Limited Government

We need to be very conscious that evil is not some nameless, impersonal and deterministic force at work in the world. Evil, the devil, works in and through human freedom, through the use of our freedom. It seeks an ally in man. Evil needs man in order to act. Having broken the first commandment, love of God, it then goes on to distort the second, love of neighbour. Love of neighbour disappears, yielding to falsehood, envy, hatred and death. But it is possible for us not to be overcome by evil but to overcome evil with good (cf. Rom 12:21). It is to this conversion of heart that we are called. Without it, all our coveted human “liberations” prove disappointing, for they are curtailed by our human narrowness, harshness, intolerance, favouritism and desire for revenge. A profound transformation of mind and heart is needed to recover a degree of clarity of vision and impartiality, and the profound meaning of the concepts of justice and the common good.

Address to Government and National Leaders, Lebanon, Sept 15, 2012

Reflection – Well, yesterday I certainly got lots of eyeballs looking at the blog, as I decried the quickening slide into tyranny of my home province of Ontario. Yesterday was all about freedom of speech and conscience, the absolute necessity for a peaceful society to engage in peaceful disputation, in a free and non-violent exchange of opposing views on any and all subjects.

Today this theme of freedom goes deeper. We see here the Pope reflecting very profoundly on the fundamental issue in every society, every civilization, and every human heart.

It is the conflict between good and evil that each of us engages in only and absolutely as individuals. Social programs can help people have opportunities, or save them from starving to death on the streets. Economic recovery plans, tax code reforms, stimuli of various types can all work, at least potentially, to encourage investment and entrepreneurial risk-taking. Legal reforms that protect minorities or outlaw discrimination do what legal reforms can do: punish and thus curtail bad behaviour.

But every revolution, every social program, every reform, every external change of law and policy is doomed to fail, utterly and completely, without this ‘profound transformation of mind and heart’ to justice and charity in the individual.

As Pope Benedict says so well, without this, we human beings are susceptible to simply lapse into narrowness, revenge, harshness, intolerance, falsehood, envy, sloth… all the usual suspects, eh? Without conversion of heart, there is not a legal system, a social program, an economic arrangement that can produce human happiness and a flourishing of human civilization.

Well, we have to know that, and know the limitations of law and the structuring of civil society. It can curtail outrageous excesses of cruelty and injustice; it can prevent people from starving to death; it cannot make society thrive and flourish in a vibrant human way.

That is the role of cultural, religious, educational, individual human formation in virtue and goodness. This is why government needs for the most part to basically stay out of the way of the very bodies that provide that formation: churches, schools, the whole network of clubs and service organizations and mediating institutions that daily call people out of their own self-interest and self-sufficiency into a communal shared project of care and help. In our modern world we take it for granted that the government needs to have a finger in every pie, be both underwriting and supervising and, increasingly, micro-managing the work of all these groups. I think we need to question this assumption and return to a much smaller government with a much more focussed role. In our day of spiralling national debt and fiscally over-extended governments living on credit, we have to find another way to organize things.

 

We are seeing in Canada and elsewhere that an overwhelmingly huge government, a government that pays for all services and supervises all aspects of life, is not conducive to the delicate play of freedom and human formation in virtue and goodness. Government is a blunt instrument of coercion and compulsion; what is needed for society to flourish are free men and women freely choosing to love and serve and care for the body of mankind out of their own freedom. Only thus is evil driven back and a clear space for goodness and justice to thrive in created.

I Beg to Differ

In order to make possible a future of peace for coming generations, our first task is to educate for peace in order to build a culture of peace. Education, whether it takes place in the family or at school, must be primarily an education in those spiritual values which give the wisdom and traditions of each culture their ultimate meaning and power. The human spirit has an innate yearning for beauty, goodness and truth. This is a reflection of the divine, God’s mark on each person! This common aspiration is the basis for a sound and correct notion of morality, which is always centred on the person. Yet men and women can turn towards goodness only of their own free will, for “human dignity requires them to act out of a conscious and free choice, as moved in a personal way from within, and not y their own blind impulses or by exterior constraint” (Gaudium et Spes). The goal of education is to guide and support the development of the freedom to make right decisions, which may run counter to widespread opinions, the fashions of the moment, or forms of political and religious ideology. This is the price of building a culture of peace!

Address to Government and National Leaders, Lebanon, Sept 15, 2012

Reflection – Well, meanwhile this week in Ontario a government cabinet minister declared that the Catholic school system will no longer be allowed to teach that human life is sacred from conception to natural death.

