This has been a long time coming, but after much reflection I have decided to take an extended and perhaps permanent hiatus from blogging here at Vox Nova. As one of the blog’s founding members, it is difficult to step away from the project, especially after working with such great co-contributors over the last three years. I am quite happy with the work we’ve done, and I am honored to have been part of the blog for so long. But for a number of reasons I feel that now would be a good time to stop. My reasons for “blogging” are shifting. Other projects and parts of my life require more and more attention. And I feel I’ve kind of “said my piece” here over the years, suggesting elements of a politically radical Catholicism in the context of an idolatrous and crumbling nation, but I feel that in some ways my time here has run its course.
I am not leaving the “blogging world” entirely, only withdrawing from certain circles and conversations. I hope and plan to keep in close contact with the friends I have made through this online community. And I will likely continue to comment here from time to time.
For those who would like to continue following my work, you can keep up with me at my personal blog CatholicAnarchy.org and at the Rock and Theology project. The former might be undergoing some changes in the near future as well, so please stay tuned. And of course I am always open to new opportunities and projects, so please get in touch if you have any thoughts.
Thanks to all for the valuable conversations, encouragement, and challenges I have experienced here. Special thanks to Vox Nova bloggers past and present for putting up with me. Keep up the good work.
Peace,
Michael
“No one can kill the voice of justice.” – Archbishop Oscar Romero
“Whoever is not angry when there is cause for anger, sins!” – St. John Chrysostom
This past Holy Week and subsequent celebration of Easter was a rough one for me this year. Too many realities converged which made it impossible to let the Triduum go by as usual. First, there is my continuing dissatisfaction with my usual parish community and my family’s inability to feel very comfortable at any of our local parishes, for various reasons. Second was the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s martyrdom, the recollection of which should truly unsettle our christologies, our ecclesiologies, and our liturgiologies. And third, of course, was the new presence of clergy sexual abuse in the media, accounts of modern day crucifixions perpetrated by those who are supposed to represent the crucified, not the crucifiers.
Blogging-about-blogging is often annoying to read. It is also a drag to write. But sometimes it needs to be done. Please bear with me as I point to an important concern.
Ben Witherington brings biblical teaching on money to bear on the current economic crisis in Jesus and Money. Witherington is a well-published Evangelical biblical scholar whose works cover a wide range of scholarly debates, presenting them in accessible ways for lay Christian audiences. In this book, however, Witherington presents an incomplete view of biblical texts on wealth and oversteps the bounds of his expertise as he applies these texts to today’s economy.
This incompleteness is ironic, as Witheringon explicitly stakes out his position as a “canonical” approach to the scriptures (142). That is, he insists that Christians may not pick and choose parts of scripture that appeal to them while ignoring others. This, he says, is precisely the problem with his primary target throughout the book: advocates of the “health and wealth” or “prosperity” gospel who focus on texts which seem to suggest that material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing. Against this painfully obvious abuse of scripture, Witherington insists that Christians must not ignore other biblical texts about wealth, and in the first eight chapters he surveys a variety of texts from both testaments. Along the way he draws out insights in order to develop a “Christian theology of money,” presented in chapter nine, and suggestions for the life of discipleship in chapter ten.
Although the passion narratives of our Gospels are well known to us and bring all sorts of images to mind, they are in fact quite sketchy overall. We fill in each of the four narratives in various ways: with one another, with images from art and film, and even with insights from the contemporary world. Or better, what often takes place is a process of “mutual illumination” through the interaction of the Gospel texts and our contemporary world. That is, while the Gospels certainly illuminate the contemporary world, the contemporary world can also illuminate the Gospels, helping us to understand them better.
This process of “mutual illumination” is quite common in theological reflection, whether it is of the formal academic type or the reflection all Christians do, but it is especially present in most expressions of liberation theology. In light of recent discussions about sexual abuse in the church, I revisited an essay I read a few years ago in which British liberation theologian David Tombs explores the interconnections between torture, execution, state terror, and sexual abuse in Latin America during the 1970s and 80s and brings this analysis to his reading of the passion of Jesus (“Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53, Nos. 1-2 [1999]: 89-109).
