+ + + Sign of the Crossing + + +

The second excuse: The story of Sodom is blurred, and the hospitality triptych is lost to us. Here’s the second of the ten excuses for inhospitality. (List of ten at bottom, in rough chronological order.) Angels of Sodom, draw near! The story of Sodom is blurred, and we have lost track of its integrity. What do you hear if someone prays that the angels of Sodom come now, and come quickly? I have never tried to measure it, but I suspect that most people think they are hearing a plea that God will send angels of destruction to kill off the LGBT folks. That’s a seriously weird distortion. The angels of Sodom are the same as the angels of Mamre. The image of the Trinity painted by the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev six centuries ago – three tranquil angels by an altar – is an image of the event at Mamre, where Abraham provided hospitality to God. Three strangers showed up at his tent, and he welcomed them, providing rest and refreshment, water for their feet, and a f...

Here’s the first of ten excuses for inhospitality. (List of ten at bottom, in rough chronological order.) What’s a GER? The Hebrew word ger cannot be translated easily into Greek, nor Latin, nor English. Teaching that was precise and easy to follow in the Old Testament is blurred in translation. This is a problem that reaches back 17 centuries for sure, and maybe 20. In Hebrew, the word “ger” is hard to mistake, because it is embedded within one of the most influential stories in world history, the story of the Exodus. God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, because the Egyptians turned away from the hospitality that Joseph had offered to his family, and enslaved the Hebrews. The key lesson of the event is about God who saves us. But the key moral lesson is about hospitality: remember what happened to us, and don’t be like an Egyptian. The word “ger” means “stranger,” but a stranger like the Hebrews in Egypt. It refers, primarily, to people who live in one land, but have u...

Western civilization has its roots in the ancient Greeks and Hebrews. In general, we can find our fundamental values explained and exemplified in these two cultures. Recalling our roots is one way to lift our minds away from the cramped fixations of day-to-day life; it is also a way to notice the unmoored drift of our society, away from ancient assumptions. Like hospitality. Today in America, we tend to think of hospitality as a decorative phenomenon, good manners, the tie to go with a tux – not a bad thing, but definitely not a serious thing. The Greeks saw it differently: Apollo, the protector of truth and justice, was also the defender of hospitality. And few moral teachings were more fundamental for the Hebrews than Moses’ words about hospitality, a rock-solid touchstone value: “Welcome strangers, because – remember! – you too once were a stranger in a strange land.” So what happened? Where did hospitality go? How did this cultural assumption and habit erode? Part of the...

+++ open letter +++ Dear Cardinal Burke, I have a question, with an explanation I’ll try to keep short. It includes a question about Amoris Laetitia , but only tangentially. The question: after the teaching of Pope Saint John Paul II on Penance and Reconciliation , which includes a revolutionary section on social sin, is the Church going to re-think and re-shape the way we go about celebrating this Sacrament, to incorporate his ideas into our life? For example, what does it look like to see the sin of inhospitality in our lives, and to repent and turn away from it, toward freedom to worship without fear? I want to write about this for 10,000 words or so. I won’t! I’ll be as brief as I can be, and hope it’s still clear, not too gnomic. 1.        John Paul II wrote: “Whenever the church speaks of situations of sin or when the condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behavior of certain social groups, big or small, or e...

In an interview applauding the election of Donald Trump, Cardinal Burke spoke about immigration. National Catholic Register: What about immigration, where his views diverge with the common position taken by U.S. bishops? Pope Francis also said, in comments perceived as criticism of Trump’s plan to build a wall on the Mexican-U.S. border to keep out illegal immigrants, that we should build bridges rather than walls. Cardinal Burke: I don’t think the new president will be inspired by hatred in his treatment of the issue of immigration. These are prudential questions — of how much immigration a country can responsibly sustain, also what is the meaning of immigration, and if the immigrants are coming from one country — questions that principally address that country’s responsibility for its own citizens. Those are all questions that have to be addressed, and, certainly, the bishops of the United States have addressed them consistently, and I’m sure they will with him, too. He has ...

October 1, 2017 A few days ago, we marked the feastday of St. Jerome, one of the great Latin Fathers of the Church, and the Father of Christian Hospitality. And now I am re-reading McCullough’s biography of similar American figure, John Adams. Between the two, I feel a call to clarify and re-state my sense of where we are in history, and what I am supposed to do about it. The nation is divided, left against right, with bitterness. And the Church is similarly divided, although it is difficult to delineate the divide. In my thinking, the divide is captured by Trump. In my thinking, the role of the Church in this time of division is to unite, and this role is personified and exemplified by Pope Francis. My own work in the midst of these tangles: I had a role in developing pro-life nonviolence, and I am now working to build/encourage/maintain a dialogue between pro-life activists and pro-immigration activists. It strikes me as a cosmic joke that I should find myself ta...

John Walton asked me about my response to a book by Pat Buchanan. I have not read that specific book, but I want to respond to the ideas that John sketched from the book. 1.        A picture of the Catholic Church. I was delighted to take part in World Youth Day 2000, the last one that Pope John Paul II sponsored and attended. About 2.3 million young men and women from around the world gathered in Rome for a week of prayer and praise and teaching and meeting. It was glorious. In Rome, the age of the Church is visible and tangible; you can pick a century and go take a look at something from that time. I loved San Clemente, where there’s a church built on top of a church built on top of a temple – approx. dates reaching back 400 years, 15 centuries, and 21 centuries. The canon of the Mass begins with a Roman declaration praising God always and everywhere: “It is right and just.” When my father was at Harvard, the chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Studen...

The seamless garment idea has roots. In the mid-1980s, Juli Loesch build an organization she called Prolifers for Survival. “P.S.”: may I add a thought. She traveled across the country by bus, and built chapters in every part of the country. P.S. was small, but it was everywhere. Most of the people involved in the leadership of the organization were also involved in prolife nonviolent action (later called rescues). Juli was later the press liaison for Operation Rescue in Atlanta. I edited the P.S. newsletter, and I helped start prolife nonviolent action in 50 states plus Australia and Korea and Latin America and Europe. Harry Hand moved from New York to live with my family – and to help build two groups, P.S. and the Prolife Nonviolent Action Project. Carol Crossed gave generously to build P.S., organized conferences for it – and organized the sit-in at which Dan Berrigan was arrested at the door of an abortion clinic. Mary Rider, P.S. coordinator for years, was also active in the res...

This is a retrospective piece, a flyer that I distributed at a rally in October 2016. Pro-life friends, this rally is not about the Lord Franklin Graham is visiting state capitals to argue that the Lord wants you to support an ignorant, racist, misogynist fraud for President, because the alternative is worse. From my perspective, the most important detail in today’s very strange presentation is the claim that Trump will push back against abortion. About 1.2 million children die from surgical abortion annually in the USA, and their moms are deceived and exploited, and Hillary Clinton supports this violence. But abortion is not on the ballot. Trump is. He wants your vote, and has made promises. But a bankruptcy is a list of broken promises! Sometimes you can’t help it; you can’t keep a promise; you have to ask creditors for patience and understanding. But six times? And now he’s rich but still doesn’t pay the people he stiffed? If he lies to people wholesale, not retail, why do...

I am still working on a short book about hospitality and immigration in the life and teaching of the Fathers of the Church. But I have done enough that I can see where I will end up. I draw three key lessons about hospitality from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. First, all the major Fathers of the Church did indeed take the lessons from Abraham at Mamre and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount very seriously. They were crystal clear that there is a serious obligation to care for those in need, including strangers. They were eloquent about the blessings attached to serving the poor – both the obviously intrinsic blessings and the less obviously attached rewards for obedience. They were forceful about the punishments attached to a failure to serve those in need, including strangers. On the other hand, the Fathers did not agree about the identity of a “stranger.” St. Jerome’s opinion was emphatic: there is no limitation to this category: person whom you meet whom you don’t know is a...

August 7, 2017 A few days ago, a national Catholic organization held its annual convention, and issued a revealing and challenging pair of resolutions. (There were a dozen resolutions, actually, but two that belong together.) The group is intelligently and honestly committed to service to the Lord and to the Church, and actually sworn (!) to serve the Pope and bishops. But in a resolution about abortion, the organization reiterated its stance: we will defend children. Faced with a resolution on another issue of grave importance in the eyes of the Church’s leadership – immigration – the organization urged prayer for our country in a time of division and tension. Prayer. I’m in favor of prayer. But I am wary of a call for prayer when there’s a need for action as well.  Suppose you ask the Lord to do XYZ, and he responds, “Good idea! I give you the power to make it happen!” And then you ask him again to do XYZ. That may not be prayer; it may be simple laziness, or simple diso...

The reading at Mass today is – or should be – sobering for pro-life activists. Who’s obnoxious? The reading is from a book that Catholics consider part of the Bible, but Protestants don’t. It’s from Wisdom, chapter 2. “The wicked said among themselves, thinking not aright: ‘Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the LORD. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us, because his life is not like that of others, and different are his ways. He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. He calls blest the destiny of the just and boasts that God is his Father. Let us see whether his words be true; let us find out what will happen to him. For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver ...

Among the many (many!) horrors of the revised executive order on demigration is its emphasis on a merit-based system. In this context, “merit” means “money.” The opposite is “family.” Be clear: a merit-based system is a deliberate decision to treat immigrants as economic animals, sources of cash – instead of treating them as members of a family. This is indeed a horror show. The horror has deep roots. When the USA was building a transcontinental railroad, we imported Chinese workers for the western half. They were not permitted to bring their wives; the racing railroad provided whores instead. And when the work was done, the workers who didn’t run for it were rounded up and sent home. In other words, anti-Chinese sentiment was among the earliest examples of ethnic-specific campaigns of racist exclusion in our history. And note well: this racist policy was explicitly anti-family. The stance of the Catholic Church is radically opposed to this de-humanization of immigrants. Since...

The reading at Mass today is (in part) about identifying people. Jesus asks for some polling data: who do “people” say I am? Maybe a prophet, or Elijah, or John the Baptist returned from the dead. Okay, forget the polling data; here’s a different question: who do YOU say I am? Peter responds, explaining who he believes Jesus to be. And promptly, Jesus re-names Peter, and clarifies his – Peter’s – identity and role. We don’t know who we are in a vacuum. We figure out who we are in a context, in some social matrix or other. I would argue that we know ourselves best when we see ourselves in a social context that includes the Person who created all Contexts. But still – with or without a personal relationship with God, a relationship in which we know somebody and sense that this person knows us – we fill in details about our identity by moving in and out of a variety of social contexts. Me: I like bright eyes. Bright, lively, dancing. I’m not always able to tell the difference...