Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, February 27

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

TURKEY AND SAUDI ARABIA GEAR FOR SUNNI-SHIA SHOWDOWN IN SYRIA: A mistake? A Russian trap? As matters unfold, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates have begun cutting ties with Lebanon while Turkey demands that the Kurds be considered legitimate terrorist targets during the coming ceasefire.

GROWING DISENCHANTMENT WITH PAKISTAN AS AN ALLY: End to blank checks to Pakistan as Senator Bob Corker, Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will block most recent military sales to Pakistan.

GETTING SYRIA WRONG - JOURNALISTS HAVE TO HELP TELL THE TRUTH OF LARGER NARRATIVES: Stephen Kinzer of International Institute at Brown University tells why the usual narrative on Syria is wrong and how independent journalists are needed to get foreign policy right.

ISIS AS LATEST INCARNATION OF SALAFIST SUNNI MOVEMENT: ISIS should be understood as the most noxious fruit of a twisted tree.

TRUMP ON WHO REALLY CAUSED 9/11 - NOT IRAQ: This is not being a "9/11 truther." They are a group of conspirators who say the attacks of 9/11 were an inside job with American and or Israeli involvement. That is patently false, but the involvement of prominent Saudis and the willful looking away by some American officials is slowly being revealed as one of the most uncomfortable truths in American foreign policy.

II. REPUBLICANS AND FOREIGN POLICY

Presidential campaigns are a mix of heavyweight boxing and brothers debating at the dinner table. The debate in South Carolina on February 13 was, by far, the clearest about foreign policy positions to date. A good deal of the credit goes to candidates who made clear statements and the moderator, John Dickerson, who heeded the advice of Pope Francis to the Mexican bishops: "If you disagree, do it like men: argue face to face."

Marco Rubio has three enemies ranking before ISIS and the Salafist Sunnis:

No. 1 is, what are we doing in the Asia-Pacific region, where both North Korea and China pose threats to the national security of the United States.

No. 2 is, what are we doing in the Middle East with the combination of the Sunni-Shia conflict driven by the Shia arc that Iran is now trying to establish in the Middle East, also the growing threat of ISIS.

And the third is rebuilding and reinvigorating NATO in the European theater, particularly in Central Europe and in Eastern Europe, where Vladimir Putin is now threatening the territory of multiple countries.

His threat list is dominated by China and Russia. He sees the Sunni-Shia conflict as driven by the Shia. All of his enemies are fighting Sunni extremism. This mirrors the threat list explained by Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, who listed Russia and China as threats one and two.

Jeb Bush represented the same viewpoint as Rubio, but added Assad of Syria. Bush's ideological and  financial backers will make the switch to Rubio comfortably:

...we need to destroy ISIS and dispose of Assad to create a stable Syria so that the four million refugees aren't a breeding ground for Islamic jihadists. It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that Russia could be a positive partner in this. I would immediately create a policy of containment as it relates to Iran's ambitions, and to make it make clear that we are not going to allow for Iran to do what it's doing, which is to move towards a nuclear weapon.

Trump countered:

Jeb is so wrong. You got to fight ISIS first. You fight ISIS first. Right now you have Russia, you have Iran, you have them with Assad, and you have them with Syria. You have to knock out ISIS. They're chopping off heads. These are animals. You have to knock 'em out. You have to knock them off strong. You decide what to do after, you can't fight two wars at one time. If you listen to him, and you listen to some of the folks that I've been listening to, that's why we've been in the Middle East for 15 years, and we haven't won anything.

Later, Mr. Bush defended his brother:

And while Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of what he did.

This led to a back-and-forth between Trump and Rubio:

TRUMP: The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that.

RUBIO: I just want to say, at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore. And again, he kept us safe, and I am forever grateful to what he did for this country.

TRUMP: How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center -- the World -- excuse me. I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe.

RUBIO: The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn't kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.

TRUMP: And George Bush -- by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn't listen to the advice of his CIA.

These are very different foreign policy proposals. On the Democratic side, Senator Sanders is much closer to the Trump perspective than any Republican candidate; while Mrs. Clinton is quite similar to Bush-Rubio.

The key figure in the national security transition from the Clinton White House to the George W. Bush administration was Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism official in the Clinton administration. He was first appointed in 1992 by George H.W. Bush to chair the Counter Terrorism Security Group, and to a seat on the NSC. President Bill Clinton retained Clarke, and in 1998 promoted him to be the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council. Under president George W. Bush, Clarke continued in the same position, but the position lost cabinet-level access. He later became the Special Advisor to the president on cyber-security. Clarke left the Bush administration in 2003. Here is his memo to the incoming Bush administration. Here is an interview. Here is Bill Clinton making an emotional, but revealing, argument answering "why he didn't do more to stop bin Laden" to Chris Wallace of Fox News.

REPUBLICANS AND ISRAEL -- WILL JOURNALISTS LEARN THE RIGHT QUESTIONS?
At the Houston Feb 25th Republican debate, CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer asked about balancing support for Israel and the neutrality needed to negotiate an Israel/Palestine agreement. Mr Trump said he was the most pro-Israel candidate, but he would try to be a neutral broker. Senator Rubio said there was no neutrality and right now a Palestinian state was not possible. Senator Cruz said he would move our embassy to Jerusalem.

Senator Cruz walked out in the middle of his own speech at a historic meeting of Persecuted Christians in the Mideast in September 2014, when he was booed for assuming that all Christians in the Mideast were unqualified in their support of Israel. Rubio was right that the Palestine/Israel question is yesterday's news and has been eclipsed by the present conflict. The CNN journalist and the candidates, however, missed the much more important question about America's loyalty to Israel. Must our loyalty include approval of  their deepening alliance with the Saudi royal family and the Wahhabi Sunnis who attacked us on September 11, 2001? The election has months to go and Americans need journalists as much as candidates who will reformulate our foreign policy debate in terms of the actual religious and national actors in the present conflict.

III. R&G ROUND UP

ANTHONY SCALIA: R.I.P.: A Catholic man in full. His 2013 New York magazine interview in which he schooled the interviewer on Heaven, Hell, the reality of the Devil, and being out of touch with Americans. Also, his remembrances of his granddaddy and hunting will make you think he died in the right place at the right time. A letter Scalia wrote to a preacher about the purpose of Christian funerals.

THE TRINITARIAN AND COMMUNAL ROOTS OF CATHOLIC EDUCATION: Tracey Rowland's lecture. Here is Fr James Schall's synopsis. "Friendship and Education" - a reflection by a bishop heavily influenced by John Senior and his friends at the University of Kansas.

LOOKING DOWN ON AFRICA: Fr. Rutler catches Albert Schweitzer and present-day German bishops behaving badly toward the darker-skinned sons of Adam.  Americans are much closer to interracial brotherhood than our European cousins.

Friday BookReview: Graham Greene's "whiskey priest"

(Graham Greene, who died in 1991, was one of the most widely read writers of his century.
Here is a review by Nick Ripatrazone that appeared a couple weeks ago.) 

In the world of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, it’s a bad time to be a Catholic. The book’s hero is an unnamed priest on the run from Mexican authorities after a state governor has ordered the military to dismantle all vestiges of the religion. Churches are burned. Relics, medals, and crosses are banned. The price for disobedience is death. While many clerics give up their beliefs and accept their government pensions, the unnamed priest travels in secret, celebrating Mass and hearing confessions under the cover of night. Yet he’s also a gluttonous, stubborn, and angry man drowning in vices, and the religious ambition of his earlier years has been replaced with a constant desire to drink, hence Greene’s term for him: the “whiskey priest.” Tired of risking his life, the priest even prays to be caught.
                             

