First, I came across this passage from Edward Schillebeeckx in his Jesus: An Experiment in Christology: “If God wills universal salvation, as Jesus preaches when he puts across the message of God’s lordship – if therefore God is love, creative love for [humanity], then even now the poor, the hungry and grief-stricken may rise up in hope, to say: but all the same…Laughter, not crying, is the deepest purpose that God wills for [humanity].”
Below is our reply to Archbishop Lori’s response. We find reason to be critical of Archbishop Lori’s written response. However, we celebrate Archbishop Lori’s recent trip to the West Bank, which is described in the attached article. Archbishop Lori calls for people in this country to advocate on behalf of people in Gaza. Let’s do this by calling for a suspension of arms to Israel!
Catholic delegation went to Holy Land as ‘pilgrims of hope,’ says Baltimore archbishop
Greetings:
Please express to Archbishop Lori our gratitude for his response and to his personal efforts, those already taken and those planned, to ameliorate the suffering in Gaza, the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as well as the suffering of the remaining Israeli hostages and their families.
We were saddened to find missing from the Archbishop’s response any real engagement with the fundamental claim of our long email to the Archbishop through Fr. Kenneth. The fundamental claim is that Israel is committing war crimes on a vast scale and, in so doing, violating fundamental moral principles of our Catholic faith. And Israel is doing so with the robust and unapologetic military and political backing of the United States. There really is no refuting this, and, notably, the Archbishop does not really try. The history is starting to be written, the truth is settling in, and the truth is that the United States has been complicit in war crimes on a vast scale in Gaza, including the war crime of genocide.
And the further truth, please correct us if we are wrong, is that no U.S. Catholic bishop or body of U.S. Catholic bishops has named this moral and factual truth. The Church cannot effectively evangelize, spread the Good News, if it cannot speak the truth on matters as grave as the matter of the suffering in Gaza.
We implore the Archbishop to reflect on what the protection of human dignity requires of us. It does not merely require that we show charity towards those who are suffering. It also requires that we do justice on their behalf. For U.S. Catholics, doing justice to the human dignity of Palestinians entails acknowledging that our own government bears substantial responsibility for their suffering and taking action to end U.S. complicity in their suffering.
It is not too late to do justice. We beg Archbishop Lori and his fellow U.S. Catholic bishops to call on all U.S. Catholics to support some form of limitation on military aid to Israel, as, for example, that proposed in H.R. 3565. When the Catechism says to those under some form of command, “One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide” (2313), how, in this moment, can Church leaders excuse everyday Catholic citizens from undertaking resistance, proper to their own sphere of responsibility, to this evil? Another unheeded call for a ceasefire, which does not even afford Palestinians the dignity of acknowledging the identity of one of the governments behind their suffering, puts up no real resistance and does no real justice.
Finally, what about the souls of the Archbishop’s flock? Before we were removed from witnessing in front of the Cathedral (we violated none of the rules set down for our witness), we had the privilege of speaking with several parishioners. The vast majority of those who stopped to speak with us were as perplexed as we are by the refusal of U.S. Catholic leaders to name the obvious – that our own government is backing, with our tax dollars, a great moral evil. The truth that our government bears substantial responsibility for this great moral evil and that this responsibility implicates us as citizens cannot be walled off from our souls. Who cannot look upon, as the Archbishop rightly put it, the “blatant cruelty” in Gaza, which has gone unchecked, and question the reality of a moral universe?
We implore Archbishop Lori – strengthen our souls with the truth, proclaim the moral goodness of God’s universe, condemn the U.S.-backed moral evil in Gaza and call us to resistance to it. We will be back at the Cathedral to continue our witness. We invite the Archbishop and any representative of the Archdiocese to meet with us, strengthen us, challenge us, engage with us.
Jeff and Suzanne