Remembering: One Gay Soldier Who Gave His Life

We Americans are a famously insular folk, and readers of this blog in other places may not be aware that today is a national holiday in the U.S.: Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember those who have died in the nation's wars.  Steve and I are using the holiday weekend to spend some time in Minnesota, so that he can visit his mother, whom he hasn't seen since his father's funeral.  And his aunts who are Benedictine sisters, who remain constantly welcoming and affirming of us as a gay couple, while Steve's über-Catholic siblings don't welcome us.  One of them even warned us not to come home to visit his mother on this whirlwind trip. 

We've also seen oodles and kaboodles of cousins, and I'm now a bit dazed by several days of driving up and down the state.  Minnesota is a looong state, and Steve's family live at the opposite end of the state from the twin cities, where our flight took us.  An interesting drive, though, with rolling hills and small lakes giving way to sandy, higher terrain with sparser vegetation, and then ending in the flat, land-rich Red River Valley on whose eastern edge Steve's family live and farm.  Full of one tiny town after another, many of them (including Steve's hometown) featuring signs equating abortion with the decline of the nation, with the original sin of the nation, on the outskirts of town, as you enter and leave the community.  

These are warning signs.  You're meant to see them as you drive into and out of town.  They're warnings of what the nation--our nation, the underlying, hidden text reads--will become if people stop voting right.

To me, the signs are reminders of how strong remains the political outreach of those using Catholics to shore up the Republican party and to get Catholic voters to vote "right," in areas like small-town Minnesota.  I'd find the insistence on forcing the rest of the nation to accept Catholic pro-life stances on abortion a lot more compelling, if I saw a similar concern for human life across the spectrum on the part of those staging this political crusade.

But, instead, I see the opposite: I see a blind, mindless equation of American values at their crudest, at their most anti-life, with the gospels, among many of those crusading against abortion.  For example: as we drive into Steve's hometown, we're listening to a radio station playing polka music, making Norwegian jokes, and celebrating the holiday weekend with patriotic and religious songs.  The program ends with an announcement (the man doing the announcing happens to be a cousin of Steve's, a staunch German-American Catholic who, Steve and I know, has a cousin who was a Nazi soldier in Germany, with whom the family remained in contact) that, it being a quasi-sacred holiday and all, we'll finish with an appropriate hymn, "The Old Rugged Cross."

But by mistake, the announcer plays, instead, "God Bless America."  And that seems to say it all, for small-town pro-life values: American dominance in the world portrayed as divine will, civil religion tragically intermixed with Catholic and evangelical values and teachings, the cross wrapped in the flag.  Nothing much examined very carefully, as long as it's proclaimed to us by some traditional authority figure somewhere, who tells us who's the real enemy (liberals, people of color, gays, Muslims, environmentalists, "them"), and who stands on God's side (George Bush, of whom one of Steve's uncles has just made a small statue, celebrating Bush's appearance at the 9/11 site, bullhorn in hand; Republicans; the pope and bishops).

And I feel millions of miles away from all of this, culturally and spiritually.  For one thing, I have no recollection at all of Memorial Day from my childhood.  We never celebrated that holiday.  Didn't even know it existed.  

And as I grew up and learned of its existence in other parts of the country, I discovered the reason why: this was a holiday that, in many parts of the American South, was considered an imposed holiday to remember them rather than us.  To commemorate the Union dead and not the Confederate dead.

So that we substituted our own version of memorial day, with Confederate themes, which was celebrated several weeks later than the Yankee holiday--in early June.  As I became an adult, I realized that this was why the cemetery in which my mother's family have been buried for several generations in southeast Arkansas has always held its decoration day on the first weekend in June, followed by a church homecoming the following weekend.  And this is why my father's maternal family have always gathered that same Sunday in June for their family reunion, which is centered around and attached to another small church cemetery in Louisiana where many of my forebears on that side of the family are buried.

I grew up with alternative traditions, and for me, the rhetoric about God and country that comes so easy to people of faith in the heartland seems alien, something from another land, another set of experiences than those that shaped me as a child.  For me, given my formative experiences, it seems dangerous--actively so--to equate God and Christian values with patriotic values and with the aspirations of any particular nation in the world.  All of which live under the eschatological proviso, and none of which deserve divine status or idolatrous adulation.

I've been remembering already, much of May, since May is the month in which that small cemetery in which my mother's family are buried issues its annual appeal for donations.  Since it's a "free" cemetery--no one pays for plots there; if you have roots in that church community, even if you don't belong to the church, you simply have to sign up and claim a plot in the cemetery--I feel obligated to give money to the cemetery each year, to assure that it's maintained. 

And as I give, I remember my mother and brother, both buried in this cemetery, along with my maternal grandparents, three great-grandparents, two great-great grandparents, and numerous other aunts, uncles, cousins buried in the cemetery.  I also remember, each May, my grandmother's death on May 23 in 1968, several days before I graduated from high school.  I remember my grandmother with great devotion, because of all she meant to me as I was growing up.  She was a strong, upright, tender woman who also had a fierce streak that frightened my brother.

But not me, for some reason.  I saw the fierceness as the external shield for the inward tenderness and inner strength: the way in which those virtues communicated (and protected) themselves in her interaction with others.  And so I remember, each May, all that my grandmother did to shape me as a human being from the time I was born--born with, so I'm told, a slightly misshapen head, since the doctors feared that labor was taking too long, and used forceps to pull me head-first from a womb I apparently intended not to leave, causing my skull to be somewhat lopsided when I emerged into the world.  So that my grandmother spent the first weeks of my life literally shaping me, carefully kneading my skull back into the seemly round shape of a well-tended child.

Steve and I are remembering this weekend in another interesting way, as we celebrate our idiosyncratic Memorial Day.  One of the cousins we visited yesterday has, over the past several years, generously shared with Steve some five or six photo albums and scrapbooks that her mother meticulously put together over the years.  Because the cousin is 87, the photos, newspaper clippings, prayer cards, and so forth in these albums go back quite a ways.  They're treasures for family historians.

And as Steve photographed and scanned all of these albums over the past year or so, we made a curious discovery: one of the people commemorated in the albums is an uncle of the cousin who owns the albums, who died in World War II.  He's not directly related to Steve, since he's on the French and not the German side of this particular family.  And he was, it's clear to Steve and me as we look at the photos his sister kept of him, a gay man.

A gay man who left small-town Minnesota before the war to go to San Francisco with a friend.  So that many of the pictures in the album show him in his San Francisco life--at the beach, with several other handsome men (and always beside him the same handsome man whom the sister carefully labels "the Virginian" in each photo).  Or sitting in a convertible, top-down, beside the Virginian, in whimsical drag, scarf carefully arranged in Grace Kelly style, demure white gloves.

Just because.  Because, it's clear from many of the pictures, this was a young man who loved life and loved to have fun, who had himself buried in sand on the beach, with tiny little legs formed from the sand to match a full-sized body. 

