"This beatification is different because this pope is different."

"He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history... The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history... In a certain sense, for many Catholics he’s already a saint, even without beatification and, let’s be honest, even without a miracle."

ADDED: Longer video here.

Why the Pope can't be an organ donor.

For one thing: "his body belongs to the entire Church and must be buried intact." But:

Furthermore, if papal organs were donated, they would become relics in other bodies if he were eventually made a saint.

I don't know enough Catholic theology to understand what's wrong with a saint's relic functioning in someone else's body. Saints are supposed to help us out only in ways that that are unachievable by ordinary dead people?

"Maybe I’m old-school, but 'President fires CEO' looks as wrong as 'Pope fires Missile.'"

Lileks.

The headline.

If the "cross in the dirt" story were true, wouldn't a good Christian have "witnessed" to it early on?

In this Bloggingheads clip, Bob Wright and I refer to different aspects of Christianity (and talk about this Andrew Sullivan post). (At the end, I ask who's more religious, McCain or Obama, and propose a bet that might shock you.)



Watching this now and comparing Bob's take on Christianity to mine, I have a theory about why McCain shifted from not talking about the cross to talking about it.

McCain was initially an Episcopalian, and only fairly recently identified himself as a Baptist. My Christian upbringing was Episcopalian, and Bob Wright was raised as a Southern Baptist. Bob thought of Christianity as something to witness at every opportunity, and I thought Jesus's admonition to keep one's religion private (which comes in Matthew 6, just before he gives the words for the Lord's Prayer):

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Could it be that McCain, as an Episcopalian, thought more like I did, and then later, after becoming a Baptist, saw the matter more the way Bob did?

ADDED: I tweak the eminently tweakable Episcopalians:

Macho Pope.

This just happened:

A man tried to jump into Pope Benedict XVI's uncovered popemobile as the pontiff began his general audience Wednesday in St. Peter's Square and was wrestled to the ground by security officers.

The pope was not hurt and didn't even appear to notice that the man had jumped over the protective barricade in the square and toward the white popemobile as it drove by with the pope waving to the audience.

At least eight security officers who were trailing the popemobile grabbed the man and wrestled him to the ground. The pope didn't even look back.

The assailant "was wearing a pink T-shirt and dark shorts, a beige baseball cap and sunglasses." That says a lot.

Cross-examination reveals the defendant was that anonymous blogger who's been writing about the trial.

Boston Globe reports:

As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question.

Was Lindeman Flea?

Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day.

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed.

Oh, there's always one more way that blogging can get you in trouble. Here's a tip. Don't blog anonymously unless you're ready to accept all the consequences that would come if everyone suddenly knew it was you. Congratulations to the lawyer who figured out that she should ask that question on cross. You know, I love to support bloggers, but this doctor totally deserved what he got.

In April, before the trial began, he wrote about meeting with an expert on juries who advised him how to act when he was cross- examined. Flea was instructed to angle his chair slightly toward the jury, keep his hands folded in his lap, and face the jury when answering questions, slowly. "Answers should be kept to no more than three sentences," he wrote.

The consultant told him juries in medical malpractice cases base verdicts almost entirely on their view of a doctor's character.

So when they hear you're a blogger...

"We've said it before, and we'll say it again: If the basis of this case is that Flea is an arrogant, uncaring jerk who maliciously neglected a patient, resulting in his death, the plaintiff will not win, period," he wrote. "As much of a cocky bastard that Flea may appear in the blogosphere, the readers who have a personal acquaintance with the real 3-D doctor understand how such an approach cannot succeed."

And all that cocky bastard Flea writing comes into the trial as evidence. Now, you might say, but can't a blogger adopt a persona and use a pseudonym to signify the disconnect between the writer taking a pose for literary effect and the real-world person?

I have a colleague who explains his use of a pseudonym this way:

I make no secret that I'm a law professor. It's right there in my profile. This means I have students, and a professor image to live up to with my students. Maybe maintaining my image as a law professor isn't as onerous as the image-burden borne by, say, a Supreme Court justice, or the pope. But it's not nothing. In front of my students, I have to be reasonably fair, dignified and mature. This doesn't mean being a phony; it's more a question of emphasizing certain aspects of one's personality and putting others in a closet for the day.

