Inaugural Lecture Series - Spring 2005
“The University and the Human in a Pluralistic Age”
Celebrating the Inauguration of the Rev. Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., as 16th president of Loyola University New Orleans, October 15, 2004
Diversity, the Catholic Church, and Ignatian Humanism: or How to Make a Roux
Ron Modras, Ph.D.
Professor of Theological Studies, Saint Louis University
April 27, 2005
Dr. Ronald Modras is
a professor of theological
studies at Saint Louis
University. The author of
seven books and
numerous articles on
topics such as Jesuit
education and interreligious
relations, he has
lectured at the
universities of Berlin,
Jerusalem, and Oxford.
The distinctive
character of Ignatian
spirituality, like that of New
Orleans cooking, lies in its
fearless embrace of
diversity. The willingness of
Jesuit missionaries to
present the Christian
message in non-Western
garb comes out of the
Ignatian celebration of God
at work in all creation and
cultures. That same ethos
needs to permeate Jesuit
education today, in a global
situation that requires
preventing a conflict of
civilizations by fostering
conversation between them.
When Father Wildes invited me to speak about diversity in this series on “The University and the Human in an Age of Pluralism,” an old saying came to mind. Was I being asked to bring coals to Newcastle? Or in this case, bring crawfish to Canal Street? Talking to New Orleaneans about diversity is like telling you how to make a roux.
The inspiration for that title came from a conversation I had several years back with a native of this city and former dean at this University, Father Joseph Tetlow, S.J. In a discussion about New Orleans cuisine, he related that its distinctiveness lies precisely in the mixing of diverse ingredients—ham and oysters, sausage and shrimp, chicken and crab. After several minutes I apologized for taking up his time to talk about food, but he assured me that New Orleans natives love to talk about the subject. They will chat about a meal from three years back: “Now when cousin Sue made that gumbo, did she start out her roux with a cold pan or a hot pan?”
New Orleaneans have a right to talk about food. When you think of it, what other city in the world has its own cuisine? There are national cuisines like the French and Italian, and regional cuisines like Tex-Mex and New England. But all Chicago has is a pizza, and all Manhattan has is a chowder. New Orleans fills whole books with Cajun and Creole recipes. And most of them begin a mixture of fat and flour that goes on to become ever more complex when it forms the basis of a gumbo.
With good reason gumbo has become a metaphor for New Orleans. Mixing defines its very makeup. The mixing of ethnic groups—the exiled Acadians from Nova Scotia intermarrying with Spanish and Irish settlers to create Cajun culture. The mixing of races—Black, White, Indian—to create Creole culture. Diversity defines the very essence of New Orleans: an island of Catholics in a sea of Bible-belt Protestants; a French Quarter dominated by Spanish architecture. What other city could have given birth to that amalgam of Africa and Europe that is jazz? The excesses along Bourbon Street may cause some to dub you Sin City, but your football team is made up of Saints.
There is no need to prolong the argument. The distinctive character, indeed the genius of New Orleans, arises precisely from its history and blend of diverse peoples and cultures. But to return to the gumbo metaphor for a moment, I remember several years ago, thumbing through a worn and yellowed New Orleans cookbook and coming upon a recipe that, like most New Orleans dishes, started with a roux. It went something like this: In a heavy skillet over low heat, melt a half-cup of butter. Add a half-cup of flour and with a wooden spoon stir constantly…for about four hours. I didn’t read any further. Four hours? There was no way I was going to be making that recipe anytime soon. There is little likelihood that anyone would in our day. When that cookbook appeared, I doubt that its author expected that any white person would be making it either. But somebody must have, and I can only imagine it was a woman of color. That cookbook told the reader more about old New Orleans than the author intended.
The title of this lecture series inaugurating Father Wildes as president of Loyola University New Orleans, is “The University and the Human in a Pluralistic Age.” I would like to improvise on it somewhat by looking specifically at “The Catholic, Jesuit University in a Pluralistic Age.” All universities today face challenges of pluralism and diversity, but Jesuit universities and colleges like yours and mine are uniquely equipped to address them precisely because of our respective Catholic and Ignatian heritages, both of which are inherently humanistic.
