Commonweal 130

Loving God, your world is a mess. For all its beauty, your creation is now showing its fierce, destructive power. Everywhere on our small globe (and nowhere more than in these United States), people are threatened with death—and dying—from an unforeseen, implacable virus. Young and old, suddenly or slowly after many weeks in a hospital, your beautiful sons and daughters are leaving us.

Countless brave people—medical caregivers like doctors and nurses, essential workers who provide food and keep our cities functioning—are threatened, too. Our efforts to keep this plague from spreading have devastated our economies, driving some toward desperation and despair. Many are stricken daily with searing anxiety. Even the bravest among us wake in the middle of the night in fear. Our political life struggles to be both compassionate and practical. Alas, we the people are fearfully divided.

Yes, Lord, we remember what Jesus of Nazareth taught us: “Do not be anxious about your life, what shall you eat or what shall you drink, nor about your body, what you shall wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?… Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to your span of life?… Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things…. Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things shall be yours as well.”

Jesus told us not to be anxious, “for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” And then, in the Our Father, as he taught us how to pray, he concluded by telling us to beg you to deliver us from evil.

But, merciful God, it is not only anxiety about tomorrow, or the longing to be free from sin, that troubles, even terrifies our hearts these days. It is the precarious weakness and murderous power of your own natural creation.  How can we not tremble before the threat it poses to our shared human life? Don’t you know that all the faithful—even your most devoted servants—are being shaken?

For what, then, shall we pray? And how? Send us, please, your Spirit to teach us.

Commonweal Magazine

Many people also assume there are rigid boundaries between various forms of living beings, whether that assumption comes from the first chapters of Genesis or a simplistic understanding of evolution. They think that bacteria are one thing, plants yet another, animals a different thing, and people something else entirely. They also assume that the development from simple to complex life forms is neat and linear, so that each more complex being that emerges includes everything in the category below and adds something new and bigger, like a set of Russian dolls.

But viruses show us that the development of complex life forms is itself staggeringly complex and even messy. Villarreal notes that between 113 and 223 genes present in both the genetic makeup of bacteria and human beings are absent in intermediate forms of life, like yeast. He suspects that those genes did not disappear and then re-evolve, but rather were somehow inserted into both bacteria and human beings by the same virus. Evolution’s traveling salesmen, viruses peddle their genetic wares near and far. They create surprising links between vastly different types of living entities, all of which are connected by their dependence on the same four building blocks that make up the DNA of all living things.

Finally, viruses challenge the idea that non-living matter is inert and static. Viruses may not be alive, but they are lively. And really, so is all matter. Inertness is an illusion. In the last century, we have learned that each atom of matter is full of motion and energy, as electrons circle the atom’s protons, neutrons, and nucleus. Chemical reactions occur not only in lab experiments, but inside human beings. More broadly, we are increasingly aware of how our brain and body chemistry affects our minds and sense of self. Serotonin influences mood and affect. Rising and falling levels of estrogen and testosterone throughout life mark not only our physical shape, but also our dispositions and judgment. We are thoroughly embodied creatures, not minds trapped in inert matter.

When Pope Francis published Laudato si’ on May 24, 2015, he couldn’t have known that five years later we’d be living through a pandemic. But that fact has only sharpened the encyclical’s prophetic call to care for our common home, and each other. Its key theme is that “everything in the world is connected,” from the well-being of the poor to the flourishing of the planet itself. Francis vividly expresses these connections when he calls the Earth our sister and our mother. Unfortunately, many people treat these images as mere metaphors, or dismiss them as instances of poetic license. But they are literally as well as poetically true, as the nature and functions of viruses help us to see. Nature is not merely the setting for the drama of human existence. Other living beings are not merely part of the chorus. Even the scenery is not mere backdrop. Everything around us has an integral part to play in the story of creation.

Commonweal Magazine

Many people also assume there are rigid boundaries between various forms of living beings, whether that assumption comes from the first chapters of Genesis or a simplistic understanding of evolution. They think that bacteria are one thing, plants yet another, animals a different thing, and people something else entirely. They also assume that the development from simple to complex life forms is neat and linear, so that each more complex being that emerges includes everything in the category below and adds something new and bigger, like a set of Russian dolls.

But viruses show us that the development of complex life forms is itself staggeringly complex and even messy. Villarreal notes that between 113 and 223 genes present in both the genetic makeup of bacteria and human beings are absent in intermediate forms of life, like yeast. He suspects that those genes did not disappear and then re-evolve, but rather were somehow inserted into both bacteria and human beings by the same virus. Evolution’s traveling salesmen, viruses peddle their genetic wares near and far. They create surprising links between vastly different types of living entities, all of which are connected by their dependence on the same four building blocks that make up the DNA of all living things.

Finally, viruses challenge the idea that non-living matter is inert and static. Viruses may not be alive, but they are lively. And really, so is all matter. Inertness is an illusion. In the last century, we have learned that each atom of matter is full of motion and energy, as electrons circle the atom’s protons, neutrons, and nucleus. Chemical reactions occur not only in lab experiments, but inside human beings. More broadly, we are increasingly aware of how our brain and body chemistry affects our minds and sense of self. Serotonin influences mood and affect. Rising and falling levels of estrogen and testosterone throughout life mark not only our physical shape, but also our dispositions and judgment. We are thoroughly embodied creatures, not minds trapped in inert matter.

When Pope Francis published Laudato si’ on May 24, 2015, he couldn’t have known that five years later we’d be living through a pandemic. But that fact has only sharpened the encyclical’s prophetic call to care for our common home, and each other. Its key theme is that “everything in the world is connected,” from the well-being of the poor to the flourishing of the planet itself. Francis vividly expresses these connections when he calls the Earth our sister and our mother. Unfortunately, many people treat these images as mere metaphors, or dismiss them as instances of poetic license. But they are literally as well as poetically true, as the nature and functions of viruses help us to see. Nature is not merely the setting for the drama of human existence. Other living beings are not merely part of the chorus. Even the scenery is not mere backdrop. Everything around us has an integral part to play in the story of creation.

Commonweal Magazine

Many people also assume there are rigid boundaries between various forms of living beings, whether that assumption comes from the first chapters of Genesis or a simplistic understanding of evolution. They think that bacteria are one thing, plants yet another, animals a different thing, and people something else entirely. They also assume that the development from simple to complex life forms is neat and linear, so that each more complex being that emerges includes everything in the category below and adds something new and bigger, like a set of Russian dolls.

But viruses show us that the development of complex life forms is itself staggeringly complex and even messy. Villarreal notes that between 113 and 223 genes present in both the genetic makeup of bacteria and human beings are absent in intermediate forms of life, like yeast. He suspects that those genes did not disappear and then re-evolve, but rather were somehow inserted into both bacteria and human beings by the same virus. Evolution’s traveling salesmen, viruses peddle their genetic wares near and far. They create surprising links between vastly different types of living entities, all of which are connected by their dependence on the same four building blocks that make up the DNA of all living things.

Finally, viruses challenge the idea that non-living matter is inert and static. Viruses may not be alive, but they are lively. And really, so is all matter. Inertness is an illusion. In the last century, we have learned that each atom of matter is full of motion and energy, as electrons circle the atom’s protons, neutrons, and nucleus. Chemical reactions occur not only in lab experiments, but inside human beings. More broadly, we are increasingly aware of how our brain and body chemistry affects our minds and sense of self. Serotonin influences mood and affect. Rising and falling levels of estrogen and testosterone throughout life mark not only our physical shape, but also our dispositions and judgment. We are thoroughly embodied creatures, not minds trapped in inert matter.

When Pope Francis published Laudato si’ on May 24, 2015, he couldn’t have known that five years later we’d be living through a pandemic. But that fact has only sharpened the encyclical’s prophetic call to care for our common home, and each other. Its key theme is that “everything in the world is connected,” from the well-being of the poor to the flourishing of the planet itself. Francis vividly expresses these connections when he calls the Earth our sister and our mother. Unfortunately, many people treat these images as mere metaphors, or dismiss them as instances of poetic license. But they are literally as well as poetically true, as the nature and functions of viruses help us to see. Nature is not merely the setting for the drama of human existence. Other living beings are not merely part of the chorus. Even the scenery is not mere backdrop. Everything around us has an integral part to play in the story of creation.

Commonweal Magazine

But in these last few months we’ve also witnessed, once again, the arrogance of power, the recurrence of internecine conflicts, and the persistence of particular ecclesial interests. The difficulty of these times has likely ended any dream of palingenesis, any expectation that we can imagine a new institutional Church. Ecclesial reform? The fact is that the pandemic has exacerbated the typically Catholic ecclesial distancing between clergy and laity, and helped the institutional Church reinforce its centrality. All its energies have been spent in keeping the existing system going, especially in terms of liturgy and Church governance. Even granting some exceptions, the clergy remain in charge of liturgy, and from the pope on down they have shown limited creativity in inserting something into the symbolic discourse. For example, it would have been a sign if, at least on one weekday, the pope had celebrated in Santa Marta not Mass, but a liturgy of the Word. The Eucharistic fast would then have united the whole body of Christ. But it’s not just clerical control of the liturgy. The Catholic laity have been dispersed and almost voiceless, except in their invisible domestic liturgies and private spiritual expressions. As for the professional theological commentariat, it had to reckon once again with the problem of appearing superfluous and needing to justify its existence against the urgent needs of the community of the believers.

The fact is that crises like the pandemic may reveal institutional weaknesses, but they can also amplify institutional advantages at both the local and the universal levels. That is the situation we’re seeing now with the institutional Church. My impression is that the balance has changed. A barely visible laity has become practically invisible, while the vulnerabilities of the professional community of theologians—who are dependent on an increasingly unstable system of private Catholic colleges—have been shown. Meanwhile, a clerical system with strong political links is now even more capable of asserting its power: the voice of the Catholic Church in the mass media is largely and by default still the voice of the clergy. 

Even if “the life” of the Church as an institution has been suspended by the pandemic, the institution itself remains a pervasive presence. Ask those who’d planned weddings or First Communions, or who found themselves having to organize a funeral for a family member. I suspect that some of the dreams of ecclesial and liturgical rebirth were an echo of a late-Enlightenment aspiration to intellectual and spiritual adulthood, in the sense of establishing independence from external structures. But those who during the pandemic had to care for the spiritual needs of the elderly and the sick, or for small children missing the children’s liturgy of the Word with their schoolmates, are probably a little less confident about their ability to do just fine without the institutional Church. It was probably wishful thinking to view this crisis as an opportunity to reimagine the liturgy in a progressive way, or to do away with clericalism in favor of community-centered reform. Maybe the moment has revealed cracks in political conservatism, but the same cannot be said about the clerical component of the Catholic Church, at least in this part of the world.

Of course, the pandemic also casts a light on what the pontificate of Francis means, beyond the small quarrels about this or that particular aspect of his teaching and policies: the transition to a spiritual and theological hermeneutic of incarnate reality as it is and as there is. Given the necessity and urgency of this transition, the institutional problem of the Catholic Church only gets more serious. We still rightfully expect the bishops to react against what we find a scandal to the Gospel. This is why so many have found the recent accommodating words from Catholic prelates to Donald Trump particularly revolting. Even if Catholics have largely stopped waiting for direction from the bishops on certain issues, we still want to be represented by the institutional Church before the highest political office in the land, especially in an election year.

