John Dear: ROTC at Loyola University

by John Dear

A few weeks ago, I came across the latest issue of the alumni magazine of Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland. On the cover we see the back of a young ROTC student cadet wearing her military fatigues, and the title, “‘Til the Battle’s Over.”  The lead article features some of the many young Catholics that this Jesuit school trains for war. This issue of the magazine is a disgrace. But so is the presence of the U.S. military at any so-called Christian institution.

What else is new?  Most Catholic, Jesuit, Christian universities in the U.S. take millions of dollars from the Pentagon to train students for war--and then call ROTC a “student” organization. In doing so, they serve the U.S. war machine and betray the Gospel of peace. They present fine rationale about having intellectual soldiers who will wage “better” wars--but they can never quite claim that they are doing God’s will, obeying the Gospel, or following the nonviolent Jesus.

What caught my particular attention this time was the news that each May at Loyola, the ROTC cadets profess their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution (if necessary by killing all our enemies), not in an auditorium, but in the university’s Alumni Memorial Chapel in front of the Blessed Sacrament. I consider this plain, old fashioned blasphemy. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s the day before commencement. Thirteen ROTC cadets march into Alumni Memorial Chapel as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays. Flanked by family and friends, each member of the ROTC reflects a deep pride. Standing on the altar, the newly commissioned officers take an oath to the Constitution of the United States. “This oath is an ideal and unlike any others,” Lieutenant Colonel Steven Carroll, chair of Loyola’s military science department, tells them.

With more than 90 cadets, ROTC is one of the largest student organizations on campus. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the students wear their uniforms as they go to classes and participate in daily student life. In recent years, at Commencement, the longest applause has been given when the newly commissioned ROTC cadets are introduced.

“St. Ignatius was a soldier,” one student, Christel Sacco, says, explaining why she joined ROTC at a Jesuit university. “A lot of people don’t put two and two together.” I thought the whole point of St. Ignatius’ life was his renunciation of militarism. He stayed up in prayer all night in a church, and placed his sword below a statue of Mary to begin his new life of Gospel nonviolence. It was precisely his conversion away from militarism that led to the Society of Jesus, his life of mystical prayer, and his call to service.

“If you think about it, the goal of war is peace,” Sacco continues. “I joined the military to bring peace to the nations we’re at war with, to bring justice and legitimacy to the people who are there now.” “It’s the soldier who above all desires peace,” Carroll explains. I disagree. As Gandhi taught the means are the ends; the only way to peace is through peaceful means, not warfare.

A lot of people don’t put two and two together. Despite the rhetoric, it appears to me that these students are not critical thinkers, that they’re very naïve, and that they have not been taught the Gospel. Here’s an excerpt from the lead editorial by Loyola’s Jesuit president, Brian Linnane:

We hold our ROTC commissioning ceremony each May in our Alumni Memorial Chapel. Some would argue than an ROTC battalion has no place on a Catholic campus, least of all in its chapel. The truth is, however, that the Roman Catholic tradition has never been one of unqualified pacifism. St. Augustine grappled with this issue in the fifth century, finding that there is just too much evil in our world, and that Catholics have an obligation to defend the innocent against aggression.  

Indeed, it is perhaps particularly fitting that we hold this ceremony in a chapel of the Roman Catholic Church, a church whose ideals have been challenged throughout history. The men and women who take their oaths in this ceremony swear to protect an idea—the United States Constitution—that has also faced opposition throughout its existence. But without its existence, without its protection, without the defense provided by our military, the right of Catholics to hold our beliefs dear becomes instantly vulnerable…  

The education we offer at Loyola aims to help these ROTC officers, and all of our students, become leaders with care and concern for society. We help students see themselves as members of a larger community, both locally and globally … We endeavor … to provide our students with an experience that will guide them and inspire them for the rest of their lives. In the officers commissioned through Loyola ROTC, you see the impact of that experience brought to life, ready to change and better the world -- for all of us.

Loyola ROTC was established in 1947

Many people have written elsewhere far better than me about why ROTC does not belong on a Christian campus. I simply submit that Fr. Linnane and his military friends are misguided. The church, for example, was at one time all about unqualified pacifism -- in the first three centuries. Then Constantine and later Augustine led the formal rejection of the Sermon on the Mount and turned to the pagan Cicero to justify mass murder for one’s empire.

Gospel peacemaking, also, is not about passivity, but about actively confronting injustice everywhere through nonviolent means, and digging out the root causes of war. The tired argument of educating elite officers in the Jesuit tradition has been used for more than 60 years, and does not hold up. With the hundreds of thousands of Jesuit educated officers, we still wage war, kill people, and lead the world to the brink. We are not making the world better; we’re making it worse.

And if supporting “the right of Catholics to hold our beliefs dear” is the goal -- what about the Catholics of Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Libya? When we train our young for war, we send them off to kill our brother and sister Catholics. I remember when I met the Cardinal of Baghdad in 1999, how he broke down sobbing over how U.S. Catholics kill Iraqi Catholics. The universality of the church, the global Body of Christ, is reason enough to outlaw ROTC and the U.S. military from any Catholic campus. We do not want one of our students hurting any other Catholic or Christian (or anyone!) anywhere.

Millions of Christians reject the lies of war. They know that war and preparing for war do not make us safer or sow the seeds of peace. It can’t end terrorism because it is terrorism. War certainly, hasn’t helped our economy or the environment or our health. As the world is learning, there are many creative nonviolent ways to solve international conflict.

