The Washington Post National Weekly - December 9, 2018

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2018

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THE FIX

WEEKLY

THE FIX

AG pick downdown on Russia probe AG pick on Russia probe A ARON B LAKE

“It is telling that none of the president’s critics are challenging decision onnone the of the president’s “Itthe is telling that

BY A ARON B LAKE merits. None arguecritics that Comey’s perform-the decision on the resident Trump insisted when he are challenging ance warranted keeping him on as director. made Matthew G. Whitaker acting insisted when he merits.

None argue that Comey’s performresident his Trump Instead, they are attacking the president’s attorney general that he wasn’t familance warranted keeping him on as director. made Matthew G. Whitaker his acting motives, claiming Instead, the president acted to iar with Whitaker’s attorney past commentary they are attacking the president’s general that he wasn’t familneuter the investigation into claiming Russia’s role critical of special counsel Robert Mueller past commentary motives, theinpresident acted to iar withS.Whitaker’s the election.

III’s probe. neuter the investigation into Russia’s role in critical of special counsel Robert S. Mueller “The notion that integrity of this But now it might III’s be happening again. thethe election. probe. investigation depends on Comey’s Trump said Friday But thatnow he will nominate “The notion presence that the integrity of this it might be happening again. just does not holdinvestigation water. Contrary to the former attorney general William P. Barrthat to he will nominate depends on Comey’s presence Trump said Friday critics’ talking points, notwater. ‘in Contrary to the once again step into that job full time.

And William P. Barr to just Comey does notwas hold former attorney general charge’ of the investigation.” picking former president George H.W. Bush’s critics’ talking points, Comey was not ‘in once again step into that job full time. And At other points, charge’ Barr has alsoinvestigation.” supported AG would seem a pretty safeformer and confirmable of the picking president George H.W. Bush’s Trump’s firing of then-acting Attorney pick, on its surface. AG would seem a pretty safe and confirmable At other points,GenerBarr has also supported al Sally Yates (whichTrump’s many legal experts agree But much like Whitaker, Barr’s past comfiring of then-acting Attorney Generpick, on its surface. with), and like Trump he Yates has criticized the legal experts agree mentary has downplayed the severity of the Barr’s past comal Sally (which many But much like Whitaker, TIME WARNER political donationswith), of the allegations against mentary Trump — both the the severity of the andprosecutors like Trumpon he has criticized the hason downplayed Mueller’s TIMEteam.

WARNER collusion and obstruction-of-justice fronts — — William P. Barr has downplayed allegations political donations of the prosecutors on allegations against Trump on both the Barr also has a relevant history with special and also suggested collusion the Clintons be in against fronts President in the past.has downplayed allegations Mueller’s team. andshould obstruction-of-justice — Trump William P. Barr counsels.

But when Bush in 1992 decided to history with special more trouble.

Barr also has a relevant and also suggested the Clintons should be in against President Trump in the past. pardon several figures in the In both stories, Barr declined to judge In fact, in November 2017, Barr told the counsels.

But Iran-Contra when Bush in 1992 decided to more trouble. scandal,tohejudge took thepardon legs out from beneath thein the Iran-Contra Trump for specific New York Times that there wasin actually more2017, several figures In both stories,investiBarr declined In fact, November Barr harshly told thefor calling prosecutor the gations — even impacting him his forindependent basis to investigateNew Hillary for there the was scandal,investigating he took the legs out from beneath the Trump harshly forand calling specific investiYork Clinton Times that actually more ones matter.

And one of the people Bush consulted political opponents, apparently.

Barr suggestUranium One deal than there is to investigate independent prosecutor investigating the gations — even ones impacting him and his basis to investigate Hillary Clinton for the wasBarr Barr.

At the time the And prosecutor, Lawthat was okay forpolitical a president as long as the Trump for potentialUranium collusionOne withdeal Russia. matter. one of the people Bush consulted opponents, apparently. suggestthanHe thereed is to investigate rence Walsh, called it “a sort of Saturday decision was made with respect to the actual went so far as to sayTrump the Justice Department was Barr. At the time the prosecutor, Lawed that was okay for a president as long as the for potential collusion with Russia. He Night Massacre” reference to high-profile evidence at hand and not for rea-respect was wrong to give Clinton pass.

Walsh, called it “a sort of Saturday decision waspolitical made with to the actual — arence went soa far as to say the Justice Department Nixon firings during the thick of the—Watersons.

“To the extent itwas is wrong not pursuing these Night Massacre” a reference to high-profile evidence at hand and not for political reato give Clinton a pass. gate scandal.

But Barrthese apparently matters, the department is abdicating Nixon firings during the thick of the Watersons. thinks those condi“To the extent it isitsnot pursuing would seem quite coincidence that have been theBarr topicapparently Trump hadthinks Itthose responsibility,” he said. gate the scandal.

But condimatters, the department istions abdicating its met on Trump appears yet another strongly tried and failed get been then-Attorney Earlier that same responsibility,” month, Barr also It wouldonseem quite the coincidence that tions to have met on the topic Trump hadto be settling heexplicitsaid. attorney general who might be prepared to General Jeff Sessions to investigate — theto get ly called for more investigation the month, Clin- Barr Trump appears to be settling on yet another strongly tried and failed then-Attorney Earlier thatof same also explicittake his — sidetheon these verygeneral personal Clintons and that has to music to tons, telling The Washington Philip attorney whoand might be prepared to General JeffbeSessions to investigate ly called for Post’s more investigation of the—Clinpolitical investigative issues a way Trump’s Rucker and Matt Zapotosky, “I don’t all take hisinside onSessions these very personal and Clintons — and that has to be music to tons, telling Thethink Washington Post’sears.

Philip wouldn’t. It’s also notable that Barr seemsissues to in a way Sessions Barr has also Trumpears. a complete pass this stuff about throwing jail or “I don’t political investigative Trump’s Rucker[Clinton] and Mattin Zapotosky, think allgiven it isn’t to erect a wall that Barr seems to on one in of jail theor central Barr events thegiven Mueller jumping to the conclusion that she should be [Clinton] wouldn’t. It’s also notable hasin also Trump believe a complete passso necessary this stuff about throwing the presidency andit the nation’s top probe: Trump’s of then-FBI Director prosecuted is appropriate.”

Then added: that believe isn’t so necessary to erect a wall on one of the central eventsbetween in the Mueller jumping to the he conclusion she should be firing law enforcement — a the wallpresidency that Trumpand the nation’s top Jameshe B. added: Comey. Inprobe: a PostTrump’s op-ed, Barr “But I do think that there areis things that Then between firingsaid of then-FBI Director official prosecuted appropriate.” has long desire didn’t just not doing wrong, should be investigated haven’t n law enforcement official — a wall that Trump James B.anything Comey. In a Post op-ed, Barr saidto demolish.

