Walking on water

Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” he said.

Matthew 14:25 - 29

There were times when my children would place their entire faith in me. With that faith they learned to balance on bikes, swim to me, and expected to know that I would be a rock for them. I still am, though they have learned just as much in life without my help. For my wife and I were joined in the enterprise of their upbringing by wonderful grandparents, great-grandparents, outstanding teachers, and a pyramid of coaches, team mates and friends. Each of these offered them the hand of love, friendship, support and encouragement.

This alone doesn’t make life idyllic. Disappointments are bound to happen. The disappointments somehow make us stronger. But what we fear more than disappointment is loosing our capacity to believe in others, the ability to trust. We all live in a time and place that says we ought not trust anyone. We are all potential victims of the acts of those who wish us ill.

When Jesus reaches out to Peter and calls him to walk across the water (Matthew 14:22 – 33) Peter begins with his customary imprudence – well before he has thought through what it is that Jesus is in fact calling him to. It is not about the miraculous power to walk across water, it is about faith. It is precisely because Peter has it about face that he begins to sink. Even Jesus’ encouragement fails to prevent Peter’s sinking.

There are other metaphors at work in this story – about the early church’s wavering faith and Jesus’ affirming closeness to it, particularly in its hour of need. But it is also a moment in the Gospel where Peter is asked to ‘step up’, to make a difference, he is being called to leadership. But the highlight is the response of the disciples in the boat, who, upon seeing the waters calmed, cry out: ‘Truly, you are the Son of God.’

With little imagination we can see that we too are invited to ‘step up’ and be accountable, to accept that though we are not perfect, we can place our utmost faith in the Lord. There will be disappointment, there will be times when my faith should be stronger. But like Peter in the boat, you will have your companions in faith to encourage you and support you.

Come, step up.

Peter Douglas

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Pope Benedict XV and the forgotten campaign to end 

World War I

Pope Benedict XV

by Patrick J. Houlihan

A century ago, during the slaughter of World War I, came a prominent call for world peace. Pope Benedict XV dated his Peace Note on Aug. 1, 1917, and it became the most famous episode of a pope unjustly forgotten today. The document, published in French and Italian to reflect the languages of early 20th-century church diplomacy, was distributed to the governments of the warring powers. Benedict’s effort was one of the war’s most concrete attempts to end the fighting, but it was later overshadowed by President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Wilson used ideas from the pope’s August 1917 Peace Note, though the president was not keen to acknowledge it.

Especially since the war continued, some might consider the 1917 papal Peace Note a failure, highlighting the supposed weakness of religion in an era of brutal realpolitik. However, the Peace Note was an idealistic yet practical effort to make a better world, and it had delayed successes. It was a key symbol of Benedict’s papacy: Surrounded by war, he strove for peace for the global community. Overshadowed in his lifetime, he nonetheless provided lessons for the world’s peoples and policymakers, then and now.

Benedict XV’s papacy lasted from 1914 until his death in 1922, taking place during the new horrors of modern war. The church strove to adapt to the world of poison gas, aerial bombardment and unrestricted submarine warfare. Nevertheless, Pope Benedict XV remains the “unknown pope,” in the words of his English-language biographer, the Cambridge historian John Pollard.

Why is Pope Benedict XV so relatively unknown? Besides his marginalization by leading politicians of his era, part of the answer must be that his world existed before the invention of radio and television that could reach global audiences. Additionally, Benedict’s reserved, unassuming demeanour would not seem to measure up to the outsized personalities of modern popes including Pius XI and Pius XII, shaped by their struggles with communism and fascism, and the two new canonized popes, John XXIII and John Paul II, who adapted the church to the new realities of globalized politics.

Giacomo della Chiesa was elected Pope Benedict XV in September 1914 as World War I was just beginning, and Catholic Europe was one of the many fracture zones. Heavily Catholic countries like France, Belgium and Italy fought their coreligionists in Austria-Hungary and Germany. (Catholics were a key minority in the German Empire, approximately 36 percent of the population in 1914.) Attuned to the realities of the political situation, Benedict would denounce the war as “useless slaughter” and the “suicide of civilized Europe.”

