Giving Thanks for Father Roy
November 22, 2012 at 11:30 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 5 CommentsTags: Catholic women's ordination, Father Roy Bourgeois, Janice Sevre-Duszynska, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, My Journey from Silence to Solidarity, Roy Bourgeois MM, School of the Americas Watch
Well, on Monday, as many of us were planning our Thanksgiving menus, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers announced that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had dismissed Father Roy Bourgeois from their order. Bourgeois had been a member of Maryknoll for forty-five years. The cause of his dismissal was his refusal to renounce his participation in the ordination of a Roman Catholic Womanpriest, Janice Sevre-Duszynska, in August of 2008, and his support of women’s ordination more broadly.
For me, the remarkable part of this announcement was that it didn’t come sooner than it did. The Vatican notified Bourgeois soon after the 2008 ordination that he was excommunicated, or, as they prefer to put it, that he had excommunicated himself by his actions. In the four years since then, Bourgeois met twice with the Maryknoll leadership to discuss the situation, most recently, last June. An article in the National Catholic Reporter quotes Bourgeois to the effect that “the discussion made no mention of his removal, but instead focused on the rights of conscience of Catholics and ‘the importance of people of faith and members of Maryknoll to be able to speak openly and freely without fear … of being dismissed or excommunicated.'” A letter from Maryknoll in March 2011 did state, however, that Bourgeois faced laicization and removal from the order if he did not comply with Vatican demands that he publicly recant his support of women’s ordination.
My own assumption is that Maryknoll did all that was in its power to prevent or at least postpone Bourgeois’s expulsion. Apparently a vote among the leadership last spring resulted in a draw, a pretty remarkable outcome almost four years down the pike. People who don’t follow the women’s ordination controversy in the Catholic Church closely might wonder why I say this. A woman on a listserv to which I belong found Bourgeois’s expulsion “shocking. But let’s be clear: the institutional Catholic Church considers ordination one of the most grievous sins it’s possible to commit. In a 2010 document, the Vatican placed the ordination of women in the same category of grave sin as the sexual abuse of children by clergy. When criticized that clergy guilty of sex abuse were not excommunicated, as those involved in women’s ordination are, the Vatican spokesperson suggested that being defrocked was more serious than excommunication. Excommunication, after all, can be reversed. As my husband used to say about the cops when we lived in Philadelphia, “These boys don’t play.” Maryknoll took considerable risk by not giving Roy Bourgeois the boot sooner, though I myself think the group’s Nov. 19th statement goes too far in its attempt to make up with Rome.
One of the reasons for Maryknoll’s dragging its feet on the expulsion, of course, is that Bourgeois is a genuine American Catholic hero. As narrated in his recently published autobiographical booklet, My Journey from Silence to Solidarity, Bourgeois was a decorated Vietnam war veteran who went on to do missionary work in Bolivia and El Salvador. These experiences so radicalized him that he joined with other activists to protest US involvement with violent Latin American dictatorships and to found the School of the America’s Watch. Though he doesn’t report exactly how much time he has spent in jail for his protests, it’s likely that historians will one day list Bourgeois with American Catholic justice activists like Dorothy Day, Phil and Dan Berrigan, and Liz McAlister.
Bourgeois’ analysis of injustice in Latin America led him eventually to protest the inequality of women in the Catholic Church. Indeed, he met the woman at whose ordination he preached, Janice Sevre-Duszynska, because she was a member of through the School of the Americas Watch. I am myself uncomfortable with Bourgeois’ decision to illustrate the section on women’s ordination in My Journey from Silence to Solidarity with photographs of US civil rights and German anti-Nazi activists for obvious reasons: excommunication is significantly different from lynching or execution. But like the anti-apartheid hero Patricia Fresen, Bourgeois’s experiences beyond white European and American divinity schools and faith communities makes his use of such analogies understandable. Compared to the many American priests and bishops who privately favor women’s ordination but wouldn’t dare to speak out for fear of retribution, Roy Bourgeois is a real gender-justice hero.
My main concern now is how Bourgeois will live in his old age. He’s 74, not a good time for starting over financially; members of religious orders depend on their orders’ facilities and resources for retirement and end-of life care. Perhaps School of the Americas Watch has been paying into a 401(K) for him, though it’s hard to imagine. The rest of us can show our gratitude by buying a hard copy of My Journey from Silence to Solidarity. Send your check to Roy Bourgeois, P. O. Box 3330, Columbus, GA 31903 (706-682-5369). The price is listed as $7 (including postage and handling) but you can always include something extra.
Distinguished Pastor Emeritus Gets the Boot.
July 15, 2011 at 12:52 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: Catholic Diocese of Oakland, Rev. George Crespin
Recently, a number of distinguished US Catholics have been condemned, or insulted, or excommunicated by the church to which they committed their lives. Among these are Mercy Sister Mary Margaret McBride of Phoenix, excommunicated for saving the life of a mother of four unable to carry a non-viable fetus to term; Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois, excommunicated for speaking publicly in support of women’s ordination; and Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, whose book, Quest for the Living God, was condemned by the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for making God sound too connected to human beings.
