HoustonChronicle.com - Text of Mario Cuomo’s Democratic response:

Once upon a time, Mario Cuomo mattered. He made speeches that made the press swoon. To the New York Times he was the right kind of Catholic, a bad Catholic. He always spoke of his love for the Church and then painfully and ever so slowly would end up agreeing with the New York Times and attacking the Church. He would then be rewarded for his courage by praise from the New York Times since everyone knew (at the Times) that it took courage to stand up to the Pope on abortion and birth control in New York State. You just never know when to expect the Spanish Inquisition!

Cuomo was always pensive, the Hamlet of the Hudson. He could not make up his mind to run for President,which some deluded folk decided was possible after one fair speech to a losing Democrat convention. (Even then carrying a Southern state did not seem important to the press!) On the way to national greatness, he lost the governorship of New York State to one of the least effective Republicans to ever run for office. The New York Times was shocked! Everyone they knew voted for him.

Cuomo looked thoughtful, always his substitute for thought, and went off into the Danish darkness only to reappear every once in a great while to speak. This only can happen when no actual Democrat wants to risk his viability or when the situation calls for a religious Democrat. For Cuomo is very religious and would be the pope today if that position were decided by the New York Times. My comments in italics follow of this speech given by Mr. Cuomo today attacking our wartime leader.

“Good morning. I’m Mario Cuomo. Today marks 100 days since President Bush took office for his second term in the White House.

Please note the assumption that anyone much remembers Mr. One Big Speech. My college students surely do not. This is the sort of humble hubris Cuomo always shows.

Politically, he and his party had everything going for them: the presidency, a Republican majority in both Houses of the Congress and a federal court system tilting ideologically in their direction.

The war is forgotten. Having to deal with nasty Islamic terrorists is not a political problem!

What has the president’s so-called ownership society done with this power and potential? The president has continued to provide rich tax cuts mostly for the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

Let’s assume this is true.

Amazing fact: if you cut taxes, the folk paying the most taxes will get the biggest cut! The rich and business take the punitive hit of high taxes and the President helped them keep MORE OF THEIR OWN MONEY. Only a Democrat thinks your keeping your money is the government “helping you” or doing you a favor.

The bold steps by the President to try growing the economy by letting the people spend their own money led to economic growth despite our being at War.

None of this matters as the main thing for Mr. Cuomo is to posture as the friend of the poor. He is most their friend, in his own mind, when he keeps them from putting their genes into the future by helping them kill their unborn children. Sadly for Mr. Cuomo he has forgotten one small commandment.

Cuomo and most cafeteria Catholics forget that one of the Ten Commandments is “thou shalt not covet.” It seems he missed papal condemnation of socialism (see Benedict XV) and has decided that Biblical instructions for the rich in Israel not to oppress the poor really mean that the government should take money from the rich and give it to the poor. Apparently keeping your own money harms the poor in Cuomo’s world. In this way of thinking, if business and the rich had less money, then poor would be better off! Such thinking is a prime reason that Mr. Cuomo is now retired and making speeches on Saturday morning in the political off season.

He’s allowed the vast majority of middle-class Americans to slide backward economically as the prices of everything they need most like health care, education, gasoline, transportation and housing go up faster than their income. And he has provided the poor little reason for a new hope.

According to Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Bush just stands around running a war while we slide backward into rack and ruin. Bad Mr. President! Bad!

What American does Cuomo see? Americans are in an economic growth period while fighting a world wide war against terror. That is amazing. Mr. Bush is not out creating government programs to give false hope to the poor. He is trying to help business grow so that the poor can get jobs and stop being poor.

It appears that Mr. Bush should fight a war, get the economy growing, and end all the problems of America. That is the job of the President, yes?

Meanwhile, the Democrats have not only blocked the President’s plans to attack some of these problems, they intentionally have offered NO solutions of their own.

Mr. Cuomo, who has no real day job, is simply the aging uncle who comes to the family meal and points out how much better things would be if HE were running things. . .even though his present job is playing shuffle board in Florida.

On Thursday, we learned that the American economy grew at its slowest rate in two years.

Translation: The economy is growing.

And despite his repeated promises, President Bush and his party have continued to mortgage the future of our children and our grandchildren by refusing to address our nation’s skyrocketing budget deficit. He has also threatened to strip the Social Security Fund of more than $1 trillion to pay for his adventurous new savings account scheme.

Now the lies and half truths begin. We are winning a world war. That costs money. Politically there is no will from the American people to cut programs and in fact, earlier in this very speech Mr. Cuomo suggested he wanted new ones. Magically, Mr. Bush is supposed to create new programs for Mr. Cuomo, win the war, keep all the old programs (if he cut the rate of their growth Mr. Cuomo would call this “slashing them”), while balancing the budget. In fact, due to growth and given the war, the operating budget is not bad. After the war, it should come back into balance when we reap the peace dividend that will come.

There is no “Social Security Fund.” It is all government IOUs and unfunded debt. Second, the money that I would get to invest from Social Security is MY MONEY. Why does Mr. Cuomo always assume he knows best what to do with my money? Mr. Cuomo’s America is a place where the government takes your money, wastes most on overhead, then gives some of it back and expects you to thank Mr. Cuomo for giving you hope. Of course, loss of economic freedom would be compensated for by government sponsored abortions which in the world of Cuomo is the fundamental human choice.

Investing in the stock market or in a mutual fund only sounds adventurous to an aging liberal and former members of the Politburo.

Now, the Republicans in the Senate, instead of dealing with his litany of failures,

Failures:

1. Winning the War on Terror.
2. Economic Growth.

are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they can not get from the proper political bodies: the Congress and the presidency.

The cynicism here is breathtaking. Mr. Cuomo and the liberals ended hundreds of years of American political practice on abortion and other social issues about thirty years ago through the courts. They placed judges on the courts that created rights nobody had ever found in the Constitution. Now when Mr. Bush wants to end this judicial over reach, Mr. Cuomo argues that this would be “legislating” from the courts. In other words, Mr. Cuomo wants to use the courts to win and then to freeze the courts forever in place. It would be nice for Mr. Cuomo if everyone were stupid enough not to notice this scam, but sadly for Mr. Cuomo blogs now allow arguments like this to face analysis less friendly than that of the New York Times.

