ivy rosary

Psalms

2011-12-02T13:44:00.002-06:00

The death of my very close friend, John Joe Lakers, last month, has made me reflect on my style of prayer.

JJ told me, not long before his death, "You and I are very different." One way we were different was in our prayer preferences. I love the psalms. He could not endure them. He never attended our community prayer when it involved praying the psalms. He welcomed spontaneous prayer with others. He was partly responsible for an attempt by our community to introduce a period of spontaneous prayer in common before dinner. He even asked that we pray the Angelus then, because it recalls Jesus' becoming incarnate, which was his favorite theological theme.

Months ago I was reflecting on the Muslim practice of praying by bowing to the floor five times a day in the direction of Mecca. That very physical action (which I could not possibly do with my knees being the way they are), led me to my own physical way of praying. I began singing the psalms out loud, privately, in my room. This became so important for me that I developed the practice of singing all the psalms in the course of a month, which means using the psalms for the Office of Readings and for Midday Prayer.

Why do I find this prayerful?

I think of my childhood, when everybody used "prayer books." Maybe using "prefabricated" prayers was something that uneducated people liked. But educated people can benefit too. I first began praying the psalms in earnest in the 1960s, when the post-Vatican II turmoil had caused us to abandon the old Latin breviary and we had not yet developed something to take its place. I was struggling with my own relationship to God, and said to myself, "I need to piggy-back on these prayers that people have used for over two thousand years."

I am a child of two parents who never attended high school. I had the benefit of a fine graduate school education. I have often thought that my experience is probably shared by every person who has jumped from a "pre-modern" culture into U.S. university culture. At heart I am a 1950 parochial grade school kid. I think of Jacques Maritain's autobiography, The Peasant of the Garonne. I never read it, but its title suggests that maybe Maritain, one of the most famous Catholic intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, was having similar reflections in his old age.

As I sing the psalms, using the antiphons provided by the breviary—I love the Advent season and its antiphons—I stop to think of all the people around the world who are praying the same psalms this very day, maybe at this very moment. The majority of Catholics, and of new entrants into religious life, are today in the southern hemisphere. I think of the friars in Vietnam, where my confrere Ken Capalbo is now living and teaching. Surely, like everyone else, these men (and possibly women—do women find the psalms as prayerful as men do?) have their distractions and times of mechanical recitation. I find that I need to pray slowly, stopping to look out the window and reflect on the trees and the sky, a sky that every person in the world also sees. I think of all the monks and friars in the middle ages who prayed the psalms in Latin, using a Latin translation that often makes no sense. (Carroll Stuhlmiller, in his introduction to the ICEL version of the psalms, says that some verses are like objects you find in an attic. Nobody knows what they mean, and the elders could tell us, if only they could speak to us. Yet the mysterious objects and verses are part of what has been handed down to us.) The psalms have their rough, raw edges, reflecting periods when people's understanding of God was more primitive than the understanding preached by Jesus. The ICEL translation of Psalm 3 prays "Break their evil jaws! Smash their teeth!" This is not Jesus. But it reminds me that my ancestors in the faith had a ways to go in their understanding of what God is like. So do I.

The negative tone of so many of the psalms (the "lament" psalms) used to turn me off. I judged them as out of touch with the great advances humanity has made in solving our problems. Now, as I pray them I reflect on how my vision of the world has been too optimistic, too pollyannish. There is evil in the world. People are suffering greatly because of it. Maybe the future will hold more suffering than I have seen in my day, especially as people around the world continue to struggle for increasingly scarce resources of energy and water. I pray soberly, trying to place myself in the shoes of those who are suffering even now from the injustice of the way we do things.

I don't bow down to Mecca five times a day. I sing aloud these ancient prayers. I feel close to those Muslims who bow down, and thank God for their example.

Fr. John Joe Lakers has died.

2011-11-04T20:15:00.003-05:00

Fr. JJ, whose writings I have linked to this blog, died on Friday, November 4, 2011 here in Holy Cross Friary.

We plan to continue to maintain a website of his writings, www.qufriary.org/Lakers. In addition, some of his former students hope to edit his work. Before he died he entrusted copies of that work to them.

Reflections on a Meeting of Priests

2011-09-30T09:49:00.002-05:00

Last week I spent three days meeting with the priests and bishop of the diocese of Springfield, Illinois. The theme of the meetings was "Catholics in the Public Square." The planners of the meetings had decided to devote Monday evening and Tuesday morning to "right to life" issues, Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning and evening to race relations issues, and Thursday morning to immigration issues. The afternoons were free.

The opening address on Monday night was given by George Weigel, a writer best known for his two biographies of Pope John Paul II, and closely associated with the journal First Things. He based his address on John Courtney Murray's 1960 book, We Hold These Truths. He observed that Murray's thought was central to the declaration on religious freedom of the Second Vatican Council. He drew from Murray's book four themes, supporting Pope Benedict's claim that our world is threatened by moral relativism.

What surprised me was that he made no mention of the one thing that stays in my mind from my own reading and study of the book 50 years ago: the concept of "articles of peace." Murray maintained that the genius of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is that it is a pair of "articles of peace." The framers of the Amendment realized that the citizens of this new nation might never agree on ideas, but that the law could provide a framework in which they would at least not be at war with one another. This is what religious liberty means. I may not agree at all with what you say, but I will not use force to get you to agree with my thinking.

That line of thought, of course, is central to Murray's contribution to the Council. It is not a statement of moral relativism. It is a statement that, given the conflicted nature of most political life today, the best policy is for the state not to try to enforce or support a particular set of religious beliefs. Murray's statement is itself an example of what traditional theologians would call natural law.

Without the text of Weigel's address in hand, it is difficult for me to evaluate the address in detail, but it seems to me that part of his approach was an attack on "postmodern" thinking. Pope Benedict seems to have that thinking in mind when he talks about moral relativism.

The term "postmodern" has a certain public relations aura--one who uses it can claim an advantage over someone who is merely "modern." My understanding of the term comes from a selection of postmodern authors I have read for my course in sociological theory. I see the term as having two claims, one intellectual and one emotional. The intellectual claim is that all human knowledge is mediated by the cultural context of language. This is not a new idea to sociology--it was expressed already in the 1960s by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality. The emotional claim is based on a critique of oppressive trends in so much of modern history. That claim says that any statement that something is true conceals a hidden desire for domination on the part of the speaker. The critique sounds very much like a denial of all truth, and as such can certainly be criticized as moral relativism. I don't see it as moral relativism. I see it as a clumsy way of saying "people who use truth-claims as a means of oppression are morally guilty." To grab the attention of readers, the overly-dramatic sentence is added, "Therefore truth should not and does not exist." The writer goes overboard.

Weigel, I presume, was using a statement that we are moving toward moral relativism as the foundation of his position on how society should deal with abortion. He would say that people who argue against a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion are guilty of moral relativism.

I have been critical of the term "natural law," because in social science it is considered a copout. "Nature" is the opposite of "nurture," and one should not pre-judge whether something is "natural" or is the result of learning. However, the term "natural" can be just another term for what Emile Durkheim called "social fact." There are some things in society that will hit you in the face regardless of what you think about them. If you try to go out of your house without clothes on, things will happen to you. This is an example of a social fact.

The real issue is not whether or not there is such a thing as natural law. The issue is: "how do you know something is 'natural?'"

Weigel stressed Murray's use of the term "self-evident." "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The social scientist asks, "how do you know a truth is self-evident?"

Let me use abortion as an example. Is it self-evident that abortion is against natural law?

Weigel cited the Hippocratic Oath as evidence that abortion has always been seen as evil. "Always having been seen as evil" is perhaps the most compelling argument that something is against natural law. Notice that this is at bottom an argument based on public opinion. Another argument used against abortion is that it not only kills the infant but harms the mother. But an argument that something is harmful seems to me to be an argument based on utilitarian criteria.

Tell me if I am philosophically naive. It seems to me that all statements that something is against natural law are grounded either in a claim that people have always considered it bad or that bad things happen when you do it. There may be other understandings, based on things like Plato's cave, but those understandings are for the philosophically sophisticated. Natural law should not require a degree in philosophy before one understands it.

Weigel could have developed the point that most people are not actively pro-abortion. His statement about the Hippocratic Oath implies such a point. He could find poll data to support that assertion. He did not develop the point, I assume, because then he would have to account for the fact that most people also think that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances.

Most people see abortion as an evil. The political issue is, what should society do about it? The pro-choice position is not, as some pro-life activists argue, a euphemism for pro-abortion. It is a sincere claim that it is better to let the choice of whether or not to have an abortion up to the woman rather than to the state.

Is it natural law that the state should make abortion illegal? That is far less "self-evident" than the statement that abortion itself is evil. When 80% of the population, including 80% of the Catholic population, say that a woman should be able to have a legal abortion under certain circumstances, it certainly does not seem self-evident that allowing legal abortion is against natural law.

Public opinion should not determine morality. It should not, but it does.

Some pro-life proponents appeal to slavery and abolitionism as a parallel to the abortion debate today. Pro-life defenders are the modern abolitionists. But this argument cuts both ways. If slavery were against natural law, how is it that Archbishop England of Charleston, South Carolina could write a series of letters to the U.S. Secretary of State in 1840 stating that "no Catholic Church authority has ever condemned slavery"? Archbishop England was wrong, but no U.S. bishop, North or South, challenged his statement at the time. Public opinion at his time determined the morality of slavery.

Is racism against natural law? If it is, how is it that the Church has been so slow to condemn it?

Project Rachel

A second address dealing with right-to-life issues featured Vicki Thorn, the woman who began "Project Rachel," a program to support women and men who have been involved in procuring abortions. Part of her address focused on physiological effects of each pregnancy that a woman and her partner experience, even though the effects are so subtle that neither partner may be aware of them. As a result, the experience of abortion has lasting effects on both the woman and the man involved, and continues in the children born to either.

Her address raised again for me a question that bothered me in the early 1990s. How is it that "secular" science and the claims of women such as this woman are in such disagreement? Just a few weeks ago I read that another set of scientific studies had definitively proved that abortion has no negative effects on women who have abortions.

The disagreement between the claim that abortion is not harmful and the witness of people involved in Project Rachel is very troubling. It should trouble anyone concerned about the truth claims of scientific statements. It calls into question the entire scientific enterprise. The social science community needs to get to the bottom of it.

The strength of social science research is that it listens to the voices of representative samples of people. The weakness of such research is that questions on a survey are often not able to probe some of the deeper complexities of the way people experience their lives. Furthermore, studies that follow people over long periods of time are expensive and rare, and yet, in dealing with an issue like the effects of abortion, such studies are necessary. There is still a lot of work to be done before we can definitively say what happens to the men, women, and children affected by abortion decisions.

I am a racist

2011-08-19T11:17:00.000-05:00

I am a racist.

I am a racist because I have lived for years--all my life in fact--in a racist culture.

“Racist” is a fighting word. I can use it to describe myself, and I can use it to describe my culture, but I will never use it to refer to another human being. Using that word shuts down the conversation.

I am not a racist because I want to hurt people who do not look like me. I go to the opposite extreme: I am so afraid that I might hurt such a person that I am tempted to keep my distance from him or her. I might say the wrong thing. It is easier just to avoid such people.

This is Effect Number One of Living in a Racist Society: because I am afraid of offending someone, it is more comfortable to stay away from the other group.

What are some other ways that living in a racist society affect me? Let me describe a racist society.

A racist society is a society where one group of people have treated another group of people unfairly for a long time. In order to justify to itself why it is permissible to treat other people unfairly, the dominant group had to invent theories. They could never treat people unfairly if those people were just like them. The other people must have been different. They must have done something wrong, or God must have punished them (“the mark of Cain”), or they must be “less developed” than the dominant group.

Charles Darwin gave the dominant group the perfect theory. Human beings evolved from lesser beings, and some human beings are more evolved than others. The dominant group is the more evolved group. They know this because they can make the other group do whatever they want. (We ignore the fact that the dominant group had the bigger guns.)

Slavery had existed for centuries, but the slaves were usually people who had lost a war. Everybody knew that the time might come when the slaves would win the war and then the tables would be turned. When the theory says that the slave group will never catch up because that’s the way evolution works, the perfect system was invented. The slaves were forever less developed, and therefore they could be forever dominated. Anybody who said otherwise was unenlightened and unscientific. They were also a public menace.

They were a public menace because when slavery married capitalism, slavery became very big business. To be against slavery was to be anti-business. When people stand to lose serious money if the system is changed, they bring in all the resources at their disposal to defend the system, beginning with the military.

The Civil War was fought because southern planters were convinced that Abraham Lincoln would destroy the system that had made them rich. After the Civil War, the southern planters used all the violence at their disposal to put the old system back into place as much as they could. We call their work “Jim Crow.”

Slavery was built on violence, and has left our country with a tradition of solving problems with violence.

Today

Nobody today will defend the theory that people of color are less developed than people without color. But we all float in a sea of the effects of the old system. We dominant folks have been trained for so long to see others as less human that we experience a psychological jolt every time we see something that doesn’t fit that theory.

I will never forget the shock I got when I first saw a mannequin with dark skin in a store window. I was in Boston, walking along Summer Street. My first reaction was, “They shouldn’t do that. Something is wrong with this picture.”

My life has been a series of such shocks. I am startled when I see black people who do not look like the way I think black people should look. When black people get old some of them surprise me with how they look. (I am 76 years old myself, but I am sure that I do not surprise people with how I look. I check this every day in the mirror.)

So, Effect Number Two of Living in a Racist Society: because I am often startled when I associate with people different from me, it is more comfortable to stay away from the other group.

Effects Number One and Two are why housing segregation is still such an important feature of American life today.

Those effects are bad enough, and help to explain why I have to struggle to welcome black people into my living spaces. But there is a more powerful factor than those two that affects me: fear. I am afraid of what my white neighbors will think if they see me associating with black people.

For those of us who are sensitive to what the neighbors will think, this is a serious problem. I may be completely convinced intellectually that my black neighbor is my equal, but I just know that my white neighbor is not as enlightened, and I have to live with my white neighbor more than with my black neighbor, because my black neighbor is not as close a neighbor to me as my white neighbor. So I can visit with my black neighbor in the workplace, or play on a team with him, but dare not invite him to have a hot dog with my family in our back yard. I can just see my neighbors glaring over their fences or from behind their curtains. “Who does he think he is? What is he trying to do?”

The sad thing is that it is quite possible that in reality my white neighbors may think exactly as I do. They may think that I will be bothered if they eat hot dogs in their back yards with black people. We all think the other guy is more racist than we are, because the media are always telling us that white people are racist. We never talk about this with our white neighbors because we think those neighbors are racist and will get mad if we bring it up.

Effect Number Three of Living in a Racist Society: we all think other people are more racist than we are.

