Church Dynamite

Yesterday evening, after travelling most of the day from a family reunion on Long Island, I attended a lecture in Roger Williams University in Bristol Rhode Island.  The speaker was Father James Ruggieri, pastor of Saint Patrick’s in Providence, Rhode Island.

The title of Father Ruggieri’s lecture was “The Dynamite of the Church’s Social Teaching in Urban Providence”.  I was attracted by the provocative title, but Father Ruggieri explained that he was using the word “dynamite” in the sense of the original Greek word, “dunamis”, which means power.  The Church’s Social Teaching has great power, but it has no impact so long as it is not taught and not put into practice.

The Church’s Social Teaching is presented in dramatic form in Saint Matthew’s Gospel 25, 31-46.  This is the Parable of the Last Judgment, where those who helped the needy in this life are invited to enter heaven, while those who neglected the needy in this life are turned away.  Those who are excluded are surprised because they are turned away not for something they did, but for something they failed to do.

In our world today that same neglect continues on a huge scale.  In 2009 there was a book published with the title, “The Hole in Our Gospel”.  It was written by Richard Stearns, who gave up a powerful corporate position and took a 75% pay cut to become President of World Vision, a Christian Relief Organization dedicated to helping poor children and their communities throughout the world.

Stearns was shocked to learn that about 26,000 children die every day from poverty-related causes that the world could easily remedy if it had the will to do so.  He tried to shock his readers and his listeners by comparing it to 100 jetliners filled with children crashing every day 365 days a year.  You imagine that people would not tolerate such a loss of life due to human negligence, yet we tolerate that many children dying every day due to poverty-related causes that could easily be prevented.

Stearns insists that things will not change until we change our values.  He compares our tolerance of extreme poverty to our tolerance of racial discrimination.  In the past, racial discrimination was openly accepted.  Today it is unacceptable, and we do not tolerate it in our schools or in our places of work.

But we continue to allow extreme poverty in the world even though it could easily be overcome with the political and moral will to do so.  It will only begin to end when we change our value system, and enough ordinary people agree that it is intolerable that so many children should die from hunger, lack of clean water, or disease, when it is in our power to prevent it.

One of the novel features in last night’s lecture was how the children at Saint Patrick’s learn their Faith.  They are not just taught that they must reach out to help the poor, but they are required to do so by spending a certain number of hours each week helping in the food pantry, or the meal kitchen or in some other service the parish provides to help the poor.

I think it would be wonderful if the Church at large had such a requirement for all its members who are capable of doing it.  The Church authorities put a lot of emphasis on when and how to pray and worship.  I think it is also important for them to designate places and opportunities where people could perform those acts of service demanded in the Gospel (Matthew 25, 31-46).

This would enable us to fulfill one of the main requirements for entry into heaven.  It would also help us to express our Faith in a practical way, and save us from the barb of the Johnny Cash lyric, “You’re so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good”.

Saints Alight

The Catholic Cathedral of Santiago, Chile, is situated in the city’s main square called the Plaza de Armas.  Even before I ever entered the Cathedral I was impressed by it because of a story I heard from an official of the Archdiocese.

The Cathedral is a popular tourist attraction, and one day a father brought his young son to see the Cathedral and to tour the interior.  The interior can be dark and almost gloomy, making it difficult to see the succession of side altars of the patron saints, and the historic treasures of the heroes of Chile’s struggle for independence encased along the inner walls.

But at a certain point of time in the late morning, the gloom is suddenly dispelled by a flood of light, as if an invisible hand had thrown a giant switch.  The sun has just turned a corner on its daily path, pouring its rays through the stained glass windows high in the central nave, flooding the interior of the Cathedral with color and light.

The little boy was taken by surprise, and grasped his father’s hand as he looked up and saw the larger than life images outlined in the sunlit colors of the stained glass.  “Who are they?” he asked in a whisper, as if afraid that they might hear him.  His father smiled in reply, “They are the saints”, he said.  Then noticing his son’s puzzled look he asked him, “Do you know who the saints are?”  The boy hesitated, then, with the excitement of one who has just made a new discovery, he replied, “The saints are people who let the light shine through”.