“But Ithat do think thatbeen there Trump are things that that he been actually Trump “made didn’t the right investigated.” has ©The Washington Post long desire to demolish. n justcall”: not doing anything wrong, should be investigated thatbuthaven’t but that he actually “made the right call”: investigated.” ©The Washington Post

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CONTENTS

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WEEKLY

CONTENTS ON THE COVER The Rev. Brian 4 Christensen at the Our The Rev. Brian 8POLITICS ON THE of COVER 4 Cathedral Lady of Perpetual Help in Rapid 10THE NATION Christensen at the Cathedral of Our 8 City. Photo by RYAN for 12THE WORLD Lady of Perpetual Help in Rapid 10 HERMENS TheSTORY Washington Post 17COVER City. Photo by RYAN HERMENS for 12 NOTE TO READERS: The Washington National 18ENTERTAINMENT The Post 17 Weekly will not18 publish the TO week of 20BOOKS NOTE READERS: The National Dec 30. It will resume on Jan.will 4. not publish the week of 23OPINION Weekly 20 Dec 30. It will resume on Jan. 4.

FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

The gracious heart of George H.W. Bush BILL CLINTON was the 42nd president of the United States. This was written for The Washington Post.

On Jan. 20, 1993, I entered the Oval Office for the first time as president. As is the tradition, waiting for me was a note from my predecessor, George Herbert Walker Bush.

It read: Dear Bill, When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.

I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.

There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice; but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course.

You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well.

Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.

Good Luck — George No words of mine or others can better reveal the heart of who he was than those he wrote himself.

He was an honorable, gracious and decent man who believed in the United States, our Constitution, our institutions and our shared future. And he believed in his duty to defend and strengthen them, in victory and defeat. He also had a natural humanity, always hoping with all his heart that others’ journeys would include some of the joy that his family, his service and his adventures gave him.

His friendship has been one of the great gifts of my life. From Indonesia to Houston, from the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast to Kennebunkport, Maine, I cherished every opportunity I had to learn and laugh with him. I just loved him.

Many people were surprised at our relationship, considering we were once political adversaries.

Despite our considerable differences, I had admired many of his accomplishments as president, especially his foreign policy decisions in managing

America’s response to the end of the Cold War and his willingness to work with governors of both parties to establish national education goals. Even more important, though he could be tough in a political fight, he was in it for the right reasons: People always came before politics, patriotism before partisanship.

To the end, we knew we would never agree on everything, and we agreed that was okay. Honest debate strengthens democracy.

While we maintained a respectful, friendly relationship throughout my presidency, it was only when President George W. Bush asked us to jointly spearhead American relief efforts in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and again after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that we got to really know each other.

When we met with children who lost their parents in the tsunami, he was moved almost to tears when they gave us drawings they had made to capture their pain and slow recovery in grief counseling. When we were asked to speak together at Tulane’s

VINAI DITHAJOHN/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush went to Thailand in 2005 to lead American relief efforts after the Indian Ocean tsunami.

graduation in 2006, I saw his genuine feeling for the students, many of whom had suffered in the flooding of New Orleans, and others who had shown heroism and love in caring for their neighbors. “Each of you here has inspired me,” he told them.

“When I look at our world, the good I see far outweighs the bad, which maybe explains why I am a real optimist about the future that you all will be facing.”

Growing old did not rob him of his optimism or his love of competition and adventure. In his book of letters, there’s a wonderful one to his family about getting older, in which he crows about driving his speedboat off the Maine coast. “Still want to compete. I still drive Fidelity II fast — very fast. My best so far — 63 mph in a slight chop with one [Secret Service] agent on board.” I took more than one ride in that boat with him over the years. It was fun but not an experience for the faint of heart. It was the same driving spirit, coupled with heartfelt patriotism, which led him to volunteer for the Navy on his 18th birthday instead of attending Yale, becoming one of the youngest American pilots to get his wings.

After the war, he took a leap of faith by staking his and his

family’s future in the Texas oil business and eventually got into politics. Fifty years ago this spring, as a congressman representing Houston, he voted for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, going against his nearly perfect record of conservative votes in Washington. When he returned to Houston, he held a town hall to explain his vote to a hostile crowd who thought he had lost his mind.

He believed that he could convince them it was the right thing to do. That evening, at least, he was right. When he was finished talking he got a standing ovation.

Given what politics looks like in America and around the world today, it’s easy to sigh and say George H.W. Bush belonged to an era that is gone and never coming back — where our opponents are not our enemies, where we are open to different ideas and changing our minds, where facts matter and where our devotion to our children’s future leads to honest compromise and shared progress. I know what he would say: “Nonsense. It’s your duty to get that America back.”

We should all give thanks for George H.W. Bush’s long, good life and honor it by searching, as he always did, for the most American way forward. n

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OPINIONS

BY HORSEY FOR THE SEATTLE TIMES

Our duty to end modern slavery IVANKA TRUMP serves as adviser to the president of the United States. This was written for The Washington Post.

The International Labor Organization estimates that worldwide, nearly 25 million children and adults of all ages and backgrounds are victims of human trafficking, including forced labor and sex trafficking. Every government in the world has a moral obligation to do all in its power to stop these heinous crimes within its borders.

That is why President Trump took strong action last month to hold accountable those governments that have persistently failed to meet the minimum standards for combating human trafficking in their countries.

Specifically, the president will limit the number of nationalinterest waivers and restrict certain types of foreign assistance for nearly two dozen governments of countries identified as “Tier 3” by the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report. The report, the world’s most comprehensive resource for governmental antitrafficking efforts, places each country in tiers to highlight best practices and urge greater action to combat human trafficking.

Tier 3 countries are those that have neither met the minimum standards nor made a significant effort to adequately identify and protect trafficking victims, punish the traffickers, or prevent human trafficking.

The United States is an

extraordinarily generous nation, but this administration will no longer use taxpayer dollars to support governments that consistently fail to address trafficking. The most urgent types of assistance to these countries will continue, including humanitarian aid and lifesaving global health programs such as HIV treatment and Ebola preparedness and response. But the new restrictions will hold these governments accountable while providing further incentive for them to live up to their responsibility to end this scourge.

In his first month in office, the president said he was “prepared to bring the full force and weight of our government” to end human trafficking, and he signed an executive order directing

BY SHENEMAN

federal law enforcement to prioritize dismantling the criminal organizations behind forced labor, sex trafficking, involuntary servitude and child exploitation.

Following the president’s directive, the Justice Department secured a record 499 human trafficking convictions in fiscal 2017, a 14 percent increase over the previous year. The director of national intelligence elevated human trafficking to a top priority for the U.S. intelligence community. Despite a deeply polarized political climate, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act championed by the White House gained strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill this year, and in April, the president signed into law this landmark legislation to fight online sex trafficking.

The administration is also working to better identify, protect and assist trafficking victims on their paths to safety and recovery.

In fiscal 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services identified 13,314 potential victims of human trafficking through local community coalitions, and between July 2016 and June 2017, the Justice Department helped more than 8,000 survivors receive services such as housing, medical care, legal assistance,

advocacy and case management.

