THE ONLY NAME

4 Easter B  #50

Acts 4, 8-12

Ps 118

1 Jn 3, 1-2

Jn 10, 11-18

Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.

April 26, 2015

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   It’s over!  Suddenly it was over, that long, hard winter.  Then, just as suddenly, winter made a reappearance: hail on Thursday, snow squalls on Friday.  But be reassured.  The earth is coming back to life.  Nature does her hardest work this time of year.  Everything is coming up.  Life is good.

           Jesus rose from the dead to assure us of life, eternal life, life everlasting.  God created man a little lower than the angels, the Psalmist tells us, but when the Eternal Word of God took flesh in the Virgin Mary’s womb, God elevated man above the angels.  The Apostle John tells us that now we are sons and daughters of God, but what we shall be, in the Resurrection, what we shall be has not yet come to light, but when it does, we shall be like God for we will see Him as He is.  Try to take that in!  We shall be like God!  We shall see Him as He is!  If we really believe this wild horses could not keep us from Sunday Mass every Sunday, to meet Jesus in breaking open the word of the Gospel and in the breaking of bread!  And why should we fear death if we can believe this?  As we age and one bodily system after another fails us, we fear death not for ourselves but for our children and theirs.  That is the most terrible loss.  But even then, God is good.  God is merciful, compassionate.  He suffers with us.

                   “There is no other name,” Luke tells us in Acts, no other name by which we are to be saved.  Jesus is the only savior, the sole mediator between God and humankind.  There is no other.  Does that mean that non-Christians cannot be saved?  There was a time, before the Second Vatican Council, when some people might say so, as hard is to imagine today. 

          I’ve told this story before but some of you might have missed it.  It happened at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, in the office of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the most influential rabbi of his generation, in the spring of 1967.  Heschel had been asked by Cardinal Bea in Rome to go to the Vatican with a team of Jewish leaders to help prepare for the Council.  That was a first.  No Jew had ever been asked to help prepare for an oecumenical council of the Catholic Church.  When they gathered, at a private meeting with Pope Paul, Cardinal Bea asked, “What would the Jews hope to see come out of the Council?” 

          They were astounded.  This is how I remember Heschel answering.  “This is what I told them.  ‘We Jews face very extinction.  There are four threats.  First, the Enlightenment hit our people unprepared so that in a generation’s time the observance rate fell precipitously.  With non-observance comes inter-marriage; that’s factor two.  That means children lost to Judaism.  Three, we lost one out of every three of our people to the Nazi Holocaust.  Four, the State of Israel is in a precarious position surrounded by enemies.  On top of all that, you people are trying to convert us!  How would the Church understand it, and how would you take it personally, Your Holiness, if the religion that Mary taught little Jesus in their home in Nazareth were to disappear from the face of the earth?’  The answer: ‘I never thought of it that way. But we’re going to!’ ” 

          The result of this consultation was the document Nostra Aetate, In Our Age, on the relation of the Catholic Church to Non-Christian religions.  The Council Fathers condemned all forms of anti-Semitism and repudiated the view that all the Jews of His time or their descendants are guilty of Jesus’ death.  They held that God’s covenant with the Jews stands and has never been withdrawn or revoked.  The Church honors the truths that can be found in all religious traditions, but she recognizes the special and unique relationship we have with the Jewish people, as wild olive branches grafted onto the good root stock of Israel. 

          The Council called upon people of all faiths to put aside past hurts and to work together for the common good, for justice and for peace.  We recognize and honor the truths found in all religions.  But Jesus remains the sole savior, the One who saves not only Catholics and Christians but Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and even those who claim they have no faith but seek truth and goodness with a sincere heart. 

          God’s greatest gift to us is our faith.  Can you believe that at last we will be like Him for we will see Him as He is?  If that is so, we can stand up to anything, as the 41 Coptic martyrs did only a few weeks ago in Egypt.  They were given the chance to renounce their Christian faith, but they gladly died with the word Jesus on their lips, Jesus, Jesus. 

