The World of 25 Years Ago, Part II

Before the month comes to a close I should finish posting the "Statement" that young John Janaro wrote in September of 1990 as he began a journal that would cover the next two years of his life and times. (See HERE for the first part.)

I began by speaking of how we human beings, even as we developed our power for accomplishing great good, always seemed to find ourselves using that power for greater evils. The tension at the heart of the profound ambiguity of human existence was growing greater.

Twenty five years later, that tension has pushed even further. It has grown exponentially, and in many ways that we could not have imagined in 1990.

If I were writing such a broad survey of the times today, however, I would do it differently. I would write more from the perspective of my own suffering and also my own gratitude. I would place my own weakness and my need for healing more in the center. I would write perhaps in a less sophisticated way.

In any case, this is what I wrote a quarter of a century ago. It is a recognizable theme that I still ponder: the problem of human beings living without God. But I believe now (more than I did before) that God still draws us on His mysterious paths by the often-hidden workings of His grace -- even in our ignorance and incoherence and failure and in the apparent insignificance of our lives.

Even if we try to live without God, He still dwells with us. He has made His dwelling among us and He is not going away.

God wants to empower us to build up the good in this world, but first and above all, He wants us. He made us not only for this world, but also to share His eternal life.

And He is Love.

He knows our weakness and our selfishness, and that we play with our own spectacular (and often dangerous) toys without even thinking about the reason why we exist. He sees our poverty and loneliness in the midst of all our riches, and it cannot be any other way because He has placed His signature on each or our hearts. Our hearts will always be greater than our power, and so "it's never enough" and yet we don't know where to go.

God knows we are a mess. But He hasn't given up on us, and He wants to meet us with His compassion.

I still see the problems of human existence but my perspective has grown, and what are "my words" below have become more my life and my suffering. In strength and in weakness, I am more aware that what matters is fidelity to the Mystery of God and His opening-up of my life to my brothers and sisters, in love.

For the record, then, let us listen to the Young Janaro of September 1990. Maybe he was smarter than I am today. He was learning and thinking about many things, and then -- as now -- he was so much in need of mercy.

We Affirm Human Dignity and Yet We Are So Cruel... Why?

Two living human persons

Recently the news and (especially) the Internet have presented for us some unbearable (but, sadly, not surprising) instances of human beings attacking other human beings.

There are many features of the events we've seen that are especially awful (but, once again, not surprising): the defenseless victims, the callous and ruthless dismissal of their humanity for money, and the pretense that the whole gruesome assault is being carried out in the service of human dignity and human freedom.

What we see here is also a problem that is peculiar to our time. Since the beginning of history there have been violence, murder, cruelty, and human trafficking. The distinctive mark of our emerging epoch, however, is the way we try to cloak all this nasty business under the mantle of "service," of "doing good," of human rights. 

We want to affirm human dignity. We have this sense that it is crucially important to recognize and uphold the value of every human person. This is a tremendously good intention, which has washed up on the shores of the 21st century like a plank from a shipwreck. It is a strong plank. Much can be done with it. But it is not made to float by itself, in the midst of stormy seas.

The dignity of human persons is founded upon—indeed consists in—their being created in the image of God, and their eternal destiny in God.

It is the image of God that gives the human person a real inviolable status. Being "someone" means being in relation to the One who is the transcendent origin, sustenance, and fulfillment of all things. It means being a person who can know and love, who can freely give his or herself and who is called to belong freely to God. Ultimately, God alone is worthy of the human person.

Without this foundation, the term "human dignity" becomes subject to all kinds of subtle manipulation. Indeed, even terms like "good" become oblique when they have no roots beyond our own intentions and determination.

And this is the problem. Contemporary Western culture has inherited and in some ways deepened a profound and mysterious crisis about God. In the midst of the titanic explosion of human power over the natural world, God seems to disappear.

Our rationalistic ancestors pushed God to the margins of the universe, and eventually declared His "death." They bequeathed to us not only what they thought to be His "powers," but also the gigantic and perplexing responsibility of His goodness. Now we look at the 21st century and our power is dazzling indeed. We have found it difficult, however, to declare that our works are good.

When God created the world, He saw that it was good (see Genesis 1). We, however, with all our amazing power and its fruits, live in our world without the awareness of God's existence. Not surprisingly, we are racked with anxiety regarding what is good in all our achievements (and there is a great deal of good—wonderful, magnificent good—in the achievements of our time). In fact we are haunted by the ambivalence of what we've done, and we search desperately for some kind of perspective that will allow us to distinguish and foster the good while correcting our failures.

In recent times we have also given great attention to the human person. We have learned so many good things about human life and human aspirations. We have discovered real ways to help people to live with greater dignity, and we want to affirm and build up human persons and communities. But with the eclipse of God and its corresponding dark cosmic solitude, we face this strange paradox: even as we become more knowledgeable about the workings of the world, and more sensitive to various aspects of the dignity and value of the person, we have no way of bringing it all together, and no sure criteria for how to apply our knowledge and our power in complicated and difficult situations.

