Articles by Rebecca Ryskind Teti
His law on our hearts
Mar 12, 2013 / 00:00 amWhat’s your favorite part of the Sermon on the Mount? My evangelical protestant mom, who in “retirement” tutors for a Christian homeschool co-op, recently posed that question to her students. Though they come from serious Christian homes, she was surprised to find that none of them had an answer. Even when given a moment to gather their thoughts, the kids couldn’t identify a single specific thing Jesus teaches in the most famous homily of all time.Mom mentioned this to the principal of a sizable evangelical school in another part of the state, and her friend tried the experiment on her pupils. Same result: most kids couldn’t identify anything Jesus taught. How can we claim to be guided by Christ’s teachings if we haven’t the foggiest what they are?If you think this is a dig at Protestantism, don’t. Evangelicals famously read their Bibles more faithfully than most Catholics do – I wouldn’t take a bet our Catholic kids could do any better, would you? Curious, I asked the girls in the morning carpool, my family around the dinner table, and a random sampling of parishioners I happened to run into. To a person, everyone said his favorite part of the Sermon on the Mount was the Beatitudes. Promising. Until I asked for an actual beatitude – that is, any of the content of this well-beloved scripture passage. Sheepish smiles and silence ensued. Only my daughter and her friend from school could answer – because they’d just covered the Beatitudes in Doctrine class. (Score one for the Nashville Dominicans who run their school.)With all this as prelude, I was deeply struck by the reading from Deuteronomy 4 in last Wednesday’s Mass. The Israelites, having completed their desert wanderings, are about to enter the Promised Land, but first the Lord renews his covenant with them, and Moses re-presents the Law.Moses says of God’s statutes, “Observe them carefully, for this is your wisdom and discernment in the sight of the peoples, who will hear of all these statutes and say, ‘This great nation is truly a wise and discerning people.’ …Or what great nation has statutes and ordinances that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?”Israel’s crowning glory, in other words, was the witness it would give by living in fidelity to the Law of God – a fidelity which would bear fruits of justice and wisdom, thus attracting everyone to it. This notion of a moral law so perfect that the world can’t help but admire it finds its fulfillment in Christ. I once heard the scholar Grace Goodell talk about her time in rural Iran many years ago, and the opportunity she had to teach the “Our Father” to the village mullah. He pronounced it: “Beautiful.” Similarly, the Sermon on the Mount is a moral teaching so sublime that it captures the hearts even of non-Christians. My dad’s an example of this. He never seems quite able to embrace religious faith, but he’s certain one ought to live by the Sermon on the Mount and often cited Jesus’ words in correcting us kids. Gandhi found the Sermon on the Mount so attractive he founded a community which tried to live by its teachings. As this blogger points out, even the uber-atheist Richard Dawkins thinks the world would be a better place if we all lived by the Sermon on the Mount.Of course Christ can’t be reduced to a mere moral teacher. But if people of other religions and none can find beauty and solace in Christ’s words – and recognize that striving to live by them is a source of personal peace and a more just community – how much more comfort is to be found in them for those of us who recognize Jesus as Lord, and know that grace is at work in our souls when we meditate on the Gospel? As Pope Benedict XVI taught in Saved in Hope, the Gospel isn’t merely “informative” – it doesn’t just tell us stuff. It’s “performative” – lived, it changes us, it makes good things happen. How sad for us if we take the Gospel so much for granted we forget to meditate on it and allow it to do its work consoling our hearts and changing the cloudy filters of our thinking. At the close of last Wednesday’s reading, Moses exhorts Israel to treasure God’s law “…be very careful not to forget the things your own eyes have seen, nor let them slip from your heart as long as you live, but make them known to your children and to your children’s children.”
