Nostra Aetate and the Church’s Relationship With Muslims and Jews

When I heard about the Boston Marathon bombings I was shocked and saddened at the suffering of the victims of the bombing. Americans came together to help the victims of the bombings get medical attention, shelter, food and monetary donations. One of the sad things, though, is the use of this event by a small group of people to blame all Muslims for the actions of two extremists. On April 15, 2013, Max Fisher wrote about the the Muslim world condemning the Boston Marathon bombings and the sense of dread that they held about the potential Islamophobic response as a result of the bombing. One has to be reminded of the decades of work of Christians, Jews and Muslims to reach out to each other and overcome a history of hostility to try to gain a new understanding and gain a greater respect for each other. One of the seminal events in the history of interfaith relationship between Christians, Jews and Muslims was the release of the document Nostra Aetate in 1965.

Nostra Aetate was one of the seminal documents that came out of the Vatican II Council that changed the relationship between the Catholic Church and other religions. This document was the result of several decades of work of Catholic reformers. John Connelly, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the book From Enemy to Brother: the Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 talked about how Catholic converts from Judaism in Switzerland and Austria had tried to form Catholic arguments against antisemitism during the Nazi era. One of the most important Catholic reformers was Johannes Oesterreicher, who spoke out against the Nazis and worked to change antisemitic teachings within the Church. Connelly wrote an article for the Jewish Daily Forward website talked about the fruits of these Catholic reformers efforts in the 1965 document Nostra Aetate:

Part four of this declaration, a statement on the Jews, proved most controversial, several times almost failing because of the opposition of conservative bishops.
Nostra Aetate confirmed that Christ, his mother and the apostles were Jews, and that the church had its origin in the Old Testament. It denied that the Jews may be held collectively responsible for Jesus Christ’s death, and decried all forms of hatred, including anti-Semitism. Citing the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, Nostra Aetate called the Jews “most beloved” by God. These words seem commonsensical today, but they staged a revolution in Catholic teaching.

Despite opposition from within their ranks, the bishops knew that they could not be silent on the Jews. When the document stalled in May 1965, one of them explained why they must push on: “The historical context: 6 million Jewish dead. If the council, taking place 20 years after these facts, remains silent about them, then it would inevitably evoke the reaction expressed by Hochhuth in ‘The Deputy.’” This bishop was referring to German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s depiction of a silent and uncaring Pius XII in the face of the Holocaust. That was no longer the church these bishops wished to live in.

As well as change the Church’s relationship with Jews, Nostra Aetate also changed the Catholic Church’s relationship with Muslims. Since the Crusades, the Catholic Church had several hostile encounters with believers of Islam and held hostile teachings towards Islam that were similar to its teachings towards Judaism. The Catholic reformers wanted a Church that would reach out and have friendlier and more respectful relationships with Islam. In Nostra Aetate is a section on the Church’s relationship with Islam:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

As the sacred synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock.

Since Nostra Aetate, Catholics have worked in interfaith meetings with Jews and Muslims to work for peace and social justice issues. Pope John Paul II, who lost several Jewish friends to the Holocaust, was especially important in improving the Church’s relationship with Muslims and Jews. In the year 2000, John Paul II extended an apology by the Catholic Church for its sins of violence and intolerance against Jews and Muslims, especially for the Church’s actions during the Inquisition and the Crusades.

The new Pope Francis is looked upon with optimism from the Muslim and Jewish community to continue the legacy of Nostra Aetate. Almudena Calatrava and Damian Pachter wrote an article for the March 18, 2013 Associated Press about Pope Francis’s interfaith work:

Bergoglio brought leaders of the Jewish, Muslim, evangelical and Orthodox Christian faiths into the Metropolitan Cathedral to pray for peace in the Middle East last November. “Everything is lost with war, everything is gained through peace,” Bergoglio said then. “With peace wins victory and respect.”

The archbishop also welcomed Jews for a joint service on the 74th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when nearly 200 synagogues were destroyed, Jewish shops were looted and tens of thousands of Jews were sent to be exterminated in Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

And he also sponsored interfaith prayers after Pope Benedict XVI offended Muslims in 2006 by quoting a Byzantine emperor as saying some of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings were “evil and inhuman.”

That time, rather than criticize Benedict directly, Bergoglio let a lower-ranking priest lead a service in which he himself did not participate. But leaders of other religions were impressed nonetheless.

This dialogue between religions “isn’t just a photo op,” Omar Abboud of the Islamic Center of the Argentine Republic said then. “It’s a genuine and well-reasoned commitment under construction, because we know that we cannot get by without this dialogue.”

Maha Elgenaidi of the Islamic Networks Group wrote an article for the Huffington Post about her optimism of Pope Francis:

What was heartening to learn recently that I didn’t know then, was the respectful rebuttal to Pope Benedict XVI’s comment of an Argentine Cardinal not well known outside the region. He shared, “Pope Benedict’s statement don’t reflect my own opinions. These statements will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last twenty years.” While mild in tone, they represent a rare and bold stand for pluralism.

Perspectives of the new pope provide a fertile new context for increasing our efforts with the Catholic community. In the past when we’ve called on regional bishops to endorse our statements condemning Islamophobia such as the one relating to attacks against Park51 the bishops have, but not without going through a third party to reach the bishops. However, in response to our outreach efforts more recently, ING hosted Bishop Patrick Joseph McGrath of the San Jose Diocese in a meeting with Muslim leaders in 2012 where we committed to working together. One of the outcomes of that meeting is an effort that is underway to collaborate with the Catholic and Jewish communities on five interfaith service days where we meet to volunteer for a local service organization, break bread, and have a conversation around a shared value. Through these we hope to build relations with the Catholic communities from the ground up. We thank Pope Francis for being a crucial part of that.

Here is a youtube video of the response of Muslim and Jewish groups towards the election of Pope Francis

A youtube video of Muslim thinkers talking about their hopes of the new pope

A youtube video of Bishop Matthew and the Diocese of Rochester, New York, and their work of interfaith dialogue

Two Cartoons on the Church

Among my facebook friends, there has been a lot of talk about the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and their hopes for the next Pope. Many of my progressive friends dislike Benedict for his conservative views. If I met Pope Benedict, I’m sure I’d like him as a person. I deeply disagree, though, with his attempts to squash dissenting voices in his church and his push to make the Catholic Church smaller and more conservative. From my perspective, Pope Benedict seems like this shy bookwormy scholar who seems more comfortable talking about theology than in dealing with the pastoral needs of his flock. Unlike Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII, Pope Benedict had almost no pastoral experience, in taking care of the diverse needs of people in a church. Almost his entire experience has been in academia. In my cartoon, I’m hoping the next Pope reaches out to both Catholics and nonCatholics and offers a helping hand to the poor and the marginalized, like Jesus did 2,000 years ago.

