Mater et Magistra

 

Mater et magistra. “Mother and teacher.”

“Mater, si, magistra, non.” That is how William F. Buckley responded to Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et magistra: “Mother, yes; teacher, no.”

In 1961 Mr. Buckley’s clever response to the pope was heresy to most Catholics. That was because he, and most Catholics with him, had a too restrictive view of what a teacher is.

Jesus once said that he alone is the teacher, all the rest of us are learners. A good teacher learns from students—teaching is not a one-way street. That is the principle that Pope Francis tried to get us to accept in his effort to promote “synodality,” which is intended to help church teachers learn from the rest of the church. That was as true of the pope himself as it is of the rest of us.

At least since the 1940’s, when Pope Pius XII began to grapple with new questions arising from scientific knowledge of the human body, the official teaching agents of Catholicism, the “magisterium,” have seemed to feel responsible for issuing definitive statements about the morality of every new scientific advancement. What has happened is that Catholic moral teaching has become less and less persuasive to our fellow seekers of truth, inside and outside of the church boundaries. There is a host of questions where public moral sensitivity has moved away from what the magisterium says ought to be done. 

We believers need to enter into honest dialog with everyone else about such questions. We are all learners.

Twenty-five years ago a Catholic personal friend of mine, Mary Lyndon Shanley, published a book titled Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-sex and Unwed Parents. I was impressed by her approach to the moral issues raised by the list of topics in the subtitle of her book. Our Catholic magisterium has a long list of official statements about all of these issues, but as far as I can tell, few people, and few Catholics, are guided by what the magisterium has said. That leaves faithful Catholics with the choice of being counter-cultural and obeying what the church officially says, or abandoning the official teaching and floating free in an atmosphere without moral guidance.

The same dilemma is at the root of serious political divisions in our country. Because our faith leaders have not engaged in serious dialog with others who do not share our beliefs, one whole segment of the Catholic population has voted for a political party that has abandoned programs designed to alleviate hunger and disease in poorer nations. The Democratic party has used the politics of U.S. Catholic leaders as a reason to banish anyone who considers abortion a moral evil from the party. We are in the middle of a religious war once again, forgetting the past two centuries of peace that arose from the First Amendment of our Constitution and that were re-affirmed by the Second Vatican Council in its decree “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” Dignitatis Humanae.

Catholic moral thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, grappled with the wider culture surrounding the faith community. Thomas was condemned by the University of Paris because he used Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved from destruction by Muslim scholars.  Surely Pope Leo XIII had that in mind when he wrote in 1879 that Catholics should use Aquinas as a guide for their thinking.

Bigger than us

Bigger than us

 

“Bigger than us” I say.

As I reflect on the place religion might play in this messy world, where so many people do not seem to have any need to see and respond to God, I ask myself, what is the core of religious response?

My answer: a sense that there is something bigger than us.

Something, maybe someone, bigger than us. Not just bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

Who are us?

 Back in the ancient days of sociology, the 1950s, one of the more famous sociologists, Robert K. Merton, coined the term “reference group.” He suggested that we fashion in our minds a group of people with whom we identify. We may not belong to that group, and may have no physical connection with them, but they shape who we are.

One of my reference groups is the Roman Catholic church community. That community, in the very concrete form of St. James parish in Decatur, Illinois, saved my parents from the effects of what I believe were my two alcoholic grandfathers, one of whom committed suicide. My parents were lower class—neither went to high school. They were suddenly uprooted from their families in Springfield and sent to Decatur by the Bell Telephone Company. There the church community, and especially its leader, Fr. Francis Ostendorf, rescued them.

The Catholic community is world-wide. It inspired my brother to live for nine years as a missionary on the Brazilian Amazon, which led me to choose “Latin American social and economic development” as one of the two topics I studied intensively for my degree in sociology. My black seminary classmate, Fr. Bennet Spivey, who died two years after his ordination of Lou Gehrig’s disease, motivated me to identify with Black Catholics.

So for me, “us” is worldwide. And now that my church has expanded its sense of who can experience the voice of God, “us” for me is even wider than the Roman Catholic world.

So I say, when Jesus said “make disciples of all nations,” I say: the word “disciple” means “learner.” Jesus calls me to make learners of all nations, and then, maybe when some learners want to affiliate in a deeper way with my church, we can baptize them. Too often in history we baptized first and then made learners. Usually we never got around to the learning and let the baptism (or lack of it) become an excuse for exploitation. “If we baptize you, you can work for us without pay. If you refuse baptism, we kill you.”

 

The troubles of our time

Our greatest problem as we muddle our way through the environmental mess and the worldwide migrations our behavior is causing, is that too many of us are drifting in a world where there is nothing bigger than us. We are masters of our destiny, and our technology should be able to dig us out of whatever hole we dig ourselves into. Without anything bigger than us, self-interest tells us that restraints are not needed.

The regulators do not regulate because there is no sense that there is something bigger than themselves. Why be concerned about the feelings pf co-workers, or respectful of people who look different?

