The ‘Hear our prayer …’ calumny

Searching twitter we find the blasphemously doctored version of the video below is still being promoted as somehow "true." That despite having been addressed by Media Matters and a page-leading link at the conservative Catholic site PewSitter.com.

Mollie Wilson O'Reilly explains at dotCommonweal:

Did you hear the one about the “Religious Left praying to Obama”? I hope not. Here’s the embarrassing story: a video clip of a pro-universal-health-care prayer service, originally posted on the Gamaliel Foundation web site but appropriated, “captioned,” and distributed by the obviously trustworthy Naked Emperor News and on Breitbart.tv, caused a stir on right-wing blogs yesterday because it reportedly showed liberals chanting the petition, “Hear our cry, Obama.”

Here is the undoctored version:

Some who posted the doctored version did not make forthright corrections when the error was pointed out. For example, Crunchy Con (Rod Dreher) apologized but as O'Reilly observed, still mumbled “I’m pretty sure at least some of those people are saying ‘Obama.’”

Nope. All who believed the "Obama" version were had. When they realize that, they'll almost inevitably consider the source.

Contentious, civil 'Blasphemy Day'

Center for Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz's dissent from the excesses of Blasphemy Day was unexpected and welcome. He wrote:

When we defended the right of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons deploring the violence of Muslim suicide bombers, we were supporting freedom of the press. The right to publish dissenting critiques of religion should be accepted as basic to freedom of expression. But for CFI itself to sponsor the lampooning of Christianity by encouraging anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, or any other anti-religious cartoons goes beyond the bounds of civilized discourse in pluralistic society. It is not dissimilar to the anti-semitic cartoons of the Nazi era. Yet there are some fundamentalist atheists who have resorted to such vulgar antics to gain press attention. In doing so they have dishonored the basic ethical principles of what the Center for Inquiry has resolutely stood for until now: the toleration of opposing viewpoints.

Catholic journalist Dave Gibson, from whom we learned of Kurtz's dissent, writes that there is in it a resonance with Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Gibson observes that of "Blasphemy Day," Mohler wrote:

The sheer foolishness of a blasphemy contest with t-shirts and mugs betrays the lunacy of it all. They can do no better than this? One testimony to the power of God is the fact that his self-declared enemies come off as so childish and manic.

Apparently lost amid the offensive silliness to which Kurtz and Mohler object is the animating purpose: protesting U.N. Resolution 62/154 on "Combating defamation of religions," which offends Mohler, Mainstream Baptist Bruce Prescott, atheist Peter Singer and a long list of others in otherwise unlikely, informal alliance in defense of free expression.

It is nonetheless inescapable that calm, civil response to the Blasphemy Day silliness is an aspect of free expression.

Texas Baptists Committed dramaturgy and change

If you know about Southern Baptists in Texas you know that Texas Baptists Committed (TBC) was organzied to preclude the conservative takeover which racked every other state with a significant Southern Baptist presence, and that strategy is widely regarded to have worked.

From Spiritual Samurai we learned that TBC was going to " Restructure, Relocate, and Refocus." That plan included keeping David R. Currie on a director emeritus, with some unspecified authority and salary.

There was some astonishment and a subsequent story by the Texas Baptist Standard (TBS). Whereupon Samurai blogged his puzzlment over TBS's withholding the story until he scooped them.

Widespread mourning may not have been the rule among blogging Texans. Ken Coffee wrote:

TBC has become what they profess to have hated in others. You have become manipulative control freaks. I would hope, for the sake of the Kingdom and the BGCT, that you would want to change that perception.

Dramatic tension was mantained by Samauri's blog asking just what Currie's "director emeritus" status would mean. Key questions were what authority and pay did the new status entail.

Whereupon Currie really resigned "Sept. 28, effective immediately," as head of the "political organization two decades ago to resist a “fundamentalist takeover” of the Baptist General Convention of Texas."

Lee at Deep In the Heart reviews the difficulties faced by narrowly focused organizations like TBC during times of transition. The issue about which he tactfully walks is whether, original purpose gone, they will survive. Or whether they should.

Lie to me (my parents did)

An adult survivor of childhood abuse responds to Lying as parenting. He begins gently by way of reference to a Fox television show:

For adults molested as children by a trusted caregiver, the attraction of Lie to Me is a promise:

There is someone to tell who will recognize your truth as you tell it and believe you, no matter how innately horrific the details of the account. Because the endless refrain of the molesting caregiver is "No one will ever believe you," sung and hummed while they apply all of their power as trusted adults to ensuring that you are not believed. Like killer whales playing toss with baby seals before eating them, they're doing what is for them entirely natural. ... [so you can see that] ... for adults molested as children by a trusted caregiver, scientific findings that most parents lie to their children for purposes of their own and without apparent remorse, aren't news.

Read on. It's brief and it's here.

Put celluloid pastor/priest Polanski in prison [Addendum]

Original poster for the 1968 film "Rosmary's Baby," directed by Roman Polanski

A celebrity then as now, three decades ago Roman Polanski drugged and raped a protesting 13-year-old girl during a photo session a lesser artistic light might not have been able to arrange.

Polanski fled to France in 1978 on the day of his sentencing, was arrested in Switzerland on Saturday and is predictably the focus of special pleadings on his behalf. For example, the French who protected him for years now argue that there is a case for mercy based on Polanski's "exceptional artistic creation and human qualities." Polish Filmmakers Association chief Jacek Bromski told the Associated Press that Polanski had paid for his crime "by not being able to make films in Hollywood."

They sound like Southern Baptist ministers seeking special treatment for a clerical sexual predator or star believer at sentencing time while the predator is in denial. Thomas J. Reese, S.J. at On Faith indicates the appropriate reaction:

Imagine if the Knight of Columbus decided to give an award to a pedophile priest who had fled the country to avoid prison. The outcry would be universal. Victim groups would demand the award be withdrawn and that the organization apologize. Religion reporters would be on the case with the encouragement of their editors. Editorial writers and columnist would denounce the knights as another example of the insensitivity of the Catholic Church to sexual abuse.
And they would all be correct.
And I would join them

As should we all. Special pleadings for Southern Baptist sexual predators, Catholic priest sexual predators and Academy Award winning director sexual predators are all “elite deviance” and when those pleadings succeed, their success tends to foster repetition of the kind of crime involved.

