What Ideology Do Rorate Caeli And ISIS Have In Common?

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, caliph
of the restored Islamic Caliphate 

Kamel Daoud wrote a thought-provoking op-ed piece for the New York Times this morning.  It began

IT might have been an occasion for collectors of omens to rejoice: For the first time in nearly five centuries, in 2015 the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday coincided with Jesus’ birthday. A cause for hope? Too little, it turns out.

Mr. Daoud went on to explain Fundamentalist Islam’s hatred of time and obsession with geography.  With the goal of returning to a “pure Islam,” time becomes the enemy because time represents change and change means decay from the pure ideal.  In the same way, Fundamentalist Islam, represented by ISIS, wants to establish control over geographic space in order to be able to erase the changes of time whether by destroying evidence of time and its changes (the ruins of Palmyra) or by creating the “clean slate” on which the Islamist ideology can be imprinted.

After explaining this Islamic fundamentalist dream of re-creating the world in its own mythic image and likeness, Mr. Dauod goes on to compare it with the policies of the various right-wing nationalist movements taking over European politics right now.  He mentions, in particular, France where the National Front is gaining popularity on its anti-immigrant policy.  He claims that it represents a desire for that pure Gallic society where French culture was unchallenged by the arrival of “The Stranger”—the immigrants from France’s former colonies in Africa.

France has a long history of Gallic xenophobia.  Go back 120 years to the Dreyfus Affair where a Jewish military officer was falsely accused of and framed for passing military secrets on to the German Embassy.  What is so disturbing to those of us who are Christian and who know history is the role the Catholic Church played in the anti-Semitism and xenophobia on which the Dreyfus Affair fed.  The goal was to undo the constitutional changes of the French Revolution and restore the unity of throne and altar of the ancien regime. 

There are Americans who share a similar xenophobic dream for our society.  They want an America that is a “Christian Nation” composed of individuals of European stock.  We not only don’t want those Syrian Muslim refugees, we don’t want our little brown brothers from the south swarming over our borders.  Bring back the America of Ozzie and Harriet. 

You see, there are Christians who, like Islamic extremists, want to establish a “pure Christianity” (or in the case of the Katholik Krazies, a “pure Catholicism”).  Like the Islamic nut-cases they view time and change with a gnostic negativity.  Your Westboro Baptist Church folk or your Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons erase twenty centuries of tradition in their romantic revival of an imagined “primitive Christianity.”  They ignore twenty centuries of biblical commentary to impose their own isolated meaning on scripture.  They ignore twenty centuries of Christian heroes as examples to guide us in discipleship.  They hold in contempt twenty centuries of liturgical and spiritual tradition in a futile attempt to erase the time between us and Jesus. 

The Katholik Krazies take a somewhat different approach.  They pick an “ideal spot” in the contemporary world—let’s say for example, the reign of Pius XII (1939-1958) and presume that the doctrine, liturgy, and practice of that time had remained unchanged from Jesus and Apostles (their well-touted myth that the Tridentine Mass is “The Mass of the Ages,” just like the Apostles said Mass; their obsession with late 19^th century neo-scholasticism as the sole model of framing the faith; their models of a monarchial Church with all its Burke-like trappings) and that all subsequent development represents only decay.

An authentically Christian approach to time sees time, not negatively as decay, but as the context in which the Kingdom of God is revealed.  Time is the theatre in which God has revealed himself in Christ Jesus—and continues to reveal himself in the life of the Church.  While it may be a bit much for some to see time as marching towards that Omega Point in which all creation is brought together in Christ, our Christian faith tells us that time is oriented towards that moment of parousia when Christ returns.  For Christians time is holy and we celebrate that in our liturgical seasons.  The Katholik Krazies and other fundamentalists are trapped in a gnostic bubble of negativity that ultimately denies the redemption. 

Mr. Douad finishes his op-ed piece by contrasting the Right-Wing western danger and the Islamic fundamentalist threat writing

One might counter that of the two groups, only Muslim extremists kill. Which is true, at least when it comes to people. But the extremists of the right kill humanism, and that’s the only thing that could save us all.

This brings up our subject for next time: Christians and humanism.  

Rageoholics and Religion

Cardinal O'Malley greets President

Obama at the funeral of the late

Senator Ted Kennedy

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, making his swan-song after twenty-four years in the United States Senate, recently said:

I’m not saying I was always right,” he said at his Senate office. “I’ll leave that to God and history. But I believed I was doing what I thought was right and people didn’t just disagree with me. There was hatred. But I’m not alone in that. You can take the last three presidents — Clinton, Bush, Obama — and people haven’t just disagreed with them, they’ve hated them. And to me, that’s really terrible. That’s a cancer that’s eating at our politics.”

As I would also say about Mr. Justice Scalia on the political right, while I have not always agreed with Senator Lieberman, I have always had a lot of respect for him because he is a man who is not afraid to speak up for what he believes to be right.   And I find that people of small intellects and narrow spirits have met both the Justice and the Senator with a personal animosity that is nothing less than pathological.  And if that is true for the lesser lights, such as Justices and Senators, how much more so for Presidents—Clinton, Bush, and Obama most of all.

I must admit that I have never cared for Mr. Clinton personally though I think he had a successful presidency and will go down in history as one of our better Presidents.  Mr. Bush I think is a good man but was a terrible president not only because of the disastrous policies that led both to a national financial shambles and two immoral wars with the consequent socio-political chaos of the implosion of the Middle-East, but even more so because he allowed himself to be surrounded by evil persons who manipulated their access to power for personal gain at the cost of national ruin.  As a professional historian, I have no doubt that the Senior President Bush and his predecessor, President Reagan, will be evaluated very differently in the long-run than they have been in the short.  When archives are opened and the definitive history of the 1980 election and subsequent presidencies of the winning candidates can be written, Americans will be appalled at the way in which the Republican Party undermined our constitutional government.   And to be honest and fair, the roots of the evil that like a cancer is eating out the democracy from within our republican form of government go back further and deeper and are not limited to one party.   I only wish there were more Joe Libermans and Antonin Scalias whose integrity I trust.  All this is a way of saying that while I while I wouldn’t buy a used car from Bill Clinton, and I think George W was in way over his head, and while I think Ronald Reagan and George H.W., and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft are (or were) evil people—and I don’t use that term lightly—I don’t have any personal animosity, much less hatred, for them.  I don’t wish them harm or even misfortune.  Like evil people I have personally encountered in my life—in the Church, in academics, in business, as neighbors, or as relatives—my disappointment in them doesn’t fester into rage or even an abiding anger.  My perception of them as “evil” is precisely that—my perception—and I don’t expect that God sees them the same way I do.  In fact, I am aware that if I saw them as God did I might better understand where their moral failure—or what I perceive to have been their moral failure—comes from and having a context for it I might better understand it.     

On the other hand, the rage we see today directed by some towards President Obama baffles me.  I can understand people disagreeing with him.  I can see their being disappointed in their fellow citizens choosing him for a second term.  I can see people worrying for the future of the country as I did under the last three Republican administrations.  I can even see people not liking him, as I obviously have disliked some of his predecessors.  What I cannot see is healthy people being enraged by everything the man does from spending a Christmas vacation with his family to his occasional attendance at a Church service to his appearance at a Catholic Charities benefit to his visits to our wounded warriors to his remarks at a memorial service for the victims of the Newtown Connecticut gun murders.  When everything an individual does inspires rage in a person, one begins to see that the problem is not with the individual but with the person who becomes angry.  

Regular readers know that one of my bête noires is the author of a blog under the title of “Les Femmes.”   Twenty years ago when I worked in Northern Virginia this woman had a certain reputation and her little home-printed newsletter circulated quarterly among the various parishes and organizations to which she mailed it, unsolicited and gratis.    She used it to excoriate various priests and nuns and diocesan officials that didn’t meet her criteria for orthodoxy or whose read on canon law differed from her own.  Though “Les Femmes” entitled themselves “Women of Truth,” she never hesitated to use lies, half-truths, innuendos, and out-of-context quotes and stories, to pass judgment on her spiritual betters.  Over the years her organization, never more than a handful, has dwindled down to what pretty much appears to be a one-woman campaign to attack a range of foes from Jesuit Father James Martin to Benedictine Sister Joan Chittester to local prelates and priests such as Father Tuck Grinnell or Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.  But these last few years, foes within the Church have been eclipsed by an increasing and incredible personal animosity towards not only President Barack Obama but towards his wife.  When, during a question and answer period after a talk I gave recently, I used her blog and newsletter as an example of pathological anger hiding beneath a cover of religion, a member of the audience told me:  

" I have known this woman for over forty years.  We had children together at St X School in Y, Virginia.  She is a rageoholic.  For her, religion—her religion, not the Church-- is the fuel that drives her anger.  Her anger blinds her ability to see reality in any way other than she constructs it and she constructs it to feed her anger.”

I found this insight fascinating.  A colleague of mine who is a psychotherapist often speaks of rageoholics.  Some people, more than a few in our society, are addicted to anger even as others are addicted to alcohol or drugs or are compulsive in their sexual acting-out, or their use of food, or their self-mutilation.   Like other addicts, rageoholics construct their realities to support or justify their addictions.  It is not that they are conscious of their lies or deliberate in their evils—reality becomes for them that which they need it to be to feed their addiction.  The roots of this addiction, like the roots of other compulsive  behavior, can be many—incidents of abuse, fear, depression, loneliness, anxiety or a thousand other experiences that produce a need for whatever gratification the addiction gives or angst it soothes.  Anger releases many of the same endorphins as sex and even as sex-addicts find their compulsions soothed by sexual release, anger-addicts find comfort in their release of those endorphins by giving rant to their rage.  The moral culpability for such behavior needs to go not towards the addict—whose loss of moral freedom has been diminished by the addiction—but to those who fan the flames of this anger.  For those who find in pseudo-Catholicism a justification for hating—not disagreeing with, but hating—someone we must find the sources that are feeding that compulsive rage.  Those who use the pulpit or the press for demagoguery or voices like that of Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic T.V.” are the ones who need to be held responsible for the epidemic of hatred under the cover of “religion,” that is becoming part of the warp and woof of our society.   There is no way that the Gospel of Christ can be used to justify the sort behavior that can swell ideological disagreement into personal hatred and as a Church we do not want to be known for this sort of attitude.  By this shall know you are my disciples—that  you have love for one another.  There is enough evil in the world already; we don’t need Westboro Baptist Catholics.              

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

Three elderly Mennonite women, all between 84 and 90 years old, were tied up and attacked with a stun gun in a small eastern Pennsylvania town Friday—the same day a gunman killed 20 children, six teachers, his mother and himself in an affluent Connecticut town.  Dereck Taylor Holt, 22, attacked the women apparently for no reason other than their religion.  The irony is that Mennonites, like their spiritual cousins, the Amish, are a peace loving people who for centuries have consecrated themselves to non-violence.  Meanwhile members of the Westboro Baptist Church—the notorious Kansas sect that pickets military funerals with signs declaring that “God Hates Gays” have announced that they are going to picket funerals of the victims of the Newtown shooting.  One has to wonder how evil such as the assault on these elderly women, the murder of children and teachers, and the hate that fills the hearts of this Topeka Kansas synagogue of Satan  can be reconciled with our belief in God.  How can a good God tolerate the harm done by evil people? 
I have been listening to Catholicism –the made for Public Television series by Father Robert Barron of Chicago as I do my treadmill routine—practicing to wow my cardiologist at my stress-test.  I am really impressed by the series.  As you know, I am a bit jaundiced by most official Catholic propaganda and there are things that Father Barron says that I find a little more “inside the box” than I might choose to say.  But overall, I am finding the series to be very thought provoking and faith-inspiring.  But he asks that very question: How can a good God tolerate evil in our world?  I think he comes up with some credible answers why God doesn’t just burn down Westboro or strike dead bullies and sociopaths.  But the real issue is—why do we tolerate evil?
I spent a weekend last year as the guest of some friends at their seaside vacation home.  There was another family there with their college age sons.  A priest friend was also there and said Mass for the group the Sunday morning.  We were all there except for the younger son of the guest-couple.  I was a bit surprised as this family are practicing Catholics and the sons are graduates of Catholic grade and high schools. The young man not only wasn’t there, he made his absence conspicuous by walking past the group several times during the liturgy and then taking out his hand gun and doing some target practice where we could all hear him. 
Afterward I asked the host “what was that all about?”  “Joe is angry with God.” My host said.  “He was bullied in school and he blames God for not doing something about it?”  To be honest, I am frightened for this young man.  This sort of unresolved anger combined with his fascination for guns are two components of what could be a toxic psychiatric cocktail.   But his question is simply a variation of why doesn’t God burn down Westboro or strike dead those who are doing harm to elderly women or defenseless children. 
The Catholic answer, rooted in Augustine and Thomas as well as Ratzinger and Rahner is that we need to take responsibility for evil in our world and we need to do something about it.  It isn’t God’s problem.  God did not create evil.  We have shattered the inherent goodness of creation by our greed, our anger, our lust, our jealousy, our need for control or power.  We have caused the problem and we must—with God’s grace—find ways of healing it.  Notice, I said “heal.”  In most cases punishment is only the petri dish that grows the evil.  But the culture of violence in which we wallow is the seedbed of the murders and assaults and the bullying and the hatred we find in Newtown and Pennsylvania and Topeka and your town and mine.  Christ alone has the answer.  Christ is the answer.   

More on the Need for a New Reformation

Two views of what the Church is about.  Which

one do you think has a greatercredibility in

bringing the message of Jesus into the world today,
the nun working with the poor, or the Cardinal in all
his glory?  

