Commonweal 845

Relations between the Vatican and Israel—and the state of Jewish-Catholic dialogue in general—are at a historical low point. The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s response have repercussions beyond the geopolitical realm, given the respective religious character (in different ways) of the Holy See and the Jewish state. We appear to have arrived at a defining moment in the relationship, and the situation becomes more pressing with everything we learn about Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and the impact on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

The article by my friend and Villanova colleague Ethan Schwartz posted by Commonweal on December 29, 2024, helps us understand what’s at stake. His piece also reveals profound differences in our views about the significance of this moment, about what is expected of the speaking partner in the Jewish-Catholic relationship (which is unique, but not exclusive of other relationships between the Church and non-Christian traditions), and about what we mean by “liberal Catholicism” today. It’s even more important to ponder these questions given increasingly polemical critiques of Pope Francis from some Jewish voices. 

It should be noted that Schwartz is right to be frustrated and disappointed with those Catholics he sees as essential partners but whose blind spots can pose problems. Further, the rise of neo-traditionalist and neo-conservative Catholic voices raises concerns about the future of Nostra aetate. There’s also the fact that in an increasingly global and post-European Church, Gaudium et spes—and its emphasis on social justice and the common good—has been received more deeply than Nostra aetate, paragraph 4, on the Jewish people. Global Catholicism relativizes the centrality of Jewish-Christian dialogue, and Pope Francis’s pontificate exemplifies this.

Importantly, Schwartz talks about “the leadership of prominent liberal Catholic publications or organizations.” It is true that the de-emphasis of theology has weakened the intellectual life of Catholic institutions, even as other areas of Catholic activity (poverty and humanitarian assistance, anti-abuse and transparency, diversity and inclusion) have developed without connection to a theological understanding of Church affairs. My colleague Ethan understands that within mainstream Catholic institutions, the inadequacy of theology in responding to the new signs of the times is a real problem.

He also makes the necessary point that Pope Francis resorts to unhelpful language in characterizing biblical Judaism. “There have also been characterizations of Israel as hypocritical Pharisees, claims that Israel represents the oppressive ‘law’ versus Christ’s compassion, and celebrations of anti-Zionist Jews as witnesses to the Gospel—just to name a few,” Schwartz writes. But especially on this last point, I wish he had provided some examples or evidence. Francis’s use of John 8:44 in his October 7, 2024, “Letter to the Catholics of the Middle East” was certainly unfortunate, and it has dangerous import for Jewish readers. But it’s not true that Catholic scholars have remained silent on this; there are those who’ve noted that Francis and his speechwriters quote from the Bible in a less than careful way. Schwartz mentions Philip Cunningham’s October op-ed in America, but not the December article in the same publication by David Neuhaus, SJ, who asked: “Why…do remarks that are tainted with anti-Judaism still make their appearance? To what extent do these remarks originate in the pontiff himself, or are they attributable to those assisting him in preparing his discourses and published texts?”

Around the same time, I wrote in La Croix International that Francis’s approach to the Catholic-Jewish relationship requires more solid scholarship and more disciplined language; he needs to be mindful of using biblical texts that have historically been used to justify the persecution of Jews. If this problem resides with his writers, then he has a responsibility to correct his writers. But less-than-careful use of language on even the most delicate issues has been a problem throughout Francis’s papacy, and it’s part of a broader question about papal pronouncements and their relationship to the living tradition as it is developed by Scripture specialists in the Catholic Church. The biblical scholarship coming from the Pontifical Biblical Institute (run by the Jesuits in Rome) always had a minor impact on papal teaching. The work of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (attached to Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) was more relevant for Jewish-Catholic dialogue during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI than under Francis.

Not helping matters was a December article in Vatican News by Pino Di Luccio, SJ, president of the Collegium Maximum, Pontifical Gregorian University, and Bishop Étienne Vetö ICN, auxiliary bishop of Reims and bishop in charge of Jewish relations for the French bishops’ conference. While it showed how the verse should be interpreted according to Catholic hermeneutical standards, with a long quotation from Nostra aetate, it didn’t explain why Francis cited it. And it underscored the mysterious public silence of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews (CRRJ, part of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Christian Unity) on this issue. Perhaps the commission is overly deferential to the Holy See’s Secretariat of State. Or maybe it’s further indication of confusion within the Vatican these days. (And since the November 25 death of Cardinal Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot after a long illness, there is no prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue who is competent for dialogue with Islam.)

Schwartz makes other points that merit response. “The gravity of a papal letter merited a response from the leadership of prominent liberal Catholic publications or organizations,” he writes. “What I really wanted was an institutional acknowledgment that using this language was unacceptable. It never came.” As mentioned before, there actually were some responses to Francis. Schwartz seems unsatisfied with the kind of response. “Given the long, bloody history of Catholic antisemitism, why should Jews give the benefit of the doubt to Catholics who say such things and then also won’t say that it’s wrong to call us the devil?” he asks. The difference is that these articles by Catholic scholars gave Pope Francis the benefit of the doubt; for many of us, it was clear that Francis was alluding to the satanic nature of violence and war as such, without specifically blaming it on the Israelis and even less on the Jews. This is where the horizons of expectations differ profoundly; there is an evident crisis of mutual trust. But there are also very different cultures of discourse within Judaism and Catholicism, and they affect what Jews and Catholics expect from each other.

What was absent in what Schwartz identifies as “prominent liberal Catholic publications or organizations” was an acknowledgment that Francis uses antisemitic language, which Schwartz sees as evidence that “liberal Catholicism” is trafficking again in antisemitism. But there is no official list of prominent voices in liberal Catholicism—a theological and intellectual movement within the Catholic Church that has gone through different phases in the last two centuries, and which differs profoundly from country to country. Schwartz sees Catholics as liberals or as traditionalists. This leaves out many centrists (if we want to use these political labels). As polarized as U.S. Catholicism is, it is not formally divided (at least not yet) between traditionalists, neo-conservatives, and liberals, which would be a very American way of sizing up religion anyway. An independent, lay-run magazine like Commonweal, for example, has been a prominent voice of liberal Catholicism for one hundred years, but it has never become its house organ.

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In his recent response to my review of Paola Ramos’s Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, Santiago Ramos (no relation) registers a few disagreements. But his criticisms actually bolster my main point: identities are complex, and cannot be reduced to simple labels. That’s why I agree with Ramos’s assessment of the wide, diverse spectrum of the country’s 60 million Latino voters, and called for a “rethinking of identity talk more broadly.”

That is also why I am concerned about the extent to which the so-called “alt-right” or MAGA style of conservatism has co-opted a reductive, essentialized Latino identity by manipulating tropes of tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma. Are all Latinos really so family-oriented, religious, sexually conservative, and fearful of communism and socialism that they must make common cause with Trump—a mendacious would-be autocrat who in many, perhaps more concrete ways is thoroughly opposed to their interests?

Like Paola Ramos, I grew up in South Florida, a place of contradiction and complexity if there ever was one. Yes, many Latinos there (and elsewhere) adhere to a Christian morality that “means decency, love, and sacrifice,” as Santiago Ramos notes. But contradictions also abounded within my community—as they do among any people—as many Latinos’ staunch, evangelical Christianity went hand in hand with their vocal racism and vicious homophobia. I can both appreciate and honor Latinos’ bonds of community and family, while rejecting the parts of Latino identity that the Trump campaign both essentialized and pandered to. 

Far from presenting Latino identity as “currently diseased” or highlighting “pathologies of a toxic Latino culture,” Paola Ramos and I acknowledge that there is no singular static Latino identity or culture. Whenever I discuss identity with students, I prefer the plural “identities” to highlight the infinite complexities that surround how each of us, at any given moment, might situate ourselves on a grid with several intersections, some more rigid and prominent than others. For example, how do I identify myself? Male, writer, professor, Latino, San Francisco resident, lover of horror novels, etc. Identities are never settled; they shift depending on experiences, contexts, and self-stylization. 

To thwart the weaponizing of simplistic identity tropes, difficult discussions of identity and the contradictions within Latino communities is necessary. “Latino” is a broad category, but it also contains specific tropes; conformity with those tropes shouldn’t be a requirement for membership, but it too often is. And that’s just what Trump and the Republicans exploited in the latest election. 

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I have wonderful memories of my father dressed in a white alb, standing piously on the altar before he distributed communion, and my mother singing in the choir. As a child I served Mass many Sundays with my friend, Steve Woodland, including when Fr. Ted Hesburgh would come to town at Christmas to visit his family. Countless sacraments and graduations in that beautiful church followed.

But as chronicled in Sarah Kelly’s poignant documentary, “Palisades Parade,” there was suffering on the horizon. Corpus Christi stepped up in a big way when my eighteen-year-old brother was killed by a drunk driver. Both my mother and Msgr. Cotter died two years later. Another wily Irishman from Cork, Fr. Liam Kidney, eventually took over the parish and responded to our increasingly libertarian culture with wit and joy that lured people back. My son was baptized there by Fr. Woodland on Christmas Eve in 1999.

In 2019 came the death of a second brother, a nationally known musical theater star. Again Corpus Christi came to our aid, with a packed funeral that featured glorious music and a soulful sermon by the Jesuit president of Los Angeles’s oldest high school, Loyola, where, like many Palisades boys, my brothers and I had been educated.

On my way to New York for a memorial planned by my brother’s wife, I felt drawn in the wake of what had happened to take a detour to Georgia to attend President Carter’s Bible-study class. After camping all night in the parking lot of Maranatha Baptist Church, I joined a line of bedraggled Carter devotees who were ushered into the tiny building as two hundred others looked on. 

President Carter, then ninety-five, had broken his pelvis just two weeks earlier. Moving gingerly with a walker, he perched in a white chair before the congregation and began to speak. His wife Rosalynn slipped in at 10 a.m. and sat down beside me. President Carter recounted falling ill while monitoring an election in Guyana in 2015. Subsequent testing showed he had metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. Quoting from the Book of Job, he spoke about his conviction that there was no need to fear death. “Though I have doubted almost all my life,” he said, his Christian faith had given him “complete confidence in life after death.” He added, “Just be reassured that you have a wonderful eternal life to look forward to,” and then he launched into a speech about how we could all help make America “a superpower for peace.” 

After a closing prayer, he shuffled down the aisle and sat down between his wife and me. He smiled later as he complimented my Save-the-Children tie, put his check in the collection plate, and passed it on to me. I had a chance later to tell him that I was traveling to New York to celebrate the life of my remarkable brother. Early the next year I received a note in the mail from the former president, expressing sincere condolences on behalf of himself and his wife.

Now, in the same week he was honored at the Capitol and buried in Plains, Georgia, Pacific Palisades suffered the catastrophic destruction of block after block of beautiful homes. Hundred-mile-per-hour winds led to the incineration of both Corpus Christi and the United Methodist Church. Heroic first responders helped ensure that virtually all the town’s thirty thousand residents escaped unharmed, and Msgr. Kidney brought the Catholic community together again in nearby Santa Monica for Mass just days later. 

The Book of Job celebrates Job’s faithfulness to God despite all the suffering and unfairness of life. Both President Carter and my hometown celebrated and suffered through long and eventful lives. “Prayer is confronting the challenges of life in the presence of God,” he said that November day at Maranatha Baptist Church, in what proved to be the last of the hundreds of Bible studies he led there. I’m hopeful now that a prayerful and communitarian spirit will guide poor Pacific Palisades and prove that there is indeed life after death. 

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When I told an older practicing Catholic I was reading How Far Can You Go?, he laughed and said it was a book aimed at his generation, not mine. Indeed, Lodge was born in 1935, the same year as my father, and four years before my mother. Odd perhaps, then, that the events of the novel felt so immediate—though I suspect I was undergoing something of a vicarious or even nostalgic experience. Lodge uncannily captures what I remember of my parents’ relationship with the Church in the 1970s, when I was a child. They remained somewhat more bound to conventional parish life than Lodge’s characters, and belonged to the particular milieu of suburban American Catholicism of that era. But they were also caught up in the ferment of the time. I recall energetic “discussions” about Vietnam, pacifism, nuclear weapons, poverty, and lay involvement in the liturgy—if not about birth control (a topic central to Lodge’s 1965 novel, The British Museum is Falling Down), though I’m sure there had to be some talk of it behind closed doors. Confessions on Saturday evenings came to seem less about admitting catechetic transgression than seeking guidance on living in a world that presented urgent spiritual, financial, and domestic challenges, hints of which could be gleaned from their conversations on the drive home from church. Some parish priests, it became clear, were more receptive to this confessional mode than others.

