A Word About the Weather

November 7, 2012 by 3 Comments

As I write, I’m also packing my toothbrush and notebooks for a conference on Catholic social teaching and climate change, beginning tomorrow at Catholic University in Washington. The climate part needs little explanation, especially after the latest climatic disaster known as Hurricane Sandy. The part about Catholicism or religious faith in general is another matter.

Even TheoPol is not quite prepared to say that theological and moral perspectives are especially critical to discussions of climate change. One would think facts and science—the inconvenient truths, as far as we know them—should be uppermost in the public debate. But theology has a way of crashing parties, including the political ones.

For now, I’ll say there’s an important link between theological ethics and at least one aspect of global climate change: relationships between rich and poor nations. In their 2001 pastoral letter, Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence, and the Common Good, the U.S. bishops zeroed in on four points about equity in these relationships.

1) Rich and poor nations alike have a responsibility to address the climate threat;

2) Historically the advanced economies have generated the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions known to cause climate disruptions;

3) In addition, wealthy nations have a greater capacity to lessen the threat of climate change, while many impoverished nations “live in degrading and desperate situations” that lead them to adopt ecologically harmful practices;

4) Advanced economies should bear the heaviest responsibilities for solutions to climate change. “Developing countries have a right to economic development that can help lift people out of dire poverty,” the bishops noted. “Wealthier industrialized nations have the resources, know-how, and entrepreneurship to produce more efficient cars and cleaner industries,” and they should “share these emerging technologies with the less-developed countries….”

These too are inconvenient truths. Undergirding them are moral and theological principles, among them solidarity and the biblical “preferential option for the poor.” Of course, all this is tendentious drivel if you think global warming is a hoax. Which brings us back to science—until further word. …read more

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Lamentations Rising: Civility Part 2

November 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Eric Liu: Politics is about “blood and guts.”

In the run-up to Nov. 6, laments about the decline of civility have continued to mount—as seen in headlines such as “A Call for Civility in Days Leading up to the Election,” “Can Civility Be Returned to Politics,” and “Reporter Confronts Obama Over His Lack of Civility.” The latter story, from Fox Nation, cried foul over President Obama’s off-color remark suggesting that Mitt Romney is a serial prevaricator.

We need critiques of incivility, early and often in an election year. And for a particularly thoughtful and earnest one, I recommend James Calvin Davis’s recent essay, “Resisting Politics as Usual: Civility as Christian Witness,” in which he adds a Calvinist punch to such virtues as humility—“an important Christian corollary to the belief that God is God and we are not.”

But we also need critiques of civility itself, or its depth and relevance to questions about justice, truth, and solidarity.

Eric Liu, a former speechwriter and policy adviser to President Clinton, hits a few of the high notes in his Oct. 16 opinion piece in Time, “Civility is Overrated.” He gives civility its due, but says that focusing on it can make us “pay disproportionate attention to the part of politics that’s rational. Which is tiny. Democracy is not just about dialogue and deliberation; it’s also—in fact, primarily—about blood and guts. What we fear, what we love, what we hate, how we belong, this is the stuff of how most people participate in politics, if they participate at all.”

Rational dialogue is just a “tiny” piece of politics? I hope not, but listen to Liu as he draws nearer to the core question of justice.

The danger with pushing for more civility is that it can make politics seem denatured, cut off from why we even have politics. As a Democrat, I want to see more anger, not less, about today’s levels of inequality and self-reinforcing wealth concentration. I want that anger to swell into a new Progressive Era. And as an American, I need to understand better the true sources of anger and fear on the right and the ways those emotions and intuitions yield political beliefs. For all the formulaic shouting in our politics, we don’t often hear the visceral, emotional core of what our fellow citizens on the other side are trying to express.

I highlight here “levels of inequality and self-reinforcing wealth concentration.” Naming that, and doing so with a touch of rage, ought to be part of civil discourse.

