Extraordinary attack by modernist Jesuit; memorial service for Charlie Kirk, "a pretentious event, a High Mass of self-exaltation, a liturgy that fused the gospel with nationalist rhetoric"
Father Mertes is a Jesuit, high school teacher, and author. At the Jesuit Canisius College in Berlin, he played a key role in uncovering sexual violence against students in early 2010, the first case of the Catholic Church's abuse scandal. Today, he is Superior of the Jesuit community in Berlin-Charlottenburg and a member of the editorial board of the cultural magazine "Stimmen der Zeit."
They have misused the Lord's name
The Trump camp invokes Jesus. Our author is a Jesuit and says: The Gospel is like music – if the clef is wrong, everything will be wrong.
"You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who misuses his name." (Second Commandment)
Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and all the rest of them did it at the memorial service for the murdered Charlie Kirk. They misused the Lord's name with a pretentious event, a High Mass of self-exaltation, a liturgy that fused the gospel with nationalist rhetoric.
"Hate is not the answer to hate." For a moment, Erika Kirk had illuminated the spirit of the Gospel with these words. But the American president smothered this moment with his hate speech. "I hate my enemies and don't wish them the best. Sorry, Erika." Then the widow's embrace – an assault on her message, the degradation of the Gospel under the spirit of hate. The image remains in the memory as a moment of maximum confusion. The unification of the incompatible through appropriation.
Everything right becomes wrong
Abuse causes everything right to become wrong. It's like a musical score behind a treble clef. If you replace the treble clef with a viola clef, everything behind it becomes wrong. The clef of the MAGA movement, with its cult of Trump and martyrdom, literally distorts everything that sounds pious. There is no longer a sentence in the Gospel that can be protected against this appropriation. An "incredibly large audience" (Donald Trump) attended Charlie Kirk's funeral in Glendale, Arizona. This event represents a profound and destructive aberration of the "Christian" right.
It is not enough to counter the abuse of the Gospel with a few individual quotations from the Gospel, such as the Sermon on the Mount. The prefix before the entire text determines how it is to be understood in its individual statements. For the early Christians, the prefix was: "We proclaim a crucified Messiah," it says in the first letter to the church in Corinth. This marked two decisions that were intended to shed light on the whole. First, the Messiah—the Anointed One, the King—has no power. So, it's about something other than power. Christianity itself has repeatedly worshipped the cult of power. But it also recognizes a powerful objection to the cult of power, stemming from the Crucified One. It is part of the DNA of Christianity, precisely because the Crucified One, in his powerlessness, is the prefiguration of the entire Christian faith. This objection also permeates the history of Christianity. From its very origins, it breaks with the idea of a saving ruler who, in the words of the Second Psalm, "smashes the enemy peoples of the earth with an iron club, shattering them as he shatters pitchers of clay."
Paradoxically formulated: Christianity counters the presumptuous power of the powerful who misuse the name of God to increase their power with the power of powerlessness. This follows what theology calls the eschatological reservation against all earthly manifestations of power. There is no power that can be equated with the power of God. The secular counterpart to this reservation is the self-restraint of the constitutional state, which knows of itself that its legislation and jurisprudence will never be entirely identical with justice. There is indeed a weakness that is a strength. To betray it in order to triumph against "the evil that still moves among us" (J.D. Vance) is the true betrayal, including the betrayal of Christianity – for it changes the key.
The fruit of confessing the crucified Christ in the post-Easter period was the reconciliation of the peoples in a newly emerging community called the Church, a "peace" between the peoples. "He united the two parts (Jews and Gentiles) and by his death tore down the dividing wall of hostility," so it says in the letter to the church in Ephesus. And in the letter to the churches in Galatia: "There is no longer Jew and Gentile... but you are one in Christ." This is the second statement that accompanies the clef of the cross: The hostility between the peoples is overcome, not merely in abstract thought, nor in a state form, but through the gathering in a social entity that calls itself the Church.
This Church has repeatedly succumbed to the danger of self-sacralization or even self-nationalization throughout history. But the precursor to the entire Gospel is and remains a transnational, universalistic ethos of charity, practiced at the grassroots level and growing from there into a church. It is, in any case, the exact opposite of what the new, self-proclaimed Christian Right propagates when it places love for its own people above the love of neighbor enshrined in the Gospel—and thereby even justifies deportation policies. Ethnic nationalism and Christianity are incompatible.
Extraordinary Grace
The memorial service for Charlie Kirk began with a bagpipe band playing the hymn "Amazing Grace." It is the same hymn that Barack Obama sang at the end of his eulogy in June 2015 for the murdered pastor Clement Pinckney. The lyrics of the hymn were written by John Newton in England in 1772. "Amazing grace. How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see." Once I was lost, but now God has found me. Newton became a pastor late in life. Before that, he went to sea and helped transport enslaved people from the west coast of Africa to America. As a former slave trader, he recounts in the song the "extraordinary grace" of God that he himself experienced as a sinner. His heart "shudders" at the thought of having participated in the slave trade.
Christianity is unthinkable without the willingness to repent. This is a final clef before the text of the Gospel: It is initially critically directed at oneself. At the beginning of the Gospel is the call to conversion, better translated: to rethinking, which at the very least means: to examine one's own mindset, not just once and then never again, but always when "the time," the kairós, an opportunity arises. The misuse of God's name, on the other hand, is based on a reading of the Gospel in the spirit of self-exaltation. The flip side of this is always the humiliation of others.
Counter-sermons cannot open the eyes of such deluded people. Neither can violence. "Hate cannot be the answer to hate," not even hatred of the presumptuous grand narcissists who preach hate. Hatred of an evil cause also "distorts the features" (Bertolt Brecht). Rather, the power of powerlessness includes hope. "The Lord will not leave him unpunished who misuses his name." One can hope – and work towards it – that the foreseeable disaster does not drag too many innocent people into the abyss.
Cathcon: Victim blaming. A Jesuit who ought to know better, whatever one's view of the MAGA movement.
.jpeg)
Comments