There is no question that the Church must begin again from the kerygma and go forth in the heart of our world. But there is an emptiness at the institutional level (and the ecclesial, and the political) that cannot be filled by the anti-institutional or post-institutional. The pandemic, forcing four months (and counting) of social and ecclesial dispersion, is likely to generate an updated theory of the relationship between “believing and belonging.” It’s shown that for all the fragility of the institutional system, its persistence is undiminished. This is in some ways a constitutional moment, for both our Church and the world. Our experience with the ecclesial system over the last few months has shown us the difference between dreams and reality.

Commonweal Magazine

But in these last few months we’ve also witnessed, once again, the arrogance of power, the recurrence of internecine conflicts, and the persistence of particular ecclesial interests. The difficulty of these times has likely ended any dream of palingenesis, any expectation that we can imagine a new institutional Church. Ecclesial reform? The fact is that the pandemic has exacerbated the typically Catholic ecclesial distancing between clergy and laity, and helped the institutional Church reinforce its centrality. All its energies have been spent in keeping the existing system going, especially in terms of liturgy and Church governance. Even granting some exceptions, the clergy remain in charge of liturgy, and from the pope on down they have shown limited creativity in inserting something into the symbolic discourse. For example, it would have been a sign if, at least on one weekday, the pope had celebrated in Santa Marta not Mass, but a liturgy of the Word. The Eucharistic fast would then have united the whole body of Christ. But it’s not just clerical control of the liturgy. The Catholic laity have been dispersed and almost voiceless, except in their invisible domestic liturgies and private spiritual expressions. As for the professional theological commentariat, it had to reckon once again with the problem of appearing superfluous and needing to justify its existence against the urgent needs of the community of the believers.

The fact is that crises like the pandemic may reveal institutional weaknesses, but they can also amplify institutional advantages at both the local and the universal levels. That is the situation we’re seeing now with the institutional Church. My impression is that the balance has changed. A barely visible laity has become practically invisible, while the vulnerabilities of the professional community of theologians—who are dependent on an increasingly unstable system of private Catholic colleges—have been shown. Meanwhile, a clerical system with strong political links is now even more capable of asserting its power: the voice of the Catholic Church in the mass media is largely and by default still the voice of the clergy. 

Even if “the life” of the Church as an institution has been suspended by the pandemic, the institution itself remains a pervasive presence. Ask those who’d planned weddings or First Communions, or who found themselves having to organize a funeral for a family member. I suspect that some of the dreams of ecclesial and liturgical rebirth were an echo of a late-Enlightenment aspiration to intellectual and spiritual adulthood, in the sense of establishing independence from external structures. But those who during the pandemic had to care for the spiritual needs of the elderly and the sick, or for small children missing the children’s liturgy of the Word with their schoolmates, are probably a little less confident about their ability to do just fine without the institutional Church. It was probably wishful thinking to view this crisis as an opportunity to reimagine the liturgy in a progressive way, or to do away with clericalism in favor of community-centered reform. Maybe the moment has revealed cracks in political conservatism, but the same cannot be said about the clerical component of the Catholic Church, at least in this part of the world.

Of course, the pandemic also casts a light on what the pontificate of Francis means, beyond the small quarrels about this or that particular aspect of his teaching and policies: the transition to a spiritual and theological hermeneutic of incarnate reality as it is and as there is. Given the necessity and urgency of this transition, the institutional problem of the Catholic Church only gets more serious. We still rightfully expect the bishops to react against what we find a scandal to the Gospel. This is why so many have found the recent accommodating words from Catholic prelates to Donald Trump particularly revolting. Even if Catholics have largely stopped waiting for direction from the bishops on certain issues, we still want to be represented by the institutional Church before the highest political office in the land, especially in an election year.

There is no question that the Church must begin again from the kerygma and go forth in the heart of our world. But there is an emptiness at the institutional level (and the ecclesial, and the political) that cannot be filled by the anti-institutional or post-institutional. The pandemic, forcing four months (and counting) of social and ecclesial dispersion, is likely to generate an updated theory of the relationship between “believing and belonging.” It’s shown that for all the fragility of the institutional system, its persistence is undiminished. This is in some ways a constitutional moment, for both our Church and the world. Our experience with the ecclesial system over the last few months has shown us the difference between dreams and reality.

Commonweal Magazine

On September 6, 2018, off-duty officer Amber Guyger entered Botham Jean’s home by mistake and shot him twice, killing him. On October 1, 2019, Guyger was convicted by a Texas jury of murder. The next day, during Guyger’s sentencing, Botham’s brother Brandt gave a moving testimony in which he forgave Guyger for the killing, gave her a long hug, and called her to Christ. Almost immediately, the clip of his act went viral. Botham’s parents also gave testimonies, emphasizing the injustice of the system of which Guyger was a part and the need for radical change; their testimony, unlike their son Brandt’s, went largely unnoticed at the time, one more small heave in a groundswell that is only now, once again, cresting.

It should be obvious to any practicing Christian that these two messages have to go together. Forgiveness would not be forgiveness if it did not assume that the one forgiven is in the wrong and must amend her life. But the fascination Brandt Jean’s testimony held for so many onlookers lies in the idea that one must choose between an anger that clings to the past (and so cannot grow into God’s love) and a forgiveness and peace that refuses to be defined by the wrongdoing of others. In other words, one must choose between how the Psalms talk about evildoers—let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the wicked be no more—and how Christ talks about them. We have, as it happens, a word for the idea that these two ways of talking are mutually incompatible, and that word is “Marcionism”—the old heresy that the God of the New Testament was at odds with the God of the Old.

The actual Christ, the historical and not the Hallmark Christ, has no discomfort with the Psalms’ words about the wicked; in fact, he often quotes them. It is almost a commonplace to note that the greatest Good Friday Psalm, Psalm 22, continues beyond what Christ quotes to praise God’s deliverance and so points toward resurrection. It is less often noted that the next-greatest Good Friday Psalm, Psalm 69, calls down punishment upon punishment upon one’s persecutors, with no acquittal. But didn’t Christ forgive his persecutors, above all on the cross? Of course; that is the point. Forgiveness is entirely compatible with anger. Sometimes it even demands it. God’s offer of forgiveness precedes the conversion of the evildoer, and the anger lasts until she converts. That leaves some time—sometimes a very long time—where anger and forgiveness run together, where the offer of forgiveness comes at the business end of a “woe unto you” and even of a whip. Did Christ not offer forgiveness in his very acts of anger? Was he somehow lacking in forgiveness, a less perfect Son of God, because he sometimes offered it more with a scourge than with a simper?

Commonweal Magazine

When the Jericho Road Community Health Center asked Martin Gugino to explain why he was a donor, he responded with a passage from the New Testament. “Jesus said to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty,” he wrote in the Buffalo nonprofit’s newsletter last fall, praising its Vive Shelter for aiding asylum seekers, including a large group of Congolese immigrants.

Now Gugino is under the glare of a much bigger spotlight, known internationally as the seventy-five-year-old protester whom Buffalo police officers pushed to the ground, causing him to bang the back of his head so hard on the pavement that blood flowed immediately from his right ear. He is the subject of one of President Donald Trump’s most asinine tweets—speculation that Gugino faked his injury as an Antifa tactic—and the victim of Trump-inspired conspiracy theorists who wildly distort who he is.

People who actually know Gugino say his Catholic faith is the root of his political activism, and that he’s a gentle man who advocates nonviolence. “He’s a devout Catholic, and really I think part of the reason that the two of us have developed a friendship is because that’s where my own social activism comes from and I recognize it in him,” said Mark Colville, who founded the Amistad Catholic Worker House in New Haven with his wife, Luz. Colville is awaiting sentencing as one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, the seven peace activists convicted of federal charges for breaking into a nuclear arsenal at the Kings Bay submarine base in Georgia as part of a protest on April 4, 2018.

Colville, who spent more than a year and a half in jail after his arrest, said Gugino contacted him constantly during his confinement. Postcards were the only permissible mail, and Gugino sent him twenty-five a week, “sometimes more,” he said. “He was with me all through the whole pre-trial and trial process.”

Colville said he asked Gugino to serve as a character witness for his sentencing. To prepare, Gugino began making videos, posting them to YouTube so Colville could review them. (They have since been removed from YouTube.) Many of his friends said Gugino has read deeply in both theology and constitutional law, and he used that knowledge to argue that Catholic social teaching justified the Plowshares defendants’ civil disobedience. Gugino also cited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s quotation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Colville said Gugino added his own twist: the arc “doesn’t bend by itself,” but “we have to bend it.”

Colville said Gugino went with him on long drives to Washington D.C., where they took part in one to two weeks of fasting and protest with Witness Against Torture, which advocates for the shutdown of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. The group’s origins are in the Catholic Worker movement and, as the Catholic Worker newspaper said in 2006, WAT holds that the jail “degrades the humanity not only of the victims but also of its perpetrators,” adding an appeal “to the soldiers at Guantánamo, our brothers and sisters, to end the torture.”

Jeremy Varon, a history professor at The New School in New York and a “sort of token, secular Jew in this group,” said most members “are coming from a deep place of religious faith. They feel called upon by God to do the work of social justice…. They point out that Jesus himself was the victim of torture. That kind of perspective makes for extraordinary commitment.” Gugino is “right in the heart of that community,” Varon added. It’s not a commitment for the sunshine protester.

The group’s major annual gathering takes place at the most frigid time of year, around January 11, since that is the date in 2002 when detainees first began to arrive at the naval base. The members fast on a liquid-only diet to be in solidarity with Guantánamo detainees, many of whom have gone on hunger strikes as a protest.

Tom Casey, a friend of Gugino from Buffalo who is active in Pax Christi, said Gugino was always among those who rose an hour early (after sleeping on the floor) to take part in a prayer circle “for those of us who wanted to get up.” These ecumenical prayer circles include Bible readings.

For protests, Gugino and other Witness Against Torture members don orange jumpsuits like those Guantánamo detainees wear, and sometimes black hoods. They generally protest outside the White House, chaining themselves to the fence. As Gugino notes on his blog, he has “Four arrests, no convictions.” The news website PolitiFact determined that Gugino’s arrest record was wildly exaggerated in false reports circulated on social media—an attempt to portray him as a violent anarchist who organizes riots “for a living.”

It is true that the Catholic Worker’s founders, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, were not fans of government power. But their understanding of anarchism is not the common one of bomb-throwing radicals. In his biography of Day, former Commonweal managing editor Patrick Jordan cites a 1957 letter in which she explained: “those dreadful words, pacifism and anarchism—when you get right down to it—mean that we try always to love rather than coerce, ‘to be what we want the other fellow to be,’ to be the least, to have no authority over others, to begin…with ourselves.” These “isms” didn’t exist during the lifetime of Saint Francis of Assisi, but this is an apt description of his message as well.

Gugino represents a face of Catholicism that Trump would not know from the Catholics around him, such as Attorney General William Barr or White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. Archbishop Carlo Viganò is Trump’s kind of Catholic: the former papal nuncio to the United States wrote to tell Trump that anti-racism street demonstrations are a tool of the supposed “deep state” effort to defeat him in the presidential election and “to build a world without freedom.”

Vickie Ross, director of the Western New York Peace Center and “very interfaith,” said she came to understand the Catholic Worker movement’s connection to the crucifixion of Jesus, and sees it in Gugino’s outlook. “His commitment to doing the right thing, and his willingness to sacrifice to do that, his service, all of those things are very much in the Catholic tradition,” she said.

