The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross
By Nicholas Frankovich
January 20, 2019 2:55 AM
It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here.
For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.
The man the crowd ridiculed is Nathan Phillips, an elder of the Omaha tribe. He was in Washington for the Indigenous Peoples March, on Friday. It coincided with the March for Life, which Covington Catholic High School organized a contingent of students to attend. According to Phillips, their confrontation with him, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, involved a disagreement about “the wall.” He’s against it. They’re for it. Some of them, including the boy who makes himself the co-star of the video by stepping forward and getting in Phillips’s face, wore “Make America Great Again” hats.
They confused issues. Over the years, I’ve heard (and perpetrated, I confess) some imaginative definitions of the “seamless garment,” or “consistent ethic of life.” It’s a matter of identifying a common principle that can be shown to underlie and unite various causes — the abolition of abortion, of euthanasia, of the death penalty, of you name it — that most people would say are disparate and unrelated. How heightened border security might be of a piece with protecting unborn children is less intuitively obvious than most such hypothetical linkages I’ve encountered.
Among the unfortunate messages that the Covington students are sending through the video, several versions of which have gone viral, is that in its heart the pro-life movement in the United States in 2019 is less concerned to advocate for human rights than to cheer for one of the two major political parties or, more broadly, for one side in the great divide between Right and Left, or red and blue, as if the abortion debate were a Yankees–Red Sox game. Don’t do that if you want to persuade Democrats and independents who are ambivalent about abortion to hear you out on why their lives mattered even when they were gestating, and on why the lives of those who at any given moment are conceived but not yet born matter no less.
In a joint statement, Covington Catholic High School and the Diocese of Covington apologized, condemning the students’ actions and noting that their conduct “is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.” I don’t know how Phillips would describe his religious affiliation. He speaks of indigenous traditions. Some people who observe them integrate them with Christianity, but some don’t. In any case, keeping in mind the parable of the proper priests and the Good Samaritan, whose religious practice Jesus’s listeners thought was wrong, listen to Phillips reflect on his experience on the Mall. Decide for yourself who is more pleasing to Christ, Phillips or his mockers. As for the putatively Catholic students from Covington, they might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with.
“...Over the years, I’ve heard (and perpetrated, I confess) some imaginative definitions of the “seamless garment,” or “consistent ethic of life.” It’s a matter of identifying a common principle that can be shown to underlie and unite various causes — the abolition of abortion, of euthanasia, of the death penalty, of you name it — that most people would say are disparate and unrelated. How heightened border security might be of a piece with protecting unborn children is less intuitively obvious than most such hypothetical linkages I’ve encountered...”
This was as far as I could read. Someone called the NRO writing style pompous or pretentious. Pendantic can be added along with muddying the water to appear deep!
Reply to Post #58- More backstory on the drum-beater.
<<<
https://www.omaha.com/news/nation/who-is-nathan-phillips-years-ago-omaha-tribe-member-said/article_6cc049c4-d6d8-5e3c-8ee6-939a203682af.html
<<<
The following article, written by Matt Kelley, originally ran in the Omaha World-Herald on Nov. 26, 2000.
....
Washington, D.C. — For 26 days now, Nebraska native Nathan Phillips has conducted a personal, somewhat eccentric vigil on Washington’s National Mall.
Joined by his companion, Shoshana Konstant, and their two small children, Phillips plans to spend all of November praying for his fellow American Indians from one of three tepee lodges he’s set up on an expanse of grass between the Washington Monument and the White House.
A member of Nebraska’s Omaha Tribe, Phillips says he doesn’t consider himself a protester but rather a man answering a call to honor his people and his Creator.
“I would call myself a spiritual runner, “ he said.
Born and raised in Lincoln, Phillips conducted his first monthlong prayer session last year in conjunction with Native American Heritage Month. Joined by Konstant and their kids — 3-year-old Zakiah and 14-month-old Alethea — Phillips spends his time praying and tending to a fire inside a canvas lodge that for weeks has served as the family’s primary home.
Those searching for a neatly packaged social studies lesson, however, won’t find it at Nathan Phillips’ prayer lodge.
While friendly enough, Phillips directs most onlookers away from the lodge where he lives, sleeps and prays. He asks them instead to peek inside two other lodges set up nearby — one for storage and one for display. And he almost always demurs when tourists ask him to pose for photos.
“They want us to be happy Indians for them, “ he said. “They don’t want to hear about the struggle.”
