Religious Liberty--For What Purpose? 3

Archbishop William Lori,

the brains behind Fortnight

For Freedom as well as the

harassment of the American

nuns. 

The following paragraphs are  from an article published in several newspapers around the nation this past week regarding the exemption of Torah scholars from the military draft in Israel.  I am not an Israeli citizen and so I have no opinion about that particular question—and in fact I remember that when the United States had a draft seminary students were exempt from it—so that is not what I am writing about.  But in the article were several paragraphs about how the ultra-orthodox are forcing non-observant Jews—and gentiles for that matter—to follow Orthodox religious practices.  

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Zalman Deren spends his days studying the Torah in a small synagogue near the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He's young and able-bodied, with a wife and three children to feed, but has no job because that would distract him from his vocation.

The draft is not the only issue that puts the Haredim at odds with Israel's secular majority, however.

As the fastest growing sector of the population, they are expanding to new neighborhoods where they establish strict religious enclaves where modern Israelis don't want to live.

They have outraged many by forcing women to sit at the back of public buses in their enclaves or trying to ban women from singing at army festivals. Some of them bully and spit on women and girls they think are not modestly dressed.

The ultra-Orthodox have also overplayed their hand in Israeli politics - many secular Israelis resent the kingmaker role their parties play in coalitions that has allowed them to demand a high level of subsidies and exert what they say is excessive influence on religious policies.

How do you feel about religious groups forcing others to follow the practices of their faith?  How does that fit into the American practice of separation of Church and State. 

I have been to Israel often and frankly I have never minded that a restaurant doesn’t serve butter when there is meat on the menu.  I don’t even miss having bacon for breakfast.  I can go without shellfish if I have to.  As a Christian I am always reminded in subtle ways that though my tourist dollar is welcome, I am no more than tolerated.  It’s fne when I am in Israel, but I don’t want to be treated that way in my home country. 

There was a day in this country when Catholics were second class citizens.   Catholic children had to listen to readings from the King James Bible in public schools.  Catholic children had to recite the “Protestant version” of the Lord’s Prayer in schools.  There were towns where Catholics were not allowed to build a church. In fact, in Washington DC 16^th Street—the street that runs north from the White House—was off limits for Catholic churches by a “covenant” that bound people who bought land along that street. 

Well, today there are Catholics who want to force non-Catholics—Protestants, Jews, non-believers, Muslims—to conform to Catholic practices regarding contraception.  It is our right, they claim, to deny access to contraceptive services to our employees who are not Catholic even if we don’t have to pay for those services or provide them ourselves.  We have a right of religious freedom to deny these services to people who work for us.  Of course, there are some who would go so far as to make our employees sign a statement that they agree  with the Catholic Church regarding our beliefs on contraception and family planning.  That isn’t much different tham the pious Hasidim making women sit in the back of the bus, is it?

Reformation Today! 3



Pope John XXIII in

the papal tiara--John

loved the pomp of the

papacy

 We have looked at the issue of Church reform from a historical perspective and although I have yet to cover the reformations of the 16^th century—Protestant and Catholic—I would like to draw on earlier entries to suggest some current principles for reform of the Church today.

I had mentioned the Carolingian and Ottonian reforms initiated under the authority of the various Holy Roman Emperors at a time when the Church seems incapable of reforming itself.  I had also dealt with the Gregorian and Innocentian Reforms of the 11^th and 13^th centuries which were successful attempts by the papacy to bring about reform.  This is the challenge—who can reform the Church?  Ideally reform comes from the leadership as it did with Gregory VII, Innocent III, and in the sixteenth century the Council of Trent and Popes such as Paul III or Pius V who were responsible for convening the Council and implementing its decrees.  Earlier in the sixteenth century when the Emperor proved not to have the resolve to reform the Church and reform was the last thing that popes such as Alexander VI or Julius II or Clement VII wanted, an effort for reform initiated from within the Church led to a series of reformations led by such figures as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others that shattered the unity of the Church and has left us today with a divided Christianity.  We need to take a closer look at the various Protestant Reformations to understand them better but we do know that we don’t want to further split the Church.  On the other hand, we do want reform and it doesn’t seem to be coming today from the leadership.