 

Love

My friends kid me about my fascination with definitions. But I insist that we need a working definition of love. Otherwise the word can mean anything, even murder. My working definition of love: respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of people with each other. (And, if you are a believer, with God).

Why should I respect, be vulnerable to, and be faithful to someone if there is nothing bigger than us?

But there is something bigger than us. That something, who I believe is a someone, is God.

I believe that we should be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our dealings with one another because that is how God is involved with us.

God loves, which is the message that Jesus took from his Jewish background, especially the psalms, and lived out himself.

 

 

Faithfulness

 [published in Muddy Riverr News, February 16, 2026]

    The first part of an operational definition of love is respect. The second is faithfulness.

    Faithfulness means that involvement is open-ended—you don’t know how your relationship with another person will look in the future, and you don’t close it off right now.

    This makes human life delightful. Any time two human beings are open to each other, the relationship might continue on into the future. When we do something to other people that shuts down that possibility, our lives are impoverished.

    When Jesus said we should become like little children, he was talking about how a child who has experienced love by another person knows that it is fun to repeat that experience. We are created to enjoy being involved with one another.

    Faithfulness is most important in the kind of relationship that we call marriage. But faithfulness is not limited to that kind of relationship.

    Faithfulness can be a low key behavior based on the tiny delight that can come from just another person’s smile—the smile of someone we meet on the street. When we know that we could, even if the possibility is hugely remote, meet that person again and have the same delight, we behave accordingly.

    We know that many of our contacts with other people are not so delightful—we sin—all of us. We damage each other, sometimes deliberately. We do things or say things that can shut down a relationship, even with someone we have loved.

    It doesn’t take much familiarity with the online world to know that online can be a sewer of unfaithfulness. It seems to be easier to say things online that you could not say face to face, which means that we shouldn’t say it online either. Every person who reads what I write online could be a person I might come to enjoy talking with some time in the future. I have a friend I disagreed with very much, but we learned to listen to each other and we changed.

    I owe my ideas about respect and faithfulness to Fr. John Joe Lakers, my Franciscan colleague and friend, whose 1996 book, Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy, says that intimacy should be the basis of all our moral judgments. As I read the book, I got the idea that what he calls intimacy can be the basis of an operational definition of love. Respect and faithfulness are two of the four behaviors that make intimacy.

 

Disciplecy

    Democracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy. All of these words end in the letters “c-r-a-c-y,” which are based on the Greek word “kratos,” which means “rule.” Democracy is rule by the people. Autocracy is rule by oneself (the person on top). Bureaucracy is rule by a committee. Meritocracy is rule by the deserving.

    The problem is the word “rule.” To rule means to tell other people what to do.  Democracy means that the people can tell you what to do. Eventually, in a democracy, what the people tell you to do can feel pretty much the same as what the monarch would tell you to do.

    Pardon my christianity, but Jesus said “You have only one teacher. All of you are learners.” The word “disciple” comes from the Latin word “to learn.” To learn is to change your mind. Jesus’s last words in the gospel of Matthew were “Go and make disciples of all nations.” He didn’t say “Go and rule all nations.”  He said, “Go and make learners of all nations.” Make learners of all people. Make all people open to changing their minds. Don’t rule them.

    So, I suggest the word “disciplecy,” pronounced di-si-ple-see. Take away the word “rule.” Disciplecy means learning how to live with other people. Learning how to live with other people means being ready to change your mind. The purpose of a disciplecy is not to tell people who should rule over them. It is to help people live together without killing each other.

The Roman Catholic Church

    I was born into a Roman Catholic family, so the story of the Roman Catholic Church has been a lifelong interest for me. Roman Catholic traditions have been too much shaped by Roman Empire traditions—canon law has the last word about everything. Popes down through the years have looked more like emperors than learners.

    The Catholic Church under the recently deceased Pope Francis engaged in a group process labeled “synodality.” The word “synod” is an ancient term for a gathering of church people to discuss things. The purpose of synodality is to get church people to learn from one another, starting with the pope. It is to get people to change their minds about what God wants, starting with the pope.

    The most recent synod was a three-year process beginning with getting people’s opinions on the grass-root level, letting the opinions migrate toward some kind of consensus, and ending with month-long meetings of representatives from all over the world. They met in a hall with round tables at which all the participants sat as equals, listening to each other, with electronic devices to deal with the variety of languages. Even Pope Francis sat at one of the round tables. They were there to learn from one another.

    When democracy really works, it is more like a disciplecy, people meeting to figure out how to live together in some kind of peace. They make rules, but the rules are hammered out by people changing their minds about what is a good way to get something done.  

    One problem we have is that our democratic gatherings tend to evolve into techniques for telling other people what they should do. They become “cratic,” focused on rule, rather than on how to live together. They get involved in collecting and distributing money taken from other people, which can be used to tell those people what to do. They become empires focused on amassing power rather than tools for living together.

    The same thing happens with our business organizations. In the capitalist dream, an entrepreneur comes up with a new way of doing something, struggles competitively with other people trying to do the same thing, and the result benefits everybody. In our world, the entrepreneur gets bought out by a bigger competitor, who gets bought out by a still bigger competitor, until we have a capitalist empire where the emperor tells everybody else what to do.

    Our country has become an empire ruled by emperors, both political and economic. Some emperors are not bad, like Caesar Augustus. Others, like Nero, are not so good.

    Democracy is not the best word for what we want, both in religion and in politics. We would do better to call it disciplecy.

 

 

Respect

    In sociology, which I used to teach, you need operational definitions. You need to be able to observe things, and even to put a number on what you are observing. If you want to study poverty, you have to have an operational definition of poverty, something you can measure.

    For years I looked for an operational definition of love. We really need that. How can men and women who call themselves followers of Jesus treat other men and women with disrespect and violence? They say, “Any talk about love is just romantic dreaming.”

    I finally found an operational definition of love. It has three or four terms, but I will just focus on one: respect. The first part of love is respect.

    Respect is observable. With a little work you could measure it.  

    Roy Webb, in his recently published book “How to Lead a School District through a Pandemic,” was describing how he did his job as superintendent of Quincy Public Schools. On page 140 he writes: “Respect is key. In the military we salute when we see others in the military out of respect. Respect is 360 degrees. You respect your boss, your peers, and your subordinates.”

    Dennis Williams, one of the founders of Bella Ease, used to tell young people not to use the N-word. When a white person uses the word addressing a black person, you have disrespect, and he did not want young people to use the word on anybody, white or black. Using it can make it easier to treat people with disrespect.  

    The F-word is a word of disrespect. The fact that it has become so common is a sign that we are getting used to treating each other disrespectfully.

    Without respect we cannot even begin to love.

    Every single human being, young, old, male, female, criminal or innocent, deserves respect, needs respect, because every single human being has dignity and needs love.

    Any form of violence is disrespectful. We cannot show love by intentionally hurting someone else. There are times when we have to cause pain—for example, when we have to struggle with someone dear to us over behavior that could destroy our relationship. But the pain is not the purpose. When you start out wanting to hurt, you diminish the dignity of the other person.

    We christians often hear the gospel admonition that we should love one another. We should love one another as Jesus loved us. Jesus never used violence against another person. Even when he was driving money changers out of the temple, he was not hitting the money changers.

    We can measure the extent to which we are a christian society by measuring the extent to which we treat every one of our neighbors with respect.

 [published in Muddy River News, January 18, 2026]

Influence versus Power

 [published in Muddy River News, December 15, 2025]

    There are two ways we can get other people to do what we want them to do. One way is to persuade them to do it. We call that “influence.” The other is to cause them pain if they do not do what we want. We call that “power.”

    Physical harm is an extreme kind of power. We allow police to carry guns. The gun is a symbol of power. If we do not do what police want us to do, they can hurt us. We do not want everybody threatening to hurt us, so the police are the only people we authorize to do it. It seems we can’t live together peacefully any other way. But we advise even the police to use power as little as possible. Some police live their whole lives as police without using their guns.

    Physical harm is not the only way for us to use power.  We can hurt with our words. Words can kill.

    We are moving away from power in many areas of our lives. We no longer allow teachers in our schools to punish students physically. We advise parents not to use physical punishments on their children. We think it is better to use influence rather than power to get children to do what we want. Why shouldn’t we treat adults the same way?

    I cannot recall one instance in the four gospels where Jesus deliberately caused or threatened pain to someone in order to get them to do something. Threatening or causing pain shows a lack of respect for the other person’s dignity. Jesus always showed respect, even to sinners.

    We say that Jesus is God. That means that God, just like Jesus, always shows respect, even to sinners. God does not use power, God does not punish. Jesus said “Let the weeds grow until the harvest.” That’s what we should do.

Counsellors and therapists are worth it

 

published in Muddy River News Oct. 14, 2025

One of my friends in the Franciscan Order recently celebrated 47 years of sobriety. It has been 47 years since he left a facility that helped religious and priests suffering from alcoholism to achieve sobriety.

Treatment like that was and still is expensive. It took my friend three months in that residential facility before its staff judged that it would be okay for him to return to a normal life. But the treatment was successful. The staff knew what it was doing.

There are many people who work in the mental health services who know what they are doing. Our problem is that we do not want to pay such people in proportion to the benefit that we receive from their services. When a recovering addict returns to society and is able to live as part of a family or church, and is working productively, we do not measure what we have all gained from their recovery.

We do not grumble about the cost of guns and fighter jets and submarines. In recent years we have spent hundreds of  billions of our hard-earned dollars to upgrade our nuclear capabilities, even though we know that if we were ever to use those capabilities, we would destroy the world for human habitation.   

We need to put our dollars where they will really do some good.  We need to use them to pay therapists and case workers and personal assistants. And not just people who help us with our aging bodies. We need to pay the people more who clean our houses or landscape our yards. The people who help us when we are ill or old contribute more to our well-being than material stuff that we buy. Too much stuff goes into storage before it goes to the landfill. We should forget stuff and think people. We need to put our money into helping each other live more fully and more abundantly.