Katrina: The Obligation to Remember — "Hurricane Katrina Exposed Our Nation's Amazing Tolerance for Black Pain" (Jamelle Bouie)

Rebecca Solnit on why we need to get what happened in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina right: 

Hurricane Katrina, Triage, and the Memorial Hospital Story: Ethical Implications for American Health Care

I have a number of reflections after reading Sheri Fink’s account in the New York Times yesterday of what happened at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. Fink revives questions about whether a medical team there led by Dr. Mary Pou actively euthanized terminally ill patients as the evacuation process was put off interminably, and as the medical staff in the hospital sought desperately to provide care for patients when the electricity shut down and temperatures inside the hospital reached well over 100 degrees.

Readers will remember that there were reports from all over New Orleans during the hurricane period that care facilities were running out of food, water, and medical supplies, and that those providing care in these facilities were trying to work around the clock while dehydrated and pushed beyond the limits of endurance. Fink’s account of what happened at Memorial Hospital suggests that there is increasing evidence that a team of doctors and nurses injected terminally ill patients with morphine and other sedatives, hastening their death during these gruesome days.

Here are some random thoughts that struck me as I read the story:

▪ Fink defines triage as a sorting procedure “used in accidents and disasters when the number of injured exceeds available resources.” She thinks that “there is no consensus on how best to do this.” She suggests that criteria such as trying to effect the greatest good for the greatest number of people often underlie the sorting process, but that there is no consensus about what the “greatest good” means.

I’m struck by the narrowness of Fink’s definition of triage, and her lack of attention to how triage is used on an everyday, ongoing basis in the American health care system. Our entire health care system is based on constant, implicit triage. A minority of citizens have access to the best health care possible in our nation on a continuous basis—for any and all medical (or cosmetic) needs (or wishes) they might have.

A sizable proportion of citizens have access to at least basic health care on a continuous basis for most of their medical needs, though not always for elective procedures. And in the case of most of these citizens, the health insurance industry constantly sorts who will be permitted even necessary treatment and who will be blocked.

A significant group of citizens have access to health care only in cases of dire need or emergency. They are very likely to experience triage in the emergency rooms to which they have to resort, as their level of need is assessed and decisions are made about whom to treat, when to treat, and whether to do follow-up.

The central norm in this system of ongoing, continuous triage is money. We dispense health care in the United States—and we practice continuous triage as we do so—based on people’s ability to pay.

To talk about triage in the narrow sense of sorting patients in an emergency situation without paying attention to the broader sense in which we are always doing triage in our medical system is to lose sight of the conditions that produce the excruciating decisions that have to be made during events like hurricane Katrina. And it’s also to lose sight of why there is difficulty deciding how to sort patients according to the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Making a moral judgment of that sort is very difficult in our system due to the sheer weight of financial considerations as we dispense medical treatment to our population. In an emergency, just as in everyday life, we do not make those decisions in a vacuum. We always make them against the backdrop of financial factors that weigh far less in any other industrialized nation in the world than they do in the American health care system.

▪ Fink’s article does not make crystal clear another point that readers need to keep in mind as they think about what happened at Memorial Hospital during Katrina. This is that the kind of end-of-life decision making the article describes takes place on a daily basis in all of our hospitals and care facilities. Decisions about withholding treatment, permitting patients to die, and, yes, about using palliatives that hasten death even as they relieve suffering, are made daily throughout this country.

What the team at Memorial Hospital did is not unique. And it’s not extraordinary. It goes on all the time. It has to go on all the time, because difficult end-of-life medical decisions happen all the time, not merely at times of emergency.

For years, I taught medical ethics as a component of introductory courses in ethics. In my classes, I frequently had students who were medical professionals—including Catholic religious. These students almost always told the class that they routinely made decisions in collaboration with medical ethical teams and family members, about withholding treatment and nutrition at the end of life when a patient was actively dying. They also told the class that they routinely made decisions about the use of palliatives such as morphine that, they well knew, would hasten the death of patients in extremis.

These stories did not shock most of the classes I taught, because the students in those classes were familiar with important norms that used to be routine in Catholic ethical thinking about end-of-life issues, but which are now under assault by the political and religious right. Those norms include 1) the distinction between active and passive killing, and 2) the principle of double effect.

The Catholic ethical tradition has always been clear about the fact that taking an innocent human life directly and intentionally is morally wrong. But the tradition has also recognized that there is a difference between allowing someone to die—in the case of the terminally ill, allowing the dying process to occur naturally without use of extraordinary means to prolong it—and actively killing someone.

