Father Douglas K. Clark's blog

On faith and reason—again

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:59:34 -0500

A little over a year ago, Pope Benedict XVi delivered his now-famous lecture, “Faith, Reason and the University. Memories and Reflections,” at the University of Regensburg. In that unprecedented papal academic lecture, the Holy Father argued the need for “reason and faith [to] come together in a new way,” given the growing split between the two.

Pope Benedict is concerned that forms of non-rational and even irrational faith, on the one hand, are proliferating in some parts of the world, while forms of faithless reason are prevailing in others. Both pose real dangers to humanity. This week’s editorial will address some dangers of non-rational approaches to faith. A later editorial will address the perils of rationalism divorced from faith.

As an example of faith deprived of the leaven of reason, the pope instanced the militaristic strain of Islam. This instance garnered headlines around the world and provoked riots and bloodshed in the Middle East, inadvertently proving the pope’s point. He might well have instanced Christian fundamentalism as well, for it too contains the seeds of irrationality and hence of violence.

This week’s “Faith Alive” section (pages 8-9) discusses fundamentalism as a world-wide phenomenon found in various religions, especially those with sacred texts. In all its forms, fundamentalism regards its sacred texts not just as divinely inspired but virtually as divinely dictated, with little or no “input” from its human authors. It follows, then, that these texts are to be taken “literally,” without the interference of the human activity of interpretation. “The text says what it says,” declares the fundamentalist. But here’s the problem: interpretation is necessary if the reader is to extract any meaning from the text.

The Catholic tradition has pondered these matters for nearly two millenia. As a religion based on belief in the Incarnation of the Word of God, the divine logos (word, reason, logic) in the man Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity in fact proclaims the “marriage of the divine and the human” in him. Hence the classic Catholic tradition has always had room for human reason, for example, philosophy, in formulating its theology, which is an attempt to understand faith. Fides quearens intellectum, wrote Saint Anselm—”faith is seeking understanding.” And so, often with difficulty, the Catholic tradition has sought to understand the sacred texts of our faith, especially the Old and New Testament using the tools of reason in its analysis of the details of the sacred texts in its interpretation of their meaning. The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), codified the Church’s developing understanding of the Scriptures by affirming that the inspired human writers of Scripture were “true authors,” along with the Holy Spirit, who brought to their task their human gifts, understanding and talents. Through their human words, the eternal Word of God is expressed. To “decode” that Word, the human words must be analyzed, translated and interpreted by human beings so that human beings of different times and places may understand them and, ultimately, the divine Word that they incarnate.

Such a task is daunting and requires enormous scholarship on the part of many. It also frightens the fundamentalist, whose movement (in the sense of Protestant fundamentalism properly so-called) began in 19th Century America, as a reaction to the uncertainties seemingly posed by the “higher criticism” of the Bible, which was just then beginning to prevail.
In its extreme form, fundamentalism can lead to everything from snake-handling to a rejection of science and technology. It can lead and has led to the condemnation of those who think differently and, as Edward P. Hahnenberg points out (see page 8), “What all fundamentalisms share is a negative view of the world and the claim to have direct access to God.”

At its basis, Catholic Christianity rejects both the utterly negative view of the world and the claim of direct access to God. Although our world is fallen, it is not so negative that God has given up on it. Indeed, Jesus tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (John 3:16). It is that world that the incarnate Word of God has redeemed by coming into it as a man, “like us in all things but sin,” taking on our human nature, suffering even death for our sins and rising for our justification.

Nor does the Catholic tradition teach that believers have immediate or “direct access” to God in that fundamentalist sense. Rather, it takes seriously the mediation between God and man effected in the God-man, Jesus Christ. It understands that God’s grace is mediated through him, and comes to us indirectly, as it were, through sacraments and sacramentals, which are actions of Christ through his Church, his Mystical Body. And it has come to understand that the Word of God is addressed to us in the human words of Scripture that we must try to understand, using our God-given tools of reason, analysis and interpretation, reading these texts carefully, in their proper historical contexts and in conformity with the lived tradition and living Magisterium of the Church.

While such is the general trajectory of the development of Catholic teaching on Scripture, Pope Benedict noted at Regensburg that there have been counter tendencies since the late Middle Ages that would “sunder” the synthesis “between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit,” for example the nominalism of John Duns Scotus that cast doubt on the human mind’s ability to understand God’s Word.

Such tendencies are not entirely absent among Catholics. There can be, as Hahnenberg points out, Catholic forms of fundamentalism, in which certain elements of the tradition, certain Magisterial documents of the past, or even reports of private revelations are taken out of context and read without the careful analysis and interpretation that they too require.
Such tendencies evince the kind of dichotomy or split between faith and reason that the logic of the Incarnation excludes.
A year ago Pope Benedict called for reason and faith to “come together in a new way.” The Catholic tradition offers a way and a context for such a coming together—provided that the Catholic people can avoid the twin temptations of fundamentalistic faith and rationalistic secularism.

—DKC

On inflicting death

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:00:32 -0500

The accused man was Middle Eastern, a resident of an occupied country, where violence had long been the norm. That violence was sometimes directed against the occupying army, and sometimes blazed out among the varying sects of the same stern religion.

The judge was the supreme representative of the Western power then occupying the land. He hated such cases, where the locals accused each other of violations of their law, about which he knew little and cared less. In this case, the accused was charged with blasphemy. But there were no eyewitnesses produced. The evidence was entirely hearsay. His accusers had secured a guilty verdict from their religious leaders, but the occupying authorities had forbidden them to carry out the death penalty, reserving that right to themselves.

The judge had no desire to execute this man for a supposed violation of what was to him an alien religious law. But then the accusers twisted the charge in a political direction. Blasphemy mutated into incitement to insurrection against the occupying authorities. Still, the judge hesitated. There was no reliable evidence on which to convict this man of incitement to insurrection, as fearsome as the charge was. Under the martial law then in force, the judge could have sentenced him to death out of mere expediency, but, although a hard man, he was reluctant to do so, in part because the accused had followers who might see their leader’s death as martyrdom, and thus provoke the very insurrection that he was so keen to avoid.

The judge offered a compromise that he hoped would satisfy both the accusers and the followers of the accused. He would impose a lesser punishment, thus acknowledging the man’s guilt, but then pardon him, as was his right. But the accusers were adamant. The man must be sentenced to death. Taking note that the two main sects, usually rivals, were united in wanting the accused executed, the judge decided that political expediency trumped justice in this case. Hoping to gain greater adherence to the Western authorities from the two rival sects, the judge ordered the accused to be put to death. There would be no appeal. The sentence was to be carried out immediately.

The place was not American-occupied Iraq or Afghanistan; it was Roman-occupied Palestine. The time was not the recent past, but two millennia ago. The judge was called Pontius Pilatus. The accused’s name was Jeshua Binzaret—Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.

His followers, the Christians, knowing of the injustice of their Master’s execution and facing the same threat from the same source, the Roman state, did not support the use of lethal force by the state, either in waging war or inflicting the death penalty, for many centuries.

After the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, the situation of Christians changed and so did their attitudes toward the state’s use of lethal force. Beginning with Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, the teaching developed that the state, as well as individuals, had the right to defend itself from unjust aggressors, both externally (in war) and internally (in keeping order, by force if necessary, and by lethal force in some circumstances). So the doctrine known as “the just war theory” evolved, which entails a rejection of aggressive, offensive war, including the Old Testament “holy war.” It should be noted that some Christians remained pacifists, refusing to take part even in defensive wars, however just.

