Commonweal Magazine

Distorting the Gospel

Teresa Delgado — Sat, 04 May 2024 16:00:48 +0000

Distorting the Gospel

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When I began studying theology and religion as an undergraduate student, I had no idea there were Catholics who supported the ordination of women. I had attended Catholic school through twelfth grade and, as far as I knew, the prospect of women in the priesthood was the stuff of fantasy. A new world of possibility was opened to me upon reading the works of thinkers like Ann Patrick, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, whose advocacy on behalf of women forced me to reconsider an experience I have come to understand as a “call” when I was a little girl. A precocious child, I began reciting parts of the missalette and forcing my sisters to “play church” with me as the priest. Ritz crackers and apple juice stood in for the bread and wine. We did this often until my father told me I shouldn’t pretend to be a priest because I would never have that chance in real life. Devastated, I ran away (for a few hours) until my mother retrieved me from the steps of the corner bodega.

Years later, in a doctoral program in theology, I studied alongside colleagues who would go on to be ordained in their respective denominations. To actualize my priestly vocational call, they encouraged me to consider the Episcopal and Lutheran churches. But I couldn’t do that because, for me, the question had grown much larger than my fulfillment of a personal vocational call. If I left, I would be forfeiting my ability to challenge the Catholic Church, not just on its stance regarding ordination but also on the many ways it perpetuates white supremacy. Was I willing to do that? I decided to stay, always on the margins, to push the Church to see the connection between its stance on women’s ordination and its dependence on a colonial mentality.

Last year, the Vatican issued a statement repudiating the doctrine of discovery, which has been used for the past five hundred years as a religious and legal rationale to seize lands, objectify entire peoples, and impose white-supremacist authority. I have come to see that the structure of the Catholic Church—with its exclusively male leadership—is connected to its relationship with peoples and lands as a colonizing entity that must be decolonized. For this reason, I’m less interested now than I was in graduate school in the question of women’s ordination on its own. Now, I want to explore the connection between sexual and institutional violence against women and colonial violence against lands and peoples. I believe both derive from an unequal power structure of subject over object, upheld by a hierarchy that maintains the status quo.

What are the alternatives to maintaining the status quo of colonization in our Church? The crumbling of the institutional Church—due in part to the sex-abuse crisis and diminishing clerical credibility—is a sign that the powerful hold of a colonizing mindset is wearing thin and being recognized for the distortion of the Gospel that it is. While promoting women in ordination is important—I would never dismiss its importance—the process of decolonizing our Church requires more than allowing women to lead from the altar. The corrective to colonization of women’s bodies in the Church requires us to learn from women’s ways of “being Church,” particularly those found in Latinx culture and theology. This decolonization has at least five components.

First, it must be centered on accompaniment and solidarity rather than preserving hierarchy or the status quo. Latinas know what it means to walk with one another through misery, hardship, and strife, and of the power of acompañamiento y solidaridad in every facet of our lives. Latinas encircle those who are in need regardless of social status or religious affiliation; I have witnessed this in my own family and in my broader community, as an embodied commitment to never allowing another to walk alone.

Second, our focus must be less on doctrine and more on popular religiosity. Women have told us that the Church’s doctrine is less authoritative than the practices of faith that are life giving and life affirming. From Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Yolanda Tarango’s seminal text, Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, to María Del Socorro Castañeda-Liles’s Our Lady of Everyday Life,women’s spirituality resides in prayer, acts of charity, and movements for justice, often in spite of the hierarchical systems within the Church.

Third, we must invest in our communities and not in the institution. If we center our understanding of community as the “body of Christ,” the communal body that nourishes us and calls us to new life in Christ, then this is not bound by an institution or an official Church, but by the people who love us, surround us with care and support, and protect us from harm.

Fourth, we must continue to challenge the institution to be better. While we should be embracing new forms of “being Church,” we can’t let the current institution off the hook. On the contrary: as women, we must lift a mirror up to the Church to show how it has fallen short of its own Gospel message of love and justice.

Fifth, we must remember the injunction to “be not afraid.” Some scholars suggest that a form of “fear not” or “be not afraid” appears over three hundred times in Scripture. Colonization instills fear, which keeps us from changing. The oppression and violence experienced by women also instills fear—and fear of excommunication, isolation, and alienation leads to paralysis. What if women had spaces and places of protection and community, of comfort and autonomy, where they could find refuge and be free from fear? Isn’t this what “Church”—the body of Christ—is supposed to be? “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and you shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).

This kind of sweeping decolonization involves the discomfort of living in an uncertain space, an unfinished space. We have to reconsider what it means to be a woman—in relationship to each other, to men, and to the Church. We have been given a framework that upholds the status quo, and it can be disorienting to question it. But this discomfort can be a catalyst for creativity, rather than something that dooms us to complacency. In fact, what emerges out of a place of dis-ease is the prophetic voice, which can motivate a people to change that which is seemingly unchangeable. This is our decolonizing challenge as Catholic women.

This article is adapted from a presentation at the Georgetown University conference in April 2023. It is part of a symposium on women and the priesthood. Read the other articles here:
“Women at the Altar” – Jane Varner Malhotra
“Moving the Center” – Mary E. Hunt
“Why Not Women?” – Alice McDermott

Teresa Delgado May 4, 2024

The Other Side of Silence

Jared Marcel Pollen — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:05:10 +0000

The Other Side of Silence

In the first half of the twentieth century, literature, like philosophy, experienced a breakdown in its trust of language. This signaled, among other things, a breakdown in the relationship between the word and the world—in the power of language to speak to the essences of things, to name and reveal. In “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967), Susan Sontag points out that, in this respect, modern art had “inherited the problem of language from religious discourse.” Thenceforth, it was artists who took up what had once been the bailiwick of mystics—the pursuit of an uncorrupted utterance. As examples, one could cite Cage, Beckett, and Wittgenstein (who said that philosophy should be practiced as an art). It was a task that would push language to the brink, and tempt many to abandon it altogether.

One cannot look at this phenomenon without considering Clarice Lispector, who is perhaps its supreme exemplar. All of Lispector’s work is preoccupied with the problem of language. Indeed, in reading her, one sometimes gets the sense that she is less a novelist than a mystic for whom the novel is a metaphysical arena for staged confrontations with language. Not for nothing does Benjamin Moser, Lispector’s biographer in English, say that she “has been compared less often to other writers than to mystics and saints.” In all of her novels we see a restless effort to break out of language and into true perception, to generate a kind of writing that can crack the glass that stands between us and reality.

This is present from her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943), but one sees it most starkly in her later, experimental works, Água Viva (1973) and A Breath of Life (1978). The book that bridges these periods is The Apple in the Dark, now available in an English translation by Moser. An inversion of the Genesis creation narrative, the novel is a heretical allegory, one that seemingly undermines the whole architecture of Judeo-Christian morality.

“It was a fascinating book to write,” she wrote to a friend after completing the manuscript, but she acknowledged that it was “also a great suffering.” Lispector wrote the novel while living in Washington D.C., where her husband, a diplomat, was stationed for more than a decade. Completed in 1956, The Apple in the Dark fell into limbo for several years and was eventually published in 1961, following a twelve-year silence and two critically unsuccessful novels, The Chandelier (1946) and The Besieged City (1949). Surprisingly, it was a commercial and critical success, after which Clarice (in time, she would be referred to simply by her first name) became a literary phenomenon in Brazil, or in the words of one journalist, “a sacred monster.”

The novel opens with a symbol of mid-century Americana: the automobile. Outside a hotel room, a black Ford idles in the night, as Martim, the protagonist, is born into a void. In the darkness, he is a nonentity—“no more than a thought”—rising into consciousness. At the center of “a great empty and inexpressive space” he hears the sound of his own name, a moment of birthing self-awareness: “So, then, me.” Grunting, wordless, scarcely anything but “indistinctly himself,” Martim metamorphoses into tree, rat, horse, then man, until he realizes: “It must be Sunday.” It is the Lord’s Day, man’s first day, the day of resurrection.

A crime has taken place, but what exactly we don’t know until the end. The crime is already so far in the past that it has started to take on the nature of an abstraction (“his crime now seemed more like a sin of the spirit, merely”). As in Kafka, it appears to be the sin of existence, the crime of having been born. It is “that thing without a name that had happened to him.” It is a primal crime, after which all other crime is redundant. Martim is “proud” of himself as he observes “the demolished world…[t]he world undone by a crime.” One that he can then rebuild “on his own terms.”

Martim is more akin to Milton’s Lucifer than to Adam. He is a co-creator in the abyss, whose revolt occasions self-discovery; it is a transgression that is its own kind of transcendence. But Martim’s self-knowledge is actually a rejection of knowledge—that is, the knowledge of good and evil. As in the Eden story, crime is the inaugurating event, but the novel’s amoral landscape rejects the notion that error is synonymous with evil (“Evil? Why use that dreadful word?” Martim thinks). Unashamed, he reflects that it had actually been “a blessing to have erred.” Only then is he able to create himself “in his own image.” Here, crime is a kind of purification rite. And in refusing judgment for his act, Martim stands beyond good and evil—a savage self-authorizer, a Nietzschean transvaluator.

Martim claims to be an engineer, a man of reason, a world builder (later, we learn he is actually a statistician). In any case, this identity is shed as he grows and embraces a new, feral physicality. When he is reborn, he is on par with the rest of creation, existing at the same frequency as the trees (“The silence of the plants was at his own pitch”). He eschews the dominion given to Adam over the plants and the animals and continuously refuses the temptation to “fall into profundity.” It is an “unintelligible but harmonious” state that he wishes to preserve against the creep of reason. He sits on a rock and watches as the world is born, basking in his own meaninglessness, in the “vast emptiness of himself.”

The first fifty pages of the novel are conducted in this “state.” There is little dialogue or action as the narrative (much like the contours of Martim’s embryonic consciousness) becomes vertebrate. Fleeing into the desert, he comes to a ranch where he is employed by two women, Vitória and Ermelinda, to till the land. There is also a third, nameless woman known only as the “mulatta,” whom Martim takes “like a bull” in order to regain knowledge of the opposite sex. The only other character who shows up at the plantation is “the teacher,” a sanctimonious clerc who holds the women of the house under his influence and whose effusive sermonizing epitomizes the abuse of words—everything Martim, in his contented silence, despises.

As Martim undertakes the task of Adam, he discovers that reality already bears the gendered imprints of language (“the world was masculine and feminine”). He is frustrated by “having to transform the growth of the wheat into numerals.” As we know from cuneiform tablets, this was the first use of writing—not storytelling or the transmission of knowledge or learning, but simple record keeping. But even this seems impossible to Martim. He finds he is unable “to organize his soul into language.” For language, like us, is fallen. The simplest act of language is the naming of things, and we see that from the very first word that the names we give things are inadequate to the things themselves. Martim even fears that assigning names to objects will contaminate the world.

In an allegorical realm in which everything is both itself and something else, all things seem to take on a resonant symbolism. Martim longs for a purely symbolic reality, where the symbol is the thing itself: “I wanted the symbol because the symbol is the true reality and our life is what’s symbolic to the symbol.” The search for a truly symbolic language is the search for the essence of essences, what the seventeenth-century German mystic Jakob Böhme called “the Language of Nature” (Natursprache), in which “each thing speaks of its particular properties.” This, Böhme says, was the language Adam spoke in the garden, a “sensual speech” that we lost with the fall and can never recover: “Today, while the birds of the air and the beasts of the forests may still, each according to their own qualities, understand each other, not one of us understands the sensual speech any longer.” But here, the outcome of the fall is upended. Through his crime and his rebirth, Martim loses “the languages of others” and recovers his own “harmonious” impressions.

Like an ape writing cursive in the dirt, Martim finally scribbles under “thing number 1”: “That.” It is an immaculate referent, seemingly containing anything and everything (“The still-wet phrase had the grace of a truth”). He stops short of adding a second word, for there are already too many, and abandons the task altogether, for nothing, not even “That,” seems sayable: “Everything that had seemed to him ready to be said had evaporated, now that he wanted to say it.” The word is the source of creation, but it inherently corrupts and occludes that creation: “So disloyal was the power of the simplest word upon the most vast of thoughts.”

This could easily serve as a description of Lispector’s literary life. “What gets in the way of writing is having to use words,” she once wrote. But it would be wrong to understand this as mere frustration with the ineffable, the yearning to express what we feel we don’t have the power to express. The worry here is with the smear that words leave upon perception, and the desire is for a perception beyond words (“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees,” as Paul Valéry said). I think the language Lispector tried to find in her writing is something resembling Böhme’s sensual speech, a true consonance, in which an “I” doesn’t stand from without, but is rather part of a single, universal substance.

One can also understand it as a quest to find what Martim at one point calls “that thing without a name.” The task of the mystic, Sontag reminds us in “The Aesthetics of Silence,” “must end in a via negativa, a theology of God’s absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech.” The course of Lispector’s development from the early novels to the later, experimental works is exactly this movement toward what lies beyond speech. “If I could, I would leave my place on this page blank,” she once wrote, “replete with a resounding silence.”

Lispector described writing as “a curse, but a curse that saves.” The envy of silence is heavily present in her work. But unlike Rimbaud or the young Wittgenstein, she was not a renunciator, nor even, like Beckett, a great negator. Instead, what we see in her work is language that attempts to transcend itself through prolonged derangement and disarticulation. This was also the path of the surrealists, the “boundless and systematized disorganization of all the senses,” as Rimbaud phrased it.

The Apple in the Dark lavishly basks in its own unknowing, in its koanlike prose, in the knocking, jostling symbolism of its abstract passages that, despite their declarative character, never seem to reach anything concrete. Indeed, Lispector herself seemed not to fully understand the novel she was writing: “I want to say something and I still don’t know for sure what,” she confessed while working on it. The novel apparently went through elevendrafts, because, she said: “By copying I will understand myself.” As monastic scribes copied psalms until they had internalized them, so Martim seeks to “copy into reality the being that he was.”

The novel’s reversal of the biblical account of creation is clear enough: man creates himself and then creates God in his own image. But it is far more unorthodox than that. Not only does it offer a new definition of what it means to be “fallen,” it plainly rejects the Christian notion of the Word. That is, the Word as the source of creation, redemption, and salvation. In the novel’s closing pages, Martim rejoices in this rejection: “[He] was no longer asking the name of things. It was enough for him to recognize them in the dark…. Then, when he went back out into the brightness, he’d see…those things with their false names.” Lispector’s novel suggests that only once the Word has been rejected can the apple be grasped, without shame, in the darkness, where we know things as they truly are.

The Apple in the Dark has been described as an allegorical novel, but this is perhaps too simple. Like Kafka and Beckett, Lispector approaches the allegorical but deprives us of the easy interpretations that allegory usually lends itself to. If it is speaking of something else, we cannot be sure of what. Perhaps it is speaking of the absence of God itself, or perhaps of that which hides in plain sight, behind the veiling brightness that Martim regards as “nothing more than the other side of the silence.”

The Apple in the Dark
Clarice Lispector
Translated by Benjamin Moser
New Directions
$19.95 | 384 pp.

Jared Marcel Pollen April 24, 2024

Moving the Center

Mary E. Hunt — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:19:32 +0000

Moving the Center

Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide.

In 1975, when the Women’s Ordination Conference began, we knew what a woman was, why men got ordained, and who was involved in the conversation by who was registered for the conference. Fifty years later, these matters are infinitely more complicated. Gender fluidity expands the definition of women; clericalism shows the limits of ordination; and what was once a weekend meeting has become an important part of a global movement. However, there are still no validly and licitly ordained Roman Catholic women deacons or priests, even though many Catholic women are engaged in myriad ministries.

Since then, the Roman Catholic Church has rendered itself all but irrelevant. By permitting women to be ordained, it could have expanded its workforce, improved the quality of its ministry, and claimed some moral status in a hurting world. But the world has moved on. The loss is not so much for women as for the Church and, more importantly, for the people who need the resources a two-thousand-year-old institution can provide.

The Church has failed spectacularly for half a century to right the wrongs of patriarchy. Despite happy talk about a synodal Church, there is little evidence that expanding the gender of those in the diaconate or presbyterate is in the offing. There is even less reason to think that such moves would do anything more than co-opt what is already unfolding: women and nonbinary people do so much of the Church’s ministry today. Their ministry often happens extra-institutionally, and it results in many and varied creative kinds of work. In these roles, they redefine what counts as the margins or the center of Catholicism.

If Vatican officials had been smart in 1975, they would have jumped at the chance to control women in ministry by ordaining them. Instead, patriarchal power-holding overwhelmed strategic sense, and the institution doubled down on its rejection of women for ordained ministry. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’sdeclaration Inter insigniores, insultingly and brazenly dated “15 October 1976, the feast of Saint Theresa of Avila,” was their response to the 1975 conference and women’s requests for ordination. It was a resounding no.

Pope Francis still clings to that no with his insistence that revelation and the historical practice of excluding women somehow prevent the institution from ordaining women today. He tries to soften the blow by saying that women have a much more important role than mere priesthood. He is at a loss to explain what that is. With sacramental ministry, including the Eucharist and Reconciliation, officially out of the toolkits of women in ministry, one wonders what he values. More to the point, since priesthood comes with jurisdiction—that is, decision-making power—women are not able to make most decisions in a parish or diocese.

Fortunately, none of this has stopped women from ministering. Many have simply decoupled their efforts from institutional constraints and gotten on with it. But it is unfair and wasteful that a Church that belongs to the whole Catholic community is held hostage by the few cardinals and bishops who make the decisions. The synodal process does not appear to have put a dent in that, as the papal fiat on same-sex blessings made abundantly clear.

The institution has sown confusion and scandal about what most people believe is really important in ordained ministry: intent and effectiveness, not gender. When people are excluded from the clerical caste, the many contributions of women and nonbinary people are lost to those who could benefit from them. Eliminating the clergy–lay split would be one solution, and my preferred option. But as long as the split endures, those who respect it deserve the right to have all qualified people as presiders, deciders, or confessors at their disposal.

Many people are perplexed about who is “really” Catholic. When they want to collaborate with Catholics on a common project, like an interfaith service, or a social issue like health care, who counts? They do not want to offend the institutional clerics, and yet they accept women and nonbinary people in ministry as their colleagues. They are unsure of how to proceed with, for example, joint ecumenical efforts involving Catholics other than clergy. Recall the hierarchy’s furor when President Obama invited Catholic nuns rather than Catholic bishops for the signing of a more expansive health-care plan than the bishops could stomach. The meaning and dimensions of “Catholic” are changing in many arenas.

One reason is because groups like Roman Catholic Womenpriests, the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, the Ecumenical Catholic Communion, people in the Women-Church movement, and many others in small base communities and organizations are doing effective ministerial work, most of it beyond the institutional Church. These people join hundreds of Catholic women ordained as ministers in the Lutheran, Episcopal, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, and other denominations. Despite the fact that the Roman Catholic Church excommunicates all women who are ordained as Catholic priests, these women are no less Catholic. For example, one could say that a Catholic woman ordained as a Lutheran is a Catholic Lutheran priest—expanding the boundaries that, when held, serve no one but those in power.

Many Catholic women work in schools, campus ministries, hospices and hospitals, prisons, and traditional parish settings. What distinguishes their ministries from ordained men’s is that many work as volunteers, and others are paid low wages for the same work for which men get salaries with cradle-to-grave benefits. One woman told me recently that when she was asked to serve several Catholic parishes in a rural part of Canada, she functioned as the pastor, including for most sacramental ministry. But when she finished her much appreciated service and returned to an urban center, she was right back to being someone’s assistant with a greatly reduced scope of responsibility and sacramental options. That benefits exactly no one.

Things are changing—not just for women, but largely thanks to them. Alyssa Duffner, a current master of divinity student at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, recalled meeting new students in her program:

One accepted student mentioned being LGBTQ+. Then, one by one, I and every other accepted student in the room said, “Me, too.” After a momentary pause, we all erupted in laughter, surprised and delighted to share this space together in the classroom of a Jesuit theology school. The laughter was followed by our sharing of how meaningful it was to be in a room full of other LGBTQ+ people pursuing theology and ministry despite the inevitable obstacles ahead of us working in the Catholic Church. Already, each of us paved our own separate ways through exclusionary sentiments and doctrine in the Church to get to that room.

They are hardly the first majority-queer class in a Catholic seminary. But they are pioneers in bringing their full, out, honest selves. I predict that their wholesome honesty will improve the quality of their ministry. How wonderful! They, like people before them, have no idea what their job possibilities are or how they will be received in Catholic ministry settings. But minister they will in a needy world, even if not under the auspices of a shrinking Church.

Their very existence is a sign that the “center” of Catholicism is not the institutional Church but the world’s people. People in need of medical care, food, housing, jobs, and support are at the center of Gospel-based faith. Luckily, thanks to the women who got the process started, the paradigm is shifting. Those on the margins now are Church officials who hoard the resources, both material and spiritual, that belong to and are needed by everyone. With a change of heart and practice, they, too, can be part of the whole; it helps no one for anyone to be marginalized. The challenge is to blur the lines of center and periphery, leaving no willing hands idle when it comes to creating justice.

This article is part of a symposium on Women and the Priesthood. Read the other articles here:
“Women at the Altar” – Jane Varner Malhotra
“Distorting the Gospel” – Teresa Delgado
“Why Not Women?” – Alice McDermott

Mary E. Hunt April 24, 2024

Why Not Women?

Alice McDermott — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:44:49 +0000

Why Not Women?

Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide.

Otto Preminger’s film The Cardinal was released in 1963, when I was ten years old, so I guess it was some years later that it appeared on TV. I recall watching it with my mother. I watched many movies with my mother.

Early on, there’s a scene where a young priest tells his pregnant sister’s doctors that they must let her die in order to save her unborn child. I turned to my mother in disbelief. Would that really happen?

“Oh yes,” my mother assured me, placidly enough. “That’s the rule in the Catholic Church. The baby’s life comes before the life of the mother.”

Until then, I’d always pestered my mother about having another baby. I was the youngest of three and the only girl. I wanted a sister. But after seeing The Cardinal, I prayed she would never again take that risk. I knew I needed her far more than I needed some imagined baby sister. Her life was the life I cherished above all others, the life most essential to my own. I suppose I was too young at the time to realize that the pregnant sister who must die could, someday, be me.

This, then, was my first encounter with the diminished value my Church assigns to the lives of women. Not the last, of course.

In those days, I could not be an altar server, as my brothers were, simply because I was female. Throughout my grammar-school years, I watched the middle-aged nuns who taught us—formidable, dignified women—bow and scrape and even giggle whenever the parish priests, some of them mere twenty-somethings, deigned to visit our classrooms.

In my all-girls Catholic high school, we were challenged by our female teachers to read widely, to know world history and Church history, to understand economics—and not just home economics. We were encouraged to debate cogently, whether our subject was politics or poetry or Plato’s cave. We were assured that the big news of the era was true: women could do, could become, anything they set their minds to. And yet we were able to celebrate Mass or line up for Reconciliation only when a local priest agreed to fit us girls into his busy schedule.

Years later, my own daughter asked Sr. Nina, her fifth-grade teacher, why there were seven sacraments for Catholic men, but only six for Catholic women. Sister’s reply? “Good question.”

Our all-male clergy is no big deal, I’ve been told over the years by Catholic men and many Catholic women. Just a small matter of custom or ritual, a harmless tradition. Jesus was a man, the old argument goes; how confusing it would be to the faithful if Christ were represented on the altar by a non-man, a woman. Of course, we don’t worry about that confusion when we make references to Mother Church with all her feminine pronouns.

“Oh, come on,” a smiling cardinal replied with a wink when I pressed him on the issue of women’s ordination. “It’s you women who really run the Church.” In a similar discussion, a laughing monsignor assured me that his priests were “terrified” of the Mothers’ Club at his school. “Talk about power,” he’d said. All in good humor.

But how to separate this “small matter” of an all-male clergy from the insidious effects of ritual misogyny? In his book Turning Point, Robert McClory tells the “inside story” of the Papal Birth Control Commission of the early sixties. The commission, which included married Catholics, found an overwhelming desire among faithful Catholic couples to be able to use birth control—for the good of their marriages but also for the health of the women in the marriage, too many of whom knew the toll of multiple pregnancies, miscarriages, or husbands who must be denied. These were faithful Catholic couples who requested access to birth control in order to protect the very life and physical well-being of Catholic women. We all know how that turned out.

In the early part of this century, I had dinner in Boston with a group of Catholic-school teachers, all women, some of them nuns or former nuns. The abuse scandal had just broken and their collective cry was one of opportunity missed. They could have protected these children from priestly predators, they said, if only the male hierarchy had told them which priests to look out for. If the male hierarchy had shared what they knew about those “troubled men,” the women were certain they could have run interference whenever a suspected priest called a child out of their classrooms.

These women didn’t want to change the power structure in the Church. They weren’t particularly interested in ordaining women. They didn’t even want to see the scandal exposed. They simply wished the cardinal and the other male pastors had trusted them, confided in them, enlisted their help for the good of the children. They wished they had been treated as equals, worthy of full participation in the life of the Church, even in its cover-ups and its failings.

Over the course of my adulthood, I have watched our Church abandon any sincere attempt to confront the complex moral issues that pertain to reproduction in exchange for a simplistic legal solution: overturn Roe. I’ve seen the leadership of the Catholic Church reject the challenge to convince, to counsel, to comfort, or to discern, in favor of promoting secular laws that will only coerce.

All the while, as one war followed another, Catholic men were told by their priests that joining the military and taking up arms is a matter of conscience. Each should follow his own understanding of just war, what counts as morally acceptable self-defense or justifiable homicide for some greater good. They were told military service is a personal, prayerful choice.

