Confederates and Conversion

Last updated on: October 26, 2016 at 12:31 pm By Jennifer Fitz

H/T to Joe Long for the link to this history of the conversion of Nathan Bedford Forrest, which begins by explaining just how unconverted the man was:

Nathan went on to become a very successful and wealthy businessman. Though uneducated and “backwoods” by nature, he was a skilled entrepreneur, albeit in an immoral trade. He made his fortune as a slave trader and as a plantation owner, and by the time the Civil War began in 1861, he was worth 1.5 million dollars, an astronomical figure, when considered by today’s standards.

. . . Forrest’s post-war life further soiled his reputation. As Reconstruction commenced in the South, many Southerners resentfully fought against the Northern “carpet baggers” who came down, collected government contracts worth millions, then did little to fulfill obligations. Tensions were high between Northerners, Southerners, and many freed slaves. In 1867 a group of white men in Pulaski, Tennessee formed a group that was meant to be a “protective” squad for Southerners that they dubbed the Ku Klux Klan.

Which means we should vilify the man, right?

Maybe not:

The next night, Rev. Stainback went by to visit with Forrest, and they fell to their knees and prayed together. Forrest said that he had put his trust in the Redeemer, and that his heart was finally at peace. The final two years of his life seemed to bear out the truth of his confession. Nathan Bedford Forrest the fierce fighter, gambler, racist, and sinner….was a changed man.

In 1875, Forrest was invited to speak to a black civil rights group called the “Pole-Bearers” Association, a forerunner for today’s NAACP. Though mocked by some white people for appearing, Forrest addressed the black people in love saying, “I came here with the jeers of some white people, who think that I am doing wrong. I believe I can exert some influence, and do much to assist the people in strengthening fraternal relations, and shall do all in my power to elevate every man, to depress none. I want to elevate you to take positions in law offices, in stores, on farms, and wherever you are capable of going. . . “

. . . At the end of his speech a young, black girl named Lou Lewis presented General Forrest with a bouquet of flowers as a sign of reconciliation between the two races. Forrest accepted the flowers, then leaned down and gently kissed the girl on the cheek, a public act of reverence and respect that was absolutely unheard of for a white man to do in that day. Indeed, Nathan Bedford Forrest, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, was a new creature in Christ.

If you read the whole story, you’ll recognize the complexity of the man even before his conversion. In history and in evangelization, the person is the thing. There are no living, breathing generalizations, and there never were.

File:NathanBedfordForrest.jpg — Neither you nor your cougar want to mess with this guy.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.

Mercy That Isn’t: More Teachers Being Thrown Under the Bus to Cover for Dissenting Administrators

Last updated on: July 9, 2015 at 1:17 am By Jennifer Fitz

H/T to Deacon Greg Kandra for pointing out the most recent case of a Catholic school teacher being fired after parents found out about her same-sex civil wedding. Let me remind you right now that I hold 100% with the teachings of the Catholic faith. I succeed at following them about 2% of the time, but that’s a problem with getting me to behave, not a problem with the ideals themselves.

The details reported at Philly.com are sparse, but raise a few flags if you know how to read doublespeak. ThinkProgress fleshes out the details:

After eight years on the job, Margie Winters was fired as director of religious education at Waldron Mercy Academy outside Philadelphia not because she just married her wife, but because some parents just found out that she’s been married for all eight years.

Principal Nell Stetser sent an email to parents that Winters had been fired but didn’t specify why, though the reason seems obvious enough. “In the Mercy spirit, many of us accept life choices that contradict current Church teachings,” she wrote, “but to continue as a Catholic school, Waldron Mercy must comply with those teachings.” Stetser had counseled her after she started the job that she could be open about her marriage to other faculty, but should avoid discussing it families.

Winters described the concealment as “hard,” but maintained the necessary low profile all this time. But then parents of at least two students found out about her marriage and complained to both the school and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. When asked to resign, Winters refused and was fired on June 22.

In other words: Waldron Mercy Academy has never had any particular concern about following the Catholic faith. Ms. Winters was hired as the director of religious education despite the fact that the principal knew she was in a same-sex civil marriage — and apparently it was understood that none of the faculty of this Catholic school saw this as a problem.

So why, eight years later, does Ms. Winters get to be the one who takes the hit for the team? Because it’s all about keeping up that Catholic brand identity. That’s why Ms. Winters was told to keep her situation hush-hush — might upset the parents shelling out $13K a year in tuition for a “Catholic” education. That’s why Ms. Winters has to go now, because the diocese rightly thinks that Catholic schools ought to teach and model the Catholic faith, and Mercy Waldron needs to not be spun off, because Catholic-brand sells.

***

The Mercy Waldron case is not complicated: The administration doesn’t give a hoot about the faith, and doesn’t care who it hurts in the process.

This is not the Catholic way.

So let’s talk briefly about the challenge facing those of us who strive to follow the teachings of the Church.

1. Unjust discrimination against persons with same-sex attraction is right out. That’s a point of the faith.

2. A theme that permeates all of Catholicism is the way that we seek to be united with all men inasmuch as possible. You see this in the way we acknowledge the sacraments of non-Catholic Christians. Typically a Catholic school will not require students to sign a statement of faith — and that’s different from what happens in certain protestant circles. Our general approach is to invite others to participate as much as they can in good conscience, even if they are not yet fully on board with the all the teachings of the faith.

