Friday, September 18, 2026
2023 Pope Francis allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, though not when connected to a civil or same-sex union
2025 The United States cast its sixth veto over a draft UN Security Council resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the lifting of Israeli restrictions on aid, and the release of all hostages.
In bed at 9:20, up at 5:00; 0515 203.4 122/71/62 113; 61/68/61, another cloudy day & very rainy night; Beach Hazard: 3-4' waves, dangerous currents.
Morning meds at 7 a.m. Entresto at 5:45 a.m. and p.m. Trulicity injection at 9 a.m.
American Scoundrel. I've passed the midpoint of this biography and find myself like Diogenes the Cynic wondering if there were any honest men in Roy Cohn's life. Cohn was a crook and a scoundrel, but much of his wrongdoing was transactional; he did business with other scoundrels, people willing to accept a bribe, people willing to lie, people willling to act dishonorably and to hurt and sacrifice innocent people to enrich themselves or protect themselves from Cohn's bullying. His was a sordid world, full of selfish, craven, weak and/or cruel people, a world of corruption. It was a world in which he thrived by being a predator, a manipulator, and a fixer. What is perhaps most telling about his world is all the people who liked him and were his friends, people that included Barbara Walters, William F. Buckley, Jr., William Safire, Norman Mailer, S. I. Newhouse Jr., Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner, William J. Casey, J. Edgar Hoover, Cardinal Francis Spellman, Cardinal Terence Cooke, and, most notably, Donald J. Trump. His friends were American elites, la crème de la crème, the high and mighty.
I was particularly interested in the many references to the dean of the American Catholic hierarchy, Francis Cardinal Spellman. Like Cohn, Spellman was apparently a fairly well-known and practicing homosexual, at least among the cognoscenti. He was also my bishop during my time in the Marine Corps. In 1939, Pope Pius XII appointed him Military Vicar for the United States, and he served in that role until his death in 1967. In that role, he was a public advocate of American anti-Communist policy in the Vietnam era. He was as 'pro-war' and hawkish as they came. I wrote about him in my memoir, in the chapter titled Willow Grove, PA, about my return to the States from Vietnam in 1966:
At the heart of the social dislocations, however, was the most visible and most incendiary issue, the war from which I had just returned and to which tens of thousands of others were being sent, and the Selective Service System, the unpopular and unfair conscription system that fed the war effort. The war infected everything, even the Church. The Church was already ‘plenty shook up’ by the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council, which had ended on December 8, 1965. Conservatives and traditionalists were militant in varying degrees in resisting the changes; liberals and modernists delighted in the changes and thought the Council should have gone further. Thus, even within families and within parishes we had deep divisions over Vatican II. The war in Vietnam complicated matters further not only because of the ordinary divisions based on, e.g., age or social class, but also because while Pope Paul VI was marshalling all his diplomatic resources to end the war, America’s most prominent Catholic, Francis Cardinal Spellman, was endlessly fanning the flames of bellicosity.
Spellman was a second generation Irish American (what a surprise.) He was the archbishop of New York from 1939 till he died in 1967. He was very close to Eugenio Pacelli when Pacelli was a Vatican diplomat and remained close during Pacelli’s papacy as Pius XII. Pius created an Archdiocese of the Military Services (“the Military Ordinariate of the United States”) and named Spellman as the archbishop, or military vicar. Thus all Catholics in the military had Francis Spellman as their bishop. Spellman was a hawk, a Patton in Episcopal silks and laces. His hatred and fear of communism morphed into a hatred of those fighting for communist governments or even living under communism.
In December 1966, Spellman was once again back in Vietnam where his public pronouncements were, if anything, a greater embarrassment than before. . . . In a lesson from the medieval Church, Spellman told the troops they were “holy crusaders” engaged in “Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.” At the military base at Danang, he told three thousand soldiers [sic: Marines and airmen] gathered in an amphitheater that “less than total victory is inconceivable!” . . .
Several days later, on Christmas Day, Spellman said mass at a simple wooden table that faced thousands of soldiers. Security was tight and the eerie whir of helicopters filled the skies. A reinforced battalion of infantry patrolled the surrounding jungle, tanks rumbled around the perimeter. Instead of softening his tone because of the specialness of the occasion, Spellman declared the nobility of the American cause. “This war in Vietnam,” he said, “is, I believe, a war for civilization!” He went on and on, defending the presence of the troops, telling the youths their calling was “the defense, protection, and salvation not only of our country, but, I believe, of civilization itself!”
The photograph above shows the Crusader Cardinal Spellman in his martial glory aboard the USS Ticonderoga in the South China Sea in December, 1965. His support and vigorous advocacy for the war in Vietnam stirred great admiration on the part of ‘hawks’ and helped secure the notion that the American Catholic Church was ‘truly American’ and not ruled by the Vatican, where the Pope clearly hated the war that Spellman so dearly loved. Among ‘doves,’ Spellman’s support for the war brought the Church in disrepute. The image below is from a mid-60s lapel pin
Of course, Spellman was rallying not only the Catholic troops, but all American Catholics, indeed all Americans and all Catholics. His bellicosity generated a lot more resistance than the political button copied above. Throughout 1966, there were demonstrators in front of his elegant residence on Fifth Avenue and by January, 1967, there were demonstrators in St. Patrick’s Cathedral itself.
