Commonweal Magazine - March 2023 by PressPad

Commonweal Religion, Politics, Culture

MARCH 2023 • VOLUME 150 • NUMBER 3

LETTERS

BO O KS

42 FRO M THE E D I TO R S

Israel in crisis CO MMENT

Earthquakes in Syria Santiago Ramos

The Ohio train derailment

Stella Maris and The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy Reviewed by Phil Christman

Cult of the Dead by Kyle Smith Reviewed by Luke Timothy Johnson

The Book of Revolutions by Edward Feld Reviewed by David Neuhaus, SJ

The Waste Land by Matthew Hollis Reviewed by William H. Pritchard

Isabella Simon

Antitrust legislation Alexander Stern

C R I T I C AT L A RG E

Performing the Passion Susan Bigelow Reynolds

Letter from California Katherine Lucky

Diplomacy in Ukraine Gregory M. Reichberg, Stein Tønnesson, Henrik Syse; and Sven G. Holtsmark

P O E T RY

Social housing

33 41 64

Pope Francis centers migrants Renunciation & happiness Zena Hitz

Assisted suicide Cole Hartin

‘Enter You, Waving’ W. S. Di Piero

‘Earth’ Stuart Dybeck L A ST WO R D

Austen Ivereigh

‘Anthracite Revisited’ Wilma Spellman

Fran Quigley

‘In the Basilica of San Vitale’ W. S. Di Piero

ARTIC LES

An unintended icon? Matthew J. Milliner

SHO RT TAK ES

‘Rhythm Revue’ Dominic Preziosi COV E R D E S I GN

David Sankey

A RTS

‘no existe un mundo poshuracán’ Alejandro Anreus

COV E R I M AG E

Socrates Baltagiannis/ picture alliance via Getty Images

march 2023

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LETTERS

F O U N D E D I N 1 9 24

Letters: The Respect for Marriage Act e d i to r

Dominic Preziosi s e n i o r e d i to r

AMERICAN OPINION IS NOT BINARY

Matthew Boudway a ss o c i at e e d i to r s

Regina Munch Griffin Oleynick f e at u r e s e d i to r

Alexander Stern m a n ag i n g e d i to r

Isabella Simon s p ec i a l p roj ec ts e d i to r

Miles Doyle e d i to r i a l a ss i sta n t

Kendall Gunter p ro d u c t i o n

David Sankey a rt d i r ec t i o n & d e s i g n

Point Five senior writer

Paul Baumann co n t r i b u t i n g e d i to r

Rand Richards Cooper e d i to r - at - l a rg e

Mollie Wilson O’Reilly s o c i a l m e d i a co o r d i n ato r

Max Foley-Keene co py e d i to r s

Susanne Washburn Christian Ramirez p o d c a st e d i to r

David Dault co n t r i b u t i n g w r i t e r s

E. J. Dionne Jr. Anthony Domestico Massimo Faggioli Rita Ferrone John Gehring Luke Timothy Johnson Cathleen Kaveny Matt Mazewski B. D. McClay Jo McGowan Paul Moses Mollie Wilson O’Reilly Santiago Ramos Susan Bigelow Reynolds Margaret O’Brien Steinfels Commonweal [ISSN 0010-3330], a review of religion, politics, and culture, is published monthly, except for a single July-August issue, by the Commonweal Foundation, 475 Riverside Drive, Rm. 244, New York, NY 10115. Telephone: (212) 662-4200. Email: editors@ commonwealmagazine.org. Fax: (212) 662-4183. postmaster: send address changes to Commonweal, P.O. Box 348, Congers, NY 10920-0348.

