A Priest's Story

Dorothy Rabinowitz's story of Fr. Gordon MacRae, which appeared earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, has been published now at Opinionjournal.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

A Lexington parent is arrested and spends the night in jail in a dispute with the school administration over prior notification about discussion of alternative families in his child's kindergarten class.

I don't have time to do all the background reading, but the Globe story is here and the email correspondence and selection from the book that touched this all off are at the "Article 8" website.

Though ignorant of the details, I have to believe that a school principal should be capable of handling any parent in this situation far better than this.

Salem Follies

This headline in today’s Boston Globe made me laugh out loud. Kudos. Count me as one of the folks who are bothered and bewildered by such a crass piece of promotion located in Salem with its unhappy history of witch hysteria.

Of course you don’t have to go back 300 years to find witch hysteria in Massachusetts. Our last witch trial occurred during the 1980s, and the prosecutors are still active in politics, and some still seeking higher office (as Democrats). While Republican Governors can share in the blame because the last 2 Governors lacked the political courage to pardon the Massachusetts witches of the 1980s – the Amiraults – who were accused of crimes every bit as absurd as the unfortunate maidens of Salem in 1692, and spent many years in prison for their wrongful convictions. The last being paroled only recently. This episode is today a far less comfortable topic for conversation than the Salem trials.

Think I am mistaken or exaggerating? Then read Dorothy Rabinowitz here and see how you feel afterwards.

Heh

The sweet irony, Baby, is that Dick Vitale's college coaching career started at the University of Detroit -- a Jesuit college.

Back from being AWOL

I’m back from being AWOL, although my Boston Globe was again AWOL today. So I belatedly offer comments on 3 stories from Sunday’s and Monday’s Globe.

First, the Sunday Globe acknowledged the Ray Reggie story here, but kept it at arms length and added no additional information. From the sound of the article they picked up the phone and called a couple of people. That’s a start, but nothing more. If the FBI is really planning on using Reggie as a witness against one of Hillary’s fund-raisers, we will hear more about this later…even in the Globe.

Second this silly story about some poor schmuck who was banned from his poetry class when his poem created a threatening environment for his instructor (or at least in her imagination). Like Ward Churchill, this is academia beyond self-parody.

Finally this editorial in Sunday’s Globe bemoans deceptive State Lottery advertisements and says:

The lottery is surely harmless entertainment for some. But it is a drain -- sometimes an addiction -- for those people who bet more than they can afford. These are not participants in ''a win-win situation." They have lost, and will likely lose more. This isn't the best way to buy the local fire department a new hose.

Not only is an addiction at work here, but there is perhaps a case of amnesia over on Morrissey Boulevard?

Did the Globe editorial page support the legalization of the Massachusetts State Lottery? Certainly. Did they utter vacuous clichés like gambling being “victimless crime” at that time? I bet so. And now that the Commonwealth budget is addicted to the Lottery to the tune of billions of dollars each year, the sanctimonious Boston Globe has the gall to say:

But when the Commonwealth sponsors games of chance, if it is going to run advertisements at all, they should be honest.

Honest? If you really want to start being honest a good start would be to publish statistics detailing how regressive a tax the Lottery in effect is, and make legislators (and editorial writers) acknowledge this fact regularly.

Second, why not admit that the biggest Lottery junkies in the state work in the State House and the Senate?

Third, admit that the folks who opposed the Lottery when it was unctuously being sold to voters in this state said exactly what the Globe began saying only last Sunday, and furthermore said that the social cost of legalizing and promoting a vice (such a puritannic word!) is not worth the social good provided by some additional state revenue. Even though these folks who opposed the lottery were a bunch of nasty scolds on the Religious Right plus the Catholic Bishops (who sadly are no more entitled to speak out against gambling then they are about the need to protect teens from sexual predators), they were correct.

Honest? Why expect honesty about the Lottery from the Lottery Commission when both the Legislature and the progressive ideologues who brought this mess into being are all still ignoring the truth about it?

And if that isn’t enough, Monday’s Globe editorial bemoans the niggardly funding of our state colleges. You mean after all these years of vast state Lottery funding “targeted for schools”, we still beggar our state colleges in Massachusetts? How is this possible?

Is somebody being just a wee bit dishonest?

Finding Ray Reggie

Using the search engine at the Boston Globe and trying to find the Ray Reggie story shows NOTHING in today's issue. Nothing!

What chutzpah! Do they really believe over on Morrissey Blvd that this story will just go away?

