A skeptical Catholic

            Forgive a skeptical Catholic, but something seems suspicious with this process of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation, official today, and the coming conclave to elect a new pope. This isn’t conspiratorial, just a little surmising, a supposition, if you will.

            Keep in mind that while the papacy and the Vatican are venerated as most holy by not only the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, but also those of other faiths, it’s also massive in its power and influence, which lends to palace intrigues.

            The pope, cardinals, bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries are, after all, human, susceptible to ambition and deceit, even in the name of the Lord.

            Consider first that 53 percent of the 117 cardinals who will elect a new pope in the conclave were appointed by Pope Benedict, according to the Catholic News Service.

            Second, Pope Benedict has taken the title of pope emeritus and will live in the Vatican, albeit in a convent within the walls of the Holy See.

            These two facts taken together could lead one to surmise that Benedict will have enormous influence in not only the selection of the new pope, but also in the new pope’s reign, which comes at a time of upheaval in the world and the church.

            Moreover, before becoming pope, Benedict was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who the late Pope John Paul II named as Prefect for the Scared Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The office’s origins are steeped in the 16^th century Roman Inquisition.

In this position, Benedict served as a tenacious defender of the faith, reaffirming the church’s position on birth control, homosexuality and inter-faith dialogue, which clearly puts the church’s doctrine at odds with most American Catholics.

In his role, Benedict (Ratzinger) went after theologians who did not tow the line; he suspended Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff for his support of liberation theology, which interprets the teachings of Christ in relation to liberation from unjust economic, political and social conditions; he censured others.

As cardinal and as pope, Benedict has been accused of covering up the sex abuse scandal that has long plagued the priests and prelates of the church.

No doubt, there are forces in the church battling to steer its course in the 21^st century; those who want reforms for progress and openness and those, like Pope Benedict, who don’t believe change is necessary in the centuries-old church.

The reformers may be gaining the edge. In his final public audience, held earlier this week in St. Peter’s Square, the New York Times quoted Benedict saying he sometimes felt “the waters were agitated and the winds were blowing against” the church.

It could be the 85-year-old pope felt he is no longer strong enough to stand out front and wage the battle, but that he can, from the privacy of his secluded apartment in the Vatican, direct the next pope to fight on.

The election of the new pope and the course he (she?) sets for the church may tells us much.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Hobby, Salk and the health care debate

 

            Oveta Culp Hobby is unknown to most people today, but she stands as an unwitting symbol of this nation’s rather complicated embrace with government-funded social programs that many Americans mistakenly refer to as socialism.  

In 1955, following severe polio outbreaks, Hobby, as the cabinet secretary to Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s newly created Department of Health, Education and Welfare, legalized the first polio vaccine.

            Two things about this are interesting: Eisenhower entered office to stop what he described as “creeping socialism” from social programs – such as Social Security – that were created under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

            Yet, Eisenhower went on to expand those programs in order to serve more people, and Hobby, who apparently opposed government administered health programs, approved the distribution of a vaccine in a national mass inoculation program.

            The program was necessary, if not life-saving. Three years prior to its approval polio outbreaks had increased dramatically from the average 20,000 per year to nearly 60,000 and 35,000 in ’52 and ’53, respectively. An alarmed public demanded action.

            Private industry toiled away on finding a vaccine, spending millions of dollars and predicting it would be years before an effective vaccine would be available.

            However, Jonas Salk developed a test-proven vaccine in 1952, for which he declined to seek a patent that would have reaped a fortune for him. “There is no patent,” he reportedly told a newsman. “Could you patent the sun?”

Salk devoted seven years researching the vaccine, which historian William O’Neill described as “the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers.” More than 1.8 million school children took part in the trial.

            Salk’s work took place at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, under the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Founded in 1938 by President Roosevelt – himself a victim of polio – it was funded through public appeal to give a dime and support research for polio’s eradication.

The organization later became known as The March of Dimes.

            While Hobby may have been a mere instrument in a tax-payer supported program to improve and ensure the health of the public, Salk and his views embodied the spirit of what those programs really mean to a democracy as wealthy and capable as ours.