There are a lot of suffering people in the world who need the Church to speak out for those who can not speak for themselves. Though I am no longer Catholic, one of the things that I most admire about the Catholic Church is their history of fighting for social justice. When I grew up during the 1980s, I deeply admired the Catholics who were integral parts of three important struggles for the poor: the Catholic Church was deeply involved in the People Power revolution in the Philippines and helped insure that it remained largely nonviolent; Catholic priests, nuns, and lay people risked their lives to fight for the poor in Latin America; and the Catholic Church supported the Solidarity movement in Poland that helped lead to the downfall of communism in Poland.

A few years ago I read The Hidden Encyclical of Pope Pius XI by George Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky that talked about a secret encyclical that Pope Pius XI commissioned that would explicitly condemn the Nazi policies against the Jews. Pope Pius XI was pope during the 1930s and he grew increasingly dismayed at Hitler’s totalitarian regime and the Nazi attacks on Jews and religious people in general. In 1937 the Pope had his German secretary of state smuggle to the German churches the encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge or “With Burning Dismay” , which denounced the Nazi intimidation of Catholic schools, the hostility of the Nazis towards free religious activity, and indirectly condemned Nazi racism. In a 1938 address to Belgian pilgrims, the pope said that “we are the spiritual offspring of Abraham… We are spiritually Semites.” That same year, Pope Pius XI commissioned an American priest named John LeFarge to write an encyclical titled Humani Generis Unitas to more explicitly denounce the Nazi policy against the Jews. Before LeFarge could finish the encyclical, however, Pope Pius XI died in 1939 and his successor, Pope Pius XII shelved the project. George Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky’s book asks: if Pope Pius the Eleventh was willing to explicitly condemn the Nazi’s policies towards the Jews in 1939, why couldn’t Pope Pius the Twelfth make an explicit condemnation of Nazi anti-Jewish policies during World War II?

It would be unfair to say that Pope Pius XII did nothing. Pope Pius XII hated the Nazis just as much at his predecessor, but Pius XII was trained as a diplomat, and he couched his criticisms of the Nazis in vague diplomatic terms. Pope Pius XII made vague criticisms against totalitarianism and racism in encyclicals like Summi Pontificatus, while he secretly allowed Jewish refugees to be sheltered in monasteries and convents while arranging for thousands to escaped to safer countries. The Nazis though, could easily ignore vague criticisms of totalitarianism and racism that could easily apply to the Soviet Union or any countless countries. They would not have been able to ignore a direct criticism of Nazi anti-Jewish laws from the Catholic Church, as Pope Pius XI had wanted to do with his encylical Humani Generis Unitas. This is one example on why the Pope must speak out on social justice issues.

I’m hoping for a reformer Pope, like Pope John XXIII was in the 1950s and 1960s, when he began Vatican II. That’s probably not going to happen, but a recent New York Times survey of American Catholics found that a majority of American Catholics hope for a more modern pope to be elected. Here are some good books on the papacy and on the Catholic Church:

Lives of the Popes by Richard P. McBrien

A Church In Search of Itself: Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future by Robert Blair Kaiser

The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World by David Gibson

Benedict XVI: An Intimate Portrait by Peter Seewald

The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II- The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy by George Weigel

Pope John XXIII by Thomas Cahill

The Good Pope: The Making of a Saint and the Remaking of a Church- The Story of John XXIII and Vatican II by Greg Tobin

The Hidden Encyclical of Pope Pius XI by George Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky

A Special Mission: Hitler’s Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII by Dan Kurzman

From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 by John Connelly

My next cartoon is about the sad situation in Uganda, where conservative Evangelical Christians have been promoting an anti-gay agenda that has led to laws against the LGBT community and a proposed death penalty for anyone who is homosexual. Thirteen years ago, when I attended a more evangelical Christian Church, I learned that underneath the surface, there was more diversity of opinions on LGBT issues among Evangelicals than is generally realized. Many Evangelical Christians thought homosexuality was a sin and hated gays and lesbians. Some Evangelicals were either gay or supported gay rights and didn’t think homosexuality was a sin. A large number of Evangelical Christians thought homosexuality was a sin, but they also had gay friends and family members and were bothered by the way their fellow churchgoers treated their gay friends and relatives. I witnessed a few times a group of Evangelicals harass or shun a gay or lesbian individual in their church. The trouble was that the Evangelicals who didn’t approve of the harassment or the shunning didn’t speak out against it and remained silent. They only spoke about it later, in private. Everyone got caught up in groupthink.

I have a feeling this situation is similar in Uganda. In the U.S., more and more Evangelical Christians are speaking out against homophobia in their churches. Several Evangelical groups now, like Soulforce, Faith In America and the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists are dedicated to fighting religious based bigotry. I think that’s why conservative Evangelicals are going to places like Uganda to spread their ideas. Gay and lesbian Ugandans are a minority and they need allies. Christians who support gay rights or who have gay friends and family members have to speak out loudly in Uganda, or their silence will make them complicit in the harassment and murders.

Here are some magazine articles on the situation in Uganda:

Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-gay Push by Jeffrey Gettleman for the January 3, 2010 edition of the New York Times

Out In Africa: A Gay Rights Struggle With Deadly Stakes by Alexis Okeowo for the December 24, 2012 edition of the New Yorker

The Ugandan Anti-Gay Movement: An Analysis of Evangelical Christian Ethics by J. Langford for Ezinearticles.com

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen. You could also join my Jasper the Cat facebook page. If you’d like to email me, you can write a comment at alopezcartoons@yahoo.com

Jasper and the Church
Jasper and the Tea Partier
Jasper Writes A Blog
Conversations During The Holidays
Jasper and the Cop
The Parents Visit the Occupation
Cartoons About Occupy Wall Street
Jasper and the Moderate Republican
Obama and the Republicans
Jasper And the Homeless Veteran
Jasper Celebrates the 4th of July
Jasper Meets Howard Zinn
Jasper and the Nature Poem
The Reunion
Government and the Market Economy
Jasper Joins Two Protests
Bob the Nerd Vampire
Jasper Debates War
Jasper Finds His Way Home
Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Mormons, Catholics, and Evangelicals Against Proposition 8

I’m against Proposition 8.  I also support the recent protests against the constitutional ban on gay marriage.  I’m not, however, a supporter of the tactic of some gay rights supporters of attacking Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical churches, because I think it is a tactic that’ll backfire and cause more harm than good for their cause.  A small group of Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals support gay rights and gay marriages and they need all the support they can get to raise their voices within their churches and counter the church hierarchy and the more conservative parishioners who champion Proposition 8. 

