On Good People Doing Something

Helmuth von Moltke was born to a military family and taught from an early age of his responsibilities to his homeland.

So when, in the first years of World War II, when he began to hear of atrocities committed by German troops against the Jews, he was torn between his ancestral obligations and the words we heard a few moments ago from the Prophet Ezekiel: “if you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked man from his way, the wicked man shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death.”

So, with his friend Yorck, Helmuth gathered together a small group of intellectuals, theologians and aristocrats to dream and plot what Germany might look like once the Nazi Reich had met its inevitable end.

But those meetings were never enough to quiet Helmuth’s nagging conscience, as he wrote to his wife Freja in 1941: “How can I know all of this and yet sit her at my table in my heated flat and have tea? Don’t I thereby become guilty as well?”

So he did what he could, subverting the state through his work for the intelligence service, he used to smuggle out resistance pamphlets, which the Americans would reproduce and drop from the sky on major German cities. He urged all his Jewish clients and friends to flee Germany, reminding one of them, “Remember, Holland is not far enough!”

But still none of it was enough to satisfy Helmut’s nagging conscience. 

“What shall I say,” he wrote again to his wife, “What shall I say when I am asked And what did you do during that time?” “Since Saturday,” he went on “the Berlin Jews are being rounded up. Then they are sent off with what they can carry...How can anyone know these things and walk around free?”

So he continued to speak out and do what he could, until he was arrested and eventually charged with treason. He was executed in 1945.

And I suspect that with his last breath, his final thought was not unlike those which troubled him throughout his life: What more can I do?  How can I not speak out?

For Helmuth understood our obligation to speak the truth, despite the cost. He knew what Saint Paul meant when he lamented  “Woe to me if I fail to preach the Gospel!” And he understood what Pope Francis calls the danger of “comfortable and silent complicity” which can lead us to hell just as surely as the original sin.

That’s what the people came to learn that Christmas night in a small New England town as the Priest, standing in the pulpit to give his homily, noticed that most of the them weren’t looking at him. They seemed to be looking past him at a single candelabra that was placed just inches from the flowing sheer fabric that provided a backdrop for the manger. As he began to speak, he later wrote, he was perplexed. “What did I say? What’s going on with these people?”

And then above five minutes into his homily it happened. The vents blew the fabric into the candelabra and the flame traveled quickly up the cloth, followed by running, shouting, and the holy water bucket being used as a fire extinguisher.

The fire didn’t do much damage, except to the consciences of those who had stared for so long, but sat there silently afraid to be the first to interrupt the homily. They all saw it coming, but everyone was silent.

And we do it all time. We prefer to hide under a bushel basket, rather than blow the trumpet of warning.

Was anyone ever better at blowing the trumpet against injustice than the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, less than 2% of the African Americans in the county where Alabama’s Edmund Pettis Bridge stood were allowed to vote. Indeed, as Dr. King wrote from the Selma jail, “There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”

And so, as you have no doubt heard, they marched across a steel span bridge named after a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Klu Klux Klan.  It did not end well, as was predicted by Dr. King, when the night before he preached a powerful sermon in which he reminded the congregation that when a man stands up against evil, he will inevitably suffer. His home may get bombed, he may lose his job, or get shot, or beatan down by state troopers.

But, he continued, the just man stands up to evil anyways. Because “a man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”

For silence kills the soul. 

The silence of one who suspects a child is being abused and looks the other way. 

The silence of the one who sees an intoxicated colleague walk out to his car and does nothing to stop him.

The silence of one who sees a friend strike his wife, but doesn’t want to get involved.

The silence of one who knows his best friend in school is taking drugs, but doesn’t want to get him in trouble.

The silence of the girl watches as a bully makes another girl cry, and refuses to get involved.

The silence of the one who delights in the juicy rumor rather than coming to the defense of an innocent victim of malicious gossip.

Lotsa silence kills. For, as a wise man once said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” 

Introduction to Liturgy Class (Class 9)

Welcoming the Stranger

Before the Babylonian exile it was unheard of for a non-Jew to be allowed to worship at the temple in Jerusalem. So it must have been shocking for those who had returned from the great exile to hear the Prophet Isaiah say what you just heard a few minutes ago: you are to welcome the Gentiles to offer sacrifice alongside you for God’s house shall be called “a house of prayer for all peoples.”¹

That’s why the psalmist wrote and we sang a few moments ago that all the nations will praise God and all nations will know his salvation. Not our tribe or nation alone, but all the nations will come to know his name. “May all the ends of the earth fear him!”

God loves the whole earth and each one of us who stand on it. Even, and especially, the stranger.