Now some, even sympathetic, critics might find that claim questionable. So let me try to back it up unpacking what I mean by humanistic, what I mean by calling our Catholic and Ignatian heritage humanistic, and how can that heritage help us confront the challenges of a pluralistic age.
Humanism
The word humanist today tends to be identified with unbelief. But long before the word was co-opted by atheists, humanism found champions in such notable Catholics as St. Thomas More, Erasmus, St. Ignatius Loyola, and the Society of Jesus. By humanistic here I mean displaying an appreciation of human achievement wherever it is found and a cultivation of human enrichment in all its forms.1
The word humanist first arose in the universities of 15th-century Renaissance Italy. In contradistinction to theologians who studied divinity, the umanisti were the teachers and students of classical Latin literature. Borrowing a phrase from Cicero, they called their discipline the studia humanitatis, what today we call the humanities.
Most Renaissance humanists were school teachers or speech and letter writers for civil authorities. Learning to speak and write well, they believed, required studying and imitating the elegance of the ancient authors, like Cicero, Seneca, and Horace. Soon enough their high regard for the style of the Latin classics extended to their contents as well. Humanists began to quote the classical authors for the value of their ideas, and in doing so found themselves confronted with the same problem as the early fathers of the church. All those Greek and Latin authors—Plato, Cicero, Seneca—were pre-Christian, what we used to call pagan. But the Renaissance humanists resolved their problem the same way early Christianity did, when it first became Catholic.
Catholic Humanism
Given that definition of humanistic, it may seem something of a stretch to claim that Catholicism is inherently humanistic. The adjective Catholic has come to be identified with nouns like doctrine, hierarchy, and inquisition. In Spain King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are called “their Catholic Majesties” and remembered for having expelled first Jews and then Muslims from their realms. The late Pope John Paul II offered apologies for the crusades, the trial of Galileo, and the Catholic anti-Judaism that morphed so easily into racist anti-Semitism. All of these blights on the history of the church have caused the word Catholic to be identified with authoritarianism, narrowness, and intolerance.
And yet, there is another side to Catholicism, though, unfortunately, it is not only outsiders who don’t always appreciate it. I remember once, many years ago, being here for Mardi Gras and going to Sunday Mass at the cathedral, where the celebrant was no one less than the archbishop. In the course of his homily he welcomed us visitors and went on to tell us that Mardi Gras had nothing to do with Catholicism. Perhaps he was referring to the excesses, but I could only shake my head in bewilderment. Mardi Gras has nothing to do with Catholicism?
The adjective katholikos is Greek for universal and explains why James Joyce could describe the Catholic church as “here comes everybody.” So far as we know, St. Ignatius of Antioch was first to use “catholic” to describe the church around the year 100, when he referred not to any one local church but to the entire network of Christian churches which, already at that time, were to be found throughout the far-flung Roman Empire. From the very beginning it denoted the very antithesis of parochialism, narrowness, or sectarianism and implied diversity.
The fact katholikos comes from the Greek is a useful reminder that it refers to what happened to Jewish Christianity when it moved into the Hellenistic culture of the Roman empire. Instead of retreating into a ghetto or rejecting Greco-Roman culture as irredeemably pagan, the fathers of the church engaged it, discriminatingly embraced certain parts of it, and eventually baptized it. The Catholic church is what happened when Jewish Christianity became Latin and Greek.
Church fathers like Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria did not repudiate pre-Christian philosophy when they embraced the faith. Instead they wondered if Plato had read Moses. They came up with the idea that the Logos, the Word of God, incarnated in Jesus and revealed in Scripture, was to be found seminally, in sparks or seeds, in reason as well as revelation. God’s truth, they argued, could be found in creation and culture, in nature and the insights of philosophers and teachers, in other words, outside the Bible and the church as well as within them. For these fathers of the church, truth is where you find it.
From virtually the beginning, the Catholic church read the Bible with more than one way of interpretation, something quite different from the literalist interpretation given Scripture today by biblical fundamentalists. And to the varieties of biblical interpretation can be added the varieties of spirituality giving rise to varieties of religious orders. And from all of the above, there arose varieties of theologies. With good reason Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa in the 14th century spoke of Catholicism as a complexio oppositorum.
In the name of a biblical exclusiveness, Protestant reformers, especially John Calvin, criticized the extraneous pre-Christian elements that Catholicism had allowed to enter into Christian tradition. In the name of grace, faith, and Scripture “alone,” Protestants criticized Catholicism for its “and:” faith and works, Scripture and tradition. Protestant churches did away with Friday abstinence and the Lenten fast as being attempts to gain salvation by way of good works. And with Lent went Mardi Gras, as apt an illustration of Catholic humanism as any I could propose in this particular venue.
If Mardi Gras has nothing to do with Catholicism, then neither does Christmas, since both celebrations arose out of the same Catholic engagement with pre-Christian culture. Both Christmas and Mardi Gras arose out of the Catholic attempt to baptize what were formerly pagan festivals. We don’t know what day of the year Jesus was born, so the Roman church leaders chose December 25 which had previously been a festival marking the winter solstice. Did baptism require Catholic Christians to give up a day off from work? The humanistic leaders of the Roman church found another reason to celebrate.
The same was true for Mardi Gras, or Carnival, as it is called elsewhere. Why is it celebrated primarily in areas that are Catholic—New Orleans, Rio? Or in Germany only in those cities that are Catholic—Cologne, Mainz, Rottenburg? You probably never heard of Rottenburg, a little town on the Neckar River not far from Stuttgart and the University of Tübingen where I did my graduate studies. On the days leading up to Ash Wednesday, nothing special ever happened in traditionally Protestant Stuttgart or Tübingen. But in Catholic Rottenburg just a few miles away, crowds would gather on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday to watch a parade in which the marchers wore grotesque wooden masks, their costumes covered with bells which would ring as they did a peculiar skip along the main street, driving out the spirits of winter.
Even more peculiar were the three-foot sticks that the marchers carried with what looked like white balloons blown up and attached to them. They would tap onlookers on the head with the balloons, especially young couples. But the balloons were not balloons at all, but sow bladders that the butchers had been saving all year for this occasion. Tapping young couples with sow bladders was a fertility rite.
Rottenburg for centuries has been a Catholic island surrounded by Protestants, the seat of the local Catholic bishop. In modern times it was only a town, smaller than it had been 2,000 years ago when it was the site of a large Roman garrison. Not by chance, Cologne and Mainz, famous for their large Carnival parades, were also large Roman outposts.
Mardi Gras came to New Orleans by way of France, but its origins lie in pagan Rome, in the pre-Christian Roman Saturnalia, a festival in which the Romans drove out the spirits of winter and celebrated fertility and spring. It was also a time when social hierarchies were turned upside down, when slaves sat down at the same table as their masters. When the Roman empire became Catholic and began preparing for Easter with 40 days of Lent, the Saturnalia became “Carnivale,” a farewell to flesh in all of its meanings, a time for frivolity as well as fat, for wearing masks and turning the world upside down, mimicking and mocking both social and ecclesiastical hierarchies.
Mardi Gras has everything to do with Catholicism—feasting before fasting, engaging pre-Christian culture and adapting it, trying, not always successfully, to eliminate the excesses. Mardi Gras typifies an attitude of openness and breadth in the Catholic church that bespeaks the celebrated humanistic dictum of the Roman playwright Terrence: “I am human, and nothing human is foreign to me.”
This humanistic strain in Catholic tradition too often receives short shrift in both secular and conservative Catholic circles. There are both individuals and groups in the Catholic church today who do not abide diversity, who work to define the church narrowly by identifying it with one particular theology or point of view, who demand lockstep obedience to church authorities and an allegedly homogeneous Catholic tradition. But Catholic tradition in the singular is a misnomer; it has always been pluralistic, consisting of a wide variety of traditions in the plural.
