21 Sunday A #121
Is 22, 19-23
Ps 138
Rom 11, 33-36
Mt 16, 13-20
August 21, 2011
Deacon Tom Cornell
Jesus and his disciples have been up north in what is now Lebanon, trying to get away from the crowds that gathered around Jesus. They needed time to think and to pray. So did Jesus. Now they are on their way south to Jewish territory. In this morning’s reading we find them in northern Galilee on their way back to Judaea where the drama will be played out soon enough. They skirt Caesarea Philippi, a city built by Philip, son of Herod and Tetrarch of Trachonitis to honor the Roman emperor. The city lies in ruins, no one lives there now. Still it is a splendid site, reflecting the glory that was ancient Rome. It was built by slaves, and maybe even Jesus had been conscripted from Joseph’s carpentry shop to work on it. Slavery lay the foundation for wealth in the ancient world and it was taken for granted as part of the human condition until the 19th Century, not so long ago in historical terms.
In today’s Gospel reading Jesus asks his closest companions, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They answer him, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “And you,” he asks, “who do you say that I am?”
Did Jesus himself know who he was, precisely? As a little baby in the manger did he know that he was both God and man, the Incarnate Word of God, the Second Person of the Trinity? Not likely! Scripture tells us “he grew in wisdom, age and grace before God and men” (Lk, 2, 52.) His self-knowledge developed. As an adolescent Jesus knew he had a special relationship to God. “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?” (Lk 2, 49). After his baptism by John, Jesus goes to the desert to fast and pray for forty days to discern his mission. He must not have known what his mission was if he had to discern it. And he is tempted. But he sees the right path and he sets out upon it. Even at the last, on the Cross, he calls out, “Lord, my Lord, why have you forsaken me?” Saint Paul tells us that “although he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at, but emptied himself and took on the form of a slave” (Phil 2, 6-11). Emptied himself! That is, he set aside all divine powers and prerogatives so as to live just as you and I do, as a man, a human being like any other. Otherwise, how could we men and women be called to follow in his footsteps, to imitate Christ?
“Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers for the other apostles. “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my heavenly Father. As for me, I tell you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. I entrust to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you hold bound on earth, it shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, it shall be loosed in heaven.”
Moments later, when Peter remonstrates with Jesus, telling him that he should not suffer and die in Jerusalem as he has just predicted, Jesus tells Peter, “Get you behind me, Satan!” This is not the only time that Peter fails. And yet Peter is always mentioned first in every listing of the apostles. It is Peter who speaks for all the others. It was Peter to whom Jesus entrusted the keys to the kingdom. It was Peter who gathered the apostles together after the Resurrection when their faith was faltering. It was Peter who was told, “Feed my lambs, feed my sheep” (Lk 21, 15-17).
There were disagreements in the early church, especially as Gentiles, more and more of them sought baptism, in Palestine but throughout the Mediterranean basin. It was for Peter to see that the other church leaders came to agreement and that they did not split up into factions and so weaken the witness to the Risen Lord.
It is our belief that the Bishop of Rome, is the successor of the Apostle Peter. The Pope is the symbol and the guarantor of the unity of the Church. That’s what he’s for above all else, to be the symbol and guarantor of the unity of the Church. Why is unity so important? In the 17th Chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus prays for the apostles and all who will come after them in faith, that “they all be one, Father, just as you and I are one, so that the world might believe that you have sent me.” Three times he prays, “that they be one” (Jn 17, 20-23). Good people, non-Christians look upon a divided church and wonder, which should I join, the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist – and there are many others. They all claim to have the truth but they do not agree one with another. And so many good people turn away.
Mahatma Gandhi, the Hindu saint, is a good example. As a young lawyer in South Africa, he read the Sermon the Mount and was mightily moved by it. He built a philosophy of action based in good part upon it, satyagraha, nonviolence or soul force. He said that if Christians acted as Jesus did, if they did what Jesus instructed them to do, then he would believe and be baptized. Gandhi freed India with nonviolence and Martin Luther King changed America with it. They believed that, if we come closer to the model that Jesus left us, the day will come when war will be as unthinkable as slavery.
That should leave us all with a question. What does it really mean to follow Jesus?
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sunday, August 7, 2011
You Bet!
19 Sunday A #115
1 Kgs 19, 9a. 11-13a
Ps 85
Rom 9, 1-5
Mt 14, 22-33
August 7, 2011
Deacon Tom Cornell
Every one of us, every baptized Christian is under the Great Commission to proclaim the Good News and to build the Kingdom. The Good News isn’t just about heaven and the world to come. It’s about the world as it is here and now: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Bishops and priests and deacons proclaim the principles of Gospel justice and peace. But it is up to you, the people, the lay faithful, to apply them, so that, little by little, we advance toward the Kingdom of God and its perfect justice and peace. To do that we must know not only the principles, but the facts, the realities of our day. The Church strenuously defends the right to private property. At the same time the Church teaches that all the world’s goods were created for everybody’s benefit. Those who have must take into account the needs of those who have not and the common good of all. You won’t know the facts from a steady diet of Fox News. And you surely won’t get the principles! “It’s my money, I made it by hard and honest work and I can do with it what I want” is not a Catholic attitude unless what you want to do with it is what God wants you to do with it. Read our own Catholic New York and reliable journals of opinion from right to left and make up your own minds, remembering our Church’s often repeated preferential option for the poor, the young, the vulnerable, the unborn, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the unemployed and the unemployable, immigrants. It is undeniable that there has been a hardening, a coarsening of attitudes toward these “least of the brethren” in the past few years in our country. Make up your own mind in prayer, listening to that small, still voice that comes not in earthquake or whirlwind or thunder and fire but in a whisper, a still whisper, the voice of conscience.
Today’s Gospel reading follows last Sunday’s. Remember Jesus was shaken by the news that King Herod has executed John the Baptist. He is looking for a quiet place to rest and to pray, but he is pressed upon by a large crowd and feeds them all with five loaves and two fishes. That feeding of the five thousand ought to be enough to convince us of his truth, whether it was a physical miracle or a moral one, whether he literally made many loaves out of a few or whether, even more miraculous, he opened people’s hearts so that they opened their hidden bags of food to share. Jesus is still shaken and tired today. Again he’s trying to get away to rest and to pray. Today he walks upon water to calm the storm and rescue his disciples. At first, they think they may be seeing things, maybe a ghost. “Be not afraid,” he assures them. Then Peter calls to Jesus, “If it’s really you, command me to come to you over the water.” Jesus calls to Peter, “Come!” At first Peter sets out upon the waves with confidence. Then his faith falters and he begins to sink. Jesus extends his hand, grasps Peter’s and all is well, he is saved. Then Jesus has a word with Peter: “Oh you of little faith, why do you doubt?” Why do we doubt?
Doubt is natural, normal. If we didn’t have doubt we could not have faith either. Why is anything? Are we alone in a meaningless universe, lost in the stars? Is the universe, is God friendly, hostile or indifferent? Is a Galilean Jew two thousand years dead the revelation of God, risen from the dead, the answer to our questions, the way, the truth and the life, as he claimed? Look at the way history has unfolded. There is proof enough. Not mathematical proof, not the kind of proof that demands assent from any and all honest minds. God does not force anybody to believe. But proof enough for me, that only light can dispel darkness, only good conquer evil, only love overcome hate. Only forgiveness can cancel wrongs. It’s the Sermon on the Mount. It’s the Cross. I know. I have seen it happen, the lame walk, the blind regain their sight and see.
This is the most important hour of the week, when we hear the Word of God and are strengthened in faith by sharing his Body and Blood to go out and do his will. Those who are not here today – do they know what they are missing? Tell them! Billions of people for almost two thousand years have lived their lives for this faith and literally millions have gone to their deaths for this faith, in our own day 37 priests murdered in 2009, about the same last year and a bishop or two, and so many lay people that figures are unreliable! Is it a faith worth dying for? You bet it is! There is nothing to fear. All is well, all will be well. Christ had died. Christ is risen! Christ will come again. You can bet your life on it!
1 Kgs 19, 9a. 11-13a
Ps 85
Rom 9, 1-5
Mt 14, 22-33
August 7, 2011
Deacon Tom Cornell
Every one of us, every baptized Christian is under the Great Commission to proclaim the Good News and to build the Kingdom. The Good News isn’t just about heaven and the world to come. It’s about the world as it is here and now: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Bishops and priests and deacons proclaim the principles of Gospel justice and peace. But it is up to you, the people, the lay faithful, to apply them, so that, little by little, we advance toward the Kingdom of God and its perfect justice and peace. To do that we must know not only the principles, but the facts, the realities of our day. The Church strenuously defends the right to private property. At the same time the Church teaches that all the world’s goods were created for everybody’s benefit. Those who have must take into account the needs of those who have not and the common good of all. You won’t know the facts from a steady diet of Fox News. And you surely won’t get the principles! “It’s my money, I made it by hard and honest work and I can do with it what I want” is not a Catholic attitude unless what you want to do with it is what God wants you to do with it. Read our own Catholic New York and reliable journals of opinion from right to left and make up your own minds, remembering our Church’s often repeated preferential option for the poor, the young, the vulnerable, the unborn, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the unemployed and the unemployable, immigrants. It is undeniable that there has been a hardening, a coarsening of attitudes toward these “least of the brethren” in the past few years in our country. Make up your own mind in prayer, listening to that small, still voice that comes not in earthquake or whirlwind or thunder and fire but in a whisper, a still whisper, the voice of conscience.
