From the Editor's Desk

Reality and recovering hope

As we go to press in the week of Ash Wednesday, we have seen news show images of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. There was an almost anxious sense to the celebration, a need to show that the city is returning, that the party goes on, that the nation wants to believe a restoration is underway.

No one I know would want to throw gloom in the direction of the pre-Lenten bash. New Orleans deserves all the help it can get. So if businesses benefit and tourists return and a bit of pride is restored, it’s all to the good. Mardi Gras, though, fills the hope container in much the same way the success of the New Orleans Saints football team reflected well on the city. They are more symbols of a city’s will and endless hope than representative of the reality on the ground not too far from the glitzy debauchery of King Bacchus and the athletic heroics in a cleaned up Superdome.

Fr. Bryan Massingale understands that New Orleans is two cities, “one of charm, cuisine and Bourbon Street, and the other of hidden, desperate poverty.”

As he points out in his commentary, that description would apply to many U.S. cities. It’s just that in New Orleans the reality poured into our living rooms in vivid images during Katrina and its aftermath. ( See story)

Those who have been there and surveyed the damage always speak of how those images are sorely deficient, no matter how many you’ve seen, in depicting the scope and severity of the devastation. They talk about driving for miles and miles through destruction and seeing no end to it.

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New Orleans today, in the aftermath of Katrina, forces us to consider our understanding of the common good if, indeed, we can yet ponder such an idea. One might fear that we’ve become so Darwinian in our approach to considering others’ plight and those who have the least that we believe it is fine to leave the “losers” to their own devices. Massingale, who has done extensive study of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, particularly the years following the “I Have a Dream” speech, uses King’s image of “the beloved community” and Pope John Paul II’s concept of “solidarity” to fashion an approach to bridging the deep racial divides (conscious and unconscious) and the economic divides that split America.

This is far more than a predictable reaction from a black theologian just as Martin Luther King’s final years were about more than combating the most obvious effects of segregation. King’s experiences during his final years carried him deep into the American psyche as well as our history, and he came away understanding -- and preaching about -- the strong links that bind poverty, racism and war.

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Massingale brings vitality to a strain of Catholic thinking that is, unfortunately, in short supply these days. Our pages have chronicled the shrinking American Catholic project. From the concerns that are prominent on the bishops’ agendas to the staff the bishops have assembled to research and formulate positions on subjects, the prevailing instinct is to downsize. Some of it is a matter of financial reality; much of it is a matter of will. Beyond a narrowly defined “life” agenda, don’t expect much activism, save the occasional perfunctory statement, or engagement on other issues.

So it is left to people like Massingale -- in this time of preemptive war and amid horrifying images that document the consequences of racism and our neglect of the poor -- to connect the dots and to remind us that our Catholic tradition has “the stuff” to deal with such maladies. We have the stuff, as he says, to recover hope.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, March 3, 2007