The Washington Post National Weekly - September 20, 2015

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

The Francis Factor The pope, who visits the United States this week, is popular and has made waves, but he’s still a bit of a mystery.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Scott Walker

by Chris Cizilla

S

cott Walker and his campaign team must have had Wednesday night’s GOP debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library circled on the calendar ever since he turned in a decidedly forgettable effort at the first gathering of 2016 candidates back in August.

Amid his sliding poll numbers — he fell from 10 percent to 2 percent over the past month in one survey — the debate offered Walker a perfect chance to counter the “he’s fading” narrative that had taken hold in the race.

Which makes his flat and largely nonexistent performance all the more troubling for him. Despite a relatively central location (next to Jeb Bush, two podiums down from front­runner Donald Trump), the Wisconsin governor struggled to stand out. His best line — “We don’t need an apprentice in the White House. We have one right now” — came in the debate’s first minutes, after which Walker seemed to shrink from the stage. He had the least screen time of any candidate.

In the wake of the debate came whispers that Walker needed to do something drastic — like jettison members of his senior staff — to show that he could reverse course.

He insisted he needed to do no such thing (always the kiss of death) and said no one except reporters had asked him about it. Nevertheless, he pulled back from most early­voting states Thursday and vowed to focus on Iowa.

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PATRICK T. FALLON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Scott Walker, for falling down rather than breaking through, you had the worst week in Washington.

Congrats, or something. n

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CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD MONEY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS COVER STORY

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ON THE COVER Pope Francis waves from the popemobile during World Youth Day celebrations in 2013 in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph

by BUDA MENDES, Getty Images

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Clashes over Trump grow uglier

KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Increasing anger between supporters and critics at his rallies is concerning the GOP BY

M ARY J ORDAN

dallas — Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric is leading to increasingly open anger between his supporters and detractors, which hasn’t hurt the GOP front-runner’s poll numbers but is raising questions about potential long-term damage to the Republican Party’s hopes of attracting minority voters.

In Dallas on Monday night, Trump nearly filled the 20,000seat American Airlines Center with wildly cheering supporters, while outside hundreds of protesters marched, holding “Dump

Trump” and “Stop the Hate” signs.

Tempers flared as the two groups met on the sidewalk outside the arena after the rally. Police on horseback moved in to separate them as they shouted at each other.

“Go back to Mexico!” yelled one Trump supporter, then another, then more, at Latino protesters.

“You can’t vote anyway!” shouted another person.

Jennifer Moreno, a nursing student and the daughter of Mexican immigrants, shot back that she is a U.S. citizen and has every intention of not only voting against Trump but getting others to do the

same. “This is our country, too.

Trump is stirring up hate.”

The increasingly ugly tenor of such clashes has brought even sharper focus to Trump’s rhetoric, which Republicans and Democrats alike have described as divisive and even racist. It has elevated the anxiety of Republicans trying to grow the party’s appeal — not shrink it. And it has left many of them wondering whether the conflicts could get worse before they get better.

Trump drew sustained applause Monday when he called city policies that shield undocumented immigrants from deportation

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event aboard the retired ship USS Iowa in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

His rallies often draw counterprotests outside the venue.

“sanctuary cities crap” and promised that if he is in the Oval Office, “They will be out of here so frickin’ fast!”

Tamara Estes, 54, a bus driver from Valley View, Tex., drove an hour and a half to Monday’s rally because she finally sees a candidate who is talking about what she cares about. She said she is fed up with thousands of “illegals” having babies in Texas hospitals and leaving hard-working American taxpayers, including her, with the bill.

Trump is “willing to take the heat” that comes with talking about race and immigration, she

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

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POLITICS said. And the way he does, she added, “shows a bold arrogance that is very appealing.”

Estes said too many Mexican immigrants “are not assimilating.”

She can’t even talk to the children of immigrants across the street, she said, because they say to her, “I no speak English.”

“I mean, these kids go to U.S. schools! For years! And don’t speak English,” she said. “Donald Trump calls a duck a duck. He is right that a lot of the illegals are criminals, they are driving the wrong way on highways and causing crashes, and [they are] in gangs.”

Many others who lined up for hours in 90-degree heat to hear Trump applauded him for “not being bothered about political correctness” and addressing issues important to “mainstream America.”

“I think white people think their sovereignty has been infringed on,” said Mark Jones, 65, a Dallas-area resident who fixes air conditioners. He said he works with many Hispanics who work hard. Some even served in the U.S. military in Iraq, he said, but many Texans see the huge numbers of Hispanics moving into their state and “they think their country is changing.”

Carlos Quintanilla, president of Accion America, a civil rights group in Texas and an organizer of Monday’s anti-Trump rally, said the candidate’s relentless talk about “anchor babies,” building a huge wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants has led to a flood of “ugly” anti-Hispanic talk on the radio.

Quintanilla said others are emboldened to insult Hispanics when they see Trump eject Jorge Ramos, one of the most respected Hispanic journalists in the United States, from one of his news conferences, saying, “Go back to Univision,” or they hear him belittle those who speak Spanish.

Trump critics said that when Trump uses phrases such as “the blacks,” he sounds like an out-oftouch “Mad Men” throwback, if not Archie Bunker. “The Hispanics love me!” — a phrase he used — signals that Hispanics are “other,” “different and maybe lesser,” said Janet Murguia, president of National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights group.

MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS

“Our experience with people who talk like that is what follows is never good,” she said.

Less clear is whether Trump is inciting his supporters on purpose.

Claudia Rankine, an English professor at University of Southern California who has written about social justice, says Trump is deliberately “playing a game with language.”

He doesn’t use the most offensive words, but “the tone you take is in recognition of your audience, and in this case, he is appealing to people in our culture who hold racist and sexist beliefs.

“The rest of us should understand it is a performance,” she said, adding, “He doesn’t care if it upsets some people, because those people are not his intended audience.”

Trump has said it is absurd to call him racist, and he insists he will win the black and Hispanic vote. Neither he nor the country has “time for political correctness,” he has said. He has mocked those who criticize his “tone,” saying that it is a silly distraction when the country has much more important issues to worry about.

Nevertheless, some critics say Trump is responsible for the effects of his rhetoric. Mike Castillo, 55, a truck driver who came to the United States when he was a child, is among them.

“It’s not good,” Castillo said, standing with a group of nearly all

Latino protesters outside the arena, that “we are here and all the white people are inside cheering him on.”

One thing is clear: The rhetoric is not going away, and it is making other Republicans uncomfortable at a time when the GOP is trying to expand its appeal to African American and Latino voters.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, one of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination, said Trump is “divisive and mean-spirited.” According to Politico, he went as far to say in New Hampshire that “those are dog-whistle terms; he knows what he’s doing. These are very divisive terms. If we’re going to win elections, we need to be much more open, open and optimistic, rather than sending signals that prey on people’s angst.”

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the past three Republican administrations, said in an interview this past week that the clashes between Trump supporters and protesters “are a harmful, radiating effect of Donald Trump that is difficult to contain, whether it’s with ethnic groups, with women, or more broadly, with the public.

“The Republican Party, as represented by Trump, isn’t an inviting and hopeful party. It’s angry, it’s vulgar, it’s quasi-nihilistic. And it’s not a pretty sight.”

There is good reason for the angst. Polls consistently show

A man aims a stick at a piñata resembling Donald Trump during a demonstration before the start of the second Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., on Wednesday.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Trump leading the pack of GOP candidates in surveys of likely Republican voters — but polling miserably with minorities.

Eight in 10 African Americans and Hispanics view him unfavorably, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC poll.

Even more discomfiting for some is the appeal Trump has among organizations known to harbor white supremacist views.

“He’s on the verge of articulating a widespread angst among white Americans that the world their grandchildren will live in will be hostile to them,” said Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a think tank “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States and around the world.”

A smattering of people who call themselves “white nationalists” or supporters of “white identity politics” have shown up at Trump rallies or voiced support for him.

David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, praised Trump’s candidacy as “a great thing” and supported Trump’s call to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Asked about Duke’s support, Trump told Bloomberg News, “I don’t need his endorsement. I certainly don’t want his endorsement. I don’t need anybody’s endorsement.”

As more and more protesters show up at Trump events carrying signs with such words as “racist” and “hate,” the potential for more conflict remains.

Supporters say such protests are an unfair ploy to discredit Trump. Some are even calling the protesters racist — because they are anti-white.

The divide was illustrated by two very different attendees of the Trump event in Dallas. Outside with the protesters, Seth Gomez held a sign that read “Trump=Hate.” He said it was “not presidential” for a candidate “to stereotype people and associate crime with skin color.”

But Michael Oehlers, who took his eighth-grade son, Cody, out of school to hear Trump, said he admired the businessman for “speaking his mind.” In an era when people take offense easily, he said, “I like that Trump calls illegal aliens ‘illegal’ and not ‘undocumented.’ ” n

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POLITICS

Team Clinton’s plan: Don’t panic BY

A NNE G EARAN

cedar falls, iowa — These

days, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her senior campaign staff sound like old-school investment advisers when the market has a stomach-lurching drop: Remain calm, they say. Don’t panic. And stick to the plan.

Faced with her worst poll ratings since she was losing badly to Barack Obama in 2008, Clinton is doubling down on a strategy laid out months ago. As drawn up by campaign manager Robby Mook and others when Clinton was seemingly invincible, the prospectus is a detailed month-bymonth, state-by-state strategy to roll out serious policy proposals, raise a prohibitive amount of money, lock up Democratic delegates and woo members of her party’s disaffected left.

It was designed to win what had been presumed to be a somewhat dull primary without looking too presumptuous. Now Clinton has a full-on fight on her hands against a surging Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and faces the possibility that Vice President Biden will make a late entrance.

Biden sits at roughly 20 percent in recent polls, and most of that support appears to come from erstwhile Clinton voters.

“You are supposed to have an election. You are supposed to have a contest,” Clinton said this past week during an event at the University of Northern Iowa. “In the Democratic primaries and caucuses, you have to try to earn every single person’s support.

That is what I intend to do.”

Clinton’s tumble in national surveys, including in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, owes partly to fallout from the fracas surrounding her State Department e-mails and partly to an anti-establishment sentiment fueling Sanders’s rise. More than 7 in 10 Americans say people in politics cannot be trusted. More than 6 in 10 say the political system does not work.

Clinton still leads among Democrats nationally, but for the first time her support has dropped

SCOTT MORGAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Her poll numbers are dropping fast among key groups, but campaign is focused on end game below 50 percent in Post-ABC surveys. The biggest decline was among white women, a mainstay of Clinton’s bid to become the first female U.S. president.

Press secretary Brian Fallon describes the campaign’s approach as “heads down, marching forward, onward and upward.”

If that does not sound very cheerful, Fallon and other Clinton aides and associates suggest patience and a deep breath.

The original plan assumed that Clinton would dispatch a challenge from her left and move on to the general election, where her center-left views, long résumé and national security credentials would have broad appeal.

Although Mook and others warned against over-confidence, most backers did not seriously contemplate that Clinton could lose to the dark-horse Sanders in New Hampshire or Iowa, as current polling suggests she could, or that her perceived weakness would be an invitation to Biden.

Clinton has an eye on the general election and Republican front-runner Donald Trump even as the current concern is more about the comparison to Sanders.

Her campaign released a new web video Wednesday, styled after Trump’s former “Celebrity Apprentice” show, that ridiculed Republican candidates ahead of their second debate.

In Cedar Falls, Clinton declined a student’s invitation to discuss Sanders’s political views, which are far to Clinton’s left, and said she is looking forward to the first Democratic debate next month. She is holding intraparty fire until then, despite some pressure from antsy supporters.

The idea is that when the dust settles — on the Democratic side and in the raucous Republican primary — Clinton will stand as the best-qualified and most electable candidate. The person, in the words of one Clinton adviser, who looks like the grown-up.

The campaign is telling anx-

Hillary Rodham Clinton attends an event Monday at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

ious supporters that the worst of the e-mail storm has probably passed, while also acknowledging that their initial response — nothing to see here, folks — was a serious mistake.

“We anticipate it will come up less and less, because she’s answered the questions,” Fallon said. “We recognize that this will be a subject we need to address, and we will do so,” he added. “We feel that while the topic won’t completely go away, it won’t obstruct or block out our other messages about the other issues that matter as time goes by.”

It is not yet clear whether Clinton’s troubles have dampened the pace of her fundraising, which hit a record $46 million in her first three months. The next Federal Election Commission report is due Sept. 30; Fallon said the campaign is comfortable with the fundraising numbers but declined to provide details.

Privately, Clinton friends are lowering expectations for the next report, noting the usual summer slowdown and the fact that her most eager supporters probably already gave in the spring.

The e-mail issue and falling poll numbers are nothing Clinton cannot manage, several donors and supporters said. But two major donors — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly — said they have told the campaign they felt blindsided by the e-mail issue and are uneasy about where an FBI investigation into the security of Clinton’s system could lead.

Others were more sanguine, though still critical of Clinton’s response to the problem.

“The Clintons have faced far worse crises. This is a blip,” said John Morgan, a major Florida fundraiser and host of one of Clinton’s early fundraising parties in the spring. “The problem was not dealing with it quickly. If someone walks in and says, ‘Stand up so I can see what’s under the cushion,’ you stand up and let them look. She should have stood up immediately because there is nothing under the cushion and never was.” n

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POLITICS: COMMENTARY

KLMNO WEEKLY

A new stage in the GOP presidential race

By Dan Balz

simi valley, calif. — Something unusual

happened here Wednesday when the Republican presidential candidates met for their second debate: For the first time since he joined the race, Donald Trump wasn’t the commanding presence on the stage.

