I once saw him live, in person. It was on Copacabana beach in Rio, World Youth Day, 2013, a few weeks after he had become pope. Somewhat out of the blue, I had been invited to speak at a panel on “Jesus and the Environment” as part of the week’s festivities. (Perhaps an early rumbling of the spirit and interest behind the famous Laudato Si’ encyclical, still two years yet to come.)

Have you ever stood in a milling crowd of over one million people? A daunting idea but, in this case, a happy crowd of mostly young people, jubilant, expectant, singing and chanting at times, as though awaiting the arrival of the greatest soccer star of all time.

He eventually arrived late afternoon in the Popemobile after a drive through the streets of Rio. Given the traffic, our cab couldn’t quite make it to the beachfront so we had to exit several blocks early and walk the rest of the way. As we got out, our cab driver smiled at us and shrugged. “Papa” he said, gesturing toward the crowds filling the streets.

It was clear right away something was very different about Francis, especially his frequent exhortations to comfortable Catholics of the global North to “go out to the peripheries.” As an Argentinian, he was himself from the peripheries, a country which had known an economic crash, a seven-year “dirty war” in which 30,000 people were disappeared, and many thousands living in favelas near great wealth.

He spoke of wanting a “poor church,” just as his namesake St. Francis of Assisi came to symbolize. This idea did not sit easily with many American Catholics, especially those still in a triumphal mood after the fall of the Soviet Union, given Pope John Paul II’s role in those events.

A few friends and I noticed this disconnect with the U.S. Church and undertook to publish a collection of essays in 2015 called “Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis,” with contributions by laypeople MT Davila, Tony Annett, Mark Gordon, Sam Rocha, Nicholas Lund-Molfese, Matthew Cooper, Michel Bauwens, John Medaille, Matthew Tan, and Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, among others.

That same year, Francis visited the U.S., speaking to Congress and holding up the legacies of four exemplary Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day.

Of the four, Dorothy was surely the least known, even to me at that point. Solidarity Hall went on to publish an anthology of articles about her in 2016 called “Dorothy Day and the Church”, based on a conference at the University of St. Francis in Ft. Wayne Indiana.

My podcast co-host Pete Davis and I next did an interview with Rosalie Riegle, an historian of the Catholic Worker movement, in which we talked about Dorothy’s impact on American culture.

And for our new podcast, Lost Prophets, we spoke with historian Kelly Johnson about Dorothy’s co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin. (Recommended also: our conversation with theologian Mike Budde on Catholic social teachings and American empire.)

Such was the influence and impact of Francis, not only on the Church’s membership but on the world at large, that an excellent doc film made by Toronto’s Salt and Light Media in 2019 was called “The Francis Effect”.

With so much more to say on all this, I want to end for now with a small memory, related to the Francis effect and the way it took hold right away in his papacy.

At World Youth Day, young “pilgrims” were arriving at Rio’s airport from all over the world, an estimated three million in all. Many were from Central and South America but there were flag-brandishing delegations, as I noticed on Rio’s beach, from seemingly everywhere. Even including, say, Iraq.

A kind of quiet fervor was noticeable in the way groups would stroll the city, singing, talking to local people, praying together publicly.

Here’s an example. A new friend I met during that Rio week recounted an incident which I dearly wish I could have witnessed in person. Among the ocean of arriving visitors to the Rio airport was a delegation of young people from (I believe) Canada. They were crossing the airport to reach public transportation downtown when they noticed a delegation from Iraq and immediately stopped to speak with them.

Within seconds, the Canadians seized this moment to drop to their knees and to ask the Iraqis for forgiveness for their part in destroying the country in the Iraq War.

The name of God, as the title of one of Francis’ books suggests, is mercy.

And as Francis said in his Message for the Fiftieth World Day of Peace in 2017, “May we dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words, and deeds, and to becoming nonviolent people and to building nonviolent communities that care for our common home…Everyone can be an artisan of peace.”

And may his memory be a blessing.

See you next time—peace.

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I’m afraid I’ve left Solidarity Hall’s Street Catholic section quiet for some time. But a recent retreat experience has restarted my engines. Which is exactly what retreats are supposed to do, of course.

My newfound energy comes out of spending three days with a group of about forty peace activists of various ages and experiences. Before the weekend, I knew only one fellow attendee, my great friend Edgar Rivera Colon (his brilliant podcast is here), who among other guises is a mystagogue, a guide of souls.

Back in early December, he invited me to a weekend at the mountaintop Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor PA, in the Poconos. Here’s Edgar’s description of the background to this gathering:

Sixty years ago, Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic and scholar, Thomas Merton discerned the moment to ask, what are the spiritual roots of protest? He convened a retreat with some of the leading faith-based nonviolent activists of the time, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, John Grady, Jim Forrest, Tom Cornell, A.J. Muste and John Howard Yoder, among others. Martin Luther King, Jr. intended to participate but travelled instead to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is the famous retreat held over Thanksgiving weekend in 1964 at Merton’s Gethsemani abbey in rural Kentucky. The agenda Merton proposed would not be about strategy or tactics of peacemaking but rather an exploration of the spiritual roots of that work.

Merton identified three themes he recommended for reflection:

1. conscientious objection to war (a practice in which Catholics in 1964 were not yet as well represented as Mennonites, Quakers, Church of the Brethren);

2. the challenge of technology (especially nuclear weapons);

3. and a provocative question, By what right do we protest?

In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, followed by Pope John XXIII’s “Pacem in Terris” encyclical on nuclear nonproliferation, Merton had moved beyond the goals of most peace advocates of the time. Instead of merely eliminating—or at least reducing—nuclear weapons testing, he had come to see the task as complete disarmament and the total abolition of war.

In these months the peace movement and the civil rights movement were gradually intersecting around a shared sense that new levels of protest would be necessary.

This history is ably recounted by Gordon Oyer (whom I met at the Kirkridge retreat) in the volume whose cover appears at the top of this post. Working from participants’ notes, Oyer reconstructed the spirit-filled conversations which inspired the group to confront the dominating powers and principalities which, we must note, have only grown stronger today.

As Oyer recounts in his book, the three days together at Gethsemani modeled something unusual for its time—namely, interreligious (meaning, at this date, simply Catholic and Protestant!) collaboration for peace work that would blossom in the coming years: the Berrigans’ Catonsville MD draft card burning, the advocacy of Clergy and Laity against the Vietnam War, the work of the Catholic Peace Fellowship with conscientious objectors, the March on the Pentagon, and much more.

When I told Edgar I would love to participate in the retreat, I truly had no idea what was coming. I found myself in a warm group of activists and contemplatives, of all ages and races, many of whom already knew each other well. Many Catholic, some not.

Some of them—especially the veteran resisters—had long ago proven themselves to be fearless people, what you might call “giraffe heroes” who stick their necks up high. People whose last name, I noticed with a touch of awe, was Berrigan.

Several were quietly famous within the American peace community, notably in the resistance to the covert wars of the 1980s in Central America and in the Plowshares anti-nuclear movement. Kathy Kelly, a gentle-spoken older woman from Chicago, recalled a protest action at the School of the Americas in which she was arrested, her hands ziptied painfully behind her before being knocked to the ground while a soldier knelt on the small of her back until eventually ordered to stop. I learned she had been arrested literally dozens of times, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Veteran peacemaker and Catholic Worker Art Laffin described getting in a canoe with friends near the Connecticut navy base where the Trident nuclear submarines were stationed, rowing out to a sub, and then boarding it. The group proceeded to pour blood on a missile warhead, hitting it several times with a hammer (recalling the biblical phrase “they shall beat their swords into plowshares”), and then kneeling to pray before being arrested and carried away.

The topic of the Gaza genocide was also foremost in our minds. Given the history of connections between the Catholic peace movement and the nonviolent organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, it was fitting to have their executive director, Ariel Gold, with us as she described how their work has led to her being expelled from the state of Israel.

I was wonderful to meet Frida Berrigan, daughter of Philip Berrigan and thus Dan Berrigan’s niece. She’s the author of It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood--a funny and striking memoir of nonviolence and family love.

Here’s a taste of Frida’s style, as she’s answering an interviewer’s question whether she is a “lapsed” Catholic:

I’m not lapsed: I am a Catholic in waiting—waiting for my Church to remember the Gospels, to be a justice- and peace-seeking community, to be fully inclusive of women, and to be welcoming to people who are not heteronormative. Pope Francis is a step in the right direction, but there is a long way to go.

