For decades only two states have required less than unanimity in criminal jury trials. The constitutionality of that was affirmed in a case called Abodaca v Oregon (1972) in a 4-1-4 split decision, with Justice Powell being the deciding justice, ruling that the 6th Amendment was not incorporated to the states by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.
You will remember that until the 14th Amendment, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and not to the states. It remained for John Bingham and the 39th Congress to attempt to have them apply to the states through the Privileges or Immunities Clause. I say “tried” because the Supreme Court was reluctant to interpret the way Bingham and the 39th Congress intended until the mid-twentieth century when the due process clause of the 14th was used to selectively apply the Bill of Rights to the states. By 1972, most of the 10 amendments had been applied to the states. After Abodaca the parts of the 6th remained applicable only to the federal government. [Note that Clarence Thomas has been a proponent of using the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th to apply all of the Bill of Rights to the states rather than use the selective due process clause in what he regards as a haphazard manner.(4)
What to do about Abodaca has been the subject of recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Ramos v Louisiana. Louisiana and Oregon are the only two states that have not required a unanimous verdict in criminal jury trials. That changed when two years ago when Louisiana changed its law and now requires a unanimous verdict. Note that the Constitution does not require a unanimous verdict, only “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." The Court has interpret this to require a unanimous verdict, at least in federal courts.
Ramos, who was convicted in a 10-2 verdict and sentenced to life, but who has maintained his innocence, argued that a unanimous verdict is essential to fair trial, that non-unanimous jury verdicts are unconstitutional, especially given the disparity between federal and state requirements, and that Apodaca should be overturned, hence the discussion of stare decisis, the principle that judges should follow precedent whenever possible. Apodaca was a precedent set by just one justice and that, too, came up in oral arguments.
The origin of non-unanimous verdicts was dissected in an article in the New Republic (1) Louisiana and Oregon have conviction rates much higher than other states and needing only ten of twelve jurors to agree is one reason why. “Anyone charged with a crime in Louisiana is more likely to be convicted than in any other state, save Oregon (which also has a non-unanimous criminal jury standard), by a factor of one in six,” Valdosta State University history professor Thomas Aiello wrote in a recent book documenting the racist origins of the Louisiana rule. “If someone is charged with a crime on the western bank of the Mississippi River, he or she has a 17 percent better chance of being convicted than if charged on the eastern bank.”
The adoption of the rule flowed from the passage of the 14th Amendment, that forced the state to include black people in juries. Since Louisiana required juries to reach unanimous decisions, as was standard, this meant a single black person on the jury would have a lot of power — which would weaken white Louisianans’ hold over the state, its government, and its laws. “This was part of the 1898 constitutional convention, which is famous for disenfranchising black voters,” Lawrence Powell, a historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, told me. “It was also around the time of the Plessy [v. Ferguson] case that just got sanction from the US Supreme Court for racial segregation. It’s all part of that mix.” Because race was not explicitly stated as the reason for the non-unanimous rule, the Supreme Court had always given it a pass even though at the 1898 convention when it was adopted, racial reasons were explicitly stated: “The goal, said Kruttschnitt, was the ‘purification of the electorate.’ The Judiciary Committee Chair, Judge Thomas Semmes, was more blunt. He declared that the purpose was ‘to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done....’” (2)
Louisiana changed its constitution in 2018 to require unanimous jury decisions. It was not retroactive.
The origin of Oregon’s rule is more recent but equally fraught. Angry with the failure to convict a Jewish gangster of murder, nativist and anti-semitic feelings prevailed and a felony conviction now required only an 11-1 or 10-2 vote by a jury. It has also been argued since that not requiring a unanimous verdict is far more expeditious.