I have met several of these folks, or heard them speak, but I can’t say that I know them well. Now, somebody I do know, somebody I consider a friend, has joined the list of the institutionally abused. Father George Crespin, 75 years old, pastor emeritus of St. Joseph the Worker Parish, in Berkeley, CA, has been put out of the rectory where he lived for the past thirty years by the new pastor, Rev. John Direen. Since his retirement as pastor in 2005, Father Crespin has been the primary minister to the large Latino community in the parish.
St. Joseph the Worker was for decades a hub of Catholic social justice activism in the San Francisco Bay area. The pastor who preceded George Crespin was Father Bill O’Donnell, a social justice icon and disciple of Cesar Chavez who was arrested approximately 250 times during his years as a priest. George Crespin became pastor in 1995, continued the parish’s commitment to social justice and the poor, and welcomed the presence of the admittedly feisty O’Donnell in the rectory for seven years, until O’Donnell died in 2002. Now, however, Direen has put Crespin out, though Crespin is downright mild compared to Bill O’Donnell.
To grasp what’s going on here, it’s helpful to know that Crespin, and O’Donnell before him, were appointed by Bishop John Cummins, a “John XXIII” bishop, widely revered for his Vatican II sensibilities and practice. In 2003, Bishop Cummins was replaced by Bishop Allen Vigneron, a “John Paul II” bishop, now the archbishop of Detroit (and one of the bishops who condemned Elizabeth Johnson’s book). His successor in Oakland, Bishop Cordileone, was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI.
The occasion for George Crespin’s removal from his home. according to a report posted on the diocesan webpage, was Crespin’s violation of rules regarding the administration of the sacraments. Now two other things you need to know about George Crespin are that 1)he was the head of the Marriage Tribunal, and then the chancellor of the Oakland diocese under Bishop John Cummins and 2) he’s a Chicano. The odds that the former chancellor of a diocese is just breaking the rules are not high. Doubtless what’s at issue is a difference of interpretation regarding the administration of the sacraments, one exacerbated by ethno-cultural differences. But in the Catholic Church, the guy on top (and I use word “guy” advisedly here) always wins.
Having observed Crespin celebrate the sacraments over a number of years, I can guarantee you that his behavior falls well within the Catholic tradition, though perhaps not the obsessive-compulsive strain introduced by Bishop Vigneron. (Vigneron was noted for saying, when he was the rector of the seminary in Detroit, that it was the only orthodox Catholic seminary in the US.) The mistreatment of my friend George Crespin reminds me of a story told me by a priest friend here in Brooklyn: a younger priest, recently arrived in the parish, warned him that it was irreverent not to vest before returning the host to the tabernacle after weekly all-afternoon exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. My friend told him God was more interested in his service to the poor. Luckily, the young priest was not the pastor.
My final reflection on the expulsion of a highly respected pastor and former diocesan chancellor from the rectory in which he lived for thirty years has to do with the declining number of vocations to the Catholic priesthood in the US. Anybody who would become a priest after witnessing this kind of spectacle is too dumb for us to have him.
Hiroshima at 75
August 6, 2020 at 9:29 am | Posted in nuclear war | 3 CommentsBack in the day, Eleanor Walker, my mentor in the Grail movement, was given to saying that she didn’t read her books; she “felt warmly toward them.”
One of my books that I have felt warmly toward over the years but never read is John Hersey’s Hiroshima. With the 75th anniversary of that bombing today, on August 6, I decided that it was time to read it.
When I began to read, I realized that I also hadn’t actually read the subtitle: The Story of Six Human Beings who Survived the Explosion of the Atom Bomb over Hiroshima. For the book is, indeed, a masterful interweaving of the stories of six individuals who lived through the bombing—what they experienced before, during, and soon after the blast. At first I feared that the book might be too much of a happy story, since it focused on survivors, but I soon gave up on that: the book details what the survivors suffered as well as what those around them suffered and in many cases died from. But the only way Hersey could collect their stories was if they had, indeed, survived.
Another thing I totally overlooked was that the book was published in 1946—a year after the bombing—and had previously been published in The New Yorker. How on earth did Hersey ever gather the detail he weaves into these stories in such a short period of time? It did not surprise me to learn, however, that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction two years before Hiroshima, so extraordinarily well-told are those stories.
The six “individuals” whose stories Hersey interweaves are Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works; Dr. Masakazu Fujii, the head of his own private hospital; Mrs. Hatsoyu Nakamura, a widow with two children; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit: Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the large, modern Red Cross Hospital, and the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church. All six were in different locations somewhat removed the center of city when the bomb exploded at 8:15 in the morning, which is part of the reason that they survived.