Andrew Callahan is a Mormon who is risking excommunication from his church for speaking out against Proposition 8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzXsl7rPV0c) and (http://signingforsomething.org/blog/?page_id=770).  His blog states that he is a high priest in good standing and he wrote:

I want you to know, that regardless of any action the church takes or doesn’t take. I will NOT cease my actions to stop them from supporting Proposition 8, and I will work as hard as I can to defeat Prop 8 and all similar measures. Bigotry in any form is wrong, and disguising it as “love” as the church leadership is now doing is especially distasteful.

Barbara Young is another Mormon who has gone out against a ban on gay marriage (http://angryxer.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/steve-youngs-household-comes-out-against-prop-8/).

Various Mormon sites are around that argue against Proposition 8.  Among them are http://www.lds4gaymarriage.org/ and http://www.gaysandthegospel.org/.  In one website, they state:

While other Pro Same-Sex Marriage sites examine the various issues surrounding Civil Same-Sex Marriage (logical, legal and emotional), and address the issues raised by those opposing Civil Same-Sex Marriage, our main objection is doctrinal, from a Latter-day Saint perspective. Our contention is that Civil Same-Sex Marriage is in no way contrary to the Constitution or official LDS doctrine (or the Bible). The efforts of those opposing Civil Same-Sex Marriage, however, are contrary to the above. Like those other sites, we too try address the questions and concerns of those, mostly active LDS members, who disagree with our stance.

In a Roman Catholic Church in Fresno, a priest went out of the closet and decried Proposition 8 in the pulpit in early October, causing controversy in his parish. The Reverand Geoffrey Farrow said,

“How is marriage protected by intimidating gay and lesbian people into loveless and lonely lives? I am morally compelled to vote no on Proposition 8…. I know these words of truth will cost me dearly. But to withhold them… I would become an accomplice to a moral evil that strips gay and lesbian people not only of their civil rights, but of their human dignity as well.”

Frank Cocozelli is a liberal Catholic blogger for the Progressive Christian website Crossleft.  He wrote a recent blog (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6651) that commended Call to Action, a liberal Catholic lay group that went against Proposition 8.  They put out a petition that stated:

As Catholics and citizens of California, we believe the right of each person to freedom of religion is based on respect for the dignity of each person. Without that basis, we would all stand in danger of being subjugated to beliefs or practices to which we do not subscribe. Fairness and equality must be living truths in a just society; therefore we oppose the proposal to amend the California Constitution to ban same-gender marriage.

 

As well as:

Civil marriage of same-gender couples does not coerce anyone to change his or her religious beliefs; nor does it coerce any religious organization to change its own teachings or beliefs.

In the November 22, 2008 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, Matthai Kuruvila wrote an article about Catholics in the Bay Area who went against their church leadership and voted against the Proposition.  Exit polls showed that 64 percent of Catholic voters in California supported the measure, with church leaders like San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer urging their parishioners to support the ballot measure.  Catholics in the Bay Area, though, went against the trend, and a majority voted against Proposition 8.  These Bay Area Catholics were especially chagrined that Archbishop Niederauer, the former bishop of Salt Lake City, was instrumental in bringing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into the Proposition 8 battle.   Kuruvila quotes Kathleen Courtney, at 63 a lifelong Catholic and a member of St. Dominic’s parish in San Francisco, who explains her opposition of Proposition 8 in spite of her denomination’s support of the measure:

“My institutional church has human frailties…  It’s my responsibility to help my institutional church move forward.  The people of God lead the way.”

Within the Evangelical community, I didn’t find anyone who made a public statement against Proposition 8, but I found some websites of gay and lesbian Evangelical Christians.  Soulforce is a group founded by Mel White, a former a former seminary professor and ghostwriter for the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and his partner Gary Nixon to fight homophobia within the Evangelical church.  In their vision statement (http://www.soulforce.org/article/7), Soulforce states:

“The mission of Soulforce is to cut off homophobia at its source — religious bigotry. Soulforce uses a dynamic “take it to the streets” style of activism to connect the dots between anti-gay religious dogma and the resulting attacks on the lives and civil liberties of LGBT Americans. We apply the creative direct action principles taught by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to peacefully resist injustice and demand full equality for LGBT citizens and same-gender families.”

A New York Times web article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/us/12evangelical.html) talks of other Evangelical gay groups like Evangelicals Concerned, founded in 1975 by a therapist from New York, Ralph Blair, and websites like Christianlesbians.com and gaychristian.net.

I have close gay and lesbian friends, but I also have close Mormon, Catholic and Evangelical friends as well.   In spite of the dominance of conservative voices, I know that these 3 denominations are a lot more politically diverse than the general public assume.  I attended an evangelical church for 8 years and found people who were either gay or supported gay rights but were quiet about it because they didn’t want to rock the boat.  I’ve witnessed what happens when people challenge their church, the ostracism and group harassment that an individual has to endure.   So I admire the courage of a Barbara Young or an Andrew Callahan or a Frank Cocozelli when they speak out because I know the consequences of their actions.  When gay rights activists make disparaging remarks against the Mormon, Catholic, or Evangelical church, they give conservative Christians ammunition to further marginalize those progressive Christians who dare to speak out.

Though I support gay marriages and protests against Proposition 8, I am against protests that degenerate into antiMormon, antiCatholic or antiEvangelical diatribes.   A better way would be for gay rights activists reach out to progressive Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals and ask their advice on how to best convince those Christians who may be sympathetic to their cause.  Since conservative Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals were successful in banding together to support Proposition 8, perhaps a coalition of progressive Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals would be an effective alternative voice for gay marriage within these 3 churches.   Conservative Christians have every right to stand up for their convictions.  They don’t have a right though to silence voices in their churches that have differing views.   Though the costs of lost friendships and possible conflict may be high, Christians who are either gay or support gay rights need to speak out within their congregations.  If the only Christian voices that people hear are conservative Christian voices, then people will assume these are the only Christian voices there are.

