"I do will it"

Some Thoughts on this 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 14, 2021

The covid pandemic has reminded us - in case we had forgotten - what happens when we are faced with a dangerous disease, before whose power people feel defenseless. None of us alive today can remember the last such pandemic - the so-called "Spanish Flu" of a little over century ago. But those of us above a certain age - my "Baby-Boom” generational cohort - can, of course, recall how ubiquitous polio was in the early 1950s. That was the last such polio epidemic, thanks to the development of the Salk vaccine, which, as 1st graders, I and many of us were among the first to receive. Beforehand, however, that last polio epidemic had induced tremendous panic, as again people were terrified of a dangerous disease, which many feared might never be conquered and in the face of which we felt defenseless.

In ancient Israel, however, what was called leprosy was sometimes not Damien’s fatal disease but actually a superficial skin condition, which was in fact curable. Hence the Jewish law made provision for examination by a priest and an offering on the occasion of someone’s being healed. Until one had been properly examined and certified as healed, however, a “leper” remained ritually impure.

In such a world, where it was believed that only God could heal leprosy and where sickness was seen as a serious threat, the leper was shunned. Cut off from ordinary life and regular relationships with others, the leper’s lot must have been a miserable one indeed - more miserable by far than the very real sufferings so many have had to endure in temporary quarantines, "lockdowns," and the other socially isolating situations that this current pandemic has imposed. In fact, even prior to the pandemic, our modern world was facing an epidemic of loneliness and lack of sufficient social relationships.

Miserable indeed was the 1st-century leper's lot, until suddenly, into this sad world of sickness and exclusion, appeared Jesus.

In this Sunday's Gospel [Mark 1:40-45], the news about Jesus and his healing powers had made the rounds and had reached even the marginalized leper. So suddenly we see a leper actually approaching Jesus directly, doing precisely what the Law prohibited him from doing. A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, “If you wish, you can make me clean.”

“If you wish!” What exactly are we to suppose that “if” meant? Did the leper doubt Jesus? And, if so, what exactly was he doubting about Jesus? Apparently, he didn’t doubt that Jesus had the power to heal him – quite amazing actually, given the general belief that only God could cure leprosy! If the leper had little or no doubt about Jesus’ power, Jesus’ ability, to heal him,  however, he still seems evidently to have wondered whether Jesus would heal him, whether he would want to heal him, whether he cared enough to heal him. (Fear of germs, after all, is only one of many motives for erecting barriers between ourselves and others).

Jesus understood and answered: “I do will it. Be made clean.” But, before he said that, Jesus did something even more meaningful to the leper, something so radical it in fact violated the Law and implicated Jesus in the leper’s ritually impure status. Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, and touched him.

Now as then, touching is one of those things people tend to be especially squeamish about with the sick - something we have deliberately shied away from, individually and as a society, thanks to this pandemic, something we may now be missing much more than we may recognize. Following Jesus' example, touching - in the form of lay on of hands, physical anointing, and other analogous rituals - has been an integral part of our sacramental experience, something we have also been deprived us in this pandemic-driven world.

In his desperation, the leper had boldly broken the Law and approached Jesus directly. Jesus reciprocated with a dramatic, unexpected touch, that spoke more than all the words in the world. With that one touch, Jesus joined the leper in his impurity and uncleanness, dramatically ending his segregation from society. With that one powerful touch, Jesus summarized his entire mission to become one with us, and so to end our segregation from God and enable us to join together in the fuller, more abundant kind of life that God wants us to live.

The same Jesus, who stretched out his hand, and touched the leper, continues his healing touch here and now in the institutional and sacramental life of his body, the Church.  That touch is every bit as necessary now as it was then – not just because sickness and suffering still abound in our world, but because the leper’s doubt also persists. How many of us at times really wonder whether anyone cares? How many of us at times doubt deep down whether even God cares? It is the mission and challenge of the Church – the mission and challenge therefore of each and every one of us – to express visibly, to embody physically, and so to become God’s healing presence and saving power present in our world, to continue Christ’s caring for us, by caring as he does.

As the Law required, Jesus sent the leper to the priest to verify his healing, and to make the ritual offering in thanksgiving that the Law prescribed. Presumably, the leper went and did what was required for him to re-enter society, but the leper’s principal offering in thanksgiving was to spread the report abroad and publicize the whole matter.

Whatever difficulties and doubts we may harbor, our own healing will not be complete until we let Christ’s healing touch transform us, in and through our life and worship together as his Church, into agents of Christ’s caring touch to and for all the world.

 

After The Trial

 

Monday will be Presidents Day, a phony shopping-weekend substitute for the authentic observance of Washington's Birthday (still the federal holiday's official name). That said, this holiday highlights the supreme significance of the American presidency - from the idealized presidency of George Washington's "Farewell Address" (the annual reading of which will continue on Monday as a Senate tradition) to the degraded presidency of Donald Trump (garishly on display in his just completed second impeachment trial).

