Is the Pope Catholic ... or one of the Vaishnavas?

In his NYT oped, which I referred to in this post yesterday, the Pope writes:

If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. ...

The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.

To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future. 

"we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain."

Yes.

Empathy, as I have often written about here and even in my newspaper columns, is fundamental to understanding what it means to be human. I wrote in this oped in October 2016 that one of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.”

The Pope writing that we have to let ourselves be touched by others' pain echoes the message that I received through the faith in which I was raised.  The fact that I do not practice religion, and challenge the very notion of a supreme being, does not mean that I do not value empathy that non-politicized religious leaders talk about with the faithful.  Why the faithful choose not to let themselves be touched by others' pain is beyond me.  The utter selfishness and disregard for human suffering that the faithful display and practice is one of the most hypocritical behaviors of the religious folk.

Empathy is framed in non-secular philosophy too.  Adam Smith, often hailed as the brains behind capitalism, was a philosopher who wrote in A Theory of Moral Sentiments " ... by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."

Many among the faithful and the irreligious alike seem to conveniently shut themselves off from the sufferer.  As the Pope writes, "some of us that we can act as if they don’t exist."

Think, for example, of the wars scattered across different parts of the world; of the production and trade in weapons; of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing poverty, hunger and lack of opportunity; of climate change. These tragedies may seem distant from us, as part of the daily news that, sadly, fails to move us to change our agendas and priorities. But like the Covid-19 crisis, they affect the whole of humanity.

Shutting ourselves off from the sufferer is nothing but a statement of our priorities.  We would rather spend money to buy the latest gadget than donate that money to help alleviate human suffering.

I am glad that the Pope continues to hammer the message that the church needs to go to the margins to see life as it really is. 

“I’ve always thought that the world looks clearer from the periphery,” he said in the book. “When God wanted to regenerate creation, He chose to go to the margins — to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude.”

If only the faithful would think about that!

We cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this

I was working in Calcutta when Pope John Paul II came to town, during his whirlwind tour of the Subcontinent in February 1986.

Of course, I too went to see him and his Popemobile.  He was an important figure for me in two ways: For one, I was coming out of my pinkie years, and I had tremendous respect for the work that he had done in ending communism in Poland and across Europe.  And, as one who was rapidly drifting away from faith, I wanted to understand the role of religion in life.

It is not merely COVID-19 that makes me think about faith and the existential crisis--these have been topics that I often blog about.  Especially during high holy days of (m)any religion.

As I noted in this post in March 2016, during the Holy Week, I use the religious calendar "to think about what it means to be human and what it means to lead a good life.  Atheist I am, but I feel constantly driven, sometimes a tad too intensely, to understand these."

We are now a week away from Good Friday.  A couple of days ago, Pope Francis gave "his extraordinary blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city and the world) in an empty St. Peter's Square at the Vatican."

Source

In that address, Pope Francis said:

We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

I was immediately reminded of MLK's "we may have come on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now."

The Pope reminds us that "we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.":

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.
In this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away, uncovering once more that (blessed) common belonging, of which we cannot be deprived: our belonging as brothers and sisters.

We're all in the same boat that has sprung a leak.  I hope that COVID-19 will teach the 63 million Americans that we are all in this together, irrespective of our skin tones, our religions, and any other superficiality that demagogues love to use to divide people up.

Here's to a better tomorrow!

(Embedding this song here because of the news that Bill Withers has died.)

Yelling for freedom, while killing and enslaving!

Barely into a tenth of the book, one truth emerges--the hypocritical and contradictory beliefs of the Europeans who settled in the new world.  On the one hand, they claim to be fleeing persecution, and are in search of freedom.  On the other hand, they annihilate Native Americans and bring in humans from Africa as slaves.  All these well before the Declaration of Independence!

Jill Lepore compels us to think about a number of questions, which she then proceeds to discuss.  Questions such as:

In December 1511, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, delivered a sermon in a church on Hispaniola. Disagreeing with the king's ministers, he said the conquistadors were committing unspeakable crimes. "Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do yo wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?  And then he  asked, "Are they not men?"

That was less than 20 years since Columbus discovered America!

