Catholic
January 6, 2019

January 6, 2019 By

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and rejects the beauty of the Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality, many wonder if religion is simply an outdated medieval superstition—antiquated, odd, unnecessary to the modern world.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.

November 8, 2018

November 8, 2018 By
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.
November 8, 2018

November 8, 2018 By

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…)

August 23, 2018

August 23, 2018 By

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.]

August 18, 2018

August 18, 2018 By

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.

July 27, 2018

July 27, 2018 By

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….

June 27, 2018

June 27, 2018 By

Vox Nova is pleased to present a guest post by Fr. Michael Najim, Pastor of St. Pius X parish in Westerly, Rhode Island.  This is the text of the homily he gave at mass on  Sunday, June 24, the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist. 

The role of the Biblical prophets was not simply to predict what God would do in the future; the role of the Biblical prophets was also to disturb people by calling out sin and injustice. The prophets were to rouse the consciences and awaken the hearts of their hearers so that they would align themselves with God’s purpose and vision for creation. This meant that the prophets challenged people to change their ways and to correct injustices that had been committed.

The role of the prophet is encapsulated in a particular way in this passage about true fasting from the Prophet Isaiah: “Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke? Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house; clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own flesh?” (Isaiah 58:6-7).

We celebrate the birth of St. John the Baptist, the great prophet who is the bridge between the Old and New Testament. John burst onto the scene proclaiming a message of repentance. His message was clear: repent and prepare the way of the Lord. John, too, tried to rouse the consciences and awaken the hearts of his hearers, calling them to repentance, and preparing them for the Kingdom of God inaugurated in and through Jesus Christ.

We are all called to be prophets because we have been baptized into Christ who is Priest, Prophet, and King. We are called to point people to follow the way of the Lord, challenging them to change their ways and to correct injustice. This is what I feel called to do today; it’s what I’ve felt called to do all week. While I don’t consider myself a great prophet, I do know that by my baptism I have been called to exercise my prophetic role in Christ.

Some of you may be disturbed by what I say. Some of you may be angry and disagree. But it must be proclaimed. It is concerning what has been happening on our southern border. Our Church teaches that as a country we have an obligation to defend and protect our borders. I am not an advocate for lawlessness or open borders. However, I am an advocate for asylum seekers, refugees, the poor, and for those fleeing violence and oppression. As Catholics, we all should be, because it is what Christ calls us to be.

I understand that immigration is a complex issue, and politicians need to work together for common sense reform. My point is not to get into immigration law or policy or even to point blame at who is at fault. My point is simple: to rouse our consciences and to awaken our hearts to the plight and dignity of asylum seekers, immigrants, and refugees; to help us have deeper compassion and empathy for their suffering.

Our bishops, along with our Holy Father, have spoken in a unified voice: the separation of children from their parents on the border must cease. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.” We must oppose unjust laws and policies. Thankfully, President Trump signed an executive order to stop this unjust practice, and I pray that it is put into effect.

What should equally disturb us, besides the separation of children from their parents, is the response of many Christians. “They should be separated,” many say. “These people are criminals.” Here’s an actual tweet that I read this past week: “Put the onus of responsibility where it belongs–on the illegal parents putting their kids in this predicament! Tell them turn around and come in legally. What kind of parent willingly does this?”

Do you want to know what kind of parent does this? The kind of parent who is surrounded by violence and abject poverty and sees no other way out. The kind of parent who lives in fear every day that their daughter will be taken as a sex slave or their son into gangs that run their neighborhoods or towns; the kind of parent who has already had family members killed by gangs or cartels. The kind of parent who wants desperately to get their children to safety. These people are not traveling hundreds (and some cases thousands) of miles to burn calories!

It’s easy for us to sit back and criticize these people. We have so many comforts here. We walk our streets freely without fear. We sit in our air-conditioned churches and then go back to our air-conditioned homes. Most of us cannot comprehend the suffering of those who are risking so much to gain safety and a better life for their families.

I’m inviting us to examine our consciences today. Are we thinking with Christ and the Church on this issue, or are we worshipping at the altar of our political ideology? My friends, we must work to correct injustice. We must do better to try to enter into the plight of these asylum seekers, immigrants, and refugees. My friend is fond of a saying, “Once you learn someone’s story, it’s hard not to love them.” Instead of condemning these parents, instead of labeling them all as criminals, we must learn their stories, enter into their plight, and align ourselves with the mind of Christ who said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

March 14, 2018

March 14, 2018 By

Vox Nova is pleased to present the following guest post by Lillian Vogl.

What does it mean to be “centrist”? It alludes to being in the center of a political map, but to understand what that means we need to agree on the map.

The most traditional political distinction is between “right” and “left,” a one-dimensional spectrum that could place anyone who doesn’t fit comfortably near one of the poles as being “centrist.” The problem with this conception is that the left and right poles are extremely reductionary, and the axis seems to shift quite a bit. Originally “right” referred to representing the interests of the upper classes and “left” referred to representing the interests of the lower classes. Now “right” has taken on a religious-populist flavor, while elected officials of the “left” tend to be secular technocrats, both of which claim to look out for “the little guy” but are actually controlled by big corporate donors. There is no cohesive “center” in this map; only a collection of malcontents with widely varying disagreements with the two dominant parties, some principled, some self-interested, some based on taste or learned bias. In this conception, the canard that “the only thing in the center of the road is roadkill” makes some sense. Unfortunately, it is the interests of the less-privileged in society who find no champion in the present configuration and who end up flattened and destroyed.

A more nuanced two-dimensional political map emerged a few decades ago that runs authoritarian to libertarian along one axis, and economic right (capitalist) to economic left (socialist) along the other. Here “centrism” begins to emerge as a more attractive space in which dialog and compromise can emerge. However, there are still considerable weaknesses to this model, which may explain why elected officials have continued to trend to polar extremes instead of converging in the middle.

A key criticism of the two-dimensional model is that it equates religious values with authoritarianism, and licentiousness with voluntarism. Thus a Catholic anarchist like Dorothy Day still finds no comfortable spot on this diagram (and may be wrongfully placed in the center because religious values are “scored” as cancelling out commitment to non-violence), while anti-abortion democratic socialists can get lumped in the same quadrant with neo-Nazis. Because people who appear to be similar on the political map may yet have some radically different values and aims, they do not easily ally with each other, so political influence continues to gravitate toward the poles.

I propose we need a new, 3-dimensional model to represent different views about how society should be organized for the “common good.” The map thus becomes a sphere (or perhaps a cube for easier visualization).

The first question that must be answered—forming a vertical axis—is what is meant by “good”? Is “good” a purely spiritual concept, such that the person is largely indifferent to secular political circumstances? Is “good” a purely material concept, pursuing Pareto optimality and relegating spiritual concerns to private preference? Or is “good” a balance of the two, in which justice demands concern for the material well-being of humanity and/or the environment as part of fidelity to a Creator or other higher power? Along this axis, a centrist position clearly holds the ethical advantage over indifference to material needs or materialism.

The next question—one that is implicit in the classic right-left spectrum but not well-articulated—is the nature of responsible citizenship. Is the “good” achieved primarily by each individual taking responsibility for their own actions toward the good end, or is it achieved by each committing their efforts toward a collective good? Should personal achievement be highly rewarded by society, or should surrender of one’s privilege and preferences to the collective good be given the highest honor? Along this axis, the dangers of collectivism are well-known, but the individualism of American culture is more recently coming into negative light. Extreme individualism, and the competitiveness it requires, leads to society-disrupting economic inequalities, family breakdown and anemic community connections, destruction of the weak and vulnerable, and poor mental health that sometimes explodes into violence against oneself or others. Here too a balance of personal and collective responsibility seems to best promote human flourishing.

The third axis represents how society is to be animated to pursue the good. On one end of the axis is authoritarianism, in which elite decision-makers use threats to gain compliance from the members of the polis. In extreme authoritarianism, the threat is one of violence and/or incarceration against all non-conformists. In softer versions of authoritarianism, a regulatory state micromanages many activities and fines transgressors, or tax policy is used to mold behaviors with punitive rates on certain undesirable activities and large tax breaks for certain preferred activities. The opposite of authoritarianism is voluntarism, in which there are no carrots or sticks to wield, but proponents hope to motivate desired behavior purely by persuasion—appeals to conscience or science—and deter undesirable behavior purely by allowing natural consequences to occur. Unfortunately, voluntarism tends to allow those with more resources and less conscience to ignore and even dominate the poor and vulnerable.

In the center between authoritarianism and voluntarism lies the democratic rule of law, in which the members of the community—not a self-appointed (or ostensibly God-appointed) elite—decide what should be required of members of society and what should be left to free choices. Also implicit in this approach is a requirement of due process under the law, in which the application of carrots and sticks is limited by some kind of societal necessity for them, as well as some kind of fair trial before applying punitive measures.No automatic alt text available.

The more the center of gravity of the political sphere tends toward the center, the more stable it is. If there is general agreement about the validity of both material and spiritual values, responsibility for both individual behavior and the collective distribution of goods, and democratic rule of law to organize, questions of policy and societal change can be incremental and less threatening to people. Society can more smoothly “roll with it” when circumstances change due to developments in technology or knowledge, or even stressors caused by hostile forces or natural disasters. Debates over policy change can center more around evidence and logic when values aren’t too far apart.

When members of the body politic start clumping around extreme positions, it destabilizes the political sphere. Instead of rational debate over incremental changes, political discourse devolves into rhetorical total warfare against diametrically opposed ideas, with one side seeking to completely dominate or obliterate the other. Change moves in a chaotic and zig-zagging manner, with a dislocated center constantly being shifted toward one extreme or the other in the attempt to correct course from the last over-reaching move. Democratic consensus cannot be achieved or sustained when the center is underpopulated, which strengthens authoritarian impulses in hopes of achieving some stability that way.

My goal as a political leader is to encourage migration toward the Golden Mean of the political sphere. I strongly believe this is the only way that we can have stability in society (which “conservatives” should laud) or move along any path of improvement (which “progressives” should seek). In short, it is the only place where we can diminish conflict and work together for the common good.

Lillian Vogl is Chair of the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party. She also blogs about spiritual topics at Beyond All Telling.
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