CrossCurrents

#349: Expanding the Religious Option

2012-02-03T11:52:00.003-05:00

EXCERPT:
For generations Americans typically assumed the First Amendment made us a “Christian nation,” where Christianity (especially its Protestant version) remained on prominent public display. So our money says “in God we Trust,” Congress opens with prayer, presidents end speeches with “God bless the United States of America,” our Pledge of Allegiance is to a nation “under God.”

As a public school first-grader I was taught to recite the “Protestant” version of the Lord’s Prayer every day, after my teacher read a psalm from her King James bible. We always had school off for Christmas and Good Friday, and Christian symbols were displayed in classrooms for both Christmas and Easter. School cafeterias never served meat on Fridays, out of respect for Catholics.

Such public prominence to Christianity began to shift in 1962 when the U.S. Supreme Court banned prayer from public classrooms. This triggered a trend toward banning all Christian practices from public schools, and eventually from all public places. By 2012, Christian symbols and activities are typically not allowed in our public schools, parks, buildings, and institutions. Attempts to provide funding for religious schools (or even vouchers to parents) have consistently been ruled unconstitutional, and people seeking legal support for their faith-based positions on abortion, creationism, intelligent design, and even marriage have generally been rejected by the courts.

Many conservative movements and media have spent recent years claiming there is a governmental “war on religion,” especially on the part of “activist” judges.
All this begs a question: is the US becoming a European style “lay state”? Is our historical desire to protect religious freedom giving way to an approach that restricts religion to the private realm? Is the First Amendment no longer protecting religious practices that clash with public policy?

On January 11 the US Supreme Court delivered a loud “No!”--a landmark decision that may be as much a turning point as the 1962 school prayer decision.

In an era of chronic split-decisions by a divided court where one swing vote often determines the outcome, there was nothing marginal about this court’s 9-0 verdict. There could have been no clearer declaration that the court considered the issue at stake here to be a no-brainer.

And that issue was religious liberty…

For American Catholics, this decision has at least four ramifications:

First, it reverses the trend of cases restricting religion by affirming, especially by its 9-0 vote, that protection for free religious practice is a constitutional cornerstone. …

Second, this was also a reversal (some are calling it a “knockout punch”) for the Obama Administration, whose lawyers argued against the ministerial exception. When EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) lawyer Leondra Kruger argued that the constitution grants churches no ministerial exception, only the same rights to free association that secular organizations (like labor unions and social clubs) enjoy, Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “That’s extraordinary! There, black on white in the text of the constitution, are special protections for religion. And you say it makes no difference?”

Similarly, Justice Roberts rejected the administration’s argument: “Their position, however, is hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives spe¬cial solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.”
Remarkable, the unanimous decision included two supposedly “radical-leftist” Obama appointees.

Third, this decision reaffirms how unique the First Amendment is, compared to other countries’ ways of separating church and state. Two justices refer to the constitution as singling out religion for “special” protections that no other institutions enjoy….

Fourth, this decision should allay fears that changes in civil policy could impose changes on religious practice….

The US Bishops, for example, have tended to treat same-sex marriage as if it were a threat to the sacrament of matrimony, but the court rejected all suggestions that churches could be forced to marry homosexuals, accept married priests, or ordain women. The fact that religious liberty enjoys such extraordinary protection also means that liberalizing social movements cannot be treated as coercion against more conservative church practices…

Scholars have cautioned that this decision is restricted to how “ministers” are treated by churches. But while this application is somewhat narrow, the notion that religion enjoys “special” constitutional protections given to no other institutions has implications broad enough to touch not only Catholics, but all Americans, and even the human family. Far from becoming a “lay state,” the land of the “religious option” has just strengthened that option.

#348: What’s Happening to OUR Holiday?

2012-01-18T14:32:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:
As the Christmas Season finally concluded last week with the Feast of the Epiphany, my mind remained cluttered with varied and contrary thoughts about the way our culture is treating Christmas.
…
First, there is little surprise that what Catholics call “Advent” is virtually invisible in American culture.
…
Indeed, our economy has become so dependent on that period’s retail sales (for some retail items, that single month yields the majority of annual revenue) that it would appear downright un-American to insist that people spend much of December in quiet reflection and preparation rather than frantic shopping and celebration.

Second, the traditional “12 days of Christmas” have largely disappeared as well.
…
Third, you probably noticed that in 2011, more than previous years, the very word “Christmas” has become endangered. Advertisers and media referred to “the holidays,” the “holiday season,” sometimes even simply “holiday.” Governors renamed their state Christmas trees the “Holiday Tree”; people wished each other “Happy Holidays,” and commercials even parodied Christian attempts to refocus on Christmas, telling us that it is the “season of the reason” for buying a new car.

It almost seems that Christmas is becoming (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde) the holiday that dare not speak its name!

My initial reflex is to adopt my traditional Christmas role as cultural curmudgeon.
…
But despite my usual hardline instincts for preserving a “traditional” approach to Christmas, I also feel a growing discomfort when I notice that my reactions are matched by many people whose assumptions I do not share.

Some of these people argue that we must preserve Christmas because we are a “Christian nation.” I respectfully disagree. Our nation has Christian roots, but is officially non-sectarian.

Others see themselves defending “traditional” Christmas, when in fact many Christmas customs they defend are less than 100 years old.
…
Of course, some people simply argue we must preserve “the reason for the season.” But they’re often unclear about what that reason is.
…
My own view is that we celebrate Jesus’ birthday as the moment when his place in history is announced--specifically, his role as the Prince of Peace, offering peace and goodwill to the human family.
…
Finally, some people want to insist on trumpeting “Christmas” to resist what they see as a dangerous inclusivity that embraces Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and, even “Festivus,” and fears offending Jews, Muslims, and even atheists.
…
I hesitate to embrace any of these reasons for opposing current trends. Instead, I’m beginning to see this cultural divide--avoiding all but the most generic references to the “holidays,” vs. the loud proclamation of “Christmas”--as a symptom of another, deeper trend in America.

More and more, I sense America drifting (perhaps without much sense of direction) toward a new cultural destination, and, I would argue, toward its true destiny. For I now believe we’re becoming, finally, the land of the religious option.
…
For most of history, large nations typically mandated (or favored) one official religion and prohibited (or disapproved) all others. So people often had no option, or at least suffered penalties for exercising an option. In the last century, we also saw new nations (like the Soviet Union) that mandated no religion at all. And in much of Europe today, the religious option is tolerated but not well protected.

Even in America, the principle of religious freedom has clashed with the practice of favoring Christianity over all other religions. Americans today remain the most religiously active population of any advanced nation, but now the dominance of Christianity is being challenged by others.

The result is the kind of inconsistency that we might naturally expect when a society is going through a major cultural transition. For example, we hear “Christmas” less and less in the public realm, and we see less and less “Christmas” observance in our towns and cities, street, parks and public places--yet “Christmas Day” remains a legal holiday!

Similarly we continue to see trees, and lights, Santa Claus, and the exchange of gifts (indeed, all these have become key to our economies holiday sales) yet they have all been largely uprooted from their Christian origins.
…
Underlying such inconsistency is a conviction that Christianity should enjoy no special privileges. Thus, saying “The Holidays” comes to represent people of all faiths and no faith. The trouble is: why is December 25 a holiday at all, if not to observe the birth of Jesus? Should we print calendars that just say “Holiday Day” in that day’s box?

America may be destined to become the one nation where religion truly is an option--where one may choose any religion without facing mandates, or prohibitions, or privileges, or penalties; a land where the religious option is alive and widely exercised and fair to all traditions.
…
But meanwhile we are living with the inconsistencies of a transition in which the dominance of Christianity is challenged but not completely erased. In short, we are clearly living in a time of cultural flux, when our principles and our practices do not always match.
…

#347: What is a “Traditionalist”?

2011-12-21T14:21:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT:

In all my years, I have never before had to defend myself on this particular charge!

In early November one of my blog readers charged me with being a peculiar kind of backsliding traditionalist:

You've become a "traditionalist"! That's right, a "Spirit-of-the-Council Traditionalist"! … nostalgic and reactionary, bewailing the impending loss of their venerable patrimony of almost five decades…I think what you are really mourning is the inevitable death of the Spirit of the Council. Hence your nostalgia.

On its surface, this charge is silly enough to be ignored. But on second thought, I realized it might provide the opportunity for some more substantive reflections on the term “traditionalist.” What, after all, does this really mean?

Am I, after all, a “traditionalist”?

Yes I am, if “traditionalist” equals an outlook that embraces Roman Catholic tradition at its core and attempts to persuade other Catholics of its meaning and value--especially in the face of widespread popular illiteracy about tradition on the part of many Catholics.

Any “tradition” is, of course, a human living reality: the process by which each generation shapes its legacy for its children by guarding some things their own parents left them, changing other things, dropping some things altogether, and adding some things of their own. This enables a human family--or a family of faith --to build a developing wisdom and richness based on present experience, the clarity of hindsight into the past, and the need to meet future challenges which the past never knew. Certainly 100 generations of Catholicism have produced a version of Christianity vastly different, and more developed, than the version known by the 1st, or the 10th, or even the 50th generation of Christians.

Built into tradition, however, is a risk: in passing from one generation to another, something essential may be lost, or its meaning distorted. This may even disturb the core of the tradition--the basic foundations that support the entire, developing structure. It then falls to the “traditionalists” to retrieve such essential core elements and restore them to their place as pillars of the tradition.

This in turn requires reviewing many elements of our Catholic heritage to correct serious misconceptions, often rooted in generations of bad education.

What are some examples of such review, retrieval, and restoration in the last 50 years? Let me cite some examples that have been especially important to me during my own lifetime. [These examples can be found in the full-text version, available on request]…

The simple fact is that my grandparents would not recognize today’s Catholic Church, mostly because, in its teachings and practices, it has restored the core of our tradition to its rightful place, often after generations of misplaced priorities, misconceived beliefs, and even distorted teachings.

If “traditionalist” means anyone happy with this historic transformation, and distressed that too many Catholics, despite these advances, still cling to a distorted version of Catholic tradition, then yes, I am a “Traditionalist”—and proud of it.

#346: A “Small” Crisis Recalled

2011-12-11T10:47:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:
Sometimes small events carry big lessons.

This week marks the anniversary of a sudden crisis that nearly shoved a small Catholic college off its foundations. That crisis, as chronicled in Diane Brady’s book Fraternity (due January 3 from Random House), demonstrated how complex moral conflicts can be solved: by the relentless healing efforts of the participants.

…

In hindsight, the recipe for the brewing crisis seems obvious. Picture the context of fall 1969, when US campuses were tinder-boxes for protests over the Vietnam War, civil rights, and social justice in general.

Add a nationwide, months-long strike by General Electric workers. (It happens my father was the local president of one of the striking unions; I ended up substitute teaching two days a week and still needed a waiver on my tuition bill until year’s end).

When GE recruiters arrived at Holy Cross on December 10, student protesters blockaded the interview rooms, declaring (1) their support for the striking workers and (2) their opposition to GE’s “war profiteering” defense contracts. The dean of students ordered protesters to disperse. When they ignored him, he asked the recruiters to leave and told his staff to round up the usual suspects.

The trouble is, that roundup, which yielded 16 names, included 4 out of the 5 black students participating. When pressed to explain why 80% of the blacks were targeted, while 80% of the white participants were not, the dean explained that the black students were “highly identifiable”!

When a judicial board met to consider charges against the named students, the Black Student Union (BSU) convened an emergency meeting, unanimously agreed that racism was involved, and sent an officer to advocate for the black students.

He returned to the BSU convinced the board was unsympathetic, so the group began to consider its options. Among the actions discussed, the option finally agreed upon came at the suggestion of one student, future US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas: if the board refused amnesty, all black students would simply leave Holy Cross. For good.

Apprised of this, Fr. John Brooks (mentor to black students and future Holy Cross president) invited two BSU officers to a 1:30 AM meeting with President Father Raymond Swords (himself Brooks’ mentor), but Brooks failed to broker a “middle ground” all could accept: Swords was not prepared to overrule the judicial board.

One hour later, at 2:40 AM on Friday, December 12, the judicial board voted to suspend all 16 students for the academic year. BSU officers immediately announced a press conference for 10:00 AM. Appearing before 600 students, BSU spokesman (and later 2006 National Lawyer of the Year) Ted Wells decried the board’s decision, and said the black students felt compelled to walk away from Holy Cross. Then the black students picked up their luggage and departed en masse.

…

During Saturday and Sunday, December 13-14, the president’s advisory board held marathon sessions, during which Fr. Swords expressed no opinions but absorbed the entire debate.

Meanwhile a campus-wide forum in the student center’s main ballroom staged a parallel marathon. A town-meeting style “open microphone” allowed dozens of faculty and students to comment on the crisis, its implications, and the options for responding.

…

At 6:30 PM on Sunday, December 14, Fr. Swords arrived at the ballroom forum to announce his decision. Unknown to him, the students gathered had already achieved consensus that (1) they would receive the president politely as “Christian gentleman,” and (2) if the suspensions were not lifted, they would quietly exit the hall and join the black students by leaving school.

Fathers Swords was received with a standing ovation. When silence returned, he announced amnesty for all 16 students, and the crowd again rose in applause and cheers. When calm resumed, he further announced (1) the suspension of all campus recruiting, (2) the suspension of classes and exams before Christmas, and (3) the opening of a “free university” to discuss the lessons of the crisis and consider the future shape and course of the entire campus community.

As cheering broke out again, a BSU spokesman took the microphone to announce the black students would return to campus.

What might have been a disastrous setback for New England’s oldest Catholic college became instead a turning point in my senior year and the school’s history. The black students’ courage, Fr. Brooks’ relentless efforts at reconciliation, Fr. Swords’ ability to cut through chaotic circumstances to discern the signs of those difficult times, the student body’s awakening to an education that transcended the classroom--all these efforts were needed to make peace possible.

…

For the world outside reading the national headlines, this may have seemed merely a tempest in a teapot. For those who lived through it, this became a defining moment for our view of faith, justice, education, and the place of conflict in a complex and changing world. Big lessons indeed from such a “small” event!

#345: Finding God at the Movies

2011-12-01T18:15:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT:

When I visit France annually, I’m always on the lookout for any signs of spiritual life in a “Catholic” country which seems nonetheless content to seek the good life without needing the “good news” of the gospel message.

But one place I never expected to detect a spiritual resurgence was in French movie houses. After all, why would anyone expect film to provide an antidote to secularism?

Whenever I am in France, I am constantly seeking good films to see--my first Parisian purchase is always “Pariscope,” the magazine-style guide to each week’s movies. So one afternoon in November I sat on a café terrace pouring through Pariscope for movies I might want to see. (Even though I average of film a day, selecting a dozen top priorities is a challenge in a city that averages more than 200 movies a week!).

Half way through my search, my mental antenna went on alert before I even knew why. As I kept reading, my awareness caught up to my intuition: it seemed that the list of current movies included a surprising number of “religious” films. Looking closer, I noticed other films which, while not about any particular religion, nonetheless focused on spiritual themes.

In all, I found 14 movies with overt religious or spiritual themes, all playing in one city in a two week span. And the city happens to be one of the great bastions of modern secularism!

For me, this list reflects three significant trends in western culture--trends that help explain why religion may be gaining new public interest.

First, the globalization of cinema. This list includes movies from Mexico, Lebanon, Turkey, and Tunisia--lands where modern secularism is not as dominant as in Europe or even the US. It can be tempting to think that our own experience a shared by everyone--that our struggle with secularism, materialism, and consumerism is the same as theirs. But it just ain’t so--and cinema offers a window on the rest of the world that enables us to see how their experience is unlike ours. Often this means discovering that religion remains a vital dimension of life in most of the world. Unfortunately, few Americans ever see movies from outside America.

Second, the rise of Islam has convinced Europeans (and especially the French) that they were wrong to predict, in the 20th century, that religion was about to disappear. Islam’s vibrance (especially in Paris, the city with the west’s largest Arab population) makes religion in general seem more current and relevant. It is no accident that four of these films were directed by a Muslim, for Islamic views are rapidly establishing themselves in mainstream western art.

Third, the feminization of cinema. Forty years ago, female directors were virtually unknown (aside from the godmother of women directors, Agnes Varda). But 10 of these movies were made in the last 5 years, and women directed four of them. Is it merely coincidence that nearly half these recent spiritually-focused movies come for women? I think not. In a world where 85% of US parish workers are women, where men dominate the statistics on violence, crime, and war, where women continue to shoulder the main burden for nurturing the human race (even as they entered the “productive” sector), where men dominate the statistics on violence, crime, and war, where women and children continue to suffer disproportionately as victims of most social ills--is it really surprising that women would focus on spiritual values in their art? The image from Il Etait Une Fois en Anatolie applies here: picture women working across religious differences to promote their common spiritual values against the prevailing material values of a dominantly male world!

I was lucky enough to see five of these films during my recent stay. They were a source for me of both hope and inspiration, for they suggested to me that, despite all conventional wisdom to the contrary, both movies and religion are alive and well and living in Paris.

#344: African Gothic? Yes!

2011-11-29T23:13:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT:
I expected to arrive at Notre Dame de Paris around 10:30 for an 11:00 Armistice Day ceremony (traditionally, the solemn chanting of Te Deum), and I guessed that, aside from the usual tourists, the congregation might be sparse (no veterans of the “Great War” of 1914-1918 survive, and this year’s anniversary--the 93rd--was not a round number that might command special attention).

Instead, I found the cathedral jam-packed and a homily already underway. The main area was blocked off, so tourists could only pass around the side aisles. It was a 10:00 Mass, and the congregation was largely black, mostly women, and many in the bright colors of traditional tribal garb.

The homily (offered by the Archbishop of Paris) was projected on HD flat screens every 10 yards long the side aisles of the cathedral. I made my way up the aisle with the tourist flow, circled counter-clockwise round behind the altar, and stopped on the far edge facing back across the sanctuary to the nave.

This was the annual Paris celebration in honor of the French overseas dioceses of Antigua, Martinique, and Guadalupe. This was, however, the first time this Mass was celebrated at Notre Dame.

The rest of the Mass was punctuated by the loud, rhythmic, drum-driven music of a large choir singing upbeat multi-part hymns in both French and the creoles of their respective countries. Most of the hymns were high energy island melodies, with the exception of a gloriously harmonized Creole lyric set to the tune of “Amazing Grace.”

As Mass ended, a bishop rose and drew loud applause and warm laughter by noting that, without doubt, this was the first time a black bishop had spoken to his people from the sanctuary of “This beautiful cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris.”

As I listened—just minutes after holding black hands on both sides of me during the Our Father, exchanging signs of peace with these French Africans, and filing up with them to receive Communion in this great monument to Catholic faith—I found the moment almost unbearably moving.

This cathedral is, after all, the crowning product of medieval Christendom, an era when the Catholic tradition achieved a remarkable integration of imperial customs (inherited from the Roman Empire) and popular culture. The result, in Gothic architecture like Notre Dame, created spaces that soar heavenward with impossibly “light” stoneworks in which walls and pillars are but bit players supporting the real stars: the fragile and flamboyant stained glass windows that make up much of surfaces. Those “Vitraux” were, a Charlemagne said, “The catechism of the people,” who despite general illiteracy provided the heroic and expert labor that made these marvels possible.

Notre Dame and its sister cathedrals across Europe are thus among the chief glories of Christendom, which was itself Catholicism’s first attempt to go global by attaching Catholic faith to Latin culture.

That culture, of course, was imposed by European Christians on most third world colonies--witness these French-speaking Africans. But once decolonization began, the dream of a permanent global Euro-Latin culture was doomed, and the “Christendom” project with it.

Enter Vatican Council II (1962-1965) with a new idea: rather than tie Catholicism’s global reach to a receding European culture in a post-colonial age, why not equip Catholicism to thrive in all cultures? Why not, for example, expand beyond Latin and Gregorian chant and western polyphony as the sole liturgical options to embrace all the languages and musics of the globe?

Because of that new idea, I got to witness, on this day, this vibrant liturgical celebration from three third world cultures--here, in this bosom of Christendom! Far from violating the wondrous gothic beauty of Notre Dame Cathedral, this heartfelt celebration lifted hearts much as the flying buttresses lift the stone--and the brilliant bright costumes seemed fitting reflections of the brilliant blues and reds, yellows and greens of the cathedral’s great rose windows.

This celbration broadcast the unmistakable message that Catholic tradition, already 100 generations old, can without warning burst forth with the youthful and holy spirit of a new generation, and thus give new life to this beautiful space which we inherited as the legacy and faithful gift of another Catholic generation, now long gone but not forgotten. Just as that generation’s genius crafted the stone, the sculptures, and the glass, this generation is crafting its own monuments to faith in music and dress.

There is no place on this earth quite like the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris, and in all its years it has never witnessed anything quite like this.

#342: Reverence for Life—Part 3

2011-10-31T15:52:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:

Bob Lindsay’s death brought an abrupt end to a long, sometimes removed, always intimate friendship.

Born in Dorchester, Bob left the year I was born to join the Society of Jesus. In more than 50 years as a Jesuit, he served in more than two dozen locations, but I first knew him my freshman year at Holy Cross. He was head chaplain, and while students lampooned him as “the toy priest” for his small stature, his liturgical presence alone made him a dominant figure on campus.

Those were the days of post-Vatican II euphoria, when Sunday Masses were jammed and even weeknight Mass (11:00 PM in the lower chapel) regularly drew 100 students. In a day when the buzzword among Catholic collegians was “relevance,” Bob’s earthy but eloquent preaching never failed to hit a timely note. And his presiding gave the Mass a dignified but intimate grandeur that drew us back again and again - -and also drew us together.
…

Bob’s charisma was not limited to preaching and presiding. He was a spiritual director by trade, and guided the personal paths of who knows how many people over the years in many roles as retreat director, sabbatical director, director of the Center for Religious Development in Cambridge, staff of the Jesuit Urban Center in Boston--and a dozen other places. His longest tenure was his last, at the Jesuit residence in Weston (Mass.) where he became a counselor and friend to fellow Jesuits and staff alike.

But he could also be the life of the party, especially when playing and singing his beloved Cole Porter. His last years he turned also to painting and his vibrant impressionist colors typified the bursting-with-life tenor of his presence to others.

…

Few people who ever met him, heard him preach, worshipped with him or received counsel from him could escape his influence unchanged. He was one of those people Reader’s Digest used to call “most unforgettable characters.” ...

Three dramatically different lives, yet all three men are revered as they pass away. Why? What did they have in common? Three things, I think.

First, they were gifted people (but aren’t we all?). Second, each tapped into those gifts with a persevering dedication, and used their years on earth fully. Third, that dedication always aimed at the good of others--all three were among that band of what the Jesuits call “men and women for others.”

Such men show us what a good life means--and their reverence for such life made them revered by all the others they lived for.

Reverence for Life—Part 2

2011-10-31T12:11:00.000-04:00

EXCERPT:

Fran Grady’s life was less public, but its impact was more personal. After seminary training he graduated Saint Mary’s College (Maryland) and became a VISTA volunteer in Baltimore, where he met Ann, his wife of 43 years. After moving to Boston he studied social work at Boston College and began devoting himself to neighborhood renewal in a city reeling from racial tensions, troubled schools, and a struggling economy.

That devotion, driven by what Ann called “his generosity of spirit, his keen interest in the world around him, and his positive thinking,” kept him active in a wide range of community initiatives even as he battled esophageal cancer.

…

Fran epitomized the kind of community activist who provides backbone to a neighborhood, making it resolute and resilient enough to counter adversity and carry on. His family loved him, but his reach was far wider than them. He was not afraid to stretch himself for a good cause (soccer, after all, was not his game), and his irrepressible enthusiasm enabled him to accumulate connections across a wide swath of Dorchester and Boston itself.

When he was waked at Saint Mary of the Angels, two things struck me. First, it was the right place for his wake, since his devotion to the community had always been faith-based; the church was his spiritual home. And second, the mourners who loved him reflected a range and diversity of American life that would be the envy of any true activist. He was revered because his life was the very model of a life devoted to “making a difference.”

#342: Reverence for Life—Part 1

2011-10-29T11:08:00.000-04:00

EXCERPT:
Three recent deaths have confirmed my conviction that death has a way of illuminating life. In each instance I had the vivid realization “this man was revered”--yet these three led remarkably dissimilar lives. I naturally wondered, what makes someone revered by others?

Steve Jobs’ passing came first, and I admit the public outpouring caught me by surprise. I had never followed his story closely, so I knew only the most basic facts. He cofounded Apple; he left Apple in the 1980s, only to return when it was near bankruptcy. Soon a rapid series of innovations (from iPods to iPhones to iPads) transformed Apple from a struggling computer builder into the world’s dominant manufacturer of personal digital devices….

… Apple’s elegant software “architecture” made it the darling of early adopters and aficionados of technological beauty.

And that’s what Steve Jobs brought to his work: a passion for beauty, even in computer technology. This meant better looking cabinets, more elegant programming, more powerful performance, and above all machines designed for ease of use. His machines were still machines, but they were more humane than other machines, and they rewarded humans in intangible ways. They did more than get the work done--they gave pleasure to the worker. Some called it “Zen computing.”

On September 16, MIT’s Kendall Square unveiled its “Entrepreneur Walk of Fame,” whose tiles at first honored but three stars: Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. After his death, his stone was adorned with flowers, images, an apple--all surrounding the inscription taken from his own words:

Becoming the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me…Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.

Needless to say, Jobs’ commitment to technology’s potential to be both beautiful and humane was a wonderful enrichment to the millions whose lives he touched, and who revered him at his passing.

#341- part II: Warfare—or Justice?

2011-10-06T09:11:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
For the last 40 years, the U.S. gap between rich and poor has steadily grown, because real wages for most have failed to match inflation, while the wealthiest Americans have enjoyed soaring dividends, salaries, and bonuses. The U.S. bishops, a dozen years into this trend, were already expressing concern:

Our economy is marked by a very uneven distribution of wealth and income. … In 1983, 54% of the total net financial assets were held by 2% of all families. (US Bishops Economic Justice For All [EJA] #183)

By 2010, the situation was even worse, as the gap just kept growing, according to a UC Berkeley analysis:

“In the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1% captured two thirds of income growth.”As others have pointed out, the average wage of Americans, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1970s. The minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s. http://integralcatholicsocialteachings.blogspot.com/2009/08/income-inequality-worst-since-1917.html

Is anyone who criticizes this trend engaging in “class warfare”?

I suppose that is mainly a question of our definitions, but let’s suppose we accept “class warfare” as the label for a debate about income distribution, income inequality, and income redistribution? In that case, two things stand out.

One, there are fighters on both sides: those defending the poor, and those defending the wealthy.

Second, there seem to be two sets of rules. Those on the “poor” side are attacking the behavior and special treatment the wealthy get (Warren Buffett called it “coddling”) to urge a change in the status quo. But the “wealthy” side, by contrast, has been attacking the character of the poor as a way of blocking any change.

Thus one TV commentator described this as a war of the “productive classes” attacked by the “moocher classes.” John Stossel likewise called a conflict between the “makers” and the “takers.” Another commentator referred to welfare recipients as “parasites.” Nebraska Atty. General John Bruning compared “stupid welfare recipients” to scavenging “raccoons.” And Ann Coulter argued that the U.S. welfare system has created “generations of utterly irresponsible animals.”

Even warfare has rules, but so far only one side is playing fair.

So given the facts about U.S. wealth and the way people are fighting over it, what are Catholic voters to think?

The answer is surprisingly straightforward. In a word: Catholic Social Doctrine has consistently opposed wide income gaps between rich and poor, and has consistently approved actions to redistribute wealth. Leo XIII first set this position in 1891, and he was seconded in 1931 by Pius XI:

Each class, then, must receive its due share, and the distribution of created goods must be brought into conformity with the demands of the common good and social justice. For every sincere observer realizes that the vast difference between the few who hold excessive wealth and the many who live in destitution constitute a grave evil in modern society-- (Quadragesimo Anno #58).

Vatican Council II (1962-1965) repeated the same basic position:

Excessive economic and social inequalities within the one human family, between individuals or between peoples, give rise to scandal, and are contrary to social justice, to equity, and to the dignity of the human person, as well as to peace within society and at the international level--(Gaudiam Et Spes #29).

And this leads to a clear Catholic mandate to support changes, and even government policies, that redistribute wealth:

Authentic economic well-being is pursued also by means of suitable social policies for the redistribution of income which, taking general conditions into account, look at merit as well as at the need of each citizen.--(The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church #303)

Does this mean the Catholic Church has been waging “class warfare” since 1891? I think not. Instead, I agree with the U.S. Bishops in saying:

The "option for the poor," therefore, is not an adversarial slogan that pits one group or class against another. Rather it states that the deprivation and powerlessness of the poor wounds the whole community. The extent of their suffering is a measure of how far we are from being a true community of persons. (EJA #88)

From the Catholic viewpoint, this is not class warfare; this is a fight for justice. And, as Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed in his very first encyclical, God Is Love: “The Church…cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice.”

So each of us must ask ourselves, and even each other, the next question: if the fight for justice is underway, which side are you on?

#341: Warfare—or Justice?

2011-09-30T23:26:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
More than a year before the next presidential elections, the battle lines are already being drawn--and one phrase already in the air seems likely to command increasing tension over the next 12 months. That phrase is “class warfare.” It’s a charge already being leveled against people as diverse as President Obama, billionaire Warren Buffett, and Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren. And it strikes me that this phrase offers a timely, even a perfect test-case for Catholic voters.

We Catholics now represent one of the largest “swing” voting groups in the country. In 2004, Catholic John Kerry lost that swing to George W. Bush, but in 2008 Obama won the Catholic majority from John McCain. In both cases, the Catholic vote swung to the winner. So now when we hear talk of “independent voters,” we can think “Catholic voters.” And I would like to think that this means “independent-minded” as well. I would hope Catholic voters are Catholics first, and party supporters second--that our Catholic values trump party platforms and political preferences.

It wasn’t so long ago that Catholic voters were largely working class, and many of them knew class warfare up close and personal (think “No Irish Need Apply”). And since the Democratic Party was, in the public side, the workers’ party, Catholics were often bloc democratic voters.

But since 1860, when JFK won 80% of the Catholic vote, Catholics have changed their class profile, emerging as among the best-educated and best-paid groups in America. The class profile of the two major parties has also changed, so it’s understandable if Catholics get confused about the issues and struggle to link their faith to their vote. It’s no longer as simple as checking the ballot for (D) or (R).

And when people start talking of “class warfare,” that makes matters even more confusing. It’s a serious charge, and demands a serious response. To get the clarity informed voting requires, we need to ask two things: What does class warfare mean? What should we think about it?

“Class warfare” sounds a lot like “class struggle,” the Marxist label for the process of workers wresting the means of production from the owners. But in today’s U.S. politics, “class warfare” has become a code word, like “socialism,” for any proposal to redistribute wealth within the population, especially through government action and taxation. It’s not about the workers seizing control of factories and companies, it’s about how much of their personal wealth rich Americans get to keep.

