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Entries from September 2024

Hungry Hearts

We see on Catholic college campuses two converging phenomena. The first is a decline in enrollment and a disparagement of the humanities as disciplines that bring no revenue and have no practical value. At the same time, we are witnessing something of a religious crisis—an increasing number of young people who are disaffiliated from institutional religion and for whom God is absent in their lives.

We see these phenomena dramatized in students whose world overwhelms them with materialism, fills them with feelings of anxiety and depression, and breaks their trust in political, educational and religious institutions that should support and guide them. These students arrive on campus motivated to gain an education that promises professional success. They have been taught that they need to develop resumes that are populated with credentials, awards and activities in order to accelerate their drive to get to the top.

The culture has stuck them in a market-driven, return-on-your-investment understanding of what attending college means. It does not fill them with a desire for an authentic fullness of life; instead, the culture impoverishes their humanity with reality television and millionaire influencers. And despite their resentment towards social media because of how it burdens them, social media is the platform they use to fill their lives but not their hungry hearts.

When they come to college, they do not think about learning with curiosity, wonder and awe. They do not understand that studying everything from literature to economics is an intellectual and spiritual journey that can bring them closer to the fullness of their humanity. They do not realize that their human reason, which can be open to studying all humanity and all reality, is speaking about God or that it can reflect deeply on experience and look deeply into their heart’s desire and need for love, truth, beauty and good.

Like Augustine, they carry an aching emptiness in their souls, and though the desire is buried deep within them, their hearts are hungry for meaning and purpose in their lives. They yearn for love, connection and community; and they search for an experience of transcendence that will move them out of the mundane numbness of their world.

So, what is the responsibility of the Catholic university? How can the Catholic university awaken in them the ultimate meaning and purpose of their education? What curriculum and pedagogy can be used to show them what Pope Francis describes as our deepest reality: “The heart is the core of the internal transcendence where the roots of truth, beauty and good are planted”?

In an essay in America Magazine, Cardinal Blase Cupich states that the task of the Catholic university is to engage students in an understanding of the Catholic intellectual tradition. While that tradition reaches across all disciplines and professional studies, it was built upon a study of the humanities. This tradition is defined as a dialogue between faith and culture, studying everything human, whose writers and texts bring students an appreciation for truth, beauty and goodness, and whose assumption, as Cardinal Cupich writes, is that, “the universe can be fully intelligible only in reference to God as its ultimate origin and end.” I would only add that how we engage our students in this ongoing tradition is as important as the curriculum we teach.

At Sacred Heart University, we engage students in two core seminars: The Human Journey Seminars: Great Books in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Students spend two semesters reading, reflecting upon and discussing the great works of this tradition. We frame these seminars with ultimate questions of meaning and we use a synodal seminar pedagogy to bring our students into this 2,000-year-old ongoing conversation of great Catholic thinkers asking questions about God, humanity, society and nature.

This synodal seminar combines reading, intentional reflection and courageous conversation that becomes a search for truth. We encourage students to keep their minds open, to listen intently, to discuss courageously and to become enriched by the larger reality that the conversation unfolds for them. As students relate these texts to their lives and the world in which they live and engage with their peers, they connect in a small community where they feel safe enough to express their ideas, feelings and perspectives.

Asking students to consider ultimate questions raises in them an attitude of awe and wonder at the mystery that these questions pose. We have found that as students reflect upon and discuss questions concerning faith, freedom, love, identity, truth, justice, happiness and evil, they awaken to an awareness of the mystery of ultimacy. The seminar may not have solved the “God crisis” or prevailed against the culture in which they live, but students are reading texts from the humanities; and the seminar pedagogy, asking ultimate questions of truth and meaning, has opened and responded to students’ hearts yearning for meaning. Our seminars in the Catholic intellectual tradition do not aim to catechize or teach doctrine; rather, they aim to engage students with all reality more intentionally, including engaging with the reality of mystery that brings them to “The heart … the core of the internal transcendence where the roots of truth, beauty, and good are planted.”  


Michelle Loris is the director of Center for Catholic Studies and associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Sacred Heart University.


Is Francis About to be Undone by His Greatest Creation?

The Second Session of the Synod on Synodality will formally open in the Vatican this October and it promises to be a deciding—perhaps the deciding—moment in the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis.

Synodality in the Francis lexicon defines a new way of being an ecclesia or assembly of believers. It involves, as he said in Quebec City, a “restructuring of the spiritual life with ‘new ways of seeing.’” To that end, he convoked a synod or assembly of representatives drawn from across the Catholic landscape—bishops and laity alike—with the intention of creating an inclusive, free and dialogue-friendly gathering where delegates speak their minds without fear of a punitive response from the senior authorities when they go off script. 

As he said in his encyclical Fratelli tutti, “a healthy openness never threatens one’s own identity.” This papal maxim was tested to the limit at the First Session of the Synod on Synodality held in October 2023. Certain hot-button issues were either shelved or referred to a specific study group charged with the responsibility of exploring in greater depth the multi-dimensional aspects of a controverted matter in the church. This is especially true of debates around women in ministry. Two commissions created by Francis to study the ordination of women to the diaconate have the status of a suspended life in the musty corridors of Roman bureaucracy.

The words of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn can serve as a cautionary warning for Francis and his church: “a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who live in it.” The women who live in the Catholic Church are by every measure the largest and most productive component of its life and outreach; the men who run the church must get to know them in ways that don’t reduce them to a holy mystery in need of their own justificatory theology, to an abstraction rather than an encounter, to a principle rather than an enfleshed reality.

Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland, a civil law professor and a canon lawyer as well, is unsparing in her view of the synod: “it got uplift from a posse of hagiographers and Pollyannas [but] the kite trails the ground and is likely to be in ribbons by the end of October 2024.” Tina Beattie, a leading British Catholic theologian, is even more blistering in her assessment: “delays, deferrals, further reflections, unpublished reports—while the platitudinous waffle about women’s charisms and gifts drone on year after year … I no longer have the slightest interest in the chunterings of a celibate male hierarchy when it comes to women.”

Ouch.

In addition, originating on the other side of the Catholic spectrum, Francis has yet to win over the majority of the current episcopate. Most are not overly resistant to his idea of a synodal church, the product of a paradigm shift that inverts the normative model of distributed power, but they are cautious and worried. After all, it involves some significant adjustment to how they as bishops govern a church that moves beyond a univocally hierarchical mode of operating. For these bishops, and for many traditionalist Catholics, the Jesuit pope as disruptor is not a consolation but a desolation. One Francis critic, Thomas Weinandy, a Capuchin friar with the disposition of an inquisitor, accuses the pope of “using high-sounding words that are very ambiguous. … There can be no authentic paradigm shift without being faithful to upholding and promoting what the church has authentically taught through the centuries.”

But the disruptor pope has done precisely that: inaugurate a paradigm shift by being faithful to the organic tradition. He has disrupted the established pattern of doing things as the premier occupant of the Vatican; he has disrupted the protocols that are the mainstay of institutional life on the Tiber; he has disrupted the way we see the church operating in the world; he has disrupted the pattern of church priorities by centering the believing community on and with the poor; he had disrupted the settled questions by introducing a new perspective, replacing a magisterial with a synodal way of being church.

And he has managed to hold to the tradition he has sworn to protect as the Successor of Peter and as the Bishop of Rome by refusing to alter church teaching by either papal fiat or parliamentary consensus; by refusing to disregard forms of devotion or expressions of popular religiosity; by refusing to dismiss the work of his predecessors and instead building on their scaffolding.


Michael W. Higgins is a senior fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. His book on the Bergoglio papacy, “The Jesuit Disruptor: Francis Takes on His Church” is available in bookstores and his book on the Synod, “The 60 Days that Shook the Church: The Synod on Synodality,” will be published in 2025.


On Fratelli Tutti and Hurricanes

Back in 2020, I co-led a Fratelli Tutti reading group with a Jesuit friend of mine. The encyclical had come out just weeks before New Orleans, my city, received a direct hit from Hurricane Zeta—so named because the number of storms that year had exhausted the Latin alphabet and now had to borrow the Greek.

This was the lens through which I re-read and discussed Fratelli Tutti later that year. Its Laudato-Si-like braid of calls for greater human cooperation to combat wealth disparities and climate change, among many other issues, spoke presciently to me of the local crises we in New Orleans confront, in particular, during hurricane season. But it also spoke to me of the extravagant displays of community support I’d seen in the wake of hurricanes here—after Zeta in 2020, the much more powerful Ida in 2021, which brought a tree crashing through part of our roof and crushed our A/C unit, displacing us for two weeks  and, this week, Hurricane Francine.

Every hurricane season, I think of Zeta, my first real hurricane, and how it was an example to me of exactly what Pope Francis was talking about in Fratelli Tutti when he described communities that work together for the sake of something greater than their individual selves.

Like Francine this week, Zeta was easy. (These are relative terms, of course.) But unlike Francine, Zeta was bizarrely magical: the eye of the hurricane passed directly over our neighborhood. Zeta was a relatively weak Category 3—the same as Katrina, but everybody knows the real damage from Katrina came from the flood afterward, not the wind—where we sat in the dark after the power went out and I learned for the first time what “howling wind” sounded like, and transformers exploded with green flashes. But we were alright, and we made tacos by candlelight because the gas stove still worked.

The eyewall was the scariest bit: Darker and louder than even the leading “dirty side” of the storm, as they call it down here, had been. Although I am sure I was afraid, I have a hard time conjuring the memory of that fear now because it was so eclipsed by the sudden and unbelievable relief of the eye. Over the course of maybe five minutes, the rain stopped, the sky grew light and peaceful and the clouds cleared enough to show us a gorgeous pink sunset. All at once, the neighbors emerged, all of us standing on our front porches, all of us holding beers (which made me laugh—the universality of storm-drinking, because what else was there to do?), all of us in disbelief that we were standing in the eye of a hurricane.

Everyone trickled out into the street, surveying the damage. A fence had fallen on our car but not done any damage—a couple of neighbors helped me pull it off and then somebody moved their car to make room for mine elsewhere. When I came back, my husband was in the front room with the door wide open playing a Cajun tune on the accordion, the music drifting out into the gloriously peaceful street where we all drifted around in the pink light, chatting, drinking, knowing what was to come—what was, in fact, all around us—and in no hurry to get back to cowering in the dark.

It was a microcosm of the community that would unfold the next day—and in the case of Ida, over many days. Neighbors pooled their groceries and invited one another to meals; those with generators offered others a cool place to charge their phones; those with chainsaws offered to chop up the fallen trees. It was a glimpse of the world we could have in the absence of individualist consumerism, toxic media consumption and our desire to mind our own business and hide our vulnerabilities. As Pope Francis wrote in Fratelli Tutti, “Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness.”

Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring people together. But it’s up to us to continue to nurture those bonds after the storm has passed. As Francis said more simply in his extraordinary Urbi et Orbi address during the Coronavirus lockdown, “We are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat … are all of us. Just like those disciples, who spoke anxiously with one voice, saying ‘We are perishing,’ so we too have realized that we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.”


Colleen Dulle is a writer and producer at America Media, where she hosts the weekly news podcast “Inside the Vatican.” Her forthcoming book on grappling with faith while covering the Vatican will be published by Penguin Random House in spring 2025.


Living Witness

When my father, Daniel Ellsberg, died of pancreatic cancer on June 16, 2023, the first person I called was Randy Kehler. Hearing my voice from my father’s phone, he said, “I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

My father’s and Randy’s lives were connected by deep ties. When Randy died on June 20 this year, his obituaries highlighted that connection. “Randy Kehler, 80, Dies; Peace Activist Inspired Release of Pentagon Papers” was the headline in the New York Times. This was true. As often as people lauded my father’s courage in risking prison to oppose the Vietnam War, he always credited Randy’s witness. As for Randy, he humbly cited his experience to encourage others in their small protests or acts of conscience. You could never know the consequences of such acts, he said. “All I did was give a speech…”

That consequential speech occurred at a conference of the War Resisters International in the summer of 1969 at Haverford College. My father, a former Marine and high-level defense analyst who had recently returned from two years in Vietnam, was an unlikely member of the audience. Despite his background and top-secret security clearances, he had turned sharply against the war and was eager to hear from those who were protesting against it.

Randy, a 25-year-old staff member for the War Resisters League, had been organizing resistance to the draft. As he concluded his speech, he cited a number of friends who had gone to prison and mentioned that he was proud to be joining them soon. He had been sentenced to two years in prison for his own refusal of induction.

At this point, my father rushed from the hall and retreated to a restroom where he sank to the floor and wept for a long time. And then a question arose in his mind: “What could I do to help end this war if I were willing to go to prison?” The answer came in his decision to copy the top-secret history of the Vietnam War in his office safe and give it to Congress. Eventually, released to the press in 1971, it became known as the Pentagon Papers. My father was arrested and faced 115 years in prison.

His case was eventually dismissed on the grounds of “gross governmental misconduct,” but in fact, with its connection to Nixon’s payoffs to the Plumbers/Watergate burglars, it played an indirect role in helping end the war. My father always said, “No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers.” With that speech at Haverford, he said, “It was as though an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open. But what had really happened was that my life had split in two.”

Randy lived a life of deep meaning and consequence, quite apart from his influence on my dad. After prison, he taught, and later helped organize the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in the 1980s. For their refusal to pay taxes for war, he and his wife, Betsy, had their house seized by the IRS. At his memorial service in August, the packed church attested to his deep impact on the community in western Massachusetts, where he and Betsy raised their daughter.

In his last years, he was steadily laid low with severe chronic fatigue syndrome. In light of his illness, I was amazed just months before his death to receive a long letter from him in which he tried to express his spiritual intuitions, and mentioned that every night before going to sleep, he read an entry in my book All Saints—a book of daily reflections on “saints, prophets and witnesses for our time.”

“I wrote that book because of you,” I told him. In the introduction to a recent 25th anniversary edition, I wrote: “I have seen and felt the impact of living witness—how one lamp lights another. Dorothy Day’s life was built on this conviction: the power of small gestures, the protests, the acts of charity, which, even if no more than a pebble dropped in a pond, might send forth ripples that could encircle the globe. As she wrote, ‘We must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the action of the present moment, but we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts, that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.’”

Randy was not conventionally “religious,” any more than my father. But he understood what I meant. In words cited on the program at his memorial, he said, “Don’t ever, ever assume that anything you do, particularly if it’s an act of conscience, won’t make a difference.”


Robert Ellsberg is the Publisher of Orbis Books. He writes a daily reflection on “Blessed Among Us” for Give Us This Day. His new book is Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings.