Dorothy Day

When Fr. William Bausch ended his service as pastor of St. Mary’s, Colts Neck, NJ, some years ago, he gave the parish a gift– a statue of Dorothy Day, which is outside the main entrance to the present church. She’s an elderly woman sitting quietly on a bench.

Her quiet appearance may throw you off. The Jesuit poet Daniel Berrigan wrote at the time of her death in 1980: “Those of us who knew her in her later years were tempted to regard her, I think, rather thoughtlessly…She seemed to always have been as she was: serene, graced with her aura of piety and pity.”

Actually, Dorothy Day who dedicated herself to championing the poor was one of the most dynamic and challenging figures in the Catholic Church in recent times. Last Tuesday the Catholic bishops of the United States voted unanimously to push her cause for canonization as a saint.

Some might not consider her a candidate for sainthood. She was born in Brooklyn in 1897. Her father was a journalist and her family  moved from place to place– the West Coast, Chicago– and she became of journalist too.

As a young woman in the 1920s she was part of the bohemian scene in New York City, a rebel with “a passion for freedom to the point of waywardness.” (Daniel Berrigan) She had a failed marriage, attempted suicide, had an abortion. After the birth of her daughter, she became a Catholic and then founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which worked for the poor and social justice, was critical of capitalism and against war. With that kind background, I wonder how many Catholic parishes would invite her as a speaker today.

I’m delighted the bishops are pushing for her canonization. Saints are antidotes to the poison of their time. Dorothy counteracts a lot of poison. There’s the poison in the way we look at the poor and the weak in our society, for example; in our trust in war, in our belief in our political systems. She questioned those positions.

What’s more, she’s an example of the power of faith. Many today, of course, write off the Catholic Church and religion in general, as irrelevant. As a young woman she read a lot, from the Communist Manifesto to the bible. She wanted to reform the world, but as a young woman the church put her off. Christians looked like everyone else, she said:

“I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn’t see anyone having a banquet and call in the lame, the halt and the blind…I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to open to the lame, the halt and the blind…Only then did people really help their neighbor. In such love was the abundant life, and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.”

Yet, remarkably, through the disguise, in the dirt that so often hides it, Dorothy found the pearl of great price. She embraced the Catholic Church.

I think Dorothy Day also contradicts the belief that people no longer search for God, that God is irrelevant. She writes in her autobiography “The Long Loneliness” “All my life I have been haunted by God…A Cleveland Communist once said, ‘Dorothy was never a Communist; she was too religious.’ How much did I hear of religion as a child? Very little, and yet my heart leaped when I heard the name of God. I do believe every soul has a tendency toward God. ‘As soon as someone recalls God, a certain sweet movement fills his heart…Our understanding never has such great joy as when thinking of God.’” (St. Francis de Sales)

She reminds us the “long loneliness”–that’s the title she gave to her autobiography–  the search for God goes on in all of us.

There’s a lot poisoning our times; Dorothy offers an antidote to it. “It is a great pity that there are not many more like Dorothy Day among the millions of American Catholics. There are never enough such people, somehow, in the church. But, without a few like her, one might well begin to wonder if we are still Christians, her presence is in some ways a comfort, in some ways a reproach.” (Letter from Thomas Merton)

Her autobiography “The Long Loneliness” is worth reading and rereading.  The Catholic Worker has a blog at http://www.catholicworker.org .  Here a short video from CNS

The Legacy of Paul of the Cross

Today, October 20th,  we celebrate the feast of St. Paul of the Cross in the United States. A saint leaves a legacy; what legacy did the saintly founder of the Passionists leave?

He died October 18, 1775, a year before our American Revolution and fourteen years before the French Revolution. In 1798, twenty three years after his death, that revolution spilled over into neighboring Italy and the Papal States. The pope, Pope Pius VI, was imprisoned by Napoleon, religious houses and church resources were taken over by French forces and the Catholic Church in Italy, like the Catholic Church in France, was crushed by a seemingly invincible French general and his powerful army.

