Maybe If They Took Off Those Silly Hats, Bishops Could Listen Better

John Henry Newman,
now here is a Cardinal
for you!

Frank Bruni had an interesting editorial in this morning’s New York Times where he points out in light of last week’s Irish referendum on same-sex marriage, that Catholic countries are in the vanguard of societies that are coming to extend the benefits of marriage to gay couples.  He also makes this comment on American Catholics and the battles over same-sex marriage.

Catholics in the United States appear to be more, not less, progressive about gay rights than Americans in general are. In an especially ambitious survey conducted over the course of 2014 by the Public Religion Research Institute, about 60 percent of Americans who called themselves Catholic said that they approved of same-sex marriage, versus about 30 percent who didn’t. The spread among all respondents was 54 to 38, and the group that clearly stood in the way of same-sex marriage wasn’t Catholics. It was evangelical Protestants.

He waters down the link between Catholic faith and the battle for marriage equality however as he points out that “Catholics” include not only regular church-goers but all those who for ethnic or cultural reasons identify themselves as Catholics regardless of their worship patterns.  He points out—and I believe truthfully—that regular worshippers would tend to be more conservative on this and other social issues than those whose Catholicism is a more abstract participation in heritage than a concrete commitment to faith.  On the other hand, as a regular church-goer myself and one whose social circle is drawn pretty heavily from regular church-going Catholics, I don’t think one can say that “good Catholics” (those who attend Mass regularly) are any less supportive of human rights—and access to marriage is at least perceived as a human right—than the larger self-identifying Catholic population.  What I mean to say here is that when one looks at the basic issues of sexual morality, I think Church-going Catholics tend to a more traditional view of what is right and what is wrong than the more secularized segments of American society, but when it is framed in a question of “rights,” I think Church-goers are just as avid, and perhaps even more avid, for social justice than the larger American society.  As long as there are legal and economic benefits to marriage, access to marriage must be open to couples regardless of their gender-composition. 

Now I want to pair Bruni’s editorial with a posting I saw on Father James Martin’s Facebook Page. 

Cardinal Walter Kasper believes that Pope Francis wants a "listening magisterium," a hierarchy that listens to the faithful, to the "sensus fidelium." Also, in an interesting approach, he says that the hermeneutic of continuity (meaning the view that the church does not change) must be a hermeneutic of reform.

This is something I have been harping on for a long time.  John Henry Newman—so beloved of the Katholik Krazies who obviously have never read him—spoke of the necessary balance between the magisterium of the hierarchy, the work of the theologians, and the faith of the faithful and warned that when they get out of balance the integrity of doctrine suffers.  The faith of the Church is the faith held in the hearts and intellects of the faithful.  The predominance over the last five centuries of what Dulles referred to as the Institutional Model of the Church reduced the laity to recipients of the teaching of the hierarchical magisterium and this has created an imbalance from which the Church and its credibility has suffered greatly.  The hierarchy needs to carefully listen to the faith as it is held by the People of God.  The Holy Spirit puts the truth in the heart of the Church—not in the pen of the hierarchy.  I am not saying that my opinion or your opinion is the truth but precisely where there is that consensus fidelium—where the hearts of all the faithful line up in harmony—the Spirit is speaking.  That is why, even in the pre-Vatican II Church, it was always acknowledged that doctrine must not only be taught for it to be established as the teaching of the Church, but doctrine must be received by the faithful.  Doctrine taught but not received is not yet mature enough to be considered an authentic expression of our Catholic faith.  There is a lot of stuff that bishops—and even popes—have taught that is yet to be received by the faithful.  Maybe it is time for our pastors to be more attentive and less on their own agenda.  

I don’t think that this means that the Church must recognize marriage beyond the traditional boundaries of one man and one women “until death do us part.”  Perhaps we would do best to clearly delineate the Sacramental form of Christian Matrimony and civil marriage as two separate realities, only one of which is  within our purview as Church.  But very frankly many of us good, regular Mass-going Catholics, don’t want our faith in Christ to be tarnished by the homophobic injustices committed in Christ’s name.  

