Crimen Sollicitationis

By now, the concept of a pedophile priest is not surprising. Articles about complaints, prosecutions and lawsuits related to priestly sexual misconduct appear in the news media every week. Back in 2006, the British television news program Panorama broadcast a special program on the way the Catholic Church handled abusive priests, a program that resulted in the resignation of an Irish Bishop. They provided a copy of a secret church document, the Crimen Sollicitationis (Crime of Solicitation), which outlined Vatican policy on dealing with priests who commit sexual crimes. The document, written and distributed in 1962, was updated in 2001 by none other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. (If you can handle the Latin, here’s the now-public update, I believe) The document lays out an entire formalized judicial process for prosecuting priests who solicited and/or engaged in sexual acts. The penalties are entirely canonical, ranging from a rebuke to removal from office. This document is significant, not only in how it defines the relationships within the church, but also between church and state. (There is evidence of a previous version of the document from 1922, “De modo procedendi in causis sollicitationis.”)

The first significant thing about the Crimen Sollicitationis is that it was necessary. Some decades ago the church realized that it had enough of a sexual misconduct problem on its hands to warrant special instructions. In section 5 of the text it states that the local authority (Bishop, abbot, or prelate) may delegate these cases, but “they may not commit these cases on an habitual basis, or for the entire group of these cases...”. This is not the only reference in the text to a “series of cases.” It seems that they were numerous enough to be a time management problem for church administrators. Some of these cases were, no doubt, priests getting some consensual action with parishioners. Some, as we have seen in the news, involved rape or molestation.

The second significant thing about the document is its emphasis on secrecy. By secrecy I mean not only the usual protection of privacy appropriate to an allegation of sexual misconduct, but also a secrecy that restricts the prosecution of the matter to the Catholic church itself. The opening instruction states: “This text is to be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published or added to with any commentaries.” The very existence of a church policy on sexual misconduct by priests was to be secret.

Sections 11 through 13 address the secrecy of the process and the oath of secrecy to be taken by all involved, including the accuser(s) and witnesses. These matters are termed a “secret of the Holy Office, in all matters and with all persons, under penalty of excommunication latae sententiae, ipso facto, and without any declaration of such a penalty having been incurred...” Translating the Latin, this means that anyone who breaks the silence is booted out of the church at that moment, without any due process, and (by Catholic standards) will roast in hell for all eternity. The text makes it clear in Section 23, covering the questioning of the accuser, “And before he is dismissed, there should be presented to him, as above, an oath of observing the secret, threatening him, if there is a need, with an excommunication reserved to the Ordinary or to the Holy See.”

The oath itself is set down in an appendix to the instructions. After mentioning excommunication, it continues, “Further, I shall observe this secret absolutely and in every way with all who have no legitimate part in the treatment of this same matter, or, who are not constricted by the same sworn bond; nor will I ever, directly or indirectly, by means of a nod, or a word, by writing or in any other way and under whatever type of pretext, even for the most urgent and most serious cause, even for the purpose of a greater good, commit anything against this fidelity to the secret, unless a particular faculty or dispensation has been expressly given to me by the Supreme Pontiff.”

The glaring omission in this 39 page document is any admonition to cooperate with the police in cases where there is reasonable cause to think that a sex crime has been committed. There are no instructions on how to coordinate internal disciplinary measures with the civil authorities. This is not a situation where a particular bishop can take the fall for failing to report cases of rape or molestation to the police. The Crimen Sollicitationis requires that the local church authorities report all cases to the Holy See.

In 2002, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops issued the Revised Essential Norms, a document outlining new church policy on cases of alleged sexual abuse by priests or other church employees. This policy was revised in 2005. This time they got it right, but 40 years too late. Perhaps 1,500 years too late? The Catholic Church has had a long history of wielding temporal power through theological means and justification. The mindset of being above civil law has to be a tough thing to discard.

An illustrative side note: Before the advent of public education just about the only literate people around were clergy, and literacy itself was both rare and valuable. Hence the legal concept of “benefit of clergy.” Well into the 17th century someone convicted of a capital crime could escape the noose by reading from the Bible, proving his literacy. The convict would generally suffer some punishment, such as branding, but for centuries it meant that a monk or priest could literally get away with murder.