For example, besides the well-known Catholic emphasis on obedience to church authority, there is also the less well-known Catholic tradition of respect for the authority and rights of an informed conscience. Allow me to quote here the opinion of a noted Catholic theologian: “Above the pope as an expression of the binding claim of church authority stands one’s own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be against the demands of church authority.”2 Those words were not written by Martin Luther in the 16th century but in 1968 by Professor Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. If they were Catholic and orthodox in 1968, they are still so today.
Precisely as Catholic, as a university that values and cultivates the entire Catholic intellectual tradition, Loyola University New Orleans is called to be a center of humanistic encounter with culture. And here I would enlist the authority of the late Pope John Paul II. In his 1990 Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, he described a Catholic university as “a primary and privileged place for a fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and culture.”3 The pope went on to cite the Second Vatican Council: “A faith that places itself on the margin of what is human, of what is therefore culture, would be a faith unfaithful to the fullness of what the word of God manifests and reveals…”4
Pope John Paul II challenged all Catholic universities to become centers of dialogue between the Gospel and all that is human. Loyola University New Orleans has reason to address that challenge not only as a Catholic university but particularly as one with an Ignatian heritage.
Ignatian Humanism
Saint Ignatius Loyola could have easily embraced the idea that “nothing human is foreign to me,” because for him nothing human was merely human. In the opening pages of his memoirs, he recalled his youthful vanity and ambition. He related how, even after his conversion, he got into a theological argument with a Moor and how he seriously considered killing him. Ignatius later became convinced that God was teaching him, speaking in his heart much as a schoolteacher would speak to a student. And he came to the conviction that, sinner that he was, capable of committing murder, if God would speak to him, God would speak to anyone.
Ignatius had a profound sense of the expansiveness of God’s grace. Toward the end of the Spiritual Exercises he waxes eloquent about God being present in all creation, not only present but laboring in each of our lives. Here is the germ of the Ignatian principle of finding God in all things, in what theologian Karl Rahner called the mysticism of everyday life. Nothing human is merely human. The secular pursuit of science is not merely secular. Classrooms, work-benches, and artists’ studios are sacred places. One can see the hand of the creator looking at galaxies through telescopes or at cellular life in laboratories. Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins summed it up famously when he wrote that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And, if the world, then all humanity in it.
Trust in the liberality of God’s grace marks Ignatian spirituality with a distinctive optimism. When Jesuit missionaries went to China, India, and the Americas and there encountered people who had never had a chance to hear the gospel, they couldn’t believe that they and their ancestors had been hopelessly condemned because of their involuntary unbelief. Catholic theology broadened its understanding of faith as encompassing not only explicit faith in the God revealed by Jesus but also an implicit faith. If God was present and at work, speaking to the hearts of sinners, then certainly God was somehow present and at work in the lives of strangers who did not know the name of Jesus but who lived lives of love arising out of their implicit faith. As Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner put it, Christian missionaries do not bring God to people’s lives; they bring God to people’s consciousness, a God who is already there.
With his faith in God and God’s grace, Saint Ignatius Loyola was obviously not a humanist in the sense of a secularist. But first in Spain and then in Paris, he was educated by humanists devoted to the so-called pagan classics. Ignatius and his companions were first the products and then the purveyors of a humanistic education and culture. When they began opening schools across Europe, Jesuits taught schoolboys the same Latin classics they had studied— Cicero, Seneca, Horace, and Virgil. They codified that humanistic course of studies into a document called the Ratio Studiorum. There were regular efforts to change the readings in that curriculum to readings that were more Christian, but Jesuits always resisted those efforts on the basis of their Ignatian heritage. For these Jesuit humanists as for the early church fathers, truth is where you find it.
Now what does all of this have to do with diversity or with the “human in a pluralistic age”? Fast forward a century to China, where Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci engaged Chinese culture and the works of K’ung Fu-tzu, whose name Ricci translated into Latin as Confucius. In his journals, Ricci wrote of Confucius, “if we critically examine his actions and sayings as they are recorded in history, we shall be forced to admit that he was the equal of the pagan philosophers and superior to most of them.”
