Catholic social teaching “at the heart of the great battle that’s going on”

Now here’s an interesting article from the British newspaper, The Catholic Herald, an interview with Maurice Glasman, a British politician and academic. He is a senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University, where he is also director of the university’s Faith and Citizenship Program. Glasman is practicing Jew and a founding member of the Stoke Newington New Shul congregation.

But he is happy to acknowledge an important debt he owes, and that we all owe, to Catholic social teaching. It’s a tradition, he says, that continues to have an important role to play in the social and political issues of our day. Many of his comments in this article are most relevant to British politics, but it does not take much thinking to see how his observations apply just a well to American politics and moral issues.

It might seem unlikely that this left-wing, Jewish, north London intellectual should be such a champion of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. But it forms the cornerstone of Glasman’s politics – and, he believes, will be at the foundation of any real attempt to move on from what he describes as “England’s two failed dreams” of 1945 welfarism and 1979 Thatcherism.

 

He stumbled across CST by accident, while studying for a PhD in Florence, dismayed by Thatcherism and its “concentration on money and individuals”, and unconvinced by Neil Kinnock’s social democracy. His girlfriend was Italian – “it was inconceivable to me that this girl was a practising, confessing Catholic at Church every Sunday and also a full member of the Italian Communist Party”. She shared the Rerum Novarum with Glasman and an intellectual love-affair began.  “I read the Novarum, I read the commentaries, I read the Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II’s encyclical marking the centenary of Catholic Social Thought.”

 

A lost soul redeemed. “The most important thing is to express my gratitude to the Church, to the Catholic tradition for the intellectual nourishment that it’s given me and so many other people who are not Catholics. It’s a gift to the world. It’s at the heart of the great battle that’s going on – about whether we’re about justice through relationships and tradition or, for the other side, human rights and procedural things.”

I must admit also to be quite taken by his proposal for “rewarding virtue” in society — what he sees as a more direct and perhaps more effective way of achieving what tax credits for married couples is intended to do.

I’d like to see us redistribute resources to people who care – for each other, for children – so that couples can have a night out on a little date. I would have a weekend away for five years of marriage. A week’s holiday for ten years of marriage. Maybe a cruise for twenty five years. Just a present, an acknowledgement that this is not easy – to stay together, to care for others, to be faithful and to forgive and rebuild.  The whole direction of society is to reward freedom and so some generosity for people who make it work and do their duty – that’s what I mean when I say ‘rewarding virtue’”.

There’s plenty more in this article worth looking at, including Glasman’s comments on Iraqi Christian as “the new Jews,” on the common good, and on Cardinal Reinhold Marx’s defense of a speech Glasman offered that one American conservative denounced as “Communist.”

“We may not be murderers, but we are inheritors.”

“To Be White and Reckon with the Death of Michael Brown,” a new piece by columnist Courtney E. Martin at the On Being website, is a fine one. It all leads up to a powerful closing paragraph:

The only way to honor Michael Brown and his family, to honor all Americans who reckon with the scourges of racism every single day, is to own that we may not be murderers, but we are inheritors. We must talk to our ugliest ghosts. We must work on strategies to dismantle structural racism. We must express our outrage at what is happening out there — in Ferguson, in Staten Island, in Oakland. But, we must also investigate what is happening in here, inside every one of us — our own unexamined privilege, our own patronizing cure-alls, our own fears. We are not bad. We are not good. We are part of the tragic story and the opportunity for transformation.

Was Bonhoeffer gay?

Two tweets from Fr. Jim Martin today:

 

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer gay? According to this superb biography, which I just finished, very probably: http://religionandpolitics.org/2014/07/30/the-life-of-dietrich-bonhoeffer-an-interview-with-charles-marsh/

 

And does it matter if Bonhoeffer was gay? Yes, it does. Because it reminds us that gay men and women can be holy–very holy, even martyrs.

500 years ago this week: the conversion of Bartolomeo de las Casas

Here’s an anniversary worth noting. This week marks the 500th anniversary of the conversion of Fr. Bartolomeo de las Casas. Las Casas was the 16th century Spanish Dominican friar who came to “the New World,” participated in the atrocities committed by the Spanish against the native Americans, and later opposed these atrocities vehemently.

Las Casas came to the Americas as a lay man. He was 18 years old in 1502, when he arrived with his father, who was a merchant, in what is today Cuba. They were among the first European settlers in the Americas. He obtained a plantation and bought slaves. But he soon decided to become a priest, and in 1510, he became the first European to be ordained a priest in the Americas. In 1513, he served as chaplain to Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the Spanish conquistador, in his mission to take control of the island of Cuba from its natives. In this role, he witnessed even crueler treatment of native Americans than he had seen (and committed) previously.

It was in August 1514 — precisely 500 years ago — that the most significant conversion of Las Casas’s life occurred. He was studying a passage from the book of Sirach in preparation for a homily. It was Sirach 34: 18-22 (here is today’s New American Bible translation):

Tainted his gifts who offers in sacrifice ill-gotten goods!

Mock presents from the lawless win not God’s favor.

The Most High approves not the gifts of the godless,

nor for their many sacrifices does he forgive their sins.

Like the man who slays a son in his father’s presence

is he who offers sacrifice from the possessions of the poor.

The bread of charity is life itself for the needy;

he who withholds it is a man of blood.

He slays his neighbor who deprives him of his living;

he sheds blood who denies the laborer his wages.

The words dug into his conscience. He prepared a special sermon about the treatment of the Indians for the feast of the Assumption, August 15. He set free his slaves and began preaching frequently that the other colonists should do the same. Las Casas went on to become one of the foremost voices in defense of the human dignity of the native American peoples — which was mostly, unfortunately, ignored.

Five hundred years ago: the conversion of Fr. Bartolomeo de las Casas, who raised his voice with courage in opposition to what would become one of the most tragic offenses against human dignity in history.