The result is that—without even realizing it—we gradually but inexorably submit to the "logic" of power itself, which "builds" by dominating and ultimately destroying anything that resists it.

Of course, this is terrifying. No one wants to acknowledge that we are lost, that for all of our good intentions we do not know what is good. Thus, we adopt the intellectual apparatus of power: ideology. We simply affirm the goodness of what we do. We use a veneer of weak argumentation, obfuscation, and deception (especially self-deception).

When all else fails, we assert and define that our way is good even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. This means that we also refuse to listen to those who would remind us of our blindness. In any case, it has become especially important for us to feel good about what we do. In the social realm, we want to feel that we are empowering human persons and serving human dignity.

We would like to think we are building a kinder and gentler world. But violence pours in upon us from every side. Even as we become more attentive and more skilled in the art of saving lives in some places, we completely disregard the value of human life in others. We are divided against ourselves: wanting peace but waging war, wanting community but building walls of isolation, seeking healing yet constantly hurting one another. We want to build something beautiful and what emerges from our hands is a grand and spectacular monstrosity.

Such is the world in which God is obscured, and even the most sincere and ardent assertions and feelings about human dignity lose their bearings and cannot engage real life, real human situations, sufferings, and frailty.

I look at myself. I know that God exists, that He is the Source of my very being, and the foundation of my dignity as a person. I know that I am made in His image: He who transcends the whole universe and by this very incomprehensible transcendence is nearer to me than I am to myself. Still, I see how much I fail to remember Him, to live my own life with gratitude, and to love the human persons He has entrusted to me.

It is not enough to acknowledge God. We must open our hearts and let ourselves be loved by Him, so that by the power of His love we are enabled to love Him in return. And still the path is narrow, the path that leads to God and passes through the relationships He gives me with the real human persons who are in my life. Yet I know that here is His gift; here is where I find His face.

With all of this, my life is still full of violence, full of the daily failure to recognize the dignity of the human person—the image of God—in my wife and children, family and friends, and in all the people He places in my path (especially the ones I don't like, or who are inconvenient to me or against me—my "enemies").

My life is full of the forgetfulness of God.

My own attitude is still largely shaped by the common mentality of our times that views the world without God, and conditions people to live as if God did not exist. I must first of all recognize this fact about myself. I have no grounds to boast in front of my third millennial brothers and sisters. We are all sinners. I am all the worse, because I have done so little with the understanding that has been given to me.

I am a sinner. I must beg forgiveness for my own sins and resolve to take up once again the arduous struggle for healing and renewal. I do so, however, with confidence, because He offers Himself to me in His mercy. My hope and my strength is in Him.

With penitential hearts, we can (and we must) face the reality of our time: people are trying to build up the world without God—they are desensitized to the need for God by the illusion of spectacular human displays of material power. Whatever may be their good intentions, they conceive a world in which power is the ultimate reality.

How can anyone expect such a world to respect human life?

Still there is something in the confused hearts of people; there is this desire for a better world, and a better, truer life for themselves. The eclipse of God in our time has only rendered more desperate the ineradicable longing of the human heart, however much people try to bury it. People carry this desire in them along with all their violence that weighs them down; it endures, perhaps as a cry for help, a cry that recognizes the need for something else.

We must also take this cry into our own hearts and turn it toward the love of God. We must beg for His mercy and do the works of mercy through which He shows Himself even in the greatest darkness. He defeats violence by answering it with an unconquerable love, and such love resonates even in the places where all the most desperate and most neglected human longings try to hide.

His mercy is our hope, and living the love that reveals and communicates His mercy is our task.

"Love," "Freedom," "Dignity": What Do They Mean?

As June draws to a close, I am drawn to reflect upon the profound and crucially important continuity between the teaching of Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si' and that of his recent predecessors in the Petrine ministry.

It is striking to reflect upon the prophetic witness of the successors of Saint Peter to an authentic view of the human person, a view that is so important for shedding light on many problems of our time. This testimony by the popes and the bishops of the world in union with them, drawn from the providential insights of the Second Vatican Council, continues to be a beacon of light for those who are searching for what it means to be a human being in the midst of the expansion and development, the wild upheaval, the chaotic shifting and tumult of this period in human history.

So often we articulate deeply diverse proposals for human life in this world using the same words, such as "dignity" and "freedom" and "love," or "growth," "progress," "community," "relationship," "maturity."

How is it that we use the same words to express radically different approaches to human life and human activity? Perhaps we use the same words with different meanings. Or maybe sometimes we use the words, but without their necessary context, which results in their losing coherence and even being manipulated.

