Harvard's "Black Mass"

It seems almost everyone is talking about Harvard University's "black mass." Well, that's certainly an exaggeration. Most people, most of the time, probably pay no attention at all to Harvard and its activities. But, for those who do, the proposed reenactment of a "black mass" planned by a Harvard Extension School student group has certainly garnered lots of attention.

The idea of a "black mass," as it has been transmitted in literature and legend over the centuries, is a ritual parody of the central sacramental ritual of the Catholic Church. Parodies only make sense, of course, in a cultural context where what is being mocked is widely recognized as sacred. The "black mass" has its origins not in some supposedly modern secular society, but in a sacral world, where the only plausible alternative to divine worship would be demonic worship. 

Negotiating the relationship between truth (which ironically is Harvard's motto, veritas) and freedom has always been something of a challenge. Prioritizing truth necessarily makes freedom instrumental at best. Prioritizing freedom inevitably relativizes the value of truth. As a result of our history and for some obvious and serious reasons, contemporary western societies have for the most part prioritized freedom. The manifest benefit of a free society is that the pursuit of truth - in religion, philosophy, science, etc. - is protected from coercion, even if only as one competing opinion among many in the resulting culture of relativism.  

Thus, in his statement on the "black mass," Harvard's President cites Justice Holmes argument that freedom of expression "protects not only free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate." 

Truth is not the only value relativized by freedom of expression, of course. While post-modern secular societies have become increasingly uncomfortable with truth claims, a more contemporary form of absolute claim is that of "inclusion." Recognizing the evident evil in the proposed satanic ritual, Harvard's President properly condemns it - invoking the value of "inclusion," the cultural language presumably most acceptable to a contemporary audience. That said, her condemnation seems clear and unambiguous: "The decision by a student club to sponsor an enactment of this ritual is abhorrent; it represents a fundamental affront to the values of inclusion, belonging and mutual respect that must define our community. It is deeply regrettable that the organizers of this event, well aware of the offense they are causing so many others, have chosen to proceed with a form of expression that is so flagrantly disrespectful and inflammatory."

In a truly free society, "disrespectful and inflammatory" speech and expression have to be lived with as part of the price of the freedom which we value for the personal and social goods freedom makes possible. But freedom from coercion does not equal or mandate passive approval. Indeed, such "disrespectful and inflammatory" speech and expression can and should be responded to - and in a way which recognizes both the responsibility that goes with living in a free society and the fundamental human responsibility to use freedom to promote a good society.

I think the Harvard President's statement captured that complex commitment in her conclusion: "I plan to attend a Eucharistic Holy Hour and Benediction at St. Paul's Church on our campus on Monday evening in order to join others in reaffirming our respect for the Catholic faith at Harvard and to demonstrate that the most powerful response to offensive speech is not censorship, but reasoned discourse and robust dissent."

Meanwhile, how many times in his little more than one year as Pope has Pope Francis warned us about Satan’s persistence? “Look out because the devil is present! The devil is here,” the Holy Father reminded us again in one of his recent Lenten morning homilies.

Vocation Sunday

As any teacher knows, to repeat the same news over and over again can help it to be accepted, to be learned, and even to become one of the things that matter most in one’s thinking. Likewise, for us to hear the proclamation of the resurrection, over and over again during these Easter Sundays, strengthens our faith by the witness of others’ faith - in particular the faith of the apostles. So one of the most noticeable features that distinguishes Easter from the other seasons of our Catholic calendar is the daily reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Through our annual journey with the apostles though the history of the early Church, we identify ourselves with that first generation of Christians in their exciting experience of the Risen Christ. We do that in order to become like them – to become a community of disciples which witnesses to the presence and action of the Risen Lord in his Church, a community which expresses its new life in its liturgy, from which it then reaches out into the wider world.

In his Message for today’s 51^st Annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Pope Francis writes of our participation “in a communal journey that is able to release the best energies” in and around us.

Preaching to the people on the first Pentecost Sunday [Acts 2:14a, 36-41], Peter wanted his hearers to feel personally impacted by his message – not simply hearing some new information about which one might or might not care, as we all do now, all day long, in our so-called “information age.” And, based on the story we just heard, Peter was apparently quite successful. The people were cut to the heart, and they asked Peter and the other apostles, “What are we to do?”

Now, one possible response to Peter’s message might be a certain feeling of remorse. In the process of conversion, guilt is often a first step. Remorse alone, however, can get stuck in a focus on oneself. We avoid getting stuck, we avoid being absorbed in ourselves, when guilt goes forward to true conversion, which resolves guilt with forgiveness and the freedom which comes from forgiveness.

The proclamation of the good news – whether in 1^st-century Jerusalem or 21^st century Tennessee - ought always to lead us to that experience of conversion. As Peter told the people, the promise is made to all those. Whomever the Lord our God will call. The apostles’ message of the call to conversion was, in that first instance of course, an invitation to identify with Christ in baptism. But, once we have been baptized, we are also repeatedly invited, as Peter exhorted his hearers in today’s 2^nd reading [1 Peter 2:20b-25], to follow in Christ’s footsteps, living the new life made accessible to us by Christ’s death and resurrection, remaining united with him no matter what.

We hear this message repeatedly during this Easter season, Sunday after Sunday, inviting us to see something that wasn’t just for the 1^st century, but is addressed to us here and now in our own 21^st century.

As Pope Francis says, “the true joy of those who are called consists in believing and experiencing that he, the Lord, is faithful, and that with him we can walk, be disciples and witnesses of God’s love, open our hearts to great ideals, to great things.”

In particular, on this 51^st Annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations, the Church challenges us to focus in a special way on what is required for the message to continue to get out, to continue to be heard, to get transmitted from this generation to the next, in the life of Christ’s Body, the Church. With confidence in the Risen Lord’s promise to be with his Church forever and never to abandon it, we must - like those first Christians - nevertheless take seriously our own responsibility to do our part in making the mission of the Church actually happen among the people of our day.

As Pope Francis writes in his Vocation Sunday message: “A vocation is a fruit that ripens in a well cultivated field of mutual love that becomes mutual service, in the context of an authentic ecclesial life. No vocation is born of itself or lives for itself. A vocation flows from the heart of God and blossoms in the good soil of faithful people, in the experience of fraternal love.”

What does it mean for us to think of our life together as Church as "a well cultivated field of mutual love"? What message might that send out to the world?

Homily for the 4^th Sunday of Easter (51^st Annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations), Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 11, 2014.

Zaccheus for Today

Yesterday, Pope Francis received in audience the Secretary-General of the U.N. and the officers of the United Nations System Chief Executives Board. International agencies and organizations often meet in Rome. When they do, a papal audience is often included on their agenda. Papal comments and those of the visiting group on such occasions are often courteous and general. Yesterday's papal address, however, was more interesting than usual.

After the usual generalities affirming the efforts of the various agencies represented, the Holy Father got more specific: an important part of humanity does not share in the benefits of progress and is in fact relegated to the status of second-class citizens. Future Sustainable Development Goals must therefore be formulated and carried out with generosity and courage, so that they can have a real impact on the structural causes of poverty and hunger, attain more substantial results in protecting the environment, ensure dignified and productive labor for all, and provide appropriate protection for the family, which is an essential element in sustainable human and social development. Specifically, this involves challenging all forms of injustice and resisting the “economy of exclusion”, the “throwaway culture” and the “culture of death” which nowadays sadly risk becoming passively accepted.

Echoing Evangelii Gaudium, the Pope's Post-Synodal Exhortation, this was obviously meant as an actual challenge to international agencies and organizations - and the constituencies they represent. It is a challenge to recognize and actually address some of the serious structural problems that characterize contemporary political and economic life, identified by the labels "economy of exclusion," "throwaway culture," and "culture of death."

