This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 128, September 16, 2017

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Zen Catholicism, Suchness, & the Rosary

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I believe the heart of Catholicism is, as Fr. Thomas Merton surmised, similar to the heart of Zen, a mystical and precious space words are unequal to; and Zen’s Suchness—the nameless reality in its central nature—is captured in many ways by Catholics, including the praying of the traditional fifteen decade rosary.

1. R. Reno, writing in the August/September 2017 issue First Things. Wrote:

“God’s revelation in Christ has a sheer thatness, a particularity that can never be framed, explained, or reduced to a cosmological or anthropological role or meaning.” (p. 62)

When our Holy Queen Mother told us to pray the rosary daily at Fatima, it was the fifteen decade rosary she was talking about; the ancient rosary connected to the Old Testament of the Psalms and Israel of the Prophets, the New Testament Israel of Christ, and the deepest roots of our Church.

Praying the fifteen decade rosary is entering into the central spirit and acts animating our Church and causing them to resonate, even if unconsciously, within us.

Solange Hertz, in an article published in Remnant Newspaper, writes:

“One of Pius XII’s favorite theologians, Fr. Matthias Scheeben, had this to say in the first chapter of his Mysteries of Christianity:

“If by mystery we mean nothing more than an object which is not entirely conceivable in its innermost essence, we need not seek very far to find mysteries. Such mysteries are found not only above us, but all around us, in us, under us. The real essence of all things is concealed from our eyes. The physicist will never fully plumb the laws of forces in the physico-chemical world and perfectly comprehend their effects; and the same is true of the physiologist with regard to the laws of organic nature, of the psychologist with regard to the soul, of the metaphysician with regard to the ultimate basis of being. Christianity is not alone in exhibiting mysteries in the above-mentioned sense. If its truths are inconceivable and unfathomable, so in greater part are the truths of reason.”

Retrieved June 27, 2017 from http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3255-the-real-world

In a very interesting book, the author connects Zen Buddhism and Catholicism:

“To be reconciled, not blindly but with a mind enlightened, to the inevitable—that, if I have rightly understood, is the heart of Zen Buddhism. But this also, in its depths at least, is the message of Catholicism. Such, at any rate, is the “suggestion” offered in these ages. Nothing in the way of religious syncretism is called for; the aim is to evaluate, sympathetically, Zen from a Catholic point of view; and in the process, though incidentally, to present Catholicism at its mature level. The approach is not that of an orientalist, for which I have no competence, but of one formed in the oldest monastic tradition of the West, familiar with a truly “existential” Christian philosophy, and really interested in the contemporary world.” (p. xiii)

Dom Aelred Graham—Prior of the Benedictine Community, Portsmouth, Rhode Island—(1963). Zen Catholicism: A Suggestion. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

As Fr. Thomas Merton was to share with us through so many beautiful books, it is a suggestion well followed.

This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

Diversionary Illusions of the Left

There are so many of them piled one upon the other as the years go by but let us focus briefly on those within the criminal justice system, as a superb article from City Journal does in their Summer 2017 issue.

For a long time liberal criminologists from the academy touted “root causes” as the public policy key to addressing crime and, as the article notes:

“On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured into ambitious social program—yet crime went up, not down.” (p. 50)

Then the mantra was that the police couldn’t really do much to stop crime either, and:

“In the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s criminal violence wouldn’t work either.” (Ibid. p. 50)

But reality intervened and:

“These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations….In the real world policy arena, however, Wilson attained significant influence: the Broke Windows theory of policing and public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.

“In short, while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated?” (Ibid. p. 50)

The leftist criminologists—there are hardly any others—constantly create new narratives to drive the discussion in the academy and one they are particularly fond of is described:

“Most criminologists follow a “penal-harm” narrative, which seeks to account for all the ways that the criminal justice system hinders the lives of offenders and their communities, generating and reinforcing social inequality and harming minorities, since they are the primary targets. Purveyors of the penal-harm narrative assert that conservative legislators demagogically used the upswing in crime rates during the late twentieth century—including more than 20,000 murders and hundreds of thousands of rapes, robberies, and assaults per year—to incite racial animosity and arouse support for overly punitive crime policies.” (Ibid. p. 53)

But, in the end, the biggest problem with the criminologists of the Left, is, as noted:

“To understand why many criminologists refuse to acknowledge criminal behavior as potent predictor of life outcomes—including premature mortality, health disparities, arrest and incarceration, and even being shot by the police—one must understand that most liberal criminologists feel strangely protective about criminals. Criminologists who work collaboratively with the police have done important work in understanding how best to respond to crime and how to prevent it. Their research, which often includes complex spatial analyses of crime patterns and which targets specific, high-rate offenders for arrest and prosecution, has been rigorously evaluated and confirmed. Yet liberal-minded criminologists dismiss these scholars as “administrative criminologists”—meaning that they help the state impose unfair social and economic arrangements.

“Liberal criminologists avoid discussing the lifestyles that criminal offenders typically lead. Almost all serious offenders are men, and they usually come from families with long histories of criminal involvement, often spanning generations. They show temperamental differences early in life, begin offending in childhood or early adolescence, and rack up dozens of arrests. Their lives are chaotic and hedonistic, including the constant pursuit of drugs and sex. They produce many children with different women and rarely have the means—or inclination—to support them. Active offenders exploit others for their own benefit, including women, children, churches, and the social-welfare system. They commit many crimes before getting arrested, and they move in and out of the criminal-justice system for decades. Many report enjoying acts of violence; the social-media accounts of martyred gangsters shot by police often illuminate this subculture. Perhaps not surprisingly, they see the police as another competing tribe that has to be manipulated, controlled, and sometimes confronted. In sum, the lives of persistent criminal offenders are often shockingly pathological. The nature of this world is hard to grasp without witnessing it firsthand.” (Ibid. p. 56)

As someone who was a professional criminal—meaning virtually all of my criminal acts were for money—for about 20 years, with 12 of those years spent in maximum security federal and state prisons; then some years after my final release entering college and earning degrees in criminal justice, organization behavior, and public administration; developing and managing a criminal reformation program that used education and peer-counseling as reformative tools; I can verify that all of what is quoted here from the article in City Journal is accurate; and it is important that more articles like this continue to be published to counter the diversionary illusions of the left.

I would strongly recommend—to get a running start—the past work of James Q. Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Q._Wilson and the current work of Heather Mac Donald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mac_Donald .

Reference: John Paul Wright & Matt DeLisi. (2017, Summer). What Criminologist Don’t Say, and Why: Monopolized by the Left, academic research on crime gets almost everything wrong. City Journal: Summer 2017. Published by the Manhattan Institute. Volume 27, Number 3. (pp. 50-57)

This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

Lampstand E Letter: July 16, 2017, The Romance of Communism & Why the Left Still Loves i

A few months ago I wrote two pieces about Communism focusing on Dorothy Day and the Soft Communism in the Catholic Church, which she played a major role in developing.

Today I want to focus on why the left still loves Communism and the major reason, I believe, is that the Romance of Communism, the Romance of the Rebel, the Outlaw, has taken up pretty much permanent lodging in the American Left’s mind and spirit.

It has taken up that home, I believe, through the use of the actual language of the Communist narrative, which is powerful and stresses all people being together and fighting injustice—One Big Union, McCarthyism, Healthcare for All, Abolish Prisons, Tolerance, Diversity—and even though this language has little real connection to Communist-run countries, the words are effectively used.

A 1978 book by Vivian Gornick,

From the 1917 book by John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, to the 1981 movie, Reds, commemorating him, the American Left has adored and supported Communism; a tragic reality that continues today, well outlined by the series of articles in the New York Times, called Red Century: Exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution; of which there are at this point ten, one every week since March 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/column/red-century

American Communism is still the meta-narrative that underlies the American outlaw narrative, and has deeply penetrated the social justice narrative of the Catholic Church.

This centrality is captured in one of the Red Century articles:

My parents were working-class socialists. I grew up in the late 1940s and early ’50s thinking of them and their friends as what they themselves called “progressives.” The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers.

Vivian Gornick (2017. When Communism Inspired Americans, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when-communism-inspired-americans.html?rref=

That time, the early ‘40s and ‘50s were when the full force of Communist’s romantic power hit, as Gornick (2017) writes:

It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive. (Ibid)

Thornton (2017) notes two reasons for Communism’s continued allure:

There are two reasons for the continuing mystery of this affection for a murderous ideology. One is, as many commentators pointed out decades ago, communism was and is a political religion, a secular substitute for a discarded Christianity. Historian Michael Burleigh details the similarities:

It is relatively easy to transpose some of the key terms from the Judeo-Christian heritage to Marxism: “consciousness” (soul), “comrades” (faithful), “capitalist” (sinner), “devils” (counter-revolutionary), “proletariat” (chosen people) and “classless society” (paradise). The ruling classes were also going to face a revolutionary form of “Last Judgement” . . .  But there were far deeper and unacknowledged correspondences, including nostalgia for a lost oneness and the beliefs that time was linear . . . , that the achievement of higher consciousness brought salvation, and that history was progressing with its meaning and purpose evident to the discerning, knowledgeable vanguard.

Bruce Thornton. (2017, May 5) The Left’s Continuing Homage to Communism: Why progressives pay no price for clinging to their murderous ideology. Frontpage Mag. http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266596/lefts-continuing-homage-communism-bruce-thornton

This article from The Catholic Thing puts it into a correct context with the Pro-Life Movement

To perpetrate a great evil it takes a great lie portraying the evil as a great good. That was the con man’s trick of Communism. Even though Communist theory imagined a laughable utopia (for anyone who thought it through), and the reality was demonstrably more murderous than anything in modern history, lots of people – sophisticated intellectuals and ordinary working folk who sought a more just society – continued to defend it well past the point when the evil was impossible to deny. Some still do.

Something similar has been going on for the past half-century and more with abortion and the sexual revolution. In the heyday of Communism, you would hear from people suffering under Marxist regimes how leaders made it seem like down was up, right was left (or wrong), repression was liberation. Any criticism was either naïve or the work of dark capitalist forces.

For decades, pro-lifers have thought that they were merely trying to defend life in the womb. For their pains, they have been accused of wanting to control women’s bodies, defend patriarchy, destroy the environment, perpetuate Western imperialism – and now (in crazier but ever more influential circles) to disrespect alternative forms of family and human life via hetero-normativity and transphobia. (I know, I don’t get the connection either – can’t you be gay or trans and pro-life?)

Let’s recall some hard facts. Communist ideology killed roughly 100 million globally in the 20th century and has not yet entirely finished its run. The pro-abortion ideology has killed 60 million in America alone, 6 million in Italy, and by reasonable estimates close to 1.5 billion worldwide since 1980. It’s no wonder abortion advocates, like the old Communists, try to cloak the carnage in terms of a warped moral crusade and to divert attention to side issues from the central reality – the innocent child in the womb.

Retrieved May 22, 2017 from https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/05/22/defending-life-in-rome/

And to provide one answer to the question implicit in these observations—why do some intellectuals love dictators—comes this article from City Journal:

Though Hollander does not claim that there is a single explanation for intellectuals’ attraction to dictatorships such as those of Stalin, Mao, and Castro (or Khomeini, in the case of Foucault), let alone to have found it, he nevertheless believes, in my view plausibly, that the longing for quasi-religious belief in an age when actual religion has largely been rejected is a significant part of the explanation. The totalitarian dictators were not the typical politicians of democratic systems who, whatever their rhetoric, seem mainly to tinker at the edges of human existence, are ready or forced to make grubby compromises with their opponents, reveal themselves to be morally and financially corrupt, are more impressive in opposition than in office, have no overarching ideas for the redemption of humanity, and make no claims to be panjandrums of all human knowledge and wisdom. Rather, those dictators were religious leaders who claimed the power to answer all human questions at once and to lead humanity into a land of perpetual milk, honey, and peace. They were omniscient, omnicompetent, loving, and kind, infinitely concerned for the welfare of their people; yet at the same time they were modest, humble, and supposedly embarrassed by the adulation they received. The intellectuals, then, sought in them not men but messiahs. Retrieved May 23, 2017 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/crushing-crushers-15207.html

Finally, don’t forget to read a few of the pieces of the series, The Red Century, from the New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/column/red-century, where, underneath the scholarly veneer, the boundless love pours off the page.

This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 123, April 16, 2017

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Dorothy Day & Catholic Soft Communism

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I was not familiar with the writings of Dorothy Day until I became a Catholic, but then became a fervent fan after reading much of her published work and eventually have pretty much collected everything she wrote in book form.

However, since I read the shocking 2010 book by Dr. Carol Byrne, The Catholic Worker Movement (1933-1980): A Critical Analysis and followed up with my own research, I realized how devoted she remained to Communism throughout her life.

Dorothy Day’s published writings, which is what most of us base our opinion of her on, are filled with devotional service and Catholic oriented content; but her writings to her fellow workers, those writings specifically in the Catholic Worker—which Dorothy Day edited from its beginning in 1933 to her death in 1980, clearly stood on the side of Communism against Capitalism, as did her many speeches, people she honored and her activism.