Yesterday I began an entry on why the Church stands in need of Reformation today just as it has in other periods of history.   I began with the axiom Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda—the Church, always reforming and always in need of reform but promised that I would look at some more concrete examples of why we need to have a modern Reformation—and my list is not meant to be an exhaustive list.  I am sure there are other reasons beyond the one’s I am going to enumerate.

     The first and most obvious is the sex-abuse crisis that has rocked the Church not only in the United States but throughout the Western world.  Even more indicative of the need for Reform than the sex-abuse itself, was the almost universal behavior of bishops attempting to “cover-up” the scandal rather than address its root causes.  And why this cannot be effectively reformed from within the ranks of the papal administration is that it is becoming increasingly clear that the bishops’ policies of cover-up were directed from Rome.  After the recent reports (The Cloyne and Murphy Reports) regarding  clergy sex abuse in several diocese of Ireland, the Taoiseach, Enda Kerry, issued a stinging condemnation in the Daìl (the Taoiseach is the Prime Minister; the Daìl is the Irish Parliament) of the Vatican for its role in orchestrating a policy of cover-up.  This problematic policy is not unique to Ireland.  The papacy of John Paul II was particularly unable to understand the crisis and deal with it openly and effectively and while Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, pressed for more effective policies to get to the roots of the problem, the obstructionist prelates in the Roman Curia who neither understand the seriousness of the problem nor are willing to effect the radical structural change that is needed to heal it are still in place. Probably the single most critical area for Reform in the Catholic Church today is the Roman Curia which has moved far from being an extension of papal power into an organization with immense power of its own, a power that transcends and even supersedes the authority of the pope himself.  (Sometimes when we do a series of entries on the Second Vatican Council we will look at how the Curia survived the Conciliar attempts of Reform and has emerged even more powerful than it was before the Council.) 
      A second reason indicating the need for a Reformation is the loss of prestige which the Church has suffered in the world over the last forty years.  This loss is due not to the Second Vatican Council.  Indeed those of us who remember the Council recall the immense boost of credibility and energy the Church enjoyed from that fateful January day in 1959 when Pope John XXIII announced he was convoking a Council.  The Catholic Church moved from being perceived as an arcane and cultic relic of the bygone days of monarchic absolutism with its millions of enthralled and docile adherents to being a vital and engaged participant in the world community.  The remote and other-worldly visage of Pius XII was replaced by the kindly and humane “Good Pope John.”   Part of the loss of prestige, and I believe a great part of it, has been the deliberate policy of a secular society and its advocates to push to the margins of public life any and all religion, but especially any religion whose influence could undermine the post-religious agenda of secular liberalism.  Again, those of us who remember the times of the Second Vatican Council remember that magazines like Time, Newsweek, and Life covered not only the Catholic Church but religious topics of all sorts with great regularity and a respectful tone.   One can search modern newspapers and journals, including the aforementioned Time and Newsweek, and will rarely find religious topics covered except for such topics as the ubiquitous sex-abuse scandal or some other story which can be viewed only from the critical perspective. This does not betray an anti-Catholic bias as some bishops have claimed, but an anti-religious slant.   Even non-Catholic churchmen of considerable repute such as Anglican Archbishops Rowan Williams or Desmond Tutu, or evangelical Jim Wallis are almost never in the pages of the press, though the more erratic such as Billy Graham’s son, Franklin,  or John Hagee occasionally show up because they reinforce Christianity as something eccentric or even hateful.   And of course, speaking of hateful,  one sees with some regularity the “God hates Fags” placards of the so-called Westboro Baptist “Church.”  Nevertheless, I don’t want to blame secularism for pushing  religion in general and Catholicism in particular from its once privileged position in the public eye.  The Church itself has contributed to its position of ridicule and contempt not only by its gross handling of the sexual abuse crisis, but by its increasing return to the authoritarianism of past epochs and the revival of so much archaic pomp as Cardinals Burke and Pell  strut around swathed in yards of watered silk and  Benedict himself seems to raid the Vatican attic for the most curious accoutrements from ages past.  I am not suggesting that Catholics should convert to Presbyterian drab, but rather we need to pay attention to the world in which we live and not attempt to inhabit a parallel universe of red queens, mad hatters, and protonotaries apostolic.  A Reformed Catholicism that focused on the Church’s mission of making the Gospel a force in the modern world, a Church that continued the Mission of its Founder ”to bring glad tidings to the poor….to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord" would recover the prestige that has  been squandered with the lack of transparency and the return to an arrogant and pretentious authoritarianism that is leaving the church “naked unto her enemies.”   well, more reasons in the next entry.