America's Roman Catholic bishops aren't completely obsessed by abortion and gay marriage. My former colleague Ann Rodgers, one of the best religion reporters around, reports in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that bishops have been battling over whether to approve a retro English translation of the Mass with more traditional (and, critics charge, more stilted) language.

The new/old language won out at the recent bishops' conference. So now when the priest says "The Lord be with you," the congregation will reply "And with your spirit," not "and also with you," the current, clunky and inaccurate translation of the response I learned as an altar boy: "Et cum spiritu tuo." Like W.H. Auden, I believe that you can combine conservatism in liturgical language with more progressive political view.

Conservatism is cool even when it leads to technical language. Take the line in the Nicene Creed in which, in recent years, Jesus has been described as "one in being with the Father." Now he will be described as  "consubstantial with the Father." Abstruse? Perhaps. But truer to the Latin rendering of a Greek theological distinction that once led to violence between Christians. Confusion can beget a look into church history.

Even archaic non-theological language can be a spur to education. When Christians used to say that Christ would return to judge the "quick and the dead," parents could explain to their bewildered children that "quick" referred not to marathon runners but to those who were living, who had been quickened in their mothers' wombs. The lesson could then turn to the expression "cut to the quick."

Now that the Vatican has invited restive Anglicans to bring at least some parts of their majestic Book of Common Prayer with them when they cross the Tiber, the "regular" Catholic Church has to worry about non-tone-deaf believers switching  to the new church-within-a-church. The new/old liturgy approved by the bishops could be a bulwark against such defections.

-- Michael McGough

I met Tim Russert only once, before a "Meet the Press" debate between two Senate candidates from my home state of Pennsylvania. Russert was engaging, impressively au courant with Keystone State politics and, well, a nice guy. I also admired his work, and I was sad when he died before his time. (You never hear about someone dying at his time.)

Still, I cringed at the excessiveness of his obsequies. Journalism has a long, and appealingly human, tradition of providing a little nicer send-off to colleagues than someone in another business might receive. That's why newspapers give their own printers and truck drivers suspiciously long obituaries. The over-the-top eulogies for Russert were a species of this phenomenon, but that didn't make them less bizarre. I like to think that Russert, looking down, would want to interrupt his media mourners in mid-gush just the way he called politicians on their prevarications.

But at least that's over now -- except that it isn't. Tomorrow the Newseum (I know, it's a goofy name for an interesting resource) will unveil a new exhibit: a re-creation of Russert's office at NBC News, complete with his desk "stacked high with research material, books and handwritten notes, illustrating the rigorous preparation Russert put into each show" and "mementos of his beloved Buffalo Bills." What, no Rolodex?

This has just a whiff of the medieval Catholic practice of venerating relics of the saints, which probably would amuse Russert -- and, I hope, embarrass him.

--Michael McGough

It's a combination of issues so hot, an op-ed about reopening King-Harbor hospital doesn't even make the top three! Leading off is a pair of op-eds about best-selling memoirist Sarah Palin -- one friendly, one not so much. Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the right-leaning Weekly Standard and author of "The Persecution of Sarah Palin," tops the page with an analysis of the many reinventions of Alaska's erstwhile governor: first culture warrior, then watchdog, reformer, would-be vice president and, now, celebrity:

But Michael Carey, a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, retorts that Palin's new book shows her to be more of a whiner than a leader:

(Are you planning to help Palin's publisher recoup its advance? Take our poll!)

Rounding out the op-ed page, Times columnist Tim Rutten urges the University of California Board of Regents to approve a proposed partnership with the county Board of Supervisors to reopen and jointly oversee Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital.

On the other side of the Opinion divide, the Times editorial board gives Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown a dash of sympathy being "trapped in a political cage from which there will be no easy escape." The cause? His office just gave a pass to Brown's former communications director for surreptitiously recording interviews with reporters, and now liberals are pushing him to investigate a pair of independent filmmakers who surreptitiously recorded ACORN employees in California advising them how to set up a prostitution ring (or, in the case of ACORN's Felix Harris in Los Angeles, refusing to help after learning the prostitutes would be minors).

The board also urges the District of Columbia Council not to bow to pressure from the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, which has threatened to stop providing social services if the council approves same-sex marriages in D.C.

