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The Wall Street Journal divines the backstory of the selection of the Pope.
On Feb. 27, a mild, dewy morning, Alitalia Flight 681 landed at Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome after 13 hours in the air. A balding man with gray-white wisps of thin hair stepped out of coach class. He wore thick-rimmed brown glasses, black orthopedic shoes and a dark overcoat. He had a slight limp, and his back was stiff from the long flight. His belly was a bit swollen, due to many decades of cortisone treatments to help him breathe after he had lost part of a lung as a young man. No one could see the silver pectoral cross he wore under his coat, though it was the symbol of his authority.
Back home in Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a prominent figure, the highest-ranking Catholic prelate in his country and to many a beloved figure known especially for his work in the city’s teeming slums. Here he was one of 115 cardinals converging on Vatican City for important business: the election of a new leader for the Catholic Church. …
… Some princes of the church believed Cardinal Bergoglio, at 76, was probably too old to become pope, especially after Benedict XVI had specifically cited his age and frailty as reasons for his resignation. “We came into this whole process thinking: The next pope has to be vigorous and therefore probably younger,” said Cardinal George. “So there you have a man who isn’t young. He’s 76 years old. The question is: Does he still have vigor?”
Two days after the dinner, however, something clicked. And it happened in the span of four minutes—the length of Cardinal Bergoglio’s speech when it was his turn to address the General Congregation. On March 7, the Argentine took out a sheet of white paper bearing notes written in tiny tight script. They were bullet-pointed.
Many cardinals had focused their speeches on specific issues, whether it was strategies for evangelization or progress reports on Vatican finances. Cardinal Bergoglio, however, wanted to talk about the elephant in the room: the long-term future of the church and its recent history of failure. From its start, Pope Benedict’s papacy had been focused on reinforcing Catholicism’s identity, particularly in Europe, its historic home. Amid a collapse of the church’s influence and following in Europe, the German pontiff had called on Catholics to hunker down and cultivate a “creative minority” whose embrace of doctrine was sound enough to resist the pull of secular trends across the continent. That message, however, had been overshadowed by the explosion of sexual-abuse allegations across Europe and rampant infighting in the Vatican ranks.
The notes on Cardinal Bergoglio’s sheet were written in his native Spanish. And he could easily have delivered the remarks in Spanish—19 of the cardinals voting in the conclave came from Spanish-speaking countries and a team of Vatican translators was on hand to provide simultaneous translations in at least four other languages.
But he spoke in Italian, the language cardinals most commonly use inside Vatican City and the native tongue of Italy’s 28 voting-age cardinals, the most of any single nation. He wanted to be understood, loud and clear. The leaders of the Catholic Church, our very selves, Cardinal Bergoglio warned, had become too focused on its inner life. The church was navel-gazing. The church was too self-referential.
“When the church is self-referential,” he said, “inadvertently, she believes she has her own light; she ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness.”
Roman Catholicism, he said, needed to shift its focus outward, to the world beyond Vatican City walls, to the outside. The new pope “must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”
The word he used, periferia in Italian, literally translates into “the periphery” or “the edge.” But to Italian ears, periferia is also a term loaded with heavy socioeconomic connotations. It is on the periphery of Italian cities, and most European ones, that the working-class poor live, many of them immigrants. The core mission of the church wasn’t self-examination, the cardinal said. It was getting in touch with the everyday problems of a global flock, most of whom were battling poverty and the indignities of socioeconomic injustice. …
Thomas Sowell would like some facts to intrude into the gun control debate.
Amid all the heated, emotional advocacy of gun control, have you ever heard even one person present convincing hard evidence that tighter gun control laws have in fact reduced murders?
Think about all the states, communities within states, as well as foreign countries, that have either tight gun control laws or loose or non-existent gun control laws. With so many variations and so many sources of evidence available, surely there would be some compelling evidence somewhere if tighter gun control laws actually reduced the murder rate.
