A Prayer for Refugees

A Message from Archbishop Hebda Regarding President Trump's Executive Order on Immigration Ban

.
Related Off-site Links:
Archbishop Hebda Joins Minnesota Faith Leaders in Opposing Trump’s Immigration Ban – Matthew Davis (The Catholic Spirit, January 30, 2017).
Trump Bars Refugees and Citizens of 7 Muslim Countries – Michael D. Shear and Helene Cooper (The New York Times, January 27, 2017).
Trump's Immigration Ban Ban Excludes Countries with Direct Links to Terrorism and Where Trump Has Commercial Holdings – The Real News, January 27, 2017).
Trump's Muslim Ban Triggers Chaos, Heartbreak, and Resistance – Ryan Devereaux, Murtaza Hussain and Alice Speri (The Intercept, January 29, 2017).
Judge Blocks Trump Order on Refugees Amid Chaos and Outcry Worldwide Michael D. Shear, Nicholas Kulish and Alan Feuer (The New York Times, January 28, 2017).
Judge Halts Deportations After Protesters Swarm Airports Over Trump’s Order Barring Muslims – Robert Mackey (The Intercept, January 28, 2017).
Donald Trump, the Refugee Ban, and the Triumph of Cruelty – Dylan Matthews (Vox, January 28, 2017).
Donald Trump Fires Acting Attorney General Hours After She Refuses to Defend His Immigration Ban – Leon Neyfakh (Slate, January 30, 2017).
Trump Refugee Ban Clashes With Faith-Based Groups' Religious Missions – Tom Gjelton (NPR News, January 27, 2017).
Pope Francis: You Can’t Defend Christianity by Being “Against Refugees and Other Religions” – Catholic News Service via Catholic Herald (October 13, 2016).
USCCB Speaks Out Against Trump’s Immigration Orders – Mary Pezzulo (Patheos, January 25, 2017).
Responding to Trump's Ban, Top Catholic Bishops Pledge Solidarity with Muslim Refugees – Michael O'Loughlin (America, January 30, 2017).
Bishop McElroy: Trump’s Executive Order is Rooted in Xenophobia and Religious Prejudice – Millennial (January 29, 2017)
Chicago's Archbishop Calls President Trump's Immigration Order a “Dark Moment in U.S. History” – Madeline Farber (Time, January 29, 2017).
LGBT Catholics Stand with Immigrants, Refugees, Visitors from Banned Countries — DignityUSA (January 30, 2017).
Twin Cities Clergy Join Protest Against Trump Immigration Ban — Jean Hopfensperger (Star Tribune, January 30, 2017).
A Message from Archbishop Hebda Regarding President Trump's Executive Order on Immigration Ban — The Progressive Catholic Voice (January 30, 2017).
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, James Martin Labels as "Appalling" President Trump's Plan to Demonize Immigrants — The Wild Reed (January 27, 2017).
550 Attend Mass Outside White House in Solidarity with Refugees – Teresa Donnellan (America, January 30, 2017).
How the Catholic Mood About the Trump Administration Shifted in Just a Week – Michael O'Loughlin (America, January 30, 2017).

"We've Become the New South"

By Joe Kruse

"We've become the New South." These words lodged in me like a thorn. The phrase comes back to me every time I see a statistic explicating the worst-in-the-nation racial disparities stitched into Minneapolis’s social and economic fabric. It comes back to me every time I think about Jamar Clark, who was killed this past Fall by Minneapolis police. Almost all the witnesses said he was handcuffed when he was shot.

In an article from last Spring, Anthony Newby, executive director of a local social change organization called Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, was quoted saying, "We've become the new South . . . We've become the new premiere example of how to systematically oppress people of color."

For years I understood Minnesota to be a bastion of liberal politics. I thought that our "progressive" ideologies saved us from bigotry and violent racism, things I often associated with the Deep South.

But recently I've come to understand more clearly the covert but brutal qualities of Minnesotan racism. Our racism is masked by colorblind language and "progressive" state and local policies that distribute wealth primarily within white communities. Our racism is propagated by fear of confrontation and awkward conversations around race. It thrives on the silence upheld by the myth of "Minnesota Nice." While the South had Jim Crow policies for decades that ensured the subjugation of people of color, Minneapolis has the over-policing of the Northside and other communities of color that result in systemic repression through mass incarceration. In our city black people and American Indians and nine times more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses then white people. (For more information, see the ACLU’s report about Minneapolis called Picking up the Pieces.)

In the face of these violent inequalities, I am honored that our community will be hosting the 2016 Midwest Catholic Worker Faith and Resistance Retreat in conjunction with Black Lives Matter (BLM) Minneapolis. Each year one Midwest Catholic Worker community hosts a gathering of Catholic Workers from all over the region who come to work on the hosting community's project or campaign.

This year the Minneapolis Catholic Worker is hosting the Faith and Resistance Retreat [April 8-12] and will be working with BLM Minneapolis to ensure that the work we will do at our retreat will benefit the organizing goals of BLM locally. We are so excited to offer up this tradition of our Movement to support the incredible work of BLM Minneapolis. [NOTE: For more information and to register for the 2016 Midwest Catholic Worker Faith and Resistance Retreat click here.]

It is very important that this retreat is led by organizers of color embedded in the BLM Minneapolis leadership. These brilliant organizers are overworked and underpaid. Part of our work is to pay them equitably for their time and expertise. To do that we need to raise $7,000, and we need your help! This money will both go to support the work that happens at our retreat, but will also go to support organizers who have been putting in countless unpaid hours leading historic direct action campaigns in our city. It is high time these folks get some compensation for their momentous social change work, and we are in the fortunate place to help make that happen. We also need funds to pay for food and housing for the Catholic Workers who are coming to Minneapolis for the retreat. Many of these people are committed to living lives of voluntary simplicity and without a place to stay, would not be able to afford a hotel or other accommodation.

So we ask, again, that you give what you are able. Whether its $10 or $100, all gifts make a huge different in the work that we will do. We find now that we are living in a revolutionary moment similar in scale and importance to what unfolded in the American South in the 1960s. Thanks to the work of BLM and other black liberation organizations, there has been a national awakening around the current state of American racism. Helping us put on this retreat, ensuring that these incredible organizers are compensated for their necessary work, will help maintain this social change movement.

We ask you join us in supporting the unfolding social transformation.

Thank you so much for your support.

Peace and Love,

Joe Kruse and the The Minneapolis Catholic Worker


NOTE: Please make checks out to the Rye House and put FARR or Retreat in the memo. Mail checks to 2204 10th Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55404.

Any questions? Call 302-729-3643.

Catholic Leaders Stand With Obama on Guns and Demand Republicans Follow His Lead

By Sarah Jones


Note: This commentary was first published January 5, 2016 by PoliticusUSA.

This one is going to hurt Republicans, but it’s right on, because responsible gun measures are a moral issue. Catholics are praising President Obama for taking his announced executive action on gun control.

“President Obama’s executive actions announced today are a welcomed step forward towards ending the scandal of gun violence that continues to plague our nation,” began a statement sent to PoliticusUSA by Christopher J. Hale, Executive Director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

They cited Pope Francis calling out the only reason these deadly weapons are being sold to those who plan to inflict harm, “Pope Francis’s words to Congress last September continue to ring in our ears: ‘Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem.'”

The money changers are in the temple of Congress.

The Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good called on Congress to follow President Obama’s lead and take action, “Today the President has made a significant step towards doing so. Now it’s up to Congress to follow through so that the dream of the prophet Isaiah can become our nation’s lived reality: a place where spears and swords are beaten into ploughshares and pruning hooks and where peace and justice will prosper.”

The Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good is, according to Wikipedia, a non-partisan, Roman Catholic, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization which aims to promote “the fullness of the Catholic social tradition in the public square”.

According to their website (my bold), “Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good promotes public policies and effective programs that enhance the inherent dignity of all, especially the poor and most vulnerable. Our work is inspired by Gospel values and the rich history of Catholic social teaching as they inform pressing moral issues of our time. We accomplish our goals through public policy analysis and advocacy, strategic media outreach, and engaging citizens in the service of the common good.”

President Obama is on the right moral side of this argument, and as he likes to remind everyone, a majority of gun owners also agree so he has political will backing his executive action, if moral responsibility is not enough. Republicans have nothing but worn out, stale, debunked NRA talking points. As a nation, we need to stand up to the NRA and support our President in taking these important steps to putting human lives over profit margins.


