Articles by Russell Shaw
The Francis Effect and the Chicago Appointment
Oct 20, 2014 / 00:00 amAt the American bishops’ fall general meeting last year reporters pressed hard to find signs of the Francis effect. But when the bishops gather next month in Baltimore, the press corps can relax. All they need do now to observe the Pope’s impact on the American hierarchy is take a look at the newly named Archbishop of Chicago, Blase Cupich.The surprise appointment of Archbishop Cupich, 65, to succeed Cardinal Francis George as head of the nation’s third largest diocese, the lynchpin of Catholicism in the heartland, was Pope Francis’ biggest and boldest step yet toward reshaping the American hierarchy to his taste. It’s also been called a comeback for the Bernardin era. Those were the years stretching from the late 1970s until his death in 1996 when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was the dominant figure in American episcopal ranks, not only in his Chicago archdiocese but on the national level. Cardinal Bernardin was indeed a man of exceptional abilities, yet those were scarcely halcyon days for the Church.But this way of viewing Archbishop Cupich’s appointment is probably unfair to him. Instead of linking him to another man in another era, it makes more sense to understand his appointment in light of what Pope Francis says now about the kind of bishop he wants.Francis has often spelled that out. Speaking last February to the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, the curial department tasked with vetting candidates for the pope’s consideration, he extolled “professionalism, service and holiness of life,” and said bishops should be “guardians of doctrine, not to measure how far the world lives from the truth it contains but to fascinate the world, to enchant the world with the beauty of love, to seduce it with the free gift of the gospel.”That’s a lovely thought of course. But fascinating, enchanting, and seducing the world with Catholic doctrine first of all require that doctrine be taught clearly and with conviction, including even doctrines that are hard sayings to the ears of the world.It’s a curious thing, by the way, that Pope Francis reportedly bypassed the bishops’ congregation in choosing Archbishop Cupich, whose previous episcopal appointments were in Rapid City, S.D., and Spokane. But that is a pope’s prerogative. If the report is true, it underlines the significance of this appointment as an indicator of Francis’ episcopal preferences.Unavoidably, these developments recall the days immediately after Vatican Council II, when Rome was eager to appoint so-called pastoral bishops thought to be attuned to the spirit of the council. That was followed, starting in the early eighties, by the era of so-called “John Paul II bishops,” reputedly firmer in doctrine and discipline than their predecessors. Now, it seems, we’re in the era of “Pope Francis bishops” of whom Archbishop Cupich is presumably exemplary.Ordinary Catholics may perhaps be excused for a certain wonderment at these shifting ideological winds. A good bishop is a good bishop, some might say—can’t we leave it at that?And what is a good bishop after all? For what it’s worth, here’s my version: A good bishop is a man of prayer, deeply in love with Christ and his Church, who enthusiastically accepts Catholic teaching and transmits it clearly, integrally, and persuasively, a pastor with a human touch who believes in mercy though not in watering-down, a competent administrator who seeks advice and takes it when it’s good, a brother to his priests and father to his people. If a bishop looks like that, who cares what label is attached to him?
Don Alvaro
Sep 8, 2014 / 00:00 amAs Pope John Paul II was leaving Opus Dei headquarters in Rome after paying his respects at the wake of Bishop Alvaro del Portillo, someone thanked him for coming. The Pope, a future saint, replied, “Si doveva. Si doveva”—I had to.It was common knowledge that John Paul didn’t usually take time out for events like this. So why “I had to” in the case of Bishop del Portillo, the Prelate of Opus Dei? Friendship was one—the two men went back a long way—but also the fact that by the time of his death in February, 1994 del Portillo, though scarcely a household name, was known, trusted and respected at the highest levels of the Church.The incident of the wake supplies the opening for a new biography of Bishop del Portillo issued in time for his September 27 beatification in Madrid. The beatification will be an occasion for rejoicing not only by Opus Dei’s 80,000 members worldwide but by many thousands of others who revere the memory of a man whom his friends knew simply as Don Alvaro.The biography, written by John F. Coverdale and published by Scepter, is called Saxum—Latin for “rock.” That was the nickname given del Portillo by the founder of Opus Dei, St. Josemaria Escriva, whom he served loyally as right hand man for nearly 40 years and eventually succeeded. It was a tribute to his steadfastness and reliability.I visited him a couple of times at his office in the Parioli district of Rome. These were just brief courtesy calls, but even so I was struck by his visible goodness and warmth. “It was like meeting your kindly grandfather,” I told someone later.Alvaro del Portillo was born March 11, 1914 in Madrid, third of eight children in a devout Catholic family. He prepared for a career in engineering but upon meeting the young priest Escriva was attracted to the ideal of holiness in ordinary life promoted by the lay group Escriva had founded. In 1935 del Portillo joined the Work and devoted himself to helping spread its message. He was ordained in 1944, one of the first three priests ordained specifically for Opus Dei.Starting in the early 1940s, Escriva sent del Portillo to Rome several times to negotiate formal approval of Opus Dei by the Holy See. When Escriva himself moved there in 1946, it became home for del Portillo too.Rome beyond the Vatican is filled with religious institutions—headquarters of religious orders, convents and monasteries, universities and seminaries, historic basilicas and humble parish churches—all more or less focused on the Holy See and the person of the Pope. This wasn’t the place the man who’d meant to be an engineer would have chosen for himself, but it was where providence put him, and in his unassuming way he thrived on it, earning a reputation for discretion and a generous heart.Before and during the Second Vatican Council, he served as staff or advisor to commissions engaged in planning and then carrying on the work of Vatican II and so made his mark on the great event itself. After Monsignor Escriva’s death in June, 1975 he was the obvious choice to succeed him, and when Opus Dei received the status of personal prelature in 1982 he became its first prelate. His old friend John Paul II ordained him a bishop in 1991.Prelate he was and “Blessed” he soon will be. “Don Alvaro” he will remain to those who loved him.
