he invited all to join his band, including married women, single women, and prostitutes; and the Gospel accounts give women a special role. They are the ones who first encounter the resurrected Lord and report back to the men on this supernatural event.
Women probably worked in the early church. In his letter to the Romans, written in the late 50s (A.D.), the Apostle Paul writes of a deacon named Phoebe; a "fellow worker" named Prisca; and "workers in the Lord" Tryphena and Tryphosa. He even mentions an "apostle" named Junia—a fact so shocking to generations of scribes who imagined that apostles could only be men that they intentionally misunderstood Paul's meaning. "Very, very frequently [Junia is] changed into a man's name," says Diarmaid MacCulloch, author most recently of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. "You get a sense that the early church is rowing away from women having positions of power."
It would be a mistake, therefore, to view the first centuries of Christianity as any feminist heyday. Women were regarded almost universally as lower beings, over whom a good Christian man had to exercise control. "Our ideal," said Clement of Alexandria in the second century, "is not to experience desire at all." And—despite the fact that clerics and even popes were often married—women's ability to arouse sexual desire in Christian men relegated them to the role of the temptress Eve, in cahoots with Satan. For women, celibacy was one way to gain any power in a man's world; by emulating Mary, a woman might find independence and strength.
By the 12th century, the separation of men and women in the church was complete. Clerical celibacy became mandatory in 1139, and in the great universities of Europe, where Christian intellectuals were establishing the foundations of modern philosophy, math, astronomy, science, literature, and theology, women were excluded completely. The only way thereafter for a Christian woman to gain prominence was as a prophet or a mystic, observes MacCulloch—and then her brethren might regard her as cracked.
One more brick, and the Vatican clerics would shut themselves off from their faithful for good. Kevin Schultz, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explains that Rome objected—strenuously—to the individualism that led to the French and American revolutions. In reaction, Catholic intellectuals revived some of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, especially his insistence on holding the community above the individual. The preeminence of these ideas essentially formed an "opposition to what the church sees as modernity," explains Schultz. "It creates us-versus-them. There becomes this level of secrecy. The popes become much more powerful."
No explanation better illuminates today's great disconnect between all the pope's men and the progressive faithful. In a world where the whole really matters more than individual parts, a rigid—sometimes brilliant, sometimes mean-spirited—morality reins. This elevation of the church above all things explains how an institution dedicated to serving the sick and the poor might also refuse condoms to those at risk for AIDS. It explains how an organization committed to families could deny birth-control pills to mothers. And it explains, sadly, how a bishop faced with a pedophile in a parish might decide not to call the cops.
To break the old habits of insularity and groupthink, the embrace of modernity that started with Vatican II must begin anew. "I want to throw open the windows of the church so that we can see out and the people can see in," said Pope John XXIII of that effort. The first, and perhaps easiest, place to start is with women.
More than 60 percent of American Catholics support the ordination of women, and though traditionalists insist that's a pipe dream, realists think otherwise. With priestly vocations in steep decline in the U.S., and women running 80 percent of parish ministries, female priests seem an inevitability. A small group of about 100 renegade women have already been ordained "by a bishop in good standing," says Eileen McCafferty DiFranco, who is one of them. Though excommunicated, DiFranco remains unbowed. "Jesus never said only men can be priests."
In the U.S., reported incidents of sex abuse in Catholic dioceses are dropping, thanks largely to the work of McChesney and her team. Now every American diocese must establish an advisory board on sex abuse, a group professionally and personally concerned with the welfare of children. McChesney believes these advisory boards should be replicated in dioceses worldwide—and at the Vatican. "Benedict needs to establish a group that is not just clergy. He needs an advisory board of people who are expert in child abuse, in investigative issues, in problem solving. You need the involvement of lay professionals." If these people are women, so much the better.
On her diplomatic mission to the Vatican, Kerry Robinson had another, more spiritual goal. Over the years, stories from the Gospels and the Old Testament about women have slowly disappeared from the Sunday lectionary, the scheduled Bible readings that massgoers hear. Robinson gently brought this to the cardinals' attention and found that some hadn't noticed the stories were gone. "It's all men, all the time," says Robinson. "They go to mass all the time, they don't distinguish, they don't think of it from the perspective of a woman who goes to mass on Sunday." Mary, the mother of Jesus, was human. A traditional girl, she made the best of an extraordinary situation and then watched, stoically, as her child suffered. This is a universal story. If the stories of the women and girls of the Bible aren't told, then mothers and daughters will stop seeing themselves as part of the Body of Christ. They'll walk away. And they'll take their children with them.
Lisa Miller is NEWSWEEK's religion editor and the author of Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.
With Pat Wingert, Jessica Ramirez, Ian Yarett, and Daniel Stone
Newsweek (Religion Counterpoint) "What Went Wrong" (April 12, 2010)
By George Weigel
Don't blame celibacy. To fight the plague of sexual abuse, the church needs to become more Catholic, not less.
Throughout what U.S. Catholics called the "Long Lent" of 2002, when every week seemed to bring revelations of clerical sexual abuse and its mishandling by the church's bishops, some observers suggested that this crisis was the byproduct of some distinctive features of Catholic life: a celibate priesthood, a church governed by male bishops, a demanding sexual ethic. "Modernize" the church by changing all that, they argued, and these horrible problems would abate, even disappear.
Sexual abuse is indeed horrible, but there is no empirical evidence that it is a uniquely, predominantly, or even strikingly Catholic problem. The sexual abuse of the young is a global plague. In the United States, some 40 to 60 percent of such abuse takes place within families—often at the hands of live-in boyfriends or the second (or third, or fourth) husband of a child's mother; those cases have nothing to do with celibacy. The case of a married Wilmington, Dela., pediatrician charged with 471 counts of sexual abuse in February has nothing to do with celibacy. Neither did the 290,000 cases of sexual abuse in American public schools between 1991 and 2000, estimated by Charol Shakeshaft of Virginia Commonwealth University. And given the significant level of abuse problems in Christian denominations with married clergy, it's hard to accept the notion that marriage is somehow a barrier against sexually abusive clergy. (Indeed, the idea of reducing marriage to an abuse-prevention program ought to be repulsive.) Sexual abusers throughout the world are overwhelmingly noncelibates.
Too many of the church's bishops failed to grasp the drastic measures required to address the sexual abuse of the young—that's obvious, and has been admitted by the bishops of the United States and two popes. Yet it is hard to see what these failures had to do with gender. Like others, many bishops had a misplaced faith in the power of psychiatrists and psychologists to "fix" sexual predators, thinking these men could be "cured" and quietly returned to ministry without damaging the church's reputation. In his recent scathing letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI denounced bishops who were more concerned with protecting the church's image than with protecting vulnerable young people. It's a critique that was applicable decades ago in the United States—but the same criticism can be made of teachers-union leaders and state legislators today who ignore or try to bury reports of sexual abuse in America's public schools.
So, yes, aspects of clerical culture in the U.S. and elsewhere contributed to the problem, but that same deplorable circle-the-wagons instinct has warped the response to this plague in other sectors of society. The difference is that the Catholic Church in America has taken more rigorous action since 2002 to protect the young people in its care than any other similarly situated institution, to the point where the church is likely America's safest environment for young people.
There may be a grain of truth in the suggestion that women's perspectives on these issues would have helped mitigate the Catholic crisis of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance: in the past the male clerical culture of Catholicism seems to have blunted in some Catholic clergy a natural and instinctive revulsion at the sexual abuse of the young—a revulsion, it is suggested, that a woman would immediately feel and act upon. But the sad, further truth is that there are no gender guarantees when it comes to sexual abuse: the physical and sexual abuse of young Irish girls in "Magdalene Asylums" decades ago was committed by religious sisters.
Nevertheless, it should also be noted that the U.S. church's handling of abuse and misgovernance since 2002 has been immensely strengthened by the insight and professional expertise of many women—just as we also ought to recognize that laywomen, single and married, are usually the teachers who make today's Catholic schools safe and successful. Moreover, women are the great majority of the volunteers and paid staff who make Catholic parishes both safe and vital. The notion that women don't have anything to do with how the Catholic Church operates confuses the Catholic Church with the higher altitudes of "the Vatican," and ignores how Catholic life is actually lived in America and Europe.
As for doctrine: what ought to be obvious about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is that these grave sins and crimes were acts of infidelity, denials of the truths the church teaches. A priest who takes seriously the vows of his ordination is not a sexual abuser or predator. And if a bishop takes seriously his ordination oath to shepherd the Lord's flock, he will always put the safety of the Master's little ones ahead of concerns about public scandal. Catholic Lite is not the answer to what has essentially been a crisis of fidelity.
Since 2002, with strong support from then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (and from him still as Benedict XVI), the Catholic Church in America has developed and enforced policies and procedures to ensure the safety of the young that offer an important model for the world church. There were only six credible reports of sexual abuse of the young in the U.S. church last year. And while that is six too many in a church that ought to hold itself to the highest standards, it is nonetheless remarkable in a community of 68 million people.
What is essential throughout the world, however, is that the church become more Catholic, not less. John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" proposed an understanding of faithful and fruitful human love as an icon of God's inner life. That vision is far nobler, far more compelling, and far more humane than the sex-as-contact-sport teaching of the sexual revolution, the principal victims of which seem to be vulnerable young people. Those who are genuinely committed to the protection of the young might ponder whether Catholicism really needs to become Catholic Lite—or whether the Augean stables of present-day culture need a radical cleansing.
Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of The Church (Basic Books).
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/235885
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Article 7 (Theology/Mission)
Christianity Today “Asking the Beautiful Question” (April 2010)
by Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke
Reading the Bible through the eyes of outsiders can awaken the church from numbness.
Christopher J. H. Wright began this series of Global Conversation essays with an exposition of the Lausanne Movement's driving definition: "Evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world." What does that gospel look like when it invades the margins of the world, sectors where our more traditional churches don't often go? To catch glimpses of that gospel in action and to understand the biblical themes that can animate ministry at the margins, we turn to Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke of the Center for Transforming Mission in Tacoma, Washington.
The psalmist asks, "How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?" (Ps. 137:4). It's a beautiful question springing from the heart of a poet struggling creatively to live out in a strange land (Babylon) what he knows to be true in another, more familiar context (Jerusalem). English poet e. e. cummings once wrote that the beautiful answer is always preceded by the more beautiful question, and in this psalm we discover a beautiful question. It has given theological roots to missional communities of grassroots leaders in six countries throughout Latin America (as well as in urban centers in the Caribbean, Kenya, and North America) under the banner of the Center for Transforming Mission (CTM).
