The day after

Like many of my friends and fellow Franciscans, male and female, I am in shock. I couldn't work today. I did some reading and ended up in the QU chapel for an hour.

I woke up at 3 am this morning in time to listen to Donald Trump's acceptance speech. The most hopeful thing he said was that we need to put serious money into fixing our infrastructure--roads, bridges, etc. Hillary had been saying the same thing.

Suppose that Trump pushes the infrastructure idea so hard that Congress will be forced to pay for it. He might get more done than Hillary ever could. Infrastructure means construction jobs. That is what Trump's base wants most. If he provides it, the deficit will go through the roof, but he is maybe the one person who can shout down the deficit hawks.

The most discouraging thing about the election is that money seems to have prevailed in the down-ballot races, especially in Missouri, which I follow because we get the St. Louis paper here. That and the people that Trump may have around him, making the decisions for him. A fellow friar, Walter Dolan, who grew up in Tip O'Neill's neighborhood in Boston, described Ronald Reagan as "a good man surrounded by some of the most selfish people in the world." Rudy Giuliani as attorney general?

A few days ago I watched a movie called "Thirteen." It is a powerful description of how the African American population has never really gotten out from under the weight of slavery. It is very critical of Bill Clinton, who I always saw as more sympathetic to the Black population than most other politicians (and he was). It accuses him of getting into office by adopting the Republican policies of "three strikes and you're out" and the war on drugs. (I would add welfare "reform" to the list.) I think of Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow. She is an African American Harvard law professor featured in "Thirteen." Her book documents how the Supreme Count ever since 1980 has systematically made life worse for Black people, over and over again. Maybe the Black voters who stayed home figured it couldn't get any worse, and that Hillary was not likely to do much to improve it.

We are in uncharted waters. We need to keep our heads, treat one another with respect, and use the political game to do as much good as we can.

Reflections on the Sacred Heart

[I wrote this last June, but never got around to posting it.]

Today is the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. My Franciscan Province has the Sacred Heart as its patron, so this day is doubly special for us.

I subscribe to a magazine called Sojourners. The editors describe themselves as "liberal evangelicals." They are not Catholic, but the magazine often includes pieces by Catholic writers.

This morning I was reading in that magazine a review of a book called Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism. The book talks about how Christian churches so often see Jesus as someone who should be in charge of society, which is not the way the Gospels present Jesus.

I was praying the "Office" this morning. The opening prayer had the words: "Come, let us worship Jesus, whose heart was wounded for love of us." That prayer jarred me. It seemed to reflect an assumption that Jesus was in charge of his own suffering, so he let his heart be wounded because he loves us.

That is the spirit of much of our traditional Catholic piety, and especially the piety centering on the Sacred Heart. Jesus came down from heaven, saw how much evil there is in the world, and let himself suffer in order to make atonement for that evil. Without that atonement, God the Father would continue to be angry with the human race.

As I continued my with the psalms, the tone changed. The psalms reflect the attitude that we are in trouble, and we depend on God to help us. Jesus prayed those psalms. Tradition said that King David was the author of all of the psalms, so there was a Latin saying "In David, Christus." "When you pray the psalms, you see Christ." I really feel that when I pray the psalms.

But the psalms are not prayers of someone in charge. For example, look at today's responsorial psalm, and imagine Jesus praying it:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
beside restful waters he leads me;
he refreshes my soul.

He guides me in right paths
for his name's sake.
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side
with your rod and your staff
that give me courage.

You spread the table before me
in the sight of my foes;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.

Only goodness and kindness follow me
all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
for years to come.

This is not the prayer of someone in charge of society.

I see the incarnation as God becoming human because God wanted to share in everything human except sin. So when Jesus was arrested and condemned and executed, he was not voluntarily looking at all the sinfulness of the world and saying "I love them so much that I am going to suffer to make up for all that evil." That attitude seems to make him in charge of the situation. I see him praying "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" which is the opening verse of psalm 22. Jesus shared the deepest defeat of us human beings. He loved us so much that he wanted to be with us in that kind of suffering. He really was powerless at that moment and throughout his life.

If we look at Jesus that way, we do not see ourselves as in charge of society. Our lives are to share in the least powerful people of our society, not the greatest ones. We clergy should not be always invited to sit at the head table. Jesus would not belong there. Jesus would belong in the kitchen.

The book review I mentioned blames our Christian racism on the attitude that we know what is virtuous, and the people who do not look like us are not as virtuous as they should be, so we must pray for them so they will become like us. We need to see all of us, no matter what color our skin is, as sharing in the human destiny that God shares in the incarnation. We are all of us standing or sitting or kneeling, or flat on our faces in the presence of a God who loves each of us and wants each of us to have life and have it more abundantly. None of us is in charge of the world.