Ontario recently passed a sweeping ‘anti-bullying’ law, the primary effects of which seem to be that the Catholic school system can no longer teach Catholic sexual morality and now, fundamental Catholic values of respect for human life. Apparently, the law of the land now in Ontario is that no one is allowed to be a bully… except the government.

The effect of this law, and this approach to civil society, is not an education in peace and tolerance. Children are actually being educated in power politics. The real lesson of the day, class, is that whoever seizes the reigns of power gets to control the speech and ultimately the lives of others.

This is not peace; this is tyranny. This is incipient fascism. Those of my blog readers who do not like my habit of using that word… well, you don’t live in Ontario! Count your blessings.

The Pope’s words here are very telling, very important. A true society of peace and tolerance requires, demands, a commitment to freedom of speech and conscience. People must be allowed to freely grapple with competing view and voices in order to freely choose the true, the good, the beautiful.

Some counter the Pope’s words by pointing out that the Catholic Church has not exactly been renowned in its history for its commitment to freedom of thought and conscience. There is  some truth to this, yes. But that actually makes his words that much stronger. Basically, the Catholic Church has a long history of mistaken policy about religious freedom and the coercion of conscience. We have been down that road and paid a heavy price for it (essentially, the Protestant reformation). We have also repeatedly apologized for it, not that anyone noticed or remembers.

Disallowing the Catholic voice calling for religious freedom is like discounting what a recovering drug addict has to say about cocaine and meth because, ‘well, he did it!’ Yes, he did, and so he knows where it leads, right?

There is a pernicious and dangerous idea growing in the formerly Christian nations of Europe and North America that peace and tolerance require the suppression of speech and the squelching of minority views. It is like we believe human beings cannot bear to be exposed to differing opinions. This is not a path of peace, but a path to a power struggle to the end—whoever wins gets to suppress everyone else’s views.

Peace and tolerance require education in virtue and character. We need to be strong enough that we don’t fly into a homicidal rage or collapse with the vapors when someone tells us abortion is wrong, or that abortion is right, that marriage is between a man and a woman or that marriage is whatever the government decided it to be last week, that contraception is a grave moral evil or that contraception is the best thing that ever happened to women.

We need to have some back bone here – all sorts of people think all sorts of things, and the only truly peaceful society is one is which we all get to have our say and teach our children what we believe. Otherwise, the goose-stepping jackboots have arrived at our door step and we appear to have invited them in and offered them a cup of tea.

 

Well, I beg to differ, and I will continue to say so on this blog and wherever else I can. So there.

It's About People

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16.

While more evident in countries which are experiencing armed conflict – those wars so full of futility and horror – there are assaults on the integrity and the lives of individuals taking place in other countries too. Unemployment, poverty, corruption, a variety of addictions, exploitation, different forms of trafficking, and terrorism not only cause unacceptable suffering to their victims but also a great impoverishment of human potential. We run the risk of being enslaved by an economic and financial mindset which would subordinate “being” to “having.”

The destruction of a single human life is a loss for humanity as a whole. Mankind is one great family for which all of us are responsible. By questioning, directly or indirectly, or even before the law, the inalienable value of each person and the natural foundation of the family, some ideologies undermine the foundations of society. We need to be conscious of these attacks on our efforts to build harmonious coexistence. Only effective solidarity can act as an antidote, solidarity that rejects whatever obstructs respect for each human being, solidarity that supports policies and initiatives aimed at bringing peoples together in an honest and just manner…

Nowadays, our cultural, social and religious differences should lead us to a new kind of fraternity wherein what rightly unites us is a shared sense of the greatness of each person and the gift which others are to themselves, to those around them and to all humanity. This is the path to peace! This is the commitment demanded of us! This is the approach which ought to guide political and economic decisions at every level and on a global scale!

Address to Government and National Leaders, Sept 15, 2012

Reflection – The Church’s social doctrine, of which the above passage is an admirable example, does not fit into tidy political categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’, ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’

This is because the Church is concerned primarily not with ‘society’ or ‘economy’ but with human beings, with the individual, and with individuals coming together to form the family of man. And so the extremities of any political economic ideology are to be condemned. A top-heavy planned economy where a central government stifles innovation and entrepreneurial spirit is bad for individuals, does not foster the flourishing of human gifts and potential.

At the same time, a coldly laissez-faire approach where people are divided up into ‘makers’ or ‘takers’ – and their value as human beings assessed in those terms, violates human solidarity and human dignity.

As always in the case of human affairs, virtue lies in the middle, and as always in the case of politics and economics, that middle will be an elusive ever-shifting point. At the moment, speaking personally, I favour less government and more room for private personal initiative, simply because the current system doesn’t seem financially viable for too much longer. People are going to need to learn to shift for themselves when our governments actually run out of money in the next decade or two—we may as well start learning now!

But these are always prudential judgments about which we can differ, not ideological dogmas. Certainly the Church, while stating very clearly the focus and the broad principles of social and economic morality, carefully avoids giving magisterial support to specific policy questions of individual governments.

Government and economic policy is at the service of the human person and of fostering human dignity. And this dignity is expressed both in subsidiarity (people taking maximum responsibility for their own lives) and solidarity (the lively awareness that we are all one human family responsible for one another). And these principles don’t just apply to government leaders and the decisions they make, but to how you and I are going to live our lives today, the choices we make and how we treat the people around us.

In fact, if we don’t get it right—don’t allow subsidiarity and solidarity (which are fancy ways of saying justice and charity!) to guide our actions, how can we expect politicians and business leaders to do so?

Mysterious Disappearances

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16.

The wealth of any country is found primarily in its inhabitants. The country’s future depends on them, individually and collectively, as does its capacity to work for peace. A commitment to peace is possible only in a unified society. Unity, on the other hand, is not the same as uniformity. Social cohesion requires unstinting respect for the dignity of each person and the responsible participation of all in contributing the best of their talents and abilities.

The energy needed to build and consolidate peace also demands that we constantly return to the wellsprings of our humanity. Our human dignity is inseparable from the sacredness of life as the gift of the Creator. In God’s plan, each person is unique and irreplaceable.

A person comes into this world in a family, which is the first locus of humanization, and above all the first school of peace. To build peace, we need to look to the family, supporting it and facilitating its task, and in this way promoting an overall culture of life. The effectiveness of our commitment to peace depends on our understanding of human life. If we want peace, let us defend life!

This approach leads us to reject not only war and terrorism, but every assault on innocent human life, on men and women as creatures willed by God. Wherever the truth of human nature is ignored or denied, it becomes impossible to respect that grammar which is the natural law inscribed in the human heart. The grandeur and the raison d’être of each person are found in God alone. The unconditional acknowledgement of the dignity of every human being, of each one of us, and of the sacredness of human life, is linked to the responsibility which we all have before God. We must combine our efforts, then, to develop a sound vision of man, respectful of the unity and integrity of the human person. Without this, it is impossible to build true peace.

Address to leaders of government and the nation, Sept 15, 2012

Reflection – There is no peace possible without respect for human life and its sacred value. It is easy to point the finger at other countries where war and violence claim the lives of so many. It is easy to point the finger at countries where blatant violations of human rights are the order of the day: North Korea and China are always handy for that purpose.

But in Canada our esteemed parliamentarians just this week soundly defeated a motion that’s only effect would be to establish a committee to discuss when human life begins from a medical point of view. Our current law, based on cutting edge science from the reign of Queen Victoria, I believe, says that a human life begins only when the baby completely exits her mother’s body. A woman cabinet minister, Rona Ambrose, who voted in favour of the motion, is being pressured to resign for ‘betraying her sex.’ And Canada continues to have legal abortion through nine months of pregnancy, and roughly a hundred thousand human beings are legally killed each year in my beloved country as a result.

We Canadians love to vaunt ourselves as a nation of peace and of peacemakers. We especially love to preen our moral superiority to those nasty people living to the immediate south of us.

So I say to my fellow Canadians reading this: we are not morally superior to anyone. We are not a nation of peace. Every ‘Canadian value’ we love to claim for ourselves is utterly belied and nullified by abortion—we really are no better than the Germans in the 1930s who quietly went about their lives while all their Jewish neighbours mysteriously disappeared. An awful lot of my younger brothers and sisters have mysteriously disappeared in the past 40 years – 4 million is the conservative estimate.

There is no peace where human life is disregarded, despised, destroyed. And this is the state of the nation in Canada, and (let’s face it) most Canadians are just fine with it that way.

Lord have mercy on us.

 

So… who’s going to Lifechain today?

Religion and Politics

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16, excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, which  provide a much needed perspective on the challenges of the Middle East in our day.

