Thursday, June 5, 2025
D+190/135
1912 US Marines invaded Caimanera, Cuba
1967 Six-Day War began between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria
1968 Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, shooting him 3 times and wounding 5 others at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Kennedy died the next day.
2018 President Donald Trump's administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families violated international law, according to the UN
In bed by 9, awake around 4:30, and up at 4:45. 52°, high 68°, mostly sunny day.
Eye drops at 6 a.m. I see Dr. Saladi today. End of eye drops? . . . Yes, but start of dry eye ointment, eye wipes, and heated eye pads. It's always somethin'.
Can the Church Evolve is the lead essay by Fintan O'Toole in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. Its subheading is "The big question for Pope Leo XIV is whether he will complete Pope Francis’s mission to make the Catholic Church less tyrannical. Like all of O'Toole's essays, it is erudite, informed, and thoughtful. Excerpts:
“If,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in the most stinging of Protestant put-downs, “a man consider the originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” It might be said that the mission of the late Pope Francis was to banish that ghost. The big question for his successor, Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), is whether his papacy will complete the exorcism or continue to be haunted by the specter of the imperial Church.
The answer matters, obviously, to 1.4 billion Catholics. But it bears heavily too on an issue at the heart of the contemporary crisis of democracy: the nature of authority. In 2023 Prevost said, “We must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today.” While serving as head of the Vatican’s commission on the appointment of bishops he remarked, “The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom.” It seems likely that he also believes the pope is not supposed to be a little emperor sitting in his imperial court. In choosing to elevate him, the 132 other cardinals eligible to vote in the conclave would seem to have had a very particular little emperor in mind: the one in the White House.
The most immediately striking thing about Prevost is that he embodies the hybrid nature of American identity. While Donald Trump has mobilized Nazi rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” Prevost’s blood is Afro-Creole, French, Italian, and Spanish. His maternal grandparents were people of color from New Orleans. He is also a Peruvian citizen who has spent much of his life ministering to the kind of people Trump characterizes as “vermin.” When Vice President J.D. Vance suggested to Fox News in January that Christianity prioritizes love for one’s own family and neighbors over love for strangers and foreigners, an X account apparently belonging to Prevost posted a rebuke: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Before the idea of an American pope became real, Trump had played with the notion that it could be him. He declared on April 29 that his “number one choice” for the succession to Pope Francis would be himself. On May 2, less than a week after he attended Francis’s funeral, Trump posted on Truth Social (and the official White House account reposted on X) an AI-generated image of himself enthroned on a gilded chair, sporting a gold-embroidered miter, and dressed in a white papal cassock with an elaborate pectoral cross. His right hand is raised in a gesture of both blessing and command. Trump was tapping into many centuries of papal portraiture, bringing to mind Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens’s description of Diego Velázquez’s celebrated Portrait of Innocent X as “an authoritative vision of an authoritarian.” Trump called the post a “little fun,” but as in so much of Trump’s humor, the comedy of the AI image did not conceal its authoritarian intent.
. . . .
Trumpism contains a deep seam of reactionary Catholicism, represented not just by Vance and Steve Bannon but by Trump’s three picks for the Supreme Court, all of whom were raised Catholic. This nexus was hostile to Francis’s version of the faith, which it regarded as weak and woke. Open opposition to Francis at the top of the Church hierarchy was led by the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who was for a time a patron of Bannon’s Dignitatis Humanae Institute. Trump’s presentation of himself as pope was wish fulfillment for those of his Catholic fans who were hoping for a Trump-friendly successor to Francis. (Trump suggested the sycophantic New York cardinal Timothy Dolan as a “very good” option.) . . .
The tension between the Church’s origins as a community of outsiders and its evolution as the inheritor of the Roman Empire’s bureaucratic systems of command and control remains radically unresolved. . . . .
Until 1967 “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” had to swear the “Oath Against Modernism” decreed by Pius X in 1910:
I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another.
This language—hierarchy, subordination, obedience, immutability—made the Church a natural ally of authoritarian regimes, especially in the forms they took in Catholic countries. The Vatican made a comfortable deal with Benito Mussolini in the Lateran Pacts of 1929. The Church declared Francisco Franco’s coup against the Spanish Republic a “national crusade” and subsequently helped to prop up his dictatorship. The Church also rallied around Marshal Pétain in Vichy France and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. Many Catholics (individually and collectively) acted heroically to resist fascism and oppose its atrocities, but they had to go against the grain of the institutional Church’s doctrine of submission to one-man rule. The spiritual dictatorship of the pope provided a model for its temporal equivalents—which is why, with the resurgence of fascism worldwide, the conduct of the pope has a resonance far beyond the bounds of his own church.