The Trump administration is working on many other fronts in this effort. It has committed more than $45 million to the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, a public-private partnership that catalyzes global efforts to remove the economic incentives behind these horrific crimes. The administration is also moving to modernize data collection and analysis. Only with complete data and timely analysis can we identify criminal actors and provide comprehensive services to victims.

Finally, the Trump administration, in collaboration with the resilient survivors who serve on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, is prioritizing efforts to ensure law enforcement, immigration authorities, and customs officials have the training and resources to identify victims of trafficking at U.S. ports of entry and in local communities.

President Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist movement gave America a unique inheritance: a principled commitment to fight slavery in all its pernicious forms. This administration is continuing the fight to end modern slavery and using every tool at its disposal to achieve that critical goal. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Our rare love for the Constitution CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER This column is excerpted from Krauthammer’s forthcoming posthumous book, “The Point of It All.” The book and column were edited by his son, Daniel Krauthammer.

In October 1981, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated, the networks ran over to Cairo and began covering the events all day and all night. The only thing I remember of all that coverage was a news anchor bringing in a Middle East expert and saying, “We’ve just looked at the Egyptian constitution, and our researchers tell us that the next in line for the presidency is the speaker of the parliament.” The Middle East expert burst out laughing. “Nobody in Egypt has read the constitution in 30 years,” he said. “No one knows it exists. And no one cares what’s in it.” Then he prompted, “Who’s the leader of the military?” The anchor answered, “Hosni Mubarak,” and the expert said, “He’s your next president.”

Two things struck me about that. First, how naive we are about what constitutions are and what they mean around the world. And the second thing, the reason for the first, is how much reverence we have — in the United States and very few other countries — for this document.

Many things are miraculous about the U.S. Constitution. The first is that, somehow, on this edge of the civilized world two and a half centuries ago, there could have been a collection of such political geniuses as to have actually written it.

The second miracle is the substance of it — the way that the founders, drawing from Locke and Montesquieu and the Greeks,

created an extraordinary political apparatus that to this day still works.

But the third miracle, and the one that I think we appreciate the least, is the fact of the reverence that we have for it. This reverence is so deeply ingrained that we don’t even see it; we just think it’s in the air that we breathe. But it is extraordinarily rare.

Consider the oath of office that we take for granted. Whenever we bestow upon anyone the authority to wield the power of the state over free citizens, we make them swear to protect not the people, not the nation, not the flag, but the Constitution of the United States. A piece of paper. Of course, it stands for the pillars of

the American experiment itself: the ideas, the structures, the philosophy that define a limited government with enumerated powers, whose mission is to preserve liberty and individual rights.

This is a gift — that we intrinsically have this sense of reverence for the Constitution.

And it’s important to remember that it is a gift from the past. It is not something that we can in any way credit to ourselves. If anything, recent generations have allowed that kind of reverence to diminish, to bleed away over the decades, as we try — as it were — to adapt constitutionalism to modernity.

What’s so remarkable is that constitutions are highly reactionary documents. The very essence of a constitution is to constrain the enthusiasms of a future that one cannot even see.

In America, constitutionalism demands that even the most distant progeny swear allegiance to a past embodied in a document written in the late 1780s.

And in America, it succeeded.

American constitutionalism declares: “We have seen the past, and it works.” Paradoxically, for all the forward-looking, blue-sky, futuristic spirit of its people, the astonishing stability, majesty and success of the American

experiment owe much to the inherent restraint and conservatism of its original constitutional blueprint.

I’ve always had a sense that there is something providential about American history. And this is from somebody who isn’t exactly religious. But starting with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: Here is a nation founded on the edge of civilization — a tiny colony, living on the outskirts of the civilized world — that at a time when it needed it miraculously produced the greatest generation of political thinkers in the history of the world. Then a century later, when it needed a Lincoln to save the republic, it found a Lincoln. In the first half of the 20th century, when it needed an FDR to get through the Depression and defeat fascism, it found him. In the second half, when it needed a Reagan to revive the country, he was there.

This is not to say that we will always be able to find our way. I don’t see or expect or wait for the next great figure. But over the years we have seen extraordinary spontaneous popular reactions against government overreach and in support of constitutional principles, and they are further signs of hope. n

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POLITICS

Early alerts of N.C. vote irregularities B Y A MY G ARDNER AND B ETH R EINHARD in Bladenboro, N.C.

W

hen GOP Rep. Robert Pittenger lost his primary by a narrow margin in May, he suspected something was amiss.

The congressman turned to a group of friends and family who had gathered with him on election night at a steakhouse near Charlotte and blamed the “ballot stuffers in Bladen,” according to three people at the gathering.

Pittenger’s concern stemmed from the vote tallies in rural Bladen County, where his challenger, a pastor from the Charlotte suburbs named Mark Harris, had won 437 absentee mail-in votes. Pittenger, a three-term incumbent, had received just 17.

In the days immediately after the race, aides to Pittenger told the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party and a regional political director for the National Republican Congressional Committee that they believed fraud had occurred, according to people familiar with their discussions.

GOP officials did little to scrutinize the results, instead turning their attention to Harris’s generalelection campaign against a wellfunded Democratic opponent, the people said.

Their accounts provide the first indication that state and national Republican officials received early warnings about voting irregularities in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, now the subject of multiple criminal probes.

A spokesman for the NRCC denied that Pittenger’s campaign raised the possibility of fraud in the primary.

Allegations of fraud in November’s general election have now put the outcome of the 9th Congressional District race in limbo.

State investigators are examining the activities of a political operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless, who ran a get-out-the-vote effort for the Harris campaign during the primary and general

JUSTIN KASE CONDER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In state under an election-fraud probe, aides to lawmaker say they warned officials last spring elections.

Dowless, who has worked on political campaigns in Bladen for at least a decade, touts his ability to mobilize voters to cast ballots by mail, according to people who know him. He has been under scrutiny by state officials since 2016, when allegations surfaced about illegal ballot harvesting in that year’s campaigns, leading to a public hearing.

Dowless, who told the Charlotte Observer that he did not commit any wrongdoing, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Harris campaign has said it was not aware of any illegal activities.

Pittenger said Dowless tried to sell him his services in 2016 but that he declined to hire the operative.

“I just knew I didn’t want to be involved with him,” Pittenger said. “Dowless’s efforts were wide-

ly known, and we did share our concerns with several people,” declining to elaborate on who he spoke to or what he said.

Since reports of irregularities in the 9th District emerged last month, GOP leaders in the state — including Dallas Woodhouse, the state GOP executive director — initially played down concerns that laws were broken. They repeatedly cast the situation in political terms, asserting that any voting irregularities were not widespread enough to change the outcome of the election.

In recent days, amid mounting allegations of a ballot-harvesting operation, state Republicans have shifted their rhetoric. Woodhouse told The Post on Thursday that if the state elections board can “show a substantial likelihood” that possible fraud could have changed the outcome of November’s vote, “then we fully would

A child stands near the street of the Twisted Hickory Bladenboro Housing Authority homes in Bladenboro, N.C. The state elections board is investigating anomalies in the 9th District general election. Many of the irregularities were in Bladen County, which includes Bladenboro.

support a new election.”