Solutions

We white people (and I am sure black people also) cannot ever change the racism of our culture until we associate day to day with people of the other group. Even then we will never quit being challenged. There are too many patterns in our heads that need to be replaced with new patterns. The patterns have to be replaced one by one, often with a little discomfort or even pain. We accept the discomfort or pain because we believe that God calls us to love one another. Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with each other. Such love is the result of decision, not of feeling.

This is not all grim news. It is delightful to see people in new ways, to hear their stories, and to learn from them. If we hang in there, little by little we create a less racist culture. Maybe we will never see the kind of culture we hope for (especially if we are 76 years old), but it is more important to be on the way.

This is what Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God.”

Why a friar writes a sociology textbook

2011-08-12T09:53:00.000-05:00

Fifteen years ago I decided to write my own introductory sociology textbook. I worked on it for a couple of years and then put it aside. Recently I decided to pick up the task again.

Why do it?

Sociology asks important questions about how we humans live together. The answers it gives are often incomplete. They are answers formulated without taking into consideration the Gospel. This is not surprising, since many of the people who created the field of sociology were not people of faith.

I am a person of faith. I think the Gospel has things to say about how we humans live together. A field of study that asks questions about that topic is impoverished if it does not take into account how the Gospel can shape human beliefs about the issue.

Sociology claims to be a science. Until a few years ago the word “science” was almost a god-term in western societies. Sociology had to defend itself against “hard” science, which argued that sociology could never be a science. Sociologists were attacked from both sides. Religious people were accusing them of being godless, and the “true” scientists were accusing them of not being scientific enough.

Today the term “science” has lost its godlike status. Postmodern authors have accused science of adding to human misery by using scientific language to cloak political oppression. This is a huge change from the days when science was seen as promising an end to all human misery.

So, sociology, never quite scientific enough, and always suspect of being godless, floats in academic limbo. Some universities, including my own, have abolished their departments of sociology, replacing them with departments of social work and criminal justice. Maybe sociology needs religion more than religion has needed sociology.

I say this because the questions raised in sociology are important questions in the world we live in. There is no problem with using both faith and human “reason” as the basis for discussions about the good life. The great medieval philosopher theologians like Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus did it all the time. They constantly asked, “what do we know from faith and what do we know without referring to our beliefs?” The one thing they lacked was the habit of using empirical observation when they discussed what we know without faith. Instead they used philosophical speculation, mostly based on ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, and Muslim philosophers like Ibn Rushd (Averroes)and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna).

Here are some of the questions raised in sociology, questions whose answers can be enriched by bringing in the Gospel. The questions are based on the topics treated in standard introductory sociology textbooks.

What good is science? How can it be misused? How do we know what “misuse” is?

What can we learn about ourselves from empirical observation? Does the Gospel have anything to say about how we do such observation?

What are values, and where do they come from? How do human beings differ around the world in their values? What should we do about those differences?

What do we know about how we humans are born, mature, and die? What influences do our groups have on our being born, maturing, and dying?

How should we react to people who hurt other people?

How do men differ from women and what should we do about the differences?

Why are some people rich and others poor? What should we do about the difference between rich and poor?

What is a good economy?

How does religion operate in human groups? What are some of its good effects and some of its bad effects?

How can we create more successful ways of governing ourselves?

What is a good education, and how can we help more people to get one?

What is good family life, and how important is it to promote it?

What is “health,” and how can we improve it among the people?

What happens when more people are born than die, or when people migrate from one place to another?

Why do people gather in cities? What are the advantages of that gathering, and what are the problems it creates?

What makes people revolt?

How have we humans changed over the centuries?

I have used the word “should” in several of those questions. It has been customary to rule such language out of scientific discussions--the job of science is to determine what is, not what should be.

Who says so? True, as soon as you use the word “should,” you get disagreement. But when you quit using the word, you make the discussion boring and irrelevant. People who refuse to use the word are operating on the basis of a belief that we can have certitudes that we can all agree on, and that by limiting ourselves to those certitudes, we reduce conflict.

It hasn’t worked. Our world has as much conflict as it ever has. When you have no conflict you have either irrelevance or oppression. The classroom is a place where conflict should be welcomed and harnessed for the good of the whole community.

The questions I listed above would have been answered by philosophy in earlier times. Academic philosophy in our day seems to have abandoned discussion of them. Sociology is a place where they can be discussed again.

Let us begin.

Burqahs and Birettas

2011-07-28T11:25:00.003-05:00

[I put this piece on the blog lastJanuary, but then moved it to my website. In view of the fact that the websitegets far fewer visitors than the blog, I decided to move it back, slightlyrevised, to the blog.]

The biggest problem facing RomanCatholicism today is the failure of its leadership to replace itself. Theaverage age of female religious, male religious and priests keeps going up.Even if you grant that the Church in the United States was “overstocked” withpriests and sisters in the 1950s, the numbers of young men and women enteringreligious life and priesthood today are nowhere near enough to continue parishlife and the ministry of religious at a level that most of us would thinkdesirable. The Church needs clergy and both Church and world need religious.Now is not the time in history for the Church to go AWOL in the face of theworld’s challenges.

Conservative elements in theChurch, under the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, seem to be trying out thehypothesis that the root of the shortage problem is that priests and sisterssince Vatican II have gotten away from an observably “spiritual” way of living.Presumably they have therefore also gotten away from the essence of aspiritually vital life. The answer is to return to pre-Vatican II styles ofdress and liturgy.

As a sociologist I think the “spiritual-abandonment”hypothesis obscures another motive, a motive probably unconscious among many. Ispeak from my own experience. The motive is social prestige. For most of myyounger life I would have vehemently denied that a desire for social prestigehad anything to do with my decision to become a priest and religious, but now Ihave to admit that such a motive probably lurked beneath my conscious thinking.

If this motive is operating, the theorybecomes that priests and religious no longer get the social prestige that canmotivate new recruits, and that the way to get that prestige is to increase thesocial distance between them and the laity. Thus, for example, priests shouldnot attend Mass like lay persons. If a priest does not concelebrate, he shouldattend Mass from a kneeler in the sanctuary. Religious and priests shouldreturn to wearing distinctive garb. Cassocks and birettas are coming back intostyle, and women’s groups are encouraged to return to old-style religious garb.

We Friars Minor here at QuincyUniversity are wearing our “habits” more than we used to. I do not see ourmotivation as a seeking after prestige, but as an attempt to dramatize theimportance of certain values in an academic environment. The problem is thatwearing a certain garb does not get at the core of the problem. If we were boldenough, we could issue religious garb to the entire faculty and require them towear it on campus. The core of the problem is that the entire Church, andindeed the entire world, has to come to terms with modern culture.

Church authorities point out thatthe Church in the “less developed” world is drawing priesthood candidates.Seminaries, they say, are full. However, those regions are starting from a muchsmaller base, and have a much greater need. For example, we consider ourselvesin North America as severely under-staffed with priests, with one priest forevery 1,536 Catholics. In Asia the ratio is one for every 2,310 Catholics, inAfrica it is one for every 4,729, and in South America it is one for every7,155 Catholics (Statistical Yearbook of the Church, as cited in “The CARAReport,” Summer, 2008). But large segments of society in Asia, Africa, andSouth America are hell bent on replicating the cultural patterns of westernEurope and the U.S. As they succeed in doing this, will they run up against thesame problems we are having? I think they will.

If secularism is the lion, and theU.S. is the den of secularism, we have to “beard the lion in its den.” We haveto deal with it where it is strongest, not where it is weakest.

The Head-scarf

The wearing of distinctive women’sgarb (the head-scarf, hijab, in more secular Muslim societies, or the burqah orchador in more religious ones) is a matter of controversy in many places. Iranis the most dramatic example. Under the Shah, women in Iran were encouraged tobecome educated and to abandon such garb. After the Khomeini revolution, thechador, the head-to-toe covering of women, was re-instated and enforced by law.These regulations, which the novelist Azar Nafisi portrays in Reading Lolitain Tehran, are oppressive, but seem mild in comparison to the practices ofthe Taliban, who burn girls’ schools.

The Catholic Church hierarchy’sattempts to restrict discussion of priestly celibacy, the ordination of women,and inclusive language in the liturgy are the Catholic version of the samestruggle, a struggle over the role of women. The hierarchy seems to believethat essential Church beliefs are under attack by modern gender norms, and thatthe Church must take a stand against those norms.

The real issue is one thatsociologists of religion have been discussing for the last forty years: canreligion survive the secularizing influences of what we call “modernity”? WeCatholics in the U.S. answer with a resounding “yes,” and even Benedict seemsto recognize that we are doing something right here. But when it comes topatterns of gender behavior, the United States suddenly becomes the opposition.The Church here seems to be maintaining a remarkably high level of churchinvolvement by its laity, far higher than that maintained in Italy, but we areaccused of selling out to a secular culture. It would be tragic if thedevelopments of the last forty years in liturgy and parish life here in theU.S. were to be replaced by a 1950s Catholic culture.

Officially, celibacy has nothing todo with norms about women’s behavior. Celibacy is intended to allow the priest,in St. Paul’s words, to be “concerned about the things of God.” If he weremarried, he would have to be concerned about pleasing his wife. But inactuality celibacy requires that women be kept at a distance. Priests are notto socialize too much with women. Dropping norms of separation from women willresult in the “loss of vocation,” and certainly history has borne this out.Sexual attraction is one of the strongest of human tendencies, one thatcertainly deserves to be labeled as “natural law.” The price of celibacy isseparation from women, and, just as in racial matters, separate is inherentlyunequal.

The real battle is over the issueof sexuality, and of how to manage it so that its power can build up societyrather than destroy its fabric. The mullahs believe that women must be coveredbecause otherwise men will be unable to restrain themselves. Men certainly haveproblems restraining themselves, but veiling the women will not solve theproblem.

The fact that we are not able tomotivate young people in our country to accept Church norms about celibacy andthe ordination of women says that the Church cannot avoid the issue. We are notpersuading young men and women to live apart in the ways that celibacyrequires. We are no more successful in persuading young women to dress intraditional religious habits than the authorities in Iran are in persuadingyoung women there to wear the chador. A few will do it. The rest, unless forcedby law, will choose otherwise.

The Solution

The solution is that the Churchmust reconfigure its leadership to allow for the development of healthy male-femalerelationships. This does not mean accepting promiscuity, it means acceptingfidelity. It is a scandal that canon law expels members of religious orders themoment the person “attempts marriage,” but defends the man or woman againstexpulsion when the behavior involves simple fornication. This norm contradictsthe Church’s claim that it stands in favor of committed marriage relationshipsover temporary sexual liaisons.

One obstacle, probably the biggestone, standing in the way of allowing priests to marry is the issue ofproperty. It costs a lot less to supporta celibate man than to support a man with wife and children. That argument madesense when Church finances centered on the day-to-day operation of parishes andseminaries. But suddenly the Church in this country has had to come up withhundreds of millions of dollars to pay lawsuits involving sexual misconduct ofpriests. If we in the Church can find huge sums of money to settle lawsuits, weshould be able to pay a living wage to priests who have families.

The experience of men and women inCatholic Worker houses is a good model. Many young people have been drawn tothe Catholic Worker because of its style of living in poor neighborhoods andinviting needy men and women to share their home. The idealism that draws theseWorkers is the same as the idealism that drew so many of us as young men andwomen to priesthood and religious life. But often, as the days of strugglingwith human realities pass by, Workers find themselves drawn to each other andend up deciding to commit themselves to marriage. A few, like Dorothy Dayherself, continue to live in the Worker communities and raise children there. Othersleave but keep contact with the Workers and develop ministries that serve theChurch and society in the places where they decide to live. There is nopressure to marry, and there is no pressure to avoid marriage. As God calls,the men and women involved are free to respond without censure by the group. Infact, their commitment to each other is seen as an enrichment of the group.

Celibacy has locked the Church intoa system where young men and women cannot commit themselves to the Churchduring the years when they have the most idealism and energy. Instead, theymust spend those years in some other work. If their desire to serve the Churchsurvives these years, they can then enter the seminary or religious life. Theyare now able to make a “mature vocational decision.” Meanwhile they have movedfurther and further away from the direct contact with younger people that couldinspire those younger people to follow a Gospel calling. I decided in the sixthgrade that I wanted to be a priest. Our parish had a kindly pastor in his late60s. I admired him, but the man who had the most influence on my desire toserve the Church was his younger assistant, just ordained, who taught catechismin our school and brought his dog “Smoky” to the classes.

Of course, as Rome knows, if menare allowed to marry and still be priests, women will not be far behind inseeking ordination. That is the dynamic of life in our cultures. The questionthe Church has to ask is, can we win this battle?

Years ago I heard a Methodistminister predict that the Catholic Church will go the way of the AnglicanChurch. As the number of Anglican ministers declined, a lay movement sprang upand replaced Anglicanism with a new form of Christianity, Methodism. What waslost was Eucharist, the thing that Catholicism has always seen as central to aChristian life.

No one has counted the number ofyoung Catholic women who have left the Church to seek ordination in aProtestant community. No one has counted the number of young Catholic men whohave reluctantly decided to choose another life course than priesthood becausethey were not sure they could commit themselves to lifelong celibacy. All wesee are aging priests, sisters, and brothers. Meanwhile Church authorities keephoping for a turnaround, light at the end of the tunnel.

I don’t think it will work. Theonly solution is to back up out of the tunnel and make use of the light that isalready out there.

Latin Masses

2011-05-26T20:55:00.002-05:00

Two or three years ago the diocese of Springfield in Illinois gave permission to use St. Rose Church in Quincy (closed since 2004) for the Latin “Tridentine” Mass. A priest from the Society of St. Peter has been living there and providing daily and weekend Masses in Latin.

I love Latin. We were exposed to six years of it in the seminary. I was ordained in 1962, and at that time had memorized the entire “ordinary” of the Mass in Latin. Over the years I have continued to use the language occasionally, especially in homily preparation. Sometimes reading how St. Jerome translated a scriptural passage into Latin gives me an idea for how to preach about a passage. Then, four years ago, I was asked to teach introductory Latin to students at Quincy University, and have done that ever since. Why shouldn’t I offer to help the priest at St. Rose by filling in for him when he cannot be there? Why shouldn’t I enthusiastically support movements to restore the Tridentine rite as the normative way for Catholics to experience Eucharist?

Throughout my years as a priest I have tried to pray with people, even when their styles of prayer were not the ones I would have preferred. I sang songs like “Here we are” and “Kumbaya.” I have joined in Masses in Spanish and in youth Masses, Masses with Black Catholics that went on for three hours, charismatic Masses in which people spoke in tongues, and Christian Family Camp Masses outdoors where I had to worry that the card table altar would be bumped by unruly children. Why should I not preside at Latin Masses when my background is so well suited to it? Is my reluctance mostly political, because I think liberal Catholics would object?

I have two problems with the Tridentine Mass. One is that it would make me relate to the congregation in a way that I can no longer accept. It is true that turning my back on the congregation and facing the east (though there are certainly old churches in which the priest does not face the east, among them St. Rose in Quincy) would not in itself separate me from sharing in the people’s worship. But that action would be for me a symbol of a relationship in which the people’s role becomes silent and secondary. I have become used to a Eucharist in which I share roles in the Mass with a variety of lay people. The phrase used by the Vatican Council was “full and active participation” by all the people, a phrase that has roots in Pius XII’s 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei. I begin the service with a procession from the back of the church, through the midst of the congregation, singing with the congregation. Lay people, sometimes very young people, read some of the Scripture. A lay person reads the intercessions at the “prayer of the faithful.” Lay ministers help distribute Communion. All this I would lose in the Tridentine rite.

A friar confrere called attention to another aspect of the Latin rite that I had not considered. The rite reinforces an individualistic approach to worship. The worshipper can be present silently without any interaction with other human beings. There is no greeting of peace. I presume that the worshipper does not even respond in Latin to the priest’s “Dominus vobiscum.” That innovation (which people called the “dialogue Mass”) came into existence only in the late 1940s after Mediator Dei. We Americans are individualistic enough without having that tendency reinforced in our public worship. We need to be reminded that we do not come to God alone. I once read that the prototypical Protestant stance before God is the individual sitting silently reading his or her bible alone. The Protestant stress on Scripture, a healthy reaction against Catholic avoidance of lay reading of Scripture, led to an overly individualistic spirituality. Catholic worship has traditionally been communal. The famous French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, developed a whole theory of suicide out of the Catholic tendency to depend on the group, as opposed to the Protestant tendency to go it alone before God. He claimed that suicide rates were lower in Catholic regions because Catholics feel supported by the community.

I do miss some of the Gregorian chant. My Liber Usualis is one of my prized possessions. Few pieces of music move me more than the Gregorian Pentecost sequence (Veni Sancte Spiritus. . .), and I love the Gregorian Kyries, Glorias, Sanctus’s, and Agnus Dei’s. I even tried once to translate one of those Sanctus’s into English in the hope that I might be able to use it with people who do not know Latin. I do not miss the Sunday “proper parts” (Introit, Gradual, Offertory, and Communion), which were seldom familiar enough to allow me to sing them with devotion and pleasure. Even in the seminary, where we had a congregation who knew Latin and had to practice beforehand, singing them was almost always an ordeal.

People speak of missing the atmosphere of awe and reverence in the Tridentine rite. My memory is of a priest rushing through the prayers at the foot of the altar so fast that I could get out only the first two words of each server response. Solemn Masses can be awesome, but I did not experience a solemn Mass until the sixth grade, because it took three priests and we only had two. Too many high Masses featured an organist ripping through the sung parts (by herself) so that the Mass would not take more than a half hour. (The priests and sisters at St. James in Decatur were not guilty of such carelessness.)

Priests and people can be reverent in any rite, and careless and irreverent in any rite. I like the theology of the Vatican II rite, and will not return to a theology that I believe was rejected by that Council. Pope Benedict believes that the Tridentine rite is compatible with Vatican II theology. I think that in the context of the ordinary parish in this country, it would not be.

The fatal wound in natural law

2011-05-16T10:19:00.000-05:00

Last summer I attended a two-day workshop against racism sponsored by a group called “Crossroads.” The Office of Social Concerns of the Springfield, Illinois diocese paid my way.

I mention the sponsorship because it represents an effort by Catholic Church leadership to deal with the still-powerful effects of centuries of racist thinking in the world and in the Church.

The workshop began with a historical overview of how racist ideas and attitudes developed in our world. The narrators picked up the story in the 1500s, when European kingdoms began to explore Africa and the Americas.

I say they “picked up” the story, because there surely must have been earlier examples of racism in history. Maybe those stories are too far buried in history for us to recover them with any degree of confidence.

The history of racist thinking, even if we start the story only in the 1500s, is enough to call into question how well we can read moral principles from “the nature of reality.” Is it any more obvious from nature that homosexual behavior is morally evil than it was obvious for hundreds of years that certain kinds of human beings are less human than we are?

It was certainly obvious for hundreds of years to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that certain human beings were less than others. Those were the years when the bishop of Rome not only claimed the authority to lead the Church, but claimed to lead the entire world. Pope Alexander VI, for example, decreed that all lands in the Americas east of a specified “line of demarcation” were to belong to Portugal, and all the lands west of that line were to belong to Spain. What Portugal and Spain were doing in those lands was using their military force to take resources from those places. If the people there had problems with such taking, it was obvious to the Europeans, including the bishop of Rome, that the people in those lands were somehow less important than Europeans, and possibly not as human. They were not as human as Europeans even if they became Christian. For example, natives could not be candidates for priesthood and religious life in the Church.

Most of the present-day societies in Latin America still struggle with a three-tiered social structure: on the top are the “white” Spanish-origin people, in between are the mixed race people, the mestizos, the majority of the population, and on the bottom are the “indigenous” peoples, the people who have lived there for thousands of years.

The fact that few peoples in the world have lived anywhere “for thousands of years” introduces complications in the story. Spain, for example, grew out of the mixture of several other groups, as its indigenous groups mixed with Jews and with “Moors,” people from African and middle-eastern regions. I suppose that it was a relief for Spaniards whose own genetic background was somewhat spoiled to find other people whose genetic background was undeniably more spoiled than theirs. Poor whites in this country have been comforted by the argument that they are at least not as bad as blacks.

The history of this kind of thinking calls into question any use of the term “natural law” in the determination of what is right and what is wrong. If natural law is supposed to be able to be read from the nature of things, why has it been considered natural for so long to treat some people as less human than other people?

This is no small problem. Some of the most intractable and peace-threatening situations in our world owe their origins to this kind of thinking. Just to limit examples to the last twenty years, think of the Bosnian conflict, or of the Rwandan genocide, of the Jewish-Palestinian situation, of the relations between India and Pakistan, or even of the Shi’ite-Sunni struggle within Islam.

Sociology and other social sciences long ago rejected any argument based on “nature” It is too easy to paste the label “natural” on anything that you think is correct, regardless of the evidence for its correctness. “Nature” is a cop-out. In sociology, if I want to argue that a human practice or rule is good or bad, I have to provide empirical evidence for its goodness or badness.

I write this in defense of John Joseph Lakers’s argument that natural law thinking cannot be the basis of moral judgments. His argument is tortured--see his book Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy and his website (www.qufriary.org/Lakers ). His argument is that is that several centuries of philosophical critique of natural law thinking have demolished the effectiveness of that kind of thinking. Lakers uses linguistic analysis and a literary approach to Scripture to arrive at the conclusion that moral judgments can only be based on what he calls “a metaphor of intimacy.” He defines intimacy as “passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement” of one human being with another or with God.

A morality grounded in a metaphor of intimacy is, he says, “without foundations.” It is floating in a world of human relationships. But it is not floating so freely that “anything goes.” Using intimacy as a criterion for moral behavior can be far more demanding than natural law. For example, using intimacy as the basis for moral judgments would make it impossible for me to treat another human being as less human than myself.

Citing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lakers argues that every moral statement depends on terms whose meanings are based on a “form of life.” My translation of this is: “a term gets its meaning from its use in a story.” There are two kinds of stories that ground Christian moral thinking. One kind is based on the metaphor of power and judgment—God is an angry God who will punish you if you do not follow the law. The other is based on the metaphor of intimacy—God is passionately, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully involved with each human being in history. The metaphor of power and judgment is found in those parts of Scripture that created “the Law”—the stories of Moses and the Israelites receiving the Law from God on Mount Sinai. The other metaphor is grounded in prophets like Jeremiah and Hosea, and even more in the New Testament stories of Jesus and the theology of Paul.

Natural law was too easy. It got in bed with the worst of human tendencies and legitimated them for centuries. In the meantime the rest of the world gradually changed its moral judgments. The Church was slow to learn that some human beings are not less human than others. We were slow to learn that slavery is evil. We are only now learning that violence causes more problems than it solves. We are learning that sexual desires are not evil.

I could be wrong, but I think we are learning that people born homosexual are better off in committed relationships with other homosexual people than in living without such commitment. I have yet to see how calling such a relationship a “marriage” threatens heterosexual marriages. I would think that more people striving to live a commitment would strengthen all people trying to live a commitment.

I think we are learning that denying women participation in some human activities simply because they are women can no longer be defended. It is no longer obvious from nature that women are so different from men that women should not be allowed to strive to play certain roles. If I am to relate respectfully and vulnerably to a woman seeking ordination, on what grounds can I tell her “you cannot do this”?

The fact that public opinion seems to be increasingly in favor of the legitimacy of gay marriage and of the ordination of women in the Church is not a sign of the decadence of our culture but of the weakness of our natural law reasoning. We should not be ashamed to learn. We have done it often enough before.

On restraining health care costs

2011-05-14T08:59:00.002-05:00

We all know that we as a nation have to somehow cut back on our spending. We know that a large proportion of our spending is for health care. Unless we can slow down the expansion of health care spending, we will not be able to control our budget.

Here are some reasons why health care costs are rising so fast:

1. Medical providers have to multiply procedures and pay more for insurance because the threat of malpractice suits hangs over every medical decision.

2. Doctors, hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies consume time and money administering our complex system of paying for health care. Every medical procedure involves decisions about who pays and how much. Everything has to be documented, either for insurance companies, the government, or both. The transfer of documentation from paper to computers is presented as reducing human effort, but computers make it too easy to introduce improvements and exceptions, and these increase complexity.

3. The expense of inventing, testing, and marketing new drugs is huge. Pharmaceutical companies can rightfully claim that they charge thousands of dollars for a single injection because of what they have had to spend developing the drug.

4. A similar problem exists with regard to the technology of medical care. New and often very costly machines to scan or treat the body more effectively are constantly being invented and marketed.

5. People are getting sick more than they used to. This is partly due to personal behaviors, such as eating too much, and partly to environmental conditions, such as allergies that may be caused by new substances in the environment.

6. There are more people in the “likely to get sick” category. This means especially the older population, because as we get older, we require more health services of all kinds. The baby boom generation will swell the numbers of older people tremendously.

The first five of the above reasons are heavily influenced by the profit motive.

1. Insurance companies make money when doctors buy malpractice insurance. Lawyers make money from malpractice lawsuits.

2. The sellers of computer technology and the work force that gets paid to process medical information profit from the complicated payment system we have.

3 and 4. Pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers exist to make profit for their shareholders.

5. Food processors and marketers, including restaurant operators, make profit from people who eat more, even when they eat more than they should. Industry is constantly inventing new products for the home and yard. Some of the new products will cause health problems, but, as in the case of asbestos or “black lung disease,” those problems may not appear for years.

The bottom line is that the profit motive is behind much of our health inflation problem.

Market Distortions

Governments have deep pockets. When a government pays for something, market forces are sidelined. The providers have an incentive to charge more for their products, and to invent products that they would otherwise not have invented. There is a disconnect between the taxpayer and the consumer of a particular health product. Patients will happily use a product that costs them little, and the cost is passed on to the insurance provider or the government. The insurance provider shifts as much of the cost as possible to the government. The government’s subsidies are becoming too great for the taxpayer to bear.

Somehow it must become possible for government to say, “We cannot pay for this research or this service. We simply do not have the resources to do it.” But when a politician suggests this as a solution, his or her opponents cry “death panel.”

The market forces arrayed against reducing subsidies that benefit wealthy patients are powerful: insurance companies, lawyers, information system manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, and the food and chemical industries.

Simply allowing market forces to operate will not solve our problem of the cost of medical care. Ayn Rand does not have the answers.

Can physical and emotional scars be redeemed?

2011-05-01T17:28:00.000-05:00

Last Friday’s gospel was the story from Luke of Jesus appearing to the disciples, showing them his hands and side, and eating a piece of broiled fish with them. I preached on how all the parts of our stories, including the painful ones, will be part of our resurrected selves. Physical wounds, like the nail marks in Jesus’ hands and feet, will be visible in us, but caught up in a new fullness of healing. Mental and emotional wounds will also be part of our resurrected story, also caught up in that new healed fullness.

One of the people present at Mass came up to me after Mass and said that she disagreed with what I said. She said that after the resurrection we will be perfect, “without any sin.” She was quite adamant that there will be no hint of any bad memory in our resurrected state.

We went back and forth for a few minutes, of course without any resolution, but the exchange made me realize that I have rejected the spirituality I grew up with, which is the one she was defending. That divide, between a spirituality focused on sin and its removal, versus one focused on how Jesus’ sharing our story redeems that story without removing its memory, may be the most fundamental divide in present-day Christianity. It cuts across denominational lines. Catholics who share the first version of Christian spirituality may be closer to Protestant “evangelicals” than to me.

The divide is not limited to the laity. Our bishop of Springfield, Thomas John Paprocki, recently mandated that every Mass in the diocese should end with a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel against the power of the devil. Bishop Paprocki, who sponsored a workshop on exorcism in connection with last November’s meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, defended his mandate by stating that the devil is never more powerful than when he convinces us of his non-existence.

In contrast to that spirituality, John Joseph Lakers, my friar philosopher and friend, likes to say, on the basis of thousands of hours of conversation with deeply troubled individuals and couples, “people sin not because they are wicked but because they are wounded.” He goes on to say that he has never encountered a situation where he thought the devil was involved. I don’t have nearly the same depth of experience as he has, but I have to say the same thing.

I am reading Stanley Karnow’s history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson continued to prosecute the war, causing tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to lose their lives. He stuck to his policy, even after he had begun to realize that the policy was failing, because he feared that his political opponents would charge him with being “soft on Communism” if he changed the policy. Surely there was evil in his decision, but was the devil involved? Of course I cannot prove that the devil was not, but the evil is understandable without reference to the devil.

One of the ten trends that John Allen describes in his 2010 book The Future Church is Pentecostalism, and one of the features of Pentecostalism that he lists is “an emphasis on evil spirits.” He says “many Pentecostals say they have personally witnessed the devil or evil spirits being driven out of someone.” Is Bishop Paprocki tuned in to the wave of the future?

I don’t think so.

What I am experiencing in my own spirituality is a change in the way I view language. Jesus says that if my hand causes me to sin, I should cut it off. He also says that if I do not feed my hungry neighbor, I will depart from him into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Why do I not take the first statement literally, but do take the second one literally? When Jesus talks about the devil or the fires of Gehenna, he is using language metaphorically, just as much as when he says that I should cut off my hand.

