"the Andalusian tribes setting the lay of Nebraska alight"

For our Friday traditio this week I offer more cutting-edge eschatology, this time from Colin Meloy of The Decemberists who sings Calamity Song off their new album The King of is Dead. One always makes comparisons. The Decemberists strike me as a mix between They Might Be Giants, REM, and Weezer. Not a bad mix that!

Hetty Green/Queen of supply-side bonhomie bone drag/if you know what I mean/On the road/It's well-advised to follow your own path/In the year of the chewable Ambien tab

Today is the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary- Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Cardinal Reinhard Marx: Sage observations

Cardinal Reinhard Marx is the current archbishop of Munich und Freising, the former see of Pope Benedict XVI. At 58, His Eminence is the youngest cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. He has written a book, Das Kapital: Ein Plädoyer für den Menschen, that very badly needs to be translated into English.

Back in 2009, after the publication of his book, Cardinal Marx did an interview with the Italian magazine 30 Giorni. This interview reinforces several aspects of a post I did a week ago Saturday on Church teaching derived mainly from JPII's Centesimus Annus and Benedict's most recent encyclical, Caritas in veritate. I have no doubt that Cardinal Marx contributed to and consulted on the latter encylical. I was struck by how relevant his insights from a little more than two years ago are to what is happening today (i.e., the Wall Street occupation and the spreading of this protest against those who opportunistically move capital with no regard for the common good, the passing of Steve Jobs, the insistence of many in the U.S. on fairer taxation policies, resisting the regressive schemes being proposed)

Recalling the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Cardinal Marx said,

I remember Bush senior saying that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism there was the possibility of building a new world order. John Paul II, back in 1991, in Centesimus Annus, warned that radical capitalist ideology would not open the path to the future. And that what was wanted was a morally alert market economy, oriented towards global welfare. In fact, that radical capitalist ideology has become the social model. The narrow view has prevailed that leaves to the market the monopoly on all human relationships. And this has led the world into a dead end. If you look back now, at the thinking, and slogans of twenty years ago, that stressed the emergence of a new social order after the end of communism, one can say with certainty that the first attempt has failed

Speaking of Karl Marx, His Eminence said that he "some of his analyses" allow us to understand the dynamics of the present moment (2009= after the beginning of the global crisis). Cardinal Marx notes as an example of one thing the other Marx's analysis enables us to grasp is "the globalization of capital" and concomitant "reduction of labor to commodity on a global scale." He states clearly that Marx's "remedy" was incorrect because he was incorrect about the nature of the human person, conceiving of human beings materially. In addition to "being at odds with the vision of Christian anthropology," Karl Marx's materialist conception the human person, according to Cardinal Marx, "does not correspond with the datum of reality." His Eminence goes on to note that this same critique can be applied that "other materialistic image" of human beings, "the triumphant one conveyed by capitalist ideology, whereby the only real man in terms of the existent is homo oeconomicus, man as a function of economic processes, and the rest is an incidental and redundant trifle."

Reinhard Cardinal Marx

Speaking of the neo-conservatives, he makes it very clear that "the Church is not against the modern world, freedom, democracy, pluralism." However, in not opposing these historical phenomena we must resist the temptation to reduce "Christianity to religious ideology propping the market economy." "On some issues such as the defense of life and the family," he continues, "the so-called neo-cons, are fully in line with the Church. But I don’t understand how one can define oneself neo-conservative and put all one’s trust in the capitalist model." He then follows with something I think most people in the U.S. might find incomprehensible: "Capitalism is dynamic, it’s not conservative, it’s very progressive. It doesn’t conserve social and cultural situations as it found them, it changes them and often distorts them by introducing new paradigms and clichés. Whereas one often sees this kind of pact linking those who nurture traditional values of conservation with capitalism. But the two things don’t go well together."

Regarding the cultural and societal situation Christians find themselves in today, he wisely observes that "we won’t get through it with catchwords about the wickedness of society, or the alleged errors made by the Pope, or priestly celibacy and other secondary issues. All these things serve only to hide and evade the only important question. That is, what does it mean to be Christians today. What does it mean that following Jesus today..." (underlining emphasis mine). Along with Pope Benedict, Cardinal Marx, holds that "the liturgy will decide the fate of the Church. If the Mass is not celebrated well, all our talk, our pronouncements, our encyclicals are of no use."

He concludes the interview by commenting on his episcopal motto- Ubi Spiritus Domini, ibi libertas ("Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty"):

I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that freedom is considered counter to the preaching of the Church. And that many people think Church and freedom are incompatible. It’s a key phrase of St Paul’s. The question of what freedom means will be crucial in the time ahead...