Analogously, the Christian tradition accepted the right of the state to execute justly condemned criminals who had forfeited their right to life, but never advocated extinguishing the lives of those whose guilt was not morally certain. But some Christians have opposed any use of the death penalty even when the guilt of the condemned was beyond doubt.

The ongoing case of Troy Anthony Davis, who faces execution for the murder of a Savannah policeman, has caused much comment, as both the Bishop of Savannah and the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States have asked for clemency in his case, in part because most of the witnesses have recanted their identification of Davis as the murderer, and in part because of the Church’s growing opposition to the use of capital punishment in today’s world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2267), quoting Pope John Paul II, teaches that if “bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, given the means at the state’s disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender ‘today ... are very rare, if not practically non-existent’.”

In 1989, Lafayette Bishop Gerard L. Frey, the former Savannah Bishop who died on August 15, called for abolition of the death penalty in these words: “We make this call for the abolition of capital punishment not because we are soft on crime nor because we have no sympathy for the victims of crime,” the statement said. “We issue this call because we believe firmly in the sacredness of human life.”

It is no wonder that those whose Lord was unjustly condemned and executed would take such a stand. But the fact that many who claim to be Christian would advocate the execution of anyone whose guilt is not certain is cause for concern.
—DKC

On two documents

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:13:37 -0500

Two recent documents from the Holy See—Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church"—have stirred up controversy in the secular press and have, to a certain extent, been misread and, in some cases, misconstrued.

The Apostolic Letter relaxes the restrictions on the “extraordinary” celebration of the Mass, in the Latin Church, according to the last Missal issued before the liturgical renewal decreed by the Second Vatican Council. The Responses reiterate and clarify the teachings of the Council with regard to the Catholic Church’s understanding of herself in relations to other Christians. Both can be seen as efforts on the part of the Holy See to win back support, especially in Europe, from those “traditionalist Catholics” who have felt alienated from the Church in recent decades. It remains to be seen how successful these documents will be in achieving their goals.

It must be said that an Apostolic Letter on the so-called “Tridentine Mass” (that is, the Mass promulgated by Pope Saint Pius V following the Council of Trent in the 16th Century) has long been expected. Indeed, a few years ago, Pope John Paul II was being urged to require the celebration of the “old Mass,” at least in larger churches, on a regular basis. Pope Benedict’s motu proprio contains no such requirement. There was some talk that the “Tridentine” Mass would be recognized as an ordinary form of celebrating the liturgy, along side the “Vatican II” Mass, but Pope Benedict clearly recognizes the latter form as ordinary and the former as merely extraordinary.

As Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley noted (see page 1), “the issue of the Latin Mass is not urgent for our country”; it is not likely to “result in a great deal of change for the Catholics in the U.S.” Not only was the Latin culture in which the “Tridentine” Mass emerged always far more vigorous in Europe than it ever was on these shores, but the decline in Latin studies in general and in seminaries in particular has resulted in two generations of priests whose knowledge of the Latin language is generally rudimentary at best. And the liturgical renewal decreed by Vatican II has been well accepted, even if not always well implemented, in this country.

It should be pointed out that the papal document intends for the “old Mass” to be celebrated where “a group of [the] faithful to the previous liturgical tradition exists stably,” and not for individuals or transient groups who are simply curious to experience a different form of Mass.

At a time when many of our priests are already stretched to celebrate multiple weekend Masses for their parishes and missions, often in Spanish as well as English, let us hope that the faithful will not burden them unduly with requests for additional Masses, in Latin, with the complicated rubrics of 1962.

Let us hope above all that the faithful will not forget that the revised Missal of Paul VI (1970) is incalculably richer than the Missal of Saint Pius X (1570) , especially in its Lectionary of Biblical readings but also in its prayers (nine Eucharistic Prayers, as opposed to one; 88 prefaces, as opposed to 14, etc.). Some close to the pope have suggested that he hopes that by allowing a bit more “competition” from the older, extraordinary Mass, priests will take more seriously the proper celebration of the ordinary form Mass, so that its comparative richness can be more clearly seen.

As for the document on the Church, some offense has been taken by Protestants at the distinctions made between “churches” (ecclesiae) and “ecclesial communions” (communiones ecclesiales).

In fact, since Vatican II first dealt systematically with ecclesiology (the study of the Church), the Roman Catholic Church has fairly consistently restricted the use of the word ecclesia to those Christian communities possessing the apostolic succession (apostolicity being one of the four “marks” of the Church, along with unity, catholicity and sanctity); thus we speak of the Orthodox Churches of the East, because they have valid bishops, priests and deacons, but only of “ecclesial communions” with regard to Protestant communities, most of whose ministers, by Catholic standards, lack apostolic succession. But reminding them of this distinction, without at the same time reiterating the context in which it makes sense, has been criticized as insensitive. That context is the comprehensive vision of membership in the Church “in concentric circles” proposed by Pope Paul VI and adopted by the Second Vatican Council. In that vision, the Catholic Church recognizes God’s gift to her of the fullness of the means of salvation (and they our gifts from God and not our achievement) and the corresponding duty to employ them for our salvation, while at the same time rejoicing at the presence of many of these same gifts, in varying degrees, among other Christians, among other believers in the same God, and among those still searching for him.

As Cardinal Walter Kaspar has noted, “we should not miss reading the positive statements of the declaration about the Protestant churches, namely, that Jesus Christ is effectively present within them for the salvation of their members.”
—DKC

Two calls, one love

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:13:39 -0500

June is the traditional month for celebrating weddings and, in today’s Catholic Church, for ordaining priests. Many couples were married in churches throughout south Georgia during June and Bishop J. Kevin Boland ordained four new priests for the Diocese of Savannah on June 23.

The conferral of the Sacraments of Matrimony and Holy Orders during this time reminds us of two different but complementary vocations, calls from God to serve the communion of believers in diverse ways. Both priesthood and marriage are sacraments, in which God strengthens the commitment of the recipients. Both are ultimately calls and responses to love. As has often been pointed out, the Sacrament of Matrimony symbolizes the intensity of God’s love for his people, while the priesthood incarnates, as it were, the universality of that love.

In the special Catholic Wedding Guide published as a supplement to the Southern Cross of February 22, 2007, Bishop Boland stressed that “marriage is a vocation,” but added that “we are so used to attributing the word ‘vocation’ to the priesthood or religious life that we have failed to appreciate that the married state is also a vocation. It is a call from God, when properly discerned and answered. It is the path of holiness for married couples. Marriages are not made in heaven; the spouses and children are made for heaven.”

In this vein, the bishop said to John Johnson, Aaron Killips, David Koetter and Stephen Pontzer during the ordination Mass, “When my brother Ray was ordained a bishop in Birmingham, Alabama in 1988, the late Cardinal Timothy Manning of Los Angeles was present. In remarks at the end, he looked at my mother and then back to Ray and said: ‘Remember Bishop Ray, the marriage ring on your mother’s finger is responsible for the ring you received today as bishop’. And hence John, Aaron, David and Stephen, you are here today because of the marriage vows of your parents.” The marriages of Keith and Martha Johnson, Dennis and Marie Killips, Stephen and Donna Koetter and Joseph and Carol Pontzer undoubtedly played a major role in nurturing the vocations of Fathers John Johnson, Aaron Killips, David Koetter and Stephen Pontzer.

