Category: In Focus

The poor you will always have with you” is perhaps the most enigmatic line in the four Gospels. Too often, it is used as an excuse not to intervene in behalf of those who do not share equitably in the gifts of God’s creation. It is a fatalistic response if taken boldly. The main issue for all of humanity is found in the Kingdom prayer – “Give us this day our daily bread.” This enigmatic comment appears shortly before Jesus’ execution when He is a guest at the house of Simon, the leper, where Jesus’ feet are anointed by Mary (the fact that He is with a leper, a marginalized person in society, means that Jesus Himself is tainted by association). This account is told in three of the four Gospels, which underscores certain significance. Strangely, it is not mentioned in Luke’s, often referred as the Gospel of the Poor because of the centrality Luke gives to them. The thinking of Jesus’ time was that the rich were blessed or favored by God while the poor were viewed as responsible for their own dire straits. This is a view that has been threaded through history and embraced by many today. Yet Jesus upends this worldview when he said: “How hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” The disciples were astonished at this. “Who then can be saved?” Popular thought held the rich were saved, the favorite of God.  Luke demonstrates the change brought by Jesus when he is quoted as saying: “Blessed are you, poor,” and “Woe to you, rich!” If “the poor you will always have with you,” is perhaps the most enigmatic line in the Gospel, the most cynical is Luke’s judgment of the rich as having such hardness of heart that even if someone were to rise from the dead, the rich would not be convinced to change their ways.  Of the three Gospels, only John mentions the motivation behind why the price of the ointment was not given to the poor. “This he (Judas) said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief and, as he had the money box, he used to take what was put into it.” The episode mirrors the fact that, often, the poor are used by those who are the bank for the needy but mainly serve themselves first. A critic of government aid programs, Graham Hancock, lambasted the bureaucrats managing them as the primary beneficiary of public monies, and called them ‘lords of poverty.’ He argued that governmental aid programs should be largely eliminated as they failed to put the poor first. To understand “the poor you will always have with you,” one needs to look at a larger context. An observant Jew would have understood this quote as a reference to Deuteronomy 15: 7-10. It admonishes the faithful to act in behalf of those in need, with an open-handed, not a hardhearted or tightfisted, attitude. The teaching emphasizes lending freely whatever

Jesus Christ. How many times have we said these two words? Surely, a Christian calls his Lord: Jesus Christ. Certainly, most priests will quote Him, at least, once in their sermons: Jesus Christ. Yet, have we ever thought that if Jesus is the name of a historical person, Christ is not His name? It is not even His last name. Jesus is a name and Christ is a title. In fact, the exact diction should be “Jesus, the Christ.” What is the meaning of saying “I believe in Jesus Christ”? I think it would be interesting to explore more what lies behind a name, and see how the realities it signifies shape our faith in the Lord. Jesus, son of Joseph, was born in what we call Holy Land some 4 to 6 years before the beginning of the modern era. A mistake in calculating His date of birth brought us to start the Christian era when Jesus was actually a small boy. The Gospels tell us that He was born in Bethlehem, yet as an adult He is always referred to as the Nazarene, the one from Nazareth. So where was He really from? It is difficult to say. We reason in a historical way, while the Gospels were written not as books of history, but as Good News, they portray the truth of faith for salvation, not always the truth as we understand it currently. Matthew and Luke speak of Bethlehem because they need to show how Jesus was indeed in the line of David, who was from Bethlehem. Mark and John, who do not place much importance on Jesus’ genealogy, simply name Him after the town He came from. This already tells us something important: Jesus was a person born in history; He had a father and a mother, and He was clearly born in one place. At the same time, the Gospels are not interested in telling us about the historical Jesus; they were written to tell us about His message and meaning. We should be discerning in understanding the history of Jesus as different from what we read in the Gospel. In fact, the Gospels are silent about Jesus’ life until He starts his public life. Where did He live? What languages did He speak? What work did He do to support Himself? Where did He study the Holy Scriptures that He used in preaching so well? We simply do not know, but we can still learn something from what the evangelists tell us.   A middle-class worker Jesus grew up in Nazareth. This was a small village in Galilee, not far from a large town, Seforis. Even though Seforis is never mentioned in the New Testament, this large town could not have escaped the interest of the young Jesus. Growing in rural Galilee, Jesus was accustomed to look at nature with interest. Later on, during His teaching, He would use what He learnt from His observation of reality: “You cannot hide a town built

