Skeptical Faith

Google Image “If people say they just love the smell of books, I always want to pull them aside and ask, to be clear, do you know how reading works?” I found this one-liner on the Internet recently. Besides being funny, it illustrates how we often miss the obvious. It also reminded me of a scene in the 1991 movie, Black Robe, a film adaptation of the book of the same name written by Brian Moore. The story is about French Jesuit priests who, in unbelievably impossible conditions, tried to convert native Canadian tribes, some of whom were considered barbarous even for the 1600s. One of the priests was traveling with a French layman and a small group of tribesman in the Canadian wilderness. Some of the tribesmen had learned French and the priest began explaining reading and writing, a “technology” with which the natives were completely unfamiliar. To illustrate, the priest wrote something on a tablet, whispered what he wrote to a nearby native, then handed the tablet to the n...

Google Image I recently met my beautiful, new great, great niece (Yes, I’m that old.). It was close to feeding time during a recent visit and her mother – like most mothers who don’t have feeding schedules down to the minute - gave the baby a pacifier. And like most babies, she was “pacified,” until she realized the pacifier wasn’t the real thing.    As I was watching her, it occurred to me how we humans are so often satisfied with pacifiers, how often we fall for what the Jesuit, Richard Leonard, calls “the narcotics of modern living.” He includes among them drugs, alcohol, sex, work, gambling, technology, and shopping. I would add the preoccupation with technology, sports, exercise and the cult of the body, the fascination with “stuff,” and the idolization of food. These allures, which can be substitutes for religion, “never take away the pain of living but temporarily mask its effects,” Leonard writes, and many of us eventually – sometimes late in life – reali...

Google Image The newspaper I read allows readers to submit anonymous comments without having to take ownership of what they write. They write about everything from politics to trends to crime news. “I believe in ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’” wrote one recent contributor. “The family that abused and tortured their (sic) foster child should receive the same treatment!” The writer is referring to a recent case in which foster parents are accused of abusing and neglecting a teen aged girl, resulting in her death. He didn’t bother to explain the “eye for an eye” passage from the Hebrew Bible or add the rest of what Jesus said. Meant to Restrict Retaliation In the Hebrew Bible, "an eye for an eye" was meant to restrict retaliation to no more than that, according to some Scripture scholars. And Jesus used the passage to teach that his followers should not seek retaliation but should, in scriptural hyperbole, “turn the other cheek.”   I know nothing...

Google Image A news article a while back noted that “in an effort to ensure transparency as well as historical and scientific accuracy,” Pope Francis approved revised norms on healings alleged to be miracles. The norms have to do with the composition and procedures of panels of medical and other experts the Vatican uses to try to determine whether an alleged healing has a “natural or scientific explanation.” I’m sure many cynics had a field day with this announcement. “Miracles?” they may ask! “No contemporary, informed person could believe in them.” There’s reason for skepticism, if not cynicism. People easily see the face of Christ or the image of Mary on gnarled trees, sides of cliffs, in the clouds and on deformed carrots. They say that the survival of their cousin with cancer is “a miracle.” They declare that their remaining alive after that horrible auto accident is a miracle. Sometimes, these phrases are simply figures of speech, meant to say that the incidents a...

Google Image Tracey, a young, healthy nurse working among the disadvantaged, is driving from one town to another when the engine of her car dies. Passersby offer to tow her car, and as that is happening, she drives over the tow rope, which flips her car over and into a ditch. “I cannot move a muscle and feel as if the entire roof of the car is pressing down on my head,” she recalls in her book about the accident and its consequences. “Many hours later… all I can feel is the most excruciating pain in my neck…and my brain knows that I can’t feel anything below my shoulders….” Soon she feels “a stabbing pain at the back of my head.” This turns out to be caused by a sharp twig encased there. Tracey would never walk again or regain the use of her arms or hands. She had to resign herself to being a quadriplegic for life. Bitter Questions Richard Leonard tells this story about his sister in his own book, saying that after he and his mother went to see Tracey in the hospital afte...

Google Image I recall my surprise when I first went to El Salvador and at community or church events saw huge photos of Che Guevara next to ones of similar size of Oscar Romero. Guevara was an Argentinian doctor who joined the Cuban revolution. He later tried to start a revolution of his own in Bolivia and was killed in 1967 by the Bolivian military. He became a symbol of armed revolution in Latin America and much of the world, his face appearing on the front of millions of t-shirts. Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. He was a champion of the Salvadoran poor and defender of human rights against a brutal government, not an advocate of violence. Nonetheless, he was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass by elements of the Salvadoran military. The shock was seeing those two, a militaristic revolutionary and a Catholic member of the hierarchy, side-by-side. The Catholic hierarchy is not known for being revolutionary. To many minds, ...

Google Image Every once in a while, you hear or read something completely unexpected. That was the case recently when I read in America Magazine a story about a resident of Paris saying that much to his surprise, Catholic churches in France – among the most secular societies on earth – are filling up again. At first, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry thought it was a phenomenon at the parish he attended, where if he was less than five minutes early for Mass he often found himself having to “step over people sitting on the floor” on his way to an overflow room. But, he writes, Mass “is packed in most parishes in Paris. This is also true in Lyon, the second biggest city in the country.” This is “in a nation where 53 percent of citizens (according to past polls) identify as Catholic but only five percent regularly attend Mass.” Of course, his "packed -church observation is anecdotal. Gobry cites no studies and couples this perception with the increase in the num...