The Apodaca decision that Louisiana and Oregon want upheld was unusual in that Powell, who wrote the prevailing opinion, couched it in very narrow terms, not completely allying himself with either countervailing group, one for upholding the unanimous requirement, the other not. “There is no reason to believe, on the basis of experience in Oregon or elsewhere, that a unanimous decision of 12 jurors is more likely to serve the high purpose of jury trial, or is entitled to greater respect in the community, than the same decision joined in by 10 members of a jury of 12,” Powell wrote. (3) He joined with Blackmun, White, Burger, and Rehnquist in upholding the Oregon law. The decision also revealed incredible naivete: “Jury unanimity is not mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment requirements that racial minorities not be systematically excluded from the jury selection process; even when racial minority members are on the jury, it does not follow that their views will not be just as rationally considered by the other jury members as would be the case under a unanimity rule.”(3)
Louisiana and Oregon both filed briefs arguing that stare decisis should prevail. Louisiana’s Attorney General paraded the “horribles” scenario that those convicted prior to the state’s adoption of the unanimous requirement would all seek new trials. (Ramos had appealed his conviction before Louisiana adopted the new rule.) Oregon argued in its brief that overturning Apodaca would unsettle the law rather than making it more consistent and destablize; that stare decisis should prevail in this case. Of course, the elephant, turning pink in the room, was Roe v Wade. This will be a fascinating case to watch.
1. https://newrepublic.com/article/154884/jim-crow-returns-supreme-court
2. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18052540/election-results-louisiana-amendment-2-unanimous-jim-crow-jury-law
3. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/406/404/
4. https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Blackman_Shapiro_14at150_DRAFT.pdf
“Five short years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court eviscerated the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) held that the provision protects only a fairly narrow subset of federal rights. Two years later, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Court rejected the argument that the right to keep and bear arms, expressly recognized in the Second Amendment, was one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship. With this one-two punch, the cornerstone of the Fourteenth Amendment was forgotten. The Supreme Court would not revisit these decisions until McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). There, only Justice Clarence Thomas was willing to restore the Privilege or Immunities Clause’s original meaning. “
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Review: Field of Prey by John Sandford
I worry about Sandford's imagination reading this book and some of the other titles where he inserts the actions and thinking of the bad guys. The killer in this one rapes and kills women and the vividness and detail with which Sandford recounts his actions is beyond chilling; it's obscene and pornographic. There's a vast chasm between erotic pornography that's loving and tender and that which is brutal and sadistic. This is the latter and it's not pleasant. One wonders about a mind that can even think up this stuff. I'm not sure I would want Sandford over for dinner.
There is a side plot (one wonders why it was included at all) involving the brother of a man shot by police during a bank robbery. Lucas is portrayed by the media as celebrating the man's death ("the police showed great restraint" in striking the man with only 20 bullets) and having been involved setting the man up for the shooting. From other comments made during the book, it's clear Sandford despises the media (ironic as Sandford is a pseudonym for John Camp a former journalist), and the name of the brother, "Immanuel Kent" can't possibly be an accident and must be a reference to Immanuel Kant, who gave us the "categorical Imperative" and the moral worth of an individual comes less from the consequences of his actions than from his motivations. Lucas' motivations in warning the police of the bank robbery was good, but the actual consequence was bad. The brother (supported by the media) seems to argue that he should be responsible for the unintended consequences, distinctly un-Kantian.
No need to repeat the plot. Lots of those descriptions available. That said, he has created some interesting characters. Davenport and his sidekicks have become more interesting as the series has progressed. And having Flowers make an appearance never hurts, either. I enjoyed this audio-book which was well read (as ever) by Richard Ferrone.
There is a side plot (one wonders why it was included at all) involving the brother of a man shot by police during a bank robbery. Lucas is portrayed by the media as celebrating the man's death ("the police showed great restraint" in striking the man with only 20 bullets) and having been involved setting the man up for the shooting. From other comments made during the book, it's clear Sandford despises the media (ironic as Sandford is a pseudonym for John Camp a former journalist), and the name of the brother, "Immanuel Kent" can't possibly be an accident and must be a reference to Immanuel Kant, who gave us the "categorical Imperative" and the moral worth of an individual comes less from the consequences of his actions than from his motivations. Lucas' motivations in warning the police of the bank robbery was good, but the actual consequence was bad. The brother (supported by the media) seems to argue that he should be responsible for the unintended consequences, distinctly un-Kantian.