The Caregiver
Aug 21, 2014 / 00:00 amThe 36-Hour Day (Grand Central Life & Style) is a handbook familiar to many caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. That seemingly mysterious title is no mystery to the caregivers. They know from plenty of experience that they would need not just the regular 24 hours but a solid day and a half to touch all the bases they’re called on to touch during a typical day. If this makes caregiving sound like difficult work, that’s because it is. Yet many millions of Americans are doing it today, and many millions more will be involved in doing it in the years just ahead. Here is an area where the Church and especially the parishes should roll up their sleeves and lend a hand sooner rather than later.There is a deeply religious sense in which all of us are called to be caregivers to one another. If anyone doubts that, take another look at the parable of the Good Samaritan. As it’s commonly used today, though, “caregiver” has a special meaning. It’s the name for a person—a spouse or other family member, a neighbor, a friend—who provides unpaid assistance in the activities of daily living and/or medical care to somebody else who needs it. (There are of course paid caregivers too.)By one count, the overall total of caregivers in America now stands at more than 65 million, which is around 30 percent of the adult population. The number is certain to rise as the number of elderly grows to 71.5 million by 2030. Two-thirds of the caregivers help someone over the age of 50, and of these about 15 million care for persons with Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. Caregiver services—volunteer work, recall—were valued at $450 billion in 2009.In the nature of things, some caregivers spend more time at it and some spend less, but no one doubts that the burden can be very great. Authors Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins write in The 36-Hour Day that ongoing care for a dementia sufferer “can be an exhausting and emotionally draining job.”“It is quite possible to collapse under the load,” they add. A Center for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet reports that about 73 percent of caregivers in a survey said prayer helps them cope. A recent, helpful volume is A Year of Grace: 365 Reflections for Caregivers by Laraine Bennett (Our Sunday Visitor). But besides prayer, these people need direct outside assistance. Here’s where the parishes come in.The literature on this subject repeatedly makes the point that caregivers need regular time off—a couple of hours to go out for lunch, take in a movie, maybe just sit in the park. To make that possible, why couldn’t the local parish run a modest community service program recruiting volunteers to go into homes—either on an as-needed basis or regularly—in order to spell the regular caregivers in tending their disabled or aged charges? Some parishes probably already do something along these lines. Others easily could. Many have retired parishioners in good health and with time on their hands who are looking for something worthwhile to do. With a little encouragement and coordination from the parish, this could be it.It could also be an important part of the answer for caregivers who are feeling the strain of struggling with 36-hour days. Some problems have no solution, but others do. This may be a problem with a solution—and the parishes could help provide it.
The Common Core controversy
Aug 11, 2014 / 00:00 amLonger ago than I care to remember, I spent three years working for a Washington-based national education organization. I liked the people, enjoyed my job, and had the pleasant feeling that I was contributing to a worthwhile cause.I also learned a couple of things. One was that professional educators love innovation, or at least the idea. Another was that there’s a vast education machine—not only schools and teachers but administrative bureaucracies, groups like the one I worked for, unions, producers of textbooks and other materials, university faculties, foundations, think tanks—for whom innovation is almost literally their bread and butter.Since that now distant era, the education machine has continued to busy itself with devising and implementing innovations—new ways of teaching this or that, new standardized tests, new technology—all said to hold the key to revolutionary change for the better. Alas, reality often falls short of expectation, and the performance of large numbers of students in American public schools has remained cause for concern.Parenthetically, one might note that a providential lack of resources has generally spared Catholic schools much of this foolishness. Nevertheless the church schools have suffered a comparable problem of their own—the long reign, now mercifully ending, of catechetical theorists with a liberal agenda who seized the upper hand in religious education after Vatican II.In any event, American education now has the Common Core and the controversy surrounding it. Product of multi-million-dollar funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the diligent churning of the education machine, the Common Core consists of standards spelling out what kids should have learned at various stages in their schooling.Forty-six states to date have bought in. Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia said no thanks, while several of the original 46 have backed out and a couple of others are weighing that. The alleged evils of the Common Core have predictably become a cause célèbre for some conservatives.I have no strong feelings either way. On the one hand, it’s not unreasonable to want realistic uniform standards for student achievement. On the other hand, neither is it unreasonable to worry about ideology-crazed innovators of the future imposing their wills on American schools in this way. Let the Common Core debate proceed.As things stand, my reservations go beyond Common Core itself. Like educational innovations of the past, its focus is on what happens—or doesn’t happen but should—in the classroom. This implies that the classroom experience determines what kids learn. But although to a great extent it does, equally or arguably even more important are the things that happen, or fail to happen, in homes, neighborhoods, and the culture at large.Why is it that the academic performance of American students so often is so poor? While the culture of poverty is frequently blamed, the culture of self-indulgent affluence is hardly less at fault. Causal factors include parents who don’t read to their kids, homes with several TVs and heaps of electronic gear but hardly any books, a youth culture that encourages frittering away time via social media and values quick-fix gratification at the expense serious intellectual work, and the emotional fallout from the breakup of marriages and homes. The list could be extended, but the point should be clear: the problem isn’t just the classroom but the culture at large.Would the education machine care to tackle that one? Would the Gates people like to pour multi-millions into the project? Now that would really be an innovation.
Was Vatican II needed?
Jul 24, 2014 / 00:00 amWhy did we need the Second Vatican Council? Did we need it at all? Hearing those questions, most Catholics who’ve thought about Vatican II would probably cite renewing and updating of the Church as solid reasons for the ecumenical council.That answer isn’t wrong. But a half-century after Vatican II (it took place between 1962 and 1965) it’s clear that a much larger purpose was at work, with Church renewal and updating its handmaids. You start to see that when you consider a common objection to the council:“Other ecumenical councils were convened to handle particular problems. Early councils dealt with heresies about Christ. In the 16th century Trent had to respond to the Reformation. Vatican I in the 19th century faced the challenge to the authority of the pope and the bishops—but it was interrupted and didn’t say much about bishops. “By contrast, there was no crisis requiring Vatican II. By the middle of the last century, the Church was strong and united in the faith. So this was a council that wasn’t needed. Wouldn’t it have been better to leave things alone?”No, it wouldn’t. The Church faced a grave problem then—indeed, it still does—and an ecumenical council was required to address it. What problem? No less than the crisis of modernity itself, especially the comprehensive undermining of humankind’s self-understanding and its disastrous consequences for faith, underway in the West for at least a century or more before the council.This process had many sources, but three especially stand out: Darwinism—popularized evolutionary theory reducing the human person to no more than a higher animal; Marxism, whose deterministic account of history eliminated free choice; and Freudianism, no less deterministic, which explained human behavior as the acting out of sublimated impulses from libidinous realms of the psyche. Capping it off was Friedrich Nietzsche, who boldly announced the death of God—the bourgeois deity of 19th century Christianity, that is—and predicted that a new morality of power vested in a superman (ubermensch) would soon emerge. Hitler apparently took that to heart.Ordinary people were understandably slow in absorbing all this, but it was gospel for the Western cultural elites of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In due course it filtered down to the masses—a process speeded by the horrors of two world wars. Here, then, was the crisis of modernity that Vatican II needed to confront. Pope St. John XXIII put it clearly in his opening address to the council on October 11, 1962. The “greatest concern” of Vatican II, he declared, was to guard Christian doctrine and teach it “more efficaciously.” That included the truth about “the whole of man, composed as he is of body and soul” and created by God not only for life on earth but for eternal life in heaven. The council did its best, and that was pretty good. Central to its teaching was the Christocentric affirmation that it’s Christ who “fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes 22). The Church has been developing that exalted vision of human dignity ever since, most notably via the personalism of Pope St. John Paul II.Yes, an enormous amount remains to be done to recapture lost ground. But don’t tell me Vatican II wasn’t needed. It was, urgently. The problem hasn’t been the council but the lack of focus in its implementation— including the constant, distracting bickering about liturgy. And saying Vatican II wasn’t necessary is surely no help.