How do we know the meaning of these words that we use to speak about the human person? This question points out the great significance of the prophetic witness of the popes and the Church in our time.

The popes who have shepherded the Church during the gradual emergence of the post-modern world -- this yet-unknown New Epoch of global interdependence, unprecedented human power, and the need for a new and deeper responsibility -- have stressed the same crucial points about the dignity of human persons, their dependence upon God, and their place in the world created by God.

At the end of this post are some passages taken from a homily of Pope Saint John Paul II over a quarter of a century ago (1989). John Paul has the same concerns as Francis, as these and many other passages from his teaching make clear.

In particular he points to a foundational and defining issue that Francis also identifies, and that I wish to unfold briefly here in this post. It is the attempt to articulate human freedom and responsibility without reference to the deepest truth about the human being, namely that the human person is radically given to his or herself. The human person is created by God.

If we forget God, if we live as if God did not exist, we let go of the fundamental basis for everything we say about ourselves. We may use the same terms -- human dignity, the human person, freedom, relationship, love, happiness -- but these words only have meaning in the context of an understanding that we are created persons.

Remembering that we are created persons means affirming the radical relationship with God that originates and sustains the gift of existence that expresses God's love for each of us, the love that gives me to myself.

And it affirms the call from God, the human vocation that leads us to the fullness of our true identity as unique human persons by bringing us to the fulfillment of love and freedom with Him.

Insofar as we forget that we are created persons and "live as if God did not exist," however, our words about ourselves drift away from their genuine significance. The same vocabulary -- human dignity, the human person, freedom, relationship, love, happiness -- becomes unmoored from basic human experience, and the true elements of our perception of reality begin to fragment.

When we forget that we are created persons, we shake the foundation of our being. We attempt to withdraw ourselves from the central relationship that defines us. Thus, a variety of confused perceptions, prejudices, emotional reactions and fears can easily become mixed into our understanding of ourselves and therefore into what we mean by the words that refer to the human person and core human values. 

The same words can thereby take on different meanings. They can become pretexts for desperate efforts of self-affirmation, or defensive words that we use to protect our ever-widening isolation from others whom we mistrust, or whom we wish to avoid because of divisions, resentment, emotional pain, or just ordinary selfishness.

Thus, it is not difficult to find ourselves in solitude and plunged into an incomprehensible and radically unstable experience of life.

We may endure this agonizing loneliness and confusion for a time. Usually, however, we seek out or stumble upon others who we think can support us in defining our identity. But we cannot understand ourselves if we seal off our own existence from the absolute, secure Source that establishes and sustains us.

Too often we have forgotten that Source, or pushed Him to the margins of our awareness. We have reduced Him to an abstraction or perhaps domesticated Him into a background figure who provides comfort, whose agency is limited and defined by our own measure. Or, we have never known anything about Him, and have never responded to the provocations in life that could have awakened our interest in seeking Him. We can thus become closed off, confused, anesthetized, or asleep in front of reality.

Insofar as we fail to live some kind of vital openness to this all-good, loving, creative, radically affirming Source of our human dignity -- the Source of the real identity and preciousness of each one of us -- we live without roots. We become disconnected from the original dynamic impetus that constitutes our freedom and makes our lives human: the search and the desire for the Mystery that sustains everything.

When peoples and cultures cut themselves off from this search, they lose the sense of who they are. They attempt to "search for their own selves" but they don't know where to look, and they often conclude that their only hope is to create their own "value," using various inadequate or even arbitrary criteria.

How often we live this way today, trying to invent ourselves and invest ourselves with value. But this is an anxious, distressing, and ultimately futile project. Life "works" only to the extent that we recognize and live with a vital awareness of the gift that originates and sustains reality and ourselves -- the gift that bestows meaning, and that awakens and draws forth our fascination with everything, our wonder at the beauty of things, the universe, and our own tremendous being as created persons.

Nevertheless, we forget, and we are tempted to try to manipulate the world and ourselves. We try to create the meaning and purpose of our lives -- our identity -- relying solely on our own ingenuity, impulses, and whims. We may succeed in putting on a spectacle, but we cannot generate satisfaction or any enduring confidence with these self-definitions. We will always be haunted by the anxious sense of precariousness, fragility, and ultimately the failure of our inadequate projections. We may be able to suppress this from our consciousness and skim through our days on the surface of shallow satisfactions, but it always remains beneath our awareness like an awful, gaping hole: "This is not real. This is not who I am. This is not... enough!"

Thus, when we live the project of self-invention and self-validation, we also live (paradoxically) with a desperate hunger for affirmation from others. Seldom do we try to stand alone in the madness of an openly anarchic affirmation of ourselves by ourselves. We feel the need for affirmation from others. We want to hear that we are good, that we have value, that we deserve to be loved. This need for affirmation is profoundly human, but it becomes distorted when we subject it to our project. We start to measure the authenticity of affirmation from others -- the genuineness of the love others offer to us -- by whether or not it endorses the artifice of our limited, self-conceived identity and the ideas implicated by it.

