Current Issues – Page 31 – About Things That Matter

Wapo Errs in Retracting ‘Hands-up Don’t Shoot’ Support

On Sunday the Lexington Herald Leader here in Kentucky published an apology by Washington Post blogger and MSNBC commentator, Jonathan Capehart. The article was entitled “Ferguson policing concerns valid, but ‘Hands-Up’ not based on truth.”

Capehart’s retraction of initial support for the “Hands-Up” movement was based on his reading of the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation that “filled in the blanks, corrected the record and brought sunlight to dark places.” The report forced Capehart (an African-American) “to deal with uncomfortable truths: Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting.”

According to the Wapo journalist, his conclusion was based on the DOJ’s “exhaustive interviews with witnesses, cross-checking their statements . . . ballistics, DNA evidence and results from three autopsies.” All of these showed that officer Wilson “knew about the theft of cigarillos from the convenience store and had a description of the suspects . . . Brown fought with the officer and tried to take his gun.”

Capehart’s general conclusion: “. . . we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative on behalf of someone who would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong.”

Capehart’s conclusion is disturbing on at least three counts. It first of all ingenuously accepts the Department of Justice as a disinterested arbitrator. Secondly, it simply accepts the false conclusion that Officer Wilson had no alternative but to kill Michael Brown, shooting him six times. And thirdly, both Capehart’s article and the DOJ report reinforce the erroneous impression that police officers are under constant threat and so can be excused for their over-reactions.

Is the DOJ disinterested? Hardly – at least not if we keep the big picture in mind. Remember, there is an encroaching police state in our country defending the interests of the 1% against the rest of us. Under the aegis of the DOJ, increasingly militarized police forces have gradually assumed the role of occupying armies, especially in communities of color.

Moreover, in representing the elite, government agencies routinely lie to us. At what point do we conclude that they have lost credibility as disinterested investigators, and discard out of hand any claims that support the forces of DOJ-sponsored occupation?

However, even if we accept the Department’s report as endorsed by Jonathan Capehart, the question remains, did Officer Wilson have no alternative but to use deadly force on Michael Brown? Clearly the answer is no.

Wilson’s alternatives were at least three. He could have (1) stayed in his car and called for backup, (2) allowed Brown to “escape” and later arrest him (with suitable reinforcement) at Brown’s home which was known to the police, or (3) in the worst of circumstances, shot the unarmed Brown in the legs to wound rather than kill.

The fact that such alternatives did not occur to Wilson underscores the poor training of police in our country. Clearly all of them are instructed on how to use their deadly force weapons. Evidently however, they are not sufficiently trained on how and when not to use them.

As for the hazards of policing, it doesn’t even rank among our country’s ten most dangerous jobs. Those belong to loggers, fishermen, pilots, roofers, steel workers, garbage collectors, electricians, truck drivers, farmers, and construction workers.

That list puts into perspective the “I feared for my life” defense inevitably invoked by police allegedly mistaking wallets, pens, candy bars, and sandwiches for lethal weapons.

As retired NYPD detective, Graham Witherspoon puts it: if policemen are that afraid to put their lives in danger, they’ve chosen the wrong profession. It would be better, he said, to “go home to mommy,” and find some other line of work.

Ironically, Darren Wilson and his defenders are correct in their claim that he was “just doing his job.”

That’s exactly the problem: the job of the law enforcement in our emerging police state is now to intimidate, control, and kill with impunity rather than to “serve and protect.”

In uncritically endorsing the DOJ’s “occupying army” model of policing, Capehart leads us to support (in the blogger’s words) a force that “would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong.”

(Sunday Homily) “Citizenfour”: Keeping God’s Law through Civil Disobedience

Readings for 5^th Sunday of Lent: JER 31: 31-34; PS 51: 3-4, 12-15; JN 12: 20-33 http://usccb.org/bible/readings/032215-fifth-sunday-lent.cfm

I saw “Citizenfour” today. You can see it too. For your own good, please do. The film is live-streamed free here: https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/

“Citizenfour” won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary. Its director is Laura Poitras. The film is about whistleblower, Edward Snowden – the 31 year old CIA employee who two years ago leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA).

The information revealed “America’s” massive world-wide spy system that Snowden saw as absolutely eviscerating U.S. constitutional protections against “unreasonable search and seizure.”

In case you’ve forgotten, the 4^th Amendment of the Constitution reads as follows:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In contradiction to those words, Snowden’s revelations show that indeed “Big Brother” is watching us at all times. We are under constant surveillance. None of our e-mails or phone calls is secure. Telephones normally found in hotel rooms are routinely used as listening devices. All of our e-mail searches are monitored and recorded.

This means that citizens expressing disapproval of government policies are easily identified. So are our constitutionally protected efforts to organize against such policies. All of us are subject to blackmail and prosecution based on stories manufactured from “metadata” and texts gathered by our watchers.

Knowing full well that he would be hunted down and prosecuted (and possibly executed) for his leaks, Edward Snowden shared his information with Laura Poitras and with Guardian reporter, Glen Greenwald. Snowden fled to Russia where he was given temporary political asylum. “Citizenfour” is the upshot.

