Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan\u2019s Challenge to Catholic Thought.<\/b><\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Edited by James L. Marsh and Anna J. Brown.\u00a0Fordham University Press. 416 pages.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\nCults take part of the truth and run with it as far as their surrounding society permits. And because we in the West are relatively secure, we tolerate and perhaps even encourage such excess.<\/p>\n
For how else does one explain the confused zealotry propagated in\u00a0Faith, Resistance, and the Future<\/i>\u00a0in praise of the poet, priest, and protester Daniel Berrigan?<\/p>\n
Let it be said that I admire Fr. Berrigan as a man of wit, courage, and service. He sticks by his beliefs, has suffered for them, and has been a devoted volunteer helping patients with AIDS. Let he who has displayed more of these virtues cast the first stone at the man.<\/p>\n
That said, this collection of essays by academics and activists presents us with the black-and-white world of the utopian true believers who surround Fr. Berrigan. They maintain the predictable enemies list: American consumerist society and American foreign policy; traditional Catholicism, including Thomism and the just-war tradition; the two Bush administrations and their corporate co-conspirators like Hal\u00ad\u00adlibur\u00adton and Bechtel; McCarthy\u00adism; imperialism; bourgeois society, J. Edgar Hoover.<\/p>\n
Opposed to these entities are the \u201cgood guys,\u201d including Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, Manuel Noriega, Noam Chomsky, philosopher John Rawls, and historian Howard Zinn. Jesus is included in this group, though He seems to gain entry insofar as He is an emissary of Zen Buddhism, Karl Marx, and Carl Jung. Anyway, you get the picture.<\/p>\n
Noticeably ignored in this division of demons and angels is the threat of Islam, which has been attacking Christianity and other religions since the seventh century, and by means of such aggression has established a most corrupt and unproductive empire. Yet one of the academics in this collection writes, \u201cThe waging of self righteous [sic<\/i>], (so called \u2018just\u2019) wars, often in the name of various religions including certainly the Christian religion, has been one of the most salient phenomena in the history of the human race\u2026.\u201d Why would a philosophy professor, of all people, write so obtusely? Aggressive countries have certainly justified their brutality in many ways. But using just-war doctrine as a rationalization for aggression has not been as routine as this writer indicates. Besides,\u00a0only<\/i>\u00a0Christianity has a just-war tradition while \u201cvarious religions\u201d have never quite got around to developing one.<\/p>\n
As one would expect, much of this book is devoted to Vietnam, including the French imperialist involvement there followed by our nation\u2019s war against North Vietnam. However wrong or right such involvement may have been, the writers in this collection ignore the atrocities that \u201cUncle Ho\u201d perpetrated in the name of \u201cland reform,\u201d as well as the butchering of French missionaries, Vietnamese Catholics, and others by his Marxist cadres. Also unacknowledged by these advocates of peace and justice are the murders and genocides of successfully dreadful Marxist states, including the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.<\/p>\n
Yet, we are told, it is the U.S. with its \u201cempire and exploitation\u201d that is the cause of geopolitical disruption. For example, under \u201cthe American empire\u201d of President George W. Bush there are \u201cmore than 20 million people who die per year due to structurally induced starvation,\u201d and there are billions more who are \u201cforced\u201d to live on less than $2 per day.\u00a0Structural<\/i>\u00a0is a word that appears often in these essays as it applies to the \u201cinequities\u201d that capitalism breeds. The opinions of the influential John Rawls are referenced here, since he has acutely described all the inequitable kinks caused by capitalism and, indeed, all the inequities in life itself.<\/p>\n
But, according to one of the zealots in this book, even the perfectionist Rawls is found wanting because he disavowed civil disobedience as a pathway to imposing a \u201cjust society.\u201d The\u00a0\u00fcber<\/i>-egalitarian Rawls is written off because he makes a \u201cmonumental concession to the presumptive legitimacy of existing institutions in bourgeois, capitalist society.\u201d<\/p>\n
Insider cant like this appears throughout the book. Some of it is nearly inscrutable: \u201cI argue, for example, for a legitimate, necessary, contemplative openness to the mystery of the natural, human, mar\u00adginalized, ontological, and religious other, but also that the contemplative articulation has to be complemented by a critique of the socio-economic system that tends to do in that otherness, exploit it, mar\u00adginalize it, deny it, kill it.\u201d Such rhetorical camouflage reminds one of what philosopher Romano Guardini, who knew Nazism and communism intimately, wrote: \u201cToo often \u2018justice\u2019 is used as a mask for quite different things.\u201d<\/p>\n
