Fifteen Things That Caught My Eye Today: Pope Francis in Iraq, Lockdowns & More

1. Javier Martínez-Brocal: Pope Francis’ Mosul Moment

I have covered three popes and joined countless papal voyages around the world. These journeys are thoughtfully planned months, sometimes years, in advance. Their detailed itineraries always include picture-perfect stops meant to inspire. But I can’t remember any image as stirring as Pope Francis among the ruins of a city once controlled by Islamic State.

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While the visit recognized and honored the victims of countless tragedies, Pope Francis also intended to look forward. At Church Square he spoke to a group of Muslims and Christians working together to restore the 12th-century Al Nuri Mosque in Mosul’s Old City, as well as two nearby churches, Al Tahera and Al Saa’a. “We want to hear the chimes of the church clock again,” one Muslim member of the group explains. “They remind us that every hour is a gift from God.”

A Muslim craftsman had even worked with a priest to make a cross from the remnants of benches and chairs gathered from destroyed churches. The cross symbolized the plight of Christians such as an Iraqi woman named Doha, who told the pope she was working to forgive the terrorists who murdered her son. Pope Francis later said that in that moment he saw not division, mistrust and malice, but “the hope of a horizon of peace and fraternity.”

As the pope was leaving the square, he saw three children and an elderly man. He asked his driver to stop, according to Olivier Poquillon, a Catholic priest coordinating the reconstruction of one of Mosul’s ancient churches. “No one could have imagined that there was a family living in the rubble,” he tells me. “The pope got out of his car and went to the kids and blessed them. When he left I asked the kids, ‘Do you know who he was?’ They said, ‘No we don’t.’ And so, a Muslim friend that accompanied me told them, ‘He is a man of God, God came to your place.’ ” As he stood in the middle of the rubble, Father Poquillon says, “in a place that wasn’t clear of explosives a few days before, Pope Francis was a testimony of the value of the people: they have value for God.”

No matter how powerful the visit, the pope won’t change Iraq’s long history of war and violence over a few days. But it meant something to this Muslim-majority nation. “The only way to live in peace with yourself is to tolerate the other,” Mr. Mohammed said. “It is time for us to understand that the other is not a threat, that sectarianism will lead us to destruction and violence. I look at the differences as a beautiful image, not a threat to me.”

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3. Abigail Shrier: The Equality Act is a Very Bad Bill 

4. John Tierney: Death and Lockdowns

The lockdowns in America exacted a toll on people of all ages because excess deaths not attributed to Covid-19 also occurred among the elderly. Some were doubtless due to undetected Covid-19 infections—particularly early in the pandemic, when tests were not widely available. However, there was probably also some overcounting (the CDC permitted states to count a death as Covid-related without a test if it was deemed the “probable cause”). Whatever the direction of the errors, there were clearly many excess deaths not caused by the virus. The CDC counted about 345,000 deaths last year in which Covid-19 was the “underlying cause.” Even if you add the deaths in which the virus was a “contributing cause,” bringing the total to nearly 380,000, that accounts for only three-quarters of the excess mortality. Given that the total number of excess deaths, by the CDC’s calculation, was about 510,000 last year, that leaves more than 130,000 excess deaths from other causes.

5. Ryan T. Anderson: When Amazon pulled my book on transgender issues, it tried to shut down debate

In August 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid wrote that “the four best designed and conducted studies that assessed quality of life before and after surgery . . . did not demonstrate clinically significant changes . . . after (gender reassignment surgery).”

What does that mean in plain English? A population of patients is suffering so much that they go through radical surgeries, and the best research the Obama administration could find suggests that these surgeries bring them no meaningful improvements in their quality of life.

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From 2009 to 2018, the United Kingdom gender clinic saw a 4,400% increase in the number of girls being referred for gender treatment. This suggests to some researchers that there is a social contagion aspect to these teens’ experience and we should not rush to pharmacological solutions.

On Dec. 1, three High Court judges in the United Kingdom ruled on behalf of a 23-year-old woman who at age 16 had been placed on puberty blocking drugs and testosterone, and at age 20 had a double mastectomy. She thought it would bring her happiness. It didn’t. Now, before treatments like this may be performed on a minor in the UK, they’ll usually require permission from the court.

