Selected Writings of Prof. Dan Maguire

Poverty, Population and the Catholic Tradition

Daniel C. Maguire, S.T.D. (Doctor of Sacred Theology)

The following address was delivered on May 19, 1993 as part of the Panel on Religious and Ethical Perspectives on Population Issues convened by the NGO Steering Committee at Prepcom II of the International Conference on Population and Development at the United Nations.

 

Because I speak as a theologian trained in Rome in the Catholic tradition, it might seem that my testimony is unnecessary since the Vatican is represented here in the dual roles of a nationstate and a non-governmental observer. Since, however, Catholicism is considerably richer than any segment of it, including the Vatican, and since it is essential for the preparatory committee to understand that in order to avoid sociological naivete, my testimony from the field of Catholic theology will not be seen as superfluous. Although many of the views that I will express - particularly in the areas of artificial contraception and abortion - are not the views of the Vatican, they are the dominant views of Catholic theology and this Preparatory Committee must be aware of that if it is to do justice to the Catholic peoples and to Catholic thought.

In many ways, the Vatican and I are at one. I do agree with Pope Paul VI in Populorum Progressio (The Development of Peoples) when he says that "demographic increases" can outstrip "available resources." I agree, too, with the US Catholic bishops who observed that "the earth's resources are finite" and can be threatened by population growth. I agree with the Vatican's statement at the European Population Conference that "unwanted migration is prevented by development" and that population declines "when people are confident that their existing children can survive." I agree also with Pope Pius XII that there can be economic, social, and health reasons to limit births and even to have child-free marriages. I agree further with the position of the Vatican and others that the limitations of births is not a simple panacea for our world's crises or a substitute for radical redistributional justice.

Contraception and Abortion

However, speaking out of Catholic theology, I would say that the time for candor is past due. The issues are too serious for less. I strongly disagree with the Vatican's position that artificial contraception is unethical or that voluntary abortion may never be licit. In the technical terms of Catholic moral theology, the moral permissibility of artificial contraception and voluntary abortion is a "solidly probable opinion," i.e., one that all Catholics may follow in good conscience. Contraception is not only licit but may often be morally mandatory. Likewise, the choice of an abortion - a choice that, ironically, becomes more necessary when artificial contraception is banned - is a moral option for women in many circumstances. That is common teaching among Catholic and Protestant moral theologians.

In 1992, 91 million people were added to the earth's population, equal to the populations of Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom, and 84 million of these were in the suffering Third World. A million women a year die from reproductive-related causes, the equivalent of a Holocaust every six years. Human genius that has the potential to make the planet a paradise has savaged the environment as no other species could and has put us in terminal peril. These problems will not go away by throwing condoms at them, but they will also not go away without condoms. Furthermore, as Worldwatch Institute has noted, abortion has played an important role in nearly every nation that has moved from a high fertility rate to replacement level rates. Artificial contraception and abortion are not the final or main solution to our ills, but they are necessary options and their moral respectability must be forthrightly maintained and vigorously defended.

Catholic theology has not traditionally been obtuse on these subjects. The first real systematic theology on abortion was done in the 15th century by Archbishop Antonius of Florence and the Dominican theologian John of Naples. Both permitted early abortions to save the women's life, a broad exception in that day. The openness to abortion was further expanded in the 16th century, and in the early 17th century, Father Thomas Sanchez, a Jesuit theologian, could not find a single Catholic theologian who did not approve of some abortions. Throughout this time, and later, the consistent teaching held that the early fetus, prior to about 90 days, was not yet an ensouled person. (This would include all abortions achieved by RU 486.)

When I published an article on this history two years ago in The New York Times, the editors mentioned that they were completely unaware of these subtleties in the Catholic tradition. Understandably so, because the tradition has been misrepresented, but this must not cloud our discussions in this important assembly. This tradition has more to offer than a simplistic negative.

As an aide to Raymond Flynn, the envoy of the United Nations to the Vatican, said: "The Vatican, obviously, is not a country in the traditional sense. It's a moral force in the world." On top of this, the Vatican, as Catholic leader Frances Kissling says, has the difficulty of being a state without women and children among its citizens. Since the church is predominately made up of women and children, this is a considerable representational debit. Catholic theology on abortion and contraception was written almost exclusively by men. It is time now for the women to speak. They will tell us that coercive motherhood may be a greater villain than coercive birth restraint. And coerced motherhood is increasing, especially among the poor.

Catholic theology at its best has rested on a tripod, consisting of the laity, the hierarchy, and the theologians. These functioned, as Father Avery Dulles, S.J. said, as multiple magisteria, "complementary and mutually corrective." Some hierarchy want a monopod Church, but that would not be Catholic. They laity, said Pius XII, "are the Church." We have heard too little from the pod of the laity and theologians have been often intimidated. Let these two pods speak out and you will be surprised at what they can contribute to the cause that brings us here today.

The Place of Social Justice

Drawing from Hebrew prophetic springs, the Catholic witness to the radical restructuring of the social and economic order can be considerable. Theologically unwarranted dogmatism on abortion and artificial contraception is a distraction that dishonors a tradition that was not without distinction in its theories of social and distributive justice. My remarks may seem impolite, but they area cri de coeur.

Let us blend Catholic witness and its announced preferential option for the poor with the wisdom of a Ghandi who said that true development puts first those whom society puts last. Let us join the Hebrew prophets who taught that poverty and wealth are correlative, and that the responsibility for poverty is on the rich, not on the backs of the poor.

Let us remember, too, that many of us here are elitists in this discussion. We stand in harsh judgment on the "draconian" measures taken in India and China to control births. But could it not be that these nations are harbingers for our future? Are they not teaching us that you can arrive at a draconian critical mass where "draconian" measures are the last defense against disaster? It is not a little interesting that Saint Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, approved of limiting by law the size of the family, and that he also said that it is not possible for a community to allow an infinite growth of the population. Now, law obviously involves sanctions to be effective. At what point of crisis do we declare some sanctions draconian? Suppose the Chinese system broke down and Western style individualistic freedom reigned. Are Western critics ready to face the demographic consequences of that development on spaceship Earth?

Anthony Lewis of The New York Times visited China some ten years ago. His entourage stopped in the middle of farm country. They thought there might be some dozen or two farmers working in the vicinity. Quickly they were surrounded not be dozens, but by hundreds of people, each working small plots. They noticed that even the strip of land between the narrow road and the footpath was cultivated. The Chinese are feeding themselves, but they are, in an ominous sign to the rest of us, skirting the limits. "Take care," they may be saying to us. "Stop your foolish quibbles over contraceptive means and choose justice and sanity before coercion is all you have left."

The soul of Hebraic religion is in Deuteronomy, chapter 30, which poetically puts these words into the mouth of God: I have set before you life and I have set before you death. Choose life for the sake of your children. At a conference in Mexico City last year I met Latin American women who said that in some poor areas, they put off baptism until the children are five or six years old. Baptism celebrates the conviction that the children now have enough strength to live. They also told us of parents who stop feeding the frail child in an effort to save other children who are stronger. These children are born into a world that spends more on the military than on health, education, and hunger relief.

These problems are soluble. The choice of life and the choice of death are set before us. For these children, we have chosen death. It is for us, in the 1994 international conference in Cairo, to choose life.

 

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About the Author:

Daniel C. Maguire teaches ethics at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He is also President of the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics. He is the author of many books, including Death by Choice (1974) and The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity (1993).

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Why Do Americans Hate Children?

Show me how you treat kids and I will tell you what you are.

By

Dan Maguire

There is a simple principle that can test the moral spirit of a people and their government. Here it is: what is good for kids, is good; what is bad for kids is ungodly. Let's take that principle and look into the American soul. I warn you in advance: the U.S. doesn't get a passing grade.