But I am scandalized that a supposedly Christian institution so blatantly rejects the teachings of the nonviolent Jesus -- “Love one another. Blessed are the peacemakers. Offer no violent resistance to one who does evil. Put down the sword. Love your enemies.” Loyola and other Christian universities can no longer claim to be teaching the Gospel of Jesus.

I consider the ROTC commissioning service held every year in the Alumni Memorial Chapel in front of the Blessed Sacrament to be blasphemous.

In particular, the oath which the cadets take is in direct violation of the Sermon on the Mount. It pledges that if necessary, they will kill any enemies of our nation.

It reads: “I, having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.”

The early church did not allow the profession of any such idolatrous oaths, especially to the Roman military. It taught that one’s baptism meant your faith and allegiance belonged solely to the nonviolent Jesus.

The ROTC oath is a pledge to kill the enemies of the United States; Jesus, on the other hand, commands us to love them. Only then, he announces, will we be “sons and daughters of our heavenly God who makes the sun shine on the good and the bad and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” The ROTC oath, professed in the Loyola chapel, mocks the God of peace.

I urge Loyola University to cancel those ceremonies, close its ROTC program, teach nonviolent conflict resolution and the nonviolence of Jesus, and “study war no more.” In the name of the nonviolent Jesus, I invite every Loyola student in ROTC, and every student in any U.S. ROTC program, to quit immediately and follow the nonviolent Jesus on the road to peace.

And I invite people from around the world to write nonviolent letters to Fr. Linnane, Loyola University and their Alumni magazine, to share thoughts about the way of peace and Loyola’s commissioning ceremony in the university chapel (Office of the President, Loyola University, 4501 North Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21212). If plans continue for the commissioning service to be held May 2012, in the chapel, I invite everyone to join me in a peaceful protest. Perhaps we can profess the Pax Christi vow of nonviolence as a witness. Or nonviolently disrupt their unholy ceremony.

Many have told me that the disarmament of our universities is no longer possible, that the culture of war has infiltrated every aspect of civil society, that it’s not possible to have a Catholic campus for peace.

But I remember my experience in El Salvador in the 1980s at the Jesuit-run University of Central America. The Jesuits turned that campus into a training camp for justice and peace. Every class, every lecture, every program was aimed at ending the war and transforming El Salvador. The steadfast determination of the Jesuits made that university an unparalleled anti-war center. The entire university became such a threat to the culture of war that inevitably, U.S.-backed government death squads killed the president and five other Jesuits.

That university approached the Christian ideal. That’s what every Catholic and Christian university should become--a school for peace, a training camp for Gospel nonviolence, where young people are taught how to love enemies, not how to kill them.

Source:

http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/rotc-loyola-university

From February-April 2012, John Dear will undertake a national book tour for his forthcoming book, Lazarus Come Forth!, which portrays Jesus as the God of life calling humanity (in the symbol of the dead Lazarus) out of the tombs of the culture of war and death. To host John for an evening talk and book-signing at your church, send an e-mail through www.johndear.org .

John's latest book, Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings (Orbis), and other recent books are available from www.amazon.com.

To contribute to Catholic Relief Services' "Fr. John Dear Haiti Fund,"

go to: http://donate.crs.org/goto/fatherjohn.

For further information, or to schedule a lecture or retreat, visit: www.johndear.org .

Tom Cornell: A Reflection on 9/11

by Tom Cornell

It was unimaginable yet we saw it with our own eyes. My fellow Catholic Workers in New York City went to our roof only a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center when the first plane struck.  Most of us saw it on TV, over and over and over again. They came down, the Twin Towers, they just came down, in smoke and ash and flame, and nearly three thousand souls. It was unimaginable, unforgettable, horrible. We all felt it, an insult to our nation, to our pride, as it was meant to be. Can we forgive such a crime against our people, a crime against our country, a crime against humanity itself, a crime against God? A crime! Not an act of war! When we refer to a “war” against terrorism, remember that the word “war” is used as a metaphor, as in the war against polio or the war against small-pox. To combat crime, we call upon our police and courts, not upon the army!

It does not dishonor the dead or excuse this crime in any degree to ask why they hate us so much. It isn’t our freedoms they hate in the Arab and Muslim world. That’s silly. They don’t give a hoot in hell about how we order our lives, unless it impinges on how they must live their lives.

This is not the time or place for a history lesson, but the gross injuries the West, especially France and England and this country have inflicted upon the Arab and Muslim worlds have been egregious, going back to World War I. We may choose to ignore or forget them but they do not! They don’t care about our freedoms. But we care. We have to care. And about our maimed and dead.

First of all we care about the dead and injured and their families, the workers in the Towers and the firemen and police who lost their lives trying to save others. These people put their lives on the line every day for us. Here in Marlboro we know our police and firefighters. They are our neighbors and friends. That’s not often the case in the City, where I live also. There was a moment in the City when people came together and actually talked to one another on the subways and the street. It didn’t last long, but that loss brought us all together, for a week or so.

As we recovered our equilibrium, feelings of anger, resentment, revenge began to surface. It’s only natural.

But then the words of today’s readings from the Book of Sirach hit us: I didn’t choose these readings. They are assigned by the Church for the Latin rite throughout the world. They are assigned for this day in the Common Lectionary that many Protestants use as well. They are Providential for our condition this day of remembrance.

“Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight. The vengeful will suffer the Lord’s vengeance…. Should a man nourish anger against his neighbor and expect healing from the Lord?”