In an interview last week, Woodhouse initially said he did not recall fielding complaints from Pittenger aides of possible fraud after the primary. But he called back a few moments later to say that he did remember hearing of anomalies — and took “a cursory look at the end of that race at the vote totals.”

He recalled concluding that Harris had won the overall vote with a strong showing from evangelical voters, but he said: “We did not look real specifically at absentee ballots.”

“If somebody said something about the absentee ballots, it is just very possible that it didn’t register with us,” Woodhouse said.

“We had a lot of campaigns and a lot of people expressing concerns at the end of the election, and we were trying to quickly move on to the general election.”

NRCC spokesman Matt Gorman denied that anyone affiliated with the Pittenger campaign brought up possible fraud to anyone at the committee, including Tyler Foote, who ran the southeast region for the NRCC. “We had them on the phone numerous times, and there was no mention of fraud,” Gorman said. “It’s unfortunate that there’s a revisionist history going on.”

Foote did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He has been named Harris’s incoming chief of staff, although whether Harris will be seated in Congress in January remains uncertain.

The state elections board is investigating irregularities in mailin balloting in the 9th District general election — many of them in Bladen County, which had the highest share of mail-in votes in the district, state records show.

Investigators have spoken with witnesses who link Dowless to an effort to collect absentee ballots from voters and are examining whether he or his associates filled out ballots or discarded them, according to people familiar with the probe. It is illegal to collect or tamper with someone else’s ballot. n ©The Washington Post

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FIVE MYTHS

Climate change BY

K ATHARINE H AYHOE

The Fourth National Climate Assessment — the work of 13 federal agencies and more than 350 scientists, including me — is clear: The Earth is warming faster than at any time in human history, and we’re the ones causing it. Climate change is already affecting people, and the more carbon we produce, the more dangerous the effects over the com­ ing century. Nevertheless, many people continue to believe and propa­ gate some misleading myths. Here are the five I hear most frequently.

MYTH NO. 1 Climate scientists are in it for the money.

When the second volume of the National Climate Assessment was released last month, Rick Santorum, a Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, took to CNN to proclaim that climate scientists “are driven by the money that they receive.”

I was one of the report’s authors. How much did I earn?

Nothing.

The reality is that nearly every climate scientist could make at least the same amount of money in a different field, including the oil industry. And the money we do receive in grants doesn’t go into our pockets. A $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation provided me with a mere $37,000 a year, all of which went to paying for the proposed work. Santorum, meanwhile, receives a substantial income from serving as a consultant to Consol Energy, a coal company.

MYTH NO. 2 The climate has changed before. It’s just a natural cycle.

Last fall, when the first volume of the National Climate Assessment was released, White House spokesman Raj Shah responded that “the climate has changed and is always changing.”

But we can look at the natural factors that affect the climate.

First, over the past few decades,

energy from the sun has been going down, not up, so if changes in the sun’s energy drove our temperature, we should be getting cooler, not warmer.

Others argue that we’re getting warmer because we’re recovering from the last ice age.

But ice ages — and the warm periods in between — are caused by the Earth’s orbital cycles, and according to those cycles, the next event on our geologic calendar is another ice age, not more warming.

We can also rule out volcanoes, which do produce heat-trapping gases, but less than 1 percent of the CO2 that humans produce. The climate change we’re experiencing now definitely isn’t natural.

MYTH NO. 3 Climate scientists are split on whether it’s real.

We often hear that climate scientists are split 50-50 when it comes to whether global warming is occurring.

In reality, more than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening and that humans are causing it. At least 18 scientific societies in the United States, from the American Geophysical Union to the American Medical Association, have issued official statements on climate change.

The public confusion has been manufactured by industry interests and ideologues to muddy the waters.

MAXIM SHIPENKOV/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

A large majority of Americans believe that global warming is happening, and virtually all climate scientists agree that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are a factor.

MYTH NO. 4 Climate change won’t affect me.

While 70 percent of American adults agree that climate change is happening, only 40 percent of those surveyed believe it will harm them personally. Sure, it’ll hurt polar bears, and maybe people who live on low-lying islands in the South Pacific. But the world has warmed by just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. What’s the big deal?

Climate change is a threat multiplier that touches everything, from our health to our economy to our coasts to our infrastructure. It makes heat waves stronger, heavy precipitation events more frequent and hurricanes more intense, and it nearly doubles the area burned by wildfires. It supercharges natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey and the Camp Fire, as those suffering the effects impacts of these events know this firsthand.

MYTH NO. 5 It’s cold outside — global warming can’t be real.

Cold weather doesn’t rebut the data that shows the planet is warming over climate time scales. Think of it this way: Weather weather is like your mood, and climate is like your personality. Weather is what occurs in a certain place at a certain time. Climate is the longterm average of weather over decades. Global warming or not, cold days still occur, particularly in winter. But since 2000, we’re seeing far more new hottemperature records than cold ones. In fact, in 2017, we saw more than 10,000 coldtemperature records broken at weather stations across the United States. And more than 36,000 high-temperature records were broken the same year. n Hayhoe is a professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is a lead author on Volumes 1 and 2 of the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

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WORLD

A global struggle with carbon taxes B Y S TEVEN M UFSON AND J AMES M C A ULEY

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he single most effective weapon in the fight against climate change is the tax code — imposing costs on those who emit greenhouse gases, economists say. But as French President Emmanuel Macron learned over the past three weeks, implementing such taxes can be politically explosive.

On Tuesday, France delayed for six months a plan to raise already steep taxes on diesel fuel by 24 cents a gallon and gasoline by about 12 cents a gallon. Macron argued the taxes were needed to curb climate change by weaning motorists off petroleum products, but violent demonstrations in the streets of Paris and other French cities forced him to backtrack — at least for now.

“No tax is worth putting in danger the unity of the nation,” said Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who was trotted out to announce the concession.

It was a setback for the French president, who has been trying to carry the torch of climate action in the wake of the Paris accords in December 2015. “When we talk about the actions of the nation in response to the challenges of climate change, we have to say that we have done little,” he said last week.

Macron is hardly alone in his frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts run into fierce opposition. But the French reversal was particularly disheartening for climate policy experts, since it came just as delegates from around the world were gathering in Katowice, Poland, for a major conference designed to advance climate measures.

“Like everywhere else, the question in France is how to find a way of combining ecology and equality,” said Bruno Cautres, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. “Citizens mostly see punitive public policies when it comes to the environment: taxes, more taxes and

DAVID VINCENT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

French protests are latest backlash to imposing such pricing laws more taxes after that. No one has the solution, and we can only see the disaster that’s just occurred in France on this question.”

“Higher taxes on energy have always been a hard sell politically,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard University economics professor and advocate of carbon taxes. “The members of the American Economic Association are convinced of their virtue. But the median citizen is not.”