This distortion of the need for affirmation leads us to search for places and groups outside ourselves that correspond to and support our ideas. Or, in times of confusion, we look for places where the affirmation of others resonates with our fractured self-image, but also seems to restore roots to our existence. Eventually we are willing to allow the affirming group to impose its own definition on us. We come to depend on this group-identity for a sense of coherence in life and for our understanding of the meaning of being human.

There are no lack of places, groups, and human social constructions that we can adhere to in this dysfunctional way: political structures, ideologies, nations, tribes, cults, corporations, social status, wealth, entitlement, resentment, and lifestyles that appear to satisfy but in reality thwart the actual humanity that has been given to us. We take up whatever seems to feed this need for affirmation, and we set ourselves against anything or anyone that appears to threaten it.

When this happens, there is no more room for discussion of what our words about "human person" and "dignity" and "love" actually mean. Instead we form into factions, seek security in our power, and inevitably make war against our rivals. Even the beautiful word "peace" becomes a mask for violence when we try to live as if God did not exist.

It is entirely different if we remember God, the Living God who creates us, holds us, loves us with an unshakable firmness, crafts each one of us down to the depths of our own freedom.

When we remember that the Good God is the Source of who we are, then we turn to Him, we seek Him, we open up to the mystery of our own destiny, we beg Him to show us His face, and we trust in Him.

Then we begin to discover the reality of our own identity, our dignity, and our greatness. We begin to become truly free.

Here are selections of the homily of Saint John Paul II given on June 4, 1989:

God is all-holy, he is the Creator who gives us life and who makes all that exists in the universe. We are creatures and his children, in need of healing because of our sins.

[Yet] it is easy to lose sight of the Creator, from whose loving hands all things come. It is easy to live as if God did not exist. Indeed, there is a powerful attraction to such an attitude, for it might seem that acknowledging God as the origin and end of all things lessens human independence and places unacceptable limits on human action. But when we forget God we soon lose sight of the deeper meaning of our existence, we no longer know who we are.

Is it not fundamental for our psychological and social well-being to hear God’s voice in the wonderful harmony of the universe? Is it not in fact liberating to recognize that the stability, truth, goodness and order which the human mind increasingly discovers in the cosmos are a reflection of the unity, truth, goodness and beauty of the Creator himself?

A radical challenge facing the human family ... [today] is to use the earth’s resources wisely and responsibly, which means with respect for the limits to which these resources are necessarily subject. To do this is to respect the will of the Creator.

And in human affairs the challenge is to build a world of justice, peace and love, where the life and equal dignity of every human being, without discrimination, is defended and sustained. To do this is to recognize the face of God in every human face, and especially in the tears and sufferings of those who long to be loved or justly treated.

Every act of goodness is an important contribution to the changes we all wish to see.... All our good actions constitute a victory for justice, peace and human dignity. But our selfishness and lack of moral courage lead to the persistence and even strengthening of injustice in the world.

The entire Good News of our salvation [is a] witness to the wonderful Gift of God himself, expressed in the Word of life. God bestows on humanity an absolutely free gift – a share in his own divine nature. He endows his creatures with eternal life in Christ.

Man is graced by God... far beyond anything that [we by ourselves] could humanly achieve or even desire, for the gift is truly supernatural. The wonder of this gift is that it makes it possible for us to achieve the object of our deepest longings: to live forever in intimate union with God who is the source of all good.

Twenty One Human Persons

These are the names of twenty one human persons.

Each name indicates a human face, a human life, interwoven with the lives of other humans: family and loved ones, communities, a people, a history.

These twenty one human persons died on February 13, 2015. I want to devote this space, today, to their names.

They deserve the honor of their names. They are the names of men, of our brothers:

1. Milad Makeen Zaky 

2. Abanub Ayad Atiya

3. Maged Solaiman Shehata

4. Yusuf Shukry Yunan

5. Kirollos Shokry Fawzy

6. Bishoy Astafanus Kamel

7. Somaily Astafanus Kamel

8. Malak Ibrahim Sinweet

9. Tawadros Yusuf Tawadros

10. Girgis Milad Sinweet

11. Mina Fayez Aziz

12. Hany Abdelmesih Salib

13. Bishoy Adel Khalaf

14. Samuel Alham Wilson

15. Worker from Awr village

16. Ezat Bishri Naseef

17. Loqa Nagaty

18. Gaber Munir Adly

19. Esam Badir Samir

20. Malak Farag Abram

21. Sameh Salah Faruq

These men were killed in Libya, along the shore of the Mediterranean sea, because they were members of Egypt's ancient Coptic Christian Church. Their enemies called them, "the people of the cross."