A violent, raw novel about suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption, The Power and the Glory received literary acclaim—but not without catching the attention of Catholic censors, who called the book “sad” and denounced its “immoral” protagonist. Despite—or even because of—this vexed history, Greene’s novel is the perfect book to read during the season of Lent... Stereotypically a time for modern Christians to abstain from Facebook or chocolate or alcohol, Lent is the most dramatic time of the liturgical year—40 days of prayer, fasting, and cleaning one’s spiritual house, in hopes that honesty might lead to penance and good deeds. One vision of Lent emphasizes transcendence over struggle: the American Catholic writer Thomas Merton called it “not a season of punishment so much as one of healing.” But Greene’s dark novel and its deeply flawed protagonist offer a richer way to think of faith and self-reflection—one that average Christians might find more accessible and realistic than romantic narratives about belief.

In life and in fiction, Greene was more interested in sinners than saints, and the whiskey priest is no saint—at least not for most of the story. If anything, he’s closer to the modern conception of the antihero. His pride swells his sense of importance. In one village, where the faithful fear retribution from the military officers, the priest hesitates to leave: “Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake, even if they were corrupted by his example?” Later, he’s selfish, crude, and heretical in one stroke: He eats a sugar cube that he discovered by a dead child’s mouth, rationalizing “If God chose to give back life, couldn’t He give food as well?” In these and countless other examples, Greene shows how easily dogma can disappear in the face of desperation.

But beneath the darkness of the priest’s actions is faith, which he bears witness to in two pivotal scenes. Arrested for possessing outlawed alcohol, he’s thrown into a small jail cell with a “pious woman,” who later notices a couple having sex in the corner. “The brutes, the animals!” she exclaims. And yet the priest counsels the woman to not think that their action is ugly, “Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.” In lines that reflect the lived truth of Lenten struggle, the priest explains, “Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner—to them.” Greene’s aversion to sentimentality makes for palpable theology. He finds God in dirt and in blood—in the Christian struggle to make faith matter in life.

Ironically, the pious woman is herself the antithesis of Lenten reflection. The priest asks her to pray for him, but she responds, “The sooner you are dead the better.” He thinks about how he can’t see her face in the dark, and uses that blindness as a metaphor for judgment and misunderstanding: “When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

Nevertheless, after publication not everyone was convinced of [the novel's] spiritual value, least of all some members of the Vatican, which had been alerted to its questionable content. Greene’s literary celebrity at the time caused some high-level Catholic officials to fear how influential his novel’s depiction of Catholicism would be. One of the consultants appointed to assess the novel concluded that “literature of this kind does harm to the cause of the true religion”...

A self-described “Catholic agnostic,” Greene had believed in “nothing supernatural” until his future wife pointed out his misunderstanding of the Virgin Mary in one of his film reviews. “I was interested that anyone took these subtle distinctions of an unbelievable theology seriously,” he said. After their engagement, he concluded “that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held ... Besides, I thought, it would kill the time.” Greene “fought and fought hard” against belief on the “ground of a dogmatic atheism,” comparing his struggle to a “fight for personal survival.” In 1926, there was no grand epiphany, but a quiet shift: Greene took the baptismal name of St. Thomas the doubter.
                                 

Mr. Greene

So why does [an old] novel about a sinful, alcoholic priest get my vote for the perfect book to read for Lent? Whereas a more optimistic believer might have written a devotional novel, Greene’s novel feels informed by the messy reality of lived belief. (He wrote it after traveling to Tabasco, Mexico, and learning about the brutal anti-Catholic laws imposed by its governor, Tomás Garrido Canabal.) Not despite but because of his sins, the whiskey priest is the prototypical Lenten character. ​Much like how Lenten resolutions—no chocolate! no TV!—are strained with each passing day of the season, the priest expects some degree of failure. But this doesn’t weaken him spiritually.

