NOTABLES - People who make the news, not necessarily Church-related

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani speaks during a town hall meeting at the Woodrow Wilson junior high school, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Wednesday, July 18, 2007.

By Libby Quaid
July 18, 2007

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (AP) - Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, a proponent of abortion rights, said Wednesday he would not use a judicial nominee's stand on the issue or the landmark Supreme Court decision as a litmus test.

On a campaign swing through conservative western Iowa, the former New York mayor pledged to appoint judges who would strictly interpret the Constitution on gun rights and other issues. Abortion never came up in his address to about 100 people at a junior high school, but it did during an exchange with reporters.

"Abortion is not a litmus test. Roe v. Wade is not a litmus test. No particular case is a litmus test. That's not the way to appoint Supreme Court justices or any judge," Giuliani said.

Roe v. Wade is the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion. Giuliani favors abortion rights though he has said he personally opposes the procedure, a stand that puts him at odds with his rivals and the conservative Republicans who hold sway in the primaries.

In talking to reporters, he said any candidate for federal judgeship would refuse to decide ahead of time on future abortion rulings.

"Otherwise, why have legal arguments if you're not going to give judges a chance to change their mind," Giuliani said.

He noted that he got no questions on abortion in his appearance. "I think Roe against Wade is an issue. It is not the only issue," he said.

At the first Republican debate in May, Giuliani was alone among the GOP candidates in offering a less-than-robust affirmation when asked whether it would be a good day if the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling.

"It would be OK," Giuliani said. "It would be OK to repeal it."

But, he added: "It would be OK also if a strict constructionist viewed it as precedent" and kept the law intact.

His promise about judicial appointments is aimed at reassuring conservatives nervous about his more liberal stands on gun control and other issues. As an example, he lauded a federal court ruling that overturned a 30-year-old ban on private ownership of handguns in Washington, D.C.

"The Second Amendment says people have a right to keep and bear arms. Judges interpret the Constitution; they should not be allowed to make it up," Giuliani said at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Council Bluffs.

As mayor, Giuliani pursued gun control laws and lawsuits against gun manufacturers. At a family restaurant in LeMars, Iowa, he said the issue should largely be left up to states.

"No state can completely take away your right to bear arms," Giuliani said.

Asked whether the country has enough gun laws, Guiliani said that is probably the case.

He said he would appoint judges like Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two President Bush appointees who were embraced by conservatives for their views on abortion and other issues.

Giuliani mentioned former President Reagan more than half a dozen times, reminding the crowd about how he served as a senior Justice Department official during the Reagan administration.

"He did a very, very good job of, much more often than not, selecting really good judges who would interpret the Constitution in a way that will protect your rights and my rights," he said. "They're there to interpret things, not to change things. You have legislators to change things."

On Wednesday afternoon, Giuliani stopped at the Sloan Cafe in the farming town _ population slightly more than 1,000 _ to meet voters. About 200 people crowded the two-room cafe, and women stood on chairs to take photographs. Many said they were conservative, especially on abortion and gun control, but were willing to give Giuliani a chance.

Coleen Savage said it's difficult to support an abortion rights candidate, but Giuliani "can stand up against Hillary."

"To get the conservative, you've got to grit your teeth and take a little bit of the moderate or liberal," said Savage, a corn-and-soybean farmer.

Throughout the day, Giuliani brought up the issue of illegal immigration, which consistently drew applause. He said the country needs to secure its borders first, then issue tamper-proof ID cards, then allow anyone in the U.S. illegally willing to identify himself or herself to go to the back of the line, pay back taxes and apply for citizenship. Illegals who remain should be rounded up and deported, he said.

Immigration is important to Dave Liebsack, a pharmacist who watched Giuliani at a town hall Wednesday night in Sioux City.

"I think the wall can't be high enough," Liebsack said.

Liebsack said he is a conservative who likes Giuliani's record on fiscal responsibility and national security.


SOURCE: dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pub&dt=070719&cat=news&st=newsd8qfddfg...

A rabbi debates the pope

By: BLAISE SCHWEITZER , Freeman Staff
Daily Freeman.com
07/20/2007

Rabbi Jacob Neusner of Rhinebeck has been an internationally sought news source lately, mostly because of the attention paid to him in Pope Benedict XVI's current book, "Jesus of Nazareth."

By extensively weighing and debating Neusner's analysis of Jesus' life in the book, the pope triggered a flurry of interview requests and additional writing assignments for Neusner. While accepting some of the offers, Neusner is a little self-conscious.

"I ... don't want to exploit the pope, or pretend that there's a relationship that hasn't been realized," he said.

Neusner is also trying to avoid politicizing his time in the spotlight. "If you raise political subjects, then you're taking advantage of a religious event for political gain, which I wouldn't want to do," he said.

Occasional correspondents, the two religious leaders began their most serious disputations in 1993 after Neusner wrote the book "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus." The pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, positively reacted to the debate framed by Neusner. He even contributed a blurb to appear on Neusner's book jacket.

This for a man who has been called among the most contentious thinkers in Judaism.

Being called contentious doesn't trouble Neusner, who is a professor of religion and theology at Bard College. He said the premise of his "Rabbi Talks" book - that he wouldn't have been converted by Jesus but would rather have taken him to task for some of his teachings - is "the fruit" of his contentious spirit.

Time magazine, upon learning of the connection between Neusner and the pope, labeled Neusner "The Pope's Rabbi" and extensively detailed their polite debates.

A subsequent extensive National Public Radio interview about Neusner's work also triggered "a lot of reaction," Neusner said. "More than Time did.

"It's been all good," Neusner said. "I've gotten some letters from people who want to take issue with my proposition, but considering the nature of the discussion the reaction has been surprisingly positive."

Among the most interesting consequences of the discussion has been an offer of a co-byline for a co-written book that would continue the threads of the discussion and debate within "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus" and "Jesus of Nazareth."

"Doubleday is bringing a proposal to the pope as we speak, this week, to write another book with me," Neusner said. "I designed a book that he and I could write together."

The two have never met in person, Neusner said, although he would enjoy doing so.

"Oh sure, he's a very interesting man," he said. "He's a German professor and I get along with German professors."

Neusner said the current pope is more self-contained than his predecessor. "He's not the dramatic public personality that John Paul II was... I don't want to say that John Paul was a showoff, but John Paul knew how to manipulate crowds and this pope is a more humble personality."

Although the exact wording that may take place within a conditional return to the Latin Mass has not been spelled out, the chance it may reinstate a Good Friday reference to praying for "the perfidious Jew" has angered some.

Neusner hasn't let it excite him.

"I've pointed out that the synagogue liturgy has an equivalent prayer which we say three times a day, not just once a year," he said.

Although he hasn't yet met the pope, his knowledge of him has led to an invitation to the White House. Prior to President Bush's June 9 visit to see the pope in Rome, Bush wanted to get some advice and input from Neusner on the pontiff.

"I said I don't really know him, but I've dealt with him all these years," Neusner said, agreeing to a visit to the Oval office to meet with some of Bush's handlers.

Although a Republican - Neusner's own son, Noam Neusner, was a speech-writer for Bush for some time - he is not a fan of the church-state collaborations that Bush has become known for. Neusner called the Bush administration's faith-based programs "modest ventures," but said little about them beyond affirming his position that a separation of church and state is crucial.

"I think the separation of church and state is the best thing that can happen to religion," he said. "I was interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz and they asked me about the relationship between the rabbinate and politics, and I said to them the best thing that could happen would be for the rabbinate to get the state off its back."

For different religious groups to collaborate, on the other hand, could be of great benefit for society, he said. "If they get together to advance a particular policy, chances are it's going to go a long way."

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Neusner is not worried about Jews marrying members of different religions. "We're not going to compete with the Chinese no matter what."

Although no stranger to controversy, Neusner chooses his battles. He has largely withheld his criticism of Israel since 1982, and he hasn't allowed himself to be pulled into the flurry of criticism of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" or the debates over the public posting of the Ten Commandments.

"I don't feel that I have to comment on everything that happens all of the time," he said.

His decision to end his criticism of the policies of the Israeli government coincided with the Lebanon war.

"I don't pay their taxes. My children don't fight in their army. I withdrew from deep involvement in criticizing their policies."

=====================================================================

Again, we must tip our hats to the eminently sensible Rabbi Neusner.

He doesn't want to exploit the Pope, he doesn't want religious matters exploited for political reasons, he doesn't feel he needs to comment on everything that happens all of the time, he refuses to be drawn into pointless debates, and he will not get involved in deep criticism of the Israeli government because he is not an Israeli citizen nor are his children.

Oh, and he says that in the synagogue liturgy, Jews pray analogously for Christians 'three times a day, not just once a year' as the since-revised Good Friday prayer that thoughtless types like Abraham Foxman are crusading against. This in itself should merit worldwide headlines, if only to right a fallacy that is being perpetrated everyday, but who among us here think MSM will even quote it?

Such great good sense. Too bad not more 'intelligent' people share it.

Teresa

P.S. Speaking of inter-religious dialog, how much more dramatic can it get than a book presenting the Catholic and the Jewish points of view on a specific subject by two unimpeachable intellectuals. What Rabbi Neusner refers to - "I designed a book that he and I could write together' - would that be the book on the apostle Paul that he mentioned in the Time article?

BUT WHY ISN'T ANYONE CALLING THEM ANTI-SEMITIC?

I first became aware of this grave issue yesterday when Lella published a 7/19/07 article from Corriere della Sera protesting that dozens of Italy's most militant and self-congratulatory liberals had signed a petition or a manifesto denouncing a book called VIVA ISRAELE and its author, Egyptian-born Muslim Magdi Allam - deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, no less - just because they disagree with his pro-Israel views!

Most of these same names had signed the infamous petition last autumn protesting that, God forbid!, the Italian bishops' conference should dare issue a pastoral note to state the Church stand about the family (and safeguarding it from threats like a law that would grant rights to de facto couples of whatever sex equivalent to those enjoyed by regular married couples).

These names are among Italy's most prestigious intellectual and cultural leaders - but they are so completely possessed by blind secularism that they do not see anything wrong in attempting to deny freedom of expression to anyone who does not think like they do!

In fact, they glory in their bigotry - and this must be the most tragic consequence so far of the ideology of secularism which has replaced Marxism as the opium of the intellectual left.

To provide a context to the stories, here first is an account of Allam's book from the European Jewish Post, which I chose simply because it is already in English:


Magdi Allam’s “Long Live Israel”
EJP - Updated:19/Jul/2007



ROME (EJP) - Magdi Allam, deputy chief Editor of Italy’s most influential daily Il Corriere della Sera, has once again shocked his readership with his seventh book, “Viva Israele” (Long Live Israel).

The subtitle of the book reads “From the ideology of death to the civilization of life: my story.”

Egyptian-born Allam was raised as a Muslim and attended the Italian school of Cairo. In Italy since 1972, Allam believes that "Israel - along with Pope Benedict XVI - represents the residual hope for Western civilization, which, more than other civilizations, embodies the sacredness of life and personal freedom".

“Long Live Israel” is the tale of his life ever since his youth under the republican regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

According to Allam, Nasser is responsible for having turned Egypt - and the rest of the Arab world - into the cradle of the "ideology of death".

By "breaking the romance" with the Western World as a means to become the leader of the Arab Nation, Nasser brought about an aggressive pan-Arabic dream based on the denial of Israel’s right to exist.

This, according to Allam, caused Egypt’s transformation from a cosmopolitan tolerant country to an anti-Zionist intolerant nation.

This need for the destruction of Israel is the dominant theme that, Allam states, made death and destruction the core values of a once liberal Islamic culture.

When the Pan-Arabic illusion declined, the Pan-Islamic chimera adopted these nihilistic values and this new concept of martyrdom created the "nihilism that deprived us of our primary value, the sacredness of life".

Due to his acquaintance with an Austrian Jewish girl living in Egypt, a 15 year-old Allam was arrested with the accusation of being a Zionist spy. The long hour he spent in a cell before his mother rescued him made the writer realize that he was an outsider in an authoritarian society.

"Starting in 1967, the inversely proportional relationship between collective hatred for Israel and individual freedom in Arab and Muslim countries was confirmed".

An active supporter of the Palestinian cause in his first Italian years, Allam then thought of Israel as a racist and aggressive State "invented by the Western world as some kind of compensation for the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust".

Years later, his interest in the history of Zionism and an encounter with Arafat brought him to realize that "Arafat was responsible for Palestinian terrorism" and that "the predication of the ideology of death eventually hit and harmed the Palestinians themselves".

"It has been thanks to my personal acquaintance with Arafat that I managed to get rid of my anti-Israeli prejudice and to understand the irresistible force of sacredness of life as a value," he writes.

Allam also slams the violent calls for the killing of the Jews that "moderate" Arabic regimes and theological schools have been spreading in the Muslim world in the last 60 years. At the same time, he reports on the growth of illiteracy and the anti-Semitic brainwash in the Arab League countries.

Today an Italian citizen, Allam has been living under security escort ever since he began to denounce the heavy infiltration of Islamic fundamentalism in Italian mosques, an event described in the book.

The continuous combination of personal stories (from his aunts’ Sixties looks in Cairo to his life in Italy) and of a historical perspective that covers more than 50 years of Middle East history make this book particularly pleasant.

From an Italian news item before the book was presented on 7/12/07:

The title of the book alone has drawn fatwahs against the author by various Muslim fundamentalists. But Magdi Allam has lived under police escort for years, and does not hesitate to say and write what he thinks.

In this book, he appeals to all - Christians and Muslims, Europeans and Arabs, and Italians in particular - to recognize the mortal danger that comes with anti-Israeli hatred

After having been directly threatened by Hamas for having writte4n against Palestinian suicide bombers from the very beginning, "my life," writes Allam, "tightly bound with the fate of Israel - because of my choice to uphold the sacredness of life and for the bizarre twist of fate that has made a lay Muslim fight on the frontlines, at mortal peril, to defend the right to existence of the Jewish state."


Here, first is a translation of the Corriere della Sera article written in defense of Allam against the rampaging liberal intellectuals:


The signatures against Allam-
An attempt to place his book
in a post-modern Index
of prohibited books
By PIERLUIGI BATTISTA

What exactly is expected by the persons behind the 'hundreds of signatures' - so they say - on a document which denounces a book and its author?

That Allam abjures what he wrote? That his publishers withdraw the book from circulation? That the bookstores refuse to carry it? That the book be outlawed for violating some article of the penal code?

Or, much more probable but just as disquieting, are they just hoping to raise so much righteous indignation against their target, isolate him like a leper and scorch the earth around him, in short, intimidate someone who has committed the grave crime of writing a book they disagree with?

This signed document - an appeal, a petition, a manifesto, or however they may want to call this latest evidence of a penchant by Italian intellectuals to put their signatures together in support of some common mobilization or cause - appears in the latest issue of the magazine Reset which has always placed itself prominently in the center of important developments in the cultural wars.

Signed by many scholars of note, they are taking issue with Allam for his 'impudence...which is farthest from the spirit and values of a constitutional democracy', an index of 'a concerning barbarization of information"' - all this occasioned because Allam has some harsh criticism in his book for two university professors who are thought-clones of the protestors.

But their document of anathema is not structured in defense of anyone unjustly criticized, but as a NO to the book, an anti-Allam attack ad personam. It amounts to a collective decree of excommunication - you can't be one of us! - rather than an attempt to refute a thesis.

Therefore, this is clearly an ideological maneuver, not a criticism of the merits of the book.

It is difficult to understand what could have led such intellectuals to such a gross and stupefying negation of the basic principles of free expression, and even to the principles of a free politico-cultural discussion of the merits of any book.

Indeed, it is expected that books are subject to criticism, but this is always expressed by individuals, not by a strident chorus of 'hundreds of signatures.'

Each of them has the right to take the book apart, demolish its arguments, tear it to pieces intellectually, but only if the critic takes the intellectual responsibility of countering argument with argument, document against document, thesis against counterthesis.

But Allam's critics have done none of that. They have targeted his book just because it exists, and it author because he has chosen to 'root' for the motives of Israel, and if he does, then so what - is that a sin or a crime?

They love to gather signatures, thinking they can reinforce their credibility just by numbers, not by having to argue out anything. Even if there were thousands of signatures instead of just hundreds, would that be a reason then to consider even more negatively a book that they have already consigned to the flames? When has the acceptance of a book ever been dependent on the presumptuous dictatorship of a self-constituted elite?

In the multitude of appeals and manifests which have customarily marked the cultural life of the postwar Italian republic, the signatories of this document have given life to an 'unicum' - there is no precedent for such a signature campaign against a book and against an author.

But if this new genre of appeal does not have anything to do with (legitimate) criticism of a book nor (sacrosanct) dissent with theses one believes to be wrong or unfounded, then we are left with the unpleasant conclusion that the magazine is in effect branding the book as 'dangerous', calling down discredit against it and arguing, in effect, for its preventive de-legitimization!

Is it not very much like an attempt to intimidate into silence, or at the very least, a decidedly specific effort to create social alarm about a book, and to warn its author and his publishers to exercise more prudence in the future?

History has shown us that such arrogance, even if prompted by the best of intentions, has always led to attempts at censorship and to proclaim an index of prohibited books.

Corriere della sera, 19 luglio 2007

Lella notes in her blog:
What a wonderful example of democracy! "Dear Magdi, and Dear Pope - speak, if you will, but only if what you say is OK by us. Should you dare speak out your own ideas, we'll put together our signatures and you will see - we will have them published in the papers because, unlike you, they are our friends. And that should put you in your place!"

On the same day as the Corriere reaction, Renato Farina reacted in Libero:


The fatwa of fellow intellectuals
falls on Magdi Allam
By RENATO FARINA


Magdi Allam must have felt a chill down his spine. 200 intellectuals, fine people, most of them Christian, brilliant writers, respected professors, preachers of peace, incapable of harming a fly, have signed a manifesto against him.

Do they know what they have done? They're all brilliant - many teach at universities. One should think they do! All of them know that Allam has been the recipient of multiple fatwas, death sentences have been decreed against him, there's a macumba-like social void around him, and he has become the most-protected journalist in the world. Surely they know this.

Then why would they have placed their signatures on a screed written by an Arabist, Paolo Branca, who teaches at the Catholic University of Milan? Not only placed their signatures but invited like-minded colleagues to sign?

And then someone like Giancarlo Bossetti, formerly deputy editor of Unita [a Communist newspaper] and a contributor to La Repubblica, accommodated this manifesto with great solemnity in his magazine Reset. If Reset were an inconsequential handout, an Internet site for insults, it wouldn't matter.

But the editorial reputation of the outlet that is spewing this odorous spit is troubling. It is a condonement, a free pass, for criminal behavior! And Bossetti obviously shares their views!

What is with these types who would play Russian roulette with the life of someone who does not think like they do?

Obviously, they can oppose, dispute, criticize whatever Magdi writes - but since when do decent people mount a manifesto against a peer who is already a 'dead man walking'?

We are not talking here of simply placing Magdi's book (Viva Israele, Mondadori) on a post-modern Index of Prohibited Books. We're talking about burning its author at the stake as a suicide-bomber against the West! (Michele Santoro on his program AnnoZero had his cartoonist depict Allam that way!).

I am reminded of two terrible historical precedents. First, the appeals that circulated in Stalin's time against 'bourgeois physicists' to emarginate them from the scientific institutes and eventually send them off to the gulag. All because they tended to believe in Einstein's theory of relativity. The same thing happened to scholars of 'bourgeois' linguistics rather than Marxist linguistics.

It was a common Soviet practice to launch personal attacks, to transform an accused individual into the embodiment of a terrible ideological illness. They never attacked a system of thought, refuting it with precise facts. That would have been legitimate and correct.

I am not arguing that because Magdi already has mortal enemies, no one else should attack him. But are we human beings, or robot corporals assembling an assault team?

This time, a person has been targeted, and accused by his critics of what they consider to be the obscene crime of 'advocacy journalism.' [But don't they, the liberals, practise that all that time? Why does it become obscene when others do it?]

