Be Thou My Vision - Beautiful

Good Lent Video w/ St. Louis Jesuit Music

NY TImes: College Does NOT Indoctrinate

March 3, 2012

The Indoctrination Myth

By NEIL GROSS

THE Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently called President Obama a “snob” for supporting higher education for all Americans. “There are good, decent men and women,” he said, “who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them.” He also called colleges and universities “indoctrination mills” for godless liberalism.

But is this true? Does attending college actually make you more liberal and less religious? Research indicates that the answer is: not so much.

It’s certainly true that professors are a liberal lot and that religious skepticism is common in the academy. In a survey of more than 1,400 professors that the sociologist Solon Simmons and I conducted in 2006, covering academics in nearly all fields and in institutions ranging from community colleges to elite universities, we found that about half of the professors identified as liberal, as compared to just one in five Americans over all. In the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents outnumbered Republicans by a wide margin; among social scientists, for example, there were 10 Democrats for every Republican. Though a majority of professors said that they believed in God, 20 percent were atheists or agnostics — compared with just 4 percent in the general population.

It’s also true that young college graduates are somewhat more likely to identify as liberal and to hold more liberal attitudes on social issues than their non-college-educated peers.

But contrary to conservative rhetoric, studies show that going to college does not make students substantially more liberal. The political scientist Mack Mariani and the higher education researcher Gordon Hewitt analyzed changes in student political attitudes between their freshman and senior years at 38 colleges and universities from 1999 to 2003. They found that on average, students shifted somewhat to the left — but that these changes were in line with shifts experienced by most Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 during the same period of time. In addition, they found that students were no more likely to move left at schools with more liberal faculties.

Similarly, the political scientists M. Kent Jennings and Laura Stoker analyzed data from a survey that tracked the political attitudes of about 1,000 high school students through their college years and into middle age. Their research found that the tendency of college graduates to be more liberal reflects to a large extent the fact that more liberal students are more likely to go to college in the first place.

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NCR's John L. Allen on 3 Myths About The Church

Three myths about the church to give up for Lent

http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/three-myths-about-church-give-lent

John L Allen, Jr. March 4, 2012

I realize this comes a little late, but if anybody's still on the market for something to give up for Lent, I'd suggest that the following misconceptions about the Catholic church and about Christianity in general would

I realize this comes a little late, but if anybody's still on the market for something to give up for Lent, I'd suggest that the following misconceptions about the Catholic church and about Christianity in general would be dandy bits of intellectual junk to cut loose in the spirit of the season.

Naturally, the venues where these three myths tend to be most deeply entrenched -- the secular media, the academy, political circles and so on -- are also places where the whole idea of Lenten sacrifice is sometimes a nonstarter. Yet they're remarkably widespread inside the church too, among people who really ought to know better. If Catholics perpetuate these ideas, it's hard to fault the outside world for being seduced by them.

Here are three popular fallacies, in the hope that Lent 2012 might mark the beginning of their expiration date.

1. Purple ecclesiology

"Purple ecclesiology" refers to the notion that the lead actors in the Catholic drama are the clergy, and in fact, the only activity that really counts as "Catholic" at all is that carried out by the church's clerical caste, especially its bishops. You can always spot purple ecclesiology at work when you hear someone say "the church" when what they really mean is "the hierarchy."

(I was once called by a producer from the BBC looking for leads on a segment they wanted to do about women in the Catholic church. I ticked off a series of high-profile Catholic laywomen they could ring up, to which the producer replied: "I'm sorry, I need someone from the church." She meant, of course, someone in a Roman collar -- that's purple ecclesiology at work.)

The truth is that the number of ordained clergy in the Catholic church comes to roughly .04 percent of the total Catholic population of 1.2 billion. If they're the main act, then all one can say is that the Catholic show is wildly top-heavy with supporting cast.

The self-parodying nature of purple ecclesiology was once memorably captured by Cardinal John Henry Newman, who, asked for his opinion on the laity, replied, "Well, we'd look awfully silly without them."

