The lady’s not for ignoring

Obama the orator has become the TelePrompter-in-Chief, though some still cling to his reputation as orator. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is a speaker who can manage with reminders that fit on her hand. NY Sun, conceding Obama as orator, has this about Palin addressing the Ground Zero Mosque question via Facebook:

Not only does Mrs. Palin manage, in a polite but firm way, to speak more forthrightly than the president and to draw finer distinctions than the president but she also manages to articulate a practical line more in keeping with a harmonious outcome.

In other words she does the leadership thing in what she says, which, come presidential choice time in a year or so, will matter for her and us more than ever.

Courage came to Mundelein

Column appeared 08/16/2010 at online, now defunct Chicago Catholic News:

The Rev. Jeffrey Keefe’s first encounter with a same-sex-attracted (SSA) client had a “profound effect” on him, he told priests and other pastoral workers at Mundelein Seminary July 30.

The man had confessed to another priest and then heard a “grunt of disgust” from the other side of the confessional screen. Father Keefe, a Syracuse, NY, Franciscan ordained in 1952 and a Ph.D. psychological counselor since 1965 with decades of experience with same-sex-attracted clients, was the first person he discussed his SSA condition with who didn’t make him feel like “a barrel of shit.” He “needed someone he could trust,” Father Keefe said.

He spoke at the 22nd annual conference of Courage, the national Catholic ministry to the same-sex-attracted, held July 29 to Aug. 1 at the seminary (U. of St. Mary of the Lake). Three hundred people were registered for the conference, including 70 priests and seminarians and three bishops, among the latter Bishop Thomas Paprocki, formerly of Chicago now of Springfield, IL. . . . .

The head reads, aptly: “Church Reporter: At Mundelein, man tells of “spiritual journey” from “practicing homosexual to practicing Catholic” [No longer linked] Aptly, because this is the grabber: the St. Augustine-like story of a Courage member.

Digging deep for a friend

Don Heyrman is obituaried in S-T today. He died a week ago today, a month short of his 91st birthday, having lived 50 years in Evanston. He plugged away all his life at civic and social concerns and what was known as “Catholic Action” in a bevy of organizations — National Association of Laymen, Chicago Conference of Laymen, Conference of the Laity, Christian Family Movement, Catholic Interracial Council, World Congress of the Lay Apostolate in Rome. A man generous with his time, while raising a family and working as a marketing manager for a major corporation.

Generous too with his cash, on a moment’s notice, as I discovered, calling him up one day long ago from the news room to tell him that Msgr. Jack Egan, then a Lawndale pastor, had worn out his credit with a card company and needed bailing out. I’d had a call from a Jesuit who was living with Egan (and many other activists) in the Lawndale parish. I called Heyrman, a friend of Egan’s, to see what he could do. “Well,” he said, with barely a pause, “my wife and I didn’t need that vacation anyway,” and he said he’d cover it.

How’s that for a measure of character?

Complain if you must, about this old gray church . . .

You hear Catholics complaining about, even being disillusioned with, the church because of its priests. I did yesterday, from a cradle RC whose memory goes back a generation in a parish where “you had to be Irish or Italian” to get any notice (he being neither: my guess is the Italians said you had to be Irish).

He was leading up to recounting a recent incident which gratified him greatly. So to be fair, he softened his critique. However, reading in recent years of Vatican chicanery and hostility to republicanism (in the 19th-century European sense), he finds himself increasingly critical and, as I say, disillusioned.

Good. It means he is developing into a grown-up Catholic, forced to ask himself why he still embraces the faith of his fathers and mothers. The short answer is that it’s the one, true church.

“To whom shall we go?” the apostles asked Jesus when they had found his preliminary Eucharist announcement hard to swallow and he had asked if they were about to leave him. “You have the words of eternal life.”

In other words, you are in for a dime? You’re in for a dollar. And not to quibble. Too much is at stake.

Flunking govt test ain’t necessarily bad

Wheeling Jesuit U. is not alone in flunking the government’s “financial-responsibity” test, as was reported yesterday. Some of the others are knocking down the feds’ argument:

The test is founded on a business model, and nonprofits dont really operate in the same way, Daniel Anderson, who since 1981 has served as president of Appalachian Bible College near Beckley said.

Because the test rewards schools that have a large amount of liquid assets, a school thats expanding and spending money on new facilities will score lower, Anderson said.

. . . theres a fallacy in the formula the Department of Ed uses, and Ive been saying that for many years, he said. A school like ours isnt going to just build up cash. When we get money, we want to put it into use.

Another days it’s old news:

At Ohio Valley University in Wood County, the news, well, wasnt news. I still dont understand all the excitement about OVU being on the (Education) Departments list, Steve Morgan, the schools executive vice president, said in a news release.

Morgan, who previously served as the schools chief fiscal officer, said Ohio Valley has been on the list for a decade as it purchased land and made other upgrades to become a full baccalaureate program.

The Education Departments tool to measure financial strength depends heavily on a comparison of a schools debt to its assets, Morgan said. By that definition, he said, Ohio Valley University has continued to score poorly despite growing enrollment, a top ranking in US News & World Report and other indicators of strength.