When I read the gospel stories in this light, I begin to read them with a whole different emphasis. Jesus’ struggle with the scribes and Pharisees, who were always accusing him of violating the Sabbath, becomes a struggle over whether God really wants the fullness of life for each human being, versus a God who seems more intent on punishing violators of “the law.” I am sure that the Pharisees would have agreed that God wants life for everyone, but their God was a God who achieved the goal by threats and fear. Jesus showed a God what does not use threats and fear. “I have come not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

Lakers develops a similar argument by reaching back into Martin Luther’s interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Luther’s telling of the story of sin and redemption, Lakers says, has poisoned both Protestant and Catholic spirituality. It is only our present-day thinking about language that is beginning to free us from that poison.

The genie of language is out of the bottle of Christian spirituality into which it was confined for the past several hundred years. No one will ever be able to put it back into the bottle, not even Pentecostal Africans.

Again, following Lakers, I argue that postmodern philosophy may look like the destroyer of truth and goodness, but it can really open up a new freedom for Christian spirituality and a new dynamism in worship that will answer people’s needs, whether those people are in Nairobi, Kenya or in New York City.

Bonhoeffer's problem

2011-04-20T10:56:00.002-05:00

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian who was executed by Adolf Hitler in 1945. During the 1960s, Bonhoeffer’s book, Letters and Papers from Prison, became a best seller in American circles. I would formulate one of his ideas this way: what are we Christians going to do when our scientific world has solved all our problems? We have been praying to a “God of the gaps,” a God who steps in the fix things that we humans have not yet learned to fix. Once we get all the things fixed, what will be left for God to do?

In the 1960s it really did seem as though the human race was on the verge of solving all its problems. At least it looked that way to us Harvard folks who were living in a very privileged environment. Once we saw the way a process was developing, we pushed the model out to the limits and assumed that reality would eventually follow the model. We knew that things can happen very fast. The automobile was invented about 1900, and now everybody in the world wants an automobile.

That way of thinking fit very well with the structural-functionalist approach to sociology. Society is like a machine, and as we learn to make the machine work better and better, it will eventually function without problems.

Another version of the theory uses “democracy” as the god-term. If a country will just adopt democracy, all its problems will be solved. We went into Iraq with this idea. Let the Iraqi people taste democracy and they will become a beacon on a hill, shining to all the Mideast, showing what wonderful things can happen when you adopt democratic institutions.

We in the U.S., of course, see ourselves as the model for all the world to follow. It is therefore distressing to see our democratic institutions faltering. Democracy should lead to more participation in the political process by more and more people. What is happening is that our political process is being subverted more and more by money. Instead of democracy, we are moving toward oligarchy, the rule of the many by the few.

Here is an example of what I mean. The Supreme Court decides in January, 2009 that we cannot restrict contributions to political campaigns by large corporate bodies. Although labor unions are among such corporate bodies, the corporations of the business world far outstrip unions in resources. The present Supreme Court is dominated by a majority put in place by Republican administrations. As I write, there is a concerted effort in Wisconsin and other states by Republican strategists to undercut further the slight power that labor unions still have, by removing the legal supports that made union influence possible. The country’s distribution of wealth becomes more and more unequal. The very rich get richer and richer, and the rest of the population has to work harder and harder just to stay even.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama broke the pattern of wealthy influence on political campaigns, but is that break only temporary? By now the wealthy have learned from the Obama campaign’s use of the social media, and are well on the way to corralling the use of those media in the interests of the usual oligarchs.

The ultimate danger (the scientist projects trends into the future) is that the managers will become so skilled at manipulating the political process that it will become impossible to challenge them. More and more money will buy more and more votes, which will result in legal institutions to protect the rich from encroachment.

What makes this possible is the lack of attention to politics by large sections of the population. Their lack of interest makes the system vulnerable to the influences that money can buy in favor of candidates (TV advertising, expensive campaign literature and signage, creative use of social media). 2008 showed that when enough people pay attention, real political change can occur. 2010 showed how hard it is to sustain the interest of the people who made 2008 possible.

This does not describe the operation of the perfect democracy.

The 2008 banking crisis was caused by wealthy speculators playing dice with the economy. The crisis caused unemployment. When unemployment is high, incumbents lose, so the Democrats lost ground in 2010. The defeat of Democrats favors the wealthy, which means that the rich end up coming out on top after the disaster that they caused. The Republicans, who systematically dismantled the regulations that might have prevented the crisis, get voted into power, and can continue to skew the legislative process in favor of the rich.

My conclusion is one that every politician has known all along: politics is a game. Winning one game does not guarantee winning future games. Winning coaches and teams have to keep inventing new plays and strategies. There is no way to solve problems for all time.

Conclusion: Bonhoeffer was misled by a structural-functionalist set of assumptions. Those assumptions go all the way back to the Enlightenment, with its stress on “reason” as the guiding light for human living. As Marx noted, “reason” is a fiction. He argued that the ruling classes create the fiction in a way that preserves their advantages.

The pessimistic scenario would say that the rich are able to lock down the process so successfully that it becomes impossible for anyone to break into it. The optimistic scenario would say that when enough people become dissatisfied enough to take part in the political process, the system will be revised.

I have been doing reading in the Civil War and its aftermath. The aftermath does not give one confidence that the poor can overcome the advantages of the rich. After the Civil War, the very people who caused and lost the war, the southern planter class, were able to re-assert control over the lives of their former slaves. It took a hundred years before a civil rights revolution began to break that control, and the fifty years since then have shown how hard it is to overcome the effects of a bad political system. But things have changed, very slowly.

All along it is a game. We all need to play it.

A Lenten homily

2011-04-08T11:41:00.000-05:00

A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

I shared the gist of last Sunday’s homily with Fr. John Joe Lakers, and he told me to write it up.

The gospel passage is John 9, the story of the man born blind. I focused on the final statement of Jesus to the Pharisees: If you were blind, you would have no sin, but now that you say “we see,” your sin remains. The Pharisees were so focused on the letter of the law of the Sabbath that they missed what God was doing in Jesus. They could not see.

We think we see when we really don’t.

I started off with a story about my Uncle Jim, who had trouble seeing toward the end of his life. But he kept driving, so my aunt would sit next to him and say “Stop sign, Jim,” and “Turn right, Jim.” He thought he could see but he could not. I used that story as humor, softening the congregation up for a more challenging message. I got some smiles.

Three questions. (I warned the congregation that I am aware that one can get in trouble for asking questions--Socrates drank poison because he asked too many questions.)

1) Are Catholic Church leaders so focused on a rule about no women priests and no married priests that they miss what God is doing? Do they think that they see God’s will but are actually blind?

Just a question.

I asked the question because both Fr. Bauer and I are 75 years old, and we do not see other people coming along to take our places. Is God telling us that our rules are too restrictive? I asked this question first, because I wanted to be an “equal opportunity” challenger. If I am going to challenge things going on in the secular world, I shouldn’t spare my own religious world.

2) Are the people who want to send 12 million undocumented immigrants back to their home countries so focused on a rule about our borders that they miss what God is doing? Do they really want to break up a lot of families in order to preserve that rule? Are people who hold to that position really blind to God’s concern for people, and thus blind to what God is doing in the lives of those people?

Just a question.

3) Are a lot of us so focused on a rule that says “Never raise taxes” that we miss how that rule can hurt people and thus miss God’s concern for those people?

Just a question.

This last one skirts the edge of getting into politics. There was a school board election two days after this homily, and one party running for school board positions were basically campaigning on the platform of “no new taxes.” But the issue is a lot broader than just schools, and I decided I had to raise the question.

Conclusion: We need to be alert to what God is doing in our place and time, and not let our human rules blind us to God’s action.

I got a couple of compliments, but no return challenges. The criticisms may come yet, like little time bombs resting out there ready to explode just when I don’t expect it. If they come, I’ll deal with them. Nobody says homilies can be perfect all the time, and not even some of the time. Homily writing is risky business. I hope that at least we’re past the days when critics would come after the homilist with a gun.

The machine and the game

2011-04-04T09:38:00.000-05:00

“The Marginal Sociologist Looks at Sociological Theory”

It has been about ten years since I have taught a course in sociological theory, and even longer since I have taught a course in introductory sociology. Yet I cannot quit thinking about theory. At heart I am a neo-scholastic disciple of Thomas Aquinas (well, not exactly--we Franciscans think Thomas was superseded by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham).

Open any introductory textbook in sociology, published even as recently as 2009, and you will find, in the opening chapters, a description of the main varieties of sociological theory. Usually there are three, sometimes four: “structural-functionalism,” “conflict theory,” “symbolic interactionism,” and sometimes “rational-choice theory.”

Intro soc courses often have a lot of students. This causes instructors to cast about for ways to save work, and publishers are happy to accommodate such a search. They provide “test banks,” whole batches of multiple-choice questions from which the instructor can randomly select enough questions to make a decent quiz or test. By the time I last taught the course, in the late 1990s, the test banks were computerized so that the instructor just had to select items and, voila, the test would appear, ready to be duplicated and distributed to the waiting students.

I found the items disappointing. I got the impression that the items were written by hacks hired by the publishers to fill up a quota. The items seldom matched what I had been trying to do in class. I tried to write my own multiple choice items. Doing this for a while created the following experience: I was spending four-fifths of my time trying to invent false answers to questions and one-fifth creating the true answers. I thought that was a poor use of my time.

I gave in and used the pre-cooked test bank. My students failed miserably. I decided I needed a study guide for them to use as a preparation. I would give them the opening part of the multiple-choice items, without the false and true answers. That would give them a clue as to what they should be studying. After a while I noticed that many of the items had the form “Socialization is . . .” “Relative deprivation is . . .”

Well, this is stupid, I thought. Why not give the student the term and have the student tell me what it is. That way the student has to do the work of formulating the answer in his or her own words. I created a study guide with about three times as many terms as were likely to be on the test, and created the test by randomly selecting from the list. This procedure had an added advantage. Invariably some student is not able to take the test on the day appointed. The instructor has two options: adopt a hard line policy: you miss the test on that day, you flunk the test or lose it as part of your grade; or the instructor has to make up an alternate test. Making up an alternate multiple-choice test is a lot of work to do for one student, even if you are using a test bank. With my technique it was easy. I would just haul out the study guide, randomly circle one-third of the items on the guide, and hand it to the student.

My procedure had an occasional criticism from students. (Well, an occasional criticism that I heard--who knows what the students were saying behind my back?) They said it depended too much on memorization. Yes it does, I said, but half of the mastery of any field is knowing the vocabulary of that field. There are other things the student needs to know, and I always supplemented my list of terms with one or two essay questions. I was too easy on my grading of these essays--part of my poor discipline described in my previous blog item was being unwilling to spend a lot of time grading long essays. But I digress.

The test-creating technique had one unique advantage. Hundreds of student responses to an item asking for a definition of “socialization” resulted in a lot of unique formulations of the concept. I was always saying to myself, “well maybe the student is right--it could really mean that.” I kept boiling down my own definitions of concepts to simpler and simpler wordings, capitalizing on the creativity of students. That got me to developing a whole dictionary of terms with memorizable definitions. Too often the definition of a term in the textbook was three lines long, and who can memorize three lines of a hundred definitions? But memorization is useful. It allows you to reflect on the term, and apply it in your reflections.

Three Varieties of Sociological Theory

1. Structural-functionalism

When I began my graduate studies in 1964, there was only one form of sociological theory: structural-functionalism. That is, there was at Harvard only one form of theory. Harvard’s competitors, especially the University of Chicago, disagreed, but they were not in our world. The Harvard world as I experienced it was ruled by Talcott Parsons, and he was the structural-functionalist. As I have described elsewhere in this blog, Parsons went around the world like an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sucking up every scrap of theory and incorporating it into his Grand Synthesis. I did not know it at the time, but Parsons’s star was setting.

Structural-functionalism depended heavily on a metaphor of the organism. A human group is like an organism, with structures, just as the human body has bones and muscles. Each structure has a function: the bones keep you standing upright, and muscles keep you moving. In a human group, the structure is made up of the norms of the group. Each norm has a function. In the family, for example, the rule is that the father should provide economically for the family, and the function of that rule is to make sure the family eats. Organisms operate by “homeostasis,” which means that if anything in the environment changes, the organism tries to maintain a stable state. If you eat too much salt, the body excretes salt and gets back to its ideal balance of salt.

You can see why Parsons’s star was setting. His model doesn’t deal well with fundamental changes, and it can promote over-simple stereotyping (the man earns, the woman loves).

Yet the metaphor of the organism is powerful. Paul the Apostle used it in his image of the Christian community as the Body of Christ. The hand cannot say to the foot, “I do not need you.”

Most of us think this way much of the time. Legislators are always trying to perfect the organism. “If we just make it illegal to . . .” And laws do solve some problems. Auto travel is safer than it used to be because we have created safer roads, and roads are created by legislators.

To me, an organism is just a fancy machine. So the real metaphor is the machine. If you can construct the perfect machine (create the perfect set of norms), you solve society’s problems. But when we solve some of the problems, we often create others. We make more and more things illegal and we fill up the prisons and then have to pay to feed and house the prisoners.

2. Conflict Theory

Along about 1960, sociologists began to pay more attention to Karl Marx. Marx had been pretty much ostracized from sociological thinking ever since the country got scared silly in the 1930s by the prospect of “socialism” taking over. Marx’s theory, which was just a sociological version of Georg Hegel’s theory of the dialectic, was that any human group invariably splits into the haves and the have-nots. He developed this theory in all kinds of directions, of course, but what he did for sociologists was sensitize us to the existence of conflict in any human group. Structural-functionalism, using the metaphor of the organism, saw conflict as a symptom of disease in the organism, something to be gotten rid of, like pain. In a well-designed organism, there would be no conflict. Marx’s theory said “Nonsense. There will always be conflict in any group.”

To me, this is just another variety of the metaphor of the machine. All social groups have authority structures, and the haves struggle with the have-nots. Marx just added the idea that you will never construct a machine to eliminate conflict. Homeostasis gets replaced by conflict.

3. Symbolic Interactionism

I mentioned Chicago as Harvard’s competitor. The University of Chicago boasted the oldest department of sociology in the country (founded in 1892). Harvard did not have a department until 1931. By the 1920s Chicago was creating a whole school of empirical research, called, of course, “the Chicago School”.

Chicago was home to a philosopher named George Herbert Mead. Sociologists picked up Mead’s ideas and, under the leadership of Herbert Blumer, created a brand of theory called “symbolic interactionism.” It was “symbolic” because it said that all human behavior is mediated through language. Blumer called it “interactionism” because he saw all human behavior as structured by the unpredictable interaction of human beings with one another.

To me, the metaphor of “the game” was a perfect way to sum up the theory. Herbert Blumer had once played professional football--what more natural thing than for him to see all behavior as a game?

In a game, there are rules, but the rules can be negotiated and people sometimes cheat. More importantly, you can never predict the outcome of a game. If the rules are well-designed, the teams are evenly matched and the outcome depends on the creativity of the players in figuring out ways to play against the opponent.

That fits the reality of society better than the machine image. Every time a legislator devises a new rule to solve a problem, someone figures out a way to get around the rule. We are in a game, with fluid expectations and no sure predictions. What looks chaotic at first glance (basketball always looks that way to me) turns out to have a structure, even though you can still never predict the winner.

Conclusion

Years ago I read Gene Sharps’s three volumes on nonviolent action. I became convinced that nonviolence was the answer to society’s most serious problems. If we could just get people to behave nonviolently. . . I now realize that I was unconsciously thinking along a structural-functionalist line. Nonviolence can be a useful play in a game, but it can no more guarantee victory than a single play in a football game can guarantee victory. In practice, nonviolence almost always seems to be overtaken by people who grow impatient with its slow results and move into violent solutions.

I now believe that there are no fool-proof solutions to any human problem. We are in a game with unpredictable outcomes. The story will go on and on, and no one can predict what twists and turns it will take. As Christians we are called to enter into the game, play it in as loving way as we can, and accept the fact that we will never control the outcome.

The game metaphor has one very important advantage as a model. It is interesting and open-ended. If society really operated like a machine, we would either become pawns in a perfectly-ordered society, or we would all die of boredom.

The Marginal Sociologist

2011-03-28T11:54:00.000-05:00

A great deal of success in life comes from being in the right place at the right time. Since most people are not in that place at that time, most people do not become great successes.

Having been admitted to the Harvard Department of Social Relations in 1966, I was deluded into thinking that I was on the way to becoming famous. I was indeed in the right place at the right time. I was a Catholic priest with good grades applying to a prestigious school at a time when everybody was enthused about ecumenism and the opening of doors to new groups. What I did not realize, and what I am only now beginning to appreciate, is that getting admitted to a good school, and completing a degree in that school, did not remove all of the obstacles to becoming famous.

Not that becoming famous was a central goal for me--after all, I am a follower of Francis of Assisi, whose goal in life was to become the least in his society. But who can resist giving in slightly to a faint dream of having your name recognized all over the world? Certainly not me.

The obstacles to making it in the academic Big Leagues are both external and internal. One big external obstacle is the lack of contacts with the Right People. Going to school in a seminary in rural southern Illinois is not a way to make friends with the intellectual elite of the country. The bigger obstacles are internal. Going to school in rural southern Illinois made me hesitant to open my mouth. “Better to keep your mouth shut and allow people to think you are stupid than to open your mouth and prove it.” In several years of graduate classes at Harvard, I hardly ever ventured to ask a question in a class. I am not even sure I know how to hold a fork in polite dining (even though I once bought a book on etiquette and studied it from cover to cover). Add in a slight tendency to depression and you have someone who is likely to avoid any opportunity to take the initiative needed to become famous.

Neither of my parents even went to high school. I was proud of the fact that my father dropped out of school after seventh grade, and that my mother wanted to go to high school but the family couldn’t afford it--they needed the income she could get by going to work. Those were great credentials for proving my membership in the Lower Classes, but I am only recently realizing the cost of those credentials. The biggest cost was the lack of coaching in the disciplines needed to do good intellectual work.

Most young people would rather enjoy life than buckle down to hard tasks. The purpose of coaches is to motivate young people to undertake the hard tasks, show them how they can be successful in mastering those tasks, and lead them on to more and more challenging tasks. Playing in the intellectual big leagues requires a lot of such discipline. For example, you need to learn how to search out and read more and more sources for your thinking, and you need to learn why you have to cite where you got your ideas. I never got such coaching. I read for pleasure, which seemed to convince my mother that whenever she caught me reading, that meant that I needed to be doing something more useful. Reading in my home consisted in my father’s subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, and my mother’s subscriptions to the Sacred Heart Messenger and the St. Augustine’s Messenger. The latter was a publication of the seminary for African American students operated in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi by the Society of the Divine Word. It happened that my mother’s best friend, who lived on the street behind ours, was the sister of the rector of that seminary. Both my parents liked the St. Anthony Messenger, a publication by the Franciscans from Cincinnati. The only thing my father ever published was a brief letter in that magazine thanking St. Anthony for the great gift in his life of a son (me).

My own reading tastes were hardly conducive to getting into Harvard. I bought every book in the Hardy Boy series and kept reading the same books over and over, often out loud to my younger brother, in bed before going to sleep, drinking Pepsi. No wonder I became overweight. I never even wondered what that experience meant to the younger brother.

The skills involved in finding and citing scholarly sources are changing rapidly, with the coming of Wikipedia and online libraries, but the basic rationale for having such skills remains the same: you need to think critically about where ideas come from, and you need to be able to show other people how your thinking has developed from those sources. Never in fourteen years of seminary training did I get training in such skills. My three years of philosophy study were intellectually stimulating, but half of the textbooks were authored by our teachers, and they never documented where they got their materials. That made sense in a system where the goal was to prepare the student to do the “care of souls” among uneducated lay people, but it caused culture shock when I arrived in graduate school. There it seemed that the game was to offer a critique of every statement made by a professor, along with the source of your critique. “But so-and-so says . . .”

The bottom line was that I finished my graduate degree, went out into the world with my Harvard Ph.D., and failed totally to do anything remarkable with it. Not that those years of study were useless. They provided me with many skills, and I have often said and still say that the years at Harvard were one of the great experiences of my life. They just didn’t make me Famous.

You can tell that I still haven’t quite gotten over the hidden dream of fame.

But being marginal in that way did give me an advantage in one way. It gave me some distance from the established ways of thinking in academia. I was always an outsider, with a little resentment at how outsiders always get treated in any game. Being a total failure at any athletic contest contributed to that sense of resentment.

Why am I saying all this? I am leading up to presenting my great ideas about sociological theory, and explaining why my ideas will not be totally useless. The next entry in this series (which may end up being a series with only two entries) will be “The Marginal Sociologist Looks at Sociological Theory,” or, “The Machine and the Game: Sociological Theory Boiled Down to Two Simple Models.” Stay tuned.

Whose wisdom, whose wealth, and whose might?

2011-03-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

We usually say that wisdom is a good thing. But there is a false wisdom. Paul says that the follower of Jesus should be foolish rather than wise. He says that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.

Some preachers these days say that if you are holy, you should get wealthy. Wealth is a sign of God’s blessing.

Practically everybody in this country says that the U.S. should have bigger guns than anybody else in the world.

Walter Brueggemann, a United Church of Christ theologian, compares Egypt under Pharaoh with our situation today (Journey to the Common Good, 2010). Pharaoh is the opposite of everything that God wants for the people. God led the people out of Pharaoh’s Egypt into a place of freedom, the desert.

Pharaoh lived by an unholy trio of values. They are:

wisdom

might

wealth

Pharaoh had all the wisdom. He had his wise men, those who interpreted his dreams and performed miracles for him. That worked until God stepped in and sent him dreams that the wise men could not interpret and helped Moses to do things that those wise men could not duplicate.

Egypt, with its seven years of famine, became a place of scarcity, and Pharaoh used that scarcity to get control of all the country’s wealth. He put Joseph in charge, and the story says that the people gave everything they owned to Joseph in return for food. Pharaoh, through his agent Joseph, ended up owning everything and making slaves of everyone. Pharaoh got all the wealth.

That’s what happens in human societies. It is happening in our society. Fewer and fewer people are owning more and more of the wealth.

God called the people out of the place of bondage, the place where scarcity kept the people under the control of Pharaoh, into a desert where they could begin to see past their scarcity. To do that they had to let go of their fear. Brueggemann uses the stories of manna and Sabbath to make that point.

When the people ran out of food, God provided them food in the form of manna, “bread from heaven.” God forbade them to store up the manna. If they tried to store it, it became rotten and wormy. But on the day before the Sabbath they could gather twice as much as they needed. The extra they kept over was to be used on the Sabbath without getting rotten and wormy. God wanted the people to rest on the Sabbath.

The kingdom of scarcity is a 24/7 kingdom. There is no rest. You can’t rest, because someone may be gaining on you. There won’t be enough if you don’t work every minute of every day.

Pharaoh had his chariots and charioteers--he had all the might. The people who run the show in our country and around the world are careful to keep control of the military, the source of might. If we don’t have the big guns, someone else will come along with bigger guns and take away what we have.

In the desert the people did not store up wealth, and God was their defense (look at what happened to the chariots and charioteers when they tried to pursue the Israelites across the sea).

The Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt into the desert is one of the great stories of all time. It motivated the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the great nonviolent movements in history. It can motivate us today.

We have to quit being so concerned with scarcity, and depend more on God and each other. We have to quit fearing possible attacks from the latest enemy (in the 1950s it was Russia, in the 1960s it was Vietnam, in the 1990s it was Saddam Hussein, and since 2001 it has been El Qaida). We have to demythologize the wise men of our time, those who tell us that our economy has to make more gadgets more and more efficiently and sell them to more and more people. That may create wealth, but it is not making us happier. We can’t see that because our wise men have sold us on Pharaoh’s wisdom.

God wants us to be free just as much as God wanted the Israelites to be free. We have to get out from under the control of Pharaoh’s wisdom, Pharaoh’s wealth, and Pharaoh’s might.

Sharing one's faith

2011-03-16T10:31:00.002-05:00

Recently the Pew Trust on Religion and Society conducted a survey of American religious practice and affiliation. It got publicity for the statement that the second largest “denomination” in the country is ex-Catholics. About 30% of people raised Catholic no longer say they are Catholic. That amounts to about 20 million people. There are only 16 million Southern Baptists in the country, and they are the largest single denomination besides the Catholics.

That is not news to me. I have been following numbers like this for thirty years, and have seen the trend toward leaving the Church increasing over that period. Also not news to me is that the Catholic Church is no worse off and no better off than any other denomination. All denominations have been losing members at the same rate or at worse rates. Whatever is happening to Catholicism is happening to everybody else too.

The study also points out an interesting fact: a substantial segment of those leaving the Church are leaving it because they see the Church as not religious enough. For example, they see Catholics as not taking the Bible word-for-word literally.

The only reason the Catholics are growing in number overall is because of the number of Catholic immigrants from Latin America.

Analysts of the Pew study surprised me with one statement, however. They say that most other groups are making up for their losses by “evangelizing,” by recruiting new members. Catholics aren’t doing that. The implicit concludion: Catholics should get with it and start evangelizing.

The word “evangelize” sounds bad in the U.S. People equate it with proselytizing. Proselytizing means that you go out and actively poach members from other churches. Evangelizing means that you witness to your beliefs publicly, and, I suppose, work to recruit unaffiliated people.

There is another connotation to the word “evangelize.” It suggests an appeal based on emotion, possibly on fear. “If you don’t join us, you are not saved.” Not being saved means “going to hell.” Vatican II pushed many of us Catholics away from that approach when it made two significant declarations: 1) God operates in some mysterious ways in religious bodies outside Catholicism, and 2) the individual person’s conscience is supreme over all else. If in conscience I believe that God calls me to leave the Catholic Church and become a Lutheran, God is okay with that.

If I really accept those two statements, and I do, I cannot go around telling people that they are lost unless they join us. I lose an important recruiting tool. Does accepting the two statements also make me too relaxed about sharing my faith?

I think it does.

For some reason, even though I think my Catholic tradition is the best thing in the world for me, and I could never think of leaving it, I am casual about sharing it with others. Why?

I parallel it with enthusiasm for something like quitting smoking. The way people describe the passage from smoker to non-smoker convinces me that non-smoking is definitely the better course of action. Yet pushing the issue can turn people off. One former smoker I know used to make a pest of himself by reminding every smoker on every possible occasion that the smoker was going to wellness hell if he or she did not quit. That made the rest of us refuse to bring up the topic with our smoking friends.

I am reluctant to get heavy, deep and real with people with whom I am engaged in casual interaction. But the easy course of action for me is to define every occasion as one that calls for steering clear of the important topic of my faith.

Do I have any enthusiasms that I find myself sharing with others?

This blog represents one way in which I do such sharing. A blog gives the other person the freedom to take it or leave it. I don’t risk pestering people. I do risk having them not listen to me at all. I have no idea if anyone reads this blog, or that they arre affected by what I say if they do read it.

The bottom line is that I do not think God calls me to go on a crusade of street preaching. Someone else may feel called to do that. More power to her.

I still think it is important to provide good pastoral care to the people already in our Catholic community. There is no reason why we have to copy the rest of the U.S. religious world by letting 30% of our own folks go somewhere else.

Recently Pope Benedict set up a Church office in Rome to promote the “new evangelization.” The idea is good. I just with he could have found a better word to name his program.

The Care of Souls

2011-03-14T09:57:00.000-05:00

Back in my seminary days in Teutopolis, Illinois (ca 1962), the term “care of souls” was one of the most important phrases in our vocabulary. In Latin the term was cura animarum.

We had been ordained to the priesthood in June of 1962, but we could not “get the cura” until we had fulfilled certain requirements. The most important of these was to deliver the “cura sermon,” a 30-minute written essay read orally to the entire seminary community during its main meal. Until we had completed the cura requirements, we could not do two important things that every priest was supposed to do: hear confessions and preach publicly.

I did not keep a copy of my cura sermon, but I remember that the topic was “tradition,” and that, following my life-long fascination with stories from the old West (the Lone Ranger), I based it on the robber’s phrase “hand it over,” which is what the word “tradition” basically meant.

I arrived at graduate school determined to use my graduate training to study the topic of “care of souls,” which people at Harvard translated, too literally in my opinion, as “cure of souls.” My heroes in the priesthood were men like Msgr. Alphonse Bertman (“Father Al”) of St. Aloysius Parish in Springfield, Illinois. My parents had moved to his parish shortly before my ordination. The neighborhood of “St. Al’s” had been an unruly Italian and Lithuanian coal miners’ enclave in the late 1930s. The bishop had asked Father Al to hold the fort for a while until some priest could be persuaded to take over the unwelcome assignment. Father Al stayed on the job until his death in 1963, and saw the parish grow into a vibrant Catholic community that helped to give new life to the entire northeast side of Springfield.

How did he do it? What did he do that made such a difference in the lives of so many people, who respected him so much that the city named a street after him? Those were my questions.

There are negative examples of care of souls also. Just recently I heard a story of how a foolish action by a priest resulted in the departure of two people from the Catholic community. That is not tragic--when we do not provide good care of souls, people should go where they can get it. But I believe that our Catholic tradition has riches that are worth trying to preserve and pass on, and that when someone leaves us, their departure impoverishes both that person and the remaining Catholic community.

For some reason, which I have spent a lifetime trying to understand, some U.S. parishes become really vital centers of Christian living, to the point where, on the whole, U.S. Catholicism has become much more vital than the Catholicism of western Europe. I was convinced that the answer lay in what I called “good care of souls.” Where you have that, good things happen. Where you don’t have it, good things don’t happen. But what is “that”? What is “good care of souls,” and how do we go about making it more likely to exist?

The Vatican II Hiccup

From 1962 to 1965 the Catholic Church experienced the Second Vatican Council, which was accompanied by a widespread revision of everything that U.S. Catholics had been doing for several centuries. Much of the revision was necessary and very productive, but some of it went off track, as many observers, including our present Pope Benedict, have observed. I want to focus on one way that the Council threw the priesthood off track.

What happened to the priesthood after Vatican II was something similar to what was happening at about the same time to the profession of teaching elementary and secondary school in our country. Every theorist in the country developed recommendations about how to make the job better. The expectations shot so high that no human being could possibly fulfill them. A priest was supposed to be a combination of financial manager, personnel specialist, psychological counselor, marriage and funeral advisor, expert in canon law, school administrator, and community organizer. In addition, he was expected to be a saint, and spend hours a day in prayer and contemplation. No wonder that many men in the role gave up in frustration, and many other people decided that priesthood was no place for them.

I call this the “Vatican II hiccup” because I think the fifty-year trend, a mere hiccup in the scale of the history of Catholicism, is about to come to an end. As priests have become fewer and fewer, lay people have taken over many of the roles that priests had been expected to play. That should make the role of priest more “do-able,” more realistic in its expectations. When I was first ordained, I thought I should act as counselor to several people who came to me for advice. Gradually I concluded that I was not doing them or myself any good and I withdrew from that role. Today I try to recognize when someone needs professional counseling, and as carefully as I can, I refer the person to a professional. Similarly, if I were a pastor, I would surely not try to handle the parish finances by myself.

Two Models of Priesthood

I use two priests as my exemplars of good care of souls. One is the man I just described, Msgr. Alphonse Bertman. The other is the pastor of the parish where I grew up, St. James Parish in Decatur, Illinois. Its pastor from around 1911 to his death in 1952 was Fr. Francis Ostendorf.

A priest who knew Fr. Ostendorf once described him, derisively, as a “sacristy priest.” That meant that Fr. Ostendorf did nothing more than carry out ritual duties without trying to help people in other ways. The criticism was muted, in my eyes, by the fact that the critic was himself pretty much a disaster as a pastor. However, I recognize that two observers can see quite different things and tell quite different stories about the same person. The author Mark Costello, who attended St. James grade school a year or two behind me, published a story about a woman I worked for at St. Mary Hospital during my high school summers. His picture of her was bitterly cynical, a picture that I could hardly believe.

From my perspective, as a child growing up during the Second World War, Fr. Ostendorf created a safe and sacred world. Every day all 300 of the students in the school (there were about 40 in my grade) marched outside for the raising of the American flag (with reveille played by a student bugalist), processed over to the church for the 8:00 am Mass, and then returned to school until, around 3:30 pm, we marched outside again for the lowering of the flag (this time the bugalist played “Taps”).

Fr. Ostendorf had an assistant, Fr. Joseph Prokopp, who won our admiration by bringing his cocker spaniel (“Smokey”) to his once-a-week catechism class and let the dog wander up and down the rows of classroom desks. The two priests presided at Masses every day (6:30 and 8:00 am), “Mother of Perpetual Help” devotions on Tuesday evenings, Stations of the Cross on Friday evenings during Lent, Saturday confessions (2:00 to 4:00 and 7:00 to 8:00 pm), and at least two or three Sunday Masses. Thirteen School Sisters of St. Francis lived in a two-story convent next to the church. Besides teaching, administering the school and providing excellent musical leadership for the church and school, they baked hosts for Mass, and probably cleaned the church. (They must have done that. If lay parishioners had been asked to do it, I am sure my mother would have been one of the volunteers, and I do not remember her ever doing it.)

Fr. Ostendorf drove a Packard, and every year he went to Wisconsin for a month of fishing. Except for that month, he was always present, bounding up the steps from the street to the rectory two at a time. I am sure he “went on sick calls,” anointing people and giving them the “last rites” in their homes at all hours of the day and night, and did many other things I never saw.

I spent three months in bed with rheumatic fever during my high school years. Fr. Ostendorf lent me a tiny metal puzzle, a checkerboard cut into pieces. The goal was to re-assemble the pieces into a complete checkerboard. It took me two months to get the puzzle solved. When I returned the puzzle to him after my recovery, he produced a piece of paper on which he had written several more solutions of the puzzle. I concluded that he must have spent a lot of time on the puzzle. He was able to relax.

A job description based on his life described a job I could handle. The Saturday confessions bothered me because that meant that I would never be able to listen to a Notre Dame football game. But some bad always comes with the good.

“Father Al” provided a rather different model. His rectory was an ordinary house along 20th Street in Springfield--if you didn’t know where he lived, you would have had trouble finding the place. He was a stickler for ritual details. I remember him carefully removing his biretta at every mention of the name of Jesus during the sung Gloria and Credo at Mass. The story was that he reproved an assistant for washing a car in the rectory driveway wearing shorts. Yet he refused the title “Monsignor,” and must have done something to win the approval of those unruly immigrant coal miners. His “right hand man” was a woman, Gilda Fulgenzi, who stayed near him as he died of liver cancer, and later became Chancellor of the Springfield diocese.

When I was ordained, even though my parents had only lived in his parish for three years, he insisted on having a “First Mass” for me in the parish. He paid for a breakfast for the clergy and my family at the Springfield Fairgrounds.

Both of these men seemed to me to be comfortable in the role of pastor, able to laugh and have fun, to be reverent and serious when dealing with sacred things, and with a sense of compassion and sympathy for the plight of ordinary men and women trying to live a Christian life in the midst of the more Catholic Springfield and the more Protestant Decatur environment.

Preparation for Priesthood

My seminary education took place just before the changes of Vatican II. The system was easy to understand. We studied Latin for six years because we needed it to say Mass, pray the breviary, and use Latin textbooks in philosophy and theology. We studied philosophy so that we could understand theology better. We studied theology so that we could minister to people (do care of souls) better. Theology consisted of four major topics: dogma, moral theology, Scripture, and canon law. Each of these fields was studied throughout the four-year program. Other smaller topics got a year or so: homiletics (how to preach) and catechetics (how to teach catechism) were two that I remember.

I came out of theology with the conviction that book learning is essential but limited. You study books so that you get more tools in your toolbox, but in the real world you are never sure that the tool you plan to use will work. You try all the existing tools, and if none of them work, you invent a new one. In the meantime you keep reading. The priest who quits reading is likely to do the care of souls poorly.

The advice about reading was good, but the system did not prepare us for change. We expected that life in the Church would be pretty much the same as it was when we started our studies.

After Vatican II much of the fixed structure of the old curriculum changed. I did not experience the change first hand, but it seems that one important change involved rejection of what was called “theology based on the manuals.” In dogma and moral theology there were “manuals,” textbooks based on earlier textbooks. The manuals tried to condense for practical use what was known about each of the issues discussed. In moral theology, for example, our (Latin) textbook was the 17th edition of a text written by Jesuits at Louvain. The first edition was probably written in the 1700s.

The old system gave me a solid foundation in factual information (what doctrines were defined by the Church and when and why they were defined the way they were), but many of my classmates found the texts deathly boring. My impression is that the new system evolved to look more like the standard game in secular academic institutions: do a critique of everything and win points by looking creative. It seemed to me that the game did what Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, accuses many Protestant seminaries of doing: make religion into an academic exercise and take out of it any emotion that might give it life. In other words, make the seminary a branch of a secular university and its graduates will kill whatever religion they find when they go out into the “real world.”

U.S. seminaries are apparently in the middle of a rejection of the post-Vatican II approach. I welcome the rejection, but my impression is that what the rejectors are suggesting to replace that approach is too slavish an attempt to return to what we had before the Council. What we need is a theological preparation designed to help us do good care of souls in the world we live in, not in the world of 1950.

My Own Struggle with the Care of Souls

I began work on my doctoral dissertation in sociology at Harvard in 1967 with the goal of describing the role of the Catholic priest. I had in mind some of the efforts to provide such care in the environment I was in: the student body at Harvard. Our efforts revolved around what we called “small-group liturgies.” Instead of focusing on the larger Catholic community at Harvard (which was centered at St. Paul Church near the center of the campus, and which regularly drew capacity crowds on Sunday), we had Mass in a nondenominational building in the Harvard Yard called Philips Brooks Hall. We could get maybe 50-75 people for a Sunday Mass.

After my dissertation committee rejected my thesis proposal in May of 1968 (“much too ambitious--get one advisor and work with him”), my new advisor, a woman named Renée Fox, suggested, “Why don’t you study the place where you live, St. Anthony Shrine in Boston?” The Shrine was the total opposite of the small-group approach that had fascinated me. I made the switch, except that problems in Boston made me move the study to Chicago, where I ended up with a study of St. Peter Church in the Loop, a place very similar to the Boston Shrine. Processing several thousand written surveys and analyzing 80 face-to-face, hour-long interviews, I developed more ideas about what makes for good care of souls.

Several of my interviewees made statements like “I like it when the priest enjoys saying Mass.” A woman interviewee said “I was praying the Our Father with the congregation one day, and suddenly the thought struck me: these people—they come here to pray.” I have never been able to pray the Our Father at Mass without thinking of that statement.

One finding astounded me. The church walls are marble. It is marble with an orange tone, but to me, any kind of stone feels cold. Yet the one adjective that came up over and over in the interviews in people’s description of the church was “warm.” The church and its staff were warm.

What makes a place “warm”? Here is my answer: the people who staff the place are open to involvement with the people who come there. The staff involvement has two characteristics: it is vulnerable, and it is faithful. The staff do not stay behind plexiglass shields, and they try to make each encounter with every individual open to future encounters. I could use the word “love” to describe this kind of involvement, but the word has become so overloaded with other connotations that it has become useless for serious use. Nevertheless, that is what love is: vulnerable, faithful involvement.

Good Care of Souls

So good care of souls requires vulnerable, faithful involvement with the people. What does that look like?

To be vulnerable means that you can be influenced by the other person. This means that you cannot enter an encounter with all the answers, dictating how things will be or have to be. Here is where the pre-Vatican II approach has its greatest difficulty. That approach was grounded in a theory which said that the pastor is judge and ruler. Judges and rulers tell you how it is and how it should be. Such an attitude makes a loving relationship difficult.

Does that mean abandoning principles and becoming totally wishy-washy? One principle you can never abandon: you must be vulnerable and faithful. That principle is not open to negotiation. If you are to be really faithful to another person, you have to have the other person’s long-term well-being at heart. If you have someone’s well-being at heart, you cannot just “let anything go,” cannot just abandon all principled behavior. The key is how you communicate your idea of what the principled behavior should be. You approach the other person vulnerably, open to the possibility that you might have to change your own mind about what is good for that person. “I believe that something has to be done a certain way, or bad things will follow. But I could be wrong.” Could the pope be wrong? The pope speaks to a universal audience, and maybe if the pope were facing this particular individual at this particular time, the pope would have second thoughts too.

This kind of openness fits exactly what Gustav Weigel, one of the great promoters of Vatican II ecumenism in the Church, laid down as the rules for ecumenical dialog: 1) state your own beliefs as clearly and honestly as you can; 2) listen to the other person state his or her beliefs as clearly and openly as she can; 3) let God determine what you should do next. That’s vulnerability. That’s what made the Vatican Council such a moment of grace in the Church.

Conscientious Objection

2011-03-07T09:35:00.002-06:00

It was February of 1968. I had been meeting with some of the Boston area Catholic anti-war activists. I joke that I had fallen among bad company.

I decided that I had to do something to stop what I considered our immoral course of action in Vietnam. I would send my draft card to President Johnson. Other war resisters had burned their cards, but I thought the President should hear my reasons.

Before I acted I wrote my provincial minister in St. Louis, Fr. Germain Schwab, told him about my plan, and asked for his permission. He wrote me back, supporting me and adding that he regretted that he had not done more to stop the war.

I sent the card to the President with a letter, saying that the card represented my participation in an enterprise that I could no longer be a part of.

A few weeks later I received a notice from the draft board in Decatur, Illinois, my home town, informing me that I had been declared delinquent for failure to have my Notice of Classification in my personal possession, and classifying me I-A, “available for military service.” The letter informed me that I had 30 days to appeal the decision.

It was at that moment that the term “conscientious objection” took on a whole new meaning for me.

I had grown up during World War II, when we Catholics were hyper-patriotic. Until that moment in 1968, I had never taken the idea of conscientious objection seriously. It was something that a few radicals did. Suddenly I realized that I was going to be expected to take up a rifle and kill people. I was a Franciscan. There was no way I was going to do that.

I appealed the draft board’s decision and asked for re-classification as a conscientious objector. It took me a while to write that letter. I asked myself whether I was asking for c.o. status because I was a coward. How could I suddenly become a c.o. when I had never been one before? The whole thing looked suspicious. Nevertheless, the over-riding fact was that I just could not see myself killing anyone.

I got supporting letters from two Decatur pastors, including the one who had baptized me. In a remarkably short time after I appealed I got notice that the Decatur board had re-classified me I-O, Conscientious Objector.

The whole experience made me realize that my earlier clerical exemption from the draft shielded me from facing the reality of what being drafted really meant. It was only when I was faced with the actual possibility of my being told to take up a weapon that I thought seriously about the issue. Before that the whole business was theoretical, and my earlier childhood opinions over-rode any serious thought about it.

What makes me reflect on this now is an article in the lastest issue of Sojourners magazine, written by a man who had served 11 months in active combat operations in Iraq and become convinced that he could no longer serve the country that way. He notes that in 2005, veterans aged 20-24 were four times more likely to kill themselves than their civilian counterparts. In January 2010 the number of suicides in the military exceeded the number of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. He argues that the moral consequences of being asked to kill another human being, and of actually doing that, damages the person. He describes his own situation: “I did not endure a physical trauma. My brain was not exposed to concussive waves or direct impact. My injury was neither exclusively physical nor mental. It was a ‘moral injury.’“

That man, Logan Mehl-Laituri, received an homorable discharge from the military in 2008, and formed an organziation called “Centurion’s Guild,” to support veterans “who wrestle with their loyalties to God and country.” He notes that the term “moral injury” is new to the clinical field. It is discussed in a 2009 article in the Clinical Psychology Review.

Too many men and women are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, unable to free themselves from the consequences of things they have seen and done, but unable to share their feelings and thoughts with anyone else. Our society, reacting against excesses of the Vietnam era, gives heroes’ welcomes to returning veterans, and remains in denial about the psychological and moral damage that so many veterans experience.