In the Great War’s opening stages, Benedict called on the belligerent powers to end the conflict, notably in his first encyclical, “Ad Beatissimi,” published on Nov. 1, 1914, but statesmen disregarded his pleas. A major reason was that each side believed Benedict to be an agent favoring the enemy. Disregarded by both warring sides and de-territorialized for the first time since antiquity, the Holy See had an ambiguous diplomatic position that ironically allowed Benedict to maneuver the church toward more humanitarian concerns beyond the politics of nation-states.

A more reactionary pope such as his predecessors—Pius IX and St. Pius X—might have turned inward and backward, nursing a grievance as a continued “prisoner of the Vatican,” in reference to the confiscation of the Papal States during Italy’s unification in the 19th century. Such a pope might have fulminated about the supposed sins of modernity, rationalized that the powers deserved their horrible fate and refused to intervene. Instead, Benedict tried to end the suffering, reaching outward and looking forward. His engagement with the humanitarian crisis of the day was a model of progressive leadership.

Many had called for an end to the Great War, but Benedict’s Peace Note was remarkable for its attempt to engage both sides on a number of practical points that would substantively advance the cause of peace. In the Vatican Archives, one can see multiple drafts of the note, including some with the pope’s handwriting, showing the considerable care that went into the document’s composition.

There were six main aims of the Peace Note: 1) simultaneous, reciprocal reduction of armaments; 2) international arbitration; 3) “true freedom and community of the seas”; 4) reciprocal renunciation of war indemnities; 5) reciprocal evacuation and restoration of all occupied territories; and 6) an examination “with conciliatory spirit” of contentious territorial claims.

Benedict’s desire for peace resonated with most of the global population, but the reactions from the leaders of Great Powers were not enthusiastic. The final two points concerning territory highlighted the main reasons why the 1917 Peace Note failed, as the opposing sides refused to budge. The Peace Note explicitly mentioned territory in Belgium, northern France, German colonies, Italy and Austria. However, the German high command, dominated by the military dictatorship of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, refused to give up territory in Belgium. As the symbolic focus of German aggression, Belgium was a key moral sticking point. France and Britain would not consider peace plans before German soldiers withdrew from Belgium and France.

The United States had entered the war in April 1917, and President Wilson was becoming the dominant voice of a new moral force in the world order. He would not brook a challenge to his leadership from Pope Benedict. Wilson came out against the pope’s peace proposals, arguing that the present rulers of Germany could not be trusted. Nevertheless, just a few months later in his famous Fourteen Points of January 1918, Wilson incorporated much of the substance of Benedict’s Peace Note. When the German military leadership realized it had lost the war, the Central Powers tried to end the conflict by accepting an armistice on the terms of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Later, many in Germany grumbled that the eventual Versailles Treaty was a harsh result of bait-and-switch diplomacy. Nevertheless, Benedict played a delayed role in bringing about the Armistice of November 1918.

The Great Powers met in Paris in 1919 to formulate peace and make terms for accepting the defeated powers back into the community of nations. They ended up planning a new world order that caused grievances culminating in the even more destructive World War II.

Benedict’s Peace Note had foreseen some of these difficulties, looking both forward and backward to the problems of historical nationhood. The note mentioned the war’s proximate territorial and political cause, the Balkan States, though without specifying which states Benedict meant or where those borders lay. Highlighting 20th-century tragedies in progress, the Peace Note also mentioned Armenia and the “noble historical traditions and the sufferings sustained” by the kingdom of Poland. Benedict had personally lobbied the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V, attempting to halt the unfolding genocide of the Armenians. During and after the war, Benedict XV would also advocate on behalf of starving children in East-Central Europe.

Unlike the statesmen who had to hash out the new state boundaries at Paris in 1919, Benedict enjoyed the moral luxury of not being responsible for political decisions. The pope had wanted to be at the Paris Peace Conference. However,in the secret Treaty of London in 1915, Italy, with the “Roman question” still a sensitive political point, had forbidden the Allies to consider the papacy in such negotiations. The Holy See would also be excluded from the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations.