Today’s Gospel reading follows last Sunday’s. Remember Jesus was shaken by the news that King Herod has executed John the Baptist. He is looking for a quiet place to rest and to pray, but he is pressed upon by a large crowd and feeds them all with five loaves and two fishes. That feeding of the five thousand ought to be enough to convince us of his truth, whether it was a physical miracle or a moral one, whether he literally made many loaves out of a few or whether, even more miraculous, he opened people’s hearts so that they opened their hidden bags of food to share. Jesus is still shaken and tired today. Again he’s trying to get away to rest and to pray. Today he walks upon water to calm the storm and rescue his disciples. At first, they think they may be seeing things, maybe a ghost. “Be not afraid,” he assures them. Then Peter calls to Jesus, “If it’s really you, command me to come to you over the water.” Jesus calls to Peter, “Come!” At first Peter sets out upon the waves with confidence. Then his faith falters and he begins to sink. Jesus extends his hand, grasps Peter’s and all is well, he is saved. Then Jesus has a word with Peter: “Oh you of little faith, why do you doubt?” Why do we doubt?
Doubt is natural, normal. If we didn’t have doubt we could not have faith either. Why is anything? Are we alone in a meaningless universe, lost in the stars? Is the universe, is God friendly, hostile or indifferent? Is a Galilean Jew two thousand years dead the revelation of God, risen from the dead, the answer to our questions, the way, the truth and the life, as he claimed? Look at the way history has unfolded. There is proof enough. Not mathematical proof, not the kind of proof that demands assent from any and all honest minds. God does not force anybody to believe. But proof enough for me, that only light can dispel darkness, only good conquer evil, only love overcome hate. Only forgiveness can cancel wrongs. It’s the Sermon on the Mount. It’s the Cross. I know. I have seen it happen, the lame walk, the blind regain their sight and see.
This is the most important hour of the week, when we hear the Word of God and are strengthened in faith by sharing his Body and Blood to go out and do his will. Those who are not here today – do they know what they are missing? Tell them! Billions of people for almost two thousand years have lived their lives for this faith and literally millions have gone to their deaths for this faith, in our own day 37 priests murdered in 2009, about the same last year and a bishop or two, and so many lay people that figures are unreliable! Is it a faith worth dying for? You bet it is! There is nothing to fear. All is well, all will be well. Christ had died. Christ is risen! Christ will come again. You can bet your life on it!
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
The Humble Handmaid
ASSUMPTION of the BVM #622
Rv 11, 19a. 12, 1-6a. 10
Ps 45
1 Cor 15, 20-27
Lk 1, 39-56
August 15, 2010
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
Deacon Tom Cornell
The Book of Revelation is full of fantastic and frightening images. Jewish writers were playing these marvelous and horrifying figures for at least a hundred years before we have them in the book we have today, Apocalypse or Revelation. Maybe it was John the Evangelist who put them together toward the end of his life, in exile on the Island of Patmos, a Roman prison colony. We don’t really know. The author works these images into a new pattern of Christian revelation, the lady clothed with the sun, standing on a crescent moon and wearing a crown of twelve stars, about to give birth is Mary, and her male child Jesus! A giant red dragon with seven heads and ten horns sweeps a third of the stars from the sky with his tail! Satan enraged at Christ, his deadly enemy. Many of the early Fathers didn’t want to include this book in the Bible at all. They thought it too confusing for most people, lay people and clergy as well, too fantastic, too frightening and too easy to misinterpret. One of my Scripture professors advised, “If you don’t have five years to spend studying Revelation, skip it!”
Apocalyptic writers were obsessed with a world they saw crumbling, their Hebrew world, little as it was but all they knew and loved. Israel no longer existed. It was Samaria. Judaea, all that was left of David’s kingdom, was under Roman occupation. These writers saw their Hebrew world falling apart at the seams under the impact of Greek and Roman culture, customs and ways. Most of the Jews were already in Diaspora, scattered throughout the Mediterranean basin and Mesopotamia. Most Jews couldn’t even read Hebrew any more. They had been reading their Scriptures in Aramaic or in Greek translation for a couple of hundred years already, or not at all. The Temple priests, Sadducees, were playing it safe, making deals with the Romans, accommodating, watering down the Law for the sake of survival. The scribes and the Pharisees, on the other hand, were trying to call the people back to an ever more strict observance of the Law, and some of their extremists were even organizing violent revolution against Rome. That would mean certain death, the writers knew. And most people, then as now, didn’t really seem to care.
Plus ca change, as the French say. The more things change the more they remain the same. Sometimes it looks as if our world, the world we know is falling apart at the seams. Will the economy ever recover? Will we get our jobs back? Will our wars ever end, useless and unwinnable as they are? Can we save Social Security and Medicare? We are told we can’t afford them. We fire teachers, cut classes, close schools and libraries and parks and playgrounds. Where will the money come from to keep them? We spend just a little less than all the rest of the world combined on the military. Yes,that's right, just a little less that all the rest of the world combined on the military. The poor we send away empty.
Not long ago the US was number one in percentage of young people going to college. Not any more! Now we are number 12, behind Germany, Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia, Italy, England and Ireland. Our health care index is even worse, about 32, just ahead of Slovenia. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The very best medical care anywhere in the world is available right here in the US, for those who can afford it. For them we are still Number One!
Our entire culture, based as it is on Jewish and Christian religious values, is undergoing a seismic shift toward – who knows what? Family values, the family itself, once thought sacrosanct, the basic cell of society, is now optional. The signs of the time are grim. “These are the worst of times, and they always have been,” Thomas Merton said. The writer of Revelation saw a world in crisis. It’s always in crisis! The End is near. It always has been near! But we are Christians. Be not afraid!
Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians in an apocalyptic frame of mind, but with a difference. He is triumphant. “Just as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will come to life again…” “After that will come the end, when, having destroyed every sovereignty, authority and power, he will hand over the kingdom to God the Father….” Christians can not be pessimists. “The worst has happened, and been repaired,” as Julian of Norwich had it. Life is not as divine tragedy. It is a divine comedy.
Why does the Church link these readings in today’s Mass to celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Mary has followed her son, assumed, taken up to Heaven, body and soul, soul and body!
We don’t, we can’t know what the next life will be. We can know this: Jesus has gone to the Father and he would have his mother with him where he is, not only because she is his mother but because she was above all angels and men and women. Mary saw reality with clarity, not as we do, “through a glass darkly.” Mary’s will never deviated from the good, free from the effects of Original Sin. At the moment of her death she did not experience corruption. God willed that Mary precede us to Heaven, body and soul, soul and body, not only because she is his son’s mother but because she never sinned. Sinners that we are, it is our destiny as well because she is our mother too. She would have it so as he will have it so if we will have it so.
What can it possibly mean, to rise from the dead, body and soul? What is a risen body, what will it be like? Will I have my gall-bladder back! I don’t want it! How about teeth? Will they break again? Silly questions, as Saint Paul points out a few verses after today’s reading. Paul compares the earthly body destined to corruption to the spiritual body that will rise from it. It is as if our present earthly body were a seed and our future spiritual body risen from it free forever from pain and corruption.
We have a mental image of Mary, most of us, I’m sure. “Lovely lady, dressed in blue….” We picture the Mysteries of the Rosary and we repeat the Hail Mary. There are paintings, reproductions of Mary on the walls of our homes, the Annunciation, the Visitation. But the Mary of today’s reading, the Magnificat, the humble handmaid of the Lord is also a strong woman. Even fierce! Listen to her words:
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior. … He has shown the might of his right arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty.” Without even a tax break!
Jesus’ mercy exceeds his justice, that is true. His mother is our mother, waiting with words to soothe, arms to embrace, that is true. But there is another side to Jesus and to Mary, one that must give us pause. He is a judge. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisee hypocrites!” And again, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and Mary’s warning today to the rich and powerful. It’s all true.
Whatever the future, however the End, we can be sure that God’s plan for us is glorious. “Now have salvation and power come, the reign of our God and the authority of his Anointed One, the Christ, have come.”
The rabbis envisioned Heaven as a banquet. That’s not a bad idea. All our family and friends around us, a circle unbroken, gathered around Jesus and Mary. Our happiest memories relived and forever, and more than that, much more. We shall be like God, God-like, for we shall see him as he is. Mary is preparing a place for us, just as she prepared for Jesus before his birth and nurtured him through his young life. She, our mother, goes before and prepares a place for us before our birth to eternal life. It’s true, now and forever.
Rv 11, 19a. 12, 1-6a. 10
Ps 45
1 Cor 15, 20-27
Lk 1, 39-56
August 15, 2010
Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
Deacon Tom Cornell
The Book of Revelation is full of fantastic and frightening images. Jewish writers were playing these marvelous and horrifying figures for at least a hundred years before we have them in the book we have today, Apocalypse or Revelation. Maybe it was John the Evangelist who put them together toward the end of his life, in exile on the Island of Patmos, a Roman prison colony. We don’t really know. The author works these images into a new pattern of Christian revelation, the lady clothed with the sun, standing on a crescent moon and wearing a crown of twelve stars, about to give birth is Mary, and her male child Jesus! A giant red dragon with seven heads and ten horns sweeps a third of the stars from the sky with his tail! Satan enraged at Christ, his deadly enemy. Many of the early Fathers didn’t want to include this book in the Bible at all. They thought it too confusing for most people, lay people and clergy as well, too fantastic, too frightening and too easy to misinterpret. One of my Scripture professors advised, “If you don’t have five years to spend studying Revelation, skip it!”
Apocalyptic writers were obsessed with a world they saw crumbling, their Hebrew world, little as it was but all they knew and loved. Israel no longer existed. It was Samaria. Judaea, all that was left of David’s kingdom, was under Roman occupation. These writers saw their Hebrew world falling apart at the seams under the impact of Greek and Roman culture, customs and ways. Most of the Jews were already in Diaspora, scattered throughout the Mediterranean basin and Mesopotamia. Most Jews couldn’t even read Hebrew any more. They had been reading their Scriptures in Aramaic or in Greek translation for a couple of hundred years already, or not at all. The Temple priests, Sadducees, were playing it safe, making deals with the Romans, accommodating, watering down the Law for the sake of survival. The scribes and the Pharisees, on the other hand, were trying to call the people back to an ever more strict observance of the Law, and some of their extremists were even organizing violent revolution against Rome. That would mean certain death, the writers knew. And most people, then as now, didn’t really seem to care.