A man who was an accomplished amateur painter, who did paintings for some of the churches in his community in small-town northern Minnesota before he left for San Francisco.  (This is a theme not new to me.  My sister-in-law's uncle was a gay man who left small-town Arkansas for San Francisco in a slightly later period, in the 1950s, who painted a stunning mural of Christ the Good Shepherd for the baptistry of his childhood church in Arkansas.)

Yesterday, when we visited the elderly cousin so that Steve could return to her the albums she had loaned him, he asked about her uncle Enthyeme's art work, and she rummaged around and brought out a number of paintings he did while living out west.  They're wonderful landscapes in vibrant colors, with witty little touches that go along with the too-small legs of sand and the natty white gloves.  For instance, Enthyeme hides his initials in tiny details of the landscape, so that you have to search the whole painting to find them.

And here's what we were able to tell his niece, who knew that he had died in the war, but didn't know the details, since her knowledge comes from one final, censored letter he sent his sister, saying that he was on the front lines: when we saw his pictures in the photo album and wondered who he was, we did a bit of online research and found he died in the landing at Anzio.  And that he's buried in a military cemetery there, whose tombstones have been photographed and are online.

So that we could retrieve a photo of the tombstone and share it with Steve's cousin, who had never seen this photograph and wasn't sure where her uncle was buried, or even where, precisely, he was killed as a soldier.  And, strangely enough, the very day we did this online research and found the photo turned out to be the day Enthyeme died.

And so we're remembering today: one soldier who left no wife and children behind, who was drafted after he'd begun a new life as a gay man (of this we're certain from the photos, though it's not something anyone in Steve's family has ever said to us, or may even know) in San Francisco.  A young man full of fun and talent, with his life ahead of him.

Who gave his life for his country, because he was called into action, despite the fact that the American armed services pretended for far too long that gay men could not make adequate soldiers.  Or were a threat to the coherence of a military unit.  Or posed a danger to the country because they could be blackmailed.

Enthyeme gave his life.  And we're determined to remember, because the pictures we see of him in the albums Steve has now copied, and the paintings of his we saw yesterday, remind us that this was a life well worth remembering.

End-of-World Predictions Revised: Stay Tuned

Well, darn.  It seems we haven't dodged the end of the world quite yet.  Christian talk-radio guru and end-of-the-world authority Harold Camping has now decided he was a wee bit off with his May 21 eschaton predictions.

The real end is going to be on October 21, it turns out.  What happened this past Saturday was a "spiritual judgment" of the world, in which we all got judged whether we realized it or not, while no one got physically raptured.  The real, entire, whole-shebang end of all things is going to happen on October 21, with a cataclysmic finale to history.

Darn.  And here I had girded my loins for the tribulation, when I discovered my feet were still inside my shoes and I hadn't been raptured.  I was absolutely certain the five months of tribulation had begun bright and early Sunday, when I happened to be in a public place seated beside a woman who took a call on her cell phone.

The horror of it!  The pain, like having needles stuck into my eyeballs!  And when her first words blared to the invisible person at the other end of the line were "Where are you at?"--not "Where are you?"--I knew.  I knew that God had designed specific tribulations for each of us, tribulations calculated to cause each of us the maximum pain possible in the five months left to us, based on our individuals needs, likes, dislikes.

My tribulation was to be a daily dicing of my nerves by one grammatical solecism after another, all delivered in trumpet-voices by people talking around me on cell phones as if I weren't there: sentences scattered with meretricious prepositions or adverbs--"Where you at?" "partnered up" "listen up"--or objective forms of pronouns used as subjects of clauses--"I hold whomever did this responsible"--by people who clearly never finished 8th-grade English, where the rule drilled into us over and over back in the days when schools really educated was that the case of the pronoun is governed by its use in the clause that is the object of a verb or preposition.

"Glee" last night was tribulation added to tribulation, as two characters said something like, "I'll always put you and I first."  And as one character after another licked his lips in that bizarre neo-macho exchange that has come to pass for acting in American television and movies: male lip-licking and tongue-protruding as studly self-declaration in lieu of language.

Yes, I just knew the tribulation was underway for me already, and am rather disappointed to discover that I'll now have to endure the linguistic solecisms and the grotesque substitutes for real acting without any purificatory end to the suffering.  Just plain old garden-variety suffering like the suffering we all court every day by drawing breath and living among other people.  And with our own sorry selves.

And as I listen to Harold Camping natter on about his now third absolutely fine-tuned prophecy of when the end of things will happen, I wonder what it says about us Americans, that this kind of pseudo-religious discourse occupies such a central place in our culture.  And clearly moves so many of us.  And engages so much mainstream media attention.  And can get people to quit their jobs and shlep around expensively produced pamphlets and carry expensively produced signs to try to frighten other folks into submission to God the Terrorist.  In huge media campaigns to promote biblical idiocy.

Biblical idiocy that infantilizes the American people, and makes us stand out in the global community for our gullibility, our ability to swallow the most ludicrous lies imaginable if those lies happen to carry a "bible-based" label.  So that we never quite grow up as human beings and take adult responsibility for our lives, and recognize our responsibility for and to the lives of others with whom we live in the human community.

Will a third wildly wrong prediction of the end finally convince us to stop paying any attention at all to these hucksters, and to their countless clones who employ the airwaves to inform us that God sends tornadoes to punish gay-friendly areas (please just ignore the recent horrific storms in the heartland),* or uses earthquakes to remind us of his (always "his," in the imagination of those promoting these ideas) power to swat us down when we cross the line?  

Will we grow up, one of these days?  Before the real end eventually arrives?

*Remember how, when the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted in 2009 to ordain openly gay ministry candidates in committed partnered relationships, detractors claimed a tornado brewed itself up instantly and plowed through Minneapolis right to the church in which the ELCA passed this resolution?  But this past Saturday, as the Minnesota legislature voted to give voters the right to amend the state constitution and enshrine anti-gay prejudice in the constitution, another tornado hit Minneapolis.  

What are the chances, do you imagine, that radio preachers are now going to announce that Minneapolis was being punished by God with a tornado for this legislative act of homophobia?  Or that those solidly Republican bible-belt areas of the nation being devastated by tornadoes and floods this spring are under divine punishment for opposing health-care coverage for all citizens and social safety nets for the poor?

Maybe it's time we grew up and stopped imagining God uses the weather to deliver wallops to those she likes and dislikes.  Reckon?

The graphic is from Doug Blanchard's wonderful blog Counterlight's Peculiars.  I'm naming this rapture picture  "White Flight."

Matthew 25 and Expectations of the End of the World

By the way: I read the strangest report yesterday morning.  Did any of the rest of you happen to see it?

It seems 284,000 empty shoes (all in pairs) were found Sunday morning around the world.  The people wearing them seem just to have . . . vanished.

And, strangely enough, they're concentrated among certain demographics: the homeless and mentally ill; several batches of gay and lesbian folks partying at fin del mundo parties in big cities; a number of transsexuals; quite a few prostitutes, people doing life terms in prison, etc.  Very few of these people belonged to any church or religious group at all, it seems.

