Maybe Democratically Incorrect, But…

Blessed Pope Paul VI, pray for us!

When Pope Paul still bore the name Giovanni Battista Montini, his father played a prominent role in Italian politics. Giorgio Montini tried everything to keep Mussolini out of power, but history ran a different direction. The Fascists won the battle, and innocent people died.

The premier English-language biographer of Pope Paul VI, Peter Hebblethwaite, holds the “official” Catholic theology of the early 20th century to blame. The Church would not officially endorse democracy. Therefore, Hebblethwaite contends, the Fascists won.

To this day, the Church does not ‘endorse’ any particular political arrangement. Now, the teaching of St. John Paul II certainly highlighted reasons why we might say that democracy seems to be the system most reflective of the dignity of the human person. (Which was revealed by Christ.)

Pope Paul VI’s father

But: I think the position we American Catholics find ourselves in at this moment, in the late fall of AD 2014–this position, in which we find ourselves, goes a long way to showing why the Church cannot ‘endorse’ any particular political arrangement.

Democracy is a complicated, messy business. Meanwhile, we strive to keep our eyes focused on the crystalline facts of fundamental human rights.

Is it ‘correct’ for us to pray and hope as follows?

A sitting President, duly elected–though hardly a champion of our Catholic principles–arguably intends to subvert the separation of powers enshrined in our Constitution, in the interest of accomplishing a goal which we would not hesitate to call the vindication of human rights–namely, that families should not be subject to arbitrary separation, that people of all races enjoy the prerogative of migrating as they think best, and governments cannot interfere with that, failing a good reason– Can we Catholics, who love democracy and America–can we hope and pray that the President will stick to his guns and unilaterally grant legal ‘amnesty’ to as many of our brothers and sisters as possible?

We can hope and pray for this. And we should hope and pray for it.

May the democratically elected President, who says and does a lot of things that we hate–may he stand firm, and subvert the Constitution, and do the right thing!

Minding the Immigrants and Refugees

Blessed are you who suffer, who hunger, who mourn. Luke 6

Tackling the profound mystery of these statements requires much more wisdom than I possess. But one thing leaps right off the page, even for an obtuse person like myself.

The Lord Jesus thought about the suffering people, the hungry people, the people in mourning. And He spent time with them and talked with them.

Inhuman cruelty can and does sneak up while we have our noses buried in our smartphones.

Like our neighbors who have to live without the basic benefits of citizenship—benefits we take for granted. Like looking to police officers for help. Like having our children apply for scholarships to go to college. Like having some recourse if we are exploited in the workplace, or abused, or fired unjustly, or cheated in a business transaction. Like having the possibility of defending our rights and claims in a court of law.

Right here in the beautiful counties of our parish cluster, we have plenty of neighbors who do not enjoy these basic prerogatives. We know from interacting with them that they themselves are no lawbreakers. What kind of country has this become, when the arrival of thousands of innocent children at our border becomes a reason not to treat Latin Americans more fairly? The children came armed with their perfect innocence and desperation, and our reaction is: Well, now we know we need to build higher walls and deport more people?

Or, while we fiddle with getting our Netflix subscriptions, another inhuman cruelty sneaks up: a jihad that enforces its will with a reign of terror that would have made the Nazi high command blush. Somehow a million+ refugees from Islamic State, with no roof over their heads, no schools, no businesses, no churches—snuck up on us somehow.

Those who suffer and mourn, who hunger and thirst. The Lord Jesus paid attention to them. If the books of the four holy gospels smell of one thing, they smell of the poor and the desperate. Christ had them on His mind. He has them on His mind. If they are not on our minds, then we are not sharing in the mind of Christ.

A decade ago we launched a war against Saddam Hussein. We fought the war in an earnest manner, I guess, basically. But we fought it for a false reason.

Now the groaning of all the Syrian and Iraqi refugees gives us a compelling and just reason to launch a war. But, to my mind, we seem a million miles away from being prepared to fight it in an earnest manner, a just manner. The legitimate reason for taking up arms is totally out-of-focus—namely, addressing the wrongs done to the countless innocents. And we appear to be incapable of learning this simple lesson of history: We cannot engineer our will from the air. That does not work; it just makes things worse and more complicated, and innocent people die. “Boots on the ground” is a stupid euphemism for actually fighting a war.