It is important not to romanticize these memories or to take them, so to speak, as gospel; the realities must be more layered and complex. Moreover, I don’t recall any conversations explicitly taking up the heavy topic of “faith” as such. But the “demands of an adult faith” were likely responsible for the charge in the local atmosphere, which must have sparked something in me in spite of my sullen, adolescent resistance. By the time I became a teenager, Ronald Reagan had been elected president and John Paul II was in the Vatican. The world they ushered in was the one in which, with trepidation and skepticism (much of it later justified), I grew into adulthood. Lodge concludes How Far Can You Go? with an authorial intrusion to comment on the then-new pope: “a Pole, a poet, a philosopher…a man of the people, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular—but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What happens now?” In the fullness of time, that question was answered. The question is being asked anew in the twilight of Francis’s papacy—both by those who think there’s been far too much change and those who think far more is necessary. 

“I received many letters from Catholic readers of my own generation endorsing the representative accuracy” of How Far Can You Go?, Lodge reported in his 2018 memoir Writer’s Luck. He didn’t want the book to be political or polemical. He seemed to steer between the opposing poles Thomas Merton was already bemoaning in the 1960s: the “exaggerated and confused enthusiasms” of liberal Catholicism, and the “fanatical, static and inert concept” of the Church that conservatives were intent on preserving. But Lodge never admitted to any consuming belief. In an introduction to the 1993 reissue of The Picturegoers, he says he was an “orthodox practicing Catholic” when he wrote the novel, but “if you were practicing, you were ipso facto orthodox in the 1950s.” On rereading The Picturegoers thirty years after publication, he was surprised by the “prominence” of the religious element and the seriousness with which he had treated the hero’s “conversion,” since he didn’t recall having “any similarly intense spiritual experience” himself.

Yet such a moment apparently awaited. He wrote in 2018 of reading a meditation pamphlet during a long flight in the 1980s, which he said spurred the only genuinely spiritual experience of his life. This “epiphany” (his word) did not fundamentally change him, however. “[T]he foundations of my Catholic faith had always been intellectual, cultural, and familial,” he explained, until he “felt free in old age” to confess his agnosticism. It would have seemed an unlikely destination for someone whose first significant literary project was a tract on Catholic authors (adapted from his college thesis) that bore a seal of approval from the Vatican declaring it free of heresy. On the other hand, the world is forever being resupplied with former believers, young and old, fervid and tepid alike, and Lodge expressed no ill will to the faith he was born into. He conducted himself well over a long literary career, and he merits credit for thinking openly about the meaning of organized religion in his work and his life. There’s much that this generation—orthodox, agnostic, and otherwise—could still gain by reading him.

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The program of synodal renewal of the Church, announced by Pope Francis, is much deeper, offering a concrete, practical method of listening to one another and of “spiritual discernment” together. The art of “spiritual discernment” is the pearl of Jesuit spirituality and “synodality” is the experience of the first centuries of the Church.

ZM: You dedicated The Afternoon of Christianity to Pope Francis, “with reverence and gratitude.” I wonder if you might say something about what impresses you most about our current pope. Conversely, what criticisms do you have of his pontificate?

TH: Pope Francis is the great prophet of our time, one of the greatest popes in Church history. No one is doing more to build bridges between cultures than Pope Francis. His encyclical Fratelli tutti could play a role in the twenty-first century similar to that played by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the twentieth century. His call for the synodal renewal of the Church can mean much more than the transformation of the Church from a rigid clerical bureaucratic organization into a flexible network of mutual communication. Synodality (syn hodos) is a common journey: it is meant to renew, revive, and deepen communication, and not only within the Church. It is also about the Church’s ability to communicate with other systems in society, with other cultures and religions, with the whole human family, and with the planet we inhabit: to perceive the ongoing symphony of creation. It can also inspire the transformation of the process of globalization into a process of sharing and solidarity.

Criticisms? I regret a number of his unfortunate statements about Russia and the Russian-Ukrainian war. Unfortunately, he is surrounded by people who tragically underestimate Russian imperialism and naively believe that Putin—the Hitler of our time—will sit down for diplomatic negotiations before he is pushed to do so by force of arms. Not a word he says can be trusted. Supporting Ukraine is necessary for the security of the whole world.

ZM: What do you think are the pastoral and theological questions we need to get ahead of the curve on as we anticipate the years and decades ahead?

TH: We need a change in theological anthropology. We need to replace the medieval static understanding of “unchanging human nature” with a dynamic understanding of human existence as being in relationship. This will have implications for political and sexual ethics. The doctrine of the Trinity needs to be taken seriously—God is relational and created humans to live in relationships, to undertake the task of maturing and transforming ourselves by living with and for others.

ZM: Many Catholics in America—particularly those taken in by various internet apologist personalities—seem to attach great importance to proper doctrine without sufficient attention to both spiritual and ethical conversion. What might a Christian faith look like that is not over-attached to beliefs but that takes up faith also—or even primarily—as a way of being in the world?

TH: The synodal reform of the Church presupposes a deepening of spirituality and a reform of theological thinking: a shift from static thinking in terms of unchanging natures to an emphasis on the dynamics of relationships. At the center of the Christian understanding of God is the Trinity—God as a relationship. God created man in his image: our human “nature” is, therefore, to live in relationships, being with and for others; our mission is to share and communicate on a common path. The shift from thinking in terms of static, unchanging natures to an emphasis on the quality of relationships involves a renewal of ecclesiology, of the understanding of the Church, and of Christian ethics, including sexual ethics and political ethics. In making this shift, we cannot ignore the findings of the natural and social sciences.

The Church is to be a community of pilgrims (communio viatorum) that contributes to the transformation of the world and the whole human family into a community of the journey, helping to deepen the dynamics of sharing. The Church also has a “political,” prophetic, therapeutic, and transformative mission in the world. Church is a sacrament, a symbol, and an instrument of the unity to which all humanity is called in Christ. This unity is an eschatological goal that can only be fully realized at the “Omega Point” at the end of history, but for which we must continue to work throughout history.

ZM: What words would you impart to American Catholics following the reelection of Donald Trump? In what ways could American Catholics view national upheaval as an opportunity to become a deeper, more spiritual people?

TH: The victory of the amoral populist Donald Trump, a chaotic and immature personality, is a tragedy not only for America but for the whole world. Those who cannot accept defeat and are incapable of critical self-reflection, who don’t respect democratic rules and the culture of law, do not deserve to win and rule. When the people of Europe watch the narcissistic scenes of Donald Trump—whose gestures and facial expressions are strikingly reminiscent of Benito Mussolini—his vulgarities, his notorious lies, and his empty phrases, they laugh out loud. I don’t know if Trump voters realize that the world will not take America seriously with such a president. The spiritual blindness that makes this figure—who is the pure embodiment of values in complete opposition to the Gospel—into the object of a religious cult needs to be seriously studied. The attempts to turn the Christian faith into an ideological weapon for culture wars dangerously discredit Christianity. Nationalism and national egoism are contrary to catholicity.

Many forms of the Church today resemble the empty tomb. Our task is not to weep at the tomb and look for Jesus in the world of the past. Our task is to find the “Galilee of today” and there encounter the living Jesus in surprising new forms. We need to rediscover the depth and richness of Christianity, the polyphony of Scripture and tradition, and faith as a source of beauty, freedom, and joy.

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But later he told me that it wasn’t just the aesthetics that drew him in. “It’s comforting,” Dean said. “But it’s more than that. As a deeply disillusioned person, upset about consumerism and the rapacious accumulation of wealth, I see the Church as an alternative to all that.” (He actually used those words.) “But that doesn’t even totally explain it. It’s complicated.”  He liked the Church’s concept of free will. “We make the choice whether to sin or not,” he said. “You take responsibility for your own actions. And Jesus is not a victim. He chose to die.” 

When he started writing about Catholicism in his fiction, Dean said he felt he had hit on something deep and meaningful. He is interested, he said, “in guilt and suffering and pity and hatred and cruelty, those human things I struggle with which are articulated so clearly by the Catholic Church.” He’s still struggling with things like the Virgin birth and Jesus’ divine nature. “I feel like you’re either all in or all out. That’s what faith is, right?” He’s admitted he’s not all in just yet.

Apparently, many other people his age are. The Catholic Leader reported recently that there has been an increase in the number of young people attending Mass, perhaps out of the possible desire for social connection post-Covid. But Covid has faded, and young people are still turning out. More than one hundred worshippers showed up for Mass at St. Augustine that Sunday, not just the usual deep bench of seniors, but young couples and more than a smattering of single young hipsters in flannel shirts. I was shocked by the turnout and the demographics. Fr. Frank Tumino, clothed in purple Advent robes, delivered a lively, timely sermon, urging those gathered to be grateful for what they have and to share it with others. He instructed us to love God, and one another. Which, of course, is the basic point of Christianity—and the message that often gets lost.

Fr. Tumino gave a nod to the young newcomers just before Communion, explaining who was permitted to receive the sacrament. “When you receive,” he said, “the proper response is to bow your head and say ‘Amen,’ not thank you or right-o or any other phrase.” The worshippers laughed and up to Communion they went, heads bowed, “Amens” quietly mumbled.

When I spoke to Fr. Tumino on the phone the next day about his youthful congregation, he said there were so many young people coming to church that he’s considered putting up a sign that says, “Bring your parents to Mass for the holidays!” He says that some of them are initially drawn by the physical church itself. “The awesomeness of the building of St. Augustine teaches them we’re small in the world, but that God is with us,” he explained. There are those who are attracted by the ceremonial bells and whistles, the Latin Mass and the incense, or the music. “But they do want to belong, and their hearts are in the right place,” he said.

Some of his young parishioners have been brought up in faith, others are completely new to it. Some drift in and out, others come every week. “But they’re all searching in the face of so much uncertainty and anxiety,” he said. “They want peace. And the Church has to meet them. Anxiety is one thing, but being alone with the anxiety, that’s the terrifying thing. In coming here, they’re not alone.”

The pandemic was simply a preview to what was headed our way. Celebrity culture, superhero movies, and a steady stream of TikTok don’t come close to assuaging the looming existential horrors of climate change, AI, unjust wars, and unbridled cruelty against immigrants. We are anxious and growing ever more anxious by the day in a world that feels like it’s spinning out of control. 

But community is only part of the draw, Fr. Tumino thinks. “So many people tell us what we should want. These young people are realizing what they need,” he said.

Like Augustine of Hippo himself, Dean and his contemporaries are not showing up out of habit or because of required worship, but have come to the Church freely, in search not just of the traditions or mystery of faith, but true meaning and an answer to so many questions—questions that as parents we haven’t been, and will never be, able to answer. 

One member of Fr. Tumino’s congregation is a high-school student who started reading the Bible and came to him asking to be confirmed and to make his Communion. Because the student was still a minor, the priest had to get parental permission. Now the boy’s mother has started attending Mass. She came to Fr. Tumino and said, “Can you believe my child brought me back to the Church?”

Right before we hung up, Fr. Tumino said to me, “Maybe your son is the instrument that brings you back as well.” 

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe he is.”

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Ever since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust—Jews have drawn on our biblical heritage to process the horror. Many examples have been moving and constructive, such as elegies for destroyed kibbutzim inspired by the book of Lamentations and invocations of the matriarch Rachel “weeping over her children” (Jeremiah 31:15). Others have been unacceptable, such as depictions of Palestinians as Amalekites—a people whom God commands the Israelites to annihilate. For my part, I have recently found myself thinking about the situation through a more mundane biblical image. I’ve been thinking about oxen.

The laws that follow the Ten Commandments in Exodus feature a discussion of penalties for a person whose domesticated ox fatally gores someone else (Exodus 21:28–31). If the ox gores randomly, it is put down. However, if it’s known to have gored previously, such that the owner has been “forewarned” (hu‘ad), then the owner is executed, too—punished for gross negligence. Postbiblical halakhah (Jewish law) elaborates considerably on the shor hammu‘ad, the “forewarned ox.” Although this case might seem oddly specific, it offers a model for a much broader phenomenon: parties who have a history of wrongdoing and are therefore subject to baseline suspicion that might otherwise be unfair.

How does this relate to October 7? As a Jewish Bible scholar who teaches at a Catholic university, I’m often asked by members of my Jewish community—pro-Israel, like most Jews—about liberal American Catholic (and broader liberal Christian) anti-Zionism. For many Jews, antisemitism is so baked into Christianity that it’s the simplest explanation for liberal Christians’ opposition to Israel: they think that the Jewish state is evil only because their religion has primed them to think that Jews are evil. This, so the theory goes, is the real reason why they support the Palestinian cause; human rights are just a pretense. In halakhic terms, Christians are the owner of the forewarned ox. Their documented history of antisemitism means that their critiques of Israel are inherently suspect.

