Twerking our way into dangerous waters

Miley Cyrus has been making headlines all week with her butt-jerking twerking routine at the Video Music Awards (VMAs). The reaction has ranged from shock and outrage to a harried defense of Miley's right (after years of being identified with the wholesome Hannah Montana) to come out as a sexual being.

I am all for people past their adolescence to express themselves sexually (and safely, please). It's part of our genetic makeup to attract sexual partners. By the time you get to be 20, Miley's age, the hormones have been flowing for the better part of a decade.

So why am I uncomfortable with her performance?

Because of guys.

Men are simple beings when it comes to sex. We're not choosy. Pour a few drinks into us, turn us on, point us in a direction, and we go, go, go unless turned off with overwhelming force. Overwhelming force can come in many forms: social pressure (women are delicate flowers!), inner morality (adultery is wrong!), fear of getting beat up by other males (dads, big brothers or other boyfriends) or fear of losing or hurting our wives/girlfriends. But the recent uptick in rape stories seems to suggest that the social barriers against sexual assault are weakening. When a room full of boys can encourage one of their number to sexually assault an intoxicated girl, then take videos of the assault and share them, it's easy to the suggest that social restraints from peers is no longer an adequate safeguard against protecting the vulnerable. Add to this what happens when boys use social media to brag about their exploits and to shame the girl, and the stakes get immeasurably higher. Sometimes, to the point of suicide for the horrified girl.

In the past, reaction to the loosening of self-controls on men has focused on the girl's behavior. She should not wear revealing clothing. She should not walk in dark areas alone. She should monitor her intake of intoxicants. Lately, and rightly so, a reaction to the reaction has developed, focusing on males and their responsibilities not to rape. There's a wonderful video giving men a model for handling a drunken female friend: make her comfortable, cover her with a blanket and protect her until she sobers up. No question, this is a welcome development. As much as we men are stupid about sex, we are not automatons incapable of making rational decisions, even when aroused, even when drunk.

But I have to wonder about media portrayals of sexual behavior, and the way they can tip the balance, or alter the set-point, for acceptable (and expected) sexual behavior. If you look back through films and TV for the last century or more, you'll see media playing, and often pushing, the edge of acceptable behavior. While the glimpse of a well-turned ankle might have thrilled our great-grandparents, our parents had Marilyn Monroe's full leg, courtesy of a windy subway grate, to capture their attention. Today, it's a thong-clad beauty, baring her full buttocks for the camera, that has become the norm. In an earlier day, courting couples went on walks or buggy rides accompanied by a chaperone. By the 40s and 50s, the automobile culture made courting a mobile and private activity. Since the 60s, free love, cohabitation before marriage, "friends with benefits" and the hookup culture have more or less eliminated formal courting.

I have to admit that much of the loosening up of sexual morays has been perfectly fine, and has allowed young men and women to be more honest and expressive about their sexuality -- especially in a culture where marriage can be delayed for a decade or more beyond puberty. Ten years is a long time to keep the lid on a boiling pot! But is it conceivable that there is a limit to the amount of sexual freedom that is healthy? After all, we are dealing with genetic patterns that were laid own over the course of a million years -- during most of which time we were not expected to live much beyond thirty five. Can a biological system geared toward creating 15-year-old mothers fit well into a culture where the median age for a woman to become a mom is 24? And rising?

If we have crossed a line into dangerous territory -- one that increasingly puts young women at risk of sexual attack -- we currently have few protections to offer aside from warnings and threats. Where in the past (which I don't advocate revisiting) young woman's activities were restricted by her parents and monitored by her village priest, today we put women into situations that are unprecedented in human history. They go off to college alone, they go on dates with men they barely know, they live by themselves, they go to clubs unaccompanied. Where their behavior could once be vetted by diligent parents, women now bear the burden of monitoring themselves and protecting themselves. And they are increasingly being placed into circumstances where drugs and alcohol combine with the presence of increasingly aggressive males and sexually explosive behaviors and expectations.

Which brings me back to Miley. I'm not bothered that "Hannah Montana" is a sexually mature young woman. I am concerned that her twerking and crotch-grabbing have raised the bar on public behavior that young men expect from their partners. And which they will punish their partners, by calling them cold or prudish, for avoiding. If twerking at a bar or concert hall makes women less safe and gives males the wrong idea about their availability and intentions, maybe we have crossed that red line that evolution drew or us so long ago.

