I actually found an article on that crazy Mecham/Quinn “On Faith” thing that I like. It’s a Jesuit calling out Catholic Bishops for spending so much time combating masturbation and teh gay that they forgot about the fucking economic crisis:
What is most remarkable about this meeting is that it took place in the middle of the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the bishops said nothing about it. It was as if they did not know that almost 10 percent of their parishioners are unemployed, that the new Congress is going to take aim at programs helping the poor and that now is the time to speak out for social justice. Their silence was deafening.
I have two questions here. One, why are Jesuits so much more thoughtful than other Catholic clergy? And two, does the complete lack of interest in the jobless that we see now from all elites — religious elite, media elite, political elite — have any historical precedent? I know it wasn’t like this during the Great Depression, but was it ever like during any other serious recessions?
Cat Lady
Don’t bishops have their health insurance and their cars and residences all paid for them? There are no problems for them, so there are no problems. QED.
Trentrunner
Well, for one thing, Jesuits fuck each other and so don’t have to expend energy seducing and raping little boys.
That’s one explanation.
schrodinger's cat
I went to a school run by Jesuit nuns, and I agree with your assessment DougJ.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Cat Lady: That reminds me of my mom who told me when the economy was tanking back when that she didn’t think it was real and they were just trying to scare everyone. They’ve lived on government checks and government health care since I can remember.
j low
Umm… Does 99% of recorded human history count?
freelancer
The Jesuits are the “evil libruls” of the Catholic Church (Which makes them the only thing about the whole crime syndicate that I admire.) They champion things like education and Social Justice.
Comrade Mary
I have a soft spot for Jesuits. But as Trentrunner said above, none of them will ever show any interest in it.
Politically Lost
It wasn’t like this during the depression because the unwashed mass o’ people were actually vocal about it. The elites can afford to ignore it because for what ever reason the people are just accepting their fate and aren’t demanding economic reform. The saturation of the basic fact of income inequality has seeped into the consciousness of just about all sentient people, however, apathy rules.
I’d do something about this but, I gotta go check out facebook and catch the latest Harry Potter tonight.
HumboldtBlue
Because the Jebbies teach you to be a critical thinker, anathema to the rest of Christianity.
Comrade Luke
Jesuits are the only “moderate” group left in the Catholic church. Needless to say, the home office in Rome hates their guts.
It’s one of those self-perpetuating things: the Jesuits do their own thing, get looked down upon by the Vatican and generally ignored, which allows them to continue to do their own thing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
SGEW
Because they’re where atheists in the Catholic church wind up, actually. From what I’ve experienced.
Anna in PDX
I usually don’t comment but had to say, I went to Georgetown, I had many classes with Jesuits and they do a great job being wonderful people and giving us non-catholics a very positive view of Catholicism. Glad to see they are still around and still doing what they can.
MikeJ
@HumboldtBlue: BIll Clinton tells a story in his book My LIfe of when he was attending Georgetown and a Jesuit prof so admired the way he argued in class he suggested Clinton become a priest.
nhoj
Not exactly the greatest praise…
Cris
I’ve also wondered why the Jesuits seem like the best strain of the Universal Church. Maybe the Ignatian ideal of self-awareness encourages them to be a little less arrogant.
@freelancer: sure, but they don’t hold a candle to Liberation Theologists.
Bnut
I suspect it’s because Jesuits have been persecuted specifically. Nothing a liberal makes like being aware of how much the system fucks you.
Comrade Luke
I’m sure the White House is shocked…SHOCKED!…that Republicans voted as a block against the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Sole “Democrat” voting against: Ben Fucking Nelson. So using the White House’s own definition, this was a bipartisan rejection.
ruemara
Jesuits study and an awful lot drop the faith thing but stick to it for the meaning thing.
kindness
Probably because priests and Bishops & Cardinals in particular rarely go hungry. (I even didn’t use any little boy jokes but it was a tough one)
kdaug
Didn’t Jesus say something about the poor? Seem to recall there’s something in there about the rich too.
I may be misremembering though – not really a follower.
Amanda in the South Bay
To be fair, the banal 1970s inspired ICEL translations suck donkey balls.
Meh, some people can be quite the social gospel types but not care for the 1970s-ification of the liturgy.
beltane
I once had a professor who was a Jesuit priest and on the board of the ACLU. I think he was also secretly pro-choice. The Jesuit order are the intellectual heavyweights of Christianity, not just of Catholicism, which is why they were regarded with suspicion by both JPII and Pope Ratzinger.
I once read an article about the Sandinistas in the NYRB which described the Marxist revolutionaries as “the only ones who paid attention in religion class.”
Max Power
It’s part of the rhetorical victory of the right; I put it down to the strange grip of the fear of rhetorical emasculation. You can’t go two posts on the internet without someone contributing “nanny state” or “girly-man” or “man-pants” to any kind of proposal that the government do something.
I’m not sure why people are so susceptible to this line of argument. But what is the lesson from the wingnuts and glibertarians? That real men should know how to die penniless in the gutters, without bothering anyone?
El Cid
__
Mixed record. Certainly history of charity in many areas of US, and some movements of Catholic priests and nuns and laity to directly work with the poor and labor.
On the other hand, when liberation theology arose in Latin America to work for the interests of the poor, the Catholic hierarchy gleefully backed death squads wiping them out, which they did.
JWL
The only significant religious activism during my lifetime was the prominent role played by various sects during the civil rights struggles, and their subsequent agitation to end the Vietnam war. Beyond that, I can’t think of a single political struggle assumed by organized religion that has impacted the nation.
It’s nowadays impossible to differentiate between the so-called ‘media and political elite’. They’re merely different sides of the same coin of the realm. To think otherwise is delusional.
