Another Voice

According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of U.S. Catholics who consider themselves “strong” members of their church has never been lower than it was in 2012.

Nearly a quarter (27%) of American Catholics called themselves “strong” Catholics last year, down more than 15 points since the mid-1980s, and among the lowest levels seen in the 38 years since first measured by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

The decline among American Catholics is even more noteworthy when compared with American Protestants, whose strength has been rising in recent years. About half (54%) of American Protestants – double the Catholic share (27%) – described their particular religious identity as strong last year, among the highest levels since1974.

Over the past four decades, church attendance has declined among “strong” Catholics as well as among Catholics overall. The share of all Catholics who say they attend Eucharist at least once a week has dropped from 47% in 1974 to 24% in 2012; among “strong” Catholics, it has fallen more than 30 points, from 85% in 1974 to 53% last year.

Among Protestants as a whole, however, church attendance has been rather stable, although the percentage of those who attend at least once a week was higher in 2012 (38%) than in 1974 (29%). Self-reported church attendance among “strong” Protestants has fluctuated; but the share of frequent attenders was not significantly different in 2012 (60%) than in 1974 (55%).

So what’s going on with U.S. Catholics?

In a word: increasing numbers don’t feel at home in their church and are finding supportive communities and more contemporary expressions of belief in other traditions. (Most of my nephews and nieces, for example, are now actively engaged in other Christian churches.)

American Catholics are generally delighted with Pope Francis. On Sunday morning, however, they find liturgical English a pious consubstantial cacophony. They see red flags as priests get older, as familiar parishes close; and as younger priests parade around their parishes, enamored by a nineteenth century clerical ethos. They applaud the pope but find their bishops incredibly out of touch with the realities of daily life. John Myers in Newark and John Nienstedt in St. Paul are symptoms of a credibility problem not exceptional deviations.

Change is possible; and change is necessary. At every level of church life: from the parish in Southwestern, Michigan where the young Legionnaire of Christ pastor now insists on Latin masses; from the East coast parochial school, where a beloved teacher is suddenly fired, because she openly lives with her gay companion; to the West coast chancery, where the shredder is devouring records of pedophile clergymen, shifted from parish to parish, as their bishops pretended not to know they were raping Catholic children.

Change is possible; and you and I are the agents of change: blowing whistles, demanding accountability, and supporting genuinely pastoral men and women.

And let us be a contemporary church. Regardless what kind of pope, it is still primarily our responsibility. Let us not lose the ability to adapt to the needs of women and men in an ever-more-changing world. Let us be church and offer generations Y, X and the baby-boomers an attractive faith vision for today and for tomorrow.

In all of our churches, let us replace the Exit signs with Welcome signs.

The Gospel does indeed proclaim: “Where two or three are gathered, there I am….” There indeed we find our faith and our credibility as church.

I appreciate and welcome the pastoral style of Francis, our still-revealing-himself Bishop of Rome; and I applaud his rejection of the Renaissance-princely garb and grandeur that so characterized his gold-embroidered and red-slippered predecessor, and more than a few men with red hats.

When it comes to women, however, Francis really needs some theological updating.

The Bishop of Rome is calling for a “theology of women.” I fear however that he is simply resuscitating and trying to re-package the short-sighted viewpoint of his papal predecessor John Paul, called The Great.

In a three-day event sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, launched on 14 October, approximately 100 women from across the globe gathered in Rome to discuss Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter Mulieres Dignitatem, issued twenty-five years ago. The theme of the conference: “God entrusts the human being to the woman.” To the woman……

The speakers emphasized Pope John Paul’s biologically-bound understanding of male/female complementarity. Women and men have complementary natures, he taught, and their “diversity of roles” in the church and in the family are a reflection of that reality. He stressed that women’s biology orients them toward acceptance and receptivity (i.e. men insert and women receive): the creation and nurturing of new human life.

The “feminine genius,” the pope taught, includes qualities such as receptivity, empathy, protection of life, sanctity, and modesty. John Paul saw the feminine genius as the answer to the “culture of death” inherent in contemporary society’s penchant for abortion, contraception, and euthanasia; and he exalted Mary, Mother of God, as the prime example of the feminine genius: a humble, generous, faithful, and a long-suffering mother.

In 1994, to officially stamp-out rapidly spreading deviant behavior and unorthodox thought and teaching, Pope John Paul II declared women’s ordination a closed matter. Pope Francis of course has reiterated that same papal teaching, so clearly expressed in John Paul’s letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: “Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance…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.”

The Roman Catholic prohibition of women’s ordination argues from a perception of divinely-constituted gender roles: the belief that masculinity was integral to the ministry of both Jesus and the apostles. Being a woman is fine; but if a human is going to act “in persona Christi,” one needs male genitalia. The Incarnation is more male than female?

Pope John Paul, Pope Benedict, and apparently Pope Francis have all believed there is an essential difference between male humanity and female humanity and therefore, while some human functions are interchangeable between men and women, others are not. So…..males are necessary for priesthood just as water is necessary for baptism, and bread and wine for Eucharist, because that’s the way Jesus set it up.

All of this is summed up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (issued by Pope John Paul in 1992): “Only a baptized man (vir) validly receives sacred ordination.” The Lord Jesus chose men (viri) to form the college of the twelve apostles, and the apostles did the same when they chose collaborators to succeed them in their ministry. The college of bishops, with whom the priests are united in the priesthood, makes the college of the twelve an ever-present and ever-active reality until Christ’s return. The Church recognizes herself to be bound by this choice made by the Lord himself. For this reason the ordination of women is not possible.”

But what about Pope Francis’ call for a “theology of women”? Do we need a “theology of women” distinct from a “theology of men”? I think not. What we need, I suggest, is an officially updated understanding of the Christian Scriptures and early church history.

Francis appears to be a courageous and humble fellow. I don’t want to hear him reiterate the old theology of women, however. I want to hear a humble and official acknowledgement that the old Roman Catholic arguments against male/female ministerial equality are based on an archaic, incorrect, and unacceptable understanding of early Christian history.

Jesus did not establish nor ordain a clerical old boys club. There were male disciples and female disciples, male apostles and female apostles. In Romans 16:7, for instance, we read: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who have been in prison with me. They are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”

Junia’s female name was considered such an appalling anomaly by later medieval readers of Romans that when manuscripts were copied and recopied by pious males over the centuries the name Junia was frequently changed to a masculine form!

Paul of course calls himself an apostle. And he had no reluctance listing and acknowledging the male and female leaders in the early church. Nor do we see any hierarchical distinctions based on biology or gender. Among the people whom Paul lists in his Epistle to the Romans are Phoebe, the deacon in the Church of Cenchreae; Prisca, a “fellow-worker;” and the women Tryphaena and Tryphosa, who are “workers in the Lord” – the ministerial term Paul also applies to men in the same passage.

Today of course, we know that ordination as we know it did not exist in the early church; and scholars stress that the women and men, who were leaders of early Christian communities, were the same leaders who presided at Eucharist as well.

In the third chapter of Galatians, remember, we also read: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Returning for a minute to the teaching in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, one could ask: what about “the Twelve”? Very often those who oppose women’s ordination argue that Jesus’ twelve apostles were men therefore all priests and bishops should be men. Well, there is a problem here.

Strictly speaking, the twelve apostles were not the twelve apostles: they were “the Twelve” who happened to be apostles. Their chief purpose was not to be the listing of Jesus’ apostles but, in Jewish-Christian imagery, a sign that Jesus was instituting a New Israel with its twelve tribes. (Even the various lists in the Christian Scriptures giving the names of the Twelve are problematic, but we can’t get into that today.)

Yes indeed, let us honor and celebrate women in the church, as we should honor and celebrate men as co-workers in the life and ministry of the church. Creating a specific “theology of women” may in fact be detrimental to guaranteeing the equal status of all in the Body of Christ.

