Some days it seems so long ago; but I clearly remember the event. Yuri Gagarin, who died 57 years ago on March 27, 1968, was a Soviet cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) quickly announced to the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party that “Gagarin flew into space but didn’t see any God up there.” Khrushchev had a big laugh about that.

In the early 1960s the “death of God” movement was also coming into prominence. It was largely inspired by the proclamation of the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900) that “God is dead.” It was explored by a group of Christian theologians and philosophers, like the French Protestant theologian Gabriel Vahanian (1927-2012), the American Protestant theologian Thomas Altizer (1927-2018), and the American theologian and Episcopal priest Paul van Buren (1924-1988). The “death of God” theologians argued that traditional Christian concepts of God were obsolete in a modern, secular world.

In 1961 after Yuri Gagarin’s space trip, I remember reading Gabriel Vahanian’s historic book God is Dead: The Culture of our Post-Christian Era. (My parents saw the book and wondered what in heck was going through Jack’s head.)  Vahanian argued that the “death of God” happened when modern culture had lost a sense of the sacred. He argued for a transformation of a post-Christian and a post-modern culture. Vahanian – contrary to what some said later — was a true believer.

In many ways, Vahanian was echoing what Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) had expressed in his Letters and Papers from Prison. During his year and a half confinement in the Berlin Tegel military prison, Bonhoeffer questioned the role of Christianity in a “world come of age,” where human beings had lost a sense of a metaphysical God. He pondered the meaning of a “religionless Christianity.” In a note dated November 21, 1943, He wrote “My fear and distrust of ‘religiosity’ have become greater than ever.” “Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’” he wrote “do not in the least act up to it and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’” Bonhoeffer of course was reacting to all the “good Christians” who supported Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism agenda.

The central theological question of how to speak of God in a secularized and suffering world was the primary focus in the writings, after the mid-1960s, of my theological mentor, at the Catholic University in Nijmegen, Edward Schillebeeckx, OP (1914-2009). Schillebeeckx emphasized that we experience God’s love, the creative and saving presence of God’s grace, wherever human persons minister to one another, especially to the neighbor in need. “Human love,” he stressed “is an embodiment, a sacrament, of God’s love.”

Pondering the crisis of secularization in the 1960s, Schillebeeckx suggested that the death of the “God of the gaps,”as he expressed it, could be a blessing that could give birth to a more profound understanding of human responsibility for the future of human history and the cosmos. That responsibility he stressed is always undergirded and empowered by the creative presence of God. The impact of radical secularization and Western technological cultures led Schillebeeckx to seek a spirituality of hope.

The focus on God’s Spirit as the source of the human ability to “hope against hope” became even more central in the spirituality of Schillebeeckx’s writings as he turned his attention to the vast and senseless suffering in our world today. Underlying Schillebeeckx’s spirituality of hope (“grace optimism”) was the faith conviction that God holds open a future “full of hope” and that human beings are the words with which God tells the story of grace.

In 1990, Schillebeeckx wrote in his book Church: The Human Story of God that the basic experience of the first disciples after Good Friday was: “neither evil nor the cross, can have the last word. Jesus’ way of life is right and is the last word, that is sealed in his resurrection. . . Suffering and death remain absurd and may not be mystified, even in Jesus’ case; but they do not have the last word, because the liberating God was absolutely near to Jesus on the cross, as during the whole of Jesus’ career.”

Sometimes, people learn very slowly. Quite often today, I fear that God, for many people, has been turned into just a cultural artifact. Our political leaders love to say, “God bless you” but they say it the same way the check-out person at the supermarket says, “Have a good day.” Is there really any belief behind it? Too many contemporary “believers” speak and behave in ungodly ways.

Nevertheless, God is still traveling with us on our journey. But I ask how do we best think of God today? What words? What imagery? God is just as much Mother as Father. Certainly, the old Hebrew and early Christian cosmology, with God enthroned in the heavens up above Earth is a passe. Khrushchev said Gagarin did not see God in space. But Khrushchev was blinded by his own ignorance and Communist ideology.

We need spirituality. Spirituality connects people to the Divine. To the depth of Reality. It provides peace and harmony in our lives. Spirituality goes to the very essence of what Christianity is all about. Spirituality is not something added on top of our Christian life.

Spirituality should be our way of life – in lived out awareness of the Divine Presence, the Sacred, the Ground of Being, Emmanuel, God with us. There are many ways to describe the depth of Reality, just like there are many ways to describe what it means to love someone and to be loved. Some of the old images of God may no longer speak to contemporary people; but God has not abandoned us. And we should not abandon God. We simply need to reflect on better ways of conceptualizing and speaking about our experience of the Divine.

We need open minds and open hearts. Our schools, study groups, and our parishes should be centers of excellence where people speak courageously about their awareness of the Divine Presence through personal shared faith stories, through drama, music, and art. And through deep reflection. We should invite and welcome the questioners and the seekers. We need to listen to young people at the start of their adult lives and to older people, confronting their life transitions.

Regardless of our stage in the human journey, the Gospels remind us that God lives and walks with all men and women, without making distinctions. Matthew 25:34-45, for example, is truly clear: “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison, and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

As the Franciscan spiritual writer Richard Rohr (born 1943) so often said: “The presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever. You cannot not be in the presence of God. There’s no other place to be. It is we who are not present to Presence. We will make any excuse to be somewhere else than right here. Right here, right now never seems enough. It actually is, but it is we who are not aware enough yet.”

• Jack

 

 

 

 

 

The relationship between religion and politics has been and continues to be a toxic and dangerous relationship. A key U.S. player in that relationship today is Kevin Roberts and his Heritage Foundation.

Kevin D. Roberts (born 1974) is the president of the Heritage Foundation, an activist conservative political think tank, based in Washington DC. Prior to assuming his current role, Roberts was the CEO of another conservative think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank that opposes efforts to fight climate change and receives millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests.

Roberts is the architect of Project 2025, also known in 2024 as the “2025 Presidential Transition Project,” an initiative of the Heritage Foundation. It aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power under the incumbent U.S. president. It calls for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuels. It recommends abolishing the Department of Education and terminating its programs. Funding for climate research would be cut. The National Institutes of Health would be reformed along conservative principles and Medicare and Medicaid would be terminated.

Roberts, 2024 book titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, features a foreword by J.D. Vance, in which Vance praises Roberts for “articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Dawns Early Light clearly outlines the Project 2025 agenda for the United States, stressing that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Vance switched from being an atheist to being a conservative Catholic and was baptized in 2019. Vance said he was drawn to the Catholic Church’s “ancient ways.”

Project 2025 lays out what is essentially a very conservative “Christian nationalist vision” of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity. It opposes what it calls “radical gender ideology” and advocates that the government “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” To achieve this, it proposes ending same-sex marriage and removing protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual or gender identity.

Project 2025 also recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants. It proposes employing the military for domestic law enforcement and calls for immediate capital punishment of convicted offenders.

What many observers do not realize is that Kevin D. Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, has close ties to the Catholic organization Opus Dei (“Work of God”). Opus Dei has long attracted significant controversy. Criticism has centered on its secretiveness and support for authoritarian, right-wing governments. An important book about Opus Dei is Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei by the investigative journalist Robert A. Hutchison (1938). The book was published in 1997, St. Martins Press, but the most recent version came out in May 2025. I would also recommend the important book by my friend Betty Clermont The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Clarity Press, 2009).

Kevin Roberts receives regular Opus Dei spiritual guidance at the Catholic Information Center, in Washington DC, headed by an Opus Dei priest. Another Opus Dei linked U.S. Catholic is Leonard Leo (born 1965), a self-declared Opus Dei operative. He is a lawyer, judicial activist, and co-chairman of the conservative legal think tank, the Federalist Society for Law and Policy. Leo has also emerged as a key architect and funder of Project 2025, backed by billions of dollars of slush fund dark money. Leo has actually created a network of influential conservative legal groups funded mostly by anonymous donors. He assisted Chief Justice Clarence Thomas in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States by a narrow Senate majority of 52 to 48. Leonard Leo also led campaigns to support the nominations of the conservative justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. All far-right Catholics except Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic but is now a member of the Episcopal Church.

Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by the Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá (1902 – 1975). Popes Pius XII (1876 – 1958), John Paul II (1920 – 2005), and Benedict XVI (1927 – 2022) were strong supporters of Opus Dei. Josemaría Escrivá was declared a saint in 2002 by Pope John Paul II, who said Escrivá should be “counted among the great witnesses of Christianity.” Well, I find it significant that Escrivá was active in bolstering the support of Fascist regimes, including that of Francisco Franco (1936 – 1975) in Spain and Augusto Pinochet (1917 – 2006) in Chile.

Although controversial, Opus Dei remains influential within the Catholic Church. Lay people make up the majority of its membership. The remainder are secular priests under the governance of a prelate (leader) elected by specific members and appointed by the Pope. Fernando Ocáriz Braña a Catholic priest born in Paris in 1944, has been the head of Opus Dei since 2017 and he is the fourth person to head Opus Dei since its founding in 1928. Two of Opus Dei’s earlier prelates were bishops appointed by Pope John Paul II. Well known in the Vatican, Ocáriz has been an advisor to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), once known as the Holy Office, since 1986.  In 2022, Pope Francis announced that the head of Opus Dei would no longer be a bishop, but he said he has very positive sentiments about Opus Dei.

Pope Leo XIV has shown interest in Opus Dei’s statutes and maintains a positive relationship with the organization, as evidenced by his recent audience with its Prelate and his annual Mass for the founder. Opus Dei has also been working on revising its statutes as requested by Pope Francis, and these revised statutes are currently under review by the Holy See. 

Opus Dei has more than ninety-five thousand members. The current Archbishop of Los Angeles, José Horacio Gómez (born 1951) was the first numerary member of Opus Dei to be consecrated a bishop in the United States. (A numerary member of Opus Dei is a member who takes a vow of celibacy.) Archbishop Gómez was President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2019 to 2022. Another Opus Dei bishop is John Barres (born 1960) the Bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York. He is a graduate of Opus Dei’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He joined Opus Dei as priest. In general, Opus Dei bishops in the United States tend not identify as members of Opus Dei because bishops have only one superior, the pope.

The British journalist and Associate Editor at Thomson Reuters, Gareth Gore, has written a new book about Opus Dei, which came out in early October 2024: Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Gore observed recently: “Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society. For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”

Well, a lot to think about.

I conclude this week’s reflection with a quote from Sandra Day O’Connor (1930 – 2023) who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 until her retirement in 2006. O’Connor was the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. She retired from the bench in 2006 to care for her ailing husband. “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

 

 

Truth is the property of being in accord with facts or reality. Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsehood. Our problem today is that falsehood in politics and religion, and medical misinformation are being promoted as truth while the actual truth-speakers are being condemned as dangerous trouble-makers.

As I was reviewing some notes about “truth,” two quotations caught my attention. The first is from the American writer William Faulkner (1897- 1962): “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.” The other quotation is from Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), the German historian and philosopher who became interested in how the most outrageous lies get a political hold over people, ever since Nazi lies about the Jews and intellectuals drove her from Berlin in 1933 after her arrest by the Gestapo. 

Arendt wrote: “This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such people, deprived of the power to think and judge, are, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such people, you can do whatever you want.” I also recommend Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism. The most recent edition was published, very appropriately, this year in May.

Rather than making decisions on what is true or not true, many people today make decisions on what they FEEL is true or most probable. Narrow feeling perspectives replace thoughtful examination of the actual reality. In an email, for example, I asked a friend why he still strongly supports the incumbent U.S. president. His reply was polite and brief: “I just feel that God has blessed him. I feel he has been chosen by God to be president again. I trust my feelings.”

When people lose the ability to be critical observers and critical thinkers, they become unable to distinguish between verified facts and falsehoods. That becomes problematic, because they cannot recognize “the big lie.”

“The big lie” is a great distortion of truth. It was the propaganda technique, originally coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 book Mein Kampf. There he wrote: “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” Hitler stressed that if a known falsehood is repeated regularly and treated as true, “the big lie” will be taken for granted rather than critically questioned. The Fuehrer’s lies were regular and colossal.

The key question is how do we know what is true and what is not true when watching the news, observing elected officials, listening to religious speakers, or using social media? 

Coming from a family of educators, my focus is on education. My paternal grandfather “Alonzo” was a hoosier schoolmaster. As John Alonzo Dick, I have inherited not just his name but more importantly his commitment to education. But we all have a responsibility to educate.

We all need to help people develop critical thinking skills. This is an essential part of education: learning how to observe and ask critical questions. What is the source of the information? Is it a reliable source? People who spread fake news and “alternative facts” sometimes create web pages, newspaper stories, or AI-generated images that look official, but are not.

We all need to combat ignorance. As an historian and a theologian, I realized long ago that a great many church leaders need remedial historical and biblical education. They may be well-intentioned but too often what they say about church history and biblical understandings is simply out of date and not true.

We are not expected to have all the answers on our own. As we look for truth, we can turn to trusted sources for guidance. That may mean a trusted mentor, a well-informed friend, an insightful public figure respected for her or his integrity, or a respected book using primary source material. Footnotes with documentation are important.

We ought to be greatly concerned about the survival of the humanities, now being unfunded and pushed to the side. The humanities insure and safeguard how we process document and understand the human experience. We desperately need literature, art, music, and history to truly be human and to understand who we are as human beings. Most importantly, we need the humanities to experience and relate to the Sacred – the Divine.

Fact-based knowledge, critical thinking skills, historical awareness, and anchors in art, music, and literature are essential elements in maintaining a humane and humanizing life and culture.

What sources of news can one trust? A credible news report will include a variety of facts, quotes from bonafide experts, official statistics, or detailed and corroborated eye-witness accounts from people on the scene. If these are missing, one should question the report’s truth and accuracy. Does the evidence prove that something definitely happened? Or, have the facts been selected or “twisted” to back up a particular fabricated viewpoint?

Ultimately, people will come to the realization that denying the truth doesn’t change the facts. But sometimes the process goes painfully slow. I often think about the observation of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”

This week’s reflection comes a couple days early because I am busy with preparations for an important family reunion.

In Rome’s church of San Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains) not far from the Coliseum, one can find Michelangelo’s early 16^th century statue of Moses. It depicts the biblical figure with horns on his head, based on a description in chapter 34 of Exodus in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (the “Old Testament”), done in the early 4^th century by Jerome of Stridon (c.342-420), commonly known as Saint Jerome. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin between 383 and 404. He originally translated it all from Greek, but as he went on he checked his text as well with the Hebrew original. There he made a mistake, which gave us Moses with horns on his head.

There have been many creative interpretations of “Moses with horns” over the years. Some rather bizarre and some very antisemitic. Today’s biblical scholars, however, provide the best explanation.

The horns on the head of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses resulted from an incorrect translation of a text in Exodus 34, which says that Moses, as he came down from Sinai, had rays of light on his forehead. The Hebrew word karan, meaning “rays,” however was mistranslated by Jerome. He confused the Hebrew word karan with the Hebrew word keren which meant “horns.” Jerome did make some other mistakes in his Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible. Nevertheless, I find it important to affirm that Jerome’s work was a significant improvement over earlier Latin translations, collectively called the Vetus Latina.

Some well-known biblical mistranslations are still with us today. In Matthew 19:24, for example, Jesus says: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The original text in Greek had the Greek word kamilos, meaning “rope.” But an early translator misread kamilos as kamelos, meaning “camel.” The mistake has been with us for a very long time.

A translation that is still problematic is the translation of Pontius Pilate’s sign on Jesus’ cross. The Latin phrase, often abbreviated as INRI, is Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. [The letter “J” did not exist in the days of Jesus. It was created in 1524 CE by Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550), an Italian Renaissance grammarian.]

The correct English translation of Pilate’s sign is “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Judeans.” Not “King of the Jews.” There were no “Jews” in the days of Jesus. There were Hebrews. The Judeans were inhabitants of the province of Judea, and Pontius Pilate, who died in 39 CE, was the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judea for ten years. But Pontius Pilate had a hard time with the Judeans and continually did things to insult and provoke them. Calling the crucified Jesus their king was one of his provocations.

And of course, we have the more complicated mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14, which reads today as: “Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” Here the mistranslation began when the ancient Hebrew language Bible was translated, in the 3^rd century BCE, from ancient Hebrew into Greek. The Greek translation was later called the “Septuagint,” based on the Latin word septuaginta for seventy because of the belief that seventy translators had worked on the project.

The mistranslation in Isaiah 7:14 involves the ancient Hebrew word almah meaning “a young woman of marriageable age.” The word does not mean a virgin. The original text, written in Hebrew in the 8^th century BCE, was Isaiah’s prediction that the faithless Ahaz, King of Judah who reigned from 732–716 BCE, would have a son who would be more godly, i.e. Emmanuel meaning “God is with us.” His son Hezekiah, who reigned from c. 715 to 686 BCE, restored worship to the God of Israel. His reign was marked by prophetic activity, with prophets such as Isaiah and Micah delivering their messages during his time.

But when the ancient Hebrew text from Isaiah 7:14 was translated into Greek, the Hebrew word almah was mistranslated as parthenos meaning “a virgin.” Centuries later Christians interpreted the Greek text of Isaiah 7:14 as a prophetic text referring to the virginal conception of Jesus, who would be “God with us.”

Some biblical translations are basically correct but miss the nuance of the original word. I give two examples. The Greek word ekklesia originally meant “a gathering” or “a community.” In New Testament English translations, it is usually translated as “church” which does not have a community nuance but an institutional nuance. My other example is the Greek word episkopos. Usually translated as “bishop,” it originally meant an “overseer” or a “guardian.” But translating episkopos as “bishop” in biblical texts can be misleading as it carries connotations of a hierarchical structure not present in the early church. More recent translations opt for “overseer,” or “pastor” to avoid these connotations.

My main point is that it is critically important that those who study and translate the Scriptures follow what we call the historical-critical method, which investigates the origins and meaning of ancient texts in order to understand the world behind the texts and what those texts mean today. Correct translations of texts are the beginning but then one must also appreciate that biblical texts contain some history but also a variety of literary forms such as symbolism, folklore, and presumed or imagined historical scenarios. The Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke are good examples.

Over the years as a Roman Catholic historical theologian, reflecting about an historical-critical interpretation of Sacred Scripture, I have often thought about the positive actions of an earlier Pope Leo.

Leo XIII, pope from 1878 to 1903, was a welcomed breath of fresh air after his arch conservative predecessor Pius IX who was pope from 1846 to 1878.

In 1892 Pope Leo XIII authorized the École Biblique in Jerusalem, the first Catholic school specifically dedicated to the critical study of the Bible. Then in 1893, with his encyclical Providentissimus Deus, Pope Leo gave the first formal authorization for the use of historical-critical methods in biblical scholarship. He warned about the dangers of rationalism but clearly endorsed the historical-critical method is a way of studying texts, by examining their historical origins, context, and development.

In 1902, Pope Leo XIII instituted the Pontifical Biblical Commission to reshape and adapt Roman Catholic biblical studies to modern scholarship.

The last major Catholic biblical turning point came with the Second Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum (“Word of God”), promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965. Paul VI was pope from 1963 to 1978. Dei Verbum supports the use of historical-critical methods in biblical interpretation. It acknowledges the importance of understanding the historical context, literary forms, and the original author’s intent when studying the Scriptures.

And so, we study, we learn, and we grow.