Pharisees, scribes and lawyers for today

“I have told you this so that you may not fall away. They will expel you from the synagogues; in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God. They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me. I have told you this so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you.

John 16: 1-4

The Cooper family in Collegedale, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, is being thrown out of the church they have belonged to for decades -- because they chose to support their gay daughter, Kate Cooper, a  detective in the Collegedale police force.

The reason? Because Kate's mom sat next to her in church, thereby "endorsing" her sinful gay lifestyle.

There is a great deal of irony on the part of Christians who preach the gospel every Sunday, yet still miss it s most powerful lessons. One of these is that ecclesial structures (churches, ministers, congregations) are extremely hard to budge.  They become impregnable, impossible to overthrow. They calcify. They stop growing. Purporting to be vessels of the Spirit of God, they constrain that spirit, which continually revivifies the Church. For the Holy Spirit, it must be like trying to inflate a concrete balloon.

The current struggle over gays in the church is the latest example of how the Church misunderstands the signal lesson in its own holy books --the struggle between the establishment and the innovators. In the gospels, that struggled was exemplified by the antipathy between Jesus and the Pharisees, scribes and lawyers. The Pharisees, et al., were the old wineskins that would be burst by the new wine of Jesus's teaching (Mark 2:22). They were the whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside and fill of filth within (Matthew 23:27).  They are the hypocrites who clean the outside of the cup (external piety) without concern for the inside of the cup (internal holiness) (Matthew 23:25-26). The conflict between the two groups became lethal in the case of Jesus, contributing to the conspiracy that led to his death.

Given their behavior, Christians seem to see the Pharisees, scribes and lawyers of the gospels as different animals from themselves. They see it as a part of the Jewish opposition to Jesus. Being non-Jewish, this problem can't apply to them. Jesus would not be unhappy with us! But the problem  in Jesus's day was not between Jews and Christians, but between Jews and other Jews. It was between people who represented stability and the status quo versus those were challenging the status quo to get into line with its own principles. Small 'p' phariseeism is not a 1st-century Jewish problem, but a human one. The tendency to see one's own religious observance as exemplary and beyond challenge is not limited to ancient peoples. It is baked into the religious DNA of the species.

We are seeing that struggle erupting all over the religious landscape. The chaos in Egypt is partly due to grappling between secularists and conservative Muslims. In the US, the struggle is apparent in all of the "culture war" issues. Gay marriage threatens a long-held and accepted antipathy toward homosexuals. The teaching of evolution threatens the conservative narrative of the Genesis creation narrative. Opening the priesthood to women threatens the control of male church leaders and the premise that undergirds it: secondary status of women. In all of these cases, progressives are looking for ways to let the Spirit expand the minds and hearts of the people. Conservatives think they are protecting the Spirit from being watered down or sullied.

It's no secret that I am in the camp of the progressives on many issues. I welcome the conflict, in this sense: only by having to face issues and working to resolve them can the will of the Spirit become known. 50 years ago, homosexuality was ridiculed, fear and persecuted. Only when actual experience with gay family members was the Church forced to examine its own premises about homosexuals - like that a gay orientation was a choice. When the supports for fearing gays were eaten away, the entire rationale for treating gays differently fell apart. Eventually, Church law will codify what was originally prompted by the Spirit and ratified by the experience of the people of God.

The Cooper case is an ugly reminder that  phariseeism is alive and will in Christian communities. We can cooperate with the Spirit by continuing the conversation, insisting that the issue be discussed openly and with compassion.

God's Rottweiller's new bone

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI recently confided that a mystical experience of God -- not merely illness and fatigue -- was behind his resignation this March. God told him to resign, he says, to devote the remainder of his life to prayer.

The waggish side of my personality says that B's resignation was simply God answering the desperate prayers of his people.  My more pious side wonders whether  the former pontiff actually had an experience. It could have been as prosaic as a as a dream, or as classically mystical as an insistent spectral voice, accompanied by colored lights and a sensation of a Presence. It could have been as mundane as an old man, achieving his life's ambition, surprised that it was so unfulfilling. Or it could have been a pathos-filled as a man realizing that he was just the wrong person for the job.