That distinction has been muddied in recent years, as the religious and political right do everything possible to depict as active killing the withholding of medical treatment (and nutrition) in cases in which there is no hope of recovery. And the deliberate muddying of that distinction is unfortunate, indeed, at a time in which our ability to keep people “alive” even when their brains have died continues to develop.

We now have extraordinary ability to prolong life in situations in which our ancestors would have died naturally. What we now end up doing in many cases is prolonging the dying process (and the suffering) of those who are dying.

The principle of double effect maintains that, in pursuit of a good end, we can sometimes make ethically justifiable decisions that will have effects we do not will as the primary end of our decision, but which we recognize as necessary if unintended effects of our pursuit of our primary goal. Giving palliatives to a dying patient to ease his or her pain has the unintended effect of shutting down the vital organs and hastening death. The principle of double effect enables us to administer such palliatives with the primary end of relieving the pain of a person in extremis, even when we know that the treatment we are using will also speed the dying process.

▪ Finally, as we assess what happened at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans, it strikes me as important to keep in mind that people are forced to make hard, well-nigh impossible ethical decisions in times of emergency, which they might not make in quite the same way when they have the leisure to reflect about those decisions. And perhaps those of us who have not lived through the situation of extreme stress should not be quick to make judgments about the intent of those who make decisions in such circumstances, and about the decisions they make.

A fundamental principle of the moral life is that we should live each day in such a way that, faced with situations of soul-bending challenge, we tend to move “naturally” towards the right and away from the wrong. As we think about the parameters of the moral decisions medical personnel made during Katrina, I think we ought to keep that principle in mind.

Which means, we need to construct the kind of society in which it becomes easier in both routine and extraordinary circumstances to make good decisions about end-of-life care and harder to make bad decisions. As our system is now constructed, it is often difficult everyday—and not just in times of emergency—to make the best decisions possible about medical care for indigent and dying patients.

It was even more difficult during the days of Katrina in New Orleans because of the conspicuous failure of religious and political leaders who like to talk louder than anyone else about respect for life to assist people dealing with gruesome decisions about sustaining life and caring for the dying under horrific conditions. Those who want to shift the blame for moral failure in our system of health care delivery to a handful of medical professionals working around the clock while making decisions unimaginable to most of us are missing an important point.

The point is that the blame for the moral failings of our health care system lies at our own feet—at the feet of an American public content to continue permitting medical treatment to depend on one’s ability to pay. And the blame lies at the feet of leaders who do nothing to challenge this immoral way of approaching medical care.

And it lies at the feet of those in the political and religious right who scream slogans about the sanctity of life even as they resist attempts to create a health care system that would, we hope, make it easier for us to recognize the value of every human life. And would help prevent the kind of impossible choices those working to care for terminally ill people in Katrina were forced to make under the direst possible circumstances.

For a close-up view of the graphic at the head of this posting, click the picture.

Talking Pro-Life or Acting Pro-Life: Informed Catholic Voters

What’s happening to the Catholic vote in this presidential election continues to draw attention. I noticed two noteworthy articles about this topic in the last day, after I posted yesterday. In today’s posting, I’d like to summarize and comment on those articles.

In “Don’t Let the Bishops Swing the Election—Again!” Robert Blair Kaiser reminds us of what happened four years ago (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/2259). In the Kerry vs. Bush campaign, the same key bishops who are trying to swing the election for McCain—Chaput and Burke—requested a letter from the Vatican’s Holy Office. They got the document they wanted: it appeared to tell Catholics that it was their religious duty to vote for Bush. Chaput and Burke and their allies disseminated the letter widely, suggesting that the Vatican had weighed in on the election and faithful Catholics should listen and act accordingly.

As a result, Ohio, which had voted overwhelmingly for the Catholic Kennedy in 1960, voted in the same proportion for Bush this time, though his opponent, Kerry, was a Catholic. Kaiser reminds us of who headed the Vatican’s Holy Office in 2004: it was none other than Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Kaiser observes, “In effect, Cardinal Ratzinger, a man who would soon be pope, swung an American election for a Republican who said he was ‘pro-life.’”

Kaiser notes that there is increasing recognition even among Catholics (including right-wing ones such as Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia) that overturning Roe v. Wade will not significantly affect the abortion rate in the U.S. If reducing abortions is a desirable objective, then attention has to be given to the reasons women choose abortion. Mitigate the needs for making this choice, and you will diminish the abortion rate—something the Democratic platform recognizes, in the view of many pro-life voters this year, better than the Republican one does.

