The City of God

Bearing the Cross

David Van Biema's "The Turning Point" in the May 2, 2005, issue of TIME magazine gives much insight into the intellectual and spiritual formation of our new pope, Benedict XVI.

It also helps me understand why he and I — though I am a Roman Catholic — don't sing from the same hymn book.

At the root of our disagreement is a different attitude toward "ordo, God's all-inclusive order." Pope Benedict, as Joseph Ratzinger before he became a cardinal and then Holy Father, lionized saints Bonaventure and Augustine. Augustine postulated The City of God, the name of one of his two major books (the other being his Confessions). "A key concept" of that book, Van Biema writes, "is that the Christian church is superior and essentially alien to its earthly surroundings."

As such, the "eternal, divine truth" of the church seems to represent to His Holiness the only true foundation for worldly order: "the only bulwark against man-made 'truths' ranging from the mischievous to the murderous." Faith in the "city of man," by way of contrast, can be a recipe for chaos.

Not that "experimentation" with "free and liberal thoughts" within the church is always forbidden. During the mid-1960's Ratzinger was in fact a key architect of Vatican II reforms, including the earth-shaking 1965 document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." It has since been cited by liberals and reformers

... as a mandate for the church to come into synch with modern Western culture. That means loosening its hierarchical authority, encouraging internal debate and external outreach and honoring individual freedom of conscience ... .

But then in 1968, while Ratzinger was a teacher at the University of Tübingen in Germany, dialogue with the left turned to disruption. Student strikes, Ratzinger's former friend and now-antagonist Hans Küng reports, "triggered a huge fright. Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing."

Since then, the less-liberal in the church have re-envisioned Gaudium et Spes as being "far less expansive than liberals imagine." Meanwhile, as a cardinal, Ratzinger became prefect of the Vatican's "heresy-hunting office," which had since been renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and which he had once been critical of as "an all too smoothly functioning [body] which prejudged every question almost before it had come up for discussion."

In that role during the 1980s — even if his various decisions and pronouncements on the subject of "liberation theology" were shaded and nuanced, and not necessarily simplistic — Cardinal Ratzinger "effectively crippled the philosophy's influence and wounded the prestige of sympathizers like the Jesuits." (Liberation theology was a movement, primarily in Latin America, in which Catholic priests sided with local Marxists on behalf of the poor and against their repression by entrenched rich oligarchies.)

When the man who would one day become pope was traumatized by the German academic upheavals of 1968, according to his former assistant and friend Wolfgang Beinart, "at that moment Ratzinger the reformer decided the necessary conditions for reform did not exist." Ratzinger apparently concluded that the City of God needed rigidity, not openness. That rigidity has been the story of his career for over three decades.

The fact that I resent this rigidity says as much about me as it does about objective truth. I was some 20 years younger than the forty-something Ratzinger when, also in 1968, "liberal" protest against the war in Vietnam turned ugly and "radical" here in this country. I never bought into the rationale for that change ... and as a result I have never felt particularly "mugged by reality" in the wake of that development. It was a tragic mistake to go "radical" ... but that was no reason for me to stop hoping for a "liberal" world of greater justice and freedom.

In those days, I was not a Catholic. As the child of lapsed Protestants, I was attending Jesuit-run Georgetown University despite my lack of religious affiliation. I accordingly imbibed the heady spirit of Gaudium et Spes and the rest of Vatican II at a slight distance, since I had known little of the heavy-handed ways of the earlier church.

But from what I heard, I knew that the Gaudium spirit spoke to me. Little surprise that when some three decades later I converted to Catholicism, I considered myself a "Vatican II Catholic." Never mind that the current pontiff, John Paul II, was a "conservative." For me, Catholicism is a faith of liberation.

In examining my own basic assumptions over the last decade or so, I have become ever more convinced that there are lawful, if hidden, sources of order in the world itself. This is why, for instance, I am so taken with the evolutionary theories of researcher Stuart Kauffman as discussed in his book At Home in the Universe (see Welcome to Beyond Darwin and the other posts in my Beyond Darwin blog).