Sociologists Anson D. Shupe, David G. Bromley define elite deviance as:

…illegal and/or unethical acts committed by persons in the highest corporate and political strata of society who run little risk of exposure or serious punishment, even though their deviance poses danger to the well-being of many others.

The film industry and the French should fall into shamed silence and Polansky should go to prison. There is no special standing which should be permitted to excuse use of one's celebrity, authority as an adult and ability to manipulate to rape an adolescent who was placed in one's care.

Addendum

Mollie at GetReligion conducts an fine, arch survey of the blog duel over Polanski's fate.

Along the way we were reminded that Polanski's plea bargain, three decades ago, was itself a clear example of “elite deviance.” Polanski was to be allowed to plead guilty to one of six charges - unlawful sexual intercourse - and have his sentence commuted to time served.

Polanski fled when the judge indicated he might reject the plea bargain - a worthwhile thought given Polanski's forcible rape of a 13-year-old - and sentence Polanski to prison.

Lying as parenting? Happens all the time ... [Addendum]

In an "honor they father and mother" society who would do research into the frequency with which parents purposefully lie to their children? Oh, and publish findings which show parents often seek to teach honesty and other virtues by lying.

A team which included Gail Heyman who is a professor of psychology at University of California San Diego (UCSD), Diem Luu who is a former UCSD student and and Kang Lee who is a professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Institute of Child Study at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

TS-SI news service reports:

Heyman and Lee are now preparing an international study to explore the subject further, and they are also beginning to study the possible consequences of "parenting by lying": Does it create confusion about right and wrong? Does it undermine a child's trust?

Well: Does it?

Addendum: Children remember and may lose faith in you

The studies looked at two groups consisting of 127 university students; and 127 unrelated parents. Students were asked whether they recalled their parents lying to them and why. Parents if they had lied to their children.

The University of Tronto's Kang Lee told Canada AM this week:

They found that 88 per cent of the students said they remembered their parents lying to them. And, 78 per cent of the parents admitted they lied to their kids.
...
"Kids have very long memories of the lies. We surveyed college students and many of them remembered vividly the lies their parents told 15 or 20 years before," he said.
...
"The problem is that if the child discovers their parents have been lying to them, they may lose trust in their parents' parenting efforts," [Lee] said.

Alaska Left Behind ...

The Mudflats bloggers were Left behind in Alaska when former Gov. Sarah Palin "was raptured by the far right fringe" to Hong Kong where the Asia Times reports she received to a mixed reception. Economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman observed that her analysis in that speech suffers from an absence of any facts to back up her claims.

Nonetheless inspired, Frank Walker at decidedly Catholic PewSitter.com invented a Palinesque "common sense:"

The honesty and simple wisdom of Sarah Palin is rejuvenating. Many who lead the Catholic Church will hopefully take notice. Today there are bishops worldwide who will go to almost any lengths in the name of social justice. Often when they do, they reveal their allegiances and their worldliness. This week the social justice arm of the USCCB, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, is under intense light again for its openly political, anti-Catholic, and corrupt beneficiaries. In Vienna Cardinal Schoenborn recently tried to squelch a pro-life rally and then forbad clergy to participate. Notre Dame, the pre-eminent American Catholic University, continues to prosecute eighty-eight pro-life demonstrators, including Norma McCorvey, following the Obama honors last spring. In August Boston's O'Malley scandalized the world with a funeral for anti-life pariah Ted Kennedy, and this past week Scotland's Cardinal O'Brien railed in the press about global catastrophes, millions of refugees, and the poor before a climate meeting at the UN.

What hath transcendence of Alaska made her then, but a vessel to be filled by conservatives in need of someone about whom to rapture. Factlessness, no object.

Losing a pastor to depression [Addendum: Preachers and depression]

Suicide Survivor Resources

• Surviving the First Year
• What Others Can Do
• Suicide Survivor's Guide
• British Support Group: Shadow of Suicude
• After Suicide
• Healthy Place.com: Suicide and Children
• KidsHealth: About Teen Suicide
• Child Suicide page.

From Buster

Each of us has an organic, living brain which is prey to illnesses to which stigma is typically attached.

The psychic pain of acute depression is, one psychotherapist writes, "wholly incompatible with human life as we know it." Even the acutely depressed who successfully seek the help of a loving, supportive community like that of Sandy Ridge Baptist Church may not survive.

The North Carolina Biblical Recorder reports that in the death of pastor David Treadway of Sandy Ridge Baptist Church in Hickory.

Several months ago Treadway ... told the congregation he was under doctor’s care for depression. An early statement Sunday from church leadership said their pastor had “succumbed to the disease of depression.”

At the spiritual core of this is love for one another and freely given help for those in need -- now for his surviving family and congregation -- but also the others who are afflicted by one of the mental illnesses into which any of us may fall. No matter where we are, the latter are in fact all around us. There is no better time to notice.

Addendum

Hickory Daily Record obituary for David Treadway

Online Guestbook for David Treadway

Biblical Recorder series on preachers and depression

• Preachers and depression
• Culture, isolation push some to depression
• Members should help pastor set boundaries

Refried Paige

Paige sings, eyes closed

Christa at Stop Baptist Predators brought perspective to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Page Patterson's tough-guy “taking the hill” for Christ video.

She recalls the deaf ear Patterson gave female Criswell College students at Criswell College, where Patterson was then in charge, who tried to tell him of sexual abuses by his protege, Baptist pastor Darrell Gilyard.

But Patterson turned a blind eye to Gilyard’s reported abuses and a deaf ear to the young women who tried to get some help.
Finally, after two decades of do-nothingness from Patterson and other Baptist leaders, the law put a stop to Gilyard when it convicted him of molesting a 15-year-old in Florida.

Read her entire blog here.

Sometimes sleepily blogging late at night ...

