Book Excerpt: Communism & Fatima

20 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Publications: Book Excerpts

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 eleven books and each one of my books is 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 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.

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Book Excerpt: Communism & Fatima

Fatima was the most important event of the 20^th Century and beyond, as Martin (2013, April) notes:

“Fatima was not just the event of the century but an event matchless and timeless, a majestic witness testifying with elemental power about the will of Heaven and the future of earth. It spoke in the fire of the sun and in the gentle words of the Virgin Mary, and promised a surpassing mercy even as it provided a terrifying vision of souls tossed about in the flames of Hell. It set forth conditions for the world’s deliverance from an imminent darkness that would be shaped and spread by the Russian followers of Karl Marx. Finally, it assured us that if the Church met those conditions, there would come unimaginable miracles: a converted Russia, a period of peace, and a world in which the beauty of holiness would be honored in a magnificent new way in the person of Mary. And all this was not a fairy tale but truth—a dazzling revelation that both Rome and the dedicated faithful must yet come to fully appreciate, believe in, and live out if the epic event we call Fatima is to fulfill its glorious promise.” (pp. 22-23) Martin, J. (2013, April) An epic in search of an ending. New Oxford Review. LXXX(3), 22-27.

However, the shepherds of the Church failed Our Lady and our Church then and continue that failure today.

They not only failed to protect our Church from the Communist wolves, but in all too many cases, became Communist wolves themselves.

The speculation surrounding why the appearance of the Holy Mother and her plea to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart, has not been followed; continues to this day as Johnston (1980) writes:

“And on 13 June 1929 she [Lucia] received the greatest of all her visions which was only made public in August 1967 after Pope Paul’s visit to Fatima. It was a climatic vision of the Most Holy Trinity in which Our Lady came to fulfill her promise of 13 July 1917: “I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart.” The following is Lucia’s own account of that sublime vision, which she wrote in 1931 on the order of her confessor…

“Our Lady then said to me: ‘The moment has come for God to ask the Holy Father to make, in union with all the bishops of the world, the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart. He promises to save Russia by this means. There are so many souls that the justice of God condemns for sins committed against me, that I have come to ask for reparation. Sacrifice yourself for this intention and pray.’ I gave an account of this to my confessor and he asked me to write down what Our Lord wanted to be done.

“Later on, through an intimate communication, Our Lord complained: ‘They have not chosen to heed my request…As the King of France, they will regret it and then will do it, but it will be late. Russia will already have spread her errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church. The Holy Father will have much to suffer.” (pp. 86-87) Johnston, F. (1980). Fatima: The great sign. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc.

The request for the Collegial Consecration was first promised before the Bolsheviks overcame Russia and her Catholic monarchy, eventually killing the entire family of Czar Romanov, and specifically called for later, and it is still unfulfilled.

Part of the reason—the influential power of human relationships—has been uncovered, as Weigel 2010) notes:

“On September 5, 1978, the new pope [John Paul I] received [Russian Orthodox] Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches and a man who struck many Westerners as deeply pious. The KGB knew Nikodim as ADAMANT, as it knew his secretary, Nikolai Lvovich Tserpitsky (code name VLADIMIR). At the end of his private audience with John Paul, ADAMANT suffered a massive heart attack and died in the Pope’s arms. John Paul I later remarked that Nikodim had spoken “the most beautiful words about the Church I have ever heard” during their meeting; his last words, as the Pope held the fallen bishop, were said to have been “I am not a KGB agent.” But he was.” (p. 99) Weigel, G. (2010). The end and the beginning: Pope John Paul II—The victory of freedom, the last years, the legacy. New York: Doubleday.

Russian Communism’s penetration and attempt to control Catholic strategy continued through the papacy of John Paul II, as Weigel writes:

“The search for truth was essential to man, the Pope concluded [John Paul II’s address to the United Nations General Assembly October 2, 1979]. Believers and nonbelievers ought to be able to agree on this as a common matter of humanistic conviction.

“The Central committee of the Soviet Communist Party might not agree on that. It did agree, however, that something had to be done about John Paul II. Six weeks after the pope spoke at the UN, the Central committee Secretariat issued an “absolutely secret” decree, entitled “On measures of Opposition to the Politics of the Vatican in Relation to Socialist Countries.” This was a political document, assigning tasks to different organs of Soviet state power: the various propaganda, radio, television, and press organs; the Soviet Communist Party’s international department; the Soviet Council of Religious Affairs; and the Central committee’s Academy of Social Sciences. Each of these instruments of the Soviet state was to do its own distinct work in combating the “perilous tendencies in the teaching of Pope John Paul II,” which were to be “condemned in proper form.” The decree was signed by the party’s chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, and was accompanied by several analyses of the situation, including a memorandum, “On the Socio-Political and Ideological Activities of the Vatican on the Contemporary Stage,” that was prepared by the KGB, although nominally authored under the auspices of the Council of Religious Affairs….at the same time as the decree was issued, the “KGB was instructed…to embark on active measures in the West” aimed at frustrating the designs of John Paul II and demonstrating that his efforts were a danger to the Catholic Church. “Active measures” in this context would have included propaganda, disinformation campaigns, blackmail, and other tactics as required, with special focus on persuading the world media that John Paul II was a threat to peace.” (Ibid. pp. 114-115)

Sciabarra (1995) provides some insight into the cultural history that led the Russian Orthodox Church to work so closely with the Communist state:

“The movement toward dialectical transcendence of opposites is manifested especially in the 1840s in Khomyakov’s critique of Western religion. Alexy Khomyakov embraced the Slavophile devotion to Orthodox Christianity and personal mystical experience. He viewed Russian Orthodoxy, with its Byzantine roots, as the reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism. N.O. Lossky, [Ayn] Rand’s teacher and author of the indispensible History of Russian Philosophy, explains that for Khomyakov, “the rationalism of Catholicism which established unity without freedom gave rise, as a reaction against it, to another form of rationalism—Protestantism which realizes freedom without unity.” Khomyakov saw the necessity for a communal, conciliar unity that transcended the Catholic emphasis on the individual judgment of the pope and the Protestant emphasis on the individual judgment of the believer. Russian Orthodoxy bound the Church and the state much more closely than was the case in the West. It was the original organic union, in Khomyakov’s view, a freedom-in-unity and a unity-in-freedom.” (pp. 26-27) Sciabarra, C. M. (1995). Ayn Rand: The Russian radical. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

The Russian Communist presence within the Vatican appears to have been the mortar that kept the Vatican from ever—to this day—fulfilling the wishes of the Holy Mother at Fatima; a tragic conclusion written about by Kramer (2010):

“The subversion of the Orthodox Church by Stalin is certainly among the developments in Russia foreseen by the Virgin of Fatima. This is precisely why She came to call for the consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart; so that Russia would embrace the one true religion and the one true Church, not the schismatic Orthodox Church which was founded in human rebellion against Rome when it left the Mystical Body of Christ over 500 years ago, and thus was constitutionally incapable of avoiding its total Adaptation to Stalinism.

“The Orthodox Adaptation began officially when the Metropolitan Sergius of the Russian Orthodox Church published an “Appeal” in Isvestia on August 9, 1927…

“This, then, is what the Adaptation involved: The church would be silent about the evils of the Stalinist regime. It would be silent in the presence of the Party Line being broadcast and rebroadcast again and again. It would become a purely “spiritual” community “in the abstract”, would no longer voice opposition to the regime, would no longer condemn the errors and lies of Communism, and would thus become the Church of Silence, as Christianity behind the Iron Curtain was often called….

“Meanwhile, the Church of Silence, in effect, was transformed into an organ of the KGB. Stalin decimated the Russian Orthodox Church; all of the real Orthodox believers were sent off to concentration camps or executed and replaced by KGB operatives.

“Shortly before Talantov died in August of 1967, he wrote as follows about the Adaptation:

“The Adaptation to atheism implanted by Metropolitan Sergius has concluded (been completed by) the betrayal of the Orthodox Russian Church on the part of Metropolitan Nikodim and other official representatives of the Moscow Patriarch based abroad. This betrayal irrefutably proved the documents cited must be made known to all believers in Russia and abroad because such an activity of the Patriarchate, relying on cooperation with the KGB, represents a great danger for all believers. In truth, the atheistic leaders of the Russian people and the princes of the Church have gathered together against the Lord and his Church.

“Here Talantov refers to the same Metropolitan Nikodim who induced the Vatican to enter into the Vatican-Moscow Agreement, under which the Catholic Church was forced to remain silent about communism at Vatican II. Thus, the same Orthodox prelate who betrayed the Orthodox Church was instrumental in an agreement by which the Catholic Church was also betrayed. At Vatican II certain Catholic churchmen, cooperating with Nikodim, agreed that the Roman Catholic Church, too, would become a Church of Silence.” (Italics in original, pp. 108-109) Kramer, P. Fr. (2010). The Devil’s final battle: How rejection of the Fatima prophecies imminently threatens the Church and the World. (2nd Ed.) The Missionary Association: Terryville, Connecticut.

No matter how many times I read this, I am still shocked that it happened and has been so completely documented from so many sources, yet so completely absent within the perspective of the Catholic public.

Communism, being able to accomplish this powerful strategy against critiques from the one force on earth with the spiritual authority to be heard and to combat it, thus proved itself a very powerful and effective adversary.

Communism is a religion, its bible is The Communist Manifesto, its theologians are Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Debray, Fanon; its priests are legion, and its shock troops are too often criminals, harking to the first name of the organization Communism’s founders, Marx and Engels, joined:

“In the spring of 1847 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels agreed to join the so called League of the Just, an offshoot of the earlier League of the Outlaws, a revolutionary secret society formed in Paris in the 1830s under French Revolutionary influence by German journeymen—mostly tailors and woodworkers—and still mainly composed of such expatriate artisan radicals. The League, convinced by their ‘critical communism’, offered to publish a Manifesto drafted by Marx and Engels as its policy document, and also to modernize its organization along their lines. Indeed, it was so reorganized in the summer of 1847, renamed League of the Communists, and ‘committed to the object of ‘the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the ending of the old society which rests on class contradictions and the establishment of a new society without classes or private property.” (Marx & Engels (1998). (p. 3) Marx. K. & Engels, F. (9198). The communist manifesto: A modern edition. (S. Moore, Trans., English Edition, 1888). New York: Verso. (Original work published in 1848)

Cummins (1994) writes about the deepening of criminal involvement in Communist revolution through the ideas and writings of the radical elements of the California criminal/carceral movement:

“The prison movement had spun away from its union-building phase. In 1972 the National Lawyers Guild reaffirmed once again the leadership of revolutionary convicts and repeated its faith that they would soon make their break to the streets to raise the level of struggle: “Prisoners are the revolutionary vanguard of our struggle. When prisoners come out, they will lead us in the streets.” (p. 221) Cummins, E. (1994). The rise and fall of California’s radical prison movement. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Russia’s continued domination of the Russian Orthodox Church is reported by Young (2013):

“The biggest news story out of Russia in 2012 was not Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in May. It was the trial of three young women from the guerrilla-girl punk band Pussy Riot, charged with “hate-motivated hooliganism” for a protest performance in a Moscow church. The women’s offense was a brief song-and-dance act at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February, opening with a prayer chant of “Mother of God, Blessed Virgin, drive out Putin.” On August 17, after a nonjury trial in which the judge blatantly favored the prosecution, Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were found guilty and handed two-year prison sentences. In October, two of the women were transported to remote penal colonies.

“The prosecution, which was condemned by figures ranging from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Icelandic singer Bjork to Polish former president and dissident Lech Walesa, became an international symbol of the Kremlin’s heavy-handed approach to dissent and artistic freedom. Yet at its core, the Pussy Riot case was also about the unholy union of organized religion and authoritarian state in modern-day Russia.

“Pussy Riot’s protest song was about not just Putin but also the cozy ties between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church under the leadership of the pro-Putin Patriarch Kirill. The indictment against the punk rockers accused them not only of demeaning the beliefs of Orthodox Christians but of “belittling the spiritual foundations of the state.”

“The case looked and felt like something out of the Dark Ages. The state-run Rossiya television channel repeatedly referred to the women as “blasphemers,” while a co-founder of the semi-official pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi warned that the decline of harsh blasphemy laws throughout Europe had set the continent on a path to destructive liberalism. During the trial, the judge deemed it relevant that the Pussy Rioters had violated rules established by an eighth-century church council. Outside the courtroom, the lawyer for one of the prosecution witnesses told a newspaper, with no trace of humor, that the group’s actions stemmed from Satan himself.” (n.p) Young, C. (2013, January) Putin goes to church: Russia’s unholy new alliance between orthodox and state. Reason Magazine. Retrieved January 5, 2012 from: http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/26/putin-goes-to-church

The Holy Mother at Fatima also knew about the real criminal danger of an unconsecrated Russia, due to the crimes—though of a much less magnitude of national violence and brutality than the horror of the Nazi holocaust and the Stalinist terror—which have resulted via a world-wide explosion of organized crime emanating from Russia, as Sterling (1994) writes:

“Organized crime was transformed when the Soviet Empire crashed, and with it a world-order that had kept mankind more or less in line for the previous half-century. As the old geopolitical frontiers fell away, the big crime syndicates drew together, put an end to wars over turf, and declared a pax mafiosa. The world has never seen a planetwide criminal consortium like the one that came into being with the end of the communist era.

“Perhaps something like it would have come sooner or later anyway. Most of the big syndicates had worked with one or more of the others for years, the Sicilian Mafia with all of them. But the opportunities opening up for them in 1990 were immense—fabulous—and they responded accordingly.

“International organized crime, an imaginary menace for many in 1990, was a worldwide emergency by 1993. The big syndicates of East and West were pooling services and personnel, rapidly colonizing Western Europe and the United States, running the drug traffic up to half a trillion dollars a year, laundering and reinvesting an estimated quarter trillion dollars a year in legitimate enterprise. Much of their phenomenal growth derived from the fact that they had the free run of a territory covering half the continent of Europe and a good part of Asia—a sixth of the earth’s land mass, essentially ungoverned and unpoliced.

“The whole international underworld had moved in on post-communist Russia and the rest of the ex-Soviet bloc: raced in from the day the Berlin Wall fell. Where Western governments tended to see Russia as a basket case, the big syndicates saw it as a privileged sanctuary and a bottomless source of instant wealth.

“Russia had a runaway black market, a huge potential for producing and moving drugs, an enormous military arsenal, the world’s richest natural resources, and an insatiable hunger for dollars of whatever provenance. Furthermore, it had a rampant mafia of its own, in need of Western partners to make the most of these prospects.” (p. 14) Sterling, C. (1994). Thieves’ world: The threat of the new global network of organized crime. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Control of Russian culture by organized crime after the fall of Communism is also written about by Satter (2003):

“The victory over communism was a moral victory. Millions took to the streets not because of shortages but in protest over communism’s attempt to falsify history and change human nature. As a new state began to be built, however, all attention shifted to the creation of capitalism and, in particular, to the formation of a group of wealthy private owners whose control over the means of production, it was assumed, would lead automatically to a free-market economy and a law-based democracy. This approach, dubious under the best of conditions, proved disastrous in the case of Russia because, in a country with a need for moral values after more than seven decades of spiritual degradation under communism, the introduction of capitalism came to be seen as an end in itself.

“The young reformers were in a hurry to build capitalism, and they pressed ahead in a manner that paid little attention to anything except the transformation of economic structures. “The calculation was sober,” said Aliza Dolgova, an expert on organized crime in the Office of the General Prosecutor; “create through any means a stratum in Russia that could serve as the support of reform…All capital was laundered and put into circulation. No measures of any kind were enacted to prevent the legalization of criminal income. No one asked at [privatization] auctions: Where did you get the money? Enormous sums were invested in property, and there was no register of owners. A policy similar to this did not exist in a single civilized country.”

“The decision to transform the economy of a huge country without the benefit of the rule of law led not to a free-market democracy but to a kleptocracy that had several dangerous economic and psychological features.

“In the first place, the new system was characterized by bribery. All resources were initially in the hands of the state, so businessmen competed to “buy” critical government officials. The winners were in a position to buy the cooperation of more officials, with the result that the practice of giving bribes grew up with the system.

“Besides bribery, the new system was marked by institutionalized violence. Gangsters were treated as normal economic actors, a practice that tacitly legitimated their criminal activities. At the same time, they became the partners of businessmen who used them as guards, enforcers, and debt collectors.

“The new system was also characterized by pillage. Money obtained as a result of criminal activities was illegally exported to avoid the possibility of its being confiscated at some point in the future. This outflow deprived Russia of billions of dollars that were needed for its development.” (pp. 1-2) Satter, D. (2003). Darkness at dawn: The rise of the Russian criminal state. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Lucas (2012) also wrote about the criminal development of post-Communist Russia:

“In no other country have gangsterdom and state power overlapped to such a threatening extent. The most powerful drug cartels may have high-tech communications equipment or the ability to penetrate a law-enforcement agency, or have some politicians on the payroll. But they have nothing that (yet) matches Russia’s ruling criminal syndicate’s capabilities. It has almost limitless money, global geographical scope and the full armory of state technical and logistical resources, from spy satellites to submarines, giving unprecedented capabilities in snooping and manipulation. Russia’s world-class hackers, for example, work sometimes in government, sometimes under official protection and sometimes entirely in their own criminal interest. Russian dirty money and underhand business practices taint and corrode the financial systems, business cultures and politics of the countries they touch. As Don Jensen, a stalwart American critic of the regime, points out, Russia’s main export is not oil and gas. It is corruption.” (p. 79) Lucas, E. (2012). Deception: The untold story of east-west espionage today. New York: Walker & Company.

The Marxist infiltration of Catholicism began in Europe, and after the years of occupation by the Nazis and the Communists, which solidified their atheistic ideology within an oppressed European peoples where the ambitious and unscrupulous assumed positions of cultural superiority because of their lack of religious commitment to martyrdom, which most of us can relate to—nor do I remove myself from being uncertain how I would react to live peacefully within an atheistic and immoral Communist culture.

