33 Sunday A #157
Prv 31, 10-13. 19-20. 30-31
Ps 128
1 Thes 5, 1-6
Mt 25, 14-30
Deacon Tom Cornell
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
November 16, 2008
Today’s Gospel parable can be confusing. But before we get to that, a married deacon can hardly let pass our first reading from Proverbs. It reads like a song, doesn’t it? The valiant women, the worthy wife brings her family increase by her labors and reaches her hands out to the poor and brings the favor of God upon her house. Beauty is fleeting. Well, not always. Not this time. It will be forty-five years for us, Monica and me. Our son and daughter came to us a couple of weeks ago and said they want to throw us a Golden Wedding Anniversary party next July. “But,” I said, “It’s only our 45th!” My daughter answered, “But Pa, how do you now you’re going to live another five years? And you might as well enjoy it now while you can.” That’s Catholic realism for you! We brought her up right. Family life is not for everyone. For us it’s been about as good as it gets – at last.
Today’s Gospel parable reminds me of the one in Luke’s Gospel about the unjust steward. The unjust steward writes off the debt owed to his master. Remember, he calls in the debtors and asks each one how much do you owe, and then has them change their bill to much less. He steals from his master in order to feather his own nest and yet his master praises him. Jesus was not suggesting in that parable that what the steward did was right and good. He makes it clear in the beginning that this is an unjust man, a man of darkness, like today’s master who reaps where he has not sown. The unjust steward acts wisely according to the wisdom of the age, the wisdom of darkness, of the unredeemed world. So it is with today’s parable. Jesus is not commending shrewd banking practices or investment tactics. In this parable too, Jesus holds up the guile and resourcefulness of the children of darkness to urge on the children of light. “We belong neither to darkness or to night; therefore let us not sleep like the rest, but stay awake and sober” against the day of judgment.
Let’s take a closer look at this parable. Jesus was talking about enormous sums of money, between sixty-five and one hundred pounds of silver or gold to one talent! His hearers were ill at ease listening to this, we can assume. Such sums of money were beyond their experience or
comprehension, mine too. They were uneasy too because the prophets of Israel had condemned usury, that is, taking interest on a loan, and so had the Psalmist. Money was for exchange, in their old fashioned view of things, not for making more money. Money stood for the value of goods that otherwise would have to be bartered. It’s a medium of exchange, that’s all. Money, or so they thought, is barren, sterile. It does not reproduce like a plant or an animal. Money does not make money and wealth. Work produces money and wealth. So the taking of money at interest was thought of as unnatural, perverse. Men are meant to live by the sweat of their brows, we learn in Genesis, the sweat of their own brows, not other peoples’ brows. And that is the essence of capitalism, living off the sweat of other peoples’ brows.
The Church is very suspicious and critical of capitalism. Many people are surprised to hear that. But it’s true. Still, we live in the real world and even the Church has investments. But the Church warns us to keep a watchful eye, because abuse of unregulated capitalism is so very easy. Wealth tends to percolate up to fewer and fewer hands, not filter down to more and more, and with wealth, power and influence, even over mass media, the power to misinform, to delude and manipulate. Power in fewer and fewer hands is a threat to democracy. Power serves its own purposes.
The Church always asks, of any economic or social program, “What does this do to the most vulnerable among us, the poor, the aged, the young? What does it do to the common good, the good of all of us?” Without some way of protecting the common good, things go wrong, desperately wrong, as we now must know. Unregulated lending for profit, usury, has led us into our present day economic crisis. How bad it’s going to get, and for how long, nobody knows. But we do know this: we are all going to feel it, sooner or later, and it’s going to be hard.
Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God. So the Church must proclaim the Kingdom of God, the City of God in the City of Man. That’s where we are, “in the world but not of it,” as we say. We strive for the Kingdom in our work. We pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” in the confidence that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. The Kingdom of God is a reign of peace and justice. So where is the justice, where the peace? This is the rabbis’ answer to our claim that Jesus is the awaited Messiah. “If he has come, where is the peace, where the justice? Look around. Nothing has changed. We’ll wait.”
Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is upon us, within us, in our midst, now. But as we can see, peace and justice do not reign on earth, not yet. The rabbis have a point. So we say of the Kingdom of God that it is here and not here, now but yet to come. Does that make any sense?
In Jesus it makes sense. Only in Jesus does it make sense. Jesus broke down the wall between Jew and gentile, between slave and free, between man and woman. More than that, Jesus broke down the wall between time and eternity, space and the “no-place” where God was before the Creation. “My peace I give you, not as the world gives.” We recall these words, his words in a few minutes. “My peace.” Those who struggle for peace and justice must know that neither peace nor justice is our first goal, but Jesus, friendship with Jesus, a personal knowledge of Jesus, a communion with Jesus. And that is precisely why we gather here today and every Sunday, to draw closer to Jesus and closer to each other in Jesus. Then the Kingdom breaks through, little by little.
We can help build the Kingdom of God, but we can not complete it. Only God can do that. Jesus will come again, and he will continue and finish what began aeons ago when Wisdom, Logos, witnessed the Creation and danced with joy. Only Jesus can lead us in the dance. Come, Lord Jesus!
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Military Chaplaincy
The Chaplain's Dilemma
Can pastors in the military serve God and government?
By Tom Cornell | NOVEMBER 17, 2008
the cover of America, the Catholic magazine
Editor’s note. In response to readers’ queries about the publication of advertisements in America for military chaplaincies, the editors invited articles about pastoral ministry to U.S. troops from John J. McLain, S.J., and Tom Cornell.
Full-page color advertisements for the military chaplaincy in Catholic publications have aroused ire in some—an emotion that pacifists shun, of course. I too was taken aback when I first saw in America magazine just such an ad. It was largely out of envy, another capital sin, because the Catholic Peace Fellowship cannot afford to advertise its full-time professional counseling. The C.P.F. receives 6 percent of all the calls made to the national GI Rights Hotline and takes calls at its own office in South Bend, Ind. Many of the calls come from members of the military and their families who are seeking counseling that, in better times and circumstances, they might expect from chaplains.
Since its beginning in 1964, the Catholic Peace Fellowship has specialized in counseling. Jim Forest and I had to train ourselves in counseling techniques, in the law and in Selective Service rules and regulations, which we did with help from colleagues at the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (now called the Center on Conscience & War) in Washington, D.C. At first we counseled Catholic conscientious objectors, then anyone who came to us from any background with any problem related to the draft, participation in war or military service. We had a very high success rate; clients received the Selective Service classification or discharge they sought. In 1980 we started training other counselors.
For decades, I have been thinking about the military chaplaincy. Surely men and women in the military deserve and have a right to the ministry of the church in word and sacrament. In this respect Catholics in the military and their dependents currently are underserved. The Archdiocese for the Military Services reports that Catholics make up 40 percent of the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard and are served by 140 priest chaplains; 28 percent of the Air Force, served by 90 chaplains; and 25 percent of the Army, served by 105 chaplains. If dependents and family members of service personnel are counted, the figure approximates two million persons served by 335 priests.
