Back to the Roots

I recently read about a movie that won awards at Cannes and is up for an Oscar (category: Short Film) called Ave Maria.  The title is meant to be somewhat ironic as the film is about a group of Orthodox Jewish settlers in Palestine that crash their car in front of a monastery of nuns.  As I understand the story from what I have read the plot develops around the fact that the settlers can’t use the phone as it is the Sabbath and the nuns can’t talk because they have a vow of silence.  Now, actually, no Catholic Order has a vow where their members can’t talk: that is a myth, but it works the plot apparently and it does introduce my point: religion, when it becomes an end in itself, goes toxic.  If Jews cannot use the phone in a genuine emergency or nuns can’t speak in order to help others in a crisis, there is something wrong.  As I just said, this story has a bit of an artificial set-up as the strictest of rabbis would agree that in an emergency a phone-call could be made and no Catholic Order, no matter how contemplative, is bound to a total silence.  But the fact of the matter is that from the radical jihadists of Islam to the tea-evangelists of Christianity, there are those who trump common decency with a toxic religiosity.  When settlers use some claim that God allegedly gave them sovereignty over a land and use that claim to justify bulldozing the houses and the orchards of people who have lived on that land long before the days when Joshua led the children of Israel into the Promised Land—that is toxic religion.  When Buddhists persecute the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar (Burma) that is toxic religion.  When Hindus attack Christian churches and faithful in India that is toxic religion.  When Pakistani Muslims use charges of blasphemy against their Christian neighbors to justify violence and plunder, that is toxic religion.  And when “Christians” use their religious beliefs to justify discrimination against others because they are Muslims or immigrants or over LGBT issues then those “religious” beliefs are not longer authentically Christian but are a toxic corruption of our Christian faith. 

I think that it is time for us Christians to move beyond religion and for us Catholics to lead the way.  As a historian it is clear from the available sources, including the New Testament, that Christ did not intend to establish a new religion.  He founded a community of people whom he called to lead a new and different sort of life.  As a historian I am used to reading how Christianity was one religion among many in the later Roman Empire.  I disagree with that.  From reading Paul or the Gospels, I don’t see any indication that the Christians saw themselves as a religion.  The followed “The Way” (see Acts 9:2; 19:9; 19:23; 24:14;24:42).  At that time they were still within the embrace of Judaism—it was only with the composure of the twelfth of the Eighteen Benedictions, the proscription of the minim or heretics, around the year 80 AD that the Christians were expelled from the Synagogue and Christianity began to develop separately from Judaism.   “The Way” was not meant to be a religion per se but a Way of Life, a path of discipleship that transcends any notion of “religion.”

Now before I get accused of heresy by the krazies who troll this site, let me distinguish between “religion” and “Church.”  According to the gospels, Christ invited together a community, an ἐκκλησία of disciples. Εκκλησία of course is the Greek word for “Church” (as a community of people, not as a building).  Yes Jesus came to establish a “Church” but that does not mean he came to establish the “Roman Catholic Church.”  The Catholic Church (Roman and otherwise) is certainly a principal heir of the ecclesial legacy of Christ’s disciples, but is also the product of an evolutionary process that has historically developed into something quite more institutionally complex than the original communities of disciples.  By institutionally complex I mean that it historically developed doctrinally, liturgically, and governmentally (though perhaps guided by the Holy Spirit) according to human design.  So while I do not think that Jesus intended to establish a new religion, I do think he established an ἐκκλησία, a Church, a community of those who were consecrated to live according to his way.   I think it might be time to move beyond the consciousness of “religion” and refocus on being a community of such disciples. 

What do I mean by a “community of disciples?”   I am not a huge fan of George Weigel or even of his book Evangelical Catholicism but I do think in that book Weigel gives us the focus for a genuine Catholic renewal when he writes

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord. 

I think that disciples are those who develop that genuine friendship with the Risen Lord through—and this is crucial—through the Scriptures, the Sacraments, Prayer, and one aspect that Weigel (in his American individualism) overlooked: community.  In the Church, the community of disciples, we together delve into the scriptures, break the Bread of Christ’s Body, and nourish our lives of intimate prayer with Christ.  If we do that genuinely and with sincerity there is no room for prejudice, no room for hatred.  We remember the commandment: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors.  If you love those who love you: what merit is there in that: even the pagans do as much. 