Secularist reactions to Hobby Lobby
Jul 10, 2014 / 00:00 amConsidered either as an ideology or as a program of action, secularism is deeply coercive. Reactions to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate make that abundantly clear.Secularists typically think of themselves as champions of liberation, empowerment, and freedom of choice. Take care, though: disagree on religious grounds with something these people espouse, and they’ll be after you with fire and sword, seeking to make you fall in line. So much for liberation, empowerment, and freedom of choice.Consider the secularist response to the June 30 decision by a five-member majority of the Supreme Court: proprietors of family-owned businesses don’t have to provide employees with health insurance coverage for abortifacient drugs the owners object to in conscience.A “deeply dismaying decision,” the New York Times huffed about the Hobby Lobby ruling. The deeply dismayed newspaper accused Justice Alito and his four colleagues of giving owners of closely held, for-profit companies “an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees.”“Nothing in the contraceptive coverage rule prevented the companies’ owners from worshiping as they choose or advocating against coverage and use of the contraceptives they don’t like,” the newspaper said. Quite so. The problem was that the rule forced people of faith to pay for something they judged morally abhorrent.As Justice Alito pointed out, government has other ways of giving people contraceptives and abortifacients besides forcing business owners with faith-based objections to become its accomplices. Unless of course making them accomplices was itself part of the project.The Washington Post was even more blunt in exposing its secularist premises, ripping into the court majority for having held that government should excuse owners who “bring their religious convictions into the public sphere.” The implication was that people with religious convictions ought to keep the convictions at home or else leave them in church. In presuming to bring religious convictions into the workaday world, they invite any penalties they get.Others sank below even this level of discourse by making overt appeals to anti-Catholicism. The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue pointed to examples from the Boston Herald, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post. The five justices comprising the majority in this case (Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas) are all Catholics. And therefore? And therefore it was now supposedly fair to repeat the ancient canard that Catholics in public life are pawns of the Church. Okay—but if so, how about the Jews? All three Jewish justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan) voted on the other side. Does this make them pawns of the Torah or something ridiculous like that? The argument collapses under the weight of its malevolent absurdity. Finally, though in a different category, we had Justice Sotomayor’s dissent (joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan) from a brief order of the court saying Wheaton College, a Christian school, deserves a fair hearing on its religious objections to the government’s so-called “accommodation” before being penalized for not complying with the contraception rule. Her remarks were disturbingly polemical, to say the least.The long expected showdown between faith and secularism has begun. Media slavishly supporting the secularist line, compliant politicians, and the efforts of well-funded interest groups make this a difficult fight. The underlying issue, seldom acknowledged, is a conflict of world views involving religious freedom and religion itself. For secularists, they are anachronisms and (at best) nuisances. For people of faith, they are foundations of human rights and a healthy social order. The common ground in this conflict, always small, grows smaller every day.
Iraq: Where to go from here
Jun 26, 2014 / 00:00 amStarting in 2003, the United States has made two fundamental mistakes in Iraq, both with strong moral implications. At the risk of oversimplification, they can be summed up like this: the first mistake was going into Iraq, the second was getting out.The first of these blunders was George Bush’s in launching an unjust and unnecessary war. The second was Barack Obama’s in pulling out before authentic stability had been restored in a country the U.S. had done so much to destabilize. By now we’ve paid heavily for both mistakes. Absent a fresh look at what we’re doing, we are likely to go on paying in days to come.To understand how America got into this fix, a glance at recent history will help.Turn back the clock to early 2003. In the face of mounting war fever, whipped up by the White House over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, some of us—fruitlessly, to be sure—opposed U.S. military action.At that time, my own opposition was exclusively moral. Iraq simply didn’t meet the criteria for a just war. The Iraqis hadn’t attacked us and weren’t about to do so. On what grounds, then, were we proposing to attack them? Preemptive war? But what’s preemptive about attacking an enemy who has no intention of attacking you? All too soon—and without altering in the least this rejection of the war on moral grounds—the practical folly of this mistaken adventure also became obvious. The Iraqis had no previous experience of democracy and no known taste for it, yet here we were, seeking to impose a democratic system on them in the mistaken belief they would fall in love with it and make it work.Even so, it was barely possible that the U.S.-imposed solution would work—except for the fact, overlooked or dismissed by American policy makers, that Iraqi society was radically divided along sectarian lines. Saddam Hussein had used brutal force to create unity. But with Saddam gone, the Sunnis and the Shiites could be counted on to have at each other as soon as they had a chance.And who stood to benefit from that? Who but the anti-American mullahs of Iran? Meanwhile, the sure loser was to be the Christian community of Iraq—now, as we see, decimated after eleven bitter years. It is debatable whether, once Obama determined to declare victory and get out, the U.S. could have left a residual military force behind to protect the feckless Iraqi regime from the consequences of its own mistakes. In any case, the Iraqis wanted no part of that. And so we left. In due course, the trauma of sectarian strife predictably set in. Which, approximately, is where this story stands now.After so many blunders and so much wasted time, this may be one of those situations where no truly good option exists. The centerpiece of American policy in Iraq from here on out must be the Hippocratic maxim “Do no harm”—no more, that is, than we’ve already done. Beyond that, America has interests it needs to protect including Western access to Iraqi oil and resisting the spread of Islamist terrorism. The sorry state of the Christian minority should also be an object of serious U.S. concern. In the end, though, the Iraqis must find their way for themselves. That will probably be ugly, but hardly uglier than the last eleven years. For certain, the U.S. doesn’t have the answer to Iraq’s problems. But then it never did.