On leisure

7/31/2016      10:20 AM

It is Sunday morning. Cool enough to sit outside under the roof of our patio. The day is bright and clear. I am wearing rose-colored sunglasses.

This is the way it should be, I say to myself. I feel good--no pains, everything in my body working, at least as far as I can tell, and for the time being. At age 81, I know that that will not continue very long, no one knows how long.

But Sunday mornings have always been special times for me. I have a couple of memories that enrich each Sunday.

This morning. I am there on the patio, singing the psalms for Week 2 Sunday, in Latin, and out loud. A couple of them even in Greek. And I think of women and men around the world using these same words, probably not in Greek or Latin, probably in their own languages, but the same words.

The same words. The mystery of language. NPR this morning had a story about Native American people working to keep alive the Crow language. Some Native American groups are down to fewer than ten people who can still speak the language of the group.

A language can only exist in a group of people. Words are more than just the sounds, and the sounds are more than just the letters. Words float among the group. Words are spiritual.

The Latin and Greek are special to me because they tie me to my early years preparing to be a priest, and to the centuries of people who used those languages before my time. Very few people these days have those experiences.

But more and more I am drawn to recall experiences from my days in the seminary. We had no TV, no computers, no cell phones, not even newspapers. Leisure for me, even when I was studying theology in Teutopolis, Illinois, was walking around the small pond on the property. That’s all I needed. One Sunday memory is Brother Adolph, a World War II veteran, and apparently something of a war hero, though he never spoke about that--in fact, he never spoke at all--flying a kite. On Sunday afternoon he would get this kite way way up, sometimes even with a flashlight on it for when it got dark. That was his leisure.

We could live that way because other people were supporting us. The time came when we had to support ourselves and the rest of the community, so I taught for thirty-plus years.

Early in my life the Second Vatican Council came along and overturned so much of what I cherished. I did not regret the overturning, in fact I promoted it, because I thought that that was what God was calling us to. And I still think God was calling us to it. But, like so many people in our world, we got away from some things that were very rich and good for us, like leisure that did not depend on material gadgets.

Francis of Assisi struggled with the tension between doing things for other people, like preaching, and going away for time alone--leisure. He spent large blocks of time in such leisure. In fact, he even wrote a small rule of life for hermitages. The rule suggested that a hermitage should have four men, two of them mothers and two of them sons. The two mothers would provide the necessities of daily living, like getting and preparing food, for the two sons. After a period of time, the mothers would change places with the sons.

I reflect that so much leisure in history has depended on a subservient class. In Greece and Rome it was slaves who provided the leisure for the people on top. In religious life, there were lay brothers and sisters. Even in the seminary we had a cadre of lay brothers who were making the place run: cooks, bakers, carpenters, plumbers, etc. Brother Herb Rempe told me that at one time there were over 30 brothers in the seminary at Teutopolis.

We have abolished the subservience in our Order--even our General Minister in Rome, Michael Perry, signs himself sometimes in official documents as “Fr. Michael Perry,” and other times as “Br. Michael Perry.”

I am benefiting from another form of leisure in my society: retirement. Some people dream of spending their retirement traveling. I dream of spending mine sitting on Sunday mornings on a patio, and walking around the area. And I try to keep busy most of the time by doing other things. At the moment the other thing is working on a history of our Province.

If we are ever to create a society where everyone earns a living wage without destroying the world we live in, it will help if we can do leisure without consuming stuff. There are elements in our traditions that give us hints about how we might do that.

How to create a world conducive to "vocations"

Here is why so few men and women are becoming members of religious orders today. They have lost the world required for their survival. They are like fish whose pond has been drained.

As a child I lived in a Catholic world in Decatur, Illinois. My parish was my world. It was made sacred by priests and sisters and a cycle of religious rituals centered on the church. It was easy for me to see myself growing up to become a leader in that world. I recall calculating that being a priest would require hearing confessions on Saturday afternoon, which would rule out listening to Notre Dame football games, but that was a sacrifice that would have to be made. It would be worth it.

I was never a great fan of football, but listening to Notre Dame games was part of my Catholic world. Notre Dame was our fortress against the secular intellectual world.

We were reinforced in our world by constant reminders of the important people who were Catholic: Bing Crosby, Bishop Sheen, Danny Thomas. The outside world recognized our world.

