Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

As part of my Lenten reading I just finished Patrick Henry Reardon’s The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth about the Humanity of Christ. Publishers choose titles, and the title is a little misleading. Reardon has some escellent insights, but as he would inist, it is nto really new: it is in the Gospels. Russell Moore’s introduction is also a little misleading. Reardon does not concentrate on the brute physicality of Jesus’ existence, such as whether he was sick and suffered the indignities of intestinal flu. Reardon, wisely, does not discuss the intensely emotional question of Jesus’ sexuality – although Jesus grew up and underwent puberty like all human males.

Like a good Antiochan, Reardon, while fully accepting the conciliar dogmas on the two natures of Christ, concentrates on the humanity of Jesus. We are saved by the human acts of a divine person, and Reardon concentrates on the human intentions of the writers of Scripture and on the humanity of Jesus.

Perhaps the most important point that Reardon makes is that to be human is to be in movement, in development. If the Son of God assumed our full humanity, he also assumed the process of development that all human beings undergo. That is, Jesus learned things as we do, by observation, study, and pondering. He also, like the prophets, was given moments of special insight into events and into human thoughts. These do not prove that he was omniscient, in the sense that he knew all things in a quantitative sense (for example, all the stars in the universe, their planets, the movements of each atom and sub-atomic particle from the Big Bang to the End, etc.)  As a Son he knew what the Father wanted him to know, in the way the Father wanted him to know them.

Reardon does not argue this but simply states it as being most congruent with the text – which it certainly is, but of course there is a strong tradition that claims that Jesus was in some sense omniscient. To address that theological tradition would require another book.

Reardon examines the texts to see how Jesus came to a clearer and clearer idea of what his Messianic mission entailed, that is, betrayal and the cross. This came about primarily through a study of the Scriptures.

When I was at Providence College in the 1960s, the Dominicans were totally captivated by the historical-critical approach to Scripture, the four source theory of Genesis, etc. I asked the question which was dismissed as not being worthy of an answer, whether Jesus’ approach to Scripture should not be normative. If we are to put on the mind of Christ, should we not also regard Scripture in the same way he regarded it? Reardon’s answer is yes.

Reardon’s approach also, no doubt inadvertently, bears a resemblance to books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that also tried to bring out the full humanity - and the masculinity - of Jesus, books such as Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows. Those writers, however, often had a weak grasp of the Messianic mission and of the atonement, and sometimes were on the fringes of orthodoxy, an accusation that cannot be made about Reardon.

This is for real:

From The Journal of Medical Ethics

Law, ethics, and medicine

Paper

After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?

1. Alberto Giubilini

2. Francesca Minerva

+ Author Affiliations

1. ¹Department of Philosophy, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

2. ²Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

3. ³Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

4. ⁴Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Abstract

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

This, via Patrick Madrid, is, for the time being, a projection:

January 22, 2023

Dear Mom:

Can you believe it is already the year 2023? I’m still writing ’22 on everything! It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in the first grade and celebrating the change to a new century.

I know we really haven’t chatted since Christmas, Mom, and I’m sorry. Anyway, I have some difficult news to share with you and, to be honest, I really didn’t want to call or talk about this face to face.

But before I get to that, let me report that Ted just got a big promotion, and I should be up for a hefty raise this year if I keep putting in all those crazy hours. You know how I work at it. (Yes, we’re still struggling to pay the bills.)

Little Timmy’s been okay at kindergarten, although he complains about going. But then, he wasn’t happy about the day-care center either. So what can we do?

He’s been a real problem, Mom. He’s a good kid, but quite honestly, he’s an unfair burden on us at this time in our lives.Ted and I have talked this through, and we have finally made a choice. Plenty of other families have made the same choice and are really better off today.

Our pastor is supportive of our choice. He pointed out the family is a system, and the demands of one member shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the whole. The pastor told us to be prayerful and to consider all the factors as to what is right to make our family work. He says that even though he probably wouldn’t do it himself, the choice really is ours. He was kind enough to refer us to a children’s clinic near here, so at least that part is easy.

Don’t get me wrong, Mom. I’m not an uncaring mother. I do feel sorry for the little guy. I think he heard Ted and me talking about this the other night. I turned and saw him standing at the bottom of the stairs in his PJ’s with his little teddy bear that you gave him under his arm, and his eyes were sort of welled up with tears.

Mom, the way he looked at me just about broke my heart, but I honestly believe this is better for Timmy, too. It’s just not fair to force him to live in a family that can’t give him the time and attention he deserves.

And please, Mom, don’t give me the kind of grief that grandma gave you over your abortions. It’s the same thing, you know. There’s really no difference.

We’ve told Timmy he’s just going in for a “vaccination.” Anyway, they say the termination procedure is painless. I guess it’s just as well that you haven’t seen that much of little Timmy lately.

Please give my love to Dad.

Your daughter

In Baltimore, parishes were closed one or two at a time, and I noticed little outcry. Ethnic parishes had been built within a block or two of each other, and the neighborhoods had become almost entirely back, with very few Catholics. Other dioceses held onto a structure that was built for a far larger and more ethnic Catholic population, and with the recent financial crunch have had to close down parishes wholesale. In Cleveland the enormous decline in both the Catholic and overall population has necessitated the closing of numerous parishes with the usual outcry – although is hard to see how it could have been avoided.

One parish responded by setting up its own congregation independent of the bishop Tom Roberts has an article, “A Community of a Different Sort,” in the National Catholic Reporter (now available here) about this situation.

The Rev. Robert Marrone had revived St. Peter’s, an inner city parish (for some of its problems see Marrone’s difficult relationship with street people) by attracting white suburbanites, but Bishop Lennon decided that it had to be closed as part of the diocesan reorganization. The members of the parish rented their own space in an industrial and have continued to meet as the Community of St. Peter with Marrone, their former pastor, who has been threatened with unspecified ecclesiastical penalties.

The parish seems to be in schism – it is conducting unauthorized liturgies with the former pastor, who is not assigned to it and is listed as being on leave from the active ministry.

The present Catholic system of episcopal governance is not God-given in all its details, but on the whole many problems in the Church have been the result of bishops (and popes) failing to exercise the oversight that is the essence of their office, not in exercising too much oversight.

The Community of St. Peter has set itself up as an independent Catholic congregation outside the structure of the diocese. Marrone has not been suspended or excommunicated – not yet, but that seems inevitable.

Marrone claims that the split was not based on any of the controversies in the Church, but on the desire of the congregation to stay together. The congregation has set itself up as a legal entity and plans to hire its own clergy.

In all the other independent Catholic congregations that have been set up, almost immediately there is a full acceptance of homosexual behavior and a general rejection of Catholic sexual ethics. It also seems inevitable that the parish will hire a woman priest, whose ordination they will claim to have somehow been in the line of apostolic succession – the one doctrine that schismatic Catholics cling to when they reject all other Catholic ecclesiology. (See the experience of Spiritus Christi in Rochester)

Protestant denominations that are congregational in polity also have a poor record of dealing with sensitive problems like sexual abuse. The Southern Baptists point out that the denomination has no authority over clergy – each congregation calls its pastor and no one outside the congregation  has any say over the qualifications, opinions or behavior of the pastor. Congregations who have suffered from manipulative, sexually abusive pastors sometimes look wistfully at denominations with an episcopal structure which could step in and deal with the problem.

I do not see why the Community of St. Peter does not join the Episcopal Church. That polity allows the congregation more autonomy in running its affairs and choosing its pastors than the Roman Catholic system does, but also provides episcopal oversight to deal with problems that congregations cannot deal with internally. A congregation can also accept or reject as much Catholicism as its feels comfortable with. The Episcopalian Church has a good pension system, which an individual congregation would have trouble setting up.

Do the parishioners of the Community of St. Peter not think that the Episcopal Church is as much a church as the Roman Catholic Church? Do they have a lingering suspicion that Episcopalian priests are not “validly” ordained? Why do they insist in being Catholic but not being in communion (or at least in impaired communion) with the local Roman Catholic bishop, or, for that matter, with any bishop of any denomination? If they reject the episcopal structure entirely, in what sense do they differ from Congregationalists? If they set up their own episcopal structure independent of the Roman Catholic Church, in what sense are they not in schism?

I suspect that, in their anger at Lennon, they have not thought these matters through, and they will sooner or later discover that it is hard to remain Catholic when one is completely detached from the structures of Catholicism. It is hard to be a Catholic with the bishops that have been inflicted on us, but it is almost impossible to be a Catholic without a bishop.

On Thursday I heard Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea speak in Naples at a VOTF series.  She is a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and had spoken to the bishops 2002 at the Dallas conference.

She focused on what she saw as the roots of the sexual abuse crisis. She had left the Catholic Church some time ago and has become a liberal Protestant, and her position was that the Catholic Church should adopt the ethos of liberal Protestantism to rid itself itself clerical narcissism that had enabled the abuse.

Unfortunately her theology is so different from Catholicism that most Catholics, especially those in the hierarchy, will dismiss her immediately, although she had some excellent suggestions. Among them was the reinstitution of the sacred penitentiary (although she did not use that term).

She said that bishops sought the easy way out of the accusations: pay off the victims and laicize the abusive priests. But this turned abusers loose with no control or supervision. She suggested offering such priests a residence in the country, where they could work, say mass, pray, and stay away from children. They would have no internet access or cell phone, and would be accompanied whenever they left the residence.

She described the process of mourning that victims had to go through for the life they had lost and Catholics had to go through for the image of the Church they had lost, an image that never corresponded to reality.

The clerical attitudes that she found intolerable and a betray of Christ were exemplified by an article that a Canadian referred me to: “Parent of Abuse Compliant Raps Plourde” (Ottawa Citizen, June 4, 1986).

The mother of one of the three boys allegedly abused by a Nepean priest lashed out Tuesday at Archbishop Joseph-Aurèle Plourde for his “unchristian” response to parent’s complaints.

On Monday, Plourde issued a statement criticizing parents for going outside the church with their allegations instead of “placing their trust in their own pastors, priests, and bishops.”

(snip)

The woman…said she had tried to get satisfaction within the church without result. After she had relayed her accusations on separate occasions to two priests a bishop, and a member of her parish council she was scolded by the bishop for gossiping, she said.

She said Plourde phoned her at her home in early May to say “she mustn’t go to the police and mustn’t go to the media and mustn’t bring shame upon the Church.

He said it wasn’t my concern and was in danger of a grave sin of scandal,” she said.

“Not once did any of these men ask about my son and his condition, not once.”

(The accused priest, Dale Crampton, later pleaded guilty.)

I really do not think that this attitude has changed – bishops have been told by their lawyers that they have to do certain things and have to pretend to be human beings and express concern for the victims, but my strong suspicions that it is all show, and there has been no conversion of heart. Liberals like Weakland and conservatives like Egan were equally hard-hearted.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia 1969-1975, the undergraduate college had a deserved reputation as a party school. Easters, which had begun as a series of genteel dances, had degenerated into a mammoth drunken orgy that attracted debauchees from across the country, until it was finally suppressed. Every year one or two students would die of an alcohol related accident or alcohol poisoning.

My dissertation director, Robert Kellogg, devoted his career there to trying to tone down the drinking culture. He helped found a residential college that provided an alternative atmosphere to the fraternities.

But thinks just got worse and worse, until UVA lacrosse player George Huguely V assaulted his former girl friend, Yeardley Love, and she died. He is on trial for first degree murder.  \

Tricia Bishop has a long article in the Baltimore Sun about the drinking culture at colleges. Why student  think it cool to drink until they pass out is beyond me.

The remarks of Webster, a professor at johns Hopkins Public Health, bear some analysis.

Webster has studied assaults among lovers, particularly lethal violence, and said alcohol is a frequent factor, and a potential, if partial, cause of it — a debated belief in the medical community.