In the United States, whose energy-related taxes are among the lowest in the developed world, politicians, their constituents and their donors have repeatedly made that clear.

To be sure, some climate-con-

scious countries have adopted carbon taxes, including Chile, Spain, Ukraine, Ireland and Scandanavia among others. Others have adopted cap and trade programs that effectively put prices on carbon emissions.

Policy experts say that to some extent the prospects of carbon taxes may depend on what happens to the money raised.

Using the revenues for deficit reduction, as was planned in France, is a no-no.

“Even in the best of times, carbon taxes must be carefully crafted to avoid political pitfalls,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Senate Finance Committee staffer and Clinton White House climate

Protesters wearing yellow vests stand in front of a makeshift barricade to block the entrance of a fuel depot in Le Mans, France on Tuesday. Because of the violent demonstrations, the French government delayed fuel tax and utility hikes.

adviser. “In particular, much of the revenue raised must be recycled back to middle-income workers. Macron’s approach put the money toward deficit reduction, stoking already simmering class grievances.”

Last year, a group of economists and policy experts — including former Treasury Secretaries James A. Baker and Lawrence H. Summers and former Secretary of State George Shultz — advocated a tax and dividend approach. It would feature a carbon tax of $40 a ton, affecting coal, oil and natural gas. The revenue would be used to pay dividends to households. Progressive tax rates would mean

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A MANDA C OLETTA in Toronto BY

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Hate crimes in Canada surged by 47% last year

more money for lower and middle income earners.

“Because the revenue is rebated equally to everyone, most people will get more back than they pay in carbon taxes,” said Mankiw, who is part of the group.

“So if people understood the plan, and believed it would be carried out as written, it should be politically popular.”

So far the group, called the Climate Leadershp Council, has not been able to generate much support from members of Congress.

But Canada is about to offer a test case.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has unveiled a “backstop” carbon tax of $20 a ton, to take effect in January, for the four Canadian provinces that don’t already have one.

Trudeau was elected partly on a promise of this sort of measure, but it’s costing him more political capital than expected. Conservative premiers oppose the plan, which looks set to become an election issue.

Trudeau’s policy, however, is designed to withstand criticism.

About 90 percent of the revenues from the backstop tax will be paid back to Canadians in the form of annual “climate action incentive” payments. Because of the progressive tax rates, about 70 percent of Canadians will get back more than they paid. If they choose to be more energy efficient, they could save even more money.

The first checks will arrive shortly before Canadian elections. n

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French President Emmanuel Macron, center, visits with officers on Sunday, a day after rioting in Paris.

eported hate crimes in Canada skyrocketed 47 percent last year, the highest number since comparable data first became available in 2009, according to recently released figures from Statistics Canada.

Law enforcement agencies reported that 2,073 hate crimes occurred in 2017, up from 1,409 in 2016, an increase fueled by incidents primarily taking place in Ontario and Quebec targeting Canada’s Jewish, Muslim and black populations.

Although it marked the fourth consecutive year that hate crimes have increased in the country, this uptick represented the largest year-on-year jump during that period.

“Ordinarily, I would give the caveat that any increase in crime statistics could be the result of better police recording and public reporting,” said Barbara Perry, a criminology professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology who studies hate crimes. “But this kind of leap means more is going on than just changes in recording behavior.”

She added that the rise is also reflected in an increase in media coverage spotlighting hate crimes as well as in figures kept by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and B’nai Brith Canada, which track anti-Muslim and antiSemitic incidents, respectively.

Hate crimes targeting religious groups accounted for 41 percent of all hate crimes in Canada in 2017 and were up 83 percent from 2016, according to the data.

In Quebec, reported hate crimes against Muslims peaked in February 2017, the month after a 28-year-old man, allegedly animated by far-right extremist figures online, opened fire on a Quebec City mosque, killing six people and injuring 19 others.

“The shooting set the tone for the rest of the year,” said Leila

CATHERINE LEGAULT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

People gather for the funeral of three of the six victims of the massacre at a mosque in a Quebec City suburb last year.

Nasr, a spokeswoman for the National Council of Canadian Muslims. “It was a year in which the Muslim community felt like it was increasingly targeted and like it was always watching its back.”

According to the Statistics Canada data, though there were increases in both violent and nonviolent hate crimes in 2017, most of the upsurge was in the latter, including crimes such as public mischief, vandalism and public incitement of hatred.

Experts say that those types of hate crimes should not be dismissed.

“There’s a tendency to think that they are very minor because no one is physically hurt,” Perry said. “But because they are targeted at entire communities their audience is broader, and this can have serious impacts.”

Nasr said that the effects of nonviolent incidents are particularly pronounced on children, for whom they may be their first encounter with Islamophobia.

Hate crimes targeting sexual orientation increased for the second consecutive year, representing 10 percent of all hate crimes in 2017, according to the data. The majority of those incidents were violent crimes.

Statistics Canada noted in its report that although its figures could be “influenced by changes in

local police service practices” and “the willingness of victims to report incidents to police,” its numbers “likely undercount the true extent of hate crime in Canada.”

Perry said that “a whole constellation of factors coming together at the same time” is responsible for this increase, including the growth of new and once-dormant far-right groups in Canada.

“In recent years, there’s been an increased polarization of our society and our political spectrum, not only in Canada but around the world,” said Nasr, who called on the government to institute a federal strategy against hate crimes.

Michael Mostyn, the chief executive of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement that the Statistics Canada report is “too stark to ignore.”

He noted that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently apologized for Canada’s turning away of the MS St. Louis in 1939 — an ocean liner carrying more than 900 German Jews fleeing Europe — and promised a plan to combat anti-Semitism.

“There can be no delay in fulfilling these commitments,” he said.

Hate crimes data released last month by the FBI showed that hate crimes in the United States increased by about 17 percent in 2017. n ©The Washington Post

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His assistant priest was jailed on charges of molesting a child.

RYAN HERMENS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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Now he must deliver his homily.

T ERRENCE M C C OY in Rapid City, S.D. BY

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rian Christensen is on his way to jail again. Clerical collar around his thin neck, rosary dangling from the rearview mirror, the priest sets out on the same trip he has taken almost every day that week.

First was Monday afternoon, when he followed the detectives down this road, then up to the third floor of the police department, where he waited outside the interrogation room. On Wednesday, he went to the preliminary hearing, where the felony charges were announced: two counts of sexual contact with a 13-year-old. On Thursday, and on Friday, he returned to arrange a visitation with the Rev. John Praveen, 38, whom he last saw being cuffed and led into a police car, and who is now being held on a $100,000 cash bond and facing 30 years in prison.

Now, Monday again, Christensen pulls out of the parking lot at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where as lead pastor he oversaw Praveen’s clerical duties. He makes the five-minute drive to the Pennington County jail, where he plans to speak with the incarcerated priest for the first time since his arrest.

“Aren’t you tired of all this?” his mother asked him on the phone that morning, and he could only sigh and say, yes, “I am tired of this.”