Their killers distributed videos and images around the world of their brutal murder, because the killers want to foment hatred, division, and fear among the peoples of the Middle East and around the world. They want to advertise for their own ideological agenda.

But we don't need their images, and we will not be driven to fear or hatred.

We Christians already have an image for the death our brothers died, and this image assures us that death has already been defeated, that death does not have the last word.

Love has the last word.

To Change People's Hearts We Must Love Them

The Cardinal who dresses in his Franciscan habit and marches with his people speaks about the power of solidarity, community and joy. Boston Pilot photo by Gregory L. Tracy, from Cardinal Sean's Blog <www.cardinalseansblog.org>

----------------------------------------------------

Cardinal Sean O'Malley gave a powerful homily at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. the evening before the annual March for Life. He expressed hope that the seeds of the culture of life and the civilization of love have already begun to sprout in the midst of a society where so many are starving for solidarity and community while others are suffocating from indifference.

The next day, a half million people marched down Constitution Avenue, not only to protest against the catastrophic violence of abortion, but also to affirm the goodness of human life, every human life; the goodness and the dignity of the human person and the possibility of human community.

The faces of these marchers are overwhelmingly the faces of young people. Among them this year were John Paul and Agnese Janaro. They went with their friends, and they were not forced to go. They went because they wanted to be there.

Young people are responding to the call to love human life, to affirm and accompany the human person in need, to love both mothers and their children, to be with the poor, the sick and suffering, the disabled, the abandoned, the lonely.

There is hope in the faces of the young, and the young-at-heart who accompany them. They help sustain and strengthen my hope.


"We must direct our love and attention

to wherever life is most threatened

and show by our attitudes,

words, and actions

that life is precious,

and we must not kill.

We must work tirelessly

to change the unjust laws,

but we must work even harder

to change hearts,

to build a civilization of love.

Solidarity and community

are the antidotes

to the individualism and alienation

that lead people

on the path of abortion and euthanasia."

"To change people's hearts we must love them

and they must realize that we care about them.

They need the witness of our love and our joy.

To evangelize is to be a messenger of joy,

of good news."

~Sean O'Malley, Cardinal Archbishop of Boston

Mary Wants to Take You By the Hand

My daughters don't often read this blog, unless it's a funny family story or something about the cat. But I hope they will read this entry because it is addressed especially to them. Dear Agnese and Lucia (and Teresa and Josefina, when you're old enough to understand), I am putting into words here a small piece of what I hope you are learning from our home and from the way we live, from the witness of others in our community, from the life of the Church, and from the Holy Spirit who speaks in the depths of your hearts.

It's just a few small words, but as I watch you grow into young women I have an urgent desire for you to know more intimately the beautiful tenderness of The Woman who will lead you to discover your dignity and your tremendous value as women human persons: the courage, tenacity, and solicitude of your femininity, and the greatness of your vocation.

I write this as a blog post because I would also like to say this to every young woman, and to every woman of every age who longs to know why God made her. Your identity is very precious to the heart of the Mother of our Lord.

Dear Daughters,

Jesus wants you to have a very special woman with you on your journey to eternal life, a woman to be your companion, your most attentive and most faithful friend. Isn't that GREAT??? It is His mother, Mary. She will help you to grow to become a great woman, to become the particular feminine human person that God wills you to be in His wisdom and love.

Mary is a gift of God's love. The outpouring of His goodness gives her as a Mother to each of us. She is mother of the new life we receive in her Son Jesus, our life as children of God. This life involves her particular tenderness and closeness to each one of us. She is your mother and your intimate friend.

Talk to Mary. Tell her your fears, your troubles, your questions, your hopes about life. Just talk to her, pour your heart out to her. Don't be surprised if she responds, in her own way. Mary will accept you as you are, and help you step by step.

A friendship with Mary will give you two great things that you seek: She will help clear all the difficulties on your path to eternal life with Jesus. Mary is very practical; she understands your challenges, your struggles, your sensibility, your frustrations in all their details. Mary will help you; she will shape your way to Jesus. She will bring Jesus to your heart. That's what she does. She started doing it when she said "yes" to the angel, which allowed Jesus to come into the world through her womb. She gave Jesus to the world. She will give you Jesus, and deepen your relationship with Him. Talk to her in your heart as a person you know you can trust completely. The Church guarantees that this is true; the Church has promised down through the centuries: Mary will bring you to Jesus.

That's the first thing. The second thing is also very important to you. Mary will teach you what it means to be a woman. Mary knows better than anyone that we live in a time when women are becoming conscious of their full dignity as human persons. Mary understands the aspirations of women's hearts today, especially young women. She will teach you to become the mature, dynamic, self-possessed and self-giving, fostering and nurturing, constructive and creative woman that you long to be. She will teach you.

