Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Monday, April 5, 2010

"Life is Good"

By Rick Garnett

Here is a short essay I did, for Notre Dame Magazine, which tries to connect "Jake" (the stick-figure guy with the smile who's on all the t-shirts), Nick Wolterstorff, and human dignity.  The bumper of my Jeep makes an appearance.  (Sorry for the long excerpt.)  Comments welcome!

I cannot help it — I love “Jake,” the distilled-to-his-essence stick-figure with a wide, winning grin, never-off shades and a disarming, simple message: “Life is good.”

Yes, he’s probably, to put it mildly, a bit overexposed. In fact, he’s everywhere. In airport gift shops and upscale shopping malls, on bumper stickers and backpacks, on doggie Frisbees, gold balls and baby bibs, there’s Jake — deftly managing a sizzling grill, cruising on a mountain bike, relaxing in a hammock, strolling through the woods, strumming a guitar. “Life is good,” he reports through the medium of carefully distressed “vintage” T-shirts. His sure seems to be.

It would be easy, but mistaken, to dismiss Jake as a knock-off of Harvey Ball’s “Have a Nice Day” smiley-face. The latter’s expression is vacant and phony — stoned, maybe — but Jake’s is genuinely happy. The smiley-face is a logo, with no story, plans or dreams, but Jake is the buddy who calls to cajole you into skipping work for a powder-day. “Have a nice day” is a limp, tepid, vague suggestion. “Life is good” is a bold blend of laid-back vibe and affirmation of the cosmos.

Jake is not just a stylized Crocodile Dundee (“No worries!”) or Bobby McFerrin (“Don’t worry, be happy!”), who is relieved to report that things aren’t too bad. He’s no slacker-nihilist, shrugging off what comes with a “Whatever, dude.” No, for Jake, life is Whitmanesque — it is large, it contains multitudes, and he likes it. It is good.

No doubt, Jake’s success is a tribute to lifestyle marketing, but his is more than a “lifestyle” claim. It is, I think, also a theological one, and I like to imagine that he knows it. When God made the world — the “dome in the middle of the waters,” the “two great lights,” the “great sea monsters” and “all kinds of creeping things” — we are told that “He saw how good it was.” Jake invites us to suppose that God’s verdict on bike rides through the backcountry and sausages cooked over fire would be — indeed, that it is — the same. No Manichean darkness here: Jake’s spirituality is joyfully incarnational. His world, like Gerard Manley Hopkins’, is “charged with the grandeur” — the goodness — “of God.”

As a general matter, I am leery of bumper stickers, even ones that tout candidates I support or causes to which I am committed. I would hate to undermine them with a sloppy lane-change, an ill-timed nose-scratch or a long-delayed car wash. My “Life is good” decal, though, seems perfect. It says it all — or, at least, it says a lot — and, really, who could object?

Secret message

To be honest, however, my sticker has a double meaning. As I see it, I’m not only safely throwing in my lot with Jake, and reminding my fellow drivers of the joys to be found in and through guitars, barbeques and hiking boots. I like to think that I am also proposing sneakily what I suppose I am too nervous to proclaim more straightforwardly (on my car, anyway): Every human person is precious and inviolable, every human person has dignity and worth, and every human person — old and young, strong and frail, vulnerable and independent, loved and lonely, innocent and guilty — ought to be welcomed in life and protected by law.

But am I really saying all that? Maybe I’m kidding myself. Sure, I want to think that Jake and his motto make it easier to invite my fellow drivers-citizens to consider and embrace what others’ bumpers say more explicitly, but is it just wishful, self-justifying thinking to imagine that hearts and minds are moved, pervasively and comprehensively, in the pro-life direction by even a contagiously good-natured cartoon-guy’s pro-“life” catch-phrase? And does Jake’s message really capture, or even map onto, what I and so many others mean by “pro-life”?

In his 1995 encyclical, The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II challenged all people of good will to take on the “responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.” Does my display of Jake’s good-natured profession cut it?

