"Christ of the Breadline," by Fritz Eichenberg

It’s with trepidation that I watch the growing unrest in Oakland and other cities whose “Occupiers” are becoming increasingly rambunctious. Violence broke out in Oakland the other night, with a protester grievously wounded by an errant canister of tear gas; I worry that we may be in store for a convulsion of violence such as the Rodney King riots, les emeutes des banlieues in the suburbs of France in 2005, or the London riots of the past year. One hopes and prays that this will not be the case. But they say that every society is just three (or is it four, or nine, or some other number less than ten!) meals away from anarchy; and while it is easier to blame the “Occupy” crackdowns on craven city mayors who are sick of having to keep a nervous eye on these sprawling, squalid tent cities all day, I’m sure things aren’t helped by the worn nerves of the increasingly exhausted and uncomfortable protesters keeping their suspicious eyes on City Hall all day.

I should confess right away that I don’t have a bone in my body bent on protest. Some have held this against me, demanding to know how we can change an unjust system without making our voices heard loud and clear. I take this point. At the same time, I also want to caution that protest carries with it enormous risks. The brilliant Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed things this way in his book After Virtue:

It is easy [to understand] why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. ‘To protest’ and its Latin predecessors and French cognates are originally as often or more often positive as negative; to protest was once to bear witness to something and only as a consequence of that allegiance to bear witness against something else.

But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestor can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that the protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective…

I’m sure that I agree with one or two or perhaps a baker’s dozen of the innumerable “anti-everything” messages the Occupiers are shouting about more or less incoherently and without anything like a platform, credo, or list of “demands.” (Even the word demand sits ill with me, though it is a hallmark of our contemporary sense of self-entitlement. Have you ever stopped to think how vicious the wording is of the instant-view television feature On Demand? It’s not On Request or On Order; no, we proudly sell and unthinkingly consume pure boorish brusqueness, the ideology that we deserve everything we want, right away. I suspect that some Occupiers share this materialist mindset with far more cogs in the capitalist machine than they would know how to admit.)

But I believe that “reason,” or “reasonableness,” is not just a sneaky tactic meant to produce, more efficiently than guttural howling, what one wants. It is not, in other words, a mechanism of power. Rather, it has some relationship to the truth; and the thing about truth is that no one person or party can claim exclusive rights to it. Truth opens us up to the possibility that the Other is right about something, too, and may have something to teach us. Belief in the truth makes us vulnerable at our core. This vulnerability proves that truth has little, if anything, to do with power, at the same time as the Other-orientedness of our cry for meaning also opens us up to the principles of empathy, respect, and compassion. It is through this lens that we must read St. Augustine’s pithy remark: “Only the truth can conquer, and the victory of truth is love.”

What happens when protest becomes not positive but negative; not protest for but protest against; taking as its byword not peace but what should be treated as its synonym, yet in practice often is not: justice? What happens, simply enough, is that anger replaces love in our hearts, and undoes the most radical injunction of all: that of Jesus, to love even our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us. We must be clear, if we are to be people of peace, that anger left unchecked and unabated always leads to the evil of violence — always.

First, the anarchy begins with small signs of disrespect, as when these Occupiers of Atlanta refused to let an honored civil rights hero speak to them, just so that they could make a dumb point about the evils of the “establishment”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QZlp3eGMNI

Then, it proceeds to somewhat bigger forms of violence, as when these Occupiers of Rome broke into a church, desecrated it, and smashed to pieces a statue of the Virgin Mary, all to a soundtrack of hollers and cheers:
http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=21750

And finally, we encounter out and out hysteria, as when these unrepentant anarchists in Oakland started throwing rocks and bottles at police (and then painted the law enforcement officers as the outrageous ones):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHlHiNEZ1wA

The final irony is that before the violence gets unleashed, the liberal-minded Occupiers always claim that they are fighting for the police, generously welcoming them into the 99%, too (at least, for as long as they share their politics). A liberal-minded thug, however, is still a thug. Granted that there are many, many different “types” in your average Occupy movement, the ones that wield the most influence and push things out of hand are almost always the professional rabble-rousers. Their true colors will show, in the end.

How, then, are we to protest the dreadful iniquity of Wall Street? (If we may narrow our focus to this particular Mammon, among the Occupiers’ many targets.) I’m not, myself, prepared to offer a complex model for the fight for social justice. Others have done so admirably in word and example, borrowing more from Reverend King than from Malcolm X, who seemed to me to be the main spiritual inspiration of many of the outraged remarks graffitied on the sidewalks of Dewey Square when I visited the Occupy Boston site the other day. Of course, even Malcolm X had his share of righteousness. My point is not that we should give up the Occupiers’ message(s) or even their basic tactics of protest and demonstration; only that we should refine them. Their cry for a more equitable distribution of goods, for a market with a conscience, is prophetic and true enough; it simply lacks something, for it to be morally satisfying as a total system of thought. What it lacks, I think, more than coherence or the aforementioned list of demands, is something striking, even spiritual, enough to remind us of our common humanity once we have so confidently broken society down into the haves and the have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and, in the end, the bad guys vs. the good guys, the monsters vs. the heroes (a distribution which is never so obvious as 99% vs. 1%).

(A final, dreadful irony, so remarkably demonstrated by Rene Girard, is that in the paroxysm of violence, allegiances can get reshuffled; friends can turn on friends in an instant, submitting them to the senselessness of the scapegoating mechanism, or the guillotine, in their urge for release, even compromising on their values and becoming like the ones they not so long ago detested. The final image of Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs eat at table with the farmers, is haunting, here; and Girard suggested that the most sinister verse in all the Gospels is when, after the crucifixion, Jesus’ two executioners, “Herod and Pilate, who till then had been enemies, on that day became friends.” Lk 23:12.)

No, I do not have a program, a “better idea” than the protests. Modestly, I would just like to remark on the Church’s efforts for peace and justice which sort of went under the radar this week. Not assuming they are better than anyone else’s, but because whatever is true, noble, good, and pure deserves to be contemplated (Philippians 4:8).

Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, actually came out in support of the Occupiers’ message a few days ago, asking rhetorically, “Do people at a certain time have a right to say: ‘Do business differently, look at the way you are doing business because this is not leading to our welfare, to our good’? Can people demand this of the people of Wall Street? I think people can and should be able to.” His office at the Vatican has just put out a 41-page document (short version here) proposing a dramatic reform of the global financial system, and which many commentators are calling left, even, of Dodd-Frank.

That is not all: Cardinal Turkson had another coup this week, with the success yesterday (though admittedly it was not as exciting as the Occupy protests!) of a “pilgrimage for peace” he organized, which brought Pope Benedict XVI together with over a hundred other world religious leaders, and four prominent atheists and secular humanists, to release doves over the basilica of St. Francis in Assisi and renew their commitment to world peace. The pope’s speech was remarkable for its frank admission of the role that religion has often had in fomenting violence:

We know that terrorism is often religiously motivated and that the specifically religious character of the attacks is proposed as a justification for the reckless cruelty that considers itself entitled to discard the rules of morality for the sake of the intended “good.” In this case, religion does not serve peace, but is used as justification for violence…As a Christian I want to say at this point: yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith. We acknowledge it with great shame. But it is utterly clear that this was an abuse of the Christian faith, one that evidently contradicts its true nature.

Predictably, he had words, too, for militants on the opposite flank:

If one basic type of violence today is religiously motivated and thus confronts religions with the question as to their true nature and obliges all of us to undergo purification, a second complex type of violence is motivated in precisely the opposite way: as a result of God’s absence, his denial and the loss of humanity which goes hand in hand with it. The enemies of religion – as we said earlier – see in religion one of the principal sources of violence in the history of humanity and thus they demand that it disappear. But the denial of God has led to much cruelty and to a degree of violence that knows no bounds, which only becomes possible when man no longer recognizes any criterion or any judge above himself, now having only himself to take as a criterion. The horrors of the concentration camps reveal with utter clarity the consequences of God’s absence.

But Benedict being Benedict — the pope who insisted that four atheists be invited to journey with him to Assisi — the conclusion of his speech concerns the role precisely of the agnostic in the quest for peace. I reproduce his final paragraph here in full:

In addition to the two phenomena of religion and anti-religion, a further basic orientation is found in the growing world of agnosticism: people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God. Such people do not simply assert: “There is no God.” They suffer from his absence and yet are inwardly making their way towards him, inasmuch as they seek truth and goodness. They are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.” They ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false certainty by which these claim to know that there is no God and they invite them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it. But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others. These people are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practiced. Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible. Therefore I have consciously invited delegates of this third group to our meeting in Assisi, which does not simply bring together representatives of religious institutions. Rather it is a case of being together on a journey towards truth, a case of taking a decisive stand for human dignity and a case of common engagement for peace against every form of destructive force. Finally I would like to assure you that the Catholic Church will not let up in her fight against violence, in her commitment for peace in the world. We are animated by the common desire to be pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.

What does the Pope have to say to the Occupiers, here? That which they perhaps already know, but are constantly, especially when tensions flare, in danger of forgetting: that solidarity with the oppressed, a “decisive stand for human dignity,” calls for a radical commitment of love, yet not, perhaps, of ideological thought. Where our political allegiances are concerned, we must “ask questions of both sides,” and renounce the “false certainty” of partisanship.

Yet the most beautiful thing, for me, about this gathering in Assisi is that it was for something, not primarily against; it was a pilgrimage, not a protest. The Occupiers may retort that it also happened to be completely useless. I am not sure that the Occupancy will settle all it claims that it will, nor am I sure that the invisible seeds planted in Assisi will not grow into flowering trees in the fullness of time (Matthew 13:32). Either way, I insist, as I mentioned before, that the truth of peace involves vulnerability for us, and even impotence. It may be that we will not win every battle. This is not an excuse to become impatient and resort to force; adding violence to the equation when one senses the revolution of freedom faltering is the logic not just of certain rock-throwing Occupiers, but of the neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq. Nor is this a reason to stop fighting and abandon the call of justice. We should avoid false dichotomies, and the decision between the fury of violent indignation and the torpor of resigned indifference is the falsest of dichotomies.

Yet this is a reason to abandon the logic of power altogether in this fight, and to understand that a life of love can sometimes appear absurd, can sometimes even appear as defeat. W.G. Sebald, in his eloquent review of Peter Weiss’s drama of fascism and communism, The Aesthetics of Resistance, describes the Marxist project “not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.”

Do we love the world enough to become its victims?

And can it be that faith in the transcendent, however this is understood, is our greatest means of transcending all these false ideologies and divisions, and the brutish animal, the choking toxin, of violent protest? Our truest means of discernment, of finding truth in hopeless situations, when all seems lost? No one has put it better than the great Henri Nouwen, in his famed and magnificent work The Wounded Healer:

My own involvement in the spasms and pains of nuclear man [that is, humanity which "has lost naïve faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new life styles carry the potential for self-destruction"] makes me suspect that there are two main ways by which he tries to break out of his cocoon and fly: the mystical way and the revolutionary way…

It is my growing conviction that in Jesus the mystical and the revolutionary ways are not opposites, but two sides of the same human mode of experiential transcendence. I am increasingly convinced that conversion is the individual equivalent of revolution. Therefore every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and he who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society.

…Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself. He was also a mystic, who did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time, but shocked his milieu to the point of being executed as a rebel. In this sense he also remains for nuclear man the way to liberation and freedom.

- October 28, 2011, the Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude

I moved into Boston yesterday, which also happened to be the final day of Ramadan. Not much connects these two occasions, really, but given that my academic interests and most personal commitments all involve the vast question of the meaning of faith in the modern world, and given that dialogue among religions is a crucial dimension of our contemporary spiritual reality, I thought that I would indicate — “off the cuff,” as it were — some of the things that most inspire me about Islam. I should state, as a disclaimer, that I know next to nothing about Islam; I have never studied its history, nor even read the Qur’an. I have only known a few Muslims in fairly ordinary circumstances and visited a mosque or two here and there. I would love to learn more. As unprofessional as these thoughts may be, I do think we have a great deal to learn from the tradition of Islam, even if we ourselves are not Muslim.

1) I have found the prayer of Muslims to be profoundly spiritual. I have long agreed with the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar that we are in need, today, of a “theology on our knees,” that in our Christian worship we often get a little too comfortable or casual. Many Catholic communities are hesitant to kneel even during the consecration of the Eucharist, the most sacred moment in the liturgy. There may be good reasons for this, but there are good reasons to kneel, too, if we can get over our fear of appearing “subjugated.” Inner recognition of our smallness and external gestures of total abandonment before God are crucial to the mystical life and fully in keeping with the sacramental imagination of the Church, which privileges not just music and text and incense, but posture, too, as outward elements of liturgical action: folded hands and bended knees mediate profound inner realities in the Catholic language of prayer. When a person is ordained a priest or deacon, he even stretches himself flat on his stomach as a sign of his self-donation to the Lord; I wish this supremely self-effacing gesture were more common in ordinary liturgies!

Indeed, there is something quite similar in the posture of a Muslim at prayer: kneeling, bowing low, touching the forehead to the ground. At times I have used this posture in my personal prayer, often while uttering the Ignatian prayer of detachment. Repetition of key phrases (“Allah is great”; “There is no god except Allah”) also figures prominently in Islamic devotions; Islam is one of many religions to cherish something like mantras, and it’s taught me a lot. These insights — posture, repetition — have contributed to some profound prayer experiences, and they owe a great deal to my brief encounters with the genius of Islam.

2) Muslim prayer services can also be profoundly communal. I suppose this begins with the call to prayer, shouted from the top of a minaret by a muezzin. You all know the sound: plaintive, intricate, it penetrates the soul. For me, its emotional resonance is quite different from that of church bells rung out to announce the angelus, the Mass, or simply the time of day (a practice which, sadly, gets rarer and rarer nowadays), but the idea is the same: the call to prayer is an exhortation to all humankind, and it is also its gift. I know that not everyone will see things this way; granted, I am pre-disposed to be friendly to (non-coercive) public displays of faith. Whenever someone gets up in arms about a downtown creche at Christmas time, I am always confused about what it is people find imposing or offensive. I’ve traveled just a bit in Israel and Tunisia, and being woken up early by the muezzin, or hearing his faithful call in the fading evening, has always been one of the great, unexpected (for a Westerner), haunting spiritual experiences. Signs of religious presence in communities, even when they are faiths we do not share, are elements of a vibrant culture.

Anyway, I digress. I believe that Friday prayer services vary, but when I have visited mosques in Los Angeles and San Antonio, usually as a guest of the imam, I have seen how tightly everyone squeezes together — shoulders are supposed to touch, without leaving any space, as all bow down together. I have found the experience of this communal solidarity, this expression of “oneness,” to be as humbling as it is consoling. To lift my head just slightly and look out at the vast assemblage, of whom I am a part, mingling with them anonymously just as my shoes coexist with everyone else’s abandoned shoes at the door, without name tags or property claims, is powerful indeed. Finally, while it would be silly to generalize about global Islam just after visiting one or two mosques, I can attest that the spirit of community and warmth I found after the one or two services I attended was vibrant and inspiring, indeed.

3) Nowadays especially, Muslims are forced to call upon deep reserves of courage. Their religion asks that they remain faithful to frequent and often public prayer, gestures more prone to ridicule and scorn than those of most Catholics, who often — and I include myself in this number — are comfortable signing themselves with the Cross before a meal when in the privacy of their own homes but find it either too scary or too impolite to do so in public. I was reading an article the other day on the Muslim “overtaking” of France; apparently, there are so many Muslims in France nowadays that there are not enough mosques to accommodate them, and they are forced to choose between congregating in the streets outside their mosques, or going home. Naturally one can argue each side of the debate reasonably and respectfully, but French politicians are not exactly known for their reasonableness or respect when it comes to matters of religion. The article reports that the leader of the French far right, Marine Le Pen – not a marginal figure – has compared this phenomenon to the German occupation of Vichy France. Apparently, and unsurprisingly, some Muslim leaders have accepted the challenge and racheted up the militaristic language of invasion, themselves.

For all this, it must take a great deal of courage for an individual Muslim to “go public” with her faith. This is especially difficult given that certain styles of dress are encouraged for the Muslim faithful. I have studied the situation in France, particularly, at some length. This is a country that sternly forbids the wearing of “external religious signs” which it deems “ostentatious” in public. Invoking concepts of fraternity, equality, and national pride – to say nothing of laicite (secularism) – apologists for this law will additionally proclaim that they are rescuing young women from the coercion of their backwards-thinking fathers who would force them to wear the veil. In fact, most long-standing immigrant communities in France are so used to being bullied and discriminated against – often institutionally, as in the case of some egregious ethnic “quotas” in employment and residential applications which use reverse affirmative action to keep the numbers of North Africans down – that it is precisely middle-aged men who forbid their daughters from attracting attention to themselves. Furthermore, young Muslim women seem to conform to growing global trends of religious traditionalism, expressing a desire to wear the veil and frustration that their boyfriends pressure them not to display any outward religious appurtenance, lest they appear too “virginal.” This is just one example of the stigmatization that European Muslims can face; the United States, of course, has its own issues, most recently and most bizarrely in the form of frequent questions posed to Republican presidential hopefuls about whether they would institute a “patriotism test” for Muslim applicants to federal judicial seats, so fearful are people of a global Muslim conspiracy to institute Sharia law in the US.

I’m all the more impressed when people have the faith to convert to Islam despite the vast cultural gulf that often yawns between their cultural backgrounds and the culture of much of the Arab world. Not that it is easy to convert from any ideology or religion to any other. Complications, doubts, and resistance always arise. For me to come to a deep sense that theism was false, for instance, and to rearrange my life accordingly, would be incredibly difficult, a matter not simply of overcoming pride but of facing the disappointment of many and the exultant “I told you so” of others. For a scientist to convert to Christianity before some of her positivist colleagues could mean the end of her career. But to convert to Islam, and perhaps to a handful of other religions (like Sikhism), must surely be the most difficult of decisions in the United States, particularly at this point in American history. I met a solidly working-class couple in Los Angeles, Hispanic and raised Catholic, who had made the decision to convert to Islam before marrying, weathering the bewilderment and scorn of much of their family. While I didn’t get to talk with them at length about their reasons, they seemed genuinely to have followed their consciences in seeking a faith that proclaimed the greatness of the One God. The detail that most struck me was that these two had, as is required by Islam, begun learning Arabic, so as to be able to study their Scriptures. Their dedication to this extraordinary task was quite moving to me. Again, call me a conservative, but I like the idea of a “sacred language” (like Arabic or Biblical Hebrew), and, more broadly, I am moved by a faith which leads people to embrace a tradition that flows deeper than the present moment, with all its fads and easy reference points.

4) This reverence for sacred history might, in fact, constitute a fourth lesson we can learn from Muslims. English-speaking Catholic dioceses are currently revamping the fifty-year-old translation of the Mass so that its prayers are in closer alignment to the original Latin texts; by and large, reaction to the proposed changes has (understandably) been nothing less than panic-stricken. Some Catholic bishops, particularly in England, are trying to get their dioceses to return to the penitential practice of abstinence from meat on Fridays. They, too, have been met with general indifference and occasional indignation. External markers of faith are not the most important elements of a spiritual life, nor are they without their own dangers, but when I met the Muslim-Hispanic couple in L.A., I found myself wishing more Catholics were inspired to learn the words to basic and beautiful Latin hymns, like the Salve Regina and O salutaris hostia, and when I see my Muslim friends’ commitments to the intensive Ramadan fast, it puts my annual Lenten abstinence from chocolate to shame!

I am probably treading on dangerous ground, here; as with every religion, there are parts of Islam’s “sacred history” that are not to be admired, and I know that there are Muslim scholars and practitioners who base their religion’s survival on the development of an authentic progressivism. I hope that this development will come, and not at the expense of a true connection to the past; anecdotally, I can say that the Hispanic couple I have been talking about was preparing for marriage at the Islamic Center of Southern California, one of the most progressive major mosques in the world, whose founders met with me and some other Catholic visitors and were quite emphatic in their proclamation of the necessity of promoting women’s rights and inter-religious dialogue.

Which leads me to…

5) The Muslims that I have met have been people not only of great prayer, but of great peace. I am not naive, and neither are these peaceable Muslims; obviously, there are great problems with militaristic Islam throughout the world. But I think it needs to be stated, in the wake of controversy over the “Ground Zero mosque” and in anticipation of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, that however dominant a false interpretation of religion may become, it remains a false interpretation, and should not be held against those who practice peace in the name of their God. Beyond my own, personal experience of friends whose steadfast Muslim faith coexists with a warmth and kindness that is truly saintly, other encouraging signs are always emerging. Take the example of certain recent developments in Jordan, which was in my religious newsfeed twice this week. Under great-hearted ecumenists like Prince Ghazi bin Muhammed and Prince Hassan bin Talal, Jordan has, in the spirit of dialogue, allowed a new Catholic university to open and named a mosque after Jesus Christ. (Muslims have always revered Jesus as a prophet and his mother, Mary, as a saint, which is itself an interesting point in Christian-Muslim relations.)