Dramatizing the Lenten struggle between doubt and faith, complacency and reflection, Greene’s novel examines what happens when an unfit believer is made responsible for the well-being of an entire community. Because the government has destroyed the physical artifacts of Catholicism, the priest must turn inward and confront his own doubts, and as the only remaining face of the church, he’s forced to air his private demons. But rather than reveling in these sins, the priest is crushed by their significance and seeks to replace greed with grace. “It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful,” the priest reflects, before the novel’s tragic end. The world “needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.” It’s the novel’s empathy for “the half-hearted and the corrupt”—and its recognition that even those people are worthy of salvation—that makes the story an unlikely but ideal one to revisit in the weeks before Easter.

                                     

Holy Communion being distributed in Chiapas, Mexico

Map on Monday: SAUDI ARABIA

Stratfor - short for Strategic Forecasting, Inc. - is a private global intelligence company that offers geopolitical insight into the interplay of nations. Stratfor has developed an excellent series of short (~2-4 minute) videos which provide the viewer with a specific nation, along with its basic history, geography, culture, and geopolitical allies and adversaries. In the following video, they present the geographic challenges facing Saudi Arabia.


                                         A SHORT PROFILE OF SAUDI ARABIA
by David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch




Saudi Arabia has a population of 30 million, with 8 to 9 million foreigners. Almost all the physical labor and service work in the kingdom is done by the foreigners. Most are from Muslim countries but there are over a million from the Philippines. Christians are not allowed to worship. Saudi Arabia has the fourth largest military budget in the world after the US, China, and Russia. They have the most oil reserves in the world and are the top oil producer. Over 15% of Saudis are Shiites, but they are clustered in the oil-rich Eastern Province where the Shiites are an oppressed majority (see map at right). Over 50% of Saudi oil is in the Eastern province with its Shiite majority and 20-30% foreign worker population. There is a Pakistani taxi-driver joke that the best proof that Islam is the true religion is that God gave it to the Arabs, and yet it is still here after all their years of misrule.  

Here is how the Saudi Embassy describes the three historical Saudi States:

In the early 18th century, a Muslim scholar and reformer named Shaikh Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1702-1792) began advocating a return to the original form of Islam. Abdul Wahhab was initially persecuted by local religious scholars and leaders who viewed his teachings as a threat to their power bases. He sought protection in the town of Diriyah, which was ruled by Muhammad bin Saud.

Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab and Muhammad bin Saud formed an agreement to dedicate themselves to restoring the pure teachings of Islam to the Muslim community. In that spirit, bin Saud established the First Saudi State, which prospered under the spiritual guidance of bin Abdul Wahhab, known simply as the "Shaikh." By 1788, the Saudi State ruled over the entire central plateau known as the "Najd." That State was displaced by the Ottoman Empire in 1818.

By 1824, the Al-Saud family had regained political control of central Arabia. The Saudi ruler Turki bin Abdullah Al-Saud transferred his capital to Riyadh, some 20 miles south of Diriyah, and established the Second Saudi State. Ottoman armies again forced them out in 1891.

Al-Saud sought refuge with the Bedouin tribes in the vast sand desert of eastern Arabia known as the Rub’ Al-Khali, or ‘Empty Quarter.’ From there, Abdulrahman and his family traveled to Kuwait, where they stayed until 1902. With him was his young son Abdulaziz, who was already making his mark as a natural leader and a fierce warrior for the cause of Islam.

The Modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The young Abdulaziz was determined to regain his patrimony from the Al-Rashid family, which had taken over Riyadh and established a governor and garrison there. In 1902, Abdulaziz – accompanied by only 40 followers – staged a daring night march into Riyadh to retake the city garrison, known as the Masmak Fortress. This legendary event marks the beginning of the formation of the modern Saudi state. After establishing Riyadh as his headquarters, Abdulaziz captured all of the Hijaz, including Makkah and Madinah, in 1924 to 1925. In the process, he united warring tribes into one nation. On September 23, 1932, the country was named the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, an Islamic state with Arabic as its national language and the Holy Qur’an as its constitution.