3. We realize that everyone sins, and so we tend to shift focus away from expecting perfection. Rather, we often ask: Does this person’s besetting sin make him incapable of or unsuitable for the task before him? If so, then we must regretfully steer the person towards more suitable avenues. If not, then we tend to breathe a sigh of relief and happily take one more on board.

4. Because we distinguish between disordered passions (which everyone is prone to in some fashion or another) and disordered actions, back to #1, we charitably assume that a person is seeking to live up to the ideals of the faith if they say that they are and the evidence supports that claim. If you seem to be living chastely and you say that you are, we assume you aren’t engaging in an illicit affair.

Because we believe in repentance and forgiveness, we can even imagine a situation in which, say, a formerly chaste employee was secretly carrying on an illicit affair, the matter reached a point where the facts were undeniable, and then the employee was shown the error of his ways, made amends, got back on the narrow road, took precautions to prevent a recurrence, and everyone left the past in the past and moved forward. Chastity’s not about your past, it’s about your future.

[Obviously the virtue of prudence must be applied in deciding how to move forward. But move forward we can, one way or another.]

Thus in making hiring decisions in parishes and Catholic schools, the faith offers wide latitude in which prudence must operate. But regardless, good, merciful Catholics don’t assign a whipping boy to bear the brunt of our own serious sins. Ms. Winters obviously has significant culpability, as a religion teacher who was blatantly failing to follow the religion she was tasked with teaching. Simple incompetence suffices as grounds for her termination.

But the school administration bears an even greater responsibility: They hired her to teach the faith, knowing full well she wasn’t practicing it. They encouraged her to live a double life.

The administration at Mercy Waldron actively set a standard at the school that the Catholic faith was not to be taken seriously, mere lip service was the order of the day.

I’m not sure whether we can say that there was in fact discrimination based on sexual orientation, or merely based on, “Who can we shove off as the sacrificial victim to get the diocese off our back?” but the case is not looking so great for Mercy Waldron. If you fire only the openly-dissenting person who just happens to be in a same-sex relationship, and let all the other dissenters stand around smugly talking about their “Mercy spirit,” that’s not looking like mercy or justice.

Be hot or cold to the faith, but quit drowning people in your lukewarm mush.

File:Tacuin Warm Water 02.jpg

Artwork: On Lukewarm Water [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

How to Protect Religious Freedom? Practice Your Religion

Last updated on: July 4, 2015 at 1:21 pm By Jennifer Fitz

I was surprised the other day to learn that the Episcopal church had just voted to allow same-sex weddings. The surprising part wasn’t the “Episcopal” the “same-sex” or even the “voted.” I was surprised that this was news. I thought the Episcopalians had decided to go this route ages ago. I had no idea — I mean seriously, no idea — that such questions were still being debated as recently as a week ago.

The reason I was surprised by this vote was because I don’t follow Episcopalian internal politics, but I do know real live Episcopalians. The ones I know love their faith and love Jesus and love other people, and pretty much school me in the charitable works department. And these people that I know, here in my Bible Belt community where a congregation doesn’t hop onto the latest fad just because it’s being done in California or something, they were living out this day-to-day reality in which same-sex weddings were just part of normal old boring Episcopalian life.

This is the normal way that most people learn about religions other than their own: You see a person practice their faith, and thus you find out bit by bit what that faith entails.

This is also the normal way that people learn about their own religion: You see your fellow believers practice your faith, and thus you find out bit by bit what that faith entails.

***

This is why the government pretty much busted out laughing when the bishops said, “But paying for contraception violates our conscience.” And the government’s like, “Um? Is this one of those secret Illuminati teachings? Because no one really hears about it.” And then there’s one guy in the government who’s like, “Oh, wait, I went to a Catholic church once and there was this poster about NFP classes in the corner by the coat rack.” The other guy’s like, “They had a coat rack?”

It is somewhat difficult to explain that IVF is a serious violation of your faith’s moral code when a theology professor at one of the best-known Catholic universities in the nation writes in the popular press in favor of the practice.

It’s going to be difficult to explain that Catholics can’t in good conscience cooperate in the carrying out of a same-sex wedding when a chairman of the theology department of a Catholic University has had his same-sex wedding (Episcopal) announced in the New York Times. This is not the lunch lady or even some guy who’s really good at physics and who has agreed not to promote non-Catholic teaching on campus, he just does science and leaves religion to other minds. It is reasonable for the general public to consider what Catholic universities’ theology professors are teaching and practicing to be an indicator of what the Catholic Church believes.

***

Fortunately, there are two pieces of good news. The first is that there are some quarters of the federal government where bureaucrats have done what bishops have not, and started distinguishing between authentic practice of the Catholic faith and just-borrowing-the-brand-name. That bodes well for us: There’s a chance the government will help us sort out our ecclesiastical mess, and sift the real freedom-of-religion cases from the I-just-want-my-benefits cases, and deal with each according to genuine merit. For all that certain regulators have abandoned common sense, there still exist government officials who believe in the Constitution.