This: a string of child sex abuse scandals that — spanning decades, continents and thousands of victims — has fundamentally altered how the world views the Catholic Church and priests like him, in particular.

With every crisis, Christensen had allowed himself to hope that now, perhaps, it would

The Rev. Brian Christensen opens the church doors after Mass. After a priest in his parish was charged with sexual contact involving a child, Christensen wasn’t sure how he would talk to his congregants about what had become the most wrenching and complicated episode of his life as a priest.

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be over, only to see another year like this one, when every day seems to bring news of sex crimes and coverups in the church. A grand jury report in Pennsylvania accused more than 300 priests of abusing about 1,000 children, spurring federal authorities to investigate. Two U.S. cardinals have been disgraced.

And approval ratings for Pope Francis, who once was the world’s most popular leader, have plummeted among Americans.

But far beneath those headlines are churches like Christensen’s, where the same themes that have come to define the scandal at large — betrayal, hypocrisy, abuse of power, defensiveness — are playing out in a microcosm.

Ever since police arrested Praveen, who has pleaded not guilty, Christensen’s thoughts have been dominated by the same conflicts, the same questions. He believes it’s his responsibility as a Catholic leader to find a way to forgive sins, but could he this time? Already, he had faced his flock once at weekend Mass, where he had struggled to explain the unexplainable, but how does he steward the faith of thousands in a church beset by crisis? And how does he protect his own?

Christensen, 53, parks his Ford SUV near the jail. He thinks about the day he became a priest, about two decades ago, and how he imagined his life would be. This is not a day he envisioned. “Priests go visit people in prison,” he says aloud. “They don’t visit priests in prison.”

He climbs out, a tall, graceful man with hair as trim as it was during his military days. He walks past the mirrored glass in the jail lobby, then to a chair in front of a monitor and a phone.

The monitor screen says that his appointment is beginning and that the call is being recorded.

The lights on either side of the monitor come on. He picks up the phone.

“Come on, Father John,” he says and waits for the priest to arrive. wo days before this jail visit, back at the cathedral, Christensen had stepped out of the confessional. Feeling harried, he’d looked at his watch. It was 4:18 p.m. on a Saturday. The confessions that afternoon had gone way over schedule, and now little more than an hour remained until

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RYAN HERMENS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

the weekend’s first Mass, barely enough time to plan how he would address what had become the most wrenching and complicated episode of his life as a priest.

To Christensen, the stakes were clear. No other major religion in the United States had lost more adherents than Catholicism over the past two decades. The combination of rapid social change, rigid church doctrine and a steady accumulation of clergy sex abuse scandals had plunged the church into turmoil. Millions of Americans raised Catholic — 41 percent of them, according to the Pew Research Center — no longer identified themselves that way.

The losses were steepest in the Northeast and the Midwest, once the center of the Catholic life in America, and among whites.

Those descriptions characterized almost all of the 1,400 families in Christensen’s congregation, some of whom he wasn’t sure would, despite everything, still come to Mass and hear his homily.

He’d stepped into his office, trying to expel the freneticism of that week — the wedding receptions, church retreats and trips

DIOCESE OF RAPID CITY

TOP: The Rev. Brian Christensen puts on an amice while preparing to celebrate Mass.

When a woman at a church retreat asked if he was uncomfortable wearing his clerical clothing, it pained him to think about it.

ABOVE: The Rev. John Praveen is charged with two counts of sexual contact with a 13-year-old.

back and forth to jail — and brought out two notepads, a pen and a book of exegesis. He headed to the place where he did all of his best thinking. Inside, the chapel smelled of incense. It was quiet except for the sound of thin Bible pages being turned in prayer.

He knelt, hunched his shoulders over a pew and lowered his head into his hands.

He’d always wanted to say, “Not on my watch,” and that was how it had been at his parish. Even if the kids complained or the courses seemed repetitive, he’d demanded biannual abuse training for children so they could recognize what it would mean to be touched inappropriately. In every church bathroom hung laminated signs encouraging victims of clergy abuse to “speak out.” But now, a scandal he’d once associated with faraway Boston or Milwaukee had arrived here, too. And it hadn’t just allegedly happened on his watch but inside the cathedral itself, down in the basement, on a late September day when hundreds of people, including him, were at the church. And none of them had any idea.

He’d made the sign of the cross, picked up a notepad and started writing.

The first time he heard about child sex abuse in the church was when he was at seminary in Winona, Minn. It was 1995, and he met a reporter who was asking seminarians what it was like to enter the church at a time when pedophilia allegations were roiling parishes in Ireland and Austria. The question startled him.

What abuse? In his whole life — from ringing bells as a Long Island altar boy, to escaping to chapel during morning marches at the U.S. Air Force Academy, to his growing church involvement while flying B-1 bombers — he’d never seen anything remotely approaching abuse.

Christensen sat back in the chapel pew, wrote the words, “What do we do?” and underlined them twice.

His faith in the clergy, then so strong, began to waver only after he put on the collar. He witnessed one elderly priest get too “chummy” with boys — crude conversations, too much time together at the rectory — and ultimately re-

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COVER STORY ported him to church leaders. He watched a South Dakota priest be removed because of abuse allegations. And then in 2005, he got his first solo pastoral assignment. It was a small church in Fort Pierre, S.D., where a priest had abused children in the 1980s and early 1990s. On Sundays, Christensen noticed an absence of 30-something men in the pews. And soon people were telling him that the priest had abused them, too, and that, no, they didn’t want it reported, they just wanted him to know that it was true, that it had happened.

He closed his notebooks, shut his eyes and thought about the conversations he’d been having since Praveen’s arrest.

“I was raised Catholic,” one recently returned parishioner, Leslie Bostick, told him over lunch about her mind-set when she abandoned the church following an earlier abuse scandal. “This [sex abuse] issue came up, and it bothered me, and I stopped. . . . I would never go to confession. I felt like, ‘Why should I confess my sins to someone who has committed a crime?’ ” Joe Carlin, 78, told him over coffee on another day: “I would not admit to people that I’m a Catholic right now if they’re not Catholic.”

“Do you feel uncomfortable wearing that?” another woman, who declined to give her name, citing the sensitivity of her work with sex abuse survivors, had asked of his clerical clothing while at a church retreat.

“I don’t, but, you know, um, no, I don’t,” he’d replied, fumbling, because it was a question he’d asked of himself before, and sometimes he didn’t know the answer. Some emotions were easier. He felt angry — angry that pedophile priests had been shuffled from parish to parish. He felt frustrated. Why all of the church secrecy? Why the sealed court cases, the priests quietly retired, the accusers silenced with confidentiality agreements? And sometimes, most painful of all, he felt betrayed. He had sacrificed his life to become a priest, a decision that hadn’t been easy. It was only in August 1993 that, after years of thinking about it, he saw a processional for Pope John Paul II while flying over Denver. In that moment, he heard God’s voice — the clearest it had ever been —

RYAN HERMENS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Christensen, pictured greeting young churchgoers, demanded biannual abuse training for children at his church so they could recognize what it would mean to be touched inappropriately.