My main guide here will be the recent blockbuster book by Gloria Albrecht: HITTING HOME: FEMINIST ETHICS, WOMEN'S WORK, AND THE BETRAYAL OF "FAMILY VALUES," Continuum, New York, 2002). Albrecht makes it clear that our nation does not think that having babies is in the national interest. (How could we miss the point that if we have no babies, there is no tomorrow?) Since 1920 the number of women in the work force rose from 21 percent to 60 percent. The economy is such that one earner per family is not enough. 58 percent of women with a baby under one year are in the labor force and 77% of mothers with kids under six kids. Only 23% stay at home. This means many children are latchkey kids, unsupervised for many hours per week. Is that in the national interest?

Obviously, children need care but the ruling assumption in this land of ours is that if you have a baby, it's your problem. Child care is looked on as a consumer item. If you can afford it, great; if not, tough! 96 % of working parents pay full costs of childcare. What government help there is, is inadequate. Only 12 percent of employers provide childcare. Of course, all this hits the poor hardest. Low income families who pay for their childcare spend 35 percent of their incomes on it compared to 7 percent of income spent by non-poor families.

Thus, in democratic America the quality of child care varies according to class. Once society decides that child care is a consumer item and not a basic human right that deserves national support, market logic kicks in, and you only get what you pay for. Of course, and ironically, according to classical economics, those who receive the benefits should pay the costs. The benefits of healthy, well cared for, well educated children accrue to the nation not just to the families. They are tomorrow's citizens.

Because they are the bearers of children, women are discriminated against in the workplace. They are denied opportunities not just when they have children, but by the very fact that they can have children.

Our attitude toward children also shows through in this telling statistic: the median wage of childcare workers in 1997 was $7.03 per hour, three cents less than that of parking lot attendants--and this is usually without benefits. These workers could not afford child care for themselves. Obviously caring for children is not work that we value.

Has anyone heard from the so-called "pro-life" people on any of this? Could it be that their interest in life is short circuited by birth?

Here is another look into the American heart: according to the Temporary Aid to Need Family program, caring for someone else's children is classified as work; caring for your own is not!

As Albrecht says: "The United States lags behind all other industrialized nations in addressing family/work concerns through public policies." A White House report in December 2000 said that "states were able to provide childcare assistance to only 12 percent of all federally eligible low-income working families." Albrecht states the assumption of U.S. welfare "reform.": "There is widespread social agreement that economically poor mothers cannot, by definition, be good mothers unless they work away from their homes and their children." Poor parents can often not afford to work because of the cost of transportation, clothing, and childcare needs at home. In a United Nations survey of 152 countries, the U.S. was one of only six countries that does not have a national policy requiring paid maternity leave.

Some 40 states are deeply in debt and are shortening the school week and cutting certain classes and programs. According to the New York Times (January 12, 2003) 60%of Americans oppose raising taxes to correct this. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is spending billions to ship soldiers to the middle east while the states back home starve and victimize kids.

There are countries that do not hate their children. Albrecht: "Many European countries already provide universal healthcare, childcare, and requirements benefits, as well as generous (by U.S.. standards) paid parental and family leave, paid vacation time and unemployment policies." Swedes currently are entitled to eighteen months of paid leave with job protection that can be prorated over the first 8 years of a child's life. France provides universal childcare to all toilet- trained children, and single mothers receive government payments until their children are over the age of three. In Denmark all children up to 18 years of age have access to free dental care for both routine examinations and treatment. Europeans are guaranteed longer vacations times, four to six weeks, and this is protected by legislation.

Americans bask in a surreal self-image, seeing themselves as a "kind and gentle" people. Most would be offended to read in Duane Elgin's book PROMISE AHEAD: "The United States is the stingiest developed nation in terms of the proportion of total wealth that it donates." We should not be surprised. If we can treat our kids the way we do, why would we be generous to strangers?

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The Loneliness of the Truth Teller

Prof. Dan Maguire

(Blog at Huss Post Religion)

With the decline of belief in a personal God and an afterlife of bliss or punishment, many modern folk overlook the fact that, aside from their varied dogmas, the world's religions are troves of insight into human psychology, housing hard earned wisdom bred of centuries of experience.

Take, for example, the striking conviction of the Jewish and Christian biblical writers that people perversely seem to want to be deceived. The third century Christian Tertullian said that "the truth appears to be instinctively hated." The prophet Hosea lamented "there is no truth ... in the land!" (4:1) Jeremiah offered a dare: "Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem and see for yourselves; search her wide squares; can you find anyone who seeks the truth?" (5:1) Our leaders speak "lies," said Jeremiah and the "people love to have it so." (5:31) Isaiah moaned that people "prefer smooth words and seductive visions." (30:10) As a result: "Truth stumbles in the market-place and honesty is kept out of court, so truth is lost to sight." (30:10;59:14)

They dunned us repeatedly with the question: "Have you eyes and you cannot see, ears and you cannot hear?" Not surprisingly, they added another observation -- you keep falling into pits that you yourselves have dug.

An ancient Latin adage put it this way: mundus vult decipi, people want to be deceived.

The Contemporaneity of It All

These biblical and classical authors who said all this wrote before sub-prime mortgages and derivatives were ever devised, and none of them had lived through an American political campaign. What they did discern was that people don't mind deception and folks in power are more than happy to accommodate them.

One has to wonder how the biblical prophets would deal with things like our military budget and our American health care "system" -- and our refusal to face the truth about either one of them.

Squandering on Kill-power

All the debts of all the U.S. states could be canceled by what it cost in a single year to fight our unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We spend around $17 billion a day on the military. If only Jeremiah could return and address the House and Senate on that. He'd skewer them for being hell-bent on slicing education budgets and Medicaid for the poor while engorging the military/industrial complex. He'd then go out onto the steps of the Capitol and blast the press for not hammering at this madness. Next Jeremiah would excoriate both presidential candidates for not making this budgetary plunder the highlight of their campaigns.

All the Jewish and Christian prophets would have pointed out the terrible truth that we cannot bear to hear -- that military science has outwitted itself. It has miniaturized weapons, including suitcase-size atomic bombs, making them available to disgruntled individuals and small groups. Drone technology leaped from Pandora's box and democratized the possibility of small-group, remote-control sneak attacks. Long gone is the predictability of state vs. state conflicts. A raw vulnerability has dislodged superpower illusions. The prophets would draw lessons from that, just as they did from their own 9/11, the Babylonian Captivity.

Posthumous Nobel Prizes

Isaiah deserves two posthumous Nobel Prizes, one in peace and one in economics and all that for just a single verse, 32:17. He said, in what I would call the most important moral/political lesson of the Bible, that unless you plant the form of justice that eliminates poverty (Sedaqah) your weapons will never bring you peace and security (Shalom). To update that text: as long as your yearly discretionary budget gives 60 percent to war and only 6 percent to the State Department, you will have wars and rumors of wars. The State Department ought to be called the Peace Department -- the arm of government that should be diagnosing tensions, defusing crises and planning collaboration on corrosive issues like the unsettling inequality of wealth, the royal power of untamed corporations, the enslavement of workers in the poor world under the euphemism of "labor arbitrage," the ongoing ecocide that threatens all life on the planet.

Health Care Debacle

Micah, Hosea and Jesus would probably have had only two words to say on our health care mess: Nikki White. She graduated from college full of verve, ambition and delight. She contracted Lupus erythematosus, a serious condition but manageable by modern medicine. Tragically, she was born in the United States, and not in Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Sweden, etc. Because she was born in the richest country in the world, she is dead. She made too much money to qualify for Medicaid and too little to pay for her needed health care. She died at 32. Insurance companies had no pity on her; they don't major in pity. When she was finally hospitalized the hospital under federal law had to treat her. She begged: "Please don't let me die." Over 10 weeks she had 25 operations but it was all too late. Had that money, and even much less of it, been spent sooner, but no. This is the United States, which imagines itself "a kind and gentle' people.