When Columbus landed on the shores of Hispaniola--his "India"--"there were about three million people on that island."  A mere fifty years later, "there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung."

Columbus couldn't care. The King of Spain couldn't care.  The Pope couldn't care.

Five hundred years later, trump couldn't care either--Haiti was his primary target when he specifically referred to a few countries as "shitholes."

"Are they not men?"

That was perhaps the first of the questions, to which there was no end.

As European invaders raped women, or even fell in love with them and stayed with them, the land now had "mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women,"  Soon, these outnumbered Indians, whose population sharply decreased.  "An intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color." Awful, "as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob."

And, therefore, "pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?"

In the contemporary US, trump and his 63 million toadies have clearly stated, over and over, that all people are not equal. 

The guy who co-chaired trump's campaign in Iowa, who had been spewing white supremacist and white nationalist talk for ever, recently said:

what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Oh, and what was the response to Montesinos' question?  The conquistadors were required to read aloud to anyone they proposed to conquer and enslave a document called the Requiremento.  If the natives accepted the story of Genesis the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen, then their lives were spared.

The Evangelicals' support for trump is a mere echo of this 500-year old beginning!

Silent Night

About a refugee and migrant camp in Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos:

If we want to imagine the Nativity, we needn’t go farther than the tent of Alaa Adin from Syria, who left his home just days after he married. Now his wife is pregnant, and when I met them they were living in a tent outside of Moria, because there was no room for them inside.
If we want to see today’s flight to Egypt, we needn’t look far: Nearly every refugee I’ve ever met has a story about escaping in the middle of the night.
If we want to understand a life upended for a census, we need only ask those refugees whose futures are uncertain until their asylum requests are processed, their entire lives now held hostage to bureaucracy.
If we want a miracle, I’d suggest looking at Anwar, who despite crying while recounting the destruction of Mosul, still paused in the middle and offered me a clementine.
As we live through the largest migration in modern history, Christmas invites us to recognize our story in the millions who have been displaced by tyrants, war and poverty and to see their stories in ours.

Pope Francis delivers a message in his address:

Using the example of the holy family to emphasize the “dangers that attend those who have to leave their home behind,” Francis noted that in Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary found a city “that had no room or place for the stranger from afar,” and which “seemed to want to build itself up by turning its back on others.” Instead, the pope said, Jesus “comes to give all of us our document of citizenship.” ...
On Christmas Eve, he recalled the famous appeal of John Paul II to opponents of Communism, that they should “Be not afraid,” “open wide the doors” and have confidence that their cause was just and would prevail.
Francis repurposed the message as an appeal for hospitality to the world’s forsaken. “Christmas is a time for turning the power of fear into the power of charity,” he said.

Peace!

Caption at the source:
A Syrian boy outside his family’s tent near the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece.

Does the Dalai Lama tweet?

I have no idea which god is out there applauding trump in the Oval Office, nor do I have any idea about the god that his 63 million voters pray to.  These religious people I can never understand!

Other religious people have tried to talk sense to trump.  Like the Pope himself.  Remember this one?

When the President met the Pope at the Vatican, last week, it was as if they were members of different species, so far apart in values and style that the actual content of what separated them proved elusive. Francis slyly presented Trump with a gift, though, that—as of yesterday—defines their opposition as absolute. The gift was a copy of his encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’.” Trump politely promised to read it. Sure.

If you believe that trump read even one page of that book, hey you are one of the 63 million voters!

[The] dangerously degraded planet, for Francis, is a manifestation of a deeper problem, for “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.” Though the Pope would not say so, Trump is an embodiment of the moral pollution that generates atmospheric pollution, a sign that something has gone gravely wrong in the way we humans relate to one another.

How awesome that the Pope reasons that our moral pollution is the cause of atmospheric pollution.

Another religious/spiritual leader has stepped in with his anti-trumpism.  The Dalai Lama writes "America First" is deeply flawed:

There are no national boundaries for climate protection or the global economy. No religious boundaries, either. The time has come to understand that we are the same human beings on this planet. Whether we want to or not, we must coexist.

I am sure trump immediately understands this.  His 63 million voters, many of whom include deeply religious Catholics--now denounce him.  Of course I am being cynical!

