A Blast From The Past

John Winthrop 

A fellow parishioner invited me to have dinner with him a week back.  I knew he was chair of the Economics Department at a major university and, as a historian, I had some questions I wanted to discuss with him about a project that I am working on concerning banking in 14^th century Siena and the creation of government debt.   My host however had invited two friends of his to dinner as well—all three had grown up in Cuba and came to the United States as boys.  They had been high-school friends and had each gone on to a career in academia.  One was a professor of Philosophy at a large Catholic University, the other a professor of Sociology at a University in Florida.  The conversation was intense—I told my friend later that I felt like I was sitting for my comprehensive exams all over again.  But the question that I brought to the table was: What are the roots of the divisions and polarization  that we are experiencing in contemporary America?

Professor X, (the economist) believes that the tension in our society is resultant on the sense of powerlessness that people experience as they find themselves slowly sliding down the economic ladder rather than, as had their parents, climbing up into greater prosperity.   As one person recently put it to me, “I have never made so much money and had so little.”  As parents are anxious not only for their own personal security but for the economic welfare of their children and grandchildren, there is a sense that economically at least, our glory days are behind us and our country is “going to hell.”  

Professor Y (the sociologist) gave the opinion that carried the conversation.  He believes that the increased ferocity of the “culture wars” is related to the collapse of such foundational institutions such as the family, the Church, the public school system, and the neighborhood—to name only a few. We really didn’t explore the economic issue sufficiently and hopefully we will in a future conversation because I think the increased economic disparity of our society should not be underestimated, but the sociological issue has perhaps more implications germane to the mission of the Church as it represents the collapse of community. 

When the Puritans coming to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony were still aboard ship in 1630, their leader, John Winthrop, addressed them with the following sermon.  It is still something, perhaps today with the fracturing of our society, even more something, to consider. 

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly; to love mercy; to walk humbly with our God. For this end we must be knit together in this work a one man: we must entertain each other in brotherly affection; we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities; we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality; we must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together; always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body, so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.  The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with.  We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations: The Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we shall be made a story and a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going. And to shut up this discourse with that exhortation of Modes that faithful servant of the Lord in his last farewell to Israel (Deut. 30): Beloved there is now set before us life and good, death and evil in that we are commanded this day to love our God and to love one another to walk in his ways and to keep his commandments and his ordinance and his laws and the Articles of our Covenant with him that we may live and be multiplied and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.  But if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey but shall be seduced and worship other gods, our pleasures, and profits, and serve them it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it. 

Therefore let us choose life

That we and our seed

May live by obeying his

Voice and cleaving to him

For he is our life and

Our prosperity

 Actually, when you read Winthrop’s sermon you can see the connection between the economic issues and the collapse of our cultural foundations.  We have lost the vision that we are mutually invested in one another and abandoned the principles of community for an individualism that permits the few to rise to towering heights of power and wealth while leaving the many to sense that their future is slipping through their hands. 

More than ever we need the voice of the Church to give the call to turn back to our commitment to a society in which all are mutually inter-dependent.  The economic philosophy of Pope John Paul II called for this sort of solidarity in which the interdependence of all was the foundation for society’s economy.  Only when we realize and take ownership of the idea that God intends for his gifts to be shared out among all his children in ways that provide for the welfare of each can we begin to build that sort of a world to which John Paul and John Winthrop and the Fathers of the Church and the Hebrew Prophets have called us—or rather made us aware that God is calling us. 