Related Off-site Links:
Obama Unveils Presidential Plan to Cut Gun Violence – Bill Chappell (National Public Radio News, January 5, 2016).
Obama: “The Gun Lobby May Hold Congress Hostage, But They Can Not Hold America Hostage” – Jason Easley (PoliticusUSA, January 5, 2016).

Refugees Are On Their Way to Minnesota: Here's How You Can Help

Minnesota is one of the states that's accepting Syrian refugees.
There are refugees (from all over the world) on their way to MN as we speak!

The International Institute of Minnesota is helping to coordinate their arrival and gathering items that will make life a tiny bit easier.

If you're here in the Twin Cities and you're interested in helping, here's what they need and where you can donate:

Address: International Institute of Minnesota, 1694 Como Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108

Drop off times: 8:45 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Monday-Friday

Please Note: Only the following items are being requested at this time.

Baby Items: Diapers (only new); Wipes (only new); Baby clothes
Winter Clothing: Coats; Boots; Gloves; Hats; Scarves.
Household Items: Dishes; Glassware; Silverware; Tea kettles; Garbage cans (only new); Garbage bags; Bed linens (laundered); Blankets (laundered); Towels (laundered); Dish towels (laundered); Vacuums; Laundry baskets
School Supplies: Pencils; Calculators; Pens; Notebooks; Folders
Crayons; Backpacks
Other Items: Maps of the City; Gift Cards (only to Cub Foods, Target, Goodwill); Bus Cards

Also, if you're interested in working more closely with a refugee family, check out the International Institute of Minnesota's refugee mentorship program by clicking here.

If you would like to ship donations directly from your home to the International Institute's offices (or directly from Amazon.com), donations should be addressed to:

Bridget Ehrman-Solberg
International Institute of Minnesota
1694 Como Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55108

Finally, if you'd like to donate money, click here.

How Catholic Leaders Are Defying Governors Who Are Trying to Block Refugees

By Leslie Caimi


Note: This article was first published December 8, 2015 by The Washington Post.


The Catholic Church is pledging assistance to Syrian refugees seeking resettlement in the United States, thwarting attempts by governors to prevent an influx of refugees from the war-torn nation.

On Monday night, the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis facilitated the arrival of a Syrian refugee family to the city, openly challenging Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s call to halt the arrival of refugees from Syria.

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris on Nov. 13, Pence joined 31 governors, primarily Republican, in objecting to the federal government’s program to resettle refugees from Syria in the United States, citing fears that there are gaps in the screening process for potential security risks.

Pence was among those state leaders who directed state agencies to suspend disbursing funds for services to refugees originating from Syria.

But Catholic leaders across the United States cried foul on plans to close the door on refugees from Syria, loudly reminding their respective communities of the humanitarian need.

The Chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on migration chided the governors for “using this tragedy to scapegoat all refugees,” in a statement on Nov. 17.

“They are extremely vulnerable families, women, and children who are fleeing for their lives. We cannot and should not blame them for the actions of a terrorist organization,” Bishop Eusebio Elizondo said.

Bishops from Chicago, New York, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and New Mexico were also among those who penned opinion pieces for local papers or open letters calling for compassion over overreaction.

“We must find a way to open our doors to them,” New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan wrote in a New York Daily News opinion piece about the need for a wide embrace of Syrian refugees.

Despite the church’s call to keep the door open to refugees, Pence met last week with local Catholic leaders to urge them to “defer from welcoming” a Syrian family seeking placement in the state until Congress passed new legislation providing more stringent security screening for refugees from Syria, Indianapolis Archbishop Joseph W. Tobin [right] said in a statement on Tuesday.

Tobin said he listened to Pence’s concerns “and prayerfully considered his request” but ultimately decided to proceed with assistance for the arrival of a Syrian family with two small children in Indianapolis on Monday night. The assistance came through “a public-private partnership between the federal government and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and its Migration and Refugee Services,” according to the statement.

“For 40 years the Archdiocese’s Refugee and Immigrant Services has welcomed people fleeing violence in various regions of the world. This is an essential part of our identity as Catholic Christians and we will continue this life-saving tradition,” Tobin said in a statement.

The refugee family was placed with relatives who live in the Indianapolis area, after fleeing Syria three years ago. The family of four underwent “extensive security checks” over a two-year period before they were approved for entry into the country.

A spokesman for Pence said that the governor “holds Catholic Charities in the highest regard but respectfully disagrees with their decision to place a Syrian refugee family in Indiana at this time,” according to a statement on Tuesday from the governor’s office.

Pence’s office said it would continue to suspend state participation in the refugee resettlement program for Syrians, which could include state funding for English language training, medical services, food stamps and employment readiness programs.

Greg Otolski, a spokesman for the archdiocese, told the Indianapolis Star that Catholic Charities would still apply for state benefits for the family. If the funding was denied on the basis that the family is from Syria, Otolski told the paper that Catholic Charities would be able to cover the resettlement expenses for the family.

“The family is entitled to the same benefits any refugees arriving in Indiana receive. We hope that the state will not single them out,” he told the paper.

Pence’s office did say the Indiana Department of Health would reimburse the cost of health-care screening for refugees, including those from Syria, by county health departments in the state.

In addition to Indiana, on Monday, Texas became home for a family of six from Syria despite opposition from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R).

Despite Abbott’s fervent objections, the family arrived in Dallas on Monday where they will live with relatives, a spokeswoman for the International Rescue Committee, who assisted with the resettlement, told the Associated Press.

Fortnight of Freedom: Hypocrisy of the U.S. Bishops

By Paula Ruddy

The U.S. Bishops have zeroed in on the main evil of our society for a two-week highlight: our religious liberty is under attack. The evils Pope Francis points to in his recent encyclical Laudato si’  – poverty, racism, environmental degradation, the commodification of women – are not the main problems we face as citizens of this nation. No, for the U.S. bishops the main problem for us is that Catholics are being denied religious liberty in the U.S. The hypocritical self-reference is embarrassing.

Since when have Roman Catholic bishops cared about religious liberty for Catholics within their own institutions? Employees have to sign an oath of orthodoxy to teach in schools or work in parishes. Pastors have to seek approval for speakers in their parishes. Questioning Catholics may not assemble on parish property and are condemned as “dissenters.” Whole communities of Catholics are banished from communion because their liturgical practice is not uniform. How “free” is religion and religious practice in the Roman Catholic Church?

Since when have Roman Catholic bishops valued individual liberty as a factor of human dignity? The Roman Catholic bishops of the U.S. have been determined to deny gay and lesbian citizens the freedom to marry under civil law. They have fought the individual liberty of women in choosing to reproduce. They have fought to separate Catholics from the “world” in a superior and isolated “Catholic identity” by constant preaching about the evils of individual liberty in the larger society.

American Catholics have been formed in the values of two traditions – the value of community in the Roman Catholic tradition and the value of individual liberty in the U.S. democratic tradition. Most of us have learned to value both, to integrate the two more or less successfully. We try to avoid both the excesses of “group think” and the excesses of “go-it-alone” individualism. We have to do this without the support of our institutional church.

The U.S. bishops who focus on the Roman Catholic traditional values exclusively are increasingly irrelevant to Catholics who have integrated the values of individual liberty and equality from the U.S. democratic tradition. They are entirely irrelevant and antagonizing to citizens of other religions and no religion.

The tragedy of this situation is that Roman Catholic community values have a great contribution to make to a society that can tend too easily to the excesses of individual liberty. To contribute the vision of human community Pope Francis provides in Laudato si’ to the U.S., the U.S. bishops will also have to affirm and demonstrate value for individual liberty.

As things stand, their “Fortnight of Freedom” has the sound of a tinkling cymbal.

Pentecost: Divine Polyculture vs. Imperial Monoculture

By Ched Myers

Note: This commentary was first published May 21, 2015 at Radical Discipleship, and is part of an ongoing series of Ched Myer’s brief comments on the Revised Common Lectionary during Year B, 2015.


How is it that we heard, each of us, in our own native tongue? (Acts 2:8)

Since the dawn of colonization, the Americas have been defined by the struggle between dominant culture ideologies of conformity imposed by those in power, and grassroots cultural diversity among those on the margins. This tension between fantasies of racial supremacy and realities of racial diversity remains one of the supreme challenges facing the U.S., and thus our churches, today. The future of North American society depends upon our ability to live peaceably and justly with human diversity — and the same can be said of the human experiment as a whole. The question is whether we can, in church and in society, forge models of coexistence-with-congruence rather than unity-by-uniformity.

