Praise for the Pope

Like most of you who read this blog, I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have considerable appreciation for Pope Francis. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in 1936, ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969, and elected Pope in March 2013. He chose Francis as his papal name in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi. 

Pope Francis speaking at the Vatican on 10/4/23]

There are many reasons to praise Pope Francis. For example, just nine days ago (on 10/4/23), the Pope issued an “apostolic exhortation” under the title Laudate Deum (=Praise God). That document, which can be read in full here, was directed “to all people of good will” and was “on the climate crisis.”

Last month, I read much of Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis’s encyclical officially published by the Vatican in 2020 on October 4, the feast day of Francis of Assisi. While there was much good and important content, I was somewhat critical of it as it seemed to be lacking specificity or concreteness.

This month’s new document, however, which is a commentary on Laudato si' (=Praise Be to You), the Pope’s major 2015 encyclical on the environment, is generally quite specific and concrete. In the second paragraph of this recent “exhortation,” the Pope says:

…with the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.

Over the past twenty months, I have cited Michael Dowd and others who have spoken warningly about collapse, but here is a clear statement about that fateful future by the Pope.**

Also, an Oct. 4 Vatican News article (see here) states that in Laudate Deum the Pope “criticizes climate change deniers, saying that the human origin of global warming is now beyond doubt.”

Early this month, the Pope convened the three-week General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, sometimes called the Super Bowl of the Catholic Church. It drew bishops from around the world to discuss hot-button issues.

Some of those issues are whether priests should be allowed to get married, if divorced and remarried Catholics should receive communion, whether women should be allowed to become deacons, and how the church will handle matters around the LGBTQ community.

It remains to be seen how, or when, these contentious matters will be resolved, but for those of us who are egalitarians, the Pope’s willingness to consider such matters is certainly praiseworthy.

Sadly, many USAmericans have little praise for the Pope. Politics takes precedence over their religious faith. Or for others, they hold to an outdated, conservative Catholicism and are, literally, more traditionally Catholic than the Pope.

According to an Aug. 28 APNews.com post, “Many conservatives have blasted Francis’s emphasis on social justice issues such as the environment and the poor,” and they have also branded as heretical his openness “to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive the sacraments.”

As an example of politics taking precedence over the position of the Pope, consider the contrast between Francis’s recent “exhortation” regarding global warming and U.S. Catholics.

The Pope, as well as the preponderant majority of climate scientists around the world, emphasizes that “the human origin of global warming is now beyond doubt.”

But last month, Pew Research Center (here) reported that only 44% of U.S. Catholics say Earth is warming mainly due to human activity—and of U.S. Catholics who are Republicans or lean Republican, only a strikingly low 18% think that global warming is human-caused.

In response to such criticism, the Pope has called the strong, organized, reactionary attitude of some Catholics in the U.S. Church “backward,” and has stated that their faith has been replaced by ideologies.

Francis reminds these people that “backwardness is useless, and they must understand that there’s a correction evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals” that allows for doctrine to progress over time.

Such progressiveness is one of the main reasons I have praise for the Pope. His deep concern for the future well-being of all people around the world has led him to claim that a correct understanding of Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.

Would that all Catholics, and all Protestants as well, could embrace these progressive ideas of the forward-looking Pope.

_____

** With considerable sadness I am sharing the news that Michael Dowd (b. 11/1958) died on October 7 as the result of a fall in a friend’s home. More information about his death and memorial service is available here. 

Women in the Church

Five days ago, I posted an article about an important decision made in the Roman Catholic Church in 1870. This article is about an action of the Catholic Pope 100 years later, as Pope Paul VI announced in July 1970 that he was going to name Teresa of Ávila the first female Doctor of the Church. 

Teresa of Ávila (1515~82) 

Women Doctors of the Church?

“Doctor of the Church” is a title given by the Roman Catholic Church to saints recognized as having made a significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research, study, or writing.

Up until 1970, there had been thirty named as Doctors of the Church. The first four, so designated in 1298, were Ambrose (340~397), Jerome (c.343~420), Augustine of Hippo (354~430), and Gregory the Great (540~604).

Over the next 672 years, twenty-six other men were similarly declared as Doctors of the Church. But then on September 27, 1970, Pope Paul VI declared Teresa of Ávila (1515~82) the first female Doctor of the Church. Just a week later, Catherine of Siena (1347~80) was also so designated.

Since then four more Doctors have been added to the list, and two of them are women: Thérèse of Lisieux (1873~97) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098~1179).