Commonweal Magazine

I began taking Orkambi in 2015. I remember how, when I first swallowed those two pink pills, I crossed myself and said a prayer. In 2018 I switched to another, more powerful version of the same drug, Symdeko. And with its release in November, I began Trikafta, which I am certain will be remembered decades from now as the quantum leap forward in CF care. I have already tasted the fruit of these miracle pills—my lungs clear more easily than before; antibiotics now function with greater efficacy; hospitalizations occur less frequently than in years past. Most importantly, my lung function—which was on a trajectory of decline starting in my twenties—has reversed, reaching 100 percent as of last week. In most ways, my breathing today is as healthy as that of someone without my illness.

Like so many others with this disease, I have stood at the door of Lazarus’s tomb. These days, I imagine a different future ahead of me. I picture a life with less disappointment due to sickness and more opportunity flowing from health, a life more free to tackle other problems, such as alleviating the suffering of others. In short, I see a life beyond the constant awareness of death’s approach.

Yet, like Lazarus, I’m still waiting to be unwrapped to new life. After living so many years in decline and foreboding, it has proven difficult for me, as for many others with CF, to adjust to the new day’s light. For those of us who have lived with the severe anxiety and depression stemming from our disease, it takes effort to know and feel ourselves as more than “the dead ones.” Hope is a muscle we must learn—and be taught—to use once again. Complicating our hope is the reality that our own improved health has not caused our CF to disappear; challenges persist because these drugs affect patients in different ways, and because side effects from Trikafta can cause significant strain. While the prospects of those born with CF today are better than even the most optimistic could have imagined not so long ago, those of us who have already endured the illness for decades will continue to struggle with its lasting damage. Some will find tremendous healing; others, only minor improvement. In short, our “grave clothes” will not come off so easily, and we require the help of physicians, nurses, social workers, therapists, friends, and family to orient us to our life after death.

Moreover, in this time of hope we remember the friends, siblings, children, and even parents with CF who died before the advent of these treatments. When I think of them I recall the words with which Martha, Lazarus’s sister, greets Jesus when he arrives at her brother’s funeral: “If you had been here sooner, my brother would not have died.” Those who have found healing during this Lazarus moment should take care not to forget the pain of those still grieving the loss of a loved one to this terrible disease. Neither can we lose sight of the 10 percent of people with CF for whom even Trikafta is ineffective—their plight must remain at the forefront of new research.

Finally, many around the globe are incapable of reaping the benefits of these new drugs because of their astronomical cost. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed these drugs—with the financial backing of the donor-funded nonprofit Cystic Fibrosis Foundation—is to be praised for its monumental achievement. But the drugs remain too expensive, and patients all over the world have suffered and died while their governments attempt to broker prices suitable to both parties. Many patients in the United States, where the drugs can cost as much as $311,503 a year, fear that their health insurer will one day deny them the coverage they need (though Vertex’s admirable patient financial-support services should not be overlooked). Anxieties run high precisely because the promise is so great. Work remains to be done on multiple fronts to alleviate these fears, and to ensure that all who suffer from this dreadful illness can experience the miracle that, just a few decades ago, we could only dream of.

The coronavirus pandemic poses a special danger to people with CF who already suffer from compromised immune systems and damaged lungs. How the CF community will be impacted by this new threat remains to be seen, although after a lifetime’s worth of mask-wearing and social distancing, many with CF feel oddly prepared for COVID-19. Nonetheless, for those only now savoring renewed strength and health, the timing of this pandemic seems like a cruel cosmic joke. It helps in this moment to remember that the Lord’s miracle was never a guarantee that Lazarus would not die once more. The gift of health is precious and precarious, a truth people with CF live more intimately than most; ultimately, it is not given to us to know the future. Still, now is also a time to celebrate, for Lazarus “was dead and has come to life.”

Commonweal Magazine

And yet, we live our lives not as generations but as individuals. At its deepest, spiritual level, sacrifice is not about guilt or politics. It is about giving ourselves in love. Ilia Delia, a Franciscan sister and theologian, wrote recently: “Only care for another humanizes us, which is why the death of the isolated self for the sake of greater life requires faith in the power of being loved, in the power of God. For where there is God there is love and where there is love there is no fear, because the one who lives in love, lives freely and celebrates life as belonging to another.”

When everyone is missing something, we think harder about what we can share. The roll of toilet paper left at my mother’s door on May Day, or the homemade chocolate-chip cookies my son delivers to friends, become acts of celebration and solidarity. We also use up objects saved or forgotten. In the past two months, I’ve read books I owned but never opened and shared muffins made from rhubarb and blueberries frozen in summers past. Scraps from quilting projects became face masks and a curtain for a granddaughter’s puppet theater. Sheltering at home makes us use what we have instead of buying more.

If such habits stick, the shift could be wrenching for an economy that relies on personal consumption for 70 percent of its growth. But the pause in purchasing gives us a chance to think more about what we truly need and how our communities would be different if we spent less on cars, cruises, and football games and more on social goods like alternative energy, affordable housing, public health, and education.

The pandemic has also made me more aware of my connections to others. When I turned seventy in early May, my husband surprised me with five Zoom gatherings and a socially distant serenade by neighbors on the front lawn. The day was a joyous series of reunions—with high school chums, siblings, past coworkers, writer friends, and couples whose children grew up with mine. Each gathering reminded me of some part of who I am, the gifts I’ve given and received from others, the gifts I still have to share.

We’ve grown weary of this isolation. The economy is reopening in every state, beaches, restaurants, and beauty parlors. My prayer is that we hold onto the lessons we’ve learned: keener awareness of inequities and interdependence, the joy that comes from sharing, the recognition that we all have more to give. How romantic that sounds, and how arduous. Do I want more sacrifice? No. Right now, I want to swim in a pool, see an orchestra, take my grandkids to Disney World, book a flight to Hawaii. My desire, and my privilege, persist.

If I seek their counsel, Scripture and the saints will remind me: sacrifice—like love—is not meant to be a sometime thing. It needs to be developed as a habit, as regular as grace before meals, not for God’s benefit but for my own. “You delight not in burnt offerings,” says Psalm 51. “Sacrifice to God is a broken heart, a heart contrite and humble you never scorn.” St. Augustine reminds us, “God has no need, not only of cattle, or any other earthly and material thing, but even of man’s righteousness…whatever right worship is paid to God profits not Him, but man.”

Early this spring my husband and I burned a small plot of land near our cabin to clear away weeds and plant prairie seeds. The fire spread quickly, turning last year’s thatch to ashes. Beneath the ash we found rusted barbed wire and old cow bones, which we carried off to make way for the tiny seeds. In the weeks since, daylilies planted long ago have emerged and the field grass has returned. The prairie plants—bluestem and butterfly weeds, coneflower and rose mallow—take more time and periodic burning to thrive. But time is one thing the pandemic has given us.

Commonweal Magazine

An incident on June 4 in Buffalo, NY, illustrates well what is at stake. Cops in riot gear who were clearing protestors out of a public space advanced on a white-haired man, held up their batons, and knocked him to the ground. The man’s head hit the pavement and he began to bleed from his ear. The Buffalo Police Department released a statement saying that the man “tripped & fell,” but cellphone footage of the police shoving him had already blown up on social media. Caught in the lie, the department suspended two cops—provoking an outcry from their police union, who called the suspensions “a politically motivated witchhunt” targeting officers “who were simply executing orders.”

This story complicates the most-cops-are-heroes defense. The conflict between the video footage and the official police department statement, and the show of defiance from the police union, demonstrates that the idea of a few “bad cops” tarnishing the image of the noble majority is itself a caricature. And yet it isn’t hard to understand those officers’ consternation. Their orders—by their own account—told them to go to that plaza and clear it, not to make sure no demonstrators got hurt. Now two officers have been punished for following through on those orders. What is a good cop supposed to do?

A good cop, or rather a good person who happened to be a cop, could look at that contradiction and recognize that the orders are the problem. He or she might consider that carrying out the state’s use of force against civilians, and then lying to the public about the consequences, is in conflict with the ideals of public service as well as belief in the dignity of all human life. That good person might turn around and join the protestors, perhaps holding a sign that says, “Police Should Protect, Not Oppress.” But doing so would require humility and a great deal of courage. Religious leaders are in a position to encourage that kind of moral heroism, if they so choose. But the work of justice cannot depend on waiting around for them to succeed.

Real justice for George Floyd and everyone like him requires rethinking what police do, and how we—all people, but especially white people—empower them to do it. It requires creating a system of oversight that doesn’t rely entirely on the decency of individual cops. Insisting on such far-reaching changes is sure to offend police officers, including Catholic ones. We still have to do it. The alternative is to carry on ignoring the much greater pain of the vulnerable, disenfranchised, oppressed populations that both law enforcement and church are supposed to serve. Every Catholic bishop should be willing to take a side, to say without qualification, “Black lives matter,” not just because it’s true, but because that’s what needs to be said now.

Commonweal Magazine

“For more than a decade and a half, under the leadership of a former political operative, the Knights of Columbus has increasingly used its enormous wealth to influence the direction of the church, underwriting think tanks and news outlets while gaining entrée to some of the highest levels of decision-making in the church,” Tom Roberts wrote in a detailed analysis of the Knight’s influence in a 2017 National Catholic Reporter article. “Its capacity for funding has given the Knights of Columbus an inordinately loud voice, potentially drowning out that of others, and no other lay group can match the Knights’ ability to leave its mark on the church.”

The backlash against Gregory from well-funded Catholics on the right was swift and revealing. Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote—which is leading a major organizing effort to re-elect Trump—called the archbishop’s statement “a partisan attack on the president.” “Archbishop Gregory is a Catholic priest and, supposedly, a spiritual leader. Not a politician,” reads a petition on LifeSiteNews that encourages readers to ask the archbishop to “apologize for, and withdraw, these churlish, hurtful and unspiritual remarks.” Edward Peters, a canon lawyer and professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit, tweeted that Archbishop Gregory’s condemnation was “devoid of any sense of Christian sentiment.” Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former apostolic nuncio to the United States and a leading critic of Pope Francis, wrote in a June 3 letter to priests and laity of the Archdiocese of Washington: “Unfortunately, the Catholic Church is led by many false pastors.” A few days later, Viganò followed up with a letter to President Trump that described the president’s opponents as “the children of darkness—whom we may easily identify with the deep state which you wisely oppose and which is fiercely waging war against you in these days.”

At an online event later in the week, hosted by the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, Archbishop Gregory did not back down. A “holy place” should “have never been used as a place for a political statement,” the archbishop said, and he commended those who “take to the streets to protest injustice.” Watching the video of a Minneapolis police officer kneel on the neck of George Floyd, the first black archbishop of Washington recalled a memory from his childhood, when he was taken to the viewing of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman in her family’s Mississippi grocery store.

In addressing his critics, the archbishop compared claims that he was being partisan to the backlash Catholic priests and sisters who marched and spoke out during the civil rights era also faced. “The Church lives in society,” he said. “It does not live behind the four walls in which we worship.” Black Catholics in Washington have expressed appreciation for the archbishop’s stance. In a sign of how out-of-step the Knights of Columbus national leadership can be with some of its own members, a local chapter of the Knights at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington D.C., a historically black church, also criticized the decision to host Trump at the shrine. “If your purpose is to see yourself as a sign instituted by Christ, then it’s baffling to see the president of the United States use their institution as a political backdrop,” St. Augustine pastor Father Pat Smith told the National Catholic Reporter. “It’s reprehensible and simply inexcusable. As a black Catholic priest for almost thirty years, there is no better way to communicate to me that I don’t matter—and the calls and consent of the people, in light of what’s going on, don’t matter.”