They're like people sharpening their knives for the kill almost without being aware of it. Oh, these intellectuals - with their heads always above the clouds! Is that it?

Then come down to earth. Be responsible, for a change. We should all be responsible.

This is so like 1971. Then too, it involved a very respected magazine, L'Espresso. At that time, there were 800 'intellectuals' who signed a letter, in the name of 'truth and goodness', in defense of the memory of anarchist-bomber Giuseppe Pinelli, giving Pinelli's killer-colleagues their justification for murdering police commissioner Luigi Calabresi, whom the liberals had identified as 'responsible for the death' of the anarchist.

The words they use against Magdi are infinitely more educated than those they used in 1971 to bring down Calabresi. None of the 800 - who thundered against the Christian Democrat regime at the time - ever met an obstacle in their ascent to the Olympian heights of political and cultural life in this country. A few of them, including Paolo Mieli, later apologized for their role in the whole sorry affair.

Mieli, now editor of Corriere della Sera, has done something more this time. Together with his other deputy editor, Pierluigi Battista, he has placed the newspaper in defense of Magdi. That's a very important sign.

It is very interesting to note that among the pugnacious signatories of the anti-Allam letter are some masters of Catholic progressive thought - much heeded by their ideological confreres among the Italian bishops - and doubtless endowed with powerful mental apparatus.

I refer primarily to Enzo Bianchi, prior of Bose, who drafted the letter signed by the bishops of the Piedmont region to torpedo the nomination of Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, as president of the Italian bishops conference; and Alberto Melloni.
Bianchi writes as the premier theologian of La Repubblica; and Melloni writes for Corriere, and so he was spared a mention in Battista's article against the signatories of the anti-Magdi manifesto.

Bosetti, editor of Reset, a pleasant man, very Popperian, is a specialist in coalescing intellectuals against persons targeted by Islamist extremists, as for instance, Oriana Fallacci, to whom he dedicated a pamphlet entitled 'Cattiva maestra' (Bad teacher). Now he has done the same thing against Magdi.

He skewers Magdi an an article calling him an adversary of pluralism, advocate of an 'ideology which has marked the past two centuries with a trail of death'[Israel????]... Whoa! Wasn't Bossetti deputy editor of Unita? Why don't we bring your Communist past into the present then, dear Bossetti? It seems that little vice of setting up 'an ememy of the people' has remained attached to your soul!

Libero, 19 luglio 2007


====================================================================

Excuse me, but why has neither writer brought up the word anti-Semitic?

Isn't this anti-Israel animus a convenient cover for anti-Semitism? As if to say - this is not against the Jews at all, it's against Zionism, the very idea that there should be a Jewish state at all! This isn't about race at all, it's about politics!

I've never bought that. With the Jews, you can't separate their race from 'politics', or at any rate, the idea of a nation-state. Their entire history is about the Jewish people, the people of Israel, having a right to the land God gave them. And no one can accuse them of ever having been interested in any piece of earth other than that which Biblical history assigns them - a very modest portion, as it is.

And yet in the past 60 years, they have had to overturn centuries of conviction to accept a necessary compromise - they must share even this little piece of earth with the Palestinians. A consequence of post-Biblical history over which the Chosen People had no control.

No one is giving them credit for accommodating this compromise, especially not the liberals of the West who find it the utmost political chic to side with the Palestinians. And there is no question of fair play here. No - everything is black that has anything to do with Israel and the Jews. The Palestinians - Hamas excesses notwithstanding - are always right.

Up to now, the liberals have managed to avoid saying outright, "Israel should be eliminated as a state." No one wants to be Ahmadinejad! But that's exactly what they have been saying all along, in siding so unconditionally with the Palestinians. And saying much more overtly now, in objecting to a book by an author who has the nerve to call his book LONG LIVE ISRAEL!

But Allam, of course, provides a very convenient cover for them. He is Egyptian and he is Muslim. So, they can technically say, "We're not anti-Semitic. He's not Jewish."

And they can say this with as straight a face as they have in trying to curb his freedom of expression, oblivious of their intellectual dishonesty in both cases, because they will always allow their ideology to trump their intellect.

So why are Messrs. Battista and Farina tiptoeing around to keep from saying these liberals are all anti-Semitic?

Tony Snow is President Bush's Press Secretary and a former TV news show host.


Cancer's Unexpected Blessings

When you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change.


Tony Snow | posted 7/20/2007 02:30PM
Christianity Today

Commentator and broadcaster Tony Snow announced that he had colon cancer in 2005. Following surgery and chemo-therapy, Snow joined the Bush administration in April 2006 as press secretary. Unfortunately, on March 23 Snow, 51, a husband and father of three, announced that the cancer had recurred, with tumors found in his abdomen—leading to surgery in April, followed by more chemotherapy. Snow went back to work in the White House Briefing Room on May 30. CT asked Snow what spiritual lessons he has been learning through the ordeal.

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages—in my case, cancer.

Those of us with potentially fatal diseases—and there are millions in America today—find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God's will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence What It All Means, Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the why questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don't know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.

To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life—and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many nonbelieving hearts—an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live—fully, richly, exuberantly—no matter how their days may be numbered.

Third, we can open our eyes and hearts. God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease—smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see—but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension—and yet don't. By his love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

'You Have Been Called'

Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet; a loved one holds your hand at the side. "It's cancer," the healer announces.

The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. "Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler." But another voice whispers: "You have been called." Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter—and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our "normal time."

There's another kind of response, although usually short-lived—an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tinny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing though the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There's nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue—for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Finally, we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the holy city. From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.

We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us—that we acquire purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God's love for others. Sickness gets us partway there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy. A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two people's worries and fears.

Learning How to Live

Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God's arms not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live. They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love.

I sat by my best friend's bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was a humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. "I'm going to try to beat [this cancer]," he told me several months before he died. "But if I don't, I'll see you on the other side."

His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn't promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity—filled with life and love we cannot comprehend—and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don't matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

When our faith flags, he throws reminders in our way. Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it.

It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit. Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up—to speak of us!

This is love of a very special order. But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense. We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? We don't know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place—in the hollow of God's hand.

Potential heir to the British throne
may have to renounce succession
to marry Catholic fiancée

LONDON, Aug 3, 2007 (CNA) .- Peter Phillips, the Queen of England’s eldest grandson, may have to give up his place in the line of succession for the throne because his fiancée is Roman Catholic.

This past week Buckingham Palace announced the engagement between Peter Phillips and Autumn Kelly, a Canadian management consultant, but no mention of a date for their marriage was made.

Peter Phillips is the first son of Princess Anne.

=====================================================================

The British are so post-modern that Parliament is considering a law that will allow creation of human-animal hybrids in the laboratory, but has not lifted a finger to amend the archaic rules imposed by Henry VIII and the Church of England he created back in the 16th century just so he could divorce and marry again.

With consequences that make Roman Catholics second-class citizens because they may not become Prime Minister nor, in this case, spouses to potential monarchs.

And yet parts of the Anglican Communion now have homosexual bishops and will accept homosexual marriages.

Discrimination is discrimination, any way it is expressed, and the British political system clearly discriminates against Roman Catholics.

Teresa

Gay Episcopal bishop endorses Obama


Washington DC, Aug 3 (CNA)- Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the nation's first openly gay Episcopal bishop, has given his endorsement to presidential hopeful Barack Obama, citing the Illinois Democrat's experience with racism and discrimination.

Obama's campaign put out a news release announcing Robinson’s support. It identified Robinson as "a civil rights leader and a leading voice in the faith community."

The bishop says he hopes to persuade Obama to embrace same-sex marriage. Obama supports civil unions and rights for gay couples, but stops short of supporting gay marriage.

The Washington Post reported that three hours after the announcement, Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, said it was "just the latest example of candidates misusing religious leaders for political gain."

Gaddy said he was sending a letter to all the presidential candidates asking them not to make endorsements that appear to be speaking on behalf of their house of worship or denomination.

"In recent presidential campaigns little concern has been in evidence about the negative consequences that certain political strategies bring about for houses of worship," Gaddy's letter reads.

Not having seen the news item at all anywhere yesterday, I am reproducing here Rocco Palmo's obituary on Cardinal Lustiger. The Vatican has now (2 p.m. Monday Rome time) released the text of the Holy Father's telegram of condolence sent to the Archbishop of Paris.


Son of Israel and Rome,
Prince of Paris, Lustiger Dies





The French church mourns one of its leading lights tonight; the archbishop-emeritus of Paris Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger died earlier today (Sunday, 8/5/07)at 80, after a yearlong battle with lung and bone cancer.

A giant of the post-Conciliar church worldwide and the secular life of Rome's "eldest daughter" for almost 30 years, Lustiger was named to the City of Light, his hometown, in 1981. Particularly favored by John Paul II, who gave him the red hat two years later, the late pontiff saw his man in France as a bridge not just to Paris, but to Israel and the Jewish people.

Born in the French capital in 1926, Lustiger's parents - Polish Jews who had emigrated west a decade earlier - named their son Aaron. At 13, against the wishes of their parents, he and his sister were baptized, at which time he took the name Jean-Marie. Three years later, in 1942, his parents were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother, Gisele, was killed.

While his conversion created a longstanding rift with his father, Charles Lustiger attended his son's ordination as a priest, sitting near the back of the congregation. Of the faith of his birth, the cardinal once said, "I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim.

"That is my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it."

In early 2005, shortly after his retirement as archbishop, John Paul asked Lustiger - a key advocate of the Holy See's establishment of diplomatic relations with the State of Israel - to represent him at observances marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Polish concentration camp to which his parents were deported.

"I don't want to return, because it is a place of death and destruction," he said at the time.

"If I am going, it is because the Pope asked me."

Ordained a priest in 1954, the cardinal-to-be was first assigned as chaplain to the students of Paris' Sorbonne, then fused new life into a parish in the city's 16th Arrondissement before being named bishop of Orleans in 1979 by the newly-elected Polish Pope, who returned him to the capital two years later as archbishop in succession to Cardinal François Marty.

