I have not been as active in publishing this blog as I had hoped, since entering “senior priest” status about a year ago. I was planning on at least two or more blogs a month, a longer article every month or two, and a few video clips on more timely matters. It was always a bit too ambitious of an agenda, but the website took an even farther backseat for the last few months, when I was asked to administrate five parishes on the Lower East Side of Detroit, whose pastors had died and a more permanent pastoral arrangement had to wait till this summer. That is now completed, so I am now able once again to go into “retirement” mode, and I hope to have some extra time for speaking and writing and giving some attention to this website.
At the same time, I also want to express a deep gratitude to the people of those five parishes: St. Augustine-St. Monica, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Elizabeth, Nativity of our Lord, and Sacred Heart. My faith, my view of parish life and community, my thinking about Church will never be the same, because of my time with these communities. Their faith, perseverance, and witness have given me a renewed appreciation for how important these local expressions of Catholic community and life are for us as a whole Church. Much of what I learned from them will be expressed in the next blog—an open letter on planning for the future in the Archdiocese of Detroit, which I am publishing on the website at the same time as this blogpost.
But in the months to come I also want to write more about various social issues from a Catholic perspective. I will be doing a parish talk on Catholic Social Teaching in a couple of weeks and then a webinar on Catholic Social Teaching as it pertains to voting in the upcoming election (see my “Upcoming Calendar” for specific dates). Preparing for these has opened up any number of ideas, which I would like to share. My hope is to do more writing in these blogs on current moral issues as I move forward, and show that, if we root such issues in our Catholic Social Teaching tradition, we are given the best framework for developing our personal and communal consciences and a direction for morally right and good responses.
We are in a world where “truth” has become whatever the loudest or most powerful say it is, or simply what “I” say it is. The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche from the 19th century truly was prescient in his understanding of power. In a world where “God is dead” and humanity has become the “super-human,” morality is no longer rooted in objective norms and the quest for objective truth. Instead, it is rooted in who has the power and control. We have an ex-president (and a sizable number of followers) who sees no irony in creating a social platform where short responses are called “truths,” even though they are laden with verifiably false claims and rather extreme opinions. We have people who rejoice when they find themselves or their partners pregnant with new life, when they are trying to have a child, but reject any politician who advocates for the protection of that unborn life. We have a country whose economy is unable to function without the millions of undocumented immigrants taking on jobs non-immigrants do not want, but then we turn around and are not willing to find a way to integrate them legally into our society. We have a world that has dangerously allowed itself nostalgia for the “strongman” authoritarian, even dictatorial, leader, and groups even within our own country who are trying to make that happen here. We have people whose scientific and historical ignorance is so complete, who still actually think that the world should be controlled by certain races (white?) and sexes (male?) and socio-economic strata (top 0.1%?). We have people who advocate for children to decide that it is acceptable to permanently alter their gender, even trying to exclude parental involvement, and a reverse backlash that is trying to criminalize doctors and professionals who are genuinely trying to help vulnerable people. We have groups and nations that treat human life as so much fodder, in their quest to gain some ideological or political agenda. And, of course, I could go on.
Why bring all these things up? I do so to suggest that the third part of the triad “Church-World-Kingdom,” which inspires this website, is vitally important in today’s Church and World. The “kingdom” or “reign” of God is a reminder to us that we are not there yet; that the journey continues; that there are better and worse ways to move forward. In short, that Truth (and Beauty and Goodness and all the transcendentals) is always rooted, objectively, in an Other, Who is beyond us, but Who wills us and this universe of ours into being every moment, Who in Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus’ life-death-resurrection has revealed a pattern for moving this world toward a greater alignment with God’s kingdom. Along the path of the Kingdom/Reign of God, there is an ability to embody, objectively, truth in better and worse ways. When we keep the Kingdom in tension with Church and World, we are less prone to a self-centered arrogance, which expresses itself in ultra-partisanship, be it national, ethnic, socio-economic, lingual, or even religious. Keeping God’s reign as the ultimate, if we are fortunate enough to be born into families and situations that surround us with care and sufficient resources, we recognize that this makes us responsible for finding ways for all people to be so fortunate (and accepting the consequences of such responsibility such as higher taxes to fund levels of basic care for those who are poor, some type of affirmative action to open up avenues for those who have been historically excluded, and so on). In the end, the kingdom/reign of God cornerstone is not about dreaming of an ideal world and leaving it at that. Rather, it is about recognizing what type of world God desires for all—and putting effort, money, time, and other resources here and now to make that vision more concretely real, not simply out of charity or kindness but as a matter of justice.
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