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From the Pastor Periodically, I comment on current events here. I believe that the pulpit should be used for preaching the Gospel, and that I should preach recognizing that people come to hear me because I am a priest and pastor - an official role - something more than just me. But being a writer, with years of experiences and a lot of ideas, I want to share them. So I do that here, where they are just one man's reflections. I add the most recent on the top, and the older ones just get pushed to the back of the bus. May 15, 2008 Today the California Supreme Court overturned a law passed by the voters about a year ago defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Needless to say, there will be much said about this ruling, pro and con. Here I want to make just one point, a particularly Catholic one. What we mean by marriage in the church, and what we mean by marriage in the California code, have been very different for a long time. In some ways what they have in common really is the word itself. The dispute that will hit the press with and news, as I see it, will not be a particularly Catholic one. For what we mean by marriage in the church and what it means in civil law, and American society has been very different for a long time. There has long been an essential - essential - difference between civil and Christian marriage. What marriage exists for, its purpose, has been very different for many years. We see marriage as a sacrament. A sacred union. Many other christian churches do not see marriage as a sacrament. Going back to the time of the Reformation they said that it was not a sacrament, that it is a contractual union set up between couples under civil law. And that view has set the tone in our country since its early days. The Catholic understanding of marriage as a sacrament has, like many Catholic beliefs, been an outsider's view. In the church's code of law marriage is described as "an intimate union of life and love" and "a union of the whole of life" entered into by a man and woman of requisite age who are free to marry. In the church marriage is an equal union between man and woman. The vows are the same for each. It is further described with three basic characteristics: it as a faithful union, a life-long union, and a union that is open to the possibility of having children. Exclude any of these three properties and whatever the union might be, it is not marriage as understood in the church. In the California code, by contrast, marriage is described as "a personal relationship arising out of contract." But what enters into that contractual relationship, or what is excluded from it, is left up to the partners to decide. It has no inherent properties or requirements. Exclude any or all of what the church sees as the essential properties of sacremantal marriage - permanence, faithfulness, child-bearing - and it is still a perfectly valid civil marriage. But even in civil law it is not like other contracts. Contracts not only bind the contracting parties, they usually have to be ended bilaterally. Both parties have a say in ending the contract. Marriage in the civil code is not like that. It can be ended unilaterally. One partner decides that he or she wants out then goes through the legal steps and it is ended. So civil marriage is just about the weakest of all contracts. It is a weaker contract than the contract implicit between the driver and the gas company at the gas pump when you fill up your tank. Like it or not, you have to honor the terms of the contract. Try to tell Chevron that you want out of it, and you will see the difference between a bilateral and unilateral agreement. We can expect to see a lot of opposition from some churches far outside the Catholic tradition to the state court's ruling. But whatever it is about, the discussion is not about the nature of marriage as traditionally understood. They gave up on that years and years ago. What these protests often seem to embody is an attempt to enforce their belief in the essential inequality of family relationships - the belief that parents have the right to control the lives of children, and that men have the right to control the lives of women - especially their wives. For us, the challenge remains what it has been right along - to recognize that our religious, moral, and ethical values are minority views, and living them out faithfully is and always will be tough.