But the Holy Father did not stop there. We usually tend to address issues of social and economic justice under the general rubric of natural law. We do so for good reason. Policy proposals generally have to resonate with universally accessible moral principles if they are to have any hope of ever being implemented in a pluralistic society. But the Pope's voice can never be that of just another international bureaucrat. Whether speaking ad intra or ad extra, whether within the Church or out to the world, he is always the Vicar of Christ proclaiming the good news - "the joy of the Gospel." And what better way to do that than by retelling a Gospel story? In this case, it was the familiar story of Zacchaeus the rich tax collector (Luke 19:1-10) which the Pope chose to recall. Zacchaeus, Pope Francis reminded his audience of international bureaucrats, made a radical decision of sharing and justice, because his conscience had been awakened by the gaze of Jesus. This same spirit should be at the beginning and end of all political and economic activity. The gaze, often silent, of that part of the human family which is cast off, left behind, ought to awaken the conscience of political and economic agents and lead them to generous and courageous decisions with immediate results, like the decision of Zacchaeus. Does this spirit of solidarity and sharing guide all our thoughts and actions, I ask myself?

(That image of "the gaze of Jesus" awakening Zacchaeus' conscience identified with "the gaze" of those "cast off" and "left behind" is one which I think will not be forgotten in future discussions of this subject!)

Without waiting for an answer to his rhetorical question, Pope Francis filled in further some of the specifics of what "this spirit of solidarity" requires of us: Today, in concrete terms, an awareness of the dignity of each of our brothers and sisters whose life is sacred and inviolable from conception to natural death must lead us to share with complete freedom the goods which God’s providence has placed in our hands, material goods but also intellectual and spiritual ones, and to give back generously and lavishly whatever we may have earlier unjustly refused to others.

The approach adopted by the media since this Pope's election has been to try to present him as in some fundamental way different from his predecessors. Countering the media's persistent preference for such a hermeneutic of discontinuity, Pope Francis began his talk by invoking his two recently canonized predecessors, Saints John XXIII and John Paul II, and their passionate concern for integral human development. He ended by invoking the encyclicals of his two immediate predecessors, John Paul II (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis 42-43, Centesimus Annus 43) and Benedict XVI (Caritas in Veritate 6, 24-40), stating that equitable economic and social progress can only be attained by joining scientific and technical abilities with an unfailing commitment to solidarity accompanied by a generous and disinterested spirit of gratuitousness at every level.

(One can read the Pope's entire short   address to the UN officials, at http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/may/documents/papa-francesco_20140509_consiglio-nazioni-unite.html.)

Built Up in Love

Each year on this Friday of the 3rd Week of Easter, as the Church continues her journey through the Acts of the Apostles, she highlights the familiar story of the "conversion" of Saint Paul. So important was this event that Luke saw fit to include not one but three accounts of it in Acts. Luke - and likewise Paul himself - certainly saw it as a critical moment in the growth of the Church, setting the stage for its expansion into the Gentile world. (That "Good News Travels Fast" - the title of a children's book version of Acts some 20+ years ago - and that it travels far, even among the Gentiles, is, of course, the theme of Acts.)

There are so many amazing things happening in this story (as in Acts as a whole) that merit attention. Speaking at Mass at school this morning, I concentrated on the brief bit of dialogue in the story between Paul, blinded by the flashing light and thrown down on the ground, and the heavenly voice. That voice initiated the dialogue by asking, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? This initial question, repeated in all three accounts of the story, elicits from Paul not a reply so much as another question, Who are you, sir? To that he then receives the definitive response, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 

Jesus then goes on to instruct him what to do, transforming the zealous Pharisee into an equally zealous Christian missionary. Meanwhile, Jesus' self-description, his identification of himself with the Christian community, would provide an interpretive key for Paul's fully developed Christocentric ecclesiology: Now you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it (1 Corinthians 12:27).