This question is as ancient as our scriptures. In particular, two related texts, one from each Testament, articulate key issues of cultural heterogeneity, social health and human freedom. One is the divine deconstruction of imperial homogeneity represented by the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. The other is the multicultural insurrection against Roman imperial monoculture on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2).

In the former tale—one the oldest in the Bible—the divine “council” that created human beings (Gen 1:26) and that had to expel them from the Garden (3:22) intervenes against the centripetal, homogenizing project of Babel: “Come, let us go down and confuse their language” (11:7). This is the closing warning tale in the overall narrative arc of Genesis 1-11, concluding that the way to resist social and political forces of centralization is to reassert the Creator’s original intention that human communities be “scattered abroad over the face of the earth” (1:28; 9:1). The divine antidote is a re-dispersion of peoples (11:8), symbolized here by both linguistic/cultural variety and geographic diffusion.

This “scattering” is portrayed in Genesis not as the tragic result of God’s judgment, as is usually preached in our churches, but rather as an act of centrifugal liberation from urban monoculture and superconcentration. This is archetypal movement from center to margins finds further articulation in two foundational stories in Torah: that of Abram (Gen 11:31-12:5) and Exodus.

The ancient Hebrews, repeatedly displaced or colonized by urban civilization, seem to have developed a paleo-psychic impulse toward such centrifugality, summarized in the Psalmist’s later reiteration of Babel’s lesson: “Truly, I would flee far off; I would lodge in the wilderness… Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech, for I see violence and strife in the city” (Psalm 55:7ff). Israel’s survival was predicated upon resistance to successive empires through a stubborn maintenance of its own cultural, linguistic and religious distinctiveness and nonconformity. Centuries later, Jewish Christians surrounded by the dominating architecture and homogenizing social forces of the Roman Empire renewed this ancient tradition of resistance, as narrated in Luke’s story of the birth of the Christian church that we celebrate at Pentecost.

Acts 2 narrates the inauguration of the church in the power of the Holy Spirit—though what sort of practices the Spirit empowered has been a divisive issue among Christians ever since. Today ecclesial debates about what it means to be “Spirit-filled” usually focus on individual charismatic gifts, rather on the church as an alternative social model. But in Luke’s narrative, the Spirit ignited a multilingual eruption at the heart of cosmopolitan Jerusalem and in the face of Roman social control, in the long tradition of Jewish centrifugal challenges to centripetal empire.

In this multilingual insurgency Luke is affirming the diverse cultural contexts in which the new Christian movement would soon take flesh as the gospel spread throughout the Mediterranean world. But the echoes of the ancient Babel tale are unmistakable: “And at this sound the multitude came together and were confused because each one heard the apostles speaking in their own language” (Acts 2:6; Gk sungcheō is the same root word used in the Septuagint text of Gen 11:7,9). This is not, as it is usually misconstrued, a reversal of the alleged “curse” of Babel. Rather, Pentecost re-iterates that tale’s polemic, and the divinely-sanctioned strategy to deconstruct pathological imperial homogeneity by reclaiming cultural diversity. The gift of tongues communicates across linguistic differences without suppressing or eradicating those differences. That is what distinguishes true gospel mission from cross-and-sword conquest in the service of empire that has characterized Christendom all too often. Unity through the Spirit does not mean monoculture, but the celebration of human variety.

The local cultures around the world that are carried by today’s immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism, and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism’s drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a “scattered” human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God’s intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire, and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted up business-as-usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time—if our tongues would but dare to loosen.


Note: This is an edited excerpt from Chapter One of Our God is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice (Orbis, 2012). See also the longer reflection here. These themes will be discussed in Radical Discipleship's next webinar on June 16, 2015.

Jesus' Radical Politics

By Brandon Ambrosino

In his kingdom, enemies are loved, the marginalized prioritized,
and wealth inequality exposed for the sham it is.

Note: This op-ed was first published April 1, 2015 by The Boston Globe.


Two thousand years have sanitized Easter for most people. Jesus is alive, we sing each spring, and now let’s get on with lilies and chocolates and bunnies and think about what his resurrection means for us — namely, that we get to go to heaven when we die, and perhaps more important, a lot of other people don’t.

A more careful look at the Gospels, however, might offer a much less sentimental, much more startling picture of the original Easter message, which was decidedly not, “Jesus is alive, and here’s what that means for the next world.” Rather, the true lesson was: “Jesus is alive, and here’s what that means for this one.”

The central claim of Easter — and indeed, of Christianity — has always been that the rejected, tortured, crucified, dead, and then resurrected Jesus is somehow Lord of the entire earth. If that doesn’t sound particularly scandalous today, imagine you’re hearing it for the first time while living in the Roman Empire. As many New Testament scholars argue, hearing “Jesus is Lord” in the first century might sound suspiciously like a bold rejection of the standard Roman creed at the time: “Caesar is Lord.” (There is a lot of discussion about this, but even a quick glance of the Gospels and Acts shows that the texts contain instances of anti-imperial rhetoric.)

What’s radical about Easter, then, is not that Christians claim a dead man rose from the dead. What’s radical is what that means — specifically, what it meant for Rome, and, by implication, what it means for all kingdoms everywhere, including the ones we live in. Jesus’ resurrection marked the end of Caesar’s way of doing things. It established a new kingdom in which enemies are loved, the marginalized are given primacy of place, and the poor are blessed. In this kingdom, hierarchies are subverted, concentrated power is decentralized, and prodigal children are welcomed home. Black lives matter here, as do queer lives and the lives of undocumented aliens within our borders — “Remember the stranger in your midst” is a common refrain in this kingdom.

Of course, speaking about Jesus in such a political way is not without its dangers. Many with political agendas are guilty of branding their particular ideologies with the name of Jesus, both on the right and left. But there’s no denying that, at least in recent US history, conservatives have been ready to marry God and government. As a result, Christianity has come to be associated less with policies aimed at helping the poor — and more with those that often serve to keep them down. The tragic irony, of course, is that, as the Gospel of Luke teaches, Jesus’ ministry is inaugurated with the announcement that the Spirit of the Lord compels him to preach good news to the poor.

Though the name of God is sometimes invoked to justify war and greed and the oppression of already marginalized persons, the broken body of Jesus seems rather like a prophetic protest against those values. Philosopher John Caputo discusses this irony in his 2007 book, “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” — a play on the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” that many conservatives have plastered onto their cars, T-shirts, bracelets, etc.

The gospels, Caputo writes, invite us to imagine a new way of life where the poetics of Jesus’ kingdom are transformed into political structures:

“What would it be like if there really were a politics of the bodies of flesh that proliferate in the New Testament, a politics of mercy and compassion, of lifting up the weakest and most defenseless people at home, a politics of welcoming the stranger and of loving one’s enemies abroad? What would it be like if there were a politics of and for the children, who are the future; a politics not of sovereignty, of top-down power, but a politics that builds from the bottom up, where ta me onta [lit. “the nothings”] enjoy pride of place and a special privilege?”

Caputo then asks this frightening question: “Would [this politics] not be in almost every respect the opposite of the politics that presently passes itself off under the name of Jesus?”

One look at current events across the globe today, and Caputo’s imaginings may be easily dismissed. How can Americans simply turn the other cheek to our warring enemies? How can anyone expect the government to make sure each child is looked after? And working to eliminate poverty? Wasn’t Jesus talking about spiritual poverty? That’s a private matter, not a public one. Those kinds of policies just aren’t practical in 2015.

Of course they aren’t. They weren’t practical in Jesus’ day, either. That’s one of the reasons Jesus was killed. He was, to use Caputo’s word, mad. How else do you explain his teachings? Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Do good to them who use you. Do not retaliate. Look after your neighbor. The meek will inherit the earth.

But the madness of God is wiser than the wisdom of man, as Paul reminds us, just like God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. And it’s the kingdom of this God — who, contrary to what anyone expected, is weak, mad, and disruptive — that Jesus is both announcing and installing.

