Faith and Culture

HEART OF THE WORLD, CENTER OF THE CHURCH:

Can CEO’s and Stockholders be Saved?

by Mark and Louise Zwick

Who then devised the torment?
Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot
remove.

We only live, only suspire
Consumed either by fire or
fire.
(T. S. Eliot)

How different our world looks today from the Civilization of Love called for by recent Popes and by David L. Schindler and other editors of Catholic journals and newspapers, including the Houston Catholic Worker.

How far is our awareness from that of Moses when he met the Lord in a
flame of fire in a burning bush that was not consumed, an encounter that
changed Moses forever and that was directly tied to a response to the
slavery and affliction of God's people.

Secularization celebrates the triumph of the will to power and affluence
over the will to holiness and genius. Cultural life is dominated by
consumerism. The unprecedented division between the spiritual and the
institutions which shape our world has allowed economists, business
executives, politicians, the media, the medical profession and the
military to act independently of the guidance of the spirit. The center
of life, the spiritual, has been pushed to the margins.

This has led, as Peter Maurin predicted, to oppression of the person and
to the bloodiest century in the history of civilization, with millions
of people having been slaughtered and with a loss of respect for all
human life. Pope John Paul II said on a recent trip to Germany that he
fears that if the new post-communist Europe is constructed without a
mooring in the continent's Christian roots, it could easily fall prey to
totalitarianism once again.

The universities, including Catholic universities, which should be great
centers of thought, are doing little to address the spiritual crisis of
our times. Instead, they encourage students to emphasize their own
rights, their own advancement, their own privilege.

Economic Crisis

With the fall of communism, marxism has been discredited as an
alternative economic system. Unfortunately, the world has returned to
the brutal working conditions of the nineteenth century, where children
of the Third World labor long hours every day for a few cents an hour to
provide cheap consumer goods for us. One third of the women of
childbearing age in Brazil have been sterilized as a requisite for their
work in factories of multinational companies so as not to interrupt
their work schedule with pregnancies. Teenage girls are enticed to
leave school to work in maquiladoras where they are only given
employment for a few years, then left without a future.

People in poor countries are being forced to live under extremely
difficult conditions as their governments are required to restructure
the economies to repay enormous debts inappropriately loaned to
irresponsible governments by the World Bank and the IMF.

Many are forced to immigrate to the United States or other nearby
countries.

A new slavery has emerged to enrich the CEO's and stockholders more than any plantation owner of a former age. The Bishop of Lincoln needs to hear about this!

CEO Theologians

Some Catholics defend this system, among them neoconservatives such as Michael Novak, George Weigel and Fr. John Neuhaus. Michael Novak, extols the creativity of capitalism: "At the inmost heart of a
capitalist system, for instance, is confidence in the creative capacity
of the human person. As Catholic theology teaches, and as experience
verifies, such confidence is well-placed. Each person is made in the
image of God, the Creator. Each is called to be a co-creator and given
the vocation to act creatively."

It is quite true that this process is creative, and one can observe it
in small businesses. But in industrial and now global capitalism, it is
only creative for a few people. If one can make a shirt for $.16 in El
Salvador and sell it for $25 in the United States, that is very
creative--it is also diabolical.

It is very creative to find a way for the CEO of a company to make
several million dollars a year and for the stockholders to reap enormous
profits while the workers make a few cents an hour. It may be very
creative to work with the U.S. and Latin American governments to develop free zones in countries such as Honduras where no taxes are paid and no labor organizing can take place at maquiladoras where workers earn $.37 cents an hour. But it hardly implements Catholic teaching.

These neoconservatives (a confusing term because their philosophy in
other countries is called neoliberalism) attempt to dress up the
Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, in Catholic clothing. In a recent article, George Weigel described "a
successful, contemporary American businessperson," who has found that
faith is no longer an obstruction to economic advancement in America and points out that there are many Catholics "at the higher altitudes of
CEO-dom." These persons make regular donations to secular and religious charities and do not "feel any serious tension" between this way of life, economic status and Catholic commitment. Weigel deplores the fact that the magisterium has not given its support to a theology of wealth creation. The reason might have something to do with the Gospel.

