4.08.2007

Chocolate Jesus

(Or why the Jesuits love Tom Waits)



The Largest Minority unearthed a great article from the Times Online entitled Drugs, alcohol and sex: why the Jesuits like Tom Waits.
At last the Vatican has found a rock oddball who embodies the softer side of Christianity.

Even if Tom Waits’s songs, which include Dragging a Dead Priest, are sung in a rasping voice that seems to have been soaked in a whisky barrel, he has won over friends in the Jesuit order. Barely a week after Pope Benedict XVI disclosed his dislike for the “prophets of pop” and Bob Dylan in particular, the Jesuits in Rome have embraced Waits as a Christian role model.
Of course, the Jesuits are famous for their radical, progressive tendencies. Anyone staying in touch with Christian dialogue will know that their opinions don't often represent the majority of Catholics, and even less Christians in general. It is all the more entertaining though when they genuinely surprise, as with their warming to Waits.
The latest issue of Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal, the contents of which are subject to Vatican approval, says that Waits represents “the marginalised and misunderstood.” He therefore understood “the lower depths” of society, and was able to convey the desperation of those on the margins. His past also enabled him to express their “capacity for hope and instinct for happiness” in “authentic songs devoid of vanity and false illusions”, Father Spadaro said.
Father Spadaro may be in the minority, skirting the margins himself, but it is a refreshing look at the world when compared with the work of the President of the Catholic League, William Donahue, who more often represents a xenophobic view of popular culture.

Speaking last week, retired professor Henry Ansgar Kelly (University of California, Los Angeles), himself a professed Jesuit, delivered an inspiring lecture entitled Infernal Ideas: Hell from the Bible On, with Stops in Limbo, Purgatory, and Another Limbo. Kelly reasons (as only Jesuits can do) that hell and Satan are nothing like what the medieval Christians made them out to be...they've been given a bum rap. In his recently published book Satan: A Biography, Kelly notes how hell and such have been eternally misunderstood. From the Guardian,
Kelly can hardly write a biography because Satan, as he demonstrates, does not have a life. He was never a person, and is absent from the Old Testament, where there are no fallen angels and the serpent is a wily, beguilingly articulate worm, not - as in Milton's Paradise Lost - a metamorphosed demon. At best Satan is a principle, an idea of intellectual resistance; he was personified, and retroactively inserted into the Bible's account of creation and the fall, as the fall guy for God.
Kelly's ideas, like those of Father Spadaro, are radical, to be sure. But in the current atmosphere of religious intolerance, we could use more of this kind of progressive radicalism.

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