Islam is a “way” to God through profession of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Their language of devotion is formidable; their history of artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific culture is awe-inspiring. I think that Catholics such as myself can learn a lot from their practice of the faith, and perhaps we, too, have things to offer them in return. At this end of Ramadan, I offer any Muslim readers an “Ein mubarak,” and wishes of peace.

Growth and Transition: 1953-1988

Father William Dillon, SJ, became just the second Jesuit pastor of Guadalupe Church after Tranchese’s monumental twenty-one-year tenure. Housing, health, and labor rights had improved for the church’s parishioners, and Father Dillon now set his sights on one of the barrio’s other great needs: access to education. A new parish school was promptly constructed on the property, replacing that which the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word had built in 1916; Dillon also built a new convent for the sisters who taught there. The national climate after the Second World War encouraged broader access to higher education to populations previously denied it, and the Jesuits too supported the college ambitions of young men graduating from the parish school, paying entire tuition bills to St. Mary’s University in the latter half of the decade.

Dillon’s tenure as pastor was short – only five years. That of his successor, Father J.J. Cazenavette, SJ, was even shorter, covering 1958-1960. Father Cazenavette continued Dillon’s emphasis on the young people of the neighborhood, building up the parish youth group. Within the next two decades, the parish school would continue to develop. In 1971, the Moody Foundation bestowed a $25,000 grant to expand Guadalupe’s elementary school programs, which at the time included individualized curricula designed to meet different levels of students’ intellectual needs.

In 1969, Our Lady of Guadalupe Church received arguably its most influential pastor since Father Tranchese, and its first Mexican-American priest. Father Edmundo Rodriguez, SJ, made it a top priority to revive the church’s flagging tradition of community organizing and social justice initiatives. In 1971, the Guadalupe parish hall hosted a news conference by state senator Joe Bernall, Archbishop Patrick Flores, and civic leader and grocery chain owner Eloy Centeno on the array of problems facing the Mexican-American community in San Antonio. Riding a new wave of enthusiasm for civic improvement, Father Rodriguez worked with Ernesto Cortes, a protégé of Cesar Chavez and Saul Alinsky, to create COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service), a groundbreaking church-based network of grassroots advocacy groups, in 1974. Under Rodriguez’s leadership, COPS found itself incarnated on the West Side of San Antonio in the form of the Westside Parish Coalition, which comprised the parishes of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Immaculate Conception, St. Alfonso, San Juan, St. Stephen, and St. Timothy. (The COPS network has since spread across the country.)

COPS immediately set to work raising funds for infrastructural improvement on the West Side. Since the turn of the century, the flooding of Alazan Creek had posed a threat; in fact, at a time when the barrio’s streets were unpaved, flooded streets which obstructed the way to the cathedral downtown had been one of the main impetuses for the construction of new, more local churches. Even into the 70′s, flooding remained problematic. COPS responded by improving drainage in the roads, fixing streets, and widening sidewalks. Further, it repurposed numerous condemned buildings and secured the commission of new public projects, such as an Olympic-sized natatorium on Durango Boulevard in 1981. The Westside Parish Coalition also helped its constituent churches to establish senior nutrition programs supported by the San Antonio Food Bank.

The 1970′s were an exciting time in the history of the West Side, and Guadalupe Church remained at the cultural heart of this swirl of energy. In 1972, San Antonio’s “Mexican-American Christmas” was broadcast from the church. Four years later, the city’s official annual festivities of the December 12 Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, previously held at the Convention Center downtown, were moved to the Westside parish. Father Rodriguez was instrumental in the foundation of the Avenida Guadalupe Association, whose twin goals have been to promote the neighborhood’s cultural vibrancy and to stimulate business and commerce there. Father Rodriguez’s successor as pastor, Father Ed Salazar, SJ (1980-1987), became the AGA’s first president, and when the Association announced its plans to construct a $15 million plaza-amphitheater (designed by architects Elias Reyna and Alex Caragonne, who had previoulsy renovated the Guadalupe Theater) in 1984-5, the formerly dilapidated arena directly across from Guadalupe Church was chosen as its site.

Father Rodriguez served as pastor of Guadalupe Church until 1980. Two years later, he was selected by a community of his Jesuit peers and confirmed by the Order’s General Superior to become the Provincial of the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus – the first Mexican-American Jesuit Provincial in the United States. Upon hearing the news, Father Rodriguez spoke with gratitude about his friends at Guadalupe Church: “Tengo yo, y tenemos los jesuitas, mucho que agradacer a la gente de Guadalupe por la formacion que nos ha dado, las oraciones que ofrece por nosotros, y el apoyo que todos sentimos de ustedes.” (“I am — and all of us Jesuits are — deeply indebted to the people of Guadalupe for the formation they have given us, the prayers that they offer for us, and the support that we all feel from you.”) He was not the only one who thought highly of the spiritual influence of Guadalupe Church. That same year, Archbishop Flores designated the church a Regional Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe, just in time to honor the 450th anniversary of the apparition of Our Lady to San Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill. The December 12 festivities that year, coordinated by a special delegate of the Archbishop, Sister of Divine Providence Angelina Breaux, are said to have drawn a full 15,000 people.

The scale of events like these can perhaps only be eclipsed by one of Guadalupe Church’s crowning memories: the visit of Pope John Paul II to the United States in 1987. The trip took the pontiff through ten American cities in as many days – Miami, Columbia (South Carolina), New Orleans, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Monterey, San Francisco, and Detroit – and was structured around a series of encounters with different sub-cultures: indigenous, African-American, youth, Protestant, Polish-American, farm workers, etc. In San Antonio, after a visit to San Fernando Cathedral and Assumption Seminary, an address to representatives of Catholic Charities, and a Mass at Westover Hills near present-day Sea World, the Holy Father came to Plaza Guadalupe to address the Hispanic-American community in the only entirely Spanish-language speech of his ten-day trip. His motorcade arrived on September 13 at around 7:15pm, while the throngs of assembled people sang Demos Gracias al Senor. After a speech that touched on the importance of the family, of catechesis, of the parish community and sacramental life of the church, and of Hispanic identity, he cried out, “Viva la virgen de Guadalupe!”, drawing an enthusiastic response from the crowd.

Towards a New Millennium, and Beyond: 1988-2011

Guiding Guadalupe Church into the next two decades were two beloved pastors: Father Marty Elsner, SJ (1988-1996, and again from 2000-2008), and Father Jim Lambert, SJ (1996-2000). Fathers Elsner and Lambert continued to throw their support behind COPS, recruiting parishioners to work both for infrastructural improvements in the neighborhood and to tackle other local issues such as the neighborhood’s drug problems, voter registration, and local energy company policies. Though the parish school moved to the campus of Immaculate Conception Church on Merida Street in 1985 (under the new name of Westside Catholic High School, which it bore until closing its doors in the 2000′s), Father Elsner rallied support around a network of civic leaders aiming to decrease truancy and improve scholarship and graduation rates at Lanier Public High School, across the street from the church.

As part and parcel of their community outreach, Fathers Elsner and Lambert also encouraged lay leadership in Guadalupe Church. Sunday Masses are amply assisted by lay coordinators and deacons, and the Guadalupana Society of Catholic laywomen – in existence since 1912, a year after the foundation of the parish – is stronger and more vibrant than ever. In the 1980′s, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps – a national network of young adult lay volunteers – was invited to Guadalupe Church to staff the parish’s social service office, which remains one of the best known sources of charitable aid in the city. Since 2001, with the departure of the last religious sisters from the church campus, where they had run a small orphanage subsequent to the end of their teaching ministry at the former parish school, the entire JVC community of San Antonio has lived in the one-time convent beside the church. When Father Ron Gonzales, SJ, became pastor in 2008, one of his first major initiatives was the creation of a permanent parish council, whose members – a third of whom are elected annually – serve terms of three years each.

Guadalupe Church, as a Jesuit parish, has also cultivated and enjoyed good relations with the local archdiocese. The church collaborates on several annual events – from Guadalupe Day festivities to Christmas gift drives – with a sister parish in Helotes, formerly run by the Marianists, though a diocesan parish since 2006. For eight years during his time in San Antonio, Father Elsner was chosen by the archbishop to head the planning committee for the diocesan presbyterate’s annual conference, a great sign of esteem for a religious order priest. Father Lambert was elected chair of this presbyteral council in 2000, but three months later his Jesuit superior reassigned him to Louisiana, and he was unable to accept the archbishop’s request.

One other great issue has taken up all of the Jesuit pastors’ attention: that of parish upkeep. The first major renovations to the church property occurred in the 1950′s under the pastoral care of Father William Dillon, who remodeled the interior of the church and paved the church and school grounds. By then the church was already pushing half a century, and this would be just the first of many major projects to stave off the inevitable wear and tear of time.

For a few decades, repairs came in fits and starts. In 1976, the church received a new set of pews. In 1986, local artist Al Medina designed and began creating a set of new stained class windows, finally completed and dedicated on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the year 2000. No sooner had this project been finished, though, than a major new restoration initiative commenced. In 2001, the exterior of the school building and parish hall were restored. In 2002, famed mural artist John Martinez painted a Guadalupe-themed mural on the side of the hall, featuring a number of kids from the parish youth group who served as models. In 2005, from January through May, liturgies were held in the parish hall, as Donald Wendt executed an extensive renovation and repainting of the church interior.

When Father Ron Gonzales became the pastor of Guadalupe Church in 2008, he continued the foregoing renovations. The interior of the parish hall was cleaned up, and the entire building was given a new foundation. The facade of the school building was repainted, and a collection of condemned buildings on the east side of the church property – which had included a guest house and the social service office, prior to its move to the bottom story of the school building – was demolished. A small chapel dedicated to Cristo de la Agonia was remodeled by Michael Wendt and local parishioners, led by brothers Carlos and Juan Chavez. Most recently, an adoration chapel has been set up in Room 1 of the school building by Associate Pastor James Marshall, SJ, and parishioner Shannon Haase.

After one hundred years, the creativity, faith, and spirit of Guadalupe Church have not been exhausted. This parish, originally founded to serve the needs of a small, poor, and exploited community, has grown into one of the landmarks of San Antonio’s cultural, historical, and religious heritage, and it only continues to grow. It has been a place of pilgrimage for many: for Eleanor Roosevelt in 1937, and for Pope John Paul II half a century later. For Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who visited Guadalupe Plaza in 1991, and for then-Senator Barack Obama, who visited the same plaza in 2008. For a group of students of the University of Texas in San Antonio, who manifested in front of the church during their twenty-two day hunger strike in support of the pro-immigrant DREAM Act legislation. For Miss San Antonio 2011 Domonique Ramirez, who bequeathed her crown to the church in honor of la Virgen, “the queen of queens, the keeper of all crowns.”

But most of all, this is a place of pilgrimage for the hundreds of thousands of Catholics who have lived their lives here under the protection of Our Lady of Guadalupe and contributed to the parish community – or who have visited this beautiful sanctuary from near and far to plead for help and healing, to offer thanks and praise, and to pray for the Church and for the world.

In the Beginning

The Rev. John William Shaw (1863-1934) was appointed the fourth archbishop of the Diocese of San Antonio on March 11, 1911. It was a turbulent time south of the border; opposition to the government of Porfírio Diaz was already brewing, and just two months later, the populist politician Francisco Madero executed a military coup against Diaz and replaced him as president of Mexico. Madero had recently returned from political exile in San Antonio, and as successive governments became increasingly hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, waves of Mexican Catholics would also flee to South Texas seeking refuge from state-sanctioned repression and persecution.

Immediately after his appointment, Bishop Shaw boarded a covered wagon and set out to visit the entirety of his sprawling diocese, which at the time extended from Brownsville to El Paso. This visionary prelate, who would go on to found the diocese’s first seminary and restore and renovate the Spanish Missions, created a parish community for Spanish-speaking Catholics on the West Side of San Antonio in his very first year as Archbishop. Bishop Shaw dedicated the parish to Our Lady of Guadalupe and entrusted it to the Claretian Fathers, who celebrated Mass in what is now, one hundred years later, the parish hall on San Fernando Street. The Theresian Sisters ran a high school until 1916, when they were replaced by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word.

The Reverend Arthur Jerome Drossaerts (1862-1940), installed as Bishop of San Antonio in 1918, inherited his predecessor’s interest in the plight of Mexican Catholics and clergy. Drossaerts tirelessly recruited priests from across the border, raised money to facilitate their resettlement, and took to the pulpit, the press, and the airwaves to advocate for American interest in their neighbors’ Revolution. He also recognized the importance of the Guadalupe neighborhood, where an ever-expanding number of Mexican immigrants were arriving. In 1921, Drossaerts ordered the construction of a brick church for Guadalupe parish. The building was completed in 1926, and six years later, in 1932, Drossaerts arranged for the Claretians to exchange it with a parish run by the Jesuits in El Paso. On July 17, Jesuit Father Carmelo Tranchese, SJ (1880-1956) assumed his responsibilities as pastor, assisted by John Buckley, SJ, and Amandus Snebelen, SJ.

Father Tranchese, the “Rumpled Angel of the Slums”

Father Tranchese, originally from Naples, had studied in Malta, Wales, and Italy before arriving in the United States as a missionary in 1911 – the same year Guadalupe Parish had been established. He ministered in Albuquerque, El Paso, Poughkeepsie, and San Jose, developing a reputation as a reformer and crusader for social justice, before arriving at the San Antonio assignment where he would leave his deepest and most lasting mark.

82,000 Mexican Americans lived in San Antonio in 1932, generally scorned by the rest of the city’s moneyed German-American population and living in general squalor. Windowless, tin-walled, dirt-floored shanties with no indoor plumbing and muddy streets that became impassable when it rained, the Guadalupe slums were among the worst in the United States. The San Antonio Housing Authority surveyed half of the barrio’s Mexican-American households and found 90% to be substandard; 72% of the city’s cases of tuberculosis occurred in Guadalupe Parish, giving San Antonio the worst rate of deaths by TB in the United States; and the Great Depression ravaged the neighborhood as hard as anywhere, compelling the executives of the three major pecan-shelling companies, which were responsible for most of the immigrants’ jobs, to adopt mechanized labor and lay off workers by the thousands. At two of the three companies, workers were denied the right to a minimum wage, and none of the employees were granted the right to unionize.

The poverty on the West Side was the worst Father Tranchese had ever seen, and it moved him profoundly. “A huge mass of humanity emerging out of little shacks wrung my heart,” he wrote in a private journal. “Pale, emaciated faces of the children playing in the dust without laughter in their hearts or on their lips haunted me at night.” Tranchese leapt to action. Over the course of the 1930s, he established and directed the Guadalupe Community Center (which exists to this day), which provided recreational and educational programs in a neighborhood profoundly lacking in public spaces. Perhaps its most important initiative was a health clinic staffed by doctors whom Tranchese recruited from more affluent areas and sponsored by the Bexar County Tuberculosis Association. The clinic offered vaccinations and classes on health and sanitation. It cut tubercular deaths in half in its first ten years of operation, and perhaps more abstractly, signified the beginnings of civil interest in this long-neglected and despised little neighborhood.

In the late 1930s, he became increasingly political and vocal, lending his support to massive pecan shellers’ strikes in 1935 and 1938; coordinating local produce merchants to stock a food pantry whose bread lines served as de facto labor meetings for the unemployed or disgruntled workers who waited there; bringing the attention of the Catholic Relief Association to the barrio and winning 1800 new jobs from the federal Works Progress Administration in 1939; and publicizing all these activities in a weekly newspaper, La Voz de la Parroquia, which he began in 1935 and which became so popular that the Archdiocese eventually bought it out and distributed it all over Texas.

His advocacy on behalf of the poor earned him the enmity of industrial bosses, anonymous death threats, and petitions for his removal sent to the archbishop. A number of landlords joined the ranks of Tranchese’s detractors as the priest turned his attention to the biggest problem of all – that of substandard housing, which was at the root of all the barrio’s crime and sanitation problems. If this segment of the population resented him, however, he found himself earning the love of his parishioners, who nicknamed him their padrecito, and the respect of none less than the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, who initiated a years-long correspondence with a 1935 letter asking him his professional opinion about the situation of the Guadalupe slums.

Tranchese, personally and spiritually close to the poor, was an equally shrewd advocate on their behalf in circles of power. His experience building bridges with city officials had prepared him to take advantage of the president’s recognition. He plied the president’s desk with a stream of letters and photographs detailing the parish area’s poverty, so that when Roosevelt started exploring options for low-rent public housing projects and signed the Wagner-Steagall National Housing Act on September 1, 1937, Tranchese was at the top of Roosevelt’s list of recipients for federal funding for these new urban initiatives. Nathan Straus, newly appointed administrator of the United States Housing Authority, authorized $3.5 million in funds for the construction, in Guadalupe parish, of one the first public housing projects in American history. This groundbreaking initiative nearly failed; before the government-funded construction could begin, the San Antonio Housing Authority (on whose five-member executive board sat Father Tranchese) had to buy the desired lots from greedy landowners who disliked Tranchese and didn’t want to relinquish control to such a project. When the landowners demanded exorbitantly high prices for their land, Straus canceled the loan.

Tranchese was alarmed, but not deterred. Not content to settle for defeat, he went straight to the top, imploring the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to visit the barrio herself and assess the neighborhood’s needs. Amazingly, she did. In 1937 Father Tranchese escorted her on a tour of the muddy, dirty streets, and after her departure, continued writing letters that detailed the number of funerals he had to conduct per month (several dozen) and begging the Roosevelts’ renowned humanitarian sympathies. Finally, the First Lady asked Straus to pay whatever it would cost to recommission the housing projects — under condition that landowners’ demands would have to be bargained down in the future if additional projects were to be built.

And so the Alazan, Apache, Wheatley, Victoria, and Lincoln Heights Courts came into being. Rent in the Alazan-Apache complex averaged $7.00 / month, and although attention to and funding of public housing was temporarily redirected to apartment complexes built for veterans near the city’s military bases during World War II, some seven decades later the Alazan-Apache Courts have retained their reputation as one of the most affordable, best designed, and safest public housing complexes in the United States.

With this victory under his belt, Father Tranchese plowed on, emphasizing the spiritual heritage of a rapidly modernizing Mexican-American community in the years after the war. He translated a shepherd’s play, Los Pastores, into English and began the tradition of producing it yearly. But the “rumpled angel of the slums,” as he was referred to in a 1948 Saturday Evening Post profile by William Sessions Perry, was aging rapidly. He suffered a stress-induced breakdown in 1953, and was sent by his superiors to St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. He died there three years later, of a heart attack, on July 13.

To be continued…

San Antonio in the summer is hot and humid, and Catholic Charities and the St. Vincent de Paul Society collaborate annually on an attempt to procure and distribute approximately six thousand fans for senior citizens. My office is one of the sites that take registrations, so I’ve met a lot of seniors lately. Many of them, especially in the wilting summer heat, have an air of resignation, even melancholy, in talking about this recurrent season in their lives. “Here it is again,” they’ll sigh, heaving their weight onto a little chair in my office positioned directly under the AC.

Friday morning, a woman with bright white hair, magnifying glass spectacles, and a body thin as a reed and bedecked in flamboyantly colored hospital scrubs came in with her taciturn fifty-year-old niece. This octogenarian woman didn’t necessarily fit the “worn out and defeated” stereotype. I wouldn’t say that she was energetic or youthful, but she did have an otherworldly air about her, as though mundane trials could be of little concern to her. It may have been that she was exceptionally hard of hearing and a consummate chatterbox, peppering me with Spanish of which I understood about half. (I gleaned that she was reminiscing about a series of events in Piedras Negras in the 1950′s, just before she came to the United States.) She also had the uncanny habit of fixing her myopic eyes on a point in the distance where the back wall and the ceiling met, as though taking dictation from God. Only briefly would her eyes rest upon me, coming into focus and holding me in a gaze sharp and insistent.

She talked about God, too. A lot. She talked about her various physical ailments, as most of my clients over fifty do when I ask them how they’re doing today, but her self-diagnosis was with constant reference to God: He had ordained her lymphoma, He had made it so that her bones were as brittle as they were, and so that she couldn’t raise her right arm over her shoulder. (She demonstrated this inability for me.) She talked about death:  how two days ago the mayor of Piedras Negras had died in a plane crash while surveying the damage caused by the recent flooding of the Rio Grande, and how on her own exodus from Mexico — the only time she’s ever flown on a plane — she feared that she would die, too, because the aircraft had experienced such turbulence. In the face of pain, suffering, and the threat of death, she told me vehemently, it is useless to be afraid. Nothing happens outside of God’s will. Not one sparrow is forgotten by God, she may have been saying. Indeed, the very hairs on our heads are numbered. If it is God’s will that we should die, then we shouldn’t fear, because His will is unquestionable and benevolent, even though mysterious.

