Is 2, 1-5
Ps 72
Jas 3, 1-2. 4, 18
Mt 5, 38-48
Saint Augustine Church
Highland, N.Y.
March 16, 2013
Deacon Tom Cornell
Thank you, Fr. Tom (Lutz), thank you for hosting
this Pax Christi Mass for Peace here at Saint Augustine’s, our grandchildren’s
parish. It’s a special pleasure for me
to be with Fr. Tom again at the altar. You
may not know that Fr. Lutz took over at St. Mary’s in Marlboro when Msgr. Dugan
was dying, and walked into a hornets’ nest. The hornets were after me. Fr. Tom stood up to them. And thank you, Madeleine Labriola and all Pax
Christi members who make this Mass for Peace happen every year.
The readings today are so familiar I hardly
need dwell upon them, Isaiah’s vision of the Messianic Era when swords will be
turned into ploughshares and all the nations will climb Zion’s holy mountain to
learn the ways of peace and justice, and they shall study war no more. This vision is an essential of our Faith. We pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth….” It will not be fulfilled by
anyone other than Jesus himself when he comes again on the Last Day. But we have a part to play. We are baptized into Christ’s death and
resurrection, and we are baptized into his mission as well. The Kingdom of God
is then and there, but it is also here and now, because he said, “The kingdom
of God is within you” (Lk 17, 21). The Greek (entos uymon) can
also be translated, “The kingdom is in your midst.”
We saw an in-breaking of the Kingdom
last Wednesday when tens of thousands of people crammed into St. Peter’s Square
on a cold rainy night. The whole world was
watching, and that in itself is proof that the moral leader of the Christian
world is the Bishop of Rome. Even
non-believers look to Rome and hope for a word that will lead us out of the
morass we are in, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the spread of
fanaticism, a hardening of hearts against the most vulnerable, the poor, the
aged and the sick and the yet-to-be-born.
And on top of that, the threat to the biosphere itself.
There is a sense, all over the world,
that a page in the book of history is turning.
A new Pope, a new day, we pray, a new burst of faith and hope. God is good!
God is love! God has care of us! It is fifty years since the Council that was
supposed to renew the Church. Fifty
years and we are still waiting. It takes
time. I have the feeling that this is the
time. Things are changing. Fifty years ago the Council Fathers urged us
to look upon questions of war and peace with a totally new attitude, a totally
new attitude. You here today, you of Pax
Christi, are proof that it’s happening.
We are called a little closer to Christ.
If the New Testament teaches us anything about Jesus of Nazareth it is
that he was nonviolent, he was a man of peace.
We fail in so many ways. But especially at this season of Lent we pick
ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start over again, because we have the
freedom to turn away from God in sin. There will be a reckoning. We condemn ourselves when we turn away. Let this time of penance, prayer, fasting and
almsgiving heal and cleanse us to receive the Risen Lord at Easter!
Something else is in the news these
days, and it too points the way out of the mess we are in, and that is the
Cause of our own Dorothy Day for canonization as a saint! Cardinal Dolan asked the assembly of all our
bishops in Baltimore last January to approve her Cause so that it can move forward
in the Vatican. He got it, unanimous
endorsement! St. Dorothy of New
York! Imagine! She was our match-maker, Monica’s and
mine. We have spent our lives in her Catholic
Worker movement, and we now manage the Catholic Worker Farm behind the cemetery
on Lattintown Road. Her message was
peace, simplicity, poverty and community, like our new Pope Francis’s. A template for survival, I dare say.
Monica and I were on a lecture tour
in Rome in 1998 when we were told that Cardinal Stafford wanted to see us. He was the highest ranking American in Rome
at that time, the President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. Of course we were glad to oblige. We had no idea what was on his mind, why he
wanted to see us. The Cardinal asked us
about the current state of the Catholic Worker movement. We were happy to tell him the Catholic Worker
is in good shape, authentically Catholic.
We traded stories in a very relaxed and friendly, informal way. We didn’t know that Dorothy’s Cause had to
get his approval before it could go forward, and Cardinal Ratzinger’s too!
Cardinal
Dolan told the bishops, as had Cardinal O’Connor and Cardinal Egan before him,
that Dorothy Day should be held up as an example of authentic Christian
discipleship for our time and place. That’s
what canonization is for; it’s not to honor a person. It’s to hold up a model of authentic
Christian discipleship for our time and place.
Pope Benedict himself spoke of Dorothy and her devotion to the service
of the poor in his Ash Wednesday sermon.
But there is more to Dorothy Day than that. Lots of saints have served the poor. Dorothy was different, different in a way
that speaks to our time and our country.
She was not content to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the
homeless. She asked: Why are they hungry? Why are they homeless? Why in a country that prides itself on its
wealth are there so many poor and why are they so poor and for so long, over
generations? And why are the poor
cannon-fodder? Is there a connection
between an unsustainable life-style and the wars that we have been in almost
without ceasing since 1950? Is there a
connection? Pope Benedict seems to think
so. In his World Peace Day he condemned
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for usury, yes! Usury!
He cited unregulated capitalism as a threat to world peace and a cause
of war, as did Dorothy Day all her life long.
Dorothy Day was arrested and jailed
seven times, the first for the women’s vote, then for peace and for workers’
rights in nonviolent civil disobedience against war and preparation for war, the
last time when she was 75 years old, for the United Farm Workers, in
California, in support of a strikers’ picket-line. She served then two weeks in the county jail,
a vacation, she said. A jail-bird held
up as a model of authentic Christian discipleship for our time and place? Yes! In
past times the Church had to teach rude, uneducated barbarians how to live
together in obedience to lawful authority.
Today we have to learn and teach when and how to disobey illegitimate
authority in conscientious objection, non-cooperation and active nonviolent resistance,
to obey God rather than men, as Saint Peter had it (Acts 5, 29) . Dorothy Day will be the patron saint of all
that!
The Gospel calls us to practice the
works of mercy. Dorothy pointed out, over
and over again, that the works of war are the exact opposite of the works of
mercy, both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Feed the hungry, give drink to the
thirsty? No! Poison their fields and their wells! Shelter the homeless? No!
Bomb their cities! Visit the
prisoner? No! Put non-conformists in jail. (J. Edgar Hoover asked Franklin Roosevelt to
put Dorothy Day in prison three times!
He didn’t!)
And how about the spiritual works of
mercy? Again, the exact opposite of the
works of war. Instruct the
ignorant? No! Lie to them.
The truth is always the first casualty of wear. Counsel the doubtful? No!
Threaten them with prison! Draft
them! Console the mourning? No!
Give them more to mourn about!
Forgive injuries? No! Make then pay ten times over!
Dorothy Day of New York, our own saint,
if she is canonized, and it looks better and better, Saint Dorothy Day of ,New
York. Learn more about her, you young
people especially. Read the new
biography of Dorothy by Jim Forest, All
Is Grace. Cardinal Dolan bought 155
copies, and he gave one to Pope Benedict!
Or just ask Monica or me. W