There’s no doubt that animosity toward Jews is deeply embedded in Christianity, including Catholicism. Over the past year, some Christian critiques of Israel have echoed this history. One example was the viral “Christ in the rubble” image from Christmas 2023, which reimagined the infant Jesus as a Palestinian child in Gaza. While many Jews, including me, understood why this was powerful for Christians, we couldn’t help but notice that the analogy cast the modern Jewish state in the role of the Christ child’s ancient Jewish persecutors. To us, this sounded perilously close to the charge of deicide, that the Jews are collectively and eternally responsible for murdering God. This is arguably the founding myth of antisemitism itself. There have also been characterizations of Israel as hypocritical Pharisees, claims that Israel represents the oppressive “law” versus Christ’s compassion, and celebrations of anti-Zionist Jews as witnesses to the Gospel—just to name a few.

Despite the prevalence of these motifs, I’ve typically pushed back on allegations that Catholic anti-Zionism is nothing other than Catholic antisemitism. There are two reasons for this. The first applies to Christians in general. Although I support Israel and regard it as both historically justified and religiously miraculous, I cannot deny that its founding and continued existence have entailed serious injustices to Palestinians. This is a historical fact—one that even a possible affinity between anti-Zionism and antisemitism would not change. As such, the most proximate explanation for liberal Christians’ anti-Zionism is exactly what they (and all progressive activists) say it is: commitment to justice for Palestinians.

The second reason concerns Catholicism specifically. I regularly find myself explaining to other Jews that liberal Catholics—as well as Pope Francis, whom the liberals regard as an unprecedented champion of their cause—are the principal defenders of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. This includes the revolution in Catholic-Jewish relations represented by the 1965 declaration Nostra aetate, which renounced the ideas that historically fueled Catholic antisemitism (including the deicide charge) and instead encouraged Catholics to see Jews as respected partners in building an open, modern society. Indeed, my own role as a Jewish professor in a Catholic theology department—where I have flourished intellectually, professionally, and spiritually—would be unimaginable without Vatican II. Meanwhile, the liberals’ traditionalist opponents are typically more skeptical of the council and highly critical of Francis. In the most extreme cases, they want to roll back Vatican II entirely and establish a Catholic theocracy—something that would fundamentally threaten Jews.

In this relief, it’s difficult for me to accuse liberal Catholics of surreptitious antisemitism. Both the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause and the internal politics of the Catholic Church militate against it. I disagree with liberal Catholic anti-Zionism, but it doesn’t meet the criteria of the forewarned ox. At least, that’s what I used to think.

On the first anniversary of the October 7 attack, I was doomscrolling on Facebook. Amid somber reflections and calls to free the hostages, something caught my eye: one of my Catholic colleagues had posted a letter from Pope Francis to the Catholics of the Middle East—who, by any account, have suffered tremendously over the past year. Emphasizing that the Church “must never tire of imploring peace from God,” the Pope declared a day of fasting and prayer to “defeat our one true enemy: the spirit of evil that foments war, because it is ‘murderous from the beginning,’ ‘a liar and the father of lies’ ([John] 8:44).”

There’s nothing objectionable about this message, especially compared with the violent rhetoric that has prevailed in public discourse. However, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read that the Pope’s biblical basis for his appeal was John 8:44. Anyone familiar with this verse knows that, in context, these disparaging epithets aren’t directed at a vague “spirit of evil that foments war.” They’re directed at Jews—part of a passage with a longer, bloodier history of antisemitism than perhaps any other in the New Testament.

The scene, like many in the gospels, depicts Jesus in a testy conversation with other Jews about his legitimacy. He provocatively questions their claim to be descendants of Abraham, arguing that the great patriarch, unlike them, would have duly accepted the truth. Instead, Jesus charges, “You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

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Religion

A Holy Invitation

This jubilee’s theme, “Pilgrims of Hope,” is meant to offer a message of comfort to victims of international warfare, the pandemic, and climate change.

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We say “Duccio” but it would be more accurate to speak of “Duccio’s workshop,” since Sienese painting in the 1300s was a more collaborative form of art-making than what we’re used to now. The works were made by many hands, from the assistants who mixed the paints and filled in the background to the metalsmiths who burnished and tooled intricate patterns and filigrees into the gold leaf. Artists had theological collaborators too, almost always members of the clergy, who not only commissioned and paid for the works but dictated the order and iconography of the scenes, and who were unafraid to intervene whenever artists deviated from their wishes. (Recent X-ray analysis reveals that Duccio originally depicted Lazarus’s tomb horizontally, like Christ’s; he was then forced to paint it over, perhaps because his patron objected to the possibility of Lazarus’s grave being accorded equal dignity with Christ’s.)

But the early fourteenth century in Siena was also a period during which painters began making names for themselves, earning public recognition as masters, shopping their skills and securing contracts for their workshops in communes and courts throughout Italy. Even the Lorenzetti brothers, as collaborative as two artists have ever been—together they frescoed Siena’s civic ospedale, Santa Maria della Scala—had their individual inclinations, recognizable in two very similar Crucifixion scenes displayed in different sections of the show.

Pietro’s was probably made first, around 1340. Here, it’s as if he wants to convey the liveliness of the scene of Christ’s death: thick globs of bright red blood drip from Christ’s arms as a stream gushes from his side. In the background, we see three pairs of soldiers mounted on horseback, following each other horizontally across the frame, behind Christ. It’s a convention Pietro uses to indicate that each pair is really the same two soldiers; they reappear in the foreground, where one of them, with a square halo (the “good centurion,” who affirms Christ as the Son of God) indicates Christ with his mace. If we follow its line, we notice another figure in the middle of the crowd: an orange-shirted executioner swinging a club at the shins of one of the thieves crucified beside Jesus (it’s the “bad thief,” who mocked Christ; the other thief, with a halo, is already dead). The man’s legs, bound with rope, are bruised, suggesting the executioner has tried breaking them. But the executioner’s pinched face and square aim leave little doubt: this time the bones will shatter, and with his legs no longer able to support him, the crucified man will soon suffocate.

Pietro has thus introduced into the scene a different type of zoomed perspective: narrative time, depicted as the moment-by-moment unfolding of salvation in history. Ambrogio, by contrast, in a mature work completed just before his death in 1348—like his brother, he died during the Great Plague—depicts a Crucifixion that is at once more static and more poignant. A master of naturalism with an uncanny grasp of physics, Ambrogio orders the space with mathematical precision: Christ’s soaring cross, which divides the foreground down the middle, rises upward, anchoring a triangular frame like a pole holding up the center of a tent. Beneath Christ, on either side, are the same two groups we see in Pietro’s version: Mary and a few of the disciples to the left; Roman officials, including the good centurion and his companion, on the right. But Ambrogio gives us many more minutely rendered physical details, such as two horses arching their necks and lifting their front right hooves as their riders shift in their stirrups and tug on the reigns. Ambrogio is also more skilled at depicting emotions than his brother: Mary’s blue-clad body is splayed across the ground in grief, her head cradled in the lap of another haloed woman. Other onlookers—long-haired Mary Magdalene, a bearded young man, a young woman in a green dress—look upward at the dead Christ as if expecting him to rise. But to no avail: it’s as if everything and everyone in the painting is pulled down by the heavy, intractable force of gravity.

All this might make it sound as if the Met’s Siena show is a downer. It isn’t. There are plenty of works that demonstrate a kind of levity, like the fluttering polychrome wings and rippling robes of the Archangel Gabriel in Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych (ca. 1333–40), or the insouciant scowl and crossed arms of Christ as a petulant adolescent in his Christ Discovered in the Temple, from 1342. Still, a weighty solemnity does pervade the show. And that might actually explain why it has been such a hit, popular not just with critics and fans of Italian religious art but also, even especially, with nonreligious audiences. Medieval Sienese artists’ respect for the communal and their straightforward earnestness are everything the contemporary art world, with its six-million-dollar bananas taped to walls, is not.

It’s a cliché that art museums have become “sacred spaces,” replacing churches, synagogues, and temples as sites of connection and shared meaning for an increasingly pluralistic, nonreligious population. Like most clichés, this one has at least a grain of truth. Generally, you don’t go to the museum to pray, but that doesn’t mean that whatever you’re doing there—or out on the street, or on the subway, or in the park—can’t also be something transcendent. If the art of Siena, with its electric colors, exotic patterns, and fanciful imagery says anything, it’s this: God is everywhere, in everything. Finding him may simply require changing your perspective.

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Is saintly sexy? Yes, if Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous Italian Baroque sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa is to be believed. Depicted in white marble, the young nun swoons with her head flung back, eyes half-closed, mouth open, as an angel aims a golden-tipped arrow at her heart. Completing it in 1652, Bernini tried to remain faithful to Teresa’s own description of her heaven-sent rapture: “It seemed to me that this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan.”

The sculpture is housed in the Cornaro Chapel of Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria Church, the middle section of an altarpiece. The walls on either side feature busts, also in white marble, of the Cornaro men scrutinizing the scene from theater boxes, as if watching a performance. They lend a shocking, voyeuristic element to what was, in reality, a middle-aged abbess’s shattering experience of divinity. One wonders: What would the saint make of her male spectators? 

Aside from being a visionary, Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) was a tireless religious reformer, the first woman of only four to be named a Doctor of the Church, and a prolific writer. The Life of Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle, and The Way of Perfection were written, in part, to explicate her mystical experiences to the Inquisition, who investigated her five times (no charges resulted). She also wrote poetry, like her Carmelite protégé St. John of the Cross. But unlike John’s highly symbolic verses on apophatic theology (also known as the “via negativa” or “negative way”), Teresa’s were written in plain language, intended to be readily understood. This openness and generosity guides Dana Delibovi’s sensitive new free-verse translation—the first by a woman of the saint’s poetry—Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila.

In the introduction, Delibovi—a poet herself—discusses Teresa’s insistence on vernacular language to elucidate spiritual concepts and transcendent experiences:

The mystical and the practical, as different as they may seem, are united in Teresa’s life and work. Moreover, for Teresa both the mystical and the practical are concrete, tangible experiences…. She prefers words and images that are experiential rather than conceptual, a preference congruent to the expressions of concrete mystical and practical experience that motivate her poetry.

Delibovi’s straightforward, but still lyrical, translation of “At the Vows of Isabel de Los Ángeles” makes that paradoxical unity accessible:

Place my love within storms

and my gift inside the wound;

put my life within death,

and my favor, in contempt.

Her free-verse adaptation gives energy to the regular ABBA enclosed rhyme structure of the original:

Entre borrascas mi amor,

Y mi regalo en la herida,

Esté en la muerte mi vida,

Y en desprecios mi favor.

As Delibovi also notes in the introduction, these are the words of a “visionary with her feet on the ground.” Shoeless feet, to boot: Teresa founded seventeen Discalced Carmelite convents in twenty years (“discalced” from the Latin “without shoes,” reflecting her intention to restore the order to its original austerity). It’s difficult to imagine how this woman got so much done, considering she suffered from mysterious ailments, including perhaps epilepsy. I emailed Delibovi to ask how Teresa’s attempts to function despite illness (and transpiercing) informed her life and writing.

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Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and author of an acclaimed biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, offers the most complex portrait in this group of memoirs. He begins Evangelical Anxiety with a description of a panic attack he experienced as a student at Harvard Divinity School. It is a signal that his memoir will be a study of the mind as well as the soul, an exploration of health as well as faith. But Marsh’s breakdown also exposes a glaring limitation of his Evangelical upbringing. A Baptist preacher’s son from the Deep South, Marsh had just one lens for interpreting his divinity-school panic: pain like this “was a kind of blessing, something that might draw me, like a medieval saint, to the suffering of my Lord.” He goes on, poignantly: “This attempt to receive suffering as a gift was the only story available to me.” The path of Evangelical Anxiety leads not so much to healing and wholeness as to the gathering of other narratives that will complicate Marsh’s understanding of being a Christian in the world. “Must play the instrument I’ve got,” Saul Bellow’s narrator concedes at the end of Herzog. That may be true, but you do get to add other strings to the instrument you’ve got. The young Marsh is desperate to do just that.

His memoir moves back and forth between adult life and childhood, and this narrative motion nicely embodies his ongoing ambivalence and unsettledness. Divinity school is followed by more graduate work and then a job at a Catholic university in Baltimore, marriage and children, a first book, long forays into both psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and eventually a return to the University of Virginia to teach. But the narrative everywhere pulls threads of childhood forward, and Marsh can’t—or won’t—untangle the ongoing influence of his Southern roots, his Evangelical conscience, his guilt over all things sexual, and the abiding, often confounding presence of his pious parents. In this sense, his memoir looks back to Gosse, whose father functioned as a kind of smothering second conscience. For Marsh, the heavy role belongs especially to his mother. In his twenties, living a thousand miles from home, trying to become a writer, and trying to muster the courage to give eros a turn, he explains the trap he’s in: “What I knew, those nights with the poet and the booze, is that if I had sex, my mother would know, and she would somehow be undone, this woman whose mental equilibrium seemed to demand the purity of her only child. What I knew is that such transgression would remove me from relationships I felt I could not live apart from.” His conclusion is conflicted, and he shows more generosity to his parents than many of us could muster: “I was oppressed by their protection, and I hated it, but their presence was also a necessity.” 