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Professor Douglas Laycock, in his article “The Only Way Forward” (January), discusses religious liberty and the Respect for Marriage Act with some degree of optimism. However, he misconstrues the political values of Roman Catholics in the United States when he implies that Roman Catholic Republicans “oppose all gay rights legislation” while Roman Catholic Democrats “oppose all religious liberty legislation” because of concerns about “gay rights, contraception, and abortion.” These three areas of controversy cannot be combined in this analysis— they are each distinct. Specifically, as to gay rights, recent polling by Gallup and others has determined that at least 69 percent of U.S. Roman Catholics support same-sex marriage. For this reason, one may conclude that not just Democratic Roman Catholics but, instead, also a very considerable number of Republican Roman Catholics favor legislation (and court rulings) protective of gay rights and same-sex marriage. Also of great concern, Professor Laycock posits a position specifically with regard to refusals of service to certain customers in commercial settings that all should challenge: he denies “that governments at any level have the same strong interest in suppressing traditional religious practices that they have in suppressing racist practices.” First, businesses such as cake bakers and computer designers that seek to deny such services to same-sex couples in the secular world are not engaged in “traditional religious practices.” More importantly, what Laycock incorrectly argues is that gay individuals are not entitled to Fourteenth Amendment equal protection of the law to the same extent as persons of color. If the Fourteenth Amendment existed only to protect the rights and privileges of persons of color, its lan-

guage would have so specified. Professor Laycock’s argument on this point is unfortunately insidious and unsupportable, although the current conservative majority of the Supreme Court may nevertheless countenance it. J. Riley Pearl River, N.Y.

DO UGLA S LAYCO C K R E P LI E S :

It is true that most Americans, including most Catholics, support the legalization of same-sex marriage. But I was talking about the behavior of elected officials. Most Republican legislators, of whatever faith, have opposed all gayrights legislation, and most Democratic legislators, of whatever faith, have opposed all religious-liberty legislation unless it explicitly excludes claims of conscientious objection to providing contraception or assisting with abortions or with same-sex weddings. The Respect for Marriage Act is a promising break in this gridlock. Similarly, it was Congress, not me, who said that governments do not “have the same strong interest in suppressing traditional religious practices that they have in suppressing racist practices.” The express congressional findings in the Respect for Marriage Act call on courts and governments to respect conservative religious views on samesex marriage. But I agree with Congress on this point, even though I didn’t say so. The LGBT community has suffered egregious discrimination in the United States until very recently, and to some extent it still does. But race is unique in our constitutional history. The LGBT community did not experience 250 years of slavery, and it did not require a Civil War, 750,000 deaths, three constitutional amendments, and 160 years and counting of efforts to enforce those amendments to achieve freedom

UNDERGRADUATE MINISTERS, STUDENT LEADERS, + EDUCATORS

FUTURO IS HERE AUGUST 1-3

A CONFERENCE FOCUSED ON advancing the practices of

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Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

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“American Catholicism: Highway to Hell? now available on Presents a series of rhetorical attempts to ‘save the patient’ of Church doctrine in America from the corruption of certain of its stewards’ personal ambitions. Charges of authoritarianism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny are made…as flagrant distortions of the teachings of Jesus.” Chris Clancy, author of We Take Care of Our Own (Montag Press).

The Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University announces a call for papers for a conference on the Second Vatican Council, The Legacy and Limits of Vatican II in an Age of Crisis: Gender, Race, Abuse, and the Living Catholic Tradition (November 30 – December 2, 2023). Proposals of no more than 300 words should be submitted by April 30, 2023, to Massimo Faggioli (mfaggiol@villanova.edu) and the steering committee secretary, Theresa Gardner (tgardn02@villanova.edu). The conference is sponsored by the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and the Office for Mission and Ministry at Villanova University.

For details, visit: villanova.edu/vatican2conference.