As an aside, I’d like to note what appears to me to be a fallacy in the statements many pro-Republican bishops are making about Roe v. Wade. Many bishops are hinging their argument for electing “the” “pro-life” party on its promise to abolish Roe v. Wade, and on the connected claim that the number of abortions rose dramatically in the U.S. after Roe v. Wade.

I wonder how bishops—or anyone—knows that the number of abortions rose after Roe v. Wade. From all I have learned through my study of American history, abortions occurred outside the scope of public scrutiny in the past. When procuring and having an abortion were criminal activities, abortions took place in back rooms.

To my knowledge, there are no trustworthy statistics for abortions that took place before Roe v. Wade. Criminalizing abortion again could have the effect not of stopping abortions, but of driving them once again into a netherworld that caused tremendous suffering to women who felt they had no choice except to seek an abortion in the past—including in circumstances when their life was endangered if they carried a baby to term.

Kaiser notes the tremendous irony in many bishops’ encouragement of their flocks to vote for “the” “pro-life” party: when these same bishops promoted the “pro-life” administration we have now, and when that administration’s record on life issues is checkered to say the least, bishops appear to be encouraging us to vote “pro-life” regardless of whether those we elect actually behave in pro-life ways. This leads to a certain cynicism among some Catholic voters: is life really the issue on which bishops are hinging their support of “the” “pro-life” party? Or do they find something else in that party, its leaders, and its platform, that they prefer for other undisclosed reasons?

Kaiser notes that an Australian Jesuit, Frank Brennan, a law professor, has critiqued the approach of Burke, Chaput, and others to the public square. In his book Acting On Conscience (Univ. of Queensland Press, 2007), Brennan notes that, during the 2004 campaign, Archbishop Burke argued, "Of course, the end in view for the Catholic must always be the total conformity of the civil law with the moral law."

In Brennan’s view, this attempt to make civil law totally conform with moral law is fatuous—it is not supported by Catholic theology, which has always recognized that civil law does not totally enshrine moral values and never will do so. Brennan calls Burke’s position "a theocratic hope." In Brennan’s view, the U.S. bishops should decisively repudiate the theocratic ambitions of their current “pro-life” pastoral agenda.

(An aside: they don’t appear to be doing so in the person of Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, about whom I blogged yesterday. I’ve just read a news report which states that when Martino barged into a parish’s political forum Sunday night, he announced, “I own this building” [www.theweeklyalmanac.com/articles/2008/10/22/news/doc48ff6abd6a680293638629.txt].

Shocking, that statement. If I am not mistaken, God owns the church, not Bishop Martino—and if Bishop Martino has suddenly been divinized, the report of that transformation has yet to reach me. Moreover, since the church is the people of God, the people of God own church buildings every bit as much as a bishop does. It was our money and our labor that built parishes, after all.)

Kaiser ends his discussion with a sane observation from Fr. Brennan: Brennan notes that the U.S. bishops "need to abandon the simplistic hierarchy of political wrongs, giving a preference to politicians who favour the criminalization of acts judged to be intrinsically evil while [ignoring] the direct action of those same politicians who themselves commit criminal acts, such as…committing the nation to war without just cause."

In other words, if bishops are going to encourage Catholics to vote pro-life, let them show at least minimal respect for truth by noting that what “pro-life” leaders actually do—whether they behave in pro- or anti-life ways—needs to be taken into consideration by pro-life voters. The kind of coercion practiced by "I Own This Building" Martino et al. in the name of pro-life politics—the attempt to shut down public forums in which Catholic voters discuss the application of Catholic principles to politics—has no place in the Christian life. It is fascist, not Christian.

The second article to which I’d like to draw attention is Chris Korzen’s “Tough Times for the Catholic Right” at www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-korzen/tough-times-for-the-catho_b_136831.html.

Korzen notes that the Catholic right had hoped for a reprise of 2004 and what occurred in Ohio. As a result, it has been dumping millions into advertising and other campaigns to promote the tried-and-true agenda of single issue voting.

(A new website purporting to inform Catholic voters about their duty to vote “right” seems to come online every day now. Yesterday, Clerical Whispers noted the appearance a new "Catholic" website that claims to offer intellectual and spiritual resources to Catholic voters [http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-website-offers-intellectual-and.html].