Abdulaziz is the father of all the subsequent kings of Saudi Arabia, including present-day King Salman and the Crown Prince Muqrin.

Oil was discovered on the Shiite majority island of Bahrain in 1932, but Standard Oil of California hit the motherload in 1938 just across the Persian Gulf in the Shiite eastern province of Saudi Arabia near the village of Dammam. Over the years the Sauds allied with SOCAL and then  eventually took over all the oil revenues. By 1988 Saudi Aramco completely controlled the country's resources. The Saudis have utilized their dominance in the market to boycott the US, Japan, Britain, and Canada after the 1972 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War, causing the energy crisis of 1973. The Saudis can also glut the market to punish their oil-producing enemies (Russia, Iran, and American fracking companies) as we see today in the precipitous 2015 oil price drops.

Smoke rises from the Grand Mosque in Mecca (1979)

The enormous oil wealth of the Saudis, their original bargain with the most intolerant of all Sunni religious traditions, and their admirable ability to negotiate betwixt allies and enemies -- all combine to place them at the center of the religious and national confusion in the Mideast. As one example of sorting out the confusion, two important events happened in November 1979. The Iranian Shiites began to hold US hostages in our embassy, and the mosque in Mecca was seized by Sunni Salafists.

In response to the mosque seizure, the control of daily cultural life by the Wahhabi clerics tightened throughout the nation. The long memory of the Iranian hostage crisis and the amnesia of the much more consequential Mecca event is a prime example of the Sunni-Shia confusion which has so perplexed American policymakers in the Mideast. Finally, policymakers who take Islam seriously as a religion must not forget that there is another claimant to the holy places in the Sunni world. The Hashemite story of the 1924 Saudi seizure of the Hajiz (the area of Mecca and Medina) is a different narrative than told on the Saudi embassy web page.

For the Jordanians, the story of the holy cities of Islam is not a triumphant  tale of the Saudi-Wahhabi concord. The emir of Mecca from 1908 to 1917 was Hussein bin Ali. The Young Turk revolution in 1908 set an increasingly nationalistic and secular movement against the Arab-friendly Islamic arrangements of the Ottoman empire. Hussein did not think of himself as an Arab nationalist, but he found the young Turkish nationalists to be the enemy of his Arab kinsmen and their religion. Hussein sided with the British against the Ottomans (who sided with the Germans and Austrians in World War I). After leading the great Arab revolt against the Ottomans, the Hashemite clan would be betrayed by the British in Iraq and Syria -- and usurped in the holy cities by the Sauds. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a very different Sunni civilization than their Saudi neighbors. They, too, have been longtime allies of the United States and represent an alternative approach to how Islam and the nations shall be configured.

Saudi Arabia is more than the Saudi clan and the Wahhabi clerics. It is Shiites in oil-rich provinces, as well as foreign workers who do the work but can neither worship nor speak freely. It is other Sunnis with different ideas of an Arab nation or Islamic caliphate. Those Sunnis love God and the Islamic ummah, but they may not feel the same about the House of Saud.  

See January 31st's Religion and Geopolitics Review for many articles examining Saudi Arabia, as well as our book review on the Kingdom.

Originally posted on February 2, 2015

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, February 20

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

AN R&G WEEK WITH POPE FRANCIS

I. THE POPE AND THE PATRIARCH

After a thousand years, the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Russia meet (read the text of the joint proclamation). This is the deepest and oldest of the divisions within Christianity (Catholic vs Orthodox, East-West schism in 1054 AD). The Orthodox Churches do not accept the authority of the Pope, but their bishops are successors of the apostles, and thus they have an apostolic priesthood and the Eucharistic Presence like the Catholics. Hundreds of years later the sundering between Catholics and Protestants led to the many Christian denominations of today. These divisions began in 1517 with the German followers of Martin Luther, and were solidified in the same century with the theology and 'Institutes' of French-speaking John Calvin.