Need for Care
Members of the military are especially in need of pastoral care, young as most are and often married, with severe pressures on them in the best of times. These are among the worst of times, with multiple deployments to combat zones. We need more priest chaplains in military hospitals and in reserve and active units.
JVC provides the cornerstone for living out a commitment to faith and justice.
Consider the rate of divorce and of suicide in the military (double that of only a few years ago) or among veterans of the Iraq-Afghanistan war. In its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress in 2007, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that 15 percent of the 671,888 sheltered and unsheltered homeless people in the United States are veterans. And the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that up to 467,877 veterans are “at risk of homelessness,” because their means lie below the poverty level and they pay more than 50 percent of their household income on rent alone. The physical, mental and moral damage done to our sons and daughters calls for everything the Christian community can offer in the way of prevention and relief.
I remember hashing all this over more than once with the late Gordon Zahn, who proposed having the chaplaincy disestablished. He would have had priests minister to the troops, but as civilians, their formation and support coming from the church, not the state. That has been the case in the past in this country and elsewhere.
Disestablishment would solve some problems, but it would give rise to others. It is hard to imagine that the church could afford to make the prospect of chaplaincy to the military as attractive as the federal government can. Moreover, priests must have the permission of their diocesan bishops or religious superiors to volunteer for the military chaplaincy and to leave their parish or other assignments. Many bishops and superiors think they cannot spare priests for even a single period of enlistment.
Military Service as Morally Problematic
Military service for some men and women becomes morally problematic when after recruitment they become aware of church teaching and of the realities in which they are immersed. They need moral guidance especially at this point in their lives.
Catholics hear the definitive teaching of the Second Vatican Council: “Those who are pledged to the service of their country as members of its armed forces should regard themselves as agents of security and freedom on behalf of their people. As long as they fulfill their role properly, they are making a genuine contribution to the establishment of peace” (“The Church in the Modern World,” No. 79). They also hear the absolute condemnations of the use of weapons of mass destruction (No. 80) and the ratification, even the praise of the right to conscientious objection (Nos. 78 and 79). In view of that condemnation of the use of weapons of mass destruction and of The Challenge of Peace, the 1983 pastoral letter by the U.S. Catholic bishops, the Pentagon considered banning observant Catholics from postings to missile silos where nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles are kept ready for launch. Church authorities allayed their fears, however. American Catholics are “good citizens.” Contrary to international law and to Vatican II (No. 79), good Catholics can be relied upon to pass moral responsibility up the chain of command, or so they were advised.
I am not making an argument here for absolute pacifism as national policy. Justice demands the protection of the innocent, even by lethal force if necessary. But it is difficult, as Pope Benedict XVI has stated, to imagine that a war might be just in these times, even though justice may require police action, as in Rwanda or Sudan, as a last resort. An army as a valid police force is not what we object to. But what of those recruits who are convinced that the war in Iraq is illegal, unjust and immoral?
Early in the war, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, then head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, sent a pastoral letter to Catholic chaplains, advising them that they may calm the doubts of soldiers by telling them that their government leaders are privy to more information than is available to the public and that they may trust their leaders’ claims to justice for the cause. His letter did not endorse the war and did not question it either. It was very temperate. But any defender of the cause of any war at any time could utilize its reasoning. Not so with Bishop John Michael Botean of the Romanian Catholic Diocese in Canton, Ohio, who forbade his faithful to participate in the Iraq war under pain of mortal sin. Had other bishops or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops itself followed suit, we might well have had a crisis of church-state relations on our hands. Might it not be time for that?
The Web site of the military archdiocese offers a supportive commentary on the war in Iraq by Archbishop O’Brien from the time when he was the bishop in charge. But he would have come across different evidence and reached a different conclusion had his guides in Iraq not been U.S. military and political functionaries, but the unembedded journalists Ned Rosen, Dahr Jamail or Kathy Kelly, or had the archbishop visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Kurdistan.
Instilling Blood Lust
What of those in basic training who come to a sudden realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with efforts to instill blood lust in them? That is the training method since the discovery after World War II and the Korean war that only a small minority of soldiers who had an opportunity to shoot at a fellow human being wearing an enemy uniform would in fact do so. This was because of the normal instinct of our species not to kill those of our own kind. Since then, the psychological science of “killogy” has revolutionized basic training to override that instinct. (Pardon the grotesque neologism; it is not mine, but Col. Dave Grossman’s, former professor of psychology at West Point and author of studies on how to desensitize people to the point of loss of scruple against homicide.) Troops in training are led to chant, “Kill! Kill!” Here is a cadence commonly used now: “What makes the grass grow? Blood makes the grass grow! Who makes the blood flow? We do! We do! Blood! Blood! Blood!” These are not theoretical considerations. I know personally a young woman of humble origin and a director of Catholic Charities in a major archdiocese who both concluded that there is something morally wrong with this kind of basic training.
Chris Hedges, for 20 years a war correspondent for the The New York Times in El Salvador, the Middle East and the Balkans, noted in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that there is an erotic charge to all this. This is not your grandfather’s army! It is impossible to imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower saying in public, as General James Mattis did, “It’s a hoot…it’s fun to shoot some people.”
What of the young man or woman who knows instinctively that this attitude is wrong? What of the U.S. Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Joshua Casteel, who had an awakening when a Muslim prisoner challenged his Christian faith? What is the chaplain’s proper role then? Are chaplains prepared to deal with men and women in a crisis of conscience that puts them outside the pale of the military? As pastors, I mean, not as military officers. Joshua’s chaplain was supportive, but many chaplains are not.
Priests enlist in the military as chaplains with the best of intentions: to serve pastoral needs. But this is not why they are commissioned as officers or what they are paid for. According to their employers, the chaplaincy’s purpose is to contribute to the military success of the unit to which the chaplain is attached. This purpose may cause cognitive dissonance for some chaplains. It is not unreasonable to assume that many, however, will resolve their distress in favor of the presuppositions of the officer corps of which they are a part and into which they have been socialized.
In 1968 then-bishop John J. O’Connor, who was chief of chaplains for the U.S. military, wrote a book called A Chaplain Looks at Vietnam, in which he defended the U.S. war policy there. He sent me, among others, an autographed copy and asked what I thought of it. Later he withdrew the book and apologized for it, calling it “a very poor book that I would like to re-write today, or hide.” He wrote it obviously influenced by the officers with whom he served in Vietnam, most of them before 1968, who were sanguine about the enterprise and its outcome. In this way O’Connor started a relationship with me and I dare say even a friendship. After some correspondence he assured me that all chaplains under his command were trained to know and understand the law and rules and regulations that apply to discharge from military service on grounds of conscience, and that Catholic chaplains were told to counsel conscientious objector claimants with the presumption of good will.
