Post-Election conversation, featuring Sr. Simone Campbell and Fr. Bryan Massingale

Heidi, Daniel, and David welcome their guests, Fr. Bryan Massingale and Sr. Simone Campbell, SSS, to look at the 2024 election and address the questions, How are we doing? How did we get here? and Where do we go from here?

Segment 1 - How are we doing?

Sr. Simone Campbell, SSS

Fr, Bryan Massingale

Ignatian Family Teach In for Justice

The story of Jesus in the boat

Pete Seeger - “Old Devil Time”

Segment 2 - How did we get here?

Astead Herndon - “The signs were here all along”

Ta-Nahesi Coates - “Donald Trump is Our First White President”

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, chapter 16

Data on the Catholic white vote, firmly in the MAGA camp now

Segment 3 - Where did we go from here?

The NCR editorial about the election: “Hope in a Time of Darkness”

Fr. Massingale’s remarks at the Ignatian Family Teach in for Justice

Sr. Simone’s book, Hunger for Hope

Fr. Massingale speaking at Center for Study of Spirituality on Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024

Fr. Massingale keynote for the 2024 LCWR Conference

“We never learned how to weep in the wake of the sex abuse scandal”

The importance of lament

TRANSCRIPT

SEGMENT 1

DAULT: Hello and welcome to the Francis Effect Podcast. My name is David Dult. I host a radio show

called Things Not Seen about Culture and Faith, and I'm an assistant professor of Christian Spirituality at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago. I'm here with my friends Heidi Schlump and Dan Harran.

I. Heidi is senior correspondent at National Catholic Reporter, a publication that connects Catholics to church faith and the common good with independent news analysis and spiritual reflection. Dan is professor of philosophy, religious studies and theology, and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at St.

Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He's also affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss news and events through a lens of our shared Catholic faith. And today we are recording this episode the day after the 2024 election, and we are joined today by two wonderful guests and friends of the podcast.

Sister Simone Campbell served as executive director of the network lobby for Catholic Social Justice from 2004 to 2021. She's a religious leader, attorney and poet with extensive experience in public policy and advocacy for systemic change. You may know her as well from her six cross country tours with the nuns on the bus.

And Father Brian Massengale, who is Professor and James and Nancy Buckman chair in Applied Christian ethics in the Department of Theology at Fordham University. I wanna say welcome to everybody and what we're gonna do today is basically have a freeform conversation and it's going to, it's gonna move in sort of three acts in the first act.

We're going to be talking about how we're doing. In the second segment we're gonna be talking about and looking at how we got here. And then in the third segment we're gonna be asking where do we go from here? And so, I just want to first of all welcome everyone to the conversation. And I guess I would start as I usually do with you, Heidi, and just say, you know, how are you doing?

SCHLUMPF: Well, thank you David for our guests and I'm very to be with Brian and Simon as well with you, David and Dan. So I guess what I would say this morning is that I'm not doing that well. I'm feeling grateful first of all to be here with all of you, with you and to be able to talk to our listeners.

But I'm feeling a lot of hard feelings this morning. I'm sad. I am angry. I am scared. I worry about bringing up a family and children in a budding, authoritarian, or at least quasi authoritarian country. And I'm not one to rush past hard feelings, so I'm gonna be honest. And it's only 10 o'clock in the morning.

I'm still in Madison, Wisconsin, where I went to report for NCR about the election. I haven't returned home yet, haven't seen my family yet. I. So, yeah, I'm not gonna move past those hard feelings, but I will say NCR had a great editorial this morning that talked about hope and where we need to go forward, and we'll talk about that more in the podcast.

But for now, I'm gonna be honest with my hard feelings. What about you, Dan? How are you feeling?

HORAN: I want to echo as well, David and Heidi and thanking Father Brian and Sister Simone for joining us. Yeah, I think there's gonna be one common thread, which is a spirit of. Disappointment, a spirit of numbness of anger, of sadness, of fear, as you said, Heidi I was spending some time this morning reflecting on how I actually feel.

I, I stayed up to about 1130 Eastern time last night and realized that, this was gonna go a bit longer than it was worth staying up. I woke at four o'clock in the morning and like an idiot looked at my phone and saw that Trump had won Pennsylvania. And so he had not been declared the winner yet, but he was three electoral college votes away from that. And so it was essentially a, a fate to complete. And so I haven't been, I didn't, wasn't able to go back to sleep, as you might imagine. So I may be a little punchy. My, my apologies to our guests and to our listeners, but I think the summary that I have for my initial feeling at this early hour, at this early time is that I am not surprised.

I don't think I can be surprised after 2016 in the last nine years. I am existentially disappointed. I'm disappointed not because this is some aberrant some sort of different reflection of who we are as a country. I think I'm disappointed because it is a mirror held up to who we are and we will see that Trump is projected to win actually the popular vote.

The first Republican in 20 years to do that. That should say a lot about who we are and who America is at this moment. So that's my initial kind of starting point. I imagine many of our listeners can empathize and sympathize with us. I'm very curious. Sister Simone, you are somebody who has been a champion, as a lobbyist, as an advocate, as an educator, as a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient from.

Soon to be former President Joe Biden. What are your feelings this morning?

CAMPBELL: Well, I echo what you've been saying. Dan, there must've been some four o'clock magic 'cause that's when I woke up myself. But I'd gone to bed earlier 'cause I just can't stand the empty horse race punditry and decided to get up and once I saw that Pennsylvania had. Been called for Trump, I leapt out of bed and went to my meditation cushion to try to focus.

And the first thing that came to my mind is I live in DC and I thought I should go back to California because I need to be with my people. And then what came to me later, after about 20 minutes of trying just to let it be, was no. You need to continue. You need to stay in the process. And I think that's what I've learned.