In spite of this high recognition of four outstanding women of the past, though, the Roman Catholic Church still does not permit women to be ordained as priests.

Women Pastors in the Churches?

Before 1970, hardly any Southern Baptist (SB) women had become preachers/pastors. During the time I was a graduate student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, though, in 1964 Addie Davis (1917~2005) was ordained in an SB church in North Carolina.

Other Protestant denominations had ordained women much sooner. For example, Anna Howard Shaw was ordained by the Methodist Church way back in 1880, and women were similarly ordained by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1888.

According to this 10/18 Christian Century article, at seminaries and divinity schools affiliated with mainline churches, women have been about half of M.Div. students since 1998—but are still only 27 percent of pastors in congregations.

The church that June and I are members of belongs to the Western District Conference of Mennonite Church USA. An Aug. 2019 article in Mennonite World Review reports, “Today, 40 of Western District’s 85 active pastors are women.” This includes Ruth Harder, who has been June’s and my pastor for the past six years—and a fine pastor she is!

My Experience with Women Pastors

Long before being a member of a church with a woman pastor here in the U.S., from the early 1980s I began to have more and more female students in the seminary classes I taught in Japan. Many of them went on to become pastors in Japan Baptist Convention churches.

One of my students was Okamura Naoko-san. While a student, she began attending the Fukuoka International Church, of which I was the founding pastor, and then after graduation she became the assistant pastor. A few years later she became my co-pastor, and that worked out well.

It was my privilege to preach Okamura-sensei’s ordination sermon. And it was partly because of that close relationship with a woman pastor that June and I could not conscientiously sign the statement that we would work “in accordance with and not contrary to” Baptist Faith & Message, 2000.

That historic doctrinal statement of Southern Baptists as revised in 2000 stipulated that women should not serve as pastors. Our refusal to sign our agreement with that statement led to our being unilaterally placed on retirement status in 2003 by the International Mission Board of the SBC.

The Catholic Church, in spite of now having four female Doctors of the Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention since 2000 are, by far, the largest Christian churches/denominations that do not ordain women.

What a shame!

TTT #21 Too Little Is Almost Always Better than Too Much

For some reason, the 21st chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT), which can be accessed here, seems a bit dated—but it shouldn’t. True, it refers quite a lot to ideas, books, and movements of the 1970s, but the problems being confronted then are still problems now, so I have no hesitation in linking this article to Chapter 21 of TTT.

What is the Problem?

My children probably didn’t appreciate me mentioning it so much, but from time to time I would say to them, “Too little is almost always better than too much.” That saying was not in harmony with the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, in which we were living then—or are living now.

In the United States, as in most of the “developed world,” the winds of capitalism have blown over the land so strongly that, fanned by the ubiquitous commercials on television, radio, and newspapers, the desire of most people is for more and more material things.

Generally, people don’t like to think about or use the word greed, especially in referring to themselves, but upon careful analysis it is hard not to think that that word is applicable to much of the consumerism rampant in capitalist societies.

Of course, greed means the excessive desire to acquire more and more, especially more material possessions, than what one needs. But the question is always about what is enough and what is, truly, excessive.

Compared to the vast majority of the people in the world, most of us middle-class people in North America, Europe, and Japan possess much more than we really need.

And considering the sizeable portion of the world’s population who live in poverty, the middle class, to say nothing of the upper class, definitely have excessive possessions. (Of course, many of those middle-class people, especially in this country, have excessive debts as well.)

So it was thinking about the problem of economic imbalance in the world, about matters of justice and equality, that led me to say to my children that too little is almost always better than too much.

What seems like too little is usually enough; too much is usually wasteful and/or extravagant.

Responding to the Problem

In the 1970s there was considerable talk among some people about “simple living.” John V. Taylor, a prominent British missionary and theologian, published in 1975 a thoughtful book called Enough Is Enough.

Back then, “Live simply so that others may simply live” was a popular slogan in some circles. The idea behind that statement, of course, is that those who voluntarily choose to live simply will have more resources to share with those who don’t have enough to live on. 

The simple living movement has been seen more recently: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Simple Living was published in 2000.

Caring for the poor has a long history in the Christian church. The current Catechism of the Catholic Church makes the RCC’s position clear: the Church’s love for the poor “is a part of her constant tradition.”

The same Catechism clearly declares, “Love for the poor is incompatible with immoderate love of riches or their selfish use.” It then cites the stinging words of Archbishop John Chrysostom (c.349~407): “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life.”

Over-consumption is one of the ways in the contemporary world that the rich steal from the poor. That is the reason one of the things important for everyone to know now is that, especially when it comes to middle-class peoples’ stance toward material things, too little is almost always better than too much.

