Of Martyrs and Murderers

Students at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota, reenact the slaughter.

Students at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota, reenact the slaughter.

Who is a martyr? The question comes to mind 25 years after what has become known as “the Jesuit massacre” in El Salvador.

On November 16, 1989, an elite battalion of the Salvadoran military forced its way into the Jesuit residence at the University of Central America, or UCA, in San Salvador. Most of the soldiers had received counter-insurgency training in Georgia, at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. They proceeded to murder six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter.

Unlike the martyrs of ancient Christianity, these men were not killed simply because they professed the faith. They were targeted specifically for speaking out on behalf of the impoverished and against persecutions carried out by the U.S.-backed military. Still, in the view of many, they died for the faith no less than the martyrs of old.

This happens to be subject to dispute in some quarters. The argument has surfaced mostly in connection with the sainthood cause of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down by a paramilitary death squad while saying mass in the chapel of a cancer hospital in San Salvador, in 1980.

Friends of the cause would like to see Romero declared a martyr, a move that would unblock his path to beatification (the next-to-last step to sainthood) by making it unnecessary to prove that he performed a miracle. In other words, if you’re a martyr, you don’t need to be miraculous, at that critical stage of the process. Your advocates do need to prove just one miracle, though, in the final lap of canonization.

Those less thrilled with this prospect say Romero was not a martyr, because he didn’t die defending Christianity in general or a core doctrine such as the Resurrection. In this right-leaning view, Romero perished because he defended something so ancillary to the faith as the rights of the poor and powerless.

The argument is a little tendentious. It’s a bit like saying Derek Jeter doesn’t deserve a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame because he didn’t hit all that many grand slammers. All he did was rack up 300-plus batting averages, steal bases like they were gold, and, speaking of which, walk off with five Golden Glove awards. Of course, all of that counts in Major League Baseball, just as standing up for the lowly and dispossessed matters in Christianity. The analogy veers off, because Romero was more than the theological equivalent of a great singles hitter. He knocked the ball out of the park in a way he could have never done by merely self-identifying as a Christian or endorsing the doctrine of transubstantiation.

In essence, Romero’s detractors are arguing that justice and the poor aren’t all that central to revealed faith. So, if you were forced to lay face down on the grass in the courtyard of UCA’s Jesuit residence, before shots were fired into your head, you didn’t have to go through all that trouble on account of your religious convictions. It was a sort of private choice you made, on the basis of your left-of-center political preferences, according to these skeptics.

But what happens if solidarity with the poor and marginalized is no small part of the story told in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures? What if the so-called “preferential option for the poor,” articulated over the past generation in Catholic social teaching, means something?

I asked a Jesuit about this, specifically in the context of martyrdom. The Rev. Stephen A. Privett, S.J., is no random member of the Society of Jesus. He is the former president of the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, and he knew the UCA Jesuits as a refugee worker in El Salvador during the late 1980s. The six priests were Ignacio Ellacuría (UCA president and internationally renowned theologian), Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes, Amando López, Joaquin López y López, and Juan Ramón Moreno. They were slain together with Julia Elba Ramos and her 16-year-old daughter, Celina Maricet Ramos.

Privett and many others refer to all of them simply as “the martyrs.” He explained why, in an article I did for the U.S. Jesuit Conference, on the 25th anniversary of the predawn rampage at UCA. (The full story is available here, and my follow-up piece was also posted yesterday at the Conference’s site, www.jesuit.org.)

“When you sacrifice your life because of your active support for the marginalized, you are a martyr in the traditional sense. You are witnessing to a transcendental reality that is not comprehended by others, particularly the folks who are wielding the power,” explained Privett, underscoring that work for justice is an inherent part of his faith.

“I think the church needs martyrs in every era, to remind us that we can never be comfortable with the world as it is. We have to work for a better world, and often we pay a pretty heavy price, but that price is not that heavy when you look at it through the lens of the Resurrection, or through the eyes of the martyrs,” Privett added, putting a doctrinal and specifically Christian spin on the matter. “It’s a really important part and a dynamic piece of our tradition that keeps us moving and engaged, never comfortable with any status quo this side of heaven.”

