I have nothing to say about the rhetorical construction of Gingrich’s claim–about his implication that Obama is somehow forcing people onto the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Nor will I comment on the inaccuracy of Gingrich’s facts, or the racist underpinnings of his commentary, both of which the media has dealt with.

Instead, I want to address a question to Mr. Gingrich from one Roman Catholic to another: how can you, as a Christian, oppose feeding the hungry? I know, I know, you say it’s better for people to have jobs. But the point is, there aren’t jobs; this is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And you know as well as I do that the requirements for getting food stamps are stringent; Americans receiving food stamps–many of them already employed in low-paying jobs, let’s be clear–have far less money, allowing for inflation, than the working class family I grew up in ever had. I am, to use an old-fashioned term, scandalized that a person claiming to be a Catholic would talk this way about feeding the hungry in order to win an election.

This way of talking is especially shocking to me as a Roman Catholic Christian because the miracle in which Jesus feeds a huge number of hungry people–”the multiplication of the loaves and fishes” as it’s called–is the most important miracle story in the New Testament. How do we know this? Because it’s the only miracle story to appear in all four of the Gospels; in point of fact, it appears twice in Mark’s Gospel.

Now Speaker Gingrich, not a person to lose a debate, would probably say here that there’s no resemblance between the people Jesus fed and the people President Obama has seduced into living off food stamps in lieu of work. The people in the Gospel story were just so mesmerized by Jesus that they walked out into the desert by mistake; if they could have gotten back to their homes, they’d have had plenty to eat.

I would point out, however, that Jesus said nothing to his disciples about checking the photo IDs of those lining up for bread and fish, or about making sure that nobody was hiding food under their cloaks, thus not deserving any more. “I have compassion on the crowd,” is what he said (Mk 8:2). In point of fact, the vast majority of the people Jesus ministered to were poor; and he didn’t have much good to say for the rich, either.

We hear a lot about Speaker Gingrich going to the Basilica Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, the biggest Catholic church in the country,  to hear his wife sing in the massed choir that performs there. But this is not what generally goes on in Catholic churches across this country and around the world. What goes on is that ordinary men and women come to those churches hungry, and confess their sins, and hear a story about Jesus, and then are fed, week, after week, after week. Nobody ever tells us that we’re lazy, that we need to get a job, or that we should learn to feed ourselves.

Now don’t get me wrong. Urinating on corpses is certainly a disrespectful thing to do. I am not actually defending these guys.

But it did strike me, as I listened,  that not a single one of our distinguished leaders alluded, even briefly, to the fact that these Taliban first had actually been killed, that is, had such damage done to their physical bodies that their lives had ended.

I don’t know about you, but as for me, I would vastly prefer to be peed upon than to be killed. But hey, that’s just me. Lots of Americans probably think that being killed in battle is far more honorable.

The pastor of my parish said this morning at Mass that some have attributed the urination, and the torture at Abu Ghraib as well, to the stress our men and women in combat are under. He thought that one solution would be for us to stop having wars.

But as for me, cynic that I am, I suspect that instead of solving this problem by renouncing war, our distinguished leaders will press ahead to have the killing of our enemies done more and more by drones, urination by drone being fairly  unusual, as far as I have been able to determine.

Now let’s be clear: contemporary Catholic bishops are not widely noted for their communication with the hoi polloi. A priest friend, the pastor of a good-sized parish, asked me not long ago to write a letter for him to the ordinary of his diocese requesting permission to start a Sunday night liturgy. Fool that I am, I wondered why he didn’t just ask the guy. “You think I talk with the bishop?” he replied.

But the current movement toward turning Catholic theologians into catechists is particular cause for alarm. Bear in mind that theologians–Aquinas, for example, and Rahner–spearheaded some of the most significant intellectual growth (God forbid that I describe it as change!) in the history of the church.

And now, the US Supreme Court, in a ruling passed on January 12, looks to make the situation of theologians in Catholic universities even worse. In Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the court “recognized a ‘ministerial exception’ to employment discrimination laws, saying that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference.”

The case itself involved a female teacher with narcolepsy, Cheryl Perich, who was fired from a Missouri Lutheran Snyod school and then sued the school for discrimination against the disabled. The case was dismissed because Perich taught religion forty-five minutes a day, though she spent the vast majority of her time teaching secular subjects. Asked specifically about “professors at Catholic universities,” the lawyer who successfully argued the case, Douglas Laycock said: “If he teaches theology, he’s covered (by this ruling). If he teaches English or physics or some clearly secular subjects, he is clearly not covered.” And you can’t even blame the decision on the six (!!) Catholic justices on the court. The ruling was unanimous. As the editors of the New York Times argue, the ruling is far more encompassing than is good for either church or society. But that’s not much help to Catholic theologians whose jobs are now on the line.

