Silvio Berlusconi and the Increasingly Farcical Defense of Family Values in the Catholic Tradition

Wouldn't you like to be a, well, what? A silent butler waiting on the pope in his private suite, as he receives news like this?: Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's former prime minister whom the Vatican placed in office to protect family values when a center-left government contemplated offering civil unions to gay couples, is engaged to be married once again.

Finding the Face of God in Church and World Today

The Vatican's boy Silvio appears about to go up in flames in Italy--though he has taken to Facebook (!) in a campaign to bolster his popularity.  You can, if you wish, click to "like" him there.

In Catholic News: Come Home Ad Campaigns, Anti-Gay Slurs, Berlusconi Embarrassment, and Playboy Priest

A number of items in the news today with import for those following current Catholic issues or discussions:

"Suddenly, Last Winter": Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi on the Resurgence of Homophobia in Italy (and the Role of Liberals in the Resurgence)

Steve and I watched Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi’s award-winning documentary “Suddenly, Last Winter” last night, and it depressed us. That’s part of the reason I haven’t yet posted anything on this blog today: as I may have hinted on these pages, we struggle with strong feelings of worthlessness, given our experiences as theologians seeking to be true to God’s plan for our lives, but finding one door after another slammed in our faces by a church (and world) that can’t put God and gay into the same sentence without oppression.

As I’ve thought about it today, I found “Suddenly, Last Winter” depressing for a quite specific reason: the story it tells is so ominously close to one now unfolding in the U.S., vis-à-vis gay rights, that it’s impossible not to be depressed. It’s impossible not to be depressed when you see in a carefully documented film how astonishingly easy it is for a few malicious folks and lots of spineless, morally obtuse ones to stop what seems to be ineluctable movement to grant rights to gay citizens, and so wreak havoc in the lives of gay persons.

Gustav and Luca document what happened in Italy when a center-left coalition came to power in spring 2006 and promised civil unions to gay couples in Italy. As they note, Italy is an exception among western European nations in its refusal to provide legal recognition of gay marriage or gay civil unions. That fact alone seemed, in the spring of 2006, to argue for the inevitable opening, even in Italy, to full recognition of gay rights, including gay unions, when the center-left parties came to power.

This is not what happened, however. The film carefully tracks what did happen instead, when the center-left coalition failed to deliver on its promises about civil unions, played ugly games with the gay community, and then fragmented, paving the way for the return to power of Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government—a political event in which the Vatican apparently played a key role (see also here and here).

The period in which there was an opening to a different political (and cultural and religious) possibility in Italy, and then the door slammed shut again, is, in the way Gustav and Luca tell their story, eerily like the period through which we are now living in the U.S. As their documentary shows, a number of factors coalesced to stop the movement to civil unions in Italy in its tracks—seemingly for the foreseeable future.

There were, first of all the empty promises (and the moral vacuity) of many center-left leaders who rose to power touting a human rights agenda (including gay rights) that they ignored, and even stalled, when they attained power. Gustav and Luca interview many of these folks. They show us their faces. They highlight their antics in government hearings about civil unions and on Italian talk shows.

These are not admirable characters. They say one thing and do another. They bend over backwards to find ways to justify any nonsense that spews out of the mouths of the political and religious right, when that nonsense is about gay and lesbian persons. They talk about the need for pragmatic caution, for coalition-building that will include even the far-right fringe and certainly include the church, though Italy is ostensibly not a theocracy.

They keep telling Gustav and Luca, every time the two ask about movement on the civil unions initiative, that it has neither been shelved nor is a priority. More studies need to be done, more coalition-building undertaken. We haven’t forgotten you or your needs, but please understand that you and your needs are not our priority.

In the final analysis, then, the center-left “supporters” of gay rights are part of the problem, and not part of the solution. They are a huge part of the problem. As the political right and the Catholic church craft a tremendous backlash against the proposed civil unions legislation, the center-left political leaders who had brought the proposal to the table suddenly display a large appetite for appeasement—of the very folks whose power they had trumped when they gained control of the government, but whom they will not challenge openly. Not when it comes to gay rights.

Gustav and Luca document the astonishing way in which some former “supporters” of gay rights suddenly find it possible to spout the same nonsense the right is spouting, in the period of intense homophobic reaction after the civil unions idea is floated, about gay people, gay lives, and gay rights: gays are an infection in healthy societies; openness to gays causes the downfall of society; homosexuality is not natural, and what is unnatural has no rights; gay men assume women’s roles and gay women want to be men; gays corrupt children; children raised in gay homes will grow up warped and perverted; we would be better off if gays simply disappeared.