One of the first laws of Israel is contained in Deuteronomy: “You shall…love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”² Or again, in Leviticus: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”³ And when Job is trying to win points with God, he describes himself as “a father to the needy, [who] championed the cause of the stranger.”⁴

No one embraced the love of the stranger more than Saint Paul. At first a Jewish rabbi who so despised the Gentiles that we see him up there every time we come to Church, his nose up in the air as they stoned poor Saint Stephen to death. Yet after his conversion on the road to Damascus Paul becomes “the apostle to the Gentiles,” dedicating his life to the conviction that in Christ there are no more strangers: ‘no longer Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free; but Christ is all in all.’⁴

And Paul gets that from Jesus, who loves the stranger most of all, a love which we see when he encounters the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel. She was a Gentile, among the unclean and unsaved; and it would have been no surprise that Jesus met a Syrophoenician, for we are told he freely set out for Tyre and Sidon, which was Gentile territory.

She comes to him begging that he might heal her son.  Like a good orthodox rabbi at first he rejects her as unclean, saying some of the harshest words we ever hear coming out of his mouth. Yet she is undeterred, driven by the love of her child. And it is her persistent faith that moves him to praise her and to heal her child.

God loves the stranger. And thank God he does.

For we are the strangers, sons of our first parents, aliens in the Kingdom of God’s love.  A Kingdom in which we wander about with all our doubts and our fears, our weaknesses and our selfish longings, our ingrained habits of darkness and death.

We are strangers in the Kingdom of love. But what does God do with we dirty little creatures?  Does he tell us to go back to the fallen Eden of Eve and Adam? Go back where we came from?  Does he discriminate against us for the color of our hearts?  Does he confine us to internment camps so the virus of our sinfulness will not infect others?

No. He embraces us, calls us his children and showers us with the gifts of his love, opening his arms on the cross out of love for we wretched strangers.

And then he says a funny thing to us: “as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. Love the other strangers, as I have loved all the strangeness in you.

Twenty percent of everyone living in Worcester was born outside United States. It’s always been that way, as when Stevie Loughlin married Nora Lynch in this Cathedral Church a dozen or so years after arriving from Ireland. They were my great-grandparents, among the 20% of the city who had been born in Ireland when in 1850 the census listed 85 Sullivans, 44 Murphys, 43 McGraths and 40 Burkes.

They were just like the 2,000 refugees from 24 countries who have arrived here in recent years, some with names like Ramirez, Padilla and Valdez; while others hail from Iraq, Bhutan, Burundi, Somalia, Liberia and Vietnam.

Like our progenitors they work hard, are less likely to collect food stamps than native Worcesterites, and enjoy an unemployment rate 4 times lower than the general population.

And they come here because they know they will be loved in Worcester. By God and by us. Not because of what they have achieved or where they have come from, what tribe they hail from or the way they speak English. They know they will be loved just because they they are “the stranger,” and those who love God love all his children spontaneously and freely from the first moment they meet them.

“Every stranger”, Pope Francis reminds us frequently, “Every stranger who knocks on our door is an opportunity to meet Jesus Christ, who identifies himself with the foreigner who has been accepted or rejected in every age.”

The Lord calls us, the Holy Father reminds us, to love them all, “and to leave no one behind.”⁵

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1 - Isaiah 56:1, 6-7.

2 - Deuteronomy 10:19.

3 - Leviticus 19:34.

4 - Job 29:16..

5 - Pope Francis, January 14, 2018.

 Here are the videos for this week's Introduction to the Liturgy Class:

Sunday Homily on Suffering

The Homily begins at 16:00. 

   

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Evangelium Vitae

Here are videos of the Morning of Recollection for the Pro-life community which we celebrated yesterday. The first Video is of the Mass:




And this video is of the talk I gave on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Evangelium Vitae.  The talk begins at 13:50 and the text follows.

The greatness of the United States, Pope Saint John Paul II once preached, is rooted in its embodiment of a “commitment to human freedom, human rights and human dignity.”  He continued, speaking to you and to me, “[As] Americans, you are rightly proud of your country's great achievements."

What makes America great, according to this saintly Pope, is our commitment to human dignity, the dignity of every human being and especially the ones forgotten or thrown away by the rest of the world. 

Emma Lazarus’ poem which graces the Statue of Liberty professes this national Creed, declaring to all the world: “ "Give me you're tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

What makes that door golden is not the wealth or power or prestige of our nation, but its essential goodness, fairness and love for those whom everyone else has forgotten. 

Twenty-five years ago, that same Pope called the whole world to embrace this most basic of all human values, defending “”the inviolable dignity of the person” from conception to natural death.  Reflecting on his Encyclical Letter, Evangelium Vitae, the Bishops of our declared that a country which was founded on the God-given right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” must never “kill, or collude in the killing, of any innocent human life, no matter how broken, unformed, disabled or desperate that life may seem.”

America seeks to be great. Yet she too often does so by building ornate structures of self-engrandisement, power and financial gain. Yet the God who endowed us with the rights we enjoy is the One who hears the cry of the poor and looks upon us in our littleness. When the road to our success is littered with the corpses of those unfortunates whom we have devalued and abandoned, we become something different than what we have been called to be. 

I sometimes fear that our great country has proved the prescient maxim of C.S. Lewis to be true: “The power of Man to make himself what he pleases means…the power of some men to make other men what they please.” For in rendering the definition of human personhood subject to negotiation and political calculation, we have excluded the unborn child from human status.

Thus the sad reality is that Abortion will long be remembered as the proto-evil of our generation, alongside those laws which would assist the old and sick in taking their own lives, putting criminals to death, refusing to welcome the immigrant and the stranger and discriminating against those who skin is a different color than our own.

This failure to acknowledge the dignity of every human person is a disease which, sadly, infects the fabric of our society and keeps us from realizing the greatness to which God has called us.  Sadly, it is a disease more deadly than any pandemic we have ever known.

…

So twenty five years after Pope Saint John Paul’s Evangelium Vitae, more than a half century after Pope Saint Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae and almost as long since our Supreme Court legalized abortion, what are we to do?

Certainly we are to pray.  It is the most fundamental and effective thing we can do to foster a culture of life in our country. We pray “in order to glorify and give thanks to God for the gift of life, and implore his light and strength in order to face times of difficulty and suffering without losing hope.”

It is also important that we exercise our duties as citizens to assure “that the laws and institutions of the State in no way violate the right to life, from conception to natural death, but rather protect and promote it.”

And finally, we must foster the Gospel of life by the way we live our life. By forgiving before we ask to be forgiven, seeking to understand before we seek to judge and giving before we seek to receive.

Two stories in this regard.

During the past year this Cathedral parish has been seeking to reach out to the neighborhood, and the neighborhood of downtown Worcester includes the Pharmacy School. So last fall we joined the many Worcester community y organizations in setting up a table at the open house for new students.

Diagonally across from us and a couple tables down was the table for Planned Parenthood. After a few minute the woman sitting at the table caught my eye and we cautiously nodded our heads.  Soon, however, I was caught up in meeting new students and bragging about the Cathedral. This went on for quite a while until lunch time approached and the crowds began to thin.

My staff and I sat down and began to compare notes on our evangelical efforts.  And then I looked down the row of table again and saw the woman whose eyes I had caught a couple hours before.  She was all alone at the table and she too was experiencing a lull. So I excused myself from the staff and walked over to meet her.

She was admittedly startled at this hulking man in a collar coming toward her, but she shook my hand and we started to talk. She was an obstetrical nurse with three children and she had lived up on Pleasant Street all her life. She had grown up in Worcester and started nursing at Saint V’s. We must have chatted for fifteen minutes, at the end of which she looked at me and said “I know we really really disagree with each other on a lot, Father,” she said, her voice trembling, “but thank you for not yelling at me.”

She knew what I believed, just by the way I was dressed. And I knew what she believed, just by the sign she was sitting behind. But our encounter was between two human beings, each convinced of the value and inherent dignity of the other. Which is a good start. And a lot better one than I had hoped for.

I wish I could give you a dramatic conclusion to the story — of conversion experiences and break-though moments. But life is a lot messier than that. And it takes a long way for us to slog through the swamp together. But maybe in God;’s good time.

God willing…with enough courage and good will.  Maybe in God’s good times.

Story number two.

At least once a month in my first ten years as a priest I would join with the folks of Problem Pregnancy in picketing the old Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.  One Saturday morning we heard the terrible news: that there had been a shooting at two clinics in Brookline.  The man with a gun was John Salvi,  and he went into two clinics, put a rifle up to the head of one woman and shot and killed her, saying “That's what you get. You should pray the rosary more.”  Then he killed a second woman.

Pro-life Catholics were ashamed and infuriated and the pro-choice folks was terrified and traumatized. Cardinal Law and most of the Bishops of new England suspended further protests and everyone from the Governor on down called for dialogue.

Concretely, the Cardinal quietly contacted Planned Parenthood and three leaders from the pro-life and pro-choice movements were chosen to secretly meet and begin a dialogue. 

One author recalled that “at first, the conversation was hard…There was a lot of finger pointing back and forth. Everybody thought, we're not going to do any finger pointing. But in fact, they couldn't help themselves is what you write.”  Each side saw the other as evil or insane. 

But slowly things changed.  A dozen years ago, one of them, Frances Hogan said this:

Now you expect me to conclude the story by saying everyone lived happily ever after because they listened so beautifully and that one of the pro-choices was marching with us last Friday.  Afraid not.  This is real life and not a movie.

Indeed, both sides reported that their view on abortion because deeper and the political attitudes of the participants became even more polarized over the years they continued to meet.  They continued to differ fundamentally on these issues, but they no longer hated each other…indeed, to this day, the participants int hat dialogue care deeply about one another.