If you read my blog, you know that I use somewhat crude language from time to time. I say "f***" in several posts. Just the other day, in a single post, I used the terms "big butt" and "ass." Indeed, "big butt" was in the title of the post. I have (in my opinion) a somewhat wide-ranging sense of humor that isn't above occasional dips into puerility...

I don't tell my students that I'm always "the dignified professor" or that I never use crude language. That would be pompous and false, not to mention irrelevant. But I don't use crude language around students.... Maintaining an image means drawing a line between your professional persona and your personal life.

Most law-prof bloggers seem content to put their blogs largely or mostly on the professional side of that line. While they don't always blog about law, they seem to refrain from saying stuff that would be inappropriate in a conversation with a student in their offices. Folks like Professor Bainbridge, or the Volokh Conspiracy, or Althouse, or Conglomerate maintain an informal, yet not-unprofessional tone. To varying degrees they trade on their academic affiliations, and would have relatively little ground for complaint if, for example, their law schools posted something about their blogs on the law school web sites. And you don't catch them saying "big butt." Indeed, a Google search "'big butt' professor bainbridge" yields only a few hits, none of them from his blog.

Hmmm... I'm not so sure I belong in that Bainbridge, Volokh, Conglomerate set. I think I cross the professional line all the time. I'm always getting the "you, a law professor" chiding. I write things all the time that I wouldn't say to a student. But still, I understand Oscar's idea of using the persona to indicate: Now, I'm speaking in this other mode.

So, fine, maybe Dr. Flea was doing something like that. But that doesn't make the evidence inadmissible. It just means he'll be able to explain that in his testimony if the material comes in. It's not hearsay, because these are statements of an opposing party. If it's relevant to an issue in the case, and the judge doesn't think it's too unfair, it can come in. You should have thought of that before you laid your arrogance out on the web. I'm sure it's a great relief to a professional who has to hide a lot of his feelings to let out all his cocky bastardliness on the web, but others have their interests too -- the plaintiffs lost their 12-year-old child -- and a pseudonym is not immunity.

Hey, I'm on BloggingHeads.tv!

Watch me with Newsday's Jim Pinkerton, talking on the split-screen. Topics (and times):

Jim McGreevey and the Church of Oprah (06:10)

Bill Clinton and the vast right-wing conspiracy (13:02)

Bill is to Hillary as Chavez is to Ahmadinejad? (05:11)

Leaking just enough intelligence about the effect of the war (12:15)

Did the Pope bumble into the clash of civilizations? (04:49)

Did Bush? (11:30)

Ann brings out the dead bodies (09:46)

ADDED: If you want just the audio, go here.

Christopher Hitchens weighs in on the Pope.

He's not a fan.

The Pope uses the I'm sorry if you were offended form of apology.

The NYT reports:

A top Vatican official said Saturday that Pope Benedict XVI “deeply regretted” that a speech he made this week “sounded offensive to the sensibility of Muslim believers.”

UPDATE: More:

The spiritual leader of Lebanon's Sunnis, the Grand Mufti Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani, said the pope's remarks emanated either from "Ignorance and lack of knowledge or were deliberately intended to distort Islam."

"Reason is the substance of Islam and its teachings ... Islam prohibited violence in human life. Anyone who wants the truth (about Islam) must take it from Islam's holy book, the Koran, rather than from a dialogue or excerpts," he said.

Sounds great. Good thing Benedict shook that message loose, because it hadn't been getting around enough. Really, Kabbani and others like him: Get your message out. Overcome the "ignorance and lack of knowlege"... wherever it may be.

"It's humanly intolerable, ugly, dramatic, with its images of destruction."

"Whatever you think, for me it’s not art, it’s a provocation." So says Mayor Pierre Dumont about "The Abode of Chaos," a $5 million house project that the neighbors don't like too much.

Together with artists from several countries, [Thierry] Ehrmann, who occupies the house with his two Great Danes, Saatchi and Reuters, has painted the two-story house and the wall around it black and arrayed them with giant black-and-white portraits of noted personalities, including eight popes, as well as President Bush and Osama bin Laden.