Mary wants to take you by the hand and mentor you, help form you into the woman God is calling you to be: free, conscious of your human dignity, responsive to God and willing to give the unique gift that is your self, with confidence and love.

Trust Mary, confide in her, and let her know you and hold you in her heart.

The War of the World

August 1, 1914. 7:30 PM. Germany declares war on Russia.

Both armies are mobilizing, bringing weapons to the field that are exponentially more powerful and more ruthless than anything before in human history.

It was clear that this was a momentous step, unleashing a catastrophic war in Europe. They knew it would be terrible when it began, but they did not know the dimensions of the horror that was being unleashed.

Armies of volunteers and conscripts poured into the field (and soon, the trenches) over the next four years, and massacred one another by the millions for reasons none of them really understood.

Terrible battles lay ahead, in which hundreds of thousands on both sides would be slaughtered, with no purpose being achieved, no ground taken, no advance, no retreat, nothing. The soldier who fell was anonymous, and his dead body would be replaced by another and another and another....

This conflict would bring the dehumanization of war to a new level, and would sow poisonous seeds of discouragement in the hearts of people in Europe and the West. The Great War raised the dramatic question of that last century: "Does the life of the individual human person have value for its own sake? Or is it merely part of a mass of humanity that is manipulated by those in power?"

This is still the urgent question for us today.

Use Well the Time We Have

"Repeatedly and in many different contexts, we have warned that courts must not presume to determine … the plausibility of a religious claim" (Supreme Court Majority Opinion, Burwell vs. Conestoga Wood Specialties / vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, et. al.).

We thank God for this exercise of restraint by the Supreme Court, given that the courts and the society as a whole regard us as eccentrics, at best. No one understands why we cannot simply join the twenty first century's march toward the triumph of Science, Reason, and Progress (see previous post).

But we cannot. We cannot abandon the dignity of the human person, created by God, created in the image and likeness of God. New kinds of power are being gathered today by those who want to engineer the future of humanity. The catastrophe that awaits us all beyond the horizon of this hubris remains as yet unknown. Those who are not already numb, however, can feel the chill of its monstrous shadow.

Still, we thank God. Today's decision means that (at least for now) government power cannot coerce Christians who own businesses to violate their consciences. It cannot coerce them into facilitating or provisioning activities which they know to be destructive to human love, human persons and relationships, human life.

We have, still, a little space and a little time.

Let us use this time well, to witness to God's love for every person, to continue to build up and bring healing and strengthen what is good, wherever we are free, for as long as we remain free.

On Parenting and Encounter

It's particularly hard to be a parent in the secularist culture of the Western world today. But Eileen and I have been blessed to be surrounded by a group of friends who support one another in the task of giving their kids a complete education.

We see all the dangers and frustrations and dead ends in our society; some of us have been down these paths in the past. But we also see many possibilities for goodness and beauty and solidarity in our society -- many perennial human possibilities but also many new possibilities opened up by all that is genuine in this emerging new epoch.

The forces of corruption are pervasive, as is the tremendous damage that is being done to persons, relationships, communities, and the civil order. It's only human for us to want to be "protective" of our children.

So we protect them, certainly, by setting certain prudent "boundaries," but also by living so as to build an environment, together with our friends and their children, that allows them to grow and develop through the normal stages of childhood and youth. We thus engage life not with a reactionary ideology, but from inside the positive dynamic of human nature and redeeming grace: the life Jesus generates among us because he is present with us.

We live with Jesus, within the context of the family, supportive institutions, and the sacramental life of the Church. From this context we introduce our kids, in a pedagogical way, to the great potential, the challenges, and the struggles of adult life in this society.

Do I mean something more here than simply that "we want to raise good kids"?

Well, certainly we want to raise good kids.

With the right pedagogy, we hope to help our children cultivate a generous personality, an authentic understanding and empathy, and a sense of responsibility based on the truth -- a solid moral character.

These are all realistic and admirable goals.

But there is a problem that might arise. I might be inclined to take as a "given" the very purpose of everything else in life, to assume it in such a way that I forget about it or it loses focus. I want an intellectual and moral formation for my kids. But as the Pope said, "Christianity is not a new philosophy or a new form of morality. We are only Christians if we encounter Christ." (And this is not Pope Francis speaking. This is Benedict XVI, and he says this over and over.)

I want to help my children to be open to the love of Jesus. I want them to encounter Jesus, to be drawn by his love, and to follow him in the paths of their vocations.

It's especially easy among us Christians to focus on raising good, morally strong kids who have the right ideas. It's easy for us to talk about Jesus and the Church and faith, but forget that he is present with us, that he is drawing the hearts of each and every one of our children and shaping their destiny according to the mystery of his wisdom and love.

Our children belong to God. It's easy to forget that as parents our vocation is to have stewardship over them, and the environment in which they awaken to life and hear his voice.

Of course we want our kids to be moral, but why? It is because we want them to respond in love to the God who gives himself to us in Jesus. This is what life is all about. Our primary task as parents is to prepare our children to encounter Jesus and follow him.

And I have failed so often (in 17+ years of parenting) to be the instrument of God's love to my children, but I pray and I beg Jesus to shine through even my weakness, to touch the hearts of my children and draw them to him, to enable them to know that he loves them personally and calls them to share in his eternal life with the Father in the Spirit.

Our children have been created for this and given to us for this. How do we truly succeed in our task as parents?

I can only humble myself before the Lord and ask for his grace for my own life, for my wife and our marriage, and for our family. The infinite mercy of the heart of Jesus is my hope. May all our children encounter him in his mercy, and place their trust in him.

Oscar Romero: Stop the Repression...of Any Human Life!

The Servant of God Oscar Romero

On the evening of March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot and killed as he began the offertory of the Mass in the chapel of Divine Providence hospital in San Salvador. For three years he had preached fearlessly against the growing violence in his archdiocese and in his homeland of El Salvador.

There is a bravery about the basic story line of Romero that is deeply inspiring, that resonates powerfully in the human soul. In the years after his death his heroic image has been used to promote all sorts of political agendas. He is widely admired in the affluent secularized Western culture, which nevertheless keeps his true figure at a safe distance. But the poor still love him, and have an instinctive sense of the real value of his life.

Oscar Romero always said that his desire was to do God's will in the particular circumstances that had been entrusted to him. He wanted to follow Christ. He was a Catholic bishop immersed in what was the beginning of a long and horrible civil war. He was a Latin American bishop. His lifelong commitment was to be faithful to Christ and to the Church. He defended the dignity of every human person, not simply for the sake of "civil rights" or as the leader of an NGO, but because he loved Jesus Christ.

He served the poor and the defenseless, recognizing that Jesus gives transcendent value to every effort to relieve suffering and render the conditions of life more human, even as He transforms from within the inescapable suffering that must be borne. In loving the poor Romero loved Jesus, incarnate, God made man at the center of history, Jesus living, transfigured, crucified and risen forever.

He truly loved human dignity and fought for real justice against real forces of evil, and it was precisely his recognition of Christ's humanity that empowered him to do so. It was not his own courage, or his sentiments, or his ideology. It was Christ. This is why he could hear the voice of Christ in the cries of his people and in the teaching authority of the Church to which he adhered with unwavering fidelity.

It is also what made him prophetic. For those who want to listen, his voice speaks with consistency about all kinds of human repression. Romero had a clear and simple vision, because it was the Church's vision, which sees that the commitment to real social justice and the defense of the preciousness of human life cannot be separated.

He remains relevant for post-modern Latin America, where the dictators of old are gone but the dictatorship of relativism is growing stronger. He remains relevant for bishops in Latin America and throughout the world, who are still called to defend with their very lives the dignity of every human person, created by God, redeemed by Christ, and destined to be transfigured by His glory.

In this 33rd anniversary of his heroic death, I want to present a few texts of Archbishop Romero. The final text is familiar (along with so much of his great testimony), but the others are not so well known. But they too are the words of a courageous man of faith, a man of the Church, and a man who really loved his people.


I. Notes from the day of his priestly ordination, April 4, 1942:

Yes, Christ!
By your Sacred Heart
I promise to give myself entirely for your glory ...
I want to die this way:
in the middle of work,
fatigued by the journey
 tired and weary ...
I will recall your toils
and they will be the price of redemption.

II. Life, Marriage, and Family:

One of evils of public life in El Salvador was the "discreditable propaganda for, and imposition of, anti-birth policies that are practically castrating our people and are undermining their reserves of morality" (Fourth Pastoral Letter, 1979 #19).

From a sermon: "As one medical student said and, forgive me for saying this: they are castrating our people. There is massive sterilization of women and men. Contraception materials are freely and shamelessly distributed with no fear of punishment. I implore you to reflect seriously on this matter because the source of life is as sacred as life itself and the relationship between woman and man, sanctified in matrimony, has a dual objective: to love one another and to enter into full and complete intimacy with one another not only for pleasure but also for procreation. Therefore the principle of the Church states that every conjugal act has to remain open to life and anything that disrupts life at its very source is a sin against nature" (Sermon, June 17, 1979).

Regarding abortion: "My sisters and brothers, this is a crime. If we experience repression when young women and men as well as adults are killed, then the same must also occur when life is removed from the womb of a woman. The life that is destroyed in a woman’s womb is the same that occurs when a person is assassinated or when the Minister of Education is assassinated. When the child is aborted from the mother’s womb, that child is also assassinated [emphasis mine]. If life is deprived of coming into existence because one is simply seeking pleasure, then this is also an assault on nature" (Sermon, June 17, 1979).

III. Stop the Repression:

A direct appeal to the military and the police: "No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The Church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression" (Homily, March 23, 1980).

The following evening, on the Vigil of the Feast of the Annunciation, a single bullet pierced his heart as he began the offertory prayer of the Mass. His journals and other evidence show clearly that he had offered his life to Christ, although he considered himself unworthy of it. But he died as he had prayed from the beginning, as a priest:

I want to die this way:
in the middle of work.... 

"In the World...." Remembering Michael Schwartz

Mike Schwartz was a remarkable man, and it was with surprise that I learned of his recent death on February 3, at only 63 years old, after struggling for a year and a half with ALS. I didn't even know he was sick.

Its probably been more than twenty years since I last spoke with Mike. I knew him from my student days, and then from my brief stint as a policy analyst on Capitol Hill (yeah, I did some time on "the Hill," back in the '80s...days of my youth, almost forgotten).

I have many happy memories of those days. I remember lectures he gave on political philosophy at our college. The man was brilliant. He was a philosophical and theological man in the best sense, in that he was always seeking to understand the most important things even as he kept both feet on the ground. I want to say, "He could have been a scholar" but in fact he was a scholar. He was a rare bird in America (or anywhere else): a well-read, deep-thinking, truth-seeking political activist.

He also knew how to connect with people, from homeless people to mothers and their unborn children to sexual abuse victims to media personalities to the big men who drove the engines of power. And he knew how to connect with and motivate young people. He cared about all of us newly winged butterflies: interns, aspiring journalists, idealistic office workers, coffee-brewing Hill staffers, think-tank hacks. He was prematurely gray and he dressed like "the older people," but he was upbeat, encouraging, enthusiastic, and always full of schemes.

Once he got asked to be part of a panel for a local daytime television show discussing the Catholic Church's teachings on sexuality. Then he found out that there were three other panelists who ranged from "not helpful" to red-hot hostile. Mike rounded up a few of us, explained the situation and told us he couldn't do it "alone." So he asked us to get on the phones to our friends and pack the audience with bright, hip young Catholics (yes, there were some of us around, even way back in the 80s).

And we did it! We got a big bunch of people together for that show. He inspired us, somehow, and we made it happen.

Mike had a hard time with the panel, but he did very well. Then they asked for audience "participation." It was amazing. For once the Church didn't get plastered. On the contrary, we made all the comments. Whoever watched that show must have been shocked to see normal young people (even some very pretty girls) intelligently defending the Catholic Church's teaching on sex and marriage. But it was live television; there was no way to stop us!

[Someone reading this was in the audience that day, I'll bet. Do you remember?]

Mike Schwartz gladly gave the limelight to a bunch of kids, so that truth might have a witness on a daytime TV talk show. That's the kind of man he was.

The obits have been pouring out on the internet, rightly extolling his unique combination of political savvy, ardor, kindness, humility, dedication to principles and willingness to fight for them, and also his real love for all people, even those who opposed him. He was a central figure in America's pro-life movement from the very beginning. He worked on social issues with conservative groups, while also being a member of the Democratic party for a good part of his life.

Mike was beyond stereotypes. He was one of those great Catholic activists who appeared in the second half of twentieth century America: courageous, good, and impossible to dismiss with any of the categories of our common political discourse. He was a man who was immersed in political work, but always at the service of others, and never interested in drawing attention to himself. He was dedicated and energetic, but he wasn't sucked into an ideological program; he was not fooled by the glitter of Washington power. He valued politics for what it was, and he knew that politics couldn't solve all our problems; he knew that there were greater things....

It was because of his Catholic faith. His faith really did penetrate his whole life. I was blessed to know several people like him in the days when I was growing up, people whose understanding was totally outside the box...because their focus was on Christ. For me it put flesh and bones on the saying that "Christians must be in the world, but not of the world."

How are we supposed to know what that saying means? By paying attention to people like Mike Schwartz.

Here are a few words from his last public appearance in November 2012. Mike knew that the way to respond to the violence of the abortion plague was to recognize a call to a greater love, a greater prayer and a greater service, a greater affirmation of the true dignity of women, a concern and an attentiveness to the needs of that most fundamental and most vulnerable of human relationships--the relationship between mother and child.

"The service and support network for mothers...is the best and most important part of our movement, but we should realize that pregnancy services are not a stopgap measure until some political victory is achieved. We will always need such services, and perhaps the reason why God allowed the evil of abortion to fall upon us was to awaken us to the need to stop trying to affix scarlet letters to women with untimely pregnancies and begin helping our sisters when they need us most."

May God reward you greatly, Mike. Thanks for everything.

...I have a video of that TV show somewhere. I've got to dig it up and watch it again. :)