Good news: viewed from a certain perspective, at least, religious faith at Harvard is alive and well. Indeed Harvard’s founding religious movement, Puritanism, is more robust than ever. To be sure, the New Puritanism has taken an explicitly self-denying, self-abnegating, indeed self-extirpating form. The university-wide Diversity Task Force, doing what Puritans have always done best, finally scrubbed from the lyrics of “Fair Harvard,” the University’s song, any reference to the Puritans themselves, as offensively narrow and exclusionary.
The reactionary mind will object that this obliterates, quite deliberately, any reference to the true origins of Harvard, which was founded as a seminary for dissenting ministers. That truth has now been been deemed not merely embarrassing, but offensive. Oddly enough, or perhaps not oddly at all, Harvard’s decision to drop its original motto Christo et Ecclesiae in favor of Veritas means that it has ended up with neither Christ, nor Church, nor Truth. The University’s new motto is, in effect, “None of the Above.” For the poor old reactionaries, this denouement is unsettling.
But this is benighted thinking. After all, to quote another broad-minded administrator coping with religion issues, “Quid est ‘Veritas’”? The search for truth invidiously excludes error. Far better to consider both truth and falsehood without bias or discrimination — the master principle of a training college for neo-Puritan ministers. In the New Model Harvard, the faculty and the visitors may “spend their time in nothing else, but to see and hear some new thing” — the Endless Conversation, in which Truth is that worst of all things, a “conversation-stopper.” Faced with the choice between Christ and Barabbas, Harvard will create a new Office of Inclusion to study the matter and issue a report that suggests choosing both, as long as Christ will promise to behave.
No, the problem with the Diversity Task Force’s purity campaign against Puritans is not that it went too far. It is that it did not go far enough, given its own stated aims. It must be taken to its logical conclusion.
In the middle of Harvard Yard stands, or rather sits, a figure from the Dark Time — no mere lyrical reference, but the brazen image of a Puritan minister himself, whose iron shoe incautious tourists touch and even kiss. (The students, who know the barbarian rituals of their fellows, never do). Unless and until the statue of the Founder is smashed in righteous wrath, there can be no true inclusion, no true diversity, at Harvard (er, I mean, at the College; the H-word will of course have to go as well). The final, fateful, consummation and self-overcoming of Puritanism will occur when the Hideous Idol is brought low with jackhammers, in a sacred frenzy of auto-iconoclasm.
What should take its place? If, as the neo-Puritans tell us, the problem with old-Puritanism is its exclusionary character, then what is needed is a symbol of the one worldwide faith that is truly diverse and inclusive, truly universal, truly ... what’s the word? ... Catholic. We will still have a statue of a seated pastor in the Yard. Believe me, we will. A Pastor Aeternus, in fact, enthroned in full sovereignty, teaching Veritas indeed, infallibly so. All will then be welcome to kiss the iron slipper. Students of the Pontifical Catholic University of Cambridge: welcome home!
There has been some talk recently about a papal interview with a journalist. One of my favorite such interviews has been organized in God and the World. It is a conversation between then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, and Peter Seewald.
Here are two questions and answers appropriate for our meditation this time in the liturgical year:
14. The Cross
We are used to thinking of suffering as something we try to avoid at all costs. And there is nothing that many societies get more angry about than the Christian idea that one should bear with pain, should endure suffering, should even sometimes give oneself up to it, in order thereby to overcome it. "Suffering," John Paul II believes, "is a part of the mystery of being human." Why is this?
Today what people have in view is eliminating suffering from the world. For the individual, that means avoiding pain and suffering in whatever way. Yet we must also see that it is in this very way the world becomes very hard and very cold. Pain is part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before everything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain.
When we know that the way of love---this exodus, this going out of oneself---is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.
Love itself is a passion, something we endure. In love I experience first a happiness, a general feeling of happiness. Yet, on the other hand, I am taken out of my comfortable tranquility and have to let myself be reshaped. If we say that suffering is the inner side of love, we then also understand why it is so important to learn how to suffer---and why, conversely, the avoidance of suffering renders someone unfit to cope with life. He would be left with an existential emptiness, which could then only be combined with bitterness, with rejection, and no longer with any acceptance or progress toward maturity.
What would actually have happened if Christ had not appeared and if he had not died on the tree of the Cross? Would the world long since have come to ruin without him?
That we cannot say. Yet we can say that man would have no access to God. He would then only be able to relate to God in occasional fragmentary attempts. And, in the end, he would not know who or what God actually is.
Something of the light of God shines through in the great religions of the world, of course, and yet they remain a matter of fragments and questions. But if the question about God finds no answer, if the road to him is blocked, if there is no forgiveness, which can only come with the authority of God himself, then human life is nothing but a meaningless experiment. Thus, God himself has parted the clouds at a certain point. He has turned on the light and has shown us the way that is the truth, that makes it possible for us to live, and that is life itself.