Not that Trump wasn’t the Trump whom Americans have seen nonstop on cable television. Among the first words out of his mouth was a personal and unprovoked attack on Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. He sparred at times angrily with Carly Fiorina over who was the better business executive. He and Jeb Bush, standing next to each other, had repeated exchanges.

But at other times, particularly when the discussion shifted from what Trump has said about the others to issues of domestic and foreign policy, the candidate who has dominated the summer and leads the polls was far less a force.

Unlike the debate in Cleveland last month, the other candidates arrived with no illusions about Trump’s candidacy — they take him seriously now — or the need for them to step up and show their own mettle, both in challenging Trump and in displaying their own attributes, records and character.

Over three hours of lively, entertaining and at times angry debate, Trump was put on the defensive as much as he tried to stay on the offensive. Whether that will change the course of the nomination battle won’t be known for some weeks. After the last debate, despite missteps, Trump rose rather than fell. But Wednesday showed that his rivals are ready to engage him, when necessary, both from long distance and to his face.

This was billed in advance as the debate that would highlight the current state of the Republican race, one in which the outsiders — Trump, Ben Carson and Fiorina — enjoy more than 50 percent of support against the insiders — the eight current or former elected politicians.

Instead, it became a classic of debates past — poke the front-runner. It was Trump against the field, or rather the field against Trump.

The ebb and flow of the debate, guided by CNN’s Jake Tapper with the help of CNN’s Dana Bash and conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, oscillated between personal exchanges, many of them with Trump involved, and discussions of issues.

When immigration came to the fore, Trump was at the center of the debate, defending his hard-line stance that calls for deporting the millions of undocumented immigrants and challenging the 14th Amendment over the issue of birthright citizenship.

Bush fired back at him over those proposals.

He invoked Ronald Reagan’s optimistic vision

MARK J. TERRILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

in contrast to what he said was Trump’s approach “that everything is coming to an end.”

He said Trump’s proposals would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tear families and communities apart.

Trump disputed Bush’s comment that those who have come illegally came out of an act of love. “This is not an act of love,” Trump said.

“He’s weak on immigration. He doesn’t get my vote.”

Trump and Fiorina clashed memorably several times. Once was over their business records, and it was as pointed and sharp as any during the evening. He accused her of running Hewlett-Packard into the ground. She accused him of running up “mountains of debt” and filing for bankruptcy four times.

The other exchange, one everyone was waiting for, came when Fiorina was asked about Trump’s comment, captured in a Rolling Stone profile, denigrating her looks by saying, “Look at that face!”

Trump had earlier explained that he was talking about her “persona,” not her looks.

Asked about that, Fiorina said acidly, “I think women all over this country heard very clearly

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina got several big applauses during the CNN Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday in Simi Valley, Calif.

what Mr. Trump said.” The audience responded with one of the biggest rounds of applause of the night. Trump’s response: “She’s got a beautiful face, and I think she’s a beautiful woman.”

Fiorina was the new addition to the main debate stage, after her performance in the undercard debate in Cleveland, and she came with the clear intention of making a memorable impression. She got another applausemeter moment with a ringing statement about Planned Parenthood and sought to project strength and confidence surrounded by 10 men in suits and ties.

One reason Trump seemed a less commanding presence was that on some issues, he offered little substance beyond reassurances that he would be strong and tough, a negotiator par excellence and someone who would grasp the complexities of national security issues as president — and would find experts to help him.

Challenged on how he would deal with the Russians putting military resources into Syria, he said he would know how to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin, an answer that others seemed to find unsatisfying.

Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who displayed his fluidity with foreign policy, challenged him implicitly on how much he knew about the world, saying he would be happy to have a longer discussion of the issues to see the depth of Trump’s knowledge.

The prelude to Wednesday’s debate was strikingly different than the buildup before Cleveland. Then, many of the other candidates still were clinging to the belief — or hope — that Trump would quickly burn himself out, that his candidacy would prove a short-lived, if entertaining, sideshow.

By this month, that belief had disappeared.

Trump’s continued strength atop the Republican field has forced all the others to rethink his potential and its impact on their hopes of winning the nomination. Some still believe he will sink under his own weight, and if they were not prepared to abandon their original strategies, they recognized that they had to make adjustments.

Last month’s debate in Cleveland marked the beginning of the end of a long exhibition season. Wednesday’s forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library signaled a turn to the post-Labor Day phase of the campaign that, historically, brings more intensive campaigning, more debates, sharper engagement and heightened stakes for the candidates.

It was clear throughout the evening that everyone on the stage understood what’s now at stake. Trump may continue to dominate the polls, but if Wednesday’s debate was any indication, he can expect a bumpier ride in the weeks and months ahead. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Is OxyContin safe for children?

BY

B RADY D ENNIS

A

fter Lynn Brown’s daughter, Amanda, was diagnosed in 1999 with a childhood form of brain cancer, the 16-year-old endured multiple surgeries, weeks of radiation, months of chemotherapy and numerous blood transfusions — not to mention intense pain.

Doctors initially prescribed morphine, and when that stopped working they switched to a relatively new drug: OxyContin.

“It made her treatments bearable,” said Brown, who lives in Miami. “I knew it was a powerful drug. . . . But you have to weigh the circumstances. You have to deal with the situation you’re given.”

Doctors weaned Amanda off the potent narcotic after several months. Now 32, she has survived cancer, graduated from college and recently gotten married.

She is the sort of patient the Food and Drug Administration had in mind last month when it approved OxyContin, an extended-release form of the opioid painkiller oxycodone, for children as young as 11 who need “daily, round-the-clock, long-term” pain relief that can’t be treated adequately with other medications.

The decision was welcomed by some pediatricians and pain specialists, but it also provoked fierce criticism. On social media, people accusedtheFDAofactingirresponsibly and putting the interests of OxyContin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, ahead of the welfare of children, who they worried would become addicted to the drug.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), whose state has been especially hardhitbytheepidemicofprescription drug and heroin abuse, wrote a scathing letter, telling the FDA it “should be absolutely ashamed of itself for this reckless act.”

The FDA, in its defense, says its recent approval for 11- to 16-yearolds wasn’t intended to expand the use of opioids in children but rather to give doctors better guidelines about how to use OxyContin safely in pediatric patients. Doctors can already prescribe medications any way they see fit, and many physi-

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LYNN BROWN

Despite FDA approval of new use, critics warn against addiction cians have long given OxyContin and other potent painkillers “off label” to children suffering from cancer or other trauma.

“We understand there is a terrible problem with opioid abuse and addiction,” said Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “But this is about evidence-based medicine for children — seriously ill children who are suffering pain.”

Woodcock noted that nearly two decades ago, Congress created incentives for manufacturers to conduct more studies of drugs in children, in part so doctors would know when it is appropriate to give a medication to a child, how to properly dose pediatric patients and what side effects to expect.

She said the effort has led to new labeling on 535 drugs to include pediatric indications, and OxyContin is merely one example.

The FDA’s reasoning has done little to mollify critics such as Andrew Kolodny, a New York psychiatrist and director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing.

Kolodny said the agency failed to sufficiently weigh the risk of addiction, which is greater in young brains that aren’t fully developed. And he says the new approval will lead Purdue, the drug’s manufacturer, to market OxyContin more broadly.

“You’re talking about a privately

held company where executives have faced criminal charges for the way they marketed OxyContin,” he said. “You’re giving a company with a very bad track record permission to market this drug for children. I think they’re going to take advantage of that.”

He said the agency should have convened a public advisory committee hearing to consider the issue, given the crisis involving the abuse of prescription painkillers.

He said there are rare circumstances when giving opioids to children is warranted, but he said the FDA’s decision does nothing to expand access to those patients, given that doctors already are free to prescribe the drug in those situations.

Meanwhile, Purdue insists it has no plans to market the drug for a pediatric population. In a separate letter to Manchin recently, Purdue’s chief medical officer, Gail Cawkwell, made a similar vow.

“We would like to assure you that Purdue will not promote to pediatriciansorotherphysiciansthenew pediatric dosing and safety information for OxyContin,” Cawkwell wrote. “This company accepted responsibility for its past actions, and since that time Purdue has led our industry in the development of technologies and programs intended to combat the abuse and misuse of prescription drugs.”

Purdue and several of its then-

Above left, Lynn Brown and her daughter, then 16, during Amanda’s illness and treatment. Amanda’s brain cancer caused pain so severe that her doctors switched her from morphine to OxyContin.

At right, Amanda Shugart is now 32, a college graduate and a recent newlywed.

current and former executives in 2007 pleaded guilty to falsely marketing OxyContin in a way that downplayed the drug’s risk of addiction and potential for abuse.

The company and the executives paid roughly $635 million to resolve criminal and civil charges related to the misbranding.

Sharon Hertz, director of the FDA’s division of anesthesia, analgesia and addiction products, said the FDA is requiring follow-up studies by Purdue on how OxyContin is used in young patients.

“What we will be watching for over time is whether the prescribing practices are changing, and if those changes are associated with undesirable outcomes,” she said.

Gary Walco, director of pain medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said he doesn’t see the FDA decision on OxyContin as inherently good or bad. Pediatricians and patients, he said, benefit from research on when and how to prescribe medications. “I am a firm believer in relying on data to drive clinical practice,” he said.

At the same time, Walco said, “We have learned from the adult world that opioids are often prescribed inappropriately. . . . It is critical that anyone prescribing this medication to children and adolescents be intimately familiar with the limitations of the data and the nuances of prescribing.”n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

9

NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

In 500 years, never this dry BY

D ARRYL F EARS

R

esearchers knew California’s drought was already a record breaker when they set out to find its exact place in history, but they were surprised by what they discovered: It has been 500 years since what is now the Golden State has been this dry.

California is in the fourth year of a severe drought with temperatures so high and precipitation so low that rain and snow evaporate almost as soon as they hit the ground. A research paper released Monday said an analysis of blue oak tree rings in the state’s Central Valley showed that the amount of mountain snow California relies on for moisture hasn’t been so low since the 1500s. That was around the time when European explorers landed in what became San Diego, when Columbus set off on a final voyage to the Caribbean, when King Henry VIII was alive.

A team of researchers embarked on the study in April when state officials announced they had found “no snow whatsoever” in the Sierra Nevada mountains for the first time in 75 years of measuring. The research showed the level of snowpack is actually the lowest it has been in five centuries.

Mountain snowpack provides 30 percent of California’s annual water supply when it melts and flows to rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs. Levels of water in those bodies are nearing historic lows.

“The results were astonishing,” Valerie Trouet, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who was a senior author for the study published in the journal Nature. “We knew it was an all-time low over a historical period, but to see this as a low for the last 500 years, we didn’t expect that.

There’s very little doubt about it.”

In a statement, Nature said the “findings highlight the critical condition” of California’s reservoirs and groundwater, where water the state needs for municipalities and agriculture is stored. Both of those sources are slowly being drained, with little precipitation to replenish the rivers and lakes

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

Surprised researchers discover that California hasn’t been this bad off since the 1500s that supply them.

The small amount of moisture stored in plants and the soil is quickly evaporating into the state’s dry atmosphere, exposing the parched ground to lightning strikes that spark wildfires. California has experienced about a thousand more wildfires this fire season compared with last, including two that are now raging in the northern part of the state.

California is having its “secondbusiest season in a decade,” said StantonFlorea,aspokesmanforthe Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region, which manages 21 million acres of wildlands in California.

In April, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) ordered the state’s first mandatory water cut for metropolitan areas.

He announced the restriction from a dry patch of grass in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe that normally would have been wet from melting snow.

Since that day, the state’s 400 water utilities have implemented water cuts of up to 35 percent in

some areas, and farmers who long enjoyed the right to freely take water from rivers to water crops and hydrate livestock gave up a quarter of those rights for fear that the state would restrict them even more. Federal and state officials have used convoys to truck salmon and other fish from one part of the state to another, fearing a mass die-off if they tried to migrate to the Pacific Ocean in rivers that are completely dry in places.

And the news keeps getting worse. A study by scientists at NASA and Columbia University said California was one of several states in the Southwest facing a mega-drought that could last up to 30 years if greenhouse gas emissions are not dramatically curtailed by 2050. A study by scientists at Stanford University said a future of more-frequent drought in California is a near certainty because temperatures are increasing at a time when precipitation rates are steady, allowing heat to overwhelm the moisture. And an-

Cows are obscured by dust on a dairy farm in Tulare, Calif., in July. The ongoing drought has created arid conditions throughout the state.

other Columbia study said California’s current drought is part of a natural pattern, but humancaused climate change has made it significantly worse.

The Columbia study analyzed month-to-month climate data between 1901 and 2014 to find fluctuations in precipitation, wind, temperature and humidity. It said average temperatures in California have increased by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over 113 years. And, starting in the 1960s, heat increased with the introduction of more greenhouse gases from automobiles and other sources.

“When greenhouse gases accumulate, it’s like a bully showing up at your door to demand that you give it more and more every year,” said the study’s lead author, Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at Columbia University’s Earth Science Institute. In California, that meant more moisture evaporated from rain and from groundwater sprayed on crops in farming regions such as the Central Valley.

What they didn’t have were fresh tree samples, so Stahle of Arkansas traveled to the Central Valley and extracted a core sample from blue oak trees. Blue oaks love winter rain, and their tree rings express it with wide bands. Low periods of moisture result in narrow bands. “It’s like a bar code,” Trouet said.

Blue oaks in the valley are a long way from the Sierra Nevadas in the northern part of the state, but the same weather systems that supply rain to the low elevations where they stand result in snow in high elevations. Analyzing the new core samples and others taken in previous years, the scientists didn’t observe rings as narrow at low elevations as today’s until a period that dated from the 1500s.

