Faith, says Joseph Cardinal Tobin, is not what you do on Sunday mornings. It's who you are. It's how you see. It's how you act.
"A
joke I use sometimes to illustrate this is the one about the priest
who's reading his breviary on a plane," he says. "At one point the
flight attendant comes out of the cockpit rather ashen-faced and says,
'The pilot informs us we can't get the landing gear to descend. Make
sure you're strapped in and assume the crash position.' The priest snaps
his breviary shut and says, 'Oh my God, I'd better pray.'"
He's
got an easy sense of humor, but Cardinal Tobin takes his role as a
leader of the faithful seriously. He's one of the U.S. Catholic Church's
most prominent voices against deportations and immigration bans. As the
previous archbishop of Indianapolis he challenged Vice President Mike
Pence, then the governor of Indiana, when Pence proclaimed Syrian
refugees would not be resettled in the state. More recently he
accompanied Catalino Guerrero, a Mexican immigrant faced with
deportation, to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center after
Guerrero was summoned to appear there in March.
His model
of leadership is notable--one of accompaniment that does not shy away
from reminders that our gospel mandate is to serve the common good--and
it's earned him a reputation as a "Francis bishop." Cardinal Tobin says
the association is inevitable (the pope named him a cardinal and
appointed him to the embattled Newark archdiocese late last year).
"Personally, I think that 'Francis bishops' are going to look different,
and I hope so," he says.
You said at your
installation as the archbishop of Newark that the biggest challenge the
church faces today is the chasm between life and faith. What did you
mean by that?
We're encouraged to compartmentalize
faith. Faith is seen as equivalent to worship and thereby reduced to an
hour on Sunday morning, if that. It really impoverishes the notion of
faith, of which the biblical image is a type of vision, a different way
of looking at things.
Faith is not an opiate or belief in
the pie in the sky and the great by-and-by. It's about the great drama
of human existence and seeing something differently. I think that part
of ministry and the life of the church is to help people make that
connection, to see something differently.
Faith tells me
that my life with God is not simply about me and Jesus, because if it's
just me and Jesus, then it's mainly about me. Faith impels me to have
the vision to see other people not as objects or people who will do
things that will meet my needs but as fellow daughters and sons of God,
as brothers and sisters, as fellow pilgrims.
I ask
Catholics to reflect: Do we identify predominantly with a political
school or a personality or a label? Or primarily as disciples of Jesus?
This
notion of "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious," is really another way
of saying, "I want to separate the faith part of me from everything
else." But religion is a lifestyle. It means that what I believe
influences the way that I live. I think that's true in politics as well.
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