Seeing the church through a purple filter is misleading, even if all we take into view is the visible, institutional dimension of Catholic life. Most Catholic schools, hospitals, social service centers, movements and associations, even chanceries and parish headquarters, are staffed overwhelmingly by laywomen and men. More deeply, however, the church doesn't exist for itself, but to change the world, which means that if its message is to penetrate the various realms of culture -- medicine, law, the academy, politics, the economy and so on -- it's either going to be carried there by laity, or not at all.

Abandoning purple ecclesiology enables a wider focus on what the Catholic story of our time actually is. That story is not limited to whatever statement the U.S. bishops have made this week on insurance mandates or the latest Vatican pronouncement on liturgical practice, however important such developments may be. The full Catholic story also includes what hundreds of millions of laywomen and men are doing in their own lives and in their circles of influence, motivated by their faith.

Among other things, a purple ecclesiology leaves one ill-equipped to see creative change taking shape in the church. Even a rudimentary grasp of church history is enough to conclude that such change rarely comes from the top down.

Catholicism developed the mendicant orders, for instance, not because a pope decreed that it should be so, but because creative individuals such as Dominic and Francis saw a new world being born in the great cities of Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries and developed new apostolic models to evangelize it. Catholicism gave birth to the great lay movements of the 20th century, such as L'Arche, Communion and Liberation, Schönstatt and Sant'Egidio, in precisely the same fashion -- bottom-up.

Any take on Catholicism in the 21st century that doesn't include the Focolare along with the bishops, or the Catholic Voices project and the Salt and Light network along with the Vatican, or the great rise of lay ministry in addition to the College of Cardinals, simply isn't seeing the whole picture.

If you don't get that, then you don't really get the church.

2. A church in decline

The popular take on Catholicism these days tends to be that it's a church in crisis. Rocked by sex scandals, bruising political fights and financial shortfalls, it seems to be hemorrhaging members -- a recent Pew Forum study found there are now 22 million ex-Catholics in America, which would be the country's second-largest religious body after what's left of the Catholic church itself -- as well as clustering parishes, closing institutions and struggling to hand on the faith to the next generation.

The overall perception is that this is an era of Catholic entropy -- decline, contraction, things getting smaller.

Seen from global perspective, however, that's just wildly wrong. The last half-century witnessed the greatest period of missionary expansion in the 2,000-year history of Catholicism, fueled by explosive growth in the southern hemisphere. Take sub-Saharan Africa as a case in point: The Catholic population at the dawn of the 20th century was 1.9 million, while by the end of the century it was more than 130 million, representing a staggering growth rate of 6,708 percent. Overall, the global Catholic footprint shot up from 266 million in 1900 to 1.1 billion in 2000, ahead of the overall rate of increase in world population, and is still rising today.

The dominant Catholic narrative of our time, in other words, is not decline but astronomic growth. (That's not true everywhere, as there are significant losses in Europe, parts of North America and in some pockets of Latin America, but it is the global big picture.)

Running those numbers, one is reminded of a famous 2003 essay by David Brooks, poking fun at secular elites who like to believe that religion is in decline: "A great Niagara of religious fervor is cascading down around them," he wrote, "while they stand obtuse and dry in the little cave of their own parochialism."

Even in the United States, the Catholic church is actually holding its own. Yes, it's lost a third of Americans born into the faith, but its retention rate of two-thirds is actually fairly healthy by the competitive standards of America's wide-open religious marketplace. (It's much higher than, say, the Jehovah's Witnesses, who retain only one-third of their members.) Further, the Catholic church is holding steady at roughly a quarter of the national population, thanks largely to Hispanic immigration and higher-than-average birth rates among Hispanic Catholics. In the words of Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum, American Catholicism is "browning," but it's not contracting.