 

 

 

 

Pope Pius XI, Pope Pius XII and Two Different Responses to Hitler’s Anti-Jewish Laws

Recently I watched Amen, a Costa-Gavras film about an SS officer and a Jesuit priest trying to get the Vatican to denounce the Holocaust.  It was very critical of the Pope for his feeble response to the atrocities being committed against millions of Jewish lives.  How fair is that criticism?  I decided to research the actions of the two popes during the 1930s and 1940s and see how they reacted to Adolph Hitler and his policy against the Jews.  Pope Pius XI, the pope during most of the 1930s, was increasingly confrontational of Hitler and the Nazis as their actions began to affect more people.  Pope Pius XII, the wartime pope, privately approved of sheltering Jewish refugees in church property, but he never publicly condemned the shipping of Jews in concentration camps and the killing of Jewish lives.  The two different reactions of the two popes offers a microcosm of the way religion has dealt with authoritarian governments and atrocities against its citizens.

Pope Pius XI was formerly Achille Ratti, a scholarly clergyman and librarian who spent 45 years of his life presiding over two great scholarly collections, the Ambrosian Library in Milan and the Vatican Library in Rome.  He was a great lover of books, and he held great faith in the power of knowledge that good books endowed upon the reader.  Ratti presided in Poland after World War I and was selected as cardinal of Milan soon afterwards.  In 1922, he was elected as pope as a compromise candidate in a divided conclave.

Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky chronicled Pope Pius XIs interactions with Hitler in a good book titled The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI.  At first Pope Pius XI signed concordants with Mussolini and Hitler in the late 1920s and early 1930s the hopes that these agreements would help maintain religious autonomy in churches and catholic schools.  To get Hitler and Mussolini to agree to this, Pius had to sacrifice the influence of Catholic political parties in the two dictators countries, and this severely weakened any political opposition to Hitler and Mussolini. 

Pius’s hopes that the concordants would allow the church to run without interference from the Nazis was dashed as Hitler broke promise after promise.    Pope Pius XI reacted in kind, increasing his criticisms of Hitler and the Nazi racial policies.  In 1937 he asked Cardinal Faulhaber to draw up an encyclical that would criticize Hitler’s nonadherence to the concordants and had his secretary of state Eugene Pacelli  secretly sent to the German churches to have them read from the pulpits and published in small local presses.  This encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge or “With Burning Dismay”  (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge_en.html), denounced the Nazi intimidation of Catholic schools and the hostility of the Nazis towards free religious activity.  In one passage, the encyclical states: 

“Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds. “

With this statement, Pius XI began to increasingly criticize Hitler’s racial policies to different groups.  In a 1938 address to Belgian pilgrims, the pope said that “we are the spiritual offspring of Abraham…  We are spiritually Semites.”   Four months earlier, he had commissioned an American priest named John LeFarge to write an encyclical titled Humani Generis Unitas to more explicitly denounce the Nazi policy against the Jews.  LeFarge was chosen because of his work in the Catholic Interracial Council and the Catholic Rural Life Movement and his 1937 book Interracial Justice, which attacked the segregation laws of the southern states of the U.S.  Before LeFarge could finish the encyclical, however, Pope Pius XI died in 1939 and his successor shelved the project.

Eugenio Pacelli succeeded Pope Pius XI and became Pope Pius XII in 1939.  While Pius XI was becoming increasingly confrontational with Hitler and his policies, Pius XII preferred to work behind the scenes and use diplomacy to get things done.  This was due, in part, to his previous experience as a Vatican diplomat and Secretary of State.  Dan Kurzman’s book A Special Mission:  Hitler’s Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII makes clear that in spite of his more circumspect approach towards Hitler, Pope Pius XII deeply disliked the dictator and the Nazi idealogy.  In the early part of his papacy, Pius XII had been involved in a plot to oust the Fuhrer.  When Pius first became Pope, he created a special department for the Jews in the German section of the Vatican information office to make it easier to protect them.  Pope Pius XII allowed convents and monasteries to shelter Jewish refugees in Rome when the Nazis were rounding up people to ship to concentration camps.  In March 1940 Pope Pius XII privately protested the persecution of Poles and Jews to German foreign minister Ribbentrop when he visited Rome.  The pope arranged for several thousand to escape to countries that would accept them.  Kurzman notes that after the war, notable Jewish leaders like Golda Meir and historian Martin Gilbert commended the pope for his efforts.

In spite of these efforts, critics ask if Pope Pius XII should’ve made an explicit denunciation of Hitler’s policies towards the Jews and especially the Holocaust, as his predecessor Pope Pius XI was going to with his encyclical Humani Generis Unitas?   Two reasons are given in Kurzman’s book for the pope’s decision not to make that denunciation.  One is that Pius worried about persecution against Catholics that would result from such a denunciation.  He also worried that an explicit statement against the Holocaust would worsen the persecution against the Jews.  Kurzman wrote:

“The strongest justification offered for Pius’s public silence was that any papal protest would provoke Hitler into drastic retaliation.  The pope’s supporters argue that because Dutch prelates protested vehemently against Hitler’s deportations in Holland, several hundred additional victims, mostly Jewish converts, including Edith Stein, the philosopher, were dragged out of Church institutions to their death.  And the supporters further note that about 80 percent of Holland’s Jews were ultimately deported, a higher percentage than in any other Nazi-occupied country.”

When Pius XII made statements critical of the Nazis or in reference to the plight of the Jews, he often couched them in vague language.  His most explicit address was his Christmas address of 1942 (http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P12CH42.HTM) where he stated: 

“Mankind owes that vow to the countless dead who lie buried on the field of battle: The sacrifice of their lives in the fulfillment of their duty is a holocaust offered for a new and better social order. Mankind owes that vow to the innumerable sorrowing host of mothers, widows and orphans who have seen the light, the solace and the support of their lives wrenched from them. Mankind owes that vow to those numberless exiles whom the hurricane of war has torn from their native land and scattered in the land of the stranger; who can make their own the lament of the Prophet: “Our inheritance is turned to aliens; our house to strangers.” Mankind owes that vow to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.”

