Looking for a fight: Pope Francis, a saint for reform

Perhaps the photo above the November 26 Washington Post story says it all about Pope Francis. His views of society are shaking the comfortable stables of the wealthy and the powerful while warming the hearts of the poor, the lost and those of diminished hope.

It’s a profile shot with a circle of light behind the pontiff’s head, reminiscent of the halos depicted around the heads of saints seen in many Renaissance paintings.

Whether or not he is saintly, Francis does appear concerned with reforming the Catholic Church and at a time when the excesses haven’t just bedeviled society, but the church in particular and religion in general.

Francis follows two papal reformers Pope John XXIII, elected pontiff in 1958, and Pope John Paul I, elected in 1978. Both men led short papal reigns. The 66-year-old John Paul I died after only 33 days, leading to conspiracy theories, and John XXIII died, at age 81, five years after his election.

John XXIII, though, was apparently meant to serve, like Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, who served nearly eight years before deciding to retire with the title pope emeritus, short-term, a sort of interim period between popes.

Though their papal reigns were short, John XXIII and John Paul I introduced reforms that set the church in new directions that many welcomed and many, even today, disapproved, but those changes, despite efforts to reverse them, remain and seem un-reversible.

Like Francis, Pope John XXIII wasted no time in abandoning old views and establishing new ones for a church that was already feeling the pressures brought by modernity. One of his first acts was to confess the church’s centuries of anti-Semitism.

His most significant reform, which altered the church, was calling what became known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II. The council has reshaped church teachings and views that many Catholics found liberation in them while others could only find gloom in the change to traditions such as having mass said in English instead of Latin.

According to religion writer and pope biographer George Weigel in a July 2001 article, when John XXIII called for Vatican II in 1959, Cardinal Giovanni Montini, who became the next pope a few years later, said to a friend: “This holy old boy doesn't realize what a hornet's nest he's stirring up.”

John Paul I also wasted no time in instituting reforms in what became one of the shortest reigns in papal history. He made changes to humanize the papacy, referring to himself in the first person instead of the third person “we.” He rejected the “papal coronation” for a simple mass.

He also was preparing an encyclical or papal letter to confirm Vatican II’s reforms before his death hardly a month after his election as pope. The Vatican has never investigated as suspicious John Paul’s death, despite books and articles claiming a conspiracy. The Vatican’s official view has been that he died mostly likely of a heart attack.

Francis appears to be directing the church to a new, perhaps higher level of reforms. He forgoes the trappings of papal power, insists on living sparingly, foregoes accouterments of papal wardrobes, and wades into humanity.

 

He returned to his hotel by bus to pay his bill the day of his election. He cradled in his arms a man whose face was covered in boils from a disfigurement caused by a genetic disorder. He washes the feet of his flock.

Francis is showing humbleness, humility and love – a trinity that he believes is severely lacking in today’s world where he sees a massive gulf between rich and poor, hope and hopelessness, hate and love.

“Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor,” Francis wrote in a statement known as an “apostolic exhortation.”

“God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless. That is no way to live a dignified and fulfilled life; it is not God’s will for us, nor is it the life in the Spir­it which has its source in the heart of the risen Christ.”  

Francis also pointed out what he sees as an imbalance in economic scale and thinking.
 

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.

“This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacra­lized workings of the prevailing economic system … Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

Francis appears to be striking the right chords and connecting with hearts and minds when he speaks about the social fabric getting torn by economic injustice and inequality, and the academic theories and laws that enshrine such imbalance. A recent poll found Francis, who became pope less than nine months ago in March 2013, the most popular person on the Internet, which is the 21^st century’s version of a world audience.

 

“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote on his exhortation.”

Saint Francis? Perhaps, but from his actions and words attaining sainthood seems the least of his concerns, if it’s a concern at all. One thing is certain about the latest successor to Saint Peter, he’s demonstrating that he lives and teaches as Jesus of the scriptures did.

JFK Remembered: What a Lucky Man He Was

John F. Kennedy’s assassination 50 years ago today seemed to bring the hopes of an aspiring generation crashing down. More assassination and war followed that fateful moment on a Dallas street on Nov. 21, 1963.

Kennedy’s life and legacy is perhaps more complex than most men’s. It was admirable and enviable, yet at times questionable, deplorable, reprehensible. He tried to reach for greatness, to inspire people to achieve greatness, and along the way he did some great things.

 

The Peace Corps comes to mind.

I was four years old when Kennedy was assassinated. What I remember is the aftermath, the arguments and debates and sorrows I heard from my parents and their friends over the years. There was a sense that something was lost, perhaps forever.

In 1988, on the 25^th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, I was listening to a rock radio station in Washington D.C. when the disc jockey noted the date, then played Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s 1970 song “Lucky Man."

 

A British progressive rock group, its singer and guitarist, Greg Lake, wrote the song in 1959, when he was 12, according to a 2012 Horizon Press interview with the singer.

 

“I did write “Lucky Man” when I was 12,” Lake said. “My mum bought me a guitar and I was very lucky in that sense, the answer was yes instead of no. There was the first bit of luck because had the answer been no, my life would have probably been totally different.”

To me, the song seemed to capture JFK’s life.
 

 Lucky Man

He had white horses
And ladies by the score
All dressed in satin
And waiting by the door

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

White lace and feathers
They made up his bed
A gold covered mattress
On which he was laid

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

He went to fight wars
For his country and his king
Of his honor and his glory
The people would sing

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

A bullet had found him
His blood ran as he cried
No money could save him
So he laid down and he died

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

 

Gettysburg Revisited

Seven score and ten years ago, our forefather stood before a divided nation to consecrate a battle ground, blood-soaked from an endeavor to re-unite a people, and to re-establish the proposition of our founders, necessary for a more perfect union, that all people are created equal, and that none are more equal than others.

             Today we are engaged in a great social fracturing, testing whether our nation can hold together that which it spent more than two centuries building, that which it once split apart, and that which it has been mending since war had once torn it asunder. 

            The world has long noted and never forgotten those words of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863. Americans, for whom his speech was meant to heed and endure, have neither noted nor remembered in the spirit for which it was made.

            We often consecrate, dedicate and hallow grounds rather than find courage to sacrifice for the greater good that tolerates all, no matter race, creed, nationality, thought or sexual orientation. This nation cannot long endure in a house that ceaselessly divides for the cause of self-interest.

            A nation that produces greatness cannot continue to self-inflict wounds and think it will become stronger. Its boldness is not in the military venture. It can not hope to last without adapting to change, economic and political.

            We cannot become great without acknowledging our nation is a work in progress, that our work is always unfinished, that we must always devote the last full measure. A government by, for, and of the people must not perish from the earth.

           

War to End War

Nearly 100 years ago today, the guns of World War I went silent at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11 month in 1918.

It was believed to be "The War That Will End War," as British author H.G. Wells first described in a collection of newspaper articles that were published in a book at the outbreak of war in August 1914.

 

Three years later, President Woodrow Wilson, in arguing for America’s involvement in the war, and only months after getting re-elected on the promise not to go to war, stated it would be “the war to end war,” a term he only used once, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s “Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking.”

Next year we will observe the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I, which lead to nine million combatants killed and another nearly eight million missing. In France, at the battlefield of Verdun, a battle that raged for 300 days and took an estimated 250,000 lives, there is a national cemetery containing the remains of 130,000 unknown soldiers.

World War I was the first conflict of the industrial age and with it came industrial horrors, machine-driven weapons – tanks and aerial bombardments – and chemical weapons, which, as recently seen in Syria, remain with us today.

As the last century has shown, it was not the war to end war. The peace negotiations in Paris that followed the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918 ensured there would be a Second World War by how the victors treated the vanquished.

The allies had little concern about the consequences of leaving a nation like German nearly destitute and little thought as to how a family of nations should behave toward one another. It would take World War II and the creation of the United Nations to begin dialogue on that concept.

In scope of nations involved and scale of destruction, World War I was unprecedented in history until World War II. Since those wars, America’s involvement in conflicts has become longer. The United States was in the First World War for 18 months before that war ended. It fought in the Second World War for three years and eight months.

The Vietnam War, 1955-1974, was 19 years and five months and our fighting in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been going on nearly 13 years.

All of these wars and so many smaller ones not mentioned have links, directly and indirectly, to the outcomes of World War I. It wasn’t a war to end war; it was a war that spawned wars.

The More the Gun the More the Violence

Just the last month alone, the reports of gun violence, nationally, regionally and locally, from home to classroom to workplace, indicates gun violence is permeating our way of life.

Here are a few of the incidents:

* A school teacher is shot and killed in Nevada trying to protect students from a gunman. Two students are wounded.

* A coach at Missouri Southern State University is shot and killed coming out of a movie theater, prompting cancellation of the school’s homecoming weekend.  

* Shots were fired at North Carolina A&T State University’s homecoming and one of the bullets wound a 21-year-old man.

* A troubled man goes on a shooting rampage at Los Angeles International Airport and kills a Transportation Security Administration officer. The shooter wounds two others and is also wounded.

* Another troubled man kills his family and then himself in South Carolina, just one of many incidents recently of family murder suicides.

  
As this dispassionate blog on gun facts by The Guardian’s Simon Rogers’ shows, the United States ranks as having the highest rate of gun ownership with the second highest percentage of homicides by guns.

The social and economic impacts of gun violence are enormous, according to Small Arms Survey, another dispassionate collection of data from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

And FactCheck.org keeps a tally on whose providing accurate information and perspective on the issue in its “GunRhetoric vs. Gun Facts.”

As reported in local newspaper and national news media, gun violence is routine in society today. Joe Nocera of the New York Times offers a daily rundown on his blog GunReport, which just provides facts, nothing more.

Perhaps it’s time to decide whether gun violence is an acceptable way of life in a free, wealthy and democratic country. Before letting your knee jerk, either right or left, read the reports, check the facts, and study the data.