Responsibility For Orlando; Responsibility For The Future

We have met the enemy and he is
us.

I am stunned over the events in Orlando.  Ironically at the very moment the calamity was unfolding, I had been sitting at my computer writing the previous posting in which I wrote that I need to see that Islam—like the other religions, great and small of our world—produces people of wide vision, great tolerance, peace builders and reconcilers and not fall into the trap that only Christian trees bear good fruit.  And now, of course, the blogosphere is replete, once again, with anti-Muslim slogans that would indiscriminately slap the brush of hatred and violence over the hundreds of millions who find in their religion the roots of compassion, reconciliation, and human betterment. 

“Christians” in Nigeria or Uganda can attack and burn a hall where gay men and women gather to socialize and Pope Francis or the Archbishop of Canterbury, much less you or me, aren’t given the burden of blame for the violence.  Indeed some of the same blogs that are now targeting Islam as the ideological tinder that was behind the Orlando violence themselves are filled with hate speech for LGBT persons, claiming that they only have reaped what they have sown.  If all Muslims are to be blamed for the violence of the Orlando attack, then we Christians, in fact, share in the responsibility as well for the judgments we make about those whom we judge to be sinners.  But the problem is much wider than religion gone toxic. 

We need to stand back and see how responsibility for the violence in our world lies as our own doorsteps.  We live in a culture saturated in violence.   Whether it is Game of Thrones or Independence Day: Resurgence or even Bluebloods we lace our entertainment with violence and death.  No one dare take on the NRA and its political agenda funded by the gun industry to prevent at all costs a rational system of legislation to keep automatic and semi-automatic weapons out of the hands of those who lack the responsibility to protect a peaceful citizenry.  Of course we are a society that condones babies being ripped from the bellies of their mothers by the abortion industry—it is all part of a wild and savage cultural imagination in which black lives do not matter, blue lives do not matter, and in fact no life really matters.  The Pope tells us that Capital Punishment is State-sanctioned murder but we close our ears.  Kids are taken to gun ranges rather than golf driving ranges.  We are drunk with violence and while we may profess to be Christian and sing our Sunday hymns, our real religion is blood.  This is not the kingdom that Jesus of Nazareth came to reveal to us.  This is not the Divine ratio for the Incarnation.  This is a fraudulent and inauthentic Christianity and we will be fraudulent and inauthentic Christians until we reject the language, vocabulary, syntax and culture of Death that runs through our society.  Before we dare demonize others we need to take a long hard look at the demons in our own hearts.  Like the first Christians who thoroughly rejected the violence of the Graeco-Roman world with its lion and gladiator shows, with its State-sponsored cruelty, with its contempt for the lives of others and indeed for its own citizens, we must turn our back on this culture of death and construct an alternative world. 

One of the etymologies often given for the word “Devil” is that it is derived from the Greek διαβολος via the Latin diabolus and the French diable.  διαβολος itself is constructed of two words, to force and apart.  The devil is the one who divides us.  Divides us from God; divides us from one another.  We need to see that whatever divides us, in our imagination, from others: Muslim, Gay, Immigrant, whatever—is the work of the evil One.  In the Mind of God every human person is his son or his daughter and his plan is to bring us together—in Christ, we Christians believe—into a conscious sharing of his Divine Nature.  This culture of unification must be our alternative to the Culture of violence and death which is eating out our world from within like the most vicious cancer. 

Earlier today, in looking up an article on Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, I found a reference to the Chemin Neuf Community.  It was founded by Jesuit Father Laurent Fabre in 1973—at the very end of the Paul VI/Vatican II papacy of hope before so much of our Catholic Church descended into the retreat from Vatican II in the protection of the more recent tragically ambiguous papacies of his successors but one.  The Chemin Neuf (Literally New Road) is an authentically Catholic (i.e. canonically recognized) movement.  It was give official recognition by Cardinal Alexandre Renard, archbishop of Lyon, in 1984 and later given the canonical status as a Public Association of the Faithful by Cardinal Albert Decourtray, Archbishop of the same See and Primate of France.  While canonically Catholic, it welcomes and includes members of a wide variety of Christian churches from the Evangelical and Charismatic to the Orthodox Churches of the East who wish to work together, hand in hand, to spread the Gospel.  To spread the Gospel: not to provide apologetics as to why we are right and everyone else is wrong, but to announce the Εωαγγελιον, The Good News of Jesus Christ, a message that calls our human family to reconciliation, peace, and unity.  The community, which follows Ignatian Spirituality, has an extensive outreach to families, including those who have been divorced and remarried.  It has provided a welcome experience of Christian community to many who have found that sense of community in Christ, to be lacking in more traditional Church structures. 

It is a different approach but then it is time for new and different approaches.  Our self-imposed diversities are from the evil One.  They lead only to death and Christ is Lord of Life.  After Orlando I am more convinced than ever that the future requires people of any and all religious beliefs to work together in mutual respect with all people of good will in taking responsibility for making our world better. 

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.

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.   

The Culture of Violence

In his first address after the Newtown Connecticut shootings, President Obama issued a very moving statement in which he said: 

"Each time I learn the news I react not as a president, but as anyone else would -- as a parent. And that was especially true today, …I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do."

I only wish what he said was true.  A tour of the usual Angry Catholic sites shows that the wolves pounced immediately proclaiming the President to be “insincere,”  “hypocritical,” “using this occasion for his own agenda.”  What spiritually sick and emotionally troubled people are those who cannot put aside their anger at the man in the Oval Office to share the horror of a nation and the grief of the bereaved parents and families?  And they think they are good Catholics when they fail to follow Christ and take the heartache of others and make it their own.   
I wrote yesterday about the culture of violence that is destroying our society.  I am not worried about gays and lesbians or Muslims or atheist displays on courthouse lawns.  I am worried about video games that teach children that life is cheap and there to be destroyed.  I am worried about movies that display gore and rage.  I am worried about television shows where guns blaze and life is cheap.  I am worried about music that celebrates death and violence.  This is pornography of the worst kind but it is totally acceptable in most American homes.  Why should we be surprised that people don’t care that babies are ripped out of a mother’s womb by an abortionist when we constantly proclaim in one form of “entertainment” after another that life has no value except to be the target of someone’s rage.  We feed rage and then we are surprised when a disturbed and angry kid commits some sociopathic act?  Who is  “insincere,” “hypocritical,” “using the media for their own agenda?”    
I can understand that people may not like President Obama.  There have been presidents that I have not liked either.  There have been men in that Oval Office whom I think have done a bad job.  There have been one or two whom I think betrayed their oath of office.  I have never wished any of them harm, however and I have never let my anger replace my desire to fulfill Christ’s command to love my neighbor—including my neighbor in the White House—as Christ has loved me.  The late M. Scott Peck—in his book People of the Lie—says that we cannot afford not to face the reality that some people are evil.  That is not to say that they were created that way and it is not to say that they can’t come to see their sin and change.  But they are, in their current state, evil: the good in them has been twisted and distorted into evil.  They become the People of the Lie.  Their anger, their pride, their need for control, their hatreds—whatever their sin is—has distorted the Divine Image in which they were created.   I grieve when I read these websites and see this evil incarnate itself in a blog or a video.  And when they claim a Catholic identity I am embarrassed that we as a Church have so compromised the Gospel that these twisted souls can claim a Catholic voice.