Truthout alerts us to ten things we didn’t know were in the health care bill. Among them are such awful, anti-life measures as:
3. Right to pump. Workplaces will have to provide “reasonable” break time and a private location — other than a bathroom — for breastfeeding mothers to pump breast milk for one year after the birth of a child. Women’s groups have long sought such guarantees, and this one will apply to all workplaces with the exception of employers with less than 50 employees, where the demand might create an “undue hardship.”
4. Postpartum depression. In addressing another priority for women’s groups, the bill singles out the problem of postpartum depression for expanded funding, worker training, publiceducation and research. The National Institute of Mental Health is due to conduct a national longitudinal study of women with postpartum depression, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services must produce a study on the benefits of PPD screening.
…
6. Adoption credit. Beginning with your 2010 taxes, the federal adoption credit goes up by $1,000 to $13,170 per child and now becomes refundable.
…
9. Abstinence education. The bill restores federal funding for abstinence-only education, the sex-ed technique that urges students to wait until marriage (while eschewing talk of contraceptives). Researchers dispute the effectiveness of the strategy, and it was getting the cold shoulder from the Obama administration. The health reform bill, however, allocates $250 million for such programs over the next five years.
“Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm
Enjoy the silence”
(Depeche Mode)
German political theologian Fr. Johann Baptist Metz famously wrote on many occasions that the challenge for theologians in the second half of the twentieth century would be to learn how to write theology that places the world’s victims at the center of its reflection. In particular, Metz insisted that theologians could no longer do their work with their backs turned to Auschwitz. In his most recent book, Catholic theologian Tom Beaudoin echoes Metz, writing that today we cannot do theology with our backs turned to the victims of sexually abusive priests. (His reflections on the latest round of abuse reports can be seen here or here.)
But this is, I fear, precisely what is likely to happen in most Roman Catholic parishes during Holy Week. Given the tendency toward apolitical and irrelevant homilies that have become standard in our communities, I have my doubts that many Good Friday homilies will make reference to the crucifixions experienced by victims of sexually abusive clergy. A friend of mine, and a doctoral student in theology herself, remarked to me that the Pope’s silence in the face of cover-up accusations could be due to the view that Holy Week is perhaps not an appropriate time to discuss such things. I suggested in return that if in Holy Week we focus our attention on the suffering of Christ, then acknowledging the Christ that suffers in the victims seems entirely fitting this week. More than fitting. Necessary. But sadly, if we are to get any reference to the scandal at all, it is likely to be the sort of thing Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s flock received at Mass this past Passion/Palm Sunday when he insisted that it is Pope Benedict who has been “crucified”.
Earlier this month in his regular NCR column, John Allen described Archbishop Charles Chaput as a “twenty-first century” bishop, not so much for his ideas and viewpoints but for the way he “compete[s] in [the] secular marketplace of ideas.”
Today in NCR’s story on the sainthood cause of Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose anniversary of martyrdom we celebrate today, Fr. Dean Brackley SJ notes that the hesitancy with which the church seems to be moving toward “Saint Oscar” is in part due to the fact that, by canonizing Romero, the church would hold him up not only as a model Christian but as a model archbishop. As Brackley says, “not everyone in the Catholic hierarchy is comfortable with presenting him as a bishop to be imitated.”
What kind of bishops does the church need in the twenty-first century? Bishops known for their (sometimes loud) participation in the “marketplace of ideas,” or pastors known for their continual conversion and for their humble walk with the oppressed even unto death? Indeed, what kind of church shall we be in the twenty-first century? A church that competes for political leverage or a treasonous church of solidarity, a church of the poor?
Today’s anniversary is a good opportunity to reflect on these questions, not only for bishops, but for all of God’s people.
That is, “If I am killed, I will rise in the Salvadoran people.”
