They shed their own blood

Last updated on: May 29, 2007 at 2:51 am By voxnovablog

“I want to be blunt with you,” the priest said to me. He was behind a curtain, and had just digested my confession. “It sounds,” he said, “like you’ve got a really ungrateful heart.”

Today, memorial day, I found myself beside a creek, watching the birds wash, breathing in the smells of spring, loving the presence of my future wife, and truly enjoying the freedoms that countless soldiers have died for, but mostly killed for.

I am grateful for these freedoms. But I feel torn by the idea that these freedoms have been purchased with blood – as I am told so often. But I wonder – whose blood? American blood? French and Indian blood? British blood? Spanish blood? Mexican blood? German blood? Italian blood? More German blood? Japanese blood? Iraqi blood? Iranian blood?

Whose blood must be shed for me to enjoy a freedom filled life? The blood of my friends or the blood of my freedom-hating enemies? Both? We are often told, on Memorial Day, that American blood has purchased our freedom. No one mentions the enemy’s blood. But General Patton points out the truth:

Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

And so I am torn. I am grateful for my freedom, but ungrateful for the violence done to secure that freedom. There are only a few ways out of this conflict:

1) Become ungrateful for my freedom.
2) Become grateful for the violence done to secure my freedom.
3) Deny that I am free.
4) Deny that violence secured my freedom.

Option 1 is the most natural, and it is the tendency that drove me to confession. I find myself feeling ungrateful for things which are good – which is insane. I’ve prayed for gratefulness, and have begun to feel it. But as my gratefulness has grown, I’ve felt the conflict growing. How can I be grateful for freedom purchased with bloodshed which I abhor?

Option 2 wants me to honor the bloodshed I abhor. But this is impossible. I have committed myself to the “nonviolence of the cross” (P.B.XVI), and believe in its unique power to defeat evil.

Option 3 would quickly resolve my conflict. If I am not free, then there’s nothing to be grateful for. But this is manifestly incorrect – as my freedom to blog shows.

Option 4? Deny that violence secured my freedom? Did warfare free me? Has violence freed me?

“The Lord has triumphed upon the cross. He did not triumph with a new empire, with a power greater than the others and capable of destroying them; he triumphed, not in a human way, as we would imagine, with an empire more powerful than the other. He triumphed with a love capable of reaching even to death . . .

This is God’s new way of winning: he does not oppose violence with a stronger form of violence. He opposes violence with its exact opposite: love to the very end, his cross. This is God’s humble way of winning: with his love – and this is the only way it is possible – he puts a limit on violence. This is a way of winning that seems very slow to us, but it is the real way to overcome evil, to overcome violence, and we must entrust ourselves to this divine way of winning.” – Pope BXVI

I will be bold here. No one, not one, has dared to refute what the Pope has said here. Those who disagree ignore it. I have yet to hear one semi-reasoned dismissal of the Pope’s words, for one clear reason – the Pope is clearly and adamantly claiming that Christ’s victory extends into the real world. Benedict claims that Christ’s victory on the cross isn’t merely a cosmic realignment of spiritual scales that allows us to get into heaven while condemning us to hell on earth. No. Christ’s victory defeats evil in this world. Christ’s love defeats violence in this world – individually, socially, and yes – even politically.

War and violence – killing – have never and will never purchase freedom or peace. While condoning violence as an ultimately futile form of self-defense, the Church always has and always will proclaim that true freedom and true peace come through Christ and Christ’s love alone.

“The Church teaches that true peace is made possible only through forgiveness and reconciliation.”

“With the conviction of her faith in Christ and with the awareness of her mission, the Church proclaims “that violence is evil, that violence is unacceptable as a solution to problems, that violence is unworthy of man. Violence is a lie, for it goes against the truth of our faith, the truth of our humanity. Violence destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings”.” Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church 496, 517

“Forgiveness in fact always involves an apparent short-term loss for a real long-term gain. Violence is the exact opposite; opting as it does for an apparent short‑term gain, it involves a real and permanent loss.” – Pope John Paul II

In spite of the bloodshed committed in the name of freedom, I remain free – individually, socially, politically, because of the blood shed by Christ and his countless disciples throughout the ages. They shed their own blood, not others’. That is how Christians make peace – dying to save those who hate them.

I remain ungrateful for war, its bloodshed, and its death. But my prayer is that I will always find the grace to be grateful for Christ’s victory upon the cross, for the blood shed upon it, and for the freedoms it has purchased.

Memorial Day and the Religious Syncretism of the State

Last updated on: May 26, 2007 at 10:11 pm By voxnovablog

During my high school and college years and beyond, I thought about becoming a Catholic priest and made an effort to discern and pray about it over the course of those years. Eventually I discovered that part of my vocation was to marry — Emily and I will celebrate our two-year anniversary this July — and so the presbyteral ordination option was closed. As I have reflected on how my religio-political views have evolved over the last ten years or so, however, I sometimes wonder what sort of trouble I would get into if I had been led to the Catholic priesthood.