The Psalm verse is, “The Lord is kind and merciful; slow to anger and rich in compassion.”

Then in today’s Gospel we have the parable of the official who was shown mercy but did not show mercy and Peter’s question to Jesus, “How often must I forgive, seven times?” “No,” Jesus replied, “not seven times but seventy times seven.”

And just before Communion we recite that most dangerous of prayers,
the Our Father. Dangerous? Yes. Why? Because we beg God to forgive
us as we forgive, that is, the same way, to the same degree that we forgive those who trespass against us. Do we really mean it?

To forgive is not to say,” that’s all right!” It can never be right to kill innocent human beings, never! Cardinal Egan gave us a clue when he preached at St Patrick’s Cathedral the Sunday after the attack, that we must not give way to fear and hatred.

All right! But to forgive? To forgive such a crime?

Forgiveness is hard, very hard. I thought I had forgiven someone who once tried, and failed, to hurt me very badly. I had prayed for her, over and over again. But a few nights ago I dreamt of her for the first, and I hope only time. I cursed her up and down and to hell and back in that dream! So I have to pray some more.

In the immediate aftermath of an attack, it’s natural for us to lose balance, to sink into confusion. Not everyone was confused that day. Those in high places seized an opportunity they had been waiting for, an excuse to attack and invade Iraq. They had planned, determined to do so months if not years before. Iraq had nothing to do with the attack of 10/11, but that didn’t matter. The people were confused and angry. They could get away with it. We now know without any doubt that the nation was led to war by a concert of deliberate lies. We have been paying the price for it ever since, not only monetarily. We have lost twice the number of our fellow citizens in war as we lost in the Twin Towers and many times more maimed, and we have caused at least 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans to die. They tell us we are broke, so we borrowed the money for the war! We pay the price in the loss of the good will of the international community as well.

A friend of mine was attending a wedding in Serbia when the news of 9/11 broke there. It wasn’t long after the US bombed Belgrade. My friend thoroughly expected that at least some in the wedding party would reproach him as an American and say something like, “Now you know what it feels like to be under the bomb!” But no, quite the contrary. Everyone sympathized and offered words of comfort. That would not happen today.

This is not the place to analyze the political, social and economic causes and effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Libya.  But this is the place to examine the spiritual roots of this insanity. Our problems are at root spiritual and must be met with the weapons of the spirit: prayer, fasting and the works of mercy. What pride and arrogance has blinded us to our self-justification in destroying Iraq and pursuing a useless, immoral and unwinnable war in Afghanistan? There is justifiable pride, to be sure, in our American traditions, even as they are being eroded by these very wars. Sinful pride, it is a deadly sin, puts us above the law of nations and above the law of God. “Thou shalt not murder the innocent!” Not even to avenge the innocent.

Is there another way? Let me tell you emphatically that the best thing you can do for your country is to be the best Catholic Christian  you can be. And take a lesson from a good Muslim man, named Rais Bhuiyan. He is an immigrant living in Texas, from Pakistan, but he could pass for an Arab to the untrained eye. He was in a convenience store with two Pakistani friends when a man came in, pulled a gun and shot two of them dead. He shot Rais in the face, blinding him permanently in one eye. It was to avenge 9/11, the shooter said, saying that he was an “Arab slayer.” The man, Mark Stroman was his name, was tried for murder in a Texan court, convicted and sentenced to death. Rais spent years in rehab, but when he was strong enough, he campaigned vigorously to save Mr. Stroman’s life. In that he failed. It was Texas, after all. Mark Stroman met his fate in the Texas electric chair.

“I have had many years to grow spiritually,” Rais said. He pledged that he will spend the rest of his life knocking on every door, trying to do the best he can to see that not another human life be lost needlessly and, in his words, “trying to teach people about the healing power of forgiveness.”

Forgiveness, mind you, in the name and spirit of 9/11, “the healing power of forgiveness.

Lord Jesus, Son of the living God, let us learn from our Muslim brother. Have mercy on us and let us be healed. Amen.

Deacon Tom Cornell is a veteran of the Catholic Worker Movement, former national secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and a founder of Pax Christi, U.S.A.   Cornell is also  professor of Catholic Social Teaching at the New York Archdiocesan Seminary, This homily was written for deacon candidates.

Source:

http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=18862

Patrick O'Neill: Years wasted in violence and fear

In a 2004 photo, Iraqi Mahdi Nawaf shows photographs of dead family members he said were were killed when a U.S. helicopter fired on a wedding party, killing more than 40 people.

by Patrick O'Neill

In a "Point of View" article published ten years ago (Sept. 12, 2001), I wrote: "I urge President Bush and our nation's leaders to forget retaliation and instead begin a process that can lead this world to eliminate violence as a means of conflict resolution. Think of the message that would send to the world - the most powerful nation forgoes retaliation and violence and instead begins a heartfelt search for justice and peace."

Sadly and tragically, our leaders have learned nothing from the 9/11 attacks. Rather than making these last 10 years a period of deep introspection about why the attacks occurred, we have instead embraced a decade of vengeance and multiple wars.

Despite the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the United States has embarked on a stated policy of war-without-end. The Washington Post, quoting from a Pentagon document, reported this week that the United States is in a "period of persistent conflict." The article stated that peace "has become something of a dirty word in Washington foreign-policy circles."

Ironically, it was 50 years ago that President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered the farewell address in which he coined the term "military-industrial complex," warning Americans of the dangers to our democracy from the unchecked power of a corporate-Pentagon war machine.

