11 Sunday A #91
Ex 19, 2-6b
Ps 100
Rom 5, 6-11
Mt 9, 36. 10, 1-8
Deacon Tom Cornell
Saint Mary’s Church
Marlboro, N.Y.
June 15, 2008
In Paul’s Letter to the Romans we read, “When we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, we were still enemies; now that we have been reconciled, surely we may count on being saved by the life of his Son.” What strikes me is “we may count on being saved by the life of his Son.” We are accustomed to hearing that we are saved by the passion and death of Jesus on the Cross. But here we are told that we are saved by his life also, by his words and his deeds, his teaching and example.
Our Gospel has Jesus sending the Twelve out on their first mission. He tells them to avoid Gentile territory, not even to enter a Samaritan town but to go only “to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” with his good news, that the kingdom of God it at hand. Little by little, the disciples came to realize who Jesus is, the Christ, the awaited one. When Jesus asks them, “Who do you think that I am,” Peter answers for the rest, “You are the Christ, the Son of God.” At Lazarus’ tomb, Martha exclaims, “You are the Christ, the one who is to come into this world.” On Mount Tabor, at the Transfiguration, Jesus instructed Peter and James and John to tell no one their vision of him with Moses and Elijah until after his Resurrection. That Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, is a secret, “the messianic secret,” as it is called, that they are to keep until the Resurrection. Then the Holy Spirit will descend upon them. They will be enlightened and grasp the meaning of all the things that had happened.
The first reading today from Exodus has Moses and the People Mount Sinai after forty years in the desert. Moses will ascend the mountain and receive the Ten Commandments. God is about to establish his Covenant with the People of Israel: “You shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”
Israel was not worthy. No people, no nation and no person can ever be worthy of God’s grace. God’s gifts are given freely, undeservedly. “Without cost you have received, without cost you are to give.” Israel was unfaithful over and over again, but God called the People back through a faithful remnant and through the Prophets. God did not choose Israel for its own sake but that Israel might be a light to the nations, a beacon of his justice, mercy and peace to all. All the nations will some day climb the Mountain of the Lord to learn the Lord’s ways. Then they will beat their swords into ploughshares and study war no more.
Jesus’ earthly mission was to the lost sheep of Israel. But after his Resurrection, his last instruction to his disciples was to go out to all the peoples. “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you,” the Great Commission. The apostles preached Jesus as Messiah and Lord, and they established churches throughout the ancient world. And as he promised, Jesus has been with us, and will be with us, through the end of time. But just as God did not choose Israel for its own sake, so God did not establish the Church for its own sake. The Church is to be a beacon of God’s justice, mercy, peace and reconciliation for all peoples and lead them at last to the Holy Mountain and to teach them the Lord’s ways.
I was trained as a high school teacher. As a teacher I learned that people do not learn so much from lessons, sermons, lectures or books as they do from stories, stories of people whose lives inspire. We have so many examples in our saints. The Church shows her human face, Christ’s face, in the witness of the saints, the canonized and the un-canonized. And we are all called to be saints.
When I am in Rome I like to live in the house where the young men from England and Wales live as they prepare for ordination to the priesthood. During the time of Elizabeth I, these men knew that if they returned to England as priests they would be pursued by agents of the Crown, and if they were caught they would have the opportunity to deny their Catholic faith or be killed. One by one, two by two and three by three they went back to England as newly ordained priests. Forty-three were hunted down, executed, hanged, drawn and quartered. Walking the halls they walked, eating in their same refectory, praying in their same chapel, you feel the presence of those young men. Theirs was a faith worth dying for. Go to Assisi and you will sense the presence even today of Saints Francis and Clare and Saint Anthony, who denounced social injustice with vehemence! And at Pietrelcina, Padre Pio. There Padre Pio established a hospital that he called “The House for the Relief of Suffering.” Isn’t that a wonderful name for a church, the Church? “A house for the relief of suffering!” Theirs is a faith worth living.
We think of Damian the Leper on Molokai, of Mother Cabrini and Mother Ann Seton and Mother Teresa, of John Henry Newman and Dorothy Day. They met the poor and the wretched, lived with them and gave them not only physical relief but a sense of worth, a feeling of being loved and forgiven their sins and their faults, God’s love. They did it day by day, directly, person to person. Our young people should know these stories. They will strengthen them in the Faith more than any threat of eternal damnation! Young people crave adventure and great deeds; their hearts are generous. They seek something bigger than themselves. The harvest is great, but the laborers few.
The saints are our models. Their stories are close at hand. People who follow their example can not fail to grow in love. They will also grow in courage and strength. They will inevitably come to ask why there is such need, why are there so many poor and why so much needless suffering in this world. Why the enormous gap between the few very rich and the many very poor when God’s creation is meant for all? Do we have more than our share? They will search for answers and they will take them into the public square.
There will be a reckoning one day, and all who cry “Lord, Lord!” will not enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of the Father. Our graces, our gifts from the Lord, we never earned them and they are not for our sakes only but for the world, the whole world, the good and the bad. For the Lord makes his rain to fall on the good and the bad and his sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike. It is not ours to judge, simply to act, in truth and in love. God will do whatever sorting there need be at the End.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI in New York
5 Easter A #52
Acts 6, 1-7
Ps 33
1 Pt 2, 4-9
Jn 14, 1-12
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
April 20, 2008
Today’s readings offer at least three themes for a homily. “A chosen people, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people the Lord claims as his own.” That’s you, dear friends, a good text from Peter’s First Letter for a sermon on the priesthood of the laity. The reading from Acts relates the institution of the order of deacons. That’s a hard one for me to pass up. Then the Gospel reading from John has Jesus tell Philip that anyone who has seen him has seen the Father, that Jesus and the Father are one. Jesus is the revelation of God. But because the Pope is the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and he’s in New York City today, I have to talk about him.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger first came into public view he was portrayed as a harsh man, seeking out heretics to punish. The media called him the Panzerkardinal, and John Paul’s Rottweiler. That was unfair. It was never true. When Cardinal Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he did his job, and that job was to see to it that what is taught in the name of the Church is indeed what the Church teaches, and he did it well. But he was never harsh or mean.
Our friend Father Martin Laird came to Monica and me twenty-five years ago as a student working for his master’s degree in divinity on the way to ordination to the priesthood. He’s a professor of theology at Villanova University now. Father Marty spent five years studying in Rome, and there he met Cardinal Ratzinger, quite by accident. He was walking in St. Peter’s Square one day when he recognized the Cardinal. “Buon giorno, Eminenza!” he said. Cardinal Ratzinger responded and stopped to ask him where he was from and what he was doing in Rome. They met the same way a few more times. The Cardinal never failed to ask, “How is your mother in Tulsa, how’s her health?” or some other personal question that showed he remembered and that he cared. And Cardinal Ratzinger would show up sometimes when doctoral candidates were defending their dissertations at the Roman universities. He never put a student down or on the spot, never asked a trick question. He was always encouraging, kind and affirming.
Now that he is pope everyone wants to know what he is going to say. There is no voice on earth that speaks with the moral authority of the bishop of Rome. Whether Catholic or not, whether Christian or not, whether believer or not – most people look to the Holy Father as just that, a holy father, a man who will speak for their hearts’ desire, their hope for peace and human decency, justice and freedom, and give them maybe a glimpse of the Beyond.
Most people don’t ask so very much out of life, just an honest job to provide a roof over their heads and food on the table, to sit beneath their own vine and fig tree, to live in peace and unafraid, free to worship God, free to share their most cherished beliefs and traditions and to pass them on. And most people have at least an intuition of the Transcendent, a sense of the holy, the sacred, beyond words. The Pope speaks to that in everyone. You don’t have to be a Catholic to thrill to the Pope’s words of unity and compassion, hope and faith and God’s love and mercy, but it’s great to be a Catholic when he speaks as he does, one of his flock, this good shepherd.
That’s what a pope is, that’s what his job is, to be a pastor, a shepherd, a father. Some may say, “We don’t need a shepherd, we are men and women, not sheep. We are adults, and we don’t need a father. This is ‘a world come of age,’” they say. “We make our own way, we know where we are going.” Sure! A steady march to a cliff, the very brink of destruction! We pollute the earth, the water, the air we breathe. We live on others, taking more than our share. And to keep it that way, we live, each one of us every day, under a nuclear cloud, the threat of extinction by our own blind greed and pride. We need a shepherd, a father, to show us another way.
The pope is the symbol of our unity as Catholic Christians, and he is the guarantor of our unity. Jesus prayed at the Last Supper for his disciples, “that they be one, even as you and I, Father, are one, so that the world might believe” (Jn 17, 21). Saint Peter was the one who spoke for all the others when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And we know what Jesus said to him. He gave him a new name: “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church... the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth, it is bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, it is loosed in heaven” (Mt. 15, 13-19). It was Peter who gathered the apostles after the Resurrection and rallied them to proclaim the Good News. Peter held the new Christians together in the first generation of the Church.
How is it that the bishop of Rome gets an official welcome at the White House and gets to address the United Nations as a head of state? It is because he is a head of state. The Holy See has had a role in framing international treaties since the Early Middle Ages. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, in the 5th Century, the Church in the West was able to maintain its independence because it controlled territories of its own. The Church in the East had a different history, where the Empire survived another thousand years. The Byzantine emperor not only acted as the protector of the Church, but presumed to act as its head, and, in the words of Orthodox Bishop Timothy Ware, the Orthodox venerated the emperor as “the very icon of God on earth.” If history has taught us nothing else, it is this: the closer the Church gets to power, the worse for the Church. Giuseppe Garibaldi did the Church and the papacy an enormous favor when he seized almost all of the papal territory for a united Italy. The pope was left with a small section of the City of Rome, Vatican Hill. But the Vatican remains an independent state, and that is why the pope has retained juridical status in the world of international diplomacy and why the Holy See is represented at the United Nations. But that wouldn’t count for much if this pope didn’t show the face of Christ. That’s what really matters.
Pope Benedict had a lot to say when he went to the White House (I’d love to hear what he had to say in private), and to the United Nations, and at the seminary for the Youth Rally and at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and he will have more to say today at Yankee Stadium. I hope it will all be collected in a book, Benedict XVI in the USA. I can’t touch on even a little bit of it now, except to say that his heart pleads for the most oppressed, the peoples of Darfur and Sudan, the people of Palestine, of Iraq as well as for the most vulnerable among us, the young, the elderly, immigrants and the unborn. His criticisms have been clear but not strident. He reaffirmed the Church’s support for the United Nations and he took sides in the current debate over national sovereignty as opposed to the duty of the international community to protect the innocent when national states will not or can not. That means Darfur! He spoke of immigrants’ rights. That means the way we treat aliens! And of unilateralism. That means the invasion of Iraq! And he criticized the culture’s hedonism and materialism, individualism and relativism. But his tone has been positive and affirming throughout. We have been through some hard years, scandal, but the Pope spoke to that frankly and earnestly, and the people heard him, and they love him.
We can all be proud of this good and gentle Holy Father. His constant reference is to Jesus Christ, not himself, but to Christ our hope, now and forever. It is the love of Christ that urges us on to prayer and to service. Benedict is a brilliant theologian, and he has a heart as warm as his brain is powerful. It is so good to have him here with us, so good to feel pride in our Catholic faith and our Church, so good to stand with Pope Benedict as he stands for the good of all people, their well-being on earth and their eternal salvation in heaven. Thank you, Holy Father!
Acts 6, 1-7
Ps 33
1 Pt 2, 4-9
Jn 14, 1-12
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
April 20, 2008
Today’s readings offer at least three themes for a homily. “A chosen people, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people the Lord claims as his own.” That’s you, dear friends, a good text from Peter’s First Letter for a sermon on the priesthood of the laity. The reading from Acts relates the institution of the order of deacons. That’s a hard one for me to pass up. Then the Gospel reading from John has Jesus tell Philip that anyone who has seen him has seen the Father, that Jesus and the Father are one. Jesus is the revelation of God. But because the Pope is the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and he’s in New York City today, I have to talk about him.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger first came into public view he was portrayed as a harsh man, seeking out heretics to punish. The media called him the Panzerkardinal, and John Paul’s Rottweiler. That was unfair. It was never true. When Cardinal Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he did his job, and that job was to see to it that what is taught in the name of the Church is indeed what the Church teaches, and he did it well. But he was never harsh or mean.
Our friend Father Martin Laird came to Monica and me twenty-five years ago as a student working for his master’s degree in divinity on the way to ordination to the priesthood. He’s a professor of theology at Villanova University now. Father Marty spent five years studying in Rome, and there he met Cardinal Ratzinger, quite by accident. He was walking in St. Peter’s Square one day when he recognized the Cardinal. “Buon giorno, Eminenza!” he said. Cardinal Ratzinger responded and stopped to ask him where he was from and what he was doing in Rome. They met the same way a few more times. The Cardinal never failed to ask, “How is your mother in Tulsa, how’s her health?” or some other personal question that showed he remembered and that he cared. And Cardinal Ratzinger would show up sometimes when doctoral candidates were defending their dissertations at the Roman universities. He never put a student down or on the spot, never asked a trick question. He was always encouraging, kind and affirming.