Maybe not. The pro-life message, after all, is not — that is, it is not only — that there’s a lot of fun to be had in “life,” that we should hope, look and reach for many pleasant experiences. It’s a call to communion, love and relationship, not just to hedonism. The good news that is the Gospel of Life is not just that not all of the stuff in the universe is inanimate but is instead teeming with metabolism, reproduction, growth and adaptation. It’s amazing and wonderful, certainly, that so much in the world is alive, and only a crank would refuse to marvel at, even revel in, its dynamism.

Still, “to be unconditionally pro-life” would seem to involve more than standing duly impressed before the workings of DNA and photosynthesis. No, the pro-life claim is about us, and not only about the arenas in which we struggle, the contexts through which we move and the stories we construct. It is about the amazing mystery and gift that is the person who lives — and laughs and cries and prays and plays — and not only about the no-doubt impressive facts that cells multiply and neurons fire.

The pro-life proposal, what it is that I want Jake to be saying when he revels in the goodness of life, is that the individual human person — every one — matters. Each person — every one — carries, in C.S. Lewis’ words, the “Weight of Glory.”

“There are no ordinary people,” Lewis insisted; “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

The claim that every person matters and has worth might seem unremarkable. Perhaps it is one of those “duh” observations that is not even worthy of a bumper sticker, let alone a pop-culture phenomenon like Jake. It is, certainly, the purported premise of the law and morality of human rights and of our American civil religion (“with liberty and justice for all”). But can this claim, this premise, bear the weight we ask it to carry? Is there anything to it? What’s so special about us, actually?

My Notre Dame colleague Tom Shaffer has said that every human person is “infinitely valuable, relentlessly unique, endlessly interesting.” This is true, I’m sure. But what is it, exactly, that makes it true, and not just wishful thinking or a delusion of grandeur?

The great worth

We profess — Jake and I, and the rest of our pro-life friends — that the dying and elderly deserve more, and better, than a chemically hastened, hospital-bed-vacating death, but what makes this true, as opposed to merely squeamish or sentimental?

We affirm that even the commission of the most grave, most horrible crime should not be enough to push the criminal beyond all hope for reconciliation, repentance and relationship, but what saves this affirmation from being so much soft-hearted, excessively expensive fluff?

We insist, flying in the face of a culture that holds out ability and achievement as the criteria for a worthy life, that a severely disabled unborn child is no less welcome, and no less inviolable, than the most gifted protégé, but why isn’t this insistence mere preening or self-indulgence?

“What is man,” the Psalmist asked God, “that thou are mindful of him?” What indeed. After all, he noted, human beings “are but a breath” and “their days are like a passing shadow.” More than a few contemporary philosophers would agree with John Searle, who insists that the world “consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force,” some of which have become organized into “certain higher-level nervous systems.” We are, in other words, electrified sacks of fluid, meat-puppets in particle-clogged space. What is so “good” about that?

It is, to say the least, an unsettling question. We are committed, today, to the morality and language of human rights and human dignity. We believe, in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s words, that “human beings, all of them, are irreducibly precious.” This is true, if a bit wordy for a bumper sticker. But how is it true, and what makes it true?

Many would say that our “reason,” “autonomy” or “capabilities” do the work. We are valuable and inviolable, the arguments go, because of the impressive, inspiring things we do, or at least can do. To be sure, we can do amazing things, we do have characteristics and capacities that set us apart and above so much else that is. But these are not enough. Many of us are broken, disabled, unimpressive; all of us are dependent, vulnerable and incomplete.

The Psalmist, again, gave thanks that he was “fearfully, wonderfully made,” but even a well-designed meat-puppet is, well, just that. Looking through a microscope, one might mistake us for chimps, if not worms. What gives us — what gives life — the great worth that we have and that saves our talk of rights, dignity and the sacred from being so much pretty nonsense?

Remember here the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit. A little boy’s toy becomes, over the years, “old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about.” Eventually the Rabbit is made “Real” by having been loved by the Boy.

