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Everybody for Everybody with Elias Crim · Tomorrow's American Catholic Podcast

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[music]
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SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Tomorrow's American Catholic.
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SPEAKER_02: This is the official podcast of Tomorrow's American Catholic,
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SPEAKER_02: And now on to today's conversation.
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[music]
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SPEAKER_02: Elias Krim is an editor, writer,
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SPEAKER_02: translator,
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SPEAKER_02: and publisher who founded the national blog and publisher Solidarity Hall in 2013 in
1:55
SPEAKER_02: the podcast Dorothy's Place, which is named for Dorothy Day in 2017.
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SPEAKER_02: Elias has written for the American Scholar,
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SPEAKER_02: Hedgehog Review,
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SPEAKER_02: Shareable,
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SPEAKER_02: Aryan, Strong Towns, Front Porch Republic, America, and other publications.
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SPEAKER_02: His latest book,
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SPEAKER_02: which we'll be discussing today,
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SPEAKER_02: is called Confessions of a Street Catholic and was published earlier this summer.
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SPEAKER_02: Elias is the co-host with the writer and civic advocate Pete Davis of
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SPEAKER_02: the podcast Lost Prophets,
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SPEAKER_02: which is dedicated to recovering the prophetic voices from the mid-20th century
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SPEAKER_02: and rediscovering what they can teach us today.
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SPEAKER_02: So Elias Krim,
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SPEAKER_02: thank you so much for taking some time to join us on Tomorrow's American Catholic.
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SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Michael.
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SPEAKER_00: So happy to be here.
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SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
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SPEAKER_02: So as our listeners may be familiar,
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SPEAKER_02: we generally like to start our conversation with a little overview
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SPEAKER_02: of our guest's spiritual biography.
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SPEAKER_02: And I think yours is particularly interesting.
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SPEAKER_02: You cover it in the book,
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SPEAKER_02: but you've seen the whole range of Catholic groups and you've seen many of
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SPEAKER_02: the subcultures, many of the political subcultures, left, right, center.
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SPEAKER_02: So could you just tell us about your journey from your origins and your entrance
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SPEAKER_02: into the church?
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SPEAKER_01: I might just say something first that I think will pique the interest
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SPEAKER_01: of our listeners is that after reading your book,
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SPEAKER_01: you are the most disarmingly interesting anomaly.
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SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
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SPEAKER_01: You know,
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SPEAKER_01: on the one hand,
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SPEAKER_01: Marian devotions and a so-called street Catholic and a Dorothy Day disciple,
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SPEAKER_01: Gregorian chant fan, supporter of ecclesial solidarity.
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SPEAKER_01: Wow.
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SPEAKER_01: Wow.
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SPEAKER_01: And I'm hoping that you're going to speak a little bit about all of these things.
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SPEAKER_01: Just so interesting.
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SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Barbara.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Well, I could use an old expression from the 60s,
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SPEAKER_00: since I am an old hippie, and say that I've been through a lot of head trips.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: You know,
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SPEAKER_00: the subtitle for the book,
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SPEAKER_00: I was thinking ought to be something like, oh, now I get it.
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SPEAKER_00: Because I've changed my mind a lot of times.
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SPEAKER_00: But I think it's a sign of health.
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SPEAKER_00: I think I worry when people can't change their minds, right, about some things.
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SPEAKER_00: I came out of a small-town Texas background.
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SPEAKER_00: My family went to a Southern Baptist church.
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SPEAKER_00: I came of age, as I mentioned, in the 60s.
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SPEAKER_00: So when I went to the University of Texas at Austin,
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SPEAKER_00: things were really heating up, and that kind of opened up the world to me.
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SPEAKER_00: I was not terribly political, but I was certainly aware of what was going on.
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SPEAKER_00: But I was really interested in school and literature.
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SPEAKER_00: I kind of discovered literature and headed out to another kind of red hot place,
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SPEAKER_00: Berkeley, California, in the late 60s.
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SPEAKER_00: And I did a bit of graduate school until finally I decided I did not want to be a professor.
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SPEAKER_00: And then on the urging of my sister,
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SPEAKER_00: instead of going to New York or Washington,
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SPEAKER_00: D.C., the kind of places most people go, she said, no, no, no, no.
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SPEAKER_00: You need to move to Chicago.
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SPEAKER_00: I'd never been to Chicago, never thought much about it.
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SPEAKER_00: And Chicago is fantastic.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: It was a wonderful place to land.
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SPEAKER_00: This is now in the late 70s.
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SPEAKER_00: And I worked in Chicago as kind of a business editor and a writer and so on,
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SPEAKER_00: and was gradually thinking, I need to go sign up down at Holy Name Cathedral.
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SPEAKER_00: I really had no faith at all particularly,
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SPEAKER_00: but I was kind of groping towards something and You know, here's a funny thing.
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SPEAKER_00: It's not in the book,
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SPEAKER_00: but I remember when I was younger,
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SPEAKER_00: I always wondered what it was about Catholic friends of mine.
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SPEAKER_00: They seemed to have a little gyroscope,
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SPEAKER_00: like a little moral gyroscope, which I was really missing.
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SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't figure out what that was or where it came from.
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SPEAKER_00: They never talked about it,
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SPEAKER_00: but it was in the back of my mind as something I wanted to understand.
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SPEAKER_00: So I came into the church in Chicago and then...
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SPEAKER_00: I went on in publishing and writing,
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SPEAKER_00: got involved in the financial world for a while as a journalist.
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SPEAKER_00: And after the big crash, I began thinking there must be another way to understand the world.
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SPEAKER_00: I'd become a Catholic, but, you know, I was pretty much a kind of a John Paul II Catholic.
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SPEAKER_00: But I discovered G.K.
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SPEAKER_00: Chesterton,
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SPEAKER_00: not just the Chesterton who wrote Orthodoxy,
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SPEAKER_00: but the Chesterton who wrote those books against capitalism.
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SPEAKER_00: And I thought, oh, Nobody told me about this.
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SPEAKER_00: So he was really interesting.
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SPEAKER_00: Distributism was his big hobby horse with Hilaire Belloc and so on.
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SPEAKER_00: And then I kind of kept going on that sort of third way economics.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: And that's sort of one way of describing how I wound up where I am today.
6:41
SPEAKER_02: Could you talk a bit about just the launch of Solidarity Hall as kind of
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SPEAKER_02: the main publishing platform that seemed to come about about the same time,
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SPEAKER_02: this post-crash moment and kind of rethinking where we were going?
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, it came out of reading, you know, Chesterton.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: And then I discovered E.F. Schumacher.
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SPEAKER_00: And then I discovered Wendell Berry.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: And then I discovered Dorothy Day.
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SPEAKER_00: And I thought, you know, I thought these people were part of a conversation.
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SPEAKER_00: And so I began to kind of put them together through some blogging and writing.
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SPEAKER_00: And I discovered other people who also were kind of on this wavelength.
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SPEAKER_00: And so I came up with the name Solidarity Hall.
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SPEAKER_00: Partly in tribute to the Polish Solidarity Movement,
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SPEAKER_00: which I didn't know a lot about,
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SPEAKER_00: but I was very struck by the fact that it was the largest,
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SPEAKER_00: most successful, nonviolent, grassroots people's movement of the 20th century.
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SPEAKER_00: And it just seemed impossible.