The garden is strewn with sculptures, mainly by Mr. Ehrmann, including a crashed helicopter, a wrecked oil truck marked “Halliburton” and a model of the jagged steel remains of the World Trade Center. A reproduction of an oil platform perches on the roof, which is draped with camouflage netting.

Mr. Ehrmann, who is married and has two children, began the project in 1999 as a kind of monument to his eclectic religious beliefs, which range from Roman Catholicism to alchemy. Hence the popes, but also numerous salamanders, an animal sacred to the alchemists, cut in steel and affixed to the walls of the building.

This monstrosity is in France, in St.-Romain-au-Mont-D'Or (which means Saint Lettuce on the Mountain of Gold). We here in Wisconsin understand the mentality of the house artist. We've been to The House on the Rock.

Anyway, yesterday we were talking about the neighbors who wanted to stop the woman who got the city to agree to cut down three nut trees on her property that were messing up her swimming pool and threatening the life of her grandson. So today, let's talk about a new set of neighbors who are offended by the preferences of a property owner. Let's see if you readers maintain a principled consistency, you who chided me yesterday for taking the neighbors' side and left me exposed as a tree hugger.

... Mr. Dumont has taken Mr. Ehrmann to court, arguing that he has violated laws concerning building within the town limits. In June, the court ruled against Mr. Ehrmann, fining him and ordering him to restore the house to its original state. A final verdict by an appeals court is not expected until September.

When Marc Allardon, a neighbor, peers across from his yard at Mr. Ehrmann’s house, he sees the crashed helicopter and the oil platform, but they do not disturb him. He considers Mayor Dumont and Mr. Ehrmann equally stubborn. “I try to mediate between the mayor and Thierry,” Mr. Allardon said. “Both are born hardheads.”

Indeed, Mr. Allardon has begun parodying Mr. Ehrmann, decorating his own home and declaring it a monument to a mock religion. Atop a stone column in his front yard stands a statue of the Virgin Mary arrayed in a rainbow-colored garment. A serpent made of pipe wraps its curls around her; in its mouth a sign says, “Let’s Be Tempted.”

On the roof of Mr. Allardon’s house are signs with uplifting words like “Tolerance,” “Utopia,” “Joy,” “Hope.” Artificial flowers sprout from the chimney, which is wrapped in green paper.

Mr. Allardon said he would do more, but his wife, a historian, brakes him. “She tells me to slow down,” he said. And what does he think of “The Abode of Chaos”? “At the start it was shocking,” he said. “Now I like it.”...

[Ehrmann] speaks dismissively of his opponents. “I told them, ‘Don’t commit the irreparable,’ ” he said. “ ‘In your resistance,’ I tell them, ‘you are contributing to this work. This work is encapsulating you, absorbing you.’ ” His friend Mr. Allardon is confident. “It’s like the Eiffel Tower,” he said. “At first, people were against it. Here it will be like that. Some day the Japanese tour buses will come.”

Okay, discuss the legal question. It's in France, so you can completely make stuff up.

Me, I'd just like to see the movie of this. My favorite character is Allardon. Ehrmann's ridiculous provocation is one thing, but the contrasting responses of Dumont and Allardon are what really makes it. Let's set this movie in America, so we can cast American actors. Ideas?

How is the "actual Satanist community" reacting to 6/6/06?

The BBC investigates:

Rev. John D Allee is the founder of the First Church of Satan in Salem, America, which split from the original Church of Satan 12 years ago.

"I plan to take Lillee, my High Priestess, to the opening of The Omen movie," says the self-styled Dark Pope. "Then it's out for dinner."

The Temple of Set takes a more solemn view. This is another breakaway from the Church of Satan, claiming a history of several thousand years, and "formally incorporated in 1975 CE".

Louise Renard is a priestess and assistant to the executive director in London. "There is nothing significant about that day or that number" she says. "Unless the new Omen movie turns out to be better than expected."

Meanwhile, Vexen Crabtree, the Minister of the London Church of Satan, plans to go to one of the alternative clubs that are celebrating 06/06/06. "My official take on it is that 666 is really only a Christian number," he explains. "But any excuse for a party is a good one."

Crabtree dissociates the Church of Satan from the Temple of Set and the First Church of Satan, saying it is the only Satanist group that is "sane and worthwhile".