6. Alexandra DeSanctis: Divide et impera

Becerra, who until now was the attorney general of California, has next to no expertise in the realm of health care or adjacent policy. Though the Biden administration and Democratic politicians contend that curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic is the most important issue before them, the president has chosen a man to lead HHS who hasn’t a single health-care accomplishment to his name.

Instead, Becerra has devoted his lengthy political career to advancing radical policies on a host of social issues and as attorney general has wielded the power of his office to compel citizens to compromise their fundamental beliefs.

7. Franciscan U President: Value of Pope Francis Iraq Pilgrimage Cannot Be Underestimated

Franciscan Father Dave Pivonka: for the people, one of the questions I always asked was, “What does it mean to you that the Holy Father is coming?” One person said, “I feel like we’re finally being seen. Until now, we’ve been in the shadows, and nobody has looked at us or seen us. And now the Holy Father is coming to us.” What he said was: “The Holy Father is not merely coming to a country. He’s coming to us, to a people, to a Christian community.” And that was very, very moving. 

8. Father Raymond J. de Souza: What Have the Popes Said About St. Joseph?

The figure of St. Joseph is something of a blank canvas upon which preachers and theologians can paint a wide array of images. As sacred Scripture says so little about St. Joseph, it is left to the Catholic imagination to build up, generation after generation, a fuller picture of the saint granted the supreme mission of caring for Jesus and Mary.

9. Ramesh Ponnuru: Charity as an Intellectual Virtue

My point in considering these two incidents together is not to say that we should be more charitable to one another just because it would be nice (although that is certainly advice I could stand to dwell on). It’s not even that different types of conservative should be charitable to one another for the sake of the causes they hold in common. It’s that often, and in these particular cases, charitable assumptions about other people can aid understanding – whether it’s understanding of why a lot of conservatives support Trump, or of the obstacles between pro-lifers and our objectives.

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11. Erika J. Ahern: It’s Time to Build That Library

When Amazon cancels books, they make themselves your new parents. When entire school districts decide that your children shouldn’t read Homer, they make themselves your children’s parents. And these new parents aren’t just putting books on the shelf you can’t reach yet. They are burning the books.

12. Michael W. Begun: The Neuroscience of Despair

A more general worry with an exclusively biological or medical approach is the assumption that conditions like depression are what philosophers call “natural kinds” — categories that exist in nature and are independent of human thought — that inhere in brain processes. While it is generally safe to consider electrons and cancer cells as natural kinds, the naturalness of mental conditions like depression, which we come to know in a very different way than these other entities, is fiercely contested. Though the full philosophical dimensions of the problem cannot be explored here, it might be enough to remind ourselves that our conception of depression — even within professional psychiatry — is sensitive to sociocultural pressures in a way that our conceptions of helium and electrons and cancer cells are not. The role that social and cultural forces have played in shaping our notions of depression has been well documented in Allan Horwitz’s Creating Mental Illness (2002) and Dan Blazer’s The Age of Melancholy (2005). Someone committed to an entirely biological account of mental illness would need to rebuild categories like depression from the neurobiological ground up, showing which brain states correspond to which symptoms — a task that depending on one’s philosophical persuasion will be exceedingly difficult or altogether impossible.

13. Elise Italiano Ureneck: How insomnia led me to a friendship with ‘Sleeping St. Joseph’

I bought a statue of “Sleeping St. Joseph” to put on my nightstand. In a belief bordering on sacrilege, I half expected it to function like a talisman that would cure me of my insomnia. Instead, it’s served as a great comfort to me when I find myself awake.

As the minutes on the clock tick forward, I look over to St. Joseph with gratitude that one of us is sleeping. I glance at the notes I’ve placed beneath his heart and remember that like any good father, he’s bringing my worries before Jesus.

14. Sister Jean gave Loyola a scouting report disguised as prayer before upset of Illinois

15.  Mike Aquilina: Why the psalms are the answer to our modern-day trust issues

Also: A virtual event about the Equality Act tonight at 8 p.m. with Ryan Anderson and others

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Watch my Friday interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan at your convenience: