A small c catholic

On the day this column is to be posted, I am scheduled to be in Israel in the midst of a 10-day Jewish-Christian study tour I'm helping to lead with a rabbi and an Episcopal priest. There are several reasons I'm thrilled to return to the Holy Land. One is that I think we Christians should do whatever we can to help ourselves understand Jesus in his Jewish context. One way to accomplish that is to hang out in Israel for awhile.

"You know," the woman told me, "about the only exposure to the Bible most of us Catholics get is when we hear the weekly readings at Mass."

Clearly this disappointed her. Clearly she was hungry for more.

It was my duty and honor to provide an hour's worth of "more" for members of an adult education class at her parish one recent Sunday morning. I came away from the experience both exhilarated and sad.

When one of my daughters was in grade school, she participated in a summer program at a wonderful place called Missouri Town 1855.

In this living history museum, she spent part of each day for a week living in a 19th-century farming community. Her context there was radically different from the context of where she slept and ate at home. Sometimes it took a bit of time to reorient her at day's end.

I can't get those debased Marines off my mind -- the ones who turned up in a video a few weeks ago urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

One reason I've cherished my long and extinguished career as a columnist is that, as you well know, columnists have the gift of prophecy.

In fact, we have a double gift of it. First, we speak resolutely with our prophetic voice, calling on the world's many wayward people to do the right thing, which always means urging them to do what we columnists want them to do. Or at least what we think will amuse us if they really do it.

At a clergy seminar on Catholic-Jewish relations I attended recently, Catholic scholar Philip A. Cunningham reminded us that Jews and Christians haven't been in serious, respectful dialogue for very long.

Indeed, this important effort has lasted but a tick of the clock compared with the century after century of anti-Judaism preached from the church almost from the beginning of the Jesus Movement within Judaism in the first century.

The recent charges against Kansas City's bishop and his diocese for failing to report suspected child abuse have been analyzed six ways from Sunday, including by me on my "Faith Matters" blog.

And they have deserved all the commentary, given the shocking nature of the failure alleged in the indictments.

But I want to look at this distressing case from the perspective of a Protestant whose form of church governance is not hierarchical but, rather, republican, in the lower-case-r sense. And I want to suggest that the two approaches to polity yield different results, though each has its strengths and weaknesses.

It may be too simplistic to put it this way, but the system of governance used by the Presbyterian Church (USA), to which my congregation belongs, is essentially bottom-up. The congregation elects its ruling elders. In turn, some elders, based on the size of the congregation, become voting commissioners at meetings of the presbytery, which is our regional governing body. Clergy also are voting commissioners of the presbytery.

A little bit to my surprise, when Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, my friend and co-author of my latest book, returned from a family trip to Israel this past summer, he was raving about the place.

This was far from his first trip there and he said he'd never enjoyed it so much or felt so safe and at peace.

The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks brings even those of us who are members of 9/11 families (my nephew perished on American Flight 11) closer to acknowledging a hard truth.

Some day -- in 90-plus years or so -- no one will be around who lived through that malevolent day.

And: One day the story of 9/11 will dissolve into the maelstrom of history's long, sad parade of violence. For several decades (or even centuries) history books will refer to it, but unless the world ends first, some distant day almost no one will speak of, read about or commemorate this faith-based catastrophe any more. (Ask the average American to recount the early 20th century genocide of the Armenians.)

Author David Rieff, in a recent essay in Harper's Magazine, puts it this way: "What history shows is that even the most monumental achievements and martial accomplishments of human beings are ephemeral."