Now that he is pope everyone wants to know what he is going to say. There is no voice on earth that speaks with the moral authority of the bishop of Rome. Whether Catholic or not, whether Christian or not, whether believer or not – most people look to the Holy Father as just that, a holy father, a man who will speak for their hearts’ desire, their hope for peace and human decency, justice and freedom, and give them maybe a glimpse of the Beyond.
Most people don’t ask so very much out of life, just an honest job to provide a roof over their heads and food on the table, to sit beneath their own vine and fig tree, to live in peace and unafraid, free to worship God, free to share their most cherished beliefs and traditions and to pass them on. And most people have at least an intuition of the Transcendent, a sense of the holy, the sacred, beyond words. The Pope speaks to that in everyone. You don’t have to be a Catholic to thrill to the Pope’s words of unity and compassion, hope and faith and God’s love and mercy, but it’s great to be a Catholic when he speaks as he does, one of his flock, this good shepherd.
That’s what a pope is, that’s what his job is, to be a pastor, a shepherd, a father. Some may say, “We don’t need a shepherd, we are men and women, not sheep. We are adults, and we don’t need a father. This is ‘a world come of age,’” they say. “We make our own way, we know where we are going.” Sure! A steady march to a cliff, the very brink of destruction! We pollute the earth, the water, the air we breathe. We live on others, taking more than our share. And to keep it that way, we live, each one of us every day, under a nuclear cloud, the threat of extinction by our own blind greed and pride. We need a shepherd, a father, to show us another way.
The pope is the symbol of our unity as Catholic Christians, and he is the guarantor of our unity. Jesus prayed at the Last Supper for his disciples, “that they be one, even as you and I, Father, are one, so that the world might believe” (Jn 17, 21). Saint Peter was the one who spoke for all the others when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And we know what Jesus said to him. He gave him a new name: “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church... the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth, it is bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, it is loosed in heaven” (Mt. 15, 13-19). It was Peter who gathered the apostles after the Resurrection and rallied them to proclaim the Good News. Peter held the new Christians together in the first generation of the Church.
How is it that the bishop of Rome gets an official welcome at the White House and gets to address the United Nations as a head of state? It is because he is a head of state. The Holy See has had a role in framing international treaties since the Early Middle Ages. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, in the 5th Century, the Church in the West was able to maintain its independence because it controlled territories of its own. The Church in the East had a different history, where the Empire survived another thousand years. The Byzantine emperor not only acted as the protector of the Church, but presumed to act as its head, and, in the words of Orthodox Bishop Timothy Ware, the Orthodox venerated the emperor as “the very icon of God on earth.” If history has taught us nothing else, it is this: the closer the Church gets to power, the worse for the Church. Giuseppe Garibaldi did the Church and the papacy an enormous favor when he seized almost all of the papal territory for a united Italy. The pope was left with a small section of the City of Rome, Vatican Hill. But the Vatican remains an independent state, and that is why the pope has retained juridical status in the world of international diplomacy and why the Holy See is represented at the United Nations. But that wouldn’t count for much if this pope didn’t show the face of Christ. That’s what really matters.
Pope Benedict had a lot to say when he went to the White House (I’d love to hear what he had to say in private), and to the United Nations, and at the seminary for the Youth Rally and at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and he will have more to say today at Yankee Stadium. I hope it will all be collected in a book, Benedict XVI in the USA. I can’t touch on even a little bit of it now, except to say that his heart pleads for the most oppressed, the peoples of Darfur and Sudan, the people of Palestine, of Iraq as well as for the most vulnerable among us, the young, the elderly, immigrants and the unborn. His criticisms have been clear but not strident. He reaffirmed the Church’s support for the United Nations and he took sides in the current debate over national sovereignty as opposed to the duty of the international community to protect the innocent when national states will not or can not. That means Darfur! He spoke of immigrants’ rights. That means the way we treat aliens! And of unilateralism. That means the invasion of Iraq! And he criticized the culture’s hedonism and materialism, individualism and relativism. But his tone has been positive and affirming throughout. We have been through some hard years, scandal, but the Pope spoke to that frankly and earnestly, and the people heard him, and they love him.
We can all be proud of this good and gentle Holy Father. His constant reference is to Jesus Christ, not himself, but to Christ our hope, now and forever. It is the love of Christ that urges us on to prayer and to service. Benedict is a brilliant theologian, and he has a heart as warm as his brain is powerful. It is so good to have him here with us, so good to feel pride in our Catholic faith and our Church, so good to stand with Pope Benedict as he stands for the good of all people, their well-being on earth and their eternal salvation in heaven. Thank you, Holy Father!
Monday, February 18, 2008
Help Thou My Unbelief
2 Lent A #25
Gen 12, 1-4a
Ps 33
2 Tim 1, 8b-10
Mt 17, 1-9
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
February 17, 2008
I hope everyone here has seen Roberto Benigni’s wonderful film, Life is Beautiful, La Vita è Bella in Italian. It won three Academy Awards. If you haven’t, you can make a date with Monica and come over to our house to watch it on VHS. Life is beautiful, indeed, yes it is, despite it all.
The movie’s plot is set in World War II, the persecution of the Jews. An Italian Jew and his son are picked up by the Nazis and sent to a death camp. The father tries to convince his young son -- he looks no more than five or six years old -- that it’s all a game, a contest, and that if he plays his part and keeps out of sight of the guards, he may win the prize. He tells the boy that everyone else in the camp is competing for the same prize, a tank, a military tank, not a toy, a real one. At last, the U.S. Army advances on the camp. The Nazis flee. But before they go, they kill all the prisoners they can. Improbably, the boy Joshua survives, playing hide-and-seek as his father is led away to be shot. When all is quiet, Joshua comes out of hiding and stands alone in a large, deserted open space. Suddenly a U.S. Army tank enters the camp, heads toward him and stops right in front of him. Joshua’s eyes light up with amazement. “È vero!” he says, “It’s true!” Joshua thinks that this is the prize, his prize, that he has won. He had begun to doubt. Soon he comes to realize just what it was that his father had given him, not a tank, but life, life itself. “It’s true!” But it’s more than he could ever have imagined, far more. Far more than a tank! It’s true!
Abraham believed and he obeyed. That is why he is our “Father in Faith.” He set out from his own country not knowing where he was to go, in obedience to God, to start a new life in a Promised Land. He was seventy-five years old. At that age one does not start a new life, you can take it from me. But he had the Promise. His wife had never conceived. And yet he is told that he will father nations, that his offspring will outnumber the stars in the sky and the sands of the seashore. Sarah laughed at the very idea. And yet, Abraham became the ancestor of the Hebrews and the Arabs as well (and many of us here too, those of us whose roots are in Sicily and Southern Italy, where the Arabs held sway for two hundred years; they made genetic contributions to our people). Spiritually Abraham and Sarah are the father and the mother of all believers in the One God of the Hebrew Bible. They had reason to doubt. Abraham knew he was not the man he used to be, and Sarah laughed. They could not imagine that billions of Muslims and Christians as well as Jews would be blessed in their name and bless them in turn. But the Promise was true. More than they could possibly imagine.
Twice each year we hear the story of the Transfiguration, every Second Sunday of Lent, and again on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6th. Just six days before, Jesus had told his disciples that he was to be handed over to his enemies to be killed, and then be raised up. He took the three, Peter, James and John, up Mount Tabor, there to be transfigured, gleaming like the sun. Moses and Elijah appeared with him. Then the voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved Son.... Listen to him!” Peter, James and John fell on their faces, struck with terror. Jesus told them to get up, not to be afraid and not to tell anyone their vision until he had risen. What they had seen was a pale glimpse of what was to be, a sign of the glory that is to come after Jesus’ death. It is a sign of the Resurrection. No one is to speak of it until it is accomplished.
We believe in the glory that is to come; we have the Promise. Doubt may linger. We pray, “Lord I do believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk 9,24). Any high school astronomy student can tell you that our sun is but a pebble wandering in the Milky Way in limitless space, aimlessly, it would seem. Our planet Earth is a speck of dust in the immensity of it all. Our lifespan, seventy or eighty years or ninety, is as a nanosecond in the billions of years the universe has been expanding. What are we then? The Psalmist sings, “What is man that you should pay him heed? You have created him a little lower than the angels....” Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls from the sky nor a hair from our heads without God our Father’s leave, and that the Father has care of us.
Non-believers do not agree. That’s nothing new. An epitaph found in the ruins of a two thousand year old Roman cemetery reads, “In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recedimus.” “Into nothing from nothing how quickly we fall back.” An atheist friend of mine said the very same thing to me not long ago, “from a vast void into a vast void” he said of birth and death. In this view, life is meaningless, or worse; it is cruel. Lost in the stars we are victims of blind chance, and nothing more. Some claim it is all the more noble to struggle for peace and justice when you are convinced it is useless, as they do. Let’s see about that! I wish them a lot of luck! A world at peace, a world of solidarity, even a world that can sustain the impact of man will never be built unless we face the hard fact that our moral failings, pride and greed and the rest, are at bottom spiritual and must be addressed with the weapons of the spirit: prayer and the sacraments, penance and fasting, self-denial and the works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual.
Lent is a time of waiting. We wait in quiet hope. We slow down. We pray more. We turn off the radio and the TV and we listen to what God is trying to tell us. We wait for Easter, the Resurrection of Jesus.
What is it we wait for in the afterlife for ourselves and our loved ones? We don’t know! We can be sure that it is glorious, to be in God, in God’s glory. It is life, the fullness of life, life everlasting. Saint John tells us, “We are God’s children now. What we shall be has not yet come to light. We know that when it comes to light we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 Jn 3, 2).
It’s true! When we wake to it in the Resurrection, that’s what we will say, like little Joshua. È vero! It’s true, more than anything we could possibly imagine.
Get up. Do not be afraid!
Gen 12, 1-4a
Ps 33
2 Tim 1, 8b-10
Mt 17, 1-9
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
February 17, 2008
I hope everyone here has seen Roberto Benigni’s wonderful film, Life is Beautiful, La Vita è Bella in Italian. It won three Academy Awards. If you haven’t, you can make a date with Monica and come over to our house to watch it on VHS. Life is beautiful, indeed, yes it is, despite it all.
The movie’s plot is set in World War II, the persecution of the Jews. An Italian Jew and his son are picked up by the Nazis and sent to a death camp. The father tries to convince his young son -- he looks no more than five or six years old -- that it’s all a game, a contest, and that if he plays his part and keeps out of sight of the guards, he may win the prize. He tells the boy that everyone else in the camp is competing for the same prize, a tank, a military tank, not a toy, a real one. At last, the U.S. Army advances on the camp. The Nazis flee. But before they go, they kill all the prisoners they can. Improbably, the boy Joshua survives, playing hide-and-seek as his father is led away to be shot. When all is quiet, Joshua comes out of hiding and stands alone in a large, deserted open space. Suddenly a U.S. Army tank enters the camp, heads toward him and stops right in front of him. Joshua’s eyes light up with amazement. “È vero!” he says, “It’s true!” Joshua thinks that this is the prize, his prize, that he has won. He had begun to doubt. Soon he comes to realize just what it was that his father had given him, not a tank, but life, life itself. “It’s true!” But it’s more than he could ever have imagined, far more. Far more than a tank! It’s true!
Abraham believed and he obeyed. That is why he is our “Father in Faith.” He set out from his own country not knowing where he was to go, in obedience to God, to start a new life in a Promised Land. He was seventy-five years old. At that age one does not start a new life, you can take it from me. But he had the Promise. His wife had never conceived. And yet he is told that he will father nations, that his offspring will outnumber the stars in the sky and the sands of the seashore. Sarah laughed at the very idea. And yet, Abraham became the ancestor of the Hebrews and the Arabs as well (and many of us here too, those of us whose roots are in Sicily and Southern Italy, where the Arabs held sway for two hundred years; they made genetic contributions to our people). Spiritually Abraham and Sarah are the father and the mother of all believers in the One God of the Hebrew Bible. They had reason to doubt. Abraham knew he was not the man he used to be, and Sarah laughed. They could not imagine that billions of Muslims and Christians as well as Jews would be blessed in their name and bless them in turn. But the Promise was true. More than they could possibly imagine.
Twice each year we hear the story of the Transfiguration, every Second Sunday of Lent, and again on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6th. Just six days before, Jesus had told his disciples that he was to be handed over to his enemies to be killed, and then be raised up. He took the three, Peter, James and John, up Mount Tabor, there to be transfigured, gleaming like the sun. Moses and Elijah appeared with him. Then the voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved Son.... Listen to him!” Peter, James and John fell on their faces, struck with terror. Jesus told them to get up, not to be afraid and not to tell anyone their vision until he had risen. What they had seen was a pale glimpse of what was to be, a sign of the glory that is to come after Jesus’ death. It is a sign of the Resurrection. No one is to speak of it until it is accomplished.
We believe in the glory that is to come; we have the Promise. Doubt may linger. We pray, “Lord I do believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk 9,24). Any high school astronomy student can tell you that our sun is but a pebble wandering in the Milky Way in limitless space, aimlessly, it would seem. Our planet Earth is a speck of dust in the immensity of it all. Our lifespan, seventy or eighty years or ninety, is as a nanosecond in the billions of years the universe has been expanding. What are we then? The Psalmist sings, “What is man that you should pay him heed? You have created him a little lower than the angels....” Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls from the sky nor a hair from our heads without God our Father’s leave, and that the Father has care of us.