The late Pope John Paul II often noted that “where marriage is esteemed so is celibacy; where marriage is not esteemed, neither is celibacy.” It is no secret that in today’s Western world both marriage and celibacy are being undermined by the prevailing materialistic and hypersexual culture. It takes unusual courage for men and women to commit themselves to the permanent, exclusive and life-long partnership called marriage. So many voices urge them to avoid commitment, to “play the field” and to feel free to discard one partner after another, heedless of the damage to themselves, their erstwhile lovers and the children they conceive.

The Catholic Church, with its sacramental view of marriage, cannot regard the erosion of marriage as a pillar of society with anything but alarm. In order to encourage couples to deepen their commitments and thus to sustain their marriages, the bishops of this country approved a National Pastoral Initiative for Marriage in November 2004 proposed by the bishops’ Committee on Marriage and Family Life, then chaired by Bishop Boland. As part of this initiative, the Catholic Communication Campaign has produced an ad campaign, “For Your Marriage” (see page 1), featuring married couples reflecting on the little things that help their unions, with the message, “Small changes can make a world of difference.”
Every wedding or ordination, whether celebrated in June or at any other time, is a sign of hope that God’s call to loving service has been heard and accepted, and that there are still faithful people willing to make the demanding commitments required by marriage and the priesthood in this challenging world and time.
Let us, whose lives are enriched by the witness of devoted spouses and zealous priests, offer our loving support to the newly married and ordained, and our prayers to the God who has called them, that he might bring to completion the good work he has begun in them.

—DKC

The best of times, the worst of times

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 08:39:25 -0500

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So runs the famous opening sentence of Charles Dickens’ novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities.

Dickens contrasts London and Paris, as well as
the two faces of the Revolution: the progress of
liberty and the Reign of Terror.

His words and contrasts might well apply
today to Atlanta and New York, to efforts to protect
human life and opposing efforts to “liberalize”
certain laws, ostensibly to enhance freedom,
but in reality to endanger the most vulnerable
lives in a new Reign of Terror.

In some states, including Georgia, this is an
encouraging time, if not the best of times, for
those concerned with protecting human life
beginning with conception. The state legislature
has passed and Governor Sonny Perdue has
signed into law HB 147. The law requires that
expectant mothers be offered an opportunity to
view an ultrasound image of their unborn children
before deciding to abort the child. According
to Georgia Right to Life, the law also provides
that “if the abortion facility does not have
ultrasound equipment, the woman may be referred
to a hospital or other facility that has the
equipment. Most abortion facilities already perform
ultrasounds, but the mothers may not be
offered the opportunity to see the image of their
unborn child prior to making their decision.”

The legislature has also passed and the governor
has signed the “Saving the Cure Act (SB
148),” which provides for the universal collection
of postnatal tissue and fluid for medical
research and treatment. This promotion of ethical
stem cell research, which does not entail the
death of a human embryo, is also most welcome
to pro-life advocates.

Some states, most recently Mississippi, have
passed “trigger laws” that would severely restrict
access to abortion in the event that the
Supreme Court should reverse its decision in
Roe v. Wade (1973) that effectively legalized
abortion on demand in the United States.
Georgia has yet to pass such a law.
So much for “the best of times.”

The Catholic Press Association reports that the
New York State Catholic Conference “has sharply
attacked Gov. Eliot Spitzer's proposals to legalize
same-sex marriages and make it illegal to
place any restrictions on abortion in the state.”
In other words, Gov. Spitzer has proposed a trigger
law for New York that would enshrine Roe v.
Wade’s permissive stance toward abortion in
New York law, even if the Supreme Court
should reverse it. He would also make New
York the second state in the nation (after
Massachusetts) to legalize “gay marriages.”

Gov. Spitzer’s proposals indicate why this is
also the worst of times for those who uphold the
sanctity of human life and the sanctity of marriage
as a union of one man and one woman.

The nation is plainly divided on these fundamental
issues, which reflect radically different
views of humanity. The “red-state, blue state”
dichotomy is very real and shows up most revealingly
in questions of life and love.

The American mind is increasingly polarized.

One pole can be labeled “secular” and the other
“religious,” although these labels are too simple.
The inhabitants of the “secular city” tend to
see things materialistically. While claiming to be
scientific, they can, in fact, ignore the scientific
data (for example, with regard to the genetic
humanity of the fetus). They also tend to ignore
the moral or ethical aspects of issues, because
these aspects require judgments of quality and
their thinking tends to favor measures of quantity.

The inhabitants of the “religious city” may or
may not be Evangelical Protestants of a fundamentalistic
mindset and are inclined to preach at
their adversaries. But if they are so minded and
preach, then there is no possibility of dialogue
between them and the secular city, for to them
faith always trumps reason and their opponents
will not listen to what is not presented rationally.

But other inhabitants of the religious city
(Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and some mainstream
Protestants) reject this dichotomy
between faith and reason and may be able to
bridge the gap between materialism and spirituality,
between reason and faith, because it is
capable of using the tools of reason (science,
philosophy and rational discourse) in order to
persuade our interlocutors of the legitimacy of
our arguments in favor of life. On the basis of
our common humanity, using our shared faculty
of reason, a dialogue between the two cities has
some hope of success. Only then can these
become the best of times for all.
—DKC

Campaign supports “worthy human communication”

Thu, 10 May 2007 11:49:06 -0500

The age of modern communications can be said to have begun in earnest with the invention of the telegraph. To be sure, brief signals could be sent over short distances by semaphores and the like faster than they could be transported by a human carrier, but Samuel F. B. Morse’s invention of the telegraph in the 1830s, building on the earlier experiments of William Sturgeon and Joseph Henry, definitively separated the speed of communication from the speed of transportation and made possible the wide array of telecommunications available today.

To telegraphy by wire soon was soon added Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Communication by wire led to wireless (radio) communication, thanks to Guglielmo Marconi, then motion pictures and television became available, with the result that by the middle of the 20th Century, the world was able to communicate more clearly and instantaneously than ever before.
In today’s world, billions of people are involved in long-distance and even global communications using a dizzying array of high-tech equipment, from the cell phone to the Internet. The means and gadgets available to so many are truly amazing. But the messages conveyed range from the sordid and banal to the sublime.

Most of us have had the experience of surfing through dozens or even hundreds of channels on our cable or satellite televisions, only to conclude that there’s nothing worth watching, or browsing through newspaper and magazine racks, only to be turned off by the sordid tabloids and entertainment rags that often pass for journalism.

In short, nearly everyone has access to extraordinary means of communication, but the message has not always kept pace with the media whose purpose it is to convey it.

For those who seek the truth, it can be discouraging to surf the Internet or the TV, because of the uneven quality of reporting. In no area is this discouragement more likely to arise than in religion. For all the secular media’s fascination with religion as a phenomenon baffling to them, their portrayal of the tenets of the world’s great faiths is often shallow and skewed, even more so in the case of the Catholic faith, which has never been predominant in this country and has often been feared and misrepresented by those outside.

Precisely to get out the Catholic message, the Good News of Jesus Christ as handed on by his Church for generations, Bishop John England of Charleston established the first Catholic newspaper, the Catholic Miscellany, in the 1820s (when what is now the Diocese of Savannah was part of his Diocese of Charleston). The visionary Bishop England set a fine precedent in using the media of his day to set forth the “Catholic case” for his own flock and for those who might want to inform themselves of what the Catholic Church actually believed and taught.