“We looked at the past 500 years,” Trouet said. “This is the most extreme. It doesn’t mean this won’t happen again for another 500 years. It’s likely that this will happen more often in the future because of the low amount of precipitation combined with higher temperatures makes it likely that they will occur together more often, causing droughts.” n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

As crisis grows, ‘Syria is emptying’ b Y L IZ S LY Izmir, Turkey

A

new exodus of Syrians is fueling the extraordinary flow of migrants and refugees to Europe, as Syria’s four-year-old war becomes the driving force behind the greatest migration of people to the continent since the Second World War. Syrians account for half of the 381,000 refugees and migrants who have sought asylum in Europe so far this year, which is in turn almost a doubling of the number in 2014 — making Syrians the main component of the influx.

The continued surge prompted European nations to tighten border controls further this past week as Germany projected that in excess of a million people could arrive by year’s end.

How many more Syrians could be on the way is impossible to know, but as the flow continues, their number is rising. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, 78 percent of those who washed up on inflatable dinghies on the beaches of Greece in July were Syrian, the latest month for which figures are available.

Some were already among the 4 million refugees who have sought sanctuary in neighboring countries, but many also are coming from inside Syria, constituting what Melissa Fleming of the UNHCR called a “new exodus” from the ravaged country. They are bypassing the refugee camps and heading straight for Europe, as the fallout from a war President Obama once called “someone else’s civil war” spills far beyond Syria’s borders.

More are on the way. Syrians are piled up on the streets of the Turkish port city of Izmir waiting for a place on one of the flimsy boats that will ferry them across the sea to Greece, and they say they have friends and family following.

“Everyone I know is leaving,” said Mohammed, 30, who climbed three mountains to make his way across the Turkish border from the city of Aleppo with his pregnant wife, under fire from Turkish border guards. “It is as though all of

ALICE MARTINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Tired of waiting for a brutal civil war to end, nation’s refugees are leading the flow into Europe Syria is emptying.”

Analysts say it was inevitable it would come to this, that Syrians would eventually tire of waiting for a war of such exceptional brutality to end. At least 250,000 have been killed in four ferocious years of fighting, by chemical weapons, ballistic missiles and the barrel bombings by government warplanes that are the biggest single killer of civilians, according to human rights groups.

Men on both sides die in the endless battles between the government and rebels for towns, villages and military bases that produce no clear victory. The Islamic State kills people in the areas it controls with beheadings and other brutal punishments. The United States is leading a bombing campaign against the Islamic State but has shown scant interest in solving the wider Syrian war, which seems destined to only escalate further with the deepening involvement of Russian troops.

“Itshouldsurprise no one. Hope-

lessness abounds,” said Fred Hof, a former State Department official who is now with the Atlantic Council. “Why would any Syrian with an option to leave and the physical ability to do so elect to stay?”

There are other nationalities, too; refugees from conflict zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, alongside a small number of economic migrants from countries that include Bangladesh, Pakistan and Senegal. But overwhelmingly this is a crisis of people fleeing war, and above all, the one in Syria, Fleming said.

Ramadan Mohammed, 53, a widower who lost his leg in shelling in Aleppo in 2012, spends his days on a blanket on the street, waiting for another chance to board a boat after multiple failed attempts. It isn’t easy to climb into a flimsy dinghy with only one leg, he said, and if it sinks, as many do, he won’t be able to swim.

But he grew despondent living alone in a tent in a refugee camp in Lebanon, and he hopes he will be

Saleh, left, and Abdul-Qader were soldiers in the Syrian army until rebels overran their checkpoint in the province of Idlib last year. They deserted and now are waiting in Izmir, Turkey, to cross the sea to Greece.

able to find a job in Europe.

Mohammed Hassan, 33, fled to a refugee camp in Lebanon from the town of Yabroud outside Damascus after Hezbollah fighters captured it from rebels in 2014. He said he could no longer bear watching his three children grow up without going to school, and he plans to bring them to Europe after he has settled there.

“My wife wants me to go so that the children can get an education.”

Most making the journey are men, in part because families prefer to send their fathers and sons on the dangerous trek, to send later for their relatives after they have secured legal residency, Fleming said.

But many are young and single, escaping a war they might otherwise have to fight.

Saleh, 24, and his friend AbdulQader, 27, were soldiers in the Syrian army until rebels overran their checkpoint in Idlib last year.

They managed to get away but felt betrayed by their government’s failure to send reinforcements.

“We were with the regime, but when they didn’t come to defend us, we decided to desert,” Saleh said. The pair have been on the run since, working at occasional jobs, and now have saved enough for the trip.

Syria’s bitterly divisive politics are mostly forgotten in the dash to get to Europe.

“Syrians are disgusted by politics,” said a 24-year-old man who left Damascus this month and hopes to resume his law studies in Germany. He fought briefly with a government militia in 2013 and decided to leave Syria after he was summoned last month to join the army, part of a new, countrywide call-up of reservists that has contributed large numbers of young men from government-held areas to this latest exodus from Syria.

“I would have had to serve the regime and participate in killing civilians,” said the man, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Bashir. “Most Syrians are now convinced the war is pointless. We don’t know who is winning, and they are all just killing each other.” n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

A man-vs.-beast conflict in Pakistan

BY H AQ N AWAZ AND T IM C RAIG

K HAN

Abbottabad, Pakistan

O

sama bin Laden hid out here for months, if not years. But in the hills surrounding this town in northwestern Pakistan, residents say they face a far scarier menace than terrorists.

With descriptive stories that bring to mind mythological tales of man vs. beast, Abbottabad residents claim to be locked in a terrifying battle against Pakistan’s endangered population of leopards.

The big cats — referred to as common leopards to distinguish them from their smaller cousins, snow leopards — lurk in the Himalayan foothills.

At dusk, common leopards slink out of the mountains into the farming villages that have been steadily encroaching deeper into Pakistan’s forests.

Then, residents say, they pounce — killing at least four people and injuring several others over the past four years.

“The leopard just sucked the blood out of her, and then she was dead,” said Zakir Abbasi, 36, recounting a leopard attack in January that killed his 7-year-old niece, Saba Noor.

Embellished? That’s common in this part of Pakistan, a patchwork of communities on the country’s rugged western frontier. As news spreads from village to village, the line between fact and fable is often blurred. But with stories like these in circulation, villagers here in northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are lashing out at the leopards.

Over the past decade, dozens of leopards have been shot or poisoned in what wildlife officials fear is the systematic culling of one of Pakistan’s most threatened species. Now, officials are rushing to convince Pakistanis from rural villages — many of whom are poor and uneducated — about the need to protect even those animals they consider to be fearsome.

“The entire ecological system is being disturbed,” said Iftikhar-uzZaman, district forest officer in

HAQ NAWAZ/TWP

Leopard attacks — some real, some imagined — are prompting rural residents to action Abbottabad. “The growing human population and their intervention in the natural habitats of leopards is causing rising attacks on humans, and people are retaliating and killing the leopards.”

The precise number of common leopards remaining in Pakistan is not known, but wildlife experts suspect it’s no more than a few hundred. What’s clear, however, is that their numbers are shrinking because of Pakistan’s rapid population growth and its abysmal record of protecting forests.

About 180 million people live in Pakistan, and the United Nations expects that by 2050 that number will top 300 million. According to various studies, Pakistan has retained only 2 to 5 percent of its original tree cover, and it’s losing about 67,500 acres annually.

Small and medium-size mammals that once flourished in northern Pakistan, such as the Himalayan musk deer, are threatened. Now, hungry leopards are showing up around Abbottabad, which became famous in 2011 when the U.S. military killed bin Laden at a compound here.

On the outskirts of town, in the

scenic Galiyat Valley, villagers say the first sign of a leopard is when stray dogs and cats disappear.

Then attacks on livestock begin.

Eventually, villagers come face to face with the animals, which are naturally reclusive.

Muhammad Zafran, 45, said his father, Muhammad Jan, 65, was hospitalized for six months and eventually died after a leopard attacked him in January 2014.

“It was 7:15 p.m., in the dark of winter . . . the leopard hid in the bushes and jumped on him,” Zafran said. “My father’s right hand was bitten and his head skinned, and hair pulled out by the leopard with just one tug.”

But wildlife officials say reports of man-eating leopards are, in most cases, overblown.

Uzma Khan, director of species conservation at the World Wildlife Fund Pakistan, recently completed a doctoral dissertation that examined the circumstances behind the recent attacks.

She concluded that the leopard that killed Noor in January didn’t consume her, suggesting that the animal mistook the child for other prey. In January 2011, a reported

The children of a Pakistani village sit on the roof of a house in the early evening. People are concerned about the threat of leopards to their children and livestock and remain inside their houses after sunsets.

attack on a 35-year-old man turned out not to have been an attack at all. Instead, Khan said, the man fell and hit his head on a rock when a leopard leaped from a bush and startled him.

Khan has no record of an attack resembling the one described by Zafran, but she said non-fatal attacks were reported here in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2013.

“People are scared,” said Syed Mushtaq, 38, a social worker in Bagh, 15 miles southeast of Abbottabad. “The people move in groups with sticks and guns . . . because the leopards don’t attack groups.”

To try to protect villagers as well as leopards, officials here are urging residents to remain indoors after sunset and directing schools to dismiss their students by midafternoon.

“We are trying to educate people when it’s not safe to enter the forests, and that little children should never go into the forests alone,” Khan said. “So, we are saying, ‘You must let children go home [from school] by 2 p.m. so, if they have to walk an hour, they are home well before sunset.’ ” Several recent attacks occurred when children were crouched in the woods to relieve themselves.

Women are attacked more than men because they spend more time in the forests, Khan said.

“Women here have more responsibility for household chores like wood collection, water collection and collecting fruit,” she said.

“They have to make breakfast for their husband or children, before school, so they go into the forests early in the morning. . . . We are saying, ‘Don’t go when it’s dark.’ ” Though such messages may help to limit encounters in the short term, Khan said Pakistan’s government also needs to set aside more protected forests.

This month, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif proposed a new highway to connect Islamabad, with Murree, a resort town 40 miles southeast of Abbottabad.

The new highway — and the development it would bring — would slice through even more prime leopard habitat, Khan said. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

12

KLMNO WEEKLY

BUSINESS

Igniting a possible firestorm BY

J ESSICA C ONTRERA

“T

his, my friends, is what dreams are made of,” the bearded man says into the camera with a deep chuckle. And then he brandishes his shiny new flamethrower.

“I’m talking about git’n some for sure!” he laughs.

Yes, a flamethrower: As in, a gun that shoots flames. They are 100 percent legal — and now, easier to obtain than you ever imagined.

Mark Hoffman’s YouTube channel was mostly focused on shotguns and pistols until he got his hands on an XM42, one of two personal flamethrowers put on the market this year and the subject of his rollicking video review.

Anyone with $899 and an Internet connection can buy one.

No background checks, no permits, and, in 48 states, no regulation.

“Fire ’er up!” Hoffman hollers before blasting some grass with a 25-foot stream of ignited gasoline.

Until this year, if you wanted to own a flamethrower, you would probably have to build it yourself, or spend big on a vintage World War II-era weapon.

A Cleveland-based company called XMatter changed that in January with the X15, a $1,599 flamethrower made of a 200ounce carbon dioxide tank, a fuel tank and a liquid-shooting gun.

When the trigger is pressed, the carbon dioxide pressurizes the fuel, and the fuel is set ablaze at the gun’s tip. The flames can shoot 50 feet into the air.

Does this sound dangerous? It obviously could be in the hands of the wrong person. The flamethrowers now on the market are all ordered online, so there’s no way of knowing whether a minor, a convicted criminal or a mentally unstable person is behind the credit card number.

Hopefully, the customers are only those the manufacturers say the product is intended for: farmers, firefighters and well-trained specialists.

“Seventy percent of our market is farmers using flamethrowers

RYAN GARZA/DETROIT FREE PRESS VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Flamethrowers are legal almost everywhere, easily bought online and largely unregulated agriculturally,” said XMatter cofounder Quinn Whitehead. “The rest are fire departments, pyrotechnicians, movie special-effects companies and a lot of people in the forestry industry who are preventing wildfires” by clearing out dry brush via controlled burns.

Whitehead declined to share sales numbers. (He also declined to share his age but eventually acknowledged that public records show he and founder Mike Sammarco are both 20 years old.)

Six months after their “practical” flamethrower went for sale, a company in Michigan released the XM42, an $899 model that looks more like a toy. It is handheld, shaped like a long-barreled gun and decorated to resemble a shark.

“Most people use it just to show off to their friends, going out in the open to shoot fire in the air, or setting up stuff you want to burn,” creator Chris Byars said. “It’s like going to a target range and shoot-

ing a gun. It’s just fun to do.”

And according to XMatter’s research, it is legal to do this everywhere but Maryland, where flamethrowers are banned, and California, where they require a permit.

A spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed this: There are no federal regulations or restrictions on flamethrowers. Ironically, flamethrowers don’t qualify as “firearms.” The National Firearms Act defines a firearm as a weapon that expels a projectile by the action of an explosive, which a flamethrower does not.

Though the modern versions aren’t intended to be weapons, that’s how we’ve seen flamethrowers used in movies — from Iron Man shooting flames from his hands, to Sigourney Weaver incinerating aliens, to that very scary scene in “Project X” where an angry drug dealer lights homes, cars and SWAT team members on fire.

Chris Byars demonstrates the XM42 flamethrower in Lake Orion, Mich.