No need to repeat the plot. Lots of those descriptions available. That said, he has created some interesting characters. Davenport and his sidekicks have become more interesting as the series has progressed. And having Flowers make an appearance never hurts, either. I enjoyed this audio-book which was well read (as ever) by Richard Ferrone.
Tuesday, October 08, 2019
Review: A Corporate Tragedy: The Agony of International Harvester Company by Barbara Marsh
A very enjoyable and interesting book that begins with a history of the reaper and its impact on American farming. The McCormick family, descendants of its inventor, built the company through beneficial mergers and clever marketing. Henry Ford was selling his Fordson tractor at a loss to gain market share. Harvester went one better by throwing in a plow, too. Their salesmen would travel around looking for Fordson dealers and demos, offering to match their tractors against Ford's, and they usually won, building a devoted customer base. IH's Farmall line was immensely popular as it was just that, a machine that did it all. It took a multitude of attachments like the 4 row cultivator that saved the farmer a huge number of man-hours. *
I remember driving a Ford 9n on my uncle's dairy farm. It was a small, squat, tractor, useful for hauling wagons and small chores. He also had a Farmall MD (new in 1952); a diesel that used a small gas engine to get it started (the switch over with the lever was very cool), but my favorite was the Oliver 77 (might have been an 88, not sure) that was the absolute best because it had a six-cylinder engine. (I hated the two-cylinder John Deere tractors - they didn't switch to more cylinders until the early sixties. And we won't even talk about the stupid hand clutch.**) To my mind Oliver made the best tractors and only went under because of mismanagement, something that we will see more of in this book.
By the fifties the company was thriving, engaged in supplying multiple markets besides farm machinery, including trucks, home appliances, and industrial machinery. However, several battles on the management and labor side threatened its dominance. There was a management battle between McCaffrey and Fowler McCormack. McCormack had become a devotee of Carl Jung and would spend months each year in Switzerland at the master's feet while McCaffrey fumed in the states. He eventually took his concerns to the board who, much to Fowler's surprise, sided with McCaffrey, relegating McCormick to a titular post. Bad blood between the two continued for years. Unlike Fowler, McCaffrey was a salesman with little feel for reining in sales demands and soon IH was offering its customers 168 different models of trucks driving the factories crazy.
Harvester had a significant number of farmers who loved red and had the dealer network to support it. They were loyal because of excellent relationships with dealers who often carried them on equipment they needed immediately, but could not pay for right away. However, the company was falling behind John Deere, which produced superior equipment and service. The author also suggests that another reason for their success was the location of Deere's headquarters in Moline, Illinois closer to the farms they served rather than Harvester's dedication to Chicago as headquarters. Deere executives all live(d) on on near farms. They too had a strong dealership network. They did it by coddling the dealers rather than Harvester's tactic of hard sell of forcing dealers to do things their way.
In the meantime the company was also battling unions and the unions were battling each other in a fight between the FE (Farm Equipment union) and the UAW each seeking to oust the other. Strikes were often called just to hurt the other union and in the decade following the war, there were 1,200 work stoppages and 48,000 job grievances between 1954 and 1959. That was unsupportable. In the end, HUAC destroyed the FE whose leaders were investigated for purported Communist activities. The union's rank and file were caught up in the anti-Communist fervor. That coupled with management's desire to break the union was its death knell.
By the sixties and seventies, Harvester was running into problems endemic to older established entities. They had had a long and beloved history of paying substantial dividends, but as their factories aged and other lines required investment, the capital was being paid out in dividends, making shareholders happy, but starving the company for capital reinvestment. So they had to rely on borrowing but thanks to the Vietnam War and other factors, interest rates were at an all time high (I remember them as high as 17% when I was thinking about buying a farm) and that kind of interest rate will make borrowing exorbitantly expensive. It was a vicious cycle, the sales force kept pushing weakly designed and ill-tested new equipment out the door, which then failed pushing market share lower making even less capital available especially with the profits all going out the door as dividends.