Plus ca change, as the French say. The more things change the more they remain the same. Sometimes it looks as if our world, the world we know is falling apart at the seams. Will the economy ever recover? Will we get our jobs back? Will our wars ever end, useless and unwinnable as they are? Can we save Social Security and Medicare? We are told we can’t afford them. We fire teachers, cut classes, close schools and libraries and parks and playgrounds. Where will the money come from to keep them? We spend just a little less than all the rest of the world combined on the military. Yes,that's right, just a little less that all the rest of the world combined on the military. The poor we send away empty.
Not long ago the US was number one in percentage of young people going to college. Not any more! Now we are number 12, behind Germany, Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia, Italy, England and Ireland. Our health care index is even worse, about 32, just ahead of Slovenia. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The very best medical care anywhere in the world is available right here in the US, for those who can afford it. For them we are still Number One!
Our entire culture, based as it is on Jewish and Christian religious values, is undergoing a seismic shift toward – who knows what? Family values, the family itself, once thought sacrosanct, the basic cell of society, is now optional. The signs of the time are grim. “These are the worst of times, and they always have been,” Thomas Merton said. The writer of Revelation saw a world in crisis. It’s always in crisis! The End is near. It always has been near! But we are Christians. Be not afraid!
Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians in an apocalyptic frame of mind, but with a difference. He is triumphant. “Just as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will come to life again…” “After that will come the end, when, having destroyed every sovereignty, authority and power, he will hand over the kingdom to God the Father….” Christians can not be pessimists. “The worst has happened, and been repaired,” as Julian of Norwich had it. Life is not as divine tragedy. It is a divine comedy.
Why does the Church link these readings in today’s Mass to celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Mary has followed her son, assumed, taken up to Heaven, body and soul, soul and body!
We don’t, we can’t know what the next life will be. We can know this: Jesus has gone to the Father and he would have his mother with him where he is, not only because she is his mother but because she was above all angels and men and women. Mary saw reality with clarity, not as we do, “through a glass darkly.” Mary’s will never deviated from the good, free from the effects of Original Sin. At the moment of her death she did not experience corruption. God willed that Mary precede us to Heaven, body and soul, soul and body, not only because she is his son’s mother but because she never sinned. Sinners that we are, it is our destiny as well because she is our mother too. She would have it so as he will have it so if we will have it so.
What can it possibly mean, to rise from the dead, body and soul? What is a risen body, what will it be like? Will I have my gall-bladder back! I don’t want it! How about teeth? Will they break again? Silly questions, as Saint Paul points out a few verses after today’s reading. Paul compares the earthly body destined to corruption to the spiritual body that will rise from it. It is as if our present earthly body were a seed and our future spiritual body risen from it free forever from pain and corruption.
We have a mental image of Mary, most of us, I’m sure. “Lovely lady, dressed in blue….” We picture the Mysteries of the Rosary and we repeat the Hail Mary. There are paintings, reproductions of Mary on the walls of our homes, the Annunciation, the Visitation. But the Mary of today’s reading, the Magnificat, the humble handmaid of the Lord is also a strong woman. Even fierce! Listen to her words:
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior. … He has shown the might of his right arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty.” Without even a tax break!
Jesus’ mercy exceeds his justice, that is true. His mother is our mother, waiting with words to soothe, arms to embrace, that is true. But there is another side to Jesus and to Mary, one that must give us pause. He is a judge. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisee hypocrites!” And again, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and Mary’s warning today to the rich and powerful. It’s all true.
Whatever the future, however the End, we can be sure that God’s plan for us is glorious. “Now have salvation and power come, the reign of our God and the authority of his Anointed One, the Christ, have come.”
The rabbis envisioned Heaven as a banquet. That’s not a bad idea. All our family and friends around us, a circle unbroken, gathered around Jesus and Mary. Our happiest memories relived and forever, and more than that, much more. We shall be like God, God-like, for we shall see him as he is. Mary is preparing a place for us, just as she prepared for Jesus before his birth and nurtured him through his young life. She, our mother, goes before and prepares a place for us before our birth to eternal life. It’s true, now and forever.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Abraham's Guests
16 Sunday C #108
Gn 18, 1-10
Ps 15
Col 1, 24-28
Lk 10, 38-42
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
July 18, 2010
Deacon Tom Cornell
Hospitality is the theme today. One of the most famous icons ever painted is Andrey Rublev’s The Hospitality of Abraham, from 15th Century Russia. He called it The Trinity, but the mystery of the Trinity was not revealed in Abraham’s time, so most people call it Abraham’s Guests or Hospitality. I have a copy. It’s too fragile to bring here to show you, but if you like, drop in on us at our home, Peter Maurin Farm off Lattintown Road. Take a look and maybe we’ll be able to give you some fresh chard to take home.
Abraham was sitting in the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day when he saw three strangers standing by a spreading pine tree, the terebinth of Mamre. They just appear, stand there, not walking. They don’t speak. They don’t ask anything of Abraham. He assumes they are traveling. Abraham goes to them and begs their leader to allow him to host them. He has a servant bring water so that they can wash their feet. He has Sarah bake fresh bread for them and he has a steer slaughtered, butchered and put to roast. He and Sarah go way beyond the normal hospitality expected of peoples of the Near East then and today. They go all out and they expect no reward. But they are rewarded. One of the men, in fact an angel, the three are angels, a manifestation of God, tells Abraham he will be back in a year’s time and that by then Sarah will have a son!
Abraham is one hundred years old. Sarah is ninety. Fat chance! Lots of luck, Abraham! But it comes true, and through his son Isaac, Abraham will father as many sons and daughters as the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea shore, and they shall be a blessing to all peoples for one of them will be Messiah, the Christ. He will break down the wall of enmity between Jew and Gentile and the two shall be one in him. Abraham and Sarah have given freely and lavishly, and God will reward them freely, lavishly, above anything they can imagine. “God will not be outdone in generosity,” Dorothy Day used to say.
Dorothy Day bought our property, 50 acres in back of the cemetery for our Catholic Worker community, in 1979, thirty-one years ago. Monica and I moved here in 1992 but we were part of the Catholic Worker community back then too and helped set up our new farm. I paid a courtesy call on the pastor, Monsignor Dugan at the time, on behalf of the community. We didn’t know him yet, but he knew us well. He told me he used to sell our paper, The Catholic Worker, on the streets of New York City back in the Thirties when he was in seminary. He told me that anti-Semites and racists used to physically attack him and his friends, tear our paper from their hands and throw them into the gutter and even beat them up. Can you imagine Fr. Dugan in a fist fight? I had to laugh! Fr. Dugan welcomed us, but I don’t think he or anyone else has ever tried to explain to the people of this parish just what we do back there. Our house, our farm community is a “house of hospitality,” as we call it. People around town call it “the camp,” why I don’t know.
First of all, it’s not a camp! It’s a farm, or better, a large garden. We cultivate two acres, and it’s a home for people who would otherwise be homeless, a house of hospitality on the land. We have two houses for the homeless in the City, one for men and the other for women. We give all our produce away to soup kitchens, our own soup kitchen in the City first and to Saint Patrick’s in Newburgh. We don’t sell anything and we don’t charge anyone anything for any service we provide. We don’t ask rent from anybody we take in for room and board. We provide utilities and laundry and all the rest at no charge and with no reimbursement from any agency of Church or state. And when our guests die we bury them. When we run out of money we pray and we beg and it comes, from readers of our paper. "I was a stranger," Christ said, "and you took me in.” Come take a look, about a third of a mile at the end of Cemetery Road. We’d love to show you around.
If people in Marlboro know anything about us it’s probably because of Slim. “The Man Who Walks,” they called him. You could hardly miss him as he walked the streets, summer and winter, often with a dog, or two or more. He was tall, well over six feet, even stooped with age. His clothing was worn and didn’t always fit. He looked a little like Freddy Kruger. He didn’t care. When he got tired, Slim just stretched out, wherever he was, on the side of the road, in a parking lot, or even in the middle of a supermarket aisle. The police knew him and they would drive him home sometimes if he seemed over-tired. Our local police are friends and neighbors. That’s one of the reasons why we pay one hundred percent of our property taxes. We are legally exempt from property taxes as a religious charity. But we want to share our neighbors’ burdens, and not be a burden ourselves in any way. Some things we can do on our own, by way of personal responsibility, but some things we have to do together as citizens, like police and fire protection, and the education of our children. We love our parish and our town, and we want to stay here in Marlboro. We’ve been very happy here.
But back to Slim. Slim’s mother had brought him to our house on Mott Street, downtown New York City. She told us, “He’s a good boy, nineteen years old, not quite right in the head but he never gives any trouble.” She said she’d really appreciate if we’d take care of him over the weekend. She’d come back for him on Monday. That was in 1937! She dumped him! She left Slim with no papers, no birth certificate, no identification of any kind, no nothing. We didn’t even know his name for sure until just a few years before he died, at age 84. If his mother had brought Slim to a hospital ER and just dumped him there, the State of New York would have had to spend $30,000 a year to keep him in an institution, tranquilized probably, where he’d have nothing to do and would fade away stuck in a bed somewhere, never a family around him, never a dog, never children, never a job. People need to work, to know that they are contributing, for their own sense of self-worth.
Slim wasn’t happy in our city house, too noisy, too crowded. When they drove him to our farm, in Easton, Pennsylvania at that time, he jumped out of the car and rolled around on the grass for joy. Slim had children and dogs around him. He had jobs. He could take pride that he was contributing. In the spring and fall he raked leaves, he hauled water, he took out the garbage and the compost. In the winter he shoveled snow, cutting paths between the houses and the barn and then anywhere his imagination led him, pathways to utopia, you might say. He had a good life, and it cost one-tenth of what the State would have spent.
