Via Vox Nova, one Professor Kmiec has been denied communion for supporting Barack Obama (who is pro-choice), due to a decision, not by a Bishop (who is the only one authorized to make such a grave decision), but by a (presumably wingnutish) chaplain.

Awesome - so I guess chaplains can, at their discretion, now refuse communion to Catholic National Review columnists who are insufficiently opposed to torture? Any Catholic politician who has failed to oppose the Iraq War?

Is a Catholic politician opposed to the pastor’s social justice group? Back to the pews with you!

The Communion line is going to get pretty short, unless Bishops put an end to waging the culture wars during Mass.

Update [2008-4-14 12:36:28 by mftalbot]: I realize upon re-reading this diary that it has a bit of a sectarian tone to it (or at least lacks somewhat in ecumenism) so I should probably add that whatever your religious tradition, the militaristic Nationalism I've described should be a grave concern. Idolatry, as I'm using the word here, means glorifying the self or the tribe over the common good. [/End of Update]

An author who goes by the name of "Morning's Minion" over at Vox-Nova.com (a politically diverse Catholic blog I read) links to this post by a Catholic priest, in which the priest looks approvingly at symbols of American miltary prowess.

About 10 years ago, I used to work with a woman named Callie, who was from New Zealand. She was about as apolitical as they come - I don’t think she’d ever voted in her life, in either New Zealand or the US.

We were sitting around the office one evening with a couple of beers, shooting the breeze after a long, hectic day taking care of the last of the seasonal inventory, and I asked her, "What was the first thing you noticed about America when you arrived here?"

What’s missing from a lot of discussions white people have about the problems that beset black America, is any sense of the concrete, complex humanity of the people being discussed.

"Blackpeopleintheghetto" is a glib abstraction, a sort of quick mental categorization, which does not bear virtually any relationship to the people who were my neighbors in Richmond, California. For those who know the area, I grew up almost exactly between the Kennedy Manor and Easter Hill housing projects, in a solidly working-class black neighborhood, in the 1960s and into the 1970s - we were the only white family in the neighborhood. (We moved in 1976, to a town called Benicia - kind of like Mayberry RFD, only with Californian rather than Southern accents.)

Some of the most noble and Godly people I have ever been blessed to know lived in that neighborhood.

Most of the parents in the ‘hood had moved in the 1940s to Richmond to get War work in the shipyard (building liberty ships mostly).

"These Fourteen Steps
That you are now about to walk
You do not take alone.

I walk with you.

Though you are you
And I am I
Yet we are truly one:
One Christ.

Therefore, my Way of the Cross,
Two thousand years ago
And your "way" now
Are also One.

But note this difference:

My Life was incomplete
Until I crowned it by my death;

Your Fourteen steps will only be complete
When you have crowned them
By your life.

-Clarence Enzler, "Everyone's Way of the Cross"

There are great possibilities for nobility and redemption in un-earned suffering. The only requirement is that the suffering is elevated by Love -- "Agape" love, love that is freely given and expects nothing in return. Am I saying, "Be a doormat"? No. I'm saying that standing in loving opposition, refusing to cooperate with evil but also refusing to hate the evil-doer, can be an occasion of reconciliation, which is better than some narrow definition of victory.

There was once a rich man - let’s call him "Dives" just for fun - who feasted every night, and wore fine clothes and lived on a large estate. On an adjacent estate there lived a poor beggar - just for fun, let’s call him "Juan Lazarus" - whose master was having a rough time, due to a combination of bad luck, some bad business decisions, and the fact that his wealthy neighbor got preferential treatment at the markets where he sold his estate’s goods.

Because Juan’s family was suffering greatly, he decided to go to Dives’ estate and seek work there.

There was a girl named Deenah Peterson and when I was about 15 years old.

She was the gawky, awkward, 5-years-younger girl who lived across the street from my best friend. We would take breaks from rebuilding his Ford Mustang motor to lob an occasional (mostly good-natured) insult across the way about the silly games she and her friends were playing.