After this theatrical lady had made her way slowly out of my office, leaning heavily on her niece’s arm, my Spanish-speaking office assistant filled in the gaps of what I hadn’t understood. As is always the case, the half-understood version is more provocative than the fully understood version. A stream of Spanish in which all you can understand for sure are repetitions of the words for “death,” “God,” “fear,” and “tragedy” seems more prophetic than perhaps it really is. This was the image of the woman I clung to after she’d gone.

I turned my attention to my next client and her five-year-old daughter, who had just come into my office. Not two minutes had gone by when my assistant, seated by the window, gasped — sharp and scary. “Nicholas!” she exclaimed. “Look! It’s that lady!” I got up out of my seat and peered through the window. My stomach turned. Fifty feet away, the woman I’d been speaking to — about death, no less — lay curled up in the fetal position out in the parking lot, only the backs of her multicolored shirt and white-haired head visible (and unmistakable) to me, with a crowd of aghast onlookers gathered around her. Carlos, the maintenance man, was waving one hand to make them keep their distance; in his other hand he pressed his cell phone to his ear. The woman’s niece stared dumbly at her crumpled aunt; another lady, who I later learned had run the woman over in her jeep as she was backing up, paced frenetically back and forth, her trembling visible even at my distance. In the time it took me to bolt up out of my cubicle and join my assistant in the doorway, it seemed to me that a small pool of blood had spread slightly under the felled woman’s body, in the area of her hip.

Sooner or later the ambulance came and took her away, and the police came and made a police report. I don’t know what her fate was. I didn’t go to her because I had clients waiting for me in the office, and there was nothing I could have done to help, except that I wondered whether I should have gone, anyway. It occurred to me that if the woman died, I would have been the last person — well, after her niece — to have had a conversation with her. This thought weighed on me all morning, like a constant pressure against my stomach. I have never seen a death; had I just seen my first? My assistant did go out and join the onlookers, and when she came back she told me that the woman had been conscious, weakly, when they took her away, and that when she fell it had been her wrist and leg that broke her fall, and not her head. These, I think, may be good signs. I tried to make much of them, because I was feeling guilty that I’d looked so shocked and hadn’t played it cool in front of the stunned- and scared-looking five-year-old girl whom I’d forgotten was peering through the doorway behind me.

I tried to call the woman’s niece, whose number I have, this morning, and to inquire after her; but no one answered the phone. I keep thinking about her broken frame lying there on the ground, as though she’d carefully gotten down on her knees and lain out to take an endless nap. Beneath and beside the culprit vehicle, she looked so very small.

II.

I worry a lot about my homebound clients, to whom I bring food on a monthly basis. Most of them live in the Alazan-Apache Courts, the public housing projects that fringe our church. Near the beginning of my year here, one of my assistants related to me the graphic story of how she had gone to check on her older sister once and had found her sprawled out on the floor, dead for a day and rigor mortis set in and a stain of dried blood making a unicolor rainbow on the bare tiles beneath her. She had lived in the Courts, and I think that every time thereafter that I went to visit my clients, and pounded on the doorbell-less doors and didn’t get an answer right away, I had that story in the back of mind and feared that I would be the one to make such a gruesome discovery.

It is strangely fascinating whenever one of my clients reflects on her own age, and on the physical process of aging. One of them, named Norma, may have been 4-foot ten in her prime, but is now so hunchbacked from a severe spinal disorder that she literally doesn’t reach my waist. Her entire torso runs parallel to the floor, and when I talk to her, I have to lean in so close that my own back begins to hurt after two or three minutes. She has a brilliant sense of humor about her condition, though, and every time I come in, she asks in a squeaky voice, “Did you bring your microscope?” I used to demur, as though I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about, whereupon she’d admonish me, “Don’t pretend! You do need a microscope! Or at least a magnifying glass, like Sherlock Holmes. I am getting smaller…smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller…” She’d hold up her thumb and index finger pursed together, as though indicating the size of a flea. “Pretty soon — you no see me. That’s how small I gonna be!”

Margarita, living in the alley directly behind the church, wasn’t so impish in her irony the first time she acknowledged her dwindling powers. Norma, learning that I’d studied in France, would clap her hands rhythmically and force me to dance a can-can, crying, “Bravo, bravo!” in her small, shrill voice. Not so Margarita. My oldest client (I think about ninety) and perhaps my most devout, she would periodically and with great dignity ask me to bless her. As her health declined over the year, her nieces and daughters would sometimes be there in the house and ask me for their blessing, too. After I’d bungled my way through some sort of prayer, they would often respond with a reverent, “Gracias, Padre.”

“Oh,” I would hasten to explain. “I’m not a priest.”

“You’re not?” would come the surprised response. “You look like a Father.” I attribute this more to my growing monastic bald spot than to any palpable aura of holiness. God knows I was goofy and awkward enough in those situations, especially at the beginning of the year, when I hadn’t spent much time around the elderly and didn’t quite know what sort of tone or demeanor I ought to strike.

As I was saying, the first time Margarita’s age came up on one of my visits to this dimly lit and pious household, I was asking her to sign her name on the confirmation form I always brought around. (I ceased bringing it to any of my clients around Christmastime. It really wasn’t necessary to make them sign. We trusted each other.) On this form, there are twelve lines, one for each month, and by the end of the year, you could look back and see that Margarita’s signature, relatively clear and firm in January, had become fainter and wavier over time, until on Thanksgiving it was little more than a squiggle. I always notice stuff like this, yet until that day in November I operated under the naive assumption that my clients themselves surely never did. As it happened, Margarita stopped about half-way (seven seconds) through the signature, blinked once at the historical record of deteriorating penmanship under her eyes, and let out a small sound. “It’s getting smaller,” she noted wistfully.

In March, I arrived at Margarita’s house and found her lying in bed, looking particularly weak and surrounded by family. “Margarita,” I asked, with trepidation. “Are you sick?”

“She’s not feeling very well,” explained a younger (but not young) female relative, as Margarita looked at me mutely, almost uncomprehendingly, her once shrewd intelligence seeming dimmed. “Father, would you give us your blessing?”

“I…I’m not a priest,” I said slowly, not taking my eyes off Margarita’s sunken eyes.

“You’re not?” The woman heaved a sigh, then said cynically, “Well, it’s not like they wear their collars anymore, anyway.”

I prayed with the family and went on my way. The next month, Margarita was still in bed. This time she was sleeping, and she didn’t wake up when I came in. A few weeks after that, I was trying to blink myself awake during morning Mass when during the Prayers of the Faithful, our pastor, Father Ron, included a petition for Margarita, who — he said — was clinging tenuously to life in the house next door, and whom he’d be visiting to deliver Last Rites after Mass.

I ran into Father Ron on my way out of church. “Is Margarita ill?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I’d give her maybe twenty-four hours. Do you know her?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Well, if you want to visit her…” he trailed off.

I didn’t visit her. I was afraid, though I’m not exactly sure of what. It wasn’t as though I really knew her or her family, I told myself; my visits there only lasted five minutes, once a month. And I didn’t want to intrude into what must have been a private moment. How would I even make an entrance? I couldn’t come in bearing food, but nor could I just come in and say, “I’m the guy who brings her groceries…I heard she was dying, and wanted to say –” what? Goodbye?

And hell, they’d probably ask me to administer Last Rites.

These are excuses. There may be a glimmer of reality to them, but they remain excuses, and I can’t help but feel they’re pitiful ones. At least, when Margarita died the next day, I couldn’t help but feel guilty for having stayed away, for having kept my prayers to myself — I, who barely knew her, and whom her family so frequently mistook for a priest.

III.

Some priest. I didn’t even learn my lesson. One of my clients, a lady named Felicia who always enjoyed my visits, failed to answer the door in April, and when I called her, there was also no response. Oh no, I heard a voice in my soul. Not this… I came back the next day, and then the next week, and still no response. Later, Carlos — the same man who called an ambulance to take away the woman from Piedras Negras — told me that Felicia (to whom he brought the Eucharist every Sunday after Mass) had been at Santa Rosa Hospital for the last few weeks. I meant to go visit her, but for some inexplicable reason — a moral lethargy which it takes a dramatic situation, sometimes, to reveal? — never did. Thank God, she returned to health and returned home in May. The last two times I’ve seen her, I’ve stayed with her for a half-hour. This is not just an effort to appease my guilty conscience. I really enjoy it. I wish I could spend this amount of time with all of my twenty-two homebound clients. They are beautiful people. (Well, we all are.)

I have a client named Catalina. I said before that Margarita was my most pious homebound client, though maybe I spoke too soon. Catalina, who doesn’t speak a word of English, was abducted from her home in Mexico when she was two or three years old. Her earliest memories are of being kept in a cage or a crib, and receiving repeated visions of the Holy Child of Atocha (who is said in Christian lore to bring solace to captives). She was later found and freed, married and then widowed in her twenties, and came to the United States, where she worked for decades as a maid in a wealthy Houston household. Though not Catholic themselves, her patrons would take her to church every Sunday, she told me reverently. Now she lives in a senior apartment complex on El Paso St. in San Antonio where her neighbor, Elisa, always complains that there is nothing to do and the staff, rather than schedule activities, just waits for them to die. Catalina’s belief in God’s guidance throughout all her ordeals is unshakable. Her demeanor is serene. Her joy is simple and pure. And her pious exclamations are at once profoundly moving and really funny: she is always calling out to mi Dioscito (“my little God”), and, in a move which is particularly dubious theologically, to mi padre Jesús (“my Father, Jesus”).

Catalina’s dog was named Lady. It may have been the only English word she knew. Lady was the fattest chihuahua I’d ever seen, as fat as Catalina is skinny. She was also the most beloved dog I’d seen in a long time. Catalina would take five minutes to rise from her sofa-bed, cross the kitchen, and answer the door for me, and invariably, there in the little carry space of her walker, Lady would lounge, panting heavily as though fat tissue were rendering her tiny trachea impassable to air. “We all knew, all of us except Catita, that that dog was gonna die,” Elisa told me, after it had happened. “All she ever did was feed that damn dog.” I never actually saw Catalina feeding Lady, but I do know that every time I visited — and I stayed longer at the gentle Catalina’s than at any of my other clients’ homes (usually more than an hour) — she would spend the whole time stroking her beloved dog.

The first time I visited Catalina after Lady had died, I hadn’t been made aware of what had happened. Catalina greeted me with an empty walker. At first I didn’t say anything. I guessed, because the always-smiling Catalina seemed unusually dejected, but I waited until she had led me to the living room, and Lady wasn’t anywhere in sight. There was just a picture of the little dog, a picture faded purple with age as though it had been taken decades earlier, propped up on the dresser alongside the customary images of a doe-eyed Jesus and his radiating Sacred Heart. Catalina and I made small talk, avoiding the elephant in the room, until after a minute or two the conversation lulled. Catalina looked down, then up at me, and whispered, “Murió Lady.” She started to cry.

I went over to the sofa without any idea how and whether to console her. We are raised to think about manners in America, and on most days this serves us well, but what is our human development worth if we get to be twenty-four and still have to think about how we should react under circumstances such as these? I held her hand. Like a young suitor making his first shy moves with a girl he loves, I reached awkwardly, ridiculously, and devoutly for the hand of this woman three times my age; she reached her own hand forward; and I held it for several minutes while she wept. In my heart, I was sad too, over many things. Now, whenever I call her to say hello, or visit her, the serene acceptance of her old age and fragile health is gone, and she always sighs forlornly, “Aquí estoy, no más yo y mis dolores.” Although our conversations — me, in my halting Spanish! — make her smile, there remains some sad secret playing around the corners of her lips, of her eyes. She feels ready, I think, to fall asleep in Christ, in her Dioscito.

IV.

I’ve heard so many of my clients say so: “Who wants to live forever?” Or, “Aquí estoy, Señor, soy lista.” And yet, I don’t want this rather macabre-sounding essay to end on a hopeless note. At this point, these reflections bifurcate. On the one hand, I believe that the best way to reconcile ourselves with the tragedy of death (without welcoming death as a means of salvation from an agonized life that we would thereby be inclined to love less) is to allow ourselves to believe in eternal life. It is precisely in his encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi, that Pope Benedict reconciles our oftentimes conflicting attitudes towards death:

Obviously there is a contradiction in our attitude, which points to an inner contradiction in our very existence. On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is life? And what does eternity really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true “life” is, this is what it should be like…St Augustine once wrote: Ultimately we want only one thing: the “blessed life,” the life which is simply life, simply happiness. In the final analysis, there is nothing else that we ask for in prayer. Our journey has no other goal—it is about this alone. But then Augustine also says: looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us. “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” he quotes St Paul.

…I think that in this very precise and permanently valid way, Augustine is describing man’s essential situation, the situation that gives rise to all his contradictions and hopes. In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. This unknown “thing” is the true hope which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity. The term “eternal life” is intended to give a name to this known unknown. Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion. “Eternal” suggests the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time, the before and after, no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John’s Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

There is another way, apart from the eschatological one, to end these reflections on a note of hope, though it is one perhaps more tinged with melancholy. In addition to these experiences of mine at work, which are laden with the tragedy of the shut-in and the unvisited, I have known other people whom death has recently visited and saddened, and in rather eerily close succession. Perhaps you have, too. Thinking about a few of these people in particular, and without this being the place for details or stories, it occurs to me that the events surrounding their passage were different from the nightmarish visions I sometimes morbidly imagine for the lonely ones of the world. These souls inspire me to think that there really is such a thing as a beautiful death. I wouldn’t want to label any specific death beautiful for fear of sounding like I’m relativizing its tragedy. No death is happy. Yet as I continue to age and negotiate a world of which death is an insuperable part, I witness the death of those who die surrounded by family — by family who love them and pray for them and continue to create beautiful and spiritual ways of remembering them later on — whose eulogies and obituaries testify to a life well lived…and I can’t help but say, at least, that when the time comes for me, this is how I would like to go; this is how I would like to be prayed for, loved and remembered.

May we all have the character to do as they have done: to touch our families, communities, and society in a deep and grace-filled way.

May all those who have toiled in this life, rejoiced in this life, and departed this life know rest, peace, and love in the life to come.

And may all those who mourn, everywhere and for every reason, be comforted.

The post in question highlighted one of my favorite murals on the West Side, an epic panorama entitled “8 Stages of the Life of a Chicana.” It comes to mind because I recently wrote to a friend expressing jealousy that she lives in New York City, where art cinemas, an opera and ballet, theaters, museums, and great architecture — in short, a world of culture — are all within reach. The same cannot be said anywhere near as enthusiastically about San Antonio, a sprawling postmodern fantasy of strip malls and interstates. As you cruise along the I-10, I-35, or 410 Loop, you are treated to endless reiterations of fast food joints, like base sequences on a DNA strand: Sonic, Luby’s, Sonic, Taco Cabana, Taco Cabana, Sonic, Wendy’s, Luby’s, Luby’s, Wendy’s, Taco Cabana. The famed Riverwalk has its beauty, but its loveliest spots are hard to find; most of it is a consumerist mishmash of kitsch, steakhouses, and Irish pubs. Its historical centerpiece, the Alamo, is a masterpiece of irony, both for how tiny it really is (earning it the distinction of “most disappointing tourist attraction ever” on a number of killjoy polls) and for its prominence as a symbol of all that is confused about Tex-Mex / Mexican-American historical identity. Jean Baudrillard, in a hardly unimpeachable study of America, explains the paradox in the book’s only paragraph concerning the city of San Antonio:

The Mexicans, become Chicanos, act as guides on the visit to El Alamo to laud the heroes of the American nation so valiantly massacred by their own ancestors. But hard as those ancestors fought, the division of labour won out in the end. Today it is their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who are there, on the same battlefield, to hymn the Americans who stole their lands. History is full of ruse and cunning. But so are the Mexicans who have crossed the border clandestinely to come and work here.

Of course, I’m not sure that “ruse” and “cunning” are the best words to describe the United States’s illegal immigrants — even if “stupid” and “unwieldy” are the best words to describe the country’s current immigration laws. And while it is true that third-generation Mexican-Americans are often proud of their American identity, to the point of scorning and mocking those newly arrived and unable to speak English, I am also not sure how tenable this alliance will continue to be given the recent news-making passage of “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law” in its recent history, SB 1070 in Arizona. Parishioners I know here at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church were up in arms against the law, and interest runs high in the immigrant-friendly “immigration academies” that many local churches — my own parish included — have begun hosting for their communities.

I cannot but remark that it is precisely the voices of the marginalized that have contributed to the most interesting and beautiful areas of San Antonio. The West Side blossoms with murals like the Chicana one to which I’ve linked, above. This is important to me, and provides the ammunition for a battle more pitched and complicated than may at first meet the eye.

The most difficult and intriguing argument I’ve heard for something like the “glory” of major Texas cities — whose paradigm, truthfully, is not San Antonio, but Dallas — comes from a Canadian-born, Texas-bred consultant to major oil companies whom I met at a French club meeting. I expected to find nothing but sympathetic liberals, eager to compliment me on my studies in Paris and my origins in a “cultured” American city like Boston, at this reunion (held at a French chain restaurant called La Madeleine. Is it less corporate if it has a French name?), a reunion of francophones whom my father would affectionately call “frogs.” (The word is grenouilles, Dad.)

Not so. This gregarious gentleman, a tall, broad-shouldered octogenarian whose arms moved spastically and whose lips trembled furiously with a perpetual tic, mumbled forth, in Canadian-accented French, a sweeping condemnation of the classical study of philosophy and of classical cities like Boston and Paris. “They’re out-of-date,” he argued. “We live in a world of information, not wisdom, and the smart and the powerful alike will want to live where information is if they are to survive in the twenty-first century. Even ethics takes its cue from informatics now. It is a foregone conclusion that people will continue developing bigger and better weapons and becoming better and better skilled at blowing each other up. The morality of war, the meaning of a ‘just’ war — these have become moot points. The ethicist’s function has been taken over by the engineer: it remains to us only to end wars swiftly, and the best way to do that is to develop the best tactical weapons and eliminate war’s messiness.” Self-righteously protesting that I, at least, was glad to have a philosopher-king, and a son of Chicago, as president — rather than an ignoramus like Bush (I was sputtering on my high-horse now) — did no good. “I’ve known Bush since he was this tall!” The consultant gestured towards his own waist. “And let me tell you something,” he said, leaning in closer, “it’s those who understand oil who are the real postmodern presidents.” I was floored. This was something I had never thought of before: to structure a defense of the cultural wasteland of Texas (whatever defense of the GOP that may or may not entail) as a defense of the postmodern.

I do wonder what this gentleman would have to say about the current disaster in the Gulf Coast, which threatens Texas itself: the other weekend, my housemates and I went to the beach in Galveston, whose waters may (or may not, depending on whom you ask) be un-swim-in-able by August. I wonder what he would say about the fact that in his Oval Office address yesterday, Obama — who may be an intellectual but who is not so averse, it must be said, to adopting a realpolitik-al approach to foreign affairs – had the wisdom not just to promise sound management of the Gulf crisis but to call us to ditch our dependence on oil.

Anyway, the man does still have an argument. One traditional antinomy at the center of the modernist-postmodernist debate is the distinction between place and space, and most contemporary postmodern arguments use laudatory catchwords like speed, freedom, and possibility to describe the postmodern emphasis on space in architecture and urban design. By way of an apologia for postmodernism, here is an extended citation of a thesis I wrote on the question back in college. To set the context, I’ve just spoken a bit about the Heideggerian notion that architecture provides a dwelling-place where we can rest safely, securely, and peacefully. Heidegger links the Old Saxon word wuon, meaning dwelling, to the later Gothic word wunian, meaning “to abide in peace.” He then notes that the German word of peace, Friede, means ”the free.” It may have been Foucault, with his talk of the panopticon, who set the precedent for considering the fixed dwelling-place to be prison-like rather than freeing. Thinkers like Gilles Deleuze followed suit.

Deleuze speaks of a difference between what he terms “determined milieus” and “originary worlds”; these former emerge from the latter. Deleuze writes: “The originary world is thronged with grottoes and birds, but also with fortresses, helicopters, sculptures, statues; and we do not know if its canals are artificial or natural, lunar. Thus the originary world does not oppose Nature to the constructions of man: it is oblivious to this distinction, which is valid only in derived milieus.”