Like the rest of the world, the Middle East is experiencing two opposing trends: secularization, with its occasionally extreme consequences, and a violent fundamentalism claiming to be based on religion. Some Middle Eastern political and religious leaders, whatever their community, tend to look with suspicion upon secularity (laïcité) as something intrinsically atheistic or immoral.

It is true that secularity sometimes reduces religion to a purely private concern, seeing personal or family worship as unrelated to daily life, ethics or one’s relationships with others. In its extreme and ideological form, secularity becomes a secularism which denies citizens the right openly to express their religion and claims that only the State can legislate on the public form which religion may take. These theories are not new. Nor are they confined to the West or to be confused with Christianity.

A healthy secularity, on the other hand, frees religion from the encumbrance of politics, and allows politics to be enriched by the contribution of religion, while maintaining the necessary distance, clear distinction and indispensable collaboration between the two spheres. No society can develop in a healthy way without embodying a spirit of mutual respect between politics and religion, avoiding the constant temptation either to merge the two or to set them at odds. The basis of a constructive relationship between politics and religion is, first and foremost, human nature – a sound understanding of man – and full respect for inalienable human rights. A sense of this correct relationship should lead to the realization that relations between the spiritual (religious) and the temporal (political) spheres should be marked by a kind of unity in distinction, inasmuch as both are called, while remaining distinct, to cooperate harmoniously in the service of the common good.

This kind of healthy secularity ensures that political activity does not manipulate religion, while the practice of religion remains free from a politics of self-interest which at times is barely compatible with, if not downright contrary to, religious belief. For this reason, a healthy secularity, embodying unity in distinction, is necessary and even vital for both spheres. The challenges raised by the relationship of politics and religion can be met patiently and courageously through a sound human and religious formation. Constant emphasis needs to be put on the place of God in personal, family and civic life, and on the proper place of men and women in God’s plan. Above all, greater prayer is required for this intention.

Post-synodal exhortation Ecclesia in Medio Oriente 29

Reflection – Benedict the teacher, at his finest here in this passage! I can’t possibly condense or elide this paragraph of the exhortation, so here it is in its fullness—a clear, simple, well-thought-out presentation of the relationship of religion and politics, Church and state.

Since the passage is long, I will write short. The document is aimed at the Middle East, but boy, do we ever need to read it in the rest of the world! There is so much confusion, and so much genuine nonsense, afoot in the land about this subject. So many people, as soon as the Church issues a statement on any public issue, scream ‘Church and State, Church and State!’ as if the mere pointing out of the moral and human implications of abortion, same-sex marriage or health care laws in itself ushers in the Taliban among us.

 

In our secularized society there is little (in my opinion) of the fusing of religion and politics, but one can see the dangers of this in the Middle East certainly. Anyhow, Pope Benedict has said all that needs saying here, and the post is long enough now, so I’ll leave you with lots of him and very little of me today (great sighs of relief are heaved…).

Peace in Our Time?

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16, excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, which  provide a much needed perspective on the challenges of the Middle East in our day.

For the sacred Scriptures, peace is not simply a pact or a treaty which ensures a tranquil life, nor can its definition be reduced to the mere absence of war. According to its Hebrew etymology, peace means being complete and intact, restored to wholeness. It is the state of those who live in harmony with God and with themselves, with others and with nature. Before appearing outwardly, peace is interior. It is blessing. It is the yearning for a reality. Peace is something so desirable that it has become a greeting in the Middle East (cf. Jn 20:19; 1 Pet 5:14). Peace is justice (cf. Is 32:17); Saint James in his Letter adds that “the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace” (3:18). The struggle of the Prophets and the reflections of the Wisdom authors were inspired by the hope of eschatological peace. It is towards this authentic peace in God that Christ leads us. He alone is its gate (Jn 10:9). This is the sole gate that Christians wish to enter.

Post-synodal exhortation Ecclesia in Medio Oriente 9

Reflection – There used to be two bumper stickers that were popular among the religious bumper sticker crowd. One of them read, “If you want peace, work for justice,” the other, “If you want peace, pray the rosary.” As it happens, we once had two guests staying at Madonna House who each had one of those bumper stickers on his car, parked alongside each other in our parking lot.

It was actually a good little catechesis on peace, as both messages are quite true. And the Pope shows us here exactly what binds the bumper stickers together in a common truth. Peace is harmony, peace is integrity. We are made for harmony with God and with one another. Harmony with God comes through prayer and the interior surrender of our hearts to Him, a surrender that Our Lady especially helps us to accomplish. Pray the rosary!

Harmony with one another comes from all our relationships being as they should. In this world there is so much that is not what it should be, and we must work as we are able, as we have light to do, to amend that. Work for justice!

So today we have truly dreadful situations brewing all over the world, but especially in the Middle East. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Syria’s bloody civil war, the rise to power of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Israel’s perilous position in the midst of all this—where is peace? Is there hope for it in our life time?

Pray the rosary, work for justice. We cannot ‘fix’ Iran or Syria or Egypt. But our own hearts, at least, can be set in integrity and harmony, with God’s help. It really does come down to that old hoary question: are you part of the problem or part of the solution? If I decide that I’m really in favour of killing all the people who (in my view) are causing problems ‘over there’, then I have abandoned the path of justice. If I, surveying the world and all its woes, and my own heart and all its woes, fail to turn to God and beg his help and healing, I have abandoned the path of prayer. I am no longer a man of peace, then.

Peace is, ultimately, an eschatological concept. In this world we all have free will, and some will always choose to abandon peace for its alternative. There will always be the anguish and heartache, violence and tragedy that flow from this choice. And there will always be most difficult decisions that have to be made by governments as to proper responses to war waging and terror dealing. Peace in this world in the broad social sphere is fleeting and frail at best.

 

But peace in our hearts—this is not a strictly eschatological concept. Today, I can choose to walk the path of harmony with God and with neighbour. Pray the rosary and work for justice, today. It is not an easy path, not without its sacrificial element, but it is a path open to each of us, today. What path will you and I walk, today?

Our Bloody God

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16, excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, which  provide a much needed perspective on the challenges of the Middle East in our day.

It is moving for me to recall my journeys to the Middle East. As a land especially chosen by God, it was the home of Patriarchs and Prophets. It was the glorious setting for the Incarnation of the Messiah; it saw the raising of the Saviour’s cross and witnessed the resurrection of the Redeemer and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Traversed by the Apostles, saints and a number of the Fathers of the Church, it was the crucible of the earliest dogmatic formulations. Yet this blessed land and its peoples have tragically experienced human upheavals. How many deaths have there been, how many lives ravaged by human blindness, how many occasions of fear and humiliation! It would seem that there is no end to the crime of Cain (cf. Gen 4:6-10 and 1 Jn 3:8-15) among the sons of Adam and Eve created in God’s image (cf. Gen 1:27). Adam’s transgression, reinforced by the sin of Cain, continues to produce thorns and thistles (cf. Gen 3:18) even today. How sad it is to see this blessed land suffer in its children who relentlessly tear one another to pieces and die! Christians know that only Jesus, who passed through sufferings and death in order to rise again, is capable of bringing salvation and peace to all who dwell in your part of the world (cf. Acts 2:23-24, 32-33). Him alone, Christ, the Son of God, do we proclaim! Let us repent, then, and be converted, “that sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19-20a).

Post-synodal exhortation Ecclesia in Medio Oriente 8

Reflection – Ecclesia in Medio Oriente is a lengthy document, and I won’t be able to do more on this blog than touch on a few paragraphs of it. It is worth reading, though, for anyone who wants to really delve into the Pope’s and the Church’s vision and program for this troubled area of the world. With so many loud and bellicose voices calling out for aggressive interventions in these lands, or the cold calculus of Realpolitik and protection of economic interest, or at best a wholly secular vision of tolerance and human rights unlikely to persuade many in this most religious of all regions, it is good to consider this other voice, this other perspective of faith.

The Pope highlights here the tragic irony of this land which is so much the locus of God’s biblical action, so much the cradle of monotheism, the revelation of the God of Israel become the God of all people in Jesus Christ, which has been so torn by violence and hatred, war and death. He points out that this very irony, this terrible clash between light and darkness, love and violence, is only resolved in Jesus Himself and his conquering of violence and death by love.

It seems to me, not called to live in the Middle East, that this same dynamic appears in big and small ways in every human life. There is God and his revelation, there is love and its work in our lives, there is all manner of good and beautiful things given and unfolding in each human life. And then there is the other thread of our being, thickening and thinning in turn, blood red and pitch dark alternately, of violence and hatred and death, selfishness and coldness and alienation.

The two merge together, weave in and out, co-exist against all seeming possibility. The life of God and the death of sin, the victory of love and the persistent negation of that victory by selfish cold hatred. It may appear in our lives with dramatic soul-shaking intensity or more insidiously in the quiet working out of the heart’s intentions, but appear in our lives it does.

We are all the Holy Land. We are all this place of God’s revelation and human darkness, of God’s assent to man and man’s refusal to God. We are all this soil bearing the bloody footprints of God in Christ and the bloody footprints of Cain. And it is Jesus, our bloody God, who is our sole hope in this holy land of the world, this holy land of our hearts. Jesus, the mercy of God who penetrates to the innermost and outermost reaches of human sin, darkness, failure, with the inexhaustible power of divine love and life. Ecclesia in Medio Oriente orients all of us in the midst of life to the hope of the Church, and that hope is Christ.

Here and Now

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16, excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, which  provide a much needed perspective on the challenges of the Middle East in our day.

Ecclesia in Medio Oriente makes it possible to rethink the present in order to look to the future with the eyes of Christ. By its biblical and pastoral orientation, its invitation to deeper spiritual and ecclesiological reflection, its call for liturgical and catechetical renewal, and its summons to dialogue, the Exhortation points out a path for rediscovering what is essential: being a follower of Christ even in difficult and sometimes painful situations which may lead to the temptation to ignore or to forget the exaltation of the cross.

It is here and now that we are called to celebrate the victory of love over hate, forgiveness over revenge, service over domination, humility over pride, and unity over division. In the light of today’s Feast, and in view of a fruitful application of the Exhortation, I urge all of you to fear not, to stand firm in truth and in purity of faith. This is the language of the cross, exalted and glorious!

This is the “folly” of the cross: a folly capable of changing our sufferings into a declaration of love for God and mercy for our neighbor; a folly capable of transforming those who suffer because of their faith and identity into vessels of clay ready to be filled to overflowing by divine gifts more precious than gold (cf. 2 Cor 4:7-18).

This is more than simply picturesque language: it is a pressing appeal to act concretely in a way which configures us ever more fully to Christ, in a way which helps the different Churches to reflect the beauty of the first community of believers (cf. Acts 2:41-47: Part Two of the Exhortation); in a way like that of the Emperor Constantine, who could bear witness and bring Christians forth from discrimination to enable them openly and freely to live their faith in Christ crucified, dead and risen for the salvation of all.

Address upon signing the post-synodal exhortation Ecclesia in Medio Oriente, St. Paul’s Basilica, Harissa, Sept 14, 2012

Reflection – ‘It is here and now that we are called to celebrate the victory of love over hate, forgiveness over revenge, service over domination, humility over pride, and unity over division.’ This is the meaning of the triumph of the Cross.

If we do not celebrate thus, we are at best saying that the Cross promises a future triumph—in the eschaton all shall be made well; then and only then can we love and live as we should. Here and now we are stuck in the world of Realpolitik and domination, factions and ambition. Somewhere else, sometime else, in some other place and mode of being, all this nice Cross stuff will prevail, but not here.

Few people consciously think this, but oh so many, I wager, live from it. It is fundamentally a Gnostic understanding of the Cross. Gnosticism identifies salvation with the flight from this world and its evil ways into some other elevated level of being. The world as we know it is inherently and irredeemably corrupt—getting out of it intact is our only hope. If the Cross merely holds out for us a promise that somewhere else we can love as we are loved and live a life of totality for God, then here and now there is no triumph, no victory, no resurrection.

This is not our Christian faith. Here and now Jesus is triumphant over the world. Here and now the grace and light of Jesus is penetrating this world and its darkness, healing this world and its brokenness, transforming the world and its lovelessness. The folly of it is that we only enter this transforming grace by surrendering to its demands, and only learn the deep wisdom of doing so after we have made that surrender. Beforehand, it looks like pure madness.

But this is it: here and now the grace of Christ is operating through the Church to extend his victory—the victory of love—to all corners of the world. The Pope is addressing the Church in the Middle East here, but it is a message that resonates for all of us. Here and now, here and now, here and now—the Cross is triumphant here and now, or it is not triumphant at all. And that is the enduring challenge of faith for Christians at all times and in all places. Do I believe this?

The Blood of the Martyrs

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16, excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, which  provide a much needed perspective on the challenges of the Middle East in our day.

Providentially, this event takes place on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, a celebration originating in the East… A month from now we will celebrate the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the appearance to Constantine of the Chi-Rho, radiant in the symbolic night of his unbelief and accompanied by the words: “In this sign you will conquer!”… It seems to me that the Post-Synodal Exhortation can be read and understood in the light of this Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and more particularly in the light of the Chi-Rho, the two first letters of the Greek word “Christos”.

 

Reading it in this way leads to renewed appreciation of the identity of each baptized person and of the Church, and is at the same time a summons to witness in and through communion. Are not Christian communion and witness grounded in the Paschal Mystery, in the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ? Is it not there that they find their fulfilment? There is an inseparable bond between the cross and the resurrection which Christians must never forget. Without this bond, to exalt the cross would mean to justify suffering and death, seeing them merely as our inevitable fate.

 

For Christians, to exalt the cross means to be united to the totality of God’s unconditional love for mankind. It means making an act of faith! To exalt the cross, against the backdrop of the resurrection, means to desire to experience and to show the totality of this love. It means making an act of love! To exalt the cross means to be a committed herald of fraternal and ecclesial communion, the source of authentic Christian witness. It means making an act of hope!

Address upon signing the post-synodal exhortation Ecclesia in Medio Oriente, St. Paul’s Basilica, Harissa, Sept 14, 2012

Reflection – Once again (and I do hate to constantly rave about him like some star-struck fanboy), the Pope does it! In a few short sentences, written in language anyone can understand with relative ease, he sketches out the very essence and sum total of Christian life. Faith, hope, and love, in grounding our life in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, and from that grounding offering our life with him to the Father for the world.

He just puts it so very, very well. And he puts it so very, very well over and over again, and has done so all his life. When Pope Benedict dies, if he ends up being canonized (I vote yes to that!) he will surely be the patron saint of writers—he’s so very, very good at it.

Of course it bears reflecting that the document he is signing and the Christian community he is addressing are being called to live out this faith, hope, and love in the most difficult and extreme circumstances possible. There are many Christian martyrs in the Middle East today. Many others have fled their ancestral homelands in the face of growing violence and hatred against the Christian presence there. So his words about the cross and the resurrection being intrinsically joined resonate with particular intensity.

It is one thing to say this in the relative comfort and plenty of North America or Europe. We may have our problems in life, but being killed by a mob is not (usually, so far) one of them. I have never had to ‘flee’ anywhere, for any reason. We must, we really must pray for our brothers and sisters in places like Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan (not in the Middle East, but very real persecution there, too).

And we must, we really must, come to grips with this same call to faith, hope, love, to laying our lives down through, with, and in Christ. Nobody is killing us in North America and Europe for our faith, yet. It could happen, you know. But meanwhile, even if we’re not dying for Christ, the call now is to live for him, to take very seriously the demands of the Gospel and commit our lives to those demands with intensity and purpose.

 

Otherwise, you know, nobody will believe us, nobody take us seriously. The blood of martyrs is the seedbed of Christians; even without literal martyrdom we can choose to ‘shed our blood’ by total dedication and commitment to the task of love and the path of the Gospel. I would suggest that there is no other way to proclaim Christ to the world, no other way for love to conquer and the Cross of Christ to be triumphant in our day.

The Arab Spring

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16, when at great risk to his own personal safety, the Pope went to the Middle East and spoke a word there of peace, reconciliation, and the dignity of the human person. I am excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, so as to provide a much needed deeper perspective on this most anguished issue of our day.

In itself, the Arab spring is a positive thing: it is a desire for greater democracy, greater freedom, greater cooperation and a revived Arab identity. This cry for freedom, which comes from a young generation with more cultural and professional formation, who seek greater participation in political and social life, is a mark of progress, a truly positive development that has been hailed by Christians too.

Of course, bearing in mind the history of revolutions, we know that this important and positive cry for freedom is always in danger of overlooking one aspect – one fundamental dimension of freedom – namely tolerance of the other, the fact that human freedom is always a shared freedom, which can only grow through sharing, solidarity and living side by side according to certain rules.

This is always the danger, and it is the danger in this case too. We must do all we can to ensure that the concept of freedom, the desire for freedom, goes in the right direction and does not overlook tolerance, the overall social fabric, and reconciliation, which are essential elements of freedom.

Hence the renewed Arab identity seems to me to imply also a renewal of the centuries-old, millennia-old, coexistence of Christians and Muslims, who side by side, in mutual tolerance of majority and minority, built these lands and cannot do other than live side by side. I therefore think it important to recognize the positive elements in these movements and to do all we can to ensure that freedom is correctly conceived and corresponds to growth in dialogue rather than domination of one group over others.

Interview with reporters on flight to Lebanon, Sept 14, 2012

Reflection – Some might argue that the Pope is being a dreamer here. Clearly, within the Arab spring movement are strong elements of intolerance, radical Islamic hegemony, and in fact a net loss of freedom in these nations.

The Pope, it seems to me, is appealing to the consciences, the better angels, the moderate and moderating elements present in all the nations of the Middle East. And he is laying out, with great respect and care, a positive vision of life that can, should, and in fact does appeal to people of good will of all or no religion.

‘Human freedom is always a shared freedom’ – this is the key element, and one which those of us not living in the Arab world must take to heart, too. Once violence becomes the order of the day, no one is really free.

The rioting mob is just as much trapped in its own energy of hate as are the victims it claims. The leaders manipulating the mob end up, almost always, to be either its victims when it turns on them or its slaves, pandering to the demands of the street.

Social reform and transformation sought through violent revolution and the chaos of mob action always yields renewed tyranny. This is true regardless of the religion and culture of the people involved. Human freedom requires tolerance and justice.

People will say, ‘Oh, but Muslims just don’t see it that way, so there’s no use presenting this.’ I don’t agree, and neither does Pope Benedict. And we have to try, and keep trying to build bridges of truth, trust, friendship, respect with all people. If a bridge gets burned down, build another. If that one is blocked by rubble, build another. This is what Christians do. Extra miles, other cheeks, giving of tunics and shirts—all that good stuff. Violence begets violence begets violence. It is love that will heal the world, and love starts nowhere else but with you and me today and the choices we make today.

The Falsification of Religion

The Holy Father’s  visit to Lebanon Sep 14-16 was an extraordinary moment in the current crisis in the Middle East, one almost entirely ignored by the secular media. At great risk to his own personal safety, the Pope went to the Middle East and spoke a word there of peace, reconciliation, and the dignity of the human person. For the next while on the blog, I will be excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, so as to provide a much needed deeper perspective on this most anguished issue of our day.

Fundamentalism is always a falsification of religion. It goes against the essence of religion, which seeks to reconcile and to create God’s peace throughout the world. Therefore the task of the Church and of religions is to undertake a purification – a lofty purification of religion from such temptations is always necessary. It is our task to illumine and purify consciences and to make it clear that every person is an image of God. We must respect in the other not only his otherness, but also, within that otherness, the essence we truly have in common as the image of God, and we must treat the other as an image of God. So the essential message of religion must be against violence – which is a falsification of it, like fundamentalism – and it must be the education, illumination and purification of consciences so as to make them capable of dialogue, reconciliation and peace.

Interview with reporters on flight to Lebanon, Sept 14, 2012

Reflection – ‘Religion causes violence. Religion causes wars.’ This is the standard answer given for rejecting religion in our day. Aside from its dubious historical basis (yes, some violence and some war has been done in the name of religion… but plenty of violence and war have been done for money, too, and I don’t see too many people renouncing that!), this claim is ably addressed here by Pope Benedict.

He grants its proper legitimacy—violence and hatred can emerge from religion, as they can emerge from anything we care deeply about—but are alien to its essence. They falsify religion, and always and everywhere are to be purged from authentic religious sentiment.

Secular people get nervous about religion and its absolutism. God has an absolute claim on our lives, our wills, our whole being. No human authority is higher than the authority of God. Before I am a Canadian or a Lemieux or any other human affiliation, I am a Roman Catholic Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ, and this lays a claim on me that supersedes every other claim. All of this I firmly believe.

To the secular person, this is a recipe for fanaticism and sets the stage for all sorts of pathological behaviours: violence, hatred, murder even. But here’s the crucial point: the God to whom I owe absolute allegiance and unhesitating obedience is a loving Father. He loves every creature he has made and bids me, commands me, to love them as well.

This God who has an absolute right to demand everything of me, my very life if He so desires it, tells me in his Word that every human being is made in His image and likeness. Every human being is a precious gift, a work of art, a walking revelation of this same God.

The question is not whether or not we can have too much religion, as if faith and spirituality are good things as long as they are kept in balance with other good things. Rather, the question is, do we have enough religion, and does the religion we have go deep enough, ascend high enough, extend broadly enough, penetrate every atom of creation enough.

When religion does not expand to its fullest realization, it tends towards fundamentalism, which is to say, religion reduced to an ideology, to a program, to some kind of extension of my being, my security, my place in the world. And of course a religion that is an ideology quickly devolves into violence, war, killing—the whole sad history of bad religion in the world.

 

In the days ahead, Pope Benedict on this blog will lay out over and over his vision of humanity and God and the path to peace and reconciliation in the world. I hope you will all join me and him as we walk this path over the next week or so.