Mike Rivage-Seul's Blog

My Tarot Journey from Priest to Satanist

Well, it’s happened. My practice of Tarot reading has converted me into a satanist.

On the one hand Tarot has caused me to recognize that the God I was raised to worship (and to preach as a priest) is more like the devil depicted in Tarot’s 15^th Major arcana card.

And on the other hand, the cards have helped me see that the devil represents a suppressed aspect of my dark side that (in the understanding of Carl Jung) contains a kind of gold I’m being called to mine. In some sense, Satan is my friend.

All of this has led me to reject the God of my youth (and to some extent of my priesthood) while embracing as a quasi-friend Satan himself.

Let me explain.

The Devil Card

To begin with, here’s the Devil as depicted in the Rider, Waite, Smith (RWS) Tarot Deck.

What do you see here?

Straight away, I notice that its number 15 stands for a trifecta of strife (3 X 5 – with 5 being the Tarot’s number of conflict). The card depicts conflict with (1) the world, (2) the flesh, and (3) the devil himself.

Next, I see that black is the card’s dominant color – representing one’s dark side, death, destruction, and negativity.

The main figure in the card is a satyric monster half man and half beast. His face is fear-inspiring with monstrous horns jutting from his head. His right hand is raised in a mudra which says, “what you see is what you get.”

An inverted pentagram (which in upright form represents virtue and good) forms the monster’s “halo,” but in its inverted form is just the opposite.

In the card’s depiction, the monster reigns over a naked man and an unclothed woman. The heads of both are horned – a clear connection to the horned devil’s mind. The female figure’s tail is tipped with grapes, a vineyard sign of pleasure and intoxication. The tail of her gender opposite is inflamed directly from the torch the devil holds inverted in his left hand. The man’s passions are on fire in the presence of the disrobed woman.

Both the man and the woman are chained by their necks to the pillar from which the monster presides. The chains are loose and could easily be removed. But evidently, the humans either don’t perceive this or don’t want to escape their bondage.

In summary, the card portrays the human body and sexuality as somehow problematic. Both are intimately connected with the Spirit of Evil, with enslavement, and ambiguity about the whole affair.

God As Enemy

Personally, the more I contemplate the card, the more I see Christianity’s traditional God rather than the devil. That God was presented as creator, lawgiver, judge, condemner, and punisher.

He was fear-inspiring, wasn’t he? After all, his principal concern was understood as connected with the “sins of the flesh.” And he made us all feel guilty (or at least uncomfortable) with sexual thoughts, words, and deeds.

All of that flew in the face of common-sense recognition of sex and propagation of the species as humanity’s second most powerful drive (after self-preservation).

It was as if devilish priests and theologians had transformed an unparalleled good into an unparalled evil to keep penitents under their control, coming to confession, and paying for the indulgences that Martin Luther and others found so odious.

III

Satan As Friend

Don’t be turned off by the idea of Satan as friend. It’s quite biblical. For instance, in the book of Job, Satan is portrayed as God’s counsellor. He’s a realist who for instance (in the Book of Job) bets the Divine One that if Job comes on extremely hard times, he will abandon his virtue and show his true colors as just another fair-weather saint.

For his part, Carl Jung saw the devil as representing aspects of God. The former as well as the latter is part of the Life Force. As a psychological phenomenon the devil embodies suppressed dark forces that are part of every human personality. In Jung’s sense, he’s the “Left Hand of God.”

Think of what we’ve been taught about the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Tradition has it that they’re pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, sloth, and gluttony. None of us wants to acknowledge that such forces are inevitable parts of our personalities. So, we spend a great deal of time pretending they belong to others but not to us. We spend our life force suppressing their influence on us. Inevitably though they bubble to the surface and express themselves periodically.

Jung calls us not only to face our inner destructive forces, but to embrace them. There’s gold in our dark side, he teaches.

What did he mean by that? Yes, he acknowledges that in the extreme any one of the Seven Deadly Sins can destroy our lives. But under conscious control, they can also enrich us with the gold they contain. For instance, properly acknowledged, accepted, and controlled

Pride can be a source of self-esteem that preventing one from acquiescing to abuse by the disrespectful.
Greed under control can cause workers to organize in pursuit of higher wages and safer working conditions.
A productive amount of Envy can drive us to imitate the Christ, and saintly figures like Gandhi, King, Malcolm, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks, and Mother Theresa.
Justified Anger can lead us to demonstrate against the genocide now perpetrated by Zionists and the United States in Palestine.
Lust can help us appreciate the gift of sex and the pleasure it brings.
Holy Sloth can keep us from endorsing our culture’s worship of “productivity,” the rat race, and overwork. It can drive workers to organize for more time off, longer vacations, and family leave for new parents.
Gluttony can help us become slow food cooks and appreciators of wines and spirits. It can turn us against fast food saturated with sugar and salt.

Conclusion

So, the next time the devil card turns up in your Tarot reading, don’t be frightened. It can serve as a reminder that God is not primarily creator, lawgiver, judge, condemner, and punisher. All of that is diabolical. Instead, the Divine One is the total of all the energy in the universe and in the universe of universes. That includes the energy of consciousness even to the extent that She is aware of each one of us and can be addressed as Thou. She wants only the fullness of life for each of us.

On the other hand (God’s Left Hand?) Satan is in some sense our brother and friend. True, he is never satisfied with temperance, harmony, and balance (Tarot’s 14^th major arcana card). However, there is gold in his Seven Deadly Sins. With controlled expression, they can drive us towards healthy self-esteem, just recompense for our work, the idealism of imitating the Christ, unwillingness to endorse genocide, an appreciation of sexual pleasure, the joy of doing nothing, and appreciation of the gifts of food and drink.

Gustavo Gutierrez and Liberation Theology’s Critical Faith Theory

The Great Gustavo Gutierrez died this week. He transitioned as a 96-year-old giant whose A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (1971) popularized and spurred the most important theological movement of the last 1700 years (i.e. since Constantine in the 4^th century). In fact, liberation theology (LT) might well be described as responsible for the West’s most influential intellectual and social developments of the last 175 years (i.e. since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848). United States and Vatican fierce opposition to LT testifies to its impact.

Think about it. Without liberation theology it is impossible to account for Salvador Allende’s rise to power in 1973 or the triumph of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in 1979, or the power the FMLN in El Salvador had and continues to enjoy today. The Zapatista movement in Mexico is also intimately connected with liberation theology. Even more, without reference to liberation theology, it’s impossible to fully understand the rise of new left governments throughout Latin America. All of them are indebted to liberation theology and its power to motivate the grassroots.

Perhaps more surprisingly: apart from LT, one cannot fully understand the prominence of conservative evangelicals in the United States. That’s because (as we’ll see below) political support for their movement was part of the Reagan administration’s strategy to defeat liberation theology which the White House and the Pentagon termed a national security threat. Their fear of LT mirrored that of the Vatican which ended up cooperating with Washington’s war against it.

Many are convinced that Washington’s and Rome’s anti-LT war was successful. That’s because the U.S. systematically assassinated its prophets along with hundreds of thousands of its adherents in a massive conflict that Noam Chomsky called “the first religious war of the 21^st century.” The sheer terrorism of the U.S. response plus an equally systematic offensive against LT within the Catholic Church itself deprived liberation theology of its best leaders, misinformed and intimidated the grassroots, and silenced many more. Nonetheless LT has changed the world. It has changed the church and Christianity in general.

But what is liberation theology? And why was it so threatening to the powers-that-be, both political and ecclesiastical? What steps were taken to defeat it? And why should believers be so grateful to theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez?

Liberation Theology Defined

Simply put, liberation theology is reflection on the following of Jesus of Nazareth from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed. More accurately, it is reflection on the following of Jesus the Christ from the viewpoint of those among the poor who are committed to their own liberation. That is, LT begins from a place of commitment – to a world with room for everyone. In itself, it represents a popular movement, a solidarity movement for social justice.

Liberation from what? In a word, from colonialism and from the neo-colonialism represented today by the forces of corporate globalization. Those forces have nearly half the world living on $2 a day or less. They’ve concentrated the world’s wealth in the hands of a sliver of 1% of the world’s population. According to UN statistics, eight billionaires own as much as 50% or humanity. As a result, at least 25,000 people including 10,000 children die of preventable starvation each day. In the eyes of liberation theology’s protagonists, that’s sinful and runs entirely contrary to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

And what were those teachings? (This is the heart of liberation theology.) They were first of all those of a man recognized by the impoverished protagonists of liberation theology as someone like themselves. He looked like them. According to experts in the field of forensic archeology, he resembled poor mestizos everywhere in Latin America. He probably stood about 5’1’’ and weighed about 110 pounds. His skin was brown. He was a laborer, not a scholar; his hands were calloused.

