DP: You spoke about the responsibility that power and privilege confer on those who possess it: a duty to offer service, protection, and allyship to the marginalized and powerless. A lot of people have been waiting for something like this. Why aren’t we getting it? And how can we begin to act?
MM: Even the word “privilege” has been politicized. There are certain people for whom I’m “White Privilege McMorrow,” or “Senator White Privilege,” and that’s used as a pejorative. And for me, especially the way that I was raised, it’s nothing to feel bad about. But it’s something to acknowledge. All of us have some privilege compared to others. We have something that others don’t have, regardless of our income or education level or how comfortable we are. There’s always something that we can offer someone else.
Service itself is a privilege. If we have the ability, mental capacity, and time to be of service, that is a privilege. It’s so easy to be comfortable and to say, “You know what, this isn’t my issue.” And for a lot of people who look like me, there’s also a fear of engaging in the wrong way, or saying the wrong thing. In an attempt to be sensitive, and out of a fear of saying the wrong thing, too often people aren’t saying anything at all. And that’s not doing anything to stop hate from growing in really dangerous ways.
DP: Although you continue to draw on your Catholic upbringing, you’ve been pretty frank about how the experience you had with the Church growing up was “not the best.” How do you go about reconciling some of these factors? How do you stay committed to ideals like faith and service when the Church you were raised in can sometimes make it so hard?
MM: It’s been a lifelong journey—not a struggle, that’s the wrong word—but a journey, to figure out those two things.
I think of it like any job: you can get hired into a position you think is your dream job, because it’s a company you admire and love. But imagine the management is bad when you get there. It might not be the experience you wanted, but that doesn’t necessarily change what that organization stands for. And that’s sort of the way that I understand the Church.
The fact that the management of my church didn’t offer the most welcoming experience to me, my mom, and my family doesn’t mean that faith is any less powerful. That’s something I take from my mom, who was pretty young when she had me, about twenty-five. She had to figure out her own relationship with the Church. She taught CCD for a while and was very active in choir with us. But she really found her comfort and strength in service, in the soup kitchen, in inviting people to our house.
I joke with people that I never had a key to my house growing up. People just walked in, sat down, and started eating food. It didn’t matter who they were, or where they were from. Sometimes they were strangers—which, looking back, might not have been a super safe thing to do. But that’s who my mom was. Our house was a community center for anybody who wanted a place to go or somebody to talk to. My mom was always of service to others, sometimes to her own detriment, but I think that’s what she really took out of life: You don’t have to be in church in the same pew every Sunday, but you can do things in your daily life every single week that are of service and express faith through works.
DP: Current polling shows that a majority of Americans favor codifying key LGBTQ rights. Do you see a role for religion and, in particular, Christianity, in helping to convert this popular support into legislative policy?
MM: Yes, I think so. I know that I am not an anomaly in terms of my own experience with faith. I think we just have to stand up and say that these things are not at odds with each other. I fundamentally believe that religious freedom in the United States means you have every right to practice and express your belief, as long as it does not hurt others. You don’t have the ability to inflict your personal beliefs on other people. So I don’t see any conflict between ensuring that our LGBTQ friends and neighbors are protected from discrimination and being a person of faith. I think that a lot more of us should get more comfortable saying so, because we know the support is there. We just have to get over our fear of speaking out imperfectly.
DP: How big a role did your understanding of faith and religion play in your decision to enter a life of public service?
MM: I don’t know that I actively thought about it. I graduated from Notre Dame, and had always wanted to be a car designer. I got to do that first, interning for Mazda before moving on to Mattel, where I was a designer for Hot Wheels. That was super fun, and now every four-year-old thinks I’m very cool.
I loved my job, but I also realized that I really missed the service aspect of my years at Notre Dame. A lot of the projects that we did in my industrial design program focused on service. We designed refugee shelters for disaster areas and thought about how to create pop-up schools. I loved that. So it wasn’t as linear as “my faith drove me to service,” but faith has definitely made me a better public servant. It impacts how I approach this job and how I found myself in this space, which wasn’t my original career plan.
DP: I want to talk about a phrase you used in your remarks on the floor that really resonated for a lot of people: “performative nonsense,” which you’ve used as a criticism. To what extent do you see “performative nonsense” taking the place of authentic political action and the responsibility of delivering concrete gains for constituents?
MM: It’s frustrating. Not only are the actions of the senator who said the really hateful things about me negative towards the LGBTQ community, they’re also really disingenuous to her own supporters. They’re a deflection, a way of scapegoating, of making people so angry and hateful that they somehow believe that the reason health-care costs are too high is because a trans fifth-grader wants to play soccer. And that is wrong.
It really comes back to authenticity. I remember one of my favorite classes in college was comparative religion. I loved learning about all the different religions and what we had in common. I vividly remember sitting in class with a student who had gone through Catholic school—I was in public school from kindergarten through twelfth grade—and who made the argument that a character in a book we were reading couldn’t be held responsible for his actions because he wasn’t a practicing Catholic, because he hadn’t received proper moral instruction. And I just thought that was such nonsense.
It doesn’t take sitting in the same pew every Sunday to look around the world and your community, and apply the lessons of faith through works: reach out to the sick and the poor, love those who have less. Calling yourself a Christian, or putting it in your Twitter bio, is not the same as being one. It’s performative, and it’s nonsense. It’s not showing faith through works.
DP: Fairly or not, Democratic politicians are perceived not to acknowledge how faith and religion figure into their lives and their work as legislators and leaders. Yet we do see from figures like President Biden and others that faith can guide their approach to policy and to action. Do Democrats have a “faith problem” they need to address? And if so, how do they do it without engaging in a different version of performative nonsense?
MM: I don’t want to claim that my story is everybody’s story. I do think that people are hungry for authenticity. I think everybody should share what their own beliefs are, even if it’s complicated. If you have a faith background, wonderful. Tell people about it. If you don’t, and you find service in other ways or value in the community, share what that is. The most important thing is that we find that connection with people first.
DP: How do you plan to proceed from here? What happens next?
MM: If anything, the response to my remarks has really renewed my faith in this job and why I’m doing it. Sometimes it can be frustrating to come to work—I’ve introduced forty bills since taking office almost four years ago, and none of them have even gotten a hearing. The past few years have been hard, and everybody’s tired. Many of us struggle to show up every day and get through it—even those of us who are, like me, comfortable suburban moms.
But my hope is that if I can help inspire more people like me, who are not members of marginalized groups, to realize that we have not only the duty, but the power to stand with our neighbors and help them when they are being targeted unfairly, we can do that.
Los Varones trace their beginning to the Franciscan friars who arrived in San Gregorio in the late sixteenth century. “They were really the first Varones,” said Carrasco, who has collected oral history about the group. “Probably in the early seventeenth century, they started using young men from the pueblo.” Members of Los Varones must dedicate at least a year to serving the Church. In addition to the work they do during Holy Week, they’re required to clean the church, care for various religious statues, help people in need, and attend Masses and Bible studies. This year, there was one more requirement. “Everyone had to be completely vaccinated,” said Castro. “We are also using masks and we have antibacterial gel.”
In a normal year, thousands of people attend the pueblo’s Holy Week events, but this year changes were made to limit the crowds. “Things are starting earlier,” said Carrasco. “We are not telling people what time things start.” Those who wished to attend had to figure the schedule out for themselves.
On Wednesday of Holy Week, Los Varones and members of the community gathered in the church to decorate the altars with fruit. “The fruit represents the tears of the Virgin,” said Javier Márquez Juárez, who has written extensively about the pueblo’s traditions. He said that decorating altars with fruit is unique to San Gregorio. In past years, people wandered in and out of the church to watch the altars being decorated. This year, the church doors were closed.
On the evening of Holy Thursday people gathered in the churchyard for the start of the week’s first big procession. The yard has three entrances, but this year only one of them was open. Before entering, people were sprayed with disinfectant and given a dollop of sanitizing gel. A young woman at the entrance could be heard calling out to one man, “Señor, please wear your mask.”
At the start of the evening’s events, Los Varones carried statues of Mary and Christ out of the church and then stood silently next to them in the churchyard. A reenactment of the Last Supper is usually held on Holy Thursday, but this year it was canceled. So it was on to the next event: Los Varones carried the statues through the streets of the pueblo, accompanied by people singing hypnotically mournful alabados. A few local residents followed the procession or stood by to watch it pass. In a pre-pandemic year, there would have been crowds. Not this year. The whole procession took about three hours. Both Los Varones and the singers wore masks, as did most of those who followed them.
On the morning of Good Friday, carved figures of the two thieves and Christ were placed on crucifixes. At one o’clock in the afternoon, there was a brief liturgy, during which the priest reminded people to take precautions. Then came the descendimiento: the two most senior Varones climbed ladders to release and lower the figure of Christ from the cross. This alone took almost two hours.
The longest and most arduous procession of the week took place that evening. The figure of Christ was placed in a glass coffin covered with rose petals. Six barefoot Varones lifted the four-hundred-pound coffin, placed it on their shoulders, and carried it through the pueblo. This time efforts to limit the crowd were less successful: thousands of people followed the procession, and thousands more lined the streets.
The report bears painful and unmistakable similarities to scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in the early 2000s. Executive Committee senior leadership mishandled abuse allegations, mistreated and intimidated victims, and remained “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations.” Fault lines emerged between leaders who advocated for victims and those who, like Ronnie Floyd, a former Executive Committee president, was caught on tape saying, “I’m not worried about that…. I just want to preserve the base.”
Uniquely villainous is former in-house counsel August “Augie” Boto, who maintained a secret list of accused ministers in Baptist churches and neglected to take steps to ensure that such individuals were not subsequently employed or involved in other Baptist ministry settings. Catholics may find in Boto and other characters in the SBC scandal parallels to some bishops, diocesan lawyers, and Vatican figures whose cover-ups undoubtedly led to subsequent crimes. The convention’s outside counsel broke with the Executive Committee last year after it agreed under pressure to waive attorney-client privilege in the Guideposts investigation. Over the course of more than five decades, as Executive Committee presidents and staff came and went, the law firm advised the convention with an apparent emphasis on avoiding liability even if it meant neglecting to implement reforms that would provide a measure of justice to survivors and likely minimize the incidence of future abuse.
The New York Times and the Washington Post carried articles about the report on their front pages. Post reporter Sarah Pulliam Bailey, referencing her coverage of a previous SBC annual meeting, said on Twitter, “In Birmingham in 2019, I asked SBC leaders if they were consulting with Catholic leaders on sex abuse since the Catholic Church has instituted many reforms. They deflected and seemed thoroughly annoyed by the question.”
The Guidepost report noted that Fr. Thomas Doyle—who publicly sounded alarms about the Catholic abuse scandals—wrote to SBC president Frank Page in 2007, warning that the SBC exhibited patterns troublingly similar to Catholic leadership in inadequately responding to clergy sex abuse. He “urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic mistakes and take action early-on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.” Page replied to Doyle that SBC leaders “truly have no authority over local churches.” SBC leaders have repeatedly leaned on this church polity distinction to dismiss liability, culpability, and comparisons to the Catholic Church’s experience. And while those differences will matter in terms of what SBC churches, entities, or insurers end up paying in awards and settlements, they will matter less with respect to criminal law. Southern Baptists have no judicatories similar to Catholic dioceses, which ultimately bore considerable liability. But the denomination’s congregational polity of autonomous local churches will not save it from crushing legal liability, nor from opprobrium in the court of public opinion.
Some survivors’ advocates, however, have been heartened by the Executive Committee’s plan to release lists of sexual-abuse allegations. And in general, in spite of the best efforts of some to protect institutions and entities at all costs, it seems that Southern Baptists will insist that their denomination proceed with considerably more openness and transparency than Catholic dioceses mustered twenty years ago.
Southern Baptists have seemed to me relatively ecumenically isolated, and needlessly so, save for their advocacy on abortion, marriage, and religious liberty. Baptist-Catholic dialogue and relations seem to hardly exist apart from these. Chief among my criticisms of Southern Baptists is their increasing departure from a broad ecumenical consensus on most other issues elucidated in Catholic social teaching. Now is the time for Southern Baptists to learn as much as they possibly can from American Catholics, whose experience, mistakes, and reforms in responding to sex abuse can be not only helpful but lifesaving.
But the pain and fallout will be immense and hard to measure. More victims, perhaps hundreds, will come forward. Among the most heartbreaking will be the stories of children and adults who experienced mental-health difficulties as a result of their abuse at the hands of Southern Baptist ministers. Such is the case of Duane Rollins, who was allegedly abused repeatedly over a span of many years beginning at age fourteen by a former Texas judge and Baptist layman named Paul Pressler. Now ninety-one, Pressler was an architect of the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC—an effort from the 1970s and ’80s to purge the denomination of moderates in order to return it to biblical orthodoxy. Stories of lives lost to addiction and debilitating mental distress—not to mention suicide—will come out. As with the Catholic experience, some of the most legally complex cases will involve victims who have repressed memories of abuse and subsequently recovered them.
