Charting a moral course: Popes, presidents and politics

"Pope Leo should stick to his lane. President Trump has said it. Vice President Vance is so convinced of it that he tried to school the pontiff on just war theory. Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon staff called the papal nuncio on the carpet to make it clear. What is the Pope’s proper purview?"

Frankly, I don't recognize much of my Catholic faith in the pronouncements emanating from the White House. And sometimes I get annoyed enough to make a public stand. I suppose I could stand outside the White House with a bullhorn and read from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or the documents of Vatican II, but instead I write. I am grateful for the Philadelphia Inquirer who has given me a space to do that.

"I hear this administration saying that our morals are supposed to be detached from our everyday lives. That our beliefs — or our unbeliefs — are an entirely private matter. If we aren’t making our choices based on our own well-formed consciences, whatever tradition has formed them, then are they our choices at all?

Faith and morals are precisely what inform my politics, what guide my thinking about economics and social policy and climate change...Are there any decisions I make where my faith doesn’t play a role? Sure. Do I want mango or lemon water ice at Rita’s? But for the rest of it, I want my moral compass to help me navigate these challenging times.

Conscience isn’t a lane; it is the map that lets us find our way through all the lanes. Pope Leo is reminding us to not leave it behind."

Know where you stand and stand there, said Daniel Berrigan SJ. I know where I stand and I will stand there as long as I can and as long as it is necessary. 

Read the whole thing at the Inquirer. And yes, I enjoyed some alliterative moments...

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For the record, the proper choice is mango!

For non-Philadelphians: Rita's is a purveyor of frozen confections, particularly "water ice" (pronounced "wodder ice"). Water ice (also called Italian ice) is more crystalline than a sorbet or gelato, but not as crystalline as a snow cone. 

An adulterated Bible

In 1631 a typesetting error resulted in copies of the King James Bible where the 6th commandment (or 7th, depending on how you count) in Exodus 20:14 is rendered “Thou shalt commit adultery.” It was a scandal, the printers were fined (though in the end they didn’t have to pay), and most of the copies of what would become known as the Wicked Bible were destroyed. 

I have started to wonder if Hegseth and Trump have a similarly adulterated version of the Gospels, where the beatitudes in Matthew have been misprinted:

Blessed are those who mourn, for clearly they deserved what they got

Blessed are the strongmen, for who wants to be WEAK?

Blessed are those who show no mercy, nor quarter to the enemy either

Blessed are those who are sure that they know better than God what is righteous, for their morality should be enough for you

Blessed are the warmongers, for obviously this is God’s war and the rest of you ought to get down on your knees and pray for victory

All amid a steady chant of be afraid, be afraid, be afraid.

Elon's Fermi problem

Elon Musk posted a table on X claiming that enormous numbers of social security payments are being made fraudulently, as much as 83%. That seemed...excessive. I teach my students Enrico Fermi's technique for getting quick estimates, good enough numbers to help direct you toward a more accurate solution. Also great for detecting bullshit. Let's see how it works for Elon's claim!

One way to estimate roughly the number of social security recipients is to say everyone in the US over 65 collects it.  (Not true, but Fermi's approach says look at the big effects.)  In 2023 that was 59.2 million people. The Social Security Administration says that the average annual payment is $24,000. So that means we should pay out 59,200,000 x $24,000 a year. That's about $1.4 trillion. What did Social Security pay out in 2023? Its total budget was...wait for it..about $1.4 trillion. Just what you'd expect. So, BS, Elon.

This may be the biggest fraud ever, but I don't think the payments are the problem.

Reality check

I have an op-ed coming out in tomorrow's Philadelphia Inquirer that covers some of this ground. It's up online here.

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Last night I did something I hadn't done in almost two years. I made lasagna for dinner. I used the recipe I reverse engineered from my favorite restaurant in Albano Laziale.  That's nice, I hear you thinking, glad it is back in your rotation. What I want to say back is, "nice? nice? It's a miracle." 

The lasagna is that good? Well, it is, but it's the preparation that's the miracle, or rather that I can undertake it. 

I use a homemade tomato sauce, which requires dicing onions and mincing garlic and opening cans of San Marzano tomatoes. I brown Italian sausage. Grate Parmesan. Hand knead dough for fresh pasta. And make béchamel sauce, which means briskly stirring to emulsify the sauce. From start to sitting down at the table it takes about four and half hours.

But recently I couldn't: dice things, open those cans, break up the sausage in the pan, knead the dough or stir the sauce to emulsify it. Some tasks on that list were merely very difficult (dicing was glacially slow) and some were just impossible. Stirring that sauce.

It was a bit like the frog dropped in a pot of cold water, slowly being heated. Things almost imperceptibly got difficult. My handwriting got smaller. Writing on the blackboard for an hour got harder. Then it was a problem to get through an entire problem. It became tough to cut a sandwich in half. Folding my socks was a challenge. So was tying my shoes. And stirring. I couldn't make a quick pan sauce. (I know, I know, first world problems.) Then it was folding flour in to make a cake (more first world problems.) Then it was stirring my tea. That was a problem. I was in hot water.

Like that frog, for the longest while I kept adapting, or at least not noticing. Adapting my wardrobe, choosing blouses that did not need buttoning (or ironing, yep, I still iron stuff). Adapting my approach to research, dictating more, typing less. Not noticing that I wasn't making lasagna on a winter Sunday afternoon. Or choosing to have yogurt for lunch instead of a sandwich. 

