For the past several months I have
been completing a history of my Franciscan province. It will soon be
self-published by "iUniverse" of Bloomington, Indiana and will be
available with the title "Cura Animarum: The Sacred Heart Province
of the Order of Friars Minor in North America: 1858-2023." During these
months I have dashed off a few short essays, which I decided to share here.
This whole religion business still
seems farfetched. Am I a fool for keeping on doing it?
This has to be one of the questions
at the back of the mind of many believers these days. We are surrounded by
people who seem to be doing just fine without religion. Maybe they are
"spiritual but not religious." Maybe they are just plain atheist.
Whatever they are, they must think people like me are fools. People like me
must be deluded, willfully self-deceived, hopelessly benighted.
Are we?
I have grown up and lived my life
cradled in a Roman Catholic world. When I am in that world, all is well. But I
have to venture out of that world, partly because I feel called to do that.
"Called." Who is calling?
Prayer
One of the central behaviors of
religious people is prayer. What is prayer?
Prayer is communicating with the
divine, the sacred, the ineffable (a big word which means you can't talk about
something). Like all other human communication, using language as a form of
involvement with another person is to engage with a partly self-made image of
that person. We do not know other people completely. We know only the stories that
we create out of our experience with those people, or stories about them that have
been given to us by other people.
There have been more than one individual
who was perceived by people as saintly, but who turned out to be an emotional
and sexual abuser. Marcial Maciel founded a religious order called the
Legionaries of Christ, was praised and considered saintly by no less than Pope
John Paul II, but was found to be a serial abuser of young men. Jean Vanier
founded an ecumenical religious movement dedicated to living with and caring
for people with disabilities called "L'Arche," but was found also to
have sexually abused six women over the course of thirty-five years.
We do not know the complete story of
the people closest to us. Are we deceived when we experience contact with God,
however we perceive God?
Our critics fault us for being too
willing to accept stories that may not be true. They may go further and claim
that the stories we accept are not true. What is the evidence they provide for
that claim?
I assume, without consulting such
critics, that the evidence they give is that people can be deceived, just as
the people around the two individuals I described were deceived. But, I reply,
does the fact that some of us can be deceived by some people imply that billions
of us are deceived about God?
Years ago I read a little of Sigmund
Freud and about Sigmund Freud. His attitude toward religious believers seemed
to me to be an accusation of infantilism. He was saying to religious people,
"Grow up. We all have a tendency to want to go back to the womb, where
everything was warm and comfortable. That is what you religious people want to
do. Be a man. Face up to the hard, cold reality." (I don't imagine him
saying "Be a woman." My own misogyny shows through here.)
The advice "Grow up" is a
moral injunction. What is the grounding for such an injunction?
I suspect it is the experience of
most of us that as we grow up, there are times when we would like to go back to
days when we were cradled in some way. But we have learned from experience that
it is not good for us to try to carry out such a desire. Freud's accusation is
a move in a game of one-up-manship. He is more mature than we are. He can see
the world as it is. We are infantile.
Community
Our U.S. culture says that it is
better to stand alone than to go along with the crowd. Our culture assumes that
the crowd is likely to be less enlightened than the individual. The result is
that we move away from any involvement that would tie us closely to a
particular group of people.
Religions, by definition (the word
comes from a Latin word meaning "to bind"), begin with the statement
that it is better to go along with a crowd than to stand alone. So it is not
surprising that U.S. culture is not friendly to religion. Our critics say that
it is because we are deceived and too anxious to go back to the womb that we
practice religion. We can counter that it is because we accept the value that
it is better to go along with others than to stand alone that we practice
religion.
There is increasing evidence that, at
all phases of the human life cycle, it is better to be in relationship with
other people than to be alone.
So, to answer the question that I
began this essay with, am I a fool? I answer: I am living in a counter-culture.
I do not accept the culture's value that it is better to be alone than to be
involved with other people. The empirical evidence of social science tells me
that too much individualism is not healthy.
I still admit that I could be wrong.
I can be deceived as much as the followers of Marcial Maciel and Jean Vanier
were. But the presence of some deceivers does not prove that everyone is a
deceiver.
Faith is to know something even when
you cannot prove that the something is true. It is better to live with faith
than to reject any story that you cannot prove true. We all depend on
testimony--we trust some people to tell us the truth when we can't prove it by
ourselves.
The prevalence of "fake
news" made more visible by social media has highlighted the failure of our
schools to help us think critically about the trustworthiness of our
information sources. We have been sold the ideas that "STEM" courses
(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) should replace traditional
courses in history, literature, and philosophy, and that the primary goal of a
college education is to get you a good job.
If I believe somebody who tells me
that I should study engineering instead of history, why is it foolish of me to believe
somebody who tells me what God is like?
I studied moral theology in the early
1960s. At that time there was an interpretation of the sacrament of
"confession" that saw the priest-confessor as a judge. I think the
interpretation was based on John 20:23, where Jesus said, "Whose sins you
forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained." Your job as a
confessor was to judge whether the penitent's sins should be forgiven or
retained (not forgiven).