How do we do it? How can we afford it? There are no administrative costs, no labor costs. We all live in voluntary poverty, we Catholic Workers. No one is paid. There is no pension fund. Our labor, it’s a gift: “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” That’s not Marxism. That’s basic Christianity as we find in The Acts of the Apostles. And it’s personal responsibility for the needs of others. We live as poor people among poor people, in community. And we have our rewards. It’s part of our understanding of nonviolence, not just refusal to engage in war but the building of a more just and merciful society by example. But some people thought otherwise. J. Edgar Hoover asked President Franklin Roosevelt to have Dorothy Day imprisoned during the Second World War, three times. He didn’t. And the Vatican has accepted Dorothy’s cause for canonization as a saint, that is a model of Christian discipleship for our time. We must be doing something right.
The story of Martha busy about the house as Mary sits at Jesus’ feet has always puzzled me. Why didn’t Jesus add just one little sentence? “Now, Mary, get up and give your sister a hand and we’ll finish talking after dinner and you’ve washed the dishes.” I think of this when I see my wife Monica, a modern day Martha, work far beyond anything that might be asked of her while some of our guests, a couple of them, just sit there on their fat cushions, watching TV. Maybe they’re praying during the commercials. I don’t think so. But that’s all right. If you don’t want to work then there’s got to be something wrong with you, and we’re here for people who have something wrong with them, so it works out! The point of this Gospel episode and Jesus’ saying is the primacy of the spiritual, the necessity of prayer. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.
“The man who does justice lives in the presence of the Lord” (Ps 15). Micah tells us that the Lord requires only this of us, that we “do justice, love mercy, compassion and walk humbly with our God (Mi 6, 8). How do we walk humbly with our God? We have to walk where he leads us, and how do we know that? By prayer. Prayer isn’t just telling God what we think he ought to know. Prayer is listening, in the depths of our hearts for the voice of God, in our own conscience, to lead us. There are those who are called to a life of prayer without ceasing and good for them! But somebody’s got to pay the bills! Those of us in that category have to remember that whatever we do, we have to pray. Prayer will open for us what to do and how to do it. Prayer will sustain us as we go. Then we pray in thanksgiving. All for the glory of God. If not, remember the Psalm, “Unless the Lord build the house, in vain do the builders labor; unless the Lord guard the city, in vain do the watchers keep vigil” (Ps 126). Both Martha and Mary will have their reward.
And we are rewarded lavishly. We may seem to be poor, but we have so many wonderful friends, Nobel Prize winners and bishops and cardinals among them, wonderful nuns and brothers and humble people who have spoken the Truth in ways to astonish, and we have been part of so many wonderful adventures. Voluntary poverty and community free us for things that others only dream of. We were among the first to protest the Nazis in the Thirties and to try to protect the European Jews by opening up our doors and offering hospitality. We helped workers to keep control of their own unions when the Communist Party and gangsters vied for control. And we supported workers in strikes. During one picket at a department store, the New York City police rounded everybody up for arrest. As a cop shoved one of our women into a paddy wagon, he snarled, “Get in, yuh damn Communist!” She answered, “I’m not a Communist, officer. I’m an anti-Communist!” He then said, “I don’t care what kind of a Communist you are, lady. Get into the van!” And in the Fifties and the Sixties we were part of the movement to tear down the legal structures of racial segregation in this country. We weren’t in the leadership. That was for the Black people. But when they called us we answered, we were there. Two high points of my life were in early 1965. Monica gave me our first-born, a son in February, and in March, Martin Luther King accepted me as a marshal at Selma for the March on Montgomery. That changed America for the better, forever. What a precious memory! When Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers came to New York, he came to us first, and his men lived with us. We set up the lettuce boycott together, the first successful boycott in this country since tea in 1776. We took a leadership role in the movement to get out of Viet Nam. We helped to reintroduce nonviolence into the mainstream of Catholic and Protestant moral teaching; and we now know that we held back the hands of those who would have used nuclear weapons in Viet Nam. Precious memories!
All that and hospitality too. Come, take a look at the Rublev and our place! And take some fresh organic veggies home with you, and a copy of our paper, and come again!
Gn 18, 1-10
Ps 15
Col 1, 24-28
Lk 10, 38-42
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
July 18, 2010
Deacon Tom Cornell
Hospitality is the theme today. One of the most famous icons ever painted is Andrey Rublev’s The Hospitality of Abraham, from 15th Century Russia. He called it The Trinity, but the mystery of the Trinity was not revealed in Abraham’s time, so most people call it Abraham’s Guests or Hospitality. I have a copy. It’s too fragile to bring here to show you, but if you like, drop in on us at our home, Peter Maurin Farm off Lattintown Road. Take a look and maybe we’ll be able to give you some fresh chard to take home.
Abraham was sitting in the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day when he saw three strangers standing by a spreading pine tree, the terebinth of Mamre. They just appear, stand there, not walking. They don’t speak. They don’t ask anything of Abraham. He assumes they are traveling. Abraham goes to them and begs their leader to allow him to host them. He has a servant bring water so that they can wash their feet. He has Sarah bake fresh bread for them and he has a steer slaughtered, butchered and put to roast. He and Sarah go way beyond the normal hospitality expected of peoples of the Near East then and today. They go all out and they expect no reward. But they are rewarded. One of the men, in fact an angel, the three are angels, a manifestation of God, tells Abraham he will be back in a year’s time and that by then Sarah will have a son!
Abraham is one hundred years old. Sarah is ninety. Fat chance! Lots of luck, Abraham! But it comes true, and through his son Isaac, Abraham will father as many sons and daughters as the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea shore, and they shall be a blessing to all peoples for one of them will be Messiah, the Christ. He will break down the wall of enmity between Jew and Gentile and the two shall be one in him. Abraham and Sarah have given freely and lavishly, and God will reward them freely, lavishly, above anything they can imagine. “God will not be outdone in generosity,” Dorothy Day used to say.
Dorothy Day bought our property, 50 acres in back of the cemetery for our Catholic Worker community, in 1979, thirty-one years ago. Monica and I moved here in 1992 but we were part of the Catholic Worker community back then too and helped set up our new farm. I paid a courtesy call on the pastor, Monsignor Dugan at the time, on behalf of the community. We didn’t know him yet, but he knew us well. He told me he used to sell our paper, The Catholic Worker, on the streets of New York City back in the Thirties when he was in seminary. He told me that anti-Semites and racists used to physically attack him and his friends, tear our paper from their hands and throw them into the gutter and even beat them up. Can you imagine Fr. Dugan in a fist fight? I had to laugh! Fr. Dugan welcomed us, but I don’t think he or anyone else has ever tried to explain to the people of this parish just what we do back there. Our house, our farm community is a “house of hospitality,” as we call it. People around town call it “the camp,” why I don’t know.
First of all, it’s not a camp! It’s a farm, or better, a large garden. We cultivate two acres, and it’s a home for people who would otherwise be homeless, a house of hospitality on the land. We have two houses for the homeless in the City, one for men and the other for women. We give all our produce away to soup kitchens, our own soup kitchen in the City first and to Saint Patrick’s in Newburgh. We don’t sell anything and we don’t charge anyone anything for any service we provide. We don’t ask rent from anybody we take in for room and board. We provide utilities and laundry and all the rest at no charge and with no reimbursement from any agency of Church or state. And when our guests die we bury them. When we run out of money we pray and we beg and it comes, from readers of our paper. "I was a stranger," Christ said, "and you took me in.” Come take a look, about a third of a mile at the end of Cemetery Road. We’d love to show you around.
If people in Marlboro know anything about us it’s probably because of Slim. “The Man Who Walks,” they called him. You could hardly miss him as he walked the streets, summer and winter, often with a dog, or two or more. He was tall, well over six feet, even stooped with age. His clothing was worn and didn’t always fit. He looked a little like Freddy Kruger. He didn’t care. When he got tired, Slim just stretched out, wherever he was, on the side of the road, in a parking lot, or even in the middle of a supermarket aisle. The police knew him and they would drive him home sometimes if he seemed over-tired. Our local police are friends and neighbors. That’s one of the reasons why we pay one hundred percent of our property taxes. We are legally exempt from property taxes as a religious charity. But we want to share our neighbors’ burdens, and not be a burden ourselves in any way. Some things we can do on our own, by way of personal responsibility, but some things we have to do together as citizens, like police and fire protection, and the education of our children. We love our parish and our town, and we want to stay here in Marlboro. We’ve been very happy here.
But back to Slim. Slim’s mother had brought him to our house on Mott Street, downtown New York City. She told us, “He’s a good boy, nineteen years old, not quite right in the head but he never gives any trouble.” She said she’d really appreciate if we’d take care of him over the weekend. She’d come back for him on Monday. That was in 1937! She dumped him! She left Slim with no papers, no birth certificate, no identification of any kind, no nothing. We didn’t even know his name for sure until just a few years before he died, at age 84. If his mother had brought Slim to a hospital ER and just dumped him there, the State of New York would have had to spend $30,000 a year to keep him in an institution, tranquilized probably, where he’d have nothing to do and would fade away stuck in a bed somewhere, never a family around him, never a dog, never children, never a job. People need to work, to know that they are contributing, for their own sense of self-worth.
Slim wasn’t happy in our city house, too noisy, too crowded. When they drove him to our farm, in Easton, Pennsylvania at that time, he jumped out of the car and rolled around on the grass for joy. Slim had children and dogs around him. He had jobs. He could take pride that he was contributing. In the spring and fall he raked leaves, he hauled water, he took out the garbage and the compost. In the winter he shoveled snow, cutting paths between the houses and the barn and then anywhere his imagination led him, pathways to utopia, you might say. He had a good life, and it cost one-tenth of what the State would have spent.
