I don't think there were that many people on the plane.
Sunday, January 20
Ms. Cyncial retorts (cynically): I don't believe it for a second.
But nothing points more clearly to Bonnie's complicity than a remarkable incident in 1980, when Bonnie came upon Bob counting out more than $20,000 in cash in the basement. He admitted he had sold information to the Soviets, though he claimed it was worthless "trash for cash." (In fact, he had revealed the identity of a longtime double agent within the GRU, Dmitri Polyakov, codenamed "tophat." Polyakov was later executed.) Bonnie dragged Bob to confession with an Opus Dei priest, Father Robert Bucciarelli, who according to Bonnie's later testimony exhorted Hanssen to pray, made him promise never to do it again, and had him donate the money to charity.
Many attacks have been made on Bucciarelli's penance. Shannon and Blackman even imply that Bucciarelli should have turned him over to the authorities, despite the well-known doctrine that Catholic priests cannot reveal the contents of the confessional, even under pain of death. Still, it's true that the priest failed to exercise prudential judgment in the matter. Bucciarelli's answer--pray and donate the money to charity--is laughably naive.
But if she and her husband got bad spiritual guidance from Bucciarelli, Bonnie Hanssen also failed to press the matter. It is too much to expect that any wife would turn in her husband. But if anything pointed to the need for a separation of some sort, or at least a serious turn to counseling, confessed espionage would seem to be it. One of the duties of Catholic marriage is, after all, to help your spouse attain heaven. Yet Bonnie, the daughter of a psychiatrist who had worked as an asylum nurse, did nothing.
The article has a great deal to say about the Opus Dei puzzle, as well. The focus is on what blinds us from seeing evil when it's right in front of us. Very good.
Some people protested. Not the University's president, mind you. But some other people. So the speech was moved. Everyone claimed ignorance, except the university president, who declared,
``As this is a town meeting, the setting neither honors him nor supports his views. Rather, as a university - and a Catholic one - we are honoring our role as citizens who have the right to voice the concerns that arise out of our personal and faith commitments,''
And what does that mean?