Time For A Rant

Sorry, guys, we got more
important things than you

As I only listen to the radio when I am driving, I probably should not listen to NPR as my particular brand of road-rage has nothing to do with other drivers (dim-witted as they can be) but in how dense, even stupid, the American public can be, something that NPR seems to spotlight in show after show.  So this past week I find out that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not require paid parental leave.  It is too expensive!!!  Yes, I realize how expensive it would be to offer.  Like Health-Care—another staple of “First World Nations”—and like universal health care I keep hearing people say “we can’t afford it.”  Well, why can’t we afford it?  We have the money.  Or, we would have the money if we (or our elected representatives) didn't  think that an unbounded supply of military helicopters, tanks, submarines, destroyers (the very word is loaded), jets, carriers, missiles, bombs, and whatever were a greater priority than our children.  And of course included in that priority over the welfare of the American family are the destabilizing wars in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the blank-check to our Israeli friends to defend themselves while despoiling Palestinians of their homes, orchards, and farms, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly know as the School of the Americas), and assorted other forays into international oppression.  Now you may say that I am departing from my concentration on the Church and entering the realm of politics, but let me put in this context: I don’t want to hear any of that “family values” crap from any “Christian”—pseudo evangelical or neo-traditionalist katholic—who opposes family leave while supporting a “defense” budget that is larger than that not only of all our allies combined, but of our combined allies together with Russia and China.  Let’s just be honest where our priorities are—and they aren’t with our families.  And the biggest danger to our the stability of our families is not from same-sex marriage but from a socio-economic-political structure that puts support for married couples and their children low on the list of fiscal priorities.   WWJD?  I bet he would just ****.  

Built on the Foundation of the Apostles and Now in Ruins

The Destruction of the Ancient

Church of Assyria in Mosul 

There are no Christians left in Mosul.  For the first time since the days of the Apostles, the city of Mosul in what is today Iraq is devoid of its ancient Christian population.  Built on the foundation laid by the preaching of the Apostles Thomas, (Jude) Thaddeus, and Bartholomew, and—by tradition—visited by the Apostle Simon Peter, it is one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world, a direct daughter of the original Church at Jerusalem and certainly as old as the Churches of Rome, Alexandria, Philippi, Corinth, India; centuries older than the Churches of England, Ireland, Germany, or Poland.  Mosul, by the way, contains the site of ancient Babylon (which is referred to in 1 Peter 5:13), though there are other interpretations of what the author of 1 Peter meant by “Babylon” which was also a primitive Christian code word for Rome. 

Ancient Mesopotamia was never part of the Roman Empire and by the fifth century political strife between Constantinople and the Sassanid Empire of Persia, led the Church in the Sassanid world to early establish its independence from any Romano/Byzantine authority.  The Churches had been in communion up until this point and thus the Church of the East had always accepted the Creed of the Council of Nicea which we Catholics (as well as Lutherans and Anglicans) use each Sunday and the Orthodox and Byzantine Rite Catholics use in every Divine Liturgy.  The bonds had been broken however by the time of the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451) and the Church of the East has never accepted the Caledonian formula that Jesus Christ is One Person with two Natures: a Human Nature likes ours in every respect and a Divine Nature which is in essence identical to the Divine Nature of the Father.  These two natures are inseparably united but not in any way mingled, each retaining the purity of its particular Nature intact.  The Chalcedonian Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans) use the Title for the Virgin Mary of Θεοτόκος (Theotokos) loosely meaning “Mother of God” as the theological symbol of this doctrine in as that Mary carried in her womb and gave birth to One Person Who is both God and man. Mary is clearly the mother of the man, Jesus.  In Jesus his Divine Nature is inseparable, though totally distinguishable, from his Human Nature, thus permitting us to say that she who gave birth to the man Jesus also gave birth the Second Person of the Trinity for in him his humanity, while distinct from his Divine Nature, cannot be separated from his Divinity. For Catholics, this is the Gold Standard of Christian Orthodoxy.  For the Ancient Churches of the East there is a reluctance to accept this precise formula because they see in it that somehow the Human Nature is subordinated to the Divine Nature though Ephesus and Chalcedon went to great lengths to make sure that this idea that the one nature absorbs the other is not the case.  The Ecumenical dialogues over the years since Vatican II have helped each side better understand the position of the other and realize that the difference is one of emphasis (the West emphasizing the Divinity of Christ; the East giving more emphasis to his humanity) than of essential difference of faith. 