We (the authors) feel so bad criticizing our neoconservative brothers
who participate at the same table of the Lord, but the same eucharistic
Jesus that we share as brothers and sisters impels us to speak for those
suffering from a capitalism that puts greed before creed.

Pope John Paul II recently put "unbridled capitalism" on a par with
communism, telling Slovenians on a visit to the former Yugoslav republic that one was no less dangerous than the other. He said Slovenia was trying to free itself "from the negative consequences of a totalitarian
ideology, but must remain especially vigilant to stop another ideology,
that is not less dangerous, that of unbridled capitalism, occupying the
vacuum."

Those who rejoiced at the fall of communism should notice that
communists are returning to popularity because of the havoc wreaked on
the emerging economies in Eastern Europe by "neoliberal" economic
policies.

Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston warned last week that "American
corporations are endangering capitalism by treating workers as
commodities that can be eliminated to produce more profits for
stockholders. In defending the weakest members of society from such
mistreatment, Cardinal Law went so far as to say that, "Unless we find a
way to show respect for the worker as a worker, then I think the whole
system is going to go."

In a recent speech Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago addressed the
ethical problems facing corporate America. He disagrees with the view
that corporations cannot afford to be fully ethical, let alone "family
friendly," in their business policies and practices. He insists that
"certain basic ethical principles need to shape our vision of corporate
America" (America, July 6-13, 1996.

As we were finishing this article on an airplane, a CEO told the authors
that his religion is between him and God, he goes to church to relax,
and he doesn't want any sermons from priests or bishops to interfere
with his business. This CEO equated helping the poor with liberation
theology, which he detested.

The papal and episcopal teachings above make it clear that a Catholic
CEO or stockholder could not, in conscience, rake in enormous profits
each year, while the employees make a pittance. Christianity involves
actually living according to the Gospels.

A Worldly Spirituality

How can Christians, how can the Church respond to the wasteland of
today, to the economic crisis, to the crisis of the spirit, to the
suffering of the poor? Where is the profound theology which can begin
to provide meaning, ethics and a spirituality for this age?

David L. Schindler provides that vision in one of the most important new
books since the Second Vatican Council. His approach to Christian
involvement in the world is dynamic and profound.

According to his new book, entitled Heart of the World, Center of the
Church: Communio Ecclesiology, Liberalism, and Liberation (Eerdman's, 1996), "Christians should seek to live at the heart of the world, from the center of the Church."

What can this mean? How can Christians bring transforming love to
society without coercing others?

Schindler responds that "in the end the Christian's and the Church's
relation to the world must be understood in terms of God's relation to
the world, as he has established that relation in Christ."

The Christian's mission to a world dis-oriented by Adam--dis-oriented in the sense of being oriented away from the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ--takes form from within Christ's own mission to re-orient and recast all of creation (including the environment) to God.

The Church is much more than morality, it is much more than social
justice, much more than Rome--more than the juridical Church. It is more
than any rights movement. It is much more than Americanism or
Europeanism. It goes beyond any one social, political or economic
system.

A new sense of the Church's relation to the world emerges in this book,
as the extension of Christ's own incarnational, redeeming mission, and
with this, a new sense of the world itself.

According to Schindler, the role of the Church in the world is not
simply to make some correction to "this-worldly political, social, and
economic systems," but to offer something more profound. The Church
"can be itself only by penetrating the world--and hence the world's
social-economic orders--with itself, with the sacramental image of the
love of the Three Person'd God revealed in Jesus Christ. Only in this
way can reality in all its aspects, including economics, be "liberated."

A quote he brings in from Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology dramatizes
the different perspective of this theology: "Success is not one of the
names of God, but consuming fire is."

Schindler insists on a deeper understanding of the Incarnation and the
Church than is present either in some liberation theologies including
feminist theologies (a new, richer feminism is needed--see Mary Ann
Glendon, America magazine July 6-13, 1996) or in ideas supporting a
capitalism of wealth production. He is a master in going beyond the
very limited perspective of John Courtney Murray in regard to religious
freedom and democracy. The traps some newer theologies have fallen into as they have developed in an atmosphere of religious pluralism have
involved the mistakes of either importing the structures of the world
into the Church or marginalizing the Church, making faith a private
affair and allowing it to enter the marketplace only as "public
morality."