According to the Boston Phoenix:

This photograph was taken on March 29, 2004 when the Massachusetts Legislature voted to ban gay marriage and establish civil unions.

[Signs] held by gay marriage supporters that [focused] on gays who've made history such as Leonardo da Vinci, Alan Turing, who invented the computer, and Katherine Lee Bates, who wrote "America the Beautiful. "The [tongue-in-cheek] sign focusing on Turning, for example, read: DESTROY THE COMPUTER! IT'S A HOMOSEXUAL INVENTION BY ALAN TURING. WHO CARES IF HE CRACKED THE GERMAN ENIGMA CODE AND WON WORLD WAR II. IT'S A HOMO'S DEVIL MACHINE.
Tom Lang of Manchester by the Sea held one of the signs -- which have taken some viewers a few moments to figure out. "We're trying to show how important gay people are to the American culture," Lang explained. "We're not mental. We're not immoral. But we're important to society and interwoven into the tapestry of America."

Some bloggers, like Bruce, Mark and PZ Myers, almost seem to take the sign seriously.

Bruce is, after all, "speechless."

Whereas the sign-holder speaks clearly, making her sympathies abundantly clear by holding, immediately beneath the sign, what we discovered is an LBGT Rainbow Flag.

Turing, of course, did not invent the computer.

Even so, sometimes while blogging sleepily, very late at night, regardless of the sexuality of the various inventors involved in creating these devices ...

Regarding 'International Blasphemy Day'

Atheist Paul Zachary "PZ" Myers saw in Blasphemy Day International 2009 the opportunity to live his unfaith and make a point, while Al Mohler saw the opportunity to live his faith and make some converts.

Blasphemy Day is at its core a protest against the U.N. Resolution 62/154 on "Combating defamation of religions," which Mohler also finds offensive.

The BD Facebook page says:

The UN, rather than standing up for free speech, has given in to pressure from Islamic nations and has proposed a resolution to essentially ban criticism of religion. In its pursuit of "tolerance" for religion, this resolution wants to strip everyone, everywhere, of their freedom, even their obligation, to criticize what they oppose. Unlike one’s political affiliation or favorite sports team, religion demands – and has been granted – unique immunity from criticism since its very inception. Labeling anything deemed critical "blasphemy", religions have effectively defined the boundaries for what can and can’t be said about them. We propose we knock down this barrier and break this spell.

As Mohler wrote in his April 17 blog:

This United Nations Human Rights Council resolution offends Peter Singer, and it offends me as well. The United Nations has no right protect adherents of any religious belief system from being offended. It should expend its energies defending the religious liberty of all persons everywhere. That policy would put the offense where it belongs.

Bruce Prescott at Mainstream Baptist, who has no truck with either Mohler or the likes of Myers, wrote on April 17:

Defaming Islam is rude and insensitive and is a faux paux for which many Southern Baptists are guilty, but it certainly should not be criminalized.
At their best, both Christianity and Islam recognize that open inquiry permitting honest critique is central to the search for truth.

If there is any blasphemy here on Sept. 30, it will be accidental and we expect you to hold us to account for it, but opposition to U.N. Resolution 62/154 is just.

About spam from banks where you have no account ...

Wait until the bank with whom you do no business sends you confidential data, and that bank has the court temporarily suspend your (Business? Church?) email account.

For that decision, U.S. District Court Judge James Ware has won Jackass of the Week from Daring Fireball and a variety of somewhat more explicit characterizations at Slashdot.

Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank started it all by complying with a request to send loan documents to a customer, and complied by sending the too much data to the wrong address. Rather than merely send loan documents, the employee also sent "a file containing confidential information for 1,325 other customers."

Then, according to The Register:

After a failed attempt to recall the email, the employee sent a second note to that wrong address, requesting that the confidential email be deleted before it was opened. There was no response, so the bank contacted Google to determine what could be done to ensure that the confidential info remained confidential. According to the court papers, Google would not provide information on the account unless it received a subpoena or "other appropriate legal process."
So the bank sued.

A truly bizarre series of events, since only a digital security nitwit would do anything with email purporting to be from a bank with which he does not do business, other than delete it. Because such emails are typically both scams and vehicles for malware.

But you can protect yourself (Business? Church?) from this sort of thing, can you not? Without exposing yourself to both endless distraction and malware?

Called to be a nun, she decided to run

Torres (right) and friend Kate (left)

Alicia Torres is running to pay off "more than $90,000 in student loans so she can enter religious life," writes Joyce Duriga.

She's a lifelong Catholic who wants to be a nun.

So Torres runs road races to attract donations, since she must be debt free to take up her vocation, blogging her effort at The Nun Run

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's '20 worst sentences'

Just three, explained, from Tom Chivers list:

20. Angels and Demons, chapter 1: Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete.
They say the first rule of fiction is “show, don’t tell”. This fails that rule.
19. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 83: "The Knights Templar were warriors," Teabing reminded, the sound of his aluminum crutches echoing in this reverberant space.
“Remind” is a transitive verb – you need to remind someone of something. You can’t just remind. And if the crutches echo, we know the space is reverberant.
18. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.
Ah, that familiar tang of deionised essence.

Read the rest here at The London Telegraph.

Heavenly beauty

An image of the Butterfly Nebula from the upgraded Hubble Space Telescope:

What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour -- fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes!

Uh-oh. What do we do now, Dr. Dobson?

Children who are spanked are likely to as a result have lower IQs?

That's not what Dr. James Dobson promised us in Dare to Discipline. He wrote that corporal punishment was a part of saving us, our society and our children from the unfortunate results “unstructured permissiveness we saw in the mid-twentieth century.”

Yet typically conservative Time reported yesterday:

On Friday, a sociologist from the University of New Hampshire, Murray Straus, presented a paper at the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, in San Diego, suggesting that corporal punishment does leave a long-lasting mark — in the form of lower IQ. Straus, who is 83 and has been studying corporal punishment since 1969, found that kids who were physically punished had up to a five-point lower IQ score than kids who weren't — the more children were spanked, the lower their IQ — and that the effect could be seen not only in individual children, but across entire nations. Among 32 countries Straus studied, in those where spanking was accepted, the average IQ of the survey population was lower than in nations where spanking was rare, the researcher says.