Sixty years on from Merton’s retreat and likewise feeling ourselves on a dark threshold, we asked, “Is this a dead-end time? Has every contradiction been pushed to its limit? What is our hope?”

One elder reminded us: we need to imagine our “agitated” ancestors at this moment. And after all, someone else added, “Success is not a name of God. But we can be pockets of creation, seed pods of the new world.”

For a few days, it all felt like the scene in Acts where the tongues of fire descend and suddenly everyone is truly hearing and understanding each other.

Some other observations that I took down:

• “We need to practice enemy love. Which like all love is a discipline. And it always contains risk.”

• “To do this work, you need more than just a good heart and good ideology.”

• “As Grace Lee Boggs told us, the time has come to grow our souls.”

• “We are working at the point where God and the Holy Spirit enter the world system.”

• “We need long obedience in the same direction. It’s like the Middle Eastern proverb: the one who plants dates does not eat dates.”

And possibly my favorite from the weekend:

• “That moment when you realize your individual spiritual journey is actually a mass pilgrimage on your way to becoming an ancestor yourself.”

See you next time—peace.

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As I was close to exiting the Catholic Church’s rear door about a decade ago, Pope Francis got my attention and I decided to stick around for a while, in case things got interesting. And sure enough, they did.

While I was disappointed that Francis apparently chose not to sell the Vatican and move the Church’s HQ operations to Haiti as I was hoping, quite a few other good things happened. Like his convening of a global group in 2019 called the Economy of Francesco, a project not exactly welcomed by certain “free market” Catholics.

Inspired by the EoF’s vision of an alternative to extractive neoliberal capitalism, my friends Felipe Witchger and Elizabeth Garlow teamed up to build a U.S.-based organization directed at Catholic asset holders, i.e., people with enormous influence in their church’s investing community.

The new org was called the Francesco Collaborative, a program of “Livable Future Investing” workshops in which participants—from Catholic hospitals, Catholic university endowments, and investment funds of religious orders—are presented with a roadmap, a series of connected dots leading from Pope Francis and the tradition of Catholic social teachings (still not well known to many Catholics) to real-world, operating solidarity economy enterprises in need of capital.

And here’s the beauty of their work. After Felipe and Elizabeth ask workshop participants to reflect over four weeks on how their training has largely led them to investment practices clearly misaligned with Catholic principles like solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good, something remarkable usually happens: millions of dollars get reallocated.

Workshop participants undergo a kind of personal transformation which reconnects them to their deepest Catholic identity—in a renewed sense and a new moment.

Sometimes well along in their careers, these money managers—who often identify as merely nominal Catholics or not at all—find themselves becoming protagonists of the change their pope has been calling for. Some spirit-filled work going on here.

See you next time—peace.

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What follows here is a brief book review—a favorable one—along with my explanation for why in some ways I’m the wrong person for the job. Or at least, I’m not this author’s ideal reviewer—I think he has quite a number of those. Here’s the background.

Last week I had the pleasure of walking only a few blocks to a bookstore event at which David Brooks (of the New York Times) was interviewing my friend Michael Wear, founder of the Center for Christianity and Public Life and author of The Spirit of Our Politics. The book’s subtitle is “Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.”

As someone who was raised quite a few years ago as a smalltown Southern Baptist in Texas, I’ve watched (now from a Dorothy Day-style Catholic perspective) the unedifying spectacle of evangelical Christianity’s gradual descent into what I can only call an aggressively anti-Gospel position. Obviously, this does not apply to all evangelicals.

I’ve always been aware that a few strong evangelical souls retain a faith that Howard Thurman or bell hooks might recognize. Or the folks who take inspiration from Shane Claiborne or Plough Magazine, for example.

In his public life, which included a stint in the Obama White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Michael has worked smack in the midst of this immense cultural shift. Despite the pandemic of Trumpism infecting so many churches today, he sees a way forward through the madness and anger now surrounding him and his fellow public-spirited believers by drawing on the ancient practice of spiritual formation,

His new book is a noble, almost a quixotic, argument for disarmament in the culture wars, given their plainly idolatrous nature. Michael draws on the example and teachings of the late Christian philosopher Dallas Willard to sketch out a type of spiritual formation that incorporates several “spiritual disciplines.” As he explains, these tools offer a hope of overcoming our tendencies toward “aversion, othering, and misplaced moralizing through a new focus on fellowship over aversion, service over othering, and confession over moralization.”

As a “street Catholic”—my invented self-description as someone engaged with the Gospel but no longer showing up in the pew—I’m not really familiar with all the internecine battles going on currently within American Evangelicalism. I had scarcely heard of Dallas Willard before reading Michael’s book. Thus my earlier point about not being quite the right reviewer here.

Beyond that, and not to put too fine a point on it, we might ask: can American Evangelicalism be inoculated against Trumpism or is has the disease developed too far? (Recent surveys show perhaps one-third of Americans are Christian nationalists, for example.) How many Christians of good will and open hearts remain within the fold? Of those, do they sense a need for spiritual formation? We can only hope so, as I’m sure Michael does in writing this book.

Personally, I’m at the point where I’m tempted to take pastor Wolfgang Simson’s advice: we should simply give up using the term “Christian”. I’ll end here with his provocative rant on this idea:

JESUS IS NOT A CHRISTIAN. WHY SHOULD YOU BE ONE?
God is not the founder of Judaism and Jesus is not the founder of Christianity. Both are man-made systems. The central idea of God always was the Kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world (Mt 25:34). If Jesus is not a Christian, why should we be?
No where does the Bible ask anyone to become a Christian. God always calls people OUT of man-made religion, not into it. The Bible calls the followers of Christ believers, disciples, saints, those of the way, children of God, citizens, brothers, fellow citizens with God’s people or members of God’s household. The term “Christian” (Greek: christianos) only appears three times in the entire New Testament, and never once in a positive way, let alone indicating we should become one.
In Acts 11:26 it states that the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. They did not (active tense) call themselves that, they were called (passive tense) by those outside. A “Christian” was a negative label, a swear word, just like the terms Quaker, Baptists or Methodists were later meant to be. Only with time did they become an accepted term. In linguistics this is called reappropriation, where a derogatory term has become acceptable. Why, therefore, would you want to wear a swear word like it is a medal?
In the two other appearances of the word Christian (Acts 26:28.29; 1. Pet 4:13-17) it is used as a derisive term and even as a reason for persecution: If someone suffers because he is (accused to be) a Christian, we should understand this as a judgment, as suffering for Christ, not as an honorary title.
What is therefore the best and most accurate label for followers of Jesus Christ? As we are entering the days where the Gospel of the Kingdom is being proclaimed to all nations (Mt 24:14), the best identifier fitting for our time is: Citizen of the Kingdom!

See you next time—peace.

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For a number of years, my family lived in northwest Indiana, just south of Chicago. Or as local folks refer to it somewhat blandly, “The Region.”

Over the last few decades, The Region has become mostly a post-industrial sacrifice zone, with a few places managing to keep up middle-class appearances (Valparaiso, Munster), quite a few more perpetually on the brink of failure (Michigan City, Hammond, La Porte), and a few in dire straits (Gary, East Chicago).

Big Steel is now Small Steel, still operating, except with a much smaller workforce. The hollowed-out former steel city of Gary could be described as a smaller Detroit, but with bigger problems (mainly an almost complete dearth of economic activity).

Somewhere around 2012, I happened to be a speaker at a men’s event at our church, after which a genial mustachioed guy came up and apologized for arriving late for my talk. He asked if we might meet for coffee sometime and we did.

Rick was a very friendly character who loved to talk about his visionary ideas, most of them hatched during his time as a salesperson in higher-end electronics store in local malls. It took a few minutes speaking with Rick before you detected that he tended to the grandiose, with his frequent referrals to Nicola Tesla as a fellow inventor and Rick’s unusual occupations as an “earthologist” and a “solutionist.” Only gradually did I realize Rick had a bipolar condition which kept him from regular employment (he had last worked somewhere around 1996) and had finally alienated his family and many friends.

