Rolando Rodriguez on Trump's Appeal to White Male Fantasy: "The Image of Our Naked Brother Hanging on the Cross Is the Result of 'the White Male Phantasy' "

A week ago, I posted some comments about David Rosen's recent Salon article which argues that Donald Trump is appealing to a group of U.S. voters who long for the resurrection of what Rosen calls the "white male fantasy" of being on top of the world. Rosen thinks that

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "If Christ Is Undiscovered Now . . . That Is in Part Because of Scandals Done in His Name, by Those Who Call Out His Name Most Loudly"

James Carroll, in Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age (NY: Viking, 2014):

Quote for the Day: When Marginalization, Discrimination, Violence, and Hatred Are Dressed in Sheep's Clothing of Religious Zeal

Brother Daniel Horan at his Dating God site writing about when Jesus broke the rules:

Remembering Vatican II, Remembering Jesus of Nazareth: James Carroll and Leonardo Boff

Former priest James Carroll commemorates the 50th anniversary of the last ecumenical council of the Catholic church, Vatican II, by concluding that the spiritual and ecclesial revolution mandated by the council is now "lost."  Pope John Paul II instituted a "counter-revolution" designed to reassert clerical power over the people of God and to ignore lay conscience, and the papacy of Benedict is "capping" that counter-revolution, Carroll proposes.

Andrew Sullivan on Jesus and His Wife Discussion: "Jesus Clearly Saw Women as Total Equals"

Andrew Sullivan on the "Was Jesus married?" discussion:

More on Discussion of Jesus and His Wife: Fred Clark at Slacktivist

At Slactktivist, Fred Clark offers the best summary I've seen up to now of the theological implications of the discovery that Jesus had a wife--if such a discovery could be proven:

Monkeying Around with Jesus: More on the Spanish Fresco Story

And speaking of remaking Jesus in our own (?) image (I'm referring here to what I just posted about Jesus and his wife): the story of the botched Spanish fresco in which Ecce Homo has been, according to some wits, transformed into Ecce Mono, continues.  Yesterday, Fiona Govan reported in The Telegraph that the Sanctuario de Misercordia in Borja, Spain, where artist Cecilia Gimenez restored the Ecce Homo fresco, is now charging admission to see the painting.  And tourists are flocking to the area for a sight of the botched artwork.

Sarah Morice-Brubaker on New Coptic Manuscript Discovery: Did Jesus Put a Ring on It?

In the lines I wish I'd written category, Sarah Morice-Brubaker writing about the discovery of a fourth-century Coptic papyrus fragment that may (or may not?) indicate Jesus was married:

Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009): An Appreciation, Part 2

In the first part of my appreciation of theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, I noted that Schillebeeckx’s work in the areas of christology and ecclesiology has profoundly influenced the Catholic Church through his role at Vatican II. Schillebeeckx was one of the primary theological advisors of the Dutch bishops at Vatican II, and his work in the area of ecclesiology in particular has now become canonical for the entire church, as it were, through the documents of Vatican II.

In key respects, Schillebeeckx belongs to a movement strong in French, Belgian, and Dutch Catholicism of the early 20th century. This movement was known as a ressourcement movement, a movement seeking to return to the sources—specifically, to the biblical and patristic foundations—of Christian theology.

The ressourcement movement was, in significant ways, a reaction to what happened to the Catholic church in its period of reaction first to the Reformation and then to the rise of modernity. During the period of the Council of Trent, the church’s official response to the Reformation, and at Vatican I, which in many ways charted the church’s strong counter-push to modernity, the Catholic church opted for an ecclesiology that was not so much strongly grounded in either biblical or patristic sources as it was innovative. It was a contextual theology that had everything to do with the church’s reaction to movements it considered threatening, movements demanding a vehement and immediate push-back from the church.

In the Tridentine period, the period of the counter-Reformation, the ecclesiology that prevailed was what is called the “perfect society” model of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. This ecclesiology laid great stress on the need of the church to function as an institution complete in and of itself, parallel (and superior) to the state, whose structures the church mirrors but which does not have the perfection of the church.

This notion of church stressed the need for top-down, hierarchical, monarchical government in the church, akin to (but more perfect than) that of the state. Indeed, the perfect society model made being church synonymous with monarchy, with absolute control (perfect conrol) of the whole church exercised from the top down through a hierarchical chain of command. The model of church that Trent set into motion placed the church and its structures over against secular models, while at the same time incorporating their key features.

This ecclesiology was then, as I note above, contextual. It was an adaptive ecclesiology, one that reflected the circumstances in which the perfect society ecclesiology was developed. It was a reaction to the Reformation, which seemed to be fragmenting the perfect society of the church, and to the rise of the nation-state, which went hand in hand with the Reformation, and seemed to be competing with the church for power and control.

Bellarmine’s perfect society model prevailed from the Tridentine period of the church through the first Vatican Council and up to Vatican II. Vatican I endorsed the model, adding to it the new twist of papal infallibility. During this period of its history, the Catholic church appeared to be locked into a bitter battle against secular society—against the world. Only in the church, which was a fortress of truth and light in the midst of a surrounding culture of error and darkness, could one find salvation. Only in the Catholic church could one find the perfect society that guarantees salvation.

I’ve labored over this quick theological sketch of the ecclesiological backdrop to Vatican II because it is essential to understand what Vatican II thought it was correcting, when it moved back to the sources, back beyond the 16th-century ecclesiology of Trent and the 19th-century ecclesiology of Vatican I. Many of those who now combat Vatican II argue that this ecumenical council was a radical departure from the tradition, that it rejected the tradition and flung the doors of the church open to a contemporary secularism that represents a wholesale departure from longstanding tradition.

In fact, the opposite is the case. The ecclesiology of Vatican II returns to more ancient, more venerable understandings of the church found in the texts of the New Testament and in patristic theology. It corrects what was in itself an innovation on the tradition—the ecclesiology of Trent-Vatican I—by reminding the church that the perfect society model and the fortress church model that developed in the Counter-Reformation and modern periods are themselves innovative ecclesiologies—new developments in the tradition not conspicuously rooted in scripture and patristic theology.

And so enter Schillebeeckx: as the bishops assembled at Vatican II began to recognize the need to re-emphasize images and theologies of the church that would correct the historically conditioned fortress church ecclesiology of Trent-Vatican I, they turned to the exhaustive theological work done by theologians of the ressourcement movement like Yves Congar (a mentor of Schillebeeckx’s) and Schillebeeckx, which delved into the biblical and patristic roots of Catholic ecclesiology.

Schillebeeckx was particularly brilliant in his ability to re-focus contemporary Catholic theology on the most fundamental meaning of sacramentality, which runs beneath the sacramental system of the church and provides meaning to that system, and which had been obscured by the theology of Trent-Vatican I. During the period of reaction of these two councils, the sacraments came to be viewed almost as “things,” as holy objects owned and dispensed by the rulers of the perfect society to their loyal subjects, insofar as those subjects were faithful and performed proper obeisance.