The church attendence decline and what to do about it
Jun 13, 2014 / 00:00 amForty years ago, as the falloff in Sunday Mass attendance by American Catholics was becoming too obvious to ignore, Catholic voices began to be raised here and there saying it didn’t really matter. “You aren’t a good Catholic just because you go to church,” these people seemed to enjoy telling us. “What counts is what you do outside church.”Two responses, which too seldom were offered at the time, were relevant to that. One was that evidence was lacking to show that most Catholics who skipped Mass had found other ways of expressing their presumed religious fervor. The other reply, arguably more to the point, was that the Second Vatican Council had only lately stressed the centrality of Sunday Eucharist in Catholic life, and staying away from Mass was hardly consistent with that.And now, four decades later? A new study underlines the evident reality that the slippage in church attendance persists. It also offers the cold comfort of situating the decline in Mass attendance in the context of a decline in churchgoing by American Christians generally. The notable exceptions, it seems, are white evangelical Protestants, for whom the weekly attendance rate is around 60 percent. Hats off to them! For the rest, including Catholics, the numbers range from depressing to dismal.The study, by a group called the Public Religion Research Institute, also compares what people say about their church attendance in live telephone interviews with what they say when they are answering questions in the impersonal medium of an online questionnaire. In brief, they are more likely to admit to not going to church in the latter situation than when actually speaking to somebody else.Although the media made much of this finding, this particular disparity has always been recognized and often been reported, at least in general terms. In the present instance, its significance as it applies to the Catholic respondents can be seen in the fact that while 41 percent claimed to go to Mass weekly or more often when talking to an interviewer, that fell to 37 percent when the question was answered online. The same pattern existed for other Mass attendance categories: “occasionally”—44 percent on the phone, 34 percent online; “seldom or never”—15 percent telephone, 33 percent online (up a whopping 18 percent).Attendance was, as noted, considerably higher among white evangelical Protestants (and among black Protestants too) and substantially lower among white mainline Protestants. Not surprisingly, attendance at church was lowest among the religiously unaffiliated, with “seldom or never” the response of 73 percent in phone interviews and 91 percent online.If there is any consolation to be found here, it may actually reside in people’s tendency to overstate their church attendance when they are talking to someone else. Reflecting, as it obviously does, the universal human craving to look good in others’ eyes, this suggests that some people feel a residual sense of embarrassment verging on guilt about not going to church as often as they know they should. Here perhaps is an opening here for getting at least some of these people back to regular attendance. It’s a simple argument: If you want X, you have to do Y—for instance, if you want to be a fan of the local ball team, you have to watch them play once in a while or at least you need to read about them in the sports page. Just so, if you want to be a friend of God, the minimal requirement is dropping in at church and saying hello on Sunday. That’s what friends do.
Crisis in the news business
May 29, 2014 / 00:00 amIt was a week that began with the management of The New York Times forcing out the paper’s executive editor after just three years. A few days later, exhibiting what can only be called eccentric news judgment, page one of The Washington Post featured one story on trendy restaurants for upscale Washingtonians and another on teenage rodeos in Maryland. Dull items like Ukraine and Syria and kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls were nowhere in sight. Think that things have gotten kind of weird in the news business lately? You’re absolutely right. In the old media especially—newspapers and magazines, that is—signs abound of continuing decline, growing angst, and a nervous scramble to reach out to new audiences or at least hang on to the dwindling audiences they’ve still got.Browsing in the Columbia Journalism Review, you find a writer referring casually, as if speaking of a fait accompli, to “the collapse of the newspaper industry.” To which, of course, one familiar response is: “So what? Take a look at the Internet—there are as many news sites out there as any sane person could want. And many of them are generated by old news media making their move into the digital era.”That’s all very well, but it ignores a crucial point. Covering the news is a labor-intensive enterprise, and the number of media actually attempting to do it—especially in the national and international sectors—has always been comparatively small and is getting smaller all the time. Newsrooms have shrunk. Foreign and domestic bureaus have closed right and left as an economy measure. In the news business now, fewer and fewer are trying to do more and more with less and less.As for news on the Internet, it’s largely the province of aggregators—sites featuring links to coverage provided by those who still hang in there doing original work—along with a wilderness of bloggers who opinionate on the news but don’t cover it. The situation in secular media is mirrored in religious media. Many diocesan weeklies have shut down, switched to biweekly or monthly, or else transitioned to the Internet. Many magazines similarly have disappeared or also moved onto the web. Blogs and bloggers have multiplied. By no means is this all for the worse, but who’d care to say it’s all for the best?Speaking at meeting in Rome, Helen Osman, the top communication official of the U.S. bishops’ conference, says that “to understand the culture of the United States and how the Church can present the faith within that culture, it is important to realize that the adoption of digital communications is fundamentally changing the culture.” Quite so. In the end, moreover, it doesn’t matter greatly whether people get their news on a printed page or a screen. But it does matter that they get it—and that it be timely, accurate, honest, and fair. Religious leaders, just like other leaders in society, need to worry about that.It’s often said that the proliferation of news-related sites on the Internet means people have plenty of news sources at their disposal and can fend for themselves. But the ugly reality is that many, instead of digging for the truth of things, settle cheerfully for the version of events—and the site—that tickles their particular bias. The old news media had lots of faults, but at their best they made an honorable effort to get the facts and tell the story straight. However you look at it, their decline is very bad news.
Our spontaneous Pope
May 15, 2014 / 00:00 amSpontaneity that reflects good-heartedness is a highly attractive trait, but the spontaneity of self-indulgence is reckless and often cruel. Spontaneity of either kind can cause confusion and dismay. Pope Francis’ spontaneity is clearly of the first sort—good-hearted, that is—but as with spontaneity of any kind, it can sometimes have confusing results.Last month brought what may have been another instance of that when it was reported that the Pope had told an Argentine woman, civilly married to a man for 19 years, that she could receive communion; accounts differed on whether the woman or the man was divorced. The woman’s pastor supposedly had told her she could not receive. The exchange apparently occurred during a telephone call Francis made to counsel the woman after getting a letter from her. Some sort of conversation pretty clearly did take place. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, commented that “consequences relating to the teaching of the Church are not to be inferred.”Whatever actually happened, episodes exhibiting Francis’ spontaneity have multiplied in this pontificate. (Think of his “who am I to judge?” concerning homosexuals who act in good faith.) Not that previous popes never misspoke themselves, but occurrences like these tended to be rare in earlier times inasmuch as popes were usually remote, sequestered figures whose public utterances were delivered in carefully vetted language. That gave rise to the institution of “Vaticanologist.” The term, like “Kremlinologist,” signified a journalist generally thought to be expert at teasing out the real meaning that lay behind the bits and pieces of information dribbling out from a closed system.There were hints of change under Pope John XXIII, a spontaneous pope if ever there was one—although, legend aside, his decision to convene Vatican Council II appears to have been less spontaneous than he sometimes liked to let on. But really big change set in under Pope John Paul II whose spontaneous press conferences on the plane returning from foreign trips were a striking feature of his pontificate. Pope Benedict XVI continued this practice, although he required journalists to submit written questions in advance. Now, with Pope Francis, the closed system is largely gone—at least, where the pope himself is concerned—replaced by a largely open and notably spontaneous papacy. Francis has given several press interviews already—with somewhat mixed results, be it noted—and he seems likely to give more. But it’s his off-the-cuff remarks in various contexts and on various occasions that have especially caught people’s eye.This is both attention-getting and appealing. It’s also upsetting to some Catholics. World leaders, they reason, surrender the luxury of unbridled spontaneity by virtue of the office they hold. Obviously, violations of this rule are not uncommon among politicians —consider Barack Obama’s “red line” in Syria or, in an earlier day, George Romney’s “brain-washed” in Vietnam, which knocked him out of a presidential race. But the rule stands just the same. Does it apply to popes? Pope Francis is unlikely to change. Not only is the spontaneity part of his personality, it’s also, one suspects, a considered part of his program and, in his eyes, worth a few glitches now and then for the sake of its long-range benefits. If so, then maybe the best advice for the rest of us is Paul’s to the Thessalonians. In the Knox translation, that goes: “Do not stifle the utterances of the Spirit, do not hold prophecy in low esteem; and yet you must scrutinize it carefully, retaining only what is good” (1 Thess 5.19-22).