(Unsurprisingly, the appointment of a prelate who, despite his conversion, never shirked his Jewish roots as archbishop of Paris was panned by the leader of France's post-Concilar resistance, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Despite being named to lead the archdiocese where he was born and ordained, Lustiger "is not truly of French origin," Lefebvre - who would be excommunicated before his 1991 death - was quoted as saying at the time.)

Marked by a fervent missionary zeal, the cardinal's quarter-century at the helm of the church in Paris saw many pioneering initiatives, some of which would spread to the wider church.

A radio station and TV channel, a ramped-up youth outreach by the college chaplain who, but a decade earlier, zipped around the city on his motor-bike, some 20 books, and the zenith of his efforts - a seminary planned around a new model of formation and the Ecole Cathedrale, now a pontifical institute, for the formation of the laity - comprised the core of a legacy whose institution-building, while great, was geared only as a complement to, never a replacement for, a diligent and enthusiastic pastoral engagement.

In 1997, Lustiger - a frequent guest in the papal apartment - welcomed his good friend to Paris for World Youth Day, where a million young people showed up and newspaper headlines proclaimed "The Triumph of John Paul II."

Eight years later, after a lengthy and contentious succession stakes, one of his former auxiliaries, Archbishop Andre Vingt-Trois of Tours, was named as his successor. As a young priest, Vingt-Trois had served as Père Lustiger's assistant at the Sorbonne.

The cardinal was diagnosed with the dual cancer at the end of 2006. He made his final public appearance at the January funeral of the wildly popular cleric Abbè Pierre, held in Notre-Dame Cathedral, and at an emotional May farewell to his fellow "immortals" of the Academie Française, he was said to have looked up at the portrait of the founder of the venerable institution and exclaimed of his next destination, "I am going to meet up with Cardinal Richelieu!"

Lustiger's death was announced by the French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who praised the cardinal as "a great figure of the spiritual, moral, intellectual and, naturally, religious life of our country."

"His personality was the image of the trials that life lead him to traverse and that were above all the trials of Europe across the 20th century," Sarkozy said. "These trials forged a man of character, but also one of social engagement and of a free spirit and mind" - a spirit and mind which, the Gaullist president noted, "never gave or did anything halfway."

"The spiritual journey of Cardinal Lustiger remained at the same time both an example and a great mystery," Sarkozy continued. "Having lived in his own sinews both the continuity between Judaism and Christianity and also the originality of the Christian message that leads certain individuals to the total and all-important gift of their persons, Jean-Marie Lustiger was the complete image of the man of faith and of the interior life."

In his own comments, Archbishop Vingt-Trois said that "we are all under the shock of his demise, even if he had prepared us to it for some time."

"I personally experience all at once the loss of a father, of a brother and of a friend, after receiving the onus of succeeding him at the head of the archdiocese of Paris," Lustiger's successor said. "Over the last two years, I had many opportunities to appreciate his thoughtfulness towards me, as he proved ceaselessly ready to answer the questions I wanted to ask him and to provide me with the advice I needed, without ever attempting to weigh upon the decisions I had to make or trying to interfere in any way."

"Many bishops in France as well as priests and deacons in Paris cannot but remember him as the one who ordained them. They know that he has not abandoned them and that he will keep on looking after them and being close to them."

Tomorrow night, the archbishop will celebrate Mass in Notre-Dame for his mentor's happy repose. The cardinal's body will lie in state there from Thursday morning until a funeral liturgy scheduled for Friday.



Here is the New York Times report today:

Jean-Marie Lustiger, French Cardinal, Dies at 80
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Published: August 6, 2007

PARIS, Aug. 5 — Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was born to Polish Jews, converted to Roman Catholicism as a boy, then rose to become leader of the French church and an adviser to Pope John Paul II, died Sunday, the Paris archbishop’s office said.

Cardinal Lustiger, whose mother died in a Nazi concentration camp and who always insisted that he had remained a Jew after his conversion, was 80.

As archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger (pronounced li-sti-ZHAY) led France’s 45 million Catholics for almost a quarter century, until his retirement in 2005.

He was an early champion of interfaith relations and accompanied John Paul to Damascus, Syria, in 2001, when John Paul became the first pope to set foot in a mosque. Earlier, Cardinal Lustiger was involved in efforts to close a divide between Jews and Christians over the presence of a convent at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where his mother had perished.

Jewish-Christian relations were a concern of his throughout his career. He spoke on that theme repeatedly. But his assertions that he had remained a Jew despite his conversion drew outcries from some Jewish leaders.

“I believe he saw himself as a Jewish Christian, like the first disciples,” said Gilbert Levine, the conductor and a close friend of the cardinal.


At WYD Paris 2000.

Like John Paul, Cardinal Lustiger was a conservative. He opposed abortion and the ordination of women and married men to the priesthood, and he sought to preserve the priestly vow of celibacy. He was accused of replacing older, liberal clergymen with younger, conservative successors.

He was also amiable and often informal. He would wear loafers and black corduroy suits with stylish cuts and sit on the edge of a desk, legs dangling, as he talked to students in a packed church hall. But the core of his message was traditionalist.

Besides his Jewish heritage, he was an unlikely and surprising choice to lead the Roman Catholic Church in France as archbishop. A former parish priest, he had few patrons in the French church establishment and had made a point of saying he felt more at ease talking to children and workers than to clerics.

But it was precisely his outsider status that may have appealed to John Paul, a fellow Pole. The pope was concerned that France had grown complacent about its Roman Catholicism. On a visit to the country in 1980, he had asked, “France, what have you done with the promises of your baptism?”

Many church analysts said they believed that John Paul had intended to provoke the French church by skirting the ecclesiastical bureaucracy and choosing a son of Polish Jewish immigrants to be archbishop — a man whom the Nazis had forced to wear the yellow Star of David during the occupation of Paris.

But once installed, Cardinal Lustiger used his intelligence and frankness, and not least his sense of humor, to try to disprove the pope’s fear that the French church was, in John Paul’s words, Rome’s “tired, oldest daughter.”

Cardinal Lustiger had been ill for some months, though the cause of his death was not provided. “In the course of phone conversations that I had with Jean-Marie Lustiger in the course of the last weeks, I found a man of great courage, lucid about his condition, but full of the hope of soon meeting him to whom he had consecrated his life,” President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement announcing his death.

Aaron Lustiger was born on Sept. 17, 1926, in Paris, the first of two children of Charles, who ran a hosiery shop, and Gisèle Lustiger; his parents had met in Paris after moving to France from Poland around World War I.

After the German occupation of France in 1940, Aaron was sent with his sister, Arlette, to live with a Catholic woman in Orléans, where the children were exposed to Catholicism and where Aaron, at 13, against the wishes of his parents, decided to convert. He was baptized in August 1940, adding the name Jean-Marie to Aaron. His sister was baptized later.

In September 1942, their mother was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she died in 1943; the father survived the war, returning to Paris, where he died in 1982.

After France was liberated, the future cardinal studied literature at the Sorbonne before entering the seminary of the Carmelite fathers in Paris in 1946 and later the Institut Catholique de Paris, a training school for the clergy. He was ordained in 1954. His father watched the ceremony from a seat far in the back.

Until 1959, Cardinal Lustiger was student chaplain at the Sorbonne, and for the next 10 years director of the Richelieu Center, which trained chaplains for French universities. In 1969, he was appointed pastor of Ste. Jeanne de Chantal, in the 16th Arrondissement, one of Paris’s wealthier neighborhoods. He transformed the parish, perhaps a model of the complacency the pope feared, into one of the archdiocese’s most active.

Cardinal Lustiger appeared to have undergone a spiritual crisis in the late 1970s, when he considered leaving France for Israel. “I had started to learn Hebrew, by myself, with cassettes,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 1981. “Does that seem absurd, making your aliyah?” he said, referring to a Jew’s return to Israel. “I thought then that I had finished what I had to do here, that I was at a crossroads.”

Then, in a surprise appointment, he was made bishop of Orléans, the city where he had been baptized. There, he called attention to the plight of immigrant workers in the region.

The pope appointed him archbishop of Paris in January 1981, and if the French clergy were surprised, the appointee felt burdened. “For me,” he told an interviewer, “this nomination was as if, all of a sudden, the crucifix began to wear a yellow star.”

In an early interview as archbishop, he said: “I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.”

Reactions to his appointment were sharp. A former chief rabbi of Paris, Meyer Jays, told an interviewer that “a Jew becoming a Christian does not take up authentic Judaism, but turns his back to it.”

Archbishop Lustiger soon earned the nickname “the bulldozer” for his energetic, impulsive, sometimes authoritarian spirit. He built new churches and founded a Catholic radio station, Radio Notre Dame, and a Catholic television enterprise, KTO. In 1983, he was made a cardinal.

Countering those who said that European youth were not receptive to religion, Cardinal Lustiger in 1997 organized a World Youth Day, which was held in Paris and attended by more than a million people, including John Paul.

He had earlier been involved in the dispute over a convent of Carmelite nuns that had been installed in 1984 near the Auschwitz concentration camp. Many in the Polish church believed that a convent at Auschwitz was justified because Poles had died there. But many Jewish leaders were outraged, saying that 9 of every 10 camp inmates had been Jews.

Roman Catholic prelates, including Cardinal Lustiger, and representatives of Jewish organizations worked out an agreement to move the convent, but the plan was thrown into doubt in 1989 when Cardinal Jozef Glemp of Poland ruled out a move. Cardinal Lustiger pressed John Paul to intervene, and in 1993 the pope ordered the Carmelites to move, resolving the crisis.

In his later years, Cardinal Lustiger accompanied Pope John Paul on his pilgrimages to promote understanding among faiths. But the cardinal’s boyhood decision to be baptized never sat well with some Jewish leaders.




In 1995, while he was visiting Israel, Yisrael Meir Lau, the Ashkenazic chief rabbi and a concentration camp survivor, said Cardinal Lustiger had “betrayed his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods” in the 1940s. The rabbi dismissed the assertion that the cardinal had remained a Jew.

In response, the cardinal said: “To say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers. I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”

He stepped down as archbishop in 2005, but with the pope’s death that year, the cardinal was frequently mentioned as a potential successor.