I recall another conversation with a charming bishop, who listened sympathetically when I described a young friend’s tragic experience of the in-utero death of her infant. “We who are pro-life need to keep such circumstances in mind,” he said kindly. But then he added, “What I object to are these women who have abortions simply because they want to go on holiday.” I told him I called this the Jezebel defense of abortion bans. He said he didn’t consider these women Jezebels; he thought them hardly human.

I attended Mass the Sunday after the Dobbs decision. I love the Mass. I love the Eucharist. For all the anguish my Church has caused, in the world and in my own heart, I have never been denied the peace, understanding, and renewal of hope and love that the celebration of the Mass has always afforded me. But on that day, I saw my presence in my own church as a kind of collusion—collusion with misogyny, with hypocrisy, with the conviction that to be female is to be the other, to be lesser. Less complex, less moral, less valuable, less intelligent, less worthy, less human.

As Catholics, we are aware of—we celebrate—the outward signs of inner grace. Our rituals are built on the importance of those signs and symbols, and our Church, our spirit, thrives on them as a source of good. But if there are outward signs of inner grace, then surely there are outward signs of inner corruption, signs that betray our faults, our sinfulness, our blindness, our failings. The all-male priesthood of the Catholic Church, my Church, has become for me just such a sign. And so I persist, with varying degrees of hope. I ask and ask again: Why not women? I pray for change.

This article is adapted from a presentation at the Georgetown University conference in April 2023. It was published as part of a symposium on women and the priesthood. Read the other articles here:

“Women at the Altar” - Jane Varner Malhotra
“Moving the Center” - Mary E. Hunt
“Distorting the Gospel” - Teresa Delgado

Alice McDermott April 23, 2024

Consecrating Error?

Bernard G. Prusak — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 18:21:42 +0000

Consecrating Error?

Once upon a time, in a land known as Christendom, a man died rather than betray his conscience, which is to say, his “convictions about what it is right and wrong to do.” That man was Thomas More (1478–1535), who, if you are a certain kind of law professor writing in the year 2020, you can imagine “erupting with amazement and anger” over some of the more liberal pronouncements of the U.S. Supreme Court before it was rescued by the three appointees of a twice-impeached president.

Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century:

Four centuries earlier, an eminent Catholic jurist, Thomas More, had resigned from the office of lord chancellor and had refused to take a mandatory oath, suffering execution as a consequence, out of faithfulness to his church. Now the situation was flipped: [the Catholic Supreme Court Justice] William Brennan emphasized his fidelity to the judicial oath as a way of demonstrating his independence from his church, and thus his suitability for high office.

Decline has come upon the land. “Ideas and movements that were fresh in the sixteenth century…seem to be floundering or decrepit today.” One such idea is that of conscience. A book might be written “[r]eflecting on the changing meanings and importance attributed to conscience” at several “decisive turning points at which Western civilization changed from what it had been in premodern times to what it is today.” Indeed, a provocative, entertaining, even theatrical book of this kind has been written! But also a book too clever and coy, a book that exults in rhetorical questions and abounds with sentences like, “Let us return and take another look. Just in case.”

Steven D. Smith’s The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity has three protagonists: Thomas More, James Madison, and William Brennan. Now and again, Smith seems to lose the thread of his story, and the reader’s patience is sorely tried, but the book’s basic argument is clear and its exposition lively. Smith wants to unspool the logic of conscience as a concept—from its zenith in late medieval times to its nadir in our own time.

First, then, Sir Thomas More, one of two “illustrious Thomases” Smith admires (the other is, of course, Aquinas). For More, conscience was fundamentally religious: God wills that you do the right; to betray what you believe in conscience is to act against God. As Smith explains, More believed “you should form your beliefs about what is right not on the basis of your own private judgment but rather according to what Christians have always and everywhere believed”—that is, “the ‘consensus’ or ‘common faith’ of Christendom.” That consensus, however, was already passing during More’s lifetime. By his own lights, he did what he could to preserve it—by persecuting Protestants—but with his death “ended…an extraordinary age. Even a world. Or…we might say that thus began a new era, or a new world.”

Enter Madison, who also conceived of conscience as “in its essence a religious faculty,” but whose interest in it was more political than personal. Smith repeatedly refers to conscience’s “capacity to consecrate error.” The idea is that you would do wrong to act against your conscience because, in doing so, you would be choosing to do what you take to be wrong, and that can never be right—even if you’re wrong about what’s right and wrong. If it’s always wrong to act against your conscience, does it follow that it is always right to act in accord with it? Smith is too quick to answer in the affirmative. According to him, the correct reasoning is: “You believe God wants you to do this; God knows you believe this; and therefore God does want you to do this (even though…in a different sense God might not want people, presumably including you, to do it)”—because what you believe is wrong. But that’s misleading. In fact, you’re responsible not only to your conscience, but for it. If it’s poorly formed, though you would do wrong to act against it, it wouldn’t be right, in the sense of good, for you to act in accord with it. Presumably, what God would really want is for you to reconsider whether your conscience is working as it should.

Conscience, then, does not “consecrate” error: nothing is made holy or true just by being dictated by someone’s conscience. It is, therefore, incorrect to claim that, for More, “it was Christianity that consecrated conscience,” while, for Madison, conscience consecrated religious liberty in the New World. Smith attributes to Madison the argument that, since all the different sects and denominations understood themselves to be doing God’s will, God must have willed that they believe and act differently from one another—which is to say that he willed religious diversity and liberty. This argument is clever, but not supported either by the historical record or by the logic of conscience. A better argument for religious liberty is that knowledge of matters religious and moral is fallible, and so a person of conscience should tolerate some diversity in judgment by other persons of conscience. (John Rawls, a bogeyman in Smith’s text, called this the fact of reasonable pluralism.) The limits of religious liberty and freedom of conscience have to be worked out over time, in conjunction with the duties of citizenship and the rights of other citizens.

If it is incorrect that conscience “consecrates” error, it is also incorrect that “the religious conscience,” as Smith calls it, “implies that for the existentially crucial purposes of this life and the next, it doesn’t really matter much whether what you believe actually is true, so long as you believe it is true.” He presents that implication as the next step in the disintegration of conscience and the decline of modernity. “If what matters is sincerity, not truth,” Smith writes, “why risk compromising your sincerity by reflecting or investigating, and perhaps thereby digging up complications and stirring up doubts?” Here it is worth pausing to ask whether you do in fact hold a belief “sincerely” when you refuse to reflect on it, or to investigate its truth. But Smith will not be denied his conclusion: “This elevation of the self was also a sort of culmination of a development denied and yet hinted at in Thomas More’s ideas and somewhat more self-consciously adopted in Madison’s—namely, the detachment of conscience from a commitment to truth.”

And here at last, slouching toward Gomorrah, comes William Brennan. He is presented as “a willingly, willfully fragmented man,” whose jurisprudence, relegating “religion and other ‘comprehensive doctrines’ to the private domain,” brought “a similar fragmentation for his fellow citizens.” Yet, Smith asks, “How can citizens meaningfully debate…issues [with a strong dimension of morality or justice] when they are admonished not to invoke what they most fundamentally believe?” The upshot is that the public square is vacated of substance. What fills this void is “the sanctity of the self,” whose “deeply felt convictions or commitments regarding how he or she should live” should never be questioned or subject to critical scrutiny, but instead accommodated as much as possible. To make his point, Smith discusses two Vietnam-era cases of conscientious objection, United States v. Seeger (1965) and Welsh v. United States (1970). In these cases, he writes, the Supreme Court “suggested that respect for conscience is based on respect for the individual subject. The sincere objector should not be forced to violate, or to be unfaithful to…himself.” God falls away, but somehow the warrant to respect conscience remains, even without “the historical commitment to formulated theological truth.”

Smith hints that this situation is unstable and perhaps untenable. “[W]hat would be the sense or authority of conscience,” he asks, “if it is detached from God?” Further, “[W]hy is conscience so weighty or so authoritative? And, more troublingly, why should government respect and attempt to accommodate the consciences of people whom government…believes to be mistaken or misguided in their judgments?” Smith ignores the work of others who have written about these questions, such as Cécile Laborde (see my “Protecting Religious Liberty,” May 2018). It is also curious that he doesn’t discuss two later Vietnam-era conscientious-objection cases, Negre v. Larsen and Gillette v. United States (1971), which already show the pendulum swinging. Guy Gillette appealed to humanistic principles for his refusal to serve in Vietnam, whereas Louis Negre, a Roman Catholic, sought discharge after consulting with a Jesuit at the University of San Francisco. That Jesuit, Fr. James Straukamp, advised Negre that “under the beliefs and teaching of the Catholic Church he [was] obliged to examine and form his own conscience in respect to participating or refusing to participate in the war at this time.” But this time the Court interpreted the Universal Military Training and Service Act more strictly than it had in Seeger and Welsh. Thirty years later, Negre’s lawyer, the distinguished Catholic scholar and jurist John Noonan, summarized the majority opinion thus: “What was truly sacred was not the claim of conscience but the security of the nation.” (See “A Right Not to Fight,” December 2017.)

After all this book’s drama (“Who knows what the situation will be by the time the book is finished and you read these words, if indeed that ever happens?”), a reflective reader might well wonder whether Smith has his villains right. His book takes several swipes at President Biden as another fragmented man in the broken mold of William Brennan. Fragmentation, however, might seem like the least of our worries. It is striking that the man with seemingly no conscience, former president Donald Trump, is not mentioned in Smith’s book. In the prologue, Smith tells us that he finished writing this book in mid-2020, before the presidential election. He couldn’t have foreseen the insurrection at the Capitol, or the resurrection of Trump from the ashes for this year’s election. It’s true that our republic is at a moment of peril, but it’s not at all clear that Smith’s story of decline captures the dynamics that have brought us to this point.

The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity
Catholic Ideas for a Secular World
Steven D. Smith
University of Notre Dame Press
$55 | 286 pp.

Bernard G. Prusak April 22, 2024

Women and the Priesthood

The Editors — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:29:06 +0000

Women and the Priesthood

From the very beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis has encouraged Catholics to recognize women’s contributions to the life of the Church. In last year’s meeting of the synod, he called it an “urgent” matter to give women more responsibility in the ministry and leadership of the Church at all levels.

In response to these calls, Georgetown University’s Berkley Center hosted an event titled “Faith, Feminism, and Being Unfinished: The Question of Women’s Ordination” in April 2023. Panelists discussed the work of Anne E. Patrick, SNJM, a moral theologian and an organizer of the first Women’s Ordination Conference, held in 1975. While the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate is under consideration at the synod, the Church has definitively rejected their ordination to the priesthood.

We asked four participants in the Georgetown panel to continue the conversation. In what ways are women excluded from and undervalued in the life of the Church? What does the Church lose by marginalizing women? How are women still managing to lead from the margins? Some of the contributors discuss their own frustrated calling to the priesthood. But there are other, subtler ways that, in their roles as ministers, mothers, daughters, scholars, and neighbors, women are made to feel less valuable than men. When women are excluded, it’s the whole Body of Christ that suffers—all of us who could be benefiting from their ministry and their gifts.

Read the symposium articles here:

“Women at the Altar” - Jane Varner Malhotra
“Moving the Center” - Mary E. Hunt
“Distorting the Gospel” - Teresa Delgado
“Why Not Women?" - Alice McDermott

And if you're interested in discussing this series of articles with your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community, click here for a free discussion guide.

The Editors April 22, 2024

Women at the Altar

Jane Varner Malhotra — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 14:23:53 +0000

Women at the Altar

Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide.

On Thanksgiving in 1975, my aunt Anne stopped by our home in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, on her way to a conference in Detroit. I was intrigued about the event she helped organize, which focused on women and Catholic priesthood. As a seven-year-old girl preparing for First Communion, I had wanted to become an altar server and ring those little bells someday, but the role was limited to boys. In International Women’s Year, there was reason to be hopeful.

That first Women’s Ordination Conference in Detroit was attended by two thousand people and helped shape the conversation on inclusive priesthood for decades to come. Altar serving opened to girls about ten years later. Changes were afoot, but embarrassingly slow in my view, so as a young adult I drifted from Church involvement.

But my aunt, Anne E. Patrick, SNJM, theologian, author, and religion and women’s studies professor at Carleton College, kept up a gentle nudging. She recognized my desire to nurture a close relationship with the divine and to share God’s love with others. She supported and counseled me as I raised my children in the Church. She encouraged me to accept a job at Georgetown University, and later wrote my recommendation for grad school.

By her lived example of sticking by the Church—in the Church—while trying to reform it, she showed our family a way to respond creatively to injustice. Her life is what I have come to understand as the kind of life Jesus himself led. He didn’t abandon the imperfectly practiced tradition of his family, but offered guidance on how to put love at the center of how we treat one another, even when it means breaking unjust rules.

I learned more about the 1975 conference only recently. Participants traveled from forty-five states and overseas to explore the possibilities for a renewed, inclusive priesthood. Renowned theologians including Margaret Farley, RSM, Anne Carr, BVM, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza presented at the conference. Attendees and public endorsements came from most major orders, many theologians, and other university faculty and Catholic leaders. In other words, this conversation was happening in the mainstream. But this open, visionary dialogue was silenced by the Vatican in the years to come, and today, most Catholics have never even heard of the assembly.

Why does this matter so much? For me, the exclusion of women from ordination is the most important issue facing the Church today because it results in so much pain. It’s an age-old system of supremacy that needs radical removal—taking it out by its roots, literally. Until women are at the table in large numbers, the Church can’t begin to fully hear the cries of the poor, the young, the disabled, the abused, and the marginalized whom the Church claims to prioritize. As creators who have the potential to give birth, women are agents of the sacred, with unique experiences and perspectives that must be shared in order to know a fuller picture of the divine. We, too, reveal God’s image.

At sacred assemblies at Georgetown, I’ve witnessed women chaplains of other faiths singing and praying and preaching, and every time I felt a pang of sadness that the Catholic Church is missing out on this. We are depriving ourselves of the divine as embodied by women. How much more fully would we express the sacraments if women were administering them, too?

In April 2023, hundreds gathered in person and online from around the world to tune in for “Faith, Feminism, and Being Unfinished,” which I co-organized. Angele White, a health minister and founder of the Black & Women’s History Ministry at St. Martin of Tours parish in Washington D.C., spoke of the history of discrimination against Catholics since the founding of this country. “Change takes time,” she noted. “And it takes determination, strategy, risks, patience, compassion, and passion.” If people didn’t stick with imperfect institutions, they would never be transformed. “There would probably be no women in positions of power to make meaningful changes, with the exception of ladylike, wifely, or motherly duties designated by men. And there would be no Black Catholics in the Church!”

Last October, I traveled to Rome to join the activities surrounding the Synod. These included a global lay-led synodal assembly with the group Spirit Unbounded, which is dedicated to human rights in the emerging Catholic Church. Speakers offered more than a hundred powerful testimonies from forty organizations working on Church reform. In her presentation, Ally Kateusz described a fourth-century ivory box which clearly depicts a man and woman concelebrating the Eucharist at the altar in Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This is one of the oldest images of early Christian liturgy. The significant location is identifiable by the unique spiral columns given by Constantine and represented today in Bernini’s altar, with the original buried below.

On my final day in Rome, I went inside St. Peter’s for the first time in twenty years. I was surprised how moved I felt, and my heart was drawn to the stunning baldacchino. No service was going on, so I walked up close and soaked it in, then took a selfie with it behind me, with a combination of smirk and prayer: “How long must women wait to be on this altar, O God?” I sighed and wandered away. A few minutes later, I looked back: lo and behold, a woman stood on that altar. An elderly sister in her habit, she held a spray bottle and rag and was wiping down the table. I shook my head and chuckled—God has a wicked sense of humor! And then I realized, God’s not joking.

Women have been at this altar all along, God was saying. You are my daughters, my queens, my caretakers, my coworkers, my companions. Soon women will be fully restored to our God-given leadership roles in places of worship, including this one, with all the challenges and blessings that will bring.

Not long after I returned home, the Vatican’s synthesis document was released. It described the working questions, reflections, and findings for this closing year of the Synod on Synodality. I noted the first two words in Italian and refer to it that way. Care sorelle (“Dear sisters”) offers some useful thoughts, but continues to fall short where women are concerned. Until we are welcomed by the Church fully into every role that God calls us to—including bishops, deacons, priests, and pope—this “hot-button issue” of inclusive ordination should not only be on the table but at the altar. It is indeed sacred to polish the chalice and ring the bells. But, assembly of women, shall we consider sharing all our gifts again in the co-responsibility of Christ?

This article is part of a symposium on women and the priesthood. Read the other articles here:

“Distorting the Gospel” – Teresa Delgado
“Moving the Center” – Mary E. Hunt
“Why Not Women?” – Alice McDermott

Jane Varner Malhotra April 22, 2024

Nursery Tales

Kate Lucky — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:24:01 +0000

Nursery Tales

he week before I gave birth to my son, I went to the library and checked out some novels. This was one of the last tasks on my list. I’d stored up diapers and blankets, hung paintings on the walls of his nursery. I’d packed my hospital bag with chapstick, toothpaste, and pajamas. And now, I had my books. I didn’t know who I would be in the days after he was born. But I assumed I’d still want to read.

Having a newborn meant noise, mess, and visitors. My love for my son was so intense it often expressed itself as panic. But those early weeks also created stillness, separate from the world of obligation. While other people were working, going out, or sleeping, I read with my baby.

I read East of Eden in the living room, the baby sprawled asleep on my lap. When I got an infection and nursing became painful—an understatement—I read The Ninth Hour and The Topeka School and Our Man in Havana, stories from Brooklyn and Kansas and Cuba to take my mind away from my body. When I couldn’t sleep, I read works by Julian Barnes, Christian Wiman, and Jamel Brinkley. I read standing up in the nursery, the baby strapped to my chest, swaying and pacing to keep him asleep, eating forkfuls of reheated dinner as my free hand turned the pages.

As the weeks passed, my son began to read, too. At least, that’s what it looked like. He stared intently at the pages of various Curious George adventures and Jamberry. He read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, a fugue state of pink-ink-drinking Ginks and Zans opening cans; Frederick, the radical tale of a mouse who writes poems instead of helping his family lay in food for the winter, a veritable artist’s manifesto; and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, an avant-garde dreamscape of colored letters climbing a coconut tree. Every night, we ended with Goodnight Moon. I watched my son flick his eyes from page to page, taking in color, shape, the pair of mittens and the bowlful of mush.

This was ridiculous. He couldn’t really be reading. I was doing that annoying thing parents do, trying to shape a child in my own image.

But I couldn’t bring myself to feel guilty. Teaching my son to love reading felt different than trying to train him up for the sake of my own ego. It was more akin to giving him a set of ethics, a particular vision of reality. Language was powerful, I wanted to insist, even from these very first days of Little Hoot and But Not the Hippopotamus. Language could change things; it was a gift. The world was full of stories and ideas that would shape his imagination, foster his empathy, provoke his delight, win his allegiance—stories and ideas he’d done nothing to earn, but inherited simply by virtue of being human. I watched his mouth make shapes, newly pairing consonants and vowels. He said “wah” and “gee” and “ho” as he studied the slashes and curves on the pages. He was learning to make meaning, learning that it cohered in tales and fables, parables and poems.

Plus: reading was fun! Books were cheap and portable. The same old volumes would always surprise you, revealing something new with each encounter. I felt that way returning to the stories of my childhood, suddenly getting the jokes in Winnie the Pooh and understanding the elegance of The Very Busy Spider.

The books of my adulthood were different, too, now that I was a mother. My son’s birth coincided (not entirely accidentally) with my rereading of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead quartet. In this multigenerational Midwest story, I found myself—not so much in the particulars, but in the “big questions” underneath them. The “big questions,” especially “What are we doing here?” and “What comes next?,” are impossible to ignore when you have a baby. Books were one of the ways I could engage with them, at least in the interval before the baby woke up and needed a diaper change.

Was every novel in the world about children? It suddenly felt that way as I read through my haul from the library, and then the next, as the weeks of my son’s life turned into months, as I started sleeping more and eating at the table and nursing, at last, stopped hurting. It was uncanny how many babies and toddlers and teenagers and adults with parents of their own appeared in these books, crucial to the plots and themes. I hadn’t noticed them before.

At the very least, every novel was about time and its passage. And about the suffering we inevitably experience, the love that inevitably prevails, the great generosity undergirding it all. These were more legible to me now, watching my baby. One day they’d be legible to him, too. For now, he slept. The pile of picture books sat next to the rocking chair, waiting for our next new day.

Kate Lucky April 22, 2024

Will Trumpism Spare Catholicism?

Massimo Faggioli — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:23:10 +0000

Will Trumpism Spare Catholicism?

In a hopeful but also worrying article published in the April issue of this magazine, Thomas Geoghegan wrote that “as a Catholic, I can take some comfort in the fact that Trump has yet to liquidate the U.S. Catholic Church.” Trump hasn’t absorbed it the way he has conservative white Evangelicals (in a kind of para-Christian political-religious entrepreneurialism), and that is something to be thankful for. But Catholicism hasn’t been totally spared by Trumpism. And there’s little comfort to be gained from the fact that his main opponents in the Catholic political realm—President Biden and Pope Francis—are increasingly at odds over the wars in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza. The other looming concern: What happens after Biden and Francis are no longer on the stage?

The end of the most similar U.S.-Vatican alignment—the presidency of John F. Kennedy and papacy of John XXIII—offers a precedent. In November 1964, Ramparts magazine ran an article titled “The Goldwater/McIntyre Axis.” A cover image showed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s head on the body of a rattlesnake, with a caricature of Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, archbishop of Los Angeles from 1948 to 1970, as the tail. “No one can be certain that the Cardinal will vote for the Senator on November 3, but if the tables were reversed, it is quite certain that the Senator would vote for the Cardinal,” concluded Edward M. Keating, the article’s author. Years later, in a 1999 essay, Catholic historian Jeffrey Burns wrote of Keating’s “ten-page rant against the cardinal’s attitude toward race. The depiction of McIntyre as racist and uncaring was patently unfair. His attitude can more accurately be described as obtuse. He simply did not understand the depth of the racial problems in Los Angeles. Nor did he understand the passionate commitment of students and activists who regarded the civil rights issue as the moral issue of the day.” That depiction was unfair, but the article also established just how much had changed in the twelve months following Kennedy’s assassination.

Just over six months out from the 2024 presidential election, it could be said that a “Trump-Strickland” axis may be coming into existence. The “Strickland” (as in Joseph Strickland, deposed bishop of Tyler, Texas) might stand for those quarters of U.S. Catholicism drawn to performances like last month’s Mar-a-Lago prayer event at the former president’s residence, where Trump was presented as “the only Catholic option” for voters. But the “Trump-Strickland” axis isn’t just political. It mixes ahistorical, magisterial fundamentalism in militant Catholicism with nationalistic impulses masquerading as concern for the “forgotten” common American (white) man. So in some sense it does feel like 1963–1964: instead of Vatican II, we have a synodal process with unclear prospects; an aging pope without a clear line of succession for the next conclave; and a presidency that, because of Biden’s age and electoral prospects, feels like it could end without a clear idea of a post-Biden Democratic party. There’s also a sense of the reduced or changing roles of the United States and the Catholic Church on the global stage, as well as the general sense of an end of an era for the Church.

But there are significant differences, too. The “Goldwater-McIntyre axis” suggested a coalescence of conservative concerns and reactionary resistance to change, particularly in regards to civil rights and Vatican II. But neither man flouted the law or social conventions the way Trump and Strickland do. Nor was there an actual alliance between them. The current axis poses greater danger because Strickland apes Trump in promoting a more strident, even violent, representation of conservative/populist concerns. Both basically ignore any authority but their own. Goldwater and McIntyre were more grounded in reality.

The links between Trumpism and certain sectors of Christianity and Catholicism have been subjected to a range of interpretations: Biblical (Romans 13 and obedience to authority); Christological (Trump as anti-Christ); and social-justice oriented (the reversal of the command to love). But an ecclesiological interpretation may shed greater light. Consider Strickland’s media stunt outside the USCCB assembly last November: it was essentially a challenge to the authority and relevance of the conference. Long gone are the days when neo-conservatives felt it a worthy or necessary endeavor to work with the USCCB and the Vatican to influence the final wording of the 1980s pastoral letters on peace and economic justice. Politicization and anti-institutionalism (aided by the development of Catholic ecclesiology of synodality) have created a vacuum. No one pays attention to what the bishops say and do, or what they agree or disagree on; rather, Strickland and clerics like him have rushed to fill the void, asserting themselves and amplifying their message online in very Trumpian fashion.

The Trump-Strickland axis also feeds on the unintended consequences of the post–Vatican II “theology of the laity.” A new breed of what used to be called BCL (“Big Catholic Layman”) has emerged: politically and economically neoliberal, devoted to turbo-capitalism, committed to theological traditionalism but equipped with the lay assertiveness once associated with progressives. The persuasive style that Vatican II envisioned as the key to letting the Church speak in the modern world has succumbed to the raw power of money—a vision of a Church that is funded by those who’ve mastered the rules of the market. The new BCL funds schools and universities, buys media, aggressively lobbies politicians, and exerts influence over judicial appointments; might bishops’ appointments and papal elections be next in their sights? This doesn’t seem so different from what Emperor Constantine, “bishop of those outside,” was able to do, or from the early medieval phenomenon of the Eigentumskirche—the Proprietary Church. It’s hardly the kind of new, emancipated laity we might have expected after the council.