I am sure Cardinal O’Connor meant what he said, but I am not sure he had the means to see whether the policy was actually in place. In fact, not long ago a highly regarded cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point had to face his chaplain as an adversary during a hearing to judge his conscientious objector claim. At that hearing, when Bishop Thomas Gumbleton appeared for the claimant, the chaplain remained silent. The cadet was released without prejudice. He deserved his chaplain’s support but did not get it.
Cardinal O’Connor had the right idea, or at least the right intention. The training of chaplains to support conscientious objectors never really took place, but if it had, much of the peace movement’s criticism of the military chaplaincy would be muted. We do not expect chaplains to trouble the consciences of their charges with the judgment of popes and episcopal conferences as to the justice of this or that war or of war in general. But we expect, even demand, that chaplains know the law and the rules and regulations pertaining to separation from military service by reason of conscience, and more critically, that they be instructed to counsel those who claim conscientious objection with a presumption of good intention.
Anecdotal evidence has it that the opposite is often the case. Conscientious objector claimants are sometimes challenged, accused of bad faith and dismissed out of hand as cowards and malingerers. That amounts to a dereliction of duty on the part of priest counselors. Citizens, even soldiers, have the right to appeal to the law. And counselors have an obligation to assume good faith in the absence of factual contrary evidence. Good conscience and right conscience are two different things, but the distinction may be assumed; questions of fact and logic may be raised, but not the validity of a moral judgment made honestly.
We in the peace movement will never be satisfied until the military chaplaincy is disestablished and priests and deacon chaplains are unambiguously servants of Christ and his church. Priests should not be forced to serve two masters.
Can pastors in the military serve God and government?
By Tom Cornell | NOVEMBER 17, 2008
the cover of America, the Catholic magazine
Editor’s note. In response to readers’ queries about the publication of advertisements in America for military chaplaincies, the editors invited articles about pastoral ministry to U.S. troops from John J. McLain, S.J., and Tom Cornell.
Full-page color advertisements for the military chaplaincy in Catholic publications have aroused ire in some—an emotion that pacifists shun, of course. I too was taken aback when I first saw in America magazine just such an ad. It was largely out of envy, another capital sin, because the Catholic Peace Fellowship cannot afford to advertise its full-time professional counseling. The C.P.F. receives 6 percent of all the calls made to the national GI Rights Hotline and takes calls at its own office in South Bend, Ind. Many of the calls come from members of the military and their families who are seeking counseling that, in better times and circumstances, they might expect from chaplains.
Since its beginning in 1964, the Catholic Peace Fellowship has specialized in counseling. Jim Forest and I had to train ourselves in counseling techniques, in the law and in Selective Service rules and regulations, which we did with help from colleagues at the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (now called the Center on Conscience & War) in Washington, D.C. At first we counseled Catholic conscientious objectors, then anyone who came to us from any background with any problem related to the draft, participation in war or military service. We had a very high success rate; clients received the Selective Service classification or discharge they sought. In 1980 we started training other counselors.
For decades, I have been thinking about the military chaplaincy. Surely men and women in the military deserve and have a right to the ministry of the church in word and sacrament. In this respect Catholics in the military and their dependents currently are underserved. The Archdiocese for the Military Services reports that Catholics make up 40 percent of the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard and are served by 140 priest chaplains; 28 percent of the Air Force, served by 90 chaplains; and 25 percent of the Army, served by 105 chaplains. If dependents and family members of service personnel are counted, the figure approximates two million persons served by 335 priests.
Need for Care
Members of the military are especially in need of pastoral care, young as most are and often married, with severe pressures on them in the best of times. These are among the worst of times, with multiple deployments to combat zones. We need more priest chaplains in military hospitals and in reserve and active units.
JVC provides the cornerstone for living out a commitment to faith and justice.
Consider the rate of divorce and of suicide in the military (double that of only a few years ago) or among veterans of the Iraq-Afghanistan war. In its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress in 2007, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that 15 percent of the 671,888 sheltered and unsheltered homeless people in the United States are veterans. And the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that up to 467,877 veterans are “at risk of homelessness,” because their means lie below the poverty level and they pay more than 50 percent of their household income on rent alone. The physical, mental and moral damage done to our sons and daughters calls for everything the Christian community can offer in the way of prevention and relief.
I remember hashing all this over more than once with the late Gordon Zahn, who proposed having the chaplaincy disestablished. He would have had priests minister to the troops, but as civilians, their formation and support coming from the church, not the state. That has been the case in the past in this country and elsewhere.
Disestablishment would solve some problems, but it would give rise to others. It is hard to imagine that the church could afford to make the prospect of chaplaincy to the military as attractive as the federal government can. Moreover, priests must have the permission of their diocesan bishops or religious superiors to volunteer for the military chaplaincy and to leave their parish or other assignments. Many bishops and superiors think they cannot spare priests for even a single period of enlistment.
Military Service as Morally Problematic
Military service for some men and women becomes morally problematic when after recruitment they become aware of church teaching and of the realities in which they are immersed. They need moral guidance especially at this point in their lives.
Catholics hear the definitive teaching of the Second Vatican Council: “Those who are pledged to the service of their country as members of its armed forces should regard themselves as agents of security and freedom on behalf of their people. As long as they fulfill their role properly, they are making a genuine contribution to the establishment of peace” (“The Church in the Modern World,” No. 79). They also hear the absolute condemnations of the use of weapons of mass destruction (No. 80) and the ratification, even the praise of the right to conscientious objection (Nos. 78 and 79). In view of that condemnation of the use of weapons of mass destruction and of The Challenge of Peace, the 1983 pastoral letter by the U.S. Catholic bishops, the Pentagon considered banning observant Catholics from postings to missile silos where nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles are kept ready for launch. Church authorities allayed their fears, however. American Catholics are “good citizens.” Contrary to international law and to Vatican II (No. 79), good Catholics can be relied upon to pass moral responsibility up the chain of command, or so they were advised.
I am not making an argument here for absolute pacifism as national policy. Justice demands the protection of the innocent, even by lethal force if necessary. But it is difficult, as Pope Benedict XVI has stated, to imagine that a war might be just in these times, even though justice may require police action, as in Rwanda or Sudan, as a last resort. An army as a valid police force is not what we object to. But what of those recruits who are convinced that the war in Iraq is illegal, unjust and immoral?
Early in the war, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, then head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, sent a pastoral letter to Catholic chaplains, advising them that they may calm the doubts of soldiers by telling them that their government leaders are privy to more information than is available to the public and that they may trust their leaders’ claims to justice for the cause. His letter did not endorse the war and did not question it either. It was very temperate. But any defender of the cause of any war at any time could utilize its reasoning. Not so with Bishop John Michael Botean of the Romanian Catholic Diocese in Canton, Ohio, who forbade his faithful to participate in the Iraq war under pain of mortal sin. Had other bishops or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops itself followed suit, we might well have had a crisis of church-state relations on our hands. Might it not be time for that?
