Bob Drinan and I design a future for the Jesuits

Just after I took my first vows as a Jesuit in 1968, Bill Guindon*, the newly appointed Provincial, hired Arthur Anderson, a corporate consulting firm, to work with the entire New England Jesuit community to re-vision the province's works. This period remains quite vivid in its emotional impact, though some of the particulars have faded away. Guindon and his Socius, Paul Lucy, were my direct superiors most of the time I was a Jesuit. 

The team from Arthur Anderson soon learned they would guide a “discernment” though the word didn't exist in their vocabulary. Of course, they agreed and were even eager to learn, but they also had their requirements for the makeup of our Jesuit teams. We were all included regardless of grade. I had only taken my vows a few months before, but in the egalitarian mix, I was chosen to work with Bob Drinan, then Dean of the Law School, regarding our political stance regarding the social apostolate. The committee was small, only four of us, perhaps due to a sizeable portion of our New England Jesuit brethren being old-time religion conservatives, even in the wake of Vatican II's closing. 

Working together those few months was remarkable. Drinan was meticulous, always attending meetings on time, prepared and attentive, and never once pulling rank. I was a Jesuit scholastic, and he was the dean of a law school, but in our meetings, he treated me as his equal. He was an incredible listener and supportive of me, encouraging me to express my opinion and pointing out where it needed to be filled in. I learned so much.

In the end, Bob Drinan, his secretary, and I wrote the proposals and guidelines that would shape the political stance of the New England Jesuits. A year later, I went to work as a community organizer in South Boston, and in 1971, he ran for Congress on an anti-Vietnam War platform. (For which Jon Kerry, working for the campaign, suggested the slogan: “Vote for Father Drinan or Go to Hell!”) 

In 1996 or 97, I read a small piece--it might have been in America or some Buddhist publication--Drinan, already in his 80s, had just completed a Zen sesshin under the direction of Father Robert Kennedy, Roshi. A sesshin makes the discipline of the Spiritual Exercises look tame. Twelve hours of silent meditation a day, usually in seated posture, in 4 blocks about three hours long with short periods of walking meditation, silent meals, a few hours of work practice, and interviews with the teacher. In the article, Bob spent only a few sentences describing how physically demanding it was and paragraphs about the insights and “consolations” he received when Kennedy celebrated daily Mass. I was incredibly moved; he jumped into a demanding spiritual practice with both feet and lived to tell the tale. 

I googled Bob Drinan, found an email address at Georgetown, and wrote to him. I said he probably didn’t remember me, but I filled in some places our paths had crossed and mentioned those few months 40 years ago when we worked together with the organizational consultants from Arthur Anderson. I told him that I had been deeply touched by the telling of his experience during sesshin and the Jesuit angle; I had been practicing Zen for almost 20 years, and I probably closed with some words of gratitude to him and how his path and service had touched me. I pressed send and forgot about it.

About a week later, he replied. It was not a formal, congressman-style “thanks for your concern about the important legislation, etc.”--I suppose that I am not alone in getting lots of those--but a very personal, connected note: Yes, of course, he remembered me; he was head over heels enthusiastic about his experience, encouraged me to keep up with my “Zen studies.” and he thanked me for undertaking it. I did not expect a response, yet he took the time, energy, and consideration to write a former Jesuit he’d known briefly 30 or more years in the past.

Nancy Pelosi was and still is my representative in Congress. For decades, I was very active in San Francisco politics, and at some constituent meeting, I mentioned in conversation that I knew Bob. She quickly volunteered that he was her spiritual director, as he was for most of the Catholic representatives. The next news I had of Bob was when my representative, now Speaker Pelosi, wrote about her sadness at the passing of the “Father of the House.” 

I tried to remember whether or not he had put up much of a fight when Pope John Paul II demanded that Pedro Arrupe order Bob to leave the House of Representatives. I couldn’t imagine that he didn’t go without a few well-thought-out and carefully researched objections, but he did. He was professed and a Jesuit through and through.

He was a hero of mine; he still is. He tried to map a path for a Catholic to participate fully in a pluralistic society even when dogma, or at least a literalistic interpretation of the teaching, sets you at odds with the tolerance a democracy requires. His stance on abortion is a good example. And I fully supported fierce opposition to American interventionism. 

I wish I could figure out how to live a complex life fully. I suppose if I still felt a strong impulse to live a life with vows and promises, that kind of spiritual discipline, and felt that I could do that without compromising or being compromised, I would look to a life like Bob’s or Dorothy Day’s as a great model. 

When I googled Bob about 40 minutes ago to check the date of his death, I found this piece about the file that the FBI kept on him and his efforts to see it. I think it is such a great story and shows how he operated. 

http://goodjesuitbadjesuit.blogspot.com/2009/01/fr-robert-drinan-sj-was-under.html

*Regarding Bill Guindon, his vision and tenure as head of the New England Jesuits were remarkable. He was a visionary, and I was always surprised, even disappointed, that he was not tapped for a wider role.

White Night; The Elephant Walk

 May 21-22, 1979

I missed Stonewall, but on White Night, I got slugged by a fat Irish cop in front of the Elephant Walk. 

A decade earlier, my response to Stonewall was to organize a stuffy seminar on the Church and Gay Rights at Woodstock College. My response to White Night was to become a radical. 