Still feeling the pressure from his parents to stay faithful to their brand of Evangelical religion, while recognizing new pressures that were now his own internalized conflicts, Marsh refers, in a lovely phrase (the memoir is beautifully written), to “the elemental choreography of it all.” The easy dynamic of a disenchantment narrative is to let every pressure accelerate you to a liberating release. But Marsh’s memoir remains tense, not triumphant. He’s going to move on from Evangelicalism without condemning it, which only adds to the stress of moving on.

More than the other three memoirs here, Marsh’s book recognizes that Evangelical intensity is a feature, not a bug. The comforts of the Bible and of the Evangelical life necessarily come “wrapped around anxiety.” The tension between comfort and anxiety is an integral part of belief. Reading Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest, Marsh notes in this canonical book of Evangelical devotion a kind of fetish for suffering—for being hurt, persecuted, and crushed. He summarizes Chambers’s piety this way: “Depletion, ruin, your ash-heap life, the filth exposed—I am vile, God be praised.” We are a long way from the triumphalist rhetoric of Christian nationalism, in which depletion, ruin, and filth are the other guy’s problem. Marsh knows that self-abnegation can lead to gratitude and song, but he is right that this intense concentration on how far from the mark your inner world really is makes the young believer vulnerable. “When such heaviness becomes your hermeneutic,” he writes, “it’s not long before any devotional ardor is crowded out by anticipatory dread, because its pages can only remind you how far you have fallen short, how infinite is your failure to properly receive the superabundance of God’s grace and mercy and love and judgment.” For him, that heaviness was too much. 

The kind of critique Marsh offers in this book is more damning than any charge of hypocrisy or coercion. The intensity, the constant watchfulness, the expectation that sin or distraction or backsliding is right around the corner, the “life-or-death struggle to be holy,” all mark fidelity to Evangelicalism. Obviously, not everyone is overcome by this struggle. Some find a calibration that lets them function and flourish. Still, it’s impossible to read Marsh’s account without feeling the anguish of his younger self. For a nonbeliever, the answer might look simple: just let go. Get away from what oppresses you. But for one who has believed, the intensity of the disenchantment will have to equal the intensity of the previous enchantment. Living anguish is a tribute to dying faith.

Marsh grew up in Mississippi at the height of the civil-rights movement. With jolting candor, he recalls that when the principal came on the loudspeaker to announce that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, the class broke into applause. I confess I had to stop for a moment here to register what I’d read. Marsh shares the shock of it but affirms what happened:

Often, when I have remembered that moment, I have paused, because I find it so incredible. I pause to say to myself, That couldn’t really have happened, Charles, only to remember with incredible vividness that my classmates did erupt in cheers, and I may have too. 

Marsh’s early academic work focused on this period and this struggle in the South, but as he recalls his personal experiences, there are strange hints of the paranoia and panic that Tim Alberta has reported among contemporary Evangelicals in thrall to Donald Trump. It’s worth noting these quiet connections. Alberta has done important work to show the roots of Evangelicalism’s recent political turns. Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) offers even more theological and cultural context. Marsh’s book is deeply personal; it is not a platform for political commentary. But that only makes his confession more revealing. Here he is commenting on the anxieties of the pious world in which he was raised: 

You couldn’t have found a safer neighborhood in those years; no one ever recalled a break-in. Yet we lived, mother, father, and only child, with the certainty that we’d be invaded. Communists, Leninists, Stalinists, unions, beatniks, peace groups, SCLC, SNCC, COFO, CORE, GROW, NAACP, Northern clergy, ecumenical councils, globalists of all sorts—they had us in their sights.

Looking back, Marsh writes, “I was struck by how our siege mentality had become so pervasive, so complete as to constitute an epistemic foundation upon which rested our entire worldview.” What is that worldview? That “no people in history had ever been persecuted like white segregationist Christians.” 

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In the same way, the authors’ failure to recognize that one cannot simply read theology off the face of narrative texts, or claim, without mediation, to capture the “character of God” from such reading, warrants some degree of skepticism about their approach. The authors risk falling into unfortunate anthropomorphisms when they fail to acknowledge that scriptures are human compositions that participate in, rather than contain, revelation, and that the image of God found in various scriptural compositions represents different human conceptions of God—none of which can be taken as absolute, and all of which must be assessed in light of the scriptural witness as a whole and of the Church’s tradition. Thus, rather than follow the Frederick Faber hymn that speaks of a “wideness in God’s mercy,” where mercy is an enduring quality of God, the authors advance as their theme “the widening of God’s mercy,” which, unfortunately, suggests that prior to such “widening,” God was either less merciful or without mercy altogether.

The notion of a mutable God, one who “changes his mind,” is essential to the authors’ argument, however: “If we take the biblical narratives seriously, we can’t avoid the conclusion that God regularly changes his mind, even when it means overriding previous judgments.” This premise, in turn, provides the legitimation for their own change of mind concerning sexuality. Christopher states that because Scripture “says that God may change his mind and his approaches to the world…faithfulness to God means sometimes doing the same”; and Richard says, “Because God sometimes changes his mind and his approaches to the world, faithfulness to God means sometimes to do the same.”

But although the notion that there is a divine precedent for changing one’s mind on sexuality may be comforting, one wonders whether the issue is really one of changing one’s mind or, rather, one of reaching the proper conclusion. Humans scarcely need to appeal to God’s variability when they change their minds; it is enough for them to change their minds in accord with God’s righteousness.

In his survey of Old Testament compositions, Christopher Hays puts particular emphasis on God’s mental mutability in his interactions with Adam and Eve, Cain, Abraham, and Moses, before spending significant time on the mutability and inadequacy of biblical laws: “Biblical laws were not unchanging, nor can they easily resolve ethical issues.” He quotes Ezekiel to the effect that “we have been following statutes that are not good,” and makes a contemporary application: sometimes, “we find that we were wrong about the things we once believed that God wanted.” He turns the theme of mind-changing more explicitly in the direction of mercy when he considers the scriptural evidence that minorities like sojourners and eunuchs were a constitutive part of Israel and that God’s mercy extends to all people, a point made spectacularly by the Book of Jonah.

The tenor of Christopher Hays’s statements, however, has the occasional effect of subtly undermining the authority of the very texts he is using to make his argument. At the very start of the introduction, for example, he calls Samuel’s declaration to Saul that God, unlike mortals, “does not recant or change his mind” (1 Samuel 15:29) a “lie,” because it conflicts with the repeated narrative statement that God had “repented” of choosing Saul (1 Samuel 15:11; 35). But is it? A lie is a deliberate attempt to deceive someone, and that is clearly not what Samuel, or the text of Scripture, seeks to do. Wanting to make a strong point, Christopher Hays makes the wrong point. Precision matters.

His section of the book also contains some obiter dicta whose tone and tendency suggest a generalized animus against conservative theological and social positions that perhaps he once shared. He declares that Jonathan Edwards had not “rightly captured God’s character” and that his exclusivist preaching was tainted by his connection to slaveholding and led to suicidal ideation among his congregants. In his citation of one biblical passage, he avoids a translation of YHWH as “Lord” because, he says, “the image of God as ‘lord’ or ‘king’ brings with it cultural and emotional baggage”—although he uses the title elsewhere. He links the daughters of Zelophehad with strong sisterhood and asks, “What if powerful people more often affirmed their subordinates when they challenged unrighteous aspects of systems?” He slides from the child sacrifice to Moloch practiced in ancient Canaan to contemporary failures at gun control, and from there to suicides caused by “social pressures on LGBTQ youth.” He avers that “[s]ome of the nations most interested in biblical interpretation—the United States, England, and Israel—are also some of the most invested in the idea of their own exceptionalism and chosenness.” And he notes, finally, that “

In his treatment of the New Testament, Richard Hays first follows the ministry of Jesus as portrayed in the synoptic gospels, asking, “How might the gospel stories of Jesus’ convention-breaking words and actions affect our thinking about norms for sexual relationships in our time?” The phrase “convention-breaking” is key to his analysis. Jesus consistently appeals to God’s mercy in his acts of healing and in his inclusion of society’s outcasts: “The consistent theme of his surprising words and actions is that God’s mercy is wider and stronger than we might expect.” Hays aligns Jesus’ pharisaic opposition with contemporaries who resist change in sexual mores on the basis of Scripture: “If the well-meaning attempt to honor God’s law leads to hardness of heart and blindness to the need of afflicted people, something has gone badly awry.” Characteristically, Hays includes his former self among such resisters: “The Lord may also have grieved with me.” Apart from his desire that this analysis of Jesus should shape thinking about sexuality—precisely how is not elaborated—Hays’s analysis of Jesus’ ministry is standard stuff and unexceptionable. Jesus’ ministry was indeed convention-breaking and was indeed resisted by those protecting their own privileged positions.

More interesting is Hays’s analysis of the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles as a process by which “the Holy Spirit began to change the church’s mind.” He traces the way in which the early Church’s decision to include Gentiles without requiring that they first become Jews (by being circumcised and keeping the law of Moses) was both startling—seemingly at odds with both Scripture and Jewish tradition—and a result of discerning God’s activity among humans through the power of the Holy Spirit. His analysis correctly observes how the perception of human experience—as the experience of God in human lives—was the key factor in changing the Church’s mind, thus opening the way for the Church to include those formerly regarded as unclean by nature and sinful in practice.

Recognizing that the Acts narrative provides a hermeneutical analogy for the acceptance or rejection of same-sex love within the Christian community is helpful and—for Richard Hays, who spent decades resisting the implications of this experiential side of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral—impressive. He is certainly right to claim that “the work of the Spirit is ongoing and the exegesis of texts does not excuse us from recognizing it.”

It should be noted, however, that contrary to the argument of this book, Acts shows us that human beings changed their minds in response to God’s leading, not that God changed his mind. Indeed, the entirety of Luke–Acts makes clear that God had always intended that “all flesh shall see God’s salvation” (Luke 3:6) and that Jesus would be a “light to the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32). The narrative of Acts does not support the authors’ premise that we can change our minds because God has changed his mind. Hays’s reading of the New Testament also confirms that, according to the witness of Scripture, God has specifically not changed his mind about human sexuality; the issue is whether God’s continuing self-revelation in human experience can lead humans to change their minds on the subject.

Finally, the narrative of Acts reminds us not only how difficult the process of discernment concerning Gentile admission was, but also how careful the Church was to ensure communion between Jewish and Gentile Christians. By demanding that Gentile converts observe certain practices that enabled Jewish believers to meet with them while still remaining culturally Jewish, and by taking care to communicate the Church’s decision to other communities through trusted delegates, the Church gave comfort to those confused and troubled by the controversy (Acts 15:24–32).

The authors invite readers to join them in their own “revision” with regard to sexuality, and to “welcome sexual minorities no longer as ‘strangers and aliens’ but as ‘fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’ (Ephesians 2:19).” Their own repentance is undoubtedly sincere; their commitment to change in the Church is unquestionably earnest. But while the authors’ scholarly reputation may make their invitation attractive to those who still hold the views that the authors once did, it is unclear whether their argument is sufficiently consistent or coherent to effect such a conversion of mind. 

The Widening of God’s Mercy
Sexuality within the Biblical Story
Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays
Yale University Press
$28 | 288 pp.

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The answer lies in Habermas’s understanding of the hermeneutical task of theology and philosophy. Just as philosophy aims to interpret the common sense that underlies our everyday practices, so theology, as “faith seeking understanding,” interprets religious discourse as found in scriptures, rituals, and other practices. But the religious language on which theologians rely loses its vitality—and theology loses its distinctive contribution to public life—if it is not sustained by a living, communal practice of faith.

In subsequent decades, Habermas’s thoughts on religion developed further, reaching full fruition in Also a History of Philosophy, which recounts the discourse between faith and knowledge over three millennia. He presents that history as a genealogy, a reconstruction of the “collective learning processes” that led to the secular, “postmetaphysical” style of thinking so dominant today.

The first volume focuses primarily on the so-called “Axial Age,” a period between 800 and 300 BC when civilizations from the Far East to Greece gave birth to the great religions and systems of cosmological thought. In those cultures, narrative myths gave way to comprehensive world-views that explained everyday appearances in terms of deeper essences and abstract theories of being. Particularly important for Habermas was the spread of universalistic conceptions of humanity and morality, expressed, for example, in forms of the Golden Rule found across all major religions. It is in the Axial Age that Western philosophy and theology are born together, sisters springing from the union of “Athens and Jerusalem,” Greek philosophy and the Judaic tradition.

