The Last Sentences of a Chapter Ready to End

 I am at my office at the school I work with today - this constitutes the actual last day of classes for students, although the 11th-graders I teach had their last day yesterday.  The remainder of the next week entails a baccalaureate Mass for the graduating seniors, graduation rehearsal and graduation, and final exams.  By this time next week, my sojourn at this particular institution will be over in a practical sense, although thankfully my contract runs through the end of June, which is good financially for me.  It is a chapter I am glad to see ending in all honesty, and I am anticipating the opening paragraphs of the next chapter - I had a very promising interview Monday with a school on Saint Simons Island, GA, that I would be happy being part of, although at this point it is just a matter of waiting to see who decides to extend the welcoming handshake regarding my next place of service.  So, we will see.  

My first full-time teaching position was two years in length, and was a mixed blessing in all honesty.  For one thing, on the positive I know I was meant to be here for a season, and the experience I gained was definitely a good thing.  However, the school I teach at is not what you would call the ideal environment either, as it has three fundamental problems.  The first is the lack of discipline with students.  Many of these students are minority students, and there are some of them with bad attitudes and a sense of entitlement which frankly makes working with critters in a zoo easier.  Secondly, the way the administration of this school runs things could use some help - there is a coverage system that is deeply flawed, and many teachers are on the verge of burnout because we feel our leadership sees us as expendable commodities rather as talented human beings.  This also means good ideas are often parried or dismissed totally, and we also haven't felt like the leadership has our backs on anything.  The third issue is the school's identity - while professing to be a Catholic school, the school doesn't seem to understand what that is because there is no real spiritual guidance (don't even get me started on the campus minister here - my goodness!) and there are some things professed and held by some faculty and even upper echelons of administration that is in deep opposition to Catholic teaching.  It makes being a Theology teacher a challenging task too, because I often had the feeling my hands were being tied and I wasn't able to shine like I wanted to.  These three fundamental issues are what I also shared in my exit interview as I begin the process of wrapping up my time here, and oddly, the HR person I interviewed with seemed to be sympathetic - people can see things just by casual observation.  Again, I will not share my school's name nor will I share any individual's identity particularly, as I want to exercise professional courtesy as well as making sure I don't sound like I am committing defamation against anyone in this institution.  However, in private conversations with parents who may be considering sending their kids here, I would highly discourage it and would recommend they seek out other options.  And. I will leave it with that.   That being said, I wanted to focus on issues with campus ministry here, as there are some underlying and very fundamental issues that cause concern.

The campus minister here is a layperson, and he was originally a worker with Maryknoll Missions in Central America.  If you know something about Maryknoll in recent decades, there are problematic things about them which raise many concerns.  Maryknoll people are notorious for instance in promoting a heresy called liberation theology, which is essentially churched-up Marxism.  It is functionally atheist in all honesty, as it seeks to exalt a political ideology rather than spiritual truth, and I have had some enlightenment on things about them in the past two years that I need to share.  First, I am beginning to understand that there are things that an order like the Jesuits get blamed for which in reality may not totally be them at all - in Latin America for instance, although there are definitely some very liberal and politicized Jesuits, it seems as if the most radical proponents of liberation theology may actually not be Jesuit priests - it is more than likely lay groups like Maryknoll who, by doing a lot of coordinated work with the Jesuit order in some nations, are the real radicals.  Jesuits, I have come to believe, are much like every other religious order - there are good Jesuits, bad Jesuits, and for the most part the actual Jesuits I have met have been pretty tame.  Some, like Fr. Mitch Pacwa, are actually quite stellar in their faith and I have no issues with those Jesuits at all.  Also, Jesuits in general have had a very good track record of both academic excellence as well as being able to reach out to the margins and do fruitful work, and that is commendable.  The only danger here is that in contrast to other religious orders, the Jesuits do have a disproportionate share of problematic figures.  This is not to say that every renegade Catholic is Jesuit at all - Thomas Merton, for example, was a Trappist, and this guy Richard Rohr, who although claiming to be a Franciscan friar is in reality a New Ager.  Another renegade priest-theologian, Richard McBrien, did not belong to any religious order I could tell but he was still heretical in much of his teaching.  Additionally, the Hindu syncretist priest Bede Griffiths was Benedictine, and Henri Nouwen was not part of a religious order either.  All of these individuals - Merton, Rohr, McBrien, Griffiths, and Nouwen - were all suspected heretics and renegade Catholics, but none of them were Jesuits as far as I know.  On the other hand, there are good Jesuits that I would highly recommend to anyone - Fr. Norris Clarke, Fr. Mitch Pacwa, Fr. Joseph Fessio, Fr. James Schall, and of course such luminaries as St. Robert Bellarmine - all of whom are very orthodox and have produced some amazing theological and social writings.  And, who could forget the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola.  St. Ignatius was a godly man, and he had a very amazing conversion story, and what is unfortunate however is that many of those who claim to carry on his legacy fall short of anything he stood for.  St. Ignatius, indeed, would be spinning in his grave if he knew what kind of people identifying as Jesuits are doing to the Church, and that is a scandal of monumental proportions. I don't think that St. Ignatius would endorse garbage such as liberation theology or theistic evolution, and if one starts to peel away some of the mythologies that many "social justice warriors" have tried to wrongly apply to St. Ignatius and other figures, one sees a completely different picture than what is depicted by the revisionists.  The school I currently teach in here for instance actually painted a mural depicting St. Ignatius as Black!  Nothing historically backs up these mythologies, and that is why when people spout that garbage, I tend to ignore it and then inform the less-informed of a more truthful interpretation.  I would be remiss as a historian if I didn't.  However, when you look at the impetus behind liberation theology and the ideologies that spawned it, you notice several things, and here are a couple of them.

The first thing one notices about such systems of thought is that they thrive on chaos and crisis, and if it doesn't exist, then it must be created.  This is right from the playbook of people such as Saul Alinsky, but it goes back even further, as much of it finds its source in the philosophy of Nietzsche and others.  The one thing that many radical political activists get from Nietzschean thought is something called the "struggle," and the way that works is that a conflicting will must exist and it must prevail against the "lesser" will, and thus a struggle is essential.  The tool of "struggle" is the means by which the will of the dominant prevails, and thus the more chaos that is created, the more certain a dominant will shall prevail.  The two most pivotal political radicals that utilized this were Marx and Hitler - class struggle is at the core of Marxism, and for Hitler, the struggle of the "master race" against the "mongrels" was integral.  Both relied on the same Nietzschean idea, with that being bolstered by the "natural selection" aspect of Darwinism, which was turned into a social construct by Herbert Spencer.  Evolution, therefore, requires struggle to progress whether that struggle is biological or social.  A basic understanding of this is that from a struggle two things must emerge - a winner and a loser.  The strongest will - to frame it in Nietzschean language - will be the victorious will, and the loser then must not be allowed to regather strength and should be eliminated.  Liberation theology is no different in that regard either, as earlier I defined it as basically Marxism clothed in religious language.  Seeing this happen in real time even at the school I work at makes this even more concerning, as the campus minister here often will try to "whup up" crowds in the name of "justice" but then a greater injustice is perpetrated upon those people like him label "unjust."  This is particularly true with the current anti-ICE protests in cities, of which our campus minister runs hot with passion about.  Again though, much of this works against the so-called "victims" they advocate for, and the recipients of this false sense of "justice" end up suffering worse as a result.  However, the person who spouts the garbage doesn't care, because if they can incite unrest, then they can try to step in as "savior" to resolve it - some of the worst criminals and cult leaders in history had the same blueprint, notably Charles Manson and Jim Jones, just to name two of them.  If a blowhard rabble-rouser doesn't have chaos and struggle, then they have no ground, and therefore more conciliatory and peaceful alternatives are not preferred by such people.  And, the campus minister at this school falls into that big time.

A second aspect to this would be mythologization.  This means revisionism in which history is rewritten to serve the interests of the one spouting the rhetoric.  The campus minister here is a master of that, as he relies on his personal testimonials to validate his views, but often he is either wrong or he is lying.  One thing he tries to play on often is this experience he supposedly had in El Salvador, where he always gives a sob story about US-backed government troops slaughtering Jesuit priests and Maryknoll missionaries indiscriminately.  However, what this fool fails to realize is that some of us didn't earn our doctorates from being stupid - we know people too, and I have friends from those countries as well that tell a different story.  Basically, what they related to me was that often Marxist guerillas, often funded by Cuba and the former USSR, would ambush government military units, and then steal the uniforms off the dead bodies.  They then would dress in those uniforms and raid villages, and it would serve to create a propaganda campaign that those "evil" government soldiers were massacring innocent villagers, and that somehow the "racist genocidal" United States was funding it.  Apparently, the propaganda worked on this idiot who claims to be a campus minister, because he now tells this ad nauseum to anyone who will listen.  How, ever, Marxist guerillas are not the only ones who used that tactic - Hitler employed it to start World War II by dressing dead concentration camp victims in Polish uniforms and saying Poland wiped out a German garrison on the border.  As I have said before, there is fundamentally no difference between Marxism and Nazism - both are left-wing totalitarian systems that used the twin bulwarks of struggle and victimhood to launch their campaigns, and thus neither is an exception to the rule.  For the dumb fairly well-off idiots like our campus minister here and so many others who buy into this, I watch in amazement as history is rewritten and facts are casually dismissed or discarded if they don't fit the narrative.  That is one reason too why I am grateful this is ending, as now even looking out the window of my office at the campus minister waddling up and down the hall like a drunk Winnie-the-Pooh with his pants hanging down below the equator, none of this really impresses me anymore.  It is time for this season to end, and thankfully our Lord agrees. 

Any rate, I have rambled enough today, so I will leave it with that thought.  See you next time.