Comrade Kevin
@Comrade Luke: and someone will be by soon enough to claim that that is actually Obama’s fault, well, just because.
MAJeff
As a whole, I’m not sure they are. I got my PhD at a Jesuit school, the first non-public school I’d ever been at. I found the institutional gay-hatred to be pretty intense. And the “preference for the poor” was little more than elite noblesse oblige.
morzer
I suspect this is another part of the fallout from the Cold War, in which the Catholic Church aligned itself very strongly and deliberately with conservatism, even when that conservatism was essentially murderous fascism. Consider how it destroyed liberation theology as far as it could, because of a paranoid fear of Communism infiltrating the church through it. Social justice is hardly an interest of the Catholic hierarchy, despite the fact that Jesus had quite a lot to say on the topic. Look at any grubby little right-wing dictatorship in the last 30 years, and you’ll find a tame Cardinal or archbishop rationalizing murder, torture, theft, rape and the whole gallery of human vileness right alongside El Supremo.
Comrade Luke
@Comrade Kevin: I’m sure that’s who Nelson will blame.
goblue72
Why should anyone be surprised – the coterie of self-hating closet cases also known as the College of Cardinals elected Herr Rat-f*&ker as pope, who’s previous job was to be the head of the papal gestapo (aka the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, aka the modern-day Inquisition and official agency for covering up the pedophilia scandals)
Pope Rat has been on record that he’d be perfectly happy with a smaller, more theologically pure church (that is, a more fundamentalist, backwards-looking, right wing reactionary church). And with an endless supply of superstitious, uneducated believers in the 3d world, they’ve got that “growth” market all lined up.
I’d be perfectly happy to see the Catholic Church collapse in an endless wave of lawsuits.
Dave
The S.J. is the most thoughtful because it was basically the last religious order to be founded (1534), just as humanism was becoming a thing; they were dedicated to fending off Reformationists, which was an intellectual endeavor; and they wouldn’t countenance bullshit from the Catholic Church. Have this quote from Ignatius Loyola:
That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which appears to our eyes to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.
David Hunt
I’ve heard that it was pretty much like that just before the French Revolution…
Amanda in the South Bay
@morzer:
Honestly, I think it extends further than that.
Certainly in the past couple of hundred years the Catholic Church has allied itself with theocratic, fascist and reactionary governments. Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, the sorta mixed head in the sand record in Nazi Germany-and who’d seriously want to live in 1940s Ireland as compared to today? It all seems like the stuff that parents taught their Protestant Anglo-American children to give them nightmares of Catholicism.
El Cid
Catholic Worker Movement.
MTiffany
Medieval Europe comes to mind.
John W.
@MAJeff: My experience at a Jesuit HS mirrors yours, but I found a Jesuit undergrad a lot more open. Still, I don’t think the point is Jesuits are awesome as much as it is that they’re much more intellectually honest than institutional Christendom.
Also, the Jesuits are the ones who educated me enough to be an atheist. i can always thank them for that.
Amanda in the South Bay
@MTiffany:
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far-its not as if anything remotely resembling a 20th century economy existed then.
burnspbesq
The parish that we belong to has always done a lot for the poor, because the overwhelming majority of our parish is poor and immigrant (mostly Mexican, with some Samoan). I guarantee you that the parish we are geographically closest to (the cathedral, where the Bishop does his thing) does nothing. Holy Family is the “parish church” of the white affluent wingnut Catholics in OC; Hugh Hewitt belongs there, and any place where Hugh Hewitt fits in is a place I want nothing to do with.
Citizen Alan
@David Hunt:
Oh please, please, please!
West of the Cascades
Jesuits take a vow of poverty (along with chastity and obedience) and have, since the order was founded in the 1500s, been at the forefront of the Catholic church’s evangelizing efforts — and hence ahead of the front lines of advancing western “civilization” as it spread from Europe. They probably have a historical perspective on exploitation unlike any other part of the Catholic church. And they don’t generally stand for it.
For an accessible cultural reference, see the movie “The Mission.”
Lev
More elite concern about Great Depression due to two major factors:
1) Elites actually suffered from Black Tuesday. No bailouts to be had there. So they wanted the economy to recover quickly.
2) There actually was a powerful, ascendant movement centered on the concerns of average folks: the labor movement. They pushed themselves onto the scene and wouldn’t be ignored.
Of course, the Republicans of the time hated Roosevelt and didn’t really care about the poor of the time, outside the GOP’s small moderate/liberal wing of George Norris/William Borah/Hiram Johnson and a few others. So in some ways, not much has changed.
Antonius
Jesuits are the intellectuals of the Church. Having been educated by Jesuits, I can tell you that my personal experience of them is that they’re generally highly intelligent, fiercely committed to social justice (the Jesuit headmaster of my high school used to smuggle out footage of atrocities in Central America during the 80s), and supportive on matters of conscience. It was Jesuit at my high school who offered a classroom full of 14-year-old boys the opportunity to go on record as Conscientious Objectors if we thought that we might have to establish that upon turning 18. I’m not surprised that a Jesuit is calling the Bishops on the carpet for their failure to focus on matters important to the well-being of their parishoners.
Citizen Alan
I’m still profoundly depressed over discovering “On Faith” this morning — I was directed by Kos to the post by Ron Rychlak from Ole Miss. I know Rychlak. I took Criminal Law from Rychlak. I’ve eaten dinner at Rychlak’s house! And while he’s always been rather aggressive in his Catholicism (he first rose to national prominence by authoring a book defending the conduct of Pius XII with regard to the Holocaust), none of my interactions with him over the last 13+ years predicted the shocking degree of Islamophobic bigotry from that blog post. I’m just speechless.
morzer
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Historically, it’s certainly true that the Catholic Church has always cozied up to the ruling regime, often at the cost of some remarkable rhetorical contortions. You can go back to the 4th/5th century AD and find Augustine of Hippo and his friends taking very good care to keep on the right side of the generals who really ran the Late Roman empire – sending them gifts of warhorses raised on church estates, for example.
.
That said, in the modern period, Catholicism’s radical hard right swing seems to me to be something that took place during and after the Cold War period. The modern Catholic church is much more interested in doctrinal purity, brand preservation, and generally hanging on to its influence and assets at all costs, and has been trying desperately to walk back Vatican II without too much fanfare. You simply don’t find any real challenge to public figures or authority, if that figure is right wing. Consider the contrast in treatment of John Kerry and Newt Gingrich. Kerry is threatened with being denied the sacraments, while the thrice married, serial adulterer Gingrich can skip down the aisle and take Communion with never a murmur that it might just be inappropriate.
Viva BrisVegas
Yes. The only exceptions are when the jobless and or repressed masses take up pitchforks and wave them in the faces of said elites.
Even that doesn’t always work, see the Bonus Army of 1932.
President Hoover ordered Douglas MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton to remove the veterans using tanks, cavalry charges, fixed bayonets and poison gas.
All for their own good of course, even the veterans that they killed. I wonder what Glen Beck has to say about it now?
Roger Moore
@morzer:
It goes back a lot further than the Cold War. Just look at the relationship between Church and State in Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain. The Catholic Church is authoritarian, and it’s perfectly happy with any authoritarian government that recognizes and helps to enforce Catholicism.
MAJeff
@John W.:
I was an atheist before I got to BC. It was more than a little shocking, after doing elementary, high school, BA, and MA in state schools to go to a Catholic University. My goal is to never set foot on a Catholic campus again, and I’ve instructed the folks at BC to remove my name from all fundraising lists.
During my time there, they refused to allow a recently formed gay group (so long as they apologized for being gay) host a dance. At first, it was because having the gay kids sponsor it would be “exclusive.” Once Hillel and the College Dems stepped in to co-sponsor, it fell afoul of “catholic values”….and hillel is so in keeping with catholic values….
The Church can’t die soon enough.
MTiffany
@Amanda in the South Bay: Discounting electricity, computers, and e-commerce, the Muslim banking system from the 8th century AD onwards comes fairly close.
morzer
@MTiffany:
Actually, medieval Europe was probably more socially cohesive than our modern age. Communities were smaller, there were institutions such as guilds to help out workers who fell on hard times, and the poor were often seen as, in some sense, closer to God than the wealthy and successful. We tend to imagine the past as much worse than it really was, but, (barring famine or plague), you were probably less likely to slip through the cracks and die alone than is now the case in our atomized, consumerist and much bigger social structures. This isn’t to deny advances in medicine, technology, and so forth, but it is important to realize that human societies worked perfectly well in the past, despite some serious imperfections by our standards (the constrained status and role of women, non-participatory power structures etc).
morzer
@Roger Moore:
Yes, as I said earlier, it does go back beyond the Cold War – but the truly radical right-wards shift of the Catholic Church is really a phenomenon of the last thirty years or so.
Amanda in the South Bay
@morzer:
I think it started with the French Revolution. Also, look at how much the Church freaked the fuck out over the unification of Italy-something that seems totally alien and bizarre from the perspective of a Protestant European or American.
That said, the rise of communism in the 20th century really caused the Church to go off the deep end in its support of reactionary regimes.
Good point, RE Gingrich. Basically, modern Catholic moral theology boils down to:
1. Support conservative politics
2. Be against homosexuality
3. Be against abortion
4. Absolutely no women priests
Who gives a rats ass about everything else! that’s modern day Catholicism for ya.
Roger Moore
@Lev:
3) Communism was still seen as a plausible alternative to capitalism. There’s nothing like the threat of an honest-to-godless Bolshevik takeover to get the attention of capitalist running dogs. One way of keeping the Communists (and their firing squads for capitalist oppressors) at bay was to ensure that the current system was doing something for the poor.
John - A Motley Moose
The 1930’s was an ascendant period for working class people, which helped lift up the poor. That’s real trickledown economics. The only reason they received any attention at the time was because the powers that be were afraid of the spread of communism. If that threat hadn’t been there the poor would have been beaten down like they were in earlier periods. Now that the threat of communism is gone it’s no longer necessary to ‘coddle’ the poor.
Lev
@Amanda in the South Bay: Funny to think about, but the Catholic Church was a virulent opponent of both capitalism and nationalism when the theories were initially rolled out. The latter for the reason that it would lead to attachments other than the Church. Funny to think about all that.
With respect to the Holy See, I think most of their problems have to do with a false belief in their own transcendence. They don’t play politics, they merely try to enforce God’s will. That’s neat. And methinks at least part of the problem with the pedophile priests is that on some level the highest echelons of the Church don’t believe they’re as prone to sin and corruption as everyone else, so there’s a defensiveness there to confront the inevitable, grubby reality.
Hoya
As a Georgetown grad, I have a lot of experience with the Jesuits. To echo several of the above posts, Jesuits are the redheaded step child of the church. Most of the reactionary right wing can’t stand them, but they also know that they can’t live without them due to the fact that they are the largest single order within the Church and the strength of the Jesuit education system.
Plus, given the difficulty of going through the Jesuit training (sometimes up to 10-15 years, no joke) tends to weed out a lot of fakers and meatheads. It’s not unheard of for Jesuits to have a double doctorate in both theology and a practical science. Those kinds of people tend not to screw around.
Personally, as a lapsed Catholic, I think Jesuit Pope would really help the Catholic Church figure itself out, but it would never happen.
morzer
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I’d be interested to know whether Catholic churches are increasing catering to older people, and finding that the young turn away from what’s on offer, much as the GOP is now reliant on older white voters. Does anyone have any statistics/facts/knowledge on this topic?