I admit to a certain antipathy toward Joseph Ratzinger, the man who became Benedict XVI. Starting his career as a liberal, he was freaked out by the radicalism of the late 1960s and became John Paul II's "Rottweiler," dispensing harsh justice on those who ran afoul of the Church's (read: the Pope's) line. As pope, Benedict hit all the wrong chords. Even smiling, he looked scary-- the Simon bar Sinister of the papacy. There was something creepy about portraits of him with children. He seemed like an ogre ready to eat them. He alienated Jews, Muslims and women with his seemingly innocuous comments. He was unable to grapple with the dysfunction, even corruption, in the Curia. His signature move -- revising the language of the Mass to make it match the Latin more closely -- was met with serious opposition by priests and laity for being unpoetic, clumsy, expensive and unnecessary.

All of this would have made a lesser man crumble. That it took Benedict 5 years to fold is a testament of sorts to his stamina and stubbornness -- the old Rottweiler clamping his jaws onto the papal throne. Until a more appealing treat beckoned.

Kudos to Benedict for having read -- if not glowing letter in the sky -- then the events on the ground. And may he be blessed on his journey

I do believe in mystical experiences - fleeting glimpses of divine truth. But they don't happen in the storybook way, with angels and halos and light and ethereal music. Our messenger angels come in the form of our friends, family and the guy in the tollbooth. Our holy voices come as part of a bad sermon, or an arresting message on a billboard. Our lights come in the form of the unexpected insights, terrifying dreams, and sudden instances when badly fitting facts coalesce into new truth.

For the Pope Emeritus , the new truth came (as it often does) at a moment that might have cause embarrassment and lack of prestige. God doesn't care about our status problems. That he followed the truth's lead says a lot about his character.

Let's follow the example of Pope Francis, and honor the old pope as he grows into a new and fuller relationship with God, more profound, apparently,  than the papacy itself.

Dad for all time

The great insight of Jesus, and the one least appreciated in its implications, is his view of God as Father. And more than Father, but as Daddy. "Abba," the word we translate as Father, is a child's appellation -- a trusting name giving by a vulnerable and dependent being.

But I think we take God's fatherness for granted. And we don't really mean it.

We call God Father, but then ascribe all sorts of unfatherly behavior to him. He is capricious, like the weather he supposedly controls. He is unpredictable, cutting short people's lives before their time. He is wrathful -- a disinterested judge more than a Dad -- punishing those who displease him. He is regal, demanding worship, adulation and obedience.

But a Dad is none of those things. A Dad is long-suffering, teaching his children their simple lessons over and over until they get it right. He is fair, giving attention and love to all of his offspring. He is protective, taking the lashings of the world on his own shoulders, lest they fall on the little ones. He is generous, providing amply from the storehouse of his time, love and treasure.

Such a God may not inspire fear or frighten people onto the right road. And that makes him useless for preachers and priests, who need a terrifying judge-king, ready to punish. Which is why they twist him into a malevolent and vengeful bully.

But the God of Jesus is a constant guide and companion. A foolish, doting Daddy who gives rain to his children, good and bad. Who gives us our daily bread. Who pays the latecomers the same wage as the all-day workers. Who seeks us and wishes us life, even when we have spent his estate on diversions and immorality.

This is a God who is hard to reconcile with a YOLO (you only live once) philosophy. For what child of God can learn all there is to know in one lifetime? What children of a loving God would find themselves in eternal fire for having been born in the wrong era, or the wrong continent or the wrong side of the tracks? Whatever the mechanism by which God accomplishes his will -- whether by multiple lifetimes, or a long purgation of what is not holy, or a theology beyond our imagination, this God of Jesus must endure as a presence at death and beyond. Through poverty, betrayal and failure.

It's what any Dad would do.

The cost of self-righteousness

I've written before about the absurdity of for profit prisons. Now, a recent article by Fareed Zakaria suggests that state governments, strapped for cash, are starting to back off on the number of inmates in their prisons. And Attorney General Eric Holder's recent comments, seeking to cut the length of mandatory drug sentences, suggests that the feds may be rethinking their policies as well.

Some facts from Zakaria's article:

In 2009, for every 100,000 citizens, 760 Americans were in prison. That was five times the rate of incarceration in Britain, eight times the rate in Germany and South Korea, and 12 times the rate in Japan.