This was a blessing in disguise. Benedict escaped the insoluble dilemmas of political boundary demarcation that caused bitter enmity leading to ethnic cleansing and genocide in World War II. At crucial moments during and after World War I, stripped of territory and outside of political alliances, Benedict focused the church on humanitarian concerns across the globe—explicitly calling for people to help each other beyond affiliation of nation or religion.

Despite the apparent failures of his peace overtures at the level of high diplomacy, Benedict’s actions kept pace with his ideals. His humanitarianism extended to those most ravaged by war: widows, orphans, displaced persons, refugees and prisoners of war. In 1915, he founded the Opera dei Prigionieri (Prisoners’ Works Office), which had offices in the Vatican under the auspices of the secretary of state and became a key focus of Vatican foreign policy. The office helped people find information about their loved ones in a time when communications channels were difficult.

Regarding spending in service of his humanitarianism, Benedict was generous to the point of profligacy. During wartime deprivation, when money was scarce all over the world, Benedict nearly bankrupted the Vatican’s liquidity, giving away 82 million lire to people in desperate need. The Vatican archives highlight the range of responses from around the world: letters from poor people in dire straits, as well as powerful organizations seeking to reform the world. His tireless advocacy generated practical connections with nongovernmental organizations such as the Red Cross and the Save the Children Fund. His example inspired individual activists such as Marc Sangnier, who experienced the horrors of war and tried to forge transnational bonds of solidarity between former enemies.

Benedict’s desire for peace resulted in a multilevel model of engagement with leading politicians as well as grass-roots efforts. Not limited to Catholic circles, his indirect influence would radiate to the League of Nations as well as thinkers who would later become important politicians responsible for the Christian Democratic Parties of post-1945 Europe. His 1919 apostolic letter “Maximum Illud,” on global missions, argued for an equal leadership role for indigenous clergy, pointing the way toward a truly global church.

One must not overly romanticize Benedict XV or give an uncritical account of his influence on the modern world. For instance, the Code of Canon Law was completed in 1917 during Benedict’s reign and lasted until 1983; it centralized hierarchical power structures and solidified lines of authority within the church. In some ways, Benedict’s apolitical humanitarianism was a brief moment that soon evaporated after his death—certainly by 1929, when the Vatican made the Lateran Treaty with Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Faced with the developing threats of communism and Nazism in the interwar period, the leaders of the Catholic Church made alliances with authoritarian powers—and, some would say, dealt with the devil.

The religious world that Pope Benedict XV inhabited needs further historical study. The apparent failure of his August 1917 Peace Note only highlights that humanitarian peace-making goes far beyond high-level diplomacy. It is an ongoing process taking place globally among masses of people. In many key ways, this process accelerated during World War I. The world needs a more thorough examination of the ideals and tangible effects of religious institutions to understand how modern war affects the hearts, minds and bodies of everyday people.

Benedict XV’s papacy was a shining example of humanitarian advocacy both above and below the messy, necessary level of high diplomacy. In our time, when politicians clamor for the quick soundbite (or tweet), true leadership inspires through personal humility and dedication to serve the deepest existential needs of others.

There was much “useless slaughter” in the First World War, as Pope Benedict XV wrote, and this view dominates contemporary reporting on war and conflict. But when faced with this seemingly endless cycle of graphic violence and bitter politics, one must not abandon hope. Rather than fixating on apparently meaningless disasters, one can look to the many people who are helping their fellow human beings, trying to make things better. There are countless untold stories of human decency behind the scenes.

The struggle for global peace continues.

Patrick J. Houlihan is a research fellow in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford and the author of Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922. He is a member of Oxford’s “Globalising and Localising the Great War” project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom.

Transfigured

It was not any cleverly invented myths that we were repeating when we brought you the knowledge of the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; we had seen his majesty for ourselves. He was honoured and glorified by God the Father, when the Sublime Glory itself spoke to him and said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour.’ We heard this ourselves, spoken from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mountain.