Visit that website—“Formed Catholics in the Public Square”—and you’ll find it’s sponsored by the brand-new “Solidarity Institute” . . . of Colorado. In other words, it comes from the Colorado Catholic Conference, presided over by none other than Archbishop Chaput, who recently lambasted Mr. Obama as the architect of millions of “little murders.” The website’s “intellectual and spiritual resources” are those tired old instructions to vote on the basis of the handful of “non-negotiable” issues on which right-wing Catholics fixate.

One has to wonder where the money to set up these “Catholic” websites is coming from . . . .

Korzen notes that this election, Catholics are not buying what the Catholic right is selling. Polls show a majority of Catholics supporting Obama. A few bishops, including Steib and Zavala, have broken with the single-issue approach to remind Catholic voters that there is a range of life issues one must consider as one forms one’s conscience. There is also unanticipated organizing on the part of Catholics who want the entire range of life issues to be part of our political dialogue.

And then there’s that inconvenient reality question, the question of whether our pro-life votes have really resulted in pro-life actions on the part of the “pro-life” leaders bishops have bullied us to elect. As Corzen says,

Like so many things, saying that a candidate's position on abortion makes him or her unfit for the Catholic vote works better in theory than practice. The Catholic right's message loses its effectiveness when voters realize it uses the same logic that impelled Catholic voters to re-elect Bush in 2004 - whose presidency turned out to be a disaster for Catholic values and the nation as a whole.

This is why I wrote my essay entitled “Remembering Katrina,” which I uploaded to this blog on August 28—as the election cycle unfolded and as I knew in my bones we’d have a reprisal of the “vote-life” argument of some bishops. I wrote that essay in September 2005, just after Hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans.

I sent the piece to National Catholic Reporter. They chose not to print it. Later, I decided (a year later, actually), to upload the statement to NCR’s blog café (http://ncrcafe.org/node/429). Despite NCR’s initial negative response to it, it must say something readers think is worth hearing. As of today, it has had 5355 reads.

I wrote “Remembering Katrina” to call the bishops’ hand on pro-life rhetoric. After watching in total disbelief as, day after day, bodies lay unburied in New Orleans, people went without food and water, the elderly and critically ill died like flies in hospitals without medical treatment, human beings were crowded like cattle into the Superdome, I decided that enough was enough.

I wrote with passion. I had friends, some of them elderly, in New Orleans who had not yet been accounted for. I was desperately seeking information about a number of people I knew, who had chosen to stay in their houses during the storm.

I wrote with anger. The scenes we all saw on our television sets in August and September 2005 were brought to us by those same “pro-life” leaders the bishops had done all but stand on their heads to elect. I concluded,

Perhaps those bishops need to re-think their support for “pro-life” politicians who, to all appearances, seem shockingly callous in face of the need of poor, hungry human beings trapped like rats in a bowl in a major American city now lying largely underwater. Perhaps, as they prepare for their big Eucharistic shindigs, they should be pondering the core significance of what they profess about the bread of life. At the very least, perhaps they should be adding to their roster of speakers some who will remind us of the connections between providing daily bread to the hungry and inviting the spiritually hungry to the table of the Lord.

If they don’t do these things, it’s entirely possible that, one day, the bishops will give a party and no one will come. Or that they’ll shake their big sticks to compel the faithful to vote the “right” way, and no one will cower anymore. It’s possible that, having seen how our pro-life leaders have responded to the needs of the people of New Orleans, we will re-think what it means to vote pro-life in future elections, no matter what our bishops tell us.

And I meant every word of that conclusion then, as I mean them now. As Colleen Baker’s perceptive comment on my posting yesterday notes, sometimes you have to keep saying the slogan over and over again—especially when you’re responding to a noxious slogan being shouted at you with the intent of shutting down your critical faculties.

To the bishops who keep shouting “pro-life,” I intend to keep saying, “Remember Katrina.” They may forget. I don't intend to do so.

You can’t claim to be pro-life when you behave in shockingly anti-life ways. My conscience tells me I’d be sinning if I voted for political leaders who continue to endanger life, no matter how loudly they and their religious acolytes shout “pro-life.”

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Steve and I went to the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival with friends on Saturday, and saw an outstanding film that continues to haunt me. As the subtitle of “Faubourg Tremé” indicates, it’s an exploration of the untold story of black New Orleans (www.tremedoc.com).

