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

That's interesting but I believe from person, whose government decided to not "discriminate" homosexuals and press the catholic orphanages to let adopt kids by homosexuals, it's rather hypocrite. Not mentioning his wife should stop to distribute condoms publicly.


=================================================================== They are simply rumors, of course. But if he did consider - even just converting - anything of the sort, he certainly would have a whole lot to confess and do penance for! And I wonder if Cherie Blair confesses at all...TERESA

I got this story because Lella on her blog posted an Italian translation of the complete speech published in La Repubblica today (it's hard to see why this liberal mouthpiece felt called upon to be masochistic!) - so I did a backward trace, hoping I could find trhe full text, but Reuters, at whose London HQ he gave this address only has this report online.


Blair attacks 'feral' media he once tamed
By Katherine Baldwin





LONDON, June 12 (Reuters) - Britain's media is like a "feral beast" that tears people and reputations to shreds, Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday in his parting shot at journalists after a decade in power.

Once known for his slick and sometimes obsessive media management, Blair accused the media of sensationalizing facts, breeding cynicism and attacking public figures.

Blair, who steps down on June 27, said he was not blaming the media for the "damaged" relationship with politicians but pointing the finger at the changing nature of modern news.

"The fear of missing out means that today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits," he said in a speech at Reuters headquarters in London.

Journalists are "increasingly and to a dangerous degree ... driven by 'impact', and this is driving down standards and doing a disservice to the public, he said.

"The damage saps the country's confidence and self-belief ... it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions," argued Blair.

Britons became increasingly cynical about Blair's reliance on public relations "spin" to nurture favorable headlines and his relationship with the media and voters deteriorated during the divisive Iraq war and its aftermath.

Opposition politicians blamed Blair's media handling for the sour relationship between politicians and the press.

"A fairer analysis would point to his own culture of spin," said Don Foster, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker.

Blair joked to reporters he was "poking them in the eye" but could do so because he was standing down. He advised his successor, finance minister Gordon Brown, not to do the same.



Blair said his government had focused too much on persuading the press: "We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labor to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media."

He also made no apologies for assiduously wooing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his influential newspapers and broadcasters.

Such close ties had been vital because the media had attacked his Labor Party with "ferocious hostility" during its 18 years in opposition until its 1997 election victory, he said.

Blair said many newspapers had become "viewspapers" with opinion overtaking fact and it was rare to find balance.

He suggested the way the British press is regulated would have to be revised soon as new trends, such as newspapers producing podcasts and TV channels having Web sites, blurred the once-clear distinction between newspapers and television.

"It becomes increasingly irrational to have different systems of accountability based on technology that can no longer be differentiated in the old way," he said.

In Britain, TV channels have one regulatory body, Ofcom. The British Broadcasting Corporation is governed by a trust and newspapers are overseen by the Press Complaints Commission.

Asked if government should do more to improve regulation, and prevent one group having a monopoly, Blair said the media were better placed to bring about change themselves.

"I think politicians would find it very hard to do this without a strong sense that there is a movement within the media itself to bring about change," he said.

(additional reporting by Kate Holton)

By Mike Baker
Wed. June 13th, 2007.

MONTREAT, N.C. (AP) - Ruth Graham, the ailing wife of evangelist Billy Graham, fell into a coma Wednesday morning and appears to be close to death, a family spokesman said. "She appears to be entering the final stages of life," said Larry Ross, Graham's personal spokesman.

The news came the same day Billy Graham said he and Ruth will be buried at the recently dedicated Billy Graham Library in Charlotte. In a statement, Graham said his 87-year-old wife, who has degenerative osteoarthritis of the back and neck and has been bedridden at their home in the mountains of western North Carolina for some time, "is close to going home to heaven."

"Ruth is my soul mate and best friend, and I cannot imagine living a single day without her by my side," Graham said. "I am more in love with her today than when we first met over 65 years ago as students at Wheaton College."

Ross said Ruth Graham was treated two weeks ago for pneumonia and her health temporarily improved before declining because of her weakened condition. Ross said she is being treated at her home outside Asheville, in the town of Montreat.

She celebrated her birthday on Sunday and was alert, Ross said. Billy Graham and four of their children are now at her side. The couple's youngest child, Ned, is flying in from the West Coast.

"Ruth and I appreciate, more than we can express, the prayers and letters of encouragement we have received from people across the country and around the world," Graham said.

"Our entire family has been home in recent days and it has meant so much to have them at our side during this time. We love each one of them dearly and thank God for them."

In San Antonio, Southern Baptist Convention president Frank Page paused the denomination's annual meeting Wednesday night to pray for Ruth Graham, whom he called "this dear saint of God."

The site of Graham's burial had appeared to be the source of some debate within his family. In December, The Washington Post reported that Ned Graham opposed burying his parents at the library. He and other members of the family preferred a burial site at The Cove, a Bible training center near the Grahams' mountain home.

The paper said evangelist Franklin Graham, who has taken over leadership of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, wanted his parents' graves to be at the Charlotte museum.

Graham, who is 88 and suffers from fluid on the brain, prostate cancer, Parkinson's disease and age-related macular degeneration, responded by saying the decision would be his and his wife's alone.

Ross said the Grahams decided this spring that they would be buried in the library's prayer garden, at the foot of a cross-shaped walkway, a symbolic decision to demonstrate both their reverence to God and their "ongoing witness of their faith in Christ."

"This is something the Grahams have been discussing and praying about," Ross said. "The two things they've always agreed on is that they'd be buried together and it's a decision they'd make on their own. Mr. Graham and Ruth have always known that their final home is in heaven. That's the important thing."

Born in Charlotte, Graham traveled the world for decades building a revival-based ministry that reached millions. He later returned to the Charlotte area, which became the home of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Graham was in Charlotte last month for the opening of the $27 million, 40,000-square-foot museum and evangelistic library. He looked frail, was brought to the site by golf cart and needed Franklin's help to reach his seat.

The emotional ceremony had such an air of finality that Graham quipped, "I feel like I've been attending my own funeral."

He told a crowd that included three former U.S. presidents; Clinton, Carter, and George H.W. Bush, that he was embarrassed by the attention and said there was "too much Billy Graham" in the exhibits.

"This building behind me is just a building," he said then. "It's an instrument, a tool for the Gospel. The primary thing is the Gospel of Christ."


Source:http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=070613&cat=news&st=newsd8po9qh80&src=ap

AP - Thu Jun 14 - Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, left, sits in front of Pope John Paul II in the papal library during a private audience at the Vatican in this Thursday, June 25, 1987 file photo. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who was elected Austrian president despite an international scandal about his secretive World War II military service for the Nazis, died Thursday June 14, 2007, Austrian media reported. He was 88. (AP Photo/Arturo Mari)

By Mike Baker
Thurs. June 14th, 2007.

MONTREAT, N.C. (AP) - Ruth Graham, who surrendered dreams of missionary work in Tibet to marry a suitor who became the world's most renowned evangelist, died Thursday. She was 87. Graham died at 5:05 p.m. at her home at Little Piney Cove, surrounded by her husband and all five of their children, said a statement released by Larry Ross, Billy Graham's spokesman.

"Ruth was my life partner, and we were called by God as a team," Billy Graham said in a statement. "No one else could have borne the load that she carried. She was a vital and integral part of our ministry, and my work through the years would have been impossible without her encouragement and support.

"I am so grateful to the Lord that He gave me Ruth, and especially for these last few years we've had in the mountains together. We've rekindled the romance of our youth, and my love for her continued to grow deeper every day. I will miss her terribly, and look forward even more to the day I can join her in Heaven."

Ruth Graham had been bedridden for months with degenerative osteoarthritis of the back and neck, the result of a serious fall from a tree in 1974 while fixing a swing for grandchildren, and underwent treatment for pneumonia two weeks ago. At her request, and in consultation with her family, she had stopped receiving nutrients through a feeding tube for the last few days, Ross said.

A public memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at the Montreat Conference Center. A private interment service will be held the next day in Charlotte.

As Mrs. Billy Graham, Ruth Graham could lay claim to being the first lady of evangelical Protestantism, but neither exploited that unique status nor lusted for the limelight.

Behind the scenes, however, she was considered her husband's closest confidant during his spectacular global career, one rivaled only by her father, L. Nelson Bell, until his death in 1973.

"She would help my father prepare his messages, listening with an attentive ear, and if she saw something that wasn't right or heard something that she felt wasn't as strong as it could be, she was a voice to strengthen this or eliminate that," said her son, Franklin, who is now the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

"Every person needs that kind of input in their life and she was that to my father."

Bell, a missionary doctor, headed the Presbyterian hospital in Qingjiang, China, that had been founded by the father of author Pearl Buck. Ruth grew up there and spent three high school years in what's now North Korea.

"What she witnessed in her family home, she practiced for herself, dependence on God in every circumstance, love for his word, concern for others above self, and an indomitable spirit displayed with a smile," said the Grahams' youngest daughter, also named Ruth.

Despite her reluctance to be a public personality herself, Ruth Graham met many of the powerful and famous through her husband, who was a spiritual adviser to presidents for decades. President Bush and first lady Laura Bush called her a "remarkable woman of faith" who "inspired people around the world with her humor, intelligence, elegance, and kindness."

She met Billy Graham at Wheaton College in Illinois. He recalled in 1997 memoirs, "If I had not been smitten with love at first sight of Ruth Bell I would certainly have been the exception. Many of the men at Wheaton thought she was stunning."

Billy Graham courted her, managing to coax her away from the foreign missions calling and into marriage after both graduated in 1943. In 1945, after a brief stint pastoring a suburban Chicago congregation, he became a roving speaker for the fledgling Youth for Christ organization.

From that point onward she had to endure her husband's frequent absences, remarking, "I'd rather have a little of Bill than a lot of any other man."

Ruth Graham moved the couple into her parents' home in Montreat, where they had relocated after fleeing wartime China. She stayed in western North Carolina mountain town the rest of her life.

The young couple later bought their own house across the street from the Bells. Then in 1956, needing protection from gawkers, the Grahams moved into Little Piney Cove, a comfortably rustic mountainside home she designed using logs from abandoned cabins. It became Billy's retreat between evangelistic forays.

Though the wife of a famous Baptist minister, the independent-minded Ruth Graham declined to undergo baptism by immersion and remained a loyal, lifelong Presbyterian. When in Montreat, a town built around a Presbyterian conference center, Billy Graham would attend the local Presbyterian church where his wife often taught the college-age Sunday School class.

Due to her husband's travels, she bore major responsibility for raising the couple's five children: Franklin (William Franklin III), Nelson, Virginia, Anne and Ruth.

Ruth Graham was the author or co-author of 14 books, including collections of poetry and the autobiographical scrapbook "Footprints of a Pilgrim."

In 1996, the Grahams were each awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for "outstanding and lasting contributions to morality, racial equality, family, philanthropy, and religion."

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell began her writing career with a Ruth Graham biography that depicted many deeds of personal charity. Cornwell said as a youth in Montreat she thought Ruth Graham "was the loveliest, kindest person ever born. I still do."

She helped establish the Ruth and Billy Graham Children's Health Center in Asheville, and the Billy Graham Training Center near Montreat.

Ruth Graham will be buried at the new Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, a source of apparent discord within the family last year. This week, Billy Graham said he and Ruth had decided "after much prayer and discussion" they would be laid to rest at the foot of a cross-shaped walkway in the library's prayer garden.

Source: dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=070614&cat=news&st=newsd8potab8...