(True personal story to illustrate how conservative the Archdiocese of Washington is: I'm a Catholic, and I got engaged to be married while I was living in D.C. But when I asked a priest at my church if I could have the nuptials there in five months, he told me I needed to wait at least a year to receive the church's blessing. And if I didn't receive the church's blessing, my soul would be "lost to perdition." In other words, I'd spend eternity in Hell because I'd gotten married the wrong way. As it happened, my future mother-in-law lived outside Baltimore, and the diocese there accommodated us without hesitation. That was 19 years ago, and we're still happily married. Whether I'm on the road to perdition is a wholly separate issue.)

Finally, the board gives its support, with reservations, to the latest version of a proposed federal "shield law" to help journalists shield the identity of confidential sources.

Illustration: Ken Fallin For The Times

-- Jon Healey

It was a blow to Roman Catholic liberals when the Vatican announced last month that it would welcome, en masse, conservative Anglicans who share the pope's opposition to female clergy and traditional views about homosexuality. But there was a silver lining for liberals: The fact that in welcoming married Anglican priests to the fold, Pope Benedict XVI was perhaps opening the door to married priests within so-called Latin Rite Catholicism. (Eastern Rite Catholics, who recognize the pope's authority but follow rites similar to those of Eastern Orthodoxy, do ordain married men, though Eastern Catholics in the United States were pressured to conform to Western practice so as not to "scandalize" their Irish Catholic neighbors).

But the publication this week of the decree implementing the overture to Anglicans suggests that the slope to married Catholic priests isn't that slippery. After saying that married former Anglican priests could be ordained as Catholic priests, the "Apostolic Constitution" stops short of adopting the Anglican practice of routinely ordaining men who want to become priests.

While authorities of the new church-within-a-church will abide by "the discipline of celibate clergy in the Latin Church, as a rule," an "ordinary" (a bishop or former Anglican bishop) may also ask the pope for permission to ordain married men "on a case-by-case basis." This could be a face-saving way to perpetuate the Anglican tradition of a married clergy without saying so, or it could be a warning that married Anglican laymen will be ordained only rarely. Either way, the new Anglican body within Catholicism will not have the autonomy enjoyed by the Eastern Catholic churches.

The more stinging rebuff to Roman Catholic advocates of married priests is this rather mean-spirited provision of a companion document: "Those who have been previously ordained in the Catholic Church and subsequently have become Anglicans, may not exercise sacred ministry in the Ordinariate." In other words, if you left the Catholic Church and now want to return alongside other Anglican priests, you are treated worse than an Anglican priest who never belonged to the Catholic Church in the first place.

Perhaps the purpose of this provision is to prevent married Roman Catholics who want to be ordained as priests to pretend to convert to Anglicanism so that they can go back through the revolving church door and be accepted as married Catholic priests. But how likely is that? And if the church is willing to incorporate Anglican traditions that don't violate Catholic doctrine (as opposed to a mere regulation like mandatory celibacy), why not treat the new Anglican Rite exactly as the Eastern churches are treated? The only justification for that inconsistency is to stifle discussion about ending mandatory celibacy for Roman Catholic priests.

-- Michael McGough

The Vatican today announced a new arrangement under which Anglicans may enter the Roman Catholic Church while retaining many of their traditions, including married priests and the use of at least some parts of the Book of Common Prayer. (It isn't clear from the Vatican news release whether this means only that already married Anglican priests will be welcome, or that future priests and candidates for the priesthood will be free to marry -- probably the former.)

This is a big deal. First and foremost, it is a reflection of the continued crackup of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide association of churches with roots in the Church of England, which was created after King Henry VIII declared himself the head of the church. (As Protestant kids in Northern Ireland used to spraypaint on Belfast city walls: "One Bible, One crown, No pope in our town.") 

In an attempt at face-saving, Rowan Williams, the Hamlet-like archbishop of Canterbury, said the new express conversion (as George Costanza would say) wasn't a "commentary on Anglican problems" over the ordination of gays and women as bishops. It's lucky he doesn't claim to be infallible, because this is a holy whopper.