For now, Privett and others will have to remain content with this supernatural form of justice. That’s because, in the case of the six Jesuits and two women, human justice was never done. None of the top military commanders who gave the orders to kill was ever prosecuted for the crimes. And we know their names, thanks in part to a 1993 report by a United Nations truth commission that investigated the atrocities.

Human-rights activists, including the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, would like to see some long-delayed justice in this matter. So would Spain, which is now claiming jurisdiction in the case because five of the six Jesuit victims were Spaniards. Prosecutors there are trying to extradite some of those named by the U.N. commission. International justice might be catching up with the murderers, as one way of honoring the memory of the martyrs. …read more

Pope Francis and His Tribe

After a long hibernation, TheoPol is stirring and muttering something about a review in the current issue of America magazine. It’s an appraisal of the latest book about a pope who continues to surprise, and about his colorful tribe, the Jesuits.

The recent Vatican synod on family issues has invited skepticism about how strongly Papa Francesco is prepared to push for his Church-altering ideas. But what the skeptics might be overlooking is Francis’s “Jesuit DNA,” as limned by the acclaimed journalist Robert Blair Kaiser.

The book is Inside the Jesuits: How Pope Francis is Changing the Church and the World (Rowman & Littlefield). Here’s the review, published under the headline, “Spiritual Exercisers.”

In July of last year, aboard a plane returning to Rome from the World Youth Day celebration in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis made clear to the world that he was pontificating in a new key. He walked back to the press compartment and stood in the aisle for 81 minutes, answering every question in a spontaneous exchange with reporters and uttering his now-emblematic “Who am I to judge?” remark about gays. Scarcely noted was another comment by this product of the Society of Jesus: “I think like a Jesuit.”

Robert Blair Kaiser contends that the latter quote is most revealing about the Jesuit pope and where he is taking the Catholic Church. Kaiser’s book—idiosyncratic though interesting at almost every turn—is largely a journalist’s probe into what it means to think like a Jesuit in the Age of Francis. He argues at the outset that Francis “has been driven by his Jesuit DNA to make changes in the Church that have been up to now unthinkable.”

Kaiser is a former award-winning religion reporter for The New York Times, CBS News, Newsweek and Time (which sent him to Rome in 1962 to cover the Second Vatican Council), and so his journalistic credentials are palpable. He is not, however, a detached observer. Kaiser spent 10 years as a Jesuit in the California Province, leaving the order before ordination for a career in journalism. He says he remains “a Jesuit at heart.”

One of the book’s early chapters is a fleeting history of the nearly 500-year-old Society of Jesus, beginning with St. Ignatius Loyola and the early Jesuits, who “had a conviction that most problems have solutions and that they should try to solve them with imagination, perseverance, and an openness to new ideas.” Managing to figure into the 10-page overview is the West Coast Compañeros Inc., Kaiser’s group of former Jesuits (“Like Marines, we have a special identity,” he writes). Less oddly, Jorge Mario Bergoglio plays a standout role in this remade history. Kaiser surmises that Bergoglio was a “lousy leader” serving as Argentina’s Jesuit provincial during the 1970s, a dark period of bloody repression there. The author concludes that the man now called Francis is “a poster boy for Cardinal Newman’s observation that ‘to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’”

The most thematic chapter is “The Jesuit DNA.” Kaiser traces no small part of this genetic structure to Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, which turn Jesuits into “men who are self-aware, with a confidence and a sense of freedom that compels them” to take risks for God and the greater good. At that point, Kaiser runs with another Pope Francis quote, that “the Society of Jesus can be described only in narrative form.” This methodology brings us to the least edifying part of the book, as Kaiser devotes 28 pages to his own Jesuit story. Along the way he settles old scores with fellow Jesuits and religious superiors who underappreciated his ministerial talents (he supplies real names). Part of the literary problem here is that Kaiser is cribbing from his engaging 2003 memoir, Clerical Error, a genre better suited to these recollections than a book subtitled How Pope Francis is Changing the Church and the World.