As I wrote in my book, Catholicism, Communism & Criminal Reformation:

As Earl Browder, who headed the Party during its heyday in the 1930s, would later boast:

Entering the 1930s as a small ultra-left sect of some 7,000 members, remnant of the fratricidal factional struggle of the 1920s that had wiped out the old “left wing” of American socialism, the CP rose to become a national political influence far beyond its numbers (at its height it never exceeded 100,000 members), on a scale never before reached by a socialist movement claiming the Marxist tradition. It became a practical power in organized labour, its influence became strong in some state organizations of the Democratic party (even dominant in a few for some years), and even some Republicans solicited its support. It guided the anti-Hitler movement of the American League for Peace and Democracy that united a cross-section of some five million organized Americans (a list of its sponsors and speakers would include almost a majority of Roosevelt’s Cabinet, the most prominent intellectuals, judges of all grades up to State Supreme Courts, church leaders, labour leaders, etc.). Right-wing intellectuals complained that it exercised an effective veto in almost all publishing houses against their books, and it is at least certain that those right-wingers had extreme difficulty getting published.

While Browder’s boast contained a lot of truth, he could hardly take full credit. The Communist Party USA only broke out of its isolation in 1935, when the Comintern [Lenin’s Bolsheviks believed that unless socialist revolutions triumphed world-wide, they would be defeated by international capitalism, so they organized the Communist International—abbreviated as Comintern—in Moscow in 1919 to foment revolution around the world.] taking advantage of the widespread legitimate fear of German Nazism, ordered the international Communist movement to adopt an ecumenical attitude and stretch its hands out to those it previously hated, including socialists and Catholics. (Italicized section added.) Romerstein, H. & Breindel, E. (2000). The Venona secrets: Exposing Soviet espionage and America’s traitors. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc. (pp. 98-99)

David H. Lukenbill. (2013), Catholicism, Communism & Criminal Reformation. Sacramento, California: Chulu Press, The Lampstand Foundation. (pp. 84-85)

Byrne (2010)—virtually alone with an insightful and penetrating understanding of the deep Communist orientation of this seminal organization and its founders—writes about the Catholic Worker Movement in the introduction to her book:

The Catholic Worker Movement was co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in New York, on 1st May 1933, to provide food, clothing and shelter for the destitute during the years of the Great Depression. It was a movement built on the long-term despair of Americans who turned to radical political and social movements for a solution to unemployment, homelessness and poverty. For Day and Maurin it was an opportunity to fulfil their dream of starting a radical mass movement that might one day reverberate around the world. But in the intervening period they devoted their energies to fomenting a revolution against the US government, immersed as it was in upholding all the social and political institutions which they wanted to abolish: Capitalism, industrial corporations, big business and the armed forces. These they regarded as the causes of poverty and injustice in the world.

Key to the technique of protest was to project an image as a victim in the “class struggle” described by Karl Marx, then to seize the moral high ground by attacking the other side as the greedy, guilty “bourgeois.” It is essential to keep in mind that Day’s theories for a new social order share a common identity: they were all part of a “culture of victimization” which claims that any kind of social disadvantage is due entirely to “oppression” by the “bourgeoisie”. That explains her presumption that in the struggle for “liberation” the poor and the workers were by definition always innocent even when they resorted to armed violence, and rich capitalists always the guilty party even when they contributed notably to the common good. Carol Byrne, (2010). The Catholic worker movement (1933-1980): A critical analysis. United Kingdom: AuthorHouse UK Ltd. (pp. ix-x)

Lukenbill Ibid. (pp. 89-90)

I think that in Dorothy Day’s case, she had conflated Communism with Catholicism so deeply in her own mind and spirit that they were virtually one and the same thing to her—a classic case of being duped—a form of thinking still very prevalent within the Catholic left, especially those still, and they are many, enamored with Liberation Theology.

Now that her cause for sainthood has been approved by the American bishops to move her from the current designation as Servant of God, to the next step in the canonization process, the history of the Vatican’s connection to Russian Communism through the period when the Fatima call from the Holy Virgin to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart was not responded to, due, in large part, to the Vatican influence of Orthodox Russian Metropolitans now known to have been KGB directed, will perhaps be examined.

Lukenbill Ibid. (p. 92)

I trust soundness will prevail and Dorothy Day will not become a saint, though admiration for her work with the poor, even tinged at it is with the anger and hostility against capitalism and the American way, is warranted and it is an admiration I share.