There are those in our society who take to themselves the appellation “evangelicals” but for the most part they are deceivers and frauds.  By their fruits will you know them.  They incite division and fear; they divide and set people against one another. And they do so in the name of Jesus.  All Christians, including us Catholics, are called to be evangelicals: witnesses to the Gospel.  By this will all people know you are my disciples: by the love that you have for one another.  It is not by our self-righteous looking down on those who are different from us, whom we judge to be sinners or non-believers that we are witnesses.  It is not by encouraging fear and hatred, by calling for people to be “sent back to where they came from,” or denies housing or education or jobs because they “aren’t like us” that we are witnesses.  When we buy into the current climate of anger and fear and prejudice we cease to be witnesses to Christ and his Gospel.  We become “evangelists” of a false gospel, the word of the Father of Lies rather than the Word of God. 

Saints, Popes, and Boatrockers

This morning the pastor at my parish gave a very good homily for the feast of Saint Martin of Tours.  I was impressed as I have always had a deep devotion to Saint Martin and know quite a bit about him whereas my pastor is not a particularly pious man and often has somewhat of a featherweight approach to our Catholic heritage and culture—a typical problem for today’s undereducated clergy whether of the liberal or the conservative bent.

In his homily Father dragged out the old Saint Martin chestnut about cutting his cloak in half to give one half to the beggar—whom Father referred to as “a homeless man,” going somewhat beyond the hagiographical text and introducing a (not unreasonable) anachronism to help us today connect with a saint of seventeen centuries ago.  Unfortunately, not being a historian he didn’t get it quite right.  Martin didn’t cut his soldier’s cloak in half as much as he cut the lining out of it to give the beggar the warm fur lining while keeping the uniform part of his cloak for himself.   I mean, he did cut his cloak in half, but not from top to bottom but rather separating outer from inner.  Small point, but if one is going to be pedantic, as I like to be, these things matter.  

What I really want to highlight in Father’s sermon today though was not simply the story about the beggar and the cloak, but the larger picture that Martin had a passion for the poor.  He had this as a catechumen (when he divided his cloak) to when he was a monk to when he was a bishop.  For Martin, the poor defined the Church and set its mission.  That emphasis is so often lost on those for whom random acts of charity are sufficient fulfillment of the Gospel.  For Martin, and especially as bishop, it was not a matter of occasionally giving of his—or the Church’s—surplus as it was of focusing all the Church’s attention on the needs of the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters. 

This is the Church to which Pope Francis is trying to return us.  We live in a world afflicted by diverse poverties: spiritual, material, social, psychological, emotional.  Francis’ desire for the Church to minister to the spiritual hungers of those who have suffered the pain of failed marriages, of those who find themselves emarginated because of their sexual orientation, of those who give themselves without the surety of commitment are all extensions of his concern for those who live under the weight of the cross of material poverty.  Ironically—or actually without any irony at all—those who cannot see the pain of the spiritually poor most often are those who are content to throw a few crumbs of their leftovers to the materially poor and think they have satisfied their obligation as Christians.  Like those critics of Jesus who were scrupulous on their tithing of garden herbs but neglected the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness—they fuss over standing for communion or which way the priest faces the altar, but pay little or no attention to the gross injustices and severe pain in which so many today are trapped.  Like the Priest or the Levite in the Gospel of Luke, they walk down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho turning a blind eye to the suffering of those who have been robbed and beaten by life but even worse than the Priest or Levite they are resentful of those who would stop and try to bind up the wounds of the suffering.  And so Pope Francis’ vision of a Church that reaches out to the poor and the pained disturbs their comfort and they find refuge in the fantasyland of a Cardinal who traipses around the world in the furs and silks of a bygone princedom and call it religion. 

