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Playing Both Sides of the Street on Catholic Social Teaching
The Washington Post’s Dana Millbank is just a little too happy over the Catholic bishops’ rebuke of Rep. Paul Ryan’s economic proposals:
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody this month, Ryan, the author of the House Republican budget endorsed by Mitt Romney, said his program was crafted “using my Catholic faith” as inspiration. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was not about to bless that claim.
A week after Ryan’s boast, the bishops sent letters to Congress saying that the Ryan budget, passed by the House, “fails to meet” the moral criteria of the Church, namely its view that any budget should help “the least of these” as the Christian Bible requires: the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the jobless. “A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote.
I think that anyone’s glee over a conservative Republican being at odds with the RCC on economic issues is premature. For me, the key factor in leaving the Roman Catholic Church for good was, this notwithstanding, its two-faced handing of social justice issues.
Once again I go back to a 2007 post where I lay this out:
Back in the early 1980′s, I was involved in a Catholic Charismatic prayer group. We were under a great deal of pressure, some of which was of our own making and some of which came from a Church which didn’t really care much for what we were doing. It was also the days of “if you want peace, work for justice,” the nuclear freeze, and other left-wing emphases which tended to deflect hierarchy and faithful alike from their relationship with God.
A major turning point for me took place on day when, while discussing things with one of our prayer group leaders, she mentioned that, because of the high tuition, she could not afford to send her eight children to Catholic school. So they went to public school.
That revelation was the beginning of the end of me as a Roman Catholic. I concluded that any church that was too bourgeois and self-satisfied not to subsidise its own needful children to attend the schools it wanted them to attend was too bourgeois to be an advocate for social justice. So I took my leave on a course that’s best encapsulated in The Preferential Option of the Poor.
Now, a quarter of a century later, the Aussies are starting to realise that this is a problem in Australian Catholic schools: a preferential option for the wealthy?
The only hitch is that they’re looking at government funding for the schools. And government funding brings government control, which will in the long run forces the schools to teach things the Church cannot support. But at least the problem is recognised.
Hopefully someone on this side of the Pacific will tackle this problem as well.
There are two other things that need note.
The first is that the Catholic Church’s happy endorsement of state aid for the economically disadvantaged is a little naive. The state does this as a patronage move, to keep the masses happy and prevent rebellion. The Church’s attempt to baptise this with moral wonderfulness does no credit to the institution which has been watching this since the days of “bread and circuses” in Rome.
The second is that any institution the size and economic scope of the Roman Catholic Church will sooner or later get its hands dirty economically. This is especially interesting to note for an institution that has always regarded businesspeople as basically morally defective, something that Rep. Ryan needs to keep in mind as he spars with his bishops.
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Living the Sermon on the Mount, Episcopal Style
Notre Dame’s Gary Gutting doesn’t think much of the real import of the Sermon on the Mount:
The Sermon on the Mount, however, does not offer a clear view of what makes for a good life. Many seem to think Jesus is saying little more than be nice to everybody. Others see a call to a heroic life of total non-resistance or self-sacrifice. Still others hear him as requiring little more than an enhanced version of the Ten Commandments (e.g., avoiding not only murder but also anger, not only adultery but also lustful desires).
He’s obviously never tried to live it. Evangelicals are notorious about their blasé attitude towards it, one partly conditioned by the fact that their modernist/liberal counterparts advertised that it was at the centre of their understanding of Christianity (as does Andrew Sullivan).
But for those of us raised in the Episcopal Church before modern Biblical scholarship (which reduced the New Testament to a patchwork of unreliable sources) become fashionable the Sermon on the Mount was serious business. For some of us at least…
Growing up in Palm Beach, it was obvious that most of those who professed and called themselves Christians (and that included most Gentiles) didn’t manifest a serious go at observing it. But I gave it, as my first Latin teacher would put it, the old college try, long before I actually found out what the old college try was all about.
When you’re on the bottom of Palm Beach’s social system, that isn’t easy. Things got better, temporarily at least, when I got to my Episcopal prep school. One command that got a workout there was the following:
Give to him who asks of you; and, from him who wants to borrow from you, do not turn away. (Matthew 5:42)
To follow that makes you a real mark in prep school. One classmate in particular, a preacher’s kid from up the coast, took advantage of this, and his call of “Lemme borrow a dime” was a frequent one.