The Con Game of an Empty Public Square

At first glance it may seem odd that Schindler groups together
liberalism, various theologies of liberation and neoconservatism. Many
would think they have nothing in common. In his view these approaches
share an inadequate theology of human freedom and of "worldly" autonomy and share the problem of identifying the Church too closely with American political structures and with the rationalism of the
Enlightenment.

These thinkers have bought into what Schindler calls a con game, the
idea of a "level playing field" where all ideas are supposedly equal in
the American political understanding, but religion privatized. The
problem with this theory, as he points out, is that no content or belief
is accepted on the playing field--and thus it is not open or neutral as
liberal theorists (including, paradoxically, neoconservatives) claim.
The agenda is controlled by secularists and only secularists can
speak--or faith can only speak as a superficial public morality
sanitized of its depth of meaning.

This is not a neutral space out there, Schindler tells us, but a space
actually filled with secular ideology.

Michael Novak, for example, actually says that it is inappropriate to
bring Christian values to the marketplace in a pluralistic society.

Whither Latin American Theology?

Some have looked for an alternative in various forms of liberation
theology. Latin American liberation theologians have recently been
faced with adjusting their perspectives on the world to the events of
1989, with the discrediting of marxism as an alternative in which some
had still hoped. The development of the theology of liberation in the
1960's and 1970's was a response to the painful realities of Third World
poverty.

According to José de J. Legoretta Z., in his "Social Sciences and
Theological Method in Latin America," published in VOCES; Revista de
Teología Misionera de la Universidad Intercontinental of Mexico City,
the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of Vatican II
encouraged the use of the social sciences in analyzing social problems
to aid theological reflection. Liberation theologians began to
incorporate this analysis into their theology. In a situation of
extreme poverty and violence for most of their people, they used studies
which emphasized a relationship of victims to oppressors which was tied to the theory of dependence in Latin America. This analysis led some to endorse violent political revolution as a road to a utopian society.

Legoretta points out that as the social science analysis is changing,
theology should reflect this change.

Latin American theologians, reflecting on Vatican II thirty years later,
are calling for a profound theology which can address the new signs of
the times of the 1990's. They ask, which people did the Constitution on
the Modern World have in mind when it emphasized responding to the
aspirations of the people of our age? Their concern is that the Council
was more First World-centered in its concern to relate to
post-Enlightenment people and developed capitalist nations. The
question from Latin America is, according to José Luis Franco B. ("The
Relation Church-Modern World 30 Years after the Council," VOCES,
enero-junio 1996), to what point did the Council incorporate the problem of hunger, poverty and misery in today's world? His answer is that it did, perhaps not as strongly as some had hoped, but that a process began there which was further developed at Latin American Bishops' Conferences at Medellín, Puebla and Santo Domingo, which supported the preferential option for the poor, with all that goes with it.

According to Franco, the situation of the '90's is much worse in Latin
America than it was at the time of the Council--a true economic
disaster.

Franco emphasizes that the mission of the Church in her relationship to
the modern world not only calls for fidelity to Vatican II, to God and
to the Church, but also a deepening of this great option for the poor.
The relation in all of the Third World with the modern world takes place
today among the poor and demands our fidelity to these signs of the
times.

The books of the Catholic neoconservatives have been translated into
Spanish and are being promoted in Latin America. They are not what
Latin America needs, because they propose an option for the rich. The
trickles of the trickle down theory become drops of blood in Latin
America.

Franco points out that what we are lacking today is an adequate theology
of faith and history, a theology of the human and the divine, capable of
articulating from a totally new foundation a theology of life and
Christian existence which is Christologically consistent and which, from
this perspective, shows the unity between God and humankind--in
continuity with the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

The Crisis of Meaning in World and University

Schindler's book, with its roots in the theology of Henri de Lubac and
Hans Urs von Balthasar, is precisely this new articulation. Schindler
presents an ecclesiology which has the potential to transform both
socialism and democratic capitalism--exactly what is needed to respond
to the crisis.