          “I do believe, Lord.  Help Thou my unbelief!”   

Choose Life

LENT 2015

Dt 30, 15-20

Ps 1

Lk 19, 22-25

The Catholic Peace Fellowship

Deacon Tom Cornell

          “I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse.  Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live,” the parting words of Moses to the Hebrews as they prepared to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land.  “Choose life!”

Today’s psalm doesn’t square with our experience.  “Happy the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked. ...He is like a tree planted near running water.  . …Whatever he does prospers. …Not so the wicked.  They are like chaff which the wind blows away.”  Would that it were so.  Often good people suffer and the wicked do just fine; we know it.  Look at the halls of power anywhere.  In our own country a council of the wicked invites a mass murderer to address a joint session of Congress to instigate war against Iran!  They all ride in state, so far!  “Pride goeth before a fall.”  In the end, the First Psalm will be vindicated. 

There are contradictory themes in the Bible.  The trials of Job and Ecclesiastes’ cry of, “Vanity of vanities and all is vanity” tell a different story than the First Psalm.  We read in Exodus that “The sins of the fathers will be visited upon their sons…. The fathers eat sour grapes and the sons’ teeth are put on edge (Ex 34,7).  On the other hand, “Each is to die for his own sin.  Every man who eats sour grapes is to have his own teeth set on edge” (Jer 31, 10   In the end, all will be put right.  That is our hope.  Christ is our hope, who broke down the wall that separated us, Jew from Gentile. “Happy are they that hope in the Lord.” 

We have to hope and trust in the Lord in the face of all that threatens life today.  The nuclear threat has never receded; we can’t bear to face that reality.   The Cold War is back, and a real danger it will turn hot.  Who could imagine in this day and age horrors such as IS and Boko Haram visit upon innocent people?   Then there is climate change.  The overwhelming consensus of scientists from all over the world blames human activity for environmental degradation and predicts extinction of species, even our own unless drastic steps are taken to reduce green-house emissions.  Our hyper-individualistic culture calls for abortion on demand, at any stage of pregnancy or even delivery.  “If we will not spare our children, whom will we spare?” asks Mother Theresa. We are all affected by a spreading culture of death.  We don’t have to go far to look for crosses to bear.

We enter Lent today, a somber time of fasting and prayer and almsgiving in anticipation of the joy of Easter.  Here are some suggestions for fasting, prayer and almsgiving.  Fasting: no meat on Fridays of Lent, and on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and only one full meal and two light meals for those between ages 18 and 59 and who are well.  You might voluntarily adopt a stricter discipline, especially if that will help you get back into clothes you have outgrown in girth.  You can fast from other things than food.  Fast from distraction.  Turn off the TV and the radio.  Establish a zone of quiet around you that will facilitate prayer.  Prayer: try reading The Liturgy of the Hours, especially the Office of Readings every day, with selections from the ancient Fathers; they are so very rich. Or plan to go through the New Testament by Holy Week. 

Read the works of Fr. John L. McKenzie, the foremost Catholic biblical scholar of his time and unsurpassed to this day.  He was an original sponsor of the Catholic Peace Fellowship.  I keep his Dictionary of the Bible by my bed.  His The Two-edged Sword: An Interpretation of the Old Testament and The Power and the Wisdom: An Interpretation of the New Testament will deepen your insight into Christian radicalism.  It was he who said that if you can’t understand from reading the New Testament that Jesus was nonviolent, then you can’t understand anything about him.  Dorothy Day said of Fr. McKenzie, “I thank God for sending me men with such insight as Fr. McKenzie.”

Almsgiving: dig deep and help the Catholic Peace Fellowship.  I will not embarrass our staff people but just let me say they work hard for what we all believe in so deeply at real personal sacrifice.  Help them to help those who call upon our services.  Pray about it.  And choose life!  W

Ministry of Justice

3 SUNDAY B  #68

Jon 3, 1-5. 10

Ps 25

1Cor 7, 29-31

Mk 1, 1-15

Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.