Let me explain more fully what I mean. One of my academic interests has been to explore American Christianity’s tendency to unite itself with American civil religion, to seamlessly ally itself, knowingly or unknowingly, with the interests of the nation-state. Even the Roman Catholic Church, a church that should (in theory) have a greater consciousness of its transnational (‘catholic’) character, perpetually succumbs to this sort of syncretism when we do things like place American flags in our sanctuaries, when we sing the national anthem at Mass, and when we refer to American soldiers in our prayers as “our” troops.[1]

Beyond these fairly obvious examples lies an even greater, though largely unrecognized, danger in our inability to distinguish between the state’s mythology and holidays and the mythology and holidays of Christianity. Many Catholics see no problem with celebrating any and all of the state’s holidays, and sometimes we even celebrate special Masses on these days, such as Independence Day and Thanksgiving, in effect “baptizing” them and making them an unofficial part of the liturgical calendar.

Memorial Day, which we celebrate this coming Monday, is a great example. Last year on Memorial Day, I was making the drive home from a family gathering. The occasion for the gathering was, in fact, not Memorial Day per se, but for the birthday of two relatives. On the drive home, Emily and I passed a small country Baptist church and on the marquee was the question: “What will you do for Christ this Memorial Day?” Aside from the fact that the question makes absolutely no sense, I was irritated and almost stopped the car to take a digital picture of the sign because it was such a clear example of the sort of religious syncretism that exists in the United States. American Christians will even combine the mythology and holidays of Christianity and American civil religion even if the result is completely unintelligible nonsense.

Two years ago, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, a visiting priest was celebrating Mass at my parish in West Virginia. Near the end of Mass, before he processed out of the church he wanted, in light of the upcoming holiday, to honor the soldiers who “made the ultimate sacrifice for us.” All of this he said in front of a giant crucifix which, last time I checked, represents the “ultimate sacrifice” in which Christians believe and which, indeed, we had just celebrated in the Eucharistic action. As a fitting conclusion to the patriotic Mass, the congregation sang, not to Jesus, but to the country itself in the words of “America the Beautiful.”

We get into a really dangerous place when we start confusing our myths and our holidays. Memorial Day honors the memory of those who gave their lives serving the United States in its military, many of them making the “ultimate sacrifice” (in the state’s view) in service to the nation. That’s fine. The state needs holidays like this to support its grand narrative and mythology, just like any community of persons.[2] The Church, however, has its own “sort” of “Memorial Day.” In fact, our celebration of the Christian “Memorial Day” spans two days: All Saints Day and All Souls Day, November 1 and 2, respectively. These are the days that Christians celebrate the lives of those who have gone before us giving their lives specifically as followers of Christ, many of them making the ultimate sacrifice as martyrs on the way of the cross.

Independence Day, of course, celebrates the foundational acts of violence that founded this community of persons. The rhetoric that honors those who made the “ultimate sacrifice” is the same. A recent essay for Independence Day on the website of the Catholic Peace Fellowship reminded us,

[W]e are mistaken if we believe we have been set free by a bloody battle, a revolution in which thousands of people were killed over the course of eight years of violence.

As Catholics, we remember and celebrate the One who sacrificed and died over 2000 years ago in order to give us our freedom. “For freedom, Christ has set us free,” Paul says in his letter to the Galatians (Gal 5:1). As followers of Christ, we know that we have already been set free, and therefore we have no need to construct a new freedom.

[…]

So why do Christians continue to wave the flag, proudly and boldly, every Fourth of July? Why are Christians often the ones cheering the loudest at each parade? Because we have bought into the myth upon which every nation rests: that a bloody sacrifice, performed in battle, is necessary for a nation’s founding.

For Christians, our foundation is built on Christ’s ultimate sacrifice of Death on the cross. His sacrifice, however, was a nonviolent one, as he accepted total suffering on Himself, and inflicted none on other human beings. In contrast, the sacrifice of a soldier, while still a sacrifice, is often done at the cost of others’ lives.

As the ultimate sacrifice has already been completed, we do not need to trump it. We do not need to come up with a better one. We need to participate in the sacrifice of Jesus in order to partake in His redemption. Participation in this sacrifice means carrying His cross with humility, without violence.

Christians have their own liturgical calendar that marks time and significant events differently than the state. Our “Independence Day” as Christians is the Triduum, where we celebrate the freedom that comes from sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection. Just as Americans celebrate their pride of citizenship on the fourth of July, Christians celebrate their citizenship in another Kingdom on the feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the Church year.

