Following on Marc's post below about John Julius Norwich's new book about the history of the papacy, I recently came across a review of Norwich's book by Eamon Duffy in the Times Literary Supplement. One might have already been suspicious upon learning that Norwich devotes an entire chapter to the anti-papal satirical legend of Pope Joan, which Bill Keller highlighted in his NY Times review--it's as if a history of the American presidency included an earnest and lengthy examination of the fable of George Washington's refusal to tell a lie when he cut down his father's cherry tree. Duffy--who actually knows something about the history of the papacy and upon whose book Saints and Sinners (Yale UP, 1997) Norwich extensively relies--is not impressed (and calls to mind the scene in "A Fish Called Wanda" when Wanda has to tell Otto that "Aristotle was not Belgian" and "the principle of Buddhism is not 'every man for himself'"):
[Norwich] is not, by his own account, greatly interested in religion, and defines his book as “essentially political, cultural and, up to a point, social”. Occasionally, he warns us, “basic matters of doctrine cannot be avoided”, but as far as possible “I have tried to steer well clear of theology”. This is probably just as well, to judge by the declaration in his opening paragraph that “Roman Catholicism began with Christianity itself; all other Christian religions – and there are more than 22,000 of them – are offshoots or deviations from it”, a claim liable to trigger apoplexy in Constantinople and Cairo, Geneva and Canterbury, and which might elicit a raised eyebrow even in the Vatican. And on theological matters at any rate, errors abound: St Luke was not the author of the earliest gospel, St Peter did not write the epistles which go under his name, Athanasius was never an archbishop, Greek was not the dominant language of the Roman liturgy in the fourth century, St Peter’s Basilica was a cemetery church and never a cathedral, St Jerome was not an Italian, Constantine was not baptized by Eusebius of Caesarea, we do not know the purpose of Gregory VII’s Dictatus papae, and they were certainly never “published”.
....
The Popes is an entertaining book which tells some good stories and embraces a large historical sweep. But its overall effect is curiously trivializing. The papacy depicted here is in the end unintelligible, its power to inspire and its centrality over two millennia of Christian development reduced to a handful of vivid personalities and the to and fro of power politics. Anyone seeking to understand more of the inwardness of the world’s most enduring religious institution will have to look elsewhere.
Take a look at Chris Lund's thorough and thoughtful treatment of the ministerial exemption (h/t Larry Solum). Chris has defended a comparatively muscular reading of the ministerial exemption here at MOJ in times past, and this represents a complete statement of his view.
Last month a group of civil-rights and religious organizations urged President Obama to rescind the Bush administration policies that had affirmed that faith-based organizations contracting with the government may consider individuals' religious commitments in hiring employees. Now comes an answer from a different coalition of organizations of varying faiths, providing varying educational and social services, who have written the President on why it is legitimate, not individious, for faith-based organizations to hire those with the same religious commitment, and why organizations should retain that right when receiving government funds to help them serve others. Here's a key passage:
Religious hiring by religious organizations is not a deviation from the great civil rights legacy of the United States but rather a distinctive and vital feature of it—vital because it protects the religious freedom of religious organizations. And religious organizations are a vital means by which religious individuals exercise their religious faith. To deny religious organizations the ability to be distinctively religious is to deny millions of Americans their unique religious voice. Religious diversity is enhanced when religious groups speak in distinctive religious voices rather than in a coerced monotone.
The signers include representatives from the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference, Jewish organizations, and evangelical agencies, and they range politically from the American Center for Law & Justice to the left-of-center group Sojourners. (HT: Stanley Carlson-Thies, whose Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance provides good leadership on this issue.)
My own defense of the right of funded religious organizations' to faith-based hiring is here (see pp. 37-42, 45-48, 53-56, 65-66), part of a general argument why such organizations should retain important rights of religious autonomy.
From The Telegraph, "Vendee French call for revolution massacre to be termed 'genocide'":
. . . Historians believe that around 170,000 Vendéeans were killed in the peasant war and the subsequent massacres – and around 5,000 in the noyades.
When it was over, French General Francois Joseph Westermann penned a letter to the Committee of Public Safety stating: "There is no more Vendée... According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all." . . .
Maybe I'll have some Burke (and O'Brien) with my Bordeaux today.
Here is an article, from today's Telegraph, noting that some in France are urging, on this Bastille Day, for the anti-Catholic massacres by the revolutionaries to be recognized as "genocide." Read this essay, "Remembering the Vendee", by Sophie Masson.
Here is Conor Cruise O'Brien, on Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France.
I was late in discovering the wonderful fiction of Ron Hansen, but I'm trying to make up for the delay now. I cannot recommend highly enough his novel, "Atticus," which I read on the plane the other day. I'm more and more in agreement with this reviewer, who puts Hansen up there with Flanner O'Connor and Walker Percy.
