WHOLE WORD CATALOG

Jerry Harkins

Preface

P

ity the poor writer scratching away in the age of MTV.  It is perfectly possible for the average American college graduate to watch one music video after another for hours on end without ever understanding a single word and still be intellectually burned out at the end of the evening.  Now that the world has mastered tweeting and texting, the next step will be to take our information intravenously.

But, you protest, why feel sorry for the writer?  Even if no one actually reads anything more complicated than a stop sign anymore, lots of stuff still has to get written down.  Which means there’ll always be work for the writer which is more than you can say for any other profession except garbage collecting.

No, Virginia, whoever told you that was wrong.  Already there are fewer writers around than buggy whip makers.  What there is is a word processor.  It has no moving parts.  It never suffers from writer’s block or jock itch.  It has never inhaled.  Anything.  It was programmed by a Japanese technician employed by a socially ambitious shipbuilding company.  Marshall McLuhan spelled it out for you forty-five years ago but it was already too late.  Tipper Gore tried to warn you but who pays attention to a blond who was once married to a jerk like Al?  Now, even though it’s too late by several decades, you should try to get it straight.  One more time, repeat after me:

The medium is the message.

It wasn’t always so.  But it is now and there’s nothing to be done about it.  Let me give you a pathetic example.  In 1958, there was a famous advertising slogan that went like this:

At sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in the

new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.

Ten years later, the most famous advertising slogan was:

Uh-huh!

Any questions?  Don’t be embarrassed;  feel free to ask stupid questions.  Like, who wrote that second line?  You may know that the first one was written by a Scotch-Irish Oxford classics scholar named David Ogilvy.  But who wrote “Uh-huh!” for Pepsi-Cola?  Please note:  do not ask why it was written.  That’s a hard question and hard questions are against the rules.  Maybe you’d like to know what it means but that too is a hard question.  So, first things first.

Once upon a time there was a meeting of High Priced Creative Types (HPCT’s).  They were sitting around a big table made out of a single slab of wood from the last living specimen of an exotic rainforest species.  It is not crucial to the story, but you may be interested in knowing they were all naked as they brainstormed the perfect line.  One suggested:

At sixty miles an hour, the loudest sound is the fizzing of the bubbles.

The boss said:

Uh-huh!

Another HPCT came up with:

At sixty miles an hour, things go great with Pepsi.

The boss said:

Uh-huh!

Are you beginning to see why she was the boss?  Can you fill in the rest of the story yourself?  I don’t want to spend too much time on this because I really want to tell you about the way things were before Uh-huh and it won’t be on the test anyway.  No matter, you can probably answer the second question yourself now.  Right!  Uh-huh! doesn’t actually mean anything.  At least not in the old fashioned meaning of meaning.  Neither do most political speeches, newspaper editorials, religious sermons or, of course, MTV videos.

It’s okay that they don’t because no one reads or listens anymore.  Remember, the medium is the message.  MTV, by the very fact of its existence (ex opere operato as my Jesuit teachers used to say in a slightly different context), tells us more about our culture than all the words in all the songs it will ever air.  It’s a gestalt.  Its semiology is not deducible from its component parts.  Like a snapshot whose meaning to the viewer is completely independent of its physics and chemistry, MTV, uh-huh and stop signs are in the business of eliciting instant emotional responses.  They are not intellectual and they cannot be parsed.

Before you were born, when reading and writing were important to the process of preserving cultural values, writers worked diligently to express themselves clearly and memorably.  I often think of Homer asking himself how best to describe Odysseus and coming up with the marvelous epithet:

polutropon

Pronounced pol-you-tro-pon and usually translated as “wily,” the literal meaning of this lovely word is having many turnings.   It refers to the hero’s wanderings on his way home from the late unpleasantness at Troy as well as to his habit of mind which is both clever and devious.  It is the absolutely perfect word, capturing Odysseus’ heroic strength and tragic flaw as well as Homer’s sophisticated understanding of situational ethics, all in a single breath.  Try explaining that to your favorite teenager.  As Lee Hayes said, “Things ain’t what they used to be and, what’s more, they never were.”  But there was a time, before words were processed, when writing was an art and a discipline, when there were tools writers used to work magic with ideas.  This is a meditation on those tools and that magic.

THE TOOL BOX

Alliteration.  A sequence of words beginning with the same initial consonant sound.  Beloved equally by poets and fourth rate politicians, alliteration is hard to resist and is not resisted as often as it should be.  We would, for example, be no poorer had we never heard of “nattering nabobs of negativism” which was created for one fourth rate politician, Spiro Agnew, by a third rate scribbler, William Safire, who remained proud of his achievement for the rest of his life.

Surely the most graceful examples of alliteration in English are contained in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ masterpiece The Windhover, the first two lines of which are:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon

Anaphora.  The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, verses or paragraphs.  On June 4, 1940, following the evacuation of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill spoke to the British people about a possible Nazi invasion of perfidious Albion.  Among the many stirring things he said that day was:

…we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;  we shall never surrender.

Repetition can be thought of as the infrastructure of the auditory arts of poetry and music.  In the third of his Norton Lectures at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein pursued this idea by arguing that Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is an extended exploration of the F to A Major Third which the composer repeats repeatedly.

Aphorism.  A pithy statement of behavioral guidance.  Most of the ones you learned as a child have, by now, failed you.  You have discovered, for instance, that a mere ounce of prevention will get you exactly nowhere and may indeed require megatons of cure.  You have first hand experience that words can hurt you far more than sticks and stones.  Fortunately, some aphorisms do express eternal verities.  Oscar Wilde hit upon several of these including, “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”  He also observed, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”  Florynce Kennedy was another master of the form.  It was she who wrote, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

My father, an effusive admirer of the Algonquin Round Table, was full of aphorisms.  He claimed, for example, that one must never discuss cosmology with people who think the moon is made of green cheese even if it turns out they’re right.  I inherited a small degree of the same skill:

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man

sees only the shadows on Plato’s wall.