In May of 1810 the situation got worse. Napoleon declared an end to the papal domains and ordered the new pope Pius VII to be imprisoned in Savona, Italy. Thousands of religious were led under police escort from their religious houses back to their homes and told to start another life. Among them were 242 Passionists, the community laboriously founded the previous century by Paul of the Cross.

The old church was dead, the emperor said. He would replace it by one of his own.

If Wikipedia existed then and someone bothered writing an article about Paul of the Cross, thirty five years after his death, the article would probably call him a poor deluded figure, now buried in an old abandoned church on the Celian Hill in Rome. His community’s disbanded and no longer exists.

Of course, the church didn’t die and neither did the Passionists.

Historians usually praise the brilliant diplomacy of Cardinal Consalvi, the pope’s secretary of state, for keeping the church alive in that chaotic time and getting it on its feet again after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, ending Europe’s long nightmare.

But the Passionists may have had something to do with it too.

Certainly, Vincent Strambi, the Passionist bishop and first biographer of Paul of the Cross, was a major inspirational church figure at that time. Before Napoleon’s troops invaded the city for the first time in 1798 Pius VI called him to strengthen the Roman people in their faith by preaching in four of the city’s major churches. He was called on repeatedly to raise the hopes of a frightened city.  After Napoleon’s defeat, Pius VII asked Strambi to Rome again to preach a 9 day retreat of reconciliation–not everybody stood up to the French invaders.

Vincent Strambi was a pillar of strength for the church in crisis, preaching the mystery of the Cross by word and example in his dioceses of Marcerata and Tolentine and throughout central Italy. He spoke to a church in ruins. Years of house arrest for refusing to take the loyalty oath to Napoleon only increased his stature. From what we know, other Passionists– also faithful followers of Paul of the Cross–joined him in shoring up a battered church.

What is St. Paul of the Cross’ legacy to us? We know he not only preached that mystery, but lived it. He held on to his dreams through hard times and the community that followed him also kept that dream alive when times were hard.

Somewhere as the years went on, Paul stopped signing his name on letters “Paul Danei” and simply wrote “Paul of the Cross.” That’s the mystery he held on to. Wouldn’t he tell us to hold on to that mystery too?

Galileo Galilei

 

The brilliant Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was one of the great figures of the 17^th century. Born in Pisa, in Tuscany, Galileo studied, taught and lectured in Pisa and Padua as well as in Florence, where he and his family made their home. The father of experimental science, his work in astronomy drew criticism from the church of his time and made him a symbol of the conflict between faith and science.

 

He was a deeply religious man; Catholic to the core. Two of his daughters entered the convent outside Florence and one of them, Sister Maria Celeste, carried on a long, tender correspondence with her brilliant father.

Galileo believed that nature was a teacher along with the bible, and he wanted the church to accept the evidence that science provides, otherwise it could be called an enemy of truth and human progress. Like others then and now, he believed that the bible taught you how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go.

His story is beautifully and carefully told today in a recent book I’m reading now:

Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love, Dava Sobel,  New York 1999

There’s a television version:  Galileo: Battle for the Heavens, that you can find on Nova’s site on the internet.

I admire the author’s even-handed description of the relations between the scientist and the churchmen who condemned him for what they saw as his heretical ideas. “A tragic mutual incomprehension has been interpreted as the reflection of a fundamental opposition between science and faith, “ Pope John Paul said regretfully  in 1992.

I’m going in October on a pilgrimage through some of the Tuscan cities and Venice,  where Galileo achieved so much.  He was a believer and a scientist. May others follow him and may our church welcome the knowledge they bring to the human family.

Go or Stay?

Bill Keller in an op-ed piece in New York Times on June 18^th had some hard words for the Catholic Church which, as he sees it, is governed by a dysfunctional leadership and is falling apart.  His advice:

“Much as I wish I could encourage the discontented, the Catholics of open minds and open hearts, to stay put and fight the good fight, this is a lost cause. Donohue is right. Summon your fortitude, and just go.”

Keller finds himself agreeing with Bill Donohue, a strident Catholic voice on the right, who urges leaving the church but for another reason. He’s telling Catholics not in agreement with some of the Church’s positions: Get out.

