May Day 2014

MAY DAY 2014, St. Joseph the Worker

St. Joseph House, New York City

Deacon Tom Cornell

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kill for Peace?

23 Sunday C  #129

Wis 9, 13-18

Ps 90

Phlm 9-10. 12-17

Lk 14, 25-33

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

Deacon Tom Cornell

                                                            

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Now let me hear AMEN!

What's the Point?

20 Sunday C  #120  2013

Jer 38, 4-6. 8-10

Ps 40

Heb 12, 1-4

Lk 12, 49-53

Deacon Tom Cornell

Peter Maurin Farm

Marlboro, N.Y.

August 18, 2013

                   “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!  …Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division.”  How are we to understand these words?  He, the Prince of Peace, also said, “My own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give.”  (Jn 14, 27).

                   How often does the word “peace” appear in our Mass?  When a bishop presides, his first words after the Sign of the Cross are “Peace be with you.”  After the penitential rite we sing the Gloria, “Glory to God in the highest and peace to people of goodwill.”  At Communion the priest addresses the congregation with the words, “The peace of the Lord be with you always.”  The deacon then says, “Let us exchange the sign of peace.”  Then we recite, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.  At the dismissal the deacon says, “Go in peace.”   

                   The fire that Jesus would cast upon the earth is his own word to set ablaze the hearts of believers, those who love God, and God is Mercy, Truth and Goodness and Love, to set them ablaze.  That word of justice, peace and love can, and does, divide some times, very painfully, sets fathers against sons and sons against fathers.  I know.  I couldn’t go home for three years because of my protest against the Viet Nam war.  And Jeremiah knew.  It was said that he too demoralized the troops.  Jeremiah didn’t want to be a prophet.  Anyone who does should have his head examined.  A prophet speaks the word of God to those who do not want to hear it.  That is never convenient.  It landed him in a cistern and many others in jail and prison cells, even in our own day and our own country. 

                   Pope Francis’ words on this day in Rome were: 

          “… Jesus says, ‘I came to bring division’; not that Jesus wishes to divide men against each other.  On the contrary, Jesus is our peace, he is our reconciliation! But this peace is not the peace of the grave, it is not neutrality.  … This peace is not a compromise at all costs.  Following Jesus means rejecting evil, egoism, and choosing the good, truth, justice, even when that requires sacrifice and renunciation of our own interests. And, yes, this divides; we know that it divides us even from the closest bonds.  But remember: it is not Jesus who divides!  He posits the criterion: living for ourselves or living for God and for others; be served or serve; obey ourselves or obey God. This is the way that Jesus is a ‘sign of contradiction’ ” (Luke2:34)  (August 18, 2013, Angelus, Vatican City). 

          His predecessor had words to say on the subject too:

         

          “ ‘To love your enemies’ (Luke 6:27; Mt 5:44) was something of a manifesto presented to everyone, which Christ asked his disciples to accept, thus proposing to them in radical terms a model for their lives. …Why does Jesus ask us to love our very enemies, that is, ask a love that exceeds human capacities? What is certain is that Christ’s proposal is realistic...This page of the Gospel is rightly considered the Magna Carta of Christian nonviolence; it does not consist in surrendering to evil—as claims a false interpretation of ‘turn the other cheek’ (Luke 6:29)—but in responding to evil with good (Romans 12:17-21), and thus breaking the chain of injustice. It is thus understood that nonviolence, for Christians, is not mere tactical behavior but a person’s way of being, the attitude of one who is convinced of God’s love and power, who is not afraid to confront evil with the weapons of love and truth alone. Loving the enemy is the nucleus of the ‘Christian revolution,’ a revolution not based on strategies of economic, political or media power. God does not oppose violence with a stronger violence. He opposes violence precisely with the contrary: with love to the end, His Cross. This is a way of conquering that seems very slow to us, but it is the true way of overcoming evil, of overcoming violence, and we must trust this divine way of overcoming” (Feb. 19, 2007 Angelus, Vatican City).