The biblical prophets would have taken Nikki White's picture into Congress and accused those well insured men and women of murder. Those old prophets, those ancient truth-speakers, were awfully blunt. They didn't indulge in politeness when greed turned murderous and unpopular truth boldly spoken was the only possible remedy.

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The Church IS a Democracy

By Daniel C. Maguire, Marquette University

No real reform of the Catholic Church is possible in areas of clergy sexual abuse or elsewhere unless two false "truisms" are corrected. These regnant falsities, perceived not only as facts, but as binding norms, are: "the Church is not a democracy" and, the implied converse, "the Church is a monarchy, governed by papal and episcopal monarchs." Nothing is intelligible outside of its history, said Teilhard de Chardin, and that holds for this monarchical deviation that paralyzes the contemporary Roman Catholic Church.

Democracy is not an alien secular concept. In fact it has better biblical roots than the claims of pope and diocesan bishops to privileged rights to teach and rule. Western democratic theory is in deep debt to the moral revolution of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. When the ancient Hebrews took the symbol of "the image of God," long used to shore up monarchs, and say it applied not just to pharaohs and kings but to all of us, the seeds of democracy--and even of our Bill of Rights--were sown. When Jesus addressed governance he said: "You know that in the world the recognized rulers lord it over their subjects, and their great men make them feel the weight of authority. This is not the way with you; among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever wants to be the first must be the willing slave of all." (Mark 10:42-43) C.H. Dodd thinks that this thought was for Jesus "fundamental to the whole idea of the divine commonwealth." It was the way government should function in any moral society.

Then whence the monarchical penchant of the Catholic Church? It starts with the papacy, which is the model then passed down to the monarchical bishops in individual dioceses. (Pope Paul VI accurately saw that the papacy was the main obstacle to ecumenism in our time. It is also, I would add, the main obstacle to church reform.) There was no pope in the early church.

The papacy as we have it was not part of the original ecclesial communities. As church historian Walter Ullmann says, as late as the year 313, "there was, as yet, no suggestion that the Roman church possessed any legal or constitutional preeminence." Leo decided to change that. The papacy as we know it is not Petrine, but Leonine. The Leo was Leo I, Bishop in Rome from 440 to 461, a Roman jurist who cast the Roman episcopate in terms borrowed directly from the Roman imperial court. The one who was called Summus pontifex (supreme pontiff), who held the plentitudo potestatis (the fullness of monarchical power) and the principatus (primacy) was the Roman Emperor. Leo grabbed all this language and applied it to himself. As Walter Ullmann says, "this papal plentitude of power was...a thoroughly juristic notion, and could be understood only...against the Roman Law background." This lording over notion directly contradicted the Jesus text on the proper nature of governance.

As Ullmann notes, Leo's claim was political; he was reacting against the power claims of the church in Constantinople, and he and others in the Roman church made no effort to base their new claims on the text in Matthew's gospel..."thou are Peter, etc."

The moment stands out as a classic failure of fifth century theology to exercise its magisterial role of critic, especially as critic of those who would make unjust power claims within the Christian community. There was a failure to recognize, as Leonard Swidler writes that "the model of how to live an authentically human life that Jesus of the Gospels presents...is an egalitarian model." The all-male claim to church governing power staked out in our canon law has no sound biblical roots. As Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza writes: "While--for apologetic reasons--the post-Pauline and post-Petrine writers seek to limit women's leadership roles in the Christian community to roles which are culturally and religious acceptable, the evangelists called Mark and John highlight the alternative character of the Christian community, and therefore accord women apostolic and ministerial leadership."

Most Catholic theologians today are scandalously timid in reimagining the new forms the church should be taking today. For at least a century after Jesus the idea of a monarchical bishop in charge of a diocese was not the norm. There is theological room for courageous creativity in discussing church governance and leadership. Now is the tempus opportunum. Our bishops have been demonstrating convincingly that they do not possess any special charism of leadership. Our hierarchy are theologically starved by their own choosing. Avery Cardinal Dulles in his Presidential address to The Catholic Theological Society of America, aptly noted that the hierarchy "seem to evade in a calculated way the findings of modern scholarship." They speak "without broad consultation with the theological community. In stead, a few carefully selected theologians are asked to defend a pre-established position."

The early church knew its freedom in the Spirit and did not shy from helpful adaptation. The list of ministries in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and Ephesians 4 all vary without apology. When they saw need for changes they changed. They knew there was no blueprint handed down from heaven. In the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 20 the terms episcopos, which came to be "bishop") and the term presbyter (which came to be priest) seem to be used interchangeably. In 1 Peter 2, the whole church is described a "priestly." Indeed the term priest is lubricious and still open to change and adaptation. As professor Sandra Schneiders writes: "Suffice it to say that there is wide consensus among reputable New Testament scholars that there were no Christian priests in New Testament times and therefore certainly none ordained or appointed by Jesus. The priesthood does not emerge in the early church until the end of the first century at the earliest and, even at that relatively late date, the evidence is scanty and unclear."

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger put it so wisely some years ag "The church is not the petrification of what once was, but its living presence in every age. The church's dimension is therefore the present and the future no less than the past." (The term "petrification" is interesting in this context.)

The Catholic Church today is wracked by world-wide scandals regarding sexual abuse by priests and bishops. Arbitrarily enforced celibacy is key to this but not the main problem of this church. False hierarchical claims limply supported by a cowed laity and a timid theological "magisterium" (a term used by Thomas Aquinas) is the Catholic problem. Paul had some relevant advice regarding the spiritual democracy that the church should be: "In each of us the Spirit is manifested in one particular way, for some useful purpose." (I Cor. 12: 7) With those credentials in hand, he would tell an infantilized church (patriarchy does that): "Do not be childish, my friends...be grown-up in your thinking." (I. Cor. 14: 20) If this church is to revive, the recovery will be led not by the Leonine hierarchy but by a mature laity and by theologians who brace their knowledge with courage, the virtue that St. Thomas Aquinas said is the "precondition of all virtue."

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Population, Poverty and Sustainable Development

By Daniel C. Maguire

President, The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health, and Ethics

To frame my remarks, I have harnessed eight keynoters or tone-setters. The first keynoter is Gerd Theissen a German scripture scholar. He noted the human absorption during the last hundred years with finding "the missing link" between apes and true humanity. He suggests calling off the search. The "missing link" has been found. It is us. We are a stage toward true humanity. We have not reached it. If we had reached it we could not live comfortably with holocausts and starvation and the devastation of the earth. No, true humanity is not yet. It certainly is not us.

The second keynoter is Robert Heilbroner, the political economist. Heilbroner looked behind our veils of respectability and concluded that "there is a barbarism hidden behind the superficial amenities of life." In a similar vein, the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel cited "the secret obscenity, the unnoticed malignancy of established patterns of indifference." This enduring malignancy was the target of all biblical prophecy. It is also the root cause of our ecocrisis. 

Next, anthropologist Loren Eiseley's indictment: "It is with the coming of human beings that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching the power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned--escaped, it may be--spewed out of nature contending in a final giant's game against its master." And we are winning in that game. We are defeating nature---and, of course, ourselves, nature's supposed pinnacle. 