A person living in the Middle East in the millennium before Christ, was bound to have a difficult time with the spiritual world. Literally, hundreds of deities, minor spirits, and gods fought for attention. Each ethnic group, often each clan, had its own pantheon. Among the gods known in the region, two stand out because of their following and their request to the faithful. Ashtart, also known as Astarte, was a mother–goddess, out of which the most important of the Semitic deities were developed. Her name appears in the Old Testament and Solomon built a temple for her near Jerusalem. Ashtart was the goddess of fertility and sexual love. Worship before the days of the prophets may have somewhat prejudiced that of Yahweh, the only God. While we think of the Jews as monotheist – that is following only one God – the reality is that, for a long time, the Jews followed many gods. It took the work of many prophets and reformers to understand that God is one, and only one. Ashtart was a danger for Israel: it was a temptation for polytheism; because the cult to Ashtart foresaw the use of swine’s blood, it was a graphic rebuttal of God’s request for purity; since she was often considered God’s wife, this goddess simply denied one of the main pillars of Judaism. A far worse god was Moloch. Moloch was a strong god who wanted sacrifices. During the rite of consecration, children were made to pass between two lines of fire. At times, children – especially the first child – were sacrificed to Moloch. Jeremiah and Ezekiel make the point that Yahweh never asked for human sacrifices, and that first–borns were to be consecrated to God through circumcision, not killing. All the same, there were Jews who followed Moloch – there was a temple near Jerusalem – and even others who mimicked Moloch’s cult and sacrificed their children to Yahweh! There were also a number of Ba’al, which means ‘lords,’ for whom small temples were erected on top of the hills. The prophet Hosea speaks clearly about the moral and religious ruin caused by this cult. The shrines were little more than altars where the fruits of the earth were offered to the gods. Yet, also the Ba’al were the occasion to run away from the worship of the only true God.   The dawning of Yahweh With time, the Jews used the names of smaller deities and applied them to Yahweh as a way of describing different aspects of Yahweh. The prophets used these names to show that Yahweh alone is the God of all. Little by little, the names of these smaller gods become some of the names of God. El–Shaddai, for instance, means God of the Mountains. Yahweh Sebaoth means the Lord of the Armies (i.e. the armies of the heavens). All the prophets called people back to the true faith in the only one God. They spoke of Yahweh as Creator, as Father and

The apostolic Church. Where does this particular word come from? The word itself cannot be found in the texts of the Bible, but what we mean by it certainly comes from the very person of Jesus, from His words and deeds and, of course, from the teachings and the actions of His Apostles.  Already in the first decades of the life of the early Christian communities, people started using this word to speak about the Church and its members. For the very first time, we also find the word ‘apostolic’ referring to the Church in a letter written by Saint Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, to the Trallians while he was on his way to Rome where he suffered martyrdom, killed by the beasts, probably in the Coloseum in the year 107. The second time we find this word is in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Here, Polycarp himself is called ‘apostolic.’ He was the bishop of Smyrna until around the year 155. (Smyrna is today called Izmir, a city on the west coast of Turkey.) The most important reference to this term is in our Creed which was decisively shaped in the Council of Nicea (325) though, at that time, the text ended with the words.. “and (we believe) in the Holy Spirit.” The part that we continue to recite today: “… the Lord, the Giver of Life, and in the one….. apostolic Church…” was officially included there by the Council of Constantinople in the year 381, though the council fathers probably took the words from an earlier document written around 374 by Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis on the island of Cyprus.     ‘Apostolic’ in the New Testament The word is not there, but those who began to use it certainly did so to say that both what we believe in, as Christians, and also much in our way of living, as a Church, certainly come from Jesus and His Apostles. We could say that the first ‘apostolic person’ in the New Testament is Jesus Himself. The word comes from the Greek verb apostellein which means to send. We remember, at once, that Jesus used the words of Prophet Isaiah to introduce Himself to His contemporaries in the synagogue of Nazareth – precisely as the One who has been anointed by the Spirit of God and sent (Lk. 4:18). The idea that He was sent by the Father is clearly seen as the main motivation behind everything that Jesus said and did. No wonder that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews will call Jesus ‘Apostle and High Priest of the faith that we profess’ (Heb. 3:1). But Jesus is not the only one sent. From the very beginning of His mission, He extended to His disciples this fundamental dynamics of His own intimate life: “As the Father sent me, so I’m sending you” (Jn. 20:21). After His death, His every appearance to His disciples ends with words or gestures that send them (e.g. Jn. 20:17–18). And His

