Sunday, July 5, 2009AD
Fourteenth Sunday in Greentime
Someday We’ll See!!
We hear many speeches yearly this weekend as we celebrate Independence Day. We are reminded of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The principles that all are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and to attain these rights, governments are instituted, etc.etc. are well known and noble. However, has our track record matched the theory? An alternate view of history has been developed, viz., Her-story. As the adage goes, history is written by the winners. Her-story is the history written by other categories.
An appropriate case in point is the curiosity that today we observe the Abolition of slavery here in NY, in 1825!!!!!! (49 years after the Declaration of Independence!) To pass such a law, the NY State Legislature (NB -- please get your act together in 2009!!) needed to correct something that actually existed in our colony, later our state in the years before and after 1776.
Yes, there was slavery here in New York and it caused problems. Most of the slaves in colonial NY were in the NYC area, but some slaves existed up this way as well. Colonial NY history shows us that slaves were not happy campers either. (Why should they have been?)
In colonial NY, the eighteenth century before 1776, there were two major incidents involving slaves in NYC. In 1712, there was a slave revolt that was beaten down brutally and cruelly as an example to other NY slaves not to repeat such actions. In 1741, there was a brutalization of slaves in NYC after a suspicious fire occurred in the city. (In that case, as well, Papists, that’s us, folks, were dragged into it as co-conspirators with the slaves.) That slavery had to be abolished in NY 49 years after the Declaration of Independence had to mean that slavery existed after American separation from England. Did Blacks come under the noble principles of Thomas Jefferson’s (a slaveholder) lofty principles?
In early America, the foreign slave trade was outlawed after 1808. The development of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 put an end to thought that slavery would wither away and die in the new republic. In 1833, through the work of abolitionists in England such as William Wilburforce, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. In 1862, the Czar abolished slavery in Russia. The USA did not abolish slavery officially in December, 1865, with the Thirteenth Amendment! (The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, was an effort to keep England and France from recognizing the Confederate States in rebellion.)
However, this weekend also represents the anniversary of the Draft Riots in NYC in 1863. It was probably the largest urban disorder in American history. Occurring throughout the city, but particularly in the area around the United Nations, Irish immigrants and poor white Protestants were reacting to the Draft Act, in which the boys of wealthy families could be exempt from the draft if their family paid $300. (Did you see the Gangs of New York a few years ago?) Some feel that the injustice continues in more subtle ways today.
Jesus lived in a world in which slavery was taken as a given. Jesus and His greatest public relations man, St Paul, never advocated the abolition of slavery in practice in the message of the Coming of the Kingdom. Still, seeds were sown when the slogans of the movement became “Your Will be done”; “The Kingdom of God is among us”; “Jesus is Lord”.
Sooner or later, honest Christians would read into the Gospel where its thrust was headed. Most Christians tolerated slavery and, indeed, some “Christian” slaveholders found justification for it in the Christian Scriptures. For example, “slaves, be obedient to your masters.” It is a sad commentary on Church history that the drive to abolish slavery arose from the seriousness of the Quakers reading into the Gospel and other persecuted groups in Europe as well as the theory in the French Revolution of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (and Sorority).
Now in the 21st century, Catholics find the institution of slavery as something hard to imagine. How could our Catholic ancestors have tolerated such a situation? Well, the System did tolerate it and the Church was immersed in the System. Using a principle of Blessed John XXIII, “we know more now.”
The prophet Ezekiel named reality in the first reading today. People do not like to have the System critiqued. At this early point in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, He met rejection from the spectrum of much of the Jewish religious establishment (from the Herodians to the Pharisses in Mk 3.6), some of His own family, his local village (today’s Gospel) and later His own followers, led by St Peter. Soon, Pontius Pilate handed Jesus over to death as a political prisoner, a challenger to the System, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.
Many feel that Pilate was not the dupe that frequently he is portrayed in the Gospels. Rather, Pilate might have read between the lines of what Jesus was really all about. Do we read between the lines as well?
It took 1800 years before the drive to abolish slavery took off seriously in Christendom “a Christian world”. Now, Catholics would not even consider the possibility of slavery as legitimate. In essence, the implications of the prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, were left untouched by the System (baptized, so to speak, in the Fourth Century.)
How long will it take before Catholics (and other Christians) come to see the further implications of the Gospel. Read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 and honestly answer the question whether or not Jesus calls all His followers (that’s us, folks) to lives of non-violence. It took 1800 years to get it on slavery. When will the day come when Catholics will ask themselves how their Catholic ancestors have failed to see the non-violence of the Gospel? When further in the future when Catholics will ask how their ancestors (Catholics, today) tolerated sins against the dignity of the human person, such as abortion, euthanasia, torture, the death penalty and war?
Will the prophet Jesus of Nazareth be welcomed in our hearts and minds when we read more honestly and clearly between the lines of what He is really saying? Pilate apparently got the gist early on and reacted to it. The System still does react to it. How do we react? 070509AD jfq
