April 28th, Fifth Sunday of Easter
As I have said for several weeks now, this is really a delightful time of the liturgical year starting Sunday after Sunday with excerpts from Acts of the Apostles that enables us to jump over 2,000 years and in a sense walk with the very first followers of Jesus, the first Christians.
One of the reasons that I enjoy this experience so much is that it shows that although 2,000 years have elapsed since the scenes described in Acts, the problems in the Church continue and because the Church is so much bigger the problems tend to be larger as well. In today’s excerpt, you have the apostles complaining that logistical responsibilities get in the way of their prayer and preaching. “Is there a pastor with a soul so dead who never to himself has said this is my own, my native land….” Oops. This wonderful poem doesn’t really fit there. But pastors do complain about administrative responsibilities that block them from more effective ministry. I don’t believe that this was ever very true. The Church of yesterday often found it far easier to “run the parish” than to study scripture and prepare great homilies, but they did have an excuse because they had virtually no staff.
In my parish at All Saints in the 1930’s, the staff consisted of three priests, eight sisters and a janitor. There were no secretaries, no professional counselors, no business managers. Today, however, things are very different. Larger parishes at least are so much better staffed can we assume that the preaching has improved tremendously? Let’s hope.

Oops. I almost forgot about the deacons. Today’s first reading tells us how this level of Holy Orders came into being. It was to help the Church run more effectively. It was wonderful that the Second Vatican Council re-established the diaconate. Isn’t it interesting that there are three levels of ordination in the Church? They are bishops, priests and deacons, and the deacons have been around longer than the priests!
Onward through the fog.

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Have you noticed that there is a widespread view that the country is “on the wrong track.” Political candidates, TV commentators, newspaper pundits and preachers in various churches seem to be of a common mind on that. The Secret Service scandal, Walmart’s bribery in Mexico and beyond, “flash mobs” in department stores, the Navy captain providing pornographic movies to his crew, an $800,000 weekend meeting of the General Service Administration, an agency that is supposed to shepherd our financial resources, violation of corpses in Afghanistan, etc., etc., etc. None of these problems are new; none of them particularly original for this period. What is different is that these very discouraging modes of operation are more easily tolerated than was ever the case in the past. Most of us are saddened by it, most of us regret these activities but most of us feel that there is little that we can do about it. Is that the case?

Our culture, if you can call it that, is the first one in human history that has denied itself the right to pass on responsibility to the next generation its own set of values.

Not only does that lack of religious values add to the criminal activity I mentioned above, but it is one of the underlying causes of so many other agonizing human problems from which we are suffering in this country. Shattered marriages, all too many immature, irresponsible adults, alcoholism and drug addiction, lack of commitment to education and a host of other tragic let downs that mark our society, our families and our individual lives.

Why not try something new? Religious formation. Some of the churches have sizable school systems and most churches have Sunday school, but they tend to concentrate on the religious teachings of that particular church. The U.S. Supreme Court continues to feel that any religious formation in the public school system is a violation of the Constitution. What a tragic mistake.

Not only are the American people blocked from using its enormous educational system from transferring moral values in any realistic way, but the court has actually worked against outside groups, such as churches and synagogues to reach its students. Several decades ago, serious efforts were made in areas such as “released time” and other efforts to provide religious instruction to public school students, but it was always rejected by the Court. The vast majority of American people hold that religious values are extraordinarily important and they ought to be imported to each new generation as effectively as possible. Can anybody imagine teaching math and science one hour a week after school? If only half our students attended those voluntary classes, can you imagine the destructive effects on their education? Well, that is what we are doing with religious values and we are paying for it.

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The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman, developed a very interesting idea recently about how Americans really are divided in terms of how best to run the country.  Krugman’s thesis is that the line of division is not between right and left, it is not between conservative and liberal, and it is certainly not merely between Republicans and Democrats.  What separates the two major groups in the citizenry is the philosophical difference on the question of moral responsibility.  Krugman’s differences run thusly:

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state – a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net – morally superior to the capitalism read in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal.  It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft.  That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

This deep divide in American political reality is a relatively recent development.

On the issue of health reform, one side saw the extension of coverage to the uninsured as fulfilling a moral imperative.  The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose without responsibility to anyone else.

As free Americans, we can decide which side of that divide we sit but as Roman Catholics, with any knowledge at all of Catholic social theology, we would find it hard to claim that we do not have responsibility for each other.  The greater our blessings and resources, the greater that responsibility.

Krugman promises to go into much greater depth on the subject and I look forward to following over the next few weeks.

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