January 25, 2015

Deacon Tom Cornell

                        Nineveh was an enormous city, once the largest city in the world, but that was long ago, over two thousand years.  Now it lies in ruins. Its massive wall remains, and little else.  A few days after Christmas, 2002, before the US invasion of Iraq, a small group of us stood under the arch of what was once a Nineveh city gate to read the whole Book of Jonah.  Then we went across the Tigris to Mosul.  A giant bell tower with a large Christian Cross to mark a Catholic parish and school rose above the city. I wonder if it’s still there.  St. Thomas the Apostle founded that church.  It is now almost entirely gone.  Christians have been forced either to convert to Islam or to flee, to abandon their homes, their shops, their livelihoods or to die.  How much of it is our fault, we must ask ourselves! Why should we care?  Because we are one body, one church.

                        Today’s Gospel reading from Mark tells of the calling of the first apostles.  “Come, follow me; I will make you fishers of men.”  They left their father and his hired men and went off with Jesus on the spot.  For three years they travelled with Jesus, walking through Galilee, up the Syrian coast, through Samaria, finally to Jerusalem, learning from him of the approaching Kingdom of God.

          Jesus’ mission was to the lost sheep of Israel (Mt 10, 5-6).  But it was through Jesus that the promise to Abraham that his children would be a blessing to all peoples would be fulfilled.  It was only after his death and resurrection that Jesus’ ultimate purpose was revealed to the Twelve, the Apostles, their mission:  “Make disciples of all the nations; baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.  And know that I am with you always, even to the end of time” (Mt 28, 19-20). 

          From Jerusalem the apostles went out.  None of them established as many churches as Paul with the possible exception of Thomas, who traveled as far as India, where a vibrant Catholic church thrives today in the State of Kerala.    

           The church is local and it is universal, governed by all the bishops  gathered around the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, whose primary function it is to symbolize and to guarantee the unity of the Church spread throughout the world.  We have been blessed with wonderful popes during my time.  And what a Pope we have today!  We knew, from the very first words he spoke to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square after his election that a new day is dawning.  We expected to hear Latin, something like “Laudetur Jesus Christus,” “Jesus Christ be praised,” which is fine, but what we heard was, “Buona Sera!” “Good afternoon!”  Instead of blessing the crowd, the Pope asked their blessing, and bowed. 

             Pope Francis will not change the doctrine of the Church.  No one can do that.  But he will forward a fundamental purpose, to serve the people, especially the poor and those who have no one else to speak for them.  For the Church speaks to people’s material as well as their spiritual needs, good news to the poor.  What does good news to the poor sound like?  “You’re  getting a disability check right now, about a thousand dollars a month.  We’ll cut that back to eight hundred next year.”  Does that sound like good news to you, to the poor? "We can’t afford to educate your children past high school because we’d have to raise taxes?”  Does that sound like good news to the poor?  Redistribution of wealth may not be good news to the super-rich, but they can take it.

          When the Holy Father speaks of the need for the redistribution of wealth, some people think he’s talking some kind of new and dangerous idea.  Not at all.  It comes right out of the Prophets of Israel and the Jubilee Year of the Old Testament and out of the social doctrine of the Church.  Listen to this:

“Workers have been surrendered… to the hard-heartedness of employers and to greed… so that a small number of the very rich have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor  a yoke little better than that of slavery.”  Is that Karl Marx?  No, it’s Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, On the Condition of the Working Class, in 1891.  Our society has made great advances since then, due largely to organized labor, but we have also taken steps backward.   The gap between their productivity and workers’ pay and the gap between rich and poor have been growing step by step along with the decline of organized labor. 

           The social doctrine of the Church continues to develop by way of

papal encyclicals and the teachings of bishops’ synods and national conferences of bishops.  The Synod of Bishops in 1971 decreed that work for justice is a constitutive, that is an essential, element of the preaching of the Gospel.  It’s not optional, something you can tack on if you want it.   Some people didn’t like that and have been trying to water that teaching down ever since.  They won’t get far with Pope Francis in Rome.