Time for a New Copernican Revolution

Meeting of the Pontifical
Academy of Science 

Easter Sunday morning, I read an extremely disturbing article in the New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/us/ashley-diamond-transgender-inmate-cites-attacks-and-abuse-in-mens-prison.html?_r=0

It is the story of Ashley Dimond of Rome Georgia who was born male thirty-six years ago but who in adolescence began living as a woman and who, for 17 years now, has been undergoing hormone therapy designed to support her transition to female.  Ms. Dimond had achieved some small degree of professional success as a song-writer and singer before falling into the trap of drugs and petty crime.  She eventually ended up in the Georgia Penitentiary system where she was placed in a men’s prison—she has male genitalia (a word, by the way, I never thought I would be using in my blog) where she has not only been subjected to humiliation by prison officials but raped more than a half-dozen times by fellow inmates.  She was denied continued access to the hormone therapy she has been on the past 17 years and that has had serious physiological as well as psychological impact on her.  Now I know that this posting is going to get some hostile and even vulgar remarks from various krazies—if they are offended by what I write about the Traditional Liturgy they sure aren’t going to like what I write about a transgendered person—but actually Ms. Dimond is not my primary subject.  This article stopped me in my tracks.  I don’t believe I have ever met, much less have known, a transgendered person.  Consequently, I have never given the issues regarding transgendered people much thought.  When I read a newspaper story or heard something on the news, I think I just shoved it into a pre-fit category in my mind and moved on to something more within my experience.   We had a neighbor, when I was growing up, that liked to wear his wife’s underthings around the house.  We kids weren’t supposed to know what our parents and the other neighbors were laughing about, but kids aren’t stupid and eventually find out the story.  I have certainly met my share of effeminate men and even a few who, while not exactly dressing in women’s clothes didn’t exactly dress like men either.  (I mean people other than certain prelates who like to get all frilled up Cinderella style.) But I must admit that I am totally unfamiliar with this transgender phenomenon and so I think I just lumped a wide spectrum of people into a single category and not a very flattering one.  This article has made me stop and realize that I need to learn more before I rush to judgments or even stereotypes.  I realized reading this article that I had always misidentified transsexual persons as transvestites when in fact it is something very different and that I know very little, and understand even less, about either phenomenon

In the course of writing this blog I have several times suggested that the Church too must rethink certain issues “from the ground up.”  A variety of the sciences –the medical, the sociological, the anthropological, the psychiatric—have made discoveries that fundamentally change the way that we are able to understand a variety of moral quandaries from in vitro fertilization to same-sex attraction to embryonic stem-cell research to gender identity.  I am not saying that this demands that we come to different conclusions, but we do need to take the new knowledge into account as we theologize for a Christian response to people whose lives are locked into these and other complex realities.  In the past it has too often taken us, as Church, far too longer to make the interface between our faith and the contemporary world, especially the sciences.  I am not going to get into the whole Copernicus/Galileo thing, but with the knowledge explosion in contemporary society we cannot afford not to engage in that dialogue now.  The Church’s—and indeed religion’s—credibility has already been all but lost to the under 30 generation.  It will take work for the theologians to absorb the immense motherload of new scientific data and it will take trust for the Magisterium to delegate the research to competent scholars, but our faith should assure us that while the way ahead seems dark and filled with pitfalls, the Holy Spirit ever guides the Church towards the truth.  There is nothing to fear about knowledge; nor is there any reason to block inquiry.  There is but one Truth and we cannot be afraid to search for it.  

Real Evangelicals Set Lazarus At Their Gate As Their Priority

In the old days he would have
worn purple and fine linen 

There was an interesting article in The New York Times this morning about political strategist David Lane who is attempting to organize a force of approximately 300,000 “Evangelicals” on behalf of the Republican party.  Read below:

DES MOINES — One afternoon last week, David Lane watched from the sidelines as a roomful of Iowa evangelical pastors applauded a defense of religious liberty by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. That night, he gazed out from the stage as the pastors surrounded Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana in a prayer circle.

