Worship, with its “meaning-laden symbols, repeating rituals, sacred texts, shared song, prescribed prayers, re-enacted narratives,” has a way of moving the worshiper away from what is proscribed to what is prescribed; in effect, from the vices of corruption to the virtues that promote the common good.
When we perceive La Santa Muerte devotees as people operating outside of the rules instead of people seeking God in the messiness of a broken world, we miss the fundamentally holy desires that operate alongside the damaged ones in these practices.
In practice, their liturgies demonstrated a complex interweaving of different social justice commitments throughout the liturgy, while simultaneously, the community described only limited connections between their liturgy and the social issues they addressed as a community.
Join recent Catholic Re-Visions contributors as they engage the relationship between nonviolence and Catholic social teaching in these times.
Priests, in order to become mayors, had to be viewed as lovers. So, the mayor-priest is a ‘lover’ in multiple senses. He has to embody God’s love. He has to perform paternal love. He has to signal to society that he is also, very likely – albeit in secret – to be a good sexual lover as well.
Two authors remember Pope Francis’s thoughts, words, and actions.
The language of ‘right to defense’ has been consistently deployed to legitimate Israel’s general military strategy and ongoing U.S. provision of weapons as its policy. Meanwhile, Pope Francis consistently calls for an end to the mass atrocity of war… Something drastically needs to change.
It turns out that when weighing warfare’s costs, benefits, and odds of success, its overall record is surprisingly weak.
It is imperative to respect the claims of conscience behind the pacifist convictions often associated with the rejection of the modern state. But if Catholic social teaching is going to incorporate nonviolence more fully, it also must develop the connection between nonviolence and modern politics.