A letter in today’s Times offered a fine answer to both Keller and Donohue:

“It seems to me that both Bill Keller and Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, misunderstand the catholicity of the Catholic Church. Mr. Keller’s advice to disaffected Catholics, including priests, nuns and vowed religious, to “summon your fortitude” and leave allows no room for reconciliation, reformation and peace within conflict that is central to Christian social life.

“Christian community is not a social contract like those of liberal democracies; it is a covenant that seeks to give witness to God’s unconditional love for humanity through the bonds of community. Leaving, as Mr. Keller suggests, may serve our consumerist attitudes well, but it does little to improve community; it only weakens community.

“Mr. Donohue makes a similar misreading of Catholic catholicity by seemingly insisting on ideological purity. This is a dangerous desire that has plagued Christianity since the fourth and fifth centuries. There is no such thing as an ideologically pure church, and frequently such perceptions have led to serious abuses of power.

 

“Disaffection and ideological dispute among Catholics are a pastoral issue that should be approached within particular religious communities, parishes and lay groups with their pastoral and ministerial leadership. It is a chance for reconciliation and understanding.

MARC LAVALLEE
Arlington, Mass., June 18, 2012

The writer is a Ph.D. candidate in practical theology at Boston University.”

 The writer’s on target.

Someone said to me today: “If your father develops Alzheimer’s  do you abandon him? If your family breaks down, is split by misunderstandings, do you leave it? Is the church a political party? You don’t like the platform, join another one?”

The church is a community formed by God’s unconditional love for humanity. That same love is asked of us.

I liked another letter to the Times also:

“The behavior of the Roman Catholic hierarchy disappoints me on so many fronts that it would be difficult even to begin cataloging those disappointments. How many times have I contemplated joining the Episcopal Church? More times than I can count.

“Why do I stay? Because my own parish, with its engaged pastor, deacon and staff members, vibrant liturgy and forward-leaning membership, is a comfortable home that embraces each one of us in times of joy and sorrow and provides an atmosphere for real spiritual growth.

“I suspect that many Catholics, including a lot of the nuns who are being hounded at the moment, stay for the same reason I do, and I would suggest to those who are on the verge of leaving that they should shop around first. There are welcoming and joyful Catholic communities just waiting for you to join. I know. I belong to one.

MARION EAGEN
Clarks Green, Pa., June 18, 2012

Preaching, 2

Yesterday I offered some thoughts on preaching. Today a few more reflections. Who are those we preach to today? We should know them as they are and the church in which we preach as it is.

Let’s recognize we’re preaching to people and to a church experiencing a priest shortage, a declining number of women and men religious, and a weakened hierarchy.Statistics– surely we see it ourselves– tell us that people, especially the younger generation, aren’t going to church as they once did.  Our parishes are suffering from a decline in members and Catholic schools are closing.

It’s a church roiled by sexual scandals, controversy over the place of women, issues like gay marriage, abortion and government regulations. Certainly,  Jesus Christ will be with us always and the church will survive, but what can we do to strengthen it?

I think the closest historical parallel to our American church today may be the Catholic church in American colonial times, which one historian describes as a “priestless, popeless church.”  We might add  “sisterless” to describe our church, since religious woman had a major role in its growth until now.

The colonial church survived, according to historians, because it was kept alive in the home, by prayerbooks and catechisms. (cf. The Faithful: A History of Catholics in American, by James M. O’Toole, Harvard,  2008)

Historical parallels are never absolute, but that era may suggest a preaching aimed at building a home-based faith, that is strongly catechetical and that promotes a life of regular prayer in people.

What would the prayerbook and basic catechism for today’s church be? The bible, now providentially blessed with new tools to access the treasures of its spirituality. We need a preaching that directs people to this source and helps them mine it.

It’s important we recommend the best versions of the scripture available (The New American Bible, The Jerusalem Bible) and encourage people to use aids like The Magnificat and Give Us Our Daily Bread to follow the daily lectionary.

Who preaches?

I believe we need a new generation of preachers in our churches and wherever the gospel can be proclaimed: men and women, priests, religious and laypeople. I’m not looking for new Bishop Fulton Sheens, spell–binding orators to dazzle us with their eloquence.

I think I’d prefer preachers with more modest skills. Maybe preachers like the hosts on the cooking shows on television, who whip up good food and bow out modestly after they show you how it’s done. I think  laypeople will have an increasing role in the renewal of preaching.

What about canon law? “The times, they are a-changing.”

St. Michael’s, Union City

On June 1, 2012, the Passionists are leaving Union City, NJ, after 151 years. The community came to Union City, then West Hoboken, following a mission preached by Passionist missionaries at old St. Mary’s church in 1860.

The next year they were invited to settle on the high palisades above the city of Hoboken on the Hudson River by James Roosevelt Bailey, bishop of the newly formed diocese of Newark, who hoped they would minister to masses of German and Irish immigrants pouring into the northern New Jersey river towns of Hoboken, Newark, Jersey City, Hackensack and Paterson because of the booming industrial expansion of New York City.

Passionist priests and brothers played a large part in building the Catholic church in northern New Jersey. They helped create 16 Catholic parishes in the area {St. Joseph, West New York, St. Paul of the Cross, Jersey City, Holy Family, Union City, St. Joseph/St Michael, Union City, among them) and preached missions and retreats to the growing Catholic population taking root in the new world.

Their base was the great church and monastery of St. Michael  built on the high palisades above the Hudson River in 1875, a familiar landmark visible for miles around. The church and monastery appear on the horizon of a panoramic map of Hoboken from 1881.

A missionary order, the Passionists chose their base in Union City, not just with northern New Jersey in mind, but because of its access to other places in the United States and the wider world. The first Passionists came to America from Italy in 1851. Before the advent of air travel, the busy Hoboken docks close by offered them access by sea to their headquarters in Rome and missionary fields in China (1922) and later the Philippines and Jamaica, West Indies.

Nearby too in earlier times were the railroads that reached into the western, northern and southern parts of the United States. From Hoboken, Passionist preachers from St. Michael’s traveled to Catholic parishes and religious communities throughout the country to preach the gospel.

The foundation in Union City was an ideal location for a community like the Passionists with global ambitions.

In 1921, the Passionists began publication of the Sign Magazine, which grew to become one of the most important Catholic publications in North America. The magazine was discontinued in 1982, but efforts in publishing and the social media continued until now.

The Passionists made Union City a center of devotion to the Passion of Jesus. One important expression was the production of Veronica’s Veil, a play produced by St. Joseph’s Parish in Union City. Catholics came to St. Michael’s in Union City to take part in its Monday devotions to the Passionist saints, St. Paul of the Cross, St. Gabriel and St. Gemma. It was a center for retreats, confessions and counseling.

The Passionists ministered to the poor in the county institutions at Snake Hill for the many years they were located there. They trained their seminarians at St. Michael’s,  and their provincial government and archives were located there.

I took the picture on the masthead of this blog from the dome of the great church of St. Michael a few years ago. To me, it expresses the Passionists: they have a message for the world.

I came from St. Mary’s Parish in Bayonne, NJ, one of the parishes the Passionists helped establish. I was ordained in St. Michael’s and much of my ministry was based here.

Places teach you how to live as well as people. Now we move on.

“The living, the living give you thanks

as I do today.

Fathers declare to their sons, O God,

your faithfulness.” Isaiah 38,20

Resurrection Thinking

I spoke today, the final day of  our mission at Immaculate Conception Church, Melbourne Beach, Florida, about the mystery of the Resurrection of Jesus, a crucial mystery of our faith. Each of the gospels presents it in its own way. Here’s a summary from a previous blog of mine.

A recent presentation on the Resurrection by Bishop Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, to the Catholic bishops of Italy, is particularly interesting. I put it on my blog last month.

I began my presentation talking about Harold Camping’s prediction from last spring that the world was going to end on May 21, 2011. It didn’t, of course. But Harold’s thinking probably reflects the widespread gloom in our western world, in particular, about where the world is heading.