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Thank you very much for keeping us up to date with this story, Lori. What a beautiful and inspiring life! Let our prayers go with her and for her family. TERESA

By Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy



Whenever he was asked how he came to be the greatest evangelist in history, Billy Graham always turned his eyes heavenward: "It was God who did this," he would say. But if there was an earthly power who helped both raise him up and keep his feet on the ground, it was his bright-souled, big-hearted wife Ruth Bell Graham, 87, who fell into a coma and died on Thursday. "Ruth was my life partner," he said in the statement announcing her death. "We were called by God as a team. No one else could have borne the load that she carried."

The daughter of Presbyterian medical missionaries in China, Ruth had no intention of getting married, much less to a man who would become one of the most famous in the world. She had seen missionary life up close: the hardship, the loneliness, the danger, as her parents lost colleagues to political violence and Ruth's little brother to dysentery. But she also admired their courage and kindness and aspired to live a life of Christian witness, as an "old maid missionary" in Tibet.

She did lead a life of witness, but not the way she planned. She and Billy met when they were students at Wheaton College, when he was already an ordained Baptist minister; "I fell in love right that minute," he said. She liked his earnestness, energy, the muscular message he preached. She came to know his gentleness and sincerity. They courted through college and married right after graduation. Billy was soon traveling the country and the world leading crusades, meeting with Truman and Eisenhower at the White House, with the Queen at Buckingham palace, with Hollywood stars and business moguls. It was a drenching wave of power and celebrity that might have swept away a lesser man; but Billy had Ruth as his firm anchor, teasing him mercilessly to puncture any temptations to pride, matching him verse for verse in his study of Scripture, hauling him back from the cliff whenever he was tempted to dive too deep into the politics that fascinated him so.

When rumors circulated in the winter of 1964 that Graham was considering running for the White House, she coolly informed him that "If you run, I don't think the country will elect a divorced president." A few months later she and Billy dined with Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson at the White House on the eve of the Democratic convention. Johnson began running down his list of possible running mates, wanting to know what Graham thought of them. Ruth kicked Billy hard under the table. "You shouldn't answer questions like that," said Ruth. "Your job is to give spiritual and moral advice to the President, not political." But when Lady Bird and Ruth got up from the table and went into the living room, Graham recalled, Johnson got up, quietly closed the door, then turned to him and said, "Now, tell me, what do you really think?"

There were many temptations facing a man in Graham's position, and Ruth was vital in helping him resist them. He vowed early on never to be alone in a room or a car with any woman other than Ruth. Members of his evangelical team would enter his hotel room before him, to search it for any adoring fan or tabloid bait that might be hiding out. Once a society doyenne swooned at Billy at a luncheon: "He is so eloquent and so handsome," she said. "Isn't it a shame that he isn't in politics?" To which Ruth dryly replied, "Maybe the Lord thought politics had its share and decided to give the ministry a break."

A woman of deep mercy and vibrant faith, Ruth was a gifted evangelist in her own right. Her ministry was far more private, counseling inquirers individually at Crusades, writing books and poetry, sharing the gospel with the ever wider circle of friends and acquaintances, including the First Families. She became quite close to Lady Bird, and then to the Nixons, and especially the Bush family. Ruth and Billy stayed at the White House with the Nixons the weekend before Christmas in 1973, as scandal consumed the country, and the First Family. "I was feeling the strain of over six months of Watergate," Julie Nixon Eisenhower recalled, "and more important, I was facing the fact that after years of searching I still did not have a deep spiritual base in my life." She and Ruth sat for a long time in a little sitting room, talking about how to study the scriptures; she marveled at Ruth's Bible, so worn and underlined, with notes in every margin. "She led the kind of life I wanted to lead," Julie said. Ruth put her in touch with a congressman's wife who could include her in their weekly Bible study.

Barbara Bush and Ruth Graham shared an extensive correspondence over the years and a great deal more: both were strong-willed and outspoken women who married young and found themselves responsible for large families while their husbands moved in ever-widening circles around the world. Both women also looked out for their sometimes too-trusting spouses. And each could unholster a wicked sense of humor when she needed it. In 2006 Barbara noted that Ruth had once been asked whether, as a Christian, she had ever contemplated divorce. Barbara explained, "Her answer, was, 'Divorce? No. Murder? Yes.'" Added Barbara, "I could understand that."

Ruth brought to their union just the right skill set to manage a household as unusual as hers. She liked to tell their five children that "there comes a time to stop submitting and start outwitting" - a rule that applied to herself as well, such as when she tried to hide a broken arm from Billy because she didn't want him to know that she had gone hang gliding. She created the safe place, the sanctuary for her husband and children to guard them from the life of fame.

By the mid-1950s it was no longer possible to live in a house where tourists could walk up to the windows and peer in (the kids once tried charging a nickel to anyone wanting to take a picture.) So they bought 200 acres on top of a mountain in Montreat, and she proceeded to build their house out of the logs she had salvaged from old cabins and barns being torn down in the area. She furnished it with antiques and the treasures of their years of world travel, and it was in this home, in her warm room with its glowing fire, that she passed her last days.

On May 31, when three former presidents and thousands of friends came to pay tribute to her husband at the dedication of his Library in Charlotte, there was a chair up front reserved for her; but she could not make it, Billy explained sadly to the crowd, for she was now so frail, her spine degenerating, and her time was coming. "Ruth is my soul mate and best friend," Billy Graham said, "and I cannot imagine living a single day without her by my side."

Gibbs' and Duffy's book,The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House, will be published in August.

Source:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1633197,00.html

Brazilian super model answers colleague: abortion is never justified

Sao Paulo, Jun 21, 2007 / 11:28 am (CNA).- Brazilian super model Fernanda Tavares criticized the statements of her colleague and personal friend, Gisele Bundchen, who recently came out publicly in support of abortion and criticized the Catholic Church for its position on the right to life.

Tavares, who is not known to be very religious and is involved in an extramarital affair with Brazilian actor Murilo Rosa, said she was disgusted by her friend Gisele because of her statements in support of abortion, especially because of her comment that at four months practically nothing exists in the womb of the mother.

Tavares, who is expecting a child from her relationship with Rosa, told the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo, At one month the babys heartbeat can be heard. Its absurd for any woman, no matter how independent she is, to defend abortion, Tavares said. Were talking about another life, she added. She said she plans to marry Rosa in October after their baby is born.

Vatican reverses annulment decision of Kennedy-Rauch marriage

Boston, Jun 21, 2007 / 11:26 am (CNA).- In a decision that does not happen often, the Vatican has reversed the annulment of former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II's first marriage, which had lasted 12 years and produced two sons. The decision was announced on the Time magazine website.

Sheila Rauch had sharply criticized the Catholic Church for annulling her marriage to Kennedy. She alleged in a 1997 book that the Kennedy family's influence in the Church had made it possible. Rauch appealed the annulment to the Roman Rota.

Rauch and Kennedy, the eldest son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, were granted a civil divorce in 1991. She said she only learned about the annulment after Kennedy married his former congressional aide, Beth Kelly, in a civil ceremony two years later.

"The (original) annulment decision totally overlooked the fact that I felt that we had a very strong marriage in the beginning, we had two wonderful children, and it lasted," Rauch told The Associated Press. "I was certainly happy in the beginning. ... things unraveled, but that doesn't mean you didn't have a marriage."

Rauch was told of the decision to reverse the annulment by officials from the Boston Archdiocese in May, although the decision was actually reached in 2005.

Bai Macfarlane of Cleveland, Ohio, also has a case pending at the Roman Rota, in which she is seeking the intervention of the Vatican and challenging a US Catholic Tribunal's failure to uphold marriage.

In May 2004, Macfarlane had asked the Cleveland Tribunal for an investigation of her marriage hoping that the Church would advise her husband that he never had a licit reason to abandon her to seek a civil no-fault divorce.

The Cleveland diocese would not even accept her petition, so she appealed to Rome. In January 2005, the Roman Rota accepted her case, and on May 9, 2007 her advocate submitted a written argument on her behalf.

According to the Churchs Code of Canon Law, there are limited reasons to separate from one's spouse (can 1151-1155). Those who agree to marry following canon law can never seek a civil separation or divorce unless it is foreseen that the civil judgments would not be contrary to divine law (canon 1692).

These cases come at a time when some church officials believe that annulments are being granted too easily in the U.S.

He's fictional, of course, but if 325-million books about him have already been sold in 64 languages, then he's a 'notable'- albeit a questionable one.

Hacker claims Harry Potter's alleged ending on Web
By Jim Finkle

BOSTON (Reuters) - The mystery surrounding the end to fictional British boy wizard Harry Potter's saga deepened on Wednesday with a computer hacker posting what he said were key plot details and a publisher warned the details could be fake.

The hacker, who goes by the name "Gabriel," claims to have taken a digital copy of author J.K. Rowling's seventh and final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," by breaking into a computer at London-based Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

For months now, leading up to the book's July 21 release, legions of "Harry Potter" fans have debated whether Rowling killed Harry or one of his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, in the final book.

Gabriel has posted information at Web site InSecure.org that, if true, would answer that question.

"We make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring," Gabriel said in the posting.

"Harry Potter" publishers have taken great pains to keep the conclusion a secret and preserve the multibillion-dollar entertainment enterprise surrounding the boy wizard.

A Bloomsbury spokesman declined comment on the hacker's claims.

Kyle Good, a spokesman for U.S. distributor Scholastic Corp., would not say whether the posting was accurate, but did warn readers to be skeptical about anything on the Web that claims to have inside information on the book's plot.

"There is a whole lot of junk flying around," she said. "Consider this one more theory."

David Perry, a spokesman for computer security company Trend Micro, said there was a good chance Gabriel's claim could be a hoax.

"We've had hypes like this on the last couple of Harry Potter books," he said. "There is a very high level of spurious information in the hacker world."

But if true, it could be a problem for Bloomsbury. The "Harry Potter" books have been global best-sellers with fans buying some 320 million versions worldwide, and anticipation for "Deathly Hallows" is high.

In April, U.S. retailer Barnes & Noble said advance orders for the book had already topped 500,000 copies, setting a chain record. Scholastic plans to release a record 12 million copies of "Deathly Hallows" to meet demand.

A stolen copy of the sixth Harry Potter novel, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" surfaced in Britain about a month before its official release in July 2005. Two people were charged after reportedly trying to sell a copy to the London tabloid the Sun.

Four "Potter" movies made by Warner Bros. film studio, a division of Time Warner Inc., have brought in $3.5 billion in global ticket sales, and a fifth film is due in theaters in early July.

(Additional reporting by Bob Tourtellotte in Los Angeles and Kate Holton in London.)

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AND THE HACKER SAYS HE DID IT FOR POPE BENEDICT!

So who dies? The Corriere della Sera article from which I first learned this - courtesy of Lella's blog - does give Gabriel's answer if you click on a link... I'll give a clue - their names both start with H...

Better yet, the Corriere item gives us Gabriel's motivation for wanting to 'spoil' the surprise. Here's a translation:

"I did it in accordance with the precious words spoken by our great Pope Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, when he expressed apprehension that Harry Potter would drive kids to neo-paganism."

Somewhere, I translated the text of the brief, rather general letter the Cardinal wrote to a German lady who wrote a book against the Potter series, so I'll come back and re-post it when I find it, just so we have the context straight.

Is the series anti-Christian or amoral? don't think so, personally (of course, I am an unabashed fan of the series, even at my age, simply because it's very good story-telling).

It's basically a drama of good vs. evil, where good is obviously favored by the author. But Christian children reading it do need to be debriefed and sustained by their parents as to WHO enables good (why is Harry the witchboy inherently good, whereas his fully human relatives are - not evil, really - but as mean and selfish as human beings can be?), and who is responsible for evil (the killing, the power games, who gets control of whom, etc).