...Freedom means choosing good in freedom. And the same thing is valid in the Church. The freest phrase that a man can utter is "I love you". And when one says it, one depends in some way on the object of one’s love. This is true in marriage, in the priestly life, it’s true for every baptized person who answers Jesus’ question: "Do you love me?" with "Lord, you know that I love you". And even in the Church, it is through that love that one can live in freedom

Prelates like Reinhard Marx, who I have mentioned before, in 2007 and in 2010, when he was created a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, give me great hope and help me to see clearly and concretely that the Spirit is at work in the Church throughout the world at every level.

Apprehending the mystery of one's "I" is not a technological endeavor

I am reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities for the first time. It is a truly masterful and descriptive work. I am still in the first section, entitled "A Sort of Introduction":

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is exactly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move more frantically ever since, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry.

This seems an appropriate thing to post on the day that Steve Jobs passed away. Don't get me wrong, Jobs, as one brother deacon described him, "was Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Walt Disney all rolled into one." Nonetheless, the exponential explosion of technology seems to outpace and even threaten our humanity. As Don Gius, citing Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, pointed out "the bee knows the secret of the beehive, the ant knows the secret of its anthill, but man does not know his own secret." So, I think the question remains, have we gained reality, or, even more directly, do we even discern our own structure?

Some thoughts prompted by St. Francis

The liturgical memorial of St. Francis seems a great time to briefly reflect on ecology, which deals with the relationship of human beings to our natural environment. There is a lot of ink spilled over the vexing issue of global warming. On one side we have what we can certainly call alarmists and on the opposite end we have those who adamantly deny that human activity is having a deleterious effect on the world. Both these positions strike me as ideological and not grounded in reality.

The truth is our activities undoubtedly effect our environment. We know that carbon emissions create pollution, which contaminates air, ground, and water. We also know the environment can absorb a fair amount of what is generated, but we have an interest in reducing output. Our extensive use of chemicals is very problematic, too. It seems that even when it comes to our yards and gardens, instead of cultivating the earth, we launch a chemical attack against nature.

Just what the long term effects of pollution are is difficult to know, the data we collect must be analyzed stringently and objectively. In any case, we are better off reducing pollution, reducing our dependency on non-renewable fossil fuels, and fostering less-polluting and renewable sources of energy. Of course, this must be done in a sensible manner and not in the well-intentioned but ineffective way it was attempted in Spain, which unfortunately became something of a model for the Obama Administration and resulted in serious missteps like Solyndra. In other words, with John McCain, the perhaps overblown spectre of global warming aside, I can't help but think that we all benefit in both the long and short run from less pollution, cleaner air, soil, and water.

I am very happy that the Vatican is carbon neutral. I think this is a wonderful achievement, something for the Church to be proud of. We work hard at our house to use less and less energy, to recycle what we can, and to consume less across-the-board. It’s difficult, but that’s no reason to stop trying. St. Francis understood ecology, that is, his proper relationship to creation, which is one of stewardship, not domination.

Food plays perhaps the biggest role in ecology, what we eat, how it is produced, how much we eat. There is a reason that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. What is often forgotten is that the seven deadly sins have contrary virtues. I like the idea of virtue being contrary because in a fallen world to seek to acquire virtue is to go against the grain. The virtue contrary to gluttony is temperance. If gluttony means to overindulge, then temperance, which for Christians has always included certain forms of temporary, but recurring, abstinence, is about self-control and moderation.

In this political season when people are being deceptively turned against their own interests and the common good by the forces of greed, by those who insist that limitless acquisition is a virtue, we can all bear being reminded that the virtue that contradicts the deadly sin of greed is liberality, or generosity. Greed is the immoderate desire for earthly goods, whereas liberality, or generosity, focuses not on moderating one’s desires for earthly goods (See "temperance" above), but is concerned with a willingness to give what one has freely and without request for compensation or commendation. Writing on this subject always brings to my mind the powerful beginning of number twenty-one of Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progesso:

"He who has the goods of this world and sees his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how does the love of God abide in him?" Everyone knows that the Fathers of the Church laid down the duty of the rich toward the poor in no uncertain terms. As St. Ambrose put it: "You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich." These words indicate that the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional.

No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life

Those who ignore these teachings of the magisterium and who selectively prefer other teachings are like those who strain at gnats while swallowing camels. After the Gospel passages we have been reading these past Sundays, can there be any doubt about this?

Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi

Another who dedicated his life to just the kind of revolution I mentioned yesterday, is St. Francis of Assisi, whose memorial we celebrate today. Without doubt he remains the best-known saint and most loved saint.