The military-industrial complex has never been more powerful than it is today. High-level Defense Department staffers move smoothly and laterally from government positions to the corporate offices of the defense industry, always marching to the same beat of endless war drums. Trillions of dollars are at stake, and those making the money - and the decisions - have no vested interest in peace and nonviolence.

On this anniversary, we are re-hearing the sad and tragic stories of those who died on that horrific day 10 years ago, and we are hearing the stories of the brave first responders, but the media make scant mention of the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who have perished under the blows of a decade of U.S. military dominance. The unrecorded deaths of non-Americans are merely collateral damage.

Little mention is made about how deeply and irreparably damaged our democracy is in the aftermath of our misguided and reckless response to 9/11. This past decade has brought us a whole new vocabulary of shame and overreaction: the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, Homeland Security, drones, IEDs and Abu Ghraib, to name a few. "Detainees" - some flown in jets based in Smithfield at Aero Contractors - have been kidnapped, tortured and deprived of their basic human rights. Surveillance of citizens is now the norm, the CIA has a separate and secret budget and soldiers of fortune, such as those from the formerly North Carolina-based Xe Corporation (the former Blackwater USA) are operating with little accountability in multiple war zones.

American leaders could have used the 9/11 tragedy as an opportunity to explore new ways of peace, reconciliation and nonviolent conflict resolution. Instead, we have wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in an endless war on terror that will never bring us peace. In the last 10 years, we have been diminished as a nation and as a people. Americans must rise up out of the ashes of 9/11, reclaim our democracy and refuse complicity in this mad display of war and violence.

In my op-ed of 10 years ago, I quoted the words the Sacred Heart Cathedral rector, Msgr. Girard Sherba, who told shell-shocked Catholics who had just watched the World Trade Center towers fall: "Our hearts have been torn apart by the senseless killing of innocent lives." Rather than seek retaliation, Sherba told us to "be people of forgiveness; be people of compassion; be people of love ... words we don't want to hear right now."

Sherba's words still ring true. Now is the time for us to pray and work for peace.

Patrick O'Neill is co-founder of the Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker House, a pacifist, intentional Christian community that provides hospitality to men, women and children in crisis.

Source:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/09/10/1474010/years-wasted-in-violence-and-fear.html

Ciaron O'Reilly: On Recent WikiLeaks Disclosure of Unredacted Cables

Guardian Initiates WikiLeaks Ass-Kicking Party while Circling the Wagons to Protect its own Butt!

by Ciaron O’Reilly

We are ten years into a war on Aghanistan, 20 years into a war on Iraq and 250+ daze into the confinement without charge of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has done so much to expose the true nature of these wars. Wars that have no end date, no popular support and presently little visible opposition.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange remains the target of powerful forces and has been largely left hung out to dry by both the legitimate voices of dissent and those who continue to prosecute these wars and isolate and crush any resistance to them. In the U.K. a lot of this isolation can be put down to the Guardian (a national British paper with an international multimedia presence) in its role as the Pravda of the liberal left (their niche market if not their personal politics of those who run the newspaper.) The Guardian sets the party line for the liberal left on which wars to support, oppose or tolerate and which dissidents are worth our sympathy or should be abandoned to the state.

The roots of the Guardian's animosity towards Assange and WikiLeaks is not clear. Whether it is borne of class tensions (the Guardian's public schoolboy journalists dislike of a hippy kid who does not know his place), cultural disdain (an antipodean rocking the boat in London town) or an economic and status fear (journalists like being the "guardian"/ gatekeepers of secrets... along comes WikiLeaks and short circuits them...."here's the cables from the horses mouth - you work it out!"). Who knows what their motives are, but there has clearly been a vitriolic campaign by the Guardian boys against Assange, a campaign that has demobilised sectors of support as he is pursued by the forces running the war.

Last week, WikiLeaks was forced to announce that the full stock of U.S. embassy cables were already out on the internet. This was not by strategic design but a combination of actions taken at a high stress time for WikiLeaks workers (not Guardian employees) when Julian Assange was imprisoned (where the British state hope to keep him...opposing bail in December 2010). This was a time when the stress free Guardian was working on its book attacking Assange and busy selling the movie rights to Spielberg. The Guardian's book included the password that could access the remaining embassy cables that had been secretly placed on Bit Torrent by a WikiLeaks worker at this time.

Caught between a rock and hard place, WikiLeaks decided to formally announce the state of play and publish the remaining cables this past week.

In the past daze, acting to type, the Guardian have published a number of articles in the lead-up to the ruling on Assange's July 2011 High Court appeal against extradition to Sweden, which is expected some time soon.

Here the Guardian tells us that they condemn WikiLeaks. They share this condemnation with the U.S. military and the five previous media partners – the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde – which had previously worked with WikiLeaks publishing carefully selected and redacted documents.

Here they show how you can become a real serious journalist with a real newspaper and be taken really seriously if you jump ship.

Here they devote an editorial condemning (one more time now, with feeling!) Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

And here they rejoice that even if Julian should win his appeal, he's lost--the Australians are going to get him.

These articles are to make the liberal left in the U.K. feel relaxed and comfortable as Julian Assange is shafted in London and shunted to a U.S. prison via Stockholm or Sydney. This process mirrors the mainstream media's role throughout these long years of war, to keep us silent and sedated as the government wreak terror and destruction on the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The war-making state, whether run by neocons or liberals, no longer requires our proactive support for their brutality inflicted on enemy poplations or domestic dissidents who have touched a nerve.

Here is some rebuttal.

NYT on WikiLeaks: Move Along, No Atrocity to See Here by Peter Hart

Facts and Myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian Saga by Glenn Greenwald

Schnews take: Leaky Arguments

Refuse to be distracted! View once again the collateral murder footage and refocus. 

Twenty years into a war on the people of Iraq, 10 years into a war on the people of Afghanistan, with millions dead, maimed, displaced and orphaned, civil infrastructure destroyed, WikiLeaks has confronted us with the nature of this war... the ongoing butchery of civilians. The powers that be, from the masters of war to the manufacturers of consent, want us to avert our gaze.

Support Bradley Manning who is in chains and accused of leaking this footage, Julian Asssange tagged and pursued for distributing this footage and Michael Lyons presently imprisoned for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan after viewing this footage.

*** YOUTUBE (16 mins) Julian Assange conference after UK court hearing (15-Jul-11)

**YOUTUBE (4 mins) - Solidarity Singing "I Shall be Released" as Julian leaves High Court (Jul-11)

*YOUTUBE (6 mins) 'Assange Subterranean Homesick Blues'

Source:

http://wiseupforbradleymanning.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/on-recent-wikileaks-disclosure-of-unredacted-cables/

Related Link: http://www.londoncatholicworker.org

Ciaron O'Reilly, <ciaronx@yahoo.com> born in 1960 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia is a long-time Catholic Worker now living in London. 

Ciaron O'Reilly Blog http://ciaron.wordpress.com

Jeff Dietrich: In tough times, remember values of 'the commons'

by Jeff Dietrich

“I can’t pay the rent. I’m back on the streets tomorrow cuz they cut $40 bucks off my check ... Hey, they took my psych meds, they cut me off Medi-Cal, and now I heard that checks won’t be sent next month ...” Times are tough and that is the “street talk” at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen.

The recent vitriolic debate in Congress about raising the debt ceiling, the rancor at paying taxes for other people’s health care, the thought that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid might be cut, and public education dismantled, the destruction of unions, and the denigration of voices calling for mutual responsibility all reflect the degree to which the values of the marketplace have displaced our sense of the common good.

When I think of the common good, I think of the commons, the common land worked communally in pre-Renaissance Europe, and I think of Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, who still had a memory of the commons æ a memory of medieval times, forged by his early village years in a part of France that was slow to develop and still lived by the old values and rhythms.

Lewis Hyde tells us in his now classic book, The Gift, that this way of life was largely destroyed throughout most of Europe, and he reminds us that it was the Reformation that changed everything. In 1525 the Peasants’ War, precipitated by the liberative aspects of the Reformation, was at its height in Germany. Hyde writes, “Germany had seen over a hundred years of unrest as feudalism faded and [Lutheran] princes began to consolidate their power by territory. ... The basis of land tenure had shifted. ... Now men claimed to own the [common] land and offered to rent it for a fee.”

Thus the mass displacement of commoners from the common land, driven by capitalism, led to an unprecedented increase of impoverished people from rural areas migrating to the plague-infested slums of large European cities, there to be exploited as cheap labor for the industrial revolution and consumers of its mass-produced commodities.

Hyde describes the Europeans’ export to the New World of this same process of displacement of commoners and commodification of the commons: “The Peasants’ War was the same war that the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found that there were individuals who claimed to be the owners of these commons.”

Like the Native Americans, the ancestors of our Judeo-Christian tradition were also tribal people. The 12 tribes of ancient Israel, our forefathers, escaped slaves from the “overdeveloped” Egyptian empire, understood that “development” and exploitation of common creation was the primary sin of humanity. They incorporated the understanding of the gift of common creation to all from the Creator God into their very laws. “Don’t take more than you need. Make sure everyone has enough. Don’t work on the Sabbath” (Exodus 16:16-30).

The Sabbath day prohibitions call us to stop and rest in creation, as did the Native Americans, who were regarded by European settlers as lazy. It is all gift, and the more we work the more we delude ourselves into thinking that what we have is what we earned and that we deserve what is in reality a gift. That is the meaning of Sabbath.

The church’s doctrine of the common good filters down to us through the scriptures. However, its moral formulation was birthed during the feudal era, a time of peasants who, like Peter Maurin, lived off the common lands and were displaced by the lords and princes of this world. The Robin Hood story of Sherwood Forest is an old memory of that struggle. Our collective longings for primeval trees, large-eyed deer and doe, and the shining salmon surging up crystal streams recall a time when the gift of creation was common to us all.

Hyde tells us that we should understand gift as a “total social phenomenon -- one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythical, and whose meaning cannot, therefore, be adequately described from the point of view of any single discipline.” The meaning of the gift, he says, is always enshrouded in mystery. However, the doctrine of the common good can be seen as not mysterious, but rational and reductionistic.

Yet, as Catholics, we are marked in our hearts and souls by mystery -- the mystery of the Eucharist.

Hyde has helped me to understand the mystery of the Eucharist, the mystery of gratitude. And it makes no difference whether we believe in the traditional eucharistic doctrine of “transubstantiation,” or we believe in the “unbloody sacrifice of Calvary,” or we believe that we simply “share a meal, a common meal, so that all might be satisfied.” It is still mystery.

And mystery, Hyde says, “revives and refreshes” and marks us as people of the gift and the common good, causing us to remember the startling words of Isaiah: “Why work for that which is not food? Why give your life for what does not satisfy?” I also think of Dorothy Day, who at the end of her life could say, “All is grace, all is grace, all is gift and grace.” Hyde quotes Thomas Merton, who says, “Grace and gift flow to the empty places, grace flows to the poor beggar with the empty bowl,” and the mystery of the Eucharist is that gift and grace flow back from the empty places, softening the hardest hearts.

As Catholics, we know intuitively and irrationally that our redemption, our very salvation, is bound up with softening hearts and the mutual reciprocity of gift that flows to the empty places. We are all people marked by mystery and the gift of the common good that surpasses all understanding and flies under the radar of logic and rationality, striking the core of our being. We know that in some mysterious way we are all connected, that we are all in communion, that as Dorothy Day would say, “An injury to one is an injury to us all.”

In addition, we know that the rancor, rhetoric and rectitude of the current public discourse is not our language. We know that our mother tongue is the language of soft hearts, of gift and grace and Eucharist. We know that we cannot be whole until all empty bowls of the poor are filled and all empty spaces are filled -- until the hills are brought down and the valleys are filled.

We cannot be satisfied until all are satisfied.

Times are tough. The commons will continue to be rapaciously “developed” for the profit of the few; the poor will continue to be evicted from the commons and marginated from the common good. Wealthy capitalists will try to commodify and control every element that is common to our common humanity: food, water, earth and even the air; and then they will try to sell it back to us for a profit.

We live in a perilous time, a time that calls for perilous action, but we cannot save the world. As Christians we are enjoined to believe that the world has already been saved, as absurd as that notion may seem. In the words of St. Teresa of Avila, “The worst is already over.”

If we believe such pie-in-the-sky nonsense, we have only one choice: We are compelled to live our lives as a testament to that very nonsense. We have to fly like a bird under the radar of marketplace rationality and marketplace logos and risk the derision, diminishment and dismissal that come to fools who take it all seriously. We have to risk everything on the importance of the common good and put ourselves in the flow of the gift relationship, into the mystery of the Eucharist that is celebrated, however improbably, in such disparate places as Sunday suburban parishes, ghetto hovels, prison cells, papal palaces, and, yes, the basements of tawdry soup kitchens.

Source:

http://ncronline.org/news/justice/tough-times-remember-values-commons

Jeff Dietrich is a Los Angeles Catholic Worker community member and editor of the Catholic Agitator, in which a longer version of this article appeared. His new book, Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row will be published this fall by Marymount Institute Press.

Tom Cornell: On Labor Day

by Tom Cornell

It’s Labor Day Weekend already, the end of summer, back to school.  What does Labor Day have to do with labor?  And why should we talk about it in church?  When you get back to school, take a look at your high school history book, you students.  Parents, you take a look too and see what it has to say about the labor movement.  I have taught public high school in four jurisdictions, Connecticut, New York City and New York State, and New Hampshire.  We are lucky here in Marlboro.  Jack Mazza tells me there is a whole week long unit on labor in the Advanced Placement American History course in our high school.  That’s great but it’s not the way it is in most places, and it’s still not enough.  You’re lucky to get a paragraph on the Knights of Labor in the 19th Century and another on the AFL-CIO in the 20th, and something about the Wagner Act of 1935 that established the National Labor Relations Board and (this they never tell you) the weakest labor laws in the industrialized world. 

If a history book tells you in the Preface that it’s going to give you an overview of the story of our nation, how it came to be, who formed it and how and it does not include the mighty battle to establish minimal protections for the working people of this country, then it is not telling you the truth.  If it’s not the truth, it’s a lie.  I realized this when a good Jesuit priest, Father Ryan, offered to teach a course in Labor History for us at Fairfield Prep, after school, not for credit.  It was the most important class I ever took, in high school or in college, because it taught me that what I had been led to believe was history, wasn’t.  The struggle for the forty hour week, for health and safety regulations, for the right to organize for collective bargaining, for social security old age pensions, for workers’ compensation for injury on the job, for unemployment compensation, for a minimum wage, that was all left out. 

Slavic Workers march in Hazelton in 1897.

It cost blood!  Yes, there was violence, almost all of it aimed against unarmed workers.  Men, women and children were burned to death, men were shot, some were lynched, castrated, dragged through the streets and hanged.  Deputy sheriffs near Hazelton, Pennsylvania in 1897 shot down nineteen unarmed Slavic, Hungarian and Sicilian miners because they went out on strike.  That stimulated the building of the United Mineworkers Union.  Organizers were imprisoned unjustly for as long as twenty years, all for trying to form a union.  Why talk about this sort of thing in church?  Church is where we come to get closer to God, to hear the Word and to come together in Communion with Jesus our God and with one another and all God’s children.  There you have it!  ALL GOD’S CHILDREN, not just the sons and daughters of the powerful.  The God we worship is a God who demands justice, “Whose mighty right arm scatters the proud in their conceit, who lifts up the lowly and casts down the mighty from their thrones, who fills the hungry with good things....” 

By the middle of the 19th Century, the Catholic Church had to deal with the devastating effects of the industrial revolution on its people.  In countries where the bishops were chosen from the sons of the powerful, the Church was very slow, too slow to respond to the crisis, and Pope Pius IX lamented, “We have lost the working classes.”  In England, where the Catholic population was small and mostly Irish and poor, and in the United States, where the bishops were, almost every single one of them, sons of workers, the response was quick and positive.  The rich and powerful, the noble families that ruled Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the Austro- Hungarian Empire and their bishop cousins wanted the Pope to condemn the labor movement, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Labor in the US as Communists and enemies of Christ and his Church.  On the other side were Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore and Cardinal Manning in London.  They went to Rome and appealed directly to the Pope.  Gibbons and Manning won. 