Ironically, Jesus also possessed characteristics that mainstream Christians often find repulsive and ungodly. He was the son of an unwed teenage mother (Mt. 118-22; Lk. 1:26-38). He was homeless at birth (Lk.2:7). If we are to believe Matthew’s account, Jesus became an immigrant in Egypt (Mt. 2:13-15). The good people of his day called him a drunkard and the companion of prostitutes. They expelled him from his synagogue because he didn’t seem to care about the 10 Commandments, especially the most important one – the Sabbath law. (For a Jew such excommunication and the shunning it entailed were like a death sentence.) The religious authorities said he was a heretic and possessed by the devil. The occupying Roman authorities identified him as a terrorist. They arrested him. And he ended up a victim of torture and of capital punishment carried out by crucifixion – a means of execution the Romans reserved specifically for insurgents. He was not the kind of person mainstream Christians usually admire. He was far too liberal to merit their approval.

Jesus was clearly a feminist. Many of his disciples were women. He spoke with them in isolated places. He actually forgave a woman caught in adultery, while implicitly criticizing the hypocrisy of patriarchal law which punished women for adultery and not men. And Jesus refused to recognize his contemporaries’ taboos around segregations. He crossed boundaries not only dividing men from women, but Jew from gentile, lepers from non-lepers, and rich from poor.

He couldn’t have been more liberal. In a sense he was an anarchist. He honored no law that failed to represent the loving thing to do. His attitude towards the law is best summarized in his pronouncement about the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was instituted for human beings,” he said, “human beings weren’t made for the Sabbath.” This was pure humanism placing human beings above even God’s holiest law. Again, it was anarchistic.

Jesus’ teachings were politically radical as well. They centered on what today is called social justice. As such they infuriated his opponents but were wildly inspiring to the poor and oppressed. His proclamation was not about himself, but about what he called “The Kingdom of God.” That was the highly charged political image he used to refer to what the world would be like if God were king instead of Caesar. In that kingdom everything would be turned upside-down. The first would be last; the last would be first. The rich would be poor; the poor would be rich.

Subsequent reflection by followers of Jesus in the Book of Revelation teased all of that out and drew the conclusion that with the dawning of God’s kingdom, the Roman Empire would be destroyed and replaced by a new heaven and a new earth entirely unlike empire. There (as indicated in the Acts of the Apostles) wealth would be distributed from each according to his ability to each according to his need. There would be room for everyone. If that sounds like communism, it’s because, as the Mexican exegete Jose Miranda points out, the idea of communism originated with Christians, not with Marx and Engels.

U.S. Opposition to LT

Those connections with Marxist analysis go a long way towards explaining resistance to LT by the U.S. government as well as within the Catholic Church.

That liberation theology dared to enter the mythological arena the right had long dominated virtually without rival astounded and infuriated the empire. Peasants throughout the subjugated world found the new explanations of God, Jesus and the gospels entirely empowering. Everywhere throughout Latin America they formed biblical circles, and those circles issued in social movements for justice.

In response, the Rockefeller Report of 1969 already identified liberation theology as a threat to the national security of the United States. By 1987, the Latin American Military Chiefs of Staff meeting in conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina, devoted several pages of their final report to liberation theology and the threat it posed to regional stability. In between, in 1979 the first Santa Fe Document advised the incoming Reagan administration that it had to do something decisive about the threat posed by liberation theology. The administration heeded the advice, and responded both militarily and ideologically.

Reagan’s military strategy against liberation theology issued in a bloody war pitting the United States against the Catholic Church in Latin America whose bishops meeting in conference in Medellin Colombia had together dared to affirm a “preferential option for the poor” as their official position. To combat that commitment, the U.S. did exactly what Rome had done in the first three centuries of our era – and for the same reason: faithfully following Jesus who called empire into question and motivated the poor to assert their rights in this world as children of the God of life.

And both the Roman response and the U.S. response to Jesus and his followers resulted in blood baths. Many of us are well acquainted with the best-known martyrs: Camilo Torres, Archbishop Romero, the Salvadoran team of liberation theologians killed at San Salvador’s Central American University in 1989, the U.S. women religious murdered years earlier in that same country, and Che Guevara. (Yes, Che. His spirituality was secular, but it was no less spiritual or liberationist than any of the others.) And then the unending list of martyrs in this war against the Catholic Church – 200,000 in Guatemala, more than 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and literally untold killings and disappearances in Honduras.

In every case, the carnage was a response to social movements inspired by liberation theology. Again, as Chomsky points out, official U.S. military documents show that liberation theology was a major target of those wars. In fact within those same official documents, the Army boasts specifically about defeating LT.

As for Reagan’s ideological response to liberation theology . . . . On his accession to power, CIA psyops began funding conservative alternatives to liberation theology in Latin America and in the U.S. So did business concerns that saw the leftward drift of Latin America as a threat to their presence there. Domino’s Pizza and Coors Brewery were prominent among the cases in point. As a result, evangelicals throughout the region grew rapidly in number, and the recipients of those funds in the United States increasingly identified with Republicans, the “hand that fed them.”

So, the television programs of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and others were beamed into every poor barrio, población, and favela. Right wing churches sprang up everywhere feeding and expanding an already robust evangelical presence in areas once completely dominated by the Catholic Church. The reactionary message was always the same – a depoliticized version of Christianity whose central commitment involved accepting Jesus as one’s personal savior and rejecting communism including the type allegedly represented by the theology of liberation.

All this points up the extreme importance of LT. including being indirectly responsible for the rise of the religious right in the United States.

On the other hand however, and on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, the Obama presidency represented the first U.S. president directly influenced by liberation theology. For 20 years, Barack Obama was part of the congregation of Jeremiah Wright – identified by James Cone, the father of black liberation theology, as the latter’s foremost contemporary embodiment.

Nevertheless, Reagan’s two-front strategy (military and ideological) worked. Revolutionary gains in El Salvador, Guatemala, and most prominently, in Nicaragua were halted and reversed. Militarily, the “Guatemala Solution” was the template. It entailed using military and paramilitary death squads to kill everyone remotely connected with guerrilla movements. According to the Reagan strategy, that included priests, nuns, lay catechists and ministers of the word influenced by liberation theology. The theological strategy worked as well. The slogan promulgated by the Salvadoran military said it all, “Be a patriot; kill a priest.”

Our Debt to Gustavo Gutierrez

Gustavo Gutierrez was by no means the founder of liberation theology. However, he is said to have coined the term in 1968 after the bishops of Latin America adopted as their own LT’s understanding of the Christ event as expressing God’s “preferential option for the poor.” The poor are God’s chosen people, liberationists explained, as testified by the divine choice to incarnate as the poor peasant earlier described.

In a sense then, Gutierrez and the movement he popularized represents a kind of “Critical Faith Theory” comparable to contemporary academia’s “Critical Race Theory.” Like the latter in relation to race, liberation theology seeks to reverse the traditional employment of religion and the Judeo-Christian tradition as tools of oppression meant to drug, pacify, infantilize, and depoliticize their adherents.

In that sense, LT is a kind of anti-theology.

Thank you Saint Gustavo Gutierrez for your life and work.

The Coming Election: I’m Sitting This One Out

Just this morning I received an appeal from a colleague of mine at OpEdNews where I’m a senior editor. He begged those on his mailing list to please vote for Kamala Harris. He said that allowing Donald Trump to be elected would be disastrous not only for the United States, but for the world. So, please, please vote for the sitting Vice President.

Believe me, I completely understand where my friend is coming from. I too dread the thought of four more years of yet another Trump presidency. For that reason, I’d never vote for him. Neither would I ever vote for a Republican. They’re just too much in the pockets of our country’s richest 1%.

However, I’ve come to realize that the same has become true for the Democrats. They too serve the interests of that same 1%. They’re just Republican Lite. With their colleagues across the aisle, they’ve formed a kind of Uni-Party.

I mean, like the Republicans, the Democrats have shown that they don’t really care about working people, except at election time. The Blues like the Reds care only about their donors.

Think about it: neither party gives a damn about what you or I think concerning Palestinians, raising the minimum wage, fairly taxing the rich and corporations, universal health care, free college tuition, homelessness, cancellation of debt for college graduates, gun legislation, nuclear arms control, closing federal lands to oil interests, a green New Deal, repairing our country’s collapsing infrastructure, high-speed rail, or solving the root problems of immigration. The list goes on. Yes, Democrats sometimes pay lip service to such issues. But that’s about as far as it goes.

Moreover, Democratic foreign policy is indistinguishable from the Republicans. There’s hardly a sliver of difference between them on Israel, Ukraine, or China. Nothing about diplomacy and its inherent need for compromise. Instead, for both parties, foreign policy has been reduced to three elements. Everyone must follow U.S. directives or face bombing, sanctions, and/or regime change. That’s it! Bombing, sanctions, and regime change.

(To give him his due however, at least Donald Trump has promised to end the Ukraine nonsense – the issue that has overridden everything else for the Biden presidency since 2022. Since that time, the U.S. has spent more than $175 billion on Ukraine. $175 billion!! That’s enough to solve all the problems listed above. But all the while Democrats have joined Republicans in claiming that there’s not enough money for addressing those issues – not even for FEMA in the wake of Helene and Milton.)