All of this calls to mind a recent comment from a dear, life-long friend, an internationally recognized (and moderate) Catholic theologian. “I’m just grateful,” she said, “That the institutional church can no longer burn theologians at the stake, as they once could.” Maybe the institution can’t burn theologians any more, but as for job security, at least in US Catholic colleges and universities, good luck to them all.

So when, back in December, I came across an article in the Times titled “Newt Gingrich Represents New Political Era for Catholics,” I very nearly retched. I leave it to the pundits to comment on Newt’s six-year affair with the woman who eventually led him into the RCC and will  stick to Newt’s social positions, nearly all of which are at odds with Catholic social teaching. Take for example his advocacy of child labor as a means of undercutting the janitor’s union (perhaps he thinks that if my Dad had done more janitoring in grade school he wouldn’t have had to live off  government give-aways in the CCC ). Then there’s Newt’s deleting a chapter on climate change from his latest book even as the current “green pope,” Benedict XVI, calls on all people of good will to work to stop it. Or consider Newt’s $30,000 an hour non-lobbyist income from Freddie Mac; this is not, let me assure you, what the church means by a “living wage.”   Newt, baptized by a cardinal, seems to be more like the Piccolomini princes of the Renaissance, seduced by the church’s power and intellectual grandeur,  than like the nuns and priests and laypeople of my father’s generation of Catholics (and of my own)  laboring, as Jesus said, to bring “good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18).

Newt, of course, is not the only instance of this new breed of Catholics, or the Times article wouldn’t speak of a “new political era.” There are lots of others. Take, for example, Paul Ryan. Ryan’s budget is based in the same neo-liberal economic assumptions that inspired the British government to let a million Irish starve during the Potato Famine, so as to protect them from the dangerous notion that the world owed them a living. But Newt, somehow, is more offensive to me than all the others, sitting in basilicas listening to his wife sing in massed choirs before he goes out to preach a gospel of greed and dishonesty across the US.

I suppose I should just count my blessings: Sarah Palin, at least,  has abandoned holy mother church to share her wisdom and example with “Bible-believing” Christians around the world.

One problem with writing for periodicals is lag time. Back in 2001, an editor asked me to write an article about Christmas: ho, ho, ho. But the request came on October 11, 2001, when my mind was filled with bombed skyscrapers and the fear of anthrax.

In such a conundrum, it helps to remember that the incompatibility between Christmas and death is a consumerist construct. Fundamental to the Christian tradition is the understanding that Christmas and Easter are different manifestations of the same mystery. Jesus himself may have escaped Herod, but those other Jewish babies did not. The liturgical calendar keeps them out of sight for a few days, but ultimately, there’s no separating life and death.

Even the kings themselves, those wise men from the East, are implicated in this part-ho-ho, part-horror story.  In Matthew’s rendering of it we learn not only that these men brought gifts with them but what those gifts were: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.  Gold and frankincense fit nicely with the spirit of the season, thank you very much, but myrrh is another matter.  John the Evangelist makes the connection clear when he writes of Jesus’ burial: “So (Joseph of Arimathea) came and took away his body.  Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds weight”  (19:38-39).

A week or so after the September 11 attacks, at the end of an interview, NPR’s Terry Gross asked the writer Karen Armstrong if she had any last thoughts to leave with the audience.  Armstrong replied that although people might not appreciate her approach immediately, eventually she hoped they would come to think of the bombings as a revelation.  If we consider the suicide bombers to be our own version of men from the East bearing gifts, what the nature of that revelation might be becomes clearer.  We are more interested in the gold and the incense, but the myrrh is under the tree too.

“Years ago Thomas Berry, the cosmological prophet, remarked in a lecture at Grailville, in Loveland, Ohio, that Christianity had become preoccupied with the crucifixion in the 14^th century, when the Black Plague killed one European out of every three.  I took him to mean that this preoccupation was some sort of distortion; only years later did I realize that the need of many of us 70s liberal Catholics to distance ourselves from the morbidity of the cross was another form of distortion, or rather, another moment in the centuries-long Christian oscillation between resisting the cross and embracing it.

