Saintly institutions

 

       Well, it's happened. Donald Trump is president.  There are no more saintly institutions.

        I grew up in saintly institutions. St. James Parish in Decatur, with its pastor, its church, its school. The city of Decatur, with its parks. The country, the USA, truly a blessed place. Victorious over Naziism and Japanese militarism.

        The Franciscan Order, with its seminary system, and their saintly faculties. And over all, the Catholic Church, with its pope and bishops.

        Added to those saintly institutions, some secular saints: science and technology.

        As a novice Franciscan in 1955 I was commissioned to write the script for a pageant celebrating the 60th ordination anniversary for a priest in our friary. My script celebrated the sanctity of everything in the Franciscan and Catholic world. I incorporated whatever music I could find that illustrated saintly triumph. A few years later I was commissioned to write another script celebrating something--it may have been the 50th anniversary of the founding of the seminary where we were studying. My script was even more triumphalist. I recall featuring a covered wagon and a campfire, with patriotic music. I involved every student in the seminary in its production--even the production had to be saintly. The friars in the Midwest were truly saints combining Franciscan virtue with American virtue.

        In grad school I received a secular vision of saintly institutions: functionalist sociology. The goal was to design perfect institutions that would run by themselves, freeing everyone in the society to pursue happiness. A society was to be like the human body, self-correcting when any outside force threatened one of its functions. Perfect laws would ensure a perfect (saintly) society.

        The nail in the coffin of Catholic saintliness was the revelation of sex abuse by clergy and religious. My experience of living fifty years in a religious community gave me more evidence that not all of us are saintly. More and more revelation brought down the image of saintliness of our American institutions: slavery, treatment of indigenous people in our land, present-day systematic injustice. All the things that Trump politicians label as "woke."

        Our culture says we should tamp down such revelations. Reinstate the vision of saintliness in America. We have no sinners.

 

 "There is no institution that human beings cannot mess up."

        I have promoted that statement for years. It was a statement of my experience. But I did not carry the statement to its logical conclusion: it means that no institution is saintly. There are sinners everywhere. We are the sinners. We will never design the perfect institution. We will never get all the laws needed to wipe out crime. We are not likely to be more virtuous than our ancestors.

        This is an old religious insight. It has not been a popular insight in our society with its image of itself as a saintly society. We keep thinking that one more law or ordinance will fix us. Our vision is too utopian.

  

Our Future under Donald Trump

        Mr. Trump and his allies are likely to mess up many of our institutions, and mess them up badly. In his last administration he allowed the Centers for Disease Control to be led by incompetent people, and when Covid hit, the CDC was not as prepared to deal with it as it would have been had it been better led. We can anticipate a flood of incompetent judges, decimation of efforts to mitigate climate change, legitimized persecution of those among us who are "not like us," (gays and transgender people), resurrection of Jim Crow-like behavior norms. We may see our military used against us. Fox news, talk radio, and social media could become our only sources of information about what is happening in our country and around the world. Foolish economic decisions could lead us into another depression.

        But let's be honest. Democratic administrations have not touched some of the root causes of our problems. The goal of wind and solar farms is to allow us to keep on doing what we have always done. No president since Jimmy Carter has dared to suggest publicly that we might need to do things we don't like to do. We may have to sacrifice something. Carter suggested sacrifice and was branded as a fool. We are living by a divinely sanctioned moral principle: "If I like to do something, you are not allowed to stop me from doing it." The effect of this principle is the legitimizing of monumental inequality. Our systems have risen up and swallowed us.

  

Repent!

      The figure of a hooded figure holding up a sign that says "Repent" is a comic staple. To repent means to stop doing something you are now doing. It means to admit that you are not saintly, and to follow up with that admission and do something to change your behavior.

        There will be saints and sinners in the Trump administration, just as there have been saints and sinners in the Biden administration, and in every bank and investment house and school and church in the country. The popular vote favoring Trump is a plea for someone to do something different. Not all supporters of Trump are sinners.

        Other countries have elected unwise leaders and survived--think of Argentina and Brazil. We will muddle through.

        We will muddle through and abandon the vision of the saintly institution. We will try to distinguish saints from sinners in whatever institution we live in. We will praise the saints and call the sinners, gently, to repentance. Punishment is not the way to create a saintly institution. We will acknowledge that we are all partly saint and partly sinner, and that it is hard to tell the difference this side of eternity. So we will treat our fellow saintly sinners the way we would like to be treated ourselves.

        This is the way Christianity says we should live. If we live that way we might be able to call ourselves a Christian society.

        But we should quit calling ourselves that. There are people among us who are not Christian and who feel excluded when we say things like that. We should call ourselves sinful/saintly followers of Jesus Christ, trying to live peacefully with people who see God differently from how we see God. We do not own God. We do not control God. We do not have a monopoly on knowledge of God, and still less on living the way God wants us to live.

        We are all learners. Jesus said "make disciples of all nations." A disciple is a learner. To learn means to change your mind.

        To learn means to repent.