When John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council it was his aim to bring the Church into step with the contemporary world—not to accommodate the Church to the culture but to renew and revitalize the Church by divorcing it from the world of the ancien regime to which it was still tied in so many ways.   (The ancien regime refers to the world of absolute monarchy and hierarchical dominance that characterized Europe before the French Revolution.)  Good Pope John was a man of the times—willing to look at old things in new ways but he did rather enjoy the pomp of the ancien regime and did not plan to change the trappings of the Church as much as to relieve it of its fear of the world outside the basilica doors.  His reign was short, however, and his successor Paul VI was far more radical.  Paul abolished the Papal Court and its ceremonial, doing away with most of the imperial trappings of the papacy—the scarlet silk trains and fur capes of the cardinals were abolished from Roman ceremonies, the various ranks of papal nobility and ceremonial guards were done away with, and the heavy gilt furniture and red damask wall coverings of the papal apartments were replaced with more elegantly simple décor.  He began to convoke synods of bishops to seek their advice.  On the local level, he radically simplified the worship and ritual of the Church, expanding the role of the laity and putting the role of the priest within the community of believers rather than over it.

It was during the reign of Paul VI that Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles, a convert to the Church and son of an American Secretary of State (and nephew of the director of the CIA) wrote a very important book called Models of the Church.  Professor Dulles suggested that the time had come to move beyond the institutional and hierarchical understanding of the Church and to understand the Church more in terms of its mission and its identity as a community—or actually as a communio which is something slightly different and much more profound than our normal understanding of “community.” 

Building on the patristic Tradition that underlays Catholicism and drawing on the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Dulles gave us new possibilities of how to understand what it means to be Church.  The centuries old emphasis on hierarchy and governance going back to Jesuit theologian Saint Robert Bellarmine in the sixteenth century was pushed to the side in favor of seeing the Church’s mission as being a herald of the Gospel in the world, as the sacred bond of Christ’s own Body, as a servant for humankind, and as the new People of God who were to be the leaven for God’s Kingdom.  Dulles did not mean that there was to be no institutionalism or hierarchy but only that the narrow view of Church in terms of structure had to be widened to draw on the ancient insights of the great Fathers of the Church.

We will continue to look at Dulles insights over several entries, but one central point of Church reform today must be to break the monopoly of institutional structure that has such a stranglehold on Catholic life today.  Yes there is hierarchy.  Yes there is structure.   But what must define us and give us energy is something less about us and more about God’s Kingdom.  The current hierarchical fascination with power and pomp that has returned like a resurgent virus in the Body of Christ is weakening the Church and sapping it strength. 

At the opening session of the Second Vatican Council, Bishop Emile deSmedt of Bruges decried the Church for its “triumphalism, clericalism, and juridicism.”  His cry became the guide for the reforms of the Council as the Bishops made a sincere and honest attempt to fashion a Church that could be an effective witness to the Gospel in the modern world.   But that vision seems to be lost today as so many of the hierarchy and clergy want to refashion a Church of pomp and power, of law and pecking order.  Reform—genuine reform—must come with a recovery of the Spirituality of Servanthood not the piety of power.

Reformation Today! 2



Model of the 2nd Temple--the temple in

the days of Jesus



I have been reading N.T. Wright’s Book Simply Jesus (Harper:2011).  I started it on my flight home from my retreat last week and have been reading it in bits and pieces over the past few days.  Almost done.  I find it a little disturbing as Wright comes out of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England and while he is an acknowledged scripture scholar, his methodologies leave him with some very different theological foundations than what my education has given me.  Ironically though, while we may begin from some different starting points—his what may be called neo-orthodoxy and mine, well, he would call them modernist simpliste probably but I would think of them as mainline Catholic (Rahnerian)—while we may begin from different premises I think we end up pretty much singing in the same choir.  Well, in the same choir, though perhaps he sings tenor to my baritone.  What I mean by that is I think the Church—in our case, the Catholic Church—needs a good shot of a sort of retro-viral evangelicalism to inoculate it against the disease of dominance-addiction that is becoming pandemic in religion today.  Ultra-orthodox Jewry wants to expel all non-Jews from Israel.  Right-wing Hindus attack churches and mosques on the Indian subcontinent.  Islamic extremism wants sharia law to be enforced over non-Muslim populations.  Religious crazies in our country want America to be declared a “Christian Nation.”  Atheists want religion relegated to the most private sectors of life and banned from view and hearing. And everybody wants their religious beliefs—or their rejection thereof—written into civil and criminal law regardless of the conscience rights of their neighbors to hold to different values and doctrines.