NBC’s chief medical editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman summarized the issues well:

Straus' conclusions refuse to be ignored: "... across entire nations. Among 32 countries ... ."

That does turn Dobson on his head. Although the issue is complex, the effect seems to transcend socio-economic groupings. Eloquent oversimplification at length was always Dobson's sin, one which sold the book that is the true foundation of his media/political empire. There is simply more data now that Dobson's oversimplification of the issues was exactly that.

The American Academy of Pediatrics didn't succumb to oversimplification in either direction in 1998 when it adopted a policy on discipline which reads in part:

When advising families about discipline strategies, pediatricians should use a comprehensive approach that includes consideration of the parent-child relationship, reinforcement of desired behaviors, and consequences for negative behaviors. Corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents be encouraged and assisted in the development of methods other than spanking for managing undesired behavior.

Unless we wish to take the risk -- which with each passing year of scientific research looks more like a certainty -- of rearing children who are discernibly less intelligent than they might have been, we will dare to discipline without violence.

Refusing to equate religious fervor with terrorism

Paul Moses writes:

The New York Times carried a profile today of Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old man suspected of a terrorism conspiracy. I admire the way Michael Wilson wrote the piece because it reflects a humility often missing in news coverage: Although the piece is well-reported, it makes clear that much about Zazi is not known, and that he has not been proven guilty of the charges against him. ... The article explores the way Islam played a role in Zazi’s life, but avoids the trap of equating religious fervor with terrorism ... .

Read the entire blog at dotCommonweal.

Without linking to a single Baptist blogger

Douglas Baker of the Oklahoma Baptist Messenger has penned a blog On Baptists and Blogging without linking to a single Baptist blog and without naming a single Baptist blog, although in a paragraph about ChurchRelevance's top 100 church blogs he does allude to some Baptist bloggers by name.

Whew! What a relief.

Because, despite his headline, the primary named focus of Baker's writing is on Joshua Micah Marshall's decidedly secular Talking Points Memo.

After an eerie exercise in reading Marshall's mind, Baker incorrectly describes Marshall as a "a junior editor at The American Prospect" while writing about the period during which Marshall was Washington editor. That was after Marshall served as associate editor. Not "a junior editor" in either case.

Having both lost track of the facts and demonstrated a failure to grasp the hyperlinked nature of blogs (by failing to do any linking himself), Baker proceeds to warn us, it seems, that blogs are somehow innately deceptive:

The challenge for the Christian blogger is to both expose and edify in a manner that obeys Jesus' process of log and speck (Matt. 7:5). Far too often blogging can be both anonymous and autonomous, tricking the writer into thinking that what they write and how they respond represents true community and reality. The real test for great writing is not its spontaneity or immediacy. Rather it is the ability to write in a manner consistent with Christian doctrine and communicated in a manner that seeks to be salt and light in the midst of a very dark world. With this as the goal, there is hope that blogging might truly be used to the glory of God.

Speaking of deceptions, that paragraph is one.

It makes unproven, undocumented, unlinked and otherwise unillustrated assertions about blogs, effectively finding some unmeasured group of blogs guilty of "tricking" someone. It then proceeds immediately to reach a vague yet effectively irrebuttable conclusion about what these possibly nonexistent blogs should do.

Okey-dokey.

Ready, aim, read (we hope)

Tony writes of books and bullets

Preach politics Sunday has come around again

Preach politics Sunday is tomorrow, and last year Lifeway Research found that over half of all Americans believe churches that publicly endorse candidates for public office should lose their tax exemption.

What has changed?

Nothing. It's a political stunt the Alliance Defense Fund is sponsoring again this year. Their goal is to provoke a court challenge of the applicable Internal Revenue Service code, which has been in place since 1954.

The issue is not whether pastors are free to preach politics from the pulpit. They are, although that preaching may jeopardize their church's IRS 501(c)(3) status.

May.

This year ADF says more than 80 pastors are involved, and if events follow the same course as last year, it will be all preaching and no court action.

The Pew Forum covered the issue nicely last year.

Advanced knowledge of Williamson's radicalism? 'Calumny' the cardinal says

The anticipated Swedish television broadcast aired discussing who knew what, when, about SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson's Holocaust denial.

Catholic Culture reports:

Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos has heatedly denied a report that he had been informed about the extreme views of Bishop Richard Williamson prior to the January 2009 announcement that the Pope was lifting the excommunications of Williamson and other bishops of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX).
In a Swedish television broadcast earlier this week, Bishop Anders Arborelius of Stockholm disclosed that he was aware of Bishop Williamson's statements questioning the severity of the Holocaust, and had alerted Vatican officials to those statements. But Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos -- who, as president of the Ecclesia Dei commission at that time, was primarily responsible for Vatican talks with the SSPX, told the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung that it was "calumny" to say that he had been informed of Williamson's views.

Francesco Colafemmina writes that Cardinal Castrillon said that prior to the lifting of SSPX Bishop's excommunication "none of us knew nothing about Bishop Williamson's statements. None of us! And no one had the duty to know it!"

Thus ends the finger-pointing, for a while.

Birthermercial bumper stickers with help from LivePrayer.com

Send faxes and get a birthermercial bumper sticker for just $30 (Call now: Supplies are limited?). Let Bill Keller and Gary Kreep mislead you (Baptist Center for Ethics, PolitiFact 1 & 2, FactCheck 1 & 2,Wikipedia) with musically attended claims that this is a legitimate debate. Just watch the new ad full of dramatic rehashes of claims about where Obama was born. TPM reports that it's running in seven Southern states.

The infomercial is hosted by Keller, a Liberty University educated fundamentalist minister who served "nearly three years in prison" for insider trading and whose LivePrayer.com produced the ad. Keller explains that LivePrayer.com was "founded for the sole purpose of having a site on the internet where people can go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for prayer." although the LivePrayer.com site has become complex and is decorated with, for example, a photoshopped image of Obama with Hitler.