The most historically accurate portrayal of flamethrowers is one that offers a sharp reminder of just how lethal they can be. In the Omaha Beach scene in “Saving Private Ryan,” troops surround a bunker and, in seconds, ignite everything inside. Enemy soldiers come tumbling out, engulfed in flames, and are left to burn.

The Defense Department phased out incendiary weapons around the same time the United Nations banned the use of flamethrowers and napalm against civilians. Three decades later, President Obama signed that U.N. treaty on his first day in office.

He probably never imagined that the use of flamethrowers by — or against — civilians on American soil might soon be an issue. But it’s a concern voiced by opponents, whose numbers are likely to rise as the public becomes aware of the flamethrowers’ availability. So far, the only outspoken politician on the topic is Jim Fouts, the mayor of Warren, Mich., near where XM42s are manufactured.

“My greatest fear is that this could be used by terrorists,” Fouts said, specifically citing homegrown killers such as Adam Lanza, who in 2012 killed 27 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. “Imagine what an unbalanced mind would do if he had a flamethrower.”

The liquids used — gasoline, diesel fuel or napalm — are extremely flammable and could cause explosions if they leaked while the devices were in use.

The creators of the X15 and the XM42 are adamant about the quality of the sealants holding their flamethrowers together and the careful inspection of each flamethrower before distribution.

As with any other tool or weapon, defenders say, safety comes down to the person using the object.

“A gun, a screwdriver, a hammer, a flamethrower — there’s no reason they shouldn’t be allowed,” said Brian Alexander, who uses an XM42 for controlled burns on his Kansas ranch. “They’re only dangerous when used irresponsibly by the incorrect person.” n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

13

MONEY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Every country that featured Queen Elizabeth II on its currency — and when

For decades, you could bank on Queen Elizabeth BY

W EIYI C AI

T

his month, Queen Elizabeth II, who is 89, surpassed her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria as the longest-reigning monarch in British history, clocking in on Sept 9 at 63 years, 7 months and 2 days.

Over her life, Elizabeth’s portrait has appeared on bank notes on every continent. The first country to feature the queen on bills was Canada, which issued a bank note in 1935 featuring her as an 8-year-old. Canada went on to issue another bill in 1951 showing the to-be queen at 25.

After ascending to the throne in 1952, her face popped up on bank notes all over the world. The 1950s and 1960s saw the greatest number of countries circulating money featuring the queen.

Britain issued its first bank note featuring her in 1960, long after many other countries. That British note also marked the first time that a monarch had been used on a Bank of England 1-pound note.

As British colonies gained independence, they often removed her from their currencies. Jamaica, for example, put Marcus Garvey on its currency in 1966, and Bermuda redesigned its bank notes to feature local animals.

However, in at least 20 countries, the queen remains.

Canada, the first country to feature Elizabeth, has her on its latest bank note. Australia and New Zealand, both countries whose flags still incorporate the Union Jack, also feature her on currency.

NOTES: These Caribbean states include six countries and two British overseas territories: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Anguilla and Montserrat. Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana have adopted East Caribbean dollars at some point but withdrew and therefore are listed separately.

Rhodesia, Rhodesia & Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia were located in southwestern Africa. Southern Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe, and Rhodesia and Nyasaland became the independent states of Zambia and Malawi in 1963.

Up until 1973, Belize was called British Honduras. Under both names, the country has featured the queen on currency; therefore, they are listed together. n

1930

Cyprus

1940

1950

1960

’52

1970

1980

Current

’60

Current

’63

Jersey

Current

’61

Isle of Man

’68

’53 ’53

Falkland Islands

’64 Current

’60

Current

’76

St. Helena Eastern Caribbean States*

Current

’94

Guernsey

Guyana

Current

’53 ’61

Jamaica Trinidad and Tobago

’53

British Virgin Islands

’53

Barbados

’53

Belize*

’52

Bermuda

’52

Bahamas

’53

’70 ’77 ’61 ’72 Current 2009 Current

Canada ’35

Current ’71

Cayman Islands

Southern Rhodesia

’70

’56 ’52

Mauritius

’54

East Africa

’53

Seychelles

’54

Fiji

’61 ’55 ’85 ’64 ’76

’53

’12 Current

’61

Australia

Current

’67

New Zealand

’77

Solomon Islands Hong Kong

’52

Malaya & North Borneo

’53

Sri Lanka

’52

SOURCE: STANDARD CATALOG OF WORLD PAPER MONEY

Current

’64

Rhodesia Rhodesia & Nyasaland

2010

Current

’75

Great Britain

2000

’60

Gibraltar

Malta

1990

’86

’65 ’59 ’56 WEIYI CAI/THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Is the universe mathematical art?

N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARGARET W ERTHEIM

‘I A BEAUTIFUL QUESTION Finding Nature’s Deep Design

By Frank Wilczek Penguin Press. 430 pp. $29.95

s the world a work of art?”

And if it is, then “is it a successful work of art?”

Specifically, as a work of art, is the physical world “beautiful”?

These are the questions Frank Wilczek sets out to explore in his ambitious new book, “A Beautiful Question,” an impassioned text he describes as a “meditation.”

It is not jumping the gun to say that Wilczek answers all three queries in the affirmative, with resounding and almost giddying gusto. The fundamental laws of nature, he tells us, have again and again revealed an inherent beauty at the heart of the universal system. He hopes to share this beauty with his readers. For Wilczek, it is always Nature with a capital N, and here there are explicit overtones of anthropomorphism, as Nature with its creative powers is likened to human artistic legends such as Rembrandt, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

“To appreciate Nature’s art,” Wilczek tells us, “we must enter into her style with sympathy,” coming to understand not only the hallmarks of this style but also the dialect in which it is couched: mathematics. He thus offers us a history of the idea that the physical world is governed by mathematical laws, which, far from being arbitrary, seem prescribed by certain aesthetic principles, specifically symmetry, here defined as “a love of harmony, balance and proportion,” and economy, defined as “satisfaction in producing an abundance of effects from very limited means.”

The Pythagorean/Platonic impulse that Wilczek traces had its first brief flourishing in ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but not until the scientific revolution did it truly effloresce, in the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and their contemporaries. Today it culminates in a desire for a mathematical theory that would unite all the fundamental physical forces along with their associated particles.

BERTIL ERICSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Frank Wilczek likens nature’s creative powers to those of Rembrandt and Mozart.

Wilczek has played no small part in this story. In 2004, he was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics for work he did as a graduate student developing our understanding of the strong nuclear force, that operates inside protons and neutrons. Additionally, he has contributed to the theory of quantum chromodynamics and is a pioneer of supersymmetry, one of the prime candidates for a unified theory.

Wilczek is at his best when describing the contemporary theoretical underpinning of symmetry in the laws of nature. That foundation was laid a century ago by the German mathematician Emmy Noether, one of science’s great under-appreciated geniuses. A friend and contemporary of Einstein’s, Noether showed that whenever some quality in nature is conserved — such as energy or momentum — there is a corresponding mathematical symmetry. Noether, a woman who had to fight even to attend university, gave us a tool that has become one

of the most powerful guides in theoretical physics today. As Wilczek notes, the prized goal now for his colleagues is to find a theory that will unify the disparate forces and particles through a mathematical framework in which they will all be shown to be specific instances of an underlying symmetry. This is the ultimate beauty that he says nature achieves.

The idea that physics is a search for beauty is not new. Historians of science have been discussing it for at least half a century. What’s missing from Wilczek’s telling is an awareness of the historical and cultural embeddedness of the subject. He writes as if conceptions of beauty were universal: “When we find that our sense of beauty is realized in the physical world, we are discovering something about the world, but also about ourselves.” Which selves do we learn about here, and whose conceptions of beauty are we engaging?

Neither is nature’s beauty usually symmetrical. The gorgeous spectacle of thunderstorms, the sub-

lime zigzags of the Grand Canyon, the fractalized forms of clouds — none of these fit the patterns of symmetry that Wilczek celebrates.

Complexity theory has revealed that a vast range of natural phenomena are literally chaotic, the very opposite of Platonic notions of regularity. That’s one reason the discovery of chaos is so important in the history of science: It shattered certain philosophical and aesthetic preconceptions about the way nature must be.

Personally, I look forward to the synthesis Wilczek envisions. I argued 20 years ago that high-end theoretical physics is a search for a certain kind of beauty, which I happen to enjoy. But the overarching symmetry sought by unifiedfield theorists pertains only to certain facets of nature, and many advancements in physics have been made precisely by branching out from this admittedly beautiful ideal. n Wertheim is the author of “Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

15

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A masterful tale of marriage, secrets

Black, rich — and uncomfortable

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

E

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

ven from her impossibly high starting point, Lauren Groff just keeps getting better and better. Her debut novel, “The Monsters of Templeton” (2008); her stirring story collection, “Delicate Edible Birds”; and my favorite book of 2012, “Arcadia ” — all demonstrated her exquisite style and tough, heart-breaking compassion. But her new novel, “Fates and Furies,” is a clear-the-ground triumph.

Spanning decades, oceans and the whole economic scale from indigence to opulence, this novel holds within its grasp the story of one extraordinary marriage. Not yet 40, Groff nonetheless captures the complicated ways love blesses, transforms and, yes, deceives us over many years.

The novel’s title reflects its twopart structure. The first half concocts the whole blessed life of Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite.

Born “in the calm eye of a hurricane” — lucky from the start — Lotto is the adored son of a wealthy Florida family.

He’s an actor, of course, first in boarding school and then at Yale, where everybody agrees that his “Hamlet” is transcendent. “He was aware of how he appeared at every angle in the room,” Groff writes in prose that seems to sigh with both adorationandexasperation.There’s a touch of F. Scott Fitzgerald in this glamorous story of a dazzling man, so rich, so likable, so desperate to give and receive affection. Dogged by depression, subject to waves of self-pity, his confidence requires constant affirmation, which any number of friends — especially women — are eager to provide.

But this is the story of a marriage, of two people who transformed themselves and each other, and it begins, as any storybook romance should, across a crowded room. “In the doorway, suddenly, her,” Groff writes, channeling the vision of Mathilde Yoder that Lotto will shape and retell for decades. “Beauty like hers cast glimmers on the walls even across cam-

pus, phosphorescence on the things she touched.” Shirtless and glistening, he swims through the crowd, falls to his knees and shouts up at her, “Marry me!”

It’s an absurd and delightful scene, ripe with Lotto’s bravado, and it launches their legendary marriage just a few weeks later: So what if Lotto’s rich mother cuts him off? So what if he can’t get any work beyond a few bit parts? It’s only a matter of time before Broadway recognizes him, right? And till then, Lotto and Mathilde can live off their love.

What makes this so endlessly engaging is the way Groff plays the vibrant tones of love, devotion and annoyance that compose any real marriage.

This would have been plenty, more than enough to recommend “Fates and Furies” as a wry critique of the golden-boy saga, but halfway through, Groff leverages her story in a remarkable and transformative way: Turning from “Fates” to “Furies,” she presents Mathilde’s life unmediated by Lotto’s idealized vision of her. Not only do we finally learn the details of her dark history, but the novel deconstructs and reimagines the founding myths of their marriage.

Groff reenacts whole scenes from Mathilde’s point of view — not just a change of perspective but a shift in the light’s frequency that brings out details we couldn’t perceive before. Here, we see what it costs her to live with Lotto and what she gets in return, how it feels to have her stories, her efforts, her talents appropriated so unconsciously by his voracious ego.

Developments that seem irrelevant or vaguely implausible in the first half of the novel are blazingly revelatory in the second.

By the end, we understand more fully than ever the way a life can be circumscribed and bent by the contours of others’ cruelty.

“Fates and Furies” is that daring novel that seems to reach too high — and then somehow, miraculously, exceeds its own ambitions. n

T FATES AND FURIES

By Lauren Groff Riverhead. 390 pp. $27.95

NEGROLAND A Memoir

By Margo Jefferson Pantheon.

248 pp. $25

l

REVIEWED BY

R OBIN G IVHAN

he Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Margo Jefferson grew up with invaluable social currency and a sense of limitless possibility. She was an African American girl from a good family that had money, connections and expectations of excellence. She attended Chicago’s private, progressive Lab School, graduated from Brandeis and Columbia universities, and eventually worked at the New York Times.

She is an accomplished and connected cultural critic.

But along the way — and perhaps still — she has nursed her discomfort with being a child of privilege. She grew up in the rarified environment of black exceptionalism. Hers was a family of black folks who had wealth and social position. She was (mostly) protected from the sting of racism and its pernicious hacking away at self-esteem, opportunity and hope. Her father was a pediatrician, and she describes her mother as a socialite. They lived in a world of private black clubs, black entrepreneurs, black accomplishment, black elegance and black beauty.

“Negroland” is her story — and that of many black men and women who came of age at a time when keeping up appearances was a common cause and bearing witness to the first black “this” or the first black “that” inspired eyedabbing jubilation rather than a complicated sense of pride, impatience and exasperation. The tale treads briskly and fearlessly across the treacherous terrain of race, class, gender and entitlement in this tightly edited memoir that recalls her youth in 1950s and ’60s Chicago. In her storytelling, Jefferson can be at turns honest and awful, beguiling and insufferable. She is a poetic and bracing memoirist.

“Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered,” she writes. “Children in Negroland were warned that few Ne-

groes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.”

The men and women who populated her world moved with confidence and no small amount of swagger. Money allowed these black doctors, businessmen and lawyers advantages and provided them with armor against cultural slights and worse. But it was thin armor, with myriad weak spots.

In Negroland — a kind of snow globe of bliss — residents were mindful that being perceived as too successful by whites risked provoking their wrath. So they walked through life proudly but with care, treading cautiously so as never to offend. They were also aware that they served as emblems for the ways in which other blacks would be judged. They had to be good race people.