I went to three of the swing states this summer and saw a commitment of people to be engaged, but a feeling of being left out. And I was in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the pain of feeling not seen or not heard. It made me wonder if we worry too much about we progressives. I put myself in that camp, worry too much about policy and not enough about people, and how do we open our hearts so people feel received? That's my big question at this point.

DAULT: And I'd invite you, father Massengale, if you wanted to tell us how you're doing as well. That's most welcome.

MASSINGALE: Like you guys I went to bed around 11 o'clock 'cause I realized that this is gonna be going later and I didn't want to be, I didn't wanna witness what I thought was going to happen. So I turned off my phone, turned off my iPad, put them both in the bottom drawer of my dresser so I wouldn't be distracted by them.

So I tried to sleep and I didn't sleep very well at all, and I said, I'll deal with what it's going to be in the morning. And so I woke up and. Turned on the phone and Pennsylvania had not yet been called but then turned on the TV and it was like a quarter to six New York time and that's when they called it and said he was the president elect.

And the first word that went through my mind was devastated. I am really devastated. I'm really feeling, I don't wanna say betrayed by the country. Because frankly, I always thought that Kamala Harris had an uphill battle. She was going against the forces of misogyny and white supremacy and anti-black racism. I guess I am angry that people aren't more honest about those forces and weren't more honest.

You don't find a lot of pundits naming that explicitly because I think we as Americans can't do that. Then I had to turn off the TV because I realized that all the pundits on TV were doing what I'm doing, trying to process in real time. And that wasn't very helpful. And I got, I really got angry with someone who said that, you know, this is not who we are and I wanna say no.

This is who we are. This is who we are. And I think that we really have to. Accept and embrace that fact that this is who America is or the majority of Americans. And so I find I, another thing I found distasteful was when someone said, well, no matter what happened, half of the country is going to be sad and angry.

And I said, that's a lazy way of thinking. Because they're sad and angry and afraid for different reasons. And I am I've friends have been texting me. I, man probably you and my LBTQ friends. Really wondering what does this mean? I have friends who are raising trans children and wondering, is this country going to be safe for them?

I have, Latino friends who are wondering in Arizona, now what does this mean? 'cause we're a mixed, our family is mixed document, you know, immigration status. So what does this mean for us? And I think the. It is devastating for me personally. It's devastating for our public health. It's devastating for the environment.

It's also devastating for our Catholic faiths, and I don't, maybe shouldn't go there right now, but I'm have to say that in addition to being devastated, I'm also very angry and furious. Our Catholic leaders. I just wanna put that out there and just say that this is a great defeat for Catholic social teaching because our bishops have never, didn't really embrace it. I think that's a real problem and I think we have to face that as Catholics.

HORAN: I just wanna pick up on that point that you mentioned about, you know, the silence of the bishops and two things come to mind immediately. One is that in the Catholic tradition, we have this belief that sin is not only a sin of commission. And here I am, you know, with, you know, Brian you're the ethicist.

You know this inside and out a thousand times better than the rest of us, but we also have the sins of omission, right? It's what we failed to do. And I think that doesn't get enough play at mass. You know, we're very quick at the penitential Act to, to say these words, but then to take them seriously with an examination of conscience.

I had a very similar sort of thought as well this morning where I'm like, did we examine our consciences as a collective group of people, as the body politic, but also the body of Christ before yesterday? And I don't think my answer to that is no. And I think the leaders of our faith community, the bishops in particular.

Have a responsibility as Episcopal, as overseers in their positions of authority and of teaching and of leadership to do this and to model this all the more, right, in addition to all of us. So I think there's a real sin of omission that plays out there. The second thing I wanna highlight is that, you know, with the exception of my own Franciscan, you know.

Brother Roberto Gonzalez down in San Juan, Puerto Rico, who was actually the only bishop that I could see in the United States after Trump's Madison Square Garden debacle and hate rally, who spoke out concretely and directly by name, calling out the then former president and now president elect.

Where was the rest of that? Where was the Cardinal Archbishop of the diocese of New York? In, in whose backyard that took place? You know, who sat next to the same? Presidential candidate at the Al Smith dinner just weeks before, right? So I think you know this, the sin of omission, the silence is deafening and it is infuriating when we don't have the kind of moral leadership that we ought to expect.

MASSINGALE: If I can piggyback on that piece, being in New York, I when you have someone at Madison Square Garden who insults Puerto Ricans insults, Latinos insulted black people, and you put all those groups together, that's the majority of the church of the Archdiocese of New York and the Chief Shepherd of this archdiocese can't even be moved to tell his people.

I love you. I mean, I think this is this goes beyond omission. This is where the lack of action becomes an action in itself. And I think what another thing we have to examine ourselves on is that so many of our leaders have used this thing about being nonpartisan and need to be nonpartisan as an excuse to not say anything.

And I was at the Ignatian Family Teaching for Justice and I challenged them. I said, look. Truth is not a partisan value, it's a gospel value. Integrity is not a partisan value. It's a gospel value. Compassion for the immigrant is not a partisan value, it's a gospel value. So to use this, you know, need to be nonpartisan as a way of avoiding entry of guiding us.

In an ethical conversation about what we were seeing and hearing, and the raw hate and the blatant misogyny and the blatant racism. I think this goes beyond omission. I mean, these are willful acts, willful decisions to not act, and that's where I get really furious.

CAMPBELL: Well, I, if I could just move on that because I think, okay, so I'm not the eist and I'm not the theologian. I'm the political actor here. So just in terms of politics, that what I saw in my travels was so many people feeling left out of anyone's care. And to me, this goes to the heart of what you just said, Brian, is that the, not even say that the people are loved, that they're cared about, that they're engaged with and feeling.