Kauffman posits that "order for free" just nautrally emerges in systems poised at the "edge of chaos." Neither rigid order nor rank chaos is the natural state of such systems. Rather, they gravitate to that fecund boundary between the two, so to evolve with greater and greater complexity. "Self-organization" accounts for the evolution of life forms and of human cultures.

I would liken the Vatican II Gaudium et Spes church to the fertile edge of chaos, the rigid church of yore and today to the frozen order which harms evolvability, and the 1968 upheavals which traumatized Ratzinger to the chaos which likewise harms evolvability.

Still, I take the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger's point that there are times when rigidity is a necessary ploy to conquer chaos. I just don't agree with his underlying metaphysics: that the City of God and the city of man are essentially alien to one another. I think our faith, hope, and joy transform the city of man into the City of God. I think the spirit of Vatican II is just what the doctor ordered for such a transformation.

I admit, however, that I can't explain why that spirit curdled so rapidly into hateful radicalism in the late 1960s. Nor am I quite certain what, if anything, would keep that from happening again, should the Holy Spirit move the new pope to resume his mid-1960s openness.

But that is exactly what I pray for today. Am I being too rigid?

The Church as Gyroscope, or Counterweight?

St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, Rome

As I indicated in A New Pope, I am like other "liberal" American Catholics who are wary of the reign of the newly installed Benedict XVI. Columnist Jules Witcover of The Baltimore Sun, himself a liberal Catholic, has this article about the situation in this morning's edition.

Of the former Cardinal Ratzinger, Witcover writes of Catholic Americans' concerns with his ...

... rigid adherence to church orthodoxy in barring women from the priesthood and marriage for male priests, in categorical opposition to abortion and to the use of condoms in the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

Moreover, Cardinal Ratzinger, in a memorandum to a leading American cleric during the 2004 presidential campaign, sent at a time when certain American prelates and priests favored denying Holy Communion to Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, because he was pro-choice ...

... appeared to sanction the same denial to any Catholic who supported a pro-choice candidate for that reason.

"A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation with evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion," the German cardinal wrote, "if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia."

Such stands on specific issues fit in with a worldview then-Cardinal Ratzinger expressed as recently as his homily to the conclave of cardinals who would elevate him to pope in the coming days, in which ...

... he warned that the world was "moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires."

Elsewhere [Witcover continues], he equated this relativism with Marxism, liberalism and feminism to be shunned by all Catholics.

I take this ultra-orthodoxy, this aversion to "relativism," as a sign that the new pope, if he had his way, would have the church and the world march in lockstep to a single drummer. That, after all, is what relativism's opposite, absolutism, is all about: there is supposedly one absolute source of values and morals, and if the world doesn't march to its beat, it's on its way to hell in a proverbial handbasket.

But, as I suggest in Emergent Expectedness, Emergent Evolvability in my Beyond Darwin blog, when any "society" composed of semi-autonomous agents coupled loosely together in networks of mutual aid and support starts marching to a single drumbeat, uh oh. Though the uniform drumbeat seems the perfect antidote to rumors of incipient chaos, it too harms the evolvability and survivability of the society in adapting to inevitable change.

I think Pope Benedict imagines the Catholic Church as a counterweight to change. Better he should imagine it as a gyroscope, dynamically spinning out the sort of change society needs today, meanwhile keeping things steady and on course.

Today, the church and the society as a whole need the affirmation of women that would come if women could be priests. Also needed is a recognition that not all good priests need be celibate. And an admission that sheer concern for the lives of millions demands that the church stop opposing condoms as barriers to AIDS.

A New Pope

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

We Roman Catholics have a new pope today, and wouldn't you know it, the man who was selected was the one man I most hoped would not be made pope. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, erstwhile chief enforcer of theological purity as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is now Pope Benedict XVI.

This is quite a blow for me, a "liberal" in my faith. Only three days ago I filed Mugged by Uncertainty, in which I pointed out TIME magazine's nominating Ratzinger as one the top 100 movers and shakers in the world. In this article, TIME said:

Ratzinger has been a tough theological enforcer in the church for more than two decades. Once an enthusiast for the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, he later wondered if they had gone too far. Call him one of the first theo-conservatives—a former liberal mugged by what he saw as the reality of religious laxity.

His response was, said TIME:

... to reassess the importance of the papacy as a means of asserting control over the church, to insist on the otherworldliness of religious faith and its imperviousness to changes in society.

The "theo-conservatism" of Ratzinger is admittedly anathema to me. So I consider it my duty to at least try to figure it out.

Some help comes from two paragraphs in a front-page profile of the new pope in today's The Baltimore Sun:

Ratzinger's experience in Nazi Germany is thought to have been a seminal moment in the formation of his theological convictions, convincing him that church teachings must be clear and absolute lest they be easily manipulated by outside forces.

"Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism," wrote John L. Allen Jr., in his book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith. "In other words, he believes the Catholic church serves the cause of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes."

The best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism? That idea of serving freedom by restricting it is truly paradoxical to me, even oxymoronic. Moreover, I am a great believer not in absolutism but in relativism: I think most moral decisions must be taken in view of a larger context. What is wrong in one context may be right in another.

My gut tells me that John L. Allen's assessment of what lies at the core of Pope Benedict XVI's thinking is spot on — ecclesial totalitarianism as the supposed guarantor of human freedom, that is — even though it is usually a mistake to summarize complex thought with simple mantras.

It furthermore looks to me as if the late pope, John Paul II, bought more and more into this notion as he got older and older. Somewhere in the newspaper coverage of the papal election was mentioned the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger was one of the few men to have had regular private audiences with John Paul. Could there be a connection?

We must keep in mind that, just as Benedict XVI was traumatized by Nazism in the Germany of his youth, the former Karol Woytila was scarred by both Nazi and Soviet occupation of his native Poland. Both were, lest we forget, forms of totaliarianism.

I can't think of many things that I hate more than totalitarianism and tyranny.

So I'm going to have to cogitate on how it could possibly be true that ecclesial totalitariansim helps the cause of human freedom!

Mugged by Uncertainty

Michael Kinsley

"Evolution of the Neocons," a recent op-ed column be the Los Angeles Times' Michael Kinsley, shows how the neoconservative movement has done a 180-degree turn since the 1970's and '80's. Where the neocons who drive foreign policy in the Bush administration have

... a "messianic vision" of using American power to spread democracy, an indifference to the crucial distinction between what would be nice and what is essential to national security, and excessive optimism that we can arrange things according to our own values in strange and faraway lands ...

the founders of neoconservatism looked askance at trying to impose American values elsewhere. Jeane Kirkpatrick, neoconservative emeritus from the Reagan years, once published an article that

... was a ferocious attack on President Carter for trying to "impose liberalization and democratization" on other countries. She mocked "the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." Democracy, she said, depends "on complex social, cultural and economic conditions." It "normally" takes "decades, if not centuries."

Part of the explanation for the about face, as Kinsley mentions, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pre-collapse neocons were mainly wanted to make certain that the communists would not win the Cold War. Indeed, Kinsley writes:

The core group [of original neocons] had famously been Trotskyites at City College in the 1930s. By the 1950s and 1960s, they had become anti-Communist liberals and supporters of the Vietnam War. ... Finally [after taking offense at various liberal programs and at the counterculture] Irving Kristol, dubbed the neocon godfather, decided to take the name [which had been coined by neoconservatism's opponents as a slur] as a compliment. He defined a neoconservative as "a liberal mugged by reality."

However, I see an overarching continuity here, despite the appearance of an about face. Kinsley himself alludes to it in his final sentences:

The seemingly easy spread of democracy over the last couple of decades may have disproved Kirkpatrick's pessimism. But all these explanations require an admission of error, something the neocons are not very good at. They are selling certainty.

They are selling certainty because they are seeking certainty. When our chances in the Cold War seemed touch and go, these folks were hell-bent on guaranteeing our victory, even if we had to climb into bed with dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran to bring it about.

Now that we've won that war, the new generation of neocons see muscular projections of American power abroad as the best guarantee that we'll win the current war against terrorism.