A year after the bombing, Hersey tells us, Miss Sasaki was a cripple, having suffered extreme damage to her legs when the Tin Works collapsed; Dr. Fujii’s hospital, which had taken him decades to build, had collapsed into a river and he had nothing to rebuild it with; the widow Nakamura and her children were destitute; Rev. Tanimoto’s church had been destroyed and “had no prospects of rebuilding”; Father Kleinsorge, who had labored ferociously to help others after the bombing, was back in the hospital with radiation sickness; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of doing the work he once could do. “The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same” (114).
A number of details have stayed with me from reading Hiroshima. One is of a survivor passing by a victim whose face had fallen off and another seeing someone with fluid from their melted eyes running down their cheeks; that the radiation sickness caused three stages of suffering and sometimes death for victims, but that the bombing also caused a wide range of weeds and plants to spring up. I guess radiation isn’t all bad!
It also struck me, though it did not particularly surprise me, that the details of the bomb’s heinous effects were repressed by the US, who had occupied Japan immediately after the bombing of Nagasaki three days later, but that Japanese scientists circulated the information widely. Also striking was that the Methodist minister, Rev. Tanimoto, who worked like a crazy person reaching out to suffering survivors despite his own radiation sickness, had access to many fewer resources than the German Jesuits in Hiroshima, who had been able to rebuild their chapel and provide food to survivors fairly soon after the bombing.
Finally almost inconceivable to me was Hersey’s reporting that many survivors of the bombing did not complain about their suffering; they believed they experienced it out of loyalty to their country and the emperor. Similarly, I could hardly believe that a good number of them remained indifferent throughout their lives about the ethics of the bombing. It was just the kind of thing countries did in order to win, they believed. Others, however, hated the US ever after, as well they might have.
It can be tempting to read Hiroshima as a well-written story of something that happened three-quarters of a century ago to people on the other side of the world. But to do so would be a serious error, since various experts like William Perry are warning us that a new nuclear arms race is now underway, with the psychotic in the White House legally empowered to push the nuclear button without consulting anyone. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists now puts the hand of the Doomsday Clock at a hundred seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. If we don’t want to pass people on the street whose faces have fallen off or enable the melting of other people’s eyes—or our own—we have to remember Hiroshima, protest nuclear funding, and most important of all, vote in November.
This article may appear in the August 2020 issue of Gumbo, the monthly publication of the Grail in the US.
An Introduction to Environmental Justice
October 26, 2015 at 3:02 pm | Posted in Climate Change | 1 CommentTags: "Cancer Alley", Dr. Robert Bullard, environmental justice, environmental racism, Peggy M. Shepherd, Rev. Benjamin Chavis, We Act for Environmental Justice Harlem
Well, you haven’t heard from me for a while, in large part because I’ve been running around like a chicken giving talks and teaching classes. I’ll be sharing some of the other talks with you in the future, but today I’m going to fill you in on the first two of a series of luncheon seminars on environmental justice that my husband, Keith Russell, the Rev. Lori Hartman, and I are leading up at New York Theological Seminary this fall.
The first session was an introduction to the environmental justice movement and the environmental racism that made the movement necessary. We discussed two on-line videos, the first a case study of the dire environmental situation in Camden, New Jersey, a majority Black city a hundred miles south of New York. Some of the seminar participants were shocked that such things were going on so close to NYC; later they would be even more shocked by the situation in Harlem and the South Bronx.
The second video was “Environmental Justice on the Cutting Edge,” a lecture by Dr. Robert Bullard, the “father of the environmental justice moment,” about what the environmental justice movement is. We began viewing it about ten minutes in, when Bullard actually begins talking. People found the series of Power Point maps that Bullard shows especially informative.
With the discussion about these two videos as background, the second session focused on environmental justice as a grass-roots phenomenon driven by groups and actions in local communities. I started the session by giving a talk about the movements in which the environmental justice movement is rooted, after which we watched and discussed another case-study video, this one about community action against environmental racism in Chester, Pennsylvania. Finally, I introduced our distinguished speaker, Peggy Morrow Shepherd, director and co-Founder of We Act for Environmental Justice, the grass-roots environmental justice organization in Harlem.
Here’s my talk:
In the lecture video that we viewed last week, Dr. Robert Bullard said that the environmental justice movement isn’t a top down movement where experts tell the people what the problem is and what they should do about it. It’s a grass roots movement where the people being harmed by environmental racism come together, get organized, and fight back.
In fact, the environmental justice movement is intrinsically connected to, or even descended from, four grassroots movements that came before it. These four movements, as Luke Cole and Sheila Foster explain in their wonderful book, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement, are the civil rights movement, the anti-toxics movement, the United Farm Workers|, and the indigenous people’s movement. (Much of this talk is taken from the first chapter of the Cole/Foster book).
