Sigh...

Today brings us another in the series of "Catholic Church Takes Stupid New Position" articles. And, as before, conservative Catholics are partly to blame, in having pulled in a Church voice of authority in order to back up their pet topic, aided by the mainstream press which is all too willing to make the Church look silly and "out of touch".

LifeSite is to blame, it seems, having dug up a couple of brief letters from two years ago in which then Cardinal Ratzinger thanks a German writer for sending him a copy of her book Harry Potter - gut oder böse (Harry Potter- good or evil?).

What did Ratzinger say to create all this fuss? This is it:

Many thanks for your kind letter of February 20th and the informative book which you sent me in the same mail. It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.

Now, from what I can make out, it seems unlikely to me that Ratzinger has read any of the Harry Potter books, nor did he go out of his way to make any statement on them. He simply replied to a letter by the author of this book saying in moderately generic terms that she was doing good work.

Needless to say, papal opinions on light fiction are not binding on Catholics, and it would be well if both LifeSite and the mainstream press would keep that in mind. Unfortunately, certain people seem all to willing to grab this as a major statement in order to support their own opinions. Here's author Michael O'Brien, quoted in the LifeSite article:

The most prominent Potter critic in North America, Catholic novelist and painter Michael O'Brien commented to LifeSiteNews.com on the "judgement" of now-Pope Benedict saying, "This discernment on the part of Benedict XVI reveals the Holy Father's depth and wide ranging gifts of spiritual discernment." O'Brien, author of a book dealing with fantasy literature for children added, "it is consistent with many of the statements he's been making since his election to the Chair of Peter, indeed for the past 20 years - a probing accurate read of the massing spiritual warfare that is moving to a new level of struggle in western civilization. He is a man in whom a prodigious intellect is integrated with great spiritual gifts. He is the father of the universal church and we would do well to listen to him."

The Anchoress has a good discussion of the "Harry Potter issue" on her site.

Amy Welborn also has a thread.

Finally, Pontification offers some sound reflections, and Pontificator's daughter profices some good thoughts from a younger reader's point of view.

Attacking the Homeland

Belmont club samples several news stories covering the recently released information that the four perpetrators of the London bombings were all native born British Muslims.

Stockholm syndrome, kinda

Darwin and I cried last night: we were laughing so hard at Mark Steyn's latest article in National Review. It's subscription only, so let me give you a little taste of the hilarity:

Guantanamo is denounced all around the world as the gulag to end all gulags because of shocking torture revelations such as this:
"A female interrogatore took an unusual approach to wear down a detainee, reading a Harry Potter book aloud for hours. He turned his back and put his hands over his ears."
Good grief, what next? Will they force detainees to sit through PBS plegde-drive weeks, watching the same Peter. Paul & Mary reunion specials over and over, punctuated only by local announcers touting the complimentary Bill Moyers mug you receive for a $200 "level of membership"?
If J.K. Rowling is the Torquemada de nos jours, nothing should surprise us. Nonetheless, even in my jaded state, I was taken aback by the remarks of Andrew Jaspan, editor of the Melbourne Age, one of Australia's biggest newspapers. You'll recall that Douglas Wood, an Aussie taken hostage in Iraq, was recently rescued, and immediately apologized to John Howard and President Bush for a video statement he'd made during his capture calling for the withdrawal of coalition forces. No apology necessary: Obviously such demands are made under duress, and it's only the media's insistence on treating them as a serious contribution to foreign-policy analysis that gives them any currency whatsoever. He then went on to describe his captors as "a**holes", or, if you prefer, "assh***s."
The Age's editor didn't care for this brusque mean-spirited judgmentalism. As Mr. Jaspan told Australia's ABC network, "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the a**hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought-through and I think demeans the man andis one of the reasons why people are slightly skeptical of his motives and everything else. The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

Sweet! To read it all, subscribe to National Review or pick up a copy at your local bookstore.

Here's more on Andrew Jaspan, BTW. I did a google search to find out if he'd ever made any references to Guantanamo, just for comparison, but all I found were a bunch of bloggers saying what I'm about to say: Dude, the prisoners at Guantanamo are fed THREE times a day, and are treated significantly better than Mr. Woods was during his captivity. Sheesh.

Greeley-Land

I have done a terrible thing, I have picked up a book by Andrew Greeley from the library.

It started innocently enough. I was (for once) at the library without the monkeys in tow, and so I was browsing the new books section. For some reason The Catholic Myth, Greeley's pop-sociology book on Catholicism in post-Vatican II America, was there, despite the fact that it came out in 1990.

Now, I have every reason to be sceptical of Fr. Greeley, but given that he's the only specialist in Catholic sociology that I've actually heard of by name, I thought maybe I should go ahead and see what he had to say. I started flipping pages.

Wow. Goodness knows a lot of people come off sounding self-satisfied in their writing. Perhaps I do at times. But never have I read anyone (and this is including people from Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter to Michael Moore and Al Franken) quite as egotistically self satisfied as Greeley comes off in Catholic Myth.

Now, to be fair, Greeley isn't a partisan hack. I'm sure he makes all "sides" furious from time to time. While on the one hand he describes the Vatican's reasoning on Humae Vitae as "demonic" and asserts that orthodox members of the hierarchy are only interested in their own power, he also criticizes feminists (saying they're right but have only allowed women to be exploited more) and recounts a fairly unflattering anecdote about Cardinal Bernardine (supposedly admitting in rather course language that Humanae Vitae was destorying his diocese, but saying that he needed to keep up the appearance of acceptance in order to curry favor with the Vatican) which that Cardinal apparently insisted was totally fabricated.