We are learning how to read the Bible not to or even for those we serve, but with those we serve—those who have been wrongly labeled the least, last, and lost. Sustaining this approach is the belief that grace is like water: it flows downhill and pools up in the lowest places. We are learning to see God's grace pooling up in places of extreme poverty and violence.
The core theological values of CTM are formed by the incarnational mission of Jesus Christ. In Jesus' incarnation—and here we mean all that Jesus did and said, including his death and resurrection to save us from our sins—the intimacy of human and divine is fully realized. Said plainly, the Incarnation unites what the world divides—always, and in all ways. It says that matter, not just spirit, matters. Ministry that spiritualizes away the problems we face in the world of matter is simply not true to the biblical picture portrayed in the Creation and the Incarnation. Biblical, incarnational ministry is radically holistic. It touches the body and the soul. It calls forth personal transformation and systemic change. It invites righteousness and justice. It connects God and humanity, heaven and earth, and, perhaps hardest of all, "us" and "them."
Our concern to incarnate Jesus among the least, last, and lost has introduced us to some amazing grassroots leaders who are singing God's song in some very strange lands, such as among populations of street youth, families in extreme poverty, prostitutes, women in the throes of domestic abuse, and incarcerated gang members in the prisons of Central America. We have learned that "misfits" are critical to the mission of the church. Let me (Joel) try to illustrate.
There is a men's prison in Central America with a surprising group of residents. A ragtag clan of girlfriends, wives, sisters, and mothers connected to one of Central America's major gangs sleep under and on top of the cement tables in what used to be the dining hall. During a recent visit, the prison "chaplain" (an ex-gang member) and I led a conversation centered on the person of Hagar in Genesis 16. The women quickly applied the story personally. They heard the angel of the Lord pay honor and respect to Hagar by becoming the only character in the narrative to address her by name. The angel then asks her a beautiful question—"Where have you come from, and where are you going?" (v. 8)—empowering her to tell her own story.
The women in the prison could relate to being unnamed and used as property by people in positions of authority and power who never bothered to ask about their stories. They knew what it felt like to live in deserts of loneliness caused by rejection and marginalization. In Hagar's story, the women found their story.
Reading the Bible with those we serve means we learn to take the stained glass off the text of Scripture and begin reading from the perspective of those who have been crushed by life. It's an adventure in mining good news out of the holes of Scripture that the church typically refuses to climb down into. Hagar's story is one of those stories, and it is no small matter that she is the first person in Scripture who has the privilege of giving a name to God. She marvels, "Could it be that I have seen the back side of the one who sees everything and am still alive?" She gives to God the name El Roi, "the God who sees me." This element of the story seized the attention of these present-day Hagars in a vise of surprise and wonder.
A few weeks after the study, the prison chaplain was able to complete phase one of a prison rehabilitation project, building a cement wall physically separating the women from the men. The idea emerged to paint a mural on the wall, and a discussion ensued about what the women wanted to paint. They came to a unanimous decision to paint the story of Hagar, with the words El Dios Que Me Ve ("the God Who Sees Me") as the focal point of the piece.
The larger missional implication is that Hagar grasps something about God that Abraham is not able to confess until six chapters later. In Genesis 22:14, Abraham names Mount Moriah Jehovah Jireh ("the God who provides"), using the verb ra'ah, the same one that Hagar used in naming God. This leads us to marvel that perhaps the Hagars of the world are able to recognize the gospel long before the Abrahams do.
Perhaps this is why reality and authenticity are the currency of those at the margins. If it is going to work, it has to be real. Perhaps that is why the gospel begins with seeing things as they are, not as they should be. It is a hard lesson, but we are learning that the primary task of the church is to see God at work in the world and to celebrate what we see God doing. It is not to build, grow, or extend the kingdom of God—that is God's work. Our job is to see what is, to name it, and to recognize God at work in it.
We are coming to see how the institutional church in Latin America often separates herself from the very people and places that could bring about the kind of vision she so desperately needs. This was reinforced for me (Joel) last year, when I was asked to lead a consultation on gang outreach in the capital of a Central American country. I asked incarcerated gang members from a neighboring country to share some thoughts that I could carry to the leaders who would be attending the event. Here is a small part of what those gang members gave me:
Frequently we have seen growth in the physical structure of many churches, leaders with a competitive attitude choosing, it seems, to compete with other churches while abandoning the needs that exist in prisons, neighborhoods, slums, and rehabilitation centers. The priority of these churches always seems to be focused on the comfort of their respective members so they can feel like VIPS; thus, they have lost, or perhaps just forgotten, the vision of Jesus Christ, who said, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations …." We don't want to criticize just for the sake of being critical, but [we do want] to stand for the truth that while churches are construct-ing huge sanctuaries, there are children dying of hunger, gang members killing one another, and prisoners suffering greatly—while Christians comfort themselves in their big churches.
In a sermon focused on Luke 23, Tim Keller notes the "outsiders" gathered around the cross. There is Simon of Cyrene, a cultural outsider. A convicted criminal is a moral outsider. There are also a centurion, a racial outsider, and the women witnesses, social outsiders. Luke locates only one religious insider at the cross who seems to be able to grasp the full significance of Jesus' death: Joseph of Arimathea.
"Due to the way salvation is accomplished," Keller says, "those on the outside tend to understand and see things before those on the inside, but all are welcome." Further insight comes from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, who quotes Walter Brueggemann as saying that the prophet's job is to free people from their numbness. That, reflects Rohr, is also the task of the church. The church exists to wake people up, to bring them to consciousness, not just to comfort them in their unaware state. Rohr's fear is that soft piety and too-quick religious comfort do precisely that. "The giveaway," writes Rohr, "is when one finds no attitude of service, volunteerism, or compassion for the outsider emerging from one's attendance at church services."
Praying with Prostitutes
At CTM we have discovered that a large part of our "prophetic charism" for the church in Latin America can be summed up in the task of freeing the church from numbness. It is often a lonely task. It puts us in some hard places as we interact with outsiders who often become scandalous and surprising sources of numbness-breaking hope. Let me (Joel) try once again to illustrate.
Pastor Francis Montas and his wife, Loly, pastor a church of young people—Casa Joven—that meets on Saturday nights in a converted Santo Domingo nightclub. Their work with street kids, incarcerated juvenile delinquents, and las chicas de Sarasota (prostitutes) serves as a prophetic wake-up call to many others in the Dominican church.
About two months ago, Francis and Loly called a special Thursday night prayer service because so many young people were having serious problems. They met near one of Santo Domingo's most infamous streets for prostitution—La Avenida Sarasota. Their prayers for one another led them to pray for the girls on the street outside, and they left the building as if a tractor beam were pulling them toward the girls. The night I went out with them was their seventh consecutive night on the streets.
What we experienced over the next three hours was a numbness-shattering picture of God's scandalous grace. Each girl we stopped to talk to lit up as the young women from the church called out to them by name and embraced them with bear hugs. The women on the street responded to a host of beautiful questions, updating us on their week, sharing stories about their children, and receiving prayer with eager anticipation, all the while completely ignoring potential clients who passed by.
We had just finished sharing and praying with a group of three prostitutes when one of them, whom I will call Gloria, asked if she could pray for us. I held hands in a circle with my Dominican friends on a sidewalk on Avenida Sarasota at 2:30 A.M. and heard one of the most beautiful prayers of my life. When Gloria uttered her "amen," a smile exploded onto her face. She sheepishly confessed that it was the first time she had ever prayed out loud. I pretended to cough while trying to wipe away tears. Gloria received more bear hugs from the ladies and an awkward handshake from me. She said that she planned to come to church that Saturday night, when I was scheduled to preach.
Gloria indeed came that night. When the service concluded, she received hug after hug from the young worshipers, including the guest preacher, whose awkward and numb handshake on the street a few nights earlier turned into a hug of scandalous grace.
It would be impossible to detail here how blessed this church has been and how their vision and mission for their city has been recalibrated through their interaction with the prostitutes. There are churches in Latin America like Casa Joven that are engaging the Hagars of their cities, and by doing so are teaching the rest of us how to sing God's song in some very strange lands.
Joel Van Dyke lives in Central America and directs a grassroots training initiative called La Estrategia de Transformación, which is a strategic alliance between the Center for Transforming Mission and Christian Reformed World Missions.
Kris Rocke is executive director of the Center for Transforming Mission.
by Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke
Reading the Bible through the eyes of outsiders can awaken the church from numbness.
Christopher J. H. Wright began this series of Global Conversation essays with an exposition of the Lausanne Movement's driving definition: "Evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world." What does that gospel look like when it invades the margins of the world, sectors where our more traditional churches don't often go? To catch glimpses of that gospel in action and to understand the biblical themes that can animate ministry at the margins, we turn to Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke of the Center for Transforming Mission in Tacoma, Washington.
The psalmist asks, "How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?" (Ps. 137:4). It's a beautiful question springing from the heart of a poet struggling creatively to live out in a strange land (Babylon) what he knows to be true in another, more familiar context (Jerusalem). English poet e. e. cummings once wrote that the beautiful answer is always preceded by the more beautiful question, and in this psalm we discover a beautiful question. It has given theological roots to missional communities of grassroots leaders in six countries throughout Latin America (as well as in urban centers in the Caribbean, Kenya, and North America) under the banner of the Center for Transforming Mission (CTM).
We are learning how to read the Bible not to or even for those we serve, but with those we serve—those who have been wrongly labeled the least, last, and lost. Sustaining this approach is the belief that grace is like water: it flows downhill and pools up in the lowest places. We are learning to see God's grace pooling up in places of extreme poverty and violence.
The core theological values of CTM are formed by the incarnational mission of Jesus Christ. In Jesus' incarnation—and here we mean all that Jesus did and said, including his death and resurrection to save us from our sins—the intimacy of human and divine is fully realized. Said plainly, the Incarnation unites what the world divides—always, and in all ways. It says that matter, not just spirit, matters. Ministry that spiritualizes away the problems we face in the world of matter is simply not true to the biblical picture portrayed in the Creation and the Incarnation. Biblical, incarnational ministry is radically holistic. It touches the body and the soul. It calls forth personal transformation and systemic change. It invites righteousness and justice. It connects God and humanity, heaven and earth, and, perhaps hardest of all, "us" and "them."