Some in the traditional wing of Catholicism—of which I am somewhat partial to, and I will explain the ‘somewhat’—believes the solution to Modernism, of which Communism can be considered as an aspect, is a reassertion of Christendom; the time when European governments—all of which were monarchial—accepted the kingship of God and his vicar, Peter.

The problem here, the ‘somewhat’, is that a central element of God’s plan—until he comes again—is the reign over earth (but not human souls) by Satan, the prince of this world; whose blandishments the Christian way of life is protection against.

Understanding all of this, coming to terms with history and the various blandishments offered by all sides in the Catholic versus Communism debate requires a process of spiritual maturation too few of us reach for.

Maturing in God, is a process each of us has to go through if we are to become mature Catholics, leaving the primitive and childish things like Liberation Theology and Communism behind, and part of this maturation is growing in wisdom and knowledge through the studying of human life on earth through the lens of Catholic doctrine.

About this maturation, Sheed (1946) writes:

“God knew what He would do, but He would not do it yet. “In the dispensation of the fullness of times,: St. Paul tells the Ephesians (1.10), “God was to re-establish all things in Christ.” What does “the fullness of times” mean? At least it means that the Redemption was to take place not at a moment arbitrarily chosen, as though God suddenly decided that the mess had gone on long enough and He had better do something about it. There was a fullness of time, a due moment. Looking at it from our angle, we feel it fitting that God did not heal the disease all at once; a disease should run its course. There is a rhythm of sin, as of revolution. Mankind had started on the road of self-assertion; it must be allowed to work out all the bleak logic of self-assertion to discover for itself all the unwholesome places into which self-assertion could take it. To be redeemed instantly might have left a faint “perhaps” to trouble mankind’s peace; the Devil had said that we should be as gods—perhaps if we had been allowed to try it out thoroughly, we might have become as gods. Well, we were allowed to try it out thoroughly; and we did not become as gods. When mankind knew at last and beyond a doubt that the game was up, might not that have been “the fullness of time”? Certainly there is an element of that in it. St. Paul perhaps is only putting the same idea more positively when he speaks of mankind as growing up, coming to maturity. By sin, mankind threw away the maturity God had conferred upon it, started it off with, so to speak. It had gone after a childish dream and must now go through all the pains of growing back to the maturity it had lost. It would be an element in that attained maturity to know that the dream was childish, to be prepared to put away the things of a child.” (pp. 172-173) Sheed, F. J. (1946). Theology and sanity. New York: Sheed & Ward.

Is this not the wonderful way of divine parentage, which we as humans so often strive to attain in our childraising?

Rebellion and questioning authority are congruent with youth, then as now, and for those of us whose youth was influenced by the siren calls of the rebellion prevalent in our youth, the critical examination of the avatars of our youth is always both difficult and exciting; difficult as it shreds a passion of youth, exciting because it presages the wisdom of age.

And so it is for me, writing about Communism, whose Marxist roots briefly influenced my work in prison and for a time after being released. (pp. 117-131) Lukenbill, D.H. (2013). Catholicism, Communism, & Criminal Reformation, Chulu Press, Lampstand Foundation, Sacramento, California.

Unpublished Work: Metaphysical Prestige of Crime

08 Sunday May 2016

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work: Criminal World Glamour, Unpublished Work: Metaphysical Prestige of Crime

≈ Leave a comment

I have written ten books and each one of my books is 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 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/

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

________

Unpublished Work: Metaphysical Prestige of Crime

I came across this great description of what I have been writing about for years as the glamorization of criminals—and their essential spiritual core—in an essay by Ann Douglas “Punching a Hole in the Big Lie”: The Achievement of William S. Burroughs, in the book Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?, where she wrote:

“The critic Lionel Abel thought that Burroughs and his Beat colleagues had established the “metaphysical prestige” of the drug addict and the criminal; though modern skepticism destroyed the belief in transcendence, the human “need for utterness,” not to be denied, had found its satisfaction in “trans-descendence.” (pp. 145-146)

Her note revealed the term originated in a review of Burroughs’s book, Naked Lunch, by Lionel Abel in the Winter 1963 issue of the Partisan Review.

Here are the relevant sections:

“A quarter century ago in Paris, the philosopher Jean Wahl gave a lecture, now famous, in which he made the point that transcendence—the act of going beyond appearances—may move upward or downward: one may transcend upward toward God, or clear values, or downward toward obscure values, or the “dark gods” of whom Lawrence wrote. And Wahl, in making his point, coined two new words: trans-ascendence and trans-descendence.” (p. 110)

“One wonders: if there is a metaphysical impulse, a real need for Being, why is this need not satisfied today in so-called higher experiences? Modern skepticism, no doubt, has destroyed the prestige of God, moral decision, speculative wonder, love or rapture. But why has it not destroyed the metaphysical prestige of crime or drug addiction? There is an interesting saying by a somewhat criminal-minded Sabbatian Cabbalist of the eighteenth century: “When the brave knights are beaten and the wise men want to retreat, a know-nothing will sneak in through a sewer and take the castle by stealth…” (P. 111)

Lionel Abel. (Winter 1963). Partisan Review, Beyond the Fringe (pp. 109-112) online at http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=326060

Foucault, also writing about events—executions in particular—in the 18^th century where:

“In these executions, which ought to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which the rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes.” (p. 61)

Michel Foucault. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

But this is different, this is the singularly restricted form of glamorization, the Bonnie & Clyde public devotion to rebels who are sticking it in the eye of authority on a case by case basis; while the theologyfication emanating from Beat literature, is a rejection of the entire previous culture in an attempt to replace it with another; which found little permanence except within the criminal/carceral world, and its wanna-be subculture of the hip/social justice warriors who still today favor the attire and mannerisms of the penal world.

It is not hard to see the attraction, especially by the young—of the Beat world and todays replicators—for much of what they produced and still produce is beautiful and art of a high order whether in literature, music, or visual.

The Beats were most taken in by the intellectuals, as Anatole Broyard writes:

“The intellectuals manqués, however, the desperate barometers of society, took him into their bosom. Ransacking everything for meaning, admiring insurgence, they attributed every heroism to the hipster. He became there “there but for the grip of my superego go I.” He was received in the Village as an oracle; his language was the revolution of the word, the personal idiom. He was the great instinctual man, an ambassador from the Id. He was asked to read things, look at things, feel things, taste things, and report. What was it? Was it in there? Was it gone? Was it fine? He was an interpreter for the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the insensible, the impotent.

“With such an audience, nothing was too much. The hipster promptly became, in his own eyes, a poet, a seer, a hero. He laid claims to apocalyptic visions and heuristic discoveries when he picked up; he was Lazarus, come back from the dead, come back to tell them all, he would tell them all. He conspicuously consumed himself in a high flame. He cared nothing for catabolic consequences; he was so prodigal as to be invulnerable.” (pp. 48-49)

Ann Charters. (Editor) (2001). Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? New York: Penguin Books.

Creating heroes of criminals/drug addicts moved from the Beats to the prison reform movement in California in the 1970’s and on, when criminals were seen as the “vanguards of the revolution”, which ended in the particularly bloody mess of the SLA in Los Angeles?

What all of this means is that many criminals feel their way of life—even if they are now in prison and if so, they will not tell this to non-criminals if the obverse guarantees more reward—is superior to all others and what they really have to do, rather than rehabilitate, is to become a better criminal.

The heroization in the criminal/carceral world is now of the victim; criminals are victims, of mass incarceration, a criminal justice system stacked against them, demands they reveal themselves on job applications, etc. etc.; but the same underlying movement tries to make bad seem good, to hide evil and make it inconsequential; all movements as old as time, all movements directed by the prince of this world, who always, still, loses.

Unpublished Work: Transformational Mentoring: Lampstand & the Didache

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work: Transformational Mentoring: Lampstand & the Didache

≈ Leave a comment

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

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

________

Unpublished Work: Transformational Mentoring: Lampstand & the Didache

The core of the method of transformation of criminals by the Lampstand Foundation is one on one personal mentoring, and it is also the core within the early Christian communities described in the Didache, as noted in this book I’ve been studying in which the author writes:

“The upshot of this whole discussion is that mentoring can be seen as the central work horse and transformative process dominating the whole of the Didache. While baptism was practiced as a kind of “rite-of-passage” in the mentoring process, there was no temptation on the part of the Didache communities to assign the rite itself any mysterious and unseen powers that would warrant extending baptism to infants or admitting untrained adults to the rite. In truth, the framers of the Didache did not even designate baptism as a “sacrament” or insist that it was “instituted by Christ.” All of these things would come in due time. For the moment, however, the framers of the Didache knew themselves to be on solid ground when they embraced their effective pastoral practice of initiating gentiles and presupposed that the grace of human transformation took place prior to the rite itself. (Milavec, pp. 853-854)

“Many times throughout this book, the oral character of the Didache has been spelled out. Already in the preface, we examined the clues in the text that indicate an oral enactment. At various other times, the transition from topic to topic as well as the development of a given topic was seen as having an oral character. This being done, it might now be possible to step back and to designate the abyss that exists between spiritualities built on orality and those built on textuality.