In the coming years, it seems almost certain that financial awards and settlements in the tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars will be paid. (By comparison, the Catholic Church is widely thought to have paid more than $4 billion to victims.) A particularly nasty insinuation common among Southern Baptist leaders who err on the side of the institution is that focusing on sex-abuse victims distracts the denomination from “mission.” While it remains to be seen exactly how these funds will flow, it is certain that some amount of money contributed by local churches will go to claimants. SBC elites would do well not to bemoan these transfers as diversions from “mission.” Apart from the sexual abuse itself, the cruelty and dismissiveness of prelates and lawyers is unconscionable. Southern Baptist leaders will need to be as gracious, sensitive, and compassionate as with God’s help they possibly can.
But it’s clear we have arrived at a critical juncture, again, in the American religious landscape. The integrity of a powerful institution is rightly being called into question, and more by those who have been harmed than by those who had the power and responsibility to protect them.
The unconscious, with its attendant myths and symbols, can also be used to underpin Eliot’s aversion to individualism. True selfhood lies far deeper than individual personality. It has its roots in a submerged domain of collective images and impersonal emotions. The individual, not least the individual author, is of relatively trifling significance. He or she is merely the tip of an iceberg whose depths are unsearchable. We are dealing here with an early version of what would later be known as the “death of the author” theory, or at least with the author’s drastic diminishment. The poet, Eliot remarks in a passage of unusual emotional intensity, is haunted by a demon, an obscure impulse that has no face or name, and poetry is an exorcism of this “acute discomfort” (“The Three Voices of Poetry”). It is a darker version of the Romantic idea of inspiration. When authors have finally arranged their words in an appropriate form, they can purge themselves of this demonic urge and in doing so rid themselves of the poem altogether, handing it over to their readers so that they can relax after their labors. It sounds more like a peculiarly painful childbirth than a piece of imaginative creation. Poetry is something to get out of your system. And whatever its mysterious source, it is certainly not the individual mind.
Poets cannot predict when these obscure upsurges will occur: they must simply devote themselves to the task of perfecting their craft in anticipation of such spiritual seizures. There is, then, a good deal of conscious labor involved in the poetic process, but it is not what is most essential to it. It is rather that the poem forces itself into the poet’s consciousness like a blind, implacable force of Nature; and when it has taken root inside them, something has occurred that cannot be explained by anything that went before. The most powerful poetry in Eliot’s view sets up an enormous echo chamber of resonances and allusions, all of which will infiltrate the reader’s unconscious in a way quite beyond the poet’s control. Perhaps the most magnificent example of this process in Eliot’s own work is “Gerontion.” If modern reality is spiritually bankrupt, one can compensate for this to some extent with a richness of experience, and much of this is a subliminal affair. It is no wonder, then, that Eliot is so casual about conscious understanding—about, for example, the scholarly business of tracking down allusions and explicating difficult passages. The Notes to The Waste Land purport to do just this, but it is now generally accepted that they are there mostly to fill in a few blank pages. Conscious meaning is not the issue—indeed, readers may well be understanding a poem at some unconscious level whether they know it or not. It is welcome news to the student who timorously opens Pound’s Cantos or the poems of Paul Celan.
The idea of poetic impersonality is closely related to Eliot’s self-declared classicism. The classic in Eliot’s view is not in the first place the work of an individual genius. It is rather a piece of literary art that is resonant of a specific civilization—one whose language gives voice to a particular culture and history at the peak of its maturity. The unique genius that produces it is not that of an individual author but the spirit of a particular age and a particular people. Virgil’s greatness springs from his place in the history of the Roman Empire, as well as in the evolution of the Latin language. The classical work brings a national language to a point of perfection, and its ability to do so, ironically, is what makes its appeal so universal.
There is, however, a problem here. A classical civilization represents Eliot’s social and cultural ideal, and the classical author who molds his mind most deeply is Dante. Yet though he produces a stunning pastiche of Dante’s verse in a passage in Four Quartets, the influence is strictly limited when it comes to the composition of his own work. There are two reasons why this is so. If the classical work thrives on shared values and standards, the liberal pluralism that Eliot finds so displeasing in modern society means there can be precious little of this. Poets can no longer assume that they and their readers share the same sensibility. There is no longer a community of meaning and belief. At the same time, if a classic is to capture the spirit of an entire civilization, it must be in touch with its common life and language. But to stay faithful to the common life and language of early twentieth-century Europe involves registering a sterility and spiritual devastation that is nearer to Baudelaire than to Dante. It is thus that Eliot announces that the modern poet must see not only the beauty and the glory but also the boredom and the horror of human existence.
For Eliot to be loyal to one criterion of a classic, then, is to flout certain others: order, balance, harmony, nobility, and the like. It means producing a poetry marked by spiritual disorder, sordid imagery, broken rhythms, banal snatches of speech and barren inner landscapes. It was from Baudelaire, Eliot tells us, that he learned that the poet’s business was to make poetry out of the unpoetical. Order and harmony can be hinted at only obliquely, either by dim allusion, ironic juxtaposition or (as in The Waste Land ) through a mythological subtext that intimates the possibility of regeneration. Baudelaire, Eliot remarks, draws some of his most striking imagery from the common life, but at the same time makes that life gesture to something more than itself. It is a familiar strategy in his own early poetry. By presenting a situation in all its squalor, you can suggest the need to transcend it without having to spell out an alternative, which might demand a verse with too obvious designs on the reader. It is not until Four Quartets that this negative form of transcendence becomes explicitly thematized. If poetry must cling to the unregenerate nature of the present, it is partly because its language must be wedded to everyday experience, and partly because literary works that propose an abstract ideal will fail to engage skeptical modern readers. Instead, their language must infiltrate their reader’s nervous system, sensory organs, and unconscious terrors and desires, all of which a remote ideal is unlikely to accomplish.
For this reason, the classical is more to be admired than imitated. More relevant to the modern age is a period which in Eliot’s view is distinctly unclassical, that of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans. “The age of Shakespeare,” Eliot comments in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” “moved in a steady current, with back eddies certainly, towards anarchy and chaos.” It was an era of muddled skepticism and clashing faiths, along with a confusion over what counts as a literary convention.
Yet it is just these aspects of the early-modern period that Eliot can bring to bear on his own tumultuous times. The “anarchism” of the Renaissance is also the unleashing of a wealth of complex feeling and exhilarating new modes of language, so that, to adopt a phrase of Karl Marx, history progresses by its bad side. In an essay on Seneca, Eliot writes, “If new influences had not entered old orders decayed, would the language not have left some of its greatest resources unexplored?” It is this fertile legacy that authors like Eliot himself will inherit some centuries later. The loss of social and cosmic order may be a spiritual disaster, but it also represents an inestimable gain for language and sensibility, which break through traditional constraints to become more subtle, diverse, volatile, and exploratory. The textures of poetry grow finer and their images more richly compacted. It is a language close to the bone yet fast-moving, packed with perception but intellectually agile. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries bear witness to “a progressive refinement in the perception of the variations of feeling, and a progressive elaboration of the means of expressing these variations” (The Sacred Wood). That this stretch of time is also the matrix of much of what Eliot detests—materialism, democracy, individualism, secularization—is an instance of the cunning of history, which takes with one hand what it gives with the other.
Indeed, in a theology/religious studies department at a Catholic college engaged in a program of diversity and inclusion, it can now seem “politically” easier to teach Buddhism or Hinduism than Patristics or the Council of Trent. Or maybe just easier overall: teaching about Trent or the Fathers requires serious historical knowledge developed through years of study, as well as knowledge of Greek and Latin, plus other languages in which the most important scholarship has been written—work not always necessarily required for teaching in the context of diverse traditions. And yet, foreign languages (ancient and modern) are necessary for gaining real access to real diversity. Today Latin is usually identified with conservatism (the “old Mass,” canon law) and not with the diverse kinds of Latin the Catholic tradition interacted with (for example, the genuine obscenity of Catullus). Further, the popular call these days for inculturation of Christianity and Catholicism in diversity is proceeding by ex-culturation of our theological studies from important aspects of Catholic tradition—by the absenting of the real diversity internal to the tradition (for example, the barely known contribution of North African and Middle Eastern bishops to the drafting of the most crucial passages of Nostra Aetate, the document of Vatican II on non-Christian religions). All of this is in keeping with the pretensions of a Western intellectual tradition that in theory seeks to be more global but in fact is at risk of becoming more parochial, estranged from its own tradition.
A right-wing, political-religious narrative often explains its opposition to diversity in terms of preserving (white) European culture while also complaining that proponents of diversity are deaf to its arguments and reasoning. The problem, as I see it instead, is that even when we aim for diversity, we must take care to remember the tradition, to emphasize serious knowledge of that tradition, so that we don’t do foolish things like censor literature or thinkers from previous ages. In Catholic academia, theology and the social sciences have become closely intertwined over the last few decades, but at the same time theology and history seem to have been separated from each other, which is a problem. Knowing how “historical understanding” works is foundational to scholarship; it’s what allows room for complexity, for ambiguity, for ideas and answers that challenge (or even confound) expectations rather than merely fulfill them. But in the discourse of diversity, some themes or ideas or pursuits are “good” by definition, and once those are identified, all that follows—from teaching to publishing to grant-writing—is aimed simply at communicating that “good” as effectively as possible, complexity and ambiguity be damned. If the neo-medievalism on the Right sees hope only in an idealized past, it can seem that proponents of diversity want to reject the past entirely. Such hostility to ascertainable linkages between history and tradition is destructive and self-reinforcing, a sign of cultural decomposition.
So at Catholic institutions, the study of theology and religion as it relates to the study of history is in a spot. It seems either not to need history or to reject the contributions of history. But even if that wasn’t the case, it would have to deal with how the study of history has also been forced to contend with a shift in emphasis to social and cultural studies, in a way that rejects the contribution of history if it is not capable of supporting a reparationist logic towards the victims of history. It seems to have become much more difficult to write about history—even Church history—as “an act of faith in the possibility of a world that is shared even among universes of differences,” as Rowan Williams wrote a few years ago.
And it was nearly thirty years ago when David Tracy wrote that we all must face the “fascinans et tremendum actuality of our polycentric present.” Today, a defiant rereading of Church history is characterized not by moral outrage in service of theological and institutional reform. It is characterized by the impact of a vertical crisis of all institutions—a gap that para-institutional, alternative, “hip” Catholic personalities are happy to fill, and who present a greater threat in some ways than the institutional crisis itself. This is important because of the short-circuit in ecclesiology—that is, a certain idea of the Church today with an emphasis on social justice. The theological debate seems aimed at an audience that is already convinced of the goodness of the causes for which it is fighting.
The loss of history is not just a problem in understanding the past of religion; it also weakens the process of symbolic thinking and moral imagination. The Catholic tradition needs to accept democratic polities in church and state, a more developmental approach to doctrine, dealing unapologetically with the contribution of Christian theologies to colonialism, racism, and white supremacy. As Michael Hollerich wrote in the conclusion to his recent book on Eusebius of Caesarea, “It is difficult for this writer at least to imagine historic Christianity without some version of ‘apostolicity’ as guarantor of continuity across time (and some claim of ‘catholicity’ across space), and for that continuity to be linked in some way with church structure, whether we think it originated in Jewish synagogal practice, Greek municipal assemblies, household governance or a combination of all three. A purely charismatic Christianity never existed.”
The de-emphasizing of history in Catholic theology and in Catholic institutions is not simply the result of the collapse of the humanities. It’s related as well to the massive shift in the discourse regarding the term “Catholic,” from the old legitimacy conferred by the ecclesia (a tradition of oppressive ecclesio-centrism to be sure, but also a healthier ecclesial sense of belonging) to the new one required by a sense of societas based on social justice, diversity, and inclusion. But history must have a role in how we study the Christian and Catholic tradition in the context of diversity and inclusion. Without it, Catholicism will simply make itself vulnerable to new forms of homogeneity and exclusion.
Noteworthy among the brief RNS statements from faith leaders who wanted to see Roe overturned were those stressing the responsibility to provide support and assistance to women and children. The bishops can do no less, but the conference as a whole has a sound basis in Catholic social teaching to do much more.
In a column for Religion News Service, Jacob Lupfer noted that curtailing abortion access meant “we will need robust pro-child policies and more government assistance to children and families. Republicans and the pro-life movement should lead the charge for these public investments, and perhaps religious leaders like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops can provide moral leadership in holding them to account.”
It does not follow that the bishops must offer a full-fledged policy agenda in response to any Supreme Court decision. That would be impossible, if not improper. I have argued in Commonweal that the bishops should embark on a full-scale pastoral letter on abortion in all its complexities and ambiguities. But this is not the time for that. The bishops can acknowledge that assuring a full range of public and private measures to protect women and children is a challenging task, for which they have no precise blueprint. But the episcopal response has to be unambiguous about the direction and urgency of change, the need for personal and collective sacrifice, and the immorality of demanding sacrifice only from those who are already burdened.
There is strong precedent in the statement made last March by Archbishop José H. Gomez, president of the conference, and eight bishops leading committees addressing issues of women and children. “We exhort our nation to prioritize the well-being of women, children, and families with both material resources and personal accompaniment,” the bishops declared, “so that no woman ever feels forced to choose between her future and the life of her child.” They called upon the Church not only to welcome and support women challenged by their pregnancies or difficulties in caring for children after birth but also “to redouble our advocacy for laws that ensure the right to life for unborn children and that no mother or family lacks the basic resources needed to care for their children, regardless of race, age, immigration status, or any other factor.”