Again, it's all about certainty. Whatever ideological posture underwrites American certitude is the right one for the times. The best way to be certain of the results is to be cocksure of the grounding philosophy.

The hunt for certainty is everywhere today. I (who am a "liberal" Catholic) believe it infects the "conservative" side of the Catholic Church. Take, for example, this article in TIME magazine nominating Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as one the top 100 movers and shakers in the world. TIME writer Andrew Sullivan says:

Ratzinger has been a tough theological enforcer in the church for more than two decades. Once an enthusiast for the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, he later wondered if they had gone too far. Call him one of the first theo-conservatives—a former liberal mugged by what he saw as the reality of religious laxity.

His response has been, says Sullivan:

... to reassess the importance of the papacy as a means of asserting control over the church, to insist on the otherworldliness of religious faith and its imperviousness to changes in society.

The "control" asserted by a strong pope, be it noted, is what brings that greatest certainty. We got that same message from the pulpit at Mass yesterday, from a visiting priest who began his homily by noting recent coverage in The Baltimore Sun about individuals whom the good father asserted were "not real Catholics."

The article, I knew, was In the church, on their own terms, from April 10. It profiled seven local Catholic women who had diverse ways of making sense of their faith in our times. One of them sent so far as to replace "Our Father" with "Our Holy Mother" in saying the Lord's Prayer.

One agreed largely with Church teachings, subject to the proviso that the Church may one day be moved to ordain women, and was especially strong for the teaching against birth control.

One resented so much emphasis on "sex, abortion, birth control" and wanted more on "the war in Iraq, executions, far more serious problems." "The primacy of [individual] conscience," that one also felt, "has always been the essence of the Catholic Church."

And so on. Not exactly a rogue's gallery of "not real Catholics." So when Father railed from the lectern at them as a lead-in to telling us how important a strong, controlling pope is, I blanched. Upon further reflection today, I realize he was basically saying what the writer of a recent letter to the editor had in mind. (See "Priest shortage result of decline in moral values" on this page.)

The writer blamed the priest shortage in the Catholic Church on our loss as a society of:

... such things as absolute truth and absolute standards of good and evil, of right and wrong. Those are radical concepts in this day and age.

The shortage of priests in these United States is not a commentary on the church's refusal to discard ancient traditions and doctrine for the sake of expedience. It is more a commentary on us, on America - a commentary on what we've lost.

That boils down, in my mind, to a fear of change. For change endangers certainty, and the thing which unites all of the conservative voices I've mentioned in this post is that they all act as if they have been mugged by uncertainty.

Is that any way for people of faith to act?

Divine Disobedience

As I mentioned in Whither the Church? and in Mass Movement, I have been reading Francine du Plessix Gray's 1970 book, Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (a book for which there is no online image available). The book assembles several articles Ms. Gray wrote for The New Yorker about radical Catholics in a radical time in America. Among them are "Catonsville Nine" leaders Daniel and Philip Berrigan, two priests for whom burning draft records in protest of the Vietnam War was as natural as breathing.

I delved into this book in hopes of stoking my own reviving commitment, in faith, to doing good works to better the world. But it's not really working.

The reason it's not really working makes itself known to me when I read, on page 79, "There is a moral fundamentalism in the Berrigans which follows this passage from the Book of Acts with total fidelity." "This passage" is one which du Plessix Gray has just quoted:

They [the early Christians] remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers ... the faithful all lived together and shared out the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed. (Acts 2:42, 2:46)

The Berrigans took this mandate, "the socialism of the Gospels" (Acts was originally the second part of Luke's Gospel), with "a disturbingly literal reading," a "simplism":

"Read the Gospel, get poor, get with it," Daniel [Berrigan] blithely told a student who had asked him how to live the Christian life. "It's just that simple." (p. 80)

I don't believe in literal, simplistic, fundamentalist readings of Scripture, whether by the Christian left or the right.

I read the early Christians' divesting themselves of material security as a metaphor for the throwing away of crutches in general, as it were ... for what a New Ager would call "claiming one's power."