Unseen unheard left out both politically and within our church structure. It really says to me that church has become, like every other institution more interested in its own economics than it is in its faithfulness to mission. And the challenge of this time is for us as Catholics to say. That we step into the gospel and live it now.

And a retreat, I had this image that from Mark's gospel of Jesus asleep in the boat and a storm at sea, and the apostles are trying to wake Jesus up. Well, one of the things that came to me after some meditation a couple of days, it was maybe the Jesus's sleep is the mystical body. And as we're talking now, I'm wondering.

If that body's asleep because it doesn't know it's loved into life.

SCHLUMPF: So I just wanna circle back though, and know that we're so excited to get into our conversation here, that we didn't check in with you, David, and I was wondering how, I wanna know what time you went to bed and what time you got up. I'm unlike all you other early to bed, early to rise people. I stayed up till three 30 in the morning, so I'm also dragging today.

But David, how are you doing?

DAULT: So for the sake of my consistent mental health, I have a routine that I go to bed at a certain time and I try and get a certain amount of hours because if I don't just because of the way that my brain chemistry is wired, I start to hallucinate. And so, I went to bed at my normal time. I kind of did my care routine with that.

But I did wake up at about. 5 45 this morning and like everybody else I went right to the NPR page and it took me a couple minutes of looking at it to realize what I was seeing and to see that check mark next to Trump's name. And my wife and I took a long walk this morning. There's been, I.

Tears in our household. We've talked to our teenage children. We've been in touch with our family this week who our extended family has trans persons in it and other people who are vulnerable and at risk, and at least one person who whose family is Puerto Ricans. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of concern.

And on our walk this morning with my wife, we talked a lot about kind of, finding ways to conserve energy and to find ways to build sites of care and resistance. So that might mean pulling back from certain things that we've been doing and really concentrating cis. Sister Simone, I'm thinking about what you said a few minutes ago about, I need to find my people.

And I think that's kind of where we are right now, is we are wanting to build and strengthen networks of care and solidarity that we have. And also, just to answer your question, Heidi, something that's been going through my mind all morning. I'm a fan of the old songwriter Pete Seeger, and he has a song called Old Devil Time.

And there's a phrase in that song, old Devil Fear You with your icy hands. Old devil fear you'd like to freeze me cold when I'm afraid my lovers gather round and help me rise to fight you one more time. And I think right now I'm just, I'm wanting. To gather around with my beloveds and to let them know that they are safe, and that I will put my body in the way to protect them and keep them safe.

And to use my whiteness and my maleness, and my middle agedness and my, my intact income ness to help to. Be a shield to them. But also, you know, there's a real fear right now that this time around is going to take a lot from us and it may not be enough. And so, I mean, I'm still, I am still processing a lot of this Listeners, we know that you also are probably processing a lot of raw emotions right now, and so please know that you and your loved ones, and particularly the vulnerable ones in your life, are in our prayers and that we are here with concern in solidarity with you.

As this conversation continues, please exercise self-care. If you need to step away from hearing us talk about this and come back to it later, that's completely fine. For right now, we're gonna take a quick. Break. We'll be back in just a couple of minutes. You're listening to the Francis Effect.

SEGMENT 2

HORAN: Welcome back to The Francis Effect. I'm Dan Horan. I'm here with David Dolt and Heidi Schlump, and with our guests Father Brian Massengale and Sister Simone Campbell. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss politics, culture, contemporary events, all through the lens of our shared Catholic faith.

We're in our special post-election round table conversation, and we're moving now to this question of how do we get here? This morning I was really eager to listen to and happy to hear the New York Times political reporter Ted Herndon, who has been traveling the country, interviewing all kinds of people, not unlike our own sister, Simone Campbell has talked to people on the ground and had a sense of what they've been experiencing and with, spirit of almost prophetic anger, which is atypical of a New York Times reporter. Ted Herndon said that the signs were here all along, that the polls were very clear about the fact that the Biden administration and subsequently the Harris campaign were not seen as the change candidates that they had convinced themselves of, and that he pointed out a lot of these themes were not surprising and yet.

A lot of decisions were avoided or there was a sort of, kind of internal conversation that led to this. And he raised some really interesting points, but with a lot of fervor because he had spent all this time in recent months talking to people on the ground, a perspective that I had not heard very much among the punditry for sure.

I also, this morning, was thinking about. Tanah Hasi Coates's 2017 article in the Atlantic Magazine that Donald Trump is our first white president. And he does, you know, I encourage everybody to go back and read that amazing and troubling piece. These both point to questions, some initial proposals, some touching on intersecting themes that might address our segment question.

Now, how do we get here? And at the risk of. Trying to present theories of the case the morning after. Recognizing that this is all quite tentative, what are you all thinking about? You know, we've seen Ted Hardin's case, Tanah Hasse Coates's case continues to ring true today. Particularly Sister Simone.

Father Brian, do you have thoughts this morning about, how did we get here? I.

MASSINGALE: I'll take a stab at. It but also with the caveat that these are initial musings and I reserved the right to change my mind I'm glad you brought Tommy Ey Coates, the first white president. If you go back to Trump's rallies where he is talking over about his beautiful white skin and the beautiful white skin that he has, it's not just an isolated reference.

It's over and over again. Trump has made white grievance and white fear of a changing country central to his message from the day he descended the escalator back in 2015. This has been a consistent through line. Of who he is and his public persona, even before he ran for president. And yet we as a country have never really have this master the skills of how to talk about race in public.

