Law and the Culture War

One of the more memorable moments in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons is Saint Thomas More’s lecture to William Roper about the value of the law:  And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?... Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Unfortunately, we have all long since become used to the notion of the law as just one more partisan weapon in our ongoing national culture war - an increasingly warranted notion given the way each side more and more approaches and uses the law that way. The judiciary itself has hardly helped, and the fact that so many of the more politically sensitive and culturally divisive issues are apparently decided by courts on obviously partisan lines has regularly reinforced this perception. So when such an issue is resolved and a decisive precedent is set by the Supreme Court in an at least apparently bi-partisan way, (as happened this week with Bostock v. Clayton) we need to take notice.

I will leave it to constitutional lawyers to parse the particulars of Justice Gorsuch's Opinion. For partisans on both sides of the argument, civil rights for gay and transgender people also involve moral assertions which are inevitably way beyond the capacity of any human court to resolve. The Court's capacity is much more finite - to figure out how we are to live together peaceably, precisely in a world where at least some of the underlying points at issue remain unresolvable politically. After all, if all Americans had been in agreement about the rights and wrongs of civil rights and racial equality when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, that legislation would hardly have been necessary. Its purpose was to establish a social policy, going forward, to treat citizens of different races (and other relevant categories) equally - regardless of whatever contrary beliefs (however strongly affirmed and conscientiously or religiously based) many citizens might continue to hold. The Court has now resolved a particular contemporary dispute about the interpretation of that law - interpreting the statue's reference to discrimination on the basis of sex as applicable to forms of sex-related discrimination not overtly at issue in 1964. The Court cannot adjudicate moral beliefs. It can, however, articulate a prudential decision that legal equality shall be the society's public policy. 

(From a democratic perspective it would likely be better - in this area as with so many other intensely contested issues - if Congress had resolved the matter legislatively, clarifying the application of the earlier statute on this issue one way or the other. As a practical matter, however, Congress has largely long since abandoned its constitutional role. As a result we are increasingly governed by the Executive branch, by statutory regulatory agencies, and by the Judiciary, as contemporary American society's de facto policy-makers.)

Both sides in this debate have been - and continue to be in their response to Bostock - intensely moralistic and uncompromising. This only highlights their mutual irreconcilability and makes harder the kind of political compromises that will be necessary in those areas where there will likely be clashes between competing rights, as in the inevitable clash between the statutory law on non-discrimination in hiring and firing and the constitutional rights of religious institutions in internal hiring and firing. 

I an old enough to remember when some religious institutions and authorities strenuously opposed divorce and fought against the liberalization of divorce laws - until that battle was decisively lost. One might still argue against the desirability of divorce on moral or other grounds and even organize one's own personal life accordingly. But no civil servant refuses to sign marriage licenses for divorced people who remarry.  Civil society's stance on marriage and divorce is what it is, however differently religious communities may regard the matter in their internal practices.

Civil laws in a pluralistic secular society are necessarily what they are. They do not resolve ultimate philosophical and theological questions of right and wrong, good and bad, but rather express some kind of consensus concerning practical policies about how people are entitled to be treated within a society.

For the Life of the World

A week ago, we celebrated First Holy Communion for 11 of our younger parishioners. It reminded me of my own First Communion, 65 years earlier. When I posted my First Communion picture on my blog 10 days ago, my sister, who has been sorting out our mother’s things,  an accumulation of decades and decades of memories, told me she had found my First Communion armband and would save it for me. What does one do with a 65-year old First Communion armband?

Most of us can remember our First Communion. Hopefully we remember more than the fancy outfits, photos, and presents. Hopefully, we remember it as a special moment of joy and grace that has been repeated over and over again, every time we have received this sacrament. Presumably we have done that many times, since we have all lived in this relatively unique period in the Church’s history when frequent Communion has been both encouraged and the common experience of most of us – at least until our recent experience of the sudden suspension of so much of the Church’s public sacramental life because of the pandemic that continues to threaten us. That unwanted and unexpected experience should invite us to reflect more seriously on what may have been in danger of becoming at times a relatively routine activity.

But however frequently or infrequently received, Holy Communion can never be allowed to become routine, for, as we just heard from Saint Paul, the bread that we break is a participation in the body of Christ, thanks to which, we though many, are one body.

But what does it mean to be “one body”? Preaching on Pentecost Sunday to another group of First communicants in early 5th-century North Africa, Saint Augustine famously told them to listen to Saint Paul if they want to understand being the Body of Christ. He told them what you receive is the mystery that means you. It is to what you are that you reply Amen, and by so replying you express your assent. … So be a member of the body of Christ, in order to make that Amen true. [Sermon 272]

The New Testament tells us how, from the beginning, Christian communities devoted themselves to the breaking of bread and prayers [Acts 2:42]. As the Church grew in size and expanded in influence, the Church’s experience of sharing in the one body of Christ, would in time transform, first, the Roman Empire and, then, the ever wider world – as it still must continue to transform each one of us and the wider world which we are all a part of.