The Satan figures in the series are quite strikingly unmistakeable, but unfortunately, the idea of God does not seem to come into it at all - other than the physical appearance of Dumbledore (kindly paternal face, flowing white hair) who looks like stereotype images of God the Father!

"So who dies? The Corriere della Sera article from which I first learned this - courtesy of Lella's blog - does give Gabriel's answer if you click on a link... I'll give a clue - their names both start with H... "


NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

benefan, 21/06/2007 22:06:

---

"So who dies? The Corriere della Sera article from which I first learned this - courtesy of Lella's blog - does give Gabriel's answer if you click on a link... I'll give a clue - their names both start with H... "

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

---

Haha...I can tell you're taking it hard. Well we know its not Snape. Emm...does this hacker mind telling us whether Snape is working for evil or good?

I would agree with your short analysis Teresa of Dumbledore. He is portrayed as knowing quite alot of things which the other characters have no idea of. I'm not sure I'd describe him as all knowing but possibly pretty close. A couple of my friends were talking about a priest that they knew who could come to you and know quite well what was wrong with you without you telling him and counsel you. It was so funny because the lady telling us the story was saying that her kids would be like "Don't let him touch you, otherwise he'll know everything. He's like Dumbledore!" Ironically when she went to confession, guess who she ended up confessing to?

By Stephen Singer
June 23rd, 2007

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.

"Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.

"Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us," the Illinois senator said.

"At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design," according to an advance copy of his speech.

"There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich," Obama said. "I don't know what Bible they're reading, but it doesn't jibe with my version."

A call to the Washington, D.C.-based Christian Coalition of America seeking comment was not immediately returned Saturday.

Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, a church of about 1.2 million members that is considered one the most liberal of the mainline Protestant groups.

In 1972, the church was the first to ordain an openly gay man. Two years ago, the church endorsed same-sex marriage, the largest Christian denomination to do so. Obama believes that states should decide whether to allow gay marriage, and he opposes a constitutional amendment against it.

Conservative Christian bloggers have linked Obama to what they call the "unbiblical" teachings of his church. Theological conservatives believe gay relationships violate Scripture, while more liberal Christians emphasize the Bible's social justice teachings.

Obama trails Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York by 33 percent to 21 percent in the most recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll among Democrats and those leaning toward the party.

Source:http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=070623&cat=news&st=newsd8puopq80&src=ap

Pope: Miracles hard to come by in Britain

From JASON LEWIS and NICK PISA in Rome
Last updated at 23:27pm on 23rd June 2007
The Daily Mail

Tony Blair's eagerly awaited meeting with the Pope resulted in discomfort for the Prime Minister when he found himself on the receiving end of a stern lecture over his record in office.

During a 25-minute face-to-face audience in the Pontiff's private apartments, Pope Benedict XVI tackled Mr Blair on the continuing crisis in Iraq and the Middle East.

Italian news agency reports said Pope Benedict also made direct criticism of New Labour laws allowing greater stem cell research on human embryos, easy access to abortion, same-sex marriages, and adoption by gay couples.

Downing Street officials said the issue of gay adoption arose between Mr Blair and senior Vatican figures, not the Pope. But it was nevertheless an unexpected turn of events for Mr Blair, whose visit to the Vatican - his final foreign engagement as Premier - had been widely believed to presage his conversion to Catholicism.

Friction even seemed to emerge as the Pope and Prime Minister appeared in public for the cameras. Mr Blair, joined by his wife Cherie, presented Benedict with a framed set of three antique pictures of Cardinal Newman, who converted in 1845 after more than 20 years in the Church of England clergy and is now a candidate for sainthood.

Mrs Blair said: "I believe you are very familiar with him and he is on the journey to sainthood."

To which the Pope responded: "Yes, yes, although it is taking some time - miracles are hard to come by in Britain."

The gift was seen as a highly significant indication of Mr Blair's wish to convert to the Catholic faith.

After the meeting, the Pope's office issued a strongly worded statement, saying the two men had a 'frank discussion on the international situation, in particular the delicate question of the Middle East conflict'.

The actual wording of the communique contained the Italian phrase 'franco confronto', literally translated as 'frank confrontation' - inflammatory language seen as highly unusual in Rome.

The statement continued: "At the end, after an exchange of opinions on several laws recently passed by Parliament in Britain, he wished the Honourable Anthony Blair best wishes with regard to the fact he is leaving his position as Prime Minister."

It then commended Mr Blair's 'vivid desire to involve himself in particular for peace in the Middle East and for inter-religious dialogue'.

But the statement was seen as indicating the Vatican's continuing unease with the Iraq conflict, and also recent domestic legislation in Britain. In the language of diplomatic communiquÇs, 'frank discussion' is customarily seen as code for an argument.

The statement was all the more surprising because the Vatican always uses carefully controlled language.

Previously, meetings with world leaders including President Bush have been described as 'warm and cordial', despite the Vatican's opposition to many of his policies and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Downing Street later talked in terms of a 'successful meeting'. A spokesman confirmed: "Private discussions included the Middle East."

A senior Catholic source emphasised the importance of the meeting to Mr Blair, and pointed to the symbolism of the Prime Minister's choice of gift.

One senior Catholic Church source said: "We are not talking about gifts of a walking stick and box of chocolates - this is a highly significant present to give the Holy Father.

"This audience was always going to be a very significant one with a lot of emphasis on the personal aspect and this gift of photographs of Cardinal Newman is a clear indication of the Prime Minister's path to conversion. It could not be more clearly spelt out."

Yesterday's audience in the library of the papal apartments was the third meeting between Pope Benedict and Mr Blair. They first met in 2005 at the funeral of Pope John Paul II and they then met last June.

For the latest visit, Mr Blair was accompanied by Cherie - their daughter Kathryn was also part of the official entourage but did not attend the audience.

Mr Blair flew to Rome straight from Brussels and landed just after 9.30am yesterday at Ciampino airport. He was then driven to Vatican City, where he met Cherie.

The official entourage also included Britain's ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Campbell, and Lady Carla Powell, who is the sister-in-law of Mr Blair's chief- of-staff Jonathan.

She has hosted the Blairs - and Tory Party leader David Cameron - at her country home on the outskirts of Rome. Cherie had spent the night there after arriving late on Friday.

The entourage also included French billionaire businessman Bernard Arnault, who is chief of luxury-goods firm LVMH and a friend of the Blairs.

Significantly, the party in addition included the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O"Connor.

At the end of Mr Blair's audience with the Pope, Cardinal Murphy O"Connor was invited in and the three had a ten-minute discussion.

Father Georg Ganswein, the Pope's personal secretary, said they had a 'meeting of six eyes' - a significant Italian phrase which means deeply personal and private.

A senior Vatican source added: "The fact that Cardinal Cormac was invited in at the end is highly unusual.

"It is not customary at all for church figures from the invited party's home nation to be present at an audience."

Again this was seen as a sign that Mr Blair was looking for the Catholic Church's approval of his future path - which, as well as conversion, includes setting up an interfaith religious foundation.

Mr Blair hopes that this will play a role in brokering peace in the crisis-torn Middle East.

Although the official communiquÇ made no mention of Mr Blair's conversion, Italian news reports said it had been discussed.

A Vatican source told The Mail on Sunday last night: "I am not going to comment on conversion but you can see for yourself from the signs and the gift."

Four years ago when Mr Blair met Pope John Paul II just before the outbreak of the war in Iraq, he was given a stern ticking-off by the late Polish pontiff.


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

I think the Daily Mail may have an axe to grind against Blair. It just goes against common sense that the Pope, who is no fool, would give Blair, who is leaving office next week, a stern dressing-down about Iraq, if he didn't do that with Bush who is still going to be chiefly responsible for Iraq over the next 18 months, and who was the lead man for the Iraq invasion.

As far as the Iraq issue goes, quite apart from advocating the plight of Iraqui Christians, the Pope would certainly appreciate getting answers or even privileged information from the two leaders who should know best what is happening there insofar as the coalition forces are concerned and the internal dynamics among the Iraqi factions - information he is unlikely to get from any sources better informed.

In the case of Blair personally, anyone who watched the video of him interacting with the Pope after the closed-door meeting would see that he appeared to be as relaxed and widely smiling as he was before the meeting. And so was Benedict. Also, that the Pope 'favored' Blair with the seat by the side of the desk during their tete-a-tete as opposed to the across-the-table place for most other guests, including Bush.

I have the strongest reservations about the Blairs' (husband and wife) lack of 'consistency' with the Catholic magisterium on many bioethical matters, including abortion and the use of condoms - which is why I did not think Blair would be so brazen as to use his last meeting with the Pope as PM as an opportunity to announce his conversion! He would know he has a lot to answer for first to his confessor and to God before the Church can take him in, because his anti-Magisterium actions were so very public, even if he was not Catholic at the time he made them. He may have been referring to that in his statements to the Times of London about many 'unresolved matters.'

I am more intrigued by the presence of Cardinal Murphy O'Connor at the audience, considering he just wrote the Pope in behalf of the bishops of England and Wales that they think he is wrong about liberalizing the Latin Mass.

TERESA

Politics, Communion, Catholic teaching: A tale of two politicians


By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- When Tony Blair came to the Vatican to meet Pope Benedict XVI in June, there was excited speculation that the outgoing British prime minister might be preparing to become a Catholic.

Across the ocean, meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lifelong Catholic, was taking heat from some church leaders for his stand on abortion. Abortion is wrong, Giuliani has said, but the government shouldn't be enforcing that moral decision on women.

Blair has similar views on abortion, saying that as much as he may "dislike the idea of abortion" it should be kept legal. Like Giuliani, Blair has said women who choose abortion should not be criminalized.

The position of both men is not in line with the church's teaching on the sanctity of human life. But to some observers, it seemed like the church was putting out the welcome mat for the potential convert and preparing a penitent's robe for the Catholic.

"It may seem like a double standard, but in fact it's a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, Blair is leaving office," said one church source close to the Vatican.

Other Vatican officials, who spoke off the record, agreed that because Blair stepped down from public office June 27 -- apparently for good -- his political position on abortion is not really an obstacle to joining the church. The important thing is that he accept the church's pro-life teachings in his own conscience, they said.

"Becoming a Catholic is not a la carte. One would presume that there is a willingness to accept the teaching of the church on all aspects of life, including abortion," said one official.

Some believe that given Blair's previous statements about keeping abortion legal, he would need to make clear in a public way that he now agrees with the church's teaching on the issue before joining the church.

But others said the act of becoming a Catholic would itself constitute a clear sign of acceptance of church teachings, and good faith would be presumed unless it were contradicted by some subsequent public action.

Church experts said there is no checklist of church teachings that need to be acknowledged by those seeking to join the Catholic Church. For baptized Christians like Blair, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults recommends a program of religious instruction tailored to the individual's needs, carried out by a local priest, deacon or catechist.

Despite the growing speculation in the British press about Blair's religious intentions, there was no indication from the Vatican that the question of becoming a Catholic was discussed in his private meeting with the pope.

Several Vatican sources said they expect Blair to take the step sometime in the near future, but they said they hoped it would be treated as a private matter.

"This is not the kind of thing like at Canossa, where an emperor was made to walk barefoot in the snow," said one source. He referred to the famous case of the Emperor Henry IV, who did public penance in the Italian city of Canossa in 1077 before his excommunication was lifted by Pope Gregory VII.

Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, is leading among Republican presidential candidates in national polls. In late May, Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence, R.I., sharply criticized Giuliani for saying he is "personally opposed" to abortion but would not impose that view on others.

Bishop Tobin said Giuliani's public proclamations on abortion were "pathetic and confusing" and represented a "defection from the Catholic faith on this moral issue."