Watching the capitulation of the liberal political elite to far-right nonsense, even when those capitulating have to know they’re dealing with toxic ideas based on no rational analysis at all, is fascinating. And frightening. One concludes, in the end, that either these people never had any real moral commitment at all to gay and lesbian rights, and so they find it easy to shrug their shoulders and do what serves their own interests (the “pragmatic” thing) when there's a price tag attached to their progressive agenda, or they know very well that they are behaving immorally, but since there is no price to be paid if they cave in and their own ox is not being gored, they do not care that they have talked out of both sides of their mouths, broken promises, and hurt supporters hopeful for substantive change.

The second fascinating way in which the story told by “Suddenly, Last Winter” parallels what is happening in our nation now is the way in which the moral cave-in and the insincere dilly-dallying of leaders of the progressive coalition that had gained power in the country facilitated the rise of a backlash that astonished not only the center-left leaders of the nation, but even those on the right who had thought that the back of their power had been broken when the center-left coalition came to power.

In the period in which the center-left leaders continued promising gay civil unions, while warning that such unions were not a priority, the right re-configured its base and made powerful breakthroughs. Gustav and Luca interview people on the streets as this cultural shift is occurring. What folks tell them is interesting: it’s a mishmash of half-digested religious ideas and bogus science re: gender roles, sexual orientation, family life, and natural law.

The two filmmakers also capture political demonstrations by right-leaning groups who want to capitalize on the homophobic backlash to reassert their power as fascist watchdogs controlling the pace of progressive movement in Italian culture. As Gustav and Luca talk to and film members of some of these groups, the men to whom they speak tap sticks they happen to be carrying on the ground, itching for the return of the kind of social order in which they could bust a fag’s skull (or a Jew’s, or an African’s, or a Muslim’s, or, most of all one suspects, a woman’s) with relative impunity.

And there, in the middle of it all, is the church, feverishly organizing huge, well-funded, high-tech “pro-family” demonstrations in which the faithful recommit themselves to a family-centered society, in which smiling sisters in habit suddenly scowl when asked if the Christian obligation to love one’s neighbor extends to loving one’s gay neighbor and supporting her right to marry. Participants in these carefully staged demonstrations make it plain to the gay reporters interviewing them that being pro-family is about more than strengthening the supposedly threatened family: it’s about being anti-gay, about making it impossible for gay couples or their families to live together as a family with any public recognition, support, or protection.

The role the church plays in this period of backlash is shameful. While helping return to power a man who divorced his sacramentally married wife after having had children by another woman, and then having several more with the second before marrying her, the church defiantly proclaims its commitment to family values and its opposition to recognition of any rights for gays, since that recognition will inevitably undermine real families. And though some church officials now claim that the Catholic church has never opposed civil unions for gays—only marriage—the film clearly documents the intent of the Vatican and the Italian bishops to oppose not only civil unions but any legal recognition of or protection for the rights of gay persons.

And how is this like what is happening in our country today? I think the parallel on the religious front is obvious. Rev. Mike Huckabee has just reminded us that we are a nation specially blessed by God—an exceptional case among all nations in the world. Italy is an exception, as well. Like the U.S., it is an exception among the developed nations of the West in its religion-fueled resistance to gay rights. And like the U.S., it allows communities of faith wide latitude in determining secular policy, even when both countries claim to value separation of church and state.

But another parallel is even more important to me: this is the parallel between the behavior of the center-left party when it came to power in Italy in the spring of 2006 and our current administration, vis-à-vis gay rights. In key respects, our leaders are behaving today precisely the way the progressive leaders in Italy behaved in the 2006-2008 period—ignoring the promises they have made to gay citizens and their progressive supporters, seeking to assure us that gay rights are on their agenda but are not a priority, and bending over backwards to find ways to include (read: appease) a small but loud and potentially dangerous (as an impediment to progress) right-leaning faction allied to many churches.

In assessing the behavior of many of our political leaders today, when it comes to gay rights, I have no choice but to conclude, sadly, that these leaders have never recognized the moral claims of gay persons on their lives, even when they espouse gay-friendly rhetoric. Or they are people of conscience who, unfortunately, choose to dull the voice of their conscience when it comes to the moral claims of gay persons, because they can do so, with relative impunity.