Non-believers do not agree. That’s nothing new. An epitaph found in the ruins of a two thousand year old Roman cemetery reads, “In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recedimus.” “Into nothing from nothing how quickly we fall back.” An atheist friend of mine said the very same thing to me not long ago, “from a vast void into a vast void” he said of birth and death. In this view, life is meaningless, or worse; it is cruel. Lost in the stars we are victims of blind chance, and nothing more. Some claim it is all the more noble to struggle for peace and justice when you are convinced it is useless, as they do. Let’s see about that! I wish them a lot of luck! A world at peace, a world of solidarity, even a world that can sustain the impact of man will never be built unless we face the hard fact that our moral failings, pride and greed and the rest, are at bottom spiritual and must be addressed with the weapons of the spirit: prayer and the sacraments, penance and fasting, self-denial and the works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual.
Lent is a time of waiting. We wait in quiet hope. We slow down. We pray more. We turn off the radio and the TV and we listen to what God is trying to tell us. We wait for Easter, the Resurrection of Jesus.
What is it we wait for in the afterlife for ourselves and our loved ones? We don’t know! We can be sure that it is glorious, to be in God, in God’s glory. It is life, the fullness of life, life everlasting. Saint John tells us, “We are God’s children now. What we shall be has not yet come to light. We know that when it comes to light we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 Jn 3, 2).
It’s true! When we wake to it in the Resurrection, that’s what we will say, like little Joshua. È vero! It’s true, more than anything we could possibly imagine.
Get up. Do not be afraid!
Friday, February 1, 2008
Remembering Selma, '65
2 Sunday A #64
Is 49, 3. 5-6
Ps 40
1 Cor 1, 1-3
Jn 1, 29-34
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
January 20, 2008
In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist proclaims Jesus the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1, 29). Lamb of God, one of Jesus’ titles. Jesus has many titles, each tells a tale, Christ, Redeemer, Son of God. Jesus is not just a son of God but the Son of God, the only begotten Son of God, the revelation of God the Father. Today we fix our attention on Jesus the Lamb of God, as John directs us. The lamb is a symbol of innocence. The innocent lamb led to the slaughter is a symbol of unmerited suffering. Unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. That is how the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King explained the dynamic of the Civil Rights Movement, which came to its climax in Selma, Alabama, in March, 1965. Unmerited suffering willingly accepted. Monsignor Dugan was there. So was I. We would not meet for another fourteen years, but when we did, Father Dugan and I, we acknowledged that that time was a highpoint in our lives, something precious that we shared, a bond as of a Band of Brother and Sisters who put our lives on the line.
Forty-three years ago! Is it possible? Today a black man has a shot at the presidency. We could not imagine it back then, when Americans, black and white, scores of them, lay down their lives just so black people could vote. Sometimes, even when I am alone and writing about those times, tears flow down my face and I choke on sobs. I don’t know why. When I talk about them at schools and colleges I have to keep my emotions in check, so bear with me if my voice cracks. Andy Young was my boss down there. I was one of his marshals. Andy went on from the Movement to the United States House of Representatives and then to the United Nations as U.S. Ambassador. I worked with him there too, in the Congress and at the U.N. I saw him on TV not long ago, talking about The Days, Selma, ’65. To wind up, the interviewer, asked him, “Do you think about those days often?” He answered, “No, not often, always, all the time!” Then he broke down and sobbed, right on screen. That made me feel better.
Fast forward to Iraq, 2003, the lobby of the Al Fanar Hotel in Baghdad and a few Americans sipping sweet tea in the lobby. Somehow Selma came up. “I was there,” said a lady from Colorado. “So was I,” I told her. “Do you remember Leroy, Leroy Moton?” I asked her. Leroy was my first friend there. I often thought of him, a nineteen year old kid, about six feet seven inches tall, lanky, very dark and full of nervous energy. Leroy showed me around town and helped me to settle in. Then he went on to lead the singing as we sat night and day under sun and rain for ten days in front of Brown’s Chapel. When the police lifted the barricades and the great march made it to and returned from Montgomery, when it was all over, Leroy helped a white woman from Detroit drive people to the airport and to the bus and train stations to return to their homes up North. Her name was Viola Liuzzo, wife of a union organizer and mother of a family. Maybe some of you remember. When we got home we heard on the news that four white men in a car menaced Mrs. Liuzzo when they saw a black youth sitting next to her in her Olds, and drove into her rear bumper. Then they gave chase, at over 80 miles per hour on a state highway. They drew alongside Mrs. Liuzzo’s car and shot her in the head. She died instantly. Leroy survived somehow. It turned out that one of the men in the car was an FBI plant who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. He testified against the Ku Kluxers at a state trial for murder, but an all white jury refused to convict. The killers were then tried in federal court for violation of civil rights. There they were convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Three years for murder!
“I wonder what happened to Leroy after all he went through,” I told my new friend in Baghdad. “I’d love to find him, see how he did in life. If if he’s in need, well, we have a farm in Marlboro....” My friend was still in touch with some people in Alabama. She gave me a clue, and the long and the short of it is: I found Leroy in Connecticut. He’s in his sixties now, retired on disability income, bent over from an industrial accident but still six feet seven if you could straighten him out. He has had a hard but a good life as a factory worker and he has a son now in high school in Hartford. Leroy shares his story with young people in schools and churches, as I’m sharing it with you today, to show just how unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. We didn’t just win the vote, we bought back America’s soul! That’s what redemption means, a buying back, at a price. We did it, black and white, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and Jew and Muslim together, and maybe an agnostic or two. We won the vote and we tore down the legal structures of racial segregation. The institutional framework for this great movement was the black Protestant church, but at the March to Montgomery, you could see a swarm of Catholic nuns in habit and priests in Roman collars, more then any identifiable group.
These days we are celebrating the Church Unity Octave, praying for, and working for the restoration of Christian unity, one church that will be truly catholic, truly orthodox, truly evangelical and truly reformed. We are already one, Saint Paul tells us over and over again, for there is but “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph 4,5). So, what we can do together, we must do together. We can pray together. We can study together. But the best way to achieve the unity that Jesus prayed the Father for his church is to struggle for peace and justice together in his name, in his way, even at a price. Jesus, the Lamb of God, has paid the price of our sin, once and for all. We are in Christ. If in baptism we died in Christ, and if in baptism we rose with Christ, then in baptism we share his saving mission too. It’s still going on, and it’s up to you. Redemption does not come on the cheap.
The night before Martin King was assassinated, Andy got him up out of a sickbed in a motel in Memphis. A large congregation was waiting in a church to hear him speak. He looked haggard and dispirited at first. But after a few minutes the Spirit caught him. His voice rang, he spoke as if he knew what was coming the next day. “Like anybody, I’d like to live a long life. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
Martin King was surely a lamb of God. I never heard of a wolf of God.
Is 49, 3. 5-6
Ps 40
1 Cor 1, 1-3
Jn 1, 29-34
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
January 20, 2008
In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist proclaims Jesus the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1, 29). Lamb of God, one of Jesus’ titles. Jesus has many titles, each tells a tale, Christ, Redeemer, Son of God. Jesus is not just a son of God but the Son of God, the only begotten Son of God, the revelation of God the Father. Today we fix our attention on Jesus the Lamb of God, as John directs us. The lamb is a symbol of innocence. The innocent lamb led to the slaughter is a symbol of unmerited suffering. Unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. That is how the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King explained the dynamic of the Civil Rights Movement, which came to its climax in Selma, Alabama, in March, 1965. Unmerited suffering willingly accepted. Monsignor Dugan was there. So was I. We would not meet for another fourteen years, but when we did, Father Dugan and I, we acknowledged that that time was a highpoint in our lives, something precious that we shared, a bond as of a Band of Brother and Sisters who put our lives on the line.
Forty-three years ago! Is it possible? Today a black man has a shot at the presidency. We could not imagine it back then, when Americans, black and white, scores of them, lay down their lives just so black people could vote. Sometimes, even when I am alone and writing about those times, tears flow down my face and I choke on sobs. I don’t know why. When I talk about them at schools and colleges I have to keep my emotions in check, so bear with me if my voice cracks. Andy Young was my boss down there. I was one of his marshals. Andy went on from the Movement to the United States House of Representatives and then to the United Nations as U.S. Ambassador. I worked with him there too, in the Congress and at the U.N. I saw him on TV not long ago, talking about The Days, Selma, ’65. To wind up, the interviewer, asked him, “Do you think about those days often?” He answered, “No, not often, always, all the time!” Then he broke down and sobbed, right on screen. That made me feel better.
Fast forward to Iraq, 2003, the lobby of the Al Fanar Hotel in Baghdad and a few Americans sipping sweet tea in the lobby. Somehow Selma came up. “I was there,” said a lady from Colorado. “So was I,” I told her. “Do you remember Leroy, Leroy Moton?” I asked her. Leroy was my first friend there. I often thought of him, a nineteen year old kid, about six feet seven inches tall, lanky, very dark and full of nervous energy. Leroy showed me around town and helped me to settle in. Then he went on to lead the singing as we sat night and day under sun and rain for ten days in front of Brown’s Chapel. When the police lifted the barricades and the great march made it to and returned from Montgomery, when it was all over, Leroy helped a white woman from Detroit drive people to the airport and to the bus and train stations to return to their homes up North. Her name was Viola Liuzzo, wife of a union organizer and mother of a family. Maybe some of you remember. When we got home we heard on the news that four white men in a car menaced Mrs. Liuzzo when they saw a black youth sitting next to her in her Olds, and drove into her rear bumper. Then they gave chase, at over 80 miles per hour on a state highway. They drew alongside Mrs. Liuzzo’s car and shot her in the head. She died instantly. Leroy survived somehow. It turned out that one of the men in the car was an FBI plant who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. He testified against the Ku Kluxers at a state trial for murder, but an all white jury refused to convict. The killers were then tried in federal court for violation of civil rights. There they were convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Three years for murder!
“I wonder what happened to Leroy after all he went through,” I told my new friend in Baghdad. “I’d love to find him, see how he did in life. If if he’s in need, well, we have a farm in Marlboro....” My friend was still in touch with some people in Alabama. She gave me a clue, and the long and the short of it is: I found Leroy in Connecticut. He’s in his sixties now, retired on disability income, bent over from an industrial accident but still six feet seven if you could straighten him out. He has had a hard but a good life as a factory worker and he has a son now in high school in Hartford. Leroy shares his story with young people in schools and churches, as I’m sharing it with you today, to show just how unmerited suffering, willingly accepted, is redemptive. We didn’t just win the vote, we bought back America’s soul! That’s what redemption means, a buying back, at a price. We did it, black and white, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and Jew and Muslim together, and maybe an agnostic or two. We won the vote and we tore down the legal structures of racial segregation. The institutional framework for this great movement was the black Protestant church, but at the March to Montgomery, you could see a swarm of Catholic nuns in habit and priests in Roman collars, more then any identifiable group.
These days we are celebrating the Church Unity Octave, praying for, and working for the restoration of Christian unity, one church that will be truly catholic, truly orthodox, truly evangelical and truly reformed. We are already one, Saint Paul tells us over and over again, for there is but “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph 4,5). So, what we can do together, we must do together. We can pray together. We can study together. But the best way to achieve the unity that Jesus prayed the Father for his church is to struggle for peace and justice together in his name, in his way, even at a price. Jesus, the Lamb of God, has paid the price of our sin, once and for all. We are in Christ. If in baptism we died in Christ, and if in baptism we rose with Christ, then in baptism we share his saving mission too. It’s still going on, and it’s up to you. Redemption does not come on the cheap.
The night before Martin King was assassinated, Andy got him up out of a sickbed in a motel in Memphis. A large congregation was waiting in a church to hear him speak. He looked haggard and dispirited at first. But after a few minutes the Spirit caught him. His voice rang, he spoke as if he knew what was coming the next day. “Like anybody, I’d like to live a long life. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
Martin King was surely a lamb of God. I never heard of a wolf of God.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Homage to Cardinal O'Connor
By Tom Cornell
John O’Connor wasn’t yet a bishop when he wrote his book about the Viet Nam war, A Chaplain Looks at Viet Nam, in 1968. He sent me a copy. I remember getting it in the mail at the Catholic Peace Fellowship office in Lower Manhattan not long after I got out of Danbury federal prison. I had led the first group act of resistance to the Viet Nam draft. Five of us had burned our draft cards in a well-organized and dignified demonstration, with Dorothy Day and A.J. Muste participating in our support and about 2,500 people in attendance at Union Square. Press and radio/TV coverage was extensive beyond imagination. After trial and conviction and failed appeals, I served five months out of a six month sentence, a very lenient sentence it was by the standards of the day.
I thanked Fr. O’Connor and sent him a copy of A Penny a Copy, the anthology of writings from The Catholic Worker that Jim Forest and I put together, published by The Macmillan Company, which was hot off the presses, too. And I wrote Fr. O’Connor, thanking him for his thoughtfulness. I don’t have a copy of that letter in front of me, but I recall its structure. I said that no one of any responsibility in the Catholic peace movement would deny the men and women in the armed forces the ministry of the Church. I think I said that I would prefer, and so would most of us, that the military chaplains be paid by the Church and not by the military. I may have said something about chaplains having the rank of military officers, and that that is at least problematic from our point of view. But all that aside, because we know that’s not going to change. There are changes that can be made, and I forward them to you now.
