Viewpoint Thoughts for New Yorks new
archbishop
By PAUL SURLIS
Already New Yorks
archbishop-designate, Edward Egan, is being praised for his unswerving loyalty
to the Vatican. Singled out for mention are his condemnation of abortion,
homosexuality and any discussion of the ordination of women. These are
significant issues, but we do not have a single recorded word from Jesus on any
of them.
If, however, loyalty to Jesus and his explicit message and
concerns were the preferred criteria, then the new archbishop would find his
mandate in the gospel and especially in its message of good news for poor
people.
Jesus is presented in Lukes gospel as inaugurating his
ministry with a text from Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed
me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the
captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are
oppressed.
Never before was there such need to use the pulpit of St.
Patricks to make the prophetic message espoused by Jesus heard locally
and globally than today.
In a Jubilee year, the new archbishop might declare his overriding
concern to be justice for poor people and solidarity with them in their
struggles.
In New York City, poor people include the homeless, the people who
are forced to go each day to a soup kitchen for their one decent meal, the
single mothers with children who are forced to go from welfare to demeaning
work without training for better jobs, without adequate day care for their
children, without means of transport to better jobs. They include the sweatshop
workers who are treated worse than slaves.
They include the kitchen workers and others in the food trade who
often work for $2 per hour, 11 hours per day, seven days a week. They include
the farm workers who live in conditions that would be condemned for animals and
who work for less than the minimum wage while harvesting the food for the
richest, most sumptuous tables in the world. They include all workers who are
underpaid and exploited. Jesus condemnation of such injustice, blind to
human need and suffering, was clear and uncompromising.
In his frequent meals and associations with poor and oppressed
people, he was empowering them to start the dangerous but deeply humanizing
work of their own liberation.
The new archbishop may wish to pursue an analogous ministry in the
third millennium. He will put at the top of his agenda full co-equal rights for
women in public life and in all church offices and ministry. The alternative is
to sanction continuing decline in vocations and denial of Eucharist to
Catholics in deference to human laws that cry out for change.
His preaching will constantly be informed by the social teaching
of the church. He will ask not how can we give charity to poor persons, but why
are there poor people in the first place. And if the systemic causes of poverty
are kept in place by capitalisms corporate managers, then does not taking
handouts from poor people betray the demands of the gospel and social
justice?
He will address the concerns of inmates from New York City
incarcerated near the Canadian border, separated from their families, suffering
often from untreated addictions and often on the way to being released to inner
cities where few low-level jobs await them and where desperation may drive them
back to violence and crime.
The archbishop will recognize that to preach justice credibly the
church must itself be just.
Loyalty to the Vatican today may not be altogether a virtue,
especially since the Vatican often operates in an authoritarian fashion. It has
sought to stifle theologies of liberation with their gospel-based commitment to
social justice. The Vatican rides roughshod over the collegial functions of
worldwide conferences of bishops who are denied their legitimate role in
collaborating with the pope in teaching and guiding the church. Fidelity to
papal teaching on a list of sexual issues discussed without reference to their
socio-economic dimensions is made a litmus test for being a loyal Catholic,
including a loyal bishop.
In these circumstances, loyalty to the Vatican may well represent
disloyalty to gospel values. After all, when the Apostle Peter reneged on his
commitment to the Council of Jerusalem and its conclusion that converts to the
Jesus movement required baptism only and not adherence to all the ceremonial
and dietary laws of Judaism, Paul the apostle tells us that he withstood Peter
to his face.
In doing so, Paul opened the way for dynamic expansion of the
Jesus movement and gave what should have been an enduring example of the
validity of loyal opposition based on the deepest religious values, in contrast
to what would have been a destructive loyalty.
Fr. Paul Surlis is associate professor of social ethics at St.
Johns University in Jamaica, N.Y.
National Catholic Reporter, May 26,
2000
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