If Gustav and Luca are correct, the lack of moral courage of the center-left coalition in Italy in its dealings with the gay community led to the fragmentation and then demise of that coalition. More importantly, it led to a resurgence of right-wing homophobia that surprised even those on the right, who had thought the movement of history was clearly not towards such a resurgence. A resurgence that is in some ways fueling the rise to power of the right all over Europe now . . . .

History may point clearly in one direction, but human beings often choose to move in another direction altogether, even when it is clear that the direction to which the movement of history points constitutes a moral arc, one we have no choice except to follow if we expect to live together productively and peaceably as a human community. History is the story of occasional breakthroughs to more humane social arrangements, and constant reversions to barbarism. It is the story of rare, surprising moral courage, and predictable, deadly, widespread moral obduracy.

I am convinced that the arc of the future—the moral arc—points to recognition of the human rights of gay and lesbian persons. I am not convinced, however, that the many liberals who refuse to stand in solidarity with gay and lesbian persons or to recognize the moral priority of gay rights at this point in history will move us along that arc, even when they have the power to do so.

And I am convinced that when liberals appease the right and cave in to its demands, allowing it to continue its gate-keeping status even when its power has been decisively checked, liberals create the conditions for a resurgence of the power of the right—even when that resurgence will effect the downfall of the same liberals who have risen to power when a popular majority repudiates the power of the right. A majority who expect progressive moral leadership once they have placed progressive leaders with claims to moral awareness in power . . . .

Mid-Week News Roundup: Wafer Wars, Benedict and Fascism, Retrieving Femininity in Christ, Citizen Blogging

More news articles cropping up, which continue stories I’ve previously noticed on this blog.

Obama and Biden: Catholic Controversy

Catholic news sites are full of discussion of the effect Obama’s choice of Biden will have on American Catholics. As Rocco Palmo notes in a posting entitled “Hail Columbia . . . Hello Controversy” this past Sunday at his Whispers in the Loggia blogsite, it appears the choice of a pro-choice Catholic candidate for the vice-presidential slot will revive the “wafer wars” of the 2004 campaign—the enervating and unnecessary wafer wars (http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com).

As I have noted in previous postings here, in the 2004 elections some American Catholic bishops sought to use the Eucharist as a political weapon, to force their flocks to vote “right” (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-catechisms-vs-fundamentalist.html). These bishops maintained that a pro-choice Catholic political leader (and anyone publicly supporting her or him) should be denied communion.

Not all American Catholic bishops agreed, however. In fact, those issuing statements forbidding pro-choice politicians from receiving communion in their dioceses were significantly in the minority. In an article entitled “Biden Nomination Could Touch Off Episcopal Split” at the National Catholic Reporter website, John Allen surveys the controversy and its theological (and church-political) roots (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1670).

Even more interesting to me than Allen’s analysis is the blog commentary following this article. The large majority of those posting comments are solidly against the use of the Eucharist as a political weapon. As one anonymous poster states, “I do not feel the Eucharist should be used as a weapon for any reason. It is an insult to the Body and Blood of Jesus who came for everyone.”

Others, however, support the decision of a few bishops to deny communion to pro-choice politicians. A poster calling himself (or herself) Abe, engages in . . . interesting . . . “logic” to conclude that a Catholic who questions any church teaching is not a Catholic, and thus not entitled to the Eucharist. Abe lambasts those of us pleading with the bishops not to make the same mistaken this election cycle that they made in the past—letting the Eucharist be used as a political weapon—as grand-standers and sophists who want everybody to get “all Hands-Across-America-like and sing koom-by-ya and feel warm and fuzzy inside and light candles to pixies and sing Sarah McLauglin songs and dance around with silk scarves.”

Abe tells us to SCRAM (his caps). As an anonymous poster replies to Abe (sarcasm meter ticking high), “That sounds sooo much like something Jesus would have said.”

In my humble opinion, the response of posters like Abe illustrates precisely what a can of worms the bishops open, if they make the Eucharist a political weapon and a reward for good (submissive, conscience-denying) behavior. They hand the church over to the worst among us, to those who don’t seem to have a clue about the core of Jesus’s message, which is inclusive love, welcome of all, an invitation of everyone to the table—where sinners have a special place.