Of Popes and Presidents

Looks pretty friendly to me 

So President Obama met with Pope Francis at the Vatican this morning and the Catholic blogosphere has lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve with the krazies saying that the President looked “chagrined” and “uncomfortable” as he met the Pope.  The photos tell quite a different story with the President in his usual strong stride and ear-to-ear smile.  And then there are conflicting stories about how the conversation went with the White House stressing points of agreement—immigration reform and checks on economic disparity with the wealthier growing wealthier at the expense of the poor who are growing poorer as we as seeing more and more people slide downhill from the middle class into the poverty range.  Catholics unhappy with Obama are quoting Vatican sources saying that the Pope “chastised” the President over Obamacare and issues of religious freedom.  Whatever, but it ended with everyone smiling and with the President inviting the Holy Father to the White House. 
What actually happened was a very cordial meeting.  These meetings are always cordial.  The Pope played Good Cop to his Bad Cop Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.  That is the way these Vatican meetings go.  The substance meeting is with the Secretary of State.  That is where there is hard talk.  The papal meetings are all about everyone behaving in the sand-box and getting along.  And the fact of the matter is the Pope and President agree on far more than they disagree on.  Even Obamacare.  The problem of the Holy See with Obamacare is not universal health coverage.  Popes have spoken about the “right” to health care being a universal right.  Italians—and Argentines and French and Canadians and English and Dutch and Norwegians and just about everyone else in the developed world—take universal health care for granted.  The Church’s problem is making the Church pay for coverage for procedures and medications that the Church believes to be intrinsically wrong.   There would be no problem with Obamacare if Catholic institutions were not required to provide coverage for contraception for their employees.  I hate to be cynical, but the bishops wouldn’t be complaining about individual Catholic employers having to cover their employees—they just don’t want to do it.  I will give them credit that I believe their reservation isn’t economic, that it is a genuine moral objection.  And I am anxious to see what the Supreme Court does with the issue.  I think the Obama administration was foolish not to back down on this one, at least as far as the Church is concerned.  But to be honest, the fight is no longer about contraception coverage.  It is an opportunity for the secular left to take a couple of swings at the Catholic Church.   The Administration doesn’t want to appear to back down to the Church’s demands and look like it is caving in in front of its base in the various left-wing lobbies that want to use this issue to slam the Church.  And of course our bishops fall right into that trap.  When will they learn to identify the real issues and respond to them rather than to react to the red flags with which they are taunted by those groups who are angry with the Church over women’s issues, gay issues, or just angry because some nun whacked their knuckles with a ruler in the sixth grade back in 1962?
C’mon guys, get on the Francis bandwagon.  Get out there in front for immigrants.  Seize the moral high-ground.  Talk about the millions who are trapped in low-income jobs with the consequent challenges to education, diet, health-care, and human dignity while some people in our society make 462 times the annual salary of their average employee.  I am no fan of the communion-wars but If you want to refuse politicians or rainbow sash folk communion, refuse it to anyone who makes more than five times the average annual salary of his workers.  Tell your communicants that discrimination against people based on their legal status is a sin.  And for heaven’s sake, let the gays march in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade—and come down the cathedral steps and shake their hands.  If Jesus could drink from the bucket of the Samaritan woman, you can be seen chatting with a LGBT person.   And, perhaps most of all, remind us that the Church says that health care is a human right and that if not Obamacare, we still need to do something to make sure that each and every person here—legally or illegally—have access to good health care.  Be a Christian and stop prostituting yourself to the selfish interests of the worst elements in our society.    I guess I wouldn’t make a good pope –I don’t always play nice.  But maybe Secretary of State. 