How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate that allows the fullest possible debate before one of the president’s choices for the Supreme Court or other federal courts is allowed to take his or her place on the on the bench. That would be a change so undesirably destructive that it has been called the nuclear option.

Cuomo once again hopes that by painting a picture exactly opposite from the truth that he can win. The filibuster is a rule of the Senate. It is not in the Constitution. It has historically only rarely been used on judges. Democrats intentionally have started using it on some Bush judges chosen to make political points with their interest groups (see the inalienable right of abortion which serves as the only unifying creed to modern Democrats).

Democrats have stopped playing by the “gentleman’s rules” of the Senate. The Republicans decided that if the Democrats will not eventually allow an up or down vote, as has almost always happened, that they will change the rules the other party is no longer playing by.

Mr. Cuomo is like the school yard bully who uses the school rules to his advantage. When the other students refuse to take it anymore, the bully bemoans the loss of civility in the school yard. The bully wants the rules to remain static once he learns to exploit them to his benefit.

The Republicans say it would assure dominance by the majority in the Senate. That sounds democratic until you remember that the Bill of Rights was adopted, as James Madison pointed out, in order to protect all Americans from what he called, the tyranny of the majority. And it sounds nearly absurd when you learn that the minority Democrats in the Senate actually represent more Americans than the majority Republicans do.

The Founders understood that the majority would eventually rule. If the tyranny of the majority (under the fearsome Dr. Frist?) is a danger, so is the tyranny of an abusive and petulant set of losers. Every church has a group of such members who cannot be pleased, lose every vote, and then demand that their views be the ones that win because they are sensitive or right or oppressed. These weary folk are always threatening to leave if they don’t get their way, studying the Church constitution and Robert’s Rules, and trying every trick to force the majority to obey their every whim. (”All the right folk just KNOW that the majority plan to replace the hymnals will lead to chaos!”)

Mr. Cuomo adds up all the people in all the states represented by the Democrats, forgetting that many Senators did not get 100% of the vote in those states, to get his bizarre factoid about Democrats being the “majority party”.

The last presidential election had, as a major issue, the selection of judges and Mr. Cuomo’s party lost. In the world of Mr. Cuomo an actual tyranny (the rule of a minority) is less to be feared than the hypothetical misuse of power by the majority.

The public surveys reveal that most Americans believe there appears to be no good reason to change the Senate process after all these years. In fact, there is none.

Most public surveys show Mr. Kerry will win the election! Virginia goes to Kerry!

Mr. Cuomo assumes:

1. the questions were asked fairly
2. the rules of the Senate should be made by people on surveys.

However, according to the last paragraph the Senate should disregard the ACTUAL VOTES of the people in November against Cuomo’s party. His candidate, a Mr. Kerry, campaigned against Mr. Bush and his bad judges. He lost. According to Mr. Cuomo that does not matter. Instead of this fact, the Senate should take a snap shot of folk (who I am sure were fully briefed on Senate history and rules) polled in a survey and do what they suggest.

Senate Democrats have worked in a bipartisan fashion to confirm 95 percent of President Bush’s nominees. Breaking the rules in order to rubberstamp the last 5 percent would be exactly the kind of tyranny of the majority that James Madison had in mind.

In the world of Cuomo, “rubber stamping” is when you lose. “Breaking the rules” means the Senate making its own rules to deal with the abuse of the old rules by the Democrats.

The Republican senators should instead start working with the Democrats to address all the serious problems of this country in the proper forms: in the Congress and in the presidency, leaving the judges to be judges instead of a third political branch controlled by the whim of the politicians in power.

We promise Mr. Cuomo if he can get the liberal judges to get rid of social legislation from the bench (Roe v Wade, forcing unnatural marriage on Americans) that conservatives will be happy to let judge be judges. Mr. Cuomo wants the winners of elections to leave his judges in place or appoint judges he likes (even though his party lost on this issue).

This is Mario Cuomo. “

Who?
What job does he have?
What are his solutions?
What do the judges believe that is so bad that the Democrats must stop them at all costs?

Oh, wait! Cuomo is the Catholic pol so personally opposed to abortion that he must come out of retirement to try to save abortion on demand through the third trimester by blocking any judge who will not swear to protect it!

Evangelicals and traditional Christians need to remember: the left in this nation hates your values and loves the culture of death. They produced the Time Magazine stories on Benedict XVI which gave Andrew Sullivan, who hates the new pope, a full page to rant against him before his pontificate could even begin. They will stop at nothing to take down our President, because he wants to protect the unborn and end their control of the courts. They hope that gas prices rising during a war in an oil region (how shocking!) will cause us to forget how much they despise our deepest beliefs. This battle for judges is all about abortion for the Democrats. They will do anything to save it.

The President fights for judicial restraint, the rule of law, American traditions, and sane judges. The Democrats to the man will not let him act to appoint judges we elected him to choose. Instead, the Democrats attack our religion, our fitness for office, and our leaders.

We will not forget. Mr. Cuomo has come to remind us.

HughHewitt.com: “When CBS rolls out its new news product, it will be the first real test of whether network news is as clueless as, say, the leadership of the Los Angeles Times or whether they have really figured out what is going on among news consumers.”

Evening news used to be the way to determine what was news. In a world of information, CBS (at least in our house) decided what was important. We did not have many choices.

I cannot remember the last time my first recourse for news was the networks. That is true of most folk who have access to the net.

However, blogs and other new media still cannot match the resources and power of the networks to report news that is not available to the general public.

I would suggest that CBS dispense with the talking head telling us what the news is. . . since we can watch CNN, FOX, or one of the other networks if we want that kind of thing. Instead, they should try to break one actual story a week and give the reporter time to develop that story over the next four nights. This would be the longest segment of the show.

Much of the rest of the twenty-two minutes or so of time could consist of rapid “blog style” bullet opinions from a diverse range of bloggers/blogger types from the “main stories” of the day as determined by the news discussions on the net and by a representative sample of bloggers (ranging from far right to far left bell curve style. . . determined the weight by the last Presidential election vote).

Imagine a set with no “center desk” but a “tour guide” for information. Rotate these tour guides amongst media savvy bloggers. (Hugh!)

“Story: Democrats block an up or down vote on the President’s judicial nominees.” The host could then give a short summary of the Democrat take on the issue and the President’s take.

