Day: March 12, 2013

What If You Get a Bad Pope?

The Holy Spirit, breathing where he wills, does not always work miracles:

. . . some particularly awful popes have given the Holy Spirit a run for his money. Popes did more than Martin Luther, John Calvin and King Henry VIII put together to spark the Reformation. Pontiffs have launched stupid wars and pointless persecutions. They have fathered households full of bastard children, disrupted the normal religious lives of Catholics in entire countries for wholly political reasons, and gorged themselves on the indulgences of the faithful. These are the men, critics of the Catholic Church are going to ask, invested with infallible authority?

It may be, this time around, after two great popes, we get a non-great one — “just a firm hand at the helm of Peter’s barque,” says Phil Lawler, quoted by Jeremy Lott at Real Clear Religion.

And the old saying, “God writes straight with crooked lines”? Maybe. Who on earth knows?

Oak Park Chronicles

Does Oak Park have a pension problem, as candidate Anan Abu-Taleb said in the March 1 Carleton Hotel forum, saying the village should go to the police and fire fighters and negotiate more of their contract offer money to their funds?

Chicago’s mayor did that with the city’s police sergeants and got nowhere, as Fran Spielman reports in today’s Sun-Times.

By a nearly 7-1 ratio, sergeants rejected a deal that would have given them a 9 percent pay raise over four years in exchange for: raising the retirement age for sergeants to 53; increasing employee pension contributions from 9 to 12 percent by January, 2015; hiking health care contributions for new retirees to 2 percent of annuities; forfeiting cost-of-living adjustments every other year and limited COLA in intervening years to 2.5 percent with simple interest.

What candidate Anan had in mind, I presume, was increasing employee pension contributions

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