“If I, with the finger of God, cast out demons among you, then the Kingdom of God has come near to you,” says Jesus, and his Jewish hearers might have understood the scandalous reference. Scandalous because in this brief line, Jesus seems to be identifying himself with the same God who heard the cry of oppressed Israel and took it upon himself to liberate them from Egypt. As the Book of Exodus recounts, when Pharaoh refuses Moses’ request to let the Hebrews go, a battle of miracles quickly ensues. Though Pharaoh’s magicians try to imitate the wonders that Moses ascribes to God, they don’t succeed. “This is the finger of God,” they explain to Pharaoh, which creates wonders, which liberates God’s people from the empires that enslave them. The finger of God, they reluctantly acknowledge, is mightier than the strongest arm of any world leader.

In reinterpreting this passage around his life and ministry, Jesus is giving us a glimpse into what he thought of himself (who but God alone works wonders by the finger of God?) as well as into what he thought about his kingdom: that, though it’s ultimate fulfillment will be in the future, look around you — it’s already here. As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright explains, for Jesus, God’s kingdom “wasn’t just an aspiration; it was an accomplishment.” Jesus was convinced that his life and preaching and miracles were bringing about the kingdom his followers had longed for.

Only, Jesus’ kingdom of peace and love looked much different than the one that Jews at the time hoped the Messiah would establish. One of Jesus’ more cryptic sayings is found in Matthew’s Gospel. After a strange discussion of kingdom, Jesus compares his audience to children sitting in the marketplace singing to each other, “We played the flute for you, but you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” Jesus, he hears them say, you are not the Messiah we expected. To which he responds: I will not dance when you tell me to dance. I will not cry when you tell me to cry. I will not be the Messiah you tell me to be. I am here to show you a different sort of dance, a different way; follow me, and build my father’s kingdom, which looks very different than the ones you cling to.

This is the prophetic memory of Jesus that rushes toward us today. What would Jesus do if he showed up today, say, in Washington, D.C.? Would he turn a blind eye to racial injustices in Ferguson and elsewhere? Would he lobby to ensure that entire swaths of our population continue to feel as if they don’t belong in their cities, in their religious congregations, in their local bakeries? Would he, interested as he is in the physical bodies of all he encounters, enact policies that bar people from the health care they desperately need?

At the same time, can we really be sure that Jesus would protest with Wall Street Occupiers, railing against the one percent? This is the same Jesus who, as Luke recounts, tells his followers that if just one of their sheep wanders away from the fold, they are to leave the 99 and go after the one percent. And can we be equally sure that this Jesus, who has no patience for greed, would spend all of his energy condemning the wealthy? This is the same Jesus, after all, who is rumored to be the friend of tax collectors.

This is why it won’t do merely to begin with a political ideology and brand it with Jesus’ memory. The memory of Jesus is disruptive to all kingdoms, to all earthly powers, without respect to any specific political affiliation or agenda.

What we can imagine that Jesus would probably do — indeed what he definitely did do, is to suddenly, without warning, announce that his new kingdom is breaking in upon all of us, has broken in upon us, and that this kingdom is almost the exact reversal of what any of us thought kingdoms were supposed to be. This new king will not tolerate oppression and systemic poverty, nor he will excuse violence directed at those in power. He has no patience for any dirges or dances. He is here about his father’s business.

THE BELLS of Easter Sunday, comforting though they may be, are actually a call to war, albeit a nonviolent kind of war; a call to rise up, to act up, to announce to the powers and principalities that rule our nations that their power has an expiration date, that their rule is a sham, that their kingdom has been undone by the one who undoes death.

The rebuttal here has always been: Open your eyes. This kingdom you’re talking about — where the last are first, where the outsiders are preferred — is not here. There is war. There is evil. There is death and rape and racism and unemployment and sex trafficking. There is a brutally agonizing world here and now, and to pretend otherwise is either naive or morally bankrupt.

But Easter doesn’t deny these things. After all, even the resurrected body of Jesus contains crucifixion scars, which are Jesus’ eternal reminder that he was murdered by the very people he came to save. What Easter teaches is this: Even in the midst of the kingdom you’re living in, it’s possible to actually pledge loyalty to a different one. By feeding the hungry, forgiving your enemies, and providing shelter for the homeless, you can actually choose to live in the kingdom Jesus established.

Hope, then, is not a spiritual thing, or a reflective exercise; it’s decidedly physical. If you believe Jesus was raised from the dead, the obligation that Jesus puts upon you is to meet people’s physical needs. “Do not abandon yourselves to despair,” said Pope John Paul II. “We are the Easter people, and alleluia is our song.”

This alleluia is both a praise and protest. The world is made new, alleluia, and all lives matter. Creation is transformed, alleluia, and therefore let us embrace the strangers in our midst. The tomb is empty, alleluia, now let us work to heal the hurt of all those who have been discriminated against, made to feel like second-class citizens. In God’s kingdom, after all, there is only one class of citizen, because all have inherited the same birthright from their heavenly father.

Two thousand years later, the promise of Easter has not lost its power. The risen Jesus, then as now, invites us to live in this world as if it is somehow a different world.

Because, alleluia, it is.


Brandon Ambrosino covers culture and religion for Vox.com.

Statement of Catholic Theologians on Racial Justice

The following statement was first published December 8, 2014 at Catholic Moral Theology, a website created and maintained by a group of North American Catholic moral theologians who "come together in friendship to engage each other in theological discussion, to aid one another in our common search for wisdom, and to help one another live lives of discipleship, all in service to the reign of God." For more information about this group of theologians, click here.

Advent is a season of waiting and of hoping. In the face of conflict, distrust, and division – in the wilderness – we are called to cry out for a different way. In consultation with several others, CMTer and former law enforcement officer Tobias Winright has prepared a statement of commitment to racial justice, which names the particularly difficult hope we might bring to illuminate darkness. We are happy to share the statement here on this blog. Many Catholic theologians, including myself and my co-editor, Jana Bennett, have already signed on to the statement. Please pray and act for truth and reconciliation this season . . .

Statement: Catholic Theologians for Police Reform and Racial Justice

The season of Advent is meant to be a time when Christians remember the birth of Jesus Christ, when God became human, born on the margins of society. To the poor shepherds, the angelic host proclaimed “peace, goodwill among people” (Luke 2:14), which refers to a shalom that is not merely the absence of conflict, but rather a just and lasting peace, wherein people are reconciled with one another, with God, and indeed with all creation. But this Advent, hope for a just peace must face the flagrant failures of a nation still bound by sin, our bondage to and complicity in racial injustice.

​The killings of Black men, women and children – including but not limited to Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, John Crawford, 7 year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones and 12 year-old Tamir Rice – by White policemen, and the failures of the grand jury process to indict some of the police officers involved, brought to our attention not only problems in law enforcement today, but also deeper racial injustice in our nation, our communities, and even our churches.

As Eric Garner’s dying words “I can’t breathe” are chanted in the streets, and as people of faith, we hear the echo of Jesus’ breathing on his disciples, telling them, “Peace be with you.” His spirit-filled breath gives his disciples, then and now, the power and obligation to raise our voices about the imperative of a just peace in fragmented and violent world.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” speaks searingly to our headline divisions today. The “cup of endurance runs over” again for African Americans and many others of good will. Our streets are filled with those exhausted by the need to explain yet again “why we can’t wait.”

King challenged “white moderate” Christians for being “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice;” and for preferring “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” This challenge to the White Christian community is as relevant today as it was over 50 years ago. Such a negative peace calls to mind the warning by the prophet Ezekiel, “They led my people astray, saying, ‘Peace!’ when there was no peace” (13:10).

Pope Francis’s warning of the explosive consequences of exclusion and fearful seeking of “security” based on such a negative peace are similarly prophetic:

“Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear.” Evangelii Gaudium, 59

As Catholic theologians, we wish to go on the record in calling for a serious examination of both policing and racial injustice in the US. The time demands that we leave some mark that US Catholic theologians did not ignore what is happening in our midst – as the vast majority sadly did during the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

● We pledge to examine within ourselves our complicity in the sin of racism and how it sustains false images of White superiority in relationship to Black inferiority. In the words of the US Catholic Bishops Conference, “Racism is a sin: a sin that divides the human family, blots out the image of God among specific members of that family, and violates the fundamental human dignity of those called to be children of the same Father.”

● We pledge to fast and to refrain from meat on Fridays during this Advent season and through the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, as well as during Lent, as a sign of our penitence and need of conversion from the pervasive sin of racism.