An online petition started by grassroots Catholics is asking Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, who serves as the Supreme Chaplain of the Knights, to issue an apology that the invitation to Trump was not rescinded and “to acknowledge that the Knights’ decision on June 2 is part of their long history of complicity with prejudice and institutional racism.” The petition notes that no person of color currently serves as a supreme officer of the organization. “The Catholic Church always has an obligation to atone and make amends for its participation in institutional racism, and this is especially true now,” the petition reads. “To this end, we urge the Knights of Columbus to commit to engaging in an internal process of healing and reconciliation with its racist legacy.” Other Catholic institutions have led the way on this, the petition notes, including Georgetown University and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. In the wake of widespread criticism, the Knights’ national leadership quickly pulled together a novena for this week focused on ending racism. “The Knights join Pope Francis in urging all to express their anger and cries for justice in nonviolent ways to end the sin of racism,” it announced.

Black people and communities of color deserve more than after-the-fact public relations campaigns. White Catholics with money and status in the church and politics, along with so many in our country, have refused to acknowledge how such influence has been used to prop up white supremacy. Archbishop Gregory has unsettled the guardians of the status quo in our church by speaking out against the use of a sacred space as a backdrop for a president who fans the flames of white resentment for political gain. There is an opening now for a more honest, and difficult, conversation about race and power in the Catholic Church. Do we have the courage to have it?

Commonweal Magazine

“I am unfortunately a complicated and difficult subject.” With these words of Martin Buber, Paul Mendes-Flohr lays down the challenge for his meticulous biography of the distinguished Jewish scholar, humanist, and author of I and Thou. “Complicated,” to be sure, and “difficult,” certainly; that goes with the territory of Buber’s at times maze-like philosophical explorations and heavily Germanic articulation. And one may add to these challenges the fact that—to quote this biographer—Buber was a “contested figure who evoked passionate, conflicting opinions about his person and his thought.” Yet these obstacles are by no means insurmountable, thanks to Mendes-Flohr’s philosophical acumen and gift for succinct expression. Indeed, in his capable hands Buber’s life makes for an engrossing, instructive tale, and an exemplary contribution to Yale’s “Jewish Lives Series.”

Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has long been a scholar of German Jewry and of Martin Buber, serving as editor-in-chief of the twenty-two-volume German critical edition of Buber’s collected works. His previous publications include the English translations of Buber’s 1909 treatise on mysticism, Ecstatic Confessions (Harper & Row, 1985), and collected writings on Jews and Arabs, A Land of Two Peoples (Oxford University Press, 1983). While Mendes-Flohr never met Buber (as did such previous biographers as Grete Schaeder and Maurice Friedman), he was a longtime confidant of Buber’s late son, Rafael, and the beneficiary of significant manuscripts and correspondence not previously available to biographers. These allow him to present Buber’s serious thought in depth as he builds a textured, comprehensive portrait of the man and his life.

Buber was born in 1878 to a wealthy Polish Jewish family in Vienna. His father, Carl, was an agronomist and entrepreneur; while not particularly religious, he was, in Buber’s words, “an elemental storyteller.” Buber’s mother, Elise, was an actress with “astoundingly beautiful eyes,” as Buber himself later attested; she abandoned the family for a Russian officer when Buber was three, and the separation had a seismic effect on Buber’s life, including his subsequent philosophy, religious sense, and social understanding. The boy was sent for ten years to live with his paternal grandparents in Lemberg, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). His grandfather, Solomon Buber, was a legendary midrash scholar and philanthropist; his grandmother, Adele, was steeped in a love for German literature, a love she passed on to her precocious grandson.

Buber’s early education took place largely at home, in a household where Hebrew, Yiddish, German, French, and English were all understood and encouraged. At ten he was sent to gymnasium, where he devised dialogues between a German and a Frenchman, a Hebrew and an ancient Roman, foundational exercises for his later philosophy of dialogue. When questioned about one of Sophocles’s choruses during a final exam, he recited the entire chorus by heart—in Greek. It was at the age of thirteen that he coined the German word Vergegnung, or “mismeeting,” a word that would spring spontaneously to mind when he was reintroduced decades later to his mother. The term would come to play a key role in his description and analysis of “the life of dialogue.”

Carl Buber eventually remarried, and at fourteen Martin Buber went to live with his reconfigured family. His father would occasionally take him to an outlying village of Hasidim, where Buber was introduced to Hasidism’s vibrant mystical worship, lore, and community. The experience would echo in his subsequent understanding of Judaism and his written works on Hasidism. Yet soon after his bar mitzvah, Buber put away the tefillin of an observant Jew. Having already started reading Nietzsche, he was embarking on a new course, exploring what it meant to be a free, self-actualizing human being.

At eighteen, Buber entered the University of Vienna. He was interested in art, literature, music, and drama, and his reading of Nietzsche reinforced his quest for greater experience. He became a proponent of the fledgling Zionist movement, and caught the attention of Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, who appointed him editor of its journal, Die Welt. Buber’s studies took him onward to Leipzig, Zurich, and finally Berlin. Along the way, he met Paula Winkler, a Catholic from Munich and a budding novelist who had briefly been a member of a syncretistic ashram in Tyrol. The two fell passionately in love, and within two years, though unmarried, had two children. (They would only marry—and inform Buber’s family of the children—in 1907, following the death of Solomon Buber.) Paula became Martin Buber’s lifelong “Thou.” According to Mendes-Flohr, her “unbending integrity and insight…made her Buber’s most trusted critic and intellectual collaborator.”

In Berlin, Buber studied under Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel; through the latter, he met Max Weber, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Edmund Husserl. During this period, underwritten by his family’s largesse, he traveled to Florence to study medieval art and spirituality. Back in Germany, he turned his focus to Judaism and Hasidism. By 1903, he had broken with Herzl over the direction and purpose of the Zionist movement. Would it be largely a political, statist enterprise, as Herzl envisioned; or would it seek to renew Judaism and the Jewish people—as Buber desired—through a rediscovery of Judaism’s historic communal and spiritual core? Buber’s first book on the Hasidim was published in 1906 (and dedicated to his ailing grandfather). In evoking the folklore of the early Hasidic masters, Buber experienced a calling and a lifelong work. In Mendes-Flohr’s words, Buber’s early work on Hasidism furnished him “with a spiritual home” that grounded all his later thinking. Though his take on the Hasidim was subsequently criticized by Jewish scholars and others, his friend and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel observed that “if you want to know Hasidism as it was, begin with Buber.”

Commonweal Magazine

The other thing that the document does is that when it speaks of racism, it speaks of it in the passive voice. African Americans were excluded from opportunities, but it never says who did the excluding or why. In other words, the document was written by white people for the comfort of white people. And in doing so, it illustrates a basic tenet of Catholic engagement with racism: when the Catholic Church historically has engaged this issue, it’s always done so in a way that’s calculated to not disturb white people or not to make white people uncomfortable. Even when the document talks about police violence, it does so in a very, to me, bizarre way. It says that we must admit that people of color their encounters with police officers to be fearful. But then it goes on to say it condemns violent language directed at police. They never condemn police abuse of power or police misconduct—despite the fact that at that time, the Department of Justice had investigated over twenty-four police departments in the United States and entered into consent decrees with them over blatant police abuse of power. But that’s never reflected in the document.

So, I think that the document really is woefully inadequate to the challenge of the time. And I think there are a couple of reasons for it. One is that they never use the Catholic Church’s leading scholars on racism and racial injustice in composing the letter. I think the other major factor is, again, the Catholic Church wants to deal with these issues in ways that won’t disturb the comfort of whites.

I think this is a very critical point. Whenever I give workshops on racism, sooner or later someone will ask a question that goes something like this: “Father, how can we talk about this in my parish, in my classroom, at my university, and not make white people uncomfortable?” I challenge them to think about that question. Why is it that the only group in America that is never allowed to feel uncomfortable about race is white people? Doesn’t that discount the real discomfort, the real fear, the real terror that people of color have to live with and endure because of racism? And if white comfort sets the limits of conversation, then that means we will never face the difficult truth: The only reason for the persistence of racism is because white people benefit from it.

I challenge them to think of this: If it were up to people of color, racism would have been over and done, resolved a long time ago. The only reason that racism continues to persist is because white people benefit from it. If we’re always going to have conversations that are predicated upon preserving white comfort, then we will never get beyond the terrible impasse that we’re in, and we will always doom ourselves to superficial words and to ineffective half-measures. That difficult truth is something that the Catholic Church in America has never summoned the courage or the will to directly address.

RM: Part of the reason for such accommodation for white people’s comfort, you’ve said, is that the church sees itself as white, for white people. Can you say more about that?

BM: In my book Racial Justice and the Catholic Church there’s one sentence that goes something like this: What makes the Church white and racist is the pervasive belief that European aesthetics, European music, European theology, and European persons, and only these, are standard, normative, universal, and truly Catholic. In other words, when we talk about what makes something Catholic, the default is always to the products that reflect a white cultural aesthetic. Everything else is seen as Catholic by exception, or Catholic by toleration.

We see it in a number of ways, so let me just sketch out a few. One instance I could point to is when I went to celebrate a Mass at a suburban parish in Milwaukee. A priest friend of mine had suddenly taken sick and he asked me to say Mass for him. I showed up at church and I asked the usher to direct me to the sacristy. He looked at me and he wanted to know why I wanted to know. So I explained the situation, thinking that the Roman collar that I was wearing would make it kind of obvious why I would like to know where the sacristy was. And he said, “You’re a priest? Who sent you?” I explained the situation again. Then he said, “Well, next time, I hope he sends us a real priest.”

Now, we can get very upset with him and his individual insensitivity, his bigotry. But he’s reflecting something that’s very ingrained in the Church, and that is that we expect the person who’s going to be the priest to be white.

Another example came during Pope Benedict’s pastoral visit in 2008, when he celebrated Mass at the stadium in Washington D.C. The theme of the liturgy was to celebrate the cultural diversity that’s present here in the United States. The readings were done in a number of languages. The first reading was the classic account of Pentecost where the Spirit descended and enabled the peoples of the world to hear the Gospel proclaimed in the world’s languages. The prayers of the faithful were offered in a variety of languages. The gifts were presented to the accompaniment of vigorous Gospel and Spanish singing. After which the commentator on EWTN opined—and I remember these words because they’re emblazoned in my mind—“We’ve just been subjected to an overpreening display of multicultural chatter, and now the Holy Father will begin the sacred part of the Mass.”

I note the disjunction between “multicultural chatter” and “sacred.” “Sacred” had nothing to do with “multicultural”. Being “sacred” means speaking in a white idiom, praying in a white idiom, using European hymns. It’s this normative whiteness that’s ubiquitous in the Catholic Church—which is its greatest hindrance to dealing effectively with issues of race.

People always ask me, well, how many African-American priests are there? Currently there are less than a hundred of us on active duty in the United States, out of tens of thousands. And it’s always been that way. African-American priests in the United States constitute less than one half of 1 percent of the total Catholic clergy. That’s not by accident. It’s a reflection, a manifestation of this normative whiteness that, to be blunt, is a form of idolatry—that God can be imaged and God can only manifest God’s self through Europeans and European cultural products. Yeah, there is a normative whiteness present in the Church, but I would also say that it’s a form of idolatry. It’s the worship of a false god.

