Michael D. Whalen, C.M.*
Professor of Theology St. John's University
On December 2, 1998 the Vincentian Center for Church and Society invited our faculty to a Colloquium on Human Rights. At this time the papers which you have read were presented to the larger community of faculty and we joined in the international celebrations of the 50th Anniversary of the UN. Father Whalen set the context for this celebration with his remarks. We present them as a conclusion to this publication because these “musings,” as he calls them, direct our work to our religious and spiritual longings. Fr. Whalen challenges us to recognize that our search for human rights is rooted in our most profound theological and spiritual insights. He calls upon this Vincentian University to pursue its quest for a spirituality of human rights by advocating, educating, investigating and celebrating. He reaffirmed the challenge posed at the inception of the Center to continue the mission and tradition of St. Vincent de Paul in our University, in our times.
I am a Vincentian and one of my areas of expertise is Christian spirituality. I want to be clear that I am not an expert in moral theology, theological ethics, social ethics, or even plain old ethics. I am a sacramental and liturgical theologian with additional post-grad work in Christian spirituality. Areas, I think are related to a vision of human rights. I am here to make some connections between work on behalf of human rights and spirituality, more particularly Christian spirituality, and more particularly Vincentian spirituality. I say this not to be exclusionary, but only because, as we all know, postmodernity has dismantled all claims that pretend to be totalizing.
I would like to title my remarks today: “Musings on a Spirituality in Quest of Human Rights: What's a Vincentian University to Do?” I am going to make four simple suggestions. On behalf of human rights, a Vincentian University ought to advocate, to educate, to investigate, and to celebrate.
I would like to begin with the story of Murph the Irishman. Murph was a great lover of animals especially his dog Leppy. One day Leppy up and dies on him as living creatures do. Murph, of course, was distraught and approaches the parish priest, Fr. O'Toole. Having poured his heart out to the priest, he proceeded to ask the priest whether a Requiem Mass could be celebrated for Leppy and if it might be possible to bury Leppy in the cemetery alongside other family members. “Now Murph,” says the
*Rev. Michael D. Whalen, C.M., is a Professor in St. John's College since 1997. His recently published books are: Sermons and Feasts of the Church Year; Remembering the Saints; On the Threshold of Mystery: An Introduction to Sacrament; and Liturgical Catechesis: An Historical Overview and American Contributions. He has published numerous other research and popular articles and has given major addresses at Religious Education and Liturgical conferences. Prior to joining St. John's, he was an Assistant Professor of Religion at La Salle University, PA. He holds an S.T.D. in Historical Theology: Ritual Studies and a S.T.L. in Liturgical and Sacramental Theology both from The Catholic University of America, Washington DC. He earned a M.A. in Religious Education from LaSalle University, a M.A. in Systematic Theology from St. Charles Seminary, a Th.M. and a M.Div. from Mary Immaculate Seminary, and a B.A. in English from Niagara University.
priest, “this is the Catholic Church. We don't do things like that. We don't say Requiem Masses for dogs and we don't bury them in consecrated ground. But I can see you're distressed, so I'll tell you what. My good friend, Reverend Jones, is the minister at the Episcopal Church up the street. I'll give him a call and I know he'll have a service and burial for the dog.” Murph quieted down after this and thanked the priest profusely. On his way out the door, however, Murph turned to the priest and inquired if he could ask one more question. The priest nodded graciously. “You known, Father,” says Murph, “you and Reverend Jones are pretty much in the same business, so could you tell me what an acceptable offering would be. Do you think ten thousand dollars would be enough?” With this the priest steps back and puts his hands up. “Now wait one minutes, Murph,” says the priest, “you never mentioned that the dog was Catholic.”
I tell the story because, all joking aside, it illustrates well, in part, the fundamental human predicament, at least from a Christian perspective. How easily we are seduced.
The theme I was asked to develop in this presentation: “Human Rights and Our Deepest Longings,” is, to my mind, delightfully ambiguous. One cannot be sure if it means that human rights are our deepest longings, or human rights are quite separate from our deepest longings. When I first approached the topic I must confess, I thought the title was: “Human Rights: Our Deepest Longing.” From the beginning I have been convinced that this is not necessarily the case. That we prefer to highlight certain human rights on occasion because they serve personal gain is undoubtedly a well-founded claim. We have become a litigious crowd, to say the least. If you doubt this, tune into “Judge Judy” and the “People's Court.” Or, to put it another way, if it is true that human rights are our deepest longings, or at least among them, those deepest longings are often overshadowed by, shall we say, more shallow concerns. And it is perhaps helpful to remember this.
