Peyote-envy

Among the sensual delights of a Tridentine liturgy, smoking, unfortunately is not one of them. The closest we Catholics get is, of course, incense. Not that I think the Congregation for Divine Worship should introduce pipes into the Mass but it's nice to see the Utah Supreme Court uphold the right of Native Americans to get high with Awonawilona. Oh, what a different faith we'd have if Moses' Passover included a smoking ritual. There'd be a lot fewer uppity Catholics, for sure.

NAACP & DC Catholicism in happier times

From McGreevy's book, p.211:

...when some southern bishops balked at the idea of issuing a statement decrying racial segregation and discrimination, Pius XII, just before his death, ordered that the statement be issued "at once."
Catholic leaders now marched in step with the liberal vanguard. "In marked contrast with Protestants," the NAACP leader Walter White explained, Catholics in the District of Columbia had achieved a remarkable "degree of integration." "[O]f course I don't prefer an authoritarian church to a democratic one," Reinhold Niebuhr told one friend in 1957, but he admitted to alternating "between a violent anti-Catholicism and a measure of respect for what they [Catholics] are doing." The Catholic authoritarianism that he found so unattractive, Niebuhr conceded, allowed Catholic bishops to discipline priests and congregations unwilling to integrate Catholic institutions. In most Protestant denominations, by contrast, no one could protect a "poor parson against the manias of his congregation. In this sad world we must pick up virtue wherever we can find it and also recognize weaknesses in our own position."

What a mixed record. The Church a century earlier was on the whole vehemently opposed to any "hasty" abolition of slavery, but for non-racial reasons, even defending the fairness of enslaving white peoples. Then there's Catholic racism throughout Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Then there's Catholic academic books, papers, and ecclesiastical statements condemning racism beginning in the 1930s, with threats of excommunication from bishops against segregationist Catholics. At times progressive, at others reactionary, the Church is tougher to pidgeon-hole than Kweisi Mfume would like. That said, Catholic University still has crappy reasons to deny the NAACP a campus chapter.

From the "Resilience of Catholic faith" file

Amazing. Isolated Catholic minority groups in southwestern China have not only maintained the faith without a priest for over half a century, but they've evangelized and grown some five-fold. They pray the Ave Maria in Tibetan! I could see Richard Gere looking confused--why would Tibetans turn to Catholicism when my Tantric Buddhism makes you feel so good about yourself and your orifices?

No Eucharist for 50 years! Well aren't we a spoiled bunch with our casual penance-free Eucharist-on-demand attitude. Maybe the bishops should just declare a Eucharistic ban on all American Catholics--few are any better than Kerry, and even fewer are such, so it sounds, than these forgotten Catholics in the mountains of Yunnan province.

Jack out of the box

Sad watching Illinois Republican candidate for US Senate Jack Ryan gettin grilled on live TV over the release of his divorce papers, peppered with more salacious sex scandal bits that we in the post-Lewinsky era enjoy in our media salad. However, it's good to see how the elephants are coming home to roost. Ryan should be so lucky to not have a Democratic version of Kenneth Starr on his tail. The additional irony of Clinton's book release today... God is funny.

Subsidiarity & the UN

From NCR's John Allen's column:

Conservatives devoted to the principle of subsidiarity increasingly wonder why the Vatican is gung-ho about handing over chunks of national sovereignty to an international authority they see as unaccountable and occasionally hostile to religious values.

Why do conservative Catholics seem to think that subsidiarity = American federalism? Just as subsidiarity upholds the good of an international theocratic bureacracy headquartered in the Vatican that we call the Catholic Church, so does it uphold the good of an international council of nations that seeks to maintain the good of a globalized humanity. Excessive contempt for the UN held by conservative Catholics only adds to my suspicion that they're just closeted "cafeteria Catholics" of the red, white, and blue stripe. And if being "unaccountable" and "occasionally hostile to religious values" were reason enough for wholesale condemnation then conservatives should be the first to renounce their US citizenship.

Desperately Seeking Relevance

Organizations like the NAACP, with an intense collective memory of more august days, feel a need to replicate the "Great Struggle" in our day even if the era of great struggles is over. Battles for legal equality have already been fought and won. What remain are the thornier problems of social and cultural reconciliation. While that may include policy and legislative advocacy, the bulk of the work rests not in voter drives or lobbying but in the transformation of neighborhoods and families from within--the one thing the Nation of Islam got right.

Unfortunately, the NAACP has found in Catholic University an easy target to reassert its dream of the "Great Struggle." NAACP sees only another big, bad, white-dominated, socially conservative institution, not a representative body of the Holy Catholic Church struggling amidst its own unique set of political circumstances to hold on to its identity. If Kweisi Mfume stirs any group of NAACP protesters into a frenzy of "We Shall Overcome" refrains on the steps of the Basilica, I'm gonna puke.

Race & Division in the One Body

I can't stand the politics of racial victimization. That said, there is a real problem amongst a large percentage of so-called traditionalist Catholics when it comes to accepting the possibility that the Eucharist includes me, not even AS an Asian-American, but simply despite being an Asian-American.

This past Corpus Christi Sunday, at my parish at which I have felt profoundly at home liturgically, yet profoundly unwelcome ethnically, one parishioner made it palpably clear to me that I am a non-entity. There I was amidst my faith family as we stood outside praying a series of stations to the Body of Christ. I was empty-handed not knowing there were programs. A woman with several programs in hand began distributing them to other parishioners around me. She first took care of her companions and then turned around to disburse the remaining copies. Practically facing me but looking right past me, she handed the last copies to the people directly behind me. A classic instance of white blindness to the ontological reality of Asians I've experienced quite often.

My first reaction was pure rage. Then the irony of ignoring a co-member of the Body of Christ while celebrating the Feast of the Body of Christ opened a pressure-relief valve. Then came the flood of questions. Was I being petty? Was I being hypersensitive? Was I falling prey to identity politics? Was I totally misreading this lady's behavior? Was I being unfair given the rarity of Latin-loving Asian Catholics? All unanswerable with any conclusiveness. Nonetheless, I left thanking God that I was Catholic, b/c I would never have put up with this treatment, intentional or not, had I remained Protestant.

Sometimes the cushy world of Asian-American evangelical churches with their ethnically-focused ministry models and familiar-faced fellowship is so alluring. Yet the noble testament of Black Catholic fidelity to the Church despite racism throughout Reconstruction and Jim Crow comes quickly to mind and I feel a kinship with them that only the resilience of Eucharistic communion could engender. It's the "long loneliness" of Dorothy Day writ onto the jagged multiethnic world of the modern American Church.

This experience has confirmed for me the weakness of Haugenesque pop hymns like "One Bread, One Body." The warm fuzzies that the melody evokes bears ZERO relevance in a church where there exists real difference. The unity of Eucharistic fellowship cannot be found in any oceanic feeling of rapturous Gemeinschaft--that's simply too static and it empties out the eschatalogical dynamism of Christ's call "Ut Unum Sint." St. Paul insists there is no Gentile nor Jew under the New Covenant but this is not a declaratory statement of a self-evident fact. Rather it is an apocalyptic statement--an unveiling of a cosmic truth that is hidden. The coziness of Asian-American churches and lovey-dovey Volkparishes is illusory. I'll take a slight against my ethnicity even during the Liturgy any day over the seductive bliss of homogeneity.

Praestet fides supplementum sensuum defectui!

I'm back

Maybe it was because I needed a break from the blog storm of Lent 2004 and the TPOTC aftermath. Maybe it was just the doldrums of Ordinary Time. Maybe it was the wiseass comments from my college buddies who have remained in a state of perpetual sophomorism. Whatever it was, the blog itch strikes again.

Roncalli to the rescue

Digging through boxes and boxes of my old div school books here in NY, I started leafing through Good Pope John’s Journey of a Soul and came across this lovely reflection on the prudence that bishops should maintain before the “affairs of men” (like Kerry, Bush, et al).

Faith, hope and charity are the three stars of the episcopal glory. The Pope as the head and as an example, and the Bishops, all the Bishops of the Church, with him. The sublime work, holy and divine, which the Pope must do for the whole Church, and which the Bishops must do each in his own diocese, is to preach the Gospel and guide men to their eternal salvation, and all must take care not to let any other earthly business prevent or impede or disturb this primary task. The impediment may most easily arise from human judgments in the political sphere, which are diverse and contradictory according to the various ways of thinking and feeling. The Gospel is far above these opinions and parties, which agitate and disturb social life and all mankind. The Pope reads it and with his Bishops comments on it; and all, without trying to further any worldly interests, must inhabit that city of peace, undisturbed and blessed, whence descends the divine law which can rule in wisdom over the earthly city and the whole world.

In fact, this is what wise men expect from the Church, this and nothing else.

My conscience is tranquil about my conduct as newly elected Pope during first three years, and so my mind is at peace, and I beg the Lord always to help me to keep faith with this good beginning.

It is very important to insist that all the Bishops should act in the same way; may the Pope’s example be a lesson and an encouragement to them all. The Bishops are more exposed to the temptation of meddling immoderately in matter that are not their concern, and it is for this reason that the Pope must admonish them not to take part in any political or controversial question and not to declare for one section or faction rather than another. They are to preach to all alike, and in general terms, justice, charity, humility, meekness, gentleness and other evangelical virtues, courteously defending the rights of the Church when these are violated or compromised.

But at all times and especially just now, the Bishop must apply the balm of sweetness to the wounds of mankind. He must beware of making any rash judgment or uttering any abusive words about anyone, or letting himself be betrayed into flattery by threats, or in any way conniving with evil in the hope that by so doing he may be useful to someone; his manner must be grave, reserved and firm, while in his relations with others he must always be gentle and loving, yet at the same time always ready to point out what is good and what is evil, with the help of sacred doctrine but without any vehemence.

Any effort or intrigue of a purely human nature is worth very little in these questions of worldly interest.

Instead, he must with more assiduous and fervent prayer earnestly seek to promote divine worship among the faithful, with religious practices, frequent use of the sacraments, well taught and well administered, and about all he must encourage religious instruction because this also will help to solve problems of the merely temporal order, and do so much better than ordinary human measures can. This will draw down divine blessing on the people preserving them from many evils and recalling minds that have strayed from the right path. Help comes down from above: and heavenly light disperses the darkness.

Once a eugenicist, always a eugenicist

In case you assumed "pro-choice" actually means pro-choice:

Support for neo-Malthusian ideology gives the lie to CFFC’s advocacy of “free choice.” After all, if choice were the ultimate criterion, the way a woman exercises that choice, through abortion, adoption or child-rearing, would be secondary. Not so, wrote Marjorie Reilly Maguire, one of CFFC’s founders, to the liberal National Catholic Reporter in 1995: "Various personal experiences with CFFC have led me to believe that its agenda is no longer simply to defend the legality of a woman’s abortion choice…I now see CFFC’s agenda as the promotion of abortion, the defense of every abortion decision as a good, moral choice and the related agenda persuading society to cast off any moral constraints about sexual behavior. I don’t think this is a Catholic or pro-woman agenda…."

And don't buy Ford stock or cars.

David Morrison to the mattresses

Former Navy man on the prison abuses as a reflection of civilian America here. One of the best rants I've heard in a while.

Folks, may this serve as a horrible wake up call to all of us. Because the men and women who abused those prisoners are not aliens to us, they are not monsters, they are not fiends. I predict they are going to turn out to BE us - and what does that say about how we have fallen - and continue to fall - as a people.

His rant calls to mind "The Last Samurai" which I just caught on DVD. Even among our professional military, I wonder about the existence/vitality of a code of honor, of chivalric virtue. The film doesn't do bushido enough justice; it's predictably romanticist about "eastern values." Still, the contempt Tom Cruise's character feels for American culture is identical to Morrison's. And both point to a hellish spiritual vacuum that can only be authentically filled by a "ressourcement" of Western civilization.

Kerry IS a Catholic

Just take a deep breath, folks and say it: "Kerry IS a Catholic." I know it's tough to admit, but for all his doctrinal folly, he is one of our own. Critique his abortion stance, not the man. Here's an dispassionate, measured article on the man's Catholicism from Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette. If the right-wing Catholics keep up their barrage, Kerry will really begin reaping sympathy credit, and not just from God-forsaken liberals. Wise, indeed, for bishops not to ban Kerry from communion.

Much of the disproportionate vitriol directed at Kerry derives from the fact that Kerry IS sadly the paradigmatic American Catholic. Otherwise, I really don't think we need to get this upset at the guy. Why are we sparing the laity (ourselves) and burning Kerry as the effigy of the laity? Of course, it's a lot easier to condemn one Catholic politician than 60 million layfolk.

Scalia, wouldn't wanna be ya

NY Times finds in a recent Antonin Scalia speech an occassion to summarize the Catholic justice's career in hi-strung jurisprudence. I had no idea he deems the Court wrong "to say the Constitution requires that lawyers be provided to poor people accused of crimes." Inconsistency, as they say, is a sign of genius.

Pope-envy from Constantinople

Okay, okay, after years of bearing an envy for the E. Orthodox "way" of conciliarist ecclesiastical governance among other things, I'm finally coming around to fully embracing Roman primacy and papalism. News like this both saddens me for the sake of the EOs and reaffirms in me my real allegiance to the Bishop of Rome. Papalism isn't so much superior to conciliarism, but neither is it inferior by any means.