If the confessor was to be a judge,
the confessor had to be educated to give sound judgments. Thus arose a system
of reasoning called "probabilism."
The system depended on the
availability of a set of moral theology authors, some of whom would say a
particular behavior was permissible, and some would say it was sinful. That in
itself strains credibility. How many confessors would have a shelf of moral
textbooks? Confessors would not have such a shelf, but moral theology
professors would, and moral theologians taught in seminaries.
When a penitent confessed that he had
had a vasectomy, the confessor was to consult the shelf of authors who
discussed vasectomy. If only one author said that vasectomy was forbidden, the confessor
should refuse absolution. The probabilist would say that even if there are only
a few authors who permit the surgery, while the majority forbade it, the
confessor should still grant absolution. There would be at least some
probability that vasectomy was not sinful.
Franciscan tradition favored
probabilism. When in doubt, judge in favor of the penitent. That was the bottom
line.
We simply do not know enough about
transgenderism to make dogmatic statements about what is moral and what is not
moral about it. What we do know is that there are more people who claim
transgender experience than there used to be. There are people who were labeled
male at birth but who experience the world from a very early age as a female
would experience it. Those people tell us that they are not deliberately faking
the experience, and they are not being deceived by medical people out to make a
profit.
So what do we do with such people?
We wait while experience accumulates.
Science moves slowly. To prove something is harmful requires much careful
research done honestly. In time we will know what is harmful and what is not.
But until then, we should err in favor of the person claiming to be
transgender. We should honor their description of their experience. To do otherwise
disrespects them. Disrespect is not loving.
To use the old language, there is a
probability that accepting transgenderism is harmless, and so anyone in a
position to pass judgment on it should err in favor of the transgender person.
We could be wrong, but only time will tell.
Serious study of sexuality is not
more than a century old. There is much that we do not know. An appeal to
"natural law" is irrelevant when nature creates a condition. When
that happens, our attitude should be, "Withhold judgment, wait for good
research, and in the meantime do not accuse people of acting immorally."
To do otherwise makes us risk the
Galileo error. The Church rushed to judgment and condemned Galileo, and it took
centuries for popes to apologize. We shouldn't do that again.
It all started with academics, those people who hang out in universities. I am one of them.
The academics speculated,
correctly, that truth is a creation of the human mind. More accurately, it is
the creation of a group of human minds agreeing on a statement or a story.
Because truth statements are human
creations, they are subject to error. More troubling is that truth can so often
be used as a weapon to dominate someone else. This insight has become the basis
of an intellectual movement labeled "postmodernism." Postmodernism agrees
with the following statement: "Whenever someone claims to be speaking the
truth, look out, because that someone is angling to get power over someone
else."
The statement can easily be oversimplified
to saying that there is no such thing as truth. Such misinterpretation leads
people to reject any statement made by academics.
What
is Truth?
We have to have truth. So we need a
definition of truth. I go to mathematics.
In geometry, we speak of a plane as
a surface with width and length but no depth. There is no such thing in
reality. But the idea is useful.
The concept of god or God is useful
in the same way. I define truth as "the story the way God (or the gods)
would tell it."
Truth is a quality of a story. Did
the criminal intend to kill the victim? We may never know, but somewhere there
is a truth: either the criminal did or did not intend to kill the victim. We
have a tool to try to determine which story is true, the jury trial. We know
that juries can be wrong, but they are the best we have.
In other areas, science plays the
same role. Is the vaccine safe? It is or it isn't. We use observation and peer
review to try to determine which story is true. Those tools can be wrong, but
they are the best we have.
A third source, which supplements both
jury trials and science, is testimony. We accept some people's story as true
because we trust those people. Jurors trust witnesses. Scientists trust other
scientists. Religious people trust their faith leaders. Politicians trust their
pollsters.
Which brings us to Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump claims that the 2000
election was stolen. Either it was or it wasn't. The truth is the story that
God would tell. We use science and testimony to try to determine which story is
true.
We have used a combination of
scientific observation of how the voting process is carried out and testimony
of people who were involved in the voting process. Out of those two sources we
have concluded that the story that God would tell is that the election was not
stolen. We could be wrong. We have claimed to speak the truth, but watch out,
we may be angling to get power over you.
The durability of the story that
Mr. Trump tells is based on two things: the reality that many people do not
understand the value of science, and the ease with which stories, true or
false, can be propagated by social media. We combine those two facts with the
danger that Mr. Trump and the people who testify in his defense are angling to
get power, the power of government. He can correctly argue that people who
oppose him are also angling to get power. Which is true? Which story would God
tell?
Truth
and Faith
I am a professionally religious
person--I make my living from religion. My faith, Roman Catholicism, claims to
speak the truth. Our claim is one of the reasons why academics say that people
who claim to speak the truth are often angling to get power. We have a sad
history of popes and other church leaders who have used power in very
unfortunate ways.
