Another Voice

During her early adventures in Wonderland, Alice cried out that things were becoming “curiouser and curiouser.” Her statement could be applied as well to the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, which is becoming a complex cacophony of ecclesiastical sounds. Three observations:

Stern Warnings for Americans 

Tuesday, May 17th, was the twelfth annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC. About a thousand prominent Roman Catholic clergy and lay people gathered at 7:00 am in the Marriott Marquis hotel and conference center to pray, have breakfast, and listen to Cardinal Robert Sarah, U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and Sister Constance Veit, from the Little Sisters of the Poor.  

This week, as you recall, the United States Supreme Court “vacated” all of the lower court cases and required them to reconsider the claims, brought by the Little Sisters of the Poor, that regulations promulgated by Obamacare violate their freedom of religious exercise, in light of the government’s admission that it could indeed provide contraceptive coverage, without the Little Sisters’ collaboration.  

In his address, Paul Ryan, echoed the position and concerns of the Sister Constance and her community, stressing that “religious liberty is under assault” in the United States and that the Obama administration “has shown a total misunderstanding of faith.” 

Cardinal Sarah, however, was the keynote speaker; and he was strongly condemnatory of a contemporary American culture disfigured by gender ideology and relativism. Cardinal Sarah was appointed Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments by Pope Francis in 2014. Is he also part of the “Francis effect”? 

In his address, the Cardinal said: “Sadly the advent of artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, so-called homosexual marriage, and other evils of gender idolatry will inflict even more wounds in the midst of the generation we live with.” The Cardinal warned the Prayer Breakfast group about signs of “the Evil One” in the United States: “The legalization of same-sex marriage, your beginning to accept contraception within healthcare programs, and even bathroom bills that allow men to use the women’s restroom and locker rooms.” His comments about “bathroom bills” drew applause and chuckles from his audience. 

Curing Pseudo-homosexuality 

According to a report, this week, from Religion News Service, over a period of several years, superiors of seminaries around France sent seminary students to Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a prominent French priest and therapist, to counsel them about their struggles with homosexuality. (Anatrella, as I mentioned in an early blog, was also the Vatican appointed speaker at a conference for new bishops. There he told the new bishops that they did not have to report clerical sexual abuse to civil authorities.) 

Monsignor Anatrella has long condemned homosexuality and argued that gay men cannot be ordained as priests. In 2005 he helped the Vatican, then under Pope Benedict XVI, to draft guidelines aimed at keeping gay men out of the priesthood. Around that same time, he wrote an article for L’Osservatore Romano, stating that homosexuality demonstrated “an incompleteness and a profound immaturity of human sexuality.”  

Today, Monsignor Anatrella’s former seminarian clients are coming forward with accusations that the highly-respected-at-the-Vatican monsignor therapist tried to cure their “pseudo-homosexuality” by engaging in sex acts with them. One former client, again a former seminarian, said he was counseled by Anatrella for 14 years, from 1997 to 2011. After the first few years, the client said, Anatrella began “special sessions” with him that included episodes of mutual masturbation. Curiously, in February 2016, Monsignor Anatrella was the chief organizer of a major conference on priestly celibacy, held at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.  

Women and Women Deacons in the Church 

As Jamie Manson wrote in the National Reporter this week, “(Pope) Francis’ theological imagination makes it impossible for women to achieve equal decision-making power and sacramental authority in this church. And its time we faced it.”  

Last week Pope Francis agreed to launch a commission to study the role of women deacons in the early church. Immediate press reactions greeted this with hopeful observations that the Catholic Church would soon be welcoming women to diaconate ordination. The Vatican quickly dispelled such expectations. 

What journalists failed to observe was that, in his remarks about women deacons in the early church, Pope Francis reasserted all of the old Roman Catholic theological arguments that prevent women from any kind of ordination in the Catholic Church.  

“There is no problem for a woman — religious or lay — to preach in a Liturgy of the Word…” Pope Francis said, “But at the Eucharistic Celebration there is a liturgical-dogmatic problem, because it is one celebration: the Liturgy of the Word and the Eucharistic Liturgy. There is unity between them; and he who presides is Jesus Christ. The priest or bishop who presides does so in the person of Jesus Christ. It is a theological-liturgical reality. In that situation, since women are not ordained, they cannot preside.” As Manson observes, there is still a phallic problem in the Catholic Church. Women do not have the same kind of genitalia that Jesus had.  
………
Curiouser and curiouser for sure. Reflections this week are neither anti-Catholic nor anti-Francis. They are simply expressions of serious concern. We are united in one faith, one Lord, and one baptism. I am not convinced however that everything coming from Rome these days is truly holy, catholic, and apostolic. Seriously hypocritical behavior has no place in church leadership; and everyone in church leadership, even the pope, seriously needs broad-range biblical and historical theological updating.  

Thoughtful Catholics need to think through the contemporary Catholic cacophony. They need to chart a new course for the Catholic Church. They can do that. They can speak out. They can change the conversation. They can continue to transform the venerable institution. If they fail, the eclipse of the Roman Catholic Church is sure to succeed.  

[With this week’s reflection I am shutting down my computer for a few weeks, to once again do some vacation research about Christianity in post-communist Eastern Europe. I hope to return in early July.]

I don’t believe we are now in the end times; but we are certainly living in strange times. In his 2015 article, “Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness,” the Canadian cultural critic Henry Giroux stresses that “malevolent modes of rationality” are starting to be imposed on everyone.