“First, an oral gospel must be heard from a specific living person. Thus, upon first hearing, the gospel has a face, a life, a personality that is met and trusted as one hears and responds to the gospel. A written gospel, in contrast, can remain silent on the shelf. The reader who wants to hear it must take it down and sound the words (verbally or, in modern times, mentally). The written gospel is one step removed from the personal performance of the oral gospel. The reader hears the gospel at his/her discretion—when and where he/she pleases. The reader is left to interpret what is read within his/her own horizon of understanding. An oral gospel always remains attached to a living person who, in their life, gives meaning and content to the gospel.”

“While there is no such thing as a face-to-face encounter with a text, the mouth-to-heart engagement in oral communication fosters personal and intimate relations. The spoken word, emanating from interiority and entering another interiority, creates a deep-set bonding of speaker with auditor.” (Kelber, p. 146)

Werner H. Kelber (1983) The Oral and the Written Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press

“This “bonding,” of course, only comes when the hearer respects and admires the speaker and endeavors emphatically to enter into his/her way of being in the world. (Milavec, p. 859)

“Sometimes it is imagined that reading the holy books of the Bible produces “faith” in the hearts of the readers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The sacred texts of India, for instance, were routinely translated and studied by Western experts for over a hundred years without producing a single convert. As soon as gurus began to arrive in the West and set up ashrams, however, a significant number of converts came forward…Sacred texts, therefore, can be studied and dissected with relish but have little power to convert lives unless they are linked to spiritual masters who offer a humanized and attractive version of what these texts mean in their lives and in their words. (Milavec, p. 861)

Aaron Milavec (2003). The Didache: Faith, Hope, and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50-70 C.E. New York: The Newman Press.

In every respect, the status I attribute to transformed professional criminals able to transform other criminals, deep-knowledge leaders, is a status that meriting a relationship with “spiritual masters.”

In my first book, I wrote:

“Transformed criminals with advanced degrees and Catholic social teaching knowledge—I describe as deep knowledge leaders—working through grassroots community organizations, can help reverse the long-term failure of criminal rehabilitation programs as they possess the elemental experiential knowledge of the criminal world allowing them, and them only, the authentic access to criminals long denied the social work professional.” (p. 9)

David H. Lukenbill (2006. The Criminal’s Search for God: Criminal Transformation, Catholic Social Teaching, Deep knowledge Leadership, and Communal Reentry. Sacramento, California: Lampstand Foundation, Chulu Press.

Further, as deeply intellectual as many in the professional criminal cohort may become, the criminal/carceral culture is still, sadly, largely an oral culture, as noted by Sanders (1994), who, though he is so wrong about the efficacy of prison for certain criminals—the efficacy being the protection of the public—he writes perceptively about the oral culture of the criminal/carceral world.

“Illiteracy leaves behind shells of people—ghosts who take to the streets in a terribly dangerous state. They are unable to feel remorse or sorrow or guilt about their actions, even those of the most violent and gruesome kind. Society needs to fear ghosts who feel no more real than the shimmering of an image on a computer screen. For them, others are no more real than they are. Under those conditions anything can and does happen. Behavior becomes literally antisocial.

“It will do no good to lock up these young people. The efficacy of the penal system rests on the basic civilizing matrix of a conscience and a sense of remorse—feelings of guilt and thus a desire to change. But these new post-illiterates—at home neither in orality nor in literacy—prowl the neighborhoods as truly aberrant beings. They abide by different rules. They have joined their own tribal units, but their behavior is anything by communal. The impoverished stories they pass around speak not of heroes who face moral dilemmas, but of gangsters who vent their rage and despair. They need to feel important and powerful, just like the literate folks around them. They crave recognition and a sense of identity. Drugs give them a rush—of hope, of power, of invulnerability.

“Whatever the problem, the new post-illiterates crave a quick fix. They get high. When they come down, society locks them up. But surely that’s a last resort. Prisons stand as a testimony to a colossal social failure.

“The solution has to lie elsewhere. It will lie—in all its insubstantiality, evanescence, and invisibility—in the human voice. In voiced breath. What those young people want is to feel and to be empowered through their own voices.” (p. 78) Barry Sanders, A is for ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and the silencing of the written word. New York: Pantheon Books.

The books I write for Lampstand are written for the deep-knowledge leaders—current or future—of organizational efforts to transform criminals; giving them the specific information to address all of the many objections that will be thrown back at them by criminals open to transformation and conversion to Catholicism, but, by nature, resistant to any change from without.

The information has been presented in detail, with many back-up references allowing them the ability to pursue the line of research on their own.

When Milavec notes “the abyss that exists between spiritualities built on orality and those built on textuality”, I see the failure of rehabilitation efforts conducted by non-criminals, which, due to the lack of credible one-on-one, shared experience mentoring, are essentially efforts “built on textuality.”

The Criminal as Philosopher

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work, The Criminal as Philosopher

≈ Leave a comment

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

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

______________________________________

The Criminal as Philosopher

Invariably, at some point during a long stretch in prison the thought occurs in the criminal’s mind, as it did in mine, what is life about, what am I doing with my life?

Though it may be shunted aside temporarily in the daydreams of eventual release and restoration of the freedom criminal life brings when all is going well, it comes back if the right set of ideas, whether in a book or from other prison philosophers, enter into the criminal’s field of vision.

The ideas have to be strong, presented with potency and clarity to even capture the attention of the criminal, and most often, initially based on a great injustice in the world that animates some of the sense of personal injustice, however unjustifiably felt, clouding the criminal’s thinking.

Just such a book is Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl.

The original title of this book was From Death-Camp to Existentialism, and recounted the experiences of Dr. Frankl while imprisoned in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau established by the Nazi’s during the reign of Adolf Hitler.

It is a powerful book, which continues to reach out to those finding themselves in the most horrible of circumstances, with its resonating message of the fierce will to retain one’s humanity, even in the most barbaric and inhuman conditions.

Studying existentialism in prison is congruent with the prison culture and it serves the purpose of beginning to study books to facilitate studying one’s self.

In the concentration camps, and in a maximum security prison, this message resonates with incredible depth and clarity of meaning, and if first encountered within the deepest cell in the dark prison—the great cell of solitude in the supermax facility where I first read it—it will resonate even the more deeply.

But even here, a choice can still be made, to continue with brutality and the entirely predictable response to it which always punishes the brutal, either spiritually or temporally; or to choose human kindness and allow the better angels of our nature to appear in our dealings with others and perhaps find the peace so often accompanying their exhibition.

The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon was printed in its first English edition in 1896, but its insight about the nature and behavior of crowds in different situations, and by supposition, that of individuals, is remarkable still.

Le Bon’s primary reference point was the French Revolution and the barbarity it released among the French people towards the ancient monarchy, still singular in its expression, though replicated somewhat in the Russian Revolution occurring about 20 years after this book was published.

During the period in which Le Bon is writing, the vast majority of the public was illiterate, so he was writing, as much of the writing was before the 20^th Century, particularly in Europe, to his fellow well-educated members of the social elite, the ruling class.

As such there was no need to shade what he was saying and his writing is sharp and clear.

The crowd is moved by emotion, which we see still and his description of what is used, should not be unfamiliar to those who have watched the speeches of politicians, exuberant preachers, or self-help gurus.

For the criminal this type of insight is rarely applied to his own actions, but to those of the herds of people populating the mass he feels he has bested, and who he feels are living lives largely constrained by rule and regulation they would willingly thwart had they the courage he has.

Consequently, much of what he reads concerning the motivation of others will be used for understanding motivation and shaping reality to more closely resemble that world he feels he has learned the truth of, the world of the criminal city, the world founded by men, not the world of the City of God.

This is not yet a place he has dared reach, nor even acknowledged exists in a potent enough way to be of concern to him and his life, but that moment is beginning to be felt.

A mention must be made here of another voice writing of crowds, mass movements; Eric Hoffer, whose masterpiece is The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.

What is so remarkable about Hoffer’s book, apart from its brilliance, is that he was a self-taught intellectual who spent his life working as a longshoreman in San Francisco.

A newer book about crowds, amplifying—while differing with—much of the work of the previous two mentioned, is The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter that the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, by James Surowiecki.

If the value of a life is determined by the proportion of it spent in service to others, as I believe it is, then the value of the lives of most of the avatars of the Sixties—marked by an intense self-preoccupation and virtually across the board endings more reminiscent of Gothic novels than American optimalism—has been found to not be very great, except as object lessons in how not to live a life.

Alan Watts surely flows into this vein and his work to relativize religion—absolute truth—was very popular, and, at the time, I loved it.

This creating your own thing and “doing your own thing” shaped the Sixties—though it ultimately destroyed the lives of its prophets—while validating the criminal world ethos, giving it more cultural resonance than it had ever enjoyed in the 1920’s or 1930’s.

Jean Paul Sartre in his seminal work, Saint Genet, completed the picture of mystifying the boundaries between right and wrong, creating a reality in which a child becoming a criminal—rather than becoming a being centered on divinity—is centered on a theology of criminality.

This work is the most detailed and interesting of the works created studying the criminal. Jean Genet, criminal, poet, writer, and actor, who was also, because of Sartre’s work, a well-known literary figure whose criminality was the mark of otherness that marked him for fame.

For several months in McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, the same group of us also read and discussed this work and the broader implications of existentialism on our lives.

From that group grew a longer discussion around ideas that continued for the almost four years I was there.

Genet had embraced his being defined by the world—when caught as a child stealing—as the thief, and he became the thief, discovering in the process the delicious freedom of death of the self by embracing his defining from others.

There is, within the intensity of the point of that tipping moment during a criminal act when one’s very life is at stake, when all falls on that one razor-edged moment, when one can feel that one is entering the sacred, and this moment often defines, as Sartre captured, the sublimity of the criminal life.

Unpublished Work: Criminal World Glamour

02 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work: Criminal World Glamour

≈ Leave a comment

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

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

________

Criminal World Glamour

The law-abiding criminal/social justice practitioner who interviews the criminal after arrest or during treatment, in addition to bringing their law-abiding sense of moral judgment to the table, often brings a certain wonder at the criminal’s ability to act with such freedom.

I cannot count the numerous times revealing my criminal/carceral past garnered admiration from people who should have known better.

This makes getting at the truth of criminal causation conflicted. What the criminals say, in their private and contemplative companionship mostly happening inside prisons or jails, is a story of having their way with the world and getting away with it.

For a time, during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, a proponent of the criminal’s victimization by the conditions of society has been the often Humanism-driven relativist and the Marxist-driven radical, to whom the criminal is an exotic creature whose acts are threatening to the foundations of order and stability—which they also wish to shake—and they would have had criminals in the vanguard of their army.

The relativist and radical has—and even still, sadly, does—proclaimed in literature, film, drama, and poetry that the criminal is special and privileged to know things that terrify the common man.

Crime and the attractiveness of it to youth are strong, and though the forces against crime grow stronger, the attraction has reached so deeply into the life of Americans that there is widespread agreement it is a major social problem and it is one of the bedrock issues that has propelled social conservatives into political power.

Many social reformers feel that a return to the values of an earlier time will change the criminal world’s great attraction for youth. It won’t. The imperative of social evolution will not let us. Crime is as old as time and ever since the acts of the first criminal it has adapted to accommodate new realities.

Many people are beginning to understand that the ancient way of Christians in reclaiming the prodigal son—love that flows from knowledge of liberation—is the only way of criminal transformation that works.

The criminal world is an immense and powerfully compelling world that has clearly shown it has the ability to drive the agenda and change individual behavior on a very large scale. It offers sensuality, excitement, danger, and the possibility of a mastery of mystery, a coming to terms with darkness and fear.

Within each criminal/carceral ethnic culture there are stories from their cultural pasts; Aztec stories, Viking stories, Arabian stories, African stories, which shape criminal/carceral reality; one, centered on the life of the legendary pimp, Iceberg Slim, has particular resonance within black urban culture with many of those cultural leaders adopting forms of his name into their own.

Many major movie actors—past and present—have at some point in their acting career felt it imperative to play a prisoner, thus facing, even if only in a make-believe way, the terrifying reality of prison life, which the non-criminal sees as the most horrific reality they could ever face, but which the criminal sees as merely a part of their life with little to fear and much to learn.

Unpublished Work,The Carceral & the Criminal World

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work,The Carceral & the Criminal World

≈ Leave a comment

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

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

________

Unpublished Work, The Carceral & the Criminal World

An excerpt from my new book still in draft form:

The Carceral & the Criminal World

One of the most significant developments in the criminal justice system over the past few decades is the impact of the carceral on the criminal world.

The American prison creates its own environment, its own world, which spreads outward, embracing the terrain where the released wander predatorily, continually reshaping and remaking the criminal world in its own evolving image.

As the number of criminals moving from the carceral to the outside world—becoming a critical mass in some neighborhoods—the influence of the carceral world spreads to that neighborhood, further criminalizing it.

In California the development of the criminal world related to the carceral is strongly congruent and the confused evolution of the California prison—from punishment to rehabilitation and back, and back once more—forlornly retains the uncertainty of the institutional world and the clarity of the criminal world within the carceral.

The carceral world looms underneath the criminal world—holding it up as it were—shaping the criminal world’s leaders as they pass into and out its steel gates.

Mastering the carceral experience within the maximum security prison is a culturally defining experience determining criminal strength, tenacity, and boldness, much as similarly defined for the non-criminal through mastering the social, athletic, and intellectual rigor of the maximum prestige academy.

And yet the prison is also the most penitential of institutions—so correctly analyzed in its reverential and redeemable components—but rarely seen by Marxist oriented criminal justice academics (who have been shaping the narrative of the American academy since the 1970s) as that place of exclusion and penance which it is, but more often through the lens of theory critically finding dark motives and capitalistic strategies at work.

Transformation had once been considered a desirable aspect of the prison time given to the criminal, and the transformation was to be hoped for as a pure result of prison itself.

For the first century of America’s experience with prisons, deeply influenced by religion, it is understood that this occurred more often than not.

Since the 20^th century, with its corresponding complexity induced by the majority of humans living in the urban environments of the criminal city; prison induced transformation lost ground as a new meta-narrative extolling criminal exploits became part of the social fabric.

In the time we live in, with ethnic, religious, and national myths being folded and blended with the outlaw as hero, a much more convoluted terrain emerges, requiring guides to traverse.

The answer is in the problem. The answer is within the outlaw mind.

From a Catholic historic perspective the prison performs a necessary penitential and reformative function, an attribute still relied on yet rarely seen.

For the public, the need for the prison is more than the rational reaction of fear to that uncertainty arising from dangerous men and women, and how to be protected from them. It is also the shutting away of that which is feared, the other, which public criminal justice policy too often allows to grow without responsibility while assuming that the real cause of crime is something vague out there, rather than individual predatory thoughts shaping individual predatory actions; rather an individual moral decision than an unconscious reaction to social forces.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in prisons in the United States representing untold millions of crimes committed, many unaccounted and uncharged, for the criminal as supreme opportunist commits much more than he is ever arrested, charged, and committed for; a danger deep as the ocean.

In my work as a capacity building consultant to nonprofit organizations, when the strategic discussion concerns the continued utility of a specific course of action, I will bring the discussion back to the founding vision and mission of the organization and from that base, try to determine if indeed, the course of action under discussion is still appropriate.

The founding mission of prisons—punishment and redemption— has not lost its utility, nor the use of cellular confinement and separation of the criminal from the innocent as a protective and penitential response as well as a redemptive stimulation.

The growth of the carceral culture within the criminal world is a dangerous influence which is manifest, and increases as criminalization deepens through carceral influence on cultural reality.

Combat and the rules of strategy are important capabilities criminals share with the military—of being able to distance yourself from what your emotions are doing and what your body wants to do when confronted with prison life or war. You have to will yourself to act, separating yourself from the urge to panic if you are to survive, whether in prison or battle. How one responds to the carceral is a crucial element in the development of criminal world leadership as is that of the soldier in battle crucial to military leadership development.

Criminals who have transformed their lives must speak and help shape the future formation of criminal justice so that it may reach its aspiration of protecting the public and reforming criminals—not currently happening with a 70% recidivism rate—which has little to do with tending to unconsciously generated symptoms, but much to do with transforming suffering into teaching.

The criminal world’s leaders understanding is that the criminal is punished for being in congruence with the same reality accepted as true by the punishers.

Within the maximum security prison where criminal world leadership serves time, there exists a long-term solitude-generating contemplation, intimately woven through the Catholic pursuit of spiritual perfection.

For the criminal prior to transformation, this contemplation revolves around the purity of their attachment to the truth of the criminal world, their life in the city of men, most dreadfully realized in the prison itself.

The prison is the truth of the city of men writ hard, writ clearly in steel and stone that none can misunderstand its moment nor its animating core reality.

This lays unconsciously under the day thoughts of most whose work calls them to develop policy around the prison and criminal world—and the politics around prisons are strong—but in the continual struggle around their use and purpose.

Over the past 70 or 80 years in this country, since the depression of the 1930’s, a criminal culture has developed which has become impenetrable, so that attempts by criminal rehabilitation practitioners are—and statistics bear this out—a dismal failure.

Attempting to describe this world for those practitioners so that they can find success in it is probably not a fruitful avenue at this moment in rehabilitative history, but the development of reformed criminals, who are cultural leaders, to advance their education and training in helping other criminals transform their lives, would be.

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This section was formerly published in another form in the book: Carceral World, Communal City, by David H. Lukenbill, published in 2008.

Have a Wonderful Thanksgiving

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

I’ll be taking the rest of the week off from blogging to celebrate, returning Tuesday December 1^st, and wish you and your family the most wonderful Thanksgiving!

Mass Incarceration

06 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work, Mass Incarceration

≈ Leave a comment

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

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

________

Mass Incarceration

A central element of the narrative of “mass Incarceration” used primarily by secular liberals to justify reducing America’s prison population is described by Barber & Maruna (2103, Spring):

“The United States now incarcerates a larger percentage of its citizens than any other country, with about one in 100 adults currently behind bars. About a quarter of the world’s prisoners are confined in U.S. prisons and jails.”Barber C., Maruna, S. (2013, Spring). The End of Second Acts?. The Wilson Quarterly. Retrieved June 30, 2013 from http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/end-second-acts

This sentiment is repeated, virtually unchanged throughout an entire genre of criminal justice/sociological/political/religious and medical literature, with a particular emphasis on the fact that America’s prison population is even greater than that of China and Russia.

