Disputed questions in religious history: The Crusades and the Inquisition

Are the Crusades and the Inquisition really still disputed? I mean, by now we all know that the Christians were the Bad Guys who committed lots of atrocities against the poor infidels in the Crusades and that the Inquisitors were Bad Guys who went around burning people left and right, right and left, don't we?
Wrong.
In the Crusades, the pendulum is swinging back to center from the "Christians as Bad Guys" position, and as for the Inquisition, extreme feminist historians notwithstanding who like to conjure up a white-robed army hunting down hordes of women and burning them as witches, well, there's another, less hysterical side to that story too.
It was time for a new book. Not a lengthy, scholarly book with lots of footnotes and other such apparatus--there are many such outstanding books--but a shorter, user-friendly book to appeal to the general reader and, even more importantly, to be used in college classrooms, that would make a contribution to setting the record straight.
Time for a disclosure. From time to time I review books that I have professionally edited and, in some cases, acquired for my publisher, and this is one of them. The author, Fr. John Vidmar, OP, is a historian on the faculty at Providence College, has done work on the Crusades and, as Archivist of the northeastern USA Province of the Order of Preachers, has access to all sorts of material in the archives, some of which relates to the Inquisition. His earlier book The Catholic Church Through the Ages is one of Paulist Press's best sellers (and is being revised and updated for its tenth anniversary--after all, we've had two new popes since the first edition came out), and so I asked him to consider writing on the Crusades and the Inquisition for our 101 Q&A series.
My brief to the author: Read as many of the latest books on the subjects--and there are plenty of them, by such outstanding scholars as Philip Jenkins, Christopher Tyerman, and others--and give us a balanced assessment of the situation: one that takes into account the recent writings and steers a middle course between the extremes.
This is what you have in the book under review. John Vidmar writes with a flair for narrative history and an obvious love of his subject matter. Noteworthy about this book is the way he draws a connection between the Crusades and the Inquisitions (and he does point out and explain the difference between the Roman and the Spanish Inquisitions -- they're not the same thing). He brings his treatment of the Crusades up to the present day by reflecting on how this segment of our history impacts Christian-Muslim relations today--surely a timely issue.
101 Questions & Answers on the Crusades and the Inquisition is a book by an author eminently skilled in putting material over to college and grad students as well as to general audiences. If you're interested in reading something that contributes to setting the record straight on the disputed questions of the Crusades and the Inquisition, I recommend that you buy it.

Pope Francis I and Fr. Edward Cleary, OP: Champions of Vibrant Latin American Catholicism

 

The election of Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to serve the Catholic Church as Pope under the name Francis I has been greeted with much rejoicing. Here, at last, is a pontiff who prefers simplicity and informality; who eschews the usual fancy trappings of the papacy; who even encouraged his compatriots not to make the expensive journey to Rome to witness his installation as pope but, instead, to give that money to the poor—of which there are all too many in his own and other Latin American countries.

Among those who have gone before us to heaven and are smiling at the election of Pope Francis I is Fr. Edward Cleary, OP, the late Director of Latin American Studies at Providence College. Ed, I would dare say, must have prayed very hard to get this man elected; he was an unstinting champion of Latin America and its people throughout his long, distinguished career, and his staggering list of publications—he was still hard at work on several more at the time of his sudden passing late in 2011—covers just about every imaginable aspect of Latin America, its people and their way of life.

One of Ed Cleary’s books on which I’m proud to have been his editor is How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church. Despite the countless pages that have been written about the dramatic rise of Pentecostalism and its winning of converts away from Catholicism, the Catholic Church still enjoys, by Ed Cleary’s reckoning, vigorous health in Latin America.

In stark contrast to Europe and North America, the numbers of priests and seminarians in Latin American countries shows a vibrant church: between 1964 and 2004 the number of Catholic priests increased by 40 percent, and in Mexico it doubled. As for seminarians, their numbers sextupled between 1972 and 2004. Similarly with lay involvement: in contrast to the precipitous decline in church attendance in Europe and North America, Latin America has witnessed an explosion of lay involvement, not only in church attendance but also in lay ministerial activity.  Indeed lay initiative in Latin America, above all as catechists, originally took off as a result of priest shortages, and catechists remain a vital and indispensable presence in the Latin American Catholic Church.  In fact, the way in which several Latin American countries historically coped with priest shortages in the past is the subject of a book Fr. Cleary was working on when he died. Tentatively titled The Challenge of Priestless Parishes: Learning from Latin America, it will be published by Paulist Press next year. As the subtitle suggests, the book’s final chapter, by Fr. David Orique, OP, Ed Cleary’s successor at Providence College, explores what we in the USA might profit from should we end up facing priestless situations as challenging as what Latin America has experienced in the past. 

The exhaustive research done by this indefatigable sociologist shows that our new pope hails from a region in which Catholicism is not moribund but vibrant and growing. As Fr. Orique observes about How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church, “With the election of Pope Francis I, the first Pope from the Americas, this book provides invaluable understanding of and appreciation for the most Catholic region of the world.”