We deny it, but Trump has made this central, and yet we never really look at how central it is. The other thing is I think we don't appreciate is the fact that this election showed how we as a country are at war with ourselves. And it's not a civil war in terms of like a violent war. Those just as erupt in violence, but we're torn between our never realized aspirations to liberty and justice for all.

Yet the darker realities of white supremacy and anti-black racism and patriarchy that are woven into this country's DNA. Yet we've never been able to articulate exactly this constant war that's there. And what we saw in this start here, you know, Kawa Harris and Donald Trump really put before us, they called the question in a sense, what is this country?

And who are we? I think that's why people perceive this as being so existential, because it was existential, even beyond policy disagreements and things like that. I think the mistake we made as, or many pundits made was treat this as a choice between policy alternatives. Whereas in reality it was a choice between who are we? And our inability to really face that question that we this constant warfare in the American soul between our public. We articulated aspirations, but the deeper, darker realities that are woven into the foundation of this country. And that's what this election was about. And that's why I think it's hitting us so deeply in a visceral way.

CAMPBELL: I really agree with that in my preliminary thoughts and reserve the right to change my mind on this too. But Brian, I think in my travels, the thing that I saw or heard from people often was a feeling of not being seen. Of being left out by the policies, but it wasn't about the policies. Everybody said, oh yeah, the, you know, the inflation reduction act there, all those policies were great, but me, I'm not there.

And we see a real decline in that sense of community, a sense of connectedness. Living in metropolitan areas or rural areas, people have less of a sense that we're in this together and this election. I think really that anger, the all of that really comes from an individualism where the sense is nobody has my back, nobody has it, and I need to take care of myself.

And anger is what I bring to the ballot box. It's painful. Community. It goes back to our conversation about church too and our incapacity to create community in church. But that's another thing. But the lack of community, I think is where much of this resides.

HORAN: I wanna pick up on that and then I'm eager to hear David and Heidi what you think. Just because. This morning when I came into the office, when I came to campus, one of my colleagues another theologian and I were having a conversation and she said exactly this point, Simone, that you're naming.

And she said I feel as if, and here we are, we're a blue.in South Bend in a very red state of Indiana. But she said I feel as if this community thing is exactly the. Diagnosis, right. That is the disease here. And I said, you know it, it reminds me of Robert Putnam's famous book, bowling Alone.

You know, this has been forecasted back to the nineties, but then in the digital age, and you know. You have. Oftentimes there's been talk as there has been in this election about the college versus non-college voter. And in both camps now there is this lack of kind of fraternization. There's this lack of association, lack of institutional belonging, religious belonging, but also I.

Social belonging. You know, the blue collar workers aren't hanging out Friday night with their spouses and friends at the Elks Club anymore. They're, these things are gone. And so there's no rubbing shoulders with the lived experiences of other people, even people in your own backyard, in your own neighborhood.

And so I really think there's something to that. Heidi, David, what do you think?

SCHLUMPF: I guess. One of the things I would say about when we look at like, how did we get here, is that for the last six to nine months, even year, I've been reporting about this election and I've written more stories about Trump voting Catholics and I attended the Republican convention you know, as well as the Democratic convention and you know.

Believe me, you know, the way our media works the way our communities are disenfranchised is part of this. But I will say that there is communities, there's just separate communities. So I, you know, I, when people often ask me like, what was it like at the Republican convention in Milwaukee? Was everybody so mean?

I'm like, no. They were actually really nice. They were all very happy. And of course at that time they were very positive about their chances of winning. They're all nice to each other. But if I had identified myself as who I am, you know, and I was identified as media, then they wouldn't have been that way towards me.

So there is that community, but o and I feel a lot of community if my techs are blowing up this morning from my neighbors and my friends and my fellow worried liberal Catholics. But there's not the mix of communities. And you talk about being, you know, dots. I live in Illinois and looking at that map.

Just seeing how the red surrounds it. I mean, there was Minnesota, which wasn't called until so late. But for a long time it was just this, it's like blue Illinois and just everything around it. But that's, Illinois is a red state with this blue city. It's just that our.in Illinois is so big that it turns the state blue.

You know, and I'm here in Madison, which is another blue.in a now red state like you were saying Dan, about, about South Bend. So I am not surprised by the reaction. Yes, it was still a gut punch, not in the same way that 2016 was, but given what I observed and the, especially in the Catholic community, that people have been given permission to.

Not just be a Republican. Believe me I would give anything to go back to where we had Republicans and Democrats who could just debate and compromise about the best way to move our country forward. But people on Catholics and other Americans who've been given permission to be part of a movement that is so antithetical to our country and our religion, that's where we are now.

CAMPBELL: I please correct something because it was really important to me that. Your last comments were Heidi, for me, is community. Community is not being with the people who think like me, who act like me, who support me, who are just all you know happy. Do you know happy days are here again? That is not community.

And I live in a religious community where you gotta restful stuff out, where there's anger, where there's disagreement, but you stay in relationship and work out the disagreement. And it's that commitment that we're sorely lacking. And for me, we've got associations. We have people that identify one way or the other, but we don't have.

Places where we sit at the table, and it quite frankly, makes religious life challenging now because we don't have com societal models for doing the work that we're trying to do.

SCHLUMPF: Thank you for saying that. That's an important distinction.

DAULT: If I could pick up on that, because there's a thread that's been moving through our conversation and it started with Dan saying, did we examine our consciences as Catholics and. Then father Brian, you said, who are we as Americans and really wanted to put that question front and center. And then Sister Simone, you talked about going to all these places and seeing people who are left out by the policies and again, they're saying I'm not there.