The second is that there is a real revival in the Church today. One of the amusing problems you run into in certain circles is that you can no longer host an event for just the serious Catholics to attend, because there are far too many of us to fit in one room. The number of people who truly do believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims is not insignificant. Some among us struggle to hold onto the faith, some of us are utterly firm but woefully hapless, some of us have our act together; most of us wander among all three categories on any given day. But we’re there.

***

So what do you do with a complex faith? One of our difficulties is that we really do mean it when we stand up every Sunday and confess that we have sinned. We take it as an article of faith that the Church is composed entirely of bad Catholics. This affects our outlook the way it doesn’t affect more aggressively delineated religions. We don’t have the option of clearing out all the sinners; the best we can do is hire the right sinner for the job.

In terms of prudent decision making, this leaves a lot of room for variation. We aren’t wondering whether this volunteer position or that staff job should be filled by someone who wanders from the faith; we’re just wondering how far the wanderer can have strayed before it’s too far. Around the edges of the question lurk the classic division between mortal and venial sins (still apropos) and of confession and repentance (likewise). Into that mix our pluralistic upbringing and our ecumenical instincts nag at us. To be Catholic is to want to open the doors to the whole world, and invite each to participate as much as able, even if that can’t be full participation just yet.

***

So here’s a funny story: After I posted on evangelization, a friend quipped that the next in the series should be about shaking the dust off one’s feet. But what I have found is that people tend to do their own grooming that way. If you persistently proclaim the Catholic faith, people who don’t want to hear it move on. If the only thing you have on offer is Jesus, people looking for something other than Jesus start looking elsewhere.

You can tell how serious a parish or a school or a diocese or a family is about practicing its faith by checking on the way it shores up the faith. When you want someone to use NFP, you offer conferences and classes and stock books and give out pamphlets and host a support group and organize your life in a way that accommodates the reality of such a practice. If you want people with same-sex attraction to live chastely, you do likewise. Is it no wonder that people don’t take seriously the teaching on divorce and remarriage, when I’ve never even heard of a support group for divorced Catholics ineligible to remarry? Is it that we think such a situation is so amazingly easy to live out, or that we think there is nobody in that position? You are thousands of times more likely to find a parish quilting club than a parish group for illicitly-remarried Catholics attempting to live chastely.

The sad reality is that the bulk of Catholics who dissent from essential Catholic teachings aren’t making a decision to counter what they’ve learned on Sunday morning and what their parish is practicing all week. They are doing exactly what they’ve been told to do, and are assuming that if the subject never comes up, then we’re free to decide as we like. It must not be important. If it were important, there’d be a sermon on it, right?

***

Our difficulty is that we have a scandalous religion and a terror of scandalizing. We hide behind an excuse we call “being pastoral” and that excuse is why I need to tell you about Downton Abbey.

See, my husband and teenagers watched the latest season of Downton Abbey on PBS, but they’d never seen all that came before. So after the season ended, we used the miracles of streaming video for us and “you can have ice cream if you don’t come into the TV room” for the younger siblings, and thus went back to episode 1, season 1, and watched the whole thing through from the beginning. The trouble with this is that my teenagers and I are prone to binge-watching our favorite shows. If it were just the three of us, we’d have watched the whole thing by now.

But we live with this responsible guy who does things like “going to bed on time” and “getting the work done before watching TV” and all that stuff. And thus we typically only get to watch one episode a week, and never, ever, get to watch two in a row. Because we’re pursuing this as group, one of the rules is that you don’t watch unless everyone watches, because then it’s more fun because you can talk about what happened afterwards, which is why the three irresponsible people don’t just forge ahead.

So when we whine, yet again, that we want to watch another episode even though it’s already 10pm, what is the pastoral response from Mr. Responsible?

If you believed the excuse people, the thing for him to do would be to not argue. Eventually we’ll figure out the virtues of good behavior on our own, and until then he mustn’t upset us, because we might be alienated and rebel and leave the Downton Abbey group.

But weirdly, that’s not what he does. What he does is say, “Um, we need to go to bed.” This is the pastoral thing. By force of his enthusiasm for the show if we’ll just wait for him and go at at the agreed-upon pace, his own self-control (it’s not like he doesn’t want to watch, too), and the camaraderie we’ve built both in our wider family life and in our pursuit of this particular hobby, he’s pastoring us towards more self-control.

Sometimes that pastoring is unpleasant. If homework isn’t done on time, no TV show for anybody, because homework comes first. There are consequences to our behavior — consequences that might be distressing at the moment, but that in the long run guide us towards a peaceful, fruitful TV-watching life.

Being part of the group means doing your best to stick to the essential practices of the group, and the way we make that happen is by supporting each other along the way.

***

So this is the challenge that lies before us. Catholics aren’t so much in peril of having our monasteries dissolved as we are challenged to figure out how to move forward when we’ve spent the last fifty years dissolving our monasteries all on our own. If we want to be recognized as a distinct religion with firmly held beliefs, we must hold onto those beliefs firmly. If we want to have our practices protected by federal law, we must be willing to protect them by church law as well. Why should the government value what we do not?

Artwork:By Central Intelligence Agency (Crusade for Freedom / Cold War Radios) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Image Description: “Stamp from the Crusade for Freedom, a campaign to create domestic support for America’s Radio Free Europe. Image depicts a heavenly world of religious tolerance on the top, versus a hellish world of communist oppression below.”

