The Church Defends the Gypsies

France is having its own immigration crackdown, and for the past month President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for "security measures" in regard to the Roma people, or gypsies.  Some fifty illegal camps have been dismantled.

Archbishop of Aix Christophe Dufour was present during one of the police raids.  He gave this statement:

The caravans have been destroyed.  I do not question the police who obey orders.  But I ask for respect for persons and their dignity, under French law.  Security discourses which may suggest that there are inferior populations are unacceptable.  These people are Europeans and living here peacefully for the most part, some of them for many years.

The archbishop offered to meet with the authorities in an attempt to arbitrate (via @lepetitchose).

Today, in his weekly Angelus address, the Holy Father addressed this issue with the French-speaking pilgrims:  

The liturgical texts of today repeat to us that all men are called to salvation.  They contain a call to learn to accept legitimate human diversity, following Jesus who came to unite people of all nations and all languages.  Dear parents, educate your children in universal brotherhood.

A shrewd observation

Yesterday I was reading an address by philosopher Peter Van Inwagen entitled Quam Dilecta. It is a very good and accessible description of faith and reason and how they work together in the life of this prominent philosopher. In the course of the biographical portion of his address, he discusses his belonging to the Episcopal Church and how his belonging illustrates "Robert Conquest's Second Law: Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents."

Of course, my purpose for citing this is that it is a universal law, not limited to Episcopalians.

The One Solution to the Political Problem

This election morning I am rereading a great article by Msgr. Albacete written for the 2004 election titled "Faith, Politics and the Scandal of Christ". In this piece he dissects our Christian problem of faith and politics and shows a way out. The whole piece is well worth some study today, especially if you feel at all queasy about your vote. Here I will highlight some sections, but better to skip this and read the whole thing.

First, the religious sense is what gives rise to politics.

The religious sense is our conviction—our experience—of whatever it is that ties this moment in our lives with the whole show, with existence, with our final destiny. It's the mystery of how and why we are here. It's what to do with the world that surrounds us. It's how to obtain satisfaction of the needs that we all experience, and for which there seems to be a world out there to satisfy those needs. How to deal with all of that is the religious sense.

The religious sense is what leads to politics. Politics, in that sense, is a manifestation of the religious sense. It's an attempt to make sense of life and to satisfy our needs. You cannot separate politics from the religious sense. And, in that way, there'll be many religious senses around. The religions of the world are all different ways of carrying out this search, of expressing this need, and politics is the art of making sure that all of them make a contribution, and don't wipe each other out.

What would you expect from a politics that is a response to the religious perspective? You would expect a politics that doesn't crush, a politics that will not provoke, or bring about, the silencing of the religious search. In that sense, all that religious people would need from the world of politics is, at the very least, religious liberty. That's so there can be this openness to the search, and then the ability to make a contribution to the society based on this opening to infinity.

In that sense, the most important requirement to be made of politics or any government is religious freedom. Without this, we cannot proceed. At the level of religion that is all one needs to ask. Already that presents a problem in many areas of the world. It might even present a problem in our own society, one that is dedicated to religious freedom. At an elementary level, you want to see how that is being lived in our society today. And you would obviously favor those political proposals that respect and promote this religious freedom. Those that do not already show an inhumanity.

Albacete goes on to explain the problem of the competing interests of time and eternity, or of religion and politics. Secularism focuses on the present to the exclusion of a higher purpose; theocracy denies the worldly situation in favor of eternal interests. There is no solution to this problem, thus we have to compromise:

Now, perhaps we don't want to use the word compromise. But sometimes there will be a relation between the two that will be the best that can be expected. It will be something that will be redefined every time, every election time, every time that the question arises. At those times we have to sit around and figure it out, and that's that.

Now usually this is the point where we get dropped. Compromise and deal with it. The lesser of two evils. Albacete doesn't leave us there with our desire mangled. He acknowledges the impossibility of this dilemma:

The problem with compromise is that it's impossible. The religious sense always wants to move towards infinity, and the desire to do that makes it dangerous to the political world. And the political world also wants to move in the same direction, to want to embrace everything, and so you have this conflict, and the question is: Are we resigned to this conflict? Must we say that religion and politics will always be in conflict? How do we design a situation that is not in conflict?

My answer to that is that it's not possible. Two sides, with one exception, are in conflict. And at the end, a compromise is the best that we can do. I am prepared to say that between the religious sense, and earthly politics, there is a conflict, and the experience of that conflict will not go away, except for one case. The efforts to solve the problem of religion and politics—not to mention that the problem is worsened when you move from religion to faith, which I will get to in a moment—are useless. We can't solve them.