God's Beauty as a Way into Justice

“What if we were to begin our study of Christian ethics not with an examination of our moral duties or the ethical principles that should guide our personal and communal lives, but with an exploration of the call of beauty?” In the opening sentence of his brief (160 pages), lucidly written book, Patrick T. McCormick provocatively suggests the idea that forms the thesis of God’s Beauty: A Call to Justice (Liturgical Press, 2012). The book’s title may lead one to anticipate one of those “spiritual,” even somewhat New Age-y meditations on beauty, perhaps with a bit of Von Balthasar’s aesthetics thrown in to give it some gravitas, but, as the subtitle, A Call to Justice, signals, it’s anything but. Justice—in particular, social justice and environmental justice—is a hard sell in Catholic circles. Any Catholic publisher can tell you that. McCormick suggests sweetening the pill by doing away with the moralizing or gloom-and-doom preaching and adopting a positive approach: a way into justice via beauty that is compelling and appealing, one that shows not the dire consequences if such justice is not realized but, instead, the harmony and attractiveness of what really stands to be achieved.
The author develops his argument in four parts. First, having followed the ancient classical authors (Plato and Aristotle, for example) in equating beauty with harmony and therefore with justice, he sets out the scriptural basis for this concept in “four biblical visions of the beautiful and righteous community.” Two of those visions use the creation accounts of Genesis to demonstrate the beauty and harmony of God’s creation—thus, harmony and justice are integral to the very fabric of creation, God’s work of art. Humanity is woven into the very web of this creation, and not, as some would prefer to interpret it, given the right to a dominion that justifies unlimited exploitation and even destruction of other species. Humans are called to be cocreators with God, a call that demands the maintenance of God’s original harmony and justice.
The third biblical vision uses “the beauty of the Promised Land” to describe what beauty, harmony, and justice should look like in human society. The Egyptian captivity of the Hebrews was ugly because human beings were enslaved to produce for their captors wealth and prosperity that they themselves were never allowed to enjoy. Can we see such a situation as a prototype of our world today? I think McCormick wants us to: his use of illustrations from classical and popular art is compelling, and when one reads his description of the scene in Pottersville from Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, one wonders whether, in this nightmare vision of a society in which the majority of the people suffer the oppression of the greedy few, Capra was prescient.
The second part of the book’s argument develops the idea that people have a right to beauty—not just those who can afford fancy homes with stunning views, but all people, including and especially the poor, who are least likely to live where they have access to beauty. This is not McCormick’s original idea—indeed, he cites a number of sources, including the Vatican Pontifical Council for Culture and liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who make this claim. The nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution produced appalling conditions and thus also a number of commentators, including D.H. Lawrence and Friedrich Engels, who deplored the ugliness in which the working classes were forced to live. It’s interesting to think of Christian clergymen siding with the likes of Lawrence and Engels, but this is what happened. The Anglican Ritualist priests, such as John Mason Neale (the translator of Latin Breviary hymns) and Alexander Heriot Mackonochie, made a point of putting on especially beautiful church services with music, “smells and bells,” and their best vestments, as a way of relieving the ugliness chronic in the lives of the London slum dwellers. The Catholic poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, assigned to a desperately poor parish in Glasgow, deplored the ugliness of the slums and regretted that the people hadn’t a bit of beauty in their surroundings which, he postulated, might have helped to mitigate the tendency toward vice.
The author also comments on the irony of women being objectified and mistreated because of their beauty—its power held in suspicion—and yet, on the other hand, constantly subject to what is known as “the male gaze,” told that they’re not beautiful enough and thus made to spend an inordinate amount of time and money on products and treatments to “beautify” themselves still further. (He does not address the very real marginalization of women who are not merely “not beautiful enough” but are actually physically ill-favored and unattractive; but then it could be argued that this does not fall strictly within the scope of the book.)
In the third part of his argument, McCormick discusses “the beautiful stranger,” anyone we regard as “the other,” anyone different from us, making the point that Jesus himself took on the role of alien, outcast, and exile. Indeed, he suggests provocatively, “We might better appreciate the scandal and sting of the stable and manger if we replaced our Renaissance and baroque images of the nativity with pictures of real homeless women clutching their crying and colicky babies, trying to protect them from the cold, hunger, and disease that stalk them so.” What if one of the many gifted documentary photographers operating today were to photograph such a woman and feature the photo on a Christmas card? What does it say about our society that very few people would purchase and send such a card?
Fourth, and finally, McCormick uses the thought of conservationist Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, to argue for the importance of “tending Eden’s beauty” and caring for creation. His contention that appealing to beauty may be the most effective way to bring about ecological conversion is right on the mark; what is particularly interesting here is his following of Leopold to widen the concept of beauty. Leopold sought to establish awareness that beauty in nature isn’t to be found only in the obvious places—“the prettiness of isolated mountain scenes, waterfalls, or ocean sunsets”—but also “in all the simple, small, ordinary creatures of nature.”       
Leopold was prophetic here and McCormick does right to use this as the basis of his argument; but McCormick weakens his argument somewhat by a tendency, first, to reduce earlier conservation efforts to instilling a love of “pretty scenery,” and then to construct an opposition between such “traditional” thought and Leopold’s thought.  McCormick appears to be basing his equation of the earlier conservation movement with love of pretty scenery on the work of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, both epigones of the Hudson River School. Undeniably, Bierstadt (1830-1902) catered to popular taste by creating awe-inspiring, at times exaggerated paintings of the “lofty mountain grandeur” to be found in the American West. And it is a matter of historical record that paintings by Moran (1837-1926) were responsible for the establishment of America’s first National Parks. But go back to the earliest generation of the Hudson River School, particularly to its founder, Thomas Cole (1801-1848), whose paintings are recognized as early statements of a conservation ethic, not because they are “pretty scenery”—they are not—but because they incorporate such elements as the blasted tree, or the railroad violating the once pristine landscape, to draw attention to the insidious destruction of the environment by those whom Cole famously termed “dollar-godded barbarians.” Not for nothing is New York’s Hudson Valley considered the cradle of the American conservation movement. Nor, in more recent times, can we disregard the important role of photographers—one thinks especially but not only of Robert Glenn Ketchum—in raising awareness about conservation by documenting environmental degradation. A reading of the essay by photographer Robert Adams on “Photographing Evil” is helpful here.
But where McCormick is quite correct is in his casting doubt on the appropriateness of relying on the power of pretty scenery to move people to want to “tend Eden’s garden.” It may have worked in the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, but no more. Coincidentally, as I was reading God’s Beauty I was also leafing through Yosemite: The Promise of Wilderness with a two-part essay by Tim Palmer about the constant struggle to keep our first National Park as what it was meant to be—a wild place—and the stunning photography of William Neill, a former student of Ansel Adams who has lived in Yosemite for much of his life. Each in his own way, Palmer and Neill make clear that beautiful scenery, as such, is not guaranteed to inspire respect for the environment, not when ongoing efforts are needed to prevent commercial interests from pandering to today’s consumer entertainment mentality and turning Yosemite into just another resort where people can do the same things they would have done at home but in a different setting. The several thousand cars that snake their polluting way through this beautiful park, or Neill’s photograph of a swimming pool such as one can see at many a cheap motel along almost any major American highway, are proof that the future of Yosemite, and of the conservation movement as a whole, is in the hands of those who take Leopold’s land aesthetic seriously.
McCormick calls for a holistic reading of Scripture by which texts are read in relation to other texts and not in a vacuum. In this way a fundamentalistic focus on and interpretation of Genesis 1 that would give human beings an unlimited claim on space (“be fruitful and multiply”) and goods (“have dominion”) is avoided. Although subtle and implicit rather than overt, McCormick challenges the assumption, so dear to the so-called “pro-life” movement, that humans have an unlimited right to “multiply and fill the earth.”
God’s Beauty is an important first step toward developing the idea of beauty as a way into justice. Those already interested in ethics should read it, and those who have resisted thinking about the challenges of justice will also find this a most palatable way to start.