                   How many of us have ever considered our commitment to Christ and his Church a revolutionary act?  Well, it is, and we are all subversives, or should be subversives when it comes to unjust social structures that deny people their fundamental rights, that impoverish and keep people in poverty, and war, unjust war.  To subvert means, literally in Latin, to turn things over, turn them upside down.  That’s what Jesus did when he said, “Blessed are the poor….”  How to do it in our time and place?  That’s for each one of us to decide for ourselves.  But if Christians are indistinguishable from non-believers in their public lives, then what’s the point?  W

Pax Christi Mass for Peace 2013

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

The Blind See, the Lame Walk

THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD  C  2013  #21

Is 40, 1-5. 9-11

Ps 104

Ti 2, 11-14, 3, 4-7

Lk 3, 15-16. 21-22

Peter Maurin Farm, Marlboro, N.Y.

January 13, 2013

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   “The Lord will bless his people with peace.”

                   Our first reading from the Prophet Isaiah foretells the coming of the Christ “upon whom I have put my spirit,” says the Lord.  He will bring justice, a just peace, not just to Israel but to the nations as well.  And he will do it not by raising an army, but quietly, gently.  “A bruised reed he will not break.” He will not take advantage of anyone’s weakness but lift up all, friend and enemy alike.  Then in our second reading from St. Paul’s Letter to Titus, the Lord addresses his Christ and calls him “a light to the nations to open the eyes of the blind, to bring prisoners out of confinement and from the dungeons those who live in darkness.”  This has an eschatological meaning – that’s a fancy word that indicates it’s for the End Time, the Second Coming, the final establishment of His kingdom which will have no end.  But it’s also meant to point to present reality.  The mystery of the kingdom of God is that it is then and there but also here and now.  By that I mean the fulfillment of the kingdom can only come about by God’s own intervention at the end of time, in the new heaven and the new earth foretold in Scripture, but it is also here and now in embryo, if you will, because He said “The kingdom of God is within you, in your midst.”  Here and now, if we will have it. The blind see?  The lame walk?  Yes!

                   I saw it happen, yes I did, in Selma, Alabama, almost 47 years ago.  It was Jesus Christ who led the March to Montgomery in the person of Martin Luther King.  Most of the white people of Alabama were and are good Christian people.  But many, very many were blind, blinded by the racist propaganda fed them by those who knowingly profited by setting race against race, worker against worker, by reinforcing negative stereotypes of black people and by propagating scare stories.  Fear is a powerful weapon, and the root of war, as Thomas Merton put it.  It’s still going on, mass media blinding people, making them believe that the poor are their enemies, that Muslims are their enemy, or the Chinese.  Back then, in 1965, the stories they spread about us in the news media made us look like degenerate hippies or Russian Reds, wild.  But as we marched through town and out on Alabama Rt. 80, the frightened people saw us for real, not as we were portrayed, ministers and priests and rabbis, nuns in full habit, and nicely scrubbed young and middle-aged and old men and women, black and white and who knows what, but normal, disciplined people, joined in a great cause for which we were willing to put our lives on the line, and I saw, as they watched us, I saw the scales fall from their eyes as Black people previously lame walked, as young and old Black people imprisoned in the dungeons of segregation walked out into the sun, heads held high.  It was a glorious time.

         We won, and we didn’t fire a shot, killed no one, injured no one, lied to no one, humiliated no one.  And we won, through the power of nonviolence, the ethic of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount put into practice.  The President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, a Southern white man, addressed a joint session of the Senate and the Congress, and the American people, and the world, and demanded the Voters’ Rights Bill of 1965 and he got it, and everything changed.  The legal structures of racial segregation were dismantled.  The sad, tragic irony is that today, more than a generation later, racial segregation is again the order of the day, not just in the South, but in Northern cities where more than ninety percent of some inner city schools are minorities.  God does not show partiality, even if people still do.

                   Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles has Saint Peter come to the realization that God’s saving grace is available to people of all nations, not just the Jews, as he had been thought. The very first Gentile Peter will baptize is a soldier, a Roman soldier, a centurion in charge of one hundred men of the occupation force.  That is startling!  The first recruit among the Gentiles to the cause of the Prince of Peace was a Roman soldier!  Did Cornelius renounce the use of weapons and refuse to kill?  Military converts were required to do just that, even if their superior officers ordered them to do so, but we do not know.  The Roman Army performed many tasks other than war-making, mail-delivery, for instance, and flood-control.  We do know that Cornelius was of good conscience and the grace of God fell upon him.  Many other soldiers, upon baptism or after deeper conversion, refused further military service, among them Saints Achilleus and Nereus, Saint Camillus and Saint Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers who refused to be a soldier.