The answer, as Christians, to the problem is in front of us:

The only solution to the problem of time and eternity, limited and unlimited, finite and infinite, the only "solution" to that problem is Jesus Christ. That is the statement that we must be prepared to make. Only the knowledge, the experience, the encounter with Christ, can resolve the problem between time and eternity, and therefore between religion and politics, which is a manifestation of this original problem.

Are we prepared to make that statement? This is the first problem. This is where all our claims begin to fall to the ground. We hesitate to say that only Christ is the solution of this conflict. In our own hearts we hesitate to say this. What are we afraid of? We are afraid—of what? Why would I hesitate to say that this is only solution to the human problem?

The pretense of solving this problem of faith and politics leads to a betrayal of the ideal.

Let me make this point: We do not have the problem, or the mission, to construct a bridge between faith and politics. We do not have this problem. To have this problem and to attempt to solve it, already violates our humanity. Every single attempt to build this bridge has been a weakening of faith, or a betrayal of the Incarnation. And historically, there have been many attempts.

Faith and politics, Albacete maintains, is a branch of Christology. That is because it was in understanding the person of Christ as divine and human that the Church discovered the human person.

...the very existence of personhood as a unique and unreplaceable individual—a "who" which is not exhausted by a "what"—that insight is the result of the Christological debate that led to the Council of Chalcedon. It was there that the Church was finally able to find a way of expressing this conviction about who Christ is. Until then it could not be understood because the concept of person that existed was insufficient. The Church had to invent the concept of personhood, perhaps its greatest contribution. But it did not invent it developing a political philosophy. It invented it through trying to understand who Christ is.

Albacete reviews the three possible ways of encountering Christ as Fr. Giussani outlined them in Why the Church? The first is rationalism, the second individual inspiriation, and the third, the Catholic way, by encounter with the living Body of Christ.

We even use the word society, a people. Peoplehood is at the origin, for it is a peoplehood expressed as a society, and structured as an institution. It is a recognizable reality, just as Jesus was recognizable as a particular human being. If the particularity of the Church offends us, given its universal claims, then why aren't we offended by the particularity of Jesus? It was even worse. He was just one guy. The Church at least can put on an impressive show. Jesus was one man who was killed.

Christ, who is the answer to the problem of time and eternity, is encountered today in the Church. "[T]he presence of Christ today, of his victory, is a form of coming together. This is what the Church is. An assembly is a bringing together." Therefore what we ask from politics is the following is freedom and unity for the Church.

Two fundamental values immediately become absolutely clear. We will favor that which promotes the liberty of the Church to carry on its work. And we oppose, no matter what—no matter what—anything that threatens the unity of the Church. Anything from any politician, any party, in domestic politics, or foreign policy, or whatever it is, anything that tries to create division within the Church, we must oppose, because unity and its compatibility with our freedom, this is the victory of Christ! Because if that is gone then Christ is not victorious, and we have no solution to the problem of faith and politics, and the only solution to religion and politics is just an unsatisfactory compromise. Those two are fundamental values.

The statement talks about the reality that will help the Church live out its freedom. Freedom is the experience of the fact that I am, in that moment, and in that location, walking towards the satisfaction—the real satisfaction—of all the desires of my life. It is what makes me free. This is the freedom we propose.

The Significance of the Second Vatican Council

Vatican II finished 43 years ago. It was a bit before I was born, so I tend to regard the Council as part of the unchanging history of the Church. I didn't always feel this way. From my father and mother, I inherited the 'hermeneutic of continuity' although I also discovered progressivism as one avenue for intellectual curiosity in my early college years. I've read the main documents of the Council, but looking at the following passages (with others, in the context of the whole book), I realize that I've never really grappled with the event of Vatican II.

«The Council has undoubtedly made Church matters more difficult. Those who seek mitigations in everything and express delight at the "progress" and the growing "maturity" as each barrier falls do not understand what the Fathers were concerned with. It was to direct into the secular world through the Church, which is a divine mystery, the mysterious ray of trinitarian and crucified love, wholly and completely. Let us add that this image of the Church — the mediation of the whole love of God to the whole world — is what makes possible true love of our neighbor. The barrier must fall that Augustine set up through his concept of a double predestination to heaven and hell. No, on the contrary, I must be able to hope for every brother so much that, in a fictional Ernstfall, if it were a question of whether he or I would enter the Kingdom, I would — with Paul (Rom 9:3) — let him go. But in order to know what that means, one would have to have uppermost in his mind a theology of Holy Saturday — the descent of Christ into hell — or at least a theology of the dark night of the soul of which John of the Cross gave an experimental description.» (The Moment of Christian Witness, 125-126; emphasis mine)

We cannot shrink from this challenge to bear "the whole love of God to the whole world." This means neither being conformed to the world, nor rebuilding the bastions of the preconciliar Church on a personal level — as if Vatican II never happened.