2 Peter 1:16 - 8

One of the ‘Luminous Mysteries’ appended to the Rosary of our parents and grandparents by the late Pope John Paul II was the Transfiguration of the Lord. The disciples Peter, James and John are witness to the appearance of Elijah and Moses together with a transfigured Jesus. The image that often attends this experience is that painted by Raphael between 1516 and 1520. This high altar piece now hangs in Pinacoteca Vaticana of the Vatican Museum. I was privileged to view it and meditate on its beauty and composition on our first visit to Rome.

As rich as Raphael’s expression is, it cannot contain the depth and breadth of what the disciples saw and felt, of the early Church and of our experience of the divine in our own lives, although his attempt is nothing short of majestic.

The Transfiguration, then, is not just a retelling of an event, it is the event. It incorporates the story of Israel’s salvation, the messiahship and mission of Jesus, and reveals the transformation that awaits us within the kingdom (the here and now) but which also anticipates our own exaltation at the end of time.

The Transfiguration reveals a part of the inner mystery of Jesus and part of our potential as human beings seeking divinity. Here is Jesus, alongside Moses, the redeemer of the Hebrews from their slavery in Egypt, with Elijah, the great prophet who worked miracles, who ascended into heaven in a whirlwind and who would return to announce the coming of the Messiah.

The early Church was in need of this affirmation and doubtlessly co-constructed this pericope to advance their understanding of their place in this extraordinary story.

As such the Transfiguration is my story too. It is about my journey. It is about raising my consciousness and awareness of the presence of Jesus in my life and his capacity to transform me into a vehicle for his Good News. It is also your story should you choose to engage in and invest yourself in it. It needs to be retold in your own life, as a story of hope, as fulfilment of a promise.

By all means  gaze upon Raphael’s Transfiguration. Meditate upon it, pray it as part of your Rosary devotion, but most of all – live it out in hope.

Peter Douglas

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How Augustine's Confessions and left politics inspired my conversion to Catholicism

by Elizabeth Bruenig

Shortly before Easter 2014, my family visited me in the United Kingdom, where I was studying Christian theology. I rode the train to meet them in London, where I planned to deliver the news to dad myself. Mom already knew. Months earlier, I had requested from her a copy of my Presbyterian baptism certificate, which she located and provided without judgment, reasoning that there were worse things a young person could get up to in a foreign country than converting to Catholicism.

It was late when I made it to their hotel, where I met them in an upstairs lounge. We caught up for a little while before I mustered my courage and came out with it.

“I’m converting to Catholicism next week,” I said. “That’s when we do it: Easter.”

At first my dad did not believe me. After all, why? To them, converting to Catholicism did not seem like something I would do. Up until that point my parents had thought of me as most parents of that era likely thought of their adventurous, college-aged children: leftish, radicalized by the 2008 financial crisis, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, no ally of anything establishment or retrograde. They knew I was very religious, but conversion likely made even less sense to them given my strong faith: Why mess with a good thing?

In the Beginning

I was baptized as a child in a Presbyterian church my family attended for a time, but was raised Methodist. I liked my Methodist church, though I was not ever sensitive to its doctrinal uniqueness. I knew we believed in a kind of free will before I knew what sort of theological conviction that belief ran up against. I knew we relied heavily on the Bible, though we were not as thoroughly literal as others. I knew we believed in being kind and orderly and that our pastors were learned and gentle and trusted to guide and illuminate, though each of us went alone before God.

When I left home for college many states away, I intended to keep up with my Methodist churchgoing but didn’t. Our Protestant chaplain was a profoundly humane Quaker with whom I spent a great deal of time, and in the light of our friendship I periodically attended meetings of the Society of Friends. I appreciated the authenticity and earnestness with which the Quakers pursued God and thought it appropriately humble to sit silently under the white beams of a New England meeting house and await Him.

But I was restless. In the quiet of the meeting house I would let my mind circle around threads of Scripture, moving like a spiral, inward toward meaning. But as the spiral tightened toward a kernel of truth, difficulties began to snare the lines. Already I was reading rapaciously about the histories of the biblical texts: their journeys through translation and interpretation; their auditions for the canon and those that did not make the cut; the late additions and redactions. I had not been raised to think the Bible totally bereft of metaphor or allegory, but these were problems of authority, not interpretation. Who could say what was symbolic or literal, what was historical artifact and what was currently applicable instruction?

Protestantism charges the individual conscience with many, if not all, of these interpretive duties. The trouble, as I came to see it, is that while Scripture must contain at least some meaning that is stable over time, consciences are not. Not only do individuals change over the course of a lifetime, inclining them to different (though entirely honest) interpretations; people change as cultures change. And some of those shifts in society and culture have major ramifications for how (or whether) we understand the things we read.

Truth in Charity

Take, for example, the winding historical journey of charity. The word caritas appears multiple times in the Latin text of the Bible and is usually translated into English as either “love” or “charity”; different translations of the same passages can feature either, as an attempted correction to the problem that follows.

The King James Bible renders 1 Corinthians 13:3 as “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” To contemporary readers, especially those outside the Catholic tradition, that verse may seem a little odd: How is it possible to give all of your possessions to the poor without doing charity? Doing so would appear to be the very definition of charity.

But the word has changed over time. As the scholar Eliza Buhrer points out, the original term Paul used was the Greek word agape; but, inspired by Cicero, Jerome, in the fourth century, translated it into Latin as caritas. That choice, Buhrer writes, “cemented the idea that caritas would forever be associated in some way with poverty,” though it certainly bore no such inherent association in its original Latin usage.

Thanks to Paul’s use of the term agape, early Christian writers (including Augustine, who never used caritas to mean almsgiving) were very cognizant of the difference between caritas and what we would now identify as charity. But throughout the middle ages, Buhrer observes, sermons and homilies on poverty began to conflate caritas with giving itself, and though the church would always distinguish between the two uses, they blurred in the popular religious imagination.

These days, charity in popular usage refers almost exclusively to almsgiving or other activities that support people in need; the less-apt reading of caritas won out. Thus, one often hears the popular talking point among politically conservative Christians that assistance as administered by the state is not charity, because it is compulsory—an argument meant to refute Christian arguments for state-funded welfare programs. This idea draws from both senses of charity, the antique and the medieval. On the one hand it suggests there is no moral imperative for Christians to pursue a robust welfare state because the Bible actually counsels love, something that cannot be coerced; on the other, it seems to accept that the term charity itself denotes the giving of goods.

It is possible to resolve the confusion: True, love cannot be coerced, and that which is given without love is not given in the spirit of caritas; still, it is entirely possible to build political institutions that ensure humane conditions for the least of these out of caritas. In that case, the charity is not in the transmission of goods to the poor, but in the initiative to create a world where those transmissions reliably take place.

And yet, so much depends on one word and its tangled history. It seems unlikely that the average reader of the King James Bible can be expected to have researched and understood the different uses of caritas—I did not do so until graduate school—yet one would be ill-suited to grasp the full meaning of 1 Corinthians 13, not to mention the political discourse that rests on it, without having done so. We read words as we understand them, but words change over time, and so do we.

As a student, I became increasingly aware of the problems these textual knots posed for the way I had been taught to relate to God: How could I read my way to God by the light of my own conscience if I was not even entirely sure of the meaning of what I was reading, much less my ability to read it reliably? And in the course of all that confusion, as if by divine providence, a professor assigned St. Augustine’s Confessions in one of my classes.

Honest Confessions

I began to read Augustine compulsively. I devoured the Confessions and City of God, then moved on to his letters, his sermons, the Soliloquies and the Enchiridion and on and on. Some five million words of Augustine’s writings survive, and I wanted to read them all.

I loved his clarity of mind, his incredible intellect, his dazzling charisma. I loved, as a young adult, all that intensity—the strength of his feelings for God and the world, his passion. But I also appreciated the service his writings provided in terms of navigating difficult texts: Without quite knowing it, I had begun to rely on the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church.