Anyhow, Ohio Valley U. is staying on the flunk list: Its a fact of life here and will continue to be so for years to come, said Morgan. The OVU president, E. Keith Stotts also demurred:

What I regret is the implication that Ohio Valley University is teetering at deaths door, he said. . . . . Just because the school shows up on the governments list doesnt mean the school is struggling, Stotts said. OVU is a true success story, the Departments list not withstanding, Stotts argues. Lord willing, our university will continue its mission of transforming lives for many years to come.

Besides Wheeling Jesuit, two other West Virginia institutions were cited: Alderson-Broaddus College in Philippi; and Davis & Elkins College in Elkins.

I like the spirit the first two show.

Smart set

Ezra Klein of Wash Post started the infamous listserv JournoList in Feb . of ’07 to provide:

An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.

That “smart” gets to me, smacking as it does of — may I say it? — elitism. A place for smart people, for people who produce smart conversation. The kind a fellow or gal can take seriously, without feeling impulse to raise brow ever so slightly, casting quick glance toward one’s intimate. Nothing crude, you know: “You’re full of shit” and all that. Just the brow and the glance and, with luck, managing to ignore the gauche thing you just heard.

It was to be an exchange that honored certain premises. “The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left,” among people unlikely to “embarrass each other.” It was to be nobody-here-but-us-chickens time. Take off your shoes and kick back, folks. You are now entering the comfort zone.

All well and good for a night on the town or in a bar or around a dinner table. But for working journalists, college professors, and the like for whom the truth presumably will out, whatever it may be, as part of their work day? Nope.

Chicago-connected JournoLister Goozner

Here’s one of three Journo-listers with Chicago identities, the only one with a media position. (Will be posting about the other two, both academics.) This fellow was with Chi Trib, but not since June 2000 (long before JournoList was started in 2007), when he “left daily journalism to teach journalism at New York University,” per his GoozNews on Health site.

He’s currently at TheFiscalTimes.com, which has partnership arrangement with Wash Post and has been a landing spot for (probably) buyout-takers and others mostly from NY Times and Wash Post, whence this is taken.

He has impeccable liberal credentials, as one may judge from what’s below. He was perhaps an amused bystander to the conspiratorial goings-on at Journo-List. In any case, he kept them under his hat.

TFT VOICES

Merrill Goozner

Columnist, Contributor

MERRILL GOOZNER is an award-winning writer based in the Washington, DC. He spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent, economics writer and investigative business reporter for the Chicago Tribune and other publications, filing stories from more than a dozen countries while posted in Chicago, Tokyo, New York and Washington. Winner of numerous journalism awards, his freelance writing in recent years has appeared in various publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The American Prospect and the Washington Monthly. He taught journalism for three years at New York University while writing “The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs,” a 2004 explanatory exposé of pharmaceutical industry research and development practices.

Wheeling Jesuit hard-pressed

Hard times at Wheeling Jesuit — one of 321 privately operated colleges (for and not for profit) that failed the U.S. Department of Education’s 2009 financial responsibility test. That means more hoops to jump through to keep aid going to the 97% of WJU students who receive it.

[Interim Pres. Sister Francis] Thrailkill said this is the first time WJU failed the test. . . . [C]olleges who score a 1 to 1.4 on the test are considered to have failed, but can still participate in federal financial aid programs, but there are a few restrictions. If a school scores in the negative, they are subject to extra requirements. WJU scored a 1.1.

Thrailkill wants to point out that WJU was notified about this issue several months ago, and said they have taken steps to improve their financial situation.

It may be standard to keep this quiet, but The Chronicle of Higher Education apparently operates under no such compulsion.

More details:

All private colleges that award federal student aid must participate in the Department of Education’s financial-responsibility test, which is based on information from their audited financial statements. The department develops a composite score on a scale of 3.0 to minus 1.0, based on financial ratios that measure factors such as net worth, operating losses, and the relationship of assets to liabilities.

Yet more, from a separate Chronicle story:

A total of 150 private nonprofit colleges failed the . . . test, [which is] based on their condition in the 2009 fiscal year . . . That’s 23 more than the 127 that failed the test in the 2008 fiscal year, and an increase of about 70 percent over the number of degree-granting institutions that failed two years ago.

WJU has company.

Psst! It’s Alinsky you’re talking about, fella!

Does this fellow know what he’s talking about?

The Industrial Areas Foundation (637 S. Dearborn St. #100, Chicago, IL 60605; http://www.10percentisenough.org), a 70-year-old national network of community organizations, has launched a “Ten Percent Is Enough” anti-usury campaign. IAF’s material, which refers to religious tradition, suggests that they understand legal victories and legislative changes are insufficient. A solution must include moral change.

Moral change, yessss! But that’s Saul Alinsky’s IAF he is recommending. Does he know that? It’s the name that dare not be named, apparently.

Sister sez — what the hell does she say?

What a display of uncertainty and mealy-mouth assertion by Chi Archdiocese’s Master (Mistress?) Educator! Italics added:

Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of schools in the archdiocese, told Chicago Public Radio: “The schools have very traditionally been tied with the life of the parish and in the parish accounts, and this kind of pulls them out a little bit from under that former umbrella to let us take a look and put them under a microscope a bit.”

Why does Sister McC. talk that way, even on public radio?

Month: August 2010