What this view of the sacramental life significantly overlooks is the way in which the sacraments are manifestations of the primary sacrament—the sacrament of Christ himself. The sacraments signify and effect grace because Christ himself signifies and effects grace in the world, as the primary, central sign of God’s salvific self-offering to the world. The church is sacramental—it is itself a sign of Christ’s sacramental presence in the world—because it is united with Christ. It mirrors Christ’s salvific presence in the world.

Schillebeeck’s pre-Vatican II work on Christ as the sacrament of the encounter with God (particularly in Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God) and on the church as the sacramental sign of Christ helped those gathered at Vatican II to refocus Catholic ecclesiology and sacramental life on biblical and patristic roots that connect the church’s life, its role as a salvific presence in the world, to the primary sacrament from which the church’s sacramental life and salvific work flow—to Christ. At one level, this ecclesiology reorients the church to something that should never be lost sight of in Christian theology and Christian spirituality: to Jesus as the model, the center, of theological reflection and of the spiritual journey.

This is a strand of the theology of Vatican II that Schillebeeckx would deepen significantly in his two post-Vatican II works Jesus: An Experiment in Christology and Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World. These provide a rich treasure trove of biblical scholarship that sets Catholic theology back on a strong, vibrant biblical foundation—a project that reflects the particular concerns of Catholic theologians in countries like the Netherlands, where Catholics and Protestants coexist and seek to recognize the important theological contributions made by the traditions of each other. Schillebeeckx’s theology is especially strong in the area of biblical scholarship. In contrast to many Catholic theologians of the latter half of the 20th century (including Benedict XVI, whose biblical scholarship has often been criticized by theological colleagues as notably deficient), Schillebeeckx grounds his theology in painstaking, well-researched exegesis.

Note what this return to the sources—above all, to the central, perduring focus of Christian theology and spirituality on Jesus as the primary sacrament, and on the church’s role as a sacramental presence in the world through its fidelity to Jesus—does, as we begin to look at how the church lives in the world and interacts with the world. In the perfect society and fortress church models, the church’s primary obligation vis-a-vis the world is to combat the world, to correct the world. The church has it all. The world is deficient. The church offers to the world what the world lacks—in particular, dogmatic truth, perfect hierarchical rule, and the sacraments. And the world, if it is wise, will respond humbly and receptively to the offer.

The sacramental notion of the church—the idea that the church mirrors Jesus as the sacramental sign of God’s presence in the world—dislodges the certainties of the perfect society and fortress church models. It does so in two ways. First, if the church is a sacramental sign of God’s salvific presence in the world, it can hardly claim to have exclusive ownership of that salvific presence. To do so would limit God. It would imply that God’s salvific intent and “reach” in the world are limited, that they do not intend and encompass the entire world.

When ecclesiology grants that God wishes and intends the salvation of the entire cosmos through Christ, then the church pursues its sacramental task in the world in part by watching for signs of the Spirit’s presence anywhere those signs are to be found in the world—inside the church, certainly, but also outside its boundaries, since God is there, too, working salvation. The sacramental church of Vatican II (and of scripture and the patristic period) is a more chastened church than that of Trent and Vatican I, which purported to have it all, almost to own God and God’s salvific work in the world, through the sacraments. The church that seeks to be a faithful sign of salvation in the world both offers salvation to the world, and receives that salvation from areas outside the boundaries of the church, as the Spirit moves through the world fanning the flames of divine love everywhere.

The sacramental notion of the church developed so brilliantly by Schillebeeckx also dislodges the certainties of Tridentine and Vatican I ecclesiology in another key way. This notion of the church, focused as it is on Jesus as the initial, the Ur-sacrament, constantly calls the church back to reflection on how, precisely, it signifies the salvific presence of Christ in the world. If the church is a sign, and, specifically, a sign of Christ and of Christ’s salvation, in the world, then everything the church does, how it behaves, how it structures itself, how it regards the rights of its own members as it exercises governance, how its pastors engage in pastoral leadership—all becomes part and parcel of the sacramental sign of salvation of Christ in the world.

Or perhaps the church’s behavior, how its pastors exercise pastoral leadership, how the church deals with the human rights of its own members as it exercises governance, how it treats the least among us, becomes a counter-sign to Christ’s salfivic presence in the world. If the church can reveal Christ’s face to the world, it can also obscure that face. It can fail to be a patent sacramental sign of salvific love in the world.

As a Dominican theologian, a member of a religious community whose charism is all about engaging and dialoguing with those living in urban centers with strong intellectual movements (Dominic began his ministry as cities began to develop in the Middle Ages, many of them with large universities), Schillebeeckx had a strong concern to see the church respond dialogically, creatively, and above all, redemptively, to the cultures in which it found itself. As with Dominicans in general, Schillebeeckx was a preacher, someone concerned to proclaim the good news of Christ in ever-changing cultural contexts.

Schillebeeckx’s vision of Christian faith was inspired by a deep, profound, and broad grasp of who Jesus was in his humanity. In his work, he was able to articulate this vision across the whole spectrum of Catholic theology from Christology and ecclesiology to ecumenism and social justice concerns. Anyone who tries to understand the Catholic tradition following Vatican II cannot do so adequately without paying attention to the monumental contributions of Edward Schillebeeckx to that tradition.

(Crossposted from The Open Tabernacle, 10 Jan. 2010)

Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009): An Appreciation, Part 1

Shortly before Christmas, the Catholic church lost one its most eminent 20th-century theologians. Belgian-born Edward Schillebeeckx, OP, a leading theologian of the Second Vatican Council, died on 23 December. Schillebeeckx’s long and distinguished career as a theologian resulted in the publication of numerous studies in the fields of christology and ecclesiology that have already become classics. These include Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (1959; English translation, 1963); Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (1974; English translation, 1979); Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (1977; English translation, 1980); The Church with a Human Face (1985); and Church: The Human Story of God (1989; English translation, 1990).

As I’ve been thinking of Schillebeeckx’s influence on me—and I do want to write this brief memoir as a personal appreciation of his work—I keep returning to the latter part of the 1960s, when I made a life-altering decision to leave my childhood Southern Baptist church and become Catholic. I’ve shared aspects of that journey on my Bilgrimage blog.

As I’ve noted there, two primary factors motivated my decision (two discernible historical factors, that is, in addition to the grace running hidden underneath the experience). The first was the struggle of my family’s church to come to terms with the Civil Rights movement and the integration process of the 1960s.

We were not merely slow to come to terms with integration. As a white church whose roots ran back to the slave period, when we had separated from Northern Baptists over the question of the morality of slavery, we actively resisted integration.

So when my church finally integrated reluctantly and after a bitter, divisive debate about this step, and when my pastor defended that reluctance to me by saying that churches have to be slow to respond to such movements of dramatic social change, I looked around for churches that provided an alternative (and prophetic) witness re: racial issues. In my small Deep South town, that happened to be the Catholic church, which had long since integrated its black and white parishes without any fanfare.

