Ask a bunch of people, “Did you experience a lot of happiness yesterday?” and those who say that religion in an important part of their daily life are more likely to answer in the affirmative than those who say it isn’t. That goes for non-Americans as well as Americans, in the aggregate as well as one by one. That is to say, there’s more reported happiness in more religious states like Mississippi than in less religious ones like Vermont. And in more religious poor countries like Rwanda than in less religious rich ones ones like Denmark. (O those melancholy Danes!)

You will not be surprised by such findings if you believe, with Marx, that religion is the opium of the people. But it does unsettle mainstream economists like Angus Deaton of Princeton and Arthur A. Stone of Stony Brook, albeit they wish to redirect measurement of human well-being “away from GDP in an era when growth rates are diminishing across much of the rich world.” As they put it in the latest issue of the American Economic Review, “These results cast serious doubt on using (the hedonic version of) happiness to provide an overall assessment of human well-being.”

What’s a poor economist to do? Well, there’s a less hedonic way of measuring subjective well-being (SWB) that isn’t at such odds with material realities. Ask people to rank their lives on a scale of one to 11 (worst possible to best possible), and lo and behold, GDP and other conventional measures of social well-being (e.g. health) make for higher life rankings. In other words, the happier inhabitants of Mississippi and Rwanda rate their lives worse than the less happy denizens of Vermont and Denmark do.

Taken together, the hedonic and evaluative measures of SWB pose the question: What should religious people do to bring their quality of life up to their happiness quotient? The answer: Move to a less religious locale. Being religious in a secular place is evidently the best of all possible worlds.  

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On April 28, Mark Mueller of the Star-Ledger reported that Fugee had been working with children, in contravention of the 2007 memorandum of understanding signed by both him and the archdiocese of Newark. “But,” Mueller reported, Archbishop John J. Myers’ spokesman Jim Goodness “denied the agreement had been breached, saying the archdiocese has interpreted the document to mean Fugee could work with minors as long as he is under the supervision of priests or lay ministers who have knowledge of his past and of conditions in the agreement.”

On May 2, after Fugee resigned his ministry amid a media firestorm, Goodness made a U-turn on his denial:

Tonight, the spokesman sought to clarify his statements, saying that while it was “good” Fugee was under supervision, the priest did not seek permission from the archdiocese before participating in youth activities.

“He engaged in activities that the archdiocese was not aware of and that were not approved by us, and we would never have approved them because they are all in conflict with the memorandum of understanding,” Goodness said.

A week later, the archdiocese lawyered up, hiring Michael Critchley, a criminal defense attorney best known in Jersey for winning the acquittal of mafioso Michael “Mad Dog” Taccetta in the mid-1980s. Then Myers took off for week-long pilgrimage to Poland.

Which brings us to yesterday, when the following statement was promulgated under Goodness’ name in response to Fugee’s arraignment on seven counts of judicial contempt, all having to do with his hearing the confessions of minors in churches and on youth retreats:

We take these allegations seriously and will cooperate fully with law enforcement in its investigation. When the Archdiocese learned of Father Fugee’s violation of certain of its protocols during his off-hours, he was informed there would be significant consequences. Nothing is more sacred than the welfare of our children.

We are in the process of taking steps to ensure that, as much as humanly possible, this type of thing cannot happen again.

You’ll note the new direction: Gone is the admission that Fugee violated the memorandum of understanding, whose provisions the archdiocese pledged “to honor both the letter and the spirit of.” His malfeasance now consists of violating certain internal protocols. You figure that, on advice of consigliere, Myers doesn’t want to be in the position of having to admit that the archdiocese didn’t keep its pledge.

I’m guessing that the relevant protocols, if they exist, run along the lines of the Safe Environment Protocol that applies when parish groups use the Archdiocesan Youth Retreat Center in Kearney. That says, among other things, that 10 days before a retreat the pastor in charge must provide the Director of Youth and Young Adult Services with a “listing all chaperones’ names, certifying that all youth ministry leaders and chaperones/volunteers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, from that parish/school have been screened by a third party and safe environment trained, as required by the procedures of this archdiocese.”

Presumably no such listing was provided to the director by the pastors who invited Fugee to minister with them. And perhaps some pastoral heads will roll, as they did when the bishop of Trenton learned that Fugee had been ministering to children on retreat in his diocese. In the meantime, job one is to protect the head of the archbishop.

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Back in 1954, your classic 501 (c) 3 non-profits (including houses of worship) were prohibited by Congress from engaging in political activity on pain of having to pay taxes. Thirty years later, out of a desire to protect the constitutional rights of churches amidst a revival of faith-based politicking, Congress passed the Church Audit Procedures Act (CAPA). Among other things, CAPA required that an audit of a church had to be approved at the level of IRS regional commissioner or higher before the agency could contact the church. 