The Web site of the military archdiocese offers a supportive commentary on the war in Iraq by Archbishop O’Brien from the time when he was the bishop in charge. But he would have come across different evidence and reached a different conclusion had his guides in Iraq not been U.S. military and political functionaries, but the unembedded journalists Ned Rosen, Dahr Jamail or Kathy Kelly, or had the archbishop visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Kurdistan.
Instilling Blood Lust
What of those in basic training who come to a sudden realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with efforts to instill blood lust in them? That is the training method since the discovery after World War II and the Korean war that only a small minority of soldiers who had an opportunity to shoot at a fellow human being wearing an enemy uniform would in fact do so. This was because of the normal instinct of our species not to kill those of our own kind. Since then, the psychological science of “killogy” has revolutionized basic training to override that instinct. (Pardon the grotesque neologism; it is not mine, but Col. Dave Grossman’s, former professor of psychology at West Point and author of studies on how to desensitize people to the point of loss of scruple against homicide.) Troops in training are led to chant, “Kill! Kill!” Here is a cadence commonly used now: “What makes the grass grow? Blood makes the grass grow! Who makes the blood flow? We do! We do! Blood! Blood! Blood!” These are not theoretical considerations. I know personally a young woman of humble origin and a director of Catholic Charities in a major archdiocese who both concluded that there is something morally wrong with this kind of basic training.
Chris Hedges, for 20 years a war correspondent for the The New York Times in El Salvador, the Middle East and the Balkans, noted in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that there is an erotic charge to all this. This is not your grandfather’s army! It is impossible to imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower saying in public, as General James Mattis did, “It’s a hoot…it’s fun to shoot some people.”
What of the young man or woman who knows instinctively that this attitude is wrong? What of the U.S. Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Joshua Casteel, who had an awakening when a Muslim prisoner challenged his Christian faith? What is the chaplain’s proper role then? Are chaplains prepared to deal with men and women in a crisis of conscience that puts them outside the pale of the military? As pastors, I mean, not as military officers. Joshua’s chaplain was supportive, but many chaplains are not.
Priests enlist in the military as chaplains with the best of intentions: to serve pastoral needs. But this is not why they are commissioned as officers or what they are paid for. According to their employers, the chaplaincy’s purpose is to contribute to the military success of the unit to which the chaplain is attached. This purpose may cause cognitive dissonance for some chaplains. It is not unreasonable to assume that many, however, will resolve their distress in favor of the presuppositions of the officer corps of which they are a part and into which they have been socialized.
In 1968 then-bishop John J. O’Connor, who was chief of chaplains for the U.S. military, wrote a book called A Chaplain Looks at Vietnam, in which he defended the U.S. war policy there. He sent me, among others, an autographed copy and asked what I thought of it. Later he withdrew the book and apologized for it, calling it “a very poor book that I would like to re-write today, or hide.” He wrote it obviously influenced by the officers with whom he served in Vietnam, most of them before 1968, who were sanguine about the enterprise and its outcome. In this way O’Connor started a relationship with me and I dare say even a friendship. After some correspondence he assured me that all chaplains under his command were trained to know and understand the law and rules and regulations that apply to discharge from military service on grounds of conscience, and that Catholic chaplains were told to counsel conscientious objector claimants with the presumption of good will.
I am sure Cardinal O’Connor meant what he said, but I am not sure he had the means to see whether the policy was actually in place. In fact, not long ago a highly regarded cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point had to face his chaplain as an adversary during a hearing to judge his conscientious objector claim. At that hearing, when Bishop Thomas Gumbleton appeared for the claimant, the chaplain remained silent. The cadet was released without prejudice. He deserved his chaplain’s support but did not get it.
Cardinal O’Connor had the right idea, or at least the right intention. The training of chaplains to support conscientious objectors never really took place, but if it had, much of the peace movement’s criticism of the military chaplaincy would be muted. We do not expect chaplains to trouble the consciences of their charges with the judgment of popes and episcopal conferences as to the justice of this or that war or of war in general. But we expect, even demand, that chaplains know the law and the rules and regulations pertaining to separation from military service by reason of conscience, and more critically, that they be instructed to counsel those who claim conscientious objection with a presumption of good intention.
Anecdotal evidence has it that the opposite is often the case. Conscientious objector claimants are sometimes challenged, accused of bad faith and dismissed out of hand as cowards and malingerers. That amounts to a dereliction of duty on the part of priest counselors. Citizens, even soldiers, have the right to appeal to the law. And counselors have an obligation to assume good faith in the absence of factual contrary evidence. Good conscience and right conscience are two different things, but the distinction may be assumed; questions of fact and logic may be raised, but not the validity of a moral judgment made honestly.
We in the peace movement will never be satisfied until the military chaplaincy is disestablished and priests and deacon chaplains are unambiguously servants of Christ and his church. Priests should not be forced to serve two masters.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Crossing the Bridge, Selma, 1965
Selma, Alabama, 1965
Our boy Tommy, Monica’s and mine, was born on February 10th, a month before Martin Luther King sent out the call for people from all over the country to come down to Selma, Alabama, to add momentum to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to win the right to vote for black people. Monica and I agreed, I had to go. Dan Berrigan gave me sixty dollars, the airfare. I flew into Montgomery, not knowing where I was going to stay the night. I walked where my nose led me with the intention of knocking on the first Catholic rectory door I came upon. So it was. I told the pastor why I had come. The local clergy had been forbidden to participate in the demonstrations, but not from aiding and abetting. The priest set the table, warmed up some leftovers, put a bottle of bourbon by my plate, sat with me and ate, then gave me a bed. The next day I took a bus to Selma, and was met there by Leroy Moton. He showed me the town. I had a choice of accommodations, he said. The floor of the parish center at Saint Edmund’s Church was littered with clerical Roman collars, black trousers and jackets. I chose to roll a bed into an x-ray room that was under construction at Good Samaritan Hospital when no one was looking and establish a comfortable little nook for myself.
Selma was strictly segregated in those days. The white people lived in a pretty little town with tidy pretty houses, green lawns, flowering trees and shrubs. The black section looked like something out of the old South Africa, shanties mostly and a project on sun-baked clay. On Sunday, March 7th, six hundred people attempted to cross the Pettus Bridge on a March to Montgomery to press for voting rights for all. The police met them with vicious dogs, high powered fire-hoses, water-cannon. The whole world saw it on television, peaceful black demonstrators with dogs tearing at their flesh and high powered water-cannon knocking them over and pinning them against walls with such force as to rip their clothes off. Two days later, three of the “outside agitators” were attacked with a baseball bat, one of them critically, a white man, Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister. Many blacks had been killed, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. When a white man lay dying, Martin King seized the moment and put out the call. He asked everyone who could to come to Selma. I had to go.