Want Religious Freedom? Ditch the Assembly Line and Start Raising Mature Catholics

Last updated on: July 3, 2015 at 6:31 am By Jennifer Fitz

So my How to Prevent Same Sex Couples from Suing Us post garnered reactions pretty similar to all my other what if we did what the Church says we should do posts about catechesis (a smattering linked below). The three main reactions are:

Nice idea, but priests have too much work as it is.
Nice idea, but how exactly do we make this happen?
Um. What??

But to give you an idea of how far off the cliff the Church has already fallen, a very fearless, no-nonsense, ardently faithful priest asked in a private forum, “So what if I do what you suggest, and the same-sex couple remains convinced that because they attend Mass and so forth, they are Catholics in good standing?” This was super curious of a question, because I’m thinking, Father, I’ve been to your parish. How exactly could someone attend your parish six months and some, plus your marriage prep, and not have figured this out?

So let’s talk about this. These objections aren’t unfounded. They are firmly rooted in the on-the-ground reality that nearly every parish struggles with. Let’s take them one by one.

Priests Don’t Have Time to Do One-on-One Discipleship

This is a reality. We haven’t had a culture of discipleship in decades. It takes disciples to beget disciples, so it’s no surprise that vocations are scarce. Pastors (and most priests end up being pastors whether they are cut out for it or not — someone has to fill that empty seat) have a crushing load of responsibilities, and not much budget with which to bring on good help even if they could get it. When our Lord spoke of faith moving mountains, I suspect He had Father’s to-do list in mind.

So what about the other hundreds or thousands of adults in any given parish? The answer I usually hear, and I have every reason to believe it is accurate, is I have nobody in this parish who could do that.

Of course not. The state of adult faith is so weak we don’t even dare let parents catechize their own children, let alone entrust to Joe Pewsitter the job of helping a troubled, confused, questioning soul through the arduous task of coming to Jesus.

There is, it seems, literally not a single available person in most parishes who is capable of evangelization and discipleship.

How Would You Do This Anyway?

Problem: Even if you want to evangelize adults, bring them to Christ, and then form them into mature Catholics who can go on to serve the Church as fellow workers in the vineyard, where do you start? If we were wondering what to do with all the spare catechists, it might not be so daunting. But we can’t just abandon religious education for children, can we? And that’s using up our six faithful and well-formed Catholics who aren’t actually on their death beds, and about two dozen other nice people who mostly don’t cause trouble.

Getting unstuck from where we are is a massive challenge.

Um, What Are You Talking About??

I had the advantage of returning to the Catholic faith through Evangelical doors. I had a series of Protestant friends who tag-team ushered me towards the decision to follow Jesus, and I was primed for the faith by an on-fire pastor at an on-fire non-denominational congregation. The moment when the Holy Spirit swooped into my life and dragged me to Mass with ears newly-opened to the Gospel? I was praying it would happen in some dappled shadows-and-sunlight corner of a stained-glass chapel all by my lonesome, but actually it was a Baptist deacon who heard the call, led me to Christ, and urged me to make a formal act accepting Him.

And then in that very instant, I had an overwhelming urge to attend Mass and never looked back.

I am literally someone whose rock-solid, 100% Catholic conversion was handled 100% by Protestants.

Afterwards I was discipled by a combination of Protestant friends, one very fervent Catholic priest, and things I could read. If I weren’t the kind of person who has to give up reading for Lent as a penance, I never would have learned a lick of apologetics, Theology of the Body, or anything else.

My education is unusual. Most Catholics, I’m learning, have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that people need to be evangelized and discipled a soul at a time. They’ve never seen it done.

Self-Service Christianity

What we have instead is cafeteria-model Catholicism. The soul-food service line consists of weekly Mass and a series of classes for designated life moments, intended to prepare us for the sacraments. If you’ll just start where it says “enter” and followed the roped-off course, you’ll end up with something like the Catholic faith on your tray by the time you get to check-out.

The difficulty is that unborn and newborn faithful don’t begin spiritual life knowing how to put a nice square meal on their tray.

Getting mad that Joe Curious doesn’t manage to get the whole of the Catholic faith onto his plate would be like yelling at a two-year-old favoring brownies over salad when you pointed towards the buffet and said, “Go through line and get what you need.”

Humans have to be taught everything. We have a few instincts, and those will mostly point us in the right direction, but we must either teach ourselves or have someone else teach us every single thing we learn. (This would be the crux of that whole opposition to same-sex marriage, right? That children truly need their mother and father? What exactly do you think the parents are needed for? Laundry money?)

My fifteen-year-old can write up a grocery list, do the shopping, and come home and make the family dinner for a week, then do it again the next week and the one after, no problem. But he didn’t get that way because we put him through a series of hourly meetings at programmed times.

We did it by first putting a few foods on his highchair tray, then taking them away when he got tired of eating and started throwing them. Slowly over time we introduced him to more foods, taught him to use silverware, allowed him to pick out a snack from the fridge, then to make his own sandwich, and so forth. When he started the Summer of Cooking, we were there to provide coaching as-desired so that he wasn’t completely on his own at first. Even now that he’s an established cook who knows recipes we don’t, he still sometimes asks for guidance, and we’re there to provide it.

