Knocking at
Haven’s Door
Knocking
at
Haven’s
Door
Four Paradigms
of Hospitality
by John
Cavanaugh-O’Keefe
foreword
by Abbot James A. Wiseman, OSB
Interim sketch of McGivney’s Guests
Credits
Cover:
Flight into Egypt, Albrecht Durer.
(Atheneum)
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Scripture
texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition©
2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C.
and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part
of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the copyright owner.
ISBN-13: 978-1724650764
ISBN-10:
1724650769
© 2018 John
Cavanaugh-O’Keefe
Dedication
I
am a member of a proud class of an elite school run by an ancient community –
the class of 1968 at St. Anselm’s Abbey School, run by English Benedictines. We
were together for six formative years, and are still deeply influenced by each
other.
The individual who has ensured that
our education and shared experiences would be a source of on-going inspiration
and strength was Charles L. Hamm. He has been a strong support in the
background of nearly everything of value that I have done since 1968.
Thanks, Larry.
Contents
Foreword
Foreword by Abbot James A. Wiseman, OSB
Toward
the end of his book, John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe relates how, when he was a student
in our school half a century ago, one of his teachers suggested that he learn
to speak and write more softly and gently.
While admitting that there are times for that, John rightly notes that
even at the highest levels of the Church we find examples of passionate
exhortation, and he is certainly correct in thinking that the current plight of
65 million refugees throughout the world requires a spirited response by all
persons of good will. Pope Francis and
the American bishops have been at the forefront of those calling for action,
and it is in that spirit that John, an activist in the best sense of the word,
is using his genial facility with words to elicit a generous response from his
fellow Knights of Columbus.
Once
you have read his book, you may not remember all the details of the four
paradigms of hospitality that he has convincingly traced through the
centuries—the national/ethnic, the personal, the ecclesial, and the global—but
you will certainly come away with the conviction that hospitality is a crucial
part of a genuinely Christian way of life.
John
rightly notes that there was a gap in the third paradigm when, beginning with
the Protestant Reformation, so many monasteries were closed. Happily, monasteries such as mine continue to
offer hospitality, and the importance of this is evident in the many letters we
receive from former guests, some of whom affirm that their stay with us was
actually life-changing. But monasteries
can no longer be the main providers of hospitality—it is up to all of us. And even though no individual or group alone
can do all that is needed by so many refugees and other strangers, Jesus’ words
in the 25th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel about welcoming him in the
person of any stranger is all the motivation any of us need to turn those words
into action. Ponder John’s book, ponder
Matthew 25:31-46, and then “go and do likewise.”
James
A. Wiseman, O.S.B.
Abbot,
St. Anselm’s Abbey
Washington,
DC
Introduction:
“Welcome strangers?”
This
booklet is adapted from the Distinguished Alumnus Address, St. Anselm’s Abbey
School, April 29, 2018, in which I tried to sketch the startling difficulty of
the transition from the third paradigm of hospitality to the fourth.
I set
out to answer five questions.
First,
and most important: when Jesus spoke of “strangers,” what did that word mean?
Welcome them, he said, and you will be welcomed into the kingdom of God; or
don’t, and depart into regions of fire. That’s pretty clear, but what’s a
“stranger”? A homeless man? Whoever knocks? An immigrant? The answer to what Jesus meant when he spoke
of strangers must be in the culture in which he spoke – in the Old Testament.
A: The
teaching about strangers in the Old Testament is clear, forceful, and abundant.
A stranger is whatever the Jews were when they were in Egypt. The word includes
immigrants.
Second,
if the teaching about welcoming strangers is clear, forceful, and abundant in
the Old Testament, it must show up in the New Testament as well. If not, I was
projecting my own ideas into Scripture. So: is it there?
A: The
teaching about hospitality is indeed all over the New Testament. But much of it
depends on a familiarity with the teaching in the Old Testament. For example,
the Last Supper was foreshadowed by the First Feast, Abraham’s hospitality to
celestial strangers at Mamre.
Third,
if the teaching about hospitality is all over Scripture, both Old and New
Testaments, it must be reflected in the life and teaching of the Church. If
not, I was cherry-picking. So: is it there too?
A:
Hospitality is indeed a central value in the life and teaching of the Church.
The Fathers taught about it at length, drawing on the Old and New Testament.
But there’s a fascinating shift in the general pattern of offering hospitality:
while the Old Testament pattern was national and the New Testament pattern was
personal, the pattern in the Church was ecclesial. Monks and nuns offered
hospitality to strangers on behalf of the entire community.
Fourth,
if the teaching and practice of hospitality to strangers was so clear in
Scripture and prominent in the life of the Church, why is it so minor – sometimes
reduced to the level of mere decoration – in our lives today?
A: The practice of hospitality for most of
Christian history depended on monks. When monasteries were dispersed or
suppressed, no one else stepped forward to fill the huge gap. Also, the teaching of Jesus about welcoming
strangers (Matthew 25) was eclipsed by a popular teaching tool, the corporal
works of mercy, which watered down the words of Jesus.
Fifth,
what’s happening with hospitality now? What are we supposed to do now?
A: Today,
Pope Francis asks the Church to respond to the plight of refugees and migrants
and other displaced persons – totaling about 65 million people on the road.
Because of the near-eclipse that lasted for generations, many Christians are
ignorant of Church history regarding hospitality, and reach back to a few
scraps of the Lord’s teaching. They are not confident that the Lord’s words
about welcoming strangers mean that we must take care of 65 million foreigners.
How about a homeless guy instead? The gap between the Pope’s intent and the
laity’s response is deep and wide. To close the gap and energize the Church, we
need a clear understanding of the teaching in Scripture and Tradition – and of
the great eclipse that we must overcome.
+++++++
A
critical addendum …
One
part of the resistance to a global response to the refugee and migration crisis
comes from people with strong views on how to respond to any “social evil.” It
seems to me that the opponents of a just and generous response to migration often
misquote St. Thomas Aquinas. So I have added an extended exploration of what
Aquinas said about hospitality.
+++++++
On the
night before he was crucified, Jesus prayed for the unity of his church. That
prayer means that: (1) unity is precious; and (2) it is difficult, almost
impossible; and (3) it will come about. This includes unity with the leaders of
the Church, and unity with people under the special protection of the Lord –
including refugees and migrants. May it be so!
Five questions
- What
did Jesus mean when he spoke about welcoming “strangers”?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout the Old
Testament, what about the New?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout
Scripture, what about Tradition?
- It
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout Scripture
and Tradition, why is it unfamiliar today?
- What
now? Can we help 65 million people?
Four paradigms
To
understand the teaching and leadership offered by the Catholic Church today, we
need a clear understanding of each of four paradigms of hospitality in the
history of Judaism and Christianity, plus a clear understanding of the long
hiatus between the third and the fourth.
The
four paradigms are the national pattern of the Old Testament, the personal
pattern of the New Testament, the ecclesial pattern of a millennium and a half
of Christianity, and the global pattern of today. Between the third and fourth
patterns, there was a period of several centuries when the Church was in a
defensive posture, focused more on protecting the purity of the Good News than
on sharing the wealth of it; and we did not have a systematic approach to welcoming
strangers. The third pattern was broken at the time of the great fracture of
Christianity during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; but the fourth
pattern did not emerge until the end of the 19th century.
1-2-3-woops-a-daisy-4.
The
four:
The Old
Testament talked about hospitality as a national or ethnic responsibility. Moses
taught: Welcome strangers, because – remember! – you too were once a stranger
in a strange land. The nation of Israel should not imitate the nation of Egypt.
If the nation of Israel does fall into rebellion and does imitate the nation of
Egypt, then they will be punished by the nation of Assyria. If the nation of
Israel is obedient to God about how to live (including hospitality), then all
nations will stream toward Israel to learn. The paradigm described in the Old
Testament is national.
The New
Testament addressed hospitality as a personal responsibility. The nation was
occupied, and could not fulfill national responsibilities. However, God’s
command that we be hospitable did not disappear; it changed a little. If the
nation cannot be hospitable, then individuals must take up the task. The
clearest encapsulation of the new pattern for the ancient command is in the
story of the Good Samaritan. There was one stranger beaten by thieves and
abandoned by the side of the road. He was tended by one other stranger, a
Samaritan. This is the second pattern: one-on-one service. The paradigm
described in the New Testament is personal.
The
Church from the time of the Fathers through a millennium to the time of the
Reformation understood hospitality to be her own responsibility. The Lord’s
precept – welcome strangers as you would welcome me – was understood to be
mandatory, but in general the laity fulfilled this responsibility by supporting
the clergy. The Rule of Benedict says that every guest is to be welcomed as Christ.
This rule was not a counsel of perfection on the road to extraordinary
sanctity; it was the social arrangement for carrying out the sacred duty (and
joy) of hospitality. For about 15 centuries of Christianity, the paradigm of
hospitality was ecclesial.
The
fourth paradigm, initiated in 1891 and continuing up today, is global. There is
a global need, requiring a global response, which the Church joins. More below.
For the moment, it’s enough to say: the fourth paradigm is based squarely on
the previous three, and if you don’t understand them, you can’t understand the
fourth. And the third is – in our time – largely lost.
The
four patterns overlap; you don’t have to abandon one to embrace another. We can
(and do) offer hospitality personally and nationally and ecclesially and
globally.
There
was a long gap between the third and the fourth, and understanding that gap
matters as much as understanding the four paradigms.
Chapter 1: Hospitality in the Law and Prophets
the
first of five questions
- What
did Jesus mean when he spoke about welcoming “strangers”?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout the Old
Testament, what about the New?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout
Scripture, what about Tradition?
- It
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout in
Scripture and Tradition, why is it unfamiliar today?
- What
now? Can we help 65 million people?
The
first question: what did Jesus mean? The answer should be in his culture, in
his background, in the language he used – that is, in the Old Testament.
Hospitality
in the Law and the Prophets
When I
started trying to understand what the Church teaches – in Scripture and in her
tradition – about immigration, I started with a single and simple question. When
Jesus used the word “stranger” 2,000 years ago, what did that word mean?
In
Matthew’s Gospel (25:30-46), Jesus describes the Last Judgment. And he says he
will separate people – separate the sheep from the goats. (It’s a metaphor;
relax, goats.) And the criteria for sorting the good from the bad are clear and
explicit: did you feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome
strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and visit the imprisoned? If yes,
enter the kingdom prepared since the beginning of creation; if no, depart into
eternal fire. That’s clear. But what’s a “stranger”? Since it’s a matter of
eternal life or death, can we take a few minutes to understand the word? Are we
talking about the new kid on the block, or the drunk on a grate, or an
immigrant? What’s a “stranger”?
Oddly,
most serious Christians recall this list about the Last Judgment imperfectly –
in fact, in a predictably spotty
fashion. Most people remember food and drink and clothes, and then some
visiting, but scramble around trying to recall that other one, the sixth item.
This is odd, because the question of when and how to welcome immigrants – or
even whether to welcome them at all – is among the most hotly disputed issues
of our time. Given that, you might expect Christians to be curious indeed about
what Jesus meant when he talked about strangers. You might expect that, but
you’d be wrong.
Anyway,
whatever others said or didn’t say, I wanted to know what the word meant. And
it seemed obvious to me that the answer to that question – what did a word in
the New Testament mean? – should be found in the Old Testament. And while it
might be useful to have a list of degrees in Scripture studies, the question
seemed simple enough that a careful reader should be able to figure it out. So
to answer that question, I read the Old Testament with an eye out for anything
about welcoming strangers. In the literature that Jesus read, in his culture
and in his language, what does it say about strangers?
What I
found shocked me deeply. The teaching about welcoming strangers in the Old
Testament was abundant and clear and forceful – and it was almost completely
unfamiliar to me. (So I wrote a couple of short books about that I found, and perhaps
you should read them.) In brief: the life of Abraham and the teaching of Moses
insist that we should welcome people from another land who come into our midst
and stay awhile. Jesus said what he said about strangers because he was a faithful
Jew. Of course, the Word of God shaped the Jews, so we have to re-think the
chronology a little bit; but one step at a time. Hospitality to strangers
including especially immigrants is fundamental in the Old Testament.
Some
examples:
The
followers of Moses took two key lessons from the Exodus. First, about God who
saved us from slavery: be grateful. And second, about people: don’t be like the
Egyptians! Welcome strangers, because – remember! – you too were once a
stranger in a strange land.
These
two key lessons from the Exodus show up all over the entire Old Testament – in
the Law, Prophets, Wisdom and history books. But one easy example: Moses had
two sons, named (more or less) “God saves” and “welcome strangers” (Eliezer and
Gershom). The sons are named with reference to the two great commandments, and
the reference to love of neighbor is expressed in terms of welcome for strangers.
Look at
THE Patriarch of Jews and Christians, Abraham. God’s revelation of himself to
the Jews began with Abraham. A quarter of the Book of Genesis is about Abraham,
and two chapters are about God teaching Abraham about hospitality at Mamre (and
Sodom). Lesson one: welcome strangers, because it might be God knocking on the
door. Lesson two: the reward for hospitality is fertility.
Look at
THE Prophet, Elijah. He is identified as a sojourner – or stranger – from
Tishbe. And he began his public life depending on hospitality – first from a
raven and then from a widow and orphan in Zarephath. We meet him as a stranger
dependent on the hospitality of others.
It’s
worth noting that the prophets throughout Scripture assert that God has a
special concern for widows and orphans – and strangers. The word “widow” shows
up 49 times in the Old Testament; of those 49, 21 references are about a
familiar pair, widows and orphans; and of those 21, 18 refer to a trio, widows
and orphans and strangers. Elijah in Zarephath is a stranger living with a
widow and an orphan: the Biblical trio.
Then
there’s THE King, David: he was just plain Jewish without any quibbling, right?
No, not quite: there’s a beautiful but puzzling book in the Bible, the Book of
Ruth, which seems to be included in the Bible because Ruth was David’s beloved
great-grandmother. And she’s an immigrant, a Moabite.
THE
Lawmaker, Moses, was a stranger in a strange land who talked endlessly about
hospitality to strangers. And THE Patriarch, was a wanderer from Aramea who
hosted God. And THE Prophet was a Tishbite sojourner. And THE King was
part-Moabite. The Patriarch, the Lawmaker, the Prophet, and the King: all
identified with strangers in some way.
These
are just a few examples. In the Old Testament, the teaching about hospitality
is everywhere. Further, this ubiquitous teaching is shockingly forceful: on at least four major
occasions – Sodom, Gibea, Exodus, and Babylon – Scripture describes God
intervening in history, with immense determination and violence, to punish grave
evils including injustice and idolatry and ingratitude and inhospitality.
The
answer to my question, “what’s a stranger,” was pretty simple. A “stranger” in
the Old Testament is, first and foremost, whatever the Jews were when they were
in Egypt. A “stranger” is a person from another land who moves into your land
and wants to stay a while – for months or centuries. A “stranger” is a member
of a divinely protected category, with widows and orphans. The word might refer
to a person you’ve never met before, but mostly the word refers to a political
category – an immigrant.
Chapter 2: Hospitality
in the New Testament
the
second of five questions
- What
did Jesus mean when he spoke about welcoming “strangers”?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout the Old
Testament, what about the New?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout
Scripture, what about Tradition?
- It
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout in
Scripture and Tradition, why is it unfamiliar today?
- What
now? Can we help 65 million people?
The
second question: if it’s in the Old Testament, what about the New?
Hospitality
in the New Testament
I was
shocked by the teaching in the Old Testament: it seemed to me to be abundant
and clear and forceful, and yet it was all new to me. I was confident that I
wasn’t completely wrong, because the Church today says these things too. But
there was so much! So I thought that maybe what I had found was just a
projection of my own ideas. The test, perhaps, could be simple. If the teaching
I found in the Old Testament was real, I could find it in the New Testament as
well. If the Old Testament had a long list of things that I hadn’t noticed
previously about welcoming immigrants and other strangers, then this teaching
must be in the New Testament also. Is it? It is! I found 21 shocks in the Old
Testament, and about triple that in the New. The teaching is everywhere. And
once you see it, you can’t un-see it.
Again,
here are a few quick examples.
The birth narratives
The
wise men from the Orient are strangers: angels ensure that the gospel in its
infancy reaches the poor – that is, shepherds – and strangers – that is, the magi.
Then
when Herod believes that there’s a threat to his throne and turns to violence,
Joseph takes his wife and son and flees to Egypt. The Holy Family becomes refugees.
Jesus,
the newborn king, returns to the land that Moses knew as a place of
inhospitality and slavery – in fact, as the prototype of inhospitality. Jesus
returns there, and gives Egypt another chance to get it right, and they do.
This is a miracle of healing, before the public ministry of Jesus began. This
early miracle in the life of Jesus is a healing response to inhospitality.
In his
Gospel, John says that the Lord came to his own, but his own knew him not. It
wasn’t good that they didn’t recognize him; but if they had treated strangers
well, their ignorance might have been acceptable. But they didn’t recognize him,
and then they maltreated this stranger.
The patient revelation: Who am I?
In
Mark’s Gospel, Jesus feeds five thousand people with a handful of food, and
then a little later he crosses the sea in a boat with his disciples. There’s a
storm, and they wake him up: “Save us!” So he calms the storm and the waters
subside. The disciples had been worried about the storm, but they were even
more disturbed by the solution. To which Jesus says (paraphrasing): I don’t
understand why you are so startled by this. What conclusions did you draw from
it when I fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread? They stare at him,
bug-eyed, completely baffled. And so do we. What’s the connection between
multiplying bread and calming the sea? What did they miss, and what do we miss?
Jesus proclaims, not in word as much as in deed, but nonetheless with clarity:
I AM the God who led my people out of Egypt and fed them in the desert. I am
the God of Moses. I am the God of your salvation who is also the God of
hospitality. Hospitality and salvation go together, two tightly conjoined revelations
of one spirit. I am the God who inspired Moses to name his children “God saves”
and “Welcome strangers.”
The Good Samaritan
Who’s
my neighbor, Jesus is asked. It’s a question about law, about defining
boundaries. But he doesn’t respond with technicalities; he responds with a
story. On the road to Jericho, a man is assaulted and robbed. Exemplars of the
community, who know the teaching of Moses and have pondered the Law, walk past
him. Then a Samaritan stops and cares for him: a stranger and outcast cares for
a needy reject. Jesus uses the story, not a text or legal tradition, to define
“neighbor.” He says (I paraphrase) that to understand what it means to love
your neighbor, you have to get inside the experience of the person who needs a
neighbor. You have to empathize – proactively and imaginatively. We might have
some theories of relationships and responsibility, a series of concentric
circles around ourselves. There’s a tight little circle, our family – the
people we know best and for whom we have the greatest responsibility. And
around that, there’s another circle – our friends, whom we also know and for
whom we are also responsible. And then there’s a circle of neighbors. Those
circles aren’t total nonsense, but they are off center. These pretty little
circles around you – the circle of family, circle of friends, circle of
neighbors – are not especially relevant. The circles that matter are the
circles around the person in need: his family, his friends, his
neighbors. His family isn’t here! His friends aren’t here! When he looks at you
and you look at him, does he see a neighbor? Is there somebody there from his
circle of neighbors? That’s the question that matters. And – Jesus says
elsewhere, not in this story – you had better make sure you are inside his
circle of neighbors, because he and I are one. When you see him, you see me,
says Jesus. If you aren’t his neighbor, you aren’t mine.
There’s
a critical detail here: Jesus talks about the boundary between the insiders and
the outsiders almost exactly the same way Moses does. Details differ: Moses
talks about strangers contrasted with the children of Israel, while Jesus talks
about neighbors contrasted with strangers. But both say that we must get inside
the outsider’s experience. Moses says we should remember, and Jesus urges us to
imagine – but by whatever route, we must get inside his or her mind. Imagination
is the wellspring of compassion.
Episkeptomai
The
morning prayer of the Church, the psalms and prayers and readings that monks
and nuns and others sing and pray daily, includes the Canticle of Zachariah, the
Benedictus. The father of John the Baptist, struck dumb during the nine months
of gestation, regained speech when the child was born, and burst into inspired
words. Note one word that shows up at the beginning and then again at the end
of the canticle. He cries out: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he
has come to his people and set them free.”
Often,
when we recite this prayer, we slur the word “come” at the beginning, and focus
on freedom: “Blessed be the Lord – he’s here to set us free!” But that’s like
skipping Christmas to get to Easter faster. The word “come” at the beginning is
episkeptomai in Greek, and it’s a
word of immense power. The same word shows up at the end of the canticle: “the
dawn from on high shall break upon us to shine on those who dwell in darkness
and the shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” “Break in
upon us like the dawn” – that’s episkeptomai!
It’s explosive and transformative. Episkeptomai:
come, break in. Perhaps God will come quietly, like the dawn slipping through
the trees; but then, also like the dawn, this advent will be inexorable, with
all the majesty and splendor of the sun-god Apollo, lighting up the entire
world, ending the power of darkness, bringing all creation back to life. Episkeptomai!
This
same verb shows up in two of the six precepts in Matthew 25, about Judgment
Day: visit the sick, visit the imprisoned. Visit: episkeptomai. This “visit” does not mean we should show up to moan
and groan in pity; we are asked to show up like the dawn, as the determined and
unswerving and unstoppable agents of eternal renewal.
Three quick notes on hospitality in
Scripture
Some
people point out that the proclamation of the Gospel is often accompanied by
healing. Jesus heals someone miraculously, and the miracle establishes his
credentials, and then he can preach with authority. Evangelization and healing often
go hand in hand. That’s interesting. But it’s also true that salvation and hospitality are conjoined over and over
all through Scripture – not just in the Benedictus, but also in many other
incidents, including the most fundamental events, like the Exodus and the
Easter Triduum.
The
hospitality described in Scripture does not keep the roles of host and guest
carefully delineated. They blur together, not in confusion but in unity. At Mamre,
Abraham is host at the beginning when strangers show up at his tent. But a few
hours later, the setting is no longer under the trees; they are, rather, under
the stars, and God is the host, showering gifts on Abraham. Similarly, when
Mary visits Elizabeth, the event is at Elizabeth’s house, but Mary took the
initiative. So who’s host, who’s guest? Who cares? This is, I think, a small
piece of what Jesus was trying to explain when he washed the feet of his
apostles: just as Abraham washed the feet of God, so now God washes our feet,
because a good host is a gentle servant, not an arrogant master.
Hospitality
is share in the life of the Trinity, a blazing ray of light straight from the
depths of the radiant heart of God.
Chapter 3: It has to
be everywhere!
the
third of five questions
- What
did Jesus mean when he spoke about welcoming “strangers”?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout the Old
Testament, what about the New?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout
Scripture, what about Tradition?
- It
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout in
Scripture and Tradition, why is it unfamiliar today?
- What
now? Can we help 65 million people?
The
third question: if hospitality is all over the Old and New Testaments, is it
fundamental in the life and teaching of the Church – in our “Tradition”?
It has
to be everywhere!
If it
is true that the Old Testament and the New Testament are chockful of teaching
about welcoming strangers including immigrants, and all this stuff is real and
not just the product of a fevered imagination, then it’s in the teaching and
practice of the Church. Go find it, or be quiet!
So I
set out to understand the teaching of a significant but limited collection of
Christian teachers. If the devil can quote Scripture, and determined fanatics
can cherry-pick Scripture to prove just about anything, the same pitfalls
certainly exist in a much larger and less authoritative body of literature –
the lives and writings of Christians for the past 20 centuries. So I tried to
understand hospitality in the early Church, focusing on (1) the Patristic era,
and then (2) Thomas Aquinas. To make the task manageable, I focused on just eight
Fathers – the eight who are called “Great,” the Four Great Latin Fathers and
the Four Great Greek Fathers. I had a ball. They’re a wonderful bunch!
St. Jerome
“God’s angry man, His crotchety
scholar,/ Was Saint Jerome,/ The great name-caller,/ Who cared not a dime/ For
the laws of libel/ And in his spare time/ Translated the Bible …” – Phyllis
McGinley
I
started with St. Jerome (347-420), because I found him easy to like. He
translated the Bible from Greek and Hebrew to the language of the people – that
is, to Latin. But he had a fiery temper, and called his bishop a “matula” – or
“chamber pot,” a bucket with a mission. He was an ascetic, but he liked fiery
redheads. Fiery, foul, smart, ADHD: what’s not to like?
Jerome
is remembered for his work as a scholar. One of the best-known commentaries on
Scripture is appropriately named for this ancient translator – the Jerome Biblical Commentary. But he is
also the person responsible for setting the pattern of hospitality in Western
(Latin) monastic life. He made sure that the monastery in Bethlehem, where he
lived, had a guest house. And he encouraged his friend Fabiola (the fiery
redhead) to do the same at the monastic establishment near Rome. What St.
Jerome and St. Fabiola did in the West, St. Basil did in the East. They
established the pattern that when you build a monastery, you build a guesthouse
as well, or at minimum you make some careful accommodation for travelers and
pilgrims and strangers, who are to be welcomed as Christ.
Jerome
wrote about Abraham with passion and tender love, and described him as the
model of hospitality. He said that when Abraham welcomed the three strangers to
his tent, he carried the fatted calf in for the feast in his own hands, and
that Sarah made the bread that they served with her own hands. Those two
details are not in Scripture; I think Jerome made them up, projecting them into
Abraham’s life because he admired Abraham. These two details reflect Jerome’s
ideal, not documented details about Abraham’s activity. Jerome found
hospitality throughout Scripture, and understood it to be central in Christian
life.
There
is a delightful passage about hospitality in a letter Jerome wrote to the
Presbyter (priest) Marcus in 378 or 379. In it, he insists that true
hospitality embraces all people, not some select portion, not just Christians.
To clarify his point, Jerome quotes a pagan poet, Virgil. (Virgil, you may
recall, wrote the Aeneid, which is
the greatest epic of Roman literature, a deliberate imitation of Homer’s great
Greek epic, the Odyssey. Centuries
later, Dante wrote yet another epic imitating Homer, the Divine Comedy, perhaps the greatest poem of the Renaissance. In it,
Dante made Virgil his guide through the Inferno. Homer, Virgil, Dante: that’s
an impressive group!) Jerome, looking for passion and eloquence about universal
hospitality, reached out to Virgil for help. In his letter to Marcus, he wrote:
“I am forced to cry out against the inhumanity of this country. A hackneyed
quotation best expresses my meaning.” The quotation that Jerome considered well
known and even over-used is from the Aeneid
(Book I, lines 539-541):
What savages are these who will not
grant
A rest to strangers, even on their
sands!
They threaten war and drive us from
their coasts!
Then
Jerome remarks in his frustration at inhospitable Christians: “I take this from
a Gentile poet so that people who disregard the peace of Christ may at least
learn its meaning from a heathen.”
St. Athanasius
Athanasius
(c. 297-373) was the first of the eight Great Fathers. His life straddled the
transition from Roman persecution to state-supported Christianity. He was
educated by martyrs, but is remembered for his participation in the Council of
Nicea and for his defense of the Nicene Creed. The Council wrestled with
questions about the Lord – true God and true man – declaring that we believe in
Jesus Christ, “the only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all
ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not
made, consubstantial with the Father.” Athanasius is credited with proposing the famous
clarifying word “homoousion”
(“consubstantial”), the hefty and ancient word that Pope Benedict XVI carefully
replaced in the Creed that we recite on Sundays. And he is also the source of
the oldest “canon,” the list of all the books that the Catholic Church
considers to be part of the Bible.
Athanasius
didn’t write about hospitality; he wrote about Christology. However, when he is
making points about the Lord’s revelation of himself, the examples that he
chooses are revealing. Athanasius was exiled five times during his life, and
also chased out of town by mobs at least six times; these experiences shaped
his imagination, at least in part. His explanation of how the Lord manifests
himself draws on stories about caring for exiles and refugees. Some of his
examples are familiar, like the stories of Abraham and Lot and Job; but he also
uses one story that’s not standard in lists of hospitality texts, the story of
Obadiah risking his life to protect 100 prophets from the bloody-minded
murderess Jezebel, hiding them in caves and feeding them (1 Kings 18:4). The
point is, although Athanasius didn’t talk about the theme of hospitality
explicitly, when he talked about the Lord’s revelation of himself, the examples
that came to his mind were examples of hospitality.
St. Basil
Basil
(c 329-379) did for the Greek world what Jerome did for the Latin world. He was
wealthy, and he poured out his wealth to build a community – a whole town,
actually, called the Basilead – of monks and nuns and other Catholic-Worker
types who devoted their lives to prayer and to serving the needy in deliberate
and conscientious obedience to the precepts of the Lord in Matthew 25. They fed
the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed strangers, clothed the
ill-clad, and visited the sick. (They may have visited prisoners too, but that
detail isn’t part of common descriptions of the Basilead.) With regard to the sick:
any serious history of hospitals must include the Basilead, which was,
arguably, the first hospital in the world, an institution devoted to caring for
the sick. There may be other examples of hospitals that pre-date Basil; but if
so, he was still a pioneer. His establishment was free, and it served the
public without discrimination. The “public”: that’s emphatically not the way
the community thought of their guests; they served Christ, whom they met in
those in need.
Augustine!
I need
Augustine! (Of Hippo, 354-430.) Augustine is among the most influential
philosophers and theologians in the history of the Church. So it’s non-trivial
that his understanding of Scripture begins (and continues and ends) with his
rock-solid conviction that to know and love and serve God, you must know and
love and serve the people around you. When he was explaining Scripture,
Augustine kept going back to Matthew 25: “Whatsoever you do for the least, you
do for me.” (There is one other passage that he also uses frequently as a kind
of a touchstone: the story of Paul getting knocked off his horse, and Jesus
asking him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” The story of Saul isn’t
similar to Lord’s description of the Last Judgment, but there is a key point
that emerges from both passages. When Jesus spoke to Saul about persecuting his
disciples, he asked Saul, “Why are you persecuting me?” Me! That is, Jesus
identified himself with his vulnerable followers.
Just
one story. Augustine was an African, and served for 35 years as the bishop of
Hippo, in northern Africa – present-day Algeria. While he was in Hippo, there
was warfare and pillaging that sent thousands of people across the
Mediterranean in anything that would float, fleeing chaos and murder and rape –
just like today. But in Augustine’s time, refugee traffic went from north to
south. The Lombards sacked Rome, and the Romans fled to Africa. Augustine urged
his people to be hospitable, and his approach to the matter is delightful. He
recalls the story of Zacchaeus, a small man who climbed a tree to see Jesus
passing by. Jesus saw him, and called out, “Zacchaeus! Come down! I’m eating
dinner at your house!” We’re inclined to be jealous, says Augustine. But we
shouldn’t be! We too can have Jesus to dinner! Just go welcome a refugee who’s
crawling out of the sea!
There
are three points worth noting in this short bit of a sermon. First, of course,
Augustine urged that we welcome refugees. Second, he understood and explained
the story of Zacchaeus in the light of Matthew 25: what you do for least, you
do for the Lord. Third, and oh so wonderful: when Augustine urges hospitality,
he does not talk about obedience so much as about joy. Joy! His experience and
his expectation is that serving those in need, including refugees, is a matter
of great joy!
St. John Chrysostom – and St. Benedict
St.
John Chrysostom (354-430) offers us a challenge. He was eloquent about the six
precepts in Matthew, but he tacked on a twist. Jesus demanded that we feed the
hungry and give drink to the thirsty, etc. But the passage ends: “whatsoever
you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.” What does that mean? Most
people think this sentence extends the call to service beyond the six specific
items; the six are prime examples of a more general invitation. For example, ransoming
captives is certainly a response to the spirit
of the six precepts, whether it’s in the list or not. John Chrysostom had a
very different understanding of that last line. He said that it clarifies the limits
the passage: we feed the hungry among the
brothers of the Lord. That is, we are obliged to care for Christians, the people who are brothers
(and sisters) of the Lord because they know the Lord by name and follow him.
Jerome
was emphatic that we are called to serve all people. John Chrysostom was
equally emphatic: we are called to serve all Christians, not others. If we serve others, that might be okay too;
but the demand is that we serve the least
of the brothers. The idea that Christians should serve Christians, and that
our obligation toward non-Christians is to preach to them until they are
Christians but not necessarily to protect them from starvation: this idea
appalls many Christians today. But it is embraced by some – and it has ancient and
respectable roots.
I am
not qualified to argue with St. John Chrysostom, one of the four Great Greek
Fathers. But his interpretation was not the majority view then, nor is it now.
Further, more importantly, the Fathers wrestled with ideas and taught eloquently;
but then, what mattered more than their words
was what others did with their ideas.
And the question of whether we should serve all people or all Christians was,
in practice, turned over to monks and nuns to settle. They were the ones who
did the actual work, for most of the history of the Church. So what did they
say and do?
The
answer comes from St. Benedict, who – though he was not among the eight Great
Fathers – was immensely influential. St. Benedict (480-550) did not invent
monastic life; there were monasteries all over the world for hundreds of years
before him. But he built communities that were balanced and sane. He and his
followers led lives of prayer, bolstered by fasting and other ascetic
practices. But Benedict was aware of the dangers of fanaticism, and he worked
hard to construct monastic life in a way that was sustainable, organized toward
God and not toward some nihilistic ideal sprinkled with holy water. Toward the
end of his life, he collected his ideas and wrote them up. Fifteen centuries
later, men and women around the world still choose to live by this “Rule of St.
Benedict.” There have been many offshoots and alterations of his communities,
and many reforms, and reforms of the reforms; but the Rule remains a steady and
healthy starting point. And the Rule is clear and explicit about hospitality:
it is universal. All guests are to be welcomed as Christ. Special care is
appropriate for those of our faith, and for pilgrims, and for the poor; but
those are details within a more general rule, based on what Jesus himself said.
The Rule of St. Benedict is unmistakable:
Caput 53: De hospitibus
suscipiendis. Omnes supervenientes
hospites tamquam Christus suscipiantur, quia ipse dicturus est: Hospis fui et
suscepistis me.
Chapter 53: about welcoming
guests. All guests who come are to be
acknowledged and accepted as Christ, because he himself will say, “I was a stranger
and you welcomed me.”
All. The teaching of St. John Chrysostom
deserves respect. But the disagreement between Jerome and Chrysostom was
settled definitively in practice, for centuries, by Benedict. Omnes: all.
What about the laity?
Emphatically,
the role of the clergy in welcoming strangers did not mean that the laity had
no responsibility. Rather, most of the time, most people discharged this solemn
and unavoidable (and joyful) responsibility by delegating it, and supporting
the agents who accepted this delegation of responsibility. That is, the “law of
the Church” that the laity were morally required
to support the clergy financially or in other practical ways was not invented
by manipulative clerical thieves; it was, in part, a logical extension of the
Lord’s fiery commands to serve the least of our brothers and sisters.
St. Thomas Aquinas
The
teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas has had an unparalleled impact on Christian
thought for centuries. And with regard to hospitality to strangers, Aquinas
made a casual remark that clarifies what happened to a whole body of Christian
thought. He made a quiet observation about the corporal works of mercy that had
little or no impact at that time, but which is – in retrospect –
extraordinarily significant. He pointed out a problem that didn’t seem
particularly serious then, but which metastasized over the centuries.
Specifically, he noticed that the corporal works of mercy were not the same
thing as the precepts in Matthew 25.
The
corporal works include the six precepts, but also include burying the dead,
following the moving and generous example of Tobit. Aquinas said that “mercy”
can’t be offered to the dead, and so burials are not, strictly speaking, acts
of mercy. So the corporal works were enumerated incorrectly, he said. They are
based on the six precepts in Matthew 25, but they aren’t the same thing. This
split between the precepts in Matthew 25 and the list of the corporal works of
mercy grew over subsequent centuries – eventually leading to catastrophic
results.
[For more on Aquinas’ nuanced
views, see the essay attached at the end.]
The third pattern, re-stated
No one
in 15 centuries of the history of the Church ever said that we needed a new
pattern of hospitality. But in fact, the pattern of hospitality that developed
in the Church was different from the national pattern of Moses, and the
personal pattern described in the Gospels. No one urged that kings, not monks,
should care for the poor. And no one challenged the guest houses at the
monasteries, and said that people in need should be dispersed throughout the
town, cared for individually. Responding to a need, the Church developed a new
pattern, based firmly on Scripture.
Jerome
(and Fabiola) and Basil established the monastic pattern of hospitality –
thinking of their work as obedience to the clear teaching of the Lord, and
understanding themselves to be doing the same thing that Abraham did. Quite
explicitly, they said they were imitating and obeying what they found in
Scripture.
Others
Fathers promoted hospitality – speaking of it as imitation of Abraham, and
obedience to Jesus – but working out details in the new ecclesial pattern. St.
Ambrose, for example, in his great work The
Duties of the Clergy taught explicitly that hospitality was a clerical responsibility. Of course
everyone has some responsibility, but caring for strangers was particularly the
duty of monks and nuns and pastors. St. Gregory the Great, similarly, in a
letter to St Augustine (of Canterbury) discussed how to work out a budget for
the churches in England, and said that a quarter of the income should go the
bishop – because he was responsible for hospitality. (For clarity’s sake, let
me state what should be obvious, but isn’t: in this context, “hospitality”
meant care for the poor and for strangers, not expensive banquets for noble
guests.)
The
pattern of hospitality for centuries and centuries in the Church was inspiring,
practical, successful. But it had a weakness. When the monasteries were
suppressed in England and weakened elsewhere, there was no Plan B for
hospitality. That sacred task fell through the cracks. When priests are on the run,
who sits up to ask about the work of the porter?