He says any Satanists who actually worship the Devil, rather than revering "Satan" as an abstract value, are "immature, unstable and nothing to do with us".

I've got to say that the thing that upsets me the most about that passage is the placement of punctuation in relation to quotation marks! The Satanists themselves seem amusingly ordinary. Or is that a trick? But really, what's with the Satanic British punctuation? I know the argument for why it makes more sense than what we do, that our approach was to make things easier for printers, but it looks so wrong.

But he loves lemonade and kitty-cats.

Pope P.R.

"Those who describe him as cold, detached, inaccessible and too intellectual have not met him."

These are the days of miracles and wonders.

I guess everyone's going to link to Peggy Noonan's essay about the new pope, and I wasn't going to pope-blog, but this line jumped out at me:

It is an age of miracles and wonders, of sightings of Mary and warnings, of prophecy, graces and gifts.

Didn't you think of two things?

1. Paul Simon's "Graceland." Was that on purpose? Google says yes. Search for "Paul Simon" and "miracles and wonders" and the first thing that comes up is this old article by none other than Noonan.

2. "Sighting of Mary"? Is Noonan excited about the salt stain on the Chicago underpass? Too bad we can't get a miracle in the form of improving the flow of traffic on the Kennedy Expressway.

UPDATE: Argonautical Ramblings is photoblogging the underpass stain and the assembling crowds. The link is to the blog itself. Each photo is a separate link, unfortunately, but here's the post that begins the series. Thanks to the commenter here who pointed out this site.

American politics and the pope.

I wasn't going to pope-blog, but this NYT article makes the new pope story all about American politics:

Pope Benedict XVI ascends to power at a tumultuous time for his church in American politics: Catholic voters, long overwhelmingly Democratic, have become a critical swing vote. Republicans have become increasingly successful at winning the support of more traditional Catholics by appealing to what President Bush calls the "culture of life" issues, including abortion, euthanasia and research on embryonic stem cells. Mr. Bush carried 56 percent of the white Catholic vote in 2004, up from 51 percent in 2000 - a formidable part of his conservative coalition.

This voting trend is longstanding and would have existed and continued even if John Paul had survived. But the point is that Ratzinger headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which backed American bishops who "have become more assertive in urging their congregations to vote in accord with Catholic teachings on those issues" and who have "chastis[ed] Catholic officials who disagree, in a few cases by threatening to deny them Communion." So there's a prediction that Catholic voter will keep feeling the need to vote based on "culture of life" values.

There is also an effect on candidates themselves. The article, written by Robin Toner, clearly seems to favor the John F. Kennedy approach to Catholicism and politics: "I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me." It worked for Kennedy (who had to battle anti-Catholic prejudice), but John Kerry had difficulty using the same move. He had difficulty for any number of reasons: he didn't need to overcome an initial aversion to a Catholic president, and he had to operate in a political field where personal moral questions have become central.

The gist of the article is that Benedict will energize American bishops to directly criticize Catholic candidates who don't adopt the complete set of orthodox Catholic beliefs, which will make it very hard on Democratic candidates. But there is no direct quote saying that. The closest of the many quotes is this one:

"I hate to pre-judge, but based on the record I would say Ratzinger is a very serious Catholic and he's going to say things like, 'Beware of falsehood in advertising,' " said Michael Novak, an expert on the Vatican at the American Enterprise Institute. "If you say you're a Catholic, be a Catholic."

A slow blog day.

It's been a long, hard day, beginning with the lack of bloggish inspiration with what was for me the excessively Pope-focused news. But there was a lot to do at the law school, including teaching one of the last Constitutional Law classes of the semester. Later, it seemed like a good idea to spend $50+ getting my toenails painted "Pompeii Purple," to have my chiropractor pop my vertabrae into a more appropriate position, and to pick up a shredded beef burrito at Chipotle. I arrive home and walk up the front path, under the arch formed by my two redbud trees, which are in bloom now. All I really want to do is to pour a glass of wine, unwrap my burrito, and turn on the television. A nice, quiet evening at home. Maybe I'll find something bloggable -- there's always the "American Idol" results show -- and I'll be back to replenish the blog.

A quick look at the news.