The San Francisco community’s response to White Night was far more ferocious than Stonewall. Our sense of outrage ran deep. In just a decade, we really had thrown off centuries of old stereotypes. A momentous change had happened in the community. For us, being gay was simply a fact of life. Stubborn segments of the general society were lagging behind, and they were about to feel the fury of the men and women they intended to keep in their place. We had won a place at the table, fair and square. It had been taken away violently, and the consequences of assassinating our leader were going to be a blink and a nod. Never again, and certainly not in San Francisco.

The verdict was announced late in the day, close to 5 o’clock. I remember because later the police claimed it was the end of a shift, and they had no time to prepare for the mayhem that ensued. I was working late in my wood shop on 22nd and Alabama. The Inner Mission, a very Hispanic neighborhood, was perhaps an unlikely place to hear about Dan White’s fate, but the whole city was listening to the news. I turned on the shop radio. Manslaughter. Dan White had been slapped on the wrists. He shot at close range, and killed two public figures. The jury of his peers was letting him off not because he binged on Twinkees but because they were sympathetic to what he stood for. We all knew this. A minimum sentence may have been the official outcome, but having tasted power by electing Milk, the GLBT community was not going to be silent. 

I decided to drive down Howard and cross Market at 9th Street. As I started north on Larkin, I passed a line of parked police cruisers. Within a few hours, these would be torched, but it was still fairly early in the evening. I decided not to join the crowd that was already forming outside City Hall. My motivation might just have been hunger. I needed to eat. 

At home on Pierce Street, Terry and I watched live TV coverage as the crowd grew to several thousand, and then in the dark we could see the flames of the burning police cars. We could hear the actual sirens in our kitchen. We were less than 14 blocks away. It was loud. I decided to walk to Castro Street. That was the community’s home. It was where the march formed if there was a protest. It was where we celebrated. I knew that there would be something going on. I had to be there, but I also had a strange sense of foreboding. 

There was stunned disbelief about White’s verdict, and the rage was not in hiding. It might have been after 10 or a little later that the first protesters from City Hall began to straggle into the Castro. They arrived in small groups, mostly on foot. No one was shouting, “Out of the Bars and Into the Streets.” It was not that kind of night. This was the debriefing after a battle. What happened? How many people were hurt? Who was arrested? What’s the current situation? Drinks were bought for the warriors. 

The crowd began to grow. I don’t remember thousands, but it was more than a few hundred. The bars were full with some spilling out onto the sidewalks. People were looking for their friends. It was pre-cell phone, so we relied on the more primitive communication of friends asking about friends. Each of the few buses that headed towards Noe Valley was full of weary men. Cabs picked up passengers quickly. But the fury had not finished its work.

I found a few friends from Alice, the gay Democratic Club, on 18th, standing near the entrance of the Elephant Walk. There was a heated discussion. Of course, we were talking politics. The real activists were already trying to formulate a strategy for the coming days and months. I was already disappointed in Harry Britt, the man whom Harvey had groomed as his successor and Mayor Feinstein had appointed to finish his term. I knew we couldn’t look to him for leadership. The majority supported Britt, or were willing to give him some time to learn to swim after being pushed into the pool. Filling Harvey’s shoes was an impossible job, and grudgingly I kept my mouth shut. 

But most of the guys just wanted to get some dirt. We were angry, and we were about to get more angry. The cops had targeted the Elephant Walk as point zero in their retaliation for the humiliation of losing control of the rioting, looting, and burning in the Civic Center. It was just after midnight or perhaps a little later that a pretty sizable phalanx of cops, swinging clubs in riot gear, appeared at Market Street and began slowly making their way down towards 18th. They stuck together but were not in tight formation, as if to protect themselves from what who knows. Probably more than a few still had grandmothers living close to Most Holy Redeemer two blocks away. Our neighborhood had been an Irish ghetto they’d abandoned for the carports of Daly City.

Then came one of those moments that sticks in your mind for life. I don’t think there were more than a dozen of us standing close to the front door of the Elephant Walk. We were just talking. At that point, there was no traffic on the street, but we were on the sidewalk. I remember I was standing on the left side of the door, perhaps 10 feet away, perhaps as close as 5 or 6 feet. Three or four cops, maybe 10, were leading the group. They speeded up, and I thought about ducking inside. One of the leaders hit me on the chest and pushed me aside. Looking at me directly he said, “Go home if you don’t want to get hurt.” I could feel his anger was much more violent than mine. He was armed, and his badge was hidden. There was going to be a fight. I realized we were overpowered and the dangers would be entirely felt by the men and women in the streets, not the cops.

I started to walk up Castro slowly and hesitantly at first. The crowd started to come out of the other bars and were taunting the cops. I looked back and saw the cops smash through the Elephant Walk’s lovely front doors with the huge brass tusk pulls. There was lots of screaming and shouting, breaking glass, the men who’d been inside began running out. Some were fighting back. I began to run up to get across Market Street knowing that many white gay men like myself would be punched, beaten and arrested that night along with many others. I stood guiltily behind the police lines on the northside of Market until the cops began threatening us as the fighting increased in the Castro. 

I was trapped in a wide range of feelings. They swung from indignation and anger to helplessness and finally just naked fear. Of course, I knew that we gays and lesbians were a minority, but somehow, this liberal former Jesuit believed that if the world were just, I would escape discrimination. The last vestiges of white classist privilege would prevail and save me from harm. I was wrong.

