Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

Reporting as art form: Imagination required

Deadline writing quick on the uptake . . .

Writers & Writing

It has been done, in this case by a master.

In his introduction to the 1946 Scribner’s edition of Henry James’s The American Scene, W.H. Auden observes that while travel is the “easiest subject for the journalist” who requires only “a flair for being on the spot where interesting events happen,” it is the most difficult for the artist, “who is deprived of the freedom to invent, free only to select and never to modify or add, which calls for imagination of a very high order.”

Except that, as Auden goes on to show, James found ways to invent, modify, or add, exploiting his “descriptive conceits” with rhapsodies on “the golden apples of the Jersey shore” and the pleasure of “being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of—well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition?”

A newspaper writer…

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Are you now or have you ever been?

Dems bigoted? Can’t be. As liberals, they are open-minded, aren’t they?

Democrats now freely display the sort of anti-Catholic bigotry that JFK was thought to have vanquished in the 1960 presidential campaign. As they have done with so much of their history, the Democrats have deposited JFK and the 1960 campaign down the memory hole.

I wrote about the anti-Catholic bigotry on display in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017. It was the subject of my City Journal column "The unfunniest

Say it ain’t so.

Read More Here:

A Three-day Meeting in Rome to Do What?

Pope Francis shut down the U.S. bishops’ meeting in November, telling them, do nothing until you hear from me — until you come to Rome, to which all roads lead, when I will have an agenda for you.

Pope Francis will meet on February 21, 2019, with the bishops’ conferences of the world on protecting minors from clergy sexual abuse. But what is the problem they will be addressing? Is the problem pedophilia, homosexuality, rogue clericalism, or all of the above?

A little clarity, please.

Father Hans Zollner, a member of the committee organizing this meeting, told the Vatican News on December 27 that the meeting should produce “a clarification of procedures, which aren’t so clear,” regarding the responsibility and accountability of bishops and religious superiors throughout the entire world.

What’s not to like about clarifying procedures?

More to come . . . 

The unfair, anti-Catholic conviction of Cardinal George Pell

“To Kill a Mockingbird” revisited.

No one with a sense of justice can fail to be outraged when, in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a jury in Maycomb, Ala., bows to social pressure and convicts an innocent man of a crime he couldn’t have committed.

Something similar took place last month in real-world Melbourne, Australia, where Cardinal George Pell was falsely and perversely convicted on charges of “historic sexual abuse” dating to the 1990s.

First jury hung. He was acquitted on 10-2 vote based on evidence he couldn’t have done it.

In the retrial, the defense again demonstrated that it was physically impossible for the alleged abuse of two choirboys (one now deceased) to have occurred, given the layout and security ­arrangements of Melbourne’s Catholic cathedral and the fact that the choir and Pell were in two different places when the abuse was alleged to have occurred.

Pell, moreover, was always surrounded by others at the cathedral that day in 1996. Why the Melbourne police never took the trouble to investigate these exculpatory facts is one of several mysteries in this sordid ­affair.

Second jury ignored this evidence?

The retrial jury took days to reach a verdict, during which the jurors asked the trial judge for ­instructions on how evidence should be considered. That an overwhelming vote for acquittal at the first trial was then flipped to a unanimous verdict for conviction invites the inference that the jury chose to ignore evidence that the alleged crimes couldn’t have happened.

Problem:

How can charges be brought when the public authorities could have easily determined that the ­alleged abuse couldn’t have happened, because the victims and the alleged perpetrator were never in close proximity, much less by themselves without witnesses?

“Mockingbird” comparison:

Any judgment on the Pell verdict must also take full account of the atmosphere in which the cardinal’s case was heard. Anti-Catholicism has been a staple of Australia’s culture for decades. Local media long misrepresented Pell, a Church ­reformer, as a power-hungry ecclesiastical politician, and that caricature made him a convenient scapegoat for the grave crimes of other priests and bishops.

But . . .

[A]s archbishop of Melbourne, Pell set up Australia’s first process for investigating and compensating claims of clerical sexual abuse. And as archbishop of Sydney, he applied strict protocols to himself, stepping aside until previous spurious abuse charges against him were thoroughly investigated — and dismissed — by a former Australian supreme court justice.

Pell couldn’t win for losing.

Aggressive secularists couldn’t forgive him for his robust Catholicism. Most Catholic progressives couldn’t abide his orthodoxy. Some of Pell’s enemies had the ­integrity to dismiss the charges against him as ludicrous, and a few said afterward that his conviction was a travesty. But the foul ­atmosphere in Melbourne was reminiscent of rural Alabama in the 1930s.

Something else there was. Follow the money.

One other facet of this miscarriage of justice deserves investigation by enterprising reporters. Pell was brought to Rome by Pope Francis to clean up Vatican ­finance, a Herculean task in which he was making progress. Then, just as he was getting down to the ­really serious corruption, which involves hundreds of millions of euros and the shadow worlds of global ­finance, these abuse charges were laid, and Pell had to return to Australia to defend himself.

Oh?

Was that timing sheer accident? Rome-based supporters of Pell’s ­reforming efforts with whom I’ve spoken think not. Just as in Harper Lee’s Maycomb, something is rotten in this business. And it isn’t the character of Cardinal George Pell.

