Robert Brophy died on August 16th after a long bout with Altzheimer’s. He was 93 years old. Bob, a former Jesuit, was a professor at Cal State University, Long Beach for many years; he taught university youngsters until a ripe old age; he was also our mentor in activism, a theologian, our companero, and a great hugger.
As a tribute to "Broph," I am posting a long interview he did with Morgan Zo Callahan and me for Intimate Meanderings, Over several sessions we explored many questions and interests of this amazing man.
Thank you, Bob, for your many years of dedication to the things that make all our lives worth living. A life well lived!
Rebel Mentor
A Conversation with Robert Brophy, Ph.D.
El Salvador
Morgan Zo Callahan (MZC): Recently I was reading the notes you took when you were an observer of elections in El Salvador several years ago in 1992. What was that experience like for you? Did some of our recent discussion of protesting this year again at The School of Americas remind you of that official excursion to El Salvador?
Robert Brophy (RB): Yes, it recalled to me my first trip to El Salvador in 1992, that country’s initial elections after the civil war. We were international observers in a urine-stinking grade school way out in Huachapan Province, where the temperature and humidity were enough to melt anyone into the floor. Picture me dressed in suit jacket and pants, dress shirt and tie with a camera hanging at my chest. The voters were mostly indigenous, small, and towered-over by the rich ranchers, one of whom got up on a table, pointing to his ballot, yelled out for all to attend: "This is how you are to vote!" Many had come at great trouble and risk. Buses, paid for by some organization, were mysteriously kept from running. The local death-squad, familiar to them all, had just come in as a group to vote and to intimidate, to remind of the thousands of “dissidents’ that had to be exterminated in El Salvador’s bloody past.
One table that I overlooked had amazingly started to count up and register their vote-tally at noon, due at 5:00 p.m.; they had already decided who had won! When I reported this to the UN observer, he wouldn't believe it but went and found it was so. He said sadly, "I can do nothing about it; we are here to observe only." It may have been he who pointed out that the voting lists posted by the door contained many of the dead, who had somehow already voted. As the afternoon waned, military aircraft thundered low over the village, not friendly or reassuring—reminding all of the risk they were taking.
That night, while we oversaw the official counting of ballots, an electric switch was tripped, and, when light was restored, a box of votes was missing, one from a rebellious district of the region, it was presumed. The highlight of the night was my discussion with a young member of the ARENA party. He had been educated at Rutgers and spoke English well. When quizzed by my companion, an African-American, and me about the status of El Salvador unions, he went into a tirade. His father had a big business and would never allow such a profit-stifling entity. But the "gem" of the evening was his response to my question of why the ARENA party's Roberto D’Aubuisson had planned and carried off the assassination of Oscar Romero over ten years before: "We never kill anyone who doesn't deserve it." It summed up the whole justification for the SOA—keep the rich in power at all costs; judge morality by its usefulness for keeping the status quo. He was probably a weekly communicant.
The Spiritual Exercises
MZC: Broph, it's just so great to be in touch with you and hear what you are doing these years. We've come together at meetings and at SOA protests; we had intimate interchanges on the Internet and conversations at some meetings at Loyola Marymount University.
RB: I especially recall that we prayed and reflected together during a six-month “19th Annotation” retreat, October 1998-March 1999, that about eight of us made, exchanging reflections (“lumina”) by Internet email, progressing through each of the original, intensive four week Ignatian Exercises, keeping pace with each other. Don Merrifield was one of the Jesuits who joined us, but we were the “leaders”; that is, we acted as retreat directors for each other. It was a Companions retreat, initiated by Bob Holstein. We used the text Choosing Christ in the World: Directing the Spiritual Exercises According to Annotations Eighteen and Nineteen: A Handbook by Joseph A. Tetlow, S.J.
Ken Ireland (KI): You wrote on 9/18/07 that you were off to a peace and justice meeting where you were to review a book on Ignatian Exercises by Dean Brackley, S.J. who teaches at UCA, San Salvador, El Salvador. (Dean and I were at Woodstock together and lived in the same small community with Avery Dulles and Drew Christensen who is now the editor of America.) One of the main explorations of "Meanderings" is how we ex-Jesuits who have done the full Exercises continue to use the Exercises in our lives; most of us would agree that the SE, coupled with the strict training at the novitiate, had a major impact in our lives. Would you tell us what you've learned from Dean's book? And how do the Ignatian Exercises relate to peace and justice, how do the two enrich each other? There are several questions in there. Handle them however you like.