In a similar way, Wolterstorff has argued, God’s love for us is what makes it true that we are precious, sacred and have worth. Our dignity is real; it is not just a convenient, reassuring construct. But, it is not achieved, earned or performed. It is freely bestowed and lovingly given. Our human rights do not attach to our own capacities but instead to the “worth bestowed on human beings by that love.”

This is what John Paul II called the “moral truth about the human person,” that the “greatness of human beings is founded precisely in their being creatures of a loving God” and not self-styled authors of their own destiny. That in which we so justifiably take pride is also, and always, a call to humility. Not one of us, in the ways that really count and matter, is self-made, and thank God for that.

Life is good, then, and it is because we love and are loved.

That almost does sound like it could work on a bumper sticker.

Public Relations and the Sex Abuse Crisis

By Steve Shiffrin

In listening to the Bishops and the Vatican circling the wagons in support of the Pope, I first thought that Spiro T. Agnew had returned from the dead to advise the Church on how to respond to a crisis: blame the media. Tell your parishioners to cancel their subscriptions to the New York Times.

 

But then came the utterly bizarre remarks of the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa. Not even Spiro, perhaps not even Fox News, could walk quite as far into outer darkness.   

 

David Wolpe the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles responds to this in the Washington Post here, “When confronted with remarks such as that of Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pope's personal preacher, that accusations against the Pope and the Catholic church are reminiscent of the "collective violence" suffered by the Jews" one must gasp, and then respond.

“Two impulses fight for ascendancy in response. First: do not give way to fury, since this is one thoughtless, brutal remark by one man. Why should such stunning insensitivity, such historical ignorance, such defensive asininity, be excoriated rather than dismissed?

But then there is that second impulse. I know too many survivors. I have heard their stories . . . It seems that each time a group is aggrieved they compare their pain to the holocaust. It rubs raw the never healed wound.

“Moreover, I think of the real victims of the church scandal; the children whose lives were permanently blighted by the cruelty and appetites of wicked men. To use the sufferings of the Jews as an analogy for the church's public discomfort -- given our painful shared history -- is indescribably tactless. . . . .

 

“Even to the powerful, the posture of a victim is often easy and attractive. The church is not the victim. Some reactions may be wide of the mark. Some people may be unjustly swept in the net sewn by the actions of others. But I would remind Rev. Cantalamessa of the precise nature of the holocaust: Six million people, including one-and-a-half million children, were starved, gassed, shot, burned, humiliated, brutalized, murdered, not for what they did but for who they were.

 

“You have added, with this callousness, yet another reason for repentance. Has the toll not already grown heavy enough?”

cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com (comments section open there)

 

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal on the allegation of media bias against the Catholic Church

By Michael Perry

"In both the U.S. and Europe, the scandal was dug up and made famous by the press. This has aroused resentment among church leaders, who this week accused journalists of spreading 'gossip,' of going into 'attack mode' and showing 'bias.'

But this is not true, or to the degree it is true, it is irrelevant. All sorts of people have all sorts of motives, but the fact is that the press—the journalistic establishment in the U.S. and Europe—has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on this issue. Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it. The press forced the church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers. The church shouldn't be saying j'accuse but thank you.

Without this pressure—without the famous 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight series with its monumental detailing of the sex abuse scandals in just one state, Massachusetts—the church would most likely have continued to do what it has done for half a century, which is look away, hush up, pay off and transfer.

In fact, the press came late to the story. The mainstream media almost had to be dragged to it. It was there waiting to be told at least by the 1990s, but broadcast news shows and big newspapers weren't keen to go after it. It would take months or years to report and consume huge amounts of labor, time and money—endless digging through court records, locating victims and victimizers, getting people who don't want to talk to talk. And after all that, the payoff could be predicted: You'd get slammed by the church as biased, criticized by sincerely disbelieving churchgoers, and maybe get a boycott from a few million Catholics. No one wanted that.

