Francis Pushes Conservatives Into the Cafeteria

just 'cause he

clowns around,

don't think he 

doesn't mean 

business 

Well Pope Francis’ long expected encyclical on a Christian response to the impact of climate change on the environment is due to be released on Thursday and it is already causing a stir. Italian   journalist, Sandro Magister, an outspoken critic of Pope Francis and blogger for the Italian daily L’Espresso wrote the introduction for a bootlegged copy—or alleged copy—his editors had managed to purloin and was promptly and indefinitely deprived of his credentials by the Vatican Press Office.  But this is not simply a matter of a newspaper getting a scoop.  Magister has become one of the rallying forces in the anti-Francis movement and has close ties to some of the curial prelates who find Francis’ reforms very threatening to their lives of comfortable graft.  The Katholik Krazies are rallying around Magister in this latest kerfuffle as this encyclical is a particularly neuralgic point for them.  While previous Popes, including Francis’ predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, have spoken up to raise the issue of environmental responsibility (and Benedict was given the moniker “The Green Pope” in acknowledgement for his environmental concerns), with Francis a real danger to the industrialized establishment has arisen as Francis is not one to pull any punches.  Previous magisterial pronouncements have been limited to somewhat abstract moral principles.  Francis is not a theologian (he was trained as a chemist) but has a science background and tends to bring abstractions right down to the very concrete realities.  This makes nervous those semi-gnostics who like to divide creation into the material and the spiritual and think our only concern is to be about the spiritual. 

Sandro Magister is not the only water carrier for the big boys of industry whose productivity and wealth depend on an unlimited access to water, atmosphere, forests, and the earth.  Former Senator and professedly new to the Catholic Cafeteria, Rick Santorum, is no admirer of Pope Francis, espousing a Reform of the Reform Catholicism that is selective in its acceptance of the teachings and decrees of the Second Vatican Council.  The implications of the role of the Church in the modern world as outlined in Gaudium et Spes would seem to him and to many Catholics like him to put too much stress on the secular and to lose focus on the Church’s spiritual mission.  Of course the fact that Consol Energy, a Pennsylvania energy company with interests in coal and natural gas production, is one of Santorum’s clients compromises the former’s Senator’s objectivity when it comes to developing a Christian response to the moral imperative of environmental responsibility.  Senator Santorum said that the Pope should limit himself to spiritual matters and leave science to the scientists.  The Pope has an advanced degree in the sciences; Santorum’s academic background is Political Science (“not a real science” as Sheldon Cooper would say) for undergraduate; a Masters in Business Administration, and a Juris Doctor (Law School Graduate).  But then Cardinal Burke says that men need to dress like men so as they say on the lower East Side: “Go figah.” 

Jeb Bush is another Catholic running for President who weighed in against Pope Francis’ teaching on the moral issues regarding the environment though he was a bit more respectful in his tone than Senator Santorum.  The former Florida governor and latest scion of the Bush dynasty to seek the White House said that he would not pass judgment until he read what the Pope wrote, but thinks that the purpose of religion was about making us better people and less about “things that end up getting in the political realm.”  Again we hear the whine of that that mild gnosticism. Well, while Poppy Bush was devilishly intelligent (adjective meant to be taken literally), his sons are somewhat dim bulbs who seem incapable of making the connections between moral imperatives and political agenda even when a Pope sent Cardinal Pio Laghi, a family friend of the Bushes, to explain it. 

But the issue about Francis bugging the conservatives is more fundamental than his call for a responsible use of our natural resources and protecting the environment.  The heart of the matter is probably best explained in this morning’s New York Time’s article where Michael McKenna, an energy lobbyist and Republican political consultant—and a self proclaimed “conservative Catholic”—said the following

“For practicing conservative Catholics, the folks who sit in the pews on Sunday, this is not going to be an indictment of guys like Rubio and Jeb,” Mr. McKenna said. “Those guys have already made up their minds on climate change. For the real churchgoers, this is going to be an indictment of the pope.

“This pope is selling a line of Latin American-style socialism,” he continued. “This guy is not in sync with the American Catholic Church. Guys like Jeb and Rubio are more in line with the American Catholic Church than the pope.”