Not a single one of these folks lived in D.C.  Or an episcopal palace.  Or the Vatican.

The report said two other down-and-out people also--believe it or not--appeared to be unaccounted for on Sunday morning.  Their families were reporting that they seem to have disappeared.

What on earth can all of this mean?

The Dark Forest, the Middle of Life (and the Church's Failure to Light the Way)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In my experience, Dante's describing a recurring experience in human life.  All unexpected, we wake up one morning or another in the middle of our lives, surrounded by dark, overhanging trees.  Shut in by the occluding forest in which there are no paths anywhere.  And it happens again and again: our lives have many middles.

I've been there recently, still am there, and that's why I've been silent on this blog.  I apologize to any readers who might have been counting on me to write more frequently than I've done in the last week or so.  And I'm very grateful--more than I can say--to those who have contacted me to ask after my well-being and Steve's.

I have no excuses, really.  No explanations, other than the selva oscura.  "Fatigue" is probably the word that best describes my prevailing inner feeling right now, as I try to make my way through the dark woods.  I just feel fairly much written out, without any strong sense of inner light or inspiration as I write.  

The most frightening effect of the dark forest is that it obscures the light of the sun of love that shines over and beyond the canopy of trees--the sun that, as Dante believed, makes the journey through the forest worthwhile.  Makes everything worthwhile.

Not being able to see that sun, when our bones tell us everything depends on its illuminating force and its warming influence, is perhaps the most painful effect of finding ourselves suddenly in the selva oscura in the middle of our lives.

I'm tired of thinking and writing about a church that all too frequently places me and many others precisely in the dark forest, rather than directing us to the illuminating, healing sun of love.  I'm tired of railing against a church whose leaders actively seek to lock up the meaning I am seeking, along with many others, as I make my way along the path of life--while claiming, even as they lock up the meaning that would light our paths and warm our hearts if they did their job as shepherds, that they and they alone are the guardians of sacred meaning.

That they and they alone interpret sacred meaning for us.  That they and they alone stake the path through the forest with reliable signposts.  And that the rest of us are the ones responsible for the loss of meaning in the church today.

While they spend nearly $2 million of the hard-earned money of American Catholics to produce yet another spin-doctored media blast indicting the 1960s (i.e., all the rest of us: not themselves) for the abuse crisis, once again letting the bishops--who are the very center and engine of that crisis--off the hook.  And while the leader of the U.S. Catholic bishops, Timothy Dolan, writes a letter implicitly blessing the anti-Catholic social and economic policies of the Republican party, as the bishops continue to rail against the deeply Catholic notion of health care coverage for all citizens, as long as that notion is promoted by the Democratic party.

I'm tired.  I'm tired of all of this, and of how it places me in a dark forest, searching for meaning that the church has promised to provide for those who trust its spiritual guidance.  I'm tired of the bishops' willing captivity by the rich, powerful men who fund their enterprises through the Knights of Columbus, and through direct behind-the-scenes donations that buy and pay for the bishops' blessing of right-wing homophobia, of right-wing attacks on health care coverage for all and other social safety nets designed to keep the least among us from falling to the bottom, with no assistance from society at large.

I'm tired of bishops who are nothing at all but poorly educated Republican businessmen gussied up in clerical drag, and who claim, as they put on their sacred drag shows, that they and they alone preserve and guard sacred meaning the rest of us have lost.

I'm tired, too, quite specifically--Steve and I are--as we near retirement age and wonder how to make humane lives for ourselves in the final part of our life journey.  And as we feel that we haven't done a conspicuously good job of preparing for that stage of life.  Because the church that we planned to serve as theologians when we worked hard to obtain doctorates in theology has not only made no place at all for us--no vocational place, and therefore no place with salaries and health-care coverage--but has expelled us from vocational life.  Has pushed us from the table of salaries and health-care coverage.

Not saying this to complain.  Just pointing out this is part of our present perplexity.  And that, as we cope with this perplexity, the church itself, and the abysmal lack of pastoral leadership in the Catholic church at present, compound the existential problems all of us have on our particular life journeys.

In the case of those of us who are lesbian and gay, the existential problems are compounded in a unique way by the church's leaders.  We who are gay and lesbian know full well that, rather than looking to them for guidance and support as we make our way through the dark, trackless waste, we must, in fact, be on guard against them.  We must be on guard against attacks  mounted by the very shepherds who are, we're told, charged by Christ to safeguard us as we make our way towards the sun of love along the paths of life.

Because the shepherds do not intend to open safe paths for us.  They intend, instead, to keep us who are gay and lesbian lost in the darkness--even as they proclaim that they and they alone possess the lamps that can light the darkness for all the rest of us.

As readers will know, since I've alluded to some stories in my own family and have written explicitly about one in Steve's in recent months, the past half year or so has provided some strong indicators to Steve and me that as we approach old age and retirement, we can't expect any real support or understanding from either of our family networks.  We're on our own, in the dark forest.  

If we want family, if we want to find fellow travelers intent on assisting each other to find the paths through the forest, we have to find family someplace other than in our families of origin.  We've long known that, of course.  Recent events have only been a reminder to us of what we've long known.  

And they've underscored, all over again, that one of the most precious forms of family believers should expect to find as they make their life journeys--the family that is church, the people of God--is simply not there for us.  Not there as a reliable signpost out of the darkness and towards the sun of love.

Because it is love itself--our love as gay and lesbian persons--that the church cannot and will not recognize.  Our love, and therefore our God-given humanity, that the church insists on problematizing in an unsurpassably cruel way.  

Even as the church speaks of itself as an incomparable sign of God's all-encompassing love in the world.

The love that lights our path and warms our heart, which is the only way we know through and beyond the dark woods--our love, the love given to us precisely as gay persons by the God who has made us gay--is identified by our church's leaders with the darkness inside the pathless forest.  Not with the sun that lights the world with meaning.

Enough of all of this.  I have deliberately not written for over a week now, because I don't want to sound maudlin.  And I don't intend for any of the darkness Steve and I find inside ourselves and our experience right now to spill over into what I write or into the lives of others.

I do want to be honest, though.  As I've said from the time I began this blog, I prefer not to write anything at all here, if the price of writing is that I have to tailor the truth as I see it to some ideology or norm imposed from outside my circle of experience-tested truth.  

And this happens to be where we find ourselves right now, and why writing these days is proving difficult for me.  It's difficult to write, when you feel your words lack meaning--for yourself, first and foremost.  And therefore for others, surely.

More down the road, as I begin to see some glimmers of light.  And meanwhile, I'm very grateful to readers for your concern.

Online Commentary Connecting Beatification of John Paul II to bin Laden Assassination

Well, yes, now that I google a bit, I discover the following commentary in the blogsphere, seeking to link the assassination of bin Laden to John Paul: 

Micaela at the Catholic Community Forum blog site: it's "more than a coincidence" that bin Laden received justice on the day of JPII's beatification and Divine Mercy Sunday (!).