To be sure, statistics alone don't settle disputes about the choices facing the church. Those 22 million ex-Catholics in America, for instance, don't necessarily represent a "vote with your feet" referendum against the conservative drift of church leadership in the last quarter-century, especially when you consider that, according to the Pew data, a sizeable chunk defected to Evangelical Protestantism. Nor does the phenomenal growth of Catholicism in the global south necessarily amount to an endorsement of current Vatican policy, because quite honestly, the Vatican has had precious little to do with it.

In other words, you can't draw a straight line from population data to who's right or wrong in current Catholic debates. What can be said with empirical certainty, however, is that anybody who thinks this is an era of Catholic decline needs to get out more often.

3. Christianity is the oppressor, not the oppressed

Of all the popular misconceptions about Catholicism, and about Christianity in general, this is arguably the most pernicious.

Stoked by historical images of the Crusades and the Inquisition, and even by current perceptions of the wealth and power of church leaders and institutions, it's tough for Western observers to wrap their minds around the fact that in a growing number of global hotspots, Christians today are the defenseless oppressed, not the arrogant oppressors.

Here's the stark reality of our times: In the early 21st century, we are witnessing the rise of a whole new generation of Christian martyrs.

Christians are today, statistically speaking, by far the most persecuted religious group on the planet. According to the Frankfurt-based Society for Human Rights, fully 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed against Christians. The Pew Forum estimates that Christians experience persecution in a staggering total of 133 nations, fully two-thirds of all the countries on earth.

As part of that picture, the Catholic relief agency "Aid to the Church in Need" estimates that 150,000 Christians die for their faith every year, in locales ranging from the Middle East to Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America. This means that every hour of every day, roughly 17 Christians are killed somewhere in the world, either out of hatred for the faith or hatred for the works of charity and justice their faith compels them to perform.

Perhaps the emblematic example is Iraq, where a strong Christian community that took two millennia to build has been gutted in the arc of a little more than two decades. Prior to 1991, the year of the First Gulf War, there were more than 2 million Christians in Iraq, while today the high-end estimate is that somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 may be left.

Given the special responsibility the United States bears for Iraq, the fact that the fate of Iraqi Christians is not a driving, front-burner priority in American Catholic life is nothing short of a moral outrage.

As the U.S. bishops gear up to fight a new set of church/state battles on the domestic front, the foregoing suggests a special challenge to American Catholics to keep our eyes on the prize. In the States, a threat to religious freedom usually means you might get sued, while in many parts of the world, it means you might get shot. Surely we can all agree that's a more dramatic set of circumstances.

If you give up anything this Lent, the inability to recognize a growing global war on Christians would be a truly inspired choice.

***

[John L. Allen Jr. is NCR's senior correspondent. His email address is jallen@ncronline.org.]

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good Release Voter Guide

Catholic political group: Reject selfishness as reason for vote

by Joshua J. McElwee on Feb. 29, 2012

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a progressive lay-led political advocacy group, released a voter guide this morning that calls for Catholic voters this election cycle to “spurn...those sins of selfishness and pride that afflict the human heart and frustrate our common endeavors as one people.”

Named “The Common Good in America Today,” the guide takes on the lens of the Catholic notion of the common good to address seven different topic areas Catholic voters might consider in the November elections, including the economy, pro-life issues, healthcare, and religious liberty.

Opening with a quotation from Pope Benedict’s encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, the guide states that while it recognizes that “no candidate and no party completely adhere to the vision of Pope Benedict XVI,” its aim is to “take up the call” issued by the U.S. bishops in their own voting guide, named Faithful Citizenship.

The bishops’ 2011 version of that document, which has traditionally been released by the bishops the year before a presidential election, was released last fall. Unlike previous years, the bishops decided that instead of writing a new version for the 2012 election that they would re-release their 2007 letter with a new introduction.

Speaking to NCR by phone Wednesday, one of the board members of Catholics in Alliance said the group decided to issue its guide to complement the bishops’, and to shine the light of Catholic social teaching on some of the most discussed topics of the day.

