06 April 2005

The Next Pope...and Why He Matters to All of Us The long text of a lecture delivered in January 2005, by the same George Weigel quoted below.  Really interesting reading, as, right now,  the College of Cardinals go through their preliminaries to the Conclave.  Obviously very well-informed, he describes what they are talking about in these current meetings - setting the agenda. Some interesting facts regarding the make-up of the group: The cardinal-electors will be the most diverse such group in history. At present, they range in age from 52-year old Peter Erdt, the primate of Hungary, to 79-year old Alexandre do Nascimento, the archbishop emeritus of Luanda, Angola, once held hostage by rebel forces in his native country during his efforts to mediate Angola’s civil war. The average age of the electors today is 66. 11% of the electorate will come from North America; 19% from Latin America; 50% from Europe (but only 17% from Italy, the lowest percentage in modern conclave history); 10% from Africa; 11% from Asia and Oceania. The overwhelming majority of the electors, almost 80%, are local pastors, not figures in the Roman Curia; and several prominent Curial cardinals were successful local pastors before being called to Rome. 18% are members of religious orders, with the Franciscans boasting the largest number of cardinal-electors (four), while the Salesians and the Jesuits have three each; two cardinal-electors are affiliated with Opus Dei – a number that will doubtless disappoint true believers in the fevered speculations of The Da Vinci Code. He discusses at length the issues facing the Church, which will inform the type of person elected to be Pope, and points out that these issues are precisely not those that the press and TV are focussing on, but much more strategic and in line with what world political leaders are grappling with: What, then, are the great issues facing the Catholic Church in the early 21st century? And how will the Church’s grappling with those issues affect "all of us?" At the outset, it may help to clarify what the issues are not. Neither the next conclave nor the next pope is going to change the Catholic Church’s teaching on the morally appropriate way to regulate births, although the cardinals may well discuss how to present that teaching with greater pastoral effectiveness. Neither the next conclave nor the next pope is going to endorse abortion-on-demand or euthanasia; the inviolability of innocent life is a bedrock principle of both natural and revealed law, and the Church has no authority to declare the use of lethal violence against innocents morally justifiable.  Similarly, while the pre-conclave prattiche and the conclave itself may involve some discussion of the effects of the revolution in women’s lives (and the concurrent revolution in men’s lives) on the Church and the world, the Church’s practice of calling only men to the ministerial priesthood is not going to change, because, as John Paul II stated eleven years ago, the Church is not authorized to change that practice.  There will likely be some discussion of the advisability of ordaining viri probati, proven and tested older married men, to the ministerial priesthood in situations where the shortage of priests is drastically impeding the Church’s sacramental life – but the cardinals well know that this solution, if in fact it be that, will create some problems as well as address others, and we need not expect (nor, from my point of view, should we want) a full-scale retreat from the ancient linkage of celibacy and ordained ministry in the Catholic Church. Which is to say that virtually all of what the New York Times imagines are "the issues" for the Catholic Church aren’t, in fact, the issues, and aren’t going to play a significant role in shaping the next conclave and the next pontificate So what are the issues? Three large-scale issues are already under discussion within the College of Cardinals and among other senior churchmen, and will certainly weigh heavily in the conclaves’s deliberations, in the next pontificate, and in the Catholic Church’s interface with the 21st century world. The first of these is the virtual collapse of Christianity in its historic heartland – western Europe. The second great issue is the Church’s response to the multi-faceted challenge posed by the rise of militant Islam. And the third involves the questions posed by the biotech revolution. Questions of the Church’s intellectual discipline will also be discussed in the next conclave, and I hope to show in a moment why those questions, properly understood, are of considerable consequence for "all of us". Then there is a question that may or may not come up in the prattiche, the general congregations, and the conclave deliberations of the cardinal-electors, but which, in my judgment, should be addressed: and that is the question of the Church’s diplomacy, or, to be more precise, the set of ideas that have guided the "foreign policy" of the Holy See for more than two generations now. All of which leads me to believe it is unlikely that the next Pope will come from the Third World;  much more likely he is another European, perhaps American.  Who knows? 11:00:06 PM    comment []

Time for something Els It is Masters week, and the papers are awash with golfing articles.  The one I have most enjoyed was from The Observer on Sunday, dealing candidly at length with Ernie Els, and the competition among golf's Big Five: Woods, Els, Mickelson , Goosen and Singh. 10:34:31 PM    comment []

More buyout action in the digital photo world.  May be I've got to take another look at Webshots?  I am a member, after all.  But I really do like Flickr. 10:10:04 PM    comment []

Doc Searls discusses bad pissing habits.  What a wild and wonderful range of topics.  Must be some wisdom, humour or both  in the comments as well. 6:39:47 PM    comment []

The Bloggies 2005 Something I missed recording a couple of weeks ago, while I was offline:  the BBC pointer to the Bloggies, the Oscars of the weblogging world, and a source of valuable new links. 6:36:14 PM    comment []

It's a Flat World, After All The high priest of Globalization, and New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman, has a major update about this topic, based on a recent visit to India, in the NYT Magazine last weekend.  Long article alert. Later:  having read the article, it is a wake-up call to America, adapted from and tied to the release of his new book: "'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century''. In fact, a wake-up call to the entire western world.  The convergence and spread of communications and technology have eliminated all barriers to education and entry to new markets; and the emerging countries of India, China and Russia are making better use of them, and producing more and better-trained scientists and engineers than the USA: Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers. 6:06:09 PM    comment []