And a final note: Any serious reflection on women in ordained ministry must seriously take into consideration the pastoral experience and witness of all those women currently exercising ordained ministry. Here I think of the ordained women in the Women
Priests Movement, ordained women in Anglican and Episcopalian churches, and of course in a great many Protestant churches. Their ordained ministry is authentic and genuine. The Church of Rome could in fact learn from them….

Now we need to get the message to Pope Francis. Maybe someone should call him on his mobile phone.

Yesterday I had a look at the agenda for the November 2013 meeting of our USCCB. Gathering again in Baltimore, they will elect a new president and vice president and designate leadership people for various committees. I am curious of course to see who will follow Cardinal Dolan as USCCB president. I don’t think it will be an African American. It would be exciting however to have two black presidents in DC.

Other USCCB November 2013 agenda items include:
•  Discussions and votes on the 2014 Conference budget and 2015 diocesan assessment
•  Consultation on the sainthood cause of Mary Teresa Tallon, Servant of God
•  Discussions and votes on the Misal Romano, the Spanish translation of the book of prayers at Mass
•  Discussions and votes on the draft translations of the Order of Celebrating Marriage and the Order of Confirmation
•  An update by Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone on the Promotion and Defense of Marriage
•  Presentation for a proposal to develop a formal statement on pornography
•  Presentation by Bishop Gerald R. Kicanas on the work and strategic priorities of CRS
•  An update and discussion on the Call to Prayer for Life, Marriage and Religious Liberty
•  Discussions and votes on proposed revisions to the USCCB handbook and regulations

I mean no disrespect but I found much of this agenda, shall we say, avoiding major issues confronting our U.S. church. So I decided to create my own agenda……

I call my USCCB agenda “Projects for Revitalizing Catholic Life in the United States….A Modest Start.”

My agenda has four points for discussion and action:

(1)  Overhauling and Redesigning ordained ministry:

This requires:

–       Dropping celibacy as a requirement for ordained ministry

–       Starting to ordain men, married or single, who have proven ministry skills

–       Ordaining women, with proven ministry skills, to be permanent deacons

–       Reconfiguring parishes so that they sustain smaller and more intimate communities of faith

–       Re-examining the current way candidates for ordained ministry are educated and trained. Is the current seminary structure a healthy way to prepare people for ordained ministry today? I really don’t think so……

(2) Education and formation about human sexuality

Launch a nation-wide human sexuality continuing education program for bishops and priests. Ideally local bishops and priests should meet at the diocesan level with experts in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and theological ethics to better understand our changing understanding of what it means to be a sexual person.

(3) Politics and Public Belief

Launch a continuing education program for all members of the USCCB about what it means to live responsibly in a values-pluralistic society.

Key issues to be examined:

–       The role and responsibility of religious institutions in a pluralistic society

–       Understanding the nature and formation of public morality in a pluralistic society and how it can be distinct from personal and confessional religious and ethical positions

(4) Listening to tomorrow’s believers

Launch a nation-wide listening program, inviting young women and men in Generation Y and Generation 9/11 to meet at parish and diocesan levels to explore and explain their deepest thoughts about God, Jesus, church, and belief today.

+++

This agenda is only a start of course. Future agenda items could cover issues like:

(1)        Calling an advisory and decision-making council for the U.S. Catholic Church

(2)        Establishing mechanisms for the election of pastors and bishops

(3)        Establish on-going theological education programs for people at all levels in the church

(4)        Re-examining the role of Catholic education in U.S. society

As Pope Francis said recently: “God is in history, in the processes.

We must not focus on occupying spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run, historical processes.”

New regulations sent to Catholic chaplains, on September 18th, by Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, describe in detail how Catholic chaplains must act when encountering gay and lesbian people who are in committed relationships.

The rules are apparently in response to the military’s repeal of the “Don’t Ask/ Don’t Tell” policy for service personnel and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this summer to strike down a key component of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Clearly, strong American Catholic military muscle against same-sex unions. The focus and intent, however, are disconcertingly out of sync with the commander back home at headquarters in Rome.