But if the "poping" of conservative Anglo-Catholics eases tensions in the Anglican Communion, it is likely to exacerbate them in their new spiritual home. Many Roman Catholic liberals will be aghast at this development, because they too believe in opening ordination to gays and women. And even some moderate Catholics are likely to grouse over the fact that cradle Catholics can't become priests and be married, but Anglican arrivistes can. (Married former Episcopal priests in the United States have been allowed to switch teams for some time, through the creation of an "Anglican Use" -- a church within a church.)

One group of Roman Catholics, which comprises liberals and conservatives on issues of sexuality, will be happy about this development. They are the Catholics (and I'm one of them) who abhor the tone-deaf language of the post-Vatican II Mass in English. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer is one of the wonders of the English language. Asked what he missed most about his former church, an Anglican-priest-turned Catholic supposedly replied: "The Mass in English."

After today's announcement, I suspect a lot of cradle Catholics in other countries will be sneaking off to "Anglican Use" parishes on Sundays.

-- Michael McGough

It's not clear what precipitated this convergence, but the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post all devoted space last weekend to op-eds ruminating on contemporary conservatism. For those who missed this odd confluence of punditry, here's a quick wrap-up.

In the LA Times last Friday, Ted Kennedy biographer Neal Gabler wrote that the conservative movement's ideological rigidity of late bears all the trappings of religion. An excerpt:

Read responses to Gabler's piece here and here.

Also on Friday, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that voters don't share with media and GOP elites the obsession over fringe-radio archetypes such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Although Brooks' piece explicitly targets GOP brass for giving too much weight to shock-jocks, I read his piece as a veiled defense of the common conservative voter. An excerpt:

Last up is conservative scholar Stephen F. Hayward, whose Op-Ed article in the Washington Post on Sunday seems to be an amalgam of the ideas expressed by Gabler and Brooks. Hayward writes that the conservative movement benefits from the provocative populists in its ranks, but in the past the Hannity- and Limbaugh-types were counterbalanced by such serious conservative intellectuals as Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. Today, that balance tilts decisively toward the populists and needs an intellectual counterweight. He finds hope in (wait for it) Glenn Beck. An excerpt from Hayward:

Which view comes closest to yours: The politics-as-religion analysis offered by Gabler, or Brooks' claim that Republican shock-jocks receive too much attention from GOP and media brass? Can Glenn Beck save the Republican Party? Or is the conservative movement on the right track? Post your comments below.

I was in high school when I learned that "fungible" was a concept in economics, not something that could give rise to a fungus infection. The idea worked its way into non-economic political discourse in the 1980s, when the Supreme Court ruled that the fact that students at a private college received federal aid didn't mean that all of the college's operations were subject to civil rights laws.

Critics of the decision -- who persuaded Congress to change the law -- argued that federal funds for individual students freed up money that the discriminatory college otherwise might have provided for scholarships. The fungibility of funds meant that the taxpayers were indirectly but actually subsidizing a refusal to comply with civil rights laws.

Flash forward to the current debate over healthcare reform. Catholic bishops and other pro-life advocates don't want federal funds to pay for abortions, primarily  because it would spare anti-abortion taxpayers from subsidizing a procedure they consider immoral. It isn't just bishops, or conservative bishops, who endorse what President Obama has called the "tradition" of not using government funds to pay for abortion. Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, an influential liberal group zealously supportive of health reform, has said that "maintaining current policy of not using federal taxpayer funds for abortions and retaining responsible conscience protections for health care workers is critical to achieving the broad consensus necessary for reform."

As Obama has argued, the major proposals being considered by Congress don't overturn the so-called Hyde Amendment, which bars federal financing of abortions. But pro-lifers, including the Catholic bishops, have been suspicious. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved an amendment that would allow health care plans to cover abortion so long as they were funded by premiums paid by the insured, not by federal funds.

This where fungibility rears its head, as Sarah Palin would say. By reducing the cost of other medical services, the bill would enhance a woman's ability to buy abortion coverage. Likewise, federal support for private plans will support abortion services by reducing a plan's overall cost, making it easier for a woman to pay for abortion coverage with her own money. The archbishop of Philadelphia ridiculed this as "a legal fiction, a paper separation between federal funding and abortion.”