No one knows exactly when the Court will issue its ruling, or how closely the final ruling will resemble Alito’s draft opinion. It could occur before the bishops disappear into contemplative silence behind closed doors. It could occur during or afterward. But a short, resounding statement has to be at the ready, and it must come from some source representing the bishops’ conference—the USCCB’s pro-life committee, the conference president, the administrative board. Whatever the precise nature of the Court decision, the bishops must use the occasion to emphasize that protecting unborn life and caring for mothers and families entail obligations on everyone, especially those of us with anti-abortion convictions.
Timing may not always be everything, but in this case it’s about ninety percent. If the bishops say nothing or imagine that their longstanding opposition to abortion says all that needs saying, then their voices—and the Church’s voice—will be swallowed up by the harshest and most partisan reactions on either side of the debate, including some who falsely pretend to represent the Church. If the bishops allow that to happen, then harmful public perceptions about the Church’s views will be fixed in place during the many difficult battles about abortion yet to come.
[This article was originally published in the November 5, 1943 issue of Commonweal]
This morning after Communion I thought of writing about Mary, and since the thought came to me at that time, I took it as an order. I always say to the Blessed Mother after Communion—“Here He is in my heart; I believe, help thou mine unbelief; Adore Him, thank Him and love Him for me. He is your Son; His honor is in your hands. Do not let me dishonor Him.”
And since too at that moment came this thought, those glimpses of all she has meant to me—all the little contacts with her that brought me to Him—I felt I must write.
One of the reasons I do not write more is that there is always housework, cleaning, scrubbing, sewing, washing (right now it is cleaning fish), etc., to do. Just as she had to do these things, and probably never neglected them. But then too I can see her sitting seemingly idle beside a well on just such a day as this, just thanking Him, with each happy breath.
Down in New Orleans twenty years ago I was working for the Item, an afternoon paper, and the job was not a very satisfactory one. Women writers, “girl reporters,” had to write feature stuff. I started in writing a column about homely things—the same kind of a column I write now—the Day after Day column, in the Catholic Worker. But they soon gave me assignments, some good, some bad. I had to interview Jack Dempsey, and such like, visiting celebrities. Once I had to cover the political situation and write a series of interviews with the retiring governor and the newly-elected governor of the state. I had to work in a dance hall for a week as a taxi dancer and write a series of articles, in one of which I insulted, so they said, the United States Navy. Representatives from the sailors of a battleship in port at the time came to the newspaper office to rebuke me. It was a change from the work I had been doing in Chicago in the radical movement. But I didn’t like it much.
Across the street from where I lived, I think it was on St. Peter street, there was the side entrance to the Cathedral. Every night I used to go in there for Benediction. Perhaps I was influenced by reading the novels of Huysmans that I had borrowed from Sam Putnam’s library in Chicago. My roommate was Mary Gordon (when I last heard of her, she was working for the League for Spanish Democracy in Chicago, a Communist affiliate), and that Christmas she gave me a rosary. So in this case I was led to the Church through two Communists. I did not know how to say the rosary, but I got a little prayer book at a Catholic book store which I often visited, and I learned how. Once in a while I said it. I remember expressing the desire to talk to a priest—to the girl who ran the book shop—but nothing came of it.
My first statue of the Blessed Mother. Peggy was my roommate in jail in Washington. When we were in the Occaquan workhouse we had adjoining rooms. In the Washington city jail I had the upper berth on one of the upper tiers, and Peggy had the lower. I read the Bible and she wrote a book of poetry, —“Poems to my Lovers” she called it. I also read letters from the boys I was going with at the time, one of them, my most regular correspondent, a United States sailor. It was during the last war. Some years afterward Peggy gave me a little statue of the Blessed Mother which had been brought from Czechoslovakia. It was made of wax, and very delicate, and there was a golden watchspring-like halo around its head, and golden curly hair and a bright blue robe. How I loved that statue! Down in Staten Island in my little shore cottage I kept it on a shelf by the door with a vigil light burning in front of it.
Peggy also was a member of the Communist party at different times, but being an undisciplined creature and an artist I don’t think she was a paid-up member for long.
One summer right after I became a Catholic I was taking care of a number of little boys from a school “for individual development.” Together with Frea, my next-door neighbor, whose friend it was who ran the school, we took the responsibility for about a dozen boys between eight and twelve. Quite a few of them were children of Communist parents, and several of them have grown up now to be members of the Young Communist League. I used to read them the “Little Flowers of Saint Francis,” which they enjoyed immensely, and they used to command each other “in the name of holy obedience” to perform this or that act of mischief. They also used to ask me to burn candles for them before the little blue statue of the Blessed Mother. Do any of them remember her now?
When my daughter was born almost eighteen years ago, I turned her over to the Blessed Mother. “What kind of a mother am I going to be?” I kept thinking to myself. “What kind of a Catholic home is she going to have, with only me?” And with the Catholic Worker movement starting six years later the home problem was even more acute.
There was a solution of course to such a difficulty. “You,” I told the Blessed Mother, “will have to be her mother. Under the best of circumstances I’m a failure as a homemaker. I’m untidy, inconsistent, undisciplined, temperamental, and I have to pray hard every day for final perseverance.”
It is only these last few years that it has occurred to me why my daughter has never called me “mother.” From the time she first spoke, it was “Dorothy.” I’d think—“of course with no other children around calling me ‘mother’ it is natural for her to call me by my first name.” I’d correct her but it did no good. Later on I’d ask her, “How will anyone know I’m your mother if you do not call me ‘mother?’ They’ll think I adopted you. They’ll think I’m your aunt or something.” “I don’t care,” she would say firmly, “I just can’t call you ‘mother.’” And for a child really extremely obedient, it was hard to understand such stubbornness.
Once, in the little post office on Staten Island—she was four then—the postmistress said, “I’d like to hear a child of mine call me by my first name! I’d give it to her!”
When she was in convent school her brief letters began “Dear Mother,” but it was under compulsion. The Sisters would not let her write unless she so began. But away from school, the letters continue, “Dear Dorothy.”
And then a few years ago, it came like a flash of light, “The Blessed Virgin Mary is Mother of my child. No harm can ever come to her with such a Mother.”
[For more of Dorothy Day’s writings from Commonweal, see our full collection.]
If we assume that the idea of governance is connected to leadership, and not just to management, then this brings up the second question: the relationship between governance and ordination at the local church level. Let’s imagine for a moment the consequences of continuing Francis’s curial reform in the context of an American diocese. Evidently, governing or presiding over the various offices in diocesan administration would now be declared open to any baptized Catholic, not be tied to the power of orders. Of course, to some extent this has already been true for several decades, particularly in a role like the chancellor of the diocese, held not infrequently by a lay woman. A glance at my own diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, shows lay governance of the majority of diocesan offices, excluding that for “clergy and religious” and the diocesan tribunal, which adjudicates all requests for marriage annulments. While it is not surprising or controversial that the office for clergy and religious is presided over by a priest, why every single officer on the tribunal is either a priest or a deacon is less easy to justify. Wisdom and a knowledge of canon law would seem to be the requirements for office, not ordination. The clerical monopoly in Bridgeport may be serendipitous, but if it is a pattern across American dioceses, it would need to change to fall into line with the papal reform—if, that is, the reform is intended to be anything more than cleaning up the Roman Curia. Nor is there any particular reason why the head of the tribunal should not be a layperson, male or female. A quick glance beyond Bridgeport reveals a wide variety of organizational models. Compare, for example, the overwhelmingly clerical composition of the tribunal in the Archdiocese of New York with the overwhelmingly lay membership of the tribunal in the diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina.
If we look a little further at the structure of leadership in the parish, things become even more interesting. As is well-known, canon law stipulates that a parish pastoral council must be presided over by the pastor and has only an advisory or consultative role. In other words, while it might take a vote on this or that matter, the vote never binds the pastor. Of course, the parish council would do well to defer to the priest over matters to do with liturgy, ritual and—maybe—theological discernment, but there are many matters often considered by parish councils that are far more mundane. In these cases it is hard to see why the pastor should always have the last say. It is not hard to imagine that lay roles might expand to more than consultative status as awareness increases of the new wind blowing through the Vatican.
This in its turn brings us to the one theological hypothetical that emerges from papal reform of the Curia. If it is correct that the papal reforms are intended to refocus priestly life on more narrowly sacramental roles, and if there could be and maybe also is already a carry-over to the structures of parochial life, shall we end up with the pastor as a mere Massing-priest, someone brought out to celebrate the Eucharist and deliver a homily on the scriptural texts of the day? This seems unsatisfactory. Isn’t the priest meant to be the leader of the local community, the symbol of its unity in faith? But the more governance at the parochial level is held in lay hands, the more restricted becomes the role of the clergy. We may not yet be ready for the full implications of this line of thought, though seventy years or so ago Yves Congar offered the prescient observation that “now we have to ask not what is the role of the laity in relationship to the clergy, but rather what is the role of the clergy in relationship to the laity.” When we conclude that the role of the clergy is being reduced to saying Mass and preaching, then we may have reached a moment at which we turn the ecclesiological question around and ask whether a rethinking of the categories of laity and clergy might lead to a different Church—in which, perhaps, the one at the altar is there because he or she is acceptable to the community as their leader, the symbol of their unity in faith.
So what might the future of ministry look like? Allow me to pirate from my book of twenty years ago, The Liberation of the Laity, and suggest that we might see a team ministry of several individuals ordained in each parish, each of them ordained because he or she has the gift of leadership in faith. Probably people with “day jobs,” they would be ordained into what is sometimes called “relational ontology.” That is, their ordination to leadership and presidency at the Eucharist would place them in a different relation to the community of faith than they would previously have had, and perhaps one that they might also relinquish after a time. Such a vision would obviously move us away from the so-called “character theology” which imagines an indelible ontological change occurring at the moment of ordination. This theology is not helpful and lies at the heart of the ills of clericalism. As Pope Francis prioritizes the ontological change of baptism as the license to govern, we might want to ask just how many ontological changes anyone needs, just how many times they can become a new creation. If and when we approach the clergy/laity relationship like this, acknowledging that the baptismal priesthood is the default and ministerial priesthood is distinguished by the charism of leadership more than by the power of orders, most of the difficulties considered above would evaporate.
Something similar can be said about the sixty-year season of the post–Vatican II Church. We thought we had left the era of great conflicts behind. While some of the old political and religious regimes persisted, their influence and impact seemed to lessen: they were no longer going to determine the future. Indeed, it seemed a new world had arrived. Now we have to wonder whether this hopefulness was misplaced. Perhaps the grip of the old-world order was stronger than we knew, or at least stronger than the dream of building a new Church in the world. In recent years the spaces of dialogue have been overwhelmed or have disappeared, both in politics and in the Church: decisions are made in places that are inaccessible or hard to locate. Synodality could yet bring real change to the Church, in the long run. But it seems we’ve lost the patience (and the obedience) that characterized the generations of Chenu, Congar, de Lubac, Rahner, and of the scholars, priests, and monks who trained me. Now it seems that romanticism or a managerial view are the only options for thinking about the past and present of the Church; walking alone (or walking out) appears to be more popular than “walking together,” pace the synodal process.
Still, on a positive note, Rome has exhibited some wisdom during this crisis. Francis is trying to save the Catholic Church from the mortal danger to which Benedict XVI and the elite he appointed were blind: falling into the same civilizational trap the Russian Orthodox Church did in the 1990s. Contrary to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (and some Catholic cardinals), Francis refuses to see the Church downgraded into an ideological refuge, whether for romantics or cynics, from the mass of collective identities that took shape during the Cold War.
Andrea Graziosi, one of the great Italian historians and a specialist of Russia and Ukraine in the last century, wrote recently that “the crisis of our West, visible in the seventies and then hidden by the triumph of 1991, was in the first decade of our century visible to all, including Putin.” The crisis of the Church has also been visible to all since the beginning of this century. In this epochal shift, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, and the papacy are still trying to find a role. We could think of Benedict as the last pope of the old era, and of Francis as the first pope of a new era. A political parallel might be the presidencies of George W. Bush and, in the new era, Barack Obama. But then we all know who followed Obama. Should we thus be on guard for what might happen in the Catholic Church?
It’s an important question, given the confusion of the diplomatic and international-relations efforts regarding Ukraine. The war is having a bigger impact on the Church than, say, 9/11 did. In 1991 the Vatican already understood how the first Iraq war would affect relations between Christianity and Islam globally, and what U.S. wars in the Middle East might mean for the region (American neocons, including Catholic neocons, might have benefited from such foresight at the time). But now, the legacy of post-conciliar Ostpolitik, John Paul II’s idea of the unity of the European continent “from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains,” Benedict XVI’s lament over the “Christian roots of Europe”—all of this seems outdated. Putin’s regime, supported by the Patriarch of Moscow, forces us to consider whether the categories and approaches that once helped us interpret the twentieth century no longer obtain. The crisis of confidence of Catholic leaders in the Vatican’s handling of the Russian war in Ukraine is the result of mounting nationalism in Europe, but it also re-ignites Eastern Catholic grievances that have been kept under control for long. And it also presents something of a theological emergency on top of the institutional paralysis of Roman Catholicism: the abuse scandal, the impending collapse of the clerical system, the ignoring or belittling of ecclesial issues (e.g., women in the Church). Key questions had been posed to the Church’s hierarchy, and with more theological coherence than today, at least fifty years ago, before postmodernism made the very concept of reform so arduous. Now it may be too late.