Harvard Business School (you know the school that gave us the creators of derivatives and other high risk financial instruments) was invited to visit and review IH's attempts at rebound. "In a sense [they wrote] the problems at Harvester faces are the problems of American industry, and to that extent is prototypical of corporate American industry,...how to compete in a slow-growth, capital-intensive market when you're not the market leader." By this time John Deere, which had recognized much earlier recognized the need for higher horse power tractors, dominated the agricultural sector and had built highly automated factories. And, of course, the changes Archie McCardle, hired away from Xerox with a huge compensation package, wanted and needed to implement, met with resistance from those who had been with IH a long time. His strategy of giving employees targets beyond what they thought were acceptable and possible could be disconcerting and morale busting when they were unable to meet those targets.
But lest this review get completely out of hand, I will just summarize and say it's a fascinating examination of the rise and fall of an iconic American company, the kind of representative history that has happened to many other companies: Sears, Montgomery Ward, K-Mart, etc., etc. and that will no doubt happen to many others when their founders leave the scene. I only wish the book could have been updated past its 1985 publication. IH was sold to Tennaco in 1985 which merged the IH tractor line with their Case line becoming Case/IH. Fortunately they adopted red as the new paint scheme rather than Case's desert sand colors as well as the Farmall designation. Excellent read.
*The Moline Model D was probably the first to offer multiple attachments on a tractor. For its time it was incredibly versatile and to my knowledge the first articulated design. See http://molineplowco.com/tractors/
**In John Deere's defense, the old two-cylinder had incredible fuel economy and lugging power. The 730, out in 1959, had accessories that beat the competition - like their seat, far and away the most comfortable.
I remember driving a Ford 9n on my uncle's dairy farm. It was a small, squat, tractor, useful for hauling wagons and small chores. He also had a Farmall MD (new in 1952); a diesel that used a small gas engine to get it started (the switch over with the lever was very cool), but my favorite was the Oliver 77 (might have been an 88, not sure) that was the absolute best because it had a six-cylinder engine. (I hated the two-cylinder John Deere tractors - they didn't switch to more cylinders until the early sixties. And we won't even talk about the stupid hand clutch.**) To my mind Oliver made the best tractors and only went under because of mismanagement, something that we will see more of in this book.
By the fifties the company was thriving, engaged in supplying multiple markets besides farm machinery, including trucks, home appliances, and industrial machinery. However, several battles on the management and labor side threatened its dominance. There was a management battle between McCaffrey and Fowler McCormack. McCormack had become a devotee of Carl Jung and would spend months each year in Switzerland at the master's feet while McCaffrey fumed in the states. He eventually took his concerns to the board who, much to Fowler's surprise, sided with McCaffrey, relegating McCormick to a titular post. Bad blood between the two continued for years. Unlike Fowler, McCaffrey was a salesman with little feel for reining in sales demands and soon IH was offering its customers 168 different models of trucks driving the factories crazy.
Harvester had a significant number of farmers who loved red and had the dealer network to support it. They were loyal because of excellent relationships with dealers who often carried them on equipment they needed immediately, but could not pay for right away. However, the company was falling behind John Deere, which produced superior equipment and service. The author also suggests that another reason for their success was the location of Deere's headquarters in Moline, Illinois closer to the farms they served rather than Harvester's dedication to Chicago as headquarters. Deere executives all live(d) on on near farms. They too had a strong dealership network. They did it by coddling the dealers rather than Harvester's tactic of hard sell of forcing dealers to do things their way.