From Mosul, Baghdad, Tabriz, Maragheh, and other centers this “Assyrian Christianity” (also sometimes referred to as East Syrian Christianity) spread southwards into India and eastwards far into modern China.  This led to the ancient legends of Prester John (John the Priest) and the fabulous wealth of his mystical kingdom.   In the fourteenth century, however, Tamerlane’s Turko/Mongol armies however brutally destroyed the Christian communities of central Asia eventually reducing Assyrian Christianity to the Mesopotamian communities from which it had originally spread.  (The southern communities in India remained and still remain today.  We should take a look at them someday.)  The Patriarchate located itself at Alqosh near Mosul.  At the end of the fifteenth century Patriarch Shimun IV Basidi decreed henceforth Patriarchs must be chosen from his family and this led to a rebellion among many of the bishops.  In 1552 a group of bishops, dissatisfied with the hereditary patriarchate, elected a rival patriarch in Mar Yohannan Sulaqa.  The patriarch-designate needed to be consecrated bishop by a prelate of his own stature or higher and consequently journeyed to Rome where he reestablished communion between his faction of the Assyrian Church and the Catholic Church and was granted the title of “Patriarch of the Chaldeans” by Julius III.  The Church itself was called the Church of Athura and Mosul.  The communion between Rome and the Chaldeans collapsed in the early seventeenth century but was restored in 1672 by Mar Joseph I.  Meanwhile, various of the Alqosh Patriarchs made overtures about entering the Roman Communion, but other than some doctrinal concords, nothing came of it until 1804. The two patriarchal lines were merged by Pius VIII in 1830.  There is still, however, a patriarchal line not in communion with Rome and headed by Mar Dinkha IV who, because of the instability in Iraq, lives in exile in Chicago from where he administers the Church.  The Patriarchate in union with Rome under Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako is located currently in Baghdad.

These Christians have suffered terribly ever since the United States invaded Iraq in the Second Gulf War.  As evil as Sadaam Hussein was, he gave protection to religious minorities.  The failure to establish a stable government has increasingly left Christians, Jews, Mandaeans and other religious minorities at the mercy of Islamic extremists.  The internecine violence between the Shia majority and the Sunni minority has been as vicious as any persecution of non-Islamic sects. 

The creation of the Caliphate by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as the Iraqi State of Iraq and the Levant, has raised the terror level for Christians to full alert.  Two weeks ago this self-proclaimed Caliphate ordered all Christians in Mosul to convert to Islam or be put to death.  There have been Christians in Mosul since the days of the Apostles!  Mosul has long been the center of Iraqi Christianity.  A decade ago there were 60,000 Christians in Mosul.  Today there are none!  Ancient Christian Churches have been turned into mosques or burned to ruins.  The fleeing Christian population has been assaulted, beaten, robbed of whatever valuable they were trying to bring out to safety with them.  

I remember having dinner with friends about two weeks before President Bush declared war on the Hussein regime in March 2003.  There were other guests including a couple who are Christian Arabs.  The husband is Egyptian; the wife Lebanese.  Both are Catholics.  Rabid Republicans in every other respect, they lambasted the upcoming war.  “It will destabilize the region.  The human suffering will be immense.  And no one will suffer more than the Christian population of the Mid-East.”  This was at a time when all we heard from the Bush Administration was how evil the Hussein regime was and how we were going to “liberate” the people of Iraq.  How tragically true my companions’ words have come to be.  Pope John Paul sent his emissary, Cardinal Pio Laghi, a personal friend of the Bush family, to beg the administration not to go to war.  He at least was admitted to the Oval Office.  The bishops of President Bush’s own Church, the United Methodist, were refused appointment.  So in the end Halliburton and Vice President Cheney made their money but at the cost of immense human suffering.  There are two Chaldean Catholic Dioceses in the United States—one located in Detroit, the other in San Diego.  Between them there are about 200,000 Catholics.  The Assyrian Church of the East, which is not in communion with the Pope, has three dioceses in the United States but notably fewer adherents.  It is common practice for Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians to share the Eucharist.  The Liturgy of the Church also has an ancient Eucharistic Prayer—far older than the Roman Canon—which has the distinguishing factor of there being no “Words of Institution,” that is the repetition of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper.  We will have to do a posting on that sometime.  In the meantime pray for the Christians of Iraq.  