Pope Leo XIII

In 1891 Pope Leo XIII gave his answer to the social question in an encyclical that set off the development of modern Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum Novarum, or In These Revolutionary Times.  Labor is prior to capital.  Work comes first, because work creates capital.  People come first because men and women are made in the image and likeness of God.  Dollars, pounds and euros are made in the mint!  Labor should not be considered a commodity on the market, subject to the law of supply and demand.  Workers should share in the profit of their labor.  All God’s creation was meant for the benefit of all.  On the other hand, the Church defends the right to private property.  “Property is proper to man.”  The problem with capitalism is that it doesn’t get enough capital to enough people.   Private property, yes, but it is not an absolute right and must be subject to the requirements of the common good.  Workers have a right, even an obligation, to band together to assert their right to a fair share of the product of their own labor by all honorable means, including the withholding of their labor.  The public sector has the duty to intervene for the re-distribution of wealth when necessary. 

Catholic Social Teaching is the envy of our fellow Christians in the denominations.  Many times I have been told by Protestant colleagues that they simply do not have the resources to develop and bring together such a body of teaching.  “You write the documents, and we teach them in our seminaries,” one told me.  And yet, so very few of our fellow Catholics are aware of it. 

Even a smaller percentage of our fellow citizens know anything about the terrible long struggle to attain the degree of social justice we enjoy in this land today, the Pullman Strike in 1894, for example.   President Grover Cleveland called out 20,000 troops to put it down.  They shot thirteen unarmed men dead and wounded fifty-seven more and the courts condemned, not the killers, but the strikers’ leader, Eugene Victor Debs, to prison for six months, one of the greatest Americans of all time.  Or the Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886 in Chicago.  Someone threw a bomb at a labor rally and four policemen were murdered.  It was a terrible crime.  Somebody had to pay, so four labor leaders were hanged and one cheated the gallows by suicide in prison.  Or the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike of 1911, the “Bread and Roses Strike.”  Two women representing the strikers went to the local newspaper editor.  He asked them, “What do you want?”  One woman answered, “We want bread!”  The other chimed in, “And roses too!”  Or the Ludlow Massacre on Easter Night, 1914, when the National Guard in Ludlow, Colorado shot dead a dozen striking coal miners, thirteen of their children and one pregnant woman.  Or the Lawrence strike of 1919, led by my beloved teacher, A.J. Muste, or the 1937 Flint, Michigan strike against General Motors that established the United Auto Workers Union, led by A.J.’s students.  In that same year, 1937, my spiritual mother, Dorothy Day, witnessed strikers and their family members gather in protest at the gate of Republic Steel in South Chicago.  A few days after she left, they gathered again.  Chicago police fired into them, clubbed about one hundred, wounded at least forty and killed ten men, shot them in the back, the Republic Steel Massacre. 

Women plunged to their deaths trying to escape the Shirwaist fire.

The last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Lower Manhattan in 1911 just died in 2006.  Two hundred and seventy-five young women, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrants right off the boat, worked six day weeks ten hours a day in this sweatshop. The doors were kept locked so that none of them could sneak out for a break.  When fire broke out on the ninth and tenth floors, many of them jumped to their deaths to escape the flames.  One hundred and forty-six died.  That spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, where my aunt learned to speak English, with a Jewish-Italian accent.  These lives were part of the price we paid for health and safety regulations in factories.

Asa Philip Randolph

Who remembers that Gene Debs ran for President of the United States from a federal prison cell and won a million votes?  Debs opposed World War I.  For saying so out loud, that’s right, just for saying so in public, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.  President Harding freed him after three years, but Debs’s health was broken and he died not long after.  Or A. Philip Randolph, who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black union when many unions were still segregated?  Mister Randolph – even his closest associates called him Mister Randolph – was the Martin Luther King of his time. 

I hope the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are not forgotten, men who were executed in 1927 for being labor activists and for being Italian immigrants.  “We never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today, which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows.  Never!” Vanzetti wrote the night before he was murdered in the electric chair.  The State of Massachusetts legislature has apologized, thank you!  Let us never forget!  The trial and appeal records are there for anyone to read, and a more shameful exhibition of ethnic prejudice and hatred can not be found.  My Italian mother impressed upon me the meaning of all this, and why we must all come to the defense of any people who are humiliated for their race or their ethnic identity.  Lest we forget! 

It wasn’t all beer and skittles within the labor movement.  Communists vied for control with gangsters.  The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, before and after World War II, set up labor schools all over the country to teach rank-and-file union members how to keep control of their own unions.  One of its leaders, my dear friend John Cort, died just last month at age 92. 

Bayard Rustin was also a speech writer for Martin

Luther King, jr. and one of the first openly gay 

African Americans in public life.

Little is known of the part that organized labor played in the great Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, but I know because I was there.  I know who paid the bills!  My teacher, A.J. Muste, trained Walter and Victor Reuther of the United Auto Workers Union.  These names, if you don’t know them, and Cesar Chavez’s, each of them deserves a chapter of its own in every American history book.  And they were all connected to Martin Luther King through A.J. Muste.  A.J. sent Bayard Rustin to Montgomery in 1956 to assist Doctor King in running the Bus Boycott.  Then Bayard put together the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, Dr. King’s organization. 