          Our archdiocesan seminary has commissioned me over the past several years to teach Catholic Social Doctrine to deacon candidates, like our dear Vinny Porcelli.  Deacons have a special responsibility to convey our social teaching to the people because of the very nature of our order, the diaconate.  We are not priests.  Ours is not a priestly office.  It is an office of justice and charity on behalf of our bishops.  Charity is a hard word.  No one wants to be the recipient of charity.  It is demeaning.  And to offer as a handout to the poor a small part of what was stolen from them is an outrage crying to heaven.  Let us rather say justice and mercy.

          We all agree on the right to life from beginning to natural end by virtue of our humanity, made in the image and likeness of God.  If that is so, then it follows that we have the right to the means to life, food, clothing, shelter, medical care, purposeful work and decent living conditions.  This again is nothing new.  Read it in Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth, 1963.

            Let me get back to Nineveh, and Mosul in Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers.   The vast majority of Muslims want the same things we do, peace and honest work to raise our families.  How is it that fanatics should murder in the name of God in a wave of barbarism one would have thought impossible in this day and age?  Saddam Hussein’s day looks good in comparison.  If Iraq needed a regime change, and it did, we should have left it up to the Iraqi people themselves to do it. 

            Why say these things in church?  Because justice is a constitutive element of the preaching of the Gospel.  Amen.   W                                         

Holy Family 2014

Gen 15, 1-6. 21, 1-13

Ps 105

Heb 11, 8. 11-12. 17-19

Lk 2, 22-40

Saint Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.

December 28, 2014

Deacon Tom Cornell

         It’s been a while.  I’m glad to be back; it’s been a rough road.  We’ve all been through a rough road in this parish these past couple of years. The less said about that the better.  You all know what I mean.  But it’s over now.  We have a pastor, a real pastor who wants to be with us.  He’s kind and he’s wise with the wisdom that is a gift of the Holy Spirit.  We are lucky to have him.  And by we, I include the people we haven’t seen here for a while.  There’s an empty hole right there, too many empty spaces.  Where are they?  Go tell your friends and neighbors who have dropped away, it’s time to come back.  Meet Father Tom.  Come home for Christmas!  

          
Today is the Feast of the Holy Family.  We are a family, a parish family, and more than that, we are one in the Mystical Body of Christ.  When one member suffers, all suffer.  When one is built up, all are built up (1 Cor 12, 26).  We need one another.  We need each other.  We are not meant to struggle alone, neither in the battle to keep a roof over our heads nor in spiritual battle to grow in faith, hope and love.  God did not lead the People out of Egypt one by one, but as a group. 

            
As many of you know, Monica and I worked closely with Dorothy Day.  We were married at the Catholic Worker.  Dorothy was our matchmaker.  Dorothy described the Catholic Worker movement as a big disorderly family, and we’re still at it behind the cemetery off Lattingtown Road.  Come visit any time.  Our bishops have petitioned the Vatican to declare Dorothy a saint, unanimously.  Imagine that, Saint Dorothy of News York!  And just weeks ago, at the Roman synod, Cardinal Dolan begged the Holy Father to move her Cause along.  In her early adult life, Dorothy was a Communist.  But all her life, even as a Communist, she felt pursued by God.  She tried to resist, but she finally gave in at the age of 27 and converted to the Catholic Church.  Her Communist friends were puzzled.  “If you want to believe in God, that’s your personal decision,” they would say, "but keep it to yourself, and why do you have to join a church, and of all churches the Catholic Church, the worst of them all, the biggest and the strongest, the most reactionary of all our enemies.”  Dorothy answered them in their own terms.  As revolutionaries we join together in a group, a party.  We are not meant to battle alone.  So it is in spiritual battle, to grow closer to God, to grow in faith, hope and love we worship together, as a family of faith, a church.  