Rogue Religion--Both in Christianity and in Islam

The restored Caliphate and its
Caliph Abu Bakr al Baghdadi 

Religion has great potential for good in the world; unfortunately it also has a great potential for evil.   The Dalai Lama has written that the purpose of religion is to cultivate such positive human qualities as tolerance, generosity, and compassion.  To this end religion has been the motivating factor in creating great works of art, music, and literature.  Even more impressively it has built massive health-care systems, institutions of learning, and movements for peace and reconciliation.  Religion has produced such people as Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Archbishop Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Jimmy Carter, Jacques Bunel, Damian of Molokai, Thich Nhat Hanh, Corrie ten Boom, Raoul Wallenberg, and Millard and Linda Fuller.  But there is a shadow side to religion as well which has led to pogroms and persecutions and inquisitions and wars. 

We now see this new phenomenon known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under the leadership of the self-proclaimed caliph Abu-Bakr al Baghdadi.  The Iraqi division of Al-Qaeda proclaimed the Islamic State of Iraq in that part of Iraq where it had been able to drive out the Iraqi military and establish its authority over the local populace. Abu-Bakr al Baghdadi, the mullah of a small mosque, had risen to prominence in Iraq in great part because of his having been held by American forces for ten months in 2004.  He had a seat on the Mujahedeen  Shura Council,  the Sunni Islamic Council that directed the Iraqi insurgency.  In 2010 when Abu Omar al Baghdadi was killed in an American attack, abu-Bakr was selected to succeed him as the head of the insurgency quasi-State.

When in 2013 the Iraqi insurgency expanded into Syria in Syria’s ongoing civil war, Abu Bakr proclaimed the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  But this was only the initial step of his dream—shared by many radical Muslims—of reestablishing the ancient Islamic Caliphate—a religious and political empire that in his heyday stretched from what is today Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan in the east through Armenia, Turkey Greece and the Balkans as well as Syria, Palestine (and modern Israel), the Arab peninsula, Iran and Iraq, along north Africa with Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and up into Europe in Spain and Portugal to the Pyrenees.  To this end, two weeks ago Abu Bakr proclaimed himself Caliph.

Now there is not agreement in the Muslim world about Abu Bakr being Caliph any  more than there is agreement in the Christian world that Pope Francis is the Vicar of Christ.   I think he is; my Baptist neighbor likes Francis but doesn’t think he is the Vicar of Christ—in fact, doesn’t think that Christ has a vicar, or needs one.  We are both Christians, we just disagree on this point.  Well, ok, there are other points as well.  And the same is true in the Muslim world.  Islam is not a unified religion. In fact it is far less unified than Christianity.  But the dream of a restored Caliphate will capture the imagination of many young Muslims who feel that for these last six centuries or so their religion has not been respected and this is the chance to make its mark once again.  While this Abu Bakr fellow would seem to be another religious nut-case like David Allen Bawden, aka “Pope Michael,” a peculiar young man from Kansas who, along with his 30 “solid followers” believes he’s the true Pope, the self-selected Caliph needs to be taken far more seriously as he has the potential to bring together a significant portion of the Muslim world that has been moving more and more towards fundamentalism over the past twenty years. 

The Caliph is the successor of Mohammed.  From the very beginning there has been discord over the position with Shiite Muslims claiming that the caliphate must descend through the family of Mohammed while Sunni’s do not.  In a future posting we will look at the struggles in Islam that followed the death of Mohammed in 632 AD and the origins of the Sunni/Shia conflict.  Although himself a Sunni, Abu Bakr, now known officially as Amir al-Mu’minin  Caliph Ibrahim, in an effort to gain Shiite support as well as Sunni, claims descent from Al-Husayn ibn ‘Alî ibn Abî Tâlib, the grandson of Mohammed.  

I think when we remember that President George W. Bush said that God told him to invade Iraq we can see the danger that religion , in the wrong hands (and minds), can create.  I remember a few days before the second Iraq war began having dinner with friends.  Other guests at the table included a Christian Arab couple.  The wife is Syrian; the husband Egyptian.  Both are Catholics.  Although they are staunch Republicans, they emphatically said that this war would destabilize the entire Near East and bring great suffering on many, including and especially, the Christian population of these nations.  Truer words were not spoken.  Pope John Paul warned us very sternly not to go into this war and he was ignored.  The American bishops did nothing to make his message heard in this country.  Few clergy took up the Pope’s admonition. 

There was, I believe, a time when the situation in the Near East could have be defused by the United States insisting on a just solution to the Palestinian issue.  The Israel Lobby in this country made sure that did not happen and we have continued to give Israel a blank check to abuse its Arab population.  Muslims—and Christians—have seen their co-religionists have their centuries-old olive orchards uprooted, their homes bulldozed, their communities divided by “the Wall,” and their people terrorized  by the “settlers” and the Israeli soldiers who protect the thieves who rob the Palestinians of their fields, their shops, and their homes.  The injustices perpetrated on these people whose ancestors lived in that land when Joshua first led the Hebrew people across the Jordan into a “promised land”  have set the Arab world afire and that conflagration now threatens the whole world.  It is, I am afraid, far too late to douse the flames by correcting the injustices in Israel/Palestine.  Militant Islam is on the move.  Thank you to the Presidents Bush.  Thank you to Dick Cheney.  Thank you to Ronald Rumsfeld.   And thank you to the “Christianity” that enabled this disaster.  

The Oath and the Offense of Lèse Majesté against God

The Bishop administering Confirmation in

the Arlington Diocese

Boy, this issue of the Arlington oath has exploded my blog with three-to-four times the number of hits this past day.  Well, more on it today. 

Some years ago I was in Rome for a meeting of a committee of which I was a member and a colleague of mine, an Italian priest who teaches Moral Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University (though he isn’t a Jesuit) asked me why I had chosen to do my doctoral studies in history and not theology.   I told him that while theology interested me, I would be reluctant to take the oath required of theology professors. History lies outside the jurisdiction of the magisterium and it is better that I stick there.  While as a faithful Catholic, I would not knowingly teach anything contrary to the teaching of the Church, I found it demeaning that it would be presumed that I or any Catholic professor would violate our sacred trust and present ideas contrary to the faith of the Church as if they were in fact part of the deposit of faith.  It is demeaning to one’s human and professional dignity to presume that he or she would betray the trust given them.  If one betrays this trust—ok, then act but the oath given to theology professors on Catholic faculties unprovokedly calls into question their commitment to the faith.    

This moral theology professor poo-pooed my reservation and said: of those oaths—“they’re given in bad faith, take them in bad faith.”  

I have often told that story and always gotten a laugh.  And I can see how others could be so cavalier about an oath “given in bad faith,” but for me an oath is an oath and it calls upon God to be my witness.     

The Diocese of Arlington is asking Catholics to stand up and swear with God as their witness, that they hold everything that is taught not only by the universal magisterium (the Pope alone and the College of Bishops acting in concert with the Pope  but by the bishops collectively (The USCCB) and by the local bishop.  This is a tall order.  OK—they want the catechists to hold—not just publically but in their conscience—that abortion is morally evil, that contraception is morally evil, that same-sex relationships are morally evil.  OK—we got that.  But they also want Virginia Catholics to swear that they abide by the Church’s teaching on capital punishment.  They want Virginia Catholics to swear that they abide by the Church’s teaching on just war.  They want Virginia Catholics to swear that they abide by the Church’s teachings on the rights of people to migrate.  They want Virginia Catholics to swear that they abide by the Church teachings on economic justice.  Now I realize these teachings are nuanced—as is the teaching on contraception and, in fact, are all doctrines—but do you really think that the person-in-the-Arlington-pews supports the teaching on the Death Penalty and the very limited circumstances in which it can be used?  No one who is going to vote for Ken Cuccinelli this autumn would qualify.   Do you really think the person-in-the-Arlington-pews think that the Presidents Bush, I and II brought us into an unjust war in Iraq?  And if they do, did they think it at the time and would they still think it if the circumstances were repeated today?  Do you think the person-in-the-Arlington-pews agrees in intellect and will with the Bishops’ 1983 pastoral on nuclear weapons or 1986 letter on Economic justice?  These documents have never been repealed and still constitute part of the teaching required by the proposed oath.

No this oath is going to bring people of good faith who have legitimate reservations about Church teaching to either forsake the ministry of teaching or to call on God to witness a lie.  People of integrity will walk away from the oath.  People who do not take God seriously will step up and perjure themselves before God.

There is no need for such a moral quandary.  The oath is being arbitrarily imposed. Canon Law does not require—nor support—such an oath.  There are alternatives.  Catechists can, at the annual mass installing them in their ministry, be called on to stand in Church, recite a profession of faith, and promise the pastor and the congregation that they will teach the faith of the Church as the Church teaches it.  The same end is attained without the lèse majesté of an unnecessary oath. 

Here Is Where the Need of a Fortnight For Freedom Is Real

The Mar Elias Monastery in

Bethlehem--Christians in the

Near East are in great peril

I want to post these selections from a United Press article by Bassem Maroue that was posted several days ago to make us more aware of the pressing concern for the safety of Syria’s Christian minority.  By and large the “Arab Spring” has been a disaster for the Christians of the Near East and American foreign policy is not helping them—to the contrary the suffering of Christians in Iraq is directly traceable to the policies of the Bush administration and the support of the Obama Administration for the “pro-Democracy” movement in Egypt is destabilizing the situation of the Coptic Christians there.  (For more information on Christians in Islamic countries see entries for December 24, 26 2011,  March 20, 21, 23, and June 7, 2012.) 

Christians, who make up about 10 per cent of Syria's population, say they are particularly vulnerable to the violence sweeping the country of 22 million people. They are fearful that Syria will become another Iraq, with Christians caught in the crossfire between rival Islamic groups.

"What is happening in these neighbourhoods pains our hearts," said Maximos al-Jamal, a Greek Orthodox priest who is still in Homs. He says about 90 of the civilians in two besieged Homs neighbourhoods are Christians, down from thousands who lived in the area before the uprising began.

"Before we were staying here to guard our homes but now the situation is unbearable," one Homs resident told The Associated Press by telephone, asking that his name not be used for fear of reprisals by both sides of the conflict.

He said he feared the rebels want to keep the Christians trapped in the city as a bargaining chip while the army's bombardment and ground attacks on the city intensify. Syrian Christians have largely stuck by President Bashar Assad, fearing the strength of Muslim hard-liners in the uprising against his rule.

Several mediators have made an urgent appeal to evacuate the Christians who they fear could be targeted for their religion. Syrian Christians don't have to look far for an example of brutal treatment. Hundreds of thousands of Christians fled Iraq after their community and others were repeatedly targeted by extremist militants in the chaotic years after Saddam Hussein's 2003 ouster.

The Christians, who are trapped in Homs' Hamidiyeh and Bustan Diwan neighbourhoods, include four children under the age of 10. There is barely any electricity or running water, telephone lines are unreliable and they are forced to hide in shelters during daily shelling. 

Al-Jamal said that many Christians from Homs are coming to his office in the city to get marriage or birth certificates to apply for visas to leave the country.

"If Syrian Christians get visas from other countries, I say more than 70 per cent of them will leave," he said.

 For what you can do to help, contact the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. (Paste this into your browser: http://www.cnewa.org/home.aspx?ID=26&pagetypeID=12&sitecode=HQ )

Keeping in Mind This Christmas the Christians of the Near East

Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Mar Emmanuel III Delly

celebrates Christmas Liturgy in Mosul.  Priests from

Arlington VA, note the altar girl serving mass on the

picture's right. 