Studies
May 5, 2014 / 00:00 amYou know morality and common sense are both under siege when a plainly obnoxious practice is regarded with complacency and even respect. “Defining deviancy down,” the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an astute social observer, called it.Draw your own conclusions therefore from the news that a journal called Porn Studies has arrived on the scene accompanied by the inevitable pseudo-scientific blather. Soon to come: The Bestiality Quarterly and The Review of Necrophilia? Just wait and see.The scientific study of pornography as a symptom of sickness might actually have some value. But a writer on the Culture of Life website expresses skepticism about Porn Studies since it originates with the same publishing group responsible for a journal of homosexuality that serves largely as an advocate for the gay lifestyle.Even so, one has to agree with the editors’ rationale that pornography deserves study because it’s important to so many people. What they don’t say is that it coarsens the cultural and moral landscape and blights lives. With the exception of child pornography—still widely deplored and occasionally punished by law—pornography is now taken for granted in the United States, a kind of background noise you’re supposedly free to ignore if you don’t like it.The Supreme Court used to wrestle with the issue occasionally, but having lowered the legal bars, these days it generally leaves it alone. It’s the price you have to pay for free speech, we’re told. And after all, pornography does no real harm.Really? Pope Francis cut to the heart of it in his message for Lent, listing pornography along with addiction to alcohol, drugs, and gambling as a form of “moral destitution” whose essence is “slavery to vice and sin.” Often, he noted, it begins with the young.A central reason for the spread of pornography is that some people get rich from it, thereby capitalizing on the weakness of others. One estimate places the annual value of the U.S.“adult video” trade alone at $20 billion. Pornography is a pervasive presence on the Internet, with an estimated 12% of all websites featuring it.Confessors report that the use of pornography has become a grievous problem for many men.It is a factor in many cases of marriage breakdown, parent-child conflict, and other forms of individual and social pathology. If all this isn’t real harm,then it’s hard to say what real harm would look like. Yet our courts, acting as agents of a secular cultural elite, have decreed a hands-off approach. “To a degree that my father could never have imagined, today’s father must protect himself and his children from the relentless assault of an increasingly pornographic culture; moreover, mothers share this sacred task.“Every home now stands in the pathway of this attack on our children’s innocence and purity. If we are not vigilant, our sons and daughters will pay a step and heartrending price.”These words come from a pastoral letter, Bought With a Price, by Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Va. Its subtitle: Every Man’s Duty To Protect Himself and His Family from a Pornographic Culture. Bishop Loverde originally published his letter in 2006. Recently he issued it in an expanded form because the problem has gotten worse.As the quote makes clear, its message is that the solution is up to everyone, with fathers at the top of the list. No one else will do it for us. Least of all,the editors of Porn Studies.
Factions in the Church
Apr 4, 2014 / 00:00 amThose first century Christians of Corinth must certainly have been a boisterous, troublesome lot. But maybe we should be glad that they were. After all, their acting up and acting out were the occasion for two remarkable New Testament documents—St. Paul’s first and second letters to the Corinthians—that get the heart of a current problem in the Church.The problem is factionalism. We find it described right at the start of Paul’s first letter: “Each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas’”—these being the names of evangelizers with whom various quarreling factions within the Christian community of Corinth chose to identify. Paul is having no part of that. “Is Christ divided?” he angrily demands. On the contrary, Christ is one and so is his church. (Cf. 1 Cor 1.12-13)Looking back on those days, it’s tempting for us now to strike a self-congratulating pose. “How foolish of those Corinthians—thank goodness we aren’t like them!”Except that we are. Leaving aside the gaping divisions that persist within the worldwide Christian body, factionalism is a real and arguably growing problem among Catholics themselves. Unfortunately, an event later this month may be an unintended reminder of that.On April 27 Pope Francis will canonize two remarkable men—Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II. A huge crowd in Rome and millions watching worldwide will witness a joy-filled ceremony formally attesting to the sanctity of two great leaders of the Church. Unfortunately, some people can’t leave it at that. How often in recent years has someone been heard to say, “I’m a John XXIII Catholic” or “I’m a John Paul Catholic”?The names have changed, but otherwise it’s like the bad old days in first century Corinth.Note, too, that pundits are wont to hold forth about the politics of canonizations. Canonizing both John XXIII and John Paul II, it is said, represents the Vatican version of a balanced ticket—something for both liberals and conservatives. It would be naïve to imagine there’s nothing to that. But political calculations inspired by factionalism obscure a more important fact: both of these popes are models of holiness for our times. The problem doesn’t end with Pope John and Pope John Paul. PopeFrancis and Pope Benedict have gone out of their way to stress the unity and continuity between them, but the factionalists won’t settle for that. Instead, these days you’re all too likely to hear “I’m Pope Francis Catholic” and “I’m a Pope Benedict Catholic.” As St. Paul might have said: Cut it out, guys!Yes, every pope is different in some ways from every other pope. Noting the differences is reasonable. Moreover, it’s natural to find some popes more congenial than others to one’s personal preferences. But it is crass, church-dividing factionalism to declare allegiance to one at the expense of another. In the end, says the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “the Church has but one faith, one sacramental life, one apostolic succession, one common hope, and one and the same charity” (no. 161). Period.But let St. Paul have the last word. After chiding the Corinthians, he goes on to underline a profound truth: “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor 12.12-13). It’s called the Church.