The war also casts a light on the sinister theo-political pieties of anti-liberal converts. Even if Francis has worked to confront this, his pontificate will not last forever. It will be up to the supporters of Vatican II Catholicism to counter the efforts of the Catholic alt-right (both in the United States and elsewhere), which seeks to link an emphasis on morality with ethnonationalism and political authoritarianism. At the same time, the war in Ukraine forces self-examination among progressive Catholics, whose horizons may now be clouded. Visions of a post-conciliar arcadia must be left behind; we should admit to some of the naivete of Vatican II itself (for example, its conception of martyrdom and martyrs only as something of the past). A naïve post–Vatican II progressivism unconsciously anticipated Fukuyama’s thesis of “the end of history.” But now it must reckon with those illusions, both in world affairs and in the Church.
“I have read many books about concentration camps,” Miłosz writes of Borowski’s account of his Auschwitz experience, “but not one of them is as terrifying as his stories because he never moralizes, he relates.” Borowski made his debut in 1942 as a poet, but after Auschwitz he found himself incapable of using poetry to convey the experience. Perhaps it seemed to him obscene to use hexameters to describe gas chambers, or to try to find a rhyme for “Zyklon.” Without metaphors or embellishment, and with the devastating precision of a born journalist, Borowski captures the camp experience in all its naked brutality.
In real life, the inmate Borowski cared for others, helped them when he could, showed sympathy and solidarity. But the world we see through his narrator’s eyes is devoid of any such feelings; here humanity is in perpetual war with itself, ready to do anything to survive. In “A Day at Harmenze,” an inmate named Beker distinguishes philosophically between mere hunger and “real hunger,” and volunteers a definition of the latter: “Hunger is real when one person looks at another as something to be eaten. I have already experienced such hunger.” This is the world Borowski tasked himself to describe and make intelligible.
As a Pole, Borowski’s narrator (like Borowski himself) was not meant for the gas chamber but for “auxiliary” work in the medical facilities, in construction, or in railway maintenance. That put him in a good position to observe the workings of the extermination factory. One day, along with other auxiliaries, he plays soccer on an improvised field, right next to the chimney. He is a goalie. He notices the trains coming in, people being unloaded and taken away. He keeps playing until he realizes what has just happened: “Behind my back, between one corner kick and the next, they had gassed three thousand people.” This is typical Borowski: pure, uninflected observation. No emotion interferes with the recording. And it’s this maddening impassivity that makes him such an excellent recording device. The death of three thousand people is not scandalous or dramatic. It is, in Borowski’s account, banal and casual, and that makes it all the more unsettling. Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories is a haunting, visceral, profoundly disturbing text. If reading it makes you feel sick, that’s precisely what Borowski wants.
When the narrator does allow himself to make an observation or draw a conclusion, he maintains the same steadiness of hand and iciness of voice: “Look at what an original world we are living in: how few people there are in Europe who have not killed a man! And how few people there are whom other people would not wish to murder!” At times his philosophical detachment allows him to contemplate a future world from which he is completely absent, but at whose construction he contributed with his pain. Borowski gives us a glimpse into a world where Hitler has won:
What will the world know about us if the Nazis are victorious? Gigantic edifices will arise, highways, factories, towering monuments. Our hands will be placed beneath every brick, the railroad ties and concrete slabs will be carried on our backs. They will slaughter our families, the sick, the old. They will slaughter the children. And no one will know about us. The poets, lawyers, philosophers, priests will drown our voices. They will create beauty, goodness, and truth. They will create religion.
In “The People Who Were Walking,” the narrator works on the roof of one of the camp’s buildings. Thanks to his position there, he can see the whole clockwork process of extermination:
From the roofs there was a clear view of the burning pyres and the working crematoriums. A crowd would go inside, undress, then the SS men would quickly shut the windows, screwing them down tight. After a couple of minutes, not enough to coat a sheet of tar paper properly, they would open the windows and side doors and air the place out. The Sonderkommando would arrive and drag the corpses onto the pyre. And so it went from morning to night, beginning anew every day.
We have read so much about the Holocaust that our understanding of it has become somewhat blunted. We know so many details about the camps that we no longer grasp what a scene like this really means—we fail to see its enormity. Humans had always killed other humans; they had done so cruelly and savagely, but also clumsily, with deficient tools, poor organization, and high rates of failure. For all the perseverance of the past mass murderers, and despite their best efforts, some of their intended victims would always manage to escape. As this scene reveals, however, by the middle of the twentieth century we had made a science of mass murder and could finally destroy each other on a truly industrial scale, aided by a flawless bureaucracy. Once you were caught up in the extermination machine, the chances of escape were close to nil. That was considered progress, of a kind. Indeed, there was a sense in which the war itself, and the Holocaust that accompanied it, was an extension of the Enlightenment ambition of technical mastery. “Never in human history has a stronger hope existed in man,” observes the narrator, but “also never has it caused so much evil as in this war, and that is why we are perishing in the gas.” So much knowledge, so painfully gained, long centuries of scientific and technological progress—all of it at the service of barbarism.
First, the book—and the tradition it retrieves—has a profound sense of the ongoing agency of the Blessed Trinity. It affirms not a deistic Supreme Being who withdraws into Olympian isolation, but the Triune God who creates now, forever speaking a life-giving Word and breathing forth the Spirit upon a beloved creation.
Second, a Christological grammar governs the Christian appropriation of the divine-ideas teaching. The teaching is employed to elucidate the striking New Testament confession that Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation” and that “in him all things hold together” (Col 1:15, 17). McIntosh writes that “God in Christ acts to restore the creation precisely by reuniting creatures with the knowledge of their true identity as it has always been known and loved in the eternal Word.” In Christ the transcendent dignity of every human being stands revealed. He or she is a concrete expression of God’s love, with a unique value and a distinct calling.
Third, the material creation exhibits “a real depth of intelligibility” as the fruit of God’s knowing and loving. Creation’s very being is sacramental. A richness of meaning lies embodied in the “ordinary.” “Charged with the grandeur of God,” creatures, both animate and inanimate, cry out, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words, “What I do is me: for that I came.” McIntosh writes that for the divine-ideas tradition “the whole creation exists as a continuous event of communication and indeed communion—whose source is the eternal self-communication of the Trinity and whose goal is the fulfillment of creatures as they come more perfectly to share in this divine communion.”
The perfected embodiment of this divine communication and communion is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The “first-born of all creation” becomes the “first-born from the dead” (Colossians 1:18), bringing creation home to its source. Here, as in his other books, McIntosh shows a deep sense of the human plight and of our need for redemption. The divine ideas are luminous guides and goals, but they also bring into relief the illusions and addictions that are roadblocks to wisdom. Made for glory, we too often settle for fool’s gold.
The death from which Christ saves us is far more than physical death. It is the very corroding of God’s image in us through fantasies of self-aggrandizement and hatred. These distortions of the generative divine ideas wreak havoc not only on individuals, but also on the whole human community and the rest of material creation. Sin falsifies divine communication and erects obstacles to the communion God desires. At its deepest, sin is refusal of Incarnation. For, in a sentence from Maximus the Confessor that McIntosh relishes, “the Word always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment.”
With the resurrection of Christ, God’s life-giving Word stands fully revealed. Christians are those whose converted consciousness perceives the fulfillment of God’s plan in the risen Christ and whose conduct seeks to further the restoration of all things in him. Immersed in Christ’s paschal mystery in baptism and nourished by the Eucharist, Christians are led “into a new communion with the divine ideas…a new perception of all reality from within the eternal divine knowing and loving of all things.” Moreover, the divine-ideas tradition fosters the realization of the interconnectedness of all created reality. Every life is constitutively relational, each imaging to every other its Triune Creator.
Significantly, McIntosh entitles the last chapter of his book “Beatitude and the Goodness of Truth.” There he struggles to give some expression to belief in “the life of the world to come.” And, once more, his reflections are not notional, but deeply, even poignantly, personal. In his preface, he frankly confesses, “As my physical incapacities became more challenging, I often wondered about the truth of my own life and how that truth might be grounded in a deeper reality.” And at the end of his exploration of the divine-ideas tradition, he returns to the question: “What is the divine meaning inherent in our earthly struggle to fulfill the personal calling and gifts that comprise our embodied existence—especially in light of the fact that we know ourselves to be mortal, that all we have loved and sought to achieve will need to be surrendered.” With the help of that tradition he ventures a response. “The self-sharing and self-communication through which we become who we are with others are meant to be life-giving and gracious moments of fulfillment, expressing in time the eternal self-sharing generosity of the Trinity within which our exemplar truth exists imperishably.” Thus, beyond the failures, the prideful refusals of communication and spurning of communion, our hope lies in “the Incarnation and Paschal mystery of the eternal Word [who] reconnects each creature with its truth in the Word and makes possible, through the self-giving love of Jesus Christ, the consummating self-donation of the creatures to each other and ultimately to God.”
As one immersed in the writings of mystical theologians from Evagrius to Merton, McIntosh wrestles in his works with the imperative to exorcise the false ego and put on the true self renewed in Christ. His book Discernment and Truth is, at heart, a study of the liberation of the ego from its illusions and addictions to the truth and freedom of the children of God. What the present work offers is the further insight that our true Christic self is already present in God’s providential design for each of us in the Word that the Father utters from all eternity.
One might say that McIntosh has written, in this parting gift, an extended commentary upon Paul’s exclamation, “For those whom God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that the Son might be first-born among many brothers and sisters” (Romans 8:29). This is the beatitude for which McIntosh longs: “As creatures are enabled in Christ to fulfill the relational nature of their identities, they are made whole again with God’s knowing and loving of their truth, their divine ideas; and this means that they are made one within the eternal event of God’s knowing of Godself in the Word, and in this way come to share in the beatitude within which the Father knows all things in the Son within the eternal joy of the Holy Spirit.” May Mark McIntosh now know fully the one who has known and chosen him, and us, “before the foundation of the world.”
The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology
Mark A. McIntosh
Oxford University Press
$85 | 240 pp.
PIH has provided a preferential option for the poor in many ways, and one strategy in particular has come to define the organization’s inspiring global impact: making community health workers central to care delivery. Community health workers (CHWs) are trusted neighbors who live in the communities they serve, and under the same circumstances as their patients. When equipped with a few months of on-the-job training, good supervision, a living wage, supplies, and strong connections to local clinics, CHWs can make a remarkable difference for people who face barriers to health care. PIH conducted the first studies to demonstrate that, with the support of CHWs, people in the poorest places on earth could complete complex treatments for afflictions such as HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis and achieve cure rates on par with those in the United States. Since then, study after study has confirmed that CHW programs are exceptionally affordable ways to improve health outcomes in poor areas. What makes a good CHW program successful is not any one clinical practice. The model is based on wrap-around social support—on making house calls, being available to come running when called, advocating for patients as needed. PIH’s community health workers in Haiti are called accompagnateurs, because they accompany patients in the journey to good health.
The theme of accompaniment permeates Farmer’s work but is perhaps most evident in his 2013 book In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez is regarded by many as the father of liberation theology, and this book offers an intimate view of his decades-long friendship with Farmer. In the introduction, Michael Griffin and Jennie Weiss Block explain that Farmer and Gutiérrez both subscribe to what they call a “theology of accompaniment.” Later in the book, Farmer explains what Fr. Gustavo’s theology and accompaniment meant to him:
I was surrounded in central Haiti by something that felt violent and oppressive—namely, deep poverty and the tail end of the Duvalier dictatorship. Violence was both everyday and structural—in the words of one woman I met: it was the fight for wood, and water, and food. The people with whom I stayed lived in a squatter settlement because some of them had been displaced by a hydroelectric dam. This was their experience of structural violence. How does one make sense of this landscape of violence as a twenty-three-year-old American? I read a lot about the history of Haiti. I read great books that were about Haitian culture, including one about that particular valley where I lived, but I really took a lot of consolation from Gustavo’s work.
In another part of the book Farmer remarks,
As long as poverty and inequality persist, as long as people are wounded and imprisoned and despised, we humans will need accompaniment—practical, spiritual, intellectual. It is for this reason, and for many others, that I am grateful for Father Gustavo’s presence on this wounded but beautiful earth.
For Farmer, accompaniment was not only what desperately ill patients needed, it was also the kind of consolation and insight he found in the work of theologians like Gutiérrez. Accompaniment was also how Farmer talked about his relationship with students like me.