Foremost among them is that military chaplains should be made aware of the theology of conscientious objection to war and to military service. It sometimes happens that an objection in conscience "crystallizes" after a man or woman has entered military service. Chaplains should understand the law and the rules and regulations that apply when a person in the military seeks separation on grounds of conscientious objection so that the chaplains might provide supportive counseling, assuming good faith in the absence if compelling evidence to the contrary. Even though the military pays the salaries of the chaplains, their first obligation is to their parishioners as pastors.
I then went on the war in Viet Nam. The bishops had accepted the Administration’s justification for US participation in the war in Viet Nam at that time and until 1970, when they published their decision that the war was no longer justifiable on grounds of proportionality, in other words, that the war was causing more harm than any good that might come out of its protraction. I simply stated my belief then in 1968, and the conviction of the Catholic peace movement that the war was unjust and immoral as well as illegal. I don’t remember how Father O’Connor replied to that letter. But not long after, he apologized for his book, calling it "very bad", and withdrew it. He must have received a lot more letters.
In subsequent correspondence, Father O’Connor assured me that he had seen to it that the military chaplains under him were acquainted with the theology of conscientious objection as well as the law, rules and regulations governing separation from military service for conscientious objector claimants within the military and that they were prepared to give positive support to conscientious objector claimants.
I don’t recall any further dealings with him until the 1976 Call to Action in Detroit. The Bishops’ Bicentennial Call to Action was a massive affair, years in the planning, with regional consultations on a wide basis in preparation for the big event. Dorothy Day and I participated in the preliminary hearing in Newark. There is a photograph of Dorothy there, published in the Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (OUP 1990). I was invited to represent CPF at Detroit also. I designated a young Franciscan seminarian my alternate, Roberto Gonzalez, who is now the Archbishop of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Pax Christi had no real constituency then. The night before the Call to Action was convened, Fr. Ken Rollins, a Franciscan priest, gathered a meeting of people and groups especially interested in peace, perhaps eighteen people or so. I was designated chairman of the peace caucus. Eileen Egan was there, and Professors Joe Fahy and Gordon Zahn. Between plenary sessions addressed by weighty figures, there were to be workshops. Each workshop would have a chair and a rapporteur. Our caucus hammered out a wish-list and made sure that there would be at least one of us participating in every workshop bringing up the same items for consideration: that the Church uphold the right of conscientious objection to war and to military service, demand an end to the production and maintenance of weapons of mass destruction, and an end to the international transfer of weapons of mass destruction, an end to the arms race and transfers of conventional weapons. Some people started tacking on all kinds of additional items that were either redundant or implicitly contradictory. More unfortunately, a mind-set was established in every cause group at the event that said something like, "You vote for my laundry list and I’ll vote for yours. We’re all together in this, aren’t we, all of us enlightened progressives in a world and in a Church dominated by patriarchs?"
It seemed to be working very nicely. John O’Connor wasn’t in my workshop, as I remember, but some of his men were. He had a battery of priests who were doing the same thing that we were doing, seeding the workshops. But they got trounced! In every workshop the people who were trying to vote down or tone down the peace propositions were decisively outvoted. At the last plenum, the report from the rapporteurs had all our laundry list items and everybody else’s too, and they were all received by acclamation. At first it seemed like a dizzying success. I remember Eileen Egan with wide eyes saying, "Do you realize what a victory we have won for the cause of peace today?" I was stunned myself, largely because I didn’t expect all the liberal nonsense that passed by voice vote with no deliberation. It seemed very cheap to me. I kept my hand down and my voice still much of the time at the final plenum. But we wanted to be able to believe that we had won a victory. Gordon was very pleased. Joe Fahy was elated. And so was I, but not for long.
Jim Finn spotted me in a hallway. Jim was a liberal who drifted rightward and by then was a neo-conservative. He was a generous man and a loyal friend and gave significant help to CPF even though he never really agreed with us except on the Viet Nam war. Jim was a principal organizer of the event. He was furious, and he pointed his fury at me! "Do you have any idea what you’ve done?" He went on about all the time and money and effort that went into the event and all of it down the drain. A few minutes later, Professor David O’Brien, foremost authority on Catholic social action and one of our staunchest allies on the left, who had been working full time on the organization of the Call to Action came up to me and said the same thing! The bishops learned a negative lesson about consultation: The people in the pews are not represented by agency bureaucrats and the people who manage to get themselves chosen to go to monster consultations. They determined never to attempt anything as foolish as this again. We had gained no victory that day.
I met Father O’Connor with his men walking down a hall as we were about to leave the Detroit Conference Center. I expected him to express disapproval or disappointment in some way. Every objection that he and his men had raised had been dismissed. But not at all. He looked tranquil and his manner was gracious and kindly. Was it that he understood better than Eileen, Gordon, Joe and I what had really happened? I don’t think so. I think he was simply a very good man who had the spirit of nonviolence! And he was aiming it at me!
In late 1979, the FOR fired me after fourteen years on the job. Joe Fahy was nominated to the personnel committee of FOR the year after. He tried to figure out from the records why I got the sack. The only reason he could come up with was that I was working at too many different things. "Unique," he said. "Most people get fired for doing too little." Another irony is that I did the most important work I ever did in my life in the next three years of "self-employment," the consultation on the 1983 peace pastoral being the high point.
Hildegard Goss-Mayr, traveling secretary of the International FOR who generated her own salary along with her husband, Jean Goss, was aware of my distress. She managed to have IFOR give me an assignment (and $1500 for expenses and for the support of my five dependents): organize support actions for Central America on behalf of CELAM, the Central American Bishops’ Conference. She asked Archbishop Oscar Romero to give me the assignment officially by letter. It was extremely difficult on such slender resources, but I managed to generate some kind of program in a couple of dozen cities: a day of prayer and reflection in a seminary, a picket line in front of a post office or a teach-in or an inter-religious workshop, in early 1980. Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark participated in the one I led in New York City, at Saint Cecilia’s Church. I have a letter on my wall from Archbishop Romero thanking me and the CPF for the effort.
Needless to say, nothing we did could compare with the spiritual energy generated by the sacrifice of Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, their two companions and the Archbishop very soon after, the women waylaid, raped and shot, buried in shallow graves in the Salvadoran countryside by US trained and financed death squads, the Archbishop shot down while saying Mass in a hospital chapel, again by US trained and financed assassins. But it did establish that we were onto an issue of great significance, and it strengthened the Catholic Worker’s and Catholic Peace Fellowship’s visibility in the geography of protest. But I had to support my family.
John O’Connor had nothing to do with these events. I’m just backing up a few years and filling in the personal story now for context until we come back to the late Cardinal. It was a little before I got the ax from FOR that the US Catholic Conference asked me to come to Washington for a consultation with their staff about the reintroduction of registration for the military draft, which had been suspended in the wake of the Viet Nam war. All the peace groups were convinced that re-imposition of military conscription was imminent. How was the Church to respond? was the question the USCC staff wanted to discuss with me.
I suggested that the USCC be explicit in its support of conscientious objection, including selective conscientious objection, and that the Church offer its good offices to the counseling of any and all who have any difficulties of any kind serving in war, with military service, or with compliance with the Selective Service Law. All my suggestions were accepted and printed as a commitment by the Administrative Board of the USCC on behalf of the bishops of the US in a 1980 document.
As soon as the words were in print, I visited the USCC once again. I thanked Fr. Bryan Hehir, who was then in charge of the Office for International Affairs, and Mr. Ed Dougherty, a long-time lay employee who played a quiet behind-the-scenes role for many years in their great work. And then I said, "What are you going to do about it? How are you going to train Church personnel in draft law, rules and regulations and counseling principles for this mission?" Fr. Hehir looked at me and laughed, "We can’t hire you, Tom, we don’t have the funds." He knew my situation. I said I wasn’t looking for a job at USCC. What I wanted was a letter or some kind of acknowledgment that CPF had a draft counselor training program of excellent quality, available to diocesan and other Catholic agencies so that they might prepare themselves to counsel any and every person who has a problem with military service or the draft.
Mind you, the wording here was careful. If there had been a reinstatement of the draft, I wanted to see the day, and soon, when any young man or any parent—Jewish, secularist, Protestant as well as Catholic—would think first of the Catholic Church or Catholic Charities or the local Catholic high school or college as the place to go for free quality counseling on questions of personal responsibility and war and military service. The Quakers have been known for that, and they have done a very creditable job of it. But they don’t have either the resources or the philosophy to do the job as we can. CPF’s success rate (that is, in helping clients to attain the draft classification they sought, usually 1-0, conscientious objector status) was far higher than AFSC’s, maybe because we are goal-oriented, and they are process-oriented.
Fr. Hehir understood exactly what I was after. He said, "You write the letter of recommendation. I’ll show it to Archbishop Quinn." The letter was mailed out on USCC stationery over Archbishop Quinn’s signature to every diocesan bishop in the US, suggesting that they contact CPF for the services of Tom Cornell or Paul Frazier for a two day draft counselor training seminar for their agency personnel.
The program was highly successful, in Davenport, Boston, New York, Chicago, Richmond, Butte, Helena, all over the country. The people involved were teachers, social workers, administrators, guidance counselors. They all expressed appreciation for the printed materials from many agencies and specialties, legal and medical, and for the oral presentations on counseling and the role-playing sessions. That year I made $3500. I had to put my house up for sale and take a job teaching 8th grade English and Latin 1 at a public junior high school in New Hampshire.
Early that spring, Ed Dougherty telephoned me at the school in Conway and said, "The Church needs you." We both appreciated the drama. He invited me to meet with the five bishops who would be drafting the peace pastoral, The Challenge of Peace, a groundbreaking document that would be published in 1983. In the meantime, the Education Department of the Archdiocese of Hartford and the Arch-diocesan Justice and Peace Commission asked me to come to Hartford with the Draft Counselor Training Program. We made a date. Days later, Jim Noonan, a member of the commission and an old friend, telephoned me at home in New Hampshire. "It’s all off," he said. "Somebody got to Archbishop Whealon. He’s a conservative, you know. They told him you were biased against the military and that you wouldn’t give a balanced presentation, that you’re not on the up-and-up. The Archbishop says you can’t come, the program’s off." I told him to go back to the Archbishop and point out to him that the program was endorsed by the USCC. He did, and he called me again to say it was still no good. I could come, but they couldn’t give me space in any church building or recruit participants through the Church network, or give me an honorarium or even pay my expenses. I told Jim to go back a third time, to tell the Archbishop that the program had been well received in several dioceses and that he could call any bishop who had the program for an evaluation, etc. Jim agreed. The result two days later: "You can come, Tom, if you get the OK from the military ordinariate in New York. But there’s no time for that and you’re up there!" It seemed impossible. "Fear not, oh ye of little faith," I told him. I’m meeting with Bishop O’Connor next Friday at St. Thomas More Chapel at Yale in New Haven. Keep everything on track." It was the consultation on the peace pastoral.
At the consultation I asked Bryan Hehir why they hadn’t asked Gordon Zahn or Eileen Egan, just me and Molly Rush and a nun I didn’t know and whose name I can’t recall. He said they knew what Eileen would say and they knew what Gordon would say. They didn’t know what I would say, but they knew that I could enter into dialogue on substantive issues.
The nun led off with a lovely and lengthy sermon on Jesus, reminding the bishops that our Lord was very good. The bishops were patient but bored. Lesson: never preach to bishops unless asked to. Molly Rush spoke briefly and affectingly, a middle-class wife and mother in danger of imprisonment for what she meant as an act of conscience against nuclear madness, but she did not engage any substantive issue.
I started off summarizing what we all know and agree to be true. The use of weapons of mass destruction has been unequivocally condemned by the highest level of teaching authority, the Second Vatican Council and the Holy See (Gaudium et Spes, par. 80-83). We know that the US continues to maintain and to expand its inventory of weapons of mass destruction. The question is, is this evil in itself or is it not? "I don’t know how you bishops are going to answer that question on behalf of the Church in the US. I know how the Catholic Worker will answer that question and I know how the Catholic Peace Fellowship will answer that question. We hold that it is evil in itself. We say that and we will continue to say it. It’s true and we can afford to say it." But, I went on in words to this effect: if you say the same, the Catholic people by and large will not believe you, and you know it. You are the leaders, but if the people do not follow you, you are not really leaders any longer, you are just taking a walk, and you have to lead. That is your God-given mandate. So I don’t know how you are going to finesse this question. You have got to tell the truth. But you also have to be able to be heard. You are in a dilemma. I hope I can help.
"Now, why do I say that the possession and further production of weapon of mass destruction are immoral? Because we either intend to use them or we do not. If we intend to use them, then we are already guilty because subjective morality lies in the intentional order. If we do not intend to use them, then the policy of deterrence is based upon a lie. We have always had difficulty in Catholic morality with lying, because it perverts the relationship of rational beings.
"So, bishops, how might we deal with this dilemma? You must tell the truth. But if you tell the whole truth now, you will not be heard and the teaching authority of the Church will be weakened."