And if tighter gun control laws don’t actually reduce the murder rate, then why are we being stampeded toward such laws after every shooting that gets media attention?
Have the media outlets that you follow ever even mentioned that some studies have produced evidence that murder rates tend to be higher in places with tight gun control laws?
The dirty little secret is that gun control laws do not actually control guns. They disarm law-abiding citizens, making them more vulnerable to criminals, who remain armed in disregard of such laws.
In England, armed crimes skyrocketed as legal gun ownership almost vanished under increasingly severe gun control laws in the late 20th century. (See the book “Guns and Violence” by Joyce Lee Malcolm). But gun control has become one of those fact-free crusades, based on assumptions, emotions and rhetoric. …
Streetwise Professor catches John Kerry trying to be part of the gun debate.
There have been some embarrassing Secretaries of State. Warren Christopher comes to mind. But I am hard pressed to name one more embarrassing than John Kerry. They say he looks French, and damned if he isn’t trying to act the part, with his current World Wide Surrender Tour and all. He has basically begged the NoKos and the Iranians to play nice, despite threats of launching thermonuclear war, and he and Obama make me cringe with their attempts to pacify Putin over the Magnitsky List. John “Kick Me” Kerry seems an apt sobriquet.
But he totally topped himself when he blamed dropping numbers of Japanese students in the US on . . . guns. No. Seriously:
“Students in other countries assessing where to study abroad are increasingly scared of coming to the United States because of gun violence, the nation’s top diplomat said Monday.
Speaking with CNN foreign affairs correspondent Jill Dougherty in Tokyo, Secretary of State John Kerry said he’d discussed the situation with officials there who said students felt unsafe in the United States.
“We had an interesting discussion about why fewer students are coming to, particularly from Japan, to study in the United States, and one of the responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents here is that they’re actually scared. They think they’re not safe in the United States and so they don’t come,” Kerry said.”
So the statement about “other countries” is based on one: Japan. And that is based on “responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents” rather than actual, you know, data.
But note: fewer Japanese are studying abroad overall. The drop is not confined to the US. Because, well, there are fewer college-aged Japanese. Go to Japan-it’s an old, old society. And because the Japanese economy stinks. …
American Spectator with more on the problems implementing the health-care law.
As a rule, I avoid the weekly news magazines. They are filled with bad fiction disguised as “reporting,” and if I really feel the need to read mediocre prose I can always rely on the work of America’s growing horde of creative-writing professors. Nonetheless, I recently stumbled across a post in Time’s Swampland blog titled, “Obamacare Incompetence,” and succumbed to morbid curiosity. It seems that Joe Klein, a usually reliable Democrat hack, is deeply unhappy with the slow and clumsy implementation of the “Affordable Care Act.”
Klein’s post focuses primarily on the implosion of Obamacare’s exchanges. Pointing out that the President’s apparatchiks squandered three full years during which they should have been hard at work preparing for the advent of these insurance “marketplaces,” Klein laments their failure to do so with the following piece of Solomonic wisdom: “This is a really bad sign.” Indeed it is. And Klein isn’t the only advocate of Obamacare to finally notice that this hopelessly Byzantine health care “reform” law is an implementation nightmare.
Even the Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) has admitted as much. But, whereas Klein correctly assigns responsibility to the President, Commissar Sebelius places the blame on evil Republicans: “It is very difficult when people live in a state where there is a daily declaration, ‘We will not participate in the law.’” Other Democrats have been more candid. Senator Jay Rockefeller, who played an important role in getting the law passed, called Obamacare “so complicated that if it isn’t done right the first time, it will just simply get worse.”
And it most emphatically isn’t getting done right the first time. …
Obama continues his ignorant animus towards Great Britain. Power Line posts on Thatcher’s funeral.
We mourn the passing of Margaret Thatcher, but President Obama is not exactly choked up. Like us, he puts her in the same category as Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, but in Obama’s scheme of things, that’s a bad place to be. Over at NRO Charles Cooke observes:
“The news that the Obama administration will sit out Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral, sending from the current crop only the charge d’affaires from the U.S. embassy in London, is disappointing. It seems that a seminal figure in Western history will be allocated the same level of functionary that was sent to mourn Hugo Chávez.
This is peculiar in and of itself, but especially so when one considers that senior officals have been readily dispatched by the administration for funerals past. The prime minister of Ethiopia was judged sufficiently important to deserve Susan Rice’s attendance, among others. The president sent Hillary to Vaclav Havel’s farewell, and also to send off the president of Ghana. Joe Biden led the delegation to a Saudi royal funeral. And Obama personally attended Polish president Lech Kaczynski’s. While she was first lady, Hillary Clinton attended the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. …”
More from Jason Riley of WSJ.
Eleven serving heads of state attended the ceremonial funeral in London Wednesday for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. And despite the fact the Britain has long been America’s closest European ally, President Obama was not among them. Nor were any senior members of his administration.
Instead, the White House sent two former secretaries of state, George Schultz and James Baker. Democrats in Congress also did their part to play down the significance of Thatcher’s achievements. A Senate resolution honoring the Iron Lady passed this week only after the removal of several paragraphs that New Jersey’s Robert Menendez—the chairman Foreign Relations Committee—found objectionable.
According to the Daily Caller, one of the nixed passages read: “Baroness Margaret Thatcher in 1984 survived an assassination attempt by the Irish Republican Army in Brighton, United Kingdom, and declared that ‘all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’”
Other language removed read: “Whereas Baroness Margaret Thatcher in 1982 led United Kingdom efforts to liberate the Falkland Islands after they had been illegally invaded and occupied by the Government of Argentina.”
The British have taken note of the snubs. “This is poor show, as a quick history lesson will prove,” wrote the Spectator of London, a British magazine. “US senators were slow to authorise President Reagan’s attack on the late and unlamented ‘Mad Dog’ of the Middle East [Libya's Moammar Gadhafi]. But the Gipper wasn’t worried because the Iron Lady allowed the assault to be launched from these shores. That’s friendship, honourable senators.”
And it’s a friendship that Thatcher apparently respected more than does our president and his party. She was among the 36 current and former heads of state who attended a service for Ronald Reagan after his death in 2004.
Paul Greenberg enjoyed being compared to H. L. Mencken.
A friend and critic here in Little Rock — well, definitely a critic and I hope he’s still a friend — submitted a guest column not long ago reciting my many sins. (Whose sins are few?) And we were happy to run it on the op-ed page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which we like to think of Arkansas’ Newspaper. It says so right on the front page. To cap off his encyclopedic review of my faults as an editor, columnist, gadfly and sorry excuse for a human being in general, our guest writer ended his philippic by comparing me to . . . H. L Mencken.
For that alone I am much indebted to my friend/critic, The Hon. Robert L. Brown, a now-retired justice of the state’s Supreme Court. Modesty should forbid, but I can’t help quoting from his climactic peroration:
“It will come as no surprise to anyone that Greenberg wants to stir the pot and sell newspapers. But in this fashion, he becomes a major purveyor of the rancor that afflicts this country, from Washington, D.C., to Little Rock. . . . In short, it is Paul Greenberg who is a major part of the problem, just as his mentor, H.L. Mencken, was when he reveled in describing Arkansas as a hillbilly backwater and did what he could to make Arkansas a laughingstock. He, too, sold newspapers.”
My first impulse on reading that comparison was to clip it out, have it framed, and hang it on my office wall next to my Mencken Award from the Baltimore Sun back in the long-ago year 1987. …
… Ever since I learned that our legislators here in Arkansas had once passed a formal resolution denouncing H.L. Mencken, my not-so-secret ambition has been to win an official, certified, duly passed and recorded resolution of censure from the legislature. Instead, I get only a denunciation from a former justice of the state Supreme Court. Ah, well, a man has to settle for what he can get in this life.