El Cruzado
@Roger Moore: This. For all their faults, Commies did a fine job of moving the Overton window leftwards.
Dr. Squid
Jesuits actually take education seriously, which makes them dangerous liberals and suspect elitists in the eyes of conservatives.
Mark S.
@Citizen Alan:
I love how Rychlak is outraged that Obama never released papers he wrote for school when he was in elementary school.
The comments on the piece are absolutely brutal.
Hawes
The worst depression in American history aside from the Great Depression (which was Great after all) was probably either the Depression of 1873 or the Depression of 1893.
The were emblematic of the Gilded Age’s boom-bust economy, and the elites were pretty much all on board.
The economic elites: argued for a deflated currency based on gold that insured that THEIR wealth was maintained, while debtors and wage labor remained poor. (In effect insuring more booms and busts.)
The political elites: Well, my favorite quote from this time period comes from Grover Cleveland. “The people should support the government, the government should not support the people.” And this was in response to giving drought devastated farmers some seeds to replant their crops. Socialmalism!
The religious elites: Well, this was the era of social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth. The Episcopal church was called the “Republican Party at prayer”. John D. Rockefeller said, “God gave me my money.”
While there was something called the social gospel, which was like a protestant liberation theology, it was not an “elite” position.
So, basically, more evidence that we live in the New Gilded Age!
Amanda in the South Bay
@morzer:
Well, among my old (the kinky, poly bisexual trans woman says) crowd I used to hang out with, Latin Mass traddies, there was always this common belief that young people flocked to churches that celebrated the Latin Mass, or at the least had a reverently, traditionally done Novus Ordo. (caveat: on a very deep level myself, I actually like old beautiful churches that weren’t wrecked by V2, altar rails, high altars, incense, good translations [I grew up an Episcopalian, so sue me]).
Its just that, having attended quite a few Latin Masses and traditionally celebrated NO masses in the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon, that doesn’t quite jive with reality. There really wasn’t a large number of young people seeking out Latin Masses or anything like that. Its a very diverse phenomenon (conservative and traditional Catholicism) but hardly a magnet for 20 something counter counter culture warriors.
EDIT: not so much a common belief that the young trend traddie, but an article of faith up there with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
Lev
@Roger Moore: There’s definitely some truth to that. Conservative Democrats based their (general) support for Roosevelt on the notion that he had warded off the threat of Bolshevism by bringing back the economy. Funny thing was that there was never really any real threat of a Communist revolution, for the reason that Reinhold Niebuhr identified: the desperately poor are excellent targets for Communism, but the working and middle classes usually doesn’t have much interest in it and they’re much more susceptible to fascism in dire economic times, since they have something to lose and getting them to accept that some despised group is robbing them is quite easy under bad circumstances. So we would more likely have gotten a fascist president without FDR (Lindbergh from The Plot Against America or some such) instead of a left-wing revolution. But admittedly the rich peoples’ deep fear of the lefties helped Roosevelt a lot.
Tracker
@nhoj: Dude, I’m a Catholic priest who happens to love the article in question, posted it on my FB page, and subscribe to the magazine in which it was published.
gbear
@Politically Lost:
I wonder how much of that acceptance of fate has to do with the medication that television provides. Back in the previous depression, there was radio, but there wasn’t the brain-numbing escape from reality that TV provides. People were much more connected to what they saw happening with their own eyes.
Cacti
The French Revolution?
SciVo
Jesuits are also humanist philosophers, not just Christian theologians. Plus, diocesan priests voluntarily applied for middle management within a strict authority structure and (I hope) we all know by now how authoritarianism corrupts the intellect. Onto the next question!
I thought it actually was like this at first in the Great Depression, under Hoover? This is pretty normal historical behavior for the elites (read: aristocrats and their toadies). You remember that scripture about how “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24, NIV)? Well, I was talking to my dad the other night about some ultra-rich people who have obsessive moral campaigns against anything that helps the poor, and had an epiphany:
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being rich. Rather, anyone who truly “love[d] his neighbor as himself” (Mark 12:31, NIV) wouldn’t be able to stay rich in a world full of human suffering. If you’re not willing to give up your toys until you’re done with them, then there’s no sacrifice and you don’t really care. However, everyone wants to feel good about themselves; so, it would logically be normal for anyone accumulating great wealth to concoct (or adopt) an anti-humanist moral code in which the suffering of the poor is good and its alleviation would be bad.
I think maybe that’s why they vilify co-ops and community organizing. Even when it’s just poor people helping each other, that still violates the moral code that justifies their retention of their wealth. Or maybe because there’s some labor going on that they can’t exploit for their personal gain. Or both.
And Another Thing...
@El Cid: Well live and learn..Had never heard of them before. You continue to be a reliable source of interesting information. Thanx
Cat Lady
@gbear:
Technology has allowed everything to be done by proxy now. Nothing is immediate anymore – screens are omnipresent distracting everyone’s attention away from the big con. It’s Orwell and Bradbury writ small.
stuckinred
@Cat Lady: Hi cat lady.
RJ
Not only a car.
The most attractive man I ever saw was the young priest driving a bishop around (not recently and not in the diocese in which I currently live.)
RJ
Not only a car.
The most attractive man I ever saw was the young priest driving a bishop around (not recently and not in the diocese in which I currently live.)
Tom
I had eight years of Jesuit education… they’re the best. I probably learned as much about other religions as I did about Catholicism… they educate and let students make their own choices. And they emphasis helping others. That was the big thing I took away from my high school education — not only helping others, but understanding others (ie… the antithesis of the “hate the sin, love the sinner” attitude).
