Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis, 11

Distinguished authority on Marxism, intellectual,

and theological commentator, Rush Limbaugh

I have been meaning to get back to Pope Francis’ interview with La Civilta Cattolica/America and now he has released the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium which, at almost one hundred pages, promises to give us fuel for quite some time to come.  Rush Limbaugh, savant of the Tea Party faction, has gone ballistic accusing the Pope of “pure Marxism,” and taken some easy but irrelevant shots at Vatican “wealth.”  Neo-Trad voices within the Church have either ignored it completely or paid it some light reference—such as Rorate Caeli’s observation that it is “a much more Thomistic text than anything authored by Benedict XVI” and then moved on to their usual cant about how Vatican II has destroyed the Roman Rite and how the advance of “homosexual marriage” is not inevitable.  Meanwhile EJ Dionne, writing the Washington Post, has called the spade.  Maybe they have reason to be afraid of the Pope. 

Christianity has been used over the centuries to prop up the powerful. But, from the beginning, the Christian message has been subversive of political systems, judgmental toward those at the top and demanding of all who take it seriously.

Pope Francis has surprised the world because he embraces the Christian calling to destabilize and to challenge. As the first leader of the Catholic Church from the Southern Hemisphere, he is especially mindful of the ways in which unregulated capitalism has failed the poor and left them “waiting.” His apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel” is drawing wide and deserved attention for its denunciation of “trickle-down” economics as a system that “expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” It’s a view that “has never been confirmed by the facts” and has created “a globalization of indifference.” Will those conservative Catholics who have long championed tax-cutting for the wealthy acknowledge the moral conundrum that Francis has put before them?

I am anxious to read it because I think I will find it challenging and I need to be challenged.  This season of Advent is one in which we each need to take a look at our lives and see what the barriers to God’s Kingdom we have erected in our lives and allow the Joy of the Gospel to dismantle them.  But we will go back first to the interview and keep looking at the previews Francis granted us there before looking at the feature Evangelii Gaudium.  And as for Francis being a Marxist, it just shows that ol’ Rush wouldn’t know the Gospel from Das Kapital.  Friday is St Nicholas Day—maybe Saint Nick will bring him a copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.    

As If I Need Another Reason to Hate the Red Sox

Cesar (not Hugo) Chavez

In the last post, I wrote of the concerns of Marielana Montesino de Stuart about Pope Francis and his supposedly liberal views.  As I mentioned Ms. Montesino de Stuart represents the intelligent wing of the neo-trads.  Let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. 
Did you ever wonder what happened to the unfortunates that President Reagan turned out of the mental hospitals in ‘80’s?  Well, I found one of them.  She moved to Boston and started a blog called The Tenth Crusade.   I must admit that I am of the school that wonders if anything good can come from Boston so I may be unduly prejudiced but the poor woman snapped again and suffered a relapse Easter Morning when she saw Cesar Chavez’s face on Google.  Not knowing the difference between Cesar Chavez and Hugo Chavez, this is what she wrote:

Google Posts Chavez's Communist Puss On Easter Sunday - Boycott

I was fit to be tied to open up my browser and see a picture of what looked like a Chinese communist on my google page. It turned out to be Chavez, to venerate his 86th birthday.
They could have put up Easter bunnies, Easter Eggs or even chosen to ignore it.
But no, they chose an outlandish and nefarious kick in the head to Catholics and Christians all over the world. I suppose we were lucky they didn't blow up pictures of their genitalia. Though I'm not sure it would have been any less offensive to me.
I couldn't delete google fast enough.
I immediately downloaded internet explorer 10.
I'll be getting rid of my gmail and switching the blog over to a forum outside of google.
I suggest you do the same.

When a respondent wrote in to say that the picture was Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Worker organizer and not Hugo Chavez, she tried to cover her gaffe but quite unsuccessfully, not knowing at first who Cesar Chavez was and certainly not knowing his Catholic ties and his deep Catholic Faith.  She tried to portray Cesar Chavez as a Communist writing

 
I'm sure your super intelligentsia won't get this, but whichever tyrant communist named Chavez they put up to insult Christians, they would have done less harm if they had put up kiddie porn and said bleep Christianity.

In interest of total disclosure, I refrained from printing part of her message because of a racist slur but as if this wasn’t bizarre enough, here is another  rejoinder she makes to one of her respondents who chided her over her failure to know what she was talking about.

TTC said...

Just for the record, long before the first time you dressed like a slut and went to barrooms to find irresponsible men willing to sleep with you, I was working against a group at the JFK School of Government named after Chavez who are stationed here in Boston to destroy the Roman Catholic Church as the first stage of destruction. They led the priests are perverts media blitz with some gays and a drunk lawyer who despises Christ.
Civil rights my foot.

This is one of the same neo-trads that went after Pope Francis for including women in the washing of the feet ceremony on Holy Thursday.  I tell you, it was a huge mistake to close the hospitals and put people like this back on the street.  I can only hope that Massachusetts does good background checks on gun buyers.  This lady is Belfry Betty.