Are we justified in attacking the Islamic State? Is the Pope Catholic? Are we justified in imagining totally unrealistic scenarios in which we don’t have to fight the war, but just have to drop bombs from a convenient distance? No way.

May God help the leaders of the world to do what is right and just, in an honest way. Our job is to keep the suffering in mind, and pray like mad.

Local Paper

published a story about our dear Enrique, with extensive quotes from the goofiest priest in the ‘ville.

Click HERE.

We thank Ben Williams for his excellent work. We look forward to reading his further reportage. He told me he finds himself deeply disturbed by the “Kafkaesque” limbo into which Enrique has fallen.

Please keep praying. And please contact your US Senator, your US Congressman, your state senators and congressmen, and anyone else you can think of, and insist/beg that they intervene personally to get Enrique Manriquez, of Martinsville, Va., out of jail and back home where he belongs.

The Trouble with the World

John 14:1

Let’s thank the good Lord that he kept someone as intelligent and insightful as St. John the Evangelist so close to Himself at the Last Supper. St. John remembered and wrote down some important things that Jesus said that evening.

Our readings from chapter 14 of St. John’s gospel began last Sunday, with the Lord Jesus saying: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

Now, the Apostles might reasonably have asked: “Don’t let our hearts be troubled? But you have just told us that you will not be with us much longer, and that we cannot go to the place where you are going. Of course our hearts are troubled!”

And we might reasonably ask also: “Don’t let our hearts be troubled? Lord, You came to reveal the face of the eternal and almighty Father, then you vanished into the heavens. But these days no one seems to care about anything other than internet access and Donald Sterling. The world seems to have closed in on itself completely, and people want immediate satisfaction instead of eternal life. Of course our hearts are troubled!”

Who Sucks More

when it comes to walls?

Israel?

or us?

Not a distinction we want.

20 C + M + B 14

In the malls and on tv, they immediately move on from Christmas–in order to exploit the next event for profit. But in church, we linger with Christmas for 2 ½ weeks. We meditate on the great mystery. And we try to get a grip on the year to come, for what it really is: a holy year of grace. The 2,014th year of Christ’s unfathomable grace.

In May, Pope Francis will visit Bethlehem and Jerusalem. He begins his trip on the 11th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood! In the fall, we will mark the 50th anniversary of the third session of the Second Vatican Council, and Holy Father will preside over the first part of the Synod on the Family! Too wonderful just to be a conincidence: This year in the cluster we already have four weddings scheduled, and there could be three or four more, on top of that!

Before all this, on this coming Friday evening, our Francis-of-Assisi youth will co-sponsor a coffeehouse in Roanoke to help people get married! Get married at the proper time and in the proper way, that is.

Two weeks from today, we will go to Washington to stand up for the innocent and defenseless unborn babies!

Then, on the following day, our Francis-of-Assisi delegation will travel to Haiti to visit Father Serdieu and our twin parish in Trianon.

It is never too cold to do the will of God.

If you paid attention to the Epiphany proclamation on Sunday, you know that Lent doesn’t start until March 5 this year. So we get to go up the whole way through the Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time between now and then!

On April 27, Pope Francis will canonize John Paul II on the ninth liturgical anniversary of his holy death!

We read about the Lord marvellously walking on water. When someone does marvelous things, sometimes we say, “He walks on water!” Well, it appears as though 2014 will “walk on water”–that’s how amazing a year it will be. Jesus will walk on the water of time through AD 2014.

So we pray. We stay close to the Lord through the Mass and all the sacraments. We pray that the human race won’t destroy the environment, that global warming will be prevented. But we also pray that it will get a little warmer during 2014 than it is right now.

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PS. Not to mention: Immigration-Reform information session at St. Joseph, Martinsville, this very evening at 6:00pm, with a screening of “The Dream is Now.”

