Diana Butler Bass: November 2009 Archives

During the last few days, Psalm 109:8, a Bible verse in the form of a "prayer for Obama," has topped the Google trends chart:  "May his days be few; may another take his office."  Evidently, a bumper sticker emblazoned with this verse has popped up in various parts of the country.  It is a sort of right-wing Christian equivalent to the old "01.20.09" stickers looking forward to the end of the Bush era.

It was, most likely, intended as a joke.  But it isn't really very funny.  Especially since the next verse reads, "May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow."  The passage goes on the same way--asking God to pulverize this poor fellow--that he lose all his worldly goods, that his orphans be abandoned, that his father be remembered as a sinner, and finally, that "his memory be cut off from the earth."

Thus, the "Prayer for Obama," does more than anticipate that he leaves office; it entreats God to destroy the president.

Psalm 109 belongs to a special category of the psalms known as "imprecatory" prayers--it is a lament in the form of petition to destroy one's enemies.  It is the personal prayer of an individual, someone who has been dealt an injustice by another--and usually more powerful--person.  The words of Psalm 109 are those of deep agony, the longings of a victim for retribution and justice.  This psalm is considered one of the most difficult of all the psalms--full of violent images of vengeance and death.   Many a biblical critic has struggled with its words--and not a few--including Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians--recommend that it not be used in public worship, much less as a bumper-sticker political slogan.

In his marvelous book, Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis observed:

In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth.  In others the same spirit ceases to be frightful only by becoming (to a modern mind) almost comic in its naivety.  Examples can be found all over the Psalter, but perhaps the worst is in 109 (p. 20).

Lewis suspects that it may be best to leave such psalms alone.  But then he says that we must face "facts squarely." 

The hatred is there--festering, gloating, undisguised--and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves (p. 22).

Lewis refers to these psalms as horrible, devilish, cruel, hateful, and evil.  He believes that Psalm 109--and the poetry of its kind in the psalter--should point us back to the evil we carry within and teach us each how to behave with goodness, humility, and love. 

According then, to the venerable C.S. Lewis, a "Prayer for Obama" is really a prayer for ourselves to go beyond "festering, gloating, undisguised" hatred.  "If the Divine does not call to make us better, it will make us very much worse," he reminded his readers,  "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst."

This morning's Washington Post made me choke on my coffee:  "Catholic Church Gives D.C. Ultimatum."  The Catholic Archdiocese is playing political hardball by threatening to cut off social services to the city's poor--including the homeless, the hungry, the sick, and children--if D.C. expands gay and lesbian civil rights and recognizes same-sex marriage.

That's right.  The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is holding poor people hostage in order to keep gay and lesbian persons from getting married.  They are willing to trade the indigent for getting their theological way.  

I don't like to criticize other people's religious faiths or churches.  There's plenty enough to criticize in my own Protestant tradition.  In the last year, however, we have witnessed a new authoritarian activism on the part of the Roman Church hierarchy that has an impact well beyond the Catholic Church.  This new coercive Catholicism is akin to the development of the Christian Right in evangelical churches in the early 1980s--a religious-political movement that reshaped American culture.  This is everybody's business.

In the last year, new Catholic politics emerged in the Prop 8 campaign in California where the church invested vast resources of money and leadership to overturn gay marriage; and then did the same in Maine.  Last week, in a political maneuver worthy of Tom DeLay, authoritarian Catholic bishops forced a Democratic Congress to adopt the Stupak Amendment undermining the legal right to choice by threatening to torpedo health reform.  Now they threaten the D.C. City Council?  Using the lives of poor people as a political tool?

I don't want to be alarmist about this.  Nor, in this ecumenical age, do I wish to be seen as a nativist calling for a new anti-Catholic crusade.  That would be a terrible misrepresentation of these concerns.  Nor do I want to offend Catholic friends and family.  But it is profoundly disturbing that the Roman Catholic Church appears to be using threats and fear to manipulate a democratic political process to enforce Catholic doctrine regarding abortion and human sexuality.  There seems to be a political pattern developing that should cause broad-minded citizens--Catholics included--to ask some serious questions regarding what is happening within the Catholic hierarchy.

Recently, Congressman Patrick Kennedy did just that.  In an argument with his own bishop about health care, Kennedy reminded the Bishop of Rhode Island that American Catholics have a long history of diversity and dissent regarding formal Catholic teaching.  Disagreement with the Catholic Church was, Kennedy argued, part of the dynamic of being Catholic in a democratic society.  Here's the bishop's answer:

"The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic." Well, in fact, Congressman, in a way it does. Although I wouldn't choose those particular words, when someone rejects the teachings of the Church, especially on a grave matter, a life-and-death issue like abortion, it certainly does diminish their ecclesial communion, their unity with the Church. This principle is based on the Sacred Scripture and Tradition of the Church and is made more explicit in recent documents.

For example, the "Code of Canon Law" says, "Lay persons are bound by an obligation and possess the right to acquire a knowledge of Christian doctrine adapted to their capacity and condition so that they can live in accord with that doctrine." (Canon 229, #1)

The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" says this: "Mindful of Christ's words to his apostles, 'He who hears you, hears me,' the faithful receive with docility the teaching and directives that their pastors give them in different forms." (#87)

It is worrisome that a Roman Catholic bishop would remind a member of the Kennedy political family that "docility" is the primary calling of faithful Catholic laity.  What about courage, compassion, and creativity?  

Oddly enough, Roman Catholic leaders have adopted a strategy of authoritarian engagement with the body politic at the very moment at which their church is declining. One in ten Americans is now an ex-Roman Catholic, with numbers dwindling, churches closing, a decline in the number of priests and religious, and with only immigration holding the number of communicants steady. With the church clearly in crisis, the bishops apparently have chosen to use the sick, poor, homeless, children, the faithful laity, and marginal as tools to increase their public power and influence by coercing public policy to fit their theology.  You'd think that they would be looking inward to see what is eroding Catholic congregations instead of lobbying Congress and threatening politicians. 

This is not what John F. Kennedy would have imagined for his beloved church when he so courageously broke through the boundaries of anti-Catholic prejudice to become the nation's first Catholic president.  The eternal flame at his grave in Arlington witnesses to the ancient Catholic vision of universal peace, justice, and love. The new authoritarian Catholicism is not only playing politics but it is replacing a more generous vision of historic Catholic faith--the traditional one that sides with the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast--with a vision of political power.  For that, I am deeply sad.  Coercive religion should have no place in a church or a pluralistic, democratic nation--much less in City Hall or the halls of the United States Congress.