They also embrace science and drink like fishes.
stuckinred
@Tom: And shoot the rock.
morzer
Leaving the stinking bishops to wallow in their episcopal pungency for a moment, I noticed this interesting reflection of modern Christianity, or a segment of it:
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/11/17/texas-tea-antisemitic/
Darkrose
Like other folks here, I had a Jesuit education–4 years at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago. Even though I went in an Episcopalian and came out a confirmed agnostic, and I hated high school as much as any other poorly socialized geek, I chose Ignatius because they’re one of the best schools in the area, and I have never regretted that choice. I learned how to think critically, and how to argue, and I got my introduction to social justice issues.
The Jesuits are for the most part the sane wing of the Catholic Church.
Rob_in_Hawaii
@schrodinger’s cat:
Jesuit nuns? Never heard of such a thing. But it’s been 40 years since I went to a Jesuit high school, so maybe I’m out of the loop on this.
Many of the Jesuits I had back in the 60s were very much into social justice. Besides a bunch of hellish memories, THAT was about the only thing that remains with me from those days.
DougJ
@Tracker:
I wish there were more priests like you.
JohnR
@SciVo:
“…and had an epiphany:”
Bingo! Short version: “Money = Morality”. Long version: Those who have money clearly deserve to have money (=righteous). Those who don’t, clearly don’t deserve it (=unrighteous). That quote from old Rocky is exactly what I would have expected. The cry “charity should come freely from the individual rather than mandated by the government” is merely an attempt to force everyone to form a crowd to hide one’s guilt within.
Anne Laurie
The Society of Jesus was founded, as I understand, to “evangelize the whole world” through rigorous study of “the sciences” — an important branch of which, in those days, was theology. It was explicitly intended to counter the alarming rise in heretical ideas like humanism by producing academic “warriors for the Church” who could fight the unbelievers (both European waverers and the “pagans” in the distant Asian / African / American realms just being “discovered” by European explorers) with close-reasoned arguments beyond the lowly medieval fallback of “God told the pope, the pope told the bishop, the bishop told the priest, and now the priest is telling us — no further explanation required”.
The whole idea of arguing for the hierarchy’s directives, rather than just enforcing them, has always been an irritant to the authoritarians, inside and outside the papal conclaves. Especially since the academic rigors of a Jesuit education have always ensured that the Jesuits were treated rather as the Ivy League is today — as a bunch of snobby elitists hovering over the common flocks, eager to steal the best & brightest & most promising young lads, take them out of their communities, and expose them to the wide world of heretical ideas and potential temptations. The Jesuits, it was whispered, “spoiled” too many young men who learned to think “above their station” and were subsequently lost to their families, their villages… even to The Church itself.
In the blue-collar parish where I grew up in the 60s, it was considered a great bragging point if your son was accepted to one of the Jesuit high schools — but, at the same time, spiteful neighbors would “lament” that the lucky lad was all too likely to be “seduced” by the Jesuits into leaving his family behind forever, disappearing into a Jesuit seminary that would eventually send him to some godforsaken foreign hellhole in Africa or South America or worst of all, Washington DC. (Like Daniel Berrigan, Jerry Brown, Garry Wills.) Of course our parish was run by the Dominicans, and when the nuns in the high school shook their heads and said, “It’s a pity you weren’t born a boy, you’d have made a fine Jesuit”… all parties knew that it wasn’t intended as a compliment.
Jim, Once
@Cris:
Liberation theologists ‘R us: My cousin is on the list for canonization after his life and death in South America; another cousin asked me and other peace activists to interview him in the company of various U.S. journalists, so that when he returned to San Salvador his death (and why he died) might at least make the front pages of the newspapers; my cousins, Franciscan nuns, spent a year in Federal prison after demonstrating at Fort Benning (School of the Americas) – the eldest sister, Dorothy, was 91 years old when she served her time. I love them so, and feel I am doing nothing to live up to their struggles. Are some Jesuits? I have no idea. I know the two sisters who spent time in Federal prison, as I said, were Franciscans. This is the Catholicism I was born into and grew up with. What has happened breaks my heart.
Chris
Playing catch-up, cause this is quite a good thread. Yes, Jesuits are indeed the intellectuals of the Catholic Church… my dad was raised by them and is a case in point (in the best possible way). From what I understand, the last two Popes haven’t been huge fans of the S.J. and kind of quietly encouraged the Opus Dei to move in on their territory… go figure.
About the Church and its reaction to economic crises. It’s important to remember this; American Catholicism historically comes from poor, urban and immigrant communities. In other words, Catholics were the ultimate outsiders, violently trampled both by the economic system that used them for cheap labor, and by the self-proclaimed Real Americans who treated them little better than blacks.
That explains why, especially in the late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth centuries, Catholics were such a strong voice for social justice. On the other hand, Catholics today (since the sixties) have largely been absorbed into the national fabric; they’re no longer stigmatized outsiders, and they’re no longer confined to the working class. That, in my opinion, is the biggest reason why you’ve had a rightward shift in American Catholicism.
shortstop
@Rob_in_Hawaii: I wonder if SC is referring to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs), an order that’s long had tight ties to Jebbies and is similarly fierce about promoting social justice. Either that or she’s/he’s snarking, with some justice, about the lack of ordained RC women.
dadanarchist
Everybody knows that the Jesuits are fucking Communists. That’s why the CIA had to kill so many of them in Latin America in the 1980s. That’s why Benedict, when he was head of the Inquisition (or whatever they are calling it these days) condemned a bunch of Jesuit liberation theologians yet ignored the Catholic bishops who backed murderous sociopaths like Pinochet.
Hence, Opus Dei. An alternative, neoliberal wingnut order, made up of the children of social elites, in order to combat the Jesuits and their heretical belief that Catholics follow all parts of the Bible, including all those inconvenient parts of the Prophets and the New Testament that condemn the rich, bless the meek and sanction class war in the name of God.