June 2, 2007 During this month I will be working on the rough draft of the documentary that Father Ken Gumbert and I are making on the Soviet use of terror. Last June,we went to Lithuania where we interviewed survivors of, and witnesses to, Stalin's takeover in 1939-40. Our focusis on the struggle of the Lithuanian people to assert their human rights and independence. Ken Gumbert, a Dominican like me, runs the film-making program at Providence College where he is a professor. So this is a collaborative effort between a writer (me) and a film-maker. I have been working in Lithuania since 2000, originally in the Family Center of the Archdiocese. It was my long background in family ministry that brought me there in the first place. And together we have spent two years putting together our storyline for the documentary. But a chance entry into the old KGB Headquarters with its torture rooms and execution chamber, when it was supposed to have been closed and locked, brought me face to face with the reality of their 50 year reign of terror. That led to work in the photo archives there, and that led to the film. So after several years of serious research, establishing my own credibility there, and getting to know the people and the history, we went there with a two-man film-crew from San Francisco. And for the next two weeks spent hour after hour interviewing and filming. To our relief, and gratification, we actuallyu were able to bring bak all the interviews, archival newsreel footage, and stills about those terrible years under the Soviets. Much, in stories, in footage, and in photos, was about the years people spent in prison, in slave labor camps all over the Soviet Union, and in exile in Siberia. During this past year we had the interviews translated, by willing Lithuanian-speaking volunteers, and I spent my spare time - such as it is - scouring resources for photo and film archives about the eventws and the period. It has all been a truly interesting adventure for an old man like me. Also puzzling, since I am at a loss to understand the reluctance in theWest to face the face that Stalin presided over a system that used state-sponsored terror as the principal means of social control, and in the process kiilled off people by the millions. Millions more people in the Soviet Union were killed by Stalin before World War II began than were killed by Hitler during the war. We hope to have the rough cut completed by summer's end, at which point it goes into the hands of the high-tech specialists for completion. An earlier write-up on this project is listed below April 12, 2006 Immigration and the Law The current brouhaha about illegal immigration seems like another phony issue, promoted for the usual political purposes - trying to assert that the country's proprietors are still in the saddle. Consider the following. For fifty years the Unites States managed to keep the largest and most powerful army in the world - that of the Soviet Union - out of West Germany and Western Europe. At the very same time, and even until this day, we are keeping the massive armed forces of North Korea out of South Korea. Given that we have had the power for a half century to keep the two largest hostile forces in the world off our turf, is it reasonable to think that, if we really wanted to, we couldn't keep a bunch of poor and unarmed Mexicans out of this country? So why are they all here? The head of California fruit growers group gave the reason two weeks ago. He said, and my memory of the exact numbers might be off, that there are enough pickers in California now to pick about 80% of the fruit on the trees. But if they are to make a profit, they have to get as much as 90% of the crop picked. And he concluded, "We really need those pickers, or we're not going to make it." And so, for all these years, things have been getting arranged that they get their pickers, and all the other businesses that need workers get their workers. The problem, if it is a problem, is not at the border. It is in the lobbying corridors of Sacramento. February 21, 2006 For upwards of four years I have been working on a project intended to tell the story of the Lithuanian resistance to the Soviet takeover under Stalin in 1939 through the later 1940s. A year or earlier I had first gone to work in Eastern Europe, traveling with a younger friend fr. Ken Gumbert, who is a film-maker. He runs the film-making program at Providence College, and was starting out on a year-long project to produce a film on the Communist destruction of the church in Czechoslovakia. We travelled together during the summer of 2000 for a few weeks, to Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Bratislava, and then he went back to Slovakia and and I went to Vilnius. Because of a chance event, which I have described in detail in my memoir, The Story of An Accidental Outsider, and will not repeat here, I started working in the newly opened archives of the Lithuanian KGB. Initially I worked in the newly-opened photo archives, and thought of coming up with a photo essay. Inevitably, his work and mine came together. I am a writer, so I do the research and story. So my plans changed, and for three years now we have been working on a second documentary. This one will be on the Lithuanian resistance to the Soviet takeover. I should add that his Czechoslovak documentary, Saving Grace, just won the Catholic Communications Project's 2004 first prize, the Gabriel Award, for documentaries. It is a very fortunate combo, for each of us has a good track-record in his field - I as a writer, Ken as a film-maker - and we value each other's professionalism. At this point we have basically completed our story line and film outline; have lined up professional assistance for filming in June; and are currently lining up the post-production phase of the documentary. This