Despite all this, Rick’s gregarious and voluble nature gave him a remarkably wide personal network in the area. At one point, he was forced to move apartments and the mayor of the town, knowing of Rick’s condition, drove over in a pickup to help him make the move.

Somehow I became one of Rick’s inner circle which meant he would occasionally ask me to sit in on sessions with his therapist. Or to join him in pointless conference calls with a “business advisor.” All these conversations were exercises in futility, with Rick rambling wildly, unable to focus on his issues.

One of which was his recklessness with his tiny monthly Social Security support checks and the subsequent threats of losing his Section 8 housing vouchers essential to keeping his housing affordable.

Attempting to help Rick meant being drawn into his incessant big talk about his ideas. These filled dozens of notebooks, usually amounting to no more than a sentence or two. (“Get all the aging rock stars together for a global tour for world wellness.” “Create a 24/7 online channel of soothing music and images using the catalogues of famous musical artists.” “Write a memoir—Rick’s World!—to explain to people what mental illness is really like.”)

Rick was surprisingly enterprising and persuasive with people. Years ago, he saw the Robin Williams movie “Patch Adams”, about the doctor who dressed up as a clown for child patients. Rick somehow tracked down the original Patch Adams in a nearby state and now speaks with him every few months.

Rick also believed that his abundant ideas would be of interest to top execs like Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and several other titans of industry. Needless to say, he never succeeded in reaching Dimon but Rick’s phone list does include a couple of Dimon’s personal assistants, as well as those of the CEOs at Walmart, the National Institute of Health, and Radio Shack. Apparently these assistants continue to take Rick’s calls, listen patiently to his latest ideas, and then politely ring off. This makes him happy, with a sense of being in touch near the top and close to a financial bonanza of some kind.

Rick’s erratic behavior has brought him close to eviction a couple of times over the last decade but friends—including myself—have always managed to round up funds, often from the local St. Vincent de Paul groups at area churches, in order to stave off disaster.

After our last group rescue, I made an effort to inform myself about various forms of guardianship and payee options, in hopes Rick would agree to turning over his Social Security income to some kind soul willing to work with him in order to help keep his bills paid. Rick absolutely refused to consider the idea.

Subsequently his non-payment of rent due to expenditures like the Peter Gabriel concert he felt he had to attend in Chicago this summer has finally cost him his Section 8 status. In the last month he received a court-ordered eviction notice ordering him to move out last week. Two days ago the angry landlord came by with two policemen to inform Rick he had until 5 PM Sunday, December 10, to clear out, taking his huge collection of old stereo equipment, papers, and personal memorabilia somewhere else. (For years, Rick has also paid for three storage sheds of personal stuff.)

I’m “watching” all this from afar, as unfortunately I no longer live in The Region. And Rick’s few remaining friends nearby him have no easy solutions either.

At this point I want to note Indiana’s ranking nationally for mental health support: 43rd. This largely explains Rick’s inability to get consistent care, whether from case workers watching out for his medications and diet, from possible assisted living options (which he obviously needs), or from licensed psychiatric care (as opposed to local, somewhat informal psychological counseling).

And now, having exhausted as well as exasperated almost all members of his personal network, Rick’s eviction is looming, with life in a shelter in a neighboring town an awful possibility. As of this writing, one social services agency working with Rick informs me they will be calling a staff meeting this coming week in hopes of helping him avoid disaster.

Finally, what I know of eviction—in Indiana or elsewhere—is largely from the excellent Substack, “Housing is a Human Right”, authored by Fran Quigley of the U. of Indiana School of Law. Fran also writes for Jacobin and Common Dreams.

Fran writes:

I think you are right to about the link between Indiana’s neglect of mental health services and neglect of the rights of renters. With housing costs being such a core determinant of homelessness and Indiana’s housing being relatively cheap, why would we have such high rates of evictions? It is because we make evictions “fast, cheap, and easy” here. (See “How Indiana Courts Can Prevent Evictions” linked here.) At every turn, we neglect the needs and the rights of those who are most vulnerable.

A legal note: I was puzzled by the landlord coming by with two police officers to threaten Rick with moving out. That sounds more like an intimidation tactic to force a move out than a formal move-out attempt, as the constables/sheriffs would physically put Rick’s stuff out and allow the landlord to change the locks. And my apologies if I have not been clear about the unofficial “lockouts”—they happen a lot, but they are 100% illegal even in Indiana.  We explain that a bit more in our “12 Rights of an Indiana Tenant” linked on our clinic page: https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/practice/clinics/health-human-rights.html.

Since this Substack’s title does contain a reference to Catholicism, I should note that Rick’s several rescue campaigns over the last decade (meaning, hurried efforts to put together his rent arrears money) were supported by the St. Vincent de Paul groups at several area parishes. All of them, I discovered, already knew Rick well and had covered various bills of his from time to time. So good on ‘em, say I.

Last minute update: Rick just called to say his vindictive landlord has turned off his heat. (The high there is in the low 40s currently.) I’m pretty sure this is illegal since the sheriff’s office has issued a “Christmas moratorium” on evictions through January 8.

Note: In the next installment of Street Catholic, I will recount my experiences—partly edifying, partly comical—as part of a group hoping to create a Catholic Worker house in the city of Gary. (It was actually the bishop’s idea!)

See you next time—peace.

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“I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid that it will not be controversial.”

--Flannery O’Connor

I need to begin with a consumer alert: this project does not have an imprimatur.

Which is a Latin phrase meaning “let it be printed”, and an old-fashioned way of signaling the Catholic reader: “No worries, at least one bishop somewhere took a look at this book and couldn’t find anything that would damage your Catholic faith.”

I’ve only known one bishop slightly and he was transferred to a distant state a few years ago. Neither he nor anyone else in the hierarchy was consulted here. Just so you know. (I identify with Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s opening comment to a group: “You’ve heard about the hierarchy? Welcome to the lower-archy.”)

I’ll add that I’m not trying to play the familiar role of the Angry Catholic Dissident working out a personal grievance. Some things about the institutional Church should make anyone angry but I’m not writing a jeremiad—mostly just a user’s guide in the form of a memoir.

After all, being a Catholic is not like being in the Army: you’re free to get up and walk out any time. (Although your parish will never cease mailing you those packets of weekly donation envelopes, wherever you go.)

So what follows here is simply a personal essay, not a work of sociology.

Who then should read this little essay? I wrote it for the following people:

• Anyone who suspects that buried somewhere beneath the foundations of this tottering ecclesial culture are treasures of spirituality and even a kind of indigenous wisdom, however barnacle-encrusted, betrayed or forgotten today

• Anyone who suspects that a good deal of what passes for American Catholic culture today is a lame imitation of evangelical culture--with even worse music and an equally compromised public witness

• Anyone who suspects that Catholics in America were once risk-takers in their sense of justice, as demonstrated in their historical solidarity at certain moments with workers, with people of color, and with non-Americans, and that this kind of authentic witness could, just possibly, be recovered amidst our current cascading crises

• Anyone who hungers to be in solidarity with the poor, with what the Old Testament calls the anawim (the “poor ones” who remain faithful to God even in their distress), especially those in the global South who do not even have the possibility of having possibilities

• Anyone whose loyalty is first and foremost to the Gospel, not to nationality or local culture or politics or even a denomination (more on this later)

In a later chapter, I’ll get to that well-worn feature of “spiritual writing”, my conversion story. For now, let me simply place myself in time.

I’m a Boomer, a former Cold Warrior, an adult Catholic convert who came into the Church at Easter 1986. For a number of years, I referred to myself as a “John Paul II Catholic.” That adjective is anachronistic now, describing only where I came from, not where I am today.

My subtitle for this little fusillade, “A Totally Unauthorized Guide to the World Church”, already suggests the book probably won’t appeal to most RCIA directors (the lay people who help instruct and shepherd new converts into the Church). But that’s fine. Nor am I expecting that anyone will necessarily join, leave or simply ignore the Church after reading my comments.

What do I mean by “the world Church”? Simply, the international community of Catholics and indeed all Christians. I’m saying that in addition to our connection with our local parish—where the Church becomes real to us—we need to claim  to our membership in a global communion, an “imagined community”. But first we have to understand what that means.

Just as Pope John XXIII wanted us to imagine human unity on a global scale (as we see in the documents of the Vatican II council), Pope Francis has urged us to take the next step and actually go out to “the peripheries”. But he’s not insisting that we get on an airplane for Zimbabwe or Mumbai.