Although Bishop Tobin is not Giuliani's bishop, his comments have echoed loudly in recent coverage of the emerging presidential campaign. They have also reached the Vatican, which in recent years has underlined the responsibility of Catholic politicians on abortion and other life issues.

In May, Pope Benedict, speaking about recent legislation in Mexico, indicated that Catholic lawmakers who vote to legalize abortion could even face excommunication.

Even when abortion is not up for a legislative vote, many church officials believe the church has no choice but to address the "scandal" of a Catholic candidate who espouses the right to abortion.

But others are reluctant to see a repeat of 2004, when Communion became a political football. During that presidential campaign, a handful of bishops said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a Catholic, should be refused Communion because of his support of legal abortion.

The Communion issue seems unlikely to present itself in Giuliani's case. He is said to refrain from taking Communion because he is married for the third time, and his second marriage was never annulled by the church.

Blair launches stinging attack
on 'absurd' British Islamists
By Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday July 1, 2007
The Observer


Tony Blair has launched a powerful attack on 'absurd' British Islamists who have nurtured a false 'sense of grievance' that they are being oppressed by Britain and the United States.
In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.

Blair's remarks, in which he also attacks some civil liberty campaigners as 'loopy loo', were made in a Channel 4 documentary recorded last Tuesday on the eve of his departure from Downing Street.

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.

'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'

Blair held out the example of the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan - criticised by Islamists as an example of the heavy-handed imperial West oppressing Muslims - to highlight unfounded claims of grievance. He asked how it is possible to claim that Afghanistan's Muslims are being oppressed when the Taliban 'used to execute teachers for teaching girls in schools'.

Blair added: 'How are [we] oppressing them? You're oppressing them when you support the people who are trying to blow them up.'

Blair, who normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists, also takes a swipe at critics who accused him of undermining civil liberties. 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.'

· The Last Days of Tony Blair will be shown on Channel Four at 8pm, July 2.

[But what an unfortunate title! One would think the Channel 4 producers should know English enough to be aware of the macabre connotation of the phrase they chose to call the documentary!]

This article is more about Christopher Hitchens than his book.


This Book Is Not Good

God Is Not Great | How Religion Poisons Everything
Christopher Hitchens $24.99, 294 pp. |

Reviewed by Eugene McCarraher
Commonweal Magazine
June 15, 2007

Christopher Hitchens used to be a courageous and electrifying writer. An heir to the mantle worn by Thomas Paine, William Hazlitt, William Cobbett, and George Orwell, he aimed his keen and pugnacious intelligence at all things false: from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa, from the Clintons to the Taliban, no idol du jour was left unscathed by his rigorous and undaunted mind.

His columns in the Nation during the first stage of the Iraq War (1990-91) are masterpieces of political analysis and moral commentary. With effortless versatility, Hitchens pronounced on literature and art as well as politics, and his judgments provided an invaluable education in sensibility. A socialist in the age of capitalist triumphalism, he embodied the finest of that sometimes ridiculous breed, the intellectual engagé.

That was then. After 9/11, in a celebrated volte-face, Hitchens loudly ambled rightward, resigning from the Nation and burning his bridges to the Left. Detecting intellectual and moral timidity in the anguished ambivalence of his liberal friends and allies, he promoted the Bush administrations war on terror, blustered tirelessly for the invasion of Iraq, and impugned the integrity of anyone who doubted the wisdom of the cause. Writing for Vanity Fair and appearing frequently on television, Hitchens joined the Beltway commentariat and plunged into that orgy of self-aggrandizement known as punditry. As the TV appearances multiplied, the level of vitriol in his manner rose, cementing his image as a virtuoso and all-but-unvanquishable contrarian.

But as Mark Twain once mused, give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep until noon. With God Is Not Great, a caustic polemic on the evils of religion, Hitchens has earned the dubious honor of confirming Twains aphorism. Anyone expecting a masterful demolition of all things sacred will be disappointed. Bullying and shallow, God Is Not Great is a haute middlebrow tirade, a stale venting of outrage and ridicule. Beneath his Oxbridge talent at draping glibness in the raiment of erudition, Hitchens proves to be an amateur in philosophy, an illiterate in theology, and a dishonest student of history. Too belligerent to be nimble and too parochial to be generous, the once-captivating Hitchens demonstrates why he has forfeited any claim on our attention.

Yet theres more at stake here than one mans career in bloviation. As part of the recent surge in books by atheists, God Is Not Great marks the gentrification of unbelief, a tony nihilism embraced by bourgeois bohemians. Though Islamo-Fascism makes a convenient target for books such as this, it is in fact religion itself, in its capacity as an intractable impediment to the juggernaut of capitalist modernity, that must be quarantined or destroyed. God Is Not Great exemplifies the connections among the new atheism, the privatization of religion, the idolatry of the nation-state, and the sacrificial violence of imperialism.

Calling for a new Enlightenment, Hitchens tries to summon the grand tradition of modern unbelief. Man will not be free, Diderot proclaimed, until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Religion! Shelley thundered in Queen Mab. Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, / And heaven with slaves! / Thou taintest all thou lookest upon. God is dead, Nietzsches Zarathustra announced, and we have killed Him. From such grandiloquent impieties rose the vision and promise of secular modernity: humanity, brave in the face of a godless universe, disenchanted of supernal hopes and terrors, firmly committed to reason as the arbiter of truth, desire, and goodness.

Henri de Lubac once named this era the drama of atheist humanism, but even Nietzsche suspected that it might be prefiguring an endless middle-class farce. Animated by the bourgeois-utopian prospect of comfort and longevity, science and technology would, Nietzche feared, enable a new character ideal: the Last Man. Disdainful of all that has gone before them, the Last Men mistake their cynicism for knowledge and wisdom. They are clever and know all that has happened, so there is no end to their derision. With all great causes defeated or reviled, they endow the banality of their private lives with the meaning theyve withdrawn from larger concerns, indulging their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night.

Consider the relevance of this prediction today, when popular culture abounds with playboy philosophers like HBOs Bill Maher, opining on the stupidity of religious faith, or loutish retreads like Roseanne Barr, yelling that religion fucking blows! (Im guessing thats her translation of écrasez linfâme.) Writers, meanwhile, hawk unabashed atheism to niche audiences in the briskly humming market of irreligion-Daniel Dennett or Peter Singer to academic readers, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to the masses.

The new militancy of secularism stems from some obvious sources: Islamic radicalism abroad and conservative evangelicalism at home, along with religious interventions in debates about abortion, gay marriage, intelligent design, and global warming. But the boom in unbelief has other bases. Todays atheism pays extravagant homage to idols dear to the professional and managerial ranks. Science as truth; the technological mastery of nature; credentialed expertise as the only credible form of learning; efficiency and profit as the sole ends of economic and political life: these shibboleths comprise the mental universe of the Western middle classes. Colored by an incoherent blend of Darwinism and environmentalism, a bland infatuation with science and technology is the bourgeois halo around instrumental reason, and nothing in the new secularism of Dawkins, Harris et al. serves to exorcise that enchantment. While Hitchens likes to bask in the grand tradition of atheism (he throws out allusions to every great skeptic from Lucretius to Bertrand Russell), his ill-tempered tract rarely ventures outside the boundaries of the suburban moral imagination, even as it manages to flatter a corporate executives every conceit.

For Hitchens, all you really need to know about religion is its historical malignancy. God Is Not Great, echoing Shelleys charge that religion taintest everything, recounts its poisonous effects on human affairs. Slavery, genocide, misogyny, racism, complicity in tyranny: it is, in truth, a hefty record of iniquity and shame, and Christians will always need-and I daresay deserve-these painful lessons in humility. But Hitchens turns the ethical lapses of religion into a silly fallacy. If, as he asserts, an ethical life can be lived without religion-a point which, to my knowledge, no major theologian has ever denied-Hitchens would also have us believe that unethical lives must be lived with religion.

Then again, this is a writer who understands religion only as a mélange of prohibition and superstition, plus an incitement to violence, and so large parts of the story get erased. Hitchenss claim that the God of Moses never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all is preposterous, given the Torahs injunctions about forgiveness of debts, redistribution of land, or openness to strangers, or the prophets exhortations to mercy, justice, and beating swords into ploughshares. He rightly contends that the crimes of Nazism and Communism do not mitigate the felonies of religion; indeed, he writes, one might hope that religion had retained more sense of its dignity than that. True, but that sense of dignity is inseparable from standards by which the religious can identify and condemn atrocities done in their name-standards that fascists and Stalinists never recognized, let alone applied. Doctrines of racial purity lead inexorably to repression, ethnic cleansing, or genocide; acceptance of historical necessity inevitably sanctions the necessary murder, as Auden later regretted putting it. There is nothing even remotely comparable in these secular ideologies to the command to love ones enemies. Those Christians down the ages who tried to prevent the crimes of their horrifically errant brethren did so because they believed-often at the cost of their lives or fortunes-that the human person was the imago Dei, a conviction they derived from Christian theology.

But Hitchens, like the choir to whom this book is directed, is uninformed about theology and much else in the Christian intellectual tradition. He does try to convince us that hes serious about religion. Holding up Philip Larkins elegiac Church-going as the summary of his perspective, he savors its melancholy portrayal of religion as a realm where all our compulsions meet, / Are recognized, and robed as destinies. He and his fellow unbelievers, Hitchens assures us, feel the lure of wonder and mystery and awe. And besides, some of his best friends are religious.

Im sure this act plays to rave reviews in the Beltway and Manhattan, but Hitchens is just too acidulous and unfair to pull it off here. One wonders what kind of intellect his religious friends possess if they cant counter his mocking and condescending charge that religion belongs to the childhood or prehistory of the species? Has Hitchens never read or sparred with, say, Garry Wills? In a Salon tribute to the late Senator Eugene McCarthy-the last intellectual in American politics-Hitchens recalled that he and Clean Gene had had highly enjoyable discussions of the more recondite aspects of church teaching. Why didnt they merit a page or two here?

Perhaps Hitchens needed the space to show how much he knows about science and its history. Jeering that religion comes from a time when nobody... had the smallest idea what was going on, he trades on the moldiest caricatures of medieval ignorance, pandering to the facile scientism rampant among the middle classes. Youd never guess that scholastic obsessives such as Robert Grosseteste or Roger Bacon were crucial to the construction of modern scientific methodology, or that the work of Gregor Mendel-an Augustinian priest-was the wellspring of modern genetics.

When it comes to the scientific present, Hitchens proves equally adept at obfuscation. He proclaims ad nauseam the latest discoveries in genetics and paleontology, as though religious believers had never heard of them. He marvels at the exploration of the human genome, but neglects to add that the director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, is an evangelical Protestant. And we get the obligatory arguments against intelligent design-arguments that have not only been supported, but in many cases crafted, by religious scientists such as Collins, Kenneth Miller, and John Polkinghorne.

This willful inattention to the harmonious relationships between religion and modern science stems, I suspect, from Hitchenss embrace of the objectivist delusions of middlebrow scientific mythology. Science, in this view, is the realm of verified facts, testable hypotheses, and reproducible experiments, hermetically protected from the corrupting vagaries of culture, politics, and ideology. Looking to science as our savior is not entirely pernicious: Hitchens rightly points out, for instance, the central role played by evolutionary genetics in dispelling the phantom of race. But youd also never suspect-and you wont learn here-that evolutionary science itself has been infected with ideological poison. Take, for example, Darwins explicit debt to Thomas Malthus, whose skinflint heresies about food and population were historical germs for laissez-faire and Social Darwinism. Hitchens might also want to re-read The Descent of Man, wherein Darwin clearly ranks races (like the Aryan and the Asiatic) in terms of their proximity to the apes. Indeed, the racist and Malthusian elements in Darwins work are subjects on which the new secularists are either silent, delicate, or mendacious. (See The Gentle Darwinians by Peter Quinn, Commonweal, March 9, 2007.)