is all the high-tech tweaking that turns a rough film into a polished documentary. High-tech and very expensive! We have put together a budget, and this week I am writing out proposals hoping to come up with a grant to cover some of the cists. It is a story we are telling because we both believe that it needs telling. It is as simple as that. And we are telling it not for some ideological reason but because we have each learned what happend to people like us and how terrible it was. We are each convinced that, for whatever reason, most Americans do not know or possibly care about what happened to Catholic peoples in Eastern Europe under the Soviets. So we want to tell the story. I am the researcher and writer. He is the film-maker. It is a good combination and we are a good team. And I consider myself very lucky to be involved in such an adventure. * * * * * * January 10. 06 Most of the time my comments have to do with current issues in the church, and this is no exception - although "current" can have a large scope with this old man. Needless to say, the most insistent issue for me, as for many priests, is the terrible cloud we find ourselves working under as a result of the publicity given to the instances of abuse assigned to priests in this country. What is so especially painful is that many of us, after dedicating so much of our lives to years of hard and good work for the church and its people, find that no one speaks out in our support. People are mad at the bishops, and so they attack the church - as though the bishops and only the bishops are the church. We, the ordinary priests and the ordinary folks in the pews, or out of the pews, don't count. And, in fact, in the battles between the media and the bishops we don't count, from either side. But I believe there is more to the current struggle than what we see on the news. I think it goes much deeper, to a real sea-change in the life of the church. Recently I read a very perceptive book by a friend, Tom Brady, who teaches history at Cal Berkeley, on the politics of the Reformation in Germany. And what he is saying, put over-simply, is that the most important effect of the Reformation was not what went on between Luther and the Bishops and the German princes and the Popes. What was so central and long-lasting was that during the Reformation the German people and clergy, on the ordinary parish level, took control of their churches and kept control of their churches. House Speaker Tip O'Neal said famously that "all politics are local." Well, for the most part, so is religion. And what we are seeing in the Catholic Church today, I believe, is just the later stages of the reform, triggered by Vatican Council II if not initiated by it, to strengthen the hand of the local parish and its people. It is not dissimilar to the situation in the German parishes in the Reformation. And it is effective here, as it was five hundred years ago in Germany. Parishes that meet what the people in the pews see as their own religious needs - a view formed at the bottom, not the top - are flourishing. Parishes that do not are suffering. Thirty years ago Notre Dame sponsored what it called "The Good Parish Project," a national survey of selected, flourishing parishes in the days after Vatican II to see what it was they were doing that worked so well. What they found out was that what made the parishes successful were about five common strengths, like a good sense of community, good preaching, and available services - all of which were lay-oriented. Submission to the hierarchy was not among them. If we look at the many cases being pursued in the courts against some of our dioceses, what is so surprising is that they are often taking place in what once were considered solidly Catholic regions and cities, not in the Bible Belt. Even more, witness Boston, the suits are being supported by Catholic public officials. To me it seems clear that there is more to this than sexual deviancy. It is an attempt to shift control in the church from the regional or diocesan level to the local or parish level - again as happend in Germany. It is not going unchallenged. There is, I believe, a strong institutional reaction to this trend on the upper levels. It is taking the form of attempts to reshape the source of ministry. Increasingly, ministry in the church in this country is being seen as diocesan rather than parochial. This extends especially to preparation for and celebration of the sacraments, which except for those celebrated by the bishop are by nature local. I find it hard not to see implicit in this approach a basic distrust of the parish priest and the choices he will make in his ministry. But my objection goes both farther and deeper. In our Catholic tradition, the hallmark of Catholic life is liturgy, our worship. It is not education, and it never has been. But reshaping the ministry according to regional norms means subordinating the liturgy to education, since educational programs are the means used for the reshaping. It will be interesting to see where it goes. All this, of course, is just one man's view. But we, or at least you younger ones, will see.
January 18 A few weeks ago the California Report - an NPR morning radion program - reported that in San Francisco there are about 3,000 youngsters, aged from 13 up 18, working as prostitutes in San Francisco. Work this into the US Census figures for San Francisco, and it means that one young girl in sixteen or seventeen in this age group in San Francisco, obviously all minors and supposedly protected by the law, is on the street as a prostitute. In effect, an under-age sex slave. We talk a lot about the great things going on in San Francisco. It is also apparently a predatory place, unsafe for kids. These things no one talks about.
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