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SPEAKER_00: It certainly was impossible for me to imagine that it was the beginnings of
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SPEAKER_00: the overthrow of the largest military empire in the modern world.
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SPEAKER_00: So we took our inspiration from that,
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SPEAKER_00: and there's a whole sort of spirit of solidarity captured in the writings
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SPEAKER_00: of their chaplain, as he's called, Father Joseph Kishner, the spirit of solidarity.
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SPEAKER_00: So that was kind of one inspiration for the group.
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SPEAKER_00: So we launched, you know, a little ways into the project.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: I heard from a guy, a Brazilian-American guy, that said, we have a new pope.
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SPEAKER_00: He's going to be landing on the beach in Rio.
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SPEAKER_00: And that week,
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SPEAKER_00: World Youth Day,
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SPEAKER_00: we're going to do a conference on sort of Jesus and the environment.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you come down and be a speaker?
8:31
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, wow, that sounds amazing.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: And then I found out I had a paid for ticket.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: And so I thought, well, OK, now.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: And I took two of my daughters.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: And so there we were standing on Copacabana Beach, surrounded by about a million people.
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SPEAKER_00: Mostly young people with backpacks and flags.
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SPEAKER_00: And it was just the most incredible vision for me anyway of sort of the world's church.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: Here it is.
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SPEAKER_00: This is what it looks like.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: And we were standing there waiting for this helicopter to come down.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: And it really felt like the world's most famous soccer player was about to descend
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SPEAKER_00: because this crowd was revved up.
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SPEAKER_00: You know, it was very exciting, very fun.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: The city was just Alive, you know, Rio, which is an incredible city anyway.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: So that made a huge impression on me because I made some friends there
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SPEAKER_00: and they further opened my eyes to the fact that the church was not just my parish.
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SPEAKER_00: It was not just my diocese.
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SPEAKER_00: It was not just the U.S.
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SPEAKER_00: It was this much, much bigger thing.
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SPEAKER_00: And that was very exciting.
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SPEAKER_02: Just thinking about the World Church,
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SPEAKER_02: because that's such a nice through line and I think a necessary through line.
9:46
SPEAKER_02: I think it's what came out of the Pope Francis era for me.
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SPEAKER_02: I also found a section of the book where you talk about ecclesial solidarity
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SPEAKER_02: to be very interesting.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: Pat and
10:16
SPEAKER_01: Attended the same parish for many years.
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SPEAKER_01: And the pastor used to say to us,
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SPEAKER_01: do you identify primarily as an American and as Catholic or a Christian as a kind of
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SPEAKER_01: a part of that?
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SPEAKER_01: Or do you identify primarily as a Catholic Christian?
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SPEAKER_01: And it used to infuriate people because primarily,
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SPEAKER_01: and I think most Americans identify primarily First and foremost, as Americans.
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SPEAKER_01: So maybe you could speak to that a little bit.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting.
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SPEAKER_00: This idea I borrowed from a friend of mine,
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SPEAKER_00: a wonderful guy, and I recommend his writing, Michael Budde, B-U-D-D-E.
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SPEAKER_00: He teaches at DePaul University in Chicago.
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SPEAKER_00: He's part of the DePaul Center for World of Catholicism and Intercultural Theology.
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SPEAKER_00: He came up with this idea that if we all could recognize the fact
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SPEAKER_00: that we have this solidarity through our membership in the faith,
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SPEAKER_00: We would have the largest non-organized political group,
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SPEAKER_00: the largest lobby,
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SPEAKER_00: the largest single voice of any organization in the world if we could speak as one.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: And I just thought that was really a striking way of putting it.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's obviously true,
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SPEAKER_00: even though,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: we're torn apart into different denominations and Fights within the denominations
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SPEAKER_00: and endlessly, endlessly.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: But on the whole,
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SPEAKER_00: what he points out is that if you look at Northern Ireland,
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SPEAKER_00: the history of Northern Ireland, Christians fighting Christians.
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SPEAKER_00: All through world history, there are lots of Christians fighting Christians.
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SPEAKER_00: Why on earth?
12:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, what went wrong in all of those instances?
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SPEAKER_00: And why can we not get past that and realize that's not what we're about?
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SPEAKER_00: But it's a powerful idea.
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SPEAKER_00: And we do have a tribalism, and that includes Catholicism.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm sure all of you, too,
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SPEAKER_00: find these moments when you feel like maybe you're listening to someone just being
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SPEAKER_00: a little too Catholic about it, kind of too inside Catholic.
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SPEAKER_00: Our evangelical friends sometimes can kind of do the same thing.
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SPEAKER_00: They're probably just kind of tired of hearing from us or tired of our, you know, triumphalist.
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SPEAKER_00: We're the biggest, you know, attitudes.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: Those things get in the way.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: But Mike Buddy is right.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: They should not get in the way.
12:44
SPEAKER_03: I want to follow up with you a little bit on, you mentioned the Solidarity Movement in Poland.
12:49
SPEAKER_03: And I sort of had forgotten about that until you mentioned it again.
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SPEAKER_03: But when I'm thinking about it,
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SPEAKER_03: it was such a fascinating movement because it wasn't really a political movement.
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SPEAKER_03: It was more of a spiritual movement.
13:02
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, as you know, I've been an activist.
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SPEAKER_03: I've worked in Washington, D.C.
13:05
SPEAKER_03: I've been involved in Lots of political demonstrations and issues.
13:10
SPEAKER_03: And I came to the understanding that we started going about this all wrong, that,
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SPEAKER_03: you know,
13:14
SPEAKER_03: we're looking to change laws rather than transform who we are, our spirituality.
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SPEAKER_03: And that's what the solidarity movement was all about.
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SPEAKER_03: It was a transformative movement, not so much a political.
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SPEAKER_03: And through that transformation, they changed the politics.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, those are great points, Pat.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: And I totally agree.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: You know,
13:33
SPEAKER_00: this book I mentioned,
13:33
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit of Solidarity by Father Czyszner,
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SPEAKER_00: he has this great line in there where he defines solidarity.
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SPEAKER_00: I think he's borrowing from scripture.
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SPEAKER_00: And he says, solidarity is bearing each other's burdens.
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SPEAKER_00: And so at that moment in Polish history, it's really interesting.
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SPEAKER_00: You know,
13:51
SPEAKER_00: the big strike that happened,
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SPEAKER_00: the illegal strike that happened in 1980 was not because people were hungry.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: It was not because of the usual kinds of grievances that people might have.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: It was about the just sort of the irrationality.
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SPEAKER_00: The undignity of the way work was organized,
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SPEAKER_00: the sort of nihilism of it all,
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SPEAKER_00: just the view of the human person and occasionally moments
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SPEAKER_00: when there was violence directed against members of this underground union.
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SPEAKER_00: And so that started out as being about the workers,
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SPEAKER_00: but the workers were also interested in the farmers.
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SPEAKER_00: And so there was a bond there.
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SPEAKER_00: And then it just got bigger and bigger.
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SPEAKER_00: And finally, it was kind of everybody for everybody.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: Also, the very important cultural glue that it was a mostly Catholic country.
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SPEAKER_00: But it is true that the leadership of the movement was not all Catholic.
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SPEAKER_00: It was really very ecumenical.
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SPEAKER_00: So it was a kind of a brief shining moment.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: And as I think I mentioned briefly in the book,
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SPEAKER_00: the tragedy of it,
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SPEAKER_00: the unfinished revolution,
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SPEAKER_00: is that once the Soviet Union fell, Poland is free to hold elections.
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SPEAKER_00: They then invite in all the American economic advisors who strip out all
15:14
SPEAKER_00: of their social safety net and go to austerity.
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SPEAKER_00: Now, this happened not only in Poland,
15:20
SPEAKER_00: but also in Russia and, you know, elsewhere around the Warsaw Pact countries.
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SPEAKER_00: This is where Putin came from.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: Catastrophic collapse of these cultures after the fall of the Soviet Union and
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SPEAKER_00: when they adopted neoliberal American style austerity economics.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine told me he rode the subway in Moscow in the 1990s
15:46
SPEAKER_00: and he saw elderly people trying to sell their pets.
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SPEAKER_00: It was worse than the American Depression.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: And so when Putin showed up about 2000,
15:55
SPEAKER_00: he was greeted with open arms because he promised to put some of
15:59
SPEAKER_00: the social safety net back into place after,
16:03
SPEAKER_00: you know, on American advice, they'd blown it all up as they did in Poland.
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SPEAKER_00: So that's a very sad outcome to that wonderful moment.
16:11
SPEAKER_03: Something we're going through right now in our country.
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SPEAKER_02: That's what I was thinking, Matt.
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SPEAKER_02: When the safety net disappears over two generations,
16:18
SPEAKER_02: it creates a vacuum, and that's where we get.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: I also thought it was really interesting where you make the statement,
16:26
SPEAKER_01: we are all Poles now,
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SPEAKER_01: and you drew a corollary between that particular time and what's happening
16:33
SPEAKER_01: in our country right now.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: Could you speak to that a little bit?
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess just a thought that occurred to me.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, Poland being between the Soviet Union on one side and Nazi Germany on the other side.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: So we have kind of a two sides we're between.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: On one side, there's kind of the, what would you call it?
16:54
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of Trumpism,
16:56
SPEAKER_00: kind of the Steve Bannon,
16:58
SPEAKER_00: very populist,
17:00
SPEAKER_00: to some extent,
17:01
SPEAKER_00: even kind of grassroots movement to tear down the government and all that.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: On the other side is the Elon Musk technocracy.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: And this is not a perfect marriage.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: This is its own kind of culture war in a way.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: And they're both very threatening in different ways,
17:22
SPEAKER_00: particularly when they cooperate, which happened for a Elon Musk and the Doge stuff.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: But either way, it's not a happy choice.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: So I feel like somehow we're just going to have to get through this moment
17:36
SPEAKER_00: without falling into the arms of either of those two camps as the Poles have had
17:42
SPEAKER_00: to do for most of their modern history.
17:44
SPEAKER_03: I'm writing a book and it's almost finished now.
17:47
SPEAKER_03: It's called It's Time for a Franciscan Renaissance.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: Ah, great.
17:50
SPEAKER_03: Basically what I talk about in the book is this sort of coming together of all of us.
17:56
SPEAKER_03: As St. Francis taught us, when I see you, I should see Christ.
18:00
SPEAKER_03: And when you see me, you should see Christ.
18:02
SPEAKER_03: And that's where I believe where we have to start coming together as the oneness
18:06
SPEAKER_03: of all of us, not being separate.
18:09
SPEAKER_03: And we're never going to do that politically.
18:11
SPEAKER_03: We can only do that spiritually.
18:13
SPEAKER_03: Spiritually can lead to political change, but without the spiritual transformative side.
18:19
SPEAKER_02: What do you make, Elias,
18:21
SPEAKER_02: I wasn't planning on asking this,
18:22
SPEAKER_02: but since we're kind of on the current political moment,
18:24
SPEAKER_02: what do you make of the,
18:25
SPEAKER_02: lack of a better term,
18:27
SPEAKER_02: right-wing Catholic common good Catholicism that we see with like J.D.
18:31
SPEAKER_02: Vance and some of these figures?
18:32
SPEAKER_02: Do you feel if there's, is there a place to work with that?
18:36
SPEAKER_02: Where do we start with that?
18:37
SPEAKER_02: What are your thoughts?
18:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm not quite sure I know what to make of it.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: I take it you're referring also to that kind of integral thing.
18:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm thinking more of like you see some gestures towards economic populism
18:49
SPEAKER_02: or like this plan Vance just came out with remunerating working parents,
18:53
SPEAKER_02: you know, trying to stabilize people economically.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
18:57
SPEAKER_02: What's your thought on that?
18:59
SPEAKER_00: I have to say I have very little confidence in it because I think it's a handful
19:05
SPEAKER_00: of political offerings, kind of window dressing.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: I am a system change guy.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
19:12
SPEAKER_00: as far as,
19:13
SPEAKER_00: for example, the Polish example, you know, solidarity comes out of suffering.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: That's what Father Tischner was kind of getting at, bearing each other's burdens.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
19:23
SPEAKER_00: aside from the sort of showbiz kind of politics represented by Vance and people like
19:28
SPEAKER_00: that,
19:29
SPEAKER_00: I would say here in D.C.,
19:31
SPEAKER_00: about a little over a year ago,
19:33
SPEAKER_00: I saw the first signs of what might be some kind of a new genuine solidarity.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: And I'm interested to see what you folks might think about this, too.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: And that was in the ICE raids.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: People around D.C.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: and certainly in the neighborhood I was in were coming out of their houses
19:53
SPEAKER_00: with bullhorns and yelling and screaming and following the ICE guys around.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: And it was tense.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: It was not as extreme, perhaps, as Minneapolis, but it was a real confrontation.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons it was happening is
20:09
SPEAKER_00: because people were being basically kidnapped off the streets.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: I walked up on,
20:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:15
SPEAKER_00: one of those big vans that had pulled over a couple of Hispanic women
20:20
SPEAKER_00: that were cleaning houses and had mops and brooms and stuff.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: They got out of their little car and the ice people descended on them.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: And there was a crowd around the women.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: Yelling at the ice guys, leave them alone, leave them alone, and so on.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: So the bishops heard this, right?
20:38
SPEAKER_00: This was their people being kidnapped in front of them.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: And so I thought this is going to echo.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: This is going to have some reverberations.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: This is important because it's kind of awakening people in a way and at
20:52
SPEAKER_00: the grassroots level that we haven't been awakened.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: And if you can...
20:57
SPEAKER_00: See other people suffering and decide you want to share in it.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: That is solidarity.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: And you could build something out of that.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what that would be, but it just seems like there's more of it.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: And particularly after these climate disasters,
21:12
SPEAKER_00: communities come together and pretty quickly everybody knows almost what to do
21:17
SPEAKER_00: because we've been kind of rehearsing.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: So I think that could bleed over into some politics and I don't know exactly how,
21:25
SPEAKER_00: but that feels real.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: But not, you know, a random proposal from the vice president.
21:31
SPEAKER_03: Again, we believe we're a resurrection people, right?
21:35
SPEAKER_03: We believe in the resurrection.
21:36
SPEAKER_03: But before the resurrection, you have to have the awakening.
21:39
SPEAKER_03: You have to have almost the death of what was happening before.
21:42
SPEAKER_03: And so I sometimes think that that's what we're in the middle of.
21:47
SPEAKER_03: We're in the midst of culture as we know it, as we're used to it, dying.
21:52
SPEAKER_03: And out of that's going to be reborn a new understanding, a new culture.
21:56
SPEAKER_03: The question is, as you just said, what's that going to look like?
22:00
SPEAKER_03: And how can we have control over it?
22:02
SPEAKER_03: And how can we go back to what Jesus taught us?
22:05
SPEAKER_03: Getting back to that will help us create heaven on earth.
22:09
SPEAKER_02: I think that comes through too in Pete's introduction to the book
22:12
SPEAKER_02: where he characterizes the past 25 years as I think an experience of unlearning,
22:16
SPEAKER_02: which definitely I related right to that because I came of age under I kind
22:20
SPEAKER_02: of was taught,
22:21
SPEAKER_02: not taught that I couldn't participate in politics,
22:23
SPEAKER_02: but it was almost like this meta reality that just kind of happened.
22:26
SPEAKER_02: It was like the weather,
22:27
SPEAKER_02: you know,
22:27
SPEAKER_02: it came and went and you could possibly follow it,
22:30
SPEAKER_02: but there was really no,
22:32
SPEAKER_02: you could maybe write a letter for a congressperson,
22:34
SPEAKER_02: but there wasn't a sense of solidarity or an embodied way to participate.
22:38
SPEAKER_02: So I think we're maybe relearning in that direction, hopefully.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: Maybe, Elias, you could just speak a bit about the title, just what a street Catholic is.
22:46
SPEAKER_02: It's such a great phrase,
22:47
SPEAKER_02: and I think opens a lot of windows and doors for us to think about Catholicism now.
22:51
SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a bit about the title?
22:53
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: Thinking about that title and the kind of person it describes is part
23:00
SPEAKER_00: of my very late realization of a lot of these things.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: You know,
23:04
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to say if I had been doing the work that Pat had been doing in
23:07
SPEAKER_00: the Franciscan Action Network or that Barbara's been doing with the Journey
23:12
SPEAKER_00: the Soul Ministry and so on,
23:13
SPEAKER_00: I think this would have all been much clearer to me much earlier.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: OK, so some of us take longer.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it is,
23:21
SPEAKER_00: but I just I couldn't figure out what to call a person that was sort of in,
23:26
SPEAKER_00: sort of out.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking there was kind of a spectrum.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: And I'll see if I can give you an example of what I mean.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: A character like Ivan Illich remained in the church,
23:37
SPEAKER_00: a faithful, tradition minded guy his whole career.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: But he did give up with consent his priestly duties.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: So I think of him as kind of a street Catholic in a certain way.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: Then moving a little further out, Paulo Freire was a Christian.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: He remained a Christian throughout his life,
23:55
SPEAKER_00: as I understand it,
23:57
SPEAKER_00: with Marxist touches, and he was not particularly concerned with religiosity.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: So he was not a conventional Catholic in any way.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: Then I think about someone like Simone Weil,
24:08
SPEAKER_00: who's a really incredible figure, who was sort of a partial Christian.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: She could not accept Resurrection theology.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: She accepted the whole story of salvation up to that,
24:20
SPEAKER_00: and it's a very interesting thing to kind of study hers,
24:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm just beginning to really,
24:26
SPEAKER_00: and understand why she saw resurrection as too much like triumphalism.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: It smacked of some kind of domination.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: And so she had to struggle with that.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: And therefore she remained at the church door, so to speak, her whole life.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking a character like Michael Harrington,
24:45
SPEAKER_00: who grew up a Catholic,
24:46
SPEAKER_00: worked with Dorothy Day and left the church and referred to himself later as kind of
24:52
SPEAKER_00: a pious apostate.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: So he was really outside the church,
24:55
SPEAKER_00: but clearly culturally was very formed by it, which is a pretty familiar scenario.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to think of a way,
25:03
SPEAKER_00: maybe a little bit tongue-in-cheek,
25:05
SPEAKER_00: to just describe, you know, Frida, Berrigan's term is Catholic and waiting.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm a Catholic, but I'm also kind of waiting for these guys, mostly guys, to figure this out.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: Kind of get it right, please.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: And then I'll feel better about the whole thing.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of what I came up with.
25:27
SPEAKER_03: We're still waiting.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: Still waiting, which is okay.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: It's okay.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: I think that's one way of doing it also.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: I think there are a lot of ways.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: I just get so nervous when people tell you there's only one way to do something.
25:42
SPEAKER_03: There's one way for you to do something.
25:44
SPEAKER_03: There's a different way for me to do it and another way for Barbara.
25:48
SPEAKER_03: All of those ways are right for each of us as long as they're not affecting.
25:52
SPEAKER_03: We're not doing stuff to hurt you or anyone else.
25:55
SPEAKER_01: I have to say that I think the first thing that began to set me a little bit free...
26:02
SPEAKER_01: As a Catholic,
26:02
SPEAKER_01: although I don't identify as a Catholic anymore,
26:05
SPEAKER_01: was Sister Joan Chittister's book, Call to Book.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: It was like invalidated for me.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: Everything that I'd been thinking and thinking I shouldn't be thinking this if I'm
26:17
SPEAKER_01: a Catholic, you know, really gave permission to be a little bit of a dissident.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: And that's okay.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's great.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
26:29
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
26:29
SPEAKER_03: People like Elia Delio.
26:31
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you're familiar with her at all,
26:33
SPEAKER_03: but brilliant scientists and her whole understanding of the cosmos and spirituality.
26:38
SPEAKER_03: And as she says,
26:40
SPEAKER_03: we have to reimagine our spirituality based on our new understanding of the cosmos,
26:44
SPEAKER_03: because when our sacred stories were written,
26:47
SPEAKER_03: Those people had a different understanding of the cosmos.
26:49
SPEAKER_03: And now we have to reimagine those with a new understanding of the cosmos.
26:53
SPEAKER_03: So when you read people like that,
26:55
SPEAKER_03: it sort of gives you that different understanding of who we are in relationship to
26:59
SPEAKER_03: the rest of creation.
27:01
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you could speak, Elias,
27:02
SPEAKER_02: to another phrase that came up that struck me was this idea of the great fog
27:06
SPEAKER_02: of bourgeois Christianity.
27:07
SPEAKER_02: And I'm wondering...
27:09
SPEAKER_02: Why we're so susceptible to it in this country.
27:11
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know, I just, when I read it, I thought, yes, that's the problem.
27:14
SPEAKER_02: I didn't even need to understand intellectually.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: That's the term itself, I know.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: It's like you immediately know what this means.
27:23
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: Could you speak a bit to that?
27:26
SPEAKER_00: You know,
27:27
SPEAKER_00: I came across it reading that wonderful book by Mark and Louise Zwick on
27:33
SPEAKER_00: the Catholic worker sort of intellectual circle.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: And the book is about who were Dorothy and Peter reading.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: And so there's Dostoevsky and who else?