That struggle, as Phillips explains it, involves centuries of religious, economic and cultural oppression of American Indians.
More personally, he says, it involves his own fight against alcoholism, a childhood floating through foster homes in Nebraska, and an early adulthood spent first in the Marine Corps and later being thrown in and out of jail.
Now 45, Phillips has been sober for 16 years. He met Shoshana Konstant, a former middle school teacher, in 1990. For several years, the couple bounced around the country agitating on behalf of American Indians being displaced from their homelands.
They settled in Washington, D.C., about six years ago, Phillips said, after their truck broke down and caught fire during a demonstration in front of the White House.
When asked about his reasons for living for 30 days on the Mall, Phillips doesn’t offer an easy or quick answer.
“It’s just everything, “ he says, sitting beside the fire. “We’ve got so many issues in Indian country.”
After struggling for a few more minutes, Phillips expands his cause to include suffering children in Africa and the soldiers left missing in action in Vietnam.
“This is not just for the Indian people, “ he says. “It’s for everybody.”
In fact, Phillips and Konstant seem better able to live their cause than to explain it.
Their lodge flaps and creaks in the cold autumn wind. At the center, the well-fed fire burns from a square, iron platform required by the National Park Service.
A buffalo skull and small bundles of sage, cedar and sweet grass form the basis of a ceremonial altar at one side of the lodge.
Sleeping pads line two sides of the fire. Everywhere there is evidence of everyday life: blankets, pillows, children’s toys, a box of doughnuts, a cell phone.
Outside, a sizable pile of firewood props up a black-and-white POW-MIA flag and a banner of the Omaha Tribe in Iowa and Nebraska.
Phillips’ dog, Jake, watches over the encampment, sounding an alarm when strangers approach.
For now, the lodge serves also as the family’s home between homes.
For years, Phillips and Konstant lived out of a run-down house in Washington frequented by itinerant hippies. More recently, they moved into an unfinished basement rented out by a storeowner in Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood.
This month, they’re moving into a better place, Phillips said, with a reliable landlord, a lease and a roof that doesn’t leak.
Back in Nebraska, Omaha tribal Chairman Elmer Blackbird did not return calls seeking comment about Phillips’ vigil.
Privately, another tribal leader said Phillips is regarded back in Nebraska as a well-intentioned brother struggling to cope with a troubled childhood. The leader said the Omaha Tribe generally avoids the type of activism Phillips prefers.
“He’s just trying to find his way, “ the leader said. “Let him find it.”
In Washington, Phillips’ high-profile patch of real estate attracts the attention of all sorts of people.
Floyd Wilson, an area resident who works for the federal government, stopped by one cold morning recently to offer Phillips coffee and a few stacks of cedar firewood. Wilson said he wanted to show his support after sitting and listening to Phillips.
“I’m bringing him coffee, “ Wilson grinned. “I’m bringing him love. I’m bringing him peace, happiness and goodness.”
At other times, tourists stop by for snapshots. Homeless people stop by for shelter. Boorish people stop by to offer uninvited advice and to reinforce their own prejudices about American Indians.
The Washington Post even stopped by, publishing a lengthy essay last week connecting Phillips’ vigil to a well-mannered protest of Thanksgiving.
Although Phillips did begin his annual fast on Thanksgiving Day, he said the holiday actually has little to do with his presence on the Mall.
Officially, Phillips says, the vigil is to benefit his organization: the Native Youth Alliance.
Kneeling on one knee and one foot, Phillips talks excitedly about creating “culturally appropriate” homes for Indian children who have been separated from their parents. The idea, he says, is to keep kids connected to their culture.
It’s a personal issue for Phillips, who was forcibly removed from his parents’ home at age 5.
Later, Phillips says he also wants to found Head Start for American Indian children, along with a community center and health-care facility.
Phillips’ stated goals range from the practical to the dreamy.
While Konstant soon will start work at a local Head Start, Phillips concedes that his organization remains far away from its other goals. He has no office, no funding, no grants and no one working for him.
And at times, Phillips seems as much caught up in his own spiritual journey as the practical aspects of running an organization.
A construction worker by trade, Phillips works odd jobs when he can find them. But he says his personal dreams usually take precedence over the American dream.
“Why can’t I just be an American, “ he asks himself aloud, “get my contracting license, get a Range Rover and buy a $20,000 bass boat?”
Then, he tries to answer his own question.
“There is a purpose for all this, “ he continues, gesturing around the lodge. “I just don’t know it yet.”
>>>