            Which brings us to today’s health care debate. For all the sound and fury about government intrusion and costs, even some ardent liberals have missed the point.

If you listen to what people who support universal access to health care are saying – and this includes people without insurance and even those with limited coverage – and if you go back to the roots of this debate that began in the 1930s, you will find the health care debate, first and foremost, is not about containing costs.

It’s about equality and rights. It’s about ensuring that everyone has access to the same quality of health care as our elected officials at the federal, state and local levels.

Yes, containing costs is an important element, and it is not as difficult as the health care industry and some politicians would like us to believe, but the real question is this:

Why provide elected officials and government workers optimum health care at the expense of taxpayers, yet many, if not most of those taxpayers must settle for less, and in many cases, far less coverage because they can’t afford to pay for it?

This question goes to the heart of who we are as a country. The social programs that emerged in the ‘30s were designed not to grab a chunk of the free market or ideologically enslave people as critics argue, but simply to help people.

It’s the same reasoning for government-funded – not government-run – health care. Wouldn’t an insurance pool of 300 million Americans drive down costs?

The present arrangement drives up costs and seems to neither promote domestic tranquility nor the general welfare. Where is the equality we supposedly are trying to build this country on that was stated in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed … .”

In the health care debate we have to decide whether health care is a certain unalienable right or whether we want to pay the extreme costs in life and money for patenting the sun. 

           

 

Transfiguration

Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough – John Houston, as Noah Cross, in “Chinatown.”

            Eighty-five-year-old Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to retire from what is a lifelong post appears to signal change to the nearly 2,000 year-old Catholic Church that for the last three decades has been buffeted by the high winds of change.

Technology – from television to computers to the Internet – has afforded more knowledge and education to Western Civilization’s populations, raising questions about faith and some church practices that have not changed in well over a millennium.

The church’s one institution in particular, the male-dominated clergy where women are forbidden to become priests, cardinals or even the pope, bedevils many Catholics. The reasons and rationalizations neither make sense nor sustain logic.

            Yet, the church is not a monolith of poor reason and irrationality. It has reversed it self on some important issues.

After imprisoning for life in 1633 the physicist, mathematician and astronomer Galileo, for making the observation that the Earth rotates around the sun, the church started to recant less than a hundred years later. Its pillorying and detention of the man who is known today as the father of modern science was, perhaps, wrong.

            In December 2008, the 400^th anniversary of Galileo’s earliest telescopic observations, Pope Benedict praised his contributions to astronomy. Interestingly, in 1741, another pontiff, Pope Benedict XIV, authorized the publication of Galileo’s complete scientific works.

            To demonstrate how far the church had come in recognizing the once heretical scientific explanations of Galileo, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences announced in 2008 that a statue of the astronomer would be erected on the Vatican grounds.

Less than a year later, though, the Pontifical Council of Culture announced that plans for the statue were suspended. It’s another example of how non-monolithic the church really is, though not for lack of trying to keep it monolithic.                                                                                           

Forces for and against progress and enlightment are at constant battle within the church.

In his homily at Mass this week, Pope Benedict spoke of “sins against the unity of the Church,” hinting at Vatican office politics, according to an NBC News report. It’s unclear exactly what his Holiness was referring to; the actual meanings of his pronouncements, like those of his predecessors, are often veiled. 

            The Vatican is an institution of immense power and wealth, largely secretive, filled with mystery and intrigue. For most people, it’s another world, one that seems very old and far removed from their own contemporary lives.

            Even the pope’s speeches on love and spirituality are distant in their impact, if there is any impact, to the average person, whether or not they are Catholic.

            Despite the church’s power and wealth, its keepers struggle from an ancient fortification, Vatican City, to maintain relevancy in a fast-changing modern world. It has failed to even adequately address the child sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the church to its core and threatens the existence of the Holy See.   