Pope Francis’ agenda for the Church is truly revolutionary as he has set out to identify the Church not with those who have long comfortably occupied its pews but with those who, like the beggar of Martin’s day, shivered outside in the cold.  His focus on those immigrants who line the shores of Tunisia in hopes of a boat to Lampedusa or those who huddle by our fenced southern border in hopes of finding their way through the desert has enraged countless of “good Catholics.”  His washing the feet of prisoners and sick—including women and Muslims—has been decried by those who confuse patriarchy with the Church and confuse Allah with a deity other than the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Jesus.  His condemnation of the death penalty irritates those self-styled pro-lifers who can’t see the inconsistencies of their argument.  And his pastoral concern for those who are divorced and remarried, or are gay, or who live together without marriage baffle those who think that because of their moral rectitude they, not “sinners,” should bask in the papal limelight.  As for me, I like it when Peter rocks the boat.  It startles me into remembering how the Master did the same.  

Evangelical Catholicism: The Challenges of A Catholic Response to the Migrants at Our Border

Pope Francis Preaching at 

Lampedusa, July 2013 

In my next posting I will begin the story of Elizabeth I and her refashioning of the Ancient Church of England into what will become contemporary Anglicanism—though I don’t think good Queen Bess would recognize it or be particularly happy with it, Anglicanism today being in some respects “too Catholic” for her taste and in others respects being “too Protestant,” in such matters as the admission of women to the ministries of bishop and priest, the blessing of same sex marriages, or a determinative voice for the laity in Church governance.  (Elizabeth’s objection to the laity having a determinative voice would be rooted in her opposition to democratic procedures in the Church which she believed—in considerable contention with Parliament—should by under the royal dictate.  But as for what Anglicanism has become in the centuries since Elizabeth, be patient: it will take us a while to get there.   In this posting I am going to return to the topic of Evangelical Catholicism and will probably alternate the two topics for a while. 

We have looked at the foundations for what George Weigel calls “Evangelical Catholicism”: a Catholicism rooted in and drawing its strength from “Word and Sacrament.”  Evangelical Catholicism cuts through both the Jesuitical sophistry of neo-Thomism and the sissified piety of nineteenth-century neo-gothic romanticism and returns to the Patristic sources of understanding the Christian life in terms of the Holy Scriptures and the Sacramental Practice of the Church. Such an evangelical Catholicism invites the faithful to—indeed demands of them—an intense commitment to Christian discipleship in which they mature into a deep and true spirituality as well as the moral capacity to make life-choices rooted in their zealous conviction that the Kingdom of God is not some future other-worldly picnic in the skies with Grandma and all our other lost loved ones, but a present, here-and-now this world reality for those who “listen to the Word of God and put it into practice.” 

Let’s start unpacking this ideal by examining its implications for a real-life crisis in which we find ourselves today in America: the plight of the immigrants, particularly but not exclusively children, who are illegally crossing our borders each day.  What should our attitude towards those migrants be? 

Many people—including many Catholics—can only look at the issue simply in terms of “The Law.”  They are breaking the law.  They are illegal.  Therefore, they have no rights and we have no responsibilities towards them.  Like those whom I mentioned in the posting about Lawrence Kohlberg and the stages of moral development who are fixated on the idea of law—whether law qua law as some sort of unchanging and binding moral absolute or law as stabilizing social convention—many simply say because they are “illegal” we have no moral responsibility for them and they should simply be turned back, put on buses or trains, sent home to where they came from.  But for the Evangelical Catholic, how would the word of God guide us in our moral response to the migrants?  Pope Francis had much to say—and said it well—from an evangelical perspective in the homily he gave at Lampedusa last summer.  Granted he was talking about migrants to Europe and not to the United States, but the moral principles he laid down are not confined to one particular situation.  They are universally applicable. 

God’s two questions echo even today, as forcefully as ever! How many of us, myself included, have lost our bearings; we are no longer attentive to the world in which we live; we don’t care; we don’t protect what God created for everyone, and we end up unable even to care for one another! And when humanity as a whole loses its bearings, it results in tragedies like the one we have witnessed.

"Where is your brother?" His blood cries out to me, says the Lord. This is not a question directed to others; it is a question directed to me, to you, to each of us. These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace; they were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death. How often do such people fail to find understanding, fail to find acceptance, fail to find solidarity. And their cry rises up to God! Once again I thank you, the people of Lampedusa, for your solidarity. … Yet God is asking each of us: "Where is the blood of your brother which cries out to me?" Today no one in our world feels responsible; we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: "poor soul…!", and then go on our way. It’s not our responsibility, and with that we feel reassured, assuaged. The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles which, however lovely, are insubstantial; they offer a fleeting and empty illusion which results in indifference to others; indeed, it even leads to the globalization of indifference. In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!