RB: It was more than just a review of the book, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola (Crossroad 2004). “Michah 6.8,” the name of my justice and peace group, made the reading of Brackley, two chapters every two weeks for almost six months, into a new kind of Ignatian retreat. What amaze me are the insights into Ignatius that have arisen in the renewed Society. The retreats that I recall over the years 1946 to 1968 were individual-centered, the sins confronted were personal sins entirely, the evil admitted by the retreatant was undifferentiated, unspecified, not outward-related. In Brackley’s presentation, this concern with sin reflects our complicity in systemic evil. The Foundation’s “praise, reverence, and serve” is identified with Jesus’ option for the poor. “Indifference” means attaining freedom to choose and undertake justice. There is emphasis on personal sin, but conversion is seen in its social dimensions. Christ’s “Call” is to engage the greatest evil of our time, a widespread if not universal poverty that amounts to a criminal “deprivation,” enabled and driven by structural sin. That “Call” is embodied in the two “Great Commandments,” Love God with your whole heart and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10); our neighbor is quintessentially the one who suffers diminishment and injustice, is a pawn in Greed’s Chess Game, the world’s economic, social and political systems. Conversion is self-transcendence, turning to love as God loves, as imaged in Jesus. This Jesus was concerned about justice. The “Kingdom,” called here “The Reign of God,” is focused on the social implications of the individual’s vocation and quintessentially in the very mission of the Church, a new way to live together in Christ. Choice of vocation asks how do I best collaborate in the Beatitudes. The “Two Standards meditation” opposes riches, honor, and pride with poverty; invited insult, and humility is found in solidarity with the poor, a choice of “downward mobility” for Jesus’ sake. The final “week” centers on learning to love like God and in God. The “Contemplation to Obtain Love” is the Pentecostal experience, as always with social implications. Everything is prayer, life permeated with God’s ever-fine-focused love. It made one hell of a retreat.
The above is in my shorthand and does not do Father Brackley justice; it was my experience. Brackley, by the way, teaches at the Jesuit University of Central America (UCA), San Salvador, from which Liberation Theology flourished and still flourishes despite the Vatican’s frowning.
It strikes me that Pope Benedict’s latest warning to the Jesuits’ 35th General Congregation against “aspects of Liberation Theology” (17 Jan 08) evokes the underlying difference in theology between old and the new. For the pope, God intends the poor to be poor and the rich to be rich in a paternalistic world. “Charity” (the old alms-giving) trumps justice. Liberation Theology sees that as the problem. Benedict’s world was also Ignatius’ world, but Ignatius, according to Brackley at least, was progressively able to see beyond it.
KI: Can you describe the role that your spiritual practice had in your decision to take an activist stance against the Vietnam War? My question is quite close to one that Morgan asks: Could you point to anything from your experience of the Spiritual Exercises that made an impact?
RB: Not really. The Ignatian Exercises were not for me then the break-through that they are in the Brackley-mirrored approach; maybe in some way they were a time bomb ticking. Dean invites one to meditate on sin as one’s own and at the same time as enabling the systemic evil in which we are complicit. He does not deny personal sin but puts it in a larger human context. I did not have that. The “Two Kingdoms” were a medieval military metaphor but actually are the confrontation between the power-hungry profit-at-any-cost machine of the contemporary world, personal and corporate, by Christ’s call to a convert mind and stance against poverty, powerlessness, and deprivation. I always had and still keep a small statue of Ignatius on my desk and my vow crucifix. I was not untouched by Ignatius’s insights; I have always seen him as an inspiring revolutionary, insisting “nothing counts but the Lord”; the crucified are in Christ the exploited, deprived, degraded poor. The cross says the only way will be the hard way.
MZC: Is there anything from Ignatian Exercises that you find most life giving to you, to your life? What do you think are the most important spiritual possibilities for those making/giving the Exercises in today's world? How do the Exercises relate to our deepest yearnings and desires? Do you find the “Examen” to be helpful? How do you interpret the "Contemplation for Obtaining Love"?