In the meantime the company was also battling unions and the unions were battling each other in a fight between the FE (Farm Equipment union) and the UAW each seeking to oust the other. Strikes were often called just to hurt the other union and in the decade following the war, there were 1,200 work stoppages and 48,000 job grievances between 1954 and 1959. That was unsupportable. In the end, HUAC destroyed the FE whose leaders were investigated for purported Communist activities. The union's rank and file were caught up in the anti-Communist fervor. That coupled with management's desire to break the union was its death knell.
By the sixties and seventies, Harvester was running into problems endemic to older established entities. They had had a long and beloved history of paying substantial dividends, but as their factories aged and other lines required investment, the capital was being paid out in dividends, making shareholders happy, but starving the company for capital reinvestment. So they had to rely on borrowing but thanks to the Vietnam War and other factors, interest rates were at an all time high (I remember them as high as 17% when I was thinking about buying a farm) and that kind of interest rate will make borrowing exorbitantly expensive. It was a vicious cycle, the sales force kept pushing weakly designed and ill-tested new equipment out the door, which then failed pushing market share lower making even less capital available especially with the profits all going out the door as dividends.
Harvard Business School (you know the school that gave us the creators of derivatives and other high risk financial instruments) was invited to visit and review IH's attempts at rebound. "In a sense [they wrote] the problems at Harvester faces are the problems of American industry, and to that extent is prototypical of corporate American industry,...how to compete in a slow-growth, capital-intensive market when you're not the market leader." By this time John Deere, which had recognized much earlier recognized the need for higher horse power tractors, dominated the agricultural sector and had built highly automated factories. And, of course, the changes Archie McCardle, hired away from Xerox with a huge compensation package, wanted and needed to implement, met with resistance from those who had been with IH a long time. His strategy of giving employees targets beyond what they thought were acceptable and possible could be disconcerting and morale busting when they were unable to meet those targets.
But lest this review get completely out of hand, I will just summarize and say it's a fascinating examination of the rise and fall of an iconic American company, the kind of representative history that has happened to many other companies: Sears, Montgomery Ward, K-Mart, etc., etc. and that will no doubt happen to many others when their founders leave the scene. I only wish the book could have been updated past its 1985 publication. IH was sold to Tennaco in 1985 which merged the IH tractor line with their Case line becoming Case/IH. Fortunately they adopted red as the new paint scheme rather than Case's desert sand colors as well as the Farmall designation. Excellent read.
*The Moline Model D was probably the first to offer multiple attachments on a tractor. For its time it was incredibly versatile and to my knowledge the first articulated design. See http://molineplowco.com/tractors/
**In John Deere's defense, the old two-cylinder had incredible fuel economy and lugging power. The 730, out in 1959, had accessories that beat the competition - like their seat, far and away the most comfortable.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Review: The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities, and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church by John Thavis
A very interesting, if uneven, look at the internal workings of the Vatican and its relationship to the Vatican press corps. I say uneven because the segments on the press corps are light, almost comical in several instances, and then he switches to much more serious topics as the way the Vatican mishandled the sexual abuse scandals and John Paul II's close relationship with Cardinal Marciel and the Legion, not to mention the personality of Pope Benedict.
The book begins with some amusing stories from the enclave where they elected Cardinal Ratzinger as the Pope, following the death of John Paul II. Apparently there are numerous traditions that must be closely followed, but some of the modern trappings are just confused things. The bell-ringer who was supposed to ring the bell at the sight of the white smoke couldn't receive the news via radio because of the jamming devices installed by the Vatican to prevent Cardinals and others from using cell phones during the enclave. Moreover, the special stove they had installed in the Chapel with a special chemical to turn the smoke white couldn't be lit so you had a group of cardinals surrounding the stove trying to get it to light that resembled old men at a barbecue, as the Sistine Chapel filled with smoke -- don't tell the museum's curators of Michelangelo's painting.