What we did was disciple our son in the art of eating and then cooking. This is a personal process. Our other children ate different first foods, had different challenges with table manners, and have built up their skills on a different set of recipes. You can’t say, “Every child will need this amount of practice with a fork and knife, and will be able to cut his own steak at the age of ____.” That just isn’t how humans are. Our children are different people with different interests, talents, and needs. You can’t raise children on an assembly line.

You can’t raise spiritual children on an assembly line either.

Cafeteria Congregations Cook Up Cafeteria Catholics

The assembly-line mentality is so deeply engrained in Catholic thinking that whenever an evangelization or discipleship problem is discussed among parish professionals, it’s guaranteed that at least one person will propose a better assembly line. Parents presenting their children for baptism don’t know the faith? Make them go to more classes! Longer classes! Start them sooner! Have them fill out attendance forms!

It is utterly foreign to most Catholic faith-professionals that you might sit down with a parent and listen to them for an hour. Find out what that person’s questions are. Find out what’s going on in that person’s spiritual life. See what that person needs and then try to meet that need.

And of course we have no one available to do that work if we wanted to . . . because the cafeteria method doesn’t produce mature Catholics. It produces people who at best aren’t starving to death.

Soul At A Time Discipleship Is the Only Solution

I’m going to be very blunt. Pastors and religious educators lament that they cannot offer one-on-one discipleship because they have no mature Catholics to carry out the work . . . and then they continue to pour every parish resource into a system that has proven it cannot produce mature Catholics.

We’re terrified of trying something new because it requires taking energy and money away from the system we have, and what we have is keeping the pews more or less full. But what the pews are full of is the spiritual equivalent of neglected children being raised in one of those horrible orphanages where you’re lucky to still be alive in ten years.

If you want to raise mature Christians, you must do the things it takes to raise a mature Christian.

You must decide that there is at least one soul in your parish actually worth saving, and sit down and evangelize and then disciple that soul. And then the two of you can start on two more.

That is how it works.

(Actually an informal batch process workshop does fine — parents sometimes raise as many as a dozen or two dozen children to maturity over the course of forty years. You don’t have to wait until one soul is full-grown before you invite the next one into your life.)

How Can This Happen at a Parish Like Yours?

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are an ordinary overworked faith-formation professional with hundreds of kids you have to push through sacramental prep or the bishop’s going to fire the lot of you. That’s reality.

If you have not a single available mature Catholic in your parish, pick victim #1. Someone who has promise. Head on straight, seems to be serious about the faith, lots of potential. Someone who, when you propose what I’m going to suggest, accepts your invitation: Spend an hour a week with that person, meeting for the express purpose of helping that person grow stronger in the faith.

You don’t need a program, but if you thirst for one, use something flexible like this free retreat workbook that helps you identify the person’s actual spiritual needs. You could read through the Bible or the Catechism together. You could just meet each week and pray together, then you sit there listening and answer questions and propose resources of interest, and then pray again.

You can do this one-on-one, or you could form a small group of would-be disciples and meet for a couple hours a week to grow in the faith together. Your mission is to work steadily on helping each person, whether it’s one person or five people, reach maturity. Don’t quit until your friend reaches that point where he or she can be the person you trust to help another person grow in the faith.

If you have one mature Catholic who can get free for an hour a week, put that person to work. That might be a person who can do full-on discipleship described above. But how about this: What if while the kids were in religious ed, you kicked aside that pile of boxes next to the secretary’s desk, then invited parents to huddle around one of those mini DVD players watching a Father Barron video, because the janitor’s closet has brooms in it and there’s not a single other square inch of parish property available? (Or you could use the other square inches and a big TV if you have such luxuries.)

And then, get this: After the mature Catholic hits “play” on the DVD, he or she steps out into the hall and sips on a beverage. And then this one parent wanders out, and the mature Catholic listens while the parent tells her tale of woe. Why she hates the Catholic church. Why she can’t get to Mass. Why her husband left her and her dog is ugly.

You create a situation where one person in your parish can actually be evangelized. One person can be excused from the assembly line.

Got more resources? Great, use them. Put more mature Catholics to work bringing more lost souls out of obscurity in the pews and into a relationship with Christ. But if you can only save one person from your infernal assembly line, start there.

***

Related Posts in this Series:

The Hero Complex that is Destroying the Catholic Faith
Getting the Parent-Church Relationship Right
What Teens (and Everyone Else) Want: Serious Discipleship Time
What Happens When We Forget that Parents are Persons
Survey Results: What Would Make it Easier for Families to Learn About the Catholic Faith? (more Listen to Me survey results coming soon — I haven’t forgotten!)
What’s Wrong with Age-Bracketed Sacramental Prep?

Artwork: Lorenzo d’Alessandro [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. You know what? Catherine of Siena did it this way. You can too.

Flag Frenzies, Social Media, and the Demise of Human Rights

Last updated on: October 26, 2016 at 12:28 pm By Jennifer Fitz

June was a busy flag month, and I’m concerned it’s costing us our humanity.

