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The Church A Catholic hanging by his fingernails to the barque of Peter will find healing empathy in Ivan Illich’s description of two forms of church (see Lee Hoinacki’s review). One, Illich loves, the church as “kingdom among us, the pearl, repository of tradition.” Then there is the self serving, worldly church that substitutes power for faith, in constant need of reform and critique. Illich was and we need to be a thorn in her side. Ambiguity is our experience as we confront the two faces of Holy Mother Church. The one introducing us to the mystery of the Incarnation, the enfleshing of love, empowering gifts of the Spirit; the other allowing culture to substitute for the clarion call of the Gospel, this shadow in the church, Illich referred to as “the corruption of the best is the worst.” A story about Illich’s presence at Vatican Council II in the 1960s, advising Cardinal Suenens of Belgium, illustrates the faces of church. Illich resigned from his position as advisor to the Commission when the members refused to condemn, “for the moment,” nations keeping atomic bombs, tools of genocide. Apparently, it required more reflection, but there was utter clarity in the condemnation of the use of condoms, as against nature. I have referred in the past to the daily experience of reading Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman in the New York Times writing with passion, moral outrage, incredulity about the Iraq war, detailing the gruesome torture of captives, the death of civilians in the tens of thousands, the need to end this debacle. They are writing as human beings, not with a particular religious persuasion. For the most part there is resounding silence in the pulpits of the American church, not the passion of a Romero preaching, “I beg you, I command you, stop the oppression.” The struggle goes on in America between “civic virtue” and the revolutionary assertion of Christ that neighbor is, as in love your neighbor as yourself, the stranger, the Iraqi. Stanley Hauerewas speaks of Rousseau as the great prophet of armed civic virtue. “The chief process that draws people out of their provincial loyalties and makes them conscious of belonging to a wider community--a national community--is military conscription. The national identity that we assume or yearn for is historically inseparable from war. The nation-state, including our own, rests on mounds of bodies.” I remember as a kid my indoctrination in “civic virtue,” hate Japanese, Germans and later Chinese, Koreans and Russians. By Vietnam, I discovered, thanks to King, Berrigan, and Day that there are profounder loyalties than the nation-state’s claim on me. The war in Iraq in the words of Pax Christi, “remains a ‘defeat for humanity.” CPF is grateful to Bob Smith and Brandywine for their unrelenting reminder of the shadow of nuclear weapons, the cloud of death hanging over the earth community. We remember in 2005 the 60th anniversary of the nuclear age--Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is particularly incumbent on Catholics to be present at the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul for a candle light vigil to City Hall on the 9th. The epicenter of the bomb in Nagasaki was a Roman Catholic Church. Our President continues to pursue new weapons of mass destruction as he condemns other nations’ desire to join the nuclear club. Our Japanese brothers and sisters will appreciate your presence at this vigil calling for a nuclear free world, especially the few remaining survivors of the 6th and 9th of August, 1945. We
cannot lose our passion to end this war!! Joe Bradley |