In A Theology of Liberation (1988) Gutiérrez writes that “if there is no friendship with the poor and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.” When I read this, I recalled the time Paul Farmer had affectionately called me an idiot for asking him to autograph a copy of In the Company of the Poor that he had given me as a gift. We laughed as he showed me where he had already signed it. I sensed that the tone of my question had put him on too high a pedestal. He wanted friends, not fans. Paul had many friends in the universities and the halls of power, but he wanted to make friends in the squatter settlements of the world, too. This interpersonal philosophy may help explain his radical rejection of material comforts. Many, including his biographer Tracy Kidder, seemed amazed at how long this esteemed Harvard University professor lived in a small home in Haiti with a tin roof and no hot water. People who knew him could tell you many similar stories: how he slept in a church rectory to save money during medical school; how he sent his paychecks to PIH only to go broke himself; how he skipped lunch because he’d given his meal to a homeless man; how he needed to borrow socks from a friend because he’d been traveling too long and simply ran out. He was like a twenty-first-century mendicant in travel-worn suit and tie. If Paul’s ideas were deeply Catholic, so were his sacrifices, and his humanizing way of life—as he would put it, totally over the top.
Let’s return to the question with which we began: how did Paul Farmer find himself at the center of an extraordinary global movement for a more humane world? It’s unlikely he could have attracted such a devoted following through works alone, by brilliance or work ethic or luck. The dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Ashish Jha, got closer to the mark when he claimed in the Atlantic that Farmer redefined the global health field to make it more human, in part by being so wonderfully human himself. Bill Gates wrote that there will never be another Paul Farmer. That’s true in a certain obvious sense, but we do ourselves and Farmer a disservice if we assume that he was simply born that way, that he was so very much better at being good than very nearly everyone else we’ve met, as if virtue were a quirk of personality. To call him a saint is perhaps no less extravagant a claim, yet thinking of him in this way places him within a group of other wonderfully human people, and suggests something important about how he became who he was. I believe that Farmer chose his way of life, and that he understood it in spiritual terms. If we dare to challenge ourselves the way Farmer often challenged us, we could acknowledge that each of us has opportunities every day to make decisions that would turn our lives in a direction more like his. Farmer’s books still provide important signposts for the journey. They are now, sadly, the only way we can still call on Farmer to accompany us in our struggles.
Or so I thought, when I started writing this article. A few days after Farmer died, a dear friend sent me a message to tell me he had been thinking of me. He said, “I know Paul would fully expect us to continue walking together. I also believe he equipped you, and all of us, and will continue to do so, for this journey.” That friend and I co-founded Medic together many years ago, a global health non-profit that—like Muso, Pivot, GlobeMed, MASS Design Group, Community Health Impact Coalition, and many others—was inspired by Farmer and only possible because of his pragmatic solidarity.
I was still pondering this message a week later, as I was working on this article. It was Ash Wednesday, so I had gone to Mass and was picturing where this journey had taken me—around the world and back many times, to St. Gabriel’s Hospital in rural Malawi, among other places. We launched Medic’s first project there, and it was in that hospital that I had really learned to pray. Eventually I was baptized in the hospital’s little chapel. Just over a decade later, as my local parish prayed to “all the angels and saints,” I realized that I was picturing Paul’s face. And then, reluctantly, I understood that Doctor Paul would still accompany me in prayer, should I find myself facing down a failure of imagination or striving for an antidote to despair. In the grief at his passing, many of us have wondered how the movement for health equity will go on without his tireless accompaniment. If we were to ask him, there’s a chance he’d say, with a wink and a smile, that he’s passed another mountain top and is just getting started.
This, at last, is the reform “strongly wished for by most of the cardinals gathered in the pre-conclave general congregations” in 2013, as Praedicate recalls at the end of its preamble. The date of the congregation’s release—March 19, the ninth anniversary of Pope Francis’s inaugural Mass—is a reminder of those days, when cardinals in the wake of Benedict’s resignation stood up, one after another, to urge the next pope to turn a dysfunctional, inward-looking court of self-aggrandizing cronies into an effective, outward-looking organism of service to the whole Church. They wanted the Roman Curia, which had spent much of 2011 and 2012 deep in scandal, to be an inspiration and model, not an embarrassment; to facilitate rather than block relations between bishops and pope; to be a help in evangelizing, rather than a counter-witness.
Anyone who heard those pleas would see at once how Praedicate specifically addresses them. While St. John Paul II’s constitution, Pastor bonus, was called simply “Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia,” Francis’s Praedicate evangelium is called “Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia and its service to the Church in the world.” The most common complaint—after finances, which occupied the early years of Francis’s reform—had been that the Curia was a law unto itself, self-referential and haughty, wedging itself between the local Church and the papacy. The Curia famously treated bishops with contempt, as they found on their ad limina visits to Rome (so called because every few years a country’s bishops pay an official visit ad limina apostolorum, “to the threshold of the apostles,” touring the dicasteries and meeting the pope.) Many bishops say the attitude was encouraged by St. John Paul II’s 1988 Apostolos suos, which all but denied any standing to bishops’ conferences.
That has long since changed. Bishops are now amazed by their reception in Rome under Francis: curial officials are keen to hear and learn from them, and to assist them. In its preamble, Praedicate praises the key role of bishops’ conferences and regional collegial bodies, calls for a “healthy decentralization”—that is, autonomy regulated by the principle of communion—and says clearly that the Curia “does not place itself between the Pope and the bishops, but is at the full service of both.” Reflecting the hierarchical nature of the Church, which is both primatial and collegial (the bishops govern “with and under Peter”), the service of the Curia is organically tied to the bishops, as the pope is; and its remit is to build bonds of collegial governance and communion by acting as a nerve center for creative ideas and contacts between bishops’ conferences. Six articles of Praedicate (38–43) are dedicated to the ad limina visits, placing great importance on them, and stressing the role of the Curia in facilitating them.
Another complaint at those cardinals’ meetings in February and March 2013 was about the Vatican’s working culture: curial officials drawn from a narrow Italian pool too often turned out to be incompetent yet self-important obstructionists, prone to nepotism if not actual corruption, spiritually dried-out careerists and clericalists detached in every sense from the People of God. Expressing on paper years of Francis’s reforms, Praedicate’s second chapter says that curiali should be distinguished by their spiritual life, pastoral experience, sobriety of life, and love of the poor, as well as their competence and capacity for discernment, and that they should serve in a spirit of collaboration and co-responsibility.
They may be selected from among bishops, clergy, religious, and lay people alike. What matters is not their state in life, but their spirit of service and mission. They should be from different cultures to reflect the Church’s catholicity, and return to their dioceses or religious congregations after five years, which can be extended to a maximum of ten. According to their state of life, those who work in the Curia must attend to “the health of souls” in addition to their office tasks, be committed to regular personal and communal prayer, and carry out their work “with the joyful awareness of missionary disciples at the service of the entire People of God.” Indeed, the function of the Roman Curia is not, primarily, bureaucratic-administrative but pastoral: as Article 3 of the General Norms puts it, the Curia carries out “a pastoral service in support of the mission of the Roman Pontiff and the bishops in their respective responsibilities to the universal Church.”
There are many other important changes in Praedicate. The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, for example, now falls within the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, resolving an enervating identity crisis in which some commissioners tried to turn it into a vehicle for holding the pope accountable to victim groups. That meant it was kept at arm’s length by the Curia, weakening it. Now it will have real heft along with a degree of autonomy. On finances, there is now a healthy distance between the bodies that administer finances and those that hold them accountable—and sophisticated oversight mechanisms to detect wrongdoing.
Finally, the whole operation has been streamlined to prevent bloating and duplication. In addition to the Secretariat of State, four justice and six finance “bodies,” and three offices to run the pope’s household and liturgies, Praedicate reduces John Paul II’s twenty-one congregations and councils to sixteen juridically equal dicasteries with clearly distinct responsibilities, helping to prevent turf wars and allowing for greater “inter-dicasterial” collaboration and co-responsibility.
But the real punch of Praedicate—its evangelizing power—is in its vision of the Church, drawn from Evangelii gaudium and the Acts of the Apostles. The preamble reminds us that Christ’s mandate to preach the Gospel is the Church’s primary task, and that it does so by witnessing to the mercy it has received through acts and words of humble service: touching the suffering flesh of Christ in the poor and the sick. To enable this witness, the Church is called to a missionary conversion, to which the reform of the Roman Curia contributes by harmonizing the daily work of the Vatican with that broader call to evangelize that Francis believes God is now making to the Church.
Instead of resisting racial divisions, the bishops reinforced them, drawing parish lines to separate Catholics by race. Here, O’Connell demonstrates how the factors that structure where people live, work, and worship—not only parish membership, but also zoning laws, hiring practices, and school policies—affect who people see in their daily lives. Their relative isolation from Black people profoundly influenced white Catholics’ imagination, cultivating “a sense that their experience was normative and therefore uncontestable.” White Catholics siloed in their own parishes did not see people of color depicted in religious art, worshiping alongside them in the pews, or serving as clergy, which subtly communicated the myth that Black people “were somehow less like the Divine and maybe even less human.” This helped reinforce the idea that white Catholics were more deserving of ecclesial resources than Black Catholics. Without encounters across racial lines, white Catholic assumptions “about God, themselves, or other people” remained unchallenged.
O’Connell’s second revelation offers some hope to the reader: traditions are constantly evolving. Although Catholicism and anti-Blackness remain entangled, O’Connell believes that connection can be unwound. The first step in the process of “undoing the knots” is truth-telling. White Catholics must lay aside our tacit beliefs about white superiority and our images of white-only saints, stop downplaying our advantages, and instead recognize the sinister aspects of Catholic history and identity in the United States.
In dwelling on her family’s participation in Catholic anti-Blackness, O’Connell models what it would look like for white Catholics to become “more truthful storytellers about ourselves and our traditions.” For her, a willingness to encounter painful pasts and to recognize our own ancestors as perpetrators of anti-Blackness is a form of witness. Being a witness means sharing knowledge of what we have encountered and offering others the chance to encounter transformative perspectives and radical ideas. O’Connell is honest about the pain and discomfort she experiences in discovering her own relatives’ biases and blind spots, as well as their participation in gentrification and the exploitation of Black people. But by mourning the past, she introduces the virtue that she hopes, if put into practice, can transform how white Catholics confront racism: racial mercy. Drawing on the work of Jesuit moral theologian James Keenan, O’Connell defines racial mercy as “a willingness to enter into the chaos of racism.” She asks white Catholics to dwell in the discomfort of Catholic entanglement with anti-Blackness. As we confront the shame and guilt that emerge when we look at our own involvement in racism, we need God’s mercy to acknowledge our shortcomings and seek forgiveness before we can meaningfully participate in the work of racial justice.
O’Connell’s vision of racial mercy encourages us to think on the level of systems and structures. Examining her own family history preserves the role of individuals as agents within these systems and structures, but her analysis of racial boundaries in parishes, neighborhoods, and communities directs our focus to transforming how our communities are structured, funded, and supported. O’Connell concludes, “If our government and our Church—at their respective national, state, and local levels—worked in tandem to create and enforce policies and practices that segregated metro areas like Philadelphia, then they are also capable of working together to repair some of that damage by enacting policies and practices that reintegrate those neighborhoods.” As parishes and schools close, merge, and restructure, we have the opportunity to reshape the boundaries of Catholicism to enact solidarity across racial lines.
But the power to make structural decisions remains largely with the Church hierarchy. Even as Pope Francis encourages lay participation in the process of synodality, the kind of structural change O’Connell calls for requires Church leaders to begin “undoing the knots.” Instead of asserting that “the Church has been antiracist from the beginning” and labeling Black Lives Matter as a Marxist “pseudo-religion,” the U.S. bishops should listen to the voices of Catholics willing to tell the truth about the Church’s involvement with racism. As the National Black Sisters’ Conference reminded Archbishop Gomez, “Over four hundred years of slavery, trauma, pain, disenfranchisement, and brutal violence have been a part of the fabric of this nation and the American Catholic Church.” Without transformative change, the Church will continue to be caught up in anti-Blackness.
Undoing the Knots
Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness
Maureen O’Connell
Beacon Press
$28.95 | 272 pp.
But there’s a bigger problem. “To think, moreover, of the Son of God taking the small cords in his hands and plaiting a scourge out of them for this driving out from the temple,” Origen says, “does it not bespeak audacity and temerity and even some measure of lawlessness?” Jesus was no brawler. To fully imagine this scene means imagining a Christ at odds with the one we repeatedly encounter in the rest of the gospels.
Origen’s solution is to turn the whole thing into an allegory. The temple is “the soul skilled in reason,” the whip is Jesus’ “word plaited out of doctrines of demonstration and rebuke,” the ox is “earthly things,” the poor sheep are “senseless and brutal things” (what did sheep ever do to Origen?), and the doves are “empty and unstable thoughts.” If this interpretation seems dubious, well…tough. If it isn’t allegory, then “we must say that the passage would otherwise have an unlikely air.”