● We commit ourselves to placing our bodies and/or privilege on the line in visible, public solidarity with movements of protest to address the deep-seated racism of our nation.

● We support our police, whose work is indeed dangerous at times, but we also call for a radical reconsideration of policing policy in our nation. We call for an end to the militarization of police departments in the US, and we support instead the proven, effective results of community policing. Rather than perpetuating an “us versus them” mentality, a community policing approach is more consonant with our Catholic convictions that we are all each other’s keepers and should work together for the common good of our communities.

● We call for a honing of the guidelines for police use of lethal force so that they are uniform in all states within the US and so that the use of lethal force, echoing Catholic teaching on “legitimate defense,” is justified only when an aggressor poses a grave and imminent threat to the officer’s and/or other persons’ lives.

● We support those calling for better recruiting, training, and education for our police so that they may truly and justly do what they have sworn, namely, to “serve and protect” their communities.

● We support new efforts to promote accountability and transparency, such as body cameras for police officers.

● Regarding the widespread dissatisfaction with recent grand jury decisions, and the perception that a conflict of interest exists between local prosecutors and police departments, we call for the establishment of publicly accountable review boards staffed with civilian attorneys from within the jurisdiction and/or for the appointment of independent special prosecutors’ offices to investigate claims of police misconduct.

● Our nation’s pervasive yet too often denied systemic racial divisions compromise our structures of justice – in our view so much so that we support calling for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America. A precedent would be the 2004 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission in North Carolina.

● In view of the recent US Justice Department’s report on the pattern of excessive force found in the Cleveland Police Department, we call for similar investigations of the Ferguson Police Department, the New York Police Department, and other police forces involved in the killings of unarmed Black citizens.

● We call upon our bishops to proactively proclaim and witness to our faith’s stand against racism They have authored pastoral statements in the past, and these documents need to be revisited – in parishes, dioceses, and seminaries – and brought to the forefront of Catholic teaching and action in light of the present crisis.

● As Catholic theologians and scholars, we commit ourselves to further teaching and scholarship on racial justice. Our faith teaches us that all persons are created in the image of God and have been redeemed in Christ Jesus. In short, our faith proclaims that all lives matter, and therefore, Black lives – and Brown lives, the lives of all, regardless of color – must matter, too. As part of this commitment, we pledge to continue listening to, praying for, and even joining in our streets with those struggling for justice through nonviolent protests and peaceful acts of civil disobedience.

We pray that all of these actions will move us closer toward the fulfillment of the hope of the Advent season, toward a time when “love and truth will meet; justice and peace will kiss” (Psalm 85:10).

To view this statement's list of signatories, click here.


Related Off-site Links:
This is Not a Protest – It is an Uprising – Zoë Carpenter (The Nation, December 3, 2014).
NYC Clergy Join Black And Latino City Council Caucus 'Die In' to Protest Eric Garner Killing – Antonia Blumberg (The Huffington Post, December 8, 2014).

Image: Michael Bayly. For more images of the December 4 solidarity rally in Minneapolis for Eric Garner and other victims of police brutality, click here.

"Labor Priests" Reviving Social Justice Teachings—and Action

By Robert Richter

Labor priests are once again gaining numbers,
advocating for workers and walking with them.

Above: Police arrest Father Andrew Switzer, a West Virginia priest and the son of coal miners, during a Mine Workers rally to save pensions and health care. (Photo: CNS/David Kameras, courtesy of UMWA)

Note: This article was first published May 28, 2014 by LaborNotes.org.


"Labor priests" were a recognized presence in the labor movement of the 1920s through the 1960s. Father Barry, the Karl Malden character in the 1954 film On the Waterfront, was the model of the priest who sided with workers.

Priests conducted Parish Labor Schools where workers interested in collective bargaining studied Catholic social justice doctrine, labor law, and parliamentary procedure.

While parish-based Labor Schools have been largely replaced today by worker centers, labor priests are once again gaining numbers (100 at last count) who share their vision that to diminish workers is to rob them of their God-given vocation.

The Priest-Labor Initiative was founded in 2012 by Father Clete Kiley and held its third meeting this month in Atlanta, with two dozen priests in attendance. Kiley was pastor of a large immigrant parish in Chicago, worked on organizing drives at university food services and at O’Hare airport, and is now director for immigration policy for UNITE HERE, the hotel workers union.


Pope’s Overhead Cover

Labor priests are doing at the parish level what Pope Francis is doing at his level. Immigration reform, income inequality, human trafficking, a living wage are some of the justice and peace issues on labor priests’ agenda, with overhead cover from Francis.

The present-day labor priest is focused on the community as a core value, insisting that all members of the community receive an adequate share in the fruits of their labor. As he deals with those who labor and are heavily burdened by underemployment, no employment, low wages, no health care, wage theft, assault and abuse in the workplace, he can be a source of compassion, mercy, and counsel. To all he says, “Come, let us reason together how to make the workplace more humane.”

Especially objectionable are imaginative, creative but harmful tactics that cheat the worker of a livelihood, health care, earned vacation time, and sick leave, and plunder pensions. At another level, the practice of pumping infusions of cash to legislators through lobbyists to fix the scales of justice for cheating, or shifting public services like hospitals, postal, prisons, and schools to for-profit contracts is even more troubling.

Labor priests believe there is a role for visible clergy supporting the religious, moral, and spiritual dimension of work, to advocate for oppressed workers, and to walk with them— especially to witness when they return to work after an action. Clergy played this role after the fast-food strikes, escorting workers back to the workplace to fend off retaliation.

So priests continue to gather for the two-day Priest-Labor Initiative training events to develop a network and to invite priests to become closer with working-class men and women.

Actions the reader might take to help grow labor priests:

• Ask your priest to conduct a listening session for workers to tell their stories and discuss what to do about things they want to change, using parish facilities like parking, meeting rooms, and kitchen.

• Ask the priest to observe an organized worker action and be present, especially after, to witness events when workers go back in to work.

The bottom line for labor priests: This is not a special ministry. This is what we do as Catholic leaders.


Robert Richter is a parish priest in Arlington, Virginia, and attended the April 2014 Labor Notes Conference.

Pope Francis is Going to Be Heard

By brooklynbadboy


Note: This commentary was first published November 29, 2013 by Daily Kos.

Pope Francis is the only head of state in the world
talking about inequality & poverty, writes brooklynbadboy.

The global economic establishment has a dissenter in the ranks, and his stature can only grow.

No election chicanery can remove him from office. He can't be pushed out with ad money or astroturfing. A head of state with no term limits that any mortal can impose.

The global heads of state, ranked by numbers of twitter followers:

• President Obama: 40,267,391

• Abdullah Gul (Turkish President): 3,971,690

• Pope Francis: 3,305,355

Nobody else is even over a million.

President Obama will leave power in just over three years. So will President Abdullah. But, God willing, Pope Francis will still be here. And he's gaining every day. He's got over three times the followers Hillary Clinton has.

While possessing little in the military power, financial might, or industrial capability relative to other nation-states, the Bishop of Rome has one thing that few heads of state today can't match: a life appointment coupled with a global organization. That's enough to begin to plant the seeds for a realignment of power in poor people all over the world.

Somewhere out there among the future leaders of the world, there are people being moved by Francis' words. The Holy Father is casting a wide net to find as many as he can.

Role of the U.S. Catholic Bishops in the Shutdown: Holding Government Funding Hostage in Battle Against Contraceptive Coverage

By William D. Lindsey


Note: This commentary was first published October 10, 2013 on William's blogsite, Bilgrimage.


In an editorial just uploaded to its website, America rightly deplores the effects of the shutdown of government on working people and people living on the margins of the American socioeconomic system. The editorial notes that many people are now forced to wonder when they'll receive the next paycheck, park facilities have been shuttered around the country, and hundreds of cancer patients, including 30 children per week, have been locked out of their last-resort treatment at NIH's Clinical Center. And it adds,

These are just a handful of the pernicious effects of the shutdown that resulted on Oct. 1 after the G.O.P’s latest effort to obstruct the Affordable Care Act. The closing of the federal government not only shuts down so-called nonessential services, like nutrition aid to women, infants and children, it also means that a federal flow of $3 billion a day into the already twitchy American economy has been cut off.