In my case, I found the peripheries simply by changing Mass times. Instead of attending the 10 AM Mass in English, for some months I attended the smaller 1 PM Mass in Spanish. (My Spanish language skills were modest but they have improved.) There I discovered a beautiful community of neighbors in my little Indiana town I had never met. And an atmosphere of worship that included a sense of solidarity, family to family. The peripheries, it turns out, are also next door. More on this experience later.

My mostly working-class friends at the Spanish Mass are of course a far cry from the millions of Catholics in the rising Church of the global South. I think of the Nigerian pastor I read about whose parish boundaries are within the area of a giant garbage dump. He’s known as the “priest of the garbage pickers.” Can you imagine? This is the real periphery to which Pope Francis is trying to awaken us comfortable First Worlders.

 So why “street Catholic”? To me the phrase suggests someone who has chosen to stand apart, no longer sitting in a pew but waiting and watching on the outside, from “the street” where we encounter the Others. (Although I’ve come to embrace the theological insight “there are no Others.”) Think of Thomas Merton’s “guilty bystander” or Fr. Richard Rohr’s notion of “the edge of the inside.”

Again, a street Catholic is not—please note--someone whose focus is mere disobedience, even if they might appear to be standing apart in some way.

But neither is a street Catholic someone attached to a collection of apologetics DVDs, fretting about having all the right arguments, if and when they ever engage with a non-Catholic, in hopes of “winning the argument.” This form of evangelism begins from a losing proposition and is rarely a true form of witness.

A street Catholic is someone who understands that not only is the planet burning (in the Amazon, in the jungles of Mexico, in California) but our very societies are aflame with fear and distrust of each other. To me and my fellow Street Catholics, that means we have to run toward these fires.

Finally, a street Catholic embraces the radicality of the Magnificat, the great Marian prayer (found in Luke 1: 46-55), in order to move beyond the Blessed Mother solely as cultural icon toward the mestizo brown figure whose face is now that of the world church.

And whose song is one of resistance to worldliness and social sin through world transformation.

Today, for a street Catholic, Mary must also be remembered as a member of the Anawim (the Hebrew word meaning those who depend upon the Lord), a young woman who lived under oppressive Roman occupation in her time. She thus represents the world’s poor—i.e., the majority of mankind on earth. You can see all this more clearly—from the street.

So with all that in mind, I offer the following definition:

Street Catholic, noun phrase

1.     A Catholic who imagines himself/herself as having left a comfortable pew in order to take up a symbolic “outsider” position on a street somewhere nearby;

2.     A Catholic who works for solidarity with the poor in resistance to bourgeois Christianity, neocolonialism, and late capitalism;

3.     A Catholic who has heard and is acting upon Pope Francis’ call to “go out to the peripheries”.

The image of the outsider contemplating an institution in slow-motion collapse is scarcely a new one. I think of the elderly St. Augustine in North Africa, hearing the news in 410 A.D. that the Goth leader Alaric, a professed Christian, had finally succeeded in entering the city of Rome and pillaging it for four days before leaving behind a landscape of corpses and ruin.

Is this an image of the American Catholic Church today? Is the best response for lay Catholics to stand apart from the institution until it heals itself? Could such a position actually be a form of faithfulness? I don’t attempt to answer such questions, I simply want to leave them hanging in the air.

See you next time—peace.

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By the peripheries, I’m pretty sure the Pope means not just the global South but also places in our own towns and cities — the homeless encampments, for example. Places where we encounter the poor.

The fact is, we need the poor — our liberation is caught up with theirs. We Catholics especially need to be evangelized by the poor. We need to have our hearts broken into humility.

And then we can have friendship with the poor and learn from their wisdom about structural violence and the gratuity of God.

More than that: we need to learn how to embrace a certain kind of evangelical poverty, in solidarity with the simpler, much more sustainable lifestyles of our fellow Christians in the global South. And soon.

This newsletter — which I’ll aim to make a weekly salvo— is an attempt not only to understand but to embrace joyfully this tectonic shift in world Christianity, now that two-thirds of all Christians live in Africa, Asia or Latin America. More than that, I will be writing about what it means to join the Pluriverse.

To begin with, here’s a little question we might ponder:

Instead of putting their national or cultural identities first, why aren’t Christians worldwide joined in ecclesial solidarity, as Michael Budde urged in a powerful essay several years ago? Who was killing whom in Northern Ireland in the decades of the Troubles? Or Rwanda in the civil war of 1994? Or today in Ukraine? We know Christians were (and still are) killing Christians, as they have done for centuries.

Within Catholicism, some are in a hopeful mood about the possible reconciliation which Pope Francis’ just-concluded Synod on Synodality might achieve.

I admit: I had no idea where the Synod was going, did you? (My theologian friend Matthew Shadle has some astute thoughts.)

And really, if you’ll permit a Bob Dylan reference, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

For quite some time, it has been blowing from the global South. (Ever noticed the lovely pun in the name Buenos Aires, Pope F’s homebase? His papacy, while imperfect, is part of the “good winds” now blowing.)

What this means and why it’s such a hope-filled new phase for the authentic life of the Church — and global Christianity in general — is part of what I want to unpack in coming issues of Street Catholic. (If you are wondering what the heck I mean by the latter term, my attempt to explain it can be found here.)

What a shame that for certain MAGA-minded U.S. Catholics and even some of their bishops, we North Americans are still the center of the world, still “exceptional” — in our privilege, at least, if not also in our growing ethnonationalism.

As probably dozens of notable Catholics remarked long ago, you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it. Noted theologian Romano Guardini (one of Pope Francis’ teachers) once even equated the institutional Church with the cross itself.

In a webinar conversation several months ago, my friend, theologian MT Davila, spoke of the sad “lack of prophecy” in most of our U.S. Catholic bishops as they continue to fail us in their role of being prophetic teachers. By contrast, can you imagine the impact of a Cornel West or Rev. William Barber III or Nadia Bolz-Weber in a Catholic bishop’s garb?

Such times as these seem to produce two extreme responses in the faithful. Either they renounce their faith entirely, slamming the door as they exit to an unhealthy condition of perpetual resentment, however justified.

Or they become what Flannery O’Connor describes in this letter:

“I know what you mean about being repulsed by the Church when you have only the Jansenist-Mechanical Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.”

As I frequently do in so many dilemmas, I’m exploring a third way here.

I had always thought about one’s status vis-à-vis the Church in terms of practicing Catholics versus lapsed Catholics, the usual distinction. But gauging how much you’re “making use of the sacraments”, as I’ve learned to say, is not the only lens through which to see our situation.

In my early days as an adult convert in Chicago back in the 1990s, my new, more conservative Catholic friends worked to impress two things on me: 1) fidelity to the Holy Father and 2) scorn for mere “cultural Catholics” — you know, people who think going to a Notre Dame game fulfils a holy obligation.

Today, it’s beyond irony how many of these same people feel only scorn for the current Holy Father while they’ve become almost wholly focused on cultural matters. As Ry Cooder once sang, it’s a Humpty-Dumpty world, all right, at least for U.S. Catholics.

For myself, I hope to discover what Emmanuel Mounier, a mid-20th-century critic of what he saw as the Church’s pusillanimous outlook, called “Christianity of the open air.”

Since my awakening as a Street Catholic, I’ve found great joy in my sense of solidarity with the world Church, both the Catholic part of it and the larger Christian community, as well as with the pluriversal spiritualities of the global South. These are joys which I felt should be shared.

See you next week, friends.

Peace.

What’s coming in future issues:

• In Search of a Catholic Economy (review of Anthony Annett’s Cathonomics)

• The Witness of Discerning Deacons

• How Black Catholicism Is Speaking Prophetically

• Why Ivan Illich Matters (Even More) Today

About Solidarity Hall

This newsletter is a project of Solidarity Hall, the group blog I founded with a group of friends about a decade ago. With my friend Pete Davis, I cohost an occasional podcast, Dorothy’s Place (named for Dorothy Day).

We also publish books, such as our new English translation of Mondragon founder Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi’s Reflections, with an introduction by Nathan Schneider and an afterword by Jessica Gordon Nembhard.

Between 2021 and 2022, we also sponsored a publication called Ownership Matters, from which you’ll find a selection of articles here.