A species of Catholic social-justice teaching is also discussed in these pages, though it is used as a hammer to bash the imperfections of the U.S. Never is Catholic teaching used as a gauge to measure the success of the U.S. in meeting people\u2019s needs, as opposed to the gross inequities in most countries of the world, where individuals\u2019 lives are stunted by class, economic, and tribal divisions. Thus the word\u00a0fascist<\/i>\u00a0is predictably used to describe America. The writers seem unaware that fascism is actually a kissing cousin to Marxism, both being top-down, totalitarian attempts at leveling out society and creating \u201cthe new man.\u201d The concept that Marxism and fascism are opposites was ably exploited by Stalin in order to stigmatize his opponents and justify his \u201cliquidation\u201d of millions of people.<\/p>\n
This mistaken positioning of fascism and Marxism as opposites represents the disabling weakness of the essays in this book \u2014 these writers are like people who arrive in the middle of a movie and attempt to choose the good guys and bad guys. Then, as leftists are wont to do, they demand that the \u201cinequities\u201d that they see be leveled out, albeit according to their cultish standards. This is what the Catholic left means by being \u201cprophetic\u201d: permitting feelings to overrule reason, history, and experience. But this is the religion of Rousseau\u00a0cum<\/i>\u00a0Oprah, not the religion of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan\u2019s Challenge to Catholic Thought.\u00a0\u00a0Edited by James L. Marsh and Anna J. Brown.\u00a0Fordham University Press. 416 pages.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87,85],"tags":[192,1017,1067,1060],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s466Sb-6142","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3177,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-defense-of-thugs\/","url_meta":{"origin":6142,"position":0},"title":"The Defense of Thugs","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 16, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Sacco and Vanzetti case set a precedent for anti-Americanisms. by Terry Scambray The Fresno Bee Hatred for America is not a recent phenomenon. Despite the opportunities offered in America for all races, creeds and nationalities, a tradition persists that Americans are racist, superficially religious and uncomfortable with foreigners. One of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terry Scambray"","block_context":{"text":"Terry Scambray","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/terry-scambray\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3152,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obstructed-view\/","url_meta":{"origin":6142,"position":1},"title":"Obstructed View","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 29, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity Science\u2019s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism\u00a0by Cornelius Hunter. 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Harper One, 2013. 412 pp. \u00a0Stephen Meyer has followed his highly acclaimed,\u00a0Signature in the Cell, with a worthy sequel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The sequel,\u00a0Darwin's Doubt,\u00a0blends the findings from molecular\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":868,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/appeasement-bode-war-not-peace\/","url_meta":{"origin":6142,"position":3},"title":"Appeasement Bode War Not Peace","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review A review of\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America\u00a0by Bruce S. Thornton. (Encounter Books, 2011 pp. 283) Winston Churchill famously said, \"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.\" In\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":149,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-orientalism-of-barack-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":6142,"position":4},"title":"The Orientalism of Barack Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review Of course the documentary movie,\u00a02016: Obama's America, was timed by the conservative, Dinesh D'Souza, to discredit the president. Nonetheless, there can't be much doubt that the president's vision of America is driven by his attitude toward the perceived sins of European colonialism and his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1706,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/it-takes-an-army\/","url_meta":{"origin":6142,"position":5},"title":"It Takes an Army","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 28, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Rodney Stark argues the Crusades were defensive wars by Terry Scambray The New Oxford Review A review of\u00a0God\u2019s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades\u00a0by Rodney Stark (Harper One, 2009, 260 pp.). 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