In general, ancient and medieval metaphysical systems of thought like Aquinas’s elaborated comprehensive theories of being from a God’s-eye point of view, presuming that the categories of everyday thought must align with ultimate structures of being as such. But with the Copernican Revolution and rise of the empirical, mathematical sciences, those worldviews gradually lost their plausibility. They were also discredited by technological developments, growing societal complexity, and religious and political conflicts. Philosophy instead began to see itself as historically conditioned, fallible, and subordinate, in many cases, to the special expertise of other disciplines.

Yet philosophy still has an important contribution to make. Habermas regards David Hume and Immanuel Kant as key figures here, offering two different visions for philosophy in the modern age. In Hume, Habermas sees the progenitor of a philosophy prone to scientism: it looks at human existence from the outside, as it were, reducing human experience to objective physical and psychological processes. Kant, by contrast, remains committed to humanism and the enduring questions about the meaning of human life that trouble our self-understanding: What can I know? How ought I to act? What may I hope? What is a human being?

Moreover, rather than skeptically dismissing religion as irrational, Kant sees it as a rich source of philosophical ideas such as human dignity, moral autonomy, and universal solidarity. Hegel develops Kant’s method by grounding these concepts in their history, but at the same time reduces history to the preordained unfolding of absolute reason or spirit (Geist), thereby negating the genuine contingency of historical development. According to Habermas, it is only with post-Hegelian thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Marx, and Peirce that postmetaphysical thought fully emerges. Habermas regards his own philosophy as another step on this humanistic path.

Philosopher Amy Allen has described Habermas’s genealogy as “vindicatory” insofar as it defends Enlightenment values as the outcome of collective learning processes. It thus stands in sharp contrast to the “nostalgic” histories of decline that one finds in thinkers like Heidegger. Rather, Habermas’s positive view of modernity is closer to that of Charles Taylor, who affirms the modern emphasis on human rights, equality, and freedom. To be sure, modernity has its dark side and its inconsistencies, as critics of Habermas have pointed out. But to defend modernity as one stage in an ongoing learning process is not to affirm these imperfections—for example, Kant’s disparagement of women and non-Europeans. Indeed, his genealogy provides a basis for hope for further moral progress.

In framing the learning process as the result of a discourse between faith and knowledge, Habermas does not mean that faith is not a kind of knowledge. His 1988 talk implies just the opposite: religious beliefs qualify as a kind of knowledge that has authority for a specific community and is fed by their religious experiences and practices. Collective learning processes, by contrast, yield a wider public knowledge.

The natural sciences offer the clearest examples of public knowledge, but moral and practical life also produce public knowledge in the form, for example, of democratic institutions and constitutional rights. Because these result from collective learning in governance over complex societies, they deserve acceptance, with a proviso for their ongoing improvement. Postmetaphysical philosophy does not exactly figure in this picture as public knowledge. Rather, it offers publicly understandable, but contestable, interpretations of the implications of public knowledge for human life and experience, without relying on the religious commitments particular to individual communities.

Though Habermas defends secular modernity, his book also marks a crucial corrective against a tendency toward self-deception in modern thought. “The blinkered enlightenment…unenlightened about itself” too often dismisses religion as a relic of a supposedly unenlightened past. Contrary to the secularization thesis, religion remains an active participant in secular societies—for better and worse. Secular rationalists will understand themselves only if they clarify the relationship between reason and religion through open dialogue with believers, in which both sides work together to identify yet-untapped resources in religion that can be translated into a postmetaphysical, secular idiom.

Naturally, Habermas does not expect such translations to preserve the full meaning of religious convictions. Rather, he seems to have in mind translations that can expand the moral sensibility of secular citizens. Such translations become especially important in pluralistic constitutional democracies. Democratic outcomes will be broadly legitimate only if citizens, religious and nonreligious, can construct a common language that can serve as the idiom of public legal justification. Without being overtly religious, this language would offer a universal way of talking about the moral consequences of politics and policy.

Behind Habermas’s entire philosophy lies a central “motivating thought.” As he explained in a 1981 interview, his work concerns the reconciliation of a modernity that has fallen apart, the idea that without surrendering the differentiation that modernity has made possible in the cultural, social and economic spheres, one can find forms of living together in which autonomy and dependency can truly enter into a non-antagonistic relation, that one can walk tall in a collectivity that does not have the dubious quality of backward-looking substantial forms of community.

Habermas’s genealogy reveals a growing concern that secular modernity, which is “threatening to spin out of control,” still needs its sister religion, perhaps now more than ever.

To understand why, we must look to the role of hope, both secular and religious, in Habermas’s model of reconciliation. Habermas envisions a cosmopolitan legal order—not a total world government but rather a structure similar to the United Nations, only with a deeper commitment to human rights, stronger powers of conflict resolution, and more effective venues for international cooperation. The crises we confront today—environmental, financial, technological, humanitarian—are global in scope and cannot be mastered at the national level. Running through Habermas’s genealogy is the hope that such a cosmopolitan constitutional order will someday arise, based on principles of international justice which all nations freely adopt.

Enacting that vision depends on dialogue and social movements that cut across cultures. But how to build such movements, which involve significant costs for their participants? Secular morality, separated from religious belief and communal practices, loses much of its motivating power. Focused on individual conscience, it “does not foster any impulse towards solidarity, that is, towards morally guided, collective action.” The consequent lack of solidarity, Habermas fears, breeds a “defeatism lurking within” reason—specifically, a lack of the hope and courage necessary to motivate risky collective action for a more just society.

Habermas offers his genealogy in response to that defeatism. By reconstructing the learning processes that produced democratic institutions and human-rights charters, he aims to provide grounds for secular hope based on the recognition that change is possible because it is already underway.

But secular hope may not be enough. Religion enjoys a motivational advantage: “Religious consciousness…preserves an essential connection to the ongoing practice of life within a community.” Thus, “the religious consciousness of the individual can derive stronger impulses towards action in solidarity, even from a purely moral point of view, from this universalistic communitarianism.” But religions, of course, come with their own baggage. Especially in their fundamentalist versions, they have a checkered historical track record and have been a source of conflict as much as solidarity. Habermas believes that the prospects for a cosmopolitan order of law depend on world religions mastering the demands of dialogue and cooperation based on mutual respect for other religions and for nonbelievers.

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There is a nondescript house on Brookfield Drive in East Lansing, Michigan, whose address I forget though I remember everything else about it. It’s where I lived for almost three years in the 1970s as part of a religious group called Shiloh Fellowship. When I’m in town, I sometimes drive slowly past it, letting my thoughts disappear into the past. I haven’t reached the point of ringing the doorbell to ask whoever lives there now if I can look at the rooms I once shared with the brethren.

The house, when I lived there, was part of the Kingdom of God. To the eye of faith, so was everything else. I was saved when I was in high school, and to the extent something like that can be explained it was for a common reason: I wanted everything to be saturated with meaning. This is a cruel demand to make of the world, but as a sixteen-year-old I felt comfortable making it.

The “hour I first believed,” as the hymn “Amazing Grace” calls it, belonged to the early seventies, when the countercultural idea of becoming a different person overnight was still strong. My younger brother Paul was saved when some college students held a youth rally at our church, after which he began leaving lurid Gospel tracts around the house. I resisted until one of them got to me and I recited the “Sinner’s Prayer” on its last page, writing down, as it instructed, the date and time of my conversion: January 6, 1973, 8:12 p.m. I became part of the subculture known as the Charismatic movement, which was then at its height. This mostly middle-class movement, which started around 1960 among Episcopalians in California, borrowed many features—especially an emphasis on the supernatural—from traditional Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God. My first Charismatic meeting was in the cavernous basement of a Catholic church. Two hundred people, mostly young, occupied metal folding chairs arranged in a circle around a few men with guitars. Guitars and metal folding chairs were in many ways the symbols of this movement. A few minutes into the meeting the room filled with the sound of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. I spoke in tongues a few days later and found it pleasant rather than ecstatic, which was disappointing.

The emphasis on direct, unmediated contact with the supernatural was, in some ways, the Charismatic movement’s undoing. It had a warm, thoughtless glow but no real structure, which opened it up to predatory messiahs such as Moses David. In 1968, David founded the organization Teens for Christ, which later became Children of God, a cult that prostituted its female members. Shiloh Fellowship, the group I joined shortly after my conversion, belonged to the Shepherding Movement, which was a reaction against Charismatic vagueness. We were accused of being a cult by Pat Robertson, himself a Charismatic, who refused to allow our leaders on his TV show The 700 Club and said the only difference between our teachings and Jonestown was “Kool-Aid.”

I was raised in the Episcopal Church but knew basically nothing about Christianity. I had never read the Bible, whose pages were less than clear about what to do now that I was a child of God. There was friendliness and warmth at the guitar-saturated prayer meetings but little in the way of doctrine, ritual, or even Bible reading. The only point seemed to be having as many ecstatic encounters with God as possible. It was a drug culture without drugs.

The Charismatic movement started before the counterculture, then partly merged with it. Though too young for drugs and sex, as a middle-schooler I had fallen in love with the rhetoric of late-sixties radicals such as Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Mark Rudd, and Abbie Hoffman. I followed their arrests, bombings, and FBI posters the way some of my peers collected baseball cards. I carried this somewhat absurd romance to the point of publishing an underground newspaper, spelling America with k rather than c, and eventually getting sent to a Quaker school for troubled boys in Canada.

Much of this was standard adolescent posturing, but it had a grain of real fanaticism that had nothing to do with revolutionary politics. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman both had what I lacked—namely, a sense of humor. Unlike them, I had no practical agenda, only frustration with the visible world, which seemed to obstruct my view of reality. I didn’t really want to burn everything down, though I did want to make the visible world transparent enough to let me see what was behind it.

My relationship to this shadowy reality felt restored for a short time after getting saved. Everything became less opaque, and I saw God’s world, the world of reality, through trees, buildings, roads, and shopping malls, making seventies suburbia continuous with the biblical world of kings, lepers, and miracles. This period didn’t last, however. About three months after gaining access to it through the Sinner’s Prayer, what I thought was a firm hold on invisible things started wavering, and I reacted by going into religious overdrive. I prayed incessantly, read the Bible, preached the Gospel, and upped my attendance at prayer meetings. On a ski vacation I waited until I was high over the slopes in a chairlift before asking the stranger next to me if they knew of Christ’s salvation. None of this frantic activity seemed to help.

Shiloh Fellowship had just started meeting in the rented basement of a Lutheran church not far from where I lived. It had the familiar trappings of guitars, glossolalia, and metal folding chairs, but something was different. At the first meeting I attended, everyone had a Bible, which made it seem doctrinal, not just emotional. The founder, Erik, was preaching from a King James Version that lay open in one hand while his other swooped, gesticulated, and singled out verses for witty, incisive, and even sardonic commentary. He attacked Christians who wandered aimlessly from meeting to meeting, calling them “spiritual lone rangers” who were afraid of commitment. I found the remark about lone rangers striking, unaware that it came from a book by Don Basham, one of the founders of the Shepherding Movement and a member of the Ft. Lauderdale Five, the group that formed its nucleus. The book, Deliver Us From Evil, was about exorcism. Basham was a professional exorcist, as was Derek Prince, another member of the Five. The three others were Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, and Ern Baxter. Their names are not forgotten by Christians of a certain age, and the ashes of the rigid hierarchy they attempted to carve from the Charismatic movement still smolder in discussion online as well as in books such as Damaged Disciples: Casualties of Authoritarian Churches and the Shepherding Movement by Ron and Vicki Burks.

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The font’s cover sports a wavy design, created, I presume, to suggest flowing or churning water. Visually suggestive but, alas, phony. It is also puzzling because it would have been so easy to design a font in which the water actually flowed, if that’s what you wanted (I am not sure it’s always desirable but it’s certainly possible). Furthermore, there is a small silver cross affixed to the top of this ill-considered lid. It is a mini symbol. In contrast, there is no paschal candle, which is a major symbol—marked with a cross at the Easter Vigil—that typically stands at the font throughout the entire year (aside from the Easter season).

Moving on to the altar, I was astonished to discover that it too is cup-shaped—a half-circle with a flat top—situated on a platform three steps high, so it’s not accessible to those with physical challenges. Made of bronze, it certainly is weighty. But it enjoys no relationship to the rest of the building. Like the font, it seems to have dropped in from somewhere else. This altar is not the axis mundi. It is a visitor from outer space. I say this with all due respect for the saints’ relics contained within it and the profound beauty of the ceremony by which it was dedicated.