At that point, the black people of Selma tried again to take an elderly black gentleman to register to vote. The police stopped them in front of Brown’s chapel, so they sat down in front of the police, and they sat there, and they sat, for four days and nights, under the sun and the moon. We sang, “They got a thing called the Berlin Wall, in Selma, Alabama.” “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round. Keep on a-walking, keep on a-talking, walking up to freedom land.” “Paul and Silas were bound in jail, ain’t nobody for to go their bail. Keep your eye on the prize, hold on, hold on!” “We are soldiers in the army, we have to fight, we know we have to die.”
The state police chief came to intimidate us. Bull Connor had the neck of a bull. He played his part well. And with him came a public relations officer from Governor Wallace’s office, Wilson Baker, Mutt and Jeff, as the saying goes, “good cop, bad cop.” They weren’t happy. We sang to them, “We love Bull Connor....” “We love Wilson Baker in our hearts.” We tried to mean it. We had to hold on to the belief that good will overcome evil and to trust in God. I joined a group of about twenty clergy to picket Mayor Joe Smitherman’s house. Bull Connor promptly arrested us and herded us onto a bus. We started to sing. He growled. We stopped. That man was truly frightening. The arrest was clearly illegal and we were released shortly.
But those white people wanted to kill us, they really wanted to kill us, some of them. Doctor King told us that blood would flow. He said it had to be our blood, not theirs. He meant it. We knew it, and we accepted it. Our blood, not theirs! “We are soldiers in the army....” A different kind of army! A policeman had killed Jimmy Lee Jackson, just another black man, for trying to shield his grandmother from another police bully. Just arrived, I was with Jimmy Lee Jackson’s people for his wake. His little brother’s face! A nine year old suddenly stripped of his innocence, the sorrow in his eyes. He had seen hatred, blind, stupid hatred.
Jim Reeb’s body was taken to Brown’s Chapel. Abraham Joshua Heschel recited Kaddish as the overflow congregation hummed, “We Shall Overcome.” Martin King preached, Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church gave the benediction. Bishop Shannon, then President of Saint Thomas College in Minnesota, was there, and Richard John Neuhaus, priests and nuns and rabbis and ministers, black and white together, in Brown’s Chapel. After that funeral the police lifted the barricades and we marched to Selma Town Hall and we registered that voter.
Then at last the great March to Montgomery. I was a marshal for the first leg. A smaller representation made the whole route walking on Highway 80. Attorney General Nick Katzenbach mobilized the National Guard to protect us. At night we all gathered, one night at the Hospital of Saint Jude to hear Harry Bellafonte and Joan Baez sing to us. We made it to the state Capitol, a sea of people, and left our demands with Governor George Wallace. Then we returned to Selma.
When we arrived back at Good Samaritan Hospital, I went to the old folks’ solarium hoping that we made the evening news. There on the TV screen was President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressing a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the nation, an estimated audience of seventy million people. He was talking about us in Selma, he named us, he spoke of “that good man,” Jim Reeb. He told America that we were right, that the problem was not a “Negro problem, or a Southern problem, but an American problem,” and that it was “deadly wrong” to deny any American the right to vote. It was time to rid this nation of every trace of bigotry and race hatred, he said, and he asked Congress to send him the Voters’ Rights bill, that he would sign into law. This was a Southern white man speaking with a Southern accent. With his every phrase, our hearts lept. He punctuated his text with the words, “We shall overcome.” As he ended, he looked up straight at the camera and the world and he said again: “We shall overcome!” He placed himself with us. The Congress rose and roared approval.
We were thunderstruck. At that moment, we knew -- we had won! After so much suffering and death, nonviolence had won. The South was going to change. America would change. We had touched the conscience of the nation. We had won! I looked around that room at hardened radicals, veterans of bitter and bloody labor battles, veterans of the peace movement who had paid the price for refusal of military service in long prison terms, and I saw tears streaming down their faces. Dr. King wept too. Nobody in the Movement ever saw him cry before, just that once.
Lyndon Johnson knew what he was doing. Against the advice of his closest advisors, he was handing the South over to the Republican Party, shattering the Rooseveltian coalition of Southern conservatives with Northern liberal progressives and realigning American politics for the foreseeable future. We had crossed more than the Pettus Bridge.
Our boy Tommy, Monica’s and mine, was born on February 10th, a month before Martin Luther King sent out the call for people from all over the country to come down to Selma, Alabama, to add momentum to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to win the right to vote for black people. Monica and I agreed, I had to go. Dan Berrigan gave me sixty dollars, the airfare. I flew into Montgomery, not knowing where I was going to stay the night. I walked where my nose led me with the intention of knocking on the first Catholic rectory door I came upon. So it was. I told the pastor why I had come. The local clergy had been forbidden to participate in the demonstrations, but not from aiding and abetting. The priest set the table, warmed up some leftovers, put a bottle of bourbon by my plate, sat with me and ate, then gave me a bed. The next day I took a bus to Selma, and was met there by Leroy Moton. He showed me the town. I had a choice of accommodations, he said. The floor of the parish center at Saint Edmund’s Church was littered with clerical Roman collars, black trousers and jackets. I chose to roll a bed into an x-ray room that was under construction at Good Samaritan Hospital when no one was looking and establish a comfortable little nook for myself.
Selma was strictly segregated in those days. The white people lived in a pretty little town with tidy pretty houses, green lawns, flowering trees and shrubs. The black section looked like something out of the old South Africa, shanties mostly and a project on sun-baked clay. On Sunday, March 7th, six hundred people attempted to cross the Pettus Bridge on a March to Montgomery to press for voting rights for all. The police met them with vicious dogs, high powered fire-hoses, water-cannon. The whole world saw it on television, peaceful black demonstrators with dogs tearing at their flesh and high powered water-cannon knocking them over and pinning them against walls with such force as to rip their clothes off. Two days later, three of the “outside agitators” were attacked with a baseball bat, one of them critically, a white man, Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister. Many blacks had been killed, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. When a white man lay dying, Martin King seized the moment and put out the call. He asked everyone who could to come to Selma. I had to go.
At that point, the black people of Selma tried again to take an elderly black gentleman to register to vote. The police stopped them in front of Brown’s chapel, so they sat down in front of the police, and they sat there, and they sat, for four days and nights, under the sun and the moon. We sang, “They got a thing called the Berlin Wall, in Selma, Alabama.” “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round. Keep on a-walking, keep on a-talking, walking up to freedom land.” “Paul and Silas were bound in jail, ain’t nobody for to go their bail. Keep your eye on the prize, hold on, hold on!” “We are soldiers in the army, we have to fight, we know we have to die.”
The state police chief came to intimidate us. Bull Connor had the neck of a bull. He played his part well. And with him came a public relations officer from Governor Wallace’s office, Wilson Baker, Mutt and Jeff, as the saying goes, “good cop, bad cop.” They weren’t happy. We sang to them, “We love Bull Connor....” “We love Wilson Baker in our hearts.” We tried to mean it. We had to hold on to the belief that good will overcome evil and to trust in God. I joined a group of about twenty clergy to picket Mayor Joe Smitherman’s house. Bull Connor promptly arrested us and herded us onto a bus. We started to sing. He growled. We stopped. That man was truly frightening. The arrest was clearly illegal and we were released shortly.