Then in 1998, Congress reorganized the IRS, replacing regions with divisions based on the constituency served. Regional commissioners were done away with, and responsibility for approving church audits was given to the director of examinations in the Division of Exempt Organizations. In 2009, a federal judge in Minnesota barred an audit approved by the  director of examinations on the grounds that this violated CAPA. And so far as is known, there hasn’t been a church audit since.

That hasn’t stopped an increasing number of conservative pastors from participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday, an election-year event that began in 2008. The pastors publicly endorse candidates as a way of protesting the 1954 law. Although cracking down on them would hardly require a special audit, the IRS, recognizing PFS for the protest it is, has wisely declined to lift tax exemptions.

CAPA’s audit rule doesn’t apply to faith-based organizations other than houses of worship — which explains the huffing and puffing of the likes of Franklin Graham (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Samaritan’s Purse) and Bill Donohue (Catholic League). Like it or not, these are 501 (c) 3′s that happen to be barred from engaging in politics. And they have strayed close enough to the line to have earned IRS scrutiny.

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In a talk on Saturday about gridlock in Washington, Dukakis pointed to areas where progress could be made (immigration, infrastructure) even as he acknowledged that the two parties differ fundamentally on taxation, economic policy, and the size of government.

– What about the cultural issues? I asked.

– What do you mean by cultural issues? he replied.

– Uh, abortion, same-sex marriage, the death penalty…

– Well, I had some trouble with the death penalty (chuckles from the audience). I never made a secret of my positions on those issues.

In the ’88 general election campaign, Dukakis was pilloried for his opposition to the death penalty, his membership in the ACLU, and the rest of his conventional liberalism in a culture war waged by George H. W. Bush’s campaign manager, the late Lee Atwater. Nearly a decade after the GOP had joined itself to the religious right, the attack seemed to catch him unawares. Twenty-five years later, what he had to offer was the belief that the next generation of Americans would be able to look past this arena of partisan conflict. Take same-sex marriage, he said.

Speaking to the representatives of the next generation in the audience, Dukakis pitched going into public service — a staple of his speeches when he was running for president. Back then, he liked to hark back to John F. Kennedy’s injunction to ask what you can do for your country. Now, he offered two caveats.

The first was that they shouldn’t expect to make a lot of money. The second: “You should have a conventional sex life.” That got the best laugh of the day.

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Myers and Wolf grew up together in the north-central Illinois hamlet of Earlville, where they learned to love science fiction from Space Hawk, a collection of stories about interplanetary gunslinger Hawk Carse, written in the early 1930s by  Harry Bates and Desmond W. Hall under the pseudonym of Anthony Gilmore. Wolf went on to be a writer, most famously inventing the title character in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Myers went into the priesthood, ascending to the diocese of Peoria and thence to Newark. Space Vulture pays homage to their youthful enthusiasm and their lifelong friendship.

The novel pits a galactic Lone Ranger named Victor Corsair against brilliant arch-villain Space Vulture, but the psychological drama at its core has to do with Gil Terry, a physically impaired space outlaw who cares only about himself. Abused as a child by his father, Terry achieves redemption by learning to love a seven-year-old boy and his adolescent older brother after their father has died and their beautiful mother is stolen away by Space Vulture.

At the end, Corsair — an otherwise hyper-ethical straight arrow — saves Terry from being sent to prison planet Purgatory by fibbing to the corrupt and incompetent Star Patrol, and getting his prior charges fixed. (“I called in some favors…”) The two turn out to be brothers too, and Corsair invites Terry to stay with him and the reunited family. (“‘Please, Uncle Gil, please!’ said the boys.’”) It’s decided that he’ll first come for a visit, taking it “one day at a time.”

There’s something disturbing about the tale of a moral reprobate redeemed through the love of young boys (the little one continually hugging him around the legs) and a hero who bends the law on behalf of the man (who happens to be his brother) in order to achieve what he deems a higher moral resolution. At least there is when the author is a bishop accused of shielding his lesser brother priests charged with abusing boys in Illinois and New Jersey.

No one framed Archbishop Corsair…er, Myers. In his novel, he’s pretty much ‘fessed up.

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When I began reading about our new Pope, before working on my own book about his life and the prospects for his pontificate, I quickly recognized that this was a man who deals in concrete facts rather than abstractions, who prefers to deal with people rather than ideas. He has not written books.