Next keynoter, philosopher John Dewey: Dewey noted that we would all agree that a U.S. senator who called his broker before a key vote to ask how his vote could best enhance his personal portfolio. Such a senator who had concern only for his personal enrichment is by any definition corrupt. Similarly, said Dewey, a citizen who votes his own portfolio and financial advantage is equally corrupt. To vote is an act of citizenship not of personal aggrandizement. It is an act of social justice geared to the common good. It is only because our social consciences are so undeveloped that we can live and vote without regard to our moral obligations to the common good.

The next keynoter is a cartoon that pictured a father and mother at a kitchen table with their three children. Bills are spread across the table. The father announces grimly: "Because of inflationary pressures, we are going to have to let two of you go." The joke is a good one because in a family or household, you don't let people go; you find new modes of sharing. And that leads into our next keynoter, Douglas Meeks who says that the first and last question from the biblical perspective is "will everyone in the household get what it takes to live?" Jewish and Christian scriptures see the human race as a household. Hardship is met by sharing, not by writing off the poor. In fact in biblical perspective, you cannot speak of the poor. You must speak of our poor. The difference is crucial. They are our poor and they are our problem.

And finally the ringing challenge of Deuteronomy 30 which pictures God as saying that he has set before us life and he has set before us death, and he has begged us to choose life for the sake of our children. All of Torah is in those words, and a look at the earth, most of which is a slum, witnesses to our perverse and persistent choice of death.

Looking at the Sun

To understand our current sins of earth-savaging, over-consuming, and over-populating we have to look at facts that are, like the sun, too painful for our direct gaze. Instinctively we look away. To know and remember that from which we shy we need a primer, a short catechism of the basic interrelated facts about population-consumption-ecology...and the three must be hyphenated and seen together. We must return to this primer frequently. Here are some suggestions from my primer:

Oysters are a good beginning. The fabled Chesapeake Bay once enjoyed a thorough filtration by the massive oyster population every three days. Thus cleansed, the Bay flourished and teemed with life. Now the oysters are so depleted that the filtration occurs only once a year with portentous results.

All life depends on cropland and water. So too, all economies. As Undersecretary of State Timothy WIrth says, "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment." Yet, topsoil, that precious and thin layer of life support, that takes centuries to develop, is washing like blood into the seas and rivers. In 30 years, China, where one of five humans lives, lost in cropland the equivalent of all the farms in France, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. All of China's major rivers are polluted. Less than one percent of the earth's water is usable by humans and it is unevenly distributed. Most of Africa, the Near East, northern Asia and Australia suffer from chronic water shortages. Threats of water wars are already on the horizon. 

The seas, like the land, are spoiling. Of the seventeen major world fisheries, nine are in decline and all the others are threatened by unsustainable fishing practices. Per capita supplies of water, fish, meat, and grain are declining.

Not surprisingly, people, in solidarity with the decedent earth are dying too. Four million babies die yearly from diarrhea in the euphemistically entitled "developing world." Almost 15 million infants die yearly from poverty-related causes. Life-expectancy among the poorest in the world is 45 years.

And yet, with less earth to share, there are more and more of us. It took 10,000 generations to reach the first 2 1/2 billion; it took one generation to double it. Till the middle of the next century, the momentum is unstoppable. Overall fertility rates have been declining over the past 40 years but mortality rates are dropping even faster, and so our numbers inexorably grow.

World population is like a triangle, with the reproductive young at the wide base and the old at the narrow top. Until the model becomes a rectangle, with a more balanced distribution of young and old, the growth will not stop, nor does anyone expect it to. And 90 percent of the growth is in the poorest parts of the world.

Humanity hit this earth like a vicious plague. Only conscience and a sense of the sanctity and interconnectedness of all life can save us from our penchant for terracide. For many in the world, the apocalypse is now. Their famished bodies and the land on which they scramble to live are damaged already beyond repair. (The cropland of Haiti and Ethiopia, for example, is so depleted that it cannot feed its people even in the best of weather. Too much of the land has been killed.) We, the first world royalty can ignore all this; such is the way of royalty. But as kings learned to their eventual undoing, the dying goes on and our royal comfort is precarious because all life on this frail planet is linked.

Poverty

"The poverty of the poor is their ruin," says the Book of Proverbs.

And the ruin is not just material. Poverty rapes and kills the spirit of the poor. We underestimate its complexity and cruelty. There are four dimensions to poverty:

(1) Material limit. Poverty does mean a lack of material necessities. For the one billion people in "absolute poverty" the most basic essentials are critically lacking and death is fastening it grip on them. Note too that fewer than 3 billion people could eat as we eat, i.e. on a North American diet. We are almost 3 billion beyond that now. Limits have already been passed.

(2) Poverty strips the human spirit of its two indispensable prerequisites, the two things we cannot do without. They are, I submit, respect and hope. The opposite of respect is insult and as Aristotle said, insult is the root of all rebellion. Respect is the recognition that our humanity is valued at its worth, that others recognize that humanity is a shared glory and our possession of it is acknowledged. Poverty turns the goodness of the world into a taunt for it denies the poor the ecstasy of life that is their birthright. It is galling and killing to be so disvalued.

Insult is treatment that implicitly denies that we matter. African Americans in the United States, for example, eat insult with their daily bread. As law professor Derrick Bell says, there is no white person in this country who at some level of their being does not think blacks to be inferior, and there is no black person who does know that and resent it. Given the persistent record, the same could be said for the often subterranean but ever active belief of men that women are inferior and that their disempowerment is the law of nature. Women have noticed this and felt the pain. The result is called feminism and its success is our last best hope for our bi-gendered species.)

Hope is also best described by its opposite. Its opposite is paralysis. Only hope activates the human will. Only possible good motors our affections and stirs us to action. Without hope, we are catatonic. Even Sisyphus had to be hoping for something or he would have left that rock where he found it. Poverty suffocates hope for it repeatedly shows possibility to be illusory. Infants reach for hope starting with their birth and the infants of the poor already show with their eyes that there is no hope for them. Hunger and pain have already told them that their humanity does not count.

The stripping of respect and hope from the poor is well systematized. Capitalism from its start had poverty in its train. Serfs in the feudal, pre-capitalist system did often have a kind of paternalistic social security. They were part of a unit that shared the essentials out of a kind of practical necessity. With the dawn of modern capitalism, the serfs were cast out to look for work and security. Capitalism had two choices from the beginning, either to correct its deficiencies and care for those who were cast out by the blind mechanisms of the market, or to embark on the systematic vilification of the poor implying that their plight was their own doing and not an indictment of the system. Capitalism embraced the second alternative with passion.

The Statute of Laborers in 1349 in England made it a crime to give alms to the poor. In modern terms this meant cutting off welfare from these "lazy drones" who opted freely for idleness. This same spirit was in The Poor Law Reform Bill in England in 1834 which said explicitly that the main cause of poverty was the indiscriminate giving of aid which destroyed the desire to work. Again, there was nothing wrong with the system, only with those left out by the system. Of this 1834 bill Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli would say decades later, "it made it a crime to be poor."

In the United States, 19th century writers like Herbert Spencer said that poverty was the direct consequence of sloth and sinfulness. One writer said: "Next to alcohol, and perhaps alongside it, the most pernicious fluid is indiscriminate soup." Cotton Mather had set the tone. "For those who indulge themselves in idleness, the express command of God unto us is, that we should let them starve." (The current Republican Contract With America is not discontinuous with this villainy.)

Religion joined the attack on the poor in a big way. Drawing from Augustinian and Calvinist predestinationist themes, it divided humanity up into the saved and the damned. Wealth came to be seen as a sign of God's favor, and then, of course, in a double whammy, poverty came to be seen as a mark of God's disgust. Bishop Lawrence of Massachusetts intoned: "In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes...Godliness is in league with riches." It is hard to get further from the Gospels that put God in league with the poor: "Blessed are the poor...of such is the kingdom of heaven." And of the rich? It would be easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get them to take a God's eye view of their hypocrisies. Privileged classes, as Reinhold Niebuhr prophetically reminded us, have always been shamefully full of self praise. They have traditionally heaped moral encomia upon themselves, dubbing themselves "nobles" and even, in that classical misnomer, "gentlemen."