Mass incarceration is to criminal justice as climate change is to environmentalism.

One author notes the contrast with China, Gottschalk (2006):

“After working for more than six years on this book about mass imprisonment in the United States, I remain similarly shocked and unsettled. The United States today has an incarcerated population that dwarfs that of China, a country that is several times larger and has at best only democratic aspirations and pretensions. The shock is all the more greater in the U.S. case not only because of the enormity of the American carceral state, but also about its invisibility—the invisibility of the numerous prisons that dot rural America and the desolate outskirts of urban areas; the more than two million men and women locked up on any given day; the hundreds of thousands released from prison each year with stunted employment, economic, educational, and social prospects; and the millions of families and children unhinged by the carceral state. (p. xi)” Gottschalk, M. (2006). The prison and the gallows: The politics of mass incarceration in America. New York: Cambridge University Press.

What continually shocks me about this narrative—and many other criminal justice issues—is the narrowness of normative criminal justice analysis and, in the case of Russia and China, what isn’t being told, nor counted, are the populations of the various re-education and forced labor camps so beloved of those two countries, most poignantly noted by Jacobs (2013, June 11):

“MASANJIA, China — The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

“Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.

“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

“The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labor,” a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial.

“But the letter writer remained a mystery, the subject of speculation over whether he or she was a real inmate or a creative activist simply trying to draw attention to the issue.

“Last month, though, during an interview to discuss China’s labor camps, a 47-year-old former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letter’s author. The man, a Beijing resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of 20 such letters he secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them inside products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they were destined for the West.” Jacobs, A. (2013, June 11). Behind Cry for Help from China Labor Camp. The New York Times. Retrieved June 30, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/world/asia/man-details-risks-in-exposing-chinas-forced-labor.html

Wikipedia’s entry about the Masanjia camp says:

“Masanjia Labor Camp…is a re-education through labor camp located in the Yuhong district near Shenyang, in the Liaoning province of China. The facility is sometimes called the Ideology Education School of Liaoning Province. It was first established in 1956 under China’s re-education through labor, or laojiao policy, and was expanded in 1999 in order to detain and “re-educate” followers of the Falun Gong spiritual practice. According to former detainees, Falun Gong practitioners represent 50–80% of inmates in the camp. Other prisoners include petty criminals, prostitutes, drug addicts, petitioners, and members of other unapproved religious minorities, such as underground Christians.

“Followers of the Falun Gong spiritual practice have long sought to publicize human rights abuses committed in the labor camp, which they describe as being among the most notorious in China. In addition to performing forced labor, prisoners are allegedly tortured using electric batons, force-feeding, prolonged solitary confinement, and other forms of abuse. These allegations received international attention in 2013 when a magazine expose on Masanjia was published—and then quickly censored—in China.” Retrieved June 30, 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanjia_Labor_Camp

The term “mass incarceration” is reminiscent of the Marxist theoretician’s use of “class” in their analysis of social structure, and helps drive a picture that the only “class” inside prisons are the poor, especially the minority poor; an argument sadly and ironically more representative of Communist countries than America.

The reasons American prisons are full is twofold: on the one hand liberal legislators have stopped new prison construction, especially in California and New York, and on the other hand, the full prisons are a result of effective broken windows policing and three strikes sentencing; which have resulted in a decades long crime rate reduction; which is now in danger due to the effectiveness of the “mass incarceration” narrative.

I know better than most that prison is not a fun place to be, having spent 12 years of my 20 years as a professional criminal—my crimes were theft and robbery—within several maximum security federal and state prisons, as well as many local jails; but it is the only effective way we have, as a society, to isolate the criminal, the often dangerous aggressor, from the often innocent victims of crime.

This form of incapacitation, imprisonment, is extremely effective in this regard, though also expecting it to function as an effective rehabilitative venue has proven, so far, to be a failure.

Other than the cohort of younger criminals scared straight from exposure to prison or jail, which some studies have found is significant, but barely reported, noted by Humes (1996):

“In 1990, researchers began watching first-offenders arrested in LA County in the first six months of that year—11,493 kids in all. Five men and women sat in a special secure room at probation headquarters and read file after confidential file, tracking every one of those kids—for three years. They did not intercede in any case, but merely watched, omnipotent and removed, part of a grand experiment that let each case spin out as it always had.

“By the end of 1993, the results of their painstaking work had become so appalling to the Probation Department and the Juvenile Court—and so profoundly threatening to the future of both bureaucracies—that officials have made no public announcement of the findings. But they boil down to this.

“A little over half—57 percent—of kids who are arrested for the first time are never heard from again. They go straight, socked by the system, mostly ordinary kids who make one mistake, and know it.

“Of the rest, just over a quarter—27 percent, to be precise—get arrested one or two more times, then they, too, end their criminal careers. But the last 16 percent—that’s sixteen kids out of every one hundred arrested—commit a total of four or more crimes, ranging from theft to murder. They become chronic offenders.” Humes, E. (1996). No matter how loud I shout: A year in the life of juvenile court. New York: Simon & Schuster. (pp. 29-30)

I was a chronic offender and I know that each arrest and commitment to jail or juvenile hall, was, for me, just another step in the building of my criminal career, a path I had chosen by the time I was barely a teenager; a path of glamour and freedom that consumed my life for decades; and rather than being scared by the many jail or prison experiences, I was heartened by them as they put me in close contact with my real peers, other professional criminals.

This is where I also became acculturated to the criminal/carceral world, learning its mores, adapting its artifacts, living its ways, a way of life I only finally became completely free of after becoming Catholic and being baptized, when the final remnants of the predatory and self-centered criminality that had informed my life for so many years gushed out of me in the deep tears shed during baptism when my sins were forgiven me.

Yes, we need prisons, for they are the only civilized way to isolate the aggressor from the innocent; and they must be civilized, which the majority of prisons in the United States are.

Recently, an article from Reuters noted that even conservatives are turning away from the use of “mass incarceration”, but it is so filled with the liberal narrative around “mass incarceration” that it is difficult to see much about it that is conservative, as conservatives generally understand that prisons—which, granted, can always be improved—are still needed.

“New Jersey is one of America’s most affluent states. Yet many of its largest cities are scarred by both high crime and an incarceration boom that has made a stint in prison a disturbingly common rite of passage, particularly for young black men. Though many believe that mass incarceration is a cure for violence, as it incapacitates potential victimizers, problems arise when incarceration becomes so commonplace that it is destigmatized, and that it ruins the lifelong earning potential of young men caught up in its net, few of whom go into prison as irredeemable villains. As Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA and a leading advocate of criminal justice reform, argues in When Brute Force Fails, the chief challenge facing many people who wind up in prison is a lack of impulse control. And this problem can be more effectively addressed through low-cost interventions — like programs for parolees that offer modest punishments for failing drug tests, like a weekend in the clink — than through high-cost interventions, like a years-long prison sentence. What we’re dealing with is an enormous waste of human potential that harms not just the young men who wind up in prison, but also the families, and the children, they leave behind.” Retrieved January 26, 2014 from http://blogs.reuters.com/reihan-salam/2014/01/24/chris-christie-and-the-failed-war-on-drugs/

The problem with these arguments to decrease the use of prisons: that criminals are largely created by “a lack of impulse control” which can be resolved through things like “programs for parolees that offer modest punishments for failing drug tests” is that the use of rehabilitation programs is largely a record of failure, and in some cases, actually makes the problem worse, something we keep track of on our blog’s rehabilitation page at http://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

Based on my experience and validated by my research, criminal justice policy and practice sways between the liberal rehabilitative program approach and the conservative policing, sentencing, and incarceration approach, and right now we do appear to be swinging back to the liberal, but it is my hope that we can, as a society, develop and keep only those programs that are rigorously evaluated and proven successful, while retaining policing, sentencing and incarcerative strategies that have already proven their success reducing crime.

The most important thing we have to do, in my opinion, is to remember what most of us already feel to be true; that becoming a professional criminal is largely a result of an individual decision, and becoming truly reformed will also come about as the result of an individual decision; and in the making of this individual decision, those reformed criminals who work with other criminals to help them get on the path they have already traveled, are a valuable asset, perhaps the very best asset, that is still too rarely utilized.

Holy Bible Translations

27 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work, Theology

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

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

________

This is why I collect Catholic Bible translations.

From the Knox Translation, a favorite of Bishop Sheen, Pope Benedict XVI and many others, to the New American; from portents and signs, to nothing.

That should not be happening in Holy Scripture, that something in there for millenia, (which appears to support some form of divination by the stars and I’ve also included St. Aquinas’ take) is just suddenly deleted.

