Having the Last Word

Today’s Gospel reports some of the argumentative ferment surrounding Jesus.  Various people and factions of the crowd make speculations about His identity (prophet?  Messiah?) and question His origins (Galilee?  Bethlehem?).  Apparently there are “guards” in the crowds colluding with some Jewish authorities (themselves in collusion with the Roman occupation?).  The summary verdict of these particular chief priests and Pharisees is that Jesus is “accursed.”  By contrast, Nicodemus pleads---as a voice of both faith and reason---that it is not just to condemn someone without first hearing him and finding out “what he is doing.”  This whole narrative of confusion and speculative confrontation (here there is no mention of directly and impartially questioning Jesus) ends strangely and abruptly:  “Then each went to his own house.”

When I first went to the Piper Clinic in St. Petersburg, Florida last September for the initial evaluation of my TMJ problem, my heart was filled with conflicted feelings about my medical care up to that point, as well as substantial worries about the future of my jaw’s health for my Priestly ministry (how could I continue to preach or teach or administer the Sacraments in such pain?).  My temporary home for these troubled thoughts was the Ponce de Leon Historic Hotel, the cheapest place I could find within walking distance of the Clinic.  As the name would imply, it had a certain Latin American accent in its décor, which I would describe as heavily trafficked contemporary---renovated to be slick minimalist, yet frayed-around-the edges.  The rooms were small, simple, and clean.  And the cast of characters that checked in and out were worthy of a novel (my favorite was the bridal party standing at the front desk with bags full of vodka and high expectations for the pre-nuptial evening, if not for the following wedding day).

In any case, the hotel was quirky and satisfactory, so---creature of habit that I am---I also returned to stay there in January of this year in the days before my surgery.  As reading I brought along an eclectic assortment of books, including John Zmirak’s The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism:  A Faithful, Fun-Loving Look at Catholic Dogmas, Doctrines, and Schmoctrines; Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson:  The Art of Power; and two books by Charles C. Mann---1491:  New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, and 1493:  Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.  Zmirak’s book was a hilarious and profound---post-modern yet utterly traditional---presentation of the Faith which seemed somehow tailored to fit my surreal medical situation.  The Jefferson book was the literary equivalent of comfort food, because our third President was the intellectual obsession of my adolescence.  But it was Mann’s two histories of the Americas that were a perfect fit for my place and time in Florida. 

Without doing book reviews, the genius of Mann’s historical/archeological/sociological/(even biological) reporting of the “Columbian Exchange”---the infinitely variegated interactions between, and changes resulting from, the encounter between the “Old World” of Europe and the “New World” of the Americas---opened my mind further to the endless complexities of human interaction and the constantly revised historical narratives which must be the fruit of deeper, more comprehensive research and honest debate.  In terms of the Catholic Church’s 15-16^th century missionary efforts, I detected in Charles Mann’s secular account no particular love for---or special interest in---the Catholic Church; nor did I detect overt animus; he was overall rather indifferent to it.  But I was continually impressed at Mann’s human sympathy for trying to understand what the different protagonists of a given place and time were trying to accomplish, and the intended and unintended results of their actions or inactions.

When on March 3, 1513---almost exactly half a millennium ago---Ponce de Leon set forth by ship from Puerto Rico, he discovered without knowing it at the time a new way to a new place.  In secular terms, his mission was both extractive and contributive; but the Spanish explorer was part of a spiritual movement much larger than his mixed motives---to fulfill Christ’s mandate to share the Catholic faith with all people of all nations.  Seeing the extraordinary beauty of its fauna and flora---and knowing that this moment of arrival was enfolded in the celebrations of the Easter season (which the Spaniards called “Pascua Florida,” the “Festival of Flowers”)---Ponce de Leon called the place La Florida.  To this place I came, not exactly to find the fountain of youth, but to receive healing of my jaw and restoration of my normal life.

I have been thinking about all of this in the past few days as I read the media caricatures of Pope Francis and his involvement as a Jesuit superior in the complexities of the Argentinean military upheavals of the 1970’s and 1980’s.  Apparently he is blamed for ordering two Jesuit Priests under his care not to engage in political action in a dangerously volatile area.  The Priests were disobedient, subsequently kidnapped and tortured by governmental authorities (for which, utterly incomprehensibly, Francis is also held up by some for indirect blame).  And when this Jesuit superior risks his life by secretly and successfully pleading for safe release of these Priests, he is finally accused of “not speaking out” with sufficient vigor to provoke (convert?) governmental authorities. [For further commentary on these points, see Edward Peters’ essay at the end of this blog post.]

When Pope Francis visited the Basilica of St. Mary Major this past week at the very outset of his Papacy to pray, he entered a church whose ceiling is literally covered in the first gold brought over by the conquistadors from the New World.  Pope Francis---like every single one of us---walks under the heavy weight of a very complex history in which weeds and wheat, sin and sanctity are often inextricably mixed, this side of Judgment Day.  The Basilica of St. Mary Major is also the place where St. Ignatius Loyola celebrated his first Mass, on Christmas Day in 1538.  As Pope Francis well knows from his Jesuit religious life, St. Ignatius wanted to begin his Priestly ministry by offering the Holy Eucharist at the chapel containing the relics traditionally associated with the manger of Bethlehem. 

Like St. Francis of Assisi before him, St. Ignatius staked his life on the belief that the humble earthly origins of our Divine Savior can in every age create a “new beginning.”  As we walk with the saints---and now Pope Francis---through the vicissitudes and ambiguities of history scarred by sin, we can do so with serenity and joy:  We know that Jesus Christ has gone before us---through every misunderstanding and beyond every argument---to explore every way forward to our true home, and in so doing to lay rightful claim by His grace to the realm of Easter (where the fruit trees always yield and their medicinal leaves never fade [cf. Rev. 22]).  The Lord has bigger plans for us than arguing and going back to fume in the private houses of our own imaginings; we are meant for the many mansions of Our Father’s House.  Even though life can seem---as St. Teresa of Άvila famously put it---like “a bad night in a bad inn,” we know in Faith that the Redeemer of history has the last word because He is the last Word:  “Behold, I make all things new!” (cf. Rev. 21:5).

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Bonus Reflection on Today’s Topic

When Nothing Else Will Work, Accuse a Catholic Prelate of NSO

Edward Peters, JD, JCD, Ref. Sig. Ap.---March 15, 2013

The mainstream media is in panic over Pope Francis.

The new pope is solidly opposed to everything big media wants (contraception, abortion, ‘same-sex marriage’, etc.), but it can’t simply write him off as an out-of-touch academic (Benedict) or as a provincial Slav suffering Nazi and Communist induced post-traumatic stress disorder (John Paul II). Worse, the first prelate of the Catholic world is a man of proven commitment to the poor (far more demonstrably than are his limousine liberal critics), and has lived his whole life in a simplicity that is utterly beyond the ken of Manhattan or the Beltway sophisticates.

So, confronted by a major Catholic prelate of such palpable integrity, what’s the media to do? Only one thing: Look up what country the prelate calls home, find out what trauma that country suffered (that’s not hard to do, all modern countries suffer from traumas, generally those organized by their governments), and accuse the prelate of—wait for it—Not Speaking Out.

NSO is the perfect accusation: first, it can only be levied by history, that is, by folks with access to much more information than was possessed by those against whom an NSO is aimed; indeed, as NSO is almost always raised well after the trauma and its agents have passed from the scene, retaliation by such agents for reminding folks of their travesties is unlikely or impossible; very importantly, NSO allows the media to claim the moral high ground by implying that, had it been on scene during the trauma, it would surely have “spoken out”. That last claim is, of course, the most laughable (as—to take just one example of ignored victims of modernity—hundreds of millions of baby souls will attest on Judgment Day). Best of all, even if evidence of “speaking out” can be found, it can always be dismissed as “not enough”.

Totalitarian regimes (whether left or right) act like rabid dogs in that their behavior, while irrational, is often predictable. Now, if one can, according to the information available to one at the time, predict that “speaking out” will provoke an act of irrational savagery, pray, where exactly is the obligation to speak out such that one’s “failure” (a judgmental word, notice) to speak out is later sanctionable by those not remotely confronted with the crisis? What if, moreover, one directly confronted by a crisis, on the basis of the information available at the time, makes the choice to oppose the savagery in other, even hidden, ways, though not in a way that big media pundits, separated from the crisis by decades and oceans, are so sure was the “correct” way to act?

I figured that an NSO would, sooner or later, be visited upon Francis, but that it comes so quickly underscores, I think, how really, really worried big media is about the influence that Francis will wield against their vision of the world.