Thoughts I Can Identify With

I came across this piece in The National Catholic Reporter. They are thoughts I can identify with. I love our church building. It's an elegant and holy place. But it can't compare with the elegance and holiness of the people who fill it!
Fr. Dan

Life of a parish, the real jewels of the church

Mar. 27, 2010
By Melissa Musick Nussbaum
 Our parish was “restored,” “remodeled,” “renewed” or “ruined” a few years ago. The verb choice varies according to the liturgical politics of the speaker. If the visitor decries the lack of a tabernacle above the high altar, I know what’s coming as surely as I do if another visitor approves the front three ranks of moveable wooden chairs.

The wooden chairs, like the pews behind them, have attached kneelers, which should please everyone. It doesn’t. Enthusiasm for curved seating is canceled out be dismay for the kneelers. Enthusiasm for kneelers is canceled out by dismay for the curved seating.

And don’t get me started on the doubled-edged sword – or butter knife, depending upon one’s point of view – that is “On Eagle’s Wings.”

As we are in the Age of the Parish Mission Statement, I sometimes think mother church should take a page from Merle Haggard’s song and simply headline out bulletins and bulletin boards with his immortal phrase, “Mama Tried.”

Of course, for the cognoscenti, one need only mention the name of the liturgical consultant who helped us with the work – Fr. Richard Vosko – and the response is immediate and strong. Like a character in a 19th-century melodrama, Vosko’s appearance on the stage elicits either cheers or boos but nothing in between. Indeed, I am told that in some circles he is known, like a liturgical Vlad the Impaler, as “Vosko the Destroyer,” in which case he needs to lose the earth-toned hush puppies and look for a cape.

I mention this because I tend to think of the great divide only when we have a visitor to the parish. The features of the building (so interesting when we were in the planning stage and under construction and when we first moved back into the space) have dimmed for me as the features of parishioners’ faces have grown ever brighter.

I can’t remember the last time I registered the new baptismal font -- an item on the liturgically correct/incorrect checklist -- except to remember the days our grandchildren went down into the water and came up wet and screaming, or the Easter Vigil when the numerous newly adopted children in one parish family went in and came out of the water smiling all the way. I remember other children, other adults in that life-giving bath, all of them greeted with songs and tears and prayers and clean towels.

I remember the coffin of a friend’s son as it lay before the font. Her son had killed himself, and Suicide had become both his fate and his name. The celebrant called out the name given him at his baptism and reminded us that he had died with Christ and so had died, though perhaps himself unable to comprehend it, in the hope of everlasting life.

My daughter turned to me and said, “They’ve given him his name back.” The church had restored his name as its waters had given him life. I doubt a single member of our community that day was remarking upon the size or placement of the font, except to give thanks for its power and its presence.

There are things I do register. I check Sunday after Sunday to see if Helen is in her customary seat near the west side of the church. Since Mitch died, we worry about her ability to make the 8:45 in bad weather. And then I glance across the altar to the section reserved for the deaf in our parish. I want to see Connie there with her son, Roy, and her granddaughter, Katarina. Connie has had some nasty falls, and if she is not at Mass, chances are she is in the hospital.

I look for David and his twins. For Marge and her daughter. For Will. For Barbie. For Jerry, due back from India. For Rita. If Bob is with her, I know he is having a good day. I look for Michelle and Chuck and Barbara, all of whom have suffered and survived.

I look at the choir and see Mike and hear again as he sings the names of our beloved dead each November. I remember the first November when his own daughter’s name was among those he sang. I look for Tom and Michael.

I look for Pat, who, when he is not with us, is ministering at the county jail. I look for Esperanza, who will watch the servers and shove them forward when they forget their jobs.

I look for John Francis, who bounces, and Juliet, who grins, and Jane, who wanders over for a hug.

I scan the entrance for our grandchildren, who clump a noisy counterpoint to the opening hymn as they race up the aisle and into our laps.

I check the back of the church for the dark heads of Mia and Nico bent over the baby’s own dark locks. I can feel peace as I count them like a mother at bedtime or mealtime, each beloved face in its place.

And I know what the visitor cannot -- the life of this parish that was vibrant and strangely beautiful even when we stood together under scaffolding and brought stadium blankets to wear against the chill from unfinished walls and windows.
I’m glad we kept the old windows and grateful we had the statues repainted, but St. Mary’s true ornaments have always been built of the same sturdy stuff as her walls and roof: the people who gather here to pray and to ask for prayer, to praise and to give thanks, to serve God and one another.

