+ + + Sign of the Crossing + + +

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

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

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

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

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