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.      

 

 

On Being Truly Pro-Life

Today’s tragedy in Newtown Connecticut makes me wonder even more deeply if one can truly be pro-life and at the same time support the NRA and the culture of violence that is devouring our society from within?   Why do we not hear about this culture of violence from our pulpits?  It is as an essential a component of the culture of death as is abortion and yet the voices that decry the one too often support the other.     

Rabbis Would Make Good Bishops

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel with

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King with

whom Heschel worked in the Civil

Rights movement and marched in 

Selma in 1965.   

As readers probably note, I don’t post the responses I get to this blog.  The first reason is that 80% are from folks who are otfw (a synonym of sorts for “just plain crazy”) but the more important reason—not unrelated to the first—is that I am not intending to start discussions but only to bring out historical information or shed on contemporary situations historical perspectives with which many people are unfamiliar.  Nevertheless, I do pay attention to those postings that seem to be from normal people (as opposed to extraterrestrials and escapees from a parallel universe where people never heard of the Second Vatican Council) and try to bring up subjects about which they comment or to indirectly answer questions they raise.  But I had a much appreciated and valuable comment after my posting on The Politics of Spirituality (Dec 12 2012) in which the responder pointed out a podcast about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the truly significant figures in American Religious History.  The podcast (and my correspondent) quoted Heschel as saying
“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined, not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid."    
This is so true.  And it is one of the reasons I do this blog.  Our Catholic Church in the United States is being taken down the road of being “irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.”  It doesn’t have to go that path.  We have a Tradition, as Catholics, that is immensely relevant, exciting, liberating, and stimulating but we have been hijacked by moronic buffoons who are successfully undermining the our mission as Church to be the Gospel’s Light for our world.  As I have written before, thanks to our bishops and their short-sighted (and retrospective) “leadership,” everyone knows what the Catholic Church is against but no one knows what it is for. There could not be a more disastrous plan for “the new evangelism.”  We are running a negative campaign against our own mission! 
Well, to help us focus on a gospel message that is pertinent, electrifying, liberating, and energizing, let’s turn to another quote from Rabbi Heschel: “The God of heaven and earth is profoundly concerned with the widow and the orphan.”   Now that is a message worth proclaiming.  Why is it that when what we need is a Rabbi, God sends us bishops?  Well, of course, maybe it isn’t God who sent them.  Or then again, maybe he sent us what we deserve and not what we need.  I hope that we are not becoming as mediocre as our leadership. 
To hear that podcast about Rabbi Heschel plug this in:  http://www.onbeing.org/program/spiritual-audacity-abraham-joshua-heschel/227

 

The Politics of Spirituality

Thomas Merton, leading

American Spiritual writer

of the last 100 years.

A friend of mine called me the other evening with a question he is facing on a take-home exam at Catholic U in Washington.  He wanted my advice as it is a field in which I teach.  And the question was “Compare and contrast contemporary spiritual writers with the classical spiritual writers.” 

I suggested several ideas he might want to follow—contemporary spiritual writers draw on other fields such as psychology, anthropology, sociology of religion etc. in their writing, fields not developed at the time of Francis de Sales or Teresa of Avila or Bernard of Clairvaux.  Moreover, contemporary spiritual writers will also draw insights from other world-religion traditions such as Buddhism or Islamic mysticism and they will also find insight in Native American spirituality or in the spiritual
traditions of cultures such as the Australian aborigines.  This would not have been done before Nostra Aetate at Vatican II nor could it have been done in the more culturally narrow worlds of the medieval or even the early modern periods.  At this point my friend interrupted me and said that the contemporary authors they had read for this course on the history of Christian spirituality drew neither on an inter-disciplinary nor a inter-faith tradition.  So whom, I asked, had they been assigned to read.  The answer was Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Karl Rahner, and Henri deLubac.  I had been expecting Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Joan Chittester, Ronald Rohlheiser, Richard Rohr, Evelyn Underhill, Henri Nouwen, and other contemporary writers.  Ratzinger, Rahner, and deLubac are great writers—but they are systematic theologians not spiritual theologians.  Granted that each of the produced some writings of profound spiritual importance and each has shown through his writings a profound personal spiritual experience but it is interesting that the writers who are influencing contemporary American Catholics are overlooked in favor of these ivory-tower pietists. 

Now I realize that a Ratzinger or a Rahner or a deLubac  bring an academic rigor to their writings that the above mentioned authors do not.  But Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux and even Francis de Sales were not academics.  Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises are not the overflow of scholarly reflection. Thomas à Kempis did not write from a theological perspective.  Eckhardt was a theologian of course—but clearly distinguished between his mystical works (which were usually in the vernacular being in the way of sermons for enclosed nus) and his speculative theology which was written in Latin.   So too Bernard—while his work is theologically sound—wrote from inner spiritual experience not from rational constructions.  I am not questioning why a fellow professor assigned Rahner and Ratzinger but I do wonder why he passed over Merton, Underhill, and others?  But then, it is Catholic University and the ecclesiology of some professors is rather narrow to suit the purposes of the University’s governors and their own advancement.   Such is how the academic world plays its politics. 