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision overturning state marriage laws, Facebook broke out in rainbow flags, and if you run in the circles I do, you saw a rash of yellow-and-white Vatican flags pop up in reply. So be it. People like their flags. But something more nefarious seems to be happening: People are becoming their flags.

We have become such a symbol-heavy culture that we no longer see the humans anymore. The people are all just symbols. Our reasonable love of flags has morphed into an irrational hatred of the human beings who symbolize something we dislike.

Watch the back and forth in the wake of the Charleston AME church shootings:

Dylan Roof turns nine people into symbols. His victims were not human beings to him, they were tools, objects, signs: Let me use you as my gesture of animosity, as a sign of my venomous rage.
The people of Charleston responded by refusing to play the symbols game. These are people, loved by God and men, who have perished. They aren’t an excuse, they are human beings who need to be mourned. They are humans whose lives had an inherent dignity and worth and we won’t settle for anything less than an acknowledgement of that.

There were another pair of actions that followed:

People like me started suggesting that now might be a good time to stop flying the Confederate flag in front of the SC statehouse.
A madness broke out in which anything evocative of the Confederacy anywhere anyhow anytime was suddenly fair game for public outrage.

These two acts are utterly different.

The decision of South Carolina citizens to resort to our legally-established democratic process to propose the removing of a particular flag in front of our state capitol? That’s our business, and we’ve been going about it slowly and mostly-courteously since long before the internet let all you social media gawkers get your noses into other people’s conversations. It is a legitimate thing for the citizens of a state, in conjunction with the work of their elected officials, to make a series of decisions concerning what does and does not happen on the grounds of our state capitol.

This is freedom and civil rights in action. This a good thing — even if you are in the minority who doesn’t win the argument of the day.

In contrast, calls to suppress the rights of the minority are exactly the opposite of freedom.

The way human rights works in democracies like South Carolina is that if you want to be an openly racist restaurant owner who flies the Confederate flag, you’re allowed to do that, and no one has to buy your barbecue if they don’t want to. This is because we belong to this country that has a Bill of Rights. One of those rights our constitution protects is the right to say stupid things. Likewise, if you want to be a non-racist history buff, or a sensation-seeking student radical, or an ordinary yokel of unknown proclivities who flies the Confederate flag, you’re allowed to do that too.

That doesn’t mean your preferred flag gets to fly at the state capitol if we can finally get the thing pulled down, and in the meantime, those of us who don’t want the flag at the state capitol have a right to peaceably assemble and protest its presence. Regardless of how the due process of law shakes out in this year or that year, the minority gets to do its thing.

We get to have our symbols.

What we don’t get to do is turn other human beings or their property into symbols. If the KKK wishes to march on the capitol, that’s legal. If the KKK starts burning churches (which appears to be the case) in response to our fair state’s failure to erupt in race riots, that’s illegal. Express odious thought: Legal. Take odious action to harm others and their property: Illegal.

This is how the rule of law works in a state that respects human rights.

***

Lately though, harmful symbolic actions by the majority against the minority have become all the rage. (And rage is exactly the word for it.) We’ve lost our interest in protecting the rights of those we disagree with. Double standards regarding conscience protection proliferate because the humans themselves have become symbols of what we detest, and we demand the symbols be destroyed. The humans themselves must be retrained to think properly, the way that the majority demands.

This is what hatred is. Hatred seeks to destroy another person. Hatred turns a person into an object, and says the object must go because the object is odious.

***

This fourth of July, resolve to step back out of the symbol world and into the real world. Resolve to respect the human rights of all the humans, not just the ones you find most pleasing.

There exists only one way to get the flag down that does any good whatsoever, that even has any point to it: South Carolina has to decide to take it down. We, the people of this state, acting through our elected representatives, have to repeal the unconscionable law that requires it to fly there, and order it to be removed. Otherwise, nothing is accomplished. Until they do this, the flag will fly, and the people of this state will continue to be collectively guilty of willing it to do so.

Brad Warthen on treating your ancestors as symbols of your own righteousness.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker on the connection between the rainbow flag and the Confederate flag.

Joseph Pearce on freedom of speech and the Confederate flag.

Brandon @ Siris on the use of men as symbols and scapegoats in 1st century Rome.

Julie Davis quoting Bill Murray on what your offendability says about you.

Fr. Z on the importance of peaceful resistance to unjust laws.

Brad Warthen on the history of the presence of the Confederate flag and monument at the SC Statehouse.

Darwin Catholic on why taking down the flag is not an excuse to trample free speech.

NPR on the investigation into the recent church fires.

The Atlantic on the legacy of racism and the recent spate of church fires.

Me on why same-sex marriage is unlike racism:

Imagine walking up to a child and saying to that child, “It is my desire to show my love for you by making a legal arrangement that ensures you will no longer live with your mother and father.”

We can think of a number of horridly abusive situations in which that must be the unfortunate and painful remedy. But it is ghastly to say to a child not yet conceived, never met, yet unknown, to be born of parents who may well be as good as any, “The best thing for you is to deprive you of a home with your mother and father — allow me to lay the legal groundwork for this.”