So the poor must not only be stripped and starved. They must also be insulted and blamed for their poverty and painted as too lazy to go out and get those mythical decent jobs that are noteven there!

(3) It is an insight of the Jewish and Christian scriptures that poverty and wealth are correlative. As Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza says: "In Israel poverty was understood as injustice." Guilt was assigned to the system, not to the poor. The temple of prejudicial economic deals had to be attacked, and the prophets from Jeremiah to Jesus undertook that mission with gusto.

(4) Poverty is genocidal and the malignant indifference and masked barbarity that underlie upper class virtue are complicit in the quiet slaughter of the poor. Poverty kills with an efficiency that could only be matched by all-out nuclear war. The wars that we have had are pikers in inflicting death compared to poverty. What war could kill 40,000 infants a day and do so with a silent efficiency that allows the polysaturated guilty to sleep comfortably in their beds, consciences fully anesthetized, with no rumble of distant guns to disturb their rest.

Theopolitical Dynamite

People of faith, step forward. A judgment scene from a modern Matthew might address you this way: "Woe to you people of inert faith. You are pathetic. You have bought the modern myths about the irrelevancy of religion. You carry in your scrolls and traditions what the orthodox Jew Pinchas Lapide called 'theopolitical dynamite,' a dynamic and powerful vision of what life could be, and yet you behave with impotent timidity, content to bleat and pray on the sidelines at a safe remove from the play of the powerful. Your faith traditions have turned history on end in the past. They could do it again. Return to them and taste their strength."

A brief visit with the forebears of Jewish and Christian faith might be enlivening.

The moral revolution to which we are unworthy heirs began in the years 1250-1050 B.C.E. At this time, as Israel formed, there were neither Jews nor Christians. What there was was a rag tag group of escaped slaves, nomads, wandering pastoralists, and misfits from surrounding stable societies who all got together in the hills and began what was a workshop for a new humanity. Disgusted by what they saw in the kingdoms around them, they rethought life with its politics and economics, from the bottom up. Here is a sampling of their revolution. (For more, see my The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity: Reclaiming the Revolution, Fortress Press.)

Symbols are powerful. They are tidal forces that move minds and history. One of the symbols of that time was "the image of God." It was used to sacralize the power of the king or pharaoh. The king was to be obeyed because he was the image of God and the sacrality of God shone through him. The Israelites coopted this imagery and transformed it. Their experience in Egypt and elsewhere convinced them that whatever royalty was it was not Godly. The pharaohs who enslaved them, broke their backs and killed their youth were not the image of their God. So where was that image?

Here it is, they answered. See this baby in my arms gently suckling, this is the image of God. See my grandfather by the fire, a little less clear in mind than he used to be, but he is the image of God. Go to the reflecting pond; look at that imperfect face smiling back at you; that is the image of God. You are the image of God! And with this audacious transmutation of symbolism, history turned a corner. The implications of this symbol-grab gave a mighty tilt toward modern democratic theory with its bills of political and economic rights. The Leviathan of the state could not crush citizens who knew that they were the image of God. Neither could despotic religious leaders belittle the dignity and rights of those whose spirits bore the imprint of the sacred.

Next the busy Israelites turned their self-confident attention to royalty. Royalty is not something past. It is a permanent human temptation. Royalty build pyramids with the privileged few at the top and a huge supporting slave base below. Royalty, Israel decided---and they had the scars on their backs to prove it--is evil. Royalty is exploitation. It is murderous in its intent and in its effects.

In an historical first, the Israelites threw out royalty. They would have no kings or queens. And for their first two hundred years--for as long as the United States has existed!!--they pulled it off. They had judges and leaders, but no kings. Or, more cleverly yet, they said: "We do indeed have a king. That king is the Lord. Any other claimant of kingship is a fraud." This was a rethinking of political power without parallel, and it too changed subsequent history.

Royalty today have different names, but they are always there. Those who eat like we eat are royalty. Those who wear the finery made in sweatshops are royalty. CEO's who make 40 million dollars a year and could not work with less "incentive" are royalty. Royalty are thieves who build privilege and comfort on the backs of the poor. The biblical condemnation of royalty skewers us all.

The Israelitic revolution next turned its attention to property, to the human phenomenon of owning. And they found a lot of malignancy there. With one grand swoop they relativized all ownership. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," sang the psalmist. "You are my tenants," said the God of Leviticus. Sweet and pious thoughts? Hardly. What it meant was that the shirt you wear and the pen you write with are not yours. They are the Lord's entrusted to you and to be used according to the mind and heart of the only real owner on earth. And that owner, remember, was notoriously biased in favor of the poor and suspicious of those who were rich. This rethinking of the stranglehold of absolutized property rights was essential to fulfill Israel's primary economic goal. This was, in Deuteronomy's words: "There shall be no poor among you." That's it. That is the purpose of Torah. That is the will of God. The absolute elimination of poverty.

Our bold revolutionaries had not heard the ancient Thales say that when there is immoderate wealth and immoderate poverty, there is no justice. But that was the Israelitic point exactly. Centuries later Thomas Jefferson would say that when there are unemployed poor "it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right." "Amen!" the Israelites would respond. Ownership must yield appropriately to sharing so that poverty will end. It can be done and there will be no peace until we do it. In this vision, the poor, again, are our poor, and our arrangements and claims must yield so that appropriate sharing will bury poverty. Then and only then can the whole world rejoice.

Next, the Israelites knew that status makes the world go round. Status claims translate into power. And here, our jolly protesters cut the legs from under the throne of royalty. Moreover, they instituted what has to be seen as an epochal moral mutation in the evolution of morals. Through all of history, it was believed with Tacitus that the Gods were with the mighty. It seems a law of nature, visible even in our zoos, that safety and well-being come from identifying with the powerful. What could make more sense!

Israel demurred. It is no longer true if it ever was, they said, that safety and peace comes from identifying with the powerful. Instead it comes from identifying with the poor. Instead of Tacitus' God of the mighty , Israel's God was a "God of the humble...the poor...the weak...the desperate...and the hopeless." This was the consummation of their economic logic. Until we identified with our poor making their cause our cause neither they nor we will ever know peace. The poverty of the poor is their ruin, but also ours. That was Israel's insight. Human peace cannot be built upon a base of human misery. With Hebraic practicality they were telling us: "It won't work!" And it never has.

The challenge that Israel faced was to change hearts. The target of their prophecy was affectivity, what we love and what we hate. They indicted us for our tearlessness. As a Catholic youth I wondered at the strange prayer in the missal Pro petitione lachrymarum...a prayer to beg for tears. A prayer to make you cry. As a boy who had been taught that big boys don't cry I was baffled. I didn't see that it reflected Israel's wisdom that the problem with the world is that big boys and big girls do not cry. The prayer begged God to break through the hardness of our hearts and bring forth a flood of saving tears. Tears would sharpen the ears so that we could hear the cries of the desperate. Tears wash the eyes so they can focus on the pain of a wasted earth. Tears are the baptismal waters of faith and there is no faith without them.

But the prophets did not just want tears. They also summoned forth anger. The Christian John Chrysostom said with biblical brilliance: "Whoever is not angry when there is cause for anger sins!" Good anger, said Thomas Aquinas, looks to the good of justice. The Israelites were angry. They knew the earth was good and that we were ruining it. They knew that poverty results from a lack of sharing and wise planning and that poverty is unnecessary on this "very good" earth. Those who are not mad, don't care.