The House Managers effectively described Trump's authoritarian effort before the election to foment distrust in the fairness and trustworthiness of election procedures and his dishonest and destructive effort after the election to attempt to reverse the lawfully arrived at result of the election, all culminating in his incitement of an anti-government mob that had assembled in Washington on January 6 and his failure to respond appropriately to the violence that followed. It is inarguable that, had Trump not falsely claimed that he had actually won the election and encouraged his followers to protest in support of this lie, there would have been no mob scene in Washington on January 6, no attack upon the Capitol, no attempt to disrupt the constitutionally prescribed process of counting the electoral votes, no lives lost and many others endangered, and our nation and its institutions not embarrassed forever in the eyes of the world.

Seven Republicans Senators - Burr (NC), Cassidy (LA), Collins (ME), Murkowski (AK), Romney (UT), Sasse (NE), and Toomey (PA) - had the courage and morality to acknowledge all this and join their 48 Democratic and 2 Independent colleagues in voting Guilty. That was not enough to disqualify Trump from future federal office, but it is enough to consign Trump forever to the infamy of history.

That said, the terrifying legacy of our worst president will continue to haunt our damaged country and our impoverished politics. His deplorable cult of personality and his political party's enabling of him will persist as a political force threatening justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, and the common good.

Questions and Answers

The only comment to make about yesterday afternoon's derisory performance by Donald Trump's defense team is that they took less than three of the sixteen hours they were entitled to use, thus sparing the Senate and the nation too many more hours of their contempt both for the process and for the truth. After the Defense rested, however, the Question-and-Answer period began. As one who appreciates parliamentary procedure, I appreciated the process as a somewhat charming relic from an earlier era, enabling everyone to exhale and settle down as Senators submitted written questions one by one, their questions then manually taken to the Chair, where the President pro tem took his time checking them. After announcing whom the question was from and whom it was for (the House Managers, the Defense Counsel, or both), he then handed it to the Clerk who stood up to read it. Only after all this, did the appropriate lawyers get up to answer (or, in the case of the Trump Team, often avoid answering). That said, some of the questions were very good ones, and they did enable the managers to highlight important elements from their earlier presentations.

Trump's defenders seem to have had a hard time letting go of their ostensibly constitutional objection, although that issue has now been legally settled by the vote of the Senate, which has sole jurisdiction in this matter. Trump's defenders also seemed determined to deny the extent to which the President seemed at best indifferent to his Vice President's safety on that terrible day, a particular aspect of the story that the Managers had effectively highlighted. presumably to the discomfort of Trump's loyalists in the Senate. Vice President Pence was probably the most obsequiously loyal of all the members of the Trump Administration. His reward was to be thrown under the proverbial bus on January 6 - surely a lesson for any other Republican foolish enough to hope his own loyalty might be reciprocated.

One of the ironies of Pence's political tragedy is that he was put on the ticket in the first place as a bridge to conservative Christian voters. Four years later, however, he was dispensable - not just to Trump but apparently also to them. What does that suggest not just about Trump but about his conservative Christian acolytes? "Faith must always fail when it goes political," Philip Rieff wrote in 1987. "So far as it remains in good faith, spiritual authority cannot become at one with political power." 

Trump's defenders also seemed, somewhat obsessively, to want to analogize aspects of this process to some of the standards of criminal judicial procedure, as if this process posed some substantive danger to ordinary Americans' rights to due process. But, in response, the Impeachment Managers made what may be ultimately the most important point of this exercise. Trump, as the Managers repeatedly pointed out, would not serve a single day, hour, or minute in jail as a consequence of conviction by the Senate. The purpose of this process is not personal punishment but protection of the Republic, setting a standard of behavior for those in positions of public trust to be held to.

If, as almost everyone expects, the Republicans stick with Trump and acquit him a second time, what will it mean for this country which Trump and his political party have so grievously wounded these pat several years? That is the final question and the most important one.

Social Reconstruction - A Century Ago

On this date in 1919, the Administrative Committee of the National Catholic War Council (the precursor of the present United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) published its Program of Social Reconstruction. World War I had just ended. "But the only safeguard of peace," the Bishops' Program proclaimed at its outset, "is social justice and a contented people." In contrast to the much more wordy style of so many magisterial documents, the entire Program is less than 17 pages - a short and easy read, well worth the effort even now 102 years later. Primary authorship of the 1919 test is traditionally ascribed to Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945). Ryan (photo) was sarcastically called "the Right Reverent New Dealer" during the 1936 election campaign by anti-FDR priest Charles Coughlin. (Ryan did indeed endorse FDR in 1936 and gave the Benediction at FDR's fourth Inauguration in 1945.) 

The Bishops' 1919 Program reflected its historical context, the aftermath of the disruption of World War I. The Bishops did not expect "as many or as great social changes" in the U.S. after the war as were expected in Europe, and they dismissed the belief that "Things will never be the same after the war." But, of course, every calamity brings both expected and unexpected changes in its wake. And we may safely suggest that things will never be quite the same after the pandemic, especially given the way the pandemic itself has unveiled so many fundamental and long-standing social ills.