How do we do it? How can we afford it? There are no administrative costs, no labor costs. We all live in voluntary poverty, we Catholic Workers. No one is paid. There is no pension fund. Our labor, it’s a gift: “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” That’s not Marxism. That’s basic Christianity as we find in The Acts of the Apostles. And it’s personal responsibility for the needs of others. We live as poor people among poor people, in community. And we have our rewards. It’s part of our understanding of nonviolence, not just refusal to engage in war but the building of a more just and merciful society by example. But some people thought otherwise. J. Edgar Hoover asked President Franklin Roosevelt to have Dorothy Day imprisoned during the Second World War, three times. He didn’t. And the Vatican has accepted Dorothy’s cause for canonization as a saint, that is a model of Christian discipleship for our time. We must be doing something right.
The story of Martha busy about the house as Mary sits at Jesus’ feet has always puzzled me. Why didn’t Jesus add just one little sentence? “Now, Mary, get up and give your sister a hand and we’ll finish talking after dinner and you’ve washed the dishes.” I think of this when I see my wife Monica, a modern day Martha, work far beyond anything that might be asked of her while some of our guests, a couple of them, just sit there on their fat cushions, watching TV. Maybe they’re praying during the commercials. I don’t think so. But that’s all right. If you don’t want to work then there’s got to be something wrong with you, and we’re here for people who have something wrong with them, so it works out! The point of this Gospel episode and Jesus’ saying is the primacy of the spiritual, the necessity of prayer. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.
“The man who does justice lives in the presence of the Lord” (Ps 15). Micah tells us that the Lord requires only this of us, that we “do justice, love mercy, compassion and walk humbly with our God (Mi 6, 8). How do we walk humbly with our God? We have to walk where he leads us, and how do we know that? By prayer. Prayer isn’t just telling God what we think he ought to know. Prayer is listening, in the depths of our hearts for the voice of God, in our own conscience, to lead us. There are those who are called to a life of prayer without ceasing and good for them! But somebody’s got to pay the bills! Those of us in that category have to remember that whatever we do, we have to pray. Prayer will open for us what to do and how to do it. Prayer will sustain us as we go. Then we pray in thanksgiving. All for the glory of God. If not, remember the Psalm, “Unless the Lord build the house, in vain do the builders labor; unless the Lord guard the city, in vain do the watchers keep vigil” (Ps 126). Both Martha and Mary will have their reward.
And we are rewarded lavishly. We may seem to be poor, but we have so many wonderful friends, Nobel Prize winners and bishops and cardinals among them, wonderful nuns and brothers and humble people who have spoken the Truth in ways to astonish, and we have been part of so many wonderful adventures. Voluntary poverty and community free us for things that others only dream of. We were among the first to protest the Nazis in the Thirties and to try to protect the European Jews by opening up our doors and offering hospitality. We helped workers to keep control of their own unions when the Communist Party and gangsters vied for control. And we supported workers in strikes. During one picket at a department store, the New York City police rounded everybody up for arrest. As a cop shoved one of our women into a paddy wagon, he snarled, “Get in, yuh damn Communist!” She answered, “I’m not a Communist, officer. I’m an anti-Communist!” He then said, “I don’t care what kind of a Communist you are, lady. Get into the van!” And in the Fifties and the Sixties we were part of the movement to tear down the legal structures of racial segregation in this country. We weren’t in the leadership. That was for the Black people. But when they called us we answered, we were there. Two high points of my life were in early 1965. Monica gave me our first-born, a son in February, and in March, Martin Luther King accepted me as a marshal at Selma for the March on Montgomery. That changed America for the better, forever. What a precious memory! When Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers came to New York, he came to us first, and his men lived with us. We set up the lettuce boycott together, the first successful boycott in this country since tea in 1776. We took a leadership role in the movement to get out of Viet Nam. We helped to reintroduce nonviolence into the mainstream of Catholic and Protestant moral teaching; and we now know that we held back the hands of those who would have used nuclear weapons in Viet Nam. Precious memories!
All that and hospitality too. Come, take a look at the Rublev and our place! And take some fresh organic veggies home with you, and a copy of our paper, and come again!
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Fathers Know!
12 Sunday C #96
Zec 12, 10-11. 13, 1
Ps 63
Gal 3, 26-29
Lk 9, 18-24
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
June 20, 2010
Deacon Tom Cornell
It’s Fathers’ Day and by now the conspiracy to honor Father Ed Bader is out! I’m glad he’s not here. It might embarrass him. What more is there to say than what you all have already said in your cards and notes and letters? The international Year of the Priest just ended. Not for us. Every year is the Year of the Priest as long as Father Ed is with us. We won’t have him forever. They rotate pastors now. It’s not like the old days of Father Hanley. I see from his gravestone in the cemetery that Fr. Hanley came to Saint Mary’s before World War I and was still here when the Korean War ended! In Connecticut where I grew up we had only one pastor from the time I can remember until I was graduated from college. It’s just as well that they rotate pastors now. We have to share! There’s only one way I’d like to see Father Ed transferred, to see him made a bishop! That’s a great idea! I’ll have to tell the Pope. But don’t worry! They never listen to me!
Our Psalm verse today goes: “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God!”
The world thirsts, each one of us thirsts with a thirst that can not be quenched. There is a longing in the human heart and soul that can not be satisfied. It is infinite. Only the Infinite can satisfy it. To deny it is to sink into useless torpor or just as useless frenzy, running around, busy, busy, busy about – nothing! No work, nothing we can do no matter how good and worthy and well-intentioned it may seem will come to any good without the grace of God we receive in prayer. Our priest shows us the way, the primacy of the spiritual, the way to the source of life and its fulfillment. That’s why we call him father. Every father is a kind of priest in a Christian family. Every Christian home is an “ecclesiola,” a little church, or it’s supposed to be.
The reading from the Prophet Zechariah speaks of a gift, “a grace to be poured out on the people of Jerusalem.” “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced and they shall mourn for him as for an only son.” Christians have always understood this to prophesy Jesus, and that one day all people will inherit the Promise made to Abraham and Sarah through him, the Promise not only of children -- he so old his body as good as dead and she well passed the age -- but the Promise of salvation from evil and emptiness, if they will have it.
We celebrate fathers today, and why? Only because of their children. A society that does not count children as its greatest blessing is a society on the skids. Abraham and Sarah knew the future belongs to the fertile.
In our second reading, Saint Paul tells the Gentiles that they are in fact sons and daughters of Abraham along with the Jews, since they have put on Christ and they are one with him. “There is no more distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus. By belonging to Christ you are the posterity of Abraham, the heirs he was promised.”
“Who do you say that I am?” Peter’s answer is burned in our memory: “You are the Messiah, the Christ of God!” Jesus then tells Peter and the others not to reveal this to anyone until he has undergone his Passion and is risen from the dead. Then he says:
“Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self, take up his cross each day and follow in my steps. Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Lose your life to save it; save your life and lose it? The Christian life is a struggle to find out what this means! It is strange, topsy-turvy, like the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. To take up our cross and to go where he went, and that is to Golgotha! Of all the hard sayings of Jesus, this is the hardest, the one that sums them all up. Does that mean we should seek our cross, look for it? I don’t think so. When I was young, a wise old Jesuit told me, “You don’t have to go looking for your cross. It will find you!”
How did he know? Fathers know!
Zec 12, 10-11. 13, 1
Ps 63
Gal 3, 26-29
Lk 9, 18-24
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
June 20, 2010
Deacon Tom Cornell
It’s Fathers’ Day and by now the conspiracy to honor Father Ed Bader is out! I’m glad he’s not here. It might embarrass him. What more is there to say than what you all have already said in your cards and notes and letters? The international Year of the Priest just ended. Not for us. Every year is the Year of the Priest as long as Father Ed is with us. We won’t have him forever. They rotate pastors now. It’s not like the old days of Father Hanley. I see from his gravestone in the cemetery that Fr. Hanley came to Saint Mary’s before World War I and was still here when the Korean War ended! In Connecticut where I grew up we had only one pastor from the time I can remember until I was graduated from college. It’s just as well that they rotate pastors now. We have to share! There’s only one way I’d like to see Father Ed transferred, to see him made a bishop! That’s a great idea! I’ll have to tell the Pope. But don’t worry! They never listen to me!
Our Psalm verse today goes: “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God!”
The world thirsts, each one of us thirsts with a thirst that can not be quenched. There is a longing in the human heart and soul that can not be satisfied. It is infinite. Only the Infinite can satisfy it. To deny it is to sink into useless torpor or just as useless frenzy, running around, busy, busy, busy about – nothing! No work, nothing we can do no matter how good and worthy and well-intentioned it may seem will come to any good without the grace of God we receive in prayer. Our priest shows us the way, the primacy of the spiritual, the way to the source of life and its fulfillment. That’s why we call him father. Every father is a kind of priest in a Christian family. Every Christian home is an “ecclesiola,” a little church, or it’s supposed to be.
The reading from the Prophet Zechariah speaks of a gift, “a grace to be poured out on the people of Jerusalem.” “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced and they shall mourn for him as for an only son.” Christians have always understood this to prophesy Jesus, and that one day all people will inherit the Promise made to Abraham and Sarah through him, the Promise not only of children -- he so old his body as good as dead and she well passed the age -- but the Promise of salvation from evil and emptiness, if they will have it.
We celebrate fathers today, and why? Only because of their children. A society that does not count children as its greatest blessing is a society on the skids. Abraham and Sarah knew the future belongs to the fertile.
In our second reading, Saint Paul tells the Gentiles that they are in fact sons and daughters of Abraham along with the Jews, since they have put on Christ and they are one with him. “There is no more distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus. By belonging to Christ you are the posterity of Abraham, the heirs he was promised.”
