About the CSPC
SERPENTES ET COLUMBAE
Mission Statement
We are called to be co-creators with the divine community, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, called to participate in the redemption of the universe, for we are made in the very image of God. If our global problems remain intractable, nonetheless, we are now more conscious than ever before of the depths and demands of this call, we are more keenly aware than ever of the wholeness of God’s grace.
With a renewed call comes a renewed writ, a detailed command to meet the challenges and complexities of this, our new age, to meet them with deepened dialogue, and in conducting this dialogue, pursuing what the great theologian, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., would call renewed insights, understandings, judgments, and, ultimately, pursuing responsible, loving actions. Accordingly, the four corners of our writ, as we read it, are these:
I. As the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council anticipated, our Catholic laity has finally come of age. With more professionals in more professions than in any prior age, we are ready for adult extensions of our faith in our many public fora. We are ready, but we have not yet found our voice. We Catholics are as deeply divided in the expressions of our spirituality as we are in those of social justice; too often, considerations extrinsic to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, considerations of political or economic gain, drive our public expressions of faith. We proceed like sheep among wolves. We must do better. In an effort of democratic understanding and assent – Cardinal Newman’s real assent – we must strive to become more prudent as well as more unified.
II. As our late, great Pope, John Paul II, recognized, the long age of secularization has finally come to fruition: nowhere does society stand in need – as it did after the Fall of the Roman Empire or even in the High Middle Ages – of the tutelage of the institutional Church, of Sancta Mater Ecclesia. All professions, all peoples, are now self-directing. And yet, at the very moment when so many voices have joined in the worldwide chorus, it is the first voice, the voice of our own spiritual yearnings, of our restless heart, that would now be stilled. Here we confront, not the fruits of secularization, but the insidious dictatorship of secularism, a censorship of society and of self, a censorship which claims that spirituality is too irrational, too divisive, to be tolerated in public discourse. It is a censorship that boldly poses as the champion of tolerance and reason; but like most censorships, secularism actually serves to comfort the comfortable, to shore up the status quo, and thus, ultimately, to reinforce the powers of the age. Secularist censorship, bereft of any transcendent reference, unwittingly serves that power that serves itself. If Jesus were to walk the earth today, this time He might not be heard as a threat to the powerful and the arrogant: this time, He might not be heard at all. We must do better. Defying the dictatorship of secularism, we must be His witnesses: for we are not called to proceed like sheep to the slaughter, we are instead called to judgment and responsible, loving action: “Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as shrewd as serpents and as simple as doves.”
III. As the Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J, articulated so incisively, in the same age in which we have gained mass literacy and mass communication, our society has lost any common language with which to debate public morality. From the inner city to foreign policy, from Washington thru Baghdad to New Orleans, considerations of pure power, of winners and losers, have rushed in to fill the moral vacuum. Despite the great political dividends gained by paying lip service to faith and morality, there is no informed piety in our counsels of public action, there is no real sense of our common destiny, still less of the providence of God, our Father and Mother, no confidence in the intrinsic truth and thus in the goodness and beauty of God’s most subtle order. We must do better. Through deepened dialogue, with prudent judgment, as God’s witnesses, we must speak a word to power, a healing word to a dangerously divided and inarticulate society.
IV. Jesus asked, once for all time, “Who do you think I am?” We are, each and every one of us, challenged to make a choice about the Christ, a choice that is no matter of convenience, of paying lip service. For once we acknowledge Jesus as the Christ, we acknowledge His challenge to turn our lives around, to undertake a new path, a twofold path of personal-faith-&-good-works. We are called not only to orthodoxy, but to orthopraxis: we are called to social justice. What challenge could be greater than self-reform, if not the reform of sinful institutions? We dare not reduce His call to personal idiosyncrasy, to private faith and private charity, for when the Son of God speaks, He addresses all humanity: there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, there is but the one community of the children of God. A community with ever new roots and branches, a community that shall be known by the fruit it bears.