Secrecy at the Vatican rises to the level of fetish. Everything is hidden and probably the most important tenet is that no one must say anything negative about his (never a her) superior or say anything that might bring the church into disrepute. John Paul II had child-like naive love for anything that smacked of evangelical revivalism for the Catholic Church, which made him susceptible to the machinations of Cardinal Marcial, founder of the Legions of Christ and serial pedophile. Marcial and the Legionnaires would shower Rome's cardinals with expensive gifts worth up to $1000 not to mention millions in support of the Pope's travels. He was brought down, if you could say that, only following numerous charges from Legionnaires who described how if they felt guilty from Marcial's inflicted masturbatory sessions, he would absolve them on the spot and often claimed he had a special dispensation from Rome for his sexual proclivities. That became too much for Rome, not the sexual misconduct, the misuse of dispensations. In any case, he was never punished, only put out to pasture. (They admitted to his fathering several children and heterosexual affairs - after-all he was human- but they never admitted to the homosexual activities.) Marcial and the Legion never apologized, claiming only that Marcial would be Christ-like in his surrendering to the higher authority of the Pope. It's enough to make you puke.
Thavis devotes a chapter to the campaign by some of the church's reactionaries to have Pius XII (considered by some to be "Hitler's Pope") declared a saint. You might as well declare a Hershey Bar (seems like Catholics will pray to anything) a saint, setting the bar so low. I mean really; Aquinas, maybe, but Pius XII or John Paul II (considered by some to be Marcial's enabler)? Give me a fucking break.
Here's what Thavis has to say about it:
One of the traditional signs of sainthood, still very much taken into account by Vatican experts, is the existence of a “popular cult” –evidence that people pray to the person in the years following his or her death. The six-year-old Nennolina, for example, who was soon to be beatified [by Pope Benedict XVI] was this kind of grassroots saint. Her friends, neighbors and relatives kept the fame of her sanctity alive by publishing her letters, reporting her holiness widely and praying to the little Roman girl.
If the fact that Pius XII was a pope gave his sainthood cause some inherent advantages, in other ways it made perceptions of his holiness less immediate and less personal. He was for most Catholics a remote figure at the far end of the hierarchy. History would ultimately be his judge, and it always struck me that whatever “popular cult” he did have seemed to be centered in and around the Vatican. (p. 229-231)
As with any large organization, politics, secrecy and money reign supreme. Sometimes they also appear quite short-sighted. Desperate for a new parking lot inside the Vatican, the engineers maneuvered the Cardinals to authorize them to begin digging without allowing any archaeologists to check the site first for possible artifacts and things of historical interest. They claimed to have done some test bores, but were horrified when the bulldozers tore open a huge burial site with many hundreds of Roman tombs and full of mosaics and museum quality pieces. Had they had any sense, it seems to me, not to mention foresight, they never would have let the archaeologists in first (full disclaimer, I studied a bit of archaeology in college) and when the tombs had been found, turned it into a major tourist attraction, charging money to watch and then visit. They could have built the parking lot elsewhere and had buses (for a fee, of course) carrying people back and forth. They would have made much more money and kept everyone (except perhaps the asphalt engineers) very happy. Instead, despite their attempt at secrecy, the result was a huge scandal.
One of the most interesting sections described the attempt by the SSPX under the leadership of Marcel Lefebvre to influence Cardinal Ratzinger and the newly elected Pope. They were upset with the changes enacted by Pope John XXIII and wanted a return to the Latin mass and the more traditional (and medieval) form of worship. He belonged to identifiable strand of right-wing political and religious opinion in French society that originated among the defeated royalists after the 1789 French Revolution. He defied Pope John Paul II and consecrated four bishops, an action for which he (and they) were excommunicated. He was particularly incensed by the Vatican's reaching out to other religious denominations, not believing in rapprochement. Apparently he and his followers didn't buy all that nonsense about the Pope being God's representative, Clearly, Lefebvre believed he had better communication with God than the Pope. The whole thing smacked of Luther's rebellion against the established order in 1521, his excommunication, and we all know where that led. Seems to me that Lefebvre met most of the conditions of heresy.