Apostrophe.  A digression in which a different audience is addressed.  In drama, an aside is a form of apostrophe in which an actor steps out of character and speaks directly to the audience, the other actors feigning not to hear what is said.  A variation of this has the actor addressing someone or something not actually present.  This produces an eerie effect of eavesdropping on the innermost thoughts of the character.  Early in his funeral oration over the body of Caesar, Mark Antony turns from the assembled crowd of Romans and the audience to address Judgment itself:

O judgment!  Thou art fled to brutish beasts

And men have lost their reason.

Addressed to the Romans or the audience, the play of “brutish” on Brutus would have been premature.  By saying the same thing to Judgment, Antony signals that he has been temporarily overcome by emotion.  He plants a seed that will grow to the conclusion that Brutus is a bloody traitor.  A few lines later, he does the same thing again:

Judge O you gods how dearly Caesar loved him.

When he has finally roused the rabble and is alone on the stage, he murmurs:

Now let it work.  Mischief, thou art afoot,

Take thou what course thou wilt!

Assonance (1).  The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in an often imperfect pattern.  More subtle than alliteration, assonance is better at establishing a mood because of the musicality of vowel sounds.  Hence the sense of foreboding created by Edgar Allan Poe in the first verse of Ulalume:

In was night in lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Assonance (2).  Any rhyme (q.v.) that is less than perfect.  The reader/listener recognizes that the poet is stretching.  Sometimes done out of desperation, it is also a useful device for avoiding boredom.  Coleridge, for example, resorts to it regularly in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to break what would otherwise be the monotony of his heroic couplets.  For example:

Four times fifty living men,

(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)

With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,

They dropped down one by one.

The ear is expecting something that rhymes with groan.  One by one is close enough to be jarring.  Its very flatness, however, cleanses the ear and restores the reader’s alertness.

Ogden Nash raised assonance to an art form by forcing imperfectly rhyming words and phrases into mock perfection.  Consider these bits of doggerel:

A thrifty soprano of Hingham Designed her own dresses of gingham On the blue and white squares She wrote opera airs So when they wore out She could singham.

There was a young belle of old Natchez Whose garments were always in patchez. When comment arose On the state of her clothes She drawled, When Ah itchez, Ah Scratchez.

Nash was also responsible for a luscious line, part of one of his titles, that combines both forms of assonance.  Speaking of the flexibility that should come with age and taking off on the assonant phrase “hardening of the arteries” he wrote:

I recommend softening of the oughteries.

Catachresis.  A strained, paradoxical or sarcastic use of a word.  Each time Antony refers to Brutus as an honorable man the meaning gets a little more catachretical.  When my father responded to me by saying “Brilliant! Fucking brilliant!” he probably meant I should reconsider my position.

Chiasmus.  A reversal of the grammatical elements from one part of an expression to a parallel part as in the reversal of subject and indirect object in JFK’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Enjambment.  A run-on line from the French word meaning to bestride or step over.  The continuation of an idea from one line or stanza of poetry to the next.  It is common in English poetry where the idea is to give the reader or speaker a sense of momentum and, incidentally, to force one to pay attention to the punctuation.  Consider, for example, the scene where Lady Macbeth is trying to encourage her husband to assassinate Duncan.  She tells him that she herself would not hesitate even to kill a baby suckling at her breast:

I would as it was smiling in my face

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this. 

Macbeth:                                        If we should fail?

Lady Macbeth:                                                            We fail?

But screw your courage to the sticking place

And we’ll not fail.

The words “Have done to this.  If we should fail?  We fail?” constitute three lines of dialogue within a single line of iambic pentameter.  Shakespeare did not punctuate the line.  Later editors and actors usually insert the question marks following the convention of ending iambs with a stressed syllable.  I do not agree.  The question mark merely says the thought of failure is inconceivable.  With a period, it would have ended the discussion with a note of contempt for anyone who could even think of failure.  Much more like the Lady willing to dash out the brains of an nursing infant.

           

Hyperbole.  Obvious exaggeration without the intent to deceive.  Paul Bunyon as opposed to Mr. Clean.  The opening line of one version of the Paul Bunyon story is:

“Well now, one winter it was so cold that all the geese flew backward and all the fish moved south and even the snow turned blue. Late at night, it got so frigid that all spoken words froze solid afore they could be heard. People had to wait until sunup to find out what folks were talking about the night before.”

Ictus.  The quality of silence in the spoken language that can be quite meaningful.  Jack Benny shrugs his shoulders, rolls his eyes, pauses for a second or two and then says, “Well…”  Writers suggest it with unusual punctuation as in the three dots following Well in the previous sentence.

Malapropism.  It’s time to get this one straight.  It is the substitution of one word for another.  The words must sound alike and produce a humorous result.  Mrs. Malaprop’s originals are by now obscure.  But you may be tempted to address your annual contribution to the Infernal Revenue Service, an agency not noted for its sense of humor.  If you went to a parochial school, you may remember:

And lead us not into Penn Station

As an adolescent essayist, your correspondent once wrote about jubilant delinquents.  But his very best Malapropism occurred more recently when he informed his attorneys he had no interest in a phallic victory.  The greatest Malapropism of all time was uttered one day at the Round Table.  The habitués were playing a game in which the idea was to use a given word in a humorous sentence.  You tried to stump your opponent by providing the most unfunny word your could think of.  Dorothy Parker got the word horticulture and, without blinking one of her formidable eyelashes, she replied:

You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.

“Whore to culture” is a Malapropic pun.  “Whore” is a simple Malapropism on the word “horse: as is “think” to “drink.”  (In case you’re interested, the second greatest Malapropism was delivered by Franklin P. Adams playing the same game.  His word was “meritritious.”  With the advantage of having had several Martinis, he said, “Meri-tritious!  And Happy New Year, too!”

Metaphor.  Ah, metaphor!  The romance of language.  The genius by which we seek to illuminate one idea by comparing it with another.  The best metaphors give wing to ideas that are otherwise inexpressible but even the most hackneyed are ripe with implication and connotation.  (A winged idea is, of course, one capable of leaping the surly bonds of earth.  A hackneyed idea is like a special breed of horse suited for the most routine jobs.  A ripe idea is like a piece of fruit just ready to fall from the tree—succulent and juicy.)

The most elegant metaphor of recent years is undoubtedly the title of the late Maya
Angelou’s inaugural poem for Bill Clinton, On the Pulse of Morning.  Here is how she uses it in the final stanza:

Here, on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister’s eyes, and into

Your brother’s face, your country

And say simply

With hope—

Good morning.