          
Dorothy didn’t go shopping for a church.  She later explained that no other church ever entered her mind.  She didn’t examine the claims of the Catholic Church.  It was just that, in all the cities where she had ever lived, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago, the Catholic Church was where the immigrants, the poor and the workers flocked.  That was good enough for her! 

                     
          Today as we commemorate the Holy Family of Nazareth, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we think of family, our own and others.  Many families suffer badly.  My father was orphaned at age eight, I at age fourteen.  Then, even worse, there are parents who bury their children, an unspeakable loss.  In times of economic stress a breadwinner may lose his job.  It’s quite a feeling when the girl behind the counter hands you your last unemployment compensation check and says, “Good luck!”  Yeah, you’re going to need it.  Then there is the family whose husband and father is called to war.  Whatever their troubles might be, They need our presence, just to be there.  If you know of a family in distress, find a way to be present to them.  Somehow, shared suffering hurts a little less.  Go visit them, and invite them to church next Sunday. 

          
And any others you might know.  Let’s get these pews filled up again.  This chapel was scheduled for the chopping block some years ago as you know, but you people appealed to the Archdiocese and promised to keep Our Lady of Mercy open and running at no financial loss.  And you’ve done it, beautifully.  A few years ago I had the opportunity to bring a world-renowned liturgical artist to visit.  She had designed churches all over the world, even in Asia.  She was stunned; she loved this sacred place.  It is really special.  Bring a friend next week.

          
Happy New Year of Our Lord 2015!  God bless and keep us all.

                  

                   

CHRIST THE KING 2014

CHRIST THE KING 2014  #160  

Ez 34, 11-12.  15-17

Ps 23

1 Cor 15, 20-26, 28. 

Mt 25, 31-46

Catholic Peace Fellowship

November 30, 2014

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   Our first reading today, from the Prophet Ezekiel, pictures God as a shepherd guarding and protecting his flock.  But the last verse has a note of warning.  “I will judge between one sheep and another, between rams and goats.”  The familiar Psalm 23 has one jarring note as well.  “You spread a table before me in the sight of my foes.”  In short, there are foes, we have enemies.  Nevertheless, “only goodness and kindness follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord.”   Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians has an eschatological tone.  Eschata is the Greek word meaning the last things, that is, “death, judgment, heaven and hell.”  Paul tells us that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.”  That brings us to the Gospel reading for today, the Last Judgment scene from Matthew, the separation of the sheep from the goats.  “Depart from me you accursed….”  But what is hell?  Surely Dante did not take literally his own description of damnation.  He knew he was writing metaphor, inspired metaphor at that. 

          George Bernanos said that hell is not to love anymore.  If that is so, what then is heaven but a love-feast?  There is an image of heaven from the rabbinical tradition of heaven and hell as each a banquet, each held in identical rooms.  In one room are the damned.  Plates piled with sumptuous goodies are placed before them but they gnash their teeth because they cannot reach them, their forks and spoons are too long.  The room of the blessed is identical in all ways, except that all are happy and content.  They use their outsized forks and spoons to feed each other. 

                   We build our heaven, we build our hell here on earth, here and now.  We bring into the next life what we have made of ourselves, sheep or goats.  The Last Judgment scene in Matthew’s Gospel inspired the Church teaching of the works of mercy.  Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, all taken from today’s Gospel reading.  The Church added to bury the dead.  Each time we do any of these things for the least of the brethren we do it for Jesus Christ, and conversely, whenever we refuse we refuse Jesus. 

                   Dorothy Day liked to point out that the works of mercy are the direct opposite of the works of war: destroy their crops, poison their wells, bomb, burn their villages, their cities, their homes.  Bury the dead?  Yes, as many as possible, under the rubble of their own homes, fields and factories.  There are spiritual works of mercy too.  Instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, reprove sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive injuries, pray for the living and the dead.  Again, the works of war are the exact opposite: deceive (it has been said that the first casualty of every war is the truth); intimidate, force conscience to act against its own judgment.  Forgive?  Not on your life.  Give them back a dose of their own medicine, twice and ten times over!