I’m trying to think through what so captivated me at a visceral level in this documentary. Part of it is that we once lived in Tremé. We bought a house there in 1986 and lived in it until our move to North Carolina in 1991. The house was an 1884 shotgun that had been partially renovated by its previous owners. We (as in Steve) completed the renovation process, turning it into a single dwelling that a colleague at Xavier once characterized as an paramount example of “simple elegance.”

But there’s more to why “Faubourg Tremé” so powerfully grabbed me. We have not been back to New Orleans since Katrina. I have not wanted to go back. We know from Steve’s cousin that our house is now “gone.” The shell of it stands, but it appears to be unrecoverable after the flooding.

In fact, it had already been cannibalized before the flood, we’d been told: the beautiful finials on the wrought-iron fence forged for the 1884 world’s fair were stolen, the shutters on the house (many of which we’d replaced, buying them from vendors of antique architectural details) were also carted off. Apparently the people to whom we sold the house defaulted on loans and lost it to the bank, and it was empty and boarded up even before the hurricane.

Both the sadness of that house, which for generations sheltered prosperous middle-class black Créole families, and the destruction caused by Katrina, have deterred me from returning. My bond with the city runs deep, so deep that I had a series of dreams about the flooding of New Orleans prior to Katrina. Pictures I saw on the news when the city flooded were familiar to me: they replicate what I had seen saw in those prescient montages of a horror that baffled me, as I saw it dreamt about it in several memorable dreams prior to the hurricane.

Indeed, the few vivid future-foreseeing dreams I have ever had in my life have almost always centered on New Orleans and its environs. My soul is linked to that magical, mystical place near the mouth of the Mississippi.

I went to college there, after all. My parents honeymooned in New Orleans, and we spent many vacations in the city as I grew up. I can remember my parents taking us to the booth of a cartoon artist outside St. Louis Cathedral on one vacation. I must have been about twelve at the time.

They did not like how the artist fussed over me. He told them that I was not, well, I can’t avoid saying it, though it sounds immodest (I want to write truth on this blog): he told them I wasn’t ordinary.

They didn’t like hearing that. I can remember my mother doing that Southern-lady freeze-out thing, drawing herself up stiffly and looking down her nose at the artist as if he were not quite her sort of people. My father grumbled, something about paying the artist to do sketches of his children and not prophesy.

At some level, I knew even at that early age that what caused the reaction was, in part, their parental fear that a gay man might recognize something in me and take advantage of it. But it was more than that: he told them—he instructed them—to pay attention to my needs for intellectual and emotional nourishment.

They did not like that. They did not intend to comply. Children should not be made to feel special, should not be fussed over—especially not a boy who refused to embrace “the” male role.

The artist drew little symbolic tokens in each of our ears. For my brother Simpson, there were dollar signs. And the prophecy turned out to be accurate. As alcoholism took his life, my mother spent a fortune trying to keep him alive, most everything she had saved for her old age. What she didn’t spend, he carted off when she was away from the house and sold to buy liquor.

Philip had a tic-tac-toe game in his ear. I’m not sure if even he knows why the artist chose to mark him with that token. Perhaps it was a recognition that, as the youngest of three rambunctious boys, Philip had to learn early on to evade, hide, outsmart, in order to survive.

In my ear, the artist put crosses.

New Orleans is the lodestone of my spiritual life. Not only was I educated there, it was in New Orleans that I met Steve. He had dropped out of St. John University in Minnesota to hitchhike south, with a vague plan to make his way to a mission in Mexico where a Benedictine relative of his was pastor.

We met at a prayer meeting sponsored by Loyola campus ministry. We soon moved in together, and have been together ever since. I persuaded Steve to return to school and complete his degree in philosophy. He did so at Loyola.

So it was in New Orleans that we began to come to terms with being gay, a long, drawn-out process that took many years and was not complete until we lived in the Tremé house. It was in New Orleans that I went to confession and had a priest hiss at me so loudly other penitents could hear, as he told me I had committed the sin that draws God’s wrath down on the world.

It was at the Jesuit church on Baronne St. in New Orleans that a priest who had taught me math at Loyola tried to spot me through the confessional grate, as he warned me that if I didn’t repent, a bus could run me down when I was not in a state of grace and send me directly to hell.

It was also in New Orleans that a Jesuit chaplain told me that God does not bully or lust to damn us, and that sexuality is a gift of God to bring us into communion with God and others. It was there that the pastor of our parish church told me in confession that he had just spent some time hearing confessions in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, and heard many German farmers tell him of sleeping with Mexican women whom they coerced into relationships. They did not feel guilty for a sin that broke their marriage vows (or for the coercion), the priest said. Why was I so weighed down by guilt at my transgressions?