It became customary for Catholic dioceses in the United States and in other countries to establish newspapers of their own, usually on a weekly basis, in order to inform the Catholic people of what has been going on in the Church (at every level, from the local parish to the Vatican) and to interpret events taking place in the Church and in the world in light of Catholic teaching and its source, the Word of God. It is nothing short of amazing that so many dioceses succeeded in establishing their own newspapers, often at great expense in terms of time, talent and effort, and remarkable that so many still engage in owning and operating their own newspapers.

Take the Diocese of Savannah, for instance. Although the Catholic population of south Georgia is extremely small, Bishop William R. Gross tried to establish a newspaper, called the Southern Cross, in the 1870s, with his brother as editor. After various mishaps, including a fire, the paper ceased publication after two years. In 1920, the admirable Georgia Catholic Laymen’s Association began publishing its own paper, the Bulletin, which eventually became diocesan. After the establishment of the Diocese of Atlanta, the Diocese of Savannah began publishing its own newspaper, the Southern Cross, in 1963.

Although a recent survey indicates that a quarter of U.S. Catholics read their diocesan newspaper at least once in a six-month period, in a world of radio, television, i-Pods and the Internet, the Church has long recognized that it must use these “means of mass communications,” the electronic media, as well as print, in order to reach as many people as possible with the Good News. The bishops of the United States have established the Catholic Communications Campaign to support an array of multimedia projects developed by the campaign, promoting Gospel values through network television specials, radio programs, movie reviews and original Internet content.

The Catholic Communication Campaign collection will be taken up the weekend of May 19-20, to coincide with the World Communications Day on Pentecost proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI. The CCC is the only national collection in which fifty percent of each donation is retained by the diocese for local projects. Your generosity has a direct effect on the Diocese of Savannah to fund projects such as spreading the word about Gartland Service Award winners through South Georgia newspapers and on the diocesan Web site www.diosav.org; airing of the Sunday Mass on Augusta and Savannah’s TV stations to permit the homebound to remain spiritually connected to the Eucharist; maintaining an email system to send instant news and information to priests, deacons, religious and lay staff.

On the national level, the CCC has recently produced two outstanding broadcast doumentaries, “Picturing Mary” and “Jesus Decoded.”

Our support for the CCC helps to fund the above programs, but above all it helps the Church share a vision of human dignity that Pope Benedict calls central to all worthy human communication. “Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave” (Deus Caritas Est, 18).
—DKC

Court fails to jettison its irrational dogma

Thu, 03 May 2007 12:31:20 -0500

The Supreme Court pleased pro-life advocates and alarmed the pro-abortion lobby by its ruling in its decisions in Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is constitutional.

To those who uphold the dignity of all human life from conception to natural death, the court’s rulings are most welcome in that they allow the Federal government to punish practitioners of a gruesome form of infanticide. But the actual rulings do not really portend a restriction, on the part of the Supreme Court, of women’s “right” to destroy new life in the womb, basically at will. In other words, the court’s earlier and catastrophic decision in Roe v. Wade still stands and nothing in Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood indicates that the court is on the verge of reversing its 1973 decision that forbade the states or Federal government to prohibit abortion on demand until the fetus is viable, that is, until it could survive outside the womb, and even then made it difficult to restrict abortion even after that point.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in both cases, rightly upholds the state’s interest in protecting innocent life, but only in the case of “intact dilation and extraction,” known to its opponents as “partial birth abortion.” According to the Catholic News Service, in this gruesome procedure, “a live fetus is partially delivered and an incision is made at the base of the skull, through which the brain is removed, and then the dead body is delivered the rest of the way.” Kennedy and four other justices decided that this procedure “undermines the public’s perception of the doctor's appropriate role during delivery and perverts the birth process.” Indeed it does.

But the five justices who made up the majority in the two partial-birth cases also stated that “if intact D&E is truly necessary in some circumstances, it appears likely an injection that kills the fetus is an alternative under the Act that allows the doctor to perform the procedure.” In other words, giving the unborn child a lethal injection while he or she is still in the womb, before delivery, is acceptable even to the five justices. While in the womb, the child is still fair game; only when he or she begins to emerge from the womb can the government step in to protect his or her life. The same artificial distinction that so flawed Roe v. Wade is still operative in Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood: the right to life is contingent on where the child is (in or out of the womb) and not on his or her basic dignity as a human being.

Like a pater familias in ancient Rome, a modern American mother-to-be has nearly absolute power of life and death over her child—until that child leaves her body. The fact that the child is the same entity before and after birth apparently has no legal ramifications.

What the court has not acknowledged is that a human being, once he or she exists (and a human being is always a “he” or ‘she,” a male or a female, and never an “it”), has the same right to continue to exist, to live as any other human being. And a distinct human being exists from the moment of his or her conception.

This prospective is not necessarily religious, let alone distinctively Christian. It is based not on dogma, but on science—not on faith, but on reason, the common currency of human discourse. It is science (genetics) that has discerned that a distinct human being, with 46 chromosomes (23 pairs of chromosomes with one-half of each pair contributed by the father and the other half by the mother), from the moment the father’s sperm fertilizes the mother’s egg. (It is possible for the new human life to become more than one individual, as in the case of twinning, but that new life is always at least one human being, genetically distinct from either parent, a “new creation.”) This scientific grounding is sufficient for reason to conclude that any new and distinct human life, once begun, should possess the same right to continued life as any other, and that this right cannot be abridged legitimately by another human being, even by one of his or her parents. Faith confirms what reason discerns, adding only, but significantly, that every human being is fashioned in the image and likeness of God.

It would not be proper for believers to demand that a secular court in a country that has insisted that the government may not establish a particular religion should adopt the perspective of a particular faith in its legislation and jurisprudence. But it is right and proper that believers (and non-believers as well) should demand that their government, in its legislative, executive and judicial branches, should act rationally and for the good of all human persons under its jurisdiction. The Supreme Court has ratified the legislature’s reasonable grant of protection, confirmed by the executive, to a small number of human beings who face deliberate death at the moment of birth, but it has not extended the same protection to those conceived but not yet at the point of birth, nor has it agreed on the philosophical basis for doing so. By adhering to the arbitrary classifications (trimesters, etc.) of Roe v. Wade, the court has failed to jettison the irrational and unscientific dogma of that tragic decision.

Unfortunately, its decisions in Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, while welcome in that they will save some lives, offer little sound hope that the justices are really open to reversing Roe v. Wade.
—DKC

Part of the problem or part of the solution?

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:57:43 -0500

Last week, two events attracted attention in the national media, above and beyond the continuing saga of the paternity of Anna Nicole Smith’s child and the latest voting on American Idol. The events were the brouhaha surrounding the latest gaffe on the part of radio shock jock Don Imus, who was subsequently ousted by CBS and MSNBC, and the final exoneration of the three Duke University lacrosse players wrongly accused of rape. Both revealed something about the parlous state of race relations in this country.

The phenomenon of the “shock jock” is a mystery to some of us. Exactly how “rude, crude and socially unacceptable” people, mostly men, have managed to garner large shares of the radio market by teetering on the edge of decency is unfathomable to us.

In chatting on the air about a recent women’s basketball game involving the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. For reasons hard to discern, Imus chose to allude to a Spike Lee movie and described the predominantly African American team in “hip hop” terms in a way that managed to be both racist and sexist. His remarks were unconscionable and gravely disrepectful of dedicated and spirited female athletes. In the ensuing uproar, Imus seemed at first clueless and then contrite. The networks dithered for a few days and then acted decisively in terminating his show. Imus has since met with the team and apologized personally, so for the moment the situation is resolved.