During the heydays of the women’s movement, Christian feminists struggled with the meaning of the cross. In Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today, the Canadian feminist theologian Cynthia Crysdale rejects the Anselmian argument that God, like an offended medieval warlord, required the death of Jesus as retribution for sin.  But she argues that this is not the only possible interpretation of the cross.  For Crysdale, “embracing travail” means struggling, along with Jesus, against the evil that is part of human existence, not from a desire to sacrifice our selves, but to heal and free those very selves.  In Tracing the Sign of the Cross, I explore the writings of four post-war American Catholics who know very well that there is no escaping loss, even if our financial resources exceed those of our immigrant forebears.  Embracing the death of Jesus is one way to work through those losses to new hope and understanding.

In many respects, I am a New Yorker.  My parents began taking me from Philadelphia to Manhattan as a small child, sharing with me their modernist passion for the bright lights and the big city.  I love every minute of the fifteen years I have lived in New York, identifying with its energy and relishing the sense that everything I want is a subway ride away.  During our decade in Berkeley, when I tried I try to explain my homesickness to my California colleagues, I invariably spoke of my longing for skyscrapers.

The World Trade Center was like a Christmas tree, a tall, glittering fantasy of promise and possibility.  I spent one of the happiest afternoons of my life there, at The Windows on the World, the famous restaurant at the top of World Trade Tower #1, celebrating my graduation from seminary with my family, my future husband, and some of my closest friends.

But after 9/11, the World Trade Center didn’t look like a Christmas tree any more.  The shards of building that were left standing looked more like a severe, modernist crucifix with its jagged ribs piercing the sky. Of course, another skyscraper will soon be completed near the place where the Golgotha-like remains of the previous towers once stood. And who knows?  I may even come to love it.  But I will never love it as optimistically as I did its predecessors.  .

Again this year, a few miles north of Ground Zero, a huge Christmas tree is glowing in Rockefeller Plaza, and people like me are looking up at it, singing carols.  Together these men and women will recreate an image of peace and harmony, of new birth, and the promise of salvation.  But if they get as far as Balthazar’s verse of “We Three Kings,” they will remember something else, something 9/11 taught us all too well:

“Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume

Breathes a life of gathering gloom.

Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying

Sealed in a stone cold tomb.”

Perhaps 9/11 has made us better able than we once were to hold the two parts of the Christmas mystery together in our hearts.

A longer version of this article appeared in the December 2001-February 2002 issue of EqualwRites, the newsletter of the Southeast Pennsylvania Women’s Ordination Conference.

In her first book, A Priceless View, Grail member Deirdre Cornell returns to her childhood home, Newburgh, NY, to share the life of the burgeoning migrant community there. But by the last few pages, she knows that she will leave. And her prediction is fulfilled: in 2004, Deirdre and her husband Kenney and three children move to rural Oaxaca, Mexico, as Maryknoll lay missioners, to deepen their understanding of the migrant cultures surrounding them in upstate New York. In American Madonna, Deirdre welcomes us into that experience.

At the heart of Deirdre’s reflections is Mary, the Mother of God. Here in the U.S., what with women’s liberation and the assimilation of white ethnic Catholics into the American middle class, devotion to the ostensibly sweet, passive Virgin Mary would seem a thing of the past. Yet as Deirdre observes, pilgrimages to sites of Marian apparitions around the world have mushroomed in the modern period, while the Madonna, bearing the marks of her various local inculturations, helps huge numbers of Latin American migrants in their journeys across the border to a new life in the North. Indeed, as Deirdre makes clear, the Virgin Mary is an ideal patroness for our globalized age, crossing borders during her lifetime between Israel and Egypt, and in her Assumption, between earth and heaven, even as she has accompanied travelers, missionaries and migrants across borders over the centuries.

Deirdre organizes American Madonna around three different manifestations of Mary: the Virgin of Solitude, the mourning Mother at the foot of the cross who watches over the capital of the southeastern Mexican province of Oaxaca; Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose apparition to St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in 1532 marks the beginning of the inculturation of Christianity among the indigenous peoples of Mexico; and my own particular favorite, Our Lady of Juquila, whose diminutive triangular figure has protected hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at her shrine on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca since 1719. In all cases, the Madonna crosses borders with her devotés, whether they are the Spanish missionaries who brought her with them to the Americas, the pilgrims journeying over hazardous terrain to reach her, or the migrants who bear her north and sometimes return home to her motherly embrace.

It would be a pity for you to conclude from this that American Madonna is a theological study of the Virgin Mary, however.  It is that, in part, but it is also much more. Indeed, what makes this book a wonderful read is the deftness with which Deirdre weaves together the multiple strands comprising the reality of the Madonna. The lives of Mexicans encountered on both sides of the border comprise one such strand; the history of the various Marian apparitions and the communities they inhabit is another. A third is the complex figure of the Virgin herself, her ancient history, her sexist appropriations, the protection and liberation she bestows on her followers. Yet another is the anthropology of pilgrimage and community, rendered accessible by clear writing.

And pulling it all together is the lyric voice of the author herself, from the wonderful portrayal, in the first chapter, of her own journey away from and back to Mary, to the traditional benedición with which her Oaxacan neighbors send her and her family back to the US at the conclusion. Indeed, it becomes clear as one drinks in this book that the “American Madonna” of the title is as much the mother who brings her high-risk twins to term in the middle of her time in Mexico as it is the Madonna with whom she crosses and re-crosses borders throughout.  Those of us still inclined to wonder how the Virgin Mary can inspire communities and individuals to resist their oppression have only to read Deirdre’s mesmerizing connection of the bonding process between mother and child–in this case, her own–with the solidarity engendered by devotion to the Virgin Mary in Oaxaca. As she asks, “Can we from the dominant culture catch new glimpses of our mother–even when she does not look like us–in images that originated beyond our borders?

(This review appeared originally in Gumbo, the newsletter of the Grail in the USA.)

For a lot of people, “globalization” is something smooth and shiny that makes better iPhones available.  For others, though, it’s an experience of displacement and being categorized as less than human.

In Guadalupe in New York, anthropologist Alyshia Gálvez zeroes in on one group strongly impacted by “globalization,” undocumented Mexican immigrants in New York City. Throughout the twentieth century, Latino New York was primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican, but since 1990, increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants have joined the mix. Some estimates put the current Mexican population of the city at 500,000. Up to half of these new New Yorkers are undocumented.

Guadalupe in New York conveys effectively the difficult situation of undocumented Mexican immigrants in New York, caught as they are between economic crises in Mexico and the increasing demonization of the immigrant labor needed to make the US function.   But primarily, Guadalupe in New York shows the ways in which devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe transforms the experience of undocumented Mexicans, instilling in them a sense of human dignity and of a trans-juridical, even cosmic, citizenship.

The subjects of Gálvez’s investigation are members of two related Mexican immigrant groups, the comités Guadalupanos, confraternal organizations based in Catholic parishes across the city and their umbrella organization, the Asociación Tepeyac.  Fundamental  to both is Guadalupanismo, devotion to Mary the Mother of God as she appeared to an indigenous Mexican convert,  Juan Diego, on the hill of Tepeyac, in the northern section of what is now Mexico City, in 1531.

Devotion to Guadalupe is a central aspect of Mexican culture.  But the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe is particularly associated with the accordance of a new dignity to indigenous Mexicans after the Spanish conquest. Guadalupe herself appeared as an indigenous woman, wearing colors, jewels and other unambiguous markers of local Nahuatl tradition. This in turn makes her a particularly apt bearer of a new sense of human dignity for undocumented Mexicans in the US.

Gálvez’s ethnographic study focuses particularly on several aspects of Guadalupanismo in New York. The best known of these is the annual torch run, in which a torch is carried by Guadalupan devotés from the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, across the Mexico/US border, and through the United States, arriving on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Patrick’s, the Roman Catholic cathedral in Manhattan. As a highly public event, the torch run is perhaps the most confrontational of the three devotional actions examined in Guadalupe in New York.  By crossing the border and publicly proclaiming their existence,  participants in and coordinators of the torch run assert “an alternative definition of citizenship: one not arbitrarily constrained by borders…(but) premised on a very particular kind of Catholic humanism articulated through Guadalupan devotion.”

A second devotion is the celebration of the Viacrucis, the way of the cross, by comités in the various New York parishes, and by comités working together on the Asociación Tepeyac’s city-wide Viacrucis del Inmigrante each Good Friday. While parish celebrations of the Viacrucis vary somewhat, with more emphasis on the social resonances of Jesus’ suffering in some parishes than others, by and large Gálvez finds that in these Guadalupan celebrations, “the traditional script describing Jesus Christ’s path is overlaid with a new script, comparing his trails at each of the stations of the cross to the humiliations and injustices suffered by immigrants.” This overlay is especially evident in the Good Friday city-wide Viacrucis del Inmigrante which begins at the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Services and then winds its way around the financial district of lower Manhattan. Throughout the procession the “Roman” soldiers scream at Jesus , “Camina, camina, ilegal!” (“Walk, walk, illegal!”)