Indigo1941 commenting at HuffPo on Sam Stein and Jennifer Bendery's report of Osama's death: "Does this count as Blessed John Paul's second miracle?"  (And note the Twitter feed underneath the comment echoing this conclusion.)

Lilith at this Yahoo Answers thread responding to the question, "Is it a coincidence that Osama bin Laden was killed moments after Pope John Paul II was declared a Saint?": "Maybe this is John Paul's II second miracle."

Ajiryn at the Newgrounds site on bin Laden's assassination as JPII is beatified as " the miracle of a bitch slap from God from beyond the GRAVE."

Etc.: this is a selection from a very cursory review of what's popping up online today.  The google list of hits for the topics "John Paul II" and "Osama bin Laden" reveals many more pages of hits than I've read my way through.

Though some of these bloggers identify themselves as Catholics, there's no way of knowing, of course, if all of them are, even when they talk about miracles and divine intervention.  Belief in the (selective) intrusion of God into the affairs of the world to vindicate Americans and American causes is deeply woven into the fabric of American popular culture, and pop culture has never hesitated to borrow freely from Catholic iconography and the Catholic belief system when some icons and beliefs coincide with widely held popular beliefs, even when the culture doesn't buy the entire Catholic system.

I think we're seeing a certain hagiography in the making here, at a pop cultural level, which illustrates the growing split in the Catholic psyche between those who see John Paul II as the lord and master of a mean machine that just rolled over dissidents with the beatification ceremonies, and many other Catholics troubled by this use of the symbol of Bl. JPII to bless the taking of a human life.

And it's clear to me that one of the reasons some of the mainstream/centrist Catholic blogs are engaging this discussion today is to offset some of the more noxious statements now being made by some Catholics (and others) about the assassination of bin Laden as Bl. John Paul's second miracle.  I expect much more of this talk at the popular level in coming days, despite the attempt of some Catholic leaders (and the Vatican itself) to combat it.  

And in some key respects, it's a bona fide manifestation of the very cult of Bl. JPII that these leaders have worked so hard to rev up.

Holy Irritations Blog: "Professed Christians" Attributing Assassination of Osama bin Laden to Bl. John Paul II?!

Maybe some readers of Bilgrimage who have been paying more attention to television commentary following the assassination of Osama bin Laden than I have can decipher the following statement by ennie on his Holy Irritations blog today:  

Now, my fallen nature wants, so bad, to go off right now on the behavior that I saw displayed last night on social networks by professed Christians, but I'm not.  I could speak about how wrong on so many levels, it is for us to say in any way that Blessed John Paul II intercession had anything to do with the death of a man (see fall of communism), but I'm not.

Really? Are some fans of Blessed John Paul II really attributing the assassination of bin Laden to Bl. JPII?  

And if that's the case, then I wonder if this is why the Vatican has made this statement about the killing of bin Laden and the proper Christian response to it?

If any readers do know of statements by the JPII fan club that his intercession is responsible for the assassination of bin Laden, or that it's some kind of divine sign that bin Laden was assassinated on the same day JPII was beatified, I'd like to know about this commentary.  These are certainly the implications I'm hearing in what ennie says above.

John Paul's Beatification: A Solution for the Divided Church? Perhaps Not (2)

I'd like to append a brief theological postscript to what I posted yesterday about how the beatification of John Paul II has revved up the mean machine within the Catholic church in recent days, as some of Bl. JPII's most ardent fans use the occasion of his beatification to issue new, even more hateful reminders to many of their Catholic brothers and sisters that we're just not wanted in the lean, mean Catholic machine of the new millennium.  New, even more hateful reminders--and this boggles the mind--to survivors of clerical sexual abuse that they're unwanted, that they're self-absorbed whiners who can't appreciate that the real, true Catholic church is all about winners and losers.

And survivors are losers.  They became losers from the time they were molested by priests as young people.  And now they need--so I hear many of those celebrating the legacy of Bl. JPII in recent days saying--to disappear again.  Get lost.  Out of sight, out of mind.

The elevation of Bl. John Paul II to the honors of the altar has become the occasion for an outpouring of venomous hatred on the part of many Catholics--hatred directed explicitly towards many of their own brothers and sisters, including some of their brothers and sisters who should have the strongest claim on the heart and conscience of any community that seeks to be known as humane.  And to my mind, that outpouring of hatred deserves attention as a theological datum in and of itself--because of what it says about the legacy John Paul left to the church.  And what kind of church we've become in the wake of his papacy.

When I posted yesterday, murrbrewster left a comment in response to my posting that's very good.  This morning, I replied to murr, and because what I say in my reply is really a theological postscript to what I posted yesterday, I'd like to lift that exchange out of yesterday's comments section and turn it into a posting this morning.

Murr writes:

I'm at a loss to see what any of it has to do with your own relationship to the man on the cross, or the person sitting next to you. It's all pomp and nonsense.

And I reply:

Thanks, murr. At one level, I see the point you're making, and think it's absolutely right.

But the other side seems to me to be this: all symbols, religious or otherwise, are mediated to us by human communities. The church plays a significant role in transmitting to us over the course of history the memory of Jesus (and symbols based on that memory).

And so a serious problem ensues when the church's behavior occludes or even contradicts the symbols it wants to transmit to us. That problem is a problem of dissonance that causes great pain to many people who have first learned about and encountered Jesus as a symbol of the divine within the Catholic tradition, but for whom the Catholic church is now in many ways a counter-sign to the gospel it proclaims.

I think many Catholics live today in that tension between what the church has told us to believe, and what the church has become. And I suspect that the number of those living in that space of pain and tension is only growing larger, and will increase significantly following JPII's beatification. 

I'm not saying anything I haven't said in many previous postings, in the comment I've just excerpted above.  But I do think it's worth making these points again, in light of JPII's beatification, and, above all, how that beatification is being "received" by some of his most ardent supporters.  In light of the renewed hostility those supporters now find themselves energized to display against brother and sister Catholics they envisage as losers in a war in which they are the winners.

As I've said frequently in previous postings, I see the church as caught between the "already" of Jesus's death and resurrection and the "not yet" of the final eschatological fulfillment of Jesus's proclamation of the reign of God, a proclamation that culminated in his crucifixion and resurrection.  In this in-between period--in the period of history prior to the eschaton--the church is always imperfect.  It's never complete.  It's always on pilgrimage.  It's on pilgrimage with everyone else in the world towards a reign of God promised by God to all creation as the final fulfillment of Jesus's redemptive act on the cross.

It never possesses all truth in itself.  It learns from the Spirit's action in other religious communities and in the world at large.  The church never completely fulfills Jesus's vision of the reign of God.  It often tragically betrays that vision, sometimes in gross ways--as it has done in the period of "holy" wars, of the Inquisition, of pogroms and mass murders of the Jewish people, in its subjugation and exploitation of the native peoples of non-European nations, in its support of slavery, in its complicity with the Holocaust, in its historic, gross abuse of women (and execution of so-called "witches" for centuries), and in its historic abusive treatment of gay and lesbian human beings.