And:

So now, after two Pontiffs with extraordinary scholarly credentials, we have a Pope who has no pretensions to intellectual status. After two Pontiffs who were active participants in the Second Vatican Council, anxious to help us understand the Council’s teachings, we have a Pontiff who was ordained to the priesthood after the Council, and has spent his entire ministry putting those teachings into practice. After two great theorists we have a practical tactician.

Yes, yes, Lawler (a Harvard man, like me of the Class of ’72) has great appreciation for Francis’ humbler gifts. Jesus, too, “spoke to ordinary people in their ordinary language.” And, of course, “The Holy Spirit chooses the man for the hour.” But it is hard to avoid a sense that, to Lawler’s way of thinking, the new pope is, well, not quite comme il faut intellectually.

I’m not so sure. What’s true is that Francis is very wary of those who pride themselves on their intellectual grasp of religious doctrine. In a talk six years ago, he had this to say about the Prophet Jonah, who fled God’s command to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh:

Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet…

What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his pre-ordained methods, in his righteous opinions.

At his morning Mass the other day, Francis analyzed Judas in similar terms, as having “an isolated conscience” separated from “the community of others”:

Let us think of that moment with the Magdalene, when she washed the feet of Jesus with nard, which was so expensive. It is a religious moment, a moment of gratitude, a moment of love. And he [Judas] stands apart and criticizes her bitterly: “But … this could be used for the poor!” This is the first reference that I personally found in the Gospel of poverty as an ideology. The ideologue does not know what love is, because they do not know how to gift themselves.”

In his critique of intellectual pride, Francis stands in the tradition of some of the Church’s greatest thinkers. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, liked to criticize book-learning, particularly as practiced by the new philosophers of the Parisian schools, but he himself wrote some of the most sophisticated spiritual theology in the Western tradition; indeed, that shrewd product of the schools, John of Salisbury, called his exposition of the Song of Songs “subtilissima et utilissima.“ 

The new pope may not appear on the world stage in the garb of the academic theologians. But what he has to say may prove to be more subtle, to say nothing of more useful, than what is in their books.

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More importantly, it came to mark the anniversary of the Theophany at Sinai, when God gave the Torah to the Israelite people in a terrifying and unique manifestation with thunder and lightning, volcanic shaking and smoking, intensifying blasts of the shofar, and a flame rising to the heavens. This is the moment when a relationship between a people and their God turns into a religion, complete with doctrines and regulations.

Greek-speaking Jews called the holiday Pentecost, after the 50-day period, and it was on that day that the first followers of Jesus, observant Galilean Jews that they were, were together in Jerusalem.

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

In other words, they spoke in all the languages of the Jews who had come to town from all over the world to sacrifice. And Peter announced to them the new Testament, the new Torah, of Jesus Christ. It was, in short, a recapitulation of the Theophany at Sinai, and the beginning of Christianity — celebrated this Sunday, fifty days after Easter.

George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have called England and America “two countries separated by a common language.” Shavuot/Pentecost reminds us that Judaism and Christianity are two religions separated by a common calendar.

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We talk these days a lot about partisanship in Washington, but Washington is more a symptom than a cause of the country’s political divide. It’s out in the states, where partisan control is less subject to checks and balances, aka gridlock, that the divide is on clearest display. And the clearest case in point is SSM.

After Republicans gained control of both houses of the Minnesota state legislature in the 2010 Tea Party election, they put on the 2012 ballot  a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The amendment went down to defeat 53-47, as did the Republicans. By common consent, it was the defeat of the amendment that energized the majority Democrats to push the state all the way to SSM.

Over the past several decades, it’s been the cultural issues, not the economic ones, that have come to pit the two parties most starkly against each other. These issues may be less consequential by the usual measures of societal well-being, but for that very reason, they make it easier to draw partisan lines in the sand. That’s Culture Wars 101.

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Catholic doctrine holds that abortions are not allowed to save the mother’s life (though indirect termination of fetal life may be permitted under the doctrine of double effect). O’Malley is the current chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, as well as one of the eight cardinals named by Pope Francis as an advisory board last month.

Even though Kenny insists he is merely providing ground rules to clarify a two-decade-old Irish Supreme Court decision permitting abortion in order to protect the mother’s life, the Irish bishops have condemned the proposed legislation. In a statement, O’Malley takes the Irish bishops’ position. Given the American bishops’ position that honors not be given by Catholic institutions to politicians who support abortion rights, he effectively had no choice but to stay away.

At the same time, the episode demonstrates just how far outside common opinion Catholic doctrine is. Kenny’s bill would not permit abortions in cases of rape, incest, or fetal defect. It is telling that, in his statement, O’Malley accuses Kenny of “aggressively promoting abortion legislation” — as if the issue were abortion on demand and not a “life of the mother” exception.