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David H. Lukenbill, President, The Lampstand Foundation

Post Office Box 254794   Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

Website: https://davidhlukenbill.wordpress.com/

Blog: www.cathliceye.wordpress.com

E-Mail: Dlukenbill@msn.com

With Peter to Christ through Mary

 

This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 122, March 16, 2017

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Norman Mailer, Jack Henry Abbott: Liberals & Criminals

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There is a new book out by Jerome Loving, Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song: primarily about the relationship between Norman Mailer, one of the foremost liberals of the 1960’s and beyond, and John Henry Abbott, the criminal/convict whose book, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, is a compilation of letters between Mailer and Abbott while Abbot was still in prison; a book I devoured when it was published in 1981, a short 12 years after my own release from prison in 1969.

Mailer proclaimed Abbott as a significant thinker and writer and helped him get released only to witness Abbott’s killing of a restaurant manager outside the New York City restaurant he managed, six weeks after Abbott’s release.

As a former criminal and convict who served time in some of the same prisons as did Abbott—though several years before him—and who shared his prison experience of serious reading while locked away in solitary confinement; I respect Abbott’s writing and his intellectuality underneath the hyperbole and believe he may have been one of the foremost intellectuals among prisoners, though, I am sad to say, based on information I learned about in the Loving book, he would not be a member of the professional criminal cohort—those to whom Lampstand’s mission is directed—which I define as:

Professional criminals—as defined by the Lampstand Foundation—are those who commit crimes for money, have served at least five years in a maximum security prison, and are not informants, pedophiles, rapists, or serial killers.

As Jerome Loving writes in his book, Jack and Norman:

As his prison misconduct in the federal system continued and worsened, Abbott became known as a reformer among fellow inmates and troublemaker to his jailers. In making the rounds of the many federal prisons as a result, he landed for the first time, in 1979, at Marion. When, by 1980, he received a tentative parole date from federal authorities, he decided to break the inmate code he had so often boasted to Mailer about in his letters and became a “snitch.” Around December 12, 1980, he identified the leaders of what became at the time the longest strike in federal prison history. Through biographer Peter Matthiessen, Mailer got wind of this information the following year, before it became public with the Adan stabbing, while Jack was still at a halfway house in New York. Although shocked that Jack had broken the inmate code he had all along boasted that he would uphold, Mailer let the matter go, wondering about what lengths he himself might go after half a lifetime in prison. (pp. 36-37)

What brings extra heft to this charge of being an informant is the status accrued by serving time in Marion, which at that time, was, within the carceral world culture, equivalent to a PhD from Harvard in the culture of the academy; consequently those who were informed on would have had great influence and stretch throughout the prison system, federal and state; so their labeling of Abbott as a snitch would ensure he was in danger, certainly while still in prison, and, in most cases, even when out.

The great swirling of complimentary verbiage from the literary community around the publication of Abbot’s book was not surprising to those of us who had actually spent time in prison as opposed to those who think they know what prison is like, or more importantly, what they want prison to be like; and my reaction was exactly as expressed by Death Row prisoners in an article by Bruce Jackson in the Buffalo Report 1 March 2002:

In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner’s Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott’s letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott’s first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).

When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.

Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that “they’re the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn’t know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will.” He and several other men on the Row found the book’s success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were. (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://www.murderpedia.org/male.A/a/abbott-jack-henry.htm )

Liberals have long been enamored by criminals and outlaws, a social stance captured wickedly by Thomas Wolfe as Radical Chic and noted in an article in the New York Post by Michael Kaplan, February 16, 2017:

At a 1981 press conference before New York media, a grim-faced Norman Mailer held up that day’s edition of The Post. A headline blared, “Norman Mailer Shocker: I’d Help Killer Again.” The city was aghast, Mailer lobbed a $2 million libel suit against the paper, and a law-abiding restaurant manager was dead.

The headlined killer in this disaster tale was Jack Henry Abbott, a lifetime product of the American prison system and an unlikely darling of Manhattan’s literary scene.

In the guilt-stink of “Radical Chic” — a term coined by Tom Wolfe after Leonard Bernstein hosted an event in his home that brought together society types and the Black Panthers — Abbott’s prison memoir, “In The Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison,” was poised to be published to rave reviews and best-seller status.

The collision of macho posturing, a publishing industry hungry for authenticity and an ex-con whose considerable literary gifts were tragically overshadowed by jailhouse paranoia are all chronicled in “Jack and Norman” (St. Martin’s Press), by Jerome Loving, out Tuesday.

