In a recent edition of America (subscription required), Kathleen Norris has an Easter reflection titled "Something Wondrous is Afoot." As we begin this Easter season, she provides rich food for prayerful reflection. Her insights are also relevant, I think, to the MOJ discussion of abuse. And, her Here is a sample:
On the way to becoming Christian, we are all learners. When it comes to fully accepting what it means to be a Christian, I am not a particularly good student. For one thing, my prayer life is much too haphazard for a Benedictine oblate. If I am fortunate enough to be visiting a monastery, going to the Liturgy of the Hours every day, I do fine; but left to my own devices I falter.
…
The writers of the early church are generally of more use to me than modern theologians when I am trying to make theological concepts come alive. John Chrysostom, for example, packs his dogma into plain speech and concrete imagery. A human voice comes through. The homily he preached in Constantinople before being forced into an exile from which he would never return is fortified with biblical allusion and still heart-rending more than 1,600 years later: “Christ is with me, whom shall I fear? Though waves rise up against me, the seas, the wrath of rulers: These things are no more to me than a cobweb.” He encourages the congregation not to lose hope because: “Where I am, there also are you; where you are, there too am I; we are one body.... We are separated by space, but we are united by love. Not even death can cut us apart. For even if my body dies, my soul will live on and will remember my people.”
To me, this is Easter truth speaking through ordinary language. To someone else, it might seem the ravings of a fool. For we are always free to choose what meaning to give to the events that shape us, to opt for fear or hope, despair or joy, bitterness or love.
Two men I knew both received a dire prognosis, one of liver cancer, the other of stage IV melanoma. The man with liver cancer, a tavern owner and petty criminal, survived much longer than anyone expected; he had several years of remission. He told me that on his worst days in the hospital he promised himself that if he ever got out again, he would devote himself to “looking out for number one.” And that is exactly what he did; living selfishly and self-indulgently until the day he died, alone and mostly unlamented.
The other man was a Benedictine monk who died just three months after his initial diagnosis. “I realized,” he wrote to friends, “that everything I’ve experienced since my original bout with melanoma 20 years ago has been a grace...not a bad realization for a monk. I have never felt so surrounded by love. This is the most grace-filled time in my life, an unending source of hope and well-being at the core of my being—pure gift.” In thanking the many who had been praying for him, he wrote: “Thanks for helping me to choose life in this time of fear and uncertainty. Something wondrous is afoot. I just can’t see it yet.”
A man named Paul, facing execution, once wrote from a jail cell: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” (Phil 4:4). A man named Jesus, on the night before he died, ate his last meal with friends, talked up a storm and no doubt startled the company by proclaiming, “I am saying these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (Jn 15:11). Wondrous things afoot: an inexpressible but ever-present love, a joy so profound that even death cannot diminish it. Happy Easter!
Friday, April 2, 2010
Fr. Ronald Rolheiser has a powerful meditation for Good Friday.
...Interestingly there is a striking parallel between what crucifixion did to the human body and what nature itself often does to the human body through old age, cancer, dementia, AIDS and diseases such as Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's, Huntington's and other sicknesses that humiliate the body before killing it. They expose publicly what is most vulnerable inside of our humanity. They shame the body.
Why? What is the connection between this type of pain and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it, as the Gospels say, "necessary to first suffer in this manner so as to enter into glory"?
Because, paradoxically, a certain depth of soul can only be attained through a certain depth of humiliation. How and why is this so? It isn't easy to articulate rationally but we can understand this through experience: ...
Sunday, March 28, 2010
My good friend and former student, Fr. Jim Goins wrote the following:
Celibacy only works when the celibate submerges sexual desire into a deeper desire for union with the Divine. Sexual repression, on the other hand, is lethal and corrupting of the entire community. The abuse scandal still swirling around the priesthood is a failure on many levels, including priestly formation. Candidates for priesthood must be taught to be men and not kept at the emotional level of an eighth grade boy. The vast majority of priests are able to move from boyhood into manhood and perform well as celibate priests. Still, the widespread instances of abuse suggest a systemic failure within our seminary system.
