Speaking before 2000 young people upon his recent arrival in Ireland, President Obama raised the old canard that religious education is divisive:

If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation.

This is a familiar refrain, one with a certain intuitive appeal, but studies are increasingly undermining it. As Ashley Rogers Berner wrote in our December 2012 issue, a 2008 study by David Campbell compared civic engagement among students from Catholic, religious non-Catholic, secular-private, assigned public, and selective magnet schools and found that students at non-state schools—which are largely religious—performed better. This was particularly pronounced in the case of Catholic schools.

Campbell’s results held even accounting for family factors like parental income, education, and religiosity and school-based factors like size and mandatory community service. So why is the president presenting religious education as divisive instead of as something that enriches the social order? That he spoke in Northern Ireland explains why he picked out Catholic and Protestant schools, but it does not excuse his mistake.

Of course, education’s aims are academic even before they are social and civic. Here, too, religious schools outperform their public counterparts. As Rogers Berner concludes: “William Jeynes, a professor of education at California State University, recently analyzed multiple studies and data sets exploring the link between religious schooling and attainment and concluded that religious education helps all children academically, but particularly helps minority and low-socioeconomic-status students close the achievement gap.”

Fr. George Rutler, pastor of the vibrantly orthodox Church of Our Saviour in midtown Manhattan, is being reassigned to St. Michael’s Church in Hell’s Kitchen. In his latest weekly column, Rutler acknowledges a quiet campaign against the reassignment:

I was gratified that so many wanted me to stay here, and Cardinal Dolan was not unaware of that when he decided that he has other tasks for me to undertake.

But Rutler insists on the importance of obedience to his bishop:

I promised obedience to the Cardinal and to his successors, and I have done that and continue to do that and shall do that until all my earthly shepherds turn me over to the Chief Shepherd.

Under the Church’s universal canon law, priests are appointed “for an indeterminate period of time,” (can. 522) and can only be removed according to a set procedure and for specific reasons. However, the canon law also allows bishops’ conferences to create set terms for priests at which point they can be reassigned at the bishop’s will (thus skirting the wrangling that might otherwise arise during an attempted reassignment). In the U.S., the set term for a priest at a parish is six years. Rutler has served two six-year terms at Our Saviour and now, at the end of his second term, is being reassigned.

Term limits are certainly good for bishops who otherwise would have to find different ways to move problematic priests, but they also make it difficult for a priest to feel true fatherhood for his parish. As soon as he gets to know his parishioners, he has to face the prospect of a move. As George Weigel writes in today’s column, the appropriate time for a priest to be at a parish will vary from case to case but “certainly can’t be measured in un-renewable terms of office”:

Once Evangelical Catholicism has taken hold in a parish—the gospel is being preached with conviction, the liturgy is being celebrated with dignity, the parish is attracting many new Catholics, religious and priestly vocations and solid Catholic marriages are being nurtured, the works of charity and service are flourishing, and the parish finances are in order—moving a pastor out because “his term is up” is about as old Church, as institutional-maintenance Church, as you can get.

Those who might lament Rutler’s reassignment are unlikely to have the full facts and so must be cautious in drawing conclusions. Any frustration would be better focused not on this particular reassignment but on the general institution of terms for priests, which shapes this case and all others.

The Weekly Standard‘s outstanding John McCormack asked Nancy Pelosi to identify “the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth?” (Pelosi opposes legislation that would ban the latter.)

“As a practicing and respectful Catholic,” Pelosi responded, “this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this. I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics.”

Pelosi’s unreasoned invocation of religious identity almost makes one wonder if the Know-Nothings were right.

Almost. The Catholic church emphatically teaches that protecting innocent life is a “political” matter, a duty of every moral community. Speaker Pelosi, meanwhile, needs to learn that being Catholic does not necessarily preserve one immaculate from error and above all criticism.

Over to you, Matthew Hennessey.

Noted philosopher of the mind Colin McGinn is resigning from the University of Miami:

Mr. McGinn . . . denies allegations that he behaved improperly. Those allegations were lodged by a female graduate student who has said that the professor sent her a series of sexually explicit e-mail and text messages, starting in the spring-2012 semester. . . Mr. McGinn wrote that he had been thinking about the student while masturbating.

McGinn, a wide-ranging but not terribly careful critic of religious belief, wrote in 2008 that sexual abuse in the Catholic church was “made possible” by “unquestioning obedience to the authority of the representatives of the church, i.e. priests.”

McGinn also has held up the idea of “atheist as ‘role-model’” which he calls a “revolutionary concept”:

[Atheists] make up in morality what they lack in belief; whereas believers have to do so much work to believe that they have no energy left over for morality. The depravity of the Catholic Church is a nice illustration.

Yet the abolition of the priesthood would not mean the end of clerisies, nor would it stop the abuse of authority. As Colin McGinn’s sad case reminds us, a world without faith is not a world without sin.

A new bible translation has become a surprise bestseller in Norway, where only one percent of the population regularly attends church:

It may sound like an unlikely number one best-seller for any country, but even more so in secular Norway.

Yet the Bible, printed in a new Norwegian language version, has outpaced Fifty Shades of Grey to become Norway’s most popular book, catching the entire country by surprise.

The sudden burst of interest in God’s word has also spread to the stage, with a six-hour play called “Bibelen,” Norwegian for “the Bible,” drawing 16,000 people in a three-month run that recently ended at one of Oslo’s most prominent theaters.