^{One might say that the very consideration of the distinction between nature and architecture is synonymous or synchronous with the derivation of milieus; the originary world is the “set which unites everything, not in an organization, but making all the parts converge,” linking everything like a law of logic. But the “geographical and historical” extension of the milieu, its specification, is its derivation; here it leaves the world of concepts, and becoming “immanent,” it “receives a temporality as destiny from the originary world.”}

^{Insofar as I can tell, this extension is what makes place possible for Heidegger, who acknowledges the distinction between nature and building but does not consider them mutually exclusive. For Heidegger, building “gathers up the fourfold” ; that is, it tries to hold the natural elements together in a manmade place, and indeed, this unifying spirit is manifest in his examples of the Heidelberg bridge (in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”) and the temple in Paestum (in “The Origin of the Work of Art”), both of which exist peacefully alongside nature, glorying in it and glorifying it in turn. Our conventional appreciation of architecture from the age of antiquity corroborates the view that place results when architecture is imposed upon nature (whether violently or peacefully). Architecture is conceived of as a device of distinction, of differentiation; breaking up the “genuine deserts, virgin forests” of Nature that betoken the expanse of pure space.}

^{But over time human beings have made known their presence on and mastery over the earth, so that undefiled natural landscapes are uncommon now. The postmodern landscape, a predominantly urban one, is the image of Baudrillard’s dystopia, in which architecture comes not to hew place out of space but to dissolve place back into space, space in the form of cyberdeserts and metal forests that all look exactly the same. The derived milieu continues to distinguish natural and built worlds but has by now correlated the desire to build with the desire to let loose the Heideggerian fourfold rather than to gather it, to homogenize all our places of habitation, to be free from what may be perceived as the constraints of dwelling.}

^{Admittedly it requires quite a stretch of the imagination to accept that the creation of a skyscraper aesthetic, for instance, has been motivated by a desire for freedom from the constraints of place. There are countless other more cogent factors – economic, social, etc. – that have contributed to this development. But the fact that in the twentieth century there has been a trend toward associating space with freedom remains. This bursting at boundaries is a part of what Deleuze will term the crisis of modernity conventionally understood, though its association with freedom goes far to explain why his is not at all a reactionary or an alarmed vocabulary – why he casts the so-called “crisis” in the excited terms of possibility: “Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible.”}

One thinks, in a cynical mood, of the infinite linkages of fast-food restaurants up and down the Texas freeways. Any-hamburger-whatever: un Big Mac quelconque?

Rather than attempt a rebuttal of the postmodern attitude — or of my Canadian friend’s thesis — I’ll be content to describe those parts of San Antonio which have retained an old-world sense of place, in the hopes that their existential solaces will be self-evident. It must certainly be pointed out that while Texas is no Old Europe, Texas, there is another reality there besides the postmodern one.

For instance, Franciscan missionaries from Spain built San Antonio’s six mission churches, of which one is the Alamo and one of which was at some point destroyed. When we took the parish youth group on a field trip to one of the missions a few days ago, I told them that this was a building of which they could be proud; its historical and artistic merit came closest to rivaling that of some great churches of South America and Europe. Never mind that as you look out over the campus of San Jose Mission you can see a Pizza Hut sign rising up in the distance, beyond the Visitors’ Center — these buildings are refuges from the shallowest forms of Americana.

San Jose Mission

A steady wave of German immigrants arrived in this part of Texas a hundred years later, and their lasting legacy in San Antonio is the majestic King William’s district, home to fabulous nineteenth century bungalows and the city’s most distinct art galleries, which come alive on the First Friday of every month. Walking along these streets is most impressive at night, when the massive houses appear ghostly in the nocturnal gloom.

A typical nineteenth century home in the King William District

When you cross the Commerce Street Bridge heading west from downtown, you literally cross over onto the wrong side of the tracks: in your rear-view mirror is the San Antonio skyline, while underneath you are a set of railroad tracks, a homeless shelter, a prison, and a warren of bail bond stores. Ahead lies the West Side, a flat sea of roofs of housing projects. You are now two minutes away from our home and our church. When you descend into the barrio, the streetcorners come alive. Here are some photos I could have taken, except that I was too lazy…I found them online and am grateful to the photographers:

A typical West Side mural

A Mural to Peace

(This mural is a monument to peace. Off left, beyond the frame, each brick is painted a different color and inscribed with a different name. These are names of victims of violence, one for each year, and they represent everyone else killed in the barrio that year. Our priest, Father Marty Elsner, SJ, a West Side legend extensively involved in local activism and community organizing, gives the annual blessing of each newly inscribed brick. To laud the “sense of place” on the West Side is not to gloss over its many, and serious, problems. But of course, as many people are killed in the barren parking lots of highway fast-food joints as against the colorful walls of local taquerias.)

The biggest candle in the United States is on Guadalupe Street, two blocks down from the church. Our Lady of Guadalupe is everywhere on the West Side!

Plaza Guadalupe. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church is visible at the end of the arcade. Pope John Paul II visited this plaza in 1987, and Obama spoke here during the election season.

The United States claims to be a melting pot, and so it is. America may be browning, but the contagion of consumerism threatens to melt everything into a bleak monoculture. A natural fear of things “alien,” and a hostility towards immigrants which is written into the law (“alien” is precisely a legal term), put pressure on immigrant communities to adapt, to let go of anything that will identify them as “foreign.” We might call this the Alamo Syndrome. Meanwhile, the arts suffer. Religious holidays are secularized, commercialized. Our paradigm for great literature has become Harry Potter. Even on First Friday, tourist kitsch is far more visible than authentic artistic production.

Art in the barrio, like life there, is not without its concessions to the postmodern. For one thing, it is largely political, but more pertinently, I am struck by images such as the “family dinner” scene in the Chicana series of murals. The flour tortillas set out before the children are probably handmade, but the bread and fish on the table are store-bought, and the father solemnly pours a Big Red soda into his cup. Still, the West Side remains a place where corner taquerias compete with fast food chains, where Spanish is spoken almost as frequently as English (though it takes the hybrid form of Tex-Mex), where religious rituals like las posadas and el Dia de los Muertos are alive and well and fascinating. (More fascinating, I should say, than the parades on the Fourth of July in which every float seems to have its advertisements and economic interests.)

I am not a sociologist, so I won’t attempt to take this primitive and belabored analysis any further. These are merely personal observations, and I’ll end with just one more. Last week, the parish threw a huge party in honor of, and thanksgiving for, the four Jesuits who staff the parish. (The Vatican declared the June 2009-June 2010 period a “Year for Priests.” Of course the festivities were diminished by global scandal, but this made it all the more important, I think, for our parish to give thanks for their excellent and attentive clerical staff.) The party was pure ecstasy. The food was amazing — mole and pico de gallo and cilantro sauce — a veritable who’s who of parishioners was represented in the chock-full parish hall, a live mariachi band gave everyone something to dance to (even the priests!), and las viejitas were crooning everything from Cucurrucucu Paloma to La Paloma. It was romantic, exhilarating, and wonderful.

I had two prevailing impressions. The first, and most immediate, was that it’s only a party like this that can help me to make sense of traditional Biblical representations of the Kingdom of Heaven as a banquet. The image usually seems custom-made for gluttons, but perhaps only a glutton would think of nothing but food in listening to Jesus’ parables. The fiesta last week was a celebration of community, and indeed presaged a heart-poundingly beautiful dream of Heaven: where everywhere you turn, you see people you know, laughter is on everyone’s lips, and there is no melancholy in moving to a new table because there is the sense that the party will never end, that there are only “see you soons” and never any “goodbyes.” Swept along for hours by a tide of friendly people, I felt wrapped in the arms of love, and my heart was brimming with love for everyone.

Yet ours is an ephemeral world. Parties do end, and so do eras: my second impression was that this gathering couldn’t have been as ecstatic, and — this is important — as capable of uniting the young and the old, if it weren’t deeply, profoundly nostalgic, if the participants weren’t subliminally aware that they were performing the magic, possible only on rare occasions, of resurrecting an epoch that had passed, lost songs and fading customs…if this celebration were not somehow a travail of the memory. This is another major characteristic of modernism; its name notwithstanding, it is haunted by the past, and place finds its analog and its ally in the moment, over and against spatial expansion and orientation towards a future possible.

Speaking personally, as I prepare to leave this place in August (and I have begun saying my long goodbyes already), I am beginning to feel really nostalgic. My nostalgia is for the West Side, but that kind of nostalgia is not as great as was my sentimentality towards the broad avenues and Haussmanian balconies of Paris, which I departed last year. My nostalgia is first and foremost towards the people — friends I’ve gotten to know well and neighbors I never had the chance to.

I’d like to spend more time on this blog discussing my experiences at work than controversies in the Catholic Church, but lately the two have intersected a lot and dominated what I think about. JVC is a program which attracts a number of disaffected Catholics. That’s something I’m not sure my friends and relatives, who may imagine us as a bunch of zealous “Christian soldier”-style missionaries, understand. I consider myself fairly moderate theologically, but relative to my peers in JVC, I am solidly at the right-ward end of whatever political / theological spectrum our various colors represent. This has been good for me. Among the moments that have most powerfully shaken my depths this year are not just encounters with my clients, but conversations I’ve had with friends whom the Church’s treatment of women has driven away from the faith. By the end of our discussions, these friends have sometimes been reduced to tears (of hurt and of wrath, in equal measure). As a heterosexual male with nothing much to lose, the temptation is strong to reduce issues like women’s ordination and homosexual erotic love to abstract theological questions; even my basic, and at times strong, sympathy for queer and feminist spiritualities can no doubt become condescending, when it is seen merely as a question of “entertaining” progressive ideas or “allowing” them into a debate.

A few weeks ago, in commenting on the sex abuse crisis that has again consumed the Catholic Church, I cited a homily by Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh, who wondered aloud why the modern world seems to hate us Catholics so. It’s only in retrospect that I’ve realized the answer to that question is a lot more obvious than I’d self-pityingly made it seem. For so many people, good works and a healthy spirituality do not require the strictures of an aged institution like ours; why, then, should they tolerate what looks to them like the Church’s homophobia and misogyny?

Nicholas Kristof

Among the decidedly leftward-leaning Jesuit Volunteers in my program, two Nicholas Kristof editorials made the rounds last month and were heartily welcomed. They’re called A Church Mary Can Love and Who Can Mock This Church?, and they’re very much worth a read. Now, I told a friend of mine, who knows me and my politics quite well, that I was going to blog about Kristof, and her gasped response was, “Oh, Nicholas, please don’t — he’s said such nice things about the Church!” She’s right. And so, a full disclaimer: I love Nicholas Kristof. His expertise in the third world, and especially women’s issues, is unquestionable, and his personal commitment to social justice is equally redoubtable, rare, and even saintly. I also greatly appreciate that while sometimes critical of the Church, he hasn’t tried to shape himself into an anti-religious demagogue as a means of scoring cheap points among readers of the New York Times. When Kristof speaks, I listen, and this would be the case even if he hadn’t, as my friend pointed out, said such beautiful things about my Church, a Church he should feel no obligation to defend.

Yet I do want to observe a few points on which my opinion diverges from his own. Briefly, his thesis is that the Vatican has strayed from the Church’s “inclusive,” “democratic” roots, becoming an old boys’ club “addicted to male domination, celibacy and rigid hierarchies.” As Kristof puts it, though:

There’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.

This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.

This is the church of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America and the Cabrini Sisters in Africa. There’s a stereotype of nuns as stodgy Victorian traditionalists. I learned otherwise while hanging on for my life in a passenger seat as an American nun with a lead foot drove her jeep over ruts and through a creek in Swaziland to visit AIDS orphans. After a number of encounters like that, I’ve come to believe that the very coolest people in the world today may be nuns.

So when you read about the scandals, remember that the Vatican is not the same as the Catholic Church. Ordinary lepers, prostitutes and slum-dwellers may never see a cardinal, but they daily encounter a truly noble Catholic Church in the form of priests, nuns and lay workers toiling to make a difference.

So.

Before we even got to his “two church” thesis, we could pause a moment to interrogate his church history. A few paragraphs earlier, Kristof has cited early Gnostic texts and excoriated the early Church’s move from “proto-feminism” to “chauvinism.” These paragraphs are not really a paradigm of scholarly writing and research. Michael Sean Winters, in a very good (if uncharacteristically venomous) response to which I’ll return in a moment, points out that “citing Gnostic texts in the early Church is a bit like citing a book called How to Win a War by Don Rumsfeld.”

Kristof also has a naive, if quite commonplace, conception of Jesus. “Jesus wasn’t known for pontificating from palaces, covering up scandals, or issuing Paleolithic edicts on social issues,” he writes, which may be true enough (thank God), but we mischaracterize the Gospels’ Jesus if we insist on seeing him as nothing more than a peacenik hippie to whom the trappings of baroque and hierarchical religion were completely foreign. Yes, Jesus was poor and concerned with social justice. He also explicitly did not come to overturn the Mosaic law (Matthew 5:17); preached in the Temple as well as on the streets (Luke 4:15, Luke 20, etc.); justified the use of expensive oils and forbade the disciples from spending that money, instead, on the poor (Mark 14:1-9); wore a seamless garment rare and rich enough that the Roman soldiers wanted to steal it from his beaten, bruised, and bloody body (John 19:23); instituted a church hierarchy for the distribution of some sacraments (John 20:23); called those who disdain religious rituals “blind” — even while reminding us that the rituals are not sufficient in and of themselves (Matthew 23:19); hobknobbed with the rich (Luke 8:3, Matthew 27:57, and it is often thought that Lazarus, the dear friend over whose death Jesus wept, was wealthy); and offered strict teachings about sexuality and moral conduct which Kristof may very well consider “Paleolithic” (e.g., Matthew 5:28, 5:32, and 19:12, Mark 10:6-9).

I am certainly not about to join Joel Osteen’s megachurch and preach a Gospel of wealth; for all of these citations, we could amass dozens more critiquing legalism, moralism, and ritualism and indicating a preferential option for the poor. But I would agree with a Jesuit priest who preached JVC’s recent Spring Retreat: Jesus was a pontifex, a “bridge-builder,” capable of speaking to rich and poor alike and, as importantly, breaking down false dichotomies that even we today might construct. Not only is there no Gentile and Jew, slave and free, in Christ, but the polarity between theory and praxis needs also to be bridged.

Winters writes that Kristof’s ecclesial diagnosis is “false” and “pernicious,” that “there is one Church, not two,” and that “the concern for dogma and the practice of charity are linked intimately in the life and heart of the Church.” I believe Winters is correct in theory, while Kristof’s basic observation remains valid; we could just put a positive spin on it, and translate it into Catholic terminology, and say that all Christians live a different vocation, or follow a different charism, from one another. In the sense that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has to be concerned with theological questions and the Maryknoll nuns have to be concerned with ministry in the trenches, Kristof would be correct. Where he falls astray, in my opinion, is in supposing that one calling is loftier than another, or that one can do without the theology and the hierarchy (if this is what he means — it’s hard to tell whether he opposes himself to the hierarchy tout court or just to the ideologies it holds today). St. Paul writes eloquently on the diversity of gifts that we, as different “parts,” bring to the “body” of Christ, the Church. We need both Mother Teresa in the slums and Pope Benedict in the academy (as well as all the Vatican dicasteries necessary for evangelization and governance) if we are to thrive as a Church — and if we are to find God in all things. Jesus alone seemed to boast all gifts, being at once a healer and a friend and a priest and a revolutionary and a Socrates-like philosopher holding forth in the town square. We may need to attend, a little more carefully than Kristof does, to this last identity, in particular. Jesus’ learned discourses with the Pharisees, or with Nicodemus, demonstrate that he was not just a social worker unconcerned with theoretical formulations of the search for truth.

A video accompanies Kristof’s second article and profiles Father Michael Barton, an American missionary priest in Sudan. The video (which Kristof probably didn’t edit) annoyed me by continually superimposing evil-looking pictures of the pope whenever it talked about the church’s failings. For me, the most interesting part of the video was when Kristof was complaining about the “disconnect” between the institutional church and the church of the poor, and the priest, as he’s listening, has an expression on his face — slightly defensive, slightly wary — which says, “I see what you mean, but there’s a little more to it than that.” When he responds, he doesn’t say, “You’re right — the institutional church is morally bankrupt,” but admits only that there is a disconnect between “the human” and the “divine.” Yes, the church has sometimes failed, but that’s not because it’s institutional; it’s because it’s human.

Kristof fails to account, I think, for the extent to which certain very conservative and loyalist tendencies can exist in the hearts of even the most superficially liberal worker-priests. Catholics simply can’t be pigeon-holed into tidy politico-theological categories. For instance, Dario Castrillon Hoyos was a priest in rural Columbia who counted FARC agents among his personal friends even while exhorting them publicly to give up their guns; roamed the streets at night ministering to street urchins even after being named a bishop; and went, disguised as a milkman, to drug lord Pablo Escobar’s house and once there persuaded him to confess his sins. His career at the Vatican, where he was placed in charge of propagating conservative liturgical reforms and reconciling a conservative schismatic group with the mainstream Church, ended spectacularly badly when it was revealed that he had congratulated a French bishop for protecting a pedophile priest from the police in 2001. Who knew? It is also dangerous to assume that you can’t be a hierarch without contributing to a problem such as, say, the sexual abuse of children. The aloof and pastorally inexperienced academic Joseph Ratzinger, whom the mainstream media missed no opportunity to slander as “God’s rottweiler,” turned out to be the Vatican’s septuagenarian Eliot Ness in the face of the child sex abuse crisis. Again, who knew?

Let me offer the example of the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, which in the 50′s and 60′s sent missionary priests, largely unsupervised, to the remote corners of Alaska. These Jesuits were very concerned with social justice and were there to do charitable work among the most poor (basically fitting the description of Kristof’s ideal priest) — but because there was no structure to the Society’s works up there, and no supervision (it looked like what the church would look like if we “turned it upside down,” as Kristof has suggested, and pretended we were all Jesus and that the only thing necessary is to be a do-gooder), dozens of children were abused over the course of decades.

It’s true that there were many problems with the institutional Church’s response even once abuse was discovered. (One of these problems was that the Vatican office responsible for processing abuse complaints was short-staffed.) It took the evil-looking Pope, sitting at the top of the ladder, to revolutionize the way complaints are processed and give jurisdiction over them to local bishops’ offices — bureaucratic, no doubt, but at an intermediary ecclesiastical level. This is not quite turning the Church upside down; it is more like folding it along the middle.

A practical question arises at the very outset. What, exactly, would it mean to “turn the Church upside down”? Kristof doesn’t say, and I’d honestly like to hear more. Does he mean that he’d like the Church’s whole catechetical (and, perhaps, liturgical) endeavor to disappear and for it to focus more on good works among the poor? Is he really only interested in a liberalization of the Church’s politics? Would he perhaps be interested in the discussion taking place among Catholics about the proper extent and form of lay control? I’m sure he knows that the Catholic Church will never adopt a more Protestant-style ecclesiology (it prefers not to see itself fractured into little communities, each with its own particular take on theological questions); nor does it want to disintegrate into a vague “cultural influence,” like “cultural Judaism,” whose profession of faith is half-hearted. In Ireland, for instance, where cultural Catholicism masks a pervasive atheism, it is rightly derided as hypocrisy.

Kristof may have some personal experience with priests whose politics he likes. (Let it not be said, by the way, that many such priests don’t have their bishops’ support, such as in African countries where even among the episcopacy, the practical need for protection against HIV/AIDS is admitted and addressed on what we in the Church call a “pastoral basis.”) But how, practically speaking, should the Vatican’s catechetical and political machines be structured? There are many — especially well educated, liberal-minded young Catholics who sometimes seem to assume that everyone in the pews has a BA in theology from a Jesuit college while the hierarchy has been stuck reading 4th century medical manuals — who advocate an increased role in Church governance for the laity, perhaps electing their own pastors and bishops, and even finding a way to give the laity some say in the election of a pope. Here, Winters makes a very good point:

Liberals should be especially aware that if there were elections for lay leaders, it is more likely than not that Bill Donohue and George Weigel and Raymond Arroyo would win at the Catholic polls. I will take my chances with the clericalist patriarchy, thank you very much. In his recent book, The Difference God Makes, Cardinal Francis George wrote that a principal problem for liberal Catholics is their willingness to become chaplains to the status quo. Kristof’s article could be exhibit A.

There are two points being made here, and I’d like to take them one at a time.

Questions for the Laity

First of all, while Kristof may think the Church is bad when its theology is determined by the Vatican, the truth is that when you eliminate that central teaching structure and leave morality and theology up to grass-roots communities, you get just as many reactionary conservative communities as you do enlightened liberal ones, just as many ignorant superstitions and backwards beliefs as you do scientific and rational convictions, and just as many violent revolutionaries in poor countries as you do peacemakers. The Protestant ecclesial model may be able to boast about enlightened Episcopalianism (although currently the Anglican Communion is in a pretty fractured state, itself), but it’s also responsible for evangelical creationist types who voted for President Bush (twice). The Catholic Church, moving slowly and cautiously through history, is less prone to extremism and division, and seems to find itself squarely in the middle of the spectrum of Christianity…and the middle ground is, in my opinion, normally a good place to be.