The discussion went on for most of the rest of the morning. Fr. Bryan Hehir reminded the bishops that the moral principles that I based my argument upon are the same that they all learned in seminary and that my argument was conservative in nature, the same as Finnis’ and Greer’s. I engaged Bishop O ’Connor more than the others because he was the man to convince. On the other hand, I sometimes flashed the bad eye at our old friend, Bishop Tom Gumbleton, every time he tried to sell the hard-core pacifist line, to keep him quiet. I knew it was a non-starter and that by asking for too much, we would end up with nothing. There is an old Latin proverb: "Qui nimis probat, hihil probat." "He who tries for too much ends up with nothing."
In the event, the bishops avoided a clear and unambiguous declaration that the deterrent is intrinsically immoral. They held that the deterrent may be acceptable morally on a conditional and temporary basis only. The condition is that its maintenance be used as a means to buy time to bargain for multi-lateral disarmament. Temporary: how long? A hard question, but one that has to be answered on the basis of prudential judgment. `
The French and German bishops were upset by the work of the USCC drafting committee, especially its second draft, and pressured the Vatican to force the American bishops into retreat. They felt themselves in the line of first attack by Soviet tanks and that they were the prime recipients of protection from the US nuclear deterrent. Bishop O’Connor was assumed to be the most sympathetic to the French and German bishops’ point of view. But he held firm with the other US bishops. Had he not, the cause would have been lost. John Howard Yoder, the most persuasive thinker of the Mennonite pacifist tradition, considered this to be a most significant advance in moral thinking about war.
I made sure I sat next to Bishop O’Connor at lunch after our consultation at St. Thomas More Chapel. At the earliest opportunity I turned to him and told him that I was having a problem with the local ordinary, John Francis Whealon, the Archbishop of Hartford. He asked what’s the problem. I told him. Then I put my hand down to the briefcase at my knees and offered to show him the course outline and the printed materials for my draft counselors’ training seminar.
Bishop O’Connor said, "No, Tom, I don’t need to see it. Just get me a phone." A telephone was brought to the table. Bishop O’Connor telephoned the Archbishop’s office in Hartford. These are the words I heard him say: "I endorse Mr. Cornell without reservation, and I endorse his program without reservation." I was stunned. As soon as I could, I called Jim Noonan. The program was on. It was a small group, the sessions were without incident and everything went just fine. One of the participants, Reed Smith, invited me to his home for supper and offered me a job running a soup kitchen in Waterbury. I accepted, and for the next eleven years, with my wife Monica and our son Tom and our daughter Deirdre, ran two soup kitchens in Waterbury for the area council of churches as well as a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality.
The Peace and Justice Commission of the Archdiocese of Hartford resigned en bloc at their first meeting after the draft counselor training program, and told the secular press, the Hartford Courant, why: to protest Archbishop Whealon’s osbtructionist attitude toward me. I would have tried to talk them out of it if I had known. There was no point in embarrassing the man.
I introduced myself to Archbishop Whealon when he came to dedicate the St. Vincent de Paul overnight shelter in Waterbury, the biggest in the State of Connecticut not long after. I had helped to establish it, so I was there for the dedication. I’m sure the Archbishop remembered my name. He never forgot a thing, I came to know. "This is my wife, Archbishop, Monica Ribar Cornell. Do you remember Martin Ribar, of Cleveland?" "Yes, I certainly do," he answered. Martin Ribar was a Thomist, a half-blind scholar, who supervised the maintenance of an apartment building in Cleveland that Monica’s uncles owned. "Monica is Martin Ribar’s niece," I said. The apartment building was a short walk from the seminary where the Archbishop had studied. He had often walked over for sessions "for the clarification of thought" at the Catholic Worker cell which met in the building’s coal cellar, I knew. "The Coal Hole University," they called it. I joked and told the Archbishop that his secret past with the CW was safe with me.
Archbishop Whealon ordained me deacon in 1988. Not long after he asked me to help re-establish the Peace and Justice Commission (no mention was ever made of the old one or the circumstances of its demise). I served two two year terms on the new commission and helped write its basic statement of purpose and its by-laws. The archdiocese also committed itself to the practical assistance of anyone with any problem in regard to military service and established a conscientious objectors registry, after three careful conversations with the Archbishop. He was no sentimentalist and had to be convinced. But he was honest and highly intelligent.
Back to Cardinal O’Connor. Shortly after O’Connor was installed as Archbishop of New York, he asked, from the pulpit of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, advice from the people of New York, whether he should propose Dorothy Day for canonization as a saint. I wrote him a three page single-spaced letter telling him why he should not. By the end of the letter I had pretty well talked myself out of that position. Twenty year later, at Dorothy’s centenary, the Cardinal again brought the issue before the Archdiocese from the pulpit at St. Patrick’s. He said that he would soon convene a gathering of people who had known and worked with Dorothy, mentioning Robert Ellsberg and me.
That meeting was held at his office at 1011 First Avenue, The Catholic Center. There were nine of us, including from the Catholic Worker Robert Ellsberg, Pat Jordan, Frank Donovan and Jane Sammon. Cardinal O’Connor mentioned his changed attitude toward war and peace questions, and he told the group that it came about largely because of the correspondence that he and I had had over the years. I was grateful to hear him say this and to have the others hear it. The meeting was scheduled for an hour but lasted two. I think that the Cardinal, who did not take a "power" seat, but actually sat lower than anybody else in the room, seemed tired but fascinated. Nobody was trying to sell him anything. Nobody said you have to do this or that or how important it was. We just reminisced about Dorothy, told stories. Toward the end the Cardinal came out with it: do you want me to propose Dorothy to the Congregation for Saints or don’t you? Do you have enthusiasm for the cause? Pat Jordan, for many years and still managing editor of Commonweal, summed up all of our feelings spontaneously and eloquently. Yes, Your Eminence, we do!
Not long after this, I visited Monsignor Gregory Mustaciuolo on the 20th floor of 1011 First Avenue, the Archbishop’s office. It was a get acquainted meeting, no agenda. Father Greg was Cardinal O’Connor’s secretary, and he remains the Postulator for Dorothy’s cause for beatification. We had met the previous week at the Archbishop’s residence in a first meeting to form a Guild for Dorothy and an Advisory Board for the Guild. I liked Fr. Greg, as he asks to be called (so he doesn’t have to hear his family named mispronounced) right away. He is straightforward and unaffected. After the Cardinal’s death I visited Father Greg again. Entering his office, I noticed a cane resting against his wall. Fr. Greg isnt 40 years old, by the looks of him. "You dont use a cane, do you?" I asked. "No," he explained. "It was the Cardinals." I measured it against the cane I was carrying. It was a little longer. "I need another cane. This one is just right. Can I have it?" "Sure," he said. "Take it." I took the cane, then I had to turn to the wall again for a moment to compose myself. "A third class relic," I said. "I thank you so very much!" I had come to love the man.
John O’Connor wasn’t yet a bishop when he wrote his book about the Viet Nam war, A Chaplain Looks at Viet Nam, in 1968. He sent me a copy. I remember getting it in the mail at the Catholic Peace Fellowship office in Lower Manhattan not long after I got out of Danbury federal prison. I had led the first group act of resistance to the Viet Nam draft. Five of us had burned our draft cards in a well-organized and dignified demonstration, with Dorothy Day and A.J. Muste participating in our support and about 2,500 people in attendance at Union Square. Press and radio/TV coverage was extensive beyond imagination. After trial and conviction and failed appeals, I served five months out of a six month sentence, a very lenient sentence it was by the standards of the day.
I thanked Fr. O’Connor and sent him a copy of A Penny a Copy, the anthology of writings from The Catholic Worker that Jim Forest and I put together, published by The Macmillan Company, which was hot off the presses, too. And I wrote Fr. O’Connor, thanking him for his thoughtfulness. I don’t have a copy of that letter in front of me, but I recall its structure. I said that no one of any responsibility in the Catholic peace movement would deny the men and women in the armed forces the ministry of the Church. I think I said that I would prefer, and so would most of us, that the military chaplains be paid by the Church and not by the military. I may have said something about chaplains having the rank of military officers, and that that is at least problematic from our point of view. But all that aside, because we know that’s not going to change. There are changes that can be made, and I forward them to you now.
Foremost among them is that military chaplains should be made aware of the theology of conscientious objection to war and to military service. It sometimes happens that an objection in conscience "crystallizes" after a man or woman has entered military service. Chaplains should understand the law and the rules and regulations that apply when a person in the military seeks separation on grounds of conscientious objection so that the chaplains might provide supportive counseling, assuming good faith in the absence if compelling evidence to the contrary. Even though the military pays the salaries of the chaplains, their first obligation is to their parishioners as pastors.
I then went on the war in Viet Nam. The bishops had accepted the Administration’s justification for US participation in the war in Viet Nam at that time and until 1970, when they published their decision that the war was no longer justifiable on grounds of proportionality, in other words, that the war was causing more harm than any good that might come out of its protraction. I simply stated my belief then in 1968, and the conviction of the Catholic peace movement that the war was unjust and immoral as well as illegal. I don’t remember how Father O’Connor replied to that letter. But not long after, he apologized for his book, calling it "very bad", and withdrew it. He must have received a lot more letters.
In subsequent correspondence, Father O’Connor assured me that he had seen to it that the military chaplains under him were acquainted with the theology of conscientious objection as well as the law, rules and regulations governing separation from military service for conscientious objector claimants within the military and that they were prepared to give positive support to conscientious objector claimants.
I don’t recall any further dealings with him until the 1976 Call to Action in Detroit. The Bishops’ Bicentennial Call to Action was a massive affair, years in the planning, with regional consultations on a wide basis in preparation for the big event. Dorothy Day and I participated in the preliminary hearing in Newark. There is a photograph of Dorothy there, published in the Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (OUP 1990). I was invited to represent CPF at Detroit also. I designated a young Franciscan seminarian my alternate, Roberto Gonzalez, who is now the Archbishop of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Pax Christi had no real constituency then. The night before the Call to Action was convened, Fr. Ken Rollins, a Franciscan priest, gathered a meeting of people and groups especially interested in peace, perhaps eighteen people or so. I was designated chairman of the peace caucus. Eileen Egan was there, and Professors Joe Fahy and Gordon Zahn. Between plenary sessions addressed by weighty figures, there were to be workshops. Each workshop would have a chair and a rapporteur. Our caucus hammered out a wish-list and made sure that there would be at least one of us participating in every workshop bringing up the same items for consideration: that the Church uphold the right of conscientious objection to war and to military service, demand an end to the production and maintenance of weapons of mass destruction, and an end to the international transfer of weapons of mass destruction, an end to the arms race and transfers of conventional weapons. Some people started tacking on all kinds of additional items that were either redundant or implicitly contradictory. More unfortunately, a mind-set was established in every cause group at the event that said something like, "You vote for my laundry list and I’ll vote for yours. We’re all together in this, aren’t we, all of us enlightened progressives in a world and in a Church dominated by patriarchs?"
It seemed to be working very nicely. John O’Connor wasn’t in my workshop, as I remember, but some of his men were. He had a battery of priests who were doing the same thing that we were doing, seeding the workshops. But they got trounced! In every workshop the people who were trying to vote down or tone down the peace propositions were decisively outvoted. At the last plenum, the report from the rapporteurs had all our laundry list items and everybody else’s too, and they were all received by acclamation. At first it seemed like a dizzying success. I remember Eileen Egan with wide eyes saying, "Do you realize what a victory we have won for the cause of peace today?" I was stunned myself, largely because I didn’t expect all the liberal nonsense that passed by voice vote with no deliberation. It seemed very cheap to me. I kept my hand down and my voice still much of the time at the final plenum. But we wanted to be able to believe that we had won a victory. Gordon was very pleased. Joe Fahy was elated. And so was I, but not for long.
Jim Finn spotted me in a hallway. Jim was a liberal who drifted rightward and by then was a neo-conservative. He was a generous man and a loyal friend and gave significant help to CPF even though he never really agreed with us except on the Viet Nam war. Jim was a principal organizer of the event. He was furious, and he pointed his fury at me! "Do you have any idea what you’ve done?" He went on about all the time and money and effort that went into the event and all of it down the drain. A few minutes later, Professor David O’Brien, foremost authority on Catholic social action and one of our staunchest allies on the left, who had been working full time on the organization of the Call to Action came up to me and said the same thing! The bishops learned a negative lesson about consultation: The people in the pews are not represented by agency bureaucrats and the people who manage to get themselves chosen to go to monster consultations. They determined never to attempt anything as foolish as this again. We had gained no victory that day.
I met Father O’Connor with his men walking down a hall as we were about to leave the Detroit Conference Center. I expected him to express disapproval or disappointment in some way. Every objection that he and his men had raised had been dismissed. But not at all. He looked tranquil and his manner was gracious and kindly. Was it that he understood better than Eileen, Gordon, Joe and I what had really happened? I don’t think so. I think he was simply a very good man who had the spirit of nonviolence! And he was aiming it at me!
In late 1979, the FOR fired me after fourteen years on the job. Joe Fahy was nominated to the personnel committee of FOR the year after. He tried to figure out from the records why I got the sack. The only reason he could come up with was that I was working at too many different things. "Unique," he said. "Most people get fired for doing too little." Another irony is that I did the most important work I ever did in my life in the next three years of "self-employment," the consultation on the 1983 peace pastoral being the high point.