The Pope and the Patriarch began with a proclamation of the Trinity:

By God the Father’s will, from which all gifts come, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the help of the Holy Spirit Consolator, we, Pope Francis and Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, have met today in Havana. We give thanks to God, glorified in the Trinity, for this meeting, the first in history.

They were  fully aware that it is precisely this Trinitarian formulation for which Christians are being killed in the Mideast.

Our gaze must firstly turn to those regions of the world where Christians are victims of persecution. In many countries of the Middle East and North Africa whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being completely exterminated. Their churches are being barbarously ravaged and looted, their sacred objects profaned, their monuments destroyed.

The urgency and drama of this meeting is a response by bishops of Christianity that their disunity is a disgrace in the face of an ecumenism of blood that is occurring in the Mideast, South Asia, and Africa.

We bow before the martyrdom of those who, at the cost of their own lives, have given witness to the truth of the Gospel, preferring death to the denial of Christ. We believe that these martyrs of our times, who belong to various Churches but who are united by their shared suffering, are a pledge of the unity of Christians.

The implications of this sign of union have been lost on much of the secular media, as well as many "Christian conservative candidates" who in the same breath decry the loss of religious liberty in America and then aggressively call for an atheistic alliance of NATO against the Russians. The Pope and Patriarch have a much more profound historical view. They understood the significance of meeting in Cuba where a Catholic president met the atheist Empire in a great nuclear drama a half century ago. They understand that the fight against communism was not done in the name of capitalism, but by religious nations and movements allied against the armed atheistic superstate. The possibility of true peace for America, the European nations, and Russia which both Gorbachev and Reagan believed in has been squandered by the baby-boomer foreign policy establishment of NATO and the US. 

The Pope and Patriarch see it this way:

In affirming the foremost value of religious freedom, we give thanks to God for the current unprecedented renewal of the Christian faith in Russia, as well as in many other countries of Eastern Europe, formerly dominated for decades by atheist regimes. Today, the chains of militant atheism have been broken and in many places Christians can now freely confess their faith. Thousands of new churches have been built over the last quarter of a century, as well as hundreds of monasteries and theological institutions.

They present to Europeans a different strategy for union:

The process of European integration, which began after centuries of blood–soaked conflicts, was welcomed by many with hope, as a guarantee of peace and security. Nonetheless, we invite vigilance against an integration that is devoid of respect for religious identities. While remaining open to the contribution of other religions to our civilization, it is our conviction that Europe must remain faithful to its Christian roots. We call upon Christians of Eastern and Western Europe to unite in their shared witness to Christ and the Gospel, so that Europe may preserve its soul, shaped by two thousand years of Christian tradition.

"Religious identities" in this context do not refer to the Muslims, Jews, and Christians of Europe. Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Italy, and Greece -- all the nations of Europe are, in fact, different civic expressions of Christian identities which have been erased in the technological modernist definition of the European Union. The Argentine Bishop of Rome and the Russian Patriarch of Moscow are not leaving the movement to recover the national identities of Europe to the nativist pagans. That was done once before. The different nations are in fact "religious identities."

Though separated for a thousand years, there are some Christian truths about the bonds of human love that are so fundamental, they are still shared;

The family is based on marriage, an act of freely given and faithful love between a man and a woman. It is love that seals their union and teaches them to accept one another as a gift. Marriage is a school of love and faithfulness. We regret that other forms of cohabitation have been placed on the same level as this union, while the concept, consecrated in the biblical tradition, of paternity and maternity as the distinct vocation of man and woman in marriage is being banished from the public conscience. We call on all to respect the inalienable right to life. Millions are denied the very right to be born into the world. The blood of the unborn cries out to God (cf. Gen 4:10).