He countered such speculation with characteristic humor. Asked by a Jewish friend over dinner whether he thought he might become pope, the cardinal responded in French-accented Yiddish, “From your mouth to God’s ear.”


Maia de la Baume contributed to the article



Here is how the Jerusalem Post reported it briefly.
Note the word 'apostate' in the headline.



Apostate French cardinal dies at 80
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Aug. 6, 2007


Former archbishop of Paris and adviser to Pope John Paul II Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger died Sunday at age 80.

Lustiger was born Jewish, the son of Polish immigrants to France. He was first exposed to Catholicism when he and his sister were sent away from Paris after the Nazi occupation, and later converted. Lustiger's mother was deported and died in Auschwitz.

The cardinal was a champion of interfaith relations and always asserted that he remained a Jew, a claim that was soundly rejected by Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Lau said that Lustiger had "betrayed his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods."

A VERY GOOD MAN

I really liked Cardinal Lustiger. I remember seeing him, when B16 traveled to Auschwitz, standing in the midst of a group of clergy, crying while the pope prayed for the various nationalities that had died there and that huge rainbow lit up the sky behind their backs.

An article I read today mentioned how the cardinal had taken part in a ceremony years ago at Auschwitz and helped read the names of those who had died there. One of the names he read was Gisele Lustiger after which he paused and said, "My mother."

May God give him peace.

Because I was curious to see where the story was going, with a lead like this:

What do Tom Brady, Barack Obama, Scooter Libby, Jay-Z, David Beckham and the pope have in common? They all get nods in Esquire's fourth annual Best Dressed Men in the World list.

It's a story in the 8/7/07 issue of USA TODAY, and I had to go several paragraphs down to see what on earth landed the Pope on such a list! Was a white cassock with a capelet and a skullcap now considered an 'in' look? Good grief, as Benefan would say!

The story continues:

Brady, 30, the dapper New England Patriots quarterback, tops the list, which appears in the September issue, on newsstands Aug. 14. He's lauded for his "All-American Kennedy-clan suits," which clasp his yummy form like a well-fitting pair of football pants. Adding to his cachet: a supermodel girlfriend, Gisele Bundchen, on his arm. Not subtracting from his cachet: Being baby-daddy to his pregnant ex-girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan.

"He's managed to learn to keep it simple. He's got a tailor who makes his clothes fit really well, and he always looks like he's put a little thought into" his dress, says associate editor Richard Dorment, who helped put the list together.

"I am honored to be chosen," Brady said in an e-mail statement to USA TODAY. "But, as much as I enjoy dressing fashionably, this time of year I care a lot more about how I look on the field than off it."

Twenty-three men landed on the list. "We looked at thousands of men from around the world," Dorment says. "The factors we consider are consistency and care, men who take the time and energy" about their appearance.

In addition to the list are a dozen men considered either "controversial" or sartorially significant — for instance, Pope Benedict XVI, who's the "accessorizer of the year" for his red leather loafers.

"It's important to have a signature, something that distinguishes you from everyone else," Dorment says.

So that's how the Pope got into this at all. But don't these people at Esquire do any research at all? One would think the Pope thought up the idea of wearing red shoes just to be cool or different!

BTW, these were supposed to be the prescribed Papal footwear (and gloves) until Paul VI decided to just wear plain red shoes, as his successors have continued to wear, but I think I read somewhere, he specified it had to be with gold-colored buckles, until John Paul-II decided to do away with the buckles. And so has Benedict, obviously.



Here's the rest of the 'Best-Dressed' story from USA TODAY:

The rest of the top five are record exec and rapper Jay-Z, 37, at No. 2, whose high-style/low-style mix gets the lifetime achievement award; the new James Bond, British actor Daniel Craig, 39, who was No. 1 last year and is praised for never wearing anything baggy; Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, 46, who has figured out that light-blue ties look best on him; and New York hipster hotelier André Balazs, 50, who turns heads with slim-fit suits, sprawling ties and a perma-tan.

Hip-hop stars ruled in previous years: The 2005 winner was hitmaker Pharrell Williams; the 2004 winner was Outkast's Andre 3000.

I warned you it was trivia!

P.S. You have to laugh out loud at the thought of an 80-year-old priest being named fashion 'accessorizer' of the year

Jewish kaddish, Catholic psalms at Notre Dame for funeral of Jewish-born French cardinal


The Associated Press
Thursday, August 9, 2007

PARIS: Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who sought to bring Jews and Catholics together in life, is continuing the mission in death.

In a funeral infused with symbolism, Jews will stand Friday in front of the sculpted saints of Notre Dame cathedral and recite one of Judaism's most sacred prayers — moments before an archbishop reads psalms for the Jew who converted to Catholicism, became a towering figure in the church and was even touted as a possible candidate for the papacy.

Lustiger's own faith remained complex up until his death Sunday at age 80 in a Paris hospice. He never rejected his Jewish identity, and worked to heal wounds between France's Jews and Catholics.

The longtime archbishop of Paris, whose mother died at Auschwitz and who was a confidant of late Pope John Paul II, asked that his funeral include both faiths.

"This was his wish, to share the remembrance this way," Arno Lustiger, a cousin who is a German historian and Auschwitz survivor, told The Associated Press.

Arno Lustiger, 83, will lead the reading of the kaddish mourning prayer, in Hebrew, in front of Notre Dame on Friday morning.

A grandnephew, Gila, will read a psalm and message to the cardinal from his family, in French. Another relative, Jonas-Moses Lustiger, is bringing earth from Christian holy sites in and around Jerusalem to be sprinkled on the coffin.

Shortly after the kaddish, Lustiger's successor as archbishop of Paris, Andre Vingt-Trois, will lead a funeral Mass inside the 12th century cathedral, one of the greatest symbols of French Catholicism.

Among those in attendance will be France's leading Jewish and Catholic figures, as well as President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy will interrupt his U.S. vacation to attend Lustiger's funeral, before jetting back to Maine for lunch the next day with U.S. President George W. Bush.

Many of those attending the Mass are expected to attend the kaddish reading as well, the Paris diocese said.

The day before the funeral, hundreds of people paid their respects at Notre Dame, where Lustiger's wooden casket was laid out on the floor under a large hanging portrait of the cardinal. Many mourners knelt to pray.

Rosita Ferrer, a 59-year-old Parisian, said she wasn't surprised by the cardinal's wish to honor his Jewish heritage.

"It's a beautiful symbol," Ferrer said. "He did so much for the reconciliation of religions. ... He is leaving us a beautiful gift for years to come."

Aaron Lustiger was born in 1926 in Paris to Polish immigrant parents who ran a hosiery shop. As an adolescent, he was sent to the town of Orleans, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of the capital, to take refuge from the occupying Nazis. There, Lustiger, who was not a practicing Jew, converted to Catholicism at the age of 14, taking the name Jean-Marie.

He was ordained a priest in 1954, and served as chaplain to students at the Sorbonne University, reportedly zipping on a motorbike through the winding streets of the Left Bank student neighborhood.

Lustiger climbed up the church hierarchy before becoming archbishop of Paris, a post he held for 24 years before stepping down in 2005.

Lustiger remained a grassroots figure, creating a Christian radio station, Radio Notre Dame, in 1981 and expounding on issues from the August 2003 heat wave that killed thousands of people in France to the building of a united Europe.

He also respected his Jewish heritage.

"Christianity is the fruit of Judaism," he once said.

"For me, it was never for an instant a question of denying my Jewish identity. On the contrary," he said in "Le Choix de Dieu" (The Choice of God), conversations published in 1987.

Lustiger's post-mortem message of unity comes as the Vatican on Thursday sought to calm Jewish anger over Pope Benedict XVI's meeting with a prominent Polish priest accused of anti-Semitism, declaring the encounter did not imply any change in the Church's desire for good relations with Jews.

=====================================================================

The view from the Jewish side:

The Jews' Catholic prince
wasn't Jews' envoy to Catholics
but Church's envoy among Jews
By Sefi Hendler
Jewish World
Published 08.07.07


PARIS – "Monsieur Cardinal, we have to leave for prayer," the young priest implored the old cleric. But Jean-Marie Lustiger stayed in the room overlooking the garden and continued to engage in a fascinating conversation in French, spiced with Yiddish. It appeared as if the old Church official preferred the company of the Israeli press over the evening mass that awaited him.

It was one of the last interviews granted by Paris' archbishop, who died Sunday, and he chose to give it to an Israeli newspaper. The meeting was held on the eve of his departure to Auschwitz as the personal representative of Pope John Paul II in the ceremony marking 60 years since the death camp's liberation.

In this event, Lustiger held a dual role: As Jean-Marie he represented the Pope; and as the child Aaron Lustiger he carried the painful memory of his mother, Gisele, who was murdered in Auschwitz after being deported from France by the Vichy government. "My children, what goes on here is a deadly disease, beware of it," she wrote her children in one of her last letters from Poland.

Young Aaron Lustiger found his own way of guarding himself. In 1940, at the age of 14, he converted to Christianity in the town of Orleans. He was sent there by his parents, who wanted to protect him, and found a new faith that remained with him until his death. His father, Charles, fought to bring him back to Judaism after the war, but failed.

Aaron became Jean-Marie and climbed the ranks of the Church until he became one of its "princes." He however kept the name Aaron in his identification card and was very proud of it. "This is my first name," he told me when we met at the Archbishop's house in Paris in the winter of 2005.

It was his Jewish name, but mainly his close ties with Pope John Paul II, that turned Lustiger into a key figure in the historic process of reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity.

After the Second Vatican Council, which cleared the Jews of responsibility for the killing of Jesus, and before the establishment of ties between the Holy See and Jerusalem, the "Jewish cardinal" managed on many occasions to bring the two sides closer together.

One example is his effort to resolve a crisis prompted by an attempt by Carmelite nuns to open a convent near Auschwitz in 1984. [They succeeded! Pope Benedict visited them last May 2006!]

It's hard to imagine who could fill the place of the Jewish kid Aaron, who became the mouthpiece of the Vatican on all issues concerning the Jews, in future crises.

