Barry Hudock's Blog, page 33

The inaugural homily: “Let us be protectors of the environment and of one another.”

I was able to watch Pope Francis preach his homily at the Mass for the inauguration of his pontificate live this morning. (The online Salt and Light Television has been my go-to place for the live broadcast of many of the important events going on in Rome these recent weeks.) It was a striking and beautiful homily.

And though the Pope never said the word, this was a homily about solidarity. Interestingly, the Pope urged us to solidarity with one another certainly, and in a particular way to solidary with those who are weak, but also to solidarity with the environment.

Today is the feast of St. Joseph. Taking Joseph’s role as protector of Jesus and Mary as a starting point, Pope Francis spoke of the role of every Christian — and not only of every Christian, he said, but of every person — to be “protectors.” A few snippets:

The vocation of being a “protector”, however, is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live. It means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every person, especially children, the elderly, those in need, who are often the last we think about. It means caring for one another in our families: husbands and wives first protect one another, and then, as parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time, protect their parents. It means building sincere friendships in which we protect one another in trust, respect, and goodness. In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts!

***

Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be “protectors” of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.

***

Certainly, Jesus Christ conferred power upon Peter, but what sort of power was it? Jesus’ three questions to Peter about love are followed by three commands: feed my lambs, feed my sheep. Let us never forget that authentic power is service, and that the Pope too, when exercising power, must enter ever more fully into that service which has its radiant culmination on the Cross. He must be inspired by the lowly, concrete and faithful service which marked Saint Joseph and, like him, he must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important, those whom Matthew lists in the final judgment on love: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Only those who serve with love are able to protect!

***

To protect Jesus with Mary, to protect the whole of creation, to protect each person, especially the poorest, to protect ourselves: this is a service that the Bishop of Rome is called to carry out, yet one to which all of us are called, so that the star of hope will shine brightly. Let us protect with love all that God has given us!

The full text of the homily is here.

A Pope of Catholic Social Teaching

I commented to my wife the other day that it seemed clear that Pope Francis would be especially attentive to Catholic social teaching, presenting it in a compelling way both in his words as well as his living. That’s an exciting thing. (And I loved Mark Shea’s great way of noting it, as I blogged yesterday.)

Now this, from Grant Gallicho’s report on the Pope’s meeting with members of the media today:

Going off script, he explained how “the bishop of Rome came to call himself Francis.” As it became clear that he was about to be elected pope, his friend Cardinal Claudio Hummes comforted him:

“He hugged me. He kissed me. He said don’t forget about the poor,” Francis said. “And that word went in here,” he said, pointing at his head. “And that’s how in my heart came the name Francis of Assisi…for me is a man of poverty, a man of peace, a man who loved and protected creation. Right now our relations with Creation are not going very well.” Francis of Assisi “gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man who wanted a poor church,” the pope explained. “How I would love a church that is poor and for the poor.”

I think that what we have here is an apostle of Catholic social teaching.

I love Mark Shea’s comment a day after Francis’s election:

“Attention, First World. The Global South is clearing its throat and is about to speak to our deranged economic system from the perspective of Lazarus. Dives will not like that, but tough noogies for Dives.”

(source)

I love Mark Shea’s comment on Francis’s election:

“Attention, First World. The Global South is clearing its throat and is about to speak to our deranged economic system from the perspective of Lazarus. Dives will not like that, but tough noogies for Dives.”

(source)

When you’re asked on the street: To give or not?

I  found myself on the road for work last week, and as I walked with two colleagues along the streets around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, we were confronted several times over a couple of days by people asking for help in the form of money. Each one had a story to tell or an explanation of how the money would be used. (One thing I heard three times was that there was a nearby hostel or shelter that would give them a bed for the night for $15.)

This presented, of course, the perennial question that we face in such situations — to give money or not to give money?

My two colleagues, both of whom I respect and one of whom had spent a year doing inner city ministry with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, were both of the opinion that it is more often better not to give money to folks asking on the street, because of the harmful ways the people who receive it might and, in their opinions, often do use it. One of them repeated comments she had heard from the director of an urban soup kitchen, basically, “Please don’t give them money. They almost always use it in ways that will do them no good.” Another told the commonly heard story of trying to offer food instead of money, and the food was rejected angrily.