«If one questions the outcome of the Vatican Council II (and what that is depends to a large extent on us), the answer should surely be this [the defenselessness of Cordula]. We have said already that it should be the Church's defenseless exposure of herself to the world, the dismantling of all bastions and the leveling of all bulwarks to boulevards. And it must take place without any mental reservations or secret hopes of triumph, since our discovery that the old kind of triumph is no longer practicable or desirable.» (136-137)

Instead of hiding out in a Catholic enclave or camouflaging one's belonging to Christ by cleverly phrasing everything in terms palatable to the world — we are called to announce the Mystery whom we have met: simple, risky, and yet the only testimony which is credible.

Tradition and Modernity

Thanks to our friend Martin for passing along this link to an article about the new artwork commissioned for the new lectionary in Italy. While on the surface it is only about an aesthetic judgment, I think the issue is much broader and opens up many avenues for exploration.

It wasn't so long ago that I myself would have been one of those angered by this artwork and grousing about the incompatibility of it with Sacred Scripture. However, recently my idea of Beauty has been broadened. If Christ cannot come down and speak to modern man - at the place where modern man lives - what good is He? How one-dimensional and powerless is a God and a faith that cannot respond to the tough questions posed by modernism, by existentialism, by idealism, by any-ism? A singular quality of true Christianity, on the contrary, is that it has the ability to meet all of reality head on and transform it with beauty.

The Newest Missionary Venture

Don't miss this week's article by John Allen on a fledgling missionary operation in Mongolia. It's a fascinating subject: a brand new territory for Christian evangelization, Mongolia, just started in 1992 by a Filipino priest, now bishop. To date there are about 400 Christians.

The attraction for the new Christians has come simply from the liturgy (in the vernacular) and from the social relief programs.

Padilla said that when he conducts interviews with Mongolian converts to understand what attracted them and made them decide to join the church, most will say they first came into contact with Catholicism through one of its social programs – a school, soup kitchen, or relief center. What “hooked” them, however, was the liturgy.

“They say it’s the singing, the liturgy,” Padilla told an audience at the Oratory of St. Francis Xavier del Caravita in Rome. “They say it’s more worthwhile than what they experience in the Buddhist temple. They’re active in the prayers and in the singing, It’s not just the monks doing all the singing.”

Padilla said that even though the four parishes in Mongolia (and four parochial sub-stations) use largely Western liturgical music, it’s translated into the vernacular, and most of the liturgy now is also said using the Mongol language. That, too, he said, is a major point of entry for new converts, most of whom are young and from the middle class or below.

“We cater mostly to the young and to the very poor,” Padilla said.

Bishop Padilla also found a strategy to soften up the local officials to get church building permits.

[A] Belgian missionary who had served in Inner Mongolia explained to him how to get things done.

“He told me that when you’re in difficulty, the thing to do is to invite these officials to dinner and get them drinking, especially vodka,” he said.

“It worked, but it was rough. At one point, I was drunk at least once or twice a week. One time I had to leave my car behind because I was too drunk to drive … but God will forgive, and anyway I wasn’t a bishop yet!”

Actually, Jesus attended a lot of parties from all accounts.

Building the Kingdom may not be so complicated as we tend to think.

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Adhering to Community

I found this section very interesting in reading School of Community (p.93) in light of our revived venture of this common blog.

We can have ideas and opinions that originate in Christian truth, but they are still not the redeeming Christian life. We are called to adhere to and participate in a reality that comes from outside ourselves: the community in which Christ places us.

I am really glad to blog here within a friendship that acknowledges first this life that we are invited to. Our smart judgments will not save the world, but instead "the instrument of the world's conversion is the visible unity of the Christian community." Thus we are back to Fred's insistence on presence as taught by Fr. Giussani.

I was struck by the recent defection of a cloning researcher away from stem-cell research. It can appear that we are not making a dent in such outrages to life, but the consistent witness to the dignity of the human being called by God is undeniable. This tenacity is evidently a fruit of the adherence of the community to Christ living with us.