And the goal of all this? A world full of tears and anger? Not at all. The goal was Shalom, and Shalom is the last word in joy. Israel believed that ecstasy is our destiny. Where joy and the conditions for joy are not present we are partly dead. Joy is the most biblical of emotions. "The good are always the merry," said Yeats' Fiddler of Dooney. The goal of virtue, said the Fiddler, is "to dance like a wave of the sea." And until we dance the dance of joy on a cherished earth we are only half alive. Jews and Christians animated with this vision schematically given here, a vision that pulses vigorously through the veins of their traditions, would be "good news" on a troubled earth. There is much that we can still save on this earth. Then, as a united household, bonded to one another and to our mother earth, humanity could with wild joy "dance like a wave of the sea!" 

***

THE VOICE OF THE FAITHFUL IN

A CLERGY DOMINATED CHURCH

by Dan Maguire, Marquette University

Strange as it may seem given the state of the church, I begin this paper on a hopeful note. My hope is grounded in my impression that the American Catholic Church is becoming more and more Italian. My reference is to culture, not to an increased number of Italian Americans. When I was sent to Rome for my doctorate, I am sure the hierarchical hope was that it would give me an infusion of Vatican rigidity. It didn't, thanks to the broader education that the Italians gave me.

Once, on a Friday in Rome, I was trying to get a meatless meal in a restaurant. Everything the waiter suggested had meat. Finally, deferring somewhat to my scruple, he suggested a spinach filled pasta. When it arrived, it was covered with bolognese meat sauce. Annoyed, I asked him if he was a Catholic. "Cattolico lei?" (Aren't you a Catholic?) His response requires no translation: "Cattolico, si; fanatico, no!" My education had begun.

Still in the salvific Italian spirit badly needed in the United States, the story is told of a cab driver in Rome in 1968 on the day when Humanae Vitae was issued. Even though the pope's advisors overwhelmingly voted to change church teaching on contraception, the pope sided with the minority and chose to continue the ban. There was great excitement that day in Rome and the cab driver had been doing the Vatican beat picking up a lot of priests who were talking about the encyclical. Finally he asked one priest "what happened?" The priest replied solemnly: "The pope came out today and condemned the pill." The cabby shook his head disconsolately and finally said: "Why did they tell him about it?"

That was Italian Catholicism behind that wheel. He knew the pope was wrong--was not pope-ing well that day--and he felt sorry for the pope and was annoyed at the people who had gotten him into such an unseemly predicament.

Let me add a few more keynoting quotes and stories to illustrate my

theological message. My next keynoter is my son Tommy. When he was three I noticed on a September day that he did not recall the previous two autumns. I came upon him standing in the den, with his thumb in his mouth and his cloth dog Patches in his arm. I said: "Tom, what color are those leaves on those trees?" "Green," he replied. "Tom," I said, "soon all those leaves are going to turn yellow, red, orange and brown and then they will all fall down." He looked at me seriously and I could not guess how my message had been received." The next day I was passing the den and Tom was at his post talking to Patches. I snuck up close quietly to share this precious moment. What I heard was Tom giving Patches my whole message on autumn. With a voice full of reverence and belief he said: "Patches, all leave green. All turn yellow, red, orange, brown. All fall down."

I realized that if I had told Tom that all the trees out back would soon lift out of the ground and hang in the air for the winter, he would have believed, and shared it with Patches. I realized that when we are shocked by birth and the noises and discomforts thereof, it is baffling, compared to the comfort of the womb. When Tom's little face emerged in the birthing process, I think the question on that face, if it could find words was "what in the world is going on?" That, of course, is the beginning of Who_are_we and theology.

There are two sources of information for the infant/toddler: sense experience, which is very impressive, and authority, the authority of these massive figures on which we are totally dependent. As impressive as sense experience is, telling us what is hot or cold or hard, etc., if the authority says something that contradicts that sense experience, the authority prevails over everything that you feel and see. At that age, we require an infallible authority system. And here is the problem: often we don't entirely grow up and we hanker for infallible guidance, whether found in a misused Bible, a Qur'an, or in a cult leader.

All religions have a tendency to become cults. Cults take away your independent judgment; some authority structure takes control of your mind. With Protestants and Muslims this often takes the form of a magically interpreted scripture; with Catholics it is more likely to be a magically interpreted hierarchy. In both cases, the cultically distorted religion inhibits growth. St. Paul's advice is relevant: "Do not be childish, my friends...be grown-up in your thinking." (1. Cor. 14: 20) Face the fact that infallibility is not in the human repertoire.

My next keynoter is Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. At the end of the Vatican Council he wrote: "The Church is not the petrification of what once was, but its living presence in every age. The Church's dimension is therefore the present and the future no less than the past."

My keynoter is Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. In his Presidential address to The Catholic Theological Society of America he said that Vatican II "implicitly taught the legitimacy and even the value of dissent." Dulles, conceded "that the ordinary magisterium of the Roman Pontiff had fallen into error, and had unjustly harmed the careers of loyal and able theologians." He mentions John Courtney Murray, Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, and Yves Congar. . Dulles says that certain teachings of the hierarchy "seem to evade in a calculated way the findings of modern scholarship. They are drawn up without broad consultation with the theological community. Instead, a few carefully selected theologians are asked to defend a pre-established position..." Dulles aligns himself with those theologians who do not limit the term "magisterium" to the hierarchy. He speaks of "two magisteria--that of the pastors and that of the theologians." These two magisteria are "complementary and mutually corrective." The theological magisterium may and indeed must critique the hierarchical magisterium. Dulles concludes: "we shall insist on the right, where we think it important for the good of the Church, to urge positions at variance with those that are presently official."

Cardinal Dulles was only two thirds right. There is a third magisterium, the sensus fidelium, the experience-rich wisdom of the faithful. Catholic theology at its healthiest said the search for truth rests on a tripod: the hierarchy, the theologians, and the wisdom of the faithful. Again Paul's words: "In each of us the Spirit is manifested in one particular way, for some useful purpose." (I Cor. 12:7) Historically, none of them has turned out to be infallible. At times each has led. The hierarchy were ahead of the other two magisteria when an early medieval pope condemned the torture of prisoners to get confessions. The laity led the way in showing that not all interest-taking is excessive and sinful as was once taught by popes, ecumenical councils and theologians. It took the theologians a century to admit that, and then, a century later, the Vatican got into the banking business and finally conceded---two centuries behind the laity and one century behind the theologians--- that moderate interest was just fine. The theologians were leaders in preparing the way for Vatican II and the pope is still resisting those advances.

My next keynoter is Thomas Aquinas himself, the saintly theologian who exemplified theology done ex corde ecclesiae. Thomas drew a sharp and still useful distinction between the officium praelationis (the administrative office) of bishops and the officium magisterii (teaching office) of theologians. What Aquinas is saying here, as Cardinal Dulles observes, is that the hierarchy does not monopolize the charism of truth and "the theologian is a genuine teacher, not a mouthpiece or apologist for higher officers."

Elsewhere, and relevant to our purposes here, Dulles, speaking at The Catholic University of America wonders whether Thomas Aquinas, "if he were alive today...would be welcome" at The Catholic University of America. Once again, he insists that the "magisterium of the professors" relies "not on formal authority but rather on the force of reasons." He unites himself with St. Thomas Aquinas' view that "with the growth of the great universities the bishops could no longer exercise direct control over the content of theological teaching." "Their role," Dulles insists "was primarily pastoral, rather than academic."