Furthermore, I think that my last post, which reveals the widespread ignorance and superstition endemic among Kristof’s cherished poor parish communities, must surely speak volumes. This is not to say that I oppose lay governance in the life of parishes; for many reasons, both practical and theological, an expanded role for the laity seems necessary to me. But I’ve had enough encounters with the parish planning committee here at Our Lady of Guadalupe to know that the loudest advocates for lay control, who usually come from those rare parishes where the parishioners may be better educated than the priests assigned to them, do not have a full, fair view of the demographic, ideological, intellectual, and political diversity of the Church. To take one example: the three priests and one brother who staff our Church have been debating whether to build a chapel for perpetual adoration of the Eucharist. While their feelings on the matter are not uniform, there is a general sense that it would be too costly and difficult to monitor. I am sure that whatever the best course of action may be, cool heads will prevail among these educated Jesuits. On the other hand, for one prominent lay leader in this community whom I ran into in the parking lot one day, it was as simple as this: “If you’re a priest and you don’t want Adoration of Our Lord Jesus in the Sacrament, it means the Devil’s got command over your soul!” I don’t mean to say that the roles couldn’t be reversed; but generally speaking, I would really rather Church governance be a meritocracy, run by those with advanced degrees in theology, than a democracy. Call it pretension, or call it a respect for education.

Secondly, Winters cites Cardinal George as saying that liberal Catholics can sometimes become chaplains for the status quo. This could mean a number of things, and I haven’t read the Cardinal’s book, so I can’t be sure of the context of his statement. First of all, the JVs along whom I have the honor of serving boast the kind of education I’d love to see behind the wheel of the Church, yet naturally it would not be fair to give them a stronger “vote” than the superstitious “masses.” But my year here has taught me another sad lesson; it is a lot easier for a layperson to cut and run when things aren’t going your way than it is for a priest or religious. Intellectuals are frequently dissidents, and while it is vitally important for an organization to hear and incorporate the voices and opinions of dissidents, it is hard to build an edifice on shifting sand. “If you only believe what you want to believe in the Gospel,” cautioned St. Augustine, “then it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.” As with everything, it cuts both ways; a lot of abuse was covered up because the clericalism of many in the Church made them feel beyond questioning and led them to put the Church’s endurance over the truth. But a lot of lay people love the Gospel values without, it seems, loving the Church, and while this can be a principled decision in what concerns the ordering of their individual souls, I am not convinced that the antidote to a Church’s problems is to upend the whole structure and let the problems on the bottom find their way to the top.

If one problem with conservative laypeople is hyper-religiosity, then we should be aware that liberal laity, in their desire to “modernize” the Church, are vulnerable to hyper-secularism. It’s in this light that I see the relevance of Cardinal George’s remark most clearly: the Church is meant to be counter-cultural, both in “liberal” regards (cf. its commitment to poverty, simplicity, and the spiritual, rather than to materialism, consumerism, and capitalism), and in “conservative” regards (cf. its commitment to chaste sexuality). But again as I pointed out in my last post, the biggest problem with liberalism may not be political (and I don’t think it’s in the political sense that George talked about the status quo); it’s philosophical. There’s a deep fear of “control” or “pushiness” at the heart of liberalism, and it results in relativism, or in banal phrases like the assertion that one is “spiritual, but not religious.” If one is forced to have religion, the reasoning goes, it should be as tame and harmless as possible. In most instances, this is not a counter-cultural stance, but a position cowed by modern animosity to religious truth claims. Like the rebels in school whose fashion statements simply turn them into cliches, those who think themselves “progressive” sometimes turn out to be the most boring and stationary, and certainly malleable, individuals of all — chaplains for the status quo.

The Dalai Lama

I’ll recount an anecdote. A friend once found me torn between two bits of reading material: Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx’s brilliant, revisionist treatise on the Eucharist, and a “chicken soup”-style collection of tidbits by the Dalai Lama that someone else had lent me. When I held up my two choices, my friend said nothing about the Schillebeeckx book — true, most tomes on the Eucharist are a lot more mawkish and pietistic than Schillebeeckx’s, though we laity would be a lot more impressive if more of us knew who Schillebeeckx was  — but her eyes lit up upon seeing the other one. “That looks so good!” she exclaimed. (I eventually read it. It wasn’t.) Case in point: one of the reasons Kristof’s article was popular was because it tried to strip religion of everything but the tepid injunction to be nice and do good things…just as the Dalai Lama’s recent op-ed in the New York Times seems to do. This is the spirituality (sans religion) of our times.

The Dalai Lama’s piece is entitled “many faiths, one truth,” and consists of a generous plea to religious open-mindedness. I agree with the main point of the article, I in fact believe that its message is crucially important, and as someone fascinated by ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue (I got a few raised eyebrows at church for taking the youth group on a bunch of field trips to different religious services), I find genuinely touching the Dalai Lama’s invocation of his friendship with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. This photograph of the Dalai Lama’s visit to Merton’s grave, praying alongside a modern-day Trappist, is a classic:

But I am afraid that the Dalai Lama’s laudable core message — that one can persist in one’s own religious faith while still learning from others — will be taken entirely backwards by a reading populace desperate to hear a religious figure say that all religions are the same and that being particular with dogmatic tenets is just going to cause us some unnecessary headaches. Many faiths, one truth? No. One faith, many truths: if I come to the conclusion that abortion or extra-marital sex or profligate substance abuse or prayer-less individualism is all right, then who can challenge me? The only real sin is ruffling each other’s religious feathers, because shouldn’t we all just get along?

Buddhism may be a great spiritual force elsewhere in the world, but in the United States, land of consumerism, it has been handily commodified. I am not inordinately fond of Bill Maher, but I think he hit the nail on the head in making fun of a picture of a young woman on a beach with Chinese lettering tattooed on the small of her back…just above a thong that revealed, suffice it to say, a lot more than it covered. “Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn’t make you spiritual,” he lectured the iconic sex symbol.

Slavoj Zizek puts it like this:

The problem is that such a satirical exaggeration is actually taking place. Today, many ethnic, sexual or racial minorities rewrite their past in a more positive, self-assertive vein, i.e. African Americans who claim that long before European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology. Along the same lines, one can imagine a rewriting of the Ten Commandments: Is some commandment too severe? Let us regress to the scene on Mt. Sinai and rewrite it! “Thou shalt not commit adultery—except if it is emotionally sincere and serves the goal of your profound self-realization.” Exemplary here is Donald Spoto’s The Hidden Jesus. In this New Age “liberal” reading of Christianity, we can read apropos of divorce:

“Jesus clearly denounced divorce and remarriage. … But Jesus did not go further and say that marriages cannot be broken. … Nowhere else in his teaching is there any situation where he renders a person forever chained to the consequences of sin. His entire treatment of people was to liberate, not to legislate. … It is simply self-evident that in fact some marriages do break down, that commitments are abandoned, that promises are violated and love betrayed.”

Sympathetic and liberal as these lines are, they involve the fatal confusion between emotional ups-and-downs and an unconditionally symbolic commitment that is supposed to hold precisely when it is no longer supported by direct emotions. “Thou shalt not divorce—except when your marriage ‘in fact’ breaks down, when it is experienced as a unbearable emotional burden that frustrates your full life.” In short, except when the prohibition to divorce would have regained its full meaning (since who would divorce when the marriage is still blossoming?).

This is how (although the modern topic of human rights is ultimately grounded in the Jewish notion of the love for one’s neighbor) we tend to establish today a negative link between the Decalogue (the traumatically imposed divine Commandments) and human rights. That is to say, within our post-political, liberal-permissive society, human rights have, ultimately, become the rights to disobey the Ten Commandments. “The right to privacy”—the right to adultery, done in secrecy, where no one has the right to probe. “The right to pursue happiness and private property”—the right to steal and exploit others. “Freedom of expression and freedom of the press”—the right to lie. “The right of free citizens to bear weapons”—the right to kill. And ultimately, “freedom of religious belief”—the right to worship false gods.

The greatness of John Paul II was that he personified the disavowal of the liberal, easy way out. Even those who respected the Pope’s moral stance usually accompanied their praise with the caveat that he nonetheless remained hopelessly old-fashioned, medieval even, by sticking to dogmas out of touch with the demands of modernity. How could someone today ignore contraception, divorce or abortion? How could the Pope deny the right to abortion even to a nun who got pregnant through rape (as he effectively did in the case of the raped nuns in Bosnia)? Isn’t it clear that, even when one is in principle against abortion, one should consent to a compromise in such an extreme case?

One can see why the Dalai Lama is a much more appropriate leader for our postmodern, permissive times. He presents us with a feel-good spiritualism without any specific obligations. Anyone, even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him while continuing their money-grabbing, promiscuous lifestyle. In stark contrast, the Pope reminded us that there is a price to pay for a proper ethical attitude. It was his very stubborn clinging to “old values,” his ignoring the “realistic” demands of our time, even when the arguments against him seemed “obvious” (as in the case of the raped nun), that made him an authentic ethical figure.

Incidentally, with the passage of John Paul, the only immediate reference to Benedict that I can find in any of Zizek’s writings is when the iconoclastic critic chastises him for being too “warm and sympathetic” because he eliminated the antiquated teaching on limbo. (Only Slavoj Zizek….!)

What is my point? My point is that for all of the Church hierarchy’s problems, just doing away with the whole kit and caboodle and enjoining people to be good and spiritual won’t do the trick. We need structure. And offering empty rituals without a real intellectual basis leaves us with a few options most Catholics find unappealing: the legalism of the Biblical Pharisees, a Protestantism unable to speak with a unified voice, or the easy, empty conveniences of a watered-down Buddhism for the New Age. (By contrast, I’m told that continental Buddhism is quite rigid and strict, as well as academic. My guess is that “the real deal” would turn many Americans off.) Personally, I am proud to belong to a religion whose leader is capable of a magisterial critique of contemporary capitalist economies such as the substantive encyclical Caritas in Veritate, rather than one whose leader is more inclined to pen nice but boring paeans to harmony and understanding which, to be quite frank, I could have written by the time I reached middle school. Besides, the feel-good sugar of relativism lacks moral substance; it is, after all, the ever-smiling Dalai Lama, and not the ever-pensive Benedict, who was capable of saying something as selfish and cruel as this (italics mine):

Of course, abortion, from a Buddhist viewpoint, is an act of killing and is negative, generally speaking. But it depends on the circumstances. If the unborn child will be retarded or if the birth will create serious problems for the parent, these are cases where there can be an exception. I think abortion should be approved or disapproved according to each circumstance.

Coda

My good-hearted and brilliant friends in JVC may not agree with my basic points here. Whoever edited the Kristof video to make Benedict look like a ghoul most certainly does not agree. This year has been a true gift for me precisely because those who disagree with me have tested me, expanded me; and if my position on lay control seems arch-conservative, I can honestly say that my views on a host of other issues have become a lot more liberal in the last few months. I’m grateful for that. Still, I find that the women and men who feel most like my sisters and brothers are those who don’t just agree with me on this or that point, but who love the Pope and the Church enough (and yes, it is a question of love) to give them a fair chance. I am thinking, for instance, of the French historian Alain Besancon, whose analysis of Benedict’s tenure as pope I found on a very interesting Catholic blog:

After five years, to me his pontificate is sorrowful. John Paul II fought against a monstrous political regime: Communism, but he had society and all of humanity on his side. Benedict XVI has the whole of modern society, born out of the crisis of the 60′s, with its new morality and new religiosity, against him….[He] finds himself in a situation similar to that of Paul VI after Vatican II, in confronting what he called ‘the self-destruction’ of the Church. This time the self-destruction is of all of society, nature and reason. The glory of his pontificate is not visible: it is that of martyrdom.

Ever the rational academic, Benedict XVI has never really embraced the florid visions or private devotions that swirl around Marian sacntuaries such as Fatima, La Salette, or Medjugorje. His interest in Fatima has always been less mystical than theological — seeing it primarily as a reminder of Mary’s role in salvation history as the one who introduces Christ to the world.

…[T]he best window onto Benedict’s attitude towards Fatima comes in his comments back in 2000, when he put the publication of the “Third Secret” into theological context. On that occasion, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger played down the significance of the secret, saying that “no great mystery is revealed” and that “the veil of the future isn’t lifted.”

…While acknowledging that Fatima has been approved by the church, he suggested that some of the more famous claims associated with the three seers may have been “interior signs” rather than something belonging to “our normal sensible world.” Not every detail of the visions has meaning, he warned, and altogether they represent a “symbolic language” requiring interpretation by the church.

When Benedict visited the Shroud of Turin a few days ago, his reaction was similar: rather than endorsing the fabric’s much-contested claim to be the real burial cloth of Christ, he cautiously described it as an “icon written in blood” — that is, something more akin to a work of art than to an authentic historical relic.

With so many of the Church’s teachings and practices regarded as retrogressive, and even paleolithic, it’s a relief to have evidence for a skeptical public that the current Pope at least doesn’t go in for mawkish superstitions. More profoundly than that, though, this question of the mystical appartenances of Roman Catholicism, in which the otherworldly personality of Pope John Paul II was steeped, is a truly vexing one for the Church in its efforts to speak to the modern world. It is difficult enough to dialogue with a haughty culture that places belief in God on the level of belief in Santa Claus simply on account of a lack of “proof”; having to rationalize saints that people pray to when they’ve lost their car keys, and rosaries they say on certain days of the year to elude X amount of time in Purgatory, sometimes seems a nigh impossible task.

If there is one major point on which I disagree with Pope Benedict, it is in fact a central tenet of his thought: Benedict holds that the modern world is in the thrall of relativism, and has lost interest in the search for objective truth. In the human sciences — anthropology, philosophy — with which the Pope is personally most familiar, there is something to this claim. At the same time, the permissiveness of modern culture concerning, most visibly, sexual and familial ethics does not seem to me to issue from an abandonment of truth; it represents, instead, a redefinition of truth along basically liberal or libertarian lines. For many, an expanded vision of tolerance is not the same thing as relativism. Contrary to what many clerics will charge, when a so-called “modern” criticizes the Church’s uptightness, she isn’t contradicting herself by hewing to a universal moral standard she’s said to have disavowed; she’s merely turning the tables on the reigning pieties, and proclaiming that truth, which does exist, nonetheless has more to do with freedom than with seemingly arbitrary behavioral restrictions or with a supposed, and scientifically naive, “natural law.” Indeed, the Church is in for trouble if it doesn’t recognize that the modern world remains wedded to a notion of truth: only, its notions about moral propriety follow from a conviction that the best standard for all truth claims is scientific, and its idea is that the Church, and not relativists, have betrayed the truth by persisting in a belief in silly things like limbo and talking snakes.

Of course, the Catechism doesn’t advocate Biblical literalism or claim to have any idea what happens to children who die unbaptized; but even if we distinguish, more carefully than Christianity’s critics do, noisy evangelical Protestantism from magisterial Catholicism, we’ll still be forced to admit that nuanced hermeneutical methods have not always reached the level of the pews. The question of evolution and creationism, held up by the media as the crux of the science-religion debate because it’s involved in the writing of public school curricula, is actually a red herring. There’s a whole gamut of difficult questions which the Church, wittingly or not, avoids every time it insists that it does accept the Big Bang, does accept some form of natural selection, and does accept the fossil record. Do cutting-edge studies of reflexes prove that free will is an illusion? If higher intelligence is discovered elsewhere in the universe, will it dash to shreds our belief in the divinity of Christ? Will transhumanist advances in biotechnology prove definitively that what we understand as intrinsic to humanity is merely provisional, and not something to base a religious anthropology on? Even more fundamentally, once we’ve quieted all doubts that the two creation myths in Genesis are meant to be taken figuratively, and permitted ourselves to believe that Adam and Eve didn’t really exist, can we still claim that the question of the unique ensoulment of homo sapiens is a no-brainer when evidence exists that members of our own species mated and reproduced with “primitive” Neanderthals?

These are incredibly difficult questions. The conventional wisdom is that science deals with that which is empirically observable, whereas theology deals with the invisible meaning of Love, yet the divide between disciplines is not as impermeable as that. To read modern science with integrity demands that we ask ourselves, honestly, what Love has to do with the human species, in the first place; and a Church that refuses to answer those questions (out of modesty) because it isn’t an “expert” on science, and then prattles on about indulgences and miracles, is, on some level, shirking an important responsibility. (Hence my ardent admiration for someone like Teilhard de Chardin, the maverick philosopher-paleontologist, a discoverer of the Peking Man and a Jesuit priest, who’s perhaps the only prominent Christian to have constructed an entire systematic theology on lessons learned from evolutionary biology.)

I’ve had the chance to interrogate, on a very modest level, the relationship of believing communities to science and reason here at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, where the question of syncretism has often reared its head. Many times in my encounters with people in the social services office, I’ve been told that if you are pregnant and don’t wear a belt around your stomach during a full moon, your child will be born deformed. I’ve also met too many people with stories like that of the woman who came in to my office yesterday morning. “The doctors have been using their chemo to treat my cancer for seven years, and they still haven’t cured me!” she pronounced contemptuously. Before I could fully process this, she leaned back in her chair and smiled. “So, now? I’m taking herbs instead.”

There’s also a rumor going around that if you distribute seven stacks of seven copies of a given prayer to St. Jude to seven different churches, God will grant whatever you wish for. This has not been known to fail!! screams the promise at the bottom of the photocopied sheet, which keeps cropping up (in multiples of seven) in the foyer of the church. Our associate pastor — who, it must be said, is a member of the mystically inclined Marian movement of priests and so cannot easily be pigeon-holed into the “skeptical and scientifically minded” category — is routinely purging the foyer of these arcane prayer sheets. One day he decided that enough was enough, and gave a forceful homily decrying the pernicious effects of paganism and belief in the occult in the barrio. “If you own a Oujia board, brothers and sisters,” he implored, “throw it away. If you own a set of Tarot cards, burn them. If you’ve ever participated in a seance, come to Confession. These simply are not things of God.”

The reaction to his homily was vicious. People stormed out of the church and were waiting for Father outside on the steps. Many of my housemates took an extremely negative view of the sermon, considering it brusque, Eurocentric, and condescending. At the same time, I couldn’t help but admire this priest for speaking what I believe to have been the truth. It is really very difficult to have much patience for superstitions like those ones when you have people coming into your office in tears because the curtains have been moving in the baby’s room and they believe that there are demons a-prowl. “They say if you get holy water from seven churches,” people will explain to me, breathlessly [it is always seven!], “and sprinkle it on the doorway, the ghosts can’t enter. Do you have any holy water?” I usually hand them an application for the San Antonio energy company’s home weatherization program so that they can seal up their draughty walls.

It’s not as simple, of course, as a battle against paganism. The form of these superstitious beliefs is often Christian. Holy water is a Catholic sacramental, whether its use in the above circumstance is Catholic or not. I’m deeply sympathetic to scientific critiques of Christian superstitions, and when I talk about the sociology of belief, I’ve come to use the phrase “ideal religion” — to imply how aware I am that the varieties of religious experience include some that are insane. Still, for everyone who rightly thinks my criticism of superstition should include Christian superstitions, there are also representatives of a third ideological camp, some of whom are Christian and some of whom are not, who seem to feel that an insistence on intellectual rigor is mean-spirited and has no place; who am I to criticize people’s “beliefs”?

They don’t always use the word “beliefs,” for beliefs are in fact fairly easy to criticize; they often speak instead about “culture.” Yet I know that myths like that story of the ghosts instill fear into people’s hearts, and lead people away from an understanding of God as love (and of modern medicine as efficacious). Culture, quite simply, can hurt people. It is in speaking with this camp that I find myself drawing on the Pope’s message about relativism: our metaphysical ideas are not irrelevant to the way we live our daily lives, and we have a moral responsibility to submit them to the honest critique of informed reason. If some religious conservatives are guilty of anti-scientific credulity, some liberal humanists are still guilty of permissive, kneejerk relativism, which doesn’t fulfill its responsibility towards the truth any better than Biblical literalism does.

For all this, I am not arguing for positivism or materialism. I believe, more and more each day, that religious belief needs to be purified by the flame of science, but I also believe in a God that is the ground of all existence and in an indwelling Holy Spirit that orients us towards that ground. In less Rahnerian terms, I believe that Love has a great deal to do with who we are and what we (are to) do. It’s also true that liberal rejections of religion still need to justify the perceptible beauty of our existence and often do so in intellectually untenable ways. Regardless how indicative he may or may not be of twenty-first century iterations of this problem, Auguste Comte, the nineteenth century sociologist and founder of positivism, is nonetheless an interesting fellow to look back on…and not just because he went off the deep end and tried to create an actual ecclesiological structure for his new “religion”: naming himself “pope,” appointing scientists as priests, and trying to convert to the new “positive religion” all the Catholic bishops of France.