“Who do you say that I am?” Peter’s answer is burned in our memory: “You are the Messiah, the Christ of God!” Jesus then tells Peter and the others not to reveal this to anyone until he has undergone his Passion and is risen from the dead. Then he says:
“Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self, take up his cross each day and follow in my steps. Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Lose your life to save it; save your life and lose it? The Christian life is a struggle to find out what this means! It is strange, topsy-turvy, like the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. To take up our cross and to go where he went, and that is to Golgotha! Of all the hard sayings of Jesus, this is the hardest, the one that sums them all up. Does that mean we should seek our cross, look for it? I don’t think so. When I was young, a wise old Jesuit told me, “You don’t have to go looking for your cross. It will find you!”
How did he know? Fathers know!
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Ut Unum Sint, That They be One
7 Easter C #61
Acts 7, 55-60
Ps 97
Rv 22, 12-14. 16-17, 20
Jn 17, 20-26
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
May 16, 2010
Deacon Tom Cornell
This Gospel reading makes me think of a young man I met not long ago, a very bright guy. He studies comparative literature at NYU. He doesn’t have a church or a religion. But he's interested, he said, even attracted. He told me that he's reading the New Testament, and that in all the world literature he had read, he never came across a figure as attractive or compelling as Jesus of Nazareth. Was Jesus really the Son of God as he read in Mark’s Gospel? Was he the Messiah the Jews expected in Matthew and Luke? Was he the Logos, the eternal Word of God who took flesh and lived among us as in John?
Was Jesus the Savior of the World as Christians claim? Did he really give us the Way to salvation, the Way to keep us from blowing ourselves up when he said from the Cross “Father forgive them?” And when he taught his disciples to pray, "forgive as we forgive." The Deacon Stephen echoed his words as he was stoned to death in our first reading, "Do not hold this sin against them." Did Jesus really take away our sins so that one day we might understand what this whole thing on earth is about, when we are with God in Heaven? It would be nice to think so, he said. Well, why didn’t he just come to our church and find out?
“You Catholics say you know what Jesus really taught, that yours is the true church, the church he founded. But the Episcopalians across the street, they say they the same thing, and the Bible Church up the hill says the same thing, and the Presbyterians over there, and the Methodists up in Milton and the Quakers over in Clintondale…. See what I mean? How can I believe any of you Christians if you can’t believe each other?” Pray for him.
You have to admit, he has a point. He's missing another point though, and that is, at a deep level, we are in fact one. There is really only one church of Jesus Christ for, as Paul has it, “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all” (Eph 4,5).
God is a mystery, the deepest mystery. God can not be defined because to define means to put an end, a boundary to something, de fine, and you can’t do that to God. God is infinite. Christ is the sacrament of God, another mystery because we can not define him either. We can say “true man and true God” but we can’t really exhaust what that means! The church is the sacrament of Christ, another mystery. So you see you can’t really put a boundary on the church either. Only God knows who is in and who is out. It’s quite conceivable that some who say, “Lord, Lord!” might not be real Christians at all, and it’s quite conceivable too that some we would never expect are true seekers of Truth and Love and doers besides and so beloved of Christ and his own.
Today we heard how Jesus prayed to the Father that his disciples be one so that the world might believe in him, that the Father sent him: “That they be one.” He says it three times. One as Jesus and the Father are one. So it will be because it is God’s will. When and how Christian unity will be achieved we can not know. But we do know this: we have a part to play in it, every one of us. How? By letting go of any feelings of resentment we might have against fellow Christians in other churches or denominations, by letting go of any feelings of hurt for wrongs committed against us, by forgiving. My Irish ancestors, you may know, had a beef with the English. That war lasted eight hundred years, but it’s over now. We don’t have to forget, we can’t forget, but we can and we must forgive.
Let go of any feeling of pride or superiority or envy or resentment and admit our failings and our sins against each other and seek forgiveness of God and of each other, brothers and sisters in Christ. We killed each other in wars of religion! Doesn’t that sound like a contradiction in terms? “A war of religion!” Thank God we are past all that. We are living in a new age, an oecumenical age. Time to love.
I spoke to a group of Protestant young people in their high school not long ago, Anabaptists. My heart had to go out to them because their hearts were so warm with the love of God and of Jesus, and for us Catholic too in our present suffering. I could feel it. How can we not love them? One of the young men asked me, “Tom, why isn’t the Catholic Church a peace church, like us or the Quakers? We have the same Gospel!”
“Timothy,” I said to him, “we owe your people, the Anabaptists, a debt. We Catholics had all but forgotten Christian nonviolence when you people kept it alive for us. We’re taking it back into the mainstream of our own Tradition. Because of your help, your faithfulness, the Catholic Church is well on its way to becoming a peace church.” By that I mean we now have peace at the top of our social agenda, the renunciation of war and the causes of war. We defend men and women who refuse to participate in war for reasons of conscience. We not only defend them but hold them up as examples of genuine Christian discipleship. That is a big step forward, even if all our people don’t know it yet.
What can we do to promote Christian unity? We can pray together, pray the Scriptures together, study together, work together as we work here at Saint Mary’s with the Presbyterians in our food bank, as Sister Mary and the others work in Newburgh Ministries for the poor; work at every level in every way we can for peace and justice in this world, to put an end to war and the causes of war, an end to hunger, an end to ethnic, racial and religious hatred.
For this we need all the strength and nourishment we can get from our Scriptures and the sacraments. We can not share the Eucharist together with non-Catholics yet, except under exceptional circumstances because the Eucharist is the ultimate sign of unity, and if we share Holy Communion prematurely we will not hunger for a common table, and that is what we must do! Hunger for it, thirst for it! It is God’s will!
When the church of Jesus Christ is the church God wills it to be, it will be truly Catholic, truly Orthodox, truly Evangelical and truly Reformed. We will be one, and the world will come to believe. Finally they will see Jesus coming on the clouds with the angels and saints, with Moses and The Baal Shem Tov and Gautama Buddha and Gandhi and the Mahdi, with Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Frank and Maisie and The B to judge the living and the dead. “I was hungry and you fed me!” Come, Lord Jesus!
Acts 7, 55-60
Ps 97
Rv 22, 12-14. 16-17, 20
Jn 17, 20-26
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
May 16, 2010
Deacon Tom Cornell
This Gospel reading makes me think of a young man I met not long ago, a very bright guy. He studies comparative literature at NYU. He doesn’t have a church or a religion. But he's interested, he said, even attracted. He told me that he's reading the New Testament, and that in all the world literature he had read, he never came across a figure as attractive or compelling as Jesus of Nazareth. Was Jesus really the Son of God as he read in Mark’s Gospel? Was he the Messiah the Jews expected in Matthew and Luke? Was he the Logos, the eternal Word of God who took flesh and lived among us as in John?
Was Jesus the Savior of the World as Christians claim? Did he really give us the Way to salvation, the Way to keep us from blowing ourselves up when he said from the Cross “Father forgive them?” And when he taught his disciples to pray, "forgive as we forgive." The Deacon Stephen echoed his words as he was stoned to death in our first reading, "Do not hold this sin against them." Did Jesus really take away our sins so that one day we might understand what this whole thing on earth is about, when we are with God in Heaven? It would be nice to think so, he said. Well, why didn’t he just come to our church and find out?
“You Catholics say you know what Jesus really taught, that yours is the true church, the church he founded. But the Episcopalians across the street, they say they the same thing, and the Bible Church up the hill says the same thing, and the Presbyterians over there, and the Methodists up in Milton and the Quakers over in Clintondale…. See what I mean? How can I believe any of you Christians if you can’t believe each other?” Pray for him.
You have to admit, he has a point. He's missing another point though, and that is, at a deep level, we are in fact one. There is really only one church of Jesus Christ for, as Paul has it, “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all” (Eph 4,5).
God is a mystery, the deepest mystery. God can not be defined because to define means to put an end, a boundary to something, de fine, and you can’t do that to God. God is infinite. Christ is the sacrament of God, another mystery because we can not define him either. We can say “true man and true God” but we can’t really exhaust what that means! The church is the sacrament of Christ, another mystery. So you see you can’t really put a boundary on the church either. Only God knows who is in and who is out. It’s quite conceivable that some who say, “Lord, Lord!” might not be real Christians at all, and it’s quite conceivable too that some we would never expect are true seekers of Truth and Love and doers besides and so beloved of Christ and his own.
Today we heard how Jesus prayed to the Father that his disciples be one so that the world might believe in him, that the Father sent him: “That they be one.” He says it three times. One as Jesus and the Father are one. So it will be because it is God’s will. When and how Christian unity will be achieved we can not know. But we do know this: we have a part to play in it, every one of us. How? By letting go of any feelings of resentment we might have against fellow Christians in other churches or denominations, by letting go of any feelings of hurt for wrongs committed against us, by forgiving. My Irish ancestors, you may know, had a beef with the English. That war lasted eight hundred years, but it’s over now. We don’t have to forget, we can’t forget, but we can and we must forgive.
Let go of any feeling of pride or superiority or envy or resentment and admit our failings and our sins against each other and seek forgiveness of God and of each other, brothers and sisters in Christ. We killed each other in wars of religion! Doesn’t that sound like a contradiction in terms? “A war of religion!” Thank God we are past all that. We are living in a new age, an oecumenical age. Time to love.
I spoke to a group of Protestant young people in their high school not long ago, Anabaptists. My heart had to go out to them because their hearts were so warm with the love of God and of Jesus, and for us Catholic too in our present suffering. I could feel it. How can we not love them? One of the young men asked me, “Tom, why isn’t the Catholic Church a peace church, like us or the Quakers? We have the same Gospel!”
“Timothy,” I said to him, “we owe your people, the Anabaptists, a debt. We Catholics had all but forgotten Christian nonviolence when you people kept it alive for us. We’re taking it back into the mainstream of our own Tradition. Because of your help, your faithfulness, the Catholic Church is well on its way to becoming a peace church.” By that I mean we now have peace at the top of our social agenda, the renunciation of war and the causes of war. We defend men and women who refuse to participate in war for reasons of conscience. We not only defend them but hold them up as examples of genuine Christian discipleship. That is a big step forward, even if all our people don’t know it yet.