So far Donald Trump has alienated large numbers of Hispanic, Asian, and college-educated voters. He calls for temporarily banning Muslims from America. He is not much of a bridge-builder and supports building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. He advocates the deportation of 12 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S., people have come to represent a substantial segment of the American labor market. (Trump prefers to hire undocumented Polish workers in his enterprises.) Nevertheless, his support among likely U.S. voters has surged, and he is now running about even with Hillary Clinton. Although they themselves are the descendants of immigrants, Trump supporters strongly believe that “immigrants threaten American customs and values.”  

Whether holy or not, Trump has a lot of spirit and he knows how to fire up his supporters. His campaign appeals to their hatred, anger, bigotry, and racism. 

Some foreign Trump supporters are OK, however. According to the Associated Press, the presumed Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency has picked up some strong foreign support from India, where, this Pentecost week end, fundamentalist Hindus are trying to get their gods on his side. These people put their faith and hope in Donald Trump. 

Already on Wednesday, May 11th, about a dozen members of the right-wing Indian Hindu group “Sena” lit a ritual fire and began chanting mantras asking Shiva and a variety of other Hindu gods to help Trump win the U.S. presidential election. “The whole world is screaming against Islamic terrorism, and even India is not safe from it,” said Vishnu Gupta, founder of the Hindu Sena nationalist group. “Only Donald Trump can save humanity….he is our hope for humanity.” 

In other parts of the world, Christians are gathering this week end to celebrate Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. 

Pentecost (the fiftieth day) is the Greek name for Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, for centuries an important Jewish feast. According to Jewish tradition, Pentecost commemorates God’s giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, 49 days after the Exodus. According to a later Jewish tradition King David was born and died on Pentecost. In the Apostle Peter’s first sermon, recorded in Acts 2:14-39, Peter linked the life, death, and Ascension of Jesus to King David’s death, burial, and hope of immortality.  

For Jewish people, Pentecost came fifty days after Passover. For Christians, fifty days after God raised Jesus from the dead. We find the earliest Christian celebration of Pentecost described in the second chapter of Acts of Apostles. About one hundred and twenty followers of Jesus (Acts 1:15) were present, including the Twelve, Jesus’ mother, various other women disciples, and Jesus’ brothers (Acts 1:14).  

We used to call Pentecost the birthday of the church. Some still do. The church, the community of faith in Jesus Christ, began right after the Resurrection. Mary of Magdala was the first church-woman, the apostle who really got things going, when she witnessed Jesus alive and raised from the dead. She was the first to proclaim the Goodnews. (In the light of Mary of Magdala’s inaugural ministry, all discussions about whether or not women can be ordained becomes meaningless chatter.) 

Pentecost proclaims that, with Jesus raised from the dead, a new age had begun: life in God’s spirit, characterized by love, unity, compassion, and understanding. Pentecost contrasts with the arrogant and narcissistic way of life portrayed in the Tower of Babel Genesis story. 

The Babel story is found in the first nine verses of Genesis 11. It narrates how, after the great flood, humanity became proud, self-centered, and arrogant. People tried to take God’s place in the world by building a tower that would reach into God’s heavens. God punished their arrogant self-centeredness. The result was confused speech, disharmony, and people scattered around the world in tribal conflict. Hatred, anger, bigotry, and racism enter human history. Not God’s way.

Pentecost is the undoing of Babel. At Pentecost people from every nation under heaven were brought together. “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Pentecost built no arrogant tower and no walls. It broke the barriers of race, religion, and nationality. Peter announced that this event was the beginning of a new life in the Spirit that would be available to all believers from that point on, Jews and Gentiles alike (Acts 2:39). 

Happy Pentecost.  

May we all grow in God’s Spirit.

David Burstein, just under twenty-five, is a writer, political-action organizer, filmmaker, and passionate believer in the Millennial generation. In his 2013 book, Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaping Our World, Burstein illustrates how his generation is simultaneously shaping and being shaped by a fast-paced and fast-changing world. Now I wish someone like David would write a book about how the Millennial generation is shaping and being shaped by Christian belief.

According to population estimates released this month by the U.S. Census Bureau, Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living generation; and the Millennial generation continues to grow, as young immigrants expand its ranks.

The U.S. Millennial population is projected to peak in 2036 at 81.1 million. Millennials are expected to live longer than any previous generation; and new research suggests that old age may actually begin for them at age 74.  Before the Millennials, the Baby Boomers had always had an outsized presence compared with other generations. They were the largest generation and peaked at 78.8 million in 1999. There were an estimated 74.9 million Boomers in 2015. By midcentury, the Boomer population will dwindle to 16.6 million.

Born between 1980 and 2000, Millennials have grown up in a time of rapid change, giving them a set of priorities and expectations sharply different from previous generations. Pearl Harbor or the assassinations of President Kennedy or Dr. Martin Luther King are historic events that they cannot relate to. They were greatly touched by 9/11. That was their big event. They have also learned to live with terrorism and the thought that they could be shot at school, as they learned early that the world is not a safe place. For Roman Catholic Millennials, the 1960s Second Vatican Council is as important for their lives as the sixteenth century Council of Trent. And they are not interested in either of them. Their big Catholic turn-offs have been the ongoing sex abuse scandal and the church’s opposition to women priests and gay marriage. 