. . . . . .
Leo will be a good pope if he succeeds, in his own quieter and more cerebral way, in sustaining the decency, compassion, and openness of his predecessor. He will be a great one if he manages to translate that benign comportment into the kind of change that does not ultimately depend on the personality of a pope. Such change is structural and permanent: the complete transformation of a monarchical male dictatorship into a living embodiment of the spirit of democracy. Only when that is accomplished will the ghost of empire have been laid to rest at last.
This is a truly wonderful essay, yet another reason why I am such a big fan of Fintan O'Toole. I especially took delight in this passage about the fop Cardinal Burke, about whom I have often written:
[T]he importance of style could be quite literal. Francis kept his old black shoes, in contrast to his predecessor Benedict’s handcrafted red ones. He sported a cheap silver-plated pectoral cross and plastic watch and dressed in a plain white cassock. By way of flagrant contrast, his would-be nemesis Cardinal Burke epitomized what Francis mockingly called the “peacock priest.” Burke, as described by Frédéric Martel in his best-selling In the Closet of the Vatican (2019), brings to mind the satiric ecclesiastical fashion show in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972):
He can stroll about in full sail, in his cappa magna, in an unthinkably long robe, in a forest of white lace or dressed in a long coat shaped like a dressing gown, while at the same time, in the course of an interview, denouncing in the name of tradition a “Church that has become too feminized.” 😂😂😂
Random thoughts to start the day: (1) I can't escape my disgust for Joe Biden and his arrogant decision to seek a second term. I hold him in very large measure responsible for the resurgence, in a much more lethal form, of Donald Trump and his myrmidons. I have written about it often and thought about it even more often. "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up" is the advice anonymously attributed to Barack Obama. He had been lusting after the brass ring since before 1988, when he first ran for the presidency and was forced out of the contest by what passed for a scandal in those days. Once he had it, i.e., was in the White House, he just couldn't give it up. He froze the field of potential competitors to Trump, annointed Kamala Harris who (1) was stuck with his record on immigration and inflation, and (2) couldn't even make it to the Iowa cauceses in 2020, and gave Trump a clean sweep of the battleground states, and a big victory in the popular vote in 2024.
(2) Tom Friedman was on Morning Joe this morning and said, "Donald Trump is not a Russian agent. I want to make that very clear, but man, he sure knows how to play one on television, because when I hear his readout of the call with Putin [about the Ukrainian attack on Russian bombers deep inside Russia], you know what he reminds me of? Pete Hegseth, not as Secretary of Defense but as a commentator on Fox TV. 'I talked to Putin and man, is he mad.' Well, what did you say?' I have speculated for some time that Trump is a Russian agent, not merely a Russian asset. I could as easily speculate that Trump is a Chinese agent. The point is that he is doing incalculable harm to the United States, economically, diplomatically, militarily, and spiritually or politically insofar as he increases polarization and internal enmities. Putin, Xi, and other dictatorial enemies of America must be licking their chops watching what is happening to this country under Trump. (And again I think, thank you, Joe Biden.)
(3) Further to the above, from Friedman's op-ed in yesterday's NYTimes, "Trump's Gilded Gut Instinct."
Trump is governing by unchecked gut impulses, with little or no homework or coordinatin among agencies . . . [W]hat you are seeing from this Trump II administration, and its bended-knee Congress, is a dangerous, undisciplined, intellectually inconsistent farce that we will pay dearly for in the future.. . . If you think this is not dangerous, just keep in mind that the Trump Organization Inc. over the years filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six different businesses. That was a reason for that: the operating style and values of its boss.
I went to Heaven this morning between 8 and 8:35 when I sat solely and silently on the patio behind our house and took in with my eyes and ears what surrounded me, a beatific vision.
Trump and Musk are in th emiddle of a food fight, calling each other names like emotional chldren. Musk has even posted a charge that Trump is one of the men referred to in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal invesigtation file and that's the reason the file is kept under lock and key by the government.
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