A point that Wright brings up several times in his book is that the Temple officials of Jesus’ day were heavy into power and the accumulation of personal wealth.  I was a bit surprised to read this—not that it is not completely true—but because modern fears of being labeled anti-Semite make it awkward to speak of the corruption in the Temple cult at the time of Jesus.  But corruption there was.  This isn’t anti-Semitic, or more properly, anti-Jewish, anymore than it is anti-Catholic to speak of the Borgia papacies or the pornocracy of the 10^th century.  Let’s just be honest.  Annas and Caiaphas and their buddies weren’t saints any more than Leo X or John XII were saints.  It’s history, no problemo. 

Yes, in the final decades of the Temple’s history, to hold the high-priesthood required one to work closely with the Roman authorities even at the cost of fidelity to Jewish principles and in return for this collaboration, the cozy arrangement of religion and power brought considerable financial compensation to those who held religious office. In fact, not only the High Priest but all those priests and levites involved in the Temple administration had access to power and the considerable revenues attached to the Temple.  The little guys from the countryside—like Zachariah, the Father of John the Baptist, came in for their two weeks a year of duty and did the routine tasks of the sacrifices and cult before returning to their villages, but the great leaders who composed the Sanhedrin or who were permanently attached to the Temple formed an elite club were men to be reckoned with.  There was a great chasm of wealth, social standing, and power between the “chief priests and leaders of the people” (Matt 26:3) and the average Jew.   The members of this small elite had no idea of the struggles and challenges of the lives of the mass of the people entrusted to their care—nor did they care.  The priesthood to them was simply a sinecure—a personal position that guaranteed them a comfortable life.  This was nothing new, Ezekiel in his day scored the priests for having been bad shepherds to the people (Ezekiel 34:1-10), abusing their position to exploit God’s faithful people.  

    I cannot but think that our Church might be very different if the Shepherds of the New Israel, the Church, had more experience of listening—listening—let me say it again—listening—to the people entrusted to their care.  I don’t think too many of the purpled mitered majesties have sat down with the father of four whose wife has anxiety attacks about becoming pregnant again and who  is wondering how he is going to put his kids through college.   I don’t know how many have sat down with the middle-aged woman whose husband has left her for an overbosomed twenty-something but who is afraid of falling in love again herself because the sacraments are too important to her.  I don’t know how many have sat down with gay couple who have had a stable and loving relationship for 25 years but are afraid that the local just-out-of-seminary jerk is going to deny them communion in front of the entire parish or refuse to baptize their adopted child.  I don’t know how many have talked with the couple who have unsuccessfully tried to become pregnant for eight years and won’t go in vitro out of fidelity to Church teaching.  You see we have all the answers—but do we really know the questions?  In speaking of prayer, Mother Theresa said:

Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.

But it is not only to God that we must listen—or rather, contemplative prayer is not the only place where we must listen to God.  We must have the lev shomea, the listening heart of Solomon and tune it to the experience of God’s people.  God speaks there too.  This is especially true of bishops and priests to whom has been entrusted the ministry of shepherding God’s people.  More important than their love for the rules and laws by which they teach and govern must be the love for those whom they have been called to lead.  The Law, after all, was made for us, not us for the Law.   

Reformation Today! 1

The Son of Man came not to

be served but to serve

(Matt 20: 28)

I think that when we bring up the subject of Reform in the Church what we most need today is a movement to restore the Church to its role as Servant in imitation of its Master who came not to be served but to serve.  All this commotion about the Affordable Care Act and what it purportedly does to our “rights” as Catholic Americans is centered about the idea that we, as Church, should be able to dictate the norms of behavior to the larger society in which we live.  That premise needs to be seriously questioned, but even more we need to take stock of the reality of the declining influence of the Church on our society.  It is unrealistic to think that the Catholic Church can have the political influence on American life that it had through most of the 20^th century.   While some may either grieve or be angry that we can’t shape public policy as we once did, I believe it presents us with the opportunity to be once again the Church that Christ established and not the Church built by human power. 

Years ago I was struck by a passage in William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas’ Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, (Nashville:Abingdon, 1989) in which they critiqued mainline Protestantism in the United States  for its delusions about a lost ability to determine societal norms.  Hauerwas and Willimon wrote:
Everything needed to be reexamined, and the failure of the old answers, seen now more clearly by the glow of the furnaces at Dachau and the fires of Hiroshima, demanded new questions.  The world had shifted.  Mainline American Protestantism as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed.  Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless,  house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.

Well, we could rewrite this today to say

Everything needs to be reexamined and the failure of the old answers, seen now more clearly in the glare of the clergy sex-abuse trials and the investigative lights of numerous financial crimes and ‘irregularities,” demands radical reform.  The world has shifted.  Catholicism in the Developed World—and in particular in the United States—can no longer plod along as if everything has not changed.  Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house falling into ruins around her, but acting as if her family still controlled the city, the Holy See and our own American bishops, continue to act as if they were still in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.     