Long before Abbott entered the picture, Mailer thrived on his reputation as an Ivy League brawler. He punched out Gore Vidal, stabbed his wife and, as Loving tells The Post, he was “a tough guy in the way that Hemingway was a tough guy. Mailer boxed until he was 60, got drunk and fought people in the street; he once got into a confrontation with somebody who made fun of his dog. Mailer had a bad temper and would not back down from anyone, but he had never been in a true danger zone. Abbott with a knife was very dangerous — and he often had a knife on him.” (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://nypost.com/2017/02/16/how-norman-mailer-helped-a-criminal-kill-again/ )

The story surrounding his life and thought after the New York killing and return to prison, is admirably captured in the book by him—co-authored by Naomi Zack—My Return, which can be purchased at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/My-Return-Jack-Henry-Abbot/dp/0879753552/ref=sr_

My Return is a must have as a companion to In the Belly of the Beast and Jack and Norman, as an admirable case study of a convict’s life amid the liberal literary world.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 121, February 16, 2017

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Women in the Church

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The mission of the Lampstand Foundation is to develop material which leads to the reformation/transformation of criminals through deep exposure to Catholic teaching as the only body of thought potent enough to trump the driving narrative of criminality which is based on the way of the world.

The most enduring work Lampstand has produced are the 11 books focusing on certain aspects of Catholic teaching which can interfere with that ministry through either misunderstanding of the teaching of the Church on the part of ministers or criminals, or ambiguous and misleading teachings calling for Church reform.

One of these books examines women as priests in the Church: Women in the Church, St. Catherine of Siena, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin & Criminal Reformation, as opening paragraphs note:

For this book, a quote from Groppe (2009) frames the over-arching theme:

In a culture that systematically denigrates, commodifies, and violates women’s bodies in advertising, film, and pornography, it is imperative that the church bear public and symbolic witness to the mystery that women and men alike can serve as an icon of Wisdom made flesh. Groppe, E. (2009). Women and the persona of Christ: Ordination in the Roman Catholic Church. In Abraham, S. & Procario-Foley, E. (Eds.) Frontiers in Catholic feminist theology: Shoulder to shoulder. (pp. 153-171), Minneapolis: Fortress Press. (p. 171)

That is bare bone essence, isn’t it?

The Church stands in the world as a sign of contradiction and as the world since time immemorial excluded women from full personhood; the Church must ensure that within her embrace, woman’s full personhood is deeply rooted and complete; which can only be accomplished by priestly ordination and full equality with men in the leadership of the Church on earth as that equality is certainly so in Heaven. Women in the Church (pp. 9-10)

Consequently, the recent article in the Vatican magazine, noted in Sandro Magister’s Blog is cause for hope.

On August 2, 2016, Pope Francis instituted a commission to study the history of the female diaconate, for the purpose of its possible restoration. And some have seen this as a first step toward priesthood for women, in spite of the fact that Francis himself seems to have ruled it out absolutely, responding as follows to a question on the return flight from his journey to Sweden last November 1…:

“For the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last clear word was given by Saint John Paul II, and this holds.”

But to read the latest issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the question of women priests appears to be anything but closed. On the contrary, wide open.

“La Civiltà Cattolica” is not just any magazine. By statute, every line of it is printed after inspection by the Holy See. But in addition there is the very close confidential relationship between Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the magazine’s editor, the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro.

Who in turn has his most trusted colleague in deputy editor Giancarlo Pani, he too a Jesuit like all the writers of the magazine.

So then, in the article with his byline that appears in the latest issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” Fr. Pani calmly rips to shreds the “last clear word” – meaning the flat no – that John Paul II spoke against women’s priesthood.

To see how, all it takes is to reread this passage of the article, properly speaking dedicated to the question of women deacons, but taking the cue from there to express hopes for women priests as well.

ONE CANNOT SIMPLY RESORT TO THE PAST, by Giancarlo Pani, S.J.

[…] On Pentecost of 1994, Pope John Paul II summarized, in the apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis,” the outcome of a series of previous magisterial statements (including “Inter Insigniores”), concluding that Jesus has chosen only men for the priestly ministry. Therefore “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women. This judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

The statement was a clear word for those who maintained that the refusal of priestly ordination for women could be discussed. Nonetheless, […] some time later, following the problems raised not so much by the doctrine as by the force with which it was presented, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was presented with a question: can “ordinatio sacerdotalis” be “considered as belonging to the deposit of the faith?” The answer was “affirmative,” and the doctrine was described as “infallibiliter proposita,” meaning that “it must be held always, everywhere, and by all the faithful.”