Keller interviews Kreep, who not only heads the birther organization U.S. Justice Foundation but also sponsors Defend Glenn (Beck), is attorney for Obama death pastor Wiley Drake and has been general counsel for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

Both are wonderfully certain of themselves. Although in a recent ruling on one of the court actions filed with regard to this matter. U.S. District Judge Clay Land said that, "Unlike in 'Alice in Wonderland,' simply saying something is so does not make it so."

Below is the introduction to the 28-minute ad:

Great Commission Desurgence?

Is it a Desurgence or a Resurgence?. As of this writing the Southern Baptist Convention's Pray4GCR had signed up 5,458 prayer partners

That's 0.034% of the roughly 16 million Southern Baptists and fewer than the 6,182 regular attendees at GCR task force chairman Ronnie Floyd's church.

Yet Floyd offered the number of registrants to the Florida Baptist Witness as evidence that "God is making His will known to those leaders about their future. Therefore, I trust God and trust them."

Even if God shows a certain lack of initial enthusiasm for the project? Or is this simply Southern Baptists responding to the dearth of straight GCR answers? Gobbledygook won't get it with practical-minded Southern Baptists, we fear.

Seven unsolid BSCNC pillars

Why did the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina would include Eddie Hammett on a list of employees it let go in August?

He's a prolific author, well-known church consultant and someone who draws crowds to breakout sessions about reaching young people while keeping older people.

The rational for throwing Hammett overboard lies deep within a speech made by BSCNC Executive Director-treasurer Milton Hollifield three months before the layoffs.

Hollifield told the BSCNC's Board of Directors on May 20 that the organization had been streamlined based on a document called "Seven Pillars for Ministry," which outlines Hollifield's vision for the BSCNC. Hollifield told the directors then that he did not know if the BSCNC would be able to get by without downsizing.

"I shared that possibility with our staff this week. Painfully, I told them, I could not promise that we would be able to avoid eliminating positions," he said. "If we do, however, it will be based upon what we consider to be mission critical in the direction of the work as documented in the 7 Pillars booklet."

One would assume, therefore, that Hammett's role was not considered "mission critical" under the "seven pillars." They are:

1. Practice fervent prayer.
2. Strengthen existing churches.
3. Promote evangelism and church growth.
4. Plant new multiplication churches.
5. Increase work with the international community.
6. Escalate technology improvements and upgrade the web site.
7. Reclaim the younger generation of church leaders.

Several of the areas don't seem to fit Hammett's strengths. Yet it is still true that Hammett helped strengthen N.C. Baptist churches and helped reclaim younger leaders.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina understood that. That group hired Hammett about a month after he was let go by the BSCNC.

“Eddie brings to the table a unique awareness of the challenges and needs of congregational life in the 21st century," said Larry Hovis, the CBFNC coordinator. "His background as a staff minister in local churches, coupled with his experience and expertise in coaching and consulting, will be an invaluable asset to what CBFNC is already doing in bringing Baptists together in North Carolina for Christ-centered ministry.”

BSCNC's loss is clearly CBFNC's big gain.

All of which leaves us with an nagging question: If they rationalize bad decisions, how can those pillars hold the BSCNC roof up?

Abandoned

When Christians leave a church, members go find them, if for no other reason to make sure they're alright. Don't they?

Real Live Preacher writes:

Most of the time when people leave our church, however, they just disappear. We notice their repeated absence after some weeks have passed.

After which he tries to track them down, to find out why they left. Which is, after all, his job. Otherwise, although he does not say so, they might actually disappear or be abandoned. As often happens in our society, as Norman Jamison doesn't quite say either when he chronicles the cases of:

• Mary Sue Merchant, 74, whose body was discovered in her Sandy Run, S.C., residence more than a year after she died.
• Marvin Schur, 93, who froze to death after his electricity was cut off.
• Angel Torres, 78, who died a year after he was left paralyzed and mute in a hit-and-run accident that was mostly ignored by witnesses.

Those were headline-grabbing, heart-rending cases in a nation which both systematically and accidentically abandons people. We abaondone people because they have become inconvenient. And when that aspect of our nature comes home to us, we look briefly and turn away. As we did in 2005, when the evidence was massive:

“Let me tell you about abandoned people,” whispered J.R., his voice rising above the sighs and soft snores of sleepers curled on the church pews around him.
“Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans,” he said, “they were abandoned long before that hurricane hit. We all were.”
J.R. (he gave no other name) spends his days with 100 others, embraced in the warmth of a magnificent edifice, 103-year-old St. Boniface Church.
Sunlight streams through stained glass and gilded saints smile down upon them from the domed ceilings; the smells of their sour, acrid clothes and bodies mix with the lingering scent of incense.
This looks like an evacuation center - row after row of desperate people and their sparse belongings, a backpack here, a blanket there.
But this roomful of displaced people is neither an emergency shelter nor a temporary situation.
This is an ongoing, daily, chronic disaster.

Or visit a nursing home, where able-bodied family members have discarded those with whom they no longer wish to be bothered. You don't have to look far. We're Americans. We abandon the inconvenient.

Abandon reality ye who enter there

Kelly Boggs of the Louisiana Baptist Messenger does not list, link to or provide pictures of a single item in his "litany" of "positions" he says liberals take regarding sexual matters.

He chooses instead to make it up, asserting as fact:

When it comes to all things pertaining to sexuality and sexual expression, ardent liberals advocate for nothing less than sexual anarchy. A litany of the left’s positions affirms that the previous statement is an ironclad truth.

Reality thus abandoned, Boggs thunders right along to endorse as our collective guide to sexual sanity British anthropologist J.D. Unwin's 1940 paper "The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society." As though Unwin's theories were fully developed.

Unwin, who was not a Christian, didn't live to fully develop his theory of "the sexual foundations of a new society," notes Christianity Today. Although the incomplete works were published in Hopousia. Boggs nonetheless uses Unwin's scholarship to forecast the fall of American civilization. That does, however, fit nicely with the attention to facts with which Boggs launches his argument.

Batholics & Cathists in Georgia [Addendum II: No answer]

The Southern Batholics and Cathists have proposed what could become the legal framework of a Georgia Inquisition. Depending upon how it is applied, of course.