Civility is about Caring

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, one of the greatest preachers of the 20th century, was similarly underwhelmed by the usual pleas for civility. “Personally, I worry more about what’s happening to civil rights than to civil discourse, and I certainly wouldn’t want to talk about civility if all it meant was good manners, manners often at the expense of morality,” he wrote in an essay on civility and multiculturalism that appeared in his 1999 book The Heart is A Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality.

But, for this liberal Christian stalwart, civility was never about good manners. Look at how civility took on both a theology and an epistemology, a concern for truth, in Coffin’s hands:

At its most profound, civility has little to do with taste, everything to do with truth. And the truth it affirms, in religious terms, is that everyone, from the pope to the loneliest wino on the planet, is a child of God, equal in dignity, deserving of equal respect. It is a religious truth that we all belong one to another; that’s the way God made us. From a Christian point of view, Christ died to keep us that way, which means that our sin is only and always that we put asunder what God has joined together.

The takeaway? “Caring, I believe, is what civility, profoundly understood, is all about,” Coffin said.

If his essay were less about multiculturalism than about economic justice, he would have undoubtedly emphasized that civility is, above all, about caring for 100 percent of God’s people—but especially for the weakest and most vulnerable among us. How the weak are faring in a society increasingly in the grip of the strong is a fair question for the civility patrol. …read more

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The Other Romney (and Obama) Videos

October 18, 2012 by 3 Comments

A broad Christian coalition unveils the poverty videos

As the post-debate spin cycle continues, it’s clear who was left behind in the huffing at Hofstra on Tuesday—the 42.6 million people who dwell below the poverty line. Maybe they should be grateful that along the way of indicting President Obama’s economic policies, Mitt Romney mentioned poverty in passing (which is more than Obama did). Aside from that hit and run, the steady mantra of the evening in Long Island was “the middle class.”

The poor shall always be with you, but not so much in election year discourse. Still, there was a resonant moment back in September when Obama and Romney sounded as though they were reading from the playbook of Matthew 25 (“As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me”).

As I report in this week’s Our Sunday Visitor, Romney and Obama appeared in separate videos in which they grappled with the moral challenges of domestic poverty. These were not secret videos, taped behind closed doors. The campaigns produced them in response to a request from the Circle of Protection, an anti-poverty coalition of Christian leaders spearheaded two years ago by the Sojourners community.

Leaders of the initiative made much of the harmonious convergence between the two contenders. And there was a fair bit of that, on the surface at least.

In his message, Romney said he was grateful for “the opportunity to share my plan to protect the poor and vulnerable among us.” Obama said his own faith teaches him that poverty is a moral issue, and “The Bible calls on us to be our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper.” Each message ran a little over three minutes and was unveiled at a Circle of Protection press conference on September 12.

Both Romney and Obama spoke of poverty reduction as an urgent priority (“more important now than at any other time in recent memory,” the Republican said). Both vowed to slash the deficit, but Romney promised to “proceed carefully,” adding: “Our government rightfully provides a safety net” for the needy that must remain intact. And, aiming straight at his opponent, Obama said the poor and struggling shouldn’t have to “sacrifice even more … just so we could offer massive new tax cuts to those who have been blessed the most.”

The commonalities faded as the two spoke of how they would tamp down poverty levels. The thrust of Romney’s message was that this would happen as a consequence of a more robust economy, ushered in by his administration (and its plan that he did not specify). Obama spoke more about specific government action, including health insurance coverage and other “vital assistance for the least of these.”

The Faith Factor

There was nothing earth shattering in these messages, and they drew little notice beyond the constituencies of the Circle of Protection, which brings together leaders of some 50 evangelical, liberal Protestant, and Catholic organizations. (In that sense they might well have been, for all practical purposes, secret videos.)

But what the Obama/Romney videos tell me is that that politicians feel they have to say the right things about poverty, when they’re in the right settings. And I can’t think of a context other than faith-based discourse that would lead both party standard bearers to speak with such sympathy and resolve about the poor, even for just three minutes.