Difficulties with the answer’s reception have created “tensions” in relations between magisterium and theology over the connected problems. These are pertinent to the fundamental theology on infallibility. It is the first time in history that the congregation explicitly appealed to the constitution “Lumen Gentium” no. 25, which proclaims the infallibility of a doctrine that is taught as definitively binding by the bishops dispersed throughout the world but in communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter.

Moreover, the question touches upon the theology of the sacraments, because it concerns the subject of the sacrament of Orders, which traditionally is indeed man, but this does not take into account the developments that the presence of woman in the family and in society has undergone in the 21st century. This is a matter of ecclesial dignity, responsibility, and participation.

The historical fact of the exclusion of woman from the priesthood because of the “impedimentum sexus” is undeniable. Nevertheless, already in 1948, and therefore well ahead of the disputes of the 1960’s, Fr. Congar pointed out that “the absence of a fact is not a decisive criterion for concluding prudently in every case that the Church cannot do it and will never do it.”

Moreover, another theologian adds, the “consensus fidelium” of many centuries has been called into question in the 20th century above all on account of the profound sociocultural changes concerning woman. It would not make sense to maintain that the Church must change only because the times have changed, but it remains true that a doctrine proposed by the Church needs to be understood by the believing intelligence. The dispute over women priests could be set in parallel with other moments of Church history; in any case, today in the question of female priesthood the “auctoritates,” or official positions of the magisterium, are clear, but many Catholics have a hard time understanding the “rationes” of decisions that, more than expressions of authority, appear to signify authoritarianism. Today there is unease among those who fail to understand how the exclusion of woman from the Church’s ministry can coexist with the affirmation and appreciation of her equal dignity.” […] Retrieved February 9, 2017 from http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2017/02/07/latest-from-santa-marta-open-doors-for-women-priests/

Concluding paragraphs in the Lampstand book, Women in the Church, St. Catherine of Siena, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin & Criminal Reformation:

Christ says in John 12:32:

[31] Now is the judgment of the world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. [32] And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.

Teilhard’s concept of evolution in Christ is built upon this, for if evolution is true, and Teilhard, as a scientist, knew that it is; and if Christ is true, and Teilhard as a Jesuit and son of the Church, knew that he is, then Christ is at the center of and animating evolution.

Teilhard de Chardin (1971) knew that understanding this was crucial to the Church:

My profound conviction, born of the experience of a life spent simultaneously in the heart of the Gentile world and in that of the Church, is that at this very moment, we have reached a delicate point of balance at which a readjustment is essential. It could not, in fact, be otherwise: our Christology is still expressed in exactly the same terms as those which, three centuries ago, could satisfy men whose outlook on the cosmos is not physically impossible for us to accept. Unless we admit that religious life and human life are independent of one another (which is a psychological impossibility) such a situation must a priori produce a feeling of dismay, a loss of balance. That it has already done so cannot be denied. I can testify to this in my own case, and the whole of what we call the modernist movement bears me out. What we now have to do without delay is to modify the position occupied by the central core of Christianity—and this precisely in order that it may not lose its illuminative value.

If we ask in what exactly this correction in relationship consists, the answer must be in bringing Christology and evolution into line with one another. Chardin, P.T.D. (1971). Christianity and evolution. (Trans. R. Hague). New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (p. 77)

This call to bring into alignment science and faith was part of the impetus for Vatican II, and much good has come from that council, but there are still central aspects that have not, and the status of women in the Church still reeks of centuries-old ideas which have indeed, caused the Church to lose some of “its illuminative value.” Women in the Church (pp. 118-119)

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David H. Lukenbill, President, The Lampstand Foundation

Post Office Box 254794   Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

Website: https://davidhlukenbill.wordpress.com/

Blog: www.cathliceye.wordpress.com

E-Mail: Dlukenbill@msn.com

With Peter to Christ through Mary

This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 122, March 16, 2017

_________________________________________________________

Norman Mailer, Jack Henry Abbott: Liberals & Criminals

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There is a new book out by Jerome Loving, Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song: primarily about the relationship between Norman Mailer, one of the foremost liberals of the 1960’s and beyond, and John Henry Abbott, the criminal/convict whose book, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, is a compilation of letters between Mailer and Abbott while Abbot was still in prison; a book I devoured when it was published in 1981, a short 12 years after my own release from prison in 1969.

Mailer proclaimed Abbott as a significant thinker and writer and helped him get released only to witness Abbott’s killing of a restaurant manager outside the New York City restaurant he managed, six weeks after Abbott’s release.