Famously, Comte identified three stages of belief which he claimed every individual’s and every society’s great ideas would pass through; though in his discussion of the three stages in his book The Drama of Atheist Humanism, Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac cautions that, realistically, they are better understood as “three coexistent modes of thought” than as “three successive states.” The states are theological, metaphysical, and physical, and de Lubac adds that true progress consists not in an advance from the theological to the physical, but in “an increasingly clear distinction between these three aspects, at first perceived in a kind of chaotic unity.” De Lubac continues, “If, then, it is true to say that ‘physics’ (in the sense of the whole of science) began by being theological, it would be just as true to say that theology began by being physical, and the law of evolution does not tend to expel theology any more than science, but to ‘purify’ both by differentiating them.”

What is meant by the physical and what is meant by the theological can be pretty accurately guessed in the context of the rest of my discussion; it is the intermediary, “metaphysical” state which is the most complicated, and the most interesting (to me), and which contains the crux of Comte’s disagreement with de Lubac. For Comte, metaphysics is a “purely critical” disposition, which derides the excesses of polytheism and attempts to straightjacket religious belief, containing it with a series of “no”s. It leaves no room, he claims, for “honest sentiment,” which — and this is telling — is what Comtian positivism tries to rescue from primitive theology. We shouldn’t be forced to choose between science and emotion, in Comte’s mind; rather, positivism as a study of humanity, unencumbered by thoughts of the unseen God (to whose actual existence Comte was agnostic and indifferent), places everything about humanity, including its emotions, center stage, and exalts the whole package. This may be the most telling lesson we have to learn from Comte; liberal modern rejections of religion often try to sacralize humanity on its own terms. They, too, at heart, want to believe in Love. We may be reminded of the wonderful scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which Alyosha visits Mitya in prison, and Mitya says:

“On the whole, I am sorry to lose God, I must say.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just fancy. In our heads, that is to say, in our brains, there are nerves…These nerves have fibers and when they begin to vibrate…You see, I look at something, like this, and they vibrate, these fibers…and, as soon as they vibrate, an image is formed, not immediately but after a second, and an impulse is born…no, what am I talking about? not an impulse but an object or an action…that is how perception happens. Then comes thought…because I have fibers and not because I have a soul and was created in God’s image, what nonsense! Mikhail explained that to me only yesterday. That fired me. what a wonderful thing science is, Alyosha! Man is undergoing transformation, I quite see that…And yet, I am sorry to lose God!”

“That’s something, anyway,” said Alyosha.

“That I regret God? Chemistry, brother, chemistry! A thousand apologies, your Reverence, would you mind stepping aside, chemistry is passing by!”

Comte will also claim that metaphysics, and monotheism, are “theologically arbitrary” — that they substitute fantasy and magic (“miracles”) at the expense of human emotion, which he calls the only authentic “religious spirit”: “Since the decrease in religious spirit, one has consequently had to create naturally the notion of miracle, properly speaking, in order to characterize exceptional events, those attributed to a special divine intervention. In the beginning, and while the theological philosophy was fully dominant, there were no miracles, since everything seemed equally marvelous. Minerva intervened to pick up the whip of a warrior in simple military games as well as to protect against a whole army…”

De Lubac, however, does not conceive of the metaphysical attitude as purely critical. He constructs an analogy, whereby theology is to myth what physics is to materialism and what metaphysics is to mystery. We might pun on positivism; the metaphysician, alone, is honest, because he isn’t “positive” about anything he has no reason to be positive about. He admits that the meaning of life transcends him, and accepts a spiritual orientation towards that mystery. Furthermore, we might say, in theological terms and against the Comtian accusation, that the reduction of the pantheon to a sole God (the work of metaphysics) is not a negative or an arbitrary movement; it allows the substance of the one God to permeate everywhere. De Lubac quotes Renan, who puts it nicely in the Cahiers de Jeunesse:

In his infancy, man and humanity does not conceive of the law of nature…He sees everywhere a supernatural action, God everywhere. In his second state, he observes the law through observation and induction, then he drives God out of the world, for he believes he no longer has need of him; from there, we have atheist philosophy…In his third state, he preserves the result acquired in the second, which is true; only he connects the laws themselves to God, the universal cause and true effector. From there, we have true, complete science…Instinct sees God everywhere and sees him nowhere; observation sees the law everywhere (hence its mocking, proud tone) and God nowhere. True philosophy sees God everywhere, acting freely through invariable laws because they are perfect.

We see in these musings a glimmer of Christianity’s light: it represents a marriage of fides et ratio, faith and reason, orientation towards the mystical and mysterious ground of our own existence without accepting just any cockamamie explanation for bizarre happenings. The Popes’ embrace of evolution, for instance, fits into this schema as well as does Jesus’ own pronouncement on the collapse of the Tower of Siloam (Luke 13:4). If only the sort of preacher in whose vocabulary the words “sacred mystery” do not exist — and who finds it, then, a lot easier to blame September 11 and Hurricane Katrina on Jews and homosexuals — had stumbled upon this page of the inerrant Scripture: “Those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them: do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means!”

The “metaphysical” view, which orients itself towards mystery, thus has this advantage over the “theological” view: it is mature enough, and secure enough, in its basic existential convictions that it neither loses faith nor retreats into radical extremism when the authority of modern science shows it the error of one or two of its beliefs or practices.

Still, the metaphysical view’s advantages over the physical, or positivist, view are equally great — not least that it admits to the existence of a category of realities unseen, realities which in my experience are the salvific ones. I’ve met murderers and rapists and victims of rape, and men and women struggling to free themselves from the ravages of addiction, who have come into my office and told me what it was that got them to reform their lives, and what it is that keeps them going through the horrible suffering of their days. It’s not membership in the Democratic party, it’s not a devotion to Flaubert and Hugo, and it’s not a firm grasp of the principles of Darwinian evolution; it’s grace, and it’s faith, and it’s God. That’s it. I invite any atheist to come up with a close and workable approximation; my mind, anyway, can’t conceive of one. When I stare into the abyss of my clients’ chaos, completely at a loss for words that will relativize their pain or offer a way out of their drama, the empty consolations of materialism become manifest. The happy ones, the ones that survive without resorting to violence, are the ones with God’s name on their lips; only reference to an ultimate meaning, which eludes us for now except for its capacity to make us feel loved, can put earthly meaninglessness into perspective.

I could give a hundred specific, real-life examples of this experience of mine, but it’s also true on the grander scale of the history of ideas. Freeing ourselves of the weight of God sounds wonderful, but it also deprives us of a shield against the meaninglessness of human existence that stares us in the face every time we look honestly at cosmic history. Levi-Strauss observed in Tristes Tropiques that “the world began without the human race, and will certainly end without it,” a statement whose melancholy is a symptom of the attitude Gabriel Marcel describes in the following analysis by de Lubac:

The “objective” world, in its most restrictive sense, is taken to be the totality of what is real, which constitutes a first impoverishment; and human reality is treated like the most inert of these “objects” to which it is assimilated. In this adolescent crisis, the essential new searches for the interior man are repulsed for a time, confused as they are with subjectivist maladies and distortions of interiority. At the same time, the intoxication of the future causes the loss of that sense of being to which one philosopher recently tried, with so much reason, to lead us. “Western man,” said Gabriel Marcel, “behaves officially more and more as if what I have called the higher soul were a survival, the useless relic of a fossil species.”

The perpetual yet ultimately weak remark that looking up at the stars and finding them beautiful — finding them, even, a sign of God’s creative genius — is proof that Christian spirituality can be “scientific” is no longer a sufficient rejoinder to the hard claims of modern science. More damningly for the Christian, though, it is not even enough to justify his own theological hopes, given that the universe stares back at him from the perspective of Voyager 1 and sees little more than the pale, blue dot famously described by Carl Sagan. For people in my office, it is often enough to have any Christianity at all, to supplant and purify with reason the naive superstitions they’ve grown up with. For human history, though, a far sharper and more rarefied Christianity needs to emerge. If popular theology doesn’t step up to the plate and address modern science, shrewdly, in its own language and on its own terms — even if that means admitting where theology has gone wrong — then I fear that an apocalyptic funk submerged beneath the surface of the positivist venture will bubble up and spread over all modernity like oil over the Gulf.

Good Friday

For me, the highlight of the Triduum was our parish’s live Via Crucis (“Way of the Cross”) on Good Friday. A cast of two dozen non-professional performers taken from parishes in our deanery acted out the Passion: most notably, a team of men dressed as Roman soldiers, lashing, spitting on, and shouting at the emaciated actor playing Christ, who staggered barefoot through the streets of our barrio hauling a life-sized wooden cross on his back. Wailing women, weeping ceaselessly, followed behind, as did a choir chanting songs of lamentation, and as did we — a crowd of some couple hundred people thronging the narrow streets of the public housing projects. Christ fell three times, and addressed the weeping women with ragged groans, on his way to being crucified. After the crucifixion, the actor’s body was taken down from the cross he had been “nailed” to and was carried into the church.

I was struck by the uncanny realism of the event, which utilized the principle of defamiliarization. When we see a film or a play, the conventional trappings of the screen and of the stage delineate a world which draws upon our emotional investment yet which we understand to be fictitious; but we are not used to the extrusion of drama into the fabric of our daily lives. I’m reminded of Halloween or other such imaginative pageants, where the strangeness of transforming our familiar neighborhoods, under cover of the nocturnal dark, into a network of haunted houses suspends, momentarily, our disbelief in ghosts. So too did seeing our barrio transformed into Golgotha, full of people in period dress and suffused with a spirit of collective sorrow, shatter my comfort and place me squarely in the midst of the narrative. Even when I recognized a few of the actors playing the cruel soldiers, shouting themselves hoarse and never breaking character, their hold on me was greater than any movie star’s could be; it was the very fact that I wouldn’t have expected these people to be particularly good actors which caused the striking realism of the performance to startle me completely.

Beholding the figure of Jesus limping ahead of me under the weight of the cross, I realized that despite my generally philosophical attraction to Christianity and chronic ambivalence towards what many Christians rhapsodically describe as a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ as savior,” to be a Christian is to be a follower not of an idea but of a man, who lived in our common history and established his life’s story, according to the will of the Father, as a testing ground for all subsequent ideas, ideologies, and impulses. Whether as a participant then, in Jerusalem, or now, in San Antonio, in the procession of this supposed criminal to the place of his execution, would I be a follower of Christ, or a mute witness to this violation of justice? Would I weep, or would I be above weeping? Over the course of the Via Crucis, an understanding of what it meant for God to suffer came over me, and a sweeping love of the person Jesus followed after it. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that love came first, and understanding after.

I was not alone that afternoon. While my fellow parishioners and I were all Christians, the soldiers did a good enough job of agitating the crowd that I could understand what it must be like to be part of a mob. Christ was not the victim of Herod or of Pilate or of the Chief Priest alone — he was the victim of a paroxysm of violence issued from a collective. The overwhelming feeling of indignation which came from seeing a host of accusers all ganging up on someone I knew to be innocent seems to validate the brilliant work of Rene Girard, the French anthropologist of violence who locates mimetic desire and the scapegoating mechanism at the heart of the human condition. According to Girard, most of our desires are not original; we don’t just want something because we think it would please us, but because we see others desiring it. All of the desires which circulate in a given society create an atmosphere of covetousness which leads to conflict. In order to preserve social order, the participants in the conflict will designate a third party to serve as a sacrificial victim, or scapegoat, upon whom they can channel their rage in a cathartic outburst of violence. Girard identifies an often overlooked but profoundly telling verse in Luke’s Gospel (23:12) in which the two agents of Christ’s crucifixion forge an alliance as abrupt and unexpected as it is sinister and slimy: “That day Herod and Pilate became friends, though they had always had enmity between them.”

Girard will go as far as to say that this is what makes Christianity so idiosyncratic: that while countless other religions have proposed a scapegoated hero (as detractors of Christianity’s uniqueness are constantly pointing out), demonstrating just how intrinsic this mechanism is to our sense of the sacred and of the social, it is Christianity alone which proposes a doctrine of Atonement. That is, God was not waylaid against his will, but purposefully and knowingly sent his incarnate son to his death in an act of self-sacrifice, thus subverting the mechanism of vengeance whose premise is the displacement of violence upon the Other. Christianity is the only religion to found itself upon this voluntary self-sacrifice, and his disciples were the only ones who broke the mold of history by finding unity not through victory but through persecution. (Eleven of the twelve original apostles, and countless others after them, followed their Master to a violent death.)

I think that Girard’s diagnosis is essentially correct and can explain why Jesus’ death is not just one act of social injustice among many and why taking part in the Via Crucis filled me with such horror; this death was the paradigmatic act of violence, for it involved a) a collective; b) a mockery of the idea of truth (cf. John 18:38); and c) the destruction of a lamb so innocent that he did not even try to escape the dictates of injustice but rushed headlong to the slaughter for the sake of Love. It is in the context of these reflections that I would like to address what for many Catholics was the elephant in the room on Good Friday: the abuse scandal in the contemporary Catholic Church.

Here one must tread carefully. I am not the first to have mentioned Girard in this context. This reflection, on one of my favorite Catholic blogs, appeared yesterday after I’d drafted most of this post; it covers a lot of the same ground as I do, but in reference to the theology of the priesthood. Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household, mentioned Girard first, in a homily which concluded by comparing contemporary criticism of the Catholic Church to anti-Semitism. However ill-advised, I believe his point was essentially valid. Of course Cantalamessa was not comparing anything to the Holocaust, to the level of whose evil virtually nothing can rise; and he wasn’t relativizing, diminishing, or denying the extraordinary evil of the sexual abuse of children committed and condoned by many within the Church. He was, however, seconding a shrewd observation (first proposed by a Jewish friend of his) that anti-Catholicism — often described, in my view correctly, as the “last acceptable prejudice” in today’s society — structures itself similarly to the way anti-Semitism often has. Austen Ivereigh, another blogger to jump on the Girardian bandwagon, describes it well:

As [Girard] writes in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, the modern scandal excites

“a feverish desire to differentiate between the guilty and the innocent, to allot responsibilities, to unmask the guilty secret without fear or favour and to distribute punishment. The person who is scandalised wants to bring the affair out into the open; he has a burning desire to see the scandal in the clear light of day and pillory the guilty party …. Scandal always calls for demystification, and demystification, far from putting an end to scandal, propagates and universalises it …  There must be scandal to demystify and the demystification reinforces the scandal it claims to combat. The more passions rise, the more the difference between those on opposite sides tends to be abolished.”

The scapegoat mechanism comes into play when tensions — often buried and unconscious — accumulate, when those involved must ‘let off steam’ or the social fabric will burst. The energy of indignation and anger is fuelled, over this issue, by the fact that sexual abuse of minors is extremely common in families — 70 per cent of victims have suffered at the hands of a relative — yet almost never talked about, let alone dealt with. The Church has become a surrogate victim, unconsciously  identified as the cause of the tension which society feels but cannot identify.

This is not a way of deflecting from the Church’s real failures on this issue, which the media’s relentless coverage has forced the Church to face. Nor is it a way of deflecting from some of the unique characteristics behind those failures in the Church — not least clericalism, past and present.

But the coverage has now moved into a new, irrational phase. The media have merged with the mob. They are not standing outside the crowd, coolly examining the facts. They are standing in locus vulgi.

Take the way that The Times — which in the UK has led the way in promoting hysteria and distortion in this issue – reports that the taliban atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are planning to “arrest” Pope Benedict when he comes to the UK.  In fact, as Dawkins spells out on his website, they are mounting a legal challenge aimed at whipping up public opinion against the papal visit. Rather than report this as a publicity gimmick, or at least point out how dubious are the legal arguments, The Times reports this as if it is a perfectly sensible response to established facts, and even enlists a semi-Catholic columnist to  agree with the idea.

The mechanism of scandal exerts a fascination which increases in line with the tension. The accusations pile up; facts cease to be sacred; the distinction between truth and hearsay blurs. There is carte blanche to demonise the scapegoat, whose guilt is largely irrelevant to the performance of the mechanism. When it is not in thrall to the mimetic contagion, journalism is one of the best means of exposing the irrationality of the scapegoat mechanism, because it relies on facts and evidence. But when journalism jettisons its responsibility to detachment, it becomes an agent of the hysteria.

Normally journalists are wary of being used by lawyers who have an obvious vested interest in advancing a certain narrative. Yet many media have been supplied with documents — such as the 1985 Ratzinger letter in the Kiesle case — by lawyers bring class actions against the Church on behalf of abuse victims. The interpretations which the lawyers are keen to put on them are precisely those which the media then uncritically adopt. When the scapegoat mechanism is in play, contradictions between agendas vanish. The crowd becomes “one”.

And so Herod and Pilate became friends.

Cantalamessa, then, was not comparing amounts of violence, but the form of related sorts of prejudicial rhetoric. The sexual abuse of children is objectively more evil than the writing of a slanderous article; but at question is whether righteous indignation at the sins of some in the Church can justify the explosion of outrageous anti-Catholic sentiment. Often those critics who carp about clericalism and the suppression of laypeople fail to realize that when hurt is inflicted against the Church, it is not just the Vatican, but lay members of the global Catholic family who feel insulted, hated, and despised; but the New York Times bristled pridefully at Cantalamessa’s preeminently justified observation because it cannot believe that so liberal a newspaper as itself could ever be responsible for propagating a hateful prejudice or that systematically demoralizing a people by assassinating the character of their leader can represent anything besides doing them a favor.

On a related note, it is interesting to read the Times’s continuing coverage of the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital. These are the kinds of casualties we can surely expect when archdioceses suffer. Nor, in thinking about the Catholic family beyond the Vatican, would it be inappropriate to remember the extent of the persecution of Christians across the world today: we are chased out of Mosul, massacred in Sudan, terrorized in India and Nepal, forced underground in China and Saudi Arabia. These persecutions are no more horrific than the segregation, lynching, and systematic marginalization of women, homosexuals, Jews, and racial and ethnic minorities in all times and places, including within Christendom. But it is notable that it is precisely in this expanded vision of the prevalence of prejudice that Cantalamessa situated his comments, in a homily whose most outspoken passages, having to do with violence against women, were almost systematically ignored by the mainstream media:

Much of this violence has a sexual background. It is the male who thinks he can demonstrate his virility by inflicting himself on the woman, without realizing that he is only demonstrating his insecurity and baseness. Also in confrontations with the woman who has made a mistake, what a contrast between the conduct of Christ and that still going on in certain environments! Fanaticism calls for stoning; Christ responds to the men who have presented an adulteress to him saying: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). Adultery is a sin that is always committed by two, but for which only one has always been (and, in some parts of the world, still is) punished.

Violence against woman is never so odious as when it nestles where mutual respect and love should reign, in the relationship between husband and wife. It is true that violence is not always and wholly on the part of one…but no one can deny that in the vast majority of cases the victim is the woman.

There are families where the man still believes himself authorized to raise his voice and hands on the women of the house. Wife and children at times live under the constant threat of “Daddy’s anger.” To such as these it is necessary to say courteously: dear men colleagues, by creating you male, God did not intend to give you the right to be angry and to bang your fist on the table for the least thing. The word addressed to Eve after the fault: “He (the man) shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16), was a bitter forecast, not an authorization.

John Paul II inaugurated the practice of the request for forgiveness for collective wrongs. One of these, among the most just and necessary, is the forgiveness that half of humanity must ask of the other half, men to women. It must not be generic or abstract. It must lead, especially in one who professes himself a Christian, to concrete gestures of conversion, to words of apology and reconciliation within families and in society.

For me, the most moving figure in the Via Crucis was Mary. The elderly woman from the West Side who played the role was transfixed like a woman possessed on the broken figure of her son. As the soldiers bullied her and kept her from going to his side, her sobs came pouring out of her like sirens, and her hands twisted and kneaded her tattered robe into knots. Just to look at her was to know the depths of human sorrow. What are you doing to my son? The mute protest could suddenly be our own: What are you doing to our mother? What are you doing to our Lord? What are you doing to our community, to our Church? God’s imploring words to the prophet Micah (6:3), which appear in the Church’s liturgy during Holy Week, sprang to mind: “O my people — what have I done to you? How have I saddened you? Tell me!”

This sentiment speaks to our situation as Catholics today: what have we done to you, o world, that you should hate us so? In truth, there may be a good answer to this question. We count sinners among us. In our theological caution we often lapse into prejudiced conservatism and intolerance. And it may be that some in the Church colluded to keep silent in the face of reports of sexual abuse, themselves scapegoating innocent children — not out of anger or derision, but out of fear or indifference. Just now the Pope has exhorted the Church to face such sins honestly and do penance for them, and I wonder whether, in my haste to defend the Church, I am not sometimes putting a blind and naive love over and above the hard yet necessary truth. For all the people in the Church who have learned the tough lessons of this past decade’s revelations (to wit, recent rushes to action in Knoxville and Denver which can only be called, for good or for ill, draconian), I hear statements like these ones coming from the curial offices I respect so much and feel simply sick to my stomach.

