Reading Rerum Novarum, Part II

June 14, 2020 By David Cruz-Uribe

In this blog post I continue my random thoughts and reflections on Rerum Novarum, the first Papal encyclical on what came to be called Catholic Social Teaching. The first part, with some background details, can be found here. I initially thought to keep editing and adding to that post (which is what I said there) but I decided that it made more sense to create a new blog post for each set of reflections.

Last week my reading group focused on Paragraphs 16-30, in which Leo XIII outlines what he believes is the central role of the Church in settling the divisions between workers and owners. At some point someone noted that this section of the document is very much influenced by 19th century Catholic thinking (which perhaps reached its apotheosis in the Syllabus of Errors) which denied what in the United States is now loosely referred to as the “separation of Church and State” and which sees the Church as having a central, authoritative role to play in civil society. This does not in any way invalidate the analysis of these sections, though I think it would come to be applied (and needs to be applied) in ways very different from what Leo XIII intended.

In particular, I am reminded of the personalism of the Catholic Worker Movement, and their aphorism that “we must build a new world in the shell of the old,” with this new world based solidly on Catholic moral truths. The need for personal charity is spelled out in great detail, as is the need for subsidiary organizations (here all Church based) that lie between the State and the family. (See paragraph 28.) And the ultimate revolution must be one in the human heart.

In our discussion first point I raised was about Paragraph 20, in which the encyclical lays out the duties of workers and owners. He begins with the workers, using for the only time the word “proletarian” which is now so evocative of Marxist thought:

the following bind the proletarian and the worker: fully and faithfully to perform the work which has been freely and equitably agreed upon; never to injure the property, nor to outrage the person, of an employer; never to resort to violence in defending their own cause, nor to engage in riot or disorder; and to have nothing to do with men of evil principles, who work upon the people with artful promises of great results, and excite foolish hopes which usually end in useless regrets and grievous loss.

A couple things struck me: first, these are categorical duties. They are short, direct, and there is no nuance or exceptions. So, one must presume that no matter how harshly or unjustly treated, workers may not strike, engage in sit-ins, or use violence in self-defense. In light of US labor history (the Homestead strike and the Ludlow massacre come to mind) this does seem to be a rather high bar.

Second, the duties of employers are much more nuanced and while strong, are less forcefully presented. To make this clear, I am going to quote the whole passage, and put in boldface the specific duties which the encyclical enjoins on them:

The following duties bind the wealthy owner and the employer: not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character. They are reminded that, according to natural reason and Christian philosophy, working for gain is creditable, not shameful, to a man, since it enables him to earn an honorable livelihood; but to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers – that is truly shameful and inhuman. Again justice demands that, in dealing with the working man, religion and the good of his soul must be kept in mind. Hence, the employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings. Furthermore, the employer must never tax his work people beyond their strength, or employ them in work unsuited to their sex and age. His great and principal duty is to give every one what is just. Doubtless, before deciding whether wages a[r]e fair, many things have to be considered; but wealthy owners and all masters of labor should be mindful of this– that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. “Behold, the hire of the laborers… which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.”(6) Lastly, the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the workmen’s earnings, whether by force, by fraud, or by usurious dealing; and with all the greater reason because the laboring man is, as a rule, weak and unprotected, and because his slender means should in proportion to their scantiness be accounted sacred.

I would not argue that these duties are bad, though the middle collection start “he be not exposed to corrupting influences” is remarkably paternalistic. But they are framed in a very different way than the duties imposed on workers. The text assumes that the duties imposed on the worker are self-evident and they are laid out as a series of commands. On the other hand, the duties of employers require explanation and cannot simply be demanded. Note the language “his great and principal duty” and “must religiously refrain“–these are exhortations to good behavior rather than commands.

That the workers are directly commanded to avoid violence is not surprising: Pope Leo XIII like much of the Church leadership, feared the social unrest which had periodically convulsed Europe since the French Revolution a century before. But a quote from Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail seems relevant here:

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.

To (try to) be fair, Leo XIII is in fact acknowledging, at least implicitly, the conditions which were leading many workers to press strongly for reforms, and for some to promote revolution with the goal of over-turning a legal and social order that tolerated and supported their abuse by the wealthy. (Indeed, in paragraph 3, which we read two weeks ago, he is much more explicit.) And he is calling for change. But the asymmetrical way in which he constructs these duties suggests that he is more concerned with order than justice.

Another interesting point that came up in our discussions was the use of “cabor” and “capital” to refer to the two social classes. The document itself refers repeatedly to “the working classes” and also to the “working class”; but it names the classes “labor” and capital” only three times: in the title “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor“, in paragraph 2, which identifies the goal of the encyclical as a discussion of “the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and of labor“, and in paragraph 19, which talks about their interdependence: “capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.” At the time I had missed the first two instances, and was struck by the use of this terminology as well as the more ubiquitous use of “working class(es)”. These social divisions are presented as given, and no indication is given that these are relatively new social constructs. One can get marvelously sidetracked into when they came into being during the Industrial Revolution, but the key point, made by social historians such as E.P. Thompson, is that the working class came to be as a self-aware social grouping in the 19th century. There have always been rich and poor–the Old and New Testaments are replete with references to them, and medieval thought included a rich treasury of thought about them. (Here I want to call out a book I found very influential, Mollat’s “The Poor in the Middle Ages: an Essay in Social History“.) But the organization of people into two classes–labor and capital–that saw themselves in opposition was a relatively new phenomenon in history.

Herein lies both a great strength and a great weakness of the encyclical. Leo XIII recognizes their existence, but calls into question whether they are, by necessity, mutually antagonistic. Certainly, much (all?) progressive thought in the 19th century explicitly saw them so. I am much less certain of how they were viewed in conservative thought, I would hazard a guess, based on the similar conservative views held about blacks in America, that they felt that labor and capital could live in perfect amity, so long as workers knew their (subordinate) place. Leo XII states explicitly in paragraph 19:

The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.

This is an important argument which needs to be made: the goal of Christian social organization should be to get people to recognize their own mutual interdependence–or, as one participant in our discussions put it, their relationality.

But notice the elision that occurs here: he passes back from the new social classes of labor and capital, and refers instead to the “wealthy” and “working men.” These are terms that refer to individuals as opposed to socially constructed classes. So it could indeed be the case the rich and poor–as individuals–should not be in mutual conflict, but that the social classes of labor and capital–as they have developed in the 19th century–are, and this points to a flaw not in the behavior of individuals, but in the way in which society had come to be organized. (I will pass over for now why it came to be so organized.) This points to the great weakness in the text: there is no structural analysis of this new social organization: as I mentioned in a comment on last week’s blog, Leo XIII tends to approach these social questions in an abstract, ahistorical way, one which does not allow him to question the contingency underlying society: that it came to be does not mean that it had to come to be. This outlook shapes the duties of the workers and employers given above: workers must not engage in actions which undermine or challenge the existing social order (at least violently), and employers are to act justly and charitably within the bounds of the social order. This development will be left to later Catholic social teaching.

There was one other point in the text that we did not discuss, which is the balance between charity and justice. Leo XIII appeals to justice several times, but in a key passage in paragraph 22, discussing the right use of money, he steps back and says that giving alms “is a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases) but of Christian charity, a duty not enforced by human law.” This tension between charity and justice is one which some of the Church fathers saw differently: here I think of St. Basil, and his injunction that “the coat in your closet you do not wear was stolen from a poor man” (emphasis added). I think that the use of these two terms in this section of the encyclical needs to be explored–hopefully, we can do this in the comments. In addition, I would love to better understand the “extreme cases” that Leo XIII was thinking of in which giving alms would be required by justice. Mollat, in his book, makes reference to a medieval debate about whether magistrates could force the rich to give alms if the need was great and they failed to do so. (If I remember correctly, the consensus was that they could.)

Our discussion ended with some questions about the relationship of Church and State, and whether one could live out and act upon Christian virtues in the context of a secular state. This was prompted by a discussion of my mother, who for many years worked for the county welfare agency. I brought her up because in the early days of her work, part of her job was making home visits to her clients, which often involved sitting and getting to know them and their circumstances. I was comparing this to a point raised by one participant about his work with the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and his suggestion that one of the strengths of private charity was its relational character, as opposed to its economic assistance. (I did note that budget cuts ended these home visits, and my mother became more concerned with paperwork and rules than with the lives of her clients.) This laid a great groundwork for our next discussion, which will focus on the role of the state.

Racism is the water we swim in

May 30, 2020 By Jeannine Pitas

In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace gave a university commencement speech that began like this:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Wallace immediately seeks to reassure his readers that he is not assuming the role of the big fish giving advice to the little fish. Instead, he is simply seeking to make his audience conscious of realities they normally take for granted. As the speech goes on, he discusses the basic self-centeredness inherent to each of us, the default settings we need to overcome in order to empathize with others.These are so basic to our human nature, he says, that we normally do not even think of them.

As citizens of Minneapolis and other US cities take to the streets to protest the brutal death of yet another unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white police officer, one terrible truth is yet again made clear: for people of European origin living in the United States of America, racism is the water we swim in. While its victims cannot ignore it, those who stand to benefit from an unjust system all too often cannot see the injustice until it is explicitly pointed out.

In late 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected to the highest office in the land, a number of hate crimes broke out across the US. As I read about harassment and violence perpetrated by whites against people of color, I was shocked. “Is this really my country?” I wrote, lamenting on social media. “Do these terrible things happen here all the time?”

“You may never know,” a Mexican-Canadian friend responded. “You’re white and you don’t have an accent. If they happen, these things won’t happen to you.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve watched European-Americans bristle with defensiveness whenever racism is mentioned. We are quick to assert our own innocence, to absolve ourselves of individual responsibility for a society-wide problem. Unfortunately, this attitude is a large part of what feeds the phenomenon.

In Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, the main character, a 26-year-old African American writer named Dana Franklin, is mysteriously transported across time and space from her Los Angeles home to a Maryland plantation in 1815. She realizes she has somehow been telepathically “called” by a white boy named Rufus Weylin, son of a domineering and abusive plantation owner, to rescue him from drowning. Dana eventually learns that Rufus is her great-great-great grandfather who, after becoming obsessed with a free black woman named Alice, forced her into slavery and concubinage.

In a period of time that for Dana is just a few weeks, Rufus “calls” her several times; she often remains in his world for months at a time or longer while just a few hours pass in her home time and place. As such, she sees him grow up from a small boy into a young man who slowly begins to take on more of his father’s characteristics, culminating in his horrific treatment of Alice.

For me, one interesting aspect of the book is the 1970’s Dana’s marriage to Kevin, a European-American writer twelve years her senior who clearly loves her, having been disowned by his racist family when he married her. But as critic Robert Crossley astutely observes, Kevin is limited in how much he can truly understand Dana’s situation.

At one point, he is transported back in time with her, and they are unfortunately separated, forcing him to stay in the antebellum USA for five years without her. While he does become an abolitionist, there are also moments when he bears an uncanny resemblance to both Rufus and his father. Though subtle, this dynamic of inequality plays out in his 1970’s life with Dana. This reality does not discredit his good intentions or undermine his love for Dana. But it reveals the unsavory truth that most if not all European-Americans have unconsciously internalized racism to one extent or another. It has become the water we swim in, and like David Foster Wallace’s fish, we usually do not even notice it.

A century and a half after the end of slavery, more than fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, we can see that racism remains alive and well in the United States. The death of George Floyd is emblematic of a conflict that remains unresolved – a conflict based on gross inequalities of power. Black Lives Matter is a new civil rights movement with complexities that parallel its 1960’s precursor. No one knows what the outcome will be, but we all will be affected.

It’s a common cliche to stay that the first step toward solving any problem is recognizing the problem’s existence. For too long, so many European Americans have reacted to the legacy of slavery and ongoing reality of racism by relegating it to the past or seeking to deny our own complicity. This needs to change. Seeking knowledge is the first step, followed by discernment and action. If we want reconciliation, we must begin with the truth, and as Pope Paul famously stated in 1972, “If you want peace, work for justice.”

The Paschal Mystery is as true as ever

April 8, 2020 By Jeannine Pitas

Greetings from Buffalo, NY, USA. Today begins Passover, and tomorrow begins the Christian Triduum. For many across the world today, these traditions are bittersweet to say the least. As of this writing, the United States – currently the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic – just reported its highest daily death rate yet; in Spain, deaths had declined but are on the rise again.

We will not be gathering for public worship this year. While I am fortunate to be spending this Holy Week in my childhood home with my elderly parents for the first time in five years, I am sad that we will not be able to participate in most of our beloved traditions: Holy Thursday pilgrimage to seven churches, outdoor Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, a blessing of Easter baskets on Holy Saturday, the Easter liturgy, and Dyngus Day (a Polish-American Easter Monday post-Lent Carnival that Buffalo has become known for).

Nevertheless, in the midst of a global pandemic, we are called to celebrate everything this season stands for: death and resurrection, hope for new life. Faced with a frightening situation that none of us have experienced before, we Christians are called to reaffirm our faith in the Paschal Mystery, which remains real and true in every circumstance.

Passolver and Easter, which both recall terrible suffering followed by grace and redemption, have been celebrated in all sorts of circumstances for a very long time. People have celebrated these festivals during other plagues. Last year, Easter was marred by violence in Sri Lanka. For many people around the world, it is just another time of hardship that they endure all year long.

A dear friend recently directed me to this passage from The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware. This anonymous letter was written by a Christian gulag prisoner in the Soviet Union. I offer it as a meditation for all of us during this holiest of weeks.

It is only by being a prisoner for religious convictions in a Soviet camp that one can really understand the mystery of the fall of the first man, the mystical meaning of the redemption of all creation, and the great victory of Christ over the forces of evil. It is only when we suffer for the ideals of the Holy Gospel that we can realize our sinful infirmity and our unworthiness in comparison with the great martyrs of the first Christian Church. Only then can we grasp the absolute necessity for profound meekness and humility, without which we cannot be saved; only then can we begin to discern the passing image of the seen, and the eternal life of the Unseen.

On Easter Day all of us who were imprisoned for religious convictions were united in the one joy of Christ. We were all taken into one feeling, into one spiritual triumph, glorifying the one eternal God. There was no solemn Paschal service with the ringing of church bells, no possibility in our camp to gather for worship, to dress up for the festival, to prepare Easter dishes. On the contrary, there was even more work and more interference than usual. All the prisoners here for religious convictions, whatever their denomination, were surrounded by more spying, by more threats from the secret police.

Yet Easter was there: great, holy, spiritual, unforgettable. It was blessed by the presence of our risen God among us – blessed by the silent Siberian stars and by our sorrows. How our hearts beat joyfully in communion with the Great Resurrection! Death is conquered, fear no more, an eternal Easter is given to us! Full of this marvellous Easter, we send you from our prison camp the victorious and joyful tidings: Christ is risen!

– Letter from a Soviet concentration camp

Passover and Holy Week blessings to all.

An Unquiet City

January 26, 2020 By Matt Talbot

I’m a member of a Facebook group devoted to St. Therese of Lisieux, and there were a couple of recent posts which were, or could be easily read as, partisan political posts.

Those posts quickly – and predictably – became a morass of accusations and assuming bad faith and all the rest, and I can’t imagine there is anyone reading this post that doesn’t know what I mean.

There are genuinely important and valid issues to discuss at this point in the history of the United States.

This post isn’t about those.

It is about the spiritual danger posed to those who participate too readily in the extreme, tribal polarization that besets our country – in fact, most of the Western world – at this moment.

It should be no secret to anyone who’s read my past posts on this blog that I’m interested in politics, and that I have written about politics seen through the lens of my faith.

There are, again, important, consequential things worth discussing there.

But, again, this post is not about that.

I’m more left than right politically, and I’ve read and been horrified by comment-box suggestions – sometimes joking, sometimes “joking” – on lefty political blogs that some degree of genocide might make defeating your opponents easier.

I believe that a significant factor in the current tribal warfare is a sort of collective egotism possessed by and within each tribe – a sense that you are either With Us or else are Comprehensively Wrong.

In David’s post last month, he wrote:

When compassion and love are absent, Merton insisted, actions that are superficially nonviolent tend to mask deep hostility, contempt and the desire to defeat and humiliate an opponent. As he wrote in one of his most profound and insightful letters:
“One of the problematic questions about nonviolence is the inevitable involvement of hidden aggressions and provocations. I think this is especially true when there are … elements that are not spiritually developed. It is an enormously subtle question, but we have to consider the fact that, in its provocative aspect, nonviolence may tend to harden opposition and confirm people in their righteous blindness. It may even in some cases separate men out and drive them in the other direction, away from us and away from peace. This of course may be (as it was with the prophets) part of God’s plan. A clear separation of antagonists…. [But we must] always direct our action toward opening people’s eyes to the truth, and if they are blinded, we must try to be sure we did nothing specifically to blind them.
“Yet there is that danger: the danger one observes subtly in tight groups like families and monastic communities, where the martyr for the right sometimes thrives on making his persecutors terribly and visibly wrong. He can drive them in desperation to be wrong, to seek refuge in the wrong, to seek refuge in violence…. In our acceptance of vulnerability … we play [on the guilt of the opponent]. There is no finer torment. This is one of the enormous problems of our time … all this guilt and nothing to do about it except finally to explode and blow it all out in hatreds — race hatreds, political hatreds, war hatreds. We, the righteous, are dangerous people in such a situation…. We have got to be aware of the awful sharpness of truth when it is used as a weapon, and since it can be the deadliest weapon, we must take care that we don’t kill more than falsehood with it. In fact, we must be careful how we “use” truth, for we are ideally the instruments of truth and not the other way around.”

Merton wrote elsewhere of where egotism and selfishness leads (if unrepented), and I believe it can be just as applicable to participants in our current tribal comflicts as to individual narcissists:

What is the “world” that Christ would not pray for, and of which He said that His disciples were in it but not of it? The world is the unquiet city of those who live for themselves and are therefore divided against one another in a struggle that cannot end, for it will go on eternally in hell. It is the city of those who are fighting for possession of limited things and for the monopoly of goods and pleasures that cannot be shared by all. There is only one true flight from the world; it is not an escape from conflict, anguish and suffering, but the flight from disunity and separation, to unity and peace in the love of other men.

Thomas Merton on Peace-Making

December 9, 2019 By David Cruz-Uribe

I received the following reflection second hand via email. It comes from a Catholic Worker email list, and is a lecture by Jim Forest, a long time member of the Catholic Worker, biographer of Dorothy Day, and friend of Thomas Merton. I find his comments about compassion and peace-making to be very pertinent given the divisions in the world today, which is why I thought it appropriate to share on Vox Nova.

Despite his physical distance from centers of protest activity, Merton was quite able to relate to those in the thick of protest thanks to his vivid memories of equivalent activities from his student days at Columbia University in New York City. “I have the feeling of being a survivor of the shipwrecked thirties,” he wrote me early in 1963, “one of the few that has kept my original face before this present world was born.”

What he found was often missing among protesters was compassion. Those involved in protests tend to become enraged with those they see as being responsible for injustice and violence and even toward those who uphold the status quo, while at the same time viewing themselves as models of what others should be. But without compassion, Merton pointed out, the protester tends to become more and more centered in anger, becomes a whirlpool of self-righteousness, and even becomes an obstacle to changing the attitudes of others rather than someone who helps open the door to conversion. As he put it in one letter:

“We have to have a deep patient compassion for the fears … and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us. These are, after all, the ordinary people, the ones who don’t want war, the ones who get it in the neck, the ones who really want to build a decent new world in which there will not be war and starvation.”

Most people, Merton pointed out, are irritated or frightened by agitation even when it protests something — militarism, nuclear weapons, social injustice — which objectively endangers them. As he put it:

“[People] do not feel at all threatened by the bomb … but they feel terribly threatened by some … student carrying a placard.”

Compassion was again stressed by Merton during a small retreat for peacemakers that he hosted in November 1964. He raised a provocative question: “By what right to we protest?” It wasn’t a question I had ever before considered. I was born into a family in which protest was a normal activity. While not by nature a person drawn to protest, as a young adult I found myself seeing protest as an unfortunate necessity. I could not watch preparations for nuclear war and fail to raise a dissenting voice or refuse to participate in actions of resistance. To protest was a duty, period. But by raising the “by what right” question, Merton forced me to consider that protest, if it is to have any hope of constructive impact on others, has to be undertaken not only with great care but with a genuine sympathy for those who object to one’s protest, who feel threatened and angered by it, who regard you as a traitor. After all, what we are seeking is not just to make some noise but to help others think freshly about our social order and the direction we’re going.

When compassion and love are absent, Merton insisted, actions that are superficially nonviolent tend to mask deep hostility, contempt and the desire to defeat and humiliate an opponent. As he wrote in one of his most profound and insightful letters:

“One of the problematic questions about nonviolence is the inevitable involvement of hidden aggressions and provocations. I think this is especially true when there are … elements that are not spiritually developed. It is an enormously subtle question, but we have to consider the fact that, in its provocative aspect, nonviolence may tend to harden opposition and confirm people in their righteous blindness. It may even in some cases separate men out and drive them in the other direction, away from us and away from peace. This of course may be (as it was with the prophets) part of God’s plan. A clear separation of antagonists…. [But we must] always direct our action toward opening people’s eyes to the truth, and if they are blinded, we must try to be sure we did nothing specifically to blind them.

“Yet there is that danger: the danger one observes subtly in tight groups like families and monastic communities, where the martyr for the right sometimes thrives on making his persecutors terribly and visibly wrong. He can drive them in desperation to be wrong, to seek refuge in the wrong, to seek refuge in violence…. In our acceptance of vulnerability … we play [on the guilt of the opponent]. There is no finer torment. This is one of the enormous problems of our time … all this guilt and nothing to do about it except finally to explode and blow it all out in hatreds — race hatreds, political hatreds, war hatreds. We, the righteous, are dangerous people in such a situation…. We have got to be aware of the awful sharpness of truth when it is used as a weapon, and since it can be the deadliest weapon, we must take care that we don’t kill more than falsehood with it. In fact, we must be careful how we “use” truth, for we are ideally the instruments of truth and not the other way around.”

Merton noticed that peace activists sometimes identify too much with sectarian ideologies or with particular political parties. In his view peace activity should communicate liberating possibilities to others, left, right and center. As he put it to me in one letter:

“It seems to me that the basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretends to arrogate entirely [to itself]…. This is the necessary first step along the long way … of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics.”

* * *

An essay that includes much more from Merton on this topic:

http://jimandnancyforest.com/2009/02/thomas-merton-peacemaker-in-a-time-of-war/

For an in-depth treatment, see my book, “The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers”:

http://jimandnancyforest.com/2016/06/root-of-war-is-fear/

* * *

Listening Carefully: A Critique of Father James Martin’s Critique of “Male and Female He Created Them”

November 6, 2019 By Brett Salkeld

In his response of the recent document of the Congregation for Catholic Education, “Male and Female he Created Them:” Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education, Fr. James Martin asks the Congregation, and Catholics more generally, to “Listen to the L.G.B.T. person.” It is true that in the section on listening (the first of three sections in the document, the following two being reasoning and proposing), the Congregation is concerned not primarily with the experience of individuals, but with the theoretical frameworks being proposed and promulgated by which people interpret that experience.

While it is critical of these frameworks, it is in the “Points of Agreement” part of this section that some of the more quoted and quotable elements of the document appear. In particular, Martin and others do not fail to note the Congregation’s commending “a laudable desire to combat all expressions of unjust discrimination” and agreement on “the need to educate children and young people to respect every person in their particularity and difference, so that no one should suffer bullying, violence, insults or unjust discrimination based on their specific characteristics.”

While I agree with Father Martin that future work in this sensitive area unquestionably requires listening to the experiences of real concrete individuals created in the image and likeness of God, it is important to recognize that the kind of listening Father Martin is encouraging does not necessarily lead to the kinds of conclusions he seems to presume it will. Indeed, in my own work in this area, I have been privileged to learn from the stories of many people. I want to share two of those stories here (anonymously), not because they trump all other such experiences and can be used to deny the experience of others, but because they intersect with and complicate Father Martin’s critique of the document at two very specific points.

The first story:

(more…)

A Litany of Saints for Peace, Life and Conscience

November 1, 2019 By Julia Smucker

In a time when fear holds so much sway, when violence is so often touted and life and dignity disrespected, may the witness of martyrs and messages of prophets strengthen us to walk the Gospel Way in the service of the Prince of Peace.

For the strength to lay down all instruments of death, giving our first and greatest allegiance to Jesus Christ the eternal king rather than fight the wars of men,

Saint Marcellus of Tangier and Saint Martin of Tours, pray for us.

For the strength to seek the physical, mental and spiritual wholeness of whole persons, and the humility to see our place as creatures within the whole created order,

Saint Hildegard of Bingen, pray for us.

For the strength to extend the hand of friendship to enemies and to pursue peace rather than conquest,

Saint Francis of Assisi, pray for us.

For the strength to quiet the world through prayer and to wilt our guns through love,

Saint John of the Cross, pray for us.

For the strength to serve others with the reverence due to Christ and to especially revere those society would discard, in both great and small ways,

Saint Therese of Lisieux and Saint Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us.

For the strength to defy an unjust order whatever the cost, and the hope to beg and entreat the conversion even of the most violent,

Blessed Franz Jagerstatter and Saint Oscar Romero, pray for us.

For the strength to embrace the most radical demands of the gospel, following the way of peace and service and nourished by community and sacrament,

Dorothy Day, Servant of God, pray for us.

For the strength to speak truth, goodness and beauty to a culture of death, and the conviction to cry from the core of our being, “Never again war!”,

Saint John Paul II, pray for us.

All holy men and women, pray for the peace and healing of this world that God so loves and for the faithfulness of all who profess his son as Lord, so that on earth as in heaven we may join the great multitude in praise of the Lamb, forever and ever. Amen.

Loving Donald Trump

August 6, 2019 By Mark Gordon

*“Don’t Matter How Raggly The Flag, It Still Got To Tie Us Together,” 2003, photo by Stephen Pitkin, Pitkin Studio © Thornton Dial, Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art*

I’ve been struggling a lot lately. For months I’ve been in a state of perpetual outrage over Donald Trump and his cruelty, the hatred and ignorance of his supporters, the cowardice of the Republican Party, and the majority of white Americans – including most Christians – who apparently still support this man and his policies. I say struggling because I have recently become aware of my disappointment and outrage evolving into hatred, which has in turn released something violent and destructive within me. I’ve been walking around with a knot in my stomach. I’ve been deeply anxious and hair-trigger touchy. I’ve caught myself daydreaming about Trump’s death or incapacity. I’ve even indulged fantasies about a cleansing civil war, with all the attendant homicidal ideation that implies.

None of this surprises me, mind you. I’ve long been aware of the fact that my capacity for hatred and violence is very deep, especially as a response to what I perceive as injustice. You might disagree, but I think we all possess this dark reservoir within us: “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked,” says Jeremiah, a diagnosis endorsed by Jesus, who said, “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.” (Matthew 7:21-23)

Recognizing that I come by this propensity for evil naturally is no excuse for indulging it. My mother used to say that the key to success in life is learning to take a stand against oneself, and I’ve found that to be true throughout my adult life. For me, that usually involves choosing a different model than the one I’m sinfully obsessing about at the moment. Lately, I’ve been obsessing about Donald Trump, who in the perverse chemistry of human psychology (see Girard, Rene) has become something of a model for me. I’ve been mirroring his hate and his violence and feeding it back to him. If I’m going to break this cycle and return to spiritual and psychological health, I need a different model. Gratefully, I have one at hand, and so do you.

This man was insulted and demeaned all his life. He was threatened with death hundreds of times. He was beaten with fists and pelted with stones. He had friends murdered, often precisely because of their association with him. He was oppressed by the full weight of the modern state: thrown in jail, made a special target by the FBI, repeatedly and unjustly charged with crimes, his privacy sundered, lies about him planted in the press, some of his confidants blackmailed into becoming informers. A cross was burned on the front lawn of his home while his small children slept just yards away. One time, someone fired shotgun blasts into his front door. Another time, his home was firebombed. Later, someone left twelve sticks of dynamite on his front porch, but they failed to explode. Finally, at the age of 39, he was shot in the face and died.

Yet this man, who endured so much hatred and violence, remained committed to nonviolence until his last breath, not as a tactic but as an imperative of his Christian faith. He had enemies, millions of them, but each one of them chose him. He chose to make no man his enemy. Thus, he could write:

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

“By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists … Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., knew for a long time that his enemies would kill him eventually. In 1963, after the death of John F. Kennedy, King told his wife, Coretta, “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society.” The night before his assassination, he told a crowd in Memphis, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” Yes, King knew he would become a victim of lethal violence, yet he persisted in love, in nonviolence, in refusing to hate. He chose no enemies. His passion for justice never abated. In fact, toward the end of his life the scope of his vision grew to encompass all the victims of discrimination, war, and economic exploitation, both here and abroad. He worked tirelessly to make the Beloved Community a global reality. But he gave no sanction to hatred in his own heart, fearing that to do so would not only blunt the cause of justice, but would cost him his own soul.

Look, we are facing terrible times. There are reasons to believe that as difficult as things are now, we may look back on these days as the quiet period before the deluge. Despite the comforting lies we tell ourselves, the United States doesn’t hold an exemption from history or human nature. As Eddie Glaudehas said, Americans are only exceptional for our ability to make up fairy tales about our history and ourselves. For 400 years we have sown the wind. Can we fail to reap the whirlwind? All that has come before will come again because the racism and violence at the heart of our national soul have never been expunged. In a sense, Donald Trump has done us a service by ripping off the scab and showing us that the American soul still rots beneath. He himself is a kind of mirror held up to white America, and in that reflected darkness we see all the work that must still be done.

Someone recently declared that we are in a “cold civil war.” I think that’s right, but I also think it’s getting warmer all the time and may well blossom into white-hot flame before long. When it does, Christians will have to remember who we are and who we serve. Dorothy Day said that “I only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” Who do you love the least? For me, there is no question. It is Donald Trump, the most unlovable figure I can imagine. But Jesus loves him, and Jesus calls us to “love your enemies.” When I wonder how that is possible, Dr. King is there to remind us. In his sermon titled “Our God is Able,” King said:

If at times we begin to despair because of the relatively slow progress being made … let us gain consolation from the fact that God is able, and in our sometimes difficult and lonesome walk up freedom’s road, we do not walk alone, but God walks with us. He has placed in the very structure of this universe certain absolute moral laws. No matter how much we try, we cannot defy or break them; if we disobey them, they end up breaking us. The force of evil may temporarily conquer truth, but truth has a way of ultimately conquering its conqueror. Our God is able. James Russell Lowell was right:

Truth forever on the scaffold
Wrong forever on the throne
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Stands God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.

Click here to review Dr. King’s Six Principles of Nonviolence

Four Episodes from a Consistent Life Ethic, Part IV

June 30, 2019 By David Cruz-Uribe

With this post I continue (and I hope finish) my very long reflection about the consistent life ethic. The first three parts can be found here: Part I, Part II, Part III. This has taken a lot longer and has been a lot harder than I thought it would be, and of course I saved the hardest part for last.

Today I want to talk about abortion. Given the recent passage of aggressive anti-abortion bills in Georgia, Alabama and Ohio, this post is timely. But I am going to say very little about the current situation, if anything. Rather, I want to round out the foundation on which my views rest. Perhaps in a later post I can try to say a few things, particularly about my adopted state of Alabama.

This post is personally difficult to write, since I am pretty sure that what I say will please a few and anger many. I know that unlike the positions articulated in previous posts, my views on abortion are viewed askance by my liberal and secular friends–at the best they ignore them or simply excuse them as regrettable exception to my otherwise progressive views. And I know from previous posts that my approach to abortion will fail the purity test applied by many staunch members of the pro-life movement. Also, as with my post on race and class, I need to detour and talk a great deal about myself in order to say anything about what I believe.

I do not know when I first began to think about abortion as a moral issue; I think it was some time in graduate school. But self-awareness about abortion is framed by two incidents that happened while I was in college. My first real memory of thinking in any way about abortion was during my first or second year in college. I was on a Greyhound bus going north from Chicago, and was sitting next to a young woman from another university, also on her way home for break. I remember she wanted to talk to distract herself from the pain: shortly before, while studying for finals her roommate had kicked over a popcorn popper and spilled boiling oil all over her arm, which was badly burned. Sitting in the dimly lit bus we had a meandering conversation. At some point she started talking about working as a patient escort at an abortion clinic in Chicago. Sitting across from us was another group of students, all male, from (I believe) Moody Bible College. I suspect they were in transit from/to a demonstration at a clinic, and the student directly across from us had his protest sign, covered with colorful, gruesome images of abortions. Overhearing her, he shoved his sign into view and started saying something. I told him, more or less politely, to shut the hell up and leave her alone. I guess I came across as pretty crazy/scary, because he immediately subsided and we ignored one another for the rest of the trip.

The second incident from college happened in my senior year. A friend of my wife (then my girlfriend) was part of (head of, perhaps) a student pro-life group at our school–I group which I did not know existed until that moment. She had learned that the Knights of Columbus at the local parish were screening a pro-life film, and she wanted to check it out to see if it would be suitable to screen on campus. She invited us along. I remember to discrete bits of the film. First, there was the filmed interview with a very stolid ACLU staff attorney, whom the interviewer was trying to provoke. She did not take the bait, but neither did she (in the clips included) make any kind of case for her position. Second, there was a long interview with a sincere sounding, somewhat over-weight man whose all-encompassing solution the problem of abortion was a presidential proclamation of personhood, modeled on Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. After the film I remember our friend being disappointed, feeling that it had not made the kind of argument that would work with college students.

These two incidents happened over 35 years ago, so many details are lost. I will freely admit that I do not remember my own views on abortion at the time: whether they were mildly pro-life or (more likely) mildly pro-choice, they were not deeply considered. And it may be that what I am “remembering” is not so much my reaction at the time, but rather a palimpsest on which my later views have been written across the memories. But from the encounter on the bus I took away the intensity of that young man’s reaction, his visceral anger, his evident self-righteousness, all of which seemed out of proportion to the situation. In the years since I have encountered other people like this in the pro-life movement–so many that I have never felt comfortable being part of many pro-life groups.

And from the film I remember thinking that the man describing his presidential proclamation was sincere but clueless, proposing a magic wand to make the problem go away. At the time I did not know much about the complex history of the Emancipation Proclamation, but I did know that it took the brutal might of the Union army to enforce it, and that it did very little to bring freed slaves to the “good life” as I discussed in Part III. In the years since, I have watched the pro-life movement focus on a new magic wand–repealing Roe v. Wade–to such an extent that it has become obsessive and has led the movement into an ideological embrace of the Republican party. This is best seen in the successive assertions, both polemical and nonsensical, that Obama was the “most pro-abortion president” in history, and that Trump is the “most pro-life president” ever. (I side with the argument, made most recently by my fellow blogger Mark Gordon, that repealing Roe v. Wade will do very little to affect abortion in America.)

I really began to think about abortion years later when I was in graduate school. A number of things happened during this period to shape my views. During this time I really began to think about life issues more deeply, as I have tried to discuss in my previous posts. Moreover, during this time my oldest son, Nicolas, was born, and he was diagnosed a month after he was born with Down Syndrome. (I have written about Nicolas here and here.) You might say, reversing the classical feminist aphorism, that his birth made the political personal. He also got me to question some of the facile rhetoric surrounding “choice”, particularly in discussions involving fetal abnormality. I am conscious of the relatively privileged situation into which he was born–though I was a broke graduate student, I had a PhD in hand and was fairly certain of some kind of gainful employment. Nevertheless, the reality of of raising a son with disabilities made me suspicious of people who regarded it as such an intolerable burden that they could not conceive of making someone else make such a “sacrifice,” especially when an abortion was such an “obvious” solution.

But it was also in graduate school that I became aware of the progressive pro-life position. Cardinal Bernadin had articulated his “seamless garment” approach to life issues, which in turn led me to investigate the Seamless Garment Network (which has since been renamed the Consistent Life Network). In Berkeley, where I was a graduate student, this was a somewhat motley collection of activists: anti-war, pro-life, animal rights, anti-poverty. But they were united by the fact that they found a common thread in all of these problems: a belief, as the American bishops said in connection with the death penalty, in the tragic illusion that violence could resolve the problems caused by violence in our society. Further, it was a positive vision defined not by what they were against, but what they were for. They wanted to, in whatever ways they could, create a better world, a world, in the words of Peter Maurin, where it was easier for a person to be good.

At the same time I also came into contact with two very different pro-life organizations. The first was Feminists for Life, which, like the Consistent Life Network, situates abortion in a broader vision of the common good. Rather than simply condemning abortion, it focuses on the social and economic structures that make choosing an abortion seem to be the right choice, particularly for women living on the margins. They argued that it was possible to be a pro-life feminist, a view which has earned them opprobrium from both left and right.

Second was CPS, Crisis Pregnancy Services, a “crisis pregnancy clinic” in the Bay Area. My office mate’s wife was a nurse, and she volunteered at CPS. I initially supported them because of this, but over the years I have come to admire this organization greatly. They have changed their name multiple times: First Resort, Third Box, and now Support Circle. Every time, it was because they wanted to make sure that their mission of support for pregnant women was at the forefront. They were opposed to abortion–they never dissembled about that–but wanted to take a positive stance by providing emotional and material support to women who found themselves pregnant and unsure.

In the years since graduate school I have kept my distance from the “established” pro-life movement. I never kept my pro-life views secret: indeed, I went so far as to write about them in the student paper (PDF, see page 3). But beyond financial support, I generally did not get involved. I served on my parish pro-life committee for a couple years, and while the other members were open to listening to me talk about a broader approach, we ended up not doing very much. I did create a few bulletin board displays that got people talking, including one that was headlined with the provocative question “Are you really pro-life?” as a way to challenge people to think about the broader issues involved. Once, at the invitation of a friend from my Franciscan fraternity, I joined a prayer vigil outside the abortion clinic in Hartford. It was an uncomfortable experience, culminating in watching an angry looking white man, working as a sidewalk counselor, chase a visibly frightened Puerto Rican woman to the entrance to the clinic. Most recently, a couple of months ago a representative from the local pro-life group came to our Knights of Columbus council to recruit the members (mostly college students) to join. The heart of his pitch was anti-feminist to the point of misogyny, culminating in the stern warning that it was the responsibility of men to attend their demonstrations to protect women (the weaker sex) from the demonic influences that were present.

I will be frank: this is not a pro-life movement I want to be associated with. I imagine I will be accused of intellectual fastidiousness for this, particularly considering some of the bedfellows I had while working in the anti-death penalty movement. The difference, in my mind, lies in our relationship: I was not joining those other groups–we were agreeing to cooperate on an issue that we shared in common. Similarly, I will donate bottled water, toilet paper and diapers to the local crisis pregnancy center (which the local pro-life group runs) because we have this desire to serve in common.

So where does all of this leave me? I find, philosophically, that I stand firmly behind what I wrote as a young assistant professor 20 years ago:

[W]hat do I mean when I say that I am pro-life? I believe that human life has an intrinsic dignity and worth which must be upheld, and this dignity is continually threatened by a world which seems to have embraced a “culture of death,” in the words of John Paul II. I believe that society has a positive obligation to protect and uphold this dignity, especially for the poor, the marginalized and the voiceless. So in defense of human life I oppose (among other things) militarism, the death penalty, punitive welfare policies, euthanasia and abortion.

Philosophically, there are deep and subtle questions I still grapple with: How does one balance conflicting rights claims? What happens to the autonomy and freedom of individual women when the act of becoming pregnant is irrevocable–especially when this act was not made by conscious choice (e.g., after the failure of birth control), or indeed happened in violation of the woman’s will (e.g., in cases of rape or incest)?

Practically, I worry about how to move forward: what are the steps which will end abortion, or at least reduce it by an order of magnitude? How can these be accomplished given the political polarization in America, where the Democrats seem determined to embrace the most extreme “abortion on demand” stance while the Republicans appear to be willing to tolerate any outrage against human dignity except abortion? A solution similar to those adopted by western European nations, which would require significant concessions by both sides, seems increasingly out of reach.

I do not know. But I know this: as Mother Theresa said,

God does not require that we be successful, only that we be faithful.

Coda: this series of posts started a year ago because I was being considered for a position on the board of the Consistent Life Network. I have been told recently that I am still under consideration. I want to thank the board for their forbearance and consideration; or, to quote John Lennon, “thanks, and I hope we passed the audition.”

The Victims Are Us, and The Violent Are Too: Lessons from New Zealand

March 23, 2019 By Julia Smucker

By Chlorineer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77507920

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the horrific mosque shootings in the city of Christchurch has been rightly hailed as exemplifying strong and compassionate leadership. Her (and her country’s) combination of compassion and resolve, lamentation and action, demonstrates what a national response to a tragedy can look like in a way that looks downright enviable from within the present American context.

Still, I have to wonder whether every part of that response is fully translatable. I’m not talking here about guns or Islamophobia, although those things are certainly worth interrogating. I’m talking, rather, about the more innocuous narratives societies tell themselves about their own true nature.

Repudiating (again rightly) the hideous ideology of xenophobia and the violence it has once again led to, Ardern recently stated,

“Many of those directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home. It is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetrated this violence against us is not.”

As an aspirational statement, the sentiment behind it is laudable. If, as Gandhi said, the true measure of society is how it treats its vulnerable members, then any society that aspires to be a moral one should choose to identify with victims of violence rather than perpetrators; that is, to repudiate acts of violence and stand with those targeted by such acts. It’s apparent enough in context that this is what Ardern really meant.

And yet on hearing the above statement, some part of me couldn’t help hearing echoes of the historically naïve refrain, often repeated in the face of violence against the vulnerable, that “this is not who we are.” In the language of American mythos, such statements are not unrelated to a particular shorthand, rarely if ever questioned in U.S. political discourse, in which “American” is an all-purpose adjective for anything positive and “un-American” for anything negative. It is a mythos by which we constantly seek to reassure ourselves of our own unique and intrinsic goodness.

To be sure, my hearing is undoubtedly influenced by my own context, and it may not be a fair comparison. New Zealand, after all, is not the United States, and given the rarity of mass shootings in the former country relative to the latter, perhaps New Zealanders can indeed say more credibly that the shooting does not reflect who they are as a society. I do not have the knowledge or background to comment on the vicissitudes of New Zealand’s history. And I hope I’ve already made it clear that my intention is not to equate Ardern’s leadership, which from what I can tell is genuinely admirable, with the empty clichés of exceptionalist mythos. Yet, sadly, the shooting and the ideology behind it have become a part of New Zealand’s ongoing history, a part of who they are. And, for better or worse, so is the response to it. It is the response that will largely determine whether the effects on their collective identity will, on balance, weigh more toward the better or the worse. That is the real lesson here for all of us.

Even where declarations that a given incident of individual or state-sponsored violence is “not who we are” are outright naïve, there is still a worthy aspiration to be gleaned from them. The best possible meaning of “this is not who we are” is that this is not who we want to be, not who we are at our best. It is a part of who we are – as individuals, as societies, as humanity – that must be acknowledged, painful as it is, if we are to have any hope of learning from it. The hopeful side of this painful reality is that we all – individuals, societies, humanity – are also more than who we are at our worst.

The truest response to hate and violence is to say that all of this is us. The violent and the vulnerable are us. The killing and the healing are us. Hate and love, division and solidarity, fear and faith are us. Shows of superficial strength based on fear, and the true strength of what Pope Francis has often called “a revolution of tenderness” : we all are capable of either, and must still and always choose, as the ancient Hebrews, between life and death, the blessing and the curse (cf. Deut. 30:19).

As Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” And he goes on to describe that shifting line as it is pulled in either direction:

“During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.”

One could add that the same line cuts through the heart of every human society, which after all is made up of human beings. Every good and every evil we witness is a chance to choose which of the two we want to win out.