Image: United States Mint [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Pope Francis’s Puzzling Comments on Guns and War: The Clue to Understanding Laudato Si’

Last updated on: June 23, 2015 at 6:55 am By Jennifer Fitz

H/T to Kate O’Hare, who linked to these initially puzzling comments from Pope Francis on weapons manufacturing and just warfare:

It makes me think one thing: people, leaders, entrepreneurs that call themselves Christians, and produce arms! This gives some mistrust: they call themselves Christians! “No, no, Father, I don’t produce them, no, no …. I only have my savings, my investments in arms factories.” Ah! And why? “Because the interest is somewhat higher …” And a double face is also a current coin today: to say something and do another. Hypocrisy …l But let’s see what happened in the last century: in ’14, ’15, in ’15 in fact. There was that great tragedy in Armenia. So many died. I don’t know the figure: more than a million certainly. But where were the great powers of the time? Were they looking elsewhere? Why? Because they were interested in war: their war! And those that died were persons, second class human beings. Then, in the 30s and 40s the tragedy of the Shoah. The great powers had photographs of the railroad lines that took trains to the concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, to kill the Jews, and also Christians, also the Roma, also homosexuals, to kill them there. But tell me, why didn’t they bomb that? Interest! And shortly after, almost contemporaneously, were the lager in Russia: Stalin … How many Christians suffered, were killed! The great powers divided Europe among themselves as a cake. So many years had to pass before arriving at “certain” freedom. It’s that hypocrisy of speaking of peace and producing arms, and even selling arms to this one who is at war with that one, and to that one who is at war with this one!

Here’s the Italian, which we’ll get to in a bit, but not how you think.

The puzzle is this: On the face of it, it sounds like the Holy Father is saying that it’s immoral to manufacture weapons . . . but that he wishes the great powers had gone to war more aggressively?

Is the Pope rolling around on the podium, tormented by a hawk on one shoulder and a dove on the other? No. Rather, there are several important language and thought patterns being used here that we need to recognize and understand.

1. “High Context” vs. “Low Context” Speech

When we say someone’s manner of speaking is “high context” what we mean is that there’s a whole backstory you need to know if you want to understand the real message. “Low Context” means that everything is completely spelled out for you. The statement stands alone, crystal clear.

Some cultures are well-known for being “high context.” Communication is subtle. You’re expected to read between the lines. People who don’t “get it” are considered a bit thick. They try your patience. High-context speech works well if the people communicating have the common experience necessary to pass subtle cues. This is why my older sister and I used to be able to win Pictionary every time: We could draw on a whole lifetime of references to inside jokes, family stories, and preferred words and phrases to quickly get a point across.

Americans as a nation use “low context” speech. We’re a nation of immigrants, and that massive diversity means that your neighbor probably doesn’t know what you’re referring to in your subtle hints or witty references. You have to spell everything out. We dislike jargon, we resent people who won’t say plainly what they mean, and we expect you to mean what you say and say what you mean.

Interestingly, though, American Internet Catholics are a high-context people. We have a whole collection of cultural references that quickly paint a picture of what we mean. Say, “the Spirit of Vatican II,” and an astute reader will look at the source (National Catholic Reporter or National Catholic Register?) and know exactly what is being implied, no further explanation necessary.

Because AIC’s live in this dual world, when someone uses a high-context reference to mean something other than what it usually (to us) implies, we expect it to be spelled out. If you tell someone on the internet, “I’m a social justice Catholic,” you know that you have to quickly say, “who is faithful to the magisterium of the Catholic Church!” unless you wish to be taken for someone who picks and chooses among the doctrines of the faith. Our high-context habits require low-context speaking to clarify anytime we deviate from code.

This creates a huge conflict with Pope Francis: He’s a high-context speaker, but who is using a completely different set of contexts than we American Internet Catholics are used to. His frame of reference is the deposit of the faith and his decades of living between two worlds: The richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. We AIC’s are used to questioning whether someone believes and accepts the entirety of the Catholic faith; Pope Francis takes it for granted that it’s his job to promulgate the fullness of truth. We AIC’s are used to moral discussions focused on our particular corner of the world; the Pope is often referring to circumstances utterly unlike our own.

2. Linear vs. Interconnected Thinking

If your brain works properly, by the time you’re forty it won’t think like it used to. When you were younger, you were an ace at memorizing things. You could walk into math class, learn a fact or a process, practice a bit, and spit it out for the test. As long as the problems on the test were the type of problems you’d seen on your homework, you could run circles around the old guys.

And then one day your brain grows and changes, and suddenly when you sit in on a presentation at work, there’s a 95% chance you won’t remember the facts and figures on the powerpoint like you used to when you were twenty, and also a 95% chance that you are thinking about the presentation and connecting the new information to thirty other things you’ve learned over the decades. A twenty year-old thinks in subjects; a forty-year-old thinks in systems.

When Pope Francis speaks off the cuff, he almost never lays out a fifth-grade catechism lesson. What he does is grabs examples, often competing examples, from all over the place. He tosses them in front of you, and says, “Connect the dots. There’s a pattern here? Can you see it?”

3. Sound Bite vs. Developed Arguments

The law of the soundbite is this: Never ever make a statement that requires two sentences in order to understand it properly. Dilly-dally like that, and the media will eat you alive. Imagine, for example, that you said something like this:

Sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth sacrificing to send my children to a good Catholic school. Then I look at the spiritual, social, and academic benefits, and I know it’s the best decision for my family.

Anyone who reads both sentences knows that this is a quote about the goodness of the speaker’s particular parish school. But the popular press wants blood, and thus the headline becomes, “Catholic Parent Doubts Value of Parish School.” We are trained to never, ever formulate a thought that isn’t fully-expressed in a single sentence. Even semicolons are risky.

Pope Francis doesn’t obey this law. It’s as if he thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to take multiple sentences, multiple paragraphs, sometimes even a whole encyclical, to lay out his ideas in succession, each part contributing to the whole. He expects you to listen, perhaps ask yourself questions as you listen, but to wait until the idea is fully presented. Only when he’s done talking do you have the whole story; until then, he’s not done.

***

If we use these three principles of communication — which are not difficult, they merely require that you not be obtuse — his message about warfare and weapons manufacturing makes perfect sense.

Because he’s a high-context speaker, we know that his statements can only be understood in light of the Catholic faith and the particular historical and social situations to which he is alluding. Just warfare and legitimate self-defense are part of the deposit of the faith. Also essential to the faith is a rejection of consequentialism: We may not do evil that good may come of it.

In condemning investors in weapons factories who look only at the profits and care little about to whom the weapons are sold, he’s referring to this second problem. Pope Francis condemns those who claim that a better return on their financial investment excuses them from looking into a serious problem: Investing in a company that sells weapons to warmongers. The Catholic faith, though simple, is not simplistic. In condemning the lack of intervention in the Armenian genocide and the Nazi Holocaust, he’s referring to the first principle. There’s a time for just warfare: The great powers knew these slaughters were taking place and didn’t come to the defense of the innocent.

Because he’s an interconnected thinker, the examples roll off quickly from all directions. One minute he’s citing the modern investor, perhaps referring to a scandal involving an arms manufacturer you’ve never even heard of yourself. The next minute he’s in Armenia in 1914, then, hop!, we’ve got Nazi railroads. This is where the Italian gets interesting — even if you have very bad Italian (as I do), you can read the text and pick up the rhythm of his speech, the way the examples roll off almost exactly the way my friend’s Italian mother used to sit in the kitchen complaining about industrial food products or kids these days. It’s a literary style that supports a thinking style, and if you ignore the poetry of it, you’ve lost the genre.

Because he doesn’t care about soundbites, you can’t get his meaning from a snippet quote. Oh sure, sometimes Pope Francis says something that is eminently tweetable. But not here. Here he’s picked up a subject, and he’s working around it piece by piece, throwing out examples and ideas, and saying to you, “Put the pieces together. You’re a smart kid. Can you see how this fits? Can you see how these very different things all point in the same direction? Can you see how the love of your fellow man takes such different turns in different times and places?”

That’s Pope Francis on weapons: Please don’t supply terrorists, but if you see people getting deported to a concentration camp, kindly cut the rail line so those trains can’t run, okay?

***

Laudato Si’ is written much more carefully than these informal remarks, and the arguments are developed more explicitly. Still, the same rules apply:

You have to have a working knowledge of the Catholic faith, Catholic social teaching, and the situations to which he is referring in each instance. It’s high-context at times, but it’s not high-context American Internet Catholic, it’s high-context from a completely different frame of references. (And sheesh, it’s really not that bad. Editors worked hard to make it understandable to anyone who’s versed in the relevant issues.)
The encyclical approaches the problem of environmental stewardship from a massive set of interconnected approaches. Laudato Si’ wanders all over the map, and well it should — it’s about the whole map.
The Holy Father’s teaching is developed piece by piece over the totality of the 200-some paragraphs. No one section tells the whole story. The whole story tells the whole story.

Use those principles, and you’ve got Pope Francis in the bag.

Related: I review The Culture Map by Erin Meyer here, a useful book for improving your cross-cultural communications. Highly recommended.

Photo by Slaunger (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons Boeing FA-18F Super Hornet at take off Danish Air Show 2014-06-22

Something Beautiful: A Short Guide to Praying as a Family

Last updated on: June 22, 2015 at 2:27 pm By Jennifer Fitz

In my mailbox this month: A Short Guide to Praying as a Family, recently released by the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia. I haven’t had a chance to read the entire thing yet, but what I’ve seen thus far is spectacular. Beautiful and useful both.

You can read a review here.

You can preview the book here.

You can order it directly from the sisters here, or from the Catholic Company here.

Excellent potential as a discussion-starter for a parents’ discipleship group this fall. Catholic parents want to learn and practice the Catholic faith. They want support from other families as they try out at home what they may have never experienced growing up. Parents struggle with passing on the faith because they need information, support, and encouragement. Books like this are a blessing because they provide an easy way to get the conversation going.

***

I’ve been remiss in not mentioning another parish resource for parents, The Catholic Navigator:

The Catholic Navigator is the lay apostolate of a small group of Catholic religious educators, each with a specific area of expertise, who are committed to keeping the Faith alive and vibrant for ourselves and others. To do this, we have developed weekly newsletters to supplement your parish’s ongoing formation efforts. Formatted as a double-sided, single sheet, each weekly print issue provides information and reflection associated with the seasons, events, and persons memorialized in the liturgical year.

If you are a looking for an affordable, down-to-earth way to help families learn the faith, take a look.