Jim, Once
@beltane:
ALL my Sisters of Mercy teachers were pro-choice.
“I once read an article about the Sandinistas in the NYRB which described the Marxist revolutionaries as “the only ones who paid attention in religion class.”*
My experience exactly.
*Sorry – blockquote fail.
Chris
@El Cid:
On the other hand, when liberation theology arose in Latin America to work for the interests of the poor, the Catholic hierarchy gleefully backed death squads wiping them out, which they did.
Actually, I think it varied from country to country.
A friend of mine who knows far more about Latin America explained to me once that how conservative and Catholic a country was depended on what the Church’s relations with the old Cold War dictatorship was.
She cited Argentina as an example, saying that over there, the Church was pretty much in bed with the junta, which explains why Argentina now is so secular and liberal (good God, they have gay marriage!) On the other hand, she also cited a Central American country (think it was El Salvador) where the Church opposed the regime, in some cases through martyrdom; as a result, the country remains deeply devout.
Be good to people and they’ll be good to you. It amazes me how many folks are incapable of processing that basic fact…
Jim, Once
@dadanarchist:
This. Reading this makes me think my cousin had to be a Jesuit.
Chris
@morzer:
I suspect this is another part of the fallout from the Cold War, in which the Catholic Church aligned itself very strongly and deliberately with conservatism, even when that conservatism was essentially murderous fascism.
I think you have to go back further, all the way to the French Revolution. The regime it created was brutally anticlerical, which left the Church with traumatized and with a suspicious attitude towards modernity and democracy that persists to this day. Communism was just another chapter in that story.
Course, the anticlerical backlash wouldn’t have happened if the Church hadn’t been backing the Ancien Regime all the way for over a thousand years, so, you know… what goes around comes around.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
3) Communism was still seen as a plausible alternative to capitalism. There’s nothing like the threat of an honest-to-godless Bolshevik takeover to get the attention of capitalist running dogs. One way of keeping the Communists (and their firing squads for capitalist oppressors) at bay was to ensure that the current system was doing something for the poor.
This.
The value of communism isn’t in what it preached, it was in creating an alternative that forced the capitalists to sit up and pay attention.
We haven’t had an ideological “rival” like that in twenty years, and as a result, capitalism’s gone wild. I don’t know when or how the next rival will appear, but it can’t come soon enough.
dadanarchist
Awesome person everyone should know about: Ammon Hennacy.
One of the original members of the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day.
Some awesome facts: “On hearing Billy Sunday preach in 1909 he became an atheist and shortly afterward became a socialist and an IWW member.”
Awesome quotes: “Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don’t need them and the bad people don’t follow them so what good are they?”
“An anarchist is anyone who doesn’t need a cop to tell him what to do.”
“I’m not disturbing the peace. I’m disturbing the war.”
Jim, Once
@Tracker: \
I so want to sit down with you face to face and talk about all this. I think it would help my soul.
Chris
@Chris:
This is the Catholicism I was born into and grew up with. What has happened breaks my heart.
I feel ya. I look back on the history of Catholicism in the U.S. and want to vomit when I look at what it’s become today.
The health care bill is perhaps the U.S.C.C.B’s most nauseating performance to date – not only did they not lift a finger to help the Dems set up something that their own religion demands, but they actively opposed it on the bullshit grounds of “ZOMG abortion!” even after Stupak had ensured that no money would be going to abortions in the first place.
Yeah, I grew up Catholic… but I’m thoroughly disgusted by the Church. I’m not even asking them to uphold my morals; would it be too much to ask that they uphold their own?
dadanarchist
The issue in the French Revolution was over who controlled the church. The revolutionaries wanted to make clerics state employees, nationalize church property (to be sold at auction) and subordinate the church to the nation, not the Vatican. The revolutionaries passed a Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 that was a terrible solution. It split the Church; half swore allegiance, half didn’t, and the church split. Those who swore allegiance were excommunicated. Parishioners, in a still very religious society, did not know if their weddings, baptisms, funerals, were sanctified or not. The issue wasn’t resolved til Napoleon.
Still, important revolutionary leaders, including the Abbe Sieyes, who wrote “What is the Third Estate” and the Abbe Gregoire, the leader to the anti-slavery forces who also voted for the king’s execution, were clerics and, from what we know, devout ones.
Sly
In terms of social and economic life? The Jesuits were the footsoldiers of Catholic evangelism, spreading from Latin America to Japan. These were guys who, by and large, lived in among the people they sought to convert. They were also the first order to set up dedicated universities, moving Catholic intellectual life away from monastic isolation and scholasticism and towards liberal education and humanism.
Their openness to the living conditions of others, in other words, is in their DNA.
As groups, no. Though there are and always have been individuals who, for various reasons, did not ignore the plight of others outside their class.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Yes, Jesus Christ. Matthew 26:11.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
Especially given that this Jebus fellow said something about behaving toward others as you’d like them to behave toward you. You’d like to think that Christians would be better at following through on that.
Jim, Once
@Chris:
That would certainly explain my father in his later years. Earlier, you couldn’t have known a better union man and populist.
efroh
Would really like some info about the Jesuit nuns (what order is this?). I always envied my brother who got to go to a Jesuit boys high school, while I was stuck at a girls high school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame. The differences between the mostly religious faculty and administration of the two schools, with regard to expectations of their students (intellectual and vocational) were remarkable and never failed to annoy me. The Jesuits wanted their boys to think and ask questions. The Sisters expected us girls to sit down and shut up (late 80s-early 90s).
(Although I have to thank my high school for solidifying my rejection of conservative and anti-feminist politics – the anti-choice propaganda at my high school was so over the top that it made me wonder, at age 13, what else they were lying about if they were lying about things I knew to be false.)