The church is not perfect.  It often grossly betrays the ideals it proclaims to the world.  It does so in its own behavior.  And when it does so, the church creates for many of its own adherents a serious theological, existential problem: this is the problem of knowing how to keep clinging to and finding meaning in the very symbols by which the church has mediated the memory of Jesus to these believers, when the church's practice betrays those symbols.

In my view, many Catholics live right now in that space of severe cognitive dissonance created by the disparity between what the church proclaims to us in its core symbols, and what it actually does with those symbols in its own practice.  My meditations in recent days, vis-a-vis the beatification of John Paul II, have had to do with the tragic disparity between the symbol of Jesus's crucifixion, a central Catholic symbol, and the real-life, real-time show of the John Paul II beatification--and its aftermath, in the outpouring of ugly, venomous remarks by many orthodox Catholics energized by the jubilation who are now intent on reminding some of their fellow Catholics that we aren't and haven't ever been welcome in the JPII mean machine.

And who are now even openly attacking and taunting their brothers and sisters who are coping with the effects of clerical sexual abuse when they were children.  Attacking and taunting these brothers and sisters precisely to demonstrate their support of the beatification of the former pope.

And so I conclude that not only do many Catholics already live within that space of severe cognitive dissonance created by the disparity between what the church proclaims to us in its core symbols, and what it actually does with those symbols, but that the tension, the space of cognitive dissonance, will only grow larger as a result of the beatification of the previous pope.  More and more Catholics will now find themselves marginalized--actively driven out--by the mean machine of the church of Bl. JPII.

To many of us, this response to the beatification of a pope--this way of celebrating the beatification of a pope--seems incomprehensible, because we have long understood catholicity to be all about including and not excluding.  About loving and not hating.  About welcoming and not slamming doors in people's faces.

About looking at Jesus hanging on the cross and remembering that the path to real victory in Christian faith lies in failure, weakness, and death, not numbers and muscle and power.  The real victory in Christian faith lies in opening one's arms to the other, particularly in her anguish, because in his own anguish on the cross, Jesus opens his arms to the entire human community and the cosmos.  The real victory lies in that gesture, Christian faith has long taught us, and not in the opposite gesture that seems all too prevalent in the mean machine that the Catholic church has become in the wake of Bl. John Paul II.

John Paul's Beatification: A Solution for the Divided Church? Perhaps Not

We won.  You lost.

Now please get lost.

That's the refrain I'm hearing over and over these days from those jubilant about the beatification of John Paul II.  That, and the refrain that success is counted in numbers--success is counted in numbers for the Christian church.  For followers of Jesus.  The bigger the crowd, the more awesome the show, the more obvious is the victory of Christianity.

Of us over them.

Of us over those who continue to point to Jesus dying virtually alone and powerless on the cross?

We won.  You lost.

The abuse crisis is over.  Get over it.  Get over yourselves, survivors.  Because it's all about you.  Can't you see the importance of this show?  And the numbers, for God's sake!  We won and you lost.  You don't count in any grand scheme of things--and that's what the leaders of the church have tried repeatedly to tell you for years now.  You're dispensable and you need to get over what has happened to you.  

Get the message now with this beatification?  We won.  You lost.  Get over yourselves.

Get over yourselves, tired old Vatican II liberals.  We won and you lost.  The numbers prove it.  (And the money.  And the power.  And the spectacles we can mount.  And the media attention we can attract and massage to our advantage.)

I hear many of my brother and sister Catholics exulting that John Paul II has been beatified and all kinds of refractory other Catholics have now been slapped in the face.  Decisively.  I hear what my brother and sister Catholics are saying to me.  Loud and clear.  

Get lost, finally.  And don't let the door hit you in the rear as you walk out.

And perhaps they're right.  

Perhaps they're right because their church, the church of John Paul II--of the John Paul II they love to use as a weapon against me and large numbers of their brothers and sisters--seems to have a serious problem on its hands for many of us who expect somehow to find the face of Jesus within our church.  If it's the face of the crucified one we hope to see in the church now, we might be well-advised to put the church of John Paul II behind us.

The problem that those using John Paul as a weapon have created for their church is this: it's the problem of finding some connection, any connection at all, between their church of numbers, big shows, wealth, power (and cruelty to survivors of clerical sexual abuse) and that tormented man who died virtually alone and a failure on the cross.

Because he, that man whose twisted, pain-racked naked body hangs on a cross in every Catholic church in the world, made himself one with the poor, despised, suffering, with rag-tag outcasts and, yes, with survivors of sexual abuse.  And neither I nor many Catholics being taunted to leave the church of John Paul II now seem able to see the face of that poor crucified man anywhere at all in the mean-spirited rhetoric that the disciples of John Paul II have been slinging around these days, as the previous pope is beatified.

Thomas Reese on "Huge" Exodus of American Catholics, and My Conclusion: Catholic Church as Mean Machine

Another follow-up:

I blogged on the weekend about the record number of German Catholics who officially resigned from the Catholic church in 2010.  As I've noted in many previous postings, there's a parallel development in American Catholicism, where a Pew report in the spring of 2008 found that one in three adults in the U.S. who were raised Catholic have now left the Catholic church, and one in ten American adults is a former Catholic.

Jesuit Thomas Reese has just published an analysis of this "hidden exodus" of American Catholics in National Catholic Reporter.  And here's what Reese means in calling the exodus "hidden":

Any other institution that lost one-third of its members would want to know why. But the U.S. bishops have never devoted any time at their national meetings to discussing the exodus. Nor have they spent a dime trying to find out why it is happening.

The U.S. Catholic bishops have been eerily silent about the mass exodus of Catholics that is occurring on their watch, under their pastoral leadership--though the image of the good shepherd to which their pastoral office points is one intent on seeking every sheep who strays, to bring every straying sheep back to the fold. 

Reese notes that the data the bishops refuse to collect in order to understand why people are leaving have to be supplied by secular groups like Pew, who are finding that those who have walked away can be grouped, roughly speaking, into two large camps: those who are now unchurched, unaffiliated with any church; and those who have become Protestant.  Quite a bit of evidence suggests that a majority of those in the latter group have joined evangelical Protestant churches.

I'll leave it to readers who are interested in this topic to follow Reese's analysis and to read his recommendations about how the bishops might address the massive hemorrhaging of American Catholics--if they chose to care at all about what's taking place, that is.  I'm drawn, in particular, to his observation that what people are seeking from the church is authentic spirituality, liturgy that touches the heart, and viable Catholic exegesis of the scriptures in a culture inundated with simplistic soundbyte biblical interpretation of a fundamentalist bent.

