Young Adult Catholics

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Complaining is holy

Posted by Justin Sengstock on June 17, 2013

Sarah Kendzior, writer, anthropologist, social critic, recently published a piece at Al Jazeera English entitled “In defence of complaining.” In it, she critiques the inviolable American orthodoxy of positive thinking:

When the bubbles popped, and the jobs disappeared, and the debt soared, and the desperation hit, Americans were told to stay positive. Stop complaining – things will not be like this forever. Stop complaining – this is the way things have always been. Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up. In other words: shut up.

What really struck me was her introduction. It was a snapshot of one clergyman who happily galloped toward the new order:

In 2006, the Reverend Will Bowen launched a movement called A Complaint Free World. The goal of the movement was to get people to stop expressing ”pain, grief, or discontent”.

The best way to stop expressing pain, grief or discontent was to buy purple bracelets from Bowen’s website. The bracelets serve as a sartorial censor for those compelled to discuss their problems. Every time you complain, you must switch the bracelet to the other wrist. If you go 21 consecutive days without complaining or switching the bracelets, you are rewarded with a Certificate of Happiness.

“Our words indicate our thoughts,” the certificate says. “Our thoughts create our world.”

Kendzior isn’t the first to call B.S. Acid-tongued author Barbara Ehrenreich, of Nickel and Dimed fame, exposed Bowen’s bracelet bonanza in her 2009 book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America:

Within a few months [since mid-2006], his church had given out 4.5 million purple bracelets to people in over eighty countries. He envisions a complaint-free world and boasts that his bracelets have been distributed within schools, prisons, and homeless shelters. There is no word yet on how successful they have been in the latter two settings.

If Bowen’s method is extreme, his general idea is not. From what I’ve seen, avoiding “bitterness” and staying “tempered in one’s speech” is a powerful American Christian motif. It’s more Protestant than Catholic, more megachurch than mainline, and more suburban than urban or rural, but still bizarrely unavoidable.

To all this, I say: no. Complaint is sacred, holy, Christian. Complaint is the moral core of our tradition.

The enslaved Israelites in Egypt “groaned and cried out” to God. Because of this, God “was mindful of his covenant” and “saw the Israelites and knew” (Exodus 2:23-25). The prophets were full-blooded complainers, whom kings and subjects alike mocked for their “negativity.” In Jeremiah, “terror on every side!” (20:10) was a dismissive nickname, like “Mr. Doomsday” or “Chicken Little.” But ruthless truth-tellers like Jeremiah and Amos survive in our canon, not their mealymouthed counterparts from the royal court.

Jesus was a razor-tongued critic, comparing hypocritical leaders to whitewashed tombs full of rot. The psalmists did not “stay positive”: they wondered why God had abandoned them, why God made them a reproach in the eyes of their friends. Job, the inexplicably-afflicted just one, lamented until God had to answer, even if God’s answer was enigmatic and lofty.

Complaint is truth, calling suffering and oppression by name. As Kendzior points out, complaint is not the opposite of action: it is the indispensable beginning of action, because you cannot change what has no name, and people ashamed of their burdens don’t name them. Complaint is a way for otherwise unnoticed persons, who have never claimed their dignity, to do so for the first time. Complaint exposes the lies that cast down the lowly, while establishing the powerful in their thrones. Complaint acknowledges that even in this life, people deserve to be somehow concretely united with Jesus’ Resurrection. Complaint courageously affirms a reality we try hard to evade, namely that God is not a wizard, prayer is not magic, and faith does not mean hitting the easy button. To remix a saying I’ve seen variously ascribed to Augustine and Desmond Tutu: without God, we can’t. But without us, without our confronting wrong as wrong, God won’t.

So complain. Do not stop naming injustice just because everyone–and at times it seems like everyone–decides you are too negative, too shrill, too depressed, too touchy, too jealous, too sensitive, too weird, too naive, too impatient, et cetera. If you annoy people today, annoy more people tomorrow. You have an unimpeachable heritage: Israelites, psalmists, Amos and Jeremiah, Job, Jesus Christ.

We don’t need your positive thinking. It is escapist, void, useless. We need your truth. We do not sing about a God who treasures the silence of the poor, a God who affirms the positive thinking of the poor. We sing: The Lord hears the cry of the poor; blessed be the Lord. Get up. Make noise. In this place. Today.

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Grandma’s bread, and other horrors

Posted by Justin Sengstock on June 3, 2013

Sometimes, when I think about my childhood, I realize it’s a wonder that I’m religious at all. For instance.

I was about four years old. It was a springtime Sunday. Dad and I had been outside, but a thunderstorm threatened, so we came back in. And in the living room, while the sky turned dark as night, Dad told me about how Jesus was killed by the bad men.

We didn’t go to church in those days except for Christmas and Easter, but Dad still tried teaching the basics. He’d already explained how I actually had two fathers, both him and another in heaven. I’m sure I had no idea what he meant. Even so, Dad thought it was time to move on to the next part: Jesus. And the bad men.

