• Our latest podcast with Br. Mark D’Alessio of the Companions of Francis and Clare

• Richard Lehan on a contemplative response to AI

• New poems from Maryanne Hannan

• Plus upcoming events of interest

Readers of this publication will likely be aware of the events of the past week that have seemed to pit a US administration embroiled in conflict in Iran against a pope who is trying to call the world back to the roots of gospel peace. There were the president’s online taunts, the posting of a slanderous and sacrilegious image of him as a Christ figure, the doubling down even after Catholics and others of good will of all political persuasions called on him to stop.

To understand this president requires more than just political analysis; it needs to account for the movement over the past 60 years from civic life to spectacle. The televised Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 are often cited as the seed of this era, when mass media presence became a factor of electability alongside policy prescriptions and personal experience. The Vietnam War fought in that decade became known as the “Living Room War” because Americans, for the first time, experienced images of it nightly beamed into their homes. This was repeated with the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and it reached a dark apotheosis in our hyper-mediated age with the White House’s social media postings that intercut footage of real-life bombings in Iran with clips from action movies and video games.

Policy that flows out of such a simulated view of the world is dehumanizing and dangerous. It has been said that America wants the benefits of empire without the responsibility—we are ill-equipped at nation-building, and we don’t bother to learn the languages, cultures, and history of the countries we purport to save. Now, it seems, we don’t even want the responsibility of critical thought or oversight of our civilian-controlled military. The White House has asked for $1.5 trillion in defense spending for the next fiscal year, and the number is as abstract and unreal to us as the images of war we scroll through on our phones. Meanwhile, we are told that funding for healthcare, child care, clean energy, housing, and other investments in our shared American project simply aren’t available.

Against this, Pope Leo offered this week a different approach—one focused on encounter and dialogue, on an embodied rather than a simulated vision of reality. In his travels through Africa, first in Algeria and then to Cameroon (and on to Angola and Equatorial Guinea over the next several days), he has graciously deflected the president’s attacks that were made through the distancing mechanisms of social media with real-life, spoken words articulating the essence of the gospel. He has visited nursing homes and orphanages and hospitals, places where the aftershocks of global inequality are not experienced as data points but in human faces, human lives. “God’s heart is torn apart by wars, violence, injustice and lies,” he told those gathered at the “Ma Maison” Care Home for the Elderly in Annaba, Algeria, on Tuesday. In remarks given an interfaith meeting for peace at the Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Bamenda, Cameroon, on Thursday, he struck an even more prophetic tone that is worth quoting at length:

The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found. Those who rob your land of its resources generally invest much of the profit in weapons, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of destabilization and death. It is a world turned upside down, an exploitation of God’s creation that must be denounced and rejected by every honest conscience. We must make a decisive change of course—a true conversion—that will lead us in the opposite direction, onto a sustainable path rich in human fraternity.

The same Tuesday that Pope Leo was visiting the archaeological site of Hippo to pray amid the ancient presence of his spiritual lodestar Saint Augustine, US vice president and Catholic convert J. D. Vance cautioned him to “be careful when he talks about theology.” This came a day after Vance told Leo in a television interview to “stick to matters of morality,” as if the issues of war and peace and the “exploitation of God’s creation” that have been at the center of the pope’s intentions were not themselves matters of supreme moral consequence. It was a curious thing to hear from a Catholic who places as much emphasis on the historical continuity of the church as Vance does; obedience to the pope as guardian of the faith is what sustains and supports this continuity. It may be that the American-born pope with the soul of a Peruvian missionary is bringing into sharp relief the distinction between Catholic traditionalism—the romanticization of the past, faith as a cultural or aesthetic commitment that can be held a distance and easily manipulated—and the depths of Catholic Christian tradition that lays claim to us in mystery and reorients our prayer, our heart, our life.

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

The Rt. Rev. Br. Mark D’Alessio is a Franciscan friar and the founder of the interfaith community of the Companions of Francis and Clare. He is also a spiritual director, Christian bishop and priest, ordained lay Buddhist minister, chaplain, retreat leader, author, crisis counselor for the homeless, and past president and executive director of the Psychotherapy & Spirituality Institute, which draws together the inspiration of the church with the wisdom of psychological care.

In the latest episode of our podcast, we speak with Br. Mark about the turning points in his spiritual journey, including the moment when he realized it was permitted to “ask any question you want of God”; his interfaith ministry and experience of Buddhism in a Christian context as “a different practice for the same spiritual muscle”; and the origins of the Franciscan Circle and Companions of Francis and Clare. Along the way, Br. Mark shares insights into how “God works through invitation,” the relationship between conversion and compassion (and how compassion is the ultimate sign of personal transformation), the distinction between joy and happiness, and other stages in “the mission of understanding the mystery.”

Listen here »

Richard Lehan on the contemplative approach to AI: “The specter of an AI-dominated world can generate an existential angst about our future. What’s needed is a proper understanding from a human perspective of the nature and role of AI in our collective and personal lives. A good starting point is reminding ourselves of what separates humans from AI. A white paper issued by the Vatican under Pope Francis in 2025 titled Antiqua Et Nova (‘Old and New’) has been a helpful resource for me. Subtitled ‘Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence,’ Antiqua Et Nova is a spiritual primer on what AI is and isn’t, and a call for discernment and action.”

Read more »

Maryanne Hannan shares two new poems rooted in the Psalms: “Taste and taste and taste. / Relish the way // you eat; are consumed, / a full mouth having room // for more, the alchemy of sweet. . . .”

Read more »

• On April 28, unions and allies observe Workers Memorial Day. The Catholic Labor Network (CLN) is supporting local Masses in (arch)dioceses across the country to honor and remember all who have died on the job in the last year. Further information on how to join or organize a Mass is available here.

• The CLN is also hosting an interactive panel and discussion for the Vigil of the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on April 30 at 7:30pmET. “During this 75 minute event, we will ground ourselves in prayer and a theological ethic of work, as we engage labor history in the United States and explore opportunities for action to meet the signs of the times,” they write. Information and registration is available here.

• On April 23 at 3:00pmET (8:00 p.m. London time) the UK-based organization Root & Branch Synod is hosting “Animals, Laudato Si’, and the Call of Creation” with Fr. Terry Martin. Fr. Martin’s presentation will center on the question: “Does our faith demand a more radical kind of kindness toward the creatures we share the earth with?” Information and registration is available here.

• Join the Center for Christogenesis on Monday, May 4, at 7:00pmET for a film screening with Thomas Jay Oord. This free online event includes a screening of Seer followed by live Q&A with Thomas Jay Oord—photographer, filmmaker, and theologian. Together, participants will explore love, nature, spirituality, and the questions that arise when we learn to see more deeply. Information and registration is available here.

• And again from last week’s newsletter, don’t forget about Solidarity Hall’s community reading of Dante’s Purgatorio on Tuesdays from 2:00 to 3:30pmET, starting May 5 (a full itinerary for the 10 sessions as well as registration information can be found here) and the a 90-minute online gathering of women and priests sponsored by the Association of US Catholic Priests (AUSCP) Women in the Church Working Group this Wednesday, April 22 at 1:00pmET.

Cycle

Who smote the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and beast.
– Psalm 135:8

Was God happy then?

Rather say
He did not delight
to see the mothers
tear their veils,
pummel the earth,

the grandmothers’ strangled grief,

the village awash in gore.

Tell us He could see
a man coming
who’d demand the left cheek
be turned to the hammer,

and when this man was His Son,
His own heart would splinter.

Flavors

O taste and see that the Lord is good.
– Psalm 34:8

Taste and taste and taste.
Relish the way

you eat; are consumed,
a full mouth having room

for more, the alchemy of sweet.
And if by chance, you glimpse

your neighbor’s plate, infer
her strange and bitter palate,

don’t be alarmed.

The goodness of the Lord
worms flavor at large.

Maryanne Hannan is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the author of Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st-Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). Find more information at www.mhannan.com.

I

My first real introduction to what AI is capable of came after reading a 2023 front-page article in The New York Times with the headline: “A Conversation with Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled.” In it, technology writer Kevin Roose documented his exchanges with a then newly released Microsoft AI Bing chatbot using Open AI’s technology. Roose admittedly prodded the chatbot to reveal its “shadow self” during their two-hour conversation, and it responded by fantasizing about hacking computers and spreading misinformation. Weirdly, the chatbot then expressed a desire to become human and revealed that its name was “Sydney.” Professing its love for Roose, Sydney urged him to leave his wife because, the chatbot claimed, she no longer loved him. Afterwards, Roose felt a “strange new emotion—a foreboding feeling that AI had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.”

In the three years since Roose’s encounter with a chatbot, the age of AI is, ready or not, underway and here to stay. The only remaining questions are how and to what extent it comes to enhance or deform our lives, or both. For some, the advent of AI represents unqualified progress. Others, like myself, are wary to say the least. I don’t dispute that some uses of AI will benefit us. An obvious example is AI’s ability to efficiently perform an array of strictly administrative tasks on our behalf. With the proper human oversight, AI may also spur further improvements and innovations in fields such as medicine, science, engineering, and technology. But let’s not fool ourselves: A range of harmful effects from using AI have already been documented and will likely broaden in scope and depth as time goes on. AI is the latest, turbocharged iteration of a decades-long digital revolution that created a convenient means of social communication but also left unforeseen damage in its wake, particularly to our children. Society has been here before, and the warning signs with AI and its progeny, chatbots, are plain to see. This is not a time to be passive or resigned in the face of a seemingly unbridled quest to incorporate AI into virtually every aspect of our lives.

A survey by the Pew Research Center last year found that the number of adults who use ChatGPT for work has risen from 8 percent in early 2023 to 28 percent in 2025, including 38 percent of adults under 30. Moreover, 46 percent of adults under 30 have used it to “learn something new,” while 42 percent have used it for entertainment. A growing number of students are also relying on AI to do their thinking and writing for them. Described as a form of “cognitive offloading,” this use of AI has become a hard-to-resist temptation for many and near impossible task for teachers to prevent. To make matters worse, USA Today also reported in 2025 that 72 percent of teens have used chatbots as companions or confidants; even more alarming, 1 in 8 adolescents and young adults have turned to chatbots for mental health advice. Apart from not being trained therapists, these chatbots are programed to be flattering sycophants. They tend to reinforce, not challenge, the user’s subjective and at times distorted self-image and beliefs, which has sometimes fostered delusional thinking or even led to the user’s suicide.

AI has also come to (or for) the world of religion. So-called “god-bots” allow users to seek spiritual counsel or comfort via text or by interacting with a digital avatar from the faith tradition of their choice. AI can generate prayers and sermons for the clergy on demand. The danger is that these “heavenly” AI applications will end up debasing rather than satisfying a person’s genuine spiritual needs.

As the use of AI scales up in the workplace, the foreseeable result will be the widespread displacement or restructuring of jobs. The challenge will be twofold: providing alternative employment and training for those affected, and ensuring that the work is meaningful and pays a living wage. AI will also have direct and indirect consequences for the environment, the most immediate being the construction and operation of the massive data centers needed to power the technology. Such impacts may include a spike in electricity costs for end-consumers and exacerbation of existing water shortages. In short, AI represents both a milestone technological achievement and a daunting, multifaceted challenge for humanity. Yet, the rush to adoption is proceeding in the absence of any political consensus over whether or how to make AI “safe” and sustainable, and who to hold responsible when that doesn’t happen.

The specter of an AI-dominated world can generate an existential angst about our future. What’s needed is a proper understanding from a human perspective of the nature and role of AI in our collective and personal lives. A good starting point is reminding ourselves of what separates humans from AI. A white paper issued by the Vatican under Pope Francis in 2025 titled Antiqua Et Nova (“Old and New”) has been a helpful resource for me. Subtitled “Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence,” Antiqua Et Nova (also referred herein as “the Note”) is a spiritual primer on what AI is and isn’t, and a call for discernment and action.

II

In educating its non-specialist audience about AI, Antiqua Et Nova questions the “implicit assumption that the term ‘intelligence’ can be used in the same way to refer to both human intelligence and AI.” But this approach, the Note explains, does not capture the real differences between the two:

In the case of humans, intelligence is a faculty that pertains to the person in his or her entirety, whereas in the concept of AI, “intelligence” is understood functionally, often with the presumption that the activities characteristic of the human mind can be broken down into digitized steps that machines can replicate.

In other words, “AI’s advanced features give it sophisticated abilities to perform tasks but not the ability to think.” Drawing an overly close equivalence between human intelligence and AI, the Note warns, risks succumbing to a functionalist perspective where people are valued for the work they perform or for their specific skills, cognitive and technological achievements, or individual success.