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What does a world look like in which there are now 258 million migrants and refugees, representing 3.4% of the global population, or, one in every 300 people?

To gain some kind of mental image, let’s begin with the extraordinary new documentary film from Ai Weiwei, Human Flow, filmed in 23 countries and 40 refugee camps.

This film is sweeping, immersive, and artful at moments, drawing us in with its use of high-altitude drone cameras looking down at a beautiful cobalt Mediterranean, across which a boat overflowing with orange life preservers gradually pulls into harbor at the island of Lesbos. As the director Ai Weiwei helps the passengers unload, he speaks with a young man from Iraq, a country that now has 4 million displaced people, internally and externally. An Greek aid worker comments to the director that in a single recent week (during the period of the film’s shooting, 2015–2016), some 56,000 refugees arrived in Greece, with another 5,000 drowned en route.

The film moves on to Iraq, with another high-altitude shot, this one of a camp stretching out over the expanse of desert to the far-distant horizon. A crawl feed at the bottom of the screen reminds us that Iraq now hosts some 277,000 Syrian refugees.

We briefly meet two Syrian women who have lived in the camp for four years. They describe how the missiles were falling on their town “like rain,” hitting every house, when they decided to flee their country. Unquestionably, the primary motive for refugees in recent years has become simply basic physical safety.

Next we go to a camp in Bangladesh and a conversation with a Rohingya man in which he describes the persecution of his people, devout Muslims, in his home country of Myanmar. A campaign of ethnic cleansing there has displaced approximately 500,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh and elsewhere in the region. He tells us his people will not fight back, viewing violence as something devout Muslims cannot chose.

The camera moves on to come alongside refugees walking, endlessly walking across southern Europe in hopes of crossing enough borders to reach Germany, a major host country. The camera lingers with these exhausted people, sometimes hopeful, sometimes ill or despairing. One Syrian man holds up the 17 identity cards owned by his extended family — of whom only 12 remain. He begins to break down as he explains that the others drowned: he says he dreams about them every night.

We watch as families — children and elderly folk in tow — somehow ford streams of freezing, rushing water as they press on toward the next border. They encounter razor wire and tear gas. One woman comments on this endless walking and their growing sense of statelessness, “Nobody shows us the way.”

The director gives these short testimonies before the camera — they’re not really interviews — an additional impact by lingering on the faces of his subjects, allowing us remain in their presence just a few extra seconds. The effect is compelling and powerfully humanizing, like brief encounters you might have with someone suffering as you walk along a city street.

Moreover, many Americans may look at these scenes — especially those of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan — with a terrible kind of foreboding at finally seeing for the first time (in HD format) just what our military policies have wrought in this region over the last two decades in particular.

In several segments, the camera takes us down the streets of Iraqi and Syrian towns, now bombed out and blasted into hellish ruin, as though no trace of human use could be spared. One brief but nightmarish moment occurs when a cow wanders down the street of an empty and demolished Kurdish town, while just over the tops of the buildings we can see huge billowing black clouds of smoke and fire from the oilfields in flames close by.

Another brief segment, location not identified, apparently depicts a Syrian Orthodox Mass underway in a camp, with chanting and a kind of makeshift iconostasis behind the altar. To explain something about this group and what I think its situation represents for Western Christians and Catholics, I want to comment on a new book, The Last Christians, by Andreas Knapp, from Plough Publishing.

The author, a priest who works with refugees in Germany, travelled in 2015 to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq to collect stories of survivors — and to seek answers to troubling questions about religion and violence.

Knapp found himself among Christians of the Syrian Orthodox Church, a Middle Eastern Christian group who still speak Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic which Jesus spoke and the everyday language of ancient Palestine. Knapp notes that when a refugee from this area speaks the words, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani!,” she is not simply quoting from the Bible in a foreign language but uttering a cri de coeur in her native Aramaic: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

This group, some 70,000 of whom were living in or near Mosul before the rise of ISIS, are part of a church with ancient origins, going back to Paul’s baptism in Damascus and the tradition of St. Peter as the first bishop of Antioch. Nearby Erbil (Arbela) is known to have been a diocesan town since 104 AD. Monks from ancient Syria founded monasteries and hermitages as far west as Italy, a tradition upon which St. Benedict of Nursia drew in founding Western monasticism. Several 7thand 8th century popes in Rome were Syrians.

The refugees told Knapp stories of awakening to find their houses spray-painted with a scarlet letter nun — the letter N in Arabic–standing for “Nazarene”, as Christians are referred to in the Koran. Everyone knew what this meant. Muslim neighbors also knocked on their Christian friends’ doors urging them to flee the approaching ISIS militias. New meaning was given to the text, “When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next” (Matthew 10:23).

Altogether, the people of Iraq have suffered an estimated 12,000 attacks by jihadi terrorists in the last 20 years. At one of the twenty-two refugee camps in Ankawa just outside Erbil, Knapp met with religious sisters of Little Sisters of Jesus, a community founded (like his own Little Brothers of Jesus) by Charles de Foucauld. Sister Salama describes for him their flight from Mosul, with its city hall in flames. In the early morning, on foot, the sisters joined a huge column of refugees, Muslims and Christians alike, crossing the Tigris bridge heading toward Kurdistan. Truck beds were overflowing with suitcases and people, elderly folk huddled among sleeping babies and screaming children. Miraculously, after reaching an ISIS checkpoint at one moment, no one was stopped.

“For us, it was exodus and apocalypse, all in one,” Sister Salama comments. “Not only were we leaving our home — we were witnessing the end of the Iraq Christian world as we knew it.”

Knapp is also struck by a particular charism of these Middle Eastern Christians: “Has anyone even noticed that, despite the numerous brutal murders of Christian priests in Iraq or Syria, no imam has ever been shot, beheaded or crucified in the name of Christianity? Or that no Christians have ever blown themselves up in a mosque in retaliation for the many attacks on Christian churches?”

His answer is that non-violence doesn’t make the news. There is no notion of Christian jihad among these faithful.

In terms of non-violence and pacifism, Knapp concludes, the churches of the Middle East have simply remained truer to the Gospel than those of the West or the East.

Knapp also argues for a renewed ecumenism that overcomes the West’s indifference to the fate of Middle Eastern Christians, very much like the ecclesial solidarity urged by Catholic scholar Michael Budde in The Borders of Baptism. The latter allegiance to first “being a Christian”, Budde argues, would make us “members of a community broader than the largest nation-state; more pluralistic than any culture in the world; more deeply rooted in the lives of the poor and marginalized than any revolutionary movement; and more capable of exemplifying the notion of e pluribus unum than any empire, past, present or future.”

Thus, in the poverty of these refugees is a healing wisdom from which we have much to learn, as Pope Francis frequently points out. But to acquire it we must put away our fears in order to embrace a theology of the encounter, the authentic human liberation.

(This article originally appeared in Church Life Journal.)

With the ghost of the visionary William Morris hovering somewhere in the background, The Politics of Virtue is nothing short of a brilliant, sometimes quirky, compendium of political, economic, and theological perceptions and insights. It is perhaps something only gifted artists such as John Milbank and Adrian Pabst could have produced. As a former classicist and something of a Dorothy Day Catholic, I am drawn by instinct to visions such as this. Even as I have some mental reservations. Divided into five major sections (Politics, Economy, Polity, Culture, and World), the book reads something like an extended position paper for a human-scale future utopia. Not that the authors’ two-part thesis cannot be summarized fairly quickly.

First, they assert that post-Cold War notions of the end of history and the supposed universality of liberalism have been shaken by two developments: the extra-civilizational challenge of Islamism after 2001 and the intra-civilizational financial and civil breakdown after 2008. Moreover, the exposure of the role in these events of the social-cultural liberalism of the left since the 1960’s, and that of the economic-political liberalism of the right since the 1980’s, amount to a twin crisis (“metacrisis” is the authors’ term), especially as the two liberalisms were “always in tacit, secret alliance . . . through their joint espousal of negative liberty.”