What I’m saying is America has become a failed state. Its system is not worth participating in. Bent on having our 4.5% of the world’s population controlling the entire thing, it’s completely corrupt. Moreover, completely controlled by money and the military industrial complex, it can’t be reformed. Even if Democrats wanted to address the problems listed above, the Republicans would never let them. Realizing this, instead of owning their working-class identity, the former have decided to become more like the latter. Republican Lite! The result is a completely frozen irreformable system.

And don’t tell me that we can vote ourselves out of this mess. Again, the system won’t let us. I mean, no one’s even talking about eliminating the Electoral College, are they? So, we keep getting “leaders” unsupported by the country’s majority. Seven “swing states” determine the whole thing reducing the rest of us to mere spectators. We’re left wondering which sock puppet the voters in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania will choose. I live in Connecticut, a solidly blue state. Why should I vote? It’s all a charade.

But here let me slow down. None of what I’ve written so far represents my decisive reason for sitting out this election. It’s simply this: I CAN’T VOTE FOR GENOCIDERS.

Can you?

For me it’s a moral issue. I just can’t do it anymore than I could have voted for that mustached man in Germany nearly a century ago.

For me, apartheid is non-negotiable. Settler colonialism is non-negotiable. But above all, GENOCIDE IS NON-NEGOTIABLE. I can’t support any government committing genocide. And that’s what a Harris presidency promises to continue. So will a Trump presidency.

End of discussion.

But who knows? Perhaps a Trump victory will at last cause Democrats to ask themselves why. It might drive them to realize that Republican Lite doesn’t cut it for working people. It might lead Democrats to unabashedly become the party of Roosevelt’s New Deal, of election reform, higher wages, universal health care, a Green New Deal, just taxation, loan forgiveness, defunding Israel’s genocide, nuclear disarmament, and enlightened immigration policy (that connects asylum seekers with failed U.S. policies such as the War on Drugs and the North American Free Trade Agreement).

Don’t hold your breath though. And buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Immigrants Are Everywhere And They’re Demanding Reparations; They’ll Replace Us; And They Should!

Last week my wife and I spent three days in Venice. For me it was a return visit.

Fifty-two years ago, I traveled there twice with a very dear friend. So, this time round brought back a flood of happy memories.

My 2024 visit was highlighted by hours spent at the Biennale art exhibition in and near the city’s Arsenale Gardens. It’s theme was “Stranieri Ovunque” (Foreigners Everywhere).

The displayed sculptures, paintings, films, fabrics, and other objets d’art celebrated rather than lamented the planet-wide population exchanges we’re all witnessing. The displays elicited deep reflections on contemporary debate about immigrants, borders, and attempts to keep “foreigners” out of Europe and the United States.

It all made me think not only about immigration, but about colonialism and reparations.

On the one hand, across the entire world we’re witnessing seemingly irresistible waves of immigrants traveling from the global south to Europe and the United States. On the other hand, those former colonial powers are contesting such movements in the name of preserving their (predominantly white) cultures and economies from foreign invaders.

The colonial powers are worried about being “replaced” in their own countries.

Attempts at preservation evoke restrictive measures such as laws, walls and increased militarization of borders. They also involve propaganda campaigns that villainize immigrants from the former colonies as invaders, criminals, and agents of economic destruction bent on taking jobs from their working-class victims.

More specifically, the propaganda would have e.g., “Americans” believe that immigrants cause their economic problems such as unemployment, job loss, and lower wages. Such reasoning has it that in our 2024 population of 350 million people, U.S. economic problems are created by 12 million of the poorest people in the world seeking refuge across “our” sacred borders. 12 million is about 3.4% of 350 million. Economically speaking, that’s an insignificant percentage – especially when those involved have virtually zero political power.

So, the concern immigration raises is not only absurd, it also misdirects public attention from the real causes not only of our economic problems and of immigration itself. Those causes include colonialism and capitalism with its practice of offshoring the very jobs that once created a prospering middle class in Europe and the United States. In other words, current economic problems are and have always been caused by the richest people among us rather than by the poorest.

More precisely, it’s all associated with colonialism – i.e. with the centuries’ long practice of western Europeans invading and plundering the homelands of those now seen as threatening Europe and the United States.

Recall that the last 500 years have seen “westerners” migrating to the Global South (Africa, Latin America, and South Asia), stealing its land and treasures, and enslaving its peoples while often taking up residence and in the process destroying economies, cultures, indigenous art, and languages.

The further result has been the creation of “underdeveloped” countries whose purloined wealth fueled the economic development of Europeans inhabiting lands (like England) that are by comparison small, resource poor and sparsely populated.

Additionally, the industrial “development” supported by the colonial system has caused an unprecedented warming of the environment that has taken its worst toll in the Global South. There formerly productive agricultural land has been robbed of its fertility by the resultant changes in temperature and rainfall as well as by forest fires.

The very existence of entire island nations is threatened by rising sea levels caused by global warming.

Likewise, invading capitalists drove peasants from their subsistence milpas and small farms through colonial practices that precisely ignored property lines and borders while often redrawing them altogether.

Additionally, “foreign aid” in the form of food giveaways and subsidies to giant agricultural firms consistently made it impossible for small indigenous farmers to compete with their invaders from the north. How can a local farmer sell her crops in the face of “foreign aid” (dumping) whose very purpose is to drive her out of business?

And when local populations tried to remedy such problems by electing governments to meet their own needs rather than those of their exploiters, the latter either initiated regime change or directly fought wars against them — all to reverse people-centered programs in the name of fighting socialism and communism.

So now the shoe’s on the other foot. Floods of people from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia are returning the favor. Whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re voting with their feet to demand reparations for the wealth the colonialists stole from them.

In other words, whether to give reparations for the plunder of colonialism is not up to the colonizers to decide. The exploited are at our doorstep to take back what was unjustly stolen. They are the deciders.

And there’s no stopping them. You can pass all the laws you want. You can build your walls.

You can militarize your borders.

But those we’ve wronged are still going to come. And they’ll bring their languages, clothing, foods, religions, music, art, and large families.

The Great Replacement is inevitable. The Great Replacement is just. It’s karma. The chickens are coming home to roost.

What goes around comes around.

The earth belongs to everyone!

From Italy

Greetings from Rome!

Apologies for not attending to my blog for so long.

I’ve been busy getting ready for this two-month trip as well as rehabbing from my knee operations and another unexpected surgery. I’ve also been preoccupied with Tarot readings for an increasing number of clients – not to mention readings for my immediate family.

All six of us (including my son-in-law) have birthdays in the span of a single month – from September 6^th to October 5^th. And this year I’ve decided to give each family member a 10-card Tarot reading. It’s been a lot of fun, but has taken time, since each reading (including visual representations of each card) runs to about a dozen pages.

With that behind me, I can now return to blogging.

So, again, greetings from the Eternal City.

Peggy and I are here visiting our son Brendan, his wife Erin, and their three children, Genevieve (4), Madeleine (2), and Sophie (8 months). We want to get to know those kids.

You may recall that Brendan works for the State Department. He operates out of the embassy in Rome and is doing quite well following previous postings in Mexico, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

You might also realize that in a sense, this visit represents my “return to the scene of the crime.” I mean, as a newly ordained priest, my first assignment was to get my doctorate in moral theology here in Rome. So, between the years 1967 and 1972, I obtained my licentiate in systematic theology at the Atheneum Anselmianum and that doctorate at the Academia Alfonsiana.

Those five years changed my life.

Having educated me for 12 years (from a callow high school freshman in Silver Creek, New York to an ordained priest in Milton, Massachusetts) the intent of the Society of St. Columban (my sponsoring organization) was for me to return from Rome and teach moral theology in its major seminary.

However, studying post-Vatican II theology and living abroad for five years radically changed my world vision and understandings of God, Jesus, church, priesthood, politics, etc. Consequently, without my knowing it, the rector of our Rome house eventually wrote to the Columbans’ Superior General that I was “too dangerous” to teach in the organization’s major seminary.

So much for that.

In any case, I’ve written about all that elsewhere in these pages behind the “personal” button in my blog’s table of contents.

I won’t bore you with repetition.

So let me do so instead by simply noting that:

We’re here.
We’ve been generously received by our hosts.
The grandkids are a lot of fun.
I’ve forgotten most of my Italian (confusing it with similar languages I’ve learned in the meantime, viz., Portuguese and Spanish).
At this very moment, Peggy and I find ourselves aboard a high-speed train heading from Rome to Turin, where we’ll attend a conference on the world’s food system.
Afterwards, we’ll spend three nights in Venice.
Then we’ll return to Rome and the adventures that await us there and elsewhere in the country.
And oh (by the way) around Thanksgiving and our planned trip home, the two of us will return to Spain’s Granada for a week. That’s where we spent about a year in 2022-23. It will be great to reconnect with friends there.