“See CBSNEWS.com for details. Now Instapundit and DailyKos with a quick take.”

For stories generated from the net that were not “two sided”. . . such as a quick hit on a film use blog reviewers (a rotating pool) not in the pay of studios. Get their quick takes.

Simulcast over the net and let the stories contain interactive links to the sites mentioned (this would include commercials). Have a system like technorati that lists the links to the stories on CBSNEWS.com all over the blogosphere.

Basically, CBS.News could serve as a place where trustworthy smart people, leaders of their respective movements, point to resources that are already out there. The show would be a one stop shop for what is happening now. It would also do what only a network can do. . . create news and inflict the comfortable with tough reporting.

The cable news networks can do the standard news show.

The other two networks can cater to the web impaired.

CBSNEWS has a chance to own the future.

HughHewitt.com

In examining the draft, I may be forced to admit that (gulp) the Packers have taken a second place seat to the (sigh) Browns.

Will this be a long season for the forces of Tradition at the Sacred Frozen Tundra?

I cannot stand to think we may be worse that a team that plays in Cleveland.

For Eastern Christians today is Good Friday. Last night we recollected Christ’s gift of Holy Communion to the Church. At the end of that most beautiful of services in the light of candles the alter was stripped. Every decoration was removed. Every sign of honor was taken from it.

It is a sad thing to see the alter bare. It is a visible sign of the time from Good Friday to Easter when the Church refrains from the Eucharist. That fast itself is an outward sign of the inward human wickedness which killed Jesus Christ. He came to give us goodness, truth, and beauty and we killed Him.

Many of us act as if we can live our lives autonomous from God and from the community of the Church. This is true of believers as well as unbelievers. We create our own meaning and we adopt a skeptical attitude to replace one of belief.

Skepticism is a precious tool in our philosophic tool kit and is very necessary in a fallen world, but it is no basis for living. It helps us strip away lies and deceit, and that is good, but when allowed to govern it strips everything good from the world. It leaves the alter bare and then does not allow us to even see the alter. Having seen through everything it is left proud of its inability to see nothing.

To create art, music, and literature is an act of faith. It requires belief that each man has a soul and that our words can be understood soul to soul. There is no gap between you and me, because these mere words, glowing on your screen, trigger communion at a deeper level. We understand, because men are more than the matter and energy that make our bodies possible.

Saddest of all is that moderns have gone about the planet intentionally removing the divine. We build communities with no zoning for Churches. We tear down groves and pave over brooks. We attempt to recreate the world in our own image and leave it uglier than we found it. We are no longer gardeners, but vandals. This is the essence of secularism which sees a tree and thinks wood, which sees a stone and sees a road.

Secularism strips our world of goodness. It does so by allowing personal pleasures to become the measure of what is right. It refuses to admit that our natures may be disordered and that some great seeming pleasures may prevent us from great spiritual joy. As a result our culture seeks pleasure more, but enjoys it less. We worship our own decisions, but cannot give them meaning to anyone other than ourselves.

Secularism removes all truth. It cannot rest on any foundation, however secure. It must challenge the very laws of logic if those cannot be fully defended by unaided human reason. In doing so it destroys reason itself. It removes the soul and so makes language impossible as we are left with individual brains, computers made of meat, cut off from each other trying to touch each other through words. However words are ideas and must exist in the soul the true medium for ideas. It is the soul that informs the body and in union with it makes a man human. There is no Word that can reach a soul for in our folly we have stripped the flesh of soul and left it bare. It sits nakes and unformed trying to reach something other than itself, but it lacks the power.

Secularism destroys real beauty. It cannot measure ideas by the Mind of God, because it does not believe in any Mind that is not dependent on matter. There is nothing transcendent and so art becomes mere taste and opinion. Science alone is given the right to knowledge and the poet is left to either glorify it or mutter meaningless sounds to himself. Soon men begin to question science itself which is based on the decision to favor elegance and beauty. Why should this be so? Such a culture strips matter itself of any meaning and can only worship chaos and darkness.

It is no wonder that our popular culture hates the new Pope, heroic men like James Dobson, and men of courage like George W. Bush. They are believers and have refused the self-centered path of the functionally secular. These men are believers. They shine with a bright light and though not perfect, and often very imperfect, their real danger to the secularists is their belief. The secularists are frightened that some great light will blind them and they will not be able to see the world clearly. The believers worship a higher power than themselves and so appear naive or frightening to those who have snuffed out every light to avoid being blinded and who now sit in darkness.

This light is so much better than the skepticism we worship in the Academy. It is good and teaches us how to love even our foes. The believer loves even the secularist who vaunts of stripping the world of divinity for he knows that in his own heart he too has been a vandal. He too has been in darkness afraid to live in the piercing beauty of Christ. We do not lose our skeptical natures in Christ. Instead our skepticism is transformed into a pathway to the Good! This is a great miracle and the best news is that it is not too late. The invitation of Easter is open to all. It is not too late!

Christ is the sun to our minds. He blinds at first as we stumble out of dark skeptical caves. However, He comes to illuminate, to cause us to question and to do true philosophy. Today the alter is bare. Tomorrow it will be bare, but Easter is coming even to the furthest East.

ESV Bible Blog: “You can now search the ESV Bible from A9.com.”

I have a new standard study Bible and can report that Torrey Honors at Biola is thinking of making the same switch.

For years I used the Revised Standard Version. Despite the beauty of the translation, it was often theologically suspect. I decided to move to the NIV, but could not stand the USA Today level writing. The NASB was good, most often it made checking the Greek in the New Testament worthless for my level of skill, but had the most ugly prose I have ever read in a translation of any ancient book. (A close second is the Loeb Iliad.) The Greek of the New Testament may be basic, but it is never ugly.

The KJV is the most beautiful English ever written, but not the best English study Bible as at times one finds oneself translating the English to understand the Greek! I still use the KJV often and always will to learn better English and the Scriptures at the same time!

I believe the ESV is an almost perfect balance between KJV beauty and NIV conservative scholarship. It is no feminist Bible, preferring to reflect the patriarchal structure of the original Greek. It is accurate and unafraid to use theologically precise words. It does not dumb down Scripture to make it “relate to the youth.” On the other hand, it uses English no more difficult (in terms of reading level) than the underlying Greek. Mark is simple. Romans is complex.