New Orleans kept drawing me back. As I’ve noted previously on this blog, when I was finishing my dissertation, I was offered a good job at a prestigious “white” university, and a much more modestly paid (and demanding) position at Xavier University, an historically black university.

The choice was obvious to me: my life journey, my struggle to understand and address the racism inculcated in me from the time I was tiny, my commitment as a theologian to give voice to those on the margins, my history as a white Southerner whose ancestors owned slaves: all of these pointed me to Xavier. Xavier was a calling, an opportunity to serve. It was a place to learn, to continue learning even as I taught.

This vocational decision—this blessing of being called to serve—was confirmed when, the following year, Steve was offered a job at the Catholic seminary in New Orleans. That was what led to our buying the house in Tremé in 1986. I was 36 at the time, Steve 35. We had never been homeowners.

In fact, we didn’t have the resources to buy a house, after years of graduate studies and work in a “poor ministry” sponsored by Loyola’s chaplain’s office, which paid us only our living expenses. Steve’s aunts, Benedictine sisters, had inherited some money from their parents’ estate, which their community generously allowed them to lend to family members. They loaned us the down-payment for the house.

At the time we moved there, Tremé was well over 90% African American. Historically, it had always, from its beginnings at the end of the 18th century, been a majority black neighborhood, dominated by Créole free people of color, many of them descended from white men and their mixed-blood mistresses in the New Orleans system of plaçage, which encouraged young French and Spanish men to choose a mistress of color prior to marriage.

By the time we moved into Tremé, the Créole population had largely dispersed to suburbs on the east side of New Orleans. The neighborhood was in deep trouble by the 1980s, full of crime and drugs. In the years we lived there, we came home twice to find our house ransacked. In the second robbery, the vandals broke a hole through the floorboards and entered the house that way.

We had a beer bottle thrown through our window at night, our car windows smashed. I was once writing at my desk facing the street and looked out to see an elderly neighbor being held up at gunpoint. A teen was shot and killed half a block from our house; the teens who shot him wanted his tennis shoes. Our neighbors, a Créole Catholic family, lost their son first to drugs and then to a gunshot wound in a drug deal.

The house across from us was a crack house. It was owned by a white gay man who lived outside the neighborhood. When almost every house in the block was robbed after the occupants of that house moved in, the police told us that everywhere the group settled, this happened. We, all of us in the block, contacted the owner. He laughed. As long as he was paid his rent, what did he care?

Our neighbors on one side were also a gay couple, equally disdainful. They lived as though in a fortress, interacting with no one, walking each Sunday to Mass at the parish church a few blocks away. They were the meanest, stingiest human beings I have ever had the misfortune to live beside.

Even with all the struggles, we suffered when we finally decided to leave that house of simple elegance. What tipped the scales was my brother’s death in 1991. I could see as though it were a fortune written in capital letters on a wall that I would soon end up needing to provide care for my mother. I knew that doing this in a troubled marginal neighborhood would be doubly difficult.

When a Catholic college in North Carolina announced two jobs in its theology department, and when, even more miraculously, the college told Steve and me that our applications were far and away the best they had gotten from some hundred applicants and they wanted to hire us, we left. The community there was more like the one in which my mother had grown up. I knew she’d find it easier to live there than in Tremé as her mind slipped away.

Homophobia definitely played a role in all of this—a big one. Part of that journey to self-acceptance—the spiritual journey on which New Orleans placed us—was learning how vicious and how entrenched homophobia was in the academy.

When I went to New Orleans to apply for the job at Xavier, a priest in the seminary who had taught me when I took classes there prior to heading to Toronto to do the Ph.D. did all he could to out me to the Xavier hiring committee, in the nastiest way possible. This was a priest who, whenever a gay rights ordinance came before the city council, would beg the archbishop to be permitted to go and speak against it. He touted himself as the archbishop’s personal theologian.

When the seminary rector unilaterally denied Steve tenure (ignoring the recommendation of faculty and students), homophobia played a key role, we knew and were told. Later, when a permanent position opened at Xavier and one of my colleagues blocked Steve’s hire, I came face to face with homophobia all over again. This was a former nun married to a former priest. They had both had their educations paid for by the church, while Steve and I struggled extremely hard as lay students to scrape together funds to get through graduate school. When she left the convent and he the priesthood, doors opened immediately for both to get jobs at Catholic universities.