Hitchenss command of philosophy is as dubious as his account of science. All too often his pose of encyclopedic learning rests on name-dropping and straw men. Philosophy in God Is Not Great is whatever is polemically useful against religion. So Democritus and Epicurus get cameo roles, while Spinoza becomes an atheist manqué. Those philosophers who did or do believe in a God-which is to say, most of the Western philosophical tradition-get nary a mention. Theres a host of Christian philosophers absent from these pages: Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Anscombe, Charles Taylor, and Alvin Plantinga, to name just a few whose work Hitchens might want to read. But this is a writer who boasts that I now know enough about all religions to know that I would be an infidel at all times and in all places.

As for straw-man argument, a single example suffices to reveal Hitchenss petulant mediocrity in philosophy. The notion of a creator, he observes, raises the unanswerable question of who...created the creator-an objection that theologians have consistently failed to overcome. Really? Any decent freshman survey could have informed Hitchens that, as Aquinas and many others have patiently explained, God is not an entity and thus is not ensnared in any serial account of causality. Not a thing himself, God is rather the condition of there being anything at all. Thus, creation is not a gargantuan act of handicraft but rather the condition of there being something rather than nothing. Creation didnt happen long ago; its right now, and forever. (This is why creationism is bad science-because its bad theology.)

Wittgenstein came to much the same conclusion. In the Philosophical Investigations, he disposed of Hitchenss allegedly insuperable objection. Just because you can always build another house in the village, Wittgenstein noted, does not change the fact that there is a last house right now. Explanations must end somewhere, as he famously conceded: I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Its no real irony, then, that the godfather of linguistic analysis could respect and share the wonder of mysticism. Not how the world is, is the mystical, he wrote in the Tractatus, but that it is.

Weak in philosophy, Hitchens is also unschooled in theology and biblical criticism. Apart from a few sentences on Pierre Bayle and Bart Ehrman, theres not a single reference in God Is Not Great to anything in the voluminous and magnificent lineage of biblical scholarship. Relying on one of the dumbest canards in the history of the discipline, Hitchens alludes to the highly questionable existence of Jesus. Maybe this passes for iconoclasm with, say, the comedians Penn and Teller-models, for Hitchens, of life and wit and inquiry-but as history it is less than sophomoric.

On theological issues, Hitchens is even more at sea. What does he think, or know, of debates about voluntarist conceptions of God, or participatory accounts of our relation with divinity? (I keep forgetting-he knows enough already.) Augustine, he scowls, was a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus who believed that the world was less than six thousand years old-assertions belied by The City of God, and by The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, where the bishop of Hippo reproached some of the more boneheaded brethren for such literalism. Aquinas, meanwhile, exhibits an impressive faith which stood up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason. Has Hitchens actually opened the Summa Theologiae, or the Summa contra Gentiles? These are monuments of rational inquiry, and not, as he suggests, fearful evasive maneuvers.

Modern and contemporary theology suffer no less in Hitchenss maladroit paws. John Henry Newman was a mighty scholar. Karl Barth goes unmentioned, while Dietrich Bonhoeffer is dragooned into service for an admirable but nebulous humanism-which is, to put it charitably, certainly one way to read The Cost of Discipleship or Sanctorum Communio. But then what should we expect from someone who brays that religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago, and who shows no evidence of having cracked a single volume of contemporary theology?

Cravenly, Hitchens tries to grab a prophetic patina from the Jewish and Christian traditions while discarding the theological foundations. Thats one of the oldest ruses in the secularist playbook, and nothing better illustrates its brazen fraudulence than Hitchenss remarks about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Though he professes to be inspired by King and the civil rights movement-the moral tutors of America and of the world beyond its shores-Hitchens doesnt comprehend the first thing about that brave community. In utter seriousness he writes that Kings refusal to summon hellfire on his enemies makes him a nominal Christian. Because he didnt act like a raving crackpot, King becomes, in Hitchenss rendering, a closet or unwitting secularist. What a disgraceful distortion of the historical record it is for Hitchens to excise Kings nettlesome theology in order to admit him to our pantheon of political heroes! One imagines Hitchens whispering behind King at the Lincoln Memorial: Youre free at last, free at last. Just dont thank God Almighty.

All Hitchens claims to ask of his deluded religious friends is that they leave me alone. But for a public intellectual, what this innocent-seeming wish really implies is the privatization of religion, its eradication as a form of public discourse. Like the New York intellectuals of yesteryear, Hitchens turns to high culture as the new symposium of moral tutelage-and specifically to literature. Well within the compass of the average person, the study of literature and poetry, he proposes, should now depose the scrutiny of sacred texts as the basis of ethical reflection. Of course, the arts and letters have long been modernitys citadel for paradise, a safehouse for idiosyncrasy, brotherly love, transcendence, and other utopian ideals battered by the power of the state and the market. Reminiscent of the democratic humanism espoused by his late friend Edward W. Said, Hitchenss expansive vision of cultural democracy should appeal to anyone serious about the moral imagination. But his insistence that we uncouple high culture from the sacred has its own insuperable problems. Aside from assigning a covert clerical status to writers and literary critics-the divine literatus, as Whitman put it-supplant¬ing sacred texts with literature would require the bowdlerization of at least nine-tenths of our literary canon. Our high culture simply owes too much to religion, Christian or otherwise, for anyone to suggest intelligibly that the two should be separated.

In any case, what we get from Hitchens in the end isnt culture but a gooey compound of boosterish bromides and liberal nationalism. Like so many disappointed radicals, Hitchens has elsewhere declared capitalism the only remaining revolutionary force, and for all his bad-boy press, he is a stalwart guardian of the bourgeois virtues, harrumphing like a sullen Rotarian at Christs injunction to take no thought for the morrow. Such gospel nonsense, Hitchens tells us, implies that things like thrift, innovation, family life, and so forth are a sheer waste of time. This former Trotskyite turns out to be a metropolitan burgher at heart, as well as a technological visionary, rhapsodizing over undreamed-of vistas, unfettered scientific inquiry, and the accessibility of scientific knowledge to masses of people by easy electronic means-all of which will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Its a Brave New World, brought to you by Merck. Cue the studio orchestra.

Hidden inside the inflated prose of Hitchenss PR flackery is a conceit common among the educated classes: namely, that the demise of religion would usher in a new age of fearless, democratic cerebration in which each of us would think on ones own. Hitchenss paean celebrates a secular moral imagination sketched in terms of professional and managerial expertise. Defining the good life for us all in word and image, the business and technical intelligentsia comprise a cultural elite, a rival clerisy whose rhetoric of Science, Progress, and Enlightenment can mystify as effectively as did the bell, book, and candle of the priesthood. In particular, our modern notion of Progress has the most beguiling account of an eschatology that never ends.

Hitchens insists that he and his secular allies do not require any priests, or hierarchy above them, that they need no machinery of reinforcement, and that sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us. In case he hasnt noticed, the corporate elite has constructed the hierarchy, along with a machinery of reinforcement it shares with the nation-state. And Hitchenss uplifting predictions about the God-less future are most savagely belied by the catastrophe in Iraq, where the bogus distinction between religious and secular violence can be seen in all its ideological duplicity. While pointing to the sanguinary unreason of fundamentalists, the wars advocates have offered up the lives of thousands in sacrifice to a future of Market and Democracy. An Iraqi killed by a U.S. Marine is just as dead as if she were dispatched by a jihadist. Both Hitchens and the jihadist would contend that her death is part of a larger struggle between the forces of light and darkness. To a Christian, shes a victim of libido dominandi, whatever the discursive camouflage; to Hitchens, shes the collateral damage of enlightenment.

So enough about the sweetness and light that await us when the gods are finally dead. The war in Iraq, like the history of the twentieth century, demonstrates that secular values provide no inoculation against credulity, madness, and butchery. Conferring a sacral aura on the market and the nation-state, secularism is a parody of religion, and its acolytes can no longer lay claim to the patent on reason and enlightenment. Blinded by the radiance of imperial righteousness, and willing to bless carnage in the most dubious of crusades, Hitchens no longer merits our attention or respect, especially on matters regarding the good life and the just city. If you doubt me, read this book.

Sorry for this belated post. I feel I owe it to her. She has given me countless hours of pleasure since I was a teenager. I last listened to a CD of her coloratura arias about 6 weeks ago. I had no idea... This was the New York Times obituary on her on July 3.



Beverly Sills in 2002, after coming out of retirement as chairwoman of Lincoln Center to lead the Metropolitan Opera.

BEVERLY SILLS: ALL-AMERICAN DIVA
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: July 3, 2007

Beverly Sills, the acclaimed Brooklyn-born coloratura soprano who was more popular with the American public than any opera singer since Enrico Caruso, even among people who never set foot in an opera house, died last night at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

The cause was inoperable lung cancer, said her personal manager, Edgar Vincent.

Ms. Sills was Americas idea of a prima donna. Her plain-spoken manner and telegenic vitality made her a genuine celebrity and an invaluable advocate for the fine arts. Her life embodied an archetypal American story of humble origins, years of struggle, family tragedy and artistic triumph.

During her day, American opera singers routinely went overseas for training and professional opportunities. But Ms. Sills was a product of her native country and did not even perform in Europe until she was 36.

At a time when opera singers regularly appeared as guests on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Ms. Sills was the only opera star who was invited to be guest host. She made frequent television appearances with Carol Burnett, Danny Kaye and even the Muppets.

Indeed, while she was still singing, and before her 10-year tenure as general director of the New York City Opera, Ms. Sills for nearly two years was host of her own weekly talk show on network television. After leaving her City Opera post, she continued an influential career as an arts administrator, becoming the chairwoman first of Lincoln Center and then of the Metropolitan Opera.

During her performing career, with her combination of brilliant singing, ebullience and self-deprecating humor, Ms. Sills demystified opera  and the fine arts in general  in a way that a general public audience responded to. Asked about the ecstatic reception she received when she made a belated debut at La Scala in Milan in 1969, Ms. Sills told the press, Its probably because Italians like big women, big bosoms and big backsides.

Along with Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland, she was an acknowledged exponent of the bel canto Italian repertory during the period of its post-World War II revival. Though she essentially had a light soprano voice, her sound was robust and enveloping. In her prime her technique was exemplary. She could dispatch coloratura roulades and embellishments, capped by radiant high Ds and E-flats, with seemingly effortless agility. She sang with scrupulous musicianship, rhythmic incisiveness and a vivid sense of text.

Moreover, she brought unerring acting instincts to her portrayals of tragic leading roles in Donizettis Lucia di Lammermoor and Anna Bolena, Bellinis Puritani, Massenets Manon and many other operas in her large repertory. And few singers matched her deadpan comic timing and physical nimbleness in lighter roles like Rosina in Rossinis Barbiere di Siviglia, whom Ms. Sills portrayed as a ditsy yet determined young woman, and Marie, the tomboylike heroine raised by a military regiment in Donizettis Fille du Régiment.

In 1955 Ms. Sills joined the New York City Opera, which then performed in the City Center building on West 55th Street. Her loyal commitment to what at the time was an enterprising but second-tier company may have prevented her from achieving wider success earlier in her career. By the time Ms. Sills finally captured international attention, her voice had started to decline.