Maybe this means there should be more, not less, religion in politics. Signs are that young evangelicals, for example, are finding little use for the politics of the religious right. In the future, evangelicals may not be cheering when Republicans say unflattering things about the poor, or when Democrats say nothing at all.

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Listening to Vatican II, 50 Years Later

October 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Pope John XXIII at the start of Vatican II

While an enormous mass of people still lacks the absolute necessities of life, some, even in less advanced countries, live sumptuously or squander wealth. While the few enjoy very great freedom of choice, the many are deprived of almost all possibilities of acting on their own initiative and responsibility, and often subsist in living and working conditions unworthy of human beings.

Hearing those words, you might think they were delivered by the likes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps in his address to the United Nations General Assembly last month. Or they may sound like something out of the Frankfurt Declaration, the principles articulated in 1951 (and updated in 1989) by the Socialist International. But you’d have to go looking farther to the right to find the people behind the “many are deprived” statement.

Proper attribution actually belongs to the Second Vatican Council—which was called to order 50 years ago, on October 11, 1962, in Rome. The world’s Roman Catholic bishops made the observation in the signature document of Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes (“joy and hope” in Latin), also known as The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The declaration itself was released two years later, on the day the Council ended.

In calling attention to extreme economic inequality, the fathers of the Council were not tapping into the currents of romantic leftwing internationalism that began flowing around that time. They were channeling traditional wisdom, which is what religious social teaching does, at its best.

Part of that wisdom is to affirm the idea of a hierarchy of values. In other words, some things we may pursue, like wealth, are lower on this scale than other values, such as happiness and care for one’s neighbor. Some things we may prize as a society, like economic growth, are really just means toward other goals, including broadly shared prosperity. They aren’t ends in themselves, although they’re often passed off that way.

Why are so many of us moderns confused about this? I think the Council fathers nailed it when they explained, in Gaudium et Spes, that many people “seem to be hypnotized, as it were, by economics, so that almost their entire personal and social life is permeated with a certain economic outlook.” It’s the kind of trance that leads some to think that the inequalities named by the Council are necessary and just.

The Great Hypnotizers

Economists, of course, are the impresarios of this collective hypnosis. But the wisest of them—including some Nobel Prize winners—would have no quarrel with the men in Rome on this count.

From the moderate left, there’s Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. In his 2000 collection Development as Freedom, Sen drew on Aristotle’s understanding of wealth as “merely useful and for the sake of something else,” and he submitted that the “something else” is human self-realization (including full participation in society). That’s a non-economic value.

From the moderate right, there’s Nobel laureate Robert William Fogel, whose starting point is the question asked by Socrates: What is the good life? He too speaks of self-realization, defined as the achievement of a moral and satisfying life (in his 2002 book The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism).

Sen and Fogel are rare, though. As a whole their profession lacks a teleological view, a sense of ultimate purposes beyond the flow of goods and services. In the absence of that, what we often see are “means parading as ends,” in the words of the iconoclastic economist E.F. Schumacher. This isn’t purely theoretical. In the past decade, the parade passed through debates over global labor and environmental standards, for example. Foes of these measures often complained that such protections would interfere with free trade (a means often mistaken for an end).

It’s all part of the hypnosis, which leads some people to contend that the “losers” in our economy are just that, losers. After all, what else is there to say about people who don’t succeed according to the criteria of the marketplace? Or they’re branded as “takers,” because they might get unemployment insurance or other government benefits.

At Vatican II, the bishops exposed this presumption, under the heading of inequality.

“The development of economic life could diminish social inequalities if that development were guided and coordinated in a reasonable way. Yet all too often it serves only to intensify the inequalities,” they said, adding—“In some places it results in a decline in the social status of the weak and in contempt for the poor.”

More recently the contempt has been known to turn itself on roughly 47 percent of the people. …read more

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Among the Homies

June 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Greg Boyle, S.J.