Till next time arrivederci!

American Politics Realigning? Walz and Vance Might Be More Similar Than You Think

Something important and promising might well be happening in American politics. At the popular level, working class folks are expressing their deep discontent with a system run by octogenarians who serve their donors rather than the American taxpayer. The latter has come to realize that Democrats and Republicans have formed a kind of Uni-party beholden to the rich and powerful rather than to their plebian electors.

Strange to say however, both parties have shown faint signs of perhaps recognizing that truth and its devastating consequences for them at the voting booth. The Republican Party has selected a presidential candidate (Donald Trump) who talks a good game in terms of rebellion against the status quo. At the same time, the Democrats have set aside their senile superannuated “leader” (Joe Biden) in favor of a much younger black woman (Kamala Harris).

The truth is however that the policies of neither Trump nor Harris promise much difference in terms of changing the given order as far as international relations are concerned. No matter who’s elected, genocidal support for Zionism will remain a cornerstone of our country’s foreign policy. The war in Ukraine will continue it seems “to the last Ukrainian.” And America’s “diplomacy” will still prioritize war, sanctions, and regime change over peace-seeking diplomacy and dialog. All of that will continue unabated.

Nevertheless, Kamala Harris’ selection of Tim Walz as her running mate and Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his offer strong indications that something new might be afoot for 2028. Both Walz and Vance are far more thoughtful than Harris or Trump. In fact, both vice-presidential candidates might be more war averse and friendly to the working class than their mentors.

Tim Walz

That’s clear to most in the case of Tim Walz. As Minnesota governor, he has distinguished himself as a progressive. Among other legislative achievements, he signed bills that:

Made access to abortion easier
Provide free breakfast and lunch to all school children
Offer free college tuition for families with incomes of $80,000 or less
Curb greenhouse gas emissions
Moved towards establishing a public healthcare option within the MinnesotaCare system
Restored voting rights to decarcerated felons
Vastly increased Minnesota’s spending on housing to prevent homelessness, expand homeownership opportunities and provide rental assistance to thousands of households.

J.D. Vance

As for J.D. Vance, his populist credentials might be less evident.

Still, according to American lawyer and political commentator, Robert Barnes, J.D. Vance might well be “the most war-skeptical, pro-worker Republican office holder of the last 100 years.”

Barnes supports this contention by citing (among other considerations) Vance’s 2024 vote against a $95 billion Ukraine aid package. Vance was one of only 18 senators voting against it in a 79-18 tally. (Vance thinks Ukraine is Europe’s problem and not that of the United States.) Barnes also points out that the Teamsters regard Vance as an important working-class ally.

As for intellectual influences on Senator Vance, here is a list provided by Politico’s Ian Ward in his article “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview.”

Catholic Social Teaching: Catholic social justice teachings (the “best kept secret of the Catholic Church”) emphasize community, workers’ rights, and environmental protection. The most famous examples of such teachings are found in the encyclicals of Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum 1891), Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno 1931), John XXIII (Mater et Magistra 1961), John XXIII (Pacem in Terris 1963), Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes, 1965), and Pope Francis (Laudato Si 2015).
Sohrab Ahmari (co-editor of Compact Magazine): Also emphasizes Catholic teachings regarding social justice.
Peter Deneen (University of Notre Dame): Deneen holds that unfettered free markets with their emphasis on competition have undercut not only the American family, but communitarian values and the collective basis of our national life. Neoliberal economics need not only restraint but replacement.
Brad Wilcox (BYU): Wilcox argues that women’s entry into the workforce has been better for companies than for most women. The companies benefit from more and cheaper labor. Meanwhile many women end up hating their jobs. Too many also feel overworked because they typically retain responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and childcare when they return from the workplace.
Peter Thiel (Hedge Fund Investor): Thiel warns against a technology that has too often shackled us as opposed to liberating us and building a better society. We need to get off our phones.
Curtis Yarvin (American blogger): For Yarvin, American democracy has deteriorated into control by a corrupt oligarchy. Resolving such tendencies, he says, might entail installing a kind of dictator— a nationalist CEO who would run the country like a startup business.
Rene Girard (French historian and theologian): Girard holds that Christianity must be reinterpreted to recognize that the Judeo-Christian tradition is on the side of the poor and oppressed rather than the rich and powerful.

Conclusion

It’s discouraging that American political discourse is overwhelmingly ad hominem rather than focused on the issues suggested by the policies of Tim Walz and the intellectual influences on J.D. Vance.

“Vance is weird.” “Walz is a communist.” “Trump’s a fascist.” “Harris is the product of DEI.” “My audience crowds are bigger than yours.”

Such immature schoolyard put-downs do nothing at all to address the real concerns of voters.

Better to explore candidates’ stances on climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Why is America so beholden to Israel and cooperative with its clearly genocidal policies? And what is Ukraine to us?

What about street people and public housing? What about subsidized childcare, free post-secondary education, and debt relief for those with unrepayable student loans? Have the candidates thought about the issues of police violence and reparations to the black community? And do any of those seeking our vote recognize connections between immigration and U.S. wars, regime changes, and sanctions?

And at an even deeper level, are we primarily individuals in competition with one another or must we rediscover community and common good? Has technology become our master rather than our servant? And what are best practices for addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion? What are the benefits and liabilities of universal healthcare and state-subsidized education?

Those are the issues that need addressing and serious debate. Those are the issues that require real discussion rather than the sound bites, slogans, and zingers.

And while Harris and Trump offer little hope of going there, I’m suggesting here that their selection of running mates more serious and thoughtful than either main candidate perhaps offer some hope for the future.

Walz’s policy decisions as governor of Minnesota and the influences on Vance’s thinking seem to suggest that it does.

What do you think?

Sunday Homily: Jesus As Prophetic Bread of Life

Bread & Puppet’s rendition of El Salvador’s martyred archbishop, Oscar Romero

Readings for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time: I Kgs. 19:4-8; Eph. 4:30-5:2; Jn. 6:41-51

This Sunday’s readings are about prophets and bread.

They remind me of a recent visit my wife Peggy and I made to Glover Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Museum along with two of our eight grandchildren, Eva (age 15) and Orlando (12). The Museum presented the work of true prophets, Elka and Peter Schumann who, like today’s readings consistently connected prophecy with hard-to-chew bread. (Elka died two years ago at the age of 85).

The Schumann’s Prophetic Puppets

I’m sure many of you have heard of Bread and Puppet. The Schumanns founded that theater in 1963 as an act of political protest. Originally their issue was poor housing conditions in New York City. Since then, their giant puppets – some more than 20 feet high – have made spectacular appearances at protests, parades, and demonstrations everywhere.

Over the years, Bread and Puppet’s focus expanded beyond housing concerns to include the Vietnam War, climate change, Nicaragua and the Contras, El Salvador, Archbishop Romero, liberation theology, Israel’s crimes in Palestine, and the general failure of capitalism. Every summer hundreds of volunteers have participated in the theater’s elaborate outdoor pageants highlighting those issues.

As a result, touring the museum last month and seeing hundreds of the Schumanns’ puppets represented a painful review of U.S. crimes over the past half century. Despite those sad reminders, the puppets also embodied an inspiring display of insight, creativity, commitment, joy, and courage. The Schumanns’ giant puppets have provided a truly prophetic deepening our collective consciousness.

The Schumann’s Nourishing Bread

However, the mammoth puppets were so stunning and arresting that it’s easy to forget the part that bread played in the Schumanns’ work. After all, the name of their company is Bread and Puppet.” (And homemade bread was served at all Theater performances.)

Elka Schumann herself made the connection in a 2001 film about her work. The documentary was produced by her daughter Tamar and DeeDee Halleck. Elka said:

“We have a grinder over there, and we grind the grain ourselves. And the bread is not at all like your supermarket bread. You really have to chew it. You really have to put some work into it. But then you get something very good for that. And when our theater is successful, we feel it’s the same way. You’ve got to think. It doesn’t like tell you everything. It’s not like Wonder Bread: It’s just like there it is, here’s the story, this is what it means. You’ve got to do some figuring yourself in the theater, in our theater. And if the play is successful, then at the end you probably feel it was worth the work.”

Elka’s words underline the essentials of good theater, good art, good religion. They don’t tell you everything. You must put in some work trying to figure out the message, to unpack it all. Good theater, good religion is not like eating white bread from Piggly Wiggly.

Jesus’ Bread

As mentioned earlier, that aspect of theater and faith is important to note this particular Sunday, since the day’s readings highlight the connections between bread, prophets, and the teachings of Yeshua, the construction worker from Nazareth who like the Schumanns’ puppets was truly larger than life.

What Jesus taught in his illustrative parables – in fact, what’s found throughout the Bible – challenges us to think and question our own lives, the values of our culture, and our too easy “understandings” of life and “God.” That’s what the Schumanns were doing too.

Think about the prodigal son, Jesus’ response to the woman about to be stoned for adultery, his dialog with Pontius Pilate about the nature of truth, and the issues raised by the fact that Jesus was executed as a rebel against Rome. Think about the prophet’s dying prayer for his enemies, his injunction to treat others as we would like to be treated, his “beatitudes'” centralizing purity of intention, poverty, gentleness, bereavement, imprisonment, mercy, peacemaking, and passion for justice. At every turn his words and deeds are challenging and (if you puzzle over them) difficult but rewarding to digest.

Understood in terms of rejecting Wonder Bread’s superficiality, all those elements in the accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds should give “Americans” pause. They should call into question the very notion of patriarchy, our worship of the rich, our wars against the world’s poor, our attitudes towards empire and capital punishment, as well as our very denial of truth’s possibility (which Gandhi boldly identified with God).

That sort of hard-to-chew bread forms the backdrop implied in today’s readings. See for yourself. Here are my “translations.” You could find the originals here to tell if I got them right.

I Kings 19: 4-8

Prophets are lonely people
Living on the edge of
Death and despair.
Elijah was no different.
He even prayed for death
On his way to Mt. Sinai.
Instead, generous Spirits
Fed him with bread and water
Twice!
He didn't have to eat again
For the remaining 40 days
Of his journey
To God's holy mountain.

Psalm 34: 2-9

Elijah's miraculous bread
Gave him a taste of
Life's Supreme Goodness
Directed especially
Towards the threatened
And afflicted poor.
The taste of bread
Replaces their shame
And distress
With joy and confidence
In Life's protective Source.

Ephesians 4: 30-5:2

So, Elijah
Should never have been sad.
In fact,
For those filled with God's Spirit
(And bread!)
There can be no room for sadness
Bitterness, fury, anger,
Shouting, reviling or malice.
There is space only for
Kindness, compassion,
Forgiveness and love
That mirror
Life's own abundance
And inherent generosity.

John 6: 42-51

John's community of faith
Identified Jesus' teaching
With the bread
That fed Elijah.
In fact,
They called Jesus himself
"The Bread of Heaven."
Consuming his teachings
Would strengthen them
For "the journey without distance"
(From heart to head).
This still upsets outsiders
Unable to overcome
Fundamentalist literalism
That yet confuses
The Bread of Life
With Wonder Bread,
And fairy tales
And spiritual nourishment
With gross cannibalism

Conclusion

When I was a kid, I actually liked Wonder Bread. In fact, I still kind of do. Don’t you? I mean it’s a bit sweet; it’s easy to chew; it’s a nice base for peanut butter and jelly, and it goes down easy. It’s comfort food. My well-intentioned mother fed it to me and my three siblings without a second thought. I ate it the same way.

But then most of us got more conscientious about what we put into our bodies. With Elka Schumann, we realized that Wonder Bread didn’t really nourish us. So, we turned to bread that (initially at least) was less familiar and that required more chewing and changing of taste-preferences – a bit more work – maybe not as strong as Elka’s bread, but more substantial nonetheless.

For many of us who have stuck with faith as a source of meaning, it’s been the same. We outgrew the beliefs that no longer nourished. We woke up to the fact that Jesus’ teachings need adult interpretation that demands thought and decision about those issues I mentioned earlier — patriarchy, grossly unequal wealth distribution, perpetual wars precisely against the world’s poor, empire, capital punishment, and about agnosticism concerning the Truth that parallels our denial of what we know to be genuine relative to the great issues of our day.

Instead, we’ve reduced “faith” to childish fairy tales that none of us can believe. We’ve made it into Wonder Bread. And this at a time in history when acceptance of life’s essential unity – proclaimed not only by Elijah and Jesus, but by all the world’s great religious traditions – is necessary for our species’ very survival.

In the words of John, the Evangelist, I’m trying to say we need the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Life now more than ever. We don’t need comfort food.

Thank you, Elka and Peter Schumann for using your puppets and bread to drive that truth home.

The Elections, the Assassination Attempt: Such a Joke!

As they say, if it weren’t so tragic, it would be laughable. I mean, they’re trying to make us believe that the upcoming election is (once again!) “the most important in our lifetime.”

What a joke! Yesterday morning New York Times editors wrote about how “centrism works,” and how important it is to avoid “radicalisms” of both the left and the right – as if in this country ANY politician represents left radicalism.

Truth is, they’re all either center right or extreme right. There is no “left” in this country.

None at all.

Face it: we’re governed by a Uni-Party. Everybody knows that. There’s hardly a sliver of daylight between Trump and (I guess) Harris. Certainly not between Biden and Trump. They’re all perpetrators of genocide. They’re all warmongers. All of them!

Oh, I suppose there’s some separation on the irrelevancies our system identifies as important: abortion, gay rights, immigration, and “wokeness” (whatever that means). Yes, in the face of genocide all those issues are trivial! Genocide eclipses everything else.

But the candidates won’t touch the real matter. Check out yesterday’s Times. They listed the issues facing Ms. Harris. Not a mention of the genocide in Gaza. Nothing about the war in Ukraine and why there are billions and billions and billions and billions and billions for that, but no money for what Americans really care about: higher wages, inflation reduction, universal healthcare, free college tuition, debt cancellation, climate change, low-cost public housing, or elimination of nuclear weapons. Not a word.

Neither does anyone explain why Joe Biden is not up to campaigning, but he’s still president. It seems the old man’s still somehow “in charge,” though everyone knows that’s never been the case. Obviously, they’ve been lying about his mental capacities for years. (They didn’t just discover it during the Trump debate.) But they continued to lie about it till a few days ago!

And now they expect us to believe they’re telling the truth. Don’t worry: they really do care about us. And Genocide Joe is really a nice grandfatherly humanitarian. And that Kamala. You go, girl!!

Of course Biden’s a liar; always has been. He’s a murderer straight up. And so is Harris. – and all those old white men who repeatedly jumped to applaud Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed Congress last week. It’s all disgraceful.

I can’t vote for any perpetrators of genocide. Which means I can’t participate in the upcoming election.

And as for assassination attempt on Donald Trump? Do you see the hypocrisy as the whole thing is swept under the rug?

I mean, Imagine if a major political opponent of Vladimir Putin were shot and wounded while campaigning on stage. There is no doubt that the IMMEDIATE conclusion of “our” MSM would be PUTIN DID IT.

No wait and see. No waiting for an independent investigation. Just ridicule of any call for an inquiry especially if it were carried out under the aegis of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB).

Such inquiry would be dismissed as a joke, since like its predecessor, the KGB, the FSB could never be trusted to reach truthful conclusions.

You KNOW that’s true, don’t you?

In fact, that’s what happened when a minor Russian political figure called Alexy Navalny (who in no way threatened Putin’s continued presidency) died in prison last February. No sooner was his death announced than a firm conclusion was drawn, Putin did it.

The same thing happened last August, when another of Putin’s opponents, Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a helicopter crash. The wreckage was still smoldering when the press identified President Putin as the one responsible.

But why do I bring that up?

It’s because over here, any public expressions of suspicions involving the Biden administration around the Trump shooting are automatically dismissed as conspiratorial – if they’re even mentioned.

Yes, we’re told, there were inexplicable lapses on the part of the Secret Service surrounding Mr. Trump. But virtually no one even hints that the Biden administration, the CIA, the FBI, or the Secret Service was behind it.

Do you think those agencies are somehow above and beyond such assassination attempts? Do you think we can trust them to investigate themselves? Remember what ex-CIA chief Mike Pompeo confessed (and laughed about it): “We lie; we cheat; we steal; we take entire courses about how to do it.”

But no, after every assassination attempt (John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King . . .) it’s the same story. No conspiracy or government involvement. Nothing to see here. Just a lone wolf and all kinds of unanswered questions in documents that won’t be released for another 50 years.

“But trust us: our three-letter agencies will get to the bottom of it. Just don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”

It’s all so corrupt. Such a joke. I just can’t take it seriously.

The Communist Manifesto (Translated for my 15-year-old Granddaughter and 12-year-old Grandson)

I’m currently in Northfield, Massachusetts where Peggy and I are spending the month of July with two of our grandchildren, Eva (15) and Orlando (12). Both are attending a summer session at Eva’s Northfield Mt. Hermon prep school. Eva is acting as a teaching associate for a beloved math instructor there as he teaches summer students pre-cal. Orlando is taking courses in physics and economics. In our spare time, we’re discussing “The Communist Manifesto,” and are planning an overview of the Bible.

To help with the former and to make discussion easier, I’ve done a rough “translation” of Marx and Engels’ “Communist Manifesto.” The basis for the translation below is a version of the text that sophomore students discussed at Berea College in a required course called “Religious and Historical Perspectives.” During my 40 years at Berea, I taught many sections of that two-semester “Great Books” course along with about 15 colleagues drawn from disciplines across the curriculum (each of whom had her or his own section). It was one of the best educational experiences of my life.

I want both Eva and Orlando to tackle the actual text before reading the summary. (I think it’s important for them to be able to claim having read the “Manifesto” which few of its critics can say for themselves.)

Please excuse any typos, obscurities of expression, and other faults in what follows. I pretty much dashed it off.

__________

The Communist Manifesto

In the revolutionary year of 1848, Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto.” Here’s what their declaration said:

The threat and fear of Communism has spread across Europe. Opposition to Communism has united everyone from the Pope himself to heads of state in Russia, France, Germany, and Italy.

In fact, virtually any opposition to the way things are is identified as “communist.”

Such universal opposition indicates that Communism has become a world “Power” on a par with the European “leaders” just mentioned. It also means that it’s high time that Communists should openly declare what they stand for.

So, Communists from across Europe have gathered in London to write and publish their Manifesto for all to read.

Bourgeois (town dwellers) and Proletarians (members of the working class)

The engine of historical change is class struggle.

That is, lower classes have always rebelled against their exploiters: e.g., slaves vs. their masters in the slave system, and serfs against their lords in the feudal system [an economic, political, and military arrangement where “serfs” (agricultural workers) were given land by their “lords” in exchange for their labor and military service)].

Modern bourgeois society (i.e., the “middle class” between royalty and agricultural workers) has given rise to brand new classes with severe tensions between them.

In fact, society is currently splitting into two camps hostile to one another, viz., the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (working class).

The bourgeoisie emerged from town dwellers (millers, miners, blacksmiths, furniture makers, shopkeepers, lawyers, politicians, clergy, etc.) who no longer were directly connected to agricultural life.

The discovery of America expanded this class to the “New World.”

Thus emerged a serious manufacturing system that overcame the power of guilds (closed associations of craftspeople and/or merchants).

A great leap forward occurred when the steam engine was invented (James Watt 1769). It gave rise to massive increases in production and the emergence of a factory system controlled by millionaires.

The new system conjoined with European colonialism and advances in navigation and railroads sold products across the planet.

In this way the bourgeoisie accumulated enormous power displacing royalty as Europe’s dominant class. The bourgeoisie established governments that function as mere managers of those powerful manufacturing interests. The resulting laws serve the bourgeoisie not the proletariat.

Moreover, bourgeois culture has destroyed tradition and religious values, replacing them with naked self-interest and cash payment. Under the new system personal worth is determined by one’s degree of wealth. The concept of freedom is reduced to Free Trade.

As a result, non-capitalists (physicians, lawyers, priests, poets, scientists. . ..) have become a wage-laborers.

Bourgeois developments have also reduced families to mere cogs in their machine held together by concern for money.

Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that the achievements of the bourgeoisie have surpassed even the pyramids of Egypt, the aqueducts of Rome, and the cathedrals of the middle ages.

Still, the bourgeois system cannot continue without constantly improving its means of production and without those improvements changing human relationships – thus sweeping aside even the most sacred traditional social relationships.

Neither can the system continue without expanding across the globe.

This latter development drives out of business local industries displacing their laborers and creating new wants satisfiable only by imports from foreign lands. Thus, nations across the globe can no longer be self-sufficient. There even arises a world literature as well.

This affects even the most backward and barbarous peoples where the attraction of mass-produced cheap products overcomes local resistance to foreign presence.

In the process, enormous cities are created which increasingly exert political, economic, and social control over the countryside. In this way, agrarian cultures become dependent on urbanized cultures. The East (like India and China) becomes dependent on the West (like England and other European colonial powers).

As means of production become centralized in fewer and fewer hands, so does world political power. Small provinces (with their separate laws and governments) disappear and nation states surface under one government and a unified code of laws.

More particularly, in scarcely 100 years the entire world has been transformed by chemistry applied to agriculture, by steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, and canalization of rivers. Entire forests have been cleared for growing food. All these developments have destroyed the remnants of feudal relationships.

Free competition has also put the bourgeoisie in charge not only of production and economics, but also of politics and law.

The bourgeoisie have unwittingly assumed the role of a sorcerer who has called up the powers of the nether world that he can no longer control. Thus, capitalist overproduction produces periodic depressions that threaten the existence of the bourgeoisie themselves. This gives rise to wars (i.e., attempts to destroy competitors’ machines and factories) and to intensified and more widespread colonialization (in search of new markets).

The result of all this is rebellion from below, whereby the weapons the bourgeoisie used in the service of their revolution against the royal classes are turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

To wit, bourgeois manufacturing processes have not only created the weapons that will bring about their own demise; they’ve also created an army that will use those weapons against them, viz., the proletariat which has developed step by step with the emergence of the bourgeoisie.

Workers have become mere commodities (things to be bought and sold) subject to laws of supply and demand.

They’ve become extensions of the machines they tend without skill or understanding. As such, workers are completely interchangeable and receive wages sufficient only to keep body and soul together and to produce other workers. Machines and division of labor (i.e. the breakdown of the productive process into small, isolated operations) makes production rapid but increasingly meaningless and burdensome – a reality intensified by long workdays and the need to keep up with the intensified speed of machinery.

Crowded into ever-larger factories, workers are organized like soldiers and slaves of the capitalist, the bourgeois state, the foreman and the boss.

Machines with their independence from human physical strength have also made it possible for increasing numbers of women and children to enter the workforce – and keep wages low.

But that’s not the end of capitalist exploitation. As soon as workers leave the factory’s area of control, they fall under the control of other members of the bourgeoisie – the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

Similarly, the lower portions of the middle class (small tradespeople, shopkeeper, handicraftsmen, and peasants) all eventually lose their source of income and fall into the proletariat. They simply can’t compete with the low-cost products of their larger competitors. In the face of machines, their special skills become meaningless.

Workers’ rebellion against all this is first directed against the means of production themselves. In their efforts to restore the status they once held in the Middle Ages, laborers destroy the products they produce, smash the factories’ machines (“sabotage”}, and burn down the factories themselves.

Still, the bourgeoisie (the real enemies of the working class) succeed in persuading workers to fight their wars, i.e., to fight the enemies of the proletariat’s enemy (the bourgeoisie itself).

But as the size of the workforce increases and as everyone’s reduced to the same low-income level while the economy in general experiences increasingly frequent depressions and economic setbacks, the workers’ rebellious instincts turn more and more against the bourgeoisie itself. In practice, rebellion takes the form of workers’ unions (with strikes wherein the workers refuse to work unless their demands are met) and at times of riots.

The workers’ rebellion is enabled by improvements in means of communication (including railways) which transform local struggles into national ones.

England’s 10-hour bill represents an example of successful worker struggle despite many setbacks caused by divisions among the workers themselves.

However, the bourgeoisie experiences its own sources of tension – with the old aristocracy, with national competitors, and with the bourgeoisie of other countries. In such struggles, it is compelled to seek help from the proletariat. This requires education, raising the political awareness of the working class, and other measures which eventually can be turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

Additional elements of enlightenment and progress are supplied to the working class by the members of the ruling class that fall into the proletariat.

And finally, there are certain members of the ruling class that on principle and recognition of history’s direction leave their class loyalties behind and join the workers’ rebellion voluntarily.

Nonetheless, the proletariat remains the only truly revolutionary class.

The others – the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the craftsman, the farmer – fight the bourgeoisie to save their traditional positions in society. They are therefore conservative, not revolutionary. They are trying to return to a bygone age that will never return.

In all this, the “social scum” (the “lumpenproletariat”) at times joins the revolution. But they can easily be bribed by the bourgeoisie to be counterrevolutionary.

For the proletariat, bourgeois values around family, morality, religion, and law are just so many bourgeois prejudices invoked to advance the capitalist agenda of profit maximization.

Any class that achieves superiority will always attempt to restructure society in ways that will solidify its property holdings and position of control. For its part and to get the upper hand, the proletariat (who own nothing) must create a clean slate abolishing all forms of ruling class property.

Unlike previous historical movements (which were minority movements – i.e., of slave holders, royalty, and bourgeoisie), the proletarian revolution is that of the world’s immense majority. Its intention must therefore be to destroy the entire social structure which has been shaped by the minority to keep the majority in a subservient position.

At first, the proletariat must rebel against its own national bourgeoisie.

Whereas previous rising classes [serfs and small businesspeople (“petty bourgeoisie”)] rose with the progress of industry, today’s revolutionary class (the proletariat) sinks lower and lower into poverty as capitalism develops. This difference completely discredits the bourgeoisie and its laws.

Bourgeois rule depends for its continuance on increased capital accumulation. Such accumulation demands wage labor. In the process, the wages of workers are driven down by competition with other workers. Workers combat the downward trend in wages by forming the above-mentioned unions which will inevitably overthrow the capitalist class.

Proletarians & Communists

The Communists are not interested in setting up a political party separate from other workers’ parties. Their interests are international – those of the proletariat itself. The Communist agenda is the same as that of the whole international proletariat.

As the most advanced and determined segment of the working class, the Party supplies a vision of the future, a sense of history, and guiding principles to the workers’ movement so understood.

Communist goals are (1) formation of the proletariat into a class (i.e., helping them develop class consciousness), (2) the overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, and (3) the attainment of political power by the proletariat.

Communist theory develops from an analysis of history and experience; it does not originate from the reflections of this or that philosopher.

Neither have the Communists originated the idea of abolishing existing property relationships.

For example, the French Revolution (1789-1799) abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

Property wise, the goal of Communism is not the abolition of property in general, but of bourgeois property (i.e., the means of production) based on the exploitation of the many by the few.

That’s Communist theory in a nutshell: abolition of private property. (i.e., private ownership of the means of production – factories, land, forests, etc.

Communists do not seek the abolition of property belonging to the petty artisan or small farmer. The development of industry has already done away with such property.

Wage labor creates no property for the worker. Instead, it creates property for his or her exploiters.

Capitalist success depends on the cooperation of whole societies.

It is a social power.

When capital is converted into community property it loses its class-character.

As for wage-labor . . ..

Minimum wage = what is necessary for workers to keep body and soul together.

Communist emphasis is on the present not on inheritances from the past. We are against the individuality, independence and freedom of the bourgeoisie. For the latter, freedom = free trade, free selling and buying.

Communists oppose free buying and selling, bourgeois conditions of production, and the bourgeoisie itself.

Are you scandalized by communist abolition of private property? It is already abolished for 9/10 of the population!

Yes, we intend to do away with your private property!

But, you ask, what about individuality?

Your question is really about bourgeois individuality. It’s that individuality that must be swept away.

Abolition of private property is in no way about depriving people of the products of society. It’s about forbidding owners of such products to subjugate the labor of others.

But won’t abolition of private property make people lazy and reluctant to work?

In fact, it is the bourgeoisie that are reluctant to work. They are the lazy ones. “Work” for the bourgeoisie refers to the exploited activity of workers within the present system. Yes, workers are reluctant to continue doing that. In that sense, they are lazy.

The same is true of intellectual property identified by the bourgeoisie as “culture” (i.e. all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation.) Class culture must disappear just as class property must vanish.

Bourgeois culture is nothing but the training of society’s majority to act like machines.

Bourgeois ideas like freedom, culture, and law are mechanisms for controlling the working class.

Like all previous forms of property and law (e.g., those belonging to slave and feudal, arrangements) bourgeois forms pretend to be natural and eternal.

And yes, the Communists do in fact propose abolition of the family as we know it. Don’t be shocked by that. The bourgeois family in question is based on private gain. Under capitalism, children are transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. Additionally, capitalist production makes family practically impossible for the proletarians. It encourages public prostitution. It encourages the exploitation of children by their parents. Communists plead guilty to advocating the abolition of all those aberrations – child labor, public prostitution, and parental abuse.

The same holds true for education. Communists propose removing all ruling class influence from educational processes.

But what about bourgeois complaints that Communism introduces a “community of women?” Actually, it is capitalism, not Communism that reduces women to common property – to a pool of cheap labor whose members are nameless and without personality or individuality and whose purpose is to drive down all workers’ wages. At the same time, the bourgeoisie refuse to compensate women for their labor at home (begetting, feeding, clothing, educating, etc. their children so they too can contribute to the “community” of nameless ciphers in the pool of unemployed workers seeking a place in the industrial system.)

As for the bourgeoisie themselves. . .. As a class, they exhibit little aversion towards their dreaded “community of women.” They freely exchange wives through their divorce processes. They take great pleasure in seducing one another’s females. Routinely, they sexually exploit their employees. They frequent public prostitutes and anonymous females desperately displaying their bodies.

In short, “The Communists have no need to introduce community of women. It has existed almost from time immemorial.” (It’s part of the patriarchy.)

Similarly, Communists are accused of advocating the abolition of countries and nationalities.

Face it: proletarians are already people without countries. You cannot take from them what they do not have. The system treats them the same no matter where they live; it gives no value to country borders or nationalities. If workers do have a nationality, it is “proletarian.”

As workers recognize this fact, nation states will become less important and will vanish altogether under proletarian leadership. Thus, international conflict will eventually end.

Philosophical and religious objections to Communism are hardly worth noting.

History shows that human consciousness (along with human relationships) transforms along with changes in material circumstances. “THE RULING IDEAS OF EACH AGE HAVE EVER BEEN THE IDEAS OF THE RULING CLASS” (My caps.)

As means of production change, so do ideas. For example, with the dawn of 18^th century “Enlightenment,” ideas about freedom of religion and conscience “merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.”

The bourgeois concept of “eternally valid truths” is nothing but a reflection of the fact that class antagonisms (along with slightly modified versions of their supporting ideologies) have always characterized human history.

With the abolition of classes, such perceptions of “eternal verities” will also disappear.

The first step in revolution by the working class is to establish the latter as the ruling class – i.e., to win the battle of democracy (in the sense of government by the people). This entails employment of despotic measures to deprive bourgeois property owners of their property.

Towards that end, Communists advocate the following practical measures:

Abolition of private ownership of land and the application of land rental to public benefit.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all who flee from or rebel against the new order.
Centralization of the banking system in the hands of the public as represented by the State.
Similar centralization of all means of communication and transport in the hands of the public.
State administration of factories, conversion of wastelands into farms, and general environmental development under State (i.e. public) administration.
Excluding no one on principle from obligation to perform manual labor.
Repopulation of the countryside to restore balance and absence of distinction between town and country.
Public schooling for everyone. Elimination of child labor in its present form.

Once class distinctions have disappeared, and all means of production have been concentrated in public hands, the State will lose its political character (since “political power, properly so called is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another”). The proletariat will thus abandon its dictatorship. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

“The Communists everywhere (in France, Switzerland, Poland, Germany, etc.) support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.”

Communist aims can only be secured by the forceable overthrow of all existing social conditions.

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

“Working men of all countries, unite!”

Jesus’ Healing Action Tells Women To Disobey Men: Control Your Own Bodies

Readings for 13^th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Wisdom 1:13-16, 2:23-24; Ps. 30:2, 4-6, 11-13; 2Cor. 8:7, 9, 13-16; Mk. 5:21-43

Last month my brilliant 15-year-old granddaughter shocked students in her high school freshman class by giving a speech about menstruation. Yes, menstruation! She called her talk “Bleeding in Silence: The Hidden Epidemic of Period Poverty.” (For those interested, I’ve pasted Eva’s words to the bottom of this posting.)

Eva’s speech was about how the patriarchal system fundamentally misunderstands how women’s bodies function. And in our man’s world, it’s women who pay the price for such ignorance. For instance, it influences the cost of “feminine hygiene products” and their availability while imposing unspoken prohibitions about even mentioning menstrual periods much less openly discussing and coping with them.

Eva’s presentation began with a video of interviews of male family members during a party over her school’s Easter break. On camera, she simply asked us “What do you understand by the word ‘menstruation?” It was surprising how quickly inarticulate, seemingly embarrassed, and (let’s face it) ignorant our responses were, even by those who (like me) should know better.

A principal conclusion of Eva’s speech was that lamentably, men know very little about how female bodies work. Women, of course know much more. Moreover, this disparity has major social repercussions when overwhelmingly male state administrators in a completely patriarchal system impose legislation about what they barely understand. e.g., about abortion, contraception sex education, and easy and cheap access to those hygiene products.

For instance, relative to abortion, the legislation ignores the fact that 70-75% of fertilized eggs end up aborting spontaneously. They’re unceremoniously flushed down toilets across the world in the menstrual period immediately following fertilization. Yet, a recent decision by the Alabama Supreme Court holds that all those unknown and unrecognized embryos are somehow “children.” At least that’s the implication of the court’s determination that frozen embryos are babies. How offensive to common sense is that? How contrary to what every woman implicitly knows.

I bring all of that up on this Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time because today’s selection from the Gospel of Mark centralizes a woman with a menstrual problem. It implies criticism of ignorant patriarchal laws regulating it, while strongly affirming a particular woman’s courageous decision to transgress those restrictions in favor of her own faith and common sense.

Jesus & Menstruation

In short, today’s reading uses the issue of menstruation to show how Jesus favored women who spoke for themselves and courageously exercised their own initiative even in the face of specific patriarchal legislation forbidding such agency. It has him even curing and praising a woman who disobeys precisely misogynistic laws. He ends up prioritizing her needs over those of a young female who was a passive captive to the religious patriarchy.

To make those points, Mark the evangelist creates what might be termed a “literary sandwich” – a “story within a story.” The device focuses on two kinds of females within the Jewish faith of Jesus’ day. In fact, Mark’s gospel is liberally sprinkled with doublets like the one just described. When they appear, both stories are meant to play off one another and illuminate each other.

In today’s doublet, we find two women. One is just entering puberty at the age of 12; the other has had a menstrual problem for the entire life span of the adolescent girl. (Today we’d call her condition a kind of menorrhagia.)

So, to begin with the number 12 is centralized. It’s a literary “marker” suggesting that the narrative has something to do with the twelve tribes of Israel – and in the early church, with the apostolic leadership of “the twelve.” The connection with Israel is confirmed by the fact that the 12-year-old in the story is the daughter of a synagogue official. As a man in a patriarchal culture, he can approach Jesus directly and speak for his daughter.

The other woman in the doublet has no man to speak for her; she must approach Jesus covertly and on her own. She comes from the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum from the 12-year- old daughter of the synagogue leader.

The older woman is without honor. She is poor and penniless. Her menstrual problem has rendered her sterile, and so she’s considered technically dead by her faith community. Her condition has also excluded her from the synagogue. In the eyes of community leaders like Jairus (the petitioning father in the story) she is “unclean.” (Remember that according to Jewish law, all women were considered unclean during their monthly period. So, the woman in today’s drama is exceedingly unclean. She and all menstruating women were not to be touched.)

All that means that Jairus as a synagogue leader is in effect the oppressor of the second woman. On top of that the older woman in the story has been humiliated and exploited by the male medical profession which has been ineffective in addressing her condition. In other words, the second woman is the victim of a misogynist religious system which saw the sacrificial blood of animals as valuable and pleasing in God’s eyes, but the blood of women as repulsively unclean.

Nonetheless, it is the bleeding woman who turns out to be the hero of the story. Her confidence in Jesus is so strong that she believes a mere touch of his garment will suffice to restore her to health, and that her action won’t even be noticed.

So, she reaches out and touches the Master. Doing so was extremely bold and highly disobedient to Jewish law, since her touch would have rendered Jesus himself unclean. She refuses to believe that.

So instead of being made unclean by the woman’s touch, Jesus’ being responds by exuding healing power, apparently without his even being aware. The woman is cured. Jesus asks, “Who touched me?” The disciples object, “What do you mean? Everybody’s touching you,” they say.

Finally, the unclean woman is identified. Jesus praises her faith and (significantly!) calls her “daughter.” So, what we end up finding in this literary doublet are two Jewish “daughters” – yet another point of comparison.

While Jesus is attending to the bleeding woman, the first daughter in the story apparently dies. Jesus insists on seeing her anyhow. When he observes that she is merely asleep, the bystanders laugh him to scorn. But Jesus is right. When he speaks to her in Aramaic, the girl awakens and is hungry. Everyone is astonished, and Jesus must remind them to feed her.

Mark’s Message for Us

What does all the comparison mean? The doublet represented in today’s Gospel addresses issues that couldn’t be more female – more feminist. The message here is that bold and active women unafraid of disobeying the religious or civil patriarchy in matters that women understand better than men. “Prioritize and act like the bleeding woman” is the message of today’s Gospel.

Could today’s gospel be telling us that bold and specifically feminist faith that sides with the poor and oppressed (like the hero of today’s Gospel) will be the salvation of us all who are moribund? Are women precisely as women today’s real faith leaders, rather than the elderly, white, out-of-touch men who overwhelmingly claim to lead in every sphere even those where women know far more.

Conclusion

Today’s Gospel suggests that it’s time for men to stop telling women how to be women – to stop pronouncing on issues of female sexuality whether it be menstruation, abortion, contraception, same-sex attractions, or whether women are called by God to the priesthood. Correspondingly, it’s time for women to disobey such male pronouncements, and to exercise leadership in accord with their common sense – in accord with women’s ways of knowing. Only that will save our national community which is currently sick unto death.

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Bleeding in Silence: The Hidden Epidemic of Period Poverty

By Eva Lehnerd Reilly

Whether they know the term or not, all women are necessarily aware of the realities of “Period Poverty.” Nonetheless, the concept remains completely foreign and even incomprehensible to most men. As a result, little is done to eliminate the problems the phrase represents. The phrase “Period Poverty” is defined as the lack of access to safe and hygienic menstrual products during monthly periods and accessibility to basic sanitation services or facilities as well as menstrual hygiene education.

Additionally, period poverty has social dimensions that include the stigmas surrounding this natural female process. To explain the problem, what follows will explore international dimensions of this issue, connect the phrase with patriarchy, misogyny and human rights and make recommendations for its elimination. This essay is arguing “Period Poverty” is a world health issue thus by refusing to acknowledge it we are proving that we still live in a society that is patriarchal, misogynist, and locked in an aggressive denial of the rights of women.

An International Problem

This issue affects billions of people worldwide in ways including stigma, dependence on transnational companies producing the necessary hygienic products, and the lack of understanding and acknowledgement of the problem. Stigma is one of the largest problems surrounding period poverty. Many countries and people believe wildly untrue period-related information. According to the Korean Journal of Family Medicine, Nepal “continues to believe in dangerous, incorrect ideas, for example, using tampons causes women to lose their virginity, or handling food while menstruating causes it to spoil the food.

Social stigma on menstruation remains even in more advanced nations: in the United States, 58% of women are ashamed of having a period, and 51% of men believe that it is improper to discuss periods at work.” (Jaafar, Hafiz, et al., 2023). The fact that stigma is so present in all different circles around the world shows how grand an issue this is and how many people are affected by it.

This is also an economic issue because women are dependent on transnational companies. Global Research and Consulting Group Insights explains that: “Multiple countries in the world impose the ‘tampon tax’ on menstrual products, frequently targeted as ‘luxury goods.’ This categorization enhances the chances that economic disparities, limit access to period products, and perpetuates the view that they are not a ‘necessity.’”(Ricardo da Costa, 2023). This tax is implemented often in particularly lower-income, less developed countries but it is far from unique to developing countries. In fact, GRC found that the elimination of the “tampon tax” in California would likely reduce government revenue by 55 million dollars. This shows how women’s reliance on companies to provide basic hygiene products is problematic because the government is trying to make financial gains by providing resources that should never be charged for in the first place.

Probably the largest problem of them all is the lack of awareness and understanding surrounding period poverty and the menstrual cycle in general. A Plan International study found that one in five boys and young men think that periods should be kept a secret. Furthermore, they associate this term with words like ‘messy,’ ‘gross,’ and ‘embarrassing.’ This tells us that the taboos set in place by society are greatly affecting young people and discouraging them from learning and understanding this issue. This is leading to the rise of a new wave of sexism.

Periods and Patriarchy

The term “patriarchy” refers to social conditions ruled by fathers–or more generally by men. In

The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner determines that this comes from lessons taught in childhood. She says that the “absolute authority of a father over his children provided men with a conceptual dominance of dependency, due to the helplessness of youth.” (Lerner, 90). Relative to period poverty, this fundamental condition has led some women to joke that if male biology included menstruation, they would likely be excused from work days before and during the entire menses process, plus they would be given a week off to recover. Additionally, menstrual hygiene products would be low or no cost, not subject to taxation, and as available as toilet paper and paper hand towels in every washroom.

In our patriarchal society no such accommodations are available for more than half our nation’s population. That’s period poverty. However, this goes farther than just the patriarchy. The issue is also affected greatly by misogyny, a term meaning hatred of women. This is revealed in attitudes surrounding mood swings, jokes about periods and even dates back to religious texts calling women ‘unclean’ during this time.

Particularly, in the third Book of the Pentateuch or Torah, known as Leviticus, it states that a woman undergoing menstruation is perceived as unclean for seven days and whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening (Leviticus 15:19). This is simply outrageous and goes to show how our society is so deeply rooted in these feelings of hatred towards women and disgust towards natural occurrences.

Finally, access to period products is a human right. A human right is what belongs to human beings simply because of being human; it does not have to be earned, it is an entitlement. All women, simply because of being women, have menstrual periods. They therefore have rights connected with their inevitable circumstances. These include rights to free or very low-cost feminine hygiene products, widespread availability of such products and freedom from blame, ridicule, or penalty for time off for personal care during their periods. Now that we have established this, how can we fix this?

Practical Recommendations

The Journal of Global Health Reports found that 500 million people lack access to menstrual products and hygiene facilities and since half the population is female and over half of university students are female, this issue can no longer be ignored. Men need to be part of the solution. We need to all work together to ensure a positive and supportive environment that allows menstruating people to participate in all aspects of life (e.g., going to school/work, and sport). In a Plan International study of over 300 men, 49% said their education on periods was poor or non-existent and just under one third (32%) said that talking about periods made them feel uncomfortable, increasing to 53% in the youngest respondents aged 16-18 years. This shows that many people (men in particular) are not receiving adequate education leading to misinformation and increased stigma associated with menstruation.

The takeaway is that we are in desperate need of a far greater and earlier education about periods in schools. There are three things to note surrounding this being a world health issue: 1) Poor menstrual hygiene often causes physical health risks, 2) globally, 1.7 billion people live without basic sanitation services, 3) girls with disabilities disproportionately do not have access to the facilities and resources they need for proper menstrual hygiene. The former Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at UNICEF said it best: “Meeting the hygiene needs of all adolescent girls is a fundamental issue of human rights, dignity, and public health.” (Rodriguez, Global Citizen). With all that in mind, allow me to conclude my argument.