Always united in prayer
Feb 19, 2013 / 00:00 amWhen the alarm radio broke the surprise news of the Pope’s abdication a week ago, my involuntary tears were as unexpected as the announcement. All I could think of was the physical and moral suffering that must have brought gentle Joseph Ratzinger to the decision, and my heart ached for him.For myself too, if truth be told, because Benedict XVI’s intellectual fearlessness, absolutely lucid writing, and constant focus on the joy of relationship with Jesus has been an important accompaniment for me personally these past eight years. When the late Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci said she felt less alone when she read the works of Ratzinger, I know exactly what she meant. I will miss him. At a week’s remove, I see the matter differently. As a priest friend of mine put it after listening to the Pope announce his decision at a consistory of cardinals, “I listened to him announce it: very sure of himself, serene, simple, matter of fact and above all humble. Saying to myself: 'This is so Benedict!'" It is so Benedict. Upon reflection I doubt the Pope is anguished over his decision, though certainly he’s prayed about it and searched his conscience repeatedly. For eight years he’s been modeling for us what it is to accept life trustingly as it comes to us from the hand of a loving God: shouldering duties bravely, enduring crosses without complaint and enjoying life’s many beauties and blessings. Indeed, the end of this papacy is coming as it began: a surprising decision accepted by a humble man. If you go back and watch his first words to us as Pope, you see a quiet man who really didn’t want to be pope accepting the office serenely and telling us he was nothing special – just a “humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord” who would do his best. Which he has: and now with exactly the same serenity with which he accepted them, he’s handing back the keys of Peter, having done all his strength can do. It’s not really surprising that Papa Ratzinger would assess his infirmities matter-of- factly and act in the best interests of the Church he has spent his life serving.There’s something more, though: he plans to retire to a monastery within the Vatican. For eight years Pope Benedict XVI has been insisting on the primacy of prayer. Christianity isn’t a set of rules, it’s a relationship with God, he told us repeatedly: if you don’t have a relationship with God, you miss out on the joy of life. When we say Christ is our Head, we don’t mean he’s like a CEO to be obeyed. We mean he’s like the center of the nervous system: cut off from him, we’re powerless. Joseph Ratzinger truly believes this, and rather than abdicating responsibility for the Church, he is dedicating the final years of his life to the best thing he or anyone can do: pray and sacrifice for her. As he said in his parting words to the priests of Rome last week, he will be “always united” to them in prayer.
Marching for hearts
Jan 25, 2013 / 00:00 amA young man smiles a salacious smile. Sniffing brandy in front of a fireplace, in sultry “let’s-get-it-on” tones, he makes love to the camera: “Hey, Baby,” he purrs, “happy anniversary.” As the film rolls, we begin to understand that he is not addressing a woman, but the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, 40 years old this January 22. The video (linked here) was produced by the Center for Reproductive Rights to celebrate Roe v. Wade.My initial reaction was to wonder if the Center’s site had been hacked by a pro-life prankster. (I contacted their media spokesman to be sure, though no response was forthcoming. But the ad hasn’t been taken down, so one must assume it’s legit.) Twenty years ago a prominent pro-life lobbyist and I fantasized about producing an ad just like this (except my friend’s notion had Alfred E. Neuman asking “What, me worry? My girlfriend’s pro-choice!) and running it on college campuses to make precisely the point the video makes: no one’s as committed to Roe as manipulative men who’ve no intention of ever being committed to a woman.I even sent the link to my old buddy with the subject line: “are you behind this?”As it dawned on me the ad was in earnest, I felt stunned and revolted at the perpetuation of an ugly racial stereotype to sell a supposedly progressive message. What were the producers thinking, portraying a young black man as the oiliest kind of cad? Why did they not recoil? Has the young actor no sense of dignity? Is that the way moms want people to think of their sons? There’s no indication in news stories that anyone has protested the ad’s blatant racism – but then support for abortion rights absolves one of many crimes among our political and media classes. All marketers target their ads to a specific audience. Who is this one aimed at? It’s not speaking to married people, who presumably are not trolling for dates.At one level the ad is telling young men that if they wish to cat around, they’d better support Roe. But since a handsome young man is talking low and sultry, while the ad might speak for men (or at least a certain kind of man), it’s not speaking to them, primarily. The primary mark has to be young single women.What message is being communicated to these women? Men are dogs. You cannot expect them to love you. You won’t have a man or a family– but at least you have Roe. No one is going to convince me that any woman who has truly listened to her own heart can find that message even slightly attractive.That is exactly the point: the Roe culture – the culture of hook-ups and the taking of life as if it were nothing – cuts us off from our own hearts. Its core is cynicism – the belief that no one can ever be trusted – with its pseudo-sophisticated mocking of anything pure or of anyone who dares to love or hope. At bottom it’s a defense mechanism, a sort of callus we put around our emotional lives in the effort to never get hurt. Does it work? Are women’s relationships healthier? Are we happy? Are our hearts less hurt? Are we freer from manipulation?It sure has coarsened everyone. Twenty years ago leading feminist figures like Naomi Wolf were arguing that abortion was a necessary evil, but still a tragic, not-to-be-celebrated solemn taking of a human life. President Clinton famously called for it to be “safe, legal…and rare.” We lived in a culture in which my pro-life friend and I could imagine the abortion groups being ashamed of their association with cads and “playahs.” Today a major abortion-rights group thinks nothing of making the taking of human life – and the use of women, and the self-degradation of men – into laughing matters. Are they cynically preying on the hopelessness of others? Or do they themselves not know anything better?At the risk of being thought a pro-life heretic, I have to admit I worry less about aborted children than about their parents. Don’t misunderstand. I know from biology that life begins at conception and shrink from thinking what a baby in-utero might suffer during an abortion. But I also hope in the baptism of desire and trust in the Lord’s mercy. It’s the ones left behind I ache for. Who suffered most and longest when Herod slaughtered the innocents? The babies? Or the moms who had to live with the holes in their hearts and the destruction of trust? Or the executioners coarsened by terrible acts, with guilt on their souls? What effect did that violence have on the local community as a whole?We’re marching for life today. And also in defense of the human heart.
Have a B16 Christmas!
Dec 18, 2012 / 00:00 amHis first Advent as Pope, Benedict XVI delighted Vatican pilgrims by donning the papal camauro, a traditional fur-trimmed red hat that both keeps His Holiness warm and evokes the image of St. Nicholas. I haven’t checked whether he’s wearing it again this season, but with or without the camauro, the Pope loves Christmas. When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was appointed by Blessed Pope John Paul II to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1982, he turned out to be not only a stalwart defender of the faith, but an effective evangelist of Bavarian Christmas traditions in Rome. He had his long-time friend, Thaddeus Joseph Kuehnel, bring him goodies from home shortly before Christmas — including two Advent wreaths (for his residence and his office) and an authentic Bavarian Christmas tree. Advent wreaths are a German, not Italian, tradition, but when Bl. John Paul saw the wreaths, he asked for some too. Their popularity spread more and more throughout the Curia each Advent until Kuehnel ended up one year transporting 52 wreaths and eight Christmas trees to the Vatican! The Pope loves Christmas cookies, too — allowing himself, according to his long-time housekeeper, to try one of each variety at seasonal parties. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the cardinal who rose to the papacy urging Christians to practice an “adult” faith should retain a childlike appreciation for the trappings of Christmas? An essay he wrote in 1977 may explain why. He begins by noting that it’s hard for Christians to say anything nice about Christmas anymore; you’re expected to denounce the popular celebrations as excessive, tacky, and commercialized. Of course, if you said that, you’d be absolutely right, the future Pope admits, but he wonders if in the midst of our pious efforts to “keep Christ in Christmas,” we might be missing the fact that he is indeed there. Then Cardinal Ratzinger reflected that frenzied Christmas shopping and maudlin sentiments might mask something deeper. “The sentimental framework often provides the protecting shield behind which hides a noble and genuine sentiment that is simply reluctant to expose itself to the gaze of the other.” In other words, in our cynical age, no one wants to risk exposing a tender heart — so we keep our sincere love and affection under wraps. And tied up with bows. If Christmas frees people to love without fear of derision, we may wish to think twice about how hard we denounce the pre-Christmas frenzy, and even about the guilt we feel if we get caught up in it at times. A well-lived Advent is the safest guarantee of a grace-filled Christmas, but even Mary and Joseph didn’t live it as a silent retreat. God demanded not only holiness, but practical preparations from them as well: traveling, hustling for accommodations, and eventually hosting surprise guests. They carried Christ into the world in the midst of the bustle of a census, after all. Commercialism may contradict the simplicity of a baby in a cave in Bethlehem, Cardinal Ratzinger continues, “Yet, underneath it all, does it not originate in the notion of giving and thus the inner urgency of love, with its compulsion to share, to give of oneself to the other?” Which brings us, the cardinal concludes, right to the heart of “the true meaning of Christmas”: “God, on this holy night, desired to make himself into a gift to mankind. ... The one genuine Christmas gift to mankind, to history, to each one of us, is none other than Jesus Christ himself.” Christmas isn’t a private Christian feast to be protected against weak or non-believers who sully it. It’s Christianity’s gift to the world, and even its least celebration is a cause for joy. Merry Christmas to all CNA readers. An earlier version of this column first appeared in Faith & Family Magazine.
How to talk to an atheist
Nov 27, 2012 / 00:00 amDo you know what distinguishes the New Evangelization from evangelization simply? The audience.
How not to respond to a lost election
Nov 13, 2012 / 00:00 amNatural marriage, the defense of life and religious liberty took hits on election night 2012. It would be inhuman for those who love the Church and desire each soul to know its dignity not to feel the sting of those blows and to take some time to reflect and regroup.
5 ways to support marriage the next 5 days
Oct 30, 2012 / 00:00 amWith polls in the four states where it is on the ballot tightening, Catholics have the opportunity to make a decisive difference in defending man-woman marriage on Election Day.
Souls to the polls for marriage
Oct 16, 2012 / 00:00 amThirty-two states have put same-sex marriage to the ballot since 1998, and thirty-two times voters have refused to redefine marriage. Same-sex marriage supporters hope that will change this November, when marriage is on the ballot in four states: Maine, Maryland, Washington and Minnesota.
Getting real about the economy
Oct 2, 2012 / 00:00 amMusic lessons, besides training the ear, cultivating good taste and creating a base for enjoyment and expression in later life, develop the brain’s capacity for language, math, spatial relations, discipline and creativity. I could not be more sold on the value of musical training in a good education.Yet when my husband lost his job for a time a few years back, piano lessons were one of the first budget items slashed.It broke my heart, but there is such a thing as reality, and sometimes priorities and even needs slap up against it.A couple of years ago the Greek economy utterly collapsed. Its debt equaled the size of its economy. Think of our Wall Street crisis, only instead of a few banks being overextended, it was an entire country. No nation was willing to loan Greece more money unless its government first made good faith efforts to regain control over its own budget. Forced to slash spending or cede financial control of Greece to bureaucrats in the European Union, the socialist government raised taxes and cut government salaries and programs. Faced with the loss of their own economic and political sovereignty, massive numbers of Greek citizens took to the streets … to protest the program cuts! “The country has no money … cut us our checks!” seemed to be the rallying cry.I often have the sense that our current economic debate is similarly unhinged from the reality. We talk about the morality of cutting this or that program, but rarely about the immorality of carrying unsustainable debt. Repaying debt is an obligation of justice, after all. Failing to do so simply shifts our rightful burden onto others: to other nations; to our own poor, who suffer disproportionately from the inflation and stagnation caused by our debt; and