Consider the word “pulse.”  She might have said, “On the threshold of a new day” or even “At the dawn of a new era.”  But calling it the “pulse of a new day” is what made her a poet.  The pulse is a tangible, intimate sensation of your own heartbeat.  You are most aware of it in quiet moments that precede high drama.  If you have ever waited for sunrise in an open field, you know that dawn is just such a moment.

Metonymy.  A name for someone or something derived from some characteristic of the person or thing  being named.  Big Blue.  Big Easy.  Air Jordan.

Onomatopoeia.  Words that sound like what they mean.  Hiss.  Rattle.  Whisper.  Rock ‘n Roll.  The Irish are very good at this.  I have often thought a Martian could understand the poetry of Father Hopkins in spite of his obscure vocabulary because the words sound right.  The master, of course, is Jimmy Joyce.  Who else would have thought of the “hither and thithering waters of the Night?”

Personification.  Treatment of any non-human thing as though it had human characteristics.  This is more common than a sensitive reader might wish.  It is frequently used deliberately in persuasion when logic and evidence fail but is always fallacious.  Occasionally, however, it can be as sublime as any metaphor as, for example, this excerpt from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac:

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.  We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life and dollars.  The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with his trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing:  peace in our time.  A measure of success in this is all well and good, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.  Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum:  In wildness is the salvation of the world.  Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

Pun.  The lowest form of humor, a play on words.  In comparing American and European humor I once observed that, “…European fairy tales are nothing if not grim.”  My father once told me that the greatest pun he had ever heard involved the way Bostonians pronounced the word “scrod.”  But he said I was not emotionally ready for it and he took it with him to his grave together with the meaning of crista da mortis which he claimed was a Gaelic-Latin pun.  The best puns (note the oxymoron) are never obvious.  My own personal best was a sign I made for my first electronic calculator:

Cogito Ergo ∑

All you need is a little Latin, a touch of Greek, a pinch of statistics and a dash of philosophy.  It’s no wonder George Wallace thought we were all pointy-headed intellectuals.

Rhopalism.  A sentence the words of which increase at the rate of one letter per word.  The most potent such sentence may be, “I do.”  A more challenging example is the 20-word sentence, “I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting;  nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.”

Rhyme.  In English, words or phrases rhyme in the strict sense if their final stressed vowels and all following sounds are identical and the preceding consonant sounds are distinctly different.  Pairs that do not meet these conditions are said to be assonant.  If the identical vowel sounds are not stressed, the rhyme may also said to be weak.  The problem with rhyme is that, although English is replete with strong ones, Joyce Kilmer is not our greatest poet.

Simile.  Metaphor calling attention to itself.  The giveaway is the word like as in, “My love is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June.”  Metaphors are said to be more elegant but sometimes they are too obvious.  I mean, wouldn’t you feel awkward writing, “My love is a red, red rose?”

Spoonerism.  A form of metathesis in which sounds are transposed between two words.  W. A. Spooner, a Oxford don, appears to have done this all the time, his most famous example being kinquering kongs when he meant conquering kings.  This can be humorous as when your usher offers to sew you to your sheet.

Synecdoche.  A form of metonymy in which a name is devised based on a definitive characteristic.  Old Blue Eyes does not qualify because Mr. Sinatra’s eyes were not his defining characteristic.  Conversely, The Velvet Fog is synecdoche because it refers to the one thing that makes Mr. Torme different from any other singer.

In South Pacific, there is a song about a sailor’s archetypical girlfriend who is given the name Honey-Bun in honor of one (well, perhaps two) of her principal attributes.  You will recall:

And she’s broad where a broad should be broad.

Calling a woman a broad is metonymy, to say nothing of misogyny.  Calling her Honey-Bun adds stress, thereby transforming more metonymy into sexist synecdoche,

EDWARD THE DEPRESSER

Jerry Harkins

            Do you remember Ed Koch?  He’s been dead awhile which fact provides the definitive answer to the question he was always asking, “How’m I doing?”  Not great.  Ed was the Mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, the 105^th in a long line of scoundrels, miscreants and jubilant delinquents.  Better than most, he proved what we had long suspected, to wit that a clown could do a better job in City Hall than a horse’s ass.  Not necessarily a good job, just better than might have been expected.  Which was another answer to that perennial question:  he was doing marginally better than a horse’s ass.  He was always good for a laugh whether staring down Al Sharpton at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge or trying to pass off Bess Myerson as his girlfriend for god’s sake.[i]  If you believed the latter, he could probably have sold you the former.

            In 2002, Ed rose from the dead[ii] and was all over the television announcing in that whinny, sing-song voice that made strong men shudder, “I’m a Democrat, a Pataki Democrat” and being quoted to the effect that fellow Democrat Alan Hevesi was a crook.[iii]  He even took notice of a State Senate race on the East Side where he made a commercial for Republican Andrew Eristoff.  Who knew?  And what was Ed doing supporting Republicans like even Al T’Omato?  Well, there are probably several reasons but it comes down to the fact that the old boy loved nothing better than media exposure and the media love nothing better than a man-bites-dog story.  Ed was endlessly fascinating to himself and, like all politicians, he was a devotee of the instant playback—seeing himself on the eleven o’clock news saying some asinine thing he blurped[iv] out earlier the same day.  He was missing the limelight and willing to descend to any level of tackiness to avoid feeling like a has been.  He tried buying himself a magic mirror.  Every morning he would ask it, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most winsome politician of us all?”  It worked for a while until one day his mirror said, “Rudolph Giuliani is far and away the most fey of you all.  Fey is almost the same as winsome.”  Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Ed decided to endorse Republicans.

            But maybe not.  In at least several cases, he was more anti-Democrat than pro-Republican.  For years, he denounced Barack Obama for being weak on Israel.  He denounced John Kerry for being weak on terrorism which Ed equated with being weak on Israel.  He denounced Ted Kennedy for being “contemptible” for being against the war in Iraq.  A bit surprising insofar as Kennedy was universally regarded as Israel’s best friend in Washington.  The Israeli government was embarrassed but Ed reserved to himself the exclusive right to make Israeli foreign policy.  Also, embarrassing the Israeli government is very hard to do so Ed could go back to feeling superior after being spurned by his magic mirror.

