ADVENT 2015
Catholic Peace Fellowship
Deacon Tom Cornell
The Catholic Church is the largest and
oldest association of people in an organized structure on earth in all of history. In two thousand years’ time, over so vast an
area with so many people, we’ve had the opportunity to make just about every
mistake conceivable. It’s no wonder
there have been scandals. It’s
painful! So why love this corrupt
institution?
First of all, the Church is not corrupt, not in
itself. Some of its representatives have
been, yes! But the Church remains the
Mystical Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit will never desert us. “The gates of hell will not prevail.” Members might fail, some very badly, but the
Church remains what it is, bringing us Jesus in word and sacrament. If it were not for the Church not many people
on earth would ever have heard of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, Lord and
Savior. Jesus would be lost to history were
it not that his followers kept together and developed, from New Testament
times, the basic hierarchical structure of the Church, East and West, with
bishops, priests and deacons, the same structure and the same seven sacraments throughout
the far-flung ancient world up to the present day.
Here we have the biblical readings every
Sunday revealing God’s plan of salvation.
Then there are the saints. If we
have villains, we have the most marvelous heroes too. Their memorials, their stories, their feasts,
are strategically placed throughout the year.
Their lives tell us what authentic Christian discipleship is all
about. We must admit, their stories are
often sanitized for mass consumption and dumbed down, sorry to say. The details of their lives are censored to
suit certain constituencies. Take Saints
Francis and Anthony, for instance.
Francis rocked both the Church and the state. We don’t hear much about that today. He not only excoriated wealth and privilege
but the political life of his day. He
fought in a battle of Assisi against Perugia before his conversion, but
thereafter he refused further military service.
His Rule for the lay Third Order forbade members to bear arms under any
circumstances. Hundreds, then thousands
of men joined the Third Order in Italy rather than serve in the military. The princes didn’t like that at all. They pressured the Pope and that section of
the Rule was dropped. They had their
way. Money talks, even in Rome!
St. Anthony was a hell-raiser; he
wasn’t just the sweet looking guy walking around in a brown robe with the Baby Jesus
sitting on a Bible in his right hand and a big white lily in his left. People called him “Il Martello,” “The
Hammer.” He relentlessly hammered away at the bankers
of his day. He’d have had a fine time at
Occupy Wall Street. He’d fit right in! The bishops took him seriously at last and condemned
usury at an area Church synod. The Church
today has taken the same stand, essentially in line with Occupy Wall Street. But who hears about that from the
pulpit? Nevertheless, our Church is
truly a champion of the poor and oppressed and of peace. Pope Francis has brought that right to the
fore. And he is probably the best loved
man on earth.
We just celebrated the feast of Saint Martin of
Tours, “patron saint of soldiers,” as he is called.
As the son of a Roman army officer, Martin was forced, conscripted into
the army for a twenty-five year term.
The persecution of the Church was over by his time and Christianity was
now the state religion. But when Martin
was baptized he refused further military service and sat out the next war in a
prison cell for a year. It was after his
release from prison and the army that he cut his cloak in half to share it with
a beggar. St. Martin should be publicly
invoked as “patron saint of conscientious objectors” at least as well as
soldiers. We have to ask, why isn’t he?
The patron and model for parish priests is the Cure of Ars, Saint Jean
Batiste Vianney. He was a French army deserter
and hid out in the woods for over a year.
We of the Catholic Peace Fellowship propose
active nonviolence for defense against tyranny and oppression of any and every
kind. But those who protect the freedom
and security of their fellow citizens honorably in the military deserve our
respect and support too. When their
patriotism and bravery are abused, when they are sent to unjust war and useless
slaughter, then we must protest in the name of God. Patriotic rhetoric will not make up for the
abuse of our soldiers or comfort them when they feel they can not resign after
four and five and six deployments because there are no jobs for them back home. It should make us all pause – more veterans
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have committed suicide than were killed in
battle. The Veterans Administration
makes a mockery of the chauvinistic cant, “Support Our Troops”! Treatment is so poor and so delayed that many
simply walk away.
There are things worth dying for, I
haven’t the slightest doubt: among them our faith, “a
faith to die for,” as Michael Baxter put it. Ancient Christian communities are being decimated in Egypt, Iraq and in Jesus own home country, Christians accepting death rather than renouncing our Christian faith. Let their witness strengthen ours.
We are a family, our Church, and like any other family, with a rascal or worse here and there, but a Mother Theresa, a Damian the Leper, an Ignatius Loyola, a Francis Xavier, a Therese of Lisieux, a Dorothy Day, a Franz Jaegerstaetter, a Francis, a Clare and an Anthony. They are our brothers and sisters and our examples. They give us heart.
The world we know today is faced with
more grave threats than ever before in history, threats to our very existence. If we are to deal with the proliferation of
nuclear weapons, with climate change and global warming, with endemic poverty
and the just revolutionary claims of the world’s disinherited, with terrorism, and with massive dislocation of peoples, know that the Catholic Church is a voice of
sanity in this insanity, this
chaos. We have all we need. We have the Book and the table and we have
examples to show the way, Dorothy Day not the least among them.
Was it a sign? Dorothy Day died just as the sun set on the
last day of the liturgical year 1980. This
is a new day, a new liturgical year. Take
heart! If we learn from her example and
have the courage that the Holy Spirit offers us, neither capitalism nor the sovereign national state will survive the 21st Century.
Take heart, and take part!