This meeting, in direct response to the persecution of Christians in the Mideast, will hopefully stir the political imaginations of Christian men and nations to unite in creating a more just world, with nations who accept the sovereignty of God and liberty of men as fundamental laws. To read the text is to put on the mind of Christ for it is to see humanity as a whole. It is a purifying view that helps a man imagine the role of his own beloved country in the context of this wider drama of all humanity.

II. POPE FRANCIS AND FRATERNITY: HOW MEN RELATE - FACE TO FACE AS BROTHERS

When Pope Francis called together bishops for the Synod on the Family, he told them to talk as brothers. They should disagree and contend but do it "face to face like men." In the joint declaration with the Patriarch we see those words again:

It is with joy that we have met like brothers in the Christian faith who encounter one another “to speak face to face” (2 Jn 12), from heart to heart, to discuss the mutual relations between the Churches, the crucial problems of our faithful, and the outlook for the progress of human civilization.

And off the cuff, when Pope Francis addressed infighting among bishops talking with the Mexican bishops, he used the same language:

“If you have to fight, fight. If you have to tell each other off, say it to them. But as men, face to face,” he instructed. “But as men of God, pray together … and if you crossed the line, ask for forgiveness. But be sure to maintain the unity of the episcopate.”

We are brothers. There is a wide-radius public communion at the heart of our relations, but there are disagreements and it is better to contend openly than by back-biting and gossip. How many priests, bishops, and laymen do we know who are always "nice" to a man's face, but then biting behind his back? How much better, how much more masculine, how much more fitting for the tasks of public life that we talk to one another as men, face to face, in the Church and civic life.

III. POPE FRANCIS IN MEXICO: HE PRAYS BEFORE THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAS AND ADDRESSES HIS FELLOW BISHOPS

Pope Francis prayed before Our Lady of Guadalupe and addressed the Mexican bishops. His vision has always been rooted in the common pious practices of the faithful. Thus, in Mexico his visit was centered around shared devotion to our Lady of Guadalupe.

How could I not come! Could the successor of Peter, called from the far south of Latin America, deprive himself of seeing la Virgen Moronity?

He chastised the bishops not to be "princes," but told civic and ecclesial authorities alike to stand up to the violence of the drug cartels. But, above all, he brought this priestly and fatherly message to the brotherhood of fathers:

God exists and is close in Jesus Christ. Only God is the reality upon which we can build, because, “God is the foundational reality, not a God who is merely imagined or hypothetical, but God with a human face” (Benedict VI, Address to CELAM, May 13, 2007). Observing your faces, the Mexican people have the right to witness the signs of those “who have seen the Lord” (John 20:25), of those who have been with God. This is essential. Therefore, do not lose time or energy in secondary things, in gossip or intrigue, in conceited schemes of careerism, in empty plans for superiority, in unproductive groups that seek benefits or common interests. Do not allow yourselves to be dragged into gossip and slander. Introduce your priests into a right understanding of sacred ministry. For us ministers of God, it is enough to have the grace to “drink the cup of the Lord,” the gift of protecting that portion of the heritage which has been entrusted to us, though we may be unskilled administrators. Let us allow the Father to assign the place he has prepared for us (Matt. 20:20–28). Can we really be concerned with affairs that are not the Father’s? Away from the “Father’s affairs” (Luke 2:48–49) we lose our identity and, through our own fault, empty his grace of meaning.

IV. MR. TRUMP AND POPE FRANCIS IN THEIR OWN WORDS

In another off-the-cuff airplane interview, Pope Francis' words have been twisted by the liberal media to advance their agenda.  That blatant misinterpretation is then amplified by being faithfully broadcast as more evidence of the pope's perfidy by Catholic conservatives. The latest case in point: "Pope says Trump is not a Christian." But what did Mr. Trump and Pope Francis really say?

MR TRUMP: "It's gonna be a great wall," Trump said. "This will be a wall with a big, very beautiful door because we want the legals to come back into the country."