Thavis, a Vatican correspondent, and chief of the Rome Bureau for the Catholic News Service, for more than thirty years, says he wrote the book to reveal the inner workings of the Vatican, a place rife with political in-fighting and scandal, hardly the locus of a church with a unified and universal mission. Whether the institution will ever become governable in the modern world remains to be seen. Ratzinger (Benedict) gave up but it should not have come as a surprise. The man had spent his entire life seeking refuge from controversy and the world in general. He had decided at a very young age he wanted to be a cardinal, and enrolled in seminary at age 12, with but a brief stint in the German Army, his life was one of books (sounds delightful) and as an academic -- he never had a job as a pastor dealing with the day to day quotidian lives of parishioners -- fled conflict. I suspect the pressures of being Pope were just too much, so off to the monastery.
The book begins with some amusing stories from the enclave where they elected Cardinal Ratzinger as the Pope, following the death of John Paul II. Apparently there are numerous traditions that must be closely followed, but some of the modern trappings are just confused things. The bell-ringer who was supposed to ring the bell at the sight of the white smoke couldn't receive the news via radio because of the jamming devices installed by the Vatican to prevent Cardinals and others from using cell phones during the enclave. Moreover, the special stove they had installed in the Chapel with a special chemical to turn the smoke white couldn't be lit so you had a group of cardinals surrounding the stove trying to get it to light that resembled old men at a barbecue, as the Sistine Chapel filled with smoke -- don't tell the museum's curators of Michelangelo's painting.
Secrecy at the Vatican rises to the level of fetish. Everything is hidden and probably the most important tenet is that no one must say anything negative about his (never a her) superior or say anything that might bring the church into disrepute. John Paul II had child-like naive love for anything that smacked of evangelical revivalism for the Catholic Church, which made him susceptible to the machinations of Cardinal Marcial, founder of the Legions of Christ and serial pedophile. Marcial and the Legionnaires would shower Rome's cardinals with expensive gifts worth up to $1000 not to mention millions in support of the Pope's travels. He was brought down, if you could say that, only following numerous charges from Legionnaires who described how if they felt guilty from Marcial's inflicted masturbatory sessions, he would absolve them on the spot and often claimed he had a special dispensation from Rome for his sexual proclivities. That became too much for Rome, not the sexual misconduct, the misuse of dispensations. In any case, he was never punished, only put out to pasture. (They admitted to his fathering several children and heterosexual affairs - after-all he was human- but they never admitted to the homosexual activities.) Marcial and the Legion never apologized, claiming only that Marcial would be Christ-like in his surrendering to the higher authority of the Pope. It's enough to make you puke.
Thavis devotes a chapter to the campaign by some of the church's reactionaries to have Pius XII (considered by some to be "Hitler's Pope") declared a saint. You might as well declare a Hershey Bar (seems like Catholics will pray to anything) a saint, setting the bar so low. I mean really; Aquinas, maybe, but Pius XII or John Paul II (considered by some to be Marcial's enabler)? Give me a fucking break.
Here's what Thavis has to say about it:
One of the traditional signs of sainthood, still very much taken into account by Vatican experts, is the existence of a “popular cult” –evidence that people pray to the person in the years following his or her death. The six-year-old Nennolina, for example, who was soon to be beatified [by Pope Benedict XVI] was this kind of grassroots saint. Her friends, neighbors and relatives kept the fame of her sanctity alive by publishing her letters, reporting her holiness widely and praying to the little Roman girl.
If the fact that Pius XII was a pope gave his sainthood cause some inherent advantages, in other ways it made perceptions of his holiness less immediate and less personal. He was for most Catholics a remote figure at the far end of the hierarchy. History would ultimately be his judge, and it always struck me that whatever “popular cult” he did have seemed to be centered in and around the Vatican. (p. 229-231)
As with any large organization, politics, secrecy and money reign supreme. Sometimes they also appear quite short-sighted. Desperate for a new parking lot inside the Vatican, the engineers maneuvered the Cardinals to authorize them to begin digging without allowing any archaeologists to check the site first for possible artifacts and things of historical interest. They claimed to have done some test bores, but were horrified when the bulldozers tore open a huge burial site with many hundreds of Roman tombs and full of mosaics and museum quality pieces. Had they had any sense, it seems to me, not to mention foresight, they never would have let the archaeologists in first (full disclaimer, I studied a bit of archaeology in college) and when the tombs had been found, turned it into a major tourist attraction, charging money to watch and then visit. They could have built the parking lot elsewhere and had buses (for a fee, of course) carrying people back and forth. They would have made much more money and kept everyone (except perhaps the asphalt engineers) very happy. Instead, despite their attempt at secrecy, the result was a huge scandal.
