Cardinal George got a kindly reception at abuse-plagued St. Agatha Church yesterday but couldn’t keep his sharp, logical tongue in check anyhow.

Asked as he left the friendly St. Agatha confines what he thought of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) protesting his imminent election as president of the U.S. bishops conference, he said, “I don’t think they have any credibility on that issue.”

A low blow?  Or badly aimed, as gun shot at one’s foot by the church leader who has nothing to say about his priest’s felonious sexual assault on children in his care but to call it “tragedy.”

Isn’t tragedy what you can’t avoid?  The horrors visited by the gods, or for us Christians, God, willy-nilly?  The Greeks — Sophocles and the like, not restaurant-owners coast to coast — made an excess of a good thing.  Your chief virtue did you in, you got a big head, fell victim to hubris, and there you were, caught in disaster not entirely of your making.

Not so.  Today, even for learned prelates, a tragedy is something clearly bad though only vaguely to be blamed on anyone.  So guns kill people, not people, the shot not the shooter, the SUV not the driver. 

Likewise, who’s to blame for the dreadful incidents at St. Agatha?  “We have tried to figure out where were the betrayals, what went wrong,” the cardinal told the eminently forgiving parishioners, gathered for him to install the new man as pastor.

Isn’t there something plaintive about that?  We have tried.  And trying is next to godliness, which robs protesting SNAP of its credibility, does it not?  Is there hubris in that? 

Moreover, there may be more to this than has met the eye so far, said George:

“A lot of that is still a story that is not truly told, for various reasons,” George said. “Sometimes things don’t become really clear for many years, and sometimes, perhaps, not until Christ returns.”

Whoa.  Not truly equals falsely, I think.  Various reasons?  Uh-oh.  Someone’s been lying, though this churchman would prefer not to use the word.  And why?  We don’t know, and may never know until the Second Coming.

Is that nonsense, or what?  We do know that no one has been penalized for letting the offender not only pass but thrive under George — who made him a vicariate dean, for gosh sakes, weeks before his arrest.  In fact, nothing has slowed the promotion machine, as Sun-Times pointed out months ago:

Top leaders in the Archdiocese of Chicago responsible for complaints about predatory priests kept their positions or rose in the church in the aftermath of the Rev. Daniel McCormack’s 2006 arrest, according to archdiocesan reports and interviews. Vicar General George Rassas was elevated to auxiliary bishop. Chancellor Jimmy Lago was named the primary point person on child abuse cases. Leaders from the offices of Vicar for Priests to Protection of Children and Youth stayed in key positions,

the paper had last July — scroll down and pay $2.95 to see whole article.  Must we wait for Jesus in a cloud of glory to know what all that’s about? 

Meanwhile, what would it be like to hear from George’s lips “disgusting” about the abuser’s behavior?  Can he say he feels “lousy” about it?  He should at least try.  It would be quite an improvement on invoking mystery and getting snappish with SNAP. 

This story is in the shop for repairs.  Thanks for your patience.

Rev. Donald McGuire SJ will remain free on bond pending appeal of his 2006 conviction, vs. attempt by his prosecutor to send him back because of the civil suit saying he committed abuse as recently as 2003.

ELKHORN, Wis. (AP) – A judge says a prominent Jesuit priest convicted of molesting high school students in the 1960s can remain free on bond despite a new allegation of abuse.

Walworth County Judge James Carlson rejected the motion, saying the claims have not been proven.

ABC-TV 7 also has this story.

Nice going for newspeak, doublespeak, and no-speak to Sun-Times for editorial today on “protected” Chicago public school teachers, “Get bad teachers out of school,” with no mention of teachers’ union.  They said it couldn’t be done, but they were wrong.

Consider then, two pages later in hard copy — which still has far more readers than cyber, or I say so until the web site posts hit numbers — the ongoing free ad for the Jacksons, Reverend Shakedown himself, spouting old, old, line, “Invest in U.S. instead of sacrificing in Iraq.”  Tell ‘em, Reverend.

Then go to p. 46, 17 pp later, for an odd angle on screwing wine instead of corking it, “Wine switch threatens cork forests.”  An environmentalist wacko headline if there ever was one, accurate, however.  It’s an AP story out of nowhere that we can see.  Citation is to World Wildlife Fund, which comes in for a terminal roughing up by Bjorn Lomborg, former Green Peace member, the Danish Debunker of World Panic, in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. 