In short, it is marvelous.

Let the people rejoice! Get an ESV, switch from the NIV, and leave the arguments behind you!

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. . .

Right now the Democrat Party and the secular left are in the process of committing electoral suicide. They don’t like Jim Dobson, a middle-of-the-road psychologist who is an evangelical. The secularists, who have taken over the left, apparently don’t like mainstream Southern Baptist Al Mohler, a seminary president and scholar. They don’t like Pope Benedict XVI, a moderate German theologian who helped create Vatican II. Of course, that is par for the course because they really hated John Paul the Great.

It would be comforting if the leaders of these extremist Democrats were actually humanists or secularists or liberal Christians. Mostly they seem bitter men out of power that yearn to get it back but who do not have the stomach to pretend they believe in much of anything, even the dogmas of their own party. They have to rant to the MoveOn.org crowd as if they care, but their hearts are clearly not in it. They are relativists whose great god seems to be staying in office or at least on CNN.

Recently Al Gore, who sometimes remembers his Christianity, was shocked to discover that people of faith were sick of having their leaders attacked by his friends. “How dare they!” he shouted. Or something like “How dare they!” It is getting hard to understand poor Al ever since he developed a permanent case of righteous indignation that has led to a speaking style that never deviates from a shout with a Ted Kennedy-like tendency to devolve into a mutter.

Evidently Al thinks the fanatics on the “religious right” are hi-jacking Christianity. That nasty pope! Who does he think he is? He sure doesn’t speak for Catholicism does he? Why dear Al got a warm feeling at the last mass he attended on the campaign trail! And Jimmy Carter is a much, much better spokesman for the Southern Baptists than Al Mohler since he long ago helped responsible Southern Baptists slip around such side issues as the inerrancy of Scripture.

Al Gore is religious. His religion is a private thing. A thing so private that it impacts his political life not at all or in fuzzy ways having a great deal to do with “world peace” and other Miss America bromides. Monday through Friday the party of Al functions with a secular worldview. Religion does not contain knowledge. . . at least not knowledge open to Al’s secular friends. . . so Al must stuff his religion except when telling heart-tugging stories or being righteously indignant about those who think their religion is, well, true.

What is the basis for human rights? Is it God as the Founders said or is it the state and popular opinion? Do we have a basic right to life given to us by a Creator? Dare we act on that belief? The Founders dared to the point of creating a new order amongst the nations.

Al Gore would not have liked these men. He would have been more happy in the court of George III where religion was not taken too seriously and deals could be made. People like Al Mohler did not demand foolish consistency and there was no frowning Benedict (how much he must remind Al of the shadow of his Daddy Senator!) telling one what to do. In the Hanover Court, all the sensible folk could posture and primp and sell the nation to the King for some of his gold pills. Religion was all well and good, but the state church was safely docile, firmly under the hand of the sensible people. If the nation needed defending, then there were German troops for hire.

The Calvinists of New England, the deists of Philadelphia, and the Anglicans of Virginia were not this sophisticated. They actually believed what John Locke and Sam Rutherford had written.

They did not think it radical to base their politics on their beliefs. They did not think it radical to believe that the rights of Englishman should not be for sale. They built a government on those rights. Their schools were religious and the most read book was the Bible. They were a diverse lot, some heterodox, and the original American sin of slavery infected them. Still they were, on the whole, consistent as men in this dark old world can be. And they created a remarkable thing: the United States of America.

Now their heirs, not by blood but by ideology, are demonized by the same tired syncophants who fear their power of the ideas of 1776. The relativist left, too flacid to be much of anything, can only moan and groan like the mad King George at the power of the American Idea. On these things men of faith will not compromise.

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. . .

Moderate, often liberal Republicans, are giving the President a hard time. Why? There is no administration scandal that often plagues second term presidents. The nation is at war which should lead to a tightening of party ranks. Sadly, the answer is simple.

Moderates have fallen for the siren song of “History.” Normally unimportant, indeed hack, politicians from tiny states like Rhode Island can derail the Bush second term. Given that the people whose favor they most want to court at parties hate Bush this is tempting indeed. Retirement is always looming for any senator, youth is not much in evidence in the Senate, and so the group of people to “hang with” in those golden years becomes more important. It is no accident that most men of conviction work until their health fails. As men of principle they have no choice. The best of the highly paid jobs where pay is given for little work and cruises are locked off from them by their behavior.

It is the same with the moderate senators and Bush. Bush will get a very long encyclopedia article. Lincoln Chafee will get none. Bush is frequently googled and will be always. The only way for the Republican with the right first name, Lincoln Chafee, to get googled is to go after Bush. His entire life has devolved into needing to be a bad Republican to be famous.

But it will not work anyway.

A very long time from now when the history of the twenty-first century is written, Bush will be a great figure. His leadership in the victorious war against terror and in the moral revival of a nation that seemed to be in decline will be the subject of many dissertations. His partnership with Benedict XVI will be compared favorably with that of Reagan and Saint John Paul the Great as part of reversing the decline of Western Europe. After the great revival that swept Europe, it will seem odd to historians at the nations leading University, Biola, that anyone ever doubted the wisdom of the plan. Just as historians today marvel at the small minded Republicans who mocked Abraham Lincoln (”ape!” “ignorant!”) so they will regale young adults with the words of obscure Republicans who opposed their Rushmore war-time leader. The veterans of the Grand Army of the Middle-East (GAM) will share a drink and toast each other with stories of the time they met Bush. And nobody will know Chafee’s name.

Why? Because he is being used by the left and will be mocked by history as turncoats always are. If the Bush administration fails, then his party will fail and the Lincoln Chafees will be ridiculed as those who lacked the courage to join the Second Clinton term team. If Bush wins, then Chafee will the the punch-line of the joke regarding the men who missed history when it was happening. Poor Lincoln. Deluded by his glorious first name he hears “Hail to the Chief” when he shaves, driven by ego and his father’s heritage. Insteads he is just one of a long line of hack pols who sell their soul and their tiny place on the team of a great man for a good write up in the New York Times, an election defeat, and an instantly remaindered memoir with a painfully self-referential title (”Man in the Middle” or “Mr. Lincoln Goes to Washington”).

The God Blogs are here. We don’t have to turn to CNN to tell us about the Pope or watch folk who know nothing about the topic struggle to talk about it.

Instead we have a voice and a press of our own.

Register now here.

Space really is limited.

We will talk, we will argue, and the blogging will be fine.

Think Southern California in the Fall.

And you get to hear the God-Father of God-Blogs Hugh Hewitt!

Miss this and you can always go to the second. . . but will have always missed the first.

Monday night football is no longer on ABC

Here is the announcement from the NFL:

The agreement with ESPN covers eight seasons of Monday Night Football from 2006-2013 and includes an earlier kickoff time — 8:40 p.m. ET — for 17 Monday night games per season. ESPN’s Monday night telecasts will be preceded by its highly rated NFL Countdown pregame show, which will continue to air at 7 p.m. ET.

ESPN will continue to make its NFL games available on free, over-the-air television in the participating team markets each week. The new agreements thus continue the NFL’s long-standing practice of making all of its games, including the playoffs and Super Bowl, available on free, over-the air television. ESPN also will continue to televise the NFL draft.

I remember when cable was “new media.” Now its penetration is so deep that the NFL can switch to a cable/dish network with little fear of losing audience. The big three continue to be in trouble as more and more original programming appears on cable/dish. For the first time last year our family’s favorite “first run” show (Monk) appeared on cable/dish first.

Networks still have huge legacy viewership. Like newspapers in the past they cling to viewers who make a habit of checking them out. The difficulty is ad revenue which cannot forever survive the splintering of the market. I think the Big Four Networks are just newspapers earlier in the revenue loss cycle.

The penetration of TIVO or other digital video recorders (my favorite “new” product) will soon make “time of showing” or network obsolete for most Americans. Midnight on the Home Garden channel is just as good for my family with TIVO as prime time on ABC. Internet video delivery means that “pay per view” where viewers watch video on demand cannot be far away.

Why watch cable when you can get the show you want when you want it? The NFL will be able to deliver live sports itself over the NFL.com website. One wonders if this is the last big network contract from the NFL which shows increasing sophistication (NFL Channel) in delivering its own product.

Of course the networks will not die tomorrow. They will even slow the decline at times and make “progress” with good shows. However, I cannot see how technology is not at war with the old media.

Showing people how to find good new stuff. . . seems like the wave of the future. The “network” of the future will be more like a guide system, think Free Republic for video. (Here are links to all the good stuff!)

Younger viewers need to be introduced to black and white television. Classics such as the best of the Dick VanDyke Show and Andy Griffith still hold up well. Now someone can recommend the “good episodes” and warn about the shark jumping years of each series. Older viewers need to be shown where the best of the new stuff is with appropriate warnings about new values! New shows will be introduced through this “media blogs” as people come to trust the taste and values of certain critics. These “eyeballs” will generate web hits and justify ad space.

If this is true, I am hoping that religious traditionalists can be in on the ground floor. As a result this site will soon be attempting to review most of the major video products. Using very bright college students we will have reviews that are not stuffy or weirdly narrow, but also reflect traditional Christian values. Soon to be Torrey grad Nate Bell will be heading this up for me. This is just a first step, I hope, in becoming a ‘media guide’ (the new network function) to the video out there.

Look for this soon!

This is the writing on peace by Benedict XV that has caused CNN and our mainstream media to see signs of moderation in Benedict XVI. They find pull quotes from academics that tell them what they want to hear. . . but most “journalists” cannot bother to read the source material themselves though it can be seen in a few clicks. Compare this piece by Benedict XV to the sermon by Benedict XVI referenced in the posts below. You will see a shocking similarity.

Benedict XVI may be about to declare war on corrosive secularism! Meanwhile CNN natters on about Benedict XV and “peace.”

What CNN is too lazy to do, I did.

Read it and you will never trust CNN again.

Here it is (edited, bold mine):

Benedict XV - Ad beatissimi apostolorum (01/11/1914): “5. But it is not the present sanguinary strife alone that distresses the nations and fills Us with anxiety and care. There is another evil raging in the very inmost heart of human society, a source of dread to all who really think, inasmuch as it has already brought, and will bring, many misfortunes upon nations, and may rightly be considered to be the root cause of the present awful war. For ever since the precepts and practices of Christian wisdom ceased to be observed in the ruling of states, it followed that, as they contained the peace and stability of institutions, the very foundations of states necessarily began to be shaken. Such, moreover, has been the change in the ideas and the morals of men, that unless God comes soon to our help, the end of civilization would seem to be at hand. Thus we see the absence from the relation of men of mutual love with their fellow men; the authority of rulers is held in contempt; injustice reigns in relations between the classes of society; the striving for transient and perishable things is so keen, that men have lost sight of the other and more worthy goods they have to obtain. It is under these four headings that may be grouped, We consider, the causes of the serious unrest pervading the whole of human society. All then must combine to get rid of them by again bringing Christian principles into honour, if We have any real desire for the peace and harmony of human society.”

9. The second cause of the general unrest we declare to be the absence of respect for the authority of those who exercise ruling powers. Ever since the source of human powers has been sought apart from God the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, in the free will of men, the bonds of duty, which should exist between superior and inferior, have been so weakened as almost to have ceased to exist. The unrestrained striving after independence, together with over-weening pride, has little by little found its way everywhere; it has not even spared the home, although the natural origin of the ruling power in the family is as clear as the noonday sun; nay, more deplorable still, it has not stopped at the steps of the sanctuary. Hence come contempt for laws, insubordination of the masses, wanton criticism of orders issued, hence innumerable ways of undermining authority; hence, too, the terrible crimes of men who, claiming to be bound by no laws, do not hesitate to attack the property or the lives of their fellow men.

10. In presence of such perversity of thought and of action, subversive of the very constitution of human society, it would not be right for Us, to whom is divinely committed the teaching of the truth, to keep silence: and We remind the peoples of the earth of that doctrine, which no human opinions can change: “There is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God” (Rom. xiii 1). Whatever power then is exercised amongst men, whether that of the King or that of an inferior authority, it has its origin from God. Hence St. Paul lays down the obligation of obeying the commands of those in authority, not in any kind of way, but religiously, that is conscientiously - unless their commands are against the laws of God: “Wherefore be not subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience’ sake” (Rom. xiii. 5). In harmony with the words of St. Paul are the words of the Prince of the Apostles himself: “Be ye subject of every human creature for God’s sake: whether it be the King as excelling, or to governors as sent by him” (I Peter ii. 13-14). From which principle the Apostle of the Gentiles infers that he who contumaciously resists the legitimate exercise of human authority, resists God and is preparing for himself eternal punishment: “Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God, and they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation” (Rom. xiii. 2).