The American narrative also features the holiday of Thanksgiving, a feast which seems to mirror the basic prayerful posture of Christian life, that of thankfulness. While giving thanks is certainly the heart of Christian life, it is important to reflect on the content of our thankfulness, and a closer look at the national holiday, with its connections to genocide and imperialism, should give Christian residents of the empire pause. Is the traditional celebration of Thanksgiving — with its focus on overeating, football, and pre-Christmas hype — really necessary for Catholics considering the Church’s ongoing focus of eucharist, the gathering of the Lord’s Supper, which some Christians celebrate weekly, or even daily?

Should not Christians at least consider resisting American holidays as a way of resisting the American mythology, the metanarrative that, as Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh says, serves as an “alternative soteriology” to the Church’s story of salvation history?[3] Should we not look for opportunites to subvert the holidays of the empire in which we find ourselves, reminding ourselves of and drawing attention to the ways in which these holidays, as part of American mythology, try to shape our loyalties and practices according to the ideals of the nation-state?

When I speak or write this way, I am often asked if I am advocating a Catholic type of separatism or sectarianism. The answer is no; I am not suggesting a withdrawal from the world. Such a suggestion would deny the mission of the Church for the world. On the other hand, I don’t think the careless syncretism of patriotic Christianity is the only alternative to sectarianism. I think we need a healthy, Catholic suspicion of alternative metanaratives to our own, an ability to clearly understand the differences between the two, and the courage to let that test our celebrations and our social ethics as Catholic Christians.

This affirmation of the distinctiveness of the Church and its practices is not lost on most Catholics when it comes to sexual and reproductive issues. With the exception of those Catholics who believe the Church must “get with the times” and update its sexual and reproductive ethics to match the dominant values of American society, most Catholics understand that our commitment to Christ entails the following of a different ethic when it comes to sexuality and the dignity of human life. Many Catholics do not even have a problem endorsing a “sectarian” view when it comes to holidays, at least when it is discussed from the opposite direction. Note the “battle for Christmas” debates that have occurred over the last couple of years, or the concern shown when non-Christians celebrate Easter. When it comes to these discussions, many Christians have no problem whatsover making the “sectarian” separation between holidays that are “ours” and holidays that are “theirs.”

I know that, had I become a priest, I would not have been able to celebrate Memorial Day or Independence Day Masses in good conscience. And I know that, as a result, I would run into congregational resistance and be reviled by my “good, patriotic” churchgoers. But, I would remind them, the days are not on the liturgical calendar for, as much as we tend to forget, they are not part of our Christian story of salvation. The ministry of the priesthood, like the ministry of ecclesially-committed theologians, is to proclaim the Gospel, the Church’s alternative story of salvation. It is a story that exposes the lie of imperial mythologies and narratives through the distinctive life of citizens of an empire not of this world, the history-spanning community of “resident aliens” within the belly of the world’s empires.[4]

______
[1] The point here, of course, is not that we should stop praying for soldiers. The point is that in the context of liturgy, words like “we” and “our” refer to our collective identify as the Body of Christ and not to our collective identity as U.S. Americans.
[2] Cf. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a shorter article which nicely summarizes the book, see their “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (Winter 1996): 767-780.
[3] William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (London: T & T Clark).
[4] The image above is from the website www.psalters.com.

Pope attempts to correct statements on indigenous peoples

Last updated on: May 24, 2007 at 6:55 pm By voxnovablog

Back when the Pope was being criticized for his Regensburg University speech which contained some not-well-thought-out comments on Islam, I argued that many of the Pope’s critics were missing the point. Indeed, I agreed with the Catholic Peace Fellowship blog when they suggested that the Pope meant to criticize Christianity just as much as Islam.

I didn’t have that same sympathy for the Pope last week when he commented on the Church’s role in the history of colonization in Latin America. Benedict angered indigenous groups when he stated that “the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture,” and that the continent was “silently longing” for the Christian faith. The Pope’s comments seemed incredibly naive given the unity of religion and imperial violence that is simply a sad matter of historical fact. John Allen reported that

Paulo Suess, an adviser to Brazil’s Indian Missionary Council, said the pope “is a good theologian, but it seems he missed some history classes.” Marcio Meira, who heads Brazil’s federal Indian Bureau, said, “As an anthropologist and a historian I feel obliged to say that, yes, in the past 500 years there was an imposition of the Catholic religion on the indigenous people.”

Thankfully, Benedict has apparently made an attempt to clarify “what he meant” yesterday in a speech in Rome, acknowledging that it is “not possible to forget the suffering and the injustices inflicted by colonizers against the indigenous population, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled.”

John Allen comments that “In that light, the pope’s comments today suggest that when Benedict said on Sunday that Christ was not an ‘imposition,’ he meant the teachings of Christianity, not the concrete behavior of Christian colonizers – whom, Benedict admitted, were sometimes guilty of ‘unjustifiable crimes.'”

John Allen’s report is here. The New York Times reports on the story here. Zenit.org here.

Howard Zinn on families as “pockets of insurrection”

Last updated on: May 18, 2007 at 8:16 pm 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.”

_______
[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

Last updated on: May 18, 2007 at 7:57 pm 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.