In an essay on FindLaw, law professor Marci Hamilton makes a convincing case for going after the Catholic Church using the federal RICO statute (Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations). She proposes that in the same way the RICO statute has been used against labor unions gone corrupt through the influence of criminals, so too the statute could be used to bring accountability to the church.

In fact, back in 2005 Philip Hower settled a RICO case against the Catholic Church. According to Hower's attorney, Ivan Abrams, this was the first RICO case against the church to make it through the judicial process intact. Hower was a seminarian who blew the whistle on sexually abusive priests and was denied ordination as a result.

The trial of the Catholic Church continues, mostly in civil court, all over this country and around the world. This is good, but it is not enough. There is plenty of evidence from successful civil suits that church employees throughout the hierarchy engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to obstruct justice. The federal government needs to reassert the rule of law over the rule of theocrats and subject the church to accountability. The Department of Justice should open a comprehensive criminal investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-ups of sex crimes.

Why I am not having a Barack attack

Your Minor Heretic is not caught up in the giddiness that surrounds Barack Obama. I was discussing this with an astute friend, and she chided me for my lack of empathy. She said (quoting from memory here), “Imagine you've just had your head held underwater for eight years. You finally come up and take a great big breath and someone says, 'What's the big deal? It's just air.'” Well put.

Yes, I am going to vote for Barack Obama. No, I don't trust him any farther than I could shot-put an anvil. It's not really about him, personally. It's about the process that got him where he is and the web of influences that would surround him as president.

Democracy is like being on a tightrope. It is an unstable and unnerving condition maintained only by the constant attention of brave and practiced people, who are in that position against their own natural tendencies. It is a natural behavior for people to reproduce their families in their political structures, which often means looking to Daddy for solutions. We have an unfortunate tendency to replace one unsuccessful Daddy with another, in the hope that the new Daddy will finally kiss our booboo and make it better. Most people are less attentive to the means by which we select the new Daddy, which is the ultimate factor in determining the quality of the leader. That is how we ended up with the new George II. That is why am not leaping with joy over the prospect of Obama. Same process, same results.

Yes, I am sure that Barack Obama would be a far better president than either George W. Bush or the lobbyist-ridden militarist neocon John McCain. However, I think that Obama's mantra of change would be more accurate as “small change.”

I looked at Barack Obama's own website. I like a lot of what he says: changing labor laws to benefit aspiring union members, raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, supporting renewable energy, emphasizing diplomacy over force.

In some areas, though, there is a kind of political anemia. I found that in terms of fighting for poor people who can't always make it from paycheck to paycheck he wants to cap the interest on payday loans to 36%. As the kids say, “Big whoop.” I know people who have been socked with rates far less than that and found them unsupportable. His health insurance plan leaves the gravy train to private health insurance behemoths intact. He wants to “reform” No Child Left Behind rather than scrapping an educational program that amounts to bayoneting the wounded. On his website there is a paragraph about prioritizing a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but I found his recent speech to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobby) somewhere between pandering and groveling. In it he declared that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," an absolute show stopper for most Palestinians. Even some Israeli hawks have publicly backed off from this position. My general impression of his proposals is of a gardener trimming weeds without actually pulling them up.

As much as I consider him (as far as I can tell, from this distance) a decent and honorable man, I wonder what will happen when he dives into the sausage mill we call the Oval Office. He has as many political debts as any former occupant. He has raised a lot of money through small online donations, but about half of his $270 million has come in chunks of more than $200. Four out of five of his top sources were the employees of huge financial firms (Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc.).

In response to the accusation of being influenced by money, Barack Obama and other members of Congress can rightfully say, “I vote how I like.” To this I respond, “That's because they like how you vote.” If Obama or his colleagues had opinions that truly offended the small cadre of millionaire donors, most would never have succeeded in politics. Let's elect Barack Obama, but not allow ourselves to feel satisfied with that. We can't cut him any slack or lose sight of the larger effort.