“We know that alcohol abuse impairs judgment, it makes it harder to control one’s impulses in certain circumstances,” Webster said. “So I think it does play a causal role.”

He also believes that alcohol treatment could reduce violent incidents, but adds that he’s part of a minority who thinks that way. It took a long time for such attacks, typically man on woman, to be considered crimes, and women’s rights advocates are reluctant to link abuse to a disease like alcoholism, Webster said.

“When we start to think about diseased people, people with an illness, some of us want to cut them some slack. how can you hold somebody accountable for their disease?” he said. “But I don’t think it’s an either-or scenario. I think you can hold people accountable for their behavior.”

The jury in Huguely’s trial, which will begin deliberation in the case next week, is expected to consider Huguely’s alcohol use when determining whether he intended to kill her. They could find that the alcohol impaired his judgment so much, that he was incapable of the premeditated murder he’s charged with.

He had been drinking almost nonstop the Sunday he went to Love’s apartment, where she too was intoxicated.

Alcoholism, like pedophilia, is regarded as a “disease,” and somehow mitigates or removes responsibility for criminal actions. I dislike the word “disease.” It sounds too much like an infection caused by a pathogen, There are almost certainly physical components and involuntary psychological quirks in both alcoholism and pedophilia, but it think it better to regard them as disorders. It is a disorder to want to drink more alcohol the more one consumes alcohol; it is a disorder to desire to have sex with children.

But a person is responsible for acting on his desires: his desires do not compel him to drink or to have sex with children. They make him want to do these things, but he is not under any compulsion to do so. It is not a tick, like La Tourette’s syndrome.

Does a disordered diminish legal responsibility? I do not see why it should. Almost everyone has a desire to do something he shouldn’t do, whether it is speeding or not paying taxes, but we chose whether to act on our desires.

Commonweal has an excerpt, “Nazi Racism and the Church,” from a forthcoming book by John Connelly that will appear next month:  From Enemy to brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965.

Briefly, Msgr. Oesterreicher was far more of a critic of the Vatican and of Pius XII’s dealings with the Nazis before and during the war than he was after the war when he defended Pius XII against of accusations of being pro-Nazi (e.g., Hochhuth’s The Deputy).

A reader of these letters encounters a very different Oesterreicher from the man who appeared on U.S. nightly news in 1963. Instead of defending the Vatican, the Oesterreicher of the prewar years is freely critical, calling Pius XII “timid” and accusing him of currying favor with fascism. The letters reveal Thieme and Oesterreicher attempting repeatedly to get the bishops of Europe—above all, the bishop of Rome—to come out unmistakably against Nazism and anti-Semitism. What they encountered was a Vatican in many ways similar to Hochhuth’s later portrayal of it. In 1937 Oesterreicher decided to publish Catholic arguments against anti-Semitism in a brochure bearing the signatures of as many prominent Catholics as he could find. The resulting “Memorandum on the Jewish People,” written anonymously by Thieme and the exiled political writer Waldemar Gurian (another Jewish-born convert to Catholicism), appeared simultaneously in Vienna, Paris, and New York, and used a range of arguments from Scripture and church history to oppose all discrimination against Jews. Despite intense canvassing, Oesterreicher found not a single bishop willing to support the effort.

Pius XII had a diplomatic mindset which was inadequate to deal with the evils of Nazism. Oesterreicher wanted Pius to release German Catholic soldiers from their oath to Hitler; that would have resulted in the martyrdom of tens of thousands of Catholic priests and laity, and possibly even civil war in Germany –but it might have prevented the universal catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Pius could not even imagine such a course of action, and made indirect public criticisms of Nazi actions, which in diplomatic terms was very daring.

A few Catholic clergy were pro-Nazi (like Bishop Hudal), most were vaguely anti-Semitic, and were exhorted by some “progressive” Catholics to adopt to the new, modern world of eugenics and scientific racism. The real opposition to Nazism, the prophetic voices that were to bear fruit in Vatican II’s statement on the Jews, was heard in the voices of converts like Oesterreicher and Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand – those who had chosen Catholicism and who took it seriously.

Although anti-Semitism has not been purged from the Catholic Church, it is on the decline – although one cardinal blamed the media’s interest in clerical sexual abuse on the Jews who wanted to punish the Church for supporting the Palestinians. However, on the whole, Catholic anti-Semitism is in decline, because of the actions of a small group, many of them converts.

Perhaps something similar will happen with attitudes to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Clearly abuse had been tolerated for a long time. “The Vatican” is not monolithic in its attitudes, any more that “Washington” is. Some still refuse to take the matter of abuse seriously; others like Benedict have come to a partial realization of how evil it is; a few, like Msgr. Scicluna (a promoter of justice [investigator] for the CDF), want to hold bishops accountable for their failures.

The small group of laity, such as Jason Berry, Richard Sipe, Terry McKiernan, and a few others, representing a spectrum of Catholicism, may be the catalyst for a change of heart in the way sexual abuse in regarded and handled in the entire Catholic Church. In such a massive institution, the change will take decades to filter throughout the world, and the change will only be partial, but it seems to be a real change, and that can be credited to those who insisted on speaking out.

The Philadelphia prosecutors are going after the Archdiocese of Philadelphian as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Msgr. Lynn, and want to introduce evidence of the pattern of enabling abusers.

When I had lawyers review my book Sacrilege for libel issues, they were astonished at what bishops had done. Bishops came very close to being accessories before the facts to felonies. Bishops escaped because a prosecutor had to prove that a bishop assigned a known abuser to a parish with children with the intention of helping the crime be committed. Intention is very hard to prove, although when a bishop makes a known abuser a Boy Scout chaplain, circumstantial evidence is pretty strong.

Bishops repeatedly showed a total disregard for the safety of children, and as I understand it their legal culpability depends on the statues in each state about child endangerment. New Hampshire has a very strong statute; I do not know what Pennsylvania has. Lynn is no doubt guilty morally of endangering children, but whether his actions and failures are caught by the statute remains to be seen.

Is homosexuality itself a psychological disorder? Freud though that homosexuality was a form of narcissism (definitely a disorder), of falling in love with an image of oneself, rather than the opposite sex.

Certainly many homosexuals are narcissists, as are many heterosexuals.

Narcissism is the root of endless evils in the clergy, and I have long thought that having the priest face the people during mass concentrates attention on the priest and feeds narcissism.

Many people, as Father Michael points out, equate homosexuality and effeminacy. This is not true. As an investigator I encountered many non-effeminate homosexuals. One case I had led me to a gay biker bar (that was scary). In another case the gay was a star rugby player. And in another case someone insisted an entire college football team engaged in homosexual orgies (I had some doubts about that).

Many of the abuser of teenage boys were fairly macho, otherwise boys would have shied away from them. This was a good cover. No one could imagine that former military engineer, tall, cowboy- booted Ed Donelan was having sex with his wards at the Casa de los Muchachos.

When we are in Baltimore, we often go to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Towson. The pastor, Father Joe Barr, is an energetic priest and the masses are more than tolerable. One of his assistants is (or was until this weekend) the Rev. Mark Bullock.

Alas, the Baltimore Sun had this story:

According to a police report of the incident, Mark Stewart Bullock, 47, was at Bush River Books & Movies, an Abingdon adult store on the 3900 block of Pulaski Highway, the night of Jan. 16, when two deputies, investigating complaints of indecent exposure, discovered him nude from the waist down in a movie theater inside the shop.

Bullock was sitting on a couch with “his pants completely off,” stated the report, which went on to state that “Bullock was not wearing any underwear and [was] exposing his penis.” He was sitting in a public area where store customers could see him, sheriff’s deputies said.

The “bookstore” had become very popular.

Monica Worrell, a spokeswoman for the Harford County Sheriff’s Office, said deputies routinely look in on adult bookstores to ensure they are complying with the law. This particular shop was drawing more traffic than normal, according to community members, who had voiced concerns at a council meeting, leading the sheriff’s office to investigate.

“Throughout the course of doing that, we found violations of law,” Worrell said. Several arrests were made, she said.

My knowledge of Bullock was limited to occasional Sunday masses that he celebrated.

The priests of the parish, aware of Catholics’ tendency to lapse into alpha sleep at the start of a sermon, have tried to make the homilies more interesting.

He was a good preacher. Bullock gave a Christmas sermon on the contrast between the hymn we has just sung, O Little Town of Bethlehem, and his visit to a military-occupied Bethlehem in which he had a submachine gun pointed at him. He has a good singing voice and sang the verses of the hymn as he commented on them. His point was that Shalom transcends earthly notions of peace.

But he, like many men, has problems with the virtue of chastity, and is totally lacking in the minor virtue of discretion. Pornography, a temptation to many men, including priests and pastors, is available on-line, and it is difficult to understand why he had to go to a “bookstore” to see it. Perhaps he was seeking the thrill of danger, of being caught. Perhaps, as the police seem to suspect, the “bookstore” was a front for other activities.

I am familiar through literature and through my former career as an investigator how sexual passion can distort a man’s judgment and cause him to do things out of character. Whether Bullock can be rehabilitated I do not know. The Archdiocese is short of priests, and apart from this personal vice he seemed to function as a good priest. The question is whether Bullock is a sinner, who can repent, or has such deep psychological compulsions that he cannot be trusted in a pastoral role. I suspect that the Archdiocese, having been badly burned by its mishandling of pedophilia (which this case is not), will permanently suspend Bullock.

Update

A few more pieces of information about Father Bullock:

He was a life long member of St. Clare’s in Essex, a working class area of Baltimore County. He studied at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. He is now 47, and was ordained in 2006. Before entering the seminary,  he was a floral designer.

St. Mary’s is known internationally as the Pink Palace.  The Archdiocese says it has ended the homosexual subculture as St Mary’s, which culture the Archdiocese it also insists never existed in the first place. Of course it did. I know people who went to St Mary’s, and many of the students there were actively gay in the 1960s and 970s.

When I went to hear a lecture by Raymond Brown in the seminary chapel I sat in front of a women Presbyterian minister and some St. Mary’s faculty. He told them that she wanted to take a course in Celtic Spirituality that Father X had give. They informed her that Father X was not teaching at the moment. He had been sleeping with the seminary students and insisted upon flaunting it too openly. His bishop had sent him to rural Pennsylvania to cool off.

Local opinion is that gay seminarians are sent to St. Mary’s in Baltimore and straight students to St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg.

Bullock was also conservative liturgically. He said a beautiful and reverent mass, and if I remember correctly, chanted the eucharistic prayer on several occasions. Older liberals claim that the new crop of priests are both more conservative and more homosexual than the older liberal generation.  There is some evidence to support that claim. There is High Anglican precedent for the phenomenon.

BTW, a long as a homosexual priest is 1. chaste 2.not effeminate, I think few people would ever care.

Fighting and killing other human beings in a war does terrible things to the soldier, even if the war is a just, defensive, unavoidable war. Paul Fussell, who fought in the invasion of France from the south and was terribly wounded, tried to make that point in his books on war.

He said that in the Pacific theater soldiers used to send home Japanese skulls as souvenirs. His readers were outraged; they had lived through the war and had never heard of American soldiers doing such a thing. Fussell then produced a Life magazine cover with photograph of a young woman contemplating a Japanese skull that her boyfriend had sent to her.