The Catholic church leadership
still uses power. If I state something publicly that goes against church
teaching, I can be out of a job. That is power.
Catholic tradition has put too much
weight on what we call "natural law." The term implies that there are
certain stories that everyone accepts as true, and that anyone who does not
accept the stories is either ignorant or is lying.
But there are no such stories.
History is full of examples of stories that everyone thought were true but were
later judged not to be true. One example from Christian (and Jewish and Muslim)
tradition is that charging interest on loans leads to bad outcomes and is
therefore evil. It was not until the 1400s or 1500s that most Christian
communities accepted the alternate story: under some conditions, charging
interest on loans will not lead to evil outcomes and is therefore permissible.
We are human beings, not gods. We
cannot tell the story that God would tell. We can only grope towards the true
story.
And once we think we have some
grasp of the story that God would tell, we enrich our knowledge with our love
of other people and of the creation that God has given us. We do the best we
can not to use truth to get power over others.
For a fine reflection on the
relationship between truth and love, I suggest reading Pope Benedict XVI's 2009
letter "Caritas in Veritate," ("Love joined with Truth"),
available on the Vatican website. Benedict does not discuss definitions of
truth. He asks us to reflect on the beautiful things that love can produce when
it merges with and enriches truth. including scientific truth.
With the help of the Quincy University Advancement Office, I have set up a website, and plan to move things from this blog to that site.
The website address is:
friarzimm.com
The website has a modified blog format. I have divided the
entries into two categories, "religion" and "secular
issues." Under each heading the entries are listed with the most recent
post on top. The titles of the entries are displayed, and the site is more
easily searchable by topic.
[published in Muddy River News 2/3/2023]
This is sad, because their moral instinct is right—every
abortion is a tragedy. It is not something that people cheer about. We do not make
jokes about it.
At a crucial moment, in 1973, after Roe v. Wade, defenders
of the unborn went on record in favor of the quintessential American solution
to all problems: pass laws. Punish evil and you will stamp out evil.
No. You will not stamp out evil because you will not stamp
out sin.
Sin is a bad word in our times. It calls to mind Puritan
divines preaching the wrath of God, and most of us Christians no longer see God
as wrathful. That is not because we have abandoned religion. We just started
realizing the message of Jesus Christ: God is not in favor of punishment.
The wrong turn that the pro-life people made in 1972 was to
go for the political solution to the tragedy of abortion. Roe said that states
could not use law to prevent abortion. The solution: overturn Roe.
The prolife cause succeeded. The dog caught the car.
What has happened is the exact opposite of what prolife
defenders want. It has made abortion something to be defended in public.
Democratic politicians go on record in favor of it. Protecting abortion has
become a virtue.
True, it took law to abolish slavery. But slavery and
abortion are very different issues. Slavery was a public practice, with immense
economic consequences. Abortion is very private, and while abortion provision
has economic consequences, as the prolife cause points out, it does not compete
with Microsoft.
What prolife defenders should have done is work to create a
moral consensus that abortion is tragic. Instead they have caused a major
political party to promote a moral consensus that abortion is to be defended.
It did not have to be this way. But our American flaw, where
there is sin, punish, captured the prolife cause.
the hood
for me
is what franciscans wear
what drew me to
them.
think of it.
christmas midnight
mass
first year
serving mass
st. mary’s hospital
two franciscans
appear
deacon and subdeacon
(sisters wanted solemn high mass)
never saw one before
I
liked the hood
neat!
three years later
high
school seminary
lots
of hoods
I
reflect
you
know,
hoods
invite
could
grab them
from
behind
these
are guys you could
grab
from behind
stop
in their tracks
I
like that
I
want to be like that.
why?
who knows?
something
in me?
a leper stopped francis in his tracks
changed
his life
go
to the bottom
be
like the carp
feed
on the bottom
who
cares what the neighbors think
where
you find Jesus
where
Jesus finds you.
francis in a broken down church
crucifix
in a broken down church
a
leper church
but
this time a message:
Build!
OK
said
francis
I
will build
I
need stones
Give me stones
and off he went.
false
start
nobody
hurt
some
buildings fixed
but
new direction
build
people
build
up souls
broken
down souls
bottom
again
no wonder anyone
can stop these guys
in their tracks
background?
questionable
grandfathers
one
suicide, other probably alcoholic
yet
loving parents
parents
without pedigree
alcohol
and suicide ruin pedigrees
did
they find Jesus on the bottom?
did
Jesus find them on the bottom?
maybe
they taught me
go
to the bottom
Jesus
will find you
so I like the hood
foolish
motive for seventy years of living
but it held up
don’t
even wear the hood that much now
but it’s there
someone
could stop me in my tracks
actually,
not
a half bad way to accept death
pulled
from behind
get
stopped in my tracks
hope
by Jesus this time
