Howard Zinn on families as “pockets of insurrection”

May 18, 2007 By voxnovablog

In a chapter of his stunning A People’s History of the United States that discusses the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, Howard Zinn writes:

In the problem of women was the germ of a solution, not only for their oppression, but for everybody’s. The control of women in society was ingeniously effective. It was not done directly by the state. Instead, the family was used — men to control women, women to control children, all to be preoccupied with one another, to turn to one another for help, to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another when things weren’t going right. Why could this not be turned around? Could women liberating themselves, children freeing themselves, men and women beginning to understand one another, find the source of their common oppression outside rather than in one another? Perhaps then they could create nuggets of strength in their own relationships, millions of pockets of insurrection. They could revolutionize thought and behavior in exactly that seclusion of family privacy which the system had counted on to do its work of control and indoctrination. And together, instead of at odds — male, female, parents, children — they could undertake the changing of society itself.[1]

Zinn’s insights here are helpful in thinking (rethinking?) the Catholic understanding of the family. As Catholics, as Christians, we are used to thinking of the family as the basic building block of society.[2] As Zinn points out, in the United States and elsewhere, as the basic building block of society, the family has been used in many ways as an agent of “control and indoctrination.”

From a radically Catholic perspective, since the central social reality is the Church, and not the state, it is more helpful to think of the family as the basic building block of the Church — the new society — rather than the basic unit of the state, or of society.[3] Indeed, in Catholic circles you sometimes hear it said that the family is the “domestic church.” If, as radical Catholic theologians like William T. Cavanaugh and Michael Baxter have argued, the Church is (also) a political reality, an alternative social body and way of life that will always be at odds with the societies in which it finds itself, then the family, as the “domestic church,” will also be a revolutionary society that resists indoctrination into the state’s system of domination and violence, or, drawing on Zinn’s terms, an ecclesial “pocket of insurrection.”

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[1] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, Revised and Updated Edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), pp. 503-4
[2] Cf. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, nos. 211, 213.
[3] The Compendium is confusing on this matter. The above reference seems to say that the family exists for society, yet elsewhere it says that the state and society exist for the family. Cf. ibid, no. 214.

Killing for Life

May 18, 2007 By voxnovablog

It is not permissible to kill in order to impose a solution. – Pope John Paul II

As a Catholic anarchist, I hope to be a disconcerting gurgle within the harmonious chords of Vox Nova. I believe that the Church is marching towards an entirely new understanding of itself and its Christ, or to put it more accurately – a more complete understanding of itself and its Christ.

I want to start with a softball of a Catholic question – the death penalty. I don’t have a long intellectual argument on this. I only know what Christ and his Church teach – that killing doesn’t solve anything. Maybe this teaching hasn’t always been as clear as it should have been. At some points, the Church has unfortunately given in to the world’s embrace of violent solutions. In reference to torture, the Catechism has this to say:

In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors. – Catholic Catechism 2298

In reference to the death penalty, the Church’s teachings have ‘developed’ to the point of practically being the opposite of what the Church once condoned – the killing of human beings to bring peace and order into the world. We, the people of God, are beginning to see that power and violence can never defeat evil. We are beginning to experience the folly of violence – not only in Iraq, but in our prisons, our neighborhoods, and our families. We are beginning to trust in the “nonviolence of (Christ’s) cross,” and when we finally embrace that cross, we will find ourselves reborn into peace and joy.

At this very moment – at a moment of a great abuse in the name of God – we need the God who triumphed upon the cross, who wins not by violence, but by his love. At this very moment, we need the face of Christ, in in order to know the true face of God and thus to bring reconciliation and light to this world. And so together, with love, with the message of love, with all that we can do for the suffering in this world, we must also bring the witness of this God, of the victory of God precisely through the nonviolence of his cross. – Pope Benedict XVI

We have a choice. We can nail people to crosses, or we can be nailed to crosses. We can hang or be hung. We can kill or we can die. In a world of sin and redemption, we must choose. Whose head goes in the noose? Whose body hangs from a cross? What path will we follow? Christ’s way – sacrifice, mercy, and peace? Or the world’s way – killing, condemnation, and chaos? Before us is life and death. It only remains for us to choose.