The first and most influential of these, of course, was the civil rights movement, with church-based civil rights leaders, Latino as well as African-American, pioneering the early actions against environmental racism. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was in Memphis to support the garbage workers’ strike there when he was killed in 1968. The first protest against environmental racism, in 1992, against the dumping of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in African American majority Warren County, NC, was led by civil rights activist and African American minister Dr. Benjamin Chavis. The first national report on environmental racism was issued by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, which was also led by Rev. Chavis.
Especially important in the development of the environmental justice movement was the civil rights emphasis on direct action and refusing to accept claims from experts who try to argue, for example, that environmental degradation in majority Black, Latino or indigenous areas are somehow random, unintentional. The five hundred people arrested in acts of civil disobedience against PCBs, the extremely toxic chemical compounds dumped in Warren County, NC, directly echoed earlier civil rights sit-ins and acts of civil disobedience.
Civil rights leaders in positions of political power have also made a difference; Congressman John Lewis introduced the Environmental Justice Act in 1992; it did not pass, but raised environmental justice as a public issue.
The anti-toxics movement was also really important. It burst into national prominence in the late 1970s when President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a disaster area and evacuated residents of a housing development built on a former toxic waste dump there. This was the beginning of “grassroots environmentalism” because it and similar actions were about the effects of toxic waste on human health, not only about wilderness and wildlife. Subsequently, seven thousand anti-toxics groups formed across the country, but they tended to lack the kind of national organizing skills that characterized the civil rights movement.
Nonetheless, anti-toxics groups advanced the national policy of pollution prevention by getting certain industrial chemicals banned. They also led the way by using (or in some cases, discrediting) scientific knowledge. Academic research has proven essential to getting toxics banned across the country. The anti-toxics movement also helped to shift the focus from legal to economic structures that were purported to be “natural” but weren’t. Profit fixation can be as harmful as unjust laws.
The third precursor of the environmental justice movement, the United Farm Workers, brought together the quest for Latino civil rights with labor organizing, focusing in particular, on the toxic effects of pesticides in the fields where farm workers labored. It started with successful organizing to ban the use of DDT in the later 1960s, an action that was the first instance of organizing against environmental racism in the US. Latinos have also organized against excessive logging that destroys the environment, and against strip mining, especially in the Southwest.
The fourth grassroots movement that has had a significant impact on the environmental justice movement is the indigenous people’s movement. This is so in part because indigenous people are all around the world, and so have helped build connections between environmental justice groups here in the U.S. and in other countries, especially in the Global South. One of the first indigenous environmental actions in the U.S. was in the late 1980s when a Navajo tribe in Northeast Arizona organized against the siting of a toxic waste incinerator on their reservation. This initial action has now grown into an international network of forty grassroots indigenous environmental justice groups.
The other significant contribution of the indigenous peoples’ movement to the environmental justice movement is the spiritual dimension it brings, specifically to the understanding of the environment by Christian and other western environmental justice groups. This is so because indigenous people understand themselves to be connected much more directly to the earth than many of us in the West do. Intrinsic to the indigenous movement is the sense that indigenous people are a part of everything, not set above it. This contrasts with the “dominion theory of creation” believed by many Christian groups, that God created us to have dominion over the earth and subdue it, not to be part of it.
But this indigenous notion of being one with the earth is precisely the “integral ecology” that Pope Francis called all people to in his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, last May. So some Christians do in fact share this notion of deep connection with all creation. This integral spirituality, introduced by the indigenous people’s movement, is present throughout the “Principles of Environmental Justice,” formulated by the first People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit in 1991. These principles affirm the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity, and the interdependence of all species.
One group that Cole and Foster do not mention in From the Ground Up, but that has played a highly significant role in the environmental justice movement, is women. But Bob Bullard and Damu Smith devote an entire chapter to women in The Quest for Environmental Justice. It’s called “Women Warriors of Color on the Front Line” of the environmental justice movement. They begin by mentioning three women of color who have received national and even international acclaim for their leadership in the environmental justice movement.
One of these is the Kenyan, Wangari Maathai, who received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for founding and leading the Green Belt Movement that mobilized poor women to plant 30 million trees in Africa over a thirty year period. Another is Margie Richard, from Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” who was the first African American woman to receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. And the third is Peggy M. Shepherd, co-founder and director of We Act for Environmental Justice in Harlem, who received the 2003 Heinz Award for the Environment and who, I’m excited to say, will be speaking with us in a few minutes.
The rest of the article by Bullard and Smith allows Latina, African, and Native American women to speak for themselves about the grass-roots actions they have led across the country. In a certain sense, women’s leadership of the environmental justice movement is the unstated theme of our seminar today. I invite you to keep that theme in mind as we show a short video and then hear from our distinguished speaker, Peggy Shepherd. The video is about grass roots organizing against environmental racism in Chester Pennsylvania, a city on the Delaware River about an hour south of Philadelphia.