Our concern to incarnate Jesus among the least, last, and lost has introduced us to some amazing grassroots leaders who are singing God's song in some very strange lands, such as among populations of street youth, families in extreme poverty, prostitutes, women in the throes of domestic abuse, and incarcerated gang members in the prisons of Central America. We have learned that "misfits" are critical to the mission of the church. Let me (Joel) try to illustrate.
There is a men's prison in Central America with a surprising group of residents. A ragtag clan of girlfriends, wives, sisters, and mothers connected to one of Central America's major gangs sleep under and on top of the cement tables in what used to be the dining hall. During a recent visit, the prison "chaplain" (an ex-gang member) and I led a conversation centered on the person of Hagar in Genesis 16. The women quickly applied the story personally. They heard the angel of the Lord pay honor and respect to Hagar by becoming the only character in the narrative to address her by name. The angel then asks her a beautiful question—"Where have you come from, and where are you going?" (v. 8)—empowering her to tell her own story.
The women in the prison could relate to being unnamed and used as property by people in positions of authority and power who never bothered to ask about their stories. They knew what it felt like to live in deserts of loneliness caused by rejection and marginalization. In Hagar's story, the women found their story.
Reading the Bible with those we serve means we learn to take the stained glass off the text of Scripture and begin reading from the perspective of those who have been crushed by life. It's an adventure in mining good news out of the holes of Scripture that the church typically refuses to climb down into. Hagar's story is one of those stories, and it is no small matter that she is the first person in Scripture who has the privilege of giving a name to God. She marvels, "Could it be that I have seen the back side of the one who sees everything and am still alive?" She gives to God the name El Roi, "the God who sees me." This element of the story seized the attention of these present-day Hagars in a vise of surprise and wonder.
A few weeks after the study, the prison chaplain was able to complete phase one of a prison rehabilitation project, building a cement wall physically separating the women from the men. The idea emerged to paint a mural on the wall, and a discussion ensued about what the women wanted to paint. They came to a unanimous decision to paint the story of Hagar, with the words El Dios Que Me Ve ("the God Who Sees Me") as the focal point of the piece.
The larger missional implication is that Hagar grasps something about God that Abraham is not able to confess until six chapters later. In Genesis 22:14, Abraham names Mount Moriah Jehovah Jireh ("the God who provides"), using the verb ra'ah, the same one that Hagar used in naming God. This leads us to marvel that perhaps the Hagars of the world are able to recognize the gospel long before the Abrahams do.
Three Gates of Change
We see three gateways to transformation: prayer, praise, and pain. The widest of all is pain. Ironically, pain is the most guarded gateway among those in power, and it is the most accessible gateway for the people we serve. Old Testament scholar Kathleen O'Connor says, "The first condition of healing is to give voice to pain."Perhaps this is why reality and authenticity are the currency of those at the margins. If it is going to work, it has to be real. Perhaps that is why the gospel begins with seeing things as they are, not as they should be. It is a hard lesson, but we are learning that the primary task of the church is to see God at work in the world and to celebrate what we see God doing. It is not to build, grow, or extend the kingdom of God—that is God's work. Our job is to see what is, to name it, and to recognize God at work in it.
We are coming to see how the institutional church in Latin America often separates herself from the very people and places that could bring about the kind of vision she so desperately needs. This was reinforced for me (Joel) last year, when I was asked to lead a consultation on gang outreach in the capital of a Central American country. I asked incarcerated gang members from a neighboring country to share some thoughts that I could carry to the leaders who would be attending the event. Here is a small part of what those gang members gave me:
Frequently we have seen growth in the physical structure of many churches, leaders with a competitive attitude choosing, it seems, to compete with other churches while abandoning the needs that exist in prisons, neighborhoods, slums, and rehabilitation centers. The priority of these churches always seems to be focused on the comfort of their respective members so they can feel like VIPS; thus, they have lost, or perhaps just forgotten, the vision of Jesus Christ, who said, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations …." We don't want to criticize just for the sake of being critical, but [we do want] to stand for the truth that while churches are construct-ing huge sanctuaries, there are children dying of hunger, gang members killing one another, and prisoners suffering greatly—while Christians comfort themselves in their big churches.
In a sermon focused on Luke 23, Tim Keller notes the "outsiders" gathered around the cross. There is Simon of Cyrene, a cultural outsider. A convicted criminal is a moral outsider. There are also a centurion, a racial outsider, and the women witnesses, social outsiders. Luke locates only one religious insider at the cross who seems to be able to grasp the full significance of Jesus' death: Joseph of Arimathea.
"Due to the way salvation is accomplished," Keller says, "those on the outside tend to understand and see things before those on the inside, but all are welcome." Further insight comes from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, who quotes Walter Brueggemann as saying that the prophet's job is to free people from their numbness. That, reflects Rohr, is also the task of the church. The church exists to wake people up, to bring them to consciousness, not just to comfort them in their unaware state. Rohr's fear is that soft piety and too-quick religious comfort do precisely that. "The giveaway," writes Rohr, "is when one finds no attitude of service, volunteerism, or compassion for the outsider emerging from one's attendance at church services."
Praying with Prostitutes
Pastor Francis Montas and his wife, Loly, pastor a church of young people—Casa Joven—that meets on Saturday nights in a converted Santo Domingo nightclub. Their work with street kids, incarcerated juvenile delinquents, and las chicas de Sarasota (prostitutes) serves as a prophetic wake-up call to many others in the Dominican church.
About two months ago, Francis and Loly called a special Thursday night prayer service because so many young people were having serious problems. They met near one of Santo Domingo's most infamous streets for prostitution—La Avenida Sarasota. Their prayers for one another led them to pray for the girls on the street outside, and they left the building as if a tractor beam were pulling them toward the girls. The night I went out with them was their seventh consecutive night on the streets.
What we experienced over the next three hours was a numbness-shattering picture of God's scandalous grace. Each girl we stopped to talk to lit up as the young women from the church called out to them by name and embraced them with bear hugs. The women on the street responded to a host of beautiful questions, updating us on their week, sharing stories about their children, and receiving prayer with eager anticipation, all the while completely ignoring potential clients who passed by.
We had just finished sharing and praying with a group of three prostitutes when one of them, whom I will call Gloria, asked if she could pray for us. I held hands in a circle with my Dominican friends on a sidewalk on Avenida Sarasota at 2:30 A.M. and heard one of the most beautiful prayers of my life. When Gloria uttered her "amen," a smile exploded onto her face. She sheepishly confessed that it was the first time she had ever prayed out loud. I pretended to cough while trying to wipe away tears. Gloria received more bear hugs from the ladies and an awkward handshake from me. She said that she planned to come to church that Saturday night, when I was scheduled to preach.
Gloria indeed came that night. When the service concluded, she received hug after hug from the young worshipers, including the guest preacher, whose awkward and numb handshake on the street a few nights earlier turned into a hug of scandalous grace.
It would be impossible to detail here how blessed this church has been and how their vision and mission for their city has been recalibrated through their interaction with the prostitutes. There are churches in Latin America like Casa Joven that are engaging the Hagars of their cities, and by doing so are teaching the rest of us how to sing God's song in some very strange lands.
Joel Van Dyke lives in Central America and directs a grassroots training initiative called La Estrategia de Transformación, which is a strategic alliance between the Center for Transforming Mission and Christian Reformed World Missions.
Kris Rocke is executive director of the Center for Transforming Mission.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Articles 6 (International Affairs/US-Israel Relations)
I apologize for posting two articles again, but I think they offer both complimentary and contrasting explanations for the U.S. commitment to Israel and the long sought "peace process" with the Palestinians. Many questions arise from taking a comparative look at these two articles. Is U.S. support for Israel rooted more in the "American civil religion" described by Skillen or the security calculations addressed by Friedman? What are the implications of explaining what drives U.S. relations with Israel in such different ways? -NB
Root & Branch (The Religion and Society Debate) “America and Israel” (June 2, 2008)
By James W. Skillen (Fellow, The Center for Public Justice)
Religions are ways of life and not merely the consciously intended practices of worship and pastoral service. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ways of life are supposed to guide the adherents of those faiths in what they do all week long and not only in the ways they worship. Religions as ways of life generally function like the glasses through which we see things; we are not always conscious of the glasses (or our eyes) when we see things, even though they are what make it possible to focus on anything in particular.
In this light it is possible to understand why the American way of life is often overlooked when people talk about religion, even though it often challenges or conflicts with the ways of life called for by the scriptures and authorities of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communions. The American way of life might not structure our Saturday or Sunday worship services, but it certainly functions as the glasses through which many Americans see and make sense of their daily lives. Let me illustrate.
We will never adequately understand America’s support for the State of Israel unless we recognize that support as an expression of the American civil religion or way of life, which is often in conflict or tension with other religious ways of life. I am discovering the depth of the tensions among these religions as I write a paper on three Zionisms, a paper that will be part of a forthcoming book on religion in international affairs. The three Zionisms are (1) American new-Israelitism, (2) Jewish Zionism, and (3) contemporary Christian Zionism. These three Zionisms are very powerful influences shaping political practice and foreign policy decisions.
Consider the current American presidential campaign. In May, one of Barack Obama’s advisers on Middle East policy, Robert Malley, was strongly criticized by pro-Israel advocates (both Christians and Jews) for having said that Israel as well as the Palestinians had been responsible for the failure of peace talks during the Clinton administration and for meeting more recently with officials of Hamas, which now controls the Gaza region of the Palestinian territory and is considered a terrorist organization by the George W. Bush administration. Obama felt compelled to dismiss Malley immediately from any formal advisory role in his campaign and assured critics that he is as fully supportive of Israel as Hillary Clinton and John McCain are.
Commenting on the Malley-Obama incident, Gordon Rachman (Financial Times, 5/27/08) writes that it’s a shame the presidential candidates cannot even raise critical questions about Israel without fear of being denounced by the powerful Christian and Jewish pro-Israel lobbies in the United States. “This taboo is all the more bizarre,” says Rachman, “since the Israeli government itself is currently negotiating with Hamas.” Rachman adds that the “last time I was in Jerusalem, Israeli officials complained to me that the US’s refusal to talk to the Syrians was foolish . . . . Now it turns out that the Israelis themselves are holding talks with Syria—but sponsored by Turkey, not the US.” Rachman also quotes a McCain spokesman who said, “It is easier to have an open discussion on Palestine in Tel Aviv than in Washington.” “Why is the American debate so constrained?” asks Rachman. It is, he says, because Jewish and Christian evangelical voters are so “fervently pro-Israel.” But why, we must ask, are those voters so fervently and powerfully pro-Israel?