It is an amendment to the Georgia Baptist Convention Constitution that Enid, Oklahoma, Southern Baptist pastor Wade Burleson rightly dubs "horrible" -- one Girolamo Savonarola could have greeted warmly.

Yet calmly Michael Ruffin, First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald, GA., offers the text of it to the readers of his blog, On Jericho Road. The keystone section says:

A cooperating church is one that gives evidence of its belief in Holy Scripture as its authority in matters of faith and practice and is in harmony and cooperation with the work and purpose of this Convention. A cooperating church does not include a church which knowingly takes, or has taken, any action to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior.

Matter of factly, Ruffin addressed some questions about the proposed amendment to the editor of the Georgia Christian Index. And in his first set of questions, Ruffin captures of spirit of the amendment as stated:

First, what is the nature of the "evidence" that is going to be required? Will it be good enough for a church to say, "Why yes, we believe in Holy Scripture as our authority in matters of faith and practice"?
Or will each local Georgia Baptist church that desires to continue as a cooperating GBC church be required by the GBC to adopt a confessional statement that affirms its commitment to biblical authority? If such an adoption is to be required, will a church be expected or allowed to compose its own statement or will it be permitted -- or maybe even required -- to adopt the Baptist Faith & Message Statement (rev. 2000) article on Scripture -- or perhaps the entire statement -- in order to be seen as providing sufficient "evidence"?

What Pastor Ruffin and a great many other thoughtful readers cannot help but read in the proposed amendment is Baptist ministerial behavior which has about it the scent of doctrinal inquisition.

Having seen and understood the obvious, then, Ruffin is really just asking how far it will go.

Certainly not to death by burning such as Savonarola suffered in the Piazza della Signoria. But how far? How much of the rich heritage of freedom of Baptist thought will be lost to creedalism if the amendment is adopted?

One commenter on Ruffin's blog predicted his questions and their answers will not see publication in the Georgia Christian Index Web site.

We asked @IndexEditor Gerald Harris via twitter whether he plans to publish the answers to Ruffin's questions on the Georgia Christian Index Web site.

For a mainstream daily newspaper, the answer would be an immediate "yes," followed by publication.

That outcome seems to us likely to be in this case, because newspapers exist to inform their readers, and this is a matter of considerable concern.

Addendum: No answer from @IndexEditor

More than a day after our first tweet and second tweet to Georgia Christian Index Editor Gerald Harris (@indexeditor), there has been no reply.

But his recent twitter stream reveals neither replies nor consistent, daily status messages.

Harris's recent, public twitter history suggests that he simply doesn't know how to use the service.

Lessons?

Addendum II: Sunday about 6 p.m. Still no answer.

Whither straight GCR answers?

Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt thinks state baptist newspaper stories about North American Mission Board/International Mission Board merger are "ludicrous."

Meanwhile Ronnie Floyd, the chairman of the Great Commission Resurgence task force. is feeding that ludicrous fire.

Floyd reportedly told the Florida Baptist Witness three times in a recent email interview:

. . . the search committees of the respective entities should be "very prayerful and watchful of the work of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force" when asked if the GCR Task Force may be considering recommendations that could alter the structure of those entities.

Now what do you suppose he meant by "alter the structure" of the NAMB and/or IMB?

Clarification was sought by the Baptist Witness. Asked to if the retirement announcements of Jerry Rankin (IMB) and Morris Chapman (CEO of the SBC Executive Committee), and the forced resignation of Geoff Hammond (NAMB) indicated a restructuring, Floyd said:

"These developments have clarified that God is doing something among us and we need to be intentional on finding out what He is doing and joining Him in it."

Okey-doke.

Still needed: Straight GCR answers.

'Atheistic fundamentalism'

Mark Silk rationally answers P.Z. Myers abandonment of the data. Read the entire entry here.

Saddleback recants (almost)

Confusing, both because correction was delayed until the raging controversy quieted, and because the original statement was clear. Nonetheless, a Saddleback Church minister reportedly told church members that he never intended to say Baptist women are obligated by scripture to stay in violently abusive relations.

It began on Jan. 8 when Associated Baptist Press (ABP) lit a fire simply by reporting:

Rick Warren, the Southern Baptist megachurch pastor chosen to offer the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration, says the Bible does not permit a woman to divorce a spouse who is abusing her.

Half a year passed before Saddleback Teaching Pastor Tom Holladay, who actually voiced the controversial audio clip, said in a statement to Saddleback Church members that it was all a misunderstanding. According to ABP, he said he was just trying to explain to explain "the difference between an angry exchange between spouses and domestic violence" and:

"We believe that one violent incident is obviously more than enough to demand the need for a separation ... ." And if an abusive spouse refuses to repent and try to change, there eventually comes a point at which he or she has abandoned the marriage and it cannot be saved.

That's a little convoluted but not incomprehensible. Even so, in the course of the audio clip (transcript) he said, “I wish there were a third [reason for divorce] in Scripture, having been involved as a pastor with situations of abuse… There is something in me that wishes there were a Bible verse that says, ‘If they abuse you in this-and-such kind of way, then you have a right to leave them.’”

Momlogic has former Saddleback Church member Sheri Ferber's account of receiving the kind of counsel apparent in the now-deleted audio clip. Momlogic notes that Saddleback has been asked to comment but has failed to do so.

This is of more than passing importance in part because Warren was chosen to give the invocation at Barak Obama's presidential inauguration, in part because Warren has a politically active ministry which includes calling presidential candidates to his Faith Forum and in part because the submission Southern Baptist doctrine requires of women can be dangerous.

The foundations, impact and validity of that submission are a matter of ongoing debate. But the necessity of keeping the vulnerable safe should not be.

Today's nominee for worst headline

Texas Baptists Committed to Seek New Leader!

The lead psychiatrist for the treatment team is guardedly pessimistic.

Protestants aren't the only ones who complain about the choir

The Italian [Catholic] Bishops Conference is looking at the rules for music and the magazine Espresso is running a poll along with its article on the national harmonic crisis.