Before we begin, let me add that this video has special meaning for me because I was born in Chester, as were my parents. But after World War II, most of the white people moved out, and Chester now has a population that’s 85 percent people of color, and is a leading cancer cluster in the U.S. I also mention this because one of my earliest memories is of watching the smoke billow out of the oil refineries in Chester, back when it was a majority white city. And it happens that my mother, her sister, their mother and I, as well as my aunt’s only son, all have had terrible abdominal cancers caused by a genetic defect, and three of the five of us died from those cancers, the three who spent most of their lives in Chester. Now nobody has proven that the toxic chemicals in the air in Chester caused those genetic defects, but I myself strongly suspect that that’s the case.
I say this because I think it’s a great pity that in the U.S. since World War II, working class white people haven’t realized that they have more in common with people of color, especially with regard to toxic chemicals in the water and the air, than they have in common with rich white people who live up in the mountains or wherever.
So here’s the Chester video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Opr-uzet7Q (9 minutes) and do be sure to notice the significant role women play in the various actions.
Finally, I am honored to introduce Peggy Morrow Shepherd, director and co-founder of We Act for Environmental Justice in Harlem, and recipient of the 10th Annual Heinz Award for the Environment and many other honors. (In case you want to get a sense of our speaker, Peggy Shepherd’s bio is on the We Act webpage at http://www.weact.org/staff-peggy-shepard and her Ted Talk on environmental justice is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJX_MXaXbJA.
The third session of our luncheon seminar series, on the relationship between climate change and environmental justice, will be held at New York Theological Seminary, 475 Riverside Drive in Manhattan, on Wednesday November 11 from noon to 1:30 PM. Please join us if you can.
Race Murder and Ecological Destruction
June 23, 2015 at 10:20 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentTags: " Religion Dispatches, Charleston Murders, environmental destruction, Kevin McCarthy, Laudato Si, Paul Ryan, Pope Francis, slavery, the steam engine
The pastor at my parish, Michael Perry, had his work cut out for him last Sunday.
Our Lady of Refuge is a tri-lingual, multiracial parish in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. (Some say it’s in Midwood, but that’s another discussion). There are a few odd lots of white folk there, me, for example, but basically, Refuge is a Caribbean-Latino-Haitian parish.
So the pastor pretty much had to begin by acknowledging the murder of nine African Americans at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston the previous Wednesday. This is not to suggest that he wouldn’t have wanted to in any case. But the murder of nine people of color in a church can’t help but mean a great great deal to a church full of people of color. As Father Perry said, the people of Our Lady of Refuge were grateful that the murders hadn’t happened there.
Then there was Father’s Day. Encouraging fathers–and mothers and families–is one of the things Catholic churches do well, and Refuge did so, acknowledging fathers at various points in the liturgy, and conducting a blessing ritual for all the fathers present before the last blessing.
And then there was Francis’s encyclical, “On the Care of Our Common Home.” Apparently a lot of priests and bishops didn’t mention the encyclical, despite the fact that it was garnering massive attention around the world, in the media, from other faith leaders, even from secular environmentalists. But Michael Perry was not one of those priests or bishops. He spoke of the encyclical in his introduction to the liturgy; he talked about it in his sermon; and he spoke about it again in his comments before the end of Mass. The earth is our home, he reminded us, and the Pope reminds us that we have to care for her as we care for the poor. I especially loved what he had to say about the attacks on the encyclical on Fox News. You go, Father Perry!
All in all, this was a lot of stuff to fit into one liturgy and sermon (along with the usual readings, offertory, canon, consecration, communion routine.) And I can’t really imagine any way that the pastor could have dealt with Father’s Day except the way he did–directly.
One way that he might have consolidated his treatment of the Charleston racial murders and the Pope’s call for us to stop making our common home into a pile of filth is that in certain respects, they are the same violence. And I’m not being metaphorical here: the destruction of Black lives in Charleston (and elsewhere) and the destruction of our common home are underpinned by the same mistaken vision–that the earth, and people whose color resembles the earth, are equally worthy of mistreatment. The nineteenth century ideology of Social Darwinism was an inherent part of all this: black and brown people had evolved from the animals, who had in turn merged from the soil. At the top of the heap were white people, who had the right to abuse those beneath them by virtue of being on top.
Another dimension of the link between racism and environmental destruction is that so many (ostensibly white) people don’t understand the ways in which their own ancestors were once associated with the earth. One of the things that most astounds me about the noxious politics of Irish-Americans like Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy is that they are oblivious to the reality that the Irish immigrants in this country were considered much farther down the evolutionary pyramid than Irish-Americans think they are today. The phrase “black Irish” can be illustrated by a cartoon from the nineteenth-century anti-Catholic caricaturist Thomas Nast portraying Catholic bishops as crocodiles crawling out of the water. And then there was the eighteenth century English travel writer who described the Irish as “primitive savages in the sea of Virginia.” Paul Ryan is genealogically a lot closer to those murdered folks at Mother Emanuel than he cares to admit.