RB: The Foundation is central. The world we live in is not Ignatius’ pre-Galileo one, but the one opened by Einstein and Edwin Hubble, cosmos-contexed 13 billion years from the Big Bang, protons and muons, black matter and black energy, NASA’s Hubble telescope. But the creator is the same and “indifference” is a goal shared with many faiths. “Contemplation” is changed. If the Gospel is full of metaphor, then I ask meaning rather than topography (though I have been to Palestine and appreciated the metaphor as palpable). I think the Exercises’ appeal is about getting one’s head on straight and one’s heart attuned. They help sort-out, correct one’s compass, renew. And the Barclay/Liberation Theology reading, that Jesus came to free every human “to be all s/he can be” is a challenge to see new depths, to seek the justice dimension. Yes, I find the Examen helpful for reality-check and reminder that all things are prayer. Prayer unceasing.
Peace and Justice Causes Most Worthy
MZC: Would you describe your work with "conscientious objectors," at Cal State University Long Beach? How do you feel when you are teaching or engaged in peace and justice projects? What do you identify today as "most worthy causes" in peace and justice?
RB: Lacking a military draft the student-body is distracted from war and justice issues, though a CAMPUS Progressive Club does focus on them. Yet many students, mostly, but not all, being minorities, cannot achieve a university education because of the costs and ROTC offers a fiscal solution; becoming an Army Reservist offers further financial support. These students usually do not believe that they are being programmed and legally committed to kill other human beings. I suppose that the now-elongated Iraq war should to some extent have changed that, but sometimes the insight comes late. The first student that came to me as the Iraq war began was an ROTC cadet, an Army Reservist and a senior; he confessed that to his consternation and horror he no longer saw a target at the end of his rifle sights, he saw a person.
I let it be known as widely as I can that I am available for counseling. I write guest editorials for the student paper suggesting the problems involved in volunteering for war, any war, and offer help. I keep files documenting the anti-war stance taken by various religions advising conscience versus war, and I have ready many Internet sites for reference. If the student wants to pursue a CO (conscientious objector) stand, I help her/him to work out a personal philosophy. With their permission, I begin a file for each, to attest to the fact that this person has expressed conscience problems at this or that date—as evidence for later military tribunals. I will attach in an appendix below an example of a personal philosophy of conscientious objection.
You ask: how do I experience my teaching as engaging peace and justice? I see my academic vocation as an extension of my priestly one; it is a ministry. Specifically literature, it has always seemed to me, pursues clarification of the human situation in all its aspects. The great writers of the novel, poetry, and drama are the philosophers and theologians of their times; they deal with what it is to have integrity. At both USF and Long Beach I have taught the course “Religious Dimensions of Contemporary Literature.” In surveying writers of middle to late 20th century one finds that they powerfully critique questions of war and peace, justice and evil. My current “Bible as Literature” course offers a rather direct application. I find, for instance, that the prophets are especially fixated on justice; a few were in their own way conscientious objectors. Happily the section on the prophets comes at the same time in November as the annual protest against the Pentagon’s School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. I confess to the class that I am myself compelled by the prophetic urge to speak and act against militarism, war, torture, and assassination which all are personified in this SOA as arm of the US foreign policy. And I describe my other protests, arrests, and my three days in the LA County jail.
You ask what I identify as the "most worthy cause(s)" for peace and justice today? This, it seems to me, is to be found in the gospel as read by Liberation Theology. As a critique of systemic evil, LT is astounding and compelling. It points out that a real war is at all times and everywhere in progress by the rich against the poor, wealth and power against justice. Profit becomes a ruthless agent of devastating deprivations. NAFTA and CAFTA, in outstanding instances, wipe out the agricultural world of small farmers by dumping subsidized grain on their markets and by expropriating land in huge tracts for mechanized agribusiness farming. Globalization at present is the corporate world, blind to the victims, squeezing life from developing countries.
