Tag Archives: Sermon on the Mount

Isolated in a cage

Posted on June 25, 2019 at 9:21 am by John Flannery |

In your most imaginative and resourceful childhood, could you imagine what it would be like to be separated from your parents, and, perhaps for the first time in your life, think they can’t protect you, and find, in the best circumstance, that you’re helpless, hungry, cold, in a cage like you’d keep a dog at a pound, without hope that you’ll see your parents again if anyone knows who or where they are?

Politicians say these are not as bad as concentration camps. Now there’s a standard as craven as any I’ve heard.

But this is a species of cruelty, no question about that, that comports all too comfortably with a kind of government that treats children this way.

So, this is Sunday, and it’s many years since I was a child and went to Mass in the Bronx every Sunday. Indeed for a long time, I went to Mass daily, at 6 am, fasting as was the ritual then, before going to class. The values were deeply imbedded in my soul. I stopped when the values I cherished were not so evident in these places of “worship.” I don’t go to church anymore – as Church I’ve found gets in the way of a spiritual experience. But I still think about the charity that was at the heart of my religious upbringing. I test friends and faux religious speakers by their acceptance of the sermon on the mount – a worthy set of values.

But where is that humane or religious sensitivity in the abuse of children at our southern border?

Echoing the words of the Sermon, if we are the salt of the earth, have we lost our savor, and are we destined to be trodden under the foot for having lost our way? Continue reading →

Religion in Moscow

Posted on May 31, 2016 at 6:03 am by John Flannery |

The Churches within the Kremlin (Photo by John P. Flannery)

In Moscow, I saw churches and domes throughout this modern cosmopolitan city of 15 million people, 600 Christian churches in all, and I visited several sanctuaries within the Kremlin Walls (Assumption Cathedral, the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, and Necropolis of the Archangel Cathedral).

When the Tsars reigned, the Churches were integral to the autocratic state, one lever of control by which to govern the masses.

Lenin fairly charged that the Church was “used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.”

When the final revolt came in 1917, the Bolsheviks took down the Tsar, but also the Tsar’s partner, the Church, in all its manifestations, outlawed its influence, even its existence.

In 1997, Russia reformed its past prohibitions, distrusting the Church less, declaring religion part of its “historical heritage” following upon Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”).

The most significant difference, before the Revolution, was that the Tsars made the Church a governing partner with the Nobles.

This error of making any religious institution preeminent in secular governance is not limited to the Russian experience.

As an Irish Catholic kid from the South Bronx, I saw how Catholics were treated in the U.S. when they ran for office, Governor Al Smith being the prime example, and I celebrated when JFK became President declaiming that his Roman Catholic religion would ever affect his judgment as a public servant. Discrimination against “papist” Catholics made his assurances necessary, although it’s a guarantee every candidate should make, that religion will not be allowed to interfere with governance.

When a religious sect is integral to governance, it comes at the cost of intolerance toward those who profess any “disagreeable” faith; as for the “faithful,” they are manipulated by the fear that any dissenting word or conduct may earn them temporal punishment and bar their “eternal reward.” Constantine, for example, had the skin torn off bishops who refused to believe the communion host became flesh. Continue reading →

1984

Posted on January 6, 2015 at 4:52 am by John Flannery |

John Flannery 1984

In 1984, I was running for Congress, as the Democratic nominee for the 10^th Congressional district, standing on the floor of the Democratic convention in San Francisco, when New York Governor Mario Cuomo challenged the convention and the nation to get on with the business of the American people. What he said then remains as urgent today.

As it was true of President Ronald Reagan, we shall soon experience a Republican leadership in our U.S. Congress who invoke the golden rule but their actions and words tell us that what they really believe is “social Darwinism” that, as the Governor said then, means the nation “should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest,” so that “what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class.”

Republicans who so easily invoke Judeo-Christian “values” believe, not what Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount, namely, that the meek shall inherit the earth, but that only the strong shall.

I believe, as the Governor said then, that “we can make it all the way with the whole family [of men and women, children and seniors] intact.” This is a more worthy legacy for public service than what we’ve been getting. Millions now have health care who didn’t. The Republican leadership looks to deny that coverage. Continue reading →