Chapter 4: The Great Eclipse
the
fourth of five questions
- What
did Jesus mean when he spoke about welcoming “strangers”?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout the Old Testament,
what about the New?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout
Scripture, what about Tradition?
- It
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout in
Scripture and Tradition, why is it unfamiliar today?
- What
now? Can we help 65 million people?
The
fourth question: if hospitality is all over the Old Testament, and the New, and
the Fathers and the whole of our Tradition, where did it go?
The
Great Eclipse
If it
is true that Moses and Jesus and the entire Church for centuries taught that
hospitality to strangers is fundamental, how did all that teaching get
eclipsed? Today, hospitality is often considered to be a pleasing but optional
decoration. Is it truly a foundation of life as God would have us live? If it’s
so important, why haven’t we heard more about it?
I’m
sure there are many reasons for the partial eclipse of hospitality in the life
of the Church, but I want to focus on two. First, the practice of hospitality was smashed in the Reformation. And second,
the idea of hospitality was obscured
by confusion about the corporal works of mercy.
The catastrophic gap, in practice
It made
sense to delegate the responsibility and joy of hospitality to monks – as long
as there were monasteries. But the monasteries were suppressed. It was worst in
England, where all the monasteries were seized by King Henry VIII and used to
purchase a brand new aristocracy. In 1535, there were about 800 Benedictine
monasteries in England, doing many good things including offering hospitality.
Between 1535 and 1540, Henry’s government closed every single one of them, up
to and including Westminster Abbey in London. The monks were scattered, exiled,
martyred. At one point in Benedictine history, there was one single English Benedictine
monk left.
Beginning
in the time of St. Jerome in the Latin-speaking world and St. Basil in the
Greek-speaking world, monasteries built guest houses for all pilgrims and
strangers. But during the Reformation, Catholics shifted to constructing priest
holes to hide and protect fugitive priests.
In the
rest of Europe, monastic life was disrupted, although not as completely as in
England. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe – including England, Ireland,
Scotland, the Low Countries, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Switzerland – was
convulsed by religious war, setting Catholics and Lutherans and Calvinists
against each other. So Christians were on the mend when they weren’t killing
each other. Amidst that, Christians didn’t welcome even Christian strangers,
let alone all strangers regardless of religion.
The
eclipse of hospitality didn’t mean that all virtue ceased. People were still
kind and generous in many ways. But organized and deliberate hospitality as a fundamental aspect of
society, as a conscious response to the Lord’s word – that stopped.
Beyond the scope
It
would be interesting – but beyond the scope of this work – to examine how much the
Lord’s words in Matthew 25 were used in debates about moral issues during the
“age of discovery.” When Europeans in search of the wealth of Asia rounded the
corner of west Africa and found their way to a whole continent south of the
Sahara, and when Columbus bumped into two more continents en route to India,
their response overall was characterized by greed on a global scale. It’s easy
to see the horrors of what they did:
genocide, grand theft, slavery. So maybe it’s silly to examine the sins of omission. It’s easy to notice that
killing and stealing and raping aren’t the same thing as loving your neighbor.
So maybe it’s silly to ask about the moral background of the proud Christian
conquistadores. Beyond silly: maybe it’s nauseatingly pedantic, like reading intriguing
treatises with a fiddle in the background while Rome burns.
Still,
a detail of the age of discovery and plunder was a grievous sin of omission: somehow,
the proud discoverers overlooked the central discovery of the universe, and did
not see Jesus in the strangers they met. All the way across three continents,
the Lord smiled at Europeans, face to face – and Christians responded with contempt
and violence. How much did the sins of omission
matter? Are “social sins” and “structures of evil” always founded firmly on
personal sins of omission?
Maybe
it’s irrelevant. Paranoid schizophrenics don’t see friends in their violent
nightmares, and rapists don’t wash the feet of their prey. But was the command
to welcome even a footnote in anyone’s moral calculus?
To see
the Lord in the face of a stranger: is that for saints on pedestals and monks
in their prayers? Or is it supposed to be normal, daily, pedestrian Christian
life?
That’s
speculation way beyond what’s necessary to make my point here, which is: the
pattern of hospitality among Christians for centuries was ecclesial, and that
seemed to work well enough – until the monasteries were smashed.
Perhaps
it didn’t matter what the pattern is, if we get so attached to a pattern that
we can’t imagine any other pattern. That’s where many Christians are today:
stuck on a pattern of one-on-one service and reluctant to believe that the Lord
might do things any other way. But in fact, the pattern we were stuck on was
the monastic pattern; and when it didn’t work, we forgot what the Lord had asked
of us.
The catastrophic gap, in theory
With
the suppression of monasteries, the third paradigm was gone. But it wasn’t just
the practice that was quenched. The theory was also misplaced, in an
extraordinary fashion. St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out this problem centuries
ago: the corporal works of mercy were cut loose from their roots in Matthew 25.
That troubled him, but he wasn’t really in a position to do much about it, and
the problem grew. The catechesis of the laity did not include Matthew 25. Instead,
standard catechesis taught the corporal works of mercy. Not “as well” but
“instead” – instead! The corporal works of mercy aren’t Scripture, so they are
plastic, subject to change. In Aquinas’s time, most Catholics were already much
more familiar with a teaching tool than with Scripture, and that got worse as
time passed. Over the centuries, most Catholics were raised memorizing the list
of corporal works, but hearing the list it was based on (in Matthew 25) only
once a year – and not noticing the differences between the two lists. So the
command to welcome strangers was smeared, blurred, and lost.
In
Aquinas’s time, there had been three changes from Scripture. First, one item
was added: Matthew 25 has six items, but the corporal works list has seven. What
was added was an item from the Book of Tobit, “bury the dead.” Second, the
order was changed: the corporal works list uses the six items from Matthew 25
in this order: 1-2-4-6-3-5. And third, “visit the imprisoned” was changed to
the “ransom captives.” These aren’t dreadful ideas or anything; it’s just that
the list was cut loose from Scripture.
This
uprooted drift continued, eventually causing real trouble when there was a
change in the reference to welcoming strangers. By 1885, when the American bishops
published the Baltimore Catechism,
the list of corporal works replaced “welcome strangers” with “harbor the
harborless.” The catechism has two footnotes about the corporal works. One
footnote is 441 words explaining the Crusades, and the need to ransom captives.
That’s a little odd in 1885. And then there’s a note about harboring the
harborless:
“A pilgrim is one who goes on a
journey to visit some holy place for the purpose of thus honoring God. He would
not be a pilgrim if he went merely through curiosity. He must go with the holy
intention of making his visit an act of worship. In our time pilgrimages to the
Holy Land, to Rome, and other places are quite frequent.
“To harbor” – that is, to give
one who has no home a place of rest. A harbor is an inlet of the ocean where
ships can rest and be out of danger; so we can also call the home or place of
rest given to the homeless a harbor.” (Baltimore
Catechism, 1885)
“Ransom
captives”: that’s a good call. You can’t visit prisoners on a galley, so ransom
them. So far, so good. But the second major alteration in the list of the
corporal works of mercy was catastrophic. “Welcome strangers” became something
vague, something about taking care of pilgrims – real pilgrims, mind you, on
the way to Jerusalem for spiritual reasons, not just tourists. What we’re
supposed to do, says the 1885 Catechism, is “harbor the harborless” – which may
be clear and to the point if you happen to own or control a harbor somewhere in
the western Mediterranean. Which is to say: that injunction is pretty
interesting, but it doesn’t apply to me.
Some words in Scripture are for kings, some for virgins, some for celibates,
some for martyrs – and some for people who run ports. But I don’t have friends
on any Saracen galleys, and I don’t have a harbor in Sicily.
So in
1885, the command to welcome strangers had effectively disappeared from the
list of corporal works of mercy. And note carefully: the text from Matthew 25,
which of course still referred to strangers, was among the readings that
Catholics heard every year – once. But it would be a remarkable person who
would sit up during Mass and notice that the list in Matthew was so different
from the familiar and long-memorized list of the corporal works of mercy that
the differences were worth exploring.
The practice of hospitality in the Christian
world was smashed during the Reformation, when the monasteries were suppressed.
And the teaching about hospitality
was also eclipsed – hidden behind an admirable but non-scriptural teaching
tool, the corporal works of mercy.
Chapter 5: Called to
Serve Millions
Fifth
of five questions
- What
did Jesus mean when he spoke about welcoming “strangers”?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout the Old
Testament, what about the New?
- If
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout
Scripture, what about Tradition?
- It
there’s clear and forceful teaching about hospitality throughout in
Scripture and Tradition, why is it unfamiliar today?
- What
now? Can we help 65 million people?
The
fifth question: if a fundamental aspect of Christian life seems to have been
mislaid, what in the world are we supposed to do now?
Called
to Serve Millions
The fourth paradigm of
hospitality is global: we are indeed called to serve tens of millions – all,
globally.
The
transformation of the Church’s thinking about hospitality begins with Pope Leo,
although he wrote about labor, not immigration. He was elected pope in 1878,
following Pope Pius IX, who had responded to new developments in the world with
vigorous denunciations of the grave threats to Christianity contained in modern
life. Leo was similarly cautious, keenly aware of the dangers of Communism. But
he refused to stay frozen in a defensive crouch. New things were unfolding in
the world, and Leo responded with new ideas. If the Industrial Revolution
threatened the dignity of workers in a new way, the Church supported new ways
of asserting and protecting that dignity.
Whatever
his intent, Pope Leo XIII initiated a new body of thought within the Catholic
Church. In 1891, he issued an extraordinarily influential encyclical, Rerum Novarum. In this carefully written
document, he taught explicitly and unequivocally that workers have a right to
organize.
It
would, of course, be ideal if a worker and an owner could sit down together and
forge agreements based on principles of justice and brotherhood; but that ideal
was not realistic in the 19th century. Workers had become replaceable bits of
machinery in large and complex systems.
Leo
discussed strikes cautiously, and urged that workers try to enlist the aid of
government when their rights were abused. He listed problems involved in a
decision to strike. But he refused to condemn them. Cautiously, he left the
door open. “Qui tacet consentire videtur”
– silence gives consent.
Strikes
don’t show up in Scripture, but the dignity of workers and indeed the dignity
of all human beings is in Scripture. So if protecting the rights of workers
requires a strike, the Church will not oppose it. The Church stands with all
the children of God, and speaks on behalf of us all. So Leo denounced “the
cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for
money-making. It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive
labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.”
He
taught that the worker’s right to a living wage took precedence over the myth
of free consent in a free market: “Wages, as we are told, are regulated by free
consent… nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more
imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought
not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If
through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions
because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the
victim of force and injustice.” Pope Leo denounced a neutral or laissez-faire
approach, asserting that “if employers laid burdens upon their workmen which
were unjust, or degraded them with conditions repugnant to their dignity as
human beings; finally, if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work
unsuited to sex or age – in such cases, there can be no question but that,
within certain limits, it would be right to invoke the aid and authority of the
law.” And he put the Church on the side of unions, expressing a desire that unions
“should become more numerous.”
It is
true that Pope Leo did not state explicitly that there is a right to strike. It
was another 90 years until Pope St. John Paul II spoke explicitly of the “right
to strike.” However, Pope Leo supported unions, supported their key demands,
and advised against some mistakes in strikes. In that context, the inference is
fair: silence gives consent.
Rerum Novarum is about labor. But more generally,
Pope Leo inserted the Church into matters of social justice. Justice is not
outside the purview of the Church. The Church claims authority to weigh social
issues in the light of the Gospel, whether or not the issues that the Church
addresses were present in Scripture.
The
Church is not the world’s expert on economic or political questions. But the
Church does assert that societies must be based on principles of justice, that
government and industry and indeed all social entities that include human
beings should operate in accord with discernible principles of justice. And in
matters of justice, the Church claims centuries of experience, and the guidance
of the Holy Spirit.
Pope
Leo’s encyclical inaugurated a new era in Church history. Three encyclicals in
later years are based so firmly on Leo’s teaching that their titles refer to
the years since Rerum Novarum, on the
40th, 80th, and 100th anniversaries. Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, 1931, balances the right to private property
with a higher good, the common good, and asserts that in an extreme case the
State may even have a right to expropriate private property. Pope Paul VI’s Octogesima Adveniens, 1971, cries out
for effective action to redress economic injustices. And John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, calls on the State to
be an effective agent of justice for the poor, and to protect the human rights
of all citizens. In addition, on the 90th anniversary, Pope John Paul II
published Laborem Exercens, a
remarkable re-thinking of the meaning of work which includes an explicit
reference to the “right to strike.” It was John Paul II’s intention to publish
the encyclical on May 15, the same day as Rerum
Novarum; but he was shot by a would-be assassin on May 13, and the
publication was delayed a few months. These anniversary encyclicals are just
the most obvious assertions of the immense significance of Pope Leo XIII’s work
inaugurating a new era; a whole new body of thought and teaching beginning with
Leo XIII, called the “Social Gospel,” was collected at the request of Pope St. Hohn
Paul II, in the Compendium of the Social
Doctrine of the Church, published in 2004.
This
new body of thought includes the idea that there are some problems that are
global in their nature, and that require a global response. For sure, it’s best
when problems are addressed as locally as possible, by the smallest unit of
society capable of an effective response – the family, the extended family, the
village, the county, the state, the nation. But plagues and famine cross
national borders; they require international action. Industrialization and modernization and
urbanization are global; effective responses must be global. And among the
challenges facing the globe – among the challenges that cannot be addressed
effectively by any social unit smaller than the globe – there’s migration.
So the
fourth paradigm of hospitality is based on the Social Gospel. All people of
goodwill work together to care for all people in need. Catholics cooperate with
others, to respond to global challenges. Global.
Pope St. Pius X
In
1914, Pope Pius X inaugurated the annual Day for Migrants and Refugees, a day
of reflection and action that the Church has marked for over a century now.
Each year since then, the pope has re-stated the Church’s support for pilgrims,
migrants, strangers, refugees.
The last “pre-Vatican” pope
One of
the most influential assertions in this line of thought, providing an efficient
and effective grasp of the Church’s teaching on migration, is the apostolic
exhortation, Exsul Familia Nazarethena,
or “The Exiled Family of Nazareth,” issued by Pope Pius XII in 1951. He opens:
The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth,
fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary and
Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for
all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and
refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by
want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives,
his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.
Fifty
years ago, Fr. Aidan Shea, a beloved teacher, noted my proclivity for stating
things with fiery adverbs – firmly, unequivocally, absolutely. Perhaps, he
suggested, I could learn to speak and write more softly and gently and
invitingly. I’m still trying. But look at the adjectives of Pius XII in this exhortation.
The Holy Family is “the archetype of every
refugee family … for all times and all
places, the models and protectors of every
migrant, alien and refugee of whatever
kind.” There’s a time and place for moderation, to be sure; but apparently,
in the view of Pope Pius the reassuringly be-spectacled scholar, this isn’t it:
Every … all … all … every … of whatever
kind.
The Second Vatican Council
The
Social Gospel teaching inaugurated by Pope Leo XIII was embraced firmly by the
Second Vatican Council, which was called by Pope St. John XXIII, and led by his
successor, Pope Paul VI. Since the apostles met in Jerusalem to decide whether
you had to become a Jew first in order to be a true follower of Jesus, there
have been 20 such councils, bringing together the successor of Peter and the
successors of the apostles. The teachings from Councils are considered by
Catholics to be our most authoritative teaching, second only to Scripture. This
Council issued a number of documents, including prominently Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”), with
an English title that describes what it’s about: The Church in the Modern World. This revolutionary document
embraces the Social Gospel firmly and completely. And it opens with a glorious
assertion of a new paradigm:
Gaudium et spes, luctus et angor
hominum huius temporis, pauperum praesertim et quorumvis afflictorum, gaudium
sunt et spes, luctus et angor etiam Christi discipulorum, nihilque vere humanum
invenitur, quod in corde eorum non resonet.
“The joys and the hopes, the
griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor
or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties
of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an
echo in their hearts.”
That
is: in our hearts.
The
document is explicitly global. The audience is global: it “addresses itself
without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke
the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity.” The concerns in it are
global: the joys and hopes and griefs and anxieties of all people in our time. The document asserts the Church’s
“solidarity with, as well as its respect and love for the entire human family.”
And looking toward wisdom in responding to global problems, the Church adopts a
new position, not as the arrogant master of all good things, but as the servant
of all: the council “offers to mankind the honest assistance of the Church in
fostering that brotherhood of all men.”
The
Second Vatican Council notes that modern life has been transformed by global
forces. Industrialization, urbanization, and rapid global communication have
changed the way we think of society. And in this context, Gaudium et Spes explicitly recognizes a “personal right of
migration.”
Centuries
before, when the Church had an organized and robust response to strangers and
wanderers and migrants, the pattern was that the Church – usually clerics,
monks and nuns – welcomed strangers. That pattern was disrupted when
monasteries were suppressed. The Council asserts a new paradigm. First, who are
the people we are supposed to serve? ALL! That’s not a change, but the demand
to universality is made explicit, authoritatively. Second, who’s supposed to
serve? If the intent is to serve the needs of all, globally, that’s beyond the
capabilities of the Church. But the Council was not troubled by that, because
the servants that the Council summons to action are all people of good will.
The Church is a partner in a global effort.
The new
paradigm, the global paradigm, remains controversial.
In our
time in history, ancient divisions are being healed. The most ancient division
in the Church’s history is our violent rejection of our “older brothers” in
faith, Jews. The Council re-oriented the Church, admitted wrong, and set out to
establish peaceful and respectful relations with Jews. That effort is not
perfect, but it’s been good. The Catholic Church is similarly committed to
peace and reconciliation with our Orthodox brothers and sisters, and there has
been great progress there too. And the Catholic Church has recognized that
Protestants know and love the Lord, that we share “one Lord, one faith, one
baptism, one God who is Father of all.” There are still tensions and
disagreements, but we aren’t on the brink of war with people whom we believe to
be heretics headed rapidly to eternal perdition. And the Catholic Church is
committed to a new and respectful relationship with Muslims, who worship the
God of Abraham.
Jews,
Orthodox, Protestants, Muslims: that’s an impressive list of relations on the
mend. But in the midst of all this dramatic healing, a new division has opened.
The Church is often seen to be ripped apart, setting the advocates of personal
morality against the advocates of social justice. This is bizarre,
schizophrenic. But there it is: we’re divided, despite the unifying teaching of
the Church. One detail of this division is that some people study and embrace
the Social Gospel, while others study and embrace the Gospel of Life. So it’s
worth noting that the Compendium of the
Social Doctrine of the Church is not afflicted by this schizophrenia: the
documents on life and family issues are intermingled with the documents about
peace, justice, labor, migration.
Indeed,
the “right to migrate” is asserted in one of the most significant “pro-family”
documents of our time, Familiaris
Consortio. This is an apostolic exhortation, issued by Pope John Paul II in
1981. A section of the document is a “Charter of Family Rights,” which includes
“the right to emigrate as a family in search of a better life.”
The
fourth paradigm of hospitality is completely established in theory, but not in
practice. The drag of centuries of confusion remains.
Protecting the foundation of
hospitality today
The
first pattern is national; the second is personal; the third is ecclesial; the
fourth is global. But the fourth pattern is based squarely on the first three –
which is a great strength, and a great challenge. Its strength is that we can
have confidence that this pattern corresponds to the will of the Lord who
created us. The weakness is – well, it’s complicated. Serious Christians doubt
whether the Lord asks us to engage in specific political arrangements. Does God
really care about border laws? Is the United Nations a Christian thing, or is
it even compatible with Christianity? Resistance to the new global pattern is
widespread, deep, and articulate.
To make
the fourth pattern work well, we need to show its relationship to the previous
patterns. But the third pattern is largely forgotten, and this amnesia is
ferociously destructive.
When
you see three patterns of hospitality, you can easily look for a fourth. But if
you forget one, then you have the pattern set by Moses and the pattern set by
Jesus. With three, you talk about various patterns of response to God – all of
them responses to the command of Jesus, all responsive to the promptings of the
Holy Spirit – one pattern described by Moses and the prophets, another
described by the four evangelists and others, and the third described by St.
Jerome and St. Basil and the rest of the Fathers and many other people. But
without the third pattern, you back up and find yourself asking whether you
want to adopt the pattern of Moses or the pattern of Jesus. That’s a false
choice that the history of the Church will keep you from falling into – if you
know the history. But if you don’t know your history, and if you think that you
have to choose between Moses’ social approach and Jesus’ personal approach,
many Christians will keep whatever Moses said that Jesus also said, but scrap
whatever Moses said that Jesus didn’t also say. So if you lose the third
pattern, the ecclesial pattern, many Christians will also promptly lose the
first pattern, the social pattern from the Old Testament. And then, if you lose
the first pattern, huge parts of the second pattern also drop out of sight,
because the New Testament teaching is based on the Old Testament. The second
pattern, isolated, is tattered and shriveled, trivialized: being nice is nice.
The
history of the Church shows that Christian men and women embraced the teaching
of Moses and Jesus, and implemented that teaching, in a pattern that was not
quite the same as the pattern of the ancient Israelites, nor quite the same as
the pattern in Bethlehem and Nazareth. Same Spirit, new arrangement. But the
loss of a vibrant awareness of hospitality in the history of the Church has
been catastrophic.
Is it
possible to build the fourth pattern on a puny scrap of the second pattern: “be
nice”? Probably not.
Can the
Catholic Church in the modern world get organized to protect and serve 65
million refugees and migrants and displaced people? Probably not – unless we
recover a clear sense of our heritage.
Here’s
the challenge. Can Pope Francis persuade the Church to care about 65 million
migrants on the roads today? Is it possible if most people have lost any sense
of the centrality of hospitality, and consider hospitality to be decorative,
like polished silverware and soft linen napkins at dinner?
Let me
repeat that.
What if
you …
·
…
forget Tradition, the third paradigm: hospitality as the work of the Church,
especially monks.
·
… set
aside the Old Testament, the first paradigm: hospitality as a national
responsibility.
·
… trim
the New Testament, the second paradigm: hospitality as a personal
responsibility – reduced to shelter for the homeless.
·
… and
then ask Christians to care about 65 million people over there.
It’s a
stretch. It’s too much. The request falls on deaf ears.
The
fourth paradigm of hospitality depends on the previous three. If we forget the
teaching of Benedict, then Moses and Matthew seem to be in tension. And if the
Gospel seems to differ in some ways from the teaching of Moses, we drop Moses. And
if we drop Moses, then Matthew is almost incomprehensible. And then, can Pope
Francis build a call to hospitality on a few incomprehensible scraps from the
New Testament? Not likely.
Modern problems, modern solutions
One of
the challenges of our time is that modern communication makes it possible for
us to see tragedies unfold all over the globe, to experience them almost
first-hand, vividly – by the thousands, daily. If you watch international news,
and try to get inside the pains and sufferings of each and every person you
see, you can go crazy pretty quickly. You can’t respond one on one, face to
face, heart to heart, to all the people you see in trouble on TV.
Unequivocally, certainly, you cannot. That’s a modern challenge, brought to you
by modern technology. And you cannot respond using only folksy old methods.
If you
can’t respond with old methods, one option is to give up, to abandon the effort
to respond to the needs you see. But another option is to look for new ways of
responding. And indeed, the world that brought you TV and a million people in
pain also brought you communication devices to reach a million people ready to
help. To be sure, massive aid agencies can be impersonal, nasty, and uncaring;
but that’s not unique to modern life; your next-door neighbor can also be nasty
and uncaring. You can’t fix a million problems daily by yourself, but you can
work with a million people who – together – can and do.
That’s
the fourth paradigm.
The scope of the Second Vatican Council
The
Council called by Pope St. John XXIII was magnificent – literally magnificent,
doing great things. And the popes since the Council devoted their papacies to
implementing that ambitious renewal. Pope Paul VI, of course, presided over most
of the Council after John’s death. Pope John Paul I took their names joined
together, to emphasize his intention to continue their work, and John Paul II did
the same. Pope Benedict XVI, the last pope who was present at the Council, also
worked to implement it. And Francis is obviously committed to ongoing
reformation and renewal on an immense scale.
One
piece of that work is a renewal of hospitality. When the monastic pattern was
disrupted, hospitality was buried in the rubble. Welcoming strangers – serving
God in the epiphany at the door, with joyful hope and confident expectancy –
was fundamental in our lives for centuries and centuries. But somehow, it
slipped sideways, and became a specialized work of specialized people – sweet
but optional, like “sugar in your coffee, dear?” – a delightful decoration at
the margins of sanctity.
The
immense work of the Council includes a renewal of hospitality, recalling a
fundamental aspect of the life of Abraham, whose hospitality foreshadowed God’s
hospitality in the Eucharist.
Hospitality
is not minor, not decorative, not optional. It’s a ray of divine light straight
from the heart of the Trinity. It’s fundamental, and restoring it to its proper
place in our lives is a part of the work of the Council. The Council, embracing
and proclaiming the Social Gospel, opens the door to a new culture of life and civilization
of love. By God’s grace, we will embrace widows and orphans and strangers.
The Good Samaritan, revisited
Let’s look
again at the pivotal New Testament story about hospitality to a stranger, the
parable of the Good Samaritan. One oft-repeated interpretation holds that Jesus
showed us how to serve the poor, including strangers. He offered personal
service, face to face, heart to heart, one on one. And indeed, this is the way
the Lord deals with each of us, now and forever: his love is intense and
personal, direct and unfiltered – one-on-one. He doesn’t rely on any massive
agencies or impersonal bureaucracies; he doesn’t build a governmental program;
he doesn’t tax the people. In fact, looking back, the closest Jesus came to
having a bureaucrat handling the requests of the poor was Judas. And if that’s
the way Jesus did it, that’s the best way, and that’s the way I want to serve.
That’s not a wacky interpretation of the passage.
But
there’s another way to understand the passage. It seems to me that the passage
shows Jesus teaching almost exactly the same thing that Moses taught. Moses had
a long list of rules and regulations, including some about how to provide for
strangers who move into the community. He laid down rules about how to harvest
crops. He said that observant Jews should be deliberately inefficient in their
vineyards and grain fields: leave some for widows and orphans and strangers to
glean. That provides the food they need, and also protects their dignity a
little. The rules are interesting, but I don’t have a vineyard; do I have any
responsibilities toward strangers? Emphatically, yes, according to Moses. We
are all required to welcome strangers, because – remember! – you too were once
a stranger in a strange land. The command includes two parts: remember and welcome.
Why should we remember? Because our memory of our past suffering opens the door
to understanding the stranger. Memory or imagination is wellspring of
compassion. The harvest rules are good, but they’re just examples; the point is
to welcome the stranger. And that welcome must come from the heart – from
compassion – from memory. Open your heart, and then act.
Jesus
was asked to define “neighbor.” But the question was nakedly practical, not
theoretical. The real question was, who can I ignore? I’ll take care of my
responsibilities, but where do they stop? What’s the boundary? Where I can turn
away from people in need with a clear conscience? Jesus declined to respond
with a legal definition; instead, he told a story. And the heart of the story
is compassion: to understand what a neighbor is, you have to see the question
from the perspective of a person in need. It’s not the circles of kinship and
friendship around you that matter; it’s the circles of kinship and friendship
around the person in need that matter.
Moses
and Jesus both talked about the boundary between “us” and “them.” Moses talked
about “us” – i.e., native-born children of Israel – versus “them” – i.e.,
strangers. He said we should find compassion in our hearts, via memory, and
welcome them. Jesus talked about “us” –
i.e., neighbors – versus “them” – i.e., non-neighbors. He said we should find
compassion in our hearts, via imagination, and welcome them.
In the
second interpretation, the point is not one-on-one service, but rather adopting
the perspective of the person in need as the starting point.
These
two interpretations of the parable of the Good Samaritan aren’t contradictory.
You don’t have to choose between them; you can use both – and likely many more.
They aren’t contradictory, but they aren’t the same either. The interpretation
that is enlightened by the Old Testament is, it seems to me, more flexible.
Suppose the person in need is a thousand miles away, in need of a lawyer? Can I
ignore that need? It’s not face to face! I’m not a lawyer! The problem is, if
you insist that Jesus served in one way – and only in this one way, and you want
to imitate Jesus in that one way – then you can fall into a new Pharisaism. You
can walk away from the problem, without trying to sympathize, without struggling
to figure out how to help.
Suppose
an immigrant needs an advocate. Offering bread to a man who needs an advocate
at the border is insulting. Offering water to a man who needs an advocate at
the border is sweet, but insufficient. Offering clothes to a man who needs an
advocate at the border is silly. Giving toys to a child who needs an advocate
at the border is callous and cruel – blind, not kind. Clearly, we should give
what’s necessary, in response to the needs of our neighbor – not just scraps
from some bag of Christmas alms!
This is
the difference between a cramped version of that second model of hospitality,
the personal model, versus the Church’s modern version of a fourth model of
hospitality, the global model.
All
four paradigms of hospitality are responses to the command of the Lord – all
four! God is not just a generous guy with a beard and an open heart; sometimes
he comes among us as Paraclete, as Advocate.
In sum
One – two – three – skip a bit – four.
There have been four paradigms of hospitality: national, personal, ecclesial –
then a great eclipse – then global.
Hospitality
is fundamental in the teaching of the Old Testament: welcome strangers, because
– remember! – you too once were a stranger in a strange land. It’s re-asserted
in the New Testament, commanded by the Lord in his description of the Last
Judgment. It was taught and practiced by the Fathers, and became a standard
part of the architecture of monasteries. But then it was smeared and bleared
and shoved aside by religious wars and a drift away from Scripture, a great
eclipse lasting several centuries. But for the past century, the leaders of the
Church have been working hard to re-establish hospitality – with a new paradigm
in mind. The paradigms of hospitality have been national in the Old Testament,
personal in the New Testament, ecclesial in the Patristic era and for centuries
afterwards; the new paradigm is global. But this great work cannot succeed
without a clear understanding of our history.
Gaudium et spes! The joys and the hopes, the griefs
and the anxieties of immigrants: these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and
anxieties of the followers of Christ. Nothing genuinely human fails to raise an
echo in our hearts.
The
hospitality of St. Benedict cannot be offered by monasteries alone. Benedict’s
work of hospitality depends on us. That great and joyful work – joyful but
work, work although joyful – national and personal and ecclesial and global –
that work is now in our hands.
Addendum: Aquinas on hospitality
As the Catholic Church
in America struggles to re-assert and defend a right to migrate, some of the opponents
of this drive for justice claim that St. Thomas Aquinas is their ally. This is
wrong-headed. The views of Aquinas are nuanced, and deserve careful treatment.
Four brief remarks about the teaching
of Aquinas
First,
Aquinas’ view is that the Lord’s command that we welcome strangers is indeed
binding. On the other hand, he also said that nations have a right to
scrutinize immigrants and to set up criteria for citizenship. He does not have
these two ideas tied together neatly, but they are both in his teaching, and
this same balance is key to the teaching of the Church today. To assert a right
to migrate without asserting a right to control borders, or to assert a right
to control borders without asserting a right to migrate – either one – is
contrary to the teaching of Aquinas, and also contrary to the teaching of the
Church. Justice requires a balance of rights that are in tension.
Second,
the Fathers of the Church agreed that welcoming strangers was fundamental, but
were divided on the question of what a “stranger” is. St. Jerome said we were commanded
to welcome all people – all. St. John
Chrysostom, on the other hand, said that the phrase “least of the brothers”
limits the command to Christian
brothers (and sisters). In practice, the matter was settled by St. Benedict and
St. Basil and their followers: for centuries, monks and nuns followed their
teaching and example, and welcomed all.
And since the Church delegated the duty of hospitality to monks and nuns, what
they did was what the Church was doing. That’s the practice; but the teaching
remained fuzzy. Aquinas weighed in on that controversy: his view was that the
command to welcome strangers applies to all, but especially Christians.
Third,
Aquinas made an observation that over time proved to be extraordinarily
significant. He asserted that the corporal works of mercy were somewhat adrift,
cut loose from their origin in the words of the Lord recorded in Matthew 25.
Aquinas embraced both Scripture and the corporal works of mercy firmly – but
noticed the differences, and was concerned about them.
And
fourth, his understanding of a poignant detail from the Last Supper is
explosive, pregnant with meaning, connecting hospitality and salvation the same
way that Moses connected them.
Some
commentators today assert blandly that Aquinas defended border security over
hospitality. This is misleading.
Welcome strangers …
Aquinas’
reflections on the Lord’s command to welcome strangers are found especially in
his sermons on Matthew 25 and John 13.
In
his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, Aquinas reviews the six
precepts in 25:31-46. He separates them into groups: internal needs, external
needs, and special needs. That is, food and drink are internal; clothing and
shelter are external; visits to the sick and imprisoned are special needs. With
regard to hospitality, he explains it by reference to a passage in Hebrews. He
says:
There are exterior needs, two of them
– one separate from the body and the other touching the body. The Lord says
about needs that aren’t physically touching us, “I was a stranger, and you took
me in.” Elsewhere, we read, “Do not forget hospitality; for by this, some
people – although they were unaware of it – have entertained angels [Heb 13:2].
With regard to a need that touches the body, the Lord says, “I was naked, and
you covered me.” Elsewhere we read, “Have I despised a man who was dying
because he didn’t have the clothes he needed, or the poor man with nothing to
warm his body? Didn’t that man bless me, warmed by the fleece of my sheep?”
[Job 31:20]. And again: “When you see someone naked, cover him!” [Isaiah 58:7].
That
is, Aquinas embraced the view that the call to welcome strangers is an
invitation to perennial epiphany, continual revelation.
Also
in the commentary on Matthew 25, Aquinas asserts that the Lord explained why
some people are excluded from the kingdom of God, and notes that some are excluded
for interior sins, and others for exterior sins. Matthew 25 has two parables
before the Lord’s description of the Last Judgment and the six precepts. One of
these parables is about virgins greeting the bridegroom when he arrives. The
wise virgins prepare, and have oil in their lamps; the foolish virgins know
what’s coming, but don’t prepare, and have no oil in their lamps. Aquinas says
that they were excluded from the celebration because of an interior defect. By
contrast, says Aquinas, the parable of the servants who were given different
amounts of talents – some invested, but one didn’t – shows that some people are
excluded from the kingdom of God because
of their neglect of exterior works (“propter
negligentiam exterioris operationis”). In other words, Aquinas asserts that
the Lord speaks about damnation because of negligence, or sins of omission. And
immediately after this parable about negligence, the Lord turns to his list of
six precepts. What follows the parable about negligence is the description of
the Last Judgment, with a list of exterior works that some people perform and
others neglect – feeding, giving water, welcoming strangers, clothing the
naked, visiting the sick, visiting the imprisoned. Those who serve people in
need find that they have served the Lord, and they are welcome in the kingdom;
others neglect these exterior works and are damned for it.
In
his reflections on John 13, which is about Jesus washing the feet of his
disciples, Aquinas asserts that the passage includes a command: “If I,
therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one
another’s feet.” And Aquinas assets again that the precepts are binding, that neglecting
them is a mortal sin. The precepts can be fulfilled in various ways; but in one
way or another, we are commanded to serve. These binding precepts include
welcoming strangers. Aquinas sees the Lord’s words at the Last Supper – to wash
the feet of others as he had washed the feet of the apostles – as a reference
to all forms of service, including feeding and clothing and welcoming those in
need. That is, in Aquinas’ understanding, the six precepts in the Lord’s
description of the Last Judgment are all commanded yet again in the Lord’s
words at the Last Supper.
Protect borders …
Aquinas’
reflections on a nation’s right to control its borders are found in the Summa Theologica (in the second half of
the first part, question 105, especially in Article 3). The passages has some
problems.
Aquinas
speculates about law, and about the Law in the Old Testament. He explores a
list of questions: are the precepts in the Old Testament binding on everyone, what
are the differences among natural law and moral law and divine law, and such.
He distinguishes among the specific commands, dividing them into three groups:
ceremonial precepts, about worshiping God; moral precepts, like “thou shalt not
steal”; and judicial precepts, about justice. Then he divides the judicial
precepts into four categories: relations between a ruler and subjects, relations
between individuals, relations with foreigners, and relations within a family.
With regard to foreigners – the passage that is pertinent here – his general
intent is to defend the wisdom of God revealed in the Old Testament, and to
sort out what is permanent and binding from what was specific to the Jews whom
Moses led. So Question 105, article three, explores: were the judicial precepts
in the Old Testament regarding foreigners “framed in a suitable manner”? (Or: “Utrum iudicialia praecepta sint convenienter
tradita quantum ad extraneos.”)
His
approach is speculative. He’s arguing, not pontificating. One of the great
puzzles about the way people use his work today is that his life-long approach
to questions was so flexible and inventive and intelligent; but many of his
admirers seize on his words – often speculations – and hold them rigidly. That
is, his followers often discard his method
and cling to his conclusions, which
is completely contrary to his genius.
In
his response to question 105, Aquinas runs into trouble almost immediately. He
says that the Jews had three kinds of peaceful interaction with foreigners:
when they are just passing through, when they come to stay, and when they want
to become full members of the community. The distinctions he makes to get to
these three categories are based on (1) a mistake in translation, and then (2)
Aristotle in direct opposition to Scripture.
His
first two categories are taken from two passages in Exodus, referring to advena in Exodus 22:20 and peregrinus in Exodus 23:9. Both are to
be protected, kept free from molestation – but, he says, they are two different
groups with different needs.
Aquinas
referred to advena, or a new-comer,
in Exodus 22:20: “You shall not oppress or afflict a resident alien [advena], for you were once aliens
residing in the land of Egypt.” And he referred to peregrinus in Exodus 23:9: “You shall not oppress a resident alien
[peregrinus]; you well know how it
feels to be an alien, since you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.”
The problem is, there are indeed two separate words in the Latin text, the
Vulgate; but there is only one word – proselutos
– in the Greek text, the Septuagint; and more importantly, there is only one
word – ger – in the original text,
the Hebrew text.
Exodus 22:20: “You shall not oppress
or afflict a resident alien [ger in
Hebrew, proselutos in Greek, advena in Latin], for you were once
aliens [ger in Hebrew, proselutos in Greek, advena in Latin], residing in the land
of Egypt.”
Exodus 23:9: “You shall not oppress a
resident alien [ger in Hebrew, proselutos in Greek, peregrinus in Latin]; you well know how
it feels to be an alien [ger in
Hebrew, proselutos in Greek, advena in Latin], since you were once
aliens [ger in Hebrew, proselutos in Greek, peregrinus in Latin] yourselves in the
land of Egypt.”
Sorry,
let me repeat that one more time:
|
|
Hebrew
|
Greek
|
Latin
|
|
Ex 22:20
|
ger
|
proselutos
|
advena
|
|
Ex 22:20
|
ger
|
proselutos
|
advena
|
|
Ex 23:9
|
ger
|
proselutos
|
peregrinus
|
|
Ex 23:9
|
ger
|
proselutos
|
advena
|
|
Ex 23:9
|
ger
|
proselutos
|
peregrinus
|
Scholars
debate whether Aquinas was fluent in Greek, but there seems to be agreement
that he didn’t read Hebrew. In this case, at least, it’s clear that Aquinas
used only the Latin text, not the older Greek text, nor the original Hebrew
text. So his first distinction – strangers who are passing through versus
strangers who come to stay – is based on a misunderstanding. The text does not
have two words; it has one. Why did Jerome, or someone working with Jerome to
produce the Vulgate Bible, use two different words to translate a single word
in the original? Who knows? Perhaps it sounded a little better than repeating a
word three times in a sentence of just 13 words. I don’t see how it did any
harm – until someone assumed that the two words referred to two different
categories of stranger.
So
far, Aquinas’ distinction is innocent. It’s not Scripture, but it’s harmless:
there are strangers who pass through, as pilgrims; and there are strangers who
stay a bit, as new-comers. But his description of a third category – settlers –
opens the door to a variety of immense abuses.
For
his third category, Aquinas finds the idea in Aristotle, without any reference
to Scripture. The distinctions he makes are sensible, rational, useful,
provocative – but they have nothing to do with Scripture. He suggests that
immigrants should go through a long period of testing and training, building
relationships and learning the culture – for decades or even generations.
Slowly, over time, they should be incorporated or assimilated into their new
culture. That’s not a foolish idea, but it’s Aristotle, not Scripture.
If
the approach that Aquinas proposes is understood to be Scriptural, that’s an
error, and the error is not trivial. Aquinas, following Aristotle, suggests
that immigrants be treated differently from citizens – excluded from the rights
and privileges of citizens for years or even for generations. Neither of these
two great men can be dismissed casually. But this proposal is directly contrary
to the clear teaching in the Old Testament that Aquinas is discussing! The
question of how to treat immigrants – and specifically what the differences in
treatment should be between native-born citizens and immigrants – comes up at
least 52 times in the Old Testament. Of these, there are 29 assertions that the
treatment of Hebrews and immigrants should be the same. There are 20 references
to preferential treatment or extra protections for immigrants. There are three
references to circumstances in which Hebrews should be treated better than
immigrants.
References
to equal treatment (29):
1.
Ex
12:19
2.
Ex
12:48
3.
Ex
12:49
4.
Ex
20:10
5.
Ex
23:12
6.
Lev
16:29
7.
Lev
17:8
8.
Lev
17:10
9.
Lev
17:12
10.
Lev
17:13
11.
Lev
17:15
12.
Lev
18:26
13.
Lev
20:2
14.
Lev
22:18
15.
Lev
24:16
16.
Lev
24:22
17.
Lev
25:35
18.
Num
9:14
19.
Num15:
14
20.
Num
15:26
21.
Num
19:10
22.
Num
35:15
23.
Dt
1:16
24.
Dt
24:14
25.
Jos
8:33
26.
Jos
8:35
27.
Jos
20:9
28.
Ez
14:7
29.
Ez
47:22
References
to preferential treatment of immigrants over Hebrews (20):
1.
Lev
19:10
2.
Lev
23:22
3.
Dt
10:17
4.
Dt
14:29
5.
Dt
16:11
6.
Dt
16:14
7.
Dt
24:17
8.
Dt
24:19
9.
Dt
24:20
10.
Dt
24:21
11.
Dt
26:12
12.
Dt
27:19
13.
Ps
94:6
14.
Ps
146:9
15.
Jer
7:6
16.
Jer
22:3
17.
Ez
22:7
18.
Ez
22:29
19.
Zech
7:10
20.
Mal
3:5
References
to preferential treatment of Hebrews over immigrants (3):
1.
Lev
25:45
2.
Lev
25:47
3.
Dt
14:21
Teaching
in the Old Testament about equality or preferential treatment of immigrants is
not absolute and rigid, but it is clear and overwhelming – 49 to 3 clear.
Greek balance versus Old Testament
balance
It’s
worthwhile comparing the Greek approach to hospitality, and the Hebrew (Old
Testament) approach. Both the ancient Greeks and the Hebrews considered
hospitality to be fundamental to civilization. Both were especially careful
about three protected classes – widows and orphans and strangers. Both
considered violations of hospitality to be heinous crimes, even capital crimes
in some cases. Both had a balanced approach to hospitality. But the way they
understood this balance was radically different.
The
Greeks were careful about balancing the rights and responsibilities of hosts on
one hand, and guests on the other. In the Odyssey,
for example, the themes that Homer explores include courage and loyalty – and
also hospitality. There are numerous visits and welcoming feasts throughout the
epic, in Ithaca and in the travels of Odysseus and Telemachus; at each, the
rules and expectations are clear for both host and guest. The issue of
hospitality is central as events unfold in Odysseus’ kingdom and palace. The
suitors abuse Penelope, although they believe – mistakenly – that she is a
widow. They abuse Telemachus, although they believe – mistakenly – that he is
an orphan. And then they abuse Odysseus, believing – mistakenly – that he is a
stranger, a mere beggar at the door. Their abuse of Penelope and Telemachus is
a long string of violations of the duties of a guest: they eat her food and consume her wealth carelessly,
heedlessly, without gratitude. But their abuse of Odysseus is a little
different. When he shows up, the suitors arrogantly assume the role of the host,
deciding who is welcome and who is not – and then they violate the sacred
duties of a host. This abuse of a
helpless and hungry stranger – apparently helpless – is the last straw. Their
abuse of Penelope shows them to be bad guests, and unworthy of marrying her.
But their abuse of Odysseus shows them to be bad hosts, and unworthy of ruling
Ithaca. So they are all executed, and their blood splashes up the walls of the
banquet hall.
The
story looks at the rights and duties of hosts and guests with severity. But
note the balance.
The
Greeks balanced the rights and duties of host and guest. In Scripture, there is
a balance – but it is worlds away from the Greek balance. Literally worlds
away: the Hebrews balance our duties of hospitality with God’s generosity to
us. The Greek balance is familiar and sensible: I give to you and you give to
me. The Hebrew balance depends on faith: I give to you, and God gives to us
both.
The
Hebrew sense of balance does not propose rules and roles for host contrasted
with guest, balanced carefully. The Hebrew approach doesn’t even distinguish
carefully between the two parties, let alone balance them. At the First Feast
in Scripture, Abraham begins as host, welcoming three strangers to his tent under
the trees at Mamre; but by the end of the day, it is God who is host, pouring
out gifts to his friend as they converse under the sky. The balance is: you
welcome a stranger, and God will welcome you.
The
lesson from Abraham, repeated by the Prophets for centuries, is that welcoming
strangers matters greatly, because the guest might be God. The lesson from
Jesus is similar, but stronger: welcoming strangers matters, because the guest is God. When you welcome a stranger, you
welcome me, says the Lord – not maybe, not sometimes – but definitely albeit mysteriously, and always.
When
Aquinas offers ideas about immigration, and draws on Aristotle, that’s rational
and reasonable – but wrong. The Old Testament isn’t Greek; it’s Jewish.
The antisemitism of the Catholic
Church
In
1986, Pope St. John Paul II visited a synagogue in Rome. He quoted a document
from the Second Vatican Council asserting that the Catholic Church is committed
to a new and peaceful relationship with Jews (and others). He said, “With
Judaism therefore we have a relationship which we do not have with any other
religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could
be said that you are our elder brothers.”
Obviously,
these words of Pope John Paul II are different from many things said by
Christians over the centuries. For 18 centuries, the history of the Church has
been marked by antisemitism. An incident of failure to love and respect our
older brothers and sisters in the faith – and a failure to understand and
cherish their insights – is troubling but not isolated, and not surprising. The
Pope was deliberately turning away from ancient sins that afflicted many
Christians through the centuries – including Aquinas.
In
his defense of the wisdom of the teaching that he finds in Scripture, Aquinas
explores six specific questions. One is, did the teaching in the Old Testament
do wrong in permitting the Hebrews to mistreat foreigners – by engaging in
usurious practices with them but not with each other. There are several
problems with Aquinas’ response to this objection. First, just as he took a
single Hebrew word and split it in two, so now he takes two Hebrew words and
combines them to make one. Hebrew does not distinguish between pilgrims passing
through and migrants come to stay. But Hebrew does distinguish between
immigrants who are settling in the land of Israel and foreigners who live
elsewhere. The Old Testament does permit Hebrews to charge interest when they
loan money to a foreigner in another land – but does not permit interest on
loans to other Hebrews, nor on loans to immigrants. But Aquinas didn’t read
Hebrew.
That
confusion doesn’t change the question at hand: does Scripture endorse an evil
practice. But it does give reason to worry about Aquinas’ understanding of what
the Hebrews were doing. The question remains, did God permit the Hebrews to
engage in a pattern of evil in their dealings with strangers. Whether they are
inside the country as immigrants or outside as plain foreigners doesn’t really
alter that challenge.
There’s
another bit of confusion here to address before looking at exactly what Aquinas
said. Aquinas considered it to be wrong to charge interest or ask for any kind
of bank fee. In his time, any fee or interest charge was considered to be
usury. Jews then – and everyone today – would make a distinction between asking
for reasonable interest for a loan versus charging a high interest rate to a
person in desperate need. The latter was and is evil, although the line between
the two practices may be hard to draw sharply. But Aquinas, considering it to
be evil to charge any interest on any loan, wonders why the Old Testament
permits it – even with strangers.
And
here we get to the real problem. His answer is bluntly antisemitic: Aquinas
says that God accommodated the hard hearts of the Jews, who are “prone to
avarice” (propter pronitatem Judaeorum ad
avaritiam). This kind of rank antisemitism is gravely wrong. And this casual
embrace of antisemitism in a passage which some people now hold up as
clear-minded insight into the problems of immigration is problematic indeed.
Obviously, it’s anachronistic to demand that Aquinas understand the lethal
effect of antisemitism in twentieth century immigration laws. But in our time,
it’s foolish – or perhaps deeply evil – to overlook antisemitism in immigration
laws!
To
say that America’s anti-immigration laws contributed to the horrors of the Nazi
holocaust is not speculation, and not exaggeration. At the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, you can get a list of the hundreds of Jews who fled from Hitler,
crossed the Atlantic on the infamous voyage of the St. Louis, saw the lights of
Miami, were turned away, returned to Germany, and died in concentration camps.
You can’t blame that on Aquinas. On the other hand, a passage about immigration
that is tainted by antisemitism cannot be used authoritatively in our time.
Antisemitism
has a long history in the Church. At the first council of all the leaders of the
Church – the Council of Jerusalem, described in the Acts of the Apostles – the
question they were wrestling with was whether you had to become a Jew in order
to follow Jesus. Jesus followed the Law of Moses; if you want to follow Jesus,
must you follow Moses? The answer was no: Greeks could follow Jesus without
being circumcised. But it took a meeting of all the apostles, and an argument
between Peter and Paul, to get to that answer firmly. However, a few
generations later, the matter was turned on its head. It wasn’t necessary to be
a Jew to become a Christian: in fact, it was prohibited. Most people who wanted
to become Christian went through a catechetical program, and then got baptized.
But Jews had to go through the same program – and then abjure Judaism! – and
then get baptized.
The
Gospels can be read by an ignorant person to say that the Jews crucified Jesus.
For example, Matthew writes that when Pilate said he was innocent of the blood
of Jesus, the people (Jews) responded, “His blood be upon us and upon our
children.” (Mt 27:25) But when he wrote that, Matthew was a Jew, and most of
his audience was Jewish. His words might have been clearer if he had said,
“Look, friends, at what we did!” But in post-Jewish Christianity, words about
the Jews were read as a reference to them,
not to us – in fact, as a reference
to a despised bunch of them. Read out
of context, the words of the Gospels seem to justify hatred – and indeed they
were used to justify hatred and rejection, for centuries.
The
Second Vatican Council explicitly and forcefully rejected this excuse and any other
excuses for antisemitism. In “Nostra Aetate,” the pope and bishops together
declared that the sacred synod “remembers the bond that spiritually ties the
people of the New Covenant to Abraham's stock.” The document continues:
“The Church, therefore, cannot forget
that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with
whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she
forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive
tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles. …
“Since the spiritual patrimony common
to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and
recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all,
of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues. …
“Furthermore, in her rejection of
every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she
shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's
spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism,
directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”
The
Church doesn’t deny that we were involved in evil; but we have understood it,
and we have turned away from it. Aquinas, of course, wrote centuries before the
Second Vatican Council, during the time when antisemitism was deeply entrenched
in Christian life. But he was unquestionably loyal to the teaching of the
Church. It is unthinkable that he would have seen the teaching of the Second
Vatican Council and rejected it. It is twisted to enlist him as a proponent of
ideas that the Church has rejected.
It
is twisted to erect Aquinas as a voice of reason opposing the teaching of the
Second Vatican Council – regarding either prejudice against Jews or unjust
restrictions on immigration. Aquinas’ antisemitism was a real problem, but we
do not have to speculate about whether he – given the teaching of our day –
would have turned away from it. Of course he would have! And his views about
immigration are similarly problematic – but again we need not speculate about
what he would have done, given the teaching of our day. He was completely and
permanently committed to the Church.
Aquinas combines hospitality and
salvation
Aquinas made mistakes, but justice
demands that we remember his wisdom and insight. Look again at his commentary
on the Gospel of St. John.
Throughout
Scripture, hospitality and salvation are intertwined. Moses took two great
lessons from the Exodus: God saves us from slavery, and asks us to welcome
strangers. Moses had two sons, whom he named Eliezer and Gershom –
approximately, “God saves” and “welcome strangers.” In the Easter Triduum, we
recall and celebrate the Last Supper, God and man at table together, an act of
world-changing hospitality that was foreshadowed by Abraham’s hospitality at
Mamre; then we recall the sacrifice on Calvary that saves us. The prayer that
Jesus taught includes asking for our daily bread and for forgiveness –
hospitality and salvation. Christmas and Easter: this is hospitality and
salvation.
There’s
a fascinating insight into this intertwining of God’s works in Aquinas. In his
Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, in his third lecture on chapter 13,
Aquinas talks about washing feet. At the Last Supper, which parallels the First
Feast at Mamre, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, imitating Abraham’s
care of his visitors. Washing feet – or at least providing water to wash – is a
standard detail of Biblical hospitality. But Aquinas, examining the passage,
focuses on forgiveness instead.
Aquinas
says that the Lord’s actions at the Last Supper leave us with a serious
obligation to wash each other’s feet; in fact, he argues, it is a grave evil
not to do so (qui negligit praeceptum
peccat mortaliter). It’s best to do it physically, literally, he says – but
if we can’t do it physically, we can and must do it in our hearts. In his view,
this metaphorical wash means washing away sin – by forgiveness and prayer
(which anyone can do, and all must do), and by the sacrament of Reconciliation
(a priest’s role).
Aquinas
asserts that when the Lord washed the disciples’ feet, he was gesturing toward
all the works of mercy – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and welcoming
visitors.
Aquinas
sees the act of washing feet, at least metaphorically or spiritually, as a
grave obligation. And he sees this act of hospitality as an act of forgiveness.
St.
Thomas Aquinas has an understanding of this gesture of washing feet – at
minimum a detail of the annual celebration of Holy Week, but at maximum a way
to refer to all the works of mercy taken together – that intertwines
hospitality and salvation. Amidst the challenges of his wonderful Aristotle
project, he develops an approach that looks like the teaching of Moses: God
saves his people, and asks us to welcome each other, including strangers – especially strangers. Aquinas, like
Moses, conjoins salvation and hospitality.
+ + + +
+ + +
The
current volume, Knocking at Haven’s Door,
is written in the middle of a longer project, McGivney’s Guests. McGivney’s
Guests is a work in progress exploring immigration and the Knights of
Columbus (KOC). The KOC is a Catholic fraternal and service organization,
founded in 1882 in Connecticut by Fr. Michael J. McGivney, to serve the poor –
at that time, mostly immigrants.
The whole work (which this booklet supports) explores:
·
the
clear and forceful and abundant teaching about hospitality in the Old
Testament,
·
the
rich and powerful teaching about hospitality in the New Testament,
·
the
insights and the labor of monks and nuns for centuries, providing hospitality,
·
the
American experience,
·
the
extraordinary document “Strangers No Longer” written jointly by the American
and Mexican bishops in 2003,
·
the
experience of the Knights of Columbus throughout the past century, and
·
essays
on justice.
Knocking at Haven’s Door is a not a part of McGivney’s Guests. It is, rather, a
pause along the way, to review and re-orient. It’s a short summary of the work
to date, with a sketch of where the work is supposed to go.
It is my intention to support the work of the Catholic
Church, welcoming strangers. The basic idea hasn’t changed since the time of
Abraham and Moses, but some quite significant details of HOW we do this work
have changed. There is a great deal of confusion about the approach of the
Church during the past century, and I think I can dispel that confusion.
Specifically, many serious Catholics are concerned that the Church’s current
approach – working with others, including the United Nations, for example – to
defend and serve over 65 million people, some Catholic, most not – does not
seem to resemble the work of Jesus Christ, who cared for people one by one. I
think that this concern dissipates, or even disappears, as soon as you
understand that the Lord called Moses to one pattern of hospitality, the
Apostles to a second pattern, the Church for most of its history to a third
pattern, and people of good will today to a fourth pattern. The Old Testament
pattern was national; the New Testament pattern was largely personal; the
pattern of the Church for centuries was ecclesial; the pattern of our time is
global. These patterns overlap, and all are genuine and necessary responses to
the Lord’s command to welcome strangers.
During a time of confusion about hospitality, the USA is not
acting as a nation of immigrants, welcoming refugees. When that changes, this
nation will again work to incorporate millions of newcomers each year. That
will require organization coordinated nationally but carried out in small
communities – often, in churches. A national service project, helping
immigrants, organized in every parish: that may require a new structure, or
maybe a happy renewal of the Knights of Columbus. We’ll see.
This booklet, as well as the larger book McGivney’s Guests, grew out of conversations
among KOC members; it is written by and principally for members. However, it is
not an official publication of the Knights of Columbus.
+ + + +
+ + +
About the Author
John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe is best known for his work as an
activist, building the nonviolent branch of the pro-life movement. He has been called by “Father of the Rescue
movement” by Time, NY Times Magazine, Joan Andrews, Joe
Scheidler, and others. LA Times
writer Jim Risen’s history of the rescue movement, Wrath of Angels, also uses this title. Cavanaugh-O’Keefe notes that the title is
odd, because the real leaders of the rescue movement were mostly women,
including Jeanne Miller Gaetano, Dr. Lucy Hancock, Jo McGowan, Joan Andrews,
Juli Loesch Wiley, Kathie O’Keefe, ChristyAnne Collins, Monica Migliorino
Miller, and others. Nonetheless, his
writing – especially No Cheap Solutions
and Emmanuel, Solidarity: God’s Act, Our
Response – influenced activists in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, all over
Europe, Philippines, Korea, and Australia.
Cavanaugh-O’Keefe has been arrested 39 times for civil
disobedience. He was in the first group
that was jailed for pro-life nonviolent action (in Connecticut, 1978). He was among the three organizers of the “We
Will Stand Up” campaign, the most successful event of the rescue movement,
closing all the abortion clinics in eight of the nine cities that Pope John
Paul II visited in 1987. He initiated
the Tobit Project, taking bodies out of dumpsters in the Washington area and
providing respectful burials.
He has written extensively about eugenics and population
control; see especially The Roots of
Racism and Abortion. He participated
in efforts to resist the population reduction campaigns, particularly in South
Africa under the apartheid government, and in Bangladesh; see especially
“Deadly Neocolonialism.” He supported
the work of the Information Project for Africa, which brought feminists and
pro-lifers together to resist coercive depopulation measures at the UN
population conference in Cairo.
He has written about eugenics and human cloning. When President Clinton established his
National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), Cavanaugh-O’Keefe helped form a
grass-roots commission in response – the American Bioethics Advisory Commission
(ABAC), and served as the ABAC’s first executive director. The first policy question that the Clinton’s
NBAC addressed was human cloning, and their report has sections on eugenics and
dignity that were written in response to input from Cavanaugh-O’Keefe. When the NBAC completed published a report
supporting human cloning as long as the clone is destroyed in the embryonic or
fetal stage, the ABAC worked with the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops against this “clone-and-kill” proposal.
He has written about eugenics and immigration; see
especially The Sign of the Crossing
and Welcome Date TBD – and the work
in progress, McGivney’s Guests, which
this booklet supports.
Throughout his life, Cavanaugh-O’Keefe has worked to
cross-fertilize, and to maintain civil dialogue with opponents. He worked with Pro-lifers for Survival, as
editor of the group’s publication, P.S. This ambitious organization brought peace
activists and pro-life activists together; their challenging work was later
taken over by Cardinal Bernardin.
Cavanaugh-O’Keefe was proud to be invited to contribute to the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia; crossing
an ideological divide, he wrote their article explaining the pro-life
movement. He worked with a common ground
group in the Washington area, bringing pro-life and pro-choice activists
together – not to find compromises, but to encourage respect and understanding.
In 2012, Cavanaugh-O’Keefe began working to strengthen the
unity of the Catholic Church by encouraging pro-life and pro-family activists
to re-consider their positions on immigration, and encouraging pro-immigration
activists to reconsider their positions on life and marriage. See www.SignoftheCrossing.org.
He and his wife live in Maryland, where they raised six
children and now enjoy 14 (plus) grandchildren.
Other books by this
author
The Sign of the Crossing. This is a painstaking effort to sort
out the words for “stranger” in the Bible. Not much of a plot: lots of vocabulary
lists. But it does permanently destroy superficial anti-immigration arguments
from careless Scripture scholars who support the work of FAIR and CIS.
McGivney’s Guests. Not published yet (2018). This is a
work in progress, to facilitate a long discussion about immigration within a
Catholic fraternal and service organization. Two parts of a projected seven are
available; see below.
Strangers: 21 Claims in the Old
Testament (McGivney’s Guests, part 1). The teaching
in the Old Testament about hospitality is clear, abundant, forceful – but
unfamiliar to most Christians today.
The Persistent Other (McGivney’s
Guests, part 2). The teaching in the New Testament about hospitality is a
hidden treasure. It’s everywhere, and it’s beautiful. And once you see it, you
can’t un-see it.
The Roots of Racism and Abortion. This is an exploration of eugenics,
the ideology of arrogance that affects the both the right and the left.
Eugenics underlies the explosive growth of abortion, and also the persistence
of racist anti-immigration policies.
Emmanuel, Solidarity: God’s Act, Our
Response. This is
about pro-life nonviolence, which is not obviously relevant to hospitality in
Scripture and Tradition. However, the section on social sin is relevant and
useful.
All
these books are available through Amazon and Kindle.
Back cover
“… reasonable, nuanced, scholarly, factual, informed, and
wide-ranging”
Peter Kreeft
Rarely
has a book suddenly and decisively changed my mind on an important religious or
moral issue. This one did. I was uncertain and “on the fence” regarding
immigration, with almost equal sympathy for both “sides.” No Catholic faithful
to the Church and no Christian faithful to Bible can be “on the fence” any more
after reading this book. It is clear, compelling, and decisive. Yet it is
reasonable, nuanced, scholarly, factual, informed, and wide-ranging. It appeals
to principles and facts, not feelings, ideologies, or political partisanship.
It is equally far from the “Right” and the “Left,” from fundamentalistic
fanaticism and romantic naivete. For it is Catholic.
Peter
Kreeft
Professor
of Philosophy
Boston
College
