The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved
“Matthew Fox’s new book The Pope’s War is a magnificent and searing indictment of the current Pope and the corrupt craziness of the Vatican. This book should be read by everybody, not only for its ferocious courage, but also for its vision for what needs to be saved from the destructive forces that threaten authentic Christianity. Matt Fox is in my opinion, the most important prophetic Christian voice and is someone I have learnt greatly from and admire deeply. Please read this book and watch Matt’s excellent YouTube presentations.”
–Dr. Andrew Harvey, author of Teachings of Rumi, The Hope, Heart Yoga, Son of Man, The Return of the Mother, and many more books.
“This book could be the match that ignites a fiery reawakening within the Catholic Church.”
–Brian Thomas Swimme, cosmologist and author of The Universe is a Green Dragon, The Universe story (with Thomas Berry), The Heart of the Universe
“Prophecy involves confronting pain and encountering beauty, both for the prophet and whoever listens attentively. For forty years, Matthew Fox has been America’s principal prophet to the Roman Catholic Church….Fox is not merely a pundit, content to analyze the gravity of our predicament. As a prophet he sees the way forward and articulates that way. What has been repressed, after all, by the Vatican’s bureaucracy is not merely a political alternative to its rule by denial, but the movement of Spirit through men and women who have willingly paid the price for speaking and acting on behalf of their vision of a genuinely apostolic Christianity, where care for the poor and embracing diversity are once again virtues.
Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to silence Matthew Fox. He failed. All such efforts will fail in the long run, because part of the beauty of prophecy is that, through all the pain it endures, its resources lie much deeper than human pretensions to power.”
–Bruce Chilton, author of Rabbi Jesus, Rabbi Paul, Mary Magdalene: A Biography, The Way of Jesus
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.
— Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and author of The Left Hand of God
“A wake-up call, to shake us free from old stereotypes of masculinity, this book is good news — and essential reading for men and those living in a world with men.
— Joanna Macy, author of World as Lover, World as Self
This book could not come at a better time for our world, with its distorted, unsustainable, testosterone-frenzied perceptions of what it means to be a man. His prophetic vision and courageous message both expand how we think of the masculine and elevate it to the level of the sacred.
— Christian de la Huerta, author of Coming Out Spiritually
Matthew Fox sounds the call and illuminates the path for every man to step into his spiritual destiny, giving birth to an authentic men’s movement of the highest order.
—Aaron Stern, founder with Leonard Bernstein of the Academy for the Love of Learning, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Matthew Fox’s book is a magnificent masterpiece, one that every man gay or straight, should read immediately. Anyone who wishes to understand the healing secrets of sacred masculinity and of the path to becoming a humble spiritual warrior for peace and justice in an endangered world will find this book both exalted inspiration and practical guidelines for realizing it in the core of life. Nothing like this book has ever been written; for the first time Matthew Fox has brought together not only all the major historical and spiritual archetypes of the sacred masculine, but also richly detailed and poetic accounts both of how they interrelate and how they empower. And he has done so within the overarching embrace of a potent vision of the Sacred Marriage of an union within each being, male or female, gay or straight, of the opposites of transcendence and immanence, masculine and feminine, inner spiritual wisdom and prophetic outer action that to birth a new human being. Our contemporary apocalypse is I am convinced the birth canal of this embodied divine human. This book will help all men everywhere incarnate the energies of the divine, and at a time when the future depends on all of us acting from awakened consciousness in every realm and on every level of society.—-Andrew Harvey, author of Son of Man; The Return of the Mother; and The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism.
A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity
This is a deep and forceful book….With prophetic insight, Matthew Fox reveals what has corrupted religion in the West and the therapy for its healing.
Bruce Chilton, professor of religion, Bard College, and author of Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography
One of the great prophetic voices of our time.
–David C. Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World
Insightful and profound. History will name Fox one of the great Christian spirits of our age.
–John Shelby Spong, author of A New Christianity for a New World
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
Matthew Fox has created a unique new project that speaks the concerns and hopes of all of us who care about creating lives of meaning for ourselves, our communities, our children and our children’s children. The A.W.E. Project does for the vast subject of learning what Fox’s Reinvention of Work did for vocation and Original Blessing did for theology. With passion and conviction, Fox turns conventional education upside down, shakes out what is no longer working, and offers visions of what can be.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh
Matthew Fox writes boldly and brilliantly about the seven cardinal sins of the spirit and the compassionate blessings of the flesh…it is a fine blend of his great intellectual prowess, creativity and love of humanity.
–Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves
A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science. A breath-taking analysis.
–Diamuid O Murchu, Reclaiming Spirituality
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
Father Matthew knows what the spirit’s life is all about and what is asked of it at this time. He opens the treasures of the Great Traditions and retrieves for us the relevant inspiring sources, but between the lines he lets the spirit of holiness breathe on us.
–Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.
–Bishop John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin
Original Blessing
Original Blessing makes available to the Christian World and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.
–Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
Fox’s accomplishment in Original Blessing…. showed us how deeply we in the West have bought into an understanding of Christianity based on the fall-redemption paradigm…. Gradually the book is assuming the status of a classic. In due course, it will take its place in the history of spirituality and indeed in the history of theology.
–John Cobb, Jr. professor emeritus at The School of Theology at Claremont , California; co-author, The Liberation of Life and For the Common Good.
Only in an addictive society that demands that we split the sacred from the secular could the call for an awareness of our original blessing be viewed as political. How strange that our experience of wholeness, oneness, a spirituality that celebrates all life, can be viewed as a political threat. This, to me, clearly shows how important these ideas are.
–Anne Wilson Schaef, Ph.D, Beyond Therapy/Beyond Science; Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much; When Society Becomes an Addict
For me, Creation Spirituality as Matthew Fox talks about it, is like the Dreamtime in the way that it brings the entire cosmos into our lives, making it a part of us and us a part of it.
–Eddie Kneebone, Aboriginal teacher and activist
Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart (formerly: Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation)
By Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Matthew Fox has done a wonderful job bringing out the earthiness of Eckhart’s spirituality into his translations and commentaries. I do not think, moreover, that Fox could have achieved what he did without a deep feeling for the shamanic influences in indigenous America. There is something about panentheism, in the beginning of his book, that speaks to this correlation. When one reads of the panentheism inherent in Eckhart’s writings, one gets a sense of the presence of Thoreau, Whitman, Jeffers, or Muir, in that kind of mysticism; something of the shaman’s presence shines through in Fox’s commentaries on Eckhart’s writings that is uniquely American.
In my interviews with the poet-shaman William Everson, who was himself an ex-Dominican monk, I told him that I thought Christianity appeared to be undergoing a transformation. I was looking at it at that time in terms of assimilation. When the settlers came to this continent, there was an assimilation by the Native Americans of European dress and lifestyle. Now, I told Everson after reading Fox’s book, it seems that the opposite is taking place; where everything that had been formerly built up by the Puritanization of America was undergoing an assimilation to a more primal level in order for a regeneration of our culture to take place. In my mind Fox stood out as a representative of this development in western religion. It appeared to me then that one way to approach the problem of what is lacking in Christianity was to look at how the vocational archetypes are constituents of the Godhead Eckhart spoke of in his Sermons. “Indeed,” wrote Matthew Fox, “there are hints in Eckhart as when he talks of God as a ‘great underground river’ of the chthonic and more matriarchal period of consciousness when spiritual experiences were bound to the soil and were localized there with ‘deities dwelling in the interior of the earth’” (31). Even in his early writing Fox made vocation the center of his creation-centered spirituality. As Fox points out, in the first of the four sections of his book, Creation Spirituality is steeped in panentheism. The whole concept of the “Ground,” the “soil,” the “riverbed” of the Godhead: all of these metaphors that point to panentheism are a way to describe what the Godhead is to America’s greatest poet-shamans, and Eckhart is the link to this tradition in Europe. Fox has done a superb job bringing out some key elements in Eckhart’s writings that were missed by many of the theologians who attempted to understand him in the last century and I relied heavily on Fox’s book to aid me in the writing of my thesis on Eckhart and Jung. Any person who is interested in Eckhart would be naive to overlook this important text which is sure to stand out, over time, as one of the best treatments of this mystical preacher yet, a mystic who is sure to win any person over with his theology of “letting go,” of creative “birthing,” and “joy” and “compassion/justice.”
Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of “William Everson: The Shaman’s Call”
Confessions: The Making of a Poet-Denominational Priest
By Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Fox speaks of his “story about the coming of age spirituality in the latter half of the twentieth century” (2) in the form of a “cultural autobiography” (3). In reading this book, one gets a sense that Fox is contextualizing his life-story in the “larger story of our coming of age” (3). In a Journal entry from Fox’s approach to his fifty-third year, he writes about his decision to become an Anglican priest in vocational terms; by narrowing the vocation-question down to how he might serve the younger generation, and young one’s to come, given his remaining “powers” (6), Fox says his becoming an Episcopalian was his answer to a call to assist young people to “reinvent forms of religion/spirituality” and “help creation spirituality come alive again” (12). By creation spirituality he means amongst other things, the fourfold path he discovered in his reading of our biblical tradition and the Christian mystics: 1) Via Positiva, delight, awe, wonder, revelry, 2) Via Negativa, darkness, silence, suffering, letting go, 3) Via Creativa, birthing, creativity, and 4) Via Transformativia, compassion, justice, healing, celebration (283). The early chapters of the book tell his story of coming of age.