From the Knox Translation:

[Genesis 1: 14] Next, God said, Let there be luminaries in the vault of the sky, to divide the spheres of day and night; let them give portents, and be the measures of time, to mark out the day and the year;

Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http://www.newadvent.org/bible/gen001.htm

From the Douay Rheims:

[Genesis 1:14] And God said: Let there be lights made in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years: Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http://www.drbo.org/chapter/01001.htm

And here is the Haydock Commentary on the verse:

Ver. 14. For signs. Not to countenance the delusive observations of astrologers, but to give notice of rain, of the proper seasons for sowing, &c. (Menochius) — If the sun was made on the first day, as some assert, there is nothing new created on this fourth day. By specifying the use and creation of these heavenly bodies, Moses shows the folly of the Gentiles, who adored them as gods, and the impiety of those who pretend that human affairs are under the fatal influence of the planets. See St. Augustine, Confessions iv. 3. The Hebrew term mohadim, which is here rendered seasons, may signify either months, or the times for assembling to worship God; (Calmet) a practice, no doubt, established from the beginning every week, and probably also the first day of the new moon, a day which the Jews afterwards religiously observed. Plato calls the sun and planets the organs of time, of which, independently of their stated revolutions, man could have formed no conception. The day is completed in twenty-four hours, during which space the earth moves round its axis, and exposes successively different parts of its surface to the sun. It goes at a rate of fifty-eight thousand miles an hour, and completes its orbit in the course of a year. (Haydock)

Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http://haydock1859.tripod.com/id327.html

From the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition:

[Genesis 1:14] And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years,

Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http://jmom.honlam.org/rsvce/

From the New American:

[Genesis 1:14] Then God said: Let there be lights in the dome of the sky, to separate day from night. Let them mark the seasons, the days and the years,

Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http://usccb.org/bible/genesis/1

Here is St. Thomas Aquinas on divinations by the stars.

Summa Theologica: Second Part of the Second Part

Question 95. Superstition in divinations

Article 5. Whether divination by the stars is unlawful?

Objection 1. It would seem that divination by the stars is not unlawful. It is lawful to foretell effects by observing their causes: thus a physician foretells death from the disposition of the disease. Now the heavenly bodies are the cause of what takes place in the world, according to Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv). Therefore divination by the stars is not unlawful.

Objection 2. Further, human science originates from experiments, according to the Philosopher (Metaph. i, 1). Now it has been discovered through many experiments that the observation of the stars is a means whereby some future events may be known beforehand. Therefore it would seem not unlawful to make use of this kind of divination.

Objection 3. Further, divination is declared to be unlawful in so far as it is based on a compact made with the demons. But divination by the stars contains nothing of the kind, but merely an observation of God’s creatures. Therefore it would seem that this species of divination is not unlawful.

On the contrary, Augustine says (Confess. iv, 3): “Those astrologers whom they call mathematicians, I consulted without scruple; because they seemed to use no sacrifice, nor to pray to any spirit for their divinations which art, however, Christian and true piety rejects and condemns.”

I answer that, As stated above (1 and 2), the operation of the demon thrusts itself into those divinations which are based on false and vain opinions, in order that man’s mind may become entangled in vanity and falsehood. Now one makes use of a vain and false opinion if, by observing the stars, one desires to foreknow the future that cannot be forecast by their means. Wherefore we must consider what things can be foreknown by observing the stars: and it is evident that those things which happen of necessity can be foreknown by this mean,: even so astrologers forecast a future eclipse.

However, with regard to the foreknowledge of future events acquired by observing the stars there have been various opinions. For some have stated that the stars signify rather than cause the things foretold by means of their observation. But this is an unreasonable statement: since every corporeal sign is either the effect of that for which it stands (thus smoke signifies fire whereby it is caused), or it proceeds from the same cause, so that by signifying the cause, in consequence it signifies the effect (thus a rainbow is sometimes a sign of fair weather, in so far as its cause is the cause of fair weather). Now it cannot be said that the dispositions and movements of the heavenly bodies are the effect of future events; nor again can they be ascribed to some common higher cause of a corporeal nature, although they are referable to a common higher cause, which is divine providence. on the contrary the appointment of the movements and positions of the heavenly bodies by divine providence is on a different principle from the appointment of the occurrence of future contingencies, because the former are appointed on a principle of necessity, so that they always occur in the same way, whereas the latter are appointed on a principle of contingency, so that the manner of their occurrence is variable. Consequently it is impossible to acquire foreknowledge of the future from an observation of the stars, except in so far as effects can be foreknown from their causes.

Now two kinds of effects escape the causality of heavenly bodies. On the first place all effects that occur accidentally, whether in human affairs or in the natural order, since, as it is proved in Metaph. vi [Ed. Did. v, 3, an accidental being has no cause, least of all a natural cause, such as is the power of a heavenly body, because what occurs accidentally, neither is a “being” properly speaking, nor is “one”–for instance, that an earthquake occur when a stone falls, or that a treasure be discovered when a man digs a grave–for these and like occurrences are not one thing, but are simply several things. Whereas the operation of nature has always some one thing for its term, just as it proceeds from some one principle, which is the form of a natural thing.

In the second place, acts of the free-will, which is the faculty of will and reason, escape the causality of heavenly bodies. For the intellect or reason is not a body, nor the act of a bodily organ, and consequently neither is the will, since it is in the reason, as the Philosopher shows (De Anima iii, 4,9). Now no body can make an impression on an incorporeal body. Wherefore it is impossible for heavenly bodies to make a direct impression on the intellect and will: for this would be to deny the difference between intellect and sense, with which position Aristotle reproaches (De Anima iii, 3) those who held that “such is the will of man, as is the day which the father of men and of gods,” i.e. the sun or the heavens, “brings on” [Odyssey xviii, 135].

Hence the heavenly bodies cannot be the direct cause of the free-will’s operations. Nevertheless they can be a dispositive cause of an inclination to those operations, in so far as they make an impression on the human body, and consequently on the sensitive powers which are acts of bodily organs having an inclination for human acts. Since, however, the sensitive powers obey reason, as the Philosopher shows (De Anima iii, 11; Ethic. i, 13), this does not impose any necessity on the free-will, and man is able, by his reason, to act counter to the inclination of the heavenly bodies.

Accordingly if anyone take observation of the stars in order to foreknow casual or fortuitous future events, or to know with certitude future human actions, his conduct is based on a false and vain opinion; and so the operation of the demon introduces itself therein, wherefore it will be a superstitious and unlawful divination. On the other hand if one were to apply the observation of the stars in order to foreknow those future things that are caused by heavenly bodies, for instance, drought or rain and so forth, it will be neither an unlawful nor a superstitious divination.

Wherefore the Reply to the First Objection is evident.

Reply to Objection 2. That astrologers not unfrequently forecast the truth by observing the stars may be explained in two ways. First, because a great number of men follow their bodily passions, so that their actions are for the most part disposed in accordance with the inclination of the heavenly bodies: while there are few, namely, the wise alone, who moderate these inclinations by their reason. The result is that astrologers in many cases foretell the truth, especially in public occurrences which depend on the multitude. Secondly, because of the interference of the demons. Hence Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. ii, 17): “When astrologers tell the truth, it must be allowed that this is due to an instinct that, unknown to man, lies hidden in his mind. And since this happens through the action of unclean and lying spirits who desire to deceive man for they are permitted to know certain things about temporal affairs.” Wherefore he concludes: “Thus a good Christian should beware of astrologers, and of all impious diviners, especially of those who tell the truth, lest his soul become the dupe of the demons and by making a compact of partnership with them enmesh itself in their fellowship.”

This suffices for the Reply to the Third Objection.

Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3095.htm#article5

The Descent of Aquinas & Ascent of Teilhard

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by David H Lukenbill in Unpublished Work, Theology

≈ Leave a comment

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

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

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

________

The Descent of Aquinas & Ascent of Teilhard

During the early half of the 20^th Century there was a deep renewal of Thomism—the foundational and intellectual floor of Catholicism for centuries—led by the papal magisterium and lay Catholic thinkers like Jacques & Raissa Maritain, whose work had a great impact on my conversion and Catholic becoming; and during the same period, a great wave of deep, foundational shaking and mystical theology emanated from the Jesuit Father Teilhard de Chardin which so confused the Vatican that the Church restricted his writings.

Sometime after, the bottom dropped out for Thomism as noted by D.Q. McInerny (2015).

By the mid-twentieth century, Thomism could be said to be the defining philosophy — the “official” philosophy, if you will — of well-nigh all the major Catholic seminaries and Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S. While the quality of the Thomism being taught varied, sometimes widely, from institution to institution, every institution, even the smaller ones with limited resources and sparse philosophical talent, could be said to be making earnest efforts to respond productively to Aeterni Patris. On an autobiographical note, the college in this country where I did my undergraduate work — an all-male institution named after St. Thomas Aquinas with some two thousand students — had a philosophy department that was unambiguously Thomistic in orientation and commitment, a goodly portion of whose members had received their doctorates from Laval. Students who majored in philosophy there received a good grounding in Thomistic thought and were well prepared for graduates studies, should they choose to pursue them. But all students at the college, whatever their major field, got a significant taste of Thomism, for they were required to take at least four courses in philosophy: logic, philosophical psychology, metaphysics, and ethics. By comparison, students at most of the country’s twenty-eight Jesuit institutions, no matter what their major field, had as part of their academic credentials what was effectively a minor in philosophy.