                   And so we gather as a Catholic Peace Fellowship.  We are commemorating this month the fiftieth anniversary of a retreat Thomas Merton called and led at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani on the Spiritual Roots of Protest.  A. J. Muste was there, John Howard Yoder, the eminent Mennonite theologian, Dan and Philip Berrigan.  Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin had been invited but Dr. King had to go to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, and Bayard went with him.  Jim Forest and I were the youngest and are among those still alive.  Merton gathered us around the question, Quo Warranto?, mediaeval Latin for “by what right?”  By what right, he asked, do we question, challenge our betters, those put in authority over us, the President and his advisers?  Don’t they know more than we do about what’s going on in Viet Nam?  How dare we, by what right, do we speak out against them, even actively resist? 

          Merton’s answer was simply to read from the book of the Prophet Jeremiah:  “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped: you were too strong for me and you triumphed.  All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me.  Whenever I speak I must cry out, violence and outrage is my message.  The word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach all the day.  I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more.  But then it becomes like a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones.  I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it” (Jer 20, 7-9).   

          We do it because we have to, that’s all.  At times it has been thin gruel, but it’s been a banquet nonetheless.  Keep it up, lest we be counted among the goats.  W

May Day 2014

MAY DAY 2014, St. Joseph the Worker

St. Joseph House, New York City

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   He did it again!  Father George gave me no warning this time.  I’m not prepared.  So just let me tell you what’s been going through my mind as I have been looking out over this congregation, in this place.  First of all – the children.  So many of them, so beautiful!  We are a pro-life church and a pro-life movement.  Let them squall and holler if they will.  We can take it, and be glad. 

                   Then I see the photograph on the far wall, near the door, Bob Fitch’s famous photo of Dorothy Day in Fresno at her last arrest, for the United Farm Workers, in 1973, sitting on her little portable three-legged chair framed by two big cops with revolvers on their hips.  That makes me think of the day so many years ago when I was walking to work at the CPF office down at Beekman Street, walking past 223 Chrystie Street.  I knew Dorothy was in town so I dropped in.  She said sit down, get a cup of coffee.  Cesar Chavez is due any minute.  Minutes later he came in.  He had to be Cesar Chavez.  He had no one with him, no driver, no secretary, just himself.  As he noticed the Guadalupe on the wall he paused, turned to it, made the Sign of the Cross, then joined us at the table.  There was no small talk, no “How was your trip?”  Dorothy got right to the point.  “What can we do for you?”

                   “We have six men coming in from California to organize a lettuce boycott.  They’ll visit the headquarters of all the supermarket chains and ask them to refuse to handle lettuce that doesn’t have the Union Eagle on it. Then they’ll go to the individual supermarkets and appeal to the grocery managers.  Then to the mom-and-pop bodegas.  Do you have room for them here?”  “No,” Dorothy answered.  “All our beds are full.  But I know there’s an empty apartment in the building where we rent.  I’ll rent that one for you.  There’s no heat or hot water in those apartments.”  “You don’t have heat and hot water, we won’t need them either.”  “You can all eat here of course.  Is there anything else?”  “Yes,” Cesar answered.  “Six men can’t cover all that territory.  We’ll need help.”  “Tom,” Dorothy turned to me.  “Here’s where you come in. You know the union leaders here in the City.  See if they can free people up to help.”  I was working with A.J. Muste, Dorothy knew.  A.J. had trained major labor leaders at the Brookwood Labor School in Katona.  All I had to do was call up the Distributive Workers Union, the Pharmacists Union 1199, the Taxi Drivers and the Meatpackers, explain the need and they all said, “Send ’em on over!”  It took twenty minutes, that’s all, to lay the foundation of the lettuce and the grape boycott.  It was that easy.