But those white people wanted to kill us, they really wanted to kill us, some of them. Doctor King told us that blood would flow. He said it had to be our blood, not theirs. He meant it. We knew it, and we accepted it. Our blood, not theirs! “We are soldiers in the army....” A different kind of army! A policeman had killed Jimmy Lee Jackson, just another black man, for trying to shield his grandmother from another police bully. Just arrived, I was with Jimmy Lee Jackson’s people for his wake. His little brother’s face! A nine year old suddenly stripped of his innocence, the sorrow in his eyes. He had seen hatred, blind, stupid hatred.
Jim Reeb’s body was taken to Brown’s Chapel. Abraham Joshua Heschel recited Kaddish as the overflow congregation hummed, “We Shall Overcome.” Martin King preached, Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church gave the benediction. Bishop Shannon, then President of Saint Thomas College in Minnesota, was there, and Richard John Neuhaus, priests and nuns and rabbis and ministers, black and white together, in Brown’s Chapel. After that funeral the police lifted the barricades and we marched to Selma Town Hall and we registered that voter.
Then at last the great March to Montgomery. I was a marshal for the first leg. A smaller representation made the whole route walking on Highway 80. Attorney General Nick Katzenbach mobilized the National Guard to protect us. At night we all gathered, one night at the Hospital of Saint Jude to hear Harry Bellafonte and Joan Baez sing to us. We made it to the state Capitol, a sea of people, and left our demands with Governor George Wallace. Then we returned to Selma.
When we arrived back at Good Samaritan Hospital, I went to the old folks’ solarium hoping that we made the evening news. There on the TV screen was President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressing a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the nation, an estimated audience of seventy million people. He was talking about us in Selma, he named us, he spoke of “that good man,” Jim Reeb. He told America that we were right, that the problem was not a “Negro problem, or a Southern problem, but an American problem,” and that it was “deadly wrong” to deny any American the right to vote. It was time to rid this nation of every trace of bigotry and race hatred, he said, and he asked Congress to send him the Voters’ Rights bill, that he would sign into law. This was a Southern white man speaking with a Southern accent. With his every phrase, our hearts lept. He punctuated his text with the words, “We shall overcome.” As he ended, he looked up straight at the camera and the world and he said again: “We shall overcome!” He placed himself with us. The Congress rose and roared approval.
We were thunderstruck. At that moment, we knew -- we had won! After so much suffering and death, nonviolence had won. The South was going to change. America would change. We had touched the conscience of the nation. We had won! I looked around that room at hardened radicals, veterans of bitter and bloody labor battles, veterans of the peace movement who had paid the price for refusal of military service in long prison terms, and I saw tears streaming down their faces. Dr. King wept too. Nobody in the Movement ever saw him cry before, just that once.
Lyndon Johnson knew what he was doing. Against the advice of his closest advisors, he was handing the South over to the Republican Party, shattering the Rooseveltian coalition of Southern conservatives with Northern liberal progressives and realigning American politics for the foreseeable future. We had crossed more than the Pettus Bridge.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Voting Is Not Enough
31 Sunday A #148
Ex 22, 20-25
Ps 18
1 Thes 1, 5-10
Mt 22, 34-40
Newman Parish
University of Rochester
October 26, 2008
Deacon Tom Cornell
I have here a long sermon, about 2,000 words, five pages single-spaced. When I showed it to Fr. Brian he said, “Oh, no, Tom! These are college students. Give them a break! They’ve been lectured at all week! Have mercy!” Okay, here, I’ll put it down.
In a week and two days we go to the polls, many if not most of us for the first time. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, intrinsic evils, and the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And our unjust immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it.
The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children. And let me add torture. Torture is also a crime against life, condemned by the Second Vatican Council.
Our bishops have not addressed issues that address the political order as such, for instance the erosion of civil liberties in the so-called “War on Terror.” In a university setting, it is not inappropriate to take note of the expansion of the powers of the President these past eight years, usurpation of powers to put it more accurately, under the concept of the unitary executive and how that affects human dignity: the power to override Congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health care, the power to wage undeclared war, the power to create military courts to try civilians, the power to seize and transport anyone to secret prisons in foreign lands, to authorize torture. Never has the Constitution been under such attack, and few seem to notice. In these days of economic turmoil, our attention is on matters closer to home.
No party and no candidate fills the bill when it come to our needs at home or our foreign policy. Neither party comes clean on Iraq and Afghanistan. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards.
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. It’s gone to the same people who engineered the economic crisis we are now entering, the worst since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch.
No matter who wins on November 4th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their last debate. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
Voting is important, a duty, but it is not enough. This country has never made any social advance unless the people rose up and demanded it. So we learned in the labor movement, so we learned in the Civil Rights Movement. So we learned during the Viet Nam war on the streets and in jail cells and in prison.
The kind of struggle we need, this country needs, will be long and hard and it’s going to cost. The kind of struggle we need can not be sustained by weak tea, I mean by a watered down faith. We need a strong and deep faith, strengthened and deepened by prayer and the sacraments.
Let me tell you a story. My friend Igal Roodenko was born in Philadelphia of a secular Jewish family in 1911. His first language was Yiddish. Igal was very well loved in our Catholic Worker community, although he was an atheist. He earned a master’s degree in plant pathology at Cornell University before World War II so that he could go to Palestine to help establish a Jewish state there, “a land without people for a people without a land.” That’s the founding myth of the modern Israeli state, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But then as Igal completed his course work, it occurred to him: there are people in Palestine. They are Palestinians. They have been there for thousands of years. They would resist having their land, their homes and farms and businesses taken from them. The Zionists would have to kill lots of Arab Palestinians to control Palestine! Igal could not eat meat. He was a vegetarian. He couldn’t even eat a fish! How was he going to kill an Arab?
Igal went to prison in World War II for three years for refusing to kill Germans and Japanese. He told me more than once that he would have loved to be able to join the army and take part in the great adventure of his generation. But he couldn’t go. He just couldn’t. In prison he met men he would never have found in the course of ordinary life, men who thought as he did. There were, and are, few of them, but more of them today. Together they studied the nonviolent theory and practice of Mahatma Gandhi. These men studied and argued about nonviolence and about our country’s social problems, and came to the conclusion that race is the fault-line in this society. They determined that after the war, after they were released from prison, they would apply Gandhian nonviolence to the race issue. The first Freedom Ride was not in 1960 – the photos you may have seen of the bus burning in Anniston, Georgia. The first Freedom Ride was in 1947, and every man on that ride spent World War II in prison for refusing military service. Igal served thirty days on a chain-gang in Virginia for sitting next to a black man on a bus. Those men sparked the great movement that finally dismantled the legal structures of racial segregation in this country, and, it is not too much to say, they saved this country.