An adequate answer to the last question cannot be developed here, but it would move along the following lines. American Christian Zionists are convinced that the end of history and God’s final judgment of the world will follow the fulfillment of certain biblical prophecies, which include God’s blessing or cursing of America depending on whether America stands firm behind the State of Israel. American Jewish Zionists are strongly pro-Israel not for reasons of biblical prophecy but out of commitment to the success of modern Jewish nationalism, and they, too, demand American commitment to Israel above all else. And why are these two Zionisms so closely connected to the United States? This is where American new-Israelitism comes in. The American way of life is predicated on the conviction that God chose this nation to be a new Israel, a light to the world, a city set on a hill, to lead the world to freedom and democracy. And this new-covenant nation should now support the State of Israel (which represents God’s old covenant people returning to the Promised Land) in order that the fulfillment of end-times prophecies will include God’s blessing (rather than cursing) of America.
Now you may think that all of this is theological nonsense or beside the point, politically speaking. But you’d be wrong. Even though America’s actual influence in the Middle East has been declining and many of its pro-Israel policies failing, the unquestioned civil-religious faith of Americanism that helps to sustain Jewish Zionism and Christian Zionism lives on and is even gaining strength among vast numbers of Americans. And if any candidate wants to succeed in politics, he or she had better toe this line if they want support from the pro-Israel lobby.
To open a genuine public debate about American policy in the Middle East, therefore, will take more than standard political arguments. It will require debates that go all the way down to the religiously deep ways of life that drive peoples and nations. And it will require coming to grips with the religious character of the American way of life.
James W. Skillen, President Center for Public Justice
The New York Times “Hobby or Necessity?” (March 28, 2010)
By Thomas L. Friedman
If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you’re clearly not paying attention — which is how I’d describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.
This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations. I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem. The collapse of the Oslo peace process, combined with the unilateral Israeli pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza — which were followed not by peace but by rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel — decimated Israel’s peace camp and the political parties aligned with it.
At the same time, Israel’s erecting of a wall around the West Bank to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel (there have been no successful attacks since 2006), along with the rise of the high-tech industry in Israel — which does a great deal of business digitally and over the Internet and is largely impervious to the day-to-day conflict — has meant that even without peace, Israel can enjoy a very peaceful existence and a rising standard of living. To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.
Why not? Newsweek’s Dan Ephron wrote in the Jan. 11, 2010, issue: “An improved security situation, a feeling that acceptance by Arabs no longer matters much, and a growing disaffection from politics generally have, for many Israelis, called into question the basic calculus that has driven the peace process. Instead of pining for peace, they’re now asking: who needs it? ... Tourism hit a 10-year high in 2008. Astonishingly, the I.M.F. projected recently that Israel’s G.D.P. will grow faster in 2010 than that of most other developed countries. In short, Israelis are enjoying a peace dividend without a peace agreement.” Now, in the same time period, America went from having only a small symbolic number of soldiers in the Middle East to running two wars there — in Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as a global struggle against violent Muslim extremists. With U.S. soldiers literally walking the Arab street — and, therefore, more in need than ever of Muslim good will to protect themselves and defeat Muslim extremists — Israeli-Palestinian peace has gone from being a post-cold-war hobby of U.S. diplomats to being a necessity.
Both Vice President Joe Biden and Gen. David Petraeus have been quoted recently as saying that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-U.S. sentiments, because of the perception that America usually sides with Israel, and these sentiments are exploited by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to generate anti-Americanism that complicates life for our soldiers in the region. I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I would not dismiss it either. The issue that should make peacemaking a necessity rather than a hobby for both the U.S. and Israel is confronting a nuclear Iran.
Unfortunately, Israel sees the question of preventing Iran from going nuclear as overriding and separate from the Palestinian issue, while the U.S. sees them as integrated. At a time when the U.S. is trying to galvanize a global coalition to confront Iran, at a time when Iran uses the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict to embarrass pro-U.S. Arabs and extend its influence across the Muslim world, peace would be a strategic asset for America and Israel. Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, last week argued that Israel should adopt a more integrated view — which he calls a “Palestine-Iran-Palestine” strategy: Israel should take the initiative with an overture to the Palestinians, which would make progress on that front easier, which would strengthen the U.S. coalition against Iran, which could ultimately weaken Tehran and its allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, which would open the way for more progress on the Palestine-Israel front. He suggests that Israel reach an interim agreement with Palestinians on the West Bank or even consider a partial, unilateral withdrawal there.
“One way or another,” said Shavit, “Netanyahu should have made a genuine move on the Palestinian front that would have made genuine moves on the Iranian front possible, that would have made dealing with the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute possible at a later stage.” Indeed, Jerusalem, settlements, peace, Iran — they’re all connected and pretending you can treat some as a hobby and one as a necessity is an illusion.
Root & Branch (The Religion and Society Debate) “America and Israel” (June 2, 2008)
By James W. Skillen (Fellow, The Center for Public Justice)
Religions are ways of life and not merely the consciously intended practices of worship and pastoral service. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ways of life are supposed to guide the adherents of those faiths in what they do all week long and not only in the ways they worship. Religions as ways of life generally function like the glasses through which we see things; we are not always conscious of the glasses (or our eyes) when we see things, even though they are what make it possible to focus on anything in particular.
In this light it is possible to understand why the American way of life is often overlooked when people talk about religion, even though it often challenges or conflicts with the ways of life called for by the scriptures and authorities of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communions. The American way of life might not structure our Saturday or Sunday worship services, but it certainly functions as the glasses through which many Americans see and make sense of their daily lives. Let me illustrate.
We will never adequately understand America’s support for the State of Israel unless we recognize that support as an expression of the American civil religion or way of life, which is often in conflict or tension with other religious ways of life. I am discovering the depth of the tensions among these religions as I write a paper on three Zionisms, a paper that will be part of a forthcoming book on religion in international affairs. The three Zionisms are (1) American new-Israelitism, (2) Jewish Zionism, and (3) contemporary Christian Zionism. These three Zionisms are very powerful influences shaping political practice and foreign policy decisions.
Consider the current American presidential campaign. In May, one of Barack Obama’s advisers on Middle East policy, Robert Malley, was strongly criticized by pro-Israel advocates (both Christians and Jews) for having said that Israel as well as the Palestinians had been responsible for the failure of peace talks during the Clinton administration and for meeting more recently with officials of Hamas, which now controls the Gaza region of the Palestinian territory and is considered a terrorist organization by the George W. Bush administration. Obama felt compelled to dismiss Malley immediately from any formal advisory role in his campaign and assured critics that he is as fully supportive of Israel as Hillary Clinton and John McCain are.
Commenting on the Malley-Obama incident, Gordon Rachman (Financial Times, 5/27/08) writes that it’s a shame the presidential candidates cannot even raise critical questions about Israel without fear of being denounced by the powerful Christian and Jewish pro-Israel lobbies in the United States. “This taboo is all the more bizarre,” says Rachman, “since the Israeli government itself is currently negotiating with Hamas.” Rachman adds that the “last time I was in Jerusalem, Israeli officials complained to me that the US’s refusal to talk to the Syrians was foolish . . . . Now it turns out that the Israelis themselves are holding talks with Syria—but sponsored by Turkey, not the US.” Rachman also quotes a McCain spokesman who said, “It is easier to have an open discussion on Palestine in Tel Aviv than in Washington.” “Why is the American debate so constrained?” asks Rachman. It is, he says, because Jewish and Christian evangelical voters are so “fervently pro-Israel.” But why, we must ask, are those voters so fervently and powerfully pro-Israel?
An adequate answer to the last question cannot be developed here, but it would move along the following lines. American Christian Zionists are convinced that the end of history and God’s final judgment of the world will follow the fulfillment of certain biblical prophecies, which include God’s blessing or cursing of America depending on whether America stands firm behind the State of Israel. American Jewish Zionists are strongly pro-Israel not for reasons of biblical prophecy but out of commitment to the success of modern Jewish nationalism, and they, too, demand American commitment to Israel above all else. And why are these two Zionisms so closely connected to the United States? This is where American new-Israelitism comes in. The American way of life is predicated on the conviction that God chose this nation to be a new Israel, a light to the world, a city set on a hill, to lead the world to freedom and democracy. And this new-covenant nation should now support the State of Israel (which represents God’s old covenant people returning to the Promised Land) in order that the fulfillment of end-times prophecies will include God’s blessing (rather than cursing) of America.
Now you may think that all of this is theological nonsense or beside the point, politically speaking. But you’d be wrong. Even though America’s actual influence in the Middle East has been declining and many of its pro-Israel policies failing, the unquestioned civil-religious faith of Americanism that helps to sustain Jewish Zionism and Christian Zionism lives on and is even gaining strength among vast numbers of Americans. And if any candidate wants to succeed in politics, he or she had better toe this line if they want support from the pro-Israel lobby.
To open a genuine public debate about American policy in the Middle East, therefore, will take more than standard political arguments. It will require debates that go all the way down to the religiously deep ways of life that drive peoples and nations. And it will require coming to grips with the religious character of the American way of life.
James W. Skillen, President Center for Public Justice
The New York Times “Hobby or Necessity?” (March 28, 2010)
By Thomas L. Friedman
If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you’re clearly not paying attention — which is how I’d describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.
This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations. I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem. The collapse of the Oslo peace process, combined with the unilateral Israeli pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza — which were followed not by peace but by rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel — decimated Israel’s peace camp and the political parties aligned with it.
At the same time, Israel’s erecting of a wall around the West Bank to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel (there have been no successful attacks since 2006), along with the rise of the high-tech industry in Israel — which does a great deal of business digitally and over the Internet and is largely impervious to the day-to-day conflict — has meant that even without peace, Israel can enjoy a very peaceful existence and a rising standard of living. To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.