He has a point. The problem is that the "fungibility" argument proves too much. Even without healthcare legislation, federal assistance to an individual or family -- such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps or a federal education grant  -- frees up private funds that can be spent on an insurance plan that covers abortion -- or an abortion itself. In a welfare state, the only way completely to eliminate government involvement in abortion is to recriminalize it, and that's not going to happen.

President Obama threw a party at the White House this morning for new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. He shouldn't have invited her, and she shouldn't have come. Her appearance exacerbated the politicization of the court that led so many Republican senators to vote against her.

In celebrating what he called an "extraordinary moment for our nation," Obama didn't pressure Sotomayor to vote in a particular way. Still, it was unseemly for the president to treat Sotomayor's confirmation as a political trophy. The victory party undermined the symbolism of Sotomayor's swearing-in at the court rather than at the White House.

Until her confirmation, Sotomayor was in a sense a creature of the executive branch headed by Obama. Once she was confirmed and sworn in, she was (and is) an officer of an independent branch of government that is often called upon to overturn the actions of the other two branches.  

One of my favorite scenes in "Becket," the biopic about the 12th century saint, is when Richard Burton as Becket realizes that he can't serve simultaneously as archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England.  Never mind that he owes his appointment as archbishop to King Henry II (played by Peter O'Toole). I wouldn't push the church-state analogy too far, but Sotomayor also may be called upon to reprimand her patron. With that in mind, she should have spent this morning poring over briefs.

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

-- Michael McGough

The Times editorial board offers a mouth-watering stack today, weighing in on the fights over legislation to require restaurant chains to post the calorie counts of menu items and lawsuits to force Denny's to reveal the sodium content of its offerings and hot dog packages to carry warning labels. The board scoffs at the lawsuits, but supports posting the caloric content at chains with more than 20 restaurants of the same name (think McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, etc.). It's already been done in New York and it's now on the books in California. The board notes that it might cost restaurants extra to reprint menus or offer lower-calorie foods, but says, "tough luck."

On the op-ed side of the pages, two top officials in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration -- legal affairs secretary Andrea Lynn Hoch and Department of Finance chief counsel Jennifer Rockwell -- contend that the governor's use of line-item veto to make deeper spending cuts than the legislature approved was well within the law.

Lionel Beehner, formerly a senior writer for the Council on Foreign Relations, gives his insights on tourism in Kurdistan and his recent visit to the region in Northern Iraq:

Finally, columnist Gregory Rodriguez endorses the strategy for combating religious fundamentalism outlined by authors Peter L. Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld. Their approach? Striking a balance between doubt and certainty, and using our democratic freedoms to "fight back" against fundamentalist beliefs. 

Photo credit: Susana Gonzalez / Bloomberg

Dale Neumann was convicted Saturday of killing his 11-year-old daughter, Madeline, because he prayed for her instead of taking her to a hospital when her undiagnosed diabetes got so bad that she couldn't eat, drink, walk or speak. She died on the floor of her rural Wisconsin home with her father, mother and a group of people praying for her healing. Neumann says he was simply putting his faith first and following the will of God, but a jury found him guilty of second-degree reckless homicide. Neumann's wife, who similarly said her daughter's sickness was a "test of faith," was convicted earlier this year.

This event raises serious questions about the conflict between individual rights and governmental power, just as abortion does. Both involve innocent and dependent lives with no real power to contest a parent's choices. And unlike Wisconsin, most states give immunity to those who rely only on faith healing and refuse medical care. Those governments are essentially recusing themselves from any duty to protect the Madeline Neumanns in their communities. According to Wayne Purdin, blogging at Examiner.com,

In 1998, a study of religion-based medical neglect in the journal Pediatrics documented 172 child fatalities over 20 years among 23 religious denominations in 34 states. Faith Assembly in the Midwest led with 64 deaths. The Christian Science Church was second, with 28. The study called the cases the "tip of the iceberg," since many are never reported. The vast majority of these deaths were avoidable.

Where should the line be drawn between parents' religious rights and the government's power to protect the defenseless? Isn't this a Right to Life issue? And if it is, where are the Right to Lifers?

--Catherine Lyons

Photo: Dale Neumann smiles at his defense attorney Jay Kronenwetter during his trial in Wausau, Wis., on July 28. Credit: AP Photo / The Daily Herald, Corey Schjoth