In 1968 it was my clerical status that shielded me from thinking about what our military were being asked to do. Today the entire country is shielded from thinking about what our military are being asked to do in the Mideast.

Military people who know what it is to be in combat are often far more reluctant to use military force than are civilian politicians who know combat only in theory. They also often know more about the limited ability of force to solve a problem. It was Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, not the military, who argued that we should go into Iraq in 2003. The politician knows what will be popular with the public, and unfortunately, the U.S. public approaches all problems with a Rambo-like attitude. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. You hit us, we will hit you back, hard! Lock ‘em up and throw away the key.”

I believe that Barack Obama thought long and hard before he authorized the “surge” in Afghanistan a year and a half ago. General Petraeus’s strategy in Iraq seemed to have worked. Hopefully it could work in Afghanistan. As Obama said in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo that year, sometimes it is necessary for governments to use force to achieve good goals. He could not know, nor could anyone else know, whether Afghanistan was such a situation. Only time will tell.

While the geo-politicians struggle with strategies toward peace, the rest of us need to keep thinking about what happens to all the “little people” who get caught in the gears of the machine: the civilians in the areas where we are intervening, and the foot-soldiers who are doing the intervening, before, during, and after combat.

Games, war, unions and governors

2011-02-28T10:40:00.000-06:00

People enjoy games. They enjoy playing games, and they enjoy watching others play games.

I should define the word “game.” A game is human competition. Two or more people engage each other in a ritualized struggle. The struggle can be fun, or it can be deadly. When it is fun, we call it a sport. When it is deadly, we call it war.

Competition tends to turn deadly when the parties abandon respect for each other and start to use brute force to win. When that happens in a sport, the referee calls a foul and penalizes the offender. In the game of politics there are no referees. Politics is a pick-up game.

A good game is one where people set up the rules so that each side has a chance to win. A “handicap” is sometimes used to help that happen. Nobody thinks handicaps are unfair. Without handicaps in some games, those games lose their fun.

All human activity can be seen as a game of one form or another. That is not bad. A marital relationship is a game. The dance is the form of game which we like to think of when we think of marital love. Two people engage in a mildly competitive struggle in which they show each other their prowess, and they show each other their mutual respect and trust. When human activity quits being a game, it becomes boring.

Capitalism is based on competition. Capitalism is fun for the players who can actually be in the game. Capitalism’s great problem is that the winners get so successful that they end up forcing other people out of the game, and we have monopoly. That happened in the late 1800s and we decided that competition had to be regulated by anti-trust laws. Something similar is happening today. The people on the top of the income pyramid are getting wealthier, and the rest of the population are being forced out of the game.

The Tea Party is right about the value of competition. The sad thing about many people in the Tea Party is that they are so moralistic that they make competition into a war. They see the country as filled with people who are out to destroy the republic and its Constitution. They’re too serious. Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan could have lunch together and laugh at each other’s jokes. Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan recognized that even serious politics has to be played like a game, with a rule that respects the dignity of all the players. When you start to see your opponent as evil, you break that rule. You give your opponents a reason to see you as evil and pretty soon you have a war.

Around the country some Republican governors are in a struggle with unions. They see unions as evil, and union people reciprocate by seeing the governors as evil. It is hard not to see your opponent as evil when that opponent is taking away thousands of your hard-earned dollars. Hopefully both sides will step back and see that what happens now is just one inning in a longer game. Neither side is evil, and nobody wins when they get into a war. Both sides need to invent new plays. Both sides may come to accept that the rule book could be changed so as to make the game more fair for all the players.

The theorists of nonviolence say that the word “enemy” should not be used. That word is too polarizing. They prefer the word “opponent,” because the goal of nonviolent protest is to get your opponent to join you in dealing with the situation that causes the conflict. You never close the door to further respectful conversation.

Confessions of an Aging Sixties' Radical

2011-02-23T10:26:00.002-06:00

They say that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. I am a conservative who came of age under Pope John XXIII.

My formative years were shaped by the post World War II takeover of Eastern Europe and China by Communist governments. A priest refugee from Croatia came to Decatur as chaplain of our Catholic high school. He became a frequent visitor in our home, and I was prepared, on the basis of the stories he told, to be forced to leave wherever I was living with just the clothes on my back and hit the road, walking to somewhere-only God would know where. I was convinced by an eighth grade classmate that Communists were stockpiling machine guns in the basement of his next door neighbor.

One of my most admired teachers in my first year of college seminary was convinced that Joseph McCarthy was being persecuted because he was Catholic. That seemed sensible to me. Communists were insidious, and they were everywhere.

I was religiously conservative too. When Pope John XXIII decreed, in 1962, that all courses in Catholic philosophy and theology seminaries were henceforth to be taught in Latin, I vigorously defended the policy. That was until I read, in Latin, a questionnaire in the official Vatican journal Acta Apostolicae Sedis. The questionnaire was so ridiculous, even to me, that my rock-solid Vatican fundamentalism suffered its first crack.

Then I read, in Pope John’s 1964 encyclical Pacem in Terris, that political systems founded on faulty philosophical bases can sometimes be lived with. You don’t have to go to war with them if they meet minimum standards of serving the public good. The experience for me can be described by the “windows thrown open” metaphor often used to describe Pope John’s calling of the Second Vatican Council.

Maybe I was just tired of war. Second World War, Korean War, and the beginnings of the Vietnam War-all of these had worn me down.

Recently I read that Teddy Roosevelt believed that each generation of Americans ought to have a war so young men could realize their masculinity. He engineered the Spanish American War to make his belief a reality. I used to wonder if our leaders believed the same thing, because it sure seemed to be the pattern.

More likely, every generation has to test the new weapons that keep the defense industries alive.

Pope John’s openness hit the world at the precise moment that the U.S. was electing its first Catholic president. All of a sudden it seemed that history was on our side. After years of struggling as an embattled minority, we Catholics were on a roll. In the words of a (rather conservative) priest professor of mine, “We’ve got the devil on the run, and it’s a downhill pull.”

Looking back, I think we were somewhat seduced by the experience of being on the winning political side for the first time. Catholic president, admired pope, and a Council throwing open the doors and windows. We were on the cover of Time magazine. I was on the Harvard campus, where John Kennedy had studied, and whose faculty had provided half the officials in his Washington administration.

I think we made the same mistake that Christians made when Constantine merged his political power with Christian ideals. It feels good suddenly to be able to be listened to by people with power.

It is always hazardous to analyze other people’s motives, but I have the sense that the religious right, including not a few Catholic bishops, have been enjoying the same experience with the Republican Party.

It’s their turn now, which is why I am an aging Sixties’ radical. Our time has passed.

The pendulum will swing back.

Preaching on Racism

2011-02-18T11:08:00.000-06:00

Fr. Steven Janoski is a priest in the Springfield diocese, now serving as a campus minister at Benedictine University at Springfield. A few years ago he earned a doctoral degree at the Aquinas Institute at St. Louis University, and wrote his dissertation on preaching about racism.

I recently got a copy of the dissertation, started to read it, and discovered that Fr. Steve had served for three years as pastor of four small parishes in Calhoun County, Illinois. Many of us friars know Calhoun County, because for years we would travel there on weekends to help pastors with weekend Masses.

Calhoun County is almost totally Catholic, and is not a wealthy county. There is no industry, and much of the land is not suitable for farming. It is also racially homogeneous. In 2000 there were only two black people living in the county, out of a population of about 5,000.

I loved the area. Shortly after my parents were married in 1928, a friend took a home movie of them tending a campfire on the banks of the Illinois River at Kampsville. It became a place I would re-create in fantasy, a link to the exciting 1920s, the era of Bonnie and Clyde and Al Capone.

But, like much of the Springfield diocese, Calhoun County has some racism in its history. Fr. Steve used his three years of service in that county, and subsequent years in nearby Troy, Illinois, as the basis for interviews dealing with racism and his efforts to preach about it. Those interviews were the basis of the dissertation.

James Loewen is a native of Decatur, Illinois, my hometown. After he earned his degree in sociology, he began a career teaching, first in a black college in the South, and then at the University of Vermont, working to combat racism. Two of his best-known books are Lies My Teacher Told Me, which examines high school history textbooks and documents the historical inaccuracies and downright falsehoods that characterize most of those books. More recently he wrote Sundown Towns, a study of places that would not allow black people to stay in them overnight. The diocese of Springfield is home to several such towns.

For years, the Office of Social Concerns of the Springfield Diocese has been struggling to find some way to deal with the race issue in the diocese. As Fr. Steve documents so well in his dissertation, much of the diocese is rural in character and racially homogeneous. Much of the population has no opportunity to interact in person with someone of another race. Can the Church do anything to promote a Catholic racial approach in such places? By “Catholic racial approach,” I mean an approach detailed in several official statements of the U.S. Catholic bishops, beginning already in the 1970s. Specifically, can priests combat racism by preaching about it in their Sunday homilies/sermons?

I have struggled with this question. I developed the following argument. I cannot “lecture” a congregation about what they should do about any controversial political or social topic because they cannot answer back. I have the microphone. When I propose something controversial, I want people to be able to reply to my proposal. Furthermore, people come to church to worship, not to be lectured about politics.

Fr. Steve presents a counter-argument to my position. He says that the prophet is not preaching effectively unless he or she gets people riled up. God does not call us to be popular, but to preach the truth, even when it discomforts people. “To Comfort or to Challenge” was the title of a book by a sociologist back in the 1970s that dealt with the question.

I am not convinced. I believe that challenge can only be done effectively after one has developed a relation of vulnerable, faithful involvement (intimacy) with the other party. Or at least, after one has tried, consistently and over time, to develop such a relationship. (I recognize that sometimes people are closed to such a relationship.) I describe it by a metaphor: the thorn of power grows out of the rosebush of intimacy in order to protect the rose. If it doesn’t grow out of the rosebush, it becomes oppressive.

So, over the years, I have gently raised the racial issue in my preaching, but always on the periphery of the more central question that I believe must characterize a homily: what does this passage say about God? But is that good enough?

I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to have made a dent in the racial prejudice that I fear still characterizes much of the city where I live.

In September 2011 the annual priests’ convocation will spend a day and a half on the topic of racism. Perhaps the priests could begin a conversation on the topic, how to preach about racism. If we do that, we will need help.

We will need help from the people in the pews, and from the people not in the pews. We will need help from the Catholics who will hear the preaching, and from the people of color who are being affected by the racism that still lurks in our bones.

The trick will be: how can we get that kind of help?

The Great Theorist

2011-02-16T14:21:00.000-06:00

In the spring of 1964 I was a young priest, one of twelve members of my class doing a year of “pastoral internship” at St. Francis Solanus Parish in Quincy, Illinois. My whole life for the previous eighteen years had been focused on being ordained as a Franciscan priest. Now that I was ordained, I had not the slightest idea of what came next. I was waiting for someone to tell me.

Someone did. The Franciscan provincial minister told me to go study sociology, and to go to Fr. Gabriel Brinkman who would tell me where to study it. Fr. Gabriel had a doctorate in sociology from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He told me, “Go to Harvard.”

That was actually not too hard. In June of that year I wrote and got a summer school catalog, filled out an application on the back page of that catalog, and a few weeks later I was on campus. I took two courses, but more importantly, I met a Franciscan from Holland who was enrolled at Harvard in a program called “Religion and Society,” a mixture of sociology and theology. He took me under his wing and advised me to enroll at the Harvard Divinity School as a “resident graduate.” That would allow me to take half my courses in the divinity school and the other half in “the Yard” (the school of arts and sciences, where sociology was taught). The friar, Theodore Mary Steeman (known by everyone as “Theo”--pronounced Tay-oh) told me, “Take Parsons. He’s an easy grader.”

Talcott Parsons was one of the best known sociologists in the country. Twenty years earlier he had edged out the founder of the Harvard sociology department, Pitirim Sorokin, and had created a new department designed to unite all the social sciences. He called it “Social Relations.” He got psychologists like Gordon Allport and Erik Erikson to cooperate, social psychologists like Thomas Pettigrew, and cultural anthropologists like Clyde and Florence Kluckhohn. He never got the economists, the physical anthropologists and the really empirical psychologists (like B.F. Skinner) to come along.

Parsons’s great goal was to create theory that would encompass all the social sciences, and for that matter, all the sciences in general. He went around like an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sweeping up any idea he came across and building it into his synthesis.

Parsons had begun his career by translating Max Weber’s essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and had then created a massive 1937 synthesis of theory which he called The Structure of Social Action. In it he tried to show that four important thinkers, Weber (who had begun as a historian of economics but moved into sociology), Emile Durkheim (the founder of the first French journal of sociology), and two economic theorists, Vilfredo Pareto and Alfred Marshall, all converged on a style of theorizing which Parsons called “voluntarism.” As far as I could see, voluntarism was the equivalent of what was traditionally called “free will.” Parsons distinguished between behavior, which is deterministic human activity, and “action,” which is goal-directed behavior, and thus in some way free.

Edward Tiryakian, Sorokin’s graduate assistant, who liked Franciscans and coached me in my Harvard career, says that Parsons allowed himself to be swayed away from his original emphasis on freedom when he had himself psychoanalyzed in the 1940s and began to try to build Sigmund Freud into his synthesis (more vacuum cleaner theorizing). Parsons’s new great term became “systems theory.” He wrote a 1950 book called The Social System, which most people found unreadable. For that matter, most of what Parsons wrote after 1950 was unreadable. C. Wright Mills devotes a whole chapter in his famous book The Sociological Imagination to criticizing Parsons, especially for his unreadability. The surprising thing, to me, was that I found him quite clear in classroom lectures. I think it was my grounding in scholastic philosophy that helped.

By the time I met Parsons, his star was beginning to set. A revolt was brewing against his imperialistic claim to include all knowledge in his synthesis, and his model was criticized as too static and conservative. He had begun to use organisms as his model of social systems, and grounded his model on the concept of homeostasis.

After Parsons retired, his synthesis broke apart, and Harvard went back to a standard department of sociology. The Great Theorist has failed in his great synthesis.

But even though it proved unworkable to unite all the social sciences into one academic department, his project reminded me of the way medieval theorists tried to summarize all their work in works like Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.

It is true that no one could possibly summarize all the ideas written in even one language in today’s world. But getting it all in is not the point. The point is to get a grasp on the whole, in such a way that one can live more vitally and fully. We need to try to get a grasp on social science, natural science, and theology. We need all three if we want to use our minds these days.

Secrecy

2011-02-12T16:48:00.000-06:00

Every year the Quincy Herald-Whig publishes the salaries of all the public employees in the city including the police, firefighters, and everybody in the public school system. This allows the rest of us to feel anger about how much money some of these people make.

Why don’t we publish the salaries of the employees and managers of all the other businesses in town? That would at least offer us some kind of comparison. I suspect that we don’t do this because most people are afraid that someone would get mad if they knew how much money they make. Information about pay is one of the closest guarded secrets in the business world.

The secrecy surrounding pay levels allows us to focus on the tiny areas where there is no secrecy, such as what we pay teachers, school administrators, police and firefighters.

When a teacher keeps one child out of prison, that teacher saves the taxpayers $30,000 a year for the prison term that the child would have served. When a firefighter keeps a home from being destroyed by fire, someone has just been saved tens of thousands of dollars. When a police officer keeps us from killing each other on the highway, we save the cost of replacing our cars, not to mention our funerals. But we don’t see those good effects. Nobody gets rewarded for stopping a bad thing before it has a chance to occur.

Our public employees help us to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The reason people get upset about paying them more is because secrecy has kept us from thinking about how much we pay others in the business world.

On inclusive language

2011-02-10T09:27:00.000-06:00

In 1995 Liturgy Training Publications, a Chicago publisher of aids to Catholic worship, issued The Psalter: A faithful and inclusive rendering from the Hebrew into English poetry, intended primarily for communal song and recitation. The subtitle continues: This translation is offered for study and for comment by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.

The “International Commission” (ICEL) involved scholars in Hebrew and English poetry. For thirty years the group worked to produce a translation of the psalms that would be understandable, poetic, and usable in common recitation or song. The psalter was approved by the U.S. bishops, with an “Imprimatur” by William Cardinal Keeler, President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

I found the translation wonderful. I immediately began to use it to begin my classes in sociology at Quincy University. I developed ways of using it in my private prayer. Our friar community at the University bought copies and we used it in our common recitation of the “liturgy of the hours” (the “divine office” or “breviary”).

Then, sometime after 2000, some commission in Rome decreed that official approval of the translation must be withdrawn. I do not recall that any explanation was provided for the withdrawal. The move was part of the replacement of the previous membership on ICEL by a newer group, a group more intent on turning back what it perceived as abuses and distortions brought about after the Second Vatican Council. Sadly, the U.S. bishops’ conference did not challenge the change, and the ICEL edition of the psalms disappeared from Catholic bookstore shelves.

It seems that one objection to the translation was its use of inclusive language in most of the psalms. Inclusive language is language that balances masculine and feminine references. What some people call “horizontal” inclusive language uses “brothers and sisters” instead of just “brothers,” or “men and women” instead of just “men.” “Vertical” inclusive language is more controversial, and attempts to refer to God without masculine terms. This requires some changing of grammatical structure, for example, some changing of third person (He [God] did such and such) with second person language (You, God, did such and such). In English, the second person is gender neutral.

There was some objection to the vertical inclusivity in the ICEL psalter even before its publication, and the publishers were required to include non-inclusive language in some passages. Fr. Gilbert Ostdiek, a friar from my province who spent his life trying to make worship more prayerful and meaningful, and who was involved with ICEL most of those years, offered to give me a list of the psalms where the translators had been forced to change their original version.

Inclusive language attempts to take into account the sensitivities of many people, especially women, who feel excluded when masculine language is used in prayer. I presume that the defense of the masculine language is that “this is what the original text says, and we should not change the original text.” I agree with that opinion, but only when it involves translation of biblical texts without reference to their use in prayer. Biblical language is often sexist, because the cultures which produced the texts were sexist. We should not gloss over that fact. If we change “official” translations to gloss it over, we produce an unrealistically high opinion of the origins of the texts.

Catholic tradition has always maintained that some Scripture cannot be accepted by Christians today, because our understanding of God’s relation to us has developed. The most visible example is Christian rejection of animal sacrifices.

But when it comes to prayer in common with others, and Catholicism has always prized prayer in common, our language needs to be sensitive to the reactions of everyone in the group praying together. I think we need to follow St. Paul’s example. In I Corinthians 8:7 ff, Paul is discussing whether Christians can eat meat sacrificed to idols. His discussion goes like this: we know that idols do not exist, and that meat sacrificed to an idol is no different from any other meat. Christians can eat such meat in good conscience. But if I have a brother (or sister) who thinks I am honoring the idol by eating such meat, then I should not eat it, because the well-being of my brother or sister is more important than my freedom to eat the meat. In fact, he says, I will never eat meat again if that is what it takes to preserve the spiritual life of my sister or brother.

I look at inclusive language that way. I know that God has no gender, and that when I refer to God as “he,” I understand that God is not masculine. But if my sister has trouble praying when I refer to God that way, I will never pray to God again with masculine language, if that is what it takes to help my sister to pray with me to our God.

Social Insecurity

2011-02-05T07:51:00.000-06:00

The word “security” is one of the most important words in the U.S. vocabulary. We have Social Security, Homeland Security, financial security, military security. If you want to win an election, just paste one of these labels over your campaign.

This compulsion to have security makes us a radically un-Christian society. Not only that, it makes us a radically un-Jewish society. Both Judaism and Christianity rest on a foundation of radical insecurity.

Look at the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Most people would say that the Ten Commandments are central to Judaism, and that the Sermon on the Mount is central to Christianity. Some Christians even appropriate the Ten Commandments and want to have them enshrined in courthouses.

The Ten Commandments

There is a sleeper commandment among the ten: Remember to keep holy the Sabbath.

The Sabbath was (and is) the custom of setting aside the seventh day as a day of rest. Chapter 16 of the book of Exodus describes how the Lord provided manna for the people in the desert. Remember that they were in that very insecure desert situation because God had called them out of Egypt. They were hungry. God provided a mysterious food called “manna,” which appeared on the ground in the morning. Moses says to the people:

“Now, this is what the LORD has commanded: So gather it [the manna] that everyone has enough to eat, an omer for each person, as many of you as there are, each man providing for those of his own tent.” The Israelites did so. Some gathered a large and some a small amount. But when they measured it out by the omer, he who had gathered a large amount did not have too much, and he who had gathered a small amount did not have too little. They so gathered that everyone had enough to eat. Moses also told them, “Let no one keep any of it over until tomorrow morning.” But they would not listen to him. When some kept a part of it over until the following morning, it became wormy and rotten.

. . .On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, two omers for each person. When all the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses, he told them, “This is what the Lord prescribed. Tomorrow is a day of complete rest, the sabbath, sacred to the Lord. You may either bake or boil the manna, as you please; but whatever is left over put away and keep for the morrow.” When they put it away for the morrow, as Moses commanded, it did not become rotten or wormy. Moses then said, “Eat it today, for today is the sabbath of the Lord. On this day you will not find any of it on the ground. On the other six days you can gather it, but on the seventh day, the sabbath, none of it will be there.” (Exodus 16: 16-26)

Gathering more than you need on a single day is driven by a desire for security. Similarly, working every day of the week is often based on a desire for security. If you don’t work every available minute, you might not have enough. We are a society that praises people who work every minute. We accuse the poor of being poor because they don’t work enough.

Actually, the whole biblical story is a story of trust in the face of insecurity. God tells Abraham, leave your father’s house and go out to a place that I will show you. That was a pretty open-ended command. Was Abraham sure that it was God who was calling? Was he sure that the “place that I will show you” was as good as the place he was leaving?

God tells Moses to lead the people out of Egypt. They ended up in the desert, and grumbled to Moses, “Why did you lead us out of a place where we at least had enough to eat and drink?” The desert was insecure, but only that insecurity led them to freedom.

Our society thinks that security is a prerequisite for freedom. We have got it backwards. Insecurity is a prerequisite for freedom. We imprison ourselves.

A hundred years ago most of our forebears lived on farms. Farming is an insecure business. The temptation must have been strong to work on Sunday. Many people nevertheless refused to work on Sunday. They accepted a lower degree of security because of God’s commandment about the Sabbath.

The Sermon on the Mount

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.

. .Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat (or drink), or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?

Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?

So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.

Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil. (Matthew 6: 19-20, 25-34)

This is counter-cultural. This is a message that our society just has to ignore. Catholics ignore it by saying that only people in religious life need to live it (and even they have problems with it). Protestants ignore it by saying that it represents an ideal, and that no one is supposed to really live that way.

What if a bunch of us were to begin to live that way?

First of all, we could reduce our concentration on the future and begin to live in the present more. “Sufficient for a day is its own evil.” We could practice what the Buddhists call “mindfulness.” We could see an upper limit on what we have to accumulate, either in physical possessions or in financial assets. Right now we are slaves to a bar that keeps getting higher and higher.

If enough of us started to adopt that mentality, it would get harder for politicians to vote huge appropriations for military hardware, and our taxes could go down. Executives would learn that they can live on less than 650 times more than the ordinary workers in their company, and there would be more for their employees.

We would not need to spend more and more just to insure ourselves against the possibility of lawsuits. We would start to see no one owes us a life free from injury and loss. Life is a gift, health is a gift, education is a gift. We need to banish the word “entitlement” from our vocabulary. Nobody is entitled to anything. When we see something as an entitlement, we take it for granted, and taking things for granted leads to boredom and anger. Boredom and anger are two of the most common emotions in our world.

God wants us to live in a world bathed in love. Love is vulnerable, faithful involvement. Vulnerability means that you don’t control things. You are insecure. If we were to become really involved with the people around us, we would not need to be thinking all the time about the future. The people around us would become our security. When disaster strikes, and old securities disappear, we turn to the people who are physically near us and discover how valuable they are.

Why does it take a disaster to make us realize that every person around us carries gifts that God would like us to have?

The Counter-cultural

Some Catholic leaders argue that the Church needs to be countercultural. The problem is that they seem to mean that the Church needs to be Republican. We need to be more countercultural than that. We need to take the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount more seriously, and apply the lessons of those two documents to the real world around us.

Faith, hope, and love

2011-02-03T14:01:00.000-06:00

   Faith does not mean that I assent to a proposition such as “God exists.” Somewhere in scripture it says “the demons know this and tremble.” Faith means that I know that God is good.

   To know that God is good is a gift. We don’t get that on our own. Others, and especially God, have to provide it for us. That is one reason that theologians call it a “theological” virtue. (There are three “theological” virtues: faith, hope, and love.)

   A virtue is a good habit, just as a vice is a bad habit. We acquire ordinary virtues, such as prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, by practicing the behaviors described by those words. When we have made those behaviors into a habit, we have those virtues. But we don’t acquire faith, hope, or love. These are “theological”--they are gifts of God.

   Theology also says that the theological virtues are the same as “sanctifying grace.” A grace is a gift, and sanctifying grace is a gift that makes one holy. Faith, hope, and love are gifts that make us holy.

   Theology even goes one step further and says that these gifts are the same as God’s gift of the Spirit. They are God’s Spirit indwelling in us. When God’s Spirit dwells in us, we know that God is good.

   When God’s Spirit dwells in me, I know that God is good for me. Now the goodness becomes personal. That is what hope is. Hope means that I know that God is good for me.

   Hope, too, is a gift. It is a sanctifying gift, one that makes me holy. When I have hope, I can live my life in a quite different way than I can when I don’t have it. But I don’t just get hope because I decide one day that I would like to have some. Someone has to give it to me.

   Love is vulnerable, faithful involvement. The habit of being involved with others vulnerably and faithfully is a gift. It too is sanctifying. It too means that in some way God’s Spirit is dwelling in me. We don’t just wake up one day and decide to love. In order for us to love, we first have to be loved. When someone else is involved with me vulnerably and faithfully, God is already in that involvement.

   Our culture is so oriented to economics and profit that we have gotten away from appreciating gifts. Christmas has turned into a business. The essence of a gift is that you can’t depend on it. When we let gifts become business, we start to think that people owe us the gifts. Gifts become entitlements.

   When we lose the ability to appreciate gifts, we can’t experience faith, hope, or love. That is our U.S. problem.

The Communion of Saints

2011-01-31T10:57:00.000-06:00

[homily from All Saints, 2009]

The feast of All Saints was on a Sunday this year, and I was asked to preach at St. Francis Church here in Quincy.

St. Francis is a church with life-size statues on each of the ten or so pillars that line the center of the church. The physical reality of being surrounded by those saints became the basis of my reflections on the communion of saints.

A few years ago the parish had produced a small booklet describing the art work of the church, including the statues. I consulted the booklet to see if I could get any ideas from the stories of the saints who were represented by the statues. One story got my attention. The last statue on the south side of the church was a statue of St. Angela Merici, and the statue was put there in 1950 to honor a Sister Angela Merici for her 50 years of teaching in St. Francis School.

It was fun to ask the congregation if they knew where the statue of St. Angela Merici was in the church. Then to ask them if they knew the story of how the statue got there. And the story of Sister Angela Merici (noting that some of the people in church probably had her in school). And to ask how many knew the story of St. Angela Merici, how she was the first person to gather women together into an order dedicated specifically to the education of girls. Did they know the story of the group that St. Angela founded, a group named the “Ursulines,” after St. Ursala? Did they know the story of St. Ursala, who was supposed to have been a woman martyred along with 11,000 virgins somewhere around 400 A.D.?

As I thought of all the interweaving of these stories, the best metaphor I could think of to describe them was a bird’s nest. I seem to recall electricians describing some sloppy wiring jobs as a bird’s nest of wires. The communion of saints is like a bird’s nest of stories, all woven together. My story is woven into it, along with the stories of all the people who have been part of the story of Jesus down through the centuries.

Thinking about bird’s nests got me to thinking about a robin’s nest that I took off a pillar at Holy Cross Friary where I live a couple of years ago. I was amazed at how solid the nest was. I could have used it like a Frisbee. I wondered how it held together so solidly. Where did the bird get the glue to hold twigs together so solidly? The only answer I could think of was that the bird somehow coughed up the glue that made the nest possible. The image was gross, but I couldn’t see any other alternative.

The grossness of the image made me think of the gross things that surround our human stories, and of the forgiveness that redeems the gross things. I ended up with this description of the communion of saints:

The communion of saints is a bird’s nest of our stories woven together by
the glue of forgiveness.

I have written elsewhere about how my soul can be thought of as my story, and about how God keeps all of our stories even when the rest of us forget them, and how God will one day tell our stories in the most loving way possible in that great event which we call the Last Judgment. After that God will rejoin our stories to physical matter in the “resurrection of the body” and set us on a course of sharing our stories with one another with all the time in the world (actually, all the time in eternity) to go into detail. And to share stories with the people we have hurt, an operation which is for me the most meaningful way to think about purgatory.

Check out my website

2010-10-01T11:40:00.000-05:00

I had accumulated so many posts on this blog that I could not find anything. I therefore decided to move all the pieces from here to my website, where I could organize them into topical categories.

In the future, I plan to post new things here, and then move them to the website.

Joe Zimmerman, OFM
October 1, 2010