The Dalai Lama continues:

We must learn that humanity is one big family. We are all brothers and sisters: physically, mentally and emotionally. But we are still focusing far too much on our differences instead of our commonalities. After all, every one of us is born the same way and dies the same way.

I wonder if the pussy-grabber really knows that he too is going to die some day, like every one of us.  Maybe not.  Maybe he thinks that he will merely step into a golden plane and be off to much greener golf courses!

So, what does Tenzin Gyatso--aka, the Dalai Lama--suggest that we do?

The young generations have a great responsibility to ensure that the world becomes a more peaceful place for all. But this can become reality only if we educate, not just the brain, but also the heart. The educational systems of the future should place greater emphasis on strengthening human abilities, such as warm-heartedness, a sense of oneness, humanity and love.

Humanity.
Empathy.
Love.
Heart.
Peace.
Words that trump does not even seem to know.  And 63 million voters elected him!  Shame on them!

All About You

I have written in plenty about the need, the urgency, to understand "the other."  About the need for empathy, especially for the migrants fleeing the tyrants.  And, in the political setting, about how 63 million people elected to the White House a horrible human being who was proudly open about his cruelest approach towards the others.  And about how a significant number of that 63 million are bible-thumping, churchgoing moralists.

Now, consider this:

As I meet, or lend an ear to those who are sick, to the migrants who face terrible hardships in search of a brighter future, to prison inmates who carry a hell of pain inside their hearts, and to those, many of them young, who cannot find a job, I often find myself wondering: "Why them and not me?"

How about this?

Good intentions and conventional formulas, so often used to appease our conscience, are not enough. Let us help each other, all together, to remember that the other is not a statistic or a number. The other has a face. The "you" is always a real presence, a person to take care of.

The other has a face.  What if that face is you?  What if you are the one who needs help?

People's paths are riddled with suffering, as everything is centered around money, and things, instead of people. And often there is this habit, by people who call themselves "respectable," of not taking care of the others, thus leaving behind thousands of human beings, or entire populations, on the side of the road.

"[Each] and everyone's existence is deeply tied to that of others."  Right?

I was quoting the Pope throughout.  Yes, that Pope.  And in a TED talk!

Atheist I am, yes.  But, it does seem to me that what I really care about is in line with the Pope's message.  And, a good chunk of the 63 million who are bible-thumpers, including Catholics, apparently are then contradicting the Pope's interpretation of what Jesus's teachings mean.

No wonder the Pope in one of his previous messages said “But to be a Catholic like that, it’s better to be an atheist.”

I will wrap this up with the Pope's own words from his TED talk:

The future of humankind isn't exclusively in the hands of politicians, of great leaders, of big companies. Yes, they do hold an enormous responsibility. But the future is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as a "you" and themselves as part of an "us." We all need each other.

The pope is coming. The pope is coming.

There is always some media event or the other here in America.  I can easily imagine t-shirts and baseball caps sold to memorialize the trip.  Money will be made--of course, not by me!  BTW, let me tell you a little bit about me, ok?  Me is a pronoun used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself as the object of a verb or preposition!  A horrible groaner, eh?  Hahaha!

Everybody loves Pope Francis, Public Radio reported when I was driving back from campus.  Yep, the commute to campus has begun.  Anyway, enough about me; back to the pope:

Roman Catholics — who make up about 20 percent of the US population — are jazzed about Francis coming, which is hardly surprising. After all, the pope is their representative of Jesus Christ on earth.
But plenty of people from other faith traditions are singing the praises of Francis. And that goes for non-believers too.
“Some of Pope Francis’s actions are really praiseworthy,” says Greg Epstein, who works as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. Epstein is an atheist.

As I listened to it, I forgot about the pope.  It was like, "hold it right there; the university has a humanist chaplain and he is an atheist?"  Damn, no wonder Harvard is Harvard, and then there is Western Oregon University ;)

So, the atheist chaplain loves the pope?

 But Epstein says he refuses to lionize a world leader with beliefs that are so out of step with a large chunk of the American public.
“Pope Francis is still out there advocating for a view of human sexuality that is really damaging to a lot of people. He’s giving temporary, partial absolution to some women who’ve had abortions this year. It’s a good step, but it’s not a solution,” Espstein says.
Esptein hopes people will be open to what Pope Francis has to say on his trip to the US, but also that they listen with a critical ear.