Even though most priests overcome the challenges of celibacy, mandatory celibacy is, in my opinion, an increasingly unproductive law of the Church. We must be allowed to ask if the discipline of mandatory celibacy is now sending the wrong sign to the world: a sign of sexual isolation and nefarious behavior. A married clergy is not without its own problems but would signal the intention of the Church to bring its clergy into the rich life of our moral center: the family.
What follows is not meant as an excuse for the actions of the Church. Rather, I hope to simply point out the reality of how society once treated sins and crimes against children.
Secrecy was not invented by the Roman Church. Until the mid 70's, the standard response to revelations of child abuse was to keep the matter private. It was believed the child would be seen as 'damaged goods' and the family shamed beyond repair. Catholic Bishops kept these secrets because they were taught that secrecy was in the best interests of the child. Shocking now, I concede, but, at the time, all institutions within society conspired with the silence.
The Church's habit of sending offenders to treatment rather than turning them over to the law now strikes us as odious. However, for years the best minds of psychology taught that such disorders could be treated and the men safely rehabilitated. As it turns out, the advice was absolutely wrong. Until the late 80's or early 90's, Bishops believed they were acting 'progressively' by spending small fortunes on men who 'suffered' from attractions to children. Would that they have acted counter culturally.
Finally, we must acknowledge that, despite the extreme damage done by the Church's failures, real progress has been made to keep children safe in Catholic parishes and schools. We are currently doing more background checks, more training, more monitoring than any other institution. Out of the ashes of this scandal, something good is emerging. Let us pray it is not too late.
Monday, March 22, 2010
On Thursday, March 25 (7:30pm in the Dick Bell Courtroom, OU College of Law), Notre Dame Political Science Professor, Daniel Philpott, will present a lecture entitled "Justice After Evil: A Catholic Ethic of Political Reconcialition."
On Thursday, April 8 (5pm in the Homsey Moot Courtroom, OCU Law School), Notre Dame Law Professor, Nicole Garnett, will deliver the Brennnan Lecture. The lecture's title: "Restoring Lost Connections: Land Use, Policing, and Urban Vitality."
Monday, March 15, 2010
Thanks Bob and Fr. Araujo for your comments.
Abortion: Bob is obviously correct that there is deep disagreement in our culture over the moral and moral/legal status of abortion, and we need to do the best we can to pray and work through those disagreements. Part of the work is attempting to listen to and understand where the other side is coming from. If it is my belief that a person's sincerely held beliefs are unreasonable but that the person is reasonable, I have hope that one day that person will come to see their position as unteneble. (As an aside, in my own life, when I have come to see the unreasonableness of a position I previously held, it is usually not reason alone that convinced me but a softening of my will, which allows me to reason more clearly). In short, failure to see the reasonableness of my interlocutor's position in a disagreement is no reason to stop a) arguing or reasoning together and b) loving (which from my experience has a greater impact). Even if we have "bracketed" the larger question of the abortion license for now because of our deep disagreement (or because the Supreme Court has bracketed it for us), I don't think legislators who see abortion as the taking of innocent human life have to or ought to bracket that decision within the context of the health care debate washing their hands of the issue, comforting themselves by saying that it is someone else imposing the death sentence. Holy Week brings to life a character who made that fateful decision when there was far less disagreement among his constiuents (subjects).
Vouchers. Here, I may have simply misunderstood Bob, he may have misunderstood me, or both. I thought I was agreeing with him at least in part. I think that Bob and I would agree that the state is or ought to be blind to sectarian differences because these questions of faith are "beyond its competence or ken." The purpose of bringing up our nation's soft theism was solely to accentuate the difference between bracketing in the voucher and abortion realms. Except for a few and perhaps growing number (Jim Dwyer comes to mind), we are generally in agreement that religious faith is a good in a way that we are not in agreement as to whether abortion is a good. Most of us believe that religion is a good but that the specifics are beyond the competence of the state. In deciding to grant vouchers, the state is recognizing that good and recognizing its own incompetence in determing the contours of that good. This seems to be a very different case than one which grants abortion coverage vouchers.