We think of the Iraqi people as Muslims but before the second Iraqi war there were approximately one million Christians in Iraqi, mostly members of the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syrian Catholic Church, or the Syrian Orthodox Church.  Christianity came to what was once Assyria in the second and third centuries and despite the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and subsequent centuries of Muslim Rule under the Baghdad Caliphate and then the Ottoman Empire, vibrant Christian communities continued to exist and even flourish especially in the towns and villages of the so-called Nineveh plain centering around modern day Mosul.  
     The Chaldean Catholic Church has been in formal communion with Rome since at least the early seventeenth century.  (It’s previous status was ambiguous, especially after the Council of Florence in 1445, but it can be said that it was never in formal schism.) The current head of the Chaldean Catholic Church is Cardinal Mar Emmanuel III Delly, Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans.  Worldwide there are about a million and a half Chaldean Catholics, six hundred thousand of whom lived in Iraq before the most recent war.  (There were also about 400,000 other Christians, not Chaldean Catholics but Latin (Roman Rite) Catholics, Syrian Catholics, and Syrian Orthodox.)     The Chaldean Catholic Church maintains  a seminary in Baghdad.   The Patriarch resides in Mosul. The Syriac Orthodox Church comes from Apostolic times and the Patriarchate of Antioch which parted ways with Greek Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism when it rejected the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon (451) regarding the manner in which humanity and divinity are united in Jesus of Nazareth.  Syriac Catholicism separated from Syriac Orthodoxy in the late eighteenth century when Mar Ignatius Michael III Jarweh, Bishop of Aleppo who had reconciled to Rome was elected Patriarch.  Several bishops who opposed union with Rome rejected his election and chose an alternative candidate pledged to retain the autonomy and separation of the Syriac Church.  The followers of Mar Ignatius thus became known as Syriac Catholics; those of his rival, Mar Matta ben Abdel Ahad Saalab bishop of Mosul are Syriac Orthodox.   Latin Catholics are fewer and their Archbishop is Jean Sleiman, a Lebanese Discalced Carmelite. There are also smaller communities of Armenian and Maronite Christians.  
      I remember that about two weeks before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 that I was at a dinner party with a couple who are Arab Christians—the husband Maronite, the wife Copt.  They were very upset at the impending war as they foretold—and foretold correctly—that a war would destabilize the entire region and have ominous consequences for Arab Christians in Iraq and throughout the region.  They could not have been more right. The late Pope John Paul II also forecast a dangerous shift of power in which Christians would suffer as a consequence of the American determination to go to war.  The Pope sent Cardinal Pio Laghi, a family friend of the Bushes, to speak with President Bush but it was to no avail.  The plight of Christians in the region has grown steadily worse since the American invasion.  
      For centuries the Christians of Iraq were give the protected status of dhimmi by the various Muslim overlords and the various Christian communities existed in peace and even thrived.  Even under the regime of Sadaam Hussein they remained protected and Chaldean Catholic Tariq Aziz served as Foreign Minister and then as Deputy Prime Minister.  The Second Iraqi War (“Mr. Cheney’s War”)  totally destabilized Iraq and not only pitted Shiite against Sunni in a bloody civil war but left the Christian minority without any protection.  American strategy only made this worse when, in order to take pressure off Baghdad, Mosul became the center of conflict.  The majority of Iraqi Christians lived in Mosul and surrounding villages and towns. Militants suspected the Christians of treasonous ties to the NATO forces whom they viewed as foreign invaders.  Terrorists began targeting the Christian communities with abductions and murders of religious leaders.  Father Ragheed Azis Ganni was killed in Mosul in 2007 along with three subdeacons at Mass.   Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was kidnapped in 2008 and found murdered several days later.  Several of his companion including chauffer and bodyguard were also killed.  Christians were threatened with death if they did not abandon their homes and their businesses.  Churches have been bombed and religious institutions destroyed.  To date about 40% of Iraqi Christians—400,000—have fled the country and most of the remainder live in fear and with hope of escaping their ancestral homeland.