Kaiser is perhaps most eloquent when writing about Vatican II and the Jesuits (John Courtney Murray, for one) who helped shape the Council, which in turn “helped us all be more real, more human, and more loving.” He is simply brilliant when profiling contemporary Jesuits including the likes of Paolo Dall’Oglio, “a tall, animated man on the move with flashing eyes,” who has devoted his ministry to dialogue with Arab Muslims. The Italian calls himself “a Jesuit Muslim …because Jesus loves Muslims, the same Jesus who is alive in me.” Kaiser also throws much light on the world of former Jesuits, with profiles of several including California governor Jerry Brown.

Throughout the book, Kaiser’s contentions and observations are rarely dull and often intriguing.

In a chapter on liberation theology, he digresses into the question of priests who fall in love, naming among them Karl Rahner, the preeminent 20th-century Jesuit theologian. He also infers (partly from the 2013 biography Francis by Argentine journalist Elisabetta Piqué) that Bergoglio was one such priest. The pope has spoken of a passing infatuation with a woman he met while a seminarian, but Kaiser speculates about a 50-year-old Bergoglio, in Germany, pursuing a doctorate. The author resumes this conjecture later in the book, writing, “No wonder Francis can laugh at himself: he, a sinner, who is also now a pope.”

Kaiser’s conclusions are lively and often bracing. In the final chapter, he argues that Francis is perfectly positioned to “bury the Church’s thousand-year-old blunder, the non-biblical understanding of papal primacy.” Francis is already reorienting Catholicism with his message that “we should care more about Jesus than the Church,” he writes, alluding to a back-to-basics Christianity that preaches “in the key of mercy.” (On the other hand, Kaiser acknowledges Francis’s limitations and urges reform-minded Catholics to cut him some slack—“If birth control is a sin, Daddy cannot give them permission to practice it. And if it isn’t, he doesn’t need to.”) He links these and other expectations to Francis’s Jesuit genes, which program him to reach for the “magis,” or more without fear of failure.

One suspects Kaiser is saying unreservedly what many Jesuits are whispering among themselves. If this is so, and if Francis does think like a Jesuit, then there are undoubtedly more papal surprises in store.

William Bole is an editorial consultant at Boston College and an independent journalist.

…read more

Why Mandela Forgave the Butchers

Mandela with Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Mandela with Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Back in the early 1960s, black South African lawyer and activist Oliver Tambo was asked to describe a colleague who had just gone to prison for resisting white minority rule in that country. He replied that this man is “passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage.” Tambo was talking about his law-firm partner, Nelson Mandela—remembered today for his grace, humor, and empathy, as well as his remarkable courage and leadership.

What happened to Mandela in prison, what changed him so radically, is still a bit of mystery in my mind. He was often asked about a slice of this question—how he let go of the anger he felt specifically toward whites—and his responses were usually of a fairly standard therapeutic variety. Bill Clinton, in an interview aired last night by CBS Evening Newsrelated one such exchange with Mandela.

I said, “Now, Mandela, you’re a great man but you’re a wily politician. It was good politics to put your jailers in your inauguration and put the heads of the parties that imprisoned you in your government. But tell me the truth, when you were walking to freedom the last time, didn’t you hate ’em?” He said, “Yes. Briefly I did. I hated them and I was afraid. I hadn’t been free in so long. And then I realized if I still hated them after I left, they would still have me. I wanted to be free. And so I let it go.” He said, “That’s what you have to do. That’s what we all have to do. We have to let it go.” I mean, that’s the kind of thing he would say to me just in ordinary conversation.

“They would still have me.” How true. But does this explain the difference between the petulant man sized up by Oliver Tambo, circa 1963, and the Nelson Mandela we came to know and revere? Former Time managing editor Richard Stengel, author of Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage, has offered some further insight into Mandela’s personal transformation during his 27 years locked up in a tiny cell. Asked in an interview if prison was one of Mandela’s great teachers, he said:

Yes. Because prison changed that young man, and it burned away a lot of the extraneous parts of his character. And again, part of it was through his own self-analysis, but part of it is through this imposed control that prison has on you. I mean, the only thing you could control when you were in prison for all those years was yourself.