11. Let the Princes and Rulers of peoples remember this truth, and let them consider whether it is a prudent and safe idea for governments or for states to separate themselves from the holy religion of Jesus Christ, from which their authority receives such strength and support. Let them consider again and again, whether it is a measure of political wisdom to seek to divorce the teaching of the Gospel and of the Church from the ruling of a country and from the public education of the young. Sad experience proves that human authority fails where religion is set aside. The fate of our first parent after the Fall is wont to come also upon nations. As in his case, no sooner had his will turned from God than his unchained passions rejected the sway of the will; so, too, when the rulers of nations despise divine authority, in their turn the people are wont to despise their human authority. There remains, of course, the expedient of using force to repress popular risings; but what is the result? Force can repress the body, but it cannot repress the souls of men.

12. When the twofold principle of cohesion of the whole body of society has been weakened, that is to say, the union of the members with one another by mutual charity and their union with their head by their dutiful recognition of authority, is it to be wondered at, Venerable Brethren, that human society should be seen to be divided as it were into two hostile armies bitterly and ceaselessly at strife? Drawn up against those who possess property, whether by inheritance or by industry, stand the proletariate and the workers, inflamed with hatred and envy, because, although they are by nature the same, they do not occupy the same position as the others. Once they have been imbued with the fallacies of the agitators, to whose behests they are most docile, who will ever make them see that it does not follow that because men are equal by their nature, they must all occupy an equal place in the community? And further, who will ever make them see that the position of each one is that which each by use of his natural gifts - unless prevented by force of circumstances - is able to make for himself? And so the poor who strive against the rich as though they had taken part of the goods of others, not merely act contrary to justice and charity, but also act irrationally, particularly as they themselves by honest industry can improve their fortunes if they choose. It is not necessary to enumerate the many consequences, not less disastrous for the individual than for the community, which follow from this class hatred. We all see and deplore the frequency of strikes, which suddenly interrupt the course of city and of national life in their most necessary functions, we see hostile gatherings and tumultous crowds, and it not unfrequently happens that weapons are used and human blood is spilled.

13. It is not our intention here to repeat the arguments which clearly expose the errors of Socialism and of similar doctrines. Our predecessor, Leo XIII, most wisely did so in truly memorable Encyclicals; and you, Venerable Brethren, will take the greatest care that those grave precepts are never forgotten, but that whenever circumstances call for it, they should be clearly expounded and inculcated in Catholic associations and congresses, in sermons and in the Catholic press. But more especially - and We do not hesitate to repeat it - by the help of every argument, supplied by the Gospels or by the nature of man himself, or by the consideration of the interests of the individual and of the community, let us strive to exhort all men, that in virtue of the divine law of charity they should love one another with brotherly love. Brotherly love is not calculated to get rid of the differences of conditions and therefore of classes - a result which is just as impossible as that in the living body all the members should have the same functions and dignity - but it will bring it to pass that those who occupy higher positions will in some way bring themselves down to those in a lower position, and treat them not only justly, for it is only right that they should, but kindly and in a friendly and patient spirit, and the poor on their side will rejoice in their prosperity and rely confidently on their help - even as the younger son of a family relies on the help and protection of his elder brother.

14. But there is still, Venerable Brethren, a deeper root of the evils we have hitherto been deploring, and unless the efforts of good men concentrate on its extirpation, that tranquil stability and peacefulness of human relations we so much desire, can never be attained. The apostle himself tells us what it is: “The desire of money is the root of all evils” (I. Tim vi. 10). If any one considers the evils under which human society is at present labouring, they will all be seen to spring from this root.

15. Once the plastic minds of children have been moulded by godless schools, and the ideas of the inexperienced masses have been formed by a bad daily or periodical press, and when by means of all the other influences which direct public opinion, there has been instilled into the minds of men that most pernicious error that man must not hope for a state of eternal happiness; but that it is here, here below, that he is to be happy in the enjoyment of wealth and honour and pleasure: what wonder that those men whose very nature was made for happiness should with all the energy which impels them to seek that very good, break down whatever delays or impedes their obtaining it. And as these goods are not equally divided amongst men, and as it is the duty of authority in the State to prevent the freedom enjoyed by the individual from going beyond its due limits and invading what belongs to another, it comes to pass that public authority is hated, and the envy of the unfortunate is inflamed against the more fortunate. Thus the struggle of one class of citizen against another bursts forth, the one trying by every means to obtain and to take what they want to have, the other endeavouring to hold and to increase what they possess.

God grant us a Pope this moderate.

My second favorite media line today (next to Sullivanism: this pope is about to crush all dissent) is:

This Pope picked the name Benedict as a sign of moderation.

Somehow media types find “moderation” in the career of Benedict XV. This makes one wonder: was he a closet gay rights activist? But no, Benedict worked for “peace” in the First World War. From that liberals and lazy people at CNN find moderation.

Benedict XV saw Europe about to commit cultural suicide in a useless war. He tried (and failed) to end it. What is liberal about that? Benedict hated communism. He wa a traditional pre-Vatican II pope who would make Benedict XVI look like a “moderate” (whatever that means) on key issues today. Can anyone imagine Benedict XV discussing women priests and gay marriage in 1914?

KEY FACT:
(Source, New Catholic Dictionary)

Benedict promulgated the new Code of Canon Law, established the Coptic College at Rome, enlarged the foreign mission field, and in his first Encyclical condemned errors in modern philosophical systems.

Nothing like a “moderate” who condemns modern philosophical systems just like Benedict XVI has been doing. What kind of facile analysis is CNN doing when even a simple look through my home office turns up the fact that Benedict XV thought modern philosophy, liberalism really, had brought on the horrors he faced as pope?