Here are a few more resources on and quotes from Archbishop Oscar Romero who was killed by a u.s. funded and trained death squad 30 years ago today while celebrating Mass. My uncle has been serving as a priest in El Salvador since the early 1980s, and he has been looking forward to today’s celebrations. From a recent email from him:
This will be a big “Sorrows Week” as it’s known here. Our big local doings center around the 30th anniversary of the assasination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. There will be a big Mass in the cathedral on Wednesday, celebrated by Cardinal McCarrick of Washington (retired) and a bunch of bishops from the U.S.A., Central America, and Europe, especially Rome, or so our archbishop has promised.
I am looking forward to hearing reports from him about today’s events. Until then:
The Daily Show reports on the Texas school board’s exclusion of Romero from the curriculum. “And that is how Oscar Romero got disappeared by right wingers for the second time.”
The latest in our ongoing series (j/k). If you are like me, you have surely seen folks remarking that “Obamacare” eliminates the need for people to be “productive” members of society. This “productivity/non-productivity” nonsense is exactly the rhetoric that the right used in their hysteria about “death panels” and “rationing.” “Non-productive” members of society, they feared, would be left to die. Now they are protesting “Obamacare” because it won’t leave “non-productive” persons to die.
At the end of the First Intercontinental Encounter in the Selva Lacandona, the Zapatistas said at one point, “We are not here to change the world, something that is very difficult, next to impossible. We are here to create a whole new world.” This looks very idealistic, romantic, not real, not pragmatic. Thinking time again with them about this, we have discovered that they are absolutely right and that this position is very realistic. To change the reality, it is very difficult, next to impossible. To create something radically new is feasible. You can do that tomorrow.
Please just think for a minute, let’s change the educational system in Mexico or in the United States. You can change the educational system? You can dedicate your whole life and the lives of your friends and your families and you will be a footnote in a textbook and nothing more. You cannot change that monster. But if you want to create a radically new thing, to learn whatever you want to learn beyond the system, you can create that tomorrow morning. You can immediately create something else, a different kind of situation.
This is the kind of thing about which we are thinking, “Yes, what we are trying to do is to create a whole new world and for this we need imagination. We need to invent that new world.”
- Gustavo Esteva, Mexican author, grassroots activist and “de-professionalized intellectual”
In the above video, U.S. Catholic Magazine asks Fordham professor Michael Lee five questions on liberation theology. The full interview with Lee on liberation theology today can be found here. Lee’s recent book, Bearing the Weight of Salvation, is a revision of his very good dissertation on the themes of soteriology and discipleship in the theology of Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ, one of the Jesuits martyred in El Salvador in 1989.
Radical political thought is always about more than the setting forth of a programme, more than the diagnosis of the ills of society, more than the sketching of the architecture of a just polity. It should also be about the education of political desire… and the expansion of the social imaginary. This is not a question of positing the impossible but realistically and rigorously both exploring and expanding the ever changing limit of the possible.
Richard Fitch, “The Pelagian Mentality: Radical Political Thought in Fifth Century Christianity,” in Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives, ed. Alexandre J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 26.
I certainly understand the concern that my religio-political views — whether one uses the terms “Catholic anarchism,” “anarcho-Catholicism,” “participatory democratic Catholicism,” “libertarian socialist Catholicism,” etc. etc. — are “idiosyncratic.” I try to be patient with such charges, pointing when I can to persons, movements, and teachings in our Catholic tradition as well as among the wider Body of Christ that inspire and support the stances that I take.
Two blog posts by different authors on the same blog on the same day. Both are about boundaries between human beings.
The first is a predictable glorification of imperial boundary-making. The author enthusiastically passes along yet another artifact from u.s. american civil religion, this time a hymn to that personification of the nation-state, Uncle Sam. And you’d have to suffer from complete religious illiteracy to miss the deeply theological content here, with its nation-based (i.e. pagan) eschatology and soteriology:
For to fight for Uncle Sam;
He’ll lade us on to glory, O!
He’ll lade us on to glory, O!
To save the Stripes and Stars.
