“We are called to deprive ourselves of essential things, not only the superfluous”

I love this passage from Pope Francis’s Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square yesterday:

Today Jesus also tells us that the measurement is not the quantity but the fullness. There is a difference. It is not a question of the wallet, but of the heart. There are heart diseases that lower the heart to the portfolio. To love God “with all your heart” means to trust Him, to trust in His providence, and to serve him in the poorest brothers and sisters without expecting anything in return. Faced with the needs of others, we are called to deprive ourselves of essential things, not only the superfluous; we are called to give the necessary time, not only what remains extra; we are called to give immediately and unconditionally some of our talent, not after using it for our own purposes or our own group.

Allow me to tell you a story that happened in my previous diocese. It is about a mother with her three children.  The father was at work and the family was at table eating veal cutlets alla Milanese.  Just then someone knocked at the door and one of the children – the young one who was five or six years old – the oldest was seven years old – came and said, “Mom, there’s a beggar at the door who is asking for some food.”  And the mother, a good Christian, said, “What should we do?”

“Give him some food,” they said.

“Ok.” She took the fork and knife and cut each person’s cutlet in half.

“Oh no, Mom! Not like this! Take something from the refrigerator!”

“No, we will make three sandwiches like this!”

And thus the children learned that the meaning of true charity means that you give not from what is left over but from what we need. I am certain that that afternoon they were a bit hungry, but this is the way to do it.

“This Land Is Home to Me,” 40 years on

Tomorrow, February 1, marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of This Land Is Home to Me, a historic pastoral letter by the bishops of the Appalachian region of the United States. OSV Newsweekly has just published a new article I’ve written about the origins of that letter, its impact on the U.S. Catholic Church and the region, and its enduring legacy. It’s in this week’s print edition and here on the OSV website.

You can find the full text of This Land Is Home to Me here (the link opens a .pdf). At the same link, you’ll also find At Home in the Web of Life, the letter the Appalachian bishops released in 1995, to mark This Land‘s twentieth anniversary. Both documents are well worth a look.

On This Land‘s anniversary, I’d also point you to “A Judgment upon Us All,” an article of mine published by Commonweal almost two years ago, which offers a more personal and on-the-ground perspective on the issues addressed by This Land. Finally, you’ll find a selection of other reflections and comments on Appalachian poverty that I’ve offered on this blog by clicking here.

 

Walking the walk

The Italian newspaper La Stampa‘s site, Vatican Insider, is reporting this morning that work will begin in a few days to renovate the public restrooms below the collonades of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Shower facilities will be installed for the use of local homeless people.

The source of this information is Bishop Konrad Krajewski, the Papal Almoner (his full-time job is helping the poor on behalf of the Pope!). La Stampa is also reporting that ten Catholic parishes in Rome in the neighborhoods most frequented by the homeless have already, at Krajewski’s invitation, installed similar showers. The full article is here. Here’s a snippet:

So he decides to visit ten parishes in areas of Rome where many homeless people live. He enters parish halls. If they do not already exist, he asks that showers be built, paid by the Pope’s charity. They are not expensive projects, they are not designed to become big community centers. They are rather a diffused service for the people in the neighborhoods of a city where public restrooms are closed and the homeless cannot go into cafés to use the toilet. Monsignor Krajewski explains that «it is not simple, because it is easier to make sandwiches than run a shower service. We need volunteers, towels, underwear». Father Conrad tells the parish priests that «the Holy Father is paying!». And Providence never fails to assist. Andrea Bocelli, through his foundation, makes a substantial donation. A senator from the North requests the intervention of a firm which builds the showers in the parishes that lack them for free.

Program getting minority kids to college

I listened to a fascinating report on Morning Edition this morning about Detroit’s Christo Rey Catholic high school system. It seems to have found a creative and effective recipe for getting at-risk minority kids motivated, educated, and into college.

The schools work in cooperation with local professional places of business — hospitals and law firms, not McDonalds and gas stations — to place the kids in internship-type positions one day a week. This gives them first hand experience of professional work environments and also some important contacts for things like letters of recommendation and college/career advice. Sounds like they’re having some good success with it, and the number of kids trying to get into the schools is now far outstripping the programs’ capacities.

I ended up sitting in my car before coming in to my office so I could hear the report all the way through. It’s here and worth the 5 minutes it’ll take to listen. The Detroit Christo Rey system website is here.

“Do you want to honor Christ’s body?”: St. John Chrysostom on liturgy and care for the poor

I’m busy wrapping up my work translating Goffredo Boselli’s The Spiritual Meaning of the Liturgy, set for publication by Liturgical Press in the fall. It’s an exciting and beautiful book in many ways, one of them being Boselli’s rich appreciation of the theology of the early Church. The book draws from many of the greatest thinkers and pastoral leaders of that era in fruitful ways.

Here’s a great passage from St. John Chrysostom that Boselli quotes at some length in chapter nine, which is on “Liturgy and Love for the Poor”:

Do you want to honor Christ’s body? Do not neglect him when he is naked; do not, while you honor him here with silken garments, neglect Him perishing outside of cold and nakedness. For He that said “This is my body,” and by His word confirmed the fact, also said, “You saw me hungry and you did not feed me” and “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.” This [the body of Christ on the altar] has no need of coverings, but of a pure soul; but that requires much attention. Let us learn therefore to be strict in life, and to honor Christ as He Himself desires….

For what is the profit, when His table indeed is full of golden cups, but He perishes with hunger? First fill Him, being hungry, and then abundantly deck out His table also. Do you make for Him a cup of gold, while you refuse to give him a cup of cold water? And what is the profit? Do you furnish His table with cloths bespangled with gold, while you refuse Him even the most basic coverings? And what good comes of it?

And these things I say, not forbidding munificence in these matters, but admonishing you to do those other works, together with these, or rather even before these. Because for not having adorned the church no one was ever blamed, but for not having helped the poor, hell is threatened, and unquenchable fire, and the punishment of evil spirits. Do not therefore while adorning His house overlook your brother in distress, for he is more properly a temple than the other.

That’s from a homily that Chrysostom preached on the Gospel of Matthew (not my translation, but one that’s more than a bit outdated; I cleaned up some of the most archaic style). Chrysostom was archbishop of Constantinople at the beginning of the fifth century.

“It’s a prison”

The threats to the water supply that began yesterday morning in southern West Virginia are only the latest in a long series of similar problems that have occured in that state as a result of coal production. As we have all enjoyed the benefits of easily available fossil fuel energy creation, the residents of this very poor state have paid the consequences.

But I can only imagine that many folks living in the central Appalachian coalfields are shaking their heads this weekend. The discovery of about 5,000 gallons of chemicals used in coal production accidentally seeping into the Elk River near Charleston, the state’s capital, happened at about 10:30 am yesterday, and it was national news by mid-afternoon. The state government, schools, and businesses all shut down, and the Department of Homeland Security is sending in bottled water on 16 tractor-trailer trucks today to distribution centers in and around Charleston. “It’s a prison from which we would like to be released,” the mayor of Charleston told CNN yesterday afternoon. And from what I have read, it’s apparently not even clear that the water is very unsafe yet; most of the response seems to be precautionary in nature. As it should be.

Well, it’s nice that everyone has lept into action. But giant multi-billion-dollar coal companies have intentionally pumped billions of gallons of more toxic stuff into the ground of some of the poorest counties of southern West Virginia for decades, leaving entire communities with dangerous and disgusting water supplies and their residents suffering long-term effects that include chronic nausea, chronic diarhhea, gum disease, dimentia, birth defects, sterility, cancer, and more.

The difference this weekend is that it happened to Charleston, where middle- and upper-class people live, where the state legislators and business leaders work and where their kids go to school.

After reading the coverage from West Virginia for about 20 minutes early this morning, I was literally feeling grateful to be able to step into a clean and safe shower. There are West Virginia families and communities that have been unable to do that for years. Anyone see a problem here?

NPR in Martin County

Today is the 50th anniverary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of “unconditional war on poverty in America.” To mark the occasion, NPR has begun a series of reports on poverty in the United States today. I listened to the first of these in the car on the way to work this morning and was very glad I caught it.

I was glad to learn what the report had to offer, of course, but probably appreciated it more because I am so familiar with the place that reporter Pam Fessler chose to consider: Martin County, Kentucky (marked in red on the state map). I worked a stone’s throw from Martin County for two years (and I mean that literally: you could throw a stone across the creek into Martin County from the spot I parked my  car every day when I got to work in Kermit, West Virginia). Many of our clients at Christian Help of Mingo County were Martin County residents. (Some of them are featured in photos in the little video I made during my time there that you’ll find at the Christian Help homepage; it’s the bottom of the two videos there.)

I know well the places Fessler mentions in her report: the town of Inez, Kentucky, and the mountains, hollers, and coalfields that surround it. I don’t know personally the people she talks to, but their surnames are familiar ones in the area.

The other thing I know well, and which made me smile, is that accent in those people’s voices. After living in the region for a couple of years and getting to know the people well, hearing that accent is like pulling a warm blanket around myself. Sounds corny, I suppose, but, well, they’re good people, who welcomed and befriended my family and me without ever for a single moment treating us as the outsiders that we were.

I can tell you that Fessler does not exaggerate the poverty of the region a bit. Her report does suggest the difficulties it causes, the crucial help that government support offers, and determination of many in the region to get by as best they can by their own efforts.

What Fessler did not mention, and probably did not have time to go into, is the broad and powerful historical, economic, and business forces that brought the region to where it was on the day Lyndon Johnson visited and where it is still today. Perhaps NPR will have a chance to explore that in the reports that will follow.

Read or listen to Pam Fessler’s NPR report, “Kentucky County That Gave War On Poverty A Face Still Struggles,” here.

“The solution is solidarity”: Mary Elizabeth Hobgood’s Dismantling Privilege

Working through an engaging and challenging book is a great way to wrap up a year. At the close of 2013, Mary Elizabeth Hobgood’s Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability has been a pleasure. Though there is plenty in the book that I will not mention here, three of its major themes are race, economics, and sexuality, and Hobgood left me thinking about all three more deeply.

For Hobsgood (who teaches theology at the College of the Holy Cross), whiteness is about far more than skin color. On a cultural level, it’s about denying our own relationality and our connectednesss to one another and to community. Hobgood says we who are white deny ourselves of these as the price of maintaining the competitive, efficient, and technologically advanced capitalist society that we have built for ourselves. Having bought into such a society, all of the unearned privileges that come with whiteness are, unconsciously, what we think we deserve for our willingness to forgo things that are so basic to being human. The unearned privileges of whiteness are our “emotional compensation for the suffering involved in being faithful to industrial morality” (49). And our fear and distrust of non-whites are rooted in our resentfulness that they have managed to hold onto those things better than we have.

The damage we’ve inflicted on non-white people through the social structures that support our whiteness is, of course, obvious, both in our history and in our present. But Hobgood points out that we have also hurt ourselves, through the emotional and moral damage that have come with all this self-denial. By forsaking relationships with the earth and the people around us, we have denied our own relational nature. “The system of white racial identity is constructed to diminish the relational capacity of whites” (61).

Hobgood also offers a compelling look at economic structures. With our concepts and systems of markets and money, we ignore the relational and historical aspects of our economy. We keep ourselves ignorant of our connections to the people who make our clothes and provide our food. We find ways to talk about poverty in terms of the failures or weaknesses or bad luck of people who are poor, ignoring history and social structures that, as contributing factors, loom high above such minor considerations. Hobgood points out that we rationalize shipping jobs overseas for the drastically lower costs involved, and congratulate ourselves at how appreciative these workers are for the jobs and the wages that are so much higher than they would be without us there, “never mind the centuries of colonial and neocolonial impoverishment by the West, which robbed them of control over their land, labor, and resources” (94).

All of this is profoundly non-Christian and anti-Christian. “Though largely ignored by First World Christians, biblical tradition is clear that poverty is not a mark of having sinned [or of personal failures], but a result of being sinned against” (68). She’s right that “beyond diffuse sentiment and generalized moral challenge … none of the official churches assists people in analyzing the roots of poverty and other forms of economic injustice” (70). As with whiteness, the damage done extends to the privileged elites whom the system supports, as well as to the poor who are hurt by it. “Everyone’s sense of virtue is degraded” (84). Capitalism robs us of our capacity to trust others, and “trust is essential for human flourishing and the development of empathy, cognition, and creativity” (100).

Less compelling and harder for me to agree with was Hobgood’s chapter on sexuality, which is so radical as to seem disconnected with reality. “Human beings,” she writes, “are socially constructed, not necessarily biologically constructed, as male or female” (108). There’s far more here than a call for greater respect and acceptance of gay people or acknowledgement by the churches of gay marriage. Hobgood argues, “‘Properly gendered’ (heterogendered) makes and females, heterosexuality, monogamy, or even biological maleness and femaleness is not a natural or universal human condition” (122). Following through on these principles, she advocates “freedom in gender and sexual expression” and “gender fluidity and fluidity in sexual practice” (124).

While I realize that these currents of thought exist out there, it’s hard to see how they are compatible with the Christian moral tradition and Catholic teaching. It’s one thing to criticize the patriarchal structures of the church or advocate opening the sacrament of marriage to gay couples; it’s a whole other thing to discard the value or normativity of monogamous marriage. I had a sense that Hobsgood’s positions here might sound fascinating in the context of academia, but would wreck havoc in real life. (Indeed, we’ve been inching closer to “gender fluidity and fluidity in sexual practice” for decades and are worse off for it.)

Also pushing Hobgood from the realms of credibility are seemingly wild-eyed assertions such as: “Catholic women have learned that without their intact hymens or multiple experiences of married motherhood, they have no right to exist” (132); and “This belief [that sexual desire is beyond the control of men] is supported by traditional moral theology that defined birth control as more sinful than rape because with rape procreation, the only legitimate purpose of sexual desire, was at least possible” (132-133). (I have a fairly thorough familiarity with “traditional moral theology” and have yet to stumble across even an obscure suggestion of this latter kind, much less its strong presence in anything close to formally endorsed doctrine or theology.)

In all of the above aspects of life, Hobsgood says, the solution is solidarity, and on this point she is surely right. By our rejection of solidarity and relationality, we have damaged people, society, and our very selves in myriad ways. Dismantling Privilege has challenged me in new ways to stand against this powerful cultural current and become more truly the person — and the person in community — that God created me to be.

[I should note that the copy I read is the first edition of the book, published in 2000. I see the publisher, Pilgrim Press, released a revised and updated edition in 2009, and I’m not sure what differences it may include.]