Emphasizing the new liberation theology which goes beyond the older
version which tended to identify liberation basically with humanization,
with development and human progress and the first world theology of the
U. S., Schindler insists that the best theology does embrace all forms
of worldly justice--but is much more than that. It is theology which is
able to respond at the deepest levels to current realities and to the
challenges of modern and postmodern philosophers who have declared both God and meaning dead.

The Enlightenment of the 18th century endorsed freedom and rejected
religion, condemning it as superstition and replacing it with human
reason. If God was allowed to exist by Enlightenment thinkers, it was
only by placing him outside the cosmos, on the margins, having nothing
directly to do with meaning and life. In this view God is the
clockmaker who remains at a great distance.

Some of the worst critics of religion present, in Schindler's view,
important challenges. Some of the more recent ones were reacting to
Enlightenment ideas, but still do not put any hope in God.

The idea of a distant God led Nietzsche to declare God dead. He noted
that God had had nothing direct or internal to do with the meaning of
Western culture for some time. He said the "smallness of the modern
soul was only matched by its superficiality." This was an indictment of
the Enlightenment.

Jacques Derrida, a postmodern philosopher taught to all university
students in today's classrooms, takes this further. According to
Derrida, if God goes, so go the foundations of meaning. He teaches that
meaning has been detached from God--and so has unraveled. The
postmodern philosophers posit that the depths of meaning are vacant.
This is often called deconstructionism.

The basic methods of research, analysis and instruction in the
university are based on the ideas of modern and postmodern philosophers who believe that meaning is best gotten at through doubt and analysis--staying at a distance while breaking up meaning into its
ever-smaller identifiable parts. Some of these philosophies have looked
on identity of both God and human meaning on the order of a machine.

Schindler, with uncanny insight, points out that breaking up entities
and their meanings, in order to give them identity, is in fact not the
innocent matter it has so often been assumed by moderns to be. It is,
after all, possible to give identity not only after the manner of the
machine, but also after the manner of love.

Giving meaning the simple identity proper to a machine is little more
than atheism unfolded into a "method": it is the death of God enacted in
the form of all of our inquiry and research.

Parents of religious faith who sacrifice to send their children to
outstanding colleges often are not aware that students will be taught to
start all their studies with atheism. Schindler proposes instead,
giving meaning the relational identity proper to love, and thereby
unfolding trinitarian theism into a "method."

Schindler advocates beginning study with trinitarian theism (a generous
God) as opposed to atheism (a God who is inactive--dead--relative to the inner workings of the cosmos) as one's foundation of meaning.

Incredibly enough, Schindler argues that, while the logic of the machine
has its paradigm in modern philosophers like Descartes (the father of
this confused philosophical world), the logic of love finds it paradigm
in Mary's fiat.

There is much discussion today about how Catholic universities can
retain their Catholic identity and not become completely secular, as
have so many Protestant universities, such as Harvard and Yale.
Schindler proposes structuring Catholic universities as schools where
young people are exposed to the challenges of the Gospel, where studies
are directed toward hearing, understanding and implementing the Word,
where prayer would be brought back into knowledge and knowledge back into prayer, where all of creation would give glory to God. This is the way the university began.

Profound Theology of Church and World

In the fifteen-volume major theological work which he finished in 1987,
Balthasar looks to the lives of the saints (Vols. 2 and 3) when he
searches for the answers to the burning questions of the age. His
sections on Charles Péguy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and others are
outstanding. Schindler asks why he does not begin first with the
theologians and philosophers of the university who may have studied
these questions. Balthasar takes this unusual approach not because he
does not appreciate the distinct role of the intelligence, but because
he understands sanctity to comprehend the order of intelligence--putting
on the mind of Christ. Balthasar is the same theologian who decried the
split in the last several hundred years between theology and
spirituality and insisted on a "kneeling theology."

Schindler suggests that other ecclesiologies have unwittingly entered
into a bad marriage with the world. They fail because they bear a
defective understanding of the Church's relation to the world and of the
world itself. They presuppose an inadequate understanding of the
persons of Mary, Christ and the Trinity as they are analogously revealed
in eucharist and communio--the communion of love of the Trinity and of
Christians.