I’m of a different opinion on this question, but let me be clear — this post is not about pointing out that my colleagues, or those who think like them on this, are wrong and bad or – what would be laughable –  ”less holy.” That a person on the street to whom I give money might use it to buy drugs or alcohol certainly is a real possibility, and avoiding that is a completely valid concern. There’s no right or wrong, black or white answer here. I’m raising a question, because when each of us is approached for help like this, we have a decision to make. Not deciding is not an option.

My own response is drawn from my experience in working with people in poverty, particularly during two years in central Appalachia. My instincts from that experience, and from the formation in it that I received most directly from the two Ursuline sisters who founded the two agencies for which I worked, is to recognize that the money might not be used well, but that it’s better to err on the side of generosity than caution. In a nutshell, I would rather give money to someone who will use it poorly than refuse money to someone who needs it badly. As Sr. Brendan Conlon, OSU, often said to me, “The only way to guarantee that you are never taken advantage of is never to offer help.”

If it’s possible to provide something to those who ask in the form of food or gift certificates, rather than cash, that does indeed reduce the ways the gift could be misused. I’ve gone this route myself often,  and each time, without exception, these gifts have been accepted with gratitude. But it doesn’t guarantee that they won’t find a way to sell or otherwise misuse that kind of gift.

The bottom line for me tends to come down to Jesus’s words in Matthew 25, which come immediately to mind each time I’m approached by someone begging on the street.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nationswill be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’ And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

I will have plenty enough to answer for when I stand before God one day. “Lord, I was afraid you’d use it badly” is not one of the things I will want to have to offer.

The mysterious workings of grace: the death of Rutilio Grande

A big transition in my day job, with new responsibilities and a bit of a learning curve, has stolen away some time that would otherwise have been spent, at least in part, in blogging, but all is well and I expect it all to even out in the near future. But I did want to make sure to mention, if only briefly, that today marks the 36th anniversary of the 1977 assassination of Fr. Rutilio Grande, SJ, of El Salvador.

Grande was killed because of his efforts to promote justice and help the poor people of his community understand better their own dignity, in the face of an oppressive Salvadoran government. Two lay men, one 72 years old and one 16, also died in the attack.

Though his death, and the ministry that led to it, are significant in their own right, they are also of capital importance because they became, in the mysterious workings of grace, the catalyst of a shift in thinking and acting on the part of his good friend, Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero was profoundly affected by Grande’s death and became a strident voice on behalf of the dignity and rights of the poor of his country. This eventually led to Romero’s own luminous martyrdom as well.

As a side note, if you’re interested, keep an eye out for a new book we’re preparing to publish at Liturgical Press. When the Gospel Grows Feet, by Thomas M. Kelly, is a fascinating exploration of Grande’s thinking, ministry, and death, but also of the ecclesial and historical context in which it all is set. Kelly also does a fine job explaining what Grande and the church of El Salvador can teach American Catholics today. It should be available in May.

Benedict’s politics

Michael Sean Winters has a helpful and well-done summary of Pope Benedict XVI’s political and social teaching at the NCR website, here. A snippet:

In Caritas in Veritate he noted the ways capitalism fails at its core and in its ethical demands. The market requires competition, not solidarity. It lionizes self-assertion, not self-surrender, and it values thrift and frugality, not gratuitousness and generosity. The market’s heroes are self-made men. But, as Benedict taught, Christians are called to follow Jesus, whose entire life was an act of solidarity, who never asserted himself but always self-surrendered to the will of the Father, whose grace is never thrifty or frugal but gratuitous, always a bit surprising, never stingy. Most obviously, Jesus was not a “self-made man.” Benedict, like previous popes, did not propose a specific economic system, but his critique of modern capitalism, root and branch, was stinging. Why did this never garner much in the way of headlines?

Read the full piece here.