I assume the Cross was part of the narrative. Yet somehow I gleaned the impression that, like in the ’80′s crime dramas we watched, Jesus had been overtaken in a city alley by leather-jacketed enforcers bearing knives. My eyes got wider; the leaden sky grew more ominous. Finally I made Dad stop so I could take a bathroom break.

As I toddled down the hallway, lightning exploded right behind the house. I screamed and ran back to Dad. Such was my first conscious introduction to Christianity: Jesus, murder, and thunderbolts of biblical smiting.

Then there was the Easter Vigil when I was traumatized by blood-spattered artwork. I think it was actually the same year, the same month. We arrived and took our pew. Curious, I pulled a book from the rack. I immediately started wailing.

It was a Holy Week-themed missal. The cover image was a pale, stylized hand, affixed to a wooden beam by a spike. Fountains of blood gushed out of it. Red. Lurid red.

I squeezed my eyes shut for the rest of the three-hour Mass. Later, I distinctly recall laying in bed at night, dreaming that my parents said it was okay not to go to that church anymore.

By First Communion time, I was less allergic to Catholic imagery. Crucifixes were almost cool. But then it came to pass: besides regular CCD, we had special sacramental prep sessions. In one, we watched a film entitled “Grandma’s Bread.”

It opened with a child sitting in the kitchen with his elderly Italian grandmother. She was making bread dough. She told the boy all about her special family recipe, how it was prized by relatives in the black-and-white photos she pulled from a wallet.

The scene was familiar, reassuring. My mom’s parents were immigrants, Polish and Russian. My grandma didn’t bake, but she famously kept her house stocked with store-bought Gonnella bread and chleb mazowiecki, from which she sawed great hunks with a butcher knife.

These people felt just like my family. So I was terribly stricken when out of nowhere, as Grandma brought the finished bread out of the oven, her legs started shaking. She heaved herself onto a chair, putting her head in her hands. She cried, “Get your mother! I need her!”

The film abruptly cut to a shot of paramedics wheeling Grandma away, frantically fitting her with an oxygen mask. Then the boy sat stunned in a living room as his parents laid their hands on his shoulders. I held my breath as they intoned: “Grandma is with Jesus now.”

My stomach swerved over a cliff. Perhaps tomorrow my real-life grandma would fling a loaf of rye down on the kitchen table and shout: “Justin! I’m dying! Get your mother!” (As it happened, she lived another seventeen years.)

The point of the movie, the reason CCD kids were obliged to watch it, was still to come: before Grandma randomly died, she had promised to bake her bread for the boy’s First Communion celebration. So he and his mom figured out how to do it themselves, and “Grandma’s Bread” ended with luncheon guests adoring a fresh loaf while the father proclaimed: “We are family!” Like Jesus, Grandma was unseen, yet still present and gathering her people via baked goods. But I remained deeply disturbed. Why kill Grandma? Why?

I could tell more tales of the borderline Catholic macabre, though after First Communion such tales would be increasingly self-inflicted. Long story short: my faith life did not have an auspicious beginning. That I emerged from it a would-be theologian is a surprise.

“In the beginning was the Word,” writes the author of John’s Gospel. Christianity is a story, one we tell each other and our children. It contains sharp edges and volatile imagery. It requires skillful handling. Told well, the story brings us life. Told badly, it oppresses and repels us, especially when we are vulnerable and young. We who tell the story need to do so with great care.

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Eternal City

Posted by Justin Sengstock on May 19, 2013

Almost exactly seven years ago, I packed a big black bag, boarded my first-ever airplane, and flew to Europe with a friend. I hyperventilated, sure I would drown somewhere in the Atlantic. I didn’t.

Our trip lasted three weeks. We picked up more friends as we moved from Rome to Paris, from Burgundy to Dublin. But Rome was the inaugural and, for me, most important stop.

The first day was hellish. After many cramped hours, we emerged onto the blazing asphalt of Fiumicino Airport. We got into a hot bus that hurtled down a hill, toward a mass of graffiti-bombed walls and knots of umbrella pines. We disembarked at Termini, the Roman rail hub.

My non-Italian-speaking buddy then stared at me hopefully while I, nearly crying from exhaustion, dredged up rusty word combinations I hazily remembered from college. Due panini, per favore. Get us two sandwiches, please. Mille grazie. Thanks so much. Cinquantatre Via Napoleone Terzo, per favore. Please take us to 53 Napoleon III Road. That was our hostel.

Suddenly we were in an elevator that smelled like lavender, rosemary and dust. Then we were in a silent and stuffy dorm room with big old Italian shutters. I had a headache. I went to bed.

The next morning, we got bread and espresso at the neighboring bar. In Italy, when you go to a bar, you go for coffee. Then we walked. Excluding our Wednesday general audience with the pope, for which we had chairs, and our limited hours of sleep, we basically walked for three days.

Rome is not entirely old: we made much use of an internet kiosk on the Via Barberini populated by hipster types. But American cities have nothing like the Pantheon and the Colosseum, the Forum and the catacombs, all impressing upon you the mind-boggling antiquity of everything. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I also sensed the city’s oldness in its merchants, those sellers of red-pepper pizza and chocolate gelato and Pope Benedict bottle-openers, who so blandly and efficiently took away our money. They seemed to say: You are mere tourists. You pass away quickly. Rome does not pass away. Rome is forever.