…

"Adam, where are you?" "Where is your brother?" These are the two questions which God asks at the dawn of human history, and which he also asks each man and woman in our own day, which he also asks us. But I would like us to ask a third question: "Has any one of us wept because of this situation and others like it?" Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families? We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion – "suffering with" others: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep! In the Gospel we have heard the crying, the wailing, the great lamentation: "Rachel weeps for her children… because they are no more". Herod sowed death to protect his own comfort, his own soap bubble. And so it continues… Let us ask the Lord to remove the part of Herod that lurks in our hearts; let us ask the Lord for the grace to weep over our indifference, to weep over the cruelty of our world, of our own hearts, and of all those who in anonymity make social and economic decisions which open the door to tragic situations like this. "Has any one wept?" Today has anyone wept in our world?

What are the moral principles we can derive from the Holy Father’s homily at Lampedusa?

1.   The migrants are our brothers and sisters, children of the same Father.

2.   We have a moral responsibility for the lives and safety of our migrant brothers and sisters.

3.   The goods God created in this world are not given to one nation or another but are created for the welfare of all God’s children regardless of nationality.

4.   Much of the suffering that has driven the migrants to leave their homes to seek not only opportunity but safety has been caused by the economic and political factors of our seemingly developed societies.

5.   Failure to respond to the humanitarian needs of our migrant brothers and sisters is grossly sinful, a narcissistic indifference to the plight of human suffering

6.   The appropriate response to the tragedy facing migrant people today is a compassionate solidarity of championing their right to seek a better life, and certainly, at the minimum,  to respond to their immediate need and give them safety, health care, food, and protection.  

But Lampedusa was not Francis final word.  He did, about two weeks ago, address a message particular to the situation we are facing on our southern border. 

Many people who are forced into emigration suffer and often die tragically; many of their rights are violated, they are obliged to separate from their families and, unfortunately, continue to be subjected to racist attitudes and xenophobia.Faced with this situation, I repeat what I stated in the Message for this year’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees: “A change of attitude towards migrants and refugees is needed on the part of everyone, moving away from attitudes of defensiveness and fear, indifference and marginalization — all typical of a ‘throwaway culture’ — towards attitudes based on a culture of encounter, the only culture capable of building a better, more just and fraternal world”.Furthermore, I am keen to call attention to the tens of thousands of children who emigrate alone, unaccompanied, to escape from poverty and violence: this is a class of migrants who, from Central America and from Mexico, cross the border with the United States of America in extreme conditions, in search of a hope that that most of the time is in vain. They increase day by day. Such a humanitarian emergency demands, first of all, urgent intervention, such that these minors are received and protected. Such measures, however, will not suffice, where they are not accompanied by information policies concerning the dangers of such a journey and, above all, which foster development in their Countries of origin. Finally, to face this challenge, it is necessary to draw the attention of the entire International Community in order that new forms of legal and safe migration be adopted.

Francis calls the response of those who feel no obligation to the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters for what it is: racist attitudes and xenophobia.  We need to move away from the fear, the indifference, the zeal to protect for ourselves what we have, rather than be willing to share what we have been given, and the tendency to ostracize those who are different from us.  We need to move towards a culture of what John Paul II called “Solidarity”—the realization that God’s plan for the human family is a vulnerable and trusting interdependency.  In the long term we need to eliminate the need for people to flee their homes in order to be safe  from gangs or to achieve an economic sufficiency, but while we heal the wound we need the Band-Aid as well.  The immediate needs of the people at our borders for safety, for food and shelter, and above all for dignity and respect must be met.   I am not extolling Francis’ admonition on the matter of refugees because it is Francis’ but because it is consistent with the Scriptures and reflections a course of action based on moral principles.  It is not simply the Catholic response, but reflects an evangelical Catholic response.  Those who opt otherwise are no more authentic in their Catholic faith than are those who claim that they can be both truly Catholic and favor abortion, or the death penalty, or any undermining the culture of life.