The current crisis which we are experiencing in our country, the consequence of a long legacy of injustice and institutionalized violence, mixed in for good measure with a global pandemic, has reminded us how we are all part of the common sufferings of our society, sharing common responsibilities to one another and to our one world.

When Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians about their sharing in the body of Christ, much of what he had to say was in fact a criticism, warning them that they were in danger of missing the main point and receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood in an unworthy way, doing so to their peril.

Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing their worldly divisions and inequalities with them - any more than we can. That is why what happens at this altar is so important, intended as it is to enable us to go beyond our individual self-enclosed limits and self-referential relationships and so bring a new unity to the world. For Jesus’ command to his disciples to do as he did is an invitation to a whole new way of life, made possible for us by what Jesus himself has already done on our behalf.

Today’s celebration invites us to focus in a particularly active and conscious way on the purpose of Christ’s presence in this sacrament, this sacrament of our unity, this sacrament which makes the Church what it is in our world. This annual festival invites us to a fuller, more conscious, and more active participation in the body of Christ, the Church, by believing firmly, celebrating devoutly, and living intensely Christ’s real bodily presence given to us for the life of the world.

Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 14, 2020. The entire Mass may be viewed on the Immaculate Conception Church Facebook Page and later on the parish website icknoxville.org.

Damnatio Memoriae

On July 9, 1776, fresh from hearing the Second Continent Congress's Declaration of Independence a New York mob pulled down the gilded lead statue of King George III at Bowling Green, an event immortalized by mid-19th-century artist Johannes Oertel in his oil painting Pulling Down the Statue of King George III (photo), now in the NY Historical Society Museum. (Although some parts of the statue were eventually salvaged, much of it became bullets for the Revolutionary cause.)

The statue of King George III had stood in New York only since 1770. Most of the statues whose future is being debated these days (or which have actually been toppled in some cases) are considerably older.  In the spirit of the ancient Roman practice of Damnatio Memoriae, renewed efforts are being made to erase if not all memory then at least all trace of public honor of historical figures who, often for very good reasons, are no longer deemed deserving of such honor. 

Recent history has abundant examples of re-enactments of what happened to the statue of New York's last king. Most of us can remember vividly the pulling down of the statue of Sadaam Hussein in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Earlier, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its former "satellites" led to all sorts of monuments being removed. 

Statues and other such monuments may memorialize history, but they are also always political expressions. As political values change over time, so do those that society chooses to remember and memorialize. Of course, some historical figures enjoy surprising staying power - long after the demise of the regimes they represent. People still bring flowers to the statue of Julius Caesar on Rome's Via dei Fori Imperiali, although the empire his conquests helped create is long gone, and few are those who pine for its restoration or wish to be governed by a Caesar today. Sometimes statues survive because they acquire a contemporary symbolism above and beyond the historical figure they portray. Rome's monumental statue of King Vittorio Emmanuele II is much more impressive than that of Caesar, although the historical person portrayed was obviously much less so, and his dynasty was evicted from Rome a mere 35 years after his statue was erected. It survives, however, as a historical commemoration to the 19th-century unification of Italy and as a symbol of commitment to secular modernity. (Of course, one can question or even oppose secular modernity, but the presence of that monument forcefully challenges anyone who does so to recognize secular modernity's historical power and continued appeal.)

But what is to be done when a society wants to reject outright what a monument or statue symbolizes? In the United States, we have the unique problem of statues and military bases which honor traitors who fought against the United States in the American Civil War, memorials erected for the most part much later as symbols of resistance against racial integration and civil rights for African-Americans. These doubly hateful objects obviously should never have been permitted to be erected in the first place and have no legitimate purpose now. This is  especially true of the statues of such Confederates in places of honor in, of all places, the U.S. Capitol!

Inevitably, however, there will be other monuments and statues, which will become controversial as society's values evolve. There is no easy or obvious answer to many of the dilemmas such situations raise. Like the Roman statues of Julius Caesar and Vittorio Emmanuele II, such monuments remember historical figures whose actual accomplishments - however problematic - certainly need to be remembered. Even more importantly, they may have acquired additional layers of historical and cultural meaning, which transcend the individuals portrayed and even the original context of the monument's erection. (The statue of Christopher Columbus at New York's Columbus Circle is as much about celebrating the Italian-American experience as it is about 1492.) So any decision to destroy or relocate a monument or statue is inevitably a complicated one, which can only be reached after an authentic process of deliberation and debate and some sort of societal consensus.  Had there been such a process in New York in 1776, would George III still be honored in Bowling Green? I doubt it. On the other hand, we might still be able to see his statue somewhere else, contextualized as part of a fuller national story, which faithfully remembers New York's 112 years as a British colony.