So what I'm hearing in this is that Catholics. Because now I'm thinking of like the, all of the signs saying mass deportation now. And so we had this vacuum created by people that, that were feeling left out. And instead of moving towards wrestling with the kind of community that you're talking about, sister Simone, they were given an easy option of, oh, we get to hate these people and now that becomes our identity and that.

Fills the void that we have and Catholics need to examine their consciences because they fell for that hook line and sinker. At least that is where I am seeing it from, you know, this morning. Now when I say that back to you, sister Simone, does that feel right or have I missed something in the equation here about the, I am not there in the policies and the lack that wasn't filled by community.

Instead that became filled by something else that was much more dangerous.

CAMPBELL: Well, I think you have a good point, David, but I think the fallacy for progressives is that policy will make a difference. It's about relationship. It's about connection and that's what's missing. And when people feel alone frightened nervous, then they're gonna go for easy answers because they don't have anybody to talk to that might develop something else.

And they're not really interested in policy. I mean, I've done this work for 20 some years, and it's real hard to get people to engage in policy. What they care about is how's their life doing? How are their kids doing?

What's happening?

This guy in Indianapolis that was so upset because his kids weren't realizing the reality that they worked hard.

They played by the rules, but they weren't getting ahead and that was breaking his heart and he couldn't do anything to help.

MASSINGALE: Okay. Simone, if I can just trouble this though, because I'm sitting here and I'm getting, I'm a, it makes me a little frustrated because yes, people can feel left out, but does that give you permission to hate? That's the thing. That's the thing that I'm really struggling with because African Americans have been left out of the picture for a long time.

Women have been feeling left out of the picture since the Dobbs decision, and yet we're not. We don't turn to hate. I. Again, one of my friends texted me this morning and said, why is it that the only group in America that reliably votes consistently with integrity, are black people and black women especially, and black women, have every reason to feel left out.

We don't turn, we don't fill that vacuum with hate. That's the thing that I really want. It's not to say that people are feeling disconnected by policies. Well, you know, a lot of people are disenfranchised policy, but they don't turn to a messianic hate. Go figure and put their trust in him. That's what I'm trying to, that's why I wanna trouble that with.

CAMPBELL: I. That at least the Trump voters I've talked to hasn't been a huge example. It's not scientific, it's nothing. They don't see it as hate. They see it as being seen, and so they come at it from a positive place, though the purveyor of the message is hateful. So I could be wrong on this, but that. I mean, that's what I heard from folks.

HORAN: I wonder just to jump in here, I think this is one of these cases where I think multiple things can be true at the same time. For instance, a, a rural white Trump voter in the Midwestern part of America could feel X, Y, or Z, and at the same time. Think that they're not hating, right? Because this is that individualism, Simone, you were talking about earlier, right?

This idea of mass deportation. What is the kind of connection that is in that person's thinking? Well, the way that the Trump administration or the Trump campaign was presenting it is they're the problem that you feel this way. And so maybe they think like, well, I'm just trying to protect my own and quote unquote, do what's right.

I think Brian's point is, but. In effect, what is happening are like the initiation of policies that are hate driven, even the slurs and the language and the rhetoric. And so I think the feeling can be true, but then I would also, I would wanna push back, and this maybe goes back to the examination of conscience question as we think about it through a Christian lens in particular are you right to feel that way?

I think that's a fair question to, to ask. You know, in, in a setting in which there are people who are much more disenfranchised and people who are much more put to the margins and people who are living far more precariously. And then this is where I think that community piece comes in. Because if you're not.

Thinking about them if you're not aware of them. If you're living in your own silo and the only sort of communication or affinity or entertainment that you have is coming through your YouTube algorithm, it become very easy to dehumanize others. And that's where I think I hear Brian coming in too, which is like this channeling that becomes hatred.

I, I mean, I can't go without ever mentioning Thomas Merton at least once in a conversation, and I'm just I'm thinking about chapter 16 in his new Seeds of Cops. Contemplation where he says The root of all war is fear, and it's the fear within us that is the source of all violence. And then we could replace, you know, hatred, racism, misogyny.

These are forms of violence too, I would say. And I think that fear is real, that those people are experiencing, but then the narrative that they weave around why they're afraid, that's, you know, what Trump provides and that's what frightens me. And it absolves them of that examination that I think the Christian tradition, the gospel requires.

SCHLUMPF: Well, and I said at the top of this podcast that I'm afraid. So I think there's fear on all kinds of sides, and we need to be aware of our fear and process our fear and not allow our fear to be manipulated into moving towards I. Hate Brian. You said earlier, and I read this somewhere else too, about how the half the country was gonna wake up today and feel afraid.

But the difference is that half of the country is afraid of things that have actually been threatened, you know, or said, and the other half is afraid of things that. Are not based in reality. So if you woke up a, you know, if you were afraid that your child was going to have a sex change operation after you send that child off to school and they were gonna come home in a different body, gender that is not a realistic thing to be afraid of.

And if you voted for Trump in part because of that, that was not based in reality or truth. So, you know, I. I'm concerned about where we go from here because I think we have data already coming out that the Catholic vote, especially the Catholic white vote, is clearly in the Republican and MAGA camp now.

And we, when I, one of the most telling, you know, I do watch all those maps on CNN stayed up and watched them, is they kept comparing Harris's, performance last night to 2020. Oh, here's where she's down a little bit from Joe Biden, but every once in a while then they click back to 2016 and be like, oh, well she's pretty much where Hillary was though.

And of course we all know Hillary lost and at one point I said, what was true with in 2016, and now that wasn't true in 2020. What was different? Okay. There were some different contexts, but the difference is two women.

MASSINGALE: Yes.