What is most foolish about this is that the “big Benedict” is Saint Benedict, the founder of Western monastic rules. Our Orthodox Church has an Order of Saint Benedict. He is that major a figure to Western Christians. He helped civilize Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. He was a missionary and evangelist.

Just maybe that is the Benedict referred to by the new Pope. . . but in any case there has never been a “moderate” Pope Benedict unless one is in the Pius-was-so-bad that every Pope not named Pius must be moderate school.

Simple fact: the media thought John Paul II would be moderate because of his name choice and because he was from Poland. “He would know how to work with communists.”

Right.

Remember: the media so deeply wants a liberal social libertine Pope that it will take any sign as positive. When Benedict XVI does not set up the Inquisition in the next two days, you will also hear that called a “sign of moderation.” Just sigh and change the channel.

Benedict XVI is an older man with a long, long paper trail of his own work. He is conservative and a traditional Catholic. This will not change because CNN has a take on a papacy they did not know about (Benedict XV) until they googled it this afternoon.

Eternal fame on this blog for anyone finding ten cases of the following insane claim:

Benedict wants to “silence” his critics.

What this means is that the new Pope does not want non-Catholic teaching proclaimed as Catholic doctrine. . . the Roman Church is not going to pay for its own destruction. What it sounds like it means, but does not, is that foes of the new Pope end up dead, in prison, or what is worse for an academic without tenure.

Repeat after me: I am not being silenced if a group does not want to pay and applaud me for attacking its beliefs.

In fact, critics of Rome such as the verbally-incontinent Hans Kung live comfortable, well-fed lives getting petted by leftists of all sorts. Having the new Pope hate you is a great way to get invited to swell parties in New York City and to get tenure at most schools. Supporting the Pope will lead to trouble at most “Catholic” colleges.

Hans Kung does not get to spout his thought-of-the-week as Catholic teaching, but if that is persecution then my inablilty to be paid to represent the Democrat Party makes Howard Dean just as eager to “silence” his critics as Benedict.

Will this quote ever appear in LA Times?

“Hardline and controversial Howard Dean silences his critics on the right. Recently he refused to appoint any well known members of National Review to his advisory board. As KJ Lopez noted, ‘Dean refuses to hear from his critics. He threatens to reduce the party to those who agree with it.’”

I found Andrew Sullivan so he does not count. Who will find the first ten advocates of Sullivanism?

Read this brilliant homily yourself.

Pope Benedict XVI: “How many winds of doctrine we have known in these last decades, how many ideological currents, how many modes of thought… The little ship of thought of many Christians has been not seldom agitated by this wind ― tossed by an extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and ways like that. Each day seven new are born arising as St. Paul said from the trickery of men, from cunning in the service of error (cf. Ephesians 4: 14). To have a clear faith, according to the Creed of the Church, comes frequently to be labeled as fundamentalism. While relativism, that which allows itself to bear ‘what is of every wind of doctrine’, appears as a unique position at the height of contemporary times. It is constituting itself a dictatorship of relativism that recognizes nothing as definitive and that allows as the ultimate measure only one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

You can tell a great deal about a man by his foes. Read this hysterical reaction to the election of Benedict XVI from Andrew Sullivan. As usual my comments are in italics.

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: “STILL IN SHOCK: Thanks for your emails both sympathizing and telling me to leave the Church entirely. But I am still in shock. This was not an act of continuity. There is simply no other figure more extreme than the new Pope on the issues that divide the Church.

Sullivan believes that keeping the same doctrinal ideas one has had for thousands of years is not an act of continuity. It is extreme. He believes issues that a tiny minority of world-wide Catholics have organized their lives around (odd sexual practices, radical feminism) mark a division in the Church. This is true in the sense that having left the faith to live in sin or to invent their own new ideas they have divided themselves from the Church. Sullivan is a prodigal son who wishes to give us an argument for living in the pig stye and is irritated with Father for inviting him to come home.

No one. He raised the stakes even further by his extraordinarily bold homily at the beginning of the conclave, where he all but declared a war on modernity, liberalism (meaning modern liberal democracy of all stripes) and freedom of thought and conscience.

A news flash for Sullivan might be that the Church never embraces “modernity” whatever the era. Christians are always out of step, because our City is never quite the City of Man, but always the City of God. Of course, Pope Benedict has embraced US style Church-State separation in the past so this statement by Sullivan is quite false any way.

And the speed of the decision must be interpreted as an enthusiastic endorsement of his views.

Is it shocking that the leaders of the Catholic Church embrace views that have never been the subject of dissent by leaders of the Catholic Church? Mr. Sullivan takes the natterings of himself and his friends too seriously.

In contrast, the Church takes the long view and does not care if the New York Times loves it since it has outlived many such organizations in the past. Does Sullivan really think that most global Christians are eager to dialog about homosexuality? Ask the Anglicans.

What this says to American Catholics is quite striking: it’s not just a disagreement, it’s a full-scale assault.

I am not a Catholic, but it seems to me that this choice confirms that some American Catholics are not going to be able to remake the Church in their own image. They are free to start their own church and make their own culture. However, they don’t get to hijack the Sistine Chapel or the history of the Roman Church as they do it.

This new Pope has no pastoral experience as such. He is a creature of theological discourse, a man of books and treatises and arguments.

In an earlier post Sullivan complained that nobody wanted to reason with him and now he complains that Benedict is a man of the academy. The trouble for Sullivan is that Benedict is better educated and read than he is and would win an argument. Therefore Sullivan has to appeal only to his personal experience in attacking this Pope.

However, personal experience is a weak guide when the personal experience of most faithful at most times is at total odds with Sullivan’s ideas. Sullivan should repent and sin no more, but that is the very thing he wishes to avoid.

He proclaims his version of the truth as God-given and therefore unalterable and undebatable.
Note that agreeing with every Pope who ever lived is eccentric according to Sullivan. Having Sullivan’s views which no Pope or Patriarch has ever held is, according to Sullivan, not hubris. Sullivan wants to change the entire Church, but it is Benedict who believes too much of himself. This seems an odd position.

Jesus Christ said stuff like Benedict says. He even claimed to be the Truth. Sullivan is free to read Jesus in a New and Improved Way, but he should go start his own church in order to do so. Perhaps he could call it the Not Quite Universal Since Limited to an American Sub-Culture Church.

Hurrah for a free country that will allow him to do so!