RM: You’ve talked about courage as a sort of neglected virtue. Why do Christians need courage? What happens when we don’t have it?

BM: Courage, I discovered, is perhaps the least studied of the virtues. For example, we learn in the Catechism that the cardinal virtues are prudence, temperance, fortitude (or what we call courage), and justice; the theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity. We say a lot about every virtue except courage.

But Thomas Aquinas taught us that courage is the precondition of all virtue. Without courage, we’re not able to be prudent. We’re not able to be just, because courage is that virtue that allows us to surmount the fear that comes with the following of the Gospel. If we’re going to do anything that is difficult, there is going to be hesitation; there are going obstacles and opposition, and the fear that those obstacles engender in us. Courage is that virtue that enables us to not be afraid. We still feel afraid, but it’s a virtue that enables us to not let fear keep us from doing the right, actualizing the good.

Another way of putting it is that moral courage is what translates conviction into action. To put this into the conversation we’re having today: There are a lot of good white people who know what the right thing to do is. But they don’t do it because they’re afraid of the disapproval of their friends or family, or they’re afraid of the consequences of speaking up and speaking out, being in solidarity and being an ally. Courage is what enables conviction to be translated into action. It isn’t that people don’t have the conviction, but they don’t have the courage to act on those convictions. So this is the reason why we need courage, especially in the pursuit of racial justice.

Commonweal Magazine

The other thing that the document does is that when it speaks of racism, it speaks of it in the passive voice. African Americans were excluded from opportunities, but it never says who did the excluding or why. In other words, the document was written by white people for the comfort of white people. And in doing so, it illustrates a basic tenet of Catholic engagement with racism: when the Catholic Church historically has engaged this issue, it’s always done so in a way that’s calculated to not disturb white people or not to make white people uncomfortable. Even when the document talks about police violence, it does so in a very, to me, bizarre way. It says that we must admit that people of color their encounters with police officers to be fearful. But then it goes on to say it condemns violent language directed at police. They never condemn police abuse of power or police misconduct—despite the fact that at that time, the Department of Justice had investigated over twenty-four police departments in the United States and entered into consent decrees with them over blatant police abuse of power. But that’s never reflected in the document.

So, I think that the document really is woefully inadequate to the challenge of the time. And I think there are a couple of reasons for it. One is that they never use the Catholic Church’s leading scholars on racism and racial injustice in composing the letter. I think the other major factor is, again, the Catholic Church wants to deal with these issues in ways that won’t disturb the comfort of whites.

I think this is a very critical point. Whenever I give workshops on racism, sooner or later someone will ask a question that goes something like this: “Father, how can we talk about this in my parish, in my classroom, at my university, and not make white people uncomfortable?” I challenge them to think about that question. Why is it that the only group in America that is never allowed to feel uncomfortable about race is white people? Doesn’t that discount the real discomfort, the real fear, the real terror that people of color have to live with and endure because of racism? And if white comfort sets the limits of conversation, then that means we will never face the difficult truth: The only reason for the persistence of racism is because white people benefit from it.

I challenge them to think of this: If it were up to people of color, racism would have been over and done, resolved a long time ago. The only reason that racism continues to persist is because white people benefit from it. If we’re always going to have conversations that are predicated upon preserving white comfort, then we will never get beyond the terrible impasse that we’re in, and we will always doom ourselves to superficial words and to ineffective half-measures. That difficult truth is something that the Catholic Church in America has never summoned the courage or the will to directly address.

RM: Part of the reason for such accommodation for white people’s comfort, you’ve said, is that the church sees itself as white, for white people. Can you say more about that?

BM: In my book Racial Justice and the Catholic Church there’s one sentence that goes something like this: What makes the Church white and racist is the pervasive belief that European aesthetics, European music, European theology, and European persons, and only these, are standard, normative, universal, and truly Catholic. In other words, when we talk about what makes something Catholic, the default is always to the products that reflect a white cultural aesthetic. Everything else is seen as Catholic by exception, or Catholic by toleration.

We see it in a number of ways, so let me just sketch out a few. One instance I could point to is when I went to celebrate a Mass at a suburban parish in Milwaukee. A priest friend of mine had suddenly taken sick and he asked me to say Mass for him. I showed up at church and I asked the usher to direct me to the sacristy. He looked at me and he wanted to know why I wanted to know. So I explained the situation, thinking that the Roman collar that I was wearing would make it kind of obvious why I would like to know where the sacristy was. And he said, “You’re a priest? Who sent you?” I explained the situation again. Then he said, “Well, next time, I hope he sends us a real priest.”

Now, we can get very upset with him and his individual insensitivity, his bigotry. But he’s reflecting something that’s very ingrained in the Church, and that is that we expect the person who’s going to be the priest to be white.

Another example came during Pope Benedict’s pastoral visit in 2008, when he celebrated Mass at the stadium in Washington D.C. The theme of the liturgy was to celebrate the cultural diversity that’s present here in the United States. The readings were done in a number of languages. The first reading was the classic account of Pentecost where the Spirit descended and enabled the peoples of the world to hear the Gospel proclaimed in the world’s languages. The prayers of the faithful were offered in a variety of languages. The gifts were presented to the accompaniment of vigorous Gospel and Spanish singing. After which the commentator on EWTN opined—and I remember these words because they’re emblazoned in my mind—“We’ve just been subjected to an overpreening display of multicultural chatter, and now the Holy Father will begin the sacred part of the Mass.”

I note the disjunction between “multicultural chatter” and “sacred.” “Sacred” had nothing to do with “multicultural”. Being “sacred” means speaking in a white idiom, praying in a white idiom, using European hymns. It’s this normative whiteness that’s ubiquitous in the Catholic Church—which is its greatest hindrance to dealing effectively with issues of race.

People always ask me, well, how many African-American priests are there? Currently there are less than a hundred of us on active duty in the United States, out of tens of thousands. And it’s always been that way. African-American priests in the United States constitute less than one half of 1 percent of the total Catholic clergy. That’s not by accident. It’s a reflection, a manifestation of this normative whiteness that, to be blunt, is a form of idolatry—that God can be imaged and God can only manifest God’s self through Europeans and European cultural products. Yeah, there is a normative whiteness present in the Church, but I would also say that it’s a form of idolatry. It’s the worship of a false god.

RM: You’ve talked about courage as a sort of neglected virtue. Why do Christians need courage? What happens when we don’t have it?

BM: Courage, I discovered, is perhaps the least studied of the virtues. For example, we learn in the Catechism that the cardinal virtues are prudence, temperance, fortitude (or what we call courage), and justice; the theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity. We say a lot about every virtue except courage.

But Thomas Aquinas taught us that courage is the precondition of all virtue. Without courage, we’re not able to be prudent. We’re not able to be just, because courage is that virtue that allows us to surmount the fear that comes with the following of the Gospel. If we’re going to do anything that is difficult, there is going to be hesitation; there are going obstacles and opposition, and the fear that those obstacles engender in us. Courage is that virtue that enables us to not be afraid. We still feel afraid, but it’s a virtue that enables us to not let fear keep us from doing the right, actualizing the good.

Another way of putting it is that moral courage is what translates conviction into action. To put this into the conversation we’re having today: There are a lot of good white people who know what the right thing to do is. But they don’t do it because they’re afraid of the disapproval of their friends or family, or they’re afraid of the consequences of speaking up and speaking out, being in solidarity and being an ally. Courage is what enables conviction to be translated into action. It isn’t that people don’t have the conviction, but they don’t have the courage to act on those convictions. So this is the reason why we need courage, especially in the pursuit of racial justice.

Commonweal Magazine

The past three days of intended peaceful protest have led to confrontations with police authorities, looting, and arson. About five hundred people have been arrested in protests in Downtown Los Angeles on Friday night and continued protests in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills on Saturday. On the eve of Pentecost, following these events, a curfew was imposed on the entire city of Los Angeles.

In the midst of all this the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Pentecost. It triumphantly concludes weeks of joy in the Resurrection and looks to the Holy Spirit in hope that she will renew of the face of the Earth. 

On Pentecost Sunday we hear of how the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles as “tongues as of fire” (Acts 2:3) which led them to speak in different languages and inexplicably understand one another. In the second reading from 1 Corinthians, we are invited to imagine the Church as the Body of Christ with Jesus as its head and the Holy Spirit uniting it. In the Gospel reading we find ourselves with the Risen Jesus, pre-Ascension, granting the Apostles peace, proving his resurrection by revealing his wounded side, breathing upon them, and saying “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgiven are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained” (John 20: 23).

I can’t help but imagine the homilies likely to be heard throughout the nation. The readings so easily lend themselves to messages about the unity of diverse peoples, the special gifts each person has to share with the world, the life-giving breath of God, and the power and authority of the Church given by Christ. But those messages, although true, will seem watered-down reflections lacking in substance and credibility because of their inability to make statements against the sins of the world, namely racism, sexism, and all forms of bigotry that counter the life of the Spirit. If we have learned anything from our communal reflection on the Acts of the Apostles this Easter season, it is that after the Ascension of Jesus and after the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Apostles and disciples became a prophetic force whose actions and words had the power to change individuals and society. 

In light of all that has transpired this Easter season, I am forewarned by those final words of Jesus in the Pentecost Gospel reading, “Whose sins you forgiven are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” So often this verse is used to speak to the authority of the Church’s Apostolic tradition. However, it also serves as criteria by which the entire Church and especially those in authority will be judged. With the power to forgive and to retain sin, those with metaphorical and literal pulpits have the responsibility to name the sin.

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It was during this time, when the understanding of diaconal ministry was expanding, that Professor John Collins’s landmark work Diakonia: Re-Interpreting the Ancient Sources (1990) first appeared. His invaluable contributions have influenced most of the major theological work on the diaconate for the past thirty years. So I would also disagree with Ruddy when he writes that “much English-language writing on the diaconate…remains wedded to the ‘humble service’ view.” That was certainly true earlier in the renewal, but not recently. Nor is the change evident only in the work of most of us writing on the diaconate. In 2000, during the Jubilee for Deacons, St. John Paul II addressed the deacons as “Apostles of the New Evangelization.” In the United States, an early draft of the USCCB’s 2005 National Directory on the diaconate ordered the three munera(offices) of the deacon’s ministry as charity/justice, Word, and sacrament. The bishops quickly amended this to specify that the Word leads to sacrament, which results in charity. It is precisely in this balanced and integrated approach to the roles of the deacon that we find the diaconate’s sacramental significance. As Ruddy correctly notes, the church does not ordain social workers.

The problem, then, lies not in the theology of the diaconate; it lies in the way the diaconate itself is being received “on the ground” in pastoral ministry. Some years ago I wrote about the confluence of three realities: that the renewal of the diaconate was taking place at the same time there was a nearly explosive growth in lay ecclesial ministry and a sharp decline in the number of priests. As Thomas Baker suggests, this has led to significant confusion over the nature and roles of all three groups of ministers. In the absence of priests, for example, it is not unusual for the deacon to be expected to “fill in for father” to the extent his ordination and faculties permit. The Holy See has repeatedly cautioned that the diaconate is not to be seen as “substitutionary” for other ministers, but simply saying that does not change the pastoral reality that deacons are often the only ordained ministers available when there’s no priest.