Activism Begun at the University of San Francisco
MZC: Broph, I want to revisit an earlier conversation we had a while ago and learn from your work as an anti-war activist, first as a Jesuit priest as well as a father and esteemed friend of many of us. Would you tell us how you became an activist Jesuit priest at the University of San Francisco?
RB: Returning to San Francisco after graduate school in 1965 and being assigned to USF was one of the highs of my life. San Francisco was my home. It was where my parents lived. I had attended and then taught at St. Ignatius High on Stanyan Street, just below the university 1953 to 1955. I had lived there all my non-Jesuit life. I knew so many in the city, had taught at least some of them. USF hospitality was warm, and I felt privileged from the first. Mine was a fifth-floor room in Xavier Hall overlooking the Golden Gate. I had access to the whole city by three trolley lines heading west to the beach, east to downtown. Two blocks away, Golden Gate Park stretched to the Beach. The Cursillo weekends with the students, organized by Fr. Gerry Phelan, almost immediately immersed me with students—more deeply than anything anywhere I had ever experienced. Together in these especially, we underwent sacramental immersion gathering, praying, and eating together. Those weekends were not political, but they opened the heart, they moved beyond the institutional, they seeded the community. Later the homily at daily Eucharist that I celebrated in Phelan Hall, dormitory and cafeteria, at 5:00 pm, overflowed into the dining room. Eating with the students was a further immersion. I got to know most of the student population, at least the many boarders.
I was brought into the total university early. I had a faculty office in the very middle of campus, upstairs from a student cafeteria/snack bar, within a few steps from classrooms, library, student dormitories, and gymnasium. The English department was small and congenial. Classrooms were always full and enthusiastic.
The student paper, the Foghorn, was from liberal to radical. I found friends on the staff and began to write for them, pieces on art exhibitions, campus culture, city life, moral and social issues. When no Jesuit would answer an appeal to join the “Committee for Religion and the Homosexual” at neighboring Glide Memorial Church, I volunteered. When no Jesuit could be found to be faculty advisor for the new Black Student Union, I accepted. When the lay faculty called a press conference to condemn the bombing of Cambodia, I stood with them. When “Urban Renewal” leveled the Black ghetto in the center of San Francisco, heartlessly leaving many of the residents homeless, in order to build a new “Japan Town,” tall residences for retirees, and a multi-million-dollar Catholic Cathedral, I spoke against it. I felt these were challenges to the Christian discernment and a priori the place of the Catholic/Jesuit clergy.
Your question was: Whence the USF prophetic activism? It had all begun in graduate school, early 1960s, on a weekday afternoon in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I was in doctoral studies. I was attacked by a furious local citizen for picketing in Roman collar the town’s “Whites Only” prestigious restaurant. The threatened violence was so traumatic (it was though that moment was framed into my mind forever) that I found myself questioning everything in the political spectrum. I had totally misjudged reality all of my life. I began to participate in marches (it turned out against the local bishop’s decree for clergy and religious). From there I moved to my first teaching assignment at USF, where I was visited by a Carolina student friend who was a bombardier in the Air Force. When I asked him his duties, he described leveling towns and villages in Vietnam. His justification was: “As long as they shoot at us it is my duty to bomb them.” A logic so skewed drove me to look beyond the current religious rant about saving the world from godless Communism to considerations of conscience regarding war. And it made me look at our USF ROTC officer-factory in a different light. Then my close student friend, Tom Sandborn, took me on a walk to explain to me the direction his newly converted Catholicism was taking him. He opened to me the world of committed non-violence. He was being refused graduation because he could not in conscience take the required ROTC courses. At that point I joined several in suing the Federal government to allow Catholics to use their religious convictions to claim conscientious objection just as Quakers, Brethren, Jehovah Witnesses. Once one begins in these directions, there is no turning back.
As for the morality of cooperation in war, there has been a gigantic leap in the Church’s theology of war conscience in the last forty years. When I was at USF in late 1960’s, the administration refused to allow draft counseling on campus; evidently no Jesuit was to offer it. That despite the fact that Catholic students were going to federal prison (one spending time on Terminal Island, Long Beach) or fleeing to Canada. Back home, pastors were telling conscience-stricken youth that there was no Catholic tradition of war-resistance. This information was false and suggested culpable ignorance. The Just-War theory was accepted, but the United States presumably would not engage in an unjust war. And defense of one’s country under any circumstances was a duty. No matter that for the first three centuries, Christianity embraced non-violence as Jesus’ way, as God’s will. It was only with 4th century Emperor Constantine, when Christianity was embraced and became the state religion, that Ambrose and Augustine had to work out a theory that would protect the empire by “necessary violence”; thence the Just-War tradition. Wars were blessed ever after. Yet, although some Catholic traditions did oppose wars, instance being the Catholic Worker, the main-line presumption was to support wars even when both sides involved Catholics. Yes, in 1963 came Pope John XXIII Peace on Earth followed by the Second Vatican Council’s urging nations to provide for those conscience-harried in time of war. In our time both Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and the Catholic bishops of the United States have judged the present Iraq war unjust. Ironically none of this has been promulgated, preached, or taught. Catholic conscientious objectors have been conspicuously few. Which is another story. Catholic chaplains are notoriously absent in discussions of the morality of wars they oversee. Are they thus chosen and self-chosen for their ministry without confronting key questions. How do they help form the consciences of their men and women? Do they urge them each day to pray for those whom they will kill or maim? How do they settle their vocation with Matthew’s picture of Jesus at the Last Judgment 25.31:“As often as you do it to the least of my brethren you do it to me”?
KI: You describe yourself in the USF days as though ending as a desperate rebel. Did you feel isolated? You do suggest there were like minds. Who were they, and what kinds of conversations did you have, if any? Whence came the strength to stand up against the community, the presumed authority of a united, conservative, stance from the old guard. Though younger, I was in the Society in 1966 and was very active in protesting the war, and took a lot of flack from those who were "older and wiser." But somehow I never felt moved to leave at that time. I did have support from some pretty liberal superiors in New England, and the NE Jesuit community in general was probably a bit more liberal than the Californians. At least we thought so. There was a pretty large solid coterie of young anti-war Jesuit activists, inspired by Dan Berrigan whom we knew. He was close, active and very visible to all of us. The superiors could not hide him away, though I suspect that many tried, urged on by Cardinal Spellman.
RB: I never once experienced a “liberal superior” in the Society. Never once. In those times, at least in California, we did not talk to superiors as fellow Jesuits to be questioned and challenged. I certainly did not do it. “Grace of Office” was a wall. In all this I make no judgment on the Society overall or elsewhere. I experienced the California Province as conservative and reactionary. And in the end I presumed that there was nowhere else to go.
In most things I felt alone. Gene Schallert was supportive but waging his own battles. Some nights I would lie on his bed and wait for him to show up so I could talk for a few minutes about my thoughts and current crises. Jim Straukamp was with me on many things, on the Eucharist, ahead of me. But I had no Jesuit confidants on peace and justice issues. Can you imagine a campus in which it was okay to refuse graduation to conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War? As I recall, no one in my time, no Jesuit in California openly objected to the Vietnam War. No one spoke of conscientious objection. I had to learn that from students, with one of whom I am weekly still in touch. Tom Sandborn burned his draft card and fled to Canada. Dan Berrigan was a complete isolate, a pariah when coming to California. I don’t know of any community that welcomed him. Certainly not USF.
The Last Turning Point
KI: There is a story that you tell about the treatment of your student at USF, his making campus a poster of Camus’s vilification of the Church’s silence during the Nazi horrors, the student court’s guilty verdict, the Jesuits’
..satisfaction, was this the actual event that broke the camel's back, when you knew there was not place for you in the Society? Your language is not that decisive: "Anyway at this time, I decided..."
RB: On campus in spring of 1968, the cause célèbre was a nocturnal lettering of passages from an “Address to the Dominicans” by Albert Camus, who in 1948 had accused the Church, with all its fantastic capacity for authoritative teaching and prophetic voice, of being silent during the Nazi occupation of France. Camus had been part of the underground Resistance, made up mostly of agnostics, confronting each day’s heinous crimes against humanity in powerlessness but defiance, attempting, as he said, to keep at least one more child from extinction. The text was being used in my “Religious Themes in Contemporary Literature” class.