The website of the Archdiocese of Paris explains that the artist who designed the furniture, Guillaume Bardet, is interested in “the forms and uses that are the ferment of our humanity.” This is both vague and basically secular. The same text asserts that his creations achieve “a timeless character.” But is this liturgical furniture timeless? Clearly not. It is most definitely modern art. The baptistery “embodies circularity,” the artist’s website tells us, “allowing visitors to move effortlessly within its space.” (Well, not quite effortlessly, since the raised platform on which it stands is not accessible.) I was left wondering whether circularity, as such, is a value. It seems to be for the artist, as the altar too is a semi-circle. But what is this meant to convey?

Bardet’s website also reveals that “

There is a lot to admire about the restored Notre-Dame Cathedral. Its brightness illuminates the stunning medieval architecture, its devotional spaces are pristine, and its overall pastoral plan and liturgical layout have been strengthened. Nevertheless, a tension exists, and you can sense it in the absolute disconnect between the liturgical furniture and everything else. Dwarfed by an immovable and inappropriate relic of the past—Nicolas Coustou’s late seventeenth–century pietà flanked by statues of Louis XIII and Louis XIV around the old high altar—the new sanctuary furniture associated with the central activity of liturgy feels like a strange visitor in a space where it ought to be most deeply rooted.

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In the following years, jubilees occurred on a fifty-year cycle, and then every twenty-five years, starting in 1475. From then on, ordinary jubilees were held at regular intervals (except when the Napoleonic Wars prevented a jubilee from happening in 1800). Even when the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls was destroyed by a fire in 1823 (subsequently rebuilt), Pope Leo XII substituted Santa Maria in Trastevere as an alternative site for jubilee pilgrims. Some popes have also declared extraordinary jubilee years to mark outstanding events or anniversaries, such as the 1954 Marian Year, or the 2015–2016 Year of Mercy. The 2025 jubilee will mark an anniversary (1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea), and it also fits within the now-typical twenty-five-year cycle.

The most famous symbol of the jubilee is the Holy Doors at the major basilicas in Rome, and it is the Holy Door at St. Peter’s that the pope opens to formally begin the jubilee year. Pope Francis will open that door on December 24 and the doors at the other major basilicas shortly thereafter. Each of the Holy Doors is decorated with intricate art. At St. Peter’s Basilica, for example, there are sixteen panels with biblical stories that highlight both moments of sin (e.g., the expulsion from the Garden of Eden or Peter’s denial of Jesus) and of grace (Mary at the Annunciation and Christ’s baptism in the Jordan). 

For centuries, the doors were cemented shut, and the pope instead commenced the jubilee by hitting each door three times with a hammer. In 1423, one chronicler noted that people showed such devotion to the bricks and cement fragments that as soon as the door was uncovered, “they are carried away by a general frenzy; the northerners take them home as holy relics.” In 1975, as Pope Paul VI struck the Holy Door at St. Peter’s, some debris nearly fell on him, and the hammering process was formally scrapped. Today, the doors are uncovered several days before, and the pope simply processes through them. At the conclusion of the jubilee, the holy doors are sealed up until the next jubilee year.

Francis also intends the 2025 jubilee to be an opportunity for mercy and justice on a systemic level. On the feast of St. Stephen (December 26), Pope Francis will for the first time open a special Holy Door at Rebibbia prison on the outskirts of Rome. The prison housed Pope John Paul II’s would-be assassin; it is also where John Paul visited him and offered forgiveness. Francis intends this unique moment to offer a message of hope and to call attention to “prisoners who, deprived of their freedom, feel daily the harshness of detention and its restrictions, lack of affection and, in more than a few cases, lack of respect for their persons.” This is of a piece with some of Francis’s other recent actions: last September, the Vatican signed an agreement with the Italian Minister of Justice and the mayor of Rome to promote opportunities for former inmates to reenter society through acts of service that will invite them “to look to the future with hope and a renewed sense of confidence.” Francis has also entreated wealthy nations to forgive the debt of the world’s poorest countries. Echoing his previous calls for the protection of the Earth in his encyclical Laudato si’, Francis will advocate international reforms to reverse climate change. Thus, the 2025 jubilee should not just be viewed as an opportunity for individuals to seek mercy through confession, but for changes to happen at a global level that will set prisoners free, protect the vulnerable, and restore broken relationships.

The spiritual, logistical, and financial preparations for the jubilee have been massive. Pope Francis formally called for the 2025 jubilee in the papal bull Spes non confundit (“Hope Does Not Disappoint”) which invokes Romans 5:5 (“Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us”). In anticipation of the jubilee, Pope Francis declared 2024 to be a year of prayerful preparation: “We devote 2024, the year preceding the Jubilee event, to a great ‘symphony’ of prayer.” These preparations also recognize that 2024 marked the end of the Synod on Synodality, another effort to bring together local communities to plan for the future of the Church.

In addition to the spiritual preparedness, Rome has undergone enormous infrastructure renovations. Over 4 billion euros in public funds have been dedicated for hundreds of improvement projects. Not only has this led to public transportation closures throughout 2024, but also to the restoration of major works of art (including Michelangelo’s Pietà and numerous Renaissance and Baroque paintings, frescos, and sculptures). Similar to the reopening of Notre-Dame in Paris, these works of art will illuminate the Eternal City and allow pilgrims and other visitors to observe the beauty of the Catholic faith.

The 2025 jubilee, the twenty-eighth jubilee year celebrated by the Catholic Church, will end on the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, 2026. By all predictions, it will be the largest in Catholic history. In this present day, it is radical to present such a bold message of hope in the face of suffering. Yet, like the medieval jubilees, which took place in the midst of numerous outbreaks of disease and warfare, the 2025 jubilee remains an invitation for Catholics searching for optimism, hope, and forgiveness to come to this sacred place, pass through the Holy Doors, leave behind sin, plead for grace, and pray for the world and its people.

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But Helfand argued that American pledges of fealty to the NPT are belied by its resistance to the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). That treaty, which entered into force with its fiftieth signatory in early 2021, bans nuclear weapons for current non-nuclear states and commits its nuclear-armed signatories to a process that would lead to the elimination of their nuclear arsenal. The Vatican was among the initial signatories of the treaty and has advocated for its wider adoption. But the United States, along with other nuclear-armed states and NATO, has refused to have anything to do with it. Gottemoeller, a Catholic who attempted to dissuade the Vatican from its support for the TPNW, said that the treaty “interferes with NATO’s extended deterrence mission.” Critics of the treaty also allege that it undermines the NPT’s authority as the primary vehicle for nonproliferation and disarmament. The treaty’s advocates, meanwhile, see it as a wholly consistent development of the NPT’s Article VI.

Gottemoeller has also expressed concern over the moral burden the Vatican’s position places on Catholics working within the deterrence paradigm. At the conference, Cardinal McElroy insisted the Church’s position that nuclear weapons are immoral is “not a judgment on individual action”; it’s meant to apply to states and institutions. 

Resistance to the TPNW points to the potential limitations of anti-nuclear advocacy by institutions like the Church. In these pages and elsewhere, Bernard G. Prusak has framed the Church’s potential role in this debate in terms that Cathleen Kaveny lays out in her 2018 book, Prophecy Without Contempt. Prusak argues that an approach of “prophetic indictment”—a simple condemnation of any policy of deterrence—is likely to alienate policymakers and, therefore, to fail. That doesn’t mean that those who are morally opposed to nuclear weapons should refrain from open and blunt criticism of such policies, but they “must also engage in the debate about what can be done now, starting from where we are.” 

It may help to look back to the early 1980s, when the U.S. Church made its most significant intervention in the nuclear-arms debate. In 1983, the U.S. bishops released a pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” which sought to clarify Catholic teaching on deterrence and the possession of nuclear weapons. The context was the Reagan administration’s program of “peace through strength” and nuclear buildup. Opposed to Reagan was the growing nuclear-freeze movement. Supported by huge numbers of Americans and Europeans, as well as the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, this movement sought a halt to the further production and testing of nuclear weapons by both the United States and the Soviet Union. The Reagan administration, which included several Catholics, tried to dissuade the bishops from adopting the rhetoric of the freeze movement, which they regarded as dangerously naïve. As initial drafts of the bishops’ letter became public, Reagan administration representatives attempted to influence them through letters, phone calls, and meetings. Reagan himself excoriated the nuclear-freeze movement in speeches—even speculating that “foreign agents” were behind it—and enjoined clergy to help him fight the “godless” Soviet Union. Meanwhile, John Paul II, who had a famously close political relationship with Reagan, urged the U.S. bishops to soften their language. 

The bishops faced the same charges then that anti-nuclear movements face today: they were accused of being out of their depth, of unfairly targeting the United States instead of its opponents, of underestimating the evil of those opponents, and of giving them a strategic advantage. Despite the friction, the bishops took the Reagan administration’s criticisms seriously, incorporating some of them into the pastoral’s final draft.

Still, the letter was a strong statement of opposition to the nuclear-arms race. While echoing John Paul II’s insistence that deterrence be understood as an interim ethic, it made clear that the concept of strategy based on horrific threats “strained [their] moral conception.” The U.S. bishops also went further than the pope in trying to define the kind of deterrence that was morally acceptable in the current circumstances. Such deterrence, they insisted, could not include targeting civilian populations intentionally or indirectly. And, given that deterrence must be limited to preventing nuclear war, neither the Reagan administration’s extensive plans for waging a nuclear war, involving drawn-out strike-counterstrike scenarios, nor its nuclear buildup could be tolerated. “If nuclear deterrence is our goal,” the bishops wrote, “‘sufficiency’ to deter is an adequate strategy; the quest for nuclear superiority must be rejected.” John Garvey wrote in Commonweal that, for the political standing of American Catholics, the pastoral was “more significant than Kennedy’s election.”

The nuclear-freeze movement and the work of groups like the bishops placed significant constraints on early Reagan-
administration policy. The degree of their influence is contested, but it likely helped push Reagan to begin negotiating the INF treaty in 1981. It also fueled resistance in Congress to the administration’s maximalist nuclear-modernization proposals, though Reagan still managed to secure support for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars,” his impractical space-based nuclear-defense project. The freeze movement also helped move the administration’s rhetoric away from discussion of “winnable” nuclear war and toward the idea that nuclear weapons “must never be used.” Finally, it had a significant effect on Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985 and whose enthusiasm for disarmament—in the wake of UN exercises that nearly sparked a nuclear war in 1983—set the stage for the agreements of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The present circumstances are much less propitious for intervention by the Church. There is no broad-based popular antinuclear movement comparable to the freeze movement, which brought a million people to the streets of New York City for a demonstration in the summer of 1982. Nor have the U.S. bishops shown any interest in taking the issue on again as a group. 

For these reasons, there is a risk that Francis’s condemnation of deterrence will consign the Church to irrelevance on this issue, at least in the American context. It may stand as a powerful expression of moral conviction but also one of practical powerlessness. As some at the Albuquerque conference argued, if the Church wants to exert influence, it should outline a feasible path from deterrence to disarmament, rather than simply condemn the former while insisting, unrealistically, on the latter. 

There is, however, a risk of overinterpreting Francis’s condemnation of deterrence as more of a “clear break” with past teaching on nuclear weapons than it really is. After all, deterrence was never accepted on its own terms, but only when coupled with genuine efforts at disarmament. One could argue that the Vatican is just recognizing that deterrence—at least as it is currently conceived—isn’t leading to disarmament. As Cardinal McElroy put it, deterrence is being implemented as a “foundational strategy,” rather than as “an intermediate tool.” What was supposed to be an interim ethic has become a permanent ideology that can hardly be challenged.

But if, as Gerard Powers argues, the Church is condemning deterrence as it exists and not as such, then it should make that as clear as possible. And it should attempt to chart a path from the current “deterrence plus” strategy to minimal or sufficient deterrence—or some other way station if deterrence must be abandoned completely—and from there to disarmament. The current nuclear postures of the United States and its adversaries may well be morally bankrupt, but they are also conceptually underdeveloped, outdated, and, given the stakes, “dizzyingly insane,” to use Daniel Ellsberg’s language. This situation presents an opportunity for the Church to propose an alternative that is moral and, just as importantly, rational. But that will require engaging seriously and in detail with nuclear policy as it exists. Arguments against the reasoning behind nuclear policy will hold more sway with the nuclear establishment than sweeping moral pronouncements, which are easily dismissed as naïveté or, worse, useful idiocy.

Neither the United States nor any of its adversaries will abandon deterrence at a stroke and disarm unilaterally in the hopes that competitors follow suit. Nor will the environment of mutual suspicion give way to an ethics of solidarity overnight. An interim ethic—one that necessarily fails the most stringent moral tests but provides a framework for progress toward disarmament—remains necessary. Developing one that can succeed remains the challenge of peace. 

