Presente! – Palm Sunday 24 March 2013

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Jeff

My sisters and brothers in Christ, today is the celebration of Palm Sunday–the entrance of our Lord Jesus into Jerusalem where he will be tried and executed through crucifixion. But on that entrance, the people stood up and shouted, “The King of Glory Comes, Hallelujah!”

We too, sisters and brothers, must shout, for if we do not, the very stones will condemn our silence with their praise of Jesus! Imagine, the stones and the trees, the hills and valleys shouting out “Glory to God!” It happens every day, but we are too deaf to hear. And every day, we crucify one more valley, one more tree, one more lake for our lack of hearing their shouting.

Today is also the celebration of the passing of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of El Salvador. Why was he martyred? Because he stood up and shouted out–these people are God’s people! These people must too shine, for their lives, like our lives, shout out to the coming of the Kingdom! But we do not hear their shouts, not do we hear the screams of their bodies, trodden under the feat of rampant capitalism and fevered nationalism. Their cries join the cries of the earth–for they are the cries of the poor.

And Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is the response: The Lord hears the cry of the poor!

Why do we not hear their cries? Or do we hear them and ignore them? Are we unwilling to stand with Romero and live a simple life of love of neighbor and the condemnation of violence in the name of profit?

I say to you, my brothers and sisters, the United States is a religious nation, and it’s religion is the idolism of money, fame, power–of materialism without spirit. We are called to stand up and shout out against this idolism–”The King of Glory Comes! Hallelujah!” For God is with us, my brothers and sisters. He is here in your hearts. Look to each other and see. He is here in the lives of every beggar on the street, of every homeless child sleeping in a shelter tonight, of every starving mother working two jobs just to keep a roof over the heads of her children.

We must rejoice at the coming of the Lord, and we too, we must lay our cloaks at the feet of Jesus in the poor who wonder our streets looking for someone to shout with them–

God is Love!

Abundant Wealth, Extreme Poverty

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Jeff

Drive through Grayson County, KY. You will see humble shacks, some falling apart, sitting next door to beautiful mansion-like homes with clean-cut green grass. We all know in any city, all you have to do is turn the “wrong” corner and you’ll move from a “nice” neighborhood to a run-down area.

We have wealth beyond compare! Yet, this wealth is concentrated in comparably few hands. And those hands become more wealthy and fewer as the years go by.

Why?

Many will claim that it’s not right to give to people who don’t earn their money. It makes them feel entitled, and all they’ll do is laze around and never work if they don’t have to. And besides, those few hands that hold the wealth earned it.

What goes unquestioned, continues to go unquestioned down the decades and years, is the whole idea that an individual earns something. What could any one person do to earn a billion dollars or 35 billion dollars? Yes, Bill Gates created a technology used across the world that makes people’s lives easier. But why do we say that he earned 35 billion dollars for that? This concept of “earning” is a judgment we make– it is a political judgment.

And when we make that political judgment, we make the related judgment that other people ought to earn their bread and their roof and that, in fact, some people never do. We make the judgment that an individual Hispanic woman who cleans rooms, picking up people’s trash and used condoms, flipping over heavy mattresses and changing sheets, and pushing a heavy vacuum cleaner, day in and day out for years does not earn $20k a year. Her work is worth the work of Gates, even though she affects as many people as he does and makes their lives easier.

Wealth distribution is a political choice we make everyday. You can deny that, but you would be wrong. You can argue that people ought to earn their bread and their roof, and, on the one hand, you would be right (if you meant that everyone should work), but on the other hand, you would be wrong (if you meant that a political decision about the worth of someone’s activities should determine whether that person is homeless and hungry or not).

It is a shame and a crisis– a true human tragedy, that we have enough material goods in this world to satisfy the needs of everyone, and yet so many millions suffer while so few thousands eat caviar and drink champagne.