Jim, Once
@dadanarchist:
The most fulfilling, memorable volunteer work I’ve done has been at our local Catholic Worker homeless shelter. What wonderful, wonderful people they are. (Of course, my born-again sister has already told me they – and I – are going to hell, because we’re associated with Catholicism.)
Jim, Once
@dadanarchist:
You know, I’m usually very careful about using this word, but I fucking love this. I will use it in future conversation, confrontations, etc.
wormtown
@MAJeff:
Grad of a jesuit college as well; and I agree with you. Also, back when I was in school (30 years ago) many were real misogynists.
I prefer Benedictines or Paulists.
Lysana
The humanism of some wings of the Roman Catholic church surprises a lot of outsiders. I was raised in a parish that was steeped in humanism thanks to its French-Canadian origins. Fr. De La Salle and his followers are why the French had the least problems with the Natives in the Americas. Their priests dared to see them as human beings.
I also was taught by Jesuits along the way, though only by former and would-have-been priests in CCD classes and the occasional public school course. It still imprinted. And yes, we remembered the need for social justice in that parish.
tkogrumpy
@SGEW: Bingo!
Innocent Bystander
@Tom: hahahaha…honest to Buddha, I could have written this reply. 8 years of Jesuit education (Holy Cross ’75)….and I ended up a lifelong social, progressive Democrat and practicing Agnostic. Way back then, liberation theology, social justice, and the Vietnam War were big influences in our education. Dan Berrigan and Mike Harrington come to mind.
Today, I doubt there are that many teaching Jesuits…I know a lot of Scholastics (jebs in training) that joined to duck the draft. There are only a fraction of Jesuits teaching at HC today, pretty much for the same reason that they can’t get socially well adjusted men to become parish Priests. Changes in societal norms, etc. Allowing women in the Priesthood and Priests to marry could change this dynamic, but I don’t see that happening in Pope Ratzo’s Church.
And you are so spot on with the ‘drink like fishes’. Those guys were pros. I had a few opportunities to join my teacher Jesuits for dinner and conversation….I was amazed with their ability to drink and converse, well into the night and be in the classroom, fully functional, at 8:00 the next morning.
Tehanu
@efroh:
I’m not Catholic but I worked for a couple of years in schools run by RSHM (Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary) nuns. Maybe they were the exception, but the ones I knew were big on intellectual questioning and science as well as social service. I didn’t agree with their religious beliefs, or their stand on birth control & abortion, but I respected them.
Platonicspoof
@Mark S.:
Thanks for pointing that out.
Bondo
The Jesuits actually go to school, and value education, while the clergy are the ignorant teabaggers of Catholicism? We’re a year or two away from having one of the nuttier bishops proudly holding a up a “Get A Brain, Morans” sign.
Darkrose
@efroh:
My Jesuit high school was all-boys until the late ’70’s. I always loved that when they started letting girls in, they had to score higher on the entrance exam than boys, so the school ended up with a bunch of girls who could run rings around the boys at first.
There was hardly any mention at all of abortion at my high school. I think that it came up in one of the sophomore religion classes in the context of the “seamless garment”: opposition to the death penalty, war, and abortion. While I’m still vehemently pro-choice, I do respect that position. Too bad the Church as a whole has forgotten the rest of the agenda.
PhoenixRising
In the blue-collar parish where I grew up in the 60s, it was considered a great bragging point if your son was accepted to one of the Jesuit high schools—but, at the same time, spiteful neighbors would “lament” that the lucky lad was all too likely to be “seduced” by the Jesuits into leaving his family behind forever, disappearing into a Jesuit seminary that would eventually send him to some godforsaken foreign hellhole in Africa or South America or worst of all, Washington DC.
My dad went to Ignatius HS with Dennis Kucinich. Neither young man was ever the same, defined as ‘hollowly acting out the commands of a hierarchical unbending institution with 15th century values’.
I too don’t insist that the Church work to carry out my vision of a just world–but would like the USCCB to consider carrying out their own damn vision, as stated in Catholic doctrine. How is it possible that these men met for days and apparently didn’t discuss poverty? Darned if I know.
Innocent Bystander
I want to add another point about Jesuits vs. Catholic Church. The Church is and always was about the propagation of the Church and its infallible doctrine. Jesuits, teachers first, have always focused on the independent growth of knowledge in the individual which conflicts with the Church’s core goals for the humankind. There’s a real divergence in their core philosophies and that has naturally produced tensions between the two for centuries.
CaseyL
I’ve noticed this phenomenon as well. I think it may have something to do with drinking being the only “vice” Jesuits are officially allowed to practice, so they focus on being able to do it really well.
Upthread, someone said there’s a lot of intrafraternal sex in the Jesuit Order which, if true, shoots my theory to hell. (Not the “officially allowed to practice” part, obviously, but the single-minded focus part.)
Agnostic/atheistic Jew though I am, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Jesuits, precisely because they were and are the intellectual Hell’s Angels of the Church. If I had the chance to take some coursework at an SJ college, I’d jump at it,even though I’m about 30 years past college age.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“@freelancer: sure, but they don’t hold a candle to Liberation Theologists.”
Heck, Jesuits invented liberation theology. They’re cool, as are the Franciscans.
As for the assertion that the archbishops always sided with the dictators, there were notable exceptions: the blessed Archbishpp Oscar Romero being one.
In the old days, the Democratic Party urban activists and the UK Labour Party activists had disproportionate numbers of Jews and Catholics.
bago
My Catholicism suck, having been raised Protestant/cult/anti-secular. (Seriously, I knew where the AFA guy was coming from). So as an atheist cyber-nerd-burner, I have to ask: Sisters of Mercy is more than a goth band?