A society's history entails both continuity and change. More than two centuries after American independence, six states are still named after British monarchs. Such symbolic continuity expresses more fundamental social, political, and cultural continuities which continue to enrich us. That said, to live is to change. As our social, political, and cultural values have experienced constant revision, the memories we have highlighted and the way we have remembered them have changed as we have changed. 

So too with the memories memorialized in our monuments, which (when not simply forgotten) may inspire us and affirm our values or may just as well challenge us to rethink our past and remember something different. Just as even churches have been renamed and rededicated in changing circumstances, there are times to rename a street, a town, or a fort, to erect a new monument or replace an old one, all the while remaining attentive to the power of historical memory to put our present moment in a larger perspective.

How Far We Must Yet Go

On this date in 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave an Oval Office Address (photo), known as the Report to the American People on Civil Rights. Timed to coincide with the integration by federal officials of the University of Alabama, Kennedy's speech proposed new legislation which would eventually become the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Kennedy was a Cold War president, primarily focused on foreign not domestic policy, pressured by circumstances - the growing visibility and rising militancy of the Civil Rights movement - to respond. But, when he responded, Kennedy rose to the occasion on an issue which he acknowledged "is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution."

Watching Kennedy's address that evening, as an unsophisticated high school student in a parochial corner of the Bronx, I never imagined that 57 years later our country would continue to be challenged by the same unresolved moral and legal issue. I could foresee neither the genuine social progress that lay ahead in so many areas of our national life, nor the stubborn persistence of our country's foundational racial divide. As Boston's Cardinal Archbishop Sean O'Malley recently wrote, recalling his early years of priesthood in Washington, DC, "to know that fifty years later four police officers would see themselves entitled to murder a black man with impunity makes clear how far we must yet go to achieve racial equality." 

The current crisis has highlighted not only the long-standing sin of racism but the (not unrelated) social and political problem of over-policing and the militarization of our police, such that instead of functioning as community peacekeepers, police increasingly appear and act more like occupying foreign armies. Indeed, as Matt Ford recently wrote in The New Republic ("The Police Were a Mistake: Law enforcement agencies have become the standing armies that the Founders feared"), American police have increasingly come to resemble the very standing army that the Founders with rare unanimity (and the Constitution they composed) so strongly opposed..

Hence the urgency of the (perhaps poorly named) "Defund" movement, which aims (depending on who is using the term and how)  to reallocate to more productive purposes resources presently poured into the militarization of police equipment, tactics, and training, to reform overly militarized police practices, possibly returning to more traditional relationships with local communities, to reappraise "qualified immunity," and maybe even to restructure local police forces the way Camden successfully did a few years back. The list of needed reforms is long, and enacting even some of them might significantly improve matters. But one thing that most obviously has to change is the relatively recently cultivated image of police as a military force occupying alien territory. (Former NYC Mayor Micheal Bloomberg boasted back in 2011 that he had his "own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world.")

Trinity

According to the famous legend, Saint Patrick is said to have used a shamrock to teach the doctrine of the Trinity when evangelizing Ireland in the 5th century. The fact that Patrick had to resort to using a shamrock illustrates the challenge of talking about the Trinity.

Created in the image and likeness of God, we all have a built-in natural longing for God. So we can theorize about God’s existence by our ordinary natural reasoning process. But who God is - in himself - that is something we cannot possibly know on our own.  That had to be revealed to us. So the doctrine of the Trinity is our fundamental – and uniquely Christian – insight into who God is. 

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the inner life of God – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, who perfectly reflects his Father, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself. Who God is in himself is how God acts. And so how God acts reveals who God is.

Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself – as he did to Moses in today’s 1st reading, as one who reveals himself in how he acts toward us: a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. It was to such a God that Moses prayed – as we all pray – do come along in our company … and receive us as your own.

It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who, as the visible image of the invisible God, came down from heaven, so that the world might be saved through him. Risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, the Son has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit unites us with the Father in the Body of Christ. Through the sacraments, Christ continues to communicate the Holy Spirit to the members of his Church, so that we can become the people Saint Paul instructs us to be: Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.

This is what our external sharing in God’s inner life involves. Just as God’s inner life is itself a unique kind of community, so too our life as Church is a unique community in unity, a distinctive way of living, a new way of being human together.

As we survey the sad wreckage of our society and the long legacy of damage individualism has done to our ability to live as humans together in God’s company, we recognize all the more urgently how uniquely demanding and uniquely necessary is our full participation in the life of the Trinity through this new way of being that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have revealed to us and called us to share in.

As the 4th century Bishop and Doctor of the Church, St. Athanasius, famously wrote in one of his letters: “When we share in the Spirit, we possess the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit himself.”

Hence, the Church faithfully follows Saint Paul in praying: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all!

Homily for Trinity Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 7, 2020.