It still isn't true, I tell you!

Swedish television coverage of what the pope knew and when he knew it is now scheduled to air tonight and the Catholic News Agency to reports:

The director of the Holy See’s press office, Father Federico Lombardi, denied again today that Pope Benedict knew Bishop Richard Williamson held Holocaust diminishing beliefs before the Pontiff lifted the excommunication of the Pius X Society bishop. Such charges only “lead to creating confusion for no reason,” he said.

Whew!

Sanctions 'are inevitable' [maybe]

Our attention-eager friends on the Religious Right surely did not anticipate seeing Iran quickly give ground in the face of "weak" President Barak Obama by offering to have its nuclear experts meet with U.S. scientists.

Although they must have known of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's statement last week, echoed today, that "Sanctions are seldom productive but they are sometimes inevitable." If they knew, you see, our friends were demanding what they had good reason to suspect was in fact inevitable. That's, well, an easy victory.

As real events proceed apace, however, their hyperventilating open letter begins to look a bit, er, undignified.

Mediation toward a settlement between FBC Jax Watchdog and FBC Jax

Makes sense to us.

Chances FBC Jacksonville, Fla., will enter into mediation toward such a proposal?

Approximately 0.

Presidents Anti-Christ

Good news! Only 10% now think Obama is the Anti-Christ, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey. What a creative bunch. Especially the Southern Baptists among them, it seems. Wade Burleson tells us that the video below is the work Carl Gallups, the Southern Baptist pastor of Hickory Hammock Baptist Church in Milton, Florida. Gallups is a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (an SBC seminary).

Read Burleson's sad, blissfully brief review here.

Or consider the possibility that Obama is one in a series, since other recent presidents have also been declared the Anti-Christ:

• George Bush
• Bill Clinton (Or the decoy anti-Christ
• Jimmy Carter
• Ronald Reagan

Frank Schaeffer summed it all outrageously up for Rachael Maddow:

:

That new poll may have found evidence of contagious Shaefferesque brain rot. Talking Points Memo reports:

Respondents were asked whether each of the two most recent presidents are the Anti-Christ. For former President George W. Bush being the Anti-Christ: 8% yes, 81% no, 11% undecided, with a breakdown among Democrats of 14%-75%-11%. And whether President Obama is the Anti-Christ: 10% yes, 79% no, 11% undecided, with a split of 19%-67%-15% among Republicans.

:looks for hiding place:

No, it isn't true

Attempting to refute allegations Sveriges Television AB is scheduled to air tonight, chief Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said, "Affirming or even insinuating that the Pope was informed beforehand of [Holocaust-denying views of SSPX Bishop Richard] Williamson's position is absolutely groundless."

An international furor ensued in March after Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications Williamson and of three other Lefebvrite bishops. It drove Vatican-Jewish relations almost to the breaking point and the broadcast threatens to unsettle matters again.

The broadcast has been called “an attack on the Holy Father." It covers what the Vatican knew about Williamson prior to the move toward rapprochement with Society of St. Pius X.

Matthew Hay Brown of the Baltimore Sun's In Good Faith Blog reports:

The SVT program does not say that Pope Benedict XVI knew of Williamson’s beliefs.

If so, this little fire may quickly burn out.

No faith-based federal aid (at all)

Susan Jacoby goes right to the core of the faith-based federal aid debate:

To require any religious institution to hire people who do not agree with and represent its principles is absurd. That is why the government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization, whatever its hiring practices.
This is not only my position as a secular civil libertarian. It is also the position of honest religious leaders, like the Rev. Albert H. Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. For Mohler, it is unthinkable that Baptists should compromise their religious principles--such as their mission to proselytize for Christianity--in order to receive federal grants. Therefore, understandably enough, he opposes the acceptance of government aid by churches. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints has taken the same position.

At issue is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed in 1993 and designed to protect religious liberty, not countenance discrimination.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been asked to reverse the “constitutionally questionable” June 2007, Bush administration memo which held that RFRA could exempt certain religious organizations from federal anti-discrimination provisions.

Not enough, Jacoby says, and not a chance more than that will be done. Ever.

Here come the Nones

Are Nones a denomination, demographically?

They don't identify with a religion and their percentage has doubled since 1990, giving them 15 percent of the population, according to Trinity College's 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS).

Now, look at their behavior, says Mark Silk of Trinity College's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. They are "are just as likely to switch to a religion in later life as those with a religion are to switch to something else."

Perhaps because Nones are not, despite occasional cries of evangelical panic, sweepingly irreligious. Fewer than 10 percent identify themselves as atheists or atheistic. The majority of Nones (59%) are agnostic or deist.

When Nones may become the largest U.S. denomination, or as Silk observes, group which acts very much like a denomination, U.S. religious life promises to be more rather than less complex.

Christian Right reassertion [fail]

Christian Right spokesmen, several Southern Baptist Convention leaders and a few others sent an open letter Tuesday calling for actions against Iran which mirror the recommendations of Republicans published in the Washington Post. Both called for trade sanctions to discourage Iran from further nuclear arms development.

Both sets of recommendations were timed to coincide with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's arrival in New York for a Sept. 23 address to the United Nations and a meeting with leaders of Group of 20 leading industrial nations, which are to meet for Thursday and Friday in Pittsburgh. And neither made substantial new policy recommendation.

In their news release about the letter, the group said:

In a remarkable ecumenical and bipartisan display of unity, Christian leaders representing over 28 million evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and other Christians have sent a letter to Congress today and other key world leaders calling for urgent action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The letter urges a total arms embargo and a cut off of exports of refined petroleum products, including gasoline, as a firm yet peaceful measure against the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

The group is profoundly conservative, and lacks significant Democratic representation. As a result, terming itself "bipartisan" is an abuse of the term. Likewise, the group is more ideologically consistent than ecumenistic, as can be seen from the list of what Associated Baptist Press writer Bob Allen characterized as "lead signatories:"

Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Broadcasting Network; Charles Colson, chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention [SBC].

Just the usual Religious Right suspects.