27:44
SPEAKER_00: Some anarchists.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: There's Nikolai Burjaev.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: And Burjaev was this really interesting Russian emigre philosopher.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: Who just felt that there was for a long time,
27:56
SPEAKER_00: many centuries in the West,
27:59
SPEAKER_00: just a kind of fascination and fixation on a certain kind
28:04
SPEAKER_00: of materialistic middle class existence as the end all and be all.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: Although he doesn't quite get into political terminology,
28:14
SPEAKER_00: clearly some kind of a victory of cultural capitalism.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: And the later forms of it, even worse.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: But the idea was you couldn't really have any ideals
28:24
SPEAKER_00: because your only ideals were just getting a second car and going on vacation soon.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
28:30
SPEAKER_00: it's a little bit like what people say happened to the labor movement
28:34
SPEAKER_00: when labor was less and less about ownership and having the capability to be
28:41
SPEAKER_00: an owner,
28:42
SPEAKER_00: start your own thing,
28:43
SPEAKER_00: and really only about So it's a little bit like the same narrowing of your vision.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: I think it's just the way in which sort of bourgeois culture,
28:55
SPEAKER_00: you know, Burjaya says this is a spiritual problem.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: It's not even really an economic problem.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: It's just a way of excluding the whole dimension in life because you've decided
29:07
SPEAKER_00: to settle for something very Kind of mundane and predictable and safe and reassuring
29:15
SPEAKER_00: and resembles everything your neighbors are doing.
29:18
SPEAKER_03: I love what you just said there.
29:19
SPEAKER_03: And I think part of that is because of,
29:23
SPEAKER_03: and particularly in Christianity,
29:25
SPEAKER_03: our whole theology centered around the idea that our whole purpose here is to get
29:29
SPEAKER_03: to there.
29:31
SPEAKER_03: There being heaven.
29:32
SPEAKER_03: And that everything we do is important only insofar as it helps us get to there.
29:36
SPEAKER_03: So we're always living under that idea that, well,
29:40
SPEAKER_03: this is fine,
29:40
SPEAKER_03: but I'm going to die and go to heaven and then it's going to be much better.
29:43
SPEAKER_03: As opposed to what Francis and others taught us, we're here to create heaven.
29:48
SPEAKER_03: We're not here to get to heaven.
29:49
SPEAKER_03: And until our mindsets change and transform, We're never going to make that change.
29:56
SPEAKER_03: We sometimes think of transformation as like that burning bush moment.
30:00
SPEAKER_03: The problem is for a lot of us,
30:02
SPEAKER_03: we see the burning bush in our first responses to get a fire extinguisher and put
30:05
SPEAKER_03: the flame out.
30:06
SPEAKER_03: The burning bush is the beginning of our transformative process.
30:11
SPEAKER_03: And it just extends.
30:12
SPEAKER_03: You're going through your transformative process right now.
30:15
SPEAKER_03: We all are, each of us in our own way.
30:18
SPEAKER_03: And it doesn't end at the burning bush.
30:20
SPEAKER_03: It starts at the burning bush.
30:21
SPEAKER_03: And then from there, we can transform into who we really are as creatures of God.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:30
SPEAKER_02: There's two questions you ask in the book that I think are really ripe for reflection.
30:34
SPEAKER_02: I know I felt for myself and probably your readers, and I'd be curious your own take on them.
30:38
SPEAKER_02: You write,
30:39
SPEAKER_02: is the best response for lay Catholics to stand apart from the institution
30:42
SPEAKER_02: until it heals itself?
30:44
SPEAKER_02: Could such a position actually be a form of faithfulness?
30:47
SPEAKER_02: And this is a big issue that we encounter time and again.
30:49
SPEAKER_02: I know I see it in my editing duties at TAC.
30:52
SPEAKER_02: People, there's a whole...
30:54
SPEAKER_02: I think there's statistics that former Catholics are one of
30:57
SPEAKER_02: the largest denominations or people who are standing on the exit ramp and looking
31:01
SPEAKER_02: for ways back in.
31:03
SPEAKER_02: How do you see your own relationship to the institutional church
31:06
SPEAKER_02: and just how you think about that relationship as a street Catholic now?
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great question.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: You know,
31:14
SPEAKER_00: my young podcast partner,
31:15
SPEAKER_00: Pete Davis, is very interested in social theory and theories of change and so on.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: And he was sharing with me a way of understanding the kind of transition
31:27
SPEAKER_00: that we're going through,
31:29
SPEAKER_00: which is that you've got people within an organization
31:33
SPEAKER_00: that are basically hospicing it.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: And what you want is for them to stay where they are and make the best of
31:40
SPEAKER_00: that situation and kind of bring it to some kind of a peaceful end.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: While also realizing there's another group of people that are going to leave it
31:52
SPEAKER_00: and go be trailblazers and do this new thing.
31:56
SPEAKER_00: And they,
31:56
SPEAKER_00: on the other hand,
31:58
SPEAKER_00: need to be aware of what's dying because they need to be in conversation with it or
32:05
SPEAKER_00: in collaboration with it in some way.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: And you could be at any point on the spectrum because it's a big spectrum.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: You know,
32:14
SPEAKER_00: I guess I would say,
32:15
SPEAKER_00: you know,
32:16
SPEAKER_00: on the website for Tomorrow's American Catholic,
32:19
SPEAKER_00: there's a small church project,
32:21
SPEAKER_00: which is great and is a symptom of what we're talking about.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of that organized and unorganized house churches and so on all over
32:29
SPEAKER_00: the place,
32:30
SPEAKER_00: particularly as younger people trying to figure out how do we pick this up?
32:34
SPEAKER_00: I think, you know, some of what you see about people going back to very traditional religion.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a piece of it.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: But I think maybe part of what I was thinking writing a book is that we need
32:45
SPEAKER_00: to remind younger people there is more than one way to do this.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: There's more than one way to be an American Catholic.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, you're going to have to find your own way through.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: There is no user's guide.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Even my book is not really a user's guide.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: It's a little more tongue in cheek in a way.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: But we're groping towards something that we can't see yet.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: That's been true for a long time, actually.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: But I think we just have to have faith that we are groping in the right direction.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: And the other thing I get from this wonderful Catholic figure that needs
33:19
SPEAKER_00: to be revived, Ivan Illich, is that we're going toward something with our friends.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: We're going to do this in friendship.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: It is friendship...
33:31
SPEAKER_00: And this is not an original idea really with Illich,
33:33
SPEAKER_00: but it is friendship that is the form of community that is in front of us waiting
33:38
SPEAKER_00: for us.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: And if we will pick it up and use it, this can be beginnings of all kinds of things.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: It's a great value.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: And in this political climate,
33:51
SPEAKER_00: I can think of friends of mine that if I said to them,
33:53
SPEAKER_00: you know, the most important thing missing in politics today is friendship.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: They would burst out laughing,
33:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:59
SPEAKER_00: or think I was crazy because,
34:01
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:02
SPEAKER_00: they would say the most important thing in politics is getting rid of your enemies,
34:06
SPEAKER_00: shutting them down, you know.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: But that unfortunately is what we've reduced our politics to.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: It has affected our community life and even our spiritual life.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: But that kind of small group You know, rebuilding, it's really all we have.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: You know,
34:25
SPEAKER_01: we've spoken with a number of our guests about all kinds of iterations
34:30
SPEAKER_01: of small church communities.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: And you mentioned a term that I had never heard before, base ecclesial communities, BECs.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: Can you talk about that a little bit?
34:41
SPEAKER_01: And are they a subset of small church communities or is it something different?
34:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess they are in a way.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: Michael, if you know differently, tell me.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: But my understanding is the term comes out of Latin America,
34:55
SPEAKER_00: Brazil and elsewhere during the heyday, the big heyday of liberation theology.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: And because there were not enough priests in a kind of spontaneous grassroots way.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: Little communities all over Brazil and Colombia and Argentina and Mexico
35:15
SPEAKER_00: and other places,
35:16
SPEAKER_00: people would just come together in little prayer groups,
35:19
SPEAKER_00: except they would open scripture and they would read it in
35:25
SPEAKER_00: the way Paulo Freire would read it.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: They would say, this is a book of liberation.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: We need to realize we have dignity.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: We need to realize where we are and who we are, the powers that are arrayed against us.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: And we need to pray together.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: We don't have a priest.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: We don't have to have a priest.
35:49
SPEAKER_00: But we need to hold each other up and kind of build power that way.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: And thousands and thousands and thousands of those came together.
35:58
SPEAKER_00: And they were a great part of the 80s and the 90s in the way
36:03
SPEAKER_00: the liberation theology movement just kind of Trickled out across the population
36:09
SPEAKER_00: until,
36:10
SPEAKER_00: you know,
36:11
SPEAKER_00: eventually there could be a change or hopefully a change in the political regime.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: And I think the small church movement is sort of the Northern American version of
36:21
SPEAKER_00: that or just another version of it.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: Maybe not necessarily with the liberation dimension,
36:28
SPEAKER_00: because that was really partly the Latin American bishops come together after
36:33
SPEAKER_00: the There are big ecclesial meetings in Pueblo and these other famous places
36:38
SPEAKER_00: before Francis came in and saying,
36:40
SPEAKER_00: you know, we have our own charism here in Latin America.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: We have discovered Something that has to do with the poor and the importance of
36:51
SPEAKER_00: the poor, priority of the poor.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: And this is something that our history has left us with,
37:00
SPEAKER_00: and we are going to cultivate it and use it as a lesson for the world church.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: So that was what was behind the groups in Latin America.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: So I think you could have that elsewhere, but that's their own distinctive kind of spin on that.
37:17
SPEAKER_01: It makes me think,
37:18
SPEAKER_01: not the liberation aspect of it,
37:21
SPEAKER_01: but in terms of small communities,
37:23
SPEAKER_01: is I think that came about quite a bit during COVID.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: People were hungry for a lot of things.
37:32
SPEAKER_01: They were hungry for some kind of church.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: They were hungry to get together with their neighbors in some kind of community.
37:39
SPEAKER_01: And so people found a way to do it.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: And I also think that there are a number of people who didn't go back.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: Because they found greater intimacy and they had a little bit more sense
37:53
SPEAKER_01: of participation in the small group than showing up for,
37:59
SPEAKER_01: you know,
37:59
SPEAKER_01: your usual Sunday mass at 10 o'clock and leave at 10 of 11 and be done with it.
38:07
SPEAKER_03: That idea is also how our church actually got founded and started.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
38:12
SPEAKER_03: You know, we sort of lose sight of that.
38:13
SPEAKER_01: Go back to the roots.
38:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean,
38:15
SPEAKER_03: when you get back to my,
38:16
SPEAKER_03: you know,
38:17
SPEAKER_03: I sometimes think that,
38:18
SPEAKER_03: you know,
38:18
SPEAKER_03: people think that,
38:19
SPEAKER_03: you know,
38:19
SPEAKER_03: that Jesus came and the crucifixion happened and the resurrection happened.
38:24
SPEAKER_03: And then the next Sunday, everybody started showing up to church for mass.
38:29
SPEAKER_03: But it's not.
38:29
SPEAKER_03: It started with small communities coming together,
38:32
SPEAKER_03: sharing their understanding of the word, of the message from Jesus.
38:36
SPEAKER_03: And out of that grew our church.
38:38
SPEAKER_03: And maybe that's what we're getting back to, those small church communities.
38:43
SPEAKER_03: That was what the original idea was from Jesus.
38:46
SPEAKER_03: We sort of lost that whole awareness of who we really are as a people and as a church.
38:53
SPEAKER_03: How do we gain that back again?
38:55
SPEAKER_02: Kind of related,
38:56
SPEAKER_02: if I could just add to that, Elias,
38:57
SPEAKER_02: I'd like to bring listeners' attention to a really great essay you wrote for
39:00
SPEAKER_02: the Hedgehog Review called Towards New Politics of Care in 2024.
39:05
SPEAKER_02: It's a wonderful essay.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: It looks at how waste is built into our systems, basically.
39:10
SPEAKER_02: I was thinking about a book,
39:11
SPEAKER_02: I think it's 20 years old now, you might be familiar, called Cradle to Cradle.
39:15
SPEAKER_02: The idea was that we can't just design things to be thrown out and just to be
39:18
SPEAKER_02: a culture of waste.
39:19
SPEAKER_02: We need to think about where they're all going.
39:21
SPEAKER_02: But I love the phrase, we live in a moment that lacks an adequate vocabulary of care.
39:26
SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a bit about a politics of care and how
39:28
SPEAKER_02: the Catholic Church might contribute to that project?
39:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean,
39:32
SPEAKER_00: I think we are discovering a vocabulary of care because the care economy,
39:38
SPEAKER_00: I love this expression, is turning out to be the core economy.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: In other words,
39:44
SPEAKER_00: it's taken a long time,
39:46
SPEAKER_00: but finally the female economists have turned out to be right.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: These women that have been writing for 20 or 30 or whatever years,
39:55
SPEAKER_00: Pope Francis popularized three of them personally,
39:59
SPEAKER_00: just saying, I read these women and their work.
40:02
SPEAKER_00: And they were not all solely about the care economy,
40:04
SPEAKER_00: but certainly feminist economics underlines the fact that the system wouldn't work.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: If there are not a care economy, informal work underpinning everything.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: So we have figured that out and we've also not figured out how do you
40:22
SPEAKER_00: then make sure this remains healthy?
40:25
SPEAKER_00: How do you make sure that the child care centers and the elder care places and so
40:29
SPEAKER_00: on do not get bought up by financial interests and kind of turned into platforms
40:37
SPEAKER_00: where people get a very degraded form of the service they once had
40:44
SPEAKER_00: with very little relationality left in the care.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: This is a big problem.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: In one part of my life,
40:52
SPEAKER_00: I think about that and I look at models from other countries like Italy,
40:56
SPEAKER_00: South Korea, Quebec,
40:58
SPEAKER_00: they do a much better job and the care is much more embedded in the community.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: It's not so top down.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: So there is that.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: But I think the other thing that may happen with the churches is that,
41:12
SPEAKER_00: you know,
41:12
SPEAKER_00: I think my understanding of the history is that a long time ago, I mean,
41:16
SPEAKER_00: a really long time ago, the churches really were hubs of all kinds of activity.
41:22
SPEAKER_00: And we remember a little bit of this.
41:25
SPEAKER_00: And churches still are filled with people that to some degree look out for each other.
41:30
SPEAKER_00: But in this new environment,
41:32
SPEAKER_00: this new economy,
41:33
SPEAKER_00: this new climate,
41:34
SPEAKER_00: more and more,
41:35
SPEAKER_00: I think,
41:36
SPEAKER_00: we're seeing that people are going to have to rediscover and engage
41:40
SPEAKER_00: with their local resources.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: And that's going to be a powerful factor because we've been told
41:46
SPEAKER_00: if you make enough money, you don't need anybody else.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter if you don't know anybody in your building.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter if you don't know anybody down the block.
41:53
SPEAKER_00: So COVID was the beginning of a change in understanding there.
41:57
SPEAKER_00: But the other thing is,
41:58
SPEAKER_00: and this is what is not well understood,
42:01
SPEAKER_00: is that when you have a kind of crisis,
42:04
SPEAKER_00: people come together and they organize, self organize.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is what the ICE arrests were showing me right here in my own backyard.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: And there are other examples we could think of.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: And there's something very empowering about that in a positive way,
42:23
SPEAKER_00: because we've all been told we don't have any power.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: The politicians have all the power.
42:27
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing we can do until there's this emergency and we are forced
42:33
SPEAKER_00: to come together in a hurry and help each other out and build.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
42:41
SPEAKER_00: for example,
42:41
SPEAKER_00: after 9-11, new organizations were created to respond to the big regional emergency.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: And those organizations stuck around.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: Same thing after Katrina.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: And it's very interesting the way this works.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: And I'm here kind of channeling a book called Paradise Built in Hell by
43:02
SPEAKER_00: a woman named Rebecca Solnit.
43:05
SPEAKER_00: And Solnit was saying, you know, most people think of catastrophes in this Hollywood way.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: People panic.
43:11
SPEAKER_00: They do bad things.
43:13
SPEAKER_00: They rob each other, blah, blah, blah.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: This is practically never true.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: And she goes back through these examples like 9-11,
43:21
SPEAKER_00: Katrina,
43:22
SPEAKER_00: the London Blitz,
43:23
SPEAKER_00: the big Mexico earthquake, and just tells the stories of what actually happened.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: And what actually happens is solidarity arrives and people look out for each other.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: And what's really interesting and kind of unexpected is that although there's a lot
43:39
SPEAKER_00: of suffering,
43:41
SPEAKER_00: it is also a time of great joy because people are free to step out
43:45
SPEAKER_00: of their usual roles.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: There are no rules.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: This is an emergency.
43:51
SPEAKER_00: So you're free to be as good at whatever you think you can do as you want to be,
43:57
SPEAKER_00: as you help organize your neighbors and fix things and suffer like everybody else.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
44:03
SPEAKER_00: this is not such an uncommon scenario anymore,
44:08
SPEAKER_00: but it is very powerful and it even has a kind of political impact
44:13
SPEAKER_00: that doesn't necessarily turn it into a party exactly.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: But it does mean that suddenly the community feels more like a we than it did a few days ago.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know,
44:23
SPEAKER_01: we've been seeing a lot of the specials on TV around 9-11 and seeing first
44:29
SPEAKER_01: the suffering,
44:30
SPEAKER_01: but also,
44:31
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:32
SPEAKER_01: to look back at that time with a little bit of like,
44:36
SPEAKER_01: wow, we really were all on the same page.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
44:41
SPEAKER_01: That we have not seen.
44:42
SPEAKER_01: Or experienced since then.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: And as a matter of fact, we're about as far from that as we can go at this point in time.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: So there was a little nostalgia is not the word,
44:53
SPEAKER_01: but a little longing for not the suffering necessarily,
44:57
SPEAKER_01: but the solidarity, as you say.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: I like that point you made about the stepping out of your traditional roles in those moments.
45:06
SPEAKER_02: There's like a gospel overtone to that, that everything's like the word of apocalypse.
45:11
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
45:12
SPEAKER_02: Agreed.
45:13
SPEAKER_03: We can just all look at the story of,
45:15
SPEAKER_03: I think it's Gardner, Canada,
45:17
SPEAKER_03: the town in Canada where the flight at 9-11 had to go elsewhere and landed there.
45:23
SPEAKER_03: And the townspeople all came out and took these people in and housed them
45:27
SPEAKER_03: and fed them and welcomed them.
45:30
SPEAKER_03: There's been a whole movie and play about that now,
45:32
SPEAKER_03: but it was just one of those moments in time when,
45:35
SPEAKER_03: like you said, Elias, everybody came together and started helping everyone.
45:41
SPEAKER_03: And I always wonder why that can't be every moment in time,
45:44
SPEAKER_03: not just that one moment in time, you know?
45:47
SPEAKER_00: Right.
45:49
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly you're needed.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly you're a part of something.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly you have a contribution.
45:53
SPEAKER_00: Right.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: After maybe years of being told that, no, we don't need you.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: You can't contribute anything.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: You don't have anything.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly you're right in the middle.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: You're forced to be creative, forced to compromise.
46:06
SPEAKER_00: And the curious thing is that as Solnit points out in this book,
46:11
SPEAKER_00: the authorities always try to dampen this down.
46:15
SPEAKER_00: They try to,
46:16
SPEAKER_00: for example,
46:16
SPEAKER_00: in the San Francisco fire,
46:18
SPEAKER_00: which Dorothy Day didn't quite witness, but she saw the aftermath of that.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: And in her you guys may remember reading this in her biography or autobiography.
46:29
SPEAKER_00: She says, you know, for for a few days, everybody loved each other.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: So because they were just trying to keep it together.
46:36
SPEAKER_00: Right.
46:37
SPEAKER_00: But, you know,
46:38
SPEAKER_00: in San Francisco,
46:39
SPEAKER_00: the city apparently said to the population, you cannot put out your own fires.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: Do not put out your own fires.
46:47
SPEAKER_00: Don't do it.
46:48
SPEAKER_00: Leave it for the fire department.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: And the fire department couldn't even find all the fires that were going on.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: There were so many.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: But the authorities,
46:55
SPEAKER_00: Truant and Katrina,
46:57
SPEAKER_00: you remember the terrible mishaps that happened then,
47:00
SPEAKER_00: they tend to be the counterforce that really does not like the citizens rising up
47:08
SPEAKER_00: and self-organizing.
47:10
SPEAKER_00: So there's a little bit of that dimension as well.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: And we are sometimes get discouraged because of the forces that be,
47:19
SPEAKER_00: the powers that be, do not want to see us self-organize and take up any power.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: And that would certainly be true for churches that behave that way, right?
47:29
SPEAKER_00: And that has been the case when they tried to do that.
47:32
SPEAKER_00: But it's a powerful dynamic,
47:33
SPEAKER_00: and it can really give people a kind of happiness that,
47:38
SPEAKER_00: strangely enough, as her book title says, it's paradise grounded in hell.
47:43
SPEAKER_03: You said, at that moment, everybody loves each other.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:47
SPEAKER_03: Again, it's like, why should it be that moment and not every moment that everybody is?
47:51
SPEAKER_03: Isn't that what Jesus taught us?
47:53
SPEAKER_03: That we should love each other every moment.
47:55
SPEAKER_02: And you see that, yeah,
47:56
SPEAKER_02: authoritarian regimes can prey on that need to be needed, to have a purpose in life.
48:01
SPEAKER_02: And when it's not being met,
48:02
SPEAKER_02: again, there's that vacuum that can come in and people can be manipulated.
48:06
SPEAKER_02: Was it William James,
48:06
SPEAKER_02: that essay about,
48:07
SPEAKER_02: I forget the exact title,
48:08
SPEAKER_02: but redirecting the energies of war towards good, but that sense of solidarity.
48:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, something like that.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: We don't have a way to channel that energy very well anymore,
48:20
SPEAKER_00: but maybe we can get Back there is local communities try more and more
48:26
SPEAKER_00: to get their own power.
48:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like literally get their own electrical power in their control.