Life Magazine, May 22, 1944

Wikipedia has an article on the practice:

A number of firsthand accounts, including those of American servicemen involved in or witness to the atrocities, attest to the taking of “trophies” from the corpses of Imperial Japanese troops in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Historians have attributed the phenomenon to a campaign of dehumanization of the Japanese in the U.S. media, to various racist tropes latent in American society, to the depravity of warfare under desperate circumstances, to the perceived inhuman cruelty of Imperial Japanese forces, lust for revenge, or any combination of those factors. The taking of so-called “trophies” was widespread enough that, by September 1942, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet ordered that “No part of the enemy’s body may be used as a souvenir”, and any American servicemen violating that principle would face “stern disciplinary action”.^[6]

Trophy skulls are the most notorious of the so-called “souvenirs”. Teeth, ears and other such body parts were occasionally modified, for example by writing on them or fashioning them into utilities or other artifacts.^[7]

Eugene Sledge relates a few instances of fellow Marines extracting gold teeth from the Japanese, including one from an enemy soldier who was still alive.

But the Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath. The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.^[8]

US Marine veteran Donald Fall attributed the mutilation of enemy corpses to hatred and desire for vengeance:

On the second day of Guadalcanal we captured a big Jap bivouac with all kinds of beer and supplies… But they also found a lot of pictures of Marines that had been cut up and mutilatedon Wake Island. The next thing you know there are Marines walking around with Jap ears stuck on their belts with safety pins. They issued an order reminding Marines that mutilation was a court-martial offense… You get into a nasty frame of mind in combat. You see what’s been done to you. You’d find a dead Marine that the Japs had booby-trapped. We found dead Japs that were booby-trapped. And they mutilated the dead. We began to get down to their level.^[9]

Another example of mutilation was related by Ore Marion, a US Marine who suggested,

We learned about savagery from the Japanese… But those sixteen-to-nineteen-year old kids we had on the Canal were fast learners… At daybreak, a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, wack off three Jap heads and jam them on poles facing the ‘Jap side’ of the river… The colonel sees Jap heads on the poles and says, ‘Jesus men, what are you doing? You’re acting like animals.’ A dirty, stinking young kid says, ‘That’s right Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals–what the fuck do you expect?’^[9]

On February 1, 1943, Life magazine published a photograph taken by Ralph Morse during the Guadalcanal campaign showing a decapitated Japanese head that US marines had propped up below the gun turret of a tank. Life received letters of protest from people “in disbelief that American soldiers were capable of such brutality toward the enemy.” The editors responded that “war is unpleasant, cruel, and inhuman. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders.” However, the image of the decapitated head generated less than half the amount of protest letters that an image of a mistreated cat in the very same issue received.^[10]

In October 1943, the U.S. High Command expressed alarm over recent newspaper articles, for example one where a soldier made a string of beads using Japanese teeth, and another about a soldier with pictures showing the steps in preparing a skull, involving cooking and scraping of the Japanese heads.^[5]

In 1944 the American poet Winfield Townley Scott was working as a reporter in Rhode Island when a sailor displayed his skull trophy in the newspaper office. This led to the poem The U.S. sailor with the Japanese skull, which described one method for preparation of skulls (the head is skinned, towed in a net behind a ship to clean and polish it, and in the end scrubbed with caustic soda).^[11]

The Marines who urinated on the bodies of dead Taliban, who had been trying to kill them and who had probably killed their friends and civilians, also paid the cost of war. That  is another reason to avoid war, if at all possible.

Accusations of sexual abuse often provoke disbelief and comments “How could he have done such a thing? He done so many good things.”

Parishioners still leap to the defense of priests accused of abuse. In New York:

A Marine Park Catholic church dedicated its Christmas display to a priest accused of sex abuse, drawing outrage from one of his his alleged victim’s family.

Msgr. Thomas Brady, 78, a retired pastor at Good Shepherd Church, was placed on administrative leave after he was charged in October with attempting a “criminal sex act” on two teenage boys - but officials at the church still dedicated their annual tree lighting to him and posted a sign in his honor in front of the church.

The sign, still posted Monday, says the tree lighting “is dedicated to Monsignor Thomas F. Brady for his Service to and Love for the People of Good Shepherd.”

The dad of a then 13-year-old boy who accused Brady of molesting him in the church rectory said he was furious to see the display at the church, where his family are longtime parishioners and his son attends the parish school.