Of course, Snowden’s opponents say his revelations have endangered national security and that he is guilty of treasonous acts of espionage. In response, the former CIA contractor says the whole matter of government secrecy and surveillance needs full debate. So do extra-judicial killings in the world-wide drone assassination program. Security, Snowden implies, is less important than freedom, privacy, and the lives of innocents arbitrarily killed on mere suspicion of possibly one day harming U.S. citizens. Then there are those disturbing words in the Fourth Amendment. . . .

All of that made me think about today’s liturgy of the word. It’s all about obeying conscience rather than the written law. It’s all about another 30 something law-breaker who rejected absolute security in favor of opposing the authorities of his time. Think about the readings one-by-one.

The first (from the prophet Jeremiah) reminds us that God’s law is not primarily found on tablets of stone. It is inscribed on our hearts. Without invoking “God,” that’s the law Edward Snowden claims to follow – a law much higher than the 1917 Espionage Act invoked against him.

According to today’s responsorial psalm, a heart shaped by God’s law is good and merciful; it is compassionate, forgiving, and guilt-free. Laura Poitras’ film shows Snowden exhibiting all of those qualities. There is not a trace of self-seeking in any of his actions or statements – only concern for others victimized by the state.

It is that heart sensitive to God’s internal law that Jesus manifested. But, like Ed Snowden, it took him great pain to get to that place. Today’s second reading specifically mentions Jesus’ “loud cries and tears,” his anguished prayers and supplications.

Finally, today’s selection from the Gospel of John reiterates the call to follow Jesus, even as Snowden has without any specific reference to Jesus. Our reading has the Master say that “serving” him means walking the way of the cross. In other words, we must learn his same lessons about rejection that always follows hard upon adoption of Jesus’ counter-cultural “Way.”

A seed has to die before it can bear fruit, Jesus explains. That’s our Teacher’s metaphor about exchanging what the world calls “life,” for what John’s gospel calls “eternal life.”

As in contemporary “America,” the world’s utopian ideal enshrines perfect security – saving our lives at all costs, even if it means wholesale killing of others, even if it means surrendering the God-given freedom that makes us specifically human.

By contrast, Jesus’ Way enshrines compassion, service and forgiveness, even if it costs us our lives.

Ironically, Jesus explains, if we expend our resources on saving our lives, we will lose them. But if we reject security as our guiding principle, we’ll gain access to “eternal life” – access to God’s Kingdom, where God is King, not Caesar.

Mysteriously, today’s final reading instructs us against loving our lives. It actually says we should hate our life in this world. Edward Snowden shows what that injunction means. His courageous example calls us to oppose Big Brother, and to support Snowden’s own return to the United States – as a hero.

Be sure to see “Citizenfour.” It exemplifies today’s readings. It’s about opposing the values of “the world,” and about losing one’s life in favor of life’s fullness. It provides an example of a young man following the Law of God inscribed deep in our hearts. That’s our vocation.

Lexington’s New Bishop Channels Pope Francis

“A Jesuit pope by the name of Francis sends you a Franciscan bishop trained by the Jesuits.”

Those were the words of Lexington, Kentucky’s new bishop, John Stowe, as he introduced himself at his first press conference last week.

The words came as a breath of fresh air to progressive Catholics in the Lexington Diocese. As a resident of that diocese, they came as a refreshing breeze to me.

In his opening statement, there was not a word about abortion, contraception, or gay marriage – the dreary, unvarying drum beat of doctrinal rigidity that has (in the pope’s words) turned the lives of Catholics into an endless “Lent without Easter.”

Instead, bishop-elect Stowe follows the lead of his boss who emphasizes the “Good News” of the Christian faith, and not right-wing doom and gloom. While not ignoring those other matters, Pope Francis (and, it seems, bishop-elect Stowe) would have Catholics engage the big issues such as the failure of corporate capitalism and its resulting wealth inequalities, wars, climate chaos, and particularly exclusion of those conservatives consider “outsiders.”

In his progressive stances, however, Lexington’s new appointee is not merely a disciple of Pope Francis. He also has a long personal history social activism, community organization, and inter-faith cooperation.

In his earlier posts in Ohio and Texas, the bishop-elect has been a consistent peace and social justice leader, and a critic of reactionary politics – especially as they affect immigrants.

Father Stowe recognizes, for instance, the parallels between the experience of today’s undocumented workers and that of his Italian grandmother who along with her compatriots were routinely called “WOPS,” or immigrants without papers.

More specifically, in 2006, when Fr. Stowe addressed the Mayor’s Congress on Immigration Reform in El Paso, Texas, he rejected the “Minuteman” and vigilante approach to border security. He criticized the U.S. Congress saying, “We shudder to imagine what the inscription on the Statue of Liberty might read if it had been erected by the current U.S. Congress.”

The bishop-elect is fluent in Spanish. His introductory conference featured a long paragraph in perfectly delivered in that language. I’m sure that gladdened the hearts of the growing Hispanic community in the Lexington diocese. Hispanics, Stowe says, (along with his Franciscan emphasis on service to the poor) have formed him as a priest and pastor.

In summarizing his priorities and agenda, Rev. Stowe said he will focus on worship and the service that inevitably flows, he said, out of meaningful liturgy. But like his papal mentor, he would do lots of listening before acting.

In all things, he would take Pope Francis as his inspiration and guide, and would follow his example. “I love Pope Francis,” he said, and will do whatever he asks.“

That augurs well for progressive Catholics, for the Lexington diocese, and for the Commonwealth in general.

Poll: Why Have You (and/or your children) Left the Church?