48:31
SPEAKER_00: Back in my previous region of Northwest Indiana,
48:34
SPEAKER_00: they had a terrible windstorm that knocked out 200,000 people's electricity
48:42
SPEAKER_00: for 10 days.
48:45
SPEAKER_00: This is creating a political earthquake in Northwest Indiana because 10 days
48:50
SPEAKER_00: and naturally it was the poorest town in the region.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: Gary, Indiana was the last one to get the lights back on.
49:00
SPEAKER_00: So there was just a real furor that came up about it.
49:04
SPEAKER_00: But on the flip side.
49:05
SPEAKER_00: You also saw local mayors and other people really rising to the occasion
49:10
SPEAKER_00: and just doing great stuff in a very impressive way because they had to rise to
49:15
SPEAKER_00: the occasion.
49:17
SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
49:17
SPEAKER_02: I know we are kind of at the top of the hour.
49:19
SPEAKER_02: We generally like to,
49:20
SPEAKER_02: because I'd be curious about your thoughts on Pope Leo,
49:22
SPEAKER_02: especially because I like your phrase.
49:24
SPEAKER_02: He's arrived in the nick of time.
49:26
SPEAKER_02: I thought of Thoreau's quote about I was born just in the nick of time.
49:30
SPEAKER_02: Something that just came to mind when I saw that.
49:31
SPEAKER_02: So two lost, two prophets in that language somewhere.
49:36
SPEAKER_02: So maybe you could just speak about Tomorrow's American Catholic, who that person is to you.
49:41
SPEAKER_02: Anything you'd like to share about our horizon as a church?
49:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: I am very hopeful about Leo.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: I just wonder if this guy had any idea what this job was about to turn into.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he just showed up just as,
49:59
SPEAKER_00: you know, kind of the whole technocratic AI thing was breaking.
50:05
SPEAKER_00: And it isn't such a curious thing.
50:07
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned the article by...
50:11
SPEAKER_02: Oh, the Jack Hansen article?
50:13
SPEAKER_00: Jack Hansen article on this moment and the kind of wave of maybe
50:18
SPEAKER_00: a new progressive Catholicism, which could be.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if what might be driving it is the same thing that's behind the fact
50:26
SPEAKER_00: that there seems to be a kind of bipartisan disgust with the idea
50:32
SPEAKER_00: of building enormous data centers outside your town.
50:36
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
50:37
SPEAKER_00: So that Leo...
50:39
SPEAKER_00: Wonderfully,
50:40
SPEAKER_00: just as Francis was the kind of the face of environmental resistance,
50:45
SPEAKER_00: Leo seems to be the face of the technocratic resistance, which is also a huge deal.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: So we need this and we need his reflection and we need him to open up.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, I would say candidly, I think he needs to go further.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: I read the wonderful L.M.
51:03
SPEAKER_00: Saccasus, Michael Saccasus.
51:05
SPEAKER_00: Who has a Substack on technology.
51:08
SPEAKER_00: He's a Christian.
51:11
SPEAKER_00: And he really believes that AI is,
51:14
SPEAKER_00: you know, a loaded gun pointed at Christian orthodoxy and belief.
51:19
SPEAKER_00: It's a terrible form of heresy and technology is not a new development in that way.
51:27
SPEAKER_00: But this particular development,
51:29
SPEAKER_00: because of the way it's going to be so invisible and pervasive and totalizing,
51:37
SPEAKER_00: is really an extraordinary threat.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: So I would like Leo to go further and really say,
51:44
SPEAKER_00: you know what,
51:45
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I'm going to have more press conferences
51:47
SPEAKER_00: with Silicon Valley guys sitting here at the dais with me.
51:52
SPEAKER_00: I see that there really is a deep civilizational split here.
51:58
SPEAKER_00: And we need to recognize it and address it,
52:01
SPEAKER_00: of course, in a charitable way, but also in a determined way.
52:06
SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, frankly, we're way outnumbered and outgunned.
52:11
SPEAKER_00: So I don't think we can politely chat our way through what's coming,
52:16
SPEAKER_00: because I think it's coming with us, without us.
52:21
SPEAKER_00: It's just going to take a portion of the world population And say, we have nothing for you.
52:29
SPEAKER_00: You can't be part of this because you don't fit the profile.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to have to leave you behind.
52:35
SPEAKER_00: That can't be where the Catholic Church ends up.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: I do think we have a broad front of people from the evangelical,
52:42
SPEAKER_00: from the Orthodox,
52:43
SPEAKER_00: from the Jewish community, Muslims, who are like-minded on this idea.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: This is not an organized kind of resistance,
52:53
SPEAKER_00: but there certainly are Plenty of people are very uncomfortable with
52:58
SPEAKER_00: the way this is all going,
53:00
SPEAKER_00: even if they don't necessarily know the details and have the exact language for it.
53:05
SPEAKER_00: But whether that can come together politically in a way to stop the billions
53:10
SPEAKER_00: of dollars that are on the other side and the fact that the government
53:15
SPEAKER_00: in many ways is now operating as part of Silicon Valley in a way.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: Amazon is deeply embedded in the Defense Department.
53:25
SPEAKER_00: And much of the Defense Department is now running through contracts
53:29
SPEAKER_00: with Amazon Web Services and all of that.
53:33
SPEAKER_00: So there's been a great kind of melding of that power center in Silicon Valley and
53:38
SPEAKER_00: the power center in Washington,
53:39
SPEAKER_00: D.C. And it's just going to be very difficult to get out of the way.
53:44
SPEAKER_02: I guess the first step with Magnifica Humanitas is he's trying to reestablish
53:48
SPEAKER_02: that language of humanity, which we've almost forgot.
53:50
SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's just, that's the first seed the church can give or can plant.
53:54
SPEAKER_02: And then hopefully more forthright pragmatic solutions to come.
53:59
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
54:00
SPEAKER_02: Well, Elias, this has been wonderful.
54:01
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for taking some time.
54:03
SPEAKER_02: And we'd love to have you back because there's all kinds of subjects.
54:05
SPEAKER_02: You're kind of a renaissance man.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: There's a lot that we'd love to pick your brain about at some point in the future.
54:10
SPEAKER_02: But thank you for all your work.
54:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm so flattered to be interviewed by you three people
54:14
SPEAKER_00: that have been doing such great work for so long,
54:16
SPEAKER_00: long before I figured anything out.
54:18
SPEAKER_00: That it's a joy to discover that work.
54:22
SPEAKER_00: And I would look forward to chatting with you again.
54:24
SPEAKER_00: And many thanks for the conversation.
54:26
SPEAKER_01: If I may add at the end for our listeners out there,
54:29
SPEAKER_01: potential readers,
54:31
SPEAKER_01: I have to say as a writer myself that one of the things besides
54:36
SPEAKER_01: the wonderful content of the book is that the book was so very readable.
54:42
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
54:43
SPEAKER_01: I always love that because if your content is great, but it's not that readable, you know.
54:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: But it was almost conversational, got a real sense of who you are in the writing itself.
54:57
SPEAKER_01: So thank you for that.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: It was great on that call as well.
55:01
SPEAKER_02: Confessions of a Street Catholic.
55:02
SPEAKER_02: We'll link to it in the notes.
55:03
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
55:05
SPEAKER_00: Great.
55:06
SPEAKER_00: Thank you both.
55:07
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Elias.
55:08
SPEAKER_02: Good day.
55:09
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55:25
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