And, while the great Roman forever stretches back to the Caesars, it is mostly the forever of the Catholic Church. You quickly grasp this even while perusing piles of pre-Christian ruins. Stones in the Forum bear relatively fresh Latin inscriptions announcing that Pope Gregory XVI restored the area in the 1830s. And when you enter the Pantheon, emblazoned with the name of Marcus Agrippa and formerly dedicated to all the gods, you immediately glimpse pews and altar, candles and crucifix, reminding you that this is officially the church of Santa Maria dei Martiri, so you should genuflect just as in your neighborhood parish.

Churches. Like Thomas Merton, who gave a wide-eyed account of his trip to Rome in The Seven Storey Mountain, I soon found myself cataloging the endless series of churches I visited, churches that haunt me still. Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, discreetly tucked into the Baths of Diocletian. Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which has really creepy organ music. San Giovanni in Laterano, the papal cathedral, where I attended evening Mass. The Gesu, mother church of the Jesuits. San Pietro in Vaticano, or St. Peter’s to you. Santa Maria Maggiore. San Carlo al Corso. San Paolo fuori le Mura, which boasts portraits of every pope ever, though many are conjectural: who knows what Linus, who came right after Peter, looked like?

I once thought I knew something about omnipresent Catholic culture. I grew up Polish in a small suburb that used to have six Catholic churches and still has three. I have mostly lived and worked in what author Eugene Kennedy called “the thickly Catholic stretches of the [Chicago] archdiocese.” But Rome was another level altogether.

Above all, in Rome I was in constant communion with the dead. I crossed one church threshold after another to find multitudinous slabs bearing the funerary inscription D.O.M., for Deo optimo maximo (“to God, the best, the greatest”). These were usually the graves of cardinals. Pope Innocent III was, rather weirdly, interred directly above the Lateran gift shop. I almost tripped over the tomb of Catherine of Siena. At Santa Maria Maggiore, I paused in a chapel to get my bearings and was jolted to find myself right next to Pope St. Pius V, whose wizened, twisted body was enshrined in glass, protected by silver mask and gloves. More deliberately, I sought out the gold casket of Ignatius Loyola at the Gesu so I could pray there. Rome’s centuries upon centuries of dearly departed are as close, as real, as matter-of-fact as any of the living.

After years of processing Rome back stateside, I realize how much the city molds the church in its own image. The impermeability of the Vatican to outside voices has various reasons, ranging from the theological to the venal, but its physical location matters. Pope Paul VI reportedly once said that 1,500 years was a “brief interval.” It is the sort of observation that makes sense in Rome as almost nowhere else. When you live and breathe Romanita, it is easy to brush off the petitions of progressive American Catholics as myopic and irrelevant: You are mere tourists. You pass away quickly. Rome does not pass away. Rome is forever.

We must indeed demand justice. But we must know the lay of the land first. We need it to inform us as we move forward.

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Nameless in the name of God

Posted by Justin Sengstock on May 6, 2013

Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s April 25 blog post is entitled “All Are Welcome!” But the irony in the New York archbishop’s already-infamous reflection is that all are really not welcome in his Catholic Church. Unless, like the grammar-school Timothy and his boyhood chum Freddie, we remember to “wash our hands” before joining the family for dinner.

Dolan lists six categories of folks who had best clean up before appearing at God’s table: active alcoholics; businesspeople who deny fair wages to migrant workers; young unmarried couples who cohabit; women who have abortions and male partners who encourage them; people who act on “homosexuality” or “same-sex attraction” (note those terms, because they’ll be important later); and wealthy folks who ignore principles of charity and justice.

It’s a clever list, superficially diverse, careful to include social sins about which progressive Catholics often speak. But Dolan gives himself away. Three of his six “dirty hands” categories are sexual/reproductive, and he treats them with minimal nuance. (Another “dirty hands” category, alcoholism, is awkward because it’s at least as much a physical and psychological illness as a moral lapse.) And, among his sexual/reproductive bullet points, the most space is reserved for “homosexuality,” for “same-sex attraction.” In fact, it’s the longest point of the entire list, constituting 60 of 191 words, almost a third. (I used Microsoft Word for a tally.)

Local Catholics who sensed Dolan’s underlying point, and didn’t like it, announced a silent protest for Sunday, May 5. The protest contained but one element: participants would attend Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral after rubbing their hands with charcoal. But alas, Dolan was evidently quite serious about soap and towels: the ten protesters were promptly greeted by an equal number of NYPD officers, who said they could not enter. A cathedral staffer confirmed it, telling the protesters that attending Mass with dirty hands would be treated as criminal trespassing. Therefore they remained outside, and one protester, Joseph Amodeo, wrote eloquently about his experience for the Huffington Post.

Better scribes than I have already spilled enough ink analyzing Dolan’s loaded rhetoric of “dirty hands,” as well as the ways Jesus deliberately transgressed the boundaries of clean and unclean during his ministry. My own insight is more of an aside.