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On a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November, a single social-media post sent shock waves through the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. It was a photograph of a letter printed on official stationery and placed on a polished wooden surface. In its few brief lines, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, announced his unprecedented decision to resign. 

Over the centuries, archbishops of Canterbury have been excommunicated, murdered, executed, or occasionally canonized. These days, they tend to retire at around seventy and head to the House of Lords. That may not happen this time. 

“Having sought the gracious permission of His Majesty The King, I have decided to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury,” Welby wrote. “The Makin Review has exposed the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth. When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow. It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024.”

The long-awaited 251-page Makin Review was an independent report commissioned in 2019 by the Archbishops’ Council into allegations around a lawyer and married father of four named John Smyth. It found Smyth was “a charismatic personality” who had subjected up to 130 boys and young men to “physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual” abuse. It also found that Welby and other senior figures had shown “a distinct lack of curiosity” about the allegations “and a tendency towards minimization of the matter.” In addition, it called into question Welby’s insistence that he had no knowledge of concerns regarding Smyth in the 1980s.

Smyth administered severe beatings to boys he had met through the Christian Forum of the prestigious boarding school Winchester College and through Iwerne Christian holiday camps, where Welby was also a volunteer leader. Though Smyth was not ordained, he had been made a lay reader—that is, someone authorized by the local bishop to carry out certain teaching and pastoral functions—in the Diocese of Winchester. In 1984, Smyth hurriedly moved to southern Africa, where he continued to abuse. He was even charged with culpable homicide over the death in mysterious circumstances of a boy, Guide Nyachuru, but the charges were later dropped. 

Initial commentary last month asked whether Welby had been right to resign. After the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, publicly called for him to go, and an online petition calling for his resignation—created by three senior members of clergy—gathered more than ten thousand signatures in two days, it was increasingly difficult for him to stay. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, issued a statement saying he was praying for “the people of the Church of England, for our siblings in the Anglican Communion, and for all victims and survivors.” Rowe also reiterated the Episcopal Church’s “commitment to this critical task [of addressing safeguarding] in our own contexts and in the Anglican Communion.”

Shortly after Welby’s resignation, Dr. Alec Ryrie, professor of Christian history at Durham University, told a BBC religious-affairs program that the archbishop’s decision was actually a testament to the progress Welby had made in creating new protections. “The fact that he has changed the culture sufficiently that it’s reached the point that he himself could be forced to step down is, in a bitterly ironic way, a kind of achievement,” he said. Some people close to Welby still feel he should not have gone, and in late November the Anglican newspaper Church Times reported that three retired senior police officers disputed the report’s claim that Welby and other church officials had inadequately referred allegations to the police. 

While the report and its fallout have shaken the Church of England and damaged its credibility, worse could yet follow. Some people have called for a clean sweep of clergy who knew of the abuse but failed to adequately respond. So far one serving bishop, Jo Bailey Wells, the bishop for Episcopal ministry and a former chaplain to Welby, and one retired bishop, Paul Butler, the former bishop of Durham, have been asked to “step back” from ministry. Four priests, including Hugh Palmer, a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, have had their licenses suspended. However, two others named in the report, Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York, and Stephen Conway, the bishop of Lincoln, have said they will not be resigning. The report suggests that another six bishops and around twenty-five other clergy also knew about Smyth’s abuse and failed to stop it. If nothing more happens, public opinion will remain firmly with the victims. 

When Welby was enthroned in 2013, his unusual path to Canterbury—he had worked in the oil industry—enabled him to speak out on moral issues in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Finding common cause with Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, Welby contributed to Nichols’s work on business ethics while Nichols himself backed Welby’s evangelization initiative, “Thy Kingdom Come.” Welby and Pope Francis began their respective roles eight days apart, and a warm relationship started quickly. This was especially visible in May 2024 when Francis addressed regional leaders of the Anglican Communion in Rome, telling them of Welby: “We have had many occasions to meet, to pray together and to testify to our faith in the Lord,” commenting on their trip to Sudan and referring to Welby as “brother Justin.”

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The program of synodal renewal of the Church, announced by Pope Francis, is much deeper, offering a concrete, practical method of listening to one another and of “spiritual discernment” together. The art of “spiritual discernment” is the pearl of Jesuit spirituality and “synodality” is the experience of the first centuries of the Church.

ZM: You dedicated The Afternoon of Christianity to Pope Francis, “with reverence and gratitude.” I wonder if you might say something about what impresses you most about our current pope. Conversely, what criticisms do you have of his pontificate?

TH: Pope Francis is the great prophet of our time, one of the greatest popes in Church history. No one is doing more to build bridges between cultures than Pope Francis. His encyclical Fratelli tutti could play a role in the twenty-first century similar to that played by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the twentieth century. His call for the synodal renewal of the Church can mean much more than the transformation of the Church from a rigid clerical bureaucratic organization into a flexible network of mutual communication. Synodality (syn hodos) is a common journey: it is meant to renew, revive, and deepen communication, and not only within the Church. It is also about the Church’s ability to communicate with other systems in society, with other cultures and religions, with the whole human family, and with the planet we inhabit: to perceive the ongoing symphony of creation. It can also inspire the transformation of the process of globalization into a process of sharing and solidarity.

Criticisms? I regret a number of his unfortunate statements about Russia and the Russian-Ukrainian war. Unfortunately, he is surrounded by people who tragically underestimate Russian imperialism and naively believe that Putin—the Hitler of our time—will sit down for diplomatic negotiations before he is pushed to do so by force of arms. Not a word he says can be trusted. Supporting Ukraine is necessary for the security of the whole world.

ZM: What do you think are the pastoral and theological questions we need to get ahead of the curve on as we anticipate the years and decades ahead?

TH: We need a change in theological anthropology. We need to replace the medieval static understanding of “unchanging human nature” with a dynamic understanding of human existence as being in relationship. This will have implications for political and sexual ethics. The doctrine of the Trinity needs to be taken seriously—God is relational and created humans to live in relationships, to undertake the task of maturing and transforming ourselves by living with and for others.

ZM: Many Catholics in America—particularly those taken in by various internet apologist personalities—seem to attach great importance to proper doctrine without sufficient attention to both spiritual and ethical conversion. What might a Christian faith look like that is not over-attached to beliefs but that takes up faith also—or even primarily—as a way of being in the world?

TH: The synodal reform of the Church presupposes a deepening of spirituality and a reform of theological thinking: a shift from static thinking in terms of unchanging natures to an emphasis on the dynamics of relationships. At the center of the Christian understanding of God is the Trinity—God as a relationship. God created man in his image: our human “nature” is, therefore, to live in relationships, being with and for others; our mission is to share and communicate on a common path. The shift from thinking in terms of static, unchanging natures to an emphasis on the quality of relationships involves a renewal of ecclesiology, of the understanding of the Church, and of Christian ethics, including sexual ethics and political ethics. In making this shift, we cannot ignore the findings of the natural and social sciences.

The Church is to be a community of pilgrims (communio viatorum) that contributes to the transformation of the world and the whole human family into a community of the journey, helping to deepen the dynamics of sharing. The Church also has a “political,” prophetic, therapeutic, and transformative mission in the world. Church is a sacrament, a symbol, and an instrument of the unity to which all humanity is called in Christ. This unity is an eschatological goal that can only be fully realized at the “Omega Point” at the end of history, but for which we must continue to work throughout history.

ZM: What words would you impart to American Catholics following the reelection of Donald Trump? In what ways could American Catholics view national upheaval as an opportunity to become a deeper, more spiritual people?

TH: The victory of the amoral populist Donald Trump, a chaotic and immature personality, is a tragedy not only for America but for the whole world. Those who cannot accept defeat and are incapable of critical self-reflection, who don’t respect democratic rules and the culture of law, do not deserve to win and rule. When the people of Europe watch the narcissistic scenes of Donald Trump—whose gestures and facial expressions are strikingly reminiscent of Benito Mussolini—his vulgarities, his notorious lies, and his empty phrases, they laugh out loud. I don’t know if Trump voters realize that the world will not take America seriously with such a president. The spiritual blindness that makes this figure—who is the pure embodiment of values in complete opposition to the Gospel—into the object of a religious cult needs to be seriously studied. The attempts to turn the Christian faith into an ideological weapon for culture wars dangerously discredit Christianity. Nationalism and national egoism are contrary to catholicity.

Many forms of the Church today resemble the empty tomb. Our task is not to weep at the tomb and look for Jesus in the world of the past. Our task is to find the “Galilee of today” and there encounter the living Jesus in surprising new forms. We need to rediscover the depth and richness of Christianity, the polyphony of Scripture and tradition, and faith as a source of beauty, freedom, and joy. 
 

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These personal stories give the book its beating, aching heart. Laurino—who sometimes gets lost in attempts at poetic writing—is at her best when she is straightforward and lets the stunning facts speak for themselves. Each child brought in around $475 to the Church, the equivalent of $4,500 today, Laurino reports. Italian women were coerced, tricked, and often lied to in order to get them to sign away their parental rights. Laurino also takes us on several searches, some fruitful and others not, including that of her cousin John, and describes Campitelli’s epic journey to find Francesca, who, upon their reunion, bakes her long-lost son a birthday cake. Laurino details Campitelli’s creation of his online organization as well as his continuing struggle to change Italy’s draconian adoption laws, which seal records for a century. Campitelli is the first person Laurino thanks in her acknowledgements. Without him, she says, this book would not exist. But Laurino diligently does her own homework.

Using the correspondence of two American priests, Msgr. Andrew P. Landi, who ran the adoption program from Rome, and Msgr. Emil N. Komora, who worked from New York to find more “deserving” families throughout the United States, Laurino carefully stitches together details of the Church scheme. Laurino found documents linking Landi to the Vatican’s Msgr. Ferdinando Baldelli, a close associate of Pope Pius XII whose influence with the government helped keep the program running from 1951 to the late 1960s, skirting Italian laws along the way. “Orphans” were sent in groups, barely chaperoned, on long flights in piston-engine planes, with stewardesses often enlisted to change their diapers, then kept overnight in New York’s Chelsea Hotel before being sent out across the country to eager families.

Laurino takes a few entertaining, though grim, detours. For instance, she wades through the “war orphan” news coverage of the day, citing war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s Saturday Evening Post story of the adoption of her Italian-born son, Sandy. Gellhorn, then forty and recently divorced from Ernest Hemingway, searched widely for the right child and finally settled on a “blonde fatty,” as she described him. The coda to the Post story was not a happy one, with Sandy sent off to boarding school and eventually landing in prison for drug possession and dealing.

That story opens up a whole other question about sealed adoptions, in which parents and the children themselves are kept in the dark about family histories, including alcohol abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, addiction, and mental illness. Keeping adoptees and adoptive parents ignorant of genetic predispositions is a sin in itself, and Laurino uses concrete examples of Italian “orphans” who suffered from such lack of knowledge. (DNA testing and ancestry sites are both helping to break the silence, she admits.)

But the ones who suffered most were the birth mothers, some of whom were told their babies had died in order to get them to walk away. One mother was even taken to a cemetery by the nuns to mourn at a fake grave. Strangest of all—though perhaps not surprising—is that Msgr. Landi was himself an orphan, the son of southern Italian immigrants who died when he was still a boy.

The book does not simply add to the dreadful list of sins of the Catholic hierarchy but provides historical context on misogyny in the Church and in Italy. The precursor to the orphan program was the ruota degli esposti, the Medieval abandonment wheel, which for centuries provided a place for unwed mothers to surrender their babies anonymously to the Church for adoption. The babies were given the surname “Esposito” (a common Italian name in the United States and abroad), meaning they were exposed to the public. The shame of giving birth out of wedlock was so great that women would give up their own flesh and blood to hide their sins.

That worldview, Laurino believes, was born from the long tradition of the Adoration of the Virgin. She writes that “in a religion that asserts celibacy as the highest moral realm, heralding Mary as the ideal woman—who remained a virgin during the birth of Jesus and throughout her life—has created a precarious psychological tightrope for women, emphasizing the pollution of sex while simultaneously establishing their primary role as childbearing vessel.”

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In the years after the war, when Yamamoto was following the Worker, the paper published articles on racial justice, labor, and the draft. It also advanced an economic and environmental vision—what Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker, called the “green revolution” (not to be confused with the Green Revolution of industrial agriculture). Maurin believed that communal farming was the ultimate pro-labor practice: it would reacquaint workers with the means of production, correct capitalism’s excesses, and reinstill in workers a sense of the dignity of their labor. Yamamoto was inspired by Maurin’s theories, especially his scholar-worker ideal. In a 2000 interview, she remembered Maurin’s “synthesis of…‘cult, culture, and cultivation,’ which meant going back to the land. His ideal was that a person could work out in the fields maybe four days—four hours a day—and then go back to the farmhouse and paint or write or do printing or whatever, all centered around the Catholic Church.”