Ricci learned to read the Confucian classics the way he had read Latin classics as a schoolboy. Eventually he donned the mandarin garb of a Confucian scholar and referred to Confucius as “venerable,” not exactly calling him a saint, but close enough to raise more conservative eyebrows. Truth is where you find it. Ricci’s success and the same kind of humanistic thinking inspired Jesuit missionary Roberto de Nobili in India, where he encountered Brahmin Hindu culture. De Nobili assumed the garb and lifestyle of a Brahmin ascetic. He learned Sanscrit and began a lifelong study of classical Hindu texts. For both these Ignatian humanists, truth is where you find it.
Ricci and de Nobili were both pioneers of what today in Catholic circles is called inculturation. As once the church had melded its Jewish-Christian origins with late Hellenistic philosophy and letters to produce Byzantine and Roman Catholicism, it seemed ready to do the same in China and India to produce a Chinese and Indian Catholicism. Unfortunately, their humanist measures would eventually fall victim to censure in what have been called the Chinese Rites and Malabar Rites controversies, both too complicated to go into here. Their efforts were exonerated, however, at the Second Vatican Council, when in 1965 the world’s bishops called for the adaptation of Christian life to indigenous cultures, in other words, for the kind of inculturation
Ricci and de Nobili exemplified. Sitting with the bishops at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 was another Jesuit missionary, Pedro Arrupe, fresh from Japan and just elected Superior General of the Society of Jesus. Like Ricci and de Nobili before him, his humanist Ignatian spirituality had inspired Arrupe to engage Japanese culture. In his years as a missionary in Japan, Arrupe visited Zen Buddhist monasteries; he learned Zen techniques of meditation, the Japanese art of calligraphy, even the Zen practice of shooting a bow and arrow.
In August 1945, Arrupe was director of Jesuit novices in Hiroshima, where he experienced first hand the effects of the first atom bomb and the devastation of modern warfare. Once the immediate aftermath of the war had subsided, he began making speaking tours around the world, describing the horror. He had spent time in the U.S. before going to Japan and had come to know American culture, just as his years as a missionary allowed him to know the Japanese and their culture. That dual experience convinced him that the world would never know peace until human beings learned not to demonize one another, not until we cease viewing people who are different as less than fully human. Peace would only be possible when we recognized our common humanity and God’s presence beneath all superficial differences of religion and culture.
The Second Vatican Council had mandated all religious orders to study their origins and discern how they were called to address the needs of the world and the church today. With Arrupe at its helm, the Society of Jesus did that at their 32nd General Congregation, sometimes called the “Arrupe Congregation.”
Convened in December 1974, the delegates at that congregation were asked to attach priorities to the Society’s various works and ministries. They came to the decision that justice issues were a “priority of priorities.” Justice, the delegates decided, was integral to the Society’s traditional service of faith. They made the promotion of justice not just one ministry along-side others but a dimension of all their ministries, part of their very self-definition. The 32nd General Congregation went out of its way to make clear that the linkage of faith and justice was not an innovation but part of their Ignatian heritage. Still critics worried that Jesuits were abandoning their commitment to education. Arrupe had to convince them that they were not abandoning education but committing themselves to what he called “education for justice.”
It was Father Arrupe who first described the goal of Jesuit education to be that of educating “men and women for others.” That descriptive phrase can be mistaken to imply a certain condescension. So more recently its wording has been modified to educating “men and women for and with others” making more explicit the need of solidarity with the poor and marginalized in our society and in our global economy.
The accommodation extends beyond the wording of mottos, however. Fifteen years after the “Arrupe Congregation,” his successor as Superior General, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, sent a letter to Jesuit provincials inquiring if the formula “promotion of justice” was still adequate in articulating the Jesuit mission or if it needed to be modified. The response was, yes, promotion of justice did indeed express the Ignatian vision but that it needed to be understood more broadly, not only in terms of economic justice. The promotion of justice concerns not only the struggle against poverty but also the defense of human dignity and rights. It means opposition to discrimination based on race, religion, caste, or gender. The promotion of justice means, as one Jesuit author put it, “the promotion of the human in all its dimensions.”5 That is as succinct a description of Ignatian humanism as one can find.