But questions linger. One regards the relative silence of Imus’ critics when it comes to similar disrespectful language about black women when those who use such language are black men. Another is why anyone listens to such shock jocks in the first place. Since Catholics (theoretically) make up about one fifth of the American population, if we were to refuse, on moral grounds, to listen to trashy radio and watch sleazy programming on television, movies and podcasts, the market for such garbage would be adversely affected. The quality of programming might well improve. But as long as we go along with the crowd as it accelerates down the slippery slope, we will be part of the problem, not the solution.

In one sense, the Duke lacrosse rape case represents the opposite of the Imus fiasco. If Imus showed appalling disrespect to African American women, then Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong erred in the opposite direction. On the basis of contradictory statements made by an obviously disturbed black woman, with no corroborating evidence of any kind (and with exculpatory evidence that was suppressed), Nifong charged three Duke lacrosse players with rape and other felonies after a now infamous team party. At first the media pilloried the players as rich, white male jocks who had viciously attacked and exploited a poor, black woman. Nifong, a white man, needed black votes to retain his position in last fall’s election. The suspicion that he was using the Duke case to pander to African American and female voters grew as his case unraveled and his own mistakes and even malfeasance became known—unfortunately not in time to prevent his reelection.

For 395 days, Reade Seligmann, David Evans and Collin Finnerty’s lives were made a living hell for something that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper has declared that they did not do. Cooper, in announcing that all charges against the players have been dropped, went so far as to state that they were “innocent” and proceeded to criticize Nifong, whom he called a a “rogue prosecutor.” The players showed considerable class in refusing to press for their accuser to be punished, on the grounds of her instability.

Although important strides have been made in the area of civil rights since the 1950s, race remains a neuralgic issue that won’t go away.

On the one hand, there are too many like Don Imus who have failed to learn, at any deep level, that using racial and gender stereotypes to denigrate others is simply not acceptable. He may have used “hip hop” terminology borrowed from the African American community, but the content of his remarks was identical to that of countless white supremacists and male chauvinist pigs through the ages.

On the other hand, there are also too many like Mike Nifong, who seek to pander to those of other races or the other gender by adopting their biases against white men, even at the risk of inflicting an injustice against them, as if such an injustice somehow balanced out the historical injustices perpetrated on women and minorities over the centuries.

What is lacking in both cases is the kind of unbiased objectivity that accords with the God-given dignity of every human person. Such an unbiased objectivity regards each person as an individual and refuses to stereotype anyone, refuses to attribute to an individual member of a group the (real or imagined) characteristics of other members of that group. This perspective is, in fact, a very Catholic one that this culture needs to learn or to relearn as it tries to cope with the toxic legacies of racism and sexism.

—DKC

Happy birthday, happy anniversary, Holy Father

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:41:37 -0500

Eighty years ago when Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, on Holy Saturday, April 16, 1927, Germany was still reeling from the loss of the First World War and its transformation from a mighty empire into the experimental Weimar Republic that had only a few years left to exist. The war and the wide-spread starvation, the dreadful influenza epidemic that accompanied it, and ongoing political upheavals and financial crises had caused a deep sense of anxiety among the German people.

Young Joseph Ratzinger’s Bavarian family was devoutly Catholic and reacted to the tumultuous post-war years by zealously practicing their religion. The two sons, Joseph and Georg (three years Joseph’s senior), both hoped to become Catholic priests and diligently pursued minor seminary studies. Both would be ordained priests, and both still serve at the altar. But their path to ordination was not easy, not because of the rigor of the classical studies then prescribed—both would excel at them—but because of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the Second World War that followed in 1939. Joseph and Georg’s father, also named Joseph, was bitterly opposed to National Socialism, precisely because he saw Nazism as anti-Christian. The “Ratzinger boys” lost a cousin, a Down’s Syndrome child, to the Nazi eugenics program.
Drafted into the Wehrnacht in 1943, at the age of 16, young Joseph Ratzinger, along with hundreds of thousands of other German soldiers, deserted before the Third Reich collapsed in 1945. Even in the chaos that ensued, he found his way home, returned to his seminary and six years later, was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising in 1951, at the young age of 24. His brother Georg was ordained in the same ceremony. Father Joseph Ratzinger’s brilliance led to graduate studies, a doctorate (with a dissertation on Saint Augustine) in 1953, and an habilitation degree, the second doctorate expected of professors in Germany (with a dissertation on Saint Bonaventure) in 1957. He began teaching in Freising in 1958 and moved to the University of Bonn in 1959. He was soon recognized as an exceptional theologian, participating in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as peritus (expert) to Cardinal Julius Döpfner, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising. In 1966, Father Ratzinger was appointed to a chair of dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen. At and after the Council, his fame as an exponent of Catholic teaching grew thanks in large part to his magisterial Introduction to Christianity (1968), which became a theological bestseller and remains a classic presentation of the Apostles’ Creed. Although for a time associated with the innovative thought of his friend, Father Hans Küng, the events of the revolutionary year 1968 prompted him to rethink the value of the unbridled freedom advocated in the “cultural revolution” of the late 1960s and by some Catholics in the heady days after the Council. Remaining faithful to the Council’s call for renewal, he came to insist that the documents of Vatican II must be interpreted in its proper context, the whole of the Catholic tradition. In 1969, he began teaching at the University of Regensburg, in Bavaria, and along with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Walter Kasper (all subsequently named cardinals) founded the theological journal Communio in 1972.
Father Ratzinger’s comprehensive insights gained the attention of Pope Paul VI, who appointed him to the International Theological Commission and, on March 24, 1977, after Cardinal Döpfner’s sudden death, named him Archbishop of Munich and Freising, creating him Cardinal Priest of S. Marie Consolatrice al Tiburtino at the consistory of June 27, 1977. As such, Cardinal Ratzinger participated in the conclaves of 1978 that elected Albino Luciani Pope John Paul I and, after his unexpected death, Karol Wojtyla Pope John Paul II.
At the end of 1981, John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the difficult task of overseeing all public expressions of Catholic teaching. Although pilloried in the media as the “Grand Inquisitor,” those who understood what was at stake in the post-conciliar years appreciated the high quality of the congregation’s critiques of various problematic writings and the cardinal’s theological acumen. Among Cardinal Ratzinger’s major contributions to the Church during his 24 years as prefect was the Catechism of the Catholic Church, whose writing and editing he oversaw.
By the time Pope John Paul II died, after a monumental pontificate of 26 years, Cardinal Ratzinger was undoubtedly the most renowned member of the College of Cardinals. As Dean of the College, he was the principal celebrant of the pope’s funeral. His masterful homily and surprising vigor seem to have convinced the cardinals that he was not too old—at 78—to succeed John Paul the Great. His forthright declaration at the opening Mass of the conclave that the great challenge facing the world, the Church and the next pope will be relativism was surprisingly blunt, pandering to no one. After a very brief conclave, the Cardinals elected Joseph Ratzinger Bishop of Rome, as Pope Benedict XVI, on April 19, 2005, three days after his 78th birthday, the oldest man elected pope since Clement XII (1730–40).
In the two years since his election, Pope Benedict has surprised many, who “knew” him only through the biased lenses of the media, by his personal warmth, pastoral concern and pervasive humility. He has not tried to be “John Paul III.” Although Benedict XVI is not a charismatic figure like his predecessor, he has been an effective and popular pontiff, in his own professorial way. His magnificent Encyclical Letter, Deus Caritas Est, presents a beautiful, profound and inspiring discussion of Christian love, rooted in profound scholarship, yet so clearly expressed as to be accessible to those who are not scholars.
The Southern Cross joins with Catholics and many others throughout the world in wishing Joseph Ratzinger many happy returns on his 80th birthay and congratulates our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, on the second anniversary of his election as chief shepherd of the Universal Church.