I think that child gave a wonderful interpretation of what he had just witnessed.  Images that had been gloomy, almost invisible, suddenly became dramatically alive and beautiful by allowing the light of the sun to shine through them.  The little boy captured it in a single phrase, and that phrase had a more profound meaning than he realized.

The saints are people who let the light shine through not just at the level of stained glass, but at the level of real life.  Saints are people who allow the light of God’s love to shine in our world through the words and actions of their daily life.

I remember Father Alfred Delp, the Jesuit priest who was executed in 1945 by the Nazis at the age of 38, once wrote, “When someone brings a little more light and truth, a little more goodness and love into the world, that person’s life has had meaning”.  The saints are continually doing that.  The rest of us try to do it now and again.

You may not be able to let the light shine through all day every day.  But if you just remember that the light is from God, that the light is God, and if you try to let the light shine through you some time each day, then maybe your life will take on a new meaning.

(For the immediate future I will try to provide a blog every Monday, and more often if the opportunity arises.  At a later date I hope to return to the 5-blog week).

Where God Weeps

Last year I took part in presenting a Church History course.  One of my points of interest was how the Church had survived persecution in its early history.  I always assumed that the greatest persecution of the Church took place under Roman Emperors like Nero, Septimus Severus, Diocletian and Maxentius from 64 to 312 AD.

I was surprised and shocked to learn that the most vicious persecution of the Catholic Church took place in the 20^th century, when more Catholics were executed for their Faith than in any previous century.  This was due primarily, but not exclusively, to the persecution of the Church in Mexico at the beginning of the century, in Spain during the civil war (1936-1939),  in Nazi Germany (1933-1944) and in the Soviet Union in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution (1917).

Today there is severe persecution of the Church in Western Asia, that large region which the Western world calls “the Middle East”.  That persecution is being experienced most acutely in Iraq, where the Christian population has decreased from 800,000 (in 2002) to 200,000 (in 2011).  This is due to an organized campaign of terror that has devastated the Christian community in Iraq.

According to Church statistics, more than 30 churches in Iraq have been attacked between 2003 and 2010.  The Archbishop of Mosul was kidnapped, and died in captivity.  The most serious attack on the Church took place in October 2010, when seven armed men stormed the Cathedral in Baghdad during Mass.  Two young priests and 50 of the faithful were killed.  It is estimated that about 40% of the 1.6 million who have fled Iraq as refugees are Christians fleeing persecution..

Recently I received a book entitled, “Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes”.  It is written by a Westerner who lived for 60 years in the Middle East.  He said his understanding of the Gospel was greatly enriched by learning from the local people’s way of thinking.

It is sad to think that there are more than 10 million Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East, whose existence is almost unknown in the Western Church. These are communities who have been Christian for more than 2000 years, while centuries of high quality Arabic Christian literature are, for the most part, unpublished and unknown.

These Middle Eastern Christian communities are the closest in thought and culture to those early communities where the gospels were gradually developed and put in written form.  I would love to see these present-day communities given a special place within our Church, and given a voice to be heard with appreciation and respect.  Yet even now, while their very survival is in doubt, the rest of the Church seems barely aware of their existence

“Where God Weeps”  (www.wheregodweeps.org) is a weekly tv and radio magazine program which seeks to raise awareness internationally about the suffering Church throughout the world.  It concentrates on areas of the world where Catholics are unable to live their faith due to outside pressures and constraints.  The program is supported by the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need.

“Where God Weeps” has chosen Iraq as the “country of the month”, not just to evoke a response to the suffering of our Catholic brothers and sisters, but to remind us that when any part of the Church suffers, the whole Church suffers (1 Corinthians 12, 26).  If God weeps, maybe it is not only because the Christian people in Iraq are suffering, but also because the Church in the rest of the world has failed to notice and respond.