The overwhelming success of the Benedict XVI papal visit was a personal victory for New York Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who invested more personal capital into that event than the Chinese government has invested into the Beijing Olympics. Before he became pope, Joseph Ratzinger had been actively booed and heckled by New Yorkers, especially Jews, but the reception in April bordered on universal adulation, without even the suggestion of any serious protest. And don’t think the Pope didn’t know who to thank for the sea change. That guy riding next to him in the Popemobile was Egan. The two of them are soulmates. If there’s such a thing as a more doctrinaire hardass than Joseph Ratzinger, it’s Edward Egan. The good news is that Egan wants to retire now. He put the Pope in Yankee Stadium during the Yankees season. Now we’ll have to call it The House That the Other Ruth Built. How could he ever top that?

Let My People Bray

The “I Believe” license plate, with a cross and a stained glass window on it, is being proposed by Christians in the Florida legislature, and opposed by the state’s Civil Liberties Union, but what was lost in the media’s “culture wars” coverage is that this would be only one of about 100 specialty plates that are already in existence. Most of them say stuff like “Gators Rule” and “Army Proud” and “Choose Life” and other equally annoying statements of egotistical brand identification, the purpose of which is to gain an additional $25 a year in revenue for the state. I strongly endorse the efforts of Christians—specifically Faith in Teaching, Inc., of Orlando, which came up with the design and got Representative Edward Bullard to propose it—to advertise their heartfelt pharisaism on the rear ends of their ozone-depleting automobiles like every other Floridian.

Church-State Fusion

When a priest was elected president of Paraguay last month, he was technically not a priest. Fernando Lugo resigned from the priesthood as well as his bishopric to get around the constitutional ban on church officials running for the office that held by the original Latin American strongman, Alfredo Stroessner, for 35 years, and more recently has been passed down to the legatees of Stroessner’s Colorado Party. Lugo is the kind of ruler likely to instill fear into both the defeated Coloradans and the Pope. Even though the Vatican has refused to accept Lugo’s resignation, he’s the kind of Liberation Theologian that the current Pope crusaded against and cited for heresy all through the 1980s, along with his designated Latin American hitman, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo of Colombia. Lugo, instead of being recruited by the Vatican like Trujillo, lived for 11 years among the peasants of San Pedro, the poorest region in the poorest South American country. He speaks Guarani, the most common indigenous language of Paraguay. He keeps a picture of Che Guevara in his office. When he makes speeches, he’s fond of bringing a white dove with him, and releasing it into the air. And he wears open-toed sandals. Memo to the State Department: don’t send Dick Cheney to any meetings with this guy.

Now We’re Leaking Faith Documents?

The Associated Press was reporting over the weekend that “conservative Christian leaders” will release a “manifesto” (strange choice of words for a faith document) on Wednesday that amounts to a mea culpa for getting too involved in culture-war politics. Somebody leaked a draft of it to the AP writers, who were sufficiently impressed by its source and called the document “starkly self-critical.” The best line in the draft: “Faith loses its independence when Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology.” Supposedly 80 evangelicals signed it, but a few quick phone calls revealed that the high-profile ones did not. Don’t look for Dobson or Land on the press release that will be handed out in Washington on the day after we know how much damage to Obama’s campaign was caused by press coverage of a liberal Christian leader. What am I missing here?