I am not sure that we have enough people who listen to anybody with a critical ear.  Most people seemed to have stopped listening.  And among those that do listen not many do that "critical thinking."

But, apparently there is a good chance that Francis might make political leaders here a tad uncomfortable:

America’s political leaders should expect some discomforting talk when the pope addresses Congress. He will likely praise the founding ideals of the United States — but point out the ways in which its leaders fall short. He’ll be equally blunt when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly in New York on issues ranging from climate change to poverty to war and refugees.

If that will be his agenda, then it seems like the Democrats will applaud him all the time, while the Republicans might begin to wonder if the pope really is a Latin American Marxist communist!  The NY Times has even setup  an opinion debate on "How Radical is Pope Francis?"

The Republican leaders of the House and Senate may squirm a bit, though, when he addresses a joint session of Congress. After decades of a conservative papal vision, the pope’s call to fight inequality and climate change has inspired many progressives, but infuriated conservatives. Is he focusing on issues at the center of Catholic teaching, or has he abandoned core Catholic beliefs to promote a liberal agenda? 

The Economist has a different kind of observation:

In the course of his travels the pontiff, who has shown real eloquence in condemning the excesses of the capitalist north, can still expect some hard questions about his attitude to excesses of another kind. Will he denounce left-wing authoritarianism as much as he has denounced the right-wing variety?

Francis won't let himself be dragged into that kind of a mess.  He seems to be charmingly diplomatic, especially after his predecessor's rottweiler image.  A diplomat is tactful.

Francis is a grandmaster of messaging. Religion writer Michael O’Loughlin has named him, “The Tweetable Pope.” 

Of course, a Tweetable Pope:

Bishops are getting crash courses on tweeting and live streaming, and organizers are pushing the official papal hashtags: #PopeInUS and, for Spanish speakers, #PapaEnUSA.

It seems to me that our political theatre will get that much more exciting to watch.  I tell ya, never a dull media moment in these United States of America! ;)

Neither god nor capitalism works in mysterious ways!

The hippie, er, Pope, is on a tear talking up the environment and criticizing capitalism, which will certainly make the right-wing Catholics wonder if Francis is some kind of a Manchurian Candidate ;)  One of the problems I have with the faith-based people, which includes not only the religious but also those who make religions of their favorite causes, is that they often tend to obfuscate facts or even try to hide them.  Ricardo Hausman goes after the Pope with facts.  But, first, what was the Holy See's problem with capitalism?

Pope Francis said in a recent speech in Bolivia: “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”

Typically, this is what happens when preaching to the choir--there is no dissent. The audience, in fact, leaves even more strengthened in their "faith," which in this case is that all the problems of this world can be attributed to capitalism.

Except for an inconvenient truth--our lives have become way more tolerable than conditions have ever been only thanks to capitalism.  If the Industrial Revolution marks as an easy to reference starting point for the economic system that we now practice, all one has to do is think about life as it was prior to that time period.  How many among us would want to live in the conditions that existed, say, 300 years ago?  (The Pope would, I am sure, because the Vatican was immensely more powerful and influential back then!)

Hausman writes:

In poverty-stricken Bolivia, Francis criticized “the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature,” along with “a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”...
Francis is right to focus attention on the plight of the world’s poorest. Their misery, however, is not the consequence of unbridled capitalism, but of a capitalism that has been bridled in just the wrong way. 

I am no rah-rah fan of capitalism, as the regular readers know all too well.  But then there is no way I will engage in a rhetorical wholesale condemnation either.  Because, there are far too many nuances to think about.  Consider one of the many sweeping accusations of "profit at any price."  Of course, there are atrocious practices like pollution or ill-treatment of the workers, primarily thanks to how those with money are able to rope the government in and get away with such crimes.  But, there is also the other side of the same system that encourages investments even when they do not generate big time profits at all.

You are perhaps thinking that it is so un-capitalistic for the system to voluntarily support when we think it is always "profit at any price."  James Surowiecki writes about " two common but ultimately questionable assumptions":

 The first is that corporate decision-makers care only about the short term. The second is that it’s the stock market that makes them think this way.

