Leah Libresco's Blog, page 11
September 25, 2018
The Cruel Warning Signs of Abuse
I’ve written an essay for the Catholic News Agency, on abuse inside and outside the Catholic Church.
McCarrick, Han, and Ronnell all carried out parts of their abuse in the open. Their campaigns of control and cruelty may not have always created the trail of evidence needed to convict them of a crime, but there was enough for those around them to see that they were failing their respective callings of stewardship. The more they were left to act abusively, the more everyone around them signaled that abuse was acceptable. Why would someone come forward with an allegation of further, private predation when there had been no consequences for public wickedness?
For U.S.A. Gymnastics and NYU, the impulse to curb these abuses is meant to come from a fear of liability. They ought to have curbed these dishonest mentors, and fired them if necessary in order to avoid culpability. But the Church should be swifter to act than any other institution, because it fears more than civil penalties.
Bad employees can be fired, and the supervising organization can wash their hands of them. A bad priest or cardinal must be contained for the sake of his potential victims, but when it seems like his vices are constrained by his age or enfeeblement, the Church cannot say that there is no harm left in him. Unrepentant, he is still a danger to himself and his own soul.
September 6, 2018
Pope Gregory the Great, on the temptations of administrators
The Office of Readings offered a homily by St. Gregory the Great for his feast day on September 3rd. I was grateful to read it, especially because it was a good prompting to pray for priests and bishops who find themselves torn between their worldly, administrative duties and the radical promise they have made to lay down their life for the church.
I do not deny that I am guilty, for I see my torpor and my negligence. Perhaps my very recognition of failure will win me pardon from a sympathetic judge. When I lived in a monastic community I was able to keep my tongue from idle topics and to devote my mind almost continually to the discipline of prayer. Since taking on my shoulders the burden of pastoral care, I have been unable to keep steadily recollected because my mind is distracted by many responsibilities.
I am forced to consider questions affecting churches and monasteries and often I must judge the lives and actions of individuals; at one moment I am forced to take part in certain civil affairs, next I must worry over the incursions of barbarians and fear the wolves who menace the flock entrusted to my care; now I must accept political responsibility in order to give support to those who preserve the rule of law; now I must bear patiently the villainies of brigands, and then I must confront them, yet in all charity.
My mind is sundered and torn to pieces by the many and serious things I have to think about. When I try to concentrate and gather all my intellectual resources for preaching, how can I do justice to the sacred ministry of the word? I am often compelled by the nature of my position to associate with men of the world and sometimes I relax the discipline of my speech. If I preserved the rigorously inflexible mode of utterance that my conscience dictates, I know that the weaker sort of men would recoil from me and that I could never attract them to the goal I desire for them. So I must frequently listen patiently to their aimless chatter. Because I am weak myself I am drawn gradually into idle talk and I find myself saying the kind of thing that I didn’t even care to listen to before. I enjoy lying back where I once was loath to stumble.
Who am I — what kind of watchman am I? I do not stand on the pinnacle of achievement, I languish rather in the depths of my weakness. And yet the creator and redeemer of mankind can give me, unworthy though I be, the grace to see life whole and power to speak effectively of it. It is for love of him that I do not spare myself in preaching him.
In further reading, my husband, Alexi Sargeant, has an excellent essay in The American Interest on lay responses to clerical silence, abuse, and sacrilege.
August 28, 2018
Living as Foreigners in the Kingdom of Truth
I’ve been reading* Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom, one to two meditations a day. Today’s meditation, on death to self, struck me with a doubled meaning—one relevant to the apocalypse-as-unveiling that the Church is going through at present.
You have an idea of what the new country looks like. Still, you are very much at home, though not truly at peace, in the old country. […] Now you have come to realize that you must leave it and enter the new country, where your Beloved dwells. You know that what helped and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by. […]
Trust is so hard, since you have nothing to fall back on. Still, trust is what is essential. The new country is where you are called to go, and the only way to go there is naked and vulnerable.
It seems that you keep crossing and recrossing the border. For a while you experience a real joy in the new country. But then you feel afraid and start longing again for all you left behind, so you go back to the old country. To your dismay, you discover that the old country has lost its charm. Risk a few more steps into the new country, trusting that each time you enter it, you will feel more comfortable and be able to stay longer.
To long for the new country of the Kingdom of God is to long for truth. To say “Amen” to Christ’s words in Luke 8:17.
For nothing is hid that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light.
When we have choked ourselves with incuriosity and cover-ups, living in truth feels like living in a foreign land. But we must allow ourselves to be grafted on to live. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever. (1 John 2:16-17).
*Look, I don’t really care how silly this is: I’ve found it helpful to do this short spiritual reading right before I shower, so I can meditate on the reading without distractions. A better woman than I would find it easier to avoid reading something else right after, but I know my limits and want to make space for Nouwen’s words.
August 23, 2018
The Dominican Nun who Shaped the Sound of Music
I greatly enjoyed reading Todd S. Purdum’s Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution. I bought a copy for my mom for her birthday, I read (and sung) chunks of it to my husband, and I was particularly charmed by the story of the real nun who consulted on The Sound of Music.
Sister Gregory was a Dominican nun who led the drama department at Rosary College. She met Mary Martin when she saw her in South Pacific, and the two became pen pals. Martin described her thus, “She didn’t act like a nun, or at least the way we poor ignorant souls thought nuns acted. She was bouncy, enthusiastic, with an ambling walk like a good baseball player.”
(This certainly matches my experience of nuns. Particularly the sisters I met when I attended a Jesu Caritas retreat with the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecelia and played kickball with the novices. I strongly recommend the retreat to any unmarried woman.)
Purdum includes an excerpt from one of Sr. Gregory’s letters, offering advice on how to write the nuns in the musical:
“The whole purpose of life, it seems to me,” she wrote, “is pin-pointed in Maria’s struggle to choose between two vocations. Like every adult human being, she must find the answer to the question: ‘What does God want me to do with my life? How does He wish me to spend my love?” She took some pains to explain that, in her view, nuns (and priests) are neither afraid of love, nor incapable of sharing it, but were drawn to their vocation “because they keenly appreciate the gift of life, and have a tremendous capacity to love.
“A religious is neither afraid of sex nor disgusted with it,” she added, “but rather recognizes it as one of God’s greatest gifts, and therefore, in consecrating it to His service, one reflects the measure of one’s love.”
Purdum, Something Wonderful, p 272.
May 23, 2018
Care for the Dying is the Last Hospitality
In Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, death is an idea we have to sneak up on. The play imagines that five children are gathering to help their father die well and to navigate the aftermath. […] As their father moans and moves, but does not speak, the siblings disagree, with patience and love, about how to care for him as his death approaches. Ann, the protagonist, opposes her brothers’ plan to keep upping his morphine—regardless of whether it is necessary to treat his pain—to help him avoid a protracted, difficult death. Groping for a way to explain her reluctance, she tells them that when she euthanized her dog she couldn’t shake the feeling she had killed her pet, and she doesn’t want to feel that way about her father. As I watched the play, I was struck by the fact that she had to turn to the example of an animal’s bad death to try to illustrate what a good one might be for a person.
[…]
Caring for the dying and the dead is an act of hospitality, the last one we get to offer someone. It is always difficult work, but we have made it harder (and rarer) than it should be by sheltering ourselves so carefully from any glimpse of death.
And, for further reading, consider visiting or otherwise supporting the Dominican Sisters at Hawthorne, who care for the dying. And check out this NYT Magazine piece on prisoners working in hospice for their fellow inmates.
(Image at top, Burial of the dead on the Antietam battlefield, Wikimedia Commons).
May 21, 2018
Of Sin and Superhero RPGs
In the beginning of the God and Comics podcast where Alexi and I were discussing Avengers: Infinity War, Alexi got to make the recommendation for the listeners and shared the superhero RPG we’ve been enjoying: Masks.
The game is tremendous fun—it’s easy to pick up the mechanics, and everything in it is designed to serve storytelling. You don’t take damage by losing hit points, you mark conditions like Angry, Guilty, Insecure, etc. Mark too many conditions and you’ll have to leave the fight, but you can ameliorate them by lashing out, making a sacrifice, etc.
I play the “Bull” archetype, who was given her powers by a shadowy and sinister organization. In a recent adventure, one of her handlers caught up with Sonia, and, by using trigger phrases, made her blow up like a bomb (luckily, she ran for it and no one was hurt when she went off).
So, since Sonia is friends with a nun (we placed a motherhouse for the Dominican Sisters of St. Rose of Lima in our fictional city), she went to her for advice.