Not long before he died, Igal reminisced. He said to me, “I’ve been in the Movement for a long time.” (He meant the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the peace movement.) “The Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Seventies and the Eighties. There were all kinds of radicals. There were Communists and Trotskyists and Socialists and anarchists and you Catholic Workers. Now they’re all gone. All gone but you. And you are stronger than ever. You know what it is, I think, what keeps you going?” “Tell me Igal, what is it?” “I think it’s your religious faith!” Igal did not die an atheist.
Today’s Gospel has Jesus restate the Two Great Commandments of love, love of God and love of neighbor, and in the parable of the Good Samaritan he expands neighbor to include even the foreigner, even the enemy. If we love God with all our hearts and all our minds and all our strength and our neighbors as ourselves, then we will not be content just to vote. We will want to take our part in the struggle for peace and justice with all our hearts and minds and strength, the nonviolent struggle for the beloved community, the only struggle that can truly claim to have God on its side.
Ex 22, 20-25
Ps 18
1 Thes 1, 5-10
Mt 22, 34-40
Newman Parish
University of Rochester
October 26, 2008
Deacon Tom Cornell
I have here a long sermon, about 2,000 words, five pages single-spaced. When I showed it to Fr. Brian he said, “Oh, no, Tom! These are college students. Give them a break! They’ve been lectured at all week! Have mercy!” Okay, here, I’ll put it down.
In a week and two days we go to the polls, many if not most of us for the first time. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, intrinsic evils, and the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And our unjust immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it.
The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children. And let me add torture. Torture is also a crime against life, condemned by the Second Vatican Council.
Our bishops have not addressed issues that address the political order as such, for instance the erosion of civil liberties in the so-called “War on Terror.” In a university setting, it is not inappropriate to take note of the expansion of the powers of the President these past eight years, usurpation of powers to put it more accurately, under the concept of the unitary executive and how that affects human dignity: the power to override Congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health care, the power to wage undeclared war, the power to create military courts to try civilians, the power to seize and transport anyone to secret prisons in foreign lands, to authorize torture. Never has the Constitution been under such attack, and few seem to notice. In these days of economic turmoil, our attention is on matters closer to home.
No party and no candidate fills the bill when it come to our needs at home or our foreign policy. Neither party comes clean on Iraq and Afghanistan. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards.
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. It’s gone to the same people who engineered the economic crisis we are now entering, the worst since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch.
No matter who wins on November 4th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their last debate. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
Voting is important, a duty, but it is not enough. This country has never made any social advance unless the people rose up and demanded it. So we learned in the labor movement, so we learned in the Civil Rights Movement. So we learned during the Viet Nam war on the streets and in jail cells and in prison.
The kind of struggle we need, this country needs, will be long and hard and it’s going to cost. The kind of struggle we need can not be sustained by weak tea, I mean by a watered down faith. We need a strong and deep faith, strengthened and deepened by prayer and the sacraments.
Let me tell you a story. My friend Igal Roodenko was born in Philadelphia of a secular Jewish family in 1911. His first language was Yiddish. Igal was very well loved in our Catholic Worker community, although he was an atheist. He earned a master’s degree in plant pathology at Cornell University before World War II so that he could go to Palestine to help establish a Jewish state there, “a land without people for a people without a land.” That’s the founding myth of the modern Israeli state, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But then as Igal completed his course work, it occurred to him: there are people in Palestine. They are Palestinians. They have been there for thousands of years. They would resist having their land, their homes and farms and businesses taken from them. The Zionists would have to kill lots of Arab Palestinians to control Palestine! Igal could not eat meat. He was a vegetarian. He couldn’t even eat a fish! How was he going to kill an Arab?
Igal went to prison in World War II for three years for refusing to kill Germans and Japanese. He told me more than once that he would have loved to be able to join the army and take part in the great adventure of his generation. But he couldn’t go. He just couldn’t. In prison he met men he would never have found in the course of ordinary life, men who thought as he did. There were, and are, few of them, but more of them today. Together they studied the nonviolent theory and practice of Mahatma Gandhi. These men studied and argued about nonviolence and about our country’s social problems, and came to the conclusion that race is the fault-line in this society. They determined that after the war, after they were released from prison, they would apply Gandhian nonviolence to the race issue. The first Freedom Ride was not in 1960 – the photos you may have seen of the bus burning in Anniston, Georgia. The first Freedom Ride was in 1947, and every man on that ride spent World War II in prison for refusing military service. Igal served thirty days on a chain-gang in Virginia for sitting next to a black man on a bus. Those men sparked the great movement that finally dismantled the legal structures of racial segregation in this country, and, it is not too much to say, they saved this country.
Not long before he died, Igal reminisced. He said to me, “I’ve been in the Movement for a long time.” (He meant the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the peace movement.) “The Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Seventies and the Eighties. There were all kinds of radicals. There were Communists and Trotskyists and Socialists and anarchists and you Catholic Workers. Now they’re all gone. All gone but you. And you are stronger than ever. You know what it is, I think, what keeps you going?” “Tell me Igal, what is it?” “I think it’s your religious faith!” Igal did not die an atheist.
Today’s Gospel has Jesus restate the Two Great Commandments of love, love of God and love of neighbor, and in the parable of the Good Samaritan he expands neighbor to include even the foreigner, even the enemy. If we love God with all our hearts and all our minds and all our strength and our neighbors as ourselves, then we will not be content just to vote. We will want to take our part in the struggle for peace and justice with all our hearts and minds and strength, the nonviolent struggle for the beloved community, the only struggle that can truly claim to have God on its side.
Voting Conscience
29 Sunday A #145
Is 45, 1. 4-6
Ps 96
1 Thes 1, 1-5
Mt 22, 15-21
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
October 19, 2008
As Catholic Christians and as American citizens we face dilemmas approaching the polls two weeks and two days from now. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” first as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And we are to consider immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it. The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children.
No party and no candidate fills the bill. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards. Have you noticed?
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, year after year, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. I don’t have to tell you. It’s gone to the same people who cooked up the mess we are now entering, the worst economic crisis since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch. What to do now? No party and no candidate passes muster on each and every issue and some issues are more important than others. Each voter must weigh them. There is no one litmus test that’s going to help you make up your mind, and no bishop, priest or deacon is going to do it for you either. Maybe it’s time to consider a third party. We’re all in the same boat, and we’re taking on water.
No matter who wins on November 4th, no matter who takes the White House on January 20th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one as is so often the case, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their debate last Wednesday night. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! Too many of us, even many of us who are poor by ordinary standards, live wasteful lives, unsustainable for the planet. If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. We have to find different ways of living. Put the laundry out to dry on a clothesline rather than into an electric dryer. Turn down the thermostat five degrees and dig out Grandpa’s long johns and put on a sweater. How about the old Christian practice of fasting? Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” The Pharisees tried to set a trap for Jesus. Jesus didn’t answer their question. Jesus gave an answer to a question they didn’t ask. Modern politicians have adopted that tactic, if little else from Jesus. “Show me a coin,” he said. Jesus did not have a coin of his own. He had to ask for one. Dorothy Day used to say the less we have of Caesar’s the less we have to give him back. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Where do the things of God end and the things of Caesar begin? Surely we must obey God rather than man, and just as surely, we are called to responsible citizenship. The things that are God’s are human life, human dignity because God created man in his own image and likeness. Come to think of it, there are no things that are not God’s things ultimately, for God created them all and saw that they are good and gave them all to all of us, not to some of us, but to all of us to share and to pass on.
