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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What’s the problem with that?

A Massachusetts Imam says Tsarnaev doesn’t deserve to be buried in a holy place. The town manager of the City of Cambridge doesn’t want a tumultuous interment to disturb the “peace of the city.” And there are worries that his grave might be defaced, or even become a secret shrine for those who profess admiration for what he did.

Behind the resistance there is the unarticulated conviction that to inter such a person would contaminate American soil — to render it somehow impure. People also objected to burying Timothy McVeigh, executed in 2001 for the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

In the end, McVeigh was cremated and his ashes scattered in an undisclosed place. But that didn’t satisfy Dave Shiflett of National Review Online, who declared that he should be dragged “through the desert behind horses until the bastard disappears.” As Ed Linenthal noted in an article on McVeigh in Religion in the News, among those involved in creating the memorial of the bombing, there was a “strong desire to prevent pollution of the memorial center by inclusion of the faces or stories of the perpetrators.”

Interring the likes of McVeigh or Tsarnaev means that there will be a physical reminder of them for all to see. What we seem to want to do is to rub out all physical evidence of them, to expunge them materially from the earth. Lurking in the background is the sense that the physical remains of a person will one day be resurrected — which is why orthodox followers of the Abrahamic faiths do not permit cremation.

And so we find ourselves at an impasse regarding Tsarnaev’s remains. A public that does not want them to remain, and a religious tradition that says they must remain, even if not in holy ground.

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In last Thursday’s self-exculpatory announcement of the departure of Fr. Michael Fugee from the “public exercise of priestly ministry,” they assert:

Following the Memorandum of Understanding, the Archdiocese did not assign Fr. Fugee to any post involving ministry with minors.  His assignments were supervised administrative positions located at the Archdiocesan Center in Newark.

That’s not true. As was reported four years ago, and recalled in the Star-Ledger‘s stories about Fugee’s recent employment with parish youth groups, after his term of probation was over in 2009, Fugee was assigned as a chaplain to St. Michael’s Medical Center, over a mile away from the Center.

This untruth comes in the wake of the archdiocese’s turnaround on the issue of whether, according the memorandum of understanding negotiated with the Bergen County prosecutor’s office, Fugee was permitted to engage in supervised ministry of, and work with, children. When the Star-Ledger‘s Mark Mueller reported two weeks ago that Fugee was indeed doing ministry with minors, the archdiocese said that he was. Last week, they confessed that he wasn’t.

Yesterday, meanwhile, Mueller reported that Fugee had been engaged in youth ministry at a parish in Nutley. This time, Mueller could elicit no comment from Archbishop John J. Myers’ spokesman, Jim Goodness. Which, I suppose, is a step forward for the archdiocese.

By contrast — and the contrast could not have been more pointed — the Bishop of Trenton, David O’Connell, sent a letter to his priests informing them in no uncertain terms what was being done to those responsible for inviting Fugee to engage in youth ministry in his diocese, and why it was being done.

No letter of suitability was sought or obtained and, consequently, the Diocese of Trenton had no knowledge of his presence or ministry there. This was a terrible lapse of judgment on the part of those who extended the invitation, resulting in unrelenting media scrutiny and much anger within the parish and beyond.

The work of the youth ministers at St. Mary’s Parish in Colts Neck has been terminated and Father Tom Triggs has offered his resignation as pastor to me this morning in a meeting I had with him at the parish…

This whole unfortunate episode has underscored the importance of following our own established policies and procedures, especially those designed to protect children and young people. There are few goals as important as protecting children and young people within the Diocese and we all need to do everything within our power to do just that.

The point here that established policies and procedures are not, in themselves, enough. They’ve got to be enforced, and if they are not enforced, then those responsible for enforcing them have to be held responsible.

Recently, Pope Francis met with the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has responsibility for cases of clerical abuse, and (according to a statement) urged the CDF to ”act decisively as far as cases of sexual abuse are concerned, promoting, above all, measures to protect minors, help for those who have suffered such violence in the past (and) the necessary procedures against those who are guilty.” Only if “those who are guilty” includes those who are guilty of covering up and enabling abuse, and who ignore the directives of civil authorities, can such a statement be considered adequate to the task at hand.