My decision to become Catholic was also influenced by my reading of John Henry Newman’s Apologia. I’m sure that at the tender (and callow) age of 16, I understood little of Newman. What I did glimpse in his work, however, and what compelled me towards the Catholic church, was an argument about the deep historical roots of the Christian movement and the institutions it spawned. In Newman, I found an alluring narrative about an “idea” of Christianity that necessarily adapts itself to ever-shifting cultural contexts, but which nonetheless remains rooted in an originating event and originating narratives that norm and correct this necessary process of development.

And so my choice to become Catholic and my initial encounter with Schillebeeckx—or, I should say more precisely, with some key themes he was developing in Dutch theology, which were, just at the moment of my conversion, taking center stage in global Catholicism through Vatican II.

I have long since forgotten the title of the catechism my local parish priest used to instruct me in the Catholic faith. It wasn’t a particularly catchy title—perhaps something as pedantic as Our Catholic Faith. I suspect that the book was an updated version of the Baltimore catechism, with pictures galore, many of them in lurid, eye-catching colors designed to appeal to a child’s eye.

I loved the catechism. I memorized it avidly, religiously. At the drop of a hat, I could recite lists of saints, of corporal and spiritual works of mercy, of capital sins. And prayers aplenty: to guardian angels, the Mother of God, prayers in Latin, prayers in English, prayers for morning, midday, and night.

And then along came a curious book my pastor didn’t recommend, but which I ordered through the mail, because it was being featured in publications I had begun to admire, like America and Commonweal. It was an alternative catechism, popularly called the Dutch catechism. It came out in the year in which I was taking instruction in Catholicism.

I hated it. And I didn't understand it. It was the antithesis of the detailed, fetchingly illustrated answer book—answers for everything!—that I had been memorizing. It purported not to deliver the Truth, in easily digested doses, but to introduce its readers to something much more difficult: it claimed to lead those being catechized into a lifelong process of dialogic pursuit of a truth that can never be perfectly formulated (those lists! those prayers in Latin and English!), but which is sought after by believers united in their communal journey towards an eschatological truth transcending any one of us. And transcending (and norming and critiquing) the church itself.

I preferred the Truth. I preferred my lists. I preferred memorizing to thinking. Memorizing was, after all, easier, as was the kind of thinking—narrow, deductive logic towards predetermined “truths”—encouraged by my picture-laden catechism.

The Dutch catechism required thinking. It required hard thought, the kind that engages mind, soul, and even body (since religious ideas have to issue in real-life commitments, if they are true). It required the humility to admit I didn’t and would never own the Truth. It required the humility to link my faith journey to that of others who were on a similar journey. It talked about reading the signs of the times, relating an ancient faith to a contemporary cultural context, using conscience and making discernment. Using conscience and discerning in union with others in the Body of Christ, it goes without saying. But also all on my own, since conscience is the deepest core of oneself, a shrine in which God speaks uniquely to one’s depths.

I didn’t want this. I wanted authority figures to tell me the Truth. I wanted right and wrong, black and white, clear-cut answers. I had, after all, just left a church whose inability to confront a profound cultural crisis with clear-cut answers perturbed me.

It would take many years of study of theology, and life experience, to show me why the church had taken the necessary turn of Vatican II during the period in which I became Catholic, and why Schillebeeckx—whose ideas were everywhere in the Dutch catechism that I hated—was well worth reading. In fact, necessary to read, if I wanted to understand what was happening in the church in the latter decades of the 20th century.

(Crossposted from The Open Tabernacle, 8 Jan. 2010).

And More Synchronicity: Newman Again--Misappropriating and Misrepresenting the Facts

More fascinating synchronicity: I learn this morning from blogger Terry Weldon at Queering the Church, an outstanding blog I read daily with great interest, that he, too, noticed the thread about Newman at Michael Bayly's Wild Reed blog yesterday, and he posted a statement about that thread as well. Terry seems to have been writing his posting around the time I was working on mine. I didn't go back to his blog after an early-morning reading of it yesterday, and learned of his statement about Newman only when I saw his comment on my blog this morning.

In his comment on my Newman posting yesterday, Terry states,

One of the key lessons for me is how easily the rightwing sometimes gets away with misappropriating and misrepresenting the real facts of church history - but not in this case. We need to completely vigilant to prevent this, and to do so we must ensure that we have a good understanding of the real history ourselves.

Terry's posting at Queering the Church about these issues also notes,

This highlights for me yet another theme I have become conscious of: so much of our popular perceptions of church history (where we have any at all) are simply wrong. The hierarchy makes no attempt to correct these misperceptions, instead selectively extracting from 2000 years of history that suits and matches their interpretations of what “must” have been, not of what actually was the case.

Then another nugget: In trying to track down the quotation I was looking for, I found another excellent and useful post on McClory, “A Catholic Understanding of Dissent.” This deals with a keynote address McClory gave to a prayer breakfast, in which he spoke (inter alia) about Bishop Nienstedt, and an extraordinary action he took concerning his predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lucker.

“At that time,” said McClory, “[Nienstedt] had done something newsworthy in relation to a book entitled, Revelation and the Church: Vatican II in the Twenty-First Century. This book had been largely written and edited by his predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lucker,” explained McClory, “and, in it, Bishop Lucker said that there were a lot of things that the Church needs to think about. He listed 37 matters of authoritative Church teaching that have undergone substantial change over time – including the Church’s approach to religious liberty, the Bible, slavery, and the Jews. Bishop Lucker’s book also contained a list of 15 teachings that could change in the future, including clerical celibacy, artificial birth control, intercommunion between Protestants and Catholics, condemnation of homosexual activity, and the ordination of women. When Bishop Nienstedt came in and saw that book he said: ‘Take that off the shelf.’”

I heartily second what Terry Weldon says in these reflections. What's at stake in this discussion is separating truth from falsehood. Terry is correct to note that one of the "key lessons" of the recent discussion about Newman on Michael Bayly's blog is "how easily the rightwing sometimes gets away with misappropriating and misrepresenting the real facts of church history."

And so the need to be vigilant and to push back daily against the falsehoods.

In the discussion of Newman and the sensus fidelium at Wild Reed to which my posting yesterday linked, there are two strands of misappropriation and misrepresentation of the facts. I'd like to label these two strands the lie and the equivocation.

The lie is rather easy to detect and combat. People who say that Newman wrote about Arianism to demonstrate that bishops defended orthodox teaching about christology, while the faithful held unorthodox teaching, turn Newman on his head. They grossly misrepresent what Newman said, and why he wrote about this topic.

As my posting about this issue yesterday noted, it's easy to overturn this lie by a reference to Newman's texts. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to tell this lie about Newman's work when Newman's writings about Arianism and the sensus fidelium are easily accessible and easily understood, and when they so clearly say the opposite of what the lie wishes to maintain.

