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Küng & Ratzinger vs Benedict XVI !

Mar 15th, 2011
by Paul Knitter.
8 comments

At the age of 82, my good friend Hans Küng is still at it.  He launched a new book on March 10 (the same day his former university colleague, Joseph Ratzinger — a.k.a. Benedict XVI — launched Part II of his book on Jesus).

The title of Küng’s book  in English, Can the Church Still Be Saved?, is essentially a call to the Roman Catholic laity to stand up,  to resist the refusal of Pope and bishops to allow any real change in the RC Church, and so save the Church.

The only hope for the Church, Küng maintains, lies in the courage and resistance of the laity.

Sounds radical?  Sure is.  But I heard basically the same message from Joseph Ratzinger when he was a promising young theologian serving as a “peritus” (an expert advisor to the bishops) during the Second Vatican Council.  At a press conference during the 1963 session (the exact year is fuzzy in my aging memory), he told us that throughout the history of the RC Church it has happened that the Bishops so lost touch with the message of Jesus that it became incumbent upon the laity to exercise their prophetic role given in Baptism and to stand up and refuse to obey!

That was Joseph Ratzinger in 1963….Quite different from Benedict XVI in 2011.

But the Ratzinger of 63 echoes what Küng said in the press conference for his new book. I quote from a report on the conference:

Speaking at the book launch in Tübingen, Germany, Wednesday, the 82-year-old said Jesus Christ would not like today’s Catholic Church.

‘If Jesus of Nazareth returned, he would not prohibit contraceptives, he would not shut out divorced people, and so on’, Kueng said.

He charged that the curia, or Vatican bureaucracy, had come up with a long series of rulings over the centuries that opposed the teachings laid down in the Christian New Testament.  He said Benedict XVI and his predecessor John Paul II had reinforced this.

In the book, he argues that resistance to church doctrines that are ‘obviously against the Gospels’ is a duty.

Küng said this included Catholic parishes insisting on keeping their priests after they marry, even if church law declares the man is no longer a priest.

He said the church could only saved by the faithful taking over responsibility for their church.

Küng’s words, and his example, urge me to take up this responsibility.

I sure hope a growing number of Catholic laywomen and men will feel the same. The well-being of our Church is at stake.

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Posted in: Benedict XVI, Catholic Church, Papacy.
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Guest Blogger: John Thatamanil on “Binocular Wisdom”

Mar 5th, 2011
by Paul Knitter.
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With this Guest Blog, I’m delighted to introduce the newest addition to the Union Theological Seminary faculty, a close friend,  and a fellow “comparative theologian” and “double-belonger.”  These are his reflections on “Learning from Multiple Religious Participation.”

I am a Christian theologian who loves Buddhism.

Unlike some who turn to Buddhism because of trauma from a toxic or inadequate version of Christianity, my love for Buddhism is not a product of alienation. My religious family of origin is not ideal — no family is — but my first Christian home, the Mar Thoma Church, and now the Episcopal Church, have done right by me. They both convey to me a progressive, justice-seeking, and reflective Christianity, one that never demands that I sacrifice intellect in order to embrace faith.

So why the fascination with Buddhism?

I am drawn to Buddhist traditions not to correct felt deficits in my own tradition, but to deepen my experience of the world by entering into another way of understanding and living. I seek a new kind of wisdom that our age requires.

In an older era, a person was accounted wise if he or she attained to a practical mastery of one tradition. Think St. Francis of Assisi. But our age requires also (not instead of) a new kind of wisdom: the capacity to see the world through more than one set of religious lenses and to integrate into one life, insofar as possible, what is disclosed through those lenses. Think Mahatma Gandhi. His theory and practice of nonviolent resistance integrated ideas and practices drawn from Jainism, Christianity (Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in particular), and, of course, Hinduism.

For lack of a better phrase, I call this binocular wisdom, an extension from binocular vision, vision generated by both eyes, the only kind that yields depth perspective.