Second, the authors argue that politics “now needs a novel and paradoxical blend of two older and nobler traditions: a combination of honourable, virtuous elites with greater popular participation; a greater sense of cultural duty and hierarchy of value and honour, alongside much more real equality and genuine creative freedom in the economic and political realms.” They look for a “newly mutualist approach to both domestic and foreign affairs that substitutes for the dominance of market, state and technocracy the primary of society, culture and interpersonal relationships.” At several points, the S-word is invoked, as here: “But the post-liberalism we advocate seeks to renew long-standing and variously embodied traditions of ‘conservative socialism’ that have been side-lined and eroded and yet have never completely disappeared.”

Of which traditions are the authors speaking? Their vision is of a way forward (“a politics of the soul”) which includes, foundationally, a recovery of both Greco-Roman virtue ethics, reformed through a personalistic Christian anthropology. Or, in their formulation: “a post-liberal politics of virtue that seeks to fuse greater economic justice with social reciprocity.” But there is more. An alternative politics, on this view, is not enough: we need a different social ethos. Indeed the social is more basic, the authors assert, “than either the political or the economic because human society . . . binds together material reality with symbolic substance.” ­­And how might we restore the sense of man as not only “a political or better, according to St. Thomas, social animal,” given our largely deracinated, humanly disconnected condition today?

Readers of Pope Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate — with its language about the “gift economy”, for example — may not be aware the current official version is a second draft written after Benedict asked his advisors that the first draft include a more compelling vision of economic renewal. The result was the inclusion of the work of two outstanding contemporary Italian economists: Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni. They are notable for their work in recovering the writings of Adam Smith’s contemporary, Antonio Genovesi, along with several other practitioners of the 18th-century Italian school of civil economy, born out of Italian civic humanism and arguably an authentic gift economy. This way of understanding economic relations has as its aim not more freedom of choice but a goal of human flourishing and a recognition of relational goods. Genovesi’s writings emphasized conviviality and economic action as the pursuit of well-being, innately cooperative in its nature. It fuses contract with gift and is thus a vocational economy as well.

*

Might we explain (the authors wonder in Part II) the craftsmanship — in high-quality cars, machinery, food, clothing — found in Italian products over the last century as owing at least partly to a continuity with Renaissance (and earlier) traditions grounded in these civil economic notions?

It is also notable that the Italian civil economy tradition was strongly infused with elements of Catholic Social Teaching, such as opposition to usury, the just wage, the just price, guilds, distributions of assets, the primary sense of land as sacred, notions of solidarity and subsidiarity. Or in broader, non-Catholic language: reciprocity, responsibility, and redistribution. Thus today’s social benefit corporations (B corps, “triple bottom line” companies, etc.) turn out to have origins in 18th-century Italy. This economic road not taken has meant the dominance of ideas such as the liberal conception of debt as absolute and primary, along with a broken connection between capital and location or vocation.

This is a tragedy because of the way it has precluded labor, the dynamic factor in any economy, from infusing and releasing personal, creative human power. In short, we are describing here an economic philosophy that aims not to abolish the market but rather to wrest it back toward goals of well-being, virtue, and the common good. For an excellent short essay by Bruni and Zamagni, I recommend their Civil Economy. Although it urges a social economy, I do not see how this approach can be described as socialism. Moreover, our politics has become purely a mass spectacle, our citizens doomed to mere specularity, always consumers and spectators. The cry of greed only ignores the nature of the broken system. What form of polity then should we pursue?

*

One which understands, the authors argue (in Part III), that “what is missing from liberal democracy is the crucial mediation of the ‘few’ — virtuous inspirers and architectonic leaders that act honorably and lead by example in all sectors of society.” That is, genuine elites, governing in the name of the good and not merely in the name of the people. More specifically, we need a return to older constitutional themes, for radical — not reactionary — reasons: mixed government with a mixed constitution.

Here the authors’ British backgrounds come out interestingly in their endorsement of constitutional monarchy. After all (as they note), in terms of quality of life, some 7 of the top 10 and 16 of the top 20 countries in the world, are constitutional monarchies, despite the fact that republics outnumber monarchies by a 5 to 1 ratio. If political truth consists in the exercise of the right set of virtues, a monarch is arguably best suited to holding politicians to a higher standard. Whatever the current condition of the Church of England, Milbank and Pabst do not see an established church’s role as sanctifying the state nor supplanting the government as elected and representative. Instead, it should “inform” public institutions toward both the individual virtue and shared sense of public honor without which democracy cannot function or thrive.

*

Part IV (“Culture”) might be described as the prescriptive European answer to Allan Bloom’s diagnosis in his Closing of the American Mind. In the authors’ words: “Liberalism enforces an equality of learning that undermines the hierarchy of value on which true education or vocation depend.” They add, interestingly, “It also destroys the fusion of high with folk culture.”Contra most modern notions, what if the main reality of all human association — including the political — is itself psychic? “It is to do with friendship (as both Plato and Aristotle taught), with benevolent generosity (as they also taught in common with Confucius and Buddha), and with a reciprocal sharing of the common good . . . only secondarily about distributing material goods and designing law codes.”

Our predicament is due to the way liberalism has come to dominate mass culture in the second half of the 20th century, that is the point at which the consumer replaced the worker. The authors cite another unintended consequence of this shift: “As Huxley noted, sexual permissiveness is a kind of opiate which covertly reconciles people to their loss of other freedoms, both civic and economic.”

Milbank and Pabst, both of them sturdy classicists, are outlining in this brilliant section a recovered sense of paideia, i.e., an education to produce citizens of philosophic and civic virtue. Authentic education would pass on a tradition as well as encouraging individual expressivity from the outset. “Today, this would amount to a ‘third way’ in education also, with spontaneity and teaching working together.” Descending slightly to a list of “transformative ideas”, mostly with the U.K. in mind, the authors include here several pages of policies — amounting to a proposed radical restructuring and re-imagining of the entire educational sector: restoring university self-government, restoring the apprenticeship system, a return to “village colleges,” abolishing all national curricula except the very broadest, “ending the current misuse of digital technology, especially in universities, to destroy the autonomy of teachers and the creativity of students,” and more.

*

One of the more provocative sections of the book is likely to be Part V (“World”) with its goal of rehabilitating a British “imperial” identity (via notions of commonwealth) as “the most civic, non-racial and non-nationalist available today.” The rationale here is based on a rejection of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, the source of our modern nation-building project and its almost “anthropomorphic fantasy” of national consciousness, national will, “as though the nation is analogous to a human being.” The latter logic tends to its own undoing, as in the case of the empire that dares not speak its name, the American global economic hegemony, enforced by its 750 military bases in three-quarters of the world’s countries. Where is the grand alternative to this world system?

Here also the authors seek a kind of third way via an “associationist” alternative in international relations, with the recovery of trusteeship or guardianship as tools in cases of transition economies, post-conflict countries or failed states. The latter system, in the authors’ view, would be dependent upon some shared vision of the common good and once again argues for the social as primary — the flow of religions, customs, influences across borders.

*

I want to conclude with a few personal thoughts on this book’s brilliant mélange of ideas.

First, its conservatism, refreshingly, comes out of a kind of Blue Labour sensibility, one in which the need for a new political economy is taken seriously, and one which requires more of us than an occasional pushing back on consumerist impulses. By contrast with the conservative (in a cultural sense) proposals and critiques of figures such as Roger Scruton and Rod Dreher, Milbank and Pabst describe an incarnational politics which can engage with elements of the Left in various ways. Rather than merely holding up notions of “order” (the lodestar of older Russell Kirk-style literary conservatism) as their sole aim, the authors are unafraid to elevate the need for a new economic settlement as key to any common future.

For many American readers, this push for economic justice matters greatly, especially in the face of the ongoing collapse of both major political parties and the growing sense of system failure across most major institutions. On the other hand, the authors reject other elements of the left, especially feminism, in light of their emphasis on conserving traditional family structures, based on their religious anthropology.

Second, their Christian perspective needs a widening and updating to include the rise of the global South and the “theology of the people” — a revised form of liberation theology baptized by Pope Benedict and developed by Pope Francis (beginning with the Aparecida document of the Latin American bishops). Very much in concert with the authors’ (otherwise mostly Eurocentric) focus, a wider vision would offer a way to address the depredations of neoliberalism by recognizing popular, indigenous cultures as the ethico-mythical core that must be preserved, especially for the global poor — “people who have no way of having,” no possibility of having possibilities, that is, the majority of mankind.