Newman wrote about the Arian crisis to demonstrate that the pastoral leaders of the church can sometimes be wrong in their doctrinal teaching, and that the lay understanding of the faith--the sensus fidelium--can be correct, and can actually save the church from error when its leaders have departed from what the laity hold as the accurate understanding of faith.

Lies about Newman's theology are easily exposed. The equivocation is harder to detect, and for that reason, is more insidious. It masquerades as something other than what it really is. It tells us it is all about concern for statistical accuracy, for correct interpretation of texts, or for legitimation of many readings of the tradition, when its real goal is to discredit this building block of Newman's theology, the sensus fidelium, in order to defend current magisterial teaching as the only possible option for faithful Catholics.

If the question at hand is, for instance, to understand what we should make of the fact that a huge majority of Catholics in the developed nations reject magisterial teaching on artificial contraception (and teachings on sexual ethics in general, insofar as they are based in a biologistic interpretation of natural law), then those dealing in equivocation will propose that this large majority is illusory. Despite hard empirical evidence for several decades now, which shows that the large majority of lay Catholics in the developed world reject magisterial teaching about artificial contraception, and that the trend is well-established and is not diminishing but increasing, those who equivocate about this topic often argue that statistics are misleading.

Or that what the empirical data are capturing consistently over several decades are sporadic "lapses" of the faithful, as they try contraception now and again and then return to the Catholic fold. Or that, if we do admit this trend exists, it exists only for Western Catholics and it is imperalistic to try to impose the concerns of those Catholics on Catholics in other parts of the world.

Since it is clear that what is happening to official teaching about artificial contraception in contemporary Catholicism so closely parallels what Newman wrote about in his work on the sensus fidelium, another line of attack in the equivocating approach is to suggest that Newman's work on the sensus fidelium is only one strand among many in his thought, and that those who focus on that strand misrepresent Newman's work in its totality.

This approach ignores--it equivocates about--the centrality of the sensus fidelium to Newman's entire body of work. It glosses over and equivocates about how Newman's work on the sensus fidelium has now become canonical within Catholic theology and magisterial teaching itself. The documents of Vatican II repeatedly enshrine the concept of the sensus fidelium in their statements about the nature and role of the church.

The equivocating position about Newman's theology of sensus fidelium stands that concept on its head as starkly as the lie does. This position seeks to subvert the plain meaning of the term sensus fidelium. As the term clearly suggests, sensus fidelium is all about the consensus of the faithful, the shared sense of many of the faithful about various Christian teachings, grounded in the lived experience of faith.

To try to twist the meaning of the phrase sensus fidelium to imply that the term means that the magisterium is always correct in its formulation of doctrine or moral teachings at any point in history is to subvert plain sense in the most machiavellian way possible. It is to take a concept that is all about listening to the laity and to use that concept to defend the magisterium when it ignores the laity's voice.

Terry is right. Somehow, how we teach Christian history and Christian theology has gotten twisted, when people of the lie can promote such obvious lies and equivocations and expect to get away with them. In my view, Terry's anecdote about how Bishop Nienstedt handled Bishop Lucker's book on revelation and the church illustrates how we have come to this point.

Though he was a bishop, Lucker had the courage to admit that the church has changed its mind about a wide range of doctrinal and moral issues in the past. Because he refused to ignore the abundant historical evidence which proves this, Bishop Lucker argued that, having done so in the past, the church can change its mind about doctrinal and moral issues in the present and future.

Bishop Nienstedt's response to his predecessor's work? It was to remove Lucker's book from the shelf. We have been living for some time now through a period in Catholic history in which some of our church leaders and some of our intellectual class think that we can control what people think and believe by simply removing contrary evidence from our bookshelves.

We have been living through a less than stellar moment in church history in which people of the lie have claimed the center of the church, and now want to lie boldly (and subtly) about matters all of us can fairly easily see right in front of us, if we open our eyes and look at what is right before our faces. And so the lie has to be supplemented by orders for us to stop seeing what we see, to stop talking among ourselves, and above all, to stop thinking. The lie has to be supplemented by distorted data and subversion of the plain sense of canonical texts.

Fortunately for those who care about the history of the church as an institution, history suggests that such authoritarian tactics of mind control will work only in the short run. They will not prevail in the long run, because people do keep thinking. And noticing the sharp discrepancies between what the official leaders of the institution teach and what they practice. And refusing to put up with those discrepancies, particularly when doing so requires that they sacrifice their own understanding of what the Christian life is all about.

Meanwhile, we are living through a time when the people most inclined to represent themselves as the only trustworthy purveyors of absolute truth are those most intent on misrepresenting and misappropriating the facts. We're living at a moment in Christian history in which Christians of the right are not only trying to outlaw artificial contraception in many places, but are inventing bogus scientific narratives about contraception which suggest that contraceptives are abortifacients and that they harm not only mothers but also children.

If a teaching is true and compelling, it does not need lies to make it palatable. When it has to rely on lies and equivocations to carry the day, something is clearly wrong with the teaching.

A Reader Responds: Standing Newman on His Head

One of the interesting experiences I sometimes have with this blog is an experience of synchronicity involving several other bloggers who talk about issues that engage the passion of all of us as a group. I've just had one of those synchronistic experiences in a three-way dialogue with two other bloggers. I'd like to relate that now, in one of my "a reader responds" postings.

In response to what I wrote yesterday about Archbishop Burke and his anti-Obama political crusade gussied up in fabulous religious garb, Colleeen Kochivar Baker of Enlightened Catholicism writes,

The whole tenor of some voices is really reminiscent of the reign of Pio NoNo. Hell and damnation from the pulpit, promotion of the personal piety of cloistered nuns, siding with the hugely wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class, and the purposeful promotion of creeping infallibility in the Papacy.

No wonder the big push is on to co opt Cardinal Newman. It's almost mandatory the Church bring him in the exalted fold before people actually read what he wrote. Perhaps he is truly the Saint for our time.

As Colleen was sending that comment to my blog, I was over at Michael Bayly's Wild Reed blog, reading and responding to his recent summary of a 2003 National Catholic Reporter article by Arthur Jones, in which Jones interviewed Richard Sipe. Sipe argues that the stage is set for a new Reformation in the Catholic church, because the sensus fidelium, the faith held by "ordinary" lay folks in our "ordinary" everyday lives, has moved in a direction decisively counter to what the church is teaching at an official level in the area of sexual ethics.

A vast majority of Catholics in the developed nations of the world reject the official Catholic teaching on contraception. Increasing numbers of Catholics also do not accept the church's teaching that homosexual acts are ipso facto unnatural and immoral, gravely sinful no matter when and in what context they occur.