I mean, I remember when I first went to his cell in Robben Island. And I walked in, I walked—nearly walked in, but I gasped when I saw it, because—I mean, Nelson Mandela, as you know, is a big man. He’s 6’2″ inches tall, he has big hands and a big head. And he is larger than life in a literally and figurative way.

And this prison cell—I mean, he couldn’t even lie down and stretch out his legs. I mean, it could barely contain him. But what he learned and what he taught himself was how to contain himself, how to practice the self control that he actually didn’t have before he went into prison.

I don’t know if even this explains how someone becomes a strikingly different human being, although prison has been known to bring about extraordinary changes in people. What’s clear is that Mandela left prison with forgiveness in his heart—but there’s no getting around the politics.

Mandela’s Politics of Forgiveness

Mandela understood the difference between personal forgiveness and forgiveness in politics. In one of many symbolic and deeply personal gestures, he made his white jailer an honored guest at his presidential inauguration in 1994. But he knew that something else was needed in dealing with the larger ranks of white South Africans (often in the police and military) who had committed terrible human-rights violations. Mandela did not, as is widely believed, simply let those people go free, unconditionally. They had to do something in return for political amnesty. And that something was enshrined in the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he set up with Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu as its chairman.

Human-rights abusers had to go before this tribunal, whose proceedings were televised, and tell the whole truth about their atrocities. They had to reveal, in some cases literally, where the bodies were buried, and they did so often in grisly detail. Or else, they faced criminal prosecution.

This is not garden-variety forgiveness. It is not a single, unconditional act of letting bygones be bygones. Political forgiveness is different. It is a process, usually a negotiated one. It calls for truth and acknowledgment, if not necessarily repentance, and there are trade-offs and conditions. Without the conditionality, forgiveness loses a vital link to justice and restitution. It ceases to have a reason for being in politics.

Mandela knew this. At the same time, he realized that justice alone (investigations and prosecutions) was not the answer. For one thing, there might not have been a negotiated settlement with the apartheid regime, without clear provisions for amnesty. In other words, there might have been the bloodbath between white and black South Africans that many had predicted.

Beyond that, Mandela had other pragmatic considerations that didn’t arise simply from the goodness of his heart. His clear-eyed view was that the stability of the New South Africa depended on a well-calibrated process of reconciliation. He went down this road at least partly because there was no real alternative. As a politician as much as a person, Nelson Mandela knew there was no future without forgiveness.

Posted today also at Tikkun Daily. …read more

Was the March on Washington Really Part of a Violent Struggle?

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

There have been many threads of coverage and commentary surrounding the March on Washington’s 50th anniversary, and one of them is naturally about nonviolence: The nation’s leadership had assumed that the march would turn violent, but August 28, 1963, turned out to be one of the most notably peaceful days in the history of the District of Columbia.

Still, the nonviolent character of the movement that the march defined is being questioned. There has been some interesting historical revisionism surrounding Rosa Parks and other civil rights figures who, unlike Martin Luther King, were less-than devoted to nonviolence as an abiding moral principle. (For my take on that, go here.) And now comes a book that, among other provocations, makes the case that King’s struggle was arguably a violent one.

The author is Benjamin Ginsberg, and his forthcoming title is The Value of Violence (Prometheus Books). This month, the Johns Hopkins University political science professor summarized his thesis in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Ginsberg declares in the article that the tactics used by proponents of nonviolence (he names King and Gandhi) “were far from nonviolent.” How so? Because they were “designed to provoke violent responses” from local authorities and thus elicit sympathy from the public.

He cites the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama (though a much better example would be the Birmingham crusade in the spring of ’63, which was clearly aimed at getting Bull Connor to respond with brutal force). He also points out that the Selma action led to the Voting Rights Act passed five months later and—more significantly in his mind—to an “army” of federal law-enforcement officials in the South. These authorities “wielded the power to suppress white resistance to the registration of black voters.”