While writing his first book Fox says he had a dream of a dancing, musical, mystical bear, and he later learned that worship of the bear is one of the oldest forms of worship in North America; the bear is said by indigenous peoples to have redemptive and healing powers. In reflecting on this dream, Fox thought: “What a perfect Christ-image for North American spirituality!” (93). But the story heats up after the writing of his book Original Blessing. The source of the controversy that eventually led to his bear-fight with the Vatican began with a talk he gave to “Dignity,” an organization of gay and lesbian lay Catholics in Seattle. Little did Fox know, in giving this talk, what the reverberations would be in Rome and how the rumblings from our current Pope would send shock waves to Chicago to California and eventually be felt in his life. Fox’s calling to penetrate the roots of the creation-spirituality tradition in America led him into a direct confrontation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) spearheaded by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Complaints reached the inquisitional Cardinal in Rome from Seattle following Fox’s keynote address for the gay and lesbian Catholic group Dignity and it was not long after he set up shop at Holy Names in Oakland that Ratzinger began his condemnation of the central thesis of Original Blessing, and Fox’s treatment of homosexuality in that text aroused all of the Cardinal’s anxiety, as he complained to the Father General, it “is neither inspired by Scriptures, nor by the Doctrine of the Church” (168).
Part of Fox’s vocation as an Episcopal priest, has been to restore into creation spirituality the erotic mysticism that the Church has been lacking, including a warm embrace of feminism and homosexuality. For surely, a central part of the evolution of Western spirituality, Fox asserts, has been not only to make it more ecumenical, but to make final “peace” with our sexuality (237). This battle is part and parcel of America’s fight for spiritual democracy, as instanced by the poetry and prose of Whitman. Perhaps, because Ratzinger’s complaints to the Magisterium were not completely unfounded, as there is no evidence in Scripture for the divinity of homosexuality, Fox found himself in the middle of a quarrel within the Catholic Church itself that had no apparent solution in sight, short of a possible end of the tyranny of the Roman Catholic era, in preparation for a rebirth of something entirely new. Such an end does not appear to be in sight, and being a visionary by nature, Fox was far ahead of his times.
There is something, I believe, in his Bear-fight with the Vatican that is sure to please, or outrage readers, and it is this very involvement with issues that are in question today that can lift our spirits and deepen us down into a more feminine earth-based wisdom: Gaia as our Mother-wisdom. By moving us to listen to the ancient wisdom and voices of the Goddess (Godhead) and Native peoples of the earth (shamans and medicine people), we will hopefully open our ears to God’s cosmic music of the spheres, and learn how to dance together, before it is too late. Fox’s vision of the Bear and the Cosmic Christ instills hope in the future direction of religion. Only through the transformation of religion as we have known it, will a new birth in spirituality come about. Confessions gives me hope that spiritual democracy may indeed prove to be the way of the future.
The Hidden Spirituality of Men
By Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
In “The Hidden Spirituality of Men” Matthew Fox presents a very interesting discussion on Sacred Marriages. I like what he is doing very much. In his book he takes an extroverted focus that is liberating and for this I am grateful. He refers “not to one sacred marriage but to multiple sacred marriages” and adds: “Archetypes, like stories, make demands on us” (2008, xxi, xxiv). Then he says, “A rebirth of culture and self comes from one’s soul and not from institutions” (xxiv). Thus, in exploring “ancient and new masculine images that allow men breathing room to be our best and deeper selves: our wild and fierce selves, our gentle and loving selves, our soaring and mystical selves … Our heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual selves” (xxvi) he is getting at the heart of the current debate in our world regarding marriage.
Myths are where changes in our soul-concept can be seen in its budding forms. Myths awaken us. Fox asks: “What can homosexual men and heterosexual men working together give birth to?” (124) As a result of instructional teachings by gay and heterosexual men in our culture, who are helping us dissolve the walls of homophobia, we are being liberated in our ideas about the soul, and our hidden spirituality of the Sacred Masculine is being Awakened. In “Other Sacred Unions,” he has a marvelous section “A Gay and Straight Wedding,” where he speaks of the marriage between heterosexuals and homosexuals in an outer way: healing homophobia in our social relations will bring about a Sacred Marriage of Masculine and Feminine in our world. He states it this way: “The `marriage’ [the Sacred Marriage of Gay and Straight] of which I speak is simply that of the sexual majority (heterosexuals) accepting and befriending the sexual minority (homosexuals)” (270).
Heterosexual men who are beginning to embrace and awaken their “hidden” homosexual and bisexual selves are embracing gay and bisexual friends and moving beyond the homophobia that divides us. What we are seeing surrounding the fiery debates concerning same-sex marriage is a paradigm shift so fundamental that it may rock the cradle of the world’s civilizations and turn our conceptions of the soul, self, and marriage upside down. For while we have seen the archetype of same-sex marriage emerge in nations of the world in isolated ways before, we have never see such grand changes taking place in the soul-concept, with such wide sweeping potential for impacting our world religions, world politics, and world’s social and legal institutions. The changes in our soul-concept have the potential to inaugurate a paradigm shift that may reverse the axis of the world, hopefully turning the institution of marriage upside down. Matthew Fox brings these changes out into the open by looking at the marriage possibilities in the ten archetypes of the sacred masculine that he uncovers for us. I highly recommend Matthew’s book!
Steven B. Herrmann, Ph.D., MFT
Author of “William Everson: The Shaman’s Call”