More than a few people in my peer group consider the Millennials entitled, lazy, unmotivated, and technology addicted. From what I have read and from what I have experienced teaching and working with Millennials at my university, I have to disagree with such a negative stereotype. There are extremes in every social grouping. I find Millennials generally compassionate, socially concerned, inquisitive, and creative. They have a lot of understandable anxiety about their own lives and their future; but they also have a lot of care for the larger world and life’s big questions. For them a lot of church rhetoric sounds hollow or is anchored in fighting human sexuality issues that for them were resolved long ago. 

Millennials belong to a generation eager to make its own mark on the world. And they will make their own mark on the church, one way or another. For many that mark may very well be to simply ignore it as antiquated and irrelevant. 

With each generation since WWII, U.S. Church attendance has been decreasing. The Millennial generation illustrates and strengthens that trend. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) rarely or never attend religious services. About one-fourth (24 percent) are active in church (meaning they attend at least once a week). A number of Millennials who do attend church do so as seekers.  

For Millennials knowledge is not so much what is passed down from authorities as what is derived from personal experience and shared group discovery. They neither need nor respect a church leader who hands them a package of beliefs to be accepted. They would rather sit down with church members and church leaders and explore the meaning of Christian belief for people today. Mutual respect, shared decision-making, grounded in the realization that no single person, and no single institution has all the answers. For a quick check on factual data they turn to the Internet more than to the local library. They are current events focused and concerned about tomorrow. In no way do they see Jesus as an institution man; and their perception is correct of course. Jesus was concerned about people. 

According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Millennials’ feelings toward present-day Christianity are rather ambivalent. Church is ok if it is helping people to be happy and to have meaningful life experiences. Church hypocrisy, misogyny, and self-defensive authoritarianism leave them cold. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of today’s say that “anti-gay” somewhat or very well describes present-day Christianity for them. More than 6-in-10 (62%) also believe that present-day Christianity is “judgmental” and much too involved in politics. In their social and political views, Millennials are clearly more accepting than older Americans of homosexuality and a broad range of gender and sexuality issues. They are scientifically oriented, more inclined to see evolution as the best explanation for human life; and they consider all sacred scriptures as human attempts to express deeply felt human spiritual experiences. In that respect, Jesus makes sense to them — often much more so than the churches that claim to embody his spirit and emulate him.  

In the Prophet Joel and in Acts of the Apostles, we read: “God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young will see visions, your old will dream dreams.”  

I often day-dream about the Millennials: about what their lives will be like…. the bridges they will have to cross…. the struggles that will mark their lives. I hope their visions will help them confront climate change with dramatic sea-level changes and environmental changes impacting water supplies and food supplies. I hope their visions will enable them to confront employment and unemployment problems we can only imagine as more production and maintenance tasks are taken over by robots and technology. With their visions they will have to learn what it means to live long lives in cultures that are multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual, etc.  

I would hope that the Millennials will also shape and be shaped by new forms and patterns of Christian life and ministry. Perhaps any meaningful church for the Millennials will have to be a humble human-service organization, pointing to deeper spiritual realities and experiences, anchored in an open and welcoming spiritual wisdom, while still very much a shared traveler and a shared discoverer and a shared truth-seeker on the human journey. I think Jesus would like that: truth-seekers on a contemporary road to Emmaus. 

A brief and very personal reflection.

Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest whose anti-Vietnam-War protests shaped and challenged many an American, like me, starting in the 1960s, died on Saturday in the Bronx, New York. He was 94.

As Daniel Lewis observed in his New York Times Article on April, 30th: “The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in Southeast Asia when Father Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an intellectual star of the Roman Catholic ‘new left,’ articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism, and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society.”

On May 17, 1968, just six weeks after the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and race riots in dozens of U.S. cities, nine Catholic protesters, led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered the local draft board offices in Catonsville, Maryland and seized hundreds of draft records. They carried them to a parking lot and set them on fire. It was an American Catholic prophetic turning point. A prophetic turning point in my life. 

The statement, that had been given to reporters ahead of time, read: “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.” Berrigan landed in prison. That would happen many times over the next decades.

Thank you Father Berrigan……..At the time you burned draft records in Maryland, I was an “ex-seminarian” emerging from being a politically conservative and pious, fundamentalist Roman Catholic young man. Yes I do understand fundamentalism. Your prophetic gestures alarmed me at first; and then they helped me to realize that asking questions was neither anti-Christian nor anti-American. A revelation. Perhaps I was simply a slow learner.
Over the years, I have tried to pass on to my students not just packets of information but the skills for critical thinking. That is real education — especially when students can now find all kinds of information data on the Internet.

May you rest in peace. May we continue to learn from your example.

At a dinner party a couple nights ago, a good friend commented that, with Pope Francis, Catholics could now stop arguing about church reform, stop criticizing recalcitrant bishops, and let the “Francis effect” do its work. I respectfully disagreed…. 

The issue is far more complex than just wanting Francis to reform the church.
First of all, if one wants to speak of the “Francis effect” as a positive solution for a number of contemporary church problems, there is still much unfinished work. And the Vatican is a good place to start.

The clerical sexual abuse crisis is not over and the Pope Francis Vatican remains sexual-abuse-schizophrenic. It refuses to remove abuse-cover-up bishops, like Bishop Juan Barros, defended by Pope Francis and assigned last year to Osorno, Chile, despite allegations that he covered up clergy sex abuse by a priest in the 1980s and 1990s. Victim testimony also indicated that Barros was present and witnessed sexual abuse by the abusive priest Fernando Karadima. 

Perhaps the self-defensive old boys club mentality still prevails behind Vatican walls? In February 2016, at an instructional presentation for newly appointed bishops, Tony Anatrella, a psychtherapist and consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, stressed that bishops DO NOT have a duty to report clerical sexual abuse to civil authorities, because going to the police is the responsibility of victims and their families. 

More recently, as we consider contemporary Vatican behavior, there is the strange case of Father Joseph Jeyapaul, a priest from India who admitted to raping two adolescent girls in Minnesota, when he served in the Crookston diocese from 2004 to 2005. 

After being charged with sexual abuse, which included rape and forcing one of the girls to perform fellatio on him, Jeyapaul fled to India, where he was arrested. Extradited back to Minnesota, he admitted his crimes. The man was then suspended from the priesthood and served a year and a day in prison in Minnesota. After his release in July, he was deported back to India. Then came an interesting turn of events.

In February, the Vatican approved lifting Father Jeyapaul’s suspension from the priesthood and agreed that he could be reassigned to a new parish in India. Later he was even appointed head of a diocesan education commission.
Pope Francis has focused appropriate attention on caring for the environment and continues to get positive acclamations for his encyclical Laudatio si. Perhaps, however, one could suggest that he has been less attentive to the spiritual and ministerial environment in our Catholic parishes. The priesthood is in crisis. Morale is low and priests are getting older and older. Calls for dropping clerical celibacy are routinely ignored; and bishops continue to shut down parishes. Not a very positive scenario. 

Contributing to the ordained ministry problem is an antiquated priestly formation process in our seminaries that, sorry to say, no longer attracts some of our best and brightest young people. Even the pope has complained about a new group of overly conservative young presets; but there has been no major overhaul of the seminary structure. It is time to stop closing parishes and start ordaining zealous and pastorally-minded young men, who are or would like to be married. We need more — not fewer — sacramental communities in our church. We need to re-think and re-make creative structures for pastoral ministry. A major complaint from millennial believers is that the church is out of touch, impersonal, and out of date. To date, 33 million Americans have dropped out of the Catholic Church.

And there is nothing positive about the still enshrined, hard-nosed old boys club structural mysogynism in our church. It is wrong; and there are absolutely no valid theological or historical reasons why women cannot be ordained as deacons and priests. For your summer reading I strongly recommend an excellent study: Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future by Gary Macy, William Ditewig, and Phyllis Zagano.

Looking at Catholic belief and practice these days, too many church leaders, including the Bishop of Rome, continue to bemoan the “tyranny of relativism.” They miss a nuanced understanding of what is happening. As theologians Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler noted, in their April 19th article in the National Catholic Reporter: “Concern about relativism is undoubtedly warranted in the 21st century, but the magisterium fails to discern the difference between relativism, which rejects objective, universal moral truth, and what we shall call perspectivism, which acknowledges objective, universal moral truth, but also insists that truth is partial and always in need of further clarification.”

Yes contemporary church leadership needs help comprehending that truth is developmental; and a good place to benign remedial education would be the entire range of issues involving human sexuality and gender. A lot of our bishops need to go back to school. It might help as well if some of them would just get married, and others come out of the closet. 

In this week’s reflection, I have no desire to denigrate Pope Francis. I am not ready to pre-canonize him either. The old gentleman can only do so much. He only wants to do so much. Frankly (no pun intended) I think Francis knows exactly what he is doing with his warm remarks followed by minimal institutional change. But do we know what we are doing? Perhaps there is too much focus on the pope? After all, it is Jesus Christ — not the Pope of Rome — who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”

It is time for all of us to realize that when it comes to church reform, in the days of the “Francis effect,” the major task belongs to you and me.

Church history is clear. Church reform is always from the bottom-up and only secondarily from the top-down. The voice of the people is where it begins and gets its energy. Popes come and go, but the institutional church remains…..continually in need of reform.

Let’s start to really think, talk, organize, and get on with the project.

Directly after the March 22, 2016 terrorist bombings at the Brussels International Airport and in downtown Brussels, an American friend sent me an urgent email. “Now,” he wrote, “I hope you understand why we must restrict and diminish the Muslim presence in the United States…..Those people are evil.”

I am a committed Christian and an historical theologian. I have worked for decades, promoting inter-religious dialogue and understanding, especially with men and women belonging to one of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Nevertheless, Islamophobia is hard to combat. It is often true that if one calls for a factual and well-researched understanding of Islam in our contemporary world, that person is often labeled “unChristian” or “unpatriotic,” or simply “dangerous.”  

“Islamophobia” warns Georgetown University researcher Nathan Lean. “is sort of like the ocean. It is working, it is churning, it is ebbing, it is flowing, even when we are asleep. There are larger systems of power and structures of power in place.” I recommend his most recent book: The Islamophobia Industry. 

According to a 2016 estimate, there are about 3.3 million Muslims living in the United States, and most see no contradiction between being American and being Muslim. About 1% of Americans, therefore, are Muslim, compared to 70.6% who are Christian, 22.8% unaffiliated, 1.9% Jewish, 0.7% Buddhist, and 0.7% Hindu. 

Interestingly, in this election year, 63% of Muslim Americans identify as Democrats or say they lean Democratic. About one-in-ten (11%) identify as Republican or lean Republican, and 26% say they are unaffiliated. 

Given the recent “Islamic terrorism,” it is not surprising that Muslims have become the target of attacks by people who feel anxious and insecure in a world of tremendous cultural change. It reminds me of nineteenth century anti-Catholic discrimination in the United States, when Catholics were perceived as foreign infiltrators and the pope was seen as an evil emperor out to destroy “Christian” America. 

After seeing and reading a lot of anti-Muslim political rhetoric, I started thinking: just what are the truths and the falsehoods behind entrenched beliefs that Muslims simply do not belong in the United States; and that they threaten U.S. security? 

1. The first falsehood is that American Muslims are not truly Americans. 
In fact, Islam was in America even before there was a United States; and Muslims didn’t peaceably emigrate to America. Slave-traders brought them to the New World. 

Historians now estimate that up to 30% of enslaved blacks were Muslims. The West African prince Abdul Rahman, liberated by President John Quincy Adams in 1828 after 40 years in captivity, was only one of many African Muslims kidnapped and sold into servitude in the New World. Muslim runaway slaves were among the pro-USA soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Muslims later fought to preserve U.S. independence in the War of 1812; and they fought for the Union in the Civil War. There are currently two Muslim members of Congress and thousands of Muslims on active duty in our USA armed forces. 

2. The second misunderstanding is that American Muslims are ethnically, culturally, and politically one solid block, who all think and act the same way. 
Actually, the American Muslim community may very well he the most diverse Muslim community in the world. U.S. Muslims believe and witness to their faith in different ways. A great many American Muslims, for example, have absolutely no problem with an historical-critical understanding of their sacred scriptures. Contrary to a popular misconception, the majority of Muslims in the United States are not Arabs. At least one-quarter, for example, are African American.  

Muslim Americans are also diverse in their beliefs and religious affiliation. They range from highly conservative, to moderate, and to secular in their religious beliefs and practices — just like members of other American religious traditions. 

With above-average median household incomes, American Muslims are also an integral and important part of the U.S. economy.  

3. One still hears the false claim that American Muslims oppress women. 
According a Gallup study, American Muslim women are more educated than Muslim women in Western Europe, and also more educated than the average American woman. More U.S. Muslim women report incomes closer to their male counterparts than do American women, belonging to other religious traditions. American Muslim women hold key leadership positions in religious and civic organizations, such as the Arab-American Family Support Center, the Islamic Networks Group, and the American Society for Muslim Advancement. 

4. A fourth major falsehood is that American Muslims often become “homegrown” terrorists. 
Many American Christians condemn Islam as an evil religion. Why are those Christians so silent when confronted with terrorism in the name of their own religion? Why can’t they acknowledge that parts of their religion are used for evil, just like any other religion? In fact, most of the terrorist activity in the U.S. in recent years has come not from Muslims, but from radical Christians, white supremacists, and far-right militia groups. 

According to the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, more non-Muslims than Muslims have been involved in terrorist plots on U.S. soil.  

In 2011, for example, analyst Daryl Johnson of the United States Department of Homeland Security said that the Hutaree Christian militia movement possessed more weapons than the combined weapons holdings of all Islamic terror defendants charged in the US since the September 11 attacks. In 2015, Robert Doggart, a member of a private militia group, informed an FBI source (and was later indicted) that he intended to gather weapons for an attack on a Muslim enclave in Delaware County, New York. In November 2015, Robert Lewis Dear, a member of the Army of God, killed three and injured nine at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Dear had often expressed his support for radical Christian views and interpretations of the Bible, saying he was doing “God’s work.”  

Feisal Abdul Rauf, a Kuwaiti American Sufi imam, who worked with FBI agents on countering extremism right after September 11, 2001, has expressed strong fears that identifying Muslims with terrorism threatens American Muslims’ civil liberties and promotes the perception that Islam is a terrorist religion.  

5. American Muslims do not want to impose Sharia law on the United States. 
In the contemporary United States there is a strongly-promoted “Sharia Scare.” It is part of a larger Islamophobic campaign sponsored by an organized network of conservative foundations, religious leaders, media outlets, and politicians. 

Sharia is the Muslim ideal of justice and compassion, similar to the concept of natural law in the Western tradition. Sharia is characterized by flexibility depending on the context and the people interpreting it. Yes radicals exist on the fringes of Islam, as they do in every religion. Most Muslim jurists, however, agree that the principal objectives of Sharia are the protection and promotion of life, religion, intellect, property, family, and dignity. None of this includes turning the United States into a caliphate.  

For centuries, Muslim scholars around the world have agreed that Muslims must follow the laws of the land in which they live. American Muslims have no scriptural, historical or political grounds to oppose the U.S. Constitution. Muslims already practice Sharia in the United States, as they worship freely and follow U.S. laws. Muslims in the United States follow Sharia in the same way that Americans of other religions (Jews, Catholics, Mormons, etc.) follow their sacred laws and traditions. The First Amendment allows complete freedom of belief and freedom of religious practice, so long as believers respect other people’s rights. 

Today some people falsely equate Sharia with criminal or hudud laws, which are centuries-old specific punishments for major crimes such as killing, adultery, or theft, which are generally not applicable in a modern context. (One can find similar archaic laws in the Old Testament.) Unfortunately, contemporary Muslim fanatics in the Taliban and ISIS generally contradict both the letter and spirit of Sharia and have given it a bad name. In their ignorance, some American politicians and religious leaders continue as well to give it a bad name. 

6. Historically, people wishing to exercise authoritarian control over other people have misused their religions.  
One cannot defend the religious fanatic misuse of Muslim belief or Muslim scriptures to justify killing or torturing other human beings. Christians of course have to humbly acknowledge what fanatic Christians have done over the centuries in the name of Christ. 

A couple weeks ago I was in the South of France, doing some research on French Protestantism and my paternal grandmother’s family. In 1562 “Riots of Toulouse” Roman Catholics battled members of the Reformed Church of France (the Huguenots). The violence, taking place in about a week, ended with the deaths of at least 3,000 (some researchers say 5,000) citizens of the French city of Toulouse. About three hundred years earlier, in 1209 in the nearby town of Béziers, 7,000 Cathar heretics were killed on orders from the pope in Rome. The Papal Legate, Arnaud-Amaury, wrote to Pope Innocent III: “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.” 

7. Yes we need to combat terrorism and fanatic religion.  
It is a complex issue; and it will take time to effectively deal with issues of economics, politics, group identity, cultural change, religious and ethical values, and feelings of lost self-worth or inferiority. Here religiously healthy Muslims need to work to combat Muslim fanaticism. And all of us, coming from a variety of religions and humanist perspectives, need to think, probe, research, and work together. 

So very close to the end of the Second World War, on 9 April 1945, Lutheran minister and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, aged 39, was executed by hanging at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Nazi Germany. After the start of WWII, Bonhoeffer had joined the underground resistance movement in opposition to Hitler. He believed that true
discipleship demanded political resistance against a criminal state. He staunchly resisted Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship and Jewish persecution and genocide.

Bonhoeffer remains one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century.

Bonhoeffer’s writings on being a Christian in the secular world were widely influential and have had a major impact on my life, especially his books The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison. I first encountered Bonhoeffer’s thought in my early twenties when I was a seminarian at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. There I read and re-read Letters and Papers from Prison.

In a letter written from his Nazi prison cell on April 30, 1944, Bonhoeffer described his thoughts about contemporary Christian life: “You would be surprised,” he wrote, “and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to… What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, for us today.” He continued: “Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious’…. how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any ‘religious’ reaction? What does that mean for ‘Christianity’?”

When he was a young seminarian in his twenties, Bonhoeffer travelled to the United States for postgraduate study at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. There he encountered life-changing experiences and friendships. He studied under Reinhold Niebuhr and met Frank Fisher, a black fellow seminarian who introduced him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Bonhoeffer began to see things “from below.” He said he “turned from phraseology to reality.” What was happening to Bonhoeffer was a personal conversion from being a theologian primarily attracted to the intellectual side of Christianity to being a dedicated man of faith.

Travel helps one better see oneself and to see bigger realities. Today I write about D. Bonhoeffer not J. Dick; but when I was a seminarian in my twenties I travelled to Europe for postgraduate theological study. My life for a while was turned upside down. Bonhoeffer’s thought was a strong spiritual guide as I started to really think about my own reality. My father use to chuckle and say “after Louvain, Jack was never the same.”

Today, 71 years after his death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and writings challenge us all to pursue justice even when it’s not popular, to care for and defend the persecuted, and to relentlessly ponder and follow the Gospel.

A concluding reflection: Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed that someday, a time would come when Christians would once again powerfully proclaim the word of God so that the world could be transformed and renewed by it.

“It will be a new language,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming — as was Jesus’ language. It will shock people and yet overcome them by its power. It will be the language of a new righteousness and truth….”

And that was my inspiration for Another Voice. I hope I can meet the challenge.

Authoritarianism is hardly a new phenomenon. In the early twentieth century we saw repressive authoritarian regimes in countries like Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and the Croatian fascist ustasha movement. While some researchers debate the causes of authoritarianism, the public and institutional behavior of authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers is rather clear-cut.

Just like drug dealers and their “clients,” authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers sell and promote authoritarian addiction. It happens when followers stop thinking for themselves and submit to the emotional rhetoric of narcissistic authoritarian leaders. We now see a classic example in our daily news. His primary focus is himself and he uses and manipulates people to achieve his goals. His campaign message is emotionally-charged bully-talk, with very little serious socio-political commentary.

Authoritarian followers are highly submissive to authoritarian leaders and aggressively insist that everyone should behave as dictated by the authority. They are fearful about a changing world and a changing society which they neither understand nor want to understand. They would rather turn the clock back to some imagined golden era.

Easily incited, easily led, and reluctant to think for themselves, authoritarian followers don’t question. They obey. They are attracted to and follow strong leaders, who, in often theatrical style, appeal to their feelings of fear and anxiety. And they respond aggressively toward “outsiders.” Blind faith is substituted for critical reason. The unknown and the different become the enemy.

What authoritarian leaders want to implement is undemocratic, tyrannical, and often brutal. Authoritarianism becomes even more sinister, when authoritarian leaders begin to proclaim their message in the name of Christianity. Then, in reality, it becomes an anti-Christian social cancer starting to metastasize across the country. Blurred vision and bizarre rhetoric are the result.

Authoritarian Morphology:

(1) In their self-righteous efforts to re-shape society in their own image and likeness, authoritarians feel empowered and compelled to isolate, to segregate, to humiliate, to persecute, to beat, and even to kill.

(2) If an authoritarian leader has a narcissistic personality disorder, he or she may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. That person belittles or looks down on people he or she perceives as inferior.

(3) Authoritarian followers need to conform and belong to their barrel-vision-group. Loyalty to their group ranks among their highest virtues. Members of the group who question group leaders or group beliefs are quickly seen as traitors.

(4) All authoritarians go through life with impaired reasoning. Their thinking is sloppy and they are slaves to a ferocious dogmatism that blinds them to evidence and logic. As Adolf Hitler reportedly said, “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”

[I still remember the example of faulty-thinking, given many years ago by my college logic professor: “All fish live in the sea. Sharks live in the sea. Therefore, sharks are fish.” Today of course one hears faulty-thinking authoritarian politicians and supportive religious leaders asserting: “All Mexicans are criminals” …… “All Muslims are terrorists” ….. “African Americans are lazy”….. “The Jews did kill Jesus Christ”…. “Feminists are undermining male and female identity”….. “And gays are destroying marriage and family life in America.”]

(5) Authoritarians are extremely resistant to change. It is difficult to communicate with people who are ferociously aggressive and fiercely defensive. One is not likely to get anywhere by arguing with authoritarians.

(6) Authoritarians are surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in; and deep, deep down inside, many of them have secret doubts about their own core beliefs. (In somewhat the same way that publicly outspoken critics of homosexuality are often men unwilling to acknowledge their own same-sex inclinations and arrested sexual development.)

Authoritarian Confrontation:

We do need to confront authoritarianism, because it is a malignancy that threatens and polarizes American society.

We need to speak-out now or forever hold our silence.

Too many people are simply standing on the sidewalk, quietly staring at the authoritarian parade as it marches on.

Even if it appears that you are the only person who grasps what’s happening, you have to take courageous leadership to inform and organize others.

Ignorance is neither civic nor religious bliss; and prejudice is based on ignorance.

Critical thinking is an adult skill. Unthinkingly following the big bully is unhealthy child’s play.

Unquestioned loyalty and obedience force authoritarian followers into servitude.

Empathy and compassion are Christ-like; but hatred and denigration of other people are tokens of the anti-Christ.

As we begin Holy Week 2016, my very best wishes for the Easter season. I will be offline for a couple weeks. Taking time for my own deeper reflection about the signs of our time.

Dear Holy Father,

Dear Brother Francis,

In just about two weeks, we will again celebrate Our Lord’s victory over death. For me it is a special kind of personal celebration, because this year I will celebrate my seventy-third birthday on Easter Sunday.

In two years, if all goes as planned (although as you will see I have some doubts about that) I will be sending you, or your successor, my “reached-the-age-of-seventy-five” letter of resignation.

Lent 2016 has been particularly poignant for me. It is not just that I realize that I am now an old man, with all the normal old-age infirmities. I also look at our church and see not the animated and life-giving institution to which I have given my entire life; but a church that has lost credibility and continues to live with an antiquated view of human reality. It is a church that is collapsing.

I often think about Jesus’ words about bread in the Gospel of Matthew. People are turning to us, asking for bread, and we continue to give them old stones.

In my little diocese, the median age of our priests is sixty-eight. Each year I am now burying more priests than I am ordaining. Yet, I will refuse to close parishes. There has to be a better way.

Another part of my Lenten reflection has been about today’s young priests. Not just in my diocese but across the country. They don’t inspire me. They frighten and discourage me. So many of them are arrogant young clerics more anchored in the ethos of 1950 than that of the third millennium. Our seminaries used to be vibrant centers of contemporary life and enlightenment. What happened?

Holy Father, I respect you. I enjoy your well-publicized inspirational words. Nevertheless, Holy Father, we need to do something more than make wonderful statements that make headline news.

When I last met you in Rome for my ad limina visit, you complimented me on my excellent theological formation. I chuckled and said “yes I am a Louvain-trained theologian and some of my professors were the formative theologians of Vatican II.” I told you I was concerned about the shortage of priests and that we should start ordaining young married men with proven ministry skills. We once called them “viri probati.” I told you that I probably have fifteen such young men in my diocese. They are bright, idealistic, well-educated, and burning with zeal for the Gospel. You smiled and said “the time is not yet ripe for such a change.”

You are a very busy man so I will keep this short. A few days ago, when I was sitting on a city bus, as you once did when a humble diocesan bishop like me, I looked at the faces of the young and old people around me. They looked so hungry for God’s bread, not hard old stones. I said to myself “it is time for a new Resurrection in our church.”

Hold on to your zucchetto Holy Father…..By the time you read this letter I will have ordained six young married men as Roman Catholic priests and six wonderful women as Roman Catholic deacons. They will join me and preside with me in our cathedral for Easter Sunday Eucharist. Twelve contemporary apostles, Holy Father! It fills me with great joy and consolation; and I see this as just the beginning.

On Pentecost (if I survive that long) I plan to ordain twelve women – some married, some single, representing all age groups – as Roman Catholic women priests. Wonderful pastoral women. One of them in fact is married to a fine young lady, who teaches social studies in a public school. (I told her, when I met her at their wedding reception, that she is probably lucky she teaches in a public school rather than a parochial school. Who knows what kind of bishop will follow me?)

We need to move forward with faith, hope, and courage Holy Father. Contrary to what is daily proclaimed in some contemporary political rhetoric, truth is stronger than fiction, love is stronger than hatred; and life is stronger than death. We need to practice what we preach.

You know as well as I that we do talk about many progressive ideas, but still behind closed doors. It is now time to move out of our theological closets (of all kinds) and walk proudly and courageously in the sunshine. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew: “What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light. What you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim from the housetops.…” The message of Jesus is indeed our way, our truth, and our life.

I send my fraternal affection and every good wish for Holy Week and abundant Easter joy. Alleluia is still our song…..

Your brother bishop,

+ John W. Greenleaf

On Tuesday, March 8, we celebrate International Women’s Day. Another and far more important Super Tuesday than the one that (temporarily?) highlighted US presidential contender Donald Trump.
Perhaps the March 8th day should be circled on calendars as “Beware-of-Patriarchy-Super-Tuesday.”  
Patriarchy is pernicious: an old authoritarian ecclesiastical vice that denigrates just about everyone in the name of Christian virtue. It is very much alive, if not well, in today’s world. 
Patriarchy proclaims male superiority over women. It also destroys children; and in the past week we have seen three big examples of patriarchal child abuse: (1) SPOTLIGHT the Oscar-winning film about the widespread and systemic sexual abuse of children in the Boston area by Roman Catholic ordained ministers (priests), as the National Catholic Reporter editorialized a great humiliation for the Catholic Church. (2) The Vatican’s treasurer Cardinal George Pell’s testimony from Rome to the Royal Commission in Australia about Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse. Pell is at the tip and top of a sordid clerical abuse iceberg. One wonders how Pope Francis can keep Pell in his Vatican position. (3) And then, on March 1st came the grand jury report that two Roman Catholic bishops in the Pennsylvania Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown covered up the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by more than 50 ordained ministers and other religious leaders over a 40-year period. Commenting about the victims, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane observed: “Their souls were killed as children. They weren’t out playing baseball; they were trying to avoid priests.” 
Patriarchy over women  
Attributes of power, control, non-emotional rationality, and extreme competitiveness are often praised as traditional male qualities and used to explain why men should be “in control.” Women are often subordinated due to – as a bishop friend likes to stress — their “emotional expressiveness.”  
Reflecting about Christian life and ministry – past and present – I count six anti-woman heresies that need to be condemned as un-Christ-like. Even, today, in all Christian churches, they are often proclaimed as virtues: 

(1) Women are called to affirm “godly masculinity.” Based of course on the false understanding that God is male. 

(2) Women must honor the God-ordained authority of their husbands and pastors. A very strong theme among many evangelical Christians but hardly unknown in Roman Catholic circles.

(3) By submitting to male leadership, women reflect Jesus’ submission to God.

(4) When women focus on their personal rights, they are behaving contrary to Christ’s spirit of submission.

(5) Having a lot of children is a woman’s chief mission in life and God’s blessed gift to women.

(6) If they are truly Christian women, they must teach the next generation of women how to submit to male leadership in church and home.

Preserving patriarchal hegemony: 
Sometimes ecclesiastics seek to preserve their patriarchal hegemony by ignoring or dismissing on-going research and new information. In 1994 Pope John Paul II formally declared that the church does not have the power to ordain women. He stated, “Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful.” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4) 
Saint Pope John Paul II was apparently ignorant of the fact that there is a growing consensus among biblical scholars and historians that women – as leaders of house churches –did indeed preside at Eucharist in the early church. A number of women served as leaders of the house churches that sprang up in the cities of the Roman Empire.  
Successors of the apostles: 
An often-repeated historical error is the insistence that only men were Jesus’ apostles. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament speaks contrary to this belief.  The consensus among a number of respected contemporary New Testament scholars, for example, is that Junia was a woman apostle. Paul wrote in the Romans 16:7: “Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.”  
Reading through the Pauline literature one finds many women who were key leaders in the early church: Phoebe, a leader from the church at Cenchreae, a port city near Corinth; Chloe, a prominent woman in Corinth; When Paul refers to Priscilla and Aquila, Priscilla is listed first two out of three times. She and her husband were missionary partners with the Apostle Paul. 
Are bishops successors of the apostles? Of course they are, BECAUSE ALL MEN AND WOMEN who go forth and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ are apostles. You and I are successors of the apostles.

Counteracting patriarchy:  
How do we counteract patriarchy and promote women in today’s church? 

(1) We need to promote continuing education about biblical scholarship and church history; and insist that church leadership take seriously the need for in-service updating. Perhaps bishops and other church leaders need to be re-certified every five years? No certification – no leadership position.

(2) We need to insist on using inclusive language in liturgical prayer, scripture readings, hymn texts, and publications. It is correct, for instance, to drop the word “men“ when the creed reads “For us men and for our salvation…” We don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to do this.

(3) One does not need permission to be inclusive. It should be understood as the normal and healthy way to live and act. Exclusive language is simply wrong and not acceptable.

(4) Just as one doesn’t laugh at racist or anti-Semitic jokes (unless one is a certain much-in-the-news presidential candidate), it is not acceptable to laugh at making-fun-of-women jokes, dumb-blond jokes, etc.

(5) At all levels in the church and civil society we need to proclaim that is not OK when women are paid less than men, when women, because they are women, are given menial or secondary responsibilities.

(6) Again – as I have stressed in the past — we need to acknowledge and support those women who are already ordained. Women’s ordination should be understood and accepted as just as normal as men’s ordination….

(7) And of course we need to encourage and support young women in the church. Whether altar servers, lectors, or Eucharistic ministers. Even as girl scouts! (Even as girl scouts in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, where Archbishop Robert Carlson said the behavior and views of America’s Girl Scouts are at odds with the teachings of the Catholic church — in particular, the Girl Scouts’ support for transgender rights and homosexuality.)