Commonweal F O U N D E D I N 1 9 24

from bondage and some semblance of equality for that community. Of course, the equal-protection clause protects the LGBT community, but the government’s compelling interest in stamping out discrimination reaches further with respect to race than with respect to LGBT rights. Same-sex couples are entitled to fully participate in the marketplace and to buy all the goods and services that they need or desire without surrendering or concealing their sexual orientation. Conservative religious believers are also entitled to fully participate in the marketplace and to pursue their chosen occupation without surrendering their faith commitments. Both groups’ rights can be fully protected in most cases. It is only when a conservative believer has a local monopoly, so that comparable goods or services are not available from another conveniently available seller, that the government has a compelling interest in overriding the believer’s conscientious objection to assisting with the celebration of a same-sex wedding.

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LETTERS

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Thanks to Clifford Thompson for a crisp and cogent analysis of the venerable Wendell Berry’s latest book (“One or Many?,” January). At eighty-eight, Berry is apparently still vibrant and able to contribute eloquently to exigent conversations and controversies afoot in contemporary America. A bighearted man with an abiding poetic temperament, Berry invites all who encounter his new book to ponder their place in the teeming salmagundi of today’s conflicting and often heated perspectives. I suspect he yearns deeply for metanoia—a collective change of heart, mind, and spirit leading to a more compassionate and charitable polity. Just how that might come about remains elusive. As we hope for such a beneficent transformation—along with the hard practical work required to make such a more irenic reality manifest here

and throughout our weary globe—time spent with any writings of Berry is always time well spent indeed. Joe Martin Seattle, Wash.

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PRESIDENT, INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED CATHOLIC STUDIES The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC, a global research center designed to strengthen the Catholic intellectual tradition and its ability to contribute to the important questions of the day, is seeking its next president. An independent nonprofit, IACS draws from an international pool of scholars from diverse disciplines and religious traditions to further innovative research and engage in sustained dialogue around the most pressing issues and the deepest concerns of our time. To inquire about the role, please send an email with your contact information, a cover letter and CV/resume attached to Michael P. Moreland, Chair of the Board of Trustees, at iacs@usc.edu with the subject line: IACS President. Learn more: iacs.usc.edu/presidentsearch

FROM T H E E D I TO RS

Israeli Democracy on the Brink

nother week, another raid by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the West Bank. The most recent took place in late February in the city of Nablus and lasted four hours. The battle left at least ten Palestinians dead (four were allegedly noncombatants, with video footage confirming that at least two unarmed Palestinians were gunned down while fleeing) and more than one hundred wounded. Much of the blame for the past year’s unprecedented uptick in violence—Palestinian deaths are at their highest levels in nearly two decades—belongs to the IDF’s “Breaking the Wave” operation, which has been carrying out near-daily actions since March 2022. Israel claims these raids are designed to neutralize terrorists and squelch armed Palestinian opposition, which has already taken the lives of eleven Israelis since the start of this year. Factor in the increase of violence committed by Israeli settlers and the growing despair felt by angry young Palestinians in the West Bank, and further mayhem is all but assured. Some analysts, including CIA Director William J. Burns, have predicted a large-scale uprising on par with the intifada of the early 2000s. Making the situation even more volatile is the political crisis unfolding in Jerusalem. For weeks, massive demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of mostly centrist Israelis have been taking place throughout the country in response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to “reform” the Israeli judiciary. The proposed changes, already approved by a preliminary vote in the Knesset, would effectively eliminate judicial review in Israel: parliament would be able to veto Supreme Court decisions by simple majority vote and appoint judges directly, bypassing the independent judiciary council. The proposals also modify Israel’s Basic Laws, weakening LGBT protections, making it harder for foreign Jews to obtain Israeli citizenship, and conveniently shielding Netanyahu, who is under indictment for corruption and other charges, from prosecution. Alarm at this blatant power grab has prompted comparisons to democratic backsliding in countries like Poland and Hungary. Israeli President Chaim Herzog, vested with symbolic authority but no actual power, used a prime-time address to declare Israel a “powder keg about to explode,” claiming that the country is “on the brink of a social and constitutional collapse.” Governor of the Bank of Israel Amir Yaron has warned that foreign investments, especially in Israel’s booming tech sector, could soon decline. Even the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, has begun issuing subtle rebukes: President Biden recently noted the “strong institutions, checks and balances, and independent judiciary” that sustain both American and Israeli democracy, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken has urged Netanyahu to “build consensus” before implementing any dramatic changes.