The only time that I experienced this kind of rage before was during the Roxbury riots that followed the killing of MLK in ‘68. I was a second-year novice doing my “Hospital Trial” at Mass General, where we served as orderlies in the Emergency Room. The stream of ambulances and police cars dumping off the victims of the riots was horrifying. Early in the morning, when all the gurneys on the platform of the ER dock were full, three Boston cops were rushing back to their cruisers. One turned to the other two and said, “Let’s get back and break some more skulls.” They used the n-word. They saw me and quickly apologized, “Sorry, Father, you just don’t know what it's like out there.” I was and am no street fighter, but my gut told me that an unprovoked attack had to be answered. There was no apology from the cops on White Night, and I still had no idea how to respond.

After Harvey’s death, I’d always been on the lookout for good gay candidates, and there have been several, but in general, I’ve been disappointed by the series of lackluster politicians who flooded San Francisco’s political life after Harvey opened the gates; Britt took being supervisor as a promotion from letter carrier and now he had Wednesday and Thursday afternoons free to play the ponies at Tanforan or Golden Gate Fields. He certainly was no Harvey Milk. But if gay men and women were to enter the world as equals with the rest of America, there is no reason why we should be spared the sad breed of political hacks. I just always hoped we could do better. I still do.

Phil asks me the Big Question

Was Phil as confused as he pretended to be? Or was he just being a wily old fox?

Mumonkan Case 2 

Hyakujô and the Fox 

Whenever master Hyakujô delivered a sermon, an old man was always there listening with the monks. When they left, he left too. One day, however, he remained behind. 

The master asked him, “What man are you, standing in front of me?” 

The man replied, “Indeed, I am not a man. In the past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I lived on this mountain as a priest. On one occasion a monk asked me, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' Because of this answer (For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness), I fell into the state of a fox for 500 lives. Now, I beg you, Master, please say a turning word on my behalf and release me from the body of a fox.” 

Then he asked, “Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?” 

The master answered, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” Upon hearing this, the old man immediately became deeply enlightened

It was Saturday morning. Only a few minutes remained until the last period of meditation ended. Phil was set to descend the stairs to the zendo and begin the ritual of opening the dharma. He was legally blind. It all required a lot of effort and planning. He was going to give a talk on this koan, Hyakujô and the Fox.

I was being his jisha and carried the incense. We paused at the top of the stairs. He suddenly decided he needed to check the exact wording of the old man’s question. Phil, another old man, could not make a mistake. He asked out loud, “Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?  What was his answer, yea or nay? What did it say exactly? Is the man free from Cause and Effect, or is he still trapped?” 

He asked me, “Check it out in the Mumonkan, will you?” But the tone of his voice sounded more like a command. He appeared agitated. He seemed to expect that I should have had some ability to find a particular case. “It’s very famous, he said. “It's in the Mumonkan. It must be somewhere on the shelf in the living room. It’s a very important case.” 

I have described his ability to find the page, the paragraph and the sentence of an author he loved in his meticulously arranged library, but that morning, standing in the living room at Hartford Street, the books on the shelves were a total disorganized mess.

With the koans, or at least in this particular moment, my ability completely disappeared. When I eventually located the Mumonkan, he said he could not remember the case number, and he seemed to be blaming me for not supplying the missing information. Eventually, making us only a few minutes late, I read, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' 

Phil said, “Good. His first answer is no. Thank you.” Now, he was prepared to open the dharma. I remember nothing about his talk. Questions tumbled over and over in my mind--not just is the enlightened man free from the law and cause and effect, but what exactly are we trying to free ourselves from anyway? What part of my life did I need to unyoke to be happy

A few years later, I sat with this koan for days in the damp woods of Camp Meeker. When the sun came up till the day darkened, I thought of Phil, his blindness, and his generosity. The wily old fox had given me a koan filled with indecision, red herrings, witchcraft, and a few wrong answers, probably just traps or misdirections laid out with skill.  He told me that he thought he remembered it correctly, but he wanted to double-check it. What was this puzzle that he had to get right? 

Philip was a man whose life, almost all of his waking life not occupied with meditation, was devoted to language and the written word. I can attest that words were his lovers, and he returned the favor. Now, he couldn’t read at all anymore. He was almost completely blind, and the reason was simply misdiagnosed glaucoma, which would have been easily treatable. What a tragedy. If only a doctor had been able to give him the correct word for his blindness and not assigned some rare disease that only one a thousand get. Or if he had only gotten a second opinion when the highly recommended quack told him to kiss his sight goodbye. Maybe not 500 lives as a fox, but close.

Sometimes, the law of cause and effect seems filled with random errors. Perhaps the law is quirky and poorly administered.  The koan says, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” 

The Zen master says he’s happy to have saved us all!

Phil’s verse:

HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS

by Philip Whalen

I praise

 those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick

                      splashed picture—bug, leaf,

                      caricature of Teacher

on paper held together now by little more than ink

& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

What would Kaiser be writing these days?

The Synod is the most significant event since the Second Vatican Council—that is, unless you read the press rather than theologians. According to my news feed, it is a dud. If I include the right-wing “traditionalist” media, it is the work of the devil. 

I wonder how our great friend and companion, Bob Kaiser, might be reporting on these events. We could all use a good dose of Kaiser’s prose at his propagandistic best.

I admired Bob Kaiser. No matter that the world seemed to turn against him, he remained a dreamer, though I can hear him complain loudly that he was a realistic one. His vision took root in Rome during the Second Vatican Council: an incarnate Church deeply rooted in faith, nourished by the Lord Jesus, guided by the wisdom of the faithful called and gathered together to ponder and pray, would prevail; that the Lord Jesus through His Incarnation blessed our world with a vision to make all things holy: churches, men and women, study, and politics, the whole enchilada.