Given the belief that imminent social change would be limited, the 1919 Program was primarily practical rather than comprehensive. That said, the Program unabashedly made the case for what was called a living wage. This, they insisted, "is not necessarily the full measure of justice. All Catholic authorities  on the subject  explicitly declare that this is only the minimum of justice." They also argued, in language reminiscent of more recent arguments about raising the minimum wage, that the demand produced by higher wages and purchasing power "is the most effective instrument of prosperity for labor and capital alike." The Program also promoted labor's right to organize and bargain collectively, and "hoped that this right will never again be called in question."

The document's ostensibly limited, practical orientation did not preclude an analysis of the prevailing economic system's serious defects, which were identified as "enormous inefficiency and the production and distribution of commodities; insufficient incomes for the great majority of wage earners, and unnecessarily large incomes for a small minority of privileged capitalists." What does it say about our society and its ostensible moral leaders that a full century later, the same description still applies - and maybe more so than it did less than half a century after the document was first issued?

Regarding the problems of production and insufficient income, the Program repeated what was earlier said about "universal living wages" and "harmonious relations between labor and capital on the basis of adequate participation by the former in all the industrial aspects of business management." Regarding the third evil of "unnecessarily large incomes for a small minority," the Program proposed "adequate government regulation" and "heavy taxation of incomes, excess profits, and inheritances." Such ideas were apparently less heretical then than now. They were mainstream ideas when I was growing up at mid-century in what was perhaps the most egalitarian and prosperous period in American history. They became hopelessly heretical after the disastrous election of 1980, which inaugurated the political cycle that thankfully may now be drawing to its close.

The Program ended by recalling "the long-forgotten truth that wealth is stewardship, that profit-making is not the basic justification of business enterprise." Now as then, that "long-forgotten truth" is something of which we all need to be reminded.

The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (The Book)

One of the side benefits of my enforced idleness has been the opportunity to read or re-read some wonderful books - among them, my undergraduate American Political Thought professor George McKenna's monumental exploration of New England Puritanism and the long-term impact of Puritan beliefs and sense of mission through our national history down to the present, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale, 2007).

The intricacies of Puritan theology and the factional disputes they produced (for example, the differences between "Spiritists" and Preparationists" and between "premillenialism" and "postmillenialism") are, well, intricate. McKenna both elucidates and explains these intricate distinctions and also highlights how they have mattered and may continue to matter throughout American history. It is one of the commonplaces of American history that so much of American political thought has been a variant of or a reaction against Puritan sensibilities. McKenna clarifies what that means and why it is important.

There is, of course the contrary commonplace that the Founders were secular-minded Deists, who had left religion behind, in a society which was severely unchurched. On the contrary, McKenna argues that "at least 60 percent of the adult white population attended church regularly between 1700 and 1776," that Deism was much less pervasive in the founding generation that is commonly alleged, that "the Christian revivalist George Whitfield was more widely known and respected than Franklin," and that what the Founders wanted was not the suspect notion of separation of church and state but rather "religious liberty, freedom from religious discrimination, and an end to religious 'establishments'."

McKenna takes us through the Great Awakening, the second Great Awakening, the  impact of Methodism, and the unique character of "politically sterile" Southern evangelicalism, and the continues the trajectory through subsequent American history, including the whigs, Lincoln, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive era, the Scopes trial, Reinhold Niebuhr's emphasis on original sin, the New Deal and World War II, the fifties and sixties, and ending in the aftermath of 9/11.

He also highlights the strong strain of anti-Catholicism in mainstream American religious and political thought throughout that history, how (contrary to the historically surprising current situation) "historically American patriotism and American anti-Catholicism are joined at the root." He demonstrates how for much of American history, Catholics and Southerners were the outsiders in terms of the American consensus.

Interestingly, he also argues that "anti-Catholicism seems to coincide with periods of national torpor and self-doubt, and it fades once America recovers its sense of mission. Anti-Catholicism almost disappeared during the American Revolution, when Americans finally knew what they were about. It came back during the anxious antebellum years, but retreated once the North began its crusade 'to make men free'." Thus, while some in FDR's administration "still retained old Whiggish anti-Catholic prejudices, the Roosevelt Administration's public face was "Catholiphilic."

McKenna also studies how, in the aftermath of World War II, Catholicism itself became (borrowing Mark Silk's typology) an American "adhesional" religion, dramatically so in the thought of John Courtney Murray, who "was saying that, of all the religions in America, Catholicism is the most faithful to America's moral foundations." The story ends with that most paradoxical product (which I would also characterize as a morally and politically poisonous product), the contemporary alliance between conservative Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism, who have come together in affirming "the older story of America as a land with a providential mission to provide opportunity for all and to carry its gospel to the rest of the world." 

The shrunken aspirational character of that alliance today, its abandonment of both "opportunity for all" and carrying "its gospel to the rest of the world," raises questions about fundamental changes in our society, which this sort of analysis needs to address, but which are beyond the scope of this book's narrative, which ends over a decade ago.