In Decatur, we were a minority. In contrast to Springfield, where my parents grew up and where we regularly visited relatives, Decatur was hostile territory for Catholics. None of the important people in Decatur were Catholic. The only time we Catholics were featured in the newspaper was when our school, St. James, outsold the entire rest of the city in World War II war bonds.

My father remarked once that he did not take his faith seriously until he and my mother moved to Decatur. In his eyes, no Catholic in Decatur could be taken seriously as a leader. We were set apart.

Admittedly, that was my perception. In actual fact, there probably were Catholics in important roles in the town. But in my mind, we were the victims of segregation and prejudice, and those things reinforced our identity.

Fast forward to present-day Quincy, Illinois. We have here in Quincy a parish, St. Rose, that is officially a "Latin" parish--all the liturgies are conducted in Latin, Latin as it was used before the Second Vatican Council. There are students at Quincy University who practice a spirituality appropriate to that Latin environment: Benediction, recitation of the rosary before Mass, women wearing a head scarf during Mass. At least some of the younger priests that I see in our diocese seem to be cooperating in re-creating that world. I respect and admire such people. But I think they are fighting a losing battle. Their problem is that the world that they are trying to re-create is no longer a viable world for most Catholics.

The boundaries are too porous. "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?" was a song made popular after World War I. You can hold children in a segregated world through grade school, and maybe even through high school, but when they hit college, off they go. The world opens up--the world in the sense of new possibilities. As someone who has spent his life teaching in a Catholic college, I see the situation. Over the years Quincy University has sent young men and women out into society to become genuine leaders, both secular and religious, but they are not the kind of leaders that the world of my childhood would have prepared. To be a leader in the worlds most people live in today, you cannot limit yourself to the world of segregated Catholicism.

Ecumenism did us in, as did success in politics (John Kennedy) and economics.

So what do we do? We need leaders in the Church, both men and women. Leaders have to live in the world that the rest of the community lives in. We have to create a world that will allow all of us to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the midst of unlimited information, profitable ways of making money, dreams of happy marriages and families, and philosophical and theological challenges. Within that world, we must be able to motivate some of us to become leaders.

We need priests, but not clericalism. Priests are people who lead us in knowing God and worshipping God. Clerics are people who survive by being a special caste supported by religiously devoted people.

We need women religious leaders, not the kind of "nuns" that used to enliven our communities. Women leaders today cannot be assumed to be subservient to men. They must have the freedom to initiate things. They must be seen as equal to men in finding ways to share faith effectively with others.

Above all, we need to create a world where religious leaders can flourish, but a world that is not set in opposition to the rest of the world. As followers of Jesus, we will need to challenge the rest of the world at times, but we cannot build our identities on challenge.

Our "vocation recruitment" efforts have been too limited to seeking out individuals to join us. We need to create cultures of faith and worship where the need for leadership will be obvious and rewarded. Only then will our "vocation problem" approach a solution. We may never have enough leaders. The harvest will always be abundant and the laborers few. But we can do better than we are doing right now.

Bad news and good news

The Bad News

I am looking at the demography of my Franciscan province: we peaked in 1961 with around 800 men, and have been going down to our present number of just under 200. Our median age is 70.

About one-fourth of people who say they were raised Catholic no longer claim membership in the Church. Except for immigrants coming to the U.S. from Catholic countries, our Church would be in the same boat as mainline Protestant churches: sinking.

The sociological explanation for the decline in membership in churches and religious orders is the individualism of modern culture. Facebook and its allies in the internet world have caused that individualism to metastasize. So many of us say we are spiritual but not religious. That means that we do religion on our own, without reference to other people.

The Good News

In the midst of this discouraging landscape, I read two encouraging things. One was an article in Sojourners magazine by a woman who described how nature brought her back to God, and indeed, to a church community. The other is my reading of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis's letter written in response to the fall 2015 Synod of bishops in Rome.

So I conclude: two things counteract our individualism: nature, and children.

Nature does not of itself call us back to community, but my sense is that if a person really spends time experiencing nature, that person cannot but feel drawn to a closer relationship with other human beings. Too many people, I speculate, spend a few hours in nature, feel uplifted, and then return to a rat-race of everyday tasks that allows them no time to reflect on anything. So the nature experience starves.

A love for nature finds a powerful ally in the environmental movement. As people struggle to save parts of the natural world, they come to appreciate the beauty of that world, and beauty is God's middle name.

But children are another story. Children are truly the prophets in our world. They get through to us at moments when we are not ready to listen to anyone else, if we let the door open even slightly. I think of Jesus' parable about the seed sown by the roadside. It only takes a tiny bit of good ground to produce fruit a hundredfold.

Unfortunately, too much of the seed falls on rocky ground and too many children are left adrift in a world without love.

In earlier ages, sexuality was natural bait for producing children. Contraception cut that link. That cutting is an important argument in Pope Paul VI's 1968 Humanae Vitae encyclical that outlawed contraception for Catholics. Before contraception was so easy, sexuality could function as a hook that drew many people--not all, of course--into involvement with a spouse and children. Without that hook, children have become an optional accessory, and accessories are a cost, not a source of life.

Amoris Laetitia (translation: "The Joy [or Happiness] of Love") tries to point out ways that children and families can lead to true love. Everyone wants true love. So many of us have forgotten how to experience it.

The headwind against which Francis is pushing is a prejudice against the words "marriage" and "family."

Marriage suffers from too much history of oppression of women, and too little acknowledgement by religious people of that oppression. It does not help that many feminists found themselves battling religious people, and that many religious people found anti-feminism to be a motivator for political advancement, including priests and bishops in the Catholic Church.

It is unfortunate that people see gay marriage as threatening. The advocates of gay marriage are the only defendants of marriage accepted by the wider secular culture. Probably they would not be so accepted except that the churches, the whipping boys of the secular world, oppose them. If the churches come to accept gay marriage, secular culture will oppose it.

"Family" is an even more despised word. I speculate that the prejudice goes back to attitudes toward Catholic immigrants in the early part of the 20th century, largely Italian and eastern European, most of whom were Catholic and who had large families. That prejudice is long gone, but the Catholic hierarchy, organized as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has cemented itself to the Republican party. Since much of the leadership of the secular world leans Democratic, the tension between secularism and Catholicism has become politicized, with the result that the USCCB is in no position to speak convincingly to the larger U.S. culture. Francis's encyclical offers an opportunity to change that, but I fear that the opportunity is being squandered.

But "family" can be an important word in reviving our culture. Men and women released from prison often want nothing more in life than a family--a spouse and children. These are people--mostly men--who have experienced life without family, both before and during their imprisonment. Released from prison, they have none of the trinkets that can distract most people from seeing a family as a precious gift. Now that our society is coming to see that too many such people were imprisoned in unconscionable ways, and are releasing them, we may have just been handed a powerful influence favoring family life. We could draw such people into our communities. We probably won't. Too many ex-convicts are Black, and racism is alive and well in our churches.

Membership in a church is good. It can provide powerful social support, and it enriches much human experience. A love for nature, pushed along by efforts to preserve our natural environment, can lead people to community. If the church were to ally itself with environmental groups, the church could be that community. Support for family life, before, during, and after courtship and marriage (see Amoris Laetitia for details), could also draw people to community.

Mega-churches are communities with enough resources to support courtship, marriage, raising children, and enjoying old age. From my standpoint as a Roman Catholic, such churches could be enriched by our Catholic experience of ritual, and our Catholic tradition of intellectual exploration of faith issues. The exchange could be helped by the large number of former Catholics who attend these mega-churches. Exchange between Catholicism and the mega-church might be the beginning of a new ecumenical movement.

We swim in the waters of racism

It has been  while since I put anything here. I wrote the following piece intending to put it into our diocesan newspaper. I hope to get around to that one of these days.


We may never be able to overcome a feeling of discomfort between Blacks and Whites in the United States. This feeling depends on two facts, one historical and the other statistical. 

Historically, the feeling comes from the years when Whites were systematically taught to consider Blacks as intellectually and morally inferior. This thinking was necessary to preserve a system where Whites could make Blacks work for them without pay, and far worse, could buy and sell human beings as though they were property. When slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment, former slave-owners devised ways to continue the system under the laws which we now call "Jim Crow." No intermarriage, no sharing of drinking fountains, etc. etc. etc.

For Whites, the atmosphere created by that history is like the water in which fish swim. We swim in it without realizing it exists. 

The second fact is statistical. There are nine Whites to every Black person in this country. In northern rural areas the difference is even greater. That means that the average White person is 90% unlikely to meet a Black person and get to know that person. There are simply not enough Black people for most of us Whites to interact with on a regular basis. Without regular interaction, stereotypes and prejudices can continue without challenge. When we get to know one another, those stereotypes are gradually dispelled, though they may never get washed out entirely. I can see Black actors on TV and vote for a Black president, but until I interact with real people of color, I can continue with the two problems I just described. Most of us do. 

So what are we to do, as people of faith, people who follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ? 

One thing we can do is to recognize the handicap we face. Call it original sin, if you prefer. It is like our traditional idea of original sin in that we are born with it. 

The more active thing we can do is to practice treating people with respect. 

Respect is a set of learned behaviors. Parents drill these behaviors into their children. But often I as a white person am uncomfortable when I meet a Black person because I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing, and in my discomfort, I forget to be respectful. I may not look the person in the eye, or I might not address that person as warmly as I would a person of my own race. Most damaging of all, I might avoid the person, and just like that, I am practicing racial segregation and contributing to the problem. 

Being respectful is not, as they say, rocket science. It means approaching another human being with the behaviors that imply that I accept the other person as an equal, even if I may not feel that equality. It means simple courtesy. 

Recently some Black friends of mine described a reunion of their family that took place, in Georgia, in a vacation site that was not used to Black faces. My friends, who are "middle class," with educations and good jobs, had every right to rent the location. A neighbor came over and wanted to know why they were there. Implied was the neighbor's expectation that Black people do not belong in that place.  

That is lack of courtesy and respect. The courteous and respectful thing for such neighbors to do would have been to approach the newcomers with a smile and gestures of welcome, even if doing that might feel uncomfortable. Asking what the newcomers were doing there implied that the questioner was afraid that the newcomers would import poverty and crime.

I think we Christians are called to practice being respectful to every person who comes into our lives, regardless of that person's appearance or history or even behavior. If we want to be like Jesus, we might even look for people who make us feel uncomfortable.

In Jesus' day, anyone with a physical disability was something of an outcast. Poor people were outcasts because they did not observe all the rules that the religious leaders set up. (Jesus had some comments about that situation.) It was the poor and people with disabilities who flocked to Jesus. I can imagine people worrying about what that was doing to the neighborhood. 

Let us White Christians sigh, accept our own disabilities of prejudice, and practice being respectful. We are going to be living in our world of stereotypes and prejudice for a long time. An act of contrition would help.

How to do religion

5/3/2016 9:49 AM

Standard survey question: “What is your religion: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, other, or none?” People who give the last answer are called “nones.” About a fourth of the U.S. population now falls into that category.

Here is why there are so many “nones.” People don’t know how to do religion.

To do religion, you have to do three things:

          1. You have to move your body. You can’t just think religion, or just feel it. You have to do something that involves physical movement. The reason for this is that, if you want to relate yourself to God, you have to do that with all parts of your being, not just your mind or feelings.

          2. You have to do religion in relationship with other human beings. The reason for this is that God is a community of persons, and God has created us to do things in relationship with others.

          This is the most serious obstacle to religion in western societies. We have become so individualized that we tend to approach everything as though we do not need anyone else for anything. Above all, we think that we do not need anybody else when we deal with God.

          3. What you do has to lead to an increase of beauty in the world. This is the ethical dimension of religion.

I am reading a book on the Franciscan approach to ethics. The author argues that Franciscan tradition sees beauty as the foundation of ethical behavior. Beauty is expressed most powerfully in the way we relate to each other as human beings. A human person fully alive is beautiful. What we do must lead toward making humans, including ourselves, more fully alive. What does not do this is “sinful” or evil.

Our capitalist cultures do not value beauty, except for those with resources. We do not care if what we do destroys beauty, as long as it increases profit. So we go though the world, leaving behind ugliness and decay. Last Sunday I took a walk along the Mississippi riverfront here in Quincy. I passed several properties overrun with weeds, featuring the remnants of concrete foundations and abandoned stair steps. In poorer neighborhoods in our beautiful city, houses features blue tarps on the roof (covering shingles blown off by last summer’s windstorm), weeds and trees sprouting up in the midst of what used to be sidewalks, houses whose paint peeled off years ago, and windows covered with plastic or even boarded up. Only the well-to-do (including me) can afford beauty.

Bottom line: if you think that you can be religious just by thinking about God, and perhaps having nice feelings, but never using your body; if you think you can be religious all by yourself; if you think you can be religious just by trusting in the maximizing of profit, you are not likely to be religious at all.

In earlier ages, followers of Jesus Christ were focused on baptizing people as a way of “saving” them. Baptism was a physical act, and it had to be done in relationship to others. If it led to an imitation of Jesus’ approach to the world, beauty followed. We have gotten away from that kind of baptizing, probably because we have downplayed the importance of the physical, of relationships with others, and of beauty.

You may notice that nothing I have said requires that you be Christian. The majority of people in the world are not Christian. But if they use their bodies in worship, relate to others in their worship, and work to create beauty, they are on the road to God. As a Christian, I happen to believe that Jesus Christ has showed us the best way to approach God, but I don’t believe that non-Christians are hopelessly out of touch with God. I believe that God loves each of them, and takes care of them in ways that I do not know.