Barry Hudock's Blog, page 34

Gracious words

I’m excited to share this new blurb for my book, Faith Meets World. This is from Sheila Gilbert, National President of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, USA:

“This is a great book. Whether you are liberal or conservative in your outlook, this book offers very helpful insights into the background and the deeper meaning of the teachings we all find challenging to live.”  

Besides simply being flattered by Ms. Gilbert’s gracious comments, I’m all the more honored by them because my dad has been a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society for decades.

“You don’t really know what you are accomplishing”

Here’s something from Dorothy Day that I came across yesterday, at a time I could really use the encouragement it offers.

Have courage. The more trouble you have, the more miserably you seem to be getting along, the more worth the whole thing is in the sight of God. If you had it all easy, if you took pleasure in it, it would not be worth much. And even if to you it seems to be going badly, that doesn’t mean a thing. You don’t really know what you are accomplishing. God makes it hard for you because you are strong and can stand it really. You are privileged. You know how a symphony, the best in the world, sounds like nothing if you yourself are tired and not in the mood for it, and yet that doesn’t detract from the perfection of the work. It’s the same with our work. We have no way of judging it, so it’s no use trying. 

That’s from a letter to Catherine de Hueck, dated July 1935 (published in All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day). Dorothy was not talking about the struggles of parenting, but I suspect she would not mind if I read it in that context.

Christianity and poverty: turning the world’s attitudes upside down

I recently finished up Loving the Rich, Saving the Poor: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, by Helen Rhee, published a few months ago by Baker Academic. The book explores the attitudes and understandings of wealth and poverty in the early church. The whole book’s worth a read, but I think what I found most interesting and striking about it came in the very first chapter.

Rhee, a professor of church history at Westmont College, opens her book by providing some important context. She offers a sense of the economic and social world into which early Christian faith stepped and in which its attitudes about wealth and poverty were situated – in other words, the socio-cultural air that the early Christians breathed. And the difference between attitudes and practices of that world and those fostered within the new Christian community are striking.

Key to that (Greco-Roman) world was the patronage system. In fact, it was pervasive enough to be called (by one study she cites) “the glue that held human society together.” Patronage involved relationships of reciprocity between people at different levels of society. Those with money and power provided to those below them on the social scale “gifts” of food, land, connections, dinner invitations, and more. In return the recipients of these things were expected to publicly provide honor, esteem, gratitude, support, and praise to their benefactors, and these were important marks of social status to those who received them.

“Justice” in this society was conceived as each person receiving according to his status within society (not according to need or rights). Beyond what the poor could provide to the rich within this system of patronage, poverty was regarded with indifference at best and sometimes as a sign of moral degeneracy.

In stark contrast to this is the understanding of poverty within the Israelite community from which Christianity sprung, fundamentally rooted in Yahweh’s deep concern for the poor, a theme that pervades Israelite scripture and history. By the obligations God places on his people as a condition of the covenant and by his own direct action in history, God protects and defends the poor and afflicted, provides for the needy, delivers the oppressed from bondage, and lifts up the lowly. From this concern on the part of their God, the Israelites developed a sense of obligation to have a similar concern for the poor . Rhee does a fine job of succinctly presenting this concern as it appears in the Old Testament’s historical works, prophets, and psalms, as well as in Jewish apocryphal literature.

Then, moving on to Jesus’s own attitudes toward wealth and poverty, Rhee illustrates well that Jesus — in his preaching, in his ministry, and in his lifestyle – ”turns traditional Greco-Roman reciprocity and patronage upside down.” By this point in the chapter, the statement was not surprising, as the Jewish history, scripture, and ethics already had done much the same thing. Jesus simply provided concrete and dramatic confirmation and exemplification of it all.

Through the course of the chapters that follow, Rhee explores the doctrine, theology, and practice of the Christian church on various aspects of poverty and wealth. Rhee is an academic, writing mostly for academics, so I can’t say it’s written in a light and breezy style, but it’s certainly worth the effort. One point that keeps resurfacing is that one essential element of the ministry of priests and bishops, right alongside acting as ministers of the sacraments and teachers of doctrine, was that they were seen as and expected to live as “lovers of the poor” — attentive to the needs of the most vulnerable, trusted distributors of the church’s charitable goods, and prophets who spoke out in the defense of the poor.

Finally, Rhee concludes with a chapter that she admits at the start is outside her area of expertise: drawing more practical conclusions from the data. What does it all mean to Christians today, especially those of us living in this “culture of affluence” and an economy that thrives on ever-increasing consumption? Despite the fact that she is a historian and not an ethicist, Rhee offers a set of meaty and challenging reflections related to simplicity, almsgiving, fasting, hospitality, distributive justice, and more.