Jews were very much mistaken in seeing Lustiger as their envoy in the Catholic world. In fact, he was the Church's envoy among the Jews. The Jews' Catholic more than the Catholics' Jew.

His process of getting closer to the religion he abandoned (although he still considered himself Jewish, of course), was long, hard and strewn with unpleasant moments and words. "Have I felt anti-Semitism toward me in the Church? Only on the fringes, but I know it exists," he confessed.

Things were not easy on the other side as well. When he arrived in Israel for an official visit in the 1990s, then-chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau – a Holocaust survivor himself - defined him as someone who "betrayed his people" during their darkest hour.

As the years passed, the words became milder and Lustiger, who was once considered a proselyte, became an honored and welcomed guest in Israel.

This closeness to Judaism filled him with pride for religious and personal reasons. during our last conversation, just before he set out for Auschwitz, Lustiger talked about his many friends in Israel.

He then turned quiet for a second, and said, "I sometimes ask myself if my father in Heaven can see this today." Now, when he's up there too, he can ask him himself.

I think if Papa saw that he was named 'Best Accessorizer' by Esquire Magazine, he'd be suprised at first, but laugh it off. Perhaps because the red loafers have not been in the public eye for a long time is why they are noted now. They might as well have mentioned his cufflinks.

Very nice article about Card. Lustiger (the second one). The first converts were Jews so I'm sure, after the initial hurt, he realized he was in good company. Count on the AP to plug in a reference about the meeting with anti-semitic Polish priest.

I think this article is just more proof that there needs to be more Democrats who are pro-life and do not support 'civil unions'/'gay marriage' in public office. Not that I dislike Obama entirely. 2008 is supposed to be my first year voting and it is becoming more and more likely I will not vote at all, especially with the present crop of 'wonderful' candidates to choose from.



Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks to the audience at the Visible Vote '08: A Presidential Forum in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles on Thursday, Aug. 9, 2007. The event, co-sponsored by cable channel Logo and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues.

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Sen. Barack Obama said Thursday he wanted to tap into the "core decency" of Americans to fight discrimination against gays and lesbians, and argued that civil unions for same-sex couples wouldn't be a "lesser thing" than marriage.

At a televised forum focusing on gay rights, the Illinois senator was asked to explain how civil unions for same-sex couples could be the equivalent of marriage. He said, "As I've proposed it, it wouldn't be a lesser thing, from my perspective.

"Semantics may be important to some. From my perspective, what I'm interested (in) is making sure that those legal rights are available to people," he said.

"If we have a situation in which civil unions are fully enforced, are widely recognized, people have civil rights under the law, then my sense is that's enormous progress," the Illinois Democrat said.

Obama belongs to the United Church of Christ, which supports gay marriage, but Obama has yet to go that far.

The senator was the first of six Democratic candidates scheduled to answer questions at an event described as a milestone by organizers. It marked the first time that major presidential candidates appeared on TV specifically to address gay issues, they said.

Obama called the event "a historic moment ... for America."

The two-hour forum, held in a Hollywood studio with an invited audience of 200, was co-sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group active in Democratic politics, and Logo, a gay-oriented cable TV channel that aired the forum live.

"We already won because the candidates are here," Logo president Brian Graden said.

Of the eight Democratic candidates, two did not attend, Sens. Joe Biden of Delaware and Chris Dodd on Connecticut.

The candidates, appearing one at a time and seated in an upholstered chair, took questions from a panel that included Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese, singer Melissa Etheridge and Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart.

All of the Democratic candidates support a federal ban on anti-gay job discrimination, want to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy barring gays from serving openly in the military and support civil unions that would extend marriage-like rights to same-sex couples.

A majority of Americans oppose nationwide recognition of same-sex marriage and only two of the Democrats support it - Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel and Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, both longshots for the nomination.

Logo, available in about 27 million homes, wanted to hold a second forum for Republican candidates but GOP front-runners showed no interest, channel officials said.


SOURCE: dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=070809&cat=news&st=newsd8qtsgeg...

‘Prince of Darkness’ explains Catholic conversion in new book

By Kaitlynn Riely
8/7/2007
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) – Syndicated columnist Robert Novak has made a living writing articles containing information from his carefully cultivated sources, and when he first became interested in Catholicism, it was, coincidentally, a former source who aided him in his conversion.

His story about a source turned priest who baptized him, as well as many other stories about his life and his work as a journalist, appear in his new book, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington.

Novak was born Jewish and attended Christian services sporadically until the mid-1960s, after which he stopped going to religious services for nearly 30 years. But Novak said the Holy Spirit began to intervene in his life.

A friend gave Novak Catholic literature after he came close to dying from spinal meningitis in the early 1980s. About a decade later, the columnist's wife, Geraldine, also not a Catholic, persuaded him to join her at Mass at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Washington. The celebrant was a former source of Novak's.

Father Peter Vaghi, now Msgr. Vaghi and pastor of the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda, Md., was a former Republican lawyer and adviser to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. He had been a source for the Evans and Novak column that Novak wrote with Rowland Evans.

Novak started to go to Mass regularly, but it wasn't until a few years later that he decided to convert to Catholicism. The turning point, as he recounts in his book, happened when he went to Syracuse University in New York to give a lecture. Before he spoke, he was seated at a dinner table near a young woman who was wearing a necklace with a cross. Novak asked her if she was Catholic, and she posed the same question to him.

Novak replied that he had been going to Mass each Sunday for the last four years, but that he had not converted.

Her response – "Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever" – motivated him to start the process of becoming a Catholic through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. He was baptized at St. Patrick's Church in 1998. His wife was also baptized a Catholic.

Novak said he believed the Holy Spirit led him to Catholicism. He told an audience at the Heritage Foundation in Washington Aug. 2 that when he was interviewed by The New York Times about his book the interviewer scoffed at his story about his source turned priest.

But Novak said he told her he believed the Holy Spirit was behind the coincidences.

"I consider this the only one true faith, so I believe the Holy Spirit led me to it," Novak said. "Then the next day Pope Benedict (XVI) said the same thing."

Novak, referring to a Vatican document released in July reaffirming that the Catholic Church is the one true church, quipped that he must have been right.

The rest of Novak's 600-page book describes a life spent developing sources close to some of the most powerful people in American political life. He said he hopes his work has done a service for his country.

"I am proud of my journalistic philosophy to tell the world things people do not want them to hear," he said.

At the end of his book, and at the end of his talk, Novak likened himself in some ways to Bertrans de Born, a medieval nobleman who stirred up strife and wreaked havoc by destroying castles and ravishing women. In Dante's "Inferno," this stirrer of strife is resigned to hold his head in his hands for the rest of his days.

Novak joked that he had not destroyed castles or ravished women, but said he hoped that, in his career, he had succeeded in "stirring up strife but not in wreaking havoc, so that I will avoid an eternity in purgatory with my head in my hands."

Faith Matters

Where Catholicism Is Going

U.S. News and World Report
August 15, 2007 09:44 AM ET | Tolson, Jay

Anyone following developments in the Roman Catholic Church today knows the work of John Allen. In addition to reporting prolifically for the National Catholic Reporter, formerly from Rome but more recently from New York, Allen has written timely books on everything from the organization of the Curia to the intricacies of the conclave (the process by which popes are elected) to the history and workings of Opus Dei. He also penned an intellectual portrait of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which he quickly revised after his subject's elevation to the papacy. Not surprisingly, Allen is a prime talking head for television and radio whenever something important happens involving the Catholic Church.

I met Allen in person just before the death of Pope John Paul II. Between handling a stream of incoming phone calls as we sat in a small cafe off St. Peter's Square, he gave me a shrewd and, as it turned out, accurate lowdown on likely successors to the papacy. I also learned a little about why he excelled in the business of Vaticanology, a trade that some old-hand journalists compare to the now-defunct pursuit of Kremlinology. He understands the culture (being a Catholic himself), he speaks the language of officialdom (Italian), and he constantly worked his sources at every level of the Vatican bureaucracy. Allen also attended everything Vatican-related during his Rome days. If there was a cocktail party for a visiting Latin American archbishop or a seminar on the church's position on Third World debt relief, Allen was there, gathering string.

Some charge that the zealous reporter became too close to his subject. Allen responds to the criticism by saying that he came to the job as a liberal American Catholic (which he remains) but that from the beginning of his days in Rome, he suspended his own political agenda in order to report accurately on all aspects of Vatican life. Part of that suspension of personal bias includes recognizing that the concerns of the American Catholic Church are not the only, or even the greatest, concerns of the church universal. For some Americans, that may seem a little like a betrayal, but many readers find it essential to Allen's cleareyed take on what is really going on in the larger church and its headquarters.

I say all this about Allen to emphasize the importance of one of his recently posted columns on the National Catholic Reporter website. In it, he provides an edited version of a talk that he gave at a conference in Washington, D.C., in July. That talk offers a foretaste of the book that he has been working on for the past two years about megatrends in contemporary Catholicism, or what he describes as the "most important forces shaping the Catholic future."

Those forces are as follows:

1. World Catholicism

2. Secularism and Catholic identity

3. Islam

4. The new demography

5. Expanding lay roles

6. The biotech revolution

7. Globalization

8. Ecology

9. Multipolarism

10. Pentecostalism

One obvious fact about this list is that it does not name American Catholicism as one of the big issues in and of itself, though of course all of the items bear, one way or another, on developments in the American church.

But what is most surprising is what the list reveals about the bold ambitions of the church—and this at a time when the church is being led by a very elderly pope whom many thought would be nothing but a caretaker after the vigorous papacy of John Paul II. Many also thought that Benedict XVI would largely restrict his papacy to the task of restoring the faith in the old European core of Christendom.

What this list suggests, if accurate, is that this papacy is thinking very globally. The challenges facing the church in Europe and America have not been abandoned, according to Allen, but they have largely been subsumed under the more comprehensive category of "Secularism and Catholic identity." One sign of what the pope is doing on this front is his support of the widening use of the pre-Vatican II liturgy. Another is his declaration, disturbing to many liberals and ecumenists, that Catholicism is the only true church and that it was designated as such by Christ.

