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Religion isn’t just talking the talk, it’s walking the walk. If you get talking (conversation) too far away from walking (doing good in the world) then you will get approximately what we have now around the globe and in our own backyards—turf wars over abstract “truth” that are getting very dangerous. Abstract principles unconnected to ethics historicallly have gotten a lot of people killed.
My faith instructs me, in the words of Jesus, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:30-31) These together are called the Great Commandment. Jesus didn’t make any exceptions about who is my neighbor, and neither do I.
The timing of the re-introduction of the Latin Mass at this time is very instructive, especially in regard to the U.S. Catholic Church. At a time when the Catholic Church in the U.S. needs to be working on becoming more open and more accountable to its laity to prevent more child sexual abuse, the re-introduction of the Latin Mass signals that the Catholic Church as a whole is moving in a reactionary direction, becoming more closed rather than more open.
The Hippocratic Oath, still taken by young doctors-in-training, requires them to pledge that they will practice their craft “only for the good of my patients.” Recently, physicians and pharmacists have started to claim a “right of conscience” in regard to informing patients about medical practices or dispensing medicine prescribed by others about which they claim to have a moral objection. These physicians and pharmacists are putting their own private conscience ahead of the “good” of their patients and, in the case of the pharmacists, ahead of the care prescribed by licensed physicians for the well-being of the patient. As with so much else in health care today, the “good of my patient” is now becoming the last consideration of some health care providers, not the first and foremost as Hippocrates taught.
When your child is sick, you don’t really sleep. You listen even as you doze. "Was that a cough? I’ll just check on her again." You lay down on the floor next to his bed. I remember the night when we thought one of our children had spinal meningitis: the high fever, the stiff neck, the frantic rush to the emergency room. Don’t lecture any parent about responsibility for their children when they are sick. Parents worry all the time about their children’s health. They have to in this American society, because apparently nobody else is worrying.
It is a sick society that would cause a frantic parent to pause in that rush to try to get medical help for their child and have to think about whether they will have to choose between paying the mortgage or paying for the hospital visit. Half of all bankruptcies are caused by catastrophic illness in an uninsured or underinsured family. Wouldn’t you sell everything you own if your child had cancer to buy the best treatment, just to see your baby live and grow? What kind of a society makes you face that choice?
“Accomplices? Addresses? Meeting places? You hardly hear it. All your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body…” Thus Jean Amery, a Belgian resistance fighter, described his torture at the hands of the Gestapo. He went on to write, “The one who is tortured is altered in this fundamental state of being human forever. Whoever was tortured stays tortured.” Amery eventually committed suicide.
Torture is a consummate moral wrong because it destroys all who participate in it. Torture degrades the human dignity of the tortured, the torturer and the society that authorizes torture.
The reason torture is morally wrong is because it destroys the human soul. The soul is the human capacity to have a truthful relationship with yourself, with others and with God. In a theological sense, it is the source of “human dignity.”
Many people think that forgiveness is about the person or people who have done a great wrong. Can THEY be forgiven? But the great secret of forgiveness is that it is about the person or people who have been wronged. Forgiveness is the path to freedom from being dominated by the harm that has been done to you or to those you love.
When you have been grievously harmed, those who hurt you in the past can continue to have control over you. They can dominate your thoughts, your fears, your whole life. Forgiveness is about letting go of the control they have over you. Forgiveness is letting it go.
This is the important lesson that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission taught the world. The victims of the horrendous system of apartheid decided not to let it control their future as it had controlled them in the past. They put it down. They demanded the truth be told and thus illustrated the biblical injunction that “you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) The truth allows you to let go of the harm and in letting it go became free from its total grasp. This work is never fully done and it is a process rather than a once-for-all kind of total release, but it is very real.
It’s not enough to be a “well-intentioned religious believer”. The intentions of religious believers unconnected to justice, to mercy and most of all, to truth, often do a tremendous amount of harm.
We buried a wonderful seminary graduate today, World AIDS Day. Rev. Anthony Hollins was an HIV-positive, African American gay man, a pastor, a dancer and an AIDS activist.
When the doctors told Anthony that he was HIV positive more than a decade ago, he refused to let disease and self-pity rule his life. He decided to dedicate his life to the divine calling of telling the truth about AIDS and the truth about God’s love for him and for all people, gay or straight, black, brown, or white, male or female. He helped people, especially in the African American community, tell the truth about their sexual orientation and live openly and truthfully. His intention was justice for those who are HIV positive and mercy for those whom some of the “well-intentioned” religious moralists despise and ignore.
The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?
A papal apology to those sexually abused by Catholic priests is certainly long overdue and it is good that Pope Benedict met with some of the victims of sexual abuse by priests on his U.S. trip.
But as Mother Jones was fond of saying, “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.” We need to know from Pope Benedict how future abuse will be stopped.
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