Can’t keep a good man down.

Hope you can make it, he tells Nancy P.

“I look forward to seeing you on the evening [of] January 29th in the Chamber of the House of Representatives,” Mr. Trump wrote in letter to Mrs. Pelosi. “It would be so very sad for our Country if the State of the Union were not delivered on time, on schedule, and very importantly, on location!”

Got no closer to ‘Nam than El Toro Calif., per his service record.

At an annual Native American memorial ceremony at Arlington Cemetery in 2008:

In tears, Phillips explained that he had literally dropped off his wife at the emergency room days before the ceremony. He had expressed to her that he wanted to stay with her, be she told him to go and conduct the ceremony.

Which he had convened for 15 years and where he was highly respected.

Phillips also described coming back to the U.S. as a veteran of the Vietnam era. “People called me a baby killer and a hippie girl spit on me.”

Not so, according to published post-Covington-students correction.

The entire crowd was moved by the events and words spoken. Phillips then led the gathering in the lighting and partaking of the sacred pipe.

But what if they had known he had not served?

R.R. Reno, “shocked by how rapidly Catholic and conservative leaders jumped into the denunciation competition”:

Here is the statement from Covington Catholic High School and the diocese of Covington under the leadership of Bishop Roger Foys:

We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students toward Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C. We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teaching on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.

It’s a shocking statement from people who know the young men involved and who are responsible for their flourishing. Before hearing the whole story and determining how events actually unfolded, they too are willing to join the social media stampede. They identify their own young people as potential racists and moral criminals unworthy of membership in their community.

They jumped at the chance to look good in others’ eyes.

Joseph Kurtz, archbishop of nearby Louisville, added his voice to the chorus of condemnation. “I join with Bishop Foys in condemning the actions of the Covington High School students toward Mr. Nathan Phillips and the Native American Community yesterday in Washington.”

We’re a long way from the spirit of John Hughes, New York’s first archbishop. He was a fierce advocate of the immigrant Catholics under his care, defending them against the condemnations of the Protestant elite. Now we seem to have a Church in which kids who go to parochial schools aren’t protected. Their school principals and bishops prefer to condemn them rather than defend them. If there’s the slightest risk of getting sideways with establishment opinion, they’re thrown under the bus.

Waiting for apology from two bishops and one high school principal, among others.

Using them for his purposes.

R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, emphasis added throughout:

Pope Francis has also [in addition to governing with “gestures, slogans, and sentiments”] revised the Catechism in a way that suggests a fundamental change in the Church’s teaching. This was done in a peremptory fashion without discussion or explanation.

It is as if Francis had meditated on St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, which guides one toward galvanizing discernments that come with commanding immediacy, rather than consulting moral theologians. This can’t help but create the impression that everything is up for grabs. Who knows what will come next?

He looks directly to the Spirit.

“Time is greater than space.” Pope Francis put this forward as one of his guiding principles. It means that movements of the spirit matter more than official liturgies, authorized doctrines, and established structures. This principle is anti-institutional. It is a characteristic sentiment of ­Jesuits formed by the Spiritual Exercises who are old enough to take the Church’s institutions for granted.

A big statement that, but the author has seen Jesuits in action.

I taught for a number of years at a Jesuit University. [Twenty years at Creighton U.] I’m familiar with a pastoral approach that treats disruption and rule-breaking as a spiritual tonic. Many Jesuits I knew were “liberal” in style and rhetoric. But I came to see that this was not always out of conviction. It was a tactic, a posture meant to enhance their evangelical effectiveness. Breaking rules and adopting heterodox views puts people at ease, they thought. It opens up space for the Holy Spirit, getting people onto the “ladder of love” that brings them into the Church.

Crazy?

This is not a crazy approach. In some circumstances, it works. As St. Paul said, “I have become all things to all people,” suggesting a mobile strategy for the proclamation of Christ crucified. This Jesuit adoption of multiple, even contradictory ecclesial masks helps us understand why Pope Francis can tack so quickly from “liberal” to “conservative” positions, suggesting a relaxation of the Church’s judgments about sexual morality (“Who am I to judge?”), while at the same time making striking statements about the unfitness of homosexual men for the priesthood.

Plus the Argentinian effect:

This approach coheres, moreover, with the Peronist tradition that seeks to transcend ideology in the service of the people. A true Peronist is left-wing—except when he is right-wing.

But the Church?

This does not work as a general strategy for the Church. The Francis mode of improvisation depends on the underlying stability of the tradition for its effectiveness. If the Church becomes the agent of her own disruption and rule-breaking becomes the rule, then Jesuit freelancing tactics lose their spiritual effectiveness. They become, instead, futile gestures in an atmosphere of disorder and confusion.

Not what Ignatius had in mind.