In my view of faith (see "Throw Those Crutches Away ... " for more) it only really begins to be faith when it gives us the power, with God's help, to create our own reality. When we do what the proverbial faith healer is wont to tell us to do —"Throw away those crutches and walk!" — then and only then are we living a life of faith.

If material wealth is in fact a crutch we lean on, it blocks our spiritual growth. That's the kind of thing the Gospels are telling us in saying man does not live by bread alone.

But literally throwing bread away — becoming poor for its own sake — mistakes a metaphor about discarding whatever is blocking our spirituality for a universal commandment which may or may not be applicable, depending on the individual person and whatever it is that acts as a crutch in that particular life.

We all have different crutches. I suppose it is possible to use one's "social commitment" as a crutch, too.

Then again, I don't want to sound like I'm against efforts on behalf of social justice. All I'm really saying is that they are not for one and all the universal elixir Daniel Berrigan implied when he told his student how to live the Christian life.

"Throw Those Crutches Away ... "

William A. Dembski's Intelligent Design

In my Beyond Darwin blog yesterday I posted Grounding Faith in Reality?, part of my ongoing critique of William A. Dembski's book Intelligent Design. This book concerns how we can go about assuring ourselves that life's complexity is so extraordinary, the "finger of God" must be behind it.

By life, Dembski means the biosphere of this planet as it has evolved over the eons. For Dembski, though he is a theist, evolution is real. It's just that Darwin's heirs are incorrect: evolution is not rooted in pure randomness. Dembski says that that claim is demonstrably false. His book is in part a "scientific" demonstration of why.

But in part, it is an exercise in theology. Dembski tries to show that life's incredible complexity is a sign from God: an event or combination of events that is so very extraordinary, it must be "uniquely specific" to an alleged sign-giver. In this case, the alleged sign-giver is God.

If a sign can be so validated, it can activate a "test-conditional" of the form if-the-sign-occurs-then-decide-such-and-such. A concrete example Dembski gives: If the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is real, then we ought to believe in our own bodily resurrection ... and all that goes with it in Christian religion. We ought to have faith that the Son of God has, through his own death on a cross, conquered death.

My quarrel with Dembski is over his idea of what faith is and how it works. He disparages faith that is "not grounded in reality." Specifically, he finds fault with the Basque-Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) for saying, "To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as though He did exist."

That formulation is not good enough for Dembski (see p. 42). It leaves room for doubt about God's existence. Dembski hopes to construct an argument about the extraordinariness of life's evolutionary history which can eliminate that doubt.

But I say that where there is no room for doubt, there is no room for faith. Faith is not supposed to be the same thing as palpable certainty. Though the risen Jesus tolerated the "hands-on" confirmation sought by his "doubting" apostle Thomas, clearly the message for us is that faith in itself ought not require such materialistic confirmation.

I would go even farther. I would say that true faith is never to be "grounded in reality." It is the other way around. As I have tried to suggest in earlier posts — Genesis by Observership, Verum Factum, The Pearlescence Principle — we are supposed to ground our reality in faith!

Dembski's argument about Intelligent Design is at best a crutch to belief. For belief to become a reality-grounding and life-generating faith for us, we need to — as the faith healers are wont to say — "Throw those crutches away and walk!"

Whither the Church?

As I mentioned in Mass Movement, I have been reading Francine du Plessix Gray's Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism. This book, from 1970, is apprently out of print, and I can find no image of its cover on the Web.

That's too bad, since it captures a spirit that has been too long absent from most of Catholicism. It is the spirit of revolutionizing the world.

The brother priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan had it when as part of the Catonsville Nine they protested the war in Vietnam by seizing and burning draft files at a Selective Service office in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland.