Some day, historians and future generations of believers (assuming we permit a future) will look back and wonder at the willingness of church leaders to court those who deny the most essential Christian values in the name of an orthodoxy that betrays the richness of the Christian tradition. The pro-life values of those who call for the Eucharist to be denied to pro-choice politicians are, in just about every case I examine carefully, limited to life in the womb. If the crop of “pro-life” leaders these folks told us to elect in 2004 are authentically pro-life, I’ll eat my hat.

Brother Roger of Taizé: A Protestant-Catholic Communion Story

As I noted in my posting cited above, re: the use of the Eucharist as a political weapon, one of the very strong arguments undercutting the way some bishops and some Catholics want to use the Eucharist today as a reward for good (submissive, conscience-denying) behavior is the choice of the present pope Benedict XVI to give communion to the Protestant prior of the Taizé movement Roger Schütz at the funeral of John Paul II. Benedict was then Cardinal Ratzinger; he had not yet been made pope.

The Clerical Whispers blogsite has a fascinating discussion of this topic today (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/08/brother-roger-of-taize-catholic.html). As this article notes, because Catholic law forbids Catholics to give communion to non-Catholics, the choice of Cardinal Ratzinger—long regarded as the watchdog of Catholic orthodoxy, when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—to give communion to Brother Roger raised eyebrows.

And even more eyebrows went up when it was revealed that Ratzinger was simply continuing a practice of John Paul II himself: the previous pope had given Brother Roger communion on a number of occasions. Well. As my elderly Polish friend Stanislaw often says when faced with a quandary requiring an inventive imagination, “What to do? What to do?”

Since it is very important for many right-wing Catholics to hold the hard line on the “use” of the Eucharist as a weapon/reward, this choice of a sitting pope and a future one to give the Eucharist to a non-Catholic is inconvenient, to say the least. These Catholics have therefore decided to spin a little myth about Brother Roger, that he secretly became Catholic before he died. Hence Benedict and John Paul II did not contravene canon law. Hence the use of the Eucharist as weapon/reward can be continued. (We Catholics have a venerable history of playing the "secret" card, when faced with inconvenient facts.)

Unfortunately, said myth is simply untrue. Brother Roger remained faithful to the Reformed tradition into which he was born, up to the day of his death—as his Taizé community also continues to do. But because the sheer fact of what Ratzinger and John Paul II did in the case of Brother Roger remains so inconvenient, the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Walter Kasper, is now seeking to develop a more sophisticated myth to “explain” the choice of Ratzinger and John Paul II to give the prior of Taizé communion.

As Kasper maintained in a recent interview (Clerical Whispers links to an English translation of the original published in L’Osservatore Romano—see http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/206302?eng=y), Brother Roger was both a Protestant and a Catholic when John Paul and Ratzinger gave him communion.

Stuff and nonsense. As a theologian, Kasper has to know better. If a prospective pope can give communion to a Protestant whose faith is “progressively enriched by the patrimony of faith of the Catholic Church” (Kasper’s phrase)—and in the highly symbolic venue of a papal funeral—and if a previous pope has set the precedent for this contravention of canon law, why may an “ordinary” priest or bishop not choose to give communion to a believer of another Christian communion whose faith has been enriched by the patrimony of Catholic faith? Or to a Catholic who, as with non-Catholics, accepts some magisterial teachings while questioning others?

I write about this topic with a certain pique for two reasons. The first is that I find it highly offensive to use the Eucharist as a political weapon or as a reward for good (submissive, conscience-denying) behavior.

But the second has to do with something that has happened in the life of my brother’s family. Several years ago, when the priest in his parish began to preach homilies that challenged parishioners to form their political conscience around church teaching (and these homilies were construed as critical of the current presidential regime), the priest found himself booted from the parish. The ostensible reason for the booting? Some parishioners offended by the “politicization” of the gospel reported having seen him give communion to non-Catholic family members at the funeral of their deceased relative.

Since that time, my brother and his family no longer go to church. The action of the bishop split the parish, so that nearly half of the parish has left. Petitions by significant numbers of parishioners to reinstated their pastor were ineffective. As my youngest nephew Patrick put it (more crudely than I’d ever say), while some priests diddle minors, church authorities go after a priest who gives communion?

