Report links Pope's resignation "to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom... were being blackmailed by outsiders."

The Guardian reports:

[The Italian newspaper] La Repubblica said the cardinals' report identified a series of meeting places in and around Rome. They included a villa outside the Italian capital, a sauna in a Rome suburb, a beauty parlour in the centre, and a former university residence that was in use by a provincial Italian archbishop....

The Vatican does not condemn homosexuals. But it teaches that gay sex is "intrinsically disordered". Pope Benedict has barred sexually active gay men from studying for the priesthood.

Scott Walker proposes expanding the school voucher program beyond Milwaukee and Racine...

... to 9 new districts, including — gasp! — Madison.

Here's what Walker said last night in his budget speech:

For communities where some schools fail to meet expectations, we include an expansion of the parental choice program in this budget. Since wealthy families have a choice because they can pay to send their children to a private school, we give low income and middle class families an opportunity to also choose a viable alternative for their sons and daughters.

Interestingly, some communities have both high-performing schools, as well as some that fail to meet expectations. Green Bay is a good example. Keller Elementary in Green Bay is a school where more than 70 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, yet Keller Elementary exceeds expectations. In this budget, schools like this will be eligible for a performance reward. At the same time, in that same district, there are other schools that fail to meet expectations. Other districts like Madison, Beloit, Sheboygan, and West Allis/West Milwaukee have similar situations.

People in Madison like to think we have fabulous public schools, so it's rough seeing Madison grouped with those other places. And of course, people in Madison tend to loathe Governor Walker. Obviously, the liberal viewpoint is that if there's a problem with the public schools, more money should be given to those public schools, not diverted into private schools. Here's the discussion in the forum over at the Isthmus, where liberal Madisonians tend to talk amongst themselves (and where Meade injects a bit of the kind of diversity they don't celebrate). I love the way the separation-of-church-and-state topic is playing out. First:

Does it bother you that taxpayer money will be spent for sectarian religious instruction?

Someone else:

If my kid went to a school with overcrowded classrooms and wasn't getting the attention he or she needed for whatever reason, I wouldn't hesitate sending him to a Catholic school if I could for free. Would you? Would you put up with a crappy classroom just because you didn't want your kid to take a half-hour of Bible study each day? I don't know many parents who would in a similar situation....

A third person (boldface added):

I don't think anybody's really upset about vouchers to send kids to Catholic schools. The Catholic schools can't take many more kids, but they are run by local parishes and nuns with good intentions and without a profit motive. It's not foremost a constitutional issue but a quality one. We're upset about a bunch of profit-motive business types setting up private schools to make money for themselves by providing services that work poorly and exploit public funding the same way the University of Phoenix does with adult students. Why anybody thinks replacing so-called overpaid teachers with overpaid executives is an improvement beats me. And that's exactly what we'll get if we don't guard against it at every turn.

The lefties really hate business! Meade provides the comic pushback. Quoting "bunch of profit-motive business types":

But enough about the teachers' unions. School choice is coming to Madison. Choice is good.

"I think Justice Scalia would correct you and say it was a Saint Thomas More hat, rather than a Sir Thomas More hat."

Said Astro in the comments to the post about the hat Scalia wore to the inauguration.

I responded saying that "the truth is that the reason I used 'Sir' is that it was the caption on the Hans Holbein painting," but the comment got me researching what's the right way to refer to More, and Wikipedia's article begins: "Sir Thomas More... known to Catholics as Saint Thomas More...." So, it seems that the failure to say "Saint" is the shibboleth that reveals that I'm not Catholic. In which case, I don't think Scalia would correct me.

Notice my tendency to reinforce my original choice — which involved little thought — with additional reasons. That's the lawyer instinct. What happened happened, and now that I'm challenged, I furiously brainstorm reasons why it was correct. (What's not lawyer-like is to concede that and display it like this.)

Another reinforcement for my choice is, as I wrote in the comments at the first link:

It's a Sir Thomas More hat, that is, a hat that he wore in his role as a knight. There is no "saint hat," or if there is — maybe you get issued a hat in Heaven — it's not that hat.

It's like, say a cowboy died and was later beatified and we had a picture of him in his cowboy hat. Cowboy Bob. If I adopted his hat, it would be a Cowboy Bob hat, not a St. Bob hat.