In 1970, state prisons had a combined total of 174,000 inmates. By 2009, they had 1.4 million – an eight-fold increase.

These correctional systems cost nearly $80 billion a year, more than the GDP of Croatia or Tunisia.

It's hard not to think that our Christian nation's excessive sense of righteous vengeance has something to do with these figures. We have talked ourselves into pushing the justice/mercy balance far into the justice category. Rabid fans of Les Mis, we have not understood its central message about forgiveness and the capacity of the human heart to change. And as if merciless justice was not enough, we have made sure to punish law-breakers severely, even for minor infractions. But harshness does not translate into changed hearts. Our desire to stick it to cons is costing us hundreds of billions. Talk about biting off your your nose to spite your face.

St. Paul had it that the wages of sin is death. But surely, the wages of self-righteousness is bankruptcy -- both moral and economic. The point of fighting crime is to provide safety and security for the mass of law-abiding citizens. But if fighting crime impoverishes society, and creates a permanent underclass of unredeemable criminals (who often have no route to full citizenship even after serving their time) what have we accomplished -- aside from stoking our sense of moral superiority?

From their point of view of our souls and personal  morality, we have never been able to afford to see the lawbreaker as Other. Now, it turns out that we can't afford it financially either.

There must be a lesson in there somewhere.

Have we outgrown the Devil?

When I was a kid, my home's cellar was a place of terror. The old stone foundation, the roar of the furnace, the cobwebs and the dark corners were creepy enough. But the true fright came from another facet of the place: the cellar was where the Devil lived. Sent down to do an errand alone, I hightailed it in and out of there, slamming the old wooden door behind me. The Devil would make a last grab for you just as you were on the brink of safety.

My devil was a companion into my twenties. He haunted my dreams, paralyzing me and sending me into nightmares. He pounded up the stairs as I lay frozen, yet conscious (in my dreams), on my bed. During waking times, he still waited to snag my ankles as I came up from basement storage areas.

The Devil was a concept taught rather too well in my parochial school upbringing. He showed up in Catholic coloring books (!), arrow-pointed tail wrapped around a tree. He was featured in lurid slide presentations about the Marian apparitions at Fatima and Garabandal. He was the ultimate dark villain, against whose power there seemed little protection. Rosaries, prayers and holy water were but tinny shields against the constant threat the Devil posed. Like the poor sailors from the Indianapolis, imperiled by hungry sharks, we young souls were in constant danger of being picked off by the swarm of devils around us, hungry for souls to drag down to the Pit.

Fifty years later, I have a little more perspective. My nightmares about devils ended abruptly when I learned safe and appropriate ways to express my repressed anger. (Thank you , Sweetie!) A little Jungian psychology went a long way toward helping me understand why the Devil lurked in low places -- symbolically, the realm of the hidden, dangerous, "shadow" side of my personality. At some point, not as long ago as I would like, the Devil literally stopped nipping at my heels.

The idea of the Devil is an old one, but not as old as some might think. When the Book of Job was written, about 400-600 years before Christ, Satan was still a member of the divine court. He was more like a prosecuting attorney -- a Devil's advocate, if you will -- keeping God's judgments honest by bringing up the frailties of men whom God considered upright. Give humans real trouble, Satan would say, and you'll see their real selves -- venal, petty and blasphemous.

By the time of Jesus, Satan had transmogrified into an adversary or God and to his Creation. Jesus saw it as a main part of his mission to overthrow the realm of Satan by casting out demons. Aside from the merely therapeutic aspects of exorcism, overthrowing the Devil had a larger purpose: signifying that God's power was breaking into Creation. God was again getting the upper hand.

Since Jesus's time, the history of the Church has been peppered with overreaction to the supposed presence of then Devil. Jews and Satan were thought to be in league, leading to persecutions, mass murders and expulsions. Women were burned because of their supposed links with Satan. Anyone who has read about the Salem Witch trials realizes that far more mayhem was committed by the righteous of Salem (including 19 deaths, one pressing and numerous unjust jailings) than by the spells of the accused. Indeed, Satan seems most dangerous in the hands of those most intent on driving him away.