Another one with unusual consequence was as follows:
You have heard that it was said–‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ I, however, say to you that you must not resist wrong; but, if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also; (Matthew 5:38-39)
One time a group of guys was running after me to attack me, but then their leader turned them away. One of them asked the leader why. His response? “He won’t fight.”
I thought for the longest I was the only one like this, but years later I had a a friend who was a) a high church Episcopalian and b) a scion of an old Charleston family. When she went to Ashley Hall, she did the same thing! (In those days the girls weren’t as much for physical fighting as they are now, but borrowing money was another story…)
And then Mr. Gutting has this to say:
Another problem is that Jesus does not explicitly or decisively endorse central contemporary values like democratic government, the abolition of slavery and the equality of women. Proponents of these values have found inspiration and support from his morality of love, but Jesus’ words alone do not push us in their direction.
In a world where elections (and governments) are bought and sold for billions, sex trafficking is on the rise, and privacy and personal liberty outside of sexual is going out the window, his characterisation of these “central contemporary values” is a little triumphalistic, to say the least. And I’ll bet that the financial people who buy and sell governments and people alike don’t find Matthew 5:42 to their taste.
The Sermon on the Mount may be hard to fulfil in this life, but life is certainly better when we give them the “old college try.” (And my first Latin teacher, BTW, was a Harvard man).
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They'll Finally Get the Communion After All
At the end of the quest, victory:
A coalition of bishops and leaders from Africa, the Americas and Australasia said it was time for a “radical shift” in how the church is structured away from models of the “British Empire”.
They criticised what they called “revisionist attempts” to abandon basic doctrines on issues such as homosexuality and “turn Christianity merely into a movement for social betterment” during Dr Williams’s tenure.
And they said it was now clear that the leadership in England had failed to hold the 77 million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion together, leaving it in “crisis”.
They spoke out as 200 clergy and laity from 30 countries gathered in London to discuss what they called the “present crisis moment” in the church.
But there’s an easier and more substantial way to even the score: just let the Africans and their allies, including the descendants of slaves in the West Indies, take the lead in the Communion.
We find, however, that, Western church leaders–liberal and conservative alike–are reluctant to bow to the obvious and allow the centre of power of Christianity to shift where its people are. The liberals are especially adverse to this process, as they are further from the Africans’ idea than their conservative counterparts.
The desperation of conservative parishes in TEC, however, has them affiliating with provinces such as Uganda and Nigeria, along with others. They have gone past guilt. It is time that the rest of us follow suit.
It was surely unlikely that the “First World” churches would give it up without a fight, but at this point they simply lack the numbers and the enthusiasm to make their hegemony stick, present whining notwithstanding.
Reverse colonialism is a blast.
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Complicated Times in Old SC: Do We Really Have Diocesan Rebellion?
At the start of the month, I made the following statement regarding the Episcopal Bishop of Virginia’s “victory lap” in the Washington Post:
To put it bluntly, this is one of the most duplicitous things I have ever seen a man of the cloth put out. I’ve griped about the Anglican Fudge and how Episcopal ministers and bishops can talk mellifluously at length and yet say nothing, but this time it’s what he says that rankles.
Down the coast, we now have the following, from the liberal Episcopal Forum of South Carolina:
Has the Diocese of South Carolina left the Episcopal Church even though its leaders continue to insist that it hasn’t?
Traditional (sic) Episcopalians in the Diocese explored the meaning of this and other critical issues facing them and their parishes in a public conversation in Charleston Sunday afternoon, sponsored by the Episcopal Forum of South Carolina.
Bishop Mark Lawrence was among 100 members and guests of the Forum who were provided a number of perspectives on recent actions of the Diocese, particularly those related to revisions of the Diocesan Constitution and a wholesale giveaway of the Diocese’s property interests in its parishes over the past two years.
Led by a panel of seven speakers (including the author of this blog), participants were assured that the national Church leadership is very much aware of the actions of the Diocese and its controversial bishop, but does not yet appear to have decided on a response.
Stuff like this is why I thought that Lawrence’s counterpart in Virginia was duplicitous.
If it is the prerogative of the diocese regarding the disposition of the property, it’s also the prerogative of the diocese to allocate that property in a way that it feels it’s in its best interests. It may not be to the liking of the EFSC, but that’s what happens when you allow some “bottom-up” voice in the governance of the church. Put another way, if you don’t want people’s opinions, don’t ask for them.