But then America goes on to maintain that the U.S. Catholic bishops "were aghast at the political breakdown" and wrote a letter to Congress on 1 October arguing that human needs must continue to be met, even if the government has shut down. Unfortunately, however, that 1 October letter, written as the shutdown began, comes on the heels of another letter that the USCCB sent (.pdf file) to Congress on 26 September. That letter is signed by Cardinal Sean O'Malley, chair of the Pro-Life Committee of USCCB (and a member of Pope Francis's "gang of eight"), and Archbishop William E. Lori, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty.

The 26 September letter states,

We have already urged you to enact the Health Care Conscience Rights Act (H.R. 940/S. 1204). As Congress considers a Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling bill in the days to come, we reaffirm the vital importance of incorporating the policy of this bill into such "must-pass" legislation. [Emphasis in original]

In other words, though on 1 October, as the shutdown began, the U.S. Catholic bishops wrote Congress to insist that human needs must continue to be met during a government shutdown, on 26 September they were encouraging members of Congress to hold the re-funding of government hostage to their insistence that even private, non-faith-based employers be allowed a "Taco Bell" exemption from the requirement of the Affordable Care Act that they provide contraceptive coverage for employees.

Permit us to discriminate--permit anyone, even a private employer in a company in no way affiliated with a religion to discriminate--or else. Or else we'll hold the nation hostage until our "conscientious" demands are met. As Adele Stan notes, it appears the USCCB wants to have it both ways: we're for the shutdown of government as a tool of holding the government hostage until our "conscientious" demands are met; but we're against it when it creates suffering for people.

Stan writes,

The bishops want to be on the record as champions of health care for the masses, food for the hungry, and shelter for the homeless—things the government, when operational, helps to provide. But they’re happy to block access to such services for those in need of them unless Congress agrees to block women of all faiths or none, on the whim of an employer, from receiving prescription birth control as part of the preventive care benefit in the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

If that doesn’t work, they wouldn’t mind seeing the global economy brought to its knees for the sake of making the most effective forms of contraception more difficult for women to obtain.

And she's correct. Via its 26 September letter to Congress, the USCCB gave a clear signal to Congress—and, in particular, to the radical Republican faction controlling the House of Representatives—that it approves of using the re-funding of the federal government as a weapon to try to roll back a provision of the Affordable Care Act to which the bishops object. So it's with astonishingly clumsy grace that the bishops, who have torn their moral credibility to shreds by their persistent shrill attacks on the Affordable Care Act, pretend now to give a hoot about the human effects of the shutdown they themselves helped to precipitate.

Pastoral leaders these men are clearly not, on the whole. Politicians, yes, and partisan ones, to boot. And they deserve to be held accountable, along with other religious and political extremists, for what has happened as they have harped about their right to a "religious freedom" that translates into their purported right to discriminate in the provision of healthcare, as the ACA is being implemented.


Related Off-site Links:
USCCB Takes on the Smell of the Elephants – Colleen Kochivar-Baker (Enlightened Catholicism, October 10, 2013).
Paralysis in Washington – The Editors (America, October 10, 2013).
Catholic Bishops to House: Shut Down the Government Unless We Get Our Way on Birth Control – Ian Millhiser (ThinkProgress.org, October 7, 2013).
At Any Cost: How Catholic Bishops Pushed for a Shutdown—and Even a Default—Over Birth Control – Adele M. Stan (RH Reality Check, October 6, 2013).
Catholic Bishops Want Entire Birth Control Rule Repealed, Not Just the Religious Exemption – Nick Baumann and Kate Sheppard (Mother Jones, February 9, 2012).
Doug Mataconis on the Bishops, Religious Freedom, and Living in a Civil Society – The Wild Reed (December 30, 2011).

An Update on This Issue: Walking Like a Duck – Ken Briggs (National Catholic Reporter, October 11, 2013).

Supporting Catholic Spirit Workers

For nearly 50 years, workers at The Catholic Spirit newspaper have been represented by a union. Now, Archbishop John Nienstedt of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has decided these workers are no longer worthy of union representation. When the current union contract expires June 30, the work and some of the workers of The Catholic Spirit will move to a non-unionized work place within a new communications department of the archdiocese.

The announced action by the archdiocese conflicts with Catholic teachings about the value of labor and and collective bargaining to bring social justice to workers. Though federal law is not definitive regarding the rights of union representation at religious institutions, Archbishop Nienstedt has refused to voluntarily recognize the Minnesota Newspaper Guild Typographical Union, CWA Local 37002, as the bargaining agent for work the union has represented since 1965.

Please contact Archbishop Nienstedt to protest this action and to tell him to recognize the union.

Telephone: 651-291-4511
Mail: Archbishop John Nienstedt
Archdiocese of St. Paul & Minneapolis
226 Summit Ave.
St. Paul, MN55102


Recommended Off-site Link:
Video: Catholic Spirit Workers, Supporters Protest Outside Cathedral – Union Advocate (June 24, 2012).

Pope Benedict's Peace Message Calls for Wealth Redistribution

By Francis X. Rocca


Editor's Note: This article was first published December 16, 2011, by Religion News Service.


VATICAN CITY (RNS) – Noting a "rising sense of frustration" at the worldwide economic recession, Pope Benedict XVI said that a more just and peaceful world requires "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth."

The pope's words appeared in his message for the World Day of Peace, released on Friday (Dec. 16) at the Vatican.

The message laments that "some currents of modern culture, built upon rationalist and individualist economic principles, have cut off the concept of justice from its transcendent roots, detaching it from charity and solidarity."

Authentic education, Benedict writes, teaches the proper use of freedom with "respect for oneself and others, including those whose way of being and living differs greatly from one's own."

Peace-making requires education not only in the values of compassion and solidarity, but in the importance of wealth redistribution, the "promotion of growth, cooperation for development and conflict resolution," Benedict writes.

The pope also calls on political leaders to "ensure that no one is ever denied access to education."

The message was presented on Friday by officials of the Vatican's Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace. The same body published a controversial document in October blaming the world's economic and financial crisis on an "economic liberalism that spurns rules and controls," and calling for global regulation of the financial industry and the international money supply.


See also the previous PCV posts:
From Jesus' Socialism to Capitalistic Christianity
Occupy Advent and the Vatican: A Revolution of Hope

Recommended Off-site Links:
Church Teaching, Occupy Wall Street Agree, Vatican Officials Say – Cindy Wooden (National Catholic Reporter, October 24, 2011).
New Vatican Document: Good News for Poor, Bad News for Tea Party – Daniel C. Maguire (Religion Dispatches, October 25, 2011).

Occupy Advent and the Vatican: A Revolution of Hope

By Alex Mikulich


Editor's Note: This commentary was first published December 6 by The National Catholic Reporter.


We live in a moment of economic, social, moral and spiritual impasse. Wondrous technological achievements fail to assuage our possessive individualism, fail to end extreme poverty, fail to cultivate life-giving connections between the rich and poor peoples of the earth, and fail to nurture our universal rootedness in the earth's ecosystems.

Scandals in almost every major societal institution erode public trust and any sense of our shared responsibility for each other. Technological prowess advanced through wars and multiple capitalist practices fail to care for the most vulnerable among us as they wreak ecological devastation and threaten the very existence of our planet.

Left to our own idolatry, the result is more of the same – insatiable consumer desire, increasing cynicism, politics and economics driven by the self-interest of the powerful against the common good, and the "presumptive" resort to violence as the solution to conflict.

In this time of global and national decline, economically, socially and morally, how do we take up the spiritual task of waiting this Advent? For what or whom do we hope in this season of longing?

As I prepare for Advent in this time of impasse, I suggest reflection upon the unlikely congruence of two divergent resources: the Occupy movement and the Vatican's recent statement on global financial reform, "Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority."

In the words of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the authoritative office within the Vatican with the highest responsibility for Catholic social teaching, "the gap between ethical training and technical preparation needs to be filled by highlighting in a particular way the perpetual synergy between the two levels of practical doing (praxis) and of boundless human striving (poiesis)."

That is a theologically sophisticated way of emphasizing the need both to integrate spirituality and ethics, individually and collectively, and restore the primacy of spirituality and ethics over capitalism and finance.

How do we begin this work in Advent?