Paul's "Body of Christ" language speaks eloquently of the unity that is supposed to characterize the Church. But it is always more than just a spiritual version of the once popular political image of a "Body Politic." For the heart of the image is not our union with one another within the body, real and important thought that is, but our union and identification with Christ, from whom our union with one another is derivative. 

Like the account of Paul's "conversion" itself, the initiative comes from Christ, who first unites and identifies himself with us in the incarnation and then facilitates our response of union and identification with him through his death and resurrection. That response sums up our life with Christ and one another as his Church: living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the body's growth and builds itself up in love (Ephesians 4:15-16).

More Callenges for Hispanic Ministry in the U.S.

The title of an article in today's New York Times says it all: "Even as U.S. Hispanics Lift Catholicism, Many Are Leaving the Church Behind." (The article by Michael Paulson can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/upshot/even-as-hispanics-lift-catholicism-theyre-leaving-it )

The article is based on the latest poll by the Pew Research Center, which "finds that 55 percent of Hispanics in the United States identified themselves as Catholic in 2013, down from 67 percent in 2010. About 22 percent of Hispanics identify as Protestant - including 16 percent who say they are evangelical or born-again - and 18 percent say they are unaffiliated."

Two things about this study stand out - or rather jump out! The first, as noted by a senior researcher at Pew, is the surprising size of the decline in so short a period - from 67% in 2010 to only 55% just three years later. It could, of course, be an anomaly. But relying on statistical anomalies does not a satisfactory pastoral strategy make. And God help us all if this is the trend!

The second thing that stands out from this study is how "Hispanics in the United States are leaving religion as they assimilate to a more broadly secular culture." The defection of a significant portion of Hispanic Catholics to various Evangelical and Pentecostal churches and movements has long been noted - and not just in the U.S. but even more troublingly in Latin American itself. As for the pattern here, all one has to do is stroll around a Latino neighborhood in a large American city and count up all the storefront churches, as well as the more mainstream churches which advertise services in Spanish. Of course, the fact that a problem has long been noted does not mean it has been adequately responded it. Obviously, it has not. But perhaps even more problematic is the increasing evidence that  a notable number of younger Hispanic Catholics are, as Paulson puts it, assimilating "to a more broadly secular culture by becoming religiously unaffiliated, becoming part of the growing group religious researchers label "the nones."

Now just yesterday, I commented in this space about a recent Boston College study that focused on parishes which have Hispanic ministry. There was much that was very positive in that report, which highlights the vitality and vibrancy of such parishes, and which Paulson summarizes as "showing that American Hispanic Catholics have higher participation rates in sacramental activities ...but lower participation rates in other  aspects of parish life than do other American Catholics." One of those areas of lower participation, which strikes me as particularly problematic, is in relation to Catholic schools. This particular factor - and the  diminished participation of American Catholics overall in Catholic schools - is I suspect not unrelated to this larger issue of so many younger Catholics (both Hispanic and non-Hispanic) becoming unaffiliated.

 

As I noted yesterday, the Boston College study points out that 93% of under-18 Hispanics are American born. Hence the study's consequential conclusion: "Much of the Catholic experience in the country during the next few decades will be significantly shaped by how the Church reaches out to this last group and whether young Hispanic in this age bracket, at least those growing up in Catholic households, decide to self-identify as Catholic."  The Pew poll simply confirms that there is much more to be done to meet the distinctive pastoral needs of younger, American-born, English-speaking Hispanic populations, who experience some of the same challenges to faith that their non-Hispanic peers are also experiencing. Likewise, it is hard to imagine a seriously successful transmission of an informed, active, and committed Catholic faith to the next generation without a strong network of Catholic schools. Nor should we ever underestimate the energy a vibrant parish school brings to the ongoing daily life of a parish.

In any case, any serious U.S. effort at "New Evangelization" must confront the challenge of increasing religious non-affiliation among younger Americans - and the disquieting spread of that phenomenon among the largely young Latino Catholic population.