“That’s a slap in the face,” he said. “Take it down. That’s hurtful. You’re gaining support for Brady, but what about the victims?”

Many parishioners have backed Brady, who was pastor at the church for more than 20 years before retiring in 2009 and was also a chaplain for the Fire Department, and insisted the accusations couldn’t be true. The priest has suffered several strokes and is battling lung cancer.

Family friend Mary Ann Moran, 54, said although Monsignor Brady performed her mother’s funeral and she appreciated his efforts to unite the neighborhood after Sept. 11, she was angry he would be honored after the accusations came to light. “I understand how we feel so connected to the priest,” she said. “In any other job or organization, someone who’s been arrested for sexually abusing a child would never be honored just for doing their job.”

This priest may or may not be guilty. The courts have to decide. But his good works do not mean he could not have committed a crime.

Abusers do many good things; they are seemingly altruistic and willing to go out of their way to help other people. But this altruism is in the service of narcissism. The narcissist wants others to have a good opinion of him, so he may do good things. But the purpose of these good actions is to feed his self-image of being a good person.

He wants to think of himself as a good person even though he may also do terrible things. He does so much good that he is entitled to whatever he wants, including sex with children. He may do some mental creative accounting: “The good I do far outweighs any bad things I may do,” or he may be grandiose and feel he is not bound by the rules to which ordinary mortals are subject.

Those around him often feed his narcissism and grandiosity; the clergy and parishioners in New York may be doing that to Thomas Brady. And if there are other victims, they see how the parish will respond to accusations.

(You will no doubt note that this in the Gheg dialect, in which the -t ending is not plural)

A traditional tree in Tirana:

And a different Christmas tree outside Tirana:

“A Christmas tree made of spaghetti sticks in the national park in Tirana December 28 2006. A local restaurant used roughly six million spaghetti sticks building the sixteen meter tree weighing 1 ton.”

Señor Rafael Cavero of Madrid is a collector, indeed the foremost collector of Papá Noel (Santa Claus) in all of Spain.

In the door which gives access to the garden of the house in which he has lived more than thirty years, a heap of little men with white beards receives visitors. They hide themselves, climb the balconies, go up the lanterns, laugh. And once you have crossed the threshold of the residence, the spectacle surpasses all expectations. “Lola, my wife, is a fan of the Three Kings, and what she hates most of all in the world, although you won’t believe it, is Santa Claus. At this time of year she is always annoyed and wants to leave the house. For this reason, and in revenge, she installs a nativity scene of gigantic size,” he explained.

A collector of many things, among which are music boxes and masks, his fondness for Santa Claus began by accident. He discovered the oldest piece of his collection at a fair and it pleased him so much that since then he looks for pieces here and there, everywhere in the world, on the internet, in catalogues, in shops…”The last ones which I acquired came from Denmark. And especially the best are those from there and from Norway. They are the most expensive; they cost almost as much as a car! Nevertheless, today many are made in China and the quality is evident. Of those which I possess, many have almost five movements. Others read stories and there are even  those who sing thirty Christmas carols with the voice of Ray Charles.”

The display in the Cavero house involves emptying the living room over three days of intense work (“I do it with two of my daughters, Ana and Piedy, with a guitarist and a carpenter”). Lola’s collection of boxes and porcelain dogs “disappears” in their place there is put up an incredible scene of crystal balls, gnomes, rabbits, and reindeer. And thousands of Santa Clauses in all postures and attitudes: playing the saxophone, getting on a motorcycle, with eyeglasses like Stevie Wonder, soaping up in  a bathtub, swinging, crossing the room at high speed, juggling on the swing, on the stairs…and all this in the middle of a great racket of songs, laughs, and train whistles.

And what does Señor Cavero want from Santa Claus? “That when in Spain almost everything is lost, that the hope in Santa Claus is not lost and to assure the whole world that the Three Kings exist. Ours (i.e., Spanish royalty] are in La Zarazuela [the royal palace], but they have some pages [Spanish politicians?] who leave much to be desired.”