This is not a bid for sympathy. It's a grounding in reality, in what can be at stake in scientific research that on the surface seems quirky (lizard saliva or getting a tranquilized rabbit's ears to perk up) or esoteric (using singular value decomposition to help assign atomic charges to atoms in a molecule.²) Or that is supported by the government, or was done by someone in the US from another country. 

Some of that research can be life changing. (Both the lizard saliva and the pop-up bunny ears research was.¹) And some of it will not be. We try as researchers to follow trails that will be productive, but not every line will lead to immediate results, some will not lead to results at all. We are exploring the universe, not following well-trod paths to known destinations.  There will be dead-ends. This is not fraud or waste. It's how research works.

The drug I take, that allows me to dice onions and emulsify a sauce, that makes it possible to care for myself and continue to work was developed in part by a scientist here on a visa at the NIH. The reality is that without it, I would be disabled and unemployed. Thanks to NIH funding (and medical insurance), I have access to a life-altering therapy. It's not a cure, but it is a miracle. Other people deserve their miracles, too. 

But Trump and Musk cry, "Fraud! Waste!" and say the NIH is a disaster. Their cuts to indirect costs will save each household less than the cost of 2 months of Netflix (about $30), and cost some people their lives. 

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1. A study on lizard saliva led to Ozempic, the bunny ears to a Nobel prize. Rabbits that had had Parkinsonism induced chemically had their droopy ears almost instantly perk-up when L-DOPA was administered. L-DOPA is still the gold standard for relieving many of the motor symptoms of Parkinson's. And as miraculous as it is, it is not perfect, so I am still rather personally invested in ongoing research.

2. That bit about singular value decomposition and charges might seem esoteric, but is my work and is used today in in silico drug design, including therapies for Parkinson's. 

Photo is of an earlier lasagna, circa 2022.

Just google "ordo amoris"

 

"Just google 'ordo amoris'," suggested VP Vance on 30 January 2025, defending his remarks earlier about who we are obliged to help:

JD VANCE: There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world... 

Apparently Pope Francis did. Or rather he used his common sense and dug into the Gospels and the deposit of Catholic social teaching that draws upon them.

"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." — Pope Francis in a letter to the Bishops of the United States, 11 February 2025

The whole letter is here.

Slot machine prayers

Representative Josh Breen walked out of last Tuesday’s prayer service, offended he said, by Bishop Budde’s hijacking of a religious service for political purposes. I came to pray, he said. For many things. For the newly inaugurated president, for his family, for success of the new administration. And for the nation — though apparently not for all the nation. Certainly not for the immigrants, or the LGBTQ+ community, or others frightened by the cruel and vindictive rhetoric that flows from the Trumpian right wing.

It struck me that Breen has a very limited idea of what constitutes prayer. That prayer is a solely a divine request line, directed at letting the Almighty know what we want. As if the omniscient God doesn’t know. Or perhaps, since not every prayer gets the answer we want — something Rep. Breen is surely aware of — a holy slot machine. Pull the handle and if you are lucky or deserving(?), three angels pop up and you get what you asked for.

Who does prayer change? Us or God? What do we hope to accomplish in prayer?

I was further stunned to hear Breen flat out accuse the Bishop of lying when she said Christianity asks that the stranger be welcomed. The Bible only means welcome the stranger who conforms to the norms of the society, says Breen. I went back and read (in Greek) Matthew 25:35: “ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in” ξένος or xenos, is rendered as “stranger” here. None of this carries any hint of limitations. The call is not to feed or offer water to or welcome only the deserving. Breen may not agree with my exegesis (or the Bishop’s) but to call it a half-truth, or an untruth? Or is it that it is an uncomfortable question that Breen prefers not to entertain? 

Breen says we might be better off if more people got up and walked out of churches in righteous anger. I agree. I have prayed and listened to the Gospel and a righteous anger is upon me. I will stand up and walk out of church, and seek to feed the hungry and see that the thirsty have something to drink and that the stranger is made to feel welcome. Without limitation. As was done for me on Calvary.

May God have mercy on us all, that is what I am praying for.

What's appealing about normalizing Nazis? Nothing.

On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere. 

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote. 

— From "A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland" New York Times 25 Nov 2017

Coincidentally this article appeared the same day my mother-in-law's immigration documents arrived on a CD in the mail. (Crash, the historian, had made a request for the records.)  As I browsed the nearly 40 pages of scanned documents, this one line stood out for me: I am citizen or subject of none. The Third Reich had stripped her of her citizenship because she was Jewish.  She was stateless.  Fleeing from a government that would strip her of her life if it could.

What looks unappealing to me?  Unappealing?  As if racism and anti-Semitism were some sort of choice on a menu.  Pizza tonight?  No, that's unappealing. 

Unappealing?  No.  It's terrifying.  Horrifying.  Intolerable.  Monstrous.

Hitler was not just "a guy who really believed in his cause...fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”  Hovater is not just the guy next door with some weird views.  He's actively advocating for a white nationalist state.  He bakes muffins and has cats.  Great.  He thinks the guy who wanted my mother-in-law dead was doing what was right. Monstrous.

I'm troubled that the Times dilutes the horror of this man's beliefs with descriptions of shopping at Target and making dinner.