POPE FRANCIS: "A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel,”

All living things have an outer covering which must do two things: there must be a barrier and there must be permeability. This is true of cell membranes, national borders, Vatican City walls, and regulations for Catholic Communion. If you only have a barrier, there will be no life. This is not Christ. If it is all permeability, there is no internal identity -- this was the destruction of the Flood. Biologically it is the rupturing death of swelling cells that let in too much water.

A barrier and permeability -- both necessary for life -- a great wall and a big door. The Pontiff (which means "maker of a bridge") and the nationalist (who says there can be no nation if we cannot control borders) will talk face to face some day in fraternity. Meanwhile across South Carolina's Evangelical landscape, it will never hurt any candidate to dispute with a Catholic Pope over Christian credentials.

Friday BookReview: Jesuit prisoner in the USSR

"Christ Jesus, of his own free will, gave up all he had, and took the nature of a servant... He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death -- his death on the cross."                     (Philippians 2:7-8)

                                   

Walter Ciszek was born of Polish immigrants in a mining area of Pennsylvania -- but spent much of his life in Soviet prisons. He survived the tortures of interrogation at Lubianka, and the prison camps of arctic Siberia.

Here is a profile of his life in 'Crisis' magazine from a couple years ago.

In the late 1920s, Ciszek studied at the Jesuit seminary in Poughkeepsie, New York. 

[Called St. Andrew's-on-the-Hudson, this is where Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would be laid to rest several decades later. The campus was purchased in 1970 by a fancy culinary school.]

Repatriated to the U.S. in 1963, he died six years after the Polish cardinal of Krakow was elevated to the papacy. It would have been fascinating to witness Fr. Ciszek's reaction to that stunning bit of news from Rome!

                         

Some excerpts from his memoir He Leadeth Me:

"Many a time, as I folded up the handkerchief on which the body of our Lord had lain, and dried the glass or tin cup used as a chalice, the feeling of having performed something tremendously valuable for the people of this Godless country was overpowering."  

"I marveled often at the ways of divine providence and the mysterious workings of grace in perserving the faith in Russia, despite the full might and power of an atheistic system determined to stamp out religion, despite even the all too human failings of the churches themselves." 

One of the best chapters of this small book is on humility; he says it is "nothing more or less than knowing our place before God." Christ's perfect act of humility "reached its crest on the cross, where he died humiliated and deprived of everything." Father Ciszek says that most of us find it incredibly hard to be humble when we're humiliated: "We constantly need to remind ourselves of the humble Christ, the Christ who did always the will of the Father..."

"Then, as the years go by, difficulties increase and there is a constant need for more sacrifice and a renewal of spirit in the initial promise or vow taken. And then it is that the test of one's humility -- the realization of one's place before God -- really begins."  

"No matter how badly the humble man fails, he will reckon his accounts with God and start over again, for his humility tells him of his total dependence on God."  

"That's what humility means -- learning to accept disappointments and even defeat as God-sent, learning to persevere and carry on with peace of heart and confidence in God... And just as surely as we begin to fail in humility, we begin to lose sight of God and his grace, to exclude him to some extent from our lives.
Be thankful then, I thought to myself, that God in his loving care sends humiliations your way. Be thankful for the KGB... You haven't done anything yet in the Soviet Union except by God's grace and his will..." 

Father Ciszek (pictured below during his imprisonment): "Faith, then, is the basis for love; it is in the insight of faith that we understand the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men. Love, St. John writes repeatedly, is the one thing that fulfills all the commandments and the law. But prior to love, and bolstering it at the core, is faith; we must have faith before we can love, or we will surely end up loving the wrong thing... To increase our love, to love properly, we must strive always to increase our faith, and we do this by means of prayer and the sacraments." 

                     

"Don't do anything from selfish ambition or from a cheap desire to boast, but be humble toward one another, always considering others better than yourselves."                                                (Philippians 2:3)