Which leads to wonder whether it is time to hang up the Devil's pitchfork and retire him for good. He has done us little good as an externalized symbol of evil - our own or that of others. Believing in him did not make me examine my motives and emotions. In fact, it made them seem to be external -- imposed by an outside force bent on destroying me. Only when I learned to acknowledge my own home-grown greed, lust, pride and anger was I able to own my emotions and learn to manage them.

Not to mention, isn't there something strange about a cosmology in which an all-powerful God is nearly equally matched by a second, dark entity, nearly as powerful and far more busy? Putative monotheists, haven't we created a second god? The sheer blasphemy of this should be enough to make us think twice about giving the Devil so much of his due.

The Devil has had his day.We have identified the source of evil in the world. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly's Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Rising to the occassion -- the Assumption of Mary

August 15th is the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, one of those particularly Catholic feasts that are widely celebrated, though rarely understood. The assumption is one of only TWO (count 'em, two) times that papal infallibility has been exercised. In 1950, Pope Pius XII decreed that Mary, "at the end of her earthly existence,"was assumed bodily in heaven. Whether she tasted death or not is not specified.

But dogma aside, I'm not sure of any Catholics, aside from the most pious conservatives, who gets excited about the Assumption. In some ways, its a late show version of the much more dumbstriking Resurrection -- the return from death of a man-god cruelly killed three days before. Mary's similar experience happened years later, and is not clearly adduced in the biblical texts. It's even tacked on to the end of the mysteries of the rosary. Also an afterthought.

Each era seems to have its religious preoccupations. In eras past, the idea that Mary might have had intercourse with Joseph seemed distasteful and blasphemous. The idea that Jesus would have let his Mom decay in an earthly tomb also seemed horrifying, and maybe a little callous. If anyone deserved a life in Heaven, surely it was the Mother of our Lord!

But, without denying the dogma, I wonder where the enthusiasm is for deifying Mary today? Even Pope John Paul II, a true devotee of the Virgin, never managed to declare her Redemptrix -- a title that would have had her share bringing salvation to the world with her son, Jesus.

Mary seems to be in the need of an extreme makeover.

What can Mary say to the heart-sore, lonely and dispossessed of our time? Is she the apt symbol of the lonely mother, cast off by her minister son in search of communion with something greater than she could provide? Is she the mother of those killed by war, terrorized by torture, held captive to societal evils?

Is she the Mary of the visionaries --  nagging her children to pray more and dress modestly? Or the Mary of the old-time nuns, a last resort to those in need of minor miracles?

The Mary who moves me the most is the one who stands confused by life's accidents, "pondering these things in her heart," unsure of the future, traumatized by the present. She is unsophisticated, not as a choice, but as a consequence of her time and her society. She is humble by necessity, enduring a life that expects nothing of her and grants her neither wisdom nor status. She is poor, her husband gone, her child murdered, her dreams nailed to a tree. Yet she is also a survivor. Battered and bruised, hanging on to a hope spoken to her as a girl. That somehow, this would all mean something.

The Mary I honor may well have gone to her death not knowing how the story ended. Her son "risen" yet absent. Yet in perhaps the most divine of human traits, she held in her heart that her life, and that of all, was ultimately in Other hands. And that the sketched line of her life was one small brush stroke in a master work beyond her ken and beyond her dreams.

What may ultimately make Mary divine is not an exemplary life, but an ordinary one, raised to the level where hope is rewarded with a view of how it all comes together in the end. How the suffering, cruelty, idiocy, meanness and poverty are turned inside out and upside down.

For behold:

from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Because he that is mighty,

hath done great things to me;

and holy is his name.

Documentary review: "Hot Coffee"

Unaccountable corporations and the trail of human misery

 Back in 1994, I was one of the people who laughed at the idea that a woman would sue McDonalds for being scalded with hot coffee. Obviously, she was just trying to make a buck from a phony law suit. I guess I had been conditioned by too many “can you believe this?” episodes of shows like “60 Minutes” to feel that there could be another side to the story. “Hot Coffee” tells the full and terrifying story of Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old who was horribly burned (you will see the wounds for yourself) by a cup of too-hot coffee. Her burns required numerous painful skin grafts and two years of recovery. Liebeck originally asked for $20,000 to cover her medical costs. MacDonald’s offered her an insultingly low $800. She eventually sued and was awarded $2.7 million, and amount that was reduced on appeal.

