Is Commonweal a political publication of the left or a journal of lay Catholic theological reflection? Political ideology and party loyality are seductive corrupters of honest theology. Commonweal can see this on the 'right,' but is it blind to its own risk of ideological capture?

Take the current front page of their website. The top three listed articles all negatively reference President Bush (see, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/). In itself, there is nothing objectionable about that fact. There is, it seems to me, a fair amount for Catholics to criticize in this (and probably any other) administration. The difficulty is the use of theology in service of politics.

One of the above referenced articles is a June 17, 2005, editorial (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php?id_article=1293) where the editors sneer at a Bush photo-op that is a part of the President's effort to increase political support for the protection of embryonic humans - a position they seem to agree with at least in part. However, the editors feel the need to make an argument for the ''ambiguous moral status of the early embryo'' based primarily on ''the biological fact that 50 percent of all embryos perish as a matter of course. If nature is so profligate with nascent human life, why must science treat as inviolable embryos that would otherwise be discarded?''

Nature is indeed so profligate that all human life ends in death at some point, so 100% of the biological entities that begin as embryos die. So what? Child mortality has been quite high historically. Even today in Sierra Leone 28% of all children born die before they turn five years old. Does this fact make the children of Sierra Leone eligible subjects for deadly experimentation? Does it give them an ''ambiguous moral status''? Is this an example of serious moral reflection by lay Catholics?

Then there is an article on Cardinal George that totally misses the context and meaning of his remarks (see, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php?id_article=1296). The author conflates the Cardinal's comments with something Bush said after the Cardinal's presentation. They may have used the same words (the President and the Cardinal), but from the context there were two totally different things being said. It is the kind of mistake (as anyone who has taught can attest) that careless undergraduates make on a regular basis, ''Look here, the same phrase used by author A is used here by author B. They must be saying the same thing.'' A good editor should have caught that. As I understand it, the Cardinal was not contacted before the article went to press, which would seem to be basic fact-checking.

Why do I think the author of the above story is using a partisan political lenses rather than a theological one? Because he said so, in the article's first paragraph: ''But when the rhetoric of a cardinal archbishop is indistinguishable from that of a president, I worry a bit. When the rhetoric is that of the rightward fringe of the Republican Party circa 1952, I worry a lot.''

Both the editorial and the article seem shaped and driven by political (anti-Bush) concerns. The important moral and theological issues raised are ill served in this context where theological reflection is captured by an overriding political agenda.

The following may be of particular interest at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. It is a quotation (The Rise of Benedict XVI, pp. 169-72--slightly abridged) from John Allen's just published book on the election of Benedict XVI. Allen is discussing the significance of the new pope's choice of name and quotes at length from a speech then Cardinal Ratzinger gave a mere 24 hours before the death of John Paul II. Ratzinger was receiving the St. Benedict Prize from the Benedictine monestary at Subiaco. Among other things he said the following (as quoted by Allen):

We need people like Benedict of Norcia, who, in a time of dissipation and decadence, sank himself into the most profound solitude, succeeding, after all the purifications that he was forced to undergo, in making the light rise again, returning to found Montecassino, the city on the hill where, amid all the ruins, he put together the energies from which a new world was formed. Thus, Benedict, like Abraham, became the father of many peoples.

Allen goes on to comment:

From this talk, one draws a keen sense of how Benedict XVI understands the historical legacy of his namesake. In an era of turbulence, of "dissipation and decadence," Benedict founded an utterly new kind of community, one based on love and truth, and in so doing kept the true humanism alive in a dark time. By way of analogy, the new pope has long believed that a similar process of intellectual and moral decay is at work in the contemporary West, and that Christianity's mission is once again to preserve an alternative vision of the meaning and purpose of human existence.

The comparison with the late fifth and early sixth centuries is not accidental. Though Joseph Ratzinger is too sophisticated a thinker to draw simplistic parallels between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the situation in the West in the early twenty-first century, he is nevertheles struck by the commonalities. In a November 28, 2000, lecture on the contemporary situation in Europe delivered in Berlin, he said: "The comparison with the Roman Empire at twilight imposes itself. [Rome] still functioned as a kind of great historical framework, but in practice it lived off forces that were destined to dissolve it, because in itself it no longer possessed vital energy."

Benedict XVI, as a man eminently aware of the intellectual conversation in the West, certainly knows the classic 1981 work, After Virtue, byAlasdair MacIntyre, one of the most celebrated works of contemporary philosophy on the cultural right. In it, MacIntyre unpacks this implied parallel between the final decay of the Roman Empire and the contemporary Western situation, and specifically located St. Benedict in this comparison. One of the new pope's aides and admirers suggested that I consult this passage from MacIntyre to contextualize the Pope's choice of name.

At this point, Allen quotes the justly famous last paragraph of After Virtue and concludes: "A quarter-century later, MacIntyre has his Benedict."

Here's an insightful article about the film industry's recent slump by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott:

The Spring of Our Discontent

The major studios seriously underestimate their audience in assuming that all we want is amusement. You would think that the recent popularity of a number of indie films and documentaries (e.g., Napoleon Dynamite and Super Size Me) that have been publicized by little more than word of mouth would be a clue as to what audiences really want.

You have to wonder also about the economic injustice of the making and release of some of the films Scott refers to as "placeholders." How many millions of dollars are spent every year on garbage like Son of the Mask and FearDotCom and Swimfan? There are plenty of films whose value is up for debate, but it seems to me that at least 15 movies are released every year that don't even pretend to offer anything of value (good or bad) to their audiences.

The fact that there are starving people in the world should not preclude the making and enjoyment of the arts, but I would hope that it would make studio executives think twice before spending so much money on garbage films.

--Katie

LA Times has an interesting article from yesterday on partial birth abortion.

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/kids/la-na-abortion31may31
,1,5953822,print.story?coll=la-health-kids&ctrack=2&cset=true (need to register in order to read it)

Although the story is clearly written in support of Kansas abortionist Dr. Tiller, the facts reveal the consistent truth that effects of abortion are far reaching and that it is hardly the panacea its supporters suggest. No matter how they try to spin it, the brutal truth still comes out.