Flash forward 10 years. I go to the local drugstore, and there behind the counter is the most stunning young woman I'd ever seen. I mean, just...a vision. Her name tag said, "Deenah Peterson." Doh!

I have very little patience for apologists for war, especially of the weak-kneed, unimaginative, "well, it's a fallen world, and so war is as inevitable as the dawn..." sort. I'm not an absolute pacifist, in the sense that I suppose that I could conjure a situation where war is necessary: I just think of pacifism as far and away the higher, more Godly way if resolving disputes.

Pacifism, to me, does not mean passivity or quietism in the face of evil - it means resisting evil through means other than violence.

The usual example of the "Good War" (despite the record of firestorms, atom bombs and assorted other appalling carnage) is World War II.

[UPDATE: re-posted due to etiquette violation in the previous version]

I thought I'd share my thoughts on a couple of issues that have bugged me.

On many issues, I'm pretty far to the...well, "left" doesn't really describe it. I'm more a "just society radical idealist" than a "lefty", per se, although there are a lot of issues (most, really) where I agree with the left.

I'll just mention a couple of issues, with where I stand and why. My hope is that this will be thought-provoking. The discussion should be interesting. I'm not really sure how to tag this...

I sometimes feel ashamed of this country - and I'm not talking (this diary, anyway...) about the leadership, I'm talking about the masses, and the class of pimps that cater to their basest..."instincts" is the wrong word, because it implies that cheap thrills, vicarious rage-expression masquerading as "justice" (*cough* Nancy Grace cough) and pornographically violent spectacle are intrinsically, deeply human, and not just an abberation that has been nurtured into a thriving, culture-destroying monster by people who worship Power over Goodness.

Someone way smarter than me once described Television as a "vast wasteland" (as I recall it was someone who was fabulously enriched by helping form and create said wasteland, but I digress) but television has moved so far down the depravity slope that people are actually nostalgic for the sentimentality-opium-softened wasteland he was describing.

I work in Phone tech support/customer service for a company that makes, among other things, custom-printed books that some people use as mementos for weddings.

Every once in awhile, I get a call from some newly-married woman who is having..."a fit" doesn't adequately capture the flavor of the rant directed at me and my company. Her photobook has some sort of problem with the binding, or one or more of the photos came out slightly dark...and now her perfect wedding is ruined!!!

I usually hit the "mute" button on my phone at that point, and tell the woman sitting next to me, "If I ever get engaged, I'm gonna tell my fiance that, if she ever starts acting like this harpy, I'm gonna tell her the wedding is off."

My co-worker once said, "But you've got to understand, it's.Her Day To Be A Princess."

One of my favorite movies is "The Mission" with Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro.

It is the story of a group of missionaries who establish the titular "Mission" in the Jungles of Paraguay, among the Guarani people.

A notorious Portuguese mercenary and slave-trader, Rodrigo Mendoza, kills his brother early in the film, and feels near-suicidal remorse, and is starving himself in an asylum. He is met there by a Spanish Jesuit priest, Father Gabriel.

Gabriel offers a dubious Mendoza a chance to redeem himself: he must travel with the missionaries up the river to their nascent mission in the jungle, and must drag a heavy bundle containing the armor and weapons he used in his life as a mercenary. There is a scene where one of the missionaries, out of pity, cuts the rope by which Mendoza is dragging his burden, but Mendoza retrieves his bundle, re-ties the rope to it.  

In my last dispatch, I told you about the (still continuing) huge Citizens' Action in Washington, DC. In this addtion, I thought I would give you some of the reasons I think the current protests are having such an effect.

Your universe, where the war continues and congress has surrendered and activists hearts feel such despair, is incredibly close to our universe, where the end of the war is in sight, and people are exercising their power. The differences are minor, but we have come to realize that those small differences are the key.