Tradition provides a chain of provenance beginning with the original biblical texts and extending down into our present year, with scholars and clerics reading their predecessors and puzzling out how to apply their thinking about God and his people to new questions that arise with time. Instead of leaving a single conscience to the knotty business of making sense of ancient texts, the tradition offers Christians a chorus of helpful coreligionists passing down insight over time. An individual’s conscience plays a role, of course, in her own interpretation of the tradition; but the weight of time and expertise are instructive, and they whisper through space and centuries that you are not alone.

I had been persuaded that this method of dealing with interpretation and authority made sense by my experience of Judaism. Early in my career at Brandeis, my predominately Jewish college, I had the privilege of taking a class with a rabbi who approached familiar texts with an inquisitive, demanding intellect, but also the company of several hundred interpreters, whose collective thinking bore weight and balanced the affective prejudices of modern readers against those of the ancients.

College is likely when most people come into Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and though I had read them before I, too, found my interest in left insights into political economy refreshed around that time. And it made me all the more curious about Augustine, who seemed to speak for a manner of thinking that could critique and even reject the aspects of modernity that are corrupt without receding into sterile nostalgia or abandoning the witness of history altogether. The reasoning was just as flexible as it needed to be, and no more. It was beautiful, elegant even.

As a Protestant, I had learned that commentaries on Scripture were just that: the ephemeral striving of mere mortals, bereft of meaning in their own right, useful only insofar as they happened to be correct according to one’s own judgment. But more and more I was convinced I could not carry out a Christian life by myself. I did not want to read and draw my own conclusions; I wanted guidance, clarity, authority. God had not seen it fit to leave Adam alone in Eden, nearer to God than we are now. He needed help, and God gave it to him.

I began to see God had already done the same for me. I just had to accept it.

Change of Heart

Plenty of converts to Catholicism prize the church’s prudence when it comes to evaluating modern conditions. Because the church is a pre-modern institution, it does not take for granted many of the givens of modernity: that personal freedom ought to be endlessly maximized, for instance; that the most important goal in life is finding oneself; that politics and religion are two sharply and rightly separate spheres.

In an essay in 2005 about his conversion to Catholicism from Episcopalianism, R. R. Reno, editor in chief of First Things, wrote that “modern theology is profoundly corruptive. The light of Christ must come from outside, through the concrete reality of the Scriptures as embodied in the life of the Church. The whole point of staying put is to resist the temptation to wander in the invented world of our spiritual imaginings.”

By “modern theology” Reno means the (mostly) liberal theology that rose up after the Enlightenment to defend Christianity from its cultured critics. In those defenses, however, Reno finds a profusion of mere theories—thin lattices of argumentation constructed to prop up denominations whose commitments, if not their doctrines, are compromised. “What my reception into the Catholic Church provided,” Reno wrote, “was deliverance from the temptation to navigate by the compass of a theory.” Instead of the ephemera of ever-generating theories, Reno found he could rely on the solid pre-eminence of the Catholic Church, whose internal life is marked by striking continuity with the past.

Ross Douthat, a prominent columnist for The New York Times, described his reasons for converting in similar terms in 2014. While Douthat noted that he could “easily imagine [Andrew] Sullivan, or some of my other eloquent critics, regarding the remarriage-and-communion proposal as an ideal means of making their conservative co-religionists grow up, of forcing us to finally leave our fond medieval illusions behind and join the existentially-ambiguous, every-man-a-magisterium chaos of our liberal, individualistic, postmodern world,” he suspected a reversal on the issue of divorce and remarriage could undercut what drew many to Catholicism in the first place: a long, documented historical integrity that has withstood political and social pressure to change.

Reno and Douthat, both of them sensitive and extremely learned critics of culture, religion and politics, are also (as one might expect of those with a healthy skepticism regarding modernity) political conservatives. I, with equal concerns about many of the conditions that make up the current political and social order, am not.

Part of the reason I found Catholicism’s challenge to modernity so compelling was that it critiques aspects of our world that mostly go unquestioned, even by those who have disputes with liberalism in sexuality, marriage and so on. For me, the case in point was property ownership, the underlying question beneath all our current debates about poverty and wealth.