—DKC

, whose reactions varied from joining radical movements (such as National Socialism and Communism), through indulging in the hedonism of the Berlin cabarets, to rediscovery and reevaluation of religious faith and practice.
To be sure, his thoughts are so complex that his pronouncements can be misinterpreted, as in the case of the lecture in Regensburg on faith and reason. Genuinely perplexed over the ensuing uproar in the Muslim world, Pope Benedict moved quickly to clarify his remarks, to meet with Muslim leaders and to carry out his planned visit to Turkey, with such graceful attention to Muslim sensibilities that the controversy gradually died away.

Bad bill should die

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:02:10 -0600

A subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the Georgia House of Representatives has approved a bill to give judges the authority to sentence to death those who have been convicted of capital crimes, even when the jury has not unanimously recommended the death penalty.

Until now, Georgia, like most American states that impose the death penalty, has required not only a unanimous vote on the part of the juries (12-0) to convict someone accused of a capital crime with at least one aggravating circumstance, but also a unanimous vote (12-0) to execute the convicted person.

House Bill 185 (“An Act to Amend Article 2 of Chapter 10 of Title 17 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated”) as introduced by Representative Barry Fleming (R-Harlem), would have allowed a judge to sentence a convict to death if as few as 9 jurors out of 12 voted for execution. The subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee amended the bill to allow a judge to impose the death penalty if 11 out of 12 jurors voted for execution: “In such a case, the judge shall dismiss the jury and impose a sentence of life imprisonment, imprisonment for life without parole, or death.” The subcommittee by a vote of 7-1 approved the amended bill on March 12. If approved by the state House of Representatives, passed by the state Senate, and signed by the governor, it will put Georgia in the company of a handful of states, including Alabama, California and Florida, that allow judges to impose capital punishment in the absence of a unanimous decision by a jury to send a convict to his or her death.

This bill, born of frustration at “hold-out” jurors (particularly in the case of Wesley V. Holmes, who was convicted on two counts of murder, but not sentenced to death because two jurors refused to vote for his execution), would mark a break with the common law tradition that has required unanimity of the jury in sentencing anyone to the ultimate penalty—death.

Make no mistake about it, this bill is bad. It provides one more example of the spirit of vengeance that prevails in our world and strengthens the culture of death in this state.

The Catholic Church, eager to promote the Gospel of Life, has strengthened its stance against the unnecessary shedding of blood by the civil authorities. The second edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2267, after acknowledging “the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not exluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty,” adds the significant sentence : “Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically non-existent’.” The last phrase is taken directly from Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
This strengthened teaching has been difficult for many Catholics to accept, given the heinous nature of murder in itself, let alone when committed on a vast scale by such people as Timothy McVeigh and Saddam Hussein. This teaching, though difficult for many to embrace, is slowly gaining acceptance among the Catholic faithful. As we reported last year, for the first time, support for the death penalty among American Catholics has fallen below 50%, according to the Zogby International poll of more than 1,500 Catholics in the United States. The poll indicated that they are nearly evenly divided as to whether “capital punishment is wrong under virtually all circumstances.” The poll found that 49% of respondents agreed with the statement, and 48% disagreed. Ten years ago, a Gallup poll reported that 77% of U.S. Catholics favored the death penalty. In the words of Sister Helen Prejean, a leading Catholic opponent of capital punishment, it is becoming clearer and clearer, at least to Catholics, that “killing people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong” is itself wrong.

Neverthless, it struck many Catholics and even more non-Catholics as strange that Catholic leaders, including popes, would plead for the lives of McVeigh and Hussein to be spared. There was no real doubt that they were guilty of mass murder. Doesn’t the Bible say, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:19-20)?

While the Hebrew Scriptures, in common with such ancient compilations of law as the Code of Hammurabi, do allow limited retaliation (“an eye for an eye”), while excluding the unlimited retaliation of the vendetta or blood feud, the New Testament does not. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer the other one to him as well” (Matthew 5:38-39).

This teaching is very hard for even the most devout Christian to accept and to live out, but it is the clear doctrine of the Savior. Over the centuries, his Church has struggled to live up to the Lord’s command, in different times and places, acknowledging that a teaching addressed to individuals may not apply in the same way to states and nations. Still, Catholic moral teaching has always excluded vengeance as a motive for the use of lethal means, restricting them to defence, and only in those cases where non-lethal means would be ineffective. In its developed form, Catholic moral teaching has been increasingly critical of the use of lethal force by nations and states, in terms of both capital punishment and war.

Just as the Church is committed to opposing the culture of death with the Gospel of Life in the area of aborting innocent children, so it is committed to opposing the culture of death with the Gospel of Life in the more neuralgic area of executing the guilty (or at least those convicted) of heinous crimes, when non-lethal means exist to keep them from inflicting further harm. To that end, those committed to the Gospel of Life should oppose HB 185 and ask their representatives to reject it.
—DKC

Good stewardship makes the difference

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:34:56 -0600

In Medieval Scotland, lairds of the manor employed officials to manage their estates. These officials were called “stewarts’ or “stewards.” They did not own the estates—the lords did. But they were entrusted with the management of the estates.
They oversaw the laborers, handled transactions and kept the accounts. A good steward managed his laird’s estate, keeping it running smoothly, turning any profits over to the laird and earning a suitable reward for his faithful stewardship.
Good stewards were prized for their services, but better ones knew their place—they were not lairds and the property was the not theirs. They were to be “good and faithful servants,” managing the laird’s property with care and deserving of his trust.
In fact, the Stewart or Stuart family did so well in managing the property of the Bruce kings that they were allowed to marry into the royal family and eventually inherited the throne of Scotland.
From Scotland, the word “steward” came into the English language and eventually into English biblical translations, rendering the Greek epitropos (the “man on the spot” or “foreman”) in Matthew 20, Luke 8, etc. (The Latin procurator, used to translate epitropos, means “one who has care of a thing on behalf of another person”).
The idea of Christian stewardship is a profound one: all human beings are stewards, not owners, of God’s gift of creation in general and of his particular gifts to each of them. We do not own the world, but are entrusted with its care. “Our lives are not our own,” as Saint Paul writes, but belong to the Creator who is their source and goal.
As stewards, we hold in trust what we have been given, to use everything well for the purposes for which God intended, and caring for what we have been given in such a way that we leave it in good condition for those who will come after us.
The theme of “stewardship of creation” is being developed in order to focus Christian minds on dangers to the environment in a way that is consonant with Christian teaching.
The theme of “stewardship of time, treasure and talent” has evolved in Catholic circles in order to deepen the sense of responsibility incumbent on all members of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church to give of themselves, of their gifts, for the good of all.
The full, conscious and active participation of all the faithful in the Church’s life and worship has been the goal of the liturgical renewal and the broader ecclesial renewal, begun a century ago and finding its clearest expression in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the Magisterium of the popes and bishops since that time. Time and again, the Church has invited all its members to give of themselves—of their time, treasure and talent—and the Catholic people have always responded generously. The Catholics of south Georgia will be invited once again, next week, to respond to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal, which helps fund a variety of significant ministries in the Diocese of Savannah.
The Church has also undertaken programs and efforts to improve its own stewardship, its own procedures for caring for the goods entrusted to it, its own sharing of those goods with those in need, and its own accountability for all the above.
As a part of its accountability to its people, the Diocese of Savannah issues a financial report each year, detailing how it has managed the temporal goods entrusted to it. This year’s report is inserted as a supplement to this week’s issue of the Southern Cross. It shows a wise and prudent stewardship of the funds entrusted to it and depicts some specific ministries that are funded by the Diocese of Savannah for its people. This year, Vocations, Catholic Schools, Social Services, and the Stewardship and Development office are highlighted—four ministries out of many.
The Vocations Office recruits candidates for diocesan priesthood and oversees their formation. The success of this program, highlighted in the National Catholic Register story reprinted on page 1, would not be possible without the support of the people through the Bishop’s Annual Appeal. Likewise, the Catholic Schools Office, Catholic Social Services and the Stewardship and Development Office depend on the active stewardship of the people.
In turn, the Diocese of Savannah is committed to good stewardship, including the use of diocesan property for the benefit of the people, and on the basis of that commitment once again invites all members of the Diocesan family to review the financial report and to pledge their fair share of support for the Bishops’ Annual Appeal.
—DKC