It’s been clear for some time that it’s too much to ask of mainstreamers even to know about Lomborg and his ilk, much less cite them.  S-T archives, for instance, has no reference in its archives for Lomborg.

Accused by his fellow poly scientists at DePaul U. of engaging in “ad hominem attacks [and] invective” in his otherwise well-argued books, Norman Finkelstein said,

“It is rather regrettable that DePaul is carrying on the spirit of Chicago’s Al Capone rather than St. Vincent de Paul.”

The poly sci faculty supported him in his recently lost battle for tenure.  Do they think their professionalism is a suicide pact, that it can countenance bad manners?

This is a Ron Grossman Chi Trib article today, “DePaul memos tell of run-ins with professor,” which shows what someone who knows the territory can discover about faculty in-fighting.  Saturday’s Sun-Times piece, on the other hand, had none of this.

Today’s generic headline from Chi Trib: “Justice delayed, perhaps not denied.”  The copy eds have a list.  This one comes in the j’s.

When is a coup not a coup? . . . Liz Sly has a Baghdad “coup” looming as “Iraq’s best hope”:

an assortment of Iraqi politicians has been spending the summer vacation plotting a new Iraqi coup — a non-violent, parliamentary coup to be sure, but a coup nonetheless, that would oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, declare a state of emergency and install a new government.

But how a coup when parliamentary? 

According to [prospective new head of govt.] Allawi’s published program, the parliamentarians would not only appoint a new government but also suspend the new constitution, declare a state of emergency and make the restoration of security its priority.

A Sunni politico is cited as saying incumbent prime minister

al-Maliki’s failure thus far to deliver on almost all the key measures of progress set forth by the Bush administration and evidence that his coalition is falling apart suggest Washington may soon have to explore alternatives,

He’s the source of the “coup” desegnation, apparently:

“The Americans finally will support us because they don’t have another solution,” he said . . . .  If all these things don’t work out, it is the people who will make a coup. They will rise up, and there will be a coup all over Iraq.”

So the story repaid reading, but no thanks to those early ‘graphs.  I say the foreign correspondent can use help from the home desk, from editors.

Where are the yea-sayers? . . . . Could not Dave Newbart have asked for some defense of the tenure-deniers in the DePaul-Finkelstein case beyond the official spokesman (oops, spokeswoman), whose hands are officially tied in such cases.  There ought to be some cool head on (or off) campus who can be trusted for at least a paragraph.

A teacher is quoted — dissidents always are available — calling the tenure denial “outrageous,” which by now has lost its sting, except she added “absolutely.” 

He does have sources saying DePaul

cited alleged [sic: why not simply “alleged” as verb?] confrontations between Finkelstein and an administrator and some faculty members who opposed his tenure bid as reasons not to allow him back.

That’s back for a final year of teaching sans tenure, not about tenure denial in itself.  In fact, searching discovers no Sun-Times article or column detailing the case against Finkelstein.  A June 12 letter is all there is.  The rest is protest and the anti-Israel accusation, which tenure-deniers would argue is beside the point. 

The letter mentions a letter to Finkelstein by the tenure reviewers:

have long found your reporting and editorial page reliable and fair. I was surprised that your [June 9] news article on the denial of tenure at DePaul University to Norm Finkelstein was lacking in context. Denial of tenure is a very rare occurrence. In this case, DePaul had a range of reasons (outlined in their letter to Finkelstein) to issue such a denial.

His faulty scholarship was the prime reason for DePaul’s rejection, since reputable scholarship is one of the prime reasons universities exist. Finkelstein‘s failures in this regard are well-known (and notorious); however, the article seemed to depict him as the victim of a vendetta from forces outside the university angered by his anti-Israel positions and the notoriety he has generated for his revisionism regarding the Holocaust. The letter from DePaul to him expressly rejected these as reasons behind denial of tenure.

He is not a victim of his politics; he victimized himself by failing to abide by the precepts of his profession.

Ed Lasky,

Northbrook

If this letter is quoted anywhere in S-T, it’s not clear from headlines, whose stories seem geared to the protestors’ viewpoint.  Do S-T and Newbart lean that way?

Today’s generic headline from Chi Trib: “Justice delayed, perhaps not denied.”  The copy eds have a list.  This one comes in the j’s.

Three reasons why Chicago Bears player Lance Briggs walked away from his crumpled $350G auto at 3 a.m. Aug. 27 on the Edens: