Yesterday, Pope Francis addressed a gathering of new ambassadors with his first major analysis on the causes of the global financial crisis.
I appreciate how he makes the connection between ethics and God. In our post-Enlightenment world, we are strong on human ethics as separated from religion. But against cancerous market capitalism, ethics separated from human solidarity and God are not powerful enough. Ethics then simply becomes a new thing to be manipulated in the market place.
“…Our human family is presently experiencing something of a turning point in its own history, if we consider the advances made in various areas. We can only praise the positive achievements which contribute to the authentic welfare of mankind, in fields such as those of health, education and communications. At the same time, we must also acknowledge that the majority of the men and women of our time continue to live daily in situations of insecurity, with dire consequences. Certain pathologies are increasing, with their psychological consequences; fear and desperation grip the hearts of many people, even in the so-called rich countries; the joy of life is diminishing; indecency and violence are on the rise; poverty is becoming more and more evident. People have to struggle to live and, frequently, to live in an undignified way. One cause of this situation, in my opinion, is in the our relationship with money, and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society. Consequently the financial crisis which we are experiencing makes us forget that its ultimate origin is to be found in a profound human crisis. In the denial of the primacy of human beings! We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old (cf. Ex 32:15-34) has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.
by Barry MoserAs an act of Christian witness Martha Mullen arranged for the burial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Her story calls to mind the story of Rizpah in 2 Samuel. Rizpah kept vigil for months over the exposed bodies of her two sons whom King David, for political reasons, had handed over to be killed.
“She allowed no bird to set upon them by day nor any wild beast by night” (21:10). Eventually, Rizpah’s campaign forced David to give her sons, and the others killed with them, a proper burial.
One of the corporal works of mercy taught by the Catholic church is to bury the dead. No matter who they are. I’m grateful for Methodist Martha Mullen’s extraordinary witness.
Here’s an excerpt from the Boston Globe interview with Mullen:
… ‘‘I can’t pretend it’s not difficult to be reviled and maligned,’’ Martha Mullen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday. ‘‘But any time you can reach across the divide and work with people that are not like you, that’s what God calls us to do.’’
Tsarnaev, 26, was quietly buried Thursday at a small Islamic cemetery in rural Caroline County. His body had remained at a Worcester, Mass., funeral parlor since he was killed April 19 in a gunfight with police, days after the bombings that killed three and injured more than 260 in downtown Boston.
Cemeteries in Massachusetts and several other states refused to accept the remains. With costs to protect the funeral home mounting, Worcester police appealed for help finding a place to bury Tsarnaev.
Mullen said she was at a Starbucks when she heard a radio news report about the difficulty finding a burial spot for Tsarnaev.
‘‘My first thought was Jesus said love your enemies,’’ she said.
Then she had an epiphany.
‘‘I thought someone ought to do something about this — and I am someone,’’ Mullen said.
So Mullen, a mental health counselor in private practice and a graduate of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, sent emails to various faith organizations to see what could be done. She heard back from Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which arranged for a funeral plot at the Al-Barzakh cemetery. ‘‘It was an interfaith effort,’’ she said.
Mullen, a member of the United Methodist Church, said she was motivated by her own faith and that she had the full support of her pastor.
‘‘Nobody is without sin,’’ she said. ‘‘Certainly this was a horrific act, but he’s dead and what happened is between him and God. We just need to bury his body and move forward. People were making an issue and detracting from the healing that needed to take place.’’ …
“A Hassidic teaching: ‘What is the world? The world is God, wrapped in robes of God so as to seem material. And what are we? We are God, wrapped in robes of God, and our task, our mission is to unwrap the robes – disrobe! – and dis-cover that we and all the world are God.’
Suppose we enrich that way of understanding God with a further teaching: That we hear the God Whose name is YHWH, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, the Name that only can only be “pronounced” by breathing, as the still small “voice” of Breath that intertwines all life on Earth.