Writing a memoir is, by its very nature, an indulgent affair. And Jefferson acknowledges a certain amount of self-conscious navelgazing. Some might see her lamentations of privilege as the whining of a lucky woman. And there are moments when the slights — the anger and humiliation expressed by her father after being given a bad room at a fine hotel, for example — feel meager in the scheme of life in the 1960s and even in 2015.

But “Negroland” is not about raw racism or caricatured villains.

It is about subtleties and nuances, presumptions and slights that chip away at one’s humanity and take a mental toll.

The book is not sweeping or encyclopedic. It is lean, specific and personal. But it is also enlightening. n Givhan is The Post’s fashion critic and the author of “The Battle of Versailles.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

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OPINIONS

Hollywood’s gridiron is just fantasy football STEVE ALMOND is the author of “Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto.”

The trailer for “Concussion,” a Will Smith project due out in December, hypes the clash between forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu, who studied brain injury in football players, and the National Football League, which sought to cover up his research. “Repetitive head trauma chokes the brain,” Omalu declares. He is warned about “going to war with a corporation that owns a day of the week.”

Sony Pictures’ release of the trailer three weeks ago was no doubt a headache for league executives. They want fans focused on the excitement of the season, which swung into high gear last weekend — not on the more than 200 diagnosed concussions NFL players will suffer this year or the neurological damage some players will endure later in life.

But it turns out those league executives may have less to fear than they originally might have.

As hacked Sony e-mails reveal, studio execs and the film’s crew discussed ways to alter the movie to avoid incurring the NFL’s wrath. Rather than dramatizing the “concerted effort of deception and denial” related to concussions, in the words of the nearly 5,000 former players who sued the NFL in federal court, the script was massaged — allegedly — to spotlight the intrepid doctor who became a whistleblower.

“We’ll develop messaging with the help of N.F.L. consultant to ensure that we are telling a dramatic story and not kicking the hornet’s nest,” one Sony executive pledged.

If the studio did indeed soften its approach, that decision represents more than a capitulation to the sacred cow (or bull) that is pro football. It’s the latest example of the powerful symbiosis between the dream merchants of Hollywood and the ones who preside over America’s most popular and profitable

sport. For years, filmmakers have used the violence of football, and the threat of serious brain injuries specifically, as a dramatic hook. A familiar pattern plays out: The audience is teased with the possibility of on-the-field death or paralysis, then magically relieved of that burden.

Consider the arc of “Heaven Can Wait,” a critically acclaimed 1978 comedy. Warren Beatty plays a star quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams named Joe Pendleton who is mistakenly transported to the afterlife. To account for this error, an angel must find Joe a new body to occupy. In the film’s climactic scene, the Rams are playing in the Super Bowl when tragedy strikes: Joe’s backup, Tom Jarrett, is killed on a brutal play.

The notion that a pro player might die during a game was hardly far-fetched. The summer the movie came out, a wide receiver named Darryl Stingley was paralyzed after being blindsided during a preseason game. But rather than forcing audiences to consider the galling prospect of such a calamity, Jarrett’s death provides Joe a remarkably convenient opportunity to inhabit a new body. The corpse is thus miraculously resurrected. Jarrett rises and jogs onto the field and leads the Rams to victory.

“Jerry Maguire,” the 1996 schmaltzfest starring Tom Cruise as a hard-charging sports agent, turns on the same sort of

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“Jerry Maguire,” with Cuba Gooding Jr., top, and “Heaven Can Wait,” with Warren Beatty, above, have used football’s violence as a hook.

narrative abracadabra. Maguire’s lone client, a voluble wide receiver named Rod Tidwell, catches a pivotal touchdown, only to receive a vicious hit. He lies on the turf, unconscious and unmoving, for half a minute. The stadium grows hushed with dread.

Fear not, gentle viewer! Tidwell awakens and, showing no apparent signs of the brain trauma he just suffered, begins to mug for the cameras.

When players do die, it’s never because they play football.

Instead, in several movies based on true stories, they are struck down by cruel fate. As famously portrayed by a young Ronald Reagan in the 1940 cornball classic “Knute Rockne, All American,” Notre Dame halfback George Gipp is laid low by a fatal illness. Similarly, Brian Piccolo, hero of the 1971 tearjerker “Brian’s Song,” dies of cancer.

There are rare exceptions to this pattern. But for the most part, what Hollywood sells to moviegoers is exactly what the NFL peddles to fans every Sunday: magical thinking. Both push the childish notion that giant men can smash into one another hundreds of times — head-first and at full speed — without their bodies and brains suffering profound injury.

We fans have a whole suitcase full of rationalizations intended to preserve our right to consume, and thus sponsor, this hyperviolent game. “The players know the risks!” we insist. “They get paid millions!” But ultimately, our most effective dodge resides in our willingness to view the game as one big movie.

In this sense, the NFL has little to fear from Hollywood or us.

We’ve been loyal teammates all along. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Colleges need to be accountable PETER CAPPELLI is the George W. Taylor professor of management at the Wharton School and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is the author of a recent book, “Will College Pay Off? A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You’ll Ever Make.”

Bowling industry management. Health records administration.

International tourism.

These are real, four-year majors at colleges today — and just a few of the growing number of professional-oriented degrees that schools have rolled out as they try to appease the concerns of students and their parents about future job prospects.

College education has begun to feel more and more like a financial contract — and a huge one at that — which has to deliver a return on its investment. But as America’s college students begin a new year of school, the big question for higher education leaders is this one: How well are they holding up their end of that new bargain?

The answer is we don’t really know. And what we do know isn’t very encouraging.

With most investment decisions, after all, people analyze risk and return, and take into account “past performance.” Yet there are virtually no requirements that colleges report on the job placements of their graduates. There are few standards for how placement data should be reported even when colleges do get it.

The White House made a step toward addressing this issue over

last weekend by releasing a new Web site that provides some information about the pay earned by graduates who took out federal loans. Pushback from the highered community apparently headed off a more aggressive attempt to call out the poorer performing schools with a system of rankings.

Instead of more evidence like this, most of what we get is marketing. A study by law professors Morgan Cloud and George Shepard found that the placement rates presented by law schools were so systematically misleading that they constituted fraud. Research also shows that almost two-thirds of recent college grads report that they did not get a job close to their field of study, suggesting few programs are really delivering on their implicit promise to get you a job. A stunning one in five say that they got no information from their college at all about the job market.

And then there are the forprofit schools, which now enroll 10 percent of all bachelor degree students. Several have been sued by the states because they were not delivering on anything like the promises they made to students, and there have been an array of federal efforts to rein in their abuses. These for-profit schools spend, on average, nearly one-quarter of their operating budgets on marketing to attract students. Their nonprofit peers may soon be close behind.

Another common pitch from colleges is the extensive internship programs they tout.

They sound great until one realizes students are, in most cases, paying tuition to do work that otherwise would pay them.

For colleges, internships are a windfall. Students burn through their required credits without the college having to pay the expenses of teaching a course.

It is not unusual for even small colleges now to promote that they have as many as 80 separate majors in practical fields.

To design a serious major, with a focused set of classes, requires considerable effort. And given that most colleges are not required to share data on job placements, and more schools are marketing themselves as job factories, a big question is

whether their leaders are truly ensuring their programs are worth the investment and are looking out for the interests of the students they serve.

Many college presidents and administrators aren’t. They need to recognize how fundamental this shift toward college-as-jobtraining is and be accountable to it. To help students and their families assess the investments they are making, colleges, at a minimum, should provide accurate information about the jobs their graduates get right after school and what they are doing later in their careers.

They might also start including information about what we know really matters for long-term career success. Do graduates learn the basic communications, problem-solving and interpersonal skills that both educators and employers say are important? Does the college have relationships with employers in those practical majors that help shape the course work and open doors to recruiters?

If college leaders don’t want to take on the job of self-policing their practices, they are likely to see much more regulation, far more reporting headaches and even greater damage to the reputation of higher education’s true value. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

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OPINIONS

BY JONES FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Why are we subsidizing religion?

DAVID NIOSE is the legal director of the Washington-based American Humanist Association and author of “Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason” and “Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans.”

The arguments for taxing churches have been around for many years, but there is reason to believe that America’s changing religious demographics will soon give them more traction. As more Americans abandon organized religion, many of the newly secular are unsympathetic to subsidizing religion via the tax code.

Recent polling shows that almost one in four Americans, and more than one-third of those ages 18 to 33, now claim no religious affiliation. Back when virtually everyone subscribed to a religious faith (the unaffiliated number polled in the single digits for most of the 20th century) an across-theboard tax break for all religions was arguably fair — or at least inoffensive. But times have changed, and so have attitudes about the extraordinary perks that churches enjoy.

Perhaps the most egregious example of religious privilege under the tax code is the socalled parsonage exemption.

Under current tax law, “ministers of the gospel” may deduct virtually all costs associated with housing from their income. At its worst, the exemption subsidizes the unseemly: televangelists enjoying multimillion-dollar estates on the taxpayer dime. But even in a more ordinary context, the allowance represents an indefensible benefit running to organized religion, subsidized by taxpayers.

Another gratuity to churches is the real estate tax exemption, which denies cash-strapped municipalities revenue that could be used for public safety, road repairs and other services.

Like everyone else in town, churches benefit from services provided by municipal governments, but in most areas are exempt from property taxation simply because they are churches.

Some will defend this extraordinary handout by arguing that churches do much good through charity work. Even

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

if this were true — and it certainly isn’t the case for every church — it hardly justifies tax exemption. Many individuals and corporations “do good” as well but still pay their property taxes.

Moreover, relying on churches to provide social services is hardly the mark of an enlightened society. A homeless person who happens to be a nonChristian should not have to depend on a local Christian church for help. In a modern pluralistic society, public resources should be available for social services. Instead, in America we use the tax code to prop up churches under the pretext that religious charity is essential.

Any real estate owner expects to pay property taxes, and churches should be no different.

If churches claim that they cannot afford to be taxed, one must question how they afford real estate in the first place. A typical church that owns property has hundreds of members or more who could join

Any real estate owner expects to pay property taxes, and churches should be no different.

together to cover the tax bill.

Maybe those that don’t have such membership and support shouldn’t own real estate.

As we reassess religious privilege in America, even the notion of having churches pay income taxes should be on the table. Critics say requiring churches to report income and expenses would somehow be an improper intrusion, but this argument fails under scrutiny.

Such reporting, which virtually every person and organization in America does routinely, is minimally intrusive and no great burden. It’s hard to see how such basic accountability would be detrimental to the public good, though we can be sure that religious leaders, from televangelists preying on society’s most vulnerable to the nation’s leading bishops, will argue otherwise.

As Americans increasingly gravitate away from organized religion, it only makes sense that public policy will follow suit.

Government need not be hostile to religion, but neither should it bestow upon it special privileges.

The nonreligious are now one of the largest categories of religious demographics and growing, and that means changes are on the horizon in the business of religion. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

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FIVE MYTHS

Public housing BY

D AVID M ADDEN

David Simon’s HBO miniseries “Show Me a Hero” has drawn atten­ tion to the history of one of the most misunderstood parts of Ameri­ can urban life: public housing. More than 2 million people live in publicly owned rental housing. Let’s look at some of the big myths.

1

Public housing residents want to escape it.

From the nearly universally negative coverage of public housing, you’d never know that far more people are trying to get into it than leave it. Nearly all of the nation’s more than 3,000 public housing authorities have waiting lists. Surveys consistently show that most residents of public housing developments (many reject the word “project” as stigmatizing) are satisfied overall with their homes, even as they demand solutions to pressing problems with maintenance and management. Ethnographic research has shown that public housing residents tend to develop important networks of solidarity and mutual aid that they want to maintain, not abandon.

Yet the story that the best way to help public housing residents is to destroy their neighborhoods and force them to move, presumably to more economically mixed areas, has become the dominant narrative for many.But as the Right to the City Alliance, a network of housing activists, puts it, “The problems with public housing are due to lack of resources and services in lowincome communities, rather than simply the concentration of lowincome people.”

2

Public housing is crumbling.

The image of public housing dereliction is, at best, a too-sweeping generalization.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “problem” developments, like the now-demolished Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago, are by far the exception,

not the rule. Most public housing is in decent shape: More than 85 percent of units meet or exceed federal standards, and more than 40 percent of developments are considered to be in excellent order. Public housing is usually in better condition than comparable private housing in similar neighborhoods.

This isn’t to say that there are no problems. But these are a result of policy choices. Public housing has suffered major cuts in funding, and this disinvestment is reflected in the condition of many developments.

3

Public housing assists the wrong people.

Public housing has long been denounced as a dwelling place for people who don’t deserve it. Recently, some news organizations have been making a big deal about millionaires living there at taxpayers’ expense. Others have cast public housing developments as “warehouses for the poor” or as home to people who are essentially different from other Americans.

The reality is that public housing is home to many different communities of lowerincome households. According to HUD, the average income of public housing residents is a bit more than $14,000 per year. More than 50 percent have annual household incomes between $5,000 and $15,000. But they are not monolithically poor: Fewer than a third receive welfare benefits. Most tenants pay 30 percent of their income in rent.

And according to reports, fewer than 30,000 of the millions of people living in public housing are ineligible noncitizens.

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor grew up in the Bronxdale Houses public housing projects in New York.

Public housing is a crucial resource for working families, the elderly, the disabled and others whom the market does not — and will not — serve.

4

High-rise public housing is unlivable.