I find the response to Michael's posting about the sensus fidelium fascinating, because several respondents completely turn on its head one of the classic sources affirming the sensus fidelium, the theology of 19th-century Catholic theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman. Newman's work noted that, in the period of controversy in the early church in which the Christian community sought to hammer out an understanding of christology (specifically, an understanding of how humanity and divinity connect in Christ), a large number of bishops held the Arian position that was eventually condemned by the church, while the laity held what eventually became the orthodox christological position.

Though Newman is very clear about this issue--in fact, much of his theology revolves around his reflections on what these historical findings portend for the development of doctrine--two posters responding to Michael's posting want to maintain that Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium is actually about the magisterium's inability to be wrong, ever, and that the magisterium (i.e., the bishops) held the orthodox teaching during the Arian crisis, while the sensus fidelium was unorthodox!

And so I responded to these comments on Michael's blog with the following comment:

Great article, Michael. I'm amazed at how a number of respondents in this thread completely turn Newman on his head, when it comes to the sensus fidelium and the Arian crisis.

As Newman repeatedly and clearly points out, it was the faithful--lay believers--who held onto what became the orthodox definition of Christ's nature, when a majority of bishops (the magisterium, to use Liam's term) were Arianists.

As John J. Burkhard notes in "The Sensus Fidelium" in Gerard Mannion and Lewis Seymour Mudge's (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (London: Routledge, 2008), "Newman, for instance, was famous for his claim that during the second phase of the Arian crisis, when many of the bishops accepted Arian compromise formulas for expressing the faith in Christ, the faithful rose to the task of witnessing to Christ's full divinity by refusing to have anything to do with such compromises. Increasingly, then, a doctrine of the role of the faithful as a true source of the church's faith became a part of the Roman Catholic theology of faith" (pp. 561-562).

My God, what are they teaching in these right-wing Catholic colleges nowadays, if they can take Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium and his history of the Arian crisis and try to argue that this theology and that history argue for the perpetual rightness of the magisterium and the wrongness of the laity in matters of faith and morals?

And then I logged into recent comments on this Bilgrimage blog to find that, while I was responding to Michael's posting and discussing Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium, noting that there seems to be a move afoot in some Catholic quarters to turn Newman's theology on its head, Colleen was responding to my posting yesterday by noting that there's a "big push" on to co-opt Newman and to "bring him into the exalted fold" before people actually read his theology.

I call this exchange synchronicity. It's that spark of insight shared by a number of bloggers day by day that keeps me going. It convinces me that many of us who are blogging about these issues are part of a wider community of thought and faith than we often realize, as we sit blogging in our individual locations.

And that's a good thing to recognize, when the odds against our marginal little communities of discourse seem stacked so largely in favor of those who hold the reins of power firmly in their hands.

The Church Turns East . . . And Back: Bishop Slattery of Tulsa Reorients Christendom

Lately, several Catholic blog sites have been discussing an issue of burning concern to American Catholics. And it’s not the health care debate or new revelations about torture under the previous administration or leaks about the forthcoming report of heinous sexual abuse of minors by Irish clergy in the Dublin diocese.

It’s which way to turn when we worship. America and Commonweal recently had lively blog discussions of a decision of the bishop of Tulsa, Edward Slattery, to face east as he celebrates Mass at his cathedral. This means turning his back on the congregation, who are also expected to face east along with the celebrant.

I’m fascinated by the theological reasons Slattery advances to justify this decision. But I’m even more intrigued by the intense fascination of many American Catholics with this topic of praying ad orientem. If these two blog discussions are any indicator, nothing quite excites the American Catholic imagination these days like a decision to face east when we pray.

In a nutshell, Slattery’s argument is that it has always been done this way, and it has been done this way everywhere. And the decision following Vatican II to have the priest facing the congregation during liturgy was a mistake, because that decision contravenes always-everywhere norms.

Slattery adds to this fundamental principle an argument about how the Eucharist is a sacrifice that the priest offers on behalf of the people of God, so that it makes sense for priest and people to be facing God all together as the priest offers up the sacrifice. And so Slattery chooses to move against the Vatican II practice of emphasizing that the Eucharist is a shared meal in which the priest and people of God commune around a common table, with the priest facing the people from that table.

Slattery’s theological arguments are problematic from a number of angles. First—and conspicuously—the argument that an ad orientem style of worship has prevailed everywhere in the church from the beginnings of Christianity completely overlooks the evidence of the New Testament communities. On which the theology of Eucharist is based and has to be based, if it’s to be connected to that formative moment of revelation from which the church itself springs. And which are all about connecting the memorial meals commemorating Jesus to his life and to the meal he celebrated with his followers before his death.

Second, there are conspicuous examples that completely contravene Slattery’s always-everywhere insistence. The most glaring of these is St. Peter’s in Rome. There, in order to face east, the priest has to face the congregation—unless, that is, the congregation turns its back on the priest in order to face east along with him, in line with Slattery’s all-together-now rubric for worship.

Third, there’s the almost total obliteration of the Eucharist-as-meal aspect of liturgy, in favor of a Eucharist-as-sacrifice understanding of divine worship. That theological move wipes away several centuries of theological agreement between the Catholic church and other church traditions that rightly want to hold those understandings in tension, and/or to emphasize the centrality of the meal aspect of the Eucharist, in line with the dominant witness of New Testament texts.

I understand, of course, why Slattery is making the move he is making—and why many Catholics also want to make this move. It’s all about priesthood. It’s about maintaining the clear, unambiguous notion of the priest as mediator between God and the people of God, which has become fuzzy and has even been challenged in post-Vatican II Catholicism.

To the extent that Catholicism hinges its future on that notion of priesthood, and on maintaining a system of governance and distribution of power centered on clerical privilege, it has to reassert this understanding of priesthood against all and sundry, in every way possible. As Rome did recently when it denied the decision of the Maryknoll community to have a brother rather than a priest lead that religious community . . . .

As I say, though, what fascinates me even more than the not very persuasive theological foundation on which Bishop Slattery bases his turn to the east (and backwards) is the way in which this decision is being welcomed—even celebrated—by large numbers of American Catholics. That is, it’s being welcomed and celebrated by American Catholics if the America and Commonweal blogs about this issue are any indicator.

Before I comment on this popular consensus, I should issue a disclaimer. As I’ve noted previously on this blog, I’m a Catholic who is alienated from the church, primarily because my life partner and I have found ourselves pushed away from the church, from communion and worship. When a college owned by a community of monks (which has, interestingly enough, now become closely connected to the controversial Legionaries of Christ) peremptorily ended our employment as theologians while offering prevaricating reasons for this in Steve’s case and no reason at all in mine, we found ourselves on the outside looking in.

On the outside looking in at the worshiping church: when the monks who shoved us away from the table of daily bread and of health coverage stood at the table of the Lord and preached about respect for human rights and the need for bread and health coverage for all, the discrepancy between what they were proclaiming and what they had done to us became too great to bear. Our very belief in the Eucharist as the bread of life was threatened by that discrepancy. It is hard to believe that those proclaiming that the Eucharist is the bread of life can seriously mean what they say, when they remove daily bread from the mouths of their brothers and sisters in Christ.