The adjective ‘apostolic’ is one that we specifically use about the Church. It is, in fact, one of the four words (one, holy, catholic and apostolic) that Christians, down through the centuries, have always used to say what we basically believe about the identity, the life and the mission of the Church.

On March 17, 1865, Fr. Bernard Petitjean found 15 Japanese outside the door of the new church that had been constructed to serve the European community in Nagasaki, Japan. Three of the women among the group knelt and said to the priest, “The heart of all of us here is the same as yours.” There had been rumors that in spite of more than two centuries of persecution, there were still Christians in Japan, the kakure kirishitan or “hidden Christians” who had secretly passed their faith from generation to generation. Those people who risked their lives to visit the Oura Church were proof that the rumors were true. The risk to their lives was real. Christianity was still outlawed, and when officials learned of their visit, a new spate of persecutions broke out focused on Urakami, a village on the outskirts of Nagasaki. This persecution began with the arrest of 100 kirishitan. By the time the protests of Western governments caused the Japanese government to halt the persecution of Christians in 1873, 13 had been executed and 3,000 exiled to different parts of the country. The origins of the kakure kirishitan date back to the 1630s after the revolt against the shogun government in which Catholics played a leading part. Christianity had been outlawed in 1587 and persecution began ten years later with the execution of 26 Christians in Nagasaki. When the Shimabara Rebellion failed, persecution became total throughout Japan and Christians went into hiding. Many fled to small islands where they would not be noticed by officials based in the cities. Some brave priests, Japanese and foreign, attempted to minister to the scattered Catholics but, by the 1640s, Japan was without priests.    Mass baptisms The evangelization of Japan began with the arrival of St. Francis Xavier on August 15, 1549, and aimed, like much of the Church’s missionary work at that time in the Americas, Africa and Asia, at the baptism of as many people as possible. Many missioners saw their work as a rescue operation, saving souls that were, otherwise, bound for damnation. One result was that catechesis was not stressed. Even today, we see the influence of this style of mission in Latin America and the Philippines where the Church has a broad, but not always, deep presence. People were baptized while having only a very rudimentary understanding of the faith. They knew some prayers (often in Latin) and some devotions to Mary and the saints. Some of these Christians went on to learn more about their faith and set up a system of lay leadership in the Church. When Catholics were driven into hiding, some communities were better equipped than others to remember and pass on their faith. As time passed, even the best-trained communities gradually drifted. Latin prayers, passed on to their children by farmers and fisherfolk, became garbled. The Hail Mary, “Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta,” became “Ame Maria karassa binno domisu terikobintsu.” It was gibberish, and no one knew what