The Hebrew creation narrative in Genesis and its Christian appropriation remind us that very early on a snake slithered into the garden. It was not so much a gardener snake as it was a cobra and the garden has never quite been the same. Something went wrong. Christian theology has referred to this situation as “Original Sin” - original not so much because it was peculiar or even novel, but original because it is radical, that is, root. It flows in our veins; it is in our blood. And while various strains of the tradition evaluate its danger differently—some saying it is primarily a nuisance, others that it is flaw, and still others seriously deadening—all tend to regard it with great caution, even respect.
And so, we should not over-romanticize our yearning for human rights, overtaken as it often is by a yearning for less-than-human wrongs. Even the Christian tradition itself has sold its soul at the pawn shops of history for the will to power, the trinkets of commercialism and consumerism, or just downright brute pleasure. That is the bad news.
The good news is that for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, human rights are rooted in our most profound theological and spiritual insights, these being:
• That from a particularly Christian perspective, in the life of Jesus we encounter a vision of the reign of God marked by service, healing, liberation, reconciliation, and inclusion. That baseleia is our destiny.
There is a wonderful scene in the film The Shoes of the Fisherman, when the soon to be elected Pope Kyril I confesses to fighting a guard in a prison camp in order to steal food for a man whose jaw had been broken by another guard. At the end of the story, and in conflict with some of his brother Cardinals, he notes with passion: “The children of God are ours to protect and if we must fight, we fight.” Recognizing both the possible paternalism and militarism that might be hiding under the text, as a Catholic and Vincentian university, we might also say this as well: “The children of God are ours to protect and if we must fight, we fight.”
The first simple point I wish to make is in regard to the relationship between human rights, Catholic Christian (and Vincentian) spirituality, and Vincentian university education. A spirituality of human rights that is Christian and Vincentian, precisely because we are inclined toward self-centeredness, must be one that advocates constantly and untiringly on behalf of the poor, the marginal, the oppressed, those most vulnerable to being deprived of their rights, all those who often experience the world as set in brutal motion against them as it pursues its own self-centered existence (even if they do so at times unconsciously).
By way of an anecdote, in my spirituality class I often address these very issues when I deal with the story of Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac. I often begin the section by articulating something I once heard one of my confreres say, that is: “The best thing you can do for the poor is not be one of them.” I found it funny then; I still find it funny now though in a very different way. I generally find the reaction of the students, though, interesting because those who seem to laugh hardest, shaking their heads “yes,” are those who come from some rather tough and poor backgrounds. The others are either rather apathetic, or find it initially offensive, because it is perceived to be insensitive, or perhaps simply not politically correct. It takes several days to unpack the story of Vincent, the tragedy of poverty, and the structures that keep many people poor, and our often unwitting collusion in all this simply by virtue of our present lifestyles. (I am told, for example, that some environmentalists now estimate that for all the earth's citizens to enjoy a comfortable, not lavish, middle-class lifestyle that most of us consider ordinary, it would take an additional three planets the size and quality of Earth to provide such resources.)
The story above serves as a bridge to the second dimension of a spirituality on behalf of human rights which has implications for us as a Catholic university, that is, the need to educate. I mean this in both a broad as well as reciprocal fashion. I am sure by now many of us are well aware that the poor and the vulnerable are sitting in our classrooms. Dr. Susan Ebbs' most recent “Focus on Students” report makes this eminently clear. I examined it last week while sitting alone at a late lunch in our house and nearly choked when I read that 21.1% of the 1997 incoming freshmen were from families with a parental income of less than $19,999 and 41.5% from families with a parental income less than $50,00. 1
In a related matter, there is an interesting, though generally unnoticed, scene in the old 1939 film portraying the life of St. Vincent in which Vincent, once exposed to
148
the deep and daily tragedies of the poor, seeks his friend Fr. Portail who is in the midst of hearing confessions in his parish Church. Vincent movingly grabs Portail's arm and tells him: “Portail, I have just learned something terrible. If we are to save the souls of the poor, we must give them a life in which they can become conscious of having one.” This, I believe, captures the infrastructure of Vincent's approach. If I might paraphrase: If we are to save the souls of those deprived of basic human rights, we must give them a life in which they, and others, are conscious of having human rights. Perhaps we have to become conscious ourselves.