A Praiseworthy Pioneer for Women’s Freedom

In stark contrast to my previous article about Mother Teresa, who was canonized just yesterday, this article is about a woman who throughout her lifetime opposed the Roman Catholic Church and was constantly opposed by the RCC as well as by many traditional Protestants.

Even though she died 50 years ago, this woman is still being severely criticized by some people, and Hillary Clinton’s approval of her is one of the reasons Hillary is currently being vilified, as I also wrote about recently.

Introducing Margaret Sanger

The person in question is Margaret Sanger, who was born in 1879 and died on September 6, 1966. Her lifelong passion was providing women with the knowledge about how to prevent pregnancies. In 1914 she coined the term “birth control,” and she was a fearless crusader for that cause, which culminated with the FDA’s approval of the use of “the pill” in 1960.

As a young nurse working in New York City, Margaret saw firsthand the misery of people living in poverty with more children than they could possibly care for adequately. And she saw the extreme suffering and even the death of some women who sought to have illegal and often unsafe abortions—or who tried to perform abortions on themselves.

Consistently an opponent of abortions, Sanger sought to help women gain the knowledge and the means to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

After several years of publishing and distributing literature that was deemed illegal according to the Comstock Act of 1873 and after spending in time in jail following her opening of a birth control clinic in Brooklyn in October 1916, Margaret started the American Birth Control League in 1921.

That group developed into the organization that since 1942 has been known as Planned Parenthood Federation of America, even though Margaret did not like the new name. 

Vindicating Margaret Sanger

In addition to charges that Sanger favored abortion, which she didn’t, she has also been charged with being a supporter of eugenics, which she was, as well as being a racist, which is patently false.

There was much interest in and support of eugenics in the first part of the twentieth century—and one of the main political supporters was the Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Sanger probably said things that we now would find problematical, but her view on eugenics in the first third of last century was very similar to that of many respected academics and politicians.

The biggest lie being told about Sanger is that she targeted African-American families. Two of her early supporters, though, were Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of the largest African-American church in the U.S. and W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP—hardly people who would be on the side of a racist.

Sanger’s vocal critics also fail to note that in 1966 Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the first recipients of the newly-established Margaret Sanger Award and that Mrs. King publically spoke in praise of Sanger and her activities. (Hillary Clinton received that award in 1999.)

There were questionable aspects to Sanger’s personal lifestyle, things that I would not condone, but her single-minded dedication to women’s freedom and the right to control their own bodies and the size of their families was a praiseworthy contribution to the well-being of our nation.

Resources consulted

Jean H. Baker, Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (2011) – A sympathetic biography 

Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (1938, 1999) – In her own words 

“Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story” (1995) – TV movie 

“Margaret Sanger,” Cobblestone Films (1998) – Available online at Mid-Continent Public Library

Saint Teresa: The Good and the Questionable

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was given that name at the time of her birth on August 26, 1910. Most people around the world, however, have for decades known her as Mother Teresa.

On September 4, this coming Sunday, during a canonization Mass in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Pope Francis will declare Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

By many people, though, Mother Teresa has been thought of as a saint for a long time. Back in 1975 the cover story of the December 29 issue of Time magazine was titled “Living Saints.” Mother Teresa’s picture was on the cover of that issue.

As a Protestant, it is not hard to understand the meaning of “saint” in the popular sense, such as that term was used in the Time article. But people being saints in the Catholic sense is a little more difficult—especially when it involves their veneration, which we Protestants sometimes incorrectly think is the worship of saints.

Recently, though, in commenting on the legacy of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Thinking Friend Glenn Hinson wrote, “The canonization of Kolbe makes me think that the Church’s singling out of certain saints has real value in challenging the rest of us to live our faith.”

Or, as it is sometimes said, saints are special people who by their lives help us to understand God better. Accordingly, by looking at Saint Teresa’s loving service to the “poorest of the poor” in Calcutta we should be able to understand God’s love better.  

When she was 40 years old, Mother Teresa was given permission by the Pope to begin a congregation called Missionaries of Charity. From their small beginning in 1950, that group grew into a large worldwide organization.

Because of their meritorious work, starting in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and then expanding to many countries, Mother Teresa became known around the world. As one indication of how esteemed she became for what had done through the years, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

There are some questionable aspects of Mother Teresa’s life and work, however. For example, I have serious misgivings about some things she has said—such as her extreme words opposing abortion. In her Nobel Lecture she declared that “the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.”

In that speech Mother Teresa went on to assert that abortion “is a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself.”