“I would not admit to people that I’m a Catholic right now if they’re not Catholic.”

Joe Carlin, a parishioner at Christensen’s church

telling him he belonged down there, with them. He soon gave up his military career, and the possibility of marriage and a family, and now to have this act of service become so twisted in people’s minds? To have someone ask if he was uncomfortable wearing his clerical clothing, when he should feel only pride? It hurt to think about it.

He’d stood and, smoothing out the folds of that clothing, stepped out of the chapel, having decided what he would say during his homily. He looked out into the main church hall.

Ten minutes until the service.

Hundreds of people already in the pews. All eyes on him.

D

ays later now, at the jail again, John Praveen’s face appears on the computer monitor against a backdrop of white walls, closed doors and a stairway leading out of the camera frame. It is a face that looks swollen, unshaven, on the verge of crying. Christensen stares at it, blinking in disbelief, before he speaks.

Every day since his arrest, he has thought about talking with Praveen and all of the questions he wanted to ask him. Everything that had happened that week still didn’t make any sense to Christensen, who couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried, square the man he had thought Praveen was with the man the police say he is.

He first heard of Praveen shortly before he moved to South Dakota last November from Hyderabad, India, to help fill the Rapid City Diocese’s shortage of priests. Praveen arrived at the cathedral in June, carrying himself with a childlike earnestness that almost everyone found disarming. He wanted to put every parishioner’s birthday in the church bulletin. He asked if he could redecorate the church’s understated altar with bright purples and blues. He followed church staff members around, repeatedly asking if they needed help with anything. “Always had a smile on his face,” said Margaret Jackson, a parishioner who took him out to an Indian restaurant days before his arrest.

On a Sunday afternoon three months after Praveen arrived, a local family reported to police allegations against him — details of which are under court seal — and the next day, investigators were at the cathedral. They said they wanted to talk to Praveen, not at the cathedral, but back at the station. Christensen followed them, then waited outside the interrogation room for more than an hour, counting tiles, praying, until the door opened. Praveen came out. His eyes were red. His hair, normally combed, was a ruffled mess. Disbelief was on his face. A detective took Christensen aside and told him. Praveen had been accused of sexually abusing

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a child. Christensen felt numb, then drove back to the cathedral in near silence with Praveen, who immediately went to his room, where he sat awake with the lights on all night.

The next day, after the police had again come to the cathedral, after Christensen had asked Praveen to change so he wouldn’t be seen cuffed in his clerical clothes, after police had photographed a classroom in the cathedral’s basement, Christensen got online. He wanted to inform the cathedral’s few Facebook followers of all the information he had, but many already had found out from the police on social media everything they needed to know.

“Is it just me, or is the vast majority of these cases that we continue to hear about, involve Catholic priests?!” one person wrote in response to the police department’s Facebook post.

“NEVER go to a Catholic Church,” another person said.

That type of reaction, the absolutism of it, was perhaps most upsetting of all to Christensen. He knew there were abusive priests, but the messy reality was that most weren’t. In fact, he’d come to see clergy members as no more likely to be sexual predators than people in other professions with access to children. Some studies, including a report in 2004 by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, put the number of sexual abusers among priests at about 4 percent, roughly consistent with clergymen of other faiths.

Other organizations, including BishopAccountability.org, placed it at just under 6 percent. Anne Barrett Doyle, the organization’s co-director, says it may be shown to be higher still — especially if authorities compel transparency.

And what to do about the priests who abuse? How to balance the secular need for punishment with the Catholic command to forgive? Could anger and compassion coexist?

Now staring at Praveen, who is wiping his eyes and sniffling, speaking so mutedly that he is barely intelligible, Christensen can’t help but feel sympathy, perhaps not as much as he has for the victim and her family, but sympathy nonetheless.

He leans forward, presses the phone tightly to his ear.

“Father John, how are you?” he

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says softly.

He decides not to ask the questions most on his mind.

“Did you know that you can get e-mails?”

He decides not to ask about either of the dates listed on Praveen’s charging document, Sept. 3 and Sept. 28, both of which were days the two priests had spent together. The first had been Labor Day, when they’d gone to a barbecue at the home of a local Catholic. Christensen didn’t see the girl there, but he did see Praveen play cornhole for hours and hours. And the second date had been the day of a ceremony at the cathedral, attended by hundreds, to honor an Italian saint, and Christensen had urged Praveen, during lunch, to try some American food for once.

“What do you need?”

He will not ask how, if the allegations are true, Praveen could have possibly toggled, on both of those days, in two separate locations, between his festivities with congregants and his abuse of the same child, and without anyone noticing.

“You have the Bible there? You have the rosary?”

And he will not ask what he most wanted to, a question that he repeated with parishioners during a moment of exasperation and frustration days earlier: How could Praveen have done this to them, to the Church?

Instead, he will say this: “Many, many people are praying for you.”

“Let’s say a prayer.”

Christensen lowers his head and closes his eyes. Praveen does the same.

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nveloped in robes of green and gold, holding the Book of the Gospels high above his head, Christensen had stared straight at the cathedral’s altar and slowly walked toward it. The opening hymn had started. The congregants had stood. He knew he had to be strong for this. He was the face of the parish. He was the representation of the priesthood. He couldn’t waver, not with so many looking to him for answers.

Christensen came to the lectern. He looked out at the hundreds of people below, barely an empty pew in sight, and glanced down at his notes. For days, he had asked where God had been in

RYAN HERMENS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

all of this, and he thought he finally had his answer. One of this week’s readings described how Jesus’ suffering had made him perfect, empathetic to the struggles of mortal life because those struggles had once been his, too.

So maybe the embarrassment and shame they felt now — their own suffering — wasn’t without value.

Maybe it could make them stronger. Like Jesus.

He looked up.

“Jesus knew suffering in so many ways. . . . Today, we as a parish family are suffering,” he said, his words slowing as he spoke, echoing faintly off the marble walls and stained-glass windowpanes. “Suffering because our brother has been arrested. A child and a family are suffering. The church, the body of Christ, our parish community of the cathedral is suffering. A priest. A priest. A brother priest and, in some ways, all priests are suffering.”

He paused for a long moment.

“Father John was arrested on Tuesday morning,” he said.

There was the sound of hundreds of lungs filling with a sharp inhalation of breath. Christensen glanced down, then up again and continued. “. . . sexual contact with a minor . . . ” A man slowly turned the gold wedding band on his finger.

Churchgoers leave Our Lady of Perpetual Help after Mass. Over the past two decades, social change, strict church doctrine and clergy sex abuse scandals have caused more Catholics to turn away from the Church.

“. . . under the cloud of this abuse . . . “ A woman put her hand over her mouth. “. . . many thoughts, many feelings . . . anger, frustration, confusion, bewilderment . . .”