That phrase, “It’s not that bad,” more than simply being the repeated insistence of a woman who recently “tweeted” her abortion, could really be the mantra of a culture that has become absolutely numb to its deep-rooted tradition of killing human persons. We americans have become simply too good at stopping the pain that comes from killing each other, whether we do it through orally-administered abortion, by pounding it into “our” soldiers that their victims are not human, by talking ourselves into believing that certain practices “aren’t really torture.”
Abortion? “Not that bad.”
Waterboarding? “Not that bad.”
Collateral damage? “Not that bad.”
Profit-centered health care system? “Not that bad.”
Capitalism? “Not that bad.”
When was the last time you said “It’s not that bad”?
Please forgive me for posting an Easter song on the second day of Lent, but this is one of the most gorgeous songs I’ve heard in a very long time. And it might just get me through these last days of what has been a brutal winter. It’s “Bells of Harlem” and it’s the last track from the new album A Friend of a Friend from Dave Rawlings Machine — which is what happens when Gillian Welch and her partner Dave Rawlings swap their customary roles.
Another humorous — and more uncomfortable — version follows the jump. Pay attention to the guy with the camera and what Dave does to him around the 2:05 mark. Let it be a lesson to rock photographers everywhere!
Here are three Ash Wednesday posts that may be of interest.
The first is from Debra Dean Murphy who is on the religion faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan College and who I have gotten to know a bit through the Ekklesia Project. Growing up in West Virginia, I never heard an Ash Wednesday homily that connected coal dust, ashes, social sin, and repentance. I suppose that’s not so strange, considering the economic, political, and cultural power that “King Coal” has in the state. It’s also not strange because Catholics are still trying to shake out of an individualistic sense of sin. Thus, for many Catholics even today, Lent is a time to “shape up” one’s self only, and not a chance to turn away from social sin. Anyway, Murphy makes those connections and I recommend her post. Read the rest of this entry »
Some readers of this blog are probably aware of my interest in El Salvador. It’s an interest that is quite personal, as an uncle of mine is a priest who has been living and working there since the 1980s. This “personal connection” is indeed what sparked my interest in Latin America and, eventually, in liberation theologies, especially the work of Salvadoran theologians Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino.
So I’m always interested when new documentaries about El Salvador are made. And there are a few new interesting ones to highlight. Read the rest of this entry »
Four years ago I mentioned the release of a new Jesus film called Son of Man which resituates the Jesus story in contemporary Africa and portrays Jesus as a nonviolent revolutionary. At the time I mentioned how the film could provide an alternative to the hysteria- and piety-surrounded (and decidedly apolitical, unless you count its anti-Jewish undertones) Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ. It took a while, but Son of Man will finally be released on DVD in north america in March.
The site Rejesus posted a brief but interesting review of the film here. And here is the trailer:
Here is yet another example of misconduct by a u.s. soldier for those who criticize my views on the military for being based in “stereotypes” or “abstractions.” This one is reported by BBC News; you don’t need to dig very hard to find this stuff.
A US soldier has been charged with assault after allegedly waterboarding his four-year-old daughter, police in the state of Washington have said.
Sgt Joshua Tabor dunked the girl’s head in a sink full of water for not reciting the alphabet, police in the town of Yelm said.
Waterboarding is an interrogation technique that simulates drowning and has been banned as torture by the US.
Sgt Tabor is a helicopter repairer who served in Iraq from 2007-08.
Yelm police chief Todd Stancil said Sgt Tabor was arrested on 31 January.
Officers were called after Sgt Tabor was seen walking around his neighbourhood holding a Kevlar helmet and threatening to break windows, the police chief added.
The girl was then found hiding in a locked bathroom in the soldier’s home, Mr Stancil said on Monday.
Sgt Tabor posted bail of $10,000 (£6,400) on Monday and has been confined to barracks at his base in Washington state.
My suggestion for the day is this: Encourage a family member or friend who serves in the military to leave this line of work. Because — I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — america is killing its soldiers.
Well, I recently purchased my first Apple product, the iPhone 3G, and I was pretty sure I’d like it. But I really like it. I still can’t stand iTunes. I had avoided downloading and using iTunes for any music purposes before getting the phone — for politico-cultural reasons as well as general annoyance — but now with the phone, using iTunes is a must. I can’t understand how the phone itself can be so elegant and iTunes so clunky.
Anyway, when searching for “apps” to download and try, I tried searching for “Catholic” and didn’t get very much. What I did get was mostly pretty bizarre. I’m not sure why one would want to pray the rosary on the iPhone or why one would need an encyclopedia of the popes in one’s pocket at all times. The best Catholic app I’ve seen — and really, the only one useful to me — is Catholic Calendar from Universalis, a free complete liturgical calendar that lets you access today’s, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s Hours, daily readings, and more. (The paid version allows access to the Hours in their entirety.)
Many of us are thankful tonight for the full, radical life of historian/activist Howard Zinn who passed away today from a heart attack. Check out the well-done obits from the AP and the Boston Globe. If there is anything recognizably good or hopeful in u.s. american history, Zinn pointed to it.
Facebook, of course, has its plusses and minuses. One of the much talked about plusses is the ability it gives its users to reconnect with people from their pasts. As is well known to FB users, this can also be a minus when the reconnection proves awkward.
Today I received a “friend request” from a high school friend. I went to a small Catholic high school in West Virginia and because we had a small class, we were pretty tight. Before approving his request I clicked to his (limited) profile and noted that since high school he had joined the Marines. His profile picture showed himself and a military friend showing off their (gigantic) guns. Thinking to myself, “Let’s see how this goes,” I approved the request.
As I usually do, I clicked back to his profile to see the rest of it, and saw that he had posted, approvingly, the following video. (Warning: Although it depicts cartoonish violence, the content is undeniably racist. The backing track also includes extreme language.)
Living on Hope While Living in Babylon: The Christian Anarchists of the 20th Century
by Tripp York
Wipf and Stock / $17.00 US (list)
[Amazon] [Wipf and Stock]
The publication of Tripp York’s Living on Hope While Living in Babylon marks a significant contribution to the recently re-emerging interest in the connection between Christianity and anarchism and for that reason should be celebrated. Very little scholarship exists regarding these questions, and the less these concerns remain marginal to political theology the better. The book is a revised version of York’s master’s thesis on anarchism and Christianity. Chapter one describes why Christianity and anarchism resonate with one another. Chapter two seeks to go beyond what York calls a merely “revolutionary” type of Christian anarchism toward what he calls an anarchistic “apocalyptic politics.” Chapters three through five each describe Christian individuals or movements whose praxis subverted the “triple axis of evil” of imperial politics described by Martin Luther King, Jr.: materialism, racism, and militarism. These chapters focus, respectively, on the Catholic Worker movement, Clarence Jordan of the Koinonia movement, and the Berrigan Brothers.
The book starts off strong in chapter one, lamenting the marginalization of anarchism and anarchists in society and in the church, a marginalization that York says is especially unjustified in light of the influence anarchists have had in promoting social justice in the united states (1). What follows is one of the better explanations of what anarchists generally do and do not believe that I have seen. Engaging classical anarchists such as Proudhon and Malatesta and contemporary ones such as Howard Zinn, York insists rightly that anarchism does not create or advocate “disorder,” but rather it is the capitalist state system which creates “dis-order”: “If anarchists are against anything, they are against the kind of chaos that arises from what they see as the unnatural relationships that occur through governments and its people” (7). Additionally, anarchists are not only against this dis-order, but for an alternative vision of human society, “the kind of society in which humanity can flourish” (8).
All Christians are white supremacists. They’re also all Spanish inquisitors. They all believe the world is six thousand years old. They all believe that women have no right to teach theology to men. They all believe that the institution of slavery is ordained by God and, within appropriate limits, is perfectly just. All Christians hate fags and believe that if this were a Christian society, homosexuality would be a capital offense. All Christians support abortion clinic bombing. Whenever an abortion clinic is bombed, Christian communities pretend to condemn it but you can see the pride just seeping through their pretense.
Read the rest here. While you’re there, browse through the rest of his great blog.