This is the culture war that really counts, one in which evangelizing means looking first at the culture and life of peoples, not to recover what has been lost, but to transform society through Scripture, Eucharist, and a focus on the poor in order that their socio-economic reality can (as it should) challenge our theological ideas with the importance of starting from below, of spiritual childhood and the onset of a kind of cultural death that increasingly threatens whole peoples worldwide. We cannot forget that the Church also needs evangelizing — by the poor. And we should note that this kind of liberation theology depends, as does the politics of virtue, upon a kind of truth and reason, that is, it is not post-modern.

Third, it is not a simple exercise to recall an earlier period in U.S. history when anything resembling this kind of socio-economic transformation — a mix of social conservatism and economic redistribution — took place. Perhaps the post-World War II years through the mid-60’s bear a slight resemblance. In this country and especially in Europe, memories of the sheer extent of human suffering during the war probably created a collective desire for economic security and community rebuilding which laid the foundation for the boom years of the 1960’s. But as Tony Judt has written, we have forgotten many things, including the nature of war. Could a conservative socialism somehow emerge — in this country or elsewhere? If no socialism of any kind gains political ground, then I would say our American decline into a mix of tyranny and anomie will continue.

Finally, this proposal also needs the global vision of thinkers such as Adam K. Webb, whose project to explore notions of a “deep cosmopolitanism” imagines fusing globalization with revitalized cultural traditions. The common ground across world culture, in Webb’s remarkable synthesis, must be more profound than a thin layer of consumerism and perhaps human rights. Through “talking across traditions,” as he puts it, we might hope a new kind of global citizenship can begin to emerge, one which could indeed include a virtuous politics.

Editorial Note: This is a review of John Milbank & Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

If I were in charge of the world — or at least in charge of Nation Books — I would probably keep the slightly mysterious title of Nathan Schneider’s remarkable new book, Everything for Everyone. (It’s a reference to the immemorial Catholic teaching on the universal destination of goods, as he explains in the text.)

On the other hand, I might choose to replace the cover image (a graphic of a network of assorted icons) with a reproduction of a famous painting — Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) — simply because of the way the author spends several striking paragraphs on this familiar scene of rural life as an image of our social condition today:

“Each [of the three peasant women in the foreground] is gathering the stray wheat left by the landowner’s appointed army of harvesters, who are working under the eyes of a foreman on a horse in the background…It’s not evident whether they’ll find enough of the leftover grain to make a decent loaf of bread.”

Before we were farmers, the author comments, we were gatherers. “Gathering became gleaning when agriculture gave rise to landowning, leaving out the non-owners. Gleaning was the original welfare…

“It remains the motive force in the underground economies that support billions of people on this planet, those who survive on cash and knock-offs rather than stock markets and brand names. The platform business models taking over the internet are making more of us gleaners again.”

Schneider recounts an episode from the life of a freelance worker in the much-vaunted gig economy, a growing sector comprised of the permanently part-time precariat (the unstable condition of those who glean), exiled from the rights and benefits of traditional employment, and doing piecework on platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The freelancer who helps support her family through a mix of soul-killing jobs, ranging from moderating offensive images to taking academic surveys, told the author, “You go to the grocery store and see a candy bar and you think, Is that worth two surveys?”

Schneider comments: “These are the sounds of a social contract shifting. New rules are taking hold, even if it is happening in ways and places that many of us don’t see.” He also quotes the recent McKinsey study indicating that fully one-half of all jobs today are vulnerable to existing technologies — not just to some distant AI development.

What If Culture Includes Economics?

One great irony revealed in this excellent new survey of the tectonic shift underway beneath us is that it’s not only the changes in traditional work which often go unnoticed. The hopeful roots of new ways of organizing our existing economy are also overlooked, even if they are still visible, assuming we have the eyes to see.

Example: the 40,000 cooperatively-run enterprises in this country, from credit unions and rural electrification programs to ag, consumer and buying co-ops. We have, Schneider points out, the makings of a co-operative commonwealth. He goes on to supply a somewhat startling quote from Socialist candidate Norman Thomas in 1934 about the latter type of system being “the only effective answer to totalitarian fascism.” He also recalls W.E.B. DuBois’ celebration of African-American co-ops in the early 20th century, a forgotten history now being recovered, happily.

Co-ops, in this excellent historical and cultural overview, represent something much more than a particular form of enterprise. They are businesses which are truly accountable to those they claim to serve — not just the shareholders but the stakeholders, the wider community and the planet. Co-ops can be seen as test runs for social contracts, accountable for participation, not just wealth.

How many people today realize that some 75% of U.S. territory is still powered by the electrical grid FDR established under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, still operating, still a co-op, and an aggressive adopter of solar farms?

The seven original principles of the International Cooperative Association — voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, member economic participation, autonomy and independence, education/training/info, cooperation among coops, concern for community — are still widely observed today. Together, they can and do create a zone of freedom where economics, human nature and neighborliness once again converge.

Nonetheless, Schneider’s international travels lead him to a sober conclusion: his meetings with participants in this somewhat hidden economy reveal that co-ops, like so many other community-facing institutions, are forgetting their democratic origins.

In the conventional economy, he skillfully describes Silicon Valley’s venture capital financing ecosystem with its focus on finding “unicorns” — startup companies which can swallow whole industries through disruptions leaving sometimes thousands of the disrupted in their wake.

Because the author gets what so many observers (especially self-styled conservatives) do not — i.e., that culture includes economics (or the reverse, if you prefer) — he offers well-written reportage about several fascinating social projects which seem to point toward a new economy emerging.

These reports include a description of the author’s time “in hiding” with Enric Duan, the Spanish activist who financed several years’ of activism through bogus bank loans before helping organize the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Barcelona. He also spends time with Kali Akuno of the Jackson-Kush Plan (“a kind of Marshall Plan for the Gulf Coast”) and with Michel Bauwens, luminary founder of the P2P Foundation, whose FLOK Society project in Ecuador 2014 represented the first nation-level engagement with ideas of the sharing economy and the need to protect the global commons.

Also covered are topics such as the Rojava regime in Turkey, the Cooperative University of Kenya, and the technologies of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Blockchain (all here finally made comprehensible — I think — in plain English).

Systems versus Models

Finally, it’s notable that Schneider’s new book received a slightly impatient review from the Democracy Collaborative’s co-founder Gar Alperovitz in which the latter both praises and criticizes it. Alperovitz seems to be annoyed mostly that Schneider did not write a different book, one which moved beyond simply espousing “models” (such as co-op enterprises represent) toward full-blown “systems” (perhaps something like those published on the Next System website, to which Alperovitz contributes).

In defense of Schneider, I think he succeeds wonderfully in capturing cooperativism as much more than a model, indeed as an entire cultural ethos, one closely related to the well-being of any society. Moreover, I’ll venture to suggest that writers of Schneider’s generation, while aware that monetary policy and questions of public ownership may be very important, tend to think in less institutional terms.

That is, nation-scale solutions simply hold less promise for them than possible regeneration at the civic/regional level, precisely as the activists of Rojava, Barcelona en Comu, Jackson Rising and the P2P Foundation are arguing.

If you’re looking for signs of hope amidst the neoliberal wreckage, this brilliant account of post-capitalist cooperative economics is the place to start.

From the grateful welcome given to the Three Magi (i.e., pagan wise men) at Bethlehem to St. Paul’s quotations from Greek philosophers to St. Thomas’ labors of commentary on Aristotle (which twice earned him condemnation in his day from the otherwise long-forgotten Bishop of Paris), the Church has always engaged with the wisdom of other cultures. (A short tour of the astonishing collections of the Vatican Museums will make the same point.)

Drawing on the teachings of Vatican II, St. John Paul II often referred to “the ancient doctrine formulated by the Fathers of the Church, which says that we must recognize ‘the seeds of the Word’ present and active in the various religions.” (See his Crossing the Threshold of Hope for the late pope’s informed appreciations of various major faith traditions.)

Among the remarkable new things that happened at the Amazonian Synod in 2019, the agenda (the Instrumentum Laboris) included “Good Living — Buen Vivir,” a new source of spiritual seeds, about which we learned the following:

The quest of the indigenous Amazon peoples for life in abundance finds expression in what they call “good living” ( buen vivir ). It is about living in “harmony with oneself, with nature, with human beings and with the supreme being, since there is an inter-communication between the whole cosmos, where there is neither excluding nor excluded, and that among all of us we can forge a project of full life” (Section 1, 12).