Fully 88 percent of Americans support abortion when the mother’s life is endangered. Many of them, probably most, believe that life begins at conception. It’s just that, for them, the life of the mother holds precedence over the life of the fetus. While such a position is anathema in Catholic doctrine, it seems all but ingrained in human nature.

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Among the institutions of higher learning that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie would like to provide with state funding are the Princeton Theological Seminary, a school dedicated to training Presbyterian clergy, and the Beth Medrash Govoha, one of the largest haredi (ultra-Orthodox) yeshivas in the world.

Of the $1.3 billion in voter-approved construction funding announced last week, the seminary was designated for $645,313 to build a new conference center and upgrade its internet technology. One might ask, for starters, whether it needs the dough.

Thanks to putting its financial affairs in the hands of the late Sir John Templeton, PTS (unrelated to Princeton University) now has an endowment approaching $1 billion to go with its 500 or so matriculated students. With a five percent draw, that’s income of $100,000 per student per year. It doesn’t get any better than that anywhere in higher education.

Then there’s the fact that the seminary’s piece of the pie would come from the state’s Higher Education Technology Infrastructure Fund, which is restricted by law to state-funded institutions. But most relevant for our purposes is the question of whether government should be underwriting sectarian professional training as a matter of constitutional principle.

University divinity schools at places like Yale or the University of Chicago have Christian identities but combine instruction for the pastorate with the academic study of religion, and make it their business to admit qualified students of all faiths and no faith. Just to apply to the M.A. program at Princeton Seminary, you need a letter of pastoral endorsement.

As for Beth Medrash Govoha (BMG), it’s slated to receive $10.6 million for a new library and academic center at its Lakewood campus. Founded 70 years ago, it now boasts over 6,600 students — all male, all engaged in the rabbinic study of Talmud. On a scale of sectarianism, it makes Bob Jones U. look like NYU.

The grants to PTS and BMG have stirred considerable controversy in the New Jersey legislature. But do they violate the constitutional ban on religious establishment? It’s a nice question.

The applicable U.S. Supreme Court case is Tifton v. Richardson, a 1971 case in which the justices permitted the provision of federal funds for construction projects at religious colleges and universities. Arguing against the more separationist view of the minority, Chief Justice Warren Burger made the case that such funding did not violate the Establishment Clause so long as the recipients — in this case, four Catholic institutions of higher learning in Connecticut — were not overly sectarian in their approach:

[B]y their very nature, college and postgraduate courses tend to limit the opportunities for sectarian influence by virtue of their own internal disciplines. Many church-related colleges and universities are characterized by a high degree of academic freedom and seek to evoke free and critical responses from their students.

The record here would not support a conclusion that any of these four institutions departed from this general pattern. All four schools are governed by Catholic religious organizations, and the faculties and student bodies at each are predominantly Catholic. Nevertheless, the evidence shows that non-Catholics were admitted as students and given faculty appointments. Not one of these four institutions requires its students to attend religious services. Although all four schools require their students to take theology courses, the parties stipulated that these courses are taught according to the academic requirements of the subject matter and the teacher’s concept of professional standards. The parties also stipulated that the courses covered a range of human religious experiences and are not limited to courses about the Roman Catholic religion. The schools introduced evidence that they made no attempt to indoctrinate students or to proselytize. Indeed, some of the required theology courses at Albertus Magnus and Sacred Heart are taught by rabbis. Finally, as we have noted, these four schools subscribe to a well-established set of principles of academic freedom, and nothing in this record shows that these principles are not in fact followed. In short, the evidence shows institutions with admittedly religious functions but whose predominant higher education mission is to provide their students with a secular education.

It is doubtful that either Princeton or BMG would meet these criteria. On the other hand, the court’s religious jurisprudence has changed a great deal since Tifton. What looked like inadmissible sectarianism to the most conservative justices in the 1970s might well be considered innocuous by today’s majority, committed as they are to a principle of neutrality entitling religious schools to receive education vouchers and other forms of public funding.

Be that as it may, there is something deeply problematic — one could even say unAmerican — about the use of tax monies to support the training of teachers of religion.

The great charter of American disestablishment, James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” was written in 1785 in opposition to a bill to levy an assessment on the citizens of Virginia to support teachers of religion. And the document of which Thomas Jefferson was most proud, the 1786 “Virginia Act for the Establishment of Religious Freedom,” declares that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.”

I venture to say that both Madison and Jefferson would be urging Gov. Christie to nix the two grants.

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