Quick. Can you think about capitalistic behavior that has resulted in strong support for companies that don't seem to generate profits?  Stumped?

Of course, there’s no shortage of investors who are myopic. But the market, for the most part, isn’t. That’s why companies like Amazon and Tesla and Netflix, whose profits in the present have typically been a tiny fraction of their market caps, have been able to command colossal valuations. It’s why there’s a steady flow of I.P.O.s for companies with small revenues and nonexistent earnings. And it’s why the biotech industry is now valued at more than a trillion dollars, even though many of the firms have yet to bring a single drug to market. None of these things are what you’d expect from a market dominated by short-term considerations.

Back when the Pope ruled the world, freedom was not known to most of the world, except for a tiny few who were the rich and the powerful.  It was a world of slavery and diseases and tortures and short-lives and poverty and starvation.  We have a lot more to do in order to address diseases and poverty and starvation and many more human sufferings.  But, no soaring rhetoric condemning capitalism will deliver any miracles, even if the faithful blindly believe in the power of miracles.

Source

The Pope's Billion. But, hey, the billion in India or China?

Ever since Pope Benedict decided to abdicate his throne, not a single day has passed without updates, analyses, and commentaries on the succession.  Now that the cardinals are in sequestration, news updates at the hour seems to be the norm at major news sources--they all seem to have something about the conclave.

Compare this nonstop coverage with the leadership transition issues in China or India.  The global Roman Catholic population is about 1.2 billion, which is the same as India's, while China has a hundred million additional people in its count.  But, news updates on China and India are no where near this barrage.

Ask yourself this question: will leadership in China and India matter more, or less, to the entire world, especially here in the US, than whoever is installed at the Vatican?

What's going on in China?  This is the period of their big time, I mean big time, leadership changes.  Given the tremendous concentration of political and economic power with those few men--yes, men--at the top, the words they say and the actions they take will have global repercussions.  From economic and environmental matters to military and cyber conflicts.

[Premier Wen Jiabao] and Hu Jintao, the president, will step down by the end of the 12-day session to make way for a new leadership headed by Xi Jinping, already secretary of the Communist Party, and incoming premier Li Keqiang.

Now, ask yourself this: how much did this leadership transition command our attention?  Compared to the papal paparazzi coverage?

It is a similar situation in India, which is gearing up for national elections in a year, or even sooner than that.  But, extensive media coverage it will not get.

My hypothesis is that the Western media have yet to truly understand how important China and India have become on the global stage, and how much more important they will become in the decades to come.  If there is any coverage at all, there is almost always a skewed representation of those two countries as our competitors.  And that is where the story ends.

We slice and dice the demographics of the cardinals at the conclave, and their political machinations.  We might even know about a cardinal from some country with a couple of million people.  But, we can barely even name those in the highest political offices in China and India.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture.

Which then leads to a follow-up hypothesis that the media attention on the Vatican is no different from its focus on the British royal wedding.  We have become a celebrity obsessed culture, and the pope is an important celebrity--way more than he is a spiritual leader.

But, of course, we are always way too keen on targeting--sometimes literally--that other billion-plus population!

Oh well ... can't change the world. Have to accept defeat and crawl back into my cave :(

Statue of Madonna in Quito, Ecuador, Summer 2011

Why is Pope Benedit like Argentina's Pinochet?

Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, ...

[Richard] Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

What is the case here with Pope Benedict?

The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court.
Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”
Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.

Wikipedia on Pinochet's arrest in Britain, and his trial(s)

A woman saint in India, and it is not Indira Gandhi!

Of course, I am kidding around. But not without reason. During the 1971 war with Pakistan, Indira Gandhi was compared with Kali. Senior leaders often said, "India is Indira and Indira is India" that reminded people of the French king noting that "I am the State".

Given that it is a land of a zillion gods and gazillion saints, hey there is one more to add here. But, it is not in Hinduism. Over to BBC:

A Catholic nun, Sister Alphonsa, has been made India's first female saint, at an event presided over by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.
The canonisation was greeted with delight by Christians in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where Sister Alphonsa lived until her death in 1946.