You have to ask yourself why they are not there in your history book, except for King of course.  Many texts don’t even tell you that King was a Christian minister, and they surely don’t tell you anything about his social philosophy.  Whose interests does this silence serve?  If you want to know the answer to that, look for the people who fought Social Security then and would undo it now, look for those who fought the minimum wage then and now, for those who fought the forty hour week and progressive taxation and are fighting still to keep it all for themselves.    

When workers band together to secure justice for themselves and their fellows so that they might raise their families in decency, they are acting under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God. That’s what Dorothy Day taught, and that’s what our own late Cardinal O’Connor taught, and it’s right out of the social encyclicals of the Popes for the last one hundred years. 

It was one hundred years ago, in 1906, that Father John Ryan published his book, The Living Wage, arguing that everyone has the right to honest work and that all honest full-time labor deserves compensation at a level sufficient to maintain a family in decency.  One hundred years later we still don’t have it, and it takes two full-time jobs to maintain a family with the kids in child-care, educated not by a parent in their family’s beliefs and traditions and values, but in a day-care center where the mention of God is forbidden and the concept of family is, shall we say, flexible. 

Young people crave adventure.  Do you want a struggle, young people?  Here’s a struggle for you!  Learn your own history, not the lying pap they feed you in school or in the mass media.  You have to search it out for yourself.  You have to find it.  Then engage yourself, get in gear, take your part in the struggle, the only struggle that can honestly claim that it has God on its side, the nonviolent struggle for justice, peace and equality in this land of the free and home of the brave. 

Happy Labor Day, everyone, and remember where you came from.  Remember Labor!   And as Mother Jones put it, “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living!” 

Deacon Tom Cornell is a veteran of the Catholic Worker Movement, former national secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and a founder of Pax Christi, U.S.A. This sermon was originally given at St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y., Labor Day Weekend, in 2006.

Walt Chura: Heart Has its Reasons: Lessons from Mary Magdalene

by Walt Chura

Today (July 22) is the feast of St. Mary Magdalene.  She has been adopted by many Roman Catholics who favor the opening of the presbyterate (aka ordained priesthood) to women.  She is known as “the apostle to the Apostles” in the Eastern (Orthodox) Christian Churches and to more and more “orthodox” (aka conservative) R.C.s.  She is also revered among the Baha’i.  Her celebrity grew among the general public, ironically, do to the sillinesses that Dan Brown presented to his great benefit in “The DaVinci Code,” i.e. the marriage of Jesus and Mary and their offspring.

Of course, Pope Gregory the Great et al. misread the Gospel accounts creating misunderstandings as well.  Suffice it to say the Pope confused the Magdalene with another Mary, i.e. Lazarus’s sister, and an penitent woman unnamed in the Gospel texts–who had in common with the Magdalene that “she loved much,” but Mary was NOT a prostitute, as the unnamed may have been.  I’ll get back to Gregory shortly with lines from his work on her that I cherish.

While I revere M.M. as “the apostle to the Apostles” and find no good Scriptural basis for excluding women from the presbyterate since there seems to be some historical precedent for including them, her greatest appeal to me is her mystical persistence and heart sense, qualities I’d like to see in more priests.  Below I let the aforementioned Gregory describe these virtues in her.

“From a homily on the Gospels by Gregory the Great, pope

She longed for Christ, though she thought he had been taken away

When Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and did not find the Lord’s body, she thought it had been taken away and so informed the disciples. After they came and saw the tomb, they too believed what Mary had told them. The text then says: The disciples went back home, and it adds: but Mary wept and remained standing outside the tomb.

We should reflect on Mary’s attitude and the great love she felt for Christ; for though the disciples had left the tomb, she remained. She was still seeking the one she had not found, and while she sought she wept; burning with the fire of love, she longed for him who she thought had been taken away. And so it happened that the woman who stayed behind to seek Christ was the only one to see him. For perseverance is essential to any good deed, as the voice of truth tells us: Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved.

At first she sought but did not find, but when she persevered it happened that she found what she was looking for. When our desires are not satisfied, they grow stronger, and becoming stronger they take hold of their object. Holy desires likewise grow with anticipation, and if they do not grow they are not really desires. Anyone who succeeds in attaining the truth has burned with such a great love. As David says:My soul has thirsted for the living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God? And so also in the Song of Songs the Church says: I was wounded by love;and again: My soul is melted with love.

Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek? She is asked why she is sorrowing so that her desire might be strengthened; for when she mentions whom she is seeking, her love is kindled all the more ardently.

Jesus says to her: Mary. Jesus is not recognized when he calls her “woman”; so he calls her by name, as though he were saying: Recognize me as I recognize you; for I do not know you as I know others; I know you as yourself. And so Mary, once addressed by name, recognizes who is speaking. She immediately calls him rabboni, that is to say, teacher, because the one whom she sought outwardly was the one who inwardly taught her to keep on searching.”

We have our English word “maudlin” from Mary’s profuse tears.  No doubt the usage began with  men who were so enraptured by cold reason that they could not understand what became known among the mystics as “the gift of tears.”  Tears may pour out of the eyes of our head but they spring from the depths of our heart.

Yes, as Wm. Stringfellow once said to Jerry Falwell, “Christ came to take away our sins, not our brains.”  But as Frank Sinatra sang, “Ya gotta have heart . . . miles and miles and miles of heart.”

Source:

http://catholicconvergences.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/heart-has-its-reasons-lessons-from-mary-magdalene/