One of the most interesting sections described the attempt by the SSPX under the leadership of Marcel Lefebvre to influence Cardinal Ratzinger and the newly elected Pope. They were upset with the changes enacted by Pope John XXIII and wanted a return to the Latin mass and the more traditional (and medieval) form of worship. He belonged to identifiable strand of right-wing political and religious opinion in French society that originated among the defeated royalists after the 1789 French Revolution. He defied Pope John Paul II and consecrated four bishops, an action for which he (and they) were excommunicated. He was particularly incensed by the Vatican's reaching out to other religious denominations, not believing in rapprochement. Apparently he and his followers didn't buy all that nonsense about the Pope being God's representative, Clearly, Lefebvre believed he had better communication with God than the Pope. The whole thing smacked of Luther's rebellion against the established order in 1521, his excommunication, and we all know where that led. Seems to me that Lefebvre met most of the conditions of heresy.
Thavis, a Vatican correspondent, and chief of the Rome Bureau for the Catholic News Service, for more than thirty years, says he wrote the book to reveal the inner workings of the Vatican, a place rife with political in-fighting and scandal, hardly the locus of a church with a unified and universal mission. Whether the institution will ever become governable in the modern world remains to be seen. Ratzinger (Benedict) gave up but it should not have come as a surprise. The man had spent his entire life seeking refuge from controversy and the world in general. He had decided at a very young age he wanted to be a cardinal, and enrolled in seminary at age 12, with but a brief stint in the German Army, his life was one of books (sounds delightful) and as an academic -- he never had a job as a pastor dealing with the day to day quotidian lives of parishioners -- fled conflict. I suspect the pressures of being Pope were just too much, so off to the monastery.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Some people will pay NOT to be prayed for....
This study is quite interesting. It seeks to determine the value of the phrase, "thoughts and prayers" following a tragedy. It attempted to place a value on the phrase economically, i.e. using the market.
"The Christians who participated in this study valued prayer from a stranger, on average, at more than $4. A prayer from a priest was worth about $7. The nonreligious participants would pay less than $2 for a priest to not pray for them, and over $3.50 to avoid a Christian stranger’s prayer.
“This article raises an interesting point — some people, maybe, just don’t want your thoughts or prayers,” said University of Colorado at Denver psychologist Kevin Masters, who was not a member of the research team. In 2006, Masters and his colleagues analyzed the body of research on the effects of prayer on someone’s behalf. No study was able to show that prayer has discernible health benefits on a distant recipient."
Study: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/10/1908268116
Article: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/16/some-people-would-pay-avoid-thoughts-prayers-after-disaster-study-finds/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
"The Christians who participated in this study valued prayer from a stranger, on average, at more than $4. A prayer from a priest was worth about $7. The nonreligious participants would pay less than $2 for a priest to not pray for them, and over $3.50 to avoid a Christian stranger’s prayer.
“This article raises an interesting point — some people, maybe, just don’t want your thoughts or prayers,” said University of Colorado at Denver psychologist Kevin Masters, who was not a member of the research team. In 2006, Masters and his colleagues analyzed the body of research on the effects of prayer on someone’s behalf. No study was able to show that prayer has discernible health benefits on a distant recipient."
Study: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/10/1908268116
Article: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/16/some-people-would-pay-avoid-thoughts-prayers-after-disaster-study-finds/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
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