            Curiously, the last time a pope resigned was 1415. Pope Gregory XII was elected under condition that he would abdicate the papacy when rival Pope Benedict XIII who presided from Avignon, France, did. Their abdications ended the Western Schism that lasted 39 years and was driven by politics rather than theological disagreements.

            Once Pope Benedict XVI steps down at the end of February, it will be fascinating to see who the College of Cardinals elects as the new pontiff and what it will mean for the future of the Catholic Church.

Send in the Drones

As a technological breakthrough, drones, or unmanned, remote-controlled vehicles, go back to the late 19th century, in the twilight of the Victorian era, when at a Madison Square Garden exhibition in 1898 inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled boat.

The public who witnessed the boat speeding around a pool of water believed magic or telepathy controlled the little vessel, according to Christopher Eger's 2007 book, "The Robot Boat of Nikola Tesla: The Beginnings of the UUV and remote control weapons."

Tesla called it a "teleautomaton" and tried to sell the invention to the United States military, but the government showed little interest, according to P.W. Singer's 2009 "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century."

After more than a century of tinkering, drones (or as their manufacturers and users prefer, unmanned aerial vehicles) have not only been perfected, but embraced by the government as a means to wage war at extremely low costs compared to the traditional means of waging war.

It's not just a matter of waging war at low cost, it's waging war effectively at low cost -- drones can spy, search, target, destroy; and can do it with stealth.

And while drones are unmanned, a man, or woman, sits at a remote location controlling the drone, identifying its target via video camera, and directing where it's going to fire its Hellfire missiles.

Tesla's concept has come a long way in 114 years.

While a technological achievement, drones are also a moral qualm for many Americans; the idea of killing so effectively and efficiently and, at times, outside the limits of the U.S. Constitution.

That American law enforcement agencies are turning to drones for crime surveillance makes us more jittery about our constitutional rights to privacy, not to mention the government's limits in search and seizure.

Congress and the Obama administration are taking the proper course in starting debate on the use of drones, militarily and domestically. We're a democracy, right?

However, the laws and policies that emerge from this debate will likely lead to greater expansion of drones, particularly in the military. In fact, drones may will set us on the course to finally becoming what we've loathed to become -- policeman of the world.

The U.S. military is already spread around the world trying to keep law and order in remote and not-so-remote places. Sending off to do battle in far away lands is an American tradition that began with the Spanish-American War, which occurred the same year Tesla invented his "teleautomaton."

It may have been hard for the public -- and the government -- to imagine Tesla's vision becoming a reality in 1898.

But today, with technology changing the world rapidly, it's not hard to imagine American-controlled drones patrolling the skies around the world, and invited to do so by nations willing to pay or at least share the cost for such a service.

Like it or not (and there is clearly much not to like) drones are the future, but we need to figure out how they fit within our democratic principles.

Adaptation

With thousands of head-injury lawsuits filed against the NFL, and Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard telling CBS Sports that he believes the game will no longer exist in 30 years, it does raise the question about the sport's future.

At this moment, football doesn't look like it's going anywhere, with the enormous profit the NFL makes each year and its popularity still strong among fans.  

Yet, this is the precise moment to start to think and believe in what now seems unimaginable – the end of football. It's what empires fail to do just before they collapse.

Perhaps a better way to think about football's future is not the end of football, but the end of football as we know it. Like former empires, companies and industries have all but disappeared because they failed to adapt.

Change is constant and inevitable.

Good companies such as Apple seem to understand this. They change because they know that even if they don't change the public and their appetites are changing, and the only way to give the public what it wants is to understand what they want and . . . change.

Henry Ford, a man who hated change yet changed American society with his Ford Model T, grudgingly accepted the idea of giving the public what they wanted; but only after his son, Edsel, spent years begging him to change or risk losing market share.

Once he did, customers started buying cars in colors other than black.

Clearly, the body-slamming, head-banging game of football has changed since its beginnings when helmets and padding were not required. And it's changing now, but will it adapt?

Change is likely to be more challenging for football then say Apple because it has to become safer while at the same time maintaining the sport’s hard physics that makes following the game so exciting.

Good businesses welcome challenges because it makes them better businesses. History shows societies progress when they embrace change and fail when they ignore it.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell seems to understand this. He told CBS's Face the Nation on Super Bowl weekend: "The game of football always evolves. Throughout the decades we've always made changes to our game to make it safer for the players and more exciting for the fans."

As long as football continues to make changes, it should be around a long time.

Of budgets and porridge

It's Budget Address day in Harrisburg, the second most important day on the legislative calendar. The most being the day the budget is signed into law, which is typically about five months from now, just before the end of the state's fiscal year.

For a state legislator, even for a member of Congress, the one job they are required to do year in and year out is pass a budget that keeps the state operating for another year. This, of course, entails quite a bit; determining what gets funded, what gets cut, and where to find the revenues (to tax or not to tax, that is always the question).

Regardless of what budget Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett presents to the General Assembly today, the real work gets done in the following months. Passing the budget could be hard fought, which was often the case under former Gov. Ed Rendell, or smooth as butter, which seldom occurs.

Whatever other legislation governors like to chase, a budget most reflects the priorities and politics of a governor. Conservatives like to slash and cut programs; liberals like to spend and raise revenues.

Moderates, regardless of party affiliation, like to do both.

Governors of moderate political temperament know that the best budgets, that is budgets legislators can agree to without too much arguing and that get the most favorable of public responses, are much like a good bowl of porridge; not too hot and not too cold, though never just right.

Gun Nation

We can, as we have, argue about the Second Amendment and whether to interpret it to mean everyone has a right to a gun or whether it means the state's can organize militias.

One thing is certain: it's an awkwardly worded document, assembled as if to purposely cloud what its actual intent is:  "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

It's almost as if that one clause, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms," was thrown in at the last moment. For what reason, though?

The National Rifle Association wasn't around at the time to serve as the guardian of the gun. Some academics cite evidence that shows the southern framers inserted the clause to allow slave owners to assemble men with guns to put down slave rebellions.

The amendment does sound more concise when you remove that clause: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, shall not be infringed."

We may never know the true intent of the framers regarding the Second Amendment. What we know is this: The Supreme Court has determined it is a right, but the court has never determined that it is a mandate; you don't have to own a gun, if you so choose.

Moreover, a decidedly different court, one that is perhaps weighted heavily liberal, could re-interpret the Second Amendment with strict limitations on gun ownership.

In this current debate on gun control, there is much fear mongering and half-truths. There is also, with each passing day, a lot of innocent people getting killed by guns.

Thought of the day: When does a "good guy with a gun" become a "bad guy with a gun?"

Cafe Europa

Americans typically don't see themselves as having much, if any, connection with Europe, even if their descendants arrived from that continental breakfast of ethnicity, culture and language.

Yet, I can't help ponder whether this once upstart nation is becoming more European-like as technology continues to pull together the two continents, long kept distant by a vast ocean. Take, for instance, tonight's Super Bowl, where the Baltimore Ravens played the San Francisco 49ers in New Orleans.

These three sisters are distinctly untypical of American cities. By their architecture and their culture, Baltimore and New Orleans are reminiscent of the Old Country; San Francisco is more a Pacific Rim city, similar to the gothams of east Asia: Hong Kong to Tokyo to Singapore.

Yes, American culture dominates in these cities, but it doesn't crush other cultures as it does in most cities, particularly in the Midwest. Even those cities, though, are starting to experience new cultures that were once considered too exotic for good ole American sensibilities.

Give a person a chance to experience something new, something different, something foreign, and it's surprising how positively they respond. Fear not the unknown.

What makes the Super Bowl, America's game, bring to mind our growing (possibly) European-ness is the name of Baltimore's team: the Ravens. Named after a poem from 19th century literature that was written by an American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, whose characteristics were very much European.

It has to say something that Americans, who typically root for teams named after animals with no connection to high-brow culture, are cheering a team named after a poem.

Perhaps we are entering a new age of enlightenment. The Ravens did beat the 49ers to become the Super Bowl Champs.

Edgar would have been proud.