We need the depth perspective of binocular wisdom for many reasons. First, increasingly many among us incorporate into our lives religious practices drawn from more than one tradition. Christians who do vipassana meditation or yoga are increasingly the norm. What is less common is reflection about the meaning of multiple religious participation. Few ask how, for example, the Buddhist wisdom that drives vipassana and Christian wisdom enacted in the Eucharist might be held together.

We also need this kind of wisdom because interfaith marriages are becoming routine. A great temptation here is to downplay religious matters for fear of conflict. Or, the most insistent parent is permitted to win: all right, the kids can go to church and not synagogue. But might this kind of double life be a source of promise and not a divisive problem? We need binocular wisdom to pull this off.

And, of course, we also need binocular wisdom to address the vast global crises of our time such as the growing gap worldwide between the rich and the poor and ecological problems that no tradition can navigate alone. Christian teaching about the natural world as God’s good creation when taken together with the Buddhist quest to end self-seeking desire promises more than either tradition can offer alone.

How might such wisdom and integration work?

Let’s begin with a small example: “Life hurts.” That is my working, albeit non-standard, translation of the Pali phrase sabbham dukkham, the First of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, which is customarily translated, “All is suffering.” The latter is the more accurate translation, literally speaking, although it suggests that neither pleasure, satisfaction, nor contentment is possible in life. That is a manifestly mistaken reading of Buddhist wisdom. One need only spend a few minutes around Tibetan Buddhist monks or enter a vast lecture hall in which the Dalai Lama is speaking to feel in one’s bones the profound joy that marks the lives of advanced practitioners.

So, what does the First Noble Truth show me as it is lived out in practice?

To say that life hurts is to name a truth that most of us spend every waking moment avoiding. Through mindfulness practice which, counter-intuitively, is the practice of leaning into life’s hurts rather than running away from them, I am coming to see daily just how much time I spend in futile attempts to evade regular visitations of pain. The memory of a lost love, the sudden intrusion into mind of some personal failing, the nagging anxiety of the undone task — mindfulness practice helps me to recognize and abandon my unrealistic quest either to avoid or to anesthetize myself from these jabs of hurt that visit me, often many times a minute.

By holding my aversion to pain in gentle, compassionate, and attentive regard — another way to understand mindfulness — I gain a measure of liberation (the standard translation of “nirvana”) from the conditioned, even addictive patterns that drive my behavior. Still more, the practice of compassionate regard is happily addictive, and it bleeds over into my disposition toward others. I am reminded that others too are making their way through twinges, jabs, and outright blows of suffering. The irritations, failings, and even the flat out nastiness of others are not about me but the disturbing fruit of unaddressed hurt.

What does this practice mean for my Christian life? As my own vipassana teacher, Gordon Peerman, an Episcopal priest who is also an advanced Buddhist practitioner, loves to say, “Buddhist practice enables me to operationalize the Christian calling to love my neighbor.” That sounds exactly right to me because it is confirmed in my experience.

I am no saint. But I am now somewhat less prone to irritation when my tween daughter insists on winning an argument. That is no advanced accomplishment on the road to mystic vision, but it is a lovely gift on the way toward a gentler life, a life that is all the more Christian for being Buddhist.

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Posted in: Buddhism, Dialogue, Interfaith Dialogue.
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Guest Writer Cathy Cornell: 48 Hours in Juarez

Feb 9th, 2011
by Preston Davis.
2 comments

Marriage is all about sharing…So I’d like to share my blog with my wife, Cathy Cornell, who recently returned from a trip to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.  These are her reflections.

Paul Knitter

Fourteen more people were killed in Ciudad Juarez during the first forty-eight hours of this week. This is not an unusual toll for Juarez…but one that is more deeply troubling and sad for me now that I have witnessed the life of the people there this past weekend. What follows is my journal recounting my recent forty-eight hours in Juarez.

Peter Hinde, Carmelite priest, and Betty Campbell, Mercy sister, both dear friends, were there to meet me at the downtown bus station in El Paso, Texas as I hopped off Bus #33 from the airport. We walked the few minutes to the border and over the bridge to Juarez. The first surprise was how different this border crossing is from the crossing in Nogales (across from where my mother lives in Tucson); in violence-torn Juarez there’s no swarm of vendors because there’s no stream of tourists.

In fact, at first, it looks like a ghost town. Empty, skeletal foundations mark the spot where a business area had been planned. Only a few years ago, the area was cluttered with shops, hotels, bars and prostitution. Today only empty, hollow streets.

The boarded up buildings along the dusty roads of the neighborhoods are the most obvious sign of trouble here – so many places closed up because owners couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the extortion fees (reported to be $100 a week). And the stories I heard – of the woman who was kidnapped in May and returned because her family was able to scrape together the $100,000 ransom; slowly she was healing from the horror of that experience…or Maricela who was murdered outside the government building in Chihuahua because she persistently demanded justice for the prior killing of her daughter … or the teenage boy from the neighborhood who went out to ride the dunes in his new car and never returned (his body was found days later).

And then we arrived at Peter and Betty’s home, Casa Tabor – a colorful and peaceful oasis in this desert, a community house of hospitality and peace. A place of beauty, of memory, of life, possibility and creativity. I walked with Betty to the nearby store and saw the neighborhood soccer court where the head of the soccer team was gunned down not long ago (there are no longer swimming pools or other recreation areas for young people and only one library). We entered a local store (open only because they do pay the extortion) and its warm welcoming environment with smiling neighbors and a shopkeeper who likes to joke around. This was my introduction to the paradox of Juarez.

I’ve come to Ciudad Juarez to join the fast to end the bloodshed; it was led by churches and human rights organizations as part of the bi-national rally for peace and justice on this troubled border. The crowd gathered at the Benito Juarez monument downtown – families and loved ones of so many murdered or disappeared, seminarians, priests, nuns and joined by journalists, photographers and people from other countries who desire peaceful change.

Banners hung on the fence surrounding the monument – the most prominent being “No More Bloodshed” and Ni Una Más” (not one more) protesting the savagery against women which has claimed the lives of 446 women from Chihuahua state last year. A multicolored homemade banner commemorate the life of their beloved “Tatic,” the recently deceased Bishop Samuel Ruíz García from Chiapas.

As the bell rang, those of us fasting donned little white masks covering our mouths to mark the beginning of our fast. Representatives from the organizing groups – numerous parishes, Paso del Norte Human Rights Center, Migrant Human Rights Center, Women Workers Pastoral Center of the diocese of Juarez passionately called for an end to the violence and madness. Local seminarians led us in prayers for peace and a clown lightened and activated our energies by engaging all of us (including the somber seminarians on stage) to wave our arms and jump up and down in unison. Our many grins and giggles helped us tolerate the sadness, grief and tension that held us all.

Then a caravan of vans and cars snaked through the city to the border fence at Anapra where we joined others on “el otro lado” (“the other side” as El Paso is called) for a bi-national rally for Peace and Justice Without Borders at noon. The US Border Police monitored the scene from the El Paso side while the Juarez side was completely without police protection. From the crowd in El Paso we heard strong statements critical of US immigration policy, of US drug consumption that fuels the violence in Juarez, of the lack of regulations to limit the thousands of guns bought in the US which are used to perpetrate the horror, and of US military and economic policies that undermine the possibility of a sustainable solution to this nightmare. Poems and songs, prayers and pleas, testimonies of family members who have lost loved ones to the violence…of kidnappings, shootings, and awful torture. More stories were told and many tears shed. The children mimicked the clown’s antics and then settled down in a circle while their minds, for a short precious time, were captivated with silliness and joy.

On the way home, a female lawyer spoke of her increasing hopelessness of finding a way out of this deadly morass where seven to ten people lose their lives each day…and we spoke of the need to keep going as well as to care for ourselves and each other. The inspiration of the day’s gathering was palpable, but the uncertainty of the future weighed heavily on those who are trying to build a culture of peace.

A short while later, with the sun going down, I walked with Peter and Betty down the uneven dusty road, past modest homes and unsteady shacks, past children playing in the yards, dogs barking, and grownups doing their daily errands. Life goes on in Juarez. Moments later we were at the church at the bottom of the valley. Betty and I took our seats and greeted many friends in the parish and Peter processed in with the other priests to begin the Mass in celebration of Pastor Arturo’s fourth anniversary in the priesthood. With standing room only, the people sang and prayed together with gusto. Yes, this is Juarez too. This is Juarez where we gather in an upstairs room decorated with brightly colored balloons and streamers, a room filled to capacity with tables and chairs and heavy plates of delicious rice, beans and meats for all. This is Juarez – ancianos, babies, toddlers and teens, all together, full of life, with such beauty and joy.

Before leaving Juarez, I wrote fifteen more names on the memorial mural of the dead of Juarez in the patio behind Casa Tabor. As I wrote, my sadness and horror at the tremendous loss and grief of the people broke through very forcefully. I walked the labyrinth that Peter created in the garden nearby as I prayed that all may be free from this suffering. I chatted with Betty’s chickens (Chula, Bonita and Hermosa) in their brightly colored coop as the sadness moved through me and the joy of being with good friends comforted me. This is Juarez, where people grieve amidst the suffering and death in their community and where people comfort one another and celebrate life. I’m reminded of the chant we said after a distraught and angry parent gave their testimony – No Estás Sola – You are not alone. We must find ways to respond to the people of Juarez – by visiting and supporting their brave workers for justice, by working in our country to end the insidious ways our country’s policies promote and sustain this violence (for more information, see http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/not-giving-our-city-fastingciudad- juarez/8457), and most of all, to remember our one-ness with our brothers and sisters in Juarez.

Juarez – You are not alone.

Cathy Cornell
New York, NY
February 4, 2011
cathy@cathycornell.com

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Badiou and Buddha

Feb 5th, 2011
by Paul Knitter.
7 comments

Alain Badiou has been described, maybe a bit extravagantly, as “perhaps the most influential of all contemporary French Philosophers.”

Well, listen to this eloquent description of Badiou’s understanding  “EVENT” by Terry Eagleton:

…the Event is that miraculous occurrence which surges up from an historical situation to which it simultaneously does not belong. Events for Badiou are … utterly original happenings founded purely in themselves, pure breaks and beginnings which are out of joint with their historical ‘site’, in excess of their contexts, sprung randomly and (as it were) ex nihilo from an established orthodoxy which could not have foreseen them. They are purely haphazard acts, as incalculable as grace…

Being in Badiou’s view is an inexhaustible multiple, which comes to us in recognizable chunks or distinct situations only through the operation of being ‘one-ed’ or provisionally unified by a human subject. Otherwise, it is as infinitely inaccessible to us as Kant’s noumenal sphere.  In the presence of an Event, however, it is as though the ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ which this counting-as-one conceals bursts momentarily out again, granting us a privileged glimpse of the disorderly infinity of pure Being. Events are explosive, ineffable exceptions to the rule, epiphanies of truth entirely without foundation.  (Trouble with Strangers:  A Study of Ethics, 260-61)

It seems to me that what the Buddha meant by Enlightenment, and what it is to live our Buddha-nature, or to live  a truly mindful life, is to realize that every single moment of our life is an Event –  that life is a constant succession of Events.  Every moment is a “privileged glimpse,” ” an ineffable epiphany of truth.”  — Or, to switch to my Christ-nature, as Thomas Merton put it: “It’s all grace.”

Can we really live a life in which Badiou’s notion of Events as “explosive” or “out of joint” or “haphazard”  are experienced as the normal, but wondrous, reality of our everyday lives?   Buddha and Jesus would seem to indicate that we can.

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Posted in: Buddhism.
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The Sitting Buddha and the Crucified Christ

Jan 21st, 2011
by Paul Knitter.
2 comments

One of the most difficult, and therefore one of the most promising, topics that came up in my recent  conversations with Korean Buddhists a couple of weeks ago was embodied in the central images of our traditions: the Buddha sitting in quiet contemplation under the Bodhi tree and the Christ agonizing on the cross.  There are real differences here.  These images point to DISTINCTIVE, or defining, truths that were discovered, or revealed, in the life and experience of Gautama and of Jesus.

One could say much about what we Christians — especially we Christian activists or liberationists — have to learn from the Buddhist insistence that unless we spend time, lots of time, sitting under a Bodhi tree and seeking enlightenment, we’re not going to be able to really change the world and its structures.  That message came through again and again in my dialogues in Korea.  And I know I have not yet fully understood what it is telling me.

But I’m not sure whether the Buddhists I spoke with really grasped what I think is one of the DISTINCTIVE ingredients in what Jesus discovered about the Mystery he called God/Father.  It’s contained in the cross.

I recently came across a powerful expression of this distinctive message of Christianity in a book by Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. (Wily-Blackwell, 2009):

If God is indeed in one sense utterly other, he is also made manifest [for Christians and for the world]  in the tortured body of a reviled political criminal … The ghastly good news of the gospel is that being done to death by the state for speaking up for love and justice is the status to which we must all aspire. The message of the New Testament is that if you don’t love you are dead, and if you do, they will kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and your opium of the people. It is a message scandalous alike to the civilized liberal, the militant humanist and the wide-eyed progressive.  (p. 256)

Eagleton’s statement is strong.  I would change his “the status to which we all must aspire” to “for which we all must be ready.”  Still, his (and my) understanding of the Gospel as not only calling us to have compassion and love our neighbor (that the Buddhists would readily agree with) but to also confront the systemic powers that be (the state or the economic system) and be ready to accept the uncomfortable or deadly consequences — this is a message that the Korean Buddhists I talked with found difficult to comprehend.

Which means that “the sitting Buddha” and “the crucified Christ” have a lot to learn from each other.

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Posted in: Buddhism, Christianity, Dialogue, Interfaith Dialogue, Liberation theology, Uncategorized.
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President Obama, I don’t want to denounce you!

Jan 19th, 2011
by Paul Knitter.
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One of the basic principles that I try to practice as a Buddhist-Christian is to oppose without denouncing.  As a Buddhist teacher once put it to a group of Christian liberation theologians, “We Buddhists don’t denounce.” This is one of the most difficult, but also one of the most important, things we Christians can learn from Buddhists: How to oppose without denouncing.  How to offer staunch opposition and resistance without denouncing and degrading the other side and so cutting off possibilities of further dialogue and cooperation.

Recent policies by President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats have made such opposing without denouncing very difficult.  Simply stated: it seems to me that so many of the policies that the President has been following, or allowing, are undermining the very structures of our democracy.  In a recent article in The Nation, William Grieder offers an analysis of what I, and so many other liberals (yes, I’m not afraid of that word), have been feeling.  So in this blog, I’m going to turn it over to Grieder:

Political events of the past two years have delivered a  profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled and captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of major media.

What the capitalist system wants is more — more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct unless goverment intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of goverment interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections. Many elected representatives are implicitly enlisted in the cause.

The administration of Barack Obama has been a crushing disappointment for those of us who hoped he would be different. It turns out that Obama is a more conventional and limited politician than advertised, more right-of-center than his soaring rhetoric suggested. Most Congressional Democrats, likewise, proved weak and incoherent, unreliable defenders of their supposed values or most loyal constituencies. They call it pragmatism. I call it surrender.

Such policies of surrender are preferring capitalism over democracy.  Capitalism is moral only when it is democratic.  If it’s not democratic, it must be opposed, and maybe  denounced.

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Posted in: Capitalism, Democracy, Liberation theology, Politics.
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A Buddhist Response to Christian Fanaticism (written on a return flight from Seoul, Korea to New York)

Jan 8th, 2011
by Paul Knitter.
18 comments

New Year Talk

For the past eight days, my wife Cathy and I have been rushing – or better, have been gently rushed – around the peninsula of South Korea as part of a project aimed at promoting a more fruitful dialogue between Buddhists and Christians.  The seed of this venture was planted, and then nurtured, by my Korean doctoral student, Mr. Kyongil Jung.  But because of unexpected political and religious developments, the seed produced a sprawling tree, rather than just a healthy bush.

The unexpected circumstances had to do with fundamentalist Korean Christians who over recent months have invaded Buddhist temples in Seoul and Daegu in an effort to exorcize the “demonic powers” there and proclaim the eventual triumph of Christianity.

So in the midst of this turmoil, a septuagenarian Christian scholar from New York arrives to talk about the value and need of Buddhist-Christian dialogue and to speak about his recent book Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. To talk about dialogue in the midst of such conflict had the semblance of urging relaxation in the midst of an earthquake. Still quaking, the Chogye Order of Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhists held to their invitation and asked this foreign Christian to come and talk.

Dialogue with Zen Master Jinjesunim

The media reacted with what seemed to me a journalistic feeding frenzy. With their cameras and recorders and interview-teams, they were swarming around almost constantly, eager to determine not only what I, the Christian theologian and foreigner, had to say, but also, and especially, what the Buddhist monks and laypersons were asking and how they were responding.

There were one-on-one dialogues with Seon Master Jinje-sunim,  the  most respected Buddhist teacher in Korea.  There were panel and community discussions with monks at the temples of Donghwa-sah (in Daegu), Haewoonjung-sah (in Pusan), and Gilsang-sah (Seoul) and many casual, but sometimes intense, conversations over meals.

The core of our conversations crystallized, I believe, in three different events.  On two different New Year’s celebrations (Jan 1 and 4), I was asked to follow the official Dharma talk of Jinje-sunim and address packed audiences of Buddhist lay people.  One of these talks took place at the very spot where Christians had invaded and desecrated.  So here was the Buddhist community responding to Christian hatred by inviting a Christian theologian and practitioner to speak to them – to enter into a dialogue with them!

And I was moved, almost to tears, when, after I assured them that many, many Christians disagreed with what these extremist Christians had done, and after I asked them to forgive and have compassion on these Christians – they responded with affirming bows and applause.

The other crystallized moment came when the abbot of Haewoonjung-sa asked Cathy to lead the monks and an assembly of about 50 laypeople, who were there for their 30 day winter retreat, in meditation!  They knew that she practices and teaches a form of Tibetan meditation that is quite different from their Zen practice. Still, they wanted to show their hospitality and their openness to learn.

With Executive Chief of the Korean Buddhist Chogye Order

The final event of our line up of dialogical encounters came on our last evening in Seoul, at the recently built and beautiful International Seon  Center.  There was a panel of four Buddhist and four Christian teachers/scholars who responded to my questions about with how to deal with Christian fanaticism and, more importantly, how to promote greater interreligious dialogue and conversation.  It was a fervent, forthright, and sometimes tense conversation. But there was agreement on the basics: the need for broader education and understanding of one’s religious neighbors, and the urgency and opportunity to bring Buddhists and Christians together to address these conflicts and to show that religion can be a greater source of peace than of violence.

The conversation at the Seon Center went on for almost three hours, with some 300 people in the audience, all of us sitting cross legged! (I managed the sitting part, but then could not get up afterwards!).

As I realized over the course of these few but intense days, the Korean Buddhists of the Chogye Order had invited me not only to learn more about Christianity but also to ask that I help make their teachings better known in the United States.  Having witnessed the seriousness of their practice, having been moved by the openness and compassion with which they reacted to the hatred of some of their fellow Christian citizens – I am extremely happy to do so.

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Posted in: Buddhism, Christianity, Interfaith Dialogue.
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We Need Some “Cold-Blooded Kindliness”

Dec 10th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
2 comments

In these times of the clatter and clash of opposing views – on the international, national, and local levels – there is an ever greater need for what William James might have called “a cold-blooded kindliness.”

Yes, we have to speak our mind clearly, represent our ideas forcefully, and, depending on our socio-political location, speak truth to power.  All of this will, inevitably, bring about the clashing of ideas and convictions and values.

But if that clash is going to have any hopes of producing conversation which is the precondition for collaboration, then the clashing of our ideas and of our dealings with each other will have to be shot through with a cold-blooded kindliness.

In the very process of confronting those with whom we disagree we have to make the effort to connect with them.  And connection will be possible only if it issues forth from a genuine caring for the person we are confronting.  Another word for “caring” is, for Buddhists, “compassion,” for Christians, “love.”

If the people we are confronting don’t feel that we care about them just as much as we disagree with them, they will never be able to really listen to us.  Psychologically – I would even dare say ontologically – if I feel a person doesn’t like me,  my heart, and therefore my ears, can’t really hear what they are confronting me with.

Unless a cold-blooded kindliness is mixed with the heat of our confrontational conversations, the conversations will go nowhere.

Maybe that’s part of the reason why, especially at this moment, whether in Washington DC or in our local communities, our conversations seem to be stuck.   We can’t hear each other.

Maybe some healthy doses of cold-blooded kindliness will open our hearts and unplug our ears.

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Would Archbishop Dolan get a “CR” or “CD” at Union?

Nov 26th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
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That’s the question I couldn’t help asking myself when I read in today’s (Nov. 26)  NEW YORK TIMES the Letter to the Editor of my good friend, Dan Maguire, who teaches theology at Marquette University.  He makes some pretty sharp, but I think pretty accurate, observations about the bishops of the American Catholic Church.   The second sentence in the last paragraph is particularly sobering — and frightening.

It is unfortunate that Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York has come across in an authoritarian tone at a time when acceptance of church authority is a critical problem.

He posits the teaching authority of the bishops as a power unto itself without need of advice or instruction. The bishops whose teaching authority he affirms are mostly former administrators without advanced degrees in theology, the subject they are to teach.

As a theologian, I submit that fewer than 10 percent could pass an exam in graduate-level theology. One cannot imagine another area, like medicine, in which the teachers did not have an advanced degree in the subject. More modesty in Archbishop Dolan would be admirable, as he proposes to be a leader in the culture wars.

(For those of you unacquainted with Union’s grading scales:  CD or “Credit with Distinction” is equivalent to an “A.”  A CR, or Credit, is A- and below.)

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The Catholic Church Burns While the Bishops Fiddle

Oct 23rd, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
5 comments

Two items crossed my desk and mind yesterday. Together, they evoked Nero and his fiddle.

The first was an excellent article by my fellow parishioner at Ascension Parish on 107th Street, Peter Steinfels.   It’s titled “Further Adrift,” playing on the title of his 2004 book, A People Adrift, and showing that in the light of the Pew Forum’s recent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the Catholic Church is suffering even greater losses, in numbers and in spirit.

Two paragraphs in Peter’s reflections captured the sad reality of my church:

One out of every three Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. That dwarfs the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. Thomas Reese, SJ, recently described that loss as “a disaster.” He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”

I wonder too. As far as I know, there has never been any systematic discussion of these findings at the meetings of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. They will meet again in mid-November, with an agenda that will deal with many things—but not with these devastating losses.

Item #2: My son John sent me a pamphlet that had been distributed in his Chicago parish on Understanding the Revised Mass Texts. In it, the bishops, following orders from the Vatican, labor to explain the importance of such liturgical changes as:

  • “greatly sinned” instead of “sinned through my own fault.”
  • “and with thy spirit” instead of “and also with you”
  • “Lord God of hosts” instead of “God of power and might.”
  • (here’s the kicker!) “not worthy that you should come under my roof” instead of “worthy to receive you.”

Where are these men, these pastors!  They fiddle with language while their – OUR! – church burns.

In his article, Steinfels expresses not just the anger, but the deep, deep grief that so many Catholics are feeling.

Whether it’s “greatly sinned” or “sinned through my own fault” something is profoundly amiss in the Catholic Church.

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Posted in: Catholic Church.
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