First of all, a relatively small number of public housing developments are high-rise buildings. Even in 1994, when the number of units was at its peak, only 27 percent of public housing buildings were high rises, and that number has decreased since.

Besides, high-rises exhibit huge diversity. Around the world, millions of people, rich and poor, live in high-rise buildings. As researchers Fritz Umbach and Alexander Gerould point out, there have been some times and places when public housing has had a crime rate that is higher than that of private housing, and other times and places when it has had a lower rate.

5

Public housing is a topdown imposition by government bureaucrats.

It’s true that some of the shortcomings of mid-century public housing can be traced to heavy-handed planners. And it is

true that, like many large public and private organizations, public housing authorities can be frustrating bureaucracies.

But the history of American housing activism shows that public housing was not only a creation of bureaucrats. It was demanded by generations of activists, including Yiddishspeaking rent strikers on the Lower East Side of New York in the early 20th century and the Black Panther Party, which included government-supported housing in its 10-point program.

As historian Rhonda Williams and others have shown, public housing provides an avenue for political participation and activism, often with women of color taking the lead. The residential public sector that exists today is a result of struggles between activists and the powerful institutions that have sought to shape it for their own ends. n Madden is an assistant professor in the sociology department and the Cities Program at the London School of Economics. He is a co-author, with Peter Marcuse, of “In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis,” which will be published next year.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARIA CORTE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A POPE FOR ALL SEASONS Francis may be empathetic.

He may tweet. But he’s got everyone guessing about what he really wants.

BY ANTHONY FAIOLA AND MICHELLE BOORSTEIN

The 78­year­old who lives behind a gas station in Vatican City previously worked as a nightclub bouncer. He’ll suffer the white robes of his office, but he won’t abide the red shoes his predecessor wore. He wants to save souls, but also save the Earth. During his first week on the job, he jokingly blessed a dog. He doesn’t really like it when they kiss the ring. He has his own flash mob. He’s on Twitter. ¶ But as Americans brace for the coming of Pope Francis, here’s a basic fact about the man often dubbed the coolest­ever leader of the Roman Catholic Church: He’s also plenty old school. ¶ He rises like clockwork at 4:30 a.m. and spends hours praying before Mass. Although he famously declared “who am I to judge” when asked about gay priests, he calls the Western rise of LGBT equality “a new sin against God.” He says the Devil is as real as God, and he endorses exorcisms. In an age when fewer and fewer believe in miracles, he is a saint­making machine. He hasn’t watched television in 25 years. ¶ This is the riddle of Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope and a man who has brought a dose of magical realism to the job of being pontiff. And as he prepares to stage his first official visit to the United States 2½ years

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

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THE FRANCIS FACTOR into his revolutionary papacy, perhaps only

one thing about the Argentine-born Francis is crystal clear: He is upending convention in one of the world’s oldest institutions.

Francis never saw the need to come to the United States before, but now that he’s pope, he’s embracing reality: The American Catholic church is one of the wealthiest, most vibrant and influential segments of Catholicism, even if it makes up only 8 percent of the global Catholic population. For a pope who has made clear that his focus is on those without power — migrants, the elderly, addicts, prisoners — visiting this superpower could be one of the most important stops of his papacy.

“The impact of the U.S. on the world is never absent from the Holy See’s view of the world — whether they think about it in positive or negative terms,” said the Rev. Bryan Hehir, who teaches about religion and global politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is a top adviser to Francis confidant Cardinal Sean O’Malley. “And this pope is pretty critical of the international global economy.”

To tackle the topics he has prioritized — immigration, poverty and the environment — Francis has to sway and involve Americans, Hehir said. He’s coming to tell the U.S. church, “You better attend to these issues.”

But will they listen? His climate-change encyclical, which challenged unbridled growth, aroused bitter responses among conservative American Catholics, who are also deeply unhappy with other signals Francis has been sending. Meanwhile, more liberal Catholics want to know whether he will follow his empathetic rhetoric on issues such as divorce and homosexuality with concrete change.

“My guess is he won’t be too specific,” Hehir said. “As others have said, he hasn’t changed the words, he’s changed the music. But that’s no small thing.”

A different kind of pope For a guy who barely left his country at the tip of South America and seemed initially terrified at the prospect of being elected pope, Francis has turned out to be a natural global leader. But he has also been a surprise to the cardinals who thought they were putting a cautious moderate on Saint Peter’s throne.

After two popes who concentrated on doctrine and traditional families, Francis is clearly in a different mold.

The cardinals “thought he was going to be more conservative than he has been, but that was partly because he did not speak English, and many bishops outside of Latin America did not know him so well as they thought,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. “In Buenos Aires, he had sat in the homes of poor people and heard their stories and did not see the marketplace or globalization as helping these people.”

But his economic pronouncements are not what rankles many traditional Catholics. Their concern is the absence of an emphasis on core continues on next page

INFANT BAPTISMS

The number of American Catholics has increased since 1965, but not as fast as the overall population. The portion of the U.S. population identifying as Catholic has dropped from 24% in 1965 to 21.5% in 2014.

1,310,413

316.9 U.S. population

693,914

1965

2014

189.9 (million)

46.3

1965

Catholics

Paul VI Length of papacy: 15 years Age at election: 65 Country of origin: Italy

68.1

2014 John Paul II Length of papacy: 27 years Age at election: 58 Country of origin: Poland

CATHOLIC MARRIAGES

PRIESTS

352,458

WEEKLY

Comparing popes

CHANGES IN U.S. CATHOLICISM Statistics show that Catholicism’s presence in the U.S. has declined since the 1960s.

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58,632 148,134 37,574

1965

2014

1965

2014

PARISHES 17,637

17,337

NUNS

Pope Benedict XVI Length of papacy: 8 years Age at election: 78 Country of origin: Germany

179,954

1965

2014

SOURCE: CARA AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, USING DATA COMPILED FROM THE OFFICIAL CATHOLIC DIRECTORY THE WASHINGTON POST

48,546

1965

2014

Pope Francis Length of papacy: 2 years (so far) Age at election: 76 Country of origin: Argentina

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THE FRANCIS FACTOR

Francis in Ameri

Sept. 22 4 p.m. Arrives from Cuba at Joint Base Andrews

Sept. 23 9:15 a.m. Meeting with President Obama at the White House 11 a.m. Parade near White House 11:30 a.m.

Address to the U.S. bishops at Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle 4:15 p.m. Mass of canonization of Junípero Serra at Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception

Sept. 24 9:20 a.m.

Address to joint session of Congress 11:15 a.m. Visit to St. Patrick in the City and Catholic Charities 4 p.m. Departs for New York 6:45 p.m. Evening prayer at Cathedral of St. Patrick with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE

Pope Francis arrives for a meeting with employees of Cooperative Credit Bank of Rome this month.

Opposite page, Francis washes the feet of a woman at Rebibbia prison in Rome.

OSSERVATORE ROMANO/REUTERS

from previous page

teachings of the church — against abortion and for the traditional family.

Almost every other day since his election in March 2013, it seems, the pope makes news with his off-the-cuff comments and actions. He was the first pope to kiss the feet of female prisoners — a gender tweak to an ancient pre-Easter ritual that riled traditionalists. Earlier this year, responding to a reporter’s question about overpopulation and the church’s ban on artificial birth control, he said Catholics should not feel compelled to breed “like rabbits.” In an interview with Jesuit journalists, he said the church “sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules,” which many took to mean the focus on strict doctrine.

The Rev. Robert Sirico, a prominent conservative who founded the free-marketpromoting Acton Institute, said “the pot is boiling over” among conservatives, who are uncharacteristically speaking out — at least to one another — against Francis. They are concerned that his style of discussion is leading many to think everything is on the table.

Catholic audiences have besieged Sirico with questions about the climate-change encyclical and whether they are obliged to embrace it even if they disagree. He tells them the pope’s authority extends to giving moral guidance, not resolving scientific disputes such as whether human beings are responsible for global warming.

That said, conservatives are also worried about Francis’s comments suggesting he is

open to resigning, as his predecessor did in 2013, blowing the minds of church historians who hadn’t seen a pope step down in centuries.

Like talking off the cuff, stepping down humanizes the papacy a bit too much, they feel.

“The pope is supposed to be the Holy Father,” Sirico said. “Fathers don’t resign. They stay.”

“He is, more than any other pope, a pope of gestures. And I’m not sure he intends to be a pope of gestures,” said Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

There’s no question that Francis is striving to be less an enforcer of religious discipline than something akin to a global Jiminy Cricket, a voice of conscience whether you believe in God or not. He has become perhaps the world’s leading champion of the poor. His first papal trip outside Rome was to speak to African migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where he railed against the “globalization of indifference.”

He has become a formidable diplomat, interjecting the Vatican into everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to U.S.-Cuba relations. He is using his post as a pulpit to demand that world leaders shape a comprehensive U.N. treaty to combat climate change.

Yet, to date, he has done nothing to alter church doctrine. His more embracing tone on issues such as homosexuality, coupled with his tough talk on global warming and free markets, is sparking a broad debate about the role of popes in the 21st century as well as the future

direction of one of the world’s largest faiths. In him, a church he took over in a profound period of crisis, as well as a world that listens less and less to its religious leaders, have both gotten far more than they bargained for.

‘Starting a revolution’ For liberals — Catholics or not — Francis has emerged as an energizing force. These days in Rome, for instance, an impromptu flash mob periodically stops traffic, bopping and rhyming to a catchy tune in honor of Pope Francis.

Yet these are not your everyday papists.

Some of its 300 members are regular churchgoers, but others are not. The group’s members largely define themselves as openminded progressives. The group is open to the young and old, to men and women, to straight and gay. A few of them aren’t even Catholic. It’s an atypical fan club for an atypical pope.

“This pope is realizing the opening of the church that so many of us have waited for,” said a gleeful Francesco Grasso, 43, an Italian marketing executive and occasional churchgoer who joined a new flash mob in Rome last April.

“There are a number of barriers that may not be broken immediately. But there are signs that Pope Francis is starting a revolution in the Roman Catholic Church.”

But Francis has also vehemently opposed same-sex marriage, condemned transgenderism as a theory “that does not recognize the order of creation,” and he called the spread of these social trends “ideological colonization.”

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THE FRANCIS FACTOR

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Sept. 25 8:30 a.m. Speech at the U.N. 11:30 a.m.

Multireligious service at 9/11 Memorial and Museum, World Trade Center 4 p.m. Visit to Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem Time TBA Procession at Central Park 6 p.m. Mass at Madison Square Garden

Sept. 26

L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

The liberals who seek change in church policy hope to pin down his thoughts on hot-button social issues: the future place of Catholics who use artificial contraception, who divorce and remarry outside the church, who are LGBT. They want to know whether access to abortion and contraception — both supported widely by U.S. Catholics — will continue to be singled out as sinful by church leaders.

Francis has welcomed discussion this year about ways to lift the stigma on divorced Catholics who remarry outside the church — making them ineligible for Catholicism’s most holy rite of Communion because Catholicism teaches that marriages are forever. This month, he eliminated some of the bureaucracy and cost of obtaining an annulment.

In his typically blunt style, Francis this summer said sometimes divorces are “morally necessary” when marriages are extremely poor, and that the church needs to do much more to welcome people who are divorced — a good slice of U.S. Catholics.

Cleaning house Perhaps nowhere would Francis’s touch become more present than inside the hermetically sealed walls of Vatican City. He would startle officials by eschewing the lavish papal apartments in favor of more humble quarters at St. Martha’s House, a lodging space for visiting clerics that stands as a grim reminder of 1990s architecture amid the Renaissance splendor of

Vatican City. But the changes to come after would prove far more significant.

Francis had replaced Benedict XVI at time when the powerful bureaucracy that runs Vatican City, known as the Roman Curia, was in the throes of crisis. Major leaks to the Italian news media had revealed widespread corruption and intrigue, including the blackmailing of homosexual clergy and internal power struggles. Shortly after coming into office, Francis started cleaning house.

He fired Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict’s secretary of state who was seen as an obstacle to reform. The new pope then continued an effort begun by Benedict, foisting new rules of transparency on the long-secretive Vatican Bank. Its 19,000 accounts were scrutinized. After fresh revelations in 2013 that an Italian monsignor had allegedly used his account at the bank for illicit deals, Francis forced out the bank’s two top officials.

There has been pushback, including extraordinarily blunt critiques of the pope’s tenure by conservative members of the church hierarchy. A pitched battle is also looming between conservative and liberal clerics over possible changes to church policies looming next year, and on which Francis will have the final word.

“There is still opposition to the pope in Vatican City because he has criticized the power structure of the curia, and there are those who believe that the steps he has taken since arriving are diminishing the prestige of

the papacy as an absolute power,” said Marco Politi, a longtime Vatican insider and author of the book “Pope Francis Among the Wolves.”

“But there is also opposition on the direction he is taking the church,” Politi said. “Some feel it is now a church without a rudder, that on the issue of remarried and divorced Catholics and others, he may go too far.”

A golden moment Regardless of their own infighting, the Vatican and the U.S. church are eager to take advantage of the incredible goodwill and interest in Francis — not only from disaffected Catholics but also from non-Catholics. Polls this year show that Americans of all stripes give him high favorability ratings. He’s been cited as a moral authority by many, including Oprah Winfrey, Rolling Stone magazine and President Obama. U.S. church leaders know that this presents a rare opportunity for them.

And they believe the trip also will teach the pope something positive about the United States — a country he looks at with a very wary eye, as the cradle of capitalism and income inequality. But it’s also a busy spiritual marketplace, vigorous and pluralistic, and U.S. church leaders say Francis will probably look to learn from it.