Some weeks ago, remember, when asked about gays, Pope Francis, replied: “If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized.” Most recently Pope Francis criticized his church’s mania for “small-minded rules” and urged it instead to emulate Jesus’ emphasis on serving people rather than excluding them.

My chaplain friends tell me that the new Roman Catholic policies were expected and follow similar guidelines issued in August by the Southern Baptist Convention for its chaplains.

 What the rules specify for Catholic chaplains:

 (1)  Chaplains cannot participate in weddings, blessings, retreats, counseling, or funerals that involve same-gender couples.

(2)  Chaplains may attend ceremonies and functions “as long as the priest is not required to acknowledge or approve of a ‘spouse’ of the same gender.”

(3)   Chaplains must exclude men and women in same-gender relationships from any lay ministries.

(4)  Catholics in military leadership positions, should be directed to discourage any support for same-gender couples; and should be encouraged to abstain from doing work that would provide benefits like housing and healthcare.

JAD Editorial comment:

Last year, Congress approved conscience protections for military members that allow them to express their personal beliefs without fear of punishment.

New regulations sent to Catholic chaplains, on September 18th, by Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, describe in detail how Catholic chaplains must act when encountering gay and lesbian people who are in committed relationships.

The rules are apparently in response to the military’s repeal of the “Don’t Ask/ Don’t Tell” policy for service personnel and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this summer to strike down a key component of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Clearly, strong American Catholic military muscle against same-sex unions. The focus and intent, however, are disconcertingly out of sync with the commander back home at headquarters in Rome.

Some weeks ago, remember, when asked about gays, Pope Francis, replied: “If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized.” Most recently Pope Francis criticized his church’s mania for “small-minded rules” and urged it instead to emulate Jesus’ emphasis on serving people rather than excluding them.

My chaplain friends tell me that the new Roman Catholic policies were expected and follow similar guidelines issued in August by the Southern Baptist Convention for its chaplains.

 What the rules specify for Catholic chaplains:

 (1)  Chaplains cannot participate in weddings, blessings, retreats, counseling, or funerals that involve same-gender couples.

(2)  Chaplains may attend ceremonies and functions “as long as the priest is not required to acknowledge or approve of a ‘spouse’ of the same gender.”

(3)   Chaplains must exclude men and women in same-gender relationships from any lay ministries.

(4)  Catholics in military leadership positions, should be directed to discourage any support for same-gender couples; and should be encouraged to abstain from doing work that would provide benefits like housing and healthcare.

JAD Editorial comment:

Last year, Congress approved conscience protections for military members that allow them to express their personal beliefs without fear of punishment.

A couple days ago I finished reading A Question of Conscience, written by the well known Redemptorist Tony Flannery, with more than 40 years of service to the Catholic community in Ireland.

The book chronicles Flannery’s painful journey since February 2012 when he was ‘silenced’ by the Vatican. That’s not long ago! He was forbidden from publicly presiding at Eucharist, hearing confessions, conducting retreats, leading novenas or otherwise practising his ministry as a Roman Catholic ordained minister.

One of the best-known and most-valued Catholic ordained ministers in Ireland, a man regarded with respect and affection by a great many Irish Catholics has now been stopped in his tracks.

Why did the Vatican silence him? Because of Tony Flannery’s work as a founding member of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP). and some offensive-to-Cardinal-Levada passages in articles he had written for the Redemptorist magazine Reality.

Cardinal Levada’s CDF — Pope Benedict’s CDF — crushed Father Flannery, using secret machinations right out of a Renaissance horror story. In his articles he expressed theological questions and positions that in fact are held by most of today’s internationally respected Catholic theologians.

Now…… the question remains: Will the CDF under the current Bishop of Rome be just as secretive, Machiavellian, and cruel?

Pope Francis continues to surprise us. First it was the July “who am I to judge” airplane conversation with reporters during the twelve hour flight from Rio to Rome. Now it is the more extensive interview conducted in August and published simultaneously in a number of Jesuit publications.