Catholic Teaching and the 2012 Presidential Election

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Jeff

Last night I was part of a panel at Providence College on Catholic teaching and the current presidential election. We had a lively, if short, discussion on war, health care, environment, economy, and abortion.

I tried to emphasize in my answers that none of these things can be separated from the other. In fact, Catholic moral teaching is a seamless garment, and questions of life cannot be separated from questions of health care and environment or war.

The Christian faith is an integral unity, and thus it is incoherent to isolate some particular elements to the detriment of the whole of Catholic doctrine. A political commitment to a single isolated aspect of the Church’s social doctrine does not exhaust one’s responsibility towards the common good (Faithful Citizenship, ¶30)

So questions about the environment, for instance must be placed in conjunction with questions about abortion. In fact, I said last night and continue to hold today, if we treated our environment better we would have fewer abortions. Modern science and philosophy make a strict dichotomy between reason and nature, man and woman, etc. Our Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition admits no such dichotomy — Francis of Assisi represents this most brilliantly in his preaching to the wolves and animals of the forest.

We as Catholics have two major tasks:

First, we must emphasize charity in our interactions with each other. Fighting over politics or religion is a discredit to our tradition and the Christian love Jesus Christ gave us.

Second, we must look beyond the two-party fetishism of American politics and find a way forward that is truly Catholic and truly moral.

CORPUS CHRISTI, EUCHARIST, HUMAN BEINGS

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Dave

CORPUS CHRISTI, EUCHARIST, HUMAN BEINGS

Today (Feast of Corpus Christi) a friend of mine posted a YouTube link on FaceBook called GOD IN THE STREETS NEW YORK CITY. When I first clicked on it I was excited because I thought to myself, “Of course God is in the streets of New York City. God is found in the faces of the suffering, the homeless, the addicts, and everyone. Where else to find God than in New York City?”

Here is the link, which, as you will see, is not what I expected.

Now, I am not here to put down Eucharistic Adoration. For those who find nourishment there, I encourage it. But, as a Subversive Thomist, I must ask: Is the devotion to the Eucharistic Host an end in itself?

I wish to propose it can lead to something else.

We are sacramental. We believe in the absurd: That God is to be found, entirely and without any qualification, even in eating a small piece of bread.

But if we are going to the Eucharist with that idea as if it were an end in itself, we may be missing out on the wild miracle Jesus sought to awaken us to: That God, really and without reservation, is to be found anywhere and everywhere, and even especially in our fellow human beings.

The flesh and blood of God, of the God who walked with and among us, can even be found in the people and the real life situations in New York City. The poor and hungry, the criminals and prostitutes, the angry and busy, the lonely and needy: All of these should awaken us to the face of God.

This is taught even now in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

CCC 1397: The Eucharist commits us to the poor. To receive in truth the Body and Blood of Christ given up for us, we must recognize Christ in the poorest, his brethren:
You have tasted the Blood of the Lord, yet you do not recognize your brother,. . . . You dishonor this table when you do not judge worthy of sharing your food someone judged worthy to take part in this meal. . . . God freed you from all your sins and invited you here, but you have not become more merciful.”

Pay attention to that second sentence. “To receive in truth….” if our reception of the Eucharist is not awakening us to finding God outside of the Eucharistic Host, if our sacramental experiences do not help us see God in our fellow human beings, then we are not receiving the Eucharist at all.

And on this feast of Corpus Christi, if our adoration of the Host, in all its piety, is not helping us find Christ in the poor and suffering, then it isn’t corpus christi at all.

And so we should all seek to “Share our food” and “become more merciful,” or else we ought to forget about Corpus Christi processions.

Pray for me as I am moving to New York City. Pray for me that we might all become more merciful and more willing to share our food, and in so doing, we might all become more appreciative of the real truth of the body of Christ.

Subversive Thomism

Living Justly and Loving Kindness in a World on the Brink of Collapse

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Presente! – Palm Sunday 24 March 2013