If I am critical of Cardinal Burke for his antiquated pomp and Archbishop Lori for his high-handed ways and the Institute of Christ the Sovereign Priest for their living in a world of make believe baroque revivalism, and Carl Anderson for his shabby influence pedaling at the Roman Curia, and Bishop Olmstead for his ill-informed autocracy, and Cardinal Law for his unrepentant lack of shame, it is because they are holding our Church hostage to a world that exists any longer only in their own fantasies of power.  Gentlemen, the ancien regime is over and it ain’t coming back.  The toothpaste ain’t  goin’ back in the tube.   You—we—simply have no power anymore to chart the course of American society.  Get over it.  Wake up and smell the coffee.  Move on!

And if I am behind the good women of the LCWR and I tend to canonize people like Dom Helder Camara and Archbishop Romero and Bishop Tom Gumbleton, and Sister Joan Chittester,  and Dorothy Day and Social Justice and L’Arche and the Jesuit inner-city schools it is because I believe these are the first fruits of a new age for the Church, an age that will be characterized by service to society rather than exercising power over it.  And as one who looks to the Gospels for guidance, I say “gratias tibi, Domine.”  

Protestant Martyrs and Catholic "Liberty"

The burning of Archbishop Thomas Cramner
in the reign of Bloody Mary

I recently was shown this slide-and-music presentation regarding the Fortnight For Freedom and the challenges facing the Catholic Church in the United States to preserve its religious freedom in face of the threats to it by liberal secularism represented by Democratic Party and the Obama administration.  This video is a stirring presentation designed by one Margie Sindelar to make it clear to the viewer that we must make a choice between our Catholic faith and the Affordable Care Act sponsored by President Obama—there is no middle ground; there is no compromise.  Ms. Sindelar shows us images of Pope Benedict representing truth and  President Obama incarnating falsehood.  The former is the good side, of course; the latter, as we all know, the evil side.  The one, in the words of the soundtrack hymn, “Once to Every Man and Nation,” represents bloom and light; the other darkness and blight.  It is very simple really.  Doesn’t require one to think much about the issues—just watch the video and run out and vote against the Reign of Evil currently occupying the White House.  Here is the link to Ms. Sindelar’s video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YIJ-G3gu9JQ

And below are the lyrics of its soundtrack—James Russell Lowell’s poem “Once to Every Man and Nation” put to the music of Thomas J. Williams. (An alternative melody sung in some churches is Haydn’s “Austria”—you would recognize it: it is the melody to Deutschland Deutschland Über Alles, the anthem associated with Hitler’s Germany.)   

Once to Every Man and Nation

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong;
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.

Lowell wrote the poem as a young man in 1845, the year after his marriage and it was published in The Boston Courier in December of that year.  Though his student-days reputation at Harvard had been one of a troublemaker Lowell went on to make a name for himself as a poet, critic, and editor.  He was active in the movement to abolish slavery and he saw the role of the poet was to be a prophet who called society to account.  He had that Whig optimism that characterized 19^th century liberalism. 

But here is the irony.  Lowell came from a Church family—his father was a Unitarian minister.  Now 19^th century Unitarians were not the vague humanists of today but were still well within the Christian orbit.  They were more Arians—Christians who reserved the fullness of Divinity to the Father but seeing Jesus as his Son come to the world to teach us through the scriptures an enlightened path that would lead us to a better world.  Like most New England Protestants, the standard pieces of religious literature in the Lowell home were the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, sometimes known as The Acts and Monuments.  This book, first published in 1563 by Anglican clergyman and polemicist John Foxe, recounted a long history of martyrdoms and persecutions stretching back into antiquity in which Foxe managed to make every victim a Protestant—even those long before Luther—and every tyrant an agent of the Pope. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was standard reading in every English (and New England) home from Puritan times down to the 20^th century and it was one of the strongest—if not the strongest—factor in creating an anti-Catholicism that portrayed the Pope as the evil enemy of Christ and his faithful, the Anti-Christ, desirous of forcing his false doctrines on them to the cost of their religious liberty.   The “burning martyrs” to whom Lowell referred in this poem-turned-hymn were the Anglican Divines put to death by burning at the stake under the reign of the Catholic Queen “Bloody” Mary.  The “cause of evil” of which Lowell wrote was Catholicism; the “truth” contrasted with it was Protestantism.  Lowell tells us that innocent and pure Protestant Truth was given the portion of the scaffold by the Catholic Queen—in the wrong—on the throne.  All this makes it a bit ironic that Ms. Sindelar uses this particular hymn as the stirring motivation to win people to the Catholic cause against that evil heir of Bloody Mary, President Obama.  But that is what happens when people don’t know their history. Tut, tut. 