                   Then I see the portrait of Martin Luther King on the east wall.  Tommy was one month old when Martin King called us to Selma, Alabama.  I asked Monica’s permission to go.  None of us could be sure we would come back home alive.  Forty of us had been killed since Emmett Till in Chicago and three more would die in Selma.  I was a marshal for the March to Montgomery.  When we got back to Selma after the March, I went to the old folks’ solarium at Good Samaritan Hospital where I was living, in hope that there would be decent coverage of the March on the Evening News.  The solarium was crowded.  It was not the Evening News on the TV.  It was the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, addressing a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and he was talking about us.  He named us.  He said we were right, there’s no room in this country any more for racial hatred and bigotry, he said.  He demanded they pass the Voter Rights Bill.  He would sign it into law.  Then he put his papers down on the lectern and looked into the camera, to say, “We shall overcome!”  We were thunderstruck.  We knew, at that moment, we knew we had won.  The President, a Southern white man, was standing with us. We had won!  Tears poured down the faces of hardened radicals from the labor movement, not a dry-eye to be seen.  Martin King was seen to weep only that once.  The South would change, this country would change.  Not that we have achieved racial justice, we are far from that even now.  But we tore down the legal structures of racial segregation and we did it with nonviolence. 

                   Then I see here closest to the altar, the photo of Archbishop Oscar Romero and his flock in a poor village.  The FOR had just fired me in 1979 after fourteen years.  I was out of work and out of money.  Archbishop Romero knew, and gave me an assignment and $1,500 to stimulate programs around the country to raise awareness in the US public of the role our country was playing in the repression in El Salvador.  With the help of movement contacts we were able to get a dozen or so people to picket a post office and hand out leaflets in some cities, and organize small educational seminars in others, and a major event at a major seminary.  Ita Ford and Maura Clark attended the seminar I led at St.  Bridget’s Church here on the Lower East Side.  I sent a report to the Archbishop and he replied with a thank you by mail.  Jim O’Callahan was in the CPF office when that letter arrived.   I showed it to him.  He said, “You ought to frame this letter in red, Tom.  This man is going be killed!”  Weeks later, it happened, and Ita Ford and Maura Clark!

                   That’s what I see when I look out at this room.  The children.  We have a future.  And the past, so rich in memories -- of Dorothy, of Cesar, of Martin, all that I owe to you.  You made, you make this movement.  Keep it up!

Kill for Peace?

23 Sunday C  #129

Wis 9, 13-18

Ps 90

Phlm 9-10. 12-17

Lk 14, 25-33

Peter Maurin Farm, Marlboro, N.Y. September 8, 2013

Deacon Tom Cornell

                                                            

                        In his last two Sunday Angelus messages, Pope Francis condemned the use of chemical weapons in Syria and called for a peaceful resolution to the conflict that is tearing that country apart.  That riled Mark Phillips of CBS News.  He criticized the Holy Father for “siding with (Russian President) Putin.”  Then The New York Times censored Pope Francis.  The so-called “journal of record” ran an article on Syria in the morning edition that, among other things, quoted the Holy Father’s words on violence.  A later edition deleted those words and any reference to the Pope.  Are the mass media joining the rush to war just as they did in the run-up to Iraq? 

          Last week, Pope Francis called for a special day of prayer and fasting for peace in Syria and to forestall any attack on that country.   The Pope urged all Christians, all believers and all men and women of goodwill to join him in a day of fasting and prayer for peace.  The Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, leader of the Orthodox Church, asked all Orthodox Christians to join Pope Francis and Catholics the world over in prayer and fasting to hold back the hand of violence.  It is rare that clergy, consecrated sisters and brother and lay people as well are called to join in prayer and fasting for peace, and even more rare that the Orthodox faithful should join with the Pope in the same.  But there you have it.  When Pope Bergoglio chose his name, Francis, he had a purpose in mind.