On and on he went, solemnly, about how prayer was needed for the accused and the accuser, how this didn’t represent the priesthood. He did not bristle with anger or speak in disgust. There were no echoes of the new calls to end the vow of celibacy or grant women more power. He did not apologize, on behalf of the Catholic Church or on behalf of himself, even if the abuse allegedly had happened on his watch, because he didn’t know what to apologize for. And as he stood outside in the misting cold of that evening, greeting parishioners as they exited Mass, it didn’t seem as though they had expected these things of him.

“Thank you, Father,” a man said, quickly shaking his hand and leaving.

“Thank you, Father,” another man said.

“Good sermon, Father,” someone else offered.

Since the days of the first major scandal in the American church, in 2002, some have predicted that Catholics would abandon the church in revulsion. But while many have left, the primary rea-

son, according to Pew research in 2010, was the conservatism of church teachings, not the sex abuse crises. “None of them were shaken by it” was how Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame, characterized 80 or so Catholics he interviewed in 2003. Another researcher, Michele Dillon of the University of New Hampshire, while wondering whether this time will be different, said Catholics have gotten past previous crises through “compartmentalization,” taking what they feel is valuable from the church and ignoring the rest.

This has extended even to survivors of sexual abuse, and their families, whose personal traumas are exacerbated by church scandals but who nonetheless don’t lose faith in Catholicism and the church, a reaction Christensen had encountered before and, to his surprise, was seeing again tonight.

“My daughter was 4,” one woman, Lisa Krogman, told him of the day-care abuse. “We have been through hell and back. . . . The thing I finally said to her was we can’t walk with this crutch. . . . We can let God have it and let it go.

And so that’s what we did.”

“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” another middle-aged woman, who declined to give her name to protect her daughters’ privacy, said to him next about the repercussions of abuse. “My girls still suffer to this day because of what happened to them. It’s horrible, but I don’t know exactly what happened to this girl.”

What Christensen did know about the girl: that her alleged encounters with Praveen had left her so shaken that she quickly told her parents what had happened, and they believed her. He knew that, within two days of it being reported, Praveen was in jail, and that the system had seemed to work as well as it could, even if it had failed so many other times. And he would soon know, but not yet, that the girl’s family would be back at the church within days of Praveen’s arrest, along with the girl herself, all of them participating in Mass, and that they would return again the week after that. He would shake his head, marveling at it. “A testimony of their own faith,” he would say. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Ambition, flaws in Franklin’s path to genius N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

L INDA K ILLIAN

I YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN The Birth of Ingenuity

By Nick Bunker Knopf. 445 pp. $30

A portrait of Benjamin Franklin, ca. 1770, by the engraver Edward Fisher, from a painting by Mason Chamberlin.

n September 1774, Benjamin Franklin sat down to write what is perhaps the most famous letter of reference in American history. He used the phrase “an ingenious, worthy young man” to describe Thomas Paine, an out-of-work former tax collector whom he had met in London and who was planning to sail for America. Paine made good use of Franklin’s introduction.

Just a year after arriving in Philadelphia, Paine wrote “Common Sense,” which passionately argued for independence from England.

Franklin probably didn’t guess when he wrote the letter that Paine would become an essential voice in the fight for American independence. But he probably saw a bit of himself in the smart, curious, working-class striver with strong egalitarian political views. Franklin also saw ingenuity.

It was a quality that he possessed and that he highly prized in others.

Ingenuity is the central theme of Nick Bunker’s book about the first half of Franklin’s life. “Ingenuity” was Franklin’s favorite word, and in the 18th century it meant a combination of intellect, imagination, practical skills, wit and sociability. In “Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity,” Bunker offers ample evidence to illustrate how Franklin developed ingenuity and how it influenced the rest of his life. Franklin’s origins, character and background, Bunker writes, serve to explain the man he would become.

It is the ambitious, flawed young printer Bunker is describing, not the world-famous scientist, businessman, prominent civic leader, diplomat, revolutionary and Founding Father who has been immortalized in countless other books. Most Americans are familiar with the rags-to-riches life story Franklin created in his “Autobiography,” published after his death. The truth is more complicated, argues Bunker, who attempts to fill in the gaps.

Bunker uses extensive original research from lesser-known

ASSOCIATED PRESS/ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

sources to examine Franklin’s formative experiences, ancestors, immediate family, the patrons who helped him achieve success and the business competitors he battled along the way. Franklin had many friends and was a master at cultivating mentors who could help him. But he was not always the best judge of character in his youth, which led to numerous personal and financial difficulties. Franklin was brilliant, talented, complicated and intensely ambitious. But as a young man, Bunker asserts, he was also constantly afraid of failure.

The story begins with Franklin’s great-grandfather Henry, who was a blacksmith in Ecton in the English Midlands. From there Bunker moves more or less chronologically through Franklin’s first 40 years, stopping right on the cusp of his scientific discoveries and his later

greatness as a national figure.

Franklin’s father, Josiah, was a Presbyterian Puritan and Whig who left England for Boston in 1683 seeking economic opportunity and freedom from religious and political persecution. Described as “pious and prudent” by Benjamin, Josiah was a candleand soapmaker who sang psalms, played the violin and had a love of books that he passed on to his youngest son. Although Benjamin was forced by his father to leave school at age 10, he became a voracious reader and autodidact.

Franklin’s early struggles with organized religion and faith, and his flirtation with atheism, are explored, along with his not-alwayssuccessful quest to be good. We know so much about Franklin’s internal struggles because of the extensive letters and writings he left behind, including the “Autobi-

ography.” Even though he wanted to project a positive image, his faults and mistakes are often on display there, including his temper and frequent lack of self-control. These are qualities Franklin strove mightily to regulate later in his life. “We remember Franklin as the apostle of hard work, temperance, and self-control,” Bunker writes. “This is the way he hoped to be remembered. But when a human being writes so much about prudence, virtue, and sobriety, it may be because he or she would prefer to be wild, intemperate, and rash.”

This is Bunker’s third book. “An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2015. In “Young Benjamin Franklin,” Bunker offers newly discovered information about Franklin’s friends and family and vivid descriptions of the political and cultural atmosphere Franklin knew in London and Philadelphia. At times the research can be overwhelming, and Franklin’s story gets a bit lost in the details about what can seem like every person he knew in his first 40 years. But these littleknown people do offer an interesting cast of characters, and many are the kind of eccentrics Franklin hugely enjoyed. They were people like Paine, whom many found annoying or a bit strange but whom Franklin appreciated.

Anyone interested in Franklin and early America should find this book fascinating. It offers important insight into the internal struggles Franklin wrestled with as a youth and the questions he strove to answer. Ultimately, though, it is as much about the emergence of the concept of ingenuity in the pre-revolutionary age and among Franklin’s intellectual and scientific mentors and friends as it is about Franklin’s own path to ingenuity. n Killian is a journalist and author. Her latest book is “The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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SUNDAY, December, 9, 2018

Foothills Magazine presents its 7th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine. Photos must have been shot during the 2018 calendar year. Entries will be judged in two categories — human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2019

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