The Occupy movement practices a way of waiting and listening I find instructive for this Advent in this moment of societal breakdown. Each word and phrase spoken by every speaker is repeated, chorus-like, by the group. It is a way Occupiers slow down the pace of conversation to attend and listen to each other's voices. It is also a way that Occupiers give priority to voices of those previously unheard or marginalized. As they listen to each other, Occupiers seek to hear the voices of those who have not spoken or have not been heard.

I am struck by the wisdom of this Occupy practice for Advent in the way that it calls us to wait and listen, wait and attend, wait and be with one another in the midst of societal breakdown. It is a way of attending to what the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace calls the depths of "human striving" for enduring goods of love, peace and justice.

In the Occupy movement, if we listen and attend to the voices of the people, we hear diverse voices crying out for a different way of living, a different way of being in the world that values every voice, liberates every voice and joins every voice in the common work of mutual uplift, healing and new life.

Both the Occupy movement through this practice and the Vatican through its recent statement on global financial reform compel us to reflect on the need for a contemplative orientation that listens and embodies the cries of the oppressed, and their cries for freedom, for work, for liberation and for new life in God.

Advent calls us to the spiritual labor of waiting and listening to each other, to those who are in any way oppressed and to our deepest longings for love, connection, new life and God.

Yet such waiting as reorientation to the truly good is no easy task, for it demands "anguish and suffering," as the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace puts it, as we struggle for love and justice in the midst of societal sinfulness and decline.

This spiritual labor of waiting and listening, I suggest, invites people of faith to open ourselves to our shared vulnerability with all people and to our loss of meaning and empty imagination in the midst of societal moral and spiritual decline.

Precisely at this seeming "deadendness," abandonment and emptiness, I wonder if God might be calling us to experience transformed desire, personally and collectively, for new vision, love, courage and hope that renews life across the face of the earth. Might there be a miracle of transformation in the midst of emptiness and poverty?

As the contemplative Constance FitzGerald suggests, the miracle is that contemplative cries from people and the earth are "no longer silent and invisible, but rather prophetic and revolutionary."

This is where the Occupy movement and the Vatican most closely converge. Both call us to wait and listen. If we attend and listen to the groans within ourselves, from peoples everywhere and from the earth, we may yet hear the cry of new life and a new creation. When will we groan with all peoples and the earth for God? In waiting and listening to these groans, may we find the Spirit yearning within us for the manger where the revolution of hope and love is born.


Alex Mikulich is research fellow at the Jesuit Social Research Institute, Loyola University New Orleans. He is co-author of The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance (Forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan in 2012).

A Pie for Peace: Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 Chance to Reflect, Bake, Resist

By Frida Berrigan


Editor's Note: This article was first published September 9, 2011, by WagingNonviolence.org.


September 11, 2001 was my friend Diana’s 30th birthday. I planned on meeting her at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station after work. Instead I walked across the Manhattan Bridge in a cloud of ash and crumbled concrete, looking back at the hole in the skyline. We all walked across the bridge. It was packed with people wearing business suits and sweatpants. I remember seeing a man on a bicycle riding towards Manhattan with a camera slung over his neck. “You’re going the wrong way,” I wanted to shout. Who takes pictures at a time like this? I remember there was a man in a yarmulke handing out bottles of cold water as we left the bridge on the Brooklyn side. I was so grateful.

I was uninjured. I had an apartment in Windsor Terrace that I was walking towards, but that sense of uncertainty—what will the future hold? What will change? When will I go back to work?—loomed large.

In the days that followed, I saw the best of America in New York City—my home. Real mourning, deep soul-searching, amazing altruism and self-sacrifice, and vigorous but respectful debate about why this tragedy happened.

“Our grief is not a cry for war.” That was the slogan that emerged in those days and it reverberated through my city—a truly international metropolis. The citizens of more than 80 nations were killed when the towers fell. Undocumented immigrants, homeless people, white shoe lawyers, seven figure corporate executives, emergency responders all died.

This was not an act of war against the United States, this was a crime against humanity and it should be dealt with thusly. These assertions—borne out of our collective experience of tragedy—were felt as deeply as the ash from the “pile” that burrowed into our pores and clogged our lungs and contaminated every surface of our homes and offices. These assertions were informed by a new group that coalesced in those early days after September 11, 2001 called September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Men and women who lost loved ones in the Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and the airplanes on that day, men and women who rejected the Bush administration’s thundering drumbeat of war and vengeance. They were inspired by Doctor Martin Luther King’s observation that “wars are poor chisels for carving peaceful tomorrows.”

And there has been little hope of a peaceful tomorrow in the ten years that followed George W. Bush’s declaration of war and the bombardment that began on October 7, 2001.

After 9/11, I threw myself into the peace movement with new vigor. If Rita Lasar and David Potorti and Colleen Kelly and Amber Amundson—members of Peaceful Tomorrows who lost close members of their families on 9/11—could turn their grief into peace-making and reconciliation, than I—who lost no one—could too.

Each anniversary that has followed, I have made a point of walking home from work, walking across the Manhattan Bridge and recalling the fear and anxiety and uncertainty that I felt that day. Reminding myself of the nearly 3,000 people who died—most of whom died in my city, recalling as many of their names as I could . . . Bill Kelly, Jim Potorti, Abe Zelmanowitz, Craig Amundson; reminding myself too of all those who have died (and continue to die) in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Guantanamo and elsewhere as the war on terror metastasized into a global war.

Each anniversary I have been part of peace vigils, civil disobedience actions, candlelight vigils. One year we did a 24 hour vigil in Washington Square Park and the next morning did a die-in in Union Square. Another year we held a reading of the names of 9/11 victims and Afghan war victims in front of the military recruiters office in Times Square. I wrote essays and analysis and reflections about 9/11 and beyond.

This year is different. This will be the first year I will not walk across the Manhattan Bridge, the first year I will not work in Manhattan and live in Brooklyn. I moved to New London, Connecticut last November and I will not rally or demonstrate or vigil this year. I will not attend any of the countless 9/11 Tributes and Memorials and Conferences and Art Shows and Demonstrations planned for this weekend.

Instead, I will make a pie.

It sounds funny, I know. After almost a decade of activism on this specific date, I will mix flour and butter and salt and roll out dough. I will pick pears from my community garden plot a few blocks away. I’ll peel and core them. After I cut them up and mix them with cinnamon, nutmeg (we are the nutmeg state), brown sugar, lemon juice and black pepper (my own secret—oops—ingredient), I’ll assemble fruit and dough into a pie and let it bake.

As I do all of this, I’ll consider the “Pies for Peace” meditation written by Reverend Carolyn Patierno of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Congregation, where my husband and I go for services (not as often as we’d like).

From the garden, to the kitchen, through our hands, to the table . . .

May we hold close the ways that we are connected to the land and to all sentient beings.

The feast we make with the pies we bake,

May they nourish what is bitter with what is sweet.

Let there be love. Let there be plenty. Let there be peace.

And let it begin with us.

Shalom. Amen. Blessed be.

Reverend Carolyn came up with Pies for Peace, to “remind us that however humble our effort we are all responsible for building a new world,” and asks “What better day to recommit ourselves than September 11, 2011?” I will also think of my friend Diana, now living in Los Angeles and celebrating her 40th birthday this weekend. I hope she eats oysters.

This is all so much more modest than lying down in the street or vigiling while standing upright. But, it feels right for me as I mark my first September 11 as a non-New Yorker. “Let there be love. Let there be plenty. Let there be peace” and let it begin with me.

From Jesus' Socialism to Capitalistic Christianity

By Gregory Paul




Editor's Note: This commentary was first published August 12, 2011, by The Washington Post.


A truly strange thing has happened to American Christianity. A set of profound contradictions have developed within modern conservative Christianity, big and telling inconsistencies that have long slipped under the radar of public knowledge, and are only now beginning to be explicitly noted by critics of the religious and economic right.

Here is what is peculiar. Many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, have come to believe and proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christian capitalists are ardent followers of Ayn Rand, who was one of – and many of whose followers are – the most hard-line anti-Christian atheist/s you can get. Meanwhile many Christians who support the capitalist policies associated with social Darwinistic strenuously denounce Darwin’s evolutionary science because it supposedly leads to, well, social Darwinism!

Meanwhile atheists, secularists and evolutionist are denounced as inventing the egalitarian evils of anti-socially Darwinistic socialism and communism. It’s such a weird stew of incongruities that it sets one’s head spinning. Social researchers like myself ask, how did these internal conflict come about? And why are not liberals and progressives doing the logical thing and taking full advantage of the inconsistencies of right wing libertarianism by loudly exposing the contradictions?

