To Fox News on Pope Francis: Every Disagreement Is Not a War

Adam Shaw, an editor for FoxNews.com, a self-identified Catholic who writes about Anglo-American and Catholic issues, posted to Fox News’ site last week his take on Pope Francis and capitalism, Pope Francis' War on Aspiration.

Here follows my response to Mr. Shaw.  Fox’s site doesn’t allow for comments, so you won’t see it there.  But I did send it to Mr. Shaw as an e-mail.  I have yet to receive a response.

In your post, you say, "The pope’s snub of the struggle for prosperity is a typically derisive attitude toward the American quest for self-development, and an attitude that is often encountered among rich European liberals, or, in this case, clergymen who have not had to work to provide a better life for their families."

While your next paragraph clarifies that you focus on the family part (as opposed to the "Clergymen who have not had to work" part), the facts suggest otherwise when it comes to whether this pope 'had to work' or not, knows privation or not:

1.  The Pope was born in the 1930's.
2.  He has described his own family's loss of everything during that time, in which his own father had no money and no job prospects.
3.  He worked as a janitor and a bouncer, as well as a chemical factory worker before entering seminary.

Not a Catholic myself, I am no defender of the Pope as pope.  But to dismiss his thoughts and views because he does not have children to support, while perhaps noteworthy, is not dispositive.  Even you do not think so, or you would not study the teachings of anyone who did not share your own life experiences, which would mean that you could not be a Christian, Jesus himself having not had (at least to our knowledge) a family himself.

Did he have 'credentials' necessary to speak about that which he did not know from personal experience?  The problem I see is in your logic more than in your own personal conclusions.  Agree with him; disagree with him, but it's problematic, I think, to dismiss Pope Francis because he does not have the life experiences you deem necessary from which to draw.

You then accuse him of 'blundering in', implying that his writings on capitalism, socialism and poverty arise in a vacuum of ignorance.

Consider, please, that the very dismissal you accuse him of you do yourself:  ignoring his context as you say he has ignored yours.  This pope is a man of South America.  Liberation theology, coming specifically out of the Central and South American context, did not arise in a vacuum.  It arose out of the context of massive exploitation of the peoples there economically, socially, politically and spiritually.  This pope speaks the language of liberation theology, a theology that is explicitly about experience.  His people have experienced capitalism first hand in a radically different way that we living in North America have.  It is from that context that he makes his conclusions.  They need not be yours.  But dismissive insults do little to further the dialogue.

Further along, you state, "Yet it is those evil capitalist Catholics who pay for the churches, fund the hospitals, the schools, the soup kitchens and everything else that allows the Church to actually help the poor."

I have to admit that one stunned me.  Having visited Catholic churches around the world, I have observed every stripe of believer, from every type of country with every type of government, contributing to the church and its work.  That includes 'capitalist Catholics', but it also includes non-capitalist Catholics.  To infer that somehow, the Catholics of the United States (which was how I 'heard' what you said) are THE source of the wealth and largess of the Catholic church is to (a) ignore history -- a whole lot of that wealth is compounding interest on the investments of centuries and (b) succumb to the pride of the wealthy -- where would you be without me?  (as a citizen in these United States, I consider myself to be one of the wealthy, so I'm speaking from inside the ball park here).

Finally, your closing quote, "Francis must stop making broad judgmental statements about those striving for success and bring himself back into conformity with Catholic social teaching and reality."  makes me smile -- sadly, but smiling I am.

'Francis must . . . bring himself back into conformity with Catholic social teaching' -- what on earth are you talking about?  I, for one, would really like to know.  You're surely not referring to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement.  Or the Nuns on the Bus.  Or the Berrigan brothers.  Or Oscar Romero.  Or Gutierrez.  Or Lech Walesa.  Or St. Francis himself.  Or Claire.  Or virtually any of the medieval monastics, who themselves eschewed wealth.  So really, what 'teaching' are you referring to?

You call the pope back to 'reality'.  What I hear (and this is speculation on my part, admittedly) is a young man in a capitalistic country who feels personally attacked by the words of the principal spiritual as well as earthly leader of his faith.

As a person of faith myself, might I offer some unsolicited advice (trust me, it's biblical):  when something said by another of faith makes me angry or uncomfortable, my first steps should not be to tell them why they're wrong.  My first steps should be self-examination (think plank and mote here), as I ask myself why these words spark such a negative response in me and seek out my own fault.  It's perhaps the hardest thing for any human being, including we Christians to do:  to intentionally engage in a wee dose of humility.

Because you are a fellow Christian and because you have such a broad public venue for your own thoughts and musings, I beseech you to do that work first.  It might just take you to a different place.

I know it smacks of pride on my part to presuppose that you haven't prayed, meditated, reflected, listened, etc. before coming to and publishing these thoughts of yours.  I make that inference based not on what you said, but based on what you didn't say, for you did not say anything about his context, except in dismissive tones.  You did not say anything about the southern (hemisphere) context out of which he comes.  You did not acknowledge the journey, let alone the autonomy and context, of the other.

I pray that in future, you will.

Yours in Christ,
Beth Pyles

[And what I didn't say then]  This should have been the main point rather than a post-script.  My lapse.

Living in the United States and having a job, family or no family to support, puts you and I ahead of a healthy percentage of the world's population.  It is, may I gently suggest, a bit presumptuous for either you or I to speak 'on behalf of'' the poor or identify ourselves as such, as you at least implicitly do when you refer to your challenges in providing for your family.  That is not to say you don't have challenges.  It is to say that those challenges are nowhere near the challenges of poverty and it is less than honest to say or think that they are.  That life may be difficult does not make one a victim.  That life's difficulties are unjust and threaten to take away life itself does.

Alas, and not surprising, a quick Google search revealed no quotes, comments, articles, blog posts, or analyses of Pope Francis' take on economics by anyone who is actually poor.  I wonder what they make of your Pope?

White Like Me

Reading Jamie Utt’s blog post, "That's Racist Against White People!" A Discussion on Power and Privilege, I come again, particularly in the comments discussion, to the place of curiosity about one of the many things that make us human beings different, each from the other.  Why do some folk, white like me, receive information about white privilege with a reaction of defensiveness, hostility and anger and others do not?  Why do some externalize the message and some internalize it?  What makes the difference in our ability or inability to hear, to listen, to be changed or to reject out-of-hand, to become more entrenched?

Utt’s interaction with a FB friend is instructive: they made progress when the conversation could be turned, even a little, from a direct discussion about ‘them’ and ‘us’ to a conversation about ‘us’, all of ‘us’.  So maybe it’s as simple as feeling included.

Yet I find even that problematic.

Long ago in a group discussion, a loving, sincere, good, young white woman commented, "but everyone's been oppressed in some way".  My thought then and now is that this point of view is a part of the problem of the well-meaning – no – everyone has not been oppressed.  To say everyone has is to say we're all in the same boat oppression-wise, which is just one logical step away from saying no one is oppressed (or perhaps better, since 'it's' happening to us all, what are we to do?)

To claim that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to oppression is to make meaningless any desire or effort to challenge systems that benefit one group at the expense of another.  In Jesus world where I (at least try to) live, that's just not on.  I cannot benefit from the pushing down of others and call it good or even just the way it is (the last refuge of moral bankruptcy).  In Jesus world, it's my job to know and to work to change, or at a bare minimum, not lie and deny.

And before we white folk cry foul, we might do well to spend a little quiet time in prayer asking God to reveal to us the ways in which we profit and benefit from the treatment and mistreatment of others who are not white in our time and place (the old adage about walking in someone else's shoes requires the thoughtful, deliberate, intentional exercise of our moral imagination).

If you think it’s not a problem, consider former Senator Jim Webb’s book, Born Fighting, where in the Foreword, he writes, “The fundamental assumption – flawed . . . was that the reins of power were unfairly held by the so-called WASPS . . . since much of American society was dominated by Caucasians of Protestant, Western European descent, then by definition all of those who, however loosely, fit this category were assumed to have shared a presumptive advantage . . .”, a position he condemns.  Senator Webb cannot accept that his ancestors, some of whom may have been dirt poor, had it better than the slaves.  I understand the crushing poverty of the Appalachias.  But you cannot compare situations in one narrow aspect and call it fair.  Slaves and indentured servants were not the same: indentured servants had a certain future that slaves did not – freedom.  And indentured servants did not have their mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children sold and forcefully removed from them.  And with the importation of slaves from Africa, white indentured servants became a higher class of worker.

Senator Webb, whose Scots-Irish ethnicity I share, misses the crucial point when it comes to black-white dynamics in these United States: no matter how bad we may have had it, we chose those paths, we and our ancestors.  With the exception of the imprisoned or impressed, no matter how poor or disadvantaged, we chose to come here.  And we were free to choose whether to remain or move on, as his book later points out in terms of those who migrated further west.  More plainly put: we started out white.  And no matter how much we want to cringe away from the reality of it, it is a disadvantage to be black in the United States.  It was in the 1600's.  It is today.  Even for the poorest among us, to start out not-black is to start out several steps ahead in virtually every aspect of our collective life.  And it does not negate the struggles of my people to admit it.

So how do we white folk talk about this?  What do we do?  How do we ‘give back’ our privilege, our edge?  Should we?  Should we even want to?  Those are all fair, if tough, questions.  But we’ve got to begin from the place where we recognize and acknowledge that we have an edge, an advantage, that we did nothing to earn and that our ancestors and the systems they put into place that continue into today, guaranteed would flow to us and not to others.  That might be a beginning.

But fighting about whether it’s true, this thing we call white privilege?  The time for that is over.  For now is the time for the grown-ups to lead the conversation.  And grown-ups do not fight about reality.  They deal with it.

***

SIDE NOTE to Fox News and others on the usage of the word ‘cracker’ and equating that to racial slurs against black people: I’m a West Virginian, so perhaps the language just doesn’t have the same history with me as it does folk of the South (to my Northern friends – West Virginia is not a southern state).  Even so, this is what I know: if someone were to call me a cracker, I would simply think it was funny or odd.  It would have no application to me.  But whenever the ‘n – word’ is used in the United States, every black person feels the assault.  I never had to have ‘the’ talk with my children about being called crackers on the street.  I do not have reason to fear for my or my family’s safety simply because the word cracker is used in a sentence.  I do not have to go out into the world always on psychic guard against the random attack of language on my personhood.  I don’t like any name calling and try my very best not to do it.  But I’m with Mr. Utt: all names are not created equal and hurt feelings are not the same as oppression.  Both matter.  But they are not the same.  One is transitory; the other is forever.


________________________
*An obvious play on the title of John Howard Griffin’s book Black Like Me, taken from a line in the poem Dream Variations by Langston Hughes:

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.

Then rest at cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently,

Dark like me-

That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide

In the face of the sun,

Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

Till the quick day is done.

Rest at pale evening...

A tall, slim tree...

Night coming tenderly

Black like me. 

Dear Mr. Huckabee

Dear Mr. Huckabee,

As a fellow pastor, here are my problems with your analysis of the question posed to you by Nick Cavuto:

How could God let this happen?

1. Your response was to a question Mr. Cavuto did not ask.  You answered the question “why is there so much violence in our schools”.  While this may be an interesting and important conversation, it was not the question Mr. Cavuto asked.  And here’s the thing: in the immediate aftermath, his was the question that needed and needs answering.  But you wandered off course, doing real harm because those who were listening for an answer to that question were left with nothing.

2. You’re a pastor.  And you were speaking as a representative (evangelist/ambassador) for Christ yesterday, not as (or not merely as) a television commentator.  You were asked the question because of your presumed expertise on the mind and heart of God.  By failing to meet the hard questions head on, the Christ you (and I) represent on earth appears to be a dodger of the tough stuff as well.

3. Crises are not times for answers, especially pat ones.  Even if you’re right (and I do not believe you are), no one can (nor should) hear logic and analysis in such times.  What they, what we, seek; nay, what we require, is comfort.

4. “I don’t know” is an acceptable and honest answer.  Allowing the demands of prime time to push you into a sound-bite response is dishonorable to the body.

Why you’re wrong in what you said.  Here’s the quote:

We ask why there’s violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability. That we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before a holy God in judgment. If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that,” said Huckabee.  He added, “Maybe we ought to let (God) in on the front end and we wouldn’t have to call him to show up when it’s all said and done at the back end. Fox News Insider

1. You’re factually wrong in the claimed link between the alleged removal of God from school and this attack.  The shooter was not a school child as in Columbine.  Nor was he an employee or former employee of the school.  He invaded the school as a very unwelcome intruder into its routine and tranquility and presumptive safe haven status.

2. Maybe you have some insider knowledge as a professional journalist, but the information reported yesterday when you were making your remarks included nothing about the young man who did this in terms of his own faith (or lack thereof).  He may have been raised in church.  He may have attended a church school.  At the time of your remarks, that simply was not known.  You made assumptions about him.  They may prove in time to be correct; they may not.

3. Theologically, I am troubled with the premise that the claimed absence of God from any sphere of life creates trouble because we forget the eternal consequences of our actions.  Is this really what we have on offer to the world – a seat in hell if we’re bad?  Isn’t the message of grace in the here and now the gift of changed-ness?  Of being more than we were before?  Of being transformed by God’s grace into someone and something we never before thought possible?  And isn’t the worldly challenge one we have to grapple with – the very real truth that Christians are too often indistinguishable from others in their/our behaviors?  That we too do heinous evil?  That we too fall short?  That our fruit is often rotten?

4. You cannot be the man you are and claim the erasure of faith and faith discussions from the public square, for you are Exhibit A for the case that this simply is not true.  You are a very public figure, paid to offer up just such opinions on the public airwaves.  You are arguing against a straw man.

5. I would say this to all sides: when a tragedy occurs and your first response links the tragedy to your own views of what’s wrong with the world, it probably says more about you than it does the world.  You regret the decision to eliminate verbal prayer from schools; thus this event must be linked to that absence.  Others decry the absence of gun control; thus this event must be linked to that absence (and given that the instrumentality was in fact a gun, they have the better argument – although Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine makes a good case that something else is at work in the national psyche of the US by contrasting our gun behavior to that of Canadians, who have similar access to such weaponry, but nothing near our levels of gun deaths).  For my own part, I do not know what the causes were.  I’m not sure that the young man who apparently did this deed even knew himself; that level of awareness generally requires more clarity of thought and judgment than his acts would indicate he possessed – but I am speculating.  The fact is I really do not know.  None of us do.  And we may never know why.

Finally, to Mr. Cavuto’s question, which deserves honest reflection and response.

How could God let this happen?

I do not know the mind and heart of God sufficiently to claim special insight into divine motivations.  So the best answer I have is I don’t know.

But this is not a question demanding of an answer grounded in reason and logic.  This is the cry of the human heart that will not be comforted.  This is Rachel weeping for her children who are no more.

And the answer I have – indeed, it is the only answer I have – to that question, that keening cry, is God’s comfort and the sure and certain knowledge that God weeps with us and that the temple curtain was rent yet again in God’s own cosmic mourning, for these were God’s children before they were ours.

But if the why question demands more attention, this is all I’ve got.  William Slone Coffin once said (I paraphrase), “when you ask God why he let something happen, have you ever considered that God is asking you the same question?”

The first time I read that, I felt as if I were gut-punched.  The truth of it slammed me against the place there is no running from: God does send help – all the time – God sends us.  And we fail.  We fail each other.  We fail ourselves.  We fail God.

My own anger yesterday was directed not at God but at us – the collective us – humanity.

In terms of God’s own responsibility, when some time has passed, those seeking the answer might read Elie Wiesel’s writings on the rabbinic trial of God in the concentration camp.  Finding God guilty of crimes against humanity, the rabbis adjourned and went for their evening prayers.  These were real people experiencing real suffering of epic proportions.  This seeming paradox was the only answer they had.

The fact is that all people of faith will wrestle with the question of how evil and tragedy can occur in a world created by a God claimed to be loving and protective of the divine creation.  And the fact is that there is no answer grounded in logic and reason that will suffice.  How could it?  What possible answer could there be in human understanding that would satisfy a grieving parent?  For my own part, as a person of faith, every answer I can imagine always leaves me responding, “But you’re God!  You can do better than that!”

And in my own heart, God responds, “But you’re humanity.  So can you.”

We’ve failed each other, it seems.

Where we go from there, who can say?

BethRant7: When is Enough Enough? On Begging, Biographies & Black Fridays

On Begging Every year, without fail, I receive a phone call from a student worker at an educational institution I attended, asking for alumni support (translate: money).  And every year, I have the same question: when is enough enough?

When will the school have reached enough money in hand to not ask for more?  When will its substantial (and I do mean substantial) endowments, investments, and assets be enough?  Really what I am asking is why isn’t what you have already enough?

I am usually misunderstood – while owning that the school does have a very handsome portfolio, there is always another project, a new vision, that requires more – always more.

Don’t get me wrong: I treasure my time spent there; I value the education I received; and I earnestly desire that others may have the same experience as I.  But truly, I want to know: is there a goal of money on hand that will suffice?  That will say we do not have to ask for more, because we have enough and more than enough?

On Biographies Reading my current issue of Smithsonian magazine, I run into a book review of yet another biography on General Custer.

Guidon lists 846 books dedicated in whole or in part to Custer, including McMurtry’s latest entry, the book treated in the Smithsonian review.

I am sure Custer is interesting.  But 846 books’ worth?  Really?  Hasn’t everything to be said about Custer and his ignominious place in the history of the United States been given its well-more-than obligatory 15 minutes of fame?

Aren’t 846 books more than enough to satisfy even Custer’s reputed vainglorious desire for even posthumous fame?

Can’t we move on?

Isn’t enough enough?

On Black Friday If you are ever tempted to doubt the efficacy of marketing (translate propaganda), of advertising’s impact on human behavior, behold Black Friday – best done from a distance, I have to say.

Photo from Doug's Foggiest Ideas

Watch on your television screen the melee at your local Wal-Mart.  Observe shopping turned into a competitive, full-body-contact sport.

My blog profile warned you: I am a curmudgeon.  So, in all my curmudgeonliness, here goes:

(1) It’s propaganda to say that you will find great bargains on Black Friday.  Samplings of goods on offer show that often the price is actually higher than at other times.

(2) It is one short step from a crowd to a mob.  People have actually been killed in the crush to buy.  While it would be sad if these were food lines for the hungry, at least it would be understandable.  But not this.  I keep a list in my head of stupid ways to die: ways I do not want to be the final word about me – ways that make people laugh at my idiocy, greed, or just plain foolishness.  Dying in a rush to buy the next new thing has to be in the top 10.

(3) Black Friday brings out the worst rather than the best in us.  It is as if we believe that we’re engaged in a holy battle when all we’re really doing is indulging our basest selves when we find we’re clinging to one end of a toy while another mother or father clings to the opposite end.  I wonder what Solomon would do with this one?

(4) Time is a divine gift.  I waste mine as much as the next person.  But we each must draw a line somewhere.  Here is one of mine: I will not meet my Maker and have to explain that I spent the gift given me wrestling other divine creations over something as insipid as a computer game, especially one whose content makes my Maker weep.

(5) Black Friday in the United States is the commercial kick-off to the Christmas season, what Christians refer to as Advent.  So I really (and I do mean really) want to know why my friends at Fox News, who can be counted on each and every year to claim that Christmas is being stolen by the government, make absolutely no noise at all about Christmas being stolen by capitalism.  Where is your outrage that your fellow entrepreneurs have taken the time set aside in the Christian calendar for the joyful reflection on the coming of Peace itself to earth and substituted that joy with the frenzy of acquisition?  Why aren’t you more frightened by this than by the removal of a creche from the local court house square?  Why don’t you see the X-Box sellers at Christmas as more dangerous than the ACLU?  I know I do.

RantEnd