So what are the facts about the distribution of wealth in the U.S.? And what does our Catholic faith tradition have to say about it?

A Rock and a Hard Place

2011-09-25T11:35:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
As a true child of the sixties, my vocational priority has always been for some kind of activism. I’ve spent my adult life in church work hoping to promote the local church as a “global force for good.” Maybe I was expecting too much, but I have not stopped hoping for a greater Catholic influence in public affairs.

So it pains me whenever I see official Catholicism squandering its potential for public influence--especially because it reminds me how damaging the last decade has been to the Church’s public image.

Last week offered a case in point, when the Catholic Bishops of Massachusetts issued a public statement opposing casino gambling in response to pending legislation authorizing three casinos in the state. In part, the statement said:

While the Catholic Church views gambling as a legitimate form of entertainment when done in moderation, the gaming legislation opens the door to a new form of predatory gaming which threatens the moral fabric of our society. We are concerned that the Commonwealth’s reliance on gambling revenue continues to escalate.…

Many of our churches, schools, and other non-profit organizations rely upon bingo and other games-of-chance for relatively small amounts of revenue. We hope the citizens of the Commonwealth will recognize the difference between a local fund-raiser managed by volunteers and a multi-billion dollar industry that exploits vulnerable members of the community for financial gain.

…My concern is not whether the Bishops are right. My concern is whether they matter--whether their position makes any difference.
…

This case demonstrates once again that, at this moment in U.S. Catholic history, the official church is truly caught between a rock and hard place. As custodians of Catholic tradition and its values and also as public figures, Catholic bishops should have a presence in the public forum. They must represent our values to the general public, so they must speak up on the issues of the day. On the other hand, doing so in the current situation raises as many problems as it solves—maybe more.
First, there’s the problem of credibility. Since scandal has tainted the public image of Catholicism, Bishops remain hard pressed to present themselves as experts on “the moral fabric of society.” Such language attracts negative attacks like a red cape attracts bulls. The Bishops would be better off spelling out the practical problems and consequences of bad policy without presenting themselves as moral authorities.

Then there’s the problem of hypocrisy. The statement expresses the hope that the public will see a difference between bingo and casino gambling, and it is true that casinos are big money operations compared to parish level bingo. But parishes run bingo for the same reason government support casinos: to pay their bills. And parishes, like governments, pay those bills with money that comes from people who like to gamble. Both of them “exploit vulnerable members of the community for financial gain.” For those individuals, the money they spend may well be money they cannot afford. Saying that the institution does not raise large amounts ignores the impact on the gamblers themselves.

Anyone paying close attention knows there are bingo players who migrate from one parish to another simply because they need to gamble every day. It is no accident that many church workers sadly refer to bingo as Catholicism’s “eighth sacrament” because they acknowledge that both parishes and parishioners have become dependent on gambling to survive--and that is the very definition of addiction.

Next, there’s the problem of special pleading: many people will assume that the Church opposes casinos to protect its own profits. And since the Church is not a neutral player on this matter, its authority to speak out is diminished.

Finally, there is an important side effect: the merits of issues can get lost when church officials take positions without presenting the strongest case…Recently, Catholic officials have shown a tendency to split hairs, making doubtful distinctions in order to express opposition that does not conflict with their own practices…In this case, the Bishops oppose “predatory” gambling so they can condemn casinos without banning their own gambling operations. In my view, such doubtful distinctions create the impression of cherry-picking the practices of others to oppose, while justifying the practices of the Church.

In a time like ours, the bishops have enough difficulty speaking out at all. Increasingly, they are reduced to preaching to the choir--and the choir itself is shrinking. Caught between a rock and hard place, they must nonetheless speak up, but how they do it matters today more than ever. They undermine themselves if their own language creates more heat than light.

Ten Years Later

2011-09-17T11:24:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
Is it possible to be happy in hell?

This question runs through my mind like an unwelcomed, stubborn tune as I reflect on last weekend’s observances of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. For amid so many moving remembrances of that awful day lurked a desire to avoid remembering its aftermath.

Ten years later, our public observances stressed whatever is consoling and life affirming. We admire the perseverance and the courage of the victims’ families, we honor the memory of the victims themselves, we follow the healing and growth of their children, we praise the heroism of the first responders and rescuers, we salute the sacrifices and service of our servicemen and women, and we stand proud of our country’s resilience, power, and virtue.

But by lifting our hearts, we also distract our minds from the real consequences of those terrible attacks - - consequences far beyond the 3,000 victims we remember and mourn this week:
…

Ten years later, more than 5,000 U.S. troops have been killed.
Ten years later, more than 40,000 young Americans are permanently disabled or traumatized by their battle wounds.

Ten years later, nearly 200,000 Iraqis and Afghanis have been killed - - 80% of them women and children.

Ten years later, more than two million Iraqis are in exile, refugees who fled the war-torn land created by the U.S. invasion. These refugees are also mostly women and children--including girls as young as 10 who must prostitute themselves in Syria just to survive.

Ten years later, we remain simultaneously mired in the two longest wars in U.S. history, while insurgencies still disrupt civil order.

Ten years later, those wars continue to fuel the growth of terrorist groups.

Ten years later, those wars continue to strengthen the hold of Iran on life in Iraq.

Ten years later, the once-defeated Taliban has risen like a Phoenix after our paranoid invasion of Iraq took our attention away from Afghanistan.

Ten years later, our nation’s policies and practices are profoundly altered, even corrupted. We have engaged in systematic torture. We have paid others to torture for us. We have paid others to kill for us, spy for us, and even spy on us. We continue to imprison people beyond the reach of our justice system. We continue to send drones on killing missions that cannot tell terrorists from bystanders. We continue the explosive expansion of a “Top Secret America” whose 17,000 U.S. locations comprise, according to the investigative reporting of the Washington Post, a “huge bureaucracy that you can’t really see,” whose budget is a “state secret,” whose brand new headquarters of the Director of National Intelligence is as large as the Pentagon, and whose activities operate “behind a black wall,” beyond public view as well as congressional or judicial oversight.

…

Ten years later, our nation’s landscape has transformed. Police cameras track our movements, scanners record our license plates, warrantless intercepts record our calls and emails, and “fusion centers” in every state collect the data on us but keep it secret from us.

Ten years later, our economy has buckled from the burden of two prolonged wars bought on credit. Our huge surplus from 2000 (originally projected to total $3.5 trillion by 2008) is now a massive deficit (projected in 2008 to grow to $3 trillion within ten years), we have become the world’s biggest debtor nation, and our political system seems paralyzed by the challenge of the faltering economy.

We all know the 9/11 attacks were acts of terror - -but do we know what that really means?

It means that the attackers were not aiming at a conventional military victory: they did not seek to gain territory or treasure or control of power. The 9/11 attacks, as is typical with most terrorists, aimed to trigger a retaliation that would lead to aggressive attacks abroad and repressive, even police-state tactics at home. The real aim was to prove that our government cannot protect us without violating the rights of other nations and the privacy of its own citizens.

In short, Bin Laden’s goal was to damage the long-term moral character and reputation of our government both here and abroad - - and to accomplish it in a single day at a cost of 3,000 lives. In one day, this villain sought to disrupt the peace, tranquility, and security of the American way of life for years to come.

After ten years of war, anxiety, deficits, and the erosion of our rights, who is to say he did not succeed?

Ten years later, Osama Bin Laden is dead. Most Americans surely believe he is in hell, and they know he must be sorely disappointed to find himself thus punished, rather than rewarded by Allah, for his terror campaign against the west. But if it is possible to be happy in hell, he must be nonetheless pleased by the fruits of his labor.

Is the “Good News” News?—Part 2

2011-08-31T10:19:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
Based on my own experience as executive editor of a Catholic newspaper, I find that many church people struggle to grasp what makes any event “newsworthy.” Consequently, they sometimes fault the media for slighting an event they regard as significant, when all along the journalists do not see it as particularly “newsworthy.”

It turns out that “newsworthy” is a fairly tricky concept. It is a little like obscenity and religion: hard to define, but you know it when you see it. At least, a good journalist does. And here lies much of the trouble between church people and secular media.

The first thing to know is that the “newsworthy” events are not necessarily the most important ones. I often made this point to pastors or readers who felt we covered minor stories while missing major events in the diocese or their parishes. They were often baffled when I asserted that even the most significant events might not be “news.” To persuade them, I developed the habit of using an example that would be unmistakably clear to them.

“If our job at the newspaper were to cover the most important events,” I would say, “we would just print the same banner headline on top of page one every week: Bread and Wine Transformed into Body and Blood of Jesus Christ at 125 parishes!”

They got the point: nothing they wanted to see in print was as important as the Eucharist, yet they could see that the Eucharist itself is not news.

So what is “newsworthy”? Some Christians think only bad things count--negative events like disasters, accidents, and crime. Thus, they think, the “Good News” of our faith gets excluded or at least short shrift.

But mass media publish lots of happy stories: moon landings, sports championships, election victories, dramatic rescues, even papal elections. And the typical modern English description of the Gospel message as “Good News” is a misleading translation that creates a false conflict between faith and mainstream media. The “Godspell” means “Good Word’” and the biblical term “Evangelion” means “Good Message.” It is, of course, our most important message--but it is not “news” in the usual sense.

Typically, “newsworthy” events are somehow unexpected, things that are not routine and not predetermined. They are outcomes we do not know until they happen. So not only do they matter (that is, they are important somehow), but they must be reported or people will not know about them.

Even dramatic events lose their newsworthy character if they become routine. The first moon landing got 24/7 coverage on every media outlet, but the last space shuttle mission was relegated to minor status; space travel had become routine.

World Youth Day may be critically important, and it is certainly big--but that’s been true since it since its inception by Pope John-Paul II in 1986. If memory serves, the overwhelming and unexpected response to WYD 1997 in Paris garnered widespread media attention. But like most regular events, its newsworthy character has faded as it has become a matter of routine. Only something unexpected--like the protests--breaks that routine and attracts the attention of the general media.

Is the “Good News” News?—Part 1

2011-08-31T10:13:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
Last week the Catholic media--both print and electronic--were filled with complaints about the mainstream media’s coverage of World Youth Day 2011, which had just finished in Madrid.

At first blush the complaints were obvious. Upwards of 1.5 million youth from around the globe converged on Madrid for worship, networking, song, sacrament and celebration, inspiration and general mass gathering. Brutal heat and drenching rains could not dampen the excitement, enthusiasm, and powerful witness these youth gave to their faith. Even Pope Benedict XVI endured a lengthy soaking to show his solidarity with them as he presided and announced that World Youth Day 2013 would be held in Rio.

Yet the mainstream media covered the event minimally, and most of the coverage that was there focused, not on the event itself, but on the various protests that accompanied it…

Small surprise that Catholic media outlets responded negatively, ranging from disappointment to outrage…

Such reactions are natural and well-intentioned, but on another level they reflect serious confusion about the journalistic nature of media coverage. When Bishop Chaput rightly recommends turning to Catholic media for better coverage, he confirms the obvious fact that their purpose and function is to focus on church events. Consequently they offer better coverage of such events. But does it follow that inferior coverage by the secular media betrays “a set of fairly rigid ideological assumptions and imperatives”?

Perhaps not.

I’m reminded of the three years I spent as executive editor of a Catholic (diocesan) newspaper in the late 1980s. Like most such editors, I faced chronic negativism from pastors who wanted the paper to focus on their upcoming parish events, and thereby boost turnout. In short, they expected the paper to serve a promotional and public relations function. As journalists, however, my staff and I saw things differently.

True, our coverage always focused on church matters, because we were church paper, but we still needed to set priorities--and our priority always went to the items we judged to be most “newsworthy.” Even for a Catholic newspaper, “news” is the name of the game. And my job was to persuade pastors and readers that we knew the rules of that game.

NEXT TIME: What makes events “newsworthy”?

#336: At A Safe Distance—Or A Dangerous One ?

2011-08-17T17:21:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
Sometimes I wonder: are our parishes really serious about reaching out to the next generation?

Several weeks ago I was conducting a year-end retreat day for a parish staff. A top priority for the upcoming year was “promoting a vibrant virtual community.” They recognized the fact that younger Catholics lead professional, social, and even family lives that mix live, in-person contact with virtual, online connections. Common sense dictates that if parish life does not join in that mix, those people may not join in parish life. In other words, we are long past the point where churches can ignore how people’s lives have been reshaped by the Internet and still expect to reach them.

Which brings me to the matter of parish websites.

When I began writing CrossCurrents in 2003 I conceived it as a resource that parishes might add to enhance their web sites. By adding an adult faith-formation piece, websites could become more than just parish directories or online bulletins. They could become educational tools and even instruments for community-building.

In those days many parishes had no website at all, and those that did were often offering sparse and static parish profiles. But recently I’ve surveyed more than 200 sites and noticed a dramatic change. In 2011, most parishes do have websites, and most of these features several pages of parish information, access to the parish bulletin, and links to other (usually official) Catholic sites.

You would think such online communication would be an increasingly important key to reaching and retaining the next generations--people from 15 to 50, for whom establishing and maintaining relationships online has become second nature.

That is, you would expect an evolution of parish websites toward a more transparent, more accessible, more welcoming online community--a virtual community, to be sure, but one that could serve the next generation as a gateway into parish life.

Now, in my research, I assumed it might be expecting too much to look for real interactive online features: a pastor’s blog, a Facebook page, or Twitter link, let alone chat forums or instant messaging or even teleconferencing. No, I thought, I would settle for the simplest, most basic form of online communications (community, after all, presumes communications). I would simply check websites for their e-mail connections.

The results astonished me.
...

In sum, while collecting more than 500 addresses, I almost never found a website that offered online pastoral staff contact up front on the main website page. Most website home pages proclaim “welcome to all” but are not actually welcoming. Many even say “we look forward to hearing from you” but do not tell visitors how to do that.

What is going on here?
...

Limiting access reduces the flow of incoming communication to a trickle, thus depriving parish leaders of a valuable and free source of information and insight about the very generation that our future depends on--a generation many leaders struggle to understand.

Also, it sends the wrong message about our intentions. It creates the impression that any talk of outreach, hospitality, and welcoming to younger Catholics is mere lip service--a public gesture we fail to back up by actually making contact as easy and comfortable as possible. In short, we risk undermining the credibility of our efforts to evangelize.

Finally, it reinforces the worst impression about the institutional church: that it is out of touch, with outmoded ways disengaged from contemporary life, too busy protecting itself from the world to adapt its methods and avoid obsolescence. In a word, we risk reinforcing the impression that the Catholic Church is irrelevant to people’s lives.

I cannot see any theological or pastoral justifications for creating the impression that Catholic tradition is not only old but also old-fashioned. Catholic parishes simply cannot afford to put their online identity and presence on the back burner--let alone behind a protective barrier.

Parish leaders may think that limiting e-mail access (not to mention avoiding Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, blogs, and teleconferencing) will keep people at a safe distance--but it’s actually a dangerous distance, for it endangers our very future.

#335: The Right Man For The Job?

2011-08-08T09:37:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:
The appointment of Denver’s Charles J. Chaput as Archbishop of Philadelphia marks a turning point in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the Archdiocese of Denver, and possibly even the Church in America.

Beyond question, Philadelphia desperately needs a new diocesan culture. Of all dioceses damaged by the sex abuse scandal since the 2000 breakout in Boston, Philadelphia is emerging as the worst case the all. First, the numbers of abuse cases are as high as any other dioceses. Second, it appears the mismanagement (through secrecy, neglect, and the recycling of offenders) lasted even longer than elsewhere. Third, the civil authorities have moved in aggressively.

Last spring Monsignor William Lynn (former Secretary for Clergy) became the first US diocesan official indicted on criminal charges (“felony child endangerment”) for recycling pedophile priests. The practice was endemic in nearly all US dioceses, but Philadelphia’s practice was so egregious it has drawn an unprecedented crackdown.

I have no inside knowledge of Philadelphia’s church culture (most of my work since 1976 has been in New England), but the arrival of the new bishop to replace retiring Justin Rigali cannot mean that “business as usual” will continue. There is every reason to expect that the way diocesan affairs have been conducted in recent years will be overhauled, and a new way of doing things will be installed.

This will make for interesting church-watching, since Philadelphia’s new bishop arrives bringing the reputation he earned in Denver. There Archbishop Chaput established himself as arguably the preeminent hard-liner in the American hierarchy (especially once Bernard Law fled the scene).

Does that mean that, if Philadelphia’s diocesan culture needs a thorough overhaul, Chaput is the right man for the job?

Here the case of legendary baseball manager Dick Williams (who died the same week as Chaput’s arrival) may be instructive. Remember, Williams led the Red Sox' “Impossible Dream” of 1967 and thus revived Boston's past glory by ruling with an iron hand to create a winning culture. But his style depended on a historical era when ballplayers were still docile wage-slaves. Once free agency liberated them, his style was largely obsolete. In short, culture-shaping requires not only strong management, but also a management style well matched to its times. For Philadelphia, the key question is: can Chaput provide both?

Time will tell. But the question is especially critical in a time when Catholic life is marked by two influences: (1) the way Vatican II made Catholic laity “free agents” rather than obedient children; (2) the way scandal and declining numbers have damaged both the morale and the motivation of those same laity. Philadelphia will need healing, not a hard line.

#334: When Irish Eyes Are Frowning

2011-07-29T17:00:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
The concept that different organizations have distinctive ways of doing things--different cultures--has been around for more than 30 years; what began as a technical term in organizational theory has become a familiar notion to most people.

But over that time the Church’s way of doing things has become more and more targeted, both by its members and by outsiders. This targeting came to a head last week in Ireland.

It was, in fact, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny himself who denounced “the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism--and the narcissism--that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”

This was in response to the recent government report claiming that Rome had secretly discouraged bishops from reporting priest abusers to authorities. This led Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore to charge the Vatican with violating Ireland’s sovereignty by placing the Church’s canon law above Irish law. And it led to a unanimous “unprecedented denunciation” by the Irish parliament:

[Parliament] deplores the Vatican’s intervention, which contributed to the undermining of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish bishops.

What followed was equally unprecedented: Gilmore summoned Vatican Ambassador to Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, for a face-to-face grilling, and subsequently Leanza was recalled to Rome.

Whether the accusations are completely accurate or not, they spring from the impression that church officials make on others by the way they conduct the Church’s business--that is, from the culture that frames their performance as church leaders. Prime Minister Kenny’s description of that culture as dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, and narcissism reflects a serious challenge to the Church’s mission. If people find Catholic leadership dysfunctional, disconnected, elitist, a narcissistic--how can the Church promote the Gospel message and the world?

Indeed, we can see this perception of Catholicism’s culture impeding our mission when Ireland proposes legislation making it a crime to withhold evidence of child abuse from the police--even evidence protected by the seal of the confessional! In short, Catholicism’s perceived institutional culture has provoked a reaction that intrudes on the very function of the Church.

All this begs the question: do the Prime Minister and the Irish government have a case? And if they do, is the culture they decry only a problem for them--or is it more than a local Irish problem?

#333: “Golden Age”—Or Golden Calf?

2011-07-15T14:17:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
…
Sometimes I think people have a psychological or even spiritual need to judge the past as superior to the present, perhaps because our memories tend to embellish reality, like the big fish that got away (and gets bigger with each retelling).

Like this big fish, for example: when the FBI finally caught its most-wanted fugitive, James “Whitey” Bulger, after 16 years, some public reactions in Bulger’s Boston were astoundingly nostalgic. Whitey wasn’t so bad, people said, he helped a lot of people, he protected his South Boston neighborhood from drugs and violence. As his girlfriend’s lawyer stated for the record:

James Bulger, at that time and era, was considered to be a hero-like figure in the city of Boston. He was alleged to have kept drugs off the street, helped the elderly and the poor. He was a man of almost mythic proportion.

Those were the days, in short, when Southie had pride and life was good.

The reality, of course, is well documented: South Boston had the largest concentration of poor white people in the country, as well as the country’s highest percentage of public housing residents. It was a neighborhood rife with domestic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, dysfunctional families, and racism--a closed neighborhood that protected its turf by harassing “outside” folks (usually black) attempting to move in, attend its schools, or even visit its beaches.

Nonetheless, the myth of a golden age persists, satisfying some inner need. But in assigning perfection to a flawed time and then becoming devoted to its invented memory, this myth comes perilously close to idolatry.

I see something similar in my own work. Quite often I meet Catholics who long for a lost past. Sometimes they are yearning for the “golden age” before Vatican II (increasingly, this comes from people too young to remember). They recall (or imagine) a contented and thriving Catholic Church: packed churches, full seminaries, with no divorce or abortion or agitation for gay rights or scandal or divisions. They bemoan the controversies, divisions, and declining numbers of recent decades.

More often I meet Catholics yearning for the church life as they recall it immediately after Vatican II. For them, 1965 to 1980 was a time of widening horizons, dynamic movement, a relevant faith and a responsive Church that made Catholics not just proud but excited to be catholic. They bemoan what they see as a recent crusade to undo the Council’s gains and restore pre-conciliar Catholicism.

Both these memories, of course, embellish the reality.
…
Perhaps the prudent thing in life is to be very cautious whenever we attempted to stir up longing for the “Good Old Days.” We might do well to realize they might actually have been pretty awful.

Pope John XXIII actually began Vatican Council II with advice like this. He noted that, even among Bishops and Vatican officials, there was moaning and groaning about the current situation, as though everything had declined since the Good Old Days. Calling such people “doomsayers,” he challenged the Council Fathers to be more realistic and optimistic, to acknowledge the flaws and limitations of the past and also to acknowledge the great blessings of current times. One never knows: one might be living through a golden age without even knowing it.

Yes, sometimes it’s good to step back and celebrate the good things that happen now, the things we can see and enjoy and experience, rather than merely remember. It reminds us that while memory matters, it is healthy as well to live in the moment--and to see that our moment is good.

Of course, the moment we live in is never perfect, but that is precisely why we are never tempted to idolize the present. We are all too aware of its dents, scratches, warts, and flaws, right in front of our eyes. It is only the past that gets polished by memory, and can appear so perfect that we bow down before it as superior to all that has come since; the golden age becomes our golden calf.
…

#332: Set in Stone?

2011-06-17T13:35:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
Once again the Archdiocese of Boston is in the news due to an internal conflict. When a Boston parish scheduled an “All Are Welcome” Mass coinciding with the city’s gay pride events, some Catholics complained to the archdiocese--and the archdiocese ordered the Mass canceled. Now some are calling for the dismissal of the event organizer, or even the pastor himself, even while he receives extended media coverage and standing ovations in church.

Amid all the back-and-forth (“Pride is a sin” vs. “Jesus accepted every one”; “You are celebrating homosexuality” vs. “We cannot discriminate”), and buried beneath the headlines, was a statement by Terrence Donilon, official spokesman for the archdiocese. Tasked with handling press coverage of the controversy, he said: “The teachings of the Catholic Church are set in stone.”

Oh really?

To be fair, it is possible that Donilon slipped his tongue. Or he might have intended “Church teachings” to refer, very narrowly, to Church disapproval of homosexual acts. Or he may have had some (unspoken) other qualification in mind which makes his meaning less definitive than it sounded.

Still, his remark begs a reply, since my experience tells me that he speaks for millions. “Set in Stone” is in fact a commonplace perception of Church teachings among “conservative” Catholics, who thus find “liberals” out of line. It is fairly common among “liberals,” who complain about the Church’s rigidity. It is even common among non-Catholics, looking in from the outside.

This perception has many sources: a misunderstanding of the doctrine of papal infallibility; the memory of Catholic life in the early 20th century; the tendency of Church officials to use language that makes every pronouncement sound eternal. But while this “Set in Stone” perception has many roots, it is not rooted in the actual history of Church teachings. It is, in fact, a misperception—simply wrong.

For however much popes, bishops, and other officials present teachings as though they never have and never will change, the simple truth is that Church teachings do change.

Of course, some fundamental beliefs--the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ, the triune God we call Trinity, the sacraments, the canon of the Bible, the obligation to love - -are pillars of our faith and essential to our Catholic identity. That is why we have creeds: to name the foundations of our Catholic tradition. We rightly believe that tradition has been built on rock, not sand.

But the vast majority of Catholic teachings, accumulated over 20-plus centuries, are not so foundational. In fact, our tradition is a living tradition precisely because, while built on a foundation of stone, its upper structure is an organic, changing body of beliefs and practices.

Examples of such change abound. Just pick an issue, and compare Church teachings from different historical periods. The 1998 book Rome Has Spoken supplies hundreds of examples.

…

The book title Rome Has Spoken is, of course, rather intentionally ironic. It translates the traditional Latin expression “Roma locuta est,” which always left an implied conclusion: Rome has spoken…Therefore the case is closed.

This is precisely the historic expression of the notion that Church teachings are “Set in Stone.” The irony, however, is that over the centuries Rome has spoken once, and then spoken again, and then spoken yet again, and sometimes spoken many more times on the same subject--each time proving that the case was not in fact closed, since even Rome often changed its mind.

#331: Creating An Authentic Vatican II Parish

2011-06-10T09:45:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:

Earlier (CrossCurrents#307, “Keeping the Flame Alive”) I drew an analogy between Catholic history and American history. We Catholics have often failed to use the story of our Church’s rebirth to inspire younger generations born after the Council experience. Americans, by contrast, have been much better at using the story of our country’s birth to inspire generations born long after 1776. I propose we now push this analogy by examining how Americans keep the flame of our founding alive.

The first thing to realize is we commemorate our nation’s birth in three distinct modes. Some practices are permanent features of American life; others are annual events built into our calendars; still others we reserve for anniversary years, such as the US bicentennial in 1976.

Permanent Features.
…Why not make effective parish use of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI? Portraits, buildings, halls, gardens, and courtyards could bear their images and/or names. Souvenirs, mementos, awards could have similar images. And why not begin the habit of calling Blessed John XXIII “the Father of Renewal,” or even “The Father of Our Rebirth”? Why not recognize Paul VI as “The Pilgrim Pope,” since it was he who created the globe-trotting papacy that John-Paul II and Benedict XVI have emulated.

…

Why not do this in our churches? I began Catholic high school just weeks before Vatican II began, and every day we recited a prayer “For the Success of the Second Vatican Council.” Why not use such a prayer to end our Masses?—surely praying for the Council's success is still a timely plea.

The Council’s story can be mined for a rich store of slogans (“Open the Windows,” “People of God,” “War No More!”) images (St. Peter’s filled with bleachers, then with 2000 bishops, Paul VI at Yankee Stadium, or meeting with President Lyndon Johnson) and even heroes and villains (Bishop Lienart, Cardinal Ottaviani). Why not make these a permanent part of our parish life?

Finally, Americans have mastered the indoctrination of each generation. …Why haven’t we Catholics taught younger generations about the Church's transformation from a Euro-centric, imperial Church to a multi-cultural global Church? Certainly the Council’s preparations, four annual sessions, and aftermath offer plenty of dramatic scenes to learn and remember.

Annual events.
…Why not select key dates on the parish calendar to celebrate as annual events? Paul VI’s famous 1965 speech to the UN was on October 4, Vatican II began on October 11, 1962 (that same date is the official feast day of John XXIII). Why not establish a special annual event around those dates? The Mass of the Holy Spirit (traditionally celebrated to open the Jesuit school-year) might be a fitting choice.

We could also re-publish famous texts from these two men. (John’s speech opening Vatican II, and Paul’s UN address come to mind), and create an annual social event to commemorate the Council.

Why not a December ministry fair, to mark John XXIII’s call (closing the first session in December 1962) for a “vast effort of collaboration” to renew the Church? In springtime, why not a “new life” event to mark (1) John's spring 1963 death (putting the Council’s fate in limbo), (2) Paul’s election (giving the Council new lease on life), and (3) renewal itself, (bringing new life to the Church)?

Anniversary years.
I recall the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976…Why couldn’t our parishes devote 2012-2013 to the 50th anniversary of Vatican II? Imagine reenacting the Council opening, with school kids processing in decked out as bishops, periti, and observers. Imagine everyone lighting special candles symbolizing their baptismal commission as members of the People of God. Imagine hearing John XXIII’s opening speech, scolding the “doomsayers” who see only evil in the world, promising mercy rather than condemnation, calling for a rebirth to revitalize the Church.

Why not organize a model Vatican II …Evenings could present video documentaries about the Council, John XXIII, Paul VI, and history before and after--all designed to provoke fresh thought and lively discussion.

…A “Popes John and Paul” lecture series can be inaugurated, then become an annual event. A “Roncalli Guild” could be formed, dedicated to permanently preserving and promoting the parish’s memory of Vatican II. An award for outstanding parishioner could be named after one or both popes, to highlight the new role for laity proclaimed by the council. A Lenten series could present the council’s history, especially for those too young to remember.

…A spirituality program on conversion and renewal would clarify why renewal means more than reforms.

…Pentecost could be a special celebration organized, culminating the parish anniversary year by emphasizing how both Popes intended the Council as a “Second Pentecost” reshaping Catholic life and renewing the hearts of Catholics into the next millennium.

By now you get the idea: we Catholics could revive our identity as a Church renewed by Vatican II the same way we Americans maintain our identity as a people freed by revolution…

The result: a type of parish life that acknowledges in celebrates a new way to be Church--and earns that parish the label “A Vatican II Parish.”

#330: We Still Don't Know--Part II

2011-06-02T08:52:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:

The Impact of Mandatory Celibacy.:

Features and characteristics of the Catholic Church, such as an exclusively male priesthood and the commitment to celibate chastity, were invariant during the increase, peak, and decrease in abuse incidents, and thus are not causes of the “crisis.”

This statement ignores any link between “changing” social values and “invariant” celibacy. The 1970s and 1980s saw a simultaneous drop in the number of seminarians and a rise in priests leaving to marry. This suggests the obvious: in changing times, an “invariant” celibacy became increasingly difficult for young men to accept—it kept some men from joining and kept others from staying. Those who did remain found celibacy harder to sustain. How can the study ignore this clash between the secular culture and the Church’s culture? Absent this difficulty (e.g. If celibacy had been optional) fewer priests might have left--and fewer might have abused.

Many accused priests began abusing years after they were ordained, at times of increased job stress, social isolation, and decreased contact with peers. Generally, few structures such as psychological and professional counseling were readily available to assist them with the difficulties they experienced.

After 40 years working professionally with priests, I have no doubt about the high stresses of their work and lifestyle. For more than 30 years, I have called rectories “the loneliest places in the Church.” How can the authors of this study not connect priests’ isolation with celibacy? Diocesan priests are men who, unlike laity, give up family and, unlike religious, do not get community as an alternative. They are isolated by design, by the very culture of their priesthood. The study seems blind to that culture and its impact. Moreover, declining numbers have left priests even more isolated than before—many today are living in empty rectories.

Priests who lacked close social bonds, and those whose family spoke negatively or not at all about sex, were more likely to sexually abuse minors than those who had a history of close social bonds and positive discussions about sexual behavior. In general, priests from the ordination cohorts of the 1940s and 1950s showed evidence of difficulty with intimacy.