It is often argued that Israel’s claim to American support has historically rested less on shared political interests than on shared democratic values. Certainly, Israel presents itself as the sole democracy in a sea of autocratic regimes. But in reality, it is a strange kind of democracy—one without clearly defined borders recognized by the international community, and one that groups its citizens into two tiers according to their ethnicity, with foreign-born Jews enjoying more rights and privileges than Arab Israelis who grew up in Israel and whose families have lived and worked there for generations (and who account for about 20 percent of Israel’s population). Writing in the New York Times, Peter Beinart argues that the liberal Zionist vision of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” is “in reality a contradiction”: “Democracy means government by the people. Jewish statehood means government by Jews. In a country where Jews comprise only half of the people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the second imperative devours the first.” The fact that so few Arab Israelis are protesting the Netanyahu government’s “reforms” is telling: for them and for their occupied brethren in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel has never been a real democracy. Two years ago, we argued in these pages that Israel too often gets a “blank check” from the United States: “Every year the United States gives Israel almost $4 billion in aid with no strings attached, despite the illegal settlements in the West Bank, the inhuman blockade of Gaza, and the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem.” Since last November, it’s gotten much worse. Netanyahu’s power-sharing arrangement with right-wing extremists, including Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich and Jewish Power’s Itamar Ben-Gvir, has led to an acceleration of both illegal evictions of Arab Israelis in East Jerusalem and new settlement construction in the West Bank. The U.S. government still holds considerable leverage over Israel, which it has mostly declined to use. That must change. American support for Israel should be contingent not only on Israel’s preservation of democratic institutions like an independent judiciary, but also on its commitment to ending the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank and to protecting the human rights of Palestinians. Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed legislation that would make Israel accountable in this way. We shouldn’t let past American accession to Israeli demands—like the Trump administration’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem—prevent us from recognizing that Israel is now well on its way to becoming a rightwing ethnocracy. If the United States cares as much about promoting democracy as we say we do, then we need to show Netanyahu and the other dubious characters in his coalition that our support cannot be taken for granted.

march 2023

COMME NT

After the Earthquakes

t was 4:15 on a Monday morning when the ground started moving, and “the [bell] tower was shaking, and some pieces fell.” Suddenly awake and in shock, Giacomo Pizzi, an NGO worker who arrived in Aleppo, Syria, the day before, fled from his room in the St. Francis Monastery, seeking the relative safety of the street. The busted tower was the first sign of the quick and brutal destruction that visited the ancient city. Immediately after the February 6 earthquake, about five hundred people sought shelter in the St. Francis Monastery, where they endured a significant aftershock in the middle of the day. On February 20, another earthquake struck the region. News agencies report tens of thousands of deaths in Turkey and Syria, but numbers are hard to verify in war-torn Syria. This is a disaster on top of a disaster. Apart from damage to the bell tower and the cupola of its adjacent church, the monastery survived the earthquake, as did most other buildings in Aleppo’s downtown quarter of Azizieh. But there was more damage in the eastern part of the city, the target of regular aerial bombing campaigns during the civil war. “You cannot distinguish the rubble from the earthquake from the rubble that is left from the bombing of 2016,” Pizzi reported. The day after the first earthquakes, he ventured to east Aleppo to assess the damage in the three orphanages funded by his organization. All three buildings were mostly unscathed, but several of the orphans had died in their new homes. They were children born during—and sometimes because of—war, children who, in Pizzi’s words, “have never known peace.” Pizzi works for the Pro Terra Sancta Association (ATS), an NGO that promotes the cultural and natural preservation of the communities of