In the Protestant mind of James Russell Lowell, Catholicism with its desire to force its doctrines on good bible-believing Christians is what had threatened religious freedom from the days of those first Protestants—the Apostles—down to his own day.  Lowell saw Protestantism as standing for that freedom of conscience against the tyranny of Catholic Doctrine.  It should make us think for a moment or two. 

Is the freedom that some are seeking in our name the prerogative to impose Catholic doctrine on the larger society—this is the very thing and Lowell and American Protestants had feared from the colonial days of Puritan New England until Vatican II and the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae  that made freedom of conscience a principle of Catholic Doctrine.  There is nothing wrong with winning our countrymen and women to our Catholic faith and its moral principles—indeed to enter into a dialogue leading towards truth is part of our mission as Christ’s Church—but do we truly want to impose unilaterally our principles on others before they come to the truth of the Catholic faith?  Would this not be the true threat to religious liberty when the doctrines and morals of one religious tradition become the standards of the civil and criminal law applicable to all?   As I said in yesterday’s blog, I have my concerns about the Obama Administration’s understanding about the mission of the Church but I am not afraid that my religious liberty is in jeopardy.  To be frank, I am concerned that the religious liberty of others may be in jeopardy due to the extremism of some of my coreligionists.       

Religious Liberty--For What Purpose 2?

Yesterday I wrote about the stinging critique of the Christian Churches by Frederick Douglass for their failure to speak up for the enslaved in the debate over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  Douglass claimed that the Churches in the United States had betrayed the religious freedom with which our Constitution had endowed them (and other religious groups) by focusing only on their freedom of worship while not using that freedom to speak up on behalf of those held in human bondage.  And are we American Catholics not engaged in the same travesty of Religious Freedom today when we scream that the Obama Administration is attacking our Religious Freedom by giving the employees of our Church institutions access to contraception and sterilization?  Note: not that the we are being forced to pay for or provide services to which our faith objects—such services must be provided to our employees without cost to us by the insurance companies themselves—but that our employees are being given access to them at all.  (The insurance companies have agreed to provide these services at their own expense as they are far more cost-effective than pregnancy-coverage.)  Meanwhile, while we are protesting in the name of religious freedom that employees of our schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, social-service centers, administrative offices, etc are being provided these services if they so request (no one is forcing anyone to use contraceptives or undergo sterilization), Cardinals Burke and Levada and Law and Archbishop Lori are decrying our Religious Sisters for being “overly concerned” with Social Justice issues.  “Overly concerned” about justice!  How can you be “overly concerned” about justice?    How can you be “overly concerned” about abused women and children?  How can you be “overly concerned” about immigrants who live in fear of being deported to countries where their lives are endangered?  How can you be “overly concerned” about senior citizens who are living in fourth-floor walk-ups without air conditioning in this 99° heat?  And—and here is the rub—how can you be “overly concerned” about 44,000,000 Americans—children, old people, women, diabetics and the other pre-existing conditioned, fathers of families, single parents etc. who don’t have health care?  Hey, you purpled eminences with your long silk trains—and you too Carl Anderson with your ostrich plumed hat and silly cape and sword—somebody here is straining the gnat and swallowing the camel and it ain’t the good sisters!  This was the very sort of abuse of religious freedom that Frederick Douglass decried a century and half-ago.  This isn’t about religious freedom—it is about license; license to enforce your opinions on others while not taking responsibility to lift the weight of the cross from the shoulders of the suffering! 

I saw photos yesterday of crowds outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington protesting the “Fortnight for Freedom.”  “Fortnight for the GOP” read one sign; “The Bishops don’t speak for me” read another.   These weren’t young radicals or disgruntled LCWR nuns.   These were  middle-aged men and women—the very sort of people that were raised to follow the Church loyally.  And follow loyally they do—for when the bishops abdicate their responsibility to speak the gospel and allow themselves to shill for political agendas—of the right or the left—they are no longer leading the Church.  Perhaps were the bishops the voice for the poor, for the oppressed, for victims as they were in the years after the Council they would have some credibility left.  Their own failure, however, to speak the truth in the recent scandals and then, like the priest of the gospels who walked down the road turning away his face from the man beaten by thieves and left for dead (Luke 10:31), to walk silently by the pressing issues of our day while piously prating about their “Religious Liberty” being endangered by Obamacare has exposed them for mere Pharisees. They worry about the washing of cups and saucers and neglect weightier matters of the Law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matt 23:23).