Highly questionable statements!

Mother Teresa’s greatest strength was the loving service she provided for the sick and the dying who were living in poverty. Perhaps her greatest weakness was lack of action—or even talk—regarding the causes of poverty. She did a marvelous job of taking care of victims; she did little in seeking to reduce the number of victims.

To her credit, in her Nobel Lecture Mother Teresa reported that she and her co-workers were teaching “natural family planning” to “our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers.” Elsewhere she claimed that such teaching given to three thousand families was “95 percent effective” (No Greater Love, pp. 127-8).

Still, how many more unwanted pregnancies might she have prevented if she had been willing to teach and provide the means for “artificial birth control”? She could not do that, of course, as a Catholic.

But no one, not even a saint, is perfect, and Mother Teresa did demonstrate great Christian love throughout her lifetime. So please rejoice with me this weekend as Mother Teresa is canonized, publically acknowledged as a saint.

Reflections on Vatican II

The first chapter of American Catholics in Transition is titled “The Legacy of Pre-Vatican II Catholics” and the authors refer to Catholics born in 1940 and earlier as “the pre-Vatican II generation.”

 They go on to say, “Prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Catholics were known for their willingness "to kneel, pray, pay, and obey.”

 Although I was not a Catholic, that is the age bracket I am in and that was the Catholic Church I grew up knowing only a little bit about.

 I finished my undergraduate theology degree in 1962. Since it was a Baptist seminary I attended, there was not a lot of study about Catholics. But of course there was some—and much of what I learned was very soon out of date.

As indicated above, the Second Vatican Council, often called Vatican II, began in 1962 and ended fifty years ago this week, on December 8, 1965.

Many significant changes were made in the Catholic Church at that Council. Consequently, much of what I had learned by 1962 about contemporary Catholic faith and practice was out of date by 1965.

Vatican II was the 21^st so-called Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church, and the first one since Vatican I in 1869-70. It was called by John XXIII, the remarkable Pope who was canonized in April of last year. Already 76 years old when he was elected Pope in October 1958, he surprised most people, who expected him to be nothing more than a “caretaker pope.”

One of the most significant changes made at Vatican II was the position of the Catholic Church’s relationship to non-Catholic Christians as well as its relationships with other religious faiths. The “Decree on Ecumenism” was passed in late 1964, more than a year after Pope John had died (in June 1963), but it was very much in keeping with his stated desire.

That Decree declared that other Christians were “separated brethren,” a remarkable shift from prior church teaching that regarded them (us Protestants) as “heretics.”

Vatican II also greatly changed the relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews. The “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions” was passed in October 1965, about six weeks before the close of Vatican II.

The fourth part of that Declaration speaks of the bond that ties the people of the “New Covenant”' (Christians) to Abraham’s stock (Jews).

It states that even though some Jewish authorities and those who followed them called for Jesus’s death, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door of all those Jews present at that time, nor can the Jews in our time be held as guilty.

Accordingly, the Jews “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.”

The Declaration also decries all displays of antisemitism made at any time by anyone. This repudiated the abuse heaped on Jewish people through the years because they were considered “Christ killers.”

There were also many changes in Catholic worship and practice. For example, there was a new emphasis on lay people reading the Bible. Also, Mass began to be conducted with the priest facing the congregation, and the language spoken by the congregants was used in worship rather than Latin.

Of course some things didn’t change, to the disappointment of some of the more progressive clergy and lay people: priests still couldn’t marry, women still couldn’t become priests, and contraceptives continued to be banned.

Some Catholics are now hoping Pope Francis will call for “Vatican III,” but that is not likely to happen.

But thank God for Vatican II!

The Significance of August 15

It goes without saying that for me, personally, today (August 15) is a very significant date, for this is my birthday. Little did I know, though, growing up as a boy in rural northwest Missouri that August 15 is one of the most significant dates in Japanese history and also an important date for the Roman Catholic Church.

In Japan, August 15 is usually referred to as shusenbi (“end of the war day”), although since 1982 it has been officially designated by the Japanese government as “the day for mourning of war dead and praying for peace.”

In the U.S. September 2, when the signing of the surrender document aboard the USS Missouri occurred, is considered V-J Day. But it was on August 15, 1945, that Emperor Hirohito announced on radio to the startled and grieving Japanese public that Japan had accepted the terms of surrender included in the Potsdam Declaration of July 26.

In classic understatement, the Emperor told the Japanese citizens, who were hearing his voice for the first time, “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.” (Even then, the Emperor’s speech was not a direct broadcast; it was replayed from a phonograph recording made in the Tokyo Imperial Palace a day or two before.)