For real change, we should concentrate on changing the process rather than just trading for a new personality. We all need to become single issue voters for a little while, that issue being electoral reform - 99% public campaign financing, paper ballots, instant runoff voting, uniform and fair electoral rules, independent bi or tri or quadra-partisan election committees, and so on. Then we can pay attention to candidates.

Aperture (A follow-on to The Hydrogen Humvee and Other Fairy Tales)

This brings us to the subject of aperture. This is the concept that anything powered by renewable energy requires a certain amount of area exposed to the sun, or wind, or water, to collect enough energy to operate. The reality is that switching our present methods of life over to a renewable fuel won't work. The energy bloated lifestyle we live can only be supplied by tapping the hundreds of millions of years of accumulated energy trapped in the coal beds and oil fields under the earth. The hydrogen Hummer is only the most blatantly misleading example of renewable energy use. Still, it is only slightly beyond most of our technology in its unsustainability. Such wishful thinking extends in more subtle ways throughout the renewable energy industry.

Think about a normal kind of energy consumption, such as burning fifty gallons of #2 fuel oil in December to heat your home. Each gallon contains about 132,000 BTUs of heat energy. Burned in a very efficient boiler, you would get around 85% of that into your house, or 112,200 BTUs. Fifty gallons would be 5.61 million BTU’s. What kind of south facing windows would you need to collect that in December in northern New England? An unshaded south facing double glazed window in Vermont allows in 480 BTUs per square foot per day in December, on average, or 14,880 for the month. To get your 5.61 million would require a wall of windows 38 feet wide and 10 feet tall, with enough mass behind them to store the incoming energy for a matter of days. Let’s say you wanted to keep your house at 65 F and had barrels of water you could get to 110 F in the sun. That would require roughly 15,000 gallons of water, or 272 55-gallon drums. You could also think of it as a 5 foot wide box 10 feet high running the length of your 38 foot wall. A tough retrofit for your average American house.

And, of course, making these windows takes energy, as do the barrels or the 38 foot solar swimming pool.

You could do as many people do up here in Vermont, and burn wood. It is a direct use of biomass, and can be done sustainably. A cord (128 cu. Ft.) per acre per year is about what you can get over time. Most hardwoods have between 20 and 25 million BTUs per cord. Call it 23. An average woodstove will get about 60% of that into your house, or 13.8 million. So, you would need 0.4 acres of decent hardwood forest to equal that 50 gallons of oil and get you through December. In 2002, 5.2 billion gallons of heating oil were sold to 6.3 million households in the Northeastern U.S. (EIA) That is the equivalent of 25,367,000 cords of hardwood, or the same number of acres of hardwood forest, carefully logged. Coincidentally, 25 million acres is roughly the amount of hardwood forest we have in the northeast. It would take every square acre we have, meticulously managed, to produce the heating energy equal to the oil we now burn in our homes. Of course, this doesn’t include the heat energy we use in the form of natural gas or propane. It doesn’t include the heat energy we use in our office buildings, stores, and factories. We clearly have a solar aperture shortfall in the firewood department.

This is just one example of the non-sustainability of our present energy use. I could take any aspect of our society, from transportation to commercial electrical use, and apply the same analysis to it.

Some well-informed students of solar or wind power may counter that we do have plenty of roof area for photovoltaic modules in this country, and enough windy places to power our present system twice over. True, in the abstract, and for electricity only. In reality, windy places are not always located conveniently to large population centers, and the wind doesn’t blow according to our electrical demand schedules. Solar power follows our peak demand curve better, but not perfectly, and not on cloudy days. Our society, as it is presently organized, needs dispatchable power, power that is available at the turn of a knob, when we need it and in the exact quantity we desire. Dispatchable power requires stored energy, either fuel or water behind a dam. For fuel, we are talking about biomass, which brings us back to the forest acreage problem. What about hydro? According to the National Hydropower Association, perhaps the most optimistic source one could find, hydroelectric power accounts for 8-12% of our present electrical demand, with 104 gigawatts of capacity. The NHA estimates that this could be expanded by 70 gigawatts if all environmental restraints were laid aside. So, best case scenario, hydroelectric power could handle 20% of our present demand. Generally speaking, a stable utility system using both variable and dispatchable power can only tolerate about 20% variable, the reverse of the percentages we could face. If we consider a renewable future where hydroelectric power is our major dispatchable source of electricity, then we would need to limit variable sources such as wind and solar to 20% of that, or 4% of our present consumption. If we abandon all environmental concerns about damming rivers, and have the economic and societal wherewithal to build the dams, our future electrical capacity would be limited to just under a quarter of what we use now.