Yet are the sins of some in the Church any reason to despise the entire notion of Catholicism, and indeed the entire Catholic family, as utterly as some in the world clearly do — people who can find absolutely nothing but hateful things to say about us and are completely incapable of granting us any benefit of the doubt? Are we worthy of nothing but contempt? Are we not human, and pricked, do we not bleed? It is no secret to my friends that I am moved, in particular, by the scapegoating of Pope Benedict, the man who has done more than anyone else in the Vatican to reform the church’s process for dealing with abuse. (He makes an easy target. I can imagine this timid academic, introverted to a fault, looking at his own aged, haggard, and fearful face in the mirror on the morning of his election to one of the most public positions in the world, and wondering whether he will be able to force an awkward smile when he greets the crowds of people waiting to catch a glimpse of the new pope in St. Peter’s Square. In front-page photos — like the one below — which depict him gazing cautiously out from sunken eyes, the media hasn’t ceased to pillory him.)

It wouldn’t be self-pitying, I think, to reflect alongside Bishop Zubik of Pittsburgh:

“I ache. I’m sick and tired. I’m angry. I’m insulted. I’m confronted by the headlines of newspapers and ongoing stories that seek to once again annihilate the body of Christ. It would be an absolute lie on my part to stand here today to say we bear no responsibility for great sins committed in the past by people who were trusted leaders of the church, by priests, deacons, bishops and others. So that is not what gives me the ache. What gives me the ache is not only the hunger and thirst to rush to judgment without an honest look at the facts, but the absolute hatred and disrespect for who we are and especially for what we believe.”

These were something of my emotions as I followed Christ in the Via Crucis.

Easter Morning

And yet, this is the Easter message: that “we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness” (Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi). First of all, even and especially in times of trial, the followers of Christ are aware of his closeness to us, are aware that in him God has revealed his inmost secret: he is not a deity immune to pain, for whom we wretched and vulnerable mortals are scapegoats of the divine plan, but a god whose very being is constituted in part by the knowledge of suffering, of the horror of the prospect of his own non-existence as Love. A god who knows all things forever knows suffering forever, too, and this may be why Pascal wrote that Christ is in agony till the end of time. Indeed, is ultimate knowledge of this cosmic agony not what we human beings, who regard equality with God as something to be grasped, also desired to possess for ourselves when we eagerly plucked the fruit (or so the story goes) from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? We are united with God through our shared pain — the pain which we become like God in understanding, by the light of our consciousness, and which God becomes like us in suffering, through his Incarnation in the world. This, I think, is the redemptive message concealed in Bishop Zubik’s “ache,” a message he articulates beautifully at the end of his homily: “We would not be celebrating the Eucharist today if God did not ache.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Eucharist lately. The obscure dogma of the transsubstantiation never made much sense to me until I read a brilliant study by the recently deceased Dutch-Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, OP. Implicit in Schillebeeckx’s approach, which stresses a return to the existential experience of the early Church, is the idea that looking back from the present day at the Institution of the Eucharist with a mind to gleaning the sources of its metaphysical nature would be taking things literally backwards. Rather, we should remind ourselves of the question Christ must have posed to himself on the night he was betrayed: “How shall I continue to abide with my disciples? Will I leave them without a visible sign of my presence?” His solution, if I may put it with these emphases, was not that in the pre-established Eucharist he should abide with us, but that he should abide with us in the Eucharist, which had yet to be instituted. (It existed, of course, as a Jewish seder, but the Christian meaning given to it by Jesus was novel and unique.) According to Schillebeeckx, who reminds us of the Aristotelian complexity of even the Tridentine conceptualization of the doctrine of transsubstantiation, the mean transformation of bread into flesh is not the point of the Sacrament. It is that in the breaking of the bread — understanding the Sacrament, now, as a communal and liturgical action of which the formal words are a co-constitutive part, along with the bread, and not just an inciting agent — we are nourished by Christ’s promised presence among us believers. Schillebeeckx writes:

Originally, the emphasis was not on interpreting this meal, but on celebrating and experiencing it. In celebrating this meal, early Christians had the experience of being a Church — an eschataological community on the basis of their personal relationship with Jesus, whom they had come to know explicitly as the Christ in the resurrection. This personal relationship with Jesus — concretely expressed in community with him at table — was experienced then as a christological and therefore as an eschatological relationship — as being placed before the living God. The primitive church had the experience of being an eschatological community, the people of the New Covenant, on the way to the kingdom of God, in and by celebrating the fraternal meal, as had happened before when Jesus was still on earth…They expressed what the personal relationship — the community at table — with Jesus meant to the primitive Church and continued to mean after his departure — namely, his real presence in the assembled community.

I think it is telling that on Good Friday and Holy Saturday (until the Vigil Mass), no Catholic Mass is celebrated. The resumption of the consecration of the Eucharist on Easter really does symbolize the way in which Christ, taken from us on the Cross, returns to us under the form of bread; in the celebration of our Christian community, which is to say, in the construction of Church; and in memory of him who voluntarily replaced the sacrificial lamb at the offertory table. Were Christ not “really present” in the Sacrament, were the Sacrament just another symbol or sign, then our celebration would be self-serving, and our unity just another treacherous peace secured through the scapegoating mechanism identified so perspicaciously by Rene Girard. But the sign of Christ’s victory over the grave is nonetheless our unity, and it’s in thinking about unity that I’d like to end these meandering reflections.

I’ve sometimes joked that going to the jam-packed 11:00 am Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe is like stepping into one of those season finale episodes of The Simpsons — the ones where there is a scene at the City Hall or some other meeting place, and as the camera pans over the assembly, you see that every character ever drawn over the course of the series is stuffed into that room: Moe, Barney, Apu, Mr. Burns, Milhouse… Similarly, when I scan the church I can see Carlos, Pearl, Lee, Joe, Calie, Don, Stephanie, Carmen…everyone I’ve come to know has her or his little cameo appearance there. And it’s extraordinary. Literally every single friend who celebrates the Eucharist with us makes it a richer and more joyful experience of Communion. I try to impress this upon the youth who do not really care to attend Mass: even though it’s first and foremost about you and God, it’s also about you and us, and even about you and me. I want your prayers and your presence, and you validate me (and everyone who is there) when you attend. Or again: not all of my housemates are Catholic, but when I looked around me on Easter and saw that all of my friends who don’t usually attend Mass were there, I felt a surge of almost ridiculous joy.

I hasten to explain that it’s not about my having “won them over” to Catholicism. I know I haven’t, and that wouldn’t be my top priority, anyway. It’s about my own discovery of the true meaning of the Church: God who is love replaced the Judaic covenant, which had by then deteriorated into legalism and self-righteousness, with a community centered around a person, Jesus, who (after all) prayed on the night of his betrayal “that we all might be as one” (John 17:21). The hierarchy of the Church does not always place this principle of unity first; playing a politics of exclusion with the Eucharist (especially regarding pro-choice politicians), or nurturing an atmosphere of homophobia, Mass can occasionally seem like an invitation-only event for the elite. This has alienated some of my friends from the Church, and I cannot pass judgment on them for their decision to cut themselves loose. Still, I think it is the wrong decision; the least I can say is that every person I know who has ceased going to Church has made the Eucharistic celebration just a little sadder, a little emptier, for the rest of us. We miss them. We need them. We need each other.

I spent some time at the ecumenical community in Taize, France, which is the only place in the world which has an indult from the Vatican to grant Communion to non-Catholics. I do not disagree with the Church’s teaching that one should, in principle, be Catholic to receive the Eucharist — not so that non-Catholics can be excluded, but so that the person who decides to place herself on the road to Catholicism can know the joy of her First Communion, a joy which is heightened by anticipation and discipline (values foreign to postmodern humanity, which demands immediate gratification in everything), like a person who decides to abstain from sex until marriage. Still, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that the spirit of Taize has not permeated me deeply. I was heartened, for instance, when Cardinal Ratzinger, the future pope, offered Communion to the Protestant prior of Taize, Frere Roger, at Pope John Paul II’s funeral. I used to be derisive of people who remained in the Church not because they accepted all the theology but because they enjoyed the sense of community the Church gave them; yet Love is personal in character, not ideological. Certainly relationships should take precedence in our hearts over ideas, however necessary good ideas may be. And the scapegoating mechanism is so pernicious and so prevalent and so central to the definition of evil that perhaps it is first and foremost in community, and in inclusion, that we should look to see it beaten into the dust. This is what’s been informing my interest in the Eucharist lately and giving new meaning to the words of the Agnus Dei: “This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. How happy are we who are called to his supper.” In Eucharistic solidarity with the Lamb, may we peacefully oppose the violence of division and derision whose model is the mechanism of scapegoating.

It may sound ridiculous, but the nightmare filled me with real anxiety. Even those believers whose recourse to organized religion is not essentially neurotic — is not at its core a desperate attempt to impose an artificial order on a chaotic existence, but is rather the natural result of honest searching which has arrived at a genuine acceptance of the veracity of the claims of faith — do nonetheless put enough trust in the institution of their choice that its structures often begin to seem synonymous with the very structure of reality. This, in my opinion, is both inevitable and blameless, so long as this trust does not remain uncritical for long. At any rate, the phenomenon explains why the latest scandal to unfold in the Catholic Church is the closest I’ve come to seeing my old nightmare come true. Seeing, in particular, how close the scandal has come to the Pope himself — a man whom I respect more than any other alive, whom I would indeed identify as my “hero” (if I had to identify anyone as such) — has been upsetting and truly surreal; every new and damning headline seems like something from a Dan Brown novel, and more than one commentator has suggested that this is the defining moment for Benedict’s papacy and, indeed, for the modern Church.

Were I really a high-ranking prelate in the Roman curia, my first official response would be an apology to all those whom the Church has betrayed in any way. Indeed, when last Sunday’s reading featured the story of the raising of Lazarus, the detail that most caught my attention was that in that tale the corpse of Jesus’ beloved friend has begun to stink; and it seemed like a massive missed opportunity when our priest in San Antonio gave a homily that didn’t reflect, in light of current events, on this key detail. Lazarus did not possess that legendary quality of saints: their corpses’ immunity to decay. In fact (and this our priest did mention, albeit without reference to pedophilia), St. Augustine proposed that this resurrection story is dramatically different from the resurrections of Jairus’ daughter and of the son of the widow of Nain in that those figures strike us as holy innocents, while Lazarus is a man whose body has been festering for days. Augustine viewed this rot as symbolic of the lingering corruption of sin.

However, I am not a prelate; I don’t think, frankly, that I personally have much to apologize for; and it would be disingenuous to pretend that I could speak for the whole Church which does. More to the point, every day’s reading of the New York Times makes me feel as though it is actually incumbent on me to respond as rationally I know that no one should: defensively. While media reportage of the Church’s problems is a moral obligation — and I can’t overemphasize that fact — figures like Rachel Donadio, Laurie Goodstein, and Nicholas Kulish have crossed a line. (Maureen Dowd qualifies, too, but her screeds against the Catholic Church are so routinely uninformed that it’s difficult to take her very seriously.) They have turned to scurrilous character assassination, manipulation of facts, shabby reportage, and demagogic generalizations that are unseemly for such professional journalists, and which deserve to be addressed head-on.

I can’t help but rue New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s knee-jerk blog post a few months back accusing the Times of anti-Catholic prejudice. The post was justified yet tactless, not terribly well argued, and incredibly poorly timed; no doubt it enraged the paper’s staff enough that now that it has an actual case to make against the episcopacy, it’s pulling out all the stops. But at heart, I agree with Archbishop Dolan that these columnists are pretty clearly biased, and their coverage of the latest scandal has reached a truly despicable low. Therefore I’d like to offer just a few reflections on a few important points.

The Murphy Case

Let’s take, first, the article which broke a week ago concerning the case of Father Lawrence Murphy. Murphy was a priest in the Diocese of Milwaukee who abused as many as 200 deaf schoolchildren in the 1970s; through an ingenious and disingenuous manipulation of the real timeline of the case, the NYT’s charge is that the Church failed to discipline Murphy for twenty years, until finally Archbishop Rembert Weakland reopened it in the 1990s. When Archbishop Weakland recommended to the Vatican that Murphy be punished, however, then-Cardinal Ratzinger — the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) — supposedly paid more heed to Murphy’s pathetic plea that he was too old to face the indignity of demotion, and the case was summarily dismissed.

The original article sounds more damning, even, than that, which to anyone honest enough to look at the actual facts is shockingly unfair. First of all, the accusation is always heard that the Church failed to punish criminal priests, as though the Church enjoyed the power to dole out legal penalties. It does not. In this case, Murphy was tried in a civil court within a few years of committing his crimes — but the charges were, for some completely unidentified reason, dropped. Note that the newspaper’s headlines frame the story as: “Warned, the Vatican fails to respond.” Cardinal Ratzinger’s name is dragged through the mud because it appears in the letterhead of a single document twenty years later; but what was the name of the judge, district attorney, or prosecutor who failed the call of justice in that civil court? Why doesn’t the legal system at large stand accused of fostering a culture of silence, irresponsibility, and disbelief of innocent victims? In fact, after the civil justice system failed to prosecute Murphy in the mid-70s, the Catholic Church was the only entity which disciplined Murphy at all, and swiftly, sending him into exile at his family home in the northern Diocese of Superior.

The biggest question is why, at this point, the priest was not defrocked. We again need to interrogate the system at large. The 1970s was a time when psychoanalysis was taking its place as a major medical science with claims to holding the key to the secrets of the human mind. Additionally, the sexual revolution and development of Kinseyian sexology had the effect of relativizing sexual deviance. The result seems to have been that secular, clinical psychiatrists believed pedophiles could be treated, cured, and reassigned. This was not the invention of Catholic bishops, although it did play into their at times naive belief that any human being can be redeemed, and it did take advantage of their ignorance regarding the true scale of the pedophilia crisis (which didn’t become evident until approximately the year 2001). The bishops simply followed the best available advice, and must have felt quite open-minded and modern in doing so.

Flash forward, then, a few decades (in which no new complaints about Father Murphy ever surfaced). In 1993 Archbishop Weakland hears from some of Murphy’s victims, who are understandably and justifiably angry at the Church. He investigates the Murphy case and although the ecclesiastical statute of limitations has passed, decides to attempt to prosecute the priest, anyway. At that time, child abuse was not under the jurisdiction of the high authority of the CDF (this would change as soon as the extent of the pedophilia problem became known), but soliciting sex of any kind under the seal of the Sacrament of Confession was. Since this was one of the things Murphy stood accused of, Weakland wrote to the CDF asking whether the statute of limitations could be waived in this particular case. The CDF, through its Secretary, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, responded affirmatively. (And what else could one have hoped from the Vatican?) Weakland continued with the prosecution.

Here is where the Times’s version of the story strays most drastically from the truth. The Times claims that Murphy wrote to Ratzinger begging for mercy, and Ratzinger dropped the case. In fact, Murphy wrote to Ratzinger, who never responded. Bertone did respond (because it was his responsibility, not Ratzinger’s), following protocol by suggesting that Weakland and the Bishop of the Diocese of Superior, Raphael Fliss, take Murphy’s request into account before proceeding. Fliss responds that the trial will proceed (in a document which the Times melodramatically entitles “Bishop of Superior Rejects Vatican Guidance” in its electronic dossier). After a meeting in Rome among Fliss, Weakland, and Bertone, whose minutes demonstrate what is to my mind an impressive canniness on the part of the bishops, it is decided that a trial will be abated and Murphy will be declared, directly, “irregular for ministry.”

If anyone anywhere — in Guantanamo or elsewhere — were to be so summarily punished without a trial, I think that most of the people who are protesting that the priest was given the easy way out would be complaining that the civil rights of the accused had been violated. Yet the Times ignores the fact that the bishops’ decision ensured that Murphy would be stripped of his priestly faculties in all but name, or that further measures were then laid out so that the priest could be evaluated by psychiatrists (one of the reasons a trial was foregone was that damning evidence would have been hard to come by after twenty years!) before deciding whether to prosecute further — a decision which could easily have resulted in his being defrocked. Certainly through no fault of the bishops’ own, though, Murphy died less than a month later, before the trial could ever reach that stage.

My own conclusion is one I hold firmly: if the Times authors did not blatantly lie, they are guilty of one of the sleaziest and most dishonest bits of reporting that I’ve ever noted in its pages.

Pope Benedict XVI

I want to be clear that I am not applauding the institutional Church’s general response to the odious problem of child abuse. Far more should have been done, and far sooner, and there have undoubtedly been hierarchs blatantly guilty of looking the other way so as to shield the Church’s reputation. To pretend otherwise would be useless because such short-sightedness and selfishness is intrinsic to human nature, and it would be counterproductive precisely because the notion that any church could be so constituted that some of its leaders would not sometimes betray its founding principles of love and charity would be nothing more than a fantasy. I love this lesson from John Paul I, the hapless pope who reigned for barely a month before dying suddenly in his sleep:

The more frequent objections you will hear will go straight against the Church. Perhaps an anecdote told by Pitigrilli will be able to help you. In London, at Hyde Park, a preacher is speaking outdoors. He is interrupted by a ruffled and dirty individual. ‘The Church has existed for two thousand years,’ says this individual. ‘And the world is full of thieves, adulterers, killers.’ ‘You are right,’ the preacher replies. ‘But water has existed for two million centuries, and look how filthy your neck is.’

In other words: there have been bad Popes, bad Priests, bad Catholics. But what does that mean? That the Gospel has been applied? No, just the opposite. In those cases, the Gospel has not been applied.

Yet two questions remain once we have acknowledged that certain individuals, even religious ones, will inevitably act sinfully: is Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, one such individual? And what are the systemic deficiencies inherent in the institutional Church, above and beyond any individual’s errors, which prolonged or aggravated the crisis?

At the risk of pedantry, I’d like to meditate at length on the figure of Joseph Ratzinger. As the media has begun to focus its attention on his brief tenure as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, it’s been said by both his supporters and his detractors that he is first and foremost an intellectual, a philosopher, not a manager. I fundamentally agree, and I think that Ratzinger does, too. It’s as a philosopher that he first entered my life and it’s as such that I’ll first consider him here.

A few years ago, difficult circumstances in my life left me mired in a sense of hopelessness and, frequently, despair. Underpinning these specific circumstances, though, was a generalized feeling familiar to me since childhood that my frame of reference in dealing with reality has always been a bit different from most people’s. At some point it occurred to me that the Roman Catholic framework fit me well, but doubts about the historical Jesus would frequently revisit me and cripple me with anxiety about the ultimate meaningfulness and reliability of Christianity. Moreover, while I’d met many people who understood my predicament, I had encountered only a handful of minds whose own predicament, I felt, it also was (a kind of self-recognition in the being of an Other which is often, though not always, experienced as falling in love). At the time I was in France I was either very distant or a little alienated from people I’d gotten along with so well, which only complicated my feeling of loneliness in the world, my feeling — which very many people have about themselves — that I did not belong to the common reality of our race.

Just as it is difficult to describe adequately what it is about a person that makes one fall in love, I am finding it difficult to evoke what it is about Joseph Ratzinger that attracts me so much. Simply, when I encountered his writing, I fell in love with it — and in a way, with him. Reading his work, I have the sense that we speak the same language (though he speaks it far better than I do!) — that in this world there is another human being which resonates on the same “wavelength,” and with whom I feel a preternatural kinship.

What are some of the characteristics of this language? I’ll describe it obliquely. One articulation of it is Benedict’s book Jesus of Nazareth, which I first read while on sabbatical in Taize. One “background” quality is its humility before the truth. One whole chapter of the book is devoted to an excited academic discussion of some claims by Rabbi Joseph Neusner, whom the Pope credits with teaching him things he’d never realized about Jesus. The foregoing paragraphs will give some indication of why I am so moved by Neusner’s response to the book’s publication: Neusner remarked that Benedict’s treatment of his ideas was so reverential that it was as though the pope had written him “a love letter.”

Benedict’s book did address a great many of my concerns about the veracity of the historical Jesus’ claims. That is neither here nor there. To learn how the Pope’s “humility,” as I perceive it — his ability to take very seriously the competing claims of someone outside of his philosophical paradigm (indeed, his frequent and not unappreciative references to people like Adorno and Marx are fascinating to me) — might incarnate an even bolder spirit, we might turn to the encyclicals. They are stark contrasts to those of his predecessor John Paul II. John Paul always began with a passage from the Gospel or with some salient aspect of Jesus’ life or ministry, and proceeded to ask what this wisdom might tell us about some modern social or ethical question. Benedict’s approach is the reverse, and Spe Salvi, which I have quoted many times on this blog, is the typical example. Here as in many of his writings as Joseph Ratzinger, we see him beginning with a question of modern humanity, and elaborating all manner of possible responses to this question. It is only eventually that he arrives at Christianity, which, he proposes, offers something unique which other ideologies cannot approximate.