SCHLUMPF: rule of sexism in this, you know, election resolve cannot be denied. Women know it in their guts, and I think we're gonna have to, you know, wrestle with that going forward.

MASSINGALE: It also means that there, one of the questions I'm wrestling with is. How can the Catholic Church make a meaningful difference with that issue when it's got its own commitments to patriarchy and sexism that it can't look at? It has its own commitments to white supremacy and racism and complicity it hasn't looked at.

And so I'm looking at this and wondering, White supremacy and patriarchy at their core are spiritual realities. They're spiritual malformations and deformation. And what I agree with you, someone about the limits of policy. Policy alone is not gonna get us out of white supremacy, is not gonna get us out of patriarchy, but this is where our religious institutions failed.

I wonder, I have to really be honest and say, I wonder whether you even have it in them, whether the Catholic church has it in itself to make a meaningful contribution when it has its own deep commitments and unexamined complicities to both patriarchy and white supremacy. I think that those commitments and complicities were part of the reasons for it's silent and it's, I'll go further.

It's abdication of gospel responsibility in this election. So I really wonder where do we go from here as a Catholic church and whether a Catholic church can really get us, how can a Catholic church get us out of this mess when it is really deeply in it?

DAULT: It seems like the conversation is naturally moving in this direction. So let's take a quick break and when we return, we will take up exactly this question. Where do we go from here? Listeners, again, please practice self-care in listening to this conversation. If you need to take it in chunks, if you need to step away and come back, we will still be here.

We're praying for you and we are with you. And we'll be back in just a moment. You're listening to the Francis Effect.

SEGMENT 3

SCHLUMPF: Welcome back to the France of I'm Heidi Schlump. I'm here today with my friend David Dalt and Dan Horan and our special guests in this election post-election round table. Brian Massing and Simone Campbell. In our third segment of the podcast today, we wanna. Look a little bit to the future. We don't want to deny people's the seriousness of the situation that we're in or people's feelings, especially in these immediate aftermath of the election results.

But we owe it to you to at least think about where we're gonna go from here and how we should think about moving into the future. In our last segment, Brian, you talked a little bit about how the church has abdicated some of its credibility or responsibility in how we got here. And I know it's hard to feel optimistic about can the church and can our overall American culture somehow start listening to each other and go forward in a positive direction?

So I think it'd be great to brainstorm some ideas. Again, I refer people to the editorial that we ran in today at NCR online that talks about hope. Is it too early to think about the need for hope? Hope is not a feeling. It's something we have to practice, right? What do you think Brian?

MASSINGALE: Well, let me echo what you just said to our listeners, and that is that maybe it's too soon for you to engage the question of hope, because hope is not Pollyannish and we don't want you to, if you need to stay time. And I think we need to take some time to grieve and to mourn and to be enraged even.

But I wa I was thinking about hope because two weeks ago I was the keynote speaker for the Ignatian Family Teaching for Justice, and this was before the election, but one of the things that I, toward the end of my address, I said, regardless of how the election turns out, the work of justice must go on because our work and our cause for justice will not go away. Because no matter who wins, I said the hungry will need to be fed. The homeless need to be sheltered. Those immigrants will need to be protected. And those who are deemed stranger among us because of their race or because of their sexual identity, because of their gender identity, will need also to be welcomed. And I said in that work, we're surrounded by. Those who've gone before us and those who will come after us. 'cause I said that the work of justice and hope is a relay race. It's not a marathon, it's not a sprint. And in a relay race, you're not just running your segment of the race to break the tape.

You're running both to honor those who ran before you, but also for the sake of those who are coming after. And I said, you know, the communion of saints means what we call about in a Catholic church. And I talked about the saintly six. The African American and I, you may know that there are 11 American saints, but not one of them is black, but there are six that are in the pipeline or in the process and in black we call them the saintly six.

And I said, you know, I've been part of my disciplines. My spiritual discipline has been to pray every day to these saints. Because they know our country, they know our situation. They've endured racism and racist insults and humiliations and exclusions and gender exclusions too. And they were never expected to be successful, and they worked against tremendous odds and precarious situations.

They're born in enslavement and in Jim Crow segregation, and yet. They created organizations and institutions and they spoke truth to power and they educated and healed and advocated. And that gives me hope that, not to minimize the difficulty and precarity that's, and that's gonna come. And I think that part of what's making this so hard to talk about is we don't even know how bad it's going to get.

I mean, let's be honest, we don't know, but we know from the first time around it was pretty bad. And it's only gonna get worse because he is got, you know, a senate that's gonna give him a blank check. And he is got a judiciary that's given him unlimited, almost unlimited immunity. And yet in our tradition, there have been those in our American Catholic tradition who despite their church and despite their country, managed to do the work of justice. And I think that's where I'm leaning on right now. Really.

CAMPBELL: Brian, thank you for that. Thank you for that anchor. It makes me think, I, my, I have one of my books is Hunger for Hope, that was published in 2020 and little did I know how much I hunger for it. But some of the points that you raised that I think are really important is to have a long and available memory to remember is really important to see those who have struggled before us.

A second point in the book is to touch the pain of the world is real. Not that we have to fix it, but just let our hearts be broken open. 'cause what I've discovered is when my heart's broken open, I have room for everyone that no one can be left outta my care. It's only if I'm protecting my heart from being broken that I get exclusive.

The third. The third piece is to have effective discourse across generations, cultures race. To understand other points of view. But the, finally, the last one that makes me kind of annoyed is to have that we're gonna live in long-term tension with the dominant culture. And as you were talking, I was thinking, what sort of missionary work do we have to the Catholic church?

