Day: October 15, 2009

The breakfast table challenge

Something new at Not for Attribution:

Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading.  Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one).  Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.

Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I say to myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head), and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage.  . . . .

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Little Jack Horner, corner, thumb, pie, I . . .

Here’s an amazing bit of Obama coverage you will never find in a U.S. sheet.  It’s in a blog at UK Telegraph, whose D.C.-based Toby Harnden got a presidential email on the day O. got the Nobel Prize — and two more since then, Nobel-dropping indicating he’s not “even faintly sheepish about the award.”

“Surprising and humbling” O. found the news, which he’d got that morning.

“To be honest,” he continued, saying he felt he didn’t deserve it (lie) and the others who got it had “inspired” him, etc. (another lie: nowhere near how Rev. Jeremiah Wright had done so).

“I’ve always thought that when someone starts a sentence with the words “to be honest . . .” it’s a signal they’re about to lie,” said Harnden parenthetically.

A few more “faux-humble paragraphs” and Harnden concluded:

Obama apparently sees the award of the prize as his biggest achievement so far, with the possible exception of his election victory. Well, it sure beats actually doing something.

“All in all,” Harnden found it “a hilarious display of vanity and self-absorption masquerading ineptly as humility and selflessness” and asked,

What does it say about Obama’s character when such an empty symbol means so much to him?

Too much, I fear.

And: Would be delinquent in my duty to humanity were I not to say Instapundit led me to this item.

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SNAP’s long shot in Wheeling

SNAP not only wants Fr. Gleeson removed and investigated.

The group also wants an explanation about why he was appointed to the board despite allegations against him, and it is seeking a settlement involving him and an investigation into the original accusation.

Ah, but the Jesuits have never conceded anything in the matter.  Not in California, where the accuser and the three accused functioned at the time, and not in West Virginia.  Indeed, the three were reassigned but not demoted, one of them to Seattle, where he became a university vice president.

So SNAP is barking up an impregnable, unclimbable tree, or so it seems.  They cite Catholic rulings. 

“In 2002, the U.S. Catholic church adopted a national clergy sexual misconduct policy . . . .  It mandates openness in cases of alleged clergy misdeeds, and it requires that a priest who is credibly accused of sexual abuse be suspended while the case is investigated.

“After that policy was adopted, many bishops re-examined earlier allegations that had once been ignored, dismissed or deemed unsubstantiated. Dozens of Catholic clerics who had been accused but kept in ministry were suspended. That is what we want to see happen here with Gleeson.”

But if the accuser was told by his California provincial to whine no more, as he claims, what will the Maryland provincial — Wheeling Jesuit is in that province — say?  Butt out, is my guess, or nothing at all.

The million-dollar suit in 1999, keep in mind, was about workplace harassment, not abuse of a minor.  The three kept hitting on this scholastic (seminarian) until, his complaints ignored, he bailed out. 

The appeals decision was very important, in that it permitted the law to enter the seminary, jumping over the wall, as it were.  Once the decision was rendered, on Dec. 1, 1999, the suit was enabled.  The settlement was made during 2000.  By August of that year, Gleeson was back in Maryland, his home province, on a new assignment in charge of a retreat house.

As reported below, he is currently on sabbatical from a similar assignment in Wernersville, PA.

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