onto future generations. As Pope Benedict XVI says in “Light of the World,” commenting on the colossal debt we and other nations are running up:“We are living at the expense of future generations. In this respect it is plain we are living in untruth. We live on the basis of appearances, and the huge debts are meanwhile treated as something that we are simply entitled to.”Even as we Catholics make our contribution to the national discussion on the economy, exploring the moral implications and tensions among the principles of preferential option for the poor, solidarity and subsidiarity (and often having to set that debate aside to defend the unborn and the conscience rights of all Americans), the conversation remains frustratingly abstract. Consider these facts.• In 2010 for the first time, the Social Security program began paying out more benefits than it is taking in revenues, so it is on course for bankruptcy. • A study by the independent Tax Foundation found that in 2004, 60 percent of American households were receiving more benefits from the government than they were paying in taxes. • In 2010 that number rose to 70 percent. That means only 3 out of 10 families in this country are fully supporting themselves – and they are supporting or supplementing all the rest of us, too. On our present course, that number is likely to shrink to two or even one out of 10.• The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects our spending will drive our debt to the equivalent of 90 percent of our economy – 90 percent of total GDP – by 2020. Talk about unsustainable growth! Insert here the obligatory pro-life note that had we engendered a younger generation large enough to support our generous social welfare programs, we wouldn’t be in this mess. (Thank you, Planned Parenthood.)Be that as it may, whatever we may think about entitlement programs in the abstract, as a purely practical matter, reality sets a limit – as it did for the Greeks and the Tetis – on what government can deliver, no matter what laws are passed. Reputable economists on the Left and Right agree (differing only about how soon) collapse will come without change. Our generation faces a choice. We can accept some changes and cuts in programs now that can save our social programs for everyone in the long run. Or we can discover the hard way how little actual safety lies in our safety nets – and what then will happen to the poor and disadvantaged? (Note: a version of this column originally appeared in Faith & Family magazine)
What Catholic women think about contraception
Sep 18, 2012 / 00:00 amIt’s a fact. Many Catholic women use contraceptives in spite of the Church’s moral prohibition.
Why we need the major political parties
Sep 5, 2012 / 00:00 amWith the Republican convention just over and the Democratic underway, now seems the moment for at least a mild defense of our party system, which I often hear Catholics and other Christians denounce.
NFP – we're all in this together
Jul 24, 2012 / 00:00 amImagine most of the world laboring under a set of presuppositions that have absolutely awful social and economic consequences.Scholars from multiple disciplines have amassed vast evidence over a length of decades demonstrating how bad these ideas are for human beings.What would you make of the people who not only ignore these facts but go out of their way to discredit the evidence, or claim the bad consequences are actually good? And how would you go about correcting the record?Those are questions Mary Eberstadt asks in one chapter of Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, her charming, readable and intellectually relentless little volume of essays re-thinking our culture from the point of view of human happiness.Are we happy?At the level of immediate gratification we unquestionably are.Were that not true there would have been no sexual revolution, because few would have bought what was being sold: liberation from the immediate consequences of sex. Almost everyone bought in at some level.As Eberstadt notes, “Every family in America by now has been shaped by one or more of [the sexual revolution’s] facets – divorce, single parenthood, abortion, cohabitation, widespread pornography, open homosexuality.”It’s precisely because we’re “all in it together,” Eberstadt argues, that we’re afraid to look at the evidence social science keeps accumulating that we are making ourselves, and the most vulnerable among us, miserable:“After all, who wants to give offense? Who wants one’s divorced brother, homosexual cousin or remarried father to get hurt? The answer is no one of course – and the desire not to hurt people who are openly living the liberationist creed is yet another reason for the denial...”But what if the fact that