5 Questions about FAITH MEETS WORLD

With just over a month to go until publication day for Faith Meets World (!!), here’s a little Q&A on the project, just for fun.

So, Barry, why did you write this book?

It was the combination of two life experiences. First, while teaching theology at a Catholic high school, nearly a decade ago, I was assigned to teach eleventh grade religion. That course was on morality, and about half the year covered Catholic social teaching. Sadly, though I had grown up Catholic and earned two theology degrees, I knew only the most basic things about CST. So I started doing a lot of reading about it, because I wanted to teach it well. The more I read, the more I realized I didn’t know. It was a real eye-opener. “The Church teaches that, huh? And that?”

That experience was followed by a couple of years of living and working in southern West Virginia, in the epicenter of Appalachian poverty, where I was absolutely gobsmacked by the truth of CST and how relevant it is to real life. That’s when I knew I wanted to, even had to, write this book. The point was to do something to help other Catholics get to know this remarkable set of teachings better.

How is Faith Meets World different from other good books out there on Catholic social teaching?

Who it’s written for, mainly. Many of the best books on Catholic social teaching that are available are pretty academic in approach. There’s the wonderful collection of commentaries on the encyclicals called Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, jam-packed with history and ideas and commentary. There’s Donal Dorr’s Option for the Poor. There’s Charles Curran’s Catholic Social Teaching, 1891-Present: A Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis. And others, too.  I love those books. They’re great. But they can be heavy lifting for many folks.

My book is not better than those are and cannot replace them. Indeed, it depends on them. It’s for a different type of reader, though. It’s for the non-scholar, the non-theologians, “the people in the pew.”

I hope what it offers is a great and compelling and accessible presentation of work that popes, bishops, and theologians have done. It’s for those who want to explore ways that the Catholic faith intersects with daily life in society in some important and consequential ways. That might be adults going deeper into their faith (through a parish program or on their own), high school or college students getting to know Catholicism and Christian morality better through a course they’re taking, or teachers who want to strengthen their own background knowledge on the topic.

Is it liberal or conservative?

Let’s face it, that’s the question that will be on the minds of many as they pick up the book for the first time. That’s the polarized climate in which we find ourselves. I think and I hope that many will have trouble answering the question, even after they’ve read it cover to cover.

It’s Catholic. For many people (especially Catholics who put being “conservative” before being Catholic) that will mean it’s “liberal.” And for many other people (especially Catholics who put being “liberal” before being Catholic), that will mean it’s “conservative.” Many will think it doesn’t fit either category well, and they’re right, it doesn’t. The Catholic faith is not a political party or platform. And it has aspects that directly challenge some of the basic presumptions and convictions of both major parties in America today.

I get a kick out of the fact that people who try to figure out whether I’m pushing Republican ideas or Democrat ideas, conservative ideas or liberal ones, end up either flummoxed or frustrated, as though I’m trying to pull something sneaky or being coy about it. I’m not trying to pull anything. I’m exploring and presenting Catholic doctine.  If you’re a die-hard Republican or a die-hard Democrat, I promise it will make you uncomfortable from time to time. (We can add that on the positive side, if you’re either one of those, it will also offer significant support for some of your convictions, too.) The challenge of being a Catholic is to allow this body of doctrine, this Good News, to form us more thoroughly and truly than any party platform.

Got a favorite part of the book?

Of course, I love all the content a lot. Why would I have written it if I didn’t, right? But one piece that stands out as an especially favorite part comes in the conclusion of the book. I tell the true story about a small group of Spanish Dominican friars living on Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that was the site of the first European colonies in the early 1500′s. These friars saw the terrible things that the Spanish colonists, their fellow countrymen, had begun to do to the natives in “the New World,” and they knew they could not remain silent. So together they prepared a sermon and chose one of their number to deliver it. They called together all of the movers and shakers on the island one day — this was in December of 1510 — to hear it. And it was a humdinger.  “You are all in mortal sin! You live in it and you die in it! Why? Because of the cruelty and tyranny you use with these innocent people!” And on it went.

Of course, centuries of European tyranny against the native peoples on this continent followed this, so it’s hard to say that their efforts made much difference. But the point is, there was this small group of faithful people who refused to let the way things were or the moral blind spots that most people of the time lived with get in the way of their faithfulness to living and proclaiming the Gospel in their own time and place, especially where the Gospel most directly challenged the status quo.

You have seven kids — six at home — and a full time job. Where do you get time to write a book?

Early mornings, mostly. I’m up around 4:00 or 4:30 am most days, even weekends. (Sometimes I rely on a little Colbie Callait to help get the blood flowing.) I do a lot of my research and writing then, along with walking the dog. At 7:00, I wake up the kids, pour the breakfast cereal to get things moving, then I’m off to my day job (one I love, thankfully), leaving the rest of the morning process to my wife who is a stay-at-home mom. I don’t recommend this system as a way of doing writing projects if you can avoid it — working in short bursts of a couple of hours at a time is not ideal. But it’s what works for me, at this stage in life anyway, because it means my research and writing does not take much away from family time.

This sounds great, Barry. How do I get a copy of Faith Meets World?

Thanks for asking! You can pre-order it online from the publisher, Liguori Publications (they have a snazzy new website), or from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or an independent bookseller. Thank you for considering it.

Pope Benedict XVI and Catholic social teaching

Probably like many folks, I remember exactly where I was on April 19, 2005, watching the live announcement of Joseph Ratzinger’s election as pope. I remember the room I was in, who I was watching the television with, and what I said when I heard. I’ll probably also remember for a long time the moment I learned that Pope Benedict had resigned his office.

Interestingly, I realize now that the very first words out of my mouth were identical on both occasions. Two words. At least the first one was “holy,” so it couldn’t have been that bad, right? Yet I’m still glad the kids were not in the room on either occasion.

I talk about Catholic social teaching a lot here, and so I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge, briefly, the Pope’s important contributions to it. In a post to follow sometime soon, I’d like to consider the mark he will have left in a second area that is of particular interest to me, liturgy and liturgical theology. (CST is the topic of my new book; liturgy was the topic of my previous one.) Come to think of it, these two areas — Catholic social teaching and liturgy — provide a very interesting double-lens through which to view the pontificate of Benedict XVI!

Pope Benedict made a real and lasting contribution to CST. Of course, there was his encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, a document that is (as the editors of The Tablet called it this week) “possibly his greatest achievement as a teacher of the faith.” Though this document may (deservedly) be remembered most for its nearly impenetrable verbiage, that would be unfortunate. It’s a profound reflection on the moral elements of the economy and rather crushing assessment of the economic theories and business practices that have dominated the world’s economy in recent decades and that brought us to the economic crisis of the last 5 years. The encyclical calls for economic activity marked by gratuitousness, affirms structural reform as a political form of love, and reaffirms the Church’s conviction — based on the principle of subsidiarity – about the need for some kind of global financial and/or political authority.

A key point to Caritas in Veritate, something that was not nearly so clear in previous Church teaching, is that love is an essential element of Catholic social teaching and a key motivation for living it out. If the episcopal motto of the late Cardinal John O’Connor is quite true — “There can be no love without justice” — Benedict insists on a related truth: “There can be no justice without love.”

Perhaps this should not be surprising coming from the Pope whose very first encyclical was Deus Caritas Est, on the virtue of charity. Indeed, that encyclical, too includes significant elements of “social teaching” in it. So does Benedict’s second encyclical, Spe Salvi, on the virtue of hope. Both of these important encyclicals blur the lines that mark off what are commonly called “social encyclicals” from the regular kind, and that’s a strong sign of what I take to be Benedict’s most lasting contribution to Catholic social teaching: more than any other pope, Benedict insisted that Catholic social teaching was of a piece with the entire body of doctrine, an essential aspect of the Good News that the Church proclaims and calls us to live.

This is expressed well in the fact that his “social encyclical” was is offered in the context of a trilogy of three, on the virtues of faith, hope, and love. It’s also expressed clearly in strong passages such as this one from Caritas in Veritate:

The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. (CV, 51)

Finally, we must also note Benedict’s strong support of and contributions to the newest facet of Catholic social teaching: care for the environment. He wrote and talked about it plenty (Our Sunday Visitor collected these writings and speeches into a volume called The Environment). He also acted on it. Under his watch, the Vatican installed solar panels on the Paul VI Audience Hall and teamed up with a Hungarian carbon offset company to plant the Vatican Climate Forest, making Vatican City literally the world’s most environmentally friendly nation.

That being said, I think it’s also true that Benedict’s designation by many as “the green pope” will one day seem like the nickname they gave Pope Paul VI in the late 1960’s. Between 1964 and 1970, Paul made nine pastoral visits to countries outside of Italy, and since international travel was, for a modern pope, unprecedented, they called him “the Pilgrim Pope.” Then came John Paul II, with a list of apostolic voyages that, shall we say, smashed all records. Probably one day, not long from now, Pope Benedict’s greenness will appear pale compared to that of a successor, and CST on the environment will develop rapidly. That papal attention and doctrinal development will come for the same reason CST on the rights and dignity of workers developed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: a new situation arose within society that produced grave consequences and about which the Christian tradition had something to say, and so the Church had to speak up with urgency. The state of the environment offers similar circumstances today.

These contributions by Pope Benedict to Catholic social teaching are worth more than a few prayers of thanksgiving.

Pope Benedict points to Dorothy Day as example of conversion

Pope Benedict XVI made prominent reference to Dorothy Day in yesterday’s Wednesday audience address. He did it in the context of talking about conversion — on the occasion, of course, of the start of Lent.

In one fine passage, the Pope noted:

The tests which modern society subjects Christians to, in fact, are many, and affect the personal and social life. It is not easy to be faithful to Christian marriage, practice mercy in everyday life, leave space for prayer and inner silence, it is not easy to publicly oppose choices that many take for granted, such as abortion in the event of an unwanted pregnancy, euthanasia in case of serious illness, or the selection of embryos to prevent hereditary diseases. The temptation to set aside one’s faith is always present and conversion becomes a response to God which must be confirmed several times throughout one’s life.

He then mentioned three twentieth century figures who experienced strong conversion experiences which left an indelible mark on their spirituality and their lives: the Russian Orthodox scientist-turned-monk Pavel Florensky, the Dutch Jewish woman Etty Hillesum, and finally Dorothy Day. About Dorothy, the Pope said:

The ability to oppose the ideological blandishments of her time to choose the search for truth and open herself up to the discovery of faith is evidenced by another woman of our time, the American Dorothy Day. In her autobiography, she confesses openly to having given in to the temptation that everything could be solved with politics, adhering to the Marxist proposal: “I wanted to be with the protesters, go to jail, write, influence others and leave my dreams to the world. How much ambition and how much searching for myself in all this!” The journey towards faith in such a secularized environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts nonetheless, as she points out: “It is certain that I felt the need to go to church more often, to kneel, to bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious of praying. But I went, I slipped into the atmosphere of prayer… ” God guided her to a conscious adherence to the Church, in a lifetime spent dedicated to the underprivileged.

It’s wonderful to see. My only hesitation is that one could get the impression, from the Pope’s telling of Dorothy’s story, that conversion led her to see that methods such as protesting, going to jail, and politics were misguided, part of “the Marxist proposal,” which she then renounced in favor of a more pious life. Of course, that’s not the case: her newfound Catholic faith and deep piety (daily Mass, daily praying of the office, deep devotion to several saints, etc) only reinforced her political activism on behalf of and in solidarity with the poor. Perhaps since her story is so well known, though, my concern here is unfounded.

The closing line of the Pope’s address is also well worth noting and reflecting on as we begin Lent: “Conversion means not closing in on ourselves in the pursuit of success, prestige, position, but making sure that each and every day, in the small things, truth, faith in God and love become most important.”

Complete text of his reflection is here. More on Benedict and his legacy, in light of his resignation, to come here soon.