Welcome to Pray Tell, a blog gives practical wisdom about prayer, sacraments, and the community of the faithful – in short, worship. Created especially for pastors, liturgists, musicians, and scholars, Pray Tell is informal, conversational, even humorous, but also – we hope – always well-informed and intellectually grounded.
They have some pretty fantastic contributors including Anthony Ruff, Michael Joncas, Susan Wood, and Teresa Berger. I’m looking forward to seeing the blog develop.
And, man, their comment policy is ways more hard core than ours. But I guess they do cover liturgy while we only cover politics! ;)
But surely, the objection might go, nobody really thinks the flag or the nation or money or sports idols are their “gods” — those [the word "desecration," for example] are just metaphors. However, the question is not simply one of belief, but of behavior. If a person claims to believe in the Christian God but never gets off the couch on Sunday morning and spends the rest of the week in the obsessive pursuit of profits in the bond market, then what is absolute in that person’s life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God. Matthew 6:24 personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes.
Another theologian in Catholic circles passes away this week, this time the controversial feminist theologian Mary Daly who taught at Boston College for 33 years. I received the following message from Daly’s colleague Mary Hunt via a bulletin from Feminist Studies in Religion:
With a heavy heart, yet grateful beyond words for her life and work, I report that Mary Daly died this morning, January 3, 2010 in Massachusetts. She had been in poor health for the last two years.
Her contributions to feminist theology, philosophy, and theory were many, unique, and if I may say so, world-changing. She created intellectual space; she set the bar high. Even those who disagreed with her are in her debt for the challenges she offered.
When I return from vacation at week’s end I will post more. But I want WATER colleagues, of which she was a stalwart one, to know this now. She always advised women to throw our lives as far as they would go. I can say without fear of exaggeration that she lived that way herself.
Dutch theological giant Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx passed away from natural causes on December 23. NCR has the story. Thanks be to God for his many contributions to the Church.
There was a human being in the first century who was called “Divine,” “Son of God,” “God,” and “God from God,” whose titles were “Lord,” “Redeemer,” “Liberator,” and “Savior of the World.” Who was that person? Most people who know the Western tradition would probably answer, unless alerted by the question’s too-obviousness, Jesus of Nazareth. And most Christians probably think that those titles were originally created and uniquely applied to Christ. But before Jesus ever existed, all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus. To proclaim them of Jesus the Christ was thereby to deny them of Caesar the Augustus. Christians were not simply using ordinary titles applied to all sorts of people at that time, or ever extraordinary titles applied to special people in the East. They were taking the identity of the Roman emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant. Either that was a peculiar joke and a very low lampoon, or it was what the Romans called majestas and we call high treason.
John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), p. 28.
With Christ, God has injected himself into history. With the birth of Christ, God’s reign is now inaugurated in human time. On this night, as we Christians have done every year for twenty centuries, we recall that God’s reign is now in this world and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth attests that God is now marching with us in history, that we do not go alone, and that our aspiration for peace, for justice, for the reign of divine law, for something holy, is far from earth’s realities. We can hope for it, not because we humans are able to construct that realm of happiness which God’s holy words proclaim, but because the builder of a reign of justice, of love, and of peace is already in the midst of us. (December 25, 1977)
An acquaintance of mine who takes issue with my affection for Latin American liberation theology forwarded me a link to a recent message of Pope Benedict XVI to the bishops of Brazil in which he reiterates the Roman Catholic Church’s warnings about “certain forms” of liberation theology. I saw a blurb about this papal statement soon after it happened and did not comment on it even though most of the Catholic media went berserk, like this friend of mine, misreading this as another “condemnation” of liberation theology when it clearly isn’t.
In the brief message, Benedict rightly reiterates the Church’s traditional warning against “a-critical acceptance” of certain “theses and methodologies that derive from Marxism” that we see in “certain theologians.” This has in fact happened in the case of a few Latin American theologians, without a doubt.