Because they believed Saint Paul: “If I have not love, I am nothing.”  And who knows, with enough love and enough of God’s grace what other miracles might occur!?

Twenty five years after Evangelium Vitae we have a lot of work to do. A lot more prayers to pray, a lot more petitions to sign, and a lot more votes to cast. But we also have a lot more relationships to build, a lot more stories to hear and a lot more friends to make.

May God gives us the words and the heart for this great work. May he bless our country and our leaders with the wisdom, the courage, the faith and the love they will need.  And may he show us the way to make this one nation, under God, with liberty and justice even “the wretched refuse” whom everyone else throws away.

Forty Years, and Sixty...

It wasn’t forty years ago, but sixty (June 4, 1960) when dressed in a little white shirt and a little white tie, little white pants and even little white shoes that I knelt down at the altar rail at Our Lady of Lourdes as Father Rueger gave me my first Holy Communion. 

That Church is gone now, long since torn down, although you can still see the stone shell where the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes once stood, right next to Mrs Mack’s Bakery (also gone, I’m afraid). And the good priest who gave me my first communion is gone as well, we buried him last year in this very place. And my mom and dad who witnessed it are also gone, having led the way to the plot in which I will someday lie. (How’s that for an aging maudlin Irish sense).

So much is gone, for but one thing lasts. The Lord who on that day took hold of my heart and gave me Holy Communion, just like Martin, who last year received Jesus in that little white host. And like Martin I became an Altar Boy, and Jesus began to share himself with me, to nourish me, to form and strengthen me, to remake me in the image of his own Body and Blood….A Body offered up for love, immolated for love of the littlest and the least and Blood poured out to wash away my selfishness and sin and make me holy, that I might go to heaven and sing with the angels in one grand chorus of joyous praise forever in God’s sight.

It started on that day, June 4, 1960. As it started once again two decades later, on June 28, 1980 when I knelt right over there before the saintly Bishop Flanagan. And God struck my heart again, filling it with boundless zeal and hope and solutions to every problem (I sometimes wish I could still remember a couple of them), utterly certain that the Lord had lit in me a fire which would consume the earth and lead all things to him. 

On that day, God drowned me, immolated me, consumed and transformed me, despite all my weaknesses and fears and foolish ambitions, he implanted in me a share in the Priesthood of Christ Jesus his Son, and empowered me, in his person, to take up the sacrifices of your lives and place them upon that altar, as Christ placed his body upon the Altar of the cross, and join your sacrifices and mine to his, as a perfect offering, a pure victim, a holy and spotless sacrifice.

Forty years ago and yet it seems like yesterday, for Priesthood, like life, is but a series of moments of Kairos, of God reaching into to the mundane passages of time, transforming us, utterly transforming us with his love….It’s a great miracle this priesthood which we share, you in the order of our Baptism and me in a configuration to Christ in the order of the presbyterate.

It’s for me a share in the fullness of the Priesthood which the man in that Cathedra carries for us, this fourth Bishop of my Priesthood who teaches me how to be a Priest and honors me by his presiding today with the renowned prelates in the copes beside him. Bishop McManus has been for me what I always told seminarians a Bishop was supposed to be for a Priest. And I will ever be grateful.

Grateful for the promises I made those forty years ago in this Cathedral Church, six promises which are all about you: promising to preach the Gospel and teach the Catholic Faith to you, celebrate the sacred mysteries for your sanctification, pray for you without ceasing and be united with Christ more closely every day obedient to the Bishop, for your good and the good of all his Holy Church.

But now, as the end of this homily approaches, I fear I have failed. For the last thing I wanted this anniversary to be about about was me.  For it has not been about me, but about this God of ours, and his Only-begotten Son, who has done such great things for me, looked upon me in my littleness and even after forty years and sixty years and sixty seven still fills my heart and strengthens my arms, urging me forward to whatever he has in store. It’s a simple as that.

Our God, who washes and anoints us, feeds and seals us in his love. This God who is so much more than our littleness and so much greater than our weakness, who no demon pandemic, ignorance or hate can quell. This God who is the reason for our being from our first breath to the last, and each breath in between.

He is as close as the beating of your heart, and as far above as the farthest star. He is who was at the beginning and he will be there at our end. But he is always right now and right here, and never closer than when we are afraid, never more loving than when we feel unloved and never more merciful than when we have betrayed him.

Which is I guess what a Priest needs to learn, so he can teach other people about him, by his words when he really needs to and by his life most of the rest of the time.

I am the most blessed of men. For not one morning in forty years have I ever regretted the day I laid on that rug. But with a heart overcome with gratitude for his love for me and for you and the countless ones who came before, and the few who may still be yet to come, I give thanks, and I ask God to bless you every day of your lives.