we’re in it together also offers an opportunity to think anew together – to offer a new vision; friend to friend and neighbor to neighbor, leaving judgment to God?That’s the idea behind Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, an annual effort to share one of the Church’s best kept secret treasures.I can’t put it better than Judy Barrett of the Diocese of Santa Rosa: “Church teaching on contraception is morally correct, good for individuals, families and society at large, and it needs a fair hearing.”When it gets that fair hearing, it convinces and attracts! For 20 years I’ve been involved with a marriage preparation program, proposing Church teaching on sexuality to engaged couples. Most of the men and women who come to us are only nominally Catholic. Most cohabit, almost all the women are on the pill, there are always non-Catholics present accompanying their Catholic fiancés. In short, the audience is predisposed to skepticism.It’s not at all unusual – it happens routinely in fact – that sometime during the sessions we’ll notice someone start to get agitated as we speak and we brace ourselves for an angry confrontation. Almost always, though, the anger is not with the presentation team; it’s with the sense of having been cheated out a more beautiful way of life. “Why was I never told this before?!” is a sad, but quite common, response to hearing the Church’s rich and positive teaching on sex laid out in its fullness for the first time.Natural Family Planning is part of that teaching. It is not, not, a thousand times NOT, the old, discredited “rhythm method.” It’s, as Barrett puts it, “the moral, holistic, drug free, natural, healthy, modern and scientific means of cooperating with God’s plan to achieve or postpone pregnancy.”The bishops’ website linked above is rich in resources of all kinds for those who’d like to learn more about NFP and help spread the word. If you have friends who won’t give a Catholic source a fair hearing, though, visit a new non-religious, non-sectarian website, iusenfp.com, designed to give information and encouragement to anyone open to learning more. There you can take a quiz to determine which NFP method might work best for you, read the latest scientific developments, and find a class or teacher near you.Mary Eberstadt’s Adam and Eve after the Pill documents the relentless unhappiness the culture built by the pill has wrought. Natural Family Planning Awareness Week is a reminder that a genuinely liberating and joyful way of life awaits anyone who is willing to think anew and give Church teaching a fair hearing.
Born American, but in the wrong place
Jul 10, 2012 / 00:00 amHungarian-born politics professor Peter W. Schramm gives a heart-warming account of his family’s flight from Communist oppression in 1956.
Lay Catholics and social justice
Jun 12, 2012 / 00:00 am“Self-Delusion & True Contrition.” That title caught my eye in our parish used book rack, so I invested fifty cents towards the enlightenment of my conscience.
18 ways to defend religious liberty
May 29, 2012 / 00:00 amLast May 21, 43 Catholic institutions including the Archdioceses of New York and Washington and the University of Notre Dame filed suit in federal courts in defense of their right to both profess and exercise their religious faith.
Is same-sex marriage the future?
May 15, 2012 / 00:00 amIs legal recognition of same-sex marriage inevitable?
That’s my husband you’re talking about: A defense of politics & politicians
May 1, 2012 / 00:00 amEveryone loves a good lawyer joke, even lawyers.
The economy of women’s work
Apr 17, 2012 / 00:00 amA left-wing political operative stepped in it last week when she accused the wife of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney of “never working a day in her life.” In justice, I think political strategist Hilary Rosen was not aiming at Ann Romney’s status as an at-home mom. She intended only to suggest the Romneys were too rich to be in touch with the needs of middle America.
On the relevance of Holy Week
Apr 3, 2012 / 00:00 amI can’t help but notice the grim mysteries of Holy Week are upon us this year in the middle of a national debate in which one side sees religious believers and institutions as a thorn in the side of progress and wishes to marginalize their ability to influence society. For Christians, the week we enter into the mysteries of sin, suffering, death and judgment are our holiest (and strangely, happiest) days of the year. But what has Good Friday to say to the world? Is it one more proof of the backwardness of Christians?
Why you may soon be paying directly for abortion
Mar 20, 2012 / 00:00 amDo you want to pay for someone’s abortion? Take money out of your wallet and directly fund the taking of a human life?