This is the problem: not that the Pope is speaking out on the moral imperatives of environmental responsibility but that the Pope is making it clear that unbridled free-market capitalism and the raping of the earth’s resources and environment that is consequent to lack of governmental—and international—control is not compatible with our Catholic faith and morality.  While previous popes—Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI—have spoken out loud and clear about the moral imperatives of social responsibility, Francis still represents a startling discontinuity with his predecessors.  The break is not so much in the message—it would be difficult to find more explicit challenges to the industrial and economic status quo than Rerum Novarum or Mater et Magistra—as in the stance from which the position is being declared.  At the end of the day Francis’ predecessors went home to the Apostolic Palace and its courtly life.  Francis, in his very public rejection of the pontifical life style and his frayed sleeves and down-at-the-heels black shoes lets you know that despite that friendly smile and his donning the occasional clown’s nose for a photo, means business.  His merciless reforms at the Vatican Bank, his virtual sacking of opposition Cardinal Raymond Burke, his plain-spoken off-the-cuff remarks to the press, his calling to account of Bishops who have covered up sexual misconduct by their priests tells us that this encyclical isn’t going to be ceremonially delivered and then go away.  Republican members of Congress (and potential Presidential candidates) should start sweating now about his September address to a Joint Session of Congress.  (Not that he will let Democrats off the hook when it comes to the unborn and probably same-sex marriage.)  But it will be much harder for Republicans in the upcoming elections to revive the Karl Rove strategy of convincing Catholics that our true political home is in the GOP. 

Francis himself has said that his papacy will be short but there is no doubt that he will not leave the Church as he found it and his legacy will be a pain in the ass for advocates of the old order of things.  It is a risky business for Francis personally but for the Church it is a defining entry into the realities of applying the Gospel to our contemporary world.  Angels need no longer dance on the head of a pin ‘cause we ain’t countin’ no more.  

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition

Rumors are flying around that when Pope Francis comes to the United States in October he will continue on to El Salvador where he will canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by  an assassin from the American backed Salvadoran military in 1980.  The interesting aspects of this canonization is that Romero has not yet been beatified—the normal preliminary step to sainthood—and there as yet no approved miracles to testify to his sainthood. 

Romero was born on August 15, 1917 to carpenter Santos Romero and his wife, Guadalupe de Jésus Galdámez in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador.  He was one of 8 children. The family does not seem to have particularly devout as the child was not baptized for 20 months after his birth, yet Oscar himself was drawn to the churches in town even as a very young child.   There were only three years of formal schooling available to him but he was tutored by a local teacher and at age 13 went off to a high-school seminary.  His father, a practical man, had wanted him to be a carpenter and the boy showed promise in that trade, but wanted to be a priest.  His intelligence was noticed in the seminary and he was eventually sent to Rome for theological studies and he was ordained in Rome on April 4, 1942.  World War II was raging at the time and on his way back to El Salvador, Father Romero and his companion, Father Valladares were imprisoned in Cuba as they were coming from Italy, then an Axis power.   He was soon repatriated and took up pastoral work in his native region in eastern El Salvador. 

Romero was by nature a conservative and a pious man.  He did what for the time and place were some innovative things such as establish Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but by and large he was given to supporting the traditional devotions and pieties of the Salvadoran peasants. 

El Salvador had from the time of its independence from Spain been controlled by an oligarchy sometimes called “The Fourteen Families.”  (There were, in fact, more families than fourteen, though they were all inter-related through marriages and had common interest.)  These were the great landowners of Spanish blood.  Their children were sent to Cuba or Mexico or even to Spain and other European countries for education.  They lived on large estates farmed by peasants of Native American or mixed blood.  After independence their cash crop was indigo from which an expensive blue dye is produced, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century the economy had switched to coffee production.  90% of the land was owned by this small number of wealthy families.  The Constitution was written to give these families a majority of seats in the national assembly and they—or their client families—held the officer positions in the military.  The military controlled the government by a series of dictatorships from 1931 until 1979.  A 1932 peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí was brutally suppressed with the murder of over 40,000 Salvadoran peasants.  In 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a conservative but reformist military junta that realized unless there was some economic and land reform the situation in El Salvador would be untenable and the country would be vulnerable to an extreme left-wing (read Marxist) power-grab.  The American government under President Carter, and later President Reagan, supported to the Junta, while Cuba and more left-wing governments supported the FLMN  (Farabundo Martí Liberation National Front) rebels.  This led to a violent civil war.  In an attempt to suppress the rebels the Salvadoran Army, under command of the Junta, was often responsible for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, most notably the El Mozote Massacre in 1981. 

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding a just social order—teachings rooted in the Encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and the decrees of the Second Vatican Council—were a powerful stimulus for the poor of El Salvador to seek social change and this left priests, nuns, and lay catechists vulnerable to attack by Junta forces who saw the work of the Church as supporting a more radical social change than they were prepared to make. 