So where do we go from here? Let me briefly suggest three interrelated ideas.

First, the unique relationship between the bishop and the deacon must be strengthened and highlighted. We must focus on the ancient apostolic tradition that speaks of deacons being ordained not to the priesthood, but to the service of the bishop. On the ground, however, deacons are most often seen as providing service to the parish pastor, and certainly if the deacon is assigned to a parish, this is understandable. But just as priests are understood to have a unique bond with their bishop, so too must the deacons’ unique relationship with their bishop be recognized and affirmed.

Second, we must continue to expand the role of the deacon beyond the parish. The deacon is not a parish employee, and anything that perpetuates such a misunderstanding must be corrected. When deacons are assigned to a parish by their bishop, they are too often hired by the pastor to fill an employment position in the parish or parish school. This helps perpetuate the idea that the deacon is little more than a parish employee. And should the pastor/employer need to terminate the employment of the deacon/employee, while that deacon remains assigned by the bishop to the parish, a nightmare ensues.

Third, and finally, we must keep the insights of Collins in balance. Yes, as all of us agree, the deacon’s role as an “apostle of the New Evangelization” (John Paul II) begins with his ordination charge to be Herald of Christ. His serving at the sacred mysteries flows from this heraldic function. But we must not forget that all of this should lead deacons to serve as leaders in caring for others, including those acts of humble service that should characterize all Christians.  

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Why is this? Part of it, I fear, is that there is too much diaconate theory and not enough pastoral imagination. Ruddy’s article is in some ways an example: as with most conversations about the diaconate, it’s more about what it might be theologically and what it once was historically than about what the church now needs it to be. Deeply symbolic and theological language about both the priesthood and the diaconate sometimes ends up stifling creative thinking about their futures.

There’s another reason too, of course: the parish system in which most deacons now function provides a command-and-control structure that everyone understands. Despite the fact that, officially, deacons are ordained for service to the bishop, in practice deacons report to parish priests who oversee their work; parish priests report to bishops. New forms and settings for ministry often don’t fit well into this traditional arrangement.

But an alternative future isn’t unthinkable. The growth of the diaconate since its revival fifty years ago is already, on the surface anyway, a sign of great health and life. Yet the vast majority of deacons in the United States today are in their sixties and seventies. Can anyone picture the energy that would be released by another 18,000 or 36,000 deacons, many of them younger, many of them women, half of them of Hispanic and Asian heritage, asked by their bishops to open up new ways and places for people to encounter Christ? 

For this to happen, some of our bishops would have to feel a little more entrepreneurial, of course, and diaconate assignments would become more creative and perhaps less parish-centric. Recruitment efforts would have to reach beyond the usual suspects. Formation programs would have to become less academic, more pastoral, and offer schedules tailored to the younger working men and women you might want to see attending them.

With the right conditions, it could happen. There is, in a way, a tradition of deacons going off the reservation. Most scholars now agree that the seven men appointed to manage the daily distribution of food in the Acts of the Apostles shouldn’t be regarded as the first deacons, although that tradition lives on in deacon lore. What I have always liked about those seven is how quickly their “minister of charity” job description went out the window once the Holy Spirit and the needs of the world took over the process. Almost immediately after his appointment, for example, Stephen is not doing parish work but bringing “signs and wonders” to the community, while Philip is preaching miles away in Samaria to an Ethiopian eunuch, among others. I would love to see a second fifty years of the revived diaconate that has some of the creativity—and disregard for traditional job descriptions—of those first seven. 

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Not all the popes were as opposed to Ward as Urban VIII was. In fact, Popes Paul V and Gregory XV, Urban’s predecessors, had both supported her. Even Pope Urban was not quite as hostile toward Ward as the strong language of his 1631 bull might suggest (that was the conventional style of bulls back then). After the promulgation of Pastoralis romani pontifices, Ward was imprisoned in Munich, in the convent of the Poor Clares. She was accused by the Inquisition of being a heretic and a schismatic (charges also leveled at Joan of Arc). When Urban learned of this, he ordered Ward’s release and summoned her to Rome. There, the same pope who had suppressed Ward’s order in northern France allowed her to open a new house for her community. She was not, however, allowed to leave the city until she was near the end of her life, nor was she to be recognized as the founder of her community. The ensuing events are hard to follow because, after the suppression, efforts were made to destroy all the related documents.

The times were, in fact, exceptional and rapidly changing. The antagonism between the English throne and the Catholic Church was aggravated by the papal excommunication of Queen Elizabeth and the release of her Catholic subjects from any oath of fidelity they might have made to her. In response, Elizabeth ratcheted up the persecution of English Catholics, who were suspected of plotting the overthrow of the queen. The Catholic Church in England was reduced to a mainly clandestine existence.

Ward, who had done all that she could to preserve what was left of the Catholic Church of England, obeyed the orders of Urban VIII without protesting and accepted the dissolution of her communities, whose members either returned to their families or entered recognized religious institutions. Under the patronage of the local nobility, some members of her “institute” in the Catholic countries of the mainland continued their work of education for Catholic girls and outreach to the marginalized. They lived in “companionship and discernment,” without the benefit of a religious rule and without being recognized as a “religious order.” In 1637, Mary was finally allowed to return to England where houses were established in London and Heworth, near York. The latter was the first convent to be founded in England since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536. Ward would remain there, an apparent failure, until her death in 1645.

Throughout her life, Mary gave proofs of utmost fidelity to the Catholic Church and to the pope, even when he attempted to eradicate all she was striving to do. She was opposed by a group of clerics who were obsessed with the niceties of canon law, as well as by those who were hostile to the innovations of the Jesuits. Even some Jesuits opposed her, on the grounds that St. Ignatius had never wanted to establish a Society of Jesus for women. Finally, Ward had to contend with all those who thought it “unnatural” for women to abandon the tasks ordinarily associated with their sex.

After her death, Ward’s companions carried on her work. Even though the institute had been officially suppressed and therefore had no official status as a religious congregation, they found ways of keeping it alive. It wasn’t until 1703 that Pope Clement XI approved a “rule” for the community. Pius IX subsequently recognized it as a religious institute. Today the Sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (or the Sisters of Loreto—so called because of Mary’s devotion to the Holy House of Loreto) number about seven hundred and are dispersed throughout the world. In addition to teaching children, the sisters have literacy programs for adults, give spiritual direction and counseling, provide shelters for the homeless, and participate in movements for greater justice in the world. The rule they were finally allowed to adopt included the wearing of the habit, but it also tried to incorporate the spirit of Ward’s intuitions.

In 1951, Pius XII referred to Mary Ward as “an incomparable woman”; John Paul II spoke of her as “a pilgrim of hope.” She was declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. Ward’s trajectory seems to demonstrate an axiom in church history: it is often those who suffer humbly and patiently from the church’s contradictions who end up redeeming it, and sometimes also reforming it. Through her obedience and fidelity both to the church and to her own intuitions, Ward ultimately brought about a radical change, opening new possibilities for women in the church. 

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Candelaria devotes a chapter each to Salvador Dalí, Fray Angélico Chávez, José Clemente Orozco, Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Luis Borges, and Richard Rojas. Subsequent chapters take up contemporary tendencies in “Liberation Theology” and “The Mestizo Christ” (which includes a bit on the Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa). A coda emphasizes the diversity of the images of Christ. The diversity is obvious when the hyper-sophistication of Dalí’s The Madonna of Port Lligat and Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) is set side by side with the raw muscularity of Orozco’s The Trinity of the Revolution, or when the passionately personal witness of de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life is compared with the playfully polysemic Three Versions of Judas. But it isn’t fully clear how such figures all fall within the category “Latino.”

While biographical and professional exposition dominate the treatment of each figure, Candelaria does not spare criticism. Mainly, he seems bothered when his outliers’ appropriation of Scripture does not match the historical certitudes offered by NT100 (see the gratuitous criticism of Fray Angélico Chávez), and even more distressed by what he considers a strain of “Gnosticism” afflicting many of these figures, a fault he seems to equate with traditional Chalcedonian piety (see his treatment of de Unamuno). It is surprising that Candelaria did not treat perhaps the most famous of Dalí’s treatments of Christ, The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

Candelaria’s prose—the standard for the academy these days—is a chore to read. Consider this typical sentence: “With an ancient Greek theme, Orozco expresses a universal ideal, transcending the provincialism of nationalistic art and the particularism of Mexican Catholic religious art, in contrast to the particularity of the revolutionary panels.” Where is an editor when we need one?

The Latino Christ in Art, Literature, and Liberation Theology
Michael R. Candelaria
University of New Mexico Press, $65, 248 pp.

In case we thought that North American problems with slavery were homegrown, Katharine Gerbner (a professor of history at the University of Minnesota) shows in great detail how the same problems existed in the colonized islands of the Atlantic as far back as the early seventeenth century—and indeed were imported directly from these islands to Maryland, South Carolina, and other Southern colonies. Gerbner’s analysis deals specifically with the deep ambiguities surrounding the baptism of African slaves. On the one hand, such a missionary effort would seem to be a Christian imperative; on the other, slaves holding Christian status could threaten the planters’ social order. Should not the “freedom of a Christian”—a Protestant ideal if ever there was one—be translated into social and political freedom as well?

Although her main focus is the island colony of Barbados, Gerbner devotes considerable attention to the Danish West Indies; and she gives as much or more attention to the efforts of George Fox and the Quakers, as well as Count von Zinzendorf and the Moravians, as she does to the Anglicans. The term “protestant” in the title is carefully chosen. Gerbner shows that Catholics cheerfully and methodically baptized slaves by the score, abetted by imperial edicts (especially of Portugal and Spain) and the coordinated efforts of religious orders like the Jesuits and Dominicans. No double-mindedness afflicted Catholic conversion activity among slaves, because unlike Protestants, Catholics generally didn’t elevate “freedom” as a distinctive mark of being Christian. 

Protestant proselytism enjoyed the benefits of neither imperial will nor Jesuitical sweat. It tended to be sporadic, freelance, and undersupported. A perfect example is the Oxford-educated Christopher Codrington, whose fervent efforts to Christianize slaves in Barbados remained frustrated, and whose bequest to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel—a bequest he intended for the conversion and education of African slaves—had the paradoxical effect of making the SPG a slaveholding organization. All these good-willed people were caught up in the incompatibility of enforced slavery and the Christian life; none of them could overcome the ideology of a planter establishment so powerful and pervasive that it even made profitability the measure of the keeping of the Sabbath.

Gerbner also carefully examines how slave conversions tended to shift the official Barbadian documents from the language of “Protestant Supremacy,” which distinguished slave and master on the basis of religion, to the language of “White Supremacy,” which distinguished them on the basis of race. This “need to distinguish” in favor of one over another is part of the toxic brew (mixed in part by Christians themselves) from which many still drink today. The book closes by treating George Whitefield’s 1740 “Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” which defended the conversion of slaves, as a transition point to a “formal defense of slavery in the Atlantic world” via its argument that becoming Christian made for better (i.e., more obedient) slaves.

“[T]he most self-sacrificing, faithful, and zealous missionaries in the Atlantic world,” Gerbner sums up, “formulated and theorized a powerful and lasting religious ideology for a brutal system of plantation labor.” Her judgment is harsh. But it is a judgment based on impeccable research. Christian Slavery is the sort of well-grounded microhistory that, in the end, proves more valuable than wide-ranging surveys and broad declarations.

Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World
Katharine Gerbner
​University of Pennsylvania Press, $24.95, 296 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

Candelaria devotes a chapter each to Salvador Dalí, Fray Angélico Chávez, José Clemente Orozco, Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Luis Borges, and Richard Rojas. Subsequent chapters take up contemporary tendencies in “Liberation Theology” and “The Mestizo Christ” (which includes a bit on the Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa). A coda emphasizes the diversity of the images of Christ. The diversity is obvious when the hyper-sophistication of Dalí’s The Madonna of Port Lligat and Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) is set side by side with the raw muscularity of Orozco’s The Trinity of the Revolution, or when the passionately personal witness of de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life is compared with the playfully polysemic Three Versions of Judas. But it isn’t fully clear how such figures all fall within the category “Latino.”

While biographical and professional exposition dominate the treatment of each figure, Candelaria does not spare criticism. Mainly, he seems bothered when his outliers’ appropriation of Scripture does not match the historical certitudes offered by NT100 (see the gratuitous criticism of Fray Angélico Chávez), and even more distressed by what he considers a strain of “Gnosticism” afflicting many of these figures, a fault he seems to equate with traditional Chalcedonian piety (see his treatment of de Unamuno). It is surprising that Candelaria did not treat perhaps the most famous of Dalí’s treatments of Christ, The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

Candelaria’s prose—the standard for the academy these days—is a chore to read. Consider this typical sentence: “With an ancient Greek theme, Orozco expresses a universal ideal, transcending the provincialism of nationalistic art and the particularism of Mexican Catholic religious art, in contrast to the particularity of the revolutionary panels.” Where is an editor when we need one?

The Latino Christ in Art, Literature, and Liberation Theology
Michael R. Candelaria
University of New Mexico Press, $65, 248 pp.

In case we thought that North American problems with slavery were homegrown, Katharine Gerbner (a professor of history at the University of Minnesota) shows in great detail how the same problems existed in the colonized islands of the Atlantic as far back as the early seventeenth century—and indeed were imported directly from these islands to Maryland, South Carolina, and other Southern colonies. Gerbner’s analysis deals specifically with the deep ambiguities surrounding the baptism of African slaves. On the one hand, such a missionary effort would seem to be a Christian imperative; on the other, slaves holding Christian status could threaten the planters’ social order. Should not the “freedom of a Christian”—a Protestant ideal if ever there was one—be translated into social and political freedom as well?

Although her main focus is the island colony of Barbados, Gerbner devotes considerable attention to the Danish West Indies; and she gives as much or more attention to the efforts of George Fox and the Quakers, as well as Count von Zinzendorf and the Moravians, as she does to the Anglicans. The term “protestant” in the title is carefully chosen. Gerbner shows that Catholics cheerfully and methodically baptized slaves by the score, abetted by imperial edicts (especially of Portugal and Spain) and the coordinated efforts of religious orders like the Jesuits and Dominicans. No double-mindedness afflicted Catholic conversion activity among slaves, because unlike Protestants, Catholics generally didn’t elevate “freedom” as a distinctive mark of being Christian. 

Protestant proselytism enjoyed the benefits of neither imperial will nor Jesuitical sweat. It tended to be sporadic, freelance, and undersupported. A perfect example is the Oxford-educated Christopher Codrington, whose fervent efforts to Christianize slaves in Barbados remained frustrated, and whose bequest to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel—a bequest he intended for the conversion and education of African slaves—had the paradoxical effect of making the SPG a slaveholding organization. All these good-willed people were caught up in the incompatibility of enforced slavery and the Christian life; none of them could overcome the ideology of a planter establishment so powerful and pervasive that it even made profitability the measure of the keeping of the Sabbath.

Gerbner also carefully examines how slave conversions tended to shift the official Barbadian documents from the language of “Protestant Supremacy,” which distinguished slave and master on the basis of religion, to the language of “White Supremacy,” which distinguished them on the basis of race. This “need to distinguish” in favor of one over another is part of the toxic brew (mixed in part by Christians themselves) from which many still drink today. The book closes by treating George Whitefield’s 1740 “Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” which defended the conversion of slaves, as a transition point to a “formal defense of slavery in the Atlantic world” via its argument that becoming Christian made for better (i.e., more obedient) slaves.

“[T]he most self-sacrificing, faithful, and zealous missionaries in the Atlantic world,” Gerbner sums up, “formulated and theorized a powerful and lasting religious ideology for a brutal system of plantation labor.” Her judgment is harsh. But it is a judgment based on impeccable research. Christian Slavery is the sort of well-grounded microhistory that, in the end, proves more valuable than wide-ranging surveys and broad declarations.

Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World
Katharine Gerbner
​University of Pennsylvania Press, $24.95, 296 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

Important as it may be, chronology is the least serious problem here. The bigger issue is that the “death-by-philosophy narrative” relies upon a drastically simplified, almost caricatured picture of what we are. It assumes that, in whatever we do—when we choose to believe or disbelieve, for example—we always act as purely rational agents, “calculating machines,” our emotions, passions, or feelings having no say in the process. Which is a strong intellectualist assumption. Worse, it’s a form of solipsism to which those of us in the business of thinking and writing are particularly prone. “Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather,” observes Ryrie, “but they are more often driven by it. People who read and write books, like you and me, have a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas.”

According to this line of thought, then, philosophers, intellectuals, and scientists started to attack religion, and then—as a result—people stopped believing in God. Blinded as we usually are to our own biases and proclivities, we easily take the part for the whole. Ryrie, though, looks at the issue from the other end and wonders: “But what if people stopped believing and then found they needed arguments to justify their unbelief?” The approach he proposes is more holistic because perhaps it is more commonsensical. There is significantly more to being human than sheer rationality. We are a complicated mix of reason and unreason, soul and body, thought and emotion. As such, when it comes to our most important choices, we make them “intuitively, with our whole selves, embedded as we are in our social and historical contexts, usually unable to articulate why we have done it, often not even aware we have done it.”

That’s how we choose to believe, and also how we choose not to believe. What comes after such a choice, thus made, is just rationalization. Our deeper self, based on motives our mind may not be fully aware of, takes a vital decision, and then the poor mind—weak and ancillary by nature—goes on a fishing expedition to find reasons for it. In a certain sense, then, it’s not we who choose not to believe, but rather unbelief that chooses us. That, Ryrie believes, doesn’t make atheism irrational, it makes us irrational. That’s why Ryrie thinks that, instead of an intellectual history of atheism, it would be more pertinent and profitable to pursue an emotional one. He uses “emotion” in an enlarged sense, to mean not just “spontaneous or involuntary passions,” but also “the conscious intellect.” In that sense, we are shaped and defined by our emotions; we become who we are in the process of dealing with them. “We may not be able to govern our emotions fully, but we curate and manage them, and we learn them from the culture around us as well as discovering them within ourselves,” he writes.

Ryrie’s “emotional history” of atheism is clustered around two emotions that, he finds, affect our belief and unbelief in a particularly strong manner: anger (under which he places the various “grudges nurtured against an all-embracing Christian society, against the Church in particular and often also against the God who oversaw it all”) and anxiety (“the unsettling, reluctant inability to keep a firm grip on doctrines that people were convinced, with their conscious minds, were true”). There are times when “the unbelief of anger” is dominant, and times when “the unbelief of anxiety” will prevail, just as it is possible for the two “emotional streams” to converge and coexist in some form or another. The book covers quite a bit of historical ground, but it doesn’t claim exhaustivity. Once Ryrie has formulated his main argument, he focuses on a few Protestant places, with most of the case studies coming from England, even though he dedicates many insightful pages to important continental figures such as Montaigne, Pascal, and Spinoza.

One of this book’s finest accomplishments is the subtle phenomenology of faith that Ryrie undertakes here. Faith is never simple or easy. It is, in itself, a momentous event (“It’s a Great Matter to Believe there is a God,” exclaims one of his characters), and, as an experience, it claims us holistically. Faith is a tyrannical and whimsical master. It can throw us not just off the horse on the Damascus road, but off any sense of balance. In no time, it can become its opposite—unless, that is, faith and doubt are meant to coexist, in various degrees of uneasiness, within the confines of the same self. William Perkins, the major theologian of Elizabethan England with whom Ryrie repeatedly engages in his book, shows how “these two thoughts, There is a God, and there is no God, may be, and are both in one and the same heart.” Indeed, a “man cannot always discern what be the thoughts of his own heart,” concludes Perkins, some centuries before Freud.

As we read Ryrie’s book, we come to realize something at once startling and refreshing: he is practicing precisely what he is preaches in this book. He comes across here as a distinctly intuitive scholar. While clearly structured and carefully developed, the book is built on intuitions. Some of them are fully explored, others only briefly (I, for one, very much hope that the few insightful pages on Hitler’s role in our religious imaginary, dropped almost by accident at the end of the book, will one day be developed into a book-length argument). As you become engrossed in the reading, you sense—sometimes clearly, sometimes more obscurely—that the argumentative prose is meant to “rationalize” things the author must have first felt intuitively. Which is, I guess, something to be expected from a “believer with a soft spot for atheism.” For what is a “soft spot,” if not feeling and intuition turned into method?

If we add to that Ryrie’s rhetorical mastery, we have the complete picture of a writer who feels his way through a difficult topic. Our emotions are not only what Ryrie is talking about in his book. They are also what he is brilliantly acting upon.

Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt
Alec Ryrie
Harvard University Press, $27.95, 272 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

Halík discovered his vocation to the priesthood in his twenties, during the post-Stalinist “thaw” of the 1950s. This was a time when “the regime was no longer ‘the iron fist of the proletariat’ but seemed instead to consist of ludicrous bloated bureaucrats confronted by long-haired and bearded intellectuals in black sweaters with feelings of alienation in their heads.” This period was hospitable enough for learning; many priests were released from prison and became Halík’s teachers. Halík read voraciously, including many Catholic authors. His education, paired with his deep sense of interiority (“the expressive feeling…that at the very center of [my] solitude there was Someone with me”), and an encounter with a priest named Jiří Reinsberg, all contributed to his conversion and eventual priesthood. Reinsberg’s preaching moved Halík, who “gradually, Sunday by Sunday…shifted from my safe distance near the church door, pillar by pillar, closer and closer to the pulpit and the altar.”

Under the Communist regime, priesthood took on a special form: the priests of the underground church in Czechoslovakia worked in complete anonymity. Similar to the French worker-priest movement of the 1940s, the Czech underground priests adopted other trades and professions and saw their vocation as requiring them to live their lives immersed in the secular world. Halík worked as a psychotherapist, never telling anyone about his ordained status unless it was absolutely necessary. Both his mother and the cardinal of Prague did not know he was a priest. (Halík was ordained by a German bishop.)

Halík’s life took a definitive turn in 1968 while he was studying abroad at Oxford, feeling helpless as the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. (Halík, like all of his generation, was also deeply affected by Jan Palach’s protest by self-immolation later that year.) Soon, study trips to the West would no longer be possible. Despite the fact that his experience at Oxford was one of the happiest of his life, Halík decided that he had a duty to return to Prague and join the resistance. He took a train home, thinking he would likely never again receive an exit visa. He did not leave Czechoslovakia, except for a few state-sanctioned trips, until 1989.