Our parish (St. Clare’s in Berea, Kentucky) continues to be inspired by Pope Francis’ “Joy of the Gospel” (JG). Our pastor has embraced its letter and spirit. So has the growing number of parishioners attending Sunday evening discussions of the document during Lent.

All of that is significant, because (as in the church as a whole) there is a lot of discontent among us. It’s like the pope says at the beginning of apostolic exhortation: there believers are described as often “resentful, angry and listless” (JG 2).

Those are the sentiments that surfaced during discussion of “The Joy of the Gospel” last Sunday evening.

The spark that caused them to rise came from an unexpected source, our pastor himself. At one point in the meeting, he said, “I have a question: Why is our church losing people?”

Our jaws dropped. A door had finally swung open to meaningful discussion.

Our pastor identified three causes for parish attrition: (1) parishioners have not felt invited to truly participate in parish life; (2) many have moved away from our town, and (3) we’re just not a welcoming enough community.

Parishioners around the table offered alternative analyses that probed a bit deeper. They said: (1) our community lacks effective leadership; (2) liturgies are boring, lifeless, and lacking the “joy” centralized in the pope’s exhortation; (3) homilies are disconnected from the world, our lives, and from the day’s burning issues. In general the church is out-of-touch.

In the midst of the conversation, someone said, “If we want to know why we’re losing people, we should ask our children. Most of us brought them up in the church the way we were supposed to. We took them to Mass every Sunday, sent them to catechism classes (and even taught some of them ourselves); we introduced them to the sacraments. And now virtually none of them go to church. We must be doing something wrong. We should ask them why they’ve left.”

So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m asking any young people who read this blog, why have you left the church. Just a sentence or two will do, though longer responses are welcome. I’m asking parents why they think their children no longer “practice” the faith.

In the meantime, here are a few of my own thoughts:

A Church in Crisis!

Our church has fallen into deep depression.

Even our pastor asks

“Where have all the children gone?

Why are the pews empty?”

His question admits that

We no longer appeal to young people.

We have lost touch with the world

And its problems

Of poverty, systemic dysfunction,

War, Michael Browns, misogyny, and abysmal income gaps.

A fearful church – the Ratzingers among us –

Defensively retreats to an imagined past

Where young people were “moral”

And still came to Mass

And confession!!

Where “reforms” meant rehabilitating words like

“Consubstantial,” “chalice,” and “under my roof.”

And where everyone cowered

In fear of the Lord

And of the Reverend “Father.”

Those days are gone

For good,

Francis says.

Thank God!

Instead,

He’d have us address

The real problems of the world.

Globalism does not work.

It’s destroying the planet.

“War never again,” he repeats

And “Who am I to say?”

This father

Does not pretend

To know best.

Instead,

He looks to the wise

Young carpenter from Nazareth

Who loved the “lazy” poor

(And was one of them!)

Who loved the whores and drunkards,

The lepers, fags and pimps.

Who cursed the rich

And blessed the ragged.

“The Kingdom is yours!”

He promised them all.

Our globe needs that Spirit today

More than ever!

But few find it

In our churches

Where we should.

That’s why the pews

Are empty!

Terrorism’s Causes? Ask Jihadi John!

Last month The Atlantic headlined Graeme Wood’s article, “What Isis Really Wants and How to Stop It.” That article apparently set the tone for President Obama’s White House Summit on Countering Violent Terrorism (Feb. 18^th).

Together the article and the Obama’s meeting gave rise to endless talk show discussions about radicalism and its causes. All reformulated the old 9/11 question, “Why do they hate us?”

Most expert answers missed the obvious historical response. They overlooked the basic law of cause and effect.

Instead, they focused on terrorist psychology.

According to the experts, many ISIS radicals are directionless youths without gainful employment. Others are adventure-seekers, or mentally ill psychopaths. Some radicals are medievalists with an unexplainable bias against the modern world. Most are products of bad religion and corrupt imams.

Ostensibly, the majority are easily influenced by Facebook advertising which ISIS rebels have mastered to an art form that somehow escapes the medium’s inventors.

What to do about such problems? The talk show whizzes weren’t sure. Most highlighted better advertising. We’ve got to improve our Facebook skills, they intoned.

Missed or downplayed in all the ruminations is the obvious. Why not ask Jihadi John?

Here’s what he said on YouTube as he pointed his knife at President Obama before beheading yet another victim dressed tellingly in an orange jumpsuit: “As your missiles continue to strike our people, our knives will continue to behead your people.”

Hmm. . . . Wouldn’t you say that’s pretty straight-forward? In a word, the man is talking about blowback. It’s as simple as that.

What causes radicalism? Let me count the ways: everything signified by Guantanamo orange jumpsuits, extra-judicial assassinations, drones hovering over towns terrorizing children, wedding parties whose revelers are suddenly turned into “bug splats,” U.S. soldiers urinating on the lifeless corpses of one’s parents, the work of reassembling body parts for purposes of identification after a U.S. bombing attack, the smell of human flesh incinerated by our napalm and white phosphorous.

The list goes on and on: Abu Grahib, Fallujah, Haditha, the Torture Report, support of dictators throughout the Arabian Peninsula, continued arming of Israel even after Netanyahu incinerated and dismembered more than 495 Muslim children in his latest “turkey shoot” in Gaza, Christian fundamentalists ignorantly crusading against Islam, racist cartoonists lampooning “the Prophet” when they can hardly spell his name, western industrialism destroying the planet by climate change.