“A judgment upon us all”: Appalachian poverty on the anniversary of “This Land Is Home to Me”

Here’s an anniversary that I point out with some bittersweetness. This week marks the 37th anniversary of the publication of This Land Is Home to Me, the historic pastoral letter “on powerlessness in Appalachia,” published on February 1, 1975, by the Catholic bishops of that region.

Rarely has any official statement of American Catholic bishops gained as much attention from the public and the media as this letter. It made many Americans aware of the astonishing conditions in which many of their fellow citizens lived and brought about far more intense pastoral efforts by the Church and its various organizations to address the myriad problems involved. February 1 should be marked annually as a sort of Appalachian Awareness Day within the American Catholic community — especially now that the spotlight has moved on to other things.

Having lived with my family for two years in the very heart of Appalachian poverty (Mingo County, West Virginia), I will mark this week’s anniversary first of all in the same spirit that I always recall the people I knew and lived with there: with warm admiration and joyful memories. What fine and strong people, who know the value of community and of family better than the people of any other place I have lived (and I’ve moved around more than many folks). What a beautiful, remarkable place.

Of the dozens and dozens of stories I could recount, let me mention just one brief and simple one. I’ll never forget attending Mass for the first time, on our first Sunday in Mingo County, in the little cinderblock church of the small Catholic parish in Williamson, West Virginia. After Mass we made our way with everyone else to the cafeteria of the parish’s tiny grade school (think of a room with space for no more than a dozen folding tables), where the community shared a brunch together. So many people made their way over to us to introduce themselves and welcome us and chat (though no public mention had been made of our being new arrivals) that one of my young kids said, “Dad, why is everyone telling us their name?” (Shall I contrast that with experiences at other Catholic parishes we’ve joined? It would be depressing.)

But I will also mark the letter’s anniversary with a sense of deep and bitter sadness, aware that poverty, devastation, and exploitation remain issues there still, nearly two generations later. There are many reasons for that, and anyone who tries to reduce them to one, to point the finger in a single direction, is clueless.

To be sure, many of the people themselves have a hand in this situation. The acceptance of dire poverty as the inevitable lot of vast numbers of people is far too widespread. Drug abuse is rampant and interest in education is often minimal. (Even some of the strongest, most admirable cultural characteristics tend to keep people from the kind of economic and personal growth that is commonplace to many Americans today. I’m thinking here of the deep personal rootedness in one’s family and in the land that can prevent people from considering college or professional training or building a career away from the holler that is their family’s home.)

But much of this is the aftermath and the persistence of over a century of iron-fisted exploitation by powerful people and businesses from both inside and outside the region. This continues today in

regional and local political leaders who insist against all evidence that reliance on coal production is the only way forward for local economies or that growing concern for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuel use represents a “war on coal” and the people who mine it;
faraway company executives who bust unions and convince locals that the only thing that will keep their jobs secure is a willingess employ mining techniques that destroy the very mountains which make their land so stunningly beautiful and which cause dire health problems in their own families;
school administrators whose expectations of their students are next to nothing. (This latter circumstance played a big role in pushing my wife and I to decide that while the kids were young was probably not the best time to be living and working where we were.)

When I hear or read of blame for their circumstances placed squarely on the people who live in Appalachia, I think of the way some people speak of their embarrassment about black slaves of nineteenth century America because they did not rise up and fight their oppressors. It reveals, in my opinion, a failure to understand the reality of the situation. Indeed, there came a time, eventually, when the black community in America could and did demand respect for their dignity and equal rights and took the lead in shaping that desire into a reality. I hope central Appalachia will have a similar moment.

I also hope, in the meantime, that people who are poor, in Appalachia and elsewhere, will continue to have advocates among Catholic leaders like they did in the bishops of the region nearly two generations ago. In This Land Is Home to Me, those bishops insisted that “the truth of Appalachia is judgement upon us all.” After briefly recounting the development of Catholic social teaching, they said (in the distinctive poetic-prose style of this letter):

Thus,

there must be no doubt,

that we, who must speak the message

of God who summoned Moses,

and whose mouth was opened

in Jesus of Nazareth,

and who keeps the Spirit alive

on behalf of justice

for so many centuries,

can only become advocates of the poor.

This is not to be simplistic,

to see all in black and white,

to be ignorant of economics

and the contributions of other human sciences,

but in a profound sense

the choices are simple

and stark:

- death or life;

- injustice or justice;

- idolatry or the Living God.

We must choose life.

We must choose justice.

We must choose the Living God.

The full text (.pdf) of This Land Is Home to Me is here.

Poverty in Appalachia, on the anniversary of “This Land Is Home to Me”

Here’s an anniversary that I point out with some bittersweetness. This week marks the 37th anniversary of the publication of This Land Is Home to Me, the historic pastoral letter “on powerlessness in Appalachia,” published on February 1, 1975, by the Catholic bishops of that region.

Rarely has any official statement of American Catholic bishops gained as much attention from the public and the media as this letter.  It made many Americans aware of the astonishing conditions in which many of their fellow citizens lived and brought about far more intense pastoral efforts by the Church and its various organizations to address the myriad problems involved. February 1 should be marked annually as a sort of Appalachian Awareness Day within the American Catholic community — especially now that the spotlight has moved on to other things.

Having lived with my family for two years in the very heart of Appalachian poverty (Mingo County, West Virginia), I will mark this week’s anniversary first of all in the same spirit that I always recall the people I knew and lived with there: with warm admiration and joyful memories. What fine and strong people, who know the value of community and of family better than the people of any other place I have lived (and I’ve moved around more than many folks). What a remarkable place.

Of the dozens and dozens of stories I could recount, let me mention just one brief and simple one. I’ll never forget attending Mass for the first time, on our first Sunday in Mingo County, in the little cinderblock church of the small Catholic parish in Williamson, West Virginia. After Mass we made our way with everyone else to the cafeteria of the parish’s tiny grade school (think of a room with space for no more than a dozen folding tables), where the community shared a brunch together. So many people made their way over to us to introduce themselves and welcome us and chat (though no public mention had been made of our being new arrivals) that one of my young kids said, “Dad, why is everyone telling us their name?” (Shall I contrast that with experiences at other Catholic parishes we’ve joined? It would be depressing.)

But I will also mark the letter’s anniversary with a sense of deep and bitter sadness, aware of the poverty, devastation, and exploitation that remain issues in that region now nearly two generations later. There are many reasons for that, and anyone who tries to reduce them to one, to point the finger in a single direction, is clueless.

To be sure, many of the people themselves have a hand in this situation. The acceptance of dire poverty as the inevitable lot of vast numbers of people is far too widespread. Drug abuse is rampant and interest in education is often minimal. (Even some of the strongest, most admirable cultural characteristics tend to keep people from the kind of economic and personal growth that is commonplace to many Americans today. I’m thinking here of the deep personal rootedness in one’s family and in the land that can prevent people from considering college or professional training or building a career away from the holler that is their family’s home.)

But much of this is the aftermath and persistence of over a century of iron-fisted exploitation by people and businesses from inside and outside the region. This continues today in regional and local political leaders who insist against all evidence that reliance on coal production is the only way forward for local economies or that growing concern for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuel use represents a “war on coal” and the people who mine it; in faraway company executives who bust unions and convince locals that the only thing that will keep their jobs secure is a willingess employ mining techniques that destroy the very mountains which make their land so stunningly beautiful and which cause dire health problems in their own families; in school administrators whose expectations of their students are next to nothing. (This latter circumstance played a big role in pushing my wife and I to decide that while the kids were young was probably not the best time to be living and working where we were.)

When I hear or read of blame for their circumstances placed squarely on the people who live in Appalachia, I think of the way some people speak of their embarrassment about black slaves of nineteenth century America because they did not rise up and fight their oppressors. It reveals, in my opinion, a failure to understand the reality of the situation. Indeed, there came a time, eventually, when the black community in America could and did demand respect for their dignity and equal rights and took the lead in shaping that desire into a reality. I hope central Appalachia will have a similar moment.

I also hope, in the meantime, that people who are poor, in Appalachia and elsewhere, will continue to have advocates among Catholic leaders like they did in the bishops of the region nearly two generations ago. In This Land Is Home to Me, those bishops insisted that ”the truth of Appalachia is judgement upon us all.” After briefly recounting the development of Catholic social teaching, they said (in the distinctive poetic-prose style of this letter):

Thus,

there must be no doubt,

that we, who must speak the message

of God who summoned Moses,

and whose mouth was opened

in Jesus of Nazareth,

and who keeps the Spirit alive

on behalf of justice

for so many centuries,

can only become advocates of the poor.

This is not to be simplistic,

to see all in black and white,

to be ignorant of economics

and the contributions of other human sciences,

but in a profound sense

the choices are simple

and stark:

- death or life;

- injustice or justice;

- idolatry or the Living God.

We must choose life.

We must choose justice.

We must choose the Living God.

The full text (.pdf) of This Land Is Home to Me is here.