 The film tells how the American legal system has been steadily tilted against ordinary litigants in favor of corporations. The system’s constant drumbeat about “tort reform” distorts individual cases to rally the masses against judgments that punish corporations when they seriously injure their customers. One featured case, about Jamie Leigh Jones against Halliburton, arose from her being drugged and gang-raped by fellow employees in Iraq. Due to a mandatory arbitration agreement, she had to fight to get her case heard by anyone but a Halliburton-appointed arbitrator. A family whose infant son’s brain was damaged due to a delay in dealing with a fetal emergency was unable to recoup the costs of his million-dollar lifelong care due to damage caps on awards. In another story, a Mississippi judge who wouldn’t play ball on tort reform was falsely accused of bribery and tax evasion, and had to fight for his reputation in the courts.

 “Hot Coffee” shines a light on the way our system of justice is used to shield corporations from accountability for the actions, to cap awards to victims of their negligence, and to prevent injured families from being able to care for their injured children. It’s also a story of how ordinary citizens are enlisted into the scheme via biased and incomplete media stories. A well-made, disturbing and eye-opening film.

The war on women is heating up

Consider:

• A Super Pac releases a new "game" that allows players to deliver a slap in the face to an image of Hillary Clinton
• A 17-year-old Canadian girl hangs herself after pictures of her sexual assault were shared online
• A 14-year-old girl in Britain commits suicide after being targeting by Internet trolls
• Also, in Britain, Twitter lit up with hateful and misogynistic comments (including death and rape threats) after a proposal to add Jane Austen to English currency
• Texas legislators Wendy Bradley is threatened with a $2.4 million bill for her filibuster of an abortion bill

These may seem like isolated incidents of male societal insensitivity, but they strike me as part of a larger trend. Women are increasingly finding themselves to be the targets of male abuse and intolerance. To cast my net more widely, the trend is even wider, aiming to roll back progress made in the treatment of women, minorities and homosexuals. The victimization has been picking up steam, or at least making the news.

I am very worried about the state of our society. Attitudes toward women seem to be regressing to their pre-feminism state. Partly, this has to be due to discomfort with the way things are going. The economy tanks, jobs are going overseas, pensions are shrinking and our government is in gridlock. Pressure groups are screaming about creeping socialism, sneaky immigrants and efforts to limit gun rights. Add to that the recent gains for gay marriage and the election of a black president, and it's inevitable that many will make the incorrect connection between laudable social progress (for formerly dispossessed groups) and the erosion of our values and capabilities. Better to roll back to the better times, the thinking goes, when white guys got all the breaks.

I have been watching the way feminism has been denigrated. I think it started with Rush Limbaugh and his attack on "feminazis." Probably everyone has met a woman who is unhappy with the unfair advantages that men have wielded for centuries, and is not shrill about it. Feminazi might well describe them. But the term came to be applied to any women who spoke up about anything at all. Women are supposed to be happy with their 81 cents to every male dollar. They should appreciate the rights that men have given them -- like the right to vote. All while continuing to be vilified in the legislatures, leered at, catcalled, stalked and raped. Whether or not you believe in a woman's right to choose, you should be upset at the paternalistic desires of mostly males legislatures and conservative churches to limit reproductive choice, close clinics, grant personhood to fetuses and insist on invasive (and rape-simulating) ultrasound tests. Women are becoming (again) mere vessels for the reproductive prerogatives of men.

Women who grew up in the post-Limbaugh feminazi era have been reluctant, understandably given the climate, to claim to be feminists. This, while training for work in corporations, the military and other traditionally male domains. But they may soon learn that the feminist label is not a badge of shame. When their body parts bring more attention than their business skills, when their leadership potential is stymied by antiquated, male-centered views and when their desire to bear children is used to restrict heir career opportunities, they may revive "feminist" as an honor.

Women, to be coequal to men in their dignity before God, must be accorded equal regard and equal protection. We cannot decry female restrictions under Sharia law and then attempt to erect Sharia-like barriers to a woman's God-given freedom and dignity at home. The fight over feminism has taken a few steps backward. I pray that today's young women will understand the stakes at pick up the banner dropped by their elder sisters.

Why, Garry? -- a review of Garry Wills' "Why Priests"?