There’s something very appealing about this mode of Biblical analysis—if you don’t like a story in the gospels, just decide it means something totally different. As a child, I heard a priest (later arrested for embezzling parish funds to feed a gambling addiction) deliver a sermon in which he claimed that when Jesus said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” he was referring not to an actual needle. That would make the passage far too radical. Instead, he claimed, it referred to a gate in Jerusalem called “the Eye of a Needle,” which, while small and narrow and difficult, could nevertheless allow a camel to shove his way through. Jeff Bezos’s afterlife, then, need not be a freefall into hellfire but something more like crossing the crowded floor of a dancehall: awkward but doable. The theological term for this style of biblical interpretation is bullshit. Christ being, after all, pretty radical, most people who call themselves Christian, myself included, couldn’t look ourselves in the mirror without it.
That’s why it’s not so surprising that before Christianity came to power (after Constantine saw the words “under this sign you will conquer” written in the sky, announcing the marriage of the Church and state violence), many of the Church Fathers were more uncompromising. “The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder,” says Cyprian of Carthage, “which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale.” “The catechumen or faithful who wants to become a soldier is to be rejected, for he has despised God,” says Hippolytus. “We who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making war upon our enemies,” writes Justin Martyr, “but also, that we may not lie nor deceive our examiners, willingly die confessing Christ.” “Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword?” Tertullian asks, before declaring, “A state of faith admits no plea of necessity.”
But the Church Fathers were not quite pacifists, as is sometimes claimed. Tertullian, for example, still prays for “security to the empire” and “for brave armies”—he’d just prefer the fighting be done by pagans. Or, as Origen put it in the second century, “While others go out to war, we, as priests and servants of God, take part in the campaign in that we keep our hands clean and pray for the just cause.” In this regard, they’re like some of our modern elites. The richest 20 percent of zip codes in America are heavily underrepresented in the mostly middle-class military, and I’ve been asked more times than I can count, “Why would you join the military after Dartmouth? You had options!” If the fighting must be done, let it be done by lesser people.
As the pagan world faded, though, Christians increasingly had to do the fighting themselves. And bloody hands, Christians worried, could mean spiritual death. “Whenever you March out, O worldly warrior,” wrote Bernard of Clairvaux, “you have to worry that killing your foe’s body may mean killing your soul, or that by him you may be killed, body and soul both.” As Philip G. Porter recently pointed out in these pages, early medieval Penitentials often imposed penances on soldiers who killed in war, regardless of whether the cause was just (“War & Penance,” January). “Homicide in war is not reckoned by our Fathers as homicide,” noted St. Basil the Great, one of the doctors of the Church, “Perhaps, however, it is well to counsel that those whose hands are not clean only abstain from Communion for three years.” Pope Gregory VII argued “it is impossible to engage in military service without sin,” though he also argued that “knights undergoing penance could nevertheless fight to defend justice on the advice of their bishops.” You can fight and kill, but as Philo Judaeus pointed out, those you kill share “a supreme and common relationship to a common father.” This is not the triumphant violence of American popular culture, but a more tragic vision, in which doing what needs to be done doesn’t always leave us untarnished.
So perhaps Christ, the untarnished one, didn’t do any violence at all. Scholars like Andy Alexis-Baker and N. Clayton Croy follow a tradition dating back to the sixth century, when Cosmas Indicopleustes argued that, if one pays close attention to the text of John’s Gospel, it does not actually say that Christ struck people.
He struck the brute beasts only, as it is written: “And having made a whip of cords he expelled all from the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.” That is to say: He struck these as living but irrational creatures…. But the rational beings he neither struck nor pushed away, but chastised with speech, as it is written: “And to those who sold doves he said, ‘Take these things hence, and do not make my Father’s house a marketplace.’”
In this reading, the key phrase in the passage is what is known as a partitive appositive, in which the “all” refers to the items in the next clause. The difference can be seen in the King James Version’s “and when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen,” in contrast to the NRSV translation: “Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.”
In this modern translation, the makeshift whip is only for the animals, since, as Ernst Haenchen pointed out, “one cannot drive animals with hands alone.” Craig Keener argues that narratively, the idea that Jesus is using the whip on people makes no sense, since immediately after he is described as using the whip he addresses the dove sellers and commands them to pack up.
In Alexis-Baker’s telling, the definitive break with early nonviolent readings of the scene comes with Augustine. The Donatist Petilian had complained that Catholics were violating Christ’s teachings by engaging in violence. “The Lord Christ drove out the shameless merchants from the temple with whippings,” Augustine responded. “So we find…Christ a persecutor…. Christ even bodily persecuted those whom he expelled from the temple.”
Christ as persecutor—you can hear a sigh of relief across the centuries, as this development allows us to sanctify our darkest desires. It appears in Bernard of Clairvaux’s argument that crusaders are “animated by the same zeal for the house of God which of old passionately inflamed their leader himself when he armed his most holy hands, not indeed with a sword, but with a whip.” It appears in John Calvin’s use of this Gospel passage to defend his role in burning Michael Servetus at the stake. And it was there in my own rather dubious comfort as I stood before El Greco’s serenely violent interpretation of the scene.
But none of that can really be blamed, I think, on grammatical ambiguity. “To move from a little whip and overturning a table to firing machine guns, missiles and other modern weaponry is simply absurd,” writes Alexis-Baker, “If Christians want to justify war and other forms of killing, they will need to look somewhere besides this passage.”
Even her fashion choices, before anything was said or sung, spoke volumes about her convictions. Like Samson’s hair, Hill’s manner and style were part of her superpowers. They were hip in an unruly way; they signaled she was not to be messed with. She sported dreadlocks, sometimes twisted and coiled in cornrows, always slick. Her clothes—leather jackets, retro tops and jeans, African and Jamaican colors and textures—were both chic and rebellious; they complemented her natural beauty without reducing her to a sex object. She had touches of Jamaican reggae in her, splashes of 1970s funk and soul, traces of Public Enemy’s militancy, and the flair and emotion of gospel. These choices of self-presentation identified her with the struggle of Black folk around the globe, connected her with refugees and agitators, and defined her as a countercultural icon.
As for the soundscape, live instruments and layered harmonies evoked the music of the 1970s, dancehall reggae and patois-inflected raps evoked the Caribbean, and, of course, the spiritual content evoked communal and religious notes from an older past, going back to the age of the spirituals and gospel. “Gospel music is music inspired by the gospels,” Hill remarked about the inspiration for Miseducation. “In a huge respect, a lot of this music turned out to be just that. During this album, I turned to the Bible and wrote songs that I drew comfort from.”
More than just comforting, though, Miseducation was also defiant and edgy. Hill stood in the lineage of Black music—the lineage of Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and Al Green—formed by soul-shaking, body-quaking, house-wrecking religion. On one track you might hear warm gospel vocals; on the next, she was blowing rival rappers away like chaff. The result was all things to all people: now tender and sensitive, now bluesy and wistful, now sanctifying and prayerful, and sometimes, in the spirit of hip-hop, rugged and confrontational.
Take “Lost Ones,” one of the most hammering displays of lyricism on the album, its percussive flow of words complementing its hardcore hip-hop beats and record scratches. (The hook samples Sister Nancy’s dancehall hit “Bam Bam” from 1982.) It begins with a declaration of personal emancipation and then turns into a dis: “My emancipation don’t fit your equation / I was on the humble / You on every station / Some wanna play young Lauryn like she’s dumb / But remember not a game new under the sun.” In the late 1990s, rap’s standard formula—a combination of flaunting one’s wealth, drug hype, and supersized masculinity—had a hard time knowing what to do with a female rapper like Lauryn Hill. The hip-hop of that period often featured displays of subversive fun, anything to keep one’s mind off the spikes in homicide, bulging prisons, the poverty of the inner city. Older generations, facing such problems, did what they could to confront and challenge the system; hip-hop of the late 1990s seemed to be doing everything it could to claw its way to the top of that system and claim it as one’s own. Lauryn Hill, needless to say, found that dream empty:
Now, now how come your talk turn cold
Gained the whole world for the price of your soul….
Now you’re all floss
What a sight to behold
Wisdom is better than silver and gold
I was hopeless now I’m on hope road
Every man wants to act like he’s exempt
When he needs to get down on his knees and repent
Can’t slick talk on the day of judgment.
“Final Hour,” another one of Hill’s fast-moving, declamatory raps, continues in the same vein, warning about the high price of fame and fortune and the danger of neglecting the values of the soul. Like the prophets Moses and Aaron, whom she invokes, Hill decries idolatrous attachments to worldly treasures—“watch out what you cling to”—and envisions a revolutionary upheaval, the kind that would fix attention on the poor instead of the rich, on outcasts and slaves instead of the princes of the world. Echoing the central tenet of liberation theology, she calls for a soul-altering change, a conversion that would prioritize the needs of the poor above all else: “I’m about to change the focus from the richest to the brokest / I wrote this opus to reverse the hypnosis.” Haranguing and cajoling at once, Miseducation was intended to re-educate Hill’s listeners, to break the spell that enthralls people to the sparkle of American capitalism. These tracks are counter-spells.
Many of the other songs on the album are more syncretistic, crossing boundaries between R&B, rap, soul, and reggae. They foreshadow melody’s take-over of rap in the early aughts, post Drake. One of the most popular hits on the album, “To Zion,” was Hill’s powerful hymn to her newborn son, from whom it gets its name. That name, of course, derives from the Bible: Zion is a synonym for Jerusalem, and Hill rhapsodizes in the song in ways that recall Jeremiah’s giddy anticipation of a day when the people “shall gather and sing aloud on the heights of Zion…. Then shall young women rejoice in the dance / and the young men and the old shall be merry” (Jeremiah 31:12–13). Verse one begins with a measured delivery until Hill’s swelling joy, growing and kicking like the child in her womb, proves too much to contain in rapped verse and spills over into exalted harmonies: “The joy of my world is in Zion,” she croons with joy and delight. Hill was advised to terminate the life within her so that she could focus on her career. The song is about her refusal to follow this advice. Instead, she chose to see her child as a miraculous blessing in her life, a gift, not a curse. Suffused with the wonder of childbirth, the entire song is framed by the dream of Jeremiah, as well as by the story of the Annunciation, where the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, a terrified and unwed young woman, and tells her that she will conceive and bear a son who will bring good news to the world. “But then an angel came one day,” Hill sings, “Told me to kneel down and pray / For unto me a man-child would be born.” Notice the formal, elevated speech of the King James Bible: street slang is common throughout the album, but here Hill makes use of a consecrated and stately diction, redolent of the archaic, dignified language of Scripture. This diction suggests that something out of the ordinary is happening to her, and she waxes ecstatic about it.
“I wanted it to be a revolutionary song about a spiritual movement,” Hill remarked in an interview, “and also about my spiritual change, going from one place to another because of my son.” Her comment applies to the album as a whole. One can even trace a spiritual development in the track list: it travels from anger and lament, in the opening rap of “Lost Ones,” to serenity, ending with the sublime “Tell Him”—a song of pure prayer and praise. It quotes St. Paul’s famous panegyric on love in 1 Corinthians 13 word for word. There’s nothing inventive in the song’s lyrics; its originality is to be found in Hill’s gorgeous phrasing, the notes bending, stretching, and sighing throughout the track. She caresses the verses with such sensitivity and nuance that they suddenly seem new and fresh, no matter how many times you’ve heard them before.
The music of Miseducation soars to sublime heights without losing its bearing here on earth. It does not overlook the struggle for racial, gender, and class equality at the heart of Black history and Black aesthetics. In this respect, the album itself, and not just its title, owes something to Carter Woodson’s classic work The Miseducation of the Negro (1933). If the purpose of Woodson’s book was to revolutionize the education of Black students—awakening racial consciousness, advancing moral and spiritual development, engaging social and political matters, and wrestling with philosophical questions—Hill’s Miseducation shares a similar purpose. It is an album that offers its own holistic pedagogy, a pedagogy of and for the oppressed. It bravely addresses social questions, questions of race and gender, but it also speaks of spiritual crisis and personal redemption. It draws all its fragments—its various musical and thematic elements—into a coherent and memorable work of art.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and we find ourselves in an entirely new climate completely at odds with the sunny, unclouded disposition of the “shiny suit” era. Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” a song and video that epitomizes these troubled times, opens with South African choral melodies, cheery and placid, a perfect harmony of female a cappella vocals. The musical accompaniment is bare and minimal at the start, a light pattern of metal jingles from a rain stick or Egyptian tambourine, a slow finger-picked acoustic guitar, and bright and breezy male voices crooning the lines “We just wanna party / Party just for you / We just want the money / Money just for you.” Childish Gambino enters the picture, strolling and dancing his way to a shoeless Black man strumming his guitar—a nostalgic image from the bucolic age of blues and folk music. After striking a “Jump Jim Crow” pose (hand on hip, leg bent, back contorted), Childish Gambino proceeds to pull out a gun and fire a blast at the bluesman’s head. The effect is shocking, brutal, grotesque, a jolting disruption of the carefree and blithe opening. Like a surrealistic image from the films of Luis Buñuel, the scene, and what follows, is dreadful and traumatizing, a subversive commentary on America’s addictions to guns, its racism and materialism, and social media.