Meanwhile in 1970 Romero had been named auxiliary to Archbishop Luis Chávez of San Salvador and four years later given his own diocese of Santiago de Mariá, a poor rural diocese.  In 1977 Paul VI named Romero to be Archbishop of San Salvador in succession to Archbishop Chávez who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Romero was, as I said, a pious priest of a more conservative bent.  He was certainly no political activist.  But like many holy people, he did not limit himself to those with whom he agreed but had friends across the political and theological spectrum.  Among his closest friends was the Jesuit Rutilio Grande.  Grande worked among the peasants, catechizing them and raising their consciousness to understand that the sort of social dysfunction where wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few while others lack necessities is contrary to the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  Rutilio Grande had huge influence among the peasantry and his message became a threat to the existing social order.  In a famous homily he declared

I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God ... of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.

On March 12, 1977, Grande and two lay associates travelling with him were ambushed and killed.  Romero heard of the murders and went at once to the church where the three bodies lay.  After celebrating Mass there, the Archbishop spent hours listening to the stories of the peasants who had gathered their to mourn.  Unable to sleep, he spent the night in prayer and underwent a deep personal conversion where he realized that the Church, if it were to be faithful, could not stand silently by while the poor were being driven ever deeper into the dirt but had to stand with them and for them.  He said that as he looked at the body of his friend,  he thought “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path” The morning after the murders, Archbishop Romero announced that he, as Archbishop, would attend no government function until the murders had been investigated.  In a Catholic culture where the presence of the Archbishop gave a legitimacy to the government, this act of separation was seen as a repudiation of the government’s moral legitimacy and a severe blow to its credibility.  It was an invitation to reject government authority.  The following day Romero published the following statement

The true reason for [Grande's] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande, without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent. In our case, Father Rutilio Grande.

As if this was not sufficient aggravation to the government, Archbishop Romero next cancelled all Masses throughout his Archdiocese, instead summoning the faithful to a single outdoor Mass in San Salvador.  150 priests and over 100,000 faithful attended.  
to be continued

OMG: There's A Communist In the Vatican!!!

Pope Francis greets Ban Ki-Moon

Well, Pope Francis may not be after the nuns, but he sure keeps himself busy stirring up hornets’ nests.  Last week he received the Secretary General of the United Nations, Doctor Ban Ki-moon along with the executive officers of the U.N.’s programs, agencies, and funds who were meeting in Rome and paid a courtesy call on the Holy Father. It is customary for the Pope to give a little exhortation on such an occasion and Pope Francis did so.  It was all rather pro-forma and the Pope really didn’t break any new ground.  “Father Z,” the Wizard of the Krazy Katholic’s Emerald City, said that for the most part it was simply (and I love this, I really do): “warmed up John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”  But Rush Limbaugh, old pill-popper that he is (or, hopefully by the goodness of God’s grace and 12 steps, was), went thermal and called the Pope a Marxist (again.)  And the Katholic Krazies on the blogosphere picked up his rant and formed a virtual reality mob of pitch-fork-carrying, torch-brandishing, lunatics howling that the Pope wanted to reach into their pockets and take their hard earned money and give it to the undeserving poor of the world.  My old friend Janet over at Restore DC Catholicism http://restore-dc-catholicism.blogspot.com) implied that Francis is “naïve,” “simplistic,” and even “moronic” for advocating socialism.  (Janet also refers to Judas as “the patron saint of Social Justice”—so you know where she is coming from.) The only problem is that the Holy Father is not advocating socialism—much less Marxism.   The talk, as Father Z said, is consistent with the Catholic Social teaching of the previous two popes—and, for that matter, with the magisterium stretching back through Progressio Popolorum, Gaudium et Spes, Mater et Magistra, Quadragesimo Anno, and Rerum Novarum.  Ol’ Janet can’t figure out why the Holy Father speaks about “legitimate redistribution of wealth.”  Duh.  Maybe to differentiate what he is calling for from the sort of illegitimate redistribution of wealth represented by the confiscation of private property such as happened in Marxist societies.  The Pope is not calling for individuals to be deprived of the fruits of their labor, but for new economic and social systems that will “promote generous, effective, and practical openness to the needs of others.”  He is calling for nothing more that what was the major theme of John Paul II’s papacy—“solidarity,” the consciousness among people that we are responsible for and to one another to insure that each of God’s children has the proper share of this world’s resources that our Father in heaven wishes them to have.  Nowhere does Pope Francis say that the pie should be cut up in equal shares, or that Peter should be robbed so that Paul won’t starve.  He is just saying that you and I and Peter all need to be deeply aware that we are responsible for Paul’s welfare, material as well as spiritual, and that we need to work for a world in which not a few are wealthy to excess while many lack the basic necessities of life.  The question will come down to this for the Janets and Rushes of this world: where is your treasure?   I am not surprised that Rush walks away from Jesus like the rich young man in the gospels, but I would have expected more from Janet and her kindred.