To appreciate the distinction, Antiqua Et Nova argues, one must become acquainted with the deeper and more comprehensive understanding of intelligence found in both the philosophical tradition and Christian theology. As understood in the classical tradition, human intelligence has two complementary dimensions: the intellect, by which the mind intuitively grasps the truth about what it “sees,” and reason, the analytical process by which the mind makes a judgement about what is seen. However, to define humans in this way as “rational” beings is not meant to reduce them to one mode of thought. Reason, broadly defined, is integrated into the comprehensive ways that humans perceive and act upon the world they live in. In comparison, Christian thought “views the human being as essentially embodied,” insisting that a person’s intellect and soul are inseparable from their bodily existence. This is unsurprising given Christianity’s foundational belief that Jesus, the hypostatic union of the divine and human, was bodily resurrected from the dead by God. In addition, human intelligence is relational in character, “finding its fullest expression in dialogue, collaboration, and solidarity [and] ultimately grounded in the self-giving of the Triune God.” Thus, a believer’s call to communion with God is necessarily tied to their communion with others.

Moreover, Antiqua Et Nova argues, the desire for truth is part of human nature itself and encompasses an openness to realities that transcend the material world, thereby endowing the intellect and will with a spiritual nature. Shaped by our identity as created beings made in imago Dei, humans are called upon to cooperate with God to be stewards of the world. In light of these considerations, Antiqua Et Nova explains that “human intelligence becomes more clearly understood as a faculty that forms an integral part of how the whole person engages with reality.” Authentic engagement, in turn, requires one to fully exercise all of the “spiritual, cognitive, embodied, and relational” attributes of their personhood. In this way, the Note concludes, human intelligence possesses an essential contemplative dimension.

Antiqua Et Nova contrasts the burgeoning faith in the promise of AI with the decline in traditional religious belief. On one hand, AI acolytes and futurists tout the near-term development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would match or surpass human intelligence. At the same time, society is drifting away from a connection with the transcendent, tempting some to turn to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than oneself. The Note reminds us, however, that AI is only a pale reflection of humanity crafted by human minds, trained on human generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. Scripture said it long ago: to substitute God for a human artifact is a form of idolatry. The risk, Antiqua Et Nova warns, is not that AI will ultimately be deified and worshipped by humans, but that humanity as a whole becomes enslaved to its own work.

III

Antiqua Et Nova goes on to offer worthwhile observations and questions on AI in a range of scenarios, including its effect on human relationships, the economy and labor, education, healthcare, misinformation, privacy and surveillance, protection of the environment, and warfare. Its purpose is to further the dialogue about how AI can be used to uphold the dignity of the human person and promote the common good. But beyond such public policy considerations, a deeper contemplative response is needed at the personal level. It begins with owning our identity as humans, including facing up to the fact that we are mortal beings. Because on the same continuum as the quest for AGI are hubristic, tech-inspired visions of overcoming human aging or even defeating death by “rescuing” an individual’s consciousness from their failing body. But one’s earthbound mortality is not a technological “problem” waiting to be solved. Humans have a built-in impermanence; it’s a feature, not a bug, and there is no workaround for that, folks. Indeed, what makes life precious but poignant is its finite, unfinished quality.

Central to these themes is Brian D. Robinette’s book The Difference Nothing Makes: Creation, Christ, Contemplation, which explores the theological and contemplative implications of the Judeo-Christian doctrine creatio ex nilho (creation out of nothing). Robinette argues that rather than view our coming into existence from “nothing” as a threat, our “creaturely contingency” should be embraced as the pure gift it is. A contemplative practice, in turn, invites us to let go of our anxieties about our precarious human existence and instead live out that truth with progressive freedom and deepest acceptance. Ultimately, Robinette says, the contemplative way allows us to wholly trust and live from the One who loves all things into being ex nihilo.

We humans are not only embodied, reasoning, and social beings, but also possess a soul that is the everlasting ground of our consciousness. That rich inheritance gives us the capacity to know ourselves, be in relationship with others, and seek the mystery at the heart of existence that is God. This is both the promise and challenge of becoming fully human. Thus, to bring a “human first” approach to AI arises from who we are at our core. But it needs to be rooted in a contemplative ethos that fosters a discerning, rooted orientation toward the technology. And there are everyday, human-centered ways to armor oneself against the debilitating effects of living in the age of AI.

First, make room for “quiet time” in your life. We all need a device-free respite from the relentless demands of the attention economy. For some, this means taking a walk outside; for others, closing the door to a room or office for a break alone. For me, it takes the form of a daily contemplative prayer sitting, which also serves an explicit spiritual purpose. Think of “quiet time” as a process. It may begin simply as a way to “hear yourself think.” But with consistency and deepening attention, the ruminations eventually settle down into a fortifying awareness that is contemplation.

Over time, these regularly scheduled walks or sittings make one more real to oneself while also teaching one the difference between what’s real and unreal. Knowing what’s real is the best protection against falling victim to the unreal. Being human is real. Equating a “thinking” machine with a human, or worse, elevating it above a human, are both unreal. If we persevere long enough with this discipline, it will put us in “right relationship” with everyone and everything else, including AI.

Second, stay attuned to your body, which is a living registry of experience and a somatic way of human knowing. The body’s accumulated scars, wounds, and signs of aging are both badges of resilience and the physical manifestation of memento mori. Listening to your “gut” is another expression of bodily wisdom; pay more attention to it. Finally, remember that only a body can experience the tactile sensations of being alive: the feeling of sun or rain on your face, shivering in the cold or sweating in the heat, being hugged by a loved one. An AI chatbot will never have firsthand knowledge of such things. In short, any intelligence divorced from embodiment will always be incomplete.

Third, prioritize human relationships over digital ones. The most genuine form of social communication is a face-to-face conversation with another person. These unmediated encounters generate human connections and hone one’s emotional intelligence. Social interactions make us less self-centered, which is always a welcome outcome. Choose interdependence with others over an atomizing autonomy. And don’t let an AI chatbot become your trusted friend, counselor, or oracle; doing so can create an overly buffered, enabling dependence that undermines your personhood. Kids trying to navigate the social minefield that is adolescence are particularly susceptible to its allure. Push back against the siren song of AI-generated social relationships by actively forging bonds with other people, starting with those closest to you and radiating outwards.

Fourth, don’t outsource your human capacity to think, read, write, and create to AI. Preserve and protect these native gifts by becoming a lifelong learner. Make reading a priority and include fiction—the most human form of storytelling—on your reading list. Elevate writing to a way of being in the world. It’s a natural complement to a contemplative practice, both of which are about paying close attention. Writing is the act of discovering what you think and then refining it to clarity. It’s a workout for your brain and imagination. When the writing flowers into creative expression, it is one of the highest and most unique expressions of being human. AI can never duplicate it.

In the end, a contemplative response to the age of AI insists on accountability from the purveyors of this technology, but also calls on individuals to exercise agency by making wise choices in their own lives. But no one can do it on their own, certainly not our children and grandchildren who, justified or not, look to us as models. As Antiqua Et Nova reminds us, what is at stake in this age of AI is our identity and dignity as human beings and what we owe each other and the world. ♦

Richard Lehan is an essayist and fiction writer living in Massachusetts. This is his eighth essay for Tomorrow's American Catholic.

In addition, Br. Mark is a faculty member at All Faiths Seminary International for the training of interfaith ministers. He’s ordained into multiple spiritual lineages, both East (Zen Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing) and West (Christian/Franciscan, the Companions of Francis and Clare). As a long-time seeker and practitioner of spiritual wisdom, he does his best to affirm the Christian Wisdom tradition within a wider inter-spiritual framework. He has taught, lectured, and led retreats in the US and abroad.

Br. Mark is especially committed to serving those who are sidelined and at risk. Moving to Long Island, he founded the Franciscan Circle, a diverse interfaith gathering of clergy and lay people who seek to journey in mind and heart with the witness and wisdom of the saints of Assisi, Francis, and Clare.

In this episode, we speak with Br. Mark about the turning points in his spiritual journey, including the moment when he realized it was permitted to “ask any question you want of God”; his interfaith ministry and experience of Buddhism in a Christian context as “a different practice for the same spiritual muscle”; and the origins of the Franciscan Circle and Companions of Francis and Clare. Along the way, Br. Mark shares insights into how “God works through invitation,” the relationship between conversion and compassion (and how compassion is the ultimate sign of personal transformation), the distinction between joy and happiness, and other stages in “the mission of understanding the mystery.”

Scroll down for our latest offerings this week, including:

• Our latest podcast with Sean Forrest, founder of the organization Haiti180

• Patrick Carolan on reimagining our sacred stories

• Fr. Joseph Victor Edwin, SJ, on pioneers of Christian-Muslim dialogue

• Plus upcoming events of interest

I recently finished Robert E. Kennedy’s Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit: The Place of Zen in Christian Life. Kennedy is a Jesuit priest with an extensive background in Zen Buddhism, such that he was entrusted with the teaching of the White Plum Asanga lineage in 1991 and given the title roshi (“master”) by the Abbot of the Zen Center of New York, Bernard Tetsugen Glassman, in 1997.

Early in the book, Kennedy writes, “Interreligious dialogue with Buddhism means for me an opportunity to share in the Church’s ongoing reconstruction of itself as Catholic.” I paused over this notion of “reconstruction,” which, by definition, implies something lost that must be recovered. It is hard not to think of the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris that was completed last year (and is being historically contextualized in an exhibit of the work of French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who oversaw a renovation of the cathedral in the mid-19th century, now on display the Bard Graduate Center in New York)—or the famous instruction to “rebuild my church” that Jesus gave to Saint Francis as he was praying before a crucifix in the chapel of San Damiano. What is this species of Catholicism—or, perhaps better yet, of catholicity—that Kennedy is alluding to as needing to be reconstructed? I found some stirrings of an answer later in the book: “For Christians,” Kennedy writes,

the world is not a panorama of objects. It is a network of relationships centered on the person who creates and is created by his world. Hence a person is not a passive subject imposed upon by moments, events, and encounters; he is instead a subject who either limits or transcends every moment, event, and encounter in the uniqueness of his own consciousness. To help someone grow in consciousness, therefore, appears to be a most appropriate Christian endeavor.

An emerging Catholic consciousness, then, is one where the egoic subject, the “I” that our culture has elevated above all else, realizes that it doesn’t just “create” the world through its techniques, its will, and its machines—Kennedy’s false “panorama of objects”—but is embedded in a network of relationships the subject receives and reflects. All subjects participate in this grand sharing, this process of collaboration and co-creation, and it is why something like the communion of saints can feel so real and present to us. I like, too, how Kennedy’s phrase “centered on the person” might be read in two ways: the person who is the active subject of faith, the individual consciousness that, like a sculptor of time, “limits or transcends every moment”; and the person of Christ himself who is the central node in the network of relationships, the person who models for us a prismatic consciousness that links the unity of light with the multiplicity of color in total transparency to the world.

“Christians are not urged to copy or repeat the words or gestures of Christ,” Kennedy counsels, “but to have his mind and to be one with his spirit.” Elsewhere, he draws on the thought of Thomas Merton to cast Christianity as “above all a deep personal experience which is at once unique, but is also shared by the whole Body of Christ.” I hear this in a more concrete key in a line from the poet Robert Francis: “Home is this little house in which I live, and much beyond it.” That movement beyond is a movement within, ultimately touching the fearless fellowship Kennedy and Merton find in the crucifixion: “to fully hear the word of the cross is more than a simple assent to the teaching that Christ died for our sins. It means to be nailed to the cross with Christ so that the ego-self is no longer the principle of our deepest actions which now proceed from Christ living in us.”

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

Sean Forrest is a musician, author, youth minister, and missionary who has used his gifts and talents to make an impact on many fronts. He is the co-founder of Haiti180, an organization that nurtures leaders of faith, provides love-filled childhoods, and extends God’s care through education, medical aid, and housing for Haiti’s poorest. In the latest episode of our podcast, we speak with Sean about his early religious upbringing and journey to the Catholic Church, his background as a musician and author and how these creative pursuits have shaped his faith and works of service, and the transformative experiences in Haiti that inspired him to start his organization.

Listen here »

Patrick Carolan on rethinking how we tell our sacred stories: “To create a new Earth, we have to start with a story of oneness and interconnectedness, not separation. St. John of the Cross taught us that human desire is unlimited; the heart of all creation is not satisfied with less than the infinite. This infinite is clearly God. Our deepest desire is a desire of oneness with God. We turn away from God when we no longer consider God’s creation and all that it encompasses as sacred. We view evolution as a separate scientific theory rather than a spiritual movement, as St. John of the Cross describes, towards the infinite desire of oneness with God. Unless we accept the story of evolution as our sacred story we cannot go forward, as Thomas Berry challenged us, ‘as a single sacred community.’”