Spirituality, heart, the Word of God: instead, the Catholic church in the U.S. (and globally) now strikes me, as an alienated Catholic shoved far to the margins, as increasingly a mean machine intent on doing harm to people, and, in many cases, to some of the most vulnerable among us.  When I read Joseph Palacios today about the disgusting defense the Vatican representative at the U.N. recently gave for the Vatican's refusal to endorse a U.N. statement deploring violence against LGBT persons; when I wade through Cardinal Wuerl's pre-Vatican II rationale for the U.S. bishops' condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work; when I read that, right on the heels of the grand jury report in Philadelphia that found 37 priests credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors still in ministry, Pope Benedict honors Cardinal Rigali: I see a mean machine in operation, which has little connection to anything I recognize as authentically spiritual, as capable of moving my heart towards God, or as skilled at breaking open the Word of God for me.

As the Vatican tinkers with new, theologically regressive translations of the liturgy regarding which the laity and even liturgical experts have had no say; as bishops reassert their right to control theological discourse and demand that theologians seek an imprimatur for any word they utter, and as they quench the Spirit by acting this way; as the Vatican depicts the Catholic hierarchy as the real victims in the struggle for human rights for LGBT persons while ignoring the actual violence to which LGBT persons are subject around the world; as a cardinal who has sheltered priests abusing minors is given an honor in the weeks before the beatification of John Paul II, who protected Marcial Maciel: I don't see spirituality at work.  I don't find my heart warmed.  I don't feel impelled to open the Word of God and read it.

Instead, I want in every way possible to distance myself from the mean machine the Catholic church has become at this point in history.  And I suspect a considerable proportion of those who have walked away and will continue to do so until these and the other significant ways in which the Catholic church now functions as a counter-sign to the gospels is addressed also share this perspective.

For National Poetry Month: Andrei Voznesensky's "Someone Is Beating a Woman" (Re-Posted)

We're right in the middle of National Poetry Month, and I haven't yet mentioned that event, for which I did a series of postings last year.  Since my discussion of the Catholic abuse crisis in the last several days turns around questions of the continued callousness of many societies and faith communities--particularly those dominated by heterosexist patriarchal elites--to the abuse of women, I want to re-post a poem I posted last April for National Poetry Month.  This is Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky's "Someone Is Beating a Woman":

Someone is beating a woman
In the car that is dark and hot
Only the whites of her eyes shine.
Her legs thrash against the roof
Like berserk searchlight beams.

Someone is beating a woman.
This is the way slaves are beaten.
Frantic, she wrenches open the door
And plunges out--onto the road.

Brakes scream.
Someone runs up to her,
Strikes her and drags her, face down,
In the grass lashing with nettles.

Scum, how meticulously he beats her,
Stilyága, bastard, big hero,
His smart flatiron-pointed shoe
Stabbing into her ribs.

Such are the pleasures of enemy soldiers
And the brute refinements of peasants.
Trampling underfoot the moonlit grass,
Someone is beating a woman.

Someone is beating a woman,
Century on century, no end to this.
It's the young that are beaten.  Somberly
Our wedding bells start up the alarm.
Someone is beating a woman.

What about the flaming weals
In the braziers of the cheeks?
That's life, you say.  Are you telling me?
Someone is beating a woman.

But her light is unfaltering:
World-without-ending.
There are no religions,
     no revelations,
There are women.

Lying there pale as water,
Her eyes tear-closed and still,
She doesn't belong to him
Any more than a meadow deep in a wood.

And the stars?  Rattling in the sky
Like raindrops against black glass
Plunging down
     they cool
Her grief-fevered forehead.

Trans. Jean Garrigue, from An Arrow in the Wall, ed. William Jay Smith and F.D. Reeve (NY: Henry Holt and Company), pp. 20-23 (originally published in Voznesensky's Antiworlds [1966]).

Mychal Judge Nominated for Congressional Gold Medal: How You Can Help

Some good news here (and an appeal for you to assist, if you're so moved): Franciscan priest Fr. Mychal Judge, who died in the 9/11 attacks after he refused to leave the North Tower building despite requests that the building be evacuated completely, has been nominated for a Congressional gold medal.  He was killed when the collapse of the South Tower sent debris into the other tower, striking him in the head.  Fr. Mychal was a chaplain to New York firefighters, and insisted on remaining in the building to minister to these and others who were wounded during the 9/11 attacks.

For information about the Congressional gold medal nomination and how you can assist by contacting your Congress persons, see the Mychal Judge website, to which Bilgrimage links in its list of recommended blogs.  Further information is also on the website of the Franciscan province to which Mychal Judge belonged.

It would certainly be wonderful to see this saintly and heroic priest (who also happened to be gay and honest about his sexual orientation) given this award, particularly because Catholic church officials have done little to recognize his holy life and heroic death.  To many Catholics, it has seemed that, as Catholic leaders have rushed to beatify John Paul II while ignoring Mychal Judge, one of the real saints of our period is being ignored--when serious questions about the man being beatified abound.

Thanks for considering this invitation to help nominate Fr. Mychal Judge for this much-deserved posthumous award.

Quote for the Day: Why Are So Many Catholics Leaving?

 

Louis Ruprecht, addressing the recent announcement of a team of mathematicians that various empirical data suggest religion (or is it "religion"?) is heading for extinction:

Sometimes the “spiritual, but not religious” person wishes to communicate his or her disgust with organized religion and institutions. This is a major feature of the landscape in U.S. Catholicism right now, given the ongoing scandals, cover-ups, and Vatican obfuscation and delay. Sometimes the “spiritual, but not religious” person is cobbling together a life of meaning outside traditionally recognized channels.

Yes.  That's exactly what I've been talking about, as I discuss the interchange between Burke and Hamilton.

Fasting for Justice

 

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: 

to loose the chains of injustice 

and untie the cords of the yoke, 

to set the oppressed free 

and break every yoke? 

Is it not to share your food with the hungry 

and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— 

when you see the naked, to clothe them, 

and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? 

Then your light will break forth like the dawn, 

and your healing will quickly appear . . .  . (Isaiah 58:6-8)

For anyone who might be thinking of ways to link Lenten penance to action on behalf for justice in our society, I'm recommending MoveOn.org's proposed fast for justice.  This organized fast is also a protest against immoral budget cuts that will shift the burden of sustaining our social networks onto the shoulders of the poor and working classes, while relieving those at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid of their responsibility to share.  Jim Wallis, David Beckmann, and Tony Hall launched this fast at the beginning of the week.

As I wrote in my comment at the MoveOn site when I committed myself to fasting, this action of solidarity and protest reminds me of the Vietnam War period, when students across the nation committed ourselves to fast for periods of time, to protest the war in Vietnam and call for an end to the war.  I regard the current socieoconomic (and moral) crisis of the U.S. as equal to that of the Vietnam War period.

I thought of the effectiveness of concerted action on behalf of justice during the Vietnam War period when I wrote a few days ago about how pressure from both the faculty senate and the student government association at Marquette University put the feet of Jesuit Fr. Robert Wild, that university's president, to the fire and forced him to offer partner benefits gay couples at that school..  I was struck by Fr. Wild's statement that taking this step is in line with the Jesuit pastoral principle of care for persons, cura personalis.