What can we do to promote Christian unity? We can pray together, pray the Scriptures together, study together, work together as we work here at Saint Mary’s with the Presbyterians in our food bank, as Sister Mary and the others work in Newburgh Ministries for the poor; work at every level in every way we can for peace and justice in this world, to put an end to war and the causes of war, an end to hunger, an end to ethnic, racial and religious hatred.
For this we need all the strength and nourishment we can get from our Scriptures and the sacraments. We can not share the Eucharist together with non-Catholics yet, except under exceptional circumstances because the Eucharist is the ultimate sign of unity, and if we share Holy Communion prematurely we will not hunger for a common table, and that is what we must do! Hunger for it, thirst for it! It is God’s will!
When the church of Jesus Christ is the church God wills it to be, it will be truly Catholic, truly Orthodox, truly Evangelical and truly Reformed. We will be one, and the world will come to believe. Finally they will see Jesus coming on the clouds with the angels and saints, with Moses and The Baal Shem Tov and Gautama Buddha and Gandhi and the Mahdi, with Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Frank and Maisie and The B to judge the living and the dead. “I was hungry and you fed me!” Come, Lord Jesus!
Saturday, May 1, 2010
In Defense of Catholic Worker Anarchism
From the May 2010 issue of The Catholic Worker
By
Tom Cornell
Ammon Hennacy did the Catholic Worker a lot of good. He got us out on the street selling the paper and into court rooms and jail cells for nonviolent direct action protesting war and war taxes and Civil Defense. We call ourselves Catholic anarchists largely because of him, but we seldom examine what that means.
Ammon refused to register for the World War I draft and served over two years, eight months of it in solitary confinement at Atlanta federal prison. In 1940 he was still of an age obliged to register for the World War II draft. Again he refused. But this time Selective Service ignored him. From then on he refused to pay federal income taxes and took day-labor as a farm-worker in Arizona so that, if the feds wanted to garnishee his wages, they’d have to send a “revenooer” out every day at sundown to confiscate his pay envelope. It wasn’t worth it. Ammon was arrested over fifty times for nonviolent civil disobedience, but more important, he took personal responsibility in little things. If a trash barrel was overturned onto the street, he would go out of his way to right things. That was essential to his idea of anarchism.
Anarchism has been controversial within the Catholic Worker movement at least since the Pacifist Weekend of 1954, when Robert Ludlow, whom Dorothy Day had dubbed the Catholic Worker’s chief theoretician, renounced anarchism, or better, the Catholic Worker’s appropriation of the term and whatever Bob meant by it (v. his “Re-evaluation” in the June 1955 CW). Many secular anarchists agree with Ludlow and hold that “Catholic” and “anarchist” are mutually exclusive terms. Ammon provocatively called his book The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist. In a second edition, Ammon added a chapter on why he left the Catholic Church and changed the title to The Book of Ammon. (Ammon was reconciled to the Church a few days before his death. His funeral was held at the Catholic Church of St. Joan of Arc in Salt Lake City, Utah.)
What kind of anarchism can we claim? An etymological definition (an- meaning no- and arche meaning rule) is useless if it fails to recognize a current in the wider socialist movement, called by its detractors anarchism. No anarchist of sound mind holds either that government does not exist or ought not to exist, etymology notwithstanding. All socialists want government to promote the general welfare rather than the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, “people before profits.”
As I see it, anarchists would want more government if that means courts defending the right of workers to organize, the Department of Agriculture helping to initiate independent producer and consumer cooperatives instead of supporting vertical integration of farms into ever bigger and more powerful conglomerates. Government could favor open-pollinated seed sharing instead of forcing farmers around the world to buy new patented hybrid seed for each planting to enrich Monsanto. Government could facilitate worker buy-outs of small industries with no-interest loans. The Postal Service could subsidize journals of opinion as it once did in order to disseminate alternative ideas and enrich democratic debate, and so that the means of communication might not fall into the hands of a few.
But conversely, anarchists would want much less government if that means the State Department, and the so-called Defense and Justice Departments and counter-revolution, the overthrow of socialist initiatives wherever they may be and the installation of right-wing dictators in client states. Anarchists want much less, no government if that means racist prisons and war, but more anti-trust legislation and enforcement, trust-busting, not union-busting, more environmental protection, more Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and immediate access to federal courts for every labor organizer punished for organizing. But anarchists will hold even benign organs of government to a most strict accounting, since "power tends to corrupt," and they will view the state in practice more as a guarantor of privilege than as an organ of its diffusion.
The late Howard Zinn described his social philosophy as “democratic socialism, without passports or visas or jails.” Noam Chomsky calls himself an anarchist, by which he means a libertarian socialist, as did Paul Goodman, Emma Goldman and in her pre-Stalinist days, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. When Dorothy Day defended the Cuban revolution she did not imagine that Fidel Castro planned to do away with government. Anarchism has to be understood within the broader socialist tradition. Neo-conservatives want to starve the government to death so as to free rapacious corporate interests from any restraint. That is not our kind of anarchism.
Anarchist thinkers distinguish between society, government and the state. National sovereignty entails the ability of the state to protect its interests or to project its might with ultimate force. But the whole of humankind will live as long as it lives under the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction can not be allowed to remain in the hands of nation states without a high probability that they will eventually be used. That is morally inadmissible, absolutely. If the primary purpose of the state is to protect its people and the modern nation state is the primary threat to the survival of all peoples, what can be said of its legitimacy?
Gordon Zahn intended in his retirement years to address the issue of nationalism as a threat to human survival. He wasn’t granted the time. Another framework has to come into play under the over-arching principles of the unity of the human family, the need to defend the innocent, the integrity of cultures and the sovereignty of God in a globalization of solidarity, not a globalization of exploitation. How will anarchists contribute to that project?
Instead of a political program or ideology, anarchists offer a set of attitudes and preferences: the fewer rules and regulations, the better. "All the law necessary, and no more than is necessary," and then we argue over "necessary." We favor spontaneity over predictability, initiative and invention over tried-and-true patterns and personal responsibility over delegation. Authority is to be won by good work and exercised only as long as it is recognized by equals. Anarchists look to horizontal organization before vertical structure, though not denying the need for that too. Catholic anarchists temper individualism with a mind toward community and the common good. Many vote and even hold local public office. But the preferred modus operandi is direct action and the formation of small, intimate communities.
Government can advance the right of peoples to organize for the redress of grievances and for the advancement of their own interests. Since the rich and powerful are already well organized, law and government should make a "preferential option" to extend the same rights to the poor and the marginalized in order to advance justice, promote the general welfare and civil harmony. In the modern state they seldom do. Anarchists are likely to perceive this anomaly, and the deception the powerful employ to justify the wars that maintain their power and privilege.
Catholic anarchists gratefully accept the teaching authority of the Church. How to make our position understandable and attractive to others, especially our fellow Catholics, should be part of our clarification of thought. I have come to conclude that Catholic Worker radicalism is not eccentric at all, but comes from the very heart of the Church. Democratic, libertarian socialism or anarchism best harmonizes the principles of Catholic social teaching: the supreme goods of justice and peace; the dignity of the human person with inherent rights from conception to natural death; universal solidarity with a preferential option for the poor and the young; the defense of the innocent; the universal destination of goods; the right to private property; the priority of labor over capital; subsidiarity and the universal common good, all in the tradition of the virtues.
Almost all Americans have been conditioned by their schooling and the media to believe that ours is a democratic republic and not what it is in fact, an oligarchic plutocracy on its way to fascism. They have been programmed to be compulsive consumers, willing cannon-fodder and compliant accomplices in their own exploitation. Religion should sharpen, not dull moral judgment. If fascism ever comes to this country it will undoubtedly be wrapped in the flag and brandishing the Cross. To reach our fellow Catholics we should go to the Magisterium.
Christians are obliged to obey duly constituted authority justly exercised (Rom 13, 1-2). We must also ask what constitutes legitimate authority and how justly is it exercised. According to the Compendium of the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church, “Citizens are not obligated in conscience to follow the prescriptions of civil authorities if their precepts are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or to the teachings of the Gospel (#820). Unjust laws pose dramatic problems of conscience for morally upright people: when they are called to cooperate in morally evil acts they must refuse…. It is a grave duty of conscience not to cooperate, not even formally, in practices which, although permitted by civil legislation, are contrary to the Law of God. Such cooperation in fact can never be justified, not by invoking respect for the freedom of others nor by appealing to the fact that it is foreseen and required by civil law. No one can escape the moral responsibility for actions taken, and all will be judged by God himself based on this responsibility (#399).” Catholics understand this in the matter of abortion. Once the principle is established, it can be applied to war and unjust social and political structures as well. It’s revolutionary!
Decisions for civil disobedience must be made in good conscience under spiritual guidance, after careful consideration of the facts of the matter and the context and the consequences and the principles involved. A good conscience must be a right conscience as well, based on a correct judgment of the facts and informed by the Gospel and the teachings of the Church. Won’t that lead to chaos? When the time draws near that nonviolent civil disobedience threatens the common good, then we will reconsider the matter. But that is not the problem today. Quite the opposite! The problem today is obedience. The Nazi Army was overwhelmingly Christian, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, over 90 percent. If there wasn’t a pastoral failure involved in that, then there is no such thing and we pastors and preachers and catechists and religious teachers are irrelevant. It’s all “pie in the sky.” If the Kingdom of God is not here and now it will never be then and there.
Dorothy Day believed that a revolutionary force already set in motion would at last sweep the world. The last century saw many a counterfeit. If there is to be a revolution, it will be, as Ammon Hennacy called it, the one man or one woman revolution, or as Dorothy put it, “the revolution of the heart,” one by one. If there is to be “a new social order in which it is easier to be good,” it will be built on the means that Peter Maurin envisioned, “a philosophy so old it looks like new, the gentle personalism of traditional Christianity.” There is no more revolutionary manifesto than the Sermon on the Mount.