          Yesterday Pope Francis led a Prayer Vigil for Peace in St. Peter’s Square with 100,000 people in attendance, streamed live by Vatican TV, from 6:50 p.m. until 11 p.m. Rome time, over four hours.  Francis spent most of the vigil in silent prayer, but during his sermon he issued a heartfelt plea for peace, denouncing those who are "captivated by the idols of dominion and power" to destroy God's creation through war.  "This evening, I ask the Lord that we Christians, and our brothers and sisters of other religions and every man and woman of good will, cry out forcefully: Violence and war are never the way to peace.  May the noise of weapons cease!" he said. "War is always a defeat for humanity."

         Three days ago, our Cardinal Archbishop Timothy Dolan, as president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, and Bishop Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, Iowa, chair of its Committee on International Justice and Peace, wrote to the President and every member of the U.S. Congress to say that a military attack “will be counterproductive, will exacerbate an already deadly situation, and will have unintended negative consequences.”

          President Obama has decried the use of chemical weapons in Syria, as well he should.  “Their use should not go unpunished,” he asserts.  Has he or this country the legal or moral authority to punish those who employ chemical weapons?  Does he include the use of Agent Orange by the U.S. in Viet Nam?  That’s a chemical weapon!  During the Viet Nam War, the U.S. military dropped tons of chemical weapons, including Agent Orange, on the forests and farmlands of Indo-China, destroying food supplies and ravaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.  An estimated 400,000 people were killed or maimed, half a million babies born with birth defects, and the cancer rate has soared.  The Red Cross estimates that one million people in Viet Nam have serious health problems related to Agent Orange.  And American soldiers suffered as well, from “blow-back,” as it is called.  A friend of mine, the father of two sons, was just released from z month in the hospital.  He has an auto-immune deficiency.  The cause?  Some forty years ago, his father, a U.S. soldier in Viet Nam, ingested Agent Orange.  How long will we, and the Vietnamese, pay the price?

          Or white phosphorous?  That’s a chemical weapon!  White phosphorous burns through and flesh and bone it touches with inextinguishable fire until all flesh and bone is destroyed.  The U.S. used white phosphorous in Fallujah, Iraq!  Will that be punished?  Iraq attacked its own Kurds and Iran with poison gas during the 1980s war.  But Saddam Hussein was our ally then; we armed him.  Was that punished?  And what of depleted uranium?  Is that not indiscriminate in its effects?  And napalm?  That’s a chemical weapon.  The U.S. poured tons of napalm on a wooden city, Tokyo, in 1942 and killed more civilians than even in Hiroshima.  No other nation has come close to U.S. use of napalm.  The Monroe Doctrine established the Western Hemisphere as a U.S. zone of influence.  The Bush-Obama Doctrine would establish the globe as a U.S. zone of influence.     

            The U.S. President does not have the legal, much less the moral authority to attack Syria, though he claims otherwise.  Our Church teaches that recourse to war is justifiable only in the event of a direct military attack, declared and carried out by competent authority, observing civilian immunity and only as a last resort after all alternatives have been tried and failed. A military attack upon Syria would violate every principle of just war theory.  A military strike on Syria would be an act of war, unjust war.  Killing in unjust war is murder.  Failure to speak out when you know an act of war in unjust is to be an accomplice to murder. 

                        Now let us join the Holy Father and our American bishops in a prayer the bishops have offered for this crisis:

                      Almighty eternal God, source of all compassion, the promise of your mercy and saving help fills our hearts with hope.  Hear the cries of the people of Syria; bring healing to those suffering from the violence and comfort to those mourning the dead.  Empower and encourage Syria’s neighbors in their care and welcome for refugees. Convert the hearts of those who have taken up arms and strengthen the resolve of those committed to peace.

          Oh God of hope and Father of mercy, your Holy Spirit inspires us to look beyond ourselves and our own needs.  Inspire leaders to choose peace over violence and to seek reconciliation with enemies.  Inspire the Church around the world with compassion for the people of Syria, and fill us with hope for a future of peace built on justice for all.  We ask this through Jesus Christ, Prince of Peace and Light of the World, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.

            Now let me hear AMEN!