I said to note my citation of Dolan’s terms “same-sex attraction” and “homosexuality.” When I read them in his piece, they reminded me of something I’d seen awhile back. But I didn’t know where to find it. So I employed brute force, typing my vague memory into Google: catholic bishops don’t use word gay. And, on page 3 of my search results, I found something familiar: an NCR article from January.

It began: “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has said Catholics opposed to same-sex marriage should limit themselves to even using the term ‘only sparingly,’ as the idea, according to him, is an impossibility.” Almost what I remembered, but not quite. Then I scanned further down, and bingo: “Cordileone also prefers that Catholics do not use the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian,’ but instead ‘persons with a homosexual inclination.’”

I can’t claim to know for sure whether older terms like “homosexuality” or “inclination” or “same-sex attraction” are indeed being painstakingly retained in ecclesiastical PR messaging, apparently as pushback to the acceptance of “gay” and “lesbian” and “bisexual.” But even so, powerful hierarchs like Cordileone and Dolan certainly do set an example for other church authorities. And they are brushing aside not just the lingua franca of the wider culture, but also the ways most LGBTQs speak of themselves and their relationships.

As a straight ally, I have to take a long moment to ponder the implications. I have to imagine what it’s like to not only belong to a group singled out for “dirty hands,” but to be simultaneously stripped of the right to claim my own name: to be, paradoxically, both a scapegoat and a whozit. Because when you can’t say your own name, when everybody else calls you whatever they want, then you have no name.

Think hard about that: people kept nameless in the name of God.

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Francis and John

Posted by Justin Sengstock on April 26, 2013

A couple days ago at work, I took a call from someone who wanted to know what I personally thought of Pope Francis. I knew what she meant. She didn’t mean what I think of him in general. She meant what I think of him now.

Now, because Francis recently reaffirmed the Vatican “reform” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the largest umbrella group for U.S. sisters. In April 2012 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith put LCWR under the control of three U.S. bishops. Vatican concerns included “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

I thought for a second and said yes, I was disappointed by Francis’ response to the LCWR issue. But I added that I still like him. Francis has open contempt for power and careerism, for triumphalism and money. Inasmuch as reform begins with the pope, I’m not sure he could change anything else unless he starts with those problems anyway.

I also pointed out that someone we now consider a liberal, John XXIII, really wasn’t the liberal of legend. It was John as catalyst, not John as progressive, that mattered. And with that in mind, lately I think a lot about John and Francis, Francis and John.

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who became Pope John XXIII on October 28, 1958, was then 76 years old. Although conversant with the socially-engaged Catholicism of his home diocese, Bergamo, he was also thoroughly steeped in traditional nineteenth-century Italian piety: Jesus and Mary and Joseph, devotions and saints, obedience and mortification. His diary and de facto autobiography, Journal of a Soul, reflects as much. His career was solidly bureaucratic, that of a consummate uomo di fiducia, or “reliable man”: three decades in low-key Vatican diplomacy and five quiet years as cardinal-patriarch of Venice.

When the conclave elected Roncalli, one of the qualities his brother cardinals appreciated was his obvious loyalty to his predecessor, the conservative Pius XII. And Roncalli continued some of Pius’ more overtly conservative policies. For example, John–or at least his Curia–would uphold Pius’ decision to shut down the French worker-priest movement, in which clergy took jobs as ordinary laborers to better connect with their flock.

John was also an old-fashioned church historian by avocation, devoted to classical and medieval literature, author of a series of books about the sixteenth-century St. Charles Borromeo. So it was really no big surprise when he issued the 1962 Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia (“The Wisdom of the Ancients”), which pointedly promoted the study and use of Latin. Catholic intelligentsia, riffing on a then-current anti-Communist slogan (Cuba si, Castro no), joked that here was a case of veterum si, sapientia no (“old men, yes; wisdom, no”).

I doubt all of what transpired in Catholicism later in the 1960s and 1970s would have met John’s approval.  You can make a strong case that, despite his now-infamous encyclical against birth control, the real liberal pope of the Second Vatican Council was Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Paul VI. But Paul, while he would continue the council, also admitted that it simply wouldn’t have occurred to him to initiate it.

And there lay John’s great gift: just to know that something had to be done, that something was missing, that we needed a gust of wind, a new Pentecost, even if he could not precisely envision it. And he intuited that only a gathering of many others besides himself could envision it. By calling the council, which only completed one session before his death, John XXIII had a sweeping effect that far transcended him.

I can see Pope Francis fulfilling a similar role. I know he will never agree with me about many causes for which I work. But I also sense a man with a holy impatience: a pope who, to paraphrase his own pre-conclave words, cannot abide a self-referential church that gets sick choking on its own stale air.

