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.