no longer many souls, but one

Today, August 28, is the feast day of Saint Augustine. He died on this day in 430, under siege, in Hippo in present day Algeria.

Some scattered responses to the day.

Augustine was, for many years, the most prominent African read in the European and American academies. Augustine's Confessions were required in the Columbia core curriculum, so as such were familiar to most of my circle in my youth. I remember a symposium organized by my brilliant friend Mark Caponigro on an important anniversary (of birth or death, I don't recall).  Mark disliked a number of the implications of his theology.

I believe Mark's objection had to do with Augustine's construction of human nature as flawed. In his Confessions, Augustine reasons that there is never a time he can remember when he was good; even in our youth, we tend toward disobedience and willfulness.

My mother used to quote his definition of evil as the act of turning away from the good, or, as it is usually formulated, choosing a lesser good over a greater good. In the excellent biography of him by Gary Wills, he quotes the example of friendship.  

Friendship is a good; it echoes the love we share with our maker, and can be a force for making God's love real in our world.  At times, choosing friendship over something greater becomes a poor choice.Then the choice, not the idea, becomes evil.

But here's what I like: in the Confessions, Augustine wrote this beautiful description of friendship, gorgeous in its appreciation of its creative glories: 

Reciprocated love uses such semaphorings -- a smile, a glance, a thousand winning acts -- to fuse separate sparks into a single glow, no longer many souls, but one. 

From Augustine, Confessions, 4, 17, in translation in Garry Wills' excellent  Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) 

Who am I to judge?

Driving from an awful job interview through crowded streets in a famously poor neighborhood in Brooklyn, with the radio on, I noticed the news of that hour was Pope Francis' statement about a limited inclusion for homosexuals, including priests. "Who am I to judge?" he said to the press corps on an airplane.

This question made the afternoon news. Other comments and speeches this pope has made are occasionally reported in the media news summary, but rarely as breaking news.

Why not report on longer, more essential comments about the church's continuing commitment to the poor? Or efforts to promote peace? Or responsibility? Or debt relief?

The pope's statements about homosexuality seem to be completely in line with other statements from the official church, the US Council of Catholic Bishops, and other authorities, a theology that recognizes individual conscience and its struggles, and notices that we all struggle with a flawed nature. As such the comment is most definitely not news, and a simpler vision in line with the Church's emphasis on her pilgrim nature, as an agent of forgiveness. All of us are welcome in the pilgrim Church. We make mistakes, we are pulled in directions that range from distracted to destructive, and we hurt ourselves and others.  Sometimes those choices are obvious, some are hidden, and some will never be known to others.  As a society, we spend enormous energy on sexual issues, perhaps a kind of legacy from the hysteria of a prior generation, or a kind of acknowledgment of the possible energy of this aspect of our nature.

But my experience of the Catholic Church has never been as an enforcer of sexual morals. I have experienced the Church as a source of strength, as a loving community, as a connection to others and to my maker. In church, in the Church, I feel mystically linked to God, to a universal community that includes all of time, and to others in my immediate community. 

Why does the media depict the Church as it does?

In part it might be that the Church appears to this sophisticated media audience as a strange anachronism, a pastiche of theater, political power, financial interests and moral influence, dressed up in the garb of the Renaissance. What the Church says is also received by outsiders as a pastiche of complicated language (such as the elegant statements of the Cathechism or from the documents from Vatican II), controversial popular statements (often from radical conservative or liberal ,members of the community) and various impassioned views from the faithful.

So it is hard to see the Church as a viable modern institution for the secular media, and harder to digest the often complex statements that emerge. So it is easier to jump on the simple quote, "Who am I to judge?" that to react to much more radical calls to action.