Despite this, my colleague was fond of saying the church persecuted married people like her and her husband while it protected and defended gays. When Steve was ditched by the seminary and applied for an opening at Xavier, she made certain he would not get the job—precipitating our need to move if we could find jobs outside New Orleans.

“Faubourg Tremé” provided me with a context in which to understand these spiritual struggles. The documentary does an outstanding job of uncovering the rich black history of the neighborhood—its association with Plessy v. Ferguson, its importance as one of the largest and first free black communities in the nation, its seminal role in the development of jazz. The film shows how the citizens of Tremé have repeatedly worked against the odds to build lives (and a marvelous culture) full of dignity, self-respect, intelligence, and creativity.

In the final analysis, watching “Faubourg Tremé” moved me because the film encapsulated key aspects of my own spiritual journey: the struggle against the odds for dignity; the call to give voice to those on the margins and to learn from marginal communities. The decisive and painful homophobic experiences through which Steve and I lived in New Orleans did not go away as we left New Orleans for first North Carolina, then Little Rock, then Florida.

In fact, we encountered them in a particularly brutal way all over again in an African-American churched community in Florida, and the film opened unhealed wounds we both have after those experiences. We certainly never expected the journey to be easy, both when we came out of the closet and also when we committed ourselves to work in marginal communities.

We also did not expect the cruelty practiced against us by an African-American Christian leader at a university in Florida. We did not expect to be repaid for years of gifts and sacrificial work at HBCUs, as well as loyalty to and sacrifice for that leader, with the deceptive byzantine maneuvers this African-American leader, who had previously called us friends and who knew how to hurt in the deepest way possible, used against us—the way in which she assaulted our dignity at the soul-shattering level only a former friend can touch, if she or he chooses to assault you.

Curiously enough, though, even when the film opened wounds I still bear from those experiences, watching “Faubourg Tremé” restores my faith in the African-American community that has called me to itself throughout my spiritual journey. Even when some tender part of me now wants to repudiate an entire community after the cruel treatment we experienced in Florida, I refuse to do so, and the film helps me to understand why.

After our experiences in Florida, I struggle as I struggled when our house was broken into in New Orleans by African-American neighbors, and after African-American teens broke our car windows and threw a beer bottle through our window. It would be so easy to give up, to pass judgment on an entire group of people on the basis of the shoddy behavior of a few—just as it would be easy for someone observing the behavior of our gay neighbors in Tremé or the gay man who owned the crack house across the street to conclude that all gay people are debased.

But observing the dignity, the creativity, the humanity of the citizens of Tremé—through monumental historic struggles that have gone on for centuries—reaffirms my belief in the rightness of keeping on keeping on. If a people who have been beaten, lynched, lied to and lied about, deprived of basic rights, can continue to struggle for dignity, who am I to give up? Even when members of a group that contains such magnificent representatives of humanity happen to be the ones oppressing me and assaulting my dignity, I refuse to allow those experiences to deter me from seeking solidarity with that group as it continues to struggle for freedom.

What African Americans have learned as they have sojourned in this land and sought to craft decent lives under the most inhumane conditions imaginable has the potential to teach all of us about the amazing resilience of the human spirit. This is what makes "Faubourg Tremé" such an important documentary to watch, such a valuable contribution to the study of our nation's history.

Respect for Life: The Tragedy in New Orleans

As the current elections revive the increasingly enervating discussion of the pro-life principles that should guide people of faith as they make political decisions, I want to post on this blog I piece I posted elsewhere on 6 September 2006. This statement appeared on the blog of the National Catholic Reporter website at http://ncrcafe.org/node/429, where there's a fairly lengthy thread discussing it. I wrote the piece in September 2005.

My statement about Katrina and Catholic pro-life principles is as follows:

I’ll admit it: I’m biased. New Orleans is the lodestone of my adult life, the gravitational force always pulling me back. I began my college teaching career there, reveling in the generosity of seasoned teacher-mentors at Xavier University, who patiently taught me how to identify and use my gifts as a teacher. The jewel-like experiences I have had in that magical, maddening city near the river’s mouth have enriched my life in ways so profound that I will never get over New Orleans. Nor do I wish to do so.

