Loving Donald Trump

Last updated on: August 6, 2019 at 4:36 pm 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

Last updated on: June 30, 2019 at 3:17 pm 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

Last updated on: March 23, 2019 at 10:53 pm 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.

So what is the problem? A post to start a discussion

Last updated on: January 6, 2019 at 5:01 pm By David Cruz-Uribe

This post began about a month ago, when I got a funding raising email from Formed. For those who are not aware of this website, it is an on demand e-library run by the Augustine Institute, which describes its mission as follows:

The Augustine Institute serves the formation of Catholics for the New Evangelization. Through our academic and parish programs, we equip Catholics intellectually, spiritually, and pastorally to renew the Church and transform the world for Christ.

Formed is marketed at the diocesan level, and so I have membership through a subscription bought by the Diocese of Birmingham. Their content leans towards Scott Hahn and similar writers.

Anyway, early in December I received an email pitch which began:

What can you do about the crisis in our culture and in the Church?

Now more than ever the Church desperately needs devout and zealous disciples—disciples who have the strength of heart to witness the truth with love to the world, and even to the Church itself.

We’re working hard to combat this crisis, but we need your help.

The sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s has expanded to today’s growing cultural pressure to redefine marriage and one’s gender. As the culture turns away and rejects the beauty of the Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality, many wonder if religion is simply an outdated medieval superstition—antiquated, odd, unnecessary to the modern world.

They wonder if the Christian faith is nothing more than a flickering candle in the wind. Are we going away?

No, we’re not.

With fierce cultural winds blowing against the faithful from all sides, many Christians have felt their footing unsure and that unsettling uncertainty was only intensified when scandals and betrayals from within the Church were made public this summer.

When I first skimmed through this email, I was rather dismissive. At first glance it appeared to be part of a standard trope popular among some conservative Catholics, one which blames all the ills of modern society on the sexual revolution, and which hearkens back (at least implicitly) to a mythical golden age in which there was no sexual libertinism. Having heard stories from older colleagues about the sexual mores of New England liberal arts colleges in the 1950s (“there are girls you date and then there are girls you marry”) and having done some scattered reading on the history of prostitution in the medieval period, I have long felt there was no such time.

I intended to blog about this, but never found anything more substantive to say, so I let it drop, though I did keep the email. But then several more fund raising emails showed up, all variations of the original. Significantly, however, they dropped the specific reference to the sexual revolution, but did not mention any other specific instances of the “fierce cultural winds blowing against the faithful.” And while I remained skeptical of the focus on the sexual revolution, I did think that they had a point. But these appeals did raise the question: what are the specific ills of modern culture in America? Which ones are foundational, and which are merely symptoms of a deeper malaise?

I have been thinking about this as this post took shape in my head, and in a (rare?) burst of intellectual humility I have to say I am not sure. I want to throw out some ideas, but I am also looking to get our readers to come back with their own thoughts. In particular, I hope that our quiet readers will have something to say. (Okay, I admit it, I miss the days when moderating the blog was a chore because of the volume of the comments requiring approval.)

To get things started: looking at modern America, I see the following (in no particular order) as deeper problems that present challenges to the Church and which we as Catholics must address. I have shared a number of links to earlier posts by myself and by our regular contributors and guests which speak to them in some form or another, though these are but a small sampling from our archives.

Our culture glorifies individualism to the extent that it significantly weakens the social bonds. A version of this argument was effectively argued by my fellow blogger Julia Smucker. I touched on it briefly as a cause of problems in the Church in an early post.
Our society is gripped by the illusion that violence is a solution to our problems, personally, domestically, and internationally. With references to WW I, I wrote about this many years ago, and Mark Gordon recently brought it up again.
Racism, “America’s original sin,” continues to blight our society. I have written about this extensively: one of my earliest posts at Vox Nova was about racism, and the most recent was only a month ago. There was also a detailed post by Jeannine Pitas a few years ago.
Nationalism and political polarization, like individualism, are tearing our society apart. Coupled with our fascination with violence, there is a danger that we could, literally, start killing one another. A guest post by Lillian Vogl earlier this year on centrism addressed this. We also had a series of guest posts by Mike McG on the effects of polarization on the Catholic Church.
Capitalism, as practiced today, with its glorification of consumption, materialism and wealth accumulation for its own sake, threaten not just our society but the very earth itself. After Black Friday this year, Julia Smucker called out Mammon. Many years ago, Mark Gordon offered a conservative critique of capitalism. Jeannine Pitas wrote about responding to Laudato Si, which requires addressing the roots of the problem in capitalism.

Looking at this list, I am not sure which if any of these is more serious than the others. I sense that some of them are inter-related. In particular, capitalism (patterns of advertising and consumption) underlie our individualism and our fascination with violence. Are there others? Is there an ur-problem, specific to America, or to western civilization as a whole, that underlies them, or is it too reductive to expect this?

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

The Power of Delusion

Last updated on: November 8, 2018 at 3:21 pm By Mark Gordon

I’ve long had a personal rule that I never debate strict five-point Calvinists online because it is a pointless exercise. You go around and around with no conclusion because they are locked into a self-referential mental loop so deep that only grace, not reason, can extricate them. I’m now adding Trump supporters to that list. They also exhibit an epistemic closure so profound that it no longer makes any sense to try to reason with them. As Mark Shea says, “we have now reached the stage of authoritarian denial of reality that the Cult is literally telling us to disbelieve video we can see with our own eyes …” He writes, of course, about the video of a young White House staffer trying to wrest a microphone from CNN reporter Jim Acosta at yesterday’s presidential press conference. Like the person who eats cilantro and tastes soap, Trumpists are convinced they see violence on Acosta’s part. Except this is no benign chemical reaction, and there is no violence of any kind in the video, no matter how mild. It is pure delusion. I couldn’t help thinking of the line from Orwell’s 1984 – “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” – not to mention this quote of Donald Trump from just a month or two ago: “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

This “strong delusion” (to borrow a term from Scripture) has infected people I know and like, both family and friends. In the Bacchae of Euripides, Agave, caught up in the strong mimetic spell of the bacchanal, assists in the beheading of her own son, Pentheus. She carries his head back to Thebes, convinced that it is the head of a mountain lion. Only later, after the hypnotic fever breaks, can Agave regain her senses and confront what she has done.

Agave: Ah! what do I see? what is this I am carrying in my hands?

Cadmus: Look closely at it; make thy knowledge more certain.

Agave: Ah, ‘woe is me! O sight of awful sorrow!

Cadmus: Dost think it like a lion’s head?

Agave: Ah no! ’tis Pentheus’ head which I his unhappy mother hold.

Something similar is happening in the United States. Like five-point Calvinism, the Trump Delusion will not be overcome by reason. It will take grace. And so, from now on I will not debate Trumpians in this or any other forum. I will merely excuse myself and pray for them, that they may recover their sight, and themselves.

On Antisemitism and the Catholic Church

Last updated on: November 8, 2018 at 2:05 pm By David Cruz-Uribe

I have been thinking a lot about antisemitism lately. Obviously, this was sparked by the killing of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27. Had it just been the shooting, I think I would have moved on–sadly, we have become desensitized to mass shootings in America. Years ago, after the execution of Michael Ross in CT, a BBC reporter asked me why protesting his execution was so important: “After all, what’s one more execution in America?” I fear the same question is about mass shootings is becoming pertinent.

But then one of the priests in my parish mentioned it in such a pro forma fashion that it really caught my attention. In the middle of his homily the following Sunday there was some hook, I think about evil, that led him to the synagogue shooting. However, in one sentence he basically said, “this is a terrible tragedy” and then went back to making whatever point he had been originally trying to make. There has been no further mention of it at mass since, either in homilies or the prayers of the faithful. (But, to be fair, the parish FB page did post a notice when our neighboring synagogue had a candlelight vigil.) (more…)

The Scandal of Redemption

Last updated on: October 12, 2018 at 1:23 pm By Mark Gordon

On Sunday, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, the martyred Archbishop of San Salvador, will be canonized by Pope Francis in a ceremony in St. Peter Square. Earlier this year, Plough Publishing House (which, in my opinion, is by far the best Christian publisher on the planet right now), released a short collection of Bishop Oscar Romero’s writings and homilies under the title The Scandal of Redemption. For those interested in the life, witness, and martyrdom of Romero (and we all should be), the book is an invaluable companion. Here’s the video trailer:

https://youtu.be/xCanmDfIPEg

What follows is a florilegium drawn from The Scandal of Redemption, and touching on various topics:

The nonviolent “violence” of love: “We have never preached violence, except the violence of the love that led Christ to be nailed to a cross. We preach only the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome selfishness and to eliminate the cruel inequalities among us. This is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love and fraternity, the violence that chooses to beat weapons into sickles for work.”

The suffering of the poor as a means to salvation: “If we want to find the child Jesus today, we shouldn’t contemplate the lovely figures in our nativity scenes. We should look for him among the malnourished children who went to bed tonight without anything to eat. We should look for him among the poor newspaper boys who will sleep tonight on doorsteps, wrapped in their papers … In taking all this upon himself, the God of the poor is showing us the redemptive value of human suffering. He is showing us the value it has for redeeming the poverty and suffering which are the world’s cross. There is no redemption without the cross, but that does not mean our poor people should be passive. We were indoctrinating the poor when we told them, ‘It is God’s will for you to live poor and hopeless on the margins of society.’ That is not true! God in no way wants social injustice … The greatest violence comes from those who deprive so many people of happiness, from those who are killing the many people who are starving. God is telling the poor, as he told the oppressed Christ when he was carrying his cross, ‘You will save the world by making your suffering a protest of salvation and by not conforming to what God does not want. You will save the world if you die in your poverty while yearning for better times, making your whole life a prayer, and embodying everything that seeks to liberate the people from this situation.'”

Ownership of the Church: “How rich is God in forgiveness and mercy! Before God we have no privileges or rights. If we have served God from our earliest years, then blessed by God! We have used our life well. But that doesn’t give us the right to feel that we are owners of the Church. Even if we are bishops, even if we are priests, we may be more in need of God’s mercy than sinners who have just converted and who by their love are perhaps closer to God than those who think they own the Church. God is kind. No one can judge his initiatives. Appeal to his mercy; beg like the good thief just to be remembered, and God will do more than remember you …”

Triumph in Christ is two-phased: “This is a night of triumph, a night of victory, but not a victory that leaves enemies crushed under hatred and bloodshed. The victories achieved by bloodshed are detestable. The victories won by brute force are brutish. The victory that truly triumphs is that of faith, the victory of Christ who did not come to be served but to serve. The triumph of his love is a peaceful triumph. Death’s triumph was not definitive. The definitive victory is the triumph of life over death, the triumph of peace, the triumph of joy, the triumph of alleluias, the triumph of the resurrection of the Lord!

“But in this triumph there are two aspects, two phases. Don’t’ forget that. The first phase is Christ’s, and he is already crowned with absolute victory; he is the king of life and of eternity. St. Paul tells us, ‘Christ has risen, and death has no hold on him.’ In him redemption has reached its peak. But tonight we are going to renew our baptism as Christians, and we know that for us the victory still lies ahead as the object of our hope. The banners of suffering and pain and sin and death are still raised over our world. This does not mean that Christ’s death and resurrection were a failure because of human wickedness; it just means that this the time of the Church. From the resurrection of Christ until the second coming how many centuries will pass? We do not know, but we do know that with the resurrection of Christ the victory over sin and hell and death has been guaranteed and that God has asked his Church to administer this victory of Christ in the hearts of every person. That is the reason for this tremendous work of evangelization, the labor of reconciling people with God, the work of bringing the blood of Christ to the hearts of all, the work of planting the love of God in the midst of hatred, the work of sowing peace among the nations, the work of promoting justice in human relationships and respect for the rights of those sanctified by the Lord’s redemption.”

What God wants: Conversion means asking at every moment: what does God want of my life? If God wants the opposite of what I might fancy, then doing what God wants is conversion, and following my own desire is perversion. What does God want, for example, of the political power in a country? He wants those forces to create sound laws and moral unity of will among all citizens for the common good. God does not want that power to be used to assault and to beat people or to attack cities and villages; that is perversion. What does God want of capital and of those to whim he gives money, properties, and other things? Again God seeks conversion. That means that people should bestow on the things created by God the destiny God ordains for them, which is the welfare of all, so that everyone might have a share in happiness.”

On the persistence of the Church: “It would seem that the Church, after twenty centuries of so many persecutions and so much fury direct against her, should already have disappeared. In El Salvador it should already have been wiped out. But the dynamism and the strength of the Church is not in us human beings who can be very fragile and very sinful. I am not surprised when people criticize me because of my sins. I know I am sinful … We must have this perspective: the Church as a human institution would simply not continue in existence, but the Church persists because she is composed of people who place their fragile trust in Christ, and Christ is in God, and God is in Christ and in us. This is a current that travels from earth to heaven through Christ, and through Christ it comes back down to earth bringing with it the Spirit of God, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of strength.”

On liberation: “The word ‘liberation’ bothers many people, but it is the reality of Christ’s redemption. Liberation does not mean only redemption after death, so that people should just conform to the system while they are alive. No, liberation is redemption that is already beginning on this earth. Liberation means that the exploitation of one human being by another no longer exists in the world. Liberation means redemption that seeks to free people from every form of slavery. Slavery is illiteracy; slavery is hunger, not having money to buy food; slavery is being homeless, not having a place to live. Slavery is misery; they go together. When the Church preaches that Christ came to redeem us and that because of that redemption no form of slavery should exist on earth, the church is not preaching subversion or politics or communism. The Church is preaching the true redemption of Christ. Christ does not want slaves; he wants all people to be redeemed; he wants us all, rich and poor, to love one another as sisters and brothers. He wants liberation to reach everywhere so that no slavery exists in the world, none at all. No person should be the slave of another, nor a slave of misery, nor a slave of anything that supposes sin in the world. This is the content of this revelation, this doctrine, this evangelization.”

Finding the face of Christ: “When we despise the poor person or the harvester of coffee or sugar cane or cotton, it is the face of Christ we despise. Let us think of the campesinos who even today are traveling about in search of sustenance for the whole year. Let us not forget them, for they are the face of Christ. The face of Christ is there among the sacks and baskets of the harvesters. The face of Christ is there in the torture and cruelty of the prisons. The face of Christ is dying of hunger in the children who have nothing to eat. The face of Christ is the needy person who asks the Church to speak out. How can the Church refuse if it is Christ who is telling her, ‘Speak for me?’

Romero’s last words, given at the altar on March 24, 1980, during a Mass offered for a friend’s mother: “If we illuminate with Christian hope our intense longings for justice and peace and all that is good, then we can be sure that no one dies forever. If we have imbued our work with a great sense of faith, love of God, and hope for humanity, then all our endeavors will lead to the splendid crown that is the sure reward for the work of sowing truth, justice, love, and goodness on the earth. Our work does not remain here; it is gathered and purified by the Spirit of God and returned to us as a reward.

“This holy Mass of thanksgiving, then, is just such an act of faith. By Christian faith we know that at this moment the host of wheat becomes the body of the Lord, who offered himself for the redemption of the world, and that the wine in this chalice is transformed into the blood that was the price of salvation. May this body that was immolated and this flesh that was sacrificed for humankind also nourish us so that we can give our bodies and our blood to suffering and pain, as Christ did, not for our own sake but to bring justice and peace to our people. Let us therefore join closely together in faith and hope at this moment of prayer for Dona Sarita and ourselves.”

This is our Romero Moment: Nicaraguan Catholic Church responds to political unrest

Last updated on: August 23, 2018 at 12:24 pm By voxnovablog

The following post was originally published by Rhonda Miska in Global Sisters Report.

This article comes from written reports and interviews with men and women religious on the ground in Nicaragua. For their safety, their names have been changed and their religious communities and ministries are not identified.

Last year, another former Jesuit Volunteer and I planned a return trip to Nicaragua. We dreamed of visiting former colleagues, seeing schoolchildren now all grown up, eating gallo pinto and quesillo, and watching the sunset behind the San Cristobal volcano as we did when we were missioned there in 2002-2004.

Heartbroken by increasingly panicked emails and Facebook posts from Nicaraguan friends, we sadly shelved our plans to return. Photos of peaceful student protestors clashing with heavily armed police or masked paramilitary in familiar streets; accounts of bishops, priests and sisters facing threats and violence for accompanying their parishioners — all of it moved us to tears.

These stories and images boggled our minds, evoking more the Central America of Ita, Maura, Dorothy, and Jean than the poor but peaceful nation we had known and loved.

I channeled my worry and sadness by singing the national anthem as a kind of prayer for peace for this country that has shaped me so deeply. I could just imagine hearing the bright-eyed, blue-and-white-uniformed schoolchildren singing the words of the anthem with me: “No longer is stained by the blood of brothers your glorious bicolor banner.”

During my Jesuit Volunteer years, as my relationships deepened and my Spanish improved, I heard much more about the “blood of brothers” which had been spilled in this Central American nation.

In Managua’s noisy barrios and on corn and coffee farms in the mountainous countryside, our neighbors and friends of all political persuasions shared their experiences of the 44-year Somoza regime and the revolution which overthrew it.

The Somoza government was as corrupt and nepotistic as it was brutal, misusing international aid which poured in after the Christmas 1972 earthquake. Somoza’s family enriched itself while leaving the majority of Nicaraguans impoverished. As the Sandinista movement against then President Anastasio Somoza Debayle gained momentum, suspected dissidents were disappeared, tortured and killed.

Somoza and his family fled the country and the Sandinistas (the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN) took power in 1979. But the bloodshed wasn’t finished. The U.S.-funded Contra war turned the northern rural area (where I later lived as a Jesuit Volunteer) into a guerrilla war zone throughout the 1980s, terrorizing the population and claiming many lives.

I recorded testimonies about these decades of violence, hope, loss and struggle with a hand-held tape recorder my mother had mailed from Wisconsin.

Nicaraguans’ hospitality and kindness to me, a citizen of the nation whose government supported Somoza as well as armed and trained the Contras, was astounding and humbling. Threaded through many of the testimonies shared with me over sweet coffee and hot corn tortillas was extraordinary faith and Gospel commitment to working for a just peace.

Now — 39 years after the Sandinista revolution and 16 years after I first arrived in Nicaragua — the stories from Nicaragua echo the fear and faith, repression and resistance that I recorded then.

How has 2018 under President Daniel Ortega become a tragic déjà vu of the 1970s under Somoza? And how is the Nicaraguan church calling us to greater conversion and solidarity?

The most recent wave of violence began on April 19 after Ortega proposed changes to the social security system, requiring those paying in to pay more, while retirees would receive less. The proposal was met with public outcry and the largest protestsin 30 years.

There are other criticisms of Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo. His administration sold rights to a foreign company to build an interoceanic canal to compete with the Panama Canal, a plan opposed by many civil-society groups.

New constitutional changes permitted him to serve a third consecutive presidential term. Over the past decade, many of Ortega’s former allies have become vocal critics; his administration is now widely seen “as a dictatorship,” according to Sr. Esperanza, a Nicaraguan woman religious who described the current state repression as “super fuerte” (super strong).

“[Ortega] is abusing an entire nation,” said Fr. Carlos. “If you came to know Nicaragua in the 1980s, you need to realize it’s a totally different situation. People who have resisted both Somoza and Ortega say in many ways Ortega is worse.”

Since April 19, police and paramilitaries have unleashed brutal violence on protestors, especially university students. Over 300have been killed and some 2,000 injured. As under Somoza, those suspected of disagreeing with the government face intimidation and threats.

“There are credible reports of torture,” said Sr. Esperanza.

Among human rights organizations calling for change are Amnesty International which called the state repression “deplorable” and Human Rights Watch which denounced “arbitrary detention, cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, and attacks on journalists.”

In July, three Ortega government officials were sanctioned to “expose and hold accountable those responsible for the Nicaraguan government’s ongoing violence and intimidation campaign against its people,” according to a U.S. State Department statement.

Both Fr. Eduardo and Sr. Esperanza urged U.S. citizens in solidarity with the Nicaraguan people to pressure legislators to sanction more officials under the Magnitsky Act. (The Global Magnitsky Act was enacted by Congress in 2016 to sanction foreign governmental officials responsible for human rights violations.)

In Nicaragua the Catholic Church literally has come under fire. On July 14, Managua’s Church of the Divine Mercy experienced 15 hours of paramilitary gunfire when pastor Fr. Raul Zamora offered refuge to about 200 students.

The Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference is the mediator between the Ortega government and Civic Alliance. The bishops, especially Managua’s Auxiliary Bishop Silvio Báez Ortega, have publically challenged the government’s human rights abuses.

“We [bishops] cannot be impartial in the face of the injustice and violence,” tweeted Báez on August 5.

“We [the Nicaraguan Catholic Church] are having our Romero moment,” said Fr. Carlos, referring to the Archbishop of San Salvador assassinated while celebrating Mass in 1980.

Fr. Carlos explained, “Just like Romero allowed himself to be converted by the excluded in El Salvador … bishops and priests are doing extraordinary things in accompanying the people. They’ve walked through streets where people are cursing them, calling them coup-mongers, terrorists. They’ve been physically attacked, like everyone else.”

“Our bishops are struggling for the people. The church is the only credible institution in the country,” Sr. Esperanza noted with admiration.

Each of these on-the-ground sources spoke frankly of fear as well as faith.

“We live with risk and uncertainty every day. We are at the point of doing our humanitarian work in secret,” Sr. Esperanza explained. By offering food, medical treatment and pastoral accompaniment to people wounded in police and paramilitary attacks, religious have become targets themselves. “All of our convents and religious houses are under surveillance.”

“People in the church, journalists, human rights workers have to deal with fear. You see these pickup trucks loaded with paramilitaries with AK-47s. They go through neighborhoods, sometimes shooting in the air, harassing people on the street. … Young people especially are afraid of being beaten up or tortured,” said Fr. Eduardo.

But, he continued, “we’re called to work with Jesus in proclaiming and trying to usher in little by little the kingdom, and challenge injustice and falsehood. If we aren’t being persecuted, we aren’t preaching the Gospel.”

“Even attending Mass is an act of rebellion. We are living the situation of the first Christians under the Roman Empire,” said Sr. Esperanza. “I hope no priests or sisters are killed, but that is very possible.” She went on to describe paramilitaries shooting doors and ransacking a Catholic school run by women religious in Jinotepe.

In the midst of uncertainty, they are trying to carry on ministry as much as possible and grounding themselves in prayer.

“Above all, we [Nicaraguans] are faithful people. This tragedy, even though it hits us hard, is making us more human and more faithful. That is one of the miracles God is working in us,” Sr. Esperanza said.

During a Skype conversation, when I told Sr. Esperanza about my cancelled plans for a return visit she smiled broadly, a marked contrast to the sadness that shadowed her face as she had spoken of threats and intimidation.

“You will come back, Rhonda. You will come to our convent and meet our nuns. You will come back to a new Nicaragua,” she said, her trust palpable.

Sr. Esperanza’s confident hope echoes another line of the Nicaraguan national anthem: brille hermosa la paz en tu cielo (“let peace shine beautifully in your sky”). Despite past and present bloodshed, this faith-filled struggle for social transformation — guided by the vision of a just peace — remains unwavering.

[Sr. Rhonda Miska is a Sinsinawa Dominican novice who writes from River Forest, Illinois, where she ministers at Dominican University. She lived in Nicaragua from 2002 to 2004.]

A Meditation on Messiness

Last updated on: August 18, 2018 at 2:46 pm By Jeannine Pitas

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a messy person. I distinctly remember being a second grader – my desk, in which we students stored our textbooks and folders, was comparatively more disorderly than that of all my fellow classmates. The same was true in sixth grade, when we graduated to lockers. In high school I lazily used one notebook for several subjects. In college and afterwards I often struggled to negotiate living standards with roommates who believed in a place for everything and everything in its place. And today, as a thirty-five-year-old living alone, I can easily go for weeks or months without cleaning, using the sporadic parties I host as motivation to at last put things in order.

It’s hard to admit that I’m an untidy person. We live in a world that is not kind to the slovenly. When I was young, my mother would often lose her temper upon seeing the clothes tossed carelessly about my room, just as she did not permit me to go to school with an untucked uniform blouse or knees socks pushed down to the ankles (“Your appearance is a reflection on me,” she said). My father would exhort me to be orderly as he was; twenty years later, when he visited me in my current hometown of Dubuque, Iowa, he took it upon himself to scrub my cabinets while asking, “How can you live like this?”

Admittedly, their criticisms did not incite me to embrace the virtues of neatness; they only made me more defensive about my own way of being. I can live like this just fine, thank you very much. In school I received excellent grades; I completed a PhD and became a tenure-track professor. A young woman who I am mentoring recently moved into my spare room and thus far has no complaints about my habits, though we’ll see how long that lasts. In any case, I’ve basically managed to function – so what if there are piles of papers stacked on my desk?

I am well aware that this attitude does not harmonize well with the dominant culture. Minimalism is ever more popular; countless self-help books and TV shows discuss the virtues of de-cluttering. But I inevitably feel a sense of unease when I enter a magazine-perfect home. Questions play in the back of my mind – how much have this space’s inhabitants had to throw away in order to achieve this environment? Did they give up anything valuable? And, what important but unsavory truths might they be hiding, even from themselves?

I have taken a six-month hiatus from writing for this blog. The reason for this is a moral one. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I will say that I’ve spent the past six months in a fairly grave state of sin – serious enough that writing for a Catholic blog seemed too hypocritical, even though I was engaged in many other things that were more hypocritical. I have caused unnecessary pain to people I care about. I have done things that, five years ago, if I’d heard of someone doing them, I would have been outraged. “How could they possibly do that?” I would have asked indignantly. While I may tolerate messiness in my external environment, I wanted to believe that my soul was well-ordered. Alas, it is not.

“How could they possibly do that?” is a question I’ve asked multiple times. I asked it as a college freshman when, during my first week of classes, I saw a plane fly into a building on live television. I asked it two years later when I saw young American soldiers my age get shipped off to invade a country that, to my knowledge, had done no wrong and posed no threat to anyone. I asked it in my mid-twenties when a con artist deliberately used deception and flattery to fool me into giving him an embarrassingly large sum of money. And I ask it today, when I read about heinous child abuse committed by priests for decades in the very diocese where I grew up – crimes that the institutional church, wanting to preserve authority and an image of neatness, attempted to stow away in a closet.

But today, I can no longer indignantly scratch my head at human cruelty. Most of us do not commit such dramatic offenses as the one that get reported on the news. But petty acts of selfishness, small failures to see the world from the point of view of others, can add up over time to cause serious harm. Given the right circumstances – particularly if we ourselves have been hurt – we can easily find ourselves doing things we never thought we’d do.

As a professor of English literature at a small college, I teach students who crave order neatness. “Is this a good character or a bad character?” they ask. When we read contemporary Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, a brilliant account of the Biafra War, they were appalled to see how someone who is compassionate could also be an unfaithful spouse, how an innocent child could become a rapist in times of war. They could not understand how Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its violence and incest and rape, could be considered a modern epic, a foundation myth. They had little patience for Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; they couldn’t bring themselves to care about the characters’ struggles – how could a mother say cruel things to her children and then still claim to love them?

But the fact is that loving parents do say cruel things to children each day. We hurt each other as we love each other; we strive to become better but fail again and again. Maybe my messiness, just as much as others’ neatness, is an attempt at control, a desire to hang onto things that should be discarded. Alas, one of the consequences of my actions has been a certain stripping away; I have lost some things I will not get back. But this does not make my world more ordered, either internally or externally. The disorder, with its accompanying anxiety, remains.

Christianity tries very hard to divide good from evil; we dream of a day when the wheat and the chaff will be unequivocally separated; we imagine a heaven where all will be well. The difficulty of this is that, unlike in polytheistic religions, where different deities embody different human characteristics, we stand before one God whom we believe to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and good. Thus, we are left like Job, astonished, awed by the existence of wrong and suffering and pain – a problem that no theodicy I’ve ever encountered can explain away. No matter how neat we try to make our environments, this is the world we have. We live with Job’s unanswered questions; we look at the world – and ourselves – with his awe.

Four Episodes from a Consistent Life Ethic, Part II

Last updated on: July 27, 2018 at 7:35 pm By David Cruz-Uribe

In this post I want to continue my episodic narrative of how I came to my views on a consistent life ethic. You can read part I here. Also, I want to apologize in advance if you are writing comments and are not seeing them or I do not respond quickly. I am on the road and do not have regular access to a computer, and I do not have my list of passwords with me.

War, peace and non-violence

As a teenager I had the usual fascination with war and violence; at one point I toyed with enlisting in the Marines, as an older friend had done. I knew some “peaceniks” in college, but for the most part I found their arguments naive. Things began to change in the early 1990s, with the Gulf War. Berkeley was a hotbed of anti-war activism. Unfortunately, given the sclerotic nature of much of the Berkeley Left in those days, it seemed more like an opportunity to relive the glory days of opposing the Vietnam war than an attempt to grapple with the reality of what was happening. (I still remember some particularly ham-handed arguments which tried to defend Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait as an act of anti-imperialism.) However, it did get me thinking about the just war theory and other ethical approaches to war and peace.

At some point during the 90s I picked up a copy of G.H.C. MacGregor’s The New Testament Basis of Pacifism, (PDF) but I did not fully understand it. More importantly, I began reading biographies and the writings of Dorothy Day, perhaps the most uncompromising pacifist in the Catholic tradition. I was teaching a first year seminar at Trinity College on the radical Christian ideal and I included Day along with St. Francis and Mother Theresa of Calcutta. I also began my long acquaintance with the Hartford Catholic Worker, and its founders, Chris and Jackie Doucot. At times I found Day equal parts compelling and frustrating; similarly, I found Chris Doucot to be equally powerful and problematic in his discussion of pacifism. But I also found his personal witness challenging; to this day I remember and reflect on his story of getting pistol whipped as he used his own body to protect a low level drug runner from an angry dealer.

I never became a fully convinced pacifist, but I became increasingly skeptical of the rhetoric of violence and the often naked imperialism that dominated US dealings with other countries. I was horrified by the naked and bloodthirsty rhetoric that arose in the aftermath of 9/11 and was used to first justify the invasion of Afghanistan and then the invasion of Iraq. My children were very young in 2001 (4, 6, 8), and I set myself during that decade to help them see that violence was not the solution to the problems of the Middle East. I dragged them to a fair number of anti-war protests, which I found useful as counter-protestors were less likely to get too hostile in the presence of children. (I remember one guy in a pick up truck who slowed down, honked his horn to get my attention, and then gave me the finger.) In 2004 I took my sons to participate in the Stonewalk, a march organized by 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. (I note in passing that shortly after this I met a woman who lost her husband in 9/11, who became an anti-death penalty activist and was speaking out against the death penalty for the 9/11 conspirators.) My middle son Antonio really impressed me that weekend. We walked 8 miles with the march, and he asked to return the next day, where we walked 14 miles in the pouring rain. He gave a very composed interview to a newspaper reporter who asked him why he was doing it, stressing his need to make a statement that he felt was “right.” And a few years later, when Antonio and his younger brother Francisco were confirmed, they each chose patron saints that showed that they had taken at least some of my lessons to heart: St. Maximilian Kolbe and Blessed Franz Jaegerstaetter.

I think my views on this complex issue are best summarized by a quixotic quest I worked on a for a few years. Originally, Secular Franciscans appear to have been pacifists. The earliest surviving rule of 1221 for the Brothers and Sisters of Penance states that

They are not to take up lethal weapons, or bear them about, against anybody.

The universal rule of the late 13th century (the rule of 1221 seems to have been a local document) weakened this slightly and the rule of Leo XIII weakened it considerably. There is nothing directly about pacifism in the rule of 1978, but our General Constitutions say that Secular Franciscans,

While acknowledging both the personal and national right to legitimate defense, they should respect the choice of those who, because of conscientious objection, refuse to bear arms. (Article 23.2)

It seemed to me then, and I still feel, that this sentence places the emphasis wrongly for followers of St. Francis who are called to be peacemakers; indeed, the Constitutions earlier note that

The renunciation of the use of violence, characteristic of the followers of Francis, does not mean the renunciation of action. (Article 22.3)

The Constitutions make military service the norm and conscientious objection the legitimate exception. I felt that this should be reversed: Franciscans should ordinarily hold fast to non-violence (and must be very active about being peacemakers), but should recognize that individuals and groups may feel that it is justified in some (limited) circumstances. So for a few years I tried to get the Constitutions amended. I brought it up with the International Council and the Minister General; they informed me that they had made a collection decision to not start amending the Constitutions so soon after they were adopted (they were promulgated in 2000). The Minister General suggested I take it up with the National Fraternity and see if they were willing to discuss amending our National Statutes. I made a pest of myself and it eventually got placed on the agenda for a meeting of the national council; however, I was not notified and was not given the opportunity to make my case, and it was quickly voted down. (I think, but am not certain, that they thought I was advocating that Secular Franciscans must be pacifists.)

To be continued….