Are We Catholics?

The question was posed by my grandson Luke Klein-Collins as he rode with his Dad and triplet brothers Seth and Jonah in suburban Chicago.  They had just passed a massively impressive church, especially to someone who was almost four.  When informed that it was a Catholic Church, Luke just had to know:  Are we Catholics?

In the fall semester of 2004, I moonlighted at Catholic Theological Union, where I team-taught an introductory course in the Bible with a Dominican Sister, Barbara Reid.  There were forty-two students in the class, more than half women, fifteen from Vietnam, one from Baghdad, and all but one Roman Catholics, the exception was Greek Orthodox.  The diversity in this class was a foretaste of the church of the twenty-first century.  I often thought about little Luke’s question:  Are we Catholics?  Well, no, and yet…

Frederick Niedner, Jr. preached the funeral sermon for an old friend of mine, David Truemper, chair of the department of theology at Valparaiso University, on November 3, 2004.  It was a funeral we all dream of—majestic organ, wonderful hymns and choral anthems, and the sermon about David and about the gospel that sustained him in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith.  Reading this exemplary sermon is not the same as being there, but it is a close second.  Would that we all could preach like Fred.  Would that we all could live—and die—like David.

David Sandmel and John Stendahl recently participated in an observance at LSTC of Kristall Nacht (the night of broken glass) that took place in November, 1938, when hundreds of synagogues were destroyed in Nazi Germany.  Sandmel recalls a quotation that that no statement, about the Shoa, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.  Redemption in our time will be built slowly by people of good will; we cannot restore the broken glass to its former state.  Perhaps the shards of glass can be made into a new mosaic that can serve as a memorial and a sign of the covenant between us as human beings, and between us and God.  Stendahl refers to the holy name of God that in Judaism is unspoken, and to the unspeakable horror of Kristall nacht and Holocaust.  Beyond our silence we are called to pray Kaddish and celebrate Eucharist in order to defy evil with words of high doxology.  We need also to acknowledge the obscene words spoken by our ancestors in the faith.  A memorial to the Holocaust in Wittenberg recalls Luther’s own highly inappropriate reflections on a caricature of Judaism carved into the wall of the City Church. We Christians are called to silent grief and contrite hope and to speaking about the unspeakable past.

Robin Bisha and Phil Ruge-Jones remind us that Christians are called to watch for signs of the times that indicate the contemporary movement of the Spirit.  But Christians also need to read critically what they hear and see in modern media.  Whose voices speak in the media, and whose voices are silenced?  The news media often present current events primarily through their impact on the interests of large corporations.  This approach is so pervasive that we begin to accept it as “natural.”  News coverage of the war in Iraq uses word choices that affect our understanding of what is really going on.  Infrequent discussion of the civilian casualties in this war may result from the frame imposed on that war as “Americans liberating Iraq.”  The authors offer six strategies for reading, seeing, or hearing critically American news sources.  In addition to reading independent and alternative U. S. news media, one should pay attention to reports from around the world on the World Wide Web.  The goal of the pastor is not to offer one more political commentary, but rather to help reshape the frame within which the people of God interpret all news and events that come their way.

John D. Lottes speaks of a theology of hospitality to other religions on college campuses, but such hospitality is also increasingly a high priority on main street and local parishes as well.  Students and the rest of us need a safe place to ask critical questions and firm up appreciation of the heritage of our faith in comparison with other traditions and in dialogue with those who espouse these differences.  Hospitality, especially to the stranger, is a metaphor for the moral life to which Christians are called, and there are great resources for twenty-first century hospitality in Scripture.  In the New Testament Jesus embodies the welcoming hospitality of God to all in his ministering, in his dying, and in his sending the gift of the Spirit.  He calls communities of faith to that same hospitality.  Christians are called to a hospitality toward others that is based on the foundational reality that the face of Christ himself is in every stranger to whom we can be hospitable.

Lawrence H. Williams reviews the circumstances behind the Black Manifesto issued by James Forman in 1969.  It demanded that half a billion dollars (later raised to three billion) be given for various black ventures by American Christian churches and Jewish synagogues as reparations for African American slavery in the United States.  Stephen Long contends that recent church statements on slavery seek cheap forgiveness since without penance forgiveness is cheap.  Williams attributes the failure of the Black Manifesto to the Marxist rhetoric of Forman and to the American mind set of the time.  Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Anything that gets white folks so upset must have some good in it.”  The implicit question behind this essay is this:  what should the church today do in this regard?

Joseph W. Blotz composes an imaginary conversation of two college students about the book of Ruth.  “Shannon” represents an understanding of Ruth that raises up the characters of Ruth and Naomi as models of women who can be emulated today.  They exemplify friendship, loyalty and fidelity.  “Kara” opposes this reading of recovery with a reading of resistance.  She sees the text so steeped in patriarchy that little if anything can be gleaned from the story except another example of our religious tradition’s suppression of women.  While notable for the active women it portrays, the Book of Ruth does not break with the tradition of patriarchy.  These two “students” know the text and recent bibliography on it well.  We hope that as a result it leads to a fresh reading of Ruth by you.

So:  Are we Catholics?  Do you mean with a big C or a little c?  Are we-- Lutherans/Protestants/non-Catholics--anything more--or less--than a reform movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church?

Jonah, the youngest of my triplet grandsons—by ten minutes—was not yet ready for the momentous ecclesial dimensions of this question.  Are we Catholics?  “No, Jonah said, we’re triplets.”

I’d give my right arm to write lines like that.


Ralph W. Klein
Editor