In 1995, 25 years after the “Arrupe Congregation,” Jesuit delegates at the 34th General Congregation affirmed the direction in which Pedro Arrupe had taken them. But they broadened the concepts of “service of faith” and “promotion of justice.” It was essential that faith be engaged in dialogue with other cultures and that injustice be seen as embedded in cultural attitudes as well as economic structures. The 34th General Congregation declared that faith, justice, culture, and dialogue were inseparable principles that integrated all Jesuit ministries including that of higher education. According to the highest legislative body that exists within the Society of Jesus, for Loyola University New Orleans to be true to its Ignatian heritage and mission, the educational programs it offers need to bear as hallmarks: faith, justice, culture, and—if I may substitute a more Ignatian word for dialogue—conversation. It is conversation with diverse cultures that I propose as a peculiarly Ignatian approach to facing the challenges of our pluralistic age.
Loyola in an Age of Pluralism
What does all of this have to do with Loyola University New Orleans? And with Father Kevin Wildes as Loyola’s new president? Jesuits, like Father Wildes, have known all about Ignatian pluralism and diversity from the beginning. Even before Ignatius died, Jesuits were an international order. But international at one time implied remote distances. Not any longer. Ours is an age of connectedness. Today you call an 800 number for information about a product and find yourself talking to someone in Bombay. In spring 2005, television satellites allowed billions of people around the globe to participate in the death-watch, wake, and burial of one pope and then the election and installation of another. In Detroit, Michigan, and elsewhere in the U.S., formerly ethnic, Catholic neighborhoods find themselves being dotted with mosques. People of diverse races and religions who once were oceans away are now studying at desks in the same classrooms or working in offices down the hall.
But along with the connectedness, ours is also an age in which differences tend to deepen into bitter animosities. Pundits speak of a “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West. The United States is divided not only into red and blue states but increasingly riven by disagreements over moral values rancorous enough to be called culture wars. All the while, wealth is becoming more and more concentrated, as the gap between rich and poor widens. But to even bring up that subject is taboo; you are accused of fomenting class-warfare. Certain subjects in both our media and in our church have been declared off limits, not to be even discussed. And yet we will never resolve some of the most important issues of our day unless we talk about them.
Jesuits have a long-standing conviction about the power of talk, the transforming power of conversation. It goes back to Saint Ignatius. He rarely preached but engaged eagerly in conversation with anyone willing to talk to him about God and spirituality. All the Jesuits I have alluded to here—Ricci, de Nobili, and Pedro Arrupe—followed in the footsteps of Saint Ignatius and engaged the strange new cultures they encountered with conversation. St. Ignatius went so far as to leave rules for conversation: by all means, start off with small talk but eventually try to get serious. Speak about your hopes and dreams, about your fears and anxieties. Talk about what comforts you but also what discomforts you.
Taking a cue from that Ignatian technique, I have come to require that students in a course I teach on Ignatian spirituality at Saint Louis University engage in a conversation with someone “outside their comfort zone” and write up a brief report on it. I leave it up to them who it is. Their choices are interesting. I have had reports on conversations with gay schoolmates and lesbians, with alienated relatives and atheists. One young woman interviewed a biblical fundamentalist.
In spring 2004, a striking report came from Elizabeth, a shy soft-spoken woman. Virtually every day, when she got off the expressway near the University, she would see a homeless woman at the exit asking for money. Elizabeth would roll down her window, give her something, and drive away. The challenge to have a conversation outside her comfort zone gave Elizabeth the push to stop her car, get out, walk over and talk to the homeless woman. She learned that the homeless woman was educated and articulate. Until recently she had been employed but sickness, medical bills, and then losing her job led to her losing her home. Elizabeth learned some valuable lessons that day—the fragility of our social safety net and the feminine face of poverty.
