Month: July 2019

Illinois Budget Woes: Still Smoking – WSJ

On June 9, “Heard on the Street” said it:

The state’s decision to legalize gambling and marijuana helps immediate problems but delays the state’s inevitable financial collapse

This week, Crain’s Chicago Business referred to it in an assessment by Mark Glennon, of Wirepoints, “Why Illinois pols haven’t fixed our fiscal crisis,” which supports that dire prediction.

Headlines earlier this month focused on Mayor Lori Lightfoot groping for ways to deal with Chicago’s increased pension and other costs over the next few years. Lightfoot floundered looking for revenue solutions to the city’s own near-term bills—a state bailout and taxes on retirement income, which were shot down quickly. That’s unfortunate because the narrow focus masks far bigger problems for Chicago taxpayers.

She gropes and flounders, Pritzker joined her in helping to

create the trap they are in. “Pensions are a promise,” they both said to get elected, ruling out any benefit cuts. Either they break that promise or our crisis will deepen.

Both were elected easily, so far are a pair of gropers and flounderers.

See also Wirepoint’s analysis, 

starting with unfunded pension liability numbers from Moody’s Investor Services. They use more realistic assumptions than are used in official reports.

And a pension actuary writing in Forbes:

“I can only repeat again and again: There is no solution to the woefully underfunded pensions in Chicago and in Illinois that does not involve benefit cuts subsequent to a 2020 constitutional amendment or municipal bankruptcy. And the sooner Pritzker and Lightfoot figure that out, the better off we’ll all be.”

Voters should

tell Lightfoot and Pritzker their campaign promise against pension reform is void. Tell them Springfield’s myriad unfunded mandates strangling all units of Illinois government must end. Tell them that pretty much every financial reform you’ve heard about must be effectuated immediately.

Which is to say, pray for a miracle.

Traditional Detroit Priest Categorically Denies Abuse Allegations

Accusation, says the archdiocese, is “credible, meaning it has a ‘semblance of truth.'” A mere semblance? Do most people understand “credible” that way?

Then this, #14 on list of 20 requirements, per Pope Francis?

The right to defense: the principle of natural and canon law of presumption of innocence must also be safeguarded until the guilt of the accused is proven.

Therefore, it is necessary to prevent the lists of the accused being published, even by the dioceses, before the preliminary investigation and the definitive condemnation.

“Definitive condemnation”

He man is 70, has been a thorn in the side of authorities (as a seminarian decades ago), takes a stand that post-Vatican 2 people often find annoying in the extreme.

I am reminded of the Chicago case of a year or so ago, in which Cardinal Cupich peremptorily removed a highly successful traditionalist priest before a judgment had been made by a panel convened in accord with Cupich’s wishes and banished him from the archdiocese after the panel found no cause to punish or penalize the priest.

Sloppy, to say the least, coming from a prelate who exudes efficiency from every pore.  The priest was Fr. Frank Phillips, of course, pastor of St. John Cantius parish.

Fulton Sheen’s cardinal in New York, Francis Spellman, persecuted him (and Sheen never complained). Archbishops do that sometimes, do they not?

via Traditional Detroit Priest Categorically Denies Abuse Allegations

Mum’s the word under new Wash. archbishop Gregory about whom McCarrick paid prelates (off?) from charity fund

Wilton G., once of Chicago, could make a major contribution to often-praised openness, but so far hasn’t.

WASHINGTON – More than one year after the announcement of allegations of sexual abuse against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Archdiocese of Washington has continued to refuse questions about McCarrick’s use of a personal charitable fund.

McCarrick funnelled hundreds of thousands of dollars through what was known as the Archbishop’s Fund, and reportedly made gifts to senior Vatican officials, even while the fund remained under the charitable auspices of the archdiocese.

Senior sources close to the Archdiocese of Washington have confirmed that archdiocesan records include the names of individuals, including senior Vatican figures, to whom McCarrick made payments from the fund.

But the Archdiocese of Washington has declined to disclose sources, sums, and uses of money, though it has acknowledged that the fund exists.

The archdiocese has also declined to comment on whether Archbishop Wilton Gregory will address accusations of financial misconduct by McCarrick, or publish the names of bishops who personally received gifts from the disgraced former archbishop.

Greatness knocks at Abp. Gregory’s door. Will he answer?

via No Answers from Washington Archdiocese About McCarrick’s Money

A word of thanks to Benedict from an English ordinariate priest

That is, an Anglican priest-scholar who joined the minor exodus to Rome made possible by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 — as the Church of England lost any semblance of what (soon to be Saint) John Henry Cardinal Newman called “the vivifying principle of truth, the shadow of Peter, the grace of the Redeemer.”