Though I empathize with the quandary that Pope Pius XII was in, I tend to agree with critics that he should’ve followed his predecessors example and made an explicit statement against the Holocaust.   Costa-Gavras noted in his movie Amen that the Catholic Church took a stand to stop the Nazi policy of euthanasia of the mentally ill.  At another time, gentile wives of Jewish men protested as a group the roundup of their husbands and the Nazis released them.   Though there would be consequences to taking such a public stand, the enormity of the Holocaust made it an imperative that any spiritual leader should’ve spoken out against it.   Though Pius XII probably felt that his diplomatic skills were what was needed to save the thousands of lives sheltered in Catholic churches, the millions that died in concentration camps demanded more of an explicit stand.

Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII offered two different responses to a great moral evil.  Pius XI was more confrontational of the racial policies of Adolph Hitler, and at the time of his death, he was moving towards making more explicit condemnations.  Pius XII was more circumspect, making a front of being neutral, but working behind the scenes to try to shelter Jewish refugees in monastaries and convents and move them to safer countries.   A case can be made for either approach for a church to use in dealing with difficult moral decisions.  During the time of slavery, the Quakers and Evangelicals made strong moral condemnations of the institution of slavery.  The Anglican Church founded the idea of Via Media as an effective diplomatic way to make peace between the Catholic and Protestant believers in Elizabethan England.   These two examples show that some times call for the confrontational style of a Pius XI, while other times call for the more diplomatic style of a Pius XII.   Though I commend Pius XII for secretly saving many Jewish lives, I think he was the wrong leader for a time that needed a more forceful pope like Pius XI.

Christians Against Proposition 8

Though I am opposed to Proposition 8, it bothers me to see antiMormon, antiCatholic and antiEvangelical signs among the protests that have occurred since the passage of the ballot measure.  Many Christians from each denomination have quietly opposed this measure against gay marriage.  Though the more conservative elements from each denomination have dominated the religious dialogue, there have been more progressive Christian voices who have fought for gay rights and gay marriage.  I worry that in their anger over the support of Proposition 8 by Mormon, Catholic and Evangelical churches, it may create a prejudice by gay rights supporters against all Christians.  The Christian community is more politically diverse than the Religious Right let on and many progressive Christians, among them Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals, are struggling within their denominations to fight to change attitudes.

Barbara Young*, a prominent Mormon, is against Propostion 8 for its discrimination against gays and lesbians.  St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco had been marshalling opposition against Proposition 8, mainly through individuals working at phone banks.  St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco, which chose lesbian priests to lead it two decades ago and gave up its membershilp in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, had fragmented efforts to make a liberal opposition.  In a Roman Catholic Church in Fresno, a priest went out of the closet and decried Proposition 8 in the pulpit in early October, causing controversy in his parish.  The Reverand Geoffrey Farrow said, “How is marriage protected by intimidating gay and lesbian people into loveless and lonely lives?  I am morally compelled to vote no on Proposition 8….   I know these words of truth will cost me dearly.  But to withhold them… I would become an accomplice to a moral evil that strips gay and lesbian people not only of their civil rights, but of their human dignity as well.”

Prominent Seventh Day Adventists like Julius Nam (Associate Professor of Religion Loma Linda University),  Lawrence T. Geraty (President Emeritus, La Sierra University), and Gary Chartier (Associate Professor of Law and Business Ethics, La Sierra University) have gone against their Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council’s public support of California Proposition 8.  The Episcopal Bishops of California issued a statement in opposition of Proposition 8 (http://www.diocal.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=303&Itemid=215).

In the October 31, 2008 edition of the San Jose Mercury News, the Council of Churches of Santa Clara County (http://www.councilofchurches-scc.org/marriage) had an advertisement against Proposition 8 and it was sponsored by the following churches:

Almaden Hills United Methodist Church, San Jose
Alum Rock United Methodist Church, San Jose
Campbell United Church of Christ Council
Campbell United Methodist Church
Celebration of Faith Church, San Jose
Center for Spiritual Living, San Jose
College Heights United Church of Christ, San Mateo
First Congregational Church of Palo Alto  (UCC), Peace and Justice Task Force
First Congregational Church of San Jose, United Church of Christ
First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto
First United Methodist Church of Palo Alto
First Christian Church, San Jose
First Unitarian Church of San Jose
Grace Baptist Church, San Jose
Holy Redeemer Church, San Jose
Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church of San Jose
Metropolitan Community Church of San Jose
Morgan Hill United Methodist Church
New Community of Faith, San Jose (UCC and American Baptist)
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Santa Clara
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, San Jose
St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Sunnyvale
Stone Church of Willow Glen (Presbyterian), San Jose
Trinity Episcopal Church, San Jose
Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto Board
St. Jude’s Episcopal Church, Social Justice/Outread Committee, Cupertino

As Barbara Young and Reverand Geoffrey Farrow  are showing, there are Mormons, Catholics, Evangelicals, and other Christians who support gay marriage and are willing to stand up for it.  In the pews of Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical churches are parishioners who are either gay or support gay rights yet are quiet about it out of fear of their more conservative churchgoers and clergy.   Supporters of gay marriage need to read out to these people within these churches and encourage them to stand up and talk.

*I made a correction.  My original post mentioned Steve Young being against Proposition 8.  I have been informed that it is his wife and not him who is against Proposition 8.  Steve Young made this statement:  “Barb and I love each other very much. It is that love of each other and the Savior that helps us come to the decisions we do. For Barb, who has a remarkable and enviable compassion for others, those political activities are far more public than mine. Those who know me, know I chose long ago not to be publicly active in the political process. I do have strong opinions. I do vote and will vote on Tuesday, but those matters are private.”

Against Prop 8 But Not Against Mormons, Catholics, Evangelicals

I am against California’s Proposition 8, which puts a ban in the California constitution on gay marriages.  When the ballot measure passed, I was disappointed, but I also thought that over time, people’s attitudes would change.  So when I saw protests against the change in the California constitution, I was generally supportive.  One of the things that bothered me about the protests, though, is the criticisms I see in some of the protest signs against Mormons, Catholics, and Evangelicals.  I think that is a big mistake, for not all Mormons, Catholics or Evangelicals supported Proposition 8.  A better way would be to appeal to the more liberal and moderate Christians that belong to each denomination to support the cause of gay marriage.

A common misconception among some progressives is that Christians are all conservative Republicans.  Yet a quick glance at the pews of the churches will find a diversity of political views.    Within the Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical churches are more liberal views that do not agree with the conservative elements in their respective denominations.  If opponents of Proposition 8 begin to view a fight for gay marriage as also being a fight against these churches, it’ll backfire for several reasons.  It’ll galvanize moderate Christians who are in the fence about this issue to defend their church.  This will also gives more ammunition to conservative Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals to marginalize their more liberal parishioners. 