Josh
I knew before clicking the link that it’d be the Jesuit who was forced out of his magazine editorship by the Vatican.
lol
Catholic schools: Yes, you have to put up with history of the church classes, but you also get taught no-bullshit science, which is more than I can for a number of supposedly non-private schools.
DPirate
That’s funny. My mom always said jesuits were more cunning and manipulative.
Innocent Bystander
@CaseyL: There were some pretty flamboyant characters and oddballs in the order to be sure (Mayor Curley’s son James comes to mind) …but I never had any that hit on me. Most seemed fairly asexual, IMHO. I suspect that there was a lot of group policing that a layperson would not be privvy to. Of course, the social dynamics of the Jesuit community would be a lot different from the typical parish priest who would have a lot less peer interaction and more opportunity for other pursuits. On occasion, there’d be a rather sudden reassignment or a return to the seminary and rumors of a breakdown (which may have been a cover story for all I know).
Saw a lot of social drinking and camaraderie, though. These guys were top-shelf in their alcohol choices and their stocks were damn impressive.
DPirate
France 1788
Mum
@schrodinger’s cat:
I didn’t think there were Jesuit nuns. I believe all Jesuits are priests.
Mum
@West of the Cascades:
And/or “Black Robe.”
Mum
@Citizen Alan:
The “On Faith” piece is pretty disgusting, but I don’t know that we could have expected much from an apologist for Pius XII. I was pleased to see that the comments unanimously criticized his little hit piece.
Mum
@JWL:
There have been several. The Quakers and other religious groups were involved in the abolitionist movements prior to the Civil War. The Catholic Worker movement was heavily involved in work with the poor and with anti-war and conscientious objector issues. The Catholic church has for some time had a sanctuary movement to help undocumented workers and their families. Habitat for Humanity had its beginnings with, and is still largely affiliated with, various Christian sects.
Mum
@morzer:
I just watched two films back to back. The first was “Inside Job,” a documentary about the financial meltdown, which definitely pointed to our “atomized” social structure. The second was “Vision: from the Life of Hildegard von Bingen,” which was set in the 11th century and was about the spiritual and communal life of the extraordinary Hildegard. And, yes, it was a feature film rather than a documentary, but you definitely had a sense that, even though there were inequalities of gender and class, life worked better than we would have supposed.
droog
@MAJeff:
The Jesuits I studied with were a mixed bag; not remarkable as a whole. Although a big part of it was that they were dominated by a contingent of the first wave of Cuban exiles, i.e. pro-Batista elites. They weren’t thoughtful or humble at all. There were others who weren’t part of that contingent but although they were more mellow they didn’t project an image of Jesuits being awesome. This wasn’t in the USA, by the way, it was Santo Domingo. Educating unruly boys is not necessarily the best way to see progressive thought flourish. I figure we got the worst of the lot.
Looking at a broader picture, most priests that belong to an order come across as better. They don’t need to be Jesuits. Franciscans, Carmelites and Dominicans are pretty good people, too. It probably is caused by the difference between solemn and simple vows that the two types of clergy take. The secular clergy don’t have to take vows of poverty, for example. They may have to lead humbles lives like all God’s children, but they don’t necessarily vow to own as little property as possible.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@schrodinger’s cat:
Jesuit nuns? I’m pretty sure there is no such thing. On the other hand, “Jesuit Nuns” would be an excellent band name.
Certified Mutant Enemy
We could use more like this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Drinan
BTW, back in the 80’s there was a rumor Fr. Drinan was going to the faculty of the Jesuit university I was attending. The right wing students went absolutely ape shit crazy upon hearing this rumor, which was why I was disappointed when the rumor turned out to be false.
Smurfhole
Worth noting that, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1745, the Jesuits began researching the scientific causation of earthquakes. To this day, they’re on the forefront of seismology. When the 1906 earthquake hit San Francisco, almost every seismograph in the world was located in a Jesuit mission.
BC
I think that the bishops in today’s American Catholic Church are focused on two issues: abortion and homosexuality. I really think they think that once these two issues are resolved in their favor, they can then pivot to the social justice issues. Problem is, I don’t think these two issues can ever be resolved in their favor, so the Church is either going to have to put them on the back burner or become ever more reactionary in trying to win on these two issues. Election of Dolan is their response now. But if only conservatives are elevated to bishops, then there is no hope for the church to be able to put these issues on back burner.
mikeyes
Innocent Bystander: Hoya! (Class of ’66)
I went to a Jesuit school from kindergarten until I entered medical school. It is hard not to admire these men who taught me critical thinking and were also able to listen and understand. (And drink you under the table.)
Just to clarify, there are certainly Jesuits who fit in the conservative mold but they too are critical thinkers. I suspect that they see that the economy is the question and that the church should put their resources where it will help. Even the most conservative priest/teacher that I had saw the wisdom of contraception. The Jesuits just weed out the morons.
As a matter of history the church banned the Jesuits for 75 years. What they forgot to do was read the rules, however, and once they thought that the last Jesuit was dead, they graciously lifted the ban only to find a nest of Jesuits in Russia where the ban had not been read. Typically Jesuitical it was pointed out that the ban did not exist in places where it was not read in. The church was hoisted on its own petard, the main mission of the Jesuits in my mind.
Sasha
Jesuits are the intellectuals of the Church, and much of their training is devoted to education, philosophy, and teaching. As a consequence they are less prone to fall victim to unthinking dogma, emotional arguments, and truthiness.
mikeyes
Who could not like educators whose alumni are as diverse as Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, Voltaire, and Fidel Castro? 11% of Congress are Jesuit trained including John Boehner, Lisa Murkowski, Sten Hoyer, and Jim Webb. They have all been infected with the secretive ratio studiorum, so watch out!