Early Christian writers, Augustine among them, thought deeply about the nature of creation. God made our material world, of course, but what for? Knowing what the bounty of the earth was meant to achieve would help them figure out how to use it rightly, that is, in accordance with God’s will for it and for us. In the view of the early church (and indeed), the world had been made and given to all people to hold in common to support their flourishing. “God made the rich and poor from the one clay,” Augustine wrote, “and the one earth supports the poor and the rich.”

Property entered the equation with sin. Since people could no longer be trusted to honor the original purpose and use of creation, governing authorities were able to maintain order by dividing it up. But the church remained sensitive to the pre-property purpose of creation, and with its own authority (throughout the Middle Ages, for instance, ecclesiastical courts heard many cases regarding property and contracts) and power to persuade states and subjects, it urged vigilance against the tendency of the wealthy to amass more than their due, to the detriment of the poor. Individual actors departed from the counsel of the church, of course, but never succeeded in altering its doctrine to advance their own purposes.

But that changed after the Protestant Reformation. While Erasmus and Thomas More had each been meditating on the common ownership of all things just prior to the schism, Luther and his adherents took a different approach. Reacting to the radical communitarianism of the Anabaptists, the Reformers took the view that all things ought to be held in common as a thin veil for idleness, debauchery and sloth. With their assault on the authority of the established church, they sapped the moral force from the church’s teaching on property, which was now up to each person to decide for himself; and with their remonstration against the temporal authority of the church, they appointed the regulation of property strictly to the state, which was meant to order human affairs toward sober efficiency, not some final good.

In the years after the Reformation, increasingly strongly articulated and absolute rights to private property gained ground in European thought, finally flowering into “the rights of an individual to resist the extractions of both church and state,” per British historian Christopher Pierson in Just Property. If this situation sounds familiar, it is because it is the rallying cry of almost all those who resist efforts to broaden our country’s support for its poor. Taxes, they say, are theft, and governments have no right to seek the good, only the maximal liberty of its client-citizens.

Yet the church remains firm, unmoved by this current in modernity. And while it is impossible to speak for all Protestants—and important to note there exists a vast array of opinions on property ownership within the Protestant tradition, some hewing close to the Catholic view—the Catholic Church, at least, bases its position on property in a moral universe far more stable than that which has been constructed since the Reformation. And by the time I neared the end of my time in college, I had become convinced it was the only firm ground from which a Christian could fight back against the domination of the poor by the rich, against poverty, against the destruction of families and communities at the hands of businesses and their political lackeys, against a world stripped of meaning.

Confirmation

By the time I graduated from college, I knew I was not through with Augustine. I left for the United Kingdom at the end of my first summer out of college, where I would earn my M.Phil. in Christian theology, with a focus on Augustine. I studied under an Anglican priest and Christian socialist whose reading of Augustine deepend mine, and it was somewhere between our meetings that the seed that had been planted some time earlier came to fruition. When I told my tutor I intended to convert, it seemed like something I had already put off too long.

In retrospect I do not remember my confirmation very clearly. I was confirmed during a very early Easter Vigil, around 4:00 a.m., in the Catholic chaplaincy at Cambridge University.

I walked to the chapel in the dark: it was cool and damp, and nightclubs were still releasing Saturday night’s revelers in a trickle into the streets. By the time I reached the chapel I was awake on pure adrenaline, exhausted but alert. I was electrified and dazed throughout Mass, aware enough to remember the dreamy surprise I felt when I realized a professor of mine was holding the chalice I drank from for the first time; too tired to recall what she said to me afterward when we all gathered upstairs to celebrate.

When I went home that morning it was daylight—very bright, and all the mist had warmed to dew. My friends parted ways near the chapel, and I walked home through a few little alleys that rounded gardens where light-colored roses were already in full bloom. It is in my nature to wander, and I had never seen the streets so bright and placid before, but I was too worn out to linger.

I felt changed when I arrived back at my room, though everything seemed the same: a desperate pile of books by my bedside, a stack of xeroxed papers spread over my desk and the Confessions alone on my squat nightstand. I fell asleep contented, following the shape of the letters on its spine. It felt good to rest.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline "Ever Ancient, Ever New," in the August 7, 2017 issue.