We have a society that is dependent upon an artificially large solar aperture. Since we have a fixed amount of surface area on the earth, one might call this a time-distorted aperture. What we are taking advantage of are the millions of years of sunlight that were absorbed by algae, most recently during the Miocene period, 12 million years ago. As James Kunstler pointed out in his excellent book “The Long Emergency,” one brief squirt of charcoal lighter fluid is equivalent to some primeval plant absorbing sunlight for seven years. Taking the period from 1859 to 2059, we will have burned through roughly 200 million years of oil and gas production in about 200 years, a million to one ratio.

The conclusion I come to from all this is that we need to calculate our available, sustainable, practical solar apertures on a local and regional basis. By solar I mean all those energy sources we derive from natural processes: direct solar, wind, rivers, tides (ok, that's lunar), ocean waves, and biomass. Then we need to plot a path from our present modes and quantities of energy consumption to those that match the available aperture.

I have to say that almost all our present efforts towards sustainability are laughably weak compared to the problem. We replace light bulbs and buy hybrid cars when we need to fundamentally redesign our entire electrical grid and reorganize our population distribution. It's like preparing to jump out of a plane with a cocktail umbrella in each hand and focusing on the design of the cocktail umbrella. We're in for a sudden jolt unless we start thinking bigger.

The Hydrogen Humvee and Other Fairy Tales

I suppose that the Hummer is an extreme example of inefficiency, but the present governor of California drives one, and fills it with hydrogen to power its fuel cell. It is put forward as an example of how high technology will allow us to retain our energy bloated lifestyle.

The hydrogen in question is merely a storage medium. Hydrogen doesn't exist (for very long) in its pure state in our biosphere, what with all that attractive oxygen everywhere wanting to make water (H2O). Most hydrogen is obtained by extracting it from natural gas (CH4) these days, but in the "hydrogen economy" plan, we will make it by splitting water with renewably produced electricity. Lets look at the numbers on this hydrogen Humvee.

A Hummer gets a miserable 13 miles per gallon. At 132,000 BTUs per gallon of gasoline, this works out to roughly 10,000 BTUs per mile, or 3 kilowatt hours. That is in absolute terms, but converting a conventional gasoline vehicle to electric propulsion generally doubles the energy efficiency. Of course, the fuel cell is not perfectly efficient, and neither is the electrolyzer that splits the hydrogen. At present, the top end efficiencies for these devices are 48% and 65%, respectively. This means that our electrical input into the electrolyzer to produce enough hydrogen to get this Hummer one mile is 4.5 kilowatt hours. How big a solar array would this require? Assuming we want to travel this mile on a daily basis, and using solar data for Bakersfield California, out in the brutally sunny Mojave Desert, we would need 810 Watts of solar electric modules. With the modules tilted at the optimal angle, this would take up about 50 square feet of flat desert. If the governor wanted to drive even fifty miles a day, it would take more than 2500 square feet, because there would have to be spacing between rows of modules to avoid shading. A fifty mile a day solar array in the Mojave would take up almost 7,500 square feet (a sixth of an acre) and at present prices would cost over a quarter of a million dollars. Maybe the governor could afford it, but not your average commuter. Even with a quarter of a million dollars in your pocket, you can't make the sun shine on command. If you are a city dweller, you probably don't have the space for a large personal solar array. In the absence of a suitable space for solar power, consider a 1 megawatt wind turbine in a decent wind location as the source for your hydrogen Humvee. This million dollar, three-hundred foot tall technical marvel, requiring heavy equipment for installation, a transformer and industrial switchgear, utility scale transmission lines and regular skilled maintenance and supervision, will supply you and 35 of your Humvee driving friends with a daily commute. You must also face the fact of the energy embodied in the massive vehicle and its high tech components, plus the huge industrial infrastructure required to produce its myriad parts.

Our society in general cannot drive around in renewably powered Humvees, or renewably powered anything that weighs in at a couple of tons. Personal vehicles of any significant size are dependent upon fossil fuels.

Some may point to biodiesel or ethanol as renewable fuels, but these fuels rely on a highly fossil fuel dependent agricultural infrastructure. More on that next time.

Ecological Design - The 5M Rules, Part 4

(Part 4 of a 4-part series)

First Principles

One important behavior for a conscientious designer is to take any design problem back to first principles. The first principles of a car are to transport people and their cargo from point to point within boundaries of speed, comfort, cost, privacy, and convenience. They must do this using an existing network of roads that have particular characteristics of width, curvature, slope, and roughness. Many of the design parameters of a modern automobile have little to do with these principles, but much to do with the manufacturer’s stock price.

Two important parameters for the auto manufacturer are apparent value and sales effort. Put simply, consumers will pay proportionally more for a big, loaded vehicle than a small, basic one, with the same cost of marketing and sales per unit. The manufacturer is also interested in maximizing the return on investment in factory equipment. This means that designs requiring radical changes in manufacturing technology will be delayed. American auto manufacturers bank on most consumers buying a new car about every seven years. If cars were to become more durable, or American buying habits should change due to financial constraints or social pressures, this might extend to eight, nine, or ten years. The drop in income would be disastrous for the industry as it is now structured.

This might explain why we use 4,000 pound wheeled boxes of steel and glass with operating ranges of 300 miles or more to move 100-300 pounds of us and a few pounds of groceries back and forth to the supermarket. The motive force for these vehicles is a device with hundreds of moving parts operating at high temperatures, plus sophisticated electronic controls and a set of (usually) automated gears in the drivetrain. Most are designed to run exclusively on highly processed liquid fossil fuel at less than 20% efficiency. This should prompt some questions. Why 4,000 pounds? Why use steel? Why build asphalt roads at millions of dollars (and gallons of oil and cubic feet of gravel) per mile? Why use the gasoline engine? Most importantly, why isn’t the grocery store within walking distance?

The last question brings up an important point. Every technology must be analyzed within a context. The answer to a technological problem may lie in that context rather than in the technology itself. The 5M standard for transportation may be best served by looking at urban planning rather than vehicle design. Going back to the basic question, “What are we actually trying to accomplish here?” allows us to simplify our approach. We can solve the problem with a minimum of energy and materials, rather than trying to make complex modifications to the dead-end system we have inherited.

A good example

If you want an example of truly sustainable housing in America, look for a mid 19th century farmhouse. It was constructed using human and animal labor, using virtually all local materials, which themselves were harvested using human and animal labor. The only semi-high-technology materials in the structure are the window glass, some iron door hardware, the nails, and perhaps some tar paper in the roof. The building was originally heated with wood, also harvested and processed with human and animal labor. Often the owners would use simple design techniques to make the house more comfortable. They would put a deep porch to the south to block the high summer sun, but allow in the low winter sun. Likewise, they would plant (or leave in place) deciduous trees on the southeast and southwest corners of the house. In the summer, the leaves would shade them, and in the winter the bare branches would allow the sunlight through.

Although this house would not meet modern building codes and standards for comfort, especially during the winter, it shows that people can build a habitable structure with virtually no use of non-sustainable inputs. It is worth investigating how close we can come to this paradigm while maintaining acceptable boundaries of comfort, cost, and safety.

One of my personal mottoes for designing sustainable housing is “Never use a pump if a brick will do.” The solar houses of the 1970’s tended to have complex active systems. They pumped fluids or blew air through gravel beds, slabs of concrete, or containers of water. Timers and electronic sensors controlled all of this activity. Much of the collected heat leaked out through thin walls and leaky window seals. Most of these systems failed and were torn out. From this experience, designers have come to rely on energy conservation strategies first, such as thick walls, good air seals, and good site work. The input is from simple systems of south facing glass heating exposed dense building materials such as concrete, brick, stone, or even gypsum board. There are no moving parts and minimal use of heavily processed material.

Briefly: Clarify your purpose. Simplify your methods. Minimize your consumption. Localize your range.