“We’re…trying to focus on the issues that seem to be getting the most attention in contemporary American politics,” said Stephen Schneck, who is also the director of Catholic University’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies.

At the same time, said Schneck, Catholics in Alliance also wanted “to bring attention to facets of this discussion that have been ignored” in the current political debates.

Addressing a question about how the U.S. bishops’ current focus on the controversial mandate requiring coverage of contraceptive services in health care plans might overshadow other issues of importance, Schneck said that the church should look for pragmatic ways to address the mandate and concerns it has generated about religious liberty in the country.

“We’re convinced that, however important religious liberty is, the way in which the church properly should be addressing all of the issues in contemporary American politics is pragmatically,” said Schneck.

[The bishops] need to be talking about the desperate problem of immigrants and the need for immigration reform. They need to be talking about the environment, they need to be talking about the poor. And frankly, they need to be talking about religious liberty,” he continued.

“But we can’t just have one channel. We need to be able to talk about all of these things, and we can only do it…if we are able to engage thoughtfully and pragmatically.”

In terms of addressing economic inequality, Catholics in Alliance’s guide calls particular attention to the Tea Party, writing that the political goals expressed by members of the group leave “no room for Christ and no room for Christian love.”

Groups like the Tea Party, the guide states, “have a different understanding of the human vocation,” which “celebrates a hyper-individualism that specifically denies the possibility of a Common Good, and is dedicated to a form of social Darwinism in which the poor and vulnerable are despised and only the achievements and wealth of the strong merit political protection.”

Among the other issues the guide addresses are immigration, workers’ rights, and foreign affairs.

In terms of immigration, the guide writes that “the greatest political failure of the past decade has been the inability of our political leaders in Washington to find a way to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

Mentioning the 2010 failure of the DREAM act, which would have granted citizenship to immigrants who have attended college or served in the military, the guide states that “immigration has made America a better, more lively, more diverse, more successful nation.”

“We believe that immigrants today should receive the same pathways to citizenship that previous generations of immigrants enjoyed,” it continues.

In the area dedicated to foreign affairs, the guide quotes Pope Paul VI’s 1965 address to the United Nations -- when the pope declared “War never again. Never again war.” -- before writing that the group “believes that statesmen should heed what is known as Just War Theory, not least because that theory insists that war must always be a last resort.”

Mentioning the roots of the theory, the guide states that “we believe its principles are accessible to all and would keep our nation, and other nations, from the kind of militaristic forays that wreak…suffering and havoc.”

For the entire voter guide, click here.

For pdf version, click here

[Joshua J. McElwee is an NCR staff writer. His email address is jmcelwee@ncronline.org.]

Heart and Bones -The Pines. Best Song on the season finale of Parenthood.

Heart and Bones -The Pines. Best Song on the season finale of Parenthood.

Porcelain by Lucy Scwartz. NBC Parenthood Season finale

Porcelain by Lucy Schwartz played during NBC's Parenthood season finale 02/28/12

Parenthood "Be My Witness" Season finale

Bahamas Be My Witness played during My Brother's Wedding episode of NBC's Parenthood 02/28/12


"Already Yours" Another Bahamas Song from Sept 20 2011 episode.

"Make Me Feel Your Love" Parenthood "My Brother's Wedding" 02/28/012

This is the song the choir sings at the wedding of Crosby and Jasmine. Can't find the one they played on the show but here's Garth Brooks' great cover of this Bob Dylan Song

JSRI's Fred Kammer, S.J, on Catholics and Capitalism

http://www.loyno.edu/jsri/catholicism-and-capitalism

Catholicism and Capitalism

“Catholic social doctrine is not a surrogate for capitalism.” [Blessed John Paul II]

by: Fred Kammer, SJ Jesuit Social Research Institute. Number 19. Feb 2012

Issues in the current political campaign season, the Occupy Movement, and claims made by free market extremists about Catholic social teaching require us to take another look at the uneasy relationship between Catholicism and capitalism. In the development of modern Catholic social thought, beginning with Rerum Novarum in 1891, there is a shift from an apparent “acceptance,” without formal endorsement, of capitalism by Pope Leo XIII in the beginning of this period. This initial acceptance is gradually changed by the doubts of Pius XI, by Pius XII's recognition of capitalism's tie to egoism, and John XXIII's call for its reform. Paul VI then seems to take a posture of greater neutrality on both capitalism and communism, allowing local church affirmation of the good and criticism of the evil in a plurality of economic and political models operative in local situations.

The In-Depth Criticism of Capitalism by Blessed Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II in his earlier writing then attempts to distance the Church from the dominant political and economic schools of both east and west. He harshly criticizes the underlying ideologies of both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism and the devastating evil and destructiveness of their interaction.

Then, in Centensimus Annus (1991), Pope John Paul reflects on both socialism and liberalism in light of the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the dominance of capitalism on the world stage. He contends that Pope Leo foresaw the negative political, social, and economic consequences of the social order proposed by socialism, including its suppression of private property [no. 12 in text]. Socialism's flawed anthropology subordinates persons to socioeconomic mechanisms [13] and is rooted primarily in atheism [13] and class struggle [14]. "Real socialism" was embodied in the oppressive regimes which fell in 1989. Their fall, John Paul says, was due to violations of the rights of workers (private initiative, ownership of property, and economic freedom) [23], the inefficiency of the economic system as a consequence of violating human rights [24], and the spiritual void created by atheism [24].

Turning to capitalism and in the context of affirming the efficiency of "the free market," John Paul writes:

We have seen that it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called "real socialism" leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization. It is necessary to break down the barriers and monopolies which leave so many countries on the margins of development and to provide all individuals and nations with the basic conditions which will enable them to share in development.¹

Again, he asks whether "capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society?" John Paul's answer is:

The answer is obviously complex. If by capitalism is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a business economy, market economy, or simply free economy. But if by capitalism is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.²

It is important to read this statement in full. Many commentators quoted it in part and out of context, even going so far as to reverse the two alternative "if" sentences to end with the affirmative (Richard John Neuhaus).³ Ringing praises of capitalism, as some claimed, or "the moral vision of a political economy such as that of the United States" (Michael Novak)⁴ were at best a new form of theological spin control and at worst a form of "market idolatry" [40] when judged in the encyclical's full complexity. As John Paul explained at an audience on the day Centesimus was released, the Catholic Church "has always refused and still refuses today to make the market the supreme regulator or almost the model or synthesis of social life."⁵

John Paul's position, consistent with the tradition, has been to criticize both socialism and capitalism, even the "new capitalism." As if to respond to the wishful thinking of some free market commentators, the Pope once more made clear in a 1993 address in Latvia his criticism of both communism and capitalism:

Besides, Catholic social doctrine is not a surrogate for capitalism. In fact, although decisively condemning “socialism,” the church, since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, has always distanced itself from capitalistic ideology, holding it responsible for grave social injustices (cf. Rerum Novarum, 2). In Quadragesimo Anno Pius XI, for his part, used clear and strong words to stigmatize the international imperialism of money (Quadragesimo Anno, 109). This line is also confirmed in the more recent magisterium, and I myself, after the historical failure of communism, did not hesitate to raise serious doubts on the validity of capitalism, if by this expression one means not simply the “market economy” but “a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality” (Centesimus Annus, 42).⁶

Pope John Paul endorses neither capitalism nor communism, nor does he propose some third way between the two or some economic model of its own. The church's proper contribution is Catholic social teaching which, in the prophetic mode, "recognizes the positive value of the market and of enterprise, but which at the same time points out that these need to be oriented toward the common good" [43]. The 1999 discussion by John Paul II of “neoliberalism” in Ecclesia in America[56] adds further weight to the argument that Catholic social teaching remains profoundly critical of current market-driven societies and the injustices which they perpetuate.