A French historian whose name I’m blanking on (Mouthot, maybe) also clarifies the link between environmental destruction and Wednesday’s race murders when he argues that the end of slavery was less about abolitionist virtue than it was about the invention of the steam engine. Coal, and later oil, were cheaper and easier to maintain and house than actual human beings, so once the steam engine was invented, slaves came to be seen as less and less economical. This helps me understand why it was that the British government who allowed a million Irish to die in the Potato Famine of the late 1840s were adamantly abolitionist. Each policy was more economical.
So to return to my pastor’s sermon: while the shooting of nine members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and Pope Francis’s encyclical on the care for our common home may seem to be two different topics, actually, destroying our brown (and green and yellow and white) mother earth and our brown and black brothers and sisters are pretty much one and the same activity. And as Papa Francesco says, until we understand that we are fundamentally connected with God, Creation, and one another, we are in for really big trouble.
Our Crabapple Tree
May 4, 2015 at 10:15 am | Posted in Amazon Rainf, Amazon Rainforest | 2 CommentsTags: Hahn Pham SJ
Well, a couple of weeks ago it was my birthday. Sixty-eight years old. A little hard to take in.
When I was a teen-ager, what I loved best about my birthday was that the crabapple in the backyard came into blossom then. We had moved to the house with the crabapple tree the summer before I started high school For twelve years previously we had lived in a much smaller stucco post-war “twin” house several miles south of the Philadelphia city line. Four of us–my parents, my grandmother (“Dommie”) and I–shared three tiny bedrooms and one bathroom. Then, when I was seven, my brother was born and he and I shared the smallest of the three rooms until seven years later we moved a few miles south to a four bedroom house, with an extra half bathroom. But what I loved best was the crabapple tree in the backyard, and how it invariably burst into pink blossoms by the time of my birthday on April 18.
After thirty years or so in that house, long after my grandmother had died and my brother Joseph and I were out in the wide, wide world, my parents sold the house and moved to a retirement community a few miles southwest, in Media. The couple who bought the house seemed nice enough, with two little boys. When I was doing my Ph.D. at Temple in the 1990s, I used to drive by the house, on Crum Lynne Rd., on my way to visit my parents (and soon, just my mother) out at Riddle Village.
That was how I discovered that the nice young couple had cut down the crabapple tree and the rose garden next to the house. They had cemented the two areas and put in an above the ground swimming pool and a basketball court. I almost cried..
I do not think of those people with hostility. I’m sure they considered it a good thing to enable their kids to get some exercise, become athletes, whatever. I do think of them as symbols of what human beings–especially human beings with some money to invest–are doing to the crabapple trees, and the Amazon rainforest, the wetlands, and on and on. With the best will in the world, we are destroying not only our own lungs but also the lungs of the planet.
There’s a happy ending to this story, though, or at least a hopeful one. When I was a seminary professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley from 1999 to 2009, I worked with a lot of wonderful students. One of them was a Jesuit seminarian, now Father Hanh Pham, SJ. Hanh made some insightful contributions to my Religion and American Film class. He was also a terrific photographer.
At one point there was an exhibit of Hahn’s photos at JSTB (The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, now at Santa Clara University). There I found a wonderful photograph of some crabapple buds. The buds were surrounded by snow, so it wasn’t my birthday yet. But they were beautiful nonetheless. A framed copy of the photograph hangs in our apartment, so I see it quite often. And if am not too much of a Luddite,I have shared a copy of that photo with you next to this blog post, courtesy of Father Hanh who’s now in campus ministry out at Regis University in Denver. In looking at it, please hope with me that human beings like that young couple down near Philly, and like us, will see the error of our ways and begin planting crabapple trees instead of cutting them down.
What if We Prayed–or Preached–Differently?
March 12, 2014 at 11:44 am | Posted in Environment | 9 CommentsTags: "The Great Work, Ash Wednesday, Climate Change, fossil fuel industry, Grailville, Lent, The Grail, Thomas Berry
Lately, I’ve been reading Thomas Berry. Berry was a “geologian”–an ecological theologian–who began decades ago talking about the environment, and the universe, and the cosmos, and how we’d better start taking them all more seriously. At Grailville, the Grail’s organic farm in southwest Ohio, we were reading Berry’s articles on this sort of thing in mimeographed form, before they were published, in the mid-1970s.
Just now I’m reading Berry’s The Great Work (1999). Throughout its two-hundred pages, Berry argues that we must leave behind the current era of planetary destruction and move into a period when we humans become present to the Earth in a manner that is mutually enhancing. What we need, he tells us, is a new story of the universe, a “numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision but also the energies needed for bringing ourselves and the entire planet into a new order of survival.” (71). Fifteen years after the book’s publication, with glaciers melting and extreme weather events multiplying, we need such a story even more.
But where do we get it? Reading Berry has me asking this question as I’ve attended various Catholic services during and just prior to this holy season of Lent.
First there was the Gospel for the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, Matt. 6:24 to 34. It’s a well-known reading, in which Jesus urges his followers not to be anxious about their lives. God knows we need to hear that. But I was struck by the passage about the birds. “Consider the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap…Yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
Now two thousand years ago, this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say; religions like Judaism were working to get people to recognize their dignity and not behave like animals. But today, we are destroying approximately three hundred species a day, and we know, as Jesus did not, that these species are an essential part of planetary survival, providing, for example, bacteria to be used in the drugs of the future, not to mention in food production, cleaning the air, etc. Maybe it’s time we stopped telling ourselves that we are of more value than other species. When I mentioned this to the priest on the way out after Mass, he looked at me as if I’d said that Jesus had actually been a hedgehog.
Then there was Ash Wednesday, with the famous verse spoken by the minister as she/he applies ashes to foreheads: “Remember you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” As with Jesus’ statement about the birds, there was good reason for the authors to use the word “dust,” (or “sand,” as it was in the Latin) when the original story was written in Genesis. There’s a lot more sand in the Middle East than there is in North America, so lots of people probably did end up getting buried in it. And even today, most people no doubt get the basic idea–the burnt palm from which the ashes come is a metaphor for death. And more people get cremated all the time. But imagine if the verse were “Remember you are earth, and unto earth you shall return,” and the minister rubbed dirt on our foreheads each Ash Wednesday. Or that he (would that it were she!) preached that we really do come from the earth and will return there. Maybe then we Christians would start demanding that the government no longer allow the destruction of our topsoil at the current terrifying rate.
Finally, there was the liturgy for the first Sunday of Lent, at a progressive parish in Manhattan. I made it through all three readings without being reminded directly of the contributions the Christian tradition has made to human alienation from the cosmos. But then there was this verse in the Offertory hymn which was aimed at inspiring hope in the worshippers: “Look to God when cynics say our planet’s doom is sealed. Look to God by whose great pow’r the dead were raised and the lepers were healed.”
Of course, if you take the words literally, they’re fine. Earth’s doom isn’t sealed. But half the people in this country believe that climate change is a fraud. And a good number more believe that it really is coming, but that that’s fine too, because it’s just a sign of the end times and the return of Jesus. Maybe hymn writers need to be a bit more careful about encouraging such attitudes.
And some of us who are less confident about the end times as a solution note that in its 2013 report, the UN’s 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that we have approximately fifteen years to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions before certain aspects of climate change become irreversible. Maybe those of us who fear doom is over the horizon aren’t so much cynics as realists. And maybe genuine hope involves demanding that our clergy start preaching about planetary survival and that our government stop allowing the fossil fuel industry to trade that survival for big bucks.
The Earth and Those Who Dwell Therein
March 21, 2011 at 10:02 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentTags: Anne Hope, Governor Tom Corbett, Hylan Boulevard, Ian Frazier, Japanese earthquake, Perth Amboy, potholes, radiation, Seals, Staten Island, Temple University, The Arthur Kill, The Grail, The Great Depression, The New Yorker, The Outerbridge Crossing, West Africa
(1) In the March 21 New Yorker there’s a stimulating article by Ian Frazier about the return of seals to New York. Frazier is a fine writer and I enjoyed learning all about the seals that are swimming around New York, sunning themselves in our harbors, etc.
However, the opening of the article got my attention more than the seals did. In it, Frazier describes driving over to Staten Island from New Jersey in his search for seals. He writes:
“Potholes, which rule the roads these days, opened before me suddenly in a wicked row on the ramp for the Outerbridge Crossing, popping my left front tire….I changed the tire in a lot in Perth Amboy and got to Staten Island just after sunrise…Hylan Boulevard, the only surface road that goes from one end of the island to the other, is a pothole festival now. I slalomed among some real beauts to the boulevard’s end, parked, and slid on the snow crust down to the beach along the Arthur Kill…” (p. 34).
The remarkable thing about this side commentary is that Frazier never complains about the Staten Island pothole festival. It’s just the way things are. No use being upset.
This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with Anne Hope, a South African Grail member, during one of her visits to the US. Anne allowed as how she was always amazed by the number of signs along the roads in this country. In Africa, they could never have so many signs, she said. The roads were full of potholes and you had to keep your eyes on them all the time or you’d be in real trouble. I have begun to think of Staten Island as a borough in very far West Africa.
(2) Many people have said many things about the recent catastrophes in Japan. I will not add to these often deeply moving commentaries. I was struck, however, by the number of times newspeople spoke with apparent relief of the radiation “blowing out to sea” and not towards Tokyo. God know, if the radiation had blown toward Tokyo, it would have been truly disastrous. But is it not disastrous that the radiation is blowing out over the Pacific? Is the ocean a place of dead matter such that its radiation is irrelevant? I have not researched what radiation does to the seas as yet–stay tuned–but surely the creatures in the sea matter too? The only indirect comment I have heard about this as yet was one from a Japanese woman on NPR this morning who said she has decided to stop eating fish. Indeed.