“Render unto Caesar!” Our boast as Americans is that we have no king, no Caesar. Ours is a “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, unless we let it fall from our grasp into the hands of invisible and irresponsible corporate managers for them to pull the strings that move our Congress and even our courts and to speak with ventriloquist voice from the Oval Office.
The old American Indian saying goes, “When you see that your canoe is heading toward a waterfall, pray to God and row as hard as you can to shore!” Pray to Archangel Michael to help us row the boat ashore. Old-timers remember a prayer we all recited after every Latin Mass for the conversion of Russia:
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in the battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, and do thou, Oh prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into Hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander the earth seeking the ruin of souls.” Pray that prayer now for the conversion of the United States!
Is 45, 1. 4-6
Ps 96
1 Thes 1, 1-5
Mt 22, 15-21
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
October 19, 2008
As Catholic Christians and as American citizens we face dilemmas approaching the polls two weeks and two days from now. Our bishops have instructed us to consider “the life issues” first as we decide how to vote, abortion and embryonic cell research, euthanasia, the death penalty, and unjust war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. And we are to consider immigration policy, poverty here and abroad and the threats to the earth and sea and sky, the very air we breathe by climate change and our part in it. The right to life covers a broad area. The right to life does not end at birth. And the right to life includes by necessity the right to the means to life. That means food, clothing and shelter and medical care. But it also means the right to education and training for an honest job that pays a living wage because without these there is no decent life for us or our children.
No party and no candidate fills the bill. We have to weigh matters and all too often we have to choose the lesser of two evils. No candidate and no party has offered a full employment goal or a living wage policy. A family should be able to live on the salary of one full-time working parent. That has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in this country since World War I. And yet we still don’t have it. In fact, for the past thirty years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, we have been going backwards. Have you noticed?
The American worker is the most productive worker in the world, year after year, we like to boast. For every hour of work the value of what the worker has produced has increased. In the past, wages and productivity have risen together, more or less in step. If workers produced more, then they earned more. But not for the last thirty years. The buying power of all but the top 10 percent of our population has actually declined since 1973. The minimum wage, if it had kept up with increased productivity over the past thirty years, would now be close to twenty dollars an hour instead of less than the seven dollars it is today. Everybody’s wages would rise as we shared the product of our own labor! Take a guess where the extra profit has gone. I don’t have to tell you. It’s gone to the same people who cooked up the mess we are now entering, the worst economic crisis since 1929. Democrats as well as Republicans have allowed this to happen. The blame lies at both their doors, and at our own too because we let it happen. We were asleep at the switch. What to do now? No party and no candidate passes muster on each and every issue and some issues are more important than others. Each voter must weigh them. There is no one litmus test that’s going to help you make up your mind, and no bishop, priest or deacon is going to do it for you either. Maybe it’s time to consider a third party. We’re all in the same boat, and we’re taking on water.
No matter who wins on November 4th, no matter who takes the White House on January 20th, our country, our society will have much the same problems we have today. Our problems are at base spiritual. Because our problems are at base spiritual they must be addressed spiritually, with the weapons of spirit. The weapons of the spirit are first of all prayer, the prayer we say with or without words alone in quiet and the prayer we pray together here today as we break open the Word of God in Scripture and share the Sacrament of the Altar breaking bread together, the Body and Blood of the Savior.
Then the works of mercy, the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and the rest. We must cultivate a merciful and loving attitude to those in need, not a judgmental one as is so often the case, not a “Why don’t they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” way of thinking. Pray God’s mercy upon us. Pray that he take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. And the spiritual works of mercy. The spiritual works of mercy are as important as the corporal: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting those in grief, pointing out their errors to those who are on the wrong path in the spirit of charity, forgiving those who have hurt us and praying for them.
Our national problems, our societal problems can be laid out on the grid of the seven deadly sins. The same vices that beset our private lives bedevil our common life: pride, greed, envy, sloth, lust, anger and gluttony. The cure for them can be laid out on a grid too, the virtues that are their opposites: for pride humility, for envy kindness, for anger patience, for lust self-control, for gluttony temperance, for greed liberality, for sloth diligence.
Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama mentioned greed in their debate last Wednesday night. They might have gone down the list to include each one of the vices. Gluttony! Too many of us, even many of us who are poor by ordinary standards, live wasteful lives, unsustainable for the planet. If everybody on earth wasted as much as the average American does the earth’s resources would run out in a very few years. We have to find different ways of living. Put the laundry out to dry on a clothesline rather than into an electric dryer. Turn down the thermostat five degrees and dig out Grandpa’s long johns and put on a sweater. How about the old Christian practice of fasting? Our bishops pledged that they would voluntarily abstain from eating meat on Fridays as a sacrifice for peace. Meatless Fridays are no longer obligatory, except in Lent. That’s why it’s even better to skip meat on Fridays, because you don’t have to, you want to. And it’s a good idea to skip a meal or two every week and send what you save to a soup kitchen or a food bank. Fasting and almsgiving cancel out sins, so the ancient fathers taught.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” The Pharisees tried to set a trap for Jesus. Jesus didn’t answer their question. Jesus gave an answer to a question they didn’t ask. Modern politicians have adopted that tactic, if little else from Jesus. “Show me a coin,” he said. Jesus did not have a coin of his own. He had to ask for one. Dorothy Day used to say the less we have of Caesar’s the less we have to give him back. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Where do the things of God end and the things of Caesar begin? Surely we must obey God rather than man, and just as surely, we are called to responsible citizenship. The things that are God’s are human life, human dignity because God created man in his own image and likeness. Come to think of it, there are no things that are not God’s things ultimately, for God created them all and saw that they are good and gave them all to all of us, not to some of us, but to all of us to share and to pass on.
“Render unto Caesar!” Our boast as Americans is that we have no king, no Caesar. Ours is a “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, unless we let it fall from our grasp into the hands of invisible and irresponsible corporate managers for them to pull the strings that move our Congress and even our courts and to speak with ventriloquist voice from the Oval Office.
The old American Indian saying goes, “When you see that your canoe is heading toward a waterfall, pray to God and row as hard as you can to shore!” Pray to Archangel Michael to help us row the boat ashore. Old-timers remember a prayer we all recited after every Latin Mass for the conversion of Russia:
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in the battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, and do thou, Oh prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into Hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander the earth seeking the ruin of souls.” Pray that prayer now for the conversion of the United States!
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