My next keynoter is Paul Lehmann, olim Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Lehmann was invited to give the inaugural address at the dedication of a new church and educational building in Towson, Maryland. The pastor, a former student, introduced Dr. Lehmann with pride. Lehmann mounted the pulpit, looked out into the sea of joyful faces in that beamingly well-lit building, and began with these words: "Do you know what you have built here? A resplendent mausoleum. It stands incandescent in the glow of its own irrelevance as the dynamics of the time rush to pass it by." After they revived the pastor, Dr. Lehmann went on to argue that it need not be so if the Church could read the signs of the times and respond with courage.

My next keynoter is St. John Chrysostom. He said, and let Catholic reformers take note: "Whoever is not angry when there is cause for anger, sins." That deserves a banner in every church.

My next keynoter is an anonymous Boston layman interviewed on National Public Radio. He said: "The gospel says that where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. He didn't say there was a need for golden chalices or multi-million dollar cathedrals. Let the church sell its lavish properties and return to the simplicity of its Master."

My next keynoter is professor Terence McCaughey, a theologian at Trinity College, Dublin. The See of Dublin was newly vacant and a group of Catholic professors were gathered in a pub near the College expressing their hopes that a progressive and powerful leader would fill the archiepiscopal chair. McCaughey was the lone Protestant in the group.

When he heard their aspirations, he replied with a twinkle: "I hope you get a terrible bishop here who provides no leadership at all. Then, maybe, at last, you Catholics will respond to your baptismal promises to grow into a mature adulthood in the very image of God." The point was taken but no offense was felt in a pub atmosphere that was flowing with sanctifying grace.

Next, two keynoting stories: Charlie Curran, while still at Catholic University, had a call from Jimmy Carter, at the time Carter was running for president. Some years later I had a call from Geraldine Ferraro asking me to do a briefing to Catholic congresspersons. Why were these politicians---people shrewd enough to run for office and win---why were they calling two Catholic theologians? Did they want to inquire about Catholics' burning concern for African Americans, the perennials orphans of American conscience? Did they want to explore Catholic indignation about a military budget that impoverishes our nation, sucking about ten thousand dollars a second our of our wealth while our schools and infrastructure deteriorate? Were they exploring Catholic sensitivities to the takeover of government by corporate lobbies, or could it have been Catholic rage at the absence of daycare and adequate welfare?

No. Sad to say, it was none of the above. They were calling about the

only thing they thought Catholics were morally serious about: abortion. None of the other issues were seen as "Catholic issues," though every one of them relates to the heart and core of biblical values. Catholics, as they read it, are fixated on pelvic issues, particularly abortion.

Somehow we have to get the abortion bone out of the Catholic throat. I just wrote a book reporting on a three year project involving 14 scholars from the world's religions. (Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, Fortress Press) The conclusion is that almost all religions have a conservative, "no choice" view on abortion. Yet all of them also came to realize that fertility which is such a blessing can also become a curse and that contraception with abortion as a backup when necessary is permissible. Both these views coexist in the world's major and indigenous religions. The situation is comparable to the ethics of war. Some religionists read their religion as rejecting all violence and they become pacifists. Other read those same traditions as permitting a "just war." The state gives the pacifists conscientious objector status and allows the others to serve, thus honoring both readings of the religions. The same is true for abortion. The religions can be read as permitting no abortions but they also can be read as permitting the choice of abortion for good reasons. Both views are "orthodox" and, speaking for Catholicism, neither one is more Catholic or more "official" than the other.

Possibilities for Catholic Reform

When I taught at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, the faculty began the year by reciting the mandatory Oath Against Modernism. That oath committed us to teach what was "always and everywhere" taught in church history. When we finished, Raymond Brown, the distinguished scripture scholar commented to me: "I can't think of anything that was ‘always and everywhere' taught." And he is right. Rembert Weakland once commented that the church today has to "reimagine" itself. In fact, it has always been doing so. There is a widespread illusion among Catholics that God issued a blueprint for all church structure and teaching. That never happened. People kept interpreting teachings and church structure and then assuming in each age that things had always been that way.

Let Professor Dennis Nineham of Oxford University take us on a visit to 10th century European Catholicism. (See his CHRISTIANITY MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN) If we were time-warped back into that time, we might find a copy of the Nicaean Creed and think we would feel at home. But wait and see how these folks had reimagined their Catholicism.

First, they imagined that God enjoyed the company of many angels, but, alas, some of them sinned and fell into hell. To make up for the

missing, God made humans. However, he made too many of them to fit into heaven, so most of them would die and go to hell. Indeed, it was estimated that only one out of a thousand could avoid this horrible fate, mostly monks and nuns. Many would try to take the cowl when near death to try to slip into heaven. Babies who died unbaptized and people who lived in parts of the world where there were no Catholics and hence knew nothing about the faith....all of these would go hell. Many teachers taught that volcanoes were the mouth of hell. Mt. Etna was especially thought to be the opening to hell. Purgatory or limbo were not imagined yet.

God, obviously, and Jesus by association with the Father, were not central to piety. Clearly they were too threatening and arbitrary. Devotion focused on the saints who really had divine status. In effect, this was polytheism. All the saints by the way, had been upper class people. Not until the 12th century were poor folks sainted. The Eucharist was mainly seen as a ritualistic means to obtain favors, like good crops.

Menstruating women were not permitted in church and, after birth, a woman could not enter a church for 40 days. Pope Gregory, called for some reason "the Great," taught that to marry is a sin.

So that is how they imagined the church and its teachings. We have imagined it differently but not all our imaginings were helpful. For example, we have imagined the church as a monarchy, not as a democracy. That is neither helpful or necessary. It certainly has no biblical foundation.

One of the sayings attributed to Jesus that some scholars believe really does originate with him, relates precisely to governance and structural organization. "You know that in the world the recognized rulers lord it over their subjects, and their great men make them feel the weight of authority. This is not the way with you; among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever wants to be the first must be the willing slave of all." (Mark 10:42-43) That is the very opposite of monarchy. Not surprisingly, the New Testament shows fidelity to that mandate. There is no pope in the early Christian community and no monarchical bishops operating as local popes in the style they do today. As church historian Walter Ullmann says, as late as the year 313, "there was, as yet, no suggestion that the Roman church possessed any legal or constitutional preeminence." Bishop Leo decided to change that. The papacy as we know it is not Petrine, but Leonine. The Leo was Leo I, Bishop in Rome from 440 to 461, a Roman jurist who cast the Roman episcopate in terms borrowed directly from the Roman imperial court. The one who was called summus pontifex (supreme pontiff), who held the plentitudo potestatis (the fullness of monarchical power) and the principatus (primacy) was the Roman Emperor. Leo grabbed all this language and applied it to himself. As Walter Ullmann says, "this papal plentitude of power was...a thoroughly juristic notion, and could be understood only...against the Roman Law background."

Leo did not even try to justify his pompous claims by referring to the text in Mathews gospel, "Thou are Peter, etc." That argument was added later. Leo had his eyes on the church in Constantinople which was making power claims that Leo didn't appreciate. As one theological wag put it, Jesus no more planned the current form of papacy than did Sitting Bull plan the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The papacy was not original equipment nor were papal-like episcopal leaders in charge of local ecclesial communities. Clearly in the early church, close as they were to the historical Jesus, they were making things up as they went along. There are lists of ministries in I Corinthians 12, Romans, 12 and Ephesians 4 and they all vary without apology. The word which came to mean bishops is used synonymously with the word that came to mean priest in Acts 20. In Acts 6 we see that the Apostles had been serving people at table but decided that they would rather devote themselves "to prayer and to the ministry of the word." So they appointed servants (deacons) to wait on tables. Lo and behold, before long the deacons seem to have tired of table work also and they opted for preaching. Today, the office of deacon is tied to preaching. We have to imagine that the women had to take over table work when the boys left to pray and preach..