It is, I am afraid, another symptom of the widening gap between the Church of the hierarchy and the Church of the Faithful.  Those who buy into the hierarchical model of Church dismiss the work of the Holy Spirit among the ordinary rank and file Christians.  It is tragic that this dichotomy has opened up at all but it is dangerous that the gap is widening.  There is so much spiritual vitality among the everyday Catholics that can be harnessed for a true New Evangelization if only those leading the hierarchical Church could look beyond their narrow vision and see it.      

 

Rethinking God IX

Pope Benedict XVI visits the

Synagogue of Rome

I saw an article in the Catholic New York recently that said that Cardinal Koch, the key Vatican official responsible for Jewish-Christian relations, said that any Vatican rapprochement with the Society of St. Pius X, the “Traditionalist” movement founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, would not include an implied endorsement of the anti-Semitism espoused by several leading members of that movement.  
We often think that the major bone of contention with the Society of St. Pius X is the Novus Ordo—the liturgical changes introduced by Pope Paul VI in the 1970 Reform of the Roman Missal but in fact the even deeper issue is the stance of the Second Vatican Council towards non-Christian religions articulated in the conciliar Decree Nostra Aetate and in particular the revision of Catholic attitudes towards Judaism.  In fact, a consistent element of Catholic neo-Traditionalism, both in its more extreme forms of the Society of Pius X and (its even more extreme) various Sede-Vacantist factions, and in such voices who claim submission (on their own terms) to the Holy See such as Michael Voris and his many admirers among such carpers as Mary Ann Krietzer of “Les Femmes” and "Restore D.C. Catholicism" is a steady anti-Semitic bias. 
“Traditional” Catholicism and anti-Semitism share a common history long pre-dating the Second Vatican Council and its changed directions.  Lefebvre himself came from a French Royalist family with roots in the Action Française movement of the late nineteenth century which was notorious for its anti-Semitic rants.  The clarification at Vatican II that not only are the Jewish people not responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus but that the Covenant which God made with the People of Israel is still a valid covenant by which they can be saved outraged Lefebvre and won to his rebellion tens of thousands of other Catholics for whom their biased hatred of the Jewish People trumped the magisterium. 
Of course this issue of the status of the Jewish People and their Covenant with God is yet another area where we Catholics have been “rethinking God.”  It would have been considered heresy five centuries ago—and not only by Catholics but by Christians of the newly formed (or the Re-formed) Churches of Protestantism that God still had anything to do with the Jewish People.  Luther was as full of anti-Semitic rants as any contemporary religious demagogue today.  But we have changed—Catholics and most Protestants—and have come to realize that God does not fit into our narrow boxes and that we must not distort his Word in scripture to make God seem to say things as repugnant as some would have it.
But how will the Society of Saint Pius X be reconciled to the Church unless it repudiates not only its rejection of the Council but explicitly its tendencies towards bigotry?  And what about other forms of bigotry endorsed by factions in the Church? If we can’t hide behind our straw man of a deity any longer to justify our hatred of Jews will be still be able to hid behind him to justify our hatred of LGBT people.  (Just in case you are confused LGBT stands for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transvestite.)   This is the danger of Rethinking God—once we stop using God to project our prejudices, all of a sudden anybody can come along and make a claim on his love.   The next thing you know, we will start thinking of God as a cosmic Someone who loves everybody and desires their salvation.  But don’t worry—we are probably five centuries away from such dangerous doctrines.  

An Example To Us All

Did you see this article by J David Goodman in the New York Times?  There was a day when you would say: “DePrimo?  Hmm, Italian, must be Catholic.”  Those days are gone, unfortunately—but I hope this guy is on our team because this is what our faith is about—not Father Mumbo Jumbo Hocus Pocus with his biretta and pious condemnations of all things Obama.  There is no Gospel that is not the Social Gospel—no Message of Christ that is not Good News to the Poor, sight to the blind, release to captives, and freedom to the oppressed/      
On a cold November night in Times Square, Officer Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he encountered an older, barefooted homeless man. The officer disappeared for a moment, then returned with a new pair of boots, and knelt to help the man put them on.
The act of kindness would have gone unnoticed and mostly forgotten, had it not been for a tourist from Arizona.
Her snapshot— taken with her cellphone on Nov. 14 and posted to the New York Police Department’s official Facebook page  late Tuesday — has made Officer DePrimo an overnight Internet hero.
By Wednesday evening, the post had been viewed 1.6 million times, and had attracted nearly 275,000 “likes” and more than 16,000 comments — a runaway hit for a Police Department that waded warily onto the social media platform this summer with mostly canned photos of gun seizures, award ceremonies and the police commissioner.
Among all of those posts, the blurry image of Officer DePrimo kneeling to help the shoeless man as he sat on 42nd Street stood out. “This is definitely the most viral,” said Barbara Chen, a spokeswoman for the department who helps manage its Facebook page.
Thousands of people commented on Facebook and Reddit, which linked to the post on Wednesday. Most of them praised Officer Deprimo, yet some suspected the photograph had been staged. Many debated whether the officer’s actions were representative of police officers in general, or were just unusually exceptional.
“I still have a grudge against law enforcement everywhere,” wrote one commenter on the police Facebook page. “But my respects to that fine officer.”
I don't have grudges against law enforcement officers--I know there are rotten apples in the barrel, but hey--show me the barrel that doesn't have a few.  But these men and women put their life on the line every day.  I never pass a police car or see an officer that I don't offer a quick prayer for them--but I hope that this officer will someday say a prayer for me 'cause I bet God hears this guy.