Again the report fails to grasp the impact of mandatory celibacy. My 40-years experience working with thousands of priests teaches me that the institution of celibacy was especially appealing to men who were (1) socially isolated, (2) afraid of intimacy, or (3) gay. All three groups found the culture of celibacy an attractive haven, a safe “closet” to hide in. This skewed the demographics of the entire priestly population, which has disproportionate numbers of isolated men, gay men, and men afraid of intimacy (especially intimacy with women). Over the years, many of these men have struck me as people who simply missed adolescence.

To answer Anne’s last comment: (blogspot still balking):

2011-05-27T12:24:00.001-04:00

I actually have many concrete ideas about retrieving the memory of Vatican II in our parishes. I suggested observing the 50th anniversary year, because I can imagine an entire year-long program of activities observances and ceremonies. For me, the rule of thumb is to focus on the “forest” (that is, the main purpose of the council: the renewal of the church) rather than the “trees” (that is, the many reforms in various aspects of catholic life). Historically, these two things were collapsed together and made synonyms, which was a tragic mistake. Reforms are supposed to lead to renewal, but because we were not careful they often became ends in themselves and led nowhere except to a new format that was just as routine as the old format. Reforms alter the face of the church, but renewal alters the heart of the church through an interior conversion of all of its members. We must remember that both John XXIII and Paul VI called the council “a second Pentecost,” in other words the rebirth of the church after 20 centuries. In CrossCurrents #307, (especially in the full-text version available by email request), I compare remembering this rebirth to remembering the birth of America, and I name concrete ways to copy how Americans keep alive the flame of the American Revolution. E.G.: Hang the portrait of JOHN XXIII in a prominent place to honor him as Father of Our Rebirth (like Washington in our schools).

#329: We Still Don’t Know—Part I

2011-05-26T09:11:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
After 9 years and $2 million, the immediate and mostly negative reaction to the new John Jay College study of the “Causes and Contexts” of priestly sex abuse from 1950 to 2002 is understandable for three reasons: (1) it does not really answer the question it needed to address; (2) the explanation it does offer raises more questions than answers; (3) as a study commissioned by bishops and based largely on data they supplied, its tone and language leave it vulnerable to the charge of being a whitewash.

…

Notice the report does not ask “Why did priests commit child sex abuse and remain unchecked?” Or “why did Bishops cover-up?” it asks only “why did such abuse peak in the 1970s?” this is not, of course, the question on the public’s mind. People are looking for a remedy--a preventive--to ensure that such a scandal cannot happen again. They want to know the root cause, which this study does not even address.

Instead, this new study begins by assuming the findings of John Jay College’s first study in 2004 on the “Nature and Scope” of the problem of child sexual abuse (which claimed abuse peaked in the 1970s) as definitive. But that study relied on data I find highly dubious. First, it used “allegations” of abuse as its base numbers, even though admitting “it is impossible to determine from our surveys what percent of all actual cases of abuse…have been reported to the church.” In other words, both studies depend on assuming that the reporting rate of abuse has been reasonably accurate, and that it has not varied much between 1950 and 2002.

Reporting rates are, of course, a major issue in estimating crime trends--especially for crimes (such as rape, incest, Et cetera) where victims may feel ashamed and remain silent. Amid all the changes of the last 60 years, there is less stigma attached to victims who come forward, and more emphasis on their need for healing and justice. Thus the reporting rates for many such crimes have risen. We cannot assume that reporting rates for sex abuse did not change as well--and if they did, the question “why did abuse peak in the 1970s” becomes moot.

If, by contrast, we assume that reporting rates were not accurate and stable over 60 years, then the resulting “peak” in the 1970s seems rather predictable, for two reasons.

First, priests ordained before 1950 represent 21.3% of allegations, but they abused at a time when victims were less likely to report, and some of their victims are already deceased; moreover if they abused before 1950, the report does not include all their cases. So the actual percentage of abuses by those priests is probably higher than 21.3%.

Second, the priests ordained after 1975 account for 10.7% of all allegations--but the study admits “These conclusions have to be qualified because additional allegations for these time periods may surface in the future.” In fact, more than 25% of allegations came more than 30 years after the alleged abuse. So their reported 10.7% is probably too low as well.

In short, the study includes one time period too old for accurate reporting (given the gaps due silence and death for older priests) and another time period too recent for accurate reporting (given the time-lagged reporting on younger priests). Isn’t it common sense that allegations would be heaviest for priests ordained in between? Yet the entire purpose of the new study is to explain what caused this “peak” --which may not be real at all, but a kind of “false positive.”

…

In short, we still don’t know why priests raped kids and got away with it.

Response to Comment #4

2011-05-25T18:27:00.001-04:00

Because Blogspot will not publish it under "comments."

Any honest reader of CrossCurrents knows how extensive my coverage in defense of Benedict XVI has been since his election in 2005. I have lamented the bad press he has received, and I have carefully examined his encyclicals to help my readers comprehend their undoubted importance. I have also recounted the history of Joseph Ratzinger’s break with his former allies from Vatican II, and expressed my own opinion that, if men of good will may disagree, there is something valid coming from both camps.

As for “Connecting the Dots,” I did not refer explicitly to Benedict XVI because in most respects the forgetting of Vatican II was already accomplished before his election. He is undoubtedly a product of the Council, since many of the salient aspects of his papacy were unthinkable before the Council. But in this latest piece, my concern was simply for the possibility that the Council’s work would be in vain due to the entrenchment of those opposing renewal itself. This same threat, of course, arose during the Council itself, and it caused Ratzinger much the same anxiety then as I feel now. As he wrote in 1963:

“There was a certain discomforting feeling that the whole enterprise might come to nothing more than a mere rubber-stamping of decisions already made, thus impeding rather than fostering the renewal needed in the Catholic Church…. The Council would have disappointed and discouraged all those who had placed their hopes and it; it would have paralyzed all their healthy dynamism and swept aside once again the many questions people of our era had put to the Church.”

#328: Connecting The Dots

2011-05-18T09:09:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
Following a recent training session for my Fidelis program, one participant made a comment that really got me thinking, all the way back to my childhood. The result was a new insight about our current struggle to thrive as Church.

…

My insight: I now realize that the widespread suspension of Vatican II’s agenda for renewing Catholicism (regular readers know this theme is dear to me) is due to a failure to connect the dots in at least three ways.

First, many pastors between 1965 in 1980 announced “the changes” coming from Vatican Council II, but could not explain them because they do not understand themselves -- they could not teach what no one had taught them!

Second, many pastors attempted explanations but did not know how to put them in their true historical context. The shift away from Latin, for example, was often explained simply as “making Mass more understandable”--which was true enough, but hardly scratched the historical surface of a paradigm shift from a liturgy tethered to one culture (the Roman Empire) to a liturgy reshaped for use in all the cultures (and languages) of the modern world.

Third, at least one person knew how important it would be to connect the dots once the Council had completed its work: Pope John XXIII. As the Council’s first session ended, John addressed the assembly to assess its achievements. He concluded that “a good beginning has been made,” but then suggested the challenge for the future, when the Council sessions were over:

It will then be a question of extending to all departments of the life of the Church, social questions included, whatever the Conciliar assembly may decide, and applying its norms to them…This most important phase will see pastors united in a gigantic effort of preaching sound doctrine and applying the law,…and for this task will be called forth a collaboration of the forces of the diocesan and regular clergy, of the congregations of religious women, of the Catholic laity with all its attributes and potential, in order that the acts of the Fathers be seconded by a joyous and faithful response.

Unfortunately, John died less than a year after this address. His successor, Paul VI, also “got” the connections as and the need to communicate them. But after Humanae Vitae in 1968, his ability to communicate anything declined rapidly, like a teacher who knows teaching but not classroom management, and has lost control of his students.

John-Paul II acted out Vatican II, but the cult of his personality obscured the Council: instead of being its chief ambassador, he became its successor--witness (a) the way the next generation of Catholic youth identified with him, not the Council, and (b) the way his beatification has obscured the status of both the Council and John XXIII, without whom the papacy of John-Paul II cannot be imagined.

The result, nearly 50 years later, reminds me of what some Christians say about Christmas: our culture forgets “the reason for the season” because it fails to connect the dots (shopping, food, parties, Santa, songs, trees and ornaments and lights) to the big picture: celebrating the birthday of Christianity’s founder. Similarly, Catholics today live amid the trappings of Vatican II yet often forget the reason it happened.

…

This has reduced the Council’s meaning to the status of a textbook to be studied, rather than a watershed event in Catholic history to be preserved and celebrated as an act of divine providence. The result: today, in the average parish, the Council’s “changes” have become mere routine and the Council itself--its importance, its purpose, its legacy--is largely ignored.

The generation that lived through Vatican II got the dots but not the connections; the next generation is living with a Church that has reformed its practices but sagged into routine instead of renewal.

Maybe it’s time we all raised our hands and demanded - - or offered -- a better explanation: one that gives us the big picture by connecting all the dots.

Saints and Martyrs

2011-05-09T16:24:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
In a bizarre irony, Pope John–Paul II is beatified the same day that Osama bin Ladin is killed. The most popular (perhaps even the most beloved) man of the last 50 years is thus linked to the most feared and vilified man since Hitler. John-Paul’s body is exhumed for the solemn celebration, while bin Ladin’s body is captured for positive identification and buried at sea.

But beyond the irony, is the any lesson for us? Is there any connection in the coincidence?

Perhaps we could pause and reflect on the values and limits of a very human instinct: the impulse to sanctify some and demonize others.

…These two men were exceptional: one an outstanding figure of principle and peace, the other a notorious icon of terror and destruction.

Such men make life simpler, in that we have definitive, un-mixed opinions about them. Most of the people we actually know evoke our appreciation for their strengths but also something less for their weaknesses, but these men evoked pure admiration and pure vilification, respectively, from millions.

Such reactions, natural as they are, can pose risks. We may so overreact to their image as “good” and “evil” that we dehumanize them--and in so doing, break their connection with us.
…
Still, this does not mean that assigning some people to our public Hall of Fame and others to our Hall of Shame is a bad idea.

The long tradition of canonizing saints (who comprise, after all, the Church’s Hall of Fame) offers many benefits. It gives recognition to a life well-lived, rendering that life more visible, and magnifying its power to inspire. It personifies, in the concrete form of one person’s life, values that otherwise might remain abstract. It creates a real-life model for others to admire and emulate. And it provides incentives and encouragement as we struggle with life’s challenges.

This is why we work to keep alive the memory of extraordinary people we may never have met. But sometimes--perhaps too often--that memory ossifies into the kind of “plaster saint” whom we pray to but never really connect with…:

If we lose this connection, we may forget that even the blessed are not perfect. John-Paul II, after all, badly misjudged the scale of the sex-abuse scandal (labeling it an “American problem”) in ways that hampered an effective response. His papacy may have been great, but his actions we not always good. So we must keep in minds that the Hall of Fame is full of fallen humans.

Having a “Hall of Shame” can be good for us too, since remembering history’s villains can personify, in concrete terms, the very vices we reject and want to expunge from our lives and our world. … Thousands of youth across America celebrated bin Ladin’ death precisely because he was the bogeyman of their youth, embodying an evil they feared and rejected.

But that fear came become paranoid, all out of proportion to the real danger. As bad as bin Ladin was, after all, he caused fewer deaths than our invasion of Iraq, the flaws in our healthcare system, or even the alcohol-related fatalities on our highways. His threat was real, but not unrivaled.
…
For the rest of us, the danger is different. By celebrating a villain’s demise we may be merely venting our relief after years of anxiety. But we may also be acting out our mistaken belief that we have defeated, not only one evil man, but evil itself. This danger is all too real when our country wages a “war on terror” in the misguided hope that world peace will come if we kill all the evil people.

This is the fundamental risk of overreacting to the saints and sinners among us. We can become blind to the human foibles of our heroes, and the same time we can pretend that our villains hoard all the evil of the world unto themselves.
…
But the fact is that, no matter how many evil men we tracked down and kill, we can never kill evil in the world, for evil lies within us all--that is what Christianity calls “Original Sin.”

#326: Something Old, Something New

2011-04-30T23:34:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
Did anyone notice?

Amid the pomp and pageantry that surrounded the royal wedding, the simple words of the Wedding Sermon by Dr. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, were probably lost on most viewers (emphasis mine):

You have both made your decision today – “I will” – and by making this new relationship, you have aligned yourselves with what we believe is the way in which life is spiritually evolving, and which will lead to a creative future for the human race.

We stand looking forward to a century which is full of promise and full of peril. Human beings are confronting the question of how to use wisely a power that has been given to us through the discoveries of the last century. We shall not be converted to the promise of the future by more knowledge, but rather by an increase of loving wisdom and reverence, for life, for the earth and for one another.

As my readers know, this is precisely the vision I have long attributed to Vatican Council II: the profound challenge of harnessing a wisdom that can guide the modern world’s newfound powers toward a future of promise rather than peril. These words, woven into the fabric of a ceremony filled with echoes of past glories, cast an unblinking eye on the future of Christianity in the modern world.

But Christianity’s ancient wisdom does no good if the modern world ignores it. To yoke power to wisdom, the Christian church must become what I have called a “global force for good.” I have written that Vatican II called for the Church to become less Roman so that it could become more catholic, less Latin so that it could be more universal.

But has that happened? Are there signs of a renewed Catholicism that is less European, Latin, imperial, and Roman - - and more international, multicultural, popular, and catholic?

In some respects the answer is: yes - - with a vengeance!

#325: “It Was A Hell Of A Crossroads”

2011-04-26T19:52:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
One Hundred and Fifty years ago last week, Confederate gunners fired on Ft. Sumter, ushering America into civil war...The more I watch and read, the more convinced I am that, in many ways the Civil War parallels the Second Vatican Council. Moreover, these parallels are instructive: they help us better comprehend both events!

Both events began small: the bombardment of Ft. Sumter killed but one horse, and John XXIII’s announcement of the Council to a few cardinals triggered only stony silence. No one expected much of either event: Americans in 1861 thought any war would end quickly; the bishops leaving for the Council in 1962 counted on a short stay in Rome.

Yet both events defied such expectations. If Ken Burns wrote, “No one could have predicted the magnitude of the explosion that rocked America following that opening shot,” we Catholics know that no one foresaw the seismic shift the Council unleashed on Catholicism.

Even today, many fail to fathom the profound importance of these events, as if they are simply past history with no present impact. But even then, the men in charge knew better.

Abraham Lincoln called the War “A New Birth of Freedom,” which justifies those who label it our “Second American Revolution.” Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, meanwhile, both called the Council “A New Pentecost”--thus justifying us who regard the Council as the “rebirth” of the Catholic Church….

For both events, the stakes could not have been higher. The War would determine whether the original United States would remain intact into the future; the Council would determine whether Catholicism’s 1500-year dependence on the legacy of the Roman Empire would remain its paradigm for the future. The War preserved the Union; the Council outgrew the Empire.

Both events brought radical change. The War saved the Union only by imposing the historical verdict that slavery, and the plantation economy built on it, were obsolete. The Council reached the historical verdict that the Church’s reliance on Imperial ways was also obsolete.

Thus both events shed light on how past accomplishments had limited present action and future prospects. Before the War, America had a “Union” on paper, but in reality remained two divergent regional cultures. Before the Council, the Church was “Catholic” in name, but in reality had become too dependent on a single (Latin) culture to be truly universal.

Nevertheless, both events involved some who staunchly defended the status quo. Many southerners feared the future without slavery and limited states’ rights would be no future at all. Many traditionalist bishops believed the Council’s efforts were destroying the Catholic Church. Both groups include those who, to this day, feel betrayed by history and refuse to accept defeat.

Thus both events have fallen prey to endless interpretation and reinterpretation; both have defied our ability to establish a consensus understanding of what happened and what it all meant.

Yet both events had unmistakable effects. Historians note that, before the War, Americans commonly used the plural for their country: “The United States of America are….” After, the verbs shifted to singular: “The United States of America is….” The Union was now a reality, not merely a paper term.

Similarly, Catholics no longer experience their Church as a mono-cultural institution, because it now speaks, not in the singular, bygone language of an obsolete empire, but in the plural languages of all the cultures of the world. Before, we professed to be “Catholic” but we acted Roman; now we acknowledge our Roman roots but have become truly Catholic in our worship and teaching and practice.

Those who resist these realities preach the virtues of “continuity” over “discontinuity,” harkening back to the pre-War and pre-Council periods, hoping to retrieve some longed-for mythical “golden age” while pretending that neither event really changed anything….

Ironically, the War left the nation more centralized than ever, while the Council opened the mother of all central hierarchies to a less centralized structure of national conferences and local councils.

Ironically, too, both events followed the adage “If at first you don’t succeed…try again.” When the U.S. Constitution failed to produce the “more perfect union” it proclaimed, the War became the nation’s second attempt at Union. And when the Church’s dependence on Imperial ways bumped up against the limits of European culture in a post-colonial era, the Council became the Church’s second attempt at global reach.…

Of course, while both events changed the face of their respective histories, they could not guarantee a change in the hearts and minds of their people. So both events continue to provide disputed interpretations, applications, and evaluations (Confederate flags and Latin Masses still compete with Union Jacks and vernacular liturgies). But one thing is clear: both events were historic watersheds defining the contemporary scene…

Thus today’s America is, for better or worse, the battle-forged national Union that the Civil War made it. And today’s Catholic Church is, for better or worse, the change-charged global body the Council created.

So as American Catholics note this year’s 150th Civil War anniversary, we might also do well to ponder: how can we best observe next year’s 50th anniversary of Vatican Council II?

#324: What Are We Supposed To Think?

2011-04-21T17:18:00.004-04:00

EXCERPT:
What am I supposed to think when I get e-mail from the right-wing evangelical site OneNewsNow running the headline Support for “Gay” Rights Rising Among Catholics? Am I supposed to think Catholics think differently from other Americans? Am I supposed to think they differ with their own hierarchy? Am I supposed to think this is a bad thing?

The story beneath the headline was not much more helpful. It reported on the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) releasing what it claims to be “The most comprehensive portrait of Catholic attitudes on gay and lesbian issues assembled to date.” The report finds Catholics more supportive of gay rights than the general public and other Christians. Specifically, it reports that among Catholics:

• 73% favor legislation to protect homosexuals against workplace discrimination.
• 63% favor legislation allowing homosexuals in military.
• 60% favor legislation allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.
• Only 22% oppose all legal recognitions of same-sex couples (for example: civil unions or same-sex civil marriage)

At the same time, Catholics expressed highly negative opinions of their own hierarchy’s performance: only 39% give the official church high marks in its handling of homosexuality, and 70% agree that messages from churches contribute (either a little or a lot) to suicides by homosexuals.

The initial impression the coverage gives is that something is amiss here, that Catholics are out of step. In fact, Dr. Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI, opines:

It may come as a surprise to many that rank-and-file Catholics are more supportive of rights for gays and lesbians than other Christians and the public.

And OneNewsNow’s Charlie Butts reports Jones noting that “A gap exists between the Vatican and Catholic Bishops… and rank-and-file Catholics.”

Really? Is that what we’re supposed to think?

For me, the statistics beg for a clear-eyed interpretation rather than distortion.

It seems to me that, in order to measure any supposed “gap” between the hierarchy and the rank-and-file, we need to start by comparing the statistics above with official church positions. Here they are, drawn from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and from statements by the Vatican and the US Bishops:

1. Homosexual orientation is most often experienced as given and discovered,not chosen--and is not in itself morally wrong or sinful.

2. Given the inherent dignity of every human person, the Church teaches that homosexual persons, like everyone else, should not suffer from prejudice against their basic human rights.”

3. Violence in speech or action against homosexuals “deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs.”

4. “Every sign of discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

5. Nothing in the Bible or Catholic teaching can be used to justify prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes and behaviors toward homosexual persons.

Of course, Catholic moral teaching also finds no justification for homosexual acts. But the moral objections are essentially the same as the Church’s objections to masturbation, artificial contraception, pre-marital sex, adultery, coitus interruptus, oral and anal sex, etc.—namely, that only marital procreative sex is morally legitimate. Everything else violates natural law.

In other words, official Catholic morality opposes all those acts but not the people who perform them. Such opposition therefore provides no grounds for treating those people differently from anyone else--and that goes for homosexuals as well as for all the others!

#323: We Are Never Finished

2011-03-31T23:33:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
There is nothing wrong with loving popular Catholic devotions and believing that they and enrich the Church and your own spiritual life. But there is everything wrong with expecting that others will feel exactly like you. The first attitude is very Catholic; the second one is not.

The first attitude simply demonstrates the power of Roman Catholic devotions. In fact it demonstrates that the key to the unity of the Church is not uniformity in all things but a diversity of practices which, while rooted in the same faith, vary from culture to culture and generation to generation. In fact it has been the ability of Catholicism to adapt to various times and places that has allowed it to expand so powerfully. That is why Irish Catholicism differs from Italian Catholicism, which is not like Polish Catholicism or French Catholicism or Vietnamese Catholicism or African Catholicism--yet all share the same essential faith.

Such diversity recognizes that no one set of popular devotions fits all Catholics. Such devotions, moreover, seldom spanned all continents or generations; Marian devotions in particular emerged in the medieval era and thrived especially at a time when art and architecture and culture in general focused heavily on Mary as the icon of Christian femininity.

The second attitude--that everyone should find the same benefit from popular devotions--contradicts this historic and cultural diversity by assuming that all Catholics need the same set of devotional practices. The frustration in this attitude is rooted in the desire for a one-size-fits-all spiritual life for all Catholics.

This contradicts our history. How else to explain the multiplication of religious communities in the Catholic Church? Nearly all of them, after all, were born of the conviction that the available forms of the spiritual life were not adequate for everyone's needs.

So, for example, Benedict founded the first monasteries because the solitary life of hermits (the only form of spiritual life prevalent then) did not fit his needs. In other words, the available spiritual practices were not enough for all Catholics.

So too, the Franciscans took to the streets and fields because the Cloistered life of monastic contemplation was not enough. Similarly, the Dominicans brought new preaching and teaching zeal to religious life. The Jesuits added an almost martial missionary fervor and discipline. The Paulist Fathers became the first American-born religious community because their founder, Isaac Hecker, found the established European orders inadequately attuned to American culture and customs.

In short, the Catholic way of spirituality requires a wide variety of approaches to the spiritual life. The longer our tradition lasts, the clearer it becomes that we are never finished developing and enriching Catholic spirituality.

When popular Catholic devotions are good and effective, it is always because they enrich the life of Catholics. But they serve no good if they begin to compete with or replace the core of our faith--the elements that all Catholics must hold in common and practice together.

What do I mean by this "core of faith"?

I mean the things that all Catholics have identified with throughout our history : (1) our belief in the triune God, as definitively enshrined in the Nicene creed ; (2) the reliance on scriptures which began with Paul's letters less than twenty years after the first Easter and culminated four generations later in what we still call the Bible; (3) the regular celebration of the risen Christ presence among us through the visible signs of Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, and the rest of the sacramental system we know today; (4) the practice of loving service that enabled the solidarity of early Christian communities to evolve into the world's largest charitable organization.

Our Trinitarian belief, our Biblical faith, our sacramental celebration, and our service to others--these form the core of Catholic life. No generation of Catholics has ever lived --or could ever live --without them.

Compared to this core, everything think else is secondary and peripheral –they are the "bells and whistles" that make Catholicism such a rich, diverse, and the even ornate tradition. But past generations lived their faith without them, and future generations do not require them to be truly Catholic. Those who love them should enjoy them, but no one should feel frustration if others do not respond the same way. And we should never allow them to compete with our core (as, for example, the rosary did during for many Mass-going Catholics in an earlier generation).

No particular Catholic popular devotion, then, can be presented as the key to a power future --or even as the key to reaching out to the next generation. For those who love them, they add to the appeal of Catholic living. But there is no guarantee that they will be enough for millions of other Catholics.

#322: Aftershock: the Exercise of Wisdom

2011-03-29T10:17:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
Longtime CrossCurrents readers know my shorthand summary of the Church-renewal agenda of Vatican Council II (1962-1965) is: “Bringing Wisdom to Power.” … The exercise of power is all around us, but the exercise of wisdom can only come from within.

The last two weeks since the tragedy in Japan show how difficult the exercise of wisdom can sometimes be. The parade of awful headlines can be numbing even from a safe distance, so the effort to make sense and filter through to the essential values can become not only a mental but even an emotional burden.

My own reflections have followed a twisted path as the news from Japan has emerged…
But suddenly the media coverage was overtaken by the nuclear crisis. After three or four days, the quake and the tsunami were nearly gone from CNN’s screens and from most newspaper pages. Both were filled with the latest breaking news from the power plants--explosion, fire, water-bombs, spreading radiation, and endless descriptions of nuclear reactors—and the experts’ assessments of the potential dangers. The fate of the whole towns and thousands of victims was shelved to focus instead on six buildings.

Within a week, reports emerged of a shortage of potassium iodide needed to protect the local populations from radiation. And I also heard reports of similar shortages in the United States (including Massachusetts) where people panicked about the effect of their own nuclear plants despite being told that stocking potassium iodide against future risk only meant it would lose its effectiveness. The risk in this over-reaction was that supplies needed in Japan would be uselessly consumed in the U.S.
…
I began to feel that U.S. paranoia about nuclear energy and radiation was beginning to overshadow the real suffering in Japan. If 20,000 Japanese have died and millions are left with nothing, why obsess about a threat that remains less than ordinary x-ray?…

Over the next few days however, even though the nuclear crisis continued to generate news, the media regained its balance and began to cover the disaster’s aftermath more broadly.…

What I first took as overreaction, national nuclear navel- gazing, and paranoia now seems to be yielding a calmer, wiser view of the need to learn from our mistakes.
By now I have two main reflections about the events and their coverage.

First, what awful tragic irony it is that Japan of all places has become, yet again, the place where the awesome challenge of nuclear power confronts the world. The very nation that remains the only victim of nuclear weaponry (from U.S. attacks that cost more than 150,000 Japanese their lives) has now become our real-life model for the inadequacy of nuclear plant designs that are commonplace even in the United States. Once again, Japan unwillingly provides the world its much-needed cautionary tale—its next nuclear wake-up call.

Second, I cannot help but recall that when Vatican Council II spoke on the need to harness power with wisdom, it especially targeted nuclear energy. Indeed, its only condemnation was reserved for the construction, threat, and use of nuclear weapons. Clearly, the Council Fathers recognized the new phenomenon of energy from fission and fusion as the prime modern example of a power which, unguided by wisdom, could destroy our dreams and haunt our hopes.

Nearly 50 years later, nuclear devices (both weapons and plants) continue to test the ability of the human race to harness its newfound powers with wisdom--and, at the same time, they confirm the importance of Vatican II’s vision, not just for Catholics, but for the whole world.

#321: Up From The Ashes?

2011-03-23T16:25:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
The Ash Wednesday story out of Philadelphia was the last straw for me. I am sick of scandal in the church—sick at heart, sick to death.

It feels like I have been living with this tragedy a very long time. In fact, I first faced the specter of clergy sex abuse in 1989, when…1990 and ‘91 my newspaper…By 1994 …In 2000 my father …In 2002, when the dam broke in Boston following the court-ordered release of Archdiocesan files sought by victims’ families, I witnessed not only the public explosion of but also many personal connections to the scandal...But since then outbreaks have occurred in Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Australia—and now again in the US, in Philadelphia among 21 active-duty priests.

Looking back over all of this, I realize that this scandal, spreading its toxic effects like some invisible radioactive material, is proving to have a very long half-life. It simply refuses to go away.

The victims will live with the damage for the rest of their lives; the bankrupt dioceses may never recover their former prosperity; it could take a generation for the institutional church to recover its good name—and the hierarchy may never regain its former control over its flock. In some very basic sense, the Church as we knew it will never be the same.

Could that be a good thing? It can—that is, this awful tragedy could even yield some beneficial byproducts—but only on several conditions.

First, for example, the outcome could be beneficial if the institutional church establishes hierarchy’s accountability to the whole People of God. We may not need to require the dismantling of the hierarchy itself, but we can no longer accept a hierarchy that answers to no one else. When Bernard Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston, it seemed unprecedented and extraordinary; in fact he received barely a slap on the wrist before the golden parachute that made him archpriest of a famous Rome church. Now in Philadelphia we see the first men facing criminal charges for their failures in supervising priest-abusers. In the future, such accountability both within the church and within civil society will have to become the norm, not the exception.

Second, the outcome might be beneficial if we ensure the safety of all children—a heavy moral responsibility on which there has been some progress but requires much more, since there is some evidence that new regulations are not being consistently enforced.

Third, we must include some account of the root causes of the abuse itself. For most of us, the hierarchical cover-up was an even bigger scandal than the abuse itself, but such mis-governance would be moot without the abuse in the first place. Is the rate of priestly abuse (some 7% percent of Boston priests over 50 years, for example) comparable to other service professions? And even if it is comparable, should the priesthood not model more integrity than other professions?
…
Fourth, then, the outcome will only be beneficial if we uproot the causes of abuse once we have identified them. I have argued in the past, for example, that making celibacy a mandate rather than an option had the unintentional effect of establishing a ready-made closet where young Catholic men could hide their emotional and sexual difficulties by entering seminaries, thereby ending once and for all the typical questions of parents, relatives, and peers about their plans to “marry a nice girl and settle down.” This had the effect of concentrating men with sexual problems into a small population of service providers with access to children and the power to abuse them. Thus the requirement that 100% of priests be celibate may turn out to have done more harm than good.

Fifth, a beneficial outcome requires that the hierarchy move beyond its recent obsession with sex - - an obsession that has infected much of Catholic life. From contraception in the 1960s to same-sex marriage in the 21st century, the hierarchy has compiled a long string of crusades against contemporary views of sexuality. If the hierarchy is not in reality obsessed with sex, it has at least succeeded in making the general public think so. It’s high time the Church re-brand its public face with higher priorities.

Finally, the outcome might only be beneficial if we avoid the temptation to scapegoat others. If pedophiles are people who are attracted, not to the opposite sex or to their own sex, but to children, then the underlying problem is not gender-preference but the inability to interact with responsible intimacy with one’s own peers. Blaming gay men for someone else’s problems will solve nothing …

Vatican II (1962-1965) preached the modern world’s urgent need to match its high-tech power with an ancient but updated wisdom. But the institution has undermined its own message by failing to marshal the wisdom it needed to control its own power and prevent abuse.

So the fundamental condition for a happier outcome will finally be: can the institution now show the wisdom and the courage to do what must be done? It so, we might somewhere on the horizon see the institution rise from its own self-inflicted ashes. If not, it will prolong self-inflicted hemorrhaging from its own hypocrisy.

#320: Catholic Solidarity, Part II

2011-03-15T10:56:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:
it is now more than a century that the Catholic Church has been on record supporting the notion that unionism, and the collective bargaining that goes with it, are basic rights which, in modern capitalist societies, are often the only protection workers have against corporate power.

Here is what Catholics need to know about this teaching, which has been established and developed by five different popes, as well as by the US Catholic Conference of Bishops:
1.Unions are indispensable in pursuing the common good of all.
2.Unions are rooted in the right to free association –that is, the right to unite with others to protect common interests.
3.Unions foster solidarity through participation and collaboration.
4.Unions have a duty to seek cooperative relationships with employers.

None of this teaching justifies union corruption; none of it justifies the failure of unions to seek the common good of all; none of it justifies intransigence or an unwillingness to bargain. When unions fail, like any other human organization, they must be reformed.

But challenging them to fulfill their duties cannot include revoking their rights. That is why Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, California, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, said the following in a recent public letter to the Archbishop of Milwaukee:

These are not just political conflicts or economic choices; they are moral choices with enormous human dimensions…The debates over worker representation and collective bargaining are not simply matters of ideology or power, but involve principles of justice, participation and how workers can have a voice in the workplace and economy.

No surprise then that the Archbishop of Milwaukee himself, Jerome E. Listecki, acting as president of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference released the following statement [emphasis mine]:

The Church is well aware that difficult economic times call for hard choices and financial responsibility to further the common good…But hard times do not nullify the moral obligation each of us has to respect the legitimate rights of workers. As Pope Benedict wrote in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate: “Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labor unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church's social doctrine…for the promotion of workers' associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past…”

Perhaps the strongest statement applicable to the current situation was made by the US Bishops in their 1986 pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All”:

The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions…No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself.

Flashback to #194: Wisdom from our “Secular Pope”

2011-02-28T17:35:00.003-05:00

[NOTE: This excerpt appeared more than three years before ElBaradie became a key figure in Egypt's Revolution:]

Ours is a time desperate for cool heads and clear vision, and one man who offers both is Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency since 1997, and winner (with the IAEA) of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

Had the US listened to ElBaradei in March 2003 when he told the U.N. Security Council that his investigations showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, we would not be at war in Iraq today. And now he’s the only public figure communicating with both the Iranians and the Americans to prevent another nuclear showdown.

The New York Times recently referred to him as a “secular pope,” which TV interviewer Charlie Rose suggested meant “making sure that people don't kill each other.” (The interview transcript is at http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/01/africa/01rose-elb.php?page=5.).Hearing this, ElBaradei acknowledged that, like the Pope, he must rely less on political power and more on moral authority:

"Secular pope" means I have to remind people of the basic principles they subscribe to. You know, I have to remind the weapons states that they committed themselves to move to nuclear disarmament. I have to remind everybody that they committed to resolve issues through peaceful means. I have to remind people that there is an inspection process at work, so we don't go and bomb…

ElBaradei hopes that in his lifetime he will see nuclear weapons become a historical taboo like genocide and slavery. But this man is experienced and wise enough to know that, more than 60 years after Hiroshima and 45 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have still not come to terms with the basic moral dilemma of nuclear weapons:

We still continue to live in a world where people see that having nuclear weapons is a means of power, of prestige and of a shield. If you really want to protect yourself, you know, you should have nuclear weapons.

The whole system, the so-called arms-control system, is based on those who do not have weapons should not have weapons, but the weapons states should move into nuclear disarmament…But as long as we continue to say, "well, nuclear weapons are very important for our security, but you cannot have it," that system is not sustainable in the long run.

So I think the US, Russia, everybody, all the weapons states, will have much stronger moral authority if they show -- if they say, "We are moving into that direction. We don't need to rely on nuclear weapons."

ElBaradei is absolutely right to place the moral burden on the Weapons States. For they are the founders and sustainers of a double standard that hypocritically reserves the supposed “benefits” of nuclear weapons to themselves while denying them to others—and even threatening war on those who seek them. The envy and resentment this creates is, all by itself, a grave obstacle to global peace. And no one can remove that obstacle but the Weapons States who invented it.

#320: Catholic Solidarity

2011-02-28T17:13:00.003-05:00

EXCERPT:
The current standoff between Wisconsin’s governor, his Democratic legislators, the protesters in and around the state house, and his own populist supporters, raises a multiplicity of issues about the place of labor unions in American Life. Over the last 50 years, the percentage of unionized American workers in private industry has declined while, at the same time, the percentage of unionized public workers has increased. This reflects both the widening of legal protections for unions (which were once widely banned from the public sector) and a simultaneous shrinkage of unions’ political power in corporate America.

In the current fight, seen as a bellweather for many other states, what is a stake is the future of those legal protections.

As the standoff continued, it became clear that the question of reducing workplace benefits for state employees was really camouflage for the deeper challenge to collective bargaining itself. By now, the unions have agreed to concede the economic provisions of the proposed legislation, but object to its legal consequences in restricting their ability to negotiate future contracts.

And here we approach an issue which, for American Catholics, should not be about liberal vs. conservative or Democratic vs. Republican; it should be about the basic matter of Catholic identity. For it is now more than a century that the Catholic Church has been on record supporting the notion that trade unionism, and the collective bargaining that goes with it, are basic human rights which, in modern capitalist societies, are often the only protection workers have against corporate power.

As complex and subtle as the Wisconsin case may be, it would be sad if Catholics lost sight of the fundamental commitment to unionism and collective bargaining which, as a matter of principle, is rooted in our own Christian faith.

#319 The Difference Between Hands and Feet

2011-02-25T10:17:00.003-05:00

EXCERPT:
After twenty centuries, Catholics symbols can get pretty complex (some of us knew that even before The Da Vinci Code!). And this week's events in Ireland gave two ancient symbols a new relevance.

The first involved the washing of feet. At a special ceremony of repentance in Dublin's Saint Mary's pro-Cathedral, two bishops -- Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin -- knelt to wash the feet of eight victims of priestly sexual abuse. The full church watched these bishops lie prostrate as abuse government reports of child abuse cases were read by lectors. They also saw the bishops join in applauding the several victims who interrupted the ceremony to give their own spontaneous testimonies.

The foot-washing ritual, of course, has deep Christian roots….
…This week's ritual in Ireland added yet another layer, echoing the repentant woman who anointed Jesus’ feet as much as Jesus himself. This was a gesture, not only of service, but of abject apology for the suffering of all the people those eight victims represented.

But another, less hopeful symbol also intruded, for at least one victim (Paddy Doyle, who was among the first to blow the whistle on Ireland's scandal) was unimpressed, and invoked another image from Catholic tradition to express his skepticism:

They said the cardinal from Boston wanted to wash my feet, but it sounded like they wanted to wash their hands of the whole thing, so I said no.

Off-hand, the phrase "wash their hands" might seem like an everyday figure of speech, but of course it also derives (like many "everyday" expressions) from the gospels. ..

...How sadly ironic that, for too long, church officials faced with charges against priests mimicked Pilate, washing their own hands of any responsibility for the fate of abuse victims and the future behavior of child-abusing priests.

Patti Doyle's doubts are perfectly understandable… Most often past churchmen have simply repeated "Roma locuta est." -- Rome has spoken -- to squelch any questioning of the hierarchy’s authority.

Even when they acknowledged some past misdeeds, such admissions have been consistently couched in a convenient but specious distinction between the Church (which never failed) and individual members of the Church's leadership. I call the distinction specious because, if the Church is the People of God, it fails if the leaders fail and the people follow their lead. But this was an admission we never heard.

What gives me hope in this case is that Sean O'Malley used the right words for a change. Yes, he first asked forgiveness for "the sexual abuse of children perpetrated by priests," and these words were par for the course. But then he went on to ask forgiveness for the past failures of "the Church's hierarchy, here and in Rome, the failure to respond appropriately to the problem of sexual abuse." This refers not to abuse itself, but to the mismanagement that covered up that abuse -- and this places responsibility for that squarely on bishops and even on the Vatican. Such a statement goes well beyond the usual grudging admissions of churchmen.

Finally, O’Malley stated:

Publicly atoning for the Church's failures is an important element of asking the forgiveness of those who have been harmed by priests and Bishops.

Again this refers to the failures that covered up abuse, holding "bishops" responsible. But more striking to me is the phrase "the Church's failures" -- clearly breaking with that old pretense that the Church itself never fails. Yes, we believe that divine guidance guarantees the Church will never experience total failure in its mission or disappear from the face of the earth. But divine guidance does not make the people of God any less human. O’Malley’s statement finally breaks through the denial of that sinful humanity.

#318 The Burden of Proof

2011-02-22T10:31:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT:
The unrest now spreading across the Middle East reminds us that the democratic idea--the desire for self-determination--is contagious. Just as each Egypt caught it from Tunisia, others may be catching it from Egypt. This contagion has been spreading for some 500 years, and is by now nothing less than a global epidemic--but bringing life, not death.

It would be sad if history finally judges that this great human achievement--the global triumph of self determination --began with a revolt against the Catholic Church. But it would be even sadder if the Church had actually incubated that idea, even given birth to it, only to resist it, reject it, and ultimately disown it.

It may seem odd to link the rebellion in Egypt with the sex abuse scandal, but they share a common cause: the abuse of autocratic power; and they both made global headlines when a few courageous individuals stepped forward to speak truth to power. Odd as the linkage may seem, the lesson is clear: the Church’s crisis is a struggle not just within the Church itself, but also in the Church's relationship with the outside world. For its autocratic culture clashes with the phenomenon of autocracy trending toward extinction.

Alfred North Whitehead once argued, nearly a century ago, that the democratic idea was the great achievement of the modern age. As such, it erects one of the great tollgates of history: one cannot pass into the future without first honoring self-determination. To resist this idea is a death-wish, leading to obsolescence rather than survival.

The ultimate question here is just as blunt and simple for the Church as it was for Egypt (and the other 83 fallen autocracies): will this be a place of freedom?
...
The Catholic Church has often cast itself as a "perfect society" -- but that cannot mean one that has outgrown the need for freedom. To survive its current crisis and embrace a brighter future, it will need to convince us -- not just Catholics but all people -- that it, too, can be a place of freedom. One cannot claim to speak for the God of history if one is on the wrong side of that history.

This does not mean the Church must install democratic structures. True, it has been more democratic in the past, but even a hierarchy can avoid autocracy if it makes itself accountable to its people. The absence of such accountability is the real scandal of recent Catholic history.

But whether its structures remain hierarchical or become more democratic, the institutional church faces a profound challenge. Can it drop the pretense that ecclesiastical autocracy is a divine mandate? Can it acknowledge that self-determination is the mandate of modern history? Can it invest Catholic concepts like the “Sensus Fidelium” (a consensus of the faithful members) and "Subsidiarity" (the need for local decision-making) with real and practical value? Can it retrieve a Church culture where ordinary Catholics have a voice commensurate with their maturity, education, life experience, and collective wisdom?

This may not require congregational autonomy or the denominational splintering typical of Protestant history, but it will require a radical change in Catholic culture. If our Church can do this, it can pass yet another of history's tollgates and renew itself as the global force it still aspires to be.

But for now, at least, the heavy burden of proof rests on the institution and its hierarchy.

#317: No Strings Attached

2011-01-31T19:21:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:
The Oscars are coming, and as usual they provoke both banal celebrity-mongering and provocative public controversy. This year's controversy is discreetly hidden in plain sight in the nominations for "Best Picture in a Foreign Language." And beneath that controversy lurks a malicious misconception about the place of the Catholic Church in global society.

On January 23 New York Times "Awards Season Blog" ran a story headlined "French Fury Over Academy Short List" detailing public outrage that the Motion Picture Academy had failed to nominate France's "Of Gods And Men" while simultaneously selecting Algeria's (French-produced) "Outside The Law." Both films portray violent martyrdom in Algeria: The first is about Trappist monks beheaded by Islamic terrorists in 1996; the latter depicts the massacre of Algerian citizens by French colonial troops. The French are outraged that, while these films show two sides of France's history in Algeria, the Academy selected only one side -- the negative side -- and snubbed the other.

I have not seen "Outside The Law," but I know the director’s previous work; he might be considered France's Oliver Stone, a master of historical propaganda aimed at revising history (in his view, correcting its oversights). His earlier film about Muslim soldiers fighting for France in World War II (“Les Indigenes”) won wide praise, and I expect his new film’s comparison of anti-colonial Algerian terrorists to World War II resistance fighters is as powerful as it is provocative.

But I have seen of “Of Gods and Men," and I fervently recommend it to my readers. Its Oscars exclusion is both disappointing and curious: the film has already received the Grand Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival and the "Best Foreign-Language Film" award by the National Board Of Review. The Oscars snub leaves one wondering if there is anti-religious bias at work.

This notion came to me when Stephen Erlanger (in a January 5 New York Times article) called "Of Gods And Men" "idyllic and bizarrely apolitical." Oddly, he did not mean that the film is neutral about the struggle between extremist Islam terrorists and Algeria's secular rulers. Nor is he referring to France's recent troubles, being targeted by terrorists for supporting Algeria's government. Instead by "apolitical" Erlanger means the film fails to pass judgment on the missionary role of the Catholic Church:

It [the film] seems strangely ignorant of the colonial implantation that the monastery represents, so many years after Algeria won its independence, and that a proselytizing Roman Catholicism itself represents. It is an odd obliviousness in a poor, divided country where jihad is on the rise as the political response of the very peasantry among whom the monks live so blissfully, and apparently blindly.

If Erlanger is right, we Catholics have a big problem. First, we belong to a Church which sprung from the Middle East but flourished especially in Mediterranean Europe (including North Africa and Spain before Islam arrived). Second, our Church does have strong historic links with European colonialism (in this case, French colonialism), since colonizers generally brought missionaries with them. Third, the Church has been accused (and often been guilty) of cultural imperialism, employing missionary zeal to impose Western European culture and a European faith. If this is still true, our presence may do more harm than good.

But Erlanger is not right. The truth is our missionary presence is different from our past...

What we do see in this remarkable film is something entirely different. We see a young girl asking a monk advice about her love life, and the monk offering empathetic and prudent council rooted in common sense rather than Catholic doctrine. We see the monks joining the villagers to celebrate a young boy’s coming of age, acting as full and joyful participants in an event that is African and Muslim, not European and Christian. We see monks sitting with local elders discussing the terror threat to the village, where they are clearly regarded as peers and neighbors, not as foreign intruders. We see monks who have made themselves at home with the local population, live in solidarity with them, and refuse to abandon them.

We see in short, no strings attached. No "proselytizing Catholicism" at all. If the terrorists see them as such a threat, it is because they (unlike the villagers) cling to an outmoded notion of the Church's presence in their land.

#316: Communities of Remembrance

2011-01-24T17:17:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:
We like to think that faith illumines life, but sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes a life experience teaches a lesson that illuminates the nature of our faith.

Just over two years ago I began searching for classmates for a reunion. I am not actually a "reunion person": I’d never been to a single high school, college, or grad school reunion despite annual invitations dating back to 1966.

But this was different. I was looking for the five dozen people who had spent their junior year of college with me in Paris.

Understand, we came from three dozen colleges from 20 states, we had never met before and we split up at year's end. Some classmates fell in love, some got married, some even stayed married, but our class only existed for about 10 months, with little back-story and even less aftermath. We had nothing else in common, before or since.

To this day I am not sure why I started my search. Partly, it was curiosity about the rest of people's lives. Partly I hoped I would get another chance to return to Paris. Mostly I wanted to find out how our time together was remembered by others.

I had long assumed my experience was unique. I had lived alone in a neighborhood far from other students; I had lacked the funds to travel with them or join them at restaurants, theater, or concerts. Much of the time I found myself "stuck in Paris”(!)--alone, cold, and more or less penniless. To survive I had to learn French faster than I had learned anything before, and sink roots in the city by cultivating any French person I could meet. Compared to my classmates, I spent less time sightseeing and traveling and more time hanging out with locals.

Over the years I tended to think that difference was a key to the impact that year had on my life. People will tell you that my obsession with all things Parisian (and most things French) is chronic and possibly incurable. The truth is I never got over the year, but I assumed the others had moved on, just as most tourists do once they return home and start thinking of new destinations. The others had stayed and studied for a year, but I had lived in Paris—I had made myself at home—and so I knew firsthand that Hemingway was right:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

The others, I told myself, had been more like long-term tourists than short-term Parisians. Their time there, I assumed, could not have had the same lasting impact.

I was dead wrong.

As a result, my search became a series of surprises...

We were strangers before and after: all we had in common was Paris at the age of 20. But that is turned out to be enough, even after 40 years of separation, to turn us into something else.

We longtime strangers have been made a community by sharing our common need to remember. Despite our separate lives and varied histories, one shared moment from the past bonds us. And that sense of one-ness is palpable and real—we have become what I think of as a "community of remembrance."

The lesson in this: When you stop to think of it, is this not very much like what being Church means? Are we not also a “community of remembrance”? Is not our own solidarity rooted in a shared memory—the memory of a man whose disciples we are? Is not our central act a ritual where we gather to celebrate precisely because he said: “Do this in memory of me?

#315: What's Missing?

2011-01-16T12:27:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT:
The Tucson tragedy has triggered a succession of supposedly sage commentaries concerning "cause and effect" in American life and politics. Was the shooter incited by the high-octane vitriol of contemporary political "discourse"? Was he enabled, by the ease of legal gun and ammunition sales in Arizona, to arm himself despite his record of instability? Was he merely and totally deranged?

Behind "cause and effect," of course, is the question of blame. Are easy guns to blame for what happened? Are talk show and cable TV propagandists to blame? Is Sarah Palin to blame? Are those who attack her to blame?

The answers depend, of course, on who gets asked. Gun-control advocates blame guns. People on the left blame vitriol on the right. Commentators on the right blame blamers on the left, saying vitriol has nothing to do with it and that only the criminal is to blame for his crime. And Palin ends up blaming the shooting’s Jewish victim for acting like an anti-Semite by committing "blood libel."

Barack Obama attempted to rise above the nastiness by calling for an end to the blame game and a new discourse that promotes healing rather than further wounds. But I fear that we Americans currently lack a fundamental ingredient necessary to make such a healing discourse possible. True, politicians may "scale back" their rhetoric in the wake of this tragedy, but that may mean simply that they avoid speaking their mind and heart until a decent interval has passed and some new controversy arrives.

Genuinely healing discourse -- the kind capable of uniting a deeply divided nation -- requires more than simply softening our rhetoric. It requires something that will enable us all to speak our minds and hearts without rancor, bitterness, or mean-spirited attacks on others. And that "something" seems to be missing.

This goes, I believe, to the notion of "civic virtues" -- the public values that anchor our life together as Americans. The Pledge of Allegiance promises a nation "with liberty and justice for all," but I get frustrated and even worried whenever Americans speak or act as though those two civic virtues are all we need. In fact, they may be precisely what divides us, with liberals calling for action to promote "social justice" while conservatives tout "individual freedom" as the absolute value. In such a climate, liberty and justice, left by themselves, end up pitted against one another.

What is missing here?

#314: An “Encore!” for Renewal

2011-01-08T14:52:00.000-05:00

EXCERPT:
The New Year 2011 marks the beginning of a new phase for my generation.

…That's because 2011 is the year when the first “Baby Boomers” (born between 1946 and 1964) turn 65. The “60s Generation” is in its 60s, and it figures that retirement, like everything else we touched, will never be the same.

…. Boomers were the largest generation in US history; now they will become the largest post-employment workforce ever: the population of retired Americans is expected to reach 66 million by 2025.

It's been called the "longevity revolution," the "third wave," and even "gerontocracy"--the idea that elder baby boomers will be the most powerful shapers of American life, and the first elder generation to dominate a society.
All of which makes me wonder: how is the Church affected by this?

Catholic baby boomers, after all, occupy a unique place in recent Church history. Their parents grew up, got married, and started families in a Catholic Church largely shaped by the immigrant experience, the Council of Trent, and the First Vatican Council. That Church spoke only Latin and commanded compliance to a complex set of strict rules and regulations; it offered sure advancement for those who entered seminaries and convents, but consigned everyone else to the passive roles “Pray, Pay, and Obey.” It enjoyed an abundance of clergy and religious communities and the massive support of its members, who took their passive role for granted in an age when Church was more about authority than faith and authority was the monopoly of the ordained.

Baby Boomers were born into that Church. All of them were baptized in Latin, and most boomers (those born 1946- 1958) received their First Holy Communion in Latin. But then the work of Vatican II (1962-1965) began to take hold, and the boomers came to maturity in a changing Church. By the time they settled down to marriage and family, the face of the Church--its liturgy, its sacraments, its devotional life, its public image, its relations with other religions and with the world at large--had all been transformed into something their grandparents could not have recognized and their parents often struggled to embrace.

Not all boomers embraced that transformed Church either, but most did, and they raised a new generation who (ironically, like their great-grandparents) knew no Church but the one they were born in.

This made the boomers the threshold generation, with one foot in pre-conciliar Catholicism and another in post-conciliar Catholicism. By default, they became the custodians of a Church renewal they never chose but only inherited. That custodianship was radically new in one major respect, compared to previous generations: there were never enough ordained boomers to do the job alone. So following through on renewal has eventually passed from a generation (the "greatest generation") of aging clergy and religious women and men to a new generation of laypeople.

And now those laypeople, the boomer custodians of renewal, are themselves feeling their age. It raises the question: what will happen now to the Church's ongoing renewal?

#313: Christmas, Confusion, and Christianity

2010-12-30T13:42:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:
Christmas can be a confusing time for all Christians, and particularly for Catholics. Already on December 26, my morning paper carried the phrase "now that Christmas is past us . . ."--this on the second day of Christmas! Our culture's hijacking of Christmas is so advanced that, no matter how many times people hear "The Twelve Days of Christmas," they still have no clue when those days actually are.

But the confusion over Christmas is much older than the current commercialization on which our economy depends for its survival. In America, Christmas has gone from an observance banned by New England Puritans in 1659 to a federal holiday in 1870, and since then has acquired all sorts of traditions from all kinds of sources. Some have Catholic origins, like the singing of carols, attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. But many traditions came to America from Protestant Germany via Victorian England, such as giving gifts on Christmas (rather than the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6) and the Christmas tree itself, which legend attributes to Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation.

One might even argue that the American way of celebrating Christmas reflects how the divisions among Christians here have diminished over time. Yet the parishioners I work with often remain confused about the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism. Are they separate religions, or different versions of the same religion? I typically answer by saying that "my Church is Catholic, but my religion is Christianity." Some people find that a pretty abstract answer, but now I have something more concrete: my recent photo of a Catholic/Protestant church!

Here is how it happened.

The Christmas display was already under construction in Strasbourg’s Main Square when I visited the city in early November. This city on the Rhine River has been juggled from France to Germany and back again, and so retains a unique character. France, a historically Catholic country where religion became a fighting matter and Protestants were once massacred as heretics, somehow embraces this town where Catholics and Protestants behave like extended family, in a way I have never seen before.

While the Reformation divided much of Europe into Protestant regions in the north and Catholic regions in the south, Strasbourg boasts a remarkable mix of Protestant and Catholic churches that is more typical in America than in Europe. In some cases Strasbourg’s co-existence of Protestant and Catholic Christianity takes on unique forms.

During my visit I attended a concert of ancient troubadour music at the church of Saint Peter the Elder. The amazing thing you realize as you approach the church is that it is really two churches stuck together. If you enter one door, you are in a Catholic church. If you enter by the other door, you are in the Protestant church. The concert was in the Protestant church, where we could see that its back wall, behind the altar, was actually the side wall of the Catholic Church, so the stained glass windows on the wall did not look outside -- they looked from one church into the other! It is as if, when the Reformation broke out in the sixteenth century, some of Saint Peter's parishioners wished to join the Reform, and so the parish built an addition where they could worship as Protestants!

The other remarkable thing is that this concert was part of an annual "St. Martin Festival," a series of performances scheduled around the feast of St. Martin of Tours on November 11, which is also Armistice Day (careful CrossCurrents readers know this is no coincidence). So while the performances are held at both Protestant and Catholic churches, the festival's timing is based on the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar.

After the concert I picked up the parish bulletin -- only the phrase "Parish of Saint Peter the Elder (Protestant)” on top told me this was not a Catholic parish. I presume the Catholic church’s bulletin looks much the same, but is topped by "Parish of Saint Peter the Elder (Catholic).”

In settings like these, it is pretty clear that both parishes practice the same religion, each in their own way. Christianity is clearly their common faith.

#312: Condoms Are Not Nukes

2010-12-28T12:02:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT:
Confusion reigns since Pope Benedict’s XVI’s latest book-length interview earned him headlines in both the secular and church press, as well as an explosion of commentary in the blogosphere. This Pope, already celebrated for his PR gaffes, has now befuddled many observers with a comment which, in my opinion, breaks no new ground yet confirms an important opportunity for the church’s leadership.

Twenty years ago I was fired as editor of a Catholic diocesan newspaper for editorializing that the New England Bishops had oversimplified the moral issues – and stretched the truth – by not only opposing the use of condoms for AIDS prevention, but claiming they were ineffective as well. It seemed clear to me that, whatever one’s opposition to condoms as birth control, as disease prevention tools they were obviously a useful option. Now it looks like I was right but too early—premature pontification !
…
The issue here is that, while the Church will always have a dogmatic dimension (that is, a teaching aspect) it must always avoid dogmatism – a rigid unwillingness to listen to reason or apply common sense. The challenge is to maintain church policies that are both dogmatic and pastoral: that is, attuned to the real-life conditions of the people affected.

Benedict XVI has never been a pastor, but he has done parish work, and despite his conservative reputation, he has shown a gentle and pastorally sensitive side. He likes to offer opinions that are personal and non-definitive. He described his book on Jesus as “one man’s views” about which others might differ. And now he has given his latest interview to a German journalist who has published on Benedict before. In it, discussing condoms and AIDS, the pope has pretty much confirmed the French bishops’ view, that in some circumstances the use of condoms to protect others may reflect an impulse toward, rather than away from, moral responsibility.

I suspect the French bishops were not alone in taking this position. In this sense, Benedict’s openness is not new at all, but reflects an existing, even established view of Catholic bishops (especially in Europe and Africa) with whom Benedict has worked for more than 30 years.

So why all the headlines and commentaries?

Clearly this Pope is inclined, especially in his informal statements, to express surprisingly personal views that often come across more like a professor’s musings than a papal proclamation – and this style confuses many in the media.

In this new interview, for example, he opposes the use of birth control pills “so that I can jump into bed with a random acquaintance” – a turn of phrase Catholics hardly expect from their pope. Then he makes his concession on condoms by citing the hypothetical case of a “male prostitute”—an equally surprising papal image.

A key point here: this 83-year-old celibate male may be forgiven for assuming that a male prostitute will service only male clients (assuming, in other words, that women never pay for sex!). On that assumption, then, he is speaking of homosexual encounters: pregnancy is not a possibility, so the condom is clearly cannot serve a contraceptive function. It serves only to protect the partner from infection. In such a case, the church’s traditional opposition to artificial contraception never comes into play.

So despite all the confusion it caused, Benedict’s position is, in my opinion, a useful clarification. My own editorial 20 years ago objected to bishops demonizing condoms, as though they were an evil invention with no possible good use. To me, it was a no-brainer that condoms could prevent infection, and that such use might be a good thing.

By citing the case of homosexual encounters where conception is not an issue, the pope is acknowledging that Church teaching opposes contraception, not condoms themselves. Once this distinction is clear, one may imagine other similar cases: for example, when an infected husband might use condoms to protect his infertile wife.

In my view, then, the real gaffe was in condemning an object instead of its use. In Catholic tradition, any invention, product, or technology has generally been considered morally neutral, and then its various uses have been subjected to moral scrutiny according to Catholic moral teachings.

So, for example, powdered infant formula is neither good nor bad in and of itself – but promoting its use in third world regions where bad water supplies make formula dangerous can be condemned as a bad use of powdered formula.

The one exception to this general rule is nuclear weapons, for which the Church’s theologians and bishops have found no moral use under any condition. That’s why Vatican II’s sole condemnation was reserved for the use, threat, and even production of nuclear weapons. Nukes present that rare case where it appears that the THINGS themselves, rather than the use humans make of them, are morally objectionable.

To equate condoms with nukes – to make the two devices the only ones that have no moral use whatsoever – is patently ludicrous. The French bishops knew this all along, the pope has now confirmed their view, and this ex-editor keeps praying that US bishops will one day see the light.

#311: Signs of Life for Europe’s Faith

2010-12-18T12:08:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:
It is no secret that Pope Benedict XVI has worried about Europe for years. Since the student revolts of 1968 he has feared that Europe's Christian roots might be plowed under by modern secularism. And more recently, the growing Muslim presence in countries like France, Germany, and Britain has given him a new cause for alarm.

It is true, of course, the Christianity’s hold on Europe has been declining since the French Revolution broke the alliance between monarchy and hierarchy. But since World War II, the shortage of clergy, worshipers, and funds has reached crisis proportions. And now the sex abuse scandal spreading across Europe has produced what one Bishop called “Our greatest crisis since the French Revolution."

Yet my recent trip to France revealed a new and unforeseen development. Despite not one but two bad reputations (it has long been accused of harboring a "retrograde" spirit, and more recently stands accused of "inexcusable nonchalance" in managing priestly pedophilia) the Church in France is enjoying something of a PR rehabilitation. (The French, of course, are never shocked by such turnabouts -- not more than 400 years after Joan of Arc’s remarkable posthumous rehabilitation when, 25 years in her grave, she was sainted despite her convictions in church court for heresy and witchcraft.)

As one popular French magazine put it:

She (the church) nonetheless continues to hold her place in public debate. Her advice is sought, she gives it, and many listen. Curiously contrasting, too, is the gap between churches (and seminaries) often deserted, and the crowds that rushed elsewhere to see Xavier Beauvais’ “Des Hommes et Des Dieux.”.

The last reference is to a movie (English title "Of God and Men," which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year and then became a box-office smash in France. It tells the true story of a community of French Trappist monks living in North Africa when Algeria erupted in terrorist violence in the 1990s. Threatened by terrorists who saw the monks as an alien presence, they decided not to evacuate the monastery for a safer venue. The film meticulously details the spiritual struggle among men committed to God -- and to the Muslim populace surrounding them -- but faced with the prospect of sudden and violent death.

The movie, which I saw during my visit, treats the monks’ faith with utmost respect, and takes their struggle absolutely seriously. I was both moved and impressed that a French director, as well as a huge French audience, would resist the easy secularist temptation to dismiss these men as misguided naifs duped by an outmoded faith. Instead they are portrayed as thoughtful, courageous, even heroic figures.

The enormous ticket sales suggest that, even if they don’t know it, the French hunger for spiritual inspiration.

Another striking example of the Church's renewed presence in France public life came on November 11 when I attended the solemn Te Deum and at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres, presided over by Bishop Michel Pansard.

Despite America's attempts to dilute the holiday into a generic celebration of military service by calling a “Veterans Day,” the French refuse to forget that on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month -- the feast of Saint Martin, patron of peace -- World War I came to an end.

The Te Deum is the traditional chant for Armistice Day, which (a bit like our Thanksgiving) is both a patriotic and a religious holiday for the French.

What struck me was that, even though I was attending a church service inside a cathedral, the Bishop’s talk (delivered to an assembly of the town's veterans, families, and other citizens and tourists, many of whom were not practicing Catholics) clearly addressed public issues. It sent the message that our faith, while personal, is hardly a private affair, but is a social thing that -- even in the most secularized country -- continues to claim its place in the public forum.

I was so moved by this address, both its content and its implications, that I asked the bishop for a copy, and translated it once I got home. As you read it, never forget that modern France has been a fiercely secularized haven for the most militant atheism and anti-clericalism; indeed, France still treats all religion as a private matter to be kept in its place.

#310b: Print The Legend

2010-11-30T13:50:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:
It turns out, however, that the publicity surrounding Mary's canonization may have embellished her story. According to one of my blog readers, MacKillop’s official biography corrects the popular media count on several details. First, the Josephites actually blew the whistle while Mary was away. Second, Mary's excommunication resulted from her assertion of the Josephites’ rights to receive due process under canon law. The excommunication itself may have been invalid. Finally, Mary's consistent character was one of obedience to "rightful superiors."

Of course, the main point stands: Mary's story includes several struggles with members of the hierarchy, in which struggles she was ultimately vindicated. The same is true for Joan of Arc, Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Galileo, and many others. And while actions against these people were ultimately invalidated, they nonetheless suffered the immediate consequences. Hierarchical sanctions, even excommunication, are (1) sometimes illegitimate yet (2) always painful. And they prove nothing about the ultimate rightness of the person sanctioned. Many such people were merely ahead of their time.

For better or worse, somewhere at the core of our Catholic tradition is this paradox: many of our tradition’s heroes have suffered martyrdom or at least banishment, and not a little of that suffering has been at Catholic hands.

So running afoul of the Catholic hierarchy by itself proves nothing, except that the hierarchy has a problem with someone’s thought, speech, writing, or behavior. Which may in fact be their own problem, not the Church’s.

But while Mary’s story stands, the gap between media accounts and biography contain another lesson for us.

Our tradition has always held up certain historical figures as models for the rest of us--and the process of honoring them has always mixed authentic history with popular embellishment. Thus the lives of saints have often blended with the legends about saints. The literature on saints, called hagiography, thus presents a unique blend of fact and fiction:

It seems scarcely worth while to insist on the considerable part played by legend in hagiographic literature, which is emphatically popular both in its origins and in its aim. Indeed it is from hagiography that the name itself has been borrowed. In its primitive meaning the “legend” is the history that has to be read, legenda, on the feast of a saint…
Hagiographic literature has come to be written under the influence of two very distinct factors…There is, first, the anonymous creator called the people…Beside him there is the man of letters, the editor…Both together have collaborated in that vast undertaking known as “The Lives of the Saints," and it is important for us to recognise the part played by each in this process of evolution.
…The interior working of grace offers nothing that can be grasped, and the mysterious colloquies of the soul with God must be translated into palpable results in order to produce any impression on the popular mind. The supernatural is only impressive when it is combined with the marvellous.
Hence it is that popular legends overflow with marvels. Visions, prophecies and miracles play a necessary part in the lives of saints….In this direction popular imagination knows no bounds, nor can it be denied that…these bold and naive fictions frequently attain to real beauty.
--Père Hippolyte. Delehaye, S.J., the Legends of the Saints

Recognizing this, one Princeton scholar even included fiction in his formal definition of “saint’s legend”:

The saint's legend is a biographical narrative, of whatever origin circumstances may dictate, written in whatever medium may be convenient, concerned as to substance with the life, death, and miracles of some person accounted worthy to be considered a leader in the cause of righteousness; and, whether fictitious or historically true, calculated to glorify the memory of its subject.--Gordon Hall Gerould

This should not surprise observant Catholics. We know Saint Patrick is honored for "driving the snakes" from Ireland, but we don't expect historical proof. We read that a dove departed Joan’s burning body--and we find it a beautiful image, whether accurate history or not. We expect--and extend--great latitude in the way we remember our heroes.

This is especially true of our patron saints. For generations Saint Christopher was the patron of travelers, though he may not have existed at all. Saint Clare of Assisi was declared the patron of television, on the ground she once heard Christmas Mass while ill in bed miles away!

So why be surprised, in this age of scandal and cover up by "wrongful superiors," if Mary MacKillop is portrayed as the patron of all who fight for a more transparent church? Why not make her patron of whistleblowers?

Fans of America's greatest filmmaker, John Ford, cannot help but recall the famous reply the editor gives (in the classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) when a senator complains his newspaper’s story was not accurate:

"This is the West, Senator. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Ford was a good Irish Catholic; he knew that the Catholic Church had been printing the legend for twenty centuries. Why stop now?

#310: The Patron Saint of Insubordinates and Whistleblowers

2010-10-31T22:57:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
It did my heart good to learn of this month’s canonization of Mary MacKillop as Australia’s first saint.

Since entering full-time ministry at the tender age of 23, I have had more than my share of run-ins with men (and occasionally women) whose ecclesiastical rank allowed them to throw their weight around with impunity. And since I don’t do docile, such run-ins were never pretty for me. Mary MacKillop’s canonization offers sweet vindication for Catholics like me – and a valuable lesson for everyone else.

For her sainthood exposes a common mistake made by many Catholics, who think that if one’s behavior or thinking meets with the disapproval of a priest, bishop, cardinal, or Pope, one must be doing something wrong. Such misconception is surprisingly common, even in the wake of appalling scandal.

You see, Mother Mary made her bones as founder of the Josephite sisters, Australia’s first native religious order, dedicated especially to the education and welfare of poor, orphaned, or at-risk children.

But in 1871 she crossed the line when she, (in concert with other Josephites) accused one Father Keating of sexually abusing children – an unspeakably, even unthinkably shocking charge in those days (alas! No more).

Keating was promptly dispatched back to the Old Sod, under the PR-friendly “cloud” of drunkenness. But Mother Mary’s transgression did not go unpunished. Father Charles Horan, the local vicar general, and a friend of Keating’s, contrived to impose new restrictions on the Josephites and got Bishop Laurence Sheil to agree. When MacKillop refused to comply, the Bishop called it “insubordination” and excommunicated her, as described in the Adelaide Advertiser:

Though the Josephites were not disbanded, most of their schools were closed in the wake of this action. Forbidden to have contact with anyone in the church, MacKillop lived with a Jewish family and was also sheltered by Jesuit priests. Some of the order's nuns chose to remain under diocesan control, becoming popularly known as "Black Joeys"…Later, an Episcopal Commission completely exonerated her.

So Mother Mary MacKillop, now sainted, joins an estimable band of Catholics banned by their bishops from the sacraments, or condemned for a lack of loyalty or fidelity, who in the end proved to be heroic daughters and sons of the Church.

Of course the Mother of all such insubordination is the maiden Joan of Arc, first excommunicated for her refusal to recant dangerous views, then condemned for heresy and witchcraft, and finally burned at the stake–only to be posthumously “rehabilitated” and declared patron saint of France by popular acclamation.

For better or worse, somewhere at the core of our Catholic tradition is this paradox: many of our tradition’s heroes have suffered martyrdom or at least banishment, and not a little of that suffering has been at Catholic hands.

So running afoul of the Catholic hierarchy by itself proves nothing, except that the hierarchy has a problem with someone’s thought, speech, writing, or behavior. Which may in fact be their own problem, not the Church’s

#309b: The President's Religion and Our Future

2010-10-31T11:38:00.000-04:00

EXCERPT:
The preoccupation with a president’s religion is somewhat recent. When Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952, for example, he was not even baptized. But once Billy Graham persuaded him to be baptized, presidents ever since have felt obliged to offer some explanation of their faith.

But here we have something new: people questioning a president’s faith even after his public explanations. Are they convinced he is lying -- or have they merely ignored his own words? If so, their ignorance is hardly innocent. Ignoring Obama at Notre Dame, at least, required very big blinders and very thick earplugs.
These same folks even question of Obama’s citizenship, despite the conclusive evidence of his Hawaiian birth. Some, confused by his name (especially “Hussein”), thought he was an Arab. Some might even know his father was Muslim. But none of these facts are relevant.

What worries me here is that deliberately ignoring the relevant facts fuels unspecified fears, prejudices, and even hatreds. Questioning Obama’s religion doesn't really matter, even if one believes him to be Muslim, unless one fears or suspects Muslims in general.

The battle over the so-called "Ground Zero mosque” or attacks on mosques in Boston or Minnesota don't matter either, except that millions of Americans remain deliberately ignorant about Islam, persisting in bigoted stereotypes that echo America's history of the anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-immigrant nativism, and racism.

I have long written that America’s future is to become the world’s most multi-religious society. But that future will challenge white Christian Americans to accept their national destiny: they began as the dominant demographic group in America, but soon they will themselves become a minority.

When that happens, white Christian Americans can only hope that the new majority will be less intolerant and belligerent to them than they have been to others. But for that to happen, our national ignorance must end.

This is a multipronged challenge. Our schoolchildren need to study religion. Adult Americans need to become more knowledgeable of their own and others’ faiths. We must not let fear or flag-waving dupe us into ignorant rants, seduce us into fake crusades against fabricated threats, or stain the honor of our heroic youth with lies, as if an ignorant people will be placated or even pleased.

Catholic tradition has long acknowledged that some wrongdoers are incapable of understanding the immorality of their actions. The condition is called "invincible ignorance." we can only hope and pray it will not become a national contagion.

#309a: Is Invincible Ignorance Catching On?

2010-10-28T11:42:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
I cringe every time I pass the monument. It stands outside a town hall just north of Boston. It honors a native son killed in action in Iraq in 2006, but the inscription begins "The Global War on Terror."

It’s a lie, of course: Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, posed no terror threat to us: no Al Qaeda, no Taliban, no WMDs. This inscription disserves that young serviceman by defrauding his sacrifice. To me, this inscription is symbolic of a frightening tendency to bend reality to our feelings while stubbornly ignoring the facts.

There is, of course a lot of comment these days about the ignorance of Americans. The recent Pew research study found that, in an age when so much of politics is faith-based, most Americans suffer broad ignorance about religion -- their own as well as the faith of others.

After 35 years in ministry I'm not surprised: I still meet people who think "Christ" is Jesus' last name, who think he spoke Latin at the Last Supper and wrote the Ten Commandments. For many years I thought this simply sad, but I now agree with James Carroll that -- especially since 9/11 -- such ignorance is dangerous.

Lacking the facts about faith, people often fill the gap with stereotypes and prejudice. Ignorance breeds bigotry, and bigotry easily feel fuels hatred and violence.

Such ignorance is partly understandable, even natural. After all, people should learn about religions the same place they learn everything else--in school. But American schools have jumped from one radical extreme to the other without ever finding of a moderate, happy medium.

Before 1962 US public schools actually practiced religion--specifically, Protestantism. Daily, my first grade teacher read the King James Bible (then prohibited for Catholics), then led the "Protestant version" of the Lord's Prayer. No one questioned having us Catholics and Jews join a de facto Protestant prayer service.

After the Supreme Court outlawed such prayer in 1962, schools swung to the opposite extreme: they stopped practicing religion and began ignoring it. They never considered that the most appropriate way for public schools to treat something as important as religion was neither to practice it or to ignore it, but to study it like any of the subject.

The result is obvious: Americans grow up learning language, math, history, and science, but most Americans never learn anything about religion. Some receive indoctrination in their own church. Some get to study religion at religious schools, or comparative religions at college. But few Americans can write a full page about a religion not their own.

Unfortunately the First Amendment, intended to guarantee everyone freedom to practice their own religion, is often misused as an excuse to reject religion -- not one religion, but religion in general -- from the public forum. As long as this misuse persists, so too will our ignorance of religion.

But our schools’ failure does not explain why Americans are ignorant, not only about religious history, but also about the facts of current religious issues--especially since religious issues get so much media attention.

#308: A Conversation With the World

2010-10-08T12:06:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
The seismic jolt of Vatican Council II (1962-1965) meant little to Americans Catholics until the first shockwave reached our shores—exactly 45 years ago this week.

This is the moment when Pope Paul VI broke all tradition and precedent (the pope had been, quite literally, the “prisoner of the Vatican” for the previous 94 years) by traveling across the Atlantic to deliver his Church’s message to the world.

The scene was the stuff of high theater...

…Now this “Pilgrim Pope” stood before the General Assembly, the first Pope to visit the New World, and spoke in French.

Paul appealed to outlaw all nuclear weapons, issued his famous cry: "Jamais plus de guerre!”(Never any more War). He also urged more concerted action on hunger. And he even advised the UN to admit Red China.

Most surprising and significant of all, however, were the Pope's extended remarks about his own Church and the UN itself. He began by giving the Catholic point of view:

Like a messenger who, after a long journey, finally succeeds in delivering the letter which has been entrusted to him, so we appreciate the good fortune of this moment, however brief, which fulfills a desire nourished in the heart for nearly twenty centuries. For, as you well remember, we are very ancient; we here represent a long history; we here celebrate the epilogue of a weary pilgrimage in search of a conversation with the entire world, ever since the command was given to us: Go and bring the good news to all peoples.

Next, he challenged the UN to an extraordinarily exalted view of its own mission:

Now, you represent all peoples...The edifice which you have constructed must never fall; it must be perfected and made equal to the needs which world history will present. You mark a stage in the development of mankind from which retreat must never be admitted, but from which it is necessary that advance be made.

The Pope paused. Then, in the measured tones of the career diplomat he was, he sharpened his point by comparing the UN's global mission to Catholicism's:

You are a bridge between peoples. You are a network of relations between states. We would almost say that your chief characteristic is a reflection, as it were, in the temporal field, of what our Catholic Church aspires to be in the spiritual field: unique and universal. Your vocation is to make brothers not only of some, but of all people.

Finally, he argued that Catholicism’s concern with humanity's spiritual needs should link, rather than separate, the two organizations:

This edifice which you are constructing does not rest upon merely material and earthly foundations, for thus it would be a house built upon sand; above all, it is based on our own consciences. The hour has struck for our "conversion," for personal transformation, for interior renewal. We must get used to thinking of humanity in a new way...With a new manner, too, of conceiving the paths of history and the destiny of the world...The edifice of modern civilization must be built upon spiritual principles which alone can, not only support it, but even illuminate and animate it.

It was October 4, 1965. Vatican II would end just eight weeks later, but until now it had remained a distant blip on most Americans’ radar. Millions saw the TV coverage of the pope landing in New York, the pope meeting the President of the United States, the pope before the UN, the Pope saying mass at Yankee Stadium. Paul had used this speech to announce the Council’s agenda in the most public way imaginable.

The implications of the seismic shift we have witnessed in Catholicism since Vatican II cannot be fully understood without accounting for the prior model being left behind. What was it, exactly, that was being changed, lost, abandoned, rejected? And what was supposed to replace it?

The world has never had a global religion. In fact, the overwhelming majority of religions in human history have never extended beyond the clan, tribe, or local region where they began…In all of history, in fact, only a handful of religions have expanded beyond local culture to become known as "world religions." But even these show marked geographic and cultural limitations...

Christianity did attempt global status once, but its bid was based on a faulty strategy that ultimately limited and even weakened its influence. The turning point was the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the early 4th century. Christianity...now adopted Greco-Roman culture as its sponsor…Christendom, became the cultural vehicle for expanding the Christian mission. As this European culture was exported across the globe via colonialism, Christianity went with it, replacing native religions wherever it went.

...But the strategy was doomed, because the attempt to Europeanize the whole world could never succeed.

Indeed, the last half of the 20th century saw…The movement of the Third World to throw off colonialism and its alien European culture

At Vatican II, the Catholic Church, in the very act of abandoning Eurocentrism, committed itself to a second attempt at making Christianity the world's first global religion. This time, however, the strategy was quite different: if there could be no global culture, if Eurocentrism was dead, then the alternative was obvious. Christianity must evolve into a religion tied to no one culture, capable of opening and adapting to any surroundings, aiming to influence without first dominating.

In Paul’s vision (inherited from John XXIII), if Vatican II's global gamble succeeded, Catholicism would lead Christianity into a position of new prominence. Already the world's largest religion, Christianity would become the world's first truly global religion -- the "Light of Nations" (Lumen Gentium), shining with vast influence as the world's "expert on humanity" to promote a "civilization of love" and a “culture of life.” If Vatican II failed, Catholicism could lose its own identity.

Forty-five years later, that gamble’s outcome remains unknown. But the “conversation with the entire world” evoked by Paul VI has blossomed, under the papacies of John-Paul II and Benedict XVI, into a permanent dialog aimed at the good of all humankind.

#307: Keeping the Flame Alive

2010-09-23T17:21:00.000-04:00

EXCERPT:
Forty-Five years ago last week, 2000 Catholic bishops arrived in Rome, one more time, for the fourth and final session of the Second Vatican Council. Autumn 1965 saw “Vatican II” conclude after four successive autumns (1962-1965) in which this massive gathering of bishops from every continent, along with their periti (theological experts) and several hundred non-Catholic observers, spent nearly 50 weeks of debate and decision-making to produce 16 major documents that transformed both the Catholic Church and the Christian world.

It was the biggest meeting in human history, held by the world’s largest organization. Historians call it “the most important religious event of the 20th century,” and the two presiding popes called it “a second Pentecost.” Since Catholics celebrate Pentecost as the “birthday of the Church,” this makes Vatican II the “rebirth of the Church.”

To undertake the rebirth of any organization twenty centuries after its founding is a huge milestone. Yet 45 years later, this milestone is in danger of disappearing from view – and I think I know why.

In my parish work I observe a widespread generation gap between two groups of people: “Vatican II” Catholics and “post-Vatican II” Catholics. In secular terms, this breakdown roughly resembles the line between Baby Boomers and their grown children. The more I observe the interaction of these two groups, the more obvious the generation gap appears – and the more important it becomes to find a solution.

Simply put, here is the problem: “Vatican II” Catholics lived through the Council and its aftermath. The Council experience began during the Cuban Missile Crisis, straddled Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, JFK’s assassination, and the Civil Rights triumphs, and ended as troops arrived en masse in Vietnam. Where many high schools held model United Nations, mine held a model Vatican II every year. For them, Vatican II was among the major events of the “sixties.”

Most “Vatican II” Catholics remember Catholic life before Vatican II (that is, before 1962), and they remember too the surprise and turmoil during the Council itself, (‘62-‘65 ) and finally the euphoric and polarizing aftermath (1965-1978). For them, Vatican II didn’t “merely” change the Church (however historic and momentous that change once) – it also changed their lives. For many, it was the equivalent of an identity transplant. They became changed people forever.

But Vatican II was not a life-changing event for the Post-Vatican II Catholics. Vatican II changed the Church they grew up in, but it did not change them. For them, Catholic life has been a relatively stable phenomenon (at least, until the eruption of scandal). In that sense, their Catholic identity has been more like their grandparents, or even great-grandparents, who died in a Catholic Church very similar to the Church of their birth.

Vatican II was like an earthquake – a sudden seismic shift. Those born afterward grow up in an altered landscape, but they do not share the outlook of those who lived through the jolting event itself.

The bottom line: the older generation shares an emotional bond rooted in the experience of Vatican II, and they grieve that their children do not also share that bond. As the V-IIs age, the challenge becomes: how to keep the memory, the flame, the legacy of Vatican II alive across this gap?

#306: The Religious Option

2010-09-18T16:10:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
Sunday I attended the John F. Kennedy Library’s observance marking the 50th anniversary of JFK’s famous 1960 “Houston Speech.” Speakers included E.J. Dionne, James Carroll, Shaun Casey, and Chris Matthews.
…
JFK’s speech helped to reduce anti-Catholicism in American society by reassuring Americans about Catholics’ essential patriotism. But it also paved the way for the acceptance of other religions by proclaiming belief in an America where “religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

This principle clearly applies to today’s controversies about the acceptance of Islam in America—and it raises the question: Who might now provide that same reassurance about American Muslims?

Ironically, the very man at the center of the controversy about the NYC Islamic Cultural Center also spoke on Sunday. In his address to the Council on Foreign Relations, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf described how, on his own journey from 1960s Egypt to US citizenship, he discovered a religious country where religion is an option:

In America, we…protect different expressions of faith. We assemble in our various houses of worship to pray, to chant, to recite our sacred scriptures, or simply to come together in communion and draw together and draw strength as a community. But religion in America is not imposed on us: We can be as devout or as agnostic as we like.

That choice -- to be or not to be religious, or anything else for that matter -- forced me to think about who I was, who I am, what I truly wanted and chose to be; and has given me a profound appreciation for the country that provides these freedoms. In that sense, you could say that I found my faith in this country. So for me, Islam and America are organically bound together.

But this is not my story alone. The American way of life has helped many Muslims make a conscious decision to embrace their faith. That choice, ladies and gentlemen, is precious, and that is why America is precious.

This statement offers a wise insight to which many Americans remain blind. It also reflects the enduring wisdom of Kennedy’s speech.

In a world divided between religious and secular countries, America stands virtually alone. In most religious countries, religion is a social or even legal requirement, not an option. And in most countries guaranteeing religious liberty, secularism reigns. America may be unique in achieving religious liberty yet remaining religious.

The “religious option” works here. Imam Rauf’s comments reflect this glorious reality, and thus Kennedy’s enduring relevance to our day.

#110: Beyond the Boogieman—Part II

2010-09-13T12:06:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
Even before 9/11, the man who would become Benedict XVI knew the dangers of religious fanaticism. In his book Salt of the Earth he said that while faith was intended for simple people, “The quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.”

Such fanaticism is not limited, of course, to Islam – there are Christian and Jewish fanatics as well. So when terror hit American shores on 9/11, the future Pope made it immediately clear that a “Boogieman” response to 9/11 would be wrong: “It is important not to attribute simplistically what happened on September 11 to Islam. It would be a great error.”

Benedict has no truck with the “Boogieman” mentality that sees threats everywhere in Islam. He has no interest in the kind of Islamophobia that has crept into American political discourse. Nor does he subscribe to scaring Christians into action by demonizing some evil force. Yet such paranoid demonizing has been chronic in America for more than 50 years. So Benedict’s vision is as challenging to American Catholics as it is to Muslims.

Upon his election, the Pope made a point of mentioning Muslims in an address the day after his installation mass:

"I am particularly grateful for the presence in our midst of members of the Muslim community, and I express my appreciation for the growth of dialogue between Muslims and Christians, both at the local and international level. I assure you that the church wants to continue building bridges of friendship with the followers of all religions."

And during World Youth Day, Benedict’s August 20 address to German-based Muslims left no mistaking his view about the importance of good Christian-Muslim relations. “Inter-religious and intercultural dialogue between Christians and Muslims,” he said, “cannot be reduced to an optional extra. It is in fact a vital necessity, on which enlargement of measure our future depends.”

To assure his listeners that this was not mere personal opinion, the Pope quoted Vatican Council II (where Joseph Ratzinger, not yet a bishop, served as theological consultant):

“The Church looks upon Muslims with respect. They worship the one God living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to humanity and to whose decrees…they seek to submit themselves whole-heartedly, just as Abraham, to whom the Islamic faith readily relates itself, submitted to God.”

And to show that his vision was neither ignorant nor naïve, the Pope again cited Vatican II’s acknowledgement of the stormy past relations between Christianity and Islam:

“Although considerable dissensions and enmities between Christians and Muslims may have arisen in the course of the centuries, the Council urges all parties that, forgetting past things, they train themselves towards sincere mutual understanding and together maintain and promote social justice and moral values as well as peace and freedom for all people.”

#109: Beyond the Boogieman

2010-08-29T17:01:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:

Isn’t it time we outgrew the Boogieman?

Since 9/11 I’ve reflected a lot on how America responds to crisis, and it seems to me that too often Americans are treated like children who can only be made to do the right thing when they are afraid – and too often our leaders make us afraid by creating a great Boogieman for our time. Rallying Americans during the great depression, FDR told us we had nothing to fear but fear itself – yet fear has become a staple tool of our national leaders for more than 50 years.

By the end of World War II Americans were already scared of the “Red Menace” that obliged us to engage in a Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellites. By the early 1950s, that scare led to the national scandal of McCarthyism, fueled by images of Communists as “Masters of Deceit” and “the Enemy Within.” I still remember our teachers scaring us with photo images of Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table while proclaiming “We will bury you.” The Cold War brought spies and spy planes and the space race and the Cuban Missile Crisis and, by the 1960s, it gave us the “Domino Theory” which made millions of Americans afraid that a Communist Vietnam threatened our national security.

That fear got us into a hot war for more than ten years, but by the time that ended we had found new Boogiemen to fear: Salvador Allende in Chile, killed by a US-supported coup because we feared him; the Ayatollah Khomeini, demonized not so much for holding American hostages as for holding the American way of life hostage by restoring his version of traditional Islamic society; the tiny island of Grenada, invaded because its new airstrip might be used to attack us; the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, whose perfectly legal election provoked the U.S. to declare the original “War on Terror” and a state of national emergency.

Meanwhile of course the Cold War itself continued. By 1980 we had dubbed our adversary “the Evil Empire,” and we built ever more monstrous weapons of mass destruction for fear that Empire would strike back at us. When it collapsed in 1989, there was brief talk of a “peace dividend,” but 1990’s Persian Gulf conflict made Saddam Hussein our newest Boogieman, and soon our troops again saw combat. Through the 1990s, we dealt with civil unrest in the Balkans and in Africa, creating new Boogiemen whose names we could not even pronounce.

Then came 9/11, and Osama Bin Laden became our Millennium Boogieman. For a while, this kept our troops occupied, but Osama’s elusiveness grew tiresome, so we shifted our focus back to a better-known Boogieman: Saddam Hussein. But now we still are not safe, and we’re still driven by fear, and so we face a new phase on our long parade of paranoia. The solution for many Americans: their fear is targeting Islam itself.
Is it possible that, in our desperate need for a motivating Boogieman, we’re about to shift from a crusade on terrorism to a crusade on Islam itself? Fear and frustration are understandable outcomes from 911 and its aftermath, but even though real threats exist, we may still be falling prey to paranoia.

As a Catholic American, several things strike me about this situation:

First, we have become a people constantly motivated by fear, even though Christians call hope a virtue. We seem hooked on Boogiemen, as if we were “chain smoking” our way through one villain after another. Sure, some of these men were monstrously evil, but many were harmless petty tyrants who never threatened us. Yet we treat them all as dire threats, which begs the question: are we letting fear run our country?

Second, this fear robs us of peace. We Americans are perpetually at war, even though we Christians claim to believe in peace. Since entering World War II in 1941 – more than 60 years ago! – we’ve seen only a brief year of peace following Communism’s collapse; for three generations, we have been almost constantly at war.
In fact, we Americans seem to link “freedom” with “fighting.” This is natural enough in a country born in revolution, a country whose union was forged only by civil war. But is it really part of the American dream that having freedom means we can never be at peace?

My own opinion is: this is not how people of faith should live. We should not behave like children who can only do the right thing if they are scared of the Boogieman. American Catholics should be able to find in their faith a more mature, confident, realistic and hopeful vision of the world with which to face the challenges of life in these difficult times.

#305: Faith, Fear, and Facts

2010-08-29T16:45:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
The "mosque battle" has gone on long enough to become instructive for those of us who care about both the Christian faith and the United States. Observing the salvos firing back and forth, I am now convinced that most of the controversy is a diversion, a smokescreen to camouflage what is really at stake: the compatibility of American patriotism with the Gospels.

This camouflage includes several layers, some easier to penetrate than others.
Calls for public officials to "stop" construction of the Islamic Community Center in Manhattan have fallen largely on deaf ears, simply because officials (from the President down to New York's Mayor) recognize one simple fact: the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the property owners a perfect right to include a house of worship in their building plans. Their legal rights are identical to those of any Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish group -- and the site of the 9/11 attacks has no relevance whatsoever.

The smoke gets somewhat thicker when debate shifts from "rights" to "feelings": shouldn't the builders' show respect for the feelings of the 9/11 families--victims, relatives, first responder is, traumatize new Yorkers? It is an attractive argument, appealing to American heart strings. But the facts don't support it: many of those affected have already gone public in support of the project, saying their loved ones were sacrificed in the name of the very liberties being exercised by the Islamic Center planners. Others feel differently, of course -- but that just means there is no unanimity of "feelings" among those affected. And that means that demanding to accommodate everyone’s “feelings” is an impossible, even silly, requirement.

Next comes the argument about violating "sacred space." This has great emotional appeal, given how the 9/11 attacks galvanized patriotic feelings (in this, comparisons to Pearl Harbor were not amiss). But emotions are easily to manipulate, as they certainly have been here. The debate itself has been labeled (on all sides and by the media) as the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. No doubt this pushes the buttons of many people of people's patriotic feelings -- but it does not fit the facts. The proposed building includes a house of worship but will not have a dome, a minaret, or other features of a full-service mosque. And it will not be located on Ground Zero. It is close, yes -- two blocks away -- but so are many other houses of worship. Any attempt to arbitrarily extend "Ground Zero" by exactly two blocks (no more, no less) is pure emotional manipulation of the facts. It is both emotionally and intellectually dishonest.

Finally, some question the prudence of the planners building (or of others tolerating) a project symbolic of Islam's rise in America, as if it acknowledges 9/11 as an Islamic triumph. Here the smoke finally lifts to reveal the real point in dispute: Islam in America.

For the fact is that the "Ground Zero Mosque" is not alone as the target of protests. There has already been public opposition to a mosque in Tennessee, for example, and before that to a mosque in Boston, and now there are protests about U.S. government funding for restoring historic mosques in Arab countries. The rhetoric in all these cases is so similar (the project offend others, it flout Islam's rise, it relies on suspect funding, the builders are themselves of suspect character) that any reasonable person must conclude that in these cases, real estate is not about "location, location, location.” It is about something else—something that has nothing to do with any particular address in Manhattan.

What is that something else?

The obvious (but misleading) answer is that the dispute is rooted in Islamophobia. I say obvious because the public commentary is chock full of prejudice against Islam. I say misleading because I believe this dispute’s roots lie deeper. I believe some people choose to ignore the facts because their patriotism is rooted in fear rather than faith. As such, the protests are mounted to defend a fraudulent patriotism which disserves both America and Christianity…

#304: Outside the Boxes

2010-08-20T13:46:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
Is it possible that Tom Brady is Vatican II's gift to the NFL?

Outrageous as this sounds, it is both (1) a serious and plausible claim and (2) an idea with serious implications for Catholic Baby Boomers and their grown children.

We Boomers fear our kids could come to represent a "lost generation" in Catholic history. That would not be tragic for Catholicism (which has seen lost generations before, and survived), but it would be tragic for us (the generations lost before were not our kids!).

Second, we fear that the legacy of Vatican II may be squandered -- and that would be a tragedy both for us (a major source of hope in our lifetimes would lose its future) and for the institutional Church (the historic opportunity Vatican II represented might never come again ).

Faced with these discouraging prospects, we Boomers long for signs of hope, or at least consolation.

Enter sports journalist Charles P. Pierce, with his 2006 book Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything. Pierce makes a compelling case that Tom Brady's greatness lies in qualities inherited from Vatican II.

That case goes like this.

Pierce describes the skinny kid who struggled for recognition first in Catholic high school, then as backup at the University of Michigan, and finally as the #4 QB with the New England Patriots. His stardom in three Super Bowl victories culminated a journey that, according to Pierce, "began in a Vatican II family."

It seems that Tom’s father, Tom Sr. joined the Maryknoll Missionary Society in September, 1962, just as Vatican II was getting underway. Had he remained a Maryknoller, Tom Brady QB would not exist. But he eventually decided to abandon "propagating the faith" in favor of "propagating the faithful," and left the seminary in 1965, just months before Vatican II finished.

That experience left him a true believer in Vatican II’s doctrine of the Church as the “People of God.” This implied the notion that authentic authority comes not for rank, but from the respect of others -- be they colleagues, family members, or teammates.

This, says Pierce, is the key to understanding young Tom Brady. From the start, what impressed those sharp enough to notice was not his size, strength, speed, or skills, but something intangible (because it was something within him): the ability to rise above others and lead them without losing his bond with them. Pierce calls it standing out without being "culled from the herd.” This gift enabled Brady to become the game’s biggest star while remaining a loyal and popular teammate.

In 2000, the New England Patriots waited six rounds to draft him, but finally chose him in part because Bill Belichick, himself a coach’s son, had long since learned the value of such intangibles--"all those things that don't fit into the boxes on the clipboard."

The rest is history. Brady stands out not for his size or arm or speed, but for his ability to inspire the kind of team confidence that produces peak performance under pressure. Pierce labels this gift "an instinct for communion," and offers this closing argument:

Tom Brady is not the conspicuous Catholic that his father is, but there is in him an instinct for communion. It was stronger than the capricious authority under which he played at Michigan. Something innate sensed that the real authority was what was loaned to him by his teammates through their respect and, especially, through the way they played when he was on the field. Vatican II created change, controversy, and perhaps a couple of saints along the way. Within one of the most profane contexts imaginable, its spirit also may have helped create a quarterback.

The moral of the story? Pierce gave me the insight that the next generation may represent a new kind of Catholic. If Vatican II suceeded in “removing the chains” (chains of guilt, fear, obligation, and duty), this new, unchained generation may indeed embody a Catholic identity that is not conspicuous, but rather innate—an authenticity that demands and offers respect for the dignity of all people, values authority only when it genuinely serves the common good, and acknowledges the intangibles within us all that will always remain outside the boxes.

Pierce says Vatican II produced a laity intent "to live the Council and not argue about it." For me, that is hope enough: that our kids, while not "conspicuous Catholics," might still live the Council. If so, then they are its heirs, and the Council is alive in them.

#303: Creating Wisdom Communities

2010-08-08T16:36:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:
To me, Vatican II’s vision is a perfect remedy for what ails parish life today. If parish life has lost much of its previous appeal as a community center, a worship center, and even as a family chapel, perhaps the time is ripe for parishes to become “wisdom communities.”…If the time is ripe for a wisdom community, it will require resetting our priorities.

…At this point I'm just beginning to reflect on this question myself; I have no full answer. But as I think how contemporary power threatens people and calls out for wisdom’s help, some ideas begin to surface about parish life becoming a wisdom center in people's lives.

…

I can imagine parish as A Place Of Wisdom About Discernment. I think of my children's generation, in their 20s and 30s, finishing school with high anxiety about job, livelihood, and career-path. Our society’s typical approach to career counseling targets only external factors “out there”: the hottest jobs, the best incomes, the most marketable skills, the winning strategies. By contrast Catholicism has always assumed that God calls each of us to a certain life path -- a path that must be discovered within each of us, by discerning our unique gifts and talents. Sadly, while Catholicism developed several effective life-discernment strategies, their use was mostly restricted to members of religious communities.

But imagine parish becoming a place of discernment, where young people (15 to 30) are guided on that inner discovery to find their real, God-given purpose in life. Choosing the right school, training, and career options would become the fruit of wisdom, not just market analysis. There are millions of kids who need this kind of help.

I can also imagine parish becoming A Place Of Wisdom About Aging. I see my peers’ elder parents, in their 80s and 90s, struggling not only with health and diminished capacities but with a loss of social purpose. We know they need our help, but what do we need from them? Our society no longer expects elders to be productive -- my own father has been retired for 30 years! -- but does that mean the very old are no longer useful to the rest of us?

Now imagine a parish ministry that engages these people in telling oral histories that are transcribed for distribution to their families--stories and lessons from a time the next generations would otherwise never know. Imagine too that ministry raising such people up as a wisdom resource for the whole community, treating their diminished capacities not as signs of helplessness but as signs of them having completed life's long cycle ahead of us.

Next, I can imagine parish as A Place Of Wisdom About Parenting. I look at my peers, who struggled with parenting in a time of rapidly changing family and societal values. Parish was rarely a resource for them. But imagine a parish where first-time parents bring babies for baptism and find a community of support -- for child care, babysitting, ready-cooked meals, guidance…I know many organizations offer parent support resources, but it mystifies me that parishes do not think they have their own contribution to make.
…

I can imagine parish, for example as A Place Of Wisdom About Citizenship. Catholics are no longer block Democratic voters, but are now among the most important swing voters in America. Moreover traditional Catholic Social Teaching (CST) offers a wealth of social, economic, and political wisdom that has evolved over twenty centuries and was dramatically renewed in the last 100 years. But my sad experience is that the average Catholic (whether active parishioner or not) knows next to nothing about CST; even if they received a catholic education, CST was often a major oversight in the curriculum. The result: American Catholics often fail to bring Catholic wisdom to the voting booth, the public forum, or even to public office. Yet how often do parishes feature programs or preaching to impart this wisdom?

Finally, I can imagine parish as A Place Of Wisdom About Lifestyle. Many Americans return from Europe noting the difference in our cultures: whereas Americans tend to focus on standard of living, Europeans focus more on quality of life. We live in a mass consumption society where earning and spending dominate. Catholicism has always proclaimed that “the good life” is more about who you are then about what you have -- yet too often even parishes have become just another provider of services for consumers: the ATM of their spiritual lives.

Ironically, the very institution of parish which used to be one of the "obligation institutions" in people's lives now competes for their leisure time. In an age when sports, the Internet, and electronic entertainment dominate people's leisure, couldn’t parishes offer meaningful alternatives? In an era when reducing our environmental footprint is a major part of the stewardship of creation, couldn't parishes play a role in helping people to live more simply, to become less consumed with consumption?

…This can only happen if parish leaders believe that wisdom could make parish relevant again, and embrace the getting and sharing of wisdom as an urgent priority.

#302: What Will We Offer Now?

2010-07-31T12:46:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT:
....Last week I suggested we might create a "new brand" for Catholicism by taking a cue from Vatican Council II. That Council did not legislate a less Euro-centric, more global Catholicism for its own sake. Rather, the Council examined the signs of the times and concluded that the "modern world" (meaning global culture in the post-World War II nuclear age) displays a widening gap between power and wisdom.

The downside of this insight: what if modern power--military, technological, economic, scientific, political--simply runs amok, unrestrained and unprincipled? The prospect was as horrifying as a mushroom cloud, a global depression, an environmental catastrophe, an invasion or a genocide.

The upside: what if the wisdom traditions of the world, like Christianity, were mobilized to harness and guide the world's power, and to ensure that such power always served good hands with just means? So, instead of fearing catastrophe, we humans might hope for a future of global peace and justice.

This bright vision from Vatican II, based on a partnership between power and wisdom, might help us answer the questions "What good is parish--What can we offer now?" Certainly, the abuse of power concerns everyone, and the urgent need for wisdom is no secret or mystery. Just look at BP, the financial crisis, or the debate over government power.

But there are two hurdles to developing a “wisdom” role for parishes.
First, the Catholic hierarchy has squandered all its credibility as models of leadership using wisdom to guide power. On the contrary, the spreading sex-abuse scandal is a scandal precisely because it displays the abuse of power unguided by any wisdom at all.

Second, parish leaders do not typically see themselves in the “wisdom business.” For parish to offer something new, this will have to change--and we must begin by asking ourselves what kind of wisdom parishes could possibly bring to people's lives that is unavailable to them anywhere else?

I have always believed Vatican II was right about power’s urgent need for wisdom. And now I believe such wisdom is precisely what our parishes need to offer in order to survive and grow. But that makes it absolutely critical for us to begin this conversation: What sort of “wisdom business” can parishes engage in? And how?

#301: Time for a NEW BRAND of Catholicism

2010-07-24T16:46:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:
Catholicism has often depended on good branding. When millions of immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Italy, Canada, and Portugal faced discrimination and thwarted opportunities, American Catholicism thrived in its trademark working-class role as "your refuge, your strength, your protector." Meanwhile, in much of Europe, Catholicism's brand as the aristocracy’s ally against the working class weakened the Church well into the 21st century.

But such national variations in Catholicism's brand were challenged in 1959 when Pope John XXIII called for a world-wide council of bishops (Vatican II, 1962-1965) to renew the Church with a new, improved brand of Catholicism.

This re-branding did not abandon Catholicism's ancient values and traditions, but it did re-package them to enable the Church to more powerfully penetrate the modern, global culture that had emerged in the 20th century. Picture John's successor, Paul VI, trading in the old sedia gestatoria (portable throne) for a bubble-top Lincoln, rolling into Yankee Stadium to celebrate Mass carrying his favorite crosier with its modernist rendition of the crucifix, and you get the picture: it's still the Pope, but the packaging has changed.

John XXIII, Vatican II, Paul VI, John-Paul II -- all these transformed Catholicism's brand, so that by 2000 the Catholic Church was once more a moral force to be reckoned with, and moreover was re-fitting itself for a global future, replacing much of its trappings (descended from the Roman Empire and medieval Europe) with new, more truly global features. By 2000 it was no longer our grandparents' Church -- the stodgy chrome-and-fin-studded gas guzzler of the 1950s had given way to a simpler fuel-efficient model that brought the Pope to 100 countries in twenty years.

But Paul VI also planted a second legacy, when his 1968 birth control cyclical Humanae Vitae left millions of Catholics -- and millions more outside the church -- wondering if Catholicism ancient wisdom had revealed its Achilles heel: its inability to comprehend human sexuality in the post-Freud era.

In retrospect, 1968 marks the birth of another, sex-obsessed Catholic brand that has competed with the Vatican II brand for more than 40 years. Of course, common sense tells us that competing brands are bad for any enterprise; but worse than that, the 1968 brand of seems to be taking over—and taking the Church's good name with it.

For millions of Catholics, Humanae Vitae alone was enough to dismiss the Catholic hierarchy’s authority on matters sexual, but things got no easier after that. The 1970s and 1980s saw huge numbers of priests leaving to marry, and equally large numbers of younger men by-passing their priestly vocation to avoid committing to celibacy in the first place. Mass attendance began dropping, and by the late 1980s American Catholicism's brand included increasingly empty pews, empty seminaries, and even closing parishes.

Sexually-loaded moral issues like abortion, homosexuality, and women's ordination reinforced the split between loyalists convinced Rome was always right and heartsick faithful equally convinced that the “Old Boys’ Club” had lost touch with human nature.

Then the 1990S are brought, over the distant horizon, a sex-based tsunami rolling in from the past. First in Newfoundland, then in New Orleans, then Fall River and Springfield and Palm Beach, and finally crashing ashore in Boston in 2002, its backwash splashing across all oceans, came the sex-abuse scandal...

The laity's reluctance to challenge authorities -- especially the reluctance to bring suit -- had protected the ecclesiastical cover-up from exposure, but that only meant the tide of evil kept rolling deeper and higher until its eventual crash brought scandal of biblical proportions. Imagine BP claiming its spill was "only a gulf problem," only to have more spills break out in every ocean it drills. Imagine Toyota claiming mechanical failures were rare, only to have 5% of all their cars crashing on our interstates.

Like those corporations, the hierarchy makes feeble PR pleas, only to commit further gaffes that further damage its brand…The Vatican announces new rules urging bishops to report priest-criminals to authorities if civil laws require it… then that same Vatican publishes a document explicitly linking pedophilia with ordaining women, under the common heading of "grave sins" committed by clergy.

…Today’s brand of Catholicism is so tarnished that, when the Church presents its face to the world, reactions range from shame to disgust to laughter.

The Church's mission cannot be accomplished by a laughing-stock, a public pervert, or a village idiot. If these are the public face of today's Catholicism, there can be no more urgent task than rescuing our tradition from such a PR disaster and restoring its good name with a better, credible, authentic brand of Catholicism.

How about a pre-owned “Vatican II”? It's got some miles and nicks on it, but its owners only drove it on Sundays, and never really gave it full throttle on the open road. No model out since can match it. With a little work, it'll run like it’s Brand New.

#300: Our Endangered Priests

2010-07-19T14:04:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
I have worked with priests most of my life, from altar boy to student in Jesuit schools to parish work. And since beginning my consulting work, I have had several hundred priests as clients. In just the last few months, there has been a storm of stories about the priests I know, their lives, and there work -- stories that seemed to bear a message for us lay folk...

First, morale has never been lower. Many priests feel battered, distrusted, disrespected, abandoned, even ridiculed. They feel scapegoated by both laity and bishops, tainted with guilt by association, and without support for protection against even groundless accusations. The vocation they once embraced for its esteemed role in helping others now seems despoiled beyond repair.

Second, many are suffering mental and emotional overload. Many others are suffering stress-related ailments. Some are succumbing to premature retirement or even premature decline and death. Among the rest, overwork and moral exhaustion are commonplace.

Third, there is a growing generation gap among priests themselves. As the larger pool of older priests ages, retires, and dies, the smaller pool of younger priests are becoming pastors in their own right. But this younger pool is not only smaller, it is also less diverse. It is dominated by conservatives who arrive with an attitude. The outlook is complex, but can comprise one or more of three elements: (1) they feel called to save faithful souls, and have little interest in church renewal, or evangelizing the alienated, or engaging contemporary culture; (2) they are deeply nostalgic for the "golden age" of Catholicism before Vatican II -- and age they never knew and thus tend to romanticize; (3) they may be convinced that Catholicism's current struggles were caused by older priests, and see their own mission to be "cleaning up their mess."

Fourth, there is a significant percentage of priests who, simply because they are gay, feel targeted. They see many people scapegoating homosexuals as the cause of the sex scandal, they know many Catholics believe keeping gays from ordination is the solution to the problem, and they know official policies now embody this belief that gays are not suitable for ordination. The celibate priesthood, once Catholicism's custom-designed (though not by design!) closet for Catholic gay men, has suddenly become a stage spotlit by scrutiny and suspicion.

Fifth, the priest shortage means each priest has more work, while the other declining numbers (in lay ministers, Mass attendance, and collection monies) mean he has less help for that work. In some dioceses, financial pressure on their parishes is increasing even as their personal financial security is weakening.

Finally, there is the long-standing structural problem facing diocesan clergy, who (unlike laity) give up family but (unlike members of religious orders) don't get the community to compensate for that loss. Given today's shortages and struggles, that leaves many rectories (already the loneliest places in the Church) empty, and most pastors isolated.

...Here is the message for the rest of us: today's priesthood is now an endangered species. Its future survival cannot be assured without our help. By “endangered” I mean more than numbers...The priesthood can survive with fewer members -- but not if those members are burnt-out cases, overworked and under-supported, lonely and leery of public opinion, confused about their future and conflicted among themselves.

Once we acknowledge the facts of the current situation, their “endangered” status is simple common sense -- but its implications are not. The only real solution to an endangered priesthood is a priesthood supported, cared for, and ministered to by the "laity" (the Greek word means "the people”) of the Church.

See the Catch-22 here? The very idea of laity ministering to clergy amounts to a radical reversal of roles—roles in place for more than 1500 years, and never more entrenched than among the immigrant families of American Catholics.

Those families produced the vast numbers of priests who led the American Church through the 20th century, but in most places (especially the large urban dioceses) those priests monopolized all ministry. Saint Paul may say we're all called and gifted for service by our Baptism, but for generations of Catholics the only sacrament of vocation was Holy Orders.

So the challenge we face is profound. In a church where laity have long been children to the priest-parents, we now see the "children" called on to care for their failing "parents."

There is no manual for this, so we laity will need to create this new role of caretaker to the clergy by ourselves. But then, life -- even life in the church -- does not come with a complete set of instructions.

#299: The Culture Clash Within Our Walls

2010-07-10T08:43:00.004-04:00

EXCERPT:
The New York Times has published a Watergate-style investigative report revealing a secret Vatican meeting in April 2000, more than a year before Boston broke, where alarmed Bishops from twelve countries challenged Vatican officials to confront the sex abuse problem.

The Vatican has so far claimed that its Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF) only received the mandate to investigate abuse cases in 2001, when authorized by Pope John Paul II. But the Times reported that Philip Wilson, Archbishop of Adelaide, notified the 2000 gathering of an authorization already in force since 1922, one which he had confirmed in the 1990s with then-CDF head cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- now Pope Benedict XVI...

It now appears that John Paul II's hesitancy to acknowledge the crisis inhibited Ratzinger from exercising his own authority before 2001…Thus the Times charges that “the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of non-responsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction.”

For me, that word "culture" jumps out. It suggests this scandal cuts deeper than I had previously realized.

I have always known that the sex abuse crisis operated on two levels. First was the immoral, even criminal behavior of the priests. Second was the mishandling of those priests by bishops...

I have always considered the cover-up to be the bigger scandal, which had the graver consequences on millions of Catholics (especially younger adults) who lost all faith in the institutional church’s credibility and moral authority.
And now I fear the spreading crisis has revealed a third level: an ecclesiastical culture of non-accountability – of immunity from scrutiny or questioning -- that borders on a totalitarian hoarding of power.

Of course, the scandal itself has always been about power rather than sex: the predatory power of priests over children and adolescents, and the paternalistic power that bishops (obsessed with protecting priests) exercised over victims and their families.

But this third level is not about personal power to prey on others, nor about official power to favor priests over people. It is about absolute power (the kind Lord Acton said corrupts absolutely) to do and say whatever one wants -- no matter how stupid or harmful -- while remaining immune to any check or balance...

This culture of immunity, with its disconnect from reality and its blindness to power’s abuse, may well cause more harm to the Church than either the abuse itself or its mishandling by Bishops. In this day and age, such a culture repels almost everyone except those who benefit from its privileges -- and that number shrinks daily.

To the extent that such a culture pervades Catholic life, we will alienate younger generations far into the foreseeable future. They will leave ashamed of their own Church and heritage…

The sad irony is that Catholicism moved to establish a radically different culture of accountability almost 50 years ago…Vatican II (1962-1965) …called for a wide variety of gatherings -- synods, conferences, and councils -- on all levels of church life.

The idea was to disseminate decision-making so the challenges were addressed as locally as possible...Vatican II’s vision for collective decision making at all levels offered precisely the kind of participatory culture that builds confidence among members of any institution. It ensures that authorities at all levels must answer to others for their actions.

But that vision has faded to the degree that the Roman Curia has restored its pre-conciliar role as the all-purpose arbiter, often pre-empting the proper role of bishops, pastors, and even laity. This restoration of a culture without accountability clearly clashes with the cultural program of Vatican II.

Benedict XVI has said that the real threat to the Church now comes, not from outside, but from within. He’s right, but the threat is not primarily priestly misbehavior, or even the bishops’ cover-up, but an entire institutional culture of immunity...

I now fear that this cultural clash within the Church, along with the scandal itself, has become the main story of the post-Vatican II era. Unless this clash is resolved, it may be a long time indeed before people regain confidence in their Church.

How long, O Lord?

#298: Connections and Journeys

2010-06-30T12:11:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
Sometimes you feel at home in the most unexpected places. That's what happened to me last weekend, at the 50th anniversary of Bob Lindsay's ordination.

For more than 30 years my wife and I have been liturgical nomads, trekking from church to church in search of life-giving liturgy and family-supporting community. Sometimes we have found it, but (with one exception) never for long. Most places got stale, or lost key clergy, or ultimately fell short of our needs and expectations.

Perhaps we were spoiled by our church experiences immediately after Vatican II (and even before we married). During my years at Holy Cross, for example, our college chaplain, Father Bob Lindsey S. J., was a central player in my liturgical formation. He was already celebrated for his weekend preaching at the main campus chapel -- I retain vivid images from his homily opening my freshman year: "welcome back from the sand, the sex, and the suds!" -- but that was not what spoiled me.

What did spoil me was weekday evening liturgy, at 11:00 PM, when 100 or so students put their books aside to trudge down to the Saint Mary Chapel, the catacomb-like low dome of the lower church. There we gathered in the rounded sanctuary singing the Psalms set to music by Jesuit Paul Quinlan, who led a small group with guitars, bass fiddle, percussion, and occasional winds, as "Father Lindsay" celebrated the sacred mysteries. The midnight walk back to the dorms became both nightly ritual and community-builder among us worshipers.

In graduate school I spent most of two years worshipping at Saint Paul's in Cambridge, where the "high church" liturgy was framed by the congregation’s full-throated accompaniment of the spectacular boy choir under Ted Marier’s direction. Then Anne and I spent two years worshiping at Saint Thomas the Apostle church in Chicago’s Hyde Park, where a Jesuit liturgical coordinator (whose name I forget) made sure that every Sunday Mass included apt, enlivening music along with creative liturgical actions and a vibrant spirit.

My first three parish jobs (as religious education director) brought me and Anne instant communities of like-minded peers and parents in Laurel (Maryland), Salem (Massachusetts), and Dorchester (Massachusetts). Then, while raising our kids, we mostly worshipped at Boston's downtown Paulist Center, later migrating to Saint William Parish in Dorchester, Saint Ann Parish in the Back Bay, the Jesuit Urban Center in the South End, and finally a trio of parishes within a short drive--one working class, one professional class, one multi-ethnic and multi-lingual.

Since our kids began leaving home in 1994 we have seldom felt at home for long -- and I suspect the failure of any parish to make us feel strong belonging explains why many Baby Boomers like us have drifted away from active church life.

We have often lamented our lack of attachment to any one church community, generally feeling that our presence was neither expected nor welcomed, and even that our absence was not much noticed.

Yet some occasions remind us that we remain part of a community of faith--even in a community of strangers!

#297: Does Credibility = Conformity?

2010-06-15T13:21:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:
It is always tough to take issue with Emmanuel Charles McCarthy. But I have a problem with his recent critique of Hans Kung’s April 17 letter calling for Church reform (see the site http://www.jesusradicals.com/a-credibility-crisis-reform-by-emmanuel-charles-mccarthy/ for his article “A Credibility Crisis? Reform?). He complains that Kung overlooks the problem of Church support for war and violence. For McCarthy, justifying killing as "faithful discipleship" amounts to a "severe credibility crisis" that "most of humanity sees as obvious."

The Church’s problem, he says, comes from "the discordance between what Jesus teaches and what the Church teaches on violence and enmity." For him, real "reform" requires "restoring conformity to what Jesus command that the church to teach and to obey," and thus "following what Jesus taught by word and deed."

This idea of conformity to Jesus in all respects is so obvious to McCarthy than any other views seems simply irrational. Indeed, McCarthy believes that Jesus' example offers, not just a good way to do things, or an ideal way, but "the only way of doing what he did."

Now, I have no problem with McCarthy’s take on the gospels. Nor do I quarrel with his history. I do not even have a problem with McCarthy’s ethics--I lean toward some form of Christian pacifism myself,and I regard non-violence icons like Dorothy Day, Gandhi, M.L. King, and Nelson Mandela as the moral giants of our day.

My problem is with his whole underlying notion that a credible Christian faith requires conformity in all respects to Jesus and his immediate followers. That is his entire basis for arguing that only a commitment to non-violence can constitute credible reform.

There is a strong case to be made against the just war theory, and an equally strong case to be made for Christian non-violence. But McCarthy has made neither case, and he does both our credibility and faithful discipleship a disservice by equating them with rote conformity.

I simply reject the idea that faithful discipleship equals rote conformity. The problem is this: not only is such a restoration a practical impossibility, but even its most ardent champions (including McCarthy himself) refuse to consistently carry it out.

The simple truth is: for such conformity to be consistent, that would require us to treat Jesus and the first Christians, not as people of their times, but as timeless arbiters of our ethical, spiritual, and even intellectual standards.

This would mean that, to be credible Christians and faithful disciples, we must embrace whatever they embraced, accept whatever they accepted, tolerate whatever they tolerated, and reject whatever they rejected. In short, we must accept the boundaries of their outlook and practice as our own boundaries.

Such a theological principle quickly leads to absurd results--for if, to be credible Christians, we must consistently conform ourselves this way, then we must, like them:

Expect Christ's imminent return and reject any long-term vision or strategy for life on earth; become practicing Jews; abstain from all involvement in politics; not resist our oppressors or occupiers; be silent about slavery and be content to convert slaves to the Christian faith; be silent on many cruelties typical in the Roman Empire, among them torture and crucifixion; share all goods in common and have no private property; regard marriage as a last resort for those unable to maintain celibacy until Christ returns; blame the “Jews” for rejecting Jesus; drop teachings they did not proclaim, such as Christ’s two natures or even the Trinity; drop practices they did not practice: Christmas, infant baptism, ecumenical relations; have bishops and deacons but no priests and no parishes; observe the Jewish Sabbath in synagogue or temple, and then break Eucharistic bread in homes; have no churches; not promote practices or policies they did not have: priests (men or women), acceptance of gays, contraception, etc.

Instead of all this, Christians believe that, as historical conditions change and offer new insights, they may develop their teachings and practices in ways that outstrip the boundaries set by Jesus, the Gospels, and the early Christians. We believe, in other words, that Jesus and his followers were, like us, people of their times -- whereas our faith in Him is a faith for all times.

So we proclaim Christ as the second person of the Trinity, a claim neither he nor his disciples ever made. And we commit the faith to building a better world over the long haul of history (already 100 generations since Jesus, and still counting)--something they never imagined. In fact, Christians began adding and dropping and changing elements of the Christian life as early as 100 AD.

Was Jesus committed to non-violence? Yes. Were the early Christians "pacifists"? Probably yes, at least in some sense of that term. Is Christian non-violence a good and important principle even today? Absolutely!

Can you make a case that all Christians should be pacifists? Sure -- but not by simply arguing that conforms to Jesus.

Can you also claim that Christians who reject pacifism are “not credible Christians”? No -- that is, not unless you are prepared to abandon much of what we today call Christianity and sign up at your local synagogue. But in that case, be prepared to hear someone mention "an eye for an eye"!

#296: Some Good News About Scandal

2010-06-10T15:20:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:
Now that Benedict XVI is sending Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley to manage the sex scandal in Ireland, it is clear that those dismissing this problem as a media invention or minimizing it as an “American problem” were wrong all along.

But even as the scandal widens to a global scale, some good news is emerging. A parish case from Boston last week triggered an old memory for me which suggests that even horrifying scandal may produce some hopeful, if unintended, consequences.

...

The Moral Of The Story. If we compare these cases, we find a radical shift from secretive mismanagement (in the old case) to a more transparent approach (in the new case)

In the older case, the obsession with secrecy dominated everything else, for the Boston hierarchy under Bernard Law consistently infantilized the laity, assuming they could not handle any bad news.

In the new case, they reported criminal behavior to the police. They knew the Boston Globe would cover the story, but they no longer regard the Globe (which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the sex abuse crisis) as a troublemaking enemy. They knew people would learn of evil-doing in church operations, but they now believe that laity are mature enough to acknowledge such human imperfections but cannot tolerate official subterfuge to keep them from knowing about it. They now realize that no one expects the institutional Church to be perfect, but everyone expects it to be accountable.

The moral of the story, then, is that even the most horrific scandal can have beneficial, albeit unintended, consequences.

#295: Scapegoating “Illegals”

2010-06-04T12:58:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:
For the people touting “respect for the law” as the key issue for immigration reform, the term “illegal” has become either a ploy or a fetish.

It’s a ploy if they hide behind “illegal” to camouflage opposition that really is rooted in racism, or paranoia, or delusion, or nativism. I’m sure this applies to some who cannot abide an America filling up with dark-skinned foreigners (who don’t speak English and may even worship a foreign God) and are convinced these people are causing all our troubles.

But let’s assume that most closed door people really are driven by their problem with the illegals’ (and their supporters’) supposed lack of respect for the rule of law. In that case, they risk idolizing the law as if it were some absolute value – as if merely being “illegal” is reason enough to be excluded.

If that is really what people think, they have made “illegal” their fetish: a small piece of the American anatomy that excites them all out of proportion to its importance…

…

Consider this lesson from history. During World War II Angelo Roncalli became Vatican ambassador to Turkey. Aware of thousands of Jews trapped in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation, he took decisive – and decidedly irregular – action. He got Jewish authorities in Palestine to send bundles of travel papers, he got the Vatican to send bundles of transit letters, and he arranged to issue baptismal certificates to thousands of Jewish children – some reflecting actual “provisional Baptisms,” some simple forgeries. Thus equipped with smuggled, fraudulent, even forged papers, thousands of Jews (some say 25,000) escaped from Poland and Hungary into unoccupied territories. Roncalli also convinced the Turkish government not to deport even the undocumented Jews.

For all these efforts on the half of “illegals” immigrating to Turkey and Palestine, the worldwide Jewish community has declared Roncalli to be one of the 20th century’s "Righteous Among the Nations". Of course, fifteen years later Roncalli was elected Pope John XXIII.

Today’s US Bishops are similarly pro-immigrant, and are fighting to help “illegals” gain acceptance and the legal permission to stay. They know, like Roncalli, that in most cases “illegal” merely means “victims of circumstance” – and they’re committed to helping any way they can.

People trumpeting “the rule of law” as a sacred value must ask themselves: are they also committed to the higher law of human rights? What about God’s law of love for neighbor? Or would they condemn Roncalli for enabling “illegality,” and tell us someone should have sent those Jews – who were Hitler’s scapegoats – back to their fate?

#294: Timidity and Transparency

2010-05-27T13:55:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT:
When Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham charged local Catholic officials with “moral timidity,” she named the difficulty many Catholics have had with their own leadership in recent years.

Abraham was commenting on the case of a child removed from a parochial school because her parents are lesbians. The principal made the initial decision, which was supported by her pastor. The Archdiocese of Boston then apologized to the family and offered to place the child in another school. This triggered criticism by some insisting the Church should stand up for its teaching against homosexuality, and citing Denver Bishop Charles J. Chaput, whose policy is to refuse enrollment to any child with homosexual parents. Boston’s Archbishop Sean O’Malley subsequently blogged in support of everyone at once, saying (1) the Church welcomes all and discriminates against none, (2) the pastor had only acted in the child’s best interest, and (3) the Denver policy would be given serious consideration.

We often find conservative leaders like Archbishop Chaput behaving as if they (and only they) occupy the high moral ground, with the courage to stand firm on right values while others yield to the pressures of a secularized society.

Sometimes this leads to unseemly (not to say un-Christian) displays of self-inflating presumption. Case in point: C.J. Doyle, head of Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, questioned why couples whose lives are at odds with Church teaching would want to send their children to Catholic schools – as if his own inability to understand was somehow the parents’ problem to solve!

But such self-righteous people, with their knee-jerk instinct to withdraw Catholicism’s benefits from those less worthy, often gain undeserved traction by presenting themselves as the courageous ones, willing to defend good against evil. Perhaps some militant conservatives see us progressive Catholics lacking the courage of our convictions, and this fuels their own self-serving posture as faith’s lone heroes.

I believe it’s time to say the emperor has no clothes. Such self-righteous posturing is cowardly, not courageous. And such posturing threatens to corrupt Catholicism’s message to the world.
…

As early as 1968, Joseph Ratzinger fled his teaching post when confronted by student protests. His flight has become symbolic of a whole new generation of post-conciliar bishops, clergy, and church leaders who, confronted by values and practices they cannot accept, withdraw from the encounter even while proclaiming themselves firm defenders of the faith. But however gifted they may be at articulating their faith and values, they are preaching to the choir – a choir chanting over increasingly empty pews. The rest of us–especially the increasingly alienated generation of post-boomer Catholics–see this façade of courageous convictions for what is: a return to the fortress, pulling up the drawbridge and refilling the moat.

In these scandal-ridden times, Catholics sick of cover-up welcome their leaders’ promise of greater transparency. But the transparency we seek is about honesty and accountability, not this: an all-too transparent attempt to cloak one’s cowardly fear of modernity in the guise of righteous convictions, and to rationalize even discriminatory practices with the lame excuse of “protecting the innocent.” At best such claims provoke deserved skepticism; at worst, they render the hierarchy a laughingstock.

#293: Beneath The Headlines AND The Trends

2010-05-15T08:52:00.004-04:00

EXCERPT:
As much as I like and recommend John Allen, Jr.’s new book The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing The Catholic Church, I have a serious problem with one section—and it’s taken me a few weeks to figure out what it is.

Among the trends Allen analyzes is the rise of what he calls "evangelical Catholicism," and his analysis includes the impact of this rise on "liberal Catholicism."...

Reading and reflecting on Allen's account, I've had three distinct reactions.
The first is that I instantly recognize both "camps." …
My second reaction is that I belong to neither camp -- and I know many Catholics who keep me in good company...

All this leads to my third reaction: something is missing from Allen's analysis...As early as 1987, in a Miami Herald op-ed piece marking John-Paul II’s second US visit, I described a third “camp” of Catholics—Catholics who reject both the evangelicals and the liberals. We think evangelicals who “build a fence around the faith” are repeating the failed “quarantine” strategy of Vatican I, which was already rejected at Vatican II and replaced by the Council’s “inoculation” strategy of engagement with the modern world. We see liberals as preoccupied with internal matters, when engaging the modern world was Vatican II’s priority.

To us, it seems both those camps have lost faith with the long-term effectiveness of Vatican II: one camp fears engagement has gone too far, the other feels reform has not gone far enough. My trouble with Allen’s two-camp account was that it leaves out the very people who remain convinced of the Council’s continued relevance.

I suspect the key to my trouble lies in Allen’s focus on the idea of "trends."...The fact is there is a movement deeper than trends. Catholicism, so ancient and vast, mostly tends to move in history much like the slow, barely noticeable but inexorable pace of the ancient vast tectonic plates drifting beneath in the earth's surface. But just like those plates, Catholicism occasionally (even without warning) suddenly shifts, causing abrupt changes in faith’s landscape. Such "Churchquakes" give way to pressures that have built for centuries, and their aftershocks last centuries as well.

Vatican II was just such a seismic spasm, as both John XXII and Paul VI acknowledged by calling it Catholicism's "Second Pentecost." If Pentecost marked the Church’s birth, they dubbed Vatican II its rebirth.

Clearly Allen's focus is deeper than headlines--but his frame of reference is the 21st century, and especially its first half. The book is a futurist exercise, full of predictions that get too risky if projected too far out in time. So Allen's real focus lies between the headlines that skim today’s surface currents, on the one hand, and the centuries-long dynamics that give global (and Catholic) history its deep structure--a structure characterized, not by trends, but by the alternation between glacially-slow drifting and sudden, seismic shifting.

If I am right, the seismic shift of Vatican II lies too deep for Allen's analysis...

#292: Hans Kung's Call to Arms

2010-05-08T14:31:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT:

By now Kung and Benedict have become iconic figures representing two distinct "takes" on Catholic life. Depending on your viewpoint, Kűng embodies either the courageous voice of authentic Catholic renewal from Vatican II, or the arrogant, even spiteful dissenter who would make a better Protestant. Similarly, Benedict XVI personifies either the heroic defender of authentic Catholic identity, or the backsliding, lapsed conciliarist bent on propping up a discredited pre-conciliar version of Catholicism.

Inevitably, then, either man's public pronouncements provoke both fervid praise and heated criticism. Kűng’s latest piece is no exception.

I have no particular interest in defending Kűng, but since he is calling on bishops to act, it makes sense to assess what such action might mean.

My own opinion: Kűng’s critique of Benedict's papacy includes some powerful truth, some personal attack, and some debatable history. But the letter’s importance depends less on these and more on his practical proposals, where he urges the Bishop to six actions. While much of Kűng’s letter earns the controversy he is provoking, a lot of the commentary strikes me as distracting us from these proposals. For once, it may be helpful to consider them out of context:

1. “Do not keep silent.” Does anyone doubt that the hierarchy’s age-old habit of silence has done more harm than good? Even when Bishops keep horrifying secrets only to “protect the Church from scandal,” they only cause worse scandal. Perhaps Kűng’s advice will fall on deaf ears if no bishops agree with him. But if they do agree, don't we hope they have the courage to say so?

…

4. "Unconditional obedience is owed to God alone." As a layperson, I do not always understand the constraints felt by clergy who have promised obedience to their superiors. But too often those constraints have allowed bad practices and even scandalous behavior to persist. Kűng’s point reminds us that, even in a hierarchy like ours, officials who fail to do the right thing will earn no sympathy by claiming "we were only following orders."

…

6. “Call for a Council.” More than 50 years after John XXIII called for Vatican II, the case for Vatican III grows stronger by the day. I can see three main arguments for convening the world's bishops: (a) the momentum of Vatican II's renewal has flagged, and passing on the torch of renewal to the next generation may require a rekindling that only a council can supply; (b) our growing global crisis of authority and credibility needs to be addressed at the highest level -- which is a council -- if the Church is going to recover its good public name in the foreseeable future; (C) the Europe-dominated hierarchy which gathered at Vatican II no longer reflects a Church that has gone global on all levels; a new council would be a more representative gathering that could put this global Catholicism on the map.

So while Hans Kűng’s critique of Rome and Benedict XVI are admittedly (and deservedly) controversial, his practical proposals seem good, constructive ideas that could only benefit the Church. It remains to be seen if he will be heard.

#291: A Look In The Mirror

2010-04-23T10:32:00.004-04:00

EXCERPT: John Allen, Jr.’s new book The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing The Catholic Church offers a journalist's wide-ranging analysis of current global tendencies and their impact on 21st century Catholicism. Much of it reflects realities I have witnessed or heard about or even predicted. But reading the chapter on “Trend Five: Expanding Lay Roles” felt like looking into a mirror image, or even a self-portrait.

Allen begins by describing "the spirit of lay activism stirring in today's church" with anecdotes about two women engaged in lay organizations, and notes "no one in officialdom drew up the plans...and their founders didn't ask anyone's permission.” This reflects my own decision to pursue theological studies: arriving at Harvard Divinity School in 1970, I assumed I would be a lone Catholic alien in a historically Protestant school. It turned out we Catholics were the largest group of students there (this remained true into the 21st century) -- and no one knew why. The school had not recruited Catholics, and our Bishops had not sent us. We just started showing up. Our best guess: what was “stirring” was the Holy Spirit.

Allen notes that "lay empowerment" was too often seen to mean laity holding church positions rather than taking their baptismal vocation into the world. But he now sees that trend cutting the other way:

The growth market for lay leadership won't be reformers seeking to alter official structures and teachings, but rather activists willing to take those things for granted, at least for the time being, in order to get on with the business of saving souls and changing the world.

For me, this reflects my own ambition to mobilize laity for activism, not primarily for reform. That was the common thread as I moved from working as a religious education director to running the Lay Ministry Training Institute, to acting as newspaper editor, to entering private practice in church consulting. Although I generally focused on parish life, and although I personally favored reforms in some church teachings and practices such as celibacy and women's ordination, my professional aim was always making parishes more effective in their mission to the world -- parish as change-agent.

Allen claims the future will emphasize what he calls “Pentecostal Catholicism”:

The growing sector of what one might call Pentecostal Catholics means that an increasing number of laity see themselves as commissioned to act as teachers, evangelists, and activists on the basis of charismatic inspiration rather than formal ecclesiastical authorization.

This has certainly been true for me. While I never joined the Catholic Charismatic movement itself (as my parents did), I had to build my own ministry outside of "formal ecclesiastical authorization.” I have been free-lancing now for nearly twenty years, and routinely tell my parish-based clients: "I do not represent any church officials, and I have no authority here except what you give me. I work for you."

When Allen warns that "the more successful a Catholic initiative becomes, the more hierarchy frets about its independence," my alarm bells go off. These days I mildly tell people, "I have two reputations," glossing over troubled waters: getting fired by two pastors and one bishop; being blackballed by diocesan officials; learning that Bernard Law (whom I had never even met) was questioning both pastors and bishops about my loyalty and orthodoxy; twice being summonsed to the Vicar General’s office, at Bernard Law’s behest, for velvet-gloved threats: ("We would hate to have to tell pastors they could not hire you!").

In my twenties, thirties, and forties, such hierarchical "fretting" took its toll on me and my family (not to mention my income), but by now -- especially following Bernard Law’s fall from grace -- I see my battle scars as badges of honor.

There are still days, amid these tough Catholic times, when I wonder what I've accomplished in nearly 40 years of lay activism. But as I look in Allen's mirror, the self I see reflected in it makes this much crystal clear: these years have been lived on a frontier that no past generation of Catholic laity before us ever approached -- and it is, moreover, a frontier we laity continue to open up toward that “Future Church.”

#290 The Missing Antidote

2010-04-20T10:00:00.006-04:00

On most social issues, Catholics’ opinions today reflect the rest of the population. In an age when Catholicism struggles to sustain its distinct identity, we have largely failed to establish a distinctive social platform among our people. I suspect that on many issues vital to America’s social and moral well-being, the problem is not that Catholics have rejected Catholic Social Teaching (CST). The problem is, they never knew what CST was.

Did most Catholics know their bishops, their pope, and virtually all the world’s bishops opposed the invasion of Iraq – and did they know why?

Did most Catholics test George bush’s assertion that Iraq was a “just war” by using the Catholic criteria for a just war?

When Catholics hear attacks on illegal immigrants, do they know CST calls migration a human right?

When Catholics here that healthcare is “a privilege, not a right” – do they know CST says the opposite?

When a mine disaster pits management against its critics, do Catholics know that CST always favors people over profits?

When policy critics attack “redistributing wealth” as “socialism,” do Catholics know that, in the face of income inequalities, CST labels redistributing wealth “justice,” not “socialism”?

Do Catholics know CST defends the right to private property – but says owners must always use property to serve the common good?

When America cuts back its nuclear arsenal, do Catholics know CST unconditionally condemns the use of nuclear weapons?

When America renounces “first use” of its nukes, do Catholics know CST forbids even the threat of nuclear attack?

When Catholics hear about “family values” do they know CST regards the human race as a single family – so that racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant attitudes all violate true family values?

Do Catholics know CST does not recognize “success” in war (whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else) as a moral justification?

Facing venomous debates about “Big” versus “Small” government, do Catholics know CST says size does not matter, but favors government that promotes the common good and a just social order?

I’m afraid that there is a yawning chasm between the vision of CST and the world view of many Catholics. Too many of them get their social values from secular society – from party politics, or media “pundits,” possibly from friends and family. If I’m right, on most social issues, millions of Catholics do not know their own faith.

#289: Will The Real Bad Guys Please Stand Up?

2010-04-12T11:22:00.003-04:00

EXCERPT: Benedict, both as a Bishop and as Vatican official, has personified the kind of official plagued with a good heart but bad vision. Men like him (and they were all men) had the best intentions to protect the Body of Christ from harm – but their horrifying myopia has cost us all dearly. To put it simply: they went after the wrong “bad guys.”

This sad story offers lots of villains: the child-rapists themselves; their enablers and protectors; commentators attacking the media for investigating criminal behavior; commentators aiming to exploit scandal simply to harm the church; church officials who avoided facing the scandal for fear of harming the church.

But from 1981 on, Joseph Ratzinger earned the moniker “God’s Rottweiler” for his aggressive vigilance against a wholly different target: priests whose writing, speaking, and thinking seemed at odds with official Church teaching. Jason Berry sums up that history like this:

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was decisive in running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is housed in a 17th-century palazzo where Galileo the astronomer was convicted of heresy. On issues ranging from the Vatican prohibition of birth control devices to Liberation Theology of Latin America, the C.D.F. used anonymous investigators to critique the works of suspect scholars. In closed tribunals, Ratzinger and his assistants interrogated those out of step with doctrine, punishing some by excommunication or orders to keep silent for periods of time. Catholic liberals were aghast as Ratzinger clashed with some of the church's leading thinkers. The Swiss theologian, Father Hans Küng, famously called him "The Grand Inquisitor," after Dostoevsky's religious persecutor in "The Brothers Karamazov."

Ratzinger was perfectly cast for the role, since he had battled such “dissidents” as both theologian and bishop throughout the 1970s even before coming to the Vatican. Indeed, he was a hero to all who, like him, felt that allowing such dissent to continue would do irreparable harm to the Church.

But while vigilant defenders of the faith of like Ratzinger and his supporters crusaded against a few dozen maverick thinkers, thousands of priests worldwide continued to rape children and youth even after their crimes were discovered. Their bishops recycled them, protected them from discovery, and fought all attempts to bring their crimes (or even official documentation of their crimes) to light.

The appalling truth is that Ratzinger and all like-minded bishops, clergy, and laity committed a horrible blunder. They poured all their energies into suppressing the threat from “dissenters,” blind to the much greater threat of child abuse.

These men were obsessed with enforcing orthodoxy (correct teaching) but blind to the importance of enforcing orthopraxy (correct practice). The system they protected enshrined secrecy and non-accountability, and made a thriving breeding ground for the very “filth” Ratzinger himself later decried. How sadly ironic: that someone so alert to the least deviation from official thinking had no clue about deviant behavior.

The Church could well have used his vigilance aimed at the real threat—but the blinders have fallen from his eyes too late. He must now resort to apologizing to victims, because no one ever protected them. Perhaps Benedict’s reputation will survive – but to tell the truth, his belief (shared by many others) that liberal theologians were the greatest threat to the Body of Christ has turned out to be tragically bad judgment.

#288: New Pro-life Profiles

2010-04-03T11:51:00.005-04:00

EXCERPT: Amid many surprises surrounding passage of Healthcare Reform came the last minute plot-twist from Rep. Bart Stupak. Stymied in his effort to insert ironclad language banning federal funds for abortion, he obtained an equivalent “ironclad” executive order from President Obama, and led his supporters in casting the decisive votes for House passage. The ban will continue not only under the protection of the Hyde amendment, but now under the direct authority of the President. The same authority George W. Bush used to restrict stem-cell research is now applied to abortion by Barack Obama.

This stunning development produced several consequences, and also contains several lessons which are relevant to Catholic Social Teaching.

…Second Lesson: Bart Stupak’s move has altered the political profile of the pro-life movement, by showing that one can be both pro-life and progressive.

Conservatives have mostly monopolized the pro-life platform, but Stupak (despite his public image) never fit the mold. …Stupak’s mold is actually the classic “Catholic Liberal Democrat” we’ve known since the New Deal.

Since Roe V. Wade in 1973 this classic mold has broken down, as the country’s polarization between “pro life” and “pro choice” drove many Catholics to vote Republican – and led some (like RI legislator and Commonweal commentator David Carlin) to question whether a Catholic can be a Democrat at all!

Stupak has altered this dynamic, with his pro-life ratings (0% from NARAL, 100% from National Right to Life Committee). It is too soon to tell, but arguably he could offer a new profile for a style of pro-life progressive politician acceptable to both mainstream Democrats and mainline Catholics.

Third Lesson: Barack Obama has altered his own profile. …In one pen-stroke, Obama joined those banning federal funding of abortions while guaranteeing reforms that can reduce abortions. If Healthcare Reform does induce a significant decline in abortions, Obama will have accomplished more pro-life success than Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush combined.

Fourth Lesson: Finally, this episode exposes two dark dimensions of the pro-life movement.

On the one hand, we have witnessed the fanaticism of those who scorn the bona fides of anyone who disagrees with them or fails to match their own private standards. After months of touting Bart Stupak as a champion of their cause, they now call him traitor and worse, threatening him and his family. Such fanatics render Stupak a kind of profile in courage, but also reveal the ugly undercurrent of violence within the pro-life movement.

On the other hand, we have seen the cynicism of those prepared to exploit the unborn to promote their own politics. Stupak himself described that cynicism in the days following his coup:

The true motives of many blogs and organizations claiming to be pro-life have become clear in recent days: to politicize life issues as a means to defeat health care reform...The pro-life groups rallied behind me -- many without my knowledge or consent -- not necessarily because they shared my goals of ensuring protections for life and passing health-care reform but because they viewed me as their best chance to kill health-care legislation.

Catholics everywhere should decry such cynicism. We reject using the unborn as bait to lure others to our politics, and we reject attempts to dupe Catholics into embracing anti-Catholic social policies just because they are wrapped in pro-life ribbons. For us, protection of the unborn must be a principle, not propaganda.

#287:What Happened to Confession?

2010-03-24T09:46:00.002-04:00

EXCERPT: Why has confession collapsed? Some blame the new format. Some blame Vatican II’s less strict style of Catholicism. Some blame secular culture’s guilt-free, sin-blind ethos.

I suspect all these things are factors, but they overlook another key factor: the self-destructive consequences of the “golden age” of Confession.

The problem was rooted in the sheer volume of confessions. Even with abundant numbers of priests, the typical large parish could only manage so many weekly confessions by keeping each confession short. But since priests needed to impose penance before each absolution, They required some way of rapidly determining a “fair” penance even for the most complicated confession. This forced clergy to develop a short-cut method for matching the “punishment” (penance) to the “crime” (sins).

Seminaries responded by training clergy to rapidly rank each sin. Thus moral theology boiled down to classifying hundreds of immoral acts into “venial” and “mortal” sins, along with the rationale for each category. Little attention was paid to any in-depth study of good and evil, grace and freedom, conscience and responsibility.

Meanwhile penitents were trained to prepare for confession by “examining your conscience” using a similar “shopping list” of sins from which to select personal failings – again, with little reflection on the shape of one’s whole moral life or the course of one’s moral development.

The concrete results: penitent and confessor met in the box armed with corresponding mental checklists. As the penitent listed items they confessed, the confessor silently ticked off “matching” penances (usually a certain number of “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys”) to ensure that the punishment would fit the crime.

In my experience, this whole process – driven by efficiency and leading to rote ritual acts – amounted to nothing less than the reduction of sin, guilt, and responsibility to mere trivial matters. The most appalling sins got routinely dismissed. This trivialization caused a general dulling of the moral sensibility of laity and clergy, especially regarding behaviors that harmed other individuals (e.g. betrayals of trust) or society itself (e.g. racism, ethnic prejudice, or the glorification of violence).

It is no accident that this trivialization coincided with an era of widespread priestly sex abuse. That scandal’s history shows many priest abusers confessed to bishops, performed some “penance” (ranging from suspension to confinement in religious houses to some period of distant exile) and then were routinely returned to their priestly duties – recycled into new parishes to abuse new victims.

Bishops apparently thought that a good act of contrition and a suitable penance settled the matter. In short, they had so trivialized the moral life that they became blind to the real nature of sin: corrosion of the abuser’s character; long-term effects on victims and the consequent need to make amends, impact on millions of Catholics; damage to the credibility and authority of the institutional church; offense to God.

This attitude has not yet disappeared. Benedict XVI’s recent apology to the Irish people included just such a prescription for abuser priests:

I urge you to examine your conscience, take responsibility for the sins you have committed, and humbly express your sorrow. Sincere repentance opens the door to God’s forgiveness and the grace of true amendment. By offering prayers and penances for those you have wronged, you should seek to atone personally for your actions.

Because the “golden age” of confession trivialized morality, routine confession ultimately became irrelevant to people’s real lives.

#286: So Many Different Differences

2010-03-16T08:53:00.004-04:00

Despite the strong emotions unleashed by changes in liturgy, not all our differences over liturgy are equal. The fact is our differences over liturgy come in many shapes and sizes.

Many differences over liturgy, for example, are really about the psychological preferences of individual people. Such preferences remain subjective and personal. There is no right or wrong, good or bad -- these are differences we should all be prepared to live with.

People also have aesthetic differences over liturgy, rooted in different ideas of beauty and taste. Mostly such differences are purely subjective and negotiable, yet I believe there is such a thing as "bad taste."

Then there are cultural differences. These vary, not from individual to individual, but from place to place and people to people. Most of us are creatures of our own culture, and are not totally at ease with liturgy rooted in a vastly different culture. But our discomfort does not make it "bad liturgy." It simply means Catholicism is for all cultures, not just my own.

There are also differences rooted in history, and especially in historical shifts. Any historical shift requires adaptation, and some people resist any change. But the historic motives behind such changes usually outweigh personal preferences.

There are, of course, practical differences about how well historic changes get implemented. But implementation mistakes make a strong case against bad implementation--not against change itself.

This can get into subtle differences over the "pastoral effectiveness" of liturgy. Liturgy is not entertainment, and the Eucharist’s validity does not depend on the quality of its performance. But the way liturgy is performed can shape its power to affect people's lives. This involves a lot of judgment calls, where people of good will can differ -- but those judgments still must be made. For example: will the proposed new translation’s awkward language, grammar, and unscriptural references make things better or worse?

So far I’ve only noted differences based on preferences, but there are also differences over principles, and some of these are not negotiable at all. I see people debating three types of principles.

First, there are liturgical principles. These are official norms for distinguishing good (proper) and bad (improper) liturgy. Most norms are very general: Vatican II's liturgy document, for example, calls 12 times for "active participation" without getting into specifics.

Second, there are theological principles. These define the meaning and value of our worship--the very nature of liturgy, rooted in our core beliefs as Catholics. So, for example, when Vatican II declares that liturgy is the "public worship" offered by the Body of Christ to God, it leaves little room for dispute or debate. People may prefer a more solitary style of worship, and may even be permitted it under some conditions--but they have no basis for claiming their preference is a better way.

Third, there are "spiritual" principles--and here everyone agrees in principle but not in practice. No one doubts, for example, that liturgy should be "reverent," "solemn," and should impart a sense of "mystery" and the "sacred." The trouble is, people define these terms in varied, often arbitrary ways. Calling for liturgical "reverence” is common sense, but limiting that to "kneeling" is an arbitrary construction. Who is to say what our actions symbolize? The overwhelming bulk of human actions have no intrinsic symbolic meaning until someone assigns one--and if someone chose these meanings, someone can also change them.

St. Augustine gave best advice for dealing with our differences:
In necessary things: Unity;
In questionable things: Liberty;
In all things: Charity.

It may be that our theological and liturgical principles provide necessary grounds for a unified yet global Catholic liturgy, but in a Catholic tradition with 23 authorized rites, most other differences leave lots of room for freedom to follow our preferences. In any case, none of our differences justifies a failure of charity.

#285: Our Liturgical Experiences

2010-03-11T09:47:00.005-05:00

EXCERPT: A battle looms over pending changes in the English text for our Mass prayers. Part of me agrees with a recent reader comment on my blog saying that this is a misplaced debate.

Indeed, arguing whether we say "and also with you" or "and with your spirit” reminds me of Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver encounters Lilliput’s battles between “Big-endians” and “Small-endians” over how to crack an egg (a satiric episode spoofing contemporary English liturgical battles!).

Still, the reality is that people have strong feelings about even the minute details of their worship experience. People feel strongly about liturgy because it provides the framework for their worship. Since the Eucharist is the summit of Christian faith and practice, it's no surprise that people cling fiercely to their way of worshiping. Perhaps we need to reflect on our own experiences and what they mean to us—and, just as important, why they mean so much.

Reflecting on my own experience, I amazed to realize how many different ways I have encountered the Eucharist in my life.

I've been part of congregations from as few as five for house Masses, to more than 400,000 for John Paul II's first US Mass on Boston Common. I've attended charismatic groups celebrating Mass in homes, in parishes, and in sports arenas. I've been in catacombs and cathedrals, monasteries and seminaries, modest homes and huge outdoor settings.

I've celebrated Mass in many languages: Latin, Greek, English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, German, and even Armenian.

I've been part of Mass presided by the Pope, by cardinals, by bishops, by monks and abbots and religious and ordinary parish priests. I've been in Masses with no music, folk-music, organ alone, organ with soloists, organs with choir, choir and orchestra, boy choirs, women's choirs, mixed choirs, rock bands, or even simple solo trumpet.

I've seen Masses lasting fifteen minutes and others lasting three hours, Masses with no one receiving Communion to Masses where Communion alone took nearly an hour. I was married at Mass, and my kids were all baptized at a Mass, and I was commentator at my high school best friend’s ordination Mass.

By global standards, all this represents only a fraction of the bewildering range of Catholic Liturgy over the past 50 years. Almost all my experience is based on only two versions of the Roman Rite: the "Tridentine Rite" dating largely from the 16th century, and the "Novus Ordo," the "new" version of the Roman Rite instituted in 1970. But even though the Roman Rite is used by the overwhelming majority of Catholics, the Catholic Church has authorized 23 different rites for celebrating Mass. My own experience has left out 21 of them! (See a complete list of Catholic rites here: http://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/rites.htm .)

For me, all my varied experiences of the Eucharist have enriched my Catholic identity. I’ve had my own personal preferences, and I still do. I also have strong feelings about what strikes me as “good” and “bad” liturgy—and I have witnessed more than my share of both.

But for me the bottom line has been: all these variations on Catholic worship have been just variations on one common theme: The Eucharist itself. In a word, for me every Mass has been THE Mass.

"Token" Catholics Are Nothing New

2010-02-27T09:37:00.002-05:00

Why do fewer Catholics go to mass? We hear many answers: loss of faith, the impact of secularization, the decline in leisure time, the explosion of alternative leisure activities, the “permissive” culture, the failure of Vatican II reforms, the scandal of clergy sex abuse, church teaching against contraception—all these are offered to explain the apparent change among American Catholics. I don’t really disagree with any of these explanation; they may all be partly true. But I have come to suspect they all over-explain the change. In my opinion, the problem is not that there’s been so much change for worse. The problem is, there hasn’t been much change at all!

Think of it this way: back in the “golden age,” say 50 years ago, most churches were full, often several times a weekend. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that people had more faith then. Remember, Catholics were taught that missing even one Sunday Mass meant an eternity in Hell. Most of the people at Mass then were just going through the motions. They were “token” Catholics, a captive audience doing the minimum required of them. They couldn’t see what the priest was doing or hear what he was saying, so they spent their time saying the rosary, or daydreaming, or sleeping, or talking, or standing at the back of the church. Very few worshippers actually followed the mass itself, using a Latin-English missal, and none participated in any active way (except the altar boys). At Communion time, very few people (maybe 15-20%) came forward to receive the Eucharist. The rest stayed in their seats, or even headed the opposite way, out the door. In many cases, the number leaving early exceeded the number receiving Eucharist.

Vatican II was supposed to encourage people to go beyond the minimum, to take their faith more seriously, to renew themselves. What happened? For many people, nothing happened, except the minimum requirements changed. Today few Catholics believe the gates of heaven close for someone who misses Mass. In other words, times have changed—and with them, the definition of what it means to be a “token” catholic. Now, instead of “going through the motions” at Mass every Sunday, the token Catholics “go through the motions” by showing up to make sure every family milestone (baptism, first communion, confirmation, wedding, and funeral) gets blessed. So Catholic life still continues for them—but the minimum requirements have changed.

For these people, the Catholic Church still counts in their lives—but the parish is no longer their place of worship. At best, they treat it like their own private family chapel. At worst, they’ve reduced it to the ATM of their spiritual lives, useful but not important—and only useful as long as it’s convenient.

During Vatican II, my father was skeptical of its outcome. “I bet a lot of priests,” he said, “will be just as good at mumbling the English as they ever were at mumbling the Latin.” The key word, of course, was mumbling: none of Vatican II’s reforms could work if people—whether priests or laity—kept on “mumbling” their way through the motions of Catholic life. It even looks like “mumbling” is hereditary, since the “ATM” Catholics of today are mostly the children and grandchildren of the “go through the motions” mass-goers of 50 years ago.

Why does this matter? Because if all that’s changed are the “mumblers” habits, we shouldn’t fool ourselves with bogus nostalgia for a “golden age” that never existed. Yes, the churches were full—but mostly they were full of “mumblers” who added nothing to our celebration of Mass except body heat and a few bucks.

#284: Cause--or Coincidence?

2010-02-25T14:34:00.004-05:00

EXCERPT: The percentage of US Catholics who attend weekend Mass has been declining gradually for nearly 45 years. Since 1965, in fact (according to Gallup polls, the encyclopedic Religion and American Cultures, and the New York Times’ Peter Steinfels), Mass attendance by US Catholics has dropped from 65%-75% to 25%-35%—although those receiving communion has jumped from 10%-15% to 90%!

Some want to blame the 1970 liturgical renewal of Vatican II. For me, there is a logical problem: coincidence never proves cause-and-effect. But linking low attendance to liturgical renewal faces a tougher problem: there are TOO MANY coincidences. Forty-five year of declining attendance leaves a lot of time for multiple coincidences. For example (note: see the complete CrossCurrents #284 for explanations of these examples):

That decline in Mass attendance has coincided with the demographic shift of US Catholics from city to suburbs. It also coincided with a dramatic rise in Catholic educational, professional, and income levels. It coincided with the massive decline in Catholic school enrolments.

It coincided with the explosion of Sunday commercialism. It coincided with the explosion of organized weekend youth sports (especially girls’ sports). It coincided with the new “leisure famine.” It coincided with the multiplication of leisure-time distractions competing with mass-going. It coincided with the phenomenon of “cocooning.”

It coincided with the general decline in church attendance among ALL Christian churches with liturgical traditions. It coincided with a general secularization of US culture.

It coincided with the rise in divorce among Catholic families.
It coincided with widespread alienation over the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae. It coincided with the 1983 Canon Law reform.

It coincided with the mass exodus of priests over the celibacy issue, and the subsequent graying of the priesthood in many US dioceses. It coincided with the rising shortage of priests. It coincided with the rise of the women’s movement, and the debate over women's roles in the Church, including women's ordination. It coincided with the rise in lay ministry. It coincided with the rise of women in parish leadership, now comprising 85% of parish professional staff. It coincided with the transformation of parish staffs, from the all-priest “drill-team" model to the mixed clergy/lay “ball club” model.