This approach seems to me far more honest and less beholden to preconceived notions of the truth; conveniently, it also parallels my own intellectual journey into the Church, a journey which began with a totally uncommitted faith and proceeded, almost despite itself, by way of repeated questioning of what has seemed to me to be the truth. While Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) was a parish priest at heart, raised in a fanatically devout underground church (that of the mystical and credulous land of Poland), Ratzinger was a theologian who worked in a country, Germany, beset by post-Enlightenment and post-Holocaust skepticism (and the inexorable emptying out of the Christian faith of Europe remains a topic of deep concern to Ratzinger to this day). He is the first pope whose encyclical letters seem written as much for the doubting spirit as for the committedly Christian spirit. Accusations that Ratzinger is a doctrinaire conservative who cares about nothing but dogma evidence an extraordinary ignorance of the truth of his life, from his early days as a philosopher to his current tenure as pope.

In the 60s, Ratzinger — along with “liberal” names like de Lubac, Rahner, and von Balthasar — was a leading proponent of the so-called nouvelle théologie, an ingenious movement which rediscovered in the ancient, pre-Scholastic Christian experience a subjective mystical encounter with the novelty of Christianity, the experience of which understands,without refuting, the agnostic situation of modern humanity. When the ground-breaking Second Vatican Council was convened, Karol Wojtyla literally took a back seat, never participating from his position at the rear of St. Peter’s Basilica. Ratzinger, on the other hand, was a theological expert deeply involved in some of the Council’s most pressing questions. This is not an essay on the theology of Joseph Ratzinger, so I won’t go to any lengths to defend my idea that his academic and philosophical work still fits squarely within this “new theological” framework, but it is doubtless fair to say — returning to the subject of the encyclical — that John Paul II would never have written, as Benedict did with Caritas in Veritate, a 100+ -page encyclical, the most important literary form of papal teaching, analyzing the state of contemporary economics and the relationship of love and truth including less than a dozen direct references to Jesus Christ. It is also unlikely that John Paul would have written as heartbreaking a meditation on the apparent desirability of death, nor as Eastern a vision of a Heaven that sounds more like Nirvana than Dante’s Paradise, as bookend Paragraphs 10-12 of Benedict’s Spe Salvi.

One of the main themes of Benedict’s thought — and this idea finds expression in Caritas in Veritate — is that metaphysical ideas are neither irrelevant to a person’s daily, lived existence nor interchangeable with each other. Love, as the title of the encyclical insists, must be practiced in light of the truth; it is not enough to throw philosophy to the wind and “simply love.” If we have bad ideas about the nature of reality, sooner or later our concrete ethical existence will suffer. The encyclical is a magisterial case study of the ways in which the ideology of capitalism vis-a-vis the free market has led to the current economic and moral crisis the world has faced in the last few years; but although the subject of the letter is a current event, its formulation remains philosophical. In a way, the ultimate test of the validity of the pope’s ideas will be the way this academic, now a pastor responsible for the tasks of governance which as an archbishop he could delegate to others, will respond to an utterly material problem: the sex abuse crisis.

And this is why the headlines that have recently emerged have seemed so surreal to me. It is much safer to argue in favor of the pope’s ideas against others whose only ammunition is ideological in nature. Far more difficult is to imagine that the pope was in fact an administrator and that his critics could point to administrative blunders to back up their case. Is it possible that this brilliant and beautiful thinker — whose ideas literally gave me a new and hopeful lease on life — allowed a proven pedophile to continue abusing young boys? Certainly the recently exposed case of Father Peter Hullermann in Ratzinger’s Archdiocese of Munich does not bode well for a defense of Benedict XVI.

Ratzinger in Munich and in Rome

Benedict’s defenders will take the Reverend Gerhard Gruber, then-Archbishop Ratzinger’s vicar general, at his word. Gruber handled much of the day-to-day administrative business of the archdiocese and has claimed responsibility for the decision to reassign the pedophile priest. Again, it should be noted, without minimizing the extent of its error, that this was much the sort of action prescribed by secular psychiatrists in the 1970s; but wouldn’t Ratzinger have read the memo forwarded to his desk, and shouldn’t he admit responsibility for the decision? According to the minutes of the meeting at which the memo was discussed, and at which Ratzinger was present, the text did not elaborate the reasons for which Hullermann had been assigned to therapy; it only indicated that he’d had to take time off and that he was re-entering active ministry. So yes, it probably would have been prudent for Ratzinger to have made a more in-depth inquiry; the fact that he didn’t proves nothing but that he is human and capable of making human mistakes. I don’t think this mistake merits the kind of hyperbolic criticism this incident has garnered him. But honestly, no one seems to have enough information about that particular event to be able to make a clear judgment either way.

What is clear is how much Ratzinger has done to address the problem of sex abuse, without any of its being reported openly or accurately by the mainstream media. For instance, it is often reported that in 2001 Ratzinger issued an executive order demanding that people with knowledge of the priestly abuse of minors conceal it from the civil authorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. The letter De delictis gravioribus in fact updates a 1962 instruction called Crimen sollicitationis which forwarded certain abuses of the Sacraments to the CDF, the Church’s highest court capable of defrocking a priest. Think back to the Murphy case. It was so difficult to defrock Murphy because in the 1990s, only abuse of Confession, and not child abuse in and of itself, could officially be referred to the CDF. De delictis gravioribus was written after the 2001 abuse crisis broke and Ratzinger realized that the scale of the problem was a matter of the utmost importance. If there were accusations that the new text counseled silence towards civil authorities, it was because Crimen sollicitationis was written with a mind to protecting priests’ reputation before they were proven guilty (and those incidents under its purview, such as desecrating the Eucharist or coming onto someone in the Confessional, couldn’t be prosecuted under the law, anyway). De delictis gravioribus makes no mention of civil law, as such is not within the scope of its dogmatic power, and in no way demands that churchmen keep things hidden from civil authorities.

John Allen is a veteran, and admirably independent, papal reporter with a clear view of what Vatican insiders have been saying for a decade: Ratzinger, perhaps more than anyone else in the high-level curia, understood what was going on and worked ferociously to address the crisis. Allen, who describes Ratzinger as a “Catholic Elliot Ness” regarding sex abuse, deserves to be quoted at length. In the National Catholic Reporter, he writes of De delictis gravioribus:

Far from being seen as part of the problem, at the time it was widely hailed as a watershed moment towards a solution. It marked recognition in Rome, really for the first time, of how serious the problem of sex abuse really is, and it committed the Vatican to getting directly involved. Prior to that 2001 motu proprio and Ratzinger’s letter, it wasn’t clear that anyone in Rome acknowledged responsibility for managing the crisis; from that moment forward, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would play the lead role.

Beginning in 2001, Ratzinger was forced to review all the files on every priest credibly accused of sexual abuse anywhere in the world, giving him a sense of the contours of the problem that virtually no one else in the Catholic church can claim. In a recent article (NOTE: it’s highly worth a read!), I outlined the “conversion experience” Ratzinger and his staff went through after 2001. Beforehand, he came off as just another Roman cardinal in denial; after his experience of reviewing the files, he began to talk openly about the “filth” in the church, and his staff became far more energetic about prosecuting abusers.

For those who have followed the church’s response to the crisis, Ratzinger’s 2001 letter is therefore seen as a long overdue assumption of responsibility by the Vatican, and the beginning of a far more aggressive response.

Allen continues:

Ratzinger’s top deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on sex abuse cases, Maltese Monsignor Charles Scicluna, recently gave an interview to an Italian Catholic paper in which he said that of the more than 3,000 cases eventually referred to Rome, only 20 percent were subjected to a full canonical trial. In some reporting, including the Thursday piece in The New York Times, this figure has been cited as evidence of Vatican “inaction.”

Once again, however, those who have followed the story closely have almost exactly the opposite impression.

Back in June 2002, when the American bishops first proposed a set of new canonical norms to Rome, the heart of which was the “one strike and you’re out” policy, they initially wanted to avoid canonical trials altogether. Instead, they wanted to rely on a bishop’s administrative power to permanently remove a priest from ministry. That’s because their experience of Roman tribunals over the years was that they were often slow, cumbersome, and the outcome was rarely certain.

Most famously, bishops and experts would point to the case of Fr. Anthony Cipolla in Pittsburgh, during the time that Donald Wuerl, now the Archbishop of Washington, was the local bishop. Wuerl had removed Cipolla from ministry in 1988 following allegations of sexual abuse. Cipolla appealed to Rome, where the Apostolic Signatura, in effect the Vatican’s supreme court, ordered him reinstated. Wuerl then took the case to Rome himself, and eventually prevailed. The experience left many American bishops, however, with the impression that lengthy canonical trials were not the way to handle these cases.

When the new American norms reached Rome, they ran into opposition precisely on the grounds that everyone deserves their day in court — another instance, in the eyes of critics, of the Vatican being more concerned about the rights of abuser priests than victims. A special commission of American bishops and senior Vatican officials brokered a compromise, in which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would sort through the cases one-by-one and decide which ones would be sent back for full trials.

The fear at the time was that the congregation would insist on trials in almost every case, thereby dragging out the administration of justice, and closure for the victims, almost indefinitely. In the end, however, only 20 percent were sent back for trials, while for the bulk of the cases, 60 percent, bishops were authorized to take immediate administrative action, because the proof was held to be overwhelming.

The fact that only 20 percent of the cases were subjected to full canonical trial has been hailed as a belated grasp in Rome of the need for swift and sure justice, and a victory for the more aggressive American approach to the crisis. It should be noted, too, that bypassing trials has been roundly criticized by some canon lawyers and Vatican officials as a betrayal of the due process safeguards in church law.

Hence to describe that 20 percent figure as a sign of “inaction” cannot help but seem, to anyone who’s been paying attention, rather ironic. In truth, handling 60 percent of the cases through the stroke of a bishop’s pen has, up to now, more often been cited as evidence of exaggerated and draconian action by Ratzinger and his deputies.

Benedict believes that only the truth can set us free. This is his truth, and I buy it: that a prelate can be tough on crime within his church, and pour out all his love upon the church’s victims, without making the Times‘s absurd leap to the conclusion that the entire church is flawed and stained by sin and needs to be taken down and rebuilt from the bottom, up.

Ireland and the U.S.

Where has all this left us? The disgraceful situation in Ireland, in which an epidemic of physical and sexual abuse of schoolchildren was perpetuated by clergy and ignored by law enforcement, sparked an uproar about a year ago, during which time the world has waited for Benedict’s response. Just as one of the first major acts of his pontificate was removing the powerful founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Degollado, for having lived a double life rife with sexual misconduct, and soon thereafter ordering an Apostolic Visitation of the Legionaries, Benedict has recently chastised the Church in Ireland with a strongly worded pastoral letter which promised a forthcoming Apostolic Visitation of certain troubled dioceses in that country. Naturally, the Times and other media outlets characterized the letter as a failure, big on words and scant on punishment…completely oblivious to how big a deal an Apostolic Visitation is and — absolutely mind-bogglingly — completely omitting the merest mention of it (though where it suits their purposes they will antagonistically brand such Visitations “doctrinal inquisitions,” such as where it concerns Rome’s investigation of American women’s religious orders suspected of diverging too far to the left of Catholic dogma).

Despite the reports of abuse which ran rampant in Ireland decades ago, the Church has been hell-bent on a self-improvement campaign which has already shown astonishing results. Despite the decline of a culture of secrecy and timidity around clergy — indeed, the media, if not the Catholic faithful, seem to be involved in a clerical witch-hunt — only six allegations of child abuse by priests were reported in the United States in 2009. Given the length of time it takes for victims to find the courage and support necessary to speak out against their abusers, it’s obviously far too early to give this statistic much credence; but other elements of an independent audit whose results were released a week ago (to the deafening silence of the New York Times) are impressive for what they say about the Church’s internal reforms. Anecdotally, I can say that in only seven months as an employee of the Catholic Church, I’ve been through extensive training on the avoidance and reporting of sexual harassment and sexual abuse not once but twice ; these sessions were required for the entire staff, and not just for new hires. Not two weeks ago, a safe environment accreditation seminar which all Jesuits of the New Orleans Province must follow rolled through our parish for the ten Jesuits in the San Antonio-Austin area.

This post has been heavy on apologetics. Put simply, there is much I had to get out of my system; it’s also true that there is always another side to every story, and the Times has cleaved to a Darth Vader view of the Church which denies this simple truth. To reiterate once more, however, I don’t believe that the truth can be found in arrogance, pride, and excuses. Empathy with the victims is what is needed most, and the pope, after all, is a “tough bird” (as this very good analysis shows). We do need more people like Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, a veritable hero of the Irish Church who has time after time called for episcopal accountability and issued countless mea culpas. Also gratifying are a wave of resignations on the Emerald Isle: to date, Bishops Donal Murray of Limerick, James Moriarty of Kildare, Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field of Dublin, and John Magee of Cloyne, a huge number unprecedented in modern Church history…and the Apostolic Visitation hasn’t even commenced yet! (We will see what happens to Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh, the highest-ranking prelate accused of mismanagement.) May their willingness to admit to sins committed be an example to all Catholic Christians.

Four Images of Pope Benedict XVI

And Pope Benedict? Should he resign, as many have suggested? It’s been about six hundred years since a pope has done so, and in an odd way, I imagine it may be tempting to Benedict: the papacy is a job he never asked for, and since his appointments to the Archbishopric of Munich and Freising and to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he’s wanted nothing more than to retire to his library and work on some books he’s been longing to write since his days in the University but has never been given the chance. Made pope at seventy-eight, having his retirement whisked away from under his nose, and given one of the highest-profile jobs in the world, he is, in my eyes, a sympathetic case study of frustrated ambitionlessness.

I don’t believe he should resign because I don’t believe he’s done anything wrong, and I don’t believe he will resign because what growing up in the Nazi regime taught him (his anti-Nazi father was censored and intimidated by them, his disabled cousin was killed by them, and some of his earliest memories are of seeing priests beaten up by SS troopers) is that shirking one’s allegiance to the truth because it constitutes the easiest way out of the tyranny of public opinion is one of the most despicable compromises with evil. I think it’s a measure of courage that this revolutionary theologian, as a young man, turned to a measured conservatism not out of any innate tendency towards dogmatism but as the result of an experience lecturing at the University in the 60s when a group of anarchists interrupted his class and he realized that popular opinion doesn’t need to be fascist to be violent. His hurt reaction, which he describes at length in his autobiographical writings, is fully in keeping with two absolutely fascinating indignant gestures he’s made during his papacy.

The first is when, after opening a dialogue with the arch-conservative Society of St. Pius X in the hopes of getting them to renounce their anti-Semitism and anti-modernism, the media pounced on him and even many Catholics accused him precisely, and paradoxically, of compromising with, or even endorsing, anti-Semitism and anti-modernism. In response, Benedict released a shrewdly observant yet humanly heartbreaking letter at once apologizing for any confusion he had caused and upbraiding the faithful for treating their own pope as just another political dummy whose good intentions it seems to be beyond the cynical, postmodern public ever to assume.

The second gesture I’m referring to is a homily given just this week, at the Palm Sunday Mass, in which he stated that Jesus gives us “courage that does not let itself be intimidated by the gossip of dominant opinions.” Just as John Paul’s refusal to resign the papacy in the face of his debilitating Parkinson’s suggested that the role of the pope is not simply to govern but to teach — in his case, to teach us how to die with dignity — Benedict’s refusal to resign teaches us something not about stubbornness or a refusal to admit that one is wrong, but about the courage necessary to stand up for what one believes to be the truth even in the face of withering sarcasm and vicious public pressure.

Up to the very last days, the media could never criticize John Paul II, more conservative than Benedict but also more photogenic, more fabled, and hence more popular. Now it has a superficially easy target in Benedict — and the media’s transparent cynicism is disgusting to me. This is not to say that Benedict is not flawed. But I recognize in his struggles something beautiful which popular hagiographies of the Dalai Lama, for instance, do not always do us a favor in ignoring. Benedict himself has written about how unattractive so many of the Bible’s vulgar protagonists are compared to the saintly (and shallow, and un-life-like) Buddha and Confucius. The genius of Christianity is in its lucid recognition of the sinful state of humankind and its compassionate conviction in humankind’s redemption; religions incapable of seizing on these two halves of the human condition are useless. In closing, I’d simply like to offer four images of Benedict which endear him to me as a human being.

1. The first is improbable. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger was on vacation in 2002, visiting his brother, when an American reporter cornered him and asked him about the Church’s response to the first major sex abuse crisis of the decade. The Cardinal became agitated and, in an infamous moment captured on video, was perceived as slapping the reporter’s hand. It is not a proud moment. It does not depict the Cardinal at his saintliest. Yet to see one’s hero at his lowest point tugs at one’s heartstrings. It would be useless for me not to link to it here, if I am to anticipate counter-arguments which claim the man is wholly neurotic or mean-spirited.

2. The second is almost comical. It is the painfully awkward raw footage of Benedict’s meeting with Barack Obama, in which the Pope stands and stares uncomfortably and silently while Obama, all smiles and idle chit-chat, shines. No, it is impossible to watch this footage and ever to think that Ratzinger wanted this job!

3. The third is beautiful. It is a rare clip of Ratzinger — who is also a concert pianist — playing the piano, his brow furrowed in a positively Kierkegaardian pose, intent on his music and frowning even more deeply when he makes a single mistake. (This is much, I think, how I look when I am playing the piano.) And then, at the end of the performance, the man stops playing, and looks off-camera with an expression so unguarded in its humility, so open-faced in its modesty, that one almost misses the simple joy which playing the piano has brought him and which reveals itself in the timid smile playing in his eyes’ sparkle and at the corners of his mouth.

4. The fourth is one of which I have no videographic or photographic evidence. I attended a Papal Mass in Paris at that time I mentioned when I felt a little lost and adrift in the universe, just as I felt lost and adrift in the crowd of pilgrims thronging the Pont Neuf waiting for Benedict to appear on the parvis in front of Notre Dame after vespers. When he finally emerged from the somber interior of the cathedral for a scheduled address to the youth of the city, his frail voice and surprisingly gentle demeanor magnified into an icon of benevolence on a series of massive television screens lining the quays of the Seine, his message was clear and pierced me to the heart: “Do not be afraid! I believe in you!”

Joseph Ratzinger is a Christian immersed in the mystical experience of God, and somehow, that for me gives credence to this statement. Doctrinaire conservative or aloof academic or whatever the case may be — nonetheless, at some point in his life, he’s attained the virtue necessary to say something like “I believe in you” and be able to mean it, with all his heart, of everyone, including people he’d never met. This is my firm conviction, and such people of whom one could say such a thing are rare. I know that he could look at me and say to me, “I believe in you,” and mean it, and mean it of me, without ever having met me: because his holiness comes from God. (Just as for God to say “I love you because you are one of my creations” is not the same thing as to say “I love you because you are Nicholas.” Both are true, yet they are different statements.)

I am a Catholic, and in this sense, an old-fashioned one: I love the Pope because he is the pope, because he represents an ideal of unity and of fatherhood and of the Good Shepherd. But I also love Benedict because he is Ratzinger — because his words give me life and hope, because I see my own failings and aspirations and weaknesses and sensitivity to beauty in his, because he has tried to be a good theologian yet tried even harder (I am convinced) to be a good pope in unfavorable circumstances out of a desire to do God’s will. Some will find this to be thin gruel; yet love is not about merit. It follows no logic but its own. I believe in Pope Benedict XVI with all my heart, and I hope that this improbable leader can bring healing to the Church — including, and especially, those people in the Church who are victims and sacrificial lambs.

“Yet the being of man is not, in fact, that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and, in these ways, has its colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves; or, more correctly, we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love – this is part of our own destiny…As Charles Péguy so beautifully put it, ‘J’espère en toi pour moi’: ‘I hope in you for me.’ It is when the ‘I’ is at stake that the ‘you’ is called upon in the form of hope.”

- Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Ratzinger), Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life

The root of man’s joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself. He lives in this affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the you, can accept the world. The reason why an individual cannot accept the you, cannot come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason, cannot accept a you. Something strange happens here. We have seen that the inability to accept one’s I leads to the inability to accept a you. But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The answer may perhaps be unexpected: we cannot do so by our efforts alone. Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms with ourselves. Our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist…If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: “It is good that you exist” — must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love. For it is the way of love to will the other’s existence and, at the same time, to bring that existence forth again. The key to the I lives with the you; the way to the you leads through the I.

- Pope Benedict XVI, Homily for Gaudete Sunday, 2006