Why do they hate us? It’s not rocket science, friends. It’s blowback. It’s what none of our leaders will say because curing the radicalism means drastically reforming U.S. policy.

It means ceasing to be the radical terrorist state “America” itself has become.

For God’s sake, listen to Jihadi John!

Cops Fearing for Their Lives: “Go Home to Mommy or Get another Job”

Recent YouTube videos have treated us to the sickening spectacle of police again shooting unarmed black and brown men – one with hands raised, the other lying on the ground. The one with raised hands was shot 17 times by police in Pasco, Washington. The one on the ground was shot 5 times by 3 Los Angeles police officers with several others standing nearby.

Couple that with what we know of Ferguson and our government’s donation of military equipment to local (even rural) police forces in the name of fighting terrorism, and there’s ample cause for concern about U.S. policing. The names Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and others, reveal the swift and easy transition from “protect and serve” to “harass and dominate.”

Why are trigger-happy police officers so easily excused by simple invocation of their favorite mantra, “I feared for my life”?

Is it that the officers caught on tape are essentially cowards? Dangerous situations emerge when fear-filled men are given license to kill unarmed people with raised hands, or those lying on the ground, even when the latter are surrounded by five or six men in blue with guns drawn. If the surrounding men were not uniformed, most of us would find their actions contemptible.

Of course, no one denies that policemen are on the whole good people and have very dangerous jobs. African-American and Hispanic communities themselves need and want good police in their neighborhoods, regardless of the officers’ skin color. And besides there are plenty of non-white officers on the Los Angeles and New York City police forces (though not on their Ferguson counterpart).

In any case, it is clear that there is something dreadfully wrong with police training. Obviously, their weapons instruction teaches them how to fire guns. It is evident however that officers need even more training about how to avoid firing those weapons. Backing off is not cowardly; neither is shooting to wound rather than kill.

That list puts into perspective the “I feared for my life” defense inevitably invoked by police allegedly mistaking wallets, pens, candy bars, and sandwiches for lethal weapons.

(Sunday Homily) Ten Reasons for Hope in a Time of Despair: Empire Is Crumbling before Our Eyes

(SYRIZA Poster: http://keithpp)

Readings for 4^th Sunday in Ordinary Time: JB 7: 1-4, 6-7; PS 147: 1-6; I COR 9: 16-19; 22-23; MK 1: 29-39 http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020815.cfm

Today’s liturgy of the word is about hope in a world wracked by despair. All of us are starved for such hope. In fact, discouragement and apparent powerlessness describe not only our personal consciousness but the larger zeitgeist that is the constant focus of these Sunday reflections dedicated to confronting the world with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Today’s confrontation should help progressives realize that our times are actually changing for the better.

Think of the most recent historical roots of today’s despair – the way the world was just 20 years ago. As described recently by Andre Vitchek, it was an unbelievably hard time for opponents of empire.

Then think of how things are different today. It’s the difference between the condition of Job in this Sunday’s first reading, and the healing Jesus brought to the poor in today’s gospel selection.

Twenty years ago Russia was controlled by Boris Yeltsin, a boozy western puppet who betrayed his own people. Like Yeltsin, other heads of state throughout Eastern Europe joined their western counterparts in a shameless surrender to imperial interests. They were largely “led” by the offspring of the elites who preceded them. China 20 years ago was still under the spell of the free market reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping. Meanwhile, Latin America reeling from decades of dictatorships imposed by the West had turned its economies over to neo-liberals trained in the Chicago School of Economics. The same was largely true of the Middle East and Africa. In those cases, dictators and the one-percenters were firmly in control. Christian vision of a kingdom where the earth belonged to everyone had been completely hijacked by religious fundamentalists and reactionaries including in his own way, the pope of Rome. All of this was largely hidden by both local and international mainstream media (MSM) which applauded dictatorships and plutocracies as “emerging democracies.”

Those were indeed hard times for anti-imperialists. I remember the despair. We were like Job in today’s first reading sitting on a dung heap lamenting the loss of hope enkindled by the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Remember Job? He too was the victim of an incredible series of misfortunes. They reduced him to a condition worse than poverty. Without warning, he lost all his wealth; his children died; he became terribly sick; and his reputation went entirely south.

Job is the image of us all 20 years ago. Like Job, progressives couldn’t be blamed for wondering if our situation could ever change.

Perhaps believers among us had forgotten the general hope offered in today’s responsorial psalm. It reminds us of the goodness of Life – the divine energy in which we live and move and have our being. (Some call that Energy, “God.”) The psalmist reminds us that time and history itself have a way of healing broken hearts. Life has a way of supporting even the most devastated. And (as Job’s case illustrates) it eventually topples even those who appear to live on top of the world. God is good, the Psalmist reminds us. God is gracious and wise beyond our wildest imaginings. God unifies the poor, even when they’re hopelessly fragmented by elite strategies of “divide and rule.”

Today’s gospel reading offers more particular hope. It recounts the first acts of a prophet from and imperial backwater, Israel – Jesus, the carpenter-preacher from Nazareth, a “Nowheresville” if there ever was one.

There he encourages the downtrodden every bit as crushed as Job. He heals with a touch, an embrace, a smile, a kiss of the foot, a word of encouragement as the afflicted assemble before him to find health and hope and relief from their demons. In other words, today’s gospel locates hope outside the political structure of the day, outside the realm of priests, lawyers, kings and emperors. It finds hope on the margins of empire.

And when you think of it, that’s where hope is to be found today. It’s not grounded in American presidents, in our imperial army, in the European Union, or in “foreign aid.” As I said, it’s not even reported in the mainstream media.

And yet the world is changing for the better right before our eyes. And the locus of change is on the margins – in the 50% of the world that has almost invisibly (for Americans) broken free of the imperial order that has governed the world since the end of World War II. Eventually the gains of that 50% will change us too.

Think of the progress I’m referring to. To even perceive it you have to step outside the powerful system of propaganda that envelops us all. Here are 10 signs of hope emerging from the margins. They have for years been signaled by J.W. Smith and his Institute for Economic Democracy:

World-wide people have lost faith in the western model of mainstream media (the Great Wurlitzer” as Smith terms it). Most have awakened to the fact that it’s all lies. In Latin America, Russia, China, and Iran, the new media is not even “alternative” any longer. Its mission is exposing the crimes of the West, its Empire and client states. Its message couldn’t be more straight-forward: No more torture, rape or genocide.
Russia has risen from the ashes and is confronting the Empire on all fronts. Vladimir Putin has emerged as the world’s most effective international leader and practitioner of diplomacy and independence from Empire.
Russia and China are both returning to their socialist roots advancing policies far more humane than their western counterparts.
In Greece the overwhelming victory of SYRIZA has threatened the neo-liberal order in the heart of the European Union. The party’s anti-austerity message is already being spread to Italy, Spain, and France.
Latin America has broken free of the shackles of the Monroe Doctrine. Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil are all forging their own paths while cooperating with and supporting one another. All are moving closer to Russia and China.
The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) themselves represent at least half the planet’s population. They are trading with each other in their own currencies now making themselves immune from western sanctions.
On June 17^th of this year, under BRICS leadership, 133 of the world’s 196 countries declared their intention to “destroy the New World Order” championed by western Empire.
For those paying attention, even the ISIS barbarians are unwittingly serving the cause of peace by demonstrating the horror of wars instigated by the West. They behead on YouTube videos, while U.S. moviegoers cheer American Snipers who blow the heads off unsuspecting Iraqis defending their homes from Seals. ISIS barbarians set fire to prisoners with matches, while their U.S. counterparts use napalm and white phosphorous. The clash of barbarisms highlighted by ISIS promises to make pacifists of anyone capable of seeing parallels. (It’s up to progressives to make them apparent.)
Even the U.S. president (the first ever influenced by liberation theology) sees parallels like the ones just referenced. He has criticized American exceptionalism by challenging his people to “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
The pope of Rome is attempting mightily to defeat Catholic fundamentalism and to turn 1/7 of the world’s population (i.e. 1.2 billion Catholics) in the direction of social justice and environmental protection as advocated by liberation theology.

None of these are “pie in the sky” hopes. They are simply facts known to the world outside our borders but hidden from us by the MSM.

Along with today’s liturgical readings, such changes should be cause for hope and encouragement. More than half the world has left Job’s dung heap. The world’s poor whom Jesus served and embodied are leading the way. The rest of us will join them soon.

(Sunday Homily) Pope Francis’ Prophetic Warning on Climate Change: Repent or Else; the Time Is Short

Readings for 2^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: JON 3: 1-5, 10; PS 25: 4-9; I COR 7: 29-31; MK 1: 4-20; http://usccb.org/bible/readings/012515.cfm

Last week, Pope Francis offered a preview of his eagerly anticipated encyclical on climate change – to be published next June or July. While visiting the Philippines, the country most devastated by climate chaos, it wasn’t that the pope merely joined the chorus of scientists, environmental activists, and those who heed them. He went much further, promising to transform the issue of climate change from a debate topic trivialized on Fox News into a matter of “faith and morals” (The phrase used by Catholics to define the area within which the pope has overriding authority.)

In doing so, Francis follows the traditions of prophets like Jonah and Jesus – each centralized in today’s liturgy of the word. Both prophets called for repentance (change of thought and action). However, the repentance they summoned pales in comparison to what the pope evidently has in mind.

Yes, the pope is a contemporary prophet. At this moment in history, he is arguably the most powerful ever in terms of his consciousness, courage, credibility and constituency. He literally embodies our best hope for “saving the world.” So it’s incumbent on progressives to heed, highlight and support his efforts.

With that in mind, consider today’s readings about prophetic warnings and how to respond.

The first recalls the message of the Bible’s fictional character Jonah. He’s a reluctant ethnocentric prophet forced by God to call Israel’s mortal enemy, Nineveh, to repentance. “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed” Jonah proclaimed with some delight.

Ultimately though, Jonah’s ethno-centricity is frustrated when against his desires, the Ninevites quickly and unexpectedly take his message to heart, change their ways, and God repents “of the evil he had planned.” In this way, the Divine One showed God’s character as depicted in today’s responsorial. There the psalmist says that (unlike Jonah) God is compassionate, loving, kind, good, and upright. God guides humble sinners on the path of truth – i.e. reality as it is, not as humans would like it to be.

Jesus’ proclamation was similar to Jonah’s, but without that prophet’s nationalist limitations. As depicted in today’s gospel reading, Jesus’ basic message was a call to profound change: “This is the time of fulfillment,” he said. “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.” That notion of fulfillment and the nearness of God’s Kingdom introduces a profound element of hope to complement Jesus’ summons to repentance.

Like the Ninevites in the Jonah story, Peter and Andrew, James and John take Jesus’ words to heart profoundly altering their lives. They leave their former employment as fishermen abandoning their nets, their fathers’ boats and hired men. They follow instead a penniless itinerant preacher and community organizer, adopting his life of complete dependence on others for daily sustenance.

In today’s second reading, Paul shows that the early church embraced Jesus’ message. “Time is running out,” Paul warns. It’s time to prioritize the Kingdom even before family, emotional ups and downs, attachment to property — and to the world as it is. Paul is uncompromising in his perception of the profundity of change “repentance” calls for.

However the apostle’s perception is nothing like the lack of compromise called for by the historically unprecedented crisis of climate change. And this brings me back to Pope Francis and the promise of his prophetic consciousness, courage, credibility, and constituency.

Begin with Francis’ consciousness. He alone among our elected thought “leaders” recognizes contemporary historical patterns – the links between climate change, capitalism, its neo-liberal order, corporate power, income inequality, poverty, colonialism, and a host of other problems (including absence of universal education and health care). For Francis, climate change is not merely one issue among many. It is the frame which makes evident the solutions to those other issues.

More than this, the pope has the uncommon courage to identify without equivocation the cause of such problems – neo-liberal capitalism. He says what politicians like President Obama and other heads of state (with the exception of Raul Castro of Cuba) find impossible to say. Their dependence for survival on billionaires and plutocrats render them impotent before the ideologies of unfettered markets and their “trickle-down” theories. By contrast Pope Francis terms the latter homicidal (53), ineffective (54) and unjust at their roots (59). (Parenthetical numbers refer to sections of “The Joy of the Gospel.”)

Additionally while speaking the unspeakable, the pope enjoys tremendous credibility. With the exception of neo-liberalism’s intractable apologists, the world loves and embraces the man. His efforts to distance himself from the traditional luxurious papal lifestyle, his honesty in responding to difficult questions, his humility and genuine love for the poor make him our century’s most credible moral leader.

And finally, there’s the pope’s constituency. Unlike prophets before him (including Jesus of Nazareth) sheer numbers give Pope Francis unprecedented power to change the world. Jonah’s potential respondents to his calls for repentance were only inhabitants of the city of Nineveh. In today’s gospel reading Jesus’ respondents were four simple fishermen: Peter, Andrew, James and John. Eventually, only a minority of poor Palestinian peasants took to heart Jesus’ words. By contrast, and in virtue of his office, this pope’s constituency is trans-national and world-wide. There are 1.2 billion Catholics on the planet the pope calls “Mother” and “Sister.”

Evidently Francis’ plan is to use his credibility to courageously spread his consciousness and widen his constituency. He plans to do so in five steps. He will (1) publish an encyclical (the most authoritative form of communication at his disposal), (2) convoke an ecumenical meeting of world religious leaders, (3) presumably secure from them a statement paralleling his encyclical’s conclusions, (4) present that statement in his speech to the United Nations in September, and (5) attempt in doing all of that to influence the conclusions of this year’s Climate Summit in Paris two months later.

That’s prophetic activism unparalleled in the recent history of the papacy.

And what specifically is entailed in the repentance necessary to save our Mother? Of course, to share the pope’s vision, we await details in the forthcoming encyclical. However, today’s liturgy of the word points us in the general direction. In the meantime, secular prophets like Naomi Klein fill in the challenging details.

General directions include (as Paul says in today’s second reading) transcending emotions like fear-inspired denial. They include willingness to cut family ties (i.e. narrow nationalism), re-examining our career paths, attachments to property and neo-liberal dreams of unlimited consumption and getting rich.

Specific repentance is more radical than any of our politicians dare articulate. According to Klein, author of This Changes Everything, that’s because our planet has reached “decade zero.” Denialists have led us to squander the leeway we had twenty-five years ago. If we don’t decisively alter within the next ten years our path of production and consumption, the planet’s temperature is bound to rise 4 to 6 degrees Celsius. However, according to climate scientists, any rise beyond 2 degrees will make disastrous climate change irreversible. And that will result in disastrous droughts, water shortages, typhoons, flooding, wildfires, and crop losses with whole cities under water and Islands swallowed by the sea.

To avoid such disasters, required repentance includes:

Rejecting the neo-liberal myth that has shaped our world over the last 35 years.
Replacing it (the pope will say) with the biblical vision of the Kingdom (proclaimed by Jesus in today’s gospel reading). God’s Kingdom is characterized not by competition and privatization, but by cooperation, sharing, prioritizing the needs of the poor and respecting the earth as commons.
Setting aside neo-liberalism’s fetish about regulation, and setting bold national policies guided by clear goals, a strictly imposed time table, and severe penalties for non-compliance.
Implementing corresponding policies to cut annual emissions in the industrialized world by 8- 10%.
Recognizing that exchange of myths means rejection of market-driven models of untargeted economic growth.
Redesigning our cities and redistributing population to eliminate long commutes between home and work.
Investing massively in light rail and other means of public transportation so that commuters might travel efficiently and free of cost.
Similarly subsidizing renewable sources of energy – solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass.
Turning the roof of every available building into an energy plant.
Respecting the rights of indigenous people under whose lands so much carbon deposit remains.
Eliminating by law, controlling by strong regulation or penalizing by heavy taxation industries that are wasteful and/or destructive of the planet such as arms manufacturers, the fast-food industry, GMO firms, and middle-man industries like health insurance.
Dealing with climate impact and damage according to “the polluter pays” principle. This recognizes that the 500 million richest people on the planet are responsible for 50% of the world’s pollution and that the U.S. military is by some estimates the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world.
According to “the polluter pays” principle, withdrawing from foreign wars, cutting the military budget by at least 25% and making the rich 1% pay their fair share of taxes.
Tolerating as necessary increased taxes on everyone, except the poor.
Drastically reducing the amount of energy each of us consumes.

You get the idea. The agenda necessary to save our planet from “the evil Nature has planned” is challenging indeed. But it contains that surprising element of hope Jesus signaled when he termed “repentance” as “good news” and “fulfillment.”

After all, our destructive way of life is anything but fulfilling. On the other side of the repentance just described is a cleaner, healthier, less stressful life with full employment, more leisure, greater equality, and harmony with one another and our world.

That’s the vision behind the pope’s courageous prophetic work. It deserves our undivided attention and support.

(Sunday Homily) Pope Francis Calls for a Global Catholic Climate Movement

Readings for 1^st Sunday in Ordinary Time: I SAM 3: 3B-10, 19; PS 40: 4, 7-10; I COR 6: 13C-15A, 17-20; JN 35-42

Recently Pope Francis has come in for some hard criticism from the U.S. right wing. It’s not just because of his rejection of free market capitalism, trickle-down theory, and huge income disparities between the rich and poor. It’s not just his openness to gays and divorcees, and his refusal to obsess about abortion and contraception.

Yes, all of these have undermined what conservatives have seen as a close alliance between the Catholic Church and their pet causes and thinking modes.

However, the straw breaking the back of reactionaries is the pope’s unequivocal warnings about climate change. They’ve gone apoplectic about his intention to publish an encyclical on the matter, and his plans to convoke a conference of religious leaders to address it. The pope’s expressed intention is to influence this year’s U.N. Paris Conference on Climate Change. All of that has raised the specter of a global Catholic climate change movement potentially mobilizing the world’s 1.2 billion members. Think about that for a minute!

In such context, Francis visit this week to the Philippines is extremely significant. The Philippines is not only the home of 80% Asia’s Catholics – more than 100 million. It is also the poster child for the devastation that climate change wreaks on the principal victims of global warming, the world’s poor. In 2013 the archipelago was raked by Typhoon Yolanda whose winds and floods killed more than 7000.

So the world listened when on his way to Manila Pope Francis was asked if climate change is “mostly due to the work of man and his lack of care for nature?” In reply, the pope said:

(F)or the greater part, it is man who gives a slap to nature continually, and we have to some degree become the owners of nature, of sister earth, of mother earth. I recall, and you have heard, what an old peasant once told me: God always forgives, we men forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives. If you give her a slap, she will give you one. I believe that we have exploited nature too much, deforestation, for example.

With words like those, the pope’s critics charge he is speaking beyond his expertise, which involves matters of “faith and morals.” But that’s just the point. The pope is making climate change a moral issue, a matter of ethics even more important than more “traditional” Catholic moral concerns about sex which after all presume the survival of the human species and the planet.

The pope’s critics also ignore, of course, that Francis bases his judgments not only on the testimony of 97% of all climate scientists, but on the research of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Its membership roster features the names of the world’s most respected scientists. These include Nobel laureates such as Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Otto Hahn, Niels Bohr, and Charles Hard Townes. The Academy’s current president is Werner Arber, himself a Nobel laureate, and the first Protestant to head the group.

But why such right-wing fury? It’s because like Naomi Klein, conservatives see the (for them) disastrous implications of addressing the issue. As announced in the title of Klein’s book, they sense that This Changes Everything. That is, taking on climate change as a moral issue undermines the political right’s program of market deregulation and continued extraction of non-renewable resources.

So pundits like First Things blogger, Maureen Mullarkey have given up on lip sticking the pope and are now in full attack mode. According to Mullarkey Pope Francis is simply “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.”

For Mullarkey, Pope Francis pretty much stinks.

And that brings me to today’s gospel reading. It’s all about stink – about what Pope Francis calls “the smell of the sheep.” Famously, you recall, the pontiff called on Catholic priests to live closer to the poor, to recognize them as God’s people and their welfare as the guideline for economic and social policy – to “take on,” he said, “the smell of the sheep.”

In other words, conservatives are suspicious of Pope Francis and are on the point of vilifying him because he smells too much like sheep — like the poor. He smells too much like Jesus.

Notice that in today’s gospel, John the Baptizer identifies Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” To begin with, the phrase reminds us of the tribal, Bedouin origin of the biblical “People of God.” Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the great King David were all shepherds. They were primitive people close to the earth. They were tribalists. Jesus was a tribalist. According to John’s image, Jesus didn’t just smell like sheep; he was a sheep! He was in spades like his slave and Bedouin ancestors — like the poor people the pope is centralizing in his visit to the Philippines.

Pope Francis is a tribalist too. And he’s practicing what he preaches — both liberation theology’s “preferential option for the poor,” and the traditionally Catholic principle of subsidiarity. Once again, that means endorsing economic and environmental policy not on the basis of market dictates, but according to human decisions about values like the common good. Humane policy, the pope implies, originates not on Wall Street, but in places like the Philippines’ Tacloban City which was leveled by Typhoon Yolanda. It’s there that the pope’s itinerary reportedly has him dining in the shack of a hurricane victim. (Can you imagine a humble Catholic housewife setting her family table to include the pope?)

As our century’s most powerful illumined voice of conscience, Francis is using his bully pulpit to wake us up. We’re like Samuel in today’s first reading – fast asleep even before the Ark of the Covenant (a reminder of Israel’s enslaved and Bedouin past). But we fail to recognize the biblical tradition’s significance to our lives – its call to tribal values which unfailingly center on animals, human family, and Mother Earth. We fail to see the implications of Paul’s observation in today’s second reading that all human beings – especially the poor and outcast – are temples of God’s spirit. That’s our tradition! That same Spirit resides, the pope says, in the planet that he (like St. Francis himself) calls our Mother and Sister.

So what would a global Catholic climate movement look like? It would entail:

Waking up like the young prophet Samuel. Like him we’ve heard God’s call many times. But at last in Pope Francis, we have a thought-leader speaking in a voice the simplest of us can hear. It’s the voice of conscience. And like Eli it’s giving us the proper way to respond: “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

A global Catholic climate movement further entails:

Rejection of corporation-based globalization which has us (over)consuming imported necessities that could be home-grown. (This involves lobbying against the Trans-Pacific Partnership.)
Joining the fight against fracking and projects like the XL Pipeline
Voting accordingly.
Urging the institutions we can influence (churches, universities, hospitals . . .) to divest from fossil fuel industries.
Adopting a “zero waste” policy in our homes and places of work.
Cultivating home gardens.
Adopting a vegetarian diet.
Educating ourselves about “green burial” and including plans for that in our “living wills.”

The list, of course, goes on. But you get the idea.

This stinkin’ pope is waking us up. He’s showing us the way. Thank God!

Charlie Hebdo: a Thought Experiment

If World War II Jews did in Berlin exactly what the Charlie Hebdo killers did in Paris, they would be considered heroes, not terrorists. That realization alone should help us re-vision what took place in Paris last week. It should make us more careful about using the term “terrorism” in the context of our country’s so-called “War on Terror.”

To get what I mean, perform the following thought experiment.

Imagine Germany in 1943. The country is at war with Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States. The Jewish holocaust is in full operation. German newspapers and magazines are full of anti-Semitic propaganda including grotesque cartoons (like the one above) depicting Jews in general and their Jewish faith in particular. The ones attacking Judaism and Moses are especially offensive to devout Jews throughout the diaspora.

One dark morning in Berlin, two Jewish gunmen burst into the offices of Lustige Blatter , the German humor magazine which as part of Germany’s war effort specializes in the publication of anti-Semitic cartoons. The gunmen know the particular cartoonists they’re looking for. They’re delighted to find them protected by a couple of Ordnungspolizei.

The gunmen open fire.

With their bloody work finished, the killers leave twelve bodies of Lustige Blatter cartoonists, copy writers, and Orpo bodyguards dead on the office floor. The assassins flee the premises.

Later on, they’re cornered and killed in a fire fight with the Gestapo.

How would the world outside the Reich’s orbit react to that sequence of events?

Would it consider the Jewish perpetrators “terrorists”?
Would it sympathize with massive protests defending the press freedom of the Lustige Blatter cartoonists to make fun of Jews and their religion?
Would it admire those waving banners declaring “Ich bin Lustige Blatter” while demonstrating in Berlin’s central Paris Square on behalf of the right to insult Jews and their faith?
Would it expect their leaders to join Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Tojo at those demonstrations?

The answer to each of those questions is probably a resounding NO! Most likely, the only ones considering the shooting an act of terrorism would be supporters of the Third Reich.

If that’s true, the thought experiment puts into perspective the events of last week surrounding the horrific events in Paris connected with the Charlie Hebdo shootings. It enables us to see this latest event in the “war on terror” from the viewpoint of the other side.

It reminds us that.

The Charlie Hebdo killers are combatants in a war and have grievances as real as any that Jews had in 1943.
For example, over the last fourteen years, western governments have daily killed untold (literally) numbers of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere throughout the world.
More specifically, their recent attacks on Palestinians killed more than 2000 in Gaza (mostly civilians) including 500 children.
By some counts, more than one and a half million Muslims (mostly civilians) have been slaughtered in the allied invasion of Iraq since 2003.
In war, both sides kill one another; retaliations are routine and to be expected; they are part of war, not to be considered acts of terrorism.
In war (as the above thought experiment shows) most would consider propagandists and psy-ops agents as vital cogs in the combat machine, and hence legitimate targets.

And now a final thought. . . .

What if, during WWII, again during the holocaust, a group of 19 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto somehow hijacked three Lufthansa airliners? And suppose they flew two of them into Berlin’s tallest building housing the offices of companies like AIG Insurance, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Krupp Aviation, and Volkswagen — all vital to the German war effort?

How would we remember those Jews? Would we consider them “terrorists” or heroes?

Hmm.

The bottom line is this: if western governments insist on fighting a “War on Terrorism,” they have to expect counter-attacks even on what the “enemy” considers war propagandists and psy-ops personnel.

Simply put, that’s war.