Accountability in Argentina.

“The attitude of the church was scandalously close to the dictatorship” that killed more than 15,000 Argentines and tortured tens of thousands more, the priest told a panel of three judges here, “to such an extent that I would say it was of a sinful degree.” The panel is deciding the fate of the Rev. Christian von Wernich, a priest accused of conspiring with the military who has become for many a powerful symbol of the church’s role.

The church “was like a mother that did not look for her children,” Father Capitanio added. “It did not kill anybody, but it did not save anybody, either.”

Father Capitanio’s mea culpa came nearly a quarter century after the junta was toppled in 1983 and democracy was restored. But in some ways, it occurred at just the right time. Through the trial of Father von Wernich, Argentina is finally confronting the church’s dark past during the dirty war, when it sometimes gave its support to the military as it went after leftist opponents.

This work is super-important, although leave it to the New York Times, which never saw an anti-Catholic story they didn’t print.  I wish the article had just once mentioned how various other Church leaders courageously fought the overwhelming political violence and disappearances of right-wing regimes.

‘Attaboy Yale!  Intellectual Imperialism be danged, I say.

Yale is returning artifiacts it “acquired” from Peru.  This is a trend occurring worldwide, and it’s wonderful to see.  The Western powers are starting to trust marginalized peoples with their own histories and artifacts–it seems obvious, but it’s shocking how rarely it happens.

On Friday night Yale officials and a Peruvian delegation that traveled to New Haven signed a preliminary agreement that would return title to Peru of more than 350 artifacts — ceramics and metal and stone objects — that are considered to be of museum quality and several thousand fragments, bones and other objects considered to be primarily of interest to researchers.

The agreement, which establishes an extensive collaborative relationship between Yale and Peru, provides for an international traveling exhibition. Admission fees will be used to help build a new museum and research center in Cuzco, the city closest to Machu Picchu. The museum, for which Yale will serve as adviser, is expected to be completed in 2010.

The Poor and Poorer help each other in Cairo.

The neighborhood was so poor it didn’t even have a proper name save for “4.5,” its distance in kilometers from the nearest major bus terminal.

When tensions between impoverished Egyptians and even more destitute Sudanese refugees reached a boiling point in March 2005, relief agencies and community leaders assembled an emergency workshop to keep fights from escalating.

They found the roots of 4.5’s quandaries lay neither in the behavior of its dark-skinned newcomers fleeing war, nor the attitudes of the Egyptians, many of them recent arrivals to the big city from the country’s rural south. The problem was the district: a decrepit, rapidly growing area lacking water, power or a police presence.

Clerics, relief workers, residents and refugees banded together and pressed the government for power lines, water mains, sewers, schools and clinics. A government that might otherwise have ignored the pleas bowed to pressure from aid groups and mosques. The tensions eased. Life improved.

“We are refugees,” said Amir Khaled, 27, a Sudanese native who has lived in the neighborhood since 2005, when he fled the bloodshed in Sudan’s Darfur region. “It’s not easy to ask the government for services.

“At first no one understood each other,” he said. “There were cultural differences. But there has been some kind of progress in the area. Now there is cooperation. Relations became better because the life here improved. We realized that we were both poor.”

From Pew, who got it from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

A lot of people don’t realize that Ramadan is a month of fasting during the day, but it’s pretty great feasts at night. Read more here.

Seriously? The Wire wins hands down. But read the debate here.

In a way, it doesn’t make sense to talk of “The Wire” as the best American television show because it’s not very American. The characters in American popular culture are rarely shown to be subject to forces completely beyond their control. American culture is fundamentally Romantic, individualistic and Christian; when it’s not exhorting you to “follow your dream” it’s reassuring us that in the eleventh hour, we will be saved. American culture is a perpetual pep talk, trafficking in tales of personal redemption and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. We don’t do doom. “The Wire” is not Romantic but classical; what matters most in its universe is fulfilling your duty and facing the inexorable with dignity.

I can’t argue that the classical view is superior to the Romantic one; to even introduce the idea that art is meant to nudge us toward moral improvement and social awareness is to concede to Romantic hope. But for some people, in some places, the classical view is more true, and in such cases, the artist’s duty is to show us that these lives are no smaller for that. And it is — as we always, always seem to forget — not depressing but strangely exhilarating to see this truth about humanity acknowledged for once. It may not be the only truth, but it’s a truth all the same.