Maurin’s vision was utopian and romantic; reality at the Worker was more complicated. Yamamoto’s arrival in September 1953 was deflating. “[O]ne of the first things we saw, on arriving at the Catholic Worker house (St. Joseph’s House) was a man lying in an alleyway…. And our first night was spent in Dorothy Day’s own room upstairs, where cockroaches and bedbugs dismayed us through the night (Dorothy Day was elsewhere).” While many of the Worker’s volunteers came and went, the unemployed and the addicted were the Worker’s permanent residents. In a December 1954 column Yamamoto wrote for the Worker, she noted, “[I]t is still a daily miracle how we, coming from such a wide diversity of backgrounds and thrown together by our common needs, live as one family, struggling to respect one another’s personalities.” In January 1955, she wrote, “Advent—liturgically a season of joyous waiting—turned out to be rather grim at Peter Maurin Farm, with the communal nerves on edge and dissension prevailing.” As Yamamoto recalled in 1987, “Dorothy Day never wrote about the darker aspects of living in community in her column, which had so enchanted me.”

In the July–August 1955 issue, Yamamoto reported on the finer points of “the back-to-the-land aspect of the work”: soil conservation, ditch digging, and grass growing. Either communal tensions had been sorted out, or the Workers were too busy during the summer to squabble. The year before, in the April 1954 Worker, Day introduced Yamamoto to the readership and praised her work ethic:

Hisaye is a Japanese American and is our best example of manual labor around here. She works without effort, quietly, efficiently, taking care of rabbits, chickens, washing up the kitchen, diningroom, hall, and corridors with a concoction of boiled onion skins and water…. Our house is spotless, thanks to her, and yet she always has time to type articles, to read, both to herself and to little Paul. What an example of tranquility.

While Day saw “tranquility” in Yamamoto, who somehow managed to live out Maurin’s scholar-worker ideal, Yamamoto remembered her time at Peter Maurin Farm as a mixed bag: “The farm, with its daily Mass, cockroaches, weaving, bedbugs, homemade whole wheat bread, poison ivy, was home for us for a couple of years.” Still, Yamamoto admired Day greatly. She was “too complex for words,” Yamamoto explained in 2000, before adding, “I believe Dorothy Day is the most important person this country has produced.”

Day may have been too complex for words, but that didn’t stop Yamamoto from writing about her in the 1960 short story “Epithalamium”—so-named because the story describes protagonist Yuki Tsumagari’s tragic wedding day. Tsumagari marries a fellow “Zualet Community” member, a handsome Italian and recovering alcoholic named Marco Cimarusti, who was modeled on one of the unruly community members from Yamamoto’s Catholic Worker column. The story opens when Yuki receives a call from an inebriated Marco, who threatens to leave forever if Yuki does not marry him that very day. She agrees, and they are hurriedly wed at city hall. Through the remainder of the story, Yuki struggles to understand how she ended up with this wayward man and reflects on her years with the Community.

“Madame Marie,” Yamamoto’s alias for Day, is a towering figure in Yuki’s memory. Described as “saintly” and “gentle,” Marie warns Yuki not to marry Marco, citing examples of other women who fell in love with alcoholics while at the Community only to endure bitter separations, suffer regular abuse, or be left to raise their children single-handedly. When Yuki objects, arguing that leaving Marco will also lead to suffering, Marie offers a devastating reply: “You’ll never know how I suffered.” The comment sends Yuki back to Marie’s autobiography, the book that “had brought [Yuki] all the way across the country.” In a retelling of Day’s relationship with Forster Battingham, described in The Long Loneliness (1952), Yuki reflects on Marie’s decision to leave her lover when he refused to enter the Church: “[S]he had no choice but to leave him. And her autobiography had admitted that it had been many, many anguished nights before she had stopped yearning for the consolation of his arms.” In Yamamoto’s depictions of Yuki and Marie’s conversations, she hints at her intimate relationship with Day.

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The film helped make Willis a star, spawned four sequels, and became a pop-culture touchstone. It is also, along with the Crusades, a cultural touchstone for Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense. “Our elites are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza,” Hegseth writes in his book, The War on Warriors (2024). “But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane.” The military, he writes, needs “patriotic, strong, manly men,” “normal dudes,” not the “Pentagon pussies” that now fill the ranks of generals and admirals. Like John McClane, Hegseth thinks women should stay behind the lines as nurses or at home minding the kids. Hegseth’s manly men would disregard the rules of war, as the veteran Hegseth instructed his own troops to do during his time in Iraq. “Aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?” Hegseth writes. He has urged Trump to protect U.S. troops charged with war crimes.

Hegseth has been accused of sexual misconduct and of having a drinking problem. He has acknowledged cheating on his first two wives, but has since undergone a religious conversion. He and his third wife are active in their conservative Evangelical church. The words “Deus Vult,” a Crusader battle cry and a right-wing motto, are tattooed on his arm, a Jerusalem Cross across his chest. “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords,” he has written, “and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” As far as Hegseth is concerned, it is domestic, not foreign, enemies who are the greater danger to the nation. Evidently, he longs for a showdown with some sort of Hans Gruber, where he can outman the smooth-talking villain and shout Deus Vult as he comes to the rescue of all the women distressed by the shortage of “normal dudes.”

In light of the political ascendancy of “manly men” like Hegseth, I have been taking even more solace in the small rituals of Advent. In an Advent homily, the Melkite Catholic priest and University of Notre Dame professor Khaled Anatolios puts our abiding predicament accurately. “Our whole human race…is bent over, stooped down, bound by the power of Satan, and unable to stand upright,” he says. “The empirical and physical evidence of the crippled conditions of our whole human race is all around us; the imminent destruction of the whole planet because of our heedless consumption; our collective inability to act in unison in order to eradicate a deadly pandemic; the steadfastness of injustice; the glorification of cruelty and hatred; the rampant disdain for God and contempt for godliness.”

What we await this Advent is, as always, the promise that our salvation has already been won. At the same time, as we open each new door to Trump’s second term as president, it is good to be reminded that despair is a sin. 

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It’s not as if the bishops, including the conservative ones, don’t care. I think back to a webinar I attended a year ago from the Center for Migration Studies, a New York-based think tank created by the Missionaries of St. Charles, the Scalabrinians. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York spoke passionately about his “sacred responsibility to welcome and defend the immigrant.” In addition to his faith, he linked his passion for immigrants to his own immigrant ancestry, to his patriotic pride as a citizen of a country that has welcomed immigrants, and to his belief that immigration is good for the Church and the country. His traditional “God and country” American Catholicism would be a good antidote to the anti-immigrant Christian nationalist rhetoric that’s found a home among some Catholics. 

“When I hear bigots in our Congress sue Catholic Charities, when I hear bigots in our Congress suggest that we’re the ones who are not patriotic and American, I’m saying, ‘Where have you ever read the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights?’” he declared. “It is a moral imperative for every Jew, for every Christian and, yes, for every member of the Islamic faith to rise to the welcome of and defense of the immigrant. That is part of our moral heritage.” 

Dolan said that he was “honored to be criticized and to be maligned for a defense of the immigrant,” adding that he received “two stacks of hate mail,” one concerned with opposition to abortion, the other with his support for immigrants. Both causes are part of the pro-life ethic, he said.

But nothing said in a rather obscure web forum can overcome the pro-Trump messaging that was the takeaway, for many voters, from the cardinal’s chummy photos with Trump at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner (which Kamala Harris skipped).

I think also of the mealy-mouthed comments that Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the USCCB, made on immigration in a post-election interview with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo. As Michael Sean Winters wrote in the National Catholic Reporter, the archbishop went so far as to say that one reason Catholic voters broke for Trump was the bishops’ “preeminent concern for the dignity of the human person.” The archbishop sidestepped the human dignity of immigrants. 

Broglio passed up the opportunity to tell EWTN’s large conservative Catholic audience about the bishops’ fears over what the Trump administration will do to immigrants. He did refer blandly to the importance of reforming immigration law. It’s fine to focus on that long-elusive goal, but whatever Congress eventually comes up with won’t really respect human dignity if the political atmosphere remains so toxically anti-immigrant. The bishops would perform a great service for their immigrant flock if they did more to help change the hearts of their fellow Catholics. 

Focusing on the need to keep mixed-status families together would be an effective starting point toward that end. It should be noted that the fine print of Biden’s Keeping Families Together plan addressed concerns the public has had about immigration. For example, the program was for noncitizen spouses who’d been in the United States for at least ten years and were married before the policy was announced in June. That meant it wouldn’t incentivize a new wave of migration or sham marriages for immigration purposes. (It’s a common misconception that unauthorized immigrants automatically qualify for a green card or citizenship by marrying a U.S. citizen, attorneys say.) Department of Homeland Security officials were to decide each case individually, screening for criminal history, pending criminal charges, or any potential threat to national security. 

In the lawsuit, Texas complained about the cost of providing services to the noncitizen spouses, including the future savings the state would supposedly achieve if these families decided to give up and go to the parent’s homeland. 

“The point is to cause fear, and to make it harder to live their lives here in the United States,” said Esther Sung, an attorney at the nonprofit Justice Action Center who represented Ricardo and Jessika and other families in attempting to challenge the lawsuit. “It’s born out of cruelty.” The half-million or more noncitizen spouses have been in the country for an average of twenty-three years, she said, and have contributed greatly to their communities and the economy. The Texas accounting of its expenses did not consider these contributions. 

In an opposing amicus brief, New York state challenged Texas. “Intact families are critical to the health and well-being of children and other dependents, while also strengthening our neighborhoods, communities, and civic society at large,” it said. “Conversely, splitting up families in the United States contradicts the values of our immigration system and will irreparably harm our families, neighborhoods, and communities.”

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As Commonweal’s centennial year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about how the magazine has played a part in my life. I have what I think is a unique perspective, given that I’m probably the only kid from the University of Bologna in Italy to grow up and come to identify with “Commonweal Catholicism.” 

In Italian Catholicism, the expression “lay theologian” was always an oxymoron. So one can understand why my parents were so nervous about my interest in theology and Church history. Both practicing Catholics, they were typical of a mainstream post–Vatican II Italian Catholic bourgeoisie that had lowered its expectations of the Church, in a healthy way. Their commitments to institutional and social Catholicism were limited: in both my father and mother’s families, women were more practicing than men, no one voted for the (already, at that time) corrupt Christian-Democratic Party, nobody ever went to a Catholic school, and no one ever joined the priesthood or a religious order. No militantism please: we’re Italian Catholics.

Nevertheless, the year I made my first communion, they decided to send me to AGESCI (the Association of Italian Catholic Guides and Scouts)—the largest Catholic youth organization in Italy. That’s where I’d spend most of the Sunday mornings of my youth, as well as many summers, at the AGESCI camp, sleeping in tents and washing in the river. It played a big part in my life right up until I left Italy to study for a PhD in theology at Tübingen. Largely independent and often critical of the institutional Church, the lay-run AGESCI had among its foundational values three especially clear ones: criticize models of behavior that debase and exploit the human person; express a preferential option for the marginalized; and decisively reject, in accordance with democratic and anti-fascist ethos, all forms of violence, both overt and covert, meant to suppress freedom and encourage authoritarianism. That third one was particularly important in 1970s Italy, ravaged by “the years of lead” terrorism—but also in my hometown in the north of Italy, Ferrara. In the 1920s, it was one of the cradles of the Fascist movement, and its Jewish community, one of the most prominent in the peninsula since early modern times, was almost completely wiped out during the Holocaust.

I’d go on to spend twenty years in AGESCI. At the midway point, I began to minister as a group leader and catechist in the association, just as I entered my freshman year at the University of Bologna. Those early weeks of school in November 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, which of course dominated discussion in the university’s school of political science. But UniBo was also known for its strong tradition of studies in the history of Christianity and the Church. Its investment in these disciplines was a reflection of how in Bologna (“the red city”) and that part of Italy in general there was a confluence of three “cultures” usually thought unable to coexist: Catholicism, Marxism, and American-style liberalism. For each, the memory of Vatican II was still vivid—extending far beyond the academic record—and also part of a civil pact. Giuseppe Dossetti, founder in 1953 of what would become the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies, believed that work in academia, service in the civitas, and ministry to the ecclesia were inseparable. Indeed, as an academic, a father of the anti-Fascist Italian Constitution and MP, and then as a priest and finally a monk in occupied Palestine, he practically embodied all three areas of emphasis. In order to address the civil and political crisis of a post-Christendom Italy, one had to address the theological and ecclesial crisis first.

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