Religious deserve better support

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:07:18 -0600

Over the past year, the Southern Cross has carried a large number of stories about religious men and women—mostly women—who have devoted their lives to serving the Lord in his Church.

It wasn’t entirely on purpose, although it began when Sister Virginia Gillis, rsm, Vicar for religious, initiated an occasional series in the Southern Cross (“Profiles in Ministry”) that would highlight the ministries of various people serving in the Diocese of Savannah, religious and eventually lay. The profiles themselves revealed a wide variety of ministries on the part of religious and a continuing desire to serve on the part of those retired.
The other stories just came in on their own.
Sister Helen Prejean, csj, spoke twice in the Diocese of Savannah early in 2006. Sister Helen was a teaching sister who became aware that social justice was “constitutive of the Gospel,” as declared by the bishops after Vatican II. This led to her ministry to death row inmates and victims’ families about which she wrote in her bestselling book “Dead Man Walking” (made into a classic film and play); she is widely credited with lifting the immorality of the death penalty into the public consciousness. Both talks, in Savannah in January and in Augusta in February, drew large attentive crowds and provoked much discussion on the Church’s stance toward capital punishment.
We could not have foreseen that Sister Vera Butler, pbvm, would win the Lumen Christi Award for her work among the poor in New Orleans. The former principal of Sacred Heart School, Warner Robins, has won national recognition for her labors in the Lord’s vineyard and her many friends in the Diocese of Savannah are justly proud of her apostolic labors.
Nor could we have foreseen that Sister Pat Coward, rsm, would be honored by the Jewish community in Savannah for her groundbreaking classes on the Holocaust at Saint Vincent’s Academy, that Sister Pat Baber, rsm, would gain local attention for her work with Mercy Housing in the Cuyler-Brownsville neighborhood of Savannah, or that the Savannah Coalition of the National Black Leadership on Cancer would name and award for Sister Margie Beatty, rsm. We are equally proud of them all.
We did know that several Mercy sisters would celebrate significant anniversaries—50 and 60 years of religious profession—this year, but were surprised at how many of them who currently serve in this diocese or have served here would reach significant milestones during the past year. We congratulate them all.
It came as a pleasant surprise to learn that a former resident of Darien, Ryan Renoud, has become a Cistercian monk in Rome.
And we mourned the passing of Sister Mary Benedict Brady, rsm, Sister Mary Cecilia Coleman, rsm, Sister Mary Jeannette Edwards, rsm, Sister Mary Alice Lovett, rsm, Sister Teresa Shields, ocd, Sister Miriam Suljak, asc, Sister M. Gratia Thomas, rsm, and Sister Betty (Charlene) Walsh, rsm. May they rest in peace.
It has been an agreeable surprise to realize just how active these religious are and have been at a time when religious life has been considered in decline. The varied ways in which consecrated religious continue to serve the people of God are manifold and bear witness to the power of the Holy Spirit working through them in our midst.
When we consider how much we owe to our vowed religious, who have taught us and our children in our schools, nursed us and many others in our hospitals, ministered to the poor in our name and have branched out to serve in new and innovative ways, we should be more grateful than ever for the charism of consecrated life.
Mindful that the vow of poverty is integral to religious life, we should nevertheless be concerned that because religious brothers and sisters have been compensated at a very low rate, and were excluded from the Social Security system until 1972, their orders, which have declined rapidly in their numbers, especially in the number of younger, working members, cannot afford to support them in retirement and must rely on the generosity of the Catholic people through the Retirement Fund for Religious, to meet their needs in their latter years.
This national collection, taken up this year on December 9-10, has been the most successful of all the special collections instituted in the United States. Its success (over $500 million collected since 1988) bears witness to the enduring gratitude of the Catholic people to those who have been consecrated to serve in their midst. The U.S. Bishops’ recent decision to extend this collection for another 10 years is most welcome.
In 2005, this appeal, which is sponsored by the National Religious Retirement Office (NRRO) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, DC, distributed $22 million in Basic Grants to 525 of the nation’s Catholic religious institutes. Locally, the Carmelite Monastery in Savannah received a grant in 2005.
But it is disappointing to note that in 2005, the Savannah diocesan collection totaled $92,713, $1,393 less than the $94,106 given in 2004. We can surely do better by our retired religious. At a minimum, this year’s collection should bring in substantially more than 2004’s total. It would be the least we can do for those who have vowed to work and pray for us, in poverty, chastity and obedience.
—DKC

Reflections on the eleventh hour

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 11:11:31 -0600

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918, an armistice went into effect between the Allied and associated powers and the German Reich. The Great War was over.
It is perhaps difficult for us today, in the wake of the Second World War, the Cold War, and the other armed conflicts that have followed, to comprehend the unprecedented carnage of the First World War. There was a sense of utter relief with the announcement of the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918 to the exhausted victors—and a sense of dismay and incredulity that washed over the even more exhausted vanquished.
From the beginning of the conflict, with the “guns of August” in 1914, an exhausted 10,000,000 combatants perished in the trenches and battlefields of the European civil war that dealt a death-blow to Western supremacy. The civilian toll was much higher, as epidemics, civil wars, and outright genocide accompanied or followed the war of soldiers, sailors and airmen.
And of course “the war to end all wars” was concluded by what has been termed the “peace to end all peace” that led directly to the Second World War and all the rest.
It is no wonder that the victorious French bled white and nearly bankrupted by the war, should have noted that the armistice went into effect on the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, the Roman soldier who became Bishop of Tours and patron of France.
It is no wonder that Armistice Day was instituted in this country to commemorate the victory, but even more to pay tribute to those who fought and, especially, those who died in that dreadful conflict. The other victorious powers instituted similar commemorations, which continue to this day.
It is no wonder that the victorious powers quickly adopted the practice of burying with the highest honors an unknown soldier of the Great War, as this country did at Arlington National Cemetery. If the war to make the world safe for democracy did not entirely succeed in this object, it was a tragically democratic conflict, indiscriminately slaying peasants, workers, capitalists, communists, and even a tsar and his family.
As the supreme allied commander, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, presciently pointed out at the time, the Treaty of Versailles that finally ended the war with Germany was so punitive as to amount to a 20 year armistice, at most, before the conflict would inevitably resume.
The Second World War eclipsed even the first in the scale of its horrors and even that dreadful conflict did not slake humanity’s thirst for armed conflict.
And so Armistice Day was expanded to honor the veterans of all the nation’s wars and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier widened to include warriors from World War II and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars.
On November 11, we are all asked to honor those have served in the armed services of this nation, risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives in its defense.
As Catholics, we join our fellow Americans in honoring our veterans and remembering those who died in the service of this country. But our faith also urges us to offer prayers for those who have died in the nation’s wars, for it is “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead.” And we might well ask the intercession of Saint Martin of Tours, who renounced violence to embrace the Gospel of the Prince of Peace, that the lessons of the past may finally be learned and that the scourge of war may at last be lifted from mankind, as Pope Paul VI so movingly prayed at the United Nations in 1965: “No more war! War never again!”