Why not? Newsweek’s Dan Ephron wrote in the Jan. 11, 2010, issue: “An improved security situation, a feeling that acceptance by Arabs no longer matters much, and a growing disaffection from politics generally have, for many Israelis, called into question the basic calculus that has driven the peace process. Instead of pining for peace, they’re now asking: who needs it? ... Tourism hit a 10-year high in 2008. Astonishingly, the I.M.F. projected recently that Israel’s G.D.P. will grow faster in 2010 than that of most other developed countries. In short, Israelis are enjoying a peace dividend without a peace agreement.” Now, in the same time period, America went from having only a small symbolic number of soldiers in the Middle East to running two wars there — in Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as a global struggle against violent Muslim extremists. With U.S. soldiers literally walking the Arab street — and, therefore, more in need than ever of Muslim good will to protect themselves and defeat Muslim extremists — Israeli-Palestinian peace has gone from being a post-cold-war hobby of U.S. diplomats to being a necessity.
Both Vice President Joe Biden and Gen. David Petraeus have been quoted recently as saying that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-U.S. sentiments, because of the perception that America usually sides with Israel, and these sentiments are exploited by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to generate anti-Americanism that complicates life for our soldiers in the region. I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I would not dismiss it either. The issue that should make peacemaking a necessity rather than a hobby for both the U.S. and Israel is confronting a nuclear Iran.
Unfortunately, Israel sees the question of preventing Iran from going nuclear as overriding and separate from the Palestinian issue, while the U.S. sees them as integrated. At a time when the U.S. is trying to galvanize a global coalition to confront Iran, at a time when Iran uses the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict to embarrass pro-U.S. Arabs and extend its influence across the Muslim world, peace would be a strategic asset for America and Israel. Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, last week argued that Israel should adopt a more integrated view — which he calls a “Palestine-Iran-Palestine” strategy: Israel should take the initiative with an overture to the Palestinians, which would make progress on that front easier, which would strengthen the U.S. coalition against Iran, which could ultimately weaken Tehran and its allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, which would open the way for more progress on the Palestine-Israel front. He suggests that Israel reach an interim agreement with Palestinians on the West Bank or even consider a partial, unilateral withdrawal there.
“One way or another,” said Shavit, “Netanyahu should have made a genuine move on the Palestinian front that would have made genuine moves on the Iranian front possible, that would have made dealing with the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute possible at a later stage.” Indeed, Jerusalem, settlements, peace, Iran — they’re all connected and pretending you can treat some as a hobby and one as a necessity is an illusion.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Articles 5 (Politics/Health Care)
I won't normally post two articles at the same time, but because of the expected House health care vote today, this is an excellent time to delve into the question of social justice in the context of a concrete social challenge. -NB
The Economist (Mar 18th 2010) "Pass the bill"
American health-care reform
Hugely expensive and full of flaws though it is, Barack Obama’s health-care plan is still worth having—just...
**GRAPH** Health Spending as % of GDP (2007): U.S. 16%, France 11%, Germany 10%, Canada 9.5%, UK 8.2%, Japan 8%
IT WILL cost close to a trillion dollars over the next ten years, a vast sum of money at any time and a heart-stopping prospect when America’s budget deficit is gobbling up nearly 11% of GDP and unemployment seems stuck at close to 10%. It takes only tentative steps towards controlling the relentless above-inflation rise in health-care costs that has gone on for decades, squeezing corporate and personal budgets alike and threatening, if unchecked, to overwhelm the federal budget entirely. It squanders a golden opportunity to shift away from a payment model that encourages doctors to prescribe too many overpriced tests. Its sponsors in Congress are likely to suffer in the mid-term elections, and it will probably always be cited as an example of Barack Obama’s leftish mismanagement during much of his first year as president.
So the latest version of health reform which Democratic leaders hope to vote on in a matter of days is, to put it mildly, a terrible disappointment. Despite that, the Democrats must summon up their courage and vote for reform. This poor bill is still better than no bill at all for two reasons.
One part basic decency, one part cost control
The first has to do with coverage. This newspaper loathes needless government intervention. But it also thinks that it is wrong for a country as rich as America to have tens of millions of people without health insurance. Beyond them is the much larger number of people who fear falling into that position through losing their jobs; and the larger number again who cannot get affordable insurance because they have an existing medical condition, or because they are too old, or because they have exhausted the “lifetime caps” imposed by insurance companies. The health-reform plan represents the last chance, perhaps for decades, of erasing one of the least creditable differences between America and the rest of the industrialised world. If this president, who came into office with solid congressional majorities and stratospheric ratings fails, neither he nor his successors will dare touch health care for many years to come; and that would be a tragedy.
The second somewhat paradoxical reason is that this bill will have to be improved on after it is passed—especially when it comes to costs. America’s health-care system is a nightmare of perverse incentives. Because employer-provided health insurance is not considered to be a taxable benefit, people feel insulated from the real cost of their coverage and consequently over-consume. Because hospitals and medical practices in many areas face too little competition, they charge absurdly too much even for simple procedures. Because of the rapacity of America’s lawyers, the fear of lawsuits encourages doctors to practise “defensive” medicine, again driving up costs.
The current bill chips away at all of these problems. Gold-plated insurance policies will in effect lose their tax-exempt status, though not for a while, and not in full. An independent presidential commission will have some power to force down the rates paid to medical-service providers—though, insanely, hospitals are exempted. Tiny steps in the direction of tort reform are also provided for. All these things could be expanded in due course. For instance Republicans elected in November may well return to the issue of malpractice costs.
Some health-reform purists will scoff at such incrementalism. They argue that it would be better to do nothing now, wait for an old-fashioned fiscal crisis to force the issue, and then start again. That is an alternative we think most Americans would rather not experience. Mr Obama’s bill does a morally desirable thing in expanding health coverage, and it does a bit on costs. That is, on balance, enough for it to deserve to pass.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 18, 2010) "Whose Vision of Social Justice?" (article taken from www.eppc.org)
By Colleen Carroll Campbell (Fellow, Ethics & Public Policy Center)
Talk-show host Glenn Beck recently struck a nerve -- and ratings gold -- when he urged his audience to abandon any church that espouses social justice. The term is "code" for extremist political ideas akin to those of Nazis and Communists, Beck said, and churches that use it are promoting "a perversion of the Gospel" that privileges big government over individual charity.
Beck's controversial advice sparked a passionate backlash, particularly from the political left. Leading the boycott-Beck brigade is liberal social activist the Rev. Jim Wallis, who says Christians now should consider Beck's show as obscene and unworthy of their patronage as shock jock Howard Stern's. "Social justice is an integral part of God's plan for humanity," Wallis wrote on his blog, after admitting that "Christians may disagree about what social justice means in our current political context."
That caveat is crucial, and it's one that politicized pastors like Wallis often forget. A spiritual adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the rather presumptuously titled manifesto "God's Politics," Wallis is an intensely partisan critic of those who reject his statist vision of social reform. He's not the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- a preacher of ranting, anti-American sermons whose Chicago church Obama attended for decades and whom Beck cited as an example of a pastor promoting extremism. But Wallis has his moments of fire-breathing invective, directed almost always at Republican politicians and conservative Christians.
Beck makes his living by making provocative statements, so he probably was not displeased by the attention that Wallis' fury generated for his show. For Wallis, the controversy has given him a bigger platform to plead his case for the inextricable link between a Christian social conscience and leftist public policy. Lost in the fray is an interesting question worth pondering: What's the meaning of social justice? Anyone who has cracked open a Bible knows that justice is indeed a recurring theme. Calls for a just social order hardly qualify as a "perversion" of a Gospel that emphasizes, again and again, God's concern for the poor and marginalized. A religion premised on the idea of original sin does not promise its adherents a pain-free existence this side of eternity, but neither does it exempt them from the duty to build a better society here and now.
Still, there's a reason that the term "social justice" provokes sighs and rolled eyes among many Christians today. The promotion of leftist politics as infallible religious dogma by pastors such as Wright and, to a lesser extent, Wallis, goes a long way toward explaining public fatigue with the term. That fatigue stretches beyond Protestant circles into Catholic ones, where the phrase has its origins. The Catholic Catechism defines social justice as a situation in which people are able to "obtain what is their due" and says such justice "can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man." The church lays out a few non-negotiable principles when it comes to respecting this personal dignity -- defense of the right to life is preeminent among them -- while leaving many public policy decisions subject to the prudential judgment of individual Catholics.
Catholicism is not libertarianism by any stretch; government is expected to have a role in protecting the poor and weak. Yet the church also defends the principle of subsidiarity in political life -- the idea that the people closest to a problem should be the ones to solve it. Despite these careful doctrinal distinctions, many Catholics -- like many mainline Protestants -- assume that social justice demands their reflexive support for unlimited expansion of the social welfare state, even when a new government program may not be the most effective way to help the poor. Meanwhile, many of these same Catholics ignore the Church's clear admonition to defend social justice by defending the right to life of the unborn from abortion and the elderly from euthanasia.
The call for social justice is an outgrowth, not a perversion, of the Gospel. But the devil is in the definition. Christians concerned about mission creep in their churches should not abandon social justice. They should fight to reclaim a fuller understanding of it, one independent of any narrowly partisan political agenda.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.
The Economist (Mar 18th 2010) "Pass the bill"
American health-care reform
Hugely expensive and full of flaws though it is, Barack Obama’s health-care plan is still worth having—just...
**GRAPH** Health Spending as % of GDP (2007): U.S. 16%, France 11%, Germany 10%, Canada 9.5%, UK 8.2%, Japan 8%
IT WILL cost close to a trillion dollars over the next ten years, a vast sum of money at any time and a heart-stopping prospect when America’s budget deficit is gobbling up nearly 11% of GDP and unemployment seems stuck at close to 10%. It takes only tentative steps towards controlling the relentless above-inflation rise in health-care costs that has gone on for decades, squeezing corporate and personal budgets alike and threatening, if unchecked, to overwhelm the federal budget entirely. It squanders a golden opportunity to shift away from a payment model that encourages doctors to prescribe too many overpriced tests. Its sponsors in Congress are likely to suffer in the mid-term elections, and it will probably always be cited as an example of Barack Obama’s leftish mismanagement during much of his first year as president.
So the latest version of health reform which Democratic leaders hope to vote on in a matter of days is, to put it mildly, a terrible disappointment. Despite that, the Democrats must summon up their courage and vote for reform. This poor bill is still better than no bill at all for two reasons.