[Editors’ note: With the author’s permission, the editors have removed a paragraph that originally appeared here because Bishop Robert Barron’s media ministry, Word on Fire, informed us that they consider it slander for them to be in any way associated with Donald Trump or Trumpism.]

The second assembly of the Synod on Synodality will gather in October, overlapping with the final weeks of the presidential campaign. Those in the Trump-Strickland axis will likely be focused on the election, not on synodality. And this will probably add to the polarization in U.S Catholicism. “Schism” is the word that sometimes comes up to describe this moment, but it’s not quite right. We actually seem to be in a time like that which preceded the Middle Age era of schisms: the age of heresies prior to the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325. For all the talk about Trump being a new Constantine, there is no state or empire limiting or guaranteeing the claims of the Church. If Trumpism has one merit, it’s of having unconsciously dispensed with the religious pretenses and claims of the American nation, as even the conservative Protestant theologian Carl Trueman notes in a column criticizing the Biden administration. American Catholicism is no less involved in this phenomenon. As Michael Hollerich wrote in the introduction to his magisterial book on Eusebius of Caesarea, the biographer of Constantine: “It is sobering to realize how quickly this universal church has, in the United States, made itself small by measuring itself against American Evangelical moralism and nationalism rather than, say, the Large Hadron Collider, my favorite symbol for humanity’s forward movement into the unknown.”

However, at the ecclesiastical and magisterial level, our period resembles the synodomachia (the battles of synods/councils) of the period around and after the council of Nicaea. As once-solid institutions in general are weakening, so are institutional structures within the Church, with the synodal movement challenging the authority of bishops. It’s not clear whether and how synodality might change the way bishops teach and interact with the laity: Will they or won’t they implement whatever changes might come, and how will the laity respond? Meanwhile, the pope and other Vatican hierarchs don’t hold as much sway as they used to with secular governments and seem unable to influence the emerging yet elusive authorities of our globalized world. Also unclear is whether there will even be another general council in global Catholicism. Will the conciliar tradition established with Nicaea and carried on through Vatican II continue into the future? When there are people like Strickland, Viganò, and other Catholic “influencers,” it seems we’ve entered a phase of “wild Christianity” where the key question is not about the undeniable cultural and institutional wilderness we are entering—the absence, collapse, or marginal role of ecclesial and ecclesiastical institutions that have governed Christianity for a millennium. The question is about the Christian character of our responses to the forces unleashed: the new political tyrants like Orbán and Putin, and the “entrepreneurial,” guru-like figures in popular religion who have no academic or ecclesial status but wield influence on militant Catholic clergy and laypeople.

If there is something like a Trump-Strickland axis—and I think there is—it’s not just the product of secularization and religious illiteracy. It’s not the outgrowth of the dogmatization of political ideologies. It’s not the loss of a sacramental imagination, or the rise of unhinged personalities. It arises out of the disappearance of a political-ecclesiastical and theological order. That makes for a far more volatile situation than in 1964, and one more fluid and open perhaps at any time since Christianity’s association with the Roman Empire, which coincided with the creation of an ostensibly universal governing structure, the ecumenical council.

[*] This sentence has been revised after an edit that changed its original intent.

Massimo Faggioli April 22, 2024

Why Do We Celebrate Earth Day?

Edward Tverdek — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 18:05:38 +0000

Why Do We Celebrate Earth Day?

Is it time to declare the party over? Are we ready to pronounce Earth Day an occasion for mourning rather than celebration? As we seem increasingly unable to address the climate crisis, who do we think we are honoring a planet we’re effectively trashing? We wouldn’t expect parents who neglect their daughter 364 days out of the year to throw an elaborate party for her on her birthday. Why do we celebrate Earth Day in a world seemingly on the irreversible slide toward catastrophe?

In the heady years following Earth Day’s 1970 debut—and arguably well into the 1980s—a celebratory mood was more understandable. Environmentalists and concerned citizens earnestly believed that humanity was recognizing the error of its ways and putting the brakes on environmental despoliation. It was just a matter of harnessing the “post-materialist” and “post-scarcity” worldview that had emerged in industrialized nations in the years following World War II. Human beings—or those of us lucky enough to be well-provided for—could now finally ascend Abraham Maslow’s familiar “hierarchy of needs.” We’d mastered the satisfaction of basic wants; now we could work toward harmonizing our higher-order needs with the needs of the planet—even the universe. It was, after all, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

But that never happened. Post-materialism gave way to a renewed hyper-materialism and predatory capitalism. Easy Rider and The Graduate were displaced as cultural touchstones by Wall Street and Risky Business. Greed was good again. Major polluters convinced us that our glutted grocery stores and gas-guzzling SUVs were not a serious threat to the health of the planet. Now, rather than anticipating with glee that Aquarian Age, we read of climate anxiety and Generation Dread.

By now, the sense of doom is so great that climate scientists have begun to drop the pretense of impartiality. Dispassionate reports of current conditions and analytical policy prescriptions have been replaced by blunt expressions of the unlikelihood of avoiding the ugly scenarios their models have anticipated for years. Long ago they warned us that burning oil, gas, and coal is raising the planet’s temperature, but it wasn’t until COP28 (the annual UN climate conference) in Dubai this past November that negotiators could even bring themselves to name fossil fuels as the problem. Arguably, the environmental movement has now refocused its vision away from shaping a brighter future and toward stopgap measures and restive lamentation.

For our part, people of faith have done little to abate the pessimism. In the 1980s members of the “deep ecology” movement already looked askance at Judeo-Christian commitments to environmental renewal, given God’s fateful decision in Genesis to award dominion over the natural world to the reckless and self-serving human species. Contemporary critics can point (accurately, for the most part) to a Church quick to pray for “care for creation” yet slow to make substantive changes to society or our own lifestyles. The Laudato Si’ Action Platform—a noble attempt to bring Catholic institutions worldwide into the net-zero orbit—remains obscure to most parishioners, if they’ve heard of it at all.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Pope Francis has given us a glimpse of how hope might figure in the climate movement and a new lens through which to view our ecological condition. While his writings contribute to the spiritual wealth of the Church’s Magisterium, Francis doesn’t rely on spirituality alone; he outlines a thoroughly material basis for hope in this world: integral ecology. He asks us to put our hope not in a particular plan, technology, or popular theory, but in an ecology that integrates our response to the “cry of the earth” with that to “the cry of the poor.” These two summonses are, for Francis, inextricable from each other.

In contrast to Francis’s holism, many activist groups attribute the source of environmental decay to a single preferred culprit. Marxists and other leftists blame capitalism and call for its systemic replacement, or at least the demise of avaricious corporations. Policy wonks attribute the problem to ineffective legislative and executive oversight, demanding institutional and regulatory reform to improve environmental metrics like air and water quality. And finally, activists beholden to vestigial New Age philosophies opt to tout the old Pogo cartoon mantra, “We’ve met the enemy, and it is us.” They assign blame to insolent consumers and cultivate a therapeutic form of environmentalism that can be satisfied with largely symbolic acts of environmental virtue like recycling plastics or composting food scraps. All of these approaches touch on part of the truth, but in isolation they are dangerously single-minded. Disarming the drivers of climate change is a multi-level and multi-dimensional project.

Pope Francis’s ideal of integral ecology asserts that the systemic, the institutional, and the personal cannot be treated apart from each other. As Marx suggested, capitalism may indeed have outlived its usefulness in satisfying human wants efficiently (much less satisfying them equitably, but that was never a selling point). Still, as Francis’s encyclicals suggest, you can’t dismantle capitalism’s modern neoliberal manifestation without at the same time inspiring a change in the habits and lifestyle choices of the countless individuals who make the system work. In the same vein, sound environmental policy is undoubtedly thwarted by the influence of the fossil-fuel industry on policy makers, but this corruption can’t be eliminated without systemic change at the political and economic level. And finally, yes, we as individuals remain resiliently numb to the consequences of our consumer actions, but it amounts to pious shaming to concentrate on this alone and folly to suggest that a change of personal habits can somehow produce social transformation without changes at the systemic and institutional level.

So, no, the party isn’t over, and all hope is not lost. But politics and economics, the institutions that govern them, and we who have benefitted most from industrial production must all change dramatically if we are to survive this century and if the marginalized are to survive the next few decades. This is not strictly a matter of revolution or reform or personal transformation. It’s all three or nothing.

Edward Tverdek April 21, 2024

A Divine Seed

Jack Nuelle — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:18:36 +0000

A Divine Seed

When we talk about the decline of religion in modern life, religious orders are not often our first topic of conversation. Shrinking Catholic religious life is a relatively specialized concern affecting a relatively small number of people. What use are orders of priests or nuns when 30 percent of U.S. adults belong to no religious denomination at all?

From one perspective, the religious life can seem like a refuge for men and women holding too tightly to an outdated mode of existence. From another, it can seem like the last refuge against a secular world firmly opposed to the truths of religious tradition. Sensing the Spirit: Toward the Future of Religious Life, Judith A. Merkle’s intervention into the question of the religious in a secular frame, is neither a surrender to the secular world nor a retreat from it. In fact, Merkle is not making an argument for the continued relevance of religious life at all. She insists that it is relevant and important because it still exists—and it must now adapt to the changed landscape of religious belonging in what Charles Taylor (one of her main interlocutors) calls the “secular age.”

The book is divided into two sections. The first utilizes Taylor to contextualize religious life in our current world. Taylor argues that we are a population of selves buffered against each other by extreme subjectivity; we live in a world that has lost its ontological commitments to a divinely ordered cosmos, and so we now have many different ways of creating meaning. If Taylor is right, then the ideas and identities that characterize religious life have to be rethought. The idea of a charism, monastic identities like virtuosi, and other concepts whose purpose is “attaining, or helping others to attain, some sort of spiritual perfection” must be reinterpreted for today’s world. Doing so can help better articulate the space that religious life must occupy.

Merkle invokes a biological metaphor: seeds. As religious congregations face the realities of a secularized world, they must unfurl in contemplative action like slowly germinating seedlings. They must adapt and settle into their niches, shift and grow as plants in hostile climates do to survive. It is a metaphor from nature and Scripture: from small beginnings emerge large trees in which “the birds of the air come and make nests” (Matthew 13:32). When it comes to religious life, the pope has a green thumb, too: in a message on the 2023 World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Francis called the gift of vocation “a divine seed that springs up in the soil of our existence, opens our hearts to God and to others, so that we can share with them the treasure we ourselves have found.”

Merkle even has a specific plant in mind: the ice plant, whose bright color against the dull desert sand shines like ice. These plants have a distinctive “flexing and packing mechanism,” intricate folds that only open when enough water has saturated them—a sort of time-release to ensure hydration in dry climates. Merkle uses this metaphor to “gain insight into the adaptations possible for religious congregations today.” She highlights four ways that religious congregations can act in our world: “As a bridge between the sacred and the secular; as a religiously focused lifestyle; as a trajectory of becoming holy and finding wholeness, and as a witness to values which matter—the coming of the Kingdom.” As her title suggests, the Holy Spirit, which both destabilizes and renews, will guide those who are seeking to reimagine religious life.

In the second half of the book, Merkle sketches out what she sees as the future of religious life in a secular age. For instance, what does it mean to make a vow of poverty in a world that condemns poverty, either on the grounds of economic injustice or as a failure to achieve the promises of capitalism? How about a vow of obedience, in a culture of justified skepticism toward institutional hierarchy? Or chastity, in a sex-obsessed culture?

Merkle’s response to each is that religious life is a call to conversion which draws us out of the flow of secular life toward a deeper relationship with God. Some might see vows as either an act of resistance against secularity or as an uncritical submission to a dominant authority, but Merkle recontextualizes the vows as a form of worship that “reflect the postures of gratitude, appreciation, and dedication to God.” A person who takes vows becomes attuned as a “worshipping self” who applies devotion to every aspect of existence. A devotional existence is a communal one, a charitable one, an abundant one. As Merkle puts it, “religious life is best described through the language of the abundance of the Kingdom, the hundredfold.”

This abundance Merkle connects with the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan’s fourth level of consciousness, which he calls religious experience. Religious experience for both Merkle and Lonergan is not strictly rational, but instead a result of judgments of value. Religious conversion and experience are oriented toward that which has ultimate value, God, and lead us to “share in the divine nature in the deepest way.” Conversion involves more than making good decisions in day-to-day existence; it’s a desire to know and do what is truly and finally good.

For Merkle, a fundamental human realization is that “through grace we are capable of God.” It is this realization that alerts us to our calling in life, whether to marriage, the single life, or religious life. God’s grace allows us to be receptive to our particular call and to live out that call well. The only thing that sets the religious calling apart for Merkle is that it is more direct. The religious call cuts out worldly intermediary concerns like careers, money, or romantic relationships; God’s ultimate value shines like a beacon, giving all vows their rationale. Merkle recasts the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as conditions of the conversion to religious life. Each is undertaken in unrestrained pursuit of God. Poverty is a symbol of absolute trust in a God who provides. Celibacy puts God in place of a loving spouse and children, and through that divine relationship, meaningful human relationships bloom. Obedience is not obedience to an arbitrary authority but the authority that comes from the “active presence of Jesus in the community.”

Merkle is aware of the variety of practical solutions proposed for a revival of religious life, but by this book’s end it is clear that her question is not one of organizational strategies but theological sourcing. Merkle is not primarily concerned with how a religious order can attract and keep new members. She is interested, instead, in how people who take religious vows can best form themselves to their vocation in this de-sacralized world. She urges authenticity, an informed faith, and love over fear.

One comes to the end of Merkle’s engaging text hoping for more concrete takeaways about reform possibilities within the Church. Her breadth of knowledge and clear awareness of the practical issues facing religious communities today indicate that she would have innovative solutions for the problems religious communities face.

Yet solutions are contextual and contingent, and therefore temporary. Merkle seeks something eternal, a return to biblical virtues like faith, hope, and love to take religious life out of the realm of the political and into the discourse of the ultimate. To make use of her favored metaphor, the tree-like structure of a religious congregation may wither and fail, its branches bound up and burned. But a tree can also image heaven. The role of religious orders now is to fold themselves into the lattice of those branches.

Sensing the Spirit
Toward the Future of Religious Life
Judith A. Merkle
T&T Clark
$16.06 | 192 pp.

Jack Nuelle April 19, 2024

Mother of the Unborn God

Brad East — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 19:30:45 +0000

Mother of the Unborn God

In seven years, the Church will celebrate the 1,600-year anniversary of the Council of Ephesus, the third of seven great ecumenical councils common to East and West. The Council came at a time of civil and ecclesial unrest. Rome had been sacked in 410; in 430, St Augustine died as Vandals besieged the walls of Hippo. The controversies of the previous century over Christ and the Trinity were more or less settled. As ever, however, settled business begets more business. The answers to one set of questions generate new questions.

One of those new questions concerned the mother of Jesus. If Jesus is God, as the bishops at both Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) had affirmed, then what does that make Mary? In her song of praise to God, she had prophesied that all generations would call her blessed. At the same moment, St. Elizabeth called her “the mother of my Lord.” So Jesus is the Lord, and Mary is his mother. Does saying so settle the question? It doesn’t—though some future theologians, such as John Calvin, wished it had. Among the faithful, a title arose for Mary: “Theotokos.” The verbal root of the Greek tokos means “to bear.” Hence Theotokos refers to the God-bearer: Mary is the one who bore God in her womb.

Could a woman really do that? Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, argued the negative case. Mary, he acknowledged, was the mother of the man Jesus and thus the mother of the Messiah. But she could not have been the mother of God himself, for God has no mother. God is uncreated, and it is unseemly and misleading to say otherwise. St. Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, disagreed. If Jesus is God and Mary his mother, then it follows quite plainly that she is the mother of God. Qualify it as much as you like—say, for example, that Jesus is God in the flesh—but the title stands. As does the scandal. For the scandal of the Theotokos is the scandal of the Gospel itself. The good news of Jesus is that his name is Immanuel: God with us. The Incarnation trips up the world because it says not only that the Creator became a creature, but that he became like you and me in everything but sin. He was a man who could suffer and die. He was a boy who could run and cry. He was an infant, nursing at the breast. He was an unborn child, gestating in his mother’s womb.

Is the womb a fitting residence for the Creator of the universe? Could God become small enough to occupy a uterus? As small as a clump of cells? Infinitesimally tiny—this, the infinite God? Gestating, growing, developing, all the while hidden from view? A secret known only to his mother, his adoptive father, and a few relatives? To all this Cyril said: yes. “He did not consider it beneath him to follow a path congruous to this plan”—namely, the plan that he become human so that we might become divine—“and so he is said to have undergone a birth like ours, while all the while remaining what he was.” As St. Bernard of Clairvaux would say centuries later, “There was never any moment…when that fullness which he assumed at the instant of his conception in the womb was in any way diminished or augmented. He was perfect from the beginning.” And so Cyril concludes: “He was God in an appearance like ours, and the Lord in the form of a slave. This is what we mean when we say that he became flesh, and for the same reasons we affirm that the holy virgin is the Mother of God.”

At the Council of Ephesus in 431, Cyril’s position won and Nestorius’s lost. Two decades later, at the Council of Chalcedon, the title of Theotokos was reaffirmed as orthodox. And ever since, the Church has reaffirmed the truth that, because Jesus is God, Mary is God’s mother.

Does Mary as Theotokos bear on any of the Church’s moral questions? It does, and in the most profound way. God almighty was conceived in the womb of a Galilean girl a little over two thousand years ago. God underwent the typical course of embryonic and fetal growth common to human beginnings. God was born: a baby boy, utterly dependent and defenseless, loved and cared for by his parents. The conception and birth of Jesus thus bear directly on the question of abortion. It is my contention that, even if Christians had no other resources for thinking about abortion, the doctrine of the Theotokos would be more than enough.

Abortion raises theological, moral, and legal questions. In that order, I should add. The theological question concerns the status of unborn human life before God: What is this life? What does God say it is? The moral question follows: How should we treat this life, given what God says? The legal (and political) questions are last: Should the state protect unborn life, and if so, how? Those last questions are far from unimportant. They’re the ones that pro-life Christians in the United States focus most of their attention on. And not just Christians: ask an American about abortion, and he or she will immediately start to talk about laws and policies and constitutional rights.

But the moral question was never in serious dispute in the Church’s history—at least, not until recently. Christians had a reputation in this regard. In the ancient world, they were the ones who did not expose their infants, even when the child was unexpected or physically flawed. They were the ones who welcomed human lives in all their variety, particularly when they were vulnerable or voiceless. So today: the Church does not wonder whether an extra chromosome justifies an abortion. How could it? Each and every human being is created by God, in God’s image. For the sake of each and every soul on earth, inside or outside the womb, Christ died on the cross. In Christian terms, these conclusions are not difficult to reach, however they may conflict with common non-Christian intuitions, and whatever they may imply for the politics of a pluralistic liberal democracy.

But moral judgments are only as firm as their foundations, and the Christian moral teaching about abortion requires theological, indeed metaphysical, grounds. The doctrine of Theotokos supplies these grounds. To be clear, I don’t mean that opposition to abortion was historically underwritten by confession of Mary as Mother of God. I mean that the Theotokos—together with the larger constellation of beliefs about the Incarnation—is part of the deep grammar of a Christian understanding of human origins, unborn life, and God’s intimate presence in procreation. Nor do I mean to suggest that a properly Christian view of abortion is the result of divine revelation alone: natural reason and the empirical sciences offer complementary paths to the same conclusion about life in the womb and the moral demands it places on us. What laws or political strategies follow from this conclusion is another question altogether. That question tends to pull everything within its orbit. For that very reason, I want to bracket it so that we can instead recall the beginning of the Gospel and reconsider the moment when the Incarnation began.

Anyone who has visited the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth can tell you the highlight. There are many things to choose from, not least the row upon row of icons and paintings of Madonna and Child offered as a gift by every nation and culture on earth. The message of these images takes you by force: the God who became a Jew is the God not only of Jews but of gentiles, too. In assuming Jewish flesh, he assumed human flesh. As the one in whom all the nations find their desires fixed and consummated, as the one who draws all peoples to himself, he is infinitely translatable, infinitely depictable. As a Jew to the Jews he is also, and therefore, an Ethiopian to the Ethiopians, a Frenchman to the French, an Indian to the Indians, a Chilean to the Chileans. When they clothe him in their garb, they are honoring the child Christ and the mother whose flesh he took. Yet somehow this is not the most memorable feature of the Basilica. As one descends to its depths, one approaches the cave where, tradition reports, the angel Gabriel announced the good news to Mary. There on the altar is a Latin transcription: verbum caro hic factum est. It’s taken from the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel: “the Word became flesh.” Except one word has been added, hic: “here.”

The Word became flesh here. In this place. At a specific time. In the womb of a woman who said yes, like father Abraham before her. Called, he went; called, she replied: fiat mihi. And as God created the heavens and the earth with his fiat lux, so through Mary’s fiat the Spirit begins the work of new creation. The new Adam starts to form inside her. As Eve was taken from the first Adam, so this Adam is taken from a new Eve. In anticipation “the whole world is waiting, bowed down at your feet,” as St. Bernard writes, addressing Mary. “And rightly so, because on your answer depends the comfort of the afflicted, the redemption of captives, the deliverance of the damned; the salvation of all the sons of Adam, your whole race.” In his poem “For the Time Being,” W. H. Auden has Gabriel say to Mary: “[C]hild, it lies / Within your power of choosing to / Conceive the Child who chooses you.”

This mystery has never been far from the Church’s heart, its teaching, or its theological reflection. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to say that, strictly speaking, Christ did not need to suffer and die for our sins. “From the beginning of his conception Christ merited our eternal salvation,” he writes. The work of Jesus for our sake does not begin in Jerusalem. The story of Jesus does not begin in Bethlehem. It all begins in a cave in Nazareth, in the womb of Mary. Our redemption starts there.

In much recent academic theology, there is a strange silence about Jesus’ life in the womb. We are told that what it means to be human finds its norm and pattern in Jesus. Yet his person and work are presented as if they began either at his birth or at his baptism. But the Annunciation was not cooked up by some overeager pro-lifers; it’s right there in the gospels. St. Luke dedicates two leisurely opening chapters to it. The Apostles’ Creed makes the crucial distinction: conceived by the Holy Spirit / and born of the Virgin Mary. In this distinction lies all we need to know about unborn human life and its relationship to Christ.

Consider the implications if all the following is true. Jesus is God incarnate. The Incarnation begins not with Jesus’ birth, but at his conception. Jesus is like us in every respect except for sin. He is fully God (consubstantial with the Father according to his divinity) and fully man (consubstantial with us according to his humanity). He became human precisely to share all that we are, that we might share all that he is. Jesus, in a word, is the God-man from conception to birth and beyond. The Incarnation therefore comprehends not only natality, but fetality; not only born life, but unborn life; not only the public and the visible, but the private and the hidden. Jesus is God in the flesh. Thus, Jesus is God in the womb. And if he is God in the womb, he is man in the womb, too. What is true of Jesus is, mutatis mutandis, true of all humanity. The unborn are sisters and brothers of Jesus. They, like us, are persons for whom Jesus died. They make claims on us—or rather, through them God makes claims on us. Our response is to be modeled on Mary’s. We welcome and protect these gifts from the Lord. For they, like him, are unseen. And like him, they are destined for glory.

“Universal joy has arrived today! God is on earth, God is from heaven, God is among human beings, God is carried in the womb of a virgin, he who is contained nowhere.” So St. Andrew of Crete cries out in praise, and continues: “You are truly blessed, who alone of all mothers was made ready to be Mother of your Creator.” Do we subtract from Christ in praising Mary so? By no means, according to St. Bernard: “Whatever we say in praise of the mother touches the Son, and when we honor the Son we detract nothing from the mother’s glory.”

Christ’s solidarity is total: in every nook and cranny of human life, he is there. He is there because he was there, beginning with the womb. For nine months, Mary was the ark of Israel. Wherever she went, she carried the Lord’s presence with her. This is why St. John leapt at her approach: like David before the ark, he couldn’t help himself. We shouldn’t help ourselves either. Each unborn life is a little Christ waiting to be born—waiting to be received and held and clothed and loved. We rejoice with Andrew and bow with Bernard and leap with John and fall to our knees with Cyril. For Christians know what pregnancy means: not the prelude to a life but the first chapter of it.

Brad East April 18, 2024

Dignity and Gender

The Editors — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 13:52:47 +0000

Dignity and Gender

On April 8, the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released the Declaration Dignitas Infinita on human dignity. Timed to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the document lays out a forceful vision of the indelible “dignity of the human person in Christian anthropology”: “Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.”

Most of the Declaration’s twelve thousand words are cogent and compelling. After analyzing four dimensions of human dignity—intrinsic, moral, social, and existential—the document’s final section specifies “some grave violations of human dignity” and calls on governments to enact legal protections against them. Followers of Francis’s papacy will already be familiar with most of these “violations”; they have been discussed at length in the encyclical Fratelli tutti and other recent Vatican documents. They include capital punishment, torture, poverty, war, the treatment of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, the marginalization of people with disabilities, and “digital violence”—e.g., surveillance, pornography, and cyberbullying.

Dignitas Infinita also cites “surrogacy,” “gender theory,” and “sex change” in its list of things that “seriously threaten the future of the human family.” Given surrogacy’s potential to lead to economic exploitation and the commodification of human life, it isn’t hard to see why Francis has pushed for a worldwide ban on the practice: commercial (as opposed to altruistic) surrogacy is a rapidly expanding, multi-billion-dollar industry in which couples—often from wealthier countries—“rent” the wombs of young women from poorer nations.