An irony: Non-Catholic members of the media were, in my observation, the least likely to want to go after the story, because they didn't want to look like they were Catholic-bashing. An irony within the irony: Some journalists didn't think to go after the story because they really didn't much like the Catholic Church. Because of this bias, they didn't see the story as a story. They thought this was how the church always operated. It didn't register with them that it was a scandal. They didn't know it was news.

It was the Boston Globe that broke the dam, winning a justly deserved Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Some blame the scandals on Pope Benedict XVI. But Joseph Ratzinger is the man who, weeks before his accession to the papacy five years ago, spoke blisteringly on Good Friday of the 'filth' in the church. Days later on the streets of Rome, the Italian newspaper La Stampa reported, Cardinal Ratzinger bumped into a curial monsignor who chided him for his sharp words. The cardinal replied, 'You weren't born yesterday, you understand what I'm talking about, you know what it means. We priests. We priests!' The most reliable commentary on Pope Benedict's role in the scandals came from John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, who argues that once Benedict came to fully understand the scope of the crisis, in 2003, he made the church's first real progress toward coming to grips with it.

As for his predecessor, John Paul the Great, about whom I wrote an admiring book which recounts some of the scandals—I spent a grim 2003 going through the depositions of Massachusetts clergy—one fact seems to me pre-eminent. For Pope John Paul II, the scandals would have been unimaginable—literally not imaginable. He had come of age in an era and place (Poland in the 1930s, '40s and '50s) of heroic priests. They were great men; they suffered. He had seen how the Nazis and later the communists had attempted to undermine the church and tear people away from it, sometimes through slander. They did this because the great force arrayed against them was the Catholic Church. John Paul, his mind, psyche and soul having been forged in that world, might well have seen the church's recent accusers as spreaders of slander. Because priests don't act like that, it's not imaginable. And he'd seen it before, only now it wasn't Nazism or communism attempting to kill the church with lies, but modernity and its soulless media.

Only they weren't lies.

There are three great groups of victims in this story. The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life. The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and, literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized. And the third group is the Catholics in the pews—the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken. No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they're stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old church too."

[Entire column here.]

Fordham philosophy prof Michael Baur weighs in ...

By Michael Perry

This morning, Fordham philosopher Michael Baur sent me this, which is posted on his blog:

Boniface’s Papal Bull, Benedict’s Papal Bull? April 2nd, 2010

In his Divine Comedy, Dante tells us that Pope Boniface VIII belongs in the eighth circle of hell, the circle reserved for those who commit sins of fraud and treachery.  The particular sin for which Boniface deserves his infernal fate is the sin of simony, i.e., the sin of trading in spiritual goods as if they were temporal goods.  For Dante, Boniface’s sin of simony included not only the literal selling of spiritual goods for temporal goods; it also included Boniface’s wrongful assertion (through his actions, but also through his papal bull of November 18, 1302,  Unam Sanctam) that his authority as supreme leader of the Church also gave him authority as supreme leader of the world.  In light of the newest revelations regarding sexual abuse by priests and administrative cover-up by bishops, one cannot help wondering whether Benedict XVI — like Pope Boniface VIII before him — has been party to a deeply imperfect Church culture which has all-too-often failed to distinguish adequately between  spiritual goods  and temporal goods.  For in recent years, some members of the Church hierarchy have appeared to behave more like members of a Pedophile Protection Syndicate than like members of the Body of Christ (by prioritizing the protection of their own power, reputation, and assets, over the protection of innocent, defenseless children).  Has Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict been part of the problem, or will he be part of the solution?

Recall: in Spain in 2002, responding to demands that the Church take more seriously the growing allegations of sexual abuse by American priests and cover-up by American bishops,  then-Cardinal Ratzinger declared: “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign . . . to discredit the church.”  We now know, of course, that the allegations of abuse and cover-up were not merely a “planned campaign to discredit the Church,” but were the heartfelt and honest pleas of innocent victims struggling to be heard.  Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2002 statement not only mis-characterized the pleas of these innocent victims; it also re-victimized the victims insofar as it labeled their pleas as unworthy of a response and — furthermore — as part of an evil plot (”a planned campaign to discredit the church”).  To the many innocent victims of clerical abuse and cover-up, Cardinal Ratzinger’s defiant, dismissive, and accusatory words must have been especially stinging and hurtful.