The Jesuits, it should be recognized, played a major role in the Thomistic renewal, and some of the best Thomists of the twentieth century were members of the Society of Jesus. This is to take nothing away from the Dominicans, who, needless to say, also made large contributions to the cause. In addition, there were a number of individuals from various other orders and congregations who figured prominently in the movement, such as Fr. Joseph Owens, a Redemptorist, Fr. Henry Koren of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, and Br. Benignus of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Lay philosophers, however, arguably made the greatest contribution to the Thomistic renewal, perhaps in good part simply on account of their numbers. Well-schooled and dedicated scholars, many of them were also outstanding teachers. And there were also many accomplished writers among them, to whom we credit many books of lasting quality; they published articles in reputable journals like The Thomist, The New Scholasticism, and The Modern Schoolman. A plethora of good to very good textbooks in Scholastic philosophy were readily available when the renewal was at its height, and many were published by major houses such as Macmillan, Prentice-Hall, and Harper & Brothers. This was also the heyday of Catholic publishing, led by houses like Herder in St. Louis and The Bruce Publishing Company in Milwaukee, both of which had impressive lists. Among the happier “problems” for philosophy teachers in those days was settling on a textbook for a particular course, say in ethics or metaphysics, when there were a half dozen, if not more, inviting titles from which to choose. Authors like Msgr. Paul J. Glenn and Fr. Celestine Bittle, O.F.M. Cap., produced entire series of textbooks in Scholastic philosophy. In all, it was an exciting time. Thomism seemed to be vibrantly alive, and the future looked quite bright.

And then the Thomistic renewal collapsed. To speak of a collapse is not to indulge in hyperbole, for the term is just the one needed to convey the sense of what actually happened — the astonishing suddenness with which Thomism ceased to be the governing and guiding philosophy in Catholic higher education. It was as if, overnight, the bottom had dropped out. So, we return to the question posed earlier: How to explain this extraordinary event of recent Church history? I offer the following: First, the collapse was a particular expression of a larger phenomenon of which it was but a part; second, it was the result of a pervasive mania for change; third, it was the targeted victim of a resurgent modernism.

Retrieved July 22, 2015 from http://perennis.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-rise-fall-of-thomistic-renewal-part.html

He goes on to write that though the collapse was significant, there is also, still, a percolating Thomism as represented by Thomist inspired educational institutions and books.

About a hundred years ago a French Jesuit, Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, began thinking and writing about a grand vision he had regarding Christ and Evolution; a vision so advanced that the Vatican theologians of the time could scarcely understand nor embrace it and forbade him from publishing his writing during his lifetime; he died in 1955.

Slowly however, after his death, as his work began to see the light of day, the Catholic theologians caught up and eventually even the popes realized how profound his work was and how much it would change the mind of the Church.

For a time, his actual faith was questioned through the complexity and speculative nature of his work, but as Cardinal De Lubac (1967) makes clear, this concern was unnecessary:

Pere Teilhard’s faith was as complete as it was ardent and firm. If he seemed to go beyond some positions generally adopted in the Church, he would never have been willing to lag behind any one of them. It was simply that it fell to him to explore truths which, without being new, stretched out like continents untrodden by man. “St. Paul and the Greek Fathers speak of a cosmic function of Christ: the exact content o that phrase has never been brought out.” That was precisely what he would have liked to find in the theology of his time—more light on the ‘organic and cosmic splendours contained in the Pauline doctrine of Chris gathering up all things.’ The least, then, we can do is to recognize that he will have done more than any other man of our time to open up a vast field of inquiry for theologians, and that they must make it their business to apply themselves to it. (p. 203)

Cardinal Henri De Lubac. (1967). The religion of Teilhard de Chardin. (R. Hague, Trans.) New York: Desclee Company

The ascent of Teilhardism has actually been going on for some time, sometimes even when the Catholic theologian is unaware of it, as this excerpt from Jacques Maritain’s final book:

The “ontosophic” truth at stake when it is a question of the world taken in itself, is that, in spite of the evil that is present in it—sometimes so great as to be intolerable not only to man’s sensibility but to his very mind—the good, all things considered, is there, much greater, deeper and more fundamental. The world is good in its structures and in its natural ends. As stagnant, even as regressive as the world can seem at certain times and in certain places of the earth, its historic development, seen in its entirety, advances toward better and more elevated states. In spite of everything, we ought to have confidence in the world because, if evil grows in it along with good (and in what a way!—one would have to be one of the new Pharisees intoxicated by the three “cosmological,” not theological, virtues not to see that) there is, nevertheless, in the world a greater growth of good. (p. 39)

Jacques Maritain. (1968). The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

And, then, of course, in the just published encyclical of the Jesuit Pope Francis—who mentions Teilhard in the note #53 in this passage, first time he is mentioned in an encyclical—we find:

The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things.[53] Here we can add yet another argument for rejecting every tyrannical and irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things. Human beings, endowed with intelligence and love, and drawn by the fullness of Christ, are called to lead all creatures back to their Creator.

Pope Francis. (2015). Laudato Si. #83. Retrieved July 13, 2015 from http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

The central element in Teilhard’s thought, in my understanding of it, is the evolutionary growth, of the entire universe from the Universal Alpha Christ—spiritual and material—towards the ultimate end, the Universal Omega Christ, when the love that defines God, infuses all, and all are conscious of it, all are conscious of being part of everything, yet still singular, still individual.

Fr. Teilhard, writing in his book, Science and Christ, Chapter II, Note on the Universal Christ:

By the Universal Christ, I mean Christ the organic centre of the entire universe.

Organic Center: that is to say the centre on which every even natural development is ultimately physically dependent.

Of the entire universe: that is to say, the centre not only of the earth and mankind, but of Sirius and Andromeda, of the angels, whether in a close or a distant relationship (and that, in all probability, means the centre of all participated being.)

Of the entire universe, again, that is to say, the centre not only of moral and religious effort, but also of all that that effort implies—in other words of all physical and spiritual growth.

This Universal Christ is the Christ presented to us in the Gospels, and more particularly by St. Paul and St. John. It is the Christ by whom the great mystics lived: but nevertheless not the Christ with whom theology has been most concerned.

The purpose of this note is to bring to the notice of my friends, more skilled than I am in sacred science and better placed to exert intellectual influence, how necessary, how vitally necessary, it now is that we should make plain this eminently Catholic notion of Christ as Alpha and Omega.

In the first place, as I have explained elsewhere, the present history of religious sentiment in man, whoever they may be, seems to me to be dominated by a sort of revelation, emerging in human consciousness, of the one great universe.

Faced by the physical immensity that is thus revealed to our generation, some (the unbelievers) turn away from Christ a priori, because an image of him is often presented to them that is manifestly more insignificant than the world. [so, so, true and a reason criminals do not respond to traditional evangelization, DHL] Others, better informed (and this includes many believers), nevertheless feel that a fight to the death is going on within them. Which will be the greater they will have to face, and which, therefore, will command their worship—Christ or the universe? The latter is continually growing greater, beyond all measure. It is absolutely essential that the former should be officially, and explicitly, set above all measure.

If the unbelievers are to begin to believe, and the believers to continue to do so, we must hold up before men the figure of the Universal Christ. (pp. 14-15)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. (1968). Science and Christ. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Within the Church, this spiritual evolution is recorded within the magisterium, primarily that of Peter and the saints, where we see the halting—sometimes two steps backwards for each forward—progress of the Pilgrim Church as she struggles through time and space, struggles with the world and the kingdom of heaven, each joined to one another, each evolving and adding to the consciousness of humans and God, within which we grow upward towards convergence.

Teilhard’s vision first entranced me in prison over 50 years ago, and Teilhard’s Catholicism was immaterial against the solidity of his vision. When I became Catholic and studied Aquinas, it all came together, for Aquinas, in his synthesizing of the science of Aristotle with second millennium Catholicism was a necessary prelude to Teilhard and his synthesizing of evolutionary science and third millennium Catholicism.

Philip Sherrard writes in Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 4, No. 3. (Summer, 1970):

The conflict between religion and science, though it may seem to have become particularly acute during the last century, is not new in our culture. In its modern form it goes back at least to the Latin Averroists, who radically severed the connection between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, and asserted that philosophical thinking must be independent of faith and theology. It is in this secularization of thought that modern philosophy and modern science in general have their basis. Briefly, at the beginning of this process of secularization is the assumption that there are two orders or levels of knowledge…It was this split between two levels or orders of knowledge that St. Thomas Aquinas sought to heal….Teilhard de Chardin saw it as his task to embrace the new vistas of man’s history exposed by science and to seek to resolve the conflict between science and religion in terms of a new synthesis….

Retrieved July 23, 2015 from

http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/Teilhard_De_Chardin_and_the_Christian_Vision-by_Philip_Sherrard.aspx

So what appears to be a descent and ascent is just a continuation, an evolution, of Catholic consciousness.

David H Lukenbill Website

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Holy Bible Translations

The Descent of Aquinas & Ascent of Teilhard