One early indicator: The longtime rumors that Francis would come to gas-guzzling America and zip around our streets in a tiny Kia proved false. He will be riding in the most iconic of American brands: a Jeep Wrangler. n

8:40 a.m. Departs for Philadelphia 10:30 a.m. Mass at Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul 4:45 p.m. Visit to Independence Mall 7:30 p.m. Festival of Families at Benjamin Franklin Parkway

Sept. 27 9:15 a.m. Meeting with bishops at St. Martin’s Chapel, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary 11 a.m. Visit to Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility 4 p.m. Mass for the conclusion of the World Meeting of Families at Benjamin Franklin Parkway 7 p.m. Visit with organizers, volunteers and benefactors of the World Meeting of Families 8 p.m. Departs for Rome

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papal visits to america

W

hen Pope Paul VI became the first pontiff to visit the United States in 1965, he stayed for only one day. Voluntary papal travel was still a new idea for the Vatican, emerging as the church adapted a set of sweeping reforms from the Second Vatican Council, commonly known as Vatican II. The pope’s arrival came five years after the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first — and so far only — Catholic president.

Kennedy’s candidacy was fraught with ques­ tions about whether he, as a Catholic, would be obligated to defer to the pope on matters of public policy.

The criticism prompted one of Kennedy’s best­known speeches on his religious beliefs and the role of religion in government.

“Contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president,” he said. “I am the Democratic Party’s candi­ date for president, who happens also to be a Catholic.”

Since that first visit, popes have visited the United States eight more times.

Pope John Paul II’s trips spanned from Boston to Los Angeles, with stops across the country in places such as Des Moines, Mi­ ami and Denver. Pope Benedict XVI visited Washington and New York. n

— Abby Ohlheiser

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Oct. 4, 1965: Paul VI became the first pope to visit the United States.

His one-day trip to New York included the first papal address to the United Nations. He also met with President Lyndon Johnson at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

BOB DAUGHERTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

May 2, 1984: During another stopover, John Paul II met with President Ronald Reagan in Fairbanks, Alaska, the first time a U.S. president and pope met outside of the White House or Vatican.

POOL PHOTO BY TIM CLARY VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Oct. 4-8, 1995: John Paul II met with Clinton in Newark, addressed the United Nations and celebrated Mass at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Oct. 1-7, 1979: John Paul II made his first U.S. visit with stops in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington and Des Moines. He met with President Jimmy Carter at the White House and addressed the United Nations.

DAVE TENENBAUM/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sept. 10-19, 1987: John Paul II visited Miami; Columbia, S.C.; New Orleans; San Antonio; Phoenix; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and Detroit. He met with Reagan in Los Angeles.

AMY SANCETTA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jan. 26-27, 1999: John Paul II met with Clinton in St. Louis.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Feb. 27, 1981: John Paul II made a stopover for several hours in Anchorage, Alaska.

BRUNO MUSCONI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Aug. 12-15, 1993: John Paul II attended World Youth Day and met with President Bill Clinton in Denver.

RICHARD A. LIPSKI/THE WASHINGTON POST

April 15-20, 2008: Pope Benedict XVI visited Washington and New York. He met with President George W. Bush at the White House and addressed the United Nations.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

MARIA CORTE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

for the nuns, an uncertain road ahead

BY

J OE H EIM

S

ister Rachel Terry has a confession to make.

“I really, really like ’90s pop music,” says the 35-year-old nun, who teaches music at Little Flower Parish elementary school in Bethesda, Md. “I like to sing it loud in the car. I like to dance to it. TLC and Destiny’s Child? That’s my favorite music as a musician and a church member.”

Sister Rachel’s housemates appreciate her taste in pop music. They just don’t share it. Sister Ritamary, Sister Madonna Marie, Sister Saint Henry and Sister Rosemaron — the four nuns who live with Sister Rachel in the convent next to the elementary school where they work in this wealthy Washington suburb — are all four decades her senior. They’re a generation (or three) removed from such hits as “Say My Name” and “Baby-Baby-Baby.” continues on next page

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from previous page

But if they don’t boast the same knowledge of ’90s hits, the five sisters — all members of the Immaculate Heart of Mary order — believe that what they do have in common is timeless: a desire to devote their lives to service, sacrifice, teaching and prayer, and to be a reflection, they hope, of the life of Jesus. It is a lifestyle that gives them spiritual sustenance and a guiding purpose. But finding others to share that journey is proving ever more difficult.

Fifty years ago, deciding to become a nun was not at all uncommon. The U.S. population was 195 million in 1965, and there were about 181,000 nuns, the peak number for religious sisters in the country, according to a 2009 study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

Today there are 321 million Americans and approximately 48,000 nuns. And the vast majority of them are retired. Sixty-nine percent of all nuns are 70 or older. Just 3 percent of nuns in the United States are under age 49.

Nuns across the country are grappling with this drop-off and what it means for their futures. Though part of the Catholic Church, their orders are mostly financially independent.

Now they worry about how they will pay for increasing health-care and insurance costs in their rapidly aging ranks, with many nuns no longer able to work and earn an income. They worry about whether they can even continue to exist, a concern that is all the more remarkable given what a significant role nuns played in the 20th-century American church.

The caricature of the nun is one with a rosary in one hand and a knuckle-rapping ruler in the other. But, in fact, American nuns were both leaders and foot soldiers in education, hospitals, orphanages, old-age homes and a wide range of social services. They also took lead roles in the civil rights movement and on social justice issues. For many American Catholics, their most frequent and sustained interactions with religious figures were with nuns, not priests.

As a young woman who chose to become a nun in the United States in the 21st century, Sister Rachel knows that she is a rarity. The numbers in her order reflect the national trends. There are close to 400 sisters, but only three are in their 30s. There are none in their 20s. And yet she seems thoroughly unvexed by the predicament of American nuns.

“I didn’t look at our sisters and say, ‘This is a group of dying women.’ I don’t think anyone would enter a congregation like that,” she says.

“Our order is very full of life. It’s a vibrant group of women.”

When Pope Francis visits the United States this aaron week, nuns here will be paying close attention to his words to see if he will acknowledge their contributions and suggest what might be done to ensure their continued and vital presence. And when he celebrates Mass at Catholic University on Sept. 23, Sister Rachel will be a member of the Archdiocesan Papal Mass Choir that greets him. She will not be singing “Baby-Baby-Baby.” She’ll be singing Lat-

PHOTOS BY EVELYN HOCKSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sister Rachel, a fan of ’90s pop music, leads her kindergarten students in a religious version of the pop hit “Cupid Shuffle” during music class at Little Flower Parish elementary school.

in chants, Aaron Copland compositions and traditional hymns in Spanish and English. And her sisters from the convent at Little Flower will be present in the audience, rooting her on.

The decision “Why?” That’s the question that Sister Rachel says she heard most about deciding to become a nun. It wasn’t asked with disapproval, but with real curiosity. Some wanted to know whether she had a “Eureka!” moment or whether she knew all along. In Rachel’s case, the answer is neither.

As a teenager growing up in a middle-class family in Millville, N.J., in the mid-1990s, Rachel Terry wasn’t thinking about eventually living in a convent. She went to a public high school. She was a member of the band and performed in musicals and plays. She went on dates and went to prom.

“I wasn’t strongly focused on the church or religion,” she says. “It was definitely a part of my life, but it wasn’t the main thrust of my high school experience.”

That began to change when she began her freshman year at Marywood University, a small Catholic college in Scranton, Pa. Many of her teachers were nuns. They were an intrinsic part of university life, in class and outside of it.

“The spirit of the sisters was very present,” she says. “I felt this really intense connection to that spirit. And I really enjoyed the sisters because they were all the things I thought I could be: very competent, professional, happy.

They loved life.”

She felt called and yet at the same time she was skeptical of that calling.

“It felt like a mind game that I was playing with myself,” she says. “So I would consistently ask for clarity, which . . . is not God’s major forte.

“I would do really juvenile things. Like I’d be in the practice room and say, ‘Okay, God, if I get through this whole Chopin nocturne without making one single mistake, then I’ll know that you want me to be a nun.’ And then I’d mess up all over the place. Or if I got to the end without messing up I’d say, ‘Well, that was a fluke, let me try it again.’ ” Eventually she became more comfortable with the decision. She talked about it with her close friends. Telling her family was next.

It was the summer of 2001 when she broke the news to her parents and three siblings at the kitchen table. Her mother dropped the laundry basket she was carrying. Everyone looked stunned.

“Like anything else that a teenager does, you wonder: How long is this going to last?” says Kathleen Terry, Sister Rachel’s mother. “At first, I was confounded. But as time went by and we realized she was very serious about this, we just accepted it the way you accept whatever your children do.”

Kathleen and her husband, David, were both involved in the church and choir and music ministry. Faith was a key element of their family. It wasn’t that their daughter’s decision went against their wishes, it’s just that they knew it was a radical choice for a young woman at the time.

“Of course, I’m thinking, selfishly, I want grandchildren,” says Kathleen, with a laugh.

She says her friends tried to get her to change her daughter’s mind and notes that at the time the church was especially unpopular because of

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the emerging sexual abuse scandal that was rocking the priesthood.

“We were grateful she had that strength in her, because, whoo, that was a gutsy move,” Kathleen says. “Now I think it’s the best decision she could have ever made.”

Sister Rachel knows that her decision has ruled out other possibilities. She will probably move often, making it harder to put down roots in a community. She will not be wealthy. The salary she makes goes directly to her order; she receives a small monthly stipend. And though she grew up in a close and happy family, she knows that motherhood and family life will not happen for her.

“No matter what path you choose, you’re saying yes to something and no to something else,” she says. “I’m not grieving for those things I didn’t choose.”

On this September day, the path she has chosen has led her to the front of her music class of 28 wriggly fifth-grade boys and girls. A sign, “Make a Joyful Noise!,” hangs on the wall of this bright music room where she teaches up to six classes a day.

Sister Rachel is wearing a blue Oxford blouse and long khaki skirt, and she starts the session with a question.

“What songs do you hear at games that get you excited? “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a girl pipes up. “We Will Rock You” a boy blurts enthusiastically.

Soon she is teaching them a new song, “Tina Singu,” which she tells them is popular at soccer games in South Africa. Within minutes she has them singing in harmony. Then she works on the rhythm, handing out drums and cowbells and sticks. The kids are smiling, dancing, sing-

ing, eating it up. She explains that the song’s lyrics translate to “We’re on fire with life” and then she asks the kids what other ways they can show they are on fire with life. It’s a subtle spiritual question woven into a 45-minute music lesson. For Sister Rachel, it is all part of a day’s work. Of a life’s work.

The challenge The long dining room table in the Little Flower convent can seat 16, but on most nights just five places are set. At its peak, the convent was a bustling home to 15 nuns, but now it’s only Sister Rachel and her four compatriots.

Their lives of poverty, chastity and obedience, the sisters say, are not as mysterious as some imagine. They shop at Safeway, get their hair cut at the Hair Cuttery and take turns doing the laundry. With their busy schedules working at the school, the nightly meal is the one time each day that all of the sisters make sure to get together. There they catch up on news and gossip and discuss school and family and politics and, yes, God. Like Sister Rachel, all of the nuns have opted to give up traditional habits for a simple, unadorned style of dressing.

The long, chatty dinners are often followed by a visit to the living room, a comfortable nun cave complete with Barcaloungers, sofas and a big-screen TV on which they’ll watch “CSI” or “Blue Bloods.” On Sundays, football is the big draw as the sisters root for their respective teams: the Steelers, the Eagles, the Redskins.

Except for Sister Saint Henry, who roots for whoever is currently running with the ball.

It is a picture of contentment, and yet the 21st century has not been an easy one for

Sister Rachel Terry, center, at dinner with, from left, Sister Rosemaron, Sister Madonna Marie and Sister Ritamary on the porch of the convent at Little Flower Parish in Bethesda, Md.

KLMNO WEEKLY

American nuns. And not just because of the declining numbers and the increased financial stresses on religious orders.

American nuns also faced a strong challenge from Rome in 2012, when the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope Benedict XVI upbraided the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group that represents the leaders of 80 percent of American Catholic sisters.

The report criticized the nuns for hosting speakers at their conferences who broke with church teaching and for embracing “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith . . . including theological interpretations that risk distorting faith in Jesus and his loving Father who sent his Son for the salvation of the world.” It called for the nuns to fully support church doctrine and theological teachings, particularly on homosexuality and whether women could become priests.

It was a harsh assessment, and the sisters at Little Flower — and nuns throughout the country — felt the sting of the report and its adversarial tone. But they also took comfort from the deluge of support they received from their parish priests and church members.

“The response of Catholic lay people was heartwarming,” says Sister Madonna Marie.

“They were so supportive that it made you feel really special and made you feel that things were going to be all right.”

Last December, the Vatican’s investigation into the American nuns concluded without taking any action or requiring any changes.

Instead, it professed “profound gratitude” for the work of women in religious orders in the United States. It was seen by many as an olive branch from Pope Francis in an effort to mend fences with the nuns and with the many Catholics who were unhappy about the Vatican’s approach.

The sisters don’t play favorites with popes, but it’s clear that Francis has made a strong impression in his first 21/2 years as pope. They have a lifesize cardboard cutout of him in the school and speak about him in glowing language normally reserved for saints.

“I think Francis is the man for today,” says Sister Rosemaron, the school’s principal. “I love the fact that he’s warm and down-to-earth and approachable. And I think that’s the resonance that we’re getting from the people. He’s the man to lead people through the turbulence of these days.”

After Pope Francis returns to the Vatican, the fundamental issues facing American nuns will remain unchanged. The numbers will continue to decline rapidly. The financial crunch will worsen. There is no magic potion to fix that.

What there is is what nuns have relied on for centuries: faith. For Sister Rachel, whose journey in religious life is still relatively young, faith is more than enough.

“We are not in a state of fear,” she says. “We’re in a state of, okay, how are we going to do this together? We live in a really graced state of hope. And not just optimism, but real hope that if it is to be, it will be.” n

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MARIA CORTE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

For some, pope sows confusion

BY

A MANDA E RICKSON

W

hen Steven Skojec heard that Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected pope, he got a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He can’t say why, exactly — though he follows Vatican politics closely, he didn’t know much about Francis then. But as he watched the new Catholic leader greet the crowds from his office computer in Manassas, Va., he was filled with dread.

“I felt a discontinuity,” he said. “A disruption.”

At first, he didn’t want to make too big a deal of it. Though Skojec blogs regularly about Catholicism at the Web site he founded, One-PeterFive (tag line: “Rebuilding Catholic culture. Restoring Catholic tradition.”), he mostly avoided the subject. “I wanted to withhold judgment,” he said.

Six months later, he was ready to judge. What really turned Skojec

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MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

To some, Pope Francis is a global rock star, but to certain traditional Catholics, his message rings hollow and they are concerned and confused about some of the effects his statements and actions may have on the church.

against Francis was the pope’s October 2013 interview in the Jesuit magazine America.

Buried in the transcript was a comment, by Francis, that the world’s biggest evils are youth unemployment and loneliness.

“That’s a jarring statement . . . when you’re on the front lines of the culture wars, looking at the death toll of abortion,” Skojec said.

“There was definitely a sense that this could be trouble.”

Among American Catholics, Francis is wildly popular, with an approval rating hovering near 90 percent. The faithful are flocking back to the pews, pollsters say, drawn by the pope’s humility and inclusive message. But a growing number in the church’s conservative wing don’t feel so welcome. Just 45 percent of conservative Catholics have a favorable opinion of Francis, down from 72 percent a year ago.

They worry that Francis is loosening the church’s strict teachings on morality (he famously told a prominent Italian atheist that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil” and has said “who am I to judge” when asked about gay priests). They accuse him of deserting them on issues such as abortion and contraception (he has said he avoids those issues because the church has become too “obsessed” with them.)

And they say his attacks on capitalism are ill-conceived and amount to a plea for redistribution of wealth — or worse.

Those fears make sense to Julie E. Byrne, a Hofstra University professor who studies American Catholics and was raised Catholic.

“The so-called bedroom issues have always been important to conservatives, and to

Catholic conservatives in particular,” she said.

“There’s a sense that the church is the only place holding the line on divorce [and] on adultery.”

Though Francis hasn’t changed church doctrine on these issues, he has shown a willingness to loosen the rules on who should receive Communion or forgiveness for their sins. “When Francis lightens up on that,” Byrne says, “people wonder what’s next.”

That, in a nutshell, is Skojec’s question. He was raised Catholic, though his parents took him to a modern church. As a young adult, however, he became curious about the more traditional components of his faith. He pored over old encyclicals, he said, and read church history. Today, he and his wife, who run a real estate business, strive to live up to these ideals. They take their seven children to Latin Mass at churches such as St. Mary Mother of God in Northwest Washington. Few parishes offer Latin services, which went out of fashion after Vatican II, the ecumenical council that modernized church doctrine.

He has spent his life making hard choices — sticking with his marriage in the moments when things seemed hard and advocating for a variety of what he sees as essential Catholic teachings (particularly the fight against abortion) in his spare time. Francis, he worries, has made it seem like these priorities, the ones he has framed his life around, are no longer central to the church.

“He’s giving the impression that he’s changing teachings that cannot be changed,” Skojec said. “He makes it seem like even if the rules on the books can stay the same, but if we change the practice, that’s not a problem. . . .

By the numbers Among American Catholics, Francis is wildly popular, with an approval rating hovering near 90 percent.

But just 45 percent of conservative Catholics have a favorable opinion of Francis, down from 72 percent a year ago.

KLMNO WEEKLY

He’s sowing confusion about what we believe.”

That worries Skojec, and not just because it means some Catholics now feel free to disregard church doctrine. When people are confused, they may sin without knowing it. And that could reshape their “eternal outcome.”

Skojec hears these concerns echoed by friends, by priests whose parishioners think adulterers can now receive Communion and by professors who wonder about what they’ll tell their students.

He also dislikes the pope’s focus on economics. Francis’s talk of the poor, his encyclical on climate change and his criticism of capitalism make Catholicism “sound more like a social program. . . . It’s like this dropping away of focus.”

That criticism has been echoed in opinion pieces by prominent Catholics in the Wall Street Journal, in free market think tanks, and by business leaders around the world. This summer, the Heartland Institute sent a delegation to Rome to “educate” the pope on climate change (the organization believes that man-made climate change is a myth).

The Heritage Foundation warned that the pope has aligned himself “with the far left and has embraced an ideology that would make people poorer and less free.”

Even Catholic publications have piled on, in unusually harsh language. A writer for the conservative Catholic publication First Things has called Francis “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist.”

An August church bulletin from the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in St. Hedwig, Tex., bemoaned the pope’s encyclical Laudato Si, writing that “it’s too bad that he acquired and used phrases that are scientifically unproven and used by the segment of world leaders that strive to ‘control people’ by controlling energy issues usages.”

Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke has even suggested it might be necessary to “resist” the Pope’s doctrinal shifts.

That uncertainty puts conservative Catholics in a tough position. More so than most other lay people, they are invested in the hierarchy of the church and the infallibility of its leaders. When the pope challenges the very core of their beliefs, they don’t know how to react.

“Progressives are more interested in the message, the politics,” says the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, who heads the Acton Institute, a conservative think tank. “But conservatives believe the church needs the pope. So it’s hard when they don’t feel like the pope is an ally.”

Skojec grapples with this, too. When he writes that Francis is wrong to suggest that we all have our own definition of good and evil, or that the pope’s position on evangelization is misguided, Skojec’s readers accuse him of leading them to sin because advising against church doctrine is forbidden.

But Skojec says they’re wrong. He is simply highlighting the truth of the church.

“Popes make mistakes,” he says. “There are good popes and there are bad popes.” n

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Junipero Serra: Saint or sinner?

BY

S ARAH P ULLIAM B AILEY

W

hen Pope Francis canonizes the 18thcentury Spanish missionary Junipero Serra on Sept. 23 in Washington — the first canonization on U.S. soil — he will declare Serra to be enrolled among the saints and “to be venerated as such by the whole church.”

For many Native Americans, however, Serra is no saint. The Indians who joined the missions Serra built were forced to shed their own culture, including their religion, dress and food. Thousands of them died prematurely from diseases common in Europe.

“It will be a day of mourning for our people,” says Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, located along the central coast of Monterey Bay in California.

Lopez said he will be cutting his own long black hair short as a visible sign of his mourning. He and other Native Americans point to Serra’s leadership over a mission system in which many were abused and died.

Serra “has to be recognized as the architect of the system,” Lopez said.

Serra, a Franciscan theologian who established Catholic missions along the coast of California as he marched north with Spanish conquistadors, has long been treated as a heroic figure by California leaders. A statue of him has stood in the U.S. Capitol — where each state is allowed two statues — since 1931. At the time, Sen. Hiram Johnson (R-Calif.) described him as “a pioneer of pioneers, bringing Christian civilization to

Pope Francis will canonize a missionary some Native Americans see as anathema

THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, ART COLLECTIONS AND BOTANICAL GARDENS

Junipero Serra, shown on an engraving from Francisco Palóu’s 1787 biography of the Spanish missionary, will be canonized by Pope Francis on Sept. 23 in the District.

the primitive and savage land, now a wondrous empire.” Some historians cite Serra’s dedication to Native Americans, while others say he oversaw and even contributed to a system that mistreated tribes.

“He was one of the founding fathers of the United States, a saintly example of the church’s universality,” the pope said of Serra in February.

Few Catholic Church observers expected the pontiff’s announcement in January that Serra would be canonized. For one thing, Serra is credited with only one miracle when saints usually need two (the pontiff says that Serra’s life serves as a second miracle).

Francis has fast-tracked several candidates for sainthood, already canonizing 21 individuals and hundreds of martyrs in just over two years as pontiff. Saints play an important role in the Catholic Church, as the church teaches that the faithful can directly pray to saints to intercede with God. The precise number of saints is unknown, though experts say it is in the thousands.

Francis’s decision to canonize Serra will be a gesture to Hispanic Catholics, and the tickets for about 25,000 people to attend the Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception will go primarily to Hispanic Catholics from the D.C. area. The pope will celebrate the Mass in Spanish.

Serra was a pivotal force in the Spanish conquest and colonization of California, said Steven Hackel, a history professor at the University of California at Riverside and author of a biography of Serra.

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MICHAEL FIALA/REUTERS

“He’s our Columbus or our Cortéz, the one who, right or wrong, for better or for worse, gets all the blame and glory in California,” Hackel said. “He’s a convenient symbol of everything.”

Serra is credited with bringing literacy, economy and agriculture to the state. “The conventional wisdom was that he saved the Indians, especially from the Spanish military at the time,” Hackel said.

Historians have documented the exploitation of the natives by Catholic missionaries and European monarchies, especially Spanish conquistadors. In July, during a visit to Bolivia, Francis offered an apology for actions of the church during colonialism.

“I say this to you with regret: Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God,” he said. “I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”

Lopez says these comments don’t square with the upcoming canonization plans.

“How can he give a blanket apology like that and at the same time canonize Junipero Serra?” Lopez said. “To do so shows hypocrisy and shows the apology is disingenuous.”

Lopez’s tribe has sent six letters to the pope protesting the canonization. Lopez received a letter from Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations, who responded with a historical note the Catholic Church issued in 1988 when the church defended the beatification of Serra by Pope John Paul II. The note said that after convening a report from historians and an-

thropologists, it was possible to move forward “with soothed consciences” to his beatification.

Many public schoolchildren in California are taught about Spanish exploration and colonization of the state, but it is up to the teacher how to portray the relationships among soldiers, missionaries such as Serra and Indians.

The Rev. Jaime Soto, bishop of Sacramento and president of the California Catholic Conference, announced on Sept. 4 that the bishops will review Catholic schools’ third- and fourthgrade curriculum to “better reflect modern understandings” of what happened. He said the church would also revise displays at state missions, saying that “the Indian experience has been ignored or denied.”

Serra began to get additional attention in 2013, the 300th anniversary of his birth. Still, there wasn’t much talk about him until the pope made his announcement earlier this year, sparking debate about Serra’s role in the abuse and deaths of Native Americans. Of the 80,000 Indians baptized in the missions between 1769 and the mid-1830s, about 60,000 died “by the latter period,” many from disease, Hackel said.

Historians say there is no evidence that Serra abused any Native Americans himself, but he oversaw people who performed whippings and defended that punishment for Indians who tried to escape the mission.

“He believed the church had the authority and power to punish Indians with blows,” Hackel said. “They were his spiritual children, because [missionaries] had brought them in the church.”

Nearly 10,000 people have signed a MoveOn.org petition asking Francis to recon-

Visitors view the altar and Junipero Serra's resting place inside the Basilica at the Carmel Mission in Carmel, Calif., this month. The Franciscan friar built a series of missions along the Pacific Coast, in what is now California, in the 18th century to spread the faith among Native Americans.

KLMNO WEEKLY

sider his canonization plans.

“Spanish Priests did little to recognize indigenous people as humans and did not come to their rescue when women were raped by soldiers and settlers,” the petition states. “With an over 90% indigenous mortality rate, Serra hardly ‘saved many souls.’ ” Serra is sometimes lumped in with other colonialists of his time, said Gregory Orfalea, author of “Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California.” Serra regularly defended Native Americans against the Spanish military, Orfalea said.

“The protesters are painting with a broad brush, and tar and feathering Serra along with colonialism,” Orfalea said. “There is plenty of room for protests about colonialism, but this particular man stands out against the worst violations of the colonizers.”

Born on Majorca in 1713, Serra was a theological professor before he decided to become a missionary in 1749 when he traveled to Mexico.

He established the Mission San Diego de Alcalá in California in 1769, ahead of much of the Western expansion of the United States.

He argued with the Spanish army over who should hold authority over the Indians, opposing military advances that many say would have caused worse conditions for the natives.

Serra thought missions could protect Indian converts from soldiers, miners or others who could bring violence or disease. He established and oversaw nine missions in California before his death in 1784.

Father Marc Lindeijer, a senior church official in Rome who compiles cases and serves as an advocate for prospective saints, said it is “not completely new” to canonize controversial figures. He cited, for instance, the canonization in 2002 of Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, a Spanish priest and founder of the conservative Opus Dei organization who also stood accused of supporting right-wing movements, including the dictatorship of Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco. “Sometimes there is a prejudice due to lack of information, but there is also the question of looking at someone during the spirit of their age, like Serra,” Lindeijer said. “It’s only afterwards that you would look back and say, ‘I don’t think we would have done it this way.’ Even saints sin. But the virtues outweigh the sins.”

The pope has called Serra “a great evangelizer,” probably fitting with the Catholic Church’s emphasis on “the new evangelization,” an effort launched by Pope Benedict XVI to further the teachings of the church.

Serra is being canonized because he was holy, not because he was perfect, historian Robert Senkewicz argued at a news conference in April hosted by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

“My sense is that people are not canonized because they are perfect — otherwise, presumably, St. Peter would never have been canonized,” he said, according to Catholic News Service. “They are canonized because they made a commitment which, on balance, had more good than non-good associated with it.” n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015

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