In his 2010 Palm Sunday address, obliquely addressing renewed questions about the Vatican’s (and his own) handling of clerical abuse and cover-up, Pope Benedict suggested that he would not be intimidated by “the petty gossip of dominant opinion.”  Will the pope’s recent words about “petty gossip” turn out to be as ill-advised as his 2002 words about a “planned campaign to discredit the church”?  I do not know the answer to that question, of course.  I am quite willing to believe (as some have claimed) that the pope is being unfairly targeted by his over-zealous, agenda-driven critics.  But I am also willing to believe that the pope is once again engaging in rhetoric that will do more to suppress and deflect the truth, than to reveal it.  The problem is that faithful, honest, truth-seeking Catholics simply don’t what to believe, when so many important questions remain unanswered.  There is, for example, good reason to believe that in 1980, then-Cardinal Ratzinger (as Archbishop of Munich and Freising) not only received a memo announcing the reassignment of known pedophile priest Peter Hullermann to pastoral duties (including duties that involved work with children), but also oversaw a January 15 meeting in which Fr. Hullermann’s reassignment was discussed (see story in the TimesOnline).  Until now, the pope has allowed Vatican officials and others to say (or strongly imply) that he was not in any way knowledgeable about or responsible for the reassignment of Fr. Hullermann in 1980 (as we now know, Fr. Hullermann went on to abuse many other children, before eventually being tried and convicted by civil authorities in 1986).  Even if the pope is entirely innocent, as his defenders say he is, he would best serve his own interests — as well as the interests of the Church at large — if he were to give a fuller account of what — if anything — he knew of Fr. Hullermann’s reassignment in 1980, and/or why he should not be criticized today for having known nothing, or doing nothing, about that reassignment.  Unfortunately, the pope’s own prior statements and his prior responses to this ongoing crisis have led many fair-minded, reasonable people to begin wondering whether he is really part of the solution or part of the problem.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Thank God for the Latter-day Saints

By Robert George

At Easter mass today, our wonderful chaplain, Fr. Thomas Mullelly of Princeton's Aquinas Institute, invited us to take a few minutes to reflect on, and thank God for, the good things He has sent our way.  Among the very first things I found myself praying in gratitude for is the friendship of many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Over the past five or six years, I have been blessed to work alongside several outstanding LDS intellectuals and to get to know a number of the Church's general authorities.  They are among the most gifted, dedicated, and inspiring people I've ever known.  Their faith is much misunderstood and, alas, there is still a great deal of anti-Mormon prejudice out there.  But they bear no resentment or ill will towards those who misunderstand or dishonor them, and they are among the first to enter the field and the last to leave it when it comes to working for justice and the common good.

I initially came to know Latter-day Saints in the marriage movement, some years before same-sex unions and the question of redefining marriage to eliminate the principle of the sexual complementarity of spouses was an issue.  They joined Catholics, Evangelicals, Eastern Orthodox Christians, observant Jews and a fair number of secular folks in the effort to do something about family fragmentation, out-of-wedlock child-bearing, and the growing divorce culture.  I've also worked alongside Latter-day Saints in the pro-life cause.  Every group has its bad apples, and I'm sure the LDS is no exception.  But anyone who knows a large number of Mormons will, I'm sure, be struck as I have been by how many members of the Church really do lead faithful and honorable lives---lives of selfless service to others.  As a community, the selflessness, generosity, and public-spiritedness of the Latter-day Saints is extraordinary.

A few weeks ago, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago spoke at Brigham Young University.  In the course of his remarks, he noted that:

In recent years, Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have stood more frequently side-by-side in the public square to defend human life and dignity.  In addition to working together to alleviate poverty here and abroad, we have been together in combating the degredations associated with the pornography industry; in promoting respect for the right to life of those who are still waiting to be born in their mother's womb; and in defending marriage as the union of ome man and one woman for the sake of family against various efforts to redefine in civil law that foundational element of God's natural plan for creation.  I am personally grateful that, after 180 years of living mostly apart from one another, Catholics and Latter-day Saints have begun to see one another as trustworthy partners in the defense of shared moral principles and in the promotion of the common good of our beloved country.

On this Easter Sunday, I would certainly say "amen" to that.  The Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints truly share some profound understandings and commitments, especially when it comes to the sanctity of human life and the value and meaning of marriage.  180 years of living "mostly apart" is enough.  Catholic and LDS scholars and leaders have a great deal to collaborate on and learn from each other.  I know that many LDS law professors, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and historians are eager to talk with their Catholic counterparts about natural law and natural rights and more generally about the Catholic tradition of thought and debate concerning morality, politics, and law.  These are conversations very much worth having. 

I give thanks to God for my LDS friends and for the inspiring and courageous witness of the LDS community.

Friendship and real disagreement

By Rick Garnett

In the March / April issue of Touchstone (go here for the magazine's "Mere Comments" blog), S.M. Hutchens writes:

Friendship overcomes one of the greatest obstacles to truth in ecumenical conversation:  unwillingness to understand the beliefs of others in meliorem partem, which should be taken to mean not just accurately, but empathetically, in the manner one would wish to be understood oneself, if one were that other.  This, of course, does not eliminate real and substantive disagreement, but will aid in assuring the disagreements are real and substantive.  It allows us to maintain the bond of truth loving men, which we know shall lead us all to the same end, making error detachable for the sake of love.  One is happy to see his friend in the right, even to his own disadvangatge, and abandonment of error is a small price to pay for the fellowship of those one loves.   . . .  [F]riendship kills the triumphalist impulse, awakening desire that the friend should, together with oneself, know and love the truth.

Nice.

Brother Hockett on Famous Blue Raincoat

By Robert George

Wow, Bob!  What an interesting interpretation of both "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "Master Song."  I had never considered anything remotely like the possibility of a Gnostic-reminiscent dualistic self-understanding on the part of Cohen himself.  At first I thought:  "That's a very clever interpretation, to be sure, but . . . no, it can't be right."  Then I considered those lines from FBR:  "Now what can I tell you, my brother, my klller, what can I possibly say? / I guess that I miss you. I think I forgive you. I'm glad that you stood in my way."  Hmmmm, I then thought, Bob could be right about this.  My "brother" could be my "other self" -- the one that sometimes takes over, replacing the self I want to be (hence, "my brother, my kller"), with all sorts of tragic consequences (wrecking relationships, etc.).  However that may be, I suspect that LC himself would probably not resist the claim that there is something Cathar or Albigensian in flavor in the sensibility he expresses in some of his songs.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

"The Convert"

By Rick Garnett

A poem, by G.K. Chesterton, which seems fitting, as we prepare to welcome tonight thousands of adults into full communion with the Church:

The Convert

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

"Facing Death"

By Rick Garnett

Here is our own Susan Stabile:

Today we sit in the darkness. We have no liturgy. Instead, we simply contemplate death. We contemplate Jesus, who lies dead in the tomb.

This is an important contemplation. Death is real and it is something none of us escapes. Our human existence, however many years it may be, will come to an end. Rich or poor, famous or unknown, smart or slow – at some point, we will all die.

We usually shy away from thinking about death. Truth be told, we tend to fear it. But the reality is that resurrection has no meaning unless we appreciate the reality of death. Unless Jesus dies for us – really dies – then he can’t rise for us. And our own resurrection is intimately tied with his; if Jesus resurrection is not real to us, then neither can be our own. . . .

Friday, April 2, 2010

The Passion of the Christ

By Robert George

I spoke to a friend today who told me that she and her husband were about to watch Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," as they do each year on Good Friday.  It has become part of their spiritual preparation for Easter.  It's a film I still haven't seen.  But I recall vividly the controversy it engendered back in 2004 in the run up to its release.  On my own campus, a forum was organized to discuss the questions at the heart of the controversy, especially the question of who was responsible for the death of Jesus of Nazareth.  Between four and five hundred people crowded into one of Princeton's largest auditoriums, with others standing outside the doors.  Most of the leaders of the University were there.  It was as tense an atmosphere as I can recall in my years here.  Despite having not seen the film, I was invited to be on the panel.  The other panelists were my colleagues Jeffrey Stout, Cornel West (who also had not seen the film), and John Gager, plus Bill Donahue of the Catholic League and David Elcott of the American Jewish Committee.  In case MoJ readers might find them to be of some interest, here are the remarks I offered:

Please excuse me for speaking this afternoon in a very personal mode.  I rarely speak this way even in private settings; never in public.  The nature and seriousness of the business at hand, however, demands what turns out for me to be rather a personal response.

I have not seen “the Passion of the Christ.”  Most of my Christian friends who have seen the film, including some with whom I have worked for the past decade-and-a-half in promoting understanding and cooperation between observant Jews and devout Christians, praise the film as a spiritually powerful re-presentation of the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ.  Yet many Jewish friends with whom I have discussed the movie are uneasy about it—some deeply so.  A few worry that its intention is to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians, by reviving the ancient charge of deicide.  A far larger number grant that this is not the film’s intention, but fear that its consequences could include hostility and even violence against Jewish people, perhaps not here in the United States, but in Europe, the Islamic world, and in other places beyond our borders where it might be shown.

No one who reflects on the shameful history of persecution of Jews by Christians, including Christians exercising ecclesiastical authority, will fail to take this concern seriously.  The gospels have in the past sometimes been distorted to whip up prejudice and violence against Jews; and any representation of Christ’s passion, however praiseworthy in itself, could be misused for that purpose again.  That is why it is important, not only for Jewish organizations, but also, and especially, for Christian leaders, Protestant and Catholic alike, to remind people that it is solemn Christian teaching that Christ’s death is not to be blamed on the Jews, and that anti-semitism is always and everywhere a sin.  This can be done, and should be done, without in any way suggesting that devout Protestant and Catholic believers are living powder kegs of anti-semitism.  They are not.

Pope John Paul II, throughout his pontificate, has set an excellent example.  His apologies and requests for forgiveness in the name of the Church for sins committed by Christians against Jews have been ungrudging and manifestly heartfelt.  He visited the Great Synagogue of Rome to declare that the Jewish people, far from being enemies of Christians, are “our brothers” and even “our elder brothers” in faith.  He has unceasingly proclaimed the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in Nostra Aetate against blaming the Jewish people, then or now, for Christ’s suffering and death, and he has seen to it that this teaching is permanently enshrined in utterly unambiguous terms in the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church.

“The Passion” has revived discussion of the question:  “Who killed Christ?”  Speaking for myself, I begin with a different question:  “Who is Christ?”  It is the answer to this second question, really, that determines for me the answer to the first.

  Jesus himself put the question to his disciples:  “Who do men say that I am?”  They answered:  “Some say John the Baptist; some Elijah; some the Prophet.”  Jesus then said:  “And who do you say that I am?”  Simon Peter replied:  “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  I have thought about this, and prayed about this, and argued with myself about this, and reached the same conclusion Peter reached.  Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  He was sent by his Father as our Savior to share in our humanity, to suffer and die in a supreme act of self-sacrificial love in atonement for sins, and to be raised up to glory, making possible for us resurrection, salvation, and sharing in the divine life of the triune God.

So having come to faith in Christ, I approach the question of responsibility for his death from the perspective of faith.  And from that perspective, the answer to the question “Who killed Christ? is clear, all-too-clear for my own comfort.  I did it.  I am the one responsible.  It was not “the Jews,” or even “the Romans.”  It was not “the religious leaders of the time.”  It was not Pontius Pilate.  It was not the crowd, or any of the historical figures in the dramatic account presented in the gospels.  It was for my sins that the Son of God suffered and died.  It was for my selfishness, my pride, my greed, my lusts, my covetousness, my self-indulgence, my injustices, my failures of courage and of love.  I hear St. Francis of Assisi talking to me when he says: “It is you who have crucified him and crucify him still when you delight in your vices and sins.”  Yes, it is true.  I am the one.  I am responsible.  And I am sorry.

Someone might say, “well, even from a Christian vantage point, it’s not just you; all are sinners, and Christ died for all; so the responsibility is shared by all.”  As the Catholic Catechism, in the precise context of rejecting the allegation of Jewish guilt for the crucifixion says: “all sinners were the authors and ministers of Christ’s Passion.”   Well, yes, that’s true.  I certainly don’t deny it.  But this theological truth is easily misunderstood.  The guilt is not collective, even when we take the collectivity to be the whole of mankind.  Sins are committed by individuals, though individuals can conspire to create sinful institutions and social structures.  So my guilt is not reduced or diluted by what I accept as the theological fact that “all sinners are authors of Christ’s Passion.”  In gazing upon the suffering Christ, it is not other people’s sins with which I am confronted; it is my sins.

Many good people do not answer the question “Who is Christ?” as I do.  For them, the question “Who killed Christ?,” if it is to be asked at all, can only be addressed as a matter of historiography.  Unfortunately, the quantity and quality of the details provided in the gospels and other sources, while sufficient to answer the personal and existential question that presents itself in the light of faith, leaves much uncertain and obscure about the events of Holy Thursday night and Good Friday.  That does not mean that historians shouldn’t do their best in trying to sort the matter out; but their answers will necessarily be tentative and somewhat speculative.

For my part, having arrived where I have arrived on the question “Who is Christ?, the question “Who killed Christ?” confronts me as a very personal and existential one.  Of course, if the Catechism is right about all sinners being authors of Christ’s passion, then others who have arrived where I have arrived on the question “Who is Christ?” will find themselves confronted, as I find myself confronted, with the personal and existential version of the question “Who killed Christ?”  Each Christian believer will hear St. Francis talking to him, very personally, when he says:  “It is you who have crucified him.”

In the liturgical commemoration of Christ’s passion in Holy Week, the Catholic Church has found a way of confronting the faithful vividly with the personal and existential truth of the matter.  There is a responsive reading of the gospel account of the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday.  A lector serves as narrator.  The priest reads the words of Jesus.  A deacon or the lector reads the words of Herod, Pontius Pilate, and other individuals in the story.  And the congregation reads the words of the crowd.  I will tell you candidly that I dread this service.  I have to drag myself to it.  The reason I dread it, is because I am required to confront that very personal and existential question.  Nothing could be more painful.  And it is painful, because this is not a play.  I am not there as an actor playing a role or part, from which I will later disengage myself.  The liturgical context, from the point of view of faith, makes it real, not pretend, not make-believe.  It brings out the truth of the matter.  What I dread are two words that I am required to speak.  And I dread them, because they leave me in no doubt as to the answer to the personal and existential question:  “Who killed Christ?”  They come after Pilate has agreed to release the criminal Barabbas at the crowd’s demand.  Pilate then asks:  “What would you have me do with Jesus of Nazareth?”  And we say—I say—“crucify him.”  Yes, I say it.  I am the one calling for his death—not as an actor in a play, but as my very self—a real-life sinner rendered transparent to myself in the existential reality of the liturgy.  In that moment, as a worshiping Christian, I am made to speak the truth about myself, my guilt, my need for repentance and forgiveness.  There and then, I validate the charge that St. Francis confronts me with:  “It is you who have crucified him.”  Yes, it is I.


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