Suffering Makes Us Light: The Political Theology of I Peter

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that at the time just right, He may exalt you. Cast all your brokenness on Him, for He cares about you. …After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, Who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To Him be dominion into the ages. Amen” (I Peter 5:6-7, 10-11).

Allow me to backtrack a little. As I noted several days ago, the vast majority of the first matins readings for Eastertide come from the Johannine corpus. The exception (other than the office for Easter Sunday, a selection from Colossians on the Second Sunday of Easter, and a reading from Ephesians on Ascension) is that most of Easter week is given over to the first letter of Saint Peter.

My post on First Peter (“To Lose is to Win”) was well received, and I wanted to write a follow-up. But I couldn’t manage it until now. There was so much I wanted to say. It probably should be a book. Another reason for the delay is that I wanted to grapple with the issue of Holy Saturday, Christ’s descent into hell. That article of the creed is directly attested in Scripture only in this epistle.

But the context for that investigation must be: what is the first papal encyclical all about? It’s about suffering in the time between the Paschal Mystery and the Parousia with the appropriate apocalyptic sensibility and what it means to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (2:9). That is, it is a political theology. Peter explores what kind of person, or subject, we must be as Christians if we are to carry out the mission entrusted to us, to preach a Gospel meant to permeate every society and to reach back even to the dead (synchronic and diachronic universality).

What strikes me most about this letter is its thematic universalizing of Christian brotherhood, briefly noted in my previous post, the unqualified radicality of Christian solidarity. Christianity has always been the truth of authentic fraternity and egalitarianism, for we are the people of, and in, the man for all, Jesus Christ.

Existence in the world, in time, means passing through fiery trials. There is no way around them. If Christians are in the vanguard of that suffering, then it is as it should be. Christ came to suffer for all, to suffer in all. Where the Master is, there will His servant be. “For the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God; if it begins with us, what will be the end for those who do not obey the gospel of God? …Therefore, let those suffering in accordance with God’s will entrust themselves to a faithful Creator, while continuing to do good” (4:17, 19).

There is a hermeneutical principle here: whenever judging is to be done, it must be of ourselves first. The sifting must always begin with me, and with the household of faith. The point is NOT that we look at non-Christians and say, “Those unbelievers sure have it coming. How lucky I am to be a Christian.” That would be a diabolically inverted misreading of the whole letter and of the substance of Christianity. The point is this: if it is hard for us to undergo the fiery trial of human existence, how much more urgently must we do the good work of evangelizing those who do not have the faith and hope we have been given in Christ. Chosenness is always and only for mission. A holy nation amongst the nations exists to share Jesus with the nations. Period.

When Saint Peter alludes to the levitical holiness code in 1:14-16, he is not regressing into pharisaism. It’s all about love, as the Johannine corpus emphasizes: “Now that your souls have been purified by obedience to the truth resulting in unhypocritical brotherly love (philadelphia), love one another fervently, from the heart” (1:22-23).

This love alone eludes the futility that mocks human life. And that love fruits in a certain ethical bearing: “Therefore, having put away all malice and all guile and hypocrisies and envies and all evil speakings [katalalias], as newborn babes, desire the pure rational (logikon) milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation…” (2:1-2).

What should make us different from the world? We leave behind sins against communion. We are a people chosen to build up communal love. Unnuanced translations obscure this. The constitution of the people of God (“called out of darkness into His marvelous light”—2:9) is not in the first place deliverance from sexual sin. A typical translation of 2:11: “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that war against the soul.” The vexed question here, as in Saint Paul and Saint John, is, “what is sarx/flesh?” Does the “flesh” mean simply our corporeality? No, that is obviously incorrect. “Flesh” means the ensemble of human powers as misaligned according to futile and self-destructive desire.

I maintain that the central “organ” of the “flesh” is our spiritual appetite, that is, our will. That is, “flesh” is, above all, perverse spiritedness (thumos). In the fallen human condition, our fundamental loves are disordered, and in the first place that means we desire to dominate others (what Saint Augustine calls the libido dominandi), and maintain our worldly status, by slander and rash judgment. My neighbor must decrease, that I might increase. The worst sins are the sins of the Pharisee.

Yes, the libido dominandi perverts sexual desire, in often spectacularly cruel ways. But it is a perversion of the will before it is a perversion of sense appetite.

The Spirit of Christian love breaks into history through the lives of Christians. The ethics that Saint Peter goes on to present in chapters 2 and 3, an ethics of Christian absorption of evil through all the ranks and orders of society, is an apocalyptic ethics, the only way those secular orders become transformed into the holy order of hierarchy, which is simply the transmission of God’s gracious goodness.

The chosen people are to display their love in the face of cursing, and this love is not something simply in-house, as if philadelphia is parochial: “fervent love, from the heart” is the fire the Christian progressively becomes, for all the world, precisely by undergoing suffering patiently. “Conduct yourselves in a beautiful way among the Gentiles, so that, though they speak evilly [katalalousin] against you as evildoers, they may see your beautiful deeds and so glorify God in the day of visitation” (2:12). Obviously, the Christian remit is to bring every one of the world’s nations to the mercy of God.

When Saint Peter rounds off his instructions about everyone’s patient submission to the (murderous and mad) emperor (the one who would have him crucified upside down), the submission of slaves to masters, and the relations of husband and wife, with a return to the theme of love, this must be understood as an exhortation to love that goes beyond loving fellow Christians: “The point, the telos, [is this]: all of you, be of one mind, empathetic, loving towards one another, tender-hearted, humble-minded. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called, that you might inherit a blessing” (3:8-9).

We have been called out of darkness (2:9). What was that darkness? It was the darkness of the “flesh,” of having the dynamisms of our soul impelled by a stygian and blind impulsivity, a perverse spiritedness (epithumia): “Therefore, Christ having suffered in the flesh (sarki), arm yourselves also with the same way of thinking, because whoever has suffered in the flesh (sarki) has ceased from sin, so as no longer to live the time remaining in the flesh (sarki) in the enthusiasms (epithumiai) of men, but in the will of God” (4:1-2).

These infernal enthusiasms or addictions lead us to curse one another to get ahead in the world and to satisfy our libido dominandi. There are dark gods at work here (one need only think of abortion or violent pornography or the sex trade).

Saint Peter gets to the root. It’s not sensuality as such that’s a problem. It’s the libido dominandi, which he hints arises from a kind of Dionysian orgiastic cultic context: “For you have already spent enough time participating in the counsels of the Gentiles, having proceeded in brutal wantonness, enthusiasms (epithumiai), drunkenness, ecstatic revels [definite Bacchic/Dionysian overtones in komois], carousing, and unconventional idolatry, wherein they, blaspheming, think it strange that you are not running with them into the same overflow of accursedness” (4:3-4).

That is, our idolatries, our pursuits of wealth, pleasure, honor, power, easily assume the cast of religious and cultic fervor. Think Bataille’s “accursed share,” which in its lack of differentiation, mixes the dark and bloody gratuity of the pagan sacrificial system with the true gratuity of festival and art, the care of children and giving more gifts than one receives, of life itself and the liturgy of adorning public spaces. There are two fundamental religious stances to take in the world: the Dionysian pagan, who would offer up victims; and the Christian, who offers himself up for victims. And it needs to be pointed out, there are many non-Christians who are less pagan than many Christians. The sacrifice of a person by defaming him has become something of a solemn communal ritual (the scapegoat mechanism) among many Christian clerics, laymen, and religious.

But here at the depth of pagan darkness, is the second mention of Christ’s descent into hell by Saint Peter (we’ll circle around to his first discussion), in 4:5-6: “[These Gentiles] will give an account [logos] to the One Who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this reason indeed was the good news preached to the dead that they might be judged indeed as men in the flesh (sarki), but live as God does, in the Spirit (pneumati).”

All of our works of the flesh will be judged, but Christ is sent even to those in the most hellish stances, set against all that is innocent, in order that they might be saved. This is remarkable. Truly, Jesus seeks the lost. The most chthonic thumos is to be purified and elevated by the Holy Spirit of the total self-sacrificial love of Christ.

It always comes back to divine love growing in us: “The end of all things is at hand; therefore, be prudent and vigilant for your prayers. Above all, hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins” (4:7-8). Reconciling love. Love that brings the sinner out of darkness into the Father’s marvelous light.

The whole teaching on Holy Saturday, on Christ’s descent into hell, in its scriptural and papal origins, is presented to demonstrate the radicality and totality of the reconciling love of God. Jesus is the Just Who dies for the unjust. This radical solidarity with all humans, while yet enemies, is the subjective position any Christian is supposed to assume precisely in assuming a life in Christ.

Not only should we not curse our current persecutors; we should not curse the dead, that is, wish them to be in hell. Of course. Cursing is the business of the Adversary, and him alone.

We finally turn to Saint Peter’s introduction of the theme of the descent. We note that he says something much like that soaring affirmation of moral realism Socrates insists upon in Plato’s Gorgias: it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. When we are cursed, we are to absorb it and return a blessing: “For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil” (3:17). To speak evil against someone (katalaleo), to curse, slander, run down, mock, would be grave evil, even if done as a response to an outrage perpetrated against one. Jesus is reviled and killed, and He begs forgiveness for us killers and revilers. Saint Stephen is cursed and stoned, and he begs forgiveness for his murderers (a prayer we can assume to have been essential in the conversion of Saint Paul).

 “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the just man on behalf of unjust men, in order to bring you [leaving no doubt about our being among the ‘unjust men’] to God” (3:18).

And then we go right into Christ’s descent into hell: “Having been put to death in the flesh (sarki), yet having been made alive in the Spirit (pneumati), in which also to the spirits (pneumasin) in prison having gone, Christ made a proclamation to those who in former times did not obey, when the longsuffering of God was waiting in the days of Noah, while was being prepared the ark in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water” (3:18-20).

Where does this come from? I believe it to be at the heart of what Saint Peter is trying to teach in this letter. The unilateral love of God the Father poured out in Christ seeks every lost soul, every single one. From the heights of eternity, as transposed to the heights of the Cross, Jesus is able to reach back in time into the lives of everyone who had ever lived before His coming, as He reaches into every life after. (“He loved me, and gave Himself up for me”—Galatians 2:20.)

Now, we know dogmatically that any person who is saved is saved before death. It is my speculation that the hope for the salvation of those who are not baptized has to do with the “moment” of death. This is a whole other essay (or book!), but my proposal has to do with the revelations to Saint Faustina combined with that astonishing passage in Gaudium et spes 22, probably the most dogmatically phrased proposition in the Pastoral Constitution: “Given that Christ died for everyone, and given that the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, that is, it’s divine, we are obliged to hold [tenere debemus] that the Holy Spirit offers to everyone the possibility of joining in this Paschal Mystery in a manner known to God.”

The normal means of joining in the Paschal Mystery is through baptism. But what is baptism? It is our sacramental configuration to the suffering, death, and Resurrection of Jesus. If a person isn’t baptized, when might it be fitting to be configured to the Paschal Mystery? It would seem one’s own dying would be exactly the occasion.

Saint Peter is clearly speaking of baptism in referring to the Noah typology.

Let me propose a constellation, which admittedly owes much to Balthasar: Holy Saturday means entombment means baptism means the final extent of solidary suffering, reaching into sin’s deepest places (vicarious substitution, victim souls). And Spirit is the medium of solidarity: pneumati. Spirit speaks to spirit. Divine love wishes to transform our spiritedness (our thumos), so that our “flesh” becomes transfigured into an instrument of love. We must suffer to be so transformed, and being transformed, must suffer so as to help others be transformed.

There are many details to be worked out, but this post is overlong as is. The basic emphases of Saint Peter’s whole letter must be borne in mind to make sense of what he’s doing: human existence is a fiery trial, often because people curse to get ahead. The Christian must love, not curse, and that means suffering more. In any case, the Christian suffers FOR those who curse. If we are Noahs in this age, then we will be mocked. The Christian response is not, “To hell with you.” It is rather, “May you see in my patient absorption of your evil, the loving gaze of the Father upon you, Who pursues you into your darkest places by His Son Jesus. I will not hate you in turn. I am in Christ, and Christ will chase your spirit into the most hellish places. He endured and, God help me, continues to endure my betrayals of love in order to hold onto me. He’s coming for you too. That’s a very good thing. I hope you see that in my eyes.”

An Addendum on Cursing

After my first post on First Peter, other thoughts about cursing came to me. I began noticing how easy it is to casually curse others. Whenever a driver cuts me off, I might say a coarse word. (Not that I would ever do such a thing…) And it occurred to me, you know there’s a reason these are called “curse words” or “swear words.” Their use can in fact be a solemn act. One doesn’t have to say “damn you” to be wishing another ill through a curse word. There’s a reason Saint Peter and Saint Paul and Saint James want us to clean up our language. It’s not rigorism. It’s that curse words in fact can make us instruments of the Adversary and his legion, the principalities and powers whose only mission is to curse us. Spiritual warfare is very real. When we wish another person ill at some level, that person may in fact be assailed. His life might collapse. It is anti-Christ to be part of such a thing. It is to become an adversary, a minion of the enemy of human nature (and I don’t mean a little, yellow, banana-loving creature).

Now, there are many instances using coarse language is appropriate, and even its comedic value shouldn’t be overlooked. But when we use such language in anger, we have to be very careful we are not in some way wishing ill upon another person.

There is yet another horizon. Sometimes something goes wrong, and if I say a coarse word, am I not cursing the order of the world? Am I not impugning the goodness of the Father? I know I have to do better. And I ask for your prayers that my faith in the Father’s goodness grow no matter how dark things are.

Eternity in Our Hearts

[This is the first of my "From the Chairman" blogs for Massachusetts Citizens for Life: http://www.masscitizensforlife.org/eternity-in-our-hearts/]

Easter does not mean forgetting the dead. Indeed, Easter would be nullified if we did so.

Jesus rises, not by erasing the history of suffering, but by absorbing all of it. He does not magically wave it away. He endures it in His own Person, and thus recapitulates it within the eternity of divine love. His love goes to the end—and only thus does He get through.

Pro-lifers know this, deep in the bone. You know this, all of you who have lost someone. We will not take a holiday from remembering. We know that any joy that is true must be gained in the teeth of wounding memory. The alternative is to find some drug, some anaesthetic, to repress the past.

We are not obstinate and morbid to guard the memory of suffering. We gladly, gladly rejoice. But we do it honestly, not in bourgeois indifference.

Joy knows how to dance without dishonoring the dead. To live time well means progressing without ungratefully, heedlessly walking on the graves of those whose suffering and passing somehow sustain our own passage through history. Remembering the dead means, first of all, that we will not appease today’s destroyers. We will do everything reasonable to impede and overcome the violence laid upon the victims.

True joy means holding the victims in our hearts and knowing that they will be vindicated. If we did not sing at Easter, how could we continue the long twilight struggle?

Easter is when eternity begins to subdue the chaos of time, the death and violence that seem to be its very metronome.

In one of the greatest novels, Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin sings of providence, and of how, somehow, in the whole, everything is itself whole. I draw such joy and hope from these words, which describe history as held by God the Father’s loving goodness:

“The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is. Everything that ever will be, is. In all possible combinations. Though we imagine that it is in motion and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. So any event is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible.”

Something Saint John Paul writes in The Gospel of Life comes to mind:

“Revelation progressively allows the first notion of immortal life planted by the Creator in the human heart to be grasped with ever greater clarity: ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time; also He has put eternity into man’s mind’ (Ec 3:11). This first notion of totality and fullness is waiting to be manifested in love and brought to perfection, by God’s free gift, through sharing in His eternal life.”

Unconquerable life, invincible because become all love: Easter is a fire and it comes on. We rejoice in its progress.

Revival of the Walking Dead

“I know your works. You have the name of being alive, but you are dead.” (Revelation 3:1)

Today’s first matins reading presents what Jesus wants Saint John to write to the churches in Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. A pattern can be noticed in this grouping. The complaints the Lord levels against Sardis and Laodicea have to do with their comfort and complacency, while Philadelphia is praised for its social littleness and faithfulness under pressure.

The words quoted above are the beginning of Jesus’ arraignment of Sardis. These Christians seem to be thriving, but they are prettified zombies. If we think successful Christianity can be captured in Catholic Directory stats or chancery program metrics, then we’ve misunderstood everything about the revolution of the heart Jesus brings about in His Kingdom.

Or if we think that being alive is to “make it” in the world, we should hear Jesus’ voice in T. S. Eliot’s jeremiad on modern, secularized civilization in The Waste Land:

 Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

But Jesus does not judge the vacuity of our lives as an end in itself: He is the absolute champion of humanity, after all. He makes His case out of mercy, to make us youthful, exuberantly alive:

“Keep vigil and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works brought to fulfillment before my God. Remember, therefore, how you once received and heard; keep to that and convert.” (Revelation 3:2-3)

We should remember the plea of Jesus to Ephesus to return to the first love of seeing everything new in Jesus. By that living flame, failing things revive. What is the particular work that the Father has entrusted to each of us, which we have not yet brought to fulfillment because we have been distracted by something less than ultimate?

“If, therefore, you do not keep vigil, I will come as a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you.” (Revelation 3:3)

A lover, in the full flush of love, keeps vigil for the beloved, even if that beloved is detained by some unfathomable agony. That is the stance of the authentic Christian, straining at any possible sign of the approach of the Lord. Christian subjectivity is structured by this in-love attentiveness to the God Who repeatedly and surprisingly advenes in Christ. By contrast, worldly or secularized subjectivity is essentially heedless of the visitations of divine love. To be of the world is to live within a closed horizon, to be one of the foolish virgins, not one of the wise. Secularization means being the strongmen of our own domains, for whom Jesus is always a thief.

To be despoiled of the whole world by the heavenly thief is to wake up to the infinite wealth of love.

Become All Flame

“I hold this against you, though, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember, then, from where you have fallen. Convert and do the works you did at first.” (Revelation 2:4-5)

A conversion to young love. That is the urgent, perennial challenge to the Christian.

All that filled our hearts when we first really saw the goodness of the Lord, or that fills us anew when that goodness comes to us, at odd times, in a loving smile, in kindness received or witnessed, in the presence of a sacrificial heart that conquers in capsizing, in the variable wonders of nature, in the deep nourishment of high culture: these glories are too strong to stay in time. So sometimes it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be in love.

For the rest of the Easter season in the breviary, we will hear from Saint John, in his letters and in the Apocalypse (the Revelation) given to him.

In today’s reading, Jesus instructs John to write first to the church that would have been his see, the church at Ephesus, where he carried out Jesus’ command to take care of Our Lady.

And that letter to Ephesus is an appeal to fall in love again.

Love, in its every manifestation, should tend towards being first love. “Love one another”: we should be powered by the brimming gratitude that would master the engines of the world so that we might do for every neighbor and for the world, in the power of God, what the Father’s goodness given us in the Spirit of Jesus has done for us. We would share the joy of Christian faith, excel at friendship, reconcile with those who've hurt us, bring back the dead, shield the babies and the elderly, ward the innocence of children, give hope to addicts, destroy the sex trade, teach truth out of aching mercy, bring our wealth to the starving and the unsheltered and the disease-ridden, emancipate minds and hearts in the grandeur of the liberal arts and of Christian civilization, rebuild this republic, slay the monsters of terrorism and tyranny.

And yet we also know worldly power cannot be mastered from within time. Love would attempt it all, again and again, even while recognizing, deep down, the inevitability of failure. Where is the church of Ephesus now?

Ours it is, in any case, to be the lampstand that is not removed.

First love is reckless, and somehow love manages to open a future because it is reckless. For One did not reck the rood, and thus all power has been given to Him. His Kingdom is coming. The revolutionary fire of history is love. Are we there at the renovation of the ages?

To Lose is to Win

If the world order is, in fact, a closed system ruled by scarcity, then it is imbecility to live the Christian life.

So it is with attitudes ranging from sophisticated bemusement to raw hostility that Christians are regarded by those who do not believe in Christ’s divine suffering on humanity’s behalf.

Of course, there are many of us Christians who aren’t good Christians—Pharisees, who denounce the world but, given the suffering human being right in front of us, are cold as ice. The world is right to judge this. It is deepest evil, and requires more mercy than is needed by non-Christians, for this is worldliness masquerading as Christianity.

But that is not what I want to discuss. It is the strange figure cut by the earnest Christian that should be explored.

Such Christians takes Christianity seriously enough to incarnate it in their everyday lives, in a life of prayer, liturgy, asceticism, longsuffering, charity, humility, and, of course, mercy.

The earnest Christian is always a loser. The game the world plays is one in which acquiring status means beating one’s neighbor whenever one can. Gossip is a common weapon in this arena. If I am to increase, you must decrease. If you mess up, I will pin you to that. That’s the way of the world, which is also, again, the way in too much of church life. This assumption of scarcity is most devastating when it comes to the status games of dominance hierarchies, but it also, of course, ramifies into the pursuit of wealth and pleasure.

The first matins readings during Easter Week come from the magnificent first letter of Saint Peter, who meditates on the hope, despite suffering, made possible by the apocalyptic interruption and transformation of history wrought by the sacrifice of Jesus.

Praying yesterday’s reading, it came to me that I had been taking a certain passage, in particular, too vaguely:

“The point, the telos, [is this]: all of you, be of one mind, empathetic, loving towards one another, tender-hearted, humble-minded. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called, that you might inherit a blessing.” (I Peter 3:8-9)

Let’s pay attention to this riff on Jesus' command to love our enemies (Luke 6:27-29), which varies it enough to wake us up to the revolutionary implications of words that may have become too familiar to some of us: if we are cursed, we cannot curse in return; we must bless. (“A benediction say upon a curse,” to quote my own poem “Amor Fati.”)

A lot of cursing goes on in this world. Again, we are so fearful that the balance of forces is zero sum. We think enjoying a place in the sun means having to put someone else in the shade.

Thus success is often purchased at the cost of parasitism: feeding off the immiseration of others. That is a question we must each confront in our examination of conscience: in what way does my comfort, such as it is, depend on my taking someone else down—even if it’s “just a peg”? In general, how does my comfort depend on the forgotten sacrifices of the dead and the legions of the unfavored classes?

Saint Peter is addressing those who are suffering unjustly, those who have been cursed by another so that that other might maintain dominance. He speaks to the victims: Christians savaged by imperial persecution, as well as slaves. And he speaks to husbands and wives to forestall marriage becoming a blood sport.

The point Peter is making in his letter is this: the Christian must break the predatory cycle of human interaction, so that true communion may appear in the world. Given the instructions he has just given, Peter is making clear that the “Kingdom law” (as Saint James calls it) of loving one another must extend beyond the bounds of the Christian community. Somehow, we must, in our asymmetrical love vis-à-vis every human, “be of one mind, empathetic, loving towards one another, tender-hearted, humbled-minded.”

But this depends on resisting that most primal, and understandable, of impulses: to defend ourselves in the savage game. How easy it is to retaliate, even if one is impotent. If you’ve had everything taken from you, and you regard your tormentors, is it not to be expected that one say, “I wish them ill”? Well, that would be a curse. And that would mean you have come to have the same mind as that behind the adversarial process, which is what took everything from you in the first place!

Saint Peter is emphatic: to give blessing, precisely in the face of a curse, is the point of our having been called to Christianity.

The blessing of being a Christian can only be received if we meet every assault with blessing. Again, Christianity is not a private salvation machine. The whole point, the whole telos, of being called to follow Christ, is to share the blessing of doing so. We have become Esau to the Christian patrimony if we treat Christian blessing as something to be hoarded. That turns the entire enterprise of Christianity into a mess of pottage. We are blessed by blessing.

Bless those who curse you. That does not mean we don’t fight for the sake of victims. But we must always do so with blessing in our hearts. For THIS we were called, to interrupt the zero-sum game of the world with the good news that the Father’s goodness is greater than our assumptions of scarcity. Living from the fullness of divine love as found in Jesus, we can be serene enough to let the Father take care of our vindication. This is what Peter goes on to say, beginning with a quote from Psalm 34:

“‘Those who desire life and desire to see good days, let them keep their tongues from evil and their lips from speaking deceit; let them turn away from evil and do good; let them seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.’ Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be troubled, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.” (I Peter 3:10-15)

Again, I was reading this too vaguely before. We have to understand this “evil” we’re being warned off of, in the first place, as the detraction and calumny and cursing (wishing ill upon our enemy) we engage in so as to protect ourselves. We don’t need to protect ourselves, if we have faith. Believe me, I know this sounds crazy. But that’s the whole point: by a worldly calculus, it is indeed crazy. Yet, “who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?” Or, as Peter goes on to clarify: okay, yes, you will suffer for living the Christian life, but just cling to Jesus. Everything will be alright. Seek peace. Don't escalate the evil.

If Jesus is our Lord, our center of gravity has been shifted out of the world and into the Father’s Kingdom. And that Kingdom is all blessing.

This argument leads to that grand injunction, which serves as the basis for all apologetics and evangelization—indicating how crucial is this point about returning blessing for curse: “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” (I Peter 3:15-16)

The great Christian apologia is to suffer patiently, in gentleness and piety towards the other. That is still (still!) a hard pill for me to swallow. But its difficulty does not make it any less true. Longsuffering points to the reality of that in which we have placed our hope: the Father's economy of gratuity, transcending all economies of scarcity. If we live it, people will ask us why we live so differently.

We can be stripped of everything, dispossessed, without crying out in rage, without cursing in return, because we follow the Crucified One, the Just One who dies for the unjust. Jesus must be all our life.

Jesus could absorb all of our cursing because He is the Son of the infinitely merciful, infinitely bountiful, infinitely gentle Father. IF the Kingdom is real, then we can follow the Christ, Who “when He was abused, did not return abuse; when He suffered, did not retaliate; Who entrusted Himself to the One Who judges justly.” (I Peter 2:23)

If you die to the world, you are, by that fact, alive in the Father’s Kingdom.

Time to Go Home to the Merciful Father: Justification by Faith

What is the point of the covenant God makes with man? Is it God’s goal to arraign us for our sins, to play gotcha? (This theology of a scorekeeper, merciless god often provokes self-justification as a defense mechanism.) Or is God’s goal precisely to justify our existence despite our failures, to envelop us in His prevenient love and so open up a way for us out of our sins? 

No person can be harangued out of sin. You can only love someone out of sin. That is the Father’s goal in His plan of loving goodness. That merciful strategy is the focus of the lectionary readings for the fifth Sunday of Lent.  

The first reading from Isaiah 43:16-21 conflates the exodus from Egypt with a prophesied return from Babylonian exile. The LORD Who “opens a way in the sea” shows that in doing new things in history He simply will be doing what He always has done, for His faithful love IS WHO HE IS: “See, I am doing something new! ...In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.” 

The Gospel presents the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11). Churchy religious hypocrites treat the sins of others as a gladiatorial spectacle by which they justify their existence (the scapegoat mechanism). Because their mercilessness blinds them to the truth of divine mercy, pharisees then and now, in their desperation to stand before God in their pride, entertain a bloodlust that ranges them, bitter irony, on the side of God’s enemy, serving the Adversary who brings charges against us all. Jesus simply cuts through the obvious self-contradiction: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” We all depend on mercy.

Let’s be clear: the pharisee is an idolater. He serves the demonic power of the Adversary. That is the simple truth. In his “religious” self-justification, he commits sacrilege by making it seem to the world that God seeks to condemn other people (it’s always other people), when it is exactly the opposite: God wants to justify all of us. There is no more total betrayal of the covenant than mercilessness. 

The second reading is from Saint Paul (Philippians 3:8-14), who of course explicitly makes war on pharisaical self-justification. In this passage, he takes a positive approach, attesting that a life lived without shoring up one’s own position is the way to hope. 

All his religious zeal, his exemplary past as a Pharisee: all that he worked, he lets go. He won’t stand before God and plead his worthiness for salvation by pointing to his works. He stands only because he can point to Christ. And why does that matter? Because he BELIEVES that in the sacrifice of Jesus, the Father has justified each of us. It’s as simple, and as hard, as that—to forswear all props in life, so as to find the goodness of the Father in Jesus:

“Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a justification of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the justification from God [the Father] that depends on faith.” 

Saint Paul isn’t simply refusing religious pharisaism here. Whenever we try to stand up in this world by gathering enough money, or enough stuff, or enough status, or enough whatever, so that we do not feel too exposed, too unaccommodated to the rough weather of this world, we show that we lack faith. Yes, the world is full of the goodness of God: but until we find ALL the goodness of the Father concentrated in Jesus, we will make an idol of all the good things. If those goods do not speak Christ to us, the Word in them has been silenced. How do we know if they speak Christ to us? Only if we can give them up, and know, in the bone, that Jesus is the great prize of the world. That’s the point of asceticism: to find all the goodness of the Father in the Son He has given to us. When that has happened, and we again open our eyes upon the world, it will shine as it has never shone before. 

Without suffering the loss of everything, we cannot escape the death that has pervaded us from the beginning of our existence, which blinds us to the iconicity of the world, the glory of the Lord shining everywhere. Love’s vision cannot be restored without sharing in that love-death of Jesus that kills the death of our alienation from the world of invisible love. I must lose all things “that I may know [Jesus] and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” 

Saint Paul emphasizes the reversal of intentionality that characterizes true religion: it is not that I must work my justification, but God justifies us. It is not that I have appropriated new life in Christ, but that Christ has appropriated me, so that I may start to cooperate with the unfolding of that life in me: “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own.”

Once we have been undone, once we have found we can do nothing to save ourselves, once we recognize that our merciless judgmentalism (towards others or even towards ourselves) has no savor of truth or of love to it, then we may begin. We may begin because we find ourselves always already surrounded by a love that, before the foundation of the world, was determined to initiate our initiative, which will have no upper limit, for the vasty spaces in which we roam in Christ are the infinitely workable fields of eternity, electric with ever-greater Trinitarian life, from which spring the fruits of love. The Father bids us rise forever: “Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.”

The exodus is the end of exile from the country of love. To come out of Egypt is to come out of Babylon, and there is only one destination: twelve gates to the New Jerusalem, the city of limitless love. Time to go home.

Love and Development: On the Fundamental Law of Human Perfection

To continue the theme of the internal belonging-together of love and solidarity, and of liturgy and social justice, I offer a few thoughts on words from the Second Vatican Council found in a section entitled “On human activity brought to perfection in the Paschal Mystery.”

That is, a very late evening made later by springing forward (arghh!) must yet be rounded out by a comment on Saturday’s second matins reading, which comes from Vatican II’s pastoral constitution, Gaudium et spes. Number 38 I think the most crucial passage in the document next to numbers 22 and 24. It contains what could well be the most important statement for decoding Catholic social doctrine: “It is [the Word of God] Who reveals to us that ‘God is love’ and at the same time teaches us that the fundamental law of human perfection, and therefore of the world’s transformation, is the new command of love.”

Love (and its intrinsic aspect of mercy) is the essence of Christianity, because the Trinitarian religion is the religion of the fact that God is love, which is the fact that WHAT IS is the mutuality of Persons Whose personalities are derived simply from Their way of giving and receiving vis-à-vis the Others. From this Trinitarian reality flow the world and history. 

Why is our deepest desire to love and be loved? Because God is Trinity. Why do we yearn for universal fraternity? Because being is Trinitarian. The semantic range of the concept of love does not arise from vagueness: love simply IS what IS, though prismated down through all the analogical levels of being.

The council fathers connect this Trinitarian fact to the ultimate revelation of the Trinitarian mystery, which occurs in the Pachal Mystery of Jesus Christ. And the constitution for the Kingdom that flows from the Paschal Mystery is summed up by the Lord Himself, as the Passion was beginning, in the “new command of love”: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). Love, of course, is the truth of Jesus’ Judaism also (love God and love neighbor), but the Old Covenant is Trinified, and therefore universalized, in the event of Jesus’ loving us to the end. This limitless, divine love, the love Who is the Holy Spirit of the Father and Son’s constitutive reciprocity, flows ecclesially and sacramentally from the pierced Heart of Jesus. In Christ, we love God and love neighbor with divine love, a love that is preemptive, unilateral, and all in favor of the enemy. 

It is this love that Saint James calls THE Kingdom law (James 2:8). And so it is.

The council fathers apply this Kingdom law to both personal and universal development. Pope Benedict in one of the great social encyclicals, Caritas in veritate, places all of Catholic social doctrine under the most clarifying concept of “integral human development.” And if I may be provocative, it is clearly adumbrated there, as it is here in Gaudium et spes, that the normative society is “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Okay, I’m having fun quoting The Communist Manifesto. Let me be clear, the simultaneously libertarian and statist hocus-pocus of communism is not the answer. The answer is the new command of love lived out intelligently according to the circumstances on the ground in any given society.

That is, the council fathers adroitly and correctly tether the flourishing of any given moral agent to social progress: the perfection of any one of us cannot be abstracted from the communities in which we are embedded (as Aristotle would already have insisted), all the way up to the consubstantial community of humanity as such, synchronic and diachronic. There is no perfection, that is, no salvation, of the human person in isolation. The body politic is essential to human perfection, and therefore ultimate human perfection (revealed to be deification) can only occur in the Body of Christ, that is, in the instrumentality bent on universal salvation.

Without Trinitarian love, each person is stillborn, and the world powerless to be born. 

That’s enough for now. Let me end by quoting the lines that follow in Gaudium et spes: “[The Word of God] gives those who believe in divine love the conviction that the way of love is open to all people and that the attempt to establish worldwide fellowship is not a delusion. At the same time He enjoins that this love is to be pursued not just in great matters but above all in the ordinary circumstances of life. Undergoing death on behalf of all of us sinners, He teaches us by His example the need to carry the Cross which the flesh and the world lay upon those who pursue peace and justice.” 

The universal call to holiness means the little way of Saint Thérèse means vicarious suffering means mercy, mercy, mercy for every single agonized human, no exception. The mission of the Christian: to be Christ’s bleeding instrument in the reconciliation of each person to God and to every other, so that God may be all in all, so that we may each be filled with the fullness of God, so that we may love one another as Jesus has loved us — to the end, into the limitless.

The Good Above, the Good Below

Mortification, asceticism, the whole season of Lent: is this simply spiritual masochism?

The first rejoinder: how questionable is the hegemonic cultural stance that finds self-discipline so strange! How many comfortable Westerners are strong enough to fast? How many are willing to put some skin in the game of "solidarity" and "social justice," and actually feel in the flesh some fragment of the immiserated existence of the dispossessed? If the question is how do we awaken hearts zombified by consumerism, surely some form of voluntary self-denial is an obvious answer.

It's not as if we're awash in a rising tide of asceticism that threatens to enervate human enterprise. In fact, from the unreal mansions and yachts of the super-wealthy down through every class in America, consumerist indifference to the cries of the weaker makes it far less likely that civilization advance and politics improve. It is love that raises monuments (especially of culture) to brave the erosions of time, and it is love that impels the tireless civic engagement necessary to build order time and again and again amidst the constant factional strains emanating from tyrants, demagogues, the crony capitalist nexus of corporate welfare rent-seekers and self-serving politicians, resentment-filled special interest groups (whose resentments may have ground enough) of both right and left.

If we're not fighting for some other group than our own, the ones less powerful, and that always at least means defending the bare life of the most powerless humans, the unborn and those threatened by euthanasia--if we're not fighting for the others, then we are only another special interest group, part of the Mexican standoff of group bias. Thus we have Donald Trump, and the pro-abortion demagogues of the left, and yes, thus we have the angry No to seeking some prudent way to be hospitable to the huddled masses of refugees, fleeing war or hunger.

That indeed is not Christianity. It doesn't even make it to the level of the basically humane.

We cannot hope to see this fact unless we enter upon the liberation that voluntary self-denial makes possible.

But only makes possible. "And though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (I Corinthians 13:3).

So, now we come to the question of getting asceticism right.

A false Christian otherworldliness, a naysaying flight from the world, runs screaming from time and space and history, from pleasure and politics and the other goods of this world, in a flattened Platonic projection of the Good into a supersensible heaven. Now, there's certainly enough to scream about, but if we understand the agony aright, ours and everyone else's, that should commit us even more to enter into the heart of the world: to become more virtuous, to rejoice in the abundance with which God surrounds us, to cultivate intense friendships, to bear and raise children, to deliberate with fellow-citizens concerning the common good, to engage the political process, to serve the powerless in a solidary descent of love, to create some marker within space and time of the truth, goodness, and beauty we have had the high honor to witness.

We are of no use to the dispossessed when we turn asceticism into a private salvation machine for rescuing the self. That is an inversion of true mortification, which is death to self so that we might serve the other's salvation.

And the false asceticism of moralism and rigorism, which shies away from the world's delights (ungratefully forgetting their origin and their conservation in, and their providential dispensation by, God), is based on the near-blasphemous, perverse theology of God as out to get us should we slip up here or there.

Yesterday's matins reading from Saint Ambrose's treatise on "Flight from the World" purifies and clarifies our yearning for the Kingdom of God.

"Where a man's heart is, there is his treasure also. God is not accustomed to refusing a good gift to those who ask for one. ...Let us reach out with our hearts to possess that good, let us exist in it and live in it, let us hold fast to it, that good which is beyond all we can know or see and is marked by perpetual peace and tranquility, a peace which is beyond all we can know or understand."

So far, so "Platonic," if we take that adjective to name a projection of all value beyond time and space. That, in fact, misses the basic point of Platonism, which is the renewal of ethics and politics, the ordering of the human soul through full-spectrum liberal arts education and the securing of the best political regime possible. Plato's own misgivings about how to reconcile the theory of forms with the multifariousness of time and space towards the end of his life were already pointing towards the ascendancy of prudence, a practical wisdom rooted in the heavens and growing downwards to bear fruit in this world.

Saint Ambrose provides a Christian continuation of that Platonic self-correction. Of that supersensible good he has just described, he goes on to say: "This is the good that permeates creation. In it we all live; on it we all depend. It has nothing above it; it is divine. No one is good but God alone. What is good is therefore divine; what is divine is therefore good. Scripture says: 'When you open your hand, all things will be filled with goodness.' It is through God's goodness that all that is truly good is given us, and in it there is no admixture of evil."

The personal goodness and particular providential care of God (which Jesus reveals and which the Greek philosophers did not see) maximally tightens the participation of the good things of this world in the Good that is God.

Indeed that participation is tightened to the point that it occurs WITHIN one Person, the Word of the Father, Jesus, Who spans in Himself the tension between eternity and time.

IN Christ, we may rest in the Goodness of God both in time and above time, so that fleeing the world can mean embracing the delight the good Father has actually suffused into creation. We drink from a fountain that overflows from heaven to earth, so that earth, this earth, may, precisely in its manifold goodness, simply present the one Goodness of God. This is our ethics; this our politics; our religion; our one desire: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.

[This was originally posted on Facebook on February 28th.]

Rubio and the Hope that Democracy and Conservatism Not Be Trumped

Is there a crony capitalist cancer raging inside the American body politic? Yes. Is there a bleeding inequality in this nation between the protected and the unprotected classes (as Peggy Noonan puts it), the former shielded by money, social power, and lifestyle bubbles from the shocks that rive the latter? Oh, yes.

But can resentment build anything? 

Of course not. Hegel and Marx notwithstanding, the fascination with negation is not life-giving. It simply breeds chaos, tyranny, and death.

Now we have large numbers of people, presumably on the right, embracing the magical power of negation, wishing that the charismatic force of a celebrity will break the chokehold by which the privileged are in fact, most balefully, asphyxiating this nation. (Though, surely, Donald Trump is a most paradoxical choice to lead the war against the decadence of our elites?)

This lacks prudence.

There is no vital political life, that is, there is no democracy, without prudence, because negotiating the complexities of history and circumstance requires an ever-renewed contemplation of what is so. By prudence I do not mean a small-minded calculation of utility or social acceptability. That has nothing to do with the classical virtue of prudence, which is the fountainhead of all virtue, of all human nobility. Prudence is the cultivated habit by which a probing and restless intellect asks questions, seeks out facts, and pays attention to the true, the good, and the beautiful as they luminously well up all round, and then applies the fruits of contemplation to the concrete situation at hand, to construct the good that can actually be constructed in this slice of time and space.

And then we have to do it again and again, because circumstances change, and the new facts on the ground have to be met with by our, hopefully, increasing store of wisdom, as we mature, as truth, goodness, and beauty assimilate us progressively. 

Reality has hard contours. You can’t build the good without attending to the truth of reality. We may have a good intention: ridding ourselves of the parasitism of the powerful, saving the unborn from being slaughtered, rectifying the fatal problems with our education system (which fall most heavily on minority and poor populations), confronting the inhumanities of our penal colonies, which ravage our black communities. But a good intention by itself can build nothing. It must connect with reality. And that involves the mediations that only patient attention to facts and principles can render.

No prudence, no democracy. The only other option is some flavor of tyranny.

Political conservatism embraces what Russell Kirk called a “politics of prudence.” I have written before: “To be a conservative should mean recognizing that any true progress depends on receiving a tradition, being open to what Chesterton calls the democracy of the dead. To be a conservative means to recognize that we belong to the great organic continuum of humanity, where past, present, and future are under our stewardship.  It means being realistic enough to see the hubris of utopian schemes which, in the name of the powerless, slaughter the powerless on the altar of ‘progress’ and revolution. To be conservative means recognizing that there are no silver bullets in politics, but only the unceasing labor of prudence and mutual deliberation. Conservatism should mean recognizing that we are not God, and that the indispensable communal act is that of thanksgiving and praise of the all-provident Creator and Sustainer of all things. Conservatism should mean humility, piety, and gratitude.”

Trump is no conservative. But how does Ted Cruz measure up to the conservative standard, the standard of graciousness and prudence?

He has rejected the core attitudinal posture of the conservative, while holding conservative policy positions. This is dangerous for the future of conservatism. Why do so many non-conservatives think of us as cold-hearted? Ignorance of relevant principles and facts? That is involved. But is it not the case that too many conservatives are in fact…cold-hearted? I am a man of the right. Always have been. But to see conservatives take hold of true things and then use them as a club with which to beat those who haven’t yet seen the same facts: it makes me ill. It is a betrayal of truth to treat truth that way. If we aren’t listening patiently to, and conversing gently with, our political opponents, we are not being pious before the sacrament of our neighbor, that is, we are not being conservative. If we are not openhearted, not principled and prudent advocates for the marginalized, standing up for the little guy in truth and love, then, I submit, we have ourselves made a caricature of conservatism. It fills me with moral revulsion to hear some conservatives rail against immigrants, to hear some conservatives talk about what are undoubtedly the truths of marriage, while making clear their disgust for our brothers and sisters who have same-sex attraction, etc.

It’s as if these mean-spirited conservatives got hold of the answer sheet, but have no idea what the questions are. It is the perversion of conservatism into pharisaism. That is just another ideology, and frankly farther from the divine fire of the prophets than Marxist ideology.

The commitment to prudence and piety places conservatism on the side of political liberalism (democratic government under law, in which the deliberations of citizens have effect in the political ordering of the nation) and of human enterprise and freedom of conscience, because top-down management of persons and their gifts is sacrilege.

Conservatives should be known for mercy. What I care about most deeply in conservatism is its compatibility with Christian charity. But even on the level of merely human love, the first principle is the preferential option for the poor. The weaker a person is, the more we are responsible for that person. That I take to be the fundamental ethical principle of political conservatism. If it isn’t that, then conservatism isn’t worth anything. Conservatism isn’t libertarianism. Conservatism celebrates and cultivates the organic bonds of love without which the body politic becomes a mere collective.

Above all, conservative piety must mean the defense of the most powerless, especially in this age of biopower and the bureaucratically organized assault on the bare life of the unborn and the elderly and medically dependent and the eugenic assault on the fertility of the women of the developing world.

As I posted yesterday, “if we're not fighting for some other group than our own, the ones less powerful, and that always at least means defending the bare life of the most powerless humans, the unborn and those threatened by euthanasia--if we're not fighting for the others, then we are only another special interest group, part of the Mexican standoff of group bias. Thus we have Donald Trump, and the pro-abortion demagogues of the left, and yes, thus we have the angry No to seeking some prudent way to be hospitable to the huddled masses of refugees, fleeing war or hunger. That indeed is not Christianity. It doesn't even make it to the level of the basically humane.”

The fire-eaters of the “right” have identified prudence with all that keeps us from restoration. They have fallen in love with negation. We have a word for that impulse: it’s called revolution. And conservatives, the ones like me who imbibed Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley, used to point out that revolutionary ideologies have piled up more dead bodies than any other belief system in the history of the world.

Do we need a breakthrough in our declining Republic? Absolutely. I do not make light of the passion behind revolution: the fire burns in me to rescue the poor, the suffering, the marginalized, the victims of history. A most urgent fire, to rescue the most powerless human life from abortion and euthanasia. We all know what was inside Lincoln, disgusted by a slave auction in New Orleans, when he said, “By God, boys, let’s get away from this. If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.”

That fire burns. It burns hot. But if the righteous pro-life passion forsakes prudence, it would become yet another inhuman ideology devouring human lives, including the ones it originally sought to rescue. 

That is, we must burn with the revolutionary fire to restore the right to life of the innocent in law, to restore the Constitutional principles of our founding, to restore liberal arts education, but we must act out of intelligence, deliberation, questioning, listening, contemplating the true, the good, the beautiful, and studying the example given by heroic statesman. 

With all this in mind, let us turn back to Cruz, who was responsible for shutting down the government in 2013, yes, in the service of a good goal, the abomination of ObamaCare crying out for redress, but it was a goal that COULD NOT have prospered taking this route, precisely given the constitutional structure of our government. That is the very definition of imprudence.

And Cruz excoriated his own Republican colleagues, slandering them as not being sincere in their conservatism, just because they recognized the imprudence, because they have brains in their heads and principles in their hearts: that would seem to indicate a character deficit, a lack of graciousness and fraternal piety, to go along with a privation of prudence large enough to swallow the common good.

Marco Rubio is a true conservative, prudent and merciful and pious. He is the way forward for conservatism and for the American Republic.

As Lincoln knew during the Civil War, the fate of democracy, of political liberalism, hinges on the fate of this nation. It is so again, as the oldest democracies are all succumbing to bureaucratic statism and crony capitalism.

A breakthrough that serves the human good cannot be achieved by the accession of another demagogue. We’ve already endured one demagogue for two terms, a man who has shamelessly, in defiance of our constitutional architecture, wielded bureaucratic power to impose his vision. 

And the breakthrough cannot be achieved by voting for the pro-abortion extremists of the Democratic Party. There are things that Sanders says that pluck upon my heart. Grotesque inequality is an urgent matter. Free enterprise promises that it’s not a zero-sum game: we may all rise; it need not be at the expense of our neighbor. Nothing threatens to give the lie to free enterprise more than the extreme inequality between the protected and the unprotected classes. 

But I would ask Bernie: what’s your definition of inequality? Do you only see inequality when it comes to money, not the far more profound inequality between those who have the power to kill and those who can’t resist their killers? This paladin of the powerless doesn’t see the most vulnerable human lives!

No, only where prudence, piety, mercy, and graciousness hold sway can there be a rejuvenescence of America. Conservatism is committed to these things in principle. We need to be committed to them in lived existence. Let’s be joyful, open to the wonders of nature and culture and the beauty of our neighbor, relishing that beauty, and relishing conversation, eager for dialectic (an intentional and shared pursuit of the truth), voracious to know and love, zealous for the common good, for the life of republican citizenship, for the cause of the poor, the immigrant, the unborn, all the powerless.

Conservatism need not be simply identified with Christian republicanism, but the spirit of the latter needs to blow through the former.

I see that in Marco Rubio. 

I do not give my endorsement in my capacity as Chairman of the Board of Massachusetts Citizens for Life. It is simply the position of a private citizen, most assuredly right now a member of the unprotected class. I submit my opinion, in humility, to my fellow-citizens.

Because I take in dead earnest the preferential option for the poor as the first principle of social ethics, the preeminent issue will always be the welfare of the most powerless human life: the babies threatened by abortion and the medically dependent and aged threatened by euthanasia. So if it comes down to Trump (God help us), I will do what I have to do. But we have options right now. We have a very good option in tomorrow’s primary here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Please vote for Marco Rubio.