Many readers — especially North American Catholics — must have wondered where this term came from and to what it really refers. (Hint: it does not refer to individualistic material comfort or first-world standards of living.)

The concept of buen vivir (sometimes referred to by its Quechua name, sumak kawsay ) is a blanket term for numerous belief systems (or “cosmovisions”) of South American indigenous people. Besides the Quechua of the Peruvian Andes, we find the Aymara (Bolivia), the Mapuche (Chile and Argentina), and the Guaraní and Shuar of Brazil, among others, sharing these values.

Other translations of the term include “plentiful life,” “sweet life,” and especially “harmonious life in a community and with nature.” To readers familiar with Native American spirituality, none of this will seem “foreign,” including the idea that humans and nature must work in harmony.

Rather than a quaint exercise in anthropological recovery, buen vivir is now an informal international coalition of communities which share an endangered way of life and a desire to seek an alternative to our current ecocidal approach to development.

This coalition is neither statist (it is instead bottom-up in strategy) nor political in nature (it does not have a political party). It represents a regional, cultural response to a half-century of extractivism and a parallel social movement to those of global justice, the recovery of the commons, movements for the rights of nature, and decolonization. (For more on the indigenous “theology of creation,” see here.)

We forget that over recent centuries, many indigenous people originally moved into the rainforest in order to escape colonization and slavery. Today, within Amazonia’s nine countries of 3 million indigenous people, the population is now about 70% urban, many of them undocumented refugees.

As explained by Uruguayan scholar Eduardo Gudynas, several common threads can be found in the buen vivir movement, including an agreement to collaborate on a new vision of development, a desire to move away from a technocratic understanding of the world, and an emphasis on non-material values. Does all this sound like any recent papal documents you can think of?

If we are truly to become a Church of and for the poor, then solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Amazonia — especially the many Catholics among them — is a critical moral test, particularly as expressed in Laudato Si’.

For their world is literally on fire and yet it is their unique spiritual resources which can offer a way forward toward the integral ecology Pope Francis has been urging.

It is the poor who evangelize the Church, as we keep discovering, as much as the other way round. Let’s pray we are beginning to listen to them just in time.

Solidarity Hall was born in 2012 as a kind of Third Way project out of a Catholic matrix. A major influence on our thinking was the work of Philip Blond and the ResPublica group in the U.K.

That was some years ago now—not only pre-Trump but pre-Pope Francis--and the political and social landscape since then has been shifting dramatically. American Catholicism, for its part, is undergoing nothing less than a theological crisis, one shared with American Christianity in general, as its compromised inter-faith chaplaincy to a collapsing empire damages its Gospel witness for likely many years to come.

Moreover, the banner of localism has increasingly been co-opted by nativists, distributism has become (or remained) the hobby of traditionalists, and most broad notions of the common good have disappeared in favor of calls for unity around compromised cultural institutions, various unsavory nationalisms, or even the fond hope for a new hybrid internationalism.

An example of the latter: this two-hour trans-Atlantic video conversation on "The Future of Post-Liberalism", hosted by ResPublica U.K.  In this exchange, the viewer will hear a number of striking propositions offered by an international group of intellectuals (American, British, Hungarian). They perhaps offer one version of the Third Way thinking from which we at Solidarity Hall began. But for a variety of reasons we don’t expect we will be joining them down this road.

Acting as a kind of self-identified “creative minority”, the group wrestles with ways to shore up (possibly through a restoration of “guardrails”, as one participant put it) what amounts to a particular version of Christian culture, including a specific Christian anthropology. (Shorthand for the latter: an Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology, taken more or less as revelation.)

Their preferred agenda, as they make clear, is Christian restoration via new institutions and a new elite. In other words: this exchange was about political theology, in William Cavanaugh’s sense of the term.

None of this group, I’m fairly sure, could be labelled nativist: indeed they agree on the need for an internationalist vision. Nor do they harbor any illusions about the need to replace our dominant neoliberal condition with a different political economy.

Where this political moment is taking them, however, is displayed in comments on the tormented topic of identity politics (I.P.). The lack of any such identity around class is aptly noted by Philip Blond at one point.

But, disappointingly, no specific thinkers or groups associated with I.P. are mentioned, other than Black Lives Matters, a movement apparently deserving a certain suspicion, merely because it is "approved" by the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.

Of the spiritual dimensions of BLM, or of the racial justice uprisings’ implications for institutional Christianity, not a word here other than a feeble note of admiration for the "energy" of these causes.

From my notes, here are some statements by participants which will give a sense for their attempt to mix left economics with a kind of integralist superstructure:

• Wherever we live, we are now mostly controlled by offshore capital--there is no such thing as "patriotic capital" (P. Blond)

• John Locke's principle of "no harm" has now been weaponized as a form of social control, notably in the area of identity politics (P. Deneen)

• We need new cosmopolitan, universalistic legal and political structures--on the model of the Holy Roman Empire or the Hapsburgs (A. Vermeule)

• It's time for a new kind of Mt. Pelerin Society [referring to the group of free market ideologues who argued for neoliberal solutions in the 1950s] but with "pro-family principles and policies" (P. Blond)

• Overlooked in the rush toward identitarian politics are groups like white, working-class boys in the U.K. (Nick Timothy)

This aggrieved tone among certain kinds of public Christians today strikes me as one more form of the very kind of identitarian complaint they lament. When confronted with an image of a defaced or toppled figure of the Blessed Virgin, for example, their likely question is not a self-reflective “what might our church have done to evoke this kind of anger?” but, “how can we punish this insult to our institution’s worldly prestige!”

Finally, the coming “persecution”—just so we’re all braced for it—will not be a matter of falling statues. It will mean having to watch today’s Christian book-tour impresarios attempt to cast themselves as latter-day Solzhenitsyns, lost in their own self-created mental gulags. Connected with the rediscovery of Christian socialism lately, the use of the ahistorical argumentum ad Stalinum, I’m predicting, will only become more popular, at least within these circles of suburban revanchement.

Goodbye to all that.

I have gradually come to realize I’m a “street Catholic.” That is, I’m on the outside now and yet still looking in.

A Street Catholic is someone who has chosen to stand apart, no longer sitting in a pew but waiting and watching on the outside, from “the street” where we encounter the Others. (Although I’ve come to embrace the theological insight “there are no Others.”)

And please do not confuse a Street Catholic with a dissident or a “lapsed” Catholic, even if they too have chosen to stand apart in some way.

A street Catholic is someone who understands that not only is the planet burning (in the forests of Canada, in our cities, at the polar icecaps) but our very societies are aflame with fear and distrust of each other. To me and my fellow Street Catholics, that means we have to run toward these fires.

From a spiritual dimension, a Street Catholic embraces the radicality of the Magnificat, the great Marian prayer (found in Luke 1: 46–55), in order to move beyond the Blessed Mother solely as cultural icon toward the mestizo brown figure whose face is now that of the world church.

And whose song is one of resistance to worldliness and social sin through world transformation.

She thus represents the world’s poor — i.e., the majority of mankind on earth. You can see all this more clearly — from the street.

So with all that in mind, I offer the following definition:

Street Catholic, noun phrase

1. A Catholic who imagines himself/herself as having left a comfortable pew in order to take up a symbolic “outsider” position on a street somewhere outside the sanctuary;

2. A Catholic who has heard and is acting upon Pope Francis’ call to “go out to the peripheries”.

3. A Catholic who works for solidarity with the poor in resistance to bourgeois Christianity;

The image of the outsider contemplating an institution in slow-motion collapse is not a new one. I think of the elderly St. Augustine in North Africa, hearing the news in 410 that the Goth leader Alaric, a professed Christian, had finally succeeded in entering the city of Rome before pillaging it for four days, leaving behind a landscape of corpses and ruin.

In a similar vein, Thomas Merton referred to himself as a “guilty bystander.” There’s Henri Nouwen’s wounded healer at work in what Pope Francis calls the world as a giant field hospital. Or we could think of Simone Weil’s comment, “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.”

Is the best stance for lay Catholics today to stand apart from the institution until it heals itself? Could such a position actually be a form of faithfulness?

I don’t attempt to answer such questions, I simply want to leave them hanging in the air.