In our current legal environment, there are good reasons why a diocese or other church entity would divest itself of local parish property. The largest one is that, in the event of litigation, with centrally held property (diocesan or church-wide) the entire entity gets sued. That’s why Roman Catholic dioceses especially hard hit by the paedophile scandals have filed for bankruptcy, although in some ways that’s been a firewall: had the property been held by, say the RCC in the USA, the entire American church would have been on the hook.
The real problem here isn’t diocesan integrity, but the fact that the Episcopal left, in the driver’s seat on a national basis, is pushing the church towards central governance rather than diocesan, which is why, IMHO, all of this blather about diocesan governance regarding property is just that.
If they want to see how a church which is really centrally governed operates, they should look at the Church of God. All of the Administrative Bishops are centrally appointed at the General Assembly, subject to rotation and votes of confidence by the ministers in the state/region. The property is likewise held centrally, which makes every piece of litigation (to say nothing of the property loans) a nail-biter for the whole church, although the day-to-day management of the property is left to the states/regions. But the Episcopal Church, until now at least, hasn’t been done this way.
And that leads to what is in reality the left’s central problem in the Diocese of SC: Mark Lawrence. Up until now they’ve tried to attack him based on a possible secession to another province of the Anglican Communion, and that has problems of its own. A more consistent solution would be to a) make the heterodoxy that dominates thinking in TEC as the official doctrine of the church and b) try Mark Lawrence and depose him as a “heretic” relative to that new “official doctrine”. They tried that in a back-door way with the difficulties he had in obtaining enough consents from his fellow bishops, but, like their real traditional counterparts fifty years ago re James Pike, they lost their nerve.
But nerve is something the current Presiding Bishop is not short of.
One cannot leave this subject without commenting on this:
EFSC President Melinda Lucka offered a lengthy review of the history of the Diocese’s rebellion against the Episcopal Church, and her professional legal opinion that the Diocese has acted illegally by relying on a 2009 state Supreme Court decision awarding a breakaway parish in Pawleys Island ownership of its property based on the issuance of a quitclaim deed in 1902.
This is about as silly as Barack Obama’s “campaign” to trash the Supreme Court in the face of a possible overturn of Obamacare. The court has spoken: what else were they supposed to do? In any case, the diocese had learned their lesson from the whole debacle and moved on.
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Why Lay Presidency Over the Holy Communion is a Bad Idea for Anglicans (and Everyone Else)
While casting about the Anglican blogosphere, I ran across an idea from an unexpected source: an endorsement of the lay presidency from John Richardson, the “Ugley Vicar”. This concept is usually associated with the Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia, the same archepiscopal entity which put subordinationism within the Trinity back into play in order to counter WO (the theology is correct in concept, but weak in execution and not suitable for the intended purpose).
For those not up to speed: lay presidency is the practice of allowing lay people to preside over the Holy Communion. Personally I cannot see this, and in this 2007 post I laid out why:
The “empowerment” they’re (the Archdiocese of Sydney) proposing is allowing lay people to celebrate the Holy Communion, which traditionally is a no-no in the Anglican world. Actually most churches reserve for their ministers the authority to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, irrespective of their theology of the church. And this isn’t challenged in most places either. The problems that these Australian Anglicans are wrestling with are a product of two trends in the Anglican world, one fairly recent and one of long standing.
The first is that many Anglican churches have made the Holy Communion the central order of worship. This is largely the result of Anglo-Catholic and Affirming Catholic influence. In the past Holy Communion, in common with other Protestant churches, was celebrated every so often (monthly, sometimes less) and the normal service was Morning or Evening Prayer. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer specifically allows lay people to celebrate the Morning and Evening Prayer (even giving suitable modifications.)
Where Morning and Evening Prayer are still the central orders of worship in Anglican life, lay celebration is certainly possible. But as long as Anglican churches insist on making the Holy Communion normative, they will not only be on the horns of the dilemma the Archdiocese faces, but they will also be a block to many visitors (since most Anglican churches still have closed communion.)
The second trend is the fact that the bar of entry into the Anglican ministry (I still hate calling them priests) is too high. Anglicans are too hung up on extensive formal education that may or may not prepare them for practical ministry or even give them a sound theological education. The classic example of this is the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Everyone knows he’s a brilliant academic, but his leadership capabilities leave a lot to be desired of (although he is in reality in an impossible situation.) I’m no advocate for institutionalised ignorance, but much of what is taught in seminaries these days–liberal and conservative alike–is not useful for real ministry or even basic management or people skills.
If it were not such a long business to obtain an education that people–lay and clergy alike–would sniff at contemptuously, the idea to accommodate the laity with the Holy Communion would not even be considered.
To this I might add the following:
- Leaving aside the whole Catholic argument over the nature of the priesthood, lay presidency undermines the whole concept of the clergy. If anyone can celebrate the sacred mysteries, why do we have a clergy at all? (That question came to mind many times while doing church work, but I digress…)
- The mania for formal education isn’t restricted to the Anglican world; my own church has in recent years jacked up the educational requirements of their own ministers. What they fail to realise isn’t that our ministers lack (and I’m not being pejorative about this; our own surveys bear this out) formal seminary or theological education; they lack formal education of any kind. If, for example, we took people with bachelor’s or higher degrees and the proper spiritual state (it really helps if ministers are saved, sanctified and baptised in the Holy Spirit) and made them into the ministerial equivalents of “ninety day wonders” we’d be further down the road than we are.
I still think this is a bad idea. Broadening our ministerial ranks with those who don’t necessarily require a stipend would solve part of the problem, and getting away from the “Communion every service” business would take care of the rest.
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They May Not Be French, But They're Definitely Not Arab
The Old Grey Lady needs some education in ethnicity re comments like this:
The effects of this exclusionary mindset are palpable. France today has Europe’s largest Islamic minority, making up nearly 10 percent of its population. Yet Muslims remain a people apart, as documented in 2011 by a research team recruited by the Open Society Institute. “In France,” one researcher summarized, “you can be of any descent, but if you are a French citizen you cannot be an Arab.” Composite identities like Arab-French are, he added, “ideologically impossible.
Most of the Muslim immigrants come from France’s old colonial empire, and the old colonies that sent the most are the closest ones: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. France has a long history of accepting immigrants from these places, aided by a low birthrate that goes back to the nineteenth century and an authoritarian assimilation mentality. France, for example, had no problem sending its colonial people to the front in World War I, which is why American black soldiers ended up fighting for France.
But North Africans are not Arabs. In the semester that’s about to close, I have had the help of a hijab-wearing Algerian lab assistant, a very pleasant geologist who made it clear that she’s Berber, not Arab. The Arabic language, she explained, came with the religion, but her higher education was conducted in French, a language she is fluent in. We also got to discuss some Islamic science history, and she stated that the Arabs invented the zero, and have been zeroes ever since.
It’s also interesting to note relative to this article that Marseilles, in addition to being the source of the French revolutionary song that became the national anthem, was also the scene of the assassination of Yugoslavian King Alexander I and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in 1934.
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Did the NAE Really Ruin the Church of God?
Now that Holy Week is done, I’d like to turn to a very thoughtful piece by Jonathan Stone about the future of the Church of God written as if that future had passed. For superannuated hippies such an approach suggests the Moody Blues, and indeed the piece has an artistic ring to it.
There are many things to be discussed about this, but in the midst of it all he brings up one that, to my mind, stands out:
Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century we became embarrassed of our roots. We desired respect from the other tribes. So, we worked hard to make ourselves more presentable to them. During that time some of the tribes came together to form what was called the National Association of Evangelicals. We made some changes in order to qualify for membership. Not everything was bad in it, and the NAE was a fine organization. But in its early days it was marked by a very conservative fundamentalism. In order to fit in with our more conservative brothers and sisters we at times betrayed our own foundations. For example, we regressed in our treatment of women in ministry despite the fact that one of our original foundations was equality. We never kept our anointed sisters from pastoring, evangelizing, serving as missionaries, etc. But we restricted their rights to serve on certain boards and blocked them from some nominated positions of leadership. It was a confusing and unfortunate time for everyone.
I’ve heard the sentiment that “joining the NAE ruined the Church of God” more than once from many of our academics. Was that when we really crossed the Rainbow Bridge, so to speak? One thing I’ve learned being in this church, and especially working at its centre, is that things look different from the inside out then they do from the outside in. Looked at from the centre, joining the NAE was momentous, if only in retrospect. But for the church at large, joining one denominational umbrella organisation wasn’t enough to affect the changes we have seen in this church.
If I had to pick one event that really altered the course of this–and really every–denomination out there, it would be World War II. Eurocentric type of people always see World War I as the watershed event in Western civilisation, but the U.S. wasn’t involved in that conflagration long enough to have the impact it had on, say, the UK, France or certainly Russia. World War II affected our society in a deeper way, and in ways that were and are so counterintuitive that we, the generation which resulted from the aftermath, haven’t really sorted them out.
The first obvious affect that World War II had on our church and society was its militarisation. It’s easy to forget that Pentecostal and Holiness churches were, at their start, pacifist, and really didn’t like the idea of their people serving in the military. Pacifism has always been a hard sell in Scots-Irish society, as the career of Alvin York is a testament to. But World War II, which mobilised an entire generation of Church of God young men into military service and sent them throughout the world, changed that in a profound way, and the generation that came to command the church was first taught leadership and life organisation by Uncle Sam.
The second effect came from the first: an emphasis on authority, and specifically human authority. When I came to work at the International Offices in 1996, I came to work in what was the most formal, rank-conscious workplace I had ever experienced. It’s true that Pentecostal and Charismatic churches produce special pastoral challenges re the productive exercise of spiritual gifts and manifestations. The Boomers, mindful of their own rebellion, have drank deep from the wells of the likes of Bill Gothard and they too put a great deal of emphasis on their own authority, which sooner or later will clash with the free move of the Spirit.
The third is broader than the war: the obsession with respectability and upward mobility. Usually that’s associated with the Great Depression. After one decade of economic hardship and another of war, the “Greatest Generation” was ready to bury its problems in the past, put on a happy face and make for themselves a secure, predictable life in the suburbs. For the Church of God, a very Southern institution, the Depression started at a lower economic level and went on longer than it did for the rest of society, which only made the desire to get out of it deeper.
The results of this have been manifested in many ways, but I’ll touch on two: women’s ordination (or WO, to use the Anglican acronym) and prosperity teaching.
At the start of modern Pentecost women in ministry were very much a given. The early pioneers didn’t set women forth into ministry based a secular, “women’s rights” model, but on a “calling/ministry fulfilment” one. The Church of God’s own statistics, however, show that the number of ministerially credentialled women peaked about 1950 and declined thereafter. I don’t think the date is accidental. On the secular side of things, women (including my own mother) filled munitions plants and did men’s work all through World War II only to be put back into the home to tend to a major jump in the birthrate. In this respect the Church of God was following societal trends.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. As Michel Walsh pointed our in The Triumph of the Meek: Why Early Christianity Succeeded
:
By the end of the first century the charismatic, itinerant group of preachers which had followed Jesus and learnt from him, had become an organisation. It had its organisational model and code of rules, both geared to making the church acceptable to the pagan environment in which it dwelt. One of the aspects of its early life which was sacrificed to convention was the leading role of women.
In general society, this trend brought the backlash that was the 1960’s and 1970’s. By then, however, the postwar mentality was set and defended vigourously.
The real tragedy of all of this, however, is that when we get WO in the COG, we will likely get it for the same reason the Episcopalians and others got it: as a secular women’s right and equality issue, not a calling/ministry fulfilment one. This not only secularises the church in general from a mission and purpose standpoint, it also will mask the one thing that needs to be fixed with ministry in general: the authoritarian/careerist bent of our ministers, which will then be replicated in both genders. But this is what happens when you abandon the God-given way you started with.
The other result of the quest for being a somebody is prosperity teaching. Having been in this church for more than a quarter of a century, if there’s one thing that has corroded the holiness construct in our church more than anything else, it’s the creeping acceptance (implicit or explicit) of prosperity teaching, something which the NAE had nothing to do with. It has turned the quest for joy in this life and eternity with God in the next into a “get rich quick” scheme where the main beneficiaries have been the ministers who are the most skilful at raising money.
It’s not the first time that American Christianity has equated being a Christian with economic prosperity. And it does attract people for whom moving up is a big deal. But it’s a Faustian bargain, and with the increasingly rigid class stratification of American society Mephistopheles is coming to fulfil the contract. It is there that the “Great Collapse” that Jonathan Stone speaks of will come, not only to the Church of God but to Evangelical Christianity in general.
In the meanwhile our secular society in general moves towards it own collapse, burdened by a society increasingly content to go on the dole, an elite with no idea as to how to make it productive again, and a ballooning debt to service with a weakened economy. How the Church of God responds to that confluence of events will ultimately determine whether the Church of God has a future or not.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 