Now this is not to say that there is not a problem with Obamacare.  There is and we should not ignore it.  As I pointed out in the entry for this past June 8^th—educational, medical, and social services are as much a part of the Church’s mission as is worship and to exempt houses of worship from the provisions of the Affordable Care Act but not schools, universities, social service centers, etc.  is to impose an understanding of the Mission of the Church with which the Catholic Church doctrinally disagrees. Such a definition as to what is our mission potentially limits our freedom to accomplish that mission. The government should not have the authority to tell the Church what is the proper role of the Church.  On the other hand, Churchmen should not abuse the freedoms given by our Constitution to impose sectarian beliefs and values on the larger society.  Christ never gave to his Church a mission to make or to change laws.  Our mission is to change hearts.  We need to bring our society to a change of heart, a job which our bishops seem particularly inept at doing.   

Religious Liberty--For What Purpose?



Frederidk Douglass

 Well, back from retreat and travels and ready to settle in again.  Today’s entry is a long one but I hope thought provoking.  I think it has implications for all sorts of issues today—the Fortnight for Freedom, LCWR and the Nuns on the Bus, Social Justice and the Church’s Mission.  If you have the patience to read the entire entry and mull it over, I will just let you draw your own conclusions as you may.  I don’t think I have any answers really—not that I ever do—but I think there is a lot to think about regarding the role of religion in society, authentic freedom of religion, what our priorities as Christians should be.  Anyway here is the background:

In 1850 the Congress of the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act requiring the return of runaway slaves in the “free states” to their owners in “slave states.”  By mid-nineteenth century hundreds of slaves were escaping to the free states each year.  Although a 1793 federal law had required the same, it was often circumvented and indeed state and local laws often forbad police under their jurisdiction to interfere with runaway slaves.  The 1850 law made it a criminal offense punishable by fine for any federal marshal or other official to fail to arrest any runaway slave or any person of color alleged to be a runaway slave.  Hmmm, sounds like some laws today.  

For the greater part the Christian Churches in the United States supported the enforcement of this law.  There was a perceived good—it was an effort to cool tempers that were leading to civil war.  That effort, of course, would prove to be unsuccessful.  Escaped slave and abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass gave a long address on July 4, 1852.  Among other things, he took a long and critical look at the response—or failure to respond—of the Churches in the United States to this law.  Here is what he had to say       

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the "mint, anise and cummin"—abridge the fight to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem "the Fugitive Slave Law" as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as "scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith."

THE CHURCH RESPONSIBLE.

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that "pure and undefiled religion" which is from above, and which is "first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy." But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation - a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, "Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow."

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that "There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it."

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The LORDS of Buffalo, the SPRINGS of New York, the LATHROPS of Auburn, the COXES and SPENCERS of Brooklyn, the GANNETS and SHARPS of Boston, the DEWEYS of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land, have, in utter denial of the authority of Him, by whom the professed to he called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach "that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God."

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the "standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ," is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.

RELIGION IN ENGLAND AND RELIGION IN AMERICA.

One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in England towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating, and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and restored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high[ly] religious question. It was demanded, in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and Burchells and the Knibbs, were alike famous for their piety, and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable, instead or a hostile position towards that movement. Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties), is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you "hotel these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

Just a final ingredient in your thoughtful stew.  This was the reading at Mass this morning.  When I heard it, I thought it was particular to Independence Day but in fact it conincidentally happens to be the assigned reading for Wednesday of the 13^th week of the Year.  It comes from the fifth chapter of the prophet Amos.

Seek good and not evil,
that you may live;
Then truly will the LORD, the God of hosts,
be with you as you claim!
Hate evil and love good,
and let justice prevail at the gate;
Then it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts,
will have pity on the remnant of Joseph.

I hate, I spurn your feasts, says the LORD,
I take no pleasure in your solemnities;
Your cereal offerings I will not accept,
nor consider your stall-fed peace offerings.
Away with your noisy songs!
I will not listen to the melodies of your harps.
But if you would offer me burnt offerings,
then let justice surge like water,
and goodness like an unfailing stream.

Hmmm  our feasts and our solemnities   our cereal offerings and our sacrifices   our Masses and our Fortnights   What are they without justice?  Without goodness?