We got out only just in time, didn’t we? Right at the very last possible moment, when the gubernator Petrinus [bark of Peter captain] had guided his barque non sine periculo [not without risk] so close to our sinking ship that we were able to step from one deck to the other, our suitcases in our hands, without even getting our feet wet. What a gentle, generous, holy and humble old man Benedict XVI is. God bless him, always.

From one who is grateful beyond imagining for being welcomed in such a way back to the church of Peter and his successors.

via Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment: Aurea Aetas Clericorum

Francis and the curia: finding people he can work with

Pope Francis has his eye on the curia, his cabinet of appointees who advise him on church matters and presumably carry out his wishes — or maybe they do, and if they do not, have been known to face the consequences.

Fr. Hunwicke has examined and discussed the curia’s role down the centuries, noting various authority they have been said to have over the years. In this the third of his discussions, he points out some elements of the current situation.

Commentators have not been slow to remark that, to the outside observer, it looks as if the current pope is attempting to prevent or eliminate the existence of strong foci within the Curia. He seems to be incapable of working with any Head of Dicastery [department] who is not a yes-man. It is a sign, not of the Holy Father’s strength, but of his weakness, that he cannot collaborate with as gentle yet principled a man as Robert Sarah, without deeming it necessary to humiliate him before the world. And Sarah was one of his own appointments.

And he also appointed Raymond Burke to be Patron of the Order of Malta. But as soon as a problem arose in the Order, he humiliated and sidelined him. When you appoint people, you should either back them up when the going gets rough, or confess that you yourself erred in making the appointment.

[Another such,] Gerhard Mueller was inherited, not appointed, by Papa Bergoglio. But he confirmed him in office, and the position is a highly significant one. The current pope is neither learned nor intelligent. To run the CDF [Congregation for Defense of the Faith] he needed someone who was each of these things. Mueller was and is. First he humiliated him by sending Schoenborn to front the Amoris laetitia news conference; then by sacking three of his collaborators without even telling him; lastly, he has humiliated him yet again by dumping him with a minute’s notice and invoking a principle he had not mentioned either to Mueller or the World before: that Heads of Dicasteries will not be continued in post beyond their first quinquennium.

In other words, Francis has acted in high-handed, dictatorial manner with those who are presumably his trusted helpers.

Which makes a person wary about what’s to come as regards reorganization of this crucial element of papal government.

via Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment: The Curia Romana (3)

Fr. George Rutler on Being a Priest-Writer

Asked why he continues to write:

I expect to publish my thirtieth book in 2019. I am surprised that almost all of them still are in print. One of my earliest was on the epistemology of Immanuel Kant, but I have been unsuccessful so far in getting it made into a Hollywood musical.

It is not that I have nothing better to do. My parishioners have an unmitigated tendency to get born, marry, and die, and this occupies one’s attention. Most of my writing is in pastoral response to events of the day, and I have to write between Holy Hours and plastering walls and fixing an antiquated heating system.

But I continue to write for the same reason that I continue to breathe: I shall only stop when the Holy Spirit rejects the manuscript which is my life itself, and which is in dire need of editing.

No wonder they’re in print.

Canonization lost its touch these days, more of a ho-hum thing in view of recent flurry? Fr. Hunwicke objects.

Fr. Hunwicke is at pains to explain why canonization is infallible — the saint’s in heaven, all’s right with the process — but not with the infallibility defined in 1870 at the First Vatican Council.

“Defined,” he points out, meaning limited, as any catechism-familiar grade-schooler knew in the ’40s and ’50s, to ex cathedra pronouncements, meaning “from the chair” or with the special full authority of the papacy.

Why does he explain?

I have returned to this question because the current, apparently politically motivated, frenzy for canonising recent Bishops of Rome may have tainted for many the very concept of canonisation . . . may have rubbed off it some of the gloss. How can we enjoy the oncoming event [canonization of Cardinal Newman] with proper exuberance when the currency of canonisation has been so devalued, so reduced to a political formality?

I have no problems. Since Saint John Henry [Newman] taught a great deal which is directly in opposition to the attitudes of the current pontificate, his canonisation cannot be seen as a political act intended to subvert the Great Tradition.

“On the contrary,” he says.

I regard it as a triumph of divine Grace in the midst of the dark clouds of this pontificate; as a sudden bright burst of sunlit glory piercing the clouds and giving us a certain pledge of the ultimate triumph of orthodoxy!

So, as one of those recently canonized bishops of Rome used to repeat, Be not afraid.

(Note various spellings of canonization, where I use the right way.)