Forty Years of Moore's Law Slashdot points to a CNET article commemorating this notable anniversary, along with some very geeky Slashdot comment. While with Slashdot, let's see if I can find the article I read yesterday or the day before, a long interview with Mark Shuttleworth, dealing with his Open Source activities, and his experiences in space.  Impressive guy, not only lucky. (Not hard to find, but really, I was learn to blog things immediately, as I see them, and not come back a day, or a week later, and search for them.  So many things never get onto the blog that way.  What fuckin' procrastinator!) 5:31:18 PM    comment []

Another South Africa Corruption Story In its short ten years of democracy, South Africa has developed a world-class culture of state corruption.  Taking their lead from the very top, with the Vice-President Zuma's evident involvement in a corrupt arms deal, and the 100+ parliamentarians involved with fiddling their travel allowances, we now get a report of 37,000 civil servants enriching themselves at the expense of the poor. 5:09:39 PM    comment []

A real-life Million Dollar Baby.  Very sad. 5:03:26 PM    comment []

Instant avalanche of bad publicity for the latest incarnation of the Ford Mustang. Money can't buy publicity like this, nor recover from it. The Mustand was always an overrated car, in my opinion, probably owing to exposure in two very popular movies of the 1960's, Steve McQeen in "Bullitt", and Anouk Aimee in "A Man and a Woman". 4:50:27 PM    comment []

Zimbabwe's Tragic Election Glenn Reynolds also comments and points to other posts on Zimbabwe's fraudulent election, including our own government's despicable role in this fiasco. Like this quote from the Washington Post: Thursday's election in Zimbabwe was not merely stolen. It was stolen with the complicity -- no, practically the encouragement -- of Africa's most influential democrat. If you think too long about this democrat, moreover, you reach a bleak conclusion. For all the recent democratic strides in Africa, the continental leadership that was supposed to reinforce this progress is not up to the challenge. The bankrupt democrat in question is Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's president. For the past few years, he's been promising a pan-African Renaissance, a new era in which Africans would take charge of their own problems. ... But do Mbeki's New Partnership principles mean anything? In the run-up to Zimbabwe's election, when the regime's thugs were denying food to suspected opposition sympathizers, Mbeki actually undercut the international pressure for a fair contest. He expressed a serene confidence that the election would be free and fair. He allowed his labor minister, who was serving as the head of the South African observer mission in Zimbabwe, to dismiss the regime's critics as "a problem and a nuisance." He quarreled with the Bush administration's description of Zimbabwe as an outpost of repression. He did everything, in other words, to signal that mass fraud would be acceptable. The Guardian's leader yesterday also expresses disgust at the outcome. I'll come back with more links and personal comment on this. 1:51:59 PM    comment []

Mark Steyn on the Pope A universal feature of the comment following the Pope's death has been along the lines of: "he was a great man and a great Pope, but.... (castigation about his attitudes to women and the priesthood, gay marriage, abortion, condoms, AIDS etc.)". Mark Steyn argues that the late Pope's approach to these matters were not only morally but practically correct, and the application of eternal truths. A sample: The secularists, for example, can't forgive him for his opposition to condoms in the context of Aids in Africa. The Dark Continent gets darker every year: millions are dying, male life expectancy is collapsing and such civil infrastructure as there is seems likely to follow. But the most effective weapon against the disease has not been the Aids lobby's 20-year promotion of condom culture in Africa, but Uganda's campaign to change behaviour and to emphasise abstinence and fidelity - i.e., the Pope's position. You don't have to be a Catholic or a "homophobe" to think that the spread of Aids is telling us something basic - that nature is not sympathetic to sexual promiscuity. If it weren't Aids, it would be something else, as it has been for most of human history. This analysis is supported in a profound remembrance of Papal biographer, George Weigel: Pope John Paul II should also be remembered, however, as a man with a penetrating insight into the currents that flow beneath the surface of history, currents that in fact create history, often in surprising ways. In a 1968 letter to the French Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac, then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla suggested that "a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person" was at the root of the 20th century's grim record: two World Wars, Auschwitz and the Gulag, a Cold War threatening global disaster, oceans of blood and mountains of corpses. How had a century begun with such high hopes for the human future produced mankind's greatest catastrophes? Because, Karol Wojtyla proposed, Western humanism had gone off the rails, collapsing into forms of self-absorption, and then self-doubt, so severe that men and women had begun to wonder whether there was any truth at all to be found in the world, or in themselves. Let me close this post by pointing to Glenn Reynolds' roundup of posts from noted bloggers. Update: The counter-position is persuasively argued in the same newspaper (The Telegraph) today by Ferdinand Mount. I think both arguments contain some truth. The Far Left position is probably represented by a Professor of "Cultural Theory", who states in The Guardian that "the Pope died with blood on his hands", having done untold damage to the Church and countless Catholics. I guess he won't be attending the funeral!  In turn, The Guardian gets a roasting. Kuro5hin also has a negative review. Timothy Garton Ash in the same newspaper has a much more positive view, hailing him as "the first world leader", while Hugh Hewitt points out that the Pope had detractors on the right also, not noticed by the mainstream media. Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post focuses on the role that JP2 played in the defeat of communism. 1:34:30 PM    comment []