Lent and the Purple Monster
Mar 10, 2014 / 00:00 amI was a little shy of ten years old when I had what may have been my most spiritually profitable Lent ever. Looking back now, I can see clearly that I owed that to my mother. And “The Purple Monster.”A short time before, my parents had taken the significant step of letting me to go to the movies by myself. That meant that every Friday after supper I trooped off to the local movie palace with a gang of neighborhood kids and plunked down my quarter to see a cowboy movie and the latest installment of the current serial.The cowboy movies were B-grade flicks starring people like Johnny Mack Brown and William Boyd as Hop-a-long Cassidy. I thoroughly enjoyed them. But what really enthralled me was the serial.The one that had started just as I began attending those Friday evening shows was called “The Purple Monster Strikes.” It was about a visitor from another planet who, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten, went about causing all sorts of trouble that each week ended with the heroes of the story in a desperate, apparently unresolvable fix. (Come back next week and you’ll see how they get out of it)The script was primitive, the acting execrable, but for at least one nine-year-old boy “The Purple Monster” was the last word in sophisticated entertainment. Week after week, I could hardly wait for Friday to roll around so that I could find out what happened next.Then came Lent. As Ash Wednesday drew near, my mother raised the inevitable question: What was I giving up? She didn’t command, but she made it clear that the correct answer was: “Candy and movies.”Candy I could do without. But no movies meant six weeks without “The Purple Monster.” Painful though the prospect was, I choked it down – both to satisfy my mother and because, I was dimly aware, somehow or other it was the right thing to do. All through Lent I did without the Friday evening movies. By the time Lent ended, “The Purple Monster Strikes” had run its course. I have the impression that “giving up something for Lent” is not as popular today as it was back then. That’s too bad. Rightly understood, it is practical training in detachment and, as such, extremely useful. God wants us to rid ourselves of our attachments, for in the end God himself is the only attachment worth having. In the words of that spiritual classic “The Imitation of Christ,” “Only God, who is eternal and immense, fills all things and is the true consolation of the soul and true joy of the heart.” (II.5)Love him and fit everything else in the context of that love – that’s the lesson God wants us to learn and the great lesson the ascetical life aims to teach. And, little as he understood it, for one not yet ten-year-old, giving up “The Purple Monster” was a step in that direction. Note that the giving-up should hurt a bit. As Pope Francis says in his message for Lent, “no self-denial is real without this dimension of penance.” If you hate turnips and give them up, it doesn’t count for much. Profitable giving-up will therefore differ for different people. Should it be television, Facebook, listening to Bach? It’s a question each one must answer for himself.Meanwhile, I’ve got another question that’s gone unanswered for quite a few years: Can anyone tell me – at last – how that Purple Monster got his comeuppance in the end?
Gay Marriage: Back to the Court
Feb 24, 2014 / 00:00 amWhen the Supreme Court last June overturned a section of the Defense of Marriage Act saying that in the eyes of the federal government only man-woman unions count as marriages, the court said it wasn’t questioning the authority of the states to bar same-sex marriage if they wish. Thirty-three states now do. Predictably, nonetheless, dozens of lawsuits in many parts of the country are currently underway in an effort to hand gay marriage advocates what they’ve wanted all along—a Supreme Court decision declaring that the Constitution gives same-sex couples a right to marry overriding state laws to the contrary. One or more of these cases will reach the Supreme Court soon, perhaps as early as next year, and will set the stage—so the advocates hope—for such a ruling. Against this background, it’s more important than ever to have a realistic understanding of what this argument is really all about. Consider, then, these words of a federal judge named Robert J. Shelby in his opinion last December striking down Utah’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage: “The state’s current laws deny its gay and lesbian citizens their fundamental right to marry and, in doing so, demean the dignity of these same-sex couples for no rational reason.” That’s the case for gay marriage in a nutshell. It makes sense if—and only if—you accept the judge’s unstated assumption that unions which necessarily exclude goods and purposes that up to now have been held to be at the heart of marriage are “marriages” just the same. The goods and purposes in question are man-woman complementarity and openness to the begetting of children. If ever there was a redefinition of marriage, it’s this. But so what? After all, doesn’t restricting marriage to man-woman couples deny gays and lesbians the right to marry and thus, as Judge Shelby says, demean their dignity? No, it doesn’t. For one thing, since gay marriage is, in the opposed view, no marriage at all, the choice to enter into such a union can’t be called an exercise of the right to marry. As for demeaning gays and lesbians, same-sex couples are no more demeaned by telling them their radical redefinition of marriage doesn’t satisfy rational criteria for marriage than I would be demeaned by being told I can’t play second base for the Chicago Cubs. At bottom, the gay marriage debate isn’t about whether a smallish number of people can enter into unions that must be recognized as marriages despite their failure to satisfy rational criteria for marriage. Rather, what’s happening here is a conflict of world views at a far deeper level. One holds that the reality of marriage is a given of nature that can’t be changed by courts or legislatures or public opinion polls. The other holds marriage to be a product of social convention, subject to redefinition and re-configuration ad infinitum at the pleasure of those who have the power. But if that’s how it is with marriage, someone might reasonably ask, what else? The answer, as we already know from the experience of legalized abortion and the continuing pressure for legalized euthanasia, extends to human life itself. Come November, voters in Oregon may find two marriage-related initiatives on the ballot. One declares approval for same-sex marriage. The other offers protection against being penalized to people who refuse in conscience to cooperate with the new marriage regime. The first seems likely to pass. The fate of the second is problematical. And that’s the world we live in now.
German marriage
Feb 10, 2014 / 00:00 amWhen Jesus said, “What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19.6), presumably he meant it. Certainly the Catholic Church believes he did, and that conviction is the basis for its solemn teaching that sacramental marriages are indissoluble. But isn’t there such a thing as “Catholic divorce” – annulment, that is? Evidently not, since annulment – a declaration of nullity by a church court – isn’t the dissolution of a marriage but a judgment that in a particular case no sacramental marriage existed. (One common reason is that one or both parties didn’t truly intend to enter into a sacramental marriage as the Church understands it.) There are of course many variations on the theme of the divorced Catholic without an annulment who marries again. Some of these people were the responsible parties in the breakup of their first marriages and aren’t troubled about violating the Church’s teaching now. But others were the injured parties. It’s natural to feel sympathy for those in this second category, who, having entered into a new union without an annulment, find themselves in a state of estrangement from the Church that includes being cut off from receiving communion (unless they separate from their second partners or forgo marital intimacy). Now a well-intentioned, but not necessarily wise, proposal by some German bishops for handling this pastoral problem is causing serious concern among those who fear further erosion of the indissolubility of marriage as a likely result. At the plenary assembly of their episcopal conference next month, the bishops of Germany will consider a set of guidelines allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to be readmitted to the sacraments in “justified individual cases.” The guidelines are expected to pass. Already one German diocese, the Archdiocese of Freiburg, has drafted, and apparently adopted, guidelines of its own. This is hardly a bolt from the blue. Prominent figures in the German hierarchy have been arguing for something like this at least since 1993. Up to now the response from Rome has been no. Indeed, as early as 1981, in an apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the Church’s practice – which, he noted, is “based on Sacred Scripture” – of not giving communion to the divorced and remarried. John Paul cited the potential for “error and confusion regarding…indissolubility” as a secondary reason for this stand. The argument was repeated last October in the pages of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, by Cardinal-designate Gerhard Mueller, the German prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Publication of the article, he noted, was approved by Pope Francis. Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, apostolic administrator of Freiburg and president of the German bishops’ conference, brushed off the CDF prefect’s remarks. The Germans, it appears, are determined to proceed, no matter what. This haste seems strange considering that an extraordinary assembly of the world Synod of Bishops next October and an ordinary Synod assembly a year later – both of them convened by the Pope – will focus on marriage and family. The pastoral problem of the divorced and remarried is certain to come up for discussion in this eminently collegial context.Not only that – for two days before the February 22 consistory at which Pope Francis will elevate 19 men to cardinal, the College of Cardinals will meet and discuss the subject of marriage. That would be a good time for someone to point out that although some adjustments in the annulment process are no doubt possible, it’s crucial to avoid the undermining of indissolubility.
Universal destination
Jan 23, 2014 / 00:00 am“Universal destination” may sound like a fancy way of saying where we’re all headed, but this odd expression happens to be the name for a central principle of Catholic social teaching. It follows therefore that it is also central to Pope Francis’ much-discussed apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel).The point is important particularly in light of the announcement that the Pope and President Obama will meet in late March in Rome to talk – according to the president – about their shared concern over economic inequality. It’s a matter on which they see eye to eye. Or do they?Even friendly critics of the apostolic exhortation have seemed often to miss its central thrust, with perhaps some reason. The document is long, rambling, and studded with overly broad generalizations, and the flaws make it easy for well-disposed readers to become distracted and lose track of what its economic sections are actually saying.Begin with the crucial fact that, like other social justice documents of the Magisterium, Evangelii Gaudium doesn’t deal in policies and programs but principles. The most important of these is the universal destination of goods, understood as an existential basis for an equitable sharing of the world’s wealth. (Worth recalling as America marks the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty.)Pope Francis, looking at the global scene, puts it like this: “We must never forget that the planet belongs to all mankind and is meant for all mankind; the mere fact that some people are born in places with fewer resource or less development does not justify the fact that they are living with less dignity” (Evangelii Gaudium, 190). With necessary adjustments, that applies to the national and local levels too.The Pope isn’t saying anything new. Other popes have made the same point. But apparently it’s new to some. In conversation with several well-educated Catholic laymen a while back, I mentioned the universal destination of goods and was met with blank disbelief: Surely the Church never said anything like that. Evidently there’s work to do getting the word around.It’s a simple enough principle. God created the world for everyone to live in and cultivate and enjoy, and that should govern the distribution of its fruits. The right to private ownership, also affirmed by the Church, remains undisturbed in this view. But it isn’t absolute, and the principle shaping its exercise is “universal destination.” Francis says: “The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good” (Evangelii Gaudium, 189).This points to the moral imperative of some form of redistribution of wealth. Here many critics lose their cool, assuming this means heavy-handed statist intervention in the economy, ruinous taxation of individuals and private enterprises that discourages initiative, and the rest of the neo-liberal chamber of horrors. Francis’ remedy is different: it’s moral change – conversion.Activists of the left and the right commonly proceed as if structures – government programs, free markets, or some combination of both – were sufficient to ensure justice and prosperity for all. But structures must be supported by change of heart. One without the other won’t do the job. Structural changes are needed, Francis says, but also more: “We are called to find Christ in [the poor], to lend our voice to their causes…to be their friends” (Evangelii Gaudium, 198).Some people will reasonably ask: Is that realistic? To which the answer is: Maybe not, but the Church must keep saying it, or it never will be.
Obamacare and abortion
Jan 13, 2014 / 00:00 amFour years ago, when passage or defeat of the Affordable Care Act appeared to rest in the hands of a small group of pro-life House Democrats, President Obama won their support for the health care plan with an executive order promising elective abortion wouldn’t be part of the program. Skeptics said the order wouldn’t do the trick.They were right. The question now isn't whether the Obamacare will include abortion but how much abortion, for whom, and at whose expense.Former Michigan representative Bart Stupak, who'd led the little band of House Democrats in negotiations with the White House, two years ago declared himself to be "perplexed and disappointed" at the violation of the executive order – and also, he added, of "statutory law" – then already beginning to take place. Stupak, who’d chosen not to seek in 2010, was speaking in particular of the HHS Mandate – the Health and Human Services Department's rule for the implementation of Obamacare that would compel even some church-related institutions to cooperate in providing abortifacient drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization to employees via their health plans.Not surprisingly, the mandate has evoked heated protests from religious leaders, the Catholic bishops among them, as well as from some proprietors of commercial enterprises opposed to abortion on conscience grounds. The argument is that coercing conscience in this manner violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.The Supreme Court in March will hear two cases brought against the mandate by private businesses, with the Justice Department arguing the pro-abortion side. Also certain to be before the court soon is a case or cases involving religious groups. As this is written, it could be the much publicized case involving the Little Sisters of the Poor or it could be some other.By no means, though, is the HHS Mandate Obamacare’s only tip of the hat to elective abortion.Experience has shown that in some places it can be difficult to impossible just to find out whether plans offered on the new federal and state exchanges cover the abortion procedure. That’s been the problem in New York and Minnesota, to mention just two.In some states, too, all plans cover elective abortion, even though federal law requires that at least one plan be available that doesn't contain this coverage. Rhode Island and Connecticut are instances.If someone ends up buying insurance that covers elective abortion, without knowing it or wanting it, he or she unwittingly is helping to pay for someone else's abortion. Legislation to remedy this problem has been introduced in both the Senate and the House but it thought to have little chance of passage. That’s not all. The federal and state governments are contracting with community groups to encourage people to use the exchanges and show them how. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, is one such group, with grants in the hundreds of thousands of dollars going to affiliates in Iowa, Montana, New Hampshire, California, Montana, and the District of Columbia. Addressing a Planned Parenthood conference last April, President Obama spoke with pride about the fact that the abortion movement's celebrated right to choose abortion was a part of Obamacare. People whose memories go back just a few years will recall a time when some Catholic apologists for Obama insisted that, even though he was pro-choice himself, he could be counted on to respect the consciences of others who disagreed. How wrong can you be?