            Every so often, the Democrats march themselves off the cliff in imitation of lemmings and 2002 happened to be one of the years of the great fall off.  In other words, Pataki couldn’t lose so Ed’s endorsement wasn’t worth a tinker’s damn.[v]  The other Republicans he endorsed all lost.  But he was nothing if not persistent.  Two years later, his great passion was George W. Bush.  During the Republican convention in New York, he was all over the television urging his fellow citizens to “make nice” to the outlanders.  Isn’t that what mothers ask their children to do during toilet training?  Afterwards he took off for Florida to campaign for Bush and Cheney among expatriate New York Jews.  They say politics makes strange bedfellows but Bush, Cheney, Koch and Zell Miller[vi] in bed together would surely raise eyebrows even in Texas.

            At least it was a feather bed.  Ed left an estate of between 10 and 11 million dollars, all of it accumulated after he left office, mostly for opinionating on everything from movies to foreign policy.  No one begrudges him his success.  He was colorful, interesting and usually successful.  His only fault as a big city politician was that he wasn’t Irish.

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[i] Bess Myerson was a smart, funny and talented lady who probably played the role of Ed’s significant other as a lark.  She was Miss America 1945, New York City’s first Commissioner of Consumer Affairs (under John Lindsay) and was damn near elected U.S. Senator from New York in 1980.  She lost to a clown named Al Tomato who went on to be the only U.S. Senator to sing "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" on the floor of Congress.  She ran afoul of Rudy Giuliani when he was still U.S. Attorney and was tried for bribery in one of New York’s finest examples of prosecutorial misconduct.  Naturally she was acquitted.  No jury would have convicted her of jaywalking but, in this case, she happened to be innocent.  Mr. G overcame his embarrassment and ran twice for the Republican nomination for President on a platform of being “America’s Mayor.”  Too bad he lost.  It would have been the first time since Caligula that a horse’s ass had been an important politician.  Ms Myerson died in 2014 at the age of 90.

[ii] He wasn’t actually dead dead at the time.  He was just another has-been politician which is very similar to dead dead in that there is nothing so pathetic as a politician who’s been out of office for more than a decade.

[iii] Of course he turned out to be right about that.  Alan eventually served nineteen months of a four-year sentence for various corrupt shenanigans he perpetrated during a term as New York State Controller.   Mr. Hevesi holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.  As to Koch being right about Hevesi, it’s no big deal.  You could say the same thing about any politician at random and there’s a high probability you’ll be right.

[iv] Blurp, v.t., to say something concisely so that it can be used by itself in a television news broadcast.  From blurt, to speak impulsively, blur, to obfuscate, and burp to emit hot air from the mouth explosively.

[v] In case you don’t remember, the Democratic candidate was Carl McCall whose nomination was a matter of seniority not competence.  His greatest virtue—and you should not underestimate it—was a congenital aversion to taking a stand.  George had six other opponents.

[vi] Zell is a born-again right wing fanatic who has held several high elective jobs in Georgia, a state which also gave America Newt Gingrich.  He served as the Newt’s campaign manager during the Slimy One’s failed effort in the 2012 Republican primaries.  Newty who holds a Ph.D. from Tulane*, was of course running on a family values platform.  He’s been married three times, the first time to his high school geometry teacher.  Zell served as Chief of Staff to Lester Maddox and later as a Director of the National Rifle Association.  He holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Georgia.  Lester Maddox you may remember was a restaurateur who kept blacks out of his establishment by threatening them with an ax handle.  As his reward, Georgians elected him Governor.  Ed always had interesting friends.

* Footnote to the Endnote:  Dr. Gingrich wrote his dissertation on “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.”

RAND PAUL IS RIGHT!

Jerry Harkins

Well, you knew that.  Rand Paul is three goosesteps to the right of Vlad the Impaler but what I really mean is that he is actually correct on at least one issue.  “I’ve been waiting,” he said recently, “for twenty years to talk about how bad these toilets are.”  He was referring to those damn low-flush toilets mandated by water conservation extremists.  You know:  the kind you have to flush three or four times which wind up using two or three times as much water as the old ones.  The next step is to return to the middle ages when you threw the contents of your slop jars out the window.  Of course living in the post-modern era means your slop jars will at least be disposable like everything else.  You will merely throw the whole thing out the window.  Not sanitary maybe but it will save a hell of a lot of water.

There’s a lot of this going around and we will be looking to Senator Paul for leadership in exposing it all.  Just for openers, we once had a perfectly good system for communicating with other people.  It was called the telephone and it instantly solved the problems of illiteracy and terrible spelling (you didn’t have to be able to read and write) not to mention awful handwriting.  Moreover, it was sort of friendly in the sense that at least some subscribers could learn to ignore the ring that peremptorily summoned most people to instant attendance.  (There was a reason Pavlov used a telephone bell to condition his dogs.  And a reason the telephone company called itself the Bell System.)  Anyway, it was the first salvo of the Information Revolution and it worked pretty well for a hundred years.  They kept adding annoying “features” to what they called “POTS”—plain old telephone service.  Call waiting, call forwarding, call answering, call messaging, caller ID, conference calling and other gizmos meant to make it impossible to escape from Ma Bell’s clutches.  Then some anarchist invented the cell phone. 

There’s a lot wrong with cell phones.  The audio quality is abysmal.  Among other things, it encourages people to shout thereby exposing the rest of us to their boring or salacious personal lives.  They are the leading cause of distracted driving, bullying and mindless babbling.  As it turns out, cell phones are the principal technology being used to convert the entire world into a more sophisticated version of George Orwell’s Oceania.  Big Brother would have loved cell phones.  As a society, we are not better off because we can read Prince Charles’ erotic fantasies about Camilla in the afternoon papers.  Somehow Charlie didn’t get the memo from the palace IT Department to the effect that cell phones are a truly public utility.  Or maybe he got it but never mastered the art of reading.

Email is a lot worse.  So-called snail mail was sacrosanct.  If it was sealed and had a stamp on it, the only person who could legally open it in the absence of a court order was the recipient.  Moreover, it was automatically copyrighted in the name of the writer.  Mail was delivered twice a day which is enough.  (When the Post Office went to once a day, it was actually an improvement.)  In some places, you could mail a shopping list to the grocery store in the morning and your food would be delivered the same afternoon.  You could send a letter from New York to Los Angeles special delivery for twenty cents.  It would get there the next day.  Email on the other hand is almost as private as smoke signals.  The reason so many financial executives are in jail today is that they blithely went about plotting the downfall of the global economy on Gmail.  On top of that, email has destroyed the Postal Service whose “service” has devolved to the levels of the Pony Express.

Nor is email the worst of it.  We have managed to dumb language down even further through such innovations as Facebook, Twitter and something called “texting.”  Under the mantle of Equal Rights for Illiterates, we have made it possible for our least gifted citizens to let the world know the most picayune details of their impoverished lives in real time, 24/7.  In the era of multitasking, we “text” while driving and while crossing busy intersections on foot.  We check Facebook in the bathtub and in church.  Marshall McLuhan said that media are an extension of our senses.  They used to be but now they have pretty much replaced our senses.  We no longer look.  We take a digital photo.  We no longer go.  We download.  We no longer think.  We blurb.  In 140 character bursts including spaces and emoticons.  Lol!

Once upon a time we had plenty of Big Problems to occupy the attention of our best scientific minds.  We needed stuff like DDT, thalidomide, napalm, tail fins and atomic bombs.  But with one thing and another, we ran out of Big Problems and had to dream up new ones if we wanted to keep our lockhold on Nobel Prizes.  It wasn’t easy and some things did not make the cut.  For example, we invented a supersonic passenger plane to address the critical need to save celebrities two hours flying time between New York and California.  We knew this would annoy everybody in Olathe, Kansas with the sonic booms disturbing their sex lives (this was before Governor Brownback outlawed sex in Kansas) not to mention the digestion of their cows which seemed a small price to pay.  But it turned out that nobody learned to love the booms and we had to restrict the SST’s to mid-ocean flight paths.  So after three hours you wound up at Heathrow or De Gaulle or JFK where it took three more hours to find your luggage and clear customs.

Mindless Progress has now been enshrined as the national psychosis in Silicon Valley which is located at the last stop of the Great Frontier, otherwise known as the Place Where the Sun Sets.  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit has been replaced by the Geek in the Unwashed Hoodie.  The only hope is that Google robots will soon take over everything.

RELIGION AND THE SITTING DUCK SYNDROME

Jerry Harkins

Ambrose Bierce, known to his contemporaries as Bitter Bierce, defined religion as, “A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”  His cynicism, however, masks the much more important truth that people need religion precisely because it does address the unknowable, the ineffable, the great mysteries of life and death, good and evil, self and other and, yes, hope and fear.  This is the reason that every culture we know about has developed an elaborate mythology of the supernatural and a coordinated set of dogmas and rituals.  Most elements of these myths serve a profound metaphoric purpose helping us cope with the existential issues:  who we are, how and why we got here and how we should live to achieve our destiny.  Most also are logically absurd and require a “suspension of disbelief” on the part of the initiate. [1] Once given, the suspension of disbelief sets like concrete and imparts to belief a persistence that insulates it from doubt.  We accept religion without careful scrutiny because life sometimes seems intolerable without it.

Karl Marx caught this poignancy is his famous aphorism which, however, must not be truncated as it usually is.  “Religion,” he wrote, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.”  He went on to argue that to ask people to give up their religious illusions is to ask them to ignore their oppression which requires illusions as a coping mechanism.  For most of history, this was probably a fair assessment but the advent of modernism began to change peoples’ psychological perspective.  Modernism means many things but essentially it shifts the traditional foundational idea of human society that individuals owe allegiance to hierarchical institutions to the opposite belief that institutions are the creatures and servants of the people.  The Catholic Church has always seen this sea change as a grave threat to its spiritual hegemony.

Traditionally, Christians have been taught that Jesus founded his church on the “rock” of Saint Peter and that may have been what he intended.  But today’s Christian enterprise is almost entirely the work of Paul—Saul of Tarsus.  Almost everything we know about Christ’s ministry and the hundred years or so after his death comes from sources written by Paul or his followers including the authors of the synoptic gospels.  Theirs is a sin-centered theology (1 Corinthians 15:21).   Paul was the first to suggest that the sin of Adam marked the entire human race as children of evil, a theory that was vastly expanded in a direct line from Paul to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Pius IX to John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  There is no difference between the theology of original sin and the various heresies that sprang from Manichaeism. [2]

As the sin/redemption narrative evolved, so too did the power assumed by the hierarchy which claimed to have the exclusive power to forgive sin and open the gates of heaven.  Dogma became increasingly complex and moral theology was often based on a degree of sophistry that would make the Red Queen blush.  Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors was a tipping point, initiating a mass defection of the educated from the church.  This spread to a vast number of ordinary Catholics following Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae forbidding the use of “artificial” contraception.  Jesus himself had preached a conservative sexual morality, claiming for example that looking lustfully at a woman was adultery, but for his successors sex became a bête noire.  When Catholics rejected Humanae Vitae, the hierarchs stood their ground with progressively more clamorous proclamations and less persuasive logic.  And so it came to pass that people began to ignore the bishops. 

The mythology persists but, at the beginning of the third millennium, only the most gullible among us insist that the myths must be literally true.  Most believers are content to like the myths which make them feel comfortable and included.  Singing about the Battle of Jericho is life-enhancing and joyous and it is irrelevant that Joshua’s trumpets did not cause the walls to tumble down.  Jesus did not walk on water, he did not turn water into wine or wine into his own blood.  Paul never went to heaven for a meeting with Jesus.  Nor did Jesus share with him the “real” gospel in order to correct the theological mistakes made by the uneducated apostles in Jerusalem.  Actually, most Christians have never encountered Paul’s coy story about his trip to heaven which he tells in the third person (2 Corinthians 12:1-10).  Moreover, the remaining true believers who do know the story do not care that it is preposterous. Their will to believe overrides logic, evidence and experience.  This makes them vulnerable to victimization.  When the flock believes you have the power to send them to heaven or hell, the sheep become sitting ducks.

Most hierarchs of course do not think of what they do as victimization.  They are themselves true believers.  Thus, when Cardinal Dolan makes the irrational claim that Obamacare is a threat to first amendment religious freedom, he is not being a hypocrite but merely an autocrat making a last stand. [3] He certainly realizes that there will always be limits on the exercise of spiritual power.  The government, for example, can and should outlaw the liturgical practice of human sacrifice without injury to the constitution.  He probably even approves of the ban on polygamy in spite of its challenge to Mormon fundamentalism.  We do not know how he felt about the 1995 decision of the Minnesota Court of Appeals in the case of a Christian Scientist mother who withheld medical treatment from her eleven year old son who then died of diabetes.  The Court sensibly said, “Although one is free to believe what one will, religious freedom ends when one's conduct offends the law by, for example, endangering a child's life.” [4] Cardinal Dolan, of course, strongly supports the right to life of even an hour-old zygote, so he might agree with the McKown decision.  Maybe not, however.  The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis joined with a bizarre coalition of religious institutions in a brief supporting the Christian Scientists. [5] It included the Church of the Nazarene, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, the Orthodox Church in America, and the United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith.  The latter denomination was founded by Bishop Charles Manuel "Sweet Daddy" Grace who is said to have taught, “Salvation is by Grace only.  Grace has given God a vacation, and since He is on vacation, don't worry about Him.  If you sin against God, Grace can save you, but if you sin against Grace, God cannot save you.”

There is a long and often bloody history of the relationship between God and Caesar.  When squabbling among the bishops began to threaten the unity of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it was the Emperor, Constantine the Great, who convened the Council of Nicaea and managed it through his puppet bishops. Pope Sylvester [6] stayed away but gave his assent to its actions perhaps because Constantine threatened to exile anyone who did not. [7] For the entire history of the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806), the papacy and the emperors fought bitterly for control of both sacred and secular functions.  Similar struggles took place between the popes and France and, famously, England.  Wars were fought over who had the right to appoint bishops, a power with important economic implications.  When King Henry II appointed Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas was his Chancellor and principal tax collector.  Before he could be installed as Archbishop, he had to be ordained to the priesthood. [8] He very soon switched sides and denied the king’s right to make such appointments.  In the nineteenth century, the church struggled fiercely against Italian unification (the Risorgimento), a protracted campaign that ended with the dissolution of the Papal States.  As recently as 1903, the College of Cardinals was prepared to elect Mariano Rampolla as the successor to Leo XIII.  But Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria vetoed the election to the outrage of the assembled cardinals who nonetheless were forced to elect Giuseppe Sarto who became Pope, later Saint Pius X.

Before the nineteenth century, Popes had always asserted enormous secular powers which were routinely contested by the kings and emperors.  The so-called Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century was the most operatic of these conflicts.  Popes Gregory VII  and Paschal II excommunicated Emperor Henry IV four different times while the Emperor deposed Gregory at least twice.  Less than a century later, Pope Adrian IV “conveyed” Ireland to England [9] and in 1494, the Pope divided South America between Spain and Portugal.  A dispute had arisen over which European power had the right to claim what they and the Pope thought was India.  Different popes had issued different proclamations before 1492 and Alexander VI, a Spaniard, tried to impose a solution that favored Spain.  This was ultimately overruled by his successor and enemy Pope Julius II who agreed that India should belong to Portugal in recognition of its “discovery” by Vasco de Gama in 1498. [10] There was no moral principle involved but, had there been, it would be “finders keepers.”

In our own time, church-state disputes, at least those involving Christian sects, have become less bloody but perhaps more interesting.  In the United States, several politicians have been excommunicated for supporting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. [11] A number of bishops have threatened to excommunicate anyone who votes for a politician they oppose.  Others have said they will close Catholic hospitals rather than allow them to provide birth control to their employees.  Many bishops denounced the University of Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to be its 2009 commencement speaker because of his positions on abortion and stem cell research. 

The church does not generally involve itself in disputes over evolution but the Thomas More Law Center, founded and operated mostly by Catholic lay people, acted as counsel for the defendants in Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket no. 4cv2688) which sought to require the teaching of intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.  The Judge properly characterized the school board’s mandate as one of “breathtaking inanity.”  But other cases pose profound questions about social values and where society should draw lines.  Do the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses have to salute the flag during public school morning exercises?  (No.)  May Quakers refuse alternative service in lieu of the military draft? (No.)   Do neo-Nazis have the right to parade through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago with many Holocaust survivors? (Yes.)  May a state ban the showing of a film deemed sacrilegious by the National Legion of Decency?  (No.)  More recently, may a private company refuse to provide its employees with federally mandated benefits that offend the owner’s religious beliefs?  (Yes.) [12] For seven years, Americans grappled with the agonizing case of Terri Schiavo which was played out before her family, federal and state courts, the President and the Congress of the United States.  Catholic bishops denounced any idea of allowing her to die peacefully but the Vatican withheld comment until two years after her death when it too expressed its agreement with the bishops.   In the national debate leading up to the Eighteenth Amendment (1920), the Catholic Church was the leading voice for the “Wets.”  But in the 1960’s, the Catholic hierarchy led by Cardinal Spellman of New York became the most vociferous defender of Sunday Blue Laws.  In both cases, mainstream Protestant sects were the principal opponents.

An interesting case emerged recently from the bankruptcy filing of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.  When he was its Archbishop Cardinal Dolan moved $57 million dollars from the general account to a trust established for the perpetual care of cemeteries.  He said the money had always been intended for that purpose but he also told the Vatican that his action would shield it from creditors in the event of bankruptcy stemming from the sexual abuse litigation.  He wrote, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.”  The Creditors Committee sued and in the summer of 2013 the federal district court ruled that Catholic belief in the resurrection of the body is a sufficient basis to shield the archdiocese from laws that would ordinarily prohibit such transfers of funds in anticipation of bankruptcy.*  The court was making a dubious theological point about the meaning of the church’s teaching about the resurrection of the body as it might relate to caring for cemetery grounds.  As important as the resurrection doctrine is, the physical condition of a grave would seem to have little relevance.  The same logic would apply to almost any kind of expenditure the church might make.  But these cases are almost always more complex than they seem.

