ANNUAL FORTY DAY FAST
for the
TRUTH OF GOSPEL NONVIOLENCE
FAST FOOD: Fourteenth Helping
Is faith a narcotic dream in a world of heavily armed robbers?…The problem of violence today must be traced to its roots: not the small time murders but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global.
-Thomas Merton
Faith and Violence
Elites “soirée” with elites. They wash each other’s hands. They scratch each other’s backs. They convivially commune and communicate with each other in places beyond the sight of the average Joe and out of the hearing range of the average Joe. They commiserate and connive with each other about matters that only they and God know about. Christian religious elites are no exceptions to the law of gravity that governs the elites of all institutions of power and wealth. They know from whence comes their bread and butter. They know the program. They joined the club. They know the “real world” consequences of betraying the code of silence about the historical and theological centrality of the Nonviolence of Jesus in the Gospels and of His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies.
So instead of betraying their fellow elites , they betray–by calculated silence and much more–Jesus and His life of Nonviolent Love, His sufferings for Nonviolent Love, His death in Nonviolent Love and His resurrection through Nonviolent Love, as well as all those immortal souls who have been placed in their spiritual care and who have spiritually trusted them. In other words, for the sacral aristocracy protecting the investment takes priority over obeying Jesus’ explicit command to them in His commissioning of them as Church leaders: “Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19).If it didn’t, you can be certain that the Pentagon would not be picking up the entire tab at a five-star Marriott waterfront hotel in Baltimore for a Tuesday evening soirée for three hundred Catholic Bishops every Fall, when the U.S. Catholic Bishops hold there annual November meeting there.
This is just more proof of the truth that Someone told His disciples two thousand years ago: You cannot serve two masters. You will either serve the one and betray the other, or betray the one and serve the other. You cannot serve God and money.
Here are the choices placed before the leaders of the institutional Churches since at least the time of Constantine: Either serve the elites by withholding from the view of the average Joe in the pew (the elites required canon fodder), or downplay to the point of irrelevancy, knowledge of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies; or serve God, Incarnated in Jesus, and proclaim by word and deed the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love with the passion, vigor, urgency and depth with which Jesus Himself proclaimed this Divine truth and this truth about the Divine. Church leaders made their choice for the former seventeen hundred years ago and have not substantially deviated from it to this day.
What Church leaders have contrived, to salve their consciences on this matter, is to implicitly and by deed, denied that Jesus was speaking the truth when He taught that “You cannot serve God and money.” They instead teach “We serve God by serving money.” Which of course is a blatant factual falsehood, when a clear teaching of Jesus, that sits there in black and white on the pages of the Gospels for any literate person to plainly see, is continuously ignored or bracketed out of the institutional Churches’ ordinary communications about Jesus, because to proclaim it, as Jesus proclaimed it by His words and deeds, would not be looked kindly upon by those with great wealth and with the power of violence required to keep it. It is clear which has priority, which is the master, who is being served by the Constantinianized Churches, when push come to shove.
When Church elites “soirée” with the financial and the military elites, they justify themselves by proclaiming that they are trying to bring Gospel values into the worlds of greed and human slaughter. Talk about living in “a narcotic dream in a world of heavily armed robbers!”
“It is not always easy to see that the duty of protecting the investment may be precisely and without doubt the old man of sin to which we must die.”
John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical Scholar
The Power and the Wisdom
-ECM