Our duty to evangelize
Nov 14, 2013 / 00:00 amThe bible study group had been discussing the Sunday readings, which naturally led to the subject of evangelization, which naturally led to our responsibility for preaching the Good News. Suddenly the subject was evangelization and us. A woman had a question."I heard the diocese was putting together an evangelization plan," she said, "but I haven't seen anything about it in the parish yet. Do you know anything about that?" And she turned a quizzical eye on me.Now, right here I should say that when it comes to real-life evangelizing, this good woman can run rings around me and just about everybody. She's a woman of faith who's eager to share her faith with others and has plenty of practice doing that. Nothing I said should be taken as a putdown of her."I don't know what the diocese has in mind," I replied. "And I certainly agree that a plan is needed if people are supposed to work together in evangelizing teams. But really – there's no reason why individual Catholics must wait for the word from on high before they evangelize. The right and the duty to do that come to each one of us with baptism and are reaffirmed and strengthened by confirmation. "Sharing in the mission of the Church – of which evangelization is a fundamental part – is something expected of every single member of the Church by reason of his or her Christian vocation. If more of us understood that, we wouldn't be sitting around waiting for somebody to tell us to start doing it. We'd be out there evangelizing right now."Which, as I said, is exactly how things already are with the woman who asked the question. We could all take a leaf from her book.Looking for an authority to support what I said? You can't do better than Blessed John Paul II's marvelous document on the vocation of the laity, Christifideles Laici (The Lay Members of Christ's Faithful People). He speaks there about individual apostolate as a duty of each baptized Catholic and then says this:"Such an individual form of apostolate can contribute greatly to a more extensive spreading of the Gospel; indeed it can reach as many places as there are daily lives of individual members of the lay faithful….In sharing fully in the unique conditions of life, work, difficulties and hopes of their sisters and brothers, the lay faithful will be able to reach the hearts of their neighbors, friends, and colleagues, opening them to a full sense of human existence – that is, to communion with God and with all people" (Christifideles Laici, 28).Beautiful but unrealistic? We'd better hope it's not. For otherwise the problems confronting the faith in the United States may be more serious than most people imagine.Recently I came across numbers for the Church in the U.S. make the point more vividly than rhetoric can. Consider. Infant baptisms declined from 1,005,490 in 2003 to 763,208 in the year past. Adult baptisms fell from 81,013 to 41,918. People received into full communion dropped from 82,292 to 71,582. Catholic marriages plummeted from 241,727 to 163,976. (Source: 2013 Official Catholic Directory)However anyone explains those numbers, they tell a troubling story. If you agree, you won't wait for somebody to hand you a plan of action before setting out to do what you can, in word and in the way you live your life, to open the eyes of family members, friends, and neighbors to the beauty and truth of the Good News.
Pope Francis' program
Oct 17, 2013 / 00:00 amAmong Catholics who've been rattled by remarks by Pope Francis in his famous interviews, some have sought solace in blaming the media. They have a point. Sensationalism, oversimplification, and ignorance (headline writers notwithstanding, "proselytism" and "conversion" are two quite different things) really have marked some of the papal coverage to date.But when you're through criticizing the press, the fact remains that the reporters have gotten it essentially right. Pope Francis truly is saying something different while apparently preparing to set the Church on a significantly new path. This makes it a matter of urgency that Catholics, instead of getting hung up on media mistakes, grasp where the Pope's newness really lies.Italian Vaticanologist Sandro Magister offers a helpful insight on that. To comprehend Pope Francis, he says, he should be seen in the line of two larger than life figures of the not so distant past--Cardinal Carlo Martini, S.J., of Milan and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago.Cardinal Martini, a Jesuit like Pope Francis, died in 2012. For many years he was Catholic progressives' favorite candidate for election as pope. Cardinal Bernardin died in 1996. During most of the preceding two decades he was the dominant figure among his brothers in the U.S. hierarchy.By no means is Pope Francis's resemblance to the two cardinals a perfect likeness. The Pope is very much his own man, with his own style and his own priorities. Still, no one who knew either Cardinal Martini or Cardinal Bernardin can help but notice the similarities. Especially, as Magister suggests, these concern the stance the Church should adopt in addressing the secular culture.In modern times, the stance has generally been confrontational and combative: error must be corrected, evil resisted, no matter the cost. By contrast, the Martini-Bernardin approach is notably different: instead of confronting the secular culture, seek common ground; where no common ground can be found, downplay the conflict as much as can be done without sacrificing principle.And the Pope? His strategy is reasonably clear from the metaphor used in his interview with several Jesuit journals to describe the role of the Church in today's world. "I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugar. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds…"Here is the context in which to read Francis's words later calling on Catholics to talk less about abortion, gay marriage, and contraception. First, he's saying, stop the spiritual hemorrhaging from the wounds inflicted by the culture on faith and hope, and only then turn to specific problems.We now have clear evidence that Francis doesn't intend only to talk about these things. It's his move in summoning an "extraordinary"--that is, out of the regular cycle--session of the world Synod of Bishops a year from now to consider "the pastoral challenges of the family." This consultation with bishops from around the world reflects his commitment to collegiality as well as his concern for divorced and remarried Catholics. If Pope Francis has anything to say about it--and it hardly needs saying that he will--the Church's pastoral approach to them will be at the top of the Synod agenda.So, this unavoidably will raise questions regardingCatholic doctrine on the indissolubility of marriage. Never mind the press--the truth is, we're in for an exciting ride.
Public prayer
Oct 7, 2013 / 00:00 amOn the face of it, the religion clauses of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment seem pretty clear: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That isn't so hard to understand, is it?Granted, the meaning of "an establishment of religion" requires explaining, and the extent and limits of religious free exercise need to be specified. But surely these matters aren't so terribly obscure that they require an endless stream of legal tests.Yet, as the Supreme Court's new term gets underway, its docket includes still another big church-state case. This one concerns the practice of opening sessions of public bodies with prayer, as happens with sessions of Congress and the Supreme Court itself. Some people may find it strange that we still need to argue about this so late in the day. A bit of historical background may help.For the nation's first century and a half, there was relatively little constitutional litigation centering on the religion clauses. People apparently agreed on what the language meant and were willing to leave it at that.Shortly after World War II, however, significant church-state disputes began in earnest. Significantly perhaps, this development coincided with the postwar growth in size and influence of the Catholic Church in the United States, which some people--including, as we now know, even some Supreme Court justices--found troubling. It's hard not to see this concern to keep the Catholics in their place as one underlying explanation for the sudden rash of court tests. Part of the reason, too, was the emergence of a new, ideologically driven thrust toward the secularization of American institutions. Since the 1940s, many, though by no means all, of the controversies have been school-related--religion in public schools, state assistance to parochial schools. In a decision in 1971, the Supreme Court delivered the famous Lemon test for identifying impermissible interaction between government and religion. The result was a fresh stream of cases requiring the increasingly frustrated justices to attempt to unravel the new complexities and contradictions created by Lemon.Thus the church-state sector remains a murky battlefront in constitutional law. And now the Supreme Court is trying again. The new case (Greece v. Galloway) comes from Greece, N.Y., a town of 100,000 near Rochester, where since 1999 the town council has opened its meetings with prayer offered by a visiting clergyman. Two local women objected to this practice and went to court. A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with them--even though the Supreme Court had said back in 1983 that there is no intrinsic constitutional violation involved in public prayer of this sort. The court will hear oral arguments November 6, with a decision expected next spring.A large number of individuals and groups with church-state interests have submitted briefs in the case. Surprising to some, the Obama administration's Justice Department has entered the fight on the side of the town. So have nine prominent Catholic constitutional specialists, including Gerard Bradley of Notre Dame, Helen Alvare of George Mason, Robert George of Princeton, Hadley Arkes of Amherst, and Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard. Their chief concern, it seems, is that the lower court decision sought to revive the moribund Lemon test instead of allowing it rest in peace.Many people who aren't constitutional authorities would agree that's a bad idea. "We are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being," the Supreme Court declared years ago. Let's leave it at that.