He wrote and spread his enthusiasm. He sold an inspired dream in which all the pieces fell into place as if Providence had ordained it, and the whole mess would begin to function as it should. Sex, imagination, and creativity played a huge role, as did prayer, the discernment of spirits, and holding fast to the promise of the Ecumenical Councils. He called this Ignatian DNA. Father Ignatius was always present for Kaiser, as for most of us. 

Another key is that Kaiser’s vision was shared. Of course, we all know and appreciate the great lengths he went to share his insights with us, his Jesuit companions—even when we couldn’t pronounce the word “autochthonous” and thought it was missing a vowel. Sharing entailed advocating a position, but in a broader sense, it also meant that the church, the gathering of fellow Christians, shared a vision for what is possible in a world redeemed by the Lord Jesus.

As corny as it sounds, Kaiser was a cheerleader. He had journalistic objectivity when required but was unequivocal about where he stood. His vision was boldly democratic—the last fruit of the Enlightenment, which began to emerge in the turbulent world of the first Jesuit explorers and missionaries.

And Bob, you encouraged me to write. I still can see the sea of red ink when you returned my paper “Xavier meets the Zen Roshi,” which I asked you to edit. Thank you.

I am no longer connected to the church in the same way I was when I graduated from college or was a young Jesuit, but my first impression is there is barely a blip on the enthusiasm meter—certainly nothing like when John 23 said, “I want to throw open the windows of the Church so we can see out and the people can see in.” The windows have been thrown open, and everyone inside looks bored to death.

It may be a case of the press coverage skewing the argument. Let me try to put on my Kaiser glasses and take a very biased look. 

Pilgrim’s Progress

I watched some of the opening salvos and prayers at the Synod on Synodality. It comes at the end of Pope Francis’s apostolic visits to Asia, then Europe, a horrendously long journey for an 87-year-old man with mobility issues. Francis began the first long leg of his trip to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore from September 2nd-13th; then, with barely time to catch his breath, he visited Luxembourg and Belgium from September 26–29th, returning to Rome to begin on October 2nd the last session of what might be the nail in the coffin of the monarchical church. He is the Pope and well taken care of, but I am exhausted just thinking about the effort required for so much travel. 

I followed as much of the journey as possible on YouTube, local TV news coverage in Asia, and the official Vatican News Service. I currently live in Asia. I have friends in Singapore and Bali. I know Jesuits and former Jesuits who live and work in India, Thailand, and Nepal. It is very different from Europe or South America, as are the Jesuits working here. I studied the photographs of Francis's private meetings with his brother Jesuits wherever his plane landed. Something I found very encouraging was that he always began by opening the floor for questions and never, as far as I know, delivered any cautions or admonitions; certainly nothing like my early days of Jesuit training more than 50 years ago.

Six countries in just over two weeks. It's not the kind of slow-moving travel I favor. I want a chance to absorb a bit of local color and adjust the clock of my biorhythms. But Francis and I have different missions. He spent a few hours and perhaps even slept in former colonies; he visited the courts of colonizers; he held court in two of the smallest and richest city-states; he touched ground in the world’s largest Muslim majority countries as well as two of the four surviving Catholic monarchies; in one of the poorest Catholic new nations, half the population attended his papal mass; and then he attended a celebration of the oldest Catholic University in the world founded in 1424. (For a more detailed look at the itinerary *). 

I was curious about Francis’s attitude toward meeting these cultures outside the Vatican bubble. His stump speeches were very carefully worded, very “correct;” they seemed open and welcoming. He’s been the Pope for more than a decade, so he has a trusted staff. He is inclusive; he is inquisitive, and he is a reformer. His message was pretty much the same at every stop, so I concentrated on his body language and facial expressions as carefully as I could when he was introduced to hundreds of diverse people. 

At times he seemed to exude a kind of joy, something that I most remember in John 23 and John Paul the First. Frankly, I am more comfortable with that than the seriously burdened look of John Paul the Second or Benedict, whose smiles felt like, against their better judgment, they were following a commandment or a recommendation from the Papal PR team rather than experiencing real joy. Perhaps that is a professional hazard whether your moniker is the Bishop of Rome or Pontifex Maximus. On Francis’s face, a bit of absolute joy still shines, though he shows the wear of years of trying to do the most impossible job in the Catholic Church. Serious work, indeed.

This may be a byproduct of taking the world and our responsibilities seriously. It is not the ecstasy of understanding the chorus of birds' songs that Francis’s namesake experienced, but Francis of Assisi was a mystic, not the practical workaholic charged with modernizing an antiquated, creaky, and too often corrupt regal court. Ignatius’s final years in Rome were largely administrative, too, but we do not have live footage of his daily routine. 

I want to talk about three public conversations that I witnessed.

My god, he’s getting dressed down! 

I followed the progress of Pope Francis’s visit to both campuses of the oldest Catholic University in the world on the occasion of its 600th-anniversary celebration. Even with a few interruptions, that's a pretty good run.

At the Old University of Leuven, which occupies the magnificent ancient buildings, the primary language is Dutch. Francis graciously thanked his hosts and gave a short blessing or prayer in Italian. Then, a striking woman stepped up the rostrum and began to address him in Dutch. A woman in charge, she wore no signs of belonging to a religious congregation. She smiled; she seemed equally gracious and respectful, but I could see that she spoke to Francis as an equal, believer-to-believer, not as his subject in a medieval court. Google suggests that she was probably Bénédicte Lemmelijn, dean of the theology faculty.