Before the Council, there was a too narrow, juridical understanding of
the Church, overidentified with the hierarchy. In the years since the
Council the "People of God" has been equated too simply with a worldly
democracy. The communio theology of Church advocated by Schindler
comprehends all of these elements of hierarchy, institution and
democracy (People of God).

Communio refers to the unity of many hearts brought about by the gift of
God in Christ--the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift that creates the
Church.

In this theology salvation is understood as intrinsically social and
incarnational. It includes the whole of the person in his or her
physical being and worldly activities, including the intelligence, and
is meant to begin already now, in this life.

As Schindler puts it: The implication is stunning: Christ's liberation
from sin is intended to make us whole, not only in a "supernatural" way,
but in a "natural" way also. Thus, the Church is the basis for
integrity of body and soul.

It is liberation in this sense which alone leads to the "civilization of
love" as the condition for the integrity of all worldly life, thought,
action and production. Hence, in a word: to cure the world, to liberate
any human or nonhuman entity or any aspect thereof to be truly what it
is, we must look to the Church. As Pope John Paul Ii has also said,
"There is no genuine solution to social problems apart from the Gospel."
The relationship of the Church (and of all creation as well) to God is
a nuptial one. Mary's consent to the Incarnation was a bridal consent,
acting for all the rest of created flesh. Schindler brings to the
reader insights from the thought of the early Church, which saw the
union of Christ with human flesh as a marriage union and interpreted the
marriage of Christ and the Church against the background of a
"fundamental marriage with mankind as a whole." There is a nuptiality
between God and the world since the Incarnation which will never be
destroyed.

The Church as Church must inform the world, not as a state or
government, but as the soul informs the body.

The Threefold Fiat

The free consent of Mary to the Incarnation, Jesus's consent to the will
of the Father and the consent of the Church and thus of each individual
Christian to God, are all crucial in this marriage relationship.

People often fear submission and obedience to God, to Christ, to the
Church, and to each other, and worry that obedience will destroy their
freedom, their personality, their creativity. The reality is the
opposite. Schindler emphasizes that the integrity of human nature is
not lost in following the way of God, but that this is the truest and
deepest form for all creaturely existence--being conformed through grace
to the image of the Son, the firstborn of all creation.

For Schindler (and for Balthasar) the starting point of all creative
activity in the world--and of holiness--is receptivity, based in the
consent (the fiat) of Mary, who heard God's word, embraced it and lived
it. This unity of contemplation and action is the highest form of
spirituality for all Christians, men and women alike. Hearing the Word
is the starting point that precedes and is in unity with creativity and
intense action.

Adrienne von Speyr, the Swiss woman mystic and physician who
collaborated with Balthasar in his life work, speaks of this attitude of
receptivity:

"Surrender to the Lord is an ascetical deed that contains in itself,
everything having to do with the Lord's plans for a person. And so, the
first quality of this deed is readiness, an open readiness that is not
always trying to calculate what for us is possible, easily possible,
then just possible and finally wholly impossible. This readiness has an
openness about it that has the courage of leaving to the Lord what is
his."

According to Balthasar (and Schindler), what our superficial Western
culture is lacking is the disposition of the fiat and of the radical
conversion of heart and mind which could allow us to perceive the
scandal of divine love and respond in obedience and loving service.
What is missing is a genuinely receptive-contemplative disposition
toward the other (God and neighbor).

An instrumentalism which emphasizes doing, making and having in relation to the other, instead of being, creates a "disposition of acting toward the other primarily in the interest of the self." There are countless examples of beginning with the interest of the self in our world today,from the economic system to the culture of death.

By contrast, authentic Christian spirituality requires renunciation. In
Balthasar's theology renunciation is involved in "hearing the word
correctly; but it becomes not a negation, but a mystery of joy and
liberation." This is the theology of beauty and God's glory that the
Scriptures speak of, even in the midst of suffering. It reminds us that
our lives, our realities as followers of Jesus are on another plane,
where time and eternity intersect, and "we only live, only suspire,
consumed either by fire or fire"-- a fire of Love which overflows to our
neighbor and even to societal structures.

This is the way of discipleship, the way of divine love, which can
transform our world.

Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XVI, No. 5, Sept.-Oct. 1996.