                   The Gospel reading simply affirms that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is the one, the long-awaited Messiah, Christ.  It is he who will usher in the kingdom of justice and peace.  If the evening news does not reflect that truth, whose fault is that? Jesus Christ is our peace.  We are his body in the world.  Let’s show it, let’s prove it!  The nonviolent Civil Rights movement offers a template.  Jesus is the Commander in Chief of the nonviolent army.  Yes, that is an army too, the nonviolent movement.  We used to sing, “We are soldiers in the army; we have to fight; we know we have to die.”  But far fewer die in the nonviolent struggle.  And it ends in reconciliation and healing, not bitterness, resentment and envy. 

                    The Lord will bless his people with peace!  “The Lord has blessed his people with peace!”  That is the Paschal Mystery, the meaning of the birth of Jesus, his ministry, his death and resurrection.  He is our peace.

                                                             W

                  

Newtown Tragedy

GAUDETE SUNDAY 20012

3 Advent  #9

Zep 3, 14-18a

(Ps) Is 12, 2-6

Phil 4, 4-7

Lk 3, 10-18

Peter Maurin Farm, Marlboro, N.Y.

December 16, 2012

Deacon Tom Cornell

                  

                   It’s a challenge to faith, the problem of evil.  How can a good and loving and all-powerful God allow such things as happened in Newtown last Friday?  On the other hand, how can we bear such loss without faith, and without a community of faith, our church?  Our own parish family is still staggering under the loss of our Sarah Saturday before last, a sixteen year old girl killed in an automobile accident.  Now this, so close to us, ten miles over the Connecticut border, twenty first graders and six teachers.  I did my teaching internship at Newtown High School in 1959 and I was student counselor and English and Latin teacher in the next town over, Brookfield, for three years after that, and might well have stayed there but for Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.  You couldn’t ask for, you couldn’t imagine better towns, better public schools, peaceful, orderly, safe.   And yet…. 

          No one is safe.  Every breath we take may be our last.  Be prepared!  And remember the words of Julian of Norwich, “The worst has happened and been repaired.” 

          This is Gaudete Sunday.   Gaudete is Latin for rejoice!  Rejoice?  How rejoice?  We are more than half way through Advent, the period of waiting, waiting for the repair.  The worst has happened?  The Fall!  And been repaired?  How repaired?   Jesus Christ, Christ himself, Christmas, Emmanuel, God with Us, come to suffer, die and rise again. 

          Evil entered that classroom in Newtown, but God was in that classroom too, and he is the stronger.  He has taken the little ones to himself.  We weep for ourselves!  They are our children too.  All children are our children.  Their families have only their memory.  They will not see those beautiful children grow and learn, see them at First Communion, Confirmation!  There will be no weddings, no grandchildren!  It is for ourselves that we weep.  They are in bliss, eternal bliss, forever innocent, to rise in glory on the Last Day.  That’s a Promise! 

          Last week a similar number of children in Afghanistan were killed by a bomb blast near their school.  Was it unexploded ordinance?  There have been so many more.  Drone strikes are not surgical, as we have been led to believe.  Many children have been killed by these fiendish weapons, nearly three hundred in the Afghan-Pakistan border area.  Afghani and Paki mothers and fathers feel the same anguish, anger, grief and loss as American mothers and fathers do.  Does this in any way diminish our loss, our pain?  Of course not!  Are those kids our children too?  God’s children?  Of course they are.  So why do we let these things happen?

          The Popes have spoken of a culture of death that pervades our society, a culture of violence, violence against the most vulnerable among us, the unborn and the elderly, against the poor, against immigrants, against children, against women.  We will balance the budget they say, but not by pulling out of unnecessary and unwinnable wars paid for on the credit card.  Let the old, the sick, disabled war veterans and children pay.  We have been lied to by politicians as long as I can remember, consistently, by Democrats as well as Republicans, and that’s a form of violence in itself.  I refer also to child pornography, widespread and easily available to feed unnatural lust and loathing, and the trafficking of women. 

          Too many guns, too little mental health evaluation and care in this country.  The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in his first address to the diplomats assigned to the Holy See, announced that the Church’s first priority in the field of international relations is the building of a culture of peace, a culture of nonviolence, a culture of life.  Do we need any more evidence that this is what we need in our country today?

          “His winnowing fan is in his hand,” John the Baptist announced.  Even here in an agricultural setting we may need to explain what a winnowing fan is, and what it means to winnow.  Before mechanization, the way a farmer removed the grain of wheat from its husk, or chaff, was to spread the wheat stripped from the stalk on the barn floor.  He would then take a large fan and stir the air over it all.  The dry husks, or chaff, are lighter than the grains of wheat, so the breeze the fan creates lifts the chaff and scatters it a few feet away from the heavier wheat.  The farmer can then gather up the wheat for storage and sweep up the chaff to compost or to burn.  That’s what it means to winnow, and the fan used is called a winnowing fan.  John’s words are harsh.  “The chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire!” a terrible judgment.  We have to take his words seriously, for we will be called to account. 

          Think on these words, think on what we have just experienced in that first grade classroom when you are selecting toys for your little ones this Christmas.  If you have already bought a war toy, or a violent video game, TAKE IT BACK!  Exchange it for a teddy bear, or a chess set!  Teach peace! 

          Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace!  Peace  be with you!     W

Cast Your Whole Ballot

26 Sunday B   #137

Nm 11, 25-29

Ps 19

Jas 5, 1-6

Mk 9, 38-43. 45. 47-48

September 30, 2012

Peter Maurin Farm

Marlboro, N.Y.

Deacon Tom Cornell

                   Imagine this passage from the Letter of Saint James being read aloud at a recent national political convention.  I won’t say which one.  We just heard the words, God’s words.  They’re important.  So let’s hear them again and take careful heed:

                   “Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries.  Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten, your gold and silver have corroded and that corrosion will be a testimony against you, it will devour your flesh like fire…. Behold, the wages you have withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.  You have lived on the earth in luxury and pleasure and you have fattened your hearts for the day of slaughter.”

                   Word as harsh as these might well have been directed at the other party convention too, I won’t say which one, words of condemnation for the crime that cries to heaven for vengeance, the slaughter of the innocent yet-to-be-born.  The legal right to abortion at any stage of gestation or even birth for any reason whatsoever is now part of that party’s orthodoxy.  How long will the hand of God’s justice be stayed?  "God is not mocked."  (Gal 6, 7)  “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, “I will repay!”  (Deut 32,35;  Rom 12, 19)

                   The president from one party declares that anything the president does is by that very fact legal.  The president from the other party acts upon that and authorizes assassination by drone missile, targeted assassination of individuals he chooses to designate enemy combatants without any judicial process, appeal, oversight or review, and ten or more innocent women, children and other by-standers die as “collateral damage.”  Obscene!  And some people wonder why they hate us. 

                   Our bishops have given us guidelines, guidance, not in how to vote, but in how to weigh the candidates and party platforms.  It is not their place or mine or anyone else's to tell you how to vote.  But we who are ordained to teach the faithful the principles of social justice based on Scripture and natural law have it laid upon us to do just that.  The bottom-line is this: how will your choice affect the most vulnerable in our society?

          Catholic social teaching holds that all citizens have the right to participate in the political life of their communities and nations, that is, among other things, to vote.  The right to participate entails the responsibility to participate.  Any who fail to exercise that right endanger the right of others to do so.  Catholics make a better showing at the polls than our fellow citizens.  We make up 20% of the population but 27% of the voting public.  There was a time when we tended to vote as a bloc, for the New Deal, for instance, up to 80 percent!  But we are not beholden to any party, nor should we ever be!  And voting is not the only way we participate in public life. 

                   Here we are about five weeks from Election Day.  I confess to you, I haven’t made up my mind yet, whom to vote for or even whether to go to the polls at all, the choices are so bad.  Choosing the lesser of two evils is choosing an evil, after all.  Maybe a third party.  But they’re all compromised.  Then again….

          I am consoled by the words of a great American once scorned but now seen as a national treasure, Henry David Thoreau.  “Cast your whole vote, not just a piece of paper.”  If we live the life that Jesus taught us to live, a life centered on the works of mercy, we cast our whole vote every day of our lives.

                   God be with you and God be with us all on November 6, a day of tears for the poor, the aged, the sick and the unborn.  God forgive us! 

                                             W