The most recent interview was conducted by Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal. Spadaro conducted the interview on behalf of La Civiltà Cattolica, America and several other major Jesuit journals around the world.

Reporting for The New York Times on Friday, September 19, Laurie Goldstein wrote: “Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic Church on Thursday with the publication of his remarks that the church had grown ‘obsessed’ with abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he had chosen not to talk about those issues despite recriminations from critics.”

The headline in the September 20 The International Herald Tribune proclaimed: “Bluntly, Pope Pushes Shift in Church.”

One of my bishop friends reacted quickly to what I called a “climate change in the Catholic Church.” “Just remember,” he said, “the pope cannot change Catholic moral teaching!”

I wonder……. It seems to me, as an historical theologian, that there have been a lot of changes over the centuries in Catholic moral teaching. And I am sure more changes are on the horizon….

Official Catholic teaching has always given the impression that Catholic moral teachings can never change because these teachings are based on God’s law. Certainly Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI insisted on this approach and understanding.

In fact, however, the Catholic Church has changed its moral teachings over the years on a number of issues.

For more than 1,800 years the popes and the church did not condemn slavery. Up until the 17th century, popes, in the very strong terms, condemned making loans with interest.

What about Catholic misogyny? Early Christian writings by great bishops and doctors of the church like Augustine, John Chrysostom and Thomas Aquinas are prime examples of the negative perception of women that has been perpetuated in Catholic teaching and practice.

St. Augustine – “I don’t see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes the purpose of procreation. If woman was not given to man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be? To till the earth together? If help were needed for that, man would have been a better help for man. The same goes for comfort in solitude. How much more pleasure is it for life and conversation when two friends live together than when a man and a woman cohabitate?”

St. John Chrysostom – “The whole of her bodily beauty is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum, and the fluid of digested food… If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and cheeks you will agree that the well-proportioned body is merely a whitened sepulchre.”

St. Thomas Aquinas – “Woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence, such as that of a south wind, which is moist.”

Papal social teachings have change significantly in the last two hundred years. Pope Gregory XVI, for instance, in an 1832 encyclical condemned freedom of conscience in society as an “absurd and erroneous teaching or rather madness.” Pope Leo XIII condemned “the modern liberties” and opposed the equality and participation of citizens in civic and political life. The people, he wrote, are “the untutored multitude” that must “be controlled by the authority of law.” Vatican II, of course, accepted religious liberty for all human beings.

Quite frankly there has been a fair amount of papal and magisterial schizophrenia about changing moral teachings in the Catholic Church. Can Francis change that? Indeed, for me, that will be the big test.

Papal schizophrenia…….When one examines issues of civic, political, and economic life, contemporary papal social teachings have stressed history and the understanding that social understandings can and do change with the times. Church teachings now emphasize the freedom, equality, and participation of the person, in what moral theologian Charles Curran calls a “relationality model” that understands people developing in multiple relationships with God, neighbors, the Earth, and self.

When it comes to papal and magisterial sexual ethics, however, Catholic teaching regresses to the older no-change methodology. It stresses an unchanging human nature and God’s unchanging eternal law. There is no understanding of human development.

Of course, a great many people inside and outside the Catholic Church recognize the dissonance (schizophrenia) between papal / magisterial sexual and papal / magisterial social teachings.

One authority but two different understandings and two different methodologies at work in areas where there should be consistency.

Changes would logically occur in Catholic moral sexual teachings if these teachings resulted from the same methodology as used in papal social teachings. Indeed, the CDF does not like to hear this but papal sexual teachings, like social teachings, will never be able to claim absolute certitude about complex and specific issues.

We are pilgrim people, making new discoveries along the human journey. Our understandings and the daily applications based on them are provisional. (I thought about this last night sitting at my desk. To my right was a handsome old crank telephone, made in Paris in 1920. In my hands I held my iPhone5, as I upgraded it to IOS 7. Afterwards my wife said: “well that will do it until next year’s upgrade.” Provisional.)

A final reflection. Church history should remind us that change in Catholic moral teachings has always come from the grass roots. Vox populi vox Dei. When it comes to the papal condemnation of artificial contraception, for instance, the vast majority of Catholics do not follow the pope.

And so the discussion about gay marriage, about women’s ordination, about our understandings of Jesus, God, and the church are all works in progress.

I hope Francis allows the work to go on

much more smoothly and much more constructively

than his two predecessors!

This weekend I finished preparing a lecture I will be giving next month about theology and contemporary culture.

The inspiration for my lecture came from a long discussion I had a couple of months ago with a  young Roman Catholic ordained minister. I had asked him what he sees as the major challenge in his pastoral ministry. His response surprised me. “The world is an evil place,” he said. “The culture in which we live is like polluted water that infects our minds with the work of the Evil One. The Human City is not and cannot be the City of God.”

He went on to explain that when he becomes pastor of a parish he will turn the altar around in his church so that he does not have to look at people but can face God directly. “In liturgy,” he said “looking at all those people is a terrible distraction and upsets my prayer.” I asked him how he would reconcile that viewpoint with the Incarnation. He said he really didn’t understand my point.

Somewhat annoyed, I replied that contemporary culture is where we live and that is the only place where we can experience and meet the Living God. He said he would like to return to the 1950s. I chuckled and said: “we can only live where we are planted.”

When we do theology we necessarily express ourselves in the symbols, words, and rituals that are products of our culture. In fact all of our concepts and all of our experiential interpretations of the Divine, of Christ, and Christian life are shaped and influenced to a great extent by the culture and the language out of which they emerge.

I have no doubts that contemporary people do indeed want to experience the Divine, the Transcendent, the Living God  – yet contemporary religion often seems to give them answers to their religious questioning from a place far away from their daily lives.

We need to find a way to understand the positive, substantive, and real meaning of transcendence as it makes a claim on human beings within their contemporary historical existence: within contemporary culture.

We need to find a new theological language. As Paul Ricoeur noted already, some years ago, “It is not regret for the sunken Atlantis that animates us, but hope for a re-creation of language. Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.”

Indeed, much current churchly theology – like the theology of my young priest friend — seems motivated by a longing for the sunken Atlantis!

 

And so here…….. My four principles for a life-giving theology anchored in contemporary culture:

(1)     The AIM of theology cannot be a kind of nostalgic retreat to recover a lost mode of being in the world. We really cannot turn-back the clock. To become a religious child again would mean to abandon the adult capacity to think and make one’s own judgments on the basis of critical principles. That is why the upsurge of fundamentalism today is so offensive. It is fundamentally faulty.

(2)     Theological thinking today needs to feel and experience the “call” of the Sacred (the Faith experience) by interpreting and thereby re-creating the meaning and power of religious language. The truly contemporary theologian must have one foot anchored in the present and the other in the tradition of the past. There must be a dynamic tension between contemporary religious consciousness and historical critical consciousness.

(3)     When we do theology – when we reflect in-depth about our Faith experiences of God – we necessarily express ourselves in the symbols, words and rituals that are products of our culture; but we also look for the resonance and dialogue with tradition: with the theological expressions of earlier cultures.

(4)     A truly authentic theology can never be simply the expression of individual, subjective experience. Theology is the result of deep reflection about my Faith experience AND your Faith experience and the Faith experience of the community of Faith: today as well as yesterday. Yesterday’s theology becomes a heritage, a tradition that finds expression in doctrine, scripture, symbol, ritual and patterns of conduct.

Yesterday I saw photos and read about the small group of Syrian rebels who brutally executed seven Syrian government soldiers.Their commander invoked the name of the “Lord of the Throne,” then the seven shirtless, bound, and terrifed men were shot in the head. I had just finished reading that Syrian update when I received an article from a good friend.

Richard Kropf is a priest theologian friend from my home state Michigan. His reflections often appear in the religion section of the Huffington Post. With his permission I am pleased to post his reflections about the situation in Syria.

By now there seems to be very little doubt that Bashar al Assad, or at least some of his military command, are guilty of using chemical weapons against their own people. However, I do very much doubt that President Obama’s call for a limited but unmistakable punitive strike against his regime will accomplish much except to throw the Middle East into even greater chaos.

I will leave it to the reader to speculate as to why our government opted out of something that is so sorely needed in this world, despite the fact that we were among the first to agree to or even insist upon holding the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders and the trials of the Japanese military commanders after World War II. Admittedly, the whole idea and functioning of the ICC remains a work in progress. Instead, I will only suggest that President Obama, as constitutional lawyer who in 2009 at least pledged to cooperate with the ICC, needs to put first things first before we wade into a conflict in which, however things turn out, we are likely to be the loser.

[Richard Kropf’s website, where his writings are posted, can be found at http://www.stellamar.net]

In Orlando, Florida, on the Feast of the Assumption, 825 U.S. Catholic women religious were meeting to discern their relationship with the Catholic Church’s bishops. Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, the man appointed by the Vatican and ordered to oversee the sisters and exercise control over over their statutes and programs, told the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), that the Virgin Mary teaches the faithful to hand themselves over “completely to the will of God.”

Mary, stressed the archbishop, teaches that it’s only in “submitting ourselves over to the one who made us … that we find fulfillment.” Archbishop Sartain’s message was clear: Mary, said the Vatican overseer “…shows us … what God himself desires to do in us all and through the church when we let the grace of God overtake us without placing an obstacle between ourself and that grace.”

LCWR, represents about 80 percent of the 57,000 U.S. sisters.

Archbishop Sartain’s image of the Mother of Jesus is a convenient image for upper-level male administrators who want to keep lower level women, as some say, “in their place.” But is it biblically correct?

Sister Joan Chittister, writing in NCR on August 30th, offers a different perspective; and I resonate very much with Joan.

Joan writes: “In this homily [i.e. Archbishop Sartain’s homily on the Assumption] Mary is ‘quiet,’ ‘docile,’ submits herself over and has no ‘desire or a need to figure things out … or resolve them to her own personal satisfaction.’ There was, we’re told here, no ‘no’ or ‘mine’ in her. The Mary of this homily is a passive receptacle of what she understands to be the Word of God.

“Well, maybe. But it might be good to think about all that a bit in the light of the other things we also know about Mary….

“The purpose of this column is not to parse what the bishop said about Mary on the Feast of the Assumption. I prefer instead to look at what he did not say about her because, it seems to me, what he left out of that homily says much about what is expected of women in the Catholic church.

“For instance, Mary answers the angel’s declaration to her by questioning it. An angel! Someone of much higher rank, it would seem, than even apostolic delegates, and only then with a ‘Be-it-done-unto-me’ response to a situation to which, apparently, ‘no’ was a viable answer. Otherwise, why bother to have the conversation?

“Even more important, perhaps, is the awareness that despite the seriousness — even the danger — of her situation, Mary did not go to any man — to the high priests of the temple, the local rabbi, her father or even Joseph — for directions about what to do next. She went to another woman for the wisdom she needed and followed that instead….

“In another instance, at the wedding feast at Cana, Mary gives her own set of apostolic orders to no less than Jesus himself as well as to the wait staff, as in, ‘Go and do what he tells you.’

“And finally, if anyone wants to know just how influential and important a figure Mary was to the development of the early church, the very idea of her being part of the gathering of apostles on Pentecost when each of them is anointed into discipleship by the Holy Spirit ought to be enough to dispel the notion that what we have here is a woman without a strong sense of self.

“No, the Mary not mentioned in this homily on the Assumption was a woman not intimidated into the Incarnation, not beholden to male answers, not shy about giving directions about what should be done, not without a high sense of personal responsibility, and not one bit in doubt about her place in the hierarchy of the church.

“Those, I think, are precisely the qualities we see in women in our own time that make for what some parts of the church are now calling ‘radical feminism.’

“From where I stand, that is a sad misuse of language and an even sadder case of spiritual blindness.”

And so, we continue to move forward, step by step……..

(Photo: Sister Joan Chittister)