There was no simultaneous translation available on YouTube. The Pope had a translator standing at his back, but I had no such luxury. However, I decided not to rush to Google to get an authorized translation into a language I understood. Instead, I tried to listen to the words spoken without fully understanding and watch her deliver the unspoken.  

Soon it became clear. She was politely and respectfully dressing him down! Of course, their body language, tone, and facial expressions told some of the story. She did not hold back. I was captivated. Francis appeared flummoxed, not shaken but clearly thrown off his game. The ceremony ended. It did not seem cut short, but when it was over, Francis was taken out past a good student choir that sang in either old Flemish or Dutch. Then, without much ado, he was whisked off to Rome for the opening of the Synod. 

I knew, in a way that defies logic and rational thought, that I had witnessed the salvos of a debate that neither party will be able to win conclusively, given our limited human resources. I didn’t know anything about the shape of the argument other than it was more vast than either party realized. It was shielded by the norms of doctrinal debate and the history of reform, but it is now impossible to sweep it back under the rug.

After 20 minutes scanning various news reports, entirely European, I was able to sketch the outline of the dispute. I will summarize the argument as objectively as I can. The theological, religious studies, and philosophy departments at Leuven had prepared a paper for the Papal visit concerning the role of a professional, academic theology faculty in today’s world. They stated that they intended to be objective, using all the tools available as scholars and researchers to examine today’s faith landscape. One phrase struck me: “[T]heology as a scientific discipline is not a ventriloquist of the church.” 

Then the committee expressed a concern. “Throughout the history of the Church, women have been made invisible,” the letter read. “What place, then, for women in the Church?” The Pope gave a response that I knew by heart: “The Church [is] female, noting that the Italian word for it, “chiesa”, is a feminine noun.” Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at UCLouvain University, replied that Francis had “failed to rise to the occasion. . . . To reply that the Church is a woman is really missing the point of the question – about the Church’s respect for women and their role in the institution and in society.” 

The Pope could not let this pass in silence. Speaking at the French campus of Louvain, Francis said, “womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication.. . . For this reason, a woman is more important than a man, but it is terrible when a woman wants to be a man: No, she is a woman, and this is ‘heavy’ and important,” he said. This argument wasn’t even going to fly at the more conservative campus. In a press release issued just moments after the pope’s speech, UCLouvain criticized Francis’ remarks on women as “conservative” and “deterministic and reductive.”

The line of questioning got under his skin. Responding to the criticism with journalists on the plane back to Rome, he returned to his argument about women's place and role, “if this seems ‘conservative’ to some people, it is because they do not understand, or ‘there is an obtuse mind that does not want to hear about this.” 

I hear a chorus of critics telling me that I could not have fleshed out this argument simply by listening to an unfiltered Dutch speech without translation, picking up a few words in a short statement in Italian, some body language, and the inflection in the speakers’ voices. And the critics are right. But I know that given their arguments' positions or merit, neither side can claim victory and that an unresolved dispute will continue unresolved. 

One man stood for thousands.

The second conversation I want to talk about is a speech by one man at the “Penitential” ceremony, which began the current Synod session in Saint Peters. Laurence Gien, standing in front of bishops, cardinals, all the members of the Synod, and Pope Francis himself, gave testimony about the trauma of being molested by a priest. He said he was “just trying to appeal to their better selves.” 

The sanctuary of Saint Peters was bare. The clergy did not wear vestments, and although they seemed to be seated by rank, the separation did not seem as rigid as when they wear their miters. Francis's slightly elevated chair was on the east side. There were some prayers, and a choir, with a predominance of young women, sang. But again, it did not have the formal feel of a papal ceremony. 

After a reading from the Hebrew Bible, Gien was the first to speak. A dignified man in a simple black suit stood facing the pope on the opposite side of the sanctuary and began to describe in some detail his molestation when he was 11 years old. I think he said, “Sixty years ago.” It had such an impact on me that I had to review it. Here is the YouTube link; Gien begins at the time mark 8:46.

Gien said he was “just trying to appeal to their better selves.” I am still searching for the words that adequately describe my reaction. The Church has been searching for words since the extent of the abuse and the attempted cover-ups first came to light. Gien’s personal description was so explicit that it took my breath away. He even described the act itself: “Far from Rome, in a small town in Southern Africa, a predator honed in on me … on a beautiful South African morning, he led me by the hand to a dark place where, in the screaming silence, he took from me what should never be taken from any child.” No one in Saint Peter’s looked away, though I noticed that some senior clergy avoided eye contact at difficult points in the narration.

Gien said that the Church had looked away for too long. He called for transparency, but there was no call for reparations or punishment. He simply said that these incidents should have been reported to the authorities. He also said that the effects of this kind of abuse can never be erased and that they ripple out into the wider church. 

Many details regarding compensation, prevention, and punishment must still be worked out. I would personally like to see an investigation of Timothy Dolan’s transfer of 57 million dollars into financial instruments, among them a trust he established for the maintenance of Catholic cemeteries to avoid paying compensation to victims of abuse in Milwaukee. I did not see Dolan among the cardinals at this ceremony. He’s one of the churchmen elected to represent the US Church at the Synod; he is known for his hostile response to the victims of clerical abuse seeking reparations; he is also one of the most responsible for the Americans’ lackluster response to Francis’s call for a Synod; I do know that he was in New York on the 19th of October for the Alfred E. Smith political dinner where he hosted Donald Trump. The Synod closes on the 27th. Dolan clearly knows who butters his bread.

This was a remarkable moment. What was secretly hidden has come to light, but senior officials can no longer obstruct victims motivated by protecting the Institution’s good name or assets.