So too in our own day the partisans of Christendom fight in service of what is manifestly a lost cause. Delsol points to shifts in both laws and popular attitudes toward divorce, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Though there are pockets of resistance to these developments (particularly, she notes, in the United States), the path of this arc is clear: “Humanitarianism, the morality of today, is a morality entirely oriented toward the well-being of the individual, without any vision of the human person [vision anthropologique].” What we see is an “inversion of the inversion,” an undoing of the revolution of the fourth century that turned the ideals of Christianity into socially enforced norms. Some would say that this is the result of our progressive realization of the inviolability of individual conscience with regard to ultimate questions, but Delsol resists narratives of progress: “In each era, ‘progress’ consists simply in reconciling realities (laws, customs, mores) with diffuse and sometimes as yet unexpressed beliefs that evolve in silence.”
This suggests that human beings are not simply behavers, but also believers. The moral norms of the ancient world changed because the beliefs of Christianity supplanted those of paganism, making long-accepted pagan practices suddenly appear odious. Delsol quotes Tacitus: “[Christians] hold profane all that we hold as sacred and, on the other hand, permit all that we hold to be abominable.” Like Marion, Delsol ascribes to Judaism and Christianity a key role in de-sacralizing the world. The dualism of Christianity, with its transcendent God standing over and against the world He created, replaced the “cosmotheism” of antiquity, which saw the cosmos itself as saturated with divinity. Or, more precisely, monotheism was layered on top of cosmotheism, a “secondary religion” covering over (but just barely) the “primary religion” of humanity, which “arises, so to speak, on its own, proliferates without fertilizer, and instantly occupies and reoccupies a place as soon as it is free.” This reoccupation of the space vacated by Christendom is what we face today. Christianity has been replaced not by atheism and secularity, as the Enlightenment philosophes foretold, but by a religion “more primitive and more rustic.”
Today this primitive and rustic cosmotheism takes various forms, perhaps most powerfully in the emergence of environmentalism as a kind of popular religion. Nietzsche was right in pointing to the “otherworldliness” of Christianity as a repudiation of the ancient world, and the contemporary repudiation of Christendom is fueled by a desire to focus again on this world as our true home. “For the monotheist, this world is only a temporary lodging. For the cosmotheist it is a dwelling. The postmodern spirit is tired of living in a lodging…. It wants to be reintegrated into the world as a full citizen, and not as a ‘resident alien.’”
Delsol notes the numerous writers who have described modernity as parasitic on Christianity, but she prefers to speak of modernity as a “palimpsest” written over the Christian text, just as Christianity was written over the text of antiquity. This is always the way that human societies work: “Using all the possible materials” from the past “but depriving them of their meaning in order to reinvent them for the benefit of a new epoch.” Just as Christendom replaced paganism, a religion founded on mythos, with one that claimed to be founded on truth—and persecuted those who denied that truth—so now, in our postmodern moment, “truth” has once again been eclipsed by mythos. Yet this new mythos is ineradicably marked by the Christian appeal to “truth,” for it does not breed tolerance, as the myths of antiquity did, but retains the universalism of the Christendom that it has overwritten. For Delsol, the “woke” have “taken over the concept of dogmatic truth, and excluded their adversaries from public life, just as the Church had excommunicated in times past.” The fate of the West is neither nihilism nor ancient pagan religion, but humanitarianism, “the evangelical virtues…recycled to become a kind of common morality.” But, Delsol asks, “what will become of principles that can no longer permanently replenish themselves, their source having been banished?” We are left with what Delsol calls, invoking Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, “the Church without Christ,” and one suspects that Delsol would agree with O’Connor in A Memoir of Mary Ann that, in the absence of faith, “we govern by…a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”
Blame for this outcome can be laid at the feet of Christendom itself: “In its pretention to establish itself as a civilization, Christianity ended up producing a monstrous avatar that is at the same time its alter-ego and its mortal enemy.” But, Delsol reminds us, Christendom is not Christianity, and the demise of the former is not the demise of the latter. She is inclined to cast a jaundiced eye at excessive Christian breast-beating over the past, “which can resemble masochism.” We rightly judge aspects of Christendom to have been distortions of the Gospel, but Delsol, the good historicist, sees little point in condemning those in the past who did not have the benefit of our hindsight. Delsol comes neither to praise nor to condemn Christendom, but to bury it.
She is concerned, however, that in their reasonable fear of repeating the errors of Christendom, Christians will end up muting their distinctive voice. Late in the book, she shifts from the descriptive to the prescriptive: “To dialogue is not to dissolve oneself in the theses of the adversary, and one does not need to cease to exist in order to be tolerant—in fact, the opposite is the case.” This is not the integralist call for a return to Christendom. It is, as Delsol puts it, a call to “a spiritual revolution,” which by worldly standards might look like defeat. Christians must form their children “to carry themselves like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: resigned, but also able to walk toward the infinite.” For Delsol, as for Marion, the category of “witness” is key. Christians without Christendom must take up the role of witnesses rather than rulers, and learn the virtues characteristic of a minority: “Equanimity, patience, and perseverance.” Christians must take as their model not Sepúlveda, who justified the conversion by conquest of the Americas, but the martyred Trappist monks of Tibhirine, who died because they would not abandon their Muslim neighbors.
There was another place I felt safe: my parish church. St. John of God was Eastern-European ornate, with paintings of gently smiling angels and saints covering the walls. No kid ever made fun of me there; talking during Mass meant punishment by ever-vigilant nuns scanning for infractions. Whenever I felt raw from taunts, I pictured myself in a pew on a summer day, light beaming down from the stained-glass windows. During Mass I stared at the statue of St. John of God in his alcove on the main altar, and instead of praying for the souls in Purgatory, I asked him to make me famous, like my idol, Janis Joplin. She’d been bullied, too; her high-school classmates had scrawled “pig” on her locker. I had no talent, but I vowed that someday I would, like Janis, go to my class reunion and make my bullies feel like failures.
Life after grammar school was a reprieve—except there was Sandy. She brought the name-calling to high school, though thankfully it never caught on because her old gang had dispersed. Still, she’d sidle down the hall toward me, a lithe, smirking sylph, and look me up and down and laugh as I passed. By that point, revenge through fame—although for what, I still didn’t know—was my main motivation. It carried me through high school to college, where I traded the Janis fantasy for something even more unrealistic: becoming a poet. In 1988 I moved to New York to attend an MFA program. I wasn’t on a fast-track to literary stardom, but I was getting published, traveling internationally to give readings, making a living teaching writing. Didn’t the poet George Herbert say, “Living well is the best revenge”?
In 2011, I got a friend request on Facebook from a former neighbor in Chicago, who told me St. John of God Church was being demolished. I was horrified and deeply grieved. Through many moves I’d carried artifacts of my sanctuary with me: a box of incense for the Feast of Epiphany, a small envelope of rose petals that had been touched to a Virgin Mary statue that supposedly cried real tears. There was a parish Facebook group where people were discussing old times. I knew my former bullies would be there, but I joined anyway, for one last look.
There my old tormentors were, including Sandy. No longer a snickering pixie, she looked hesitant, diminished, as if life had whittled her down. She had posted photos she took of the half-bulldozed church: a mural of the Holy Family with nothing but blue sky behind it, and the main altar, divested of everything, towering above a rubble-strewn floor. The St. John statue was gone. Great-grandpa had done carpentry work for the church, but nothing he’d built remained. From Sandy’s comments on the photos, I could tell she was grief-stricken. I’d thought I was the only one who loved that place. I was wrong.
After I posted a greeting in the group, friend requests and messages appeared:
“Sharon, I remember when your Nicholas Copernicus poem won an award in that Polish contest.”
“Are you still writing? You were so talented.”
Did none of them recall what they did? In spite of myself, I felt nostalgic.
A month later, someone organized a reunion. There was no Pulitzer in my future, but maybe I could flaunt my travels. Most of those women had never left Chicago. I decided to go.
As I walked into the bar area of the restaurant, Sandy and three former mean girls rushed toward me. I readied myself to say something eloquently sarcastic. Then one of them, Linda, thrust my first poetry collection at me.
“I ordered this off Amazon,” she said. “Will you sign it? You know, I visited the East Coast once.”
I waited for a pause in Linda’s breathless story about her trip to New York to begin my fierce narrative, but then she interrupted herself: “Hey, remember the ‘Living Rosary’?”
I did, vividly. Every year, on an evening during the first week of May, the entire grammar school walked in procession from the schoolyard to the church, led by priests carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary adorned with roses. The entire neighborhood thronged the streets, singing, taking pictures. Inside the church, we kids lined up one behind another in the aisles as an eighth-grade girl in a white dress lit the candles we were holding. As each flared, the congregation said a “Hail Mary.”
“And when all the candles were lit,” Linda said, “they’d turn off the lights, and—”
“And we were the Living Rosary,” I laughed.
The scientific analogies Lakeland deploys are not very useful in thinking about sexual morality. What new telescope allows us to see human sexuality more clearly than our ancestors did? Homosexuality, after all, has existed since the beginnings of the human race; it is not a modern discovery. Yes, we now have more knowledge of how the body works but, if our current sexual confusions are any indication, no more knowledge of the human heart. When Lakeland writes that “common sense says that human beings know how to employ sexual relations responsibly,” I wonder what planet he is living on. Something closer to the opposite seems to be the truth, today as in the past. The Church has not always been right on these issues, but it has been more often right than wrong on how easily all of us deceive ourselves about sex, love, and many other things. We live in a broken world, and human nature itself is broken and in need of redemption. That, at least, is the traditional teaching. The invocation of love does not trump Scripture and tradition. Love is the excuse of every adulterous couple; love of country the justification for countless crimes. As I note in my most recent column, love was the reason Amy Bloom helped her husband commit suicide. I do not doubt the authenticity of that love, but I do question what she did in the name of it. I welcome the sort of interrogation the Church offers when I am inclined to think my desires or ambitions are my business alone and affect no one else.
Obviously, Genesis is not a scientific text. But the “biological distinctions” found in Genesis, which Lakeland considers theologically trivial, pervade Scripture and Church teaching. Heterosexual marriage is the metaphor used to describe God’s love of Israel and the relationship between Christ and the Church. Sacramental marriage itself is understood to participate in the mystery of Christ’s love for his Church. In Revelation, the coming of the Kingdom of God is described as a wedding day. (Talk about productive non-contemporaneity!) Setting all of this aside as just so much outdated anthropology, or as an instance of sexualizing the Godhead, turns much of the Church’s teaching and plain language upside down. Such an approach stymies, rather than advances, reform.
Finally, as I wrote in my piece on Renkl’s recent NYT columns, different Catholic communities will come to terms with same-sex marriage in different ways. I proposed that we wait and see which communities flourish. Lakeland is impatient with that sort of gradualism; he thinks I can’t see the forest for the trees. I just don’t want to see a lot of old trees cut down before we inspect the saplings that are supposed to replace them.
An example of another way to think about suffering and joy might be found in the medieval saints, whose self-mortifications and spiritual practices, at first blush, can make just about all grace look cheap. (Oh, you stopped eating chocolate? Catherine of Siena lived entirely on the Eucharist.) One such penitent was Margaret of Cortona, a thirteenth-century woman whose life and visions are recorded for us by her confessor, Fra Giunta of Bevegnati. She had fled an abusive family to live with a man as his mistress for nine years, bearing him a child. After his death, she took up a life of penance.
While Margaret has been, for some, a romanticized figure, a kind of love martyr—François Mauriac wrote a book about her in this vein—it’s worth pointing out that Christ, in her visions, refers to the man she lived with as a “deceiver who incessantly ensnared you against your will” (emphasis added). Her great sin seems to involve her love of money and luxury, not her sexual past.
In any case, her penances were extreme; she ate almost nothing, refused most charitable gifts, and ended any sort of relationship with her son. Her confessor, in his account of her life, records that she called herself “a cesspool of vice, an abominable vessel full of defects, detestable, a stall of stinking filthiness”—this after confessing (and re-confessing) her sins against God. She’s terrified, despite receiving more assurances than most people get in a lifetime, that she’s simply too foul for God.
But Christ’s words to Margaret, as related by her to her confessor, are, for the most part, gentle. Some of the ascestic disciplines undertaken by Margaret are encouraged by him. But when Margaret wishes for leprosy, or tries to cut her face open with a knife, or wishes to be paraded through her home town as a shameful example, either Christ or Giunta stops her (and is praised for doing so). Eventually, Christ and Margaret have the following exchange:
Then Margaret, the servant of God, said to Christ: “Lord, I realize that my purity does not deserve your mercy, something no one would deny. Indeed, if a big fire were prepared for me, I would jump into it before I would retract my statement that my impurity is unworthy of your mercy.” The Lord said: “Why are you so incredulous? You cannot imagine what the saints, both present and past, have done, and how their actions make me well disposed toward them. Your answer, then, would have closed the door of my mercy, if it were not motivated by your devotion to my greatness and beauty.”
Medieval piety isn’t modern piety, a change which is neither good nor bad—just a change. But even in the intense self-mortification that Margaret’s piety demands, Christ emphasizes to her that to will only self-destruction is to refuse to accept mercy, that to focus intently on lack of desert is a way to avoid accepting what you haven’t earned. Since what is offered by Christ is impossible to earn, this retreat into penance can represent a way of turning away from God in a more subtle guise.