The monks who had taken away our daily bread and health care coverage did not have to live with the worry of finding new jobs or of receiving medical treatment if they were ill. All of that was assured to them, even as they took these necessities from us. It became impossible for us to hear the Eucharistic words proclaimed, to hear words welcoming us to the table of the Lord with any belief in their sincerity, when those mouthing the words seemed to belie everything that this table stands for in everyday life.

So I approach this discussion knowing very little, at a practical level, about what has been happening in Catholic parishes and Catholic worship for almost two decades now. We do not go to liturgy any longer, because we cannot do so. We can no longer bear the huge gap between what the church proclaims and what it actually does. Since no official representative of the church has sought to reach across that gap and to offer healing or even an apology for the injustice done to us, we remain where we've been placed, outside looking in.

Here is what strikes me, as an alienated Catholic eavesdropping on discussions of my co-religionists now regarding revision of the liturgy: first, it’s astonishing how quickly those leading the church in the post-Vatican II period have succeeded in shutting down important theological conversations that, when they began, promised significantly to enrich the church’s life in manifold ways.

These conversations included conversations about exegesis, about the New Testament church, and about christology, which might as well simply never have taken place for many of those talking about liturgical reform today. In the blog discussions to which I link above, some posters try to make the point that the New Testament evidence in support of Slattery’s ad orientem thesis is ambiguous at best.

But for the majority of those posting to the two blog discussions, that point falls on deaf ears. There appears to be no awareness at all of the considerable, powerful biblical scholarship both within the Catholic tradition and in other Christian traditions throughout the 20th century, which shows that the Eucharist grew out of a communal meal celebrated by the early Christian communities to remember Jesus and to keep his memory alive in a communal context.

It’s as if biblical scholarship and theological development since the Council of Trent have suddenly vanished. We are now back at questions about whether Jesus lifted his eyes to heaven at the last supper, and whether the Eucharistic sacrifice can be meaningful when it is offered around a common table by a priest facing his (yes, always “his” in these stifling Catholic intra-ghetto discussions) brothers and sisters sharing the meal with him.

We are back at a sacrificial notion of the Eucharist that could well have just been proclaimed by the Council of Trent, as if Vatican II never happened. The pastoral leaders of the church who have worked very hard to return us to this situation—to obliterate Vatican II in order to preserve clericalism at all cost—have succeeded, to a great extent.

They have succeeded to an astonishing degree in dumbing down our theological conversations, our understanding of church, our theology of worship, our strategies for relating the Catholic tradition both to the public square and to other religious traditions. They have failed lamentably in one of their most important pastoral charges: catechizing the people of God. And this failure has been deliberate, and that makes it all the more heinous.

And the predictable upshot of this failure is that we find ourselves more and more irrelevant, as other churches and the public arena discuss political and ethical issues of great importance in the postmodern period. We have nothing to offer, except for a handful of slogans that are in no meaningful sense a reasoned, persuasive contribution to important political and ethical discussions, but the antithesis of reasoned and persuasive moral discourse.

As I listen to many Catholic contributions to the health care debate (and this is relevant; it is clearly related to the liturgical issue, since it’s in the worship context that people’s theological imaginations are largely informed), I become more and more convinced that all many Catholics have to offer anymore to any debate is the slogan, But what about abortion!?

Mrs. X: Isn’t the weather nice today? Mr. Y: Yes, but what about abortion?

Mr. A: Aren’t these revelations about torture dreadful? Mrs. B: But what about abortion?

Ms. L: Catholic teaching insists that everyone needs access to health care. Mr. M: And what about abortion!?

Or, as Steve's mother said several years ago after we took her and Steve's father to a play about the Holocaust, followed by a first-hand testimony about life in a German concentration camp by a Holocaust survivor, “Yes, it was terrible, wasn't it? But what about abortion? We're butchering babies off like chickens nowadays.” Because both of his parents had grandmothers born in the Sudetenland areas that so ardently supported Hitler, and because Steve's mother's family maintained ties with some of these relatives who were Nazi soldiers, Steve had hoped for a probing ethical discussion about the Holocaust.

That discussion became, But what about abortion!?

That’s where we’ve gone. That’s it, in a nutshell. That’s what we have to offer now: But what about abortion!? Nothing more, nothing less. That’s our moral analysis, our moral argument, our overweening moral stance.

It’s totally unconvincing, and it’s not designed to be convincing. Because we don’t want or intend to talk. We intend to draw lines and face, all in one direction, all in a unified body, against anything and everything that we can conceivably connect to abortion, if that anything and everything gives the slightest impression of being in favor of baby-killing. We intend to shout and overcome. Not to convince.

And certainly not to witness. And that’s my third observation about recent liturgical discussions among American Catholics. Perhaps the most lamentable result of the suppression of theological discourse, the deliberate refusal to catechize, and the molding of the Catholic community into a slogan-shouting political machine in recent years is the way in which our theology—and our liturgy—have taken leave of what always has to be foundational for any Christian church, if it is convincingly to claim a vital connection to Jesus and his memory.

This is the story of Jesus, the heart of the gospel message—the story we remember and proclaim (and share as bread) over and over in our liturgical gatherings. The Jesus we re-ghettoized Catholics have come to see to the exclusion of all other representations is the Jesus who is a high priest, the Jesus offering himself as sacrifice for the sins of the world.

There may well be a place in theological traditions for that image of Jesus, and it certainly has New Testament validity. But no christological tradition and no image of Jesus can ever be adequately Christian unless it also finds ways to link, fruitfully and with practical implications, to the story of Jesus’s life in the gospels.

Book after book after book has been written on this topic within the Catholic tradition in recent years—by Schillebeeckx, Crossan, Kasper, Haight, Segundo, Metz, Gutiérrez—and by powerful writers in other Christian traditions, including Marcus Borg. But for those intent on turning the church back to its true and final orientation—to the east—it seems as if none of those books has ever been written.

The attempt to relate what Christians do when they worship and when they witness to the New Testament documents, and above all to the gospels, is simply gone from much of the discussion of liturgy I’ve been hearing as I follow the ad orientem discussion. The attempt to relate what Christians do to how Jesus lived, insofar as we can glimpse the path he walked from the gospels, is entirely absent from these discussions.

And so the necessary theological step of grounding the Eucharist first and foremost in the gospel witness regarding the last supper, and in the New Testament documents which suggest how the first Christian communities incorporated that memory into their developing Eucharistic worship, is nowhere to be found in the discussions of those enthused at the thought of facing east all together now—if the discussions I’ve been following are a good indicator of the tenor of thought of those promoting this move.

It’s all about sacrifice, an intermediary priest, facing the east, standing together before a God whom we need to appease. And shouting together in every way possible at every moment possible, And what about abortion!?

How on earth did we get so quickly into this sad, constricting little ghetto after the springtime of promise Vatican II seemed to represent?