So, without pope-blogging, what is there? There's Tom DeLay zeroing in on Justice Kennedy, but that's just a rehash, though I suppose we can snort at this line:

"He said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous."

There's the Nanny News: maybe fat isn't so fatal, let's redraw the food pyramid.

There's the postponement of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote on John Bolton, over some mystifying story of him banging on a woman's door in a Russian hotel and because Senator Voinovich, who skipped last week's two-day hearing, suddenly didn't "feel comfortable."

Enough for me, for now!

Not pope-blogging.

The news seems to be all about the new Pope this morning, so I'm not finding the usual stimulation for blogging. I have nothing to say about the Pope!

Pope Benedict!

A 78-year-old Pope will replace John Paul, or should I say, to repeat what I just heard repeated over and over on TV during the post-white-smoke, pre-announcement period, will never be able to replace John Paul.

UPDATE: I was watching NBC, and I must say, they were pathetically unprepared to fill the time which they knew they were going to have to fill. They really did just keep saying one thing over and over: John Paul is a tough act to follow, the new Pope must know that he will not be able to take the place of John Paul, John Paul has made it very difficult for this next Pope to find a way to begin to fill his shoes, those are very big shoes to fill, and this new Pope is going to have quite a difficult time in this, his effort to fill those unusually large shoes that John Paul II has left us with here today, shoes indeed of the very great, very large-shoe-wearing, now deceased, Pope John Paul II.

"Another non-Italian pope would confirm Italy's decline."

Here's an interesting piece in the NYT about the need some people feel for an Italian pope.

A moot court day.

I agreed to serve as one of the judges in the 2005 Evans Moot Court Competition, so I drove downtown. Here's some graffiti I happened to see:



It seems like the graffiti version of this blog.

I stopped at L'Etoile Café for some coffee and a sandwich and to read the bench memo in preparation:



Here's the coffee and the memo:



Here's the sandwich:



That's "Fountain Prairie Farm Dried Cured Beef," I'll have you know. I know that will help you think about what kind of life I live here in Madison.

I needed to walk across the state Capitol Square to get to the Dane County Courthouse, and I stopped to take a picture of myself and the Capitol in a mirrored window:



The square looked pretty:



The flag was at half-staff -- not for Saul Bellow, for the Pope:



The judges congregated in a shabby jury room. I don't need these refreshments:



I looked around the jury room and thought about all the boring hours good citizens doing their duty have had to spend here. There was some reading material for them: big piles of depressingly old magazines.



There were also two books in the room: a collection of Erma Bombeck's humor columns and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."



There were a lot of very old jigsaw puzzles, including this one, half put together:



I speculate about whether the lawyers would like to know how prospective jurors put together their jigsaw puzzles and decide that the prosecution should want the kind of people who look for the edge pieces and get the frame completed first. Another "judge" asks what other way is there, and other ways are discussed: concentrating on color areas, finding a particular object in the picture, looking at the shapes of the pieces. But the shapes are nearly identical! My grandson looks for the shapes, someone says. Use a peremptory challenge on that one, I think.

The picture on the puzzle is a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post from 1961:



That issue had an article on what Oklahoma wants from TV. I wonder what it said. I wonder if Oklahoma ever got what it wanted. Perhaps they wanted "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which debuted in 1961.

We went over to courtroom 2F, which was awfully shabby. [ADDED: A new Dane County Courthouse is under construction.]



Among the framed portraits on the wall were two garishly blown-up photographs of female judges:



I think about all the people who must have been depressed and scared and bored out of their skulls in this room. But soon enough, the arguments begin, and the room is ignored. The law students from various schools -- they aren't allowed to say which school -- launch into their arguments and we pepper them with questions and let them show their stuff. They're all great students who've prepared very hard and advanced in the competition.

They've had to learn a lot about the Establishment Clause and the Free Speech Clause of the Constitution, and we debate a lot about a school district's policy barring teachers from teaching "intelligent design" (or anything like it) when they teach evolution.

Tomorrow, the finalists will get to make their arguments in the beautiful room in the Capitol Building that houses the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Until then, I hope all the wonderful law students enjoy their visit to Madison. It's a lovely day, and it's always fun to be here on a Saturday night.