Benedict vs. Fascism: Update on Controversy re: the Berlusconi Government

And as long as I am recounting Catholic news, I’d like to make brief note of another story about which I have previous blogged a number of times. This is the story of the connection of the Vatican to Italy’s current prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

In the 15 August posting from this blog cited above, I speak of “the fascist tendency that runs always just beneath the surface of Catholicism.” In several postings at the beginning of this year, I expressed my strong reservations about the apparent alliance the Vatican had made with the Berlusconi government, around “family values” (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/02/limits-of-crozier-shaking_26.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/02/compendium-of-recent-catholic.html). In a later posting, I noted the patent shortcomings of Berlusconi’s own family-values track record, after Benedict chose to be photographed with Berlusconi
(http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/churches-political-dialogue-and.html).

As my postings indicate, I strongly fear that, in allying itself with political currents that use the family issue to try to hold together center-right and right-wing alliances, the church will end up being implicated in fascism—as it was in the first half of the 20th century. Because I am concerned about this possibility, I am happy to note that some recent indicators appear to indicate that the Vatican is perhaps raising the same questions I’ve raised about Berlusconi’s government.

Recently, the best-selling Catholic weekly newspaper in Italy, Famiglia Cristiana, published an editorial warning that Italy was in danger of returning to fascism under the Berlusconi government. The paper, which is owned by the Paulist fathers, pointed in particular to the xenophobia and racism that the current government’s policies towards groups like the Gypsies seemed to be eliciting.

Immediately, the Italian government went on the offensive, and the Vatican issued a statement appearing to distance itself from Famiglia Cristiana. But the story didn’t end there: this past Sunday, in his Angelus prayer at Castel Gandolfo, Benedict noted the importance for Christians to help society to "overcome any temptation of racism, intolerance and exclusion, and to organize themselves with options that respected the dignity of human beings" (see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/08/pope-warns-italy-in-danger-of-returning.html, which documents the entire controversy leading up to the Angelus remarks).

Because these remarks come right on the heels of the Famiglia Cristiana controversy, many political and religious observers have read them as the pope weighing in on that controversy—and against a Vatican alliance with the Berlusconi government whose price would be looking the other way as fascism reasserts itself. I hope those observers are correct.

Helping Women Retrieve Their Femininity in Christ

As blog readers know, I am highly skeptical of the male-female complementarity argument increasingly used by Christian churches today across the board to frame sexual ethics (and worldviews with significant political implications that support male domination and female subordination) (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/divine-order-argument-unmasked-more.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/flying-saints-and-anglicans-crossing.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/male-female-complementarity-and-bogus.html). Though many churches are building elaborate theological systems on the assumption of a male-female complementarity they see as central to the bible, and have elevated the concept of male-female complementarity to the level of a church-sustaining and church-dividing issue, I don’t find a scrap of evidence to suggest that maintaining such complementarity was an overwhelming concern of Jesus or of the Jewish tradition in which he was grounded.

This being the case, I’m interested to learn that the notorious “ex-gay” ministry Exodus International has just announced a ministry to help women (clearly, given the organization’s goals, women questioning their sexual orientation) to “embrace their . . . God-given femininity” and “journey towards wholeness in their femininity in Christ.” I’m grateful to the blog Good as You for bringing this important initiative to my attention—see www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2008/08/unfair-movement.html, linking to www.citizenlink.org/CLNews/A000008036.cfm).

Hmmm. I’ve read and re-read the Christian scriptures, and don’t recall ever having come across the phrase “femininity in Christ” (or its counterpart “masculinity in Christ”). I’d surely be happy to see some scriptural reference to this phrase, on which whole ministries and the theology of many churches today are implicitly relying. And, given the importance being placed on male-female complementarity in churches across the board, I’d dearly love to see some reference to Jesus’s overwhelming interest in this subject.

The Increasing Importance of Citizen Bloggers in Our Democratic Society

A remark Arianna Huffington makes today in her Huffington Post assessment of the role played by bloggers at the current Democratic National Convention has me thinking (www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/dnc-diary-william-rocks-t_b_121609.html). Huffington notes that in the 2004 election, Huffington Post did not exist. Nor did YouTube.

When one puts those facts in context—in the context of the increasing predominance of citizen blogging in our political process—the implications are enormous. It begins to make sense why so many of those who want to control the process—by controlling the flow of information, what may and may not be said—are so frightened of the new world of citizen blogging.