Jasmyne A. Cannick, an African American lesbian activist, wrote an article called The Gay/Black Divide for the November 8, 2008 edition of the Los Angeles Times.  She commented:

“White gays often wonder aloud why blacks, of all people, won’t support their civil rights.  There is a real misunderstanding by the white gay community about the term.  Proponents of gay marriage fling it around as if it is a one-size-fits-all catchphrase for issues of fairness.
But the black civil rights movement was essentially born out of and driven by the black church;  social justice and religion are inextricably intertwined in the black community.  To many blacks, civil rights are grounded in Christianity- not something separate and apart from religion but synonymous with it.  To the extent that the issue of gay marriage seemed to be pitted against the church, it was going to be a losing battle in my community.”

Cannick makes a good point that there is a strong progressive tradition within the Christian church, especially within the Catholic and Evangelical movement.  The anti-slavery movement and the Social Gospel movement both had adherents within the Evangelical churches.  The Catholic Church has always taken up the cause of the poor and the marginalized, and since Vatican II has also take up anti-war positions.   Though the past 30 years have seen the rise of the Religious Right, there are still progressives within those two denominations and I’m sure that is true of the Mormon Church as well.

So what should supporters of gay marriage do with their Christian foes?  We should protest and go in the streets, as people have done these past couple of days.  But we should refrain from making our protests into antiMormon,antiEvangelical or antiCatholic protests and instead encourage liberals and gays within those denominations to speak out.  And we should try to persuade moderates and even sympathetic conservatives within those churches of the prejudice that arises from a ban in the constitution.  In my time at an evangelical church, I found two types of people who were against homosexuality: one group thought homosexuality was a sin and hated gays and lesbians; and the other group thought homosexuality was a sin but had close family members or friends who were gay and lesbian and sincerely struggled with loving their gay friends and family while holding on to their belief. Trying to talk to the first group is a waste of time, but I think it’s possible to talk to the second group. The people in the second group do not see gays and lesbians as two dimensional stereotypes: they are their brothers, sisters, relatives, close friends. Though it may be futile to try to convince them that homosexuality is not a sin, I think it’s possible to convince them that even if they believe homosexuality is a sin, homophobia is an even worse sin. Homophobia is like racism and sexism in that they have the effect of dehumanizing and marginalizing a group of people, making them vulnerable to a whole range of cruel treatment. Jesus went out of his way to reach out to marginalized people, to make people see the humanity in prostitutes, demon possessed people, taxcollectors and outcasts.

If we demonize Catholics, Mormons and Evangelicals, the road to gay marriage will become much harder than it already is.  If we instead reach out to the liberals within those churches, we may find support where we least expect.

The Evolution of the Institution of Marriage

Groucho Marx once said, “Marriage is a wonderful institution.  But who wants to live in an institution.”

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot during these past couple of weeks hearing arguments about Proposition 8.  Proposition 8 is in the California ballot that will ban gay marriages in the state and overturn a California State Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.   Right now conservative Christians in the Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical churches are leading the fight to support Proposition 8 and their main argument is that this goes against the institution of marriage as it has been defined for several centuries as being between a man and a woman.  This got me thinking about history of the institution of marriage.  Has the institution of marriage always been the same over the course of human history and the course of Christian history?  Or has it been an institution that has evolved over time, as the understanding of human relations evolved?

First let’s how marriage is defined from the traditions of the main supporters of Proposition 8.  A detailed description of marriage from the points of view of the Mormon, Catholic and Evangelical churches can be found in these websites:  http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/mormon/marriage/, http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p2s2c3a7.htm, and http://www.pursuingthetruth.org/studies/files/marriage1.htm.   In the understanding of marriage from these three Christian denominations, marriage is an instititute ordained by God and is found in the Bible in Genesis 2:22-24, Matthew 19:4-6, and Ephesians 5:22-33.   In this belief, marriage is more than just a human institution, but is the center of Christian and human community and is a reflection of God’s relationship with human beings.    The Christian view of marriage is more than just a partnership;  it emphasizes the ability of a heterosexual couple to procreate.  The Catholic Bishops of California and the National Association of Evangelicals offers more detailed arguments in these sites:  http://www.catholicvoiceoakland.org/08-08-04/inthisissue7.htm and http://www.nae.net/index.cfm?FUSEACTION=editor.page&pageID=303&IDCategory=8.

Not all Christians hold this view.  Steve Young, the former San Francisco 49er quarterback and prominent Mormon, is against Propostion 8 for its discrimination against gays and lesbians.  Father Geoffrey Farrow recently went out of the closet and took a stand against the measure.  St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church and St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco have lead efforts to oppose Proposition 8.  Prominent Seventh Day Adventists like Julius Nam (Associate Professor of Religion Loma Linda University),  Lawrence T. Geraty (President Emeritus, La Sierra University), and Gary Chartier (Associate Professor of Law and Business Ethics, La Sierra University) have gone against their Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council’s public support of California Proposition 8.  The Episcopal Bishops of California issued a statement in opposition of Proposition 8 (http://www.diocal.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=303&Itemid=215).

I checked out two books for this weekend to read about the history of marriage.  Stephanie Coontz, the Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families, wrote the book Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Marriage or How Love Conquered Marriage.  Marilyn Yalom, a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University, wrote the book A History of the Wife.   Both books agree that for many centuries, the primary role of marriage was not for the fulfillment of a loving relationship, but to secure a dowry and cement political alliances with prominent families, to increase one’s family labor force through the producing of children, and even to secure peace treaties.   Marriage since the times of Rome and Greece was primarily an economic and political institution and for any commoner who was not a slave, marriage was essential for the individual’s survival within that society.  In ancient societies, women needed men for the plowing;  men needed women to preserve food, spin wool, grind grain and provide children to work in the fields.   When choosing a mate, the individual was looking for a strong worker than a mate that one had love for.  Proverbs 31:10-20 and 24-27 gives a description of what a man looked for in a wife in ancient society:

Who can find a virtuous woman?  For her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchants’ ships;  she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
She considereth a field, and buyeth it:  with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
She girdeth her lins with strength, and strengthen her arms.
She perceiveth that her merchandise is good:  her candle goeth not out by night.
She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
She stetcheth out her hand to the poor;  yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy…
She maketh fine linen, and selleth it;  and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
Strength and honour are her clothing:  and she shall rejoice in time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom;  and in her tongue is the law of kindness
She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.

It is true that through most of history, a primary role of marriage was to produce children.  That tradition, however, was very cruel to women who were barren.  Marilyn Yalom wrote, “Throughout the ancient world, the primary obligation of the wife was to produce offspring.  Woe to the barren wife of biblical times- not only would she be enveloped in shame, but often replaced by a second (or third) wife.  Well into modern times, wives could be disposed of for not producing children- especially among royalty and the aristocracy, where the necessity for a male heir placed even greater pressure on the wife.”   There was much physical abuse in these marriages, as women often had few legal rights and were dependent on their husbands for economic security.   Battering was an accepted practice that was sanctioned by law amd custom as a way to allow husbands to enforce authority over their wives.

Many early Christians had ambivalent feelings about marriage, believing as St. Paul did in 1 Conrinthians 7:32-34 that marriage undermined the self control needed to achieve spiritual salvation.   They thought of marriage as being the best alternative to satiating the temptation of lust.  This attitude changed over time as Christians grew in number and as the Roman Empire gradually accepted Christianity under the reigns of Constantine and Theodosius. 

As the Roman Empire fell, the Catholic Church slowly began to take over the institution of marriage.  In the sixth and seventh centuries, the Church began to define laws of incest as they began to preside over marriages of the aristocracy.  They condemned the Old Testament practice of marrying a brother’s widow, and then they condemned the marriage of first and second cousins, stepmothers or stepdaughters, and the widows of uncles.  Since many kings and nobles used marriage to consolidate wealth and social status, this gave the church much power if it chose to enforce these rules.   In the twelfth century, the church pressured individuals to marry in the presence of a priest and to marry inside a church.  It downplayed the need for parental consent, and made marriage the mututal will of the intended spouses a criterion.  Marriage became a sacrament of the church, meaning that God’s grace was received during the ceremony, and this made divorce unacceptable.   Women gradually lost the right to inherit and own property as the idea of primogeniture, of the right of the firstborn son to inherit the family wealth, began taking root.

One of the great influences of marriage was from Martin Luther, the famous Protestant dissident.  He opposed the Catholic Church’s opposition to priestly celibacy by marrying the former nun Katherina von Bora in 1525.  He had found no tenet in the Bible specifically stating that priests shouldn’t marry, and believed that the apostles and Jesus himself might have been married at some point in their lives.  Since many priests had concubines anyways, Luther felt that it was better for priests to get married rather than to live in sin.

In the 16th and 17th century, the growth of a market economy and the ideas of the Enlightenment changed attitudes towards marriage.  Personal choice of spouses replaced arranged marriages as a social ideal and individuals were encouraged to marry for love.  Stephanie Coontz explains the cause of the changes:

“Two seismic social changes spurred these changes in marriage norms.  First, the spread of wage labor made young people less dependent on their parents for a start in life.  A man didn’t have to delay marriage until he inherited land or took over a busines from his father.  A woman could more readily earn her won dowry…  They could marry as soon as they were able to earn sufficient funds.
Second, the freedoms afforde by the market economy had their parallel in new political and philosophical ideas.  Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, some political theorists began to challenge the ideas of absolutism.  Such ideas gained more adherents durig the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when influential thinkers across Europe championed individual rights and insisted that social relationships, including those between men and women, be organized on the basis of reason and justice rather than force.  Believing the pursuit of happiness to be a legitimate goal, they advocated marrying for love rather than wealth or status.”

These ideas uprooted centuries of belief about marriage and caused much worry.  Critics claimed that marrying for love would undermine the social and moral order of society.    Among the criticisms that Coontz found were these:  “If wives and husbands were intimates, wouldn’t women demand to share decisions equally?  If women possessed the same faculties of reason as men, shy would they confine themselves to domesticity?  Would men still financially support women and children if they lost control over their wives’ and childrens’ labor and could not even discipline them properly?  If parents, church, and state no longer dictated people’s private lives, how could society make sure the right people married and had children or stop the wrong ones from doing so?”

Anthony Giddens had called a marriage based on love “the intrinsically subversive character of the romantic love complex” and he was right.    As husbands and wives began to see each other as equals in intimacy, it was the start of a long fight to gain women more equal rights in the marital sphere and the outside society.   Women had a long road to fight.   Women were once considered inferior beings, whose main purpose was to serve their men and be their helpers.  Once they were married women lost the rights of their property and were subject to their husbands’ authority.  Often they suffered abuse, and they had no means of recourse in the courts system.  Society made it difficult to divorce and most women felt trapped.  Records of the early seventeenth century physician Robert Napier showed that more than a thousand female patients treated for mental illness concluded that they were especially troubled by oppression they experienced as daughters and wives.  British writer Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 treatise Vindication of the Rights of Women saw the existing intitution of marriage as being similar to the institution of slavery.  

Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte were inspired by the idea of love in marriage to create headstrong and intelligent women characters in their books that went against social norms.  Their writings inspired Sarah Grimke, who wrote Letters on the Equability of the Sexes in 1837 about the need to educate both the husbands and the wives see themselves as equals.    Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony fought for women’s equality and were proud of the passage in 1860 of the Married Women’s Property Act in New York, which gave wives the right to own their own property and earnings. 

Along with the fight for gender equality was the fight for racial equality.  Laws against interracial marriage were in place in America to seperate whites from blacks and other races that were deemed inferior to the majority race.  In an internet post (http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html), Peggy Pascoe, an Associate Professor and Beekman Chair of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon, found four reason often given to support a ban on interracial marriage: first, judges claimed that marriage belonged under the control of the states rather than the federal government; second, they began to define and label all interracial relationships (even longstanding, deeply committed ones) as illicit sex rather than marriage; third, they insisted that interracial marriage was contrary to God’s will; fourth, they declared that interracial marriage was somehow “unnatural.” In the 1883 Supreme Court case Pace versus Alabama, the Court ruled that the Alabama miscegenation laws did not violate the fourteenth amendment because both parties suffered under interracial marriages and interracial sex.  it wasn’t until 1967 and the Loving versus Virginia case when the Supreme Court made laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.

As the twentieth century dawned, more attitudes changes about the institution of marriage.   The early twentieth century was a time of great turmoil for married couples going through two world wars, a great depression, and new ideas of sexuality coming from Freud and the roaring 1920s.  In the 1950s, the view that many people see as traditional marriage became common, as the two parent family with the single male wage earner took hold in most of America.  But that time hid many stresses on that model of marriage.   Many men felt that being the sole breadwinner was a burden and they were often tired and stressed.  Women felt isolated at home while trying to rear their children.  The coming of the Women’s Liberation movement and the economic realities that brought on the two income marriage brought more changes to the way marriage is viewed. 

When I look at the history of marriage, I do not see an institution that has been unchanging over time.  Marriage as an institution that has constantly evolved to the changing economic, political and social changes that have affected people.   The Enlightenment ideas of equality, the fight for women’s rights, the fight for civil rights, and now the fight for gay rights have changed our views on the roles that men and women play.  I respect the rights of conservative Christians to hold a different view from mine.  I do not think churches should be forced by the government to perform same sex marriages if it goes against their creeds.  But I also think it is wrong for those churches to ban gay marriages for people who do not share their beliefs or who do not belong to their churches.   I am against Proposition 8 for this reason.

Cardinal Sin and the People Power Revolution

During the 1980s, I thought it was funny, and sadly appropriate, for the head of the Catholic Church in the Philippines to be a man called Cardinal Sin.

Certainly, the crimes committed against the Filipino people at that time was a sin. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had been ruling the Philippines for 20 years, and they greedily plundered the economy and lived lavishly while much of the economy was mired in poverty. I remember reading news about the Philippines at that time with a certain sense of dread. Benigno Aquino got shot and killed. The Marcos government was cracking down and seemed to have friends in the Reagan administration that would let them get away with murder. The opposition turned to Aquino’s widow, a housewife with no political experience and no desire to lead a country. And the church stood by for 20 years as Marcos terrorized the country. I didn’t have high hopes for the Philippines as Marcos called snap elections in 1986. I didn’t see how things could wind up as anything except tragic.

The events that unfolded that year astounded me. Election officials fighting to make sure ballot boxes were not tampered with. Masses of rich and poor pouring out on the streets with yellow shirts and rosaries, standing in front of tanks with prayers and appeals to their compassion. Cory Aquino, the housewife leader, turned out to have real leadership qualities, as she calmly went about her business with a confidence in God. And Archbishop Cardinal Sin used the power of the Church to insure that the unfolding revolution stay nonviolent and democratic.

I was wrong about a lot of things. I kept the March 10, 1986 issue of Time magazine, that chronicled the People Power Revolution, and learned about how important Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin was in influencing the change in the year 1986. The archbishop encouraged opposition political leaders and quietly aided in Cory Aquino’s run for the Presidency. When opposition military factions broke with Marcos, Cardinal Sin called on the Filipino people to go out to the streets to support them. Radio Veritas, the Catholic radio station, broadcast instructions to the crowds to insure that marches stayed peaceful. I had a stereotype of the higher Catholic officials who supported the rich and the powerful, and were Marx’s opiate of the masses. Cardinal Sin showed me that year that the higher clergy could be on the right side of history, that Marx could be wrong.

The events that year made me very proud of my heritage. I grew up in military bases, so I grew up more American than Filipino and with little first hand knowledge of my Filipino culture. The people who went to the streets and risked their lives to stand in front of tanks armed with only rosaries and flowers really impressed me. So that year I took a course in Asian American history and began reading Carlos Bulosan and “America is in the Heart” and began asking my parents about their lives and the lives of my grandparents.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, so many astounding things happened. The People Power Revolution in the Philippines. The freeing of Nelson Mandela and the peaceful fall of Apartheid. The fall of the Eastern bloc and the dissolving of the Soviet Union. I’m sure there were times that activists in those countries were discouraged, that it seemed like things wouldn’t change and horrible governments would have impunity to oppress their peoples. They didn’t give up, and their activism bore fruit. Evil systems fell. And though each country has had its struggles since then, at least the people have a say on their own destiny.

The later years of Pope John Paul II

It took me a while to respect, then later admire John Paul II.  At first I really didn’t like him.

 Which was kind of strange, because it seemed like everyone else did like him.  He was the first Polish Pope, the first non Italian Pope in over 400 years.  But I began hearing about his more conservative positions on abortion and homosexuality and the roles of women and I began to get wary of him.  As the early 1980s unfolded, he and Joseph Ratzinger began clamping down on dissident theologians and the liberation theologians in South America and my early impressions of this Pope were really not that good.

 My attitudes began to change in the mid 1980s when I saw how involved he was in helping the Solidarity movement in Poland against communist rule.   I’d watch the news and read the newspapers and see how the Polish people looked to John Paul II for inspiration for their quest for freedom and democracy.   In 1986 he also held a prayer conference in Assissi with leaders of most of the major religions and they all prayed together.   And when he visited the Bay Area, he made a point of visiting AIDs patients in San Francisco.  These little surprises slowly chipped away at my earlier stereotypes of him as a rigid conservative authoritarian.

 In the 1990s, as the Pope became more vulnerable, I began to like him more.  I read a biography on him by Tad Szulc and learning about his background helped me to understand why he thought the way he did.  He came out of World War II in Poland and he lost a lot of Jewish friends to the Holocaust, and the horrors of that war really affected him.   So when he visited Synagogues and had dialogue with Jews, when he went out against the two Iraqi wars, when he talked out against the mistreatment of Muslims in the Bosnian Serbian conflict, it made sense to me.  In light of the friends that he lost in the Holocaust, it must’ve really anguished him to see what was happening in the genocide in Rwanda.  

At first it was tough for me to see the Pope in his deteriorated state, especially when I remembered the robust Pope of his earlier years.  But then I read an article in Time where he wanted the world to see him in the state that he was in and to see the dignity in suffering.  This was when I really started admiring his courage.   The Pope John Paul II of his last years was the Pope I liked the best.   He spent the entire year of 2000 apologizing on behalf of the Church for its various sins:  he apologized to the Jews for the Church’s history of persecution, he apologized to the Muslims for the crusades, he apologized posthumously to Galileo.  This was a noble thing that John Paul II did.  

It’s been two years now, and it still seems strange to see Benedict as Pope.  I still disagree with John Paul II on the same issues that I disagreed with in the beginning of his Papacy.  But I agreed on a lot more of the things that he did.  John Paul II was a lot more complex than I originally thought, more nuanced in his thinking.   I didn’t really appreciate him until the later years of his Papacy, but I admire him now like I admire my dad.  I didn’t always agree with him, but I admire him for his integrity and his wisdom.