Jesus's Solidarity with Outcasts in Light of Patriarchy's Abuse of Women

And, to continue a theme in recent postings (see here and here) about the biblical and theological foundations of movements today to question the theology of male-female complementarity seeking dominance in heterosexist, male-controlled communities of faith, I offer the following brief reflections from a journal entry of mine in September 1994:

Attempts to show that the life of Jesus can be a ground for feminist concerns today focus on this or that facet of his teaching or behavior, but overlook its central thrust. In making solidarity with outcasts, Jesus was engaging in quintessentially “feminine” behavior.

Patriarchal societies are all about who has power to consume whom. They do not permit gestures of compassion from those who rule, because they construe such gestures as weakness. Thus, they tutor men to make allies with the powerful and dominate the weak.

Jesus’s solidarity with outcasts breaks fundamentally, radically, with such expectations. In making solidarity with societies’ refuse, he becomes a woman—one who is to be beaten, kicked, scorned, dispensed with when used up. Patriarchy crucifies Jesus as it crucifies every feminine gesture: to show that it has power to do so.

(The illustration is from William D. Edwards, Wesley J. Gabel, and Floyd E. Hosmer, "Study on the Physical Death of Jesus Christ," Journal of American Medical Assoc. 255, 11 [1986], illustrating the use of torture [scourging followed by crucifixion] by Roman soldiers to terrorize subjugated populations into submission.)

Towards a Post-Male Dominant Reading of the Life of Jesus: Jesus's Baptism in the Jordan

And, as a complement to what I have just posted about Benedict's recent homily at Nazareth speaking of the transmission of "manly piety" by Joseph to Jesus, I'd like to offer the following musings from a journal of mine back in 1993. I ran across this passage recently, as I mined the journals for material about my travels. It may be worth noting that I wrote this in the midst of an experience of horrific abuse by a Catholic male religious community, at the college this community owned, where I taught theology and had just received a terminal contract that the college refused to explain to me:

Because Francis of Assisi (see here) and Jesus dispossess themselves, they have ultimate freedom to live their message of good news. In their symbolic actions of throwing their clothes at the father’s feet (Francis), and going down into the Jordan (Jesus), they are symbolically acting out a dispossession, an absolute repudiation of the male world of entitlement and privilege life had prepared for them. Francis and Jesus are, in this sense, “female”—symbols of a dispossession associated with the female, and when men engage in it, with gay men.

Look carefully at the story of Jesus’s baptism, and some interesting recognitions leap out, particularly if this story is read—as it was meant by its authors to be read—against the backdrop of the Jewish scriptures. First, there are important overtones of the creation narratives, in which water is equated with chaos, to be shaped into the cosmos by the divine creative Word. Jesus enters chaos, in walking into the Jordan River, submits himself to its unmaking, in order to symbolize his entry into an entirely new way of life, the life of his ministry, a post-patriarchal life and ministry that seek the divine voice on the other side of the water.

As Freud has noted, water has female significance in the deep structures of the mind. Jesus enters the womb—a curiously a-masculine act of submission and self-deprecation—in entering the Jordan. He goes under and down into the water (gestural enactments of subordination, renunciation, self-abandonment and self-abasement) to become the anointed prophet of God. He lets another man take and hold him in his arms and bring him into the maternal waters.

The Naaman narrative in 2 Kings deconstructs the military overtones of the Jordan stories and Joshua. In 2 Kings, Naaman is told by his wife, who has the story from a little servant girl, that Elisha can cure him.

He goes instead to the king, hoping for a phallic male such as himself to cure him by command, as befits a military man. The king is enraged; he sees this as a test of phallic strength and power.

When Naaman goes to Elisha and is told to dip himself into the Jordan, he, in turn, is enraged. The absurdity of it, the submission to play (and powerlessness) as a preliminary to receiving divine healing.

Benedict and the Dictatorship of Relativism: What Concern Lurks Behind the Mask?

John Allen thinks (and I suspect he's right) that Benedict's animus against the christology of Roger Haight is driven by a fear of relativism (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3062). Allen notes that Ratzinger's homily before the conclave that made him pope focused on the "dictatorship of relativism."

And, as Allen also points out, the concern to silence Haight began when Ratzinger was head of the CDF, the Vatican office that censures theologians . . . .

The theological question that occurs to me--at least, one of them--as I think about Ratzinger's claim that Christianity is up against the "dictatorship of relativism," is how Benedict thinks we can sustain Vatican II's confidence that God reveals Godself in all the religions of the world, while we condemn christologies that seek to explore the implications of that affirmation of God's salvific presence in the entire world and its religious traditions?

Under the rubric of combating relativism, Benedict is implicitly saying that Vatican II was wrong: that God is not salvifically present in the religious traditions of the world. Vatican II left room for a creative tension in Christian thinking about christology and world religions. Benedict deals with that tension by denying it, by collapsing it back into a univocal affimation that salvation comes only through Jesus (and Jesus understood in traditional high-christological terms). Benedict removes one leg of the two affirmations that seek to hold in tension traditional affirmations about Jesus and the insight that God can be salvifically present in other religious traditions.

And why does he do this? In my view, the concern is not relativism at all, though Benedict's agenda may masquerade as a concern with relativism. The underlying concern is to combat christologies that undercut the unilateral claims of the clerical system to power. Benedict needs, wants, and intends to enforce (at the price of censuring all other approaches) a high christology that undergirds the exclusive sacral claims of the priesthood.

Benedict intends to center the church--his church--on an exclusivist, triumphalistic christology that reads all other religious traditions out of the history of salvation, except insofar as they accede to his exclusivist claims. He intends to suppress any christology that might see God active among the laity, independent of clerical control--that might see God at work to save the people of God apart from and even in opposition to the privileged clerical elite.

And for this christology, he is willing to pay a tremendously high price--on behalf of the whole church, which, after all, pays the price at his command, since the church is not really his church, no matter how devoutly he believes that. It is God's church, first and foremost; it is the church of the people of God. He is willing to pretend that a century of historical critical research about the scriptures simply does not exist, as he did in a recent remark he made at a papal Angelus, when he claimed, astonishingly!, that the gospel of John is an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus.

And he is willing to write off the crisis of faith that ensues for many believers when we are told that we have to swallow exclusivist, triumphalistic claims about Jesus and his significance--a crisis of faith, because our faith has come to center, after Vatican II, on a Jesus whose entire sigificance was to undercut such exclusivism and triumphalism, in a life lived in complete self-abnegation and total donation to the other. The Jesus many of us have come to follow and believe in would never repudiate and condemn to eternal damnation the adherents of other world religions.

He would find a way to embrace them. To dialogue with them. To learn from them. To find God among them.

What an atrocious price John Paul II and Benedict have asked post-Vatican II Catholics to pay, in order to keep the clerical system alive and to bolster the dying triumphalism of the defensive Tridentine model of the church. How will history judge this movement against history, I wonder? This movement against the Spirit that brought Vatican II about . . . .