One part basic decency, one part cost control
The first has to do with coverage. This newspaper loathes needless government intervention. But it also thinks that it is wrong for a country as rich as America to have tens of millions of people without health insurance. Beyond them is the much larger number of people who fear falling into that position through losing their jobs; and the larger number again who cannot get affordable insurance because they have an existing medical condition, or because they are too old, or because they have exhausted the “lifetime caps” imposed by insurance companies. The health-reform plan represents the last chance, perhaps for decades, of erasing one of the least creditable differences between America and the rest of the industrialised world. If this president, who came into office with solid congressional majorities and stratospheric ratings fails, neither he nor his successors will dare touch health care for many years to come; and that would be a tragedy.
The second somewhat paradoxical reason is that this bill will have to be improved on after it is passed—especially when it comes to costs. America’s health-care system is a nightmare of perverse incentives. Because employer-provided health insurance is not considered to be a taxable benefit, people feel insulated from the real cost of their coverage and consequently over-consume. Because hospitals and medical practices in many areas face too little competition, they charge absurdly too much even for simple procedures. Because of the rapacity of America’s lawyers, the fear of lawsuits encourages doctors to practise “defensive” medicine, again driving up costs.
The current bill chips away at all of these problems. Gold-plated insurance policies will in effect lose their tax-exempt status, though not for a while, and not in full. An independent presidential commission will have some power to force down the rates paid to medical-service providers—though, insanely, hospitals are exempted. Tiny steps in the direction of tort reform are also provided for. All these things could be expanded in due course. For instance Republicans elected in November may well return to the issue of malpractice costs.
Some health-reform purists will scoff at such incrementalism. They argue that it would be better to do nothing now, wait for an old-fashioned fiscal crisis to force the issue, and then start again. That is an alternative we think most Americans would rather not experience. Mr Obama’s bill does a morally desirable thing in expanding health coverage, and it does a bit on costs. That is, on balance, enough for it to deserve to pass.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 18, 2010) "Whose Vision of Social Justice?" (article taken from www.eppc.org)
By Colleen Carroll Campbell (Fellow, Ethics & Public Policy Center)
Talk-show host Glenn Beck recently struck a nerve -- and ratings gold -- when he urged his audience to abandon any church that espouses social justice. The term is "code" for extremist political ideas akin to those of Nazis and Communists, Beck said, and churches that use it are promoting "a perversion of the Gospel" that privileges big government over individual charity.
Beck's controversial advice sparked a passionate backlash, particularly from the political left. Leading the boycott-Beck brigade is liberal social activist the Rev. Jim Wallis, who says Christians now should consider Beck's show as obscene and unworthy of their patronage as shock jock Howard Stern's. "Social justice is an integral part of God's plan for humanity," Wallis wrote on his blog, after admitting that "Christians may disagree about what social justice means in our current political context."
That caveat is crucial, and it's one that politicized pastors like Wallis often forget. A spiritual adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the rather presumptuously titled manifesto "God's Politics," Wallis is an intensely partisan critic of those who reject his statist vision of social reform. He's not the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- a preacher of ranting, anti-American sermons whose Chicago church Obama attended for decades and whom Beck cited as an example of a pastor promoting extremism. But Wallis has his moments of fire-breathing invective, directed almost always at Republican politicians and conservative Christians.
Beck makes his living by making provocative statements, so he probably was not displeased by the attention that Wallis' fury generated for his show. For Wallis, the controversy has given him a bigger platform to plead his case for the inextricable link between a Christian social conscience and leftist public policy. Lost in the fray is an interesting question worth pondering: What's the meaning of social justice? Anyone who has cracked open a Bible knows that justice is indeed a recurring theme. Calls for a just social order hardly qualify as a "perversion" of a Gospel that emphasizes, again and again, God's concern for the poor and marginalized. A religion premised on the idea of original sin does not promise its adherents a pain-free existence this side of eternity, but neither does it exempt them from the duty to build a better society here and now.
Still, there's a reason that the term "social justice" provokes sighs and rolled eyes among many Christians today. The promotion of leftist politics as infallible religious dogma by pastors such as Wright and, to a lesser extent, Wallis, goes a long way toward explaining public fatigue with the term. That fatigue stretches beyond Protestant circles into Catholic ones, where the phrase has its origins. The Catholic Catechism defines social justice as a situation in which people are able to "obtain what is their due" and says such justice "can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man." The church lays out a few non-negotiable principles when it comes to respecting this personal dignity -- defense of the right to life is preeminent among them -- while leaving many public policy decisions subject to the prudential judgment of individual Catholics.
Catholicism is not libertarianism by any stretch; government is expected to have a role in protecting the poor and weak. Yet the church also defends the principle of subsidiarity in political life -- the idea that the people closest to a problem should be the ones to solve it. Despite these careful doctrinal distinctions, many Catholics -- like many mainline Protestants -- assume that social justice demands their reflexive support for unlimited expansion of the social welfare state, even when a new government program may not be the most effective way to help the poor. Meanwhile, many of these same Catholics ignore the Church's clear admonition to defend social justice by defending the right to life of the unborn from abortion and the elderly from euthanasia.
The call for social justice is an outgrowth, not a perversion, of the Gospel. But the devil is in the definition. Christians concerned about mission creep in their churches should not abandon social justice. They should fight to reclaim a fuller understanding of it, one independent of any narrowly partisan political agenda.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Article 4 (Politics)
New York Times (March 12, 2010) "Getting Obama Right"
By David Brooks
Who is Barack Obama?
If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.
If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.
You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.
The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.
He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.
But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.
Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.
Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.
Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.
Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.
Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.
In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.
By David Brooks
Who is Barack Obama?
If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.
If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.
You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.
The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.
He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.
But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.
Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.
Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.
Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.
Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.
Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.
In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Article 3 (Theology/Ecclesiology)
First Things (April 2009) "The One True Church"
By Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
The Public Square
Richard John Neuhaus died on January 8, 2009, at the age of seventy-two—a great loss to the magazine, to American public discourse, and to his many friends.We present here a previously unpublished essay, “The One True Church,” which he wrote in New York during his last months, together with a few of our favorite While We're At It items from the nineteen years of his work in The Public Square.
My church is better than your church. It sounds like the stuff of schoolboy quarrels on the playground: My dad can beat your dad! Yet, sad to say, that is how many Christians have understood recent statements on Catholic ecclesiology. In 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document called Dominus Iesus and then, in 2007, reiterated its main points in “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church.”
The gist of these is that, with important qualifications related to Eastern Orthodoxy, non-Catholic churches are not to be called “Church” in the proper sense of the term but are better described as “ecclesial communities.” This was widely decried by many non-Catholic (and some Catholic) theologians as a departure from, if not reversal of, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It was, we were told, a body blow to ecumenism, the quest for visible unity among Christians.
I have on occasion offered this proposition: “The Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.” Some of my critics have questioned whether that is adequate. To say that it is the most fully and rightly ordered, they contend, implies or at least invites the inference that other communities are also the Church of Jesus Christ, albeit not so fully and rightly ordered.
To think more fully about this, we need to clarify what the Catholic Church claims for herself and what she does, and does not, acknowledge with respect to other Christian communities. My own thoughts are occasioned by two essays I read recently: one by Avery Cardinal Dulles in a volume called Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition and the other by Christopher J. Molloy, an essay titled “Subsistit In: Nonexclusive Identity or Full Identity?” that appeared in The Thomist.
Before we can get anywhere with this discussion, two stipulations must be firmly in place. The first is that we are not engaged in a rivalry between our side and some other side. Some years ago, when William F. Buckley heard that a prominent Protestant had entered into full communion with the Catholic Church, he exclaimed: “This is great news. It's like the Yankees stealing the star pitcher from the Red Sox.” That is an understandable tribal response, but it takes us back to the squabbling of boys on the playground. Questions of great theological moment are at stake. In these matters, Catholic and non-Catholic alike should have as their one concern the question of what Christ intended, and still intends, for his one Church—it being understood by all that, in the deepest meaning of the term, there can finally be only one Church, since the Church is the Body of Christ, of which Christ is the head, and there is only one Christ.
Tribalism has no place in this discussion. As John Paul II reminded Catholics in his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, being a Catholic is not reason for proprietorial pride but for profound gratitude for a grace received, all undeserved on our part. Moreover, a Catholic who does not earnestly want to recognize and rejoice in the gifts of grace to be found in other Christian communities will almost certainly be more hindrance than help in this discussion.
The second and related stipulation is that we are not comparing an ideal depiction of the state of Catholicism with less flattering depictions of other communities—or vice versa. It is not a matter of what we like or dislike in this community or that. I have decided views on certain Orthodox and Protestant virtues that Catholics might well emulate. As Malloy writes, in reflecting on the uniqueness of the Catholic Church “one can affirm both the essential fullness of the ecclesial reality of the Catholic Church and the concrete poverty and woundedness of her lived life, together with her practical need of the expressive ecclesial riches found outside her visible boundaries.” Not only can one affirm both, one must affirm both.
Subsistit In
With those two stipulations firmly in place, one notes that the chief reason the documents of 2000 and 2007 were viewed as setbacks to ecumenism is that, for a long time and in many quarters, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council was gravely misrepresented. Cardinal Dulles writes that there still exists a general impression that Vatican II mandated a revolution in Catholic ecclesiology. He cites writings by John O'Malley as well as those by Gregory Baum, who claims the council reflects a “Blondelian shift” from “extrinsicism” toward experience and immanence. The Church is what you experience it to be. Richard McBrien speaks of “Copernican” and “Einsteinian” revolutions that overcame the unhealthy “ecclesiocentrism” of the past. Others claimed the council teaches that the Catholic Church is but one church among many. Some went further, saying that the Church is not only not the ordinary means of salvation; it is an extraordinary means for people who happen, for one reason or another, to be Catholic.
So what is to be made of all this? A good place to start is with what the Second Vatican Council actually said. Lumen Gentium, the Constitution on the Church, reads: “This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, which our Savior, after his Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority, which he erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth.' This Church, constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”
Much ink has been spilled in unpacking those three sentences, with most particular attention being devoted to the words “subsists in” (subsistit in). Much is made of the fact that the first draft of the constitution said that the Church of Jesus Christ is (est) the Catholic Church, which suggests that the final wording is a weakening of a straightforward identity of the Church with the Catholic Church. Both Dulles and Molloy point out, however, that subsistit in did not replace est but replaced adest in—“is present in”—a phrase that appeared in an intermediate draft. As a matter of fact, subsistit in was proposed by Sebastian Tromp, who had been a staunch proponent of the earlier est and the position that the Church of Christ is identical with the Catholic Church. In addition, the great majority of conservative bishops at the council voted in favor of the final draft, which clearly suggests that they did not think subsistit in was a watering down of the Church's self-understanding.
A few years before he became pope, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger explained it this way:
The word subsistit derives from ancient philosophy, as it was later developed among the Scholastics. It corresponds to the Greek word hypostasis, which of course plays a key role in Christology in describing the union of divine and human natures in the one person of Christ. Subsistere is a special case of esse. It refers to existence in the form of an individual subject. . . . With the word subsistit, the Council wanted to express the singularity and non-multipliability of the Church of Christ, the Catholic Church: the Church exists as a single subject in the reality of history. But the difference between subsistit and est also embraces the drama of ecclesial division: for while the Church is only one and really exists, there is being which is from the Church's being—there is ecclesial reality—outside the Church.
The elements of sanctification and truth to be found outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church are ecclesial elements. Can there be ecclesial elements without ecclesia? Obviously, some fine but important distinctions are in order. The late Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, longtime head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, was fond of saying, “Christ and the Church are coterminous.” I take that to mean that, if one is in a living relationship with Christ, one is also in relationship with his Church, for body and head cannot be separated. Therefore communities of faith outside the Catholic Church are ecclesial communities.
And therefore Lumen Gentium says that non-Catholics who are baptized and believe in Christ are in a “certain but imperfect communion with the Catholic Church.” The goal of ecumenism is not to create a unity that does not exist but to bring to fulfillment the very real unity that is already there between Catholics and non-Catholics who are brothers and sisters in Christ. (For purposes of this discussion I leave largely aside the situation of the Orthodox, who have valid ordination and other sacraments and adhere to apostolic teaching. Among the Orthodox, according to Catholic doctrine, there are not just ecclesial communities but “particular churches,” although they are, in the language of CDF, “wounded” by the lack of full communion with the ministry of Peter exercised by the bishop of Rome.)
Realizations of the Sacrament
Molloy and others speak of the “full,” “complete,” “total,” and “exclusive” identity between the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ. Such language can easily mislead and is understandably offensive to non-Catholic Christians. The intention, however, is to underscore that the Catholic Church is nothing less than the Church of Christ and to counter any suggestion that the Catholic Church is—albeit the most fully and rightly ordered—only one church among other churches. Again, this is not a matter of boasting or of ecclesial rivalry, which should have no place among followers of Christ. It is a matter of being as faithful as possible to what Christ intended his Church to be.
Since Christ is manifestly present in other communities, and since Christ, the head, can never be separated from his Body, the Church, how are we to understand the presence of the Church in these communities that possess “ecclesial elements”? One formulation is offered by John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint: “Insofar as these kinds of elements exist in other Christian communities, the one (unica) Church of Christ has an efficacious presence therein. On this account, the Second Vatican Council speaks of a certain, albeit imperfect, communion. The constitution Lumen Gentium highlights that the Catholic Church knows that ‘for many reasons she is joined' to these communities in a certain real communion of unity in the Holy Spirit.”
Molloy puts it this way: “Dominus Iesus states not that the Church of Christ exists only in the Catholic Church . . . but that the Church of Christ exists fully only in the Catholic Church. The same document affirms that non-Catholic communions with valid orders and a valid celebration of the Eucharist [i.e., Orthodox] are ‘true particular churches.' Therefore, the Church of Christ can exist elsewhere, though not fully.” Then one must ask, what Church is it that exists in the Orthodox particular churches and in the non-Catholic ecclesial communities? The answer would seem to be that the Church that exists elsewhere than in full communion with the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church.
An implication of that answer is that everyone who is baptized and believes in Christ is Catholic, although in imperfect communion with the Church. Some Christians who are quite sure that they are not Catholics may view that claim as an instance of outrageous ecclesiastical cheekiness, of recruiting by definition people who do not want to be Catholics.
Others, more charitably, may view it as the best that Catholics can do, given their peculiar ecclesiology. Yet others may recognize it as a consistent working out of what it means to be in continuity with the apostolically constituted Church as a distinct society through time. They might further recognize that the presence of the Catholic Church in their ecclesial communities gravitates toward full communion with the Catholic Church. Again the words of Lumen Gentium: “These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”
Does this mean that all Christians are members, or partial members, or something like honorary members of the Catholic Church? The Church does not say so. In the 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (On the Mystical Body of Christ), Pius XII addressed the meaning of membership in the Church, but, as Cardinal Dulles writes, Vatican II took a somewhat different approach. The emphasis of Vatican II is on the Church as sacrament, which, he says, is of “foundational importance” to the ecclesiology of the council, appearing four times in Lumen Gentium and six times in other documents of the council.
Dulles explains: “Avoiding the term ‘member,' which had become bogged down in controversy, [the Council] spoke of perfect and imperfect realizations of the sacrament. The sacrament of the Church is fully realized only in the Catholic Church, the visible and grace-filled society in which the bonds of professed faith, ecclesiastical government, and sacramental communion remain fully intact. These bonds belong together insofar as the true Church indefectibly possesses them all. But the bonds are separable in the sense that some may survive in the absence of others. Non–Roman Catholic communities may possess some authentic ecclesial elements and be able to make fruitful use of them as channels of grace.”
I would only offer what I am sure Cardinal Dulles would recognize as a friendly amendment, namely, that such communities do possess such elements and do make fruitful use of them. The Council teaching readily recognizes the evidence of Christian faith and holiness outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church; evidence, one might add, that is sometimes more conspicuous than the evidence found among some who are in full communion with the Church.
And yet there is no denying that Dominus Iesus of 2000 and “Responses to Some Questions” of 2007, both interpreting Vatican II according to the hermeneutic of continuity, were viewed by many as a cause of ecumenical scandal.
These documents said nothing new but simply aimed at correcting misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the Church's teaching that had occasioned serious ecumenical confusions. Some Protestants thought that repeating the points in 2007 was rubbing it in a bit, but I suppose CDF had its reasons. In any event, we do Christian unity no favors by fudging what we actually believe.
Moreover, most non-Catholic Christians in the West do not bridle at the claim that what is authentically Christian in their communities is derived, in one way or another, from the apostolically continuing tradition that is the Catholic Church, beginning with the canon of Holy Scripture and the Christological and Trinitarian definitions of the early councils. Of course, what they have selectively received from the Catholic Church they have revised and reformed according to their understanding of the Bible or of the needs of the time, and such changes are the subject of continuing ecumenical conversation. People of goodwill do not take umbrage at the claim that such elements are “gifts belonging to the Church of Christ [and] are forces impelling toward catholic unity,” although they have their own ideas about what form that unity should take.
All Christians can agree on the formula that there is finally only one Church because there is only one Christ and the Church is his Body. Of course, Catholics are insistent that the one Church is both visible and invisible. But all affirm the maxim extra ecclesia nulla salus—at least to the extent that one must have heard the preaching of the gospel or read the Bible, both of which are impossible without the Church. As for saying that these other associations are ecclesial communities rather than churches in the full sense—as, for instance, the “particular churches” of Orthodoxy are churches—this should cause no hard feelings. Such communities do not claim to be what the Catholic Church claims to be.
They readily acknowledge that they are human associations united by common belief and purpose. The Presbyterian Church USA was formed in 1983, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 1847, and the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, while the Episcopal Church claims a more venerable, or at least longer, legacy reaching back to Henry VIII's styling himself Supreme Head of the Church in England in 1534. True, there are Landmark Baptists and sundry Campbellites who claim they have uniquely preserved or restored the true Church of the New Testament, but most of them do not take that improbable claim very seriously today, and those that do are not part of the ecumenical project.
Most Fully and Rightly Ordered Through Time
In sum, Catholics should not fear offending our ecumenical partners by affirming what we believe the Catholic Church to be. To be sure, that affirmation has weighty implications. For instance, Lumen Gentium also says, “Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.” But that, too, should not offend non-Catholic Christians, since we can all agree that such a person would be acting against his conscience and his sure discernment of the will of God. If he continues on that course without repentance, he could not be saved. It is quite a different matter with those who do not know—i.e., do not recognize the truth—that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be. They are wrong about that, of course, but that, presumably, is one reason why they are not Catholics.
And so I think I'll stay with my admittedly provocative title, “The One True Church.” In accord with the Church's teaching and appreciative of the scholarship of such as Cardinal Dulles and Christopher Molloy, I will also continue to make the case for the proposition that “the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.”
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Article 2 (Security/Use of Force)
The Economist (Feb. 18th 2010) Assassinations "A time to kill"
The professional and presumably state-directed killing of a leading Palestinian has been exposed in embarrassing detail. Perhaps such methods have had their day.
USING subterfuge to entrap and kill adversaries, in locations far from any battlefield, has been a feature of conflict for the past 3,000 years or so—at least since Jael, one of the warrior heroines of ancient Israel, lured the enemy commander Sisera into her tent, lulled him to sleep with a refreshing drink of milk, and then used a tent peg to smash out his brains.
In modern times targeted killing is a more elaborate business, and many of the finer points—how the victim is stalked, how many people are involved—usually remain under wraps. But the plot to eliminate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas commander who was found dead in a Dubai hotel room on January 20th, has been laid bare in stark detail by the police in that country, not normally regarded as a model of open government.
Hamas instantly blamed Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, confirming that the dead man was a founder of the movement’s military wing. Israel had fingered him in particular for the abduction and killing of two soldiers in 1989. Mr Mabhouh’s brother claimed that he had been killed by an electrical appliance that was held to his head. The local police said he had been suffocated.
The gory details of his end were not made public in Dubai, but many of the events that led up to it were starkly exposed. Indeed any amateur student of espionage and its tradecraft can now consult YouTube, the video-sharing site, to see closed-circuit television footage of some of the 11 people (all travelling on European passports) who are said by the Dubai authorities to have joined in the plot. On February 15th the country’s police chief offered a blow-by-blow account of the plotters’ doings, elucidating the images.
The key agents were “Gail” and “Kevin” who supervised the hit, and “Peter” who was in charge of preparatory logistics. In the films their appearances changed frequently. Kevin acquires glasses and a full head of hair, after going to the loo. It is clear that the plotters were expecting Mr Mabhouh’s arrival. One spotter waited at the airport; he duly tipped off a couple of colleagues, stout figures in tennis gear, who wait at the hotel and take note of the victim’s room number, 230. The plotters book room 237, which they use as a base. In later footage Gail and Kevin are seen pacing the corridor nearby. Four men in baseball caps, one also wearing gloves, are seen getting into a lift to leave; they seem to be the ones who did the job.