What the Marquette scenario brings to mind for me is what happened on the campus of the Jesuit university I attended in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Loyola in New Orleans, when students began to pressure the Jesuit community at Loyola to divest its stock holdings in companies manufacturing war chemicals.  Students at Loyola were particularly upset to learn that the Jesuits who owned and ran the university had holdings in Dow Chemicals, which was making the napalm used to burn villages, people, and the countryside in Vietnam.

When the student protests about this began, the Jesuits tended to react with disdain, blowing the students off and even, on one memorable occasion, sending one of their head honchos at the University to mock the student protesters and lie to us about the Jesuit investment portfolio.  But when the pressure continued and increased, and there were student take-overs of the student union building on the campus, the Jesuits began to discover their consciences, and began to take heed of the student requests.

And the point of that story is this: concerted action to protest immoral behavior of institutions that claim to have a moral basis does sometimes work.  And it's sometimes the only thing that will get such institutions to do the right thing, despite their lofty claims of moral principles.

These thoughts will be in my mind and heart as I commit myself to this particular fast for socioeconomic justice in the U.S.

Gardens: Madness, Frustrated Hopes, and Cheap Sermons

Diane Ackerman writes,

Few things are begun with as much hope as a garden, and it can disappoint in direct proportion to one’s anticipation (Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden [NY: HarperCollins, 2001], :p. 32).

And May Sarton writes,

It has to be accepted that gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age.  Quite the contrary (At Seventy [NY: W.W. Norton, 1984], p. 49).

And they're both right.

The picture above this posting shows what has happened to our front yard this year, all unintended.  It has become a violet garden.  And we're not disappointed, but actually delighted, for obvious reasons.  In a totally unanticipated way, our madness in removing all of the measly grass from the yard a few years ago has suddenly paid off in a ground cover of violets.

With each passing year, our front yard has become more and more a shaded spot.  A huge silver maple on one side of the yard shades much of the area, and what it doesn't accomplish, a yaupon holly grown into a large umbrella shape finishes off.

And so grass simply won't grow there, not when it gets no light and has to compete with the aggressive, shallow, voracious roots of the maple.  When we began to realize this, I dug up all the grass and planted monkey grass in its place, thinking it would soon spread and cover the entire yard.

I was mistaken in my thinking.  The monkey grass has been puny in its growth, if tenacious.  And meanwhile, as we weeded out all intruders except the few violets that persisted in coming back after the grass was removed, the violets proliferated.

Last spring, my nephew Patrick kindly helped me dig up as many of these as I could, to put them into a bed in front of a fringe of ferns beneath the azaleas out front.  Somehow, the digging of the violets stirred them to a mad replication of themselves, possibly from snippets of roots Patrick and I left in place when we transplanted them.

And now the result is, as this spring arrives, that the front yard has been taken over by violets, which are beginning to bloom.  Our best gardens are frequently those we never intended to plant.  And our most carefully cultivated ones are not uncommonly our biggest failures.

Even if Verlyn Klinkenborg does rightly say, "A garden is so full of cheap sermons" (The Rural Life [Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2003], :p. 172).

Remembering Oscar Romero: God Hears the Cries of the Poor

 

Today is the anniversary of Oscar Romero's assassination in 1980.  Since several readers have mentioned in comments here lately that they don't know much about Romero, in commemoration of his life and profound witness to the gospel, I thought I'd point readers to some valuable resources to learn more about Romero.

The first is a wonderful set of articles and liturgical resources about Romero at the U.S. Catholic website.  The second is a collection of Romero's homilies, in a volume entitled The Violence of Love, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, SJ.  It's online at the Plough website, and has a good foreword by Henri Nouwen.

Finally, I never think of Romero and the struggle of the poor in Latin America for socioeconomic security and humane lives without thinking of the magnificent 1986 film "The Mission," tracking the history of the establishment of the Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay.  Here's a YouTube clip of Carlo Romano and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI playing the theme music of the film, "Gabriel's Oboe":

And, since one memory always links to another, remembering Romero and "The Mission" always brings to my mind the memory of the wonderful Jesuit whose scholarly work laid a foundation for "The Mission," C.J. McNaspy, the anniversary of whose death in 1995 recently came around.  Not only did C.J.'s book on the Jesuit Reductions play a role in providing the scholarly underpinnings for the 1984 Roland Joffé film, but he served as a musical advisor for the film, as well.

C.J. was my teacher when I was an undergraduate at Loyola in New Orleans.  I learned much from him--about music, philosophy, history.  But above all about the Jesuit ideal of living as a man for others.  His stories about what some of the early advocates of integration in New Orleans--he was among them--endured as they met and planned strategy in a culture hostile to racial reconciliation were hair-raising, and very moving.  These were people who put their lives on the line, as did Romero, to proclaim the gospel.

And so I never think of Romero without thinking of C.J.  Both are saints who occupy prominent spots on my own personal iconostasis.  C.J. died soon after Steve's and my careers as Catholic theologians were definitively ruined by what Belmont Abbey College chose to to do us, by firing us without providing a reason for the firing in my case, and on spurious grounds in Steve's case.  He was very unhappy about this, since he had recommended us for our jobs there.

And, above all, because he believed profoundly in justice and charity.  And so I pray to C.J. McNaspy along with Oscar Romero for the reform of our church, and for its renewed commitment to justice and charity for everyone, including those on the margins of church and society.

Worth Reading: Sustenance for Lenten Reflection

Worth reading in the past several days--worth reading specifically because of the spiritual sustenance these pieces provide for Lenten reflection:

1. Joe Feuerherd's commentary in National Catholic Reporter on the recent Cuomo debacle.  Feuerherd is more charitable than I was re: Archbishop Timothy Dolan, when I commented on the Cuomo story--and his commentary is worth reading for that charity and balance alone.  But it also contains more valuable background information about the connection between Edward Peters, who has raised the stink about Gov. Cuomo's reception of communion given his lifestyle, and Cardinal Raymond Burke.  And (reading between the lines) about the  (Republican) political agendas of both Peters and Burke.

2.  Matthew Dowd at Huffington Post writing about Persian poet Rumi and St. Francis of Assisi as valuable complementary witnesses to "the healing power of love in thought and action" at a time in which Islamic Americans are being explicitly targeted by the malicious hearings now being held by Rep. Peter King of the Homeland Security Committee. 

3. Lawrence Downes in today's New York Times noting the publication several months ago of selected letters of Catholic activist Dorothy Day in a volume entitled All the Way to Heaven, and proposing Day as a saint for our time.

4. As the anniversary of the martyrdom of Oscar Romero approaches, Jayden Cameron's commemoration of this other extremely important saint for our period of history at Jayden's Gay Mystic blog--with a wonderful snippet from a recent performance of Rene Ochoa's Misa del Pueblo at Prague's Basilica of Sts. Simon and Jude.

5. And John McNeill's beautiful meditation (at his Spiritual Transformation blog) on the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts, and of the emphasis in Judaism's prophetic tradition on the messianic inclusion of the non-procreative (e.g., eunuchs) in the community of God's people.

To all: happy Lenten Sunday, happy Lenten reading.