USF was into new construction and Phelan Hall was surrounded by an eight-foot plywood wall. One of my students in the dark of night wrote out sections from Camus’ indictment on that wall. The Jesuit community was outraged; these scurrilous words were attacking their “holy mother the Church.” The student was caught and punished by the student court, a condemnation supported by the Jesuits. So, of course, I argued and advocated for my student and for the doubts and rejections that were surging during this time against the Vietnam War. I challenged the idea of ROTC training at a Jesuit university, training officers to feed this (in the minds of many of us) immoral war. I felt and do today the desire to support students who want to refuse going into military service as “conscientious objectors.” I made this option known to my students.
During the last days of my tenure at USF, a Jesuit administrator met me one evening in the hall of the Jesuit residence and came out with this immortal line: “Bob, if we let them question their country [and Church?], they will question everything.” This Jesuit friend was denying what a university is supposed to be all about. I knew that he was sincere. And that he was abysmally wrong. That the university was behind him, as were the Jesuit community. Clearly I did not belong.
But the “turning point” wasn’t one thing but cumulative. I reached a place where things added up in that spring 1968. I was a leper for the Jesuit community, denounced, avoided, but never addressed. More substantially decisive, I’d say, was my subpoenaed appearance in court for the defense during the “Love Book” obscenity trial. A Presbyterian minister from the Haight-Ashbury district four blocks east of campus was so impressed by the students at our Sunday student liturgy that she invited me to visit a coffee house she and a Methodist minister had opened for the homeless. Complicating that invitation was an added request that I sit in on a panel discussing a book of poetry being locally prosecuted for obscenity. My contribution was that I thought the “Love Book” poem was highly erotic, offensive to some sensitivities, not something for a captive audience, but not pornographic; in fact, could be judged a “paean to human heterosexual love.” At that a “plainclothes” person from the audience arose and said to the panel: ”You are all under arrest; Father Brophy, would you care to withdraw your last statement.” I refused and he backed down, perhaps not wanting to arrest a Jesuit faculty member from USF. But another bridge was crossed and burned.
I will never know whether he was truly from the SF Police Department, but I wrote an editorial the next day for the student paper, detailing the event and describing USF as a circle of wagons shutting out the real world’s concerns, in this instance police harassment going on across the park at a Height bookstore. My editorial was reprinted by the American Civil Liberties Union bulletin without my knowledge or consent, and I was served a subpoena to appear in court for the defense of the clerks who had sold the book to the police. An informer, possibly the police chief who was the brother-in-law of my dean, alerted the administration. Called in by USF president Father Dullea, S.J., I explained what had happened and my decision in conscience to appear. He said my involvement and the prospect of court appearance did not sit well with USF benefactors. He then commanded me not to go within three blocks of the courthouse. I replied that his edict hit deep into my sense of integrity and conscience. He told me I had three days to think it over. I don’t know how he intended to fix the subpoena downtown. That is another matter. I appeared in court, was interrogated by the prosecution through morning and afternoon sessions; subsequently another Jesuit was sent to give testimony to contradict me. No Jesuit, including Fr. Dullea, further communicated with me. But the Rubicon was crossed.
In the community “wreck” room I was confronted and abused by Frank Marion, a sweet person, head of a philosophy department that at the time was wrestling with the fact that one of its members had declared himself an atheist. He saw me as an outsider, a fame-monger, publicity-hound, and most un-Jesuit of all. My friend Gene Schallert, a classmate of Frank, stood there and said nothing. It was that insane year of assassinations, when in his death some campus Jesuits openly dishonored and slandered Martin Luther King, when the renewed hope in a Kennedy was snuffed in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Anyway, yes, at this time, I decided to leave the Jesuits, being an un-reformable, somewhat desperate rebel.