This is drawing orthodox lines in the sand, and it shows that the current pope may be more concerned about reassuring more conservative Catholics in the developing world than in wooing progressives in Europe or America. It also reflects his long-held conviction that a small but orthodox church in the West is preferable to a large but theologically squishy one.

Allen focuses on the relevance of these megatrends for Europe because Europe was the focus of the conference. But even in this partial foretaste of the book to come, he gives us a valuable template for evaluating specific teachings and policies that have issued, and will continue to issue, from Pope Benedict XVI and his Curia.

I am glad John Allen - in what appears to be his much-awaited return from his book-deadline hiatus - has chosen to write about Magdi Allam, about whom I some translations a few weeks ago in this thread [See Post #8437, 7/22/07, on this same page!] Allen writing about him at least brings his peculiar situation, to say the least, to the attention of the Anglophone media.



A secular Muslim hawk
who has the Church's ear on Islam
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York
Aug 21, 2007


Communion and Liberation’s annual “Meeting” in the Italian coastal city of Rimini is sort of a Catholic cross between the Algonquin Roundtable and Lollapalooza – one part intellectual discourse, one part rock-and-roll festival. Drawing crowds in excess of 700,000, it’s perhaps the leading annual forum in Europe for Catholics attracted to a strong sense of religious identity and a challenge to secular culture.

(Communion and Liberation is among the new movements in the Catholic Church, often regarded as fairly conservative. The group's American director, the affable Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, once laughingly described it as "Opus Dei for lazy Catholics.")

Ironically, one of the biggest draws each year in this robustly Catholic milieu is a secular Muslim – Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam, a columnist and vice-director [the correct translation of his title is really 'deputy editor'] of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper. This year’s August 19-25 edition of the “Meeting” has been no exception, as Allam’s presentation on Sunday attracted an overflow crowd.

Allam, it should be stressed, is no ordinary Muslim. In some ways, he is the heir to Oriana Fallaci as Italy’s most prominent critic of Islam, someone whose views carry considerable weight in Catholic circles.

His most recent book is titled Viva Israele, in which Allam argues that Israel represents a culture of life, in contrast with militant Islam’s culture of death. Allam minces no words in making the point.

In a recent interview with an Israeli news agency, for example, Allam was asked about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His lapidary response: “I hope that someday Israel will capture Ahmadinejad and force him to live the rest of his life between the walls of Yad Vashem.”

Allam has said that Israel, along with Pope Benedict XVI, represents the “residual hope” for Western civilization against the Islamic threat.

On Sunday, Allam took part in a session called “Let’s Save the Christians,” devoted to anti-Christian persecution in the Muslim world. He took the opportunity to reiterate a proposal he first made on July 4, during a rally in Rome in favor of persecuted Christians: the creation of a “Permanent Observatory” to monitor religious freedom worldwide.

Allam described the realities facing Christians in many majority Muslim states.

“In Saudi Arabia, all it takes is for the police to find a Bible in the drawer of a bedside table in a private house, for someone to be accused of apostasy, of betrayal,” he said. The consequence, Allam said, is that the Bible’s owner could be imprisoned and subjected to torture.

Such realities are producing an escalating Christian exodus out of the region. According to the World Council of Churches, the number of Christians in the Middle East has plummeted from 12 million to 2 million in just the last 10 years, the result of a triple whammy of political insecurity, economic stagnation, and harassment at the hands of Islamic radicals.

Allam also pointed to the example of Mohammed Ahmed Hegazy, an Egyptian Muslim convert to Christianity, who has gone into hiding due to death threats after he sued the Egyptian government for refusing to allow him to change his religious affiliation on his national identity card. [Now I feel guilty, because Allam wrote an article about Hegazy for Corriere yesterday, and I haven't found time to translate it!]

Allam denounced jurists at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, widely considered the most authoritative institution in the Sunni Muslim world, who have sided against Hegazy.

Among other things, Allam called upon Italian universities that have signed agreements for cultural collaboration with Al-Azhar to renounce them. One of those institutions is the Pontifical Oriental Institute, which is affiliated with the Gregorian University, the Jesuit-run flagship pontifical university in Rome.

His willingness to take such bold public positions has made Allam a sign of division in both the Muslim and Catholic worlds. Among Muslim radicals he’s seen as a traitor, one sign of which is that Allam is always surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards.

Among moderates in both the Muslim and Catholic camps, meanwhile, Allam is often seen as a provocateur, painting anyone who expresses sympathy with the Palestinians or with other Islamic causes as a dupe of the terrorists.

That was the spirit of a letter critical of Allam’s latest book published in the Italian journal Reset, signed by some 230 writers, academics and activists, both Muslim and Christian, in its July-August issue.

“Journalism risks falling into the logic of cheering for one sports team against another, rather than being rational and analytical, above all when it’s dealing with delicate and sensitive subjects such as religion,” it said, accusing Allam of adopting the all-or-nothing logic of “totalitarian ideologies.”

The appeal was signed by a “who’s who” of center-left Italian Catholic opinion, including Enzo Bianchi, founder of the ecumenical monastery of Bose; Paolo Branca, an expert on Islam and advisor to Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi of Milan; Alfredo Canavero, a scholar who also writes for Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops; and Alberto Melloni, a well-known church historian [and habitual dissenter-critic!]

In effect, this school of thought believes that Allam’s hard line actually serves the interests of Western neo-cons and Islamic radicals, both of whom, they say, benefit from polarizing opinion in order to justify unending combat. Meanwhile, a number of leading Italian figures leapt to Allam’s defense, insisting that his critics are in denial about the realities of radical Islam.

In that sense, Allam incarnates the division between “hawks” and “doves” on Islam, between those who emphasize confrontation and those who seek dialogue. Today the winds seem to be blowing in favor of the hawks, a transition reflected in Allam’s own biography.

In Viva Israel, Allam recounts growing up as a convinced supporter of the Palestinian cause, believing that Israel was a racist state invented by the West as a compensation for the Holocaust. What turned him around, he wrote, was getting to know Yasser Arafat, which convinced him of the bankruptcy of terrorism.

As recently as 2002, Allam was still seen as something of a dove. In his book Diary of Islam, published that year, he wrote, “A moderate and tolerant Islam was among the first victims of Islamic terrorism,” insisting that Islam is compatible with democracy and pluralism. The hijackers of 9/11, Allam wrote, did not represent the “overwhelming majority” of Muslims around the world.

“The West is in the DNA of Islam, in the same way in which Islam is in the DNA of the West,” he wrote in 2002.

In a subsequent piece in Reset critical of Allam, a writer asked rhetorically if the Magdi Allam of 2002 would even have a coffee with the Magdi Allam of today. Yet the distance covered by Allam in those five years has hardly been his journey alone; in some ways it reflects a general trend in Western thought, including senior levels of the Catholic Church, towards ever-greater doubt about the prospects for a moderate Islam ready to make its peace with pluralism.

In that sense, the debate over Magdi Allam raises, in microcosm, one of the central questions of the 21st century – making him a very interesting figure to watch indeed.

Belated post. I didn't realize ZENIT was back from its summer hiatus.


Europarliament President Defends Values:
Pöttering Addresses Communion and Liberation Meeting



RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 21, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Hans-Gert Pöttering addressed participants at a Communion and Liberation conference, telling them that Europe should be characterized by values.

The president of the European Parliament joined with John Waters, a columnist for the Irish Times, to discuss "What Identity for Europe?" on Sunday at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, hosted by the Communion and Liberation Movement in Rimini, Italy.

During the press conference that preceded the round-table discussion, the president of the European Parliament detailed what he considers the priorities for the consolidation of Europe.

He said a "European Union that is not only for the elite, but for the common citizens," should have "human rights, the value of the person, and of the elderly," as reference values. And, he said, dialogue among cultures should be a priority.

"We don't want to foment a clash of civilizations, but rather to create partnership," he added.

Pöttering said he wished that a mention of Christianity would have been included in the European constitution.

"Personally I always insisted on the reference to God and Judeo-Christian roots, but unfortunately we didn't achieve it," he said. "The majority of the European Parliament was not favorable to this reference and they caused the resistance, in particular from France and Belgium.

"But the values affirmed of the human person, that every person is unique, including the elderly and children, are fundamental Christian values. And in this area our commitment should continue day after day."

During the round-table discussion, Pöttering clarified that his concept of common values doesn't mean something vague or generic: "When we speak of the rights of the elderly, of children, of no to cloning, of tolerance, we are not making vague affirmations."

The president of the European Parliament also spoke on religious liberty and the relationship with Islam: "If an Egyptian can declare his religious affiliation to Islam, this should be true for all other religions, including Christianity.

"Toward the Arab world we should be open and ready to dialogue, but we should also ask that our stance be reciprocated."

Regarding the possible entry of Turkey into the European Union, Pöttering said in the press conference that most parliamentarians are favorable to the idea, "with the condition that all the established conditions are respected. The accession, which is not automatic, will be decided upon at the end of the negotiations."

Concerning China, he said that "it is necessary to take advantage of the opportunity of the Olympics to promote human rights" in that Asian country.

Thanks to Gerald Augustinus for putting together material about this case which was reported in all the newscasts here in the US yesterday. His post includes a You-Tube of the Democratic smear-ad in question.


closedcafeteria.blogspot.com/2007/08/democrat-smear-of-bobby-jin...



Bobby Jindal, a Catholic [convert from Hinduism], Republican, Louisiana politician of Indian (as in India) descent, has been smeared in a Democrat ad quoting his New Oxford Review article [written in December 1996] out of context. It helps their cause that the articles are only available to subscribers. At National Review Ed Morrissey bought one of the articles that Jindal wrote for the subscription-only New Oxford Review.

---

The Louisiana Democrats are using this article and others as the basis for their ad claiming that Jindal is "anti-protestant." Morrissey found out just how badly they distorted Jindal's words:

I purchased the first essay highlighted on the website that the Democrats set up to demonize Jindal's writings. In this, they cleverly write hyperbolic descriptions of his essays while hiding behind the knowledge that readers will have to pay to read them from New Oxford Review. For instance, the description on the essay I bought claims that "Jindal explains how Catholicism has more merit than all other Religions. Jindal states non-Catholics are burndened [sic] with "utterly depraved minds" and calls individuals who ignore the teachings of the Catholic church intellectually dishonest."