Similarly, in Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, God says that “guilt is not atoned for by suffering simply as suffering,” adding that “the value is not in the suffering but in the soul’s desire.” His love isn’t merited through suffering, but simply present for us, whether or not we ask for it and whether or not we deserve it. Grace is equally cheap and equally costly to anybody willing to accept it. And Easter promises us that something has actually happened, that our faith doesn’t simply depend on a conveniently unrealized future.
So—Easter. If we struggle to rejoice through this season in the way we ought, then perhaps it’s important to try to cultivate joy as a response that’s as authentically Christian as sorrow, the realization of a hope as much as expectation. Much like grace itself, we can’t earn Easter. But we could receive it, and live into it better than we do.
This article was originally published on April 15, 2018.
As a child, Palm Sunday was always a highly anticipated event for me. My parents would buy an elaborate palm-weaving from a street vendor outside our San Bernardino, California, parish. The church would be packed with people standing in the aisles and the narthex, with the overflow spilling out of the doors. All had gathered to experience, within one liturgy, Jesus’ triumphant, joyful entrance and the heartbreak of his passion. My siblings and I, having collected single palms, would wave them during Mass as holy water came sprinkling down, and we’d laugh when it landed on our faces. My mother would always make sure it had reached us, and on those rare occasions when we hadn’t felt it, she’d wipe drops from her own skin and bless us. (After Mass, my father would help us weave our palms into crosses that for the next year we’d keep in our rooms.) My siblings and I enjoyed the first half of the liturgy more than the second half, when the community’s mood would become somber upon Jesus’ crucifixion and death. Our joy was innocent. We were happy because we were children. As I got older, I began to see the joy of the procession with palms through the lens of the injustice in our world, the same injustice that leads to Jesus’ crucifixion.
The Gospel reading at the procession with palms this Sunday is from Luke. It concludes with the following:
[The disciples] proclaimed: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to [Jesus], “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He said in reply, “I tell you, if they keep silent, the stones will cry out!” (Luke 19: 38-40)
A brief look at the New Jerome Biblical Commentary will tell you that when Jesus responds, “if they keep silent, the stones will cry out!” he is referencing Habakkuk 2:11. The prophet Habakkuk calls to God, expressing woe over the injustice and violence of the time. God responds to Habakkuk with a rebuke of tyrants and their motivations, and says, “For the stone in the wall shall cry out, and the beam in the frame shall answer it!” The decrying of injustice and violence perpetuated by tyrants cannot be contained, and in the same way, the joy of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem cannot be contained.
I am afraid that the short answer is that we cannot, not because we are liberals but because we respect the advance of scientific understanding. When we ask the question this way, we are forced to ask about the valence of “traditional anthropology.” Is anthropology impervious to or absolved from the historical process? If not, should the male/female identities as Baumann here seems to understand them be so confidently described as “God-given”? It seems to me a mistake to assume that sexual ethics can be tied to an “unchanging” anthropology. Sexual ethics depends upon anthropology, for sure, on our understanding of what it is to be a human being. Philosophical or theological anthropology is no more immune to changing historical understanding than was geocentrism, or indeed than was the heliocentrism that replaced it for a time. What is unchanging in the vision of Genesis is to be found in the theological truth that human beings are dependent upon a creator God, who chose to make them in the divine image and likeness. The rest of the story, the details, are what the author of Genesis lays upon the Creator, extrapolating from what the author or authors knew to be the case in their own times to the origins of life billions of years before. When science comes to understand more fully what it is to be human, science is not disproving our dependence on a creator God; rather, it is advancing our knowledge of what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God.
Among the salient historical facts of our present moment that seem to require an adjustment to Christian anthropology are two of great importance. First, men and women who have same-sex sexual attraction are following their natural inclinations, and seem in all or almost all respects to live and function in our modern world in precisely the same way as do their heterosexual fellow citizens. A corollary to this is the fact that sexual activity has been decoupled from procreation. The instinct-driven sex drive of the animal world has now found its way to the opportunity for truly human responsible sexual choices. Biology says that sexual intercourse between men and women tends towards procreation. Catholic theology has said for a very long time that sexual intercourse that is not open to the possibility of procreation is objectively sinful. Common sense says that human beings know how to employ sexual relations responsibly, whether in the service of procreation or in that of loving intimacy and mutual sexual pleasure.
Second, it is beyond dispute that same-sex relationships, whether blessed by ritual or not, are marked by loving mutuality just about as much as heterosexual relationships are. One of the most momentous changes in our world today is that there is what is still a relatively new openness about sexual identity, in consequence of which we all know men and women who are gay or lesbian or transgender, and we can see that they are not better or worse than anyone else, and that they succeed or fail in life in about the same percentages. In other words, they are normal in all the important ways. And nothing is more normal than the wish to love and to be loved.
When we bring these two thoughts together, and we insist on the Creator’s intent to make human beings in the divine image and likeness of God—an image that is neither gendered nor sexualized—and on the impossibility of frustrating that divine will, it is surely clear that to be made in the divine image is to be created to love. Wherever there is genuine love, there is God. When we step away from outdated anthropology and trust our God-given eyes, there is no rational way to deny that genuine love is not confined to heterosexual relationships. If the Church were to reflect on these facts, both the biological and the theological, it might find its way to celebrating loving unions wherever it is fortunate enough to find them.
I can still recall my shock. I didn’t know how to react, and, in that moment, I felt uncomfortable in my body. What she was really doing was expressing her disapproval of young lay women working in close proximity with a priest, but obscuring it with false concern about my well-being. Indeed, she might as well have placed me in the middle of the parish community to be objectified, judged, humiliated, and dehumanized. She was right about one thing, though: I was young, and my inexperience at the time kept me from responding the way I now wish I would have. Instead of questioning her own internalized sexism, I responded to her outrageous indirect accusation by saying I would never think of doing such a thing. One week later, the pastor told me that this woman had spoken to the young priest, my colleague, to warn him against working with young women, and he in turn asked the pastor to end our collaboration. That priest never spoke to me again.
The Gospel reading continues with Jesus saying to the scribes and Pharisees, “’Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her’… and in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders” (John 8: 7,9). Jesus invites the woman to see that no one is left to condemn her. Often in scripture we find that the sins of the men who are religious leaders are sins rooted in the abuse of power, pride, and avarice, but one never hears of their objectification of women. The authors of the Gospels wouldn’t know to do so. Therefore, though the scribes and Pharisees recognized themselves to be sinners, I’m not sure they understood their sin against her, their inability to see her as a whole person, and similarly women in the Church today continue to be objectified. The “adulterous woman” may have survived the altercation, but her reputation would be forever marred within the community.
“Authority and Participation” is one of ten themes selected in the Synod on Synodality process “intended to highlight significant aspects of ‘lived synodality’” (Vademecum for the Synod on Synodality). Some of the prompting questions that accompany this theme include: How is authority or governance exercised within our local church? How are teamwork and co-responsibility put into practice? How are lay ministers and the responsibility of lay people promoted? Based on the experience I just shared, I would offer the following to the synodal conversation. My assignment to work with the young priest had the potential to be an exemplary example of collaboration between young lay women and clergy. The project offered me a share in the authority that only the clergy possessed in this community, but it was short-circuited by ingrained sexist beliefs and the perceived threat it posed to one person in leadership. Authentic collaboration in the Church is possible only when women are seen as whole and necessary, not as challenges or threats to the “purity” of clergy. In our current national climate and in a time of decline in trust in institutions, young women are less likely to tolerate the kind of behavior I experienced because their ability to recognize and name these sins, these injustices, is greater. The future of the Church depends on the work of women, and so there must be a preferential option for their ministry. Their authority cannot hang simply on the whims and permission of men. In today’s first reading, from Isaiah, the Lord says, “See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the wilderness I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers” (Isaiah 43:19). This the Lenten promise and my hope for the Synod.
This is the fifth in a series of reflections for each Sunday in Lent. You can read the others here.
Like any groundbreaking book, Soldiers of God stirs questions and the desire to know more. This is definitely a book about the nouvelle théologie, not the nouveaux théologiens. I longed to know more about these men beyond their common revolt against an outworn neo-scholasticism. What were their various temperaments and personal experiences? Stern or cheerful? Did they vote? Read detective stories? Love any movies? Fume at any politicians or at one another? Ever struggle with faith or prayer?
And though Shortall’s subtitle alludes to “twentieth-century French politics,” in fact it actually concentrates on French politics from about 1940 to the mid-1950s, with a brief flashback to the condemnation of Action Française. What, I wondered, had been the responses of these theologians to the political run-up to the stark moral crises of France’s military defeat, Nazi occupation, Vichy collaboration, and post-war coalitions? What about the economic impact of the Depression, Hitler’s shredding of the Versailles Treaty and Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, the 1934 anti-Republican riots in Paris, the Popular Front, Spanish Civil War, Munich, and France’s military policy? I cannot believe that the nouveaux théologiens were lacking in reactions to such political challenges. What captured their attention? What did they read? Whom did they trust? How did these shape their eschatological or incarnational perspectives?
Shortall mentions two books that Gaston Fessard—the Jesuit author of the cri de coeur, “France, Beware of Losing Your Soul,” that launched Témoignage chrétien—wrote about pre-war issues, such as pacifism, the Spanish Civil War, and the military threat of the Third Reich. A leading participant in the revival of Hegel in France as well as the spiritual director of Gabriel Marcel, Fessard is an intriguing figure who deserves more attention in English. Shortall sketches philosophical aspects of his work but not its prewar political conclusions.
The mettle of political theologies cannot be tested, it seems to me, only in the fiery furnace of yes-or-no moral crises. Those theological perspectives must also speak to the “ordinary” politics that Max Weber described as the “slow boring of hard boards”—all the concrete, complex, fact-laden, difficult, but seemingly less existential choices that determine whether those awful moments of moral crisis ever occur. Here I do not find Shortall’s repeated references to a “counter-politics,” as developed, for example, in the work of William Cavanaugh, either clear or helpful.
Shortall is no antiquarian. The questions she explores in fine detail “remain just as relevant today,” she writes, “as they did in the 1940s.” I strongly agree, and because I do, two features of the story she tells leave me dissatisfied. One is her treatment of liberalism. The other is her treatment of the secular. Thinking about both topics has advanced since the heyday of the nouvelle théologie; even the meaning of the terms has shifted, in some parts of the world more than in others.
Shortall mentions liberalism only occasionally. She takes as unproblematic the rejection of it by the nouveaux théologiens (as well as, in fact, by neo-scholastic reactionaries and by Thomist progressives like Maritain).
She does not define the liberalism they had in mind. Was it primarily the individualism and self-seeking of “bourgeois man,” the preeminent rights of private property, the disruption of community by the market’s cash nexus, plus, perhaps, Enlightenment irreligion? Did it also include parliamentary democracy, freedoms of speech, press, and religion, regular elections, majority rule, minority rights, and judicial independence? Liberalism has always been a multi-dimensional, evolving tradition. Can its rejection be unproblematic for any theology claiming contemporary relevance?
In contrast to liberalism, Shortall frequently mentions the secular, secularism, and secularization. These words run from the book’s title to its final sentences. Here too there is a frustrating lack of precision. A secular world is clearly a world in which the Church and Christianity no longer hold the controlling positions they once did. The nouveaux théologiens welcomed the change in some respects, deplored it in others. They did not appear to agree on what brought it about, though they all thought a defensive, stultifying neo-scholasticism had actuallyworsened the situation. Nor were they of one mind on what positions the Church and Christianity can aspire to in the changed world and by what means. Shortall is nonetheless convinced—and I tend to agree—that the nouvelle théologie, and especially its eschatological current, have much to teach us. But what? A lot depends on one’s understanding of the “secular world.”
Shortall is well versed in the recent literature challenging the assumption of old-fashioned secularization theory that modernity and the decline of religion always go hand in hand. The reality, these analyses demonstrate, is much more complex and variously shaped by region, history, religion, and culture, but is nevertheless profound. Obviously, Shortall can rehearse only so much of this in a book about French theology, but given the importance of this theme in her story, I regret that she does not at least try to disentangle what might be meant by “secular,” “secularization,” and “secularism.” These terms can encompass everything from government neutrality toward religion to the emergence of spheres of activity— such as science, economics, and psychology—largely governed by internal rules apart from religion to a polite label for atheism. All these modern developments come in different shades and flavors; all are vulnerable to critique. Shortall, unfortunately, uses the terms interchangeably and without explication.
When it comes to the contemporary political relevance of the nouvelle théologie, Shortall may be more impressed than I am with a few interlocutors in the left-wing academy who could be described as post-liberal or post-secular. She may also be more occupied with the drama of political resistance than the slog of political participation. But no one should imagine that she is not a subtle analyst. She often qualifies the binaries she sets up between eschatological and incarnational and between patristic and Thomist. She recognizes overlaps between the two camps and diversity within them. She acknowledges limitations in the eschatological theology she clearly favors.
Soldiers of God in a Secular World is an outstanding book by a young and brilliant historian, well-launched into a career of integrating religion and theology into intellectual and political history. If this reviewer is left with some nagging questions, Shortall, should she so choose, has plenty of time to answer them.
Soldiers of God in a Secular World
Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics
Sarah Shortall
Harvard University Press
$49.95 | 352 pp
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