I'd like to think Justice Scalia would be intrigued by this language usage question, whether the noun hat calls for the modifier Sir rather than Saint — even for those who revere him as a saint — because it's not a saint hat.

ADDED: Astro did a Google images search for "saint hat," with hilarious results. Before clicking on the link try to guess what 3 types of hats come up most often. It's not this:

Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel "say one of the things that really politicized the abortion issue was the efforts of those working to re-elect President Richard Nixon in 1972."

"His aides, including future Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, wanted to lure Northern Catholic voters, who had traditionally voted Democratic, over to the Republican Party."

Nixon "was strongly advised by his strategists ... to make a play for a Northern urban Catholic Democratic vote," says Greenhouse. "A kind of Northern strategy that mirrored the Southern strategy."

In fact, up until then, top Republicans tended to be more in favor of abortion rights than Democrats, including, for much of his first term, Nixon himself....

So, taking his aides' advice, Nixon switched sides on abortion, even reversing an earlier relaxation of an abortion ban in military facilities.

"We regret very much that the impression has been given to the public that rape victims are no longer able to be treated in Catholic hospitals."

"That is false."

Are you keeping up with the tweeting of the Pope?

I started "following" him, but then there were no tweets, and I check Twitter so rarely, that I hadn't read any of his tweets. Then, I read in Vanity Fair: "Pope Starts Tweeting, Can’t Stop Tweeting, Is Called a 'Huge Bummer." Wow. Okay. So, I'll check what the Pope is tweeting. (I am not Catholic, so I'm under no obligation!)

Mary is filled with joy on learning that she is to be the mother of Jesus, God’s Son made man.True joy comes from union with God
— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 19, 2012

Going for the embed code, I get to see everyone who's replying to that:

@pontifex dear Pope, we can read it in Bible, Twitter is for posting something trendy. Try it please.
— Jānis Palkavnieks (@Palkavnieks) December 19, 2012

. @pontifex Who is this 'God' you keep talking about?
— Carl Maxim (@carlmaxim) December 19, 2012

"Bishop Robert Morlino cracks down on Madison nuns for espousing 'New Ageism' and 'indifferentism.'"

Sisters Maureen McDonnell and Lynn Lisbeth — Sinsinawa Dominicans — are in trouble for their interfaith spirituality center Wisdom's Well.

"Indifferentism" is "the belief that no one religion or philosophy is superior to another."

"How did you suppress your sexual feelings?"

"I think they are natural. If I tried to suppress them I'd be storing up trouble for myself in the future. So I acknowledge to myself: 'Yes, that is a beautiful girl'. The thing that stood by me was: 'God created it, but you are not allowed to play with it!'"

Interviews with 4 priests about celibacy. I was a little troubled by the "it," but there's much more here than that. For example:

Being celibate means you are always able to be open to one more relationship. If you are in a relationship with another person, to a degree that has to be exclusive; other people have to be kept out.

That is very profound and is helpful in ways not limited to those who have taken a vow of celibacy.

Do you remember the first time, as a child, you had the insight nothing is something?

"Does Mitt Romney’s Mormonism make him too scary or weird to be elected to president of the United States?"

Asks Glenn Beck, a Mormon, speaking to Evangelical Christians, reported in the NYT.

During his special program, Mr. Beck took questions from mostly evangelical Christian listeners, colorfully debunking misperceptions about Mormonism. The “magic underwear” was compared to a skullcap, and Mr. Beck insisted that polygamy was seen as a “perversion” in the modern church.

“It’s not weird to be a Mormon,” he assured his listeners at the end of the program, “and it’s not weird to be president if you’re Mormon.”

It's fascinating — isn't it? — how little anti-Mormon material has been spread about in this election. The only notable person who seems to be going there is Andrew Sullivan:

Andrew Sullivan recently posted YouTube footage of LDS temple ceremonies in an effort to turn Romney’s Mormonism into an argument against his candidacy.

The video posted by Sullivan was shot surreptitiously inside LDS temples by a former Mormon who wanted to use the publicity connected with the Romney campaign to embarrass the LDS community. (The video creator enhanced the footage with his own monologue — wearing a gorilla mask — and spooky "Carmina Burana" soundtrack.)...