It coincided with the collapse of “Obligation Catholicism.” It coincided with the sex-abuse scandal which touched millions of Catholics even before exploding into public view. It coincided with the revelation of widespread chronic episcopal malfeasance.

Logically, none of these coincidences proves what caused our decline in Mass attendance. One reader believes ONE of these—liturgical reform—explains it all. Sociologist Andrew Greeley likewise believed ONE thing—Humanae Vitae—caused it all. Personally, I suspect many of the factors above had some impact one way or another, but I have no magic method for singling out ONE coincidence as the “poison pill” that caused it all. Having lived through all these changes, I am very skeptical of any easy, one-cause-fits-all answer.

Ironically, my own first experience of empty churches came as a student in 1960s Europe, before the 1970 renewed Mass rite that my reader blames for our losses. I saw churches peopled by a few old ladies and children—churches far emptier than US churches are even today. That Mass rite essentially dated from the Council of Trent. At the time, I blamed secularization. Should I have blamed Trent for those empty churches? For me, it’s another coincidence.

Coincidences CAN be causes, but proving that requires MORE than the coincidence itself.

#283: George Weigel: Noisy Catholicism?

2010-02-17T08:58:00.004-05:00

EXCERPT: George Weigel has done it again--just in time for Lent! He has turned a perfectly sensible appeal for silent reflection and prayer during Lent into a rant aimed at a variety of Catholics whose behavior he deplores.

Liturgists and organists whose prayers, songs, or organ solos produce “all noise, all the time”; children, described as “squawking" twice),” “crying,” “fussing,” “fractious (twice),” and “caterwauling”; worshipers, whom he scolds for “chattering” before mass, “chattering” after the recessional “chattering” during the exchange of peace, “chattering with friends” while entering church, “chattering with neighbors” while leaving church—all these people become targets of George’s ire.

He argues that American culture now surrounds us with noise, citing airports filled with “TSA announcements, airline announcements, airport announcements, muzak, and the ubiquitous CNN-airport channel”—plus “squawking” children, loud conversations, and passengers yelling at cell phones. He concludes:

There is virtually no public space, outside art museums and courtrooms, where our aural senses are not under assault….Churches should be different.

Weigel gets no quarrel from me about the American “noise culture.” I agree with Weigel that environments free from “noise” are increasingly rare. I also half-agree that “churches should be different.” As sacred spaces reserved for sacred activities, it makes sense for churches to offer opportunities to escape the “noise culture” of the outside world.

Does this mean that Mass-time has been invaded by “the contemporary American noise culture”? Hardly!

In fact, the “noises” Weigel describes at church are either ancient (babies crying, people singing and praying) or else date from the liturgical reforms of Vatican II (congregants praying parts of the Mass aloud, speaking at the sign of peace, conversing before and after Mass, singing, even applauding). Everything Weigel complains about was quite commonplace in the churches I knew in the late 1960s and 1970s – well before TSA, CNN, and cell phones.

Then why complain about a lack of silence in church at Mass times? I suspect the clue is in Weigel’s comment that silence is “a way to ensure that you actually get a chance to pray yourself”—as if one only prays when left alone in peace and quiet. In this view, Weigel speaks for many Catholics who simply want to be left alone at Mass.

In fact, I am convinced Weigel uses “silence” as a code word for “private time and space.” And certainly, our spiritual life as Catholics can always benefit from more of that—especially as an antidote to our “noise culture.”

The trouble is, if one wants peace and quiet be alone with the Lord, Mass is neither the time nor the place to seek such privacy. As Vatican II made unmistakably clear:

Liturgical services are not private functions, but are celebrations of the Church, which is the “sacrament of unity,” namely, a holy people united and organized under their bishops…Therefore liturgical services pertain to the whole body of the Church…Communal celebration is to be preferred…to the celebration that is individual and quasi-private.
Vatican II, CONSTITUTION ON THE SACRED LITURGY, #26.

The key here is “communal celebration.” We gather together at Mass, not as random individuals seeking to pray by ourselves, but as a faithful community assembled to offer a communal celebration of the Eucharist which signifies and expresses our communion with Christ, his Father, his Spirit, and each other.

Those who prefer private prayer time with God would do better to come back some other time. Catholic tradition is rich with personal devotions and prayers, and an empty church is not hard to find these days. To insist on privacy during Mass implies one does not want a communal celebration at all.

#282: Today's Moral Prejudice

2010-02-12T10:51:00.003-05:00

EXCERPT: The Gospel of John depicts Jesus’ own disciples wondering about the man born blind:
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
Having said this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes. "Go," he told him, "wash in the Pool of Siloam" (this word means Sent). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

Perhaps such moralizing on health is largely extinct (although all readers may well know someone who assigns moral blame to alcoholics, for example ). But it seems the old prejudice has been replaced by a different, equally irrational, prejudice: imposing moral judgment on individuals due to their socio-economic condition!

In effect, today’s moral prejudice poses a revised question: What did these people (people born poor who have stayed poor, for example) do, or their parents do, that left them so deficient in achieving success ?

The underlying assumption is that success and failure must reflect moral character, because we all start on equal footing and strive in the equal conditions. This assumption results from a huge cultural blind spot. It is as if we just cannot see how much "chance" -- meaning forces beyond our individual rule -- shapes our social destiny. So we keep believing that success comes from individual effort, and failure results from a lack of effort.

It astounds me that any modern person can ignore the forces shaping us. Each life brings its unique blend of pluses and minuses, and common sense tells us that some people get more pluses the others, while some lives seem almost all minuses. And all of these differences result, not from effort, but from fortune or misfortune.
The fact is that we have no choice or control over many factors shaping our lives. Some people simply have advantages that others do not. Those advantages are not chosen, or earned, or merited. They are privileges.

The fact is that American society includes extraordinarily privileged classes – people born and raised with great advantages over their fellow citizens – but they represent a tiny portion of our population. It also includes a vast middle class whose lives include both privileges (of education, home ownership, unprecedented access to consumer goods and energy resources ) and detriments (healthcare costs, debt troubles, a leisure famine, declining real incomes). And it includes a vast underclass living lives shaped mainly by their misfortune and their lack of any privileges at all.

Thus it is that, in America, those with good fortune have fortunes and those with misfortune stay poor.

#252 Beyond Never-Neverland

2010-01-31T20:20:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT: What can we do about the perception that Catholicism is for kids? For too long we have sent that message by design. We established the largest private school system in history, and even where schools declined or were not built we’ve made school age kids our number one educational priority despite Vatican policies to the contrary. We've even transformed Confirmation into the Catholic equivalent of graduation. The result? Millions of adults aged 20 to 60+ walking their life journey equipped with only a teenager's faith. Is it any wonder they find Catholic faith deficient? It is!

This is not Never-Neverland. We all grow up sometime, and so must our faith. When John-Paul II called for the Church to be an “expert on humanity” he did not mean an expert on childhood.
What can we do?

We can brand a grownup Catholicism where adult baptism (not teen confirmation) is the standard, and where people seek the kind of "faith-fitness" that comes from regular workouts.

I write CrossCurrents, for example, precisely to confront readers with a faith-view of current events that can stretch people’s thinking and build a more mature and muscular faith. Religious education curricula like "Generations of Faith” also flex adult faith, as do ministries like "Theology on Tap."

These are ready resources to firm up a flabby faith, so others begin to admire how strong and fit Catholicism is to face current challenges. Such rebranding can make the Church appear a source of wisdom rather than mere childish storytelling.

#281: Losing Faith

2010-01-31T20:16:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT: Listening to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, I was especially struck by this passage:

Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions — our corporations, our media, and, yes, our government — still reflect these same values. Each of these institutions are full of honorable men and women doing important work that helps our country prosper. But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure, or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people's doubts grow. Each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith. The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away. No wonder there's so much cynicism out there. No wonder there's so much disappointment.

I noticed two things. First, Obama mentioned government (including lobbyists and politicians), media, and corporations—but he never mentioned churches. It is, of course, bad politics to criticize churches no matter how appalling their performance. Nonetheless his comments beg the question: are not churches also big institutions, and also sometimes guilty of abusing their powers?

Second, Obama twice spoke of losing faith. The irony is in using “faith” while overlooking the very institutions (churches) which claim to be stewards of faith. It’s a double irony, in fact: the public figure most vocal about this loss of faith is our head of state, not the head of any church.

This double irony makes me wonder several things. First, is Obama right that cynicism is widespread? Second, is it really due to a loss of faith in our institutions? Third, is our Church also implicated in this? Fourth, what is to be done?

#280: Renewal Without Revolution?

2010-01-28T16:54:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT: For us Baby Boom parents, Vatican II proved the Church capable of breaking with its recent past (based on a "quarantine" strategy, ghetto-fying Catholic life to protect it from the infections of modern life), capable of throwing open its windows and admitting the freshening gusts of renewal, of engaging the world outside.

For us, this gave the Catholic Church a public presence, even an influence, it had never had in "Protestant" America. Instead of a ghettoized curiosity, Catholicism became a public force for good. Vatican II made Catholicism a player in the cultural struggles of the 1960s at the very time most institutions were being dismissed as arrogant, unresponsive, and irrelevant.

The key point here is not the objective reality of Vatican II, but rather our personal (and collective) experience of it. Sure, the Council changed the Church -- but more importantly, it also changed us! Once the dust settled, we were no longer the same people. We were still Catholics, to be sure -- but that no longer meant docile people going through the motions and rituals of Catholic life out of obligation or the comfort of conforming to generations-old family ways. Being Catholic now meant, rather, accepting stewardship of a vast ancient legacy offering priceless wisdom to a world beset by abuses of power.

Sadly, this change in us may be the source of the generation gap between us and our children. Perhaps our problem is not that Vatican II has failed, or that its changes have not lasted, or that a reactionary and fearful hierarchy is bent on restoring the pre-conciliar status quo.

For the most part, in fact, the reforms of Vatican II have lasted. They are still with us, and so our kids grew up in a Church that we know has changed. But it did not change them, because they have never experienced these changes as change.
We remember pre-conciliar Catholicism, so for us there is a "before" and an "after" -- and we experienced living through the transition from one to the other. That shifting experience changed us as well as the institution, but our kids never lived through that shift.

Whereas we had Vatican II's constant shifting as our coming-of-age church, our children had John-Paul II's charismatic globe-trotting. Now, J-P II’s papacy was unthinkable without Vatican II's changes, but he neither sought nor brought the kind of radical overhaul accomplished by John XXIII and Paul VI before him. Our children experienced renewal precisely as the status quo of Catholicism.

In short, the very thing that was the transformative experience of our lives became something our kids just took for granted. The Catholicism they knew in the 1980s and 1990s was nearly as stable as 1950s Catholicism. In that sense, their experience of Church was more like our own parents' (their grandparents') experience.

Who can blame them for not seeing the Church as we did—as a place of change, and hope, and even revolutionary promise?

#279: Gentle Giant

2010-01-11T17:31:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT: Arriving in New York City in September, 1968 for the flight to begin my junior year abroad, my father and I accepted a lunch invitation from John Sexton, a Fordham lay theologian and Brooklyn high school debate coach I had met on the high school debate circuit. During lunch he gifted me with a copy of A New Catechism, a work commissioned by the Dutch hierarchy to communicate Catholic beliefs in light of Vatican Council II.

That book traveled with me to France, and became an inspiration to me that ultimately convinced me to drop my political science studies and pursue theology. At the time, I had no idea that Schillebeeckx was principal author – indeed, I did not even know his name.

But I knew it two years later, beginning my master’s degree in theology at Harvard, when I learned that Schillebeeckx would arrive in spring term as Erasmus Lecturer in Dutch Culture, In addition to the lecture series, he announced a Divinity School course in “Dutch Theology and Church Life.” I quickly signed up for what turned out to be a graduate seminar with only six students.

Schillebeeckx expressed mild shock at the lengthy reading assignments typical in American universities. Giving us a short six-book list, he asked: “How can anyone do justice to so many books in a few weeks?”

When he announced that each student would be responsible for an in-class presentation on one book, we realized he was giving us a special role: half the lectures in this world renowned theologian’s course would be student lectures! To this day, I have a vivid memory of my own lecture and the way our lively post-lecture discussion was facilitated by Schillebeeckx himself, and ended with his quiet, sincere praise for my work.

Early on, we students began cultivating this gentle man outside class. Fr. Schillebeeckx proved himself a charming guest, eager to absorb any experience of American culture and church life, open-minded in his outlook, unfailingly modest in his opinions. During one Divinity Hall dinner, we pressed him for some wisdom about reconciling Catholic tradition with the tougher challenges of a secular age. He back-pedaled for a while, and when pressed finally declared it was up to us, the next generation, to work out the answer. His one lament about Harvard: among the faculty, only Harvey Cox showed interest in him!

At semester’s end, we finished our last class with a photo session. I still have the picture of a middle-aged Schillebeeckx surrounded by six eager young theologians. He was nearly 60 already, but would live and work for nearly 40 more years, dying December 23 at 95.

He left Harvard with two of my things. The first was my own personal copy of the (then new) album Jesus Christ Superstar, which we gave him as a farewell gift—and which he regarded as an emblem of modern culture’s take on Christianity. The second was my final paper, delivered too late for him to read before leaving. Midway through July he returned it to me by mail; I still have it, with his margin notes and his generous evaluation on the last page.

#278 Leading Us Astray

2009-12-31T23:38:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT: Perhaps you saw the same AP headline I did: “Nevada couple stranded three days after GPS leads them astray.” It seems they asked for the shortest route from Portland to Reno, and they got it – but their machine, while full of instant data, was mindless enough to recommend an unsafe, snow-bound road.

Me thinks a parable lurks therein! And with everyone trying to pick a name for the decade that ends this week, perhaps this story offers an apt theme.
It has something to do with technology and our response to it—or, more accurately, our responses.

There are, of course, those people who embrace every new technological advance with gusto – the folks who had home TVs in the 1940s, video cameras by 1970, a $700 single-disc CD player by 1983, a car phone by 1990, and a $4000, 30-inch HDTV by 2000.

Then there are the people who militantly resist every innovation. They clung to black & white TV, to dial phones, they have no use for snow blowers or dishwashers or cell phones.

The first group bought Apple computers in 1982; the second group still holds the line against e-mail.

Most of us, I suspect, are somewhere in between. We neither race into new things nor resist them on principle. We don’t need to be the first kid on our block. We’re content to wait until new technologies prove their worth. We know they often need debugging, and we prefer not to play the role of guinea pig. We guess that subsequent versions will be not only better but also cheaper. And we even suspect that some innovations will eventually either fail or prove actually harmful. So we never went for Edsels or 8-track tapes or Fen-Phen or sub-prime mortgages.

Yet we embrace proven technologies with prudent optimism. We start emailing, while remaining alert to spam and viruses. We buy hybrids, but know that batteries remain underdeveloped. We love the way computers transmit data at the speed of light, but we never forget that they’re still stupid machines. We experiment with voice-recognition software, but chuckle wryly when it types Ratzinger as “rap singer” or Jesus as “cheeses.”

My own humble opinion is that this middle way is not merely moderate, it is also wise.

In fact, a strain throughout Christian history – or at least Catholic history – has been to display mixed feelings about technology in general. Given the Christian view of the world, this makes perfect sense. Since all technology comes from human intelligence and our drive to subdue creation to our benefit, we regarded as potentially a gift (albeit indirect) from God. But since every technology is a human product, it is never perfect, and its flaws may outweigh its benefits.

No humans in history have ever needed this wisdom more than our present generations.

#277: Obama’s Catholic Case for Peace

2009-12-17T09:11:00.002-05:00

EXCERPT:I am baffled: no one else seemed to notice the very thing that struck me most about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

While some wrongly compared Obama’s discourse on war and peace to George Bush, and others rightly pointed out Obama’s debt to Franklin Roosevelt and the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, no one I have read noticed this: Catholic Church teaching on war and peace is now shaping American policy at the presidential level for the first time.

Obama is clearly no pacifist. He clearly embraces “just war” theory, not only in name, but in its substance. As The New Republic’s Michael Walzer noted, he is not the first President to invoke the theory: "Other presidents have done that, but this one seemed to have a better grasp of the theory than any of his predecessors did."

Secular and Protestant thinkers too, including Niebuhr, have also espoused the just war concept—but they were adopting (and sometimes adapting) an idea of Catholic origin. Obama here became the first US President to adopt Catholic teaching as his own. Without naming it, Obama was making the Catholic case for peace.

For years I’ve told parish groups that we American Catholics are in trouble: a President can claim “just war,” and his Catholic listeners can’t tell he is invoking a Catholic concept, let alone judge whether the claim is legitimate.

But now we hear a President who not only claims “just war,” but explains what he means by it– with an explanation solidly rooted in Catholic thinking. Fifteen centuries after it first emerged, the just war concept is now US foreign policy.

There remain some grounds for disappointment. Obama failed to say that, while Afghanistan may meet just war conditions, Iraq never did. He failed to argue that success in Afghanistan is “morally certain” – a key just war condition. He never answered those who believe “total war” can never meet just war criteria. He never admitted that just war has never actually prevented a war. He failed to link defense of every person’s dignity with the fate of the unborn.

Still, just war theory is a major contribution of Catholic tradition to public policy thinking, and Obama’s speech marks the first time this contribution has been enshrined as the official peace platform of any US President.

Who knows? The day may come when America, invoking this very speech, avoids or ends a war. On that day, not only will humanity take one giant step toward genuine peace, but the Catholic Church will have proven its worth as a global force for good. As Advent approaches the arrival of the Prince of Peace, no Christmas gift could be greater than this: our Church sowing the seeds of a President’s pathway to peace.

#276: The Long and Winding Road

2009-12-11T17:34:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT: St. Jean Pied-de-Port is where pilgrims from three different starting points in France converge to rest one last time before beginning the daunting trek over the mountains into Spain and their eventual destination. The steep cobbled lane leading up to the trailhead is lined with hostels for pilgrims spending their last night in France.

Some make the pilgrimage on foot, others on bicycle or on horseback, or even by car. But they all have the same destination: the town on Spain's Atlantic coast where, legend holds, Saint James the Apostle (Santiago in Spanish, Saint Jacques in French) began his mission to convert Spain. Pilgrims have been tracking to his tomb since the tenth century.

What amazed me most is that each year El Camino sets new records. In 2008, 25,964 Pilgrims passed through St. Jean Pied-de-Port. In 2009, 26,901. When registering to certify their trek, some pilgrims cite "religion" as their motive; some cite "spirituality," others “sport" or "tourism" or "culture." Some cite several motives.

For me, it begs this question: "Why is the pilgrim experience so popular—especially in a secular age like ours?” Many other activities, after all, could serve those same motives. Why is it that pilgrimage draws people? Why do growing numbers choose the pilgrim’s path?

Perhaps pilgrimage touches on an inner desire much like John the Baptist’s -- a desire to make paths straight? Maybe, by completing the trek and conquering its obstacles, pilgrims feel they have filled every valley, made low every mountain and hill, straightened the winding roads, smoothed out the rough ways? We are all pilgrims, of course, all on our way to some destination, however distant or vague.

Advent reminds us that life is indeed a long and winding road. Our paths are seldom straight smooth or flat, and we may often feel like a voice crying in the wilderness. Yet, sometimes we find our way to a place (or a moment) where the pathway stretches before us clear and bright, with a new beginning at the end -- the beginning we Catholics celebrate as Christmas.

#275: Philippe Saez, the Man With Three Names.

2009-12-08T11:18:00.001-05:00

EXCERPT: Product of a Basque-language upbringing and elementary education at Notre-Dame de Belloc, Saez was twenty in 1978 when he joined the ETA. The decision was a young man’s revolt against the repression around him. During concert tours in Basque Spain, he had witnessed raids where police, lurking at nightclub exits, took men into custody and raped their dates. He even witnessed an onlooker shot to death in Pamplona in 1977.

“At the time,” he later said, “the ETA still represented the myth of the glorious days of the struggle against Franco. Joining up was a kind of exaltation for me, but I quickly went clandestine,”—in fact, he was made part of the ETA’s most secret commando unit, taking his new code name Txistu (the name of the Basque flute he played and taught).

The ETA trained Txistu in small arms combat, explosives, and bomb-making. In November, 1978 he drove getaway in the killing of a Spanish industrialist. In January, 1979 he took part in assassinating a general in Madrid, and that May he was sentry for a grenade attack that killed three Spanish army officers and their driver.

The next day he realized he had had enough of armed resistance, especially since negotiations had begun between the ETA and Spain’s post-Franco government. So Txistu got the ETA’s permission to quit, and he kept quiet until 1987, when he repented his acts, confessed them – and one year later entered Notre-Dame de Belloc as a Benedictine novice!

He later explained he had felt called to monastic life even before joining the ETA. Now Txistu acquired his third name, Frère (Brother) Jean Philippe. He set about learning theology and cheese-making.

God’s ways are certainly unlike ours, when such troubles over borders and power and violence find their final rest in the serene life of the Benedictine abbey of Notre-Dame de Belloc, amid rolling hills and grazing sheep.

Faith Beyond Borders

2009-11-30T23:24:00.000-05:00

The Benedictine abbey of Notre Dame de Belloc has been nestled in the hills of Southern France’s Basque region for more than 100 years. The countryside could not be more picturesque: rolling green hills dotted white with grazing sheep, needed to produce the abbey’s famous cheese, and snow-capped Pyrenees in the distance.

Mass in the abbey crypt is a sublime experience, as the austere modern chapel offers deeply resonant acoustics for the voices of the monks, whether they sing Gregorian chant or French or Basque-language polyphony.

But the abbey’s apparent serenity masks another dimension: solidarity with the Basque people. More than once French police have raided the abbey to search for evidence of collaboration with the Basque separatist movement, ETA.

At Odds Among Ourselves

2009-11-28T16:59:00.003-05:00

The spat between Congressman Patrick Kennedy and Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin began over healthcare reform, but quickly spilled onto other issues. Taken together, these “other issues” reflect much about the splintered state of American Catholicism. Even a simple listing reveals how deeply divided we have become:

The Abortion Issue. During my recent visits church visits in France, not a single Catholic (whether lay or clergy) could understand why American Catholics are at odds. The Notre Dame graduation, the disputes over politicians receiving Communion, the question of healthcare reform funding -- these seem peculiarly "American" problems. I explained that, since Roe V. Wade, many Catholics (and most bishops) equate "anti-abortion” with commitment to the total legal prohibition of abortion, and equated any other position with "pro-abortion.” This at least clarified the controversies for them, even though prohibition is a non-issue for French Catholics.

The Communion Issue. Some Bishops like Raymond Burke (former Archbishop of St. Louis) claim canon law is so clear they have no choice but to exclude catholic politicians from communion if they fail to tow the official line on abortion: "The Church's law is very clear…The person who persists publicly in grave sin is to be denied Holy Communion, and it [Canon Law] doesn't say that the bishop shall decide this. It's an absolute."

But other bishops believe just the opposite, such as Washington, DC Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh, who said: "That's the new way now to make your point…We never - the Church just didn't use Communion this way. It wasn't a part of the way we do things, and it wasn't a way we convinced Catholic politicians to appropriate the faith and live it and apply it; the challenge has always been to convince people.'' On the other hand, sanctioning Catholics tends to alienate them, he said. “I stand with the great majority of American bishops and bishops around the world in saying this canon [law] was never intended to be used this way." Wuerl also said that he thought "we've been making progress" in conveying the pro-life message to the Democratic Party, but "There was just a setback with the distraction of Communion."

No one should be surprised if rank and file Catholics become divided when even Bishops cannot agree on such aggressive measures.

The "Scandal" Issue. Clearly many Catholics were "scandalized" by Obama’s degree at Notre Dame, while others are equally "scandalized" by bishops moving to exclude politicians from Communion. But in Catholic tradition, "scandal" does not mean to offend or shock. It means to leave others into evil-doing.

Obviously, sex abuse by clergy is gravely scandalous, and the malfeasance of Bishops responsible for such clergy even more so, since it had led millions to doubt the moral integrity of the Catholic Church. Among this scandal’s victims are other bishops, like Bishop Tobin, who present themselves as moral arbiters to a Catholic public that no longer trusts them or the institutional authority they represent. Patrick Kennedy inevitably gets the benefit of the doubt because of the hierarchy’s self-inflicted credibility gap.

The Catholic Identity Issue. When Bishop Tobin wrote to Kennedy, "I’m not sure whether or not you fulfill the basic requirements of being a Catholic," he opened a particularly messy can of worms. Of course, all baptized Catholics are members of Christ's body. Of course, some people are better Catholics than others. Of course, Catholic parishes lack the clear-cut "membership" requirements of some Protestant churches. So, of course, every Catholic parish includes multiple degrees of membership. In my experience, very few parishioners perform all their duties and accept all Church teachings. As a matter of actual fact, "being a Catholic" means many things

These issues all point to one thing: we American Catholics are at odds among ourselves across a wide array of questions. I see no upside here, since I am convinced we are driving away millions of young adults (in their 20s, 30s, and 40s) who see a Church too preoccupied with internal conflicts to focus on its true mission of proclaiming Good News and practicing Love.

American Catholics desperately seek (or at least need) a leader who can unify us -- someone with a hopeful message, a constructive strategy, and an inclusive manner. Is there a candidate among our Bishops? Among our clergy? Among our laity?

Time will tell--but time is not on our side.

On Pilgrimage

2009-11-21T05:24:00.000-05:00

Lurking behind Thanksgiving’s obvious message of gratitude for God’s blessings is another theme: pilgrimage.

The gratitude of our Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers rose from this fact: they WERE pilgrims, following a journey along a path to an unfamiliar destination, a place where survival itself would be at risk.

During my recent trip to France’s southwest, I visited Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, where, since the 12th century, pilgrims from three different starting points have converged at the foot of the Pyrenees to rest one last time before beginning the daunting trek over the mountains into Spain and their eventual destination at San Diego de Compostella.

The amazing thing: after more than 8 centuries the number of pilgrims keeps growing. Each year brings a new record.

Until recently participants could obtain a record of their pilgrimage by registering their reason for going. Some said religion, others said spirituality, others sport, others leisure—and some said all of the above!

It fascinates me that all these reasons motivate people to go on pilgrimage, even though they could well motivate other activities instead. Why is it that pilgrimage draws people? Why is the pilgrim experience so popular?

We should not forget how many forms pilgrimage takes, and how diverse their destinations. There is Lourdes as well as Compostella. There is the Holy Land and Mecca (even if arriving by air is unlike walking from Paris to Spain). There is the “Path to Jerusalem,” the labyrinth in the cathedral at Chartres where one follows a stone path in the floor to arrive at a center that symbolizes Jerusalem itself.

And then there are historical pilgrimages. The Plymouth Pilgrims, for example, set a precedent for every wave of immigrants that followed, including those who today trek the line of land from South America up through Mexico into the promised land of the American southwest.

They arrive, like their Plymouth forebears, without permission or papers. And like them, they hope and pray the natives will offer the kind of welcome that leads to a shared bounty for which all might give thanks to God.

Balancing Act

2009-11-15T05:49:00.003-05:00

SEQUEL TO #271: While conducting a staff retreat last week I realized my earlier comments on Spirituality and Religion were incomplete. It’s true these terms mark a gap between my generation and younger Catholics, but they also mark a gap between us and my parents’ (or grandparents’) generation.

It’s common among my children’s peers to show interest in spirituality without religion. The big questions—What does life mean? What are we doing here? Where is my life going?—have not disappeared, but many younger adults who pose these big questions have no confidence in the Church’s capacity to help answer them.

But I had forgotten the opposite extreme: my childhood experience of Catholicism before Vatican II (1962-1965), when too many Catholics practiced religion without spirituality—that is, they went through the motions, they obeyed all the rules, but without much attention to the inner life where the big questions arise. Such people belonged to Church, but did not pose or wrestle with the big questions.

If spirituality is about the inner life and religion is about belonging, perhaps the next generation focuses too little on belonging, while the generation before mine focused too much on belonging.

The lucky fate of my generation was to witness the way Vatican II struck a happy medium by rejecting not only religion as an end in itself, but also spiritual journeys pursued by isolated indivuals unaided by a community of faith.

Unhappily, this balancing act dominated Catholic life for only one generation. Is it possible Catholicism has swung from one extreme (hollow, empty relgiosity) to another (isolated spirituality) in a mere 50 years?

#274: Like the Air We Breathe

2009-10-31T10:43:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT: I got a shock last week when I found myself delivering a series of parish talks on the theme “Parish.” Suddenly I realized that I had never spoken on this topic before – in 35 years devoted to parish work!

If I had really been paying attention, the irony should not have surprised me at all. So what if I tended to take “Parish” for granted, even though it has been the focus of my entire professional career? Church teaching also takes “Parish” for granted. Canon law takes “Parish” for granted. So do most Catholics -- until someone tries to close their parish!

I’m not talking here about our church buildings. People made great sacrifices to build them and take great pleasure in using them. Nor am I talking about the identity of individual parishes. Obviously, Catholics have often invested great pride in their own parish’s schools, teams, and successes – especially wherever one’s parish came to represent community rivalries or ethnic solidarity.

No, I am talking about the phenomenon of “Parish” in general: the entity, the “thing” that has been the basis for normal day-to-day Catholic living for nearly all Catholics. If Tip O’Neill said all politics is local, we could say that all Catholic life is “Parish.”

The irony is that, for hundreds of millions of Catholics worldwide, “Parish” is like the air we breathe: we hardly ever notice it – unless we’re deprived of it.

#273: A Second Reformation?

2009-10-30T11:01:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT: What if, by encouraging conservative Anglicans to join the like-minded Catholic Church, the Vatican eventually encourages all Christians to seek out like-minded churches for themselves?

Suppose some progressive Catholics become Anglicans just because it seems more progressive? Suppose others find the Unitarian more congenial? This has already happened to individuals, but what if it happens with entire congregations and their priests?

Christianity’s first Reformation resulted in people forced to belong to whatever Church their ruler chose. So Northern Europe became Protestant while Southern Europe remained Catholic, and resistors nearly everywhere were persecuted. Hence theological differences not only fractured Christian unity – they validated violence.

Perhaps a new Reformation would peaceably encourage everyone to make their own choice: the Body of Christ as consumer society!

#272: Travel Lessons: Cultural and Spiritual

2009-10-16T20:46:00.001-04:00

EXCERPT: So now the parishes of Antigonish are being told to pool their own cash to fund a $15 million suit settled by a bishop who has already resigned over a child pornography charge which reflects behavior going back more than twenty years!

"This will bring another element of pain into the situation," Rev. Paul Abbass, a spokesman for the Antigonish diocese said. "We want to find some hope in the midst of all of this, but right now it’s just so overwhelming."

When the Mount Cashel story originally broke in 1989, I was editing a Catholic newspaper, and we covered the story as a "Canadian" phenomenon with fingers crossed, hoping there would be no expansion into the US. Of course, that expansion came all too soon, first in Louisiana, then in Boston, then in dozens of US dioceses. The Vatican, crossing its own fingers, termed it an "American problem."

We have since learned that priestly sex abuse and episcopal malfeasance are not the monopoly of any country or hemisphere.