Should American currency refer to God?  Should religious institutions be tax exempt?  May states erect monuments to the ten commandments?  May towns allow crèches in public spaces? [13] Can Arizona require a loyalty oath invoking “So help me God” as a condition of receiving a high school diploma?  May public high school students pray in public before a football game?  Did the United States and Canada have the right to suppress the Native American ceremony of the potlatch festival or the sun dance because both were considered pagan and uncivilized?  What is the difference between allowing members of the Native American Church to use peyote for sacramental purposes but not allowing members of The Religion of Jesus to use marijuana? [14]

No survey of church-state relations would be complete without reference to the United States v. Moon.  In 1982, the founder and self-proclaimed Messiah of the Unification Church, Sun Myung Moon, was convicted on twelve counts of failing to report $150,000 in income from 1973 to 1975.  What he had done was a common practice among start-up religions but no other leader had ever been challenged by the government.  The problem was that, because of Rev. Moon’s flamboyant theology, the Unification Church was widely regarded as a cult and its adherents were referred to as “Moonies.”  Ultimately, he served thirteen months of an eighteen month sentence.

Around the world, the church-state issue is no less bewildering.  In militantly secular France, the government prohibits the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols by students in public schools, a ban widely assumed to be aimed primarily at the Islamic khimar or headscarf.  In theocratic Iran, on the other hand, the same students could be flogged in public for not wearing such a garment.  The Israeli government, beset by deadly sworn enemies on all sides, spends vast amounts of time on deciding what further accommodations to make to the ultra orthodox who drain its resources without accepting its legitimacy.  It allows grown men with huge families to collect welfare so they can study Torah all day every day.  In Haredi neighborhoods, women ride in the back of public busses while, at the Western Wall, they are pelted with insults and assaulted with human waste by Yeshiva boys.  In Great Britain, the Church of England is the official religion and the monarch is its Supreme Governor.  This, however, has little practical meaning.  The church receives no direct support from the state and the Queen’s role is entirely ceremonial.  Less than 2% of the population attends weekly services and only 30% attend as often as once a year.  The real dominant force in the Anglican Communion today consists of a half dozen super conservative African Primates at least one of whom supports the idea of stoning homosexuals to death in accordance with Leviticus 20:13.

If we were to place Cardinal Dolan on a political philosophy spectrum between the French and the Ayatollahs, he would wind up rubbing shoulders with the latter.  He would never admit it of course but you can be sure he believes he would make a much better president than Barack Obama whom he regards as the Antichrist incarnate.  The reason is simple.  He would base his decisions on biblical mythology, not literally perhaps, but as interpreted by him and his friends in Rome.  It could be worse.  Unlike the Rev. Pat Robertson or Saint Paul, Dolan has never reported receiving instructions directly from God.  But he certainly agrees with Robertson about the manifest failures of American democracy.  This, too, he will deny.  He is not burdened with a great reverence for the truth when it comes to the interests of the hierarchy.  Thus, for example, when he writes, “Respect for religious freedom rooted in basic human dignity is a core Catholic teaching,” [15] he is fibbing.  He believes the government should prohibit the use of what he defines as “artificial” contraceptives, always and everywhere, regardless of the religious beliefs of its citizens.  He believes divorce should be illegal—for almost everyone. [16]

As recently as the nineteenth century, the church consistently denounced the separation of church and state.  In 1791, Pius VI condemned the French Declaration of Human Rights  specifically because it advocated religious freedom.  In 1895, Pope Leo XIII expressed satisfaction that the church was free in many countries but said it would be even better if, “…she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  In other words, the church should have access to both the police power and the treasury of the state.

As any five-year old will be happy to tell you, it’s a free country.  Popes and prelates can think, say and write pretty much anything they want.  They can even electioneer from the pulpit although, if they do, in theory they will lose their tax-exempt status.  But this is extremely rare.  The first time the IRS revoked a church’s tax-exempt status was in 1992 when a New York church ran an ad four days before the presidential election urging citizens to vote against then-Governor Bill Clinton for his anti-Christian positions.  This would seem to be an egregious violation of an unambiguous law but even so the courts treaded lightly.  The church was allowed to avoid taxes on contributions it had received during the litigation.

When free speech is not an issue, the results have been more restrictive.  In 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its policy prohibiting interracial dating (461 U.S. 574).  The University argued that, “God intended segregation of the races and that the Scriptures forbid interracial marriage.”  When it lost, it simply paid its back taxes and agreed to continue doing so until the law changed.  It also suffered a 13% decline in contributions. [17]

Freedom of Speech and its corollaries Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Religion are complex ideas that have inspired some of the most closely argued and most densely intellectual litigation in American history.  Sadly, Cardinal Dolan and those who agree with him are not even part of that discussion.  They could be.  The substance of their case—that those who oppose contraception on religious grounds should be exempt from paying for it for their employees—is not without merit.  But to claim that it is a mortal threat to the first amendment is to reduce it to an absurdity.  It is rhetorical extremism, unworthy of a moral person never mind an educated one.  But it is the standard operating procedure of the Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, of almost all religions.

When Pope Pius IX proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility, Lord Acton, a devout Catholic, was led to his famous remark, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” [18] Beginning no later than the reign of Pope Gregory I (590-604), virtually all popes have sought to expand their power and influence over both the sacred and the secular.  With a few notable exceptions, all have presided over an earthly kingdom of ever-increasing deceit and corruption.  They are by no means alone.  Self-aggrandizement  is in the nature of religion—perhaps in the nature of all institutions.  Today we are witnessing this will to power among many religious leaders in the Muslim world, among the ultraorthodox in Israel and even among Buddhists in Myanmar.  In Russia, the Orthodox Church has entered into an unholy alliance with the corrupt government of Vladimir Putin.  In each case, the message is the same:  do as we say because we represent the divine;  we are the owners of the myths.

As the Catholic Church has become increasingly isolated and irrelevant, it has become desperate to hang onto whatever power it can.  John Paul II and Benedict XVI together invented a category of teachings called “definitive” that are perhaps slightly less than infallible but still mandatory.  Among these is the contention that the church has no power to ordain women.  This, of course, contradicts one of their favorite biblical quotations, “Whatsoever thou shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven.”

We are at the beginning of a new papacy.  In much of the world, hope has been reborn.  Francis is as different from his recent predecessors as could possibly be expected.  He recalls the charisma of John XXIII.  He has yet to change anything substantive but the hierarchs who work for him would do well to notice how much a smile can accomplish, how quickly an institution can renew itself with a little humility.  But he is faced with the daunting challenge of rescinding the foolishness of the last fifty years and the fifteen hundred years before that.  The cynical among us remember that young Catholics greeted John Paul II with the same enthusiasm their successors lavished on Francis in Rio.  We recall how the crowds at John Paul’s funeral chanted their demand for an immediate declaration of his sainthood.  We wonder whether any Pope could risk the schism that would surely follow a decision to ordain women priests.  The new pope might begin modestly by reminding Cardinal Dolan and his American colleagues that Barack Obama is a lot more faithful to the Beatitudes than they appear to be.  He could insist that they cease their ignorant blitherings about sexual morality and instead carry the good news of God’s implacable love to the entire world.  He could encourage them to stop preaching the myths as if they were facts and instead explain why we think of Mary as a virgin, why Jesus chose to be born in a manger and why the tomb was said to be empty on Easter morning.  I suspect Cardinal Dolan does not know the answers and thinks it unnecessary to speculate about them.

*Subsequent Event:  On March 9, 2015 The United States Court of Appeals ruled that Timmy’s tricky transfer of $57 million from the general fund of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to a newly created cemetery trust fund to protect it from being used to pay pedophile victims was not protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  Presumably, then, said transfer will be subject to scrutiny under federal and state laws regarding fraud. 

Notes

1.  The phrase “suspension of disbelief” was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1817 autobiography.  He was making the point that a little human interest and/or a little element of truth in a narrative would encourage the reader to ignore even the most flagrant implausibility of the storyline.  Later critics modified the concept to stress the willingness and desire of the audience to overlook the limitations of media.  This is an active process unlike the passivity implied by the word faith.

2. Orthodox Christian theologians will deny this vigorously and point to the differences between their beliefs and those of the European Gnostics.  But the Egyptian Christian Gnostics treated Paul as one of their own and Augustine was a “hearer” of Manichaeism well into his 30’s.  Original sin is a direct expression of the basic Gnostic belief in the absolute evil of the material world.

3. Before exonerating Cardinal Dolan entirely of hypocrisy, it should be noted that until Vatican II adopted Dignitatis Humanae, the church had always regarded religious freedom as anathema.  Indeed it is one of the “errors” Pope Pius IX cited in his Syllabus of Errors, which reads that it is wrong to think that, “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”

4. McKown v Lundman, Minnesota Court of Appeals No 95-355, April 4, 1995.  The decision was appealed to the United States Supreme Court which declined to hear it.

5. The case developed late in the tenure of John R. Roach, Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis.  A former President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Roach was a much-beloved moderate who was, like all of us, not without sin.  He struggled successfully against Demon Rum and against his own tendency to be lenient toward abusive priests. 

6. Saint Sylvester was the Bishop of Rome from 314 to 335.  There was, as yet, no such thing as a Pope who ruled over the entire Christian world.  Sylvester is best known for  killing a dragon who had been eating 300 Roman citizens every day.  He said Saint Peter had helped him.

7. The Council of Nicaea was the most important Episcopal meeting of the Roman era, noted for writing the first draft of the Nicene Creed still recited today.  It also established the precedent for Emperors to convene councils.  The Council of Chalcedon, arguably the second most important of the ancient church was called by the Emperor Marcian with the reluctant acquiescence of Pope Leo I (Leo the Great) in 451.

8. Thomas did spend nine years as Archdeacon of Canterbury, a lucrative post he originally intended to keep while also serving as Chancellor.  Most but not all archdeacons were ordained priests.  Thomas was almost certainly in minor orders although that does not explain how he became an archdeacon which is not minor.

9. Pope Adrian IV’s legal basis for giving Ireland to England was the “Donation of Constantine” which gave popes temporal power over much of the Western Roman Empire and direct control over all European islands.  The Donation was a forgery commissioned by Pope Stephen II in the eighth century when Constantine had been dead for 400 years.  Adrian is remembered as the only English pope and the only pope who died of tonsillitis.

10. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) which finalized the line of demarcation and reversed the decision of Alexander VI was negotiated without the knowledge or consent of Pope Julius II who, however, accepted it.

11. The usual formulation of this penalty has it that the offender “may already have incurred automatic excommunication” and the usual the penalty itself takes the form of withholding communion or suggesting that the offender refrain from its reception.

12. The answers given in parentheses are consistent with current case law which has changed many times over the years and is subject to further change.

13. In a 1985 case, the Supreme Court ruled that nativity scenes on public lands violate the separation of church and state unless they comply with what came to be called the Reindeer Rule , which provides for equal opportunity for non-religious symbols, such as reindeer.

14. The answer,  it seems, is that peyote is very much an acquired taste and therefore does not have a major recreational market.  Also when the Supreme Court did threaten its legality, Congress passed an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act declaring it lawful.  The Religion of Jesus, on the other hand, is seen as “a humorous, personal, idiosyncratic religion” which presumably makes it a non-religion.  (See:  “As a Religion, Marijuana-Infused Faith Pushes Commonly Held Limits” by Mark Oppenheimer, New York Times, July 20, 2013, p. A14.)

15. See the Cardinal’s op ed piece, “Go to the barricades for religious liberty,” in the New York Daily News, June 28, 2013.

16. As usual, the church makes exceptions for kings and other favored classes including converts whose spouses desire separation.  This deviation was invented by St. Paul (1 Corinthians 7:10-15) in clear contradiction to Jesus’ mandate (Matthew 5:31).

17. Seventeen years later, the University changed its mind and announced than henceforth it would permit interracial dating.  Stephen Jones, its then President, said, “I've never been more proud of my dad than the night he...lifted that policy.”  He did not comment on whether God and the Scriptures had also changed their position.

18. The sentence following the famous aphorism is, “Great men are almost always bad men.”  John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was an English historian and politician and a towering intellect of the Victorian era.  He campaigned vigorously against the unbridled power of the papacy and might have been excommunicated had he not been such a influential figure.