Between 1968 and 1989, Halík was involved in all sorts of clandestine activities. As a priest, he said Masses, taught seminarians, and worked as a spiritual director. With fellow intellectual dissidents like Havel and Patočka, he participated in underground university seminars, wrote articles published in the secretive Samizdat journals, and helped distribute Charter 77 (though he did not sign it, because his bishop believed doing so might endanger his secret status as a priest).

The life of the mind was integral to the work of resistance. Professors like Patočka educated Halík in the modern thought of Arendt, Heidegger, Rahner, and others; guest professors from the West, ranging ideologically from Jacques Derrida to Roger Scruton, conducted secret seminars.

But it was the philosophical school known as “phenomenology” that was particularly important. Halík writes of being “high on phenomenology” after one of Patočka’s lectures. Phenomenology sought, among other things, to undo the Enlightenment notion that the empirical sciences can explain all reality. Instead, phenomenology attempts to uncover the primacy of first-person experience, which precedes any scientific data-gathering; it gives dignity of place to the daily realities—like beauty and value—that the empirical sciences cannot measure. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that phenomenology “restored to things their horror and their charm.”

Phenomenology was also fundamentally at odds with the state-imposed Marxism taught in Eastern-bloc universities. It assigned a bigger role to individual conscience than to material processes in determining the course of history. In the first half of the twentieth century, phenomenology was embraced by Catholic theologians like the young Karol Wojtyła.

Halík emphasizes the Catholic elements in the Velvet Revolution, an event that was “marked by wit, laughter, and singing,” rather than violence and hatred. He prefers to call it “the Revolution of St. Agnes.” Havel’s arrest in January 1989 is often said to have sparked the revolution. But Halík observes that according to Czech legend, upon the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia—a princess who eschewed her riches for a life of charity and poverty—“all would be well in the Czech lands.” Agnes was canonized on November 12, the Velvet Revolution began on November 16, and the regime was gone by November 29.

Halík also argues that Cardinal Tomášek’s televised Mass commemorating the canonization of Agnes, during which he expressed support for the protests, was a key moment. He claims that “Prague had two heroes: Václav Havel and the priest Václav Malý.” Malý became a hero when he led thousands of protestors in reciting the Our Father during a critical moment when it appeared that the crowd was about to attack the policeman in charge of suppressing the protests: “The young policeman apologized with a faltering voice, and Václav Malý appealed to the crowd for reconciliation and forgiveness.”

In recounting these events, Halík is not attempting to “baptize” the Velvet Revolution. Rather, he seems to be building on the same general insight expressed by other, secular Czech dissidents. “Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim,” Václav Havel declared in a 1990 address before the U.S. Congress. This is not a dig against socialist economics, but a theory, inspired by phenomenology, about political reform. No material progress can be made without cultural renewal and the transformation of the consciences of individuals: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.” Halík stands on the same conviction when he claims that after Malý’s Our Father, the 1989 revolt “was no longer a political struggle but something much more significant: a spiritual healing. The situation suddenly turned into a sacred moment with a therapeutic dimension.”

For Halík, the church was an aide to the revolution because it provided the spiritual impetus and educational institutions for a cultural conversion. The revolution did not create utopia, and today the Czech Republic and Slovakia suffer from many of the same problems that afflict the rest of Europe. But it did usher in a new, hopeful way of looking at the world, and a renewed appreciation for truth and justice. This cultural epiphany might not be sufficient for long-term reform; but long-term reform, Halík would say, cannot come without it.

From the Underground Church to Freedom
Tomáš Halík
Translated by Gerald Turner
University of Notre Dame Press, $35, 352 pp.

Commonweal Magazine

The many current crises in our world all have something in common. Whether they are humanitarian or economic, whether they are threats to democracy or to creation, there is a common thread running through them. Each in its own way exploits and thrives on division—between the rich and the poor, humanity and the rest of the natural world, citizens and immigrants, the relatively safe and the deeply desperate. Each thumbs its nose at the common human dignity of all people and our joint responsibility for a secure political order, true human freedom, and a healthy natural world. Somewhere at the back of all these and other challenges is the lust for money and power. These issues are all parts of one larger, fundamental crisis: the degradation of the very notion of the human, brought on by the complex mechanism today called neoliberalism. We encounter it most directly in the triumph of finance capitalism and the arrival of surveillance capitalism, effective economically through globalization and politically through the deliberate erosion of the democratic process. To borrow a phrase from Jürgen Habermas, we are witnessing “the colonization of the life world by the system.” The crisis, then, is both global and intensely personal. The forces unleashed in the world by developments in the mode of capitalism are effectively refashioning the human person and the human community.

If “neoliberalism” is a word unknown to you, or simply one that you hear without its impinging much upon your life or consciousness, this is testimony to its sinister force. Coined by Friedrich Hayek, it referred to his belief that all reality can be explained on the model of economic competition, and that all human activity can be measured in terms of wealth, value, or price. Price in particular was a means to allocate scarce resources, and for its efficient function, the market had to be free and competitive. “The market” for Hayek was not just a term for economic activity, but one that described society as a whole. Hence, he could extrapolate a vision of human beings as creatures who would and should follow their own self-interest in competition for scarce resources. Through this human competition, we would learn who and what is really valuable.

All the ills of our contemporary world are either directly or indirectly related to neoliberalism, the globalized form of free-market capitalism that results from the impoverished understanding of a human being as a consumer seeking to maximize self-interest. One such ill is the growing gap between rich and poor nations, and between rich and poor individuals. The statistics are well known. Here in the United States, the richest 1 percent hold about 38 percent of all private wealth, while the bottom 90 percent have 73.2 percent of all debt. The richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Globally, the situation is far worse; forty-two individuals hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion. These are the perverse fruits of neoliberalism, the consequence of reducing human beings to “covetous machines.”

Today our biggest problems may turn out, however, to be the indirect consequences of such huge gaps in income, wealth, and prosperity across the globe. Critics of the free-market system and its attendant neoliberal ideology often challenge its excesses while reinforcing a sense of its inevitability. We, the securely affluent, have for the most part bought into the cultural and economic benefits of neoliberalism and closed our eyes and minds to the human consequences. Those who have less—and this is most of the world—struggle to survive the economic and cultural consequences of the same system. Frustration often leads to the violent rejection of the economic and political systems that accompany neoliberalism, and we end up with a politics of envy that threatens democratic culture. Look around our world today and we will see the progressive diminishment of true human agency. The forces unleashed by the global market render us seemingly impotent in the face of growing disparities of wealth and power, climate change, and a rise in nationalism that may presage a return to forms of authoritarianism or fascism that we thought the twentieth century had eradicated.

A recent call to arms against finance capitalism is contained in an extraordinary work by the distinguished American Protestant theologian Kathryn Tanner. In Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism Tanner presents a disturbing phenomenology of life under finance capitalism. Reversing Max Weber’s classic account of how Christian beliefs could be compatible with and even formative of capitalism, Tanner proposes a view of Christianity as perhaps the last best hope in the struggle against this attack on human flourishing. In the face of capitalism’s pretense to be “all-encompassing,” a return to a prophetic form of Christianity shows “the coherence of a whole new world” that can disrupt finance-dominated capitalism’s claim to inevitability.

The phenomenon of surveillance capitalism, not considered by Tanner, is even more insidious. Neoliberalism’s greatest danger is its ability to present itself as a default; it has become as invisible as the air we breathe and, for the most part, we regard it as “reality.” Surveillance capitalism intensifies this danger by threatening the freedom of human thought. In the words of philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the normalization of surveillance capitalism “leaves us singing in our chains.” If Hayek and his fellow-travelers imagined that the pinnacle of human freedom is being a consumer, companies like Google and Facebook set out to deny us even that freedom. These ultra-powerful companies gather knowledge about our experience and behavior to shape what we take to be our freedom, and sell it to those who want to profit from the chains we do not know are weighing us down. As Shoshana Zuboff puts it in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, we are not its customers. Instead, we are its sources of a crucial surplus, “the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation.” Its actual customers are “the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.” Even more sobering, “Our lives are scraped and sold to fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know.”

In the struggle against the neoliberal system, there is a special role for theology. Both the individual theologian and the collective voice of the discipline must engage with the forces of dehumanization and resist their effects in the name of the God of love. Today, the form theological inquiry must take is one of active involvement in what might be a last-ditch struggle for human flourishing.

I propose that the path we take is one of “spiritual resistance.” I make no claim to having invented the phrase. We can look to the example offered by a small group of French Jesuit priests during the Second World War, whose notion of “spiritual resistance” was what they saw to be the only effective mode of engagement with the crisis brought on by the Nazi occupation of France. Their practical courage offers us some clues about how we might move forward as Catholic theologians, individually and collectively, in confronting our own human crisis and helping repair the torn fabric of creation. I first encountered many of these men in the movement of la nouvelle théologie that flourished in France in the 1940s. But I had no idea that behind their fine theological thinking lay clandestine work of enormous courage, conducted in great danger, in the struggle against Nazism.

Historian Étienne Fouilloux has commented on this development among these theologians, both the Jesuits and their Dominican counterparts like Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu. Dubbing them “servant theologians,” Fouilloux writes that each of them was “neither an agent of the magisterium nor a simple seminary professor, not an Anglo-Saxon scholar nor a German academic” but rather “an apostle whose desire to preach the gospel leads him to put his professional skills at the service of the Christian community, the most humble and the most distinguished.” In recent times much the same understanding of our role emerged in the late Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s notion of the theologian as “the professional insider.” The effective theologian, she thought, is someone rooted in the human world and its challenges, who can put the skills she or he has acquired in service of the community.

When France was overrun by the Nazis in 1940 and then partitioned into an occupied north and a so-called Vichy France in the south, French Jesuits responded with a form of resistance that suited perfectly their identity as Christian intellectuals, French patriots, and courageous activists. For four years under occupation, they regularly published the anti-Nazi journal Cahiers du témoignage chrétien, and later its more popularized cousin, Courrier français, in a fearless act of resistance. The famous opening words of the first issue of the Cahiers sounded a call to arms: France, prends garde de perdre ton âme—“France, take care not to lose your soul.” Fr. Gaston Fessard, the editor of the distinguished Jesuit journal Études and the author of this issue, and others like Henri de Lubac and Yves de Montcheuil all worked clandestinely and in fear of their lives. De Montcheuil was captured in 1944 and executed by the Nazis, and de Lubac himself recounts a number of narrow escapes from the Gestapo.

Publishing the Cahiers was, then, an act of what its authors called “spiritual resistance.” De Lubac was particularly clear in his assertion that the Cahiers was “in no way a political undertaking”; its inspiration did not come from a place on the political spectrum, but grew out of the Gospel. Yet the work they did clearly had profound political consequences. There was no doubt in their minds that Nazism was an evil they had to combat, but their cudgels were evangelical and humanistic. One can see this in the circumstances surrounding de Montcheuil’s capture and execution. De Montcheuil was paying what he called a “pastoral visit” to members of the French underground resistance (the so-called maquis) when the Gestapo made a surprise attack. De Montcheuil had been clear that he would not identify with the maquis because, as he said, their methods were often similar to those of the occupying force. He was also devoutly anti-Communist, though he recognized that some of the Communists’ values made them allies in what was a Gospel-inspired struggle for justice that aligned itself with no one political group. Though de Montcheuil was deeply involved in the Cahiers, his death was not directly connected to the journal. Instead, he was erroneously identified with the maquis because he saw it to be his priestly responsibility to offer them pastoral encouragement even though he did not approve of their methods.

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