Entries for August 2009

Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Earlier this month, President Obama's faith-based office marked its six-month anniversary. Although the news media has paid it little mind, the administration has quietly transformed the office from the one that George W. Bush launched in 2001.

Boosters say the Obama office gives religious leaders a real voice in shaping policy while deemphasizing its role under Bush as a matchmaker between religious groups and the national piggybank.

Critics say the office has kept too low a profile and is too focused on faith outreach, which they say is more political than substantive.

Here's the crux of my U.S. News Weekly column sizing up the office at the six-month mark, just posted at usnews.com:

Six months after its rollout, Obama's office has dramatically shifted gears from the one that Bush started from scratch in 2001. Bush's office sought to "level the playing field" for faith-based and community groups seeking federal grants to deliver social services, like counseling drug addicts and mentoring at-risk youth. Obama, by contrast, has tasked his office with four broad policy goals: bringing faith groups into the recovery and fighting poverty, reducing demand for abortion, promoting responsible fatherhood, and facilitating global interfaith dialogue. "We're moving from a sole focus on leveling the playing field," says Joshua DuBois, the office's executive director, "to forming partnerships with faith-based and community groups to help solve specific policy challenges."

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Since launching three weeks ago, the White House Reality Check Web site on healthcare reform has been updated several times to debunk a growing number of alleged myths about the Democrats' plan.

But the site is still silent on conservatives' charge that the plan will use taxpayer money to cover abortions. It's a stunning omission, given how much the government-funded abortion allegation has dominated this month's congressional town hall meetings on healthcare reform—and given that President Obama himself has called the charge a myth. "You've heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion," he said recently. "Not true."

Why does the White House site ignore such a big elephant in the room? I can think of two possible reasons.

The first is obvious: The abortion-in-healthcare-reform debate is one the administration would rather avoid, lest it consume the entire debate over reform. The other is that the White House sees the abortion-in-healthcare question very much as an open one and is still weighing options on exactly how government-controlled healthcare ought to treat abortion.

Have another theory?

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Incredible how much the days since Ted Kennedy's death have been dominated by revelations about his apparently deeply felt Roman Catholicism—from a priest's account of the senator's final hours to the decision to hold his funeral at an out-of-the-way church where Kennedy sought healing to stories of how his faith begat his political passions.

At Kennedy's burial on Saturday came another revelation, as Washington, D.C., Archbishop Emeritus Theodore McCarrick read from a poignant letter that President Obama delivered from Kennedy to Pope Benedict XVI last month, along with portions of the Vatican's reply.

Excerpts of Kennedy's letter to the pope:

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Ted Kennedy's death is an end to several different eras, but Politics Daily's David Gibson warns against seeing it as the end of an era for the socially minded ethnic Catholic tradition in Democratic politics:

It is tempting to view Ted Kennedy's passing as the end of an era, both politically and culturally, but also religiously—the end of a reform-minded, socially oriented Catholicism that entered the mainstream in the 1960s and brought certain liberal values to the public square while remaining anchored, at times tenuously, to the religious (and ethnic) tradition that nurtured those values...

[But] surveys of young adult Catholics over recent years have shown that, in many respects, the younger generation resembles Kennedy's approach to faith and politics, with social justice and equality for women and gays as public markers of their religion, and devotion to the sacraments the lodestar of their private devotion.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Of the avalanche of comments coming in on Sen. Ted Kennedy's Catholicism, the huge majority fall into the skeptical/critical column. They're a counterpoint to the news media's mostly favorable Kennedy remembrances. Here's a sampling:

Mike of Minnesota:

The only way Ted Kennedy doesn't go to hell is if he had a last minute conversion. He never defended the catholic faith publicly. And he often violently opposed the teachings of the church in the legislation he sponsored and endorsed. He took the easy way out to ensure he maintained his position of power and influence. May God have mercy on his soul.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

I'm launching a new quote-of-the-week feature on the blog today. Let me know when you come upon quotes worth featuring in this slot.

"The truth is, he expressed to his family that he did want to go. He did want to go to heaven. He was ready to go. There was a certain amount of peace, actually—in the family get-together last night. I couldn't help but think that the world doesn't know that part of Kennedy at all."

— The Rev. Patrick Tarrant on his final hours with Sen. Ted Kennedy. View an interview with Tarrant here.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

The Boston church that will host Sen. Edward Kennedy's funeral mass on Saturday doesn't have air conditioning. It's less grand—and a lot less well known—than Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It lacks parking.

So why is the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help the staging ground for a historic event this weekend? Because Kennedy, like thousands of others, came to the church seeking help for medical ills. Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson explains:

For years, thousands of Bostonians have sought healing by praying before a golden image of the Virgin Mary in a shrine on Mission Hill. They kneel before the painting, leave flowers by the rail, deposit notes in a glass bowl, turn on electronic candles, even drop off crutches or braces as a sign of a miraculous cure.

Many of the petitioners are poor and powerless.

But over the years, Senator Edward M. Kennedy also came to the shrine seeking healing, and now his family has chosen the landmark basilica in which the shrine is located as the site for the senator's funeral Saturday.

Kennedy visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help daily in 2002, while his daughter was being treated for lung cancer at the nearby Brigham and Women's Hospital, praying before the icon and meeting with a priest thought to have a healing touch. And the senator again visited the basilica last year, after he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

"The senator wanted to be buried from the basilica because of a deep connection developed here during his daily visits while his daughter, Kara, was going through cancer treatment,'' said Scott Ferson, a former Kennedy staffer who is helping the family with funeral preparations. "Because of her recovery, it remained an especially sacred place for him.''

The choice of the basilica, a puddingstone Romanesque Revival structure that punctuates the cityscape with its high octagonal cupola and twin spires, came as a surprise to many. . . .