No.

A Letter to the Bishops

Comments on the mark for this:
* Thanks for the perceptive reading, Amy. I scanned the letter earlier and just couldn’t cut through the fluff.
* Unfortunately, the personal “philosophy” which the Pope expresses (don’t impose abstractions, “time is greater than space”, etc.) is itself an abstraction and even a mystification.
* I couldn’t finish reading the letter. I know this isn’t the first Pope in my life time to speak elliptically or be difficult to follow, but I’m just so tired of the delicacy of the writing, the “We shepherds must always be careful” language. No, that’s not what this sheep wants. This sheep wants the courageous, driven, single minded shepherd who loves us enough to sacrifice for us. It is not careful. It is not gently finding unity where there is division. I see all the time what they call “prudence” is only prudent for shepherds, not for the sheep. Whenever I hear words like this, I think “The vast majority of bishops and cardinals are still not even sorry.”
* The line in the Holy Father’s letter that sent chills down my spine was this:
“Clearly, a living fabric has come undone, and we, like weavers, are called to repair it.”
The first thing that came to mind was the motto of the Bohemian Club – “Weaving spiders come not here” from A Midsummers’ Night Dream. The thought of the bishops as “weavers” seems… odd.
even moreso if the fabric is living. Does that call for surgeons, not weavers? Weavers don’t generally repair – they patch. New cloth over the old. How else does weaving repair a cloth that has come undone?
It’s a very odd analogy.
* I think one of the Jesuits surrounding PF wrote this in an attempt to preserve the status quo. I hope our bishops will see the reality under the fluff and act appropriately.

Charlotte was Both

Pope Francis wrote a letter to the American bishops, on retreat at Mundelein Seminary this week.

Here’s the text.

It is, honestly, the usual strange/not-strange message from Pope Francis. Strange in that he goes all over the place except to the specific place where the problem resides, and not-strange in that, well, this is what he usually does, and there’s always a reason for that.

Your experience of reading the letter might be like mine (or it might not – who knows!) – I read it and nodded and thought, Well, not bad, that’s true, sure, it’s good for these things to be said, nice point there and then I finished, thought about it for a minute, and realized that none of the specific problematic issues had actually been addressed and further, the spiritual context which Pope Francis recommends for going forward, it could be argued, actually enables the original…

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Reporting as an art form: W.H. Auden on Henry James

Henry James, W.H. Auden, some reporters

Not for attribution

W.H. Auden said it took imagination “of a very high order” to “extract importance” from events while remaining faithful to them, “free only to select and never to modify or add.”

He was introducing a 1946 edition of Henry James’s The American Scene, a travel book that Auden considered more than that. Travel he called the “easiest subject for the journalist” who requires only “a flair for being on the spot where interesting events happen.”

For the artist, on the other hand, it’s that “high order” performance.

However, I’ve known journalists who like James as Auden described him, or at least somewhat like him, picked what mattered, extracting importance without modifying or adding to it.

It’s been a goal worth striving for, even on deadline.

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Pope Francis’ Argentinean Protegé Accused of Sex Abuse

Daily Beastly treatment of The Man from Argentina, how it’s done in cynical/realistic/in-your-face,front-page style, in which the story’s the thing. Not a or any story but the story:

DON’T CRY FOR HIM

Pope Francis’ Argentinean Protegé Accused of Sex Abuse

An Argentine in a suspiciously cushy job in the Vatican’s treasury is now credibly accused of abusing seminarians in Argentina—and everyone wants to know what the pope knew when.

What are the beastly to say, in face of such a story?

ROME—When 53-year-old Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta abruptly left his post as bishop of Orán in Argentina in July 2017, he cited “health reasons” and a need for “treatment.” Many were concerned that he might have a terminal disease, according to local press reports at the time. After all, the popular bishop didn’t even seem well enough to hold a farewell mass.

Zanchetta tendered his resignation to Pope Francis, who often sits on such matters for months. Instead, the pope granted it within three days, according to the Associated Press, which broke the story, and soon Zanchetta was on his way to Rome, first spending time at an undisclosed location in Spain.

Now safely in Vatican City where he enjoys diplomatic immunity, the bishop stands credibly accused of sexually harassing young seminarians in the home country he shares with Francis.

Look. How ridiculous can a pontiff get? Having done his best to be a Beastly kind of pope, he’s become a Beastly kind of butt. Moral high ground, from which he can take a lead role in making this a better world? Not quite.

Not long after resigning, Zanchetta showed up on Pope Francis’ doorstep in Rome, apparently miraculously cured. Francis, who had made his fellow countryman a bishop right after becoming pope in 2013, naturally helped him out. Francis, back when he was Cardinal Jose Bergoglio and archbishop of Argentina, apparently knew Zanchetta well. He gave the younger man a high-ranking position in the Argentinean Bishops Conference when he was president of the organization. It made sense that he would find a place for a fellow Argentine in the Curia in Rome.

You just don’t get that sort of coverage from the boldest of politesse-equipped church-oriented media, whose market would be caught dramatically unaware. Can’t be done, that is, by some with more skin in the game than pushing the story. Which story this beast seems to have discovered.