Teaching on the life St. Francis is his General Audience on 27 January 2010, Pope Benedict noted "that Francis represents an alter Christus" and noted that this friar "was truly a living icon of Christ." His ideal, the Holy Father continued, was "to be like Jesus, to contemplate Christ in the Gospel, to love him intensely and to imitate his virtues." What Francesco sought above all to attain was both interior and exterior poverty, something he taught those who followed him.

Pope Benedict noted that "[t]he first Beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven' (Mt 5: 3) found a luminous fulfilment in the life and words of St Francis." So, what does St. Francis teach us? Too much to capture in a blog post certainly, but in this age of rampant consumerism and disregard for creation, Francis taught us that poverty is the best means of following "Christ with dedication and total freedom." Hence, we need to cultivate poverty, which is a means of growing in our trust of God. We do this, Benedict insists, "by adopting a sober lifestyle and a detachment from material goods."

In his still very remarkable film, The Flowers of St. Francis, Roberto Rossellini filmed a vignette of Brother Ginepro, one of Francis' friars, who grew tired of not being able to join his brothers in preaching because he had to cook. So, he decides to cook all of the food that they have, estimating it will last them two weeks. This ingenious idea would allow him to preach instead of staying behind to cook. Francis gives Ginepro permission to preach, but there is a condition- that Ginepro start each sermon with the words, "I talk and talk yet I accomplish little."

St. Francis of Assisi, pray for us.

"So, you say you want a revolution?"

In this budding political season, in which it is very difficult for me not to be disheartened, I am reminded that my salvation and that of the world is not brought about through politics, electoral or ecclesial. We are always promised progress, a more glorious and prosperous future. This pseudo-promise (it is false because it cannot be realized, at least not by political and juridical means) prompted Luigi Giussani to ask, in whose hands would we entrust this promise, assuming for a moment these means could bring about the desired end?

It seems that regardless of our ideological and political pre-dispositions, we are content to entrust ourselves to the powerful, to "those who have the force and circumstances others do not. Those rich, who perhaps no longer rise to the top by the sweat of their brow, but are born with a certain shrewdness for the political life or the use of an inheritance" (The Religious Sense 78).

Due to this, as well as the rise of technocrat with all that entails, Giussani insisted "that there must be a revolution for the defense of what is human, and this revolution can only come about under the banner of religiosity. It must be authentically religious, and therefore, with authentic Christians on the front lines" (79).

John O'Donohue

One such person was John O'Donohue, who wrote:

While our [Western] culture is all gloss and pace on the outside, within it is too often haunted and lost. The commercial edge of so-called "progress" has cut away a huge region of human tissue and webbing that held us in communion with one another. We have fallen out of belonging

For Christians, especially Catholic Christians, we become, as Pope Benedict noted in his homily in Germany the Sunday before last:

The Lord concludes his parable with harsh words: “Truly, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the harlots believed him, and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him” (Mt 21:32). Translated into the language of our time, this statement might sound something like this: agnostics, who are constantly exercised by the question of God, those who long for a pure heart but suffer on account of our sin, are closer to the Kingdom of God than believers whose life of faith is “routine” and who regard the Church merely as an institution, without letting their hearts be touched by faith

Recognizing your own presence as blessing

"There is a quiet light that shines in every heart," the late John O'Donohue wrote at the beginning of his lovely book To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. This light, while it always burns, "draws no attention to its itself." As O'Donohue described it, this light is what "illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life."

If this light did not burn within us, O'Donohue insisted, "our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing." As it is, "Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life."

I was struck by this passage after reading (and posting on) what Giussani wrote in The Religious Sense in response to Theodor Adorno's insistence that not only is the hope that is part and parcel of our common humanity false, but that it is our recognition of its falsity that allows us to live. Wisely, Giussani does not make fun of this position because it is one sincerely held by many people both implicitly and explicitly. It is the basis on which a way of living is built that denies transcendence even while recognizing and cherishing our innate, existential desire for complete fulfillment. It seems to me that O'Donohue does a beautiful job of mediating the space between the two positions. He does not do this by showing how to get from the one to the other, which is the kind of thing we concern ourselves about too much, but showing us our hearts.

As I was driving up the road to my house from our annual diocesan deacon's retreat, wonderfully led by Owen Cummings (the last conference of which he entitled The Gift of John O'Donohue, about whom poet David Whyte said, "John was a love-letter to humanity"), I was driving up the hill looking at the mountains with leaves starting to catch fire against the blue sky featuring high, white clouds and one of the quotes from O'Donohue Owen put in his retreat notes happened to me- "A day in the mountains or by the ocean helps your body unclench" and to "recover your deeper rhythm." Even seeing this, sometihng inside me moved, loosened.

It also dawned on me at the very end of the retreat that the best mentors trust the ones they mentor and understand that mentoring means helping someone to stand his/her own two feet confident that s/he is both gifted and immensely loved.