The problem for Sullivan is he wants all the history and benefits of the Roman Church without the things in it he does not like. He wants the name Catholic for his time bound and parochial views.

His theology is indeed distinguished, if somewhat esoteric and at times a little odd.

Any bets on how many Ratzinger books Sullivan has actually read?

But his response to dialogue within the church is to silence those who disagree with him.

This is a lie. Worse it is the sort of lie that plays on Catholic stereotypes and prejudices in our culture. It invokes images of the Church that have been used by bigots for centuries. What has Benedict done to critics like the nattering Kung? He has simply said that they cannot teach as Catholic theologians. It might shock Sullivan, but as an Orthodox Christian, I too cannot teach as a Catholic theologian. I do not feel silenced. I can go on not being Roman and Benedict is happy to dialogue with me. However, I cannot call myself Roman when my beliefs place me outside the mainstream of the Church. If this is oppression then I should be able to join the Sierra Club and advocate (as a spokesman for the Club) building strip malls in Yosemite!

He has no experience dealing with people en masse, no hands-on experience of the challenges of the church in the developing world, and complete contempt for dissent in the West.

Those with that experience elected him Pope. Sullivan’s views are the least popular in places with persons of color and in the developing world. The Pope with his traditional Western views represents one of the true voices of dissent from Sullivanism in the West.

His views on the subordinate role of women in the Church and society, the marginalization of homosexuals (he once argued that violence against them was predictable if they kept pushing for rights), the impermissibility of any sexual act that does not involve the depositing of semen in a fertile uterus, and the inadmissibility of any open discourse with other faiths reveal him as even more hardline than the previous pope.

Mostly stereotyping complex positions or positions all popes have held. . . but also a fair bit of personal sorrow and that should invoke our pity. I am sorry for Sullivan. I know the pain of having to repent and of wanting things I should not have. Every Christian knows the pain of a disordered soul. There is no joy in seeing Christians falter.

I expected continuity. I didn’t expect intensification of the fundamentalism and insularity of the current hierarchy.

What does he mean fundamentalism? Benedict has a very liberal view (in my opinion a too liberal view) on reading Scripture. Is Benedict’s community which is heavily third-world more or less insular than that of the Sullivan sub-culture in New York?

I expect an imminent ban on all gay seminarians, celibate or otherwise. And I expect the Church’s immersion in the culture wars in the West - on every imaginable issue. For American Catholics, I foresee an accelerating exodus. But that, remember, is the plan. The Ratzingerians want to empty the pews in America and start over. They will, in that sense, be successful.”

I doubt it happens, but does Sullivan really think that a ban on gay seminarians would be unpopular in the pews in, lets say, Los Angeles?

I will bet Sullivan that being more robust in these areas will not empty the pews. Marginal Catholics will leave. The millions who have been dying for more discipline will come. The more rigorous the Church becomes the more it will grow just not with the sort of people Andrew Sullivan wants to hang around with at parties. How many former Catholic evangelicals have I met? They attended Church where nothing like a gospel was preached with priests who had “clown mass” in the “spirit of Vatican II.” They only met Christ when a Baptist missionary shared with them a “fundamentalist” (read Christian) faith. It is just a sociological fact that being “more” whatever brings higher commitment and more growth in the end.

Sullivan thinks the Anglican model produces growth, but he cannot name one church community where it has led to anything other than disaster. Liberal Christians talking about the danger of emptying churches is like an official of the White Star Line talking about ship safety. It can be done but it takes titanic gall.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s Challenge (washingtonpost.com): “The modern world, Ratzinger insisted, has jumped ‘from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, up to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and on and on.’”

The new Pope, Benedict XVI, is exactly right. This is the most hopeful statement from a world leader I have read in some time.

There exists in our culture a confusion of liberty with a libertine lifestyle. This lifestyle ends up enslaving men to their passions. Benedict XVI understands this problem.

A man doing a thing he knows is wrong in his deepest heart cannot stand any disagreement. Any voice raised questioning his folly reveals that folly all too clearly. The leader who will parade naked cannot stand even a child to say that he has no clothes. This is why our pop culture hates a move like “The Passion of the Christ.” It contains a message that cannot be merely marketed and controlled. No one can spin the Cross.

Jesus Christ is Lord of all. This is not a message that the decadent parts of the West can stand to hear. Having been given liberty by the Christian faith, the dying West presumes to believe that they can outgrow that faith and decide for themselves, outside of any community of faith, what the Word of God is. Some even decide that they are little gods themselves. . . taking the image of God in themselves and worshipping it.

Benedict understands the danger this poses to men.

These men find that their god is too small. Having become an idol, their minds become like stone and wood, unable to be flexible. The secularist, if he is not very careful, always turns to power and its use. His god-given inner heart screams out that he is behaving badly and so he must still any voice that disagrees. He must lock himself in secular conclaves of agreement like those found in the modern university and entertainment worlds. Unlike the sacred conclave that elects the pope, there is not, even in principle, some outside power that can come and illumenate. Cardinals seek the Holy Spirit to mold their minds. The decadent secularist seeks only to know his own mind.

These men makes themselves lonely to support their unsupportable lifestyles.

For the secularist there is no higher reality or calling than that found in mankind. In the end, in a world without metaphysics even mankind vanishes and the man is trapped in his own atomized world. He is alone with himself. . . the only servant of his god.

Pope Benedict XVI understands this problem. He is a brilliant man and is willing to say in thoughtful, but forceful words that the our culture is naked.

Wait for the media storm to follow the honeymoon.

Bendict XVI has long been a friend of the true West and the foe of those who would represent that Western civilization is best described by Starbucks and MTV morals. He knows that the Madonna of the West in not the Madonna of pop culture. He knows that the modern academy has given up on foundational beliefs and so has plunged into the utter folly of post-modernism.

Only in the wise rule of the Creator God can mankind find a foundation for knowledge and good politics. In rights given to us by our Creator, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, stand as a bulwark against statism and the abuse of power.

In the Monarchy of God there is provided space for the Republic of Men.

Three other trivial observations on the election:

1. The Italian hold on the papacy is broken forever.
2. Germany has been restored fully to the community of nations. World War II is not forgotten, but Germany is not trapped in its fascist past.
3. There is no “liberal” wing to the Roman Catholic Church.