He gives many signals that our self-referential, royalist climate is finished. There is his name, his emphasizing his local role as bishop of Rome, his refusal to move into the nineteen-room papal apartment, his paying his own hotel bills, his black pants and black shoes, his cheap iron pectoral cross, his insistence on constantly dialing up random friends and telling them “it’s Jorge calling,” his historic appointment of eight international cardinals as an advisory council (seven of them metropolitan archbishops, and only one Vatican official), his reported “unblocking” of Oscar Romero’s beatification, his celebration of Holy Thursday in a juvenile detention center. At the Vatican, in many ways a small village where symbolic gestures foreshadow programmatic changes, all this matters very much.

So for now I retain the hope that Pope Francis is himself a catalyst, that he too will have an  impact far transcending his own conscious intent.

(P.S. I’m not the only one pursuing this comparison: Historians ask: Is Francis a John XXIII? | National Catholic Reporter)

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Language gap

Posted by Justin Sengstock on April 7, 2013

Jamie Manson’s latest NCR commentary is entitled: “Dolan and Cordileone: Please don’t call it love.” She wonders what exactly it might mean for Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York, and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, to proclaim that the Catholic Church really does love gays and lesbians.

Dolan said “I love you, too” (literally) in an Easter Sunday interview on ABC. He elaborated: “we want your happiness…you’re entitled to friendship.’” And when Cordileone arrived in San Francisco in 2012, he announced: “We need to continue to learn how to be welcoming, let them know that we love them and we want to help them.”

But Dolan is, of course, a vocal opponent of marriage equality. He also declined a request to meet with homeless LGBTQ youth last year. Cordileone, meanwhile, is nicknamed the “Father of Proposition 8.”

And Jamie notes that when the Human Rights Campaign recently distributed a red and white equal-sign graphic on Facebook, meant to be posted while the Supreme Court heard arguments on marriage equality, Cordileone’s PR staff went ahead with their own jaw-dropping riposte: “a graphic of a white division sign and the citation ‘Luke 12:51′ on a red square. (Luke 12:51 is the verse in which Jesus says, ‘Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division.’)” The archdiocese pulled it from Facebook when people complained, but the division sign had made its point.

Jamie wants church officials to stop using the word “love” unless they demonstrate it in concrete, relational ways:

When we love another person, we genuinely desire to know her or him. When we love, we long to listen to the beloved and to learn his or her story….But that quality of listening requires true presence and vulnerability. For now, men like Dolan and Cordileone continue to insist that gays and lesbians do not know the truth about themselves and their relationships.

Unsurprisingly, commenters began shooting back. One critic, who goes by the screen name Purgatrix Ineptiae (my rough translation: “she who cleans out the folly”), wrote that love means something else entirely:

When a bishop says he loves you, he means he wants to help you get into heaven. It doesn’t mean he will clear his schedule to listen (for the thousandth time) to your protestations that he should adopt your opinions. It doesn’t mean he enjoys your company. It doesn’t mean he wants you to like him. It means he wants to help you eschew sin and grow in faith in accordance with his understanding of sin and faith.

Reading Jamie’s understanding of love, which I confess to sharing, and reading the alternate view provided by Purgatrix, I realized (for the thousandth time) what one of the biggest problems is in the church today. It is the language gap.

For all intents and purposes, there are multiple Catholicisms. Words and symbols might coincide, but meanings do not. I began to grasp this near the end of my college career, while researching a paper on sexual ethics for a theology class. I read articles about John Paul II’s understanding of love.

The articles suggested that love for John Paul was, at bottom, the choice to disinterestedly pursue the objective good of another person, particularly the other’s eternal good. Because God is the creator and ground of all that is, we learn how to make such a choice by first studying God’s self-revelation, of which the church is the privileged custodian. Only secondarily do we study human experience.

This view appeals to our idealism, and has some beauty and logic. It is also somewhat removed from the friction of our everyday, embodied lives. It frequently does not allow our personal encounters to speak for themselves with all their compelling mystery and poetry, their unbidden ecstasy and sorrow. And so when we try to dialogue with the Vatican about love, particularly sexual love, the result is generally an impasse.

Speaking of dialogue, I had a related light-bulb moment while reading David Gibson’s book about Pope Benedict XVI, The Rule of Benedict. One passage argued that while Benedict considered himself wholeheartedly committed to dialogue, he often used the word in a different way than it appears in common discourse. Benedict’s model for “dialogue” was the Gospel of John, in which the truth-seeker asks questions of the truth-bearer, as Nicodemus does with Jesus, and then accepts what the truth-bearer reveals. This is dialogos with the divine logos, not a hashing-out among parties of equal standing. For me, it explained a lot.

If this is how much our basic terms and concepts differ, then consider just how much we talk past each other, and how much we will continue to do so. I obviously have no easy solution. I doubt there is even a hard solution.

But if I am not immediately optimistic, I yet have hope. My hope is in Jesus’ observation that the proof of the tree is its fruit. My hope is in Gamaliel’s counsel that what comes from God is not stoppable. We will see which language, which worldview, gives the most abundant life to the most people. And you know where my bias is.

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Unless a grain of wheat shall fall

Posted by Justin Sengstock on March 25, 2013

On a hazy, hot July morning several years ago, I sat in a comparatively frosty classroom at Boston College, auditing a summer course. Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology, was our teacher.

The frail 82-year-old Peruvian priest, who sweated profusely despite the air conditioning (his lungs were stressed by the local air, and he habitually carried an extra shirt in a plastic bag), described his last conversation with his friend Oscar Romero. He had called Romero from an airport.

Gutierrez had only a few minutes before his flight, but he wanted to check in with the embattled archbishop. For several years, Romero had witnessed on behalf of the abused, terrorized Salvadoran poor. And it was now clear that the death squads, backed by the powerful interests they served, no longer wished to endure this meddlesome priest.

Gutierrez told Romero, “Take care of yourself.” There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“If I wanted to take care of myself, I’d have to leave the country,” Romero said.

A couple of weeks later, presiding at evening Mass on March 24, 1980, Romero preached from the text in John about how the grain of wheat must fall to the ground and die if it would ever become more than a grain of wheat. As he finished, a sniper stepped out from behind a pillar and pulled the trigger. The grain of wheat fell to the ground and died.

The thirty-third anniversary of Romero’s martyrdom, March 24, 2013, coincided with Palm Sunday. I am appreciative of this double observance. Deeply appreciative.

You see, we tend to shroud Jesus’ Passion in an incense-scented mist. We cull from the Gospels, from the prophets and the epistles, from later traditions like Veronica and her face wipe and Longinus and his spear, mixing and matching. We construct a Greek play where the chorus and the actors all strut their proper roles and chant their honed responses. We watch from a distance while the blood saves us from our sins. The main characters either mysteriously understand the cosmic transaction, knowing they are on a mission from God, or giddily refuse to grasp the obvious significance, happy to serve their father the Devil.

We easily forget this is also an earthy, brass-tacks narrative, its protagonist a mouthy upstart from the edge of acceptable society, who stood up for inconvenient outsiders and their inconvenient lives. He finally became a traitor to the state and its authorized religion, both of which did business in a corrupt, self-aggrandizing way he loudly rejected. Therefore the state disposed of him alongside the other criminals, who to their executioners were an undifferentiated glob of undesirables, all equally destined for the garbage disposal: thieves, murderers, prophets, messiahs.

We seem to need martyrs like Oscar Romero, who lived a very similar story in our own time, to sharply remind us that as it was for them, so it was for Jesus Christ.

And many of us really don’t like to hear it. We resist. We do not want the Passion narrative to be too readily accessible to us as everyday human beings, as people who have daily opportunities to reject injustice and incur the cost, or accept injustice and swallow our shame.

We know deep down that if this week is more than just a memorial of salvation history, more than just a time to gratefully celebrate what somebody else did, then we are obliged to find some way of embodying the Passion narrative ourselves. And, in so doing, we will incur responsibilities greater than pious acts and ritual observances. We will have to focus on things much bigger than our interior devotion or personal purity. We will have to accept, as both Jesus and Romero did, some way of dying so that others around us might live.

At the Last Supper, Jesus said: “If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14). So much easier to limit ourselves to thanking the first person who showed up with soap and a bucket, isn’t it? I know it is for me.

Oscar Romero, pray for us. Happy Holy Week.

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Francis, S.J.

Posted by Justin Sengstock on March 13, 2013

Wednesdays are my day off. I got up late. I was on my second cup of coffee when CBS News broke in, bringing white smoke and booming bells in the campanile of St. Peter’s Basilica. I was on my second egg-salad sandwich when the former Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, S.J. of Buenos Aires stepped in front of the city and the world.

Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran, the protodeacon with the privilege of announcing such things, spoke in Latin that echoed badly on the CBS feed. I needed the interpreter to tell me it was Bergoglio, which was the first surprise. With the election over so quickly, I had feared a barreling tide for the Milanese cardinal, Angelo Scola, who kept crawling around the top of all the good bookie lists.

I do not hold anything unique against Scola. But I did not want the papacy to revert to an Italian possession. This is an international church, now more than ever. Nor did I want a man who would be both the third archbishop of Milan (Pius XI, 1922; Paul VI, 1963) and fourth patriarch of Venice (Pius X, 1903; John XXIII, 1958; John Paul I, 1978) elected pope in only a century. We need to keep moving on, and I’m pleased that we are.

I did not need an interpreter for the rather electrifying name, Franciscum, which came through clearly enough. Francis he would be. According to Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, Bergoglio’s choice is in deference to il Poverello from Assisi, not the Basque Jesuit evangelist Xavier.

It is not technically “Francis the First,” as I keep hearing. Albino Luciani specifically stipulated himself as Joannes Paulus Primus (John Paul I). Pope Francis did not do so.

He is the first Jesuit pope. I admit some tribal pride here: my college degree is from Loyola University Chicago. And Francis, son of Italian immigrants but a Buenos Aires native, is also as much the first American pope as Dolan or O’Malley would have been. Argentina is in South America, and, as I always want to tell people who speak overmuch about “American this” and “American that,” South America is America.

He is 76. That means that, considering that modern popes from Leo XIII (aged 67 when chosen in 1878) onward have generally been elected at ages 63 to 68, we’ve gone to the extremes for the third time in a row. John Paul II, 58, represented the young extreme (as did Benedict XV, 1914, aged 59), while Benedict XVI, 78, represented the elderly extreme (along with John XXIII, 76). Francis, like his immediate emeritus predecessor, will have a reign of years, not decades.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio was known for his attention to the gulf between rich and poor. He lived in a small apartment rather than the palace available to him. He is said to cook for himself. He pointedly shunned his limo, favoring public transit.

When Francis emerged onto the loggia, his balding head and inscrutable, abstracted half-smile reminded me of no one so much as Pius XII, a Roman-born aristocrat and the last pre-Vatican II pontiff. But I noticed right away that Francis was not wearing the red mozzetta, the short choir-dress cape of watered silk or ermine-lined velvet that popes usually don for their first public appearance.

Nor did he wear the liturgical stole. He only put it on when he gave the blessing, and then he promptly handed it off to an aide. The image was that of a matter-of-fact, plainclothes pope, someone who really would rather be riding a bus or making his own dinner right now instead of standing here, doing this.

He began his opening remarks with a quiet “good evening,” joking that the cardinals had gone to the edge of the world just to get them a bishop. He led some prayers for Benedict, then asked the crowd to “do me a favor” by blessing him first before he blessed them. Francis bowed for several seconds while the crowd prayed. He concluded by asking everyone to please have a good night’s rest.

It had a different flavor from Benedict’s reflections on being a worker in the vineyard: humble, yes, but you could hear all of Ratzinger’s commas click into place. It was also different from John Paul II, the former stage actor, whose apparently spontaneous but precisely polished introductory speech had a “friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” ring to it.

I won’t lie. I was thoroughly and completely charmed. I want Francis to succeed. I want to believe. And yet…and yet…

…I’m not naive. He is no liberation theologian. Latin American Jesuit does not always mean Grande, Ellacuria, or Martin-Baro, and in Francis’ case it does not. There is controversy over whether Bergoglio appropriately supported Argentinean church workers against the military junta. And he is unfriendly to the LGBTQ movement. Much of this is to be expected. Radicals rarely become popes or pope-makers.

And I want particularly to guard against being taken in by emotion or symbols, by either pageantry or deliberate departures from pageantry. The Catholic Church, whatever else it may be, is consummate theater, the best in the world.

Jesus told the first Francis to rebuild his church. Now we can only wait and pray, with everyone else, until today’s Francis reveals what he believes Jesus is telling him.

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Murdered metaphor in the cathedral

Posted by Justin Sengstock on February 26, 2013

It was a Sunday in late January. It was my first visit to New York and I was staying with a buddy at his place near Brooklyn College. The sky was waxing purple with sunset, and a day that had included pizza (which fell on my pants), a boat ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan (invigorating), and violin music in Central Park (awesome) was finally winding down.

We stepped out of Central Park, shivering a bit now that temperatures had tumbled from the fifties to the thirties, and walked twenty-five blocks down Fifth Avenue. First we passed foreign consulates; then we passed shops that looked like they would have gladly accepted my yearly salary in return for exactly one shoe. We crossed left at 51st, squeezed in under a scaffolding, and entered St. Patrick’s Cathedral just in time for 5:30 Mass.

I’m shy. I wanted to sit in the back somewhere. My buddy is not shy. He dragged me to the front pew, which was miraculously still empty at 5:29. We claimed it. A gilded altar canopy, studded with tiny heraldic emblems, loomed directly ahead.

A few feet away, I saw the spot where Robert F. Kennedy lay in repose in 1968. A few more feet in another direction, and there sat the throne of the archbishop of New York. And, way off to one side, I saw a flat-screen TV playing an endless loop of digitized cathedral photos for the benefit of wandering turisti.

The young, green-clad priest preached about Christian marriage. He said that Christ had changed marriage into something better than it was before he came. He said most married people needed to have more children. He said fruitful marriages were the nuclei of the social order, which would collapse without them. I wanted to raise my hand and remind him that Jesus, unmarried, had wandered from his nuclear family, who thought he was insane, to travel around with at least twelve other guys and a bunch of women to whom they were not attached.

Still, I was expecting this kind of homily. We were in Cardinal Dolan’s house. The Gospel was the wedding at Cana. It was Respect Life Sunday.

The part that threw me was the rock-climbing.

Father said that in his wedding sermons he enjoyed comparing marriage to extreme sports. I raised my eyebrows. Father, with his carefully parted hair and painstakingly modulated voice, did not immediately strike me as an extreme sports kind of guy. Specifically, he said he preferred the image of rock-climbing. It’s strenuous work, you’re tied together for safety, the view at the top is great, etc.

Here I began to cringe. Over the years I’ve endured the facile and occasionally dreadful metaphors of many clergymen: the spiritual life is like a basketball game, and priests are our coaches. Mass is like a wake, so we dress up for the dearly departed relative. God’s love is like a fire hose, a dump truck, and Niagara Falls all at once. I could go on.

But what I mainly noticed about today’s several-minute digression was that Father never slipped into a reverie about personally rappelling off the face of a cliff or gazing down from a summit. His bullet points, written on a sheet he kept glancing at for reminders, very much came across as a list of things he had looked up, or been told, about rock-climbing. In other words, the priest was teaching authoritatively about intimacies he didn’t have in terms of extreme sports he evidently didn’t engage in.

My buddy and I had spent much of the weekend discussing complicated relationships from hard experience, so we felt very put off. After Mass we retired to a restaurant that, according to a sign sitting on the table next to the Parmesan cheese, had once been patronized by the mobster Lucky Luciano. In between mouthfuls of pasta, we wondered what it would mean for our generation and its religious discontents if such priests continued to multiply, to become men of trust who are assigned to cathedrals.

My fellow CTA 20/30 member, Kate Childs Graham, recently published an excellent NCR column. It collects hopes young adults have for the next pope. Personally, I fantasize about a pope who, in collegiality with all the bishops, re-examines the priesthood. You cannot preach or teach meaningfully unless you live fully. If you are content to cordon yourself off with an altar rail, if you habitually speak of places you have never been, then expect this generation to follow other guides and seek other vistas.

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Dies cinerum

Posted by Justin Sengstock on February 18, 2013

I remember different Ash Wednesdays for different reasons. The first time I ever received ashes was in second-grade CCD class. The teacher herded us into the field behind the school where Father waited, vested in alb and purple stole. He burned the palms right there in a Weber grill while we watched.

Today this same priest is for me a dark avatar of penance and conversion. A couple of years ago, he pleaded guilty to looting the Sunday collection to finance a gambling addiction. Lent is now his everyday life: he works off the debt, dollar by dollar, as a hospital orderly.

In middle-school CCD, Ash Wednesdays–or at least the classes closest to them–were about getting little cardboard buckets to collect for Catholic Relief Services. I spent forty days begging change from my parents and obsessively scanning the school floors with a laser eye during passing periods. Given my school’s many staircases, its vast lunchroom, and its maze-like subterranean tunnel system covered in murals, seeking stray coins was quite the adventure.

I admit to making charitable giving one competitive Lenten event among others, like the couple of years I gave up snacks entirely, proud of the splitting hunger headaches I dedicated to Christ. But I did grasp that Lent should make you not only ascetic but generous.

I remember an Ash Wednesday from my Catholic high school, I think freshman year. With our ashes, we received a wooden nickel with a red cross on it, called “Cross in My Pocket.” It had a prayer on the back and we were supposed to carry it during Lent.

I soon noticed abandoned wooden nickels all around the building. Here I was, a former “public” kid in this mythical wonderland of Catholic education, slowly absorbing that many classmates did not share my devotion, that not a few were in fact calling B.S. on it. Learning to sit with this, without judging, later became a major theme in my faith journey.

My most memorable college Ash Wednesday was the one when I watched Mel Gibson’s lurid epic, “The Passion of the Christ.” I got my forehead smudged, inhaled a vegetarian quesadilla, and joined my housemates in a darkened cinema to take in the blood-spatter. Knowing that in real life the Romans most likely gave Jesus thirty-nine lashes, I sat dumbfounded as I counted seventy-eight. The rest of the film proceeded with similar enthusiasm. Hours later I stood shivering on an El platform, feeling grossed out and violated.

Looking back, I realize that was when I finally rejected a particular Catholic aesthetic, one perversely fascinated with mortification. There is a difference between embracing the natural risks and pain of self-giving, on the one hand, and the pornography of suffering on the other. Officially, the church agrees. In practice, we still get confused.

A few years later, I distributed ashes for the first time. We had many young kids in the congregation that night, and we are not the sort of parish that does the “turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel” thing. So I bent down to these munchkins, who all seemed to have uniformly flaxen hair and angelic eyes and speckled-puff faces, and ground soot into their foreheads while informing them they were dust and unto dust they would return.

The words were harsh. I winced apologetically. Yet Christianity is not a religion of caramel and marshmallows, and it is probably better to learn that early.

This year also really stands out. It was the first time I’ve begun Lent knowing there would be a new pope at the end. I knew it because only two days prior, and for the first time since the Middle Ages, the pope cashed in his chips before he died.

I don’t doubt Pope Benedict XVI’s official reason for retirement, his age and infirmity. But for two centuries, popes have routinely lived into their eighties. I suspect a deeper reason is the wall of “everything and all at once” his age and infirmity ran up against: hemorrhaging church attendance; a still-exploding sexual abuse crisis; Vatican infighting and backstabbing, gone septic and exposed by VatiLeaks; inquiries into alleged Vatican financial misconduct; restive women and LGBTQs who simply refuse to stay silent; and more.

Meanwhile, “everything and all at once” suggests it’s not just the accretion of individual problems. They are all somehow linked. And they are signalling that the world is about to turn.

So I will remember Ash Wednesday 2013 in a unique way, not for how it spoke to me personally, but for what it revealed to the whole church: that we now officially live, however uncertainly, at both the end and the beginning.

___________

*Dies cinerum, Lat., “day of ashes.”

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