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the Holy Land. It is one of the many Western NGOs that provide the bulk of humanitarian aid in Syria. Apart from humanitarian projects, ATS helps develop small businesses and tourism. Before the earthquake, the organization had been working on reconstructing Aleppo through several development projects, including installing solar panels to generate electricity for a city whose infrastructure has been decimated by years of war. ATS is an arm of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, a network of monasteries spread across the Middle East; there is one in every major site mentioned in the New Testament. Like many NGOs working in Syria, ATS had stockpiled food and other supplies for years. Since the earthquakes, more humanitarian aid has arrived from the developed world. Orthodox and Catholic churches have been working together to distribute food and blankets. Fr. Bahjat Karakach, a Franciscan in Aleppo, found a sign of hope in this cooperation. The earthquake, he said, “has united our efforts, erased all our differences, mobilized all our capabilities.… This earthquake may be necessary to put us back on the map of the world and thanks to it we may be able to rebuild modern Syria.” In the northern coastal port of Latakia—what used to be called Laodicea—the Syrian regime’s large military presence has kept the city more intact than Aleppo. After the earthquake, refugees from the neighboring Idlib province, still controlled by anti-government rebels, flooded into Latakia, where there was already a refugee camp for Palestinians. ATS is present there as well, depending on what Pizzi calls “the machine of solidarity” around the world to provide supplies for those displaced by conflict and, now, natural disaster. To facilitate this work, the U.S. government has temporarily lifted its sanctions on Syria. Meanwhile, on the ground, churches—some equipped with generators—have become a refuge for many of those who suddenly

find themselves without homes during an exceptionally cold winter. —Santiago Ramos

Off the Rails

esidents of East Palestine, Ohio, are still reeling from a February 3 train derailment that led to a chemical explosion two days later. An overheated wheel bearing on one of the train’s 141 cars caused the accident on the small town’s eastern outskirts, less than half a mile from the Pennsylvania border. In the days after the crash, one of the five cars containing vinyl chloride—a known carcinogen used to make PVC plastic—registered an alarming temperature change that could have caused a catastrophic explosion. Officials issued an evacuation order, then vented and burned the cars, creating a toxic mushroom cloud. Other hazardous chemicals also leaked into the surrounding air and water, but three days later, on February 8, the EPA declared the air quality safe enough to end the evacuation. Returning residents have complained of headaches, dizziness, and strong chemical odors. Thousands of fish in local waterways have died from the contamination, but the chemicals that reached the Ohio river were diluted enough that municipal water is safe to drink. Residents with wells have been advised to drink bottled water until their wells have been tested. The derailed train was operated by Norfolk Southern, whose initial response to the accident made a bad situation worse. A letter from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro outlines the ways the company failed to consult state and local agencies about its disaster response and decision to vent and burn all the cars containing vinyl chloride. Shapiro accused Norfolk Southern of “prioritizing an accelerated and arbitrary timeline to reopen the rail line,” which “injected unnecessary risk and created confusion.” This

is not the first time a rail company has sought to maximize profits at the expense of workers and communities. In the name of greater efficiency, railroads have in recent years slashed staff and stretched their remaining employees to the breaking point. Their lobbyists have also resisted safety regulations at every turn. They persuaded the Trump administration to roll back a 2015 rule that required rail companies to modernize the “Civil War–era” brakes on any train carrying “high-hazard” materials. Before the accident in East Palestine, President Biden’s administration had made no attempt to restore that rule. Now, in the face of growing criticism, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is finally calling for both stricter regulations and harsher penalties for safety violations. The Department of Transportation might begin by reinstating the 2015 rule and putting vinyl chloride on the list of high-hazard materials that would require updated brakes. Norfolk Southern has promised to support East Palestine as it recovers from the accident and has already provided more than a million dollars for residents and businesses affected by the evacuation orders. The company, which now faces multiple lawsuits, claims it’s “not going anywhere,” though it decided to skip a town-hall meeting where community members gathered to ask questions about their safety. Fortunately, no one was injured in either the derailment or the subsequent explosion, but the long-term effects of the accident on the local environment will depend on the speed and thoroughness of the cleanup. So far, the damage appears limited; tests of more than five hundred homes have not revealed any signs of dioxins or other toxic chemicals. Still, without improved regulation, the next derailment—and there will be another—could have much worse consequences. The railroad industry has proved incapable of policing itself, and unworthy of public trust. The federal government must force it to prioritize safety over profits. —Isabella Simon