Pope Benedict Continues this Critical Analysis

In Caritas in Veritate (2009), Pope Benedict follows his predecessor Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (1991) by highlighting “the need for a system with three subjects: the market, the State and civil society” [38].

The Market

The pope understands and affirms the importance of the economic marketplace as the institution “that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their needs and desires” [38]. He further acknowledges that in the global era, the economy is influenced by a number of competitive and different models tied to cultures. Economic life requires contracts, the point at which commutative justice is most applicable to regulate relations of exchange. But, as the pope notes, “the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy…” [35]. Benedict also makes it clear at various points that in a globalized economy, it is access to international and other markets that is most needed by the poor and by underdeveloped nations.

The State

The second sector or subject in society is political authority, which Pope Benedict promotes as ideally “dispersed” and “effective on different levels” [41], including the international. It is “the political community” which has responsibility for directing economic activity towards the common good [36]. Grave imbalances are produced, he writes, “when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution” [36].

Benedict further acknowledges that, “the State finds itself having to address the limitations to its sovereignty imposed by the new context of international trade and finance, which is characterized by increasing mobility both of financial capital and means of production, material and immaterial” [24]. This has altered the political power of States and calls for a reevaluation of the role of the States. Rather than “being too precipitous in declaring the demise of the State,” however, Benedict suggests that in the current world economic crisis the State’s role seems destined to grow in working towards resolution of this crisis [41]. In addition, he argues that governments must commit themselves to greater collaboration with one another to deal with a transnational integrated economy [41], as well as a stronger and reformed United Nations and other international economic institutions and international finance [67].

Civil Society

Pope Benedict is in continuity with his predecessors as well in emphasizing the importance of civil society which Pope John Paul II saw “as the most natural setting for an economy of gratuitousness and fraternity…” [38]. In this country, this sector is what we call the “voluntary sector” or “non-profit sector.” It is very consistent with the principle of subsidiarity, and in Catholic social thought this sector has been critical to arguments against the absorbing tendencies of centralizing governments. It also has been important to cushioning the worst aspects of the market. For Benedict, civil society is essential to preserving important aspects of human society and promoting integral human development. In his words:

When both the logic of the market and the logic of the State come to an agreement that each will continue to exercise a monopoly over its respective area of influence, in the long term much is lost: solidarity in relations between citizens, participation and adherence, actions of gratuitousness, all of which stand in contrast with giving in order to acquire (the logic of exchange) and giving through duty (the logic of public obligation, imposed by State law) [39].

Thus, civil society is a key counter-balance to both the market and the State for Pope Benedict and Catholic Social Teaching.

In conclusion, Pope Benedict highlighted the importance of markets, the necessity of justice to assure that markets are directed to the common good and function effectively, and the role of political authorities in making justice a reality. In response to free market extremists, Benedict is clear that “the conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from ‘influences’ of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way” [34]. One way in which he discusses the implementation of economic justice is the redistribution of particular goods to those most in need. (Beware, “Joe the plumber”!) Some examples where the pontiff cites the importance of redistribution are in the economy [37], redistribution of wealth on an unprecedented and worldwide scale through appropriate globalization [42], and a necessary worldwide redistribution of energy resources [49].

---

1. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, op. cit., No. 35.

2. Ibid., No. 42.

3. Richard John Neuhaus, “The Pope Affirms the ‘New Capitalism,’” Wall Street Journal, editorial page, May 2, 1991. Neuhaus even violated the Vatican’s press embargo in order to give his own spin to the encyclical before other commentators could report on the encyclical.

4. Michael Novak in “The Pope, Liberty, and Capitalism: Essays on Centesimus Annus,” National Review, Special Supplement, p. S-12.

5. Cindy Wooden, “Marxism Worsened Problems of Working Class, Pope Says at Audience,” Catholic News Service, May 1, 1991.

6. Pope John Paul II, “What Social Teaching Is and Is Not,” in Origins, Vol. 23, No. 15, September 1993, pp. 256-58, at 257.