Ginsberg contends that “in essence,” the Selma protest succeeded because “the protesters’ allies”—meaning the feds—“had an even greater capacity for violence than their foes.” (A bold assertion, considering the foes included men who had a capacity for lynching.)

It’s not a new idea. During the movement’s early years, the representatives of respectable opinion, including those in the Kennedy administration, argued similarly. They worried that the civil rights campaigners were fomenting violence in reaction to their confrontational brand of nonviolence. For his part, King explained in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail that those who engage in such resistance merely “bring to the surface” and shine a light on the violence inherent in an unjust system. It’s a long stretch to call this violence.

The confusion was understandable at the time. Those were the days before people had any real grasp of nonviolence as a strategy of social change. Circa 1963, you were either a pure pacifist (passive, in other words) or someone who preferred the violent approach. There was no separate category for active nonviolent resistance, as there has been since not only the civil rights victories but also other great nonviolent struggles, notably the ones that toppled Communism in Eastern Europe.

Now there is such a well-known category, although not quite in Ginsberg’s thinking. Police dogs, peaceful (though provocative) protests—they’re all the same. They’re all part of the scheme of political violence, as he sees it.

I should quickly add that Ginsberg, who chairs the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins, isn’t critical of the historic civil rights movement, on that score. He has a broader agenda—to debunk the now-familiar view in some quarters that violence is “not the answer” to our problems. It is very often the answer, he asserts. “Violence and the threat of violence are the most potent forces in political life,” he writes contrarily, in a challenging thesis that bears revisiting when the book comes out. …read more

In the NSA Debate, Where’s the Common Good?

TheoPol is off its weekly schedule, running occasionally during the summer.

As I scan the headlines and hear the radio talk about the federal surveillance program, one thought keeps coming to me: Why don’t I give a poop about any of this?

Maybe it’s because I don’t understand the implications of collecting domestic telephone data. Or maybe it’s because I cling to the rustic notion of the common good, in which personal liberties are of course balanced with the needs of community. That would basically mean balancing my right not to be surveilled with our need not to be bombed.

There’s a chance I’d react differently if the NSA’s algorithms were to spit out a particular innocent person—me. And I guess there are real questions that need to be answered about the NSA program, questions framed well by the Times today. But I don’t feel that the government is necessarily trampling upon my liberty, by scanning for networks and patterns of telephone use. Google already knows more about me than I know about me.

And then there’s that quaint idea of the common good. What is it, anyway? Someone in the field of Catholic social ethics once said that defining the common good is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. But that hasn’t stopped theologians and church authorities from hammering away at it.

For instance, the Second Vatican Council defined the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members ready access to their own fulfillment.” There goes the gelatin, dribbling from the wall.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tried to get more of a handle on the concept, by breaking it up into pieces. The Catechism cited three components of the common good: 1) “respect for the person” (including individual freedom and liberties); 2) “social well-being and development” (including rights to basic things like food and housing); and 3) peace—“that is, the stability and security of a just order,” the Catechism said.

It’s abstract, but I like it. The Catechism’s rendering makes it clear that this principle is about balancing, not choosing between, various personal and social goods.

But I think the common good will always be subject to the Potter Stewart rule of knowing it when you see it. I see it in a raft of initiatives like gun control and progressive taxation, and yes, maybe even in Obama’s surveillance program. The critics of that program have real concerns about personal liberties, but these ought to be balanced with “social well-being” and “the stability and security of a just order.” The common good would seem to call for that. …read more

Sacred Space, at the Corner of Boylston and Berkeley

At Boylston and Berkeley, 8:00 a.m., Monday April 22

At Boylston and Berkeley, 8:00 a.m., Monday April 22 

Prepared for today’s edition of Tikkun Daily.