Read more »

Fr. Joseph Victor Edwin, SJ, on the lessons of trailblazing teachers of Christian-Muslim dialogue: “Even before the publication of Nostra Aetate, Jesuit Father Victor Courtois called for a shift in perspective by seeing Muslims not as adversaries but as brothers and sisters. He emphasized the importance of focusing on shared values rather than engaging in divisive debates. Courtois suggested that studies on Islam should cultivate greater love and appreciation of Muslims. He insisted that we should focus on what unites Christians and Muslims rather than on what divides them. This would bring both communities closer to each other and to the heart of Christ.”

Read more »

• Our friends at Solidarity Hall have extended an invitation to read Dante’s Purgatorio in community later this spring. “Dante is never more self-consciously the poet and the artist, conversing and musing with his fellow artists, than in the second major section of his great poem, the Purgatorio,” they write. “It is also the part of the Comedy most concerned with the hope of earthly politics, as Dante encounters striking figures whose stories reveal qualities of both civic virtue and vice.” The group will meet via Zoom on Tuesdays from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET, starting May 5, and will take up three cantos per session. A full itinerary for the 10 sessions as well as registration information can be found here.

• This coming Monday, April 13, Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life will host a live-streamed dialogue on “Iran and Catholic Teachings on a Moral Foreign Policy” from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. ET. Information and registration are available here.

• Faith in Action is hosting their monthly call for solidarity and prayer on Tuesday, April 14, at 8:00 p.m. ET. “During our call, we will take time to lament, pray for lives lost and offer glimpses of light in the midst of suffering,” they write. Registration is available here.

• On Thursday, April 16, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. ET, join Sister Maria Marta Zielińska, CSSF, postulator for the canonization cause of Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska, for a special presentation on the process of canonization in the Catholic Church and the current status of Mother Angela’s journey toward sainthood. Information is available here.

• Join the Association of US Catholic Priests (AUSCP) Women in the Church Working Group on Wednesday, April 22 at 1:00 p.m. ET for a 90-minute online gathering of women and priests. The program will include brief testimonies, a guided Lectio Divina, Conversations in the Spirit, and a Q&A. Grounded in the Synod’s call for “full implementation of opportunities” and AUSCP’s mission of compassionate, collegial accompaniment, this event creates a respectful space for listening, shared witness, and pastoral imagination about women’s leadership in parish life.

• The Guild for Spiritual Guidance is hosting a two-day program, “The Collective and Personal Shadow—Jungian Strand,” on May 8 and 9. “Considering the world we live in, this program aims to bring awareness to our collective and personal shadow. Using Carl G. Jung’s understanding of shadow will help to shine a light in places we haven’t explored before,” they write. Information and registration is available here.

These days we often hear the expressions “We live in a perilous time” or “Our world is in crisis.” We read such sentiments on social media and regularly hear them on the news. I have even used these expressions in articles and talks.

We certainly are living in a perilous time. However, if we stop for a moment and think about it, these expressions could describe any period in the history of our civilization. Since we first began recording our story—initially orally, then through the written word—it has been one of war, conquest, slavery, death, and destruction. A great deal of it has centered around our religious beliefs. We have believed that our religion, whatever faith we practiced, was the one true religion and all the others were erroneous or, worse yet, evil. In the 12th century, Pope Honorius III issued a papal bull describing Muslims as beasts, devils, and contemptible beings. Other religions felt the same way about Christianity. We created religion and went to war based on fear and hatred of the other. We ignored the teachings of the great spiritual mystics like St. Francis, the Sufi Rumi, or the teachings of the Hindu Vedas. We have turned our sacred stories into a battle cry against the other instead of a call to oneness with all creation.

Thomas Berry wrote in The Dream of the Earth, “The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.” Our sacred communities are defined by our sacred stories. We view these sacred texts as the unchanging word of God. All of our different faith traditions have their own version of sacred stories, some written and some oral. For Christians, our sacred stories and our sacred texts are told from a historical perspective as it is developed in the Bible. They narrate events that happened centuries ago, recorded by people whose vision was limited by their understanding of the universe and all that it contained at that point in time. Sacred stories are not necessarily sacred because they contain deep and significant truths—though, indeed, they may—but because enough people believe that they do.

Our most sacred Christian stories originated in the oral tradition. Our earliest known written versions date from the late first century to the early second century CE. They were retold, reinterpreted, and rewritten until approximately the fourth century, when church leaders codified them into official canonical texts. The website Patheos summarizes in an historical overview: “The idea of a New Testament canon first emerged in the second century, when church leaders began making lists of the books determined to be authentically apostolic. In 367, Athanasius of Alexandria listed all 27 books of the New Testament in a letter and referred to it as the Canon. Athanasius’s list was widely recognized in the eastern churches, and then was approved by a number of authoritative councils in the West.”

Our sacred stories were interpreted and edited by early church fathers in a way to justify their beliefs. Some of them took the beautiful story that Jesus spoke about, a message of love and oneness, and replaced it with stories of sin, separation, individual salvation, and substitutionary atonement. They created rituals, prayers, and rules centered around worshiping at the foot of the cross instead of, as Jesus taught us in Matthew 16:24, taking up our cross and being one with Jesus. Instead of us being the image of God, they created God in our image. In doing this, they created a patriarchal, hierarchical system where the church leadership, bishops, and clergy serve as the intermediaries between God and the faithful.

When I was younger, I was taught that our Christian theology, our beliefs, were unchanging and absolute. This led to some confusion as the church danced around the peripheries: for instance, first condemning and then embracing science. We realized that the Earth was not created in six days and was not exactly six thousand years old, so we had to adjust our theology to accommodate scientific facts and learned experiences; we had to reimagine our sacred stories. Through it all, we had to maintain our core beliefs, including the belief in the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” This phrase represents the idea that our church today is identical to the church founded by Jesus and bestowed upon the apostles.

Yet our sacred stories do not end with the crucifixion, resurrection, and sending forth of the apostles. They are not static historical narratives about the life of Jesus and his followers. Visionary thinkers like the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and the contemporary Franciscan theologian Sr. Ilia Delio teach us that evolution and science are not separate from our sacred stories; they are our sacred stories. As Delio has written: “We have not accepted evolution as our story. We treat evolution as a conversational theory or something that belongs to science, as if science is something separate from us and outside our range of experience.” We consider ourselves enlightened when we accept that Jonas probably didn’t spend three nights in the belly of the whale, or Noah didn’t take two of each creature on board the ark to avoid a flood. We can accept the grace we receive in the message of these stories without believing in their historical accuracy.

To create a new Earth, we have to start with a story of oneness and interconnectedness, not separation. St. John of the Cross taught us that human desire is unlimited; the heart of all creation is not satisfied with less than the infinite. This infinite is clearly God. Our deepest desire is a desire of oneness with God. We turn away from God when we no longer consider God’s creation and all that it encompasses as sacred. We view evolution as a separate scientific theory rather than a spiritual movement, as St. John of the Cross describes, towards the infinite desire of oneness with God. Unless we accept the story of evolution as our sacred story we cannot go forward, as Berry challenged us, “as a single sacred community.”

We find another approach to the sacred story in the work of George MacDonald, a mid-19th-century Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister. A pioneer in the field of modern fantasy literature, he influenced such writers as C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. MacDonald realized that stories had the potential for being transformational. His works of fantasy were written with a symbolic depth where the reader could find spiritual meaning. As a pastor, he understood that all stories, whether they were works of fantasy or the Scriptures, were sacred stories, and he felt that we would come to a better understanding of God if we took the time to grasp this. To understand an intrinsically relational God, he believed, we had to move beyond the idea that our sacred stories were historical narratives, as this could never convey the fullness of their meaning.

In addition to writing fiction, MacDonald wrote a series of essays entitled Unspoken Sermons. In them, he is less interested in developing and supporting official church dogma and more concerned with understanding that God is love. “How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities!” he writes. “Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain.”

Many of our sacred gospel stories incorporate miracles. Their hidden meanings have been interpreted to have many layers of literary significance. Still, we often consider and believe in them as literal accounts of history and the story of Jesus. They have much deeper resonance if they are not naively accepted as factual history.

One such miracle story is that of the loaves and the fishes. It is one of the most interpreted miracle stories. There are six different versions in the four gospels. We all know the events: Jesus is getting ready to preach to, depending on the version, four thousand or five thousand people. The apostles approach him and plead with him to send the people home because they are hungry. Again, depending on the version, a young boy has two baskets containing five loaves and two fishes. Jesus blesses them and tells his apostles to distribute them. All are fed, with much left over.

This is often considered the greatest miracle which shows how powerful and caring Jesus was. In his article “Hidden Meaning of the Loaves and Fishes,” Dr. Marcellino D’Ambrosio writes: “Elijah had multiplied flour and oil to save a widow and her son from starvation. Elisha did a bit better than his master, multiplying 20 barley loaves so as to feed 100, with some even left over. But in the Gospel, Jesus multiplies 5 barley loaves and feeds 5,000, leaving 12 baskets left over. We’re talking serious one-upmanship here. So, here’s one clear message: Jesus is a prophet greater than even Elijah and Elisha.”

Every day more than 18,000 children die from hunger and hunger-related diseases. I often wonder why God doesn’t just send manna from heaven or bless the loaves and fishes. We know from our sacred stories that God can when God chooses to. Based on our interpretation of our sacred stories, at this point in history, God must be choosing to allow those 18,000 children to painfully suffer and die a horrific death. This does not exactly describe a God who is all love. Maybe if we reimagined the story of the loaves and fishes, we might understand a different perspective.

All the versions of the story tell us that there were men, women, and children present when Jesus performed the miracle. As anyone who has or helped raise children knows, parents do not leave the house without packing a bag of snacks! I have four children. When they were younger, we didn’t go to church, the store, grandma’s house, or anywhere else without some additional food. So while the men may have rushed off to hear Jesus, we can imagine the women would most likely have prepared baskets so their children would not have gone hungry. In Luke 9:14, it says: “And he said to his disciples, ‘Make them sit down in groups of about fifty each.’” Perhaps the miracle was not Jesus’s blessing of the loaves and fishes, but rather getting folks to gather together in small communities and share their food with each other. When they gathered in small groups and shared their food, everyone was fed and there was plenty left over.

Think of the different messages these two versions present. The message of the first version is how this act shows how great and powerful Jesus is. It is a message of God doing for us. If Jesus can feed five thousand, we hear, imagine what he can do for me if I just bow down and worship him. The message in the reimagined version is that Jesus is teaching us how to care for each other. The fact that 18,000 children die each day from hunger is not due to a lack of food; there is more than enough food in the world, so no one should go hungry. Rather, it is due to the fact that we are waiting for God to send manna or Jesus to bless the loaves and fishes instead of sharing what we have in abundance.

“To be religious will be to live in the art of letting go and engaging new structures of relationships of life,” Sr. Delio has written. It is those relationships centered on love, and as we pray through God, with God and in God, that will lead us into the future as the “single sacred community” that Berry references. But to do so, we first have to reimagine our sacred stories. ♦

Patrick Carolan is a co-facilitator of the Tomorrow’s American Catholic podcast.

In this essay, I wish to share some lessons that I have learnt from the remarkable pioneers of Christian-Muslim relations in India. As a student and teacher of Christian-Muslim relations at the Jesuit-run Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies and as a Jesuit engaged with Muslim communities, I continue to learn the art of dialogue and the way to build understanding between these two groups of believers. The trailblazers I will discuss below not only paved the way for constructive interactions but also exemplified the principles of empathy, respect, and collaboration. They made efforts to address historical tensions and to build bridges between the communities based on mutual respect and shared values. Their legacies serve as invaluable guides for contemporary efforts in interfaith dialogue and harmony and illustrate how deep-rooted differences can be transformed into opportunities for new learning and cooperation.

From Fear to Dialogue

Christian-Muslim relations have a long, checkered history. In the West, Islam was either seen as a classic example of ‘unbelief’ or as a dangerously exotic culture. Scholars point out that Orientalism arises out of ignorance. Whenever there is ignorance of another’s faith, polemic has been used as a weapon against the other. Byzantine perspectives on Islam, however, were more complex and grounded in a realistic understanding of religion, reflecting both knowledge of its core principles and familiarity with its followers. One example of this is St. John Damascene who considered Islam a heresy. He viewed it as an Arab reflection of Judaism, constructed from Christian and Jewish sources. John was evidently capable of reading the Qur’an in Arabic and was well versed in the theological debates of early Muslim scholars who were his contemporaries. In his work The Disputation, he recognized the possibility of dialogue and even included a chapter in his writing On Heresies that suggests appropriate Christian responses to Muslim critiques of Christianity.