As early as 1970, reviews of her work were mixed. Harold C. Schonberg, then the chief music critic of The New York Times, fretted in his columns about Ms. Sillss inconsistency. Yet reviewing her as Donizettis Lucia at the City Opera in early 1970, Mr. Schonberg wrote: The amazing thing about her Lucia is not so much the way she sings it, though that has moments of incandescent beauty, but the way she manages to make a living, breathing creature of the unhappy girl. He added that Ms. Sills delivered by far the most believable mad scene I have ever seen in any opera house.

That fall Mr. Schonbergs quite negative review of Ms. Sillss singing as Queen Elizabeth I in Donizettis Roberto Devereux was strongly countered by other critics, notably Alan Rich in New York magazine. Mr. Rich reported that he had left the performance in a state of euphoria bordering on hysteria. A magnificent opera, he added, had been rescued from oblivion and accorded superb treatment. It was an extraordinary accomplishment for Ms. Sills, he felt.

For the rest of her singing career, Ms. Sills elicited divergent reactions from critics. But the public, by and large, adored her. Though most of her fans knew that her struggle to the top had been long and tough, few realized just how long and how tough.

An Early Start

Beverly Sills was born Belle Silverman on May 25, 1929, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Her father, Morris, was an insurance broker whose family had emigrated from Bucharest, Romania. Her mother, Shirley, was born Sonia Markovna in the Russian city of Odessa. Ms. Sills was nicknamed Bubbles at birth because, her mother said, she emerged from the womb with bubbles in her mouth, and the name stuck.

Because Morris Silverman worked on commission, the familys income fluctuated wildly, and they moved often. The first apartment Ms. Sills recalled living in was a one-bedroom flat where she shared the bedroom with her parents while her older brothers, Sidney and Stanley, slept on a Hide-a-Bed in the foyer.

Shirley Silverman was an unabashed stage mother who thought her talented little girl with the golden curls could become a Jewish Shirley Temple. So with the stage name Bubbles, Ms. Sills was pushed into radio work. At 4 she made her debut on a Saturday morning childrens show called Uncle Bobs Rainbow House, quickly becoming a weekly fixture on the show. At 7 she graduated to the Major Bowes Capital Family Hour, on which she tap-danced and sang coloratura arias that she had learned phonetically from her mothers Amelita Galli-Curci records. She won a role on a radio soap opera, Our Gal Sunday, where for 36 episodes she portrayed a nightingirl of the mountains.

But her father put an end to her child-star career when she was 12 so that she could concentrate on her education at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and the Professional Childrens School in Manhattan. She devoted herself to her voice lessons with Estelle Liebling, which had begun when Ms. Sills was just 9. Liebling had coached Galli-Curci and was Ms. Sillss only vocal teacher.

When Ms. Sills graduated from the professional school in 1945, at 16, she began 10 years of grinding work, including long stints with touring opera companies, performing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and, later, leading roles like Violetta in Verdis Traviata. Recounting these tours for a Newsweek interview in 1969, Ms. Sills said, I had my first high heels, my first updo hair style, my first strapless dress, and I didnt know what to hold up first.

A Triumphant Debut

In 1955, after seven previous unsuccessful auditions over a three-year period, Ms. Sills was accepted into the New York City Opera. Her debut as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus was enthusiastically received by critics.

On tour with the City Opera in Cleveland in 1955, Ms. Sills met Peter B. Greenough, a Boston Brahmin descendant of John Alden, whose family holdings included The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. With a degree from Harvard and a masters degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, Mr. Greenough was then an associate editor at The Plain Dealer. When he met Ms. Sills, he was going through a difficult divorce. Eight weeks after it was made final, he married Ms. Sills in a small civil ceremony at Lieblings New York studio.

Suddenly Ms. Sills found herself the stepmother to three daughters and the mistress of a 23-room house in Cleveland. She hated the city, as she acknowledged in Beverly: An Autobiography, her blunt 1987 memoir: Peter was ostracized by Clevelands rinky-dink version of high society because he had the nerve to fight for custody of his children.

During this period Ms. Sills regularly commuted to New York to perform with the City Opera, which was experiencing hard times. The problems came to a head in 1956 when the conductor Joseph Rosenstock, the companys general director, resigned. Ms. Sills was one of a core group of singers who met with board members to find a way to save it. This led to the appointment of the pragmatic, take-charge conductor Julius Rudel, who spearheaded a revival, as general director in 1957.

In 1959 Ms. Sills gave birth to a daughter, Meredith Holden Greenough. Two years later she gave birth to the couples second child, a son, Peter Bulkeley Greenough Jr. At the time Meredith, called Muffy, was 22 months old but unable to speak. Tests revealed that she had a profound loss of hearing.

Just as Ms. Sills and her husband were absorbing their daughters deafness, it became clear that their son, called Bucky, now 6 months old, was significantly mentally retarded, with additional complications that eluded diagnosis. They knew nothing about autism then, Ms. Sills later wrote.

With support, their daughter thrived over time. But the boys problems were severe, and he was eventually placed in an institution.

The diagnoses of her childrens disabilities had come within a six-week period. For months thereafter, Ms. Sills turned down all singing engagements to be at home. Mr. Rudel, convinced that going back to work would help her cope, sent lighthearted letters addressed to Dear Bubbala, suggesting absurd roles for her to sing, like Boris Godunov, and sharing opera gossip. He then tried to insist that Ms. Sills had a contract to fulfill. When she reported for work, she felt like a totally different artist.

I was always a good singer, she said in the Newsweek interview, but I was a combination of everyone elses ideas: the director, the conductor, the tenor. After I came back, I talked back. I stopped caring what anyone else thought. But she managed to rid herself of bitterness.

I felt if I could survive my grief, I could survive anything, she said. Onstage I was uninhibited, and I began to have a good time.

Her Breakthrough Role

The Newhouse newspaper chain bought The Plain Dealer in 1967 for $58 million, a substantial portion of which went to Mr. Greenough. The family, extremely wealthy, lived in Milton, outside Boston. He was a financial columnist at The Boston Globe from 1961 to 1969.

There Ms. Sills formed a close working relationship with the conductor and stage director Sarah Caldwell, who then ran the Opera Company of Boston, and stretched herself in operas like Rameaus Hippolyte et Aricie.

At the City Opera, Ms. Sills scored a notable success singing the three heroines in Offenbachs Tales of Hoffmann. But her breakthrough came in the fall of 1966, when she helped to inaugurate the City Operas residency at its new Lincoln Center home, the New York State Theater, singing Cleopatra in Handels Giulio Cesare, the first production of a Handel opera by a major New York company in living memory. In snagging that role for herself, Ms. Sills demonstrated a fierce determination born of long frustration.

Mr. Rudel had conceived the production as a vehicle for the bass-baritone Norman Treigle, who was to sing the title role. For Cleopatra he had selected the soprano Phyllis Curtin, who joined the City Opera two years before Ms. Sills but who had been singing with the Metropolitan Opera since 1963.

Ms. Sills felt that Cleopatra was ideally suited to her and that the role might lift her to star status. Moreover, she felt she had earned the role because of her loyalty as a company member. After unproductive talks with Mr. Rudel, Ms. Sills told him that she would resign from the City Opera if he did not give her the role, and that her husband would secure Carnegie Hall for a recital in which she would sing five of Cleopatras arias. Youre going to look sick, she told him. Mr. Rudel relented.

Ms. Sills was correct about the effect that singing Cleopatra would have on her career. In a move that Handel purists today would consider sacrilege, Mr. Rudel and the stage director, Tito Capobianco, cut the lengthy opera to a workable three hours. The international press was in town to cover the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House, which was presenting the premiere of Samuel Barbers Antony and Cleopatra. Many critics also checked out the other Cleopatra opera across the plaza at Lincoln Center.

Ms. Sills won the greatest reviews of her career. Critics praised her adroit handling of the musics florid fioritura, her perfect trills, her exquisite pianissimo singing and her rich sound. Beyond the vocal acrobatics, she made Cleopatra a queenly, charismatic and complex character. The production employed vocal transpositions and other alterations that would be frowned on today, in the aftermath of the early-music movement, which has enhanced understanding of Handelian style and Baroque performance practice. Still, at the time, the production and Ms. Sillss portrayal were revelations. Suddenly she was an opera superstar.

In 1968 she had another enormous success in the title role of Massenets Manon. When the production was revived the next year, the New Yorker critic Winthrop Sergeant wrote: If I were recommending the wonders of New York City to a tourist, I should place Beverly Sills as Manon at the top of the list  way ahead of such things as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.

In April of 1969 Ms. Sills made her La Scala debut, prompting a Newsweek cover story about Americas favorite diva and her European triumph. The opera was Rossinis Siege of Corinth, which had not been performed at La Scala since 1853. A leading Italian critic, Franco Abbiati of Milans Corriere della Serra, commented: In many ways she reminds me Callas  good presence, good face and, above all, a beautiful voice. Shes an angel of the lyric phrase, with great sweetness, delicacy and technical bravura.

An Overdue Milestone

Her acclaimed debut at Londons Covent Garden came with Donizettis Lucia di Lammermoor in December 1970. But the one company notably missing from her international schedule was the Metropolitan Opera. Rudolf Bing, who ran the Met during Ms. Sillss prime years at the City Opera, later conceded that he had never managed to walk across the Lincoln Center plaza and hear her City Opera triumphs. He had invited her several times to sing with the Met, Bing later said. But either the invitations conflicted with Ms. Sillss other bookings or the offered repertory did not interest her.

In 1975, three years after Bing retired, Ms. Sills finally made her Met debut in the opera of her La Scala success, The Siege of Corinth. In interviews she tried to play down the significance of this overdue milestone. The next season she repeated her role in The Siege of Corinth for the Mets prestigious opening night. In the spring of 1976 she sang Violetta in La Traviata at the Met, having gotten the company to agree to invite her longtime colleague Ms. Caldwell to conduct, making her the first woman to take the Mets podium.

But now that this kind of clout and acclaim had come to her, she started experiencing vocal unevenness. Ms. Sills continued to sing with a communicative presence and charisma that reached audiences. But in 1978 she announced that she would retire in 1980, when she would be 51. Ill put my voice to bed and go quietly and with pride, she said in an interview with The New York Times. . It was announced at the same time that she would become co-director of the City Opera.

The plan was for her to ease into the general directors post, sharing it with Mr. Rudel. But in 1979 he officially left the City Opera, and Ms. Sills assumed the post. She inherited a company burdened with debt and unsure of its direction.

Her vision for revitalizing the City Opera included offering unusual repertory and making the company a haven for talented younger American artists. Under her, the repertory significantly diversified, with productions of rarities like Wagners early opera Die Feen, Verdis Attila and Thomass Hamlet, as well as new operas like Anthony Daviss X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X).

To entice new audiences, she reduced ticket prices by 20 percent. A $5.3 million renovation of the New York State Theater in 1982 improved the look and efficiency of the building, though not its problematic acoustics. In 1983 the City Opera became the first American company to use supertitles. The company had a sense of mission and vitality. But the deficit grew to $3 million. Then a devastating warehouse fire destroyed 10,000 costumes for 74 productions.

Still, Ms. Sills was a prodigious fund-raiser and a tireless booster. When she retired from her post in early 1989, she had on balance a record of achievement. The budget had grown from $9 million to $26 million, and the $3 million deficit had become a $3 million surplus.

She then took her skills as a fund-raiser, consultant and spokeswoman to the entire Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts organization. In 1994 she was elected the chairwoman of the board, an unpaid but influential post. In 2002 she announced her retirement from arts administration.

But six months later she was persuaded to become the chairwoman of the Met. Her most significant act was to talk the board into hiring Peter Gelb as general manager, starting in 2006. During these years, she remained the host of choice for numerous arts programs on Live from Lincoln Center television broadcasts.

In retirement she continued a life of charitable work, notably as chairwoman of the board of trustees of the March of Dimes for several years, until 1994.

Ms. Sillss two children, both of Manhattan, survive her, as do her stepchildren, Lindley Thomasett, of Bedford, N.Y.; Nancy Bliss, of Woodstock, N.Y.; and Diana Greenough, of Lancaster, Mass. She is also survived by a brother, Stanley Sills (who legally changed his name from Silverman), of Boca Raton, Fla., and Islip, N.Y. Ms. Sillss husband, Mr. Greenough, died last year after a long illness.

In a conversation with a Times reporter in 2005, reflecting on her challenging life and triumphant career, Ms. Sills said, Man plans and God laughs. She added: I have often said Ive never considered myself a happy woman. How could I, with all thats happened to me. But Im a cheerful woman. Work kept me going.


Correction: July 4, 2007
An obituary in some copies yesterday of the soprano Beverly Sills misstated the year she made her debut at Covent Garden in London, in the opera Lucia di Lammermoor. It was 1970, not 1973. The obituary also omitted a survivor. He is Ms. Sillss brother, Stanley Sills, of Boca Raton, Fla., and Islip, N.Y.

Lady Bird Johnson in a field of wild flowers in the Texas Hill Country on May 10, 1990.

By Enid Nemy

Lady Bird Johnson, the widow of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was once described by her husband as "the brains and money of this family" and whose business skills cushioned his road to the White House, died yesterday afternoon at her home in Austin, Tex. She was 94.

Mrs. Johnson was hospitalized for a week last month with a low-grade fever. She died of natural causes, surrounded by family, including her two daughters, and friends, said a family spokeswoman, Elizabeth Christian.

Mrs. Johnson was a calm and steadying influence on her often moody and volatile husband as she quietly attended to the demands imposed by his career. Liz Carpenter, her press secretary during her years in the White House, once wrote that "if President Johnson was the long arm, Lady Bird Johnson was the gentle hand."

She softened hurts, mediated quarrels and won over many political opponents. Johnson often said his political ascent would have been inconceivable without his wifes devotion and forbearance. Others shared that belief.


Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the late President Lyndon B. Johnson, is pictured at the White House in 1967.

After Johnson became the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1960, James Reston, the Washington columnist of The New York Times, said, "Lyndon could never have made it this far without the help of that woman."

Mrs. Johnson was often compared to Eleanor Roosevelt, a first lady she greatly admired but did not emulate.

"Mrs. Roosevelt was an instigator, an innovator, willing to air a cause without her husband's endorsement," Ms. Carpenter said. "Mrs. Johnson was an implementer and translator of her husband and his purpose - a wife in capital letters."

Mrs. Johnson had one major cause during the Johnson presidency, highway beautification, and her husband pushed Congress into passing legislation to further the program.

Mrs. Johnson made many trips to explain her husband's programs like Head Start, the Job Corps and the War on Poverty. But, Ms. Carpenter said, she "never hesitated to admit that during the early years of their marriage, her husband expected coffee and newspapers in bed and his shoes shined and that she was happy to comply."

Bonnie Angelo, a reporter who covered Mrs. Johnson for Time magazine, said, "She took a lot from him, but she always said, 'Lyndon is larger than life,' and she took him with equanimity. She was the eye of the hurricane, the calm center of the maelstrom that was Lyndon Johnson."

Mrs. Johnson developed her own public projects. She was an early supporter of the environment and, in championing highway beautification, worked to banish billboards and plant flowers and trees.

The Lady Bird Johnson Park in Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, is an outgrowth of her First Lady's Committee for a More Beautiful Capital. She founded the $10 million National Wildflower Research Center in Austin, Tex., which opened in April 1995 and changed its name to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in 1998. The center conducts research and provides information on plants, landscaping and conservation.

Mrs. Johnson was known for her even temper, although she did not always consider it an asset. "I think it might be better to blow up sometimes," she once said.

She was a stoic, rarely admitting pain, a trait her husband characterized as perhaps her only fault. She had four miscarriages but never indulged in self-pity.

Mrs. Johnson financed her husband's first campaign for Congress in 1937 with a $10,000 loan against a small inheritance from her mother. She began taking an active role in politics in 1941, after he lost his first bid for the Senate and returned to the House. While he was on active duty in the Navy during World War II, Mrs. Johnson managed his legislative office. From that point she shared his public life, representing him, speaking for him and answering questions with unusual candor.

When Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, rather than his rival Johnson, was nominated for the presidency in 1960, a reporter asked if she was disappointed. "I'm relieved," she said, then immediately confessed: "That isn't true. I'm terribly disappointed. Lyndon would have made a noble president."

Although Mrs. Johnson was less than enthusiastic when her husband accepted the nomination for vice president, she campaigned tirelessly and accompanied the women of the Kennedy family on many of their appearances, particularly in the South.

Once the election was won, she threw herself into the role of second lady, traveling to 33 countries in the 34 months of Johnson's vice presidency. She also made 47 trips in the United States in that time, attending social and political gatherings and promoting her husband's programs and her environmental interests.

"My role," Mrs. Johnson said, "was to be an extra pair of eyes and ears for Lyndon."

She also substituted for the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, on many occasions.

Johnson openly expressed affection for his wife. He often planted a quick kiss on her forehead and held her hand when they were being driven somewhere. In public, Mrs. Johnson referred to her husband as Lyndon; when they were alone or with friends, he was Darling. She was always Bird.

She was with her husband in the motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Later that afternoon, she was beside Johnson in the executive suite of Air Force One as he took the oath of office as 36th president. It was she who suggested to Mrs. Kennedy that she remain in the White House to wind up her affairs.

"I wish to heaven I could serve Mrs. Kennedy's happiness," she said. "I can at least serve her convenience."

Mrs. Johnson took up residence in the White House on Dec. 7, 1963, feeling, she said, "as if I am suddenly on stage for a part I never rehearsed." She converted a small corner room overlooking the Washington Monument into an office and set aside an hour a day to record her life as first lady. She wrote about 1.7 million words in her years in the White House; 800 pages of them were published in 1971 as "A White House Diary."

It was only then that she publicly acknowledged that it was not until Mrs. Kennedy's remarriage in 1968, to Aristotle Onassis, that she felt liberated from the former first lady's presence and influence. "I feel strangely free," Mrs. Johnson wrote. "No shadow walks beside me down the hall of the White House."

Although she had attended many state dinners in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Mrs. Johnson made no effort to copy the style of previous first ladies. Her first state dinner, for the president of Italy and his wife, combined Italian opera and American hootenanny.

The Johnsons enjoyed entertaining official guests at the L.B.J. Ranch in Stonewall, Tex. Their Texas background inspired the menus and entertainment for many White House events. The South Lawn, which the president referred to as the backyard, became a setting for barbecues.

Mrs. Johnson's Texas heritage was often evident in her speech. "I'll see you next week if the Lord be willing and the creek don't rise" was one expression. Her description of someone who acted without thinking was "the type who would charge hell with a bucket of water."

Johnson won election to a full term as president in 1964 with a lopsided majority. But as his term neared its end, he was the beleaguered and increasingly unpopular leader of a country divided over Vietnam. The war came to overshadow the legislation he had pushed through - strong measures on civil rights, Medicare, urban development, federal aid for schools, the Head Start program and the War on Poverty.

The president held to the conviction, however, that continuing the war was a course both honorable and in the national interest. Yet as the war grew more and more unpopular, so did the president. On March 31, 1968, he surprised the nation by announcing that he would not seek re-election.

Almost exactly a year earlier, Mrs. Johnson wrote in her diary: "I do not know whether we can endure another four-year term in the presidency. I use the word 'endure' in Webster's own meaning, 'to last, remain, continue in the same state without perishing.' I face the prospect of another campaign like an open-end stay in a concentration camp."

Mrs. Johnson came to Washington in 1934 as the 21-year-old bride of Lyndon Johnson, then an assistant to a Texas congressman. By the time he became president, Mrs. Johnson had acquired more than a quarter century of experience in national politics, covering his 12 years in the House, 12 years in the Senate - 6 of them as majority leader - and almost 3 years as vice president.

She also became a successful businesswoman in those years, using the final $21,000 of her $67,000 inheritance in 1942 to buy KTBC, a small radio station in Austin.

Although the station was bought in Mrs. Johnson's name, her husband's political influence, even though limited at the time, helped in acquiring the license from the Federal Communications Commission. Johnson became the commission's champion at a time when Congress was about to cut its budget. Mrs. Johnson's application was speedily approved.

KTBC had no nighttime franchise and no network connection, and it owed money to several banks. Mrs. Johnson went to Austin and reviewed the debts, the accounts receivable and the staff and made changes. Seven months later, the station showed its first monthly profit, $18.

Within 20 years, the station and the affiliates bought with its profits became a multimillion-dollar radio and television enterprise. At one time, the Johnson interests included KTBC Television, which was sold to Times Mirror in 1973, Austin cable interests, which were sold to Time Warner Cable, and Karnack Cable System, cable interests outside Austin, which were sold to Tele-Communications.

Both Johnson daughters were born in Washington, Lynda Bird Johnson in 1944 and Luci Baines Johnson in 1947, and both had weddings while their father was in the White House. Lynda Bird is the wife of former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia; Luci Baines, divorced and remarried, lives in Austin, where her husband, Ian Turpin, is president of the Johnson family business, the LBJ Company, which owns KLBJ, an Austin radio station, and has land interests in Texas. Mrs. Johnson and her younger daughter owned the company, having bought Mrs. Robb's share some years earlier.

Mrs. Johnson's survivors include her two daughters, seven grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Johnson was born Claudia Alta Taylor on Dec. 22, 1912 in a big red brick house in the East Texas town of Karnack (population 100). The youngest of three children and the only girl, she acquired the name Lady Bird as a toddler after a nursemaid described her as "purty as a lady bird."

"I was a baby and in no position to protest," Mrs. Johnson said of her nickname.

Her father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, was the prosperous owner of two country stores and a cotton gin. But Mrs. Johnson recalled using an oil lamp until she was 9 and never forgot the big day "when we finally got inside plumbing." Her mother, Minnie Patillo, of Alabama, surprised her neighbors by listening to opera, reading voraciously and campaigning for women's right to vote.

When Mrs. Johnson was 5, her mother died, and an unmarried maternal aunt, Effie Patillo, moved from Alabama to live with the Taylors and help rear the children.

Mrs. Johnson's education began in a one-room school with a stove in the middle of the room for which, she recalled, "the big boys always brought in the wood." She graduated from Marshall High School at 15 and enrolled in St. Mary's School for Girls, an Episcopal junior college in Dallas. Its influence led her to change her church affiliation to Episcopalian from Methodist. She went on to the University of Texas, graduating in 1933, and returned for another year to major in journalism.

Her whirlwind romance with Lyndon Johnson began in the autumn of 1934 in the office of a friend in Austin. They met for breakfast the next morning. After pouring out his life history, financial status, how much insurance he carried and his prospects, Johnson asked her to marry him. When she reported the first-date proposal to her father, he showed no astonishment. "Some of the best bargains are made in a hurry," he said.

It took a few more tries before Johnson's persistence was rewarded.

"He was the most outspoken, straightforward, determined person I'd ever encountered," Mrs. Johnson said of her suitor years later. "I knew I'd met something remarkable, but I didn't know quite what."

They were married on Nov. 17, 1934, two months after they met, in St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio. The groom forgot the ring, and the best man was sent across the street to buy one at a Sears, Roebuck store for $2.98.