Ms. Gray profiled the Berrigans in the New Yorker essays which formed her book. This was in a time before the title "Ms." was even yet known. The Church itself had recently been revolutionized by Vatican II. Ms. Gray wrote (pp. 67-68):

Docile seminarians though they were in their youth, Daniel and Philip were soon affected by the progressive theology that poured out of Europe after World War II. The French, Belgian, and Dutch churches had been radicalized by Catholics' participation in the Resistance Movement, by priest's and laymen's militant political involvements under the Nazi occupation. Even liturgy had been renewed by the improvised Masses which were often said, during wartime, in private homes, factories, or open fields. The Berrigans' vocations were deeply affected by the ideology of the French Resistance. In the late 1940's, when Daniel Berrigan was studying at Weston [a Jesuit seminary] and Philip was at Holy Cross College nearby, the French avant-garde was a favorite theme of their Sunday afternoon conversations. Their heroes were men like Cardinal Suhard, a guiding spirit of the Missions de France and of the worker-priest movement, whom Philip regards as the greatest single influence on his life; the Jesuit Father Henri Perrin, who became a factory worker after his return from German concentration camps; Abbé Pierre, the Resistance leader and MRP [Mouvement Républicain Populaire] deputy who ministered to thousands of homeless families in the Paris suburbs, and needled the French government into starting a new housing program for the poor. These men had preached, in Cardinal Suhard's words, "a fearless involvment in the temporal and social spheres." The classical missionary tactic of Saint Paul ("With the Jews I live like a Jew, to win the Jews") had been put into reverse gear by the worker-priests. The Berrigans had learned from them that their task was not to convert the world to the Church, but, rather, the Church to the world.

I interpret that as meaning that the struggle for human life, liberty, and dignity and against poverty, oppression, and degradation is at the heart of the Church's concern, just as the late Pope John Paul II said it was, and not a matter peripheral to the faith.

The conventional wisdom, however, is that JPII was a "conservative" and the Berrigans "radicals." I admit that I myself cannot resolve that dichotomy to my own satisfaction. I don't fully understand why the late Holy Father did not go "all the way" and make women the full equals of men in the Church, for instance. But never mind. My point here is that the Church today needs to reclaim the spirit of worker-priests in the French Resistance, Vatican II, the Berrigans, and John Paul II on his better days. It needs to allow itself to be
"converted to the world" once again, so that it might once more expend its energies in making the world a more hospitable place for all God's children.

Mass Movement

We Catholics are about to gain a new pope.

The death of Pope John Paul II came at at time when this particular blogger's personal zeal for his Catholic Christianity was at a low ebb. By some mysterious synchronicity, the evening before the pope's funeral, I "happened" to watch Casablanca on Turner Classic Movies. As I saw Humphrey Bogart join Paul Henreid yet again in the war against Nazi Fascism, I recognized that the struggle against oppression lies near the heart of my religious soul. Without an emphasis on fighting tyranny and widening the scope of liberty, religion goes dead for me.

Then came the funeral of the Holy Father who Lech Walesa said was at least 50% responsible, all by himself, for freeing Poland from Communist dictatorship.

By this time I was on a personal spiritual roll. I unearthed my copy of Francine du Plessix Gray's 1970 book Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (no online image available), and I rediscovered the spirit, so large in the 1960s, of clerics like Ivan Illich, the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and the priests who founded Emmaus House in East Harlem.

I also popped the DVD of the 1982 movie Gandhi in the player and began drinking in the tale of how one man's refusal to compromise his personal dignity blossomed into a mass movement and freed India. (Wouldn't you know it — it had that famous Catholic activist Martin Sheen in it, in a minor role. Round up the usual suspects!)

The brothers Berrigan and seven other priests, religious, and lay people were the Catonsville Nine. To protest the Vietnam War, they burnt draft records a Selective Service office in the suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, where I now happen to live. The church at which I regularly attend Mass is a stone's throw from the Knights of Columbus hall whose second floor housed the office they targeted. Daniel Berrigan considered their illegal act, for which they went to jail, "an act beyond politics: a religious act, a liturgical act, and act of witness" (Divine Disobedience, p. 57).

But in my ten years at St. Mark, the nearby parish church, I've heard basically nothing from the pulpit about such activism, such committment to social justice and peace. So yesterday, a beautiful April Sunday, I decided to join my friend Bob and his family at St. Ignatius, an old Jesuit church in downtown Baltimore, where Bob tells me you do indeed hear the call to speak up for justice and against oppression.

Now, Bob is just about my oldest friend. We met in our freshman year at Georgetown University, when I was not even yet a Christian or a Catholic. It was 1965. Bob had it all over me in terms of being aware of what came to be called the Movement. He was, on his mother's side, the heir to a liberal brand of Catholic witness of the sort to be found in her native Netherlands ... and on his father's, a liberal sort of Midwestern Protestantism.

Bob was struggling with the fact that he depended on a stipend from Army ROTC to help meet his tuition bill, and was it kosher to take their money but then, after graduation, refuse to fight in Vietnam? (He soon decided he had to quit ROTC and give up the money.)

"Where?" asked I. I had scarcely heard of Vietnam in September 1965. For I simply hadn't been paying attention to much printed in the newspaper beyond the sports scores.

Bob began filling me in and gave me a copy of The Vietnam Reader to complete the job. That book — I'm talking about the 1967 tome by that name, edited by Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, for which I can find no image on the Web — was a compilation of writings indicting the "military action" in South Vietnam (not officially a war) as ill-conceived, ill-motivated, and downright immoral. (It was also Bob who, a few years later, gave me Divine Disobedience. Or was it just a loan? I'd better ask.)

1965 came in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of Catholic clergy which had been convened in Rome by the recently deceased Pope John XXIII to provide aggiornimento, or updating, to Catholic belief and practice. At that juncture, I could barely spell "Vatican." But the ferment which "Vatican II" unleashed was obvious to me in classes such as Philosophy of Man, taught by a Jesuit scholastic (priest-in-training) named John Cunningham who later left the order, as so many priests, nuns, etc., did in that era.

During the late '60's and the '70's I got "liberalized" but not quite "radicalized." Before entering Georgetown, my attitude toward the civil rights movement had been one of apathy, even hostility, but by 1968 when Martin Luther King was slain, I was able to march with Bob and other students from Georgetown to a park across the street from the White House to mourn his assassination publicly ... and then, on the way back to the Hilltop, to look back over my shoulder and see the inner city of D.C. start to go up in smoke.

Though I mourned King, I would be many years before I allowed myself to recognize him as an American Gandhi. First, of course, I would have to learn something about mind, heart, and soul of the real Gandhi ... a process which has yet to come to completion. I would also have to come to see that mass movements for liberty and justice are inextricably linked to Christian faith. That's precisely what I'm focusing on as I write this.

(In between Georgetown and now, by the way, I went from agnostic to believing Christian. That eventually led me to the Catholic Church, some ten years ago. Had Father McSorley planted something in my brain, back at Georgetown, when he used me as a willing, nay, eager guinea pig in his hypnosis demonstrations on campus?)

As a Christian, though, I've tended to resist the link between social concern, mass movement, and religiosity. One reason may well be that I have the temperament of a staunch maverick, an obdurate outsider: not a team player, not able to surrender my independence of thought and behavior to leadership (except possibly through hypnotism).

But I have recently come to see that faith requires submission — if not to a leader, to a creed. You have to decide what you most deeply believe in and act upon that belief. For it is only in acting upon your belief that you make your faith real (see my earlier post Verum Factum).

It is only by choosing what universe you expect to live in that you make that universe actual (see Genesis by Observership).

I know that sounds crazy, but it's what I'm coming to see as the essence of faith: in a sense, you have the power, through faith, to "hypnotize" the world into doing your bidding. Gandhi did it. King did it. Popes John XXIII and John Paul II did it. And to one extent or another, every person of faith does it.

Faith is at the heart, of course, of every mass movement. And faith without mass movement is dead. The torn, scandal-weakened Catholic Church needs another mass movement today, which is why I pray that the next pope can call one forth. And I hope the movement he ignites will be intensely focused on extending human liberty and dignity and opposing oppression in all its forms.

Evolutionary Latency

Earlier, in At Home in the Universe, I suggested that theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman is right in his so-named book: there were, from the very start, "profoundly robust" properties lurking in the evolving biosphere. Certain latent qualities of living organisms would have emerged, no matter what the other, chance details of evolution happened to be.

Thus did the "deep and beautiful laws" of emergent, self-organized complexity make creatures like us: "we the expected," Kauffman calls us. We could have turned out like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or the aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in terms of our looks and bodily configuration, but our kind was nonetheless ever in the offing.

By "our kind" I mean, principally, creatures that are self-aware — not just conscious, but alive to their own consciousness. I believe (see my earlier post Abortion and Personhood) that our personhood and our self-awareness are one and the same thing. So what I have just said is tantamout to saying that we as persons could have been, and were, expected to evolve in our universe all along.

Straight-up Darwinists don't tend to believe that. They tend to emphasize the haphazardness and unpredictability of evolution's pathways, owing to the fact that most or all hereditary variation stems from genetic mutation, and mutations are gene "copying errors" that happen at random. That makes for a panoply of variants, as well as the usual more mouths to feed than there are places at the table (which scientists call "superfecundity"). So that blind force of nature, Darwin's "natural selection," simply sifts the variants that are less fit — less well adapted to current living conditions — out of the mix, and voilà, over incredibly long amounts of time you get ... whatever you get.

But Kauffman says the Darwinist's troika of mutational variation, superfecundity, and natural selection have a "handmaiden": self-organization, the process by which a lovely "order for free" has managed to emerge and continues to emerge spontaneously in the natural world. Another term for the phenomenon would accordingly be emergence, as when Kauffman calls his professional endeavors "a search for a theory of emergence." And I would call it evolutionary latency: from day one there was, within the workings of our cosmos, a quiescent, dormant, irresistable "urge" to produce not only life but conscious, self-aware, personal life.

The Sexual Revolution

Make Love, Not War by David Allyn

Make Love, Not War is David Allyn's "unfettered" history of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. It was a time which this blogger lived through, though when Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl appeared in 1962, he was not quite old enough to know what all the fuss was about.

Looking back, I see it was a truly nutty, schizophrenic time. There were weird people such as the founders of the League for Sexual Freedom running around New York City proselytizing for an agenda that included things like "the legitimacy of public masturbation" (p. 46). One, the possessor of one of the great names of all time, Tuli Kupferberg, was a member of a folk-rock band called the Fugs. Their songs included such all-time favorites as "Group Grope," "Boobs a Lot," "Kill for Peace," "What Are You Doing After the Orgy?" and "Dirty Old Man" (p. 45).

Another Sexual Freedom League founder, Jeff Poland, was "one of the first hippies" (p. 42). He, Kupferberg, and others who included the soon-to-be-famous poet Allen Ginsburg took up the cause of Professor Leo Koch, fired by the University of Illinois for a 1960 letter he wrote to the Daily Illini, a student newspaper, advocating (gasp!) premarital sex (p. 43).

As advanced as Koch's views seemed to be at the time, today he could very easily be deemed a galloping sexist, a male-chauvinist pig, and worse. A footnote Allyn includes (p. 43) notes that Koch's letter was in rebuttal to

... an article written by two male students condemning premarital petting. The students argued that the average college man treated every college woman as "a simple female sex unit" rather than as "a living individual — as an organic complexity of personality and character, emotion and intellect, and passion and reason." (This was some eight years before radical feminists would make the very same claims about the "objectification" and sexual exploitation of women.)

In retrospect, in fact, I realize the entire launching pad for the sexual revolution was basically sexist, if sexist means not coming to terms with the realities of women, their bodies, their needs, and their wills. We had Hugh Hefner airbrushing the pubic hair out of his Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month photos. We had the Pill — the first oral contraceptive, appearing in 1960 and gaining phenomenal acceptance by 1965 — making it for the first time

... possible to prevent pregnancy without ever touching one's vagina or penis. It was ultimately a technological accommodation to the deepest dualism of American culture: the belief that the mind was pure and noble while the body is dirty and base. Ironically, the single most revolutionary invention of the 1960s was a tiny, timid little pill ... secreted away in a purse or a pocketbook without anyone ever knowing about it. No wonder the pill did little to erase Americans' ambivalence about sex. (p. 40)

As I read these early pages of Allyn's book, I find I can't wait for radical feminism to assert itself. How odd that is ... at the time, I thought "women's lib" was much ado about nothing!