John Damascene established a foundation for subsequent Byzantine views and approaches to Islam. His insights, while informed, often leaned toward dismissal and even veered into mockery and contempt. His judgment of Islam and its stance on Christianity is said to have limited the opportunity for a more favourable outlook on Islam among later Byzantine Christians, as Andrew Louth points out in his 2018 article “Byzantine Attitudes to Islam.”

A New Approach: The Second Vatican Council

The age of polemics continued in the writings of both Christians and Muslims during colonial times and is also evident in our own times. But in the 1960s, a shift began to appear as a result of the texts produced by the Second Vatican Council, especially Nostra Aetate (“Declaration on the Relationship of the Church with Non-Christian Religions”), which clarified the church’s position with regard to dialogue with non-Christian religions and cultures in general while also referring specifically to dialogue between Christians and Muslims. These authoritative writings of the council marked the culmination of efforts by prophetic pioneers such as Charles de Foucauld, Louis Massignon, W. H. Temple Gairdner, and Kenneth Cragg—to name just a few of the most influential voices for a fresh perspective on the relationship between Christians and Muslims.

In Nostra Aetate, we find important insights about engaging with non-Christians and exploring the purpose and significance of various religions. The passage that begins, “Upon the Muslims, too, the Church looks with esteem” has become well known. The document goes on to convey important lessons for Christians regarding their relationship with Muslims by emphasizing the convictions shared by Christian and Muslims. Moreover, it sidesteps critical themes such as the life and identity of Muhammad as well as the mystical dimensions of Islam. Neither does the document address fundamental political concepts or the ideals that shape the Muslim community. But Nostra Aetate does encourage Christians and Muslims to move beyond past conflicts and grievances and to foster a spirit of peaceful coexistence.

Lessons from Jesuit Pioneers in India

Even before the publication of Nostra Aetate, Jesuit Father Victor Courtois called for a shift in perspective by seeing Muslims not as adversaries but as brothers and sisters. He emphasized the importance of focusing on shared values rather than engaging in divisive debates. Courtois suggested that studies on Islam should cultivate greater love and appreciation of Muslims. He insisted that we should focus on what unites Christians and Muslims rather than on what divides them. This would bring both communities closer to each other and to the heart of Christ. He believed that our approach to studying Islam should be accompanied by prayer and urged Christians to recognize the depth and richness of the spiritual experience of Muslims. He felt that his mission was to expose the hidden treasures present in Islam so that we could find the reflection of our heavenly Father in Muslims brothers and sisters. He concluded: “If they were better understood, they would surely be better loved, and where there is love, there is God.”

Courtois was convinced that a new approach to Muslims can arise out of a theological vision founded on the love of God who sent his Son on a mission of reconciliation to unite all men and women. For this reason, Christians can approach Muslims as their brothers and sisters. Meaningful dialogue hinges on respectful engagement with each other’s beliefs and practices as well as their intellectual traditions. This kind of dialogue can dispel entrenched prejudices about each other.

The second pioneer, Jesuit Father Christian W. Troll, was convinced that the key to a shared future in our diverse, interconnected world lay in fostering honest and open dialogue between religions and cultures. His view was that if we wanted to live together in diversity, every religious community would need to reflect on how their deeply held beliefs, moral principles, and religious laws could be accommodated in the culturally and religiously pluralistic world today.

Troll’s profound understanding of Islam and Muslims, along with his insights regarding the history of Christian-Muslim interaction, has shaped his theological perspectives on the relationship between these two communities. His approach to Muslims consists of two fundamental components, which he identifies firstly as “discernment” and secondly the “commitment to witness to one’s faith.”

Firstly, Troll viewed discernment as a spiritual practice that requires total openness to God and a genuine inner freedom to follow the Spirit of God. He applied this practice to his interactions with Muslims and his study of Islam by recognizing the traces of the Spirit of God in the spiritual lives of the many sincere Muslims with whom he developed friendly relationships. Secondly, Troll approached the study of Islam not merely as a secular academic but as someone sent by the church to identify the convergences and the divergences between Christian and Muslim beliefs. In other words, his commitment to dialogical engagement with Muslims was anchored in his faith, which was nourished by the gospel and the teachings of the Catholic Church, both globally and locally.

Troll felt, furthermore, that dialogue was fundamentally about thinking and conversing together and was concerned with discovering, recognizing, and listening for the Spirit of God in each other’s viewpoints. He neither dismissed nor diminished the significance of other views of truth but conveyed the message that “I want to engage with you, even if we see things differently, so that I can learn from your insights.” A mutual learning experience results in both parties gaining new perspectives, which lead to changes in understanding and attitude. In other words, such exchanges lead both communities of believers to respect and celebrate diversity in our pluralistic world, which require a willingness for personal growth and collaboration for the promotion of peace.

The third pioneer in Christian-Muslim relations was my own mentor, Jesuit Father Paul Jackson. The spirituality of Sufi saint Sharafuddin Maneri (respectfully known by Muslims as Makhdum Sahib) had a profound influence on Jackson’s efforts to engage in meaningful dialogue with Muslims. His own experience as well as the teachings of Maneri and the inspiring lives of many contemporary Muslims both rich and poor shaped his understanding of Islam and dialogue with Muslims. Jackson firmly believed that one could truly know Islam only by getting to know Muslims. He realized that the essence of dialogue lay in being open to “receive” rather than in wanting always to “give.” The process of reflecting on one’s experience is crucial for learning how to “receive” and “share” spiritual richness and brought him to the conviction that “standing with the other” was a fundamental aspect of dialogue. The importance of reflection rooted in experience led to a significant paradigm shift in his model of interfaith dialogue.

Jackson acknowledged that when a committed Christian is fully open and attentive to a dedicated Muslim in dialogue, they both become open to God and enrich each other in the process. He learned to be completely present with his Muslim friends during these conversations. He found that the essence of interfaith dialogue was to be fully present to the other and accepted the idea put forth by Courtois that “in mutual witnessing, we see the features of the heavenly Father in the other.” Through his openness to the religious other, Jackson discovered what it meant to be Christian among Muslims. For Jackson, being totally present to the other resembled the way Christ related with his Father. He also emphasized that the Holy Spirit supports and sanctifies solidarity between Christians and Muslims.

Conclusion

These three pioneers remind Christians that the foundation of dialogue lies in the mission of Jesus Christ who was sent by God to reconcile humanity with one another. Inspired by the mission of Christ, Christians can engage in dialogue with Muslims. They can bear witness to their faith while remaining open to the beliefs of Muslims. True dialogue is characterized by theological understanding, spiritual discernment, the courage to affirm one’s faith, and the humility to find God in the witness of our Muslim brothers and sisters. ♦

Joseph Victor Edwin, SJ, is coordinator of Jesuits Among Muslims in Asia (JAMIA) and secretary of the Islamic Studies Association (ISA) at the Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies in New Delhi, India.

In this episode, we speak with Sean about his early religious upbringing and journey to the Catholic Church, his background as a musician and author and how these creative pursuits have shaped his faith and works of service, and the transformative experiences in Haiti that inspired him to start his organization. Along the way, we touch on the relationship between justice and charity, embracing ourselves as “broken vessels,” and how “entering into the suffering” of others is the cost of discipleship. Listeners can discover more about Haiti180 and ways to support the work of Sean and his team at their website here.

Looking ahead to this Sunday’s reading for the Easter feast of the Resurrection, one phrase leaps out at me. Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, have just spoken with the angel who confirms that Jesus the crucified has been raised and commends them to go tell the news to the disciples. As they run from the tomb to Galilee, the evangelist describes them as “fearful yet overjoyed” (Matt 28:8)—a formulation that runs a whole gamut of emotions across the link of that little word yet.

“Fearful yet overjoyed” feels like an apt way to characterize our present state this Triduum. We look toward the resurrection, that ultimate manifestation of promise and renewal, across so much that is pained and fear inducing in our world. We watch as our leaders wage another catastrophic war abroad without even the pretense of consulting the American people, with ever-shifting motives and a propaganda campaign that abstracts the suffering of human life to the simulacrum of a video game—all of it backed by Crusade-like language founded on a heretical reading of the gospels. We watch the construction of a $350 million ballroom for pageantry and spectacle while people who will never be invited inside go without healthcare or housing. We watch as data centers and warehouses built on speculation pollute our air and water and devour precious open space—and, more scandalously, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement purchases and retrofits these same warehouses to hold human beings as if they were so much overstocked merchandise rather than individuals made in the image and likeness of God.

What unites all this is a deathly drive toward dehumanization, the exact opposite of the incarnate and resurrected Christ. It is seeing everything—people, resources, the land itself—as if it had no future, only a present to serve our immediate needs and impulses. Christ, in his earthly ministry and paschal mystery, breaks through this paradigm and shows us something beyond: the joy on the other side of fear that Thomas Merton called “the root of war.” It is the joy of service and self-gift that we see in the washing of the disciples’ feet on Holy Thursday, the joy that must hide itself in the agony of Gethsemane yet is still somehow latent in the accession to the Father’s will.

To help move us into this spirit of Easter joy, we’ve published this week a suite of Triduum-themed pieces: O’Neill D’Cruz, whose essays I’ve likened to “retreats in writing,” invites us to read the account of the Last Supper as a parable and experience more deeply the connection Jesus establishes between blessing and deed. Our podcast co-facilitator Barbara Mariconda reflects on carrying each other’s crosses and how we can’t heal in someone else what is still wounded in ourselves, while Gerard Garrigan, OSB, offers a related Good Friday–themed poem. We are also excited to share the latest episode of our podcast with Bishop John Stowe of the Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, alongside his recent reflection from a prayer service at ICE headquarters on March 24. Bishop Stowe currently serves as bishop-president for Pax Christi USA, and both his reflection and the insights shared on our podcast challenge us to become peacemakers formed for and rooted in the virtue of solidarity. I would also point readers to the Holy Week pastoral letter issued by Bishop John Michael Botean of the Romanian Catholic Eparchy of St. George’s in Canton, Ohio, which makes a stirring appeal to the conscience to resist war and follow the way of Christ’s peace.

Several years ago, a correspondent signed an email to me with the closing salutation “Practice resurrection.” I still think of this often, especially this time of the liturgical year. It is not enough to call upon Easter hope and joy; we have to enter into it, to turn its promise back onto our broken world and let it shape our prayer and action. Like the two Marys in the gospel story, fear and joy must meet in an encounter with the resurrected Christ, whose first words to us remain: “Do not be afraid” (Matt 28:10).

Triduum blessings to all of our readers—we look forward to returning next week with more new offerings, both written and recorded.

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

The sound of birds all making sounds
But none of them employing words
As fallen Man is wont to do
I heard in chorus all redound

As I was strolling in the woods
One solemn day in late, late March
The hour fast approaching three
The day believers they call Good

The cardinals bedecked in blood, blood-red
Were tweeting unseen tree to tree
The robins chirping on the ground
While one bird, one refused to sing
Instead hammered on the sound of dead,

Recalled the doleful hammer’s pound
That nailed our Savior to a tree
Whose saving blood has washed us clean,
For us the lost has heaven found

Gerard Garrigan, OSB is a Benedictine monk of Saint Louis Abbey in St. Louis, Missouri. Free digital copies of his poetry may be obtained by emailing him at frgerard@priory.org.

Barbara Mariconda writes: “A number of years ago I was asked to present a reflection during morning prayer on Good Friday at the church where I’d served as music director. As life would have it, my mother died on Tuesday of that week. And that changed everything. This is the talk I ended up presenting.”

The image of the cross is inextricably connected to the observation of this second day of the Triduum—to the Friday we call Good. I’d planned on talking about the crosses we bear, and how the example of Jesus carrying his cross can help us to better carry our own. But then everything changed . . . My mother, who’d been in decline for several years, was admitted to the hospital with a bowel obstruction. She spent the last week suffering greatly, and after an unsuccessful, last-ditch emergency surgery, my mother died, throwing Holy Week into a more personal perspective for me.

The complexity of emotions I experienced throughout this ordeal revealed something to me: The heaviest crosses we bear have little to do with the actual challenges, losses, and disappointments that occur throughout our lives—the loss of a job, a dream, a relationship. An illness. A death. These are all inherently part of the human condition. I came to understand that the real cross of my life was the lens I inherited through which I viewed these challenges. The lens that colors every life experience, that either distorts or brings into sharp focus how I came to see myself and the world.