The following autumn, when I assigned my class the same kind of conversation, I told the story of Elizabeth. It must have made an impression on Russell. He wrote of returning to his apartment late one night after dinner and drinks with friends. In his own words, I was “feeling pretty good, when a man came walking towards me. I reacted as usual, placing one hand on my pocket knife and my other on my wallet.” But then Russell remembered that he had an assignment to talk to someone outside his comfort zone, and he began a conversation with Larry.
They talked about everything from why Larry was living on the streets to politics. After some 15 minutes, Russell gave Larry five dollars, thanked him for the conversation, and began walking away. But then he realized that what he gave Larry was less than the tip he had given to the waitress at dinner, and that didn’t feel right. In Russell’s own words,
“I then turned back around and called out for Larry, motioning for him to come back. When he did, I gave him the rest of the cash in my wallet which did not amount to much, twelve dollars. What Larry, a man who lives on the street in a life full of problems, said to me then will always stick with me. Larry took the extra money extended, looked me in the eye, and said, “Hell, there’s enough for me and Jake.” I smiled and said, “Who’s Jake?” Larry smiled back and said, “Just another guy who shot craps one too many times.”
In just 15 minutes Russell learned something about solidarity and survival.
The same thing can be said for Robyn, who this semester joined with two other undergrads to produce a video on homelessness. They took a video recorder to the inner city of St. Louis where Robyn met Ruben and Sylvester. Would they be willing to video and talk into the camera about what life was like on the streets? As Robyn told it, every time she and her fellow students came back with their video recorder, Ruben and Sylvester were surprised. Thirty times they came back and each time Ruben and Sylvester were surprised. It took that long for Ruben to trust Robyn enough to entrust his papers with her. It took thatlong for Ruben to ask Robyn, what would you do if one morning you got up and found that you were black?
It struck me, when Robyn made her report, that—with all the many reports on conversations outside their comfort zones—here was the first conversation that brought up even remotely the topic of race. My classes have found it easier to talk about social and economic differences, gender and religious differences, but not race. We are as a nation perhaps most uncomfortable talking about race. But we need to talk. And even more we need to learn how to listen. Truth is where you find it, if we would only listen.
In a nation whose culture and media are filled with talking heads, how often do we find ourselves listening only to people who think and talk like us? How willing are we to listen to people outside our comfort zones?
What kind of conversations make people uncomfortable here in the Crescent City? What topics make the Big Easy uneasy? It seems to me that those are the kind of conversations that should mark the Catholic, Jesuit education provided here at Loyola University New Orleans. It seems to me that it is something like this that Father Kevin Wildes had in mind when he decided to inaugurate his presidency at Loyola with a lecture series on “the university and the human in an age of pluralism.”
This presentation has covered a wide variety of topics—humanism, the Catholic church, Ignatian tradition, everything from Cicero to sow bladders. In some ways it has been like the gumbo that symbolizes this city, a complex mélange of diverse ingredients. Not too complex, I hope. But just in case, let me close by returning to the basic recipe as given us by the Society of Jesus at its 34th General Congregation—faith, justice, culture, and conversation.
Engaging our culture with conversation is as basic to the Ignatian identity of this university as mixing fat and flour to start a gumbo. And everyone in New Orleans knows that to make gumbo, first you make a roux.
________
Notes
1 See Ronald Modras, Ignatian Humanism: A Dynamic Spirituality for the 21st
Century (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004), xii.
2 Cited in Hans Küng, My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs, trans. by John
Bowden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 441.
3 Pope John Paul II, The Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities (Ex
Corde Ecclesiae), Origins, vol 20, no.17 (October 4, 1990), 265-276, #43.
4 Ibid., #44.
5 Michael Amaladoss, “Sent on Mission,” in Constitutions of the Society of
Jesus: Incorporation of a Spirit (Rome: Secretariatus Spiritualitatis
Ignatinae, 1993) 342-43.