Ryan Smith: War is hell when women are there

Many of the arguments that I’m hearing put forth against women in combat strike me as ones that might have been used to argue, a couple of generations ago, against women in the workplace. Women alongside men will be “distracting” and “uncomfortable” and damaging to unit cohesion and espirit de corps. If this were all there was to it, I’d simply say to the objectors: get over it.

But Ryan Smith, a former Marine infantryman, has offered a little more in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that has received a lot of attention. (In the last 24 hours, I’ve heard it mentioned in an NPR report and seen it linked from the First Things blog. As I write this, it has 933 comments from readers.) To be sure, Smith presents exactly those arguments, but he also adds to them considerably.

Smith offers from experience a window into some horrific battlefield conditions that women will face. (Don’t read this over lunch, Matthew Franck at First Things wisely suggests.) Smith’s point is to say that these would be terrible conditions for women to face, as well as for men to face in the company of women. And he’s surely right. But in my view, Smith’s account does not offer a compelling argument against women in combat nearly so much as it does against anyone in combat — against combat, period. His concluding paragraph reads:

Despite the professionalism of Marines, it would be distracting and potentially traumatizing to be forced to be naked in front of the opposite sex, particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene. In the reverse, it would be painful to witness a member of the opposite sex in such an uncomfortable and awkward position. Combat effectiveness is based in large part on unit cohesion. The relationships among members of a unit can be irreparably harmed by forcing them to violate societal norms.

If it the potential trauma of being being forced to be naked in front of people of the opposite sex “particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene” is to be avoided, then so is the trauma of having to do it at all. (As for it being “distracting,” “uncomfortable,” and “awkward,” who cares. As I said, these are no more arguments against women in combat that they are against women in the workplace.) If we’re talking about irreparable harm inflicted upon the members of a unit who are “forced … to violate societal norms,” the threat of this is obviously no less real when there are only men around.

Let me be clear – my point is not to argue that women have or don’t have a place in combat. It’s to argue that people have no place in combat.  Smith’s account teaches us something about war, not gender. But if what it tells us is not enough to convince us that war must be avoided, it’s not nearly enough to convince us that women should not be permitted to be there.

Politicians and economists consider: Can Catholic social teaching help get us beyond the current economic crisis?

It is increasingly acknowledged, indeed by some surprising sources, that Catholic Social Teaching offers one of the most persuasive and morally interesting responses to the recent financial crisis.

That’s Anne Rowlands, of King’s College in London, in an article posted this month at Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits. The article is called “Catholic Social Teaching: Not-so-secret anymore?”, and the “surprising sources” Rowlands has in mind are leading British politicians and economists. She writes that a growing number of them are beginning to recognize Catholic social teaching as an important resource for moving beyond the economic crisis. They see that “CST envisions a world of value, relationship and social creativity beyond the narrow confines of a framework couched primarily in the language of profit, marketization, choice and endless consumption.”

The crisis has presented the church, Rowlands says, with a great opportunity “to make the case for a Catholic vision of economic life” because “many of the alternative narratives have run into moral cul-de-sacs and there is a greater openness to a degree of reflection on the last three or four decades of policy-making, its social impact and the model of the human person at its heart.”

That’s exciting stuff. And there’s more, too. I was especially interested in her comments about the way CST has provided concrete resources for helping the British political Left to “re-orient its politics,” the  ”fundamental coherence” of the various points of Catholic social teaching, and the need for discussion of “structures of virtue” to compliment CST’s awareness of “structures of sin” in society.

Have a look.

Archbishop Aquila on abortion and a culture of life

Kudos to Denver Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila, who made public a well-done pastoral letter on abortion yesterday, the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

There’s much to like about the letter. The opening account of a couple of his own personal experiences is startling and real. He acknowledges that we have all been complicit by our complacency, our ineffective action, or, for some, our pro-choice positions. He offers a beautiful quotation from a homily of Pope John Paul II during his 1987 pastoral visit to America that I hadn’t been familiar with. He points to the centrality of human dignity in a healthy culture — which means more than just respect for unborn babies:

A culture of life, quite simply, is one which joyfully receives and celebrates the divine gift of life. A culture of life recognizes human dignity not as an academic or theological concept, but as an animating principle—as a measure of the activity of the family and the community. A culture of life supports most especially the life of the family. It supports and celebrates the dignity of the disabled, the unborn, and the aged. A culture of life seeks to live in gratitude for the gift of life God has given us.

If we want to build a culture of life, we need to begin with charity. Social charity, or solidarity, is the hallmark of a culture of life and a civilization of love. It allows us to see one another through the eyes of God, and therefore to see the unique and personal worth of one another. Charity allows us to treat one another with justice not because of our obligations, but because of our desire to love as God loves.