From the four corners of our writ, our resolution follows accordingly.
Now that we Catholic laity have come of age, we must find our voice. It will be neither strident nor merely “tolerant.” Ours is a dialogue that will not reduce our Church, our faith community, to a go-along-to-get-along society; nor will our dialogue reduce our expression of belief to an adjunct of power, be it political, economic, or ecclesiastical. We do not derive our theology from the editorials of The “New York Times,” but nor do we use Communion as a political weapon. In sum, our voice will be neither trendy nor subservient to the status quo; we favor neither Pharisee nor Sadducee, neither Leonard Feeney nor Tissa Balasuriya, neither accommodation of all views nor condemnation of any difference. We shall proceed, ever mindful of society and of Caesar, but first, we render unto God.
LUX MUNDI
Vision Statement
In the dominant public discourse, a discourse oriented to power (be it economic or political, technological or strategic), it is said that we live in the “era of globalization.” In point of fact, this is at least the seventh of such eras; earlier eras ended in A.D. 410, 1492, 1588, 1815, 1842, and 1918. Each of those waves of globalization – Roman, Islamic, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Western European, respectively – was led by a preponderant military and economic power; each of them ended with the precipitate decline of that global power, or its complete defeat – or the near destruction of civilization itself.
Given that historical record, as a practical matter, other modes of discourse need to be heard. One such discourse is the unbroken witness of Catholic faith. For ours is not only a new era of globalization, it is also the dawn of the third millennium of our “common era,” of our worldwide reckoning of time from the birth of Christ.
Our global problems remain as intractable as ever, problems ranging from the psychological and social dimensions, through the economic, energy, and environmental dimensions, the ethnic, racial, and national dimensions, to the political and legal dimensions. Yet, a new light is dawning, the light of a beauty “ever ancient, ever new”. This is the light of our participation in the divine mystery. In this Light:
- We are called, first, to adore the beauty and goodness of God, Who has brought forth all things, a beauty and goodness reflected throughout creation;
- We are called, second, to open our hearts to the Love that inspires all creation;
- We are called, third, to open our minds to the deep structures, the scientific and moral laws, underpinning all creation; &
- We are called, fourth, to be co-creators with the divine community, with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are called always and everywhere to participate in the redemption of the universe, its restoration and completion, for we are made in the very image of God: imago Dei.
If our problems remain intractable, nonetheless, we are now more conscious than ever before of the depths and demands of this fourfold call, we are more keenly aware than ever of the wholeness of God’s grace.
Humbled by our accumulated global challenges, yet confident in the promptings of the Spirit, we go forth to dialogue with our neighbors, to renew the sense of our global family as being all of us sons and daughters of the living God. Our lives, our universe, are too big to be reduced to the dimensions of political and strategic power, of “Social Darwinism” by another name. To resist the discourse of exclusive power, to refuse to be divided into “winners” and “losers,” to affirm instead the glory of God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves: these are the promptings of the Spirit, this is the Light, that no power can overcome. This is the Light of the world. This is Jesus, here and now, always and everywhere.
To identify and understand the reach of His Light, to affirm His presence, above and yet also within all matter and all matters, be they economic or political, technological or strategic, and to do so in dialogue: this is at once our vision and our task.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Amen.
A Word from the President
People wonder, “What kind of concerns are ‘spiritual-and-public’ concerns?” Perhaps we could shed a little light on that three-word wonder by recalling the famous concern embedded in another three-word phrase, a phrase reflecting a crucial practice in public life. I mean the practice of “Do ut des”: “I give [something] to you in order that you may give [something to me].” That is a very succinct Latin phrase, for a central practice in Ancient Roman law.