In the wake of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake, prominent advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. and the international community to reverse decades of racial and political discrimination and build relief and reconstruction efforts on human rights principles, transparency, and respect for the dignity of all Haitians. The director of one of the groups, Monika Kalra Varma of the RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights, commented: “Over the years, help for Haiti has been shaped by ideological politics and broken promises. Generally, the international community has made pledges to Haiti that remain unfulfilled. Donor states have human rights obligations to Haiti as well – they must do no harm. When states pledge funds to Haiti on which the Haitian people and the government rely to meet their needs, particularly monetary pledges to strengthen water, education, and health systems, and that money doesn’t come in, the donors violate their human rights obligations.” Some development experts who have worked in Haiti for years spoke on condition of anonymity because they have friends and family members involved in the relief effort. “There have been hundreds of millions of dollars in development assistance that have gone to benefit Haiti’s elites – government, business and the military – at the expense of the country’s common people,” one source said. “These elites have abused international aid as they have done nothing to create an education system, a public health system or any meaningful infrastructure.”  Racial politics has always played a significant role in Haiti’s history. Haitian elites “tend to have lighter skin color than their darker-skinned brothers and sisters who make up the vast majority of Haitians,” the source said. At one point in its storied history, Haiti was divided into two sections: the lighter and the darker-skinned citizens. In 1806, Haiti had a black-controlled north and a mulatto-ruled south – merely five years after a former black slave, Toussaint Louverture, became a guerrilla leader and overthrew French rule, abolished slavery and proclaimed himself governor-general of an autonomous government. For decades afterwards, Haiti was crippled by reparations it was forced to pay to former slave owners.    Corruption and selfish interests Another Haiti expert, Prof. Robert Maguire of Trinity College in Washington, said that the history of aid to Haiti has been a complex combination of corruption among the government and business elites of the country and the selfish interests of international investors from the private sector who “wanted to maintain the status quo” and who viewed Haiti as “a low-wage and stable dictatorship” able only to manufacture basic garments and other textile products. He proposes a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth who, he calls, the “wellspring of creativity, talent and potential.”  A civic service corps “would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince to work. They could start with the once-iconic centre of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti’s countryside,” said Maguire, who

In June of this year, from the Basilica of St. Paul-Outside-the-Walls in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI announced his intention to establish a new pontifical council. That council is to focus on the “progressive secularization” of once predominantly Christian cultures and territories. In his speech, in which the new council was announced, Pope Benedict indicated two important themes that are of special concern to those unwilling to automatically conform to the rhetoric of “culture war” or to the “clash of civilizations,” both of which are well-used means clearly implicit in any simplistic division of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The themes that were inadvertently addressed were that of “powerlessness” and of “desert.” In this short blogpiece, I’d like to explore some of the ramifications of these unintended allusions, and also add a third: that of the ‘stranger,’ a figure so deeply imbedded within our history of spirituality and so deeply challenging to this latest twist of the failed “new evangelization.” Pope Benedict remarked that, in the face of so many historical, social, political and (especially) spiritual changes, all of which overwhelm our human capacities, “it seems sometimes we pastors of the Church (are) reliving the experience of the Apostles, when thousands of needy people followed Jesus, and He asked: What can we do for all these people? They then experienced their powerlessness.” It is worth pausing to listen deeply to the nuances that are swirling under this one sentence, and the content of the speech generally, because here is revealed a primary matter of concern: that of power. For a while now the rhetoric of a siege mentality has dominated the evangelical content of neo-orthodox mission. The declared ‘culture wars’ of the 1980’s have continued unabated within the Church, despite having reached their apotheosis outside of Church circles in the slaughter of the “clash of civilizations.” In harmony with the deeply destructive range of narratives manufactured within a “culture war,” enemies are identified, ever more pure criteria of purity and legalism are enforced, and Gospel and Tradition become malevolently transformed into the weapons by which cruelty is given legitimacy.  In such an atmosphere of manufactured menace and threat, we are led to forget that our faith is based upon the very thing that many now so fear: powerlessness. Our faith is not based upon a triumphant messianic warrior, or upon ritual righteousness and privilege. Our faith is built upon the self-emptying of God, a scandal and a blasphemy to religious respectabilities and self-sufficiencies of the first century. Just as once the small imaginations of humanity created an elaborate divide between matter and spirit, time and eternity, holy and profane, now, it is between ‘Church’ and secular. We live as if Christ has not already healed that breach, as if the Kingdom is not already ahead of us, independent of us, leaven-like and, as the mustard seed, beyond the confines of the Church. The Incarnation itself is the holy ‘yes-saying’ that we, too, narrowly and presumptuously define as alien to God,