The  third Guadalupan devotion Gálvez studies is La Misión Guadalupana, in which members of a comité  carry a figure, often a statue, of the Virgin of Guadalupe from one home to the next.  In this devotion Mexican immigrant families are welcomed by Guadalupe and invited to participate in the comité or renew their commitment.  Because the misión Guadalupana is a much smaller and quieter devotional practice than the two described above, it’s possible to imagine them dropping under the radar altogether. But Gálvez demonstrates that they are fundamental to the formation of the Guadalupan community that in turn enables undocumented Mexican immigrants in New York to develop a new more deeply human sense of citizenship.

In making this argument, that for undocumented Mexican immigrants in New York devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is integral to the formation of a sense of dignity and self worth beyond contemporary desiccated definitions of citizenship, Alyshia Gálvez moves well beyond the understanding of religion that was fundamental to western social science in the second half of the twentieth century.  According to that understanding, religious beliefs and practices distracted human beings from contending with the really-real—economics, politics, even biology. Members of religio-ethnic groups, as they became assimilated into advanced democratic societies, were expected to shed their quaint devotional and organizational customs, learn  civil religion, become secularized. By the end of the twentieth century, and especially since 9/11, increasing numbers of scholars have been forced to acknowledge that this scenario never adequately represented the complexity of human experience. In works like Guadalupe in New York, this long-overdue recognition comes into its own.

(A longer version of this review appeared in The Living Pulpit, Vol 19, No 1, [Jan-March 2010] 30-31.)

For readers from New York who may have read my last post, “And Jesus said,’Don’t frack,’” I’m pleased to report that New York has extended until January  11 the opportunity to comment on the Draft SGEIS document. This, I’m told, is a good sign; we are having some impact.

In addition to following the suggestions in my previous post on how to comment on SGEIS, you can also send a letter to Governor Cuomo and to the NY DEC commissioner through the webpage of Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, an impressive activist group.

Some, of course, are in favor of fracking, because of the jobs it’s supposed to create, the profits to be gained from marketing a new form of energy, and because a domestic fuel helps free us from our dependence on foreign oil. Some even argue, because natural gas discharges less CO2 into the atmosphere when burned than oil and coal do , that it will help to prevent climate change. But as Elizabeth Kolbert argues convincingly in this week’s New Yorker, these arguments minimize (when they don’t outright ignore) the enormous damage that fracking does to the environment. This includes discharging large quantities of methane into the atmosphere, contributing more to climate change than CO2 does. All told, fracking is a very bad deal, even for the cash-strapped farmers who lease their land to gas companies, and then get sick from the pollutants discharged on their property, or watch their water catch on fire. (For more on all of this,  try watching Josh Fox’s galvanizing film, Gasland.)

For the next two weeks–until December 13–residents of New York state have several opportunities to weigh in on the harms of fracking. They/we can do so by commenting on the inadequacies of a document released in September by the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, the “Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement,” (SGEIS), which paves the way for fracking in New York State.

The first opportunity is to turn out for the last in a series of DEC hearings on SGEIS to be held tomorrow, November 30, from 1-4 and 6-9 PM at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers Street, in Manhattan. You arrive, sign up, and get up to three minutes to comment on the document, that is, on fracking. There’s also going to be a press conference there at noon during which you can wave anti-fracking signs, and an anti-fracking rally at 4:30 PM (ditto on the signs.) Here’s some information about what to say when you comment.

Or if you can’t make it to Manhattan tomorrow, you can send comments about SGEIS to the DEC, or record your comments for the DEC on-line. The anti-fracking activist group “United for Action” provides excellent suggestions for what to say about SGEIS on its web page.

Finally, of course, Jesus didn’t say “Don’t frack.” But I am struck, as the hope-filled season of Advent gets underway, by how many of the readings speak of water, as when we hear from the prophet Joel, in yesterday’s morning prayer, that  ”all the streams of Judah will flow with water.” Surely God doesn’t intend that water to be full of carcinogens, or to catch on fire.

Turns out they are notices you get when another blogpage has linked to yours.

Another reason, besides stupidity, that I didn’t know what pingbacks are is that I had never gotten one until the other day.

So what other blogpage do you think I heard back from? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, wishing I would say something nice about them? Sister Elizabeth Johnson, thanking me for my praise  of her book?

Not on your life. My first pingback was from Chicken-ark.com, a blog about raising chickens, building chicken coops, etc. (Turns out a chicken ark is a certain kind coop. Who knew?)

In the interest of expanding the number of my followers, I am seriously considering renaming my blog “An American Catholic on the Margins of Chickenland.” Be sure to check back and see what I decide.