But the sections on gender theory and sex change have triggered strong critical reactions in the West, especially among many LGBT people and their allies. Francis had condemned “gender ideology” several times before, but given the DDF’s recent endorsement of informal blessings for same-sex couples and the pope’s own gestures of welcome to the LGBT community, this latest condemnation came as an unwelcome surprise to many. One of the passages in question reads: “Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes…amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into a competition with the true God of love as revealed to us in the Gospel.” While the document affirms the dignity of “every person, regardless of sexual orientation” and rejects “every sign of unjust discrimination,” especially in countries where LGBT people are “imprisoned, tortured and even deprived of the good of life,” its peremptory and somewhat confusing critique of “gender theory” and “sex change” is likely to reinforce the very discrimination it explicitly condemns.

The Vatican’s denunciation of “gender theory” arrives in a context of increasingly intense cultural battles over transgender rights and medical treatments for transgender youth, whose numbers have increased dramatically during the past decade. In the United States, lawmakers in more than twenty states have proposed or enacted limits on gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers and hormones. After England determined that these therapies were overprescribed to transgender youth and that the data about their long-term efficacy were inconclusive, it joined Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands in limiting their availability.

Those looking for a nuanced discussion about this controversy won’t find it in the rather blunt assertions of Dignitas Infinita, which accuses “gender theory” of wanting to eliminate “the anthropological basis of the family” and “dictating how children should be raised.” These broad claims seem overstated; they will puzzle or disappoint many people who are otherwise receptive to the Vatican’s message about the ethical and political priority of human dignity. Nor is it obvious that, as the document blankly asserts, “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” There may be good arguments for this conclusion, but they are not in evidence here, and their absence invites both incredulity and misunderstanding. More generally, the DDF should consider making a greater effort in such declarations to persuade and not merely to, well, declare.

The DDF’s failure to carefully distinguish between “gender theory” and the varied experiences of actual transgender people—or, indeed, among the rival versions of gender theory—risks further alienating a group that already feels rejected by the Church. At least one American bishop has even advised his priests to withhold the Eucharist from transgender people; Dignitas Infinita neither endorses nor condemns this kind of foolish and spiteful pastoral blunder. Because the declaration has so little to say about the pastoral care of transgender people, the important questions it raises about identity and the limits of self-determination are unlikely to get a hearing among the very people who have the most at stake in this discussion—those who sincerely believe that their gender does not correspond to their sex. The Vatican has now made it clear that (if not why) it regards their belief as a kind of illusion. It could at least have made it equally clear that it does not regard this belief as a grave sin, much less as a bar to God’s love.

The Editors April 18, 2024

Local Adaptations

John T. McGreevy — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:40:22 +0000

Local Adaptations

Gary Bass’s Judgment at Tokyo assesses the trials of Japanese leaders conducted by the Allied powers after World War II—a lesser known and, in Bass’s view, less successful counterpart to the Nuremberg trials in Germany. It will surely become the standard account. Bass and his research team have plowed through more than two years of complex legal proceedings and press coverage in multiple languages. The result is unfailingly lucid and intelligent, if perhaps overly detailed. (“This a long book,” Bass warns us, “necessarily so.”) It is Bass’s third deeply researched book in the past fifteen years. His first book controversially located the origins of modern ideas of human rights in the independence movements of the nineteenth century. His second book described how the Cold War machinations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger included permitting the Pakistani military to slaughter tens of thousands of Bengalis in 1971.

Now Bass tackles the Tokyo trials. Twelve judges from eleven different countries, including three from Asia, supervised the proceedings. Topics adjudicated included the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, the 1940 invasion of French Indochina, the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent invasions of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and the Philippines. Much of the testimony indicted the Japanese for their treatment of Allied prisoners of war. Nine American pilots, for example, bailed out of their planes during the bombing of Chichi Jima, an island off the Japanese coast. Eight were tortured and executed; four were partially eaten. The ninth pilot, rescued by the Americans, was a twenty-one-year-old from Connecticut named George H. W. Bush.

As Bass shrewdly emphasizes, judges whose own countries had not yet abandoned Asian empires were unlikely to be viewed as making impartial assessments of Japanese colonialism. This undermined the credibility of the trials. The most famous defendant at the trial, former prime minister Tojo Hideki, declared the Pacific war “justified and righteous” because of Japan’s efforts to elevate “all the races of the Greater Asiatic powers.” Given Japan’s own colonial record, Tojo’s cynicism was breathtaking, but the delayed independence of Indonesia (from the Dutch), Vietnam (from the French), and India (from the British) made his arguments plausible. So did the legal racial segregation still marking much of the United States in the 1940s and the more general disparagement of “inferior” Asian races widespread in Europe and North America. Tojo’s animus toward the United States was spurred, at least in part, by racially motivated congressional legislation banning most immigration from Japan and other parts of Asia in 1917. The United States allowed Filipino independence in 1946, but the American firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant that charges of victor’s justice had far greater potency in a defeated Japan than in a defeated Germany.

Because many Japanese contested the convictions of their leaders at the trials, and still do, Bass suggests that the liberal international order in Asia was stillborn. His subtitle—World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia—reflects this emphasis. Yes, Bass concedes, the trials themselves reflected newfound interest in human rights after the Holocaust and the Second World War. And yes, the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is inconceivable without that interest. But his final sentence wistfully invokes a “more and more rare” capacity to invoke “conscience over nationalism.”

This seems too stern. After 1945, Japan became an essential part—not an antagonist—of the liberal international order. The origins and consequences of World War II still occasion intense debate across East Asia, in contrast to Germany, but if General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman had been offered the bargain of close to eighty years of a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Japan, they surely would have taken it.

Admittedly, controversies surrounding so-called “comfort women”—Koreans forced to work as prostitutes in service to the Japanese army during the war—continue to unsettle relations between South Korea and Japan. Leaders outside Japan still use the Tokyo trials for propaganda purposes. Even as his armies invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has defended the Tokyo trials in an effort to ally Russia with China, claiming a shared status as victims of German and Japanese aggression.

The Yasukuni Shinto shrine in Tokyo remains a flashpoint, because venerating the war dead there means venerating some of the men convicted of war crimes. The government moved the remains of Tojo Hideki, executed in 1948 after his conviction, to Yasukuni thirty years later, cementing its association with right-wing Japanese politics. One of the most visited statues at Yasukuni is of the Indian judge Satyabrata Pal, who, while denouncing Western powers, refused to convict Japanese leaders for what he said was the normal give-and-take of power politics. If colonialism was a war crime, Pal added, “the entire international community would be a community of criminal races.”

Controversy over the Yasukuni shrine should be of special interest to Catholics. An incident there in 1932, described by scholars such as Klaus Schatz, SJ, and others, provides a footnote to Bass’s grand themes of human rights and international law. It can also be understood as yet another variation on the political and cultural decolonization so evident since the retreat of European empires in the mid-twentieth century.

The incident began when the colonel in charge of the military-cadet program at the Jesuit-run Sophia University in central Tokyo announced that the cadets would walk to the Yasukuni shrine. As they marched across the campus, some of the Catholic cadets encountered the university’s rector, Fr. Hermann Hoffmann, a German Jesuit. They queried Hoffmann: Should they participate in ceremonies at the shrine?

It was not a simple question. Visits to Shinto shrines had long been forbidden for Japanese Catholics, for the same reason that Catholics in the rest of the world were nominally prohibited from attending worship services—even funerals and weddings—in Protestant or Orthodox churches or Jewish synagogues. At best, they could participate “passively,” out of respect for the deceased or the engaged couple. Better not to show up at all. Even being present, according to strict canon lawyers and theologians, signaled that Catholicism was one among many equally valid religions, not the true faith. In 1928, Pope Pius XI had issued an encyclical declaring that ecumenical discussions between Catholics and Protestants would proceed only after recognition of the “authority and supremacy of Peter and his legitimate successor.”

Questions about participation in the larger society were never theoretical for Japanese Catholics. Roughly ninety thousand Catholics lived in Japan in 1930, less than one percent of the population. It was one thing to forbid attendance at a Protestant wedding in, say, Milan, where such occasions were rare. Quite another to resist appearing at Shinto shrines in Tokyo. Evading opportunities to venerate Japanese war dead was even more fraught. In 1931, the Japanese army had invaded northern China, or Manchuria, and installed a puppet government. The cadets at Sophia knew they could soon be drafted into active duty. They also knew that a militarist Japanese government had begun a process of firmly tying Shintoism to the state, and restricting the rights of Buddhists, Christians, and other religious minorities.

Fr. Hoffmann told the cadets they did not have to participate in Shinto ceremonies. A handful of cadets took him at his word, and although precise accounts of what happened vary, two cadets seem to have refused to salute the shrine during the presentation of arms. Two or three cadets also declined to bow their heads. These modest defiant gestures unsettled the officers in charge. Just two days after the cadets visited the shrine, the colonel in charge of the cadets officially complained to Fr. Hoffmann, who tried to explain the Catholic viewpoint. The dissatisfied colonel then contacted high government officials. The vice minister of the Ministry of War personally called Fr. Hoffmann and told him to close the Sophia cadet program because “the spirit of the University [Sophia] does not correspond to the principles of national education.” Given this expression of government displeasure, the future of the university now seemed shaky. Enrollment at Sophia dropped precipitously.

When reports from Catholic leaders in Japan reached Rome, Vatican officials joined university leaders at Sophia and government bureaucrats at the war ministry in pondering just what obligations Sophia students owed the nation-state. They did so in a volatile context. The intense nationalism of the 1920s and ’30s disoriented Catholic leaders far beyond East Asia. Vatican officials signed treaties or concordats with Mussolini’s Italy (1929) and Hitler’s Germany (1934), although neither document protected Catholic institutions in the ways these officials had hoped. More broadly, Catholics in both Europe and Asia aimed to demonstrate that even as members of an international Church, they would remain loyal to their native homelands.

To the relief of administrators at Sophia, local Catholic leaders and Vatican officials eventually changed course and ruled that Japanese Catholics could pay their respects to Japanese war dead at Yasukuni as a civic, and not religious, obligation. Even more significantly, in 1939, the same Vatican officials reexamined a famous 1742 ruling on Chinese rites and allowed Chinese Catholics to venerate ancestors according to Confucian tradition, again defining such veneration as civic and cultural, not religious.

In the cauldron of the 1930s, these adaptations to nationalism in Japan and China seemed sensible. Both decisions—allowing Japanese Catholics to participate in ceremonies at Shinto shrines and reassessing the Chinese rites controversy—are now understood by theologians as victories for inculturation, the idea that Catholics must build Indigenous churches, not simply transplant European Catholic practices. These issues were especially acute in Japan and China. Outsider status in these complex civilizations inhibited evangelization. Lourdes grottoes, the Latin Mass, and neo-Gothic churches could no longer constitute a Catholic vernacular. Rather, Indigenous devotions, languages, and architectural forms offered a strategy for shedding the stigma of a foreign import. Vietnamese Catholics appalled by French colonialism destroyed French-made Catholic statues in local churches in the late 1940s. A leading Filipino Jesuit wrote as early as 1952 that Catholicism must no longer be viewed as a Western import, but instead belonged “fully as much to Asia as to Europe.”

Here is where Gary Bass’s yearning for international human rights and norms, as well as his emphasis on individual conscience, intersects with the challenges faced by religious minorities such as Japanese Catholics. Even as Japanese intellectuals denounced Western modernity for its corrupt individualism and liberalism in the 1930s, so, too, did many Catholics—and not only in Japan. Japan’s leading Catholic intellectual fit snugly within both the Catholic and the Japanese milieus when he lamented a Western focus on the “isolated and abstract individual” and urged a “new East Asian spiritual civilization.”

Inculturation in Tokyo in the 1930s, then, could mean inculturation to a nationalist, antiliberal, and authoritarian military government. Inculturation in Germany and Italy was equally fraught. Over time, reform-minded Catholics would challenge this instinct to conform to the demands of the nation-state. The French Jesuit Henri de Lubac published one of his first essays on the distinction between patriotism (good) and nationalism (troubling). During World War II, de Lubac played a role in the French resistance and wrote against anti-Semitism and racism. He helped draft some of the documents at the Second Vatican Council, and his influence may be evident in the distinction made in Gaudium et spes (1965) between a “generous and loyal” patriotism and a “narrow-mindedness” that foreclosed identification with the “whole human family.” Bishops at the Council invoked—and Vatican officials later beatified—the Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and who, as a result, was beheaded in the last months of the war. Jäggerstätter’s witness was deemed admirable because he would not sacrifice his conscience in service to nationalist aims.

Now nationalism seems again ascendant. Pope Francis resists this impulse at every turn, as suggested by his focus on migration issues (which cross national borders) and the environment (which knows no borders). At the same time, he also favors liturgical and cultural inculturation, in part because of his long experience with and sympathy for Indigenous peoples in Latin America.

The trick is to figure out what kind of inculturation makes sense, and when. Those Catholics now dismissive of liberalism should be wary of tying themselves, as in the 1930s, to regimes incompatible with a universal Church. Those eager to diminish distance between Catholic practices and local customs might also tread carefully. After all, too successful an absorption into any one local milieu—Japan in the 1930s or the United States in 2024—could diminish the Church’s capacity to challenge, not simply accept, the ambient culture.

Judgment at Tokyo
World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
Gary J. Bass
Alfred A. Knopf
$46 | 912 pp.

John T. McGreevy April 15, 2024

Divorce, Annulment & the Petrine Privilege

Beverly Willett — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:36:14 +0000

Divorce, Annulment & the Petrine Privilege

My divorce was final fifteen years ago. But the Catholic Church, to which I’m a recent convert, considers me still married.

My ex-husband (or am I still supposed to call him my husband?) and I exchanged vows in 1982 at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan. My grandfather, a Southern Baptist minister, presided. I was Baptist. My ex-husband was (then) a nonobservant Jew. We had two daughters. Motherhood changed my life, and I wanted to spend as much time with my children as I could during their short childhood. And so, after financing the down payment on our home, I left the practice of law and became a full-time stay-at-home mom.

A few years later, my ex-husband had an affair and served me with divorce papers at our front door. In front of our little girl, whom I was about to walk to school. I opposed the lawsuit. God help me, I loved him. I wanted to save my marriage and our beautiful family. At the time of the lawsuit, New York was the only state that hadn’t yet adopted no-fault divorce. That meant that unless I’d breached the marital contract—by committing domestic violence, adultery, cruelty, for example—he couldn’t divorce me against my will. For years, the Catholic Church in New York had successfully persuaded state legislators not to adopt no-fault divorce, my lawyer said. I was impressed. It was one of many reasons I would come to admire the Church.

But judges and lawyers who represented my ex-husband pressed me to give up my right to defend myself and my choice to remain married. If anybody had the right to sue, it was me; after all, he was the one having the affair. But I knew in my bones that I had to stand up and speak the truth. The stress of doing so nearly took me down. I even contemplated suicide. I didn’t dare tell anyone about this—not my friends, not my shrink, not my lawyer. My ex had threatened to seek sole custody of the children. By then, he was the one who earned the hefty paycheck, while I took care of the kids. So I lived in fear.

Several years after the lawsuit started, the third of seven judges dismissed all the charges against me. There would be no divorce, at least not then. I hoped my ex-husband’s girlfriend would finally disappear, but she didn’t. So he moved to New Jersey, which had adopted no-fault divorce, giving him the power to end our marriage. I had no choice but to give in. We settled custody, and a second trial ensued over property division. The new judge—a woman—pressured me to accept my ex-husband’s settlement demands and warned that my future hung in the balance. She shamed me for being a stay-at-home mom. She told me I needed a boyfriend. Although I’d once practiced law, nothing prepared me for the horrors of divorce court. The divorce was final in March 2009. My ex remarried a few days later.

I temped, became a landlord, and paid bills on ever-dwindling savings and child support. In 2010, New York adopted no-fault divorce as the other forty-nine states already had. Somehow the Church had lost its influence. I began writing about my experiences. I cofounded a volunteer bipartisan organization to advocate for divorce reform. Meanwhile, my children grew up. When I could no longer afford the mortgage, I sold my house, moved, and started over.

In December 2018, I converted to Catholicism. When a Catholic college friend heard the news, she texted to say I’d need an annulment to marry again. After years of heartache and hardship, I hoped a faithful midlife partner would come along. No one had. Still, my friend’s revelation stunned me. Surely, Church teachings about the permanency of marriage didn’t apply to me retroactively. My ex and I weren’t Catholic. I was a Baptist when I married my Jewish ex-husband, an Episcopalian when we divorced. We exchanged vows in a Protestant church. Catholicism came decades later.

My parish priest confirmed what my Catholic friend had told me. He handed me a twenty-five-page questionnaire to initiate the annulment process. It included questions about our marriage, divorce, and children. It asked specifics about our formative years, relationships with parents and siblings, and what we’d been taught about marriage, family, alcohol, and drugs. It sought details about our courtship, engagement, and wedding, down to the frequency of dates, nature of our disagreements, and sexual activity. Ironically, as the “petitioner” in an annulment case, this time I’d be the plaintiff. Annulment wouldn’t render my children illegitimate, the priest said. That made no sense to me. But okay. Despite prevailing myths, the cost of the annulment would be negligible. (My divorce lawyer had handed me a legal bill for six figures.) The “defect” required to invalidate our marriage must have existed at the time of the ceremony—four decades ago—thus preventing the necessary marital consent.

I began researching possible grounds. Had my ex-husband been intoxicated with alcohol during the ceremony? No. Impotent? No. Had he married not intending that the marriage exist forever? Not that I knew of. No homosexuality. No epilepsy. We weren’t blood relatives. Had my ex-husband suffered from an underlying psychological disorder preventing fulfillment of his marital promises? From impairments not initially obvious, like mental illness, addictions, or narcissistic and sociopathic personalities that became evident only during the marriage? If so, I’d need affidavits from corroborating witnesses. My family had never lived close by. They’d be no help, and I couldn’t envision most of them wanting to get involved in such a mess anyway. My parents would have rushed to my aid, but they were both dead. Most of my ex-husband’s family members were dead, too, and one lived abroad. Was I really expected to track down his old friends and pressure them to sign an affidavit against him?

The inquiry was becoming uncomfortable. My ex-husband would also be entitled to receive copies of all papers and could oppose the annulment. Having sued me for divorce and already remarried, maybe he couldn’t care less. But then again, we’d been through the War of the Roses. I was petrified that anything questioning his character—even for the sake of an annulment—might renew his wrath. For years, therapists and friends had warned me not to contact him. I’d ignored them early on, wanting to save my marriage. Finally, I’d listened, and it was only then that I was able to recover.

There was another problem. A declaration of nullity would mean that my marriage would be technically erased. How could that be? I had loved my husband and still loved the family we’d created. How could I accept the fact that the union I’d fought to preserve had never been a real marriage in the first place? Granted, I married in my twenties. Caught up in the whirlwind of a nine-month courtship, had I even known what “forever” meant? It’s hard to remember that far back, but I believe I did. At the time, there had never been a divorce in my family. I’d watched the ups and downs in the marriages of parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles, and their reliance on God to see them through. They’d been my role models. If my ex-husband hadn’t left, we’d still be married in the eyes of the law and the Church. Annulment felt like getting off on some technicality. That felt wrong. It cheapened my marriage, even if the Church believed I was entitled to an annulment.

I spoke with my parish priest again. There was no rush, he said. I was headed for surgery that fall, so why not take some time to think it over, he suggested. “What about the Petrine privilege?” I asked. I’d stumbled across the reference during my research. Codified in the Church’s Canon Law 1150, it applies to marriages between Christians and non-Christians. “It’s called a petition in favor of the faith,” the priest said. A rarely used avenue, it takes longer than an annulment. That didn’t bother me. The petition must be presented in Rome to Pope Francis himself or someone acting on his behalf. Such petitions go back to the time of St. Peter, hence the name, and they have been granted by popes throughout history. The early Church believed that only two baptized persons could form a sacramental union. I was baptized; my husband wasn’t. Dissolving a marriage like ours had been seen as a way of preserving the faith of a new convert like me. It would also allow my marriage to remain recognized.

Instead of an annulment, I’d essentially receive a Catholic “divorce.” Having done what I could to preserve my marriage, I liked thinking that its dissolution would have been blessed by the early Church and could be administered by Peter’s own successor. I’m not a canon lawyer or scholar, but I’d also come across a reference to a statement made by Pope Pius XII to the Roman Rota in 1941 that seemed to support my view. He’d quoted Matthew 19:6: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” And then he added, “that is to say, not man but God can put asunder.” Didn’t the pope often act in persona Christi? Didn’t Christ tell his disciples, “Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven”? It seemed to me that if my union wouldn’t have been considered sacramental in the early Church, then its dissolution shouldn’t violate Catholic doctrine either. This was closure I could accept. I wanted to get started as soon as possible. My priest sent me an application.

I went home and opened my Catechism, eager to read more about marriage. The Catechism describes two aspects of marriage: the mutual and exclusive love and affection of spouses, and the transmission of life, through which marriage “finds its crowning glory.” I definitely considered my daughters “supreme gifts.” Perhaps my ex-husband and I got that part right.

I had always thought of marriage as sacred, but I began to view it in a deeper way. God had created marriage for my good, for the fulfillment of my highest potential. I’d never experienced this spiritual communion in which the Divine Creator was present, where spouses committed themselves “totally.” I can’t say I’d ever given myself totally to anyone like that. And what would it feel like to receive the exquisite gift of someone giving themselves completely and absolutely to me in the presence of the Holy Spirit? This biblical call to love one another was something else entirely, a “mystery,” as the Catechism put it, mirroring God’s own irrevocable love for me. This was mind-blowing. I wept. Perhaps I, too, would have another chance to experience this kind of marriage, but not unless the Church granted my petition.

But before I’d even finished filling out the petition, my parish priest phoned to say that the privilege wasn’t available to me after all—not until I, a woman the Church still considered married, got engaged first. It instantly reminded me of that last judge, the one who’d advised me to find myself a boyfriend. My ex-husband had betrayed our marriage and gotten engaged well before we divorced. I had to do what he’d done in order to apply for the Petrine privilege.

Why do Church rules seem to dovetail with the advice of family-court judges and the example of adulterers? Where is the fairness or mercy in that? And if the purpose of the Petrine privilege is to preserve my faith, why do the rules now seem to threaten it? As a convert, I struggle with these rules; they seem perverse, senseless, and cruel.

In 2022, my ex-husband and I would have celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary. We’ve been apart now as long as we were together. Accepting the Church’s view that I’m still married feels like being forced to live a lie after years of mustering the courage to finally start over.

Beverly Willett April 10, 2024

God or Trump?

Thomas Geoghegan — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:40:31 +0000

God or Trump?

“God made Trump.” So Trump’s platform, Truth Social, now declares. And He made him for a divinely appointed mission. This is actually the more discreet form of the new blasphemy. Some of the former president’s base now treat him like the son of God. It is a mistake to see Trump only as a political leader. In 2024, he is also a cult for Evangelicals who no longer want to be Christians or churchgoers constrained by the Bible or a community of fellow believers. He has liberated them from the Bible, or from biblical morality, which is evidently too great a burden. Their new religion consists of participating in ritual acts where Trump tramples on that old morality in some new and shocking way, intoxicating his supporters with the thought that they, too, are now free to trample on these values.

In a January 11 front-page story published just before the Iowa caucus, the New York Times described these Evangelicals who no longer go to church and instead religiously follow Trump, who never goes to church. Given that Trump’s appeal is all about resentment, something like this was bound to happen. Like elite education, biblical morality was just one more thing about which Trump’s followers could be made to feel bad or looked down upon. So many of them are enraged at being judged, even by the Sermon on the Mount. I was a stranger and you welcomed me? That sounds like Biden. Even if such biblical morality is by now much weaker than it once was, it is still there, as an irritant. Trump relieves his followers of this sense of shame. By elevating a leader who violates every commandment, MAGA has become a new religion—and like any other new religion, it has created a burst of energy. The old Evangelical Christianity was not quite the right vehicle for Trump. Its replacement is better because it excises the moral element altogether.

Erik Erikson’s classic religious study, Young Man Luther, argues that a new religious leader can arise by working out an identity crisis in the culture. Of course, Trump is no Luther, and he is certainly not working through any religious crisis of his own. But his cult ends the embarrassment of following Jesus, of taking as a model someone whose mission ended in failure, and whom Trump would call a loser. Instead of following Jesus the loser, Trump’s followers seek someone who can win “bigly,” and claim to have won even when he’s lost. It’s in Trump’s interest that his supporters leave the churches. Doing so strips them of even the small social capital that comes from attending church. He wants them isolated, with no connection to each other, and with no trust in anyone but him.

Tocqueville famously celebrated American individualism. But Tocqueville believed it was biblical morality that kept this individualism from going off the rails. He was worried that, without our churches, we would become so isolated from each other that we could no longer govern ourselves. He warned it would be difficult to operate free institutions without certain “habits of the heart” that came not just from engagement in New England town meetings but from biblical religion. The same warning was taken up by Robert Bellah and his colleagues at Berkeley in the Reagan-era classic Habits of the Heart (1985). By then, the individualism that had worried Tocqueville in the 1830s had gone much further, while biblical morality had become much weaker. Using interviews with ordinary Americans, Bellah and his colleagues tried to show that even decent people had trouble explaining their generous impulses as anything other than a form of individualism; even an act of charity could be justified only as a form of self-care. At the same time, Bellah and his colleagues argued that Americans were becoming more isolated from each other, especially as they left their churches. In the decades since the publication of Habits of the Heart, that isolation, especially in Trump country, has gone much further. This isn’t just because people are losing trust in our institutions, but because, even in Trump country, people have lost their trust in each other. The House GOP majority is a case in point: it does not trust itself. Members of the House Freedom Caucus don’t even trust each other. Like Trump himself, they all see political treason everywhere. Yes, the Evangelical churches are emptying out partly because of pressures from the surrounding secular culture, and partly because these churches are just political anyway—and so there is no longer any need for them as churches. But it’s also partly because of the increasing isolation and distrust evident everywhere in this country. Voter after voter in the Times article looked forward to Trump assuming absolute power so he could save them from their fellow citizens.