Is there a lesson in all this? Had I become a cog in the process of change? I’m afraid not. Ironically I would be no problem at the current 2008 USF that has as president a Liberation theologian, Stephen Privett, S.J., has a Peace Center headed by a world-renowned director, Stephen Zunes, publishes a peace periodical, sends students to Central and South America to witness and work for justice issues. But I see no connection, no role I filled. I wrote to the California provincial and to Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit general, informing them of my disillusionment and imminent choice to leave. Gene Schallert told me afterward that Fr. Arrupe was saddened by my letter. He didn’t elaborate. I don’t see myself as a martyr toward bringing those changes. They happened ten or so years later because of an avalanche of other forces. I have admiration for the current Society of Jesus. It is at the cutting-edge for Gospel Justice issues. Where would I be if all this change had come sooner? That’s another’s lifetime
Church and Fascism, Conservatism
KI: You use the term "all its fantastic capacity" (Camus reference) to describe the power of the Church that was not turned to defeat, or at least discredit, fascism. Of course, that was also the situation in Spain where the preponderance of the hierarchy in the Church actually supported Franco. Do you see something in the organization of the Roman Church that gives a huge weight to conservatism, even fascism, even when it is clearly not in tune with the Jesus Teaching? I suppose that is a position I have come to, especially watching the Vatican close down the great opening of Vatican II. It made me a liberationist in my theology. Any comments about your thinking in the late 60's?
RB: At the time, I found the Church abysmally intractable, untrue to itself. Though we did experience exceptions in John XXIII and the Vatican Council in the 60s, these were obstructed, especially by Pope John Paul II. Yes, the hierarchical church still appears to be a typical conservative, very human organization intent on damage control, wrapped in sometimes brute, unconditioned power, in many ways corrupt because the power is exercised absolutely. Its modernity is more typical in Pope John Paul II, who will be judged a criminal by many on account of his cold-bloodedly crushing of Latin American Liberation Theology and replacing bishops—those who cared for the poor, deplored dictators and elite-rule, and embraced an option for the poor—with Opus Dei prelates who side with the rich and powerful and do not see justice as a concern. An irony is that the Church has a most revolutionary and lyrical teaching on social issues, war and peace, commutative and distributive justice, human rights, common good, living wage, rights of unions, wealth distribution, and dangers of Capitalism. But these are never preached, too seldom applied. Typical also is its current dealing with everything from recycling pedophiles to declaring gays unnatural, its dealing with women’s place in the priesthood, forbidding contraception, second marriage, condoms for spouses of those with AIDS. Most often egregiously unpastoral, comfortable with power for its own sake, fearing to admit mistakes or missteps, reflecting little humanity, little mercy, allowing few exceptions; intent on keeping an “infallible” system, the hierarchical church becomes in parody an Old Boys' Club. In all its purple head-to-toe garb, pomp, and arcane rituals one finds little holiness, little humility, or even concern because hierarchical loyalties are not to me, you, or us but to their system, to keep it in its every case unquestioned. The lay world at present has no voice, no constitutional rights. They are serfs. Have you ever thought to write to Rome? Write to Santa Claus.
In this latest case of molestation-cover-up, an admission of guilt would/could be healing for all. Stonewalling involves a claim that bishops, cardinals, and pope are the Church not just a skewed, long-outmoded hierarchical structure; they are unresponsive, immune to questions, hostile to challenges. If the Church is to live, the sharing of power might be a first step—as for the acknowledgment of fault. I suspect Vatican and bishops are following lawyers' advice: Admit nothing lest you lose your episcopal palaces, and you lose the loyalty and support of lock-step Opus Dei among whom you are, in all, God speaking and ruling.
Bible as Literature: Genres
MZC: Broph, you teach a course at the university, "The Bible as Literature,” beginning with Genesis 1-11, as Myth. What do you convey in your teaching to the students? What kind of questions do your students ask you? How is Literature related to Myth? How do you do the trick of presenting Creation to your students, creation myth as a spiritually rich "deep truth-bearing genre, the dramatizing of a belief system, a creed as told in a story"?
KI: I just read this quote from an email of yours: "One Catholic priest in Orange County I am told (don't know his name) tells his class for converts: 'The Bible is entirely true, and some of it really happened.'" I have heard that there is convincing evidence that the entire Exodus story was made from whole cloth during the Babylonian exile, by I think P (Priest editor). And yet we never, never hear about things like this in the popular press. Instead we get pious documentaries on PBS about following in Moses footsteps or the like? Is there some kind of censorship going on? It can't be conscious? (In my view it is kind of cultural myopia.)