“The Church cannot be understood without being rooted in a place and a culture.”

When I decided to dedicate time to observing the Synod and comparing notes with my experience during Vatican II, I asked myself, where are the theologians, or more specifically, who are the best creative theologians working today? Who are John Courtney Murray, Gus Weigle, Hans Kung, Urs van Balthasar, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Augustin Bea, and Henri de Lubac in today’s church? Who are the men and women Kaiser would be asking to his legendary Sunday night dinners? 

But what do I really know about doing theology? As a Jesuit theology student, I read something from the luminaries I listed, usually 10 to 20 mimeographed, pirated pages from a larger text or article. There was some casuistry afloat that Jesuit seminarians were not obliged to pay the high price of textbooks, including royalties to the author because they were Jesuits. I cannot remember ever spending a semester with one book in its entirety. This was how I might open my argument that I cannot recognize essential theology—due to my inadequate Jesuit training.

However, I’d witnessed great theology being done, although I was hardly aware of it. During the year that I lived in a small community on the Upper Westside with Avery Dulles, he finished “Models of the Church.” He taught courses, so days were consumed with class and student meetings, but every night after dinner, when all the dishes had been washed and put away, he would go to his room, surrounded by stacks of books—this was very pre-Google—and he shut the door.  

Avery was very conservative by disposition. There was no firebrand reformer like Hans Kung, but in retrospect, the open way Avery embraced several of the Reform models was itself radical. He would share some of the issues with us from time to time over dinner, but the work, at least the portion that we witnessed, was solitary. We did not knock and invite him to watch a TV show with us. But from long before 1972-3 in a sprawling shared apartment on 102nd Street, this is how theology was done. Even in the intense work at the old Woodstock leading up to Vatican II, individuals worked alone and came together to test one another and present a unified, coherent position. All that changed at Vatican II, and I’d like to think that Kaiser’s Sunday soirees also had something to do with it. 

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich is a young Jesuit Cardinal from Luxembourg whom Francis chose as the Synod's General Rapporteur, indicating a high level of confidence and trust. He was also a member of the Japanese Province, as were Pedro Arrupe, Father Adolfo Nicolás Pachón, and Father LaSalle, whom I revere as the first Jesuit Zen Master. 

Cardinal Hollerich introduced the Synodal module focused on “Places " by stating that the Church “cannot be understood without being rooted in a place and a culture.” This phrase caught my attention. I would describe it as “theological anthropology,” or at least that discipline will have a significant impact. It also feels like an extension of the Ignatian missionary impulse without the colonial jingoism that accompanied those first brave explorers, missionaries, and saints. I would describe it as “theological anthropology,” or at least that discipline will have a significant impact. 

If it is a theological proposition, it seems like the exact opposite of a universal church where one size fits all, that the good news of liberation Jesus delivered in the first century of the common era transcends language and culture, the theological template of the church triumphant; it will require our best minds to unpack it and our most prayerful Christians to work with it in the various cultures they encounter. That cannot be a solitary pursuit. Working together will be the norm. Observing the panels that I’ve witnessed during the Synod, they are much more diverse than I’d imagined; they include religious women, laymen and women, many people of color, and many languages other than the traditional European church languages, though Italian seems to be the lingua franca.

This theological inquiry dovetails with the personal work I’ve been doing for over 50 years. Suddenly, the Synod’s inquiry became interesting again.

Going to Battle under a False Flag.

I began my survey of the Synod prepared to criticize Francis; I was looking for evidence that his dream of a Synod on Synodality was insignificant, bogged down, and unable to move past Curial politics to what matters. The Synod's day-to-day work seems geared to ensuring that “Sector Eight” functions smoothly. I looked at Francis during a deliberation or a ceremony, and I thought I saw a bleak and frustrated expression, as you might expect after spending years defining terms and conditions while carefully and deliberately sidestepping urgent questions lurking in the shadows. 

We’re at the end of an era. Speaking from the Chair of Peter as an oracle, Francis cannot transform our modern world. I don’t think Popes ever could, although it’s part of the script religious monarchs inherit. (I discussed my view of the Infallibility doctrine in “Vatican I was a Colossal Mistake”). But once or twice in a century, it might be possible to bypass this repetition of history and begin anew. Did Francis miss this opportunity?

The Lord Jesus preached a vision of humankind transformed. He did not teach us, love us, live, die, and then live again so that we could all say our prayers in Latin and cower before Irish priests lecturing about the evils of masturbation. He did not throw the money changers out of the Temple at the risk of his life so that priests in his name could make deals with Mafiosa to stuff their pockets. He did not preach freedom, love, and salvation so that nuns recruited by colonizers would savage indigenous children on the tundra or the savanna and subjugate them to the whim of European elites. He did not form an old boys' club with a peculiar set of initiation rituals for this new elite, or worse, afford cover for pedophiles to abuse children. Once in a great while, an opening appears, giving us a chance to wipe away the insidious accretions of the past and start afresh. That was the promise of Vatican II.

I focused on the concerned look on Francis’s face and the lack of enthusiasm in Paul Six Hall rather than the politics of reform. I could barely detect a smile among the delegates. Perhaps everyone was simply trying to be “recollected," but I doubt it. Francis is trying to reset the stage for Vatican II's promise to finally take hold, but the forces of the clerical monarchy are still too strong to die with a single blow, especially because Francis is determined to use collegial decision-making to kill the demon. Vatican II brought out the best of theological thinking that had gone into hiding during the reactionary authoritarian pontificates of almost every Pope called Pius since Vatican I, but it only took a few years before the entrenched monarchy and the aristocrats who love the money and power began to write their revisionist history and mount an aggressive campaign against reform. Francis’s critics have started their attack, and we can see that this clique is perhaps more underground but still alive and kicking in the halls of the Vatican and elsewhere.