This charity must begin in the family. Our families are the first place where those who are marginalized, and whose dignity is forgotten, can be supported. To build a culture of life we must commit to strengthening our own families, and to supporting the families of our community. Strong families beget the strong ties which allow us to love those most in danger of being lost to the culture of death.

The charity of the culture of life also supports works of mercy, apostolates of social justice and support. Families impacted by the culture of death are often broken. Supporting adoption, marriage, responsible programs of social welfare and healthcare, and responsible immigration policy all speak to a culture which embraces and supports the dignity of life.

I think if I’d been writing the letter, I’d have made sure to acknowledge the very difficult situations in which people find themselves that leads them to contemplate and choose abortion. I’d have noted that there is in our times a moral blind spot that allows many, many good people to miss the reality of the situation. And I’d also have included a strong statement that God’s mercy is always available to those who have been involved in abortion.

I might also hesitate to headline the entire letter with reference to “the culture of death” (the letter is titled, “40 Years of the Culture of Death”), because of the grave moral judgments it suggests against anyone who does not agree with church teaching. With that title, is anyone who does not already agree going to read any further?

But all in all, Archbishop Aquila’s letter makes for worthwhile reading.

Speaking of good reading on this dark anniversary, I’d also point out Simcha Fisher’s column (on the many reasons that using graphic abortion images to protest legal abortion is usually not a good idea) posted yesterday at the National Catholic Register and Charles Camosy’s post (on the inaccuracies of some conventional wisdom on the subject) at the Catholic Moral  Theology blog.

January 22: A day of penance and prayer

In all the dioceses of the United States of America, January 22 (or January 23, when January 22 falls on a Sunday) shall be observed as a particular day of penance for violations to the dignity of the human person committed through acts of abortion, and of prayer for the full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life. The Mass “For Peace and Justice” (no. 22 of the “Masses for Various Needs”) should be celebrated with violet vestments as an appropriate liturgical observance for this day.

General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 373

On a dark anniversary: abortion and Catholic social teaching

This Tuesday, January 22, marks the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade and companion Doe v. Bolton decisions. It’s worth pointing out on this blog, which spends so much time considering Catholic social teaching (CST), that the the abortion issue falls directly — not peripherally, but directly — under the umbrella of the Church’s social teaching and should be understood in the context of it.

That’s not just my quirky take or the theory of a few ”liberal” CST enthusiasts who wish the pro-lifers would get as excited about “their” issues as they do about abortion. Pope John Paul II and now Pope Benedict XVI have been adamant about the fact. (See, for example, John Paul’s Evangelium Vitae, sections 5 and 20, and Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate, section 51.)

Why? Abortion has everything to do with CST because it is so clearly related to CST’s two central principles, the ones on which everything else rests.

First, there is human dignity. That abortion is a grave violation of human dignity is clear, and there’s no need to appeal to religion, revelation, or faith to make the point. Indeed, to be “pro-choice” about abortion, one must rely completely “on faith,” believing against all empirical evidence that what is being snuffed out is not a human life. The remarkable Christopher Hitchens – ”liberal,” adamantly atheist, and pro-choice – insisted in an essay a decade ago (in which he defended a woman’s right to choose) that denying that the fetus is a living, individual, human person is “obvious nonsense from the biological and embryological points of view.”

Even the “secular” argument can establish abortion as a violation of human dignity, based simply on biology and basic human rights. Throw in the theological principle of the sacredness of the human person, who is made in the image of God and with whom God united himself in the incarnation of Jesus, not to mention the fifth commandment, and the case becomes all the more clear.

Second, there is human solidarity, which is the moral response to the factual interdependence we share with one another. (Though it is often said that human dignity is the central principle of CST, I suggest in Faith Meets World  that it’s more accurate to think of CST as a bicycle with two wheels — human dignity and human solidarity — upon which all the rest rides.) This principle, too, sheds much light on the nature of abortion. The very same moral impulse that compells us to care for those around us, especially the weakest and most vulnerable among us, because they are one of us, because we are all members of the same human family, demands that we reject abortion. It not only violates the solidarity between a mother and her child, but between human society and each person, each family, who make it up.

Throw in the theological/doctrinal principles that we are all children in the family of God, that we share and are intended to share a communion with one another that is analogous to the life of the blessed Trinity (again, we’re made in the image of God), that we’re therefore called to a preferential option for the poorest and most vulnerable, and the reality becomes even clearer.

Forty years of legal abortion in the U.S. means two generations of of aborted children and two generations of the rest of us living in, being complicit with, and being formed by that reality. This Tuesday, January 22, should be for each of us a day of reflection and regret, of fasting and repentance.