As a former criminal and convict who served time in some of the same prisons as did Abbott—though several years before him—and who shared his prison experience of serious reading while locked away in solitary confinement; I respect Abbott’s writing and his intellectuality underneath the hyperbole and believe he may have been one of the foremost intellectuals among prisoners, though, I am sad to say, based on information I learned about in the Loving book, he would not be a member of the professional criminal cohort—those to whom Lampstand’s mission is directed—which I define as:

Professional criminals—as defined by the Lampstand Foundation—are those who commit crimes for money, have served at least five years in a maximum security prison, and are not informants, pedophiles, rapists, or serial killers.

As Jerome Loving writes in his book, Jack and Norman:

As his prison misconduct in the federal system continued and worsened, Abbott became known as a reformer among fellow inmates and troublemaker to his jailers. In making the rounds of the many federal prisons as a result, he landed for the first time, in 1979, at Marion. When, by 1980, he received a tentative parole date from federal authorities, he decided to break the inmate code he had so often boasted to Mailer about in his letters and became a “snitch.” Around December 12, 1980, he identified the leaders of what became at the time the longest strike in federal prison history. Through biographer Peter Matthiessen, Mailer got wind of this information the following year, before it became public with the Adan stabbing, while Jack was still at a halfway house in New York. Although shocked that Jack had broken the inmate code he had all along boasted that he would uphold, Mailer let the matter go, wondering about what lengths he himself might go after half a lifetime in prison. (pp. 36-37)

What brings extra heft to this charge of being an informant is the status accrued by serving time in Marion, which at that time, was, within the carceral world culture, equivalent to a PhD from Harvard in the culture of the academy; consequently those who were informed on would have had great influence and stretch throughout the prison system, federal and state; so their labeling of Abbott as a snitch would ensure he was in danger, certainly while still in prison, and, in most cases, even when out.

The great swirling of complimentary verbiage from the literary community around the publication of Abbot’s book was not surprising to those of us who had actually spent time in prison as opposed to those who think they know what prison is like, or more importantly, what they want prison to be like; and my reaction was exactly as expressed by Death Row prisoners in an article by Bruce Jackson in the Buffalo Report 1 March 2002:

In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner’s Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott’s letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott’s first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).

When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.

Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that “they’re the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn’t know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will.” He and several other men on the Row found the book’s success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were. (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://www.murderpedia.org/male.A/a/abbott-jack-henry.htm )

Liberals have long been enamored by criminals and outlaws, a social stance captured wickedly by Thomas Wolfe as Radical Chic and noted in an article in the New York Post by Michael Kaplan, February 16, 2017:

At a 1981 press conference before New York media, a grim-faced Norman Mailer held up that day’s edition of The Post. A headline blared, “Norman Mailer Shocker: I’d Help Killer Again.” The city was aghast, Mailer lobbed a $2 million libel suit against the paper, and a law-abiding restaurant manager was dead.

The headlined killer in this disaster tale was Jack Henry Abbott, a lifetime product of the American prison system and an unlikely darling of Manhattan’s literary scene.

In the guilt-stink of “Radical Chic” — a term coined by Tom Wolfe after Leonard Bernstein hosted an event in his home that brought together society types and the Black Panthers — Abbott’s prison memoir, “In The Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison,” was poised to be published to rave reviews and best-seller status.

The collision of macho posturing, a publishing industry hungry for authenticity and an ex-con whose considerable literary gifts were tragically overshadowed by jailhouse paranoia are all chronicled in “Jack and Norman” (St. Martin’s Press), by Jerome Loving, out Tuesday.

Long before Abbott entered the picture, Mailer thrived on his reputation as an Ivy League brawler. He punched out Gore Vidal, stabbed his wife and, as Loving tells The Post, he was “a tough guy in the way that Hemingway was a tough guy. Mailer boxed until he was 60, got drunk and fought people in the street; he once got into a confrontation with somebody who made fun of his dog. Mailer had a bad temper and would not back down from anyone, but he had never been in a true danger zone. Abbott with a knife was very dangerous — and he often had a knife on him.” (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://nypost.com/2017/02/16/how-norman-mailer-helped-a-criminal-kill-again/ )

The story surrounding his life and thought after the New York killing and return to prison, is admirably captured in the book by him—co-authored by Naomi Zack—My Return, which can be purchased at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/My-Return-Jack-Henry-Abbot/dp/0879753552/ref=sr_

My Return is a must-have as a companion to In the Belly of the Beast and Jack and Norman, as an admirable case study of a convict’s life amid the liberal literary world.