However, no where in this document, nor in either of the Vatican’s other two documents on liberation theology, does the Church condemn liberation theology as a whole. Nor does the Church even condemn all of the ideas of Marxism. John Paul II in fact used Marx very clearly in his encyclical Laborem Exercens. Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Marxian themes can see Marx’s influence on John Paul II. Paul VI affirmed the compatibility of some forms of socialism with Catholicism and used Marxian terminology in his encyclical Populorum Progressio. In fact, by warning against “a-critical” uses of Marxism, the Church implies that critical use of Marxism is in fact acceptable, and this is what most liberation theologians in fact do. Indeed this is what official Catholic social teaching has done since the Second Vatican Council.
Once again, this is not a condemnation of liberation theology. It is merely a warning against certain tendencies. The only way one would know this, though, is to know the history of the disputes and to know the Vatican’s two previous texts on liberation theology neither of which condemn liberation theology in toto.
Finally, it is important to consider not only this message to the Brazilian bishops, but a message to the same bishops delivered by the Venerable John Paul II who insisted that liberation theology is “both useful and necessary.”
§176. Respect for flag.
(j) The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing.
If this excerpt does not represent an explicit sacramentology of signs becoming what they signify, I don’t know what does.
A couple other fun facts from the same section:
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery.
(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever.
(d) is frequently broken by your Aunt Wilma who breaks out her “Go u.s.a.” t-shirt on various national feast days.
(i) is frequently broken by Jimmy’s Used Cars or your local liquor store nearly every day.
I was reading excerpts tonight from the late German feminist and political theologian and activist Dorothee Soelle — who coined the term Christofascism — and thought I would share just a few provocative passages.
“I suspect that the post-Christians do not want to have anything to do with the dialectic of a religious institution. But it is just this self-contradictory experience of the church as traitor and the church as sister that stares me in the face, and I have to live with it. Post-Christianity seems to me like a slick formula that covers up the two-sided encounter with the church and reduces it to the ‘church from above.’ Then the church from below is forgotten, and with it what tradition has identified as the ‘mystical body of Christ.’”
(From “Christianity and Post-Marxism” in The Window of Vulnerability: A Political Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), pp. 24-5)
“I am often impatient when believers ask me: ‘Are you a Marxist?’ The best reply I can think of is a counter-question: ‘Do you brush your teeth? I mean, since the toothbrush has been invented?’ Read the rest of this entry »
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Vox Nova
"In their patriotism and in their fidelity to their civic duties Catholics will feel themselves bound to promote the true common good; they will make the weight of their convictions so influential that as a result civil authority will be justly exercised and laws will accord with moral precepts and the common good."
Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam actuositatem 14
Posted by Michael J. Iafrate 
Jesus and Money: A Guide for Times of Financial Crisis
I certainly understand the concern that my religio-political views — whether one uses the terms “Catholic anarchism,” “anarcho-Catholicism,” “participatory democratic Catholicism,” “libertarian socialist Catholicism,” etc. etc. — are “idiosyncratic.” I try to be patient with such charges, pointing when I can to persons, movements, and teachings in our Catholic tradition as well as among the wider Body of Christ that inspire and support the stances that I take. 
Well, I recently purchased my first Apple product, the iPhone 3G, and I was pretty sure I’d like it. But I really like it. I still can’t stand iTunes. I had avoided downloading and using iTunes for any music purposes before getting the phone — for politico-cultural reasons as well as general annoyance — but now with the phone, using iTunes is a must. I can’t understand how the phone itself can be so elegant and iTunes so clunky.
Living on Hope While Living in Babylon: The Christian Anarchists of the 20th Century
With Christ, God has injected himself into history. With the birth of Christ, God’s reign is now inaugurated in human time. On this night, as we Christians have done every year for twenty centuries, we recall that God’s reign is now in this world and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth attests that God is now marching with us in history, that we do not go alone, and that our aspiration for peace, for justice, for the reign of divine law, for something holy, is far from earth’s realities. We can hope for it, not because we humans are able to construct that realm of happiness which God’s holy words proclaim, but because the builder of a reign of justice, of love, and of peace is already in the midst of us. (December 25, 1977)
