Let my people go. (Or else.)

• Stuart Halpern looks at the role that Exodus language played in America’s Civil War: “A Plague on Both Your Houses.”

“Let my people go” was an obvious biblical reference for Black Americans and white abolitionists, but they also noted that, in the context of Exodus, that really meant “Let my people go … or else.”

The language of Exodus is just as clear and just as available here in Trump’s MAGAmerica. You were slaves in Egypt, so you must not enslave. You were mistreated strangers in Egypt, so you must not mistreat strangers.

And every commandment given with that reminder of Egypt is a commandment given with that implicit “Or else.”

What happens to a disobedient nation that mistreats the stranger? Boils, hail, locusts, darkness at noon and the death of the firstborn. “Let my people go … or else.”

(See, for example, and as a foretaste: “Acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons has been hospitalized at least twice for stress-related issues. …”)

• You know who is not perpetually on the verge of being hospitalized for stress? The Scalabrian Sisters of El Paso.

These sisters are working just as hard as any ICE official or ICE agent, because wherever ICE takes a detained immigrant, the sisters follow. This is a great story of accompaniment, of standing with and bearing witness.

It’s also delightful to realize that wherever ICE goes in and around El Paso, these sisters are right behind them, Jiminy Cricketing every step they take.

• “The name doesn’t make the band, the band makes the name.” Mostly true. But some band names are so awful or weird or unwieldy that they make it hard for the band to find an audience no matter how good that band might otherwise be.

Consider, for example, the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Great band. Horrible band-name.

I really want more people to hear their songs, but that’s never going to happen with a name like that.

• Following those two links about Catholics Getting It Right, here’s the opposite of that: “Chile’s new President José Antonio Kast brings openly religious views to a changing country.”

According to this article, Kast is a devoutly religious man whose deeply held faith shapes his views on abortion, divorce, and the legal equality of LGBTQ folks.

But also, according to this article, Kast is a devoutly religious man whose deeply held faith has absolutely no bearing on his admiration for the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Kast’s devotion to the adoration of Pinochet is, according to this stock-framing about faith and politics, is wholly unrelated to the religious ideology that otherwise supposedly shapes his entire outlook on every other aspect of life and politics.

That’s not possible. That’s not how religion works.

There’s a story here — an intrinsically religious story — about Kast’s involvement in the Schoenstatt movement in Catholicism, which started in Germany in 1914. The founder of the Schoenstatt movement, Fr. Joseph Kentenich, was a critic of Nazism who sent some of his followers to other countries, fearing persecution in Germany. That is how the first small gr0up of Schoenstatt Catholics arrived in Chile. Kentenich was later imprisoned at Dachau from 1942 until its liberation in 1945.

But it was after the war when the Schoenstatt really took off in Chile, thriving more there than in any other country besides Germany. That started with the arrival there of German immigrants, including Kast’s own family, many of whom were war veterans. So while the Schoenstatt movement in Germany had been anti-Nazi, it was reborn in Chile in the image of the kind of Germans who fled to South America after the war — with all that entails.

José Antonio Kast has boasted that Pinochet would have voted for him, and he’s mused about how he wishes he could have visited Pinochet in his palace to share a friendly cup of tea. Fr. Kentenich, on the other hand, is someone that Pinochet almost certainly would have had thrown out of a helicopter.

The difference there is, I think, the essential key to Kast’s “openly religious views” — the meaning and the substance of his faith.

• I goofed on Andrew Lloyd Webber in a post earlier this week, briefly forgetting that it is Holy Week and thus also an appropriate time to share my favorite piece of his: Pie Jesu, from his Requiem. It ain’t Faure, but it’s lovely with an achingly simple melody. When somebody really nails that song — soaring up to those high notes in a way that sounds like they’re fluttering down to them — it gets me.

Watching the videos linked there reminded me of the opening credits of Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal, which is also a fine thing to revisit in or around Holy Week.

Arcand’s film is at its best when it uses the story of Jesus to explore the meaning of theater, but it often works the other way around. (If you’ve spent any time working in church world, the hilariously pretentious critics and manipulative agents of the theatrical world have recognizable parallels.) Either way, Lothaire Bluteau chasing the money-changers out of the temple with a whip of cords is unforgettable.

Bluteau’s Daniel/Jesus is so earnest that he carries us past even the film’s occasional stumbles, like when it drags in outdated “modern” theology that’s something like a cross between the Jesus Seminar and the Da Vinci Code. For Daniel, all that matters is getting the story right and committing to it fully to produce something beautiful and true.

Jesus of Montreal is on YouTube.