Remembering St. David's Day

 

And for what it's worth, on the day of St. David: a small excerpt from something I posted over on my travel blog several years ago, about a pilgrimage Steve and I took in May 2006.  We began at the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk and then made our way west across southern England, praying at various holy places along the way, until we ended up at the shrine of St. David in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

My reflections about the visit to the shrines of David and his mother Non end with these notes:

St. David’s: the end of things. Perhaps one reason I felt perturbed as we left for here yesterday is that I sense this.

Every pilgrimage has an end. This destination is a reminder of the ultimate westering of life. What could be further west—and more cut off and distant from everything else—than those old Celtic holy sites on the western fringe of Britain?

The wildness seems to attract poets, artists, nature lovers. Long, exhausting walk to St. Non’s well in the evening, but worth it for the sea vistas, the sense of visiting a site with ancient holy roots.

So much I’m seeing demands the artist’s brush to capture it, not words.

And since that pilgrimage, I've worn a cross, a version of the ancient Celtic love-knot design, which Steve bought for me to mark the end of the pilgrimage, at the shrine of St. David.  Today, I'll wear the cross thinking of my tiny bit of Welsh blood, of forebears like Thomas and Gwenllian James and their son Griffith James, of Honour Pritchard, and George Llewellyn.

(And what a beautiful time of year to celebrate any saint's day, as jonquils burst into bloom here, along with Japanese magnolia, forsythia, japonica, and a carpet of wildflowers, from spring beauty to Quaker ladies and henbit.)

Eugene Kennedy on John Paul II's Beatification: The Saint Who Kept Looking Away

Eugene Kennedy's reading at National Catholic Reporter this week of what the beatification of John Paul II will signify for many Catholics is thought-provoking.  And, as with everything Kennedy writes, masterfully written.

Kennedy adopts psychotherapeutic categories of analysis, especially the category of narcissism, to put his finger on what troubles many of us about the precipitous haste to beatify and then canonize JPII.  He notes that the previous pope certainly appealed to audiences that were receptive to his rock-star image.  On some young Catholics, in particular, the rock-star pope exerted mesmerizing influence through his adroit use of theatrical skills and his ability to project a stage persona.

But for many others, it was precisely that image and that ability to put on a mask and play a role that were troubling.  Kennedy writes, 

Are there unanswered questions about this pope who may have dazzled but seemed to exude so little real warmth for the believers at whom, above his Slavic smile, he never seemed to look directly?

What was the inner man -- for this must be the testing point for the blessed -- like when, claiming to be a champion for personalism, he preached of human personality as divided rather than united? What was he like when, in his romantic but self-contained reflections on human sexuality, he spoke so abstractly but with such certainty that abstaining from sex was the highest ideal even for married couples?

Who was this man who sang the glories of the Blessed Mother but who kept real women beyond the end of his wagging finger and was determined, as if the fate of the world depended on it, to keep them out of the priesthood? Who was this man who always defended Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, but who absented himself from the final vote of the Vatican II commission that recommended a broadening of the church’s position on birth control?

Who was this man who looked away from the burgeoning sex abuse scandal of his clergy while he sheltered and defended the godfather of all sex abusers, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado? Who was he when he welcomed Cardinal Law to a Roman sinecure after Law was forced to resign from the archbishopric of Boston for his manner of dealing with sex abusing priests?

A man who looked away: a man who looked away when he smiled, so that his eyes appeared not to see those at whom he was smiling, the real human beings; a man who looked away when women asked him to see what being second-class citizens in a church that denies them ordination means for their real human lives; a man who looked away when lay Catholics asked him to engage in dialogue about how, no matter what Rome says, a huge majority of married Catholics are using contraceptives and will continue to do so, and the resistance of the church's top leaders to dialogue about this matter is scandalous.  And, finally, a man who turned his head and averted his eyes as the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Fr. Marcial Maciel, sexually molested one seminarian after another, fathered children and maintained them and their mothers in secret, using his community's funds to do this, abused narcotics, and, it's now known, raped his own children.

And here's the problem, of course: many of us don't want an icon of holiness for our church today who looks away, in the face of human need and human problems.  We want pastors who are human, who can engage our human faces with their human faces, face to face, eye to eye.  We want--we desperately need--pastors who will walk among us, hearing our voices, listening to our concerns and to what we have to say.  We don't want, we don't need, rock stars on stages lit by bright lights, far removed from us.

We try to imagine Jesus in all of this--in the looking away, in the self-absorption on a stage, in the smiles that aren't really smiles and the performance that masks the real human being behind the mask--and our imagination falters.  Because the Jesus about whom we read in the gospels wasn't on a stage.  He wasn't self-absorbed.  He was among the crowds, imminently approachable, so approachable that he gave himself away over and over again.

As he listened to those in need, wept with them, let them touch him, and invited them--everyone, and especially the outcasts of his world--to table.  As he repudiated the class system of his culture and priestly caste, which placed women beyond the pale, because of their menstrual impurity, so that no respectable rabbi would invite a woman, let alone one accused of immorality, to his table.  For fear that her ritual pollution would pollute him, the teacher.

For many of us, John Paul II does not point the way to holiness for the church today.  Made a saint, he will not be a symbol of holiness that charts the course for the church of the world in which we live today.  He will, instead, be a countersign, someone whose very remembrance points back to a model for holiness in the church of our period that thwarts the effective engagement of church with world.  Many of us remember the previous pope as a pope who called on us to pretend that all holiness in creation is found only in the church, and that the world is entirely full of sin--at the very moment in which we began to discover the depths of corruption within our church and its pastoral leaders, who had been hiding abusive priests and sending known  molesters of children back into parishes to abuse again.

The canonization of John Paul II is, of course, a foregone conclusion.  It always has been, because John Paul belongs to (in the sense that the Vatican and Catholic leaders have been bought by) a number of powerful and very wealthy right-wing Catholic groups who intended, from the outset, to secure his canonization.  Groups that have the backing of powerful and very wealthy right-wing political donors in the secular sphere in many places.  Canonization is every bit as much a political process as it is a religious one.  And money talks in political processes.

So the previous pope will most certainly be canonized, no matter how much the haste to declare him a saint causes pain to many Catholics--whose voices do not and will not count in this matter.  I predict, however, quite a bit more pain to come from this canonization, some of it unforeseen right now.

One of the hazards of rushing anyone to sainthood with unseemly haste is that the jury is often still out about aspects of that person's life, while people still living have pieces of information about him or her that may not yet have come to light.  I think we have yet to see or hear all that might be disclosed about John Paul's leadership of the church during the dark period in which the abuse crisis finally came to light.  And I suspect that some of what we will begin to hear after the beatification in May will not prove flattering at all for the legacy of the saint-to-be.

This canonization process is dividing the church even more than it is already divided, at a point in history in which it can least stand to be divided.  And the imminent beatification of JPII will only drive the wedge deeper, producing more pain in a church in which the pain of unresolved issues--issues from which John Paul averted his face--is already all around.