Clearly, there was a freedom and fluidity to the formation of administration and structure. Taking off into a society where monarchy was the norm, the Christians eventually imitated and aped the dominating, hierarchical forms of their civil society, leaving us with the current monarchical papacy and episcopate. Monarchy is a political anachronism. The pope and the bishops needs downsizing to ceremonial status, following the model (to take one of the more benign royal examples) of the Danish monarchy.

The laity must exercise their role as shepherds and stop behaving as

sheep. They must stop acting as medieval subjects of medieval monarchs.

Priorities for Reform

Catholic reform should start with its strength. The Protestant theologian Emil Brunner said: "While the Catholic Church, drawing on centuries of tradition, possesses an impressive systematic theory of justice, Protestant Christianity has had none for some three hundred years. past." Applying basic concepts of justice from the Catholic storehouse, these are the first practical issues that should be addressed.

(1) Lay control of finances:

There is no auditing of diocesan monies, no transparency, and no accountability. This is obvious when Rembert Weakland could pay $450,000.00 out of diocesan funds to someone alleging abuse, and this figure does not show in any reports. For there to be real reform in the Catholic Church, there must be lay management of all finances. The bishop should answer to an elected diocesan board, not the other way around. The rulings of this board should be deliberative, not advisory. Church dollars are sacred dollars donated by widows on fixed incomes, factory workers, children, and truck drivers. The days of bishops treating these dollars as a private cache is an immoral practice that must be ended.

A lay board in Milwaukee, for example, should immediately consider the sale of the lake front seminary property. The American landscape is dotted with half empty seminaries. The seminary property is worth a fortune. It is also unjust to the Milwaukee community to keep all that prize real estate "tax free." "Tax free" is a fiction; what it really means is tax shifting. The tax burden is shifted to other citizens, Catholic or not. The case for such a sale is all the more compelling when you realize that Catholic seminaries are discriminatory institutions like the Augusta National Golf Club where the Masters is played. In both institutions, women are barred for no just reason. Theology has long since established that, if there are to be priests in the Catholic community, they need not be male. The state has no right to give tax breaks to discriminatory institutions, thus underwriting them with public funds.

Also, and obviously to anyone who has read a newspaper in the last 18 months, the resurgent laity must demand an end to mandatory celibacy as a condition of service. It is irrational and sick. If it were suddenly required that all mathematicians and brain surgeons had to be celibate, would the mathematicians and surgeons not immediately ask: "what in the world does celibacy have to do with my work??!!" Church ministers should ask the same thing. When seminarians enter the seminary full of idealism and good will and ready to serve the church and the world, current discipline says to them: "You may do all that, but you may never fall in love. Married love would pollute your mission." What an invitation to pathology and the evidence of that pathology is overwhelmingly, sickeningly visible for all to see thanks to the Pulitzer-prize- worthy work of The Boston Globe. When a bishop like the new bishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan, arrives at this scandal-ridden scene and responds to the crisis by launching a campaign to recruit more young people into the sickness of an enforced, not-job-related celibacy, he is part of the problem not part of the solution. Here again the people must lead because clearly the hierarchy cannot.

(2) Establishing a new Catholic, justice-based political identity:

The challenge here is to redefine what are "Catholic issues" and to do so on biblical grounds and in terms of Catholic social justice theory. The philosopher John Dewey offered a simple ethics question. He asked what we would think of the ethics of a U.S. senator who would call his broker before a major vote and ask how he should vote to best enhance his personal portfolio. Obviously such a senator is totally corrupt. Then Dewey moved forward and said that any citizen who votes for the same reason, to enhance his finances, is equally corrupt. Voting is an act of social and distributive justice, the citizen's response to the needs of the common good. It is not an act of personal acquisition. That's a tough message---prophetically tough. It means that most citizens are totally corrupt and politicians know it and appeal to it. "Are you

better off than you were four years ago?"

Let's dream of a Catholic citizenry who take this as their biblically grounded first principle: WHAT IS GOOD FOR KIDS IS GOOD AND WHAT IS BAD FOR KIDS IS UNGODLY. All foreign policy decisions, all domestic spending decisions should be judged by this criterion. This is a simple application of the Hebrew idea of the ANAWIM, a rich word meaning not just the poor, but the needy, the weak, the exploited poor. Children with their absolute dependence exemplify the poor, but there are others, e.g. African Americans whose lives are shortened and embittered by our genocidal and long tenured prejudice. When I was young in Philadelphia and they spoke of a parish as "going down," it meant that people of color were moving in and we were moving out. Blacks turned in great numbers to Islam where such prejudice is rare; they did not turn to us where such prejudice is rampant. Others such as those insulted because of their sexual orientation should be the darlings of Catholic conscience.

Imagine it: Catholics as a powerful lobby for the ANAWIM. Politicians checking their votes to see how they might affect the poor and those suffering discrimination lest they offend the Catholic voters. Now there is a dream!

In all the theories of justice I have studied, none match in heart and power the Hebrew word for justice, TSEDAQAH. (Accent on the last syllable.) The word has an Aramaic root meaning "mercy toward the poor." The goal of TSEDAQAH shows up in Deuteronomy 15:4: "There shall be no poor among you." The goal of justice in this classic theory is the absolute elimination of poverty. Our notions of justice are thin broth compared to this. Our image of justice is a blindfolded lady holding scales that perfectly balance. Isaiah, Micah, and Jesus would find this symbol hopelessly naive. They would advise the lady to take off the blindfold and see who is fussing with the scales.

The biblical symbol of justice is more dynamic and realistic. Amos 5:23 gives it. Justice is a roaring mountain torrent, an ever flowing stream rushing down the side of a tall mountain. I never caught the full force of this image until I spent a week in Colorado talking to Lutheran pastors. One day I climbed a mountain. As I neared one of these flowing streams I first heard the thunderous roar of the water smashing against the rocks, rocks that that water would eventually defeat. Fed by winter snows and unmelted glaciers the tonnage of water is enormous. As I neared it I could see the spume rising, and when I came closer, I stepped back defensively. It was as formidable as it was beautiful.

Now that is scriptures's image of justice and it is no static statue of a blindfolded lady. First of all it is water, the prerequisite for life. Secondly it is not water at rest, but water with a mission and direction, tumbling powerfully down the mountain. One of the Lutheran pastors was trying to take a picture of his wife standing on a bridge; he slipped and fell in. Fortunately he was thrown against a large rock, where he would have spent the rest of his life if we had not been there to get a rope around him and pull him to safety.

In the biblical image, this torrent represents justice, TSEDAQAH, rushing---gobbling up everything it touches---Lutheran pastors and all---and to what end? Back to Deuteronomy 15:4. "There shall be no poor among you." Justice is a force sweeping away all the causes of poverty, cleansing the earth with the peace-bringing water of life.

If Catholicism is to be healthy it will incarnate TSEDAQAH. It will instinctively reach out to the poor and the wounded, the insulted and the weak, planting justice so that there can be peace. It will say with Judith that our God is a "God of the humble...the poor...the weak...the desperate...and the hopeless." (Jud.. 9:11) When Catholicism is not recognized by dogmatism on issues that are genuinely debatable among good people, not by its unnecessary and unsuccessful insistence on celibacy for its ministers, not by its anachronistic insistence on monarchical rule by pope and bishops---but by the justice-love that make the church "good news to the poor" and a prime force for peace...when that happens reform will have happened and bare ruined choirs may fill and sing again.

Perhaps all of this is but a hopeless dream, and indeed it may be, but, to adapt the words of the Irish poet Yeats, tread softly if you would tread upon that dream!