As Tocqueville made clear, our New World equality had its dangers. If we Americans became so isolated from each other that we were incapable of running free institutions, we might easily turn to a dictator. As he might have pointed out if he were with us today, the emptying out of the churches in the New World took longer than in the Old World, but it is more politically destabilizing here than it has been over there. People in rural Iowa now want the Leviathan. How ironic that a republic conceived in a distrust of concentrated power by Federalist and anti-Federalist alike would now have so many hoping for a strongman to protect them from their neighbors. If there is hysteria over migrants, who seem so far off, it is because they are stand-ins for people living next door, or down the street, or in those blue states far away. Unable to act, the MAGA base has decided there is no alternative but to vest absolute power in Trump. And if people are really incapable of operating free institutions, what’s the point of keeping them? Both the House and the Senate are bogged down by gridlock. The House Freedom Caucus, which revels in dysfunction, seems by its very existence to make the case for someone who can dispense with the niceties of democracy and get things done. Of course, that someone is Trump.

Tocqueville wrote, “It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo American society. In the United States religion is therefore commingled with all the habits of the nation and all the feelings of patriotism; whence it derives a peculiar force.” Well, we have forgotten. The Left has forgotten; the Right has, too. Now that Trump himself has become a kind of religious leader, he is liquidating the authority of Evangelical ministers. There is no longer any need for them, as they merely offer more secular political ideology, and as Trumpism itself has become more like a real religion. The secular Left may take satisfaction in Trump wiping out the churches, but they shouldn’t: Trump grows stronger by atomizing everything around him and leaving his supporters with no alternative to him. This makes him a bigger threat.

As a Catholic, I can take some comfort in the fact that Trump has yet to liquidate the U.S. Catholic Church. To the extent that right-wing Catholicism has also become a kind of secular political ideology, one centered on the issues of abortion and sexuality, you might expect some conservative Catholics to dispense with the Church, too. After all, once you’ve joined the church of Trump, God’s anointed, there is no longer any need for the Church or the bishops, many of whom have given Trump their indirect blessing. These bishops might come to rue their pact with Trump, who took them up to the mountaintop and showed them all the kingdoms of the world, including the U.S. Supreme Court, and promised them power over it. They just had to support him—it didn’t have to be too obvious—and so they lifted their clerical robes and did.

Of course, the bishops got nothing for any of this. Even the repeal of Roe was pointless. The number of abortions is up because people are more insecure. And what the bishops did not bargain for was Trump offering himself as an object of religious devotion, a new god for a new faithful. He is not fully there yet, but he is on the way, and this idol is being funded by alumni of Notre Dame. How are the bishops supporting Trump? First, they are pushing out Catholics who are anti-Trump. This is a terrible thing all by itself. As a friend of mine puts it, “They are depriving people of the consolations of the Church.” This is just what appalls Pope Francis. But what the bishops fail to realize is that as the Catholic Church gets smaller, Trump gets bigger. The weaker the Left—and the center—becomes within the Church, the more vulnerable the Right becomes to capture.

Two years ago, I read a book by Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. At that time, Egan was still writing a weekly column for the New York Times. He was well known for books on American history, such as The Worst Hard Time, a history of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. This book was different. In A Pilgrimage to Eternity, an account of his footsore walk across Europe, Egan confronts his own Catholic past and mulls over why he left the Church. This is not St. Augustine’s Confessions, or even a true spiritual autobiography; Egan seems more like a workaday reporter reporting on himself. Still, it was a puzzle why he was doing this long walk in the first place. Sure, maybe in midlife, Egan was just in a dark wood, like Dante at the start of The Divine Comedy. But it wasn’t clear to me just why he was in a dark wood. Then he made a passing reference to Trump, and all at once I knew: “He is doing it because of Trump.” Yes, that was it! Trump was president when Egan made this walk, and Egan was looking for an explanation. He wasn’t able to understand. I’m not able to understand. Secular humanism does not understand. Nevertheless, there is an increasing use of the word “evil” on the Left. As a Catholic friend of mine says, “It’s interesting, under Trump, how people we know, not Catholic, are using what is a religious term.”

At Easter, it is customary for the priest to lead the congregation in renewing their baptismal vows. “Do you believe in God?” “I do.” And so on. Call and response. Then comes:

“Do you renounce Satan and all his works?”

“I do!”

I now like to add, prayerfully: “And I didn’t vote for him in the last election!”

Though I haven’t walked to Rome like Egan, I have done one thing I once would have found it hard to believe I’d ever do: pray for my country. It’s like praying for the New York Yankees or giving money to Harvard Law School. Sure, maybe pray for poor Botswana, or El Salvador, or the homeless in my own city, but not for the overweight, overprivileged, hard-hearted United States, richest country in the world. Well, I do pray for it now. It’s in a dark place and maybe headed to some place darker. Even if Trump loses this fall, there may soon be someone worse than him.

At least as a liberal Catholic, I can enjoy having, however fleetingly, both the president and the pope that I want. It reminds me of my childhood, when a liberal Catholic (Kennedy) was president, and a liberal Catholic (John XXIII) was pope. I’m back in the sixth grade. Yes, it’s too bad that both will soon be gone. But that was also true back then. And it is also true for me. For now, Biden and Francis have at least one thing in common. Both are confronting a religious crisis. This is not your grandfather’s gerontocracy. These old guys can’t just be caretakers; they have to take on prophetic work. Each in his own way needs to start a “project state.” I take this term from a history of the twentieth century by the Harvard historian Charles Maier, The Project-State and Its Rivals (2023). It’s a term for certain periods during the twentieth century when the state—whether it was the United States in the New Deal or totalitarian regimes abroad—was trying not just to govern but to change the moral character of its citizens. That’s what Biden would like to do: restore the moral character of the United States in which he grew up, a country in which religion still helped to form our patriotism. A country Tocqueville might still have recognized. But even if Biden himself still goes to church—sometimes even in the middle of the week—most of the rest of us are not going. Like it or not, 2016 marked a decisive break in our history. The old balance that worked in Tocqueville’s America and was still working, more or less, ten years ago, now seems to be gone. This balance meant that even some GOP politicians could work as responsible members of an opposition party, capable of bipartisanship. But it’s gone, and will be for a long time, perhaps forever. It is now too late to heed the warning of Bellah and others. We have had the crash they were predicting—a complete loss of our shared moral compass, a demonstrated incapacity to govern ourselves. Maier’s title includes both the project state and its rivals, and its biggest rival is capitalism, which changes moral character too. Such a change gave rise to Trump, who is taking the change further still. It is Trump, not Biden, who has been more successful in shaping the moral character of the American people.

That’s not to say all is lost. After all, there is prayer. And, of course, even as Trump’s base has grown, a majority or near majority resist. But those who resist need a “project state” to counter Trump’s, one that will make all of us better people—a better people. The pope seems to be ahead of Biden in recognizing there must be a new way of moral engagement in a culture that has long ceased to be in any way Christian or even religious. It seems to me that Pope Francis has at least two big ideas.

The first is to live and let live—not to proselytize, but to accept that we are no better than others and leave them to make the best decisions they can for themselves. It is to stop being so clerical and hierarchy-ridden and go out to where people are to serve them, not to convert them. That’s the project for the Church, and it should also be, in a different form, the project for the Left and those who resist Trump.

The second big idea is to think of religion in a new way, a way that adds a religious obligation to protect nature and to oppose capitalism in order to preserve the beauty of the world. In a secular culture, this is the way people are most likely to apprehend God. In some secular form, this should be our new FDR-like project of the state, too: to make America great again by preserving its amber waves of grain. This would be a patriotism based not on the marvel of our Constitution, which is no longer a marvel, or on the old boast of being the world’s leading democracy, which we are not, but on loyalty to the land we share.

But not just to the land, also to each other. In this increasingly secular culture, we still have to smuggle back in some kind of religion that is not the worship of power, or of Trump. True religion, St. James writes, is caring for widows and orphans in their distress and keeping oneself unspotted from the world. It is a self-sacrificing love, generosity, forgiveness, to check our off-the-charts individualism. Trump, and our response to him, seem to have cut the last tie with this kind of religion. And that’s why, for the first time in my life, and to my surprise, I find myself praying for our country.

Thomas Geoghegan April 8, 2024

The Theology of Social Democracy

Anthony Annett — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 17:25:04 +0000

The Theology of Social Democracy

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Social democracy might well be the most successful economic project in history. During its heyday—the three decades following the Second World War on both sides of the Atlantic—it led to high productivity, economic growth, full employment, low inequality, and very few financial crises. Political and economic institutions made sure that rising prosperity benefitted all classes in society. The time has come to rehabilitate this economic model for our era. And just as in the middle of the twentieth century, Catholic social teaching can help provide a moral framework for this model.

What do I mean by social democracy? I mean an economic system predicated on the belief that an economy must be underpinned not only by property rights but also by economic rights. More concretely, in a social democracy, the government supplies public goods, uses the welfare state to protect people from adverse economic circumstances, and promotes unions to make sure that workers can bargain for their fair share of economic progress.

One could say that social democracy seeks, however imperfectly, to make operational Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That Article spells out the economic rights that should be afforded to all people: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” In this, social democracy guarantees a standard of living sufficient for all to be able to participate in the economic and social life of the nation. Recognizing that market income is often inadequate for that purpose, social democracy insists on an active role for government.

This expansive rights-based approach can be contrasted with the approach of free-market economics or economic libertarianism. Under those two systems, the only rights recognized are property rights. A free-market system might allow for a minimal social safety net to prevent outright destitution, but nothing more than that. There is certainly no sense of a common obligation to support the well-being of all. And there is no “right” to an adequate standard of living. Free market theorists such as Friedrich Hayek were quite clear about that.

In one sense, free-market ideology harks back to Adam Smith’s key insight that the “invisible hand” of the market would harness the power of self-interest, market competition, and the division of labor to produce ever-increasing prosperity—“the wealth of nations.” This ideology can also be traced back to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that property rights were the only rights that mattered, and that the proper role of government was just to protect those rights.

It’s true that markets are quite good at creating wealth. The problem is that they are quite poor at distributing it. Smith wasn’t much interested in questions about poverty or the distribution of income; he merely assumed that the market economy would lift all boats. But this simply isn’t the case. As Pope Francis has reminded us, a market economy is compatible with vast amounts of inequality and exclusion.

The Catholic social tradition starts with this key recognition. Beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum in 1891, it condemned the excesses of economic liberalism during the Industrial Revolution. It called for the state to protect the poor and workers. It called for just wages, and insisted that workers should be able to form labor unions that could bargain on their behalf.

From its earliest days, Catholic social teaching forged a middle path between free-market libertarianism and socialist collectivism. Pope Pius XI condemned these two extremes as the “twin rocks of shipwreck” in his encyclical Quadragesimo anno. It’s important to note that when Catholic social teaching condemns socialism, it is referring to the collective ownership of the means of production and the total abolition of private property. But Pius also condemned an economic system based on a “free competition of forces.” Such a system, he claimed, reflected the “errors of individualist economic thinking.” Accordingly, economic life must be “subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle.” By this, he clearly meant the state.

We should not infer from this condemnation that early Catholic social teaching favored social democracy. What Leo XIII and Pius XI leaned toward were systems known as distributism and corporatism. Distributism is based on the dispersed ownership of private property. For Leo, if every person held a small amount of property, this would ensure harmony between the classes and promote material sufficiency. Corporatism, which was favored by Pius, is based on the division of society into functional groups comprising both employers and workers. The assumption was that these groups would together pursue the common good under the general direction of the state.

The problem with both distributism and corporatism is that, despite their nostalgic appeal, they are no longer practical. Distributism looks back to a world of smallholder farmers, increasingly anachronistic in the industrial age. Corporatism appeals to the medieval guild system, which also seems hopelessly out of date. There were some experiments with corporatism in a number of Catholic countries in the interwar years, including Austria, Italy, and Portugal. The general consensus is that they were not successful. And corporatism was forever tainted by its association with authoritarian regimes.

As James Chappel shows in his book Catholic Modern, the intellectual ground began to shift decisively in the 1930s. During that period, Catholics became more comfortable with both democracy and state involvement in the economy. The shift began with a movement Chappel calls “paternal Catholicism,” which sought to protect families and assumed they would have a single breadwinner. “Paternal Catholicism” supported such policies as the provision of family benefits and the promotion of industrial unions. It was fiercely opposed to Communism, while recognizing that Communism was offering something to workers, and that the offer needed to be countered. Along with “paternal Catholicism,” Chappel documents a parallel movement that he refers to as “fraternal Catholicism.” This was more left-wing, more supportive of larger welfare states, and more open to tactical alliances with socialists and secular social democrats. In the early postwar years, “paternal Catholicism” was ascendent, but “fraternal Catholicism” also exerted an influence. By the 1950s, both movements had come together with the goal of supporting what Chappel calls the “consuming family” in a new age of affluence.

That was the golden era of postwar Christian democracy. And in the domain of economics, it aligned with secular social democracy. But the sources of these economic models were different. Christian democracy derived from Catholic social teaching. It was especially influenced by thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and the “personalists,” with their emphasis on human dignity. Secular social democracy, on the other hand, had its roots in revisionary socialism. Theorists like Eduard Bernstein sought to replace the Marxist insistence on the inevitability of revolution with an emphasis on social reforms within the democratic system. Apart from their origins, there were other notable differences between Christian and social democracy. Christian democracy was concerned with protecting and promoting the traditional family as the basic unit of society, whereas secular social democracy—especially in Scandinavia—focused on the provision of universal social benefits. But there was also a significant overlap: both Christian democracy and social democracy built large welfare states and empowered unions as bulwarks against excessive corporate power. It is for this reason that I use “social democracy” as an encompassing term that includes Christian democracy.

It is commonly believed that the twin pillars of social democracy—the welfare state and strong unions—were more solid under secular social democracy than under the more conservative Christian democracy. But this assumption is wrong. Over this period, social spending—in such areas as education, health care, old-age pensions, incapacity-related benefits, family support, unemployment benefits, active labor-market policies, and housing support—was just as high in the Christian-democratic heartland of France, Germany, Italy, and Austria as in classic secular social democracies such as Sweden and Denmark. This social spending was paid for with high taxes, which sharply increased during the postwar years.

The same holds true for labor: unions became as dominant in countries like France and Germany as in Scandinavia. This can be measured in collective-bargaining coverage—the percentage of workers under a collective-bargaining agreement (whether or not they’re union members). Coverage reached 98 percent in France and Austria, and 90 percent in Sweden. This highlights the role played by sectoral bargaining, whereby collective bargaining agreements are extended to all workers in a particular sector or industry. Countries like Germany and Austria went even further in promoting workers’ rights by putting in place systems of codetermination, whereby workers are given a share in the governance and management of the companies they work for.

The United States never had this kind of Christian- or social-democratic tradition, but the New Deal order mirrored some of its elements. The New Deal order encompasses the original New Deal instituted by Franklin Roosevelt as well as its extension by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. This order limited the excesses of the market, sought just and harmonious industrial relations, and protected people from a variety of market risks. The broad contours of the New Deal order were accepted by both political parties during the postwar years, and they even informed the settlement imposed on Germany and Japan after their defeat in the Second World War.

Nonetheless, social democracy in the United States always had a more limited range than in Europe. Here, the welfare state was less generous. When it came to organized labor, the United States never really embraced sectoral bargaining; labor negotiations took place primarily at the level of the individual employer. Even so, in 1950, the famous Treaty of Detroit secured autoworkers a share in the country’s rising prosperity. Since then, however, American corporations have become notably more hostile to worker interests, and today, only six percent of private-sector workers belong to a union, down from a postwar high of almost a third.

The alignment between Catholic social teaching and social democracy would never have happened without significant developments within Catholicism itself—especially the Second Vatican Council and its pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et spes. It was in the Council that the Church finally made peace with the liberal democratic state.

I would argue that, in keeping with this relatively new acceptance of democracy, the key principles of Catholic social teaching now point toward social democracy in the economic order. These principles include the common good, integral human development, solidarity, subsidiarity, reciprocity and gratuitousness, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, economic rights, and norms of justice.

The “common good” is the most important concept in Catholic social teaching. In his encyclical Laudato si’, Pope Francis calls it a “central and unifying principle of social ethics.” The common good is the good of “all of us,” a reflection of our nature as social animals. Gaudium et spes defines it as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” This has clear relevance for the role of the state in economic life. In his encyclical Mater et magistra, Pope John XXIII stressed that the state’s purpose was the realization of the common good, which meant that it sometimes had to intervene in economic affairs. Contrary to free-market ideology, the Church teaches that nobody can be excluded from the common good.

The common good is closely related to another key principle of Catholic social teaching: integral human development. This concept is associated with Pope Paul VI and his encyclical Populorum progressio. Integral human development means the development of the whole person and of all people. It entails a broader notion of human development than the merely material, seeking the fullest development of each person’s capabilities. Thus, the idea of integral human development is more expansive than social democracy, but social democracy is certainly nested within it. This is because the fullest development of human capabilities depends on certain material conditions—physical and economic security; access to food, housing, health care, and education; opportunities for decent and rewarding work; and a sustainable natural environment.

Solidarity, another key principle of Catholic social teaching, is defined by Pope John Paul II in Sollicitudo rei socialis as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.” A welfare state embodies this collective responsibility for furthering the well-being of all, especially the weak and vulnerable. Unions are another expression of solidarity.

The principle of subsidiarity is often paired with solidarity. Some Catholics have argued that subsidiarity requires that the state take a hands-off approach to economic life. This isn’t quite right. Subsidiarity means that higher-level associations like the state must actively help and support lower-level associations like families, unions, and civil-society organizations. As Pope Francis puts it, subsidiarity means that “when single individuals, families, small associations and local communities are not capable of achieving primary objectives, it is right that the highest levels of society, such as the State, should intervene to provide the resources necessary to progress.” This is why unions, for example, are—as Pope John Paul II put it in his encyclical Laborem exercens—indispensable elements of social life. But there are still things that only a state can do to help individuals and families.

Obviously, the state should not provide this help in a demeaning or overly bureaucratic manner, or in a way that hinders the agency of the people being helped. Pope John Paul II warned about “malfunctions and defects” of the welfare state when subsidiarity is not respected. There are a number of ways to avoid this pitfall. One is to resist onerous and intrusive conditions for welfare that stigmatize the beneficiary. Another is to avoid “poverty traps,” where workers are actually discouraged from taking a job or working more hours because of the loss of benefits. Hence, the advantage of universal benefits as a right of citizenship, supplemented but not replaced by cash transfers for those who need them. Another way the welfare state can respect subsidiarity is the so-called “Ghent system,” whereby unions are in charge of dispersing social insurance (even if the funding ultimately comes from the government).

That brings us to reciprocity and gratuitousness, principles most associated with Pope Benedict XVI and his encyclical Caritas in veritate. Benedict thought that fraternity, not self-interest, should be at the heart of economic activity, and that real fraternity required a willingness to give to others without expecting anything in return—gratuitousness. As for reciprocity, it turns out that selfishness is not the only important motivator in human psychology. In contrast to transactional relationships—what you give me, now or soon, in return for what I give you—reciprocity involves and fosters social trust by extending our relationship into the future: what I give you now is what I may need from you later. Or: what you give me now is what I may one day need to give someone else. This is the bedrock of any successful welfare state: everyone contributes (through taxes or social-security contributions) and everyone gets benefits (health care, education, or pensions). But what one gets back from the state may not always be the same as what one contributed. Instead, one gets what one needs.

Another central principle of Catholic social teaching is the universal destination of goods. Harking back to Scripture, the Church fathers, and St. Thomas Aquinas, this principle implies that the goods of the earth are destined for all people, not just the rich. Here is how Gaudium et spes explains it: “Man should regard the external things that he legitimately possesses not only as his own but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others.” This has direct relevance for economic life. Under a free-market system, what matters most is the right to private property. But as Pope Francis reminds us in Fratelli tutti, this is a secondary natural right, and it comes with what Pope John Paul II calls a “social mortgage.” Some have argued that the universal destination of goods is to be achieved only by means of private charity. People are called upon to voluntarily use their surplus to relieve the suffering of the less fortunate. This is not wrong, but it ignores the importance of institutions. Gaudium et spes states explicitly that it is the role of social institutions, not only individuals, to bring about the universal destination of goods in developed countries. And Pope Paul VI taught that when private-property rights clash with the needs of the community, it is up to public authorities to resolve the conflict. Thus, the universal destination of goods is compatible with the broad approach of social democracy, which treats the material resources of society as, in some sense, common. Ownership rights are provisional, not absolute or sacred, and taxation is not theft.

A related principle is the preferential option for the poor, which is utterly essential to the Christian worldview. It implies that public policies should be judged first and foremost by how they affect the poor and the excluded. Again, this is a marked departure from free-market economics, which favors those with the most resources. In this, the preferential option for the poor is closely related to John Rawls’s difference principle, which calls for the position of the least well-off to be maximized. Thus, the preferential option for the poor supports the efforts of a social democracy to relieve the plight of those in greatest need.

Catholic social teaching also makes room for economic rights (and does not reduce these to property rights). As we have seen, these economic rights are spelled out explicitly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the Church goes further, treating economic rights as the central rights, even before civil and political rights. Here is how Pope John XXIII describes these central rights in his 1963 encyclical, Pacem in terris:

Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of ill health; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood.

Pope John enumerates further economic rights, including the right to be given the opportunity to work, the right to just wages and a standard of living consistent with human dignity, and, yes, the right to private property—subject to the universal destination of goods. These rights mirror those listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they can be regarded as the core rights of social democracy.

This New Deal–era mural by Julius Woeltz, The Bauxite Mines, was originally installed in the Benton, Arkansas, post office in 1942 (Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons).

Finally, justice—which means giving people their due—is central to both Catholic social teaching and social democracy. John Rawls, for example, argued that justice was achieved through fairness, which means prioritizing the position of the least well-off. In Catholic social teaching, justice is regarded as a cardinal virtue and oriented toward the common good. There are various forms of justice. Commutative justice is the justice between two individuals. In economic life, it is the justice of contracts, agreements, and promises—and, as such, is accepted by all, including libertarians. Distributive justice is different. It refers to what the community owes the individual. This is the justice embedded in social democracy—and not accepted by libertarians. Finally, contributive justice refers to what the individual owes to the community. In Catholic social teaching, every right is attached to a corresponding duty. It is worth noting that the concept of duty, as opposed to mere contractual obligation, has no role to play in free-market economics.

Given this close alignment between the principles of Catholic social teaching and social democracy, it should come as no surprise when Pope Francis claims that the Church supports what he calls the “social market economy”:

I do not condemn capitalism in the way some attribute to me. Nor am I against the market [economy]. Rather, I am in favor of what John Paul II defined as a social economy of the market. This implies the presence of a regulatory authority, that is the state, which should mediate between the parties. It is a table with three legs: the state, capital, and work.

Pope Benedict XVI made an even stronger claim, arguing that “in many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

But social democracy didn’t last. It was replaced by something called neoliberalism, which sought to minimize the role of the state and organized labor in economic life and to let the private sector flourish and drive innovation. It was touted as a remedy for the economic malaise of the 1970s, a period of low growth and stubbornly high inflation. The social-democratic model seemed to have reached its expiration date, and something new was required.

But neoliberalism did not work as promised. Productivity and economic growth have both been lower in the neoliberal era than in the era of social democracy. The goal of full employment was cast aside. Inequality soared as a greater portion of the more modest economic growth went to those at the top of the income distribution. And deregulation caused global financial crises—most notably the Great Recession of 2008–2009.

We are now living with the social and political fallout from the failures of neoliberalism. In the United States, whole communities have been hollowed out, and life expectancy is actually falling among those without college degrees. On both sides of the Atlantic, economic precarity and anxiety are fueling the rise of far-right demagogues eager to burn down the last institutional vestiges of the postwar order. Hovering over everything is an environmental crisis for which there seem to be no adequate political solutions. The common good is the great casualty of the neoliberal era.

All of this calls for a return to social democracy. But the social democracy of the future can’t just be a carbon copy of the past. It must be attuned to the particular challenges and circumstances of our time, and I believe the principles of Catholic social teaching can help with that new attunement.

The two original pillars of social democracy were the welfare state and labor power. We need to restore both of those. We need a robust welfare state—funded by taxes on income, wealth, and inheritance—to protect people from economic dislocation and guarantee their basic economic rights. And we need to boost the power of organized labor, especially in the United States. These two pillars of social democracy will need to be supplemented by two newer ones: workplace democracy and decarbonization.

The combination of the shift to a predominantly service-based economy with the deployment of advanced technologies throughout the workplace has led to less worker autonomy and more monitoring and surveillance by employers. Workers need to take back some element of control and responsibility. To that end, there has been growing interest in workplace democracy in recent years. The economist Thomas Piketty has attributed the collapse of social democracy partly to the fact that workplace democracy has failed to expand much beyond Germany and a few other countries. And in a recent book on the contemporary relevance of John Rawls titled Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, the economist Daniel Chandler argues that Rawls’s famous “difference principle” implies that workers have the right to participate in decision-making. According to Chandler, respecting this right would lead to more meaningful work, which is a vital source of self-respect.

The idea of workplace democracy—where workers have a share in both the ownership and the management of the companies that employ them—is deeply embedded in Catholic social teaching. This is spelled out in Gaudium et spes, which stresses that “the active sharing of all in the administration and profits of these enterprises in ways to be properly determined is to be promoted.” In his encyclical Laborem exercens, Pope John Paul II promotes what he calls the socialization (as opposed to the collectivization) of the means of production: “On the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part-owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else.”

What would workplace democracy look like in practice? One obvious model is the worker cooperative. Successful examples include Mondragon in Spain and La Lega in Italy. Yet worker cooperatives have gained surprisingly little traction beyond these famous examples. Another model is codetermination, in which workers are represented on boards of directors. Several European countries grant workers this kind of representation, but none go as far as Germany, where half of the board members at large firms are chosen by workers. In general, codetermination induces firms to place less weight on the interests of shareholders. It leads to higher productivity, lower wage inequality, and more family-friendly policies. Codetermination could also be expanded to include work councils that allow workers and management to make joint decisions on day-to-day issues. The right to bargain over wages would remain with unions, however. There could also be more profit-sharing arrangements, based on clear and transparent formulae. In France, half of all private-sector workers have access to such profit-sharing systems. Alternatively, the employees of a company could own more of its shares. Such a system could ultimately lead to majority worker ownership.

The second new pillar of social democracy must be decarbonization. This is the great challenge of our time. The massive amount of energy produced by burning fossil fuels has powered the Industrial Revolution and the tremendous economic progress of the past few centuries. But we now know that burning fossil fuels is undermining the conditions for human flourishing by causing global temperatures to rise to dangerous levels. Unless we find a way to stop it, climate change will have devastating consequences for the economy, especially among the world’s poor. Indeed, low-income countries, especially in Africa, are already facing some of the worst effects of climate change: droughts, floods, and lower crop yields. This was not a central concern for social democracy in the twentieth century, but it must be in the twenty-first.

Keeping the rise in global temperatures below the danger zone—no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—will require a complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050. This is consistent with the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Instead of burning oil, coal, and gas, the global economy will need to be powered entirely by renewable energy. This will amount to the largest economic transformation in human history over the shortest period of time. It is a daunting task. The reason I include decarbonization as one of the new pillars of social democracy is that it will not be accomplished by the free market. Rather, it will require the guiding hand of government—through large-scale public investment and public–private partnerships. It will require extensive industrial policy, whereby the government subsidizes entire sectors of the economy.

The original social-democratic era did indeed engage in this kind of planning and industrial policy. The experience of the postwar United States is instructive here. Government investment stimulated many technological advances, including the development of the internet and the human genome project. Consider the space industry. In 1961, John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. At the time he said that, only one American astronaut had gone to space and only for a few minutes. But eight years later, that goal was accomplished. It is precisely this kind of goal-based development, backed by the immense resources of both government and private industry, that is needed to decarbonize the global economy by the middle of this century. Technological and financial resources will need to be guided in directions different from those determined only by the free market.

Catholic social teaching can help us develop the moral capital to make this difficult transition. It is no accident that Pope Francis has made climate change one of the priorities of his papacy. His encyclical Laudato si’ helped guide the global community toward the Paris Agreement. Last fall, he issued an unprecedented follow-up to this encyclical, an apostolic exhortation titled Laudate Deum. In Laudato si’, Pope Francis formulated the newest principle of Catholic social teaching—integral ecology. This principle reminds us that the relationships between human beings and the natural world are interconnected and part of a larger whole. Accordingly, if we upset the balance of nature, we upset the conditions for human flourishing, especially for the poor. Climate change is not just an environmental problem, but also a social one. And it is a mistake to assume that all social problems will be solved for us by the free market.

Building a new kind of social democracy will require an agreement on the basics between the Right and Left. That, after all, was the secret of the original social-democratic moment in the postwar era. It is worth noting that the politics of early postwar years in countries such as France, Germany, and Italy were dominated by center-right parties. The political Left had little influence there. Yet, these center-right parties built up the economic edifice of Christian democracy—welfare states, strong unions, and codetermination. (The Left did hold power in Scandinavia, which developed its own, more ambitious kind of social democracy.) In any case, there was a strong alignment between Christian democrats and social democrats on economics in those early postwar years. In the United States, too, the basic contours of the New Deal order were accepted and endorsed by Republican presidents such as Eisenhower and Nixon.

Can this model be restored and adapted in our own time—a time marked by deep partisanship and rancor? I believe it is possible. The political Left would need to return to its working-class roots, moving away from the politics of culture and identity—the politics favored by educated elites. The political Right, meanwhile, would need to rediscover the successes of Christian democracy, and turn away from neoliberalism and climate-change denialism. Despite growing polarization on culture-war issues, there are a few hopeful signs of this kind of right-left alliance in the domain of economic policy, a few green shoots amid the ashes of our burnt-out political culture. Given the challenges we and the planet face, it is no exaggeration to say that the future may depend on these shoots growing into something more.

Anthony Annett April 5, 2024

A New Era in Poland?

Lauren Kane — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:18:03 +0000

A New Era in Poland?

A week or so before I was due to travel to Warsaw, my text messages were filled with photos of Poland’s Independence Day. They had all the elements of your typical national celebration: streets dense with people, flags aloft over the heads of the crowd, and what appeared to be detonated smoke bombs tinting the dusk with chalky red and white, the colors of Poland’s flag. The photos recalled images I’d seen in the news from the rally on October 1, a gathering of nearly a million people just ahead of the elections that ousted the Law and Justice Party from power. While all the flags and colored smoke on November 11 commemorated Poland’s liberation from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and the establishment of the modern Polish state, this year they also seemed to celebrate an important new epoch that began in 1989: a collective movement toward, and excitement about, liberal democracy. While authoritarianism seems to be cresting in other European countries, Poland at this moment appeared to show the potential for a kind of populism that wasn’t right wing.

The official reason for my visit to Poland at the end of November was a conference organized by the philosophy department of the University of Warsaw. One of the conference’s organizers, Dr. Mikolaj Sławkowski-Rode, a friend of mine from when I was a visiting student in Oxford ten years ago, now runs a fellowship program for postgraduate students from central and eastern Europe. There were presentations on various topics by the faculty at Warsaw—one on artificial intelligence and whether it can do satisfactory theology, another on evil as a “thick” moral concept. (My own presentation was on the lowly subject of publishing in magazines.) The University of Warsaw’s philosophy department is housed on the wide main street running through campus, which is lined with exquisite baroque buildings. Inside the building are dark wood staircases, long hallways, and seminar rooms with actual chalkboards. Next door is the Church of the Holy Cross, where Frédéric Chopin’s heart is interred.

Both the church and most of the university, established in 1816, are typical of the city’s monumental architecture. Warsaw was largely obliterated during the Second World War, so buildings in the city that look older than 1945 are often reconstructed copies of the original. The result can be uncanny: buildings that look old but are ever so slightly too pristine. Yet there is something poignant about Warsaw’s efforts to preserve and, when necessary, rebuild the symbols of its past glory. In the Old Town district, for example, the Sigismund’s Column, which honors the king who moved the Polish capital from Kraków to Warsaw, is such a point of pride that the ruined column on which the statue originally stood is displayed some two hundred feet from its replacement. So one is invited both to experience the place as though it were free from the pain of its past, and also to confront that pain as an experience of the city. Many such layers of Warsaw’s history are visible in its built environment. In the city’s commercial district, Centrum, looms Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science, illuminated at night by impressive purple lights. In the lobby, there is a long line for the elevator to the top of the building. Underneath the city run tunnels that were used by Communist Party officials, though they’re now flooded and out of use. There is even a rumor of an underground train rail running all the way from the palace to Moscow.

I was staying in Warsaw’s Praga neighborhood, which until recently was considered derelict and dangerous, and at one point a taxi driver did take a moment to warn me about it. Yet despite this reputation, it appeared to be comfortably gentrifying into a place of laptop-friendly cafés, hip bars with live music, community arts spaces, and a local theater. My first day there, I’m not sure I saw a single person over the age of forty. Not only were the people in Praga young, they were cool. The barista at a café named after Kafka was seated playing chess with a friend. When I approached the unattended counter to order a coffee, he was not in a hurry to leave his match. On Saturday night, a nearby bar packed a crowd into its back room to sip draft beer and sway to a very good synth-pop band.

The first night of the conference, there was a dinner for attendees at the restaurant on the first floor of the Royal Castle, Café Zamek. On the menu: beef carpaccio, cream of crawfish soup, and guinea-fowl breast cooked in krupnik (a kind of liqueur) and butter, with grape leaves and potatoes. The decor was cozy old-world—white tablecloths with florid lacy detailing, elaborately framed mirrors, and a general sense of dainty, aristocratic visual clutter. Afterward, a small group of us headed over to a party in the apartment of a visiting professor (an American, who ended the night with a sing-along to John Denver songs on his acoustic guitar). There I had a conversation with a new acquaintance, Bartosz Wesół, an occasional contributor to Poland’s own lefty Catholic magazine, Więź. The tenor of our conversation had that special intensity reserved for parties, but when we met again a few days later at a café (also named after Kafka), his tone was thoughtful and calm. The arc of his journey to Warsaw would sound familiar to many college-educated Americans: His parents’ generation is more conservative than he is. After a modest suburban upbringing, he arrived in the metropolitan capital for a university education and an academic career. As with most people in Poland, he was raised Catholic. When I ask how his relationship to Catholicism had changed over the course of his life or even the past few months, he seemed slightly unsure how to approach what seems to him a non-issue. He is on board with the socially liberal agenda of Poland’s new coalition government, and he is a practicing Catholic. The relationship between his religion and his politics does not appear to trouble him.

On another night, I get a chance to talk to Mikolaj over beers at a New York–themed bar just a short walk from the tony Żoliborz neighborhood, where he lives in an apartment with his wife and young son. Mikolaj was born shortly after martial law was decreed in 1981, and lived his first eight years under Communism. He remembers his parents and their circle “living and breathing the elections” in 1989. In his view, the decades since 1989 have been an economic success, but everything else in Poland has been “a colossal letdown.” Like other Poles I’ve spoken with, he suggests that the usual American interpretation of the recently ousted Law and Justice Party is only partially true. Yes, they are very socially conservative, especially with regard to issues important to the Catholic Church, such as abortion. But their economic policies have been largely social-democratic: generous state support for working families and lots of regulation.

Liberal democracy in Poland can be traced back to the Constitution of May 3, 1791. Widely considered the first European constitution, it’s a rousing document, declaring that Poland will be a land of religious freedom (with limits: Catholicism would remain the official national religion, and apostasy—that is, conversion from Catholicism to another religion—would remain illegal). It also declared that anyone who immigrated into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was immediately a free person, able to enter into contracts or learn a trade. Of course, a lot has happened since 1791: wars, shifting borders, long periods of subjugation by neighboring states. But the vague assumption, still common in the United States and other parts of Europe, that liberal democracy in Poland only began to take root after the end of the Cold War is a mistaken one. It is also possible to overdramatize last year’s October rally and to overstate the effects of last year’s elections. Poland has not changed overnight. In any case, much of the take-to-the-streets public discontent seems to have dissipated. The only public protest I saw in November was one person with a portable speaker making a long speech about abortion in front of a few curious bystanders.

Like young Americans, young Poles are renegotiating their relationship to religious values as they relate to issues such as abortion. But to judge from the conversations I had in Warsaw, the aspect of Polish life that nearly all Poles seem to take for granted is Catholicism. Even those who welcome the new government’s socially liberal agenda do not think of it as a matter of Polish society abandoning its traditional religion. Abortion, the political issue most obviously related to Catholic morality, remains a top-tier concern, and the new prime minister, Donald Tusk, seems to be gingerly testing abortion-law reforms that would please liberal voters without putting off the large bloc of swing voters for whom opposition to abortion remains a central feature of Polish Catholic identity. But for the most part, what I found during my brief time in Poland were people whose political engagement seemed unencumbered by their religious affiliation. In this way, at least, Poland seems quite different from the United States, where political and religious polarization are so closely intertwined. What’s perplexing to an American visitor is that the attachment to Catholicism in Poland is so pervasive, and yet it does not seem to result in the kind of partisan zeal we associate with the Religious Right in the United States.

In fact, Polish Catholics still seem to take their faith quite seriously. On Sunday, both the 9:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. Masses were packed at St. Florian the Martyr in Praga. If you weren’t on time—by which I mean early—you had to stand in the aisles flanking the nave, along with a lot of other people. The Mass-goers were both young and old; there were families, single people, and couples. On the afternoon of Sunday, November 24, the cobblestone streets leading toward the Old Town were crowded by a procession for the Feast of Christ the King. Formally called the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, the feast was established in 1925 by Pope Pius XI as a day to stave off impending secularism by publicly celebrating Christ’s dominion over all people, nations, governments. A procession through the streets is part of the observance (you can still see it in some American cities, too). The one in Warsaw went on and on. Hanging above the heads of the processing crowd were pictures of Christ wearing a crown of thorns, and banners with the colors of the Polish flag. I stood there watching for some time, then moved on before the end was in sight.

Lauren Kane April 2, 2024

Christianity in the Middle East

Joseph Phillip Amar — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:47:39 +0000

Christianity in the Middle East

On October 19, 2023, an Israeli airstrike near St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City caused a wall of the church to collapse, killing eighteen Palestinian civilians who had taken refuge there. If, as Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stated, the deaths were a case of “collateral damage,” what happened two months later at Holy Family Catholic Church was targeted and premeditated. Pope Francis had been in regular communication with this parish, where most of Gaza’s Christians had taken refuge since the war began. On December 16, 2023, two Christian refugees, Nahida (Umm Emad) and Samar—an elderly mother and her daughter—were walking from the church to a convent within the parish complex. Snipers from the IDF shot and killed Nahida. Then they shot and killed her daughter as she tried to carry her mother to safety. Seven others, fellow refugees from the siege of Gaza, were wounded. A statement released by the office of Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, was exceptional for its directness. It noted that “no warning was given, no notification was provided. [The two women] were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish where there are no belligerents.” In his Angelus address the following day, Pope Francis echoed the same level of concern. “I continue to receive very serious and sad news about Gaza where unarmed civilians are the targets of bombs and gunfire. This has happened even within the parish complex of the Holy Family where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick and with disabilities in the care of religious Sisters.”

Nahida Khalil Boulos Antoun and her daughter, Samar Kamal Antoun, who were killed at Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza (X/@ChristiansMENA)

Most Christians in the West have no understanding of the crushing pressures bearing down on their sisters and brothers in the Middle East. Their incomprehension was on full display nearly ten years ago in a reaction to a Christian attempt at national diplomacy. On April 9, 2014, a delegation of bishops from the Syriac Orthodox Church was received by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. They came to introduce the man they had elected nine days earlier as the new patriarch of their church, His Holiness Ignatius Aphrem II. Reports of the visit, including photos of the newly elected patriarch and President al-Assad, were carried by Arabic media throughout the Middle East. But when news of the meeting was picked up in the West, social media lit up with reactions ranging from disbelief to utter horror. Why, commentators asked, would leaders of a church that traces its origins to the preaching of St. Peter in Antioch associate themselves with a ruthless dictator who was waging a brutal war against his own people? An American pundit went so far as to observe that the benighted Eastern prelates who met with Assad might learn a thing or two from the Jeffersonian doctrine of separation of church and state. It was a classic case of deep ignorance and blaming the victims.

Middle Eastern Christians are well aware of their minority status in their native countries. Without sufficient numbers to influence the political dynamics of the region, they have no choice but to support whatever party, faction, or strongman comes to power. In Syria, this dilemma has translated into unquestioned allegiance to the Assad family. Throughout their more than forty years of draconian rule, the Assads, père et fils, aided by their Russian handlers, have manipulated Syria’s Christian and Muslim minorities—which include Kurds, Druze, Isma’ilis, and Alawites—by stoking fears of a Sunni fundamentalist takeover. In exchange, these groups give their support to the regime, which the Assads then trumpet as evidence of their benevolent protection of Syrian minorities.

Orthodox and Catholic Christians in the Middle East have long relied on local variations of this dynamic, which, though far from ideal, have secured an uneasy peace for an embattled minority that has no control over its circumstances. This all changed in 2003 with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The George W. Bush administration sold the invasion to an American public traumatized by the horror of 9/11 on the unlikely premise that, once planted in Baghdad, democracy would spread throughout the Middle East. It has since been shown that not even the most vocal advocates of the invasion believed this claim, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent toppling of Saddam Hussein clearly did not bring democracy to Iraq or the Middle East. Instead, it unleashed a cycle of death and destruction that contributed to a refugee crisis that has reached far beyond the region. In December 2023, the United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that in Lebanon alone, the number of refugees from the wars in Iraq and Syria stood at 1.5 million, in addition to more than three hundred thousand Palestinians who have sought shelter there since the creation of the state of Israel.

The final betrayal came on October 6, 2019, when President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from a large swath of territory along Syria’s northern border with Turkey, a region that is the ancestral homeland of Aramaic-speaking Christians who trace their origins to the first Jewish followers of Jesus. Not only was the decision made against the advice of the administration’s top generals; it was executed without coordination with U.S. allies, including Syrian Democratic Forces opposed to the Assad regime. The result was a massacre unleashed against a mixed population of Christian, Kurdish, and Yazidi refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. How did we get here?

Once the preoccupation only of popes and archbishops of Canterbury, the disappearance of Christianity from the lands of its origin has entered mainstream media, including the New York Times Magazine (“Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?” July 2015); the Atlantic (“The Impossible Future of Christians in the Middle East,” May 2019); and the Guardian (“Persecution of Christians ‘coming close to genocide’ in Middle East,” May 2019). Iraq was once home to more than 1.5 million Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq triggered a mass exodus of Christian and Muslim minorities seeking refuge in the West. Countless others died trying to escape. Today, the number of Christians in Iraq is estimated to be less than eighty thousand. The invasion contributed to a humanitarian crisis that continues to engulf the region, but it also foreshadowed worsening conditions for Iraqi Christians.

On July 3, 2023, Iraqi president Abdul Latif Rashid revoked the government’s formal recognition of Cardinal Louis Sako as patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church (see “A Patriarch Flees Baghdad,” September 2023). The move came at the instigation of Kata’ib Babilyun, “the Babylon Brigade,” a faction of the Iraqi government with ties to Iran. In addition to dealing a serious blow to the Chaldean Catholic presence in Iraq, the move was seen as a direct affront to Pope Francis, whose historic visit to the country in 2021 augured hopes for more peaceful relations between the Iraqi government and Iraq’s Christian minorities. Innocent Iraqis are not the only victims of a reckless military intervention. By displacing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the U.S.-led invasion has resulted in the deaths of millions and has contributed to a refugee crisis that is damaging the prospects for democracy in the region.

There is an unspoken assumption that the problems facing Christians in the Middle East began with the arrival of the Arab Muslims in the seventh century. The reality is more complex. Under Islamic law, non-Muslims were considered ahl al-dhimmah (“protected peoples”) who were guaranteed certain freedoms. Originally limited to Christians, Jews, and Sabians, the umbrella of “protected peoples” eventually widened to include Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists as Islam spread into central Asia. The inferior status of minority populations under Islamic governance was reinforced by al-jizyah, the tax levied against non-Muslims, as well as by restrictions placed on public displays of religion.

Left: Syrian Orthodox archbishop Mar Swerios Malki Murad washes the feet of congregants on Holy Thursday at San Marcos church in the Old City, East Jerusalem (Eddie Gerald/Alamy Stock Photo).
Right: Easter Mass at the Syriac Orthodox Mart Shmoni Church in Bartella, east of Mosul, Iraq, 2022 (DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy Stock Photo)

Even when restrictions against non-Muslims were officially mandated, how they were interpreted and enforced varied dramatically from one region to another. In Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, Christians rose to positions of influence in Islamic government and participated in high-profile religious debates with their Muslim counterparts. As “protected people,” Christians were by no means equal to Muslims, but they were not merely tolerated either. They were respected and relied on for their learning and expertise.

Western scholars often observe that, under Arab Muslim rule, the Christians of the Middle East were Arabized. While this is obviously true, what these scholars fail to mention is that Arabic was also being Christianized. The ritual invocation bismillah, “in the name of God,” that stands at the head of the surahs, or “chapters,” of the Qur’an, was countered by bis-mis-saleeb, “in the name of the cross,” which Arabic-speaking Christians began using as a greeting and as an introduction to formal documents and letters. Arabic-speaking Christians would go on to spearhead al-Nahda, the Arabic literary renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All of this notably departed from the circumstances in which many Middle Eastern Christians found themselves before the coming of Islam.

When Muslim armies first arrived in the Middle East, they found a deeply fractured Christianity. The cities of Palestine that figured prominently in the New Testament—Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Emmaus—as well as Damascus and Antioch in Syria, were firmly under the control of Christians whom Muslim Arabs quite accurately identified as al-Rum, or “Romans,” former subjects of the Eastern Roman Empire whom Muslim armies had driven from the region. In the West, the Eastern Roman Empire is often referred to as the Byzantine Empire.

But as Muslim armies pressed farther east into rural areas of Syria, they encountered other Christians who identified not as al-Rum but as Syriac Orthodox and who had been forced to maintain a less public profile. By professing a single nature in Christ, the Syriac Orthodox Church opposed the Christological definitions of the Council of Chalcedon (451), which defined Christ as fully divine and fully human. Judged to be heretics by the Great Church of the Roman Empire, the Syriac Orthodox would be joined by the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Coptic Church of Egypt, which were also deemed heretical and therefore enemies of the Christian Roman State.

Under the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, Syriac Orthodox bishops were exiled from their dioceses, imprisoned, or murdered. The churches, monasteries, and convents under their jurisdiction were torched or ceded to bishops who signed on to the imperially mandated formula of Chalcedon. Syriac Orthodox Christians were driven underground. That they survived at all was due to the heroic efforts of Jacob bar Addai, an itinerant bishop who traveled under cover of night to secretly ordain priests and bishops. It was because of Jacob’s efforts that Western Christians pejoratively labeled the faithful of the Syriac Orthodox Church “Jacobites.”

With the arrival of the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century, Roman armies sent to eradicate heretical Syriac Christians were driven out of Syria. Under Islamic rule, the once-persecuted Syriac Orthodox Church came out of hiding and was granted the status of “protected people.” They were not the only Christians who benefited from the policies of their new Muslim overlords. As Muslim armies pushed farther east into what are today Iraq and Iran, they encountered still other Christians who had run afoul of the Roman Imperial Church. The Assyrian Church of the East had been declared heretical by the Council of Ephesus in 431. As enemies of Christian Rome, Assyrian Christians were driven from the empire and took refuge in Central and Far Eastern Asia. During his Apostolic Journey to Mongolia in 2023, Pope Francis deplored the persecution and exile of the Assyrian Church. Speaking to a delegation of Assyrian churchmen, he recalled the courageous efforts of Assyrian Christian missionaries who took the Gospel as far as China.

The common notion of Christianity divided between “Latin West” and “Greek East” effectively erases an entire Christian culture that predates either of these designations. The indigenous Christians of the Middle East are not culturally Greco-Roman; they are Semites who speak Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke. Syriac-speaking Christians originated as a breakaway movement among Jewish communities in Adiabene, a region whose capital, Arbela, is the modern Iraqi city of Irbil. The Jewish-Christians of Adiabene continued to pray, read the scriptures, and live their faith in Aramaic.

Fr. Behnam Konutgan celebrates Mass at the Virgin Mary Church in Diyarbakir, Turkey, for the last Assyrian families in the town (Sipa USA/Alamy Stock Photo).

The ecumenical outreach that followed the Second Vatican Council has gone a long way toward healing the tragic consequences of these early Christian doctrinal disputes. Mutual excommunications that had as much to do with engrained cultural prejudices as with doctrine have given way to dialogue and reconciliation. In 1964, Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople repealed the mutual anathemas their two churches pronounced against each other in 1054. This was followed eleven years later by a Common Declaration of Christian Unity between Shenuda III, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and Paul VI. In 1994, John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, signed a Common Christological Declaration. Pope Francis and Mar Gewargis III, successor of Mar Dinkha, moved further along the path of reconciliation when they signed a Common Statement on Sacramental Life in 2017.

While these efforts have gone a long way toward healing ancient wounds, the more recent history of the Middle East has given rise to a new set of problems. The early modern Middle East was dominated by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which survived for more than four centuries before being dismantled in the wake of World War I. The Ottoman Turks swept in from central Asia in the thirteenth century. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), Turkish armies conquered Arabia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and North Africa, lands that had been under Arab Muslim rule since the seventh century.

Under the Ottomans, religious minorities that included Christians and Jews were organized into millets, from the Arabic milla, meaning “nation.” Like the earlier dhimmi status of non-Muslim minorities, the millet system allowed for a degree of self-determination by making the leaders of indigenous churches responsible for their community’s relationship to the Turkish government. The millet system was far from perfect, but it resulted in an overall reduction of tensions among Christian denominations.

In 1569, the Ottoman Empire granted economic and commercial rights to European powers in the region. France, which had maintained close ties to Christians in western Syria and Lebanon since the time of the Crusades, supported Catholics. Russia assumed the role of protector of Orthodox Christians. In time, this was followed by an influx of Protestant missionaries whose efforts were directed at converting Muslims and Jews. When this failed to produce converts, the missionaries trained their sights on “converting” the indigenous Christians of the region. American Protestant missionaries, in particular, saw themselves as the bearers of civilization and progress to Christians laboring under centuries of what they referred to as “Catholic superstition.” The Vatican, for its part, seized on the opportunity to re-establish a unity with the churches of the East that had never in fact existed. The effort was not without success.

In 1724, the Greek Catholic (Melkite) Church severed ties to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and professed allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. An Armenian Catholic Church was created in 1740 when the Armenian Archbishop of Aleppo, who had previously identified as Catholic, was elected Patriarch of Cilicia in Turkey. In 1783, the Syriac Catholic Church was formed when Ignatius Michael III Jarwa was elected patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church but soon afterward declared himself Catholic. These so-called “uniate churches,” which identified as Catholic, found themselves on the receiving end of much needed material support, including educational opportunities for both girls and boys. But these advantages came at a price. Churches that professed allegiance to Rome underwent a process known as “Latinization,” which meant that their ancient traditions were suppressed and replaced with Roman Catholic rites and practice. This further alienated them from local Christians with whom they shared a history and culture.

The Churches of the Middle East are heirs of a rich theological vision of Mary in the life of the Church. But their unique contribution was often buried by imports from Catholic Europe. Middle Eastern churches in union with Rome saw a proliferation of Italianate devotional art, which replaced the tradition of native iconography. This was joined in the twentieth century by a proliferation of replicas of the Grotto of Lourdes outside Catholic churches and institutions in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. These contributed to the view of Christians as “Other” in their own lands.

The formation of the Uniate Catholic Churches was part of the Vatican’s long-term strategy to bring the Orthodox Churches of the East into union with Rome. In reality, the piecemeal approach to unity created fresh tensions between Catholics and Orthodox. In 2018, while addressing a delegation from the Patriarchate of Moscow, Pope Francis acknowledged the harm done by Uniatism. He voiced his preference for pursuing unity through “the outstretched hand, the fraternal embrace, (and) thinking together.”

While European and American involvement in the Middle East created new tensions, it also resulted in the establishment of schools and hospitals that served both Christians and Muslims, as well as a recent influx of Jewish immigrants to the region. In 1866, the Syrian Protestant College was founded; it is known today as the American University of Beirut. Nine years later, French Jesuits established St. Joseph University in Beirut. Not only have both institutions survived Lebanon’s tumultuous recent past, but their continued presence in the face of ongoing sectarian violence remains a beacon of hope. These institutions were followed, in 1919, with the establishment of the American University in Cairo, an outreach of the United Presbyterian Church of North America.

In 1932, the year in which the League of Nations granted independence to Iraq, four French Jesuits arrived in Baghdad to found Baghdad College, which was open to both Christian and Muslim young men. This was followed in 1955 by the creation of Al-Hikmah (“Wisdom”) University. The fact that these institutions refrained from proselytizing was an irritant to their American Catholic donors. Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston complained that the Jesuit mission in Baghdad was “the biggest waste of money and manpower in the history of the Church,” for not producing a single convert from Islam. Al-Hikmah University was closed and the Jesuits were evicted from Iraq in 1969 when the Ba’ath Party seized control of the government. Today, Jesuit Refugee Service brings much needed humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq. Jesuits also serve heroically in apostolates in Jordan.

The growing influence of European and American Christians in the region fueled resentments that led to violence. Angered by what they saw as the rising economic and political fortunes of their Christian neighbors, Muslims retaliated. Between 1850 and 1860, Christian homes and businesses were attacked in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. By far the most widespread and devastating violence took place in Lebanon. What began in May 1858 as a dispute between Maronite Christian sharecroppers and their Maronite landlords erupted into full-scale sectarian violence between Maronite peasants and Druze landlords, who belonged to an offshoot of Isma’ili Islam. More than twenty thousand Christians were massacred before the conflict spilled into neighboring Syria. In Damascus alone, between ten and fifteen thousand Christians were killed, while European consulates were torched. The slaughter spread to Aleppo, a major Christian economic and cultural hub, and eventually to Nablus and Gaza in Palestine. The carnage continued until August 16, 1860, when an expeditionary force of six thousand French troops intervened on behalf of their Maronite Christian clients in Lebanon.

French intervention on behalf of the Maronites was not exceptional, but the arrival of the French fleet signaled a departure from previous efforts. Rather than docking in the coastal cities of Batroun or Jounieh in the Maronite heartland, the flotilla continued south along the coast to the international port of Beirut. The French were sending a message to anyone who would threaten the Maronites of Lebanon. What began as a struggle between competing religious minorities had acquired a political component.

Violence against Christian minorities would continue into the twentieth century. In 1915, a joint force of Ottoman and Kurdish infantry murdered 1.5 million Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christians. Although the Turkish government continues to frame the killings as accidents of war, the systematic slaughter has been deemed a genocide.

The Coptic Orthodox Christians of Egypt have been subject to the most recent—and arguably the most horrific—persecution. Coptic Christians account for a tenth of Egypt’s population, followed by smaller Protestant and Roman Catholic minorities. Between 2011 and 2017, the Muslim Brotherhood began attacking churches, convents, and monasteries. In 2015, twenty-one Coptic Christians were beheaded by ISIS on a beach in Libya. Two years later, suicide bombers entered two churches during Palm Sunday Mass and detonated explosives. Three hundred sixty-three Coptic faithful were killed; more than five hundred sustained serious injuries. In a historic show of unity, Pope Francis and Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, travelled to Egypt where they joined Pope Tawadros II of the Coptic Orthodox Church to solemnly commemorate the Coptic martyrs. In 2023, Francis, in consultation with Pope Tawadros II, added the names of the twenty-one Coptic martyrs to the Roman Martyrology.

The significance of Lebanon for the future of Christianity in the Middle East cannot be overestimated. As the most Catholic country in the region, Lebanon has been the recipient of unflagging attention and support from the Vatican. In 1964, Pope Paul VI made a brief stop there on his way to the Eucharistic Congress in Mumbai, India. John Paul II visited in 1997, followed by Benedict XVI in 2012. In 2021, Pope Francis hosted a meeting of Lebanon’s Catholic and Orthodox religious leaders at the Vatican. He had to cancel a planned visit in 2022 because of poor health. Today, Lebanon is gripped by political dysfunction and economic collapse that make such a trip unimaginable anytime soon.

Tragically, when it comes to Lebanon, there is blood on everyone’s hands. Between September 16 and 18, 1982, Lebanese Christian militias, in collusion with IDF charged with security, entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut and indiscriminately opened fire. At the request of Christian militia leaders, Israeli troops took up positions at the exits of the area to prevent those living in the camps from escaping the carnage. Over the course of two days, 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians were mowed down. An independent commission chaired by Seán MacBride, assistant to the secretary general of the United Nations, determined that the massacre constituted a genocide.

Today, Lebanon risks becoming a failed state. The country has been without a president since October 2022. Political infighting has paralyzed the parliament. Gross mismanagement and corruption in the banking system have plunged more than 80 percent of the population into poverty and fueled the exodus of Christians from the country. As if all this were not enough, mounting tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which controls Lebanon’s southern border, threaten to erupt into full-scale war.

The abandoned village of Killit, near the towns of Savur and Mardin, Turkey, which was once inhabited by Syrian Orthodox Christians (MehmetO/Alamy Stock Photo)

It was once common to hear Middle Eastern Christians wonder why their co-religionists in the West had abandoned them. These days, they speak more often of betrayal.In 2014, In Defense of Christians (IDC), a group that identifies itself as “an institute of the Institute on Religion & Democracy,” hosted a three-day summit that brought together Arab Christians and their leaders from across the Middle East. Most of the panels were of a religious nature, but American political figures were also invited, including Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was the featured keynote speaker.

Cruz began his remarks by claiming that President Assad of Syria, Hezbollah, and ISIS were indistinguishable from each other. This was preamble to a remark calculated to provoke Cruz’s Arab Christian audience. The Christians of the Middle East, Cruz asserted, “have no greater ally than the Jewish state.” The audience, which up to this point had listened with polite attention, erupted with boos. Cruz had achieved his goal. He continued undeterred. “Let me say this: those who hate Israel hate America. And those who hate Jews hate Christians.” With this, the heckling grew louder. Cruz expressed sadness for the fact that there were those in the audience who were “consumed by hate,” and left the stage.

Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post, “I support Israel, but what Senator Cruz did was outrageous and incendiary.” Dent was not alone in his criticism. Mark Tooley, then-president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which hosted the event, noted that Cruz was “a savvy politician” who “knew the reaction he would provoke…and he maximized his political moment before the many cameras.” The real question is why IDC invited Cruz—with his well-earned reputation for grandstanding—in the first place.

With Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutal response, the situation for Christians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza has become more dire. On December 29, 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in for a sixth time as prime minister of Israel. His previous term in office was plagued by charges of corruption and sweeping attempts to reform the judicial system in ways that would have protected him and jeopardized the country’s democratic institutions. Tens of thousands of Israelis, including the military and business establishments, took to the streets to express their outrage.

Netanyahu’s return to power was spearheaded by a coalition of ultranationalists and ultra-Orthodox religious parties. In exchange for their support, Netanyahu vowed to expand West Bank settlements deemed by human-rights organizations to be in violation of international law. Netanyahu made good on his promises. According to figures compiled by the UN, in 2023 alone, there were on average ninety-five attacks per month on Palestinians living in the West Bank. Armed Israeli settlers have terrorized and killed Palestinians, torched their homes, and cut down ancestral olive groves, while Israeli soldiers stood idly by.

Attacks directed specifically against Christians have also increased. Nuns and priests are cursed and spat upon. Churches and holy sites are vandalized and desecrated. Jewish settlers have attempted to seize church property in the Old City of Jerusalem. On February 4 of this year, CNN aired footage from security cameras in the Old City showing Christian pilgrims processing with a large cross being spat upon by ultra-Orthodox Jews mumbling “F*** Jesus.” Buoyed by Netanyahu’s extremist views, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have turned to the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who considered the establishment of the state of Israel as a step toward “saving the world from the filth of Christianity” (Shemonah Kevatsim, vol. 2).

The involvement of Western Christians in the Middle East brought much needed support to Christians throughout the region, but it also drove a wedge between the communities that received that support and the broader society in which they lived. Christians came to be viewed as a fifth column, representatives of foreign interests. This perception was not helped by the fact that Christians on the receiving end of Western largesse increasingly identified with the cultures and religious sensibilities of their patrons.

All the popes going back to John XXIII have alerted the world to the accelerating eradication of Christian communities throughout the Middle East. In spite of their warnings, these communities are now on the verge of extinction. It is often said that, in the relentless cycles of violence that have consumed the Middle East, there are no winners. A better way of saying this might be that in the Middle East everyone just keeps losing.

Joseph Phillip Amar April 1, 2024

A Paschal Mystery

Rita Ferrone — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:47:16 +0000

A Paschal Mystery

When the American bishops produced their multi-year plan for a National Eucharistic Revival in 2022, there was only one passing reference to the concept of the Paschal Mystery in their founding statement. I was dumbfounded. Only one! I’ve been wondering ever since why they would abandon the language and concept of Paschal Mystery, and I think I’ve finally figured it out. They must have concluded that it wouldn’t serve their purpose, which was a return to the Eucharistic piety that predated the Second Vatican Council.

The prominence of the Paschal Mystery is one of the hallmarks of Vatican II, and it has not diminished in importance since that time. Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on the fruits of the Second Vatican Council in a 2013 address to the clergy of Rome, remarked:

There were several of these: above all, the Paschal Mystery as the center of what it is to be Christian—and therefore of the Christian life, the Christian year, the Christian seasons, expressed in Eastertide and on Sunday which is always the day of the Resurrection. Again and again we begin our time with the Resurrection, our encounter with the Risen one, and from that encounter with the Risen one we go out into the world.

Pope Francis, in his 2021 letter on liturgical formation, Desiderio desideravi, likewise places the Paschal Mystery at the center of his reflections on the Eucharist. In that letter alone, he refers to the Paschal Mystery eleven times.

Pope Francis and Pope Benedict are not outliers here. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy invokes the Paschal Mystery seven times; it appears twice in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, and once in the decree on the formation of priests. The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes more than fifty references to the Paschal Mystery, and even uses it in the titles of several sections pertaining to the liturgy (“The Paschal Mystery in the Age of the Church,” “The Paschal Mystery in the Church’s Sacraments,” and “The Sacramental Celebration of the Paschal Mystery”).

Although the term “Paschal Mystery” is not found in the scriptures, it rests upon the biblical witness. The New Testament places the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus at the absolute center of our understanding of the mystery of Christ and our salvation. The term arose in the early Church and came into prominence in the twentieth century through the writings of Odo Casel, Josef Jungmann, Louis Bouyer, and other luminaries. Pope Paul VI hailed it as an important historical and biblical synthesis anchored in our sacramental life: “To participate in the Paschal Mystery is nothing other than to put oneself in real communion with him, dying with him, rising with him.” Our whole sacramental life has brought this insight into focus through the liturgical reform.

The Paschal Mystery not only describes the arc of Christ’s self-emptying love leading to new life and glory; it also describes how believers enter into Christ’s Passover through the sacraments. This is not a new idea. The Fathers of the Church, particularly St. Augustine, understood that the liturgy was not only about Christ’s Pasch, but also our Passover from death to life, from sin to grace. The Paschal Mystery is the paradigm or pattern of the whole Christian life, expressed with eloquent symbolism in the liturgies of Holy Week, but also celebrated every Sunday. Pope Francis was right to affirm that the work of the Holy Spirit in the liturgy conforms us so closely to Christ that “we become him.” One might reflect on this mystery endlessly without exhausting its treasures. Theologian Joseph Ratzinger in 1966 called the Paschal Mystery “perhaps the most fertile theological idea of our century.”

The centrality of Paschal Mystery to our understanding of the liturgy has, of course, been disputed, but not by many. The only notable critique was offered by the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X. Their book, The Problem of the Liturgical Reform, devotes considerable attention to undermining the idea of the Paschal Mystery precisely because they find it to be the key to the liturgical reform, and because it wasn’t mentioned at Trent. In its place, they wish to return to the Tridentine emphasis upon Christ’s expiatory sacrifice on the cross, something that the American bishops are also keen to do. Although I do not seriously believe that our bishops share the traditionalist desire to turn the clock back on the liturgical reform, I suspect they align with the traditionalists to some extent in wishing for a return to “the good old days” of Eucharistic devotion.

I was giving a talk on Desiderio desideravi recently and happened to mention that the launch of the Eucharistic Revival included almost no place for the Paschal Mystery in its presentation. One of the attendees, a priest, asked how I could explain this. He couldn’t make sense of it: “Every time I say the Eucharistic prayers or other prayers of the Eucharist, it’s all over the place.” I really couldn’t explain it. Christ’s passing over from death to life is what the liturgy celebrates, or else what are we doing?

When I got home I wondered whether the bishops had developed something more to say about the Paschal Mystery since the launch of the revival. So I did a web search for “paschal mystery eucharistic revival” and a post concerning the Paschal Mystery came up from the theological blog on their official website. Aha! Finally, something about the Paschal Mystery for the Eucharistic Revival!

Frankly, it was an embarrassment. It was billed as a mystagogical reflection on the Paschal Mystery, but really it was all about sacrifice. The victim dies and rises right there on the altar, according to this “theological” reflection. But this is nonsense. Even if one is fully on board with the idea of the Mass as a sacrifice, the liturgy is not about witnessing Christ’s death and resurrection on the altar. It is about sharing in Christ’s perfect self-offering and offering ourselves to God in communion with him. The paschal character of the liturgy is found in the transformation of the elements of bread and wine into the living Christ, but it is no less about our transformation as partakers of his body and blood.

If the bishops think that the concept of the Paschal Mystery doesn’t fit neatly into the Eucharistic piety that predated the Council, they are right. It is something more brilliant, wonderfully so when seen against the background that preceded it. What a shame that they chose not to talk about it. But it’s not going away. As part of the legacy of the Council, it remains with us, no matter what.

Rita Ferrone March 30, 2024

Rather than Void

Dominic Preziosi — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:09:59 +0000

Rather than Void

In mid-March, four months after my father died, my son got married. My father had been in declining health for a few years, during which time my mother took on the role of full-time caretaker (as a lifelong partner might be expected to). Resisting entreaties to accept regular outside help, she also stubbornly and preemptively ruled out any kind of travel, even for a grandson’s wedding. That she was able to be present after all made everyone happy, including her. The ceremony was joyous, the reception a party for the ages: a happy marriage, if you will, of Russian-Jewish and Italian-Catholic tradition. But the reality of what allowed my mother to be in attendance—and the fact that she was attending on her own—was never far from the surface of things.

“May his memory be a blessing,” my son’s soon-to-be in-laws said to me in the days and weeks following my father’s death, as together we helped plan the wedding. It’s hard to express the comfort that their words—the English translation of the traditional Hebrew zichrona livricha—brought me. “A Blessing too Good for Jews Alone,” as a headline at the Tablet once memorably put it, and I can now personally attest to that. “It wishes not only that when the living think about those who have died, they do so with warmth and joy,” the article’s author wrote. “It also [marks] the ways those lives have mattered and continue to matter in this world, even if they are no longer in it.” At the reception, when it came time for toasts, my son’s new mother-in-law asked guests to remember family members who’d recently died. She spoke of the “void” the departed leave in the lives of those still living. Until then, I’d experienced my father’s death more as an absence than a void—a difference of degree, not of category, but still a difference. Yet what, if not “void,” best describes that state when someone who was so much a part of this world is no longer in it?

By coincidence, the wedding took place in a part of New Jersey where I’d lived as a child. It’s a densely populated conglomeration of suburban towns and small cities linked by a network of highways, state roads, and commercial strips as tangled and complex as the circulatory system. I feel as if I spent most of that childhood in the car with my parents and brothers traveling these roads—trips to visit family and to see New York City; to gas stations and furniture outlets and appliance stores. Over the course of the wedding weekend’s mandated journeys—airport, bakery, reception hall, hotel—I got to relive some of those earlier drives. The roads still hew to their long-ago plotted routes. Even some of the old landmarks remain, stores and restaurants and malls that have withstood the passage of years.

This includes a roadside diner we always used to pass without ever stopping to eat at. But once it offered a place of rest. Late on the night of Holy Thursday in 1982, I accompanied my father to our parish church to sit vigil before the stripped and barren altar, one shift in the long line that would carry on through the next afternoon. We stayed for our assigned hour until being relieved by the next parishioner. But our night wasn’t over. Out in the station wagon were boxes of donated food to deliver to a sister parish several towns away in time for Easter weekend. It was getting late by the time we arrived at that church and began to unpack the car. We left the boxes near a row of refrigerators beneath the basketball nets in the gym, as instructed by the parish priest. Then we began the ride home. At that hour traffic was light, but it still felt like a long drive. I’d been in school all day, and my father had been at work. Usually one to push all the way through, he uncharacteristically this night pulled off the road and into the parking lot of that diner we’d always sped right by. I thought he wanted coffee, but he said he just needed to sleep for a few minutes. I sat there watching people go in and out of the diner while my father dozed. The clock ticked past midnight into Good Friday, and a few minutes later, he was awake and ready to drive on.

I’ve often thought about that night, sitting by my father on a hard pew bench in the empty church and, later, in the car while he slept. But it wasn’t until the weekend of my son’s wedding that I actually saw that diner again. I was sixteen in 1982, a junior in high school. My father was forty-six: old to me then, enviably and unimaginably young from where I stand now. Other well-wishers in the months since he died have used the word “imprint” in describing a parent’s lasting, indelible mark on a child. This image, too, has caused me to think. Photos of me from the wedding capture a man bearing unmistakable and not entirely welcome resemblance to his late father—don’t we all want to escape such easy and reductive linkage, so obvious an “imprint”? And yet, beyond what’s visible within the borders of a photograph, there is other evidence of his imprint, perhaps known only to me, that I’m not always so hesitant to acknowledge.

“The mystery / that there is anything, anything at all, / let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, / rather than void,” Denise Levertov writes in her poem “Primary Wonder.” There are days that force us to contemplate the void more directly than we might like to. We cannot be sure that the emptiness will be filled; we understandably doubt the very possibility of it. But if a memory can bring blessings, and if we bear the imprint of those who preceded us, it’s a little easier to imagine emptiness becoming fullness, absence becoming abundance, life being renewed. It might even stir that joyful hope: that there is not just anything, but everything, rather than void.

Dominic Preziosi March 28, 2024

Hijacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Peter Steinfels — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 17:19:55 +0000

Hijacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral

On Thursday, February 15, a group of gay, lesbian, and transgender activists briefly hijacked a funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. They filled the front pews costumed in carefully chosen funeral garb: the skimpy, the glitzy, the gaudy, and the drag. One eulogist led the congregation in repeated chants of “Cecilia, Cecilia,” the deceased’s name; another celebrated her as “St. Cecilia, mother of all whores”; and one woman interrupted the “Ave Maria” by twirling down the aisle with the refrain of “Ave Cecilia.”

The subject of this sudden canonization was Cecilia Gentili, a transgender activist, former prostitute, and accomplished lobbyist for the rights of streetwalkers and the decriminalization of prostitution. She was a sometime actress and writer and an inveterate performer—in sum, a prominent member of the high-glamor wing of trans and queer New York society. (Her fullest obituary appeared in Vogue online, punctuated by Gucci ads.)

The St. Patrick’s funeral was a stellar example of what, in 1961, Daniel J. Boorstin, called a “pseudo-event.” For Boorstin, a conservative American historian and later Librarian of Congress, a pseudo-event is an event that might have the appearance of a genuine news event but is in fact staged and orchestrated mainly to generate publicity.

Provoking publicity may not have been the only objective behind the staging of the Gentili funeral, but it was surely a major one. The day before the funeral, a clearly alerted New York Times reporter called the archdiocese for comment on St. Patrick’s holding such a rite for a transgender activist. The Times story on the funeral ran for two columns, filled with colorful details, for example, about the “daring outfits—glittery miniskirts and halter tops, fishnet stockings, sumptuous fur stoles and at least one boa sewed from what appeared to be $100 bills.”

In line with the familiar culture-wars script for covering things Catholic, the story proposed that the funeral might be a landmark event. Was the notoriously repressive Catholic Church catching up to the enlightened, progressive worldview of, say, Vogue or the New York Times? Surely that possibility was worth two columns—the space that in my time as the Times’s senior religion reporter might have been allotted for a major papal decree.

The story pinged everywhere. Outrage duly followed. Some Catholics fell ill at the very thought of a priest blessing the casket and commending to God the soul of a transgender person. Others managed to blame Pope Francis. But the common, overriding reaction was indignation and pain at a sacred rite in a sacred space denatured into street theater—and reported as though this were an unambiguously positive thing.

That was certainly my initial reaction. It was magnified by disappointment in the paper where I had prized my own decade as a religion reporter and my two decades as a biweekly columnist. The Times story contrasted the present welcome for Gentili’s funeral with the December 10, 1989 ACT UP protest at Cardinal John O’Connor’s opposition to publicly supported, condom-based “same sex” programs, especially ones mandated for Catholic schools. The article accurately described the massive 1989 protest as “a touchstone in the city’s gay history.” It did not mention that the protest had involved the disruption of a liturgy and the desecration of a consecrated host—and was widely condemned by public officials, media editorials (including in the New York Times itself), and many in the LGBTQ community.

Most disappointing was that the Gentili funeral story, though written by a newly appointed metropolitan-area religion reporter, was religiously tone-deaf. That the event might have abused a religious ritual and setting was apparently not worth even a hint of attention.

My immediate mortification was quickly eased. Hadn’t Jesus warned his followers to anticipate abuse and persecution, indeed in forms far more severe than this? And hadn’t the cathedral been clearly ambushed—and hadn’t it acquitted itself well? The Times reported that the person requesting the funeral had kept Gentili’s transgender identity “under wraps.” One can understand a cathedral official not being aware of Gentili’s identity, whether gender or sexual or political or, for that matter, religious. (She was a self-proclaimed atheist with, it seems, a vague and perhaps growing openness to faith.) The cathedral later explained that it does not do “background checks” on those for whom a funeral was requested, though one wonders whether it will feel compelled to do so now. But Ms. Gentili’s gender status was not really the point. Indeed, when the Times reporter raised the question of that status in his call to the archdiocese before the funeral, Joe Zwilling, an archdiocesan spokesman, refused the bait. The funeral was routine: burying the dead “is one of the corporal works of mercy,” he said; it demonstrated the way “we should treat all others, as if they were Christ in disguise.”

That was the right answer. And once the funeral was scheduled, any backing off would have provoked more public controversy. Imagine refusing entrance to the garishly or inappropriately dressed, or censoring the petition for gender-affirming health care, or confiscating the “mother of whores” imagery, or cutting off the microphone when eulogies turned offensive, or ushering away the “Ave Cecilia” dancer. The event would have gone from provocation to eruption.

Days later, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said on the radio, “I think that our cathedral acted extraordinarily well.” He might want to modify that, at least a little. Are the cathedral’s procedures for accepting and overseeing funerals so bureaucratized or understaffed that the hijackers had free rein? Arrangements are apparently turned over to a funeral home chosen by the person requesting the funeral—in this case, one that had worked with LGBTQ groups. Indeed, what was scheduled appears to have been an actual funeral Mass, which would have raised still more fraught issues about the distribution and reception of Communion. Much like a quarterback switching a play at the line of scrimmage, the soundtrack of the service contains a last-minute “audible”—a cathedral official telling (or reminding) the celebrant to conduct only a funeral service without a Mass.