Here’s what Sr. Lucia Marie had to say about Sonia’s problems with mind control:
Sonia, it sounds to me like you made the best of a dangerous situation. Many of us—well, all of us—have certain scars on our souls we didn’t put there, thanks to original sin, but many of us have more specific ones, thanks to the sins of our own fathers and mothers. God doesn’t judge us for those, but we do have a responsibility to become the saints He wants us to be, despite all of that. I’m proud of you for protecting people, even from yourself, Sonia.
The game is a blast, and ours has more theological content than average, I’d guess.
That’s Sonia second from left in the art above, drawn by Alexi, our GM and my husband.
May 18, 2018
Thanos loses to “Riotous Fecundity”
My husband and I joined the clergymen of God and Comics to discuss the latest MCU movie: Avengers: Infinity War. The full episode is available to stream on the God and Comics site, but I thought I’d type up this teaser for you.
Alexi: So if Killmonger is the shadow self of Black Panther, who is Thanos the shadow of?
Me (Leah): I do see a resemblance between him and another Marvel villain: Iron Man. In that Iron Man and Thanos both present an inhumane solution to what they see as the problem of humanity.
Where Thanos’s answer is simply DEATH—that the only way people can flourish is if there’s fewer of them. Iron Man in Age of Ultron also struggles with “people have difficulty living with each other” so I’ll just build a BIG ROBOT so that people won’t have to be responsible for each other, and I won’t have to be responsible for them anymore. This robot will be able to keep everyone safe and contained.
And I think it’s that idea of containment that’s common both to Iron Man and Thanos. That their ways of dealing with the riotous fecundity that can spill over, that’s human nature/human life, is to in some way slow it down, box it in.
If you want the light side, the opposite to the shadow self of Thanos or Ultron, the opposite of all that is marital sex, which is always, when open to life, a pledge of faith in the goodness of creation.
May 15, 2018
Interviewed on Illiberalism
All discussions of the dangers of too much emphasis on autonomy and self-sufficiency should take place with a backdrop of shrieking children scooting by on trikes, eating ice cream, and jumping off the platform they’ve built with the outdoor stacking blocks that the Bruderhof make in their community factory.
I had the pleasure of being part of a symposium of writers on post-liberalism/illiberalism at the Bruderhof community in upstate New York. Below, you can find a short interview I did about the weekend with Alina from the Bruderhof community.
May 11, 2018
Killing Tyranny with Kindness in The Winter’s Tale
No villain ruins Leontes but himself—no wicked daughters deceive him with flattery, no Iago drips poison in his ear. In an instant he becomes convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that his wife Hermione has become the lover of King Polixenes of Bohemia, his dear friend. As he spirals into self-sustaining despair, Leontes becomes a tyrant to himself, before he acts tyrannically toward others. In Riccardo Hernandez’s scenic design, the stage is expansive, open, even to the heavens (snow falls intermittently). But Anatol Yusef (Leontes) contorts himself as if penned in as he falls victim to his fear. Shorter than most of the cast, he makes himself even smaller; he is his own jailer.
Leontes’s friends, followers, and family rebuke him at every turn, wishing he would allow them to do him good. If there were an external threat to refute or defeat, they might be able to do so, but they can’t find a way to cajole him into opening the door he has barred shut. As Leontes’s madness threatens them, each manages to do what he cannot: hold onto their interior freedom and trust they will find a way out, even if they cannot see it yet. More than that, they trust that the moral choice will lead them to this escape—or will lead others to take up the burden when they can go no further.
I had a wonderful time seeing Theater for a New Audience’s The Winter’s Tale, and you can read my whole review at The American Interest.
April 24, 2018
Talking BenOp in Pittsburgh
I’m headed to Pittsburgh this weekend to give two talks. On Friday, April 27th, I’ll be a guest at SENT, a young adult gathering with live music, free food and drinks. I’ll be speaking about my upcoming book, Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name and leading a workshop on how to open your home.
The SENT facebook event is here, and my husband helped me shoot some footage of me talking about the book for the archdiocese’s promotional video. It can’t be embedded here, but you can check it out on Facebook. (And, if you want to see the silly outtakes, I’ll be sending that to my book announcement email list soon).
On Sunday, April 29th, I’ll head over to the parish of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, where I’ll speak after Mass at 12:45p. At this event, I’ll be talking about my first book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer. I’ll be telling the story of my conversion and how I learned to pray as a foreign language. The parish has full details at their Facebook event.
And remember to get in touch if you’d like me to speak in your town!