It also begins to make sense to me why groups historically concerned with the transmission of information—e.g., the media, churches, schools, colleges and universities—are far behind the learning curve, if they have not yet recognized the importance of citizen blogging in their information-transmitting initiatives. As I have noted in numerous postings on this blog, in my view, the shift to citizen blogging as a way of transmitting and dissecting the news holds great promise for a democratic society.
The mainstream media have simply stopped doing their job. In my view, they are no longer doing it well enough to sustain our democratic society. As quite a few blog commentaries on mainstream media coverage of the current DNC are noting, in televised coverage of our election process, we increasingly have to put up with red-faced, belligerent talking heads shouting sports metaphors across tables at each other (see, e.g., www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-emanuel/this-is-real-news----dont_b_121631.html).

Because I am not edified by that kind of “news” coverage, I am just saying no to televised coverage of the convention. And I’m highly dubious of the print coverage I do read daily online. When I compare a video clip of a convention speech with the “official” presentation given to that speech in the mainstream print media, I’m shocked at the disparity between what I see and hear and what I’m told I should have seen and heard.

Having direct access to all kinds of media clips, as well as on-the-spot analysis and reporting of the news by citizen bloggers, gives me a much wider range of information than I could ever get through the managed outlets of television or print media. It also allows me perspectives (and stories) I would never run across in our official news outlets.

As an educator, as a theologian, I am baffled that so few academic institutions have begun to recognize the power of citizen blogging as a tool for teaching, facilitating dialogue, and transmitting information. I am baffled, and yet I understand the reluctance of university administrators who have bought into the corporate-managerial model of running their schools to encourage faculty to teach and do research by means of blogging: putting ideas and opinions out there for everyone to read will inevitably ruffle the feathers of some funders who want “their” universities to toe their political line in order to keep on receiving funding. In the minds of all too many university presidents, the boundaries of academic freedom end where funding pressures begin.

But at what a price that funding is bought, when blogging can so effectively transmit ideas and information today, and catch others up in that dialogic process of critical reflection that we keep saying is essential to education—not to mention our political process . . . .

Churches, Political Dialogue, and the Banality of Evil

Philosopher Hannah Arendt has added immeasurably to our understanding of evil—and, in particular, how evil gets a foothold in a world or in a culture in which one would not expect people to entertain the notion of patent, systemic, humanity-crushing evil.

Such as the Holocaust. As a German Jewish woman and a philosopher, Arendt was perplexed at the Holocaust. How could a supposedly highly civilized nation—a nation full of churches—have engaged in an act of evil so singular that this planned and engineered act of mass murder has come to stand as a shorthand for all such atrocities after the middle of the twentieth century?

In studying the Holocaust, Arendt came to the startling conclusion that those who set it into motion—its perpetrators, yes, but also the German people, who permitted the small group of leaders to carry out their plan of mass destruction—simply did not see the evil they were perpetrating in the Holocaust. Not with clear eyes. They were unable to see their resolution of the “Jewish problem” for what it was: stark evil, evil so stark that it is now impossible to speak of social evil without speaking of the Holocaust.

The German people were able to buy into the solution of the Jewish problem because evil is banal. It does not appear to us with horns on its head, a pitchfork, a long tail trying to ensnare us. It appears in a sober uniform—that of a CEO, for instance, or a soccer mom. Or in a Roman collar or religious habit. Or perhaps waving a sign that says “open hearts, open minds, open doors.”

Evil gets a foothold in a culture because it does not appear as evil. It appears as normal. It appears as sober reality, as a description of what is. As a solution to a problem—the Jewish problem—rather than mass murder.

Evil is banal because it can imagine nothing, effect nothing but destruction. Evil does not build. It destroys. It stands astride history and shouts stop: to all progressive shifts that promise a social order in which fewer are excluded from the table, in which more have access to basic human rights.

Evil keeps trying the same show-stopping tactics even when it is evident that those tactics are no longer effective—when it is evident that the humane and progressive changes it seeks to undermine and destroy will inevitably be accepted by a culture shaped by the belief that the moral arc of the universe bends always in the direction of justice.

I am thinking about the banality of evil these days as I continue pondering some of the politico-religious tactics of posters these days on the blog threads of the National Catholic Reporter internet discussion café. Some of these posters show up only when when an election cycle is underway. When they do so, they employ the same tired old tactics again and again: divide and conquer by setting one progressive group against another, making it appear that the quest for justice in one group is oblivious to the needs of the other; create semantic traps that have people endless arguing over what is plainly misleading or untrue; throw out false dichotomies that seek to corner people and thus stop the flow of constructive dialogue.

What interests me about these tactics is not much their predictability. It’s their futility. There is all kinds of statistical evidence that the Catholic vote in the coming elections will not predictably go to the candidates these posters want elected. There is all kinds of evidence that the Catholic vote is in play as it has not been in recent elections, and that attempts of hierarchical figures or right-wing Catholic activists to swing the vote in the “right” direction are simply not going to work as they have done in the past.

There are sound reasons for this, and it perplexes me that those trying to throw cogs into the wheel of Catholic public discourse seem not to see these—or, better perhaps, are unwilling to discuss these.

One overriding reason is that the president whom many bishops worked so hard to bully Catholic voters into electing in the previous presidential election has egregiously betrayed core Catholic values—over and over. The weak, not to say non-existent, response to the Midwest flooding this week is reminding people all over again of the similar non-response to Katrina. A pro-life federal administration again and again acts in shockingly anti-life ways . . . .

I am aware that Mr. Bush just met with Pope Benedict, and that the media have been falling all over themselves to portray this as a warm, engaging meeting in which the pope noted that his fundamental values and those of Mr. Bush are the same. I’m also aware that this photo-op event is being exploited—and was no doubt staged—by those who want to herd Catholic voters to the polls to vote Republican in the coming election.

But I’m also aware that the pope met recently as well with the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, to be photographed with him, as these two esteemed leaders issued a statement about their joint support for family values. Family values. Yes. Berlusconi. Berlusconi and family values. That Berlusconi. Yes, Pope Benedict and that Berlusconi, issuing a joint statement about their support for family values.

The same Silvio Berlusconi who divorced his lawfully (and sacramentally) wedded wife in 1985 after having had two children by her. While already having had one child by his current wife, an actress, prior to 1985, and two more prior to their marriage in 1990.

No, the Catholic church hasn’t changed its teaching about the indissolubility of marriage—that is, between a man and a woman—or about the sinfulness of having sexual relationships outside marriage.

But, you see, family values now means something different. It now means standing with anyone who opposes the marriage of two people of the same sex, no matter how unworthy of close inspection that person’s own sexual behavior and family life are.

When I put the meeting of Benedict and Bush beside the meeting of Benedict and Berlusconi, and note that in both instances the pope professes his collusion with the fundamental values of the leader in question, I am not inclined to be impressed. Or convinced.

The banality of evil. When churches, and church authority figures, and good church people, can only keep saying the same old thing over and over, as movements for progressive social change unfold outside the perimeter of the churches—when that word is no and again no—the churches and church authority figures and good church people are dangerously close to succumbing to the banality of evil.

When the only word the church is capable of saying to progressive social changes is no, when the church loses the ability to engage the imagination of culture because it has itself stopped imagining a more humane and inclusive future, the church is in serious danger of becoming ensnared by the banality of evil.

From God’s first statement to the world that God had made—it is good—to the incarnation, God’s fundamental word to the world is always yes and not no. A church capable of saying only no has lost its grounding in the incarnation, in the choice of God to love the world so much that God takes flesh to be joined to the world.

A church that loses its grounding in the incarnation is a church that loses its ability to represent the divine in sacramentally effective ways. A church that is not grounded in incarnation and incapable of being sacramentally effective no longer shapes culture, because the church’s ability to shape culture depends on its being incarnate within the world as a sacramental sign of God’s loving embrace of the world.

Churches that can say only no end up choosing cultic status, in the negative sense of that world. They choose to become defensive enclaves holding onto (and implicitly sacralizing and idolizing) cultural models of the past, while the culture around them moves into the future—a future of which God is the horizon.

In their at-all-costs defense of male domination and female subordination as the only thinkable model for organizing societies, the churches today are not merely fighting a losing cultural battle (because the moral arc of the universe always bends towards justice). They are also betraying their fundamental mission in the world—to be sacramental signs of God’s redemptive presence in the world, speaking a constructive word of affirmation to the world.

And, in doing so, they are letting themselves be ensnared by the banality of evil, an evil that finds it much easier to destroy than to create, to say no than to say yes, to refrain from imagining a more humane world than to participate in a fruitful dialogue with culture to help craft an imagination of a future in which everyone might have a place at the table.