To understand why the pro-capitalist stance of many modern religious conservatives is at odds with Christian doctrine we need to start with the Gospels.

Jesus is no free marketeer. Improving one’s earthly financial circumstances is not nearly as critical as preparing for the end times that will arrive at any minute. He does offer substantial encouragement for the poor, and warns the wealthy that they are in grave danger of blowing their prospects of reaching paradise, as per the metaphor of a rich person entering heaven being as difficult as a camel passing through the eye of the needle (a narrow passageway designed to hinder intruders). This caution makes sense: sociological research is confirming that the more securely prosperous individuals and societies are, the more likely they are to lose the faith. A basic point of core Christian doctrine is that the wealthy have no more access to heaven than anyone else (and in fact may have less), offering hope to the impoverished rejected by cults that court the elites. This remains true in Catholicism, in which being poor does not constitute evidence of a personal deficiency, and church authorities decry the excesses of unrestrained capital at the expense of social justice.

But to understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all “the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. . . . No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. . . . There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”

Now folks, that’s outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx – who likely got the general idea from the gospels.

The pro-capitalist Christians who are aware of these passages wave them away even though it is the only explicit description of Christian economics in the Bible.

To get just how central collectivism is to Christian canon, consider that the Bible contains the first description of socialism in history. Anti-socialist Christians also claim that the Biblical version was voluntary. Aside from it being obvious that the biblical version of God was not the anti-socialist Christian capitalists commonly proclaim he was, some dark passages in Acts indicate how deeply pro-socialist the New Testament deity is. Chapter 5 details how when a church member fails to turn over all his property to the church “he fell down and died,” when his wife later did the same “she fell down . . . and died. . . . Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.”

Dear readers, does this not sound like a form of terror-enforced-communism imposed by a God who thinks that Christians who fail to join the collective are worthy of death? Not only is socialism a Christian invention, so is its extreme communistic variant. The claim by many Christians that Christ hates socialism is untrue, while no explicit description of capitalism is found in the Bible – not surprising because it had not yet evolved.

So how did so much of Christianity come to reject socialism? That is not hard to figure out. In the early Protestant Netherlands, Switzerland and England capital became the dominant economic driver. Of course members of a religion want to think that God approves of what they are up to. So many (but not all) Protestants began to cherry pick those Biblical passages that could be massaged to seemingly support laissez-faire markets while pretty much ignoring those that clearly don’t. This works because, as surveys show, most Christians don’t actually read the bulk of the Bible, and people are mentally skilled at dismissing the awkward passages they do come across. Christians really took the theory that God is pro-capital to its extreme in what has be come the least socialistic and most Jesus-following of the advanced democracies, the USA, where many see the nation as an exceptional, God blessed “Shining City on the Hill” they think stands as the exemplar of Godly capitalism to the world.

In Puritan doctrine only the few destined for heaven can enjoy earthly wealth – that’s why there aren’t many rich folks – and poverty is the widespread sign of being destined for hell. But Puritanism was too dour for most Americans, so the notion that God wants his many followers to become as well-heeled as possible really took off with the emergence of the celebratory, self help oriented evangelical and Pentecostal Prosperity Christianity that the likes of Amy McPherson began to promote at the same time the modern corporate-consumer culture arose after the First World War.

The intellectual foundations for the alliance between capital and God were laid after the Second World War by Catholic William Buckley, who, like some others contrived to maneuver around their churches’ skepticism about mercantile interests, worked to convert frugal church goers into materialistic consumers who spend their Sundays watching spectator sports and charging up interest loaded debt at the mall.

Back in the 1800s the non-theist Herbert Spencer adapted the evolutionary science developed by Darwin into what has become known as social Darwinism – even though the biologist had little interest in socioeconomic issues, as well as a live and let live attitude about religion. It was Spencer who coined the term “survival of the fittest” that Darwin worked into later editions of his biology texts. Many Christians – logically concerned at the threat that a naturalistic explanation of human origins posed for popular belief in a supernatural creator – reacted by blaming harsh Darwinian biology for creating the similarly harsh “Darwinian” socioeconomics that they saw as responsible for the ills of the modern world.

At the same time socialists and communists were adapting those aspects of evolutionary science that they liked (a god-free origin of our world) while rejecting those they did not (the anti-egalitarianism integral to survival of the fittest free markets caused Marx and Engels to denounce evolution as a “bitter satire” on man and nature, and Stalin would ban pre-deterministic genetics for contradicting the blank slate theory of communism). While the communists drove the reasonable concept of social equality into the ground, Ayn Rand did the same with individual liberty. Because she hated the teeniest expression of socialism, and because the concept was in the archaic Bible long before some non-theists decided it was the wave of the future, she promoted an anti-Christian, pro-evolution atheism so extreme that even most atheists including myself reject her claim to have philosophically absolutely disproved the existence of any god. But many influential conservative Christians have embraced her expressly atheistic theory of Objectivism that in her books such as The Virtue of Selfishness, they propose that government must be shrunk to a bare minimum so socially Darwinist that it dances with anarchy. Only then can entrepreneurial greed have the free run that liberty demands. Hence Rand’s more nobly titled Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are required reading for the staff of Paul Ryan.

Reagan’s economic advisor, Milton Friedman, was an anti-religious Objectivist Rand devotee. So is Alan Greenspan. Skeptics Penn and Teller and Michael Shermer are atheistic libertarians. In the Randian hyper-materialistic world those who are on the financial make are the exalted makers, the impoverished that accept tax payer assistance are parasitic takers who need to fend for themselves. A radical modernist ideology in greater antithesis to the traditional scriptural favoring of the poor over the rich can hardly be imagined. Yet the economics of the plutocratic Republican Party that embraces the Christian, anti-Darwinist creationist right are essentially those of the uberatheist, anti-creationist, Darwin-adoring Christianity-loathing Ayn Rand. So we have Christian creationists like Jay Richards writing books titled Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Can a stranger amalgam of opposing opinions be devised?

What I do not get from a sociological perspective is why – rather than letting the right avoid being called out for decade after decade – progressives from pious to atheist (most being liberals) as well as the mainstream news media have not been exposing the fascinating incoherence of the right wing’s anti-Darwinian biology, pro-Darwinian economics? Logically Stewart, Maddow, Olbermann, Maher et al. should on a regular basis challenge Christian libertarians on how Palin, Bachmann, Coulter, Beck, Limbaugh, Gingrich et al. can reject as ungodly evil the hard line socialism that is explicitly enforced by their God in the Bible they profess to read and believe? And how can those libertarians who manage to be devout Christians fawn over Ayn Rand whose entire philosophy is a condemnation of Christian doctrine? Also that O’Reilly and Bennett explain how they can continue to be in opposition to their pope who issued the newest encyclical reaffirming the churches opposition to libertarian economics. And ask if a person opposes evolution because it leads to ungodly societal chaos then how can the same person endorse the economics that most closely replicate biological evolution? It does not make practical sense for progressives to fail to use the deep, hypocritical conflicts that mar the right to try to split the movement at its weakest links. The right cannot reply in kind because progressives are less internally conflicted; although liberals too range from devout to atheist they share a secular sense of social tolerance, concur that the gospels are economically progressive, and agree that organisms have evolved over deep time.

In educational terms mainstream press coverage of the issue would be a public service giving the public the information it needs to decide whether or not current conservatism is fatally disingenuous. In a Washington Post column liberal Catholic E. J. Dionne Jr. got things rolling by pointing out that the Rand whose books so many Christian conservatives treat as scripture was a flaming atheist.

It’s a start.

And why are progressives not regularly putting forward the fast growing body of technical research proving that it is the most secular, liberal democracies that are enjoying the overall best socioeconomic circumstances in history, including lower rates of homicide, incarceration, juvenile and adult mortality, STD infections, abortion, teen pregnancy, mental illness, illicit drug use, and so on compared to the more libertarian USA, and superior levels of economic security, upward mobility and education?

And finally, if you don’t like socialism and communism stop blaming atheists and other secularists for concocting egalitarian collectivism backed by fear of death. It got its start long ago in the Good Book.


Gregory Paul is an independent researcher in sociology and evolution. He wrote this article for washingtonpost.com/onfaith.


Image: "Last Supper" by Bohdan Piasecki (1998).