I studied at both Loyola and Tulane. In my undergraduate education, what the Jesuits at Loyola taught me about God’s determination to lift up the downtrodden has forever stamped me. The Jesuits compelled me into ministry, overturning my well-laid plans to sequester myself in an ivory tower with my beloved Greek and Latin texts. Those crafty men who would not cease nattering about the importance of living for others turned my life upside down. I came to them a callow middle-class youth from a small Southern town. I left them with blinders forever stripped from my eyes. After what I learned in my years of ministry to the needy in New Orleans, I had no option except to head off to study theology, to get my mind around what my heart had learned about how systems of neglect and oppression affect the poor.

In my forays into ministry in New Orleans, I brought books, literacy training, food, and housing assistance to the needy. I approached these expeditions cavalierly: I was the one bearing gifts, after all, the one with the answers. But I quickly discovered that those to whom I reached out offered me far more than I could ever bring them. They taught me more than I could ever begin to teach them.

With these connections, I am shaken to the core of my soul by the scenes I have watched unfold in New Orleans day after day this week. I feel a frustration akin to battering my head against prison walls as I watch people pleading for food and water, even dying from lack of elemental nutrition or simple medication. I watch these scenes in helpless rage, in a comfortable house well-stocked with food and pure water. As I sit glued to my television set, I shout questions at it: how is it possible that we live in an advanced nation in which technology allows us to see people die of hunger, and yet our nation’s leaders seem incapable of delivering food to these suffering people we can see in front of us? I ask the television if we are in truth a developing nation, incapable of meeting the simplest nutritional and healthcare needs of our populace when disaster strikes.

As I worry the well-paced rug of questions in my head, I flash back to the last presidential election, when so many of our religious leaders twisted our arms as they informed us that voting for any but the pro-life candidates would be wicked in the extreme. I recall some of my own Catholic bishops compelling their flocks to vote pro-life, spelling out the “right” candidates and the “wrong” ones. I recall bishops who were willing to break with longstanding Catholic tradition and to use the Eucharist as a political whip to coerce errant believers into submission to their episcopal will.

I am also flashing back now to those grim scenes outside the facility in which Terri Schiavo died, when pro-life religious leaders held daily vigil as hydration was removed from the brain-dead woman lying inside. Where are those advocates for life now, I keep crying out to my television? Where are they as babies cry for water in the grueling heat of New Orleans summer days? Where are they, while corpses collect unburied, blankets draped over them, on the sidewalks of New Orleans?

The scenes we are seeing show us people dying precisely as Terri Schiavo died, from lack of nutrition and hydration. And yet those now dying on the streets of New Orleans are not brain-dead. They have the potential to live vibrant lives. Where are the buses of protesters now, shouting about how our nation has lost all respect for life? For that matter, where are the bishops who sought to bully us into voting pro-life in the last election? I have yet to hear the voice of a single one of my episcopal leaders, as human beings plead for food and water in New Orleans.

And the pro-life leaders the bishops told us to elect: what is their response to the agonizing scenes we see anytime we care to turn on our television sets? They are as absent as our bishops. As the grim scenes in New Orleans unfold before us, a number of bishops (along with their political allies) are engrossed in planning Eucharistic events, huge religious parties to celebrate the bread of life. Are those planning these parties recalling, I wonder, that the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper centers on a table, on bread, on wine, on food offered to the hungry? There is continuity between the dinner table at which we break our daily bread and the Eucharistic table at which the church offers bread to all hearts hungry for God.

When the church fails to do all it can to defend those who lack daily bread, it undermines everything that it proclaims about the holy bread of life. A church that neglects those hungry for daily bread cannot convincingly announce God’s invitation to hungry hearts everywhere to come to the table of living bread. Where are the bishops who teach this as the very heart and soul of Christian faith, while people lie dying in the streets in New Orleans, in this land of plenty, and no bread arrives?

Perhaps those bishops need to re-think their support for “pro-life” politicians who, to all appearances, seem shockingly callous in face of the need of poor, hungry human beings trapped like rats in a bowl in a major American city now lying largely underwater. Perhaps, as they prepare for their big Eucharistic shindigs, they should be pondering the core significance of what they profess about the bread of life. At the very least, perhaps they should be adding to their roster of speakers some who will remind us of the connections between providing daily bread to the hungry and inviting the spiritually hungry to the table of the Lord.

If they don’t do these things, it’s entirely possible that, one day, the bishops will give a party and no one will come. Or that they’ll shake their big sticks to compel the faithful to vote the “right” way, and no one will cower anymore. It’s possible that, having seen how our pro-life leaders have responded to the needs of the people of New Orleans, we will re-think what it means to vote pro-life in future elections, no matter what our bishops tell us.