What sort of missionary work do we need to bring? Ality that was practically totally ignored in our nation. I'm not terribly content with ality. It's not enough. It was at least something, but it's like how do we engage this long-term tension? And what I started with, how do we find each other and support each other in doing them?

NCR is one way. Network's another, several other options, but help.

HORAN: One of them would be for, and this is a commercial advertisement for the Center for the Study of Spirituality. Our own father, Brian Massengale here is giving the Thomas Merton lecture in spirituality on Tuesday, November 12th. You can find more information on our website and the show notes link. I.

With the title Courageous Hope in Precarious Times. So in addition to listening to that a powerful lecture on Tuesday and buying Sister Simone's book that she just described, these key points, one of the things I want to highlight is in addition to community, what you were saying, Simone, about memory, and this brings us back to, I think something Brian, you were talking about in the very first segment.

Early in our conversation, and I'm struck by the image that Jesus uses in the gospels when he talks about. Vessels that look clean and polished on the outside. Whitewashed tombs, he says that have rotten corpses within. And I think about the great false American myth, right? That, that what we see, what was in unveiled in this ugly, racist, misogynist, I mean no holds Barr in that last week of the Trump campaign.

Full disclosure about what's at stake and what's really going on here, and that people and the majority of folks in the United States. Embraced that. I think part of what is the condition of the possibility of that is going back to Simone, your point about our failure to remember, I think of Johan Baptist Mets in, in the notion of dangerous memory and that when we don't think about that, when we look we repress that in this country, whether it's indigenous genocide or chattel slavery or Jim Crow or our history of patriarchy and misogyny, I mean it is and rightfully so lauded that we've had two presidential candidates in the last eight years.

And the Democratic party who are women, when women haven't even really had the right to vote for much more than a century in this country's history. And yet how little we've advanced as a community of justice and peace and as faith. People of faith within this community. We have, going back, Brian, to your point, we have been complicit in the telling, in the ignoring of our past and the remembrance of difficult truths.

And because of that you know, it bubbles up in these ways. And I will scream every time I hear somebody say, well, this isn't the America I believe in, or This isn't who we are, or this isn't like us, this is who we are.

DAULT: I wanna pick up on that because this idea that this is who we are I think this is kind of where I'm landing. Some listeners know that I've been working through the Federalist Papers with friend of the podcast, Steven Mille's from Catholic Theological Union, and one of the things that I keep coming back to again and again is that the system is operating the way that it was designed to operate.

Part of my problem is I keep expecting a different result when this was designed to protect the property of white men and to exclude persons of color and women from the equation. And we're watching the sort of the outcome of that again and again. And so part of what I want to ask is.

You know, my, my old teacher, Walter Bergman, would talk about the prophetic imagination and being able to speak the otherwise in the midst of a situation of lament. How can we as Catholics be grabbing the message of otherwise and preaching the message of otherwise. And Sister Simone I think that it is in the kind of.

Community and relationship that you're talking about, but we have so many impediments right now to even beginning that or continuing that. And so it's hard to find hope in this situation for me, and I am, I'm wanting to figure out how to break a system that has been designed from the very beginning to break us.

MASSINGALE: If I could piggyback on that, David. The word keyword, you said there was lament and we have not, as a people, as a church lamented our history. We've not lamented what brought us here. I was privileged to give the keynote address to LCWR at their annual meeting this year, and I really stressed that and said We really need to help.

Help Americans lament the loss of unjust privilege, that even if the privilege is unjust and they should be taken, how do you lament that? And part of the anger that Simone was talking about earlier that we were talking about is that. when a loss is unmourned and unprocessed, that pain becomes anger, which erupts into rage, and that's what's happened in our society, and we have not helped the people who feel left out, how do we help them lament their situation?

Also in that lament to touch when not only their own personal lament, but how that lament is part of and reflective of the communal brokenness of America and the communal brokenness of our church. And Walter Bruen man makes the point that, you know, one third of the Salter are Psalms of lament, but you would never know that because we don't use them in our liturgy, except on Good Friday.

HORAN: Yeah.

MASSINGALE: And I think that we have to learn as a people, how do we lament the situation we're in and the brokenness of our community? How do we lament how that is impacted where we are? And to realize that the. blue collar factory worker who fears for his family's future is not that far removed from the parent of the trans child who also feels for their child's future, and that's not removed from the church mother at St.

Charles born male in Harlem, who told me she was voting because she wants to vote for her children and her grandchildren. All of these people are lamenting, but we have not created spaces for that lament to come forward. And if that mourning cannot be processed, it will erupt in pain and rage.

SCHLUMPF: Well, Brian, and you raise a good point that it's our faith structures that could be helping us with that processing of the grief rep, because as you point out, David, the institutional structures in our country. Year political structures were kind of created to pit us against each other so that one party or another can gain power.

I do get concerned that, we'll, quickly as a country, we will quickly move to like, analysis of the politics. And, you know, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna, on the record, I'm gonna say here. I am not going to dis Kamala Harris for anything she did. She ran a near perfect campaign. She was put in an incredibly, and I'm not gonna dis Joe Biden either, you know, I mean, I think it's not helpful to look at mistakes that might've been made because the reality is so many more mistakes were made on the other side, and yet they won.

But my concern is that. There will be some need to hit rock bottom at like they say in AA or 12 steps before we can sort of address the issues that we're talking about of grief and loss. And I am worried about that factory worker and that mom in Harlem and that parent of the trans child.

And I do think as a church we can try to be there for them, but I'm worried that we've lost credibility.

HORAN: Heidi I just wanna say like, I just two quick things. One is what does rock bottom look like after the last week of the Trump campaign, right? So if the GOP hasn't hit rock bottom with everything that we saw unfold, I mean, what does that look like on the Democratic side, right? Like, what.