Hildegard Goss-Mayr, traveling secretary of the International FOR who generated her own salary along with her husband, Jean Goss, was aware of my distress. She managed to have IFOR give me an assignment (and $1500 for expenses and for the support of my five dependents): organize support actions for Central America on behalf of CELAM, the Central American Bishops’ Conference. She asked Archbishop Oscar Romero to give me the assignment officially by letter. It was extremely difficult on such slender resources, but I managed to generate some kind of program in a couple of dozen cities: a day of prayer and reflection in a seminary, a picket line in front of a post office or a teach-in or an inter-religious workshop, in early 1980. Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark participated in the one I led in New York City, at Saint Cecilia’s Church. I have a letter on my wall from Archbishop Romero thanking me and the CPF for the effort.
Needless to say, nothing we did could compare with the spiritual energy generated by the sacrifice of Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, their two companions and the Archbishop very soon after, the women waylaid, raped and shot, buried in shallow graves in the Salvadoran countryside by US trained and financed death squads, the Archbishop shot down while saying Mass in a hospital chapel, again by US trained and financed assassins. But it did establish that we were onto an issue of great significance, and it strengthened the Catholic Worker’s and Catholic Peace Fellowship’s visibility in the geography of protest. But I had to support my family.
John O’Connor had nothing to do with these events. I’m just backing up a few years and filling in the personal story now for context until we come back to the late Cardinal. It was a little before I got the ax from FOR that the US Catholic Conference asked me to come to Washington for a consultation with their staff about the reintroduction of registration for the military draft, which had been suspended in the wake of the Viet Nam war. All the peace groups were convinced that re-imposition of military conscription was imminent. How was the Church to respond? was the question the USCC staff wanted to discuss with me.
I suggested that the USCC be explicit in its support of conscientious objection, including selective conscientious objection, and that the Church offer its good offices to the counseling of any and all who have any difficulties of any kind serving in war, with military service, or with compliance with the Selective Service Law. All my suggestions were accepted and printed as a commitment by the Administrative Board of the USCC on behalf of the bishops of the US in a 1980 document.
As soon as the words were in print, I visited the USCC once again. I thanked Fr. Bryan Hehir, who was then in charge of the Office for International Affairs, and Mr. Ed Dougherty, a long-time lay employee who played a quiet behind-the-scenes role for many years in their great work. And then I said, "What are you going to do about it? How are you going to train Church personnel in draft law, rules and regulations and counseling principles for this mission?" Fr. Hehir looked at me and laughed, "We can’t hire you, Tom, we don’t have the funds." He knew my situation. I said I wasn’t looking for a job at USCC. What I wanted was a letter or some kind of acknowledgment that CPF had a draft counselor training program of excellent quality, available to diocesan and other Catholic agencies so that they might prepare themselves to counsel any and every person who has a problem with military service or the draft.
Mind you, the wording here was careful. If there had been a reinstatement of the draft, I wanted to see the day, and soon, when any young man or any parent—Jewish, secularist, Protestant as well as Catholic—would think first of the Catholic Church or Catholic Charities or the local Catholic high school or college as the place to go for free quality counseling on questions of personal responsibility and war and military service. The Quakers have been known for that, and they have done a very creditable job of it. But they don’t have either the resources or the philosophy to do the job as we can. CPF’s success rate (that is, in helping clients to attain the draft classification they sought, usually 1-0, conscientious objector status) was far higher than AFSC’s, maybe because we are goal-oriented, and they are process-oriented.
Fr. Hehir understood exactly what I was after. He said, "You write the letter of recommendation. I’ll show it to Archbishop Quinn." The letter was mailed out on USCC stationery over Archbishop Quinn’s signature to every diocesan bishop in the US, suggesting that they contact CPF for the services of Tom Cornell or Paul Frazier for a two day draft counselor training seminar for their agency personnel.
The program was highly successful, in Davenport, Boston, New York, Chicago, Richmond, Butte, Helena, all over the country. The people involved were teachers, social workers, administrators, guidance counselors. They all expressed appreciation for the printed materials from many agencies and specialties, legal and medical, and for the oral presentations on counseling and the role-playing sessions. That year I made $3500. I had to put my house up for sale and take a job teaching 8th grade English and Latin 1 at a public junior high school in New Hampshire.
Early that spring, Ed Dougherty telephoned me at the school in Conway and said, "The Church needs you." We both appreciated the drama. He invited me to meet with the five bishops who would be drafting the peace pastoral, The Challenge of Peace, a groundbreaking document that would be published in 1983. In the meantime, the Education Department of the Archdiocese of Hartford and the Arch-diocesan Justice and Peace Commission asked me to come to Hartford with the Draft Counselor Training Program. We made a date. Days later, Jim Noonan, a member of the commission and an old friend, telephoned me at home in New Hampshire. "It’s all off," he said. "Somebody got to Archbishop Whealon. He’s a conservative, you know. They told him you were biased against the military and that you wouldn’t give a balanced presentation, that you’re not on the up-and-up. The Archbishop says you can’t come, the program’s off." I told him to go back to the Archbishop and point out to him that the program was endorsed by the USCC. He did, and he called me again to say it was still no good. I could come, but they couldn’t give me space in any church building or recruit participants through the Church network, or give me an honorarium or even pay my expenses. I told Jim to go back a third time, to tell the Archbishop that the program had been well received in several dioceses and that he could call any bishop who had the program for an evaluation, etc. Jim agreed. The result two days later: "You can come, Tom, if you get the OK from the military ordinariate in New York. But there’s no time for that and you’re up there!" It seemed impossible. "Fear not, oh ye of little faith," I told him. I’m meeting with Bishop O’Connor next Friday at St. Thomas More Chapel at Yale in New Haven. Keep everything on track." It was the consultation on the peace pastoral.
At the consultation I asked Bryan Hehir why they hadn’t asked Gordon Zahn or Eileen Egan, just me and Molly Rush and a nun I didn’t know and whose name I can’t recall. He said they knew what Eileen would say and they knew what Gordon would say. They didn’t know what I would say, but they knew that I could enter into dialogue on substantive issues.
The nun led off with a lovely and lengthy sermon on Jesus, reminding the bishops that our Lord was very good. The bishops were patient but bored. Lesson: never preach to bishops unless asked to. Molly Rush spoke briefly and affectingly, a middle-class wife and mother in danger of imprisonment for what she meant as an act of conscience against nuclear madness, but she did not engage any substantive issue.
I started off summarizing what we all know and agree to be true. The use of weapons of mass destruction has been unequivocally condemned by the highest level of teaching authority, the Second Vatican Council and the Holy See (Gaudium et Spes, par. 80-83). We know that the US continues to maintain and to expand its inventory of weapons of mass destruction. The question is, is this evil in itself or is it not? "I don’t know how you bishops are going to answer that question on behalf of the Church in the US. I know how the Catholic Worker will answer that question and I know how the Catholic Peace Fellowship will answer that question. We hold that it is evil in itself. We say that and we will continue to say it. It’s true and we can afford to say it." But, I went on in words to this effect: if you say the same, the Catholic people by and large will not believe you, and you know it. You are the leaders, but if the people do not follow you, you are not really leaders any longer, you are just taking a walk, and you have to lead. That is your God-given mandate. So I don’t know how you are going to finesse this question. You have got to tell the truth. But you also have to be able to be heard. You are in a dilemma. I hope I can help.
"Now, why do I say that the possession and further production of weapon of mass destruction are immoral? Because we either intend to use them or we do not. If we intend to use them, then we are already guilty because subjective morality lies in the intentional order. If we do not intend to use them, then the policy of deterrence is based upon a lie. We have always had difficulty in Catholic morality with lying, because it perverts the relationship of rational beings.
"So, bishops, how might we deal with this dilemma? You must tell the truth. But if you tell the whole truth now, you will not be heard and the teaching authority of the Church will be weakened."
The discussion went on for most of the rest of the morning. Fr. Bryan Hehir reminded the bishops that the moral principles that I based my argument upon are the same that they all learned in seminary and that my argument was conservative in nature, the same as Finnis’ and Greer’s. I engaged Bishop O ’Connor more than the others because he was the man to convince. On the other hand, I sometimes flashed the bad eye at our old friend, Bishop Tom Gumbleton, every time he tried to sell the hard-core pacifist line, to keep him quiet. I knew it was a non-starter and that by asking for too much, we would end up with nothing. There is an old Latin proverb: "Qui nimis probat, hihil probat." "He who tries for too much ends up with nothing."
In the event, the bishops avoided a clear and unambiguous declaration that the deterrent is intrinsically immoral. They held that the deterrent may be acceptable morally on a conditional and temporary basis only. The condition is that its maintenance be used as a means to buy time to bargain for multi-lateral disarmament. Temporary: how long? A hard question, but one that has to be answered on the basis of prudential judgment. `
The French and German bishops were upset by the work of the USCC drafting committee, especially its second draft, and pressured the Vatican to force the American bishops into retreat. They felt themselves in the line of first attack by Soviet tanks and that they were the prime recipients of protection from the US nuclear deterrent. Bishop O’Connor was assumed to be the most sympathetic to the French and German bishops’ point of view. But he held firm with the other US bishops. Had he not, the cause would have been lost. John Howard Yoder, the most persuasive thinker of the Mennonite pacifist tradition, considered this to be a most significant advance in moral thinking about war.
I made sure I sat next to Bishop O’Connor at lunch after our consultation at St. Thomas More Chapel. At the earliest opportunity I turned to him and told him that I was having a problem with the local ordinary, John Francis Whealon, the Archbishop of Hartford. He asked what’s the problem. I told him. Then I put my hand down to the briefcase at my knees and offered to show him the course outline and the printed materials for my draft counselors’ training seminar.
Bishop O’Connor said, "No, Tom, I don’t need to see it. Just get me a phone." A telephone was brought to the table. Bishop O’Connor telephoned the Archbishop’s office in Hartford. These are the words I heard him say: "I endorse Mr. Cornell without reservation, and I endorse his program without reservation." I was stunned. As soon as I could, I called Jim Noonan. The program was on. It was a small group, the sessions were without incident and everything went just fine. One of the participants, Reed Smith, invited me to his home for supper and offered me a job running a soup kitchen in Waterbury. I accepted, and for the next eleven years, with my wife Monica and our son Tom and our daughter Deirdre, ran two soup kitchens in Waterbury for the area council of churches as well as a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality.
The Peace and Justice Commission of the Archdiocese of Hartford resigned en bloc at their first meeting after the draft counselor training program, and told the secular press, the Hartford Courant, why: to protest Archbishop Whealon’s osbtructionist attitude toward me. I would have tried to talk them out of it if I had known. There was no point in embarrassing the man.
I introduced myself to Archbishop Whealon when he came to dedicate the St. Vincent de Paul overnight shelter in Waterbury, the biggest in the State of Connecticut not long after. I had helped to establish it, so I was there for the dedication. I’m sure the Archbishop remembered my name. He never forgot a thing, I came to know. "This is my wife, Archbishop, Monica Ribar Cornell. Do you remember Martin Ribar, of Cleveland?" "Yes, I certainly do," he answered. Martin Ribar was a Thomist, a half-blind scholar, who supervised the maintenance of an apartment building in Cleveland that Monica’s uncles owned. "Monica is Martin Ribar’s niece," I said. The apartment building was a short walk from the seminary where the Archbishop had studied. He had often walked over for sessions "for the clarification of thought" at the Catholic Worker cell which met in the building’s coal cellar, I knew. "The Coal Hole University," they called it. I joked and told the Archbishop that his secret past with the CW was safe with me.
Archbishop Whealon ordained me deacon in 1988. Not long after he asked me to help re-establish the Peace and Justice Commission (no mention was ever made of the old one or the circumstances of its demise). I served two two year terms on the new commission and helped write its basic statement of purpose and its by-laws. The archdiocese also committed itself to the practical assistance of anyone with any problem in regard to military service and established a conscientious objectors registry, after three careful conversations with the Archbishop. He was no sentimentalist and had to be convinced. But he was honest and highly intelligent.
Back to Cardinal O’Connor. Shortly after O’Connor was installed as Archbishop of New York, he asked, from the pulpit of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, advice from the people of New York, whether he should propose Dorothy Day for canonization as a saint. I wrote him a three page single-spaced letter telling him why he should not. By the end of the letter I had pretty well talked myself out of that position. Twenty year later, at Dorothy’s centenary, the Cardinal again brought the issue before the Archdiocese from the pulpit at St. Patrick’s. He said that he would soon convene a gathering of people who had known and worked with Dorothy, mentioning Robert Ellsberg and me.
That meeting was held at his office at 1011 First Avenue, The Catholic Center. There were nine of us, including from the Catholic Worker Robert Ellsberg, Pat Jordan, Frank Donovan and Jane Sammon. Cardinal O’Connor mentioned his changed attitude toward war and peace questions, and he told the group that it came about largely because of the correspondence that he and I had had over the years. I was grateful to hear him say this and to have the others hear it. The meeting was scheduled for an hour but lasted two. I think that the Cardinal, who did not take a "power" seat, but actually sat lower than anybody else in the room, seemed tired but fascinated. Nobody was trying to sell him anything. Nobody said you have to do this or that or how important it was. We just reminisced about Dorothy, told stories. Toward the end the Cardinal came out with it: do you want me to propose Dorothy to the Congregation for Saints or don’t you? Do you have enthusiasm for the cause? Pat Jordan, for many years and still managing editor of Commonweal, summed up all of our feelings spontaneously and eloquently. Yes, Your Eminence, we do!