The Future of Antitrust

n his 1979 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter proposed to fight crippling inflation through, in part, “better enforcement of our antitrust laws.” A month later, Carter withheld support from new antitrust legislation championed by Sen. Ted Kennedy, and Kennedy’s efforts fizzled. The next year Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, who ushered in an era of widespread, little-challenged corporate concentration that continued largely unabated through the Obama administration. When, in February, President Biden asked Congress to “pass bipartisan legislation to strengthen antitrust enforcement,” it marked the first time since Carter’s address that a president’s State of the Union had included the word “antitrust.” Since taking office, Biden has placed aggressive antitrust advocates in prominent positions, including Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice.They have joined a group of concerned senators, including Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren and even some Republicans like Mike Lee, to create new momentum around antitrust. Klobuchar and Lee led a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee into the monopolistic practices of concert promoter Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010. Ticketmaster built its monopoly through a run of acquisitions—it bought seven competitors between 1985 and 1991—and a mix of aggressive and illegal tactics like predatory pricing, kickbacks, exclusivity agreements with artists and venues, and retaliation against those challenging its position. When Pearl Jam circumvented Ticketmaster by scheduling a 1994 tour in far-flung outdoor venues, the company was accused of organizing promoters to boycott the tour. A subsequent antitrust investigation by the Justice Department ended without action against Ticketmaster.

Since then, Ticketmaster’s fees have grown, sometimes reaching up to 75 percent of ticket face value. Now, “Live Nation is so powerful,” Klobuchar said in her opening statement, “that it doesn’t even need to exert pressure, it doesn’t need to threaten, because people just fall in line.” The hearing followed a botched presale of tickets for a Taylor Swift tour, which left many fans stranded after hours of trying to navigate a faulty system. An ongoing investigation into the company could result in an anti-monopoly suit. Live Nation has responded by ramping up its lobbying operation and retaining the antitrust subcommittee’s former general counsel. On the same day as the hearing, Kanter announced a suit against Google’s ad business. Where Ticketmaster has inserted itself between artists and fans, Google occupies a chokepoint between advertisers and publishers. A series of acquisitions, forced adoption of Google tools, and anticompetitive ad auctions have left publishers with few alternatives to Google’s service, which extracts an average of 30 percent of ad revenue. Lost advertising revenue has contributed heavily to the recent decimation of local journalism. Antitrust advocates are also proposing new legislation to rein in anticompetitive practices, especially in big tech. In a recent speech of her own, Sen. Warren listed bills that would prohibit tech platforms from “unfairly preferencing their own products” and “abusing their control over their app stores.” Despite broad bipartisan support, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has never brought these bills to the floor for a vote. Critics have pointed to Schumer’s substantial ties to big tech, including numerous former staffers and a daughter now lobbying for the industry. In a divided government, antitrust legislation is one of the few items on Biden’s agenda that might have enough votes to pass, but the new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, also has a reputation for friendliness to big tech. Antitrust advocates will have to contend not just with corporate concentration, but also with the concentration of power in Congress. —Alexander Stern

march 2023

S H O RT TA KE S SUSAN BIGELOW REYNOLDS

Ways of the Cross What a four-century-old Passion play reveals about the meaning of tradition

A scene set in Bethany at the Oberammergau Passion Play in Germany

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nity in Atlanta’s Peoplestown neighborhood memorialized Jesus’ Crucifixion beside the burned-out Wendy’s parking lot where police officers killed Rayshard Brooks in 2020. I’ve become captivated by the question of what it is about the Stations of the Cross—this quintessentially traditional, medieval devotion and its fourteen-station template—that makes it such a rich site of theological agency for communities on the margins. Aside from its source material, the Oberammergau Passion play has little in common with these urban Ways of the Cross. Its origin story begins in 1633, when village leaders assembled under a wooden crucifix in the parish

courtyard and begged God to save the plague-ravaged community from further death. In return, they promised to perform Christ’s Passion every ten years. Plague deaths miraculously subsided, and the following year, villagers made good on their vow. With a few notable interruptions, villagers have staged the Passion about once a decade for nearly four centuries. The play was slated to debut for the forty-second time in 2020, until—ironically—the pandemic forced a two-year delay. Under three-time director Christian Stückl, Christ’s Passion in Oberammergau becomes a wrenching, intimate, sometimes chaotic psychological

cns photo / birgit gudjonsdottir , passionsspiele oberammergau 2022

n September 2022, I traveled to Oberammergau, Ger many, to attend the village’s world-famous, once-a-decade Passion play. I’m working on a book about how local communities reinterpret the Stations of the Cross to claim divine solidarity in the face of injustice, a project that has led me to Passion rituals of many kinds. Last Good Friday, students invited me to join an ecumenical Atlanta congregation composed predominantly of people living on the street as they carried a cross down a gentrified stretch of busy Ponce de Leon Avenue to lament the racialized displacement wrought by recent urban redevelopment. The next day, a commu-

theo-drama. Performed in German on an open-air stage, the play is nearly six hours long, in addition to a three-hour break in the middle for dinner. Scenes are punctuated by “living images”— color-saturated, summarily haunting tableaux from Hebrew Scripture that, in Stückl’s vision, strive for longue durée rather than biblical typology—and carried by a full orchestra and chorus performing a score adapted from one composed some two centuries ago. But what has made the Oberammergau Passionsspiele a source of global fascination has arguably less to do with its content and more with the traditions associated with its production. To participate, a person must have been born and raised in Oberammergau or have resided there for at least twenty years. (Anyone under the age of eighteen can perform, no matter how long they’ve lived in town.) Everyone from the village has the right to participate; the 2022 production featured a cast, chorus, and crew of nearly two thousand people, around 40 percent of the village’s total population. Preparations begin years in advance. To achieve that rugged first-century look, villager-actors refrain from cutting their hair or trimming their beards beginning on Ash Wednesday the year before the play. The lives of the Bavarian village and its people revolve around the play in ways that feel beguilingly incongruent with Western Europe’s otherwise late-modern secular milieu. It’s impossible to listen to a cool and self-described religiously ambivalent German twentysomething talk about eagerly putting his life on hold for a year—leaving university, quitting his job, moving back home with his parents, all for the chance to join his neighbors on stage in a play about Jesus’ Crucifixion—and not come away wondering what exactly is going on here. But it’s another question raised by the play that I find most exigent: What is tradition? And, faced with tradition, who are we? Adherents? Agents? Something else? In 2000, Columbia University English Professor James Shapiro published an exposé that traced the play’s anti-Semitic history and complicity in