For Mr. Lane, a onetime Bible salesman and self-described former “wild man,” connecting the pastors with two likely presidential candidates was more than a good day’s work. It was part of what he sees as his mission, which is to make evangelical Christians a decisive power in the Republican Party. “An army,” he said. “That’s the goal.”

And Mr. Lane is positioning himself as a field marshal. A fast-talking and born-again veteran of conservative politics with experience in Washington, Texas and California, Mr. Lane, 60, travels the country trying to persuade evangelical clergy members to become politically active. . . .

But close observers of evangelicals and their political involvement say Mr. Lane is emblematic of a new generation of evangelical leaders who draw local support or exert influence through niche issues or their own networks.

My intention is not to write about the political side of this, but the religious—just what is an “Evangelical” and do these people fit the bill or are they counterfeit disciples.

So, what is an “Evangelical?”  Evangelical comes from the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good news” and specifically the news of a victory.  The Greek word for Gospel is εὐαγγέλιον because it is the Good News of God’s Victory in Christ, the Victory of Christ over sin and death which is the authentication of his message of the Kingdom of God.  A true evangelical announces the Good News of the Kingdom of God, the central message of Jesus which he handed on to his disciples to be preached to the four corners of the earth until the end of time. 

Jesus spoke constantly of this Kingdom—it was his mission, his raison d’etre for coming into this world.  He was faithful to this mission to death and because he was faithful he was, we Christians believe, raised from the dead and given the place at God’s right hand as a validation of his mission.  But we make a huge mistake by conflating this message of the kingdom into some “pie in the sky when you die” and robbing it of its true import for our life in this world.

Heaven was not a particular pre-occupation of Jesus and his preaching.  He didn’t talk about it very much.  As a Pharisee himself, Jesus was not so focused on heaven as he was on the Resurrection at the end time.  Like other Pharisees (and unlike the Sadducee’s) Jesus believed  that the faithful would be raised at a final judgment to eternal life and the sinners to an eternal punishment.  He didn’t talk much about what happened between death and final-day resurrection.  He did, of course, mention that Lazurus (the poor fellow whose sores the dogs used to lick while he lay at the rich man’s gate, not his friend from Bethany) was carried to the bosom of Abraham while the rich man was in hell where he “was in torment.”  And he does promise the repentant thief on the cross that “this day you will be with me in paradise.”  That is about it for what Jesus says about life after death and before the resurrection.  But he has plenty to say about the Kingdom of God and he makes it very clear that the Kingdom of God is not some post-mortem picnic in a celestial park but a commitment to here-and-now fidelity to God—to live lives of conformity to God’s Kingship.  What does that a life of subjugation to that kingship look like?  Well, there is a lot about forgiving others even as we ask God to forgive us; something I recall that the measure with which we measure forgiveness out will be used to measure forgiveness to us.  And there is that passage about leaving your gift at the altar and being reconciled with anyone who has a bone to pick with you before you return and offer your gift.  There is quite a bit actually about “the poor having the good news preached to them.”  And there is something about I was hungry and you gave me to eat; a stranger and you welcomed me (migrants like this one); in prison and you ministered to me, sick and you visited me.  These last seems to be particularly important as they constitute the “final exam” by which our eternal destiny is determined.  I definitely remember something about you can’t serve God and wealth.  And there is that line about “love your enemies; pray for your persecutors.”  Hmmm, but did Jesus know about ISIS?  Would he really have said that if had?   Maybe we need to do a more critical edition of the gospels, don’t you think?  You know, take out some of these “inconvenient truths?” (Apologies to Al Gore.)  I think that we are not supposed to store up wealth where moths devour and rust corrodes—or even in bigger and bigger barns—lest we be called to account this very night.  And of course there is that thing about turning the other cheek?  Does that mean I can’t shoot the SOB?  The NRA says I can. 

This kingdom of God is, as St Paul sums it up, a matter of integrity, of peace, and of the joy that comes from the Holy Spirit.  (Romans 14:17)  I am choosing integrity but some translations say “justice,” some say “righteousness.”  This righteousness or justice means that we have aligned ourselves to the Divine Will.  We are obedient to God, our hearts (wills) are surrendered to him.  Can we honestly say that we are righteous when we have more of this world’s goods than we can use while others of his children lack for their basic needs?  (Some radicals call this “income inequality.)  Is there righteousness in God’s sight when so many of his children have no grounds for hope for a decent life?  When life is structured to exclude them from a future in which they can realize their God-given potential. 

Real evangelicals are not those who cry out Lord, Lord, or who say “We ate and drank with you (think Holy Communion) and you taught in our streets (we went to Church every Sunday and listened to the sermons).”  Real evangelicals are those who see in the systemic injustice in our society and are determined to set right that which our collective sinfulness has set wrong.  And you know, God bless David Lane and army of Republican activists, but they just don’t get it.  You are not a genuine evangelical if you are keeping the stranger in our midst from making a home.  You are not a genuine evangelical if you are dividing your world into “us” and “them.”  You are not a genuine evangelical if you support the 5% rich who control 80% of the world’s wealth when 60% of the Lazaruses of this world are undernourished.  You are not a genuine evangelical if you believe we can use violence to rid this world of violence.  I would love to see evangelical leadership our nation—genuine evangelicals—but frankly I don’t see anyone in either party who fits the bill—or even comes close.  

Let’s continue on with some more excerpts from the same article

Bob Perry, the wealthy Texas home builder and Republican donor, who later funded the Swift Boat Veterans campaign against John Kerry in 2004, gave Mr. Lane $3,000 of seed money to get started in Washington, where Mr. Lane began working for Carl Channell in support of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense system.  Oh yeah, I remember the Swift Vote Veterans—they spread lies to accomplish their agenda?  Evangelicals?   I don’t think so.  Children of the Father of Lies, maybe.

After Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey made a good impression at a Republican event later that year, Mr. Lane offered him the chance to join primary state pastors on a “Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II” tour to California, London and Rome.

“They turned it down,” said Mr. Lane, who smiled when asked if he thought that was a mistake.

Instead, Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, jumped at the opportunity, subbing former Nazi concentration camps and Oskar Schindler’s former factory in Poland for the stop in Rome.  Well Christie is a Catholic, Huckabee has long shown his bigotry against Catholics, thus scratch Rome.  We don’t want to be associated with that Roman anti-Christ—even some of his own followers are saying he’s a commie. 

Last month, Mr. Lane took 60 members of the Republican National Committee to Jerusalem at a cost, he said, of about $500,000. A trip to Israel with Mr. Jindal is planned for July.

Missing from his travel manifests and events are the Republican Party’s establishment candidates. While Mr. Lane is technically neutral at this point, he clearly is no fan of the more moderate wing of his party. He said he tried to rescue the 2008 and 2012 tickets by advocating Mr. Huckabee for vice president.

“If the Lord were to call 1,000 pastors in America — 1,000 — and they ended up with an average of 300 volunteers per campaign in 2016, that would be 300,000 grass-root, precinct-level, evangelical conservatives coming from the bottom up,” he said to the ballroom full of pastors. “It would change America.”

I’m sure it would change America, but not for the better.  I am not saying that David Lane and his “evangelical” army are frauds; I am sure they are sincere in their beliefs.  I am only saying that they are not evangelicals because their agenda is inconsistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God.  Like so many they have made god in their own image and likeness, and to their convenience; a deity that shares their view of the world, rather than tailoring their view of the world to the revelation that God has given us in Jesus Christ.  Lane is right, we need to bring our Christian faith to bear on our political life; he is only wrong in what he determines to be Christian faith.

The Synod, Gays, A Life Lost, And A Need For Change

Morgan Kristopher Powell 

Sad story in the New York Times this morning. 

Morgan Powell lived for Bronx history. He spoke about everything from the borough’s parks, rivers and early settlers — the kind of people for whom streets and neighborhoods are named — to the waves of African-American and Latino immigrants who remade the area during the 20th century.

He paid the bills — as best as he could — working as a landscaper and gardener. But he sustained his spirit with his love of Bronx history and his advocacy for the natural environment. He did his research on his own, sharing his knowledge and passion on blogs and free tours….

Now Ms. Martell and her friends are struggling to find the most basic of connections to Mr. Powell — his next of kin. His body was discovered floating in the Erie Basin, off Red Hook, Brooklyn, on Sept. 29. The New York City medical examiner’s office is investigating the cause of his death. People are devastated and confused: How could a man devoted to uncovering the hidden history of the Bronx have concealed his own past? Worse, would he now be fated to a pauper’s unmarked grave?

“When it came to his family life, there were all these questions I never asked,” Ms. Martell said. “Now I wonder, was I a good friend? I didn’t even know his family. I’ve talked to people who knew him longer, but nobody knew his family.”

Mr. Powell, 40, lived on Allerton Avenue, not far from the tree-shaded paths along Bronx Park East and the Bronx River. He had grown up in the area, attended Christopher Columbus High School (where he was known by his given name, Kristopher) and eventually became interested in horticulture through a program at the nearby New York Botanical Garden. Ms. Martell said his interest in history was piqued by a plaque he had spotted at the garden that referred to Joseph Rodman Drake, a poet and a member of a prominent early Bronx family.

Mr. Powell threw himself into the study of local history, combining it with his love of nature. In time, he developed walking tours that explored both the environment and the borough’s African-American past, which he detailed on his Bronx River Sankofa blog.

“He was an independent scholar who did this on his own, without any grants,” said Mark Naison, a history professor at Fordham University . . . “He did incredible research and published work. I have never seen anything quite like it.”

Last year, Mr. Powell stunned Mr. Naison by donating his archives to Fordham.

“It was like this phase of his life was coming to an end,” the professor recalled. “He said something about maybe moving south and wanting to make sure this material was preserved. It was a pretty heavy thing to do.”

Mr. Powell had told some friends that his mother immigrated to New York from Jamaica and raised him along with two sisters who now lived in either Maryland or the Carolinas. Last year he told an acquaintance that he had had little contact with any family members after he came out as a gay man.

 “They rejected him and disinherited him,” Ben Stock, a gay rights advocate, said. “Parental rejections are extraordinarily painful. Your sense of home is gone. What more can they take away?”

To his friends, Mr. Powell was intelligent, confident and unashamed of being gay. Active on social media, he lamented last month on Facebook about the lack of a support group for closeted black men in the Bronx. It was one cause, he told friends, on which he would not take the lead. Near the end of September, he told a colleague at the garden center where he worked that he had to “go away on family business” and that if he did not return by Oct. 2, he would never be back.

“When we found out he was dead, we all kept going back to that Facebook post, wondering if there was something there,” said Ed Garcia Conde, a blogger who had published Mr. Powell’s writing on environmental and historical topics. “It was so out of character for him.”

Scores of people who knew Mr. Powell have been contacted. Still, no relatives have surfaced yet. Ms. Martell insisted that if no one emerged to claim his body, she and her friends would…

“Potter’s field cannot happen,” Ms. Martell said, her voice breaking. “He spoke a lot about potter’s field and not having access. How people would be forgotten. That would be a slap in the face if that happened to him. This guy who did so much, to be buried where nobody can see him? If no family comes, we will bury him.”

There are a lot of people who say: “See, this is what being gay leads to.”  And they miss the point.  Maybe the story grabs me because of Powell’s love for history but here is a man with a High School education whose intelligence and sense of purpose made him a serious scholar who could make an exceptional contribution to his community’s knowledge and self-understanding, not as an academic in an ivory tower but as a person who did manual work to support himself while he did serious research and publication.  Maybe his story grabs me because of my own career in teaching, but here is a man who loved books and knowledge and learning for its own sake and for the ability to open the eyes of his neighbors to learn things about themselves that they had never yet known.  And here, finally, is a man whose gifts have been lost, indeed whose life has been lost, because he was left isolated and rejected and without the support of those nearest to him.  I don’t know if Mr. Powell was Catholic or not, and I am not saying that we as a Church failed him.  But we do fail the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters when we fail to be the sort of family of God to which and in which all are welcomed without condition.  Morgan Powell’s story is what happens in a society that leaves people isolated because of their sexual orientation or gender identification and we as a Church cannot be part of that isolation.  To be part of system that perpetuates the sort of prejudice that left Morgan Powell bereft of the love and support of his family, or as feeling alien and alone within one’s social network, is as seriously wrong, if not more so, than any sin of sexual behavior of which we humans can be found guilty.  We as a Church profess to decry any discrimination against people because of sexual orientation, but when “the rubber hits the road” we too often find ourselves part of the problem and not of the solution.  

The Extraordinary Synod of Bishops had proposed the following statement about the Church’s relationship with men and women who have same-sex attraction. 

Paragraph 55: “Some families live the experience of having persons with a homosexual orientation. In that regard it was asked what pastoral attention is appropriate facing this situation, referring to what the church teaches: ‘There does not exist any basis for assimilating or making analogies, however remote, between homosexual unions and the design of God for marriage and the family.’ Nonetheless, men and women with homosexual tendencies must be welcomed with respect and delicacy. ‘In their regard, every trace of unjust discrimination is to be avoided.’ (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Considerations regarding Projects of Legal Recognition of Unions among Homosexual Persons,’ 4).”

The proposed paragraph was not a particularly challenging statement.  In fact it passed with a majority of 118 votes with 62 votes against.  That means that while a majority of bishops favored it, it was not included in the final statement because it did not obtain the ⅔ majority needed for consensus.   Moreover, several of the negative votes were from bishops who considered the statement to have been too watered down in asserting a welcome place in the Church for gays and lesbians.  Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, was one of those who saw the proposed statement as a moral failure because it did not go far enough.  The Cardinal expressed his disappointment that the proposed document had not used much stronger language about the need to “respect, welcome and value” people in same-sex relationships.

The interesting thing will be to see where the agenda goes from here.  Pope Francis said in his closing homily Christ wanted his Church to be a “house with doors always open to welcome everyone.”  This was an obvious echo of the proposed statement “men and women with homosexual tendencies must be welcomed with respect and delicacy.”  Francis seems, from his homily, not to be willing to let drop either the statement on people with same-sex attraction or the need to find a way to let the divorced and remarried take a place at the Table of the Lord for the Sunday Eucharist.  Over the course of the next eleven months, expect the Holy Father to return to these themes in subtle but unmistakable ways. I think we can expect to see him relying less and less on Cardinal Kasper and others to get the message out and to see him take a more direct (though implicit) role in shaping the discourse.  The Wednesday Audience remarks, his daily homilies, and his Sunday Angelus messages will probably be the medium, though he may also use his homilies for several key feasts—such as the Sunday of the Holy Family between Christmas and New Year’s—to make observations and express hopes for the upcoming Ordinary Synod in 2015.  I think we will also see some reshuffling of the deck before the next synod.  Cardinal Burke has already confirmed that he is on his way out of a Curial position that would guarantee him a seat at the Synod, although the Pope could, in theory, appoint him to the Synod.  It will be interesting to see what happens.  And pray for Pope Francis himself, not only that God will guide him through this process, but that God will protect him and give him the health to see it through.  There is a lot riding on that papal horse.