Society

The Golden Arches are shining with even greater lustre than usual in Chicago these days. McDonald’s, the world’s biggest food chain, has just opened its flagship restaurant in the town it calls home – and what a marvel it is. More like an Apple Store than a fast food joint, the new outlet is described by designers Ross Barney Architects as an ‘oasis,’ a sleek glass cube the size of a city block with shared tables, ‘tapestries’ of living plants on the walls, an apple orchard and table service as well as automated ordering. The new look will form the basis of redesigns for the majority of the firm’s 14,000 restaurants across the country, at a cost of $6 billion, meaning an oasis could be coming to a McDonald’s near you very soon.

A Pennsylvania grand jury report released last night has revealed that the Catholic Church in six dioceses systematically and sneakily covered up sexual abuse by priests on a horrifying scale. The American Church has now been plunged into the worst crisis in its history. The 884-report comes less than a month after the revelation that ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington DC, was a compulsive predator. His serial molestation of seminarians was an open secret, and cannot possibly have come as a surprise to some of his friends in the American hierarchy.

A writer friend recently told my son about an exercise he was given in a high school composition class. The idea was to show how word choice affects the mood and emotional weather of your prose. He recalled an example from TIME magazine. (For younger readers: TIME used to be — long, long ago — an important news outlet; that TIME is not to be confused with the virtue-signaling enterprise of the same name that has taken its place). Consider the different rhetorical implications of these two sentences: Truman slunk from the back room to huddle with his cronies. vs. Eisenhower strode from the chamber to consult with his advisers. Would you rather “slink” or “stride”? Do you frequent “back rooms” or occupy “chambers”?

My friend recently met a man on a dating app and went out for dinner with him. When he arrived, the man announced that he didn’t drink. Nothing unusual about that: plenty of young men are abstemious these days. His next declaration was more surprising: he didn’t eat. Instead, he lived off something called ‘Huel’. Huel — an abbreviation of ‘human fuel’ — is a type of powdered food made of oats, peas, flax and rice. I’ve tried it and it is disgusting — gruel, essentially, in smart packaging. But it’s hugely popular: Huel is now one of the fastest growing companies in Britain. Huel is low in fat and high on principle. ‘We live in difficult times,’ says its evangelical marketing bumf.

President Trump has confirmed that tonight, at 9 pm EST, he will announce his choice of candidate for the Supreme Court following the departure of Justice Anthony Kennedy. And what, do you reckon, are the chances of his critics here being mollified if it turns out his candidate is in fact a woman, and a working parent? It would bring the Supreme Court almost into gender balance, with four women and five men. I mean, when President Obama added a further woman to make it a measly four women out of 113 Supreme Court judges who have served to date, that was seen as proof of his essential soundness. But if President Trump does so, well, that’s another matter.

I write this on my last day in the Bagel, and it sure is a scorcher, heat and humidity so high that the professional beggars on Fifth Avenue have moved closer to the lakes in Central Park. Heat usually calms the passions, but nowadays groupthink pundits are so busy presenting fake news as journalism you’d think this was election week in November. Here’s one jerk in the New York Times: ‘The court’s decision was narrow…’ The decision in question is the Supreme Court ruling that a baker could refuse a gay couple’s request for a cake on religious grounds. The writer who described the result as narrow, one Adam Liptak (Lipgloss would be more appropriate), did not mention that the vote was seven to two. Talk about fake news.

A solution ‘must be found’ in order to halt the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families, according to an American cardinal. That’s hardly news, you may say: the US conference of bishops is united in outrage at this cruel practice. But the cardinal I’m quoting is Raymond Leo Burke, former Archbishop of St Louis, a theological and political conservative who is the closest thing the president has to an ally in the American hierarchy. Cardinal Burke therefore finds himself in an unfamiliar place: on the same side of the fence as the man who sacked him from a top-ranking post in the Vatican, Pope Francis.

The divide in the world’s largest Protestant denomination has widened beyond issues related to gay marriage. Controversy in the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the global Anglican Communion, over the revision of traditional marriage and the ordination of openly gay and partnered clergy and bishops is old news. The new split centres on the role the archbishop of Canterbury plays in the Anglican Communion, which consists of churches, formally known as provinces, drawn largely upon national boundaries. That was evident at the Global Anglican Future Conference, a confab of some 2,000 theological conservatives from 50 countries, held in Jerusalem.

New York This week 50 years ago saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a man I met a couple of times in the presence of Aristotle Onassis, whom some Brit clown-writer once dubbed Bobby’s murderer. (Bad books need to sell, and what better hook than a conspiracy theory implicating a totally innocent man?) I once witnessed Bobby, at a Susan Stein party, asking Onassis for funds — the 1968 election was coming up — and Ari showing Bobby his two empty trouser pockets. Bobby’s assassination did alter American politics. Violence, black anger and despair spilled out on to the streets of American cities.

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact — and determined to ignore a Catholic hierarchy contaminated by child abuse.

It will, as one pro-life campaigner told me, take an act of God to swing the Irish referendum for the No side tomorrow. I’m all for referendums but this one has been so wildly unbalanced as to make the Brexit campaign look almost effete in its regard for impartiality and fair play. The polls suggest a win for the Yes side, on repealing the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution which protects the right to life of the unborn – something around the 44-32 per cent margin according to the last Irish Times poll. It’s a big deal, abortion. But there is not one political party that represents the No side other than a tiny outfit called Renua which doesn’t have a single MP. There is no newspaper that represents this quite hefty minority.

It will come as no surprise that something in the news has Piers Morgan deeply troubled. For the past two days, Morgan has been incandescent over the Met Gala and its dress code. In a column for MailOnline he claims that, as a Catholic, he has become a victim of cultural appropriation due to fancy dress outfits worn to a party by celebrities.The Gala, a fixture of the New York social season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is well known for the theme it sets, and this year it was ‘Heavenly Bodies’ - inspired by the Roman Catholic Church. The Gala was held to launch an exhibition of the same name. Dozens of items of religious clothing have been allowed out of the Vatican Archives to be seen by the public for the first time.Guests at the party took the dress code to heart.

When poor old battered Odysseus landed on Circe’s island having lost all his ships (except his flagship) when he tangled with the Laestrygonians (their king liked to eat Greek flesh and swallowed up most of his crews, yummy) Circe — witch, sorceress and goddess in her own right — turned the few survivors into swine, except for Odysseus, whom she wanted for some old-fashioned hanky-panky. If she were around today she would most probably be the first American female president. Odysseus serviced her rather well and stayed in her palace for a year. He also used the ‘moly’, the antidote Hermes had given him in the form of a magic herb that turned pigs back into men.

Hell is a hell of a problem. Eternal punishment of the damned is a basic dogma of the Catholic Church and most other forms of Christianity. But the Bible has surprisingly little to say about it, and philosophers have struggled for millennia to give a rigorous account of what hell would really mean. Without reason or revelation giving a clear picture, hell has been left to the popular imagination to fill in with scenes of devils either scary or absurd poking people with their pitchforks.