In Israel the initial reaction to the killing was of telling smirks, plus leaks to the effect that the victim was buying arms from Iran. But this gave way to embarrassment as the Dubai authorities produced their evidence, and as protests came from countries—Britain, France, Germany and Ireland—whose passports had apparently been faked or abused; and from individuals whose identities were “borrowed”.
The Israeli security services have never voiced any moral doubts about targeted assassinations (whether in the neighbourhood or farther afield) but there was a concern that the latest killing might go down on a list of plots that have misfired in unforeseen ways. In 1997, for instance, Mossad agents tried to eliminate Khaled Meshal, a senior Hamas official, in Jordan (see article). Two agents posing as Canadians were caught trying to poison him and Israel, under threat that its agents would be executed, agreed to send an antidote. In 1973 Israeli agents murdered a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer in Norway, mistaking him for the leader of Black September, the group blamed for a massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
These bungles contrast with operations that Israeli spooks recall with defiant pride: the killing of Imad Mughniyeh, a top member of Hizbullah, in Damascus in 2008 (a particular coup since Syria is hostile territory for Israel); and the dispatch of Abu Jihad, a senior Palestinian official and founder of the Fatah movement, by a squad that swooped into Tunis in 1988.
The not-so-cold war
Israel has no monopoly on killing its foes far from home. European countries, including Britain (since the 1950s, anyway) claim to eschew such methods. But during the cold war both superpowers conspired eagerly to eliminate people they deemed undesirable. In America there was a rethink after a committee, under Senator Frank Church, disclosed that it was probing a web of plots to kill senior figures in countries like Congo, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. This led to a series of presidential decisions—most famously order number 12,333, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981—which barred assassinations.
The real force of such orders was to squelch rogue plots hatched in the lower levels of the security services; procedures still exist for the president, in consultation with congressional leaders, to authorise the killing of a perceived adversary. In 1998, three years before the 9/11 attacks, Bill Clinton mandated the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, after bombs at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Since the start of the “war on terror”, the boundaries in American thinking between legitimate military action and cold-blooded assassination have become fuzzier still. Among America’s foreign-policy pundits there were serious discussions, back in 2003, as to whether simply killing Saddam Hussein would be a humane alternative to waging war against Iraq. More recently, as the fronts in the battle with al-Qaeda have broadened from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Somalia and Yemen, so too has the scope of American actions to eliminate perceived foes. Last September, for example, American helicopters fired on a convoy of trucks in Somalia and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was blamed for an attack on an Israeli hotel in Kenya in 2002, and for the embassy bombs of 1998.
On February 3rd Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that American forces might sometimes seek permission to kill a citizen of the United States, if he was a terrorist. This followed a report that Barack Obama had authorised an attack on Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American imam, in Yemen.
The operation in Somalia earned Mr Obama a rebuke in the Harvard law faculty, where he first shone as a progressive young legal scholar. Such actions were counterproductive and of dubious legitimacy, a columnist in the Harvard Law Record argued. But defenders of the right to kill selectively cite the shooting down of Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in the second world war, which was quite a cold-blooded business—though he was clearly an enemy combatant.
In truth, the factor that has changed the tactics of the American administration is less legal than mechanical: the advent of drones that can be directed with lethal accuracy (most of the time) from offices in Virginia. The best-known target was Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who was blown up at his home in Waziristan last August. A study by the New America Foundation, a think-thank, points out that CIA drone attacks have become far more frequent since Mr Obama took office, with more strikes being ordered in his first ten months than in George Bush’s last three years.
In a world where Western voters demand maximum results for minimum expenditure of blood and treasure, assassination by machine has an obvious appeal to political leaders. Although they cost more “enemy” lives (including civilian ones) than old-time stabbing or poisoning, they also arouse less controversy. But for how long? Legal watchdogs say it makes unlawful killing more likely by dehumanising the process; and Pakistani officials, even those committed to fighting the Taliban, say the ruthless use of drones is alienating local people.
Whether death is by computer or by more old-fashioned methods, the antecedents and details of assassination are easier to hide in rough, remote locations than in rich, westernised ones. And even in wild places, awkward facts can come out—as they obviously did in Dubai.
The professional and presumably state-directed killing of a leading Palestinian has been exposed in embarrassing detail. Perhaps such methods have had their day.
USING subterfuge to entrap and kill adversaries, in locations far from any battlefield, has been a feature of conflict for the past 3,000 years or so—at least since Jael, one of the warrior heroines of ancient Israel, lured the enemy commander Sisera into her tent, lulled him to sleep with a refreshing drink of milk, and then used a tent peg to smash out his brains.
In modern times targeted killing is a more elaborate business, and many of the finer points—how the victim is stalked, how many people are involved—usually remain under wraps. But the plot to eliminate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas commander who was found dead in a Dubai hotel room on January 20th, has been laid bare in stark detail by the police in that country, not normally regarded as a model of open government.
Hamas instantly blamed Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, confirming that the dead man was a founder of the movement’s military wing. Israel had fingered him in particular for the abduction and killing of two soldiers in 1989. Mr Mabhouh’s brother claimed that he had been killed by an electrical appliance that was held to his head. The local police said he had been suffocated.
The gory details of his end were not made public in Dubai, but many of the events that led up to it were starkly exposed. Indeed any amateur student of espionage and its tradecraft can now consult YouTube, the video-sharing site, to see closed-circuit television footage of some of the 11 people (all travelling on European passports) who are said by the Dubai authorities to have joined in the plot. On February 15th the country’s police chief offered a blow-by-blow account of the plotters’ doings, elucidating the images.
The key agents were “Gail” and “Kevin” who supervised the hit, and “Peter” who was in charge of preparatory logistics. In the films their appearances changed frequently. Kevin acquires glasses and a full head of hair, after going to the loo. It is clear that the plotters were expecting Mr Mabhouh’s arrival. One spotter waited at the airport; he duly tipped off a couple of colleagues, stout figures in tennis gear, who wait at the hotel and take note of the victim’s room number, 230. The plotters book room 237, which they use as a base. In later footage Gail and Kevin are seen pacing the corridor nearby. Four men in baseball caps, one also wearing gloves, are seen getting into a lift to leave; they seem to be the ones who did the job.
In Israel the initial reaction to the killing was of telling smirks, plus leaks to the effect that the victim was buying arms from Iran. But this gave way to embarrassment as the Dubai authorities produced their evidence, and as protests came from countries—Britain, France, Germany and Ireland—whose passports had apparently been faked or abused; and from individuals whose identities were “borrowed”.
The Israeli security services have never voiced any moral doubts about targeted assassinations (whether in the neighbourhood or farther afield) but there was a concern that the latest killing might go down on a list of plots that have misfired in unforeseen ways. In 1997, for instance, Mossad agents tried to eliminate Khaled Meshal, a senior Hamas official, in Jordan (see article). Two agents posing as Canadians were caught trying to poison him and Israel, under threat that its agents would be executed, agreed to send an antidote. In 1973 Israeli agents murdered a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer in Norway, mistaking him for the leader of Black September, the group blamed for a massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
These bungles contrast with operations that Israeli spooks recall with defiant pride: the killing of Imad Mughniyeh, a top member of Hizbullah, in Damascus in 2008 (a particular coup since Syria is hostile territory for Israel); and the dispatch of Abu Jihad, a senior Palestinian official and founder of the Fatah movement, by a squad that swooped into Tunis in 1988.
The not-so-cold war
Israel has no monopoly on killing its foes far from home. European countries, including Britain (since the 1950s, anyway) claim to eschew such methods. But during the cold war both superpowers conspired eagerly to eliminate people they deemed undesirable. In America there was a rethink after a committee, under Senator Frank Church, disclosed that it was probing a web of plots to kill senior figures in countries like Congo, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. This led to a series of presidential decisions—most famously order number 12,333, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981—which barred assassinations.
The real force of such orders was to squelch rogue plots hatched in the lower levels of the security services; procedures still exist for the president, in consultation with congressional leaders, to authorise the killing of a perceived adversary. In 1998, three years before the 9/11 attacks, Bill Clinton mandated the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, after bombs at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Since the start of the “war on terror”, the boundaries in American thinking between legitimate military action and cold-blooded assassination have become fuzzier still. Among America’s foreign-policy pundits there were serious discussions, back in 2003, as to whether simply killing Saddam Hussein would be a humane alternative to waging war against Iraq. More recently, as the fronts in the battle with al-Qaeda have broadened from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Somalia and Yemen, so too has the scope of American actions to eliminate perceived foes. Last September, for example, American helicopters fired on a convoy of trucks in Somalia and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was blamed for an attack on an Israeli hotel in Kenya in 2002, and for the embassy bombs of 1998.
On February 3rd Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that American forces might sometimes seek permission to kill a citizen of the United States, if he was a terrorist. This followed a report that Barack Obama had authorised an attack on Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American imam, in Yemen.
The operation in Somalia earned Mr Obama a rebuke in the Harvard law faculty, where he first shone as a progressive young legal scholar. Such actions were counterproductive and of dubious legitimacy, a columnist in the Harvard Law Record argued. But defenders of the right to kill selectively cite the shooting down of Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in the second world war, which was quite a cold-blooded business—though he was clearly an enemy combatant.
In truth, the factor that has changed the tactics of the American administration is less legal than mechanical: the advent of drones that can be directed with lethal accuracy (most of the time) from offices in Virginia. The best-known target was Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who was blown up at his home in Waziristan last August. A study by the New America Foundation, a think-thank, points out that CIA drone attacks have become far more frequent since Mr Obama took office, with more strikes being ordered in his first ten months than in George Bush’s last three years.
In a world where Western voters demand maximum results for minimum expenditure of blood and treasure, assassination by machine has an obvious appeal to political leaders. Although they cost more “enemy” lives (including civilian ones) than old-time stabbing or poisoning, they also arouse less controversy. But for how long? Legal watchdogs say it makes unlawful killing more likely by dehumanising the process; and Pakistani officials, even those committed to fighting the Taliban, say the ruthless use of drones is alienating local people.
Whether death is by computer or by more old-fashioned methods, the antecedents and details of assassination are easier to hide in rough, remote locations than in rich, westernised ones. And even in wild places, awkward facts can come out—as they obviously did in Dubai.
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