While Garry Wills is acerbic and astute as ever in this examination of the roots of the Catholic priesthood, don’t expect an epic takedown of the Roman Catholic priesthood from “Why Priests?” But as with all Wills’ books, and there is some interesting material along the way, in the end, his analysis falls short, and his wish for a future Church without priests falls flat.

Wills attacks the priesthood by hammering away at what he takes as its main pillar: the priesthood of Jesus in the line of Melchizedek. Ol’ Mel, who gets all of 3 verses in Genesis, was the King of Salem and priest of the Most High God. The patriarch/warlord Abraham gave a tenth of his war booty in return for feeding his men. The priest-king appears suddenly at a moment of crisis to bless Abraham, then disappears abruptly. But how about the connection to Jesus? That comes through the New Testament book of Hebrews, once ascribed to  St. Paul, which links Christ,  in a line of tortured reasoning brilliantly untangled by Wills, with the Old Testament priest-king. For chapter after chapter, Wills batters away at the foundations of the story, first by examining the Genesis account, and then closely analyzing the logic of Hebrews. By the end, he had made his point. Hebrews is a well-meaning mess. But it does something that Wills claims no other New Testament text does: it turns Jesus, who was often at odds with priests and did not hold any priestly office, explicitly into a priest, officiating at the sacrifice of his own body at the  Last Supper and on the Cross. It is this connection – the priest-king Jesus who presides, in effect, at the greatest originating symbol of Christianity -- that the Church uses to claim Christ’s desire to perpetuate his own priesthood through the calling of Catholics to be priests.

Wills follows up his attack with couple of chapters on the history of the sacraments. Not surprisingly, he sees little association between the gospels and the sacramental system. This point, that the seven Catholic sacraments bear only a vague relationship with the earthly activities of Christ, has been raised by others. Why, for instance, is healing not a sacrament, when Jesus spends so much time perform medical miracles? Yet marriage, hardly a Christian innovation (not to mention that it was not integrated into the Church for centuries) makes the Super Seven? Wills suggests that baptism and confirmation were not originally separate sacraments, and that splitting them is a Church innovation, invented after child baptism became the  norm. Maybe, but a precedent for separate baptisms of water and spirit are found in the book of Acts, which shows newly-baptized Christians needing the laying on of hands to bring about the gifts of the spirit. But Wills’s boldest attack is on the Last Supper itself, the meal on which is based the most exalted part of the Mass, and which the Church commemorates when bread and wine are changed to the body and blood of Christ. Wills’ makes a very weak argument that the Last Supper was nothing more than an eschatological meal – the last one enjoyed by Jesus, to be sure – but in continuity with countless other such meals in Jesus’s lifetime. But the heightened language of the meal, and its unusual evocation of Christ’s impending betrayal and death, and the offering of body ahd blood (not likely a feature of Christ’s typical meals) make this seem unlikely. By the 50s, Paul was writing about the shared memorial meal whose symbols and language are easily recognizable to Christians today, whatever eschatological overlay might also have been present.

Two sections of the book gave me a great deal of food for thought. One deals with the way that bread/wine become body/blood. Wills describes the complex philosophical constructs that Thomas Aquinas went to to explain the miracle of the Eucharist. By separating the “breadness” (substance) of the bread from its appearance/taste/smell (accidents ) he seemingly solved a complicated question: why don’t the bread and wind don’t change in appearance during the Mass, as they become the body and blood of Christ? But by doing so, Aquinas introduces new issues that had to be dealt with. What if the wine was poisoned? Can it be discarded? (No, it is still the Blood of Christ.) What if a fly lands in the cup? (The fly had to be removed, washed and burned, with its ashes placed in the tabernacle). A certain amount of the fussiness of today’s priests can be laid at the feet of Aquinas’s solution to the mystery of transubstantiation.

The other section of value detailed salvation theology, and is one of the most readable on the subject. Wills presents compelling evidence that the story of Jesus as a substitute sacrifice for humanity has troubled even (literally) sainted Catholic theologians. 11^th century Anselm say Jesus was paying an honor-debt owed by mankind to God for having sinned in the Garden. Aquinas thinks this is rather potty. Meanwhile, Augustine focuses on the Incarnation as the miracle of greatest worth, placing the death and sacrifice of Jesus as somewhat secondary. The story of how each of these intellectual giants wrestled with matters as seemingly simple as the meaning and even the number of sacraments should make ordinary Catholics breathe more easily. Even our biggest guns didn’t agree, and the Church was left with the task of weaving together the contrasting threads of their sometimes contrary opinions.