It was the first of the four forms of contract in the civil law, in other words, it was the original form of a public bargain; it lasted until the very end of the Ancient World (we find it in Justinian’s Digest, 19.5.5.2). When Roman law was revived at the outset of the High Middle Ages, it, too, was revived. It was only when Modern industry disturbed the balance of conditional gifts between private individuals – when the employer’s bargaining power became exponentially greater than that of any and all employees – that Marx and others realized that the bargain, the swap of gifts, no longer worked to set wages; this realization helped launch, not only communism, but the entire reform movement within capitalism. Today, though it has been reduced by the reform of our wage law and similar bargains, the ancient concept still endures in Western private law (e.g., in the German Citizens’ Lawbook, or Buergerliches Gesetzbuch, Sec. 320); what’s more, it thrives under the guise of international law! We have only to look at current events to see how countries trade votes (as conditional gifts) onboard the U.N. Security Council: Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao want to know in advance what they’d get for supporting George Bush. Thus, from Beijing to our own backyard, the famous concern first embedded in Roman law is none other than self-concern; in this case, State interest is no more than self-interest writ large.
Obviously, the original do ut des has a downside: it never transcends self-interest, i.e., private interest. The horizon of one’s real concerns is dramatically foreshortened. Serving one’s self-interest becomes one’s public goal: “What’s in it for me?” The public dimension is reduced to the personal, and the personal, to gain. This reductionistic phenomenon is not limited to the Security Council or to contracts; a very widespread phenomenon, it is a perpetual temptation. Indeed, it not only predates international law, but even Roman law; it was a constitutive element of Roman public worship, and before that, of Greek public worship. The Ancient city-states would make offerings to the gods for military victories, good harvests, and the like; individuals would similarly offer sacrifices to the gods for their own personal gain. Although a few great philosophers (like Socrates) demurred, for the vast majority of people in the Ancient World, even when it came to converse with the gods – the highest dimension of their public and private life – do ut des was little more than legal bribery.
Enter the Carpenter.
Embodying the finest Jewish wisdom, Jesus informs us that God, our Father – Abba – is not to be bargained with, that the Creator of the Universe, Who is absolutely Self-sufficient, needs nothing from us. Quite the contrary: “God is love” – or, in the words taken from St. Jerome’s Vulgate, taken for the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est.”
God takes no bribes. Yet, precisely because God is love, everything we give to God or to others in our service of God, will be repaid many times over. Everything! Not because God owes us on a contract, but because He has freely pledged Himself, by his very nature, to assist us. The gift is now truly gratuitous. It is now God who says, and without condition, “I give to you so that you may give to others, too.” (Cf. St. Augustine, Sermon 158)
And as we are made in God’s image, so too, we can give as God gives. Give freely. Give: so as to inform and empower others, inform and empower them in love.
To do this, to emulate the Creator of the Universe, is no private indulgence. This is a public gift. For this is what it means to be spiritual: not to bargain with God, but to accept His gifts; not merely to seek our own advantage in the world (the predisposition of self-love: amor sui), but to go and do likewise: to go forth to love and serve one another, to love and serve the Lord (the predisposition of the love of God: amor Dei).
Whether it is a question of our health policy or of our retirement policy, the public and the spiritual dimensions ineluctably intersect. All the more is this true when we dialogue with other faiths and civilizations – or when we confront the specter of war.
And if this public-spiritual intersection is a global intersection, it is just as much a local intersection. Here is a capital instance.
But for the free sacrifices of members of our Committee, we should never have mounted such an extraordinary effort in our Inaugural Year. Our team dug into the very depths of its being … and, all too frequently, into the depths of the night and even the depths of our purse! Through these, the strenuous efforts of my fellow Committee members, too numerous to recount here, too great ever to forget, God’s gifts have been shared – and multiplied!
Ultimately, then, what is this “spiritual-and-public” concern? It is none other than the sense that “I give to you so that you may give to others, too” – the new sense, read in the realization that God is love.
What is this spiritual-public phenomenon? The beauty we find in the forum or in the hearth – but always in one another: depth calling to depth.
Jerome D. Maryon