(3) NPR this morning also reported that Tom Corbett, the governor of Pennsylvania, as part of his effort to solve the state’s funding crisis, has proposed to cut the budget of the state system of higher education by more than half, or $625 million. This grabbed my attention because I am a double graduate (BA and Ph.D.) of one of those institutions, Temple University. One of the reasons I was able to afford to get a Ph.D. is that the tuition at Temple was reasonable. I knew very well that it would be insanity to borrow money to get a Ph.D., in the humanities–in Religion, in my case–because teaching in the humanities pays badly. So I got an assistantship, paid in-state tuition, and depended on the generosity of my husband, the Baptist minister.
I have always been amazed that someone like me, whose father dropped out of high school during the Great Depression, would have the privilege of becoming a professor and publishing books. My generation of Americans may turn out to have been the most privileged generation of human beings in the history of the world. Now that I hear about Corbett’s effort to destroy the state universities in Pennsylvania I think it even more. I wonder if any of Corbett’s kids are enrolled at Temple, or at Cheney University, the majority African-American state-related institution south of Philadelphia?
Climate Change Goes to the Movies
February 17, 2011 at 4:55 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentTags: "Killing in the Name", "Sun Come Up", Academy Awards, Climate Change, climate refugees, documentary films, environmental pollution, jihad, Papua New Guinea
Sister Grail member Joy Garland and I went to the IFC, the film center on lower Sixth Avenue in Manhattan yesterday, to see three short documentaries that have been nominated for an Academy Award this year. I’m really glad we did.
The first of the films, KILLING IN THE NAME, is the story of a Muslim man, Ashraf Al-Khaled whose wedding ceremony in a hotel used by Westerners was blown up by an Al Qaeda suicide bomber, resulting in the deaths of 27 members of his family, including his and new wife’s fathers. The film follows Ashraf’s efforts to convince Muslims around the world that killing other Muslims does not qualify as Jihad. I was particularly moved by the segment in which he debates with teenage boys in a Muslim school in (I believe) Indonesia. It’s not clear that he convinces them, but clearly, this is the kind of courage the world needs if we’re to stop killing one another.
But I was much more taken with the other two films, which address the pressing and linked issues of the world water shortage and climate change. I am greatly encouraged that such films are up for an Academy Award. May we all be showing them in our church basements and community centers soon!
The first is the exquisitely beautiful SUN COMES UP, which follows the relocation of a group of indigenous people in the south Pacific from their island home to the nearby Bougainville section of Papua New Guinea. The Carterets may be the first climate refugees most Americans will ever meet—their islands are being washed away by rising sea water—though they surely won’t be the last; estimates have it that various aspects of climate change—rising tides, the desertification and salination of fields, and floods—will produce as many as 100 million climate refugees by 2050. Viewers learn about the particular effects of climate change that are driving the Carterets off their island home. But the primary value of the film, I think, is that it presents us with some real and deeply inspiring human beings as they confront this horrific situation. The shots of faces, of people dancing, of the residents of Papua New Guinea welcoming the Carterets into their community, all of this brings home to us what will be lost if, by ignoring the reality of climate change, we allow millions of human beings to be washed away or die of starvation or thirst.
If SUN COMES UP fights climate change with its sheer beauty, THE WARRIORS OF QIUGANG attacks the world water shortage and related environmental harm head on, documenting the refusal of the residents of a Chinese village to let a chemical company continue to destroy their land and water. The film focuses on a deeply appealing farmer, Zhang Gongli. When Zhang’s fields become so poisoned he can no longer farm them, he teaches himself enough law to sue the chemical company that has caused the pollution, not once, but twice, losing both times. Eventually, though, he organizes the villagers and they force the government to close the factory. If you need to find some hope for the struggle, watch this movie. If you need to be reminded of the horrific impact of chemical contaminants on earth, water, and people, watch this movie.
As with all films, a few quibbles trail along behind. For one thing, in the case of the Carteret Islanders, it’s hard not to wonder what the survival expectations are for the section of Papua New Guinea to which they are relocating. At least it’s inland, but it’s hard to imagine that that’s the last we’ll be hearing about climate refugees in Papua New Guinea. And toward the end, THE WARRIORS OF QIUGANG raises its own question: will the government prevent the chemical company from doing the same harm to the area where it has moved (5 miles away) as it did to Quigang? Maybe Zhong Gongli will ride over there and fill the neighboring villagers in.
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WISDOM'S FEAST
Sophia in Study & CelebrationSpeaks against the inertia and retrenchment of the ecumenical churches on the loaded issue of the gender of God....Appropriately scholarly and...readily accessible.
—Theology TodayWISDOM'S FEAST is available in paperback on Amazon.
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Marian Ronan 