What's hard to take, though, about Greeley is primarily his utter assurance that he is an insightful and fascinating person, and that hardly anyone else is. Most if his chapters start with an anecdote following one of the two following patterns:

1) Greeley is forced to put right an impossibly ignorant person who imagines that to be Catholic you need to believe in Catholicism -- and he does so with great tolerance and weariness because he's had to do this so many times before.

2) Greeley has an insight so brilliant that he's himself astounded by it and spends innumerable hours wondering at how brilliant the insight is.

Along with this certain lack of humility in tone, the book is also very light on actual statistics (I suppose this is what makes it pop-sociology instead of sociology) so it reads like several hundred pages of Greeley stating his opinions with an tone of great authority.

A meme, whatever that is

Confidential to Kate: I don't usually bite on these sorts of things, but just for you... :)

What I was doing ten years ago: busting my rear in rehearsals for a musical. Box step, anyone?

Five years ago: busting my rear working at the bookstore during the summer conferences of my alma mater.

One year ago: this is where my memory gets hazy... I couldn't honestly tell you. Probably about what I'm doing now, minus the blog.

Yesterday: Not a whole lot, let me assure you, other than dealing with bathtub disasters, fridge disasters, and bookshelf disasters. All in all, a quiet day.

Five snacks I enjoy: Chips; salsa; chips and salsa; salsa with chips; limeade.

Five songs I know all the words to: Whiskey, You're the Devil; VeggieTales theme song; Silent Night; I Got Rhythm; Caro Mio Ben

Five things I would do with $100 million: Pay off the freakin' college loans; get this for Darwin and this for myself; buy this, donate here; get a house like this.

Five locations I would like to run away to: an Irish pub with a good session; Wadowice, Poland; CINCINNATI; Rome; to the library without bouncy children in tow.

Five bad habits I have: wouldn't you like to know? I do bite my fingernails, but that's all you'll get from me here.

Five things I like doing: snacking (see above); playing Irish fiddle; reading good stuff; solving the world's problems with Darwin; getting through Mass without having to take one of the girls outside.

Five things I would never wear: a teeshirt with a political slogan; a shapeless jumper; a burka; a toe ring; a banana clip

Five TV shows I like: Lost; Samurai Champloo; Full-Metal Alchemist; Masterpiece Theater; the All-Stars section of Brit Hume's news show on Fox

Five biggest joys of the moment: sleeping; reading Crossing the Threshold of Hope; driving at twilight; a full moon; hugging my girls

Five favorite toys: wha...? Not in this house, thank you very much.

Five next victims: Nah, I can't. Let the curse fall!

Evolution vs. Creationism

Since Cardinal Schonborn's opinion piece on evolution and design appeared in the NY Times, there's been much discussion in the Catholic blogsphere about creationism, intelligent design, and evolution. One reader here asked if I would post the book review of Creation Rediscovered that I wrote for New Oxford Review some years back. It turns out, it's on their newly revised website.

Here is my review of Creation Rediscovered.

In the interests of fairness, here's the reaction it generated in the letters column (including one letter from the author -- scroll down a bit to find the letters).

I also wrote a review for them of Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology by William A. Dembski (half-way down the page), but it was neutered of most of my more severe criticisms of ID.

Growing up in a very science oriented family (my father is a planetarium director) which was also devoutly Catholic, the fear of evolution has always struck me as odd and misguided.

If you're interested on reading more about evolution and the "conflict" between science and religion I'd recommend Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould (an agnostic, but trying to be fair in establishing boundaries between science and religion) and Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller (a Catholic, explaining how he reconciles his religion with his work as an evolutionary biologist).

For the record, I think what Cardinal Schonborn was doing (and could perhaps have done a little more clearly) was emphasizing that regardless of evolution's success in describing the common ancestry of life on earth, evolution cannot speak to the metaphysical questions of what life is and why life is. The fact that the biological process is "unguided" does not mean that life is itself "unguided". All creation relies on the active will of God for its very existence. To assert that because we now know more about the way in which life physically developed on Earth in now way allows us to say that God is in some sense "un-needed". I think that what Schonborn was primarily reacting to in "neo-Darwinism and the multiverse theory of cosmology" is the assertion that while there may be a God lurking somewhere out in the wings, there is no need for him because life must have developed this way regardless of any movement of providence. To that extent, I think Schonborn is completely correct. However, it's unfortunate that all sides of the evolution debate (secularists, creationists, intelligent design proponents) seem to be using this as an opportunity to say "See, the Church rejects evolution". Secularists would like this in order to discredit the Church. Creationists and ID proponents would like it in order to discredit evolution. But I think what we're seeing is in fact a great deal of smoke and very little fire.

Van Gogh-in' my Way

Stanley Kurtz over at The Corner points us to this news article about the trial of Mohammed Bouyeri, the Muslim who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Bouyeri has shown marked disrespect to the judge and officers of the court, claiming through his lawyer that he recognizes only Islamic law. Wait a few decades, Bub: if Holland doesn't buck up a bit, there won't be enough Dutch left to enforce Dutch law.

Here's the coup de grace, though:

Holland's welfare society had one more surprise to offer. Two senior policemen involved in the final shootout with Bouyeri appeared in court to ask for €3,000 (£2,060) compensation for emotional distress.

Insp Marcel Groenendaal and Brig J S de Ruyter said they had suffered loss of concentration and apathy since the gunfight. Bouyeri rolled his eyes at their testimony, apparently amused.

But the scene disgusted two protesters, watching the hearing in T-shirts bearing images of Fortuyn and van Gogh. One of them, Marianne Houtzager, condemned the police for recalling how they hid on the floor of their car. "They acted like victims, not policemen. We are too soft."