Continuation of the Inquisition: New Penalties for Theologian Roger Haight

I began this day reading a posting by David Gibson on the Commonweal blog which says that the Vatican has added new penalties to those already in place for American theologian Roger Haight (www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=2644. Previously, he had been forbidden to write in the area of christology or to teach in Catholic institutions. He is now forbidden by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the contemporary embodiment of the Inquisition, to write about theology at all or to teach anywhere, including in non-Catholic institutions.

Roger directed my dissertation. Because of that connection, and the gratitude I owe him for the hard work he put into that arduous process (arduous for both of us), I feel what is being done to this good Jesuit at a deep level. I am, frankly, appalled and angry, and I'm not sure that writing out of the space of anger and disgust is wise. Most of all, I would not want anything I write to bring further harm to a man in his 70s whose vocational life has been well-nigh destroyed by church fiat.

Because I went to a Jesuit university, I know a bit about Ignatian spirituality. I have long admired the Jesuit emphasis on living for others, and on placing oneself each day in God's hands, in the hope that God will use one's heart, mind, and soul to serve good ends and combat bad ones. I pray the Suscipe prayer of Ignatius of Loyola at the start of each day, before I begin my work.

At the same time, as I say this, I have to say honestly that few Jesuits I have ever met impress me. Many of those who taught or tried to guide me at Loyola were, frankly, too enmeshed in the top-level social circles of New Orleans to make much impression on me. I was simply not in their scope of vision, a scope limited to those with money, power, and significant family ties. I remember sitting through an entire semester of a math class at Loyola taught by such a Jesuit, who never learned my name, but persisted on addressing me by the name Danny--the name of another young man in the class who fit the ideal this priest, whose unique vocation was to take well-heeled Garden District matrons to the Holy Land each summer, pursued.

A few Jesuits I've met have, however, significantly impressed me, and have made a dent on my hard-hearted hell-bound heart. One of these was my undergraduate professor C.J. McNaspy, who embodied the Jesuit ideal of wide learning and catholic sympathy for everybody and, in particular, those on the margins. C. J. was a Jesuit, a person for others, par excellence.

As is Roger Haight. Roger worked his rear off to teach graduate students. Not a single other professor I had in grad school prepared for class as assiduously as Roger did. No other drew from students the response Roger did--a response out of the depth. In his classes, what one thought was not so important as how one thought, as the basis on which one made theological judgments. Knowing the theological literature, being able to cite it fluently, being persistent about pursuing its arguments and capable of defending one's own arguments: these were what counted in Roger's class.

As a result, even when I took classes in 19th-century theology from him in the fairly moderate 1980s, in a fairly moderate graduate school in theology, there were strong reactions against Roger. Because he pushed students to think and not to parrot.

One of these, I recall, came from a California nun with whom I took a class, and who was the first right-wing Republican nun I had ever had the misfortune to meet. This sister was not to the right in terms of lifestyle. Indeed, she dressed in expensive, tailored clothes and had immacuately coiffed hair. She moved among and expected to continue to move among highly placed Republicans in her home county, Orange Co., California.

Her reactionary views were political and theological. With Roger, she was persistently at daggers drawn for reasons murky to me. It was clear she was on a crusade--to purify the church and make it safe for her sort. She relegated the rest of us, her fellow students, to the sidelines in class, where we were expected to enjoy the privilege of listening to her rail at Roger for his christological heresies. Yes, that was the term she used--in the 1980s, in a theology class: heresies.

She would not be challenged to think or defend. She preferred to parrot, to repeat the creed and to point out that, in her humble opinion, Roger's christology from below did not conform to the words she was reciting from the creed. She preferred to hobnob with the rich and powerful in both church and society. A christology from below made her uncomfortable, because it said something about those with whom she stood in solidarity socially and politically.

It was also clear to me that Roger was not supported by some of his fellow Jesuits in Canada, though I could perhaps cause trouble for him by telling all that I saw in that respect. Some of these Jesuits were staunch anti-communists from Eastern Europe, with a penchant for "reporting" to the authorities anyone they suspected of being less than orthodox.

One of the first articles I sought to publish in graduate school got panned by a Jesuit in that network, who happened to be at Fordham at the time, and who had whited out his scathing critique of my work on connections between peacemaking and economic justice so badly that his name was still legible on the letter encouraging the Jesuit journal to which I had submitted my essay not to publish it. Fortunately, a more progressive Catholic journal took the article gladly when I sent it to them.

There was also among Roger's confreres in the Jesuit community in Toronto a priest who has been made bishop, and who is, in my view, hardly distinguishing himself by some of the pig-headed and theologically dubious actions he has taken to earn a name for himself as defender of an orthodoxy willing to butt heads with the Canadian government. He is a John Paul II appointee, the kind of priest being made bishop under the current regime.

I interacted with this priest a number of times as I went through graduate school. I wanted to wash my hands each time I shook his--and mentally, want to wash them even today, as I think about him. I am fairly certain that he has played a big role in bashing his Jesuit brother, who to my mind, far more faithfully embodies Jesuit ideals than he, the big bishop, does. This bishop is also a big old gay basher, to boot--a quality that helps rather than hurts, if one wants to be appointed to office in the church of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Reading some of the comments on the Commonweal blog defending what the CDF is doing to Roger Haight infuriates me even more than I am already angered by the cruel, unjust action of the Vatican towards Haight. One respondent suggests that the CDF never undertakes actions like this without "due diligence" and abundant evidence. Just trust the big papa at the top . . . .

Really, I want to say sarcastically to him? Really? The way the Inquisition undertook actions against witches in the past, with due diligence and abundant evidence? Witches were never burned at the stake until their inquisitors proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were witches: by neighbors who had seen them cavorting nude on mountaintops with the devil, or riding across the sky, or casting spells that caused harm to others. Neighbors and relatives who often benefited economically by accusing the witch of witchcraft. Witches were not ever condemned until the Inquisition had gathered as much evidence as possible to prove the heinous crime of the witch--evidence gathered under torture, if needed.

Really? Trust the authorities? Give ourselves and our minds over to a doctrinal-purity commission that carries on the Inquistion, that does its work in secret, that will not allow the accused to know who has accused him or her, or of what he or she has been accused, so that he/she may defend himself/herself? Everything the Catholic church and other churches have done is worthy of trust?

Nothing I can say will ever change the minds of such folks. And, sadly, those who "think" like this are now at the very center of the Catholic church--again. There may have been a brief moment in the 1960s and 1970s, when Steve and I foolishly headed off to study theology, in which it appeared that a window had opened.

John Paul II and his henchman Ratzinger, the current pope, decisively slammed that window. And for many of us, what the church is doing to people like Roger Haight does not elicit trust. It provokes deep anger and alienation. A church whose leaders behave with such conspicuous lack of justice and charity has an uphill battle in trying to convince many folks that it stands for justice and charity.