Catholic Workers do not, by and large, engage in conventional politics. It is too late for that. "What matters is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict" (Alisdaire MacIntyre, After Virtue). Although he insists that he is not an anarchist, MacIntyre paints the picture as we see it.
In order not to be conformed to this age, not to be co-opted by an effete state socialism or, even worse, by decadent bourgeois liberalism, to continue ever to be transformed in the renewal of our understanding, to discern what is truly good and pleasing and perfect, the will of God, Catholic Workers should nurture the gifts our founders left us, continue to identify as anarchists, and struggle always to understand just what that means.
By
Tom Cornell
Ammon Hennacy did the Catholic Worker a lot of good. He got us out on the street selling the paper and into court rooms and jail cells for nonviolent direct action protesting war and war taxes and Civil Defense. We call ourselves Catholic anarchists largely because of him, but we seldom examine what that means.
Ammon refused to register for the World War I draft and served over two years, eight months of it in solitary confinement at Atlanta federal prison. In 1940 he was still of an age obliged to register for the World War II draft. Again he refused. But this time Selective Service ignored him. From then on he refused to pay federal income taxes and took day-labor as a farm-worker in Arizona so that, if the feds wanted to garnishee his wages, they’d have to send a “revenooer” out every day at sundown to confiscate his pay envelope. It wasn’t worth it. Ammon was arrested over fifty times for nonviolent civil disobedience, but more important, he took personal responsibility in little things. If a trash barrel was overturned onto the street, he would go out of his way to right things. That was essential to his idea of anarchism.
Anarchism has been controversial within the Catholic Worker movement at least since the Pacifist Weekend of 1954, when Robert Ludlow, whom Dorothy Day had dubbed the Catholic Worker’s chief theoretician, renounced anarchism, or better, the Catholic Worker’s appropriation of the term and whatever Bob meant by it (v. his “Re-evaluation” in the June 1955 CW). Many secular anarchists agree with Ludlow and hold that “Catholic” and “anarchist” are mutually exclusive terms. Ammon provocatively called his book The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist. In a second edition, Ammon added a chapter on why he left the Catholic Church and changed the title to The Book of Ammon. (Ammon was reconciled to the Church a few days before his death. His funeral was held at the Catholic Church of St. Joan of Arc in Salt Lake City, Utah.)
What kind of anarchism can we claim? An etymological definition (an- meaning no- and arche meaning rule) is useless if it fails to recognize a current in the wider socialist movement, called by its detractors anarchism. No anarchist of sound mind holds either that government does not exist or ought not to exist, etymology notwithstanding. All socialists want government to promote the general welfare rather than the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, “people before profits.”
As I see it, anarchists would want more government if that means courts defending the right of workers to organize, the Department of Agriculture helping to initiate independent producer and consumer cooperatives instead of supporting vertical integration of farms into ever bigger and more powerful conglomerates. Government could favor open-pollinated seed sharing instead of forcing farmers around the world to buy new patented hybrid seed for each planting to enrich Monsanto. Government could facilitate worker buy-outs of small industries with no-interest loans. The Postal Service could subsidize journals of opinion as it once did in order to disseminate alternative ideas and enrich democratic debate, and so that the means of communication might not fall into the hands of a few.
But conversely, anarchists would want much less government if that means the State Department, and the so-called Defense and Justice Departments and counter-revolution, the overthrow of socialist initiatives wherever they may be and the installation of right-wing dictators in client states. Anarchists want much less, no government if that means racist prisons and war, but more anti-trust legislation and enforcement, trust-busting, not union-busting, more environmental protection, more Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and immediate access to federal courts for every labor organizer punished for organizing. But anarchists will hold even benign organs of government to a most strict accounting, since "power tends to corrupt," and they will view the state in practice more as a guarantor of privilege than as an organ of its diffusion.
The late Howard Zinn described his social philosophy as “democratic socialism, without passports or visas or jails.” Noam Chomsky calls himself an anarchist, by which he means a libertarian socialist, as did Paul Goodman, Emma Goldman and in her pre-Stalinist days, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. When Dorothy Day defended the Cuban revolution she did not imagine that Fidel Castro planned to do away with government. Anarchism has to be understood within the broader socialist tradition. Neo-conservatives want to starve the government to death so as to free rapacious corporate interests from any restraint. That is not our kind of anarchism.
Anarchist thinkers distinguish between society, government and the state. National sovereignty entails the ability of the state to protect its interests or to project its might with ultimate force. But the whole of humankind will live as long as it lives under the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction can not be allowed to remain in the hands of nation states without a high probability that they will eventually be used. That is morally inadmissible, absolutely. If the primary purpose of the state is to protect its people and the modern nation state is the primary threat to the survival of all peoples, what can be said of its legitimacy?
Gordon Zahn intended in his retirement years to address the issue of nationalism as a threat to human survival. He wasn’t granted the time. Another framework has to come into play under the over-arching principles of the unity of the human family, the need to defend the innocent, the integrity of cultures and the sovereignty of God in a globalization of solidarity, not a globalization of exploitation. How will anarchists contribute to that project?
Instead of a political program or ideology, anarchists offer a set of attitudes and preferences: the fewer rules and regulations, the better. "All the law necessary, and no more than is necessary," and then we argue over "necessary." We favor spontaneity over predictability, initiative and invention over tried-and-true patterns and personal responsibility over delegation. Authority is to be won by good work and exercised only as long as it is recognized by equals. Anarchists look to horizontal organization before vertical structure, though not denying the need for that too. Catholic anarchists temper individualism with a mind toward community and the common good. Many vote and even hold local public office. But the preferred modus operandi is direct action and the formation of small, intimate communities.
Government can advance the right of peoples to organize for the redress of grievances and for the advancement of their own interests. Since the rich and powerful are already well organized, law and government should make a "preferential option" to extend the same rights to the poor and the marginalized in order to advance justice, promote the general welfare and civil harmony. In the modern state they seldom do. Anarchists are likely to perceive this anomaly, and the deception the powerful employ to justify the wars that maintain their power and privilege.
Catholic anarchists gratefully accept the teaching authority of the Church. How to make our position understandable and attractive to others, especially our fellow Catholics, should be part of our clarification of thought. I have come to conclude that Catholic Worker radicalism is not eccentric at all, but comes from the very heart of the Church. Democratic, libertarian socialism or anarchism best harmonizes the principles of Catholic social teaching: the supreme goods of justice and peace; the dignity of the human person with inherent rights from conception to natural death; universal solidarity with a preferential option for the poor and the young; the defense of the innocent; the universal destination of goods; the right to private property; the priority of labor over capital; subsidiarity and the universal common good, all in the tradition of the virtues.
Almost all Americans have been conditioned by their schooling and the media to believe that ours is a democratic republic and not what it is in fact, an oligarchic plutocracy on its way to fascism. They have been programmed to be compulsive consumers, willing cannon-fodder and compliant accomplices in their own exploitation. Religion should sharpen, not dull moral judgment. If fascism ever comes to this country it will undoubtedly be wrapped in the flag and brandishing the Cross. To reach our fellow Catholics we should go to the Magisterium.
Christians are obliged to obey duly constituted authority justly exercised (Rom 13, 1-2). We must also ask what constitutes legitimate authority and how justly is it exercised. According to the Compendium of the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church, “Citizens are not obligated in conscience to follow the prescriptions of civil authorities if their precepts are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or to the teachings of the Gospel (#820). Unjust laws pose dramatic problems of conscience for morally upright people: when they are called to cooperate in morally evil acts they must refuse…. It is a grave duty of conscience not to cooperate, not even formally, in practices which, although permitted by civil legislation, are contrary to the Law of God. Such cooperation in fact can never be justified, not by invoking respect for the freedom of others nor by appealing to the fact that it is foreseen and required by civil law. No one can escape the moral responsibility for actions taken, and all will be judged by God himself based on this responsibility (#399).” Catholics understand this in the matter of abortion. Once the principle is established, it can be applied to war and unjust social and political structures as well. It’s revolutionary!
Decisions for civil disobedience must be made in good conscience under spiritual guidance, after careful consideration of the facts of the matter and the context and the consequences and the principles involved. A good conscience must be a right conscience as well, based on a correct judgment of the facts and informed by the Gospel and the teachings of the Church. Won’t that lead to chaos? When the time draws near that nonviolent civil disobedience threatens the common good, then we will reconsider the matter. But that is not the problem today. Quite the opposite! The problem today is obedience. The Nazi Army was overwhelmingly Christian, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, over 90 percent. If there wasn’t a pastoral failure involved in that, then there is no such thing and we pastors and preachers and catechists and religious teachers are irrelevant. It’s all “pie in the sky.” If the Kingdom of God is not here and now it will never be then and there.
Dorothy Day believed that a revolutionary force already set in motion would at last sweep the world. The last century saw many a counterfeit. If there is to be a revolution, it will be, as Ammon Hennacy called it, the one man or one woman revolution, or as Dorothy put it, “the revolution of the heart,” one by one. If there is to be “a new social order in which it is easier to be good,” it will be built on the means that Peter Maurin envisioned, “a philosophy so old it looks like new, the gentle personalism of traditional Christianity.” There is no more revolutionary manifesto than the Sermon on the Mount.
Catholic Workers do not, by and large, engage in conventional politics. It is too late for that. "What matters is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict" (Alisdaire MacIntyre, After Virtue). Although he insists that he is not an anarchist, MacIntyre paints the picture as we see it.
In order not to be conformed to this age, not to be co-opted by an effete state socialism or, even worse, by decadent bourgeois liberalism, to continue ever to be transformed in the renewal of our understanding, to discern what is truly good and pleasing and perfect, the will of God, Catholic Workers should nurture the gifts our founders left us, continue to identify as anarchists, and struggle always to understand just what that means.
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