Over the past week, my thoughts about political matters have taken a sort of geographical turn, after going to see Father Gregory Boyle lecture at Boston College High School. The Jesuit priest is well known for his work with gang members in Los Angeles, far too many of whom he has buried over the years. Speaking to a lively overflow crowd in the school gym on a Tuesday night, Boyle did a remarkable riff on the Beatitudes, the eight “blessed are the … ” declarations by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

He noted that some translations of the sermon say “happy” instead of “blessed.” And, he pointed out that many biblical scholars are thrilled with neither word, because the more precise (if cumbersome) rendering of the passage from the Gospel of Matthew would be—“You’re in the right place.” That is: You’re in the right place if you’re merciful. You’re in the right place if you hunger and thirst for justice. And so on.

“It’s about social location. It’s about where we choose to stand,” said Boyle, who delivered the second annual Dowmel Lecture sponsored by the New England Province of the Society of Jesus on June 5. Then he offered this bracing interpretation—“The Beatitudes is not a spirituality. It’s a geography. It tells us where to stand.”

In the Lowly Places

Boyle takes his inspiration in part from Jesuit founder St. Ignatius Loyola, who instructed his recruits to “see Jesus standing in the lowly places.” He has inhabited such a place since the mid-1980s, when he arrived in East Los Angeles—often called the gang capital of the world—as a young pastor and quickly decided that presiding over funerals wasn’t going to be his signal contribution to gang members and their families. Two years later, in 1988, he started Homeboy Industries, a now-thriving collection of enterprises that include baking, silk-screening, tattoo-removal, landscaping, and other homie-staffed businesses.

Boyle, a gentle soul who looked pleasantly rumpled in an old black blazer and an unpressed pale-blue shirt, recounted the Homeboy story with grace and wry humor. (The whole story is told beautifully in his book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, published in 2010 by Free Press).

In the beginning, he went looking for what he called “felony-friendly” employers who might want to hire the young ex-cons, and who were (not surprising to hear) few and far between. Then he got the idea to start some businesses—like Homeboy Plumbing, which didn’t exactly catch on. “Who knew? People didn’t want to have gang members in their homes,” Boyle said, tossing up his hands in mock amazement. “Who saw that coming?”

The Jesuit even made a joke with regard to the leukemia he has recently battled (and which is now in remission). He noted that he when he has an appointment at the hospital, he always gets a ride from a homie—which is “clearly more harrowing than the chemotherapy itself.”

Today, Homeboy Industries employs approximately 300 of those who used to run with gangs. One of its newer ventures, HomeGirl Café, staffed by female ex-gang members (“waitresses with attitude,” Boyle quips), serves about 2,000 customers a week at three sites. The broader organization also provides an array of social services such as tutoring and job training to more than 1,000 homeboys and homegirls each month. The vast bulk of them are on probation or parole.

What Boyle hopes for is hope itself. “Gangs are places kids go where they have encountered a life of misery,” he told the 500 or so lecture goers, among them students who read the Spanish-language edition of his book in a “Spanish Liberation Theology” class at the Jesuit high school, and who turned out wearing black-and-white Homeboy Industries T-shirts. “Nobody ever met a hopeful kid who joined a gang.”

Anyone with a Pulse?

During the Q&A, a young African American man asked the Jesuit if a white guy like him could really connect with these troubled young people of color. Boyle has a ruddy face and a bushy white beard—he could not be mistaken for a homie.

“Who can do this?” he asked rhetorically. “Anyone with a pulse. You can do it,” he said running a finger from one side of the audience to the other (over a crowd that included no slim share of Irish Catholic suburbanites). “If you’re receiving people and loving people, nobody will ever say, ‘You don’t understand.’ ”

The problems of the world are immense, and there will always be plenty of room for debate about the best solutions. But there is perhaps a simpler way of looking at the social challenges, the way of the Beatitudes. As Greg Boyle suggests, the clearest task of faith is not necessarily to take the right stands on issues, which are perpetually open to argument. The unmistakable task is to stand in the right places, with the lowly, despised, and afflicted.