I guess I'm at a loss because I agree with you. I, there was a, another political commentator I heard last week, right after the Madison Square Garden rally who said if Kamala Harris, not just in this campaign, but at any point in her 60 years on this Earth, said one of the things that Trump said it would've disqualified her from ever being able to run as a black woman to this high office.

And I'm like, why are the standards so different, right? I mean, maybe that's not what you mean, but. That, that I'm just kind of confused by that. Like, was rock bottom not 2016? Is it Nana?

SCHLUMPF: Well, just to answer the question real quick though, rock bottom is the concern that I have for the suffering of the policies that Trump is going to.

CAMPBELL: I wanna leap in here because we, this is sort of, I don't know. It's feeling a little self-centered, like, how are we gonna do this? The fact is it's bigger than us. And the fact is, our church never learned how to weep following the sex abuse scandal or in, in the context of the sex abuse scandal.

Weeping is required. A few years ago, I was down on the border in the last Trump reality when he was separating kids from parents, and we were down there for to protest it, and I was with the American Federation of Teachers and I wasn't supposed to speak at the press conference, and it was breaking my heart and I walked away.

I was crying, and then they decided I needed to speak and they're calling me up and I had nothing to, alls I did was stand in front of the press and weep. That actually became the lead. I finally found some words I finally found, pulled myself together. I did the thing that I was expected to do. It was weeping.

That became the symbol, the press hook. And I'm wondering if our church can't weep, how do we weep for what's happened and how do we collectively weep and give ourselves permission to do that? We don't have to cope. Maybe we just need to weep.

MASSINGALE: Except that I wanna say that in answers the question of, you know, what does rock bottom look like? I think it won't be until the rhetoric of the rallies. Are translated into concrete actions. So for example, when Elon Musk says that we're gonna cut $2 trillion from the budget, and it's going to be painful for a while, but look at what's going to happen.

The $2 trillion are going to impact people who aren't gonna able to feed their kids because they're. Public school lunches and meals won't be provided for. And so we'll have hunger. There won't be, there won't. The inadequate way that we care for the homeless will become even more a tragedy when we win.

God forbid we have these massive camps created where people are massively deported. There's no legal recourse. Only then when the pain of this rhetoric that everyone, that, not everyone but the majority of the country supported by their vote and many cheered at its rallies when this moves out of rhetoric into reality and when the pain becomes so visible.

Then I think it's gonna be up to people of faith, not up to the church in general, because I, this was another invitation I get to LCWR. Can you, 'cause I said there are many leadership groups in this Catholic church besides bishops and priests. Praise God. Can the sisters teach us how to lament? Can we make that pain visible so that we can see, oh my God, what have we become? Then perhaps there's room to move away from this.

HORAN: I just worry that I thank you, all of you for the comments on the question of what is rock bottom, but Brian, what you just so eloquently laid out for us. Is that not too late? You know, I think history is a real important teacher here when, you know, I know it, it gets thrown around too easily, especially in Trump's former chief of staff and others calling him a, a textbook fascist and everything, which is technically true.

And then people dismiss this and they say, oh, well anyone who mentions Hitler or something, then you've lost the conversation. But I was reflecting this morning that, you know, the Third Reich came to power through democratic processes that began with language that functions the same language that Trump has been using Minoritized.

Peoples in the nation who are called, you know, garbage and this kind of stuff. And then you're saying Brian is right, but at that point it's, you know, how many millions of people have to die or these camps that you're talking about, like the deportation, like I. You know, I think that's the thing that troubles me and I get accused sometimes of being too theoretical.

You theologians, you academic types, you know, what do you mean language functions? I mean, it does, it's not just nothing. It forms social imaginaries that create the permission structures for these sorts of things to happen. And I think as we ask ourselves this question, like what do we do moving forward?

I think Simone, your point about weeping tied to, as an expression of Brian's cry of lament that he's advocating for, like, this is a ritualistic, a liturgical practice and it functions too. But I guess I'm going back to you, Heidi, about the rock bottom thing. I'm like, well, that doesn't seem to me that's too late.

And I'm, I feel incapacitated by that, frankly, at this point.

SCHLUMPF: Yeah. And these concerns are real. I have them as a journalist as well. I do think one thing we can keep doing, and we've been doing it here today as we've been recording this, is we can keep talking. We can keep being those voices that are raising these concerns and that are pointing out what has happened.

I appreciate what you're saying, Brian. It doesn't just have to be priests and bishops. By the time we meet to record our next episode of the podcast, our US bishops will have held their fall meeting and we'll see what they say or don't say. And I think that will also be very indicative of what it's gonna mean for church leadership structures going forward.

We're just coming in the aftermath of the Senate where there was a. Fair amount of disappointment about how some really important issues the church needed to address there, including women and L-G-B-T-Q people stalled as well. But we can at least right now, we're still free to keep recording podcasts like this and speaking the truth as we see it and trying to call our listeners and all who will listen to join us in that conversation of lament I.

Said at the beginning, I have a lot of hard feelings. I'm not ready to be positive or hopeful yet, but I will not give into despair.

HORAN: Amen.

SCHLUMPF: so maybe that's a good good thing to end on. And we can thank our guests Brian Massengale and Simone Campbell for joining us this very difficult morning.

And to all of you listeners who may be hurting, again, thank you for joining us and we hope this was helpful to you. Please take care of yourselves. Please be in contact with us if you want to vent or talk to anyone here at the podcast. And we will look forward to joining you again in two weeks with hopefully some new conversation that will be a little more hopeful. This is the Francis Effect.