The story is told of St. Lawrence that upon his arrest during the Valerian persecutions in the third century, he was ordered to surrender the church riches to Roman authorities. Deacon Lawrence, we hear, went out and gathered people, members of the church, and brought them before the Roman prefect. “Here,” he said to his accusers, “are the jewels of the church.”

I know just what he meant.

[Melissa Musick Nussbaum lives in Colorado Springs, Colo. She is coauthor, with Jana Bennett, of Free to Stay, Free to Leave: Fruits of the Spirit and Church Choice.]

There is no "Christian" Torture
Fr. Steve Patti
published in the Herald-Sun

There is a new book called “Courting Disaster: How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack,” by Marc A. Thiessen. In the book, the author makes the claim that waterboarding, a form of torture that we have become familiar with over the past few years, is not only useful and desirable, but also permitted by the teachings of the Catholic Church. Mr. Thiessen describes himself as a practicing Roman Catholic.


Mr. Thiessen draws on the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states that “the defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to do harm.” In his book he writes: “If this principle applies to taking human life, it must certainly apply to coercive interrogation as well. A captured terrorist is an unjust aggressor who retains the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks.” In a recent homily at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church here in Durham, I asked the question: As Catholics, how do we respond to Marc Thiessen’s claim? As Catholics, can we ever justify torture?

It’s a sensitive issue for sure. Almost nine years after September 11, 2001, that day haunts us still. We will never forget the images from that day. I remember a cartoon that appeared in the newspaper a week or so after the attacks. It showed a person looking at a computer screen, right hand on the mouse, ready to click, and on the screen were two words – “freedom” and “security.” Which do you choose? We still wrestle with that question today.

It’s a sensitive issue as well because some of our brothers and sisters or sons and daughters or friends or neighbors have served, and continue to serve, bravely in our armed services.

When torture came up during the war in Iraq, you sometimes heard people say “you have to do what you have to do in times of war.” Or “sometimes what Jesus says in the gospel doesn’t work in the real world. We have to be realistic.”

Whatever we might think about torture or “coercive interrogation,” the teaching of the Catholic Church is that torture is wrong. “The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” a document from the Second Vatican Council, refers to the words of Jesus from the gospel of Matthew, “As you did to one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” The document then powerfully lists what it calls “varieties of crimes” against these brothers and sisters. These include: “all offenses against life itself, such as murder, genocide, abortion, and euthanasia; all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressures; all offenses against human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, the selling of women and children, degrading working conditions where people are treated as mere tools for profit rather than free and responsible persons: all these and the like are criminal: they poison civilization; and they debase the perpetrators more than the victims and militate against the honor of the creator.”

This is strong language. Torture “debases the perpetrators.” In a survey taken in 2005, it was revealed that 74% of Catholics agreed that torture can be justified in at least rare occasions. In my homily, I asked the question, what happens to us (Catholics, or Americans) when we unreflectively accept a policy of torture from our government? I asked the question conscious, and respectful, of the brave military service of our troops. I asked the question, as well, very aware of the evil that was committed against our nation by the terrorists on September 11, 2001. Still, these words from the Second Vatican Council haunt us: are we, in some way, “debased” by our acceptance, or justification, of torture?

As a Franciscan friar, I am drawn to the life and witness of St. Francis of Assisi, who lived 800 years ago in the times of the Crusades. The East was at war with the West. Christians were fighting Muslims. Thousands were dying. St. Francis, drawing from his own experience of the gospel and its call to peace and reconciliation, sailed from Italy across the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, marched through the Christian/Muslim battle lines, and asked to meet with the Sultan, the head of the Muslims. The soldiers, perhaps surprised by such a bold gesture on the part of this small, dressed-in-rags man, allowed him through. And as the story is told, Francis and the Sultan spoke, respectfully, of each other’s faith, and their own hopes for peace.

Was Francis naïve? Was he a fool for trying something so bold, so risky? Maybe he was. But he took the gospel and its call to radically re-think one’s life, its call to every person to be a bearer of peace and reconciliation, very seriously. As a nation that refers to itself as Christian, can we do the same?