For centuries before that fateful day in 1945, and long before it was made a Church dogma by Pope Pius XII in 1950, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven had been celebrated on August 15. That is the event by which Mary “having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory” according to the Catholic Church, and it is still a “holy day of obligation.”  

Doubtlessly, it was by intention that Ignatius Loyola and his six friends in 1534 formed the Society of Jesus on August 15. Then, exactly fifteen years later, Francis Xavier, one of the seven original Jesuits and the first Christian missionary to Japan, first set foot in that country. 

In the book about Takashi Nagai that I mentioned earlier this month, author Paul Glynn tells about the 400th anniversary of that event being celebrated by Dr. Nagai and other Christians in Nagasaki on August 15, 1949. 

And in his book Bells of Nagasaki, Dr. Nagai tells of going to the dawn mass on August 15, just six days after the bombing, in celebration of the Feast of the Assumption (p. 77). 

On November 23, 1945, there was a memorial mass for the more than 8,000 Christians who were victims of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. Dr. Nagai gave an address to those who had gathered by the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral. 

In that notable speech, Dr. Nagai said, “On August 15th, the imperial edict that put an end to the fighting was officially issued, and the whole world saw the light of peace. August 15th is also the great feast of the Assumption of Mary. It is not for nothing that the Urakami Cathedral was consecrated to Her” (p. 107). 

(That Cathedral, which in 1945 was the largest church building in Asia, was called St. Mary’s Cathedral in English.) 

Last Sunday most Christians and many others all across Japan thought deeply about the tragic events that took place in Japan 70 years ago this month and about the end of the war on August 15. 

Let us join with them, and people all around the world, to remember that today is an appropriate day for mourning the war dead—in all countries—and praying for world peace.

"White Smoke"

“Habemas Papam!” Those words resounded throughout the Vatican on Wednesday evening after the throngs gathered outside St. Peter’s Basilica observed white smoke emanating from the chimney connected to an old stove temporarily installed again in the Sistine Chapel.

As you know, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected as the new pope on the fifth ballot of the sequestered cardinals. He took the name Francis, the first pope with that name, although two of the best-known saints in the Catholic Church are Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier.

The election of Cardinal Bergoglio came as a surprise to me, and evidently to a lot of other people. For example, he was not even mentioned in the March 12 Washington Post article about who might be elected.

Not only is Pope Francis the first pope with that name and the first pope from South America, he is also the first Jesuit to be elected pope. Born in Buenos Aires in 1936, the son of an Italian immigrant, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1958.

While seen as a staunch conservative on such issues as abortion, contraception, and gay marriage, the new pope is said to be moderate to liberal on social issues such as poverty and social justice. Regardless of his own position, though, it is quite evident that the new pope faces huge problems within the Vatican as he assumes his new role.

Bob Englehart has been an editorial cartoonist for the Hartford Courant since 1980. On March 3, a cartoon by Englehart (b. 1945) appeared in that newspaper. Here it is:

The problems of the Vatican are disturbingly portrayed in Andrew M. Greeley’s book White Smoke: A Novel about the Next Papal Conclave (1996). Although the next conclave after its publication was in 2005, it seems quite relevant to the current situation. One hopes, however, that the present situation is not quite as bad as that portrayed in Greeley’s novel, which I just finished reading earlier this week.

Greeley (b. 1928 ) is a Catholic priest and a sociologist who for years has taught at both the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona. He has written a huge number of books, both non-fiction (academic) works and novels—including several bestsellers.

In White Smoke, Greeley says that the fictitious cardinal from Chicago “understood clearly that the Holy Spirit does not whisper names in their [the cardinals’] ears but rather works through the ordinary political process of an election” (pp. 26-27).

In Greeley’s novel, Don Luis, who is eventually elected pope—and takes the name John XXIV—gives a talk before the conclave begins. He closes his talk with a quite significant statement, saying that what he considers to be of prime importance “is the affirmation that we exist to preach a God of love, we try to be people of love, and we want our Church to be, insofar as we poor humans can make it, a Church of radiant love.

     “Does such a Church have a future?

      “How could it not?” (p. 143).

Then later at a dinner party, but still before the start of the conclave, Don Luis prays, “May the Spirit inspire us to work well and with openness and courage ... and grant that our Church, our poor battered Church, may shine once again as a light of radiant love to all the nations” (p. 204).

I pray that the words of Greeley’s fictitious pope will also be on the lips and in the heart of Pope Francis.