Ordinary Time

By Lucia A. Silecchia

As September dawned, eyes turned to Rome with joy to celebrate the canonizations of two young men – Sts. Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis. In a particular way, many hoped that the holy lives of these two new saints would have a special appeal to young people who would see in them examples of lives well and faithfully lived.

Merely a week later, Sept. 14 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the canonization of another young saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton. I dimly remember this event from my early childhood, and recall similar excitement that she would inspire a world hungry for good examples of faithful lives.

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton was the first American-born saint to be canonized, a sign that our still-young nation can be the soil from which holy lives spring forth for the glory of God.

As a native New Yorker, I am parochially proud that St. Elizabeth Seton was born in New York City. In addition, St. Kateri Tekakwitha was also born within what would become New York State. Other saints such as Frances Cabrini, Marianne Cope, Isaac Jogues and John Neumann, while not born in New York, contributed greatly to the spiritual and temporal good of my home state. Certainly, not all saints from the United States are from New York! In the past fifty years Elizabeth Seton has been joined by other saints and blessed from across her homeland.

The story of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s short life is well known, but worth reflecting on in this milestone year. She was born in 1774 to a prominent Episcopalian family. Her mother died when she was a mere toddler – the first of many profound losses she would experience. Elizabeth married William Magee Seton, a prominent businessman, in 1794. Together they had five children.

Sadly, their happiness was short-lived. William’s business fortunes declined, and tuberculosis took a toll on his health. Hoping that a change in climate would cure him, they sought refuge with friends in sun-soaked Italy. Alas, William died there in 1803, leaving Elizabeth a young widow with five children aged eight and under. It was in Italy, however, that Elizabeth learned about the Catholic faith and it touched her soul in a bleak season of her life. When she returned to New York, she entered the Catholic Church in 1805 – a decision with a deep cost to her in social circles hostile to Catholicism.

Four years later, Elizabeth and her children came to the Diocese of Baltimore – the premier see in the young United States – at the invitation of Bishop John Carroll. She established both a school and the first American community of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph.

“Mother Seton,” as she was now known, her children, and the first of her sisters settled in the hills of Emmitsburg, Maryland to build their school and community.

I have often visited Emmitsburg to enjoy the peaceful beauty of the hills she knew and the places she dwelled. What I easily lose sight of is that the rugged beauty of this place was, two centuries ago, harsh and unforgiving. It was in those hills, in a simple graveyard, that Mother Seton buried two of her daughters, Annamaria and Rebecca, who succumbed to illness in the cold. Many of Mother Seton’s first sisters – including other members of her family – also died in those early, desolate years in Emmitsburg.

After losses like these she said, “I am satisfied to sow in tears if I may reap in joy. And when all the wintry storms of time are past, we shall enjoy the delights of an eternal spring.”

Now a saint, Mother Seton truly does “enjoy the delights of an eternal spring.” The community she gathered and the school she founded, at such great cost, continued to flourish. To her is credited the American Catholic school system that, for more than two centuries, has taught generations about both this world and the next.

I vaguely remember watching her canonization on television and discussing it in school. I remember the excitement, on the eve of the United States’ Bicentennial, that an American saint was celebrated beyond the confines of the time and the place she had lived.

As he proclaimed her a saint, Pope Paul VI said, “Elizabeth Ann Seton is a saint. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is an American. All of us say this with special joy … Rejoice for your glorious daughter. Be proud of her. And know how to preserve her fruitful heritage.”

Fifty years have passed since then. I was blessed with many years as a student in Catholic schools and have spent my adulthood in Catholic higher education. I have read Mother Seton’s writings, inspired by the simplicity and the strength of this older sister in faith. I have wondered how willing I would or could be in saying “yes” to the labor asked of me, if I knew in advance how high the cost might be.

I have spent time in the hills of Maryland where Mother Seton lived, worked, prayed and died at the age of forty-six, on January 4, 1821. I hope that if time and travel allows, you might find yourself in Emmitsburg someday to walk where she trod, pray where she mourned, see where she taught and pause at the tomb of this “glorious daughter.” More than that, it is a beautiful place to pray for all who serve our church and our nation. May they have the strength, faith and wisdom to “preserve her fruitful heritage” in the hard work of ordinary time.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research at The Catholic University of America. “On Ordinary Times” is a bi-weekly column reflecting on the ways to find the sacred in the simple. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
My father died when I was twenty-three, a seminarian, green, still learning about life. It’s hard to lose your father at any age, and my grief was compounded by the fact that I had just begun to appreciate what he had given me.

Only later did I realize that I no longer needed him, though I still very much wanted him. What he had to give me, he had already given. I had his blessing.

I knew I had his blessing. My life and the direction it had taken pleased him. Like God’s voice at the baptism of his Jesus, he had already communicated to me: You are my son in whom I am well pleased. Not everyone is that lucky. That’s about as much as a person may ask from a father.