If Cardinal Martini Had Been Pope

Reincarnation or resurrection? Either way, I’m back after a bit of a hiatus.

In my initial post I disclosed that some of the books I’ll be reviewing have been published by the company for which I work as an editor. The subject of this post is one such book, and I was very privileged indeed to have edited the English translation (the original was in German). It's Night Conversations with Cardinal Martini: The Relevance of the Church for Tomorrow by Cardinal Carlo M. Martini and Georg Sporschill (Paulist Press, 2013). Cardinal Carlo Martini was a great scholar, cardinal archbishop of Milan, Italy, and for quite a while was considered papabile or worthy of being elected pope. One can’t help but think what a different church it would have been had Cardinal Martini been given the opportunity of occupying the See of Peter: more humane, more in touch with the times, more down to earth, and thus, most importantly, appealing to young people, who are, after all, the future. I profoundly regret that this never happened.

Shortly before his death in August 2012, Cardinal Martini gave an interview in which he challenged the church to embark on a radical journey of change. He went so far as to assert that the church is two hundred years behind the times. Some people responded by asking why he never had the courage to come out and say these things earlier. Well, the fact is that he was always tirelessly working to realize the kind of church he thought it should be—the kind that would truly meet the needs of the People of God. This book, Night Conversations, is a fascinating, personal book that develops his thoughts and offers a tantalizing glimpse of what the church might have been like had he occupied the Chair of Peter. His partner in conversation is a fellow Jesuit and prominent Austrian priest, Fr. Georg Sporschill. Cardinal Martini and Fr. Sporschill met in Jerusalem, where the Cardinal had gone to live after his retirement, and they became friends as they shared a passionate search for ways in which the message of Jesus of Nazareth can still be effective for tomorrow.  What can faith mean for life? What future is there in the church for young people, and what must be changed so that Christianity itself has a future? What would Jesus say today?  Actual questions from young people serve as catalyst for deep thought. 

This is a short, well organized, well translated book. Read it, reflect on it, and, if you agree, pray that another brilliant and compassionate man of this calibre may soon come to the fore in church leadership--one who will ensure the relevance of the church for tomorrow.