SBC names on the letter ranged from convention president Johnny Hunt to one of the originators of the SBC commitment to conservatism:

... Paul Pressler, a retired judge from Texas and one of the architects of the "conservative resurgence" movement that gained control of the nation's largest non-Catholic faith group in the 1980s.

The letter made strident predictions, dutifully quoted by Allen. For example:

"A nuclear-armed Iran is almost certain to initiate an arms race with other Middle Eastern and Arab nations who have reason to fear the religious, political and military ambitions of Iran's extremist leaders," the letter said. "As the world's leading state sponsor of international terror, we must assume Iran will sell or give nuclear weapons to extremist groups that are declared and demonstrated enemies to America and her allies."

Visits to other sources were required to learn of Obama administration policies. The Christian Science Monitor reported, for example, that Iran was reluctant to discuss its nuclear program and the Obama administration planned to force that discussion:

The US insists it will raise the topic during any talks. "This may not have been a topic that they wanted to be brought up but I can assure that it's a topic that we'll bring up," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Saturday.

Some UN officials regard as inflammatory and unjustified predictions like those in the Christian Right letter. For example, Newsweek reported:

In a private e-mail sent last week to nuclear experts and obtained by NEWSWEEK, Tariq Rauf, a senior official with the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, wrote that the mainstream media are repeating mistakes from 2003, when they "carried unsubstantiated stories on Iraq and WMD—the same mistakes are being repeated re IAEA and Iran." Rauf added that "the hype is likely originating from certain (known) sources." The message does not specify the sources, but U.S. and European officials have previously accused Israel of exaggerating Iran's nuclear progress.
...
Western intelligence agencies are sharing reports about Iranian efforts to acquire weapons-related technology but disagree about what they mean. Most officials doubt Tehran is pursuing nuclear technology entirely for benign purposes. Israel doubts it, too, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has signaled that his patience is limited. [U.N. Ambassador Susan] Rice said no one is giving up on diplomacy, adding, "We have other tools." U.S. options could include stepping up sanctions ...

What the Christian Right letter added to the debate, other than heat and an attempt to reassert the group's political significance, is altogether unclear.

Baptist leadership in freedom of thought

Southern Baptist Convention intolerance not withstanding, Baptists were early leaders in the movement which gave us enlightened, Western religious liberty. Mainstream Baptist reminds us of revolutionary era Baptist evangelist John Leland, who wrote:

Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three gods, no god, or twenty gods, and let government protect him in so doing.

Of course it is important that the matter being discussed isn't a principal concern of the Southern Baptist Convention but rather of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship [CBF]. Still quite Baptist, the CBF composed in considerable part of folks fleeing the shrinking SBC. The SBC isn't just failing to recruit new members, as its Great Commission Resurgence suggests in part. It is still losing longtime members and churches which find the increasingly conservative "takeover" harder and harder to bear.

Abortion vs. Miscarriage

With 20 percent to a 40 percent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage (depending upon how it is measured), there are more miscarriages than abortions in the U.S. now, as Mark Silk observed recently.

Perhaps 900,000 miscarriages and just over 800,000 abortions. Which creates something of a puzzle, as Silk goes on to explain:

Those who believe that there is a live person from the moment of conception presumably struggle from time to time with the theodicy question: Why does a just God permit such destruction of innocent life?

There is debate, often attended by the grief of loss.

Read Silk's brief blog in its entirety here.

When is leniency due?

Sex offenders are apparently unsurprised when Southern Baptist clergy seek clemency for them, as Raleigh, N.C., pastor Ricky Mill did last Monday for a man convicted of possessing child pornography.

The pastor's good faith not at issue, but the overall predictability of the behavior is a concern.

In 2003 a researcher [.pdf] was told by a predator:

I considered church people easy to fool ... they have a trust that comes from being Christians...They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people ... I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.

The court was unconvinced, and on firm ground the plea for clemency made by Mills and others. Whatever the personal history of that individual offender, a study of child pornography offenders at the Butner, N.C., federal prison by M.L. Bourke and A.E. Hernandez Journal of Family Violence found:

More than 85 percent admitted to abusing at least one child, they found, compared with 26 percent who were known to have committed any “hands on” offenses at sentencing. The researchers also counted many more total victims: 1,777, a more than 20-fold increase from the 75 identified when the men were sentenced.

That study suggests a risk to the community in releasing a known offender. The offender has a twelve-year history of "looking at images of children being molested and sexually abused," and according to the Charlotte Observer had accumulated "more than 3,400 images and videos of naked, molested boys and girls, toddlers and teens."

If the pattern of seeking leniency had not already been established in cases in involving crimes like and including sexual indecency with children, it might be overlooked. Instead, it should be corrected.

Bishop Williamson/SSPX bursts back into flame

"The Vatican was warned about the Holocaust-denying views of SSPX Bishop Richard Willamson before it lifted his excommunication," wrote Damian Thompson today. And the world is going to hear all about it. Wednesday night Sveriges Television AB will broadcast “an attack on the Holy Father" which covers what the Vatican knew about Williamson prior to the move toward rapprochement with Society of St. Pius X.

According to Carlos Antonio Palad, the promotion for the almost inevitably explosive program says:

Last winter the Catholic Church was shaken by the interview made by Uppdrag granskning with Bishop Richard Williamson. The Pope and the cardinals in charge assured the world that they had not known about the interview, but this is not true.
Swedish Bishop Arborelius: "From our side we passed the information on. That is so to say the usual way of doing it, the local church passes important news about the Church on to the papal representation.”
What did the Vatican know about the Holocaust-denying bishop?

None of this is going to leave the until recently somewhat reassured international Jewish community or not altogether mollified U.S. Bishops awash with good cheer. Nor will it smooth launch of the first round of discussions between the representatives of the Holy See and SSPX.

Exercising his gift for wry understatement, Thompson writes:

Anyway, now that Rorate Caeli has drawn attention to the documentary, you can rest assured that the Pope’s enemies and critics will get to work again. I’ll be interested to see what The Times [of London] makes of it. One request: this time, could the Vatican press office get its act together?

Answer [not from the Vatican]: Probably not.