Egypt and Other Rough Places

“Out of Egypt I called my son.” (Matthew 2:15)

In Egypt they venerate the places where the Holy Family lived during their quiet sojourn there. Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus left their homeland and went to the country where their ancestors had been slaves.

Of old, in Egypt, God had shown His mighty power, working great prodigies to bring about the liberation of His beloved people. Now God came in the flesh to Egypt, an infant fugitive. And He spent time there in a state of perfect quiet, nursing at the breast, listening to His foster father and mother sing to Him the very songs that He Himself had taught King David to sing a thousand years earlier.

Heartbreaking Quote of the Day

The immigration fight is a parable of American politics in the age of gridlock—when even popular legislation favored by bipartisan majorities of lawmakers, including leadership, and backed by a passionate grassroots coalition, can fail for seemingly no reason at all.

“What Happened to Immigration Reform,” The Atlantic online

Pro-Life Pro-Immigrant

Which one of you, wishing to construct at tower, does not sit down and calculate the cost? (Luke 14:28)

Building anything requires deliberation, reflection, informed decision-making. We don’t need the Lord to tell us that; common sense tells us. But it helps when higher authority spells things out.

Now, I do not claim to know much about politics. I do know that politics involves the art of building up the nation. And I also know that when the American Bishops instruct us priests to preach on a certain political topic on a given Sunday, I had better try to do it.

In a republican democracy like ours, politics begins with our reflecting on a question like this: What kind of country do we want to live in?

We know we want a country that respects the gift of life. We want to live in a country where babies don’t get killed in the womb. We want a country where no one’s life gets snuffed-out arbitrarily. Where people get treated fairly under law.

[You may recall that we already discussed the topic which we are under orders to consider. I gave a little sermon on this subject on the Sunday before Independence Day.]

We want to have the kind of country that other people want to come to—a free and decent and honest country, a nation of humane laws and wholesome customs. And when people come here, we want to welcome them. We want to open our communities up to them. A community that can welcome new people is a strong community. A community obsessed with border-fences is not.

Hard Fall, Hard Praying

The Lord has called us to be His disciples, to put out into the deep waters of this world, and fish for men.

Terrifying and bewildering as it may be for us to be summoned for duty by the good God Himself, we cannot say, ‘depart from me, Lord.’ Or, rather, we can say it—but He won’t do it.

So we must engage everything that comes our way as Christians, as servants of Christ. He guides our ship; He’s the captain. He will not take us out any further from shore than we can handle—even if, to us, it may seem like He has guided us out into the remote and uncharted expanses of the ocean.

This Sunday is our Lady’s birthday, which is when the wild ride of the fall flurry of activity usually begins. From all appearances, our nation, the United States, is in for a difficult, a taxing—potentially a very painful fall.

The fax machines and the internet connections at the US Bishops’ Conference have been running hot. We priests have orders to preach on immigration reform this Sunday. We are for immigration reform. The bishop who ordained me, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, published an inspiring short essay on Sunday in the Washington Post, outlining our Catholic vision for immigration reform. (More to come on that, in this Sunday’s sermon.)

But on Sunday we will also read the parable about the king preparing for war, and how he must prudently study the situation before marching to arms.

The Pope and the American Bishops have asked all of us faithful Catholics to pray for peace in Syria. We are against a US military strike. We pray that it will not occur. I will lead a rosary for peace on Saturday. Maybe all of us could recite the rosary at 5:30 pm, no matter where we are-—and we will all be united spiritually—and with our Holy Father, too, who will pray in St. Peter’s Square on Saturday evening for peace in Syria.

Like I said, I think this weekend is just the beginning of the hard praying we will need to do this fall–for our nation, for our leaders. From where I am sitting, I see a perfect storm brewing over Washington.

(May it please God that my spiritual meteorology is wrong here. May it please Him that the fall of 2013 doesn’t wind up feeling like the fall of 2001 and the fall of 1963, all rolled into one. But I am afraid that this fall will wind up feeling like that.)

Let’s pray: May the Holy Spirit of wisdom and truth enlighten and guide all those who hold reins of power.

…The good news is: The Beast is back in town! (Kinda.)