Our belief in the Risen Christ affects the way we see our church, ourselves and our world. We learn from this mystery to trust in the Risen Christ who King of all creation, our Way, our Truth and our Life. We need Resurrection Thinking.

Here’s a visual meditation on the Passion of Jesus from Rembrandt:

Calling Us Together

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (February 18,2012) entitled “Religion for Everyone” the British atheist Alain De Botton expressed his hopes for a future world without God, but he suggests keeping some things religions have done well in the past. One of them is the ability to create vital communities.

“One of the losses that modern society feels most keenly is the loss of a sense of community.” De Botton writes. Religions once supplied a sense of neighborliness. Now it’s “been replaced by ruthless anonymity, by the pursuit of contact with one another primarily for individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.”

We’re set on making money, getting ahead and plenty of sex, he says. We’re building more restaurants, more bars, more gated communities, but there seem to be fewer places where all of us can get together. “The contemporary world is not lacking in places where we can dine well in company, but what’s significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.”

Of all things, De Botton points to the Catholic Church and its liturgy of the Mass as his prime example of religion’s ability to create community:

“Consider Catholicism, which starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their confines there will reign values utterly unlike the ones that hold sway in the world beyond. A church gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.”

No one asks what you do or how much you earn when you come for Mass.  The banker and the cleaner sit side by side. The Mass places you in a setting that focuses on human dignity and its blessings. It urges you to give up being judgmental of others and look on them with respect.

“Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.”

De Botton makes you think, doesn’t he? Modern society is losing a sense of community as we become more and more individualistic. An atheist, he recognizes in a religion like the Catholic church a powerful remedy to the ills of our times.

Why don’t we see these same blessings in our church? Though De Botton doesn’t see them so, they’re signs of God’s lively presence.

Successful and Unsuccessful Saints

In yesterday’s post I offered a summary of Bishop N.T. Wright’s talk to the Italian Catholic Bishops in which he stated that our understanding of the resurrection of Jesus is influenced today by the thinking of the Enlightenment, which placed God (if God exists) beyond our world. We are the lords of creation, according to that thinking. This life and all in it is in our hands to shape and control as we think best.

Yet, the Risen Christ is Lord of creation, still present in our world, fashioning it to become God’s new creation. He has not just come and now is gone, with us only at our death to take his own into heaven. Nor is he just lord of the perfect. Every knee bows before him.

I wonder if the thinking of the Enlightenment has also influenced our thinking about the saints. We like “successful saints” who seem to leave their mark in society by what they accomplish: building schools, hospitals, blazing new trails on the world scene. We like saints who do something big.

What about saints like Saint Gemma, Saint Pio–who seem to be sidelined most their lives without obvious human accomplishments­– aren’t they witnesses to the power of the Risen Christ to reach into humble life and be present there?

I heard recently that Saint Pio is probably the most popular saint in the church right now. Interesting. Books about St. Gemma are the most popular books we distribute at Passionist Press. Interesting.

Is holiness only for the perfect, the bright, the accomplished? Or does the Risen Christ reveal himself to the humble, sometimes giving them the treasures of his wounds? Maybe the voice of the faithful is telling us something.

Emmaus Centre

Crucifix, St.Anselm Church

Yesterday I gave a presentation on preaching to the priests, deacons and lay ministers from the Bahamas at Emmaus Retreat Center in Nassau. Like John the Baptist, by our “voice’ in preaching and catechesis we point out the Word.

Preaching and catechesis should be an expression of our “personal search for the face of the Lord,” to use Pope Benedict’s words. We should let the scripture readings, the liturgy, the seasons, as well as the life of the people give us the material for our preaching and catechesis.

Those participating were from the Bahamas, Haiti, India and North America, reflecting the Catholic population here.

Afterwards, Fr. Tom and I visited St. Anselm’s church with its pastor, Msgr. Preston Moss. Only two years old, the church is in one of the earliest villages on the island and reflects its traditions and art.

Archbishop Patrick Pinder and Passionists

St. Anselm Church