I think most Americans have a deep sensibility respecting religion and don't care to look into details about any given sect that could be exploited to make outsiders see it as bizarre. Sullivan, like Joe Biden, is a Catholic. You could make an equivalent YouTube video holding Catholics up to derision and contempt. That's generally not how we behave in America. I wonder who is more susceptible to this anti-Mormon material: the middle Americans who are aggregated under the "Evangelical Christians" label, who listen to Glenn Beck, or the affluent, educated coastal Americans who read Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times? Whichever, the notable fact is that there has been very little effort to stimulate anti-Mormon sentiment, and that's an excellent thing about America.

"For Andy Warhol to be openly gay... and at the same time intentionally celibate seems to represent a certain peace about the man..."

"... an intellectual separation of the sinless same-sex attraction and the sinful homosexual action, and an effort at communion with the teachings of the Catholic Church."

If it is sinful from the Catholic perspective, it is only sinful in that he may have lead others astray, those who did not know of his intentional celibacy.

But all this would be a view of the man, struggling for the good, failing and succeeding as only sinners can, not of the caricature our Gays vs. Hate world is comfortable with. It’s a pity, as an understanding of Warhol’s Catholicism lends a unique — and ignored — insight into his art.

No comment from me. Presented for what it's worth.

Here's a book: "The Religious Art of Andy Warhol."

ADDED: From Andy's diary:

“Yesterday, I was watching a game show, Blockbusters with Bill Cullen, and it was two black guys, a warden and his cousin, against a white girl and the category was “Letters” and the question was: “Andy Warhol is a ‘V.’” And (laughs) she got the answer right, she said “Virgin.””

"Rosary rallies" at the Wisconsin Capital are partisan politics....

... according to some partisans of the side that is not the one the reciters of Catholic prayers are supposedly partisan for.

Local organizers are continuing the rallies every Thursday through Nov. 1 to focus people's prayers on issues such as religious liberty and opposition to abortion and contraception, said the Rev. Rick Heilman, pastor of St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Mount Horeb.

Heilman said Nov. 1 was chosen as the last rally because the weather will be turning colder and because it is All Saint's Day, during which Catholics honor all saints....

At the Aug. 16 rally, Heilman told the crowd that "amazing things are happening right here in this very place," including the failure of "this whole nonsense of recalling this strong governor" (referring to Republican Scott Walker) and "now tapping our own Paul Ryan" as a vice presidential candidate....

Craig Spaulding, 47, of Madison, one of about a dozen counter-protesters who have been attending the rallies, doesn't buy it. "It's definitely partisan," he said. "It's all about the GOP."

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, has been watching the rallies with concern. Tax-exempt groups such as churches are not to say or do anything that indicates whom they want people to vote for or against, said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president. 

The NYT tries to figure out what portion of Barack Obama is Valerie Jarrett.

A fascinating long article by Jo Becker:

“She is the single most influential person in the Obama White House,” said one former senior White House official, who like many would speak candidly only on condition of anonymity.

“She’s there to try to promote what she understands to be what the president wants,” the former aide said. “Ultimately the president makes his own decisions. The question that is hard to get inside of, the black box, is whether she is really influencing him or merely executing decisions he’s made. That’s like asking, ‘Is the light on in the refrigerator when the door is closed?’ ”

Makes her sound like Karl Rove, right? But as the NYT puts it: "If Karl Rove was known as George W. Bush’s political brain, Ms. Jarrett is Mr. Obama’s spine."

“He’s got a real mess in the West Wing,” said one close presidential adviser. “Valerie is effectively the chief of staff, and he knows, but he doesn’t know. She’s almost like Nancy Reagan was with President Reagan, but more powerful.”...

It is not so much that she is Mr. Obama’s liberal id. Rather, her voice is often the one at the table reminding everyone of the president’s aspirational “first principles,” that he “didn’t just come to the White House to hold the office, but to make change,” [according to Anita Dunn, who was the president’s communications director].

Specifics: 1. Jarrett was responsible for encouraging Kathleen Sebelius to go ahead with the contraception mandate in the health insurance regulations; 2. She once "order[ed] a drink from a four-star general she mistook for a waiter"; 3. She snubbed George Soros and may be be responsible for his "largely sitting on the sidelines this presidential election," 4. She insulted Cornel West (after he whined about not getting invited to the inauguration), letting people know, as he put it: "one, I was crazy, and two, I was un-American."

#1 is the most important revelation, and the NYT begins and ends the article with it:

Worried about the political and legal implications [of the requirement that employers provide health insurance that covers the cost of birth control], the chief of staff, William M. Daley, reached out to the proposal’s author, Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary. How, he wondered, had the White House been put in this situation with so little presidential input? “You are way out there on a limb on this,” he recalls telling her.

He was told that Valerie Jarrett was involved, and it was her support that made Sebelius go ahead with something that got Obama in trouble with Catholics as he faced his reelection.

Catholics, a group Mr. Obama won in 2008, make up more than a quarter of the electorate. Though most personally support birth control, Mr. Daley and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. worried about how forcing church-affiliated organizations to pay for it would play....

Mr. Biden arranged for Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York to meet with the president and express the church’s view. With the support of some of the president’s political advisers, Ms. Jarrett pushed back in her own meeting with Mr. Obama, aides said. And she signaled Ms. Sebelius to “keep fighting — I’m with you on this,” said one former official with knowledge of the matter.

But by January, even friendly voices were accusing the president of throwing “his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.” Democratic members of Congress were fielding calls from constituents who felt, in the words of one, that this was a “big blunder.” In a senior advisers meeting, the president, exasperated, ordered his senior staff to “figure it out,” one participant said.

But if some expected significant backtracking, they were mistaken. In phone calls the next week, the president outlined his compromise: the burden for the coverage would shift from employers to insurers, but women who worked for religious organizations could still avail themselves of the benefit.

“When the president called me,” said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, “I could practically hear Valerie’s influence.”

And the "war on women" — which to me looks like nothing but rhetoric designed to paper over this policy screw-up — is that the voice of Valerie Jarrett? What is the President's voice? Whose "aspirational 'first principles'" are we talking about?

Is the light on in the refrigerator when the door is closed?

"The Republicans are smart enough to get the ‘pope of America,’ and the Democrats are stupid enough not to invite him."

"The Catholic vote is the most critical vote. They’re the wild card... So, why wouldn’t you ingratiate yourself to the pope of America and send a wink and a nod to Catholics?"

Who's the "pope of America"? It's Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan:

He's also a scholar and a passionate defender of the church's traditional views on what he calls "settled questions." If you've ever wondered why exactly the Catholic church opposes gay marriage and ordination of women as priests, listen to Dolan articulate the church's beliefs. It's far from a simple matter of saying "no."...

For example, here's the archbishop on gay marriage: "I have a strong desire to play shortstop for the Yankees. I don't have a right to because I don't have what it takes. And that would be what the church would say about marriage."

I was playing the video on that, and Meade said: "He sounds like Scalia." And I said: "That's what I thought!"

And here's Dolan arguing against the ordination of women as priests: "Jesus gave women positions of responsibility. The only ones at the foot of the cross except for St. John? Women. The people that discovered his resurrection? Women. The people that were with him on his journeys? Women. People say, 'This guy was kind of a pioneer in women's rights.' So, if he were going to intend them for the priesthood, he woulda done it. And he didn't."

Got that?

Vote Republican or go to Hell.

"Along with her new Catholic school, the 6-year-old daughter of Katie and ex-husband Tom Cruise will have a uniform..."

"... when she's in school, and 'normal kid' clothes when she's out and about."

This is the 6-year-old "fashionista" with $3.2 million worth of designer clothes and custom-made shoes.

Previously, the child was home-schooled within a Scientology milieu.

"For decades, Democratic politicians have found ways to win Catholic swing voters despite taking positions that are at odds..."

"... with the Catholic Church’s views on abortion, same-sex marriage, and yes, contraception. But it will be considerably harder for this White House to win over those same voters if it seems to be picking a fight with American Catholicism as a culture — with the local Catholic hospital, the local Catholic soup kitchen, and yes, the Fighting Irish."

Says Ross Douthat, who is good at political analysis, but a bit slapdash about the law at issue in the suit that was filed by the Catholic bishops.

Whether [they] win in court will presumably depend on how the judicial branch weighs the public health concern involved. It’s true that religious institutions can’t be exempt from every regulation they don’t like, and maybe the courts will accept the argument that it’s worth sacrificing a measure of religious liberty in order to marginally expand the number of insurance plans covering contraception.

At least he says "presumably," and perhaps he's trying to express the view that the courts don't follow legal rules but approve of laws that seem like a pretty good idea in relation to how troublesome they are to people who like to think they have rights.

Bloomberg's ridiculous photographic bias.

Reporting on yesterday's Wisconsin recall primary, Bloomberg runs this photograph of Tom Barrett...



... which comes straight from Barrett's mayoral office. That is, it's Barrett's own propaganda.

And this picture of Scott Walker...



... taken by a photographer who has a job in the Bloomberg organization either in spite of his inability to shoot a decently lit image or because of his ability to make selected targets look as bad as possible.

The text of the article is equally slanted, largely a collection of quotes from Barrett said from UW-Milwaukee professor Mordecai Lee. Lee is the guy who told us 95% of Republicans would cross over and vote in the Democratic primary, but Walker got 626,538 votes even though he had only nominal opposition in the Republican primary, and the 4 Democrats combined only got  665,436 votes. How many of those 665,436 were Republicans? Anyway, now Lee is feeding Bloomberg crapola like:

“In the 1950s there was a saying, ‘He’s a nice Catholic boy... That’s Tom Barrett. He believes the world is good... He believes in doing good. He believes that in a moral universe, right always wins out.”

And:

“In his view, the November 2010 election was simply an error and he welcomes the opportunity to right the wrong."

It's a moral universe thing. Walker beat Barrett in the regular election, a fair election, a democratic election. But somehow that was a wrong, and the nice Catholic boy is all about righting wrongs in the moral universe. Holy lord, what nonsense. That's the Milwaukee professor's assertion about the candidate's quest to get his hands on power: For the world to be good, I must rule.

Paul Ryan invokes the Catholic "principle of subsidiarity" in support of small-government politics.

NPR reports, noting something Ryan said on the Christian Broadcasting Network:

"Through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities — through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community — that's how we advance the common good," Ryan said.

NPR gets a counterpoint from a polisci prof at Catholic University:

But Stephen Schneck... says he thinks Ryan is "completely missing the boat and not understanding the real heart, the real core, of Catholic social teaching."

Schneck says Catholicism sees everyone as part of a mystical body, serving one another. True, the New Testament does not specifically speak to the government's role. "But charities and individuals and churches can't do it all," Schneck says. "When charities are already stretched to their limit, Catholic social teaching expects the state to step up and to fill that gap."

I'm no expert on Catholic doctrine, but it seems to me that the key difference is whether you want individuals and relatively small associations of individuals to experience the inward motivations and choices to be charitable in giving and ministering to others, or whether you want a rational, overarching system that determines what everyone must give and what everyone ought to receive. In the second view, you care more about meeting all the needs, and you don't depend on the various individuals deciding to be good. In the first view, the needs create opportunities and tests for everyone to notice and to care enough to do something, to give. If you set up a governmental structure to deal with those needs, then everyone can move on and assume needs are being met, the experts will tweak the structure and get the taxing and spending something reasonably close to right.

So, now can you figure out how Jesus wants you to vote?

"Tony Scalia's Retirement Has Started Early."

Says Charles P. Pierce on the Esquire website.

Calling a man of Italian ancestry "Tony" when that isn't his nickname? Isn't that on the level of calling a Latino "Jose" or a black man "Leroy" (or some such stereotypical name)?

Of course, quite aside from that, the blog post is bilge:

I think Justice Antonin Scalia isn't even really trying any more. It's been clear for some time now that he's short-timing his job on the Supreme Court. The job bores him....  he's now bringing Not Giving A Fuck to an almost operatic level.

Opera... see? That's like talking about a black person and throwing in watermelon.

His "originalism" was always a shuck, even if it was consistent, which it rarely was, and even if it was principled, which it never was.... But at least, for a while, he actually tried to act like a judge in a democratic republic, and not the lost Medici pope. 

Pope? More anti-Italian (and anti-Catholic) stereotyping crap, which Pierce probably thinks is just fine, indeed hilarious, because it's against a conservative.

It is plain now that Scalia simply doesn't like the Affordable Care Act on its face.... He doesn't think that the people who would benefit from the law deserve to have a law that benefits them. On Tuesday, he pursued the absurd "broccoli" analogy... And today, apparently, he ran through every twist and turn in the act's baroque political history in an attempt to discredit the law politically, rather than as a challenge to its constitutionality. (What in hell does the "Cornhusker Kickback" — yet another term of art that the Justice borrowed from the AM radio dial — have to do with the severability argument? Is Scalia seriously making the case that a banal political compromise within the negotiations from which bill eventually is produced can affect its ultimate constitutionality? Good luck ever getting anything passed if that's the standard.)

Pierce just doesn't understand what the Cornhusker Kickback has to do with the severability argument. He smears Scalia, but he doesn't do the basic work of fathoming the argument. He denounces without earning the right to denounce, and instead of saying anything of any value about law he flips out over into the ethnic insults.

Here's the portion of the severability argument — transcript PDF — where Scalia talks about the Cornhusker Kickback:

JUSTICE SCALIA: All right. The consequence of your proposition, would Congress have enacted it without this provision....

That is, Paul Clement's argument — attacking the statute — is that the test of what is severable — what will fall along with the unconstitutional provision — is whatever Congress would pass if it were asked to vote on the bill with the unconstitutional provision extracted.

That would mean that if we struck down nothing in this legislation but the -- what's it called, the Cornhusker kickback, okay, we find that to violate the constitutional proscription of venality, okay? (Laughter.)

He's stating a hypothetical: What if the only thing removed were that one provision, the Cornhusker kickback? For the purposes of the hypothetical, he made up a fictional constitutional ground that it is held to violate — a constitutional rule against a purely venal law. ("Venality is a vice associated with being bribeable or of selling one's services or power, especially when one should act justly instead.")  We know that the Cornhusker kickback — AKA the Nebraska Compromise — was a deal made by Harry Reid to get the vote of Senator Ben Nelson, the last hold-out among the Democrats. The state of Nebraska got 100% funding for Medicaid, unlike all the other states, so that extra funding to Nebraska approaches vote-buying.

Maybe there should be a constitutional rule like the one Scalia hypothesizes. That is a quick attack on the political process that produced the bill, but it's actually not irrelevant to the question of severability, because there's a question about deferring to democratic decisionmaking, and that deference is less justified when the process itself is dysfunctional democracy. But the function of the Cornhusker kickback in the hypothetical is mainly, simply, that one provision of a big statute has been stricken down.

JUSTICE SCALIA: When we strike that down, it's clear that Congress would not have passed it without that. It was the means of getting the last necessary vote in the Senate. And you are telling us that the whole statute would fall because the Cornhusker kickback is bad. That can't be right.

So Justice Scalia has landed a brutal attack on Clement's theory of severability at that point. The hypothetical was knife-sharp and brilliant. But Pierce can't even understand it — or lies about his incapacity. 

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Scalia, I think it can be, which is the basic proposition, that it's congressional intent that governs. Now everybody on this Court has a slightly different way of divining legislative intent. And I would suggest the one common ground among every member of this Court, as I understand it, is you start with the text. Everybody can agree with that.

So Clement readjusts and begins to articulate a text-based approach to severability, which he knows is more what Scalia wants, but he craftily preserves the other theory, which he knows some of the other Justices might prefer.

"Can you be a Catholic and practice Buddhism at the same time?"

So-called "religious pluralism":

[Barbara] Johnson’s depiction of her faith mirrors that even of some clergy, including famed Trappist monk Thomas Merton who embraced and deeply studied Buddhism before his death in the 1960s. More recently, two Episcopal priests — including a bishop — described themselves as followers of Christianity and other faiths, one of Zen Buddhism and one of Islam....

“This is so surreal because I was getting closer and closer to my faith,” she said of those who assail her for seeking Communion with her blended faith identities. “I had really integrated my Catholic identity into my larger identity as someone who is very influenced by Buddhist teachings.”...

“Wasn’t the doubting Thomas good because he was in dialogue with his faith? It’s not between me and other Catholics, it’s between me and God.”