Not long after this, I visited Monsignor Gregory Mustaciuolo on the 20th floor of 1011 First Avenue, the Archbishop’s office. It was a get acquainted meeting, no agenda. Father Greg was Cardinal O’Connor’s secretary, and he remains the Postulator for Dorothy’s cause for beatification. We had met the previous week at the Archbishop’s residence in a first meeting to form a Guild for Dorothy and an Advisory Board for the Guild. I liked Fr. Greg, as he asks to be called (so he doesn’t have to hear his family named mispronounced) right away. He is straightforward and unaffected. After the Cardinal’s death I visited Father Greg again. Entering his office, I noticed a cane resting against his wall. Fr. Greg isnt 40 years old, by the looks of him. "You dont use a cane, do you?" I asked. "No," he explained. "It was the Cardinals." I measured it against the cane I was carrying. It was a little longer. "I need another cane. This one is just right. Can I have it?" "Sure," he said. "Take it." I took the cane, then I had to turn to the wall again for a moment to compose myself. "A third class relic," I said. "I thank you so very much!" I had come to love the man.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Memorial: Stephen J. Spiro
Stephen J. Spiro Memorial
Mt 5, 1-12. 20-23. 38-41. 43-48
St. Francis Cathedral, Metuchen, N.J.
December 1, 2007
Deacon Tom Cornell
Last spring, Shorty called me on the phone at Peter Maurin Farm, up in the Hudson Valley. He had visited us a year before. At that time he seemed confident that he was out of the woods as far as his health was concerned, his cancer. Now on the phone his voice was just as steady and assured as when we had last met. He told me that he was dying, the cancer had returned, that he had maybe until September, but then again, maybe longer. He’d like to make it to Thanksgiving or to Christmas but his bags were packed in any event, he told me. He seemed so up-beat about it! Would I preach at his funeral? “Of course,” I said, “of course!” He said that he had no regrets, that he had done most of what he had hoped to do in life. His tone of voice and his words convinced me that he was as he said he was, content and at ease, ready to meet his God. Shorty had faith in the Resurrection. That’s why he was not afraid. He had faith in God, and that God is good.
The first time we met was at a Friday Night Meeting for the Clarification of Thought at the Catholic Worker house on Chrystie Street, in The Bowery, in 1962 or ’63. Shorty was a regular at the Friday Night Meetings at the Catholic Worker, then the most exciting forum in town. After the meeting a few of us would walk down the length of Mott Street to Number 10 to have a late night meal. Shorty liked to eat. We would continue to talk, to clarify thought, as we say, about man and the state, about war and peace, about the Church and how Catholic tradition, the Christian tradition of gentle personalism, might lead us to something better, a better world, a new society in which it would be easier to be good. He was then a Republican. But little by little, over a period of some years, through study and prayer, Shorty wrote that “he gradually became a Biblical anarchist and a radical pacifist.”
Well before that, in 1964 a few of us organized the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Thomas Merton and the Berrigan brothers Phil and Dan gave Jim Forest and me their names and helped us to raise funds. Jim and I did the work, gathering a membership and offering educational services and especially, as it turned out, counseling for those vulnerable to the Viet Nam draft, and later members of the military who felt that they could no longer serve in good conscience and wanted out. Shorty was one of our earliest Catholic Peace Fellowship members, and one of our first clients.
He was well formed in fundamental theology by the Jesuits at Francis Xavier High School in Manhattan. He continued to develop a Catholic view of things by personal study at the University of Chicago and later at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, and by continuing clarification of thought in dialogue with us Catholic Workers. He knew what he was talking about; he knew what he was doing. Subject to the Viet Nam war draft, Shorty determined that he was not going to go, under any circumstances. He presented a claim for exemption from military training and service on the grounds of conscience, a conscientious objector on the basis of just war theory. That presented a problem.
The law allows conscientious objection only on the grounds of opposition to all war. Shorty was convinced that the war in Viet Nam was unjust and that for him to participate in it knowingly would be gravely sinful. He knew that if he made his claim on that basis and did not present himself as opposed to participation in war in any form, any kind of war, then he would be turned down. Denied conscientious objector status, he would face induction. In that event, he would refuse induction and stand trial. He knew that at trial he would be found guilty, and that the court could sentence him to up to five years in prison and a quarter million dollars fine. On the other hand, if he appealed his conviction he just might make it to the Supreme Court, and if that court upheld his defense, then the law would be broadened and all so-called “selective” conscientious objectors after him would be recognized. For their sakes, to expand liberty under law, and for the sake of the traditional teaching of the Church, that it is forbidden to wage unjust war, and for the sake of American democracy, Stephen stood his grounds. I assured him that by stating his case honestly but carefully, avoiding the question of unjust versus just war, he would almost certainly qualify as a universal objector and be off the hook, home free. Shorty took the harder road. In this he became a hero in my eyes and the eyes of those who knew and understood what he was doing, too few, then and now.
As it turned out, Shorty’s judge recognized his sincerity and his larger purpose and kept him out of prison by giving him a suspended sentence and five years probation. He was a convicted felon nonetheless, and he reveled in it, a “criminal for peace.” But a felony rap can limit one. President Ford gave Shorty a pardon, so he was no longer a felon, but a “political criminal,” as he liked to call himself. Shorty had faith that if he did God’s will, all would be well, and all was well. He had an honorable career in the computer industry, married and raised a family, his pride. But he continued to be a thorn in the side of some.
Shorty had a way of upsetting people. He was convinced it was good for them. He became the Catholic Peace Fellowship’s voice in this diocese and in New Jersey. At anti-war peace rallies he set up a Right to Life table, that is to say, Right to Life as inclusive of all the life issues. At anti-abortion rallies he was sure to be seen at the same folding table, handing our literature against the death penalty and war. Call it a consistent life ethic, or the seamless garment argument. Shorty knew that the right to life does not end at birth, and that the right to life entails the right to the means to life, including health care and the right to make a decent living at an honorable job. In this way, Shorty conformed himself to the mind of the Church; he knew that he spoke the mind of the Church, from the heart of the Church, and he understood too that in the long run, our argument in favor of life will not convince unless it is across the board. He had little use for the argument that abortion is intrinsically evil while the other forms of life-taking are not. Willfully killing the innocent is intrinsically evil any way you do it – that’s what happens in unjust war. And the ancient Fathers taught that depriving a worker of his just wage is a crime that cries to heaven for vengeance, along with murder and rape and stealing from widows and orphans.
This is not supposed to be a eulogy but a homily, not so much to praise Shorty as to focus on what gave Shorty his vision, his courage and his tenacity over more than four decades; what made him live as he did and what made him face death with such equanimity, peace and assurance. That, anyone who knew him can tell you, was his faith in God and in Jesus Christ, in Christ crucified, risen, to come again. Shorty believed in the Resurrection, Christ’s Resurrection and our own, “the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
In Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, he says, “Someone may ask, ‘How are dead people raised, and what kind of body do they have when they come back?’ These are stupid questions,” Paul assures us (1 Cor 15, 35). He goes on to try to explain, but he is not entirely successful. We can not “know” what the Resurrection is, not Jesus’ Resurrection, and not the Resurrection of the Just on the Last Day. What we can know, what we can be sure of, is that it is real.
Jesus showed himself in the upper room, behind locked doors. John tells us his words to the doubting Thomas. “Put your finger here; look, here are my hands. Give me your hand, put it into my side” (Jn 20, 27). Luke recounts that Jesus appeared at the seashore after his Resurrection, that he “stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you!’ In a state of alarm and fright they thought they were seeing a ghost. But he said, ‘Why are you so agitated and why do these doubts rise in your hearts? Look at my hands and feet; yes, it is I indeed. Touch me and see for yourselves; a ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have.’ And as he said this he showed them his hands and his feet. Their joy was so great that they still could not believe it and they stood there dumbfounded; so he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ And they offered him a piece of grilled fish, which he took and ate before their eyes” (Lk 24, 36-43). Whatever the Resurrection is, it is real. That’s all we can know, that’s all we need to know.
“Vita non tollitur sed mutatur.” “Life is not taken away, it is changed.” Nothing is lost. That’s the first law of thermodynamics, isn’t it? Nothing is lost, nothing lost, just changed. Everything changes, all the time, says sage Heraclitus, all the time, “panta rrhei, ouden menei.” But at the end of time? Not to worry. The worst has happened, and been repaired. Christ is risen!
Did he sing? I can imagine Shorty in his last days singing:
(Sing)
“Just a few more weary days and then,I'll fly away;
To a land where joy will never end,I'll fly away.
I'll fly away, oh GloryI'll fly away;
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,I'll fly away.”
(Speak)
“To a land where joy will never end....”
That’s where he is. That’s where he will be. A brief sleep and then to rise in glory. È vero! It’s true! Happy is he, blessed is he. Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called the children of God. Blessed are you, Stephen Spiro, Son of God. Pray for us. We should all live so honestly, we should all die so well. #
Mt 5, 1-12. 20-23. 38-41. 43-48
St. Francis Cathedral, Metuchen, N.J.
December 1, 2007
Deacon Tom Cornell
Last spring, Shorty called me on the phone at Peter Maurin Farm, up in the Hudson Valley. He had visited us a year before. At that time he seemed confident that he was out of the woods as far as his health was concerned, his cancer. Now on the phone his voice was just as steady and assured as when we had last met. He told me that he was dying, the cancer had returned, that he had maybe until September, but then again, maybe longer. He’d like to make it to Thanksgiving or to Christmas but his bags were packed in any event, he told me. He seemed so up-beat about it! Would I preach at his funeral? “Of course,” I said, “of course!” He said that he had no regrets, that he had done most of what he had hoped to do in life. His tone of voice and his words convinced me that he was as he said he was, content and at ease, ready to meet his God. Shorty had faith in the Resurrection. That’s why he was not afraid. He had faith in God, and that God is good.
The first time we met was at a Friday Night Meeting for the Clarification of Thought at the Catholic Worker house on Chrystie Street, in The Bowery, in 1962 or ’63. Shorty was a regular at the Friday Night Meetings at the Catholic Worker, then the most exciting forum in town. After the meeting a few of us would walk down the length of Mott Street to Number 10 to have a late night meal. Shorty liked to eat. We would continue to talk, to clarify thought, as we say, about man and the state, about war and peace, about the Church and how Catholic tradition, the Christian tradition of gentle personalism, might lead us to something better, a better world, a new society in which it would be easier to be good. He was then a Republican. But little by little, over a period of some years, through study and prayer, Shorty wrote that “he gradually became a Biblical anarchist and a radical pacifist.”
Well before that, in 1964 a few of us organized the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Thomas Merton and the Berrigan brothers Phil and Dan gave Jim Forest and me their names and helped us to raise funds. Jim and I did the work, gathering a membership and offering educational services and especially, as it turned out, counseling for those vulnerable to the Viet Nam draft, and later members of the military who felt that they could no longer serve in good conscience and wanted out. Shorty was one of our earliest Catholic Peace Fellowship members, and one of our first clients.
He was well formed in fundamental theology by the Jesuits at Francis Xavier High School in Manhattan. He continued to develop a Catholic view of things by personal study at the University of Chicago and later at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, and by continuing clarification of thought in dialogue with us Catholic Workers. He knew what he was talking about; he knew what he was doing. Subject to the Viet Nam war draft, Shorty determined that he was not going to go, under any circumstances. He presented a claim for exemption from military training and service on the grounds of conscience, a conscientious objector on the basis of just war theory. That presented a problem.
The law allows conscientious objection only on the grounds of opposition to all war. Shorty was convinced that the war in Viet Nam was unjust and that for him to participate in it knowingly would be gravely sinful. He knew that if he made his claim on that basis and did not present himself as opposed to participation in war in any form, any kind of war, then he would be turned down. Denied conscientious objector status, he would face induction. In that event, he would refuse induction and stand trial. He knew that at trial he would be found guilty, and that the court could sentence him to up to five years in prison and a quarter million dollars fine. On the other hand, if he appealed his conviction he just might make it to the Supreme Court, and if that court upheld his defense, then the law would be broadened and all so-called “selective” conscientious objectors after him would be recognized. For their sakes, to expand liberty under law, and for the sake of the traditional teaching of the Church, that it is forbidden to wage unjust war, and for the sake of American democracy, Stephen stood his grounds. I assured him that by stating his case honestly but carefully, avoiding the question of unjust versus just war, he would almost certainly qualify as a universal objector and be off the hook, home free. Shorty took the harder road. In this he became a hero in my eyes and the eyes of those who knew and understood what he was doing, too few, then and now.
As it turned out, Shorty’s judge recognized his sincerity and his larger purpose and kept him out of prison by giving him a suspended sentence and five years probation. He was a convicted felon nonetheless, and he reveled in it, a “criminal for peace.” But a felony rap can limit one. President Ford gave Shorty a pardon, so he was no longer a felon, but a “political criminal,” as he liked to call himself. Shorty had faith that if he did God’s will, all would be well, and all was well. He had an honorable career in the computer industry, married and raised a family, his pride. But he continued to be a thorn in the side of some.
Shorty had a way of upsetting people. He was convinced it was good for them. He became the Catholic Peace Fellowship’s voice in this diocese and in New Jersey. At anti-war peace rallies he set up a Right to Life table, that is to say, Right to Life as inclusive of all the life issues. At anti-abortion rallies he was sure to be seen at the same folding table, handing our literature against the death penalty and war. Call it a consistent life ethic, or the seamless garment argument. Shorty knew that the right to life does not end at birth, and that the right to life entails the right to the means to life, including health care and the right to make a decent living at an honorable job. In this way, Shorty conformed himself to the mind of the Church; he knew that he spoke the mind of the Church, from the heart of the Church, and he understood too that in the long run, our argument in favor of life will not convince unless it is across the board. He had little use for the argument that abortion is intrinsically evil while the other forms of life-taking are not. Willfully killing the innocent is intrinsically evil any way you do it – that’s what happens in unjust war. And the ancient Fathers taught that depriving a worker of his just wage is a crime that cries to heaven for vengeance, along with murder and rape and stealing from widows and orphans.
This is not supposed to be a eulogy but a homily, not so much to praise Shorty as to focus on what gave Shorty his vision, his courage and his tenacity over more than four decades; what made him live as he did and what made him face death with such equanimity, peace and assurance. That, anyone who knew him can tell you, was his faith in God and in Jesus Christ, in Christ crucified, risen, to come again. Shorty believed in the Resurrection, Christ’s Resurrection and our own, “the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
In Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, he says, “Someone may ask, ‘How are dead people raised, and what kind of body do they have when they come back?’ These are stupid questions,” Paul assures us (1 Cor 15, 35). He goes on to try to explain, but he is not entirely successful. We can not “know” what the Resurrection is, not Jesus’ Resurrection, and not the Resurrection of the Just on the Last Day. What we can know, what we can be sure of, is that it is real.
Jesus showed himself in the upper room, behind locked doors. John tells us his words to the doubting Thomas. “Put your finger here; look, here are my hands. Give me your hand, put it into my side” (Jn 20, 27). Luke recounts that Jesus appeared at the seashore after his Resurrection, that he “stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you!’ In a state of alarm and fright they thought they were seeing a ghost. But he said, ‘Why are you so agitated and why do these doubts rise in your hearts? Look at my hands and feet; yes, it is I indeed. Touch me and see for yourselves; a ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have.’ And as he said this he showed them his hands and his feet. Their joy was so great that they still could not believe it and they stood there dumbfounded; so he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ And they offered him a piece of grilled fish, which he took and ate before their eyes” (Lk 24, 36-43). Whatever the Resurrection is, it is real. That’s all we can know, that’s all we need to know.
“Vita non tollitur sed mutatur.” “Life is not taken away, it is changed.” Nothing is lost. That’s the first law of thermodynamics, isn’t it? Nothing is lost, nothing lost, just changed. Everything changes, all the time, says sage Heraclitus, all the time, “panta rrhei, ouden menei.” But at the end of time? Not to worry. The worst has happened, and been repaired. Christ is risen!
Did he sing? I can imagine Shorty in his last days singing:
(Sing)
“Just a few more weary days and then,I'll fly away;
To a land where joy will never end,I'll fly away.
I'll fly away, oh GloryI'll fly away;
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,I'll fly away.”
(Speak)
“To a land where joy will never end....”
That’s where he is. That’s where he will be. A brief sleep and then to rise in glory. È vero! It’s true! Happy is he, blessed is he. Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called the children of God. Blessed are you, Stephen Spiro, Son of God. Pray for us. We should all live so honestly, we should all die so well. #
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
33 Sunday C #159
Mal 3, 19-20a
Ps 98
2 Thes, 3, 7-12
Lk 21, 5-19
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
November 18, 2007
Saint Paul was near the end of his days when he wrote this Second Letter to the Thessalonians. More than a generation’s time had passed since Jesus had gone to the Father. Still, many believers expected Jesus’ Second Coming any day, any minute. And so some of them put aside all worldly cares, even their own personal responsibilities. Why go off to work if Jesus is going to put an end to this earthy order of things, maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow? What’s to work for; what’s to save for? The End is near! Years before even Paul seemed to say as much in his First Letter to the Thessalonians. But as the years passed and Jesus tarried, Paul and the community of the Church began to realize that they had better hunker down for the long haul. So in today’s reading, we hear Paul telling people to get to work. That is how we are to understand his words, “anyone unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.”
Work can be drudgery. It is not meant to be so. Work may be hard and we may win our bread by the sweat of our brows quite literally. But work is meant to be ennobling, all honest work, no matter how humble. Even as a child I knew this. When one of my grammar school teachers warned us, “Learn your lessons, do your homework or you will end up sweeping the floors, like Sam the janitor,” I felt ashamed, not for Sam the janitor, but for my teacher. Sam was doing a job that was worth doing, keeping our school clean and safe, and he did it honestly.
My uncle Charley swept out a courthouse in Brooklyn. He was lucky to have the job. His father had died much too young, a “Christ in Concrete,” the old story, an immigrant worked to death on a construction site. He left a widow and five children, so the oldest boy, Charley, took
a job in construction to support his mother and the family. He was twelve years old. In the heat and strain of it, he collapsed, suffered what they called a sun-stroke, and never recovered his full mental capacity. So a local politician got him the job sweeping the courthouse floor. That’s the way it worked in those days.
Not every job is worth doing (let me suggest advertising) and not everyone gives an honest day’s work and not everyone gets an honest, that is to say, a just day’s pay. But all honest work is honorable. In our society we still tend to look down on so-called menial labor and prize prestige jobs. That’s not the way Saint Paul saw it. Paul made his living as a tent-maker. He was also a student, a scholar of the Hebrew holy books. But he was happy to make a living mending tents.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus warns the disciples against false expectations and false prophets. And many false prophets there have been, false messiahs in our own time, who have promised an earthly paradise only to deliver death and destruction. Jesus warns of natural disasters and war and persecution, but he assures us that “not a hair of your head will be harmed,” that he himself will deliver us if we keep faith.
There is work to be done. Today’s Psalm tells us that when the Lord comes he will rule the world with justice. Justice is the work of his people on earth, and peace the fruit of justice. You may have read in the news media last week that our bishops have just issued another Voters’ Guideline in preparation for the next election cycle. They put forward issues for us to consider when deciding who gets our vote. The secular news media picked up on only one, abortion, maybe two, embryonic stem cell research. They neglect to say that our bishops include every crime against life, naming specifically racism, unjust war, capital punishment and the denial of adequate medical care to so many of our citizens, and the abuse of immigrants and neglect of the poor. The bishops do not suggest which candidates or what party faithful Catholics ought to vote for, but they warn against “single-issue” voting.
Social justice issues are not tacked on to the preaching of the Christian Gospel. They are not optional – take it or leave it. They are integral, a “constitutive” element, as the Roman Synod of world bishops put it in their 1971 pastoral letter on justice. They are essential to our Gospel proclamation. Justice, social justice, must never give way to sentimental piety. You can not come to God to escape reality, or to Jesus Christ or to his Church to escape reality. Far from it! Quite the contrary! God is the ultimate reality. Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God and the Church is the mystery, the sacrament of the unity of the human race in all its joy and hope, suffering and grief, and his Mystical Body on earth. This is no new doctrine.
Saint Anthony of Padua is a favorite saint among our people. He was a close follower of Saint Francis of Assisi. His statue has a favored place in many of our homes, a brown-robed Franciscan holding the Baby Jesus to his chest, and a lily. So lovely, so sweet! In fact, Anthony didn’t walk around with a lily in one hand and Baby Jesus in the other. He was a terror to the money-lenders of his day. He pounded the loan-sharks so hard that people called him Il Martello, The Hammer. The bankers were not pleased. They told Anthony to keep to the sanctuary arranging Christmas crèches and not to upset people. But no, he thundered “Justice!” from the pulpit and in the marketplace. And he was heard. Anthony inveighed against the abuse of the poor so insistently, so passionately that he moved a council of the Church to condemn usury. And God loved him for that. No less is required of us today. Christ will not tarry forever.
Remember the words of the Prophet Malachi:
“Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
And the day that is coming will set them on fire,
leaving neither root nor branch, says the Lord God of hosts.
But for you who fear my name, there will arise
the sun of justice with its healing rays.”
Come, Lord Jesus!
W
1,111 words
Mal 3, 19-20a
Ps 98
2 Thes, 3, 7-12
Lk 21, 5-19
Deacon Tom Cornell
St. Mary’s Church, Marlboro, N.Y.
November 18, 2007
Saint Paul was near the end of his days when he wrote this Second Letter to the Thessalonians. More than a generation’s time had passed since Jesus had gone to the Father. Still, many believers expected Jesus’ Second Coming any day, any minute. And so some of them put aside all worldly cares, even their own personal responsibilities. Why go off to work if Jesus is going to put an end to this earthy order of things, maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow? What’s to work for; what’s to save for? The End is near! Years before even Paul seemed to say as much in his First Letter to the Thessalonians. But as the years passed and Jesus tarried, Paul and the community of the Church began to realize that they had better hunker down for the long haul. So in today’s reading, we hear Paul telling people to get to work. That is how we are to understand his words, “anyone unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.”
Work can be drudgery. It is not meant to be so. Work may be hard and we may win our bread by the sweat of our brows quite literally. But work is meant to be ennobling, all honest work, no matter how humble. Even as a child I knew this. When one of my grammar school teachers warned us, “Learn your lessons, do your homework or you will end up sweeping the floors, like Sam the janitor,” I felt ashamed, not for Sam the janitor, but for my teacher. Sam was doing a job that was worth doing, keeping our school clean and safe, and he did it honestly.
My uncle Charley swept out a courthouse in Brooklyn. He was lucky to have the job. His father had died much too young, a “Christ in Concrete,” the old story, an immigrant worked to death on a construction site. He left a widow and five children, so the oldest boy, Charley, took
a job in construction to support his mother and the family. He was twelve years old. In the heat and strain of it, he collapsed, suffered what they called a sun-stroke, and never recovered his full mental capacity. So a local politician got him the job sweeping the courthouse floor. That’s the way it worked in those days.
Not every job is worth doing (let me suggest advertising) and not everyone gives an honest day’s work and not everyone gets an honest, that is to say, a just day’s pay. But all honest work is honorable. In our society we still tend to look down on so-called menial labor and prize prestige jobs. That’s not the way Saint Paul saw it. Paul made his living as a tent-maker. He was also a student, a scholar of the Hebrew holy books. But he was happy to make a living mending tents.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus warns the disciples against false expectations and false prophets. And many false prophets there have been, false messiahs in our own time, who have promised an earthly paradise only to deliver death and destruction. Jesus warns of natural disasters and war and persecution, but he assures us that “not a hair of your head will be harmed,” that he himself will deliver us if we keep faith.
There is work to be done. Today’s Psalm tells us that when the Lord comes he will rule the world with justice. Justice is the work of his people on earth, and peace the fruit of justice. You may have read in the news media last week that our bishops have just issued another Voters’ Guideline in preparation for the next election cycle. They put forward issues for us to consider when deciding who gets our vote. The secular news media picked up on only one, abortion, maybe two, embryonic stem cell research. They neglect to say that our bishops include every crime against life, naming specifically racism, unjust war, capital punishment and the denial of adequate medical care to so many of our citizens, and the abuse of immigrants and neglect of the poor. The bishops do not suggest which candidates or what party faithful Catholics ought to vote for, but they warn against “single-issue” voting.
Social justice issues are not tacked on to the preaching of the Christian Gospel. They are not optional – take it or leave it. They are integral, a “constitutive” element, as the Roman Synod of world bishops put it in their 1971 pastoral letter on justice. They are essential to our Gospel proclamation. Justice, social justice, must never give way to sentimental piety. You can not come to God to escape reality, or to Jesus Christ or to his Church to escape reality. Far from it! Quite the contrary! God is the ultimate reality. Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God and the Church is the mystery, the sacrament of the unity of the human race in all its joy and hope, suffering and grief, and his Mystical Body on earth. This is no new doctrine.
Saint Anthony of Padua is a favorite saint among our people. He was a close follower of Saint Francis of Assisi. His statue has a favored place in many of our homes, a brown-robed Franciscan holding the Baby Jesus to his chest, and a lily. So lovely, so sweet! In fact, Anthony didn’t walk around with a lily in one hand and Baby Jesus in the other. He was a terror to the money-lenders of his day. He pounded the loan-sharks so hard that people called him Il Martello, The Hammer. The bankers were not pleased. They told Anthony to keep to the sanctuary arranging Christmas crèches and not to upset people. But no, he thundered “Justice!” from the pulpit and in the marketplace. And he was heard. Anthony inveighed against the abuse of the poor so insistently, so passionately that he moved a council of the Church to condemn usury. And God loved him for that. No less is required of us today. Christ will not tarry forever.
Remember the words of the Prophet Malachi:
“Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
And the day that is coming will set them on fire,
leaving neither root nor branch, says the Lord God of hosts.
But for you who fear my name, there will arise
the sun of justice with its healing rays.”
Come, Lord Jesus!
W
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