Geography. …read more

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The Return of Mother Jones

May 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Coming to a post office near you?

With all the problems to ponder—war, hunger, intolerance, and the like—it’s impressive that some on the left would find time to push for getting one of their foremothers onto a 45-cent stamp. But that’s what some are trying to do with the dowdy visage of Mary Harris Jones, better known as “Mother Jones.”

The latest lobbying of the U.S. Postal Service on this front has come in an article published last week in the Huffington Post, under the headline, “If Elvis can get his own stamp, why not Mother Jones?”

“By all accounts Mary was a brilliant, charismatic speaker, and a fearless, dedicated champion of social justice,” Los Angeles playwright David Macaray wrote. He was speaking on a first-name basis about the Irish-born labor activist who fought captains of American industry for decades around the turn of the 20th century, and often prevailed. “The authorities (politicians, mine owners, business groups) were terrified of her,” Macaray reports.

The fusty image of Mother Jones, in her laced black dress and black bonnet, has crept back into political consciousness over the past few decades. Some have discovered her through the left-leaning national magazine that bears her name. Others have encountered her fiery rhetoric on T-shirts, like one that proclaims: “Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the living.”

For the American Left, or what’s left of it, there’s much to commemorate here. There may also be some inconvenient truths about Mother Jones, depending on one’s particular leftish leaning. And these make her all the more interesting, someone I’d actually like to see on a postage stamp.

Jones biographer Dale Fetherling found the right label for the mother of all union agitators. He called her a “conservative radical.”

She was a God-fearing widow who saw her labor activism as a divine calling: “We are doing God’s holy work. We are putting the fear of God into the robbers” of the poor. She broke with the socialists, ridiculing their ideology as “mostly sentiment, and that’s why it [socialism] will never work.” She appalled the suffragists, declaring that “home training of the child should be her [women’s] task, and it is the most beautiful of tasks.” (She herself had lost her husband and four children in a yellow-fever epidemic that blazed through Memphis in 1867.)

Mother Jones was a lifelong Roman Catholic, albeit an irreverent one. She saved some of her sharpest barbs for priests and nuns who fled the fight for social justice. During the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914, she called the Sisters of Charity “moral cowards … owned body and soul by the Rockefeller interests.” The sisters had let the state militia use their hospital in Trinidad as a prison for union organizers—including Mother Jones.

In the end, she was feted far and wide. On May 1, 1930, her 93rd birthday, even John D. Rockefeller Jr. cabled a warm message to her in Washington, D.C., where she spent her final years with friends. In a reply dictated from her sickbed, Jones told her natural enemy he had “a Christian heart.”

Seven months later, Jones passed away. She was given a high requiem Mass at St. Gabriel Church in Washington, where thousands came to view her body in a gray casket with black rosary beads wrapped around her fingers. …read more

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The Man who Discovered Poverty

March 8, 2012 by 9 Comments

Michael Harrington

Interviewed by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien last month, Mitt Romney tried to make a point about the struggling middle class, first, by saying he’s not worried about the very rich (so far, so good), and then with this blooper: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” It took the Democratic National Committee all but a day to field an attack ad featuring the CNN spot. Few mentioned that Romney’s fumbled message has been more or less the Democratic Party’s mantra—We’re all about the middle class. You’d have to flip back quite a few pages of American political history to find a president who crisscrossed the country saying, We need to do something for the poor. That president was Lyndon Johnson, though he and many others at the time had a galvanizer—a man and a book.

In March 1962, Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States hit the bookstores with slim expectations of sales and influence. Almost instantly it became a publishing phenomenon, and less than two years later Business Week and other outlets were calling it a classic, as the historian Maurice Isserman recounts in the current issue of Dissent magazine. President Kennedy either read the book itself or a lengthy review of it published in the New Yorker in February 1963, and he was inspired to begin shaping a national response. This became, under Johnson, the War on Poverty.