—DKC

Bearing witness to peace, life and love

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:55:24 -0500

A look at the world around us can be profoundly discouraging. The announcement by North Korea that it had tested an atomic bomb is very bad news. Another nation apparently joined the lethal fraternity of the “nuclear club,” and that nation is a rogue state, an atheistic, Stalinist regime governed by a madman who has violated every agreement he has made to curb his nuclear ambitions in exchange for billions of dollars given primarily to feed his starving people.

As if that news weren’t bad enough, Iran’s uranium-enrichment program continues apace. Iran is another pariah state, but is, in addition, the heartland of radical Shi’a Islam, with yet another unstable leader who has flagrantly announced his determination to wipe Israel off the map, for religious reasons.
The United Nations Security Council has condemned North Korea’s move, but the sanctions agreed on, as limited as they are, are not likely to be fully enforced. And the Security Council has yet to reach agreement on Iran.
In what the Associated Press called “a grim warning of nuclear proliferation,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency recently said that “up to 30 countries beyond the nine known or suspected nuclear weapons states could have the technology to develop such arms ‘in a very short time’.”
As many commentators have noted, the “genie of death” is truly out of its bottle.
And if the mad scramble for the ultimate weapons of mass destruction weren’t bad enough, the use of lesser lethal technology around the world continues to wipe out human beings, our brothers and sisters, on an appalling scale.
From improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, through the abundant Kalashnikovs in Darfur, to the wild variety of lethal technology available and used on the world’s streets, the means of killing others are increasing, have increased and ought to be diminished. But more alarming than the means of killing human beings is the untrammeled will to use them.
As Pope Benedict XVI tried to point out in Regensburg, the schism between faith and reason has led to the dire situation in which we stand. Thus practical science can and does provide more and more sophisticated weapons, but methodically excludes the unquantifiable and therefore is not equipped to ask or answer ethical and moral questions, such as whether such weapons should be produced and used.
And faith without reason can easily lead to violent impulses in defending or spreading a faith that one believes to be absolutely true. But as the Holy Father pointed out, “violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.” This at least is the hard-won insight of the Christian faith. That insight may not always have guided Christians in practice, but it is precious and much needed today, when an unholy alliance has been formed between technology and fanaticism.
Bearing witness to this insight may be the most needed aspect of the Christian missionary endeavor in today’s world. The “holy alliance” between faith and reason promises peace, the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares” (Isaiah 2:4)
Our missionaries abandoned coercive measures centuries ago, as contrary to the Gospel. These peaceful men and women minister to people of every race and tongue, indeed of every creed. Some die as martyrs to the Gospel of Life—most recently Sister Loenella Sgorbati, who was shot in the back, allegedly by a Muslim fanatic who was supposedly incensed by the pope’s Regensburg lecture, as she entered the Somali hospital where she had ministered to Muslim mothers and children for years. She had not sought to convert anyone, but had striven to manifest God’s love for all.
World Mission Sunday (October 22) offers us all a chance to support and to share in the witness to peace, life and love that our missionaries give in this world of violence, death and hatred.

—DKC

“Strangers and aliens no longer”

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:52:37 -0500

Ignoring or downplaying the unity of the human race is a well-known human weakness. Many cultures and religions have, from ancient times, seen the world in terms of “us vs. them”—Jews vs. Gentiles, Greeks vs. barbarians, the faithful vs. the infidel.

But it is not supposed to be like that for Christians. Indeed, from the beginning, Christians have understood that “for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28.

On the eve of World War II, the newly elected Pope Pius XII issued his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, in which he denounced as a “pernicious error “the forgetfulness of that law of human solidarity and charity which is dictated and imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men, to whatever people they belong, and by the redeeming Sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ on the Altar of the Cross to his heavenly Father on behalf of sinful mankind” (Summi Pontificatus, 35). This forceful statement was clearly understood at the time to refer to Nazi and Fascist racial ideology, but that fact has been largely forgotten today.

Pope Pius pointed out that “the first page of the Scripture, with magnificent simplicity, tells us how God, as a culmination to his creative work, made man to his own image and likeness (cf. Genesis 1:26, 27),” adding “Even when they abandoned their Creator, God did not cease to regard them as his children, who, according to his merciful plan, should one day be reunited once more in his friendship” (Summi Pontificatus 36, cf. Genesis 12:3).

In Summi Pontificatus, Pope Pius developed this theme of the unity of the human race in terms of New Testament writings, calling Saint Paul’s proclamation of “the human race in the unity of one common origin in God” a “ marvelous vision” (Summi Pontificatus, 38).
This unity reaches its culmination in Jesus Christ. While other religions continued to make “us vs. them” distinctions, Christianity has always stressed the insignificance of such distinctions, which have been abolished, in principle, by Christ’s redeeming death and resurrection. After all, anyone can become a Christian, men and women, people of every race and tongue. Our is a transcendent religion, not restricted to any particular people.

Considering the traditional enmity between the Chosen People and the Goyim (Gentiles), Saint Paul wrote of Christ, “for he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it. So then you are strangers and aliens no longer, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:14-16.

Even those who do not profess belief in Christ are claimed by his Church as at least potential members. The vision of Pope Paul VI in the encyclical Ecclesiam Suam is truly breathtaking and all-encompassing, and led to the Second Vatican Council’s discussion of degrees of fullness in membership in the Catholic Church. The pope and the council envisioned a series of concentric circles, with believing, practicing Catholics in a state of grace at the center, and moving out through other Christians, the People of God of the Old Covenant, other believers in the one God, and followers of other world religions, to the whole human race. No one is excluded a priori from membership in God’s people; all are at least potential members of his flock.

Catholics are called to live in such a way as to manifest these basic truths, this vision. We forget them at our peril.
Would that more Catholics had refused to own other human beings as slaves and had joined with their fellow Christians in the movement to abolish slavery.

Would that more Catholics had heeded Pope Pius’ clear teaching. Had they done so, the Holocaust would either not have occurred or would have been severely restricted in scope had German and other European Catholics refused to participate in the persecution of Jews and others deemed by the civil authorities as “subhuman.”
Would that Catholics had protested the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Let us hope and pray that future generations will not have cause to say, “Would that American Catholics had opposed the harsh and inhumane treatment of undocumented migrants, most of them fellow Catholics, at the beginning of the 21st century.”

And let us not forget the ultimate goal of our shared human existence—to join together to sing the new hymn in heaven: “Worthy are you to receive the scroll and to break open its seals, for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation” (Revelation 5:9).

—DKC