Jesus said a person's enemies will be those of his own household (Matthew 10:36). When I began to see Francis’s critics emerge, I realized that I had been wrong in my initial assessment of the Synod. It was pretty clear that many Americans in the hierarchy had become enemies of Francis--they told us. But some are passive-aggressive and try to hide. They use False Flag tactics to discredit or implicate their rivals, create the appearance of enemies when none exist, or create the illusion of organized and directed persecution.

In my view, the tactics of the devout cult that reveres Latin Mass burn all the oxygen in the room and stifle any real conversation. That is the intention. They parade a pious front to avoid criticism but are filled with too much self-pity to merit serious consideration. Sentimental arguments based on nostalgia are False Flags. Go ahead. Pawn your freedom for an “et cum spiritu,” but do it on your own time. 

However, when I recognized the tactic, I saw evidence that Francis’s Synod was succeeding. He is playing a long, deliberate game to replace Papal fiat with a far more open and democratic process. It will take more time than he has, so he is laying the foundation and will have to wait for death to cancel a lot of the votes for monarchy. 

Some of the questions that the Synod cannot answer cannot yet be answered. Best leave them that way. All the churchmen Francis talked with on his journey were dressed in almost identical costumes; they were from many races and ethnicities, but, at least in my sample, they were almost all men. To grasp all things is the only way to bring the word of God to all men and women, and it will take some time before women's voices gain parity. Francis can say that the word for church is feminine, but that does not settle the conversation. I don’t know how it will play out, but neither does Francis.

What would Kaiser do with all this? He would write. He would not hold back. He included a vast array of theology in his dream. His lease on a rather luxurious apartment in Rome became, at least in legend, the hotbed of the most forward-thinking theologians and experts at the Council. To quote Cardinal Hollerich, Kaiser cannot be understood without being rooted in a place and a culture. The church you reported on with your genius, Bob, continues and changes, probably not fast enough for your taste, but it is changing.

I confess, Bob, that you still inspire me. I miss your voice, the breath of your vision, and the depth of your commitment. Hand it to Francis; he is trying to be all things to all men. I know that you, Bob would approve, and so do I. I pledge to do my best to carry on the dream. 

___________________

*Luxembourg's population is 672,050, and Belgium's is much larger, at 11,870,000. Those countries are two of the last four remaining Catholic countries with royals as constitutional heads of state. Queen Mathilde of Belgium is one of only four women allowed to wear white in the presence of the Pope, and I can’t pass over in silence that Belgium was one of the last notoriously evil colonizing powers. 

Indonesia, with a population of 281,190,067 in 2022, is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. India has the largest Muslim population as well as more than 4000 Jesuits, the most of any country in the world. East Timor’s population of 1.341 million fought for independence twice--from Portugal in 1975 and Indonesia in 2002. Papua New Guinea, with a population of 10,329,931, has one of the richest biodiverse environments remaining on Earth, 

Singapore, with its 5.637 million people, has more than 35% who identify as Christian; Anglicans number 22,000, which seems small given that it was one of the last colonial holdings of the United Kingdom in Southeast Asia. It gained independence on 9 August 1965. 

Louvain University, founded in 1424, has 30,760 on its new French-speaking campus, but from what I was able to observe of language, customs, and Francis’s somewhat perplexed look, the smaller Old University of Leuven occupies the very old medieval buildings and is primarily Flemish or Dutch-speaking.

Stepping Out From Under the Shadow of God

Originally posted on Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The Gateless Gate, Case 32, Blue Cliff Record, Case 65: 

A philosopher asked Buddha: "Without words, without the wordless, will you tell me the truth?"
The Buddha kept silence.
The philosopher bowed and thanked the Buddha, saying: "With your loving kindness I have cleared away my delusions and entered the true path."
After the philosopher had gone, Ananda asked the Buddha what he had attained.
The Buddha replied, "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip."

Mumon's Comment

Ananda was the Buddha's disciple, but his understanding was not equal to that of the non-Buddhist. I want to ask you, what difference is there between the Buddha's disciple and the non-Buddhist?

Mumon's Verse 

On the edge of a sword,

Over the ridge of an iceberg,

With no steps, no ladders,

Climbing the cliffs without hands.

___________

A friend asked, “If convert Western Buddhists just set up a competing cult, what’s the value in that?’ Then, because it was a rhetorical question, he answered himself, “The West doesn’t need another religion.” My first impulse was to agree, but when I realized that the koan was about asking questions. That put every answer into a new perspective. I believe some of the answers to my own questions; others I rebel against; some cannot be answered.

Although we cannot identify the “philosopher”with certainty—sometimes it’s rendered, “the pagan” and one teacher even calls him a “Hindu”—this much is clear, the Buddha’s questioner is not a member of the sangha or a lay follower. Sadhus, Confucian scholars, philosophical atheists, pagans, Unitarians, even Jesuits, people who may not even be interested in learning about the Buddhist Path, I have many friends in all those categories.

When I first heard this koan, I took it as validation of my strongly held opinion that no one, not even Buddhists, should try to convert anyone. Who am I to convert anyone? I have a hard enough time with myself. And as the Lord Buddha himself didn’t have anything to say, it was further proof that I was on the right side, or if I were a betting man and took Blaise Pascal’s wager seriously, I picked the right pony.