Two days after the Boston Marathon bombings, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was asked in a public radio interview if there would be a permanent memorial to the victims of that horrific act. Patrick understandably felt it was too early to speculate about such a memorial—this was before the dramatic lockdown of Boston and surrounding communities. He went further to say that the most fitting tribute would be to return next year with the biggest and best marathon ever.

That surely would be a testimony to the city’s spirit, but it seems the governor, as a good technocrat, was missing the point. Fact is, people were already finding makeshift ways to memorialize the event. And if past atrocities are a guide, they’ll eventually find a permanent space for that solemn purpose.

If I didn’t know this already, I’d have found out just by standing for a few minutes near Copley Square this past Monday morning, at the intersection of Boylston and Berkeley streets.

Boylston, a crime scene, was still closed at the time. But people stood silently on a sidewalk at the corner, leaning against a police barricade in front of a popup memorial. They gazed at the flowers, flags, candles, handwritten notes, and other items left by anonymous people. They stared at three white crosses in the center of that growing memorial—in remembrance of the three who perished in the twin bombings of April 15. The shrine to eight-year-old Martin Richard was teeming with Teddy Bears, balloons, and children’s books.

People will memorialize, because they know hallowed ground when they see it. It’s extraordinary, when you think about it—how the heinous and the hallowed can share the same space, how a site of evil can be transfigured as holy. But this seems to happen every time. It happened at the Twin Towers, at the Murrah Federal Building at Oklahoma City, at Pearl Harbor, and most profoundly, at Auschwitz. Each of those names marks out a distinct space in the timeless realm of evil. And each space is inviolable.

But how about Boylston Street, or a consecrated corner of it? Is it now part of this geography of the sacred? It is, if you think of such space the way historian Edward Linenthal does. In an interview adapted in a book I did some years ago with Bob Abernethy of PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, he said:

My definition of a sacred space is a simple one. Any place that’s capable of being defiled is by definition sacred. You can’t defile ordinary space. Any place that for a group of people is so special that a certain way of being there would be an act of disrespect means that that place is charged with a particular kind of meaning.

Linenthal, who now teaches religious studies at Indiana University, continued:

I tell my students, if they were sitting in the parking lot at K-Mart with a boom box, no one’s going to really care. They might be irritated that the noise is too loud. But if they had a boom box at Gettysburg or in the grove of trees at Shanksville [into which United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001, in Pennsylvania] or in a church, a mosque, or a temple, it would be considered an act of defilement.

This is why questions about what to do with these places fraught with meaning can be so vexing and contentious. Consider the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan. The decision to store the unidentified remains of victims in an underground repository—rather than a more visible place of tribute—stirred resistance from victims’ families.

Sure enough, a debate erupted this past week over the impromptu memorial at Boylston Street—how to preserve it, where to move it. Such a discussion would have been ludicrous, if this were ordinary space. If it were incapable of being defiled.

And that’s just a prelude. A few days ago, Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s office let it be known that the process of figuring out how to permanently memorialize the bloodshed at Boylston has begun. …read more

Fumbling and Fallibility at the Vatican

One of the many questions being asked about Pope Francis is whether he’ll be able to get a handle on the unruly and unpredictable Roman curia, the central administration of the Catholic Church. In the past year, that governing body has delivered such spectacles as the case of the pope’s butler, the so-called “Vatileaks” affair, and a continuing corruption scandal at the highest levels of the Vatican bank. Infighting and skullduggery have made it clear that Vatican politics, like the secular variety, can be all too human and at times brutish.

Partly with that in mind, a number of Vatican experts are saying that the new successor of St. Peter needs to have the skill set of a CEO, to manage the unmanageable. I don’t know if that’s necessary (or sufficient). Pope John Paul II was not especially noted for his managerial brilliance, but he was able to transcend the bureaucracy and project a global presence that overshadowed it. The curia was generally trying to keep up with him, not the other way around.