The lives of the Bavarian village and its people revolve around the play in ways that feel beguilingly incongruent with Western Europe’s otherwise late-modern secular milieu. Nazi persecution of the Jews. When the book debuted, most community leaders still approached the play’s troubling past with a mix of denial and shame. Twenty-three years and three productions later, actors discuss the history with frank sincerity. In August 2022, the American Jewish Committee honored Stückl with the Isaiah Award for Exemplary Interreligious Leadership for catalyzing a village-wide reckoning with the play’s legacy. In sustained consultation with Jewish groups, Stückl exorcized the play’s anti-Semitism and reinvented the production to accentuate Jesus’ Jewish identity. In the conservative Bavarian village still haunted by the region’s Nazi past, the decades-long process of revising the play was politically arduous and personally risky. It’s also clear that what seemed at the time to be a departure from tradition was in fact, for the play, a necessary act of salvation. Change has come in other ways, too. Before 1990, concerns that any woman in the play appear properly virginal meant that only unmarried women under the age of thirty-five were allowed to perform. Deputy Director Abdullah Karaca explained that after the rule was changed, four hundred women who had previously been excluded signed up to act. The play widened to incorporate them, creating new roles and amplifying crowd scenes. Today, no one would guess that the old women around town whose long gray hair signifies their participation in the play had ever been excluded from the tradition. Karaca, who portrayed Nicodemus, was as sensitive as anyone to the ever-widening circle of inclusion: he was one of two Muslims in the 2022 production. Nowadays, Karaca noted, the question on many people’s minds is whether the residency requirement should be amended. Those who want to maintain the rule invoke the sanctity of tradition. But, he explained, the rule was only

instituted in 1960 to keep World War II refugees from participating. It called to mind the scores of Confederate monuments across the U.S. South erected not by grieving Civil War widows, as some would like to imagine, but by Jim Crow–era segregationists seeking new ways to terrorize Black citizens with the white gaze. How much of what we call tradition is just the loosely calcified discriminations of some recent past? When is change an act of fidelity? How do we learn to tell honest stories about the things we’ve inherited? Scholarly accounts of urban Good Friday processions like the ones I’m researching all seem to include a quotation from a participant firmly disavowing the idea that their ritual is a “Passion play.” The idea, I guess, is that Passion plays are benign and apolitical, part of a dusty genre of lacy, sentimental piety. A via crucis that winds through the streets of San Antonio or Atlanta or Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, on the other hand, is something different, something real: defiant, rooted, prophetic. It’s a reasonable conclusion— but, I now see, an incomplete one. Every Passion play, whether on stage or in the streets, is an act of filling in the blanks; to fill in the blanks is to do the work of tradition. I went to Oberammergau because I viewed it as the consummate Passion play, the pious control group against which the radical nature of the other Passion rituals I planned to examine would become even more apparent. Yet as I delved into the play’s complicated history and the work it has taken to remake and redeem it, such distinctions have become blurrier. I’m still not sure where Oberammergau will fit into the narrative I’m crafting, but I do know that it won’t be as a foil. SUSAN BIGELOW REYNOLDS is assistant

professor of Catholic studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University.

march 2023

S H O RT TA KE S

A mudslide blocks the road in Studio City, California, January 10, 2023.

KATHERINE LUCKY

Letter from California

commonweal

We’d prayed for it constantly, through smoke-choked air. Now, it was here. “When can we stop praying for rain?” a congregant asked as we stood huddled under the awning afterwards. And so we changed our prayers, petitioning for those who’d lost property and life. Along with the rain came the analysis. The downpours had not, as we’d naïvely hoped, ended the drought. The reservoirs weren’t yet full, and the fish populations were far from recovered. We simply hadn’t invested in the infrastructure to capture and treat the water for drinking. Now it was draining into the Pacific Ocean—the absurdity! Climate change was to blame for the pace of the storms and the amount of moisture they carried, and thus for the inability of the reservoirs to keep up. More crises were

sarah reingewirtz / the orange county register via ap

State of Disaster

t the start of the year, rain finally fell. The colors on the drought map started to fade, from the reds of “exceptional” and “extreme” to the oranges of “severe,” even “moderate.” Ponds and creeks appeared in places we’d never known were meant for water. In those early weeks, the rain came with consequences. Neighborhoods flooded and mudslides wrecked homes. A flower farmer I know couldn’t make his usual trek to our market; a tree had crushed his delivery truck. Power outages caused by more falling trees left another acquaintance with a steep repair bill after a generator malfunction fried her electrical wiring. “But we need it, we need it,” she said of the rain. In church, we thanked God for relief from drought.