But I was selling the koan short. The Buddha kept silent. This might be an invitation for introspection and not a confirmation of some rule not to proselytize, but did the Buddha really pass over the philosopher’s question in silence? What if it was an invitation to examine my own questions to see how much they were merely a reaction to the unspoken admonitions of my training both as a Jesuit and an ordinary human? 

During our last meeting Avery Dulles said to me: “I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course he knew the answer—most Buddhism is non-theistic; it does not entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. In the realm of dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm, and for Avery the existence of a personal deity was a deal breaker. 

But that afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of that bond, I felt as though Avery was trying to pry out an answer that would undermine my Buddhist “beliefs.” His tone was friendly and loving, not disapproving or forceful. He may have been trying to push me towards a more traditional faith, but I couldn’t respond.,“Of course I still believed in God,” because honestly I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations. Again, we’re back to questions and answers. 

Avery however was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered his proposition with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening for discovery. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or to return to my original thoughts about placing my bet on the right pony, the restrictive notions about God that Jesuits famously argued about with M. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists.

Working with the koan opened up that opportunity again.

Avery framed his statement as a tautology. In logic it’s known as the excluded middle: the law (or principle) of the excluded third, principium tertii exclusi. Another Latin designation for this law is tertium non datur: "no third [possibility] is given." 

Wittgenstein says this constitutes a statement empty of meaning. Framing the question that way, did Avery cut off the possibility of even seeing or imagining anything but God-or-no-god? Despite what’s almost universal acceptance of monotheism at this point in time, it is simply one formulation that won the cultural and political “god” debate. It wiped out a huge range of numinous experience, or reduced it to a series of distinctions within the “God, Yes or No” conversation, turning monotheism into a kind of shibboleth* that separates believers and excludes atheists and materialists.

The outside questioner couldn’t force the Buddha to either take that position into account or exclude him or herself from the Way. That would be simply framing a question for a incorrect answer. Our philosopher doesn’t misstep.

There is an old adage in spiritual life that there are no bad questions. Frankly in my view this is little more than just trying to ease any inhibition from asking whatever questions might pop up. Given no picking and choosing, bad questions do not exist, and in the realm of good questions, there are better or more ‘useful’ questions when we are seeking to clear our path.

I am a former Jesuit*, and to be clear, I left the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church. However it is impossible for me to change that part of my training, no matter how much I find myself outside the tradition. For me the practice of meditation has been more like stepping out of the shadow of God. There are innumerable spiritual possibilities hidden in between dogmatic statements, mixed in with syncretism and heresy. They exist in a kind of shadow world that is a rich vein for exploration. Maybe Jesus wasn’t bodily resurrected from the dead, but the myth still opens a window into the human psyche. I can happily remain agnostic and explore that possibility.

After the philosopher leaves, Ananda asks the Buddha what the philosopher had attained. Poor Ananda. He missed the opportunity to ask someone who might have pointed him towards a useful answer. If he’d asked the philosopher, for example, how meditation had changed his worldview, we’d be in practice territory.

So Ananda just gets to wrestle with a puzzling shadow. Perhaps that was a gift. 

I need balance. If not, I get lost in a long theological rant and call it spiritual practice. Sitting quiets my mind just enough so that I can hear other voices besides my own. The rants calm down. Hearing and listening, however, are just the first steps towards understanding, and ultimately compassion. I encourage anyone, no matter what beliefs they cherish, to practice meditation with their whole heart. 

There are several “philosophers” who have attained fluency in Zen practice, Christians, Jesuits, other Catholic religious, a Unitarian minister, and one UCC minister, a friend, who have followed this path and become teachers in the koan tradition. I won’t even try to predict where their practice will take them or their students, but may their practice help relieve suffering and free all beings.

Father Ignatius would have approved of the Buddha's “shadow of the whip” answer. I think that it might point to the heart of the Jesuit-Zen connection. Go ahead. Ask the question of your own self: "Without words, without the wordless, will you tell me the truth?"

I have translated Wittengenstein’s answer into Latin.

De quibus loqui non possumus, nobis tacendum est.

[About what we cannot speak, we have to remain silent. Or

What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.]

I will let the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins cap this conversation (from The Habit of Perfection):

Elected Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:

It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come

Which only makes you eloquent.

Avery died on 12 December 2008; I was told that among the few personal items he carried with him when he went into hospice care was the image of a painting I did when we lived together in New York. Your friendship was a precious gift. Thank you.

___________

Because this has become a Jesuit koan, footnotes are mandatory. 

*Shibboleth comes from the Hebrew for “ear of corn.” In the Book of Judges we learn that the Isrealites used it as a password because it was difficult for foreigners to pronounce. Mispronunciation didn’t just exclude. It marked them for death.

*Here is Pascal’s bet. 

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is...."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. 

Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

"That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.[12]

*I entered the Jesuits just after Jean-Baptiste Janssens’ tenure as Father General. Janssens was a remarkable man, the recipient of the title, “Righteous among the nations” for his courageous act of hiding a large group of Jewish children in the Provincial's residence in Brussels. 

He was also not known for a lax interpretation of Jesuit discipline. His letters to the brethren were filled with more admonitions than Saint Paul. He began with the Latin heads up, “Taceo--I pass over in silence reports that many Jesuits are smoking,” which was in no uncertain terms an order: “stop smoking.” Needless to say, examining the restrictive Jesuit norms brought a great sense of freedom, almost as much as rebelling against them. But even Buddhists agree that behavioral norms can promote liberation.