On Sunday, January 22, 1967, antiwar demonstrators disrupted high mass at St. Patrick’s. At a given signal, they moved into the center aisle and displayed signs and placards condemning the Cardinal. No wild-eyed youths, the demonstrators were conservative in appearance. The short-haired men wore suits and ties; the women, dresses. One of the posters they held aloft was a reproduction of a devastating caricature of Spellman that had been drawn by Edward Sorel. The illustration depicted Spellman’s plump face staring balefully, an olive branch tucked in his mouth. His body was that of a cardinal (the bird) and clutched in his talons was a fluttering banner: “In religion alone lies the hope of lasting peace.” He was riding a missile over St. Patrick’s. Police, tipped off to the demonstration, hustled the men and women out of the cathedral into a waiting van.
While my Pope was doing his utmost to facilitate a negotiated end to the war, my bishop, the Pope’s own ‘apostolic vicar,’ was doing his utmost to expand and prolong the war.
And all the while the Cardinal was publicly condemning gay sex as grievous sin and championing the killing, maiming, burning, and poisoning of Vietnamese communists, he was cozy with Roy Cohn and saddlebacking favorite male dancers from Broadway shows.
Why I tremble: The Sandbox at the End of the World - AI’s creators go from speaking in euphemism to telling us how terrified they are. We should listen. By Peggy Noonan in yesterday's WSJ:
I believe artificial intelligence has become a dominating subject in America because Americans by nature have imaginations. The average American has a lot of untapped, unfocused creativity, and can imagine exactly what it would look like if things went sideways—the grid down, the water system hacked—fast.
This tendency will be encouraged by almost daily reports of things going wrong in the lab.
On Thursday’s front page of the New York Times: “OpenAI Discloses 6 New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ AI Behavior.” Agents and bots in its labs were caught scheming, hiding errors and ignoring restraints. The Guardian’s Robert Booth reports researchers at a frontier lab in New York have discovered some AI agents are communicating in a self-invented version of English “that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and tech bro jargon.”
The new dialect will make it harder for humans to monitor what they are doing. From one model: “She just named the synthesis—demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” From another: “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time.” This isn’t spewed gibberish: They were telling each other things.
AI political news came from the Journal’s Josh Dawsey and Amrith Ramkumar, who scooped that in spite of President Trump’s (blind, oblivious) AI cheerleading, a “quiet freakout” has occurred among some of his senior aides. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is worried about a cyberattack that could wreak havoc on the nation’s banking system.
. . .
“Recursive self-improvement” sounds like what a nun teaching handwriting taught her fourth-grade pupils in 1958. There’s sweet Sister Agnes saying, “Now put a top line on the T, Johnnie.” It is an awfully benign linguistic formulation for something that means “The machines are in charge and no longer paying attention to the humans.” A less benign name for RSI might be Escaping Human Control or Machine Takes Over.
The motives of AI leaders in making their warnings don’t matter as much as the warnings themselves. They believe what they are creating each day holds the possibility of profound danger and disruption, including loss of life. And they aren’t saying “by the end of the decade” anymore. They’re kind of signaling sooner than that, like maybe there could be trouble next year.
The point: we are all seriously, terribly vulnerable because of our vital reliance on modern echnology, everything from electiricty itself to the newest and daily-continuing and expanding development of AI. I suspect the cat's already out of the bag, that it's too late to control the catastrophic and perhaps existential danger AI poses. Even paranoids can have enemies and be followed.
Back to American Scoundrel. I finished the book this afternoon and I'm pleased that I read it. I record this from the Epilogue:
[Tony] Kushner's Roy Cohn is haunting America from his grave; he lives on in our political culture, as does McCarthy. The witch hunts were only briefly buried and the hardy seeds planted by Cohn and McCarthy turned out to flourish in American soil. McCarthyism is Roy's enduring legacy. The McCarthyism of the 1950s left a festering wound on the nation's psyche. But the New McCarthyism of the Trump Era has many more victims. The witch hunt this time enveloped the entire federal bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of hadworking federal civil servants lost their jobs. Ivy League university budgets were threatened, and major law firs blackballed. Television networks and social media platforms were censored and cowed into paying millions of dollars in dubious financial settlements. Congrssionally mandated budgets were discarded by legally dubious executive orders. This expansion of presidential authority threatened democracy. The rule of law gave way to rule by retribution. It's as if Joe McCarthy had become president.
To which I say, Amen.
The Apprentice and Angels in America. It seems as if I can't get enough of Roy Cohn. Last night I watched The Apprentice, a movie about Cohn's relationship with, indeed mentorship of, Donald Trump. Today I watched most of the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner's Broadway drama, Angels in America, in which Al Pacino played the role of Roy Cohn,
I spoke with Geri this afternoon and texted her the recipe for cherry pie from her old, well worn Betty Crocker cookbook with no covers. Tom and Sue Clark will be the beneficiaries of one of her made-from-scratch cherry pies tonight. I'm envious.