When I read Jindal's essay, however, it says nothing of the sort. Jindal quotes John Calvin as saying that all men are born "utterly depraved" and then argues against it: [...]

He also does not call Protestants "intellectually dishonest." He says that it would not be intellectually honest to ignore the teachings of the Catholic Church when studying Christianity. That doesn't mean all Protestants are dishonest, but that any comparative study of the religion without at least seeing for one's self what Catholicism has to say about itself is intentionally self-limiting. He also calls on the Catholic Church to live up to those teachings in almost the same breath. Frankly, this piece is pretty much Catholic Apologetics 101. [...]

Put frankly, the Louisiana Democratic Party is despicable. Anyone contributing to this campaign should be publicly outed for the bigots they are.

---

I bought another one of the articles the LDP is using to attack Jindal. This distortion is even worse. The Democrats' website describes the subscription-only article thus:

---

Jindal describes himself as a "Knight in Shining Armor" while assisting an "intimate friend" with her battles with illness.

---

Note the slimy insinuation inherent in putting quotation marks around "intimate friend." Here's the actual excerpt:

---

Though she had not said anything, I knew something was wrong. Susan and I had developed an intimate friendship; indeed, our rela­tionship mystified observers, who insisted on finding a romantic component where none existed.

---

From Bill Donohue [president of the CAtholic League of America, on catholicleague.org/

---

“This is one of the most scurrilous smear jobs we’ve ever seen. When Jindal dropped the term ‘scandalous’ in his article, he was referring to the sad historical chapter that witnessed a division within the Christian house. To be exact, he made reference to the ‘scandalous series of divisions and new denominations’ that marked the post-Reformation period. Regarding the terms ‘utterly depraved,’ ‘selfish desires’ and ‘heresy,’ Jindal was citing Calvin. It was Calvin who warned against random interpretations of the Bible. As individuals, Calvin instructed, Christians were burdened with ‘utterly depraved’ minds and ‘selfish desires.’ According to Jindal, what concerned Calvin was a ‘subjective interpretation which leads to anarchy and heresy.’

“This is a fairly unremarkable exegesis. But to the twisted folks who lead the Louisiana Democratic Party, this is proof of bigotry.

“The ad should be withdrawn immediately. If it isn’t, Jindal should use it in his own ads to educate the public about the truly depraved conduct of his competitors. Maybe if the Democrats had a credible candidate (they still don’t have one), they wouldn’t have to get into the gutter.”

---

To protest this ad, contact chris@whittingtonlawfirm.com. Whittington is chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party.

=====================================================================

What really interests me more at this point - I don't doubt the bad faith, to say the least, of the Dem ad [it appears Jindal currently leads his Democratic rival by more than 50 points, according to the latest polls in Louisiana) - is Jindal's conversion story. It isn't often we have a Hindu convert to Catholicism, at least not one who reaches the prominence Jindal has.

The Smear against Jindal

The religion-based attack ads being used against Jindal are despicable. There are numerous other unfair TV ads being aired against him as well. Jindal almost beat Kathleen Blanco, our current Democratic governor in Louisiana, during the last gubernatorial race. There are no really prominent Democrats running against him in the current race so he is ahead in the polls.

Jindal is a very devout Catholic and so is his wife, an engineer who is also of Indian descent. They were high school sweethearts, if I recall correctly, and both went on to college in excellent out-of-state schools. I believe they have two young children.

Jindal has been serving as a congressman from the suburbs of New Orleans. He is extremely bright and earned an excellent reputation in previous jobs in federal agencies in Washington.

The smear campaign against him is almost more anti-brains, anti-integrity, and anti-hope than anti-Catholic. It represents old-style Louisiana politics, pushing a good-old-boy mentality and way of life. Jindal is considered too young, too educated, too progressive and, to some people, too religious and too dark.

It is a pity because Louisiana needs desperately all the smart people it can possibly find in order to help it with the zillions of problems it is struggling with. I find it amazing and inspirational that Mr. and Mrs. Jindal, with all the abilities and potential they have, would CHOOSE to stay in Louisiana and not move somewhere else where they could have a much better quality of life for themselves and their children. God help them.

Cstholic nun chosen
most powerful figure
in U.S. health care
By Catholic News Service


WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 (CNS) -- More powerful than bodybuilder-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger?

It's true if you're Sister Carol Keehan.

The issue isn't about who can lift the greatest weight in the gym. It's about who's got more muscle in the health care arena.

Sister Carol, a Daughter of Charity who is president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, the trade group for Catholic hospitals, finished first in the sixth annual reader poll conducted by Modern Healthcare magazine of the 100 most powerful people in health care.

Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, finished third. Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor, was second.

Sister Carol topped all comers, including presidents, presidential candidates, congressional movers and shakers, federal officials, hospital executives, educators and public policy vanguards in the survey, which was published Aug. 27.

She was ranked 26th in the 2006 survey. Sister Carol had just assumed the CHA presidency the previous November.

In profiling Sister Carol, the magazine said she "has somehow managed to connect with all the disparate interest groups without alienating any of them."

But being the most powerful doesn't get you everything.

"Quite frankly, I think we won't have health care reform worthy of this country until the American people demand it," Sister Carol told the magazine.

"I'm not sure that any one person or association has enough power to move our health care system to where it needs to be for the good of this nation," she added. "Until we have that critical mass of American people saying 'We want it,' loud enough and dominant enough, we won't have the coordinated responsiveness from the powers that need to come together to build a health system worthy of this nation."

Sister Carol, 63, has been a member of the Daughters of Charity for 43 years. She is the first woman to have ever topped the Modern Healthcare list, as well as the first former bedside nurse and the first former hospital CEO to make it to No. 1.

Over the past year, the CHA, under her leadership, has stumped for renewal of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, lobbied for greater access to health care for all, and advocated for the continued tax-exempt status of hospitals.

Prior to assuming the CHA presidency, Sister Carol had chaired the board of Sacred Heart Health System in Pensacola, Fla. She had also headed Providence Hospital in Washington for 15 years.

Others in Catholic health care who made the top 100 included:

- Anthony Tersigni, president and CEO of Ascension Health in St. Louis, 15th.

- Joseph Swedish, president and CEO of Trinity Health in the Detroit suburb of Novi, Mich., 22nd.

- Sister Mary Jean Ryan, a Franciscan Sister of Mary who is president and CEO of SSM Health Care in St. Louis, 49th.

- A. David Jimenez, chief operating officer of Catholic Healthcare Partners in Cincinnati, 72nd.

- Lloyd Dean, president and CEO of Catholic Healthcare West in San Francisco, 73rd. Apart from Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who placed 10th, he is the highest-ranking African-American on the list.

- Kevin Lofton, president and CEO of Catholic Health Initiatives in Denver, 93rd. Lofton is also chairman of the American Hospital Association.

Interfaith Pioneer Klenicki Knighted By Pope
For Historic Contributions To Jewish-Catholic Relations

This is a press release from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.



New York, NY, August 27, 2007 - Rabbi Leon Klenicki, the Anti-Defamation League's Interfaith Affairs Director Emeritus, has been knighted by Pope Benedict XVI for his historic contributions in creating positive relationships between Catholics and Jews around the world.
Rabbi Klenicki was made a Papal Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great at a ceremony at the Vatican's Mission to the United Nations, presided by Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston.

Rabbi Klenicki becomes the second ADL interfaith official to receive papal knighthood. In 1986, the late Dr. Joseph L. Lichten became the first American Jew to receive the honor, from Pope John Paul II.

A renowned scholar and theologian, Rabbi Klenicki joins a select group of living Jews, and only a handful of rabbis, who have been so honored by the Vatican. Klenicki is the author and co-author of hundreds of books and papers dealing with the theological and practical aspects of improving relations between Catholics and Jews after nearly two millennia of tragedy.

"I am deeply honored by Pope Benedict XVI for my nomination as a Papal Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great," said Rabbi Klenicki, who recalled his many meetings through the years with the future pope - then Cardinal Ratzinger - whom he praised for "the depth and breadth of his knowledge."

"I cannot describe how much this honor means to me," he said. "It is recognition of the importance of the interfaith dialogue that has been my vocation and my passion for more than 30 years."

Rabbi Klenicki, a native of Argentina, thanked his high school and university teachers, his family, and his wife, Myra Cohen, whom he called his inspiration. He also thanked ADL "for the opportunities it has given me to spend more than 30 years in the field of interfaith work."

"We are extremely proud that Rabbi Klenicki's decades of work to help reconcile the Catholic and Jewish people has been recognized by Pope Benedict XVI with this special honor," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "Leon is a true pioneer in interfaith dialogue and education. I can think of no better person to deserve this honor."

Leon Klenicki received a Rabbinical diploma in 1967 from the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. In September 1967, Klenicki returned to Buenos Aires, where he accepted the position of Director of the Latin American Office of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

He helped develop Reform Judaism in Latin America and lectured widely at the main Latin American Jewish centers. Rabbi Klenicki served as an advisor on interfaith affairs for the DAIA, the main Jewish organization in Argentina.

In October 1973, Rabbi Klenicki joined ADL as head of the Jewish-Catholic Relations Department. He became Director of ADL's Department of Interfaith Affairs in 1984, and ADL's Co-Liaison to the Vatican. He held this position until his retirement in January 2001.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recommended to all U.S. bishops and cardinals that they observe Holocaust Memorial Day by using as a liturgy the service prepared by Rabbi Klenicki and Dr. Eugene J. Fisher, "From Desolation to Hope: An Interreligious Holocaust Memorial Service."

In May 2001, Rabbi Klenicki was honored by the Holy See's Commission for Interreligious Relations with Judaism for his contributions to the interfaith dialogue.

Attending yesterday's ceremony at the Vatican Mission were leading Catholic and Jewish interfaith officials including Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Holy See's Permanent Observer to the United Nations and Father James Massa, Executive Director of the Office of Ecumenical and Interrreligious Affairs for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.