Just so you don’t make the same mistake, let’s do a quick look at the late Cesar Chavez.    
Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was born in Yuma Arizona.  His father was a local grocer but lost both his business and his home in the great depression.  The Chavez family moved to California where they became migrant workers, picking peas and lettuce in the winter, cherries and beans in the spring, corn and grapes in the summer, and cotton in the autumn.  He dropped out of school after seventh grade to work full time in the fields but joined the United States Navy at age 17 during World War II.  Even though it was war time, Mexican Americans in the Navy were allowed only to do menial work in the Navy and not to fight.   Chavez was discharged at the end of the War and returned to California and the fields.  He began organizing Latinos for voter registration and to report and expose police brutality.  In 1962 Chavez and Delores Huerta organized the National Farm Workers Organization , later known as the United Farm Workers.  They also organized a march on the State Capitol to bring attention to the rights of migrant workers.  A five year strike against the growers won support of Americans from across the country and made many Americans aware of the plight of migrant workers.   Like Martin Luther King, Chavez supported civil disobedience but insisted on non-violence. 
The nineteen sixties were a time when American Catholics became much more aware of the demands of the Gospel for Social Justice.  Chavez was a devout Catholic and many conscientious laity, religious, priests and even bishops rallied to his support for the Farm Workers.   According to Dr. Christopher Shannon, professor of History at Christendom College—no liberal and one of America’s most right-wing Catholic institutions—Chavez offered Catholics a model for faithful and effective civic engagement.  Writing last year in Crisis Magazine, Dr. Shannon made the claim that Chavez was “The last Catholic in America to achieve a ‘cultural/political synthesis’ that brought the Church’s social teaching into the public square.”  Shannon moreover wrote that Chavez contributed to the development of an authentic Catholic politics because of his ability “to speak a common language with non-Catholics” while attempting to enlighten them as to a deeper appreciation of Catholic Social thought. 
Chavez made several bad judgments in his career—most notably endorsing the Marcos Regime in the Philippines in an effort to win Filipino support for the Farm Workers. 
Chavez died in San Luis Arizona on April 23, 1993. Almost 40,000 people gathered for his funeral presided over by several bishops and dozens of priests. 
Chavez’ birthday, March 31, is a state holiday in Colorado, California, and Arizona.  This year President Obama suggested that all Americans take time to honor his legacy.  That is how his face happened to show up on Google and drive The Madwoman of Back Bay into her tirade.  Good heavens. 

Post-Newtown Choices

I mentioned in my last post H. Richard Neibuhr and his book Christ and Culture, or more specifically I referred to his “Christ of Culture” model drawn from that book.  Neibuhr, the younger brother of theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, was a Protestant theologian coming out of the Evangelical and Reformed tradition (now the United Church of Christ) a German based denomination that embraced both Lutheran and Calvinist roots.  Neibuhr, who died in 1962 at age 68, represents the “neo-orthodox” movement in American Protestantism of the first half of the twentieth century that provided an important corrective to the modernist-leaning liberal trend in American and European Protestant Christianity of the period.  Neibuhr held his Ph.D. from Yale in 1924 and after serving several years as president of Elmhurst College and two stints of teaching at Eden Theological Seminary, he returned to Yale to teach in 1931 and remained there until his death.  As a “neo-orthodox” Christian, Neibuhr drew his chief inspiration from Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth.    Typical to this Calvinist heritage, Neibuhr stressed the absolute Sovereignty of God.   His acerbic critique of contemporary liberal Protestantism remains a classic and I often quote it in my talks as it applies equally well to the American happy-clappy Catholicism that I detest for its lack of gravity and historical context.  Neibuhr wrote of liberal Christians that they believed in

A God without anger

Who led a people without sin
Into a kingdom without judgment
Through the ministry of a Christ without a cross. 

If that just doesn’t sum up what is wrong with a lot of contemporary Christianity —Catholic and Protestant—I don’t know what does.

In any event, the “Christ of Culture” position which Neibuhr scores can  basically be described as the socio-political-economic stance of the “Christian” who uncritically endorses the cultural status quo.  I always use the example of the Russian Orthodox Bishops standing on the railway station platforms blessing the Czarist troops as they are sent off to World War I.  National flags flanking the altar or singing “America the Beautiful” in a worship service would be other examples.  The identification with America as the new “Promised Land” or Americans being the new “chosen people” is yet another.  All these are examples of the unhealthy alliance of public culture and religious institutions.  They are usually wed to a moralism that takes no account of the modern sciences and a free-market capitalism that leaves every man to himself and leaves women and children to be victimized by a system based on rabid individualism and unbounded greed.    
But the relationship of the Christian to the prevalent culture is even more complex today than in Neibuhr’s time.  We are in the midst of what is being called “culture wars” as two competing ideologies strive for recognition as the predominant American culture.  The competing culture to the neo-cons is a libertarian/libertine society in which the individual has no accountability to the common ethic—for there is no acknowledged “common ethic.”  This society would advocate a feel-good world of total subjectivism, addictive consumerism, actions without accountability, sex without commitment, and narcissistic me-firstism.  Neither “culture” is consistent with core Christian values.  The fatal flaw in both pseudo-cultures, the neo-con and the liberal, is the American lie of individualism.  I, the individual, is not the subject of supreme good.  “My rights,” my good, my desires, and even my freedoms must be subordinated—freely, but subordinated none the less—to the common good.    
The Newtown Tragedy demands the Christian, Catholic or Protestant, must step into the culture and redeem what is redeemable within it and repent of what is not.   What is not redeemable in contemporary America is our fascination with violence and our addictions to anger.  What threatens to destroy us as a society is the ever widening gap rooted in rage that makes dialogue impossible and reconciliation no more than a dream. 
By the way, yesterday (Thursday, Dec 20) Terry Gross had a great discussion on the challenges facing those who advocate stronger gun-control policies from the NRA and from the gun manufacturers--and the relationship between NRA and manufacturers.