And what did he leave me and the rest of his offspring?

Too much to name, but among other things, moral steadiness. He was one of the most moral people I have ever known, allowing himself minimal moral compromise. He wasn’t a man who bought the line that we are only human and so it’s okay to allow ourselves some exemptions. He used to famously tell us: “Anyone can show me humanity; I need someone to show me divinity!” He expected you not to fail, to live up to what faith and morality asked of you, to not make excuses. If we, his family, inhaled anything from his presence, it was this moral stubbornness.

Beyond this, he had a steady, almost pathological sanity. Today we joke that moderation was his only excess. There were no hysterical outbursts, no depressions, no giddiness, no lack of steadiness, no having to guess where his soul and psyche might be on a given day.

With that steadiness, along with my mother’s supporting presence, he made for us a home that was always a safe cocoon, a boring place sometimes, but always a safe one. When I think of the home where I grew up, I think of a safe shelter where you could look at the storms outside from a place of warmth and security. Again, not everyone is that lucky.

And because we were a large family and his love and attention had to be shared with multiple siblings, I never thought of him as “my” father, but always as “our” father. This has helped me grasp the first challenge in the Lord’s Prayer, namely, that God is “Our” Father, whom we share with others, not a private entity.

Moreover, his family extended to more than his own children. I learned early not to resent the fact that he couldn’t always be with us, that he had good reasons to be elsewhere: work, community, church, hospital and school boards, political involvement. He was an elder for a wider family than just our own.

Finally, not least, he blessed me and my brothers and sisters with a love for baseball. He managed a local baseball team for many years. This was his particular place where he could enjoy some Sabbath.

But blessings never come pure. My father was human, and a man’s greatest strength is often too his greatest weakness. In all that moral fiber and rock-solid sanity, there was also a reticence that sometimes didn’t allow him to fully drink in life’s exuberance. Every son watches how his father dances and unconsciously sizes him up against certain things – hesitancy, fluidity, abandonment, exhibitionism, momentary irrationality, irresponsibility.

My father never had much fluidity or abandon to his dance step, and I have inherited that, something that can pain me deeply. There were times, both as a child and as an adult, when, in a given situation, I would have traded my father for a dad who had a more fluid dance step, for someone with a little less reticence in the face of life’s exuberance.

And that is partly my struggle to receive his full blessing. I’m often reminded of William Blake’s famous line in Infant Sorrow, where he mentions “Struggling in my father’s hands.” For me, that means struggling at times with my dad’s reticence to simply let go and drink in life’s full gift.

But, if there was hesitancy, there was no irresponsibility in his dance, even if sometimes that meant standing outside the dance. I was grieved at his funeral, but proud too, proud of the respect that was poured out for him, for the way he lived his life. There was no judgment that day on his reticence.

I’m older now than he was when he died. My earthly days now outnumber his by fifteen years. But I still live inside his blessing, consciously and unconsciously, striving to measure up, to honor what he gave me. And mostly that’s good, though I also have moments when I find myself standing outside of life’s exuberance, looking in at the dance, reticent, his look on my face, feeling a certain envy of those who have a more fluid dance step – me, ever my father’s son.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Few things in life are as difficult as the death of a young person, particularly one’s own child. There are many mothers and fathers, with broken hearts, having lost a daughter, a son, or a grandchild. Despite time and even the consolation of faith, there often remains a wound that will not heal.

There’s a reason why this wound is so unrelenting, and it lies not so much in a lack of faith, as in a certain lack within nature itself. Nature equips us for most situations, but it does not equip us to bury our young.
Death is always hard. There’s a finality and an irrevocability that cauterizes the heart. This is true even if the person who has died is elderly and has lived a full life. Ultimately nothing prepares us, fully, to accept the deaths of those whom we love.

But nature has equipped us better to handle the deaths of our elders. We are meant to bury our parents. That’s the way nature is set up, the natural order of things. Parents are meant to die before their children, and generally that’s the way it happens. This brings its own pain. It’s not easy to lose one’s parents or one’s spouse, one’s siblings, or one’s friends. Death always exacts its toll. However, nature has equipped us to handle these deaths.

Metaphorically stated, when our elders die, there are circuits in our hardwiring that we can access and through which we can draw some understanding and acceptance. Ultimately, the death of a fellow adult washes clean, and normality returns because it’s natural, nature’s way, for adults to die. That’s the proper order of things. One of life’s tasks is to bury one’s parents.

But it’s unnatural for parents to bury their children. That’s not the way nature intended things, and nature has not properly equipped us for the task. Again, to utilize the metaphor, when one of our children dies (be it through natural disease, accident, or suicide) nature has not provided us with the internal circuits we need to open to deal with this.

The issue is not, as with