Wills looks to early Church documents to make the case for a sacrifice-free (and hence priestless) Christianity. He turns to the Didache (which contains a description of an early Christian celebration) and the descriptions of worship by Justin Martyr. Wills argues that the meals they describe were not Masses, in which a sacrifice was offered, but thanksgiving (Eucharistic) liturgies. But even here, Wills describes an unfolding need for leaders. A “stander-before” (proestos) led the gathering in prayer and thanksgiving. “Diacones” (deacons) organized the distribution of food to the needy. Overseers (“espiscopos,” anglicized as “bishop”) organized and led communities. Though Jesus may not have anticipated a church structure, his followers quickly (within the first 100 years of the Church) -- perhaps led by need, perhaps by the Spirit -- organized themselves hierarchically. Whether the current church structure can claim direct succession from these structures is a good question. Whether today’s Church requires its complex and stratified priesthood is another. But if a refusal to evolve the priesthood can be laid as a charge against the Church, surely the urge to self-organize can’t be.

Ultimately, Wills’ arguments falls short. Hoping to topple the temple, he merely knocks over the rickety outhouse. If asked, I doubt that many Catholic priests would claim the legitimacy of their priesthood on the person of Melchizedek and the logic of Hebrews. The arguments are too esoteric. As noted, Wills’ desire to use the early Church as a model for today’s worship is naïve, and at odds with the Church’s rapidly evolving governance in the earliest centuries. And trying to model ourselves on Jesus’s own actions may not do us any good either. Jesus did not act as a priest, performing liturgies and sacrifices, unless you count the sacrifice of Calvary as him sacrificing himself. He preached, healed, fed and critiqued. He appointed emissaries (apostles), not bishops.

By knocking out what must be the its least sound biblical supports, Wills has done little damage to the idea of priesthood. There are plenty of scriptural and utilitarian reasons to accept some sort of priesthood, if not the current model we now enjoy. Though Christ did not serve as a priest in the Jerusalem Temple, his priesthood could easily be derived from his total dedication to his mission and to God, to the point of giving up family, marriage, and fortune. He lived and preached a life of self-sacrifice, which could be argued is the highest form of sacrifice. And even if the current seven sacraments can’t all comfortably be traced back to Jesus, the idea that sacraments are invalid if Jesus didn’t specifically originate them seems to go too far the other way. I would argue that the lack of sacramental provenance gives us the opportunity to become more creative with the sacraments, freeing us to re-invent them to address today’s needs. Recall that the Church already took a step in this direction when it rechristened Last Rites as the Sacrament of the Sick.

Strangely, Wills go nowhere near the reason that many modern Catholics find the priesthood appalling: its arrogance, divisiveness and irrelevance to contemporary needs. The priest abuse crisis gets nary a mention. Priestly celibacy is not discussed. Arrogant bishops who run their dioceses like petty despots don’t rate a word. Conservative Catholics who long for priests to be the sexless autocrats of old don’t rate a mention. There is no doubt that the less blinkered of us are open to look at scripture and church tradition more honestly. Indeed, the sensum fidei, the gathered voice of the Church as a whole shows willingness to open priesthood to women and the married. But are the faithful (or even the unfaithful) calling for a Church without priests? Here Wills seems a voice crying in the wilderness of his own pessimism. We want our priests to act with integrity, to have a clue about what our lives are like, to be wise and inspiring. We want to be led by well-balanced, intelligent men and women who can lead their flocks into an imitation of Christ. But no priests? No thanks.

Could the Church exist (and thrive) with a priesthood based on different premises and with a different set of disciplines -- say, optional celibacy, the power of congregations to select their own priests, the diffusion of sacramental powers among the faithful, and a bottom up governance model? Perhaps. But Wills does not paint a picture of what such a Church might look like, and what objections it would raise among the conservative faithful. Wills whiffs on his promise of a better, priestless Catholicism. That’s disappointing from a writer and thinker of such usual clarity and vigor.

As the church has changed in the past, so can it change in the future. While Wills may pine improperly for the purity of the nascent church, he has to be commended for bringing up the question.

But for a useful guide to the future leadership of the Church, we will need to look elsewhere.