Then there were the eulogists. One of them, identified as Gentili’s longtime partner, was personal and genuine in his loss. The other two were deliberately provocative and disruptive. Were they vetted? Many dioceses have regulations regarding the always sensitive issue of family requests for “words of remembrance,” as they are properly called. In the Archdiocese of New York, certain standards are recommended while actual policies and practices are left to the discretion of parish pastors, admittedly often a delicate task. In this case, however, the cathedral parish can probably be faulted for being completely missing in action.

Still, having watched the entire film of the service days before the cardinal’s remarks, I had to agree with his basic conclusion. Despite everything, at the service for Cecilia Gentili, the Gospel was proclaimed and preached, the meaning of death explained, God’s love and mercy invoked. Rather than a defeat for Catholicism, it was a victory.

Whether it was a victory or defeat for the memory and causes of Ms. Gentili is another question. A native of Argentina, she was sexually abused as a child and then trafficked. She came to the United States illegally, and survived homelessness and heroin addiction as a prostitute before advocating for people with HIV and becoming an effective organizer, fundraiser, and lobbyist. By all accounts, she was fiercely generous and dedicated to others in similarly marginalized or criminalized circumstances. True, much of this remarkable life story rests on the testimony of Ms. Gentili herself—a “born storyteller,” according to friends and admirers. Was it the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Enough is on the public record—her overcoming of obstacles, her gifts for friendship, her pursuit of housing and health care for those in need—to elicit compassion, awe, and gratitude despite deeds and convictions to which some might take grave exception.

At the funeral the celebrant wisely steered clear of all this. At moments he looked like an aging high school teacher bewildered by the hijinks of unruly students, but he soldiered on. He proclaimed the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. In words he had obviously spoken many times before, he preached the good news of dying and rising in Christ. He added a reflection from an Anglican woman priest about love of life, hatred of death, and hope of resurrection.

At the end of the service, he blessed the casket and commended Gentili to the “Father of mercies in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she will rise with him on the last day…. Open the gates of paradise to your servant, and help us who remain to comfort one another with assurances of faith until we all meet in Christ and are with you and with our sister forever.”

Was such a prayer inappropriate or even blasphemous? Some may feel so. But to me it was profoundly moving, the triumph of our liturgy over provocation.

Of course, the hour-long film I watched kept the camera on the cathedral’s sanctuary, celebrant, cantor, lectors, petitioner, eulogists, and front pews. Was there snickering elsewhere? Or contempt? Or tears? Or boredom? I wasn’t there to know. When the camera followed the casket up and down the main aisle, glimpses of the congregation showed many dressed like ordinary funeral-goers. Seen and heard from afar, many also appeared unfamiliar with a Catholic rite; perhaps they could be forgiven for mistaking a Catholic service for more exuberant ones found elsewhere or for a rally or a theatrical memorial, where applause and cheering might have been appropriate. (The organizer of the funeral said that if St. Patrick’s had been unwilling, she would have sought a theater space.) At the same time, it was not hard to believe that a significant number of these mourners might have been deeply touched by the readings, the homily, and the prayers.

Responding to outrage at the spectacle, St. Patrick’s swiftly held a “Mass of Reparation,” and the Times promptly ran another story, suggesting that the Mass of Reparation represented backtracking on the cathedral’s willingness to host a funeral for a transgender person. Other media took the same tack. Nothing I read from archdiocesan officials suggested that they regretted allowing a service to be held for a transgender activist. Their distress, they said, was at the deception that preceded the service and, above all, at the conduct that accompanied it.

And now it was the turn of the funeral’s organizers to be outraged. The “community Ms. Gentili served,” they insisted, deserved “a public apology” from the archdiocese. Her right to the “full Catholic Mass that was agreed upon” had been violated because “she was an ex-sex worker.” The archdiocese had employed “painful and exclusionary language” in its criticism of the event, and the remarks of an archdiocesan official amounted to an incendiary “hate rant.” Then they played the inevitable sex-abuse card: “Did those priests that raped those young men get an honorable burial?”

Was this response utterly cynical, one more ploy in the orchestration of a pseudo-event? Many people, especially many Catholics, will see it that way. Because motives are always mixed, they would not be altogether wrong. Still, I see something else at work here, something sincere and for that reason all the more serious. It is a sense of entitlement common to the glossier sector of the LGBTQ world. It is the entitlement of victimhood—the entitlement of an identity that defines itself by its victimization.

“We still gonna show up as us!” said a trans eulogist at the funeral before whipping up the congregants into the initial chanting of “Cecilia, Cecilia.” Showing up “as us” seems to have meant not surrendering their identity to the Gothic arches and Catholic expectations of reverence for a rite at St. Patrick’s. Showing up “as us” meant: This is our space now, our time, and we proceed by our own norms. It meant parading one’s derision of traditional sexual or social codes and reveling in the transgressive as an expression of freedom and a path toward fulfillment. If the words “bitch” and “whore” are terms of endearment in certain trans settings, then they should be no less welcomed as part of queer culture in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as two authors argued in the National Catholic Reporter. If the Catholic Church employs the title “saint” in a very particular way and we don’t, then tough luck for the Catholic Church.

No matter that flaunting this defiant scorn for a religion and its norms both misrepresents most gay, lesbian, and transgender people and makes life harder for them. It has broader consequences as well. Is it really surprising, for instance, that so many Americans suspect the liberalism that defends and applauds Drag Queen Story Hour? Or that sympathy with pride flags and marches is fading? Or that questions about “gender-affirming” medical treatments for children, who gets to use which school bathrooms, and who can compete as male or female in athletics have escalated so quickly to the top of our cultural politics?

It would be wrong to think that the sense of entitled victimhood that rendered the organizers of the Gentili funeral insensible to the norms and feelings of millions of Catholics is in any way unique. On the contrary, variants of it are currently inflaming American life, from left to right. Everyone has an identity, and every identity is a victim of some other identity. Consequently, every identity is entitled to its own form of assertion. If that assertion is excessive or even a little false, so be it. We are, after all, the real victims, and we are entitled to fight fire with fire.

The “we” in this outlook is, of course, very flexible. The fundraising letter from the Republican National Committee in front of me warns of the “dismantling” of the foundations of “the American way of life we once knew.” Who is this victimized “we”? All of us? All Republicans? All who disagree with the “agenda” of “Joe Biden and his socialist allies” to “normalize gender-dysphoria, high-taxes, and…endless handouts to illegal immigrants and criminals”? This is nonsense of course, but it is part of the rhetoric of victimhood that seethes all around us. Not all versions of that rhetoric are equally plausible, not all claims of victimhood equally persuasive. But they all have a similar logic. Whenever we don’t like this kind of rhetoric, we call it self-pity and resentment; when we do, we use phrases like “showing up as us.”

For years, scholars have puzzled over the growing appeal of what is not so much sturdy conservatism as aggrieved anti-liberalism. Why does it flourish in the very small towns and rural areas that have benefitted from liberal government programs? Why do fanciful or unspecified MAGA promises (“I will fix it”) enjoy so much more trust than imperfect but solid liberal programs? Liberal pundits scratch their heads, parse the latest numbers on inflation and unemployment, and wonder why these economic factors get so little traction. In the wake of the president’s State of the Union address and its many claims about past economic achievements or future economic initiatives, the head-scratching may only redouble.

The answer might lie not in the economic factors at all but in cultural factors that create the distorting filter of distrust through which the economic factors are viewed. This is a very large topic. It could easily go back to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century making of middle-class progressivism and its two wings: the cultural and bohemian wing rebelling against the religious and sexual conventions of late-Victorian “genteel” America, and the socioeconomic wing combatting new monopoly powers, urban poverty, immigrant slums, frightful working conditions, and political corruption. The story might skip over the Roaring Twenties, when the cultural rebels were in the ascendancy, and take up with the New Deal and its economistic legacy in politics and social analysis. But its most accessible starting point might be the sixties and the profound shaking of taken-for-granted notions about race, sexuality, gender, religion, and the meaning of America.

In the ensuing “culture wars,” politicians, especially Democratic politicians, often waffled and dodged, but liberal and progressive thinkers and activists did not. They lined up on the side that viewed traditional values as obstacles to liberation and progress—and in many instances they were right. When they found themselves at a popular disadvantage, however, they went in several directions. With great success, they went to the courts. (This is now conveniently forgotten.) Or they turned to what might be called the “commanding heights of the culture”—higher education, movies, television, theater, professional organizations of everyone from doctors to teachers and librarians—to promote what remained unwinnable in legislatures. Or they hoped that the genuinely needed economic benefits of active government would soothe the pains of cultural shocks. Or they simply counted on time and demographics to win their battles for them in the long run. One thing they did not do was to treat cultural resistance as something to be engaged, conciliated, possibly learned from. Instead, all such resistance was assumed to be intransigent and unalterable—the atavistic remains of racism, sexism, homophobia, Evangelical nationalism, or xenophobia.

For many liberals and progressives, cultural factors—a.k.a.“social issues”—were to be understood as the tools that right-wing demagogues wielded on behalf of entrenched wealth to bring out backward people and fool them into voting against their own economic interests. Or, conversely, cultural issues were cheap diversions that neoliberal elites favored to distract voters from challenging corporate power. Either way, economic benefits and losses were where the political action was. The culture, at least traditional culture, was a sideshow.

It’s been over a month since the hijacking of St. Patrick’s. If any liberals have criticized it, their voices have been lost in the vast galaxy of opinion-makers. The event is already receding from view, and its details will soon be forgotten as it becomes in retrospect just one more drop in the drip, drip, drip feeding the impression that the leading edges of liberalism view Catholic convictions and customs in essentially negative terms, ranging from inexcusable ignorance and insensitivity to outright hostility.

But overstate this impression, and one sinks back into the quicksand of entitled victimization. No one was faster out of the blocks in denouncing the Gentili funeral than the MAGA-mouthpiece CatholicVote. Still, the point remains: those who would take the threat to liberal democracy seriously should lift their eyes from economic factors and register the impact of provocations like the St. Patrick’s funeral and the apparent inability of mainstream liberalism to view it as anything but a blow for inclusivity and progress. It’s a small but striking example of a large problem.

Peter Steinfels March 27, 2024

Suicide as Protest

Santiago Ramos — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 16:54:54 +0000

Suicide as Protest

Self-immolation as a form of political protest has a long tradition. Among the most famous examples is that of twenty-year-old Jan Palach, who, in 1969, set himself on fire to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Palach was part of an activist group that had chosen, at random, one of its members for this ultimate gesture. Despite the Catholic prohibition of suicide, Tomáš Halík, who later became a priest and famous theologian, helped organize a requiem for Palach. He and other Czech dissidents revere Palach to this day, claiming that his death planted a seed for the Velvet Revolution twenty years later.

The tradition continues. In February, a twenty-five-year-old Air Force officer named Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. His motive was clear: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza],” he said on Twitch, a live-streaming service, before dousing himself in flammable liquid. He hoped his act would spur the consciences of his fellow citizens.

Like Palach, Bushnell has inspired thousands of conversations and debates and has been celebrated as a hero by some activists. And as with Palach, a Christian thinker has come to Bushnell’s defense. Halík didn’t say so explicitly, but his admiration for Palach might be rooted in the words of Christ: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In his memoir, Halík called Palach’s death “a sacrifice,” saying it “established a firewall in the conscience of many people in his generation.” Presidential candidate Cornel West, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, sees Bushnell’s action in similar terms: “Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice!” he wrote on X. “I pray for his precious loved ones! Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time!”

Most other commentators have been critical of Bushnell’s actions. Some have assumed that Bushnell was mentally ill, and that it would therefore be irresponsible to praise his suicide. Bernie Sanders called it a “terrible tragedy” sparked by “despair.” The Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone, a trenchant critic of American foreign policy, praised Bushnell, but in carefully qualified terms. She would never do the same thing herself, she wrote, nor counsel others to do it, but Bushnell’s self-immolation was an act of “profound sincerity.”

What Halík, West, and even Johnstone have failed to see is that a suicide can never be self-sacrificial in the Christian sense. Ambiguity is built into the act of self-immolation, no matter how noble the cause. Whoever dies fighting a just war or delivering aid to the suffering has sacrificed their life for justice and truth. Bushnell’s action, on the other hand, may have been physically courageous, but it was finally an act of self-directed violence that did nothing to stop the violence it was intended to protest. Immanuel Kant wrote that suicide entails a contradiction: suffering makes it difficult to live, so we seek relief from suffering in order to improve life—but you can’t improve life by ending it. In Bushnell’s case, the contradiction inherent in suicide also muddled his message: he tried to defend the dignity of Palestinians while violating his own.

Heads of state might see themselves as lords of life and death, and it is right to protest this lie. But no human being is the lord of life and death, including one’s own life, one’s own death. To declare protest-by-suicide permissible, even heroic, is to declare that the prohibition against taking innocent human life does not apply to the taking of one’s own life. The best that can be said of Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation is that it briefly drew attention to a horrific war before adding to its body count.

Santiago Ramos March 26, 2024

Bent Like the Palm Trees

Claudia Avila Cosnahan — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 15:34:44 +0000

Bent Like the Palm Trees

The Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange is a 130-foot tall, five-level stack interchange near the Athens and Watts communities of Los Angeles It is considered one of the most complicated interchanges in the United States, with multiple entries and exits in all directions between the I-105 and the I-110. Returning to LAX from traveling, I always look forward to my husband driving me home through this interchange. It offers a breathtaking view of Los Angeles; you can see the city below and downtown in the distance. The Santa Monica Mountain Range serves as a backdrop. Some days the range looks more beautiful than others, depending on how clear the sky is. Then there are the palm trees (another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, in addition to the freeways). They stand out high above the rest of the city like tulips in a garden, and are a sign that I am home. Even where I grew up on Palmetto Ave., fifty miles from downtown, palm trees line both sides of the street.

I’ve wondered on Palm Sunday what palm-waving feels like to those who don’t have this connection to the palm tree. As a child, I loved watching the palm trees sway in the Santa Ana winds. Palms are more like grass than hardwoods, so they bend easily in strong winds, even up to hurricane conditions. The palm fronds aren’t as resilient and blow down easily. As children, we felt lucky if we witnessed the moment a large frond fell from above. It was almost exhilarating. After high winds, the street and front yard would be covered in fronds. My father would spend a morning collecting the palm debris and the rest of the day complaining about it.

Though ubiquitous across southern California, most varieties of palm trees are not native to the state. Falling palm fronds can be dangerous to cars, pedestrians, and buildings. Improperly maintained palm trees can accumulate dead and dry fronds over time and become highly flammable, yet palm-tree trimming itself presents unique dangers to those who are tasked with their maintenance. Yet few think about this as they take in the sight of palm trees standing tall, silhouetted by the sun, or bending (but not breaking) in the winds.

The liturgical Procession with Palms offers two Gospel reading options, Mark 11:1-10 or John 12:12-16. The community, gathered outside the church with palms in hand, will either hear Mark’s description: “Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields” (Mark 11:8). or John’s version of the great crowd that “took palm branches and went out to meet [Jesus]” (John 12:13). There is an important distinction here. Mark’s gospel speaks of leafy branches, while John’s specifically mentions palm branches. Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel doesn’t mention branches at all, while Matthew states, “The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and strewed them on the road” (Matthew 21:8). Palm branches are mentioned only in John’s gospel, and yet they are the chosen liturgical sacramental.

Signs and symbols are important to us. They remind us of a time, people, places, and feelings. John’s gospel differs from the synoptic gospels. It presents a more developed theology, employing symbolism to communicate it. The specificity of the palm branches in John’s gospel allowed his intended audience to easily infer the meaning of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Palms were a symbol of joy and victory in that time and place and for the people his Gospel was intended for. We don’t know for certain what kind of branches were used to welcome Jesus in Jerusalem (or if branches were used at all, based on Luke’s account). What matters most is that Jesus came home, and his return was a victory.

The palms I wave on Palm Sunday are familiar to me. They have a symbolic meaning unique to my experience. The second Gospel reading every Palm Sunday retells Jesus’ road to crucifixion. Gathered in the worship area in our pews, we are still holding the palms we waved outside for the procession. As I listen to the Gospel account of Jesus’ crucifixion the palm branch in my hand reminds me that like the palm trees, Jesus was bent to great extremes—but I trust that he’ll stand tall among us, silhouetted by the sun on Easter.

Claudia Avila … March 22, 2024

Seeing the Sistine Chapel

Jeff Reimer — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 14:42:15 +0000

Seeing the Sistine Chapel

There are two difficulties with writing about Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. One is saying anything fresh about them. The other is seeing them at all. I don’t mean the task of hauling yourself all the way to the Vatican, getting tickets, standing in line, jostling with tourists, and straining your neck to squint at the paintings sixty-odd feet above you. That would be, to employ a common distinction, the task of looking at them, difficult enough in itself. Seeing them is a different, more interior thing. Seeing requires attending to the image as it discloses itself to you, not to what you assume you are seeing. This kind of seeing takes intentionality, discipline, self-reflection, contemplation, and, of course, lots of looking. The ubiquity of the chapel’s central panel, The Creation of Adam, in the Western cultural imagination renders it all but invisible to the twenty-first-century viewer. No other work of art, perhaps, is weighed down so heavily by pop-cultural pastiche, from E.T. to Arrested Development. If what a painting like this one means is inseparable from what Gadamer calls the “history of effect,” then seeing it involves self-consciously investigating that history along with the image itself.

It is this series of negotiations that Jeannie Marshall sets for herself in her book All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. Not that she burdens herself with much phenomenological speculation. And that’s a welcome thing. A journalist based in Rome, Marshall took up the task of going to the Sistine Chapel again and again, looking at Michelangelo’s paintings until she could finally see them, and then writing about them in such a way that her readers might also come to see them anew. In this she mostly succeeds.

Marshall’s narrative of her attempts to see the Sistine Chapel is structured as a series of chapters corresponding to sections of Michelangelo’s grand series of paintings. She works outward from the central panels to the surrounding images, as one would tend to look if one were visiting the chapel. She ends, fittingly, with The Last Judgment, which Michelangelo painted on the altar wall in 1536, more than twenty years after he finished the ceiling. She works patiently and slowly, wrestling with each painting until it yields a blessing. And that means attending to the Sistine Chapel’s whole history of effect: not only theological, political, and historical, but also, more poignantly, personal and familial.

The strongest tension in Marshall’s book lies in the fact that Michelangelo’s paintings are Christian and she is not. She confronts the tension head on and, to her credit, with disarming honesty and self-awareness. “We don’t encounter art from a blank slate,” she says, and her own slate is typically modern and secular. “As a non-Christian,” she writes:

I felt that my interest in Christian art was irreverent, but now I see that believing the story of Christianity doesn’t really matter. A good piece of art touches the same spiritual need in me that it does in a devout Catholic. The intensity of religious art communicates itself even to the non-religious among us because it is about our shared urge to reach up and beyond the knowable world.

I found myself arguing with passages such as this one. Religious art certainly is about our shared urge to reach up and beyond the knowable world, but it is not just that. Michelangelo actually seems to have believed the things he painted—creation ex nihilo, the fall from grace, a universal flood, a final judgment, and all the other weird particulars of a very dogmatic Christianity—and he painted them at the behest of people who also believed those things. To transpose the particularities of the Church’s dogma into a key in which “the story of Christianity doesn’t matter” strikes me not as a natural expansion of Michelangelo’s vision but rather as a too-casual appropriation of his art by an alien ideology.

I dwell on this because it is a point of real disagreement: Marshall tends to think religious art is meaningful because it’s human, whereas Michelangelo believed (and Christians still believe) that we’re human because these things are meaningful. In the second half of the book, Marshall often expresses regret at the intolerant, moralistic direction the Church has taken, contrasting it with the more humane, expansive spirit of the Renaissance. Lord knows we could use a more humane, expansive spirit in this world. But the evacuation of real Christian dogma in favor of a vague aspirational notion of neo-Renaissance ideals seems like a poor trade.

Still, to insist on the fundamental incompatibility of these two perspectives and dismiss Marshall as a sort of apologist for secular modernity would be small-minded and churlish; it would also miss the point. Whether religious art is meaningful because it’s human or we’re human because it’s meaningful, there is plenty of meaning and plenty of humanity to go around. Marshall does not set up her unbelief as a barrier to encounter. Rather, she allows herself to be addressed by the paintings. She opens herself to them. Still finding belief unavailable to her, she attempts to assimilate the art into a perspective that makes sense to her but still welcomes the possibility of an always fuller disclosure of meaning. This is an attitude she brings to all things religious. “Every time I enter a church,” she says, “I feel the sense of mystery there, and I know that having faith is a more complex, even artful way of existing than I have wanted to believe.” Marshall is as much seeker as skeptic. It is this sense of humility and honesty before religious commitment that keeps things interesting.

Marshall’s spirit of receptivity turns out to be an opening into a deeper, more complex engagement with the vectors of belief and unbelief in modernity. It also provides some welcome thematic continuity to her sometimes meandering narrative. The book initially appears to be an account of a purely “secular” encounter with religious art, but it isn’t. Marshall’s family, we soon learn, is deeply entangled with the Catholic Church—though “in flight” from it—and the book’s origins lie in her investigation of her own past during a time of profound loss. Marshall tells us that during this time she found herself compelled to probe her deep-seated ambivalence toward the Sistine Chapel and the Catholicism it represents. Something about it both repelled and pulled at her, and she was not sure why. The name Michelangelo, she says, “vibrates for me like a string plucked long ago” and “has the ring of cultural memory blended with family history.” This sense of resonance, she eventually realized, goes back to memories of a thick cultural and religious heritage woven throughout her childhood: most notably, a grandmother who dreamed of seeing the chapel and Michelangelo’s brilliant works of art but never left her native Canada. But these memories come shot through with a sense of resistance: Marshall’s experience of Catholicism as a child was of a religion “obsessed with small rules of behaviour, of policing our lives for moral transgression.” This attitude was imparted to her by her mother, a lapsed Catholic who harbored deep resentment toward the Church. When her mother visits her in Rome later in life, Marshall learns that her mother’s resentment, which stemmed from an “unsanctioned” marital arrangement that alienated her from the Church, also left her with a terrible burden of guilt. Wishing her mother spiritual peace late in life, Marshall urges her to seek out a priest and make a confession. Marshall’s own spiritual journey is not, it turns out, the only one she is chronicling. Meanwhile, her teenage son, after looking at Signorelli’s The Preaching of the Antichrist in the Orvieto Cathedral’s Cappella Nuova, is unbothered by the threats and perils of traditional religion. He is, she writes, “incredulous that their fear of damnation was so great.”

On the one hand, then, is Marshall’s mother, wracked with guilt and unable to find peace outside a Church that shapes not only her loves but her hatreds as well. On the other hand is her son, “a true inheritor of the Enlightenment,” who finds all this religious art “familiar and meaningless.” In between is Marshall herself, pushed and pulled by what her fellow Canadian Charles Taylor calls the cross-pressures of our secular age. Her own confession, understandably, is more complicated: “I don’t know what to believe, or even if faith and belief are possible for me. I only know what I feel when looking at art, when thinking about a piece of art.”

The success of a book like this, one about the experience of art, the way it shapes and works on you, hinges partly on your visual experience of the book itself. And it is a lovely artifact: a crisp hardcover with Smyth-sewn binding, printed on glossy, full-color pages. On the cover, sloppy graffiti-like text overlays one of Michelangelo’s Sibyls, signaling that though this is a book about supposedly staid Renaissance art, it’s best if we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The text is liberally interspersed with reproductions of Michelangelo’s art, which helpfully complement Marshall’s descriptions. But there are also many uncaptioned photos of modern-day Rome, taken by the photographer and novelist Douglas Cooper. The photos are not simple illustrations of what’s in the text, but they provide an eloquent visual commentary on the narrative. The unidealized Rome they show us is ugly and commonplace, vulgar even. This is a side of the Eternal City that those who have never visited it in person will rarely see. The inclusion of these photos poses a pointed, if unspoken, question to the reader as we follow Marshall in her peregrinations: Where is the sacred in all this? What does Michelangelo’s art mean when it is not ensconced in abstracted Renaissance glory, but rather amid the trash and the poverty and the sprawl and, yes, the beauty of the modern world? If the invisible God is on brazen display in the Sistine Chapel, he quietly haunts the graffitied walls and broken glass of the modern city.

Perhaps that is as it should be. In the first chapter, focusing on the central panels of the Sistine Chapel, Marshall confesses that she finds it very difficult to see the images afresh, particularly The Creation of Adam, which has been overexposed and trivialized into a cliché. Speaking of this painting, she writes, “I once ate a plate of spaghetti atop this image on a disposable placemat.” In keeping with this observation, the most interesting passages in the chapter are not on the central panel but on The Deluge, Michelangelo’s depiction of the flood, where Marshall observes that “Michelangelo blends the sea and the sky at the horizon into a void, an unbearable emptiness.” This leads her into an insightful discussion of the sublime in art. Somehow nothingness is more compelling than God the Father. It’s possible the problem is not overexposure but the fact that the Father is exposed at all, and thus diminished. Even at the dazzling heights of Renaissance virtuosity, the stark, visible fact of a God circumscribed within the bounds of the frame somehow disappoints. “Some of the first people to see the Sistine Chapel didn’t recognize the figure of the old man as God,” she says, which is a telling little fact. God is all too visually present, a being among other beings, more Zeus than the I Am That I Am. Maybe that is something the evacuation of God from the modern world can teach us—that if God is present in the terrorizing immanence of contemporary reality, he is present not as one of us, not as something we can reach out and grasp or see with our eyes, but as a hint or a gesture, a negative presence that presses in against the edges of our experience.

All Things Move
Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel
Jeannie Marshall
Biblioasis
$34.95 | 239 pp.

Jeff Reimer March 20, 2024