RB: There is cowardice in not updating the faithful on Bible interpretation; it is true, a kind of pusillanimity, and a fear of undermining faith. But adults can be taught, though it has to be gradual and heart-felt. I teach the Bible as an anthology of genres: myth (story embodying a belief system), fable, legend, epic, covenant, legal and holiness codes, cycle stories, proto-history, oracle, diatribe, vision, allegory, poetic prayer, cautionary tales, revisionist history, melodrama, proverb and diatribe, verse-drama, and so forth. What one seeks is the meaning, the revelation of each pericope. For instance, Genesis 1-11 is a credo in story form (we believe in one god, transcendent and immanent, holy, ethical, forming mankind in his image, creating good and allowing evil, caring but just, forgiving but confrontive; the medium is myth (Greek for “story”) turning upside down the polytheistic myths surrounding Israel by using the same story elements (clay potter, tree, serpent, flood, tower) in a new way. Adam and Eve are metaphors of disobedience and infidelity, but no one, not the 1992 New Catholic Catechism, for instance, will breathe such a sentence. We thus ask the wrong questions, listen with prejudiced, preprogrammed ears. We are left as children hugging our stories and oblivious of the meaning they really carry. We want an historic Samaritan with wife and children rather than an extended metaphor demanding that we love and care for our enemies as ourselves, all of them. The result of this prolonged silence and its ignorance is often disastrous for faith. Every year I have five to ten fallen-away Catholic students in class who have not been taught to see beyond fairy stories.
Scholar—Teacher—Activist—with Jeffers as Guru
MZC: Broph, you're a scholar, teacher and activist. How do they relate and complement each other? What projects are calling you, first as a scholar, second as a teacher and third as an activist? And finally, would you say how your appreciation of Robinson Jeffers affects your life? How did you get into his literature? I remember once when we were at a meeting with Bob Holstein at Verbum Dei High School in Watts and you offered to teach the high school boys Robinson Jeffers. I've wondered how Jeffers has captivated you.
RB: Jeffers entered my life almost by chance or was it providence. For my doctoral dissertation I had begun working on the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. In the summer of 1962, I was back in California and making a retreat at the then School of Theology, Alma College. In a break from the Exercises, I wandered through the library and looking up to the shelves on American literature, among the poets, I spied the volume Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers and took it down from the shelf recalling that one of my North Carolina professors had done something of a parody of Jeffers in my first year of studies. He assigned Jeffers’ two most difficult lyrics—“Night” and “Apology for Bad Dreams,”—probably because he himself did not understand them, and then proceeded to give synopses of Jeffers’ long narratives. I was later to think that if anyone had only summaries of Aeschylus and Euripides, he might think that the two playwrights should be in a psychiatric ward—for their fixation on incest, murder, and perverse fate.
My take on Jeffers was quite different; I found him one of the most religious writers of the century. He was obsessed with questions on the nature of God, depth of prayer, meaning of beauty, perversity of mankind, extent of the universe, the beginning and the end. To the consternation of my professor, I found religious awe and austere asceticism in each poem. Here was a man who was obsessed with ultimate questions. He found different answers from mine, but the focus was there. He was a challenge that grabbed, struck deep. He was a determinist and pessimist as regards to mankind, seeing humans as blasphemous, myopic, obsessed with themselves, perverse in their wars and their oblivious destruction of environment. I carried him with me into my growing activism. He was a pessimist and determinist; I argue with him though dead since 1962. He has a saying for me, confronting my activism: “Go out into the Seal Beach surf, hold up your hand for ten minutes, and then come back and tell me how many waves you have stopped.” He has kept me honest. He was a mystic; he prayed daily with poems. That was what counted.
I loved to take students on camping weekends to Jeffers Country stretching from Carmel to Big Sur. We went in convoys of five or so cars, launching out from Long Beach at 5:00 am, putting up tents at Big Sur at 11:00, searching through the fantastic stone house and tower he built solely with his own hands in Carmel at 1:00, reading poems to each other from the time we started. Then Point Lobos and down the coast stopping at each turnout to read more poems composed at those spots. It turned out to be the highlight of each student’s college years. I found that the two other persons working on RJ were Catholics, the monk Brother Antoninus and the daily communicant Ann Ridgeway.