By George 3

George Weigel

Let me come back to George Weigel’s book Evangelical Catholicism.  I had begun to discuss this in a number of earlier entries (November 19, 20, and 22^nd 2013). To recap, Weigel credits contemporary Catholicism as finding its roots in the vision of Pope Leo XIII, a pope who very much—in his day—engaged the (then) modern world and its questions and issues.  And, appropriate to his ministry, Leo brought the rich theological heritage of our Catholic faith into the dialogue.  Leo is probably best remembered for his startling encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which for its day was every bit as “radical” as the recent papal letter, Evangelii Gaudium.  I think Weigel fudges his history a bit—or rather paints the picture with strokes so broad as to be inaccurate in some details—but I think he is on to something in his thesis.  (My objections would center mostly in that I don’t see Pius X and his pontificate as standing in continuity with Leo (his predecessor) or with Benedict XV and Pius XI, his successors.  But I am willing to let the point pass.)   I am very much taken, however, by Weigel’s vision of an Evangelical Catholicism that anchors Catholic life in taking the Word of God to bear in our daily lives and nourishing ourselves by fully participating in the sacramental life of the Church.  Indeed, I think it was this immersion in Word and Sacrament that gave us the Second Vatican Council and especially its Liturgy.  The spiritual energy of places like Maria Laach and Beuron Abbey, Saint Séverin in Paris and Combermere in Ontario, the witness of people like Edith Stein and Dorothy Day and the Dominican friar Jacques Loew, and the scholarship of Josef Jungmann, Augustin Bea, and Marie-Dominique Chenu all reflect this spirituality of Word and Sacrament and all provided the resources from which the Council Fathers were able to imagine a new and renewed Church  that could project in our day and in our world the enthusiasm with which the Apostles propagated the Gospel in theirs. 
At the same time that this tremendous energy was flooding the Church, the world around the Church—or at least the European and American worlds—were falling into a post-Christian culture that would present the Church with an incredible challenge but one which we could meet strengthened by these resources of revived engagement with the Word of God and Sacramental Life.  The problems that prompted Leo to write Rerum Novarum—the sordid view of the Robber Baron Capitalists that the human person is no more than a tool to be used to make money—threated industrial societies with the grossest dehumanization.  Nihilism, the cynical philosophical system that swept away any idea of a moral compass by which the industrialists, the wealthy classes, and the State should be governed in their relationship with the masses, devoured whatever soul remained in Western society after the rise of secularism consequent to the “Enlightenment” and the Revolution it spawned.  The emergence of Leninism/Stalinism in Russia and its devaluation of the human individual in favor of the State as well as the rise of National Socialism with its dehumanization of the individual and its repugnant racial ideology were the results of this collapse of humanistic thought. 
In the face of this implosion of civilization, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular had the resources to provide an alternative view in which the human person retained his or her worth as a being and not dependent on the usefulness of the individual  to society or to the state.  Catholic philosophers such as Paul Claudel, Etienne Gilson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,  and Gabriel Marcel presented philosophies in which the human person, far from being a tool of the State or having no intrinsic value, is the raison d’etre of being, the very center of existence for whose sake and good interest society exists. 
The philosophic debate is not over.  In the post-World War II period, secularism has espoused and advanced a philosophy in which there is no concept of the common good but in which ethics are guided by self-interest of the individual.  The impact of Ayn Rand, the doyenne of this school of radical self-interest, has transformed American society (and not, to my mind, for the better.)   American society today would seem to recognize no good that trumps the self-interest of the individual.  We are left with a “trickle-down economics” that sees the gap between a rich minority and an ever-poorer and growing majority increasing by the year. In 2009, the average salary of a CEO was 263 times that of the average American worker, a situation every bit as evil as that against which Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum.  Americans are obsessed with alleged personal rights whether it is the right to possess firearms or the right to have an abortion.  We find our chief form of entertainment in the vicarious disposal of human life through media ranging from movies through television to video games for youth and consider this to be our “right.”  We perceive pornography—whether sexual or violence—to be a “victimless crime.”  The family is in shreds because “I don’t want to be married anymore” is sufficient cause—again the triumph of the selfish individual—to overturn commitments of marriage and parenthood.  Both “the left” and “the right” have bought into this heresy of “it’s all about me and my happiness.”
The antidote to this moral chaos is Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism.  It is a revived commitment to a scriptural spirituality in which, as one medieval spiritual text explains:  Let the Sword of the Spirit, that is the Word of God, dwell in your minds and in your hearts that all that you do may be done in the Word of the Lord. What has been the genius of evangelical voices throughout the history of Christianity has been this call to “hear the Word of God and put it into practice.” (cf Luke 11:28).  
The error that I see Weigel making is not in his vision of Evangelical Christianity but in his understanding of how it is to be presented.  He sees it as a bastion against the philosophical/moral chaos of post-modern society.  He wants Christians to use their clout to contain and suppress this modern heresy of an “ethics” of self-interest.  He falls into the same error our bishops have fallen into these past thirty some years since Roe vs. Wade: change laws and everything will be alright.    But if Weigel knew the scriptures himself he would know that the mission God gave to the prophets and Jesus gave to his disciples is to change hearts.  It is a far more challenging mission to change hearts than to change laws, but it is the only path that will bring success.  I am all in favor of Evangelical Catholicism but it must be, well, evangelical—you know—evangelizing. 
I remember thirty years ago I was part of a committee a young priest was trying for form in our parish.  It was an evangelism committee—an attempt to evangelize our neighborhood in which many had fallen away from the faith and even more had never had it.  At the end of the organizational meeting a wise old nun (yes, an LCWR nun) who had served as novice mistress in her community observed: “ok, fine, but who will evangelize us so that we can go and evangelize the neighborhood?”  Yes, who will evangelize us?  I think Weigel makes an important contribution to this task but he needs to go back and re-read those scriptures.