A few things I've read this morning that may be of interest:
Over the past few years, hundreds of organizations and thousands of people (myself included) have mobilized to reduce political polarization, encourage civil dialogue and heal national divisions.
The first test case for our movement was the Kavanaugh hearings. It’s clear that at least so far our work is a complete failure.
- Our own Margaret O'Brien Steinfels in Commonweal with a review of Karen Johnson's One in Christ. "In the fifty years following World War I and the murderous 1919 race riot, a small number of Chicago Catholics, black and white" worked for racial justice and equality, in the community and in the church. Fascinating stuff, not least because Peggy is able to situate herself in the latter years of that history.
Margaret's list of Chicagoans who battled for civil rights set me rummaging until I found (another survivor of the Great Purge) "Race: Challenge to Religion," being essays based on talks by a string of luminaries at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1963. Martin Luther King was there (as a co-pastor with his father), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Cardinal Albert Meyer, Sargent Shriver, Will Campbell and you name it. In addition to talk, the gathering produced an "appeal to the conscience of the American people," which included:
ReplyDelete"Racism is our most serious domestic evil. We must eradicate it with all diligence and speed."
1963. That would be 55 years ago." The diligence hasn't been all that good, either.
Matthew Ahmann, one of those Margaret mentioned, did the heavy lifting on pulling the conference together and edited the book. The publisher was Henry Regnery, which had published W. F. Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" and got more and more conservative as time passed. I can't imagine a conservative publisher handling a book like this these days. But, once upon a time, racism wasn't evil only in the eyes of liberals.
Don't know the book...and 0 copies available at alibris. Do you have a copy?
DeleteAmazon has it in paperback for $10.57. Publishing date is listed as 2017, it appears to be a re-release.
DeleteThanks...Will take a look.
DeleteI do have to say something about poor David's tsouris. I wasn't going to, but I just a answered an email from an extended (off the end of the Earth) member of my wife's family, who is fighting with his siblings since he discovered God on Youtube. He informed me that PBS, on which David appears on Fridays with Mark Shields, is an organ of the leftwing conspiracy, not mainstream. And Brooks is complicit in PBS evil. So I thought maybe I ought to say this:
ReplyDeleteAddison M. McConnell is a thug. Everybody (except people who find God on Youtube) has known that since Merrick Garland. (Who?) The Democrats, especially the deplorable Minority Leader, who went to to toe with him are so brain dead that they couldn't organize soup in the Senate dining room without most of them going hungry. So it is that the public is entranced by a he-said/she-said and is blissfully unaware of how often Kavanaugh purgered himself in previous confirmations. And thus, even Susan Collins can sound like she makes sense.
What good would that do? It is just high brow insult, isn't it? The only way to challenge these people is by asking a lot of questions like, what's your evidence, how is that logical, and can you give me an example?
DeleteI have been doing this with my fundie relatives for over 30 years, though I get in here and complain about them all the time.
"Even Susan Collins"?
"Even Susan Collins" who enjoys being asked what she is going to do but doesn't do it particularly well.
DeleteAbout Susan Collins; I wish she had paid more attention to Kavanaugh's record in previous confirmations, as Tom said. However I strongly disagree with the oppobrium being heaped on her head for not toeing the Democratic feminist line. ( Duh, she's not a Democrat) One headline actually said, "She doesn't deserve a uterus!" Note to the Democrats: if you want Donnie for 8 full years, keep abortion rights front and center as your raison d 'etre.
DeleteAs of this afternoon, apparently, Kavanaugh will be able to rape the country for decades. Actually, with his record on the environment, the whole world.
DeleteUnless I missed it somewhere, his record on the environment and everything else that wasn't to do with sex scandals never even got discussed. It almost seems like the sex scandals were a good strategy to get him confirmed.
DeleteHere is my thing with Collins, forever. If you drop a TV camera halfway between her and Chuck Schumer, she would get there first. Yet, with one notable exception, after all her huffing and puffing she votes exactly like Sen. Barrasso, and he's in the leadership but still a who-dat. Lisa Murkowski, on the other hand, is actually interesting because she has no reason to adore the GOP establishment and acts like it. And now is threatened with being primaried by Sarah Palin (Be still, my heart).
DeleteYes! Huffing and Puffing Sue!
DeleteI think Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad are well-deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. God bless them for their efforts in ending rape as a weapon of war. It is a disgrace that in the 21st century that it is still happening. In times past we had some moral standing to push harder on observance of the Geneva Conventions. I'm not sure about now.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Margaret for her review of "One In Christ". I learned a lot that I hadn't known from it.
Of course if you aren't a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, which the Congo isn't, I guess you wouldn't consider yourself bound by them. But one would think there would be some consideration of, I don't know, concepts such as human dignity.
DeleteHere's another link from NCR on the "Authentic Reform" conference. There are actually some good ideas (as well as some bad ones). I feel that the progressives and the conservatives actually want a lot of the same things in ending the sex abuse scandals. I just wish they were talking about it together instead of off in their respective corners.
ReplyDeleteI was struck by this statement by Scott Hahn, who doesn't happen to be one of my favorite authors. But here he made a good point:
"...Hahn, a member of Opus Dei, noted that after McCarrick stepped down from the College of Cardinals, some called for laicization as a stronger punishment.
"Think about that: What does that imply? What do people think about laity?" he said."
That is a pretty good point by Hahn.
DeleteWhen Benedict was pope (or maybe when he was still head of CDF) and trying to figure out what to do about abusive priests, he noted at one point that laicization requests originally were conceived of as a way of the church to act mercifully toward a priest who had, as I think they used to say, "lost his vocation" (e.g. wanted to get married). On that basis he objected to diocesan bishops utilizing the laicization process to rid themselves of abusive priests. I confess that, at the time, I thought Benedict was being a bit "technical" in his objection. But really - there is something to his line of thought. I think Hahn is drawing water from the same well here.
There is another way to look at it. Society's. When Holy Mother casts one of her wayward sons into outer darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth leads to another job where he can sin again, without benefit of clergyhood. Reduction to the lay state gets rid of the Church's problem without by foisting it off on someone else.
DeleteTom, that is true. That basically puts the relationship between bishop and priest on an employer/employee basis. That basis is valid as far as it goes (the priest does work for the diocese, receives his paycheck and benefits from the diocese, etc.), but it's only a small slice of the richness of the theology of holy orders.
DeleteAny responsible employer who learns that it has an abusive employee will immediately fire the employee. The employer will do that primarily for self-serving reasons: keeping an abuser on the payroll provides a setting for an abuser to abuse, and employers don't want to be sued by other employees who were abused by the abusive employee. That line of reasoning applies to the church as well.
Whether and to what extent the church has continuing responsibility for the priests it has fired is not a simple question. What should the church do with the priests it has fired? What if the fired priest doesn't want to do what the church wants him to do (e.g. devote his life to penitence and prayer somewhere far away from potential victims)?
It is discombobulating to be reading a history of "you were there."
ReplyDeleteSince Johnson starts with the birth of Arthur Falls in 1900, gears up post-WW1, and ends in 1965, I wasn't wholly there; only "present" for the last decade or so, that is to say conscious of the world around me, although in fourth grade (1950) there was the introduction of Robert Weaver, African-American to our class--the only black in our school. The kids, the pastor, and the nuns took it in stride as I recall--some parents tried to raise a ruckus, but didn't succeed.
I was surprised at how early the Summer Schools of Catholic Action came on the scene, ditto CISCA. I thought they were newbies when I was in high schools, apparently not. The other surprise, noted in the review, was the photo of the 1950 CYO team on the cover of "Crossing Parish Boundaries," Black and White, Male and Female--all in bathing suits--more clevage than you might guess for 1950.
Found the whole book fascinating.