The couple moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Washington. Johnson's salary, as administrative assistant to Representative Richard M. Kleberg, Democrat of Texas, was $267 a month. The next year they returned to Texas, where Johnson became administrator of the Texas National Youth Administration. But politics had cast its spell. Johnson ran for the House and won, and the couple returned to Washington in 1937.

The Johnsons returned to the L.B.J. Ranch, a 438-acre spread on the Pedernales River in central Texas, in 1969. The ranch, bought in 1951 from Johnson's aunt for $20,000, originally consisted of 245 acres of Texas hill country and a dilapidated house that Mrs. Johnson once said "looked like a haunted house in a Charles Addams cartoon." It was soon rehabilitated.

On their return to Texas, President and Mrs. Johnson helped establish the eight-story Lyndon Baines Johnson Library on the campus of the University of Texas. It opened in 1971. Less than two years later, on Jan. 22, 1973, Johnson died of a heart attack. He is buried in the family graveyard on the ranch.

In the succeeding decades, Mrs. Johnson lived in Austin and spent weekends at the ranch, though the Johnsons had donated it to the nation in 1972 as a National Historic Site. She oversaw the landscaping of the 15-acre L.B.J. Memorial Grove across the Potomac River from Washington. She campaigned for Mr. Robb as he moved up the political ladder. She was a member of the University of Texas Board of Regents, the National Parks Advisory Board and the Highway Beautification Board. And she was awarded a Medal of Freedom by President Gerald R. Ford in 1977 and a Congressional Gold Medal in 1988.

Although she suffered a mild stroke in 1993 and in her mid-80's was declared legally blind, she remained active in the Wildflower Center and at the L.B.J. Library.

A private family eucharist will be held at the Wildflower Center on Friday, after which Mrs. Johnson will lie in repose at the library for public viewing. On Saturday, a funeral service open by invitation only will be held at Riverbend Centre in Austin. A public funeral cortege on Sunday morning will take her to the Johnson family cemetery at Stonewall, Tex., but the graveside service that afternoon will be private.

"It has been a wonderful life," she told Ms. Carpenter in 1992. "I feel like a jug into which wine is poured until it overflows."

SOURCE: www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/washington/12johnson.html?pagewanted=1...

I know we already have an article about Lady Bird Johnson but I thought this Catholic connection was interesting.


Lady Bird Johnson, former first lady, dies at 94, Catholic priest at her bedside

By Kaitlynn Riely
7/12/2007
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS)  Former first lady Lady Bird Johnson "truly was a Texas treasure," said the bishop of Austin, Texas, where she lived at the time of her death July 11.

Johnson made beautifying the nation's highways and public lands her legacy.

She died of natural causes at her home near Austin at the age of 94, according to The Associated Press.

Upon learning of her death, Austin Bishop Gregory M. Aymond issued a statement expressing his sadness and asking for prayers for her and her family.

"She truly was a Texas treasure," Bishop Aymond said. "She found and spread God's beauty in the simplicity of wildflowers and nature. In faith, we trust she is resting in comfort in the Lord's garden."

Paulist Father Robert Scott was at Johnson's bedside when she died at approximately 4:15 p.m. Though Johnson was an Episcopalian, her daughter Luci Baines Johnson Turpin converted to Catholicism during her father's presidency and knew Father Scott, a senior minister at St. Austin's Parish in Austin and at the University of Texas Catholic Center.

Father Scott said July 12 that he has known Turpin and her family for 25 years. He also knew the former first lady because she attended all her grandchildren's first Communions, graduations and confirmations. Father Scott recalled that she hosted a confirmation retreat for an entire confirmation class at the LBJ Ranch.

Father Scott said Turpin called him in the hours before her mother's death to be with the family and to pray with them. By the time Father Scott arrived at the house, Johnson had been in a coma for about 24 hours.

With about 13 members of her family gathered in the room, Father Scott led them through the litany of the saints. When he concluded the prayer, a nurse announced that Johnson had died.

"She died very peacefully and there seemed to be a great relief in the family when she died," Father Scott said in a telephone interview. He then prayed that Johnson's soul be commended to God. Johnson had suffered a stroke in 2002.

Johnson's body was to lie in repose at the LBJ Library and Museum from 1:15 p.m. July 13 until 11 a.m. the following day. A private funeral service was scheduled for the afternoon of July 14 and she will be buried in the Johnson family cemetery, according to AP.

While she was in the White House, the first lady used her position to embark on a campaign to spruce up the nation's public lands. She and her husband, Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president, moved into the White House in 1963 after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Johnson finished Kennedy's term and was re-elected to an additional term.

Lady Bird Johnson started a First Lady's Committee for a More Beautiful Capital, which later founded the Society for a More Beautiful National Capital. As part of the group's first effort to make Washington a model for the rest of the country, Johnson planted different types of flowers and trees around the city.

The committee used donations to plant azaleas, cherry trees, daffodils, dogwood and other plants and gave awards for neighborhood beautification efforts. Johnson's efforts encouraged individuals and businesses to use their own time and resources to clean up their communities.

Johnson was a strong force behind the Beautification Act of 1965. The law called for control of outdoor advertising and led to the removal of certain types of signs along the nation's interstate highway system. Shortly before her husband left office in 1969, Columbia Island in the Potomac River was renamed Lady Bird Johnson Park.

Her conservation efforts continued when the Johnsons returned to private life in Texas. She encouraged the creation of a bike and hike trail in Austin. Starting in 1969, she gave awards, in the form of personal checks, to highway districts that used native Texan plants and sceneries best. In 1982, she created the National Wildflower Research Center, which was renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in 1997.

She received the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, from President Gerald Ford in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal from President Ronald Reagan in 1988.

Born Dec. 22, 1912, in Karnack, Texas, Claudia Alta Taylor received the nickname "Lady Bird" from a nurse who said she was "as purty as a lady bird." Johnson, whose mother died when she was 5 and whose father was the owner of a general store, graduated from the University of Texas in 1933 with a bachelor's degree in history. She earned a journalism degree from Texas in 1934.

She married Lyndon B. Johnson on Nov. 17, 1934. They had two daughters -- Lynda Bird and Luci Baines.

Luci became a Catholic when she was 18, though her father was a member of the Disciples of Christ and her mother and sister were Episcopalians.

When she married Patrick John Nugent in 1966, she was the first daughter of a president to marry in a Catholic church. They were married at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception; it was the first wedding there. (The shrine was designated a basilica in 1990 by Pope John Paul II.)

The couple had four children, but divorced after 13 years of marriage. The marriage was annulled in 1979. She is now 60 and has been married to Canadian financier Ian Turpin since 1984. Her sister, Lynda Bird, 63, is married to Charles S. Robb, a former Virginia governor and U.S. senator.

In addition to her two daughters, Johnson is survived by seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. President Johnson died in 1973.

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What a beautiful story!

One can only wonder now at the grace of the Holy Spirit that inspired the 18-year-old Luci Baines to convert to Catholicism and raise her children in the faith.

Flights of angels must have winged you home to the Lord, dear LadyBird.

One personal recollection I have of you - when you visited the Church of Santa Ana in an old district of Manila, to look at the excavation in the churchyard that had uncovered a whole treasure trove of burial pottery by early Filipinos dating back to the 12th-13th centuries. Your fascination and interest were riveting, as were your charming Texan drawl and utter lack of airs. [It was 1966, and President Johnson had come to Manila to rally the heads of the Southeast Asian Nations to support the United States in the Vietnam War. Truly a different time and place and Zeitgeist!]

Thanks for posting that, benefan. I had no idea. I had heard it mentioned on the radio from their spokesperson that she died just as the priest was performing the last rites. Hearing that made me go "Huh?" b/c I knew she wasn't Catholic, but this clears it up.

EDIT: Found an article with a bit more information, so I posted it below.

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President, Lady Bird Johnson had long association with Catholics

By Kaitlynn Riely
July 13, 2007
Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com)

WASHINGTON (CNS) - Lady Bird Johnson, an Episcopalian, died just after a Catholic priest finished reciting the litany of the saints with her family at her bedside in Austin, Texas.

This ecumenical interaction July 11 was not unusual for the former first lady or for her husband, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, a member of the Disciples of Christ.

Their closest Catholic relationship was with their daughter, Luci Baines Johnson Turpin. It was Turpin who called Paulist Father Robert Scott, a senior minister at St. Austin's Parish in Austin, Texas, and at the University of Texas Catholic Center, to come to the LBJ Ranch when it became clear her mother was close to death.

In an interview July 12, Father Scott said he has known Turpin and her family for 25 years. He said Johnson attended every first Communion, confirmation and graduation for her Catholic grandchildren. And when Turpin's daughter, Nicole Nugent, was preparing for her confirmation, Johnson invited the whole class out to the LBJ Ranch for a retreat.

In the shock and confusion following the assassination of the nation's first and only Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office as chief executive Nov. 22, 1963, placing his hand on a Catholic Bible aboard Air Force One. Johnson asked for God's help in performing his duties in his first public statement following his swearing in.

Like Kennedy before him, Johnson seemed to be popular among Catholics. A Gallup Poll in 1963 said nine out of 10 Catholics questioned said they would vote for President Johnson, a Democrat, over Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater in a presidential election.

National Catholic News Service coverage of Johnson's association with Catholics dates back to his vice presidency, when he met with Pope John XXIII. NCNS, the precursor to CNS, enthusiastically followed Luci Johnson's conversion to Catholicism at age 18, a decision her mother praised as sincere and serious.

Luci's marriage to Patrick John Nugent in 1966 was widely covered, as she was the first daughter of a president to marry in a Catholic church. Her marriage at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception also marked the first time a president had visited the church. (The national shrine was named a basilica in 1990.)

The Nugents, who had four children, divorced after 13 years of marriage. The marriage was annulled in 1979. Now 60, Luci has been married to Canadian financier Ian Turpin since 1984. Her sister, Lynda Bird, 63, is married to Charles S. Robb, a former Virginia governor and U.S. senator.

According to the 1982 book "The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson" by Ronnie Dugger, daughter Luci encouraged her father to pray to her "little monks" at St. Dominic Church in Washington when he was worried about the progress of the war in Vietnam.

President Johnson was known for making nocturnal visits to Washington area churches, such as St. Dominic, during his presidency. He also occasionally attended Mass at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Stonewall, Texas, when he was at his ranch. He would typically attend a second, Protestant service on the same day, NCNS reported.

Dugger said that Johnson, who had a close relationship with Baptist evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham, prayed about a dozen times a day. At a prayer breakfast in 1968, Johnson said, "America never stands taller than when her people go to their knees." On several occasions during his presidency, Johnson established national days of prayer for causes such as peace and racial harmony.

When President Johnson met with Pope Paul VI, he asked him to pray for U.S. efforts for world peace. The pope did so, and also prayed for the U.S. leader's quick recovery after his 1965 gall bladder operation.

When he died, several Catholic leaders spoke highly of the former president.

NCNS ran a story Jan. 23, 1973, the day following Johnson's death, that included quotes from Cardinal John J. Krol of Philadelphia.

Cardinal Krol, then president of what is now called the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called Johnson a "dedicated American whose leadership of our country, in years of conflict and controversy, manifested his deeply held personal commitment to the well-being of our nation and to the achievement of human rights."

Upon hearing of Lady Bird Johnson's death, Austin Bishop Gregory M. Aymond honored the lifelong environmentalist by saying she was "truly a Texas treasure."

"She found and spread God's beauty in the simplicity of wildflowers and nature," he said. "In faith, we trust she is resting in comfort in the Lord's garden."

SOURCE: www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=24713

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Dear Lori - THANKS! I had no idea LBJ was that religious. And the quotation from him is something more Americans should remember:

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"America never stands taller than when her people go to their knees."

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