Well, sort of.

Stage One Stage Two Stage Three

I disagree with Fr. Neuhaus here. On purely rhetorical levels, please note that I am not calling attention to these sarcastic attacks:

Kindly note that I have refrained from mentioning that the recent record of the bishops in governing the Church—where they do have competence (at least in the sense of authority)—is not so stellar as to warrant great confidence in their ability to conduct American foreign policy. Nor, be it noted, have I mentioned that no comparable initiative has been announced by the bishops’ conference to constructively engage the many Catholic members of Congress who reject and persistently work against the Church’s teaching regarding the protection of unborn children, a matter indisputably within episcopal competence and on which the conference has spoken words of admirable clarity.

I saw Fr. Neuhaus give a talk once in which he said that the best way to bridge the great red-blue divide is to, essentially, be nicer. Call a spade a spade, Father.

A few more things though: Fr. N. distinguishes between abortion and war as being outside of the Bishops’ competence, yet didn’t Pope JPII and Pope Benedict’s statements make this the Bishops’ concern? This isn’t something out of nowhere here–heck, this is half the reason Tony Blair was told he couldn’t be Catholic!

Also, Fr. N. attacks the Bishops essentially for being partisan. That’s probably true, but out of necessity. I’m sure if Republican Catholics were against the war, they’d work with them. But that misses the point: the real debate here is Bishop’s competence, and he’s right, I think that Bishops get too involved in politics when they should be working on their Church. Theocracies or folks who want Churches running the state are creepy for me on either side of the divide. Yet there are also issues of basic human rights (including things like euthenasia and abortion) that the Church has to speak out on. And how we are currently handling Iraq, nobody would disagree I hope, is affecting a lot of human rights. Should the Bishops make concrete policy decisions? Of course not. But they give no indication they want to do that. They want to set basic moral principles, as the Bishops of any nation should do.

Should we do the same thing on abortion? Sure. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also do this on Iraq, and constantly drawing attention to that is a red herring on this issue, even if a legitimate, broader critique.

Keep those folks alive, says the Vatican. Here’s the Latin with a translation, and here’s a story from Beliefnet:

Friday’s statement said the Vatican was asked whether the administration of food and water to a patient in a vegetative state was morally obligatory except when they cannot be assimilated by the patient’s body or administered without causing significant physical discomfort. The answer was yes.

The statement said exceptional cases, such as the inability of a patient to cope with feeding or food shortages in poverty-stricken or remote areas, “take nothing away from the general ethical criterion.”

The Vatican noted that Pope John Paul II told a 2004 medical conference on ethical dilemmas that providing food and water to people in vegetative states should be considered natural, ordinary and proportional care.

It’s a fair compromise. Someone’s heart beating by a machine or something like that is still “extra-ordinary” means but a feeding tube and water are not. It’s still such a difficult tension though: on one hand there is a life we don’t want to let go and don’t want to kill just to be rid of; on the other hand, if this person is in a PVS, she’s not coming back.

But then, at what point does that matter? If I were severely brain-damaged, I would not be coming back either, at least not to the extent I had before. Like with abortion here, the Church is in murky water and chooses to err on the side of caution.

I don’t love Ayn Rand. The novels are terrible! They’re as polemical as the worst essay-novels. I mean, it’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull for conservatives! Every high school kid with two bits of brain goes through a Rand phase and hopefully later starts to like things with some ambiguity.

(If you want a great work of literature about Randian themes that has some merit read Kurt Vonnegut’s finest short story, Harrison Bergeron)

Fine, fine. She’s all about freedom. Okay, great. I can respect that philosophically, and I think she had important (if not, well, wrong) things to say. I’m just saying: she’s a terrible, terrible novelist. Don’t worry: so is Harold Bloom. So are lots of folks who are great at other things.

Look at the back of an Ayn Rand book: you won’t see one blurb from a writer.

I think getting rid of Roe would be the best thing to happen to the abortion debate in this country.  Read more here.

Doing good work that a Cardinal (or Bishop) ought to do.

Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino of Caracas has urged the Venezuelan government to show respect for critics of constitutional changes proposed by President Hugo Chavez.

Cardinal Urosa insisted that “no persons of groups should be disregarded or execrated simply because they disagree with the proposal.” He said that the proposed constitutional amendments deserve serious discussion, and encouraged a respectful hearing for all reasoned points of view.