The Breath that we breathe in is what the trees breathe out; the Breath the trees breathe in is what we breathe out. God is our Interbreathing. YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh. Pronounce it: Breathe.
That Breath is also the Air, the “Atmosphere” of Earth. The balance of oxygen that the trees breathe out with the carbon dioxide we breathe out is what makes up the balance of geological history.
Now, we humans have invented ways of pouring far more CO2 into the air than the trees can absorb. With 400 parts per million of CO2 in our air, scorching earth, the “interbreath” is in crisis. What we call the “climate crisis” is a crisis in the very Name of God!
Pope Francis has vowed to take on the “third rails” of Vatican power: the Roman Curia and the Vatican Bank.
From news this week, he’s moving forward on cleaning house in the Vatican Bank! All of this is in line with the document released by the Pontifical Justice and Peace Council a few years ago on reforming global finance, a document that was sort of buried until Pope Francis started acting out of it. Here’s an excerpt from the Vatican Information Service release:
“The Holy See Press Office issued a press release on May 8 with the information that the Financial Intelligence Authority of the Holy See and Vatican City State (“Autorita di Informazione Finanziaria”, AIF), signed a Memorandum of Understanding that day, 7 May, in Washington, D.C., USA. The memorandum’s cosignatory was the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), its United States counterpart at the US Department of Treasury. The purpose of the collaboration is to strengthen efforts to fight money laundering and the global financing of terrorism.
The Memorandum, signed by Rene Brulhart, director of AIF, and Jennifer Shasky Calvery, director of FinCEN, will foster bi-lateral cooperation in the exchange of financial information. “This is a clear indication that the Holy See and the Vatican City State take international responsibilities to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism very seriously, and that we are cooperating at the highest levels”, said Brulhart. “The Vatican has shown that it is a credible partner internationally and has made a clear commitment in the exchange of information in this fight.”
Read more.
Read more on the the Justice and Peace document for reforming global finance.
“There are two major obstacles to a development of a spirituality of peace. The fear of silence and solitude looms like cliffs in the human psyche. Noise protects us from confronting ourselves, but silence speaks the language of the heart. Silence and solitude are what really bring us into contact both with ourselves and with others. Deep down inside of us reside, in microcosm, all the human hopes and fears, the struggles to control them, the hope to set them free, the peace that comes when we have confronted both the best and the worst in ourselves and found them both acceptable.
Silence requires a respect for solitude, however, and solitude is even more frightening than quiet. One of life’s greatest lessons is that solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Loneliness is that sign that something is lacking. The purpose of solitude, on the other hand, is to bring us home to the center of ourselves with such serenity that we could lose everything and, in the end, lose nothing of the fullness of life at all.
Silence does more than confront us with ourselves. Silence makes us wise. Face-to-face with ourselves we come very quickly, if we listen to the undercurrents that are in contention within us, to respect the struggles of others. Silence teaches us how much we have yet to learn. Or, as we get older, silence perhaps reminds us too that there are qualities that we may never with confidence attain and that will war in our souls till the day we die. Then face-to-face with our struggles and our inadequacies, there is no room in us for mean judgments and narrow evaluations of others. Suddenly, out of silence, comes the honesty that tempers arrogance and makes us kind.”–Joan Chittister, OSB
In Rome on May 4, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Sr. Florence Deacon, addressed 800 leaders of women religious throughout the world.
“Serious misunderstandings” exist between Vatican officials and Catholic sisters, said the head of the U.S. sisters’ group that was ordered to place itself under the review of bishops.
Deacon’s 20-minute address was LCWR’s most public statement to date of their relations with the Vatican. Women religious around the world are watching closely how the process between the Vatican and LCWR moves forward.
“It’s had a huge impact in Australia,” Mercy Sr. Catherine Ryan from Australia told the National Catholic Reporter. “We watch it very carefully because the LCWR … has huge significance for our lives,” said Ryan. “I don’t see that the religious women in Australia are any different than the religious women in America.”
Here’s an excerpt from Sr. Deacon’s address:
“What this assessment shows is that there is serious misunderstanding between officials of the Vatican and women religious, and the need for prayer, discernment, and deep listening.
We determined that we would do this negotiation outside of the glare of the media and we turned down thousands of requests. We could have been on every news program on every major channel in every part of the world if we would have said yes. (more…)
Last week, former president Jimmy Carter gave an important speech at a little liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. He urged America to become a “champion for peace.”
(The 7-minute video above is a segment of a much longer video of the speech and the question and answer period that followed, which included a candid discussion about North Korea.)
Carter, the 39th President of the United States, delivered Lafayette College’s inaugural Robert and Margaret Pastor Lecture in International Affairs on April 22 in Easton, PA. (Bob Pastor was national security advisor on Latin America and the Caribbean under Carter.)
President Carter clearly identified that the U.S. has been in a constant state of war since the end of World War II. He named off the dozens of countries the U.S. has been formally at war with and the many that the U.S. has waged illegitimate war on.
He recalled the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the U.S. helped create in 1948 (thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt) and that the U.S. is currently in violation of 10 of the 30 principles — specifically noting illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay prison and using drones to commit targeted assassinations.
He also addressed climate change and the international environmental treaties that have fallen into disrepair, since President Bush Senior.
(Thank you to Don Mosley of Jubilee Partner and Shelley Douglass of Mary’s House for the tip on Carter’s address.)
“For the kingdom to come in this world, disciples must have the competence to see and the courage to act, which is a call to do as Jesus did, working for justice through loving service to the poor.”–Brothers of the Holy Cross
Friend Steve Clemens joined with 35 other yesterday in Winona, Minn., to nonviolently block 18-wheeler semis delivering silica “frac sand” to barges on the Mississippi River. (The sand is mined in Minnesota and then shipped to natural gas fracking operations in Texas and other locations.)
They were arrested on trespass charges in what may have been the largest protest to date against “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing is a nontraditional extractive process to release methane pockets in shale).
Read Steve’s whole story at his blog Mennonista, but here’s an excerpt of a letter of support that the group received from farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry:
“You have offered me the privilege of joining by letter with you and your friends in Winona in opposition to “frac sand mining,” and I am happy to accept.
I will say, first, that there is never, for any reason, a justification for doing long-term or permanent damage to the ecosphere. We did not create the world, we do not own it, and we have no right to destroy any part of it.
Second, most of our politicians and their corporate employers are measuring their work by standards of profitability and mechanical efficiency. Those standards are wrong. There is one standard that is right: the health of living creatures and the living earth.
Third, we must give our needs to eat, drink, and breathe an absolute precedence over our need for mined fuels.
I wish you well.”–Wendell Berry, personal correspondence
This is an example of the amazing work that Sojourners interns do. I’m so awed by and proud of them.
As a staff we worked on building the crosses to represent the gun deaths in the U.S. SINCE the Newtown massacre. (Although, I kept reminding them that there was a time Christians got their crosses handed to them rather than having to make their own.)
Web intern Brandon Hook is brilliant with the video camera and put together this moving 2 minute clip.
Sign the letter to Congress, standing with Newtown clergy, to demand effective gun laws.
Yesterday, Pope Francis addressed a gathering of new ambassadors with his first major analysis on the causes of the global financial crisis.
Pope Francis has vowed to take on the “third rails” of Vatican power: the Roman Curia and the Vatican Bank.
In Rome on May 4, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Sr. Florence Deacon, addressed 800 leaders of women religious throughout the world.
“For the kingdom to come in this world, disciples must have the competence to see and the courage to act, which is a call to do as Jesus did, working for justice through loving service to the poor.”–Brothers of the Holy Cross
Friend Steve Clemens joined with 35 other yesterday in Winona, Minn., to nonviolently block 18-wheeler semis delivering silica “frac sand” to barges on the Mississippi River. (The sand is mined in Minnesota and then shipped to natural gas fracking operations in Texas and other locations.)
Rose Marie Berger 