We are profoundly distressed by the introduction of a bill in New York State today that would ease restrictions in state law on late-term abortion and runs the serious risk of broadly expanding abortion access at all stages of gestation. This legislation would add a broad and undefined “health” exception for late-term abortion and would repeal the portion of the penal law that governs abortion policy, opening the door for non-doctors to perform abortions and potentially decriminalizing even forced or coerced abortions. In addition, we find the conscience protection in the bill to be vague and insufficient, and we are concerned about the religious liberty of our health facilities. While the bill’s proponents say it will simply “codify” federal law, it is selective in its codification. Nowhere does it address the portions of federal laws that limit abortion, such as the ban on taxpayer funding, the ban on partial birth abortion or protections for unborn victims of violence.

As the pastors of more than 7.2 million Catholic New Yorkers, we fully oppose this measure, and urge all our faithful people to do the same, vigorously and unapologetically. We invite all women and men of good will to join in this effort and defeat this serious attempt to expand abortion availability in our state and to codify the most radical abortion proposals of any state in the nation.

We support the first nine points in the Governor’s agenda that enhance the true dignity of women. We commit ourselves to examining those proposals and working with the legislature on any and all efforts that help guarantee real equity for all women and men. Our position on these issues will be consistent with all the efforts of the Catholic Church throughout the world to enhance the dignity of women. The direct taking of the life of a child in the womb in no way enhances a woman’s dignity.

Instead of expanding abortion and making abortions even more prevalent, we would like to protect both the woman and the child in the womb. In New York, where one in every three pregnancies ends in abortion (and upwards of 6 in 10 in certain communities), it is clear that we as a state have lost sight of that child’s dignity. We pledge all our efforts to defeat this proposal. We call on all pro-life New Yorkers to stand together with us and with all the leadership in Albany who share our conviction that we have no need for such a bill to become law. We need instead to enhance and promote the life and dignity of all human beings from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.

Even as Chris Christie announced that he would fill Frank Lautenberg’s senate seat with an August 13 special election, conservatives banded together under the hashtag #appointRPG to call for the interim appointment of one of their most articulate leaders: Princeton professor Robert P. George.

Steven Hayward, a blogger at Powerline wrote, “Memo to Gov. Christie on Senate vacancy. Two words: Robbie George.”

Charmaine Yoest, president and CEO of American United for Life, jumped on the bandwagon, saying “Let’s get it going”:

Yair Rosenberg, a writer for Tablet told Christie to “make it happen”:

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek asked her followers to take up the cause:

Meanwhile, the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson panned the idea:

I have no doubt that George would oppose such an idea even more strenuously than Olson, and not just out of humility. It’s hard to see him winning the seat outright in New Jersey’s deep-blue sea.

Still, Governor Christie would be canny to put George on the shortlist for any interim appointee. Looking forward to 2016, Christie will need the support (or at least not the active opposition) of social conservatives. As this grassroots campaign demonstrates, few proposals would do more to galvanize that crucial bloc.

Update: At National Review, Princeton politics professor John Londregan lays out the case for Senator Robert P. George:

If we accept that Governor Christie should seek the best person to fill a possible Senate vacancy, the case for Robert George is compelling. He is already engaged in the central political debates of our age, he has been a valiant defender of the sanctity of human life, he takes a balanced conservative view of fiscal issues and of foreign policy, and he has the energy and charisma to communicate his ideas, and to follow through on his promise.

Steven F. Hayward, meanwhile, makes the best case yet: Cory Booker is going to win the special election anyway. And of course progressive groups are already raising objections.

A new app called “Texas Bible” replaces “you” with “y’all” in English bible translations wherever the original language used a second-person plural. John Dyer, its creator, explains:

Just about any time I teach from the Scriptures I have to point out a place where the English Bible says “you,” but the original Hebrew or Greek indicates you plural rather than you singular. This means the original author was addressing to a group of people, but a modern English reader can’t detect this because in common English we use “you” for both singular (“you are awesome”) and plural (“you are a team”). This often leads modern readers to think “you” refers to him or her as an individual, when in fact it refers to the community of faith. . . .

It turns out there are at least 4,720 verses (2,698 in the Hebrew Bible and 2,022 in the Greek) with you plural translated as English “you” which could lead a reader to think it is directed at him or her personally rather than the Church as a community.

So I initially set out to develop a plugin for a Bible software project that would convert all “You plurals” to “Y’all” for my Bible project. I liked it so much I decided to create a Google Chrome extension that does the same thing for some popular Bible websites (youversion.com/bible.com, biblegateway.com, biblehub.com).

Via @williambrafford

Today the British House of Lords began debate on a bill that would create a right to gay marriage. Speaking before the body, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby panned it:

The result is confusion. Marriage is abolished, redefined and recreated – being different and unequal for different categories. The new marriage of the bill is an awkward shape with same gender and different gender categories scrunched into it – neither fitting well.

The concept of marriage as a normative place for procreation is lost. The idea of marriage as covenant is diminished. The family in its normal sense predating the state and as our base community of society is weakened.

For these and many other reasons those of us in the churches and faith groups, who are extremely hesitant about the bill in many cases, hold that view because we think that traditional marriage is a cornerstone of society and rather than adding a new and valued institution alongside it for same gender relationships, which I would personally strongly support to strengthen us all, this bill weakens what exists and replaces it with a less good option that is neither equal nor effective.

“It is not at heart a faith issue,” said Welby. “It is about the general social good.”

In a baccalaureate address at Princeton University, Ben Bernanke reminded his high-achieving audience that the meritocracy is not synonymous with justice:

The concept of success leads me to consider so-called meritocracies and their implications. We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate–these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.

The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others. As the Gospel of Luke says (and I am sure my rabbi will forgive me for quoting the New Testament in a good cause): “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” Kind of grading on the curve, you might say.

It’s a basic enough observation but a necessary one. Aspiring consultants and financiers who might yawn this away if said by a minister or rabbi are likely to take it much more seriously coming from the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who as much as anyone is the high priest of our meritocracy.