"reggie AND kennedy" matched 0 document(s). The results appear below. To get the full text of a story, click on the headline. If you did not find what you're looking for, try searching again with a different term.

No documents matched

UPDATE: The Boston Herald and the NY Times both have this story today, but it remains "Banned in Boston", at least for the Globe. Are they perhaps waiting for instructions from someone on how the story should be played? Lazy? Wildly incompetent? All of the above? Who knows?

One column-inch

Try to find this story in today's Boston Globe. It is not easy. Below is the whole story (rather, that part of the story reported to Kennedy's constituents by the Boston Globe):

Kennedy kin pleads guilty to bank fraud
NEW ORLEANS -- A prominent political consultant who is Senator Edward M. Kennedy's brother-in-law pleaded guilty yesterday to bank fraud charges. Terms of the plea deal for Raymond Reggie, brother of the Massachusetts Democrat's wife, Victoria, were not known late yesterday. (AP)

Somehow you might never guess from reading the Globe story that this guilty plea is connected to White House sleepovers during the Clinton administration and to possibly fraudulent fund-raising by Senator Clinton. For these eye-catching details about the story, you will have to forsake the Globe and see Power Line here and the NY Sun yesterday and today.

Begin Bashing Benedict

Not even waiting for the white smoke to dissipate over St Peter's Square, the Boston Globe OpEds begin bashing the new pontiff on his first day. Leading off the attack and showing a surprising recall of recent church history is James Carroll....no wait...instead of a former Catholic priest, the charge is led by Derrick Jackson (!) who bashes the new pope for holding the same views as the late John Paul II. Derrick opines:

"If Ratzinger's past words guide his rule, his papacy has the potential to irritate and inflame religious and cultural tensions around the world."

How these words differ from those of Benedict's predecessor, Derrick does not say. From the sound of it methinks Derrick wrote this column using a copy of somebody's press release.

Editorial? This is news!

From an editorial in today's Boston Globe on France's upcoming referendum on the 511-page EU constitution (emphasis mine):

"The difficulty of [French President] Chirac's task was compounded by his need to answer criticisms from sectors of both the left and the right. Their objections target disparate aspects of the new-model EU that would be endowed with a unified foreign and defense policy implemented by a president and a foreign minister. To placate the left, Chirac invoked a presumed need to defend France's ''humanist' version of a free market against the ''ultraliberal, Anglo-Saxon, Atlanticist current,' a pejorative allusion to British and US free-enterprise models that Chirac's France is now emulating."

Wow. Whooda thunkit? A master of deception is Messr Chirac.

Favorite Penguin does the "Summers"

Poor Opus is weekly consigned to perdition for frankly speaking his mind. No wonder the strip is so popular these days. Sunday's Opus was a delight. Thanks to WaPo for putting it online.

An egg facial? Fabbed story at the Globe

I have been away too long! A reader points me to this item from Reuterville which covers a Boston Globe story from last week that the Globe admits represents "violations of the Globe's journalistic standards".

Umm...yeah. A violation of anybody's standards except the old Pravda.

Perhaps by coincidence this story made a point that resonated within the ideologically uniform newsroom. More diversity needed here?

Interregnum

Business travel will prevent me from posting until 18 April. I’m sorry for the lack of content. I recommend these 2 articles in the Times UK and Washington Times about the fresh evidence pointing to a KGB connection in the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.

But they failed!

So more important is to watch the amazing spectacle of the millions of ordinary people walking past the body of the Pontiff. He would feel more honored by the throngs of ordinary people, I bet, than by all the heads of state and VIPs that will attend him on Friday.

Rest in peace.

All Canada is reading CQ today

Monday was a record day for blogs.

Captain’s Quarters blog is publishing details online concerning testimony about the breaking “Sponsorship” scandal in Canada. This is material that Canadian media are forbidden by law to report – which until recently was a source of some relief to the Liberal party. But of course the forbidden fruit once published on CQ has a way of slipping back over the Canadian border. Yesterday CQ had just under 400,000 hits as measured by Sitemeter, much of them from our neighbors to the north. I believe that is a 1-day record for hits on any blog.

Here is a graph of CQ’s traffic over the past month, and also a screen-grab of Sitemeter's report. Remember that CQ is normally one of the highest-hit blogs in the US, and then look at the last 2 days. Canadians are certainly hungry for this news!


CQ's daily visits for the last 30 days



Sitemeter for CQ at 11:59PM on 4 April 2005

Well done, thou good and faithful servant

A true hero has died. He was a man who followed his calling tenaciously and faithfully wherever it led him. One who not only inspired the lives of millions, but vastly improved the lives of millions. A man we will deeply miss, yet now that he is gone it is not so much a feeling of sadness but one of profound gratitude and thanksgiving that comes over me as just one of the people he shepherded.

I can add little besides my own experiences to the eloquence of so many others.

In the Detroit area where I grew up, the Poles were the butt of every joke – the silly and foolish people that children learn are safe targets for ridicule. Perpetually defensive, this people was instantly transformed by the election of Pope John Paul II. In Monroe, where I lived at the time, our outstanding young Polish pastor was simply radiant. He knew the election of Wojtyla was a miracle and expected great things to follow. Two years later, this wonderful pastor died, but today he worships together with the man he so admired.

Detroit’s huge Polish community already knew Karol Wojtyla 1n 1978. He had visited Detroit as the Archbishop of Krakow. A group of Polish men in the Detroit area raised money and sent an American car to him in Krakow so that he could more easily visit area parishes. Wojtyla was already loved and respected in Detroit, but the election of him to the papacy sent Detroit’s Poles into delirium. They knew more than we did what kind of change was in store for their beloved Poland, and for the world.

After to pope’s incredible visit to Poland and the rise of Solidarity, the signs clearly pointed to the dissolution of Poland’s Communist rule. Such signs had been seen before and crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks in Warsaw and Prague. The Soviet authorities recognized the magnitude of the threat represented by the pope. But they outsourced their bloody solution to the Bulgarian secret police. In the era of détente, deniability and distance from assassination were needed. The western media, especially the New York Times highlighted the assassin’s background in Fascist organizations and said no evidence of international conspiracy could be found (as if it would be lying around for inspection!). The real story was that this loose cannon of a man had been loaded and aimed at the pope by the KGB’s good friends in the Bulgarian secret police.

The pope survived that horrible day of 13 May 1981. It is frightening to think of the weight of all that hung that day by the tiny margin of his hold on life. The pope counted it as a miraculous intervention, and the bullets removed from his body are kept today in Fatima. Even atheists would be moved in thinking about how our history hinged on his survival and on the path of these deadly bullets that gravely, but not fatally wounded the pontiff.

When John Paul visited New York in 1995 I took two of my sons there to see him. We barely did, but that didn’t matter to me. As a father I wanted them to have that one chance to see this man in person, even if from a distance. They were very young boys (12 and 10), but it would be a chance that would never come again. It was a chance to see both grace and history at once.

In thinking of John Paul one line that comes back to me is by Claudia Rosett writing of the 2004 orange revolution in the Ukraine when she said:

“Ukraine is telegraphing around the globe a reminder that freedom brings with it the great gift of dignity. That is precisely why it is so stirring to watch such revolutions. They speak to the best part of the human spirit, because we are witnessing people, often against big odds and at great risk, recovering their self-respect."

John Paul brought this feeling of dignity to the entire world, to Eastern Europe, most especially to his homeland. But many there today and many more in the west cannot connect his struggle against totalitarianism with his “traditional” views which are not so widely shared. The connection is one of faith.

To John Paul it is not the state or the Party that allocates each person a value as in the Nazi or Stalinist ideologies. Neither is one’s value set by a person’s capacity to produce, as libertarians or free-marketeers might have it. And we ourselves can add but cannot create our own value through achievment, our own autonomy, or our own relationships. No, to John Paul the fundamental value of a person derives from the fact that they have received the great and mysterious gift of life from the creator of all life (as our nation’s founding document implies). As a result, their part of creation and their part of history commands our respect for the creator’s gift. The unborn child in the womb, the Olympic athlete, and the old bishop struggling just to breathe and nourish himself all share this gift in common until it is taken away.

Thank God that this gift was shared for so long with Karol Wojtyla – and his gifts with us.

The culture of convenience

Mark Steyn writes eloquently on the Terri Schiavo case (registration required):

"One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of ‘choice’, it created a culture where it’s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren’t. Down’s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It’s foolish to think you can raise entire populations — not to mention generations of doctors — to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn’t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The ‘right to choose’ is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one."

Call it the culture of convenience, eugenics, or whatever. It it an ideology that has been proposed -- and tried -- before.

Chatolics

Matt Drudge has a funny typographical error today; calling the Pontiff's flock "Chatolics"



If the shoe fits...