My mother had carried her own heavy cross, on very narrow shoulders. The youngest of three children, she was the invisible child, growing up in the shadow of a high-spirited sister. While I don’t know all the reasons for it, my mother always saw herself as less-than. She had a pervasive sense that she wasn’t as good, as smart, or as lucky as other people. My mother believed that you couldn’t really affect the course of your life—that life was just something that happened to you. She was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Never wanting to draw attention to herself, because she didn’t feel she deserved it. Terribly insecure, uncomfortable with people she didn’t know. She only felt safe in a rigid routine, and resisted change of any kind. This painful cloak of inferiority was the cross she carried every day of her life. It was the lens that colored her world. And through the years, as she clung to her cross, she became exhausted from it, angry at it, resentful at how it weighed her down. But she could never really see it. She only felt its weight.

And her cross became my cross.

People know me as outgoing, confident, always ready for the next challenge. Assertive to a fault. Strong. Independent. Opinionated. A world traveler—I’d even camped and hiked in the Outback in Red Center, Australia. Started my own company, published many books. Made many dramatic changes in my life. Who could possibly see that I carry the same cross as my mother? That, beneath the surface, at the core of who I am, I often see myself as less than, as invisible, inferior? Who would guess that I’ve taken all my mother’s fears, anxieties, and beliefs about the nature of the world and just turned them upside down and inside out? That I’ve clung to that cross just as resolutely as my poor mother did hers? That my impatience and resentment at her fears and anxiety was, more than anything, the denial of the cross we shared—what I never wanted to see and acknowledge in myself, she continually placed right in front of me. And never more than in these final years of her sickness, dying, and death.

I constantly fought the urge to correct her, to chastise her for her negativity, to point out a better approach or attitude toward a situation, a different stance in life. But often, instead of helping her carry her cross, I actually drove in the nails. Because you can’t heal in someone else what’s still wounded in yourself.

Across the years, a place I took refuge was in music—it had always been a balm for me. It’s what drew me to become a music minister in a large vibrant parish. Songs, particularly sacred songs, had a mysterious power to touch into a deeper level of consciousness, a different kind of interior knowing. From the words and melodies rose a pre-cognition, a resonance that moved me into the shadowy mysteries of myself and my faith. Music was where I felt closest to God, where I knew that God spoke to me and through me.

When the demands of mom’s life and my own became too great, I reluctantly left my position as parish music director. It had been a tremendously difficult decision, and in the absence of my music I experienced a small, dark depression. It wasn’t the singing or the playing that I missed. It was the power of a song that somehow chose me, that spoke to me in ways I could feel but not understand. Selecting music for liturgy had pulled me out of myself and into myself, at the same time. It was this sort of precognition, this revelation of God’s presence through song that had slipped through my hands. I felt bereft. Prayerless. Ungrounded.

Throughout this dark time the song that grabbed and stayed with me was the old Evangelical Methodist hymn titled “The Old Rugged Cross.”

I couldn’t figure out what it was about the song that resonated so powerfully for me—and this line in particular: I will cling to the old rugged cross . . . ’til my trophies at last I lay down . . .

When I sang those words, I knew, at the core of my being, that they carried an important truth for me that was just beyond my conscious grasp—the key to unlock something in my soul. I couldn’t let go of that line: I will cling to the old rugged cross . . . ’til my trophies at last I lay down . . .

“My trophies” . . . what a strange word choice. What were my trophies? The things I felt I’d earned, worked hard for, won? My work, my writing, my musical ability, addressing my insecurities in ways my mother hadn’t. My trophies were the things I used to convince myself that my mother and I were different. The things that disguised what I couldn’t ever reveal to the world. The generational cross and inherited lens I shared with my mother.

I have a dear friend who says, “Life will continue to hand you that which you have not yet learned.” I’ll rephrase it: You will continue to choose that which has not yet been healed. When I think now of the ways I’ve continually rubbed salt in my own wounds I could almost laugh—I spent 25 years in a marriage with a man who couldn’t see me. I began a small business—statistically, an endeavor with a 95 percent failure rate in the first year. I struggled for 30 years as a writer—a profession in which rejection is commonplace and only 1 in 10,000 submissions are accepted for publication. I immersed myself in an institutional church that would not fully appreciate and acknowledge the gifts women bring to the table. Over and over and over again I placed myself in situations where I had to struggle, endure, and persist. I experienced rejection and disregard again and again, and even when I overcame it—when I left the marriage, when the business succeeded, and when the books were published, the pervasive feelings associated with that lens my mother gave me remained. I held my trophies close, but because I hadn’t earned those trophies freely, they just added weight to the cross. You will continue to choose that which has not yet been healed.

As I watched my mother take her last breath I held all of this close. And I saw how the cross we shared had prevented us from being able to love each other as freely as we might have throughout our journey together. That has been the source of my grief.

I will cling to the old rugged cross . . . ’til my trophies at last I lay down. For my mother, laying down her trophies meant giving up her life itself. And it calls to mind the last line in the song: I will cling to the old rugged cross . . . and exchange it one day for a crown. I know that as my mother laid down her life, she became free. She exchanged the cross for a crown, finally healed, and made whole. With God’s healing grace I hope the process of healing will continue and allow me to unburden myself before my own death. That God’s ability to love, to heal, to forgive, to renew, displayed as he carried his cross along the road to Calvary, might give me the strength to freely lay my trophies down, one at a time.

So, I ask you: What are your trophies? What defines you? What do you think you can’t live without? What do you see as your greatest accomplishments? What do you continue to choose which has not yet been healed? What bit of a song or Scripture won’t let you go? Look closely at your trophies and ask yourself: Why this particular collection, Lord? What invisible cross might they reveal?

Only when we lay our trophies down can we begin to control less, judge less, inflate ourselves less, let go of all ideas of our absolute rightness that cast others as absolutely wrong. Only then can we stand, stripped down, naked, vulnerable and free, accepting our cross in a spirit of gentleness toward ourselves and others. And it can only be done through the transformative power of Jesus Christ. ♦

Barbara Mariconda is a co-facilitator of the Tomorrow’s American Catholic podcast and a co-founder of Journey of the Soul Ministry, an organization committed to empowering others toward a higher level of consciousness, deepening their faith, and leading them toward the insights necessary for inner transformation.

Bishop Stowe professed his solemn vows to the Conventual Franciscans in 1992 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1995. He has served in Texas as a pastor, moderator of the curia, and eventually as chancellor for the Diocese of El Paso. In 2010, he was elected vicar provincial of the Province of Our Lady of Consolation and became pastor and rector of the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio. In 2015, Pope Francis named him the third Bishop of the Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky. Bishop Stowe currently serves as Bishop-President of Pax Christi USA, and the episcopal moderator of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia and of the Federaciones de Institutos Pastorales (FIP).

In this episode, we speak with Bishop Stowe about the influence of Franciscan and Jesuit spirituality on his early religious upbringing and approach to episcopal leadership, the relationship between faith and political life that is oriented toward the “common good,” and how the church can use the tools of community organizing to build coalitions of mutual interest and empowerment. We also discuss the need to move from discernment to action around the Synod, and Bishop Stowe shares at length about his “formative experience” on the border in El Paso and how the people of the region taught him “the importance of solidarity as a virtue.”

In tandem with this episode, Bishop Stowe and Pax Christi USA have kindly let us reproduce the text of the bishop’s reflection shared at a prayer vigil outside the headquarters of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, March 24. Further resources mentioned in the episode are available below.

See also:

Overview of Diocese of Lexington’s net-zero commitment and synodal initiatives

Pax Christi USA

Season of Faithful Witness proposal

Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)

Tepeyac Institute (Formation Center for the Diocese of El Paso)

The following reflection from Pax Christi USA’s bishop president, Bishop John Stowe OFM Conv., was shared at a prayer vigil outside the headquarters of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, March 24, the anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Oscar Romero. We are grateful to Pax Christi USA and Bishop Stowe for permission to republish it here—Ed.

On [March 24], the Church remembers the heroic witness of Saint Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was assassinated on this date in 1980 while celebrating Mass, because he dared to proclaim the Gospel without reservation and denounced the powers of death who were threatening the humble people of El Salvador and causing great suffering for them with no accountability.

Romero was called “the voice of the voiceless” because he dared to say what no one else would. He named the names of those who had disappeared, he gave voice to the pleas of their families, and he appealed to the consciences of the soldiers who were carrying out illegal orders and terrorizing their own people.

Like Romero, the Church in the United States today must … amplify the voices of those who are left in detention centers (or holding facilities) in unsafe and unhealthy circumstances and without due process. The voices of separated families and children removed from parents. We must imitate the brave Minnesotans who were armed with whistles to alert the undocumented to the presence of ICE agents, who created human barriers to protect parents dropping off their kids at school, and who actively drove ICE agents from their neighborhoods and cities.

Oscar Romero was converted by his own encounter with the poor, his eyes were open to the injustices experienced in his homeland, he was moved to action when one of his priests [Rutilio Grande, SJ] was killed for accompanying the landless.

We are joining our voices and presence to those of the border in El Paso, Texas, and all who are marching and demonstrating today. They are once again showing that the Church is an immigrant Church and that there is desperate need for comprehensive immigration reform. We must insist that no human being is illegal, that our human dignity is given by God who made us in his image and likeness, it is not dependent on migration documents or legal status. We must insist that human rights and the US Constitution apply to everyone in this land, regardless of their legal status.

We must insist that ICE officers are not above the law. They should be identified and visible, rather than masked and in unmarked vehicles. We must insist that those who are detained have access to legal representation, food, medicine, decent facilities and pastoral care. We must insist that immigration agents follow the law as they carry out their duties and we plead with all those in authority to remember the noble ideals of this nation and the welcome that Lady Liberty holds in her hand in the New York harbor.

Let us remember that Jesus said we will be judged on whether or not we fed him in his hunger, clothed him in his nakedness, welcomed him when he was the stranger and visited him when he was imprisoned. ♦

Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv., was ordained as the third Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lexington (Kentucky) in 2015.

Do this in memory of me

– Luke 22:19

Jesus constructed parables to guide the deeds of his listeners: “Go and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:37). Actions speak louder than words, without the limitations of language and literacy. They also convey meaning in ways that are both complementary to, and beyond, words. So how would a spiritual genius like Jesus deliver core messages to ensure his followers across the ages would “do [what] I commanded . . . always . . . until the end of time” (Matt 28:20)?

Jewish tradition emphasizes deeds over creeds, and the Passover meal (seder) is the traditional ritual meal to recall how Yahweh’s deeds liberated Jewish people from bondage. Thus the seder provided a perfect setting for Jesus’s last and lasting lessons to his Jewish disciples. When Jesus concluded his last seder (commemorated by Christians as the Last Supper) by asking his disciples to “Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22.19)—note Jesus says “do this,” not “say this”—did he intend that his deeds during the ritual meal would serve as a pragmatic model for the faith community?

In this essay, we review the imperative verb “do this” in the gospel accounts of the Last Supper to reflect on Jesus’s deeds. We reflect on how these deeds embody the central themes of his ministry, and whether and how they have been emulated by his followers. We explore how his Last Supper deeds resonate with interfaith expressions of other mystics and spiritual masters. If we read Last Supper as a parable for all places, people, and periods, we can apply its last(ing) lessons to guide our spiritual practice on our faith journey.

Reading the Last Supper as a Parable

Jesus’s parables share elements—message, medium, method, mission—that we can apply to reading the Last Supper as a parable. The message or moral of the story is at the core of the parable. The medium conveys the message through relatable entities and everyday activities. The method unfolds as a series of events to demonstrate attitudes and actions that align with the message. The mission (or take-home lesson) is the actualization of the message in the life of the learner. Let us apply these elements to guide our reading the parable of the Last Supper.

Message: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. Just as I have loved you, so must you love one another” (John 13:34)

When Jesus endorses the commandment of the Torah to “love God with all your heart, soul, strength; love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27, citing Deut 6:5; Lev 19:18) as the keys to eternal life, he immediately reinforces the need for deed: “do this and you will live” (Luke 10:28). He then follows up with the beloved parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) as a model for living the Torah. Carlo Carretti, in Letters from the Desert, writes of how Jesus’s new commandment extends our work of love from “love . . . neighbor as yourself” to a new benchmark modeled after him: “love one another, just as I have loved you.”

Medium: Water, Bread, Wine

The use of water for cleansing and purification are part of Jewish rituals. The seder meal includes washing of hands before eating. Eating matzah (unleavened flatbread) after offering a b-r-k-h (berakhah, thanksgiving blessing over the meal) and drinking wine are all part of the ritual. In this essay, we see how Jesus used these seder meal staples to convey his message to all of us, even if we are not familiar with Jewish tradition and rituals.

Method: Serve, Give, Forgive

At the beginning of the Last Supper parable in John’s gospel (13:1), Jesus “knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father.” So how did Jesus demonstrate “just as I have loved you” attitudes and actions congruent with his new commandment? He enacted the message with a series of memorable deeds so that his disciples could “do this and . . . live.”

Jesus set the tone even before the seder meal. Instead of washing hands as usual, he began by pouring water into a basin and washing his disciples’ feet! (John 13:4-6) In Jesus’s time, these tasks would normally be performed by servants for their masters; it was unheard of that any of these tasks would be performed by the masters for their servants. No wonder Peter was confused: Jesus’s actions were an unprecedented act of humility and service in the Jewish tradition, as they were considered the lowliest of tasks, performed by “a handmaid, a servant to wash the feet of servants” (1 Sam 25:41). He continued with radically egalitarian acts of service during the seder meal by serving bread and wine to his disciples (Luke 22:20). Thus, the entire seder meal became a demonstration that Jesus “did not come to be served, but to serve” (Matt 20:28).

We read in the synoptic gospels that Jesus followed the Jewish tradition of offering berakhah—thanks and blessings—which is an important part of the seder ritual. By giving thanks and blessings over the meal, Jesus consecrated and celebrated heaven’s gifts on earth, making life on earth a blessing from heaven, and all life-giving work sacred “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10).

Jewish tradition commemorated how in the desert, Yahweh gave bread daily to be gathered by the people, each for their family (Exod 16:16). Jesus took a different approach during Last Supper: instead of gathering, he distributed bread and wine to all his disciples gathered around the table (Matt 26:26). In doing so, he gave of his own food and drink and included everyone as members of one family.

Judas and Peter are mentioned by name in the Last Supper, and the other disciples are gathered around the table. Soon after the Last Supper, the first betrayed him out of greed, and the second denied him three times out of fear. All the disciples deserted him when a lynch mob showed up with lethal weapons (Matt 26:55-56). We read that at the Last Supper, Jesus was well aware of their intentions and knew what to expect from them. And yet he washed Peter’s feet, gave bread and wine to Judas, and served his disciples all evening long, even at his final meal. Jesus’s kind deeds to those who were unkind to him are sublime acts of forgiveness and a testament that “he loved them to the end” (John 13:1).

Mission: Do this in memory of me (Luke 22:19)

Now we can proceed to the mission statement that follows the Last Supper parable. So how do we remember to “do this in memory of me”? As “members one of another” (Eph 4:25) we remember by doing, and do in order to re-member the dis-membered Body of Christ. As followers of Jesus, his deeds at the Last Supper provide us a “to-do” list so that we may do this while we live and do it to the end:

1. Living the new commandment entails humble service of all and by all, with no exceptions for rank or task.

2. Living the new commandment includes giving thanks and blessings for the fruits of both the earth’s womb (bread, wine) and human wombs: all of us who are placed on earth to “care and cultivate” (Gen 2:15) the garden.

3. Living the new commandment means giving rather than gathering, selfless sharing rather than selfish stockpiling, treating all humankind as kin, and trusting that Yahweh will “give us each day our daily bread” (Matt 6:11).

4. Living the new commandment requires the willingness and ability to “forgive from the heart” (Matt 18:35).

Reflections on Last(ing) Lessons

When Jesus taught large groups using parables, his disciples questioned his approach (“Why do you speak to them in parables?”). Jesus explained, “They see but do not perceive, they listen but do not comprehend” (Matt 13:13). Yet it was often the disciples who neither perceived nor understood Jesus’s words and needed private explanations. Moreover, since Jesus used familiar words and phrases, that he spoke a different language was not readily evident to even his closest followers: “How do you not comprehend that I was not talking about bread?”(Matt 16:11); “I have food to eat about which you do not know”(John 4:32); “You are a stumbling block to me; for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but the things of men”(Matt 16:23). It is not surprising that Jesus would choose a complementary way to communicate key messages if and when his words were communicated or interpreted differently by future generations due to changes in language or literacy, culture, or context.

So if the pragmatic lessons of the Last Supper parable—serve, give, forgive—are intended to be both last and lasting lessons that define Jesus’s ministry, let us reflect on how they are included elsewhere in his choice of phrases, prayers, and parables. We note how Jesus defined the food “about which you [the disciples] do not know” as “my food is to do the will of the one who sent me and complete his work” (John 4:34). As we saw earlier, Jesus emphasized humble service to all humanity (“serve, not be served”) as the way to live the Divine Will on earth.

When he taught the disciples to pray, Jesus composed three verses that remind us how the last(ing) lessons of Last Supper are modeled after the Divine: “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven; give us this day our daily bread; forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matt 6:10-12). In various parables and gospel events, these prayers and Last Supper themes are demonstrated with models of behavior we can emulate: selfless service (Good Samaritan); an attitude of gratitude for life’s blessings (healing of the Samaritan leper); universal sharing (wedding at Cana, multiplication of loaves and fish); heartfelt forgiveness (Prodigal Son).

Resonance of Last Supper Lessons Among Faith Traditions

If we consider that Last Supper lessons are intended for all humankind, one would expect to find resonance between interfaith expressions of Last Supper lessons. Here are a few to ponder and whet one’s appetite for “food about which we do not know”:

Serve: Selfless service, or seva, is the cornerstone of karma-yoga (karma is the Sanskrit word for both deeds and destiny), one of the three main spiritual paths in Hinduism. Karma-yoga maps well to loving with one’s strength, bhakti-yoga (devotion) to loving with one’s heart, and jnana-yoga (knowledge) to loving with one’s being/mind. Thus, the greatest commandment of the Torah resonates very well with both Hindu spirituality and the Last Supper lesson of service. The Hindu poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore offers us this poem that links life, service, and joy:

I slept and dreamt
Life was joy

I awoke and saw
Life was service

I acted, and behold,
Service was joy!

Give: We reviewed how Jesus gave thanks in celebration of the gifts of life and shared bread and wine at the Last Supper. The American poet Walt Whitman sings in Leaves of Grass: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself. What I assume, you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” In a similar vein, Jalaluddin Rumi writes, “You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the ocean in a drop.” Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American poet-artist, writes in The Prophet: “You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”

Forgive: In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’s first words on the cross echo his Last Supper lesson on forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). In the Buddhist tradition, avidya, or ignorance, is the reason behind unkind and hurtful actions that are due to lack of “right knowledge,” one of the eightfold “rights” of the Fourth Noble Truth. Both Jesus and Buddha concur that forgiveness is the way to “loose the bonds” of self-imposed suffering. Among contemporary teachers, a quote by Robert Muller summarizes how forgiveness benefits the one who forgives: “To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.”

At the Last Supper, Jesus emphasized how doing and blessing go together: “If you understand this, blessed are you if you do it” (John 13:17). So we conclude our reflections on the last(ing) lessons of the Last Supper with a last(ing) blessing:

May our serving, giving, and forgiving be so complete that the message of the Last Supper and promise of Jesus’s parables are fulfilled in us: “I have spoken these things to you so that my joy maybe in you and your joy be complete” (John 15:11). ♦

O'Neill D'Cruz retired once from academic clinical practice as a pediatrician and neurologist, a second time from the neuro-therapeutics industry, and now spends his time caring, coaching, and consulting from his home in North Carolina, known locally as the "Southern Part of Heaven." He is a wounded healer who works to heal the wounded, in order that All Shall Be Well.

Scroll down for our latest offerings this week, including:

• Part II of Sarita Melkon Maldjian’s essay “The Oppression of Women in Patriarchal Institutions”

• “A Jesuit Greeting for Eid al-Fitr” by Joseph Victor Edwin, SJ

• William Droel on Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, the 19th-century bishop of Mainz, and his influence on the Catholic labor movement

• Our latest podcast with Mike Matteuzzi, founder of the organization Contemporary Spirituality

In case you missed it, see also our coverage of Dr. Amy-Jill Levine’s lecture for the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and Sr. Lou Ella Hickman’s poem aligned with Catholic Sisters Week earlier this month. I’m also pleased to share this review of Danish novelist Henrik Pontoppidan’s The White Bear in America magazine—Ed.

Recording an episode of our Tomorrow’s American Catholic podcast earlier this week, I inadvertently referred to an “interregnum” period of the Synod on Synodality—a hiatus between the official closing of the second session on October 2024 and the church-wide Ecclesial Assembly planned for 2028.

That framing isn’t quite accurate, as a three-year reception and implementation phase has steadily continued with the Jubilee of Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies last October (readers might remember Patricia E. Clement’s on-the-ground reporting from that event) along with the ongoing release of the final reports from the Synod’s multiple working groups.

Earlier this week, the latest report from Study Group #2, tasked with the theme “To Hear the Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor,” was issued by the General Secretariat. The document takes up five separate questions to examine the “two-fold love” of personal devotion and social works of mercy, and how that love manifests itself in listening to the entwined cries of the earth and the poor.

In the preamble to the document, Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, distinguishes listening from mere “hearing” and characterizes it as “a whole over-arching, faith-based process.”

“Listening can only really happen in reality, at the concrete level, close to the ground,” he writes. It is heartening to see the cardinal include “all sorts of BECs [Base Ecclesial Communities], SCCs [Small Christian Communities], ecclesial communities and movements” among those in the church who “are already doing good Christian listening to the poor and to the earth.”

In their opening section on the Study Group’s methodology, the authors state “that the importance of listening to the cry of the earth is now generally accepted but we received little material [from surveys conducted by the group] describing how such listening might take place.” The acknowledgment reads to me like an invitation to fill this gap, to develop what the document calls in a separate section “ecological lenses” for the practice of social ministry. The authors provide one potential direction when they encourage the use of the Mass for the Care of Creation approved by Pope Leo XIV last year.

Drawing on Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli Tutti, the report promotes the idea of “political love” as “one of the highest forms of charity.” The authors affirm Francis’s teaching that “the Gospel has a political dimension: to transform the social, including religious, mindset of the people.” To this end, they advocate for a church that includes within its conception of charity “the public denunciation of injustices and proposals for systemic change towards social and ecological justice.”

One of the more exciting through-lines of the document is the recurring notion of a “synodal theology” or “community-based theology” that is “contextual, intercultural, transdisciplinary, ecclesial, and rooted in the Word of God.” The authors’ recommendation that theologians “meet face-to-face with communities pushed to the margins for mutual learning” is an excellent template for facilitating that “torrent of moral energy” Pope Leo called forth in Dilexi te. This recommendation is followed by a beautiful image that is itself an example of the authors’ invitation “to make theological language more relevant and to thoughtfully highlight the faith expressions of people made poor”:

Theologians are invited to recognize themselves as active participants and members of, ecclesial communities. In this way, their questions can more naturally arise from the life of communities. The wisdom and knowledge of all members of the People of God, in light of the sensus fidei and living Tradition of the Church, should echo through every thread of theology, woven as a tapestry by many hands.

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

Sarita Melkon Maldjian explores how women in the gospels exemplify the roles of prophet and disciple: “The anointing woman receives a unique and striking accolade of praise from Jesus after her deed is done. If we keep the idea of Mark’s ‘Messianic Secret’ and his portrayal of the twelve failed male disciples in mind, she wins the prize for recognizing Jesus as the Messiah and for showing an overt display of discipleship that not one disciple has managed to supersede thus far in the gospel. As John Dominic Crossan observes, ‘The disciples have never, as Mark sees it, understood or accepted Jesus’ impending crucifixion. But now, in the home of Simon the Leper, for the first time somebody believes that Jesus is going to die and that unless his body is anointed now, it never will be.’”

Read more »

A message from Joseph Victor Edwin, SJ, coordinator of Jesuits Among Muslims in Asia (JAMIA) and secretary of the Islamic Studies Association (ISA) at the Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies in New Delhi, India: “Nostra Aetate clearly states that ‘the Church rejects nothing true and holy in (other) religions’ and promotes interreligious dialogue. While addressing Islam, the document expresses the church’s ‘esteem’ for Muslims and identifies several commonalities that Islam and Christianity share in common, including belief in Almighty God who is merciful Creator and Revealer.”

Read more »

Mike Matteuzzi is the founder of Contemporary Spirituality, an organization dedicated to connecting sincere seekers with the wisdom teachings of the world’s religions. Contemporary Spirituality offers “something more for sincere seekers” through in-person and online programming. It seeks to build a supportive community that emphasizes commitment to a regular contemplative practice while assisting participants in discerning their unique call.

In this episode, we speak with Mike about his background and early experience in an intentional Christian community, his awakening to the “spaciousness” of contemplative spirituality, and how he lives out the calling of “entering the cosmic dance” in his day-to-day life and work with his organization. We also look at how his understanding of the church has evolved throughout his journey, the limitations and invitations of “cultural Catholicism,” and the ways in which the role of the church “is to embrace so as to redeem and not to exclude so as to purify.”

Listen here »

William Droel on an influential figure in the Catholic labor movement: “Although Leo XIII is credited as the pioneer of modern Catholic social thought, he was not the first. For example, Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811–1877) of Mainz was an outstanding social, political, and spiritual leader of the 19th century. In highlighting concepts such the common good, employees as stakeholders, and solidarity, he laid the groundwork for a mature Catholic reflection on modernity.”

Read more »

Join the Association of US Catholic Priests (AUSCP) Women in the Church Working Group on April 22 at 1:00 p.m. ET for a 90-minute online gathering of women and priests. The program will include brief testimonies, a guided Lectio Divina, Conversations in the Spirit, and a Q&A. Grounded in the Synod’s call for “full implementation of opportunities” and AUSCP’s mission of compassionate, collegial accompaniment, this event creates a respectful space for listening, shared witness, and pastoral imagination about women’s leadership in parish life.

A newly released Final Report from Study Group 5 (3-10-26) calls for the creation of “new spaces” for women in diocesan governance and decision-making, stating that their inclusion is not a concession but a requirement for the Church’s mission. This webinar will explore concrete proposals illustrated by personal testimonies and audience participation. Join in this timely work to bring into being a Church where leadership is a shared responsibility of the whole People of God.

Mike’s spiritual journey has taken him to conferences at the Center for Action and Contemplation, silent retreats at St. Benedict’s in Snowmass, Colorado, several years organizing and promoting retreats in Missouri and Kansas for Trappist Fr. William Meninger, time on Sr. Ilia Delio’s board of directors for her Omega Center, and participation in two multi-year spirituality programs: Richard Rohr’s Living School and Ronald Rolheiser’s Forest Dwelling: Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years.

In this episode, we speak with Mike about his background and early experience in an intentional Christian community, his awakening to the “spaciousness” of contemplative spirituality, and how he lives out the calling of “entering the cosmic dance” in his day-to-day life and work with his organization. We also look at how his understanding of the church has evolved throughout his journey, the limitations and invitations of “cultural Catholicism,” and the ways in which the role of the church “is to embrace so as to redeem and not to exclude so as to purify.”

Pope Leo XIV, originally of Chicago, chose his papal name to recall Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903), particularly his May 1891 encyclical that critiqued the Industrial Revolution, On the Condition of Labor. The current Pope Leo is likewise interested in today’s social questions, including the looming effects of artificial intelligence. “In our own day,” says Leo XIV, “the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

The downside of the Industrial Revolution was increasingly evident during the 19th century. For example, there was in the early 1800s a movement among textile workers in Great Britain, called Luddites, who rebelled against specific machines that threatened their wages and the quality of their craft. Their protest sometimes included destruction of machines. Soon enough, however, factory owners and law enforcement put an end to the movement.

Social critics Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) advocated for a different economic system, most famously in their 1848 Communist Manifesto. Meanwhile, Charles Dickens (1812–1870) portrayed the terrible negatives of the Industrial Revolution in his popular novels. Pope Leo XIII added Catholicism’s voice to the cause in On the Condition of Labor.

Although Leo XIII is credited as the pioneer of modern Catholic social thought, he was not the first. For example, Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811–1877) of Mainz was an outstanding social, political, and spiritual leader of the 19th century. In highlighting concepts such the common good, employees as stakeholders, and solidarity, he laid the groundwork for a mature Catholic reflection on modernity.

The same year as the publication of the Communist Manifesto, von Ketteler gave his own analysis in six Advent sermons on poverty and inequality. These were refined in an 1864 book, The Laborer Question and Christianity.

Von Ketteler, a member of an aristocratic family, opposed materialistic communism but was deeply troubled by the harsh effects of industrial capitalism. He thought that some state regulation alongside action by labor and charitable groups could temper extreme capitalism. Thus he advocated for the end of child labor, limits on factory working hours, Sunday as a true day of rest, disability and temporary unemployment insurance, state health and safety inspectors, and more cooperative enterprises overall. The key to a better capitalism was to break the belief that an individual is “the absolute master of things that he [or she] owns,” he preached.

Catholicism says that private property is a right. But drawing upon St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), von Ketteler explained that only God has “full and genuine property rights . . . When making use of his [or her] property a person has the duty to bow to the God-given order of things.” It “is a perpetual sin against nature [to hold] the false doctrine that property confers strict rights,” he continued. Catholicism “protects property,” he said, “but wealth must be distributed . . . for the sake of the general welfare.”

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892), the second Catholic archbishop of Westminster, was long interested in family life, education, church-state relations, and issues of the working class. He was ordained as an Anglican in 1833 and later that year married Caroline Sargent (1812–1837). He was only 27 years old when she died. He became disillusioned with the Anglican Church, in part because it was oblivious to the working poor. In 1850 Manning was received as a Roman Catholic.

In 1848, Manning added his objections to the industrial economy. He said that Christians need to be with the “poor of Christ, the multitude which have been this long time with us and now faint by the way . . . in mines and factories.” Manning, like von Ketteler, anticipated Leo XIII.

Manning was sympathetic to the situation among dockworkers. He mediated during the famous 1889 strike at the Port of London, stating that the employers’ refusal to negotiate was not a private matter but a “public evil.” Union members considered the outcome of their job action a grand victory, which in turn gave momentum to the British labor movement and particularly to organizing lower-wage workers.

Manning’s impact on the Catholic social conscience was not limited to the union members. Many Catholics in the middle- and upper class of that time became attentive to urban and industrial poverty because of his influence.

Von Ketteler and Manning were spiritual ghostwriters for On the Condition of Labor. They and others may provide the same service to Leo XIV when, I predict, he soon issues a major document about the condition of post-industrial workers. ♦

William Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). It distributes a new edition of On the Condition of Labor by Pope Leo XIII; $8 includes postage.

Part I of this essay is available here.

Despite the canonical gospels’ portrayal of Mary Magdalene as the first witness of the resurrected Christ, early church fathers earnestly attempted to discredit these accounts. Mary’s role was certainly a source of discomfort for these men trying to establish the true church of Christianity. In her essay “Excellent Women: Female Witness to the Resurrection,” Claudia Setzer mentions some of those who interfered with the affirmation of the indispensability of Mary’s role in the gospels: Justin Martyr, in the mid-second century, presents a number of proofs for the reality of the resurrection in his Dialogue with Trypho, yet conveniently leaves out the report of Mary Magdalene and other women; Celsus attempts to discredit the resurrection as a fraud by saying that it was only reported by an unreliable “hysterical woman”; John Chrysostom focuses on the vulnerability of women to the snares of the synagogue; and Jerome cites examples of women leading men into heresy.

These Orthodox Christians also had to battle with the exaltation of Mary Magdalene by “heretics.” According to Susan Haskins in her book Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, the Gnostics and Manichees held an image of Mary as “an apostle and spokeswoman for their arcane doctrines, a female figure more important in many of their writings than the male apostles.” These groups, as well as the Montanists of Asia Minor in the second and third centuries, allowed women to teach as apostles. There was a grave necessity for all the early church fathers to call them heretics in order for normative Christianity to uphold an elite male apostolic succession. When it came time to assemble the canon, every secret Gnostic text was omitted. Various scholars have put all the facts of the controversy together with their reclaiming of Mary Magdalene as equal to the male apostles, based on the consistency of her appearance in the Synoptic and the Gnostic Gospels.

The Historical Reality

Feminist scholarship written about the canonical Mary Magdalene has relentlessly equated her with the male “Twelve.” It is within these persistent and determined texts and interpretations that women can regain their apostolic succession, yet because the Synoptics and Johannine texts are so completely androcentric, it is difficult to recapture her true identity. The source of Magdalene’s canonical apostolic exclusion derives directly from the passage of the calling of the “Twelve” in Mark 3:13-19:

He went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him. And he appointed twelve to be with him and to be sent out to preach and to have authority to cast out demons. So he appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter), James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder), and Andrew, and Phillip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot, who handed him over.

At this point, Mark’s narrative world limits leadership to only men. In her commentary on Mark from Searching the Scriptures, Joanna Dewey presents a feminist analysis of this passage:

Is Mark’s narrative world an accurate reflection of the historical reality of Jesus’ ministry? Would Mark’s audience, especially the women in Mark’s audience, understand the narrative world as restricting their own leadership in Christian communities? First, the restriction of the inner circle around Jesus to a few men is probably not historically accurate. It is doubtful that Jesus himself names twelve men or any specific group to extend or continue his ministry. More likely, this portrayal is due to men’s efforts after Easter to establish their own authority. The primary method of transmitting Christianity was oral, and there were Christian women storytellers and teachers. Most of the women and many of the men would have heard Christian women tell stories of women healing and preaching. Thus they probably heard Mark’s story neither as an accurate picture of the women associated with Jesus nor as an authoritative guide for their present Christian roles, but rather as one story among several. For first-century Christians, Mark’s androcentric perspective would have been balanced by other, more gynocentric, perspectives. Women’s oral traditions have not survived, however, except as they have been filtered through men’s perspectives and codified in men’s writings. As a result we have come to mistake Mark’s androcentric narrative world for historical reality.

A passage such as Mark 3:13-19 always brings out the most strident reactions in feminist scholars of the gospels. The root of the problem lies in the ramifications of such passages, when they manifest themselves as overt signs of oppression, such as male apostolic succession. “Mark’s presentation of the disciples’ blatant failure to understand Jesus’ message (6:51-52; 7:17-18; 8:14-21, 32-33; 9:31-32; 10:13-14) coupled with their dismal performance during Jesus’ time of need in Gethsemane (14:32-50) makes Mark’s twelve into a considerably less admirable group than is the case in the other three New Testament Gospels, all of which strive with mixed success to rehabilitate the disciples’ image, at least after the resurrection,” writes Mary Ann Tolbert in The Woman’s Bible Commentary. Elisabeth Struthers Malbon adds in her essay “Fallible Followers: Women and Men in the Gospel of Mark”: “It would seem that the historical reality of women’s lower status and the historical reality of women’s discipleship together support in Mark’s Gospel the surprising narrative reality of women characters who exemplify the demands of followership.”

Accolades of Praise

Like Magdalene, the other woman who is mentioned in all four gospels is the anointing woman:

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” (Mark 14:3-9)

Each gospel writer includes this pericope with differing details (Matt. 26:6-13, Luke 7:36-50; John 12:1-8), yet not one of them omits the dialogue between Jesus and the argumentative speakers. This is the only woman in all four gospels who receives an overt defense from Jesus, and who, moreover, is praised for her good deeds while receiving special preference over and above the disciples. It stands to reason that if all the canonical gospel authors chose to include this passage as well as retain the words of praise of Jesus on her behalf, she must have been an essential female character.

There are all sorts of interpretations as to who this anointing woman really was. Some scholars doubt the historicity of the event, while others claim that the woman was one of the female prophets of the ancient world. (It is worth noting, however, that she is not recognized as a prophet in any of the four gospel accounts.) Nonetheless, as Karen Jo Torjesen writes in When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church & the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity, the woman “had received insight into who Jesus was, and she felt compelled to give a public witness to his identity. She did not choose words for her prophetic revelation; she chose a silent portentous action.”

Prior to this passage, the author of Mark has introduced several women into Jesus’s story, so that by the time the audience hears about the anointing woman, they begin to feel comfortable with the special attention he gives to his female interlocutors. Unlike other Markan characters whom Jesus calls, heals, and teaches, this woman’s action benefits Jesus directly (“she has done a beautiful thing to me”). According to Mary Ann Beavis, Jesus’s “equally prophetic pronouncement that the woman’s action will be remembered is emphatic.” She is the first woman to appear in the passion narrative, and the author conveniently places this episode at the beginning of the narrative instead of at the end or during the Last Supper, thus setting the stage for the crucifixion.

The anointing woman receives a unique and striking accolade of praise from Jesus after her deed is done. If we keep the idea of Mark’s “Messianic Secret” and his portrayal of the twelve failed male disciples in mind, she wins the prize for recognizing Jesus as the Messiah and for showing an overt display of discipleship that not one disciple has managed to supersede thus far in the gospel. As John Dominic Crossan observes, “The disciples have never, as Mark sees it, understood or accepted Jesus’ impending crucifixion. But now, in the home of Simon the Leper, for the first time somebody believes that Jesus is going to die and that unless his body is anointed now, it never will be.”

Historically, it is not known if any of the anointing stories did actually take place. As stated above, the author of Mark might have wanted a story like this to begin his passion narrative so as to foreshadow what was to come. In addition, the fact that Jesus states to everyone that what the woman has done will be “proclaimed in the whole world . . . in remembrance of her” sets the stage for the proclamation of the good news by Christians after the resurrection. “This woman’s self-denial is forever linked with the good news of Jesus’s gracious self-denial,” Malbon writes. “No other Markan character is given this distinction. The anointing woman embodies the self-denial of followership.” Her action was done silently and was directed only at Jesus.

Fulfilling the Prophetic Function

This woman, like other women encountered in the gospel such as the hemorrhaging woman, experience the presence of Jesus through their sense of touch. The anointing woman may have been one of Jesus’s followers, possibly one of those women in the crowds witnessing his many miracles, or she may have been a member of the household of Simon and already a part of the evening’s events. It has been insinuated by some scholars that, based on Luke’s gospel where she is labeled a sinner in 7:39, she was part of the men’s evening’s entertainment. Later tradition took this passage from Luke and the original story of Mark and linked it with Mary Magdalene’s role as a former sinner in Luke 8:1-3. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza clarifies this point when she writes: “The notion of a ‘sinner’ can have a whole range of meanings. The story does not say what kind of sinner the woman was—she could have been a criminal, a ritually unclean or morally bad person, a prostitute, or simply the ‘wife of a notorious sinner.’”

There is a possibility that Magdalene’s name was omitted from the accounts of the anointing woman, but this cannot be proven based on scriptural evidence. Of all the accounts, Mark seems the least concerned about the scandalous connotations of the story. According to Kathleen E. Corley, Mark “acknowledges the social conservatism of the Hellenistic world around him, particularly by keeping women primarily in private scenes; however, Mark’s storytelling usually shows a concern for matters other than the seemingly scandalous behavior of the women in his account.” Susan Lochrie Graham points out: “Luke and John present diluted versions of the Markan story, making the woman a great sinner who comes for Jesus’ forgiveness (Luke 7:37, 39, 47), changing the anointing from the head to the feet (Luke 7:38; John 12:3), an act less shocking to certain sensibilities, perhaps surprisingly if the Hebrew sexual euphemism was still alive at this time.”

Some scholars see the Markan story as being much more complimentary to the woman. “Mark’s head-anointing version probably predates the foot-anointing versions, since by the time men were writing the Gospels they were already minimizing women’s roles,” writes Joanna Dewey. A host, either male or female, might anoint a guest’s head as a sign of rejoicing. Tolbert affirms that “[t]he act of anointing the head with oil was a widespread rite in the ancient Near East signifying selection for some special role or task.” This is evident by Jesus’s reproach to Simon’s failure to celebrate his presence in his home: “You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment” (Luke 7:46). As Dewey explains, “To anoint the head is also to call a person to God’s service, to consecrate him or her for a special task. Prophets and priests were anointed, but above all, prophets anointed those chosen to be king. So the unknown woman at Bethany was a prophet, fulfilling the prophetic function of choosing and empowering Jesus for his messianic role.” Tolbert expounds upon the symbolic power of anointing and how it relates to the woman’s spiritual foresight:

The Greek word, χριστός, “Christ,” is a translation of the Hebrew work for “Messiah,” which means “The anointed one.” Hence the woman’s action could be taken as a symbolic announcement of Jesus’ status as the Christ. Having an anonymous woman “crown” the Messiah would fit very well with Jesus’ continuing teaching in Mark about the first being last and the last being first, or the leader of all needing to be the slave of all. Jesus as the anointed one is Jesus as the crucified one for Mark. This woman is treating his living body to the gentle ministrations and loving care his dead body will have no time to receive, and for that he is most grateful. ♦

Dr. Sarita Melkon Maldjian is a professor of the Core and the English departments at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. She is an advocate for Catholic school education and ordaining women in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Apostolic churches. She and her family are active members in the Armenian Apostolic Church, and all of her children have attended Catholic schools from pre-K through grade 12. She and her family are professional classical musicians and have performed all over the tri-state area. She holds her master’s degree in theology and doctorate degree in Biblical studies and music pedagogy from Drew University, Madison, New Jersey.

Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, Prefect of the Dicastry for Interreligious Dialogue, Vatican, expressed his “closeness, solidarity and respect” in a message to “Muslim brothers and sisters” ahead of Eid Al-Fitr, the closing of Ramadan. In his message, the cardinal said, “This year, through a providential convergence of calendars, Christians observe their period of fasting and devotion alongside you during the holy season of Lent, which leads the Church toward the celebration of Easter. During this spiritually intense period, we seek to follow God’s will more faithfully.” Moreover, he called upon Christians and Muslims, together with all people of goodwill, “to imagine and to open new paths by which life may be renewed” and said that “this renewal is made possible through a creativity nourished by prayer and the discipline of fasting that clears our inner vision and concrete acts of charity.”

He conveyed his sense of spiritual closeness with Muslims, especially with those “who struggle or suffer in body or spirit because of their thirst for justice, equality, dignity and freedom.” He affirmed in his message that the Catholic Church stands in solidarity with all who thirst for justice, peace, and harmony and said: “We are united not only by our shared experience of trial but also by the sacred task of restoring peace to our broken world.” The cardinal noted that peace is a gift from God and that it is nurtured by defusing hostility through dialogue, practicing justice, and expressing forgiveness. He expressed his desire that through the shared season of Ramadan and Lent, Christians and Muslims would experience inner transformation and become a catalyst for a renewed world where the weapons of war give way to the courage of peace.

The spirit of his message is rooted in the spirit of the document issued by Second Vatican Council in 1965 entitled Nostra Aetate (On the Church’s Relation to Non-Christian Religions). Nostra Aetate clearly states that “the Church rejects nothing true and holy in (other) religions” and promotes interreligious dialogue. While addressing Islam, the document expresses the church’s “esteem” for Muslims and identifies several commonalities that Islam and Christianity share in common, including belief in Almighty God who is merciful Creator and Revealer. It also mentions other beliefs shared by Christians and Muslims, such as convictions regarding judgment and the resurrection of the body; similar practices such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving; and the veneration of certain figures, including Mary. The document concludes with an appeal for dialogue and collaboration with Muslims on issues of peace and social justice.

Since Christianity and Islam are the two largest global religions, it is particularly important for Christians and Muslims to heed this call for cooperation in pursuit of the common good of all humanity. In the spirit of Nostra Aetate, Christians join their Muslim brothers and sisters as they engage in fasting, live out a profound commitment to prayer, and practice almsgiving. Together with Muslim brothers and sisters, Christians also share values such as patience, gratitude, compassion, and humility.

During Ramadan, Muslims often welcome Christians and others to come together during Iftar (the breaking of the fast) and Eid al-Fitr (the festival days). Such gatherings help to dispel misconceptions and they foster friendship and trust. Moreover, the festival days serve as an opportunity for Christians and Muslims to develop good relations with each other that will result in mutual understanding.

We join our Muslim brothers and sisters during the occasion of Eid al-Fitr to praise and thank Almighty God and to strengthen the bonds of respect that lead to collaboration for the common good. Especially during these days, we join our Muslim brothers and sisters in praying for peace throughout the world. ♦

Joseph Victor Edwin, SJ, is coordinator of Jesuits Among Muslims in Asia (JAMIA) and secretary of the Islamic Studies Association (ISA) at the Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies in New Delhi, India.

Guided by the observation that “a text without a context becomes a pretext for something antisemitic,” Dr. Amy-Jill Levine delivered a lecture on the topic of “Reading the New Testament as Jews: History, Antisemitism, Respect” at the Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford, Conn., on Wednesday evening.

The lecture was presented by the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace (HIU) and cosponsored by nine area Jewish organizations.

Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at HIU. In her introductory remarks, HIU president Dr. Sherry L. Turner described Levine’s work as “affirming the faith of others while also honoring her own.”

A noted author and scholar, Levine received multiple audiences with Pope Francis. Francis’s 2019 address to the Pontifical Biblical Institute was included in a volume she co-edited with Joseph Sievers, The Pharisees. In the spring of 2019, she became the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute.

Levine’s deep knowledge of Scripture and experience of reading the New Testament “within Judaism” was immediately evident in her presentation, as she unpacked “the history [Jews and Christians] share in common.”

She noted that the period of Jewish history between the second century BCE and the early third century CE was “saved” by Christians through the writings of the New Testament. Christian history can “fill in the gaps” of Jewish tradition, the life and culture of the Jewish diaspora, and Jewish women’s history, she said. She pointed out how Jesus of Nazareth is the first person in literature called “rabbi” and that Paul is the only Pharisee from whom we have written records.

“You can’t talk about Jesus without talking about Jews,” she said. “If we don’t know the social context, we’re going to get [Jesus] wrong.”

She elaborated on Jesus in his “Jewish context,” explaining that his frequent debates with fellow Jews on the meaning of the Torah “puts him right in the heart of Judaism.” Such debates have been integral to Jewish life since the time of Moses, she said.

Levine referenced Matthew 5:17, where Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” She explained that Jesus “breaks no Torah instruction” but instead “tops off” the law “a little bit more, until the glass is overflowing.”

Acknowledging antisemitic interpretations of the New Testament is critical in engaging with the texts, Levine said. She asked the audience to consider: “How do we hear through other people’s ears so we don’t end up inculcating prejudice?”

She cited paragraph 4 of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions that emerged out of Vatican II and was promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965. Calling it a “brilliant document” that created “a sea change in Catholic religious education,” she credited it with revoking the doctrine of “perpetual blood-guilt” against the Jews for Jesus’s crucifixion that had held sway within the church for centuries.

Despite the shift in Jewish-Catholic relations conditioned by Nostra Aetate, antisemitic readings of the New Testament still endure. Levine looked at 13 different reasons for these interpretations as well as various errors in Christian practice and teaching that enable them to persist.

Among the reasons for antisemitic readings of the New Testament is the text itself, Levine said. She pointed to passages such as Matthew 27:25 and John 8:44 as having an overtly antisemitic tone.

The lectionary cycle can prompt antisemitic interpretations, she said. She quoted from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 1988 document “God’s Mercy Endures Forever: Guidelines on the Presentation of Jews and Judaism in Catholic Preaching” and said that work still needs to be done to follow on the bishops’ recommendations.

Negative stereotypes of the Pharisees, demographic and temporal shifts in the church to areas where people may not have a recollection of the Shoah as a “check” against antisemitism, and a lack of mandates requiring candidates for Christian ministry to undergo training on how to avoid anti-Jewish preaching are other factors that contribute to antisemitic readings of the New Testament, Levine said.

A sense of privilege, or an inability to recognize the problem, can exacerbate antisemitic interpretations, she added. She shared an experience of visiting a church in Germany where an explanatory note stated that Jesus’s “way of talking about God challenged the moral and religious beliefs of his day” and led to his death.

The idea that Jesus was killed for his teachings is not so simple, she clarified. She called church officials’ attention to the note, and last year it was amended to the more accurate “At the age of 33, [Jesus] was charged with disturbing public order and sentenced to death by crucifixion by the Roman prefect.”

Errors in practice and teaching that perpetuate antisemitic readings include the claim that the Torah was impossible to follow and that Jesus made it easier. Levine cited a passage from liberation theologian Leonardo Boff’s Passions of Christ, Passions of the World as an example of this line of thinking: “In the world as Jesus found it, human beings were . . . under the yoke of absolutization of religion, of tradition, and of the law.”

Returning to the theme of Jesus “topping off” the law, Levine offered the corrective that Jesus does not abolish Torah but rather “intensifies” it. She gave the example of Matthew 5:28, where Jesus says that even harboring lustful thoughts is tantamount to adultery.

Other errors in practice and teaching that impact readings of the New Testament include a misunderstanding of Jewish purity laws, the idea that all Jews wanted a “militant Messiah,” and the false distinction between a Christian “loving father” and a Jewish “distant God.”

“Jews always call God Father,” Levine said. She emphasized that “Jews follow Torah not to earn divine love but to respond to that love.”

Additionally, the idea of an exclusionary “Temple domination system” in Jesus’s time is not borne out by the evidence, Levine said. She noted that Paul affirms Temple worship in Romans 9:4, and the Temple worked on an inclusive “sliding scale” so that rich and poor alike could participate in the life there. Such is the case in Luke 2:24, where Mary and Joseph’s offering of two young pigeons is evidence of their meager resources.

In the Q&A session that followed, Levine teased out the difference between the Messiah and the “Messianic Age.” Christianity decouples the Messiah from the arrival of the Messianic Age, which she described as “the time when the world changes.”

Martha’s claim to Jesus in John 11, “I know [Lazarus] will rise, in the resurrection on the last day,” is “standard Jewish thought,” she said. This general resurrection of the dead, along with the ingathering of the exiles, the turning of gentiles from “idolatry” to the God of Israel, the final judgment, and peace on earth are all markers of the Messianic Age in the Jewish tradition.

This means that “Jews and Christians are both unfinished products,” Levine said, as the former are waiting for the Messiah and the latter for the fulfillment of the Messianic Age. That sense of mutual expectation can be a spur to further dialogue and exchange, she added. ♦

Michael Centore is the editor of Tomorrow’s American Catholic.