But now, many are asking an oddly necessary question about the most famously hierarchical organization on earth: Who’s in charge there? John Thavis, a longtime Rome correspondent, digs deeply into the paradox in his new book, The Vatican Diaries (Viking). My review of the memoir appears in the current edition of America magazine, and here it is, in full:

After turning the last pages of The Vatican Diaries, I noticed an Associated Press item that began, “The Vatican praised President Barack Obama’s proposals for curbing gun violence.” The report was based on a radio commentary by the Vatican press secretary, Frederico Lombardi, S.J., on Jan. 19. Those who read John Thavis’s vivid recollections in The Vatican Diaries will have cause to be at least initially skeptical whenever they hear that “the Vatican” said this or that definitively about anything.

Recently retired as the longtime Rome bureau chief of Catholic News Service, Thavis argues that the popular image of the Vatican as a monolith, eternally on message, is a myth. On the contrary, it “remains predominantly a world of individuals, most of whom have a surprising amount of freedom to operate—and, therefore, to make mistakes,” he writes.

Re-enter Father Lombardi.

The author tells of an incident when Lombardi, during Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Jerusalem in 2009, lashed out at “lies” circulating about the young Joseph Ratzinger in Nazi Germany. “The pope was never in the Hitler Youth, never, never, never!” the Vatican spokesman declared to an incredulous press. The problem was that Ratzinger’s Hitler Youth involvement was a matter of historical record. As Thavis explains, Lombardi (whom he describes otherwise as “a gentle soul with a sharp mind”) had overheard the papal secretary remark offhandedly at breakfast that Ratzinger was never an “active” Hitler Youth member. By lunch, the misconstrued comment had become the Holy See’s “latest media fiasco.”

Thavis points to the “fragmented chain of command in what is arguably the world’s most hierarchical organization,” and he relishes the irony. For him, the fumbling and fallibility humanize the institution. But not even the bureau chief was charmed by another episode he recounts that revealed both bungling and deception.

Thavis unfolds the story in a riveting chapter titled “Cat and Mouse,” about negotiations between Rome and the ultra-traditional Society of St. Pius X. Some at the Vatican sympathized with the breakaway order and saw no need to inform top officials that one of four traditionalist bishops whose excommunications were being lifted as part of a reconciliation effort, Richard Williamson, was a Holocaust denier. But most of those who could have averted this particular fiasco—the Williamson affair became one of the biggest religion stories of 2009—were not scheming. They were just snoozing. In the end, the pope admitted publicly that anyone with an Internet connection could have known of the bishop’s bizarre anti-Semitism.

In recent years I haven’t followed Catholic News Service closely, so I’m not sure how much of the book would have been politically incorrect and therefore not publishable in that official news outlet. But I’m guessing Thavis did not often portray Benedict unflatteringly alongside his immediate predecessor, as he does in this memoir.

Here is how the author, with help from Bob Dylan, teases out one contrast at the start of his last chapter, “The Real Benedict”:

The first thing I noticed was the twitching leg. It was dark backstage, but I could make out the slight figure standing at the edge of the platform. He wore a black suit with a white stripe running down the side, and his right leg was jerking up and down involuntarily. It had to be Dylan. And he must be nervous, I thought. Singing for the pope was not an everyday thing.

The performance took place at a Eucharistic congress in Bologna in 1997. Pope John Paul II followed with some reflective riffs on “Blowin’ in the Wind,” evoking the Holy Spirit in motion. Meanwhile, back at the Roman Curia, Cardinal Ratzinger was exuding disapproval, openly disparaging Dylan and other pop icons as “false prophets.” As Thavis writes in another chapter, John Paul traveled to remote lands to be with “tribal dancers in feathered headdresses.” Benedict prefers sitting “in a concert hall filled with dignitaries like himself, listening to Mozart.” John Paul projected a spirit of openness to the wide world. Benedict? Not so much.

Thavis also looks probingly at how the AIDS pandemic has provoked genuine debate within the Vatican about the use of condoms to prevent transmission of the disease. That aside, I was surprised to find little in the book that throws light on global justice issues. During Thavis’s 29 years in Rome, Communism imploded in Eastern Europe, Jesuits and others were massacred in El Salvador, and two popes issued encyclical letters refreshing Catholic social teaching—to mention a few developments. But hardly any of that is recalled in these pages.

Then again, income stratification does not make the most scintillating subject matter for a book subtitled A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities, and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church. And I’m glad Thavis has offered this rare, perceptive and highly readable glimpse into a power structure that is less in control than many would have us believe. …read more

Rosa, We Hardly Knew Ye

Rosa Parks and Jeanne Theoharis, author of the first scholarly biography of the civil rights legend.

Nonviolence as a tool of social change has often been underestimated and misunderstood. The British thought Gandhi was nuts when he predicted they would simply pick up and leave India without the Indians firing a shot. Black militants sneered at Martin Luther King’s program of nonviolent direct action. And many southern whites assumed African Americans were too undisciplined to collectively turn the other cheek. Or they reasoned curiously that King’s approach was actually violent because it provoked violence in response.

During this Black History Month, new questions about nonviolence and the Civil Rights Movement have bubbled up, thanks to an important new book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press), by Brooklyn College political scientist Jeanne Theoharis. Her subject is the presumably quiet, unassuming seamstress who refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white passenger because her feet were tired. But aside from her act of resistance, Parks was not that person, according to Theoharis.

For one thing, Parks often dismissed the fabled narrative about how she remained seated because of her tired feet. “I didn’t move, because I was tired of being pushed around,” she clarified. As Theoharis shows, black radicalism ran deeply in her family, and she came to sympathize with the Black Power movement that challenged King’s ethic of love and nonviolence.

This storied figure of nonviolent struggle always believed in what she called “self protection.” Like most blacks at the time (including King, very early in the movement), Parks and her husband owned guns. But once the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, she knew many whites were wishing it would turn violent. That would give them “an excuse to dramatically crush the protest,” Theoharis relates.

Parks took a both/and approach:

For her, collective power could be found in organized nonviolence, while self-respect, at times, required self-defense: “As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible”…. Parks saw nonviolent direct action and self-defense as interlinked, both key to achieving black rights and maintaining black dignity.

Still, she felt that nonviolent resistance during the bus boycott served as a rebuke to white citizens who regarded blacks as too feckless and “emotional” to carry out such a disciplined strategy. “Parks had delighted in the power of it,” her biographer writes.

The ultimate message about nonviolence is mixed, in the book. Both the author’s narrative and Parks’s own words years later (she died in 2005) suggest a historical revision—a sense that nonviolence was, in the end, not so effective. Here’s Parks:

Dr. King was criticized because he tried to bring about change through the nonviolent movement. It didn’t accomplish what it should have because the white establishment would not accept his philosophy of nonviolence and respond to it positively. When the resistance grew, it created a hostility and bitterness among the younger people, who worked with him in the early days, when there was some hope that change could be accomplished through his means.

This sounds just a little odd to me—as though all hope of racial justice and equality was quickly dashed. There certainly was and remains much unfinished work. But in view of the remarkable social change that took place during the King years, you have to wonder: If he wasn’t successful in effecting change, then who was?

From Montgomery to Cairo

In his Times column on the revised Rosa, Charles M. Blow treated her militancy as a stunning revelation. And it might well be, as far as her children’s-book image goes. Echoing Theoharis, he wrote on February 1, “The Rosa Parks in this book is as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr.”

But does this compelling biography demand a larger retelling of the role of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement? Not really.

What it does is throw light on the distinction between nonviolence as an absolute principle and nonviolence as a useful strategy. As his biographers make clear, King knew that African Americans (and people in general) were far more likely to embrace the tactic than the belief system. In King those two perspectives—the practical and the philosophical—merged. More recently they blended also in the witness of other moral and spiritual figures. These included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who convinced his fellow black South Africans that they and their country had “no future without forgiveness,” and Pope John Paul II, who inspired armless resistance in his native Poland and who spoke of war as an “adventure with no return.”

But it’s fair to say that most who have taken to the streets peacefully—in places ranging from the Philippines to Poland to Egypt—have not been true believers in the gospel of pure nonviolence. They’ve merely delighted “in the power of it.” …read more