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Simplest, of course, is that New England Catholics don’t pay much attention to what the Church teaches. But that just begs the question. What differentiates them from Catholics in other parts of the country is their greater reluctance to impose the teachings of their faith on the rest of society.

As my colleague Andrew Walsh and I argue in One Nation, Divisible, our book on religion and region in American politics, New England Catholics retain a vibrant communal memory of once having been a disfavored minority subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous Yankee behavior. Rather than return the favor, they have chosen to do better unto others than was done unto them. Why should the Catholic proscription of SSM prevail against the wishes of those who have no part of it?

Such privatization — or, one might say, communalization — of Catholic marriage doctrine sits poorly, of course, with bishops who believe the doctrine to be inscribed in natural law and thus incumbent on all people at all times. But for New Englanders all politics tends to be local, which is to say less about big ideas than about reconciling your preferences with mine.

It’s a lesson that Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence would do well to take to heart. Tobin, who did all he could to keep SSM from coming to Rhode Island, was in a monitory mood as he faced the inevitable. Declaring himself “profoundly disappointed,” he warned that

because “same-sex marriages” are clearly contrary to God’s plan for the human family, and therefore objectively sinful, Catholics should examine their consciences very carefully before deciding whether or not to endorse same-sex relationships or attend same-sex ceremonies, realizing that to do so might harm their relationship with God and cause significant scandal to others.

Of course, it can also cause scandal when you disrespect your neighbors’ customs and mores.

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In Finn’s case, Donohue spent much of his energy attacking the Kansas City Star and, true to form, it’s the Newark Star Ledger that draws his ire this time — above all last Sunday’s editorial calling for Myers’ resignation. In his “special report,” entitled ”Star-Ledger’s War on Archbishop Myers,” Donohue argues that the newspaper’s claim that the archbishop abrogated his agreement with prosecutors regarding Fr. Michael Fugee’s is “patently false.”

He also chastises the newspaper for failing to mention that “in addition to being cleared by the civil courts, the archdiocesan review board cleared Fugee of any wrongdoing. Nor did it mention that the case was sent to Rome for review; no charges were brought against him. In other words, Fugee’s case was thrice thrown out. Also, the newspaper failed to mention that there has not been one allegation made against this priest in the past 12 years.”

Before considering whether the agreement was abrogated, let’s review how the conviction of Michael Fugee happened to be thrown out.

On March 19, 2001, Fugee was read his Miranda rights and interrogated by a police detective, who proceeded to elicit a confession from the priest that he had the year before groped an adolescent with whom he was wrestling. In the confession, Fugee admitted that he had been sexually excited by the encounters, acknowledged that he knew they were wrong, and described himself as “bisexual, homosexual, but struggling with that identity.” The interview concluded with Fugee agreeing that his statements had been the result of neither force nor threats and that everything he had said was the truth.

The confession was critical to the prosecution’s case, and in a pretrial hearing in December of 2002, Fugee’s lawyer sought to have it suppressed on the grounds that it had been coerced. The judge wasn’t buying. ”I don’t think the questioning was coercive,” he said. “I think the defendant and the detective had a rapport. … I find it was totally voluntary.”

When he went to trial the following April, Fugee, asserting his innocence, claimed that actually he had not told the detective the truth. ”I lied in this instance to say what was expected of me so then I could go home,” he testified. The jury did not believe him and proceeded to find him guilty of aggravated criminal sexual contact.

It’s important to recognize that something critical happened between Fugee’s confession and his recantation: the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, passed at the June 2002 meeting in Dallas of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The charter, which Myers helped draft, stipulated that “for even a single act of sexual abuse of a minor whenever it occurred which is admitted or established after an appropriate process in accord with canon law, the offending priest or deacon is to be permanently removed from ministry.” In other words, after Dallas, Fugee’s confession was sufficient to guarantee his permanent removal from priestly ministry.

Three years later, a unanimous three-judge appellate panel threw out Fugee’s conviction on the grounds that the judge had not made the priest’s supervisory status sufficiently clear to the jury and that the jury had been prejudiced by being permitted to learn of Fugee’s statements about his own sexual identity. ”They [the statements] injected into the case the specter of a jury deciding a defendant’s guilt on the unfounded association between homosexuality and pedophilia,” his lawyer said.

Donohue has long insisted that the abuse crisis is really just about the disproportionate attraction of homosexual priests to teenage boys, so there is a certain irony in his now embracing a judicial decision based on a rejection of this Donohue Doctrine. Be that as it may, rather than retry Fugee, prosecutors chose instead to forge an agreement with him and the archdiocese that would impose essentially the same penalty on the priest that he had received after conviction.

The agreement was put in the form of a memorandum of understanding that was incorporated by the court into a consent order. The agreement satisfied the state’s need to be assured that Fugee would not be free to molest minors. But what of the act of sexual abuse that he had at first admitted to? Under the Dallas charter, only a determination that such an act had not occurred would allow him to remain in ministry.

And so, it seems, Myers called in his review board. How it could have found that no abuse occurred is beyond me. To be sure, the jury verdict was tainted. But the judge’s finding in open court that Fugee’s confession had been freely and voluntarily given was as valid as ever.  Surely that should have outweighed Fugee’s self-serving testimony.

Nonetheless, the review board went the other way, Rome signed off, and Myers went ahead and returned Fugee to ministry. After he completed his probationary program in June 2009, his first assignment was as chaplain at St. Michael’s Hospital in Newark, where he apparently had the opportunity for contact with minors. When the Star Ledger reported what he was doing, he was dismissed forthwith by hospital officials, who said they had not been informed of his past.

And here we come to the question of whether, under the consent order, Fugee was permitted to engage in supervised ministry of minors, as is now claimed by Donohue and the archdiocese in order to legitimate his work with a youth group in a Monmouth County parish. The relevant passage in the memorandum of understanding stipulates that the archdiocese “shall not assign or otherwise place Michael Fugee in any position within the Archdiocese that allows him to have any unsupervised contact with or to minister to any minor/child under the age of 18 or work in any position in which children are involved. This includes, but is not limited to, presiding over a parish, involvement with a youth group, religious education/parochial school, CCD, confessions with children, youth choir, youth retreats and day care.”

Donohue contends that “the court agreement expressly allowed Father Fugee to have contact with minors, provided he was supervised.” The agreement allows no such thing, expressly or otherwise. The issue of supervision concerns contact with minors alone; “contact” is the only word the adjective “unsupervised” modifies. When it comes to ministering or working, there’s nothing about supervision; the prohibition is absolute. That’s clear not only from the grammar but also from the list of disallowed activities. How is a priest to preside over a parish under supervision?

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the memorandum managed to rise to the level of ambiguity. Wouldn’t the proper thing for Myers to do have been to approach the court for a ruling on the consent order to determine whether Fugee could in fact be permitted supervised ministry to minors? Of course, had he done so, it’s a safe bet that the court would have have said the same thing it did when Fugee’s lawyer tried to have his record expunged in 2009: No way.

Update: Last evening, the Star Ledger reported that Fugee had resigned his ministry, admitting that he had violated the terms of his agreement. For its part, the archdiocese not only accepted the resignation but now claims to have known nothing of Fugee’s activities with the Monmouth County parish youth group, and no longer contends that the terms of the consent order permitted Fugee to minister to minors.

Here are the relevant paragraphs quoting Myers’ spokesman Jim Goodness, from Mark Mueller’s original story:

But 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 the conditions in the agreement.

“We believe that the archdiocese and Father Fugee have adhered to the stipulations in all of his activities, and will continue to do so,” Goodness said.

Yesterday Goodness, had this to say to Mueller: “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.

Will Donohue issue his own clarification? And what will Myers do?

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