Harrington’s book was a revelation to early-1960s America. It was an exposé of abject poverty in what many fancied as “the affluent society,” the title words of economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book. Harrington introduced middle-class Americans to the “invisible land” of the poor, and the operative theme was their invisibility. “They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen,” he wrote.

The 50th anniversary of The Other America is attracting some attention this month, at a time of preoccupation with the economy but not with the poor. With the noteworthy exception of an upcoming conference at Holy Cross College (Harrington’s alma mater in Worcester, Massachusetts), probably less attention will be paid to Harrington’s moral and religious bearings. But these were the sensibilities that informed him, the sensibilities of a self-described Catholic atheist.

“Forever Backsliding”

Those words—“Catholic atheist”—reveal a taste for paradox that he absorbed from one of his favorite writers, the happy Catholic warrior G.K. Chesterton. Harrington was arguably the last influential American socialist; he died of cancer at age 61 in 1989. In his highly readable and probing biography The Other American (published in 2000), Isserman noted that Harrington could “never shed the influence” of Catholic teachings and habits of thought. It was Catholicism that gave the Marxist “a sense of moral gravity,” Isserman wrote.

Harrington was an only child of devout Irish Catholic parents who prospered in St. Louis (his father was a patent lawyer). As early as kindergarten, he would go hungry by slipping his lunch money into the missionary-donation box at St. Rose’s Parish, according to his biographer. But Catholics are “forever backsliding, de-converting,” Harrington observed in his 1988 autobiography The Long-Distance Runner. And so was he, though not forever.

In the late 1940s he lost his faith while studying literature in graduate school at the University of Chicago. He found it in New York during the early 1950s when he joined the Catholic Worker movement and became a favorite of its saintly founder, Dorothy Day. Harrington practiced voluntary poverty and ladled out soup to the Lower East Side’s homeless for a couple of years, before he concluded once and for all that he could not believe. He became a Marxist of the anticommunist variety, and remained one for the rest of his life.

Good-natured and uncommonly civil in ideological exchanges, Harrington had a lively intellect and a gift for the written and spoken words. He was able to “convey moral seriousness without lapsing into moralism,” Isserman notes in the Dissent piece. But his passions and talents were poorly spent on years of infighting in the terminally fractious socialist movement.

In 1972 he suffered a humiliating setback: a curious, pro-Vietnam War labor faction took over the Socialist Party, which Harrington headed. As Isserman points out, it might have been a good time for him to rethink his socialist commitments and strike out on his own as an independent social critic. Instead he chose to start all over again with a new democratic socialist organization. His explanation was oddly religious: “Protestants can, if need be, worship and serve God on their own; a Catholic needs infrastructure,” said Harrington, who raised two boys with his Jewish wife, Stephanie.

The Mumbling God

In The Long-Distance Runner, Harrington wrote that during his months of radiation treatment in 1985, he would hear an inner voice reciting Mary’s Magnificat, “My soul doth magnify the Lord….” He said the voice even spoke in Latin: Magnificat anima me…. He reexamined his unbelief, but realized again that while he never stopped loving Catholicism and its rituals, he could not believe in God.

Incongruously perhaps, the atheist added that he was not afraid of meeting his Maker. “In case I did encounter God face-to-face,” Harrington recalled telling his cousin, a nun, “I was going to accuse Him (Her?) of mumbling to humankind.”

Revisiting Harrington’s legacy in his engaging Dissent essay, Isserman points out that 50 years after The Other America, “the poor are still among us—and in a testament to the lasting significance of Harrington’s work, not at all invisible.” I could quibble with “not at all,” but Isserman puts a finer point on the matter near the end of his article. “The poor never returned to the invisibility that had been their fate in the 1950s, before the publication of The Other America; but concern over their condition never returned to the list of national priorities, not even”—Isserman rightly specifies—“in years of Democratic political ascendancy.” …read more

Filed Under: Culture, Economics, Politics, Poverty, Selected, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: , , , , ,
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