Perpendicular Axes?

The primary election is three days away in New York and we have long since passed the time when every piece of news has become relevant to partisans of the candidates only in so far as it shines light on their favorites or shade on the others.  Bernie Sanders makes a reference to subway tokens? (Obsolete 13 years this past Wednesday.)  Hillary fans guffaw at him as a faux native son, hopelessly out of touch.  Hillary Clinton chuckles at a Bill diBlasio "joke" about "CPT"?  Bernie Bros who have never heard that term are consumed with righteous outrage.

The feeling to me is that nothing matters now except in relation to this election.  I will be voting for Sanders on Tuesday, despite my profound reservations about his understanding of the issues of race, nationality and gender.  But I am apparently supposed to shut up about those things and go into full-throated denunciations when I hear anybody else raise them, too.  In geometric terms, it is as if everything in the universe exists on a single line, with Bernie on one end and Hillary on the other.  (Forget Republicans.)  Our job is simply to run as fast as we can in the direction we choose, while heaving opprobium on those we pass traveling the other way.

I have been thinking a lot about other axes, perpendicular to the political "left" and "right" and our confident failure to look at them at all.  Religious faith, for example, has very little to do with politics.  But you would never know that if you listen to so many people.  I think, for that matter, that religion has very little to do with morality, either.

There are people (religious people) who wonder how anybody can ever learn morality if it isn't taught in a house of worship and backed up with threats of eternal punishment or promises of an afterlife reward.  There are also people (mostly irreligious) who point to clerical abuse scandals, wars, and  the current spate of so-called "religious freedom" laws (justifying discrimination with "closely-held belief") who argue that formal religious faith is inversely proportional to morality.  They see institutional defense of pedophiles, denunciations of other traditions and anti-gay bias.  They do not see love and spirit.  When a Pope Francis comes along they prefer to place him somewhere on the left-right political axis rather than to understand him in terms of his own language of the Gospel.

Yesterday Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew of the Orthodox Church traveled together with Archbishop Ieronymos of Greece to visit the refugees on the island of Lesbos.  Implicit in their call for support for the people fleeing war across the Mediterranean is a prophetic critique of those who would close the door to them.  It is a religious critique, rooted in the Gospel and they quoted Matthew to make that explicit: "For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me."

I do not understand our obligation to care for the victims of war as a religious one.  But I don't see it as political, either.  I would much rather align myself with people of a faith that I do not share in order to care for the Honduran children at our gates, than to support people I agree with politically who make excuses for imprisoning those children and sending them back to die in San Pedro Sula.  I am not interested in covering up the errors (or crimes) of people on my "side."  I will not make excuses for Israel's crimes against humanity in Gaza or the West Bank just because some anti-semite is using those crimes to attack Judaism or Jewish people.

But we are in primary season.  So while there has been some modest coverage of the Pope's visit to the refugees (mostly failing to mention the Orthodox leaders), the big Vatican news in New York was Bernie Sanders's visit.  Some questions were eagerly debated: Was he invited by the Pope? Did he meet with the Pope?  Hillary supporters mocked him when the Church announced there was no formal invitation.  Bernie supporters fired back when the two men chatted informally in the Papal residence.  Because -- for both sides -- the only thing that matters is fodder for their respective wars of words against one another.

I believe that the Papal news that matters is his demand that we show hospitality for other people.  That news is not on the political axis.  It may be on the religious axis.  It is certainly on the human axis.