The difficulty is, however, that the state and the Church have sometimes been quite unconscious in this regard. We live relatively ordered lives, thinking that the whole world is equally so ordered. Or we simply choose not to see. We choose to look away.
I was recently in Washington, D.C. at the inauguration of Fr. Dave O'Connell, our former dean, as the President of Catholic University. One day I was riding the metro train over to Catholic University. The D.C. metro experience is one quite different from the New York subway experience. The metro cars are clean and neat. There is no graffiti. And a synthetic voice announces “Doors opening” and “Doors closing.” The seats are even padded and everyone seems seated, or at least orderly. New York subway cars are often littered and generally packed. People are constantly holding doors and a voice often screams over the speaker system, “Let go of the doors.”
As I reflect on myself in light of that experience, I realize how often I have lived life as if I was riding on the D.C. metro, quite unconscious of what's really happening above ground where people spend most of their lives. I live life below the surface. I do not always see the poverty, and the chaos, and the pain of many who live on the surface.
In a university setting, in order to educate others, we must also strive to investigate. That is my third point in this spirituality on behalf of human rights. Those disciplines and sciences which are, from my theological armchair, sometimes referred to as “secular” are the real key. What are the causes of the deprivation of human rights? How are those causes interrelated? And how are those rights related, and here I use the term in an arguably analogous fashion, to rights in other spheres? It seems to me that as I read through the papers for today, this spirit of study and investigation was very much at work.
This brings me to my final point. A spirituality of human rights involves the capacity to celebrate. My area of expertise is said to be liturgical and sacramental theology. I have for a long time now, believed that the cult mediates the culture, and likewise, culture forms cult. Put another way, one more germane to the topic at hand: there is an intricate connection between human rights and divine rites. I suspect we will never simply insure human rights by the promulgation and implementation of laws. Despite laws fixed in books, human rights are violated with great regularity. Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, classism—the whole constellation of distorted ideologies—continues to mar the landscape of the human imagination.
I have come to believe that the redemption of the imagination is effected, at least in part, by the capacity to celebrate God, or to put it another way, to worship, or, if you will, to perform the vision of human rights before God in praise, thanksgiving, and intercession. More specifically, from a Christian point of view, to sit at table in commemoration of Jesus of Nazareth in the hope of a renewed creation. In worship we pray God, if I may quote the First Eucharistic Prayer of Reconciliation used in the Roman Church: “In that new world where the fullness of your peace will be revealed, gather people of every race, language, and way of life to share in the one eternal banquet.” This vision is not far removed from the United Nations' definition that “human rights are the rights and freedoms that allow us to fully develop and use our human qualities, our intelligence, our talents, and our conscience and to satisfy our spiritual and other needs. They belong to everyone and are the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”
Conclusion:
In summary, a spirituality which engages human rights in the context of a Vincentian university is one that, in part, engages the need to advocate, to educate, to investigate, to celebrate. Vincent de Paul is noted to have once said: “Let us love God but let it be with the strength of our arms and the sweat of our brow.” Frankly, in a world where charity is no longer enough, where injustice is structured, where violence is subtle, a university such as this one can in fact be that strength and that sweat. I do not know about you, but it seems to me that a spirituality on behalf of human rights is hard work, especially in a university classroom, office, food court, and even gym. So we continue sweating.
ENDNOTE
1 Dr. Susan Ebbs is the Vice President of Student Life at St. John's University. Her report, dated fall of 1998, is
entitled “Focus on Students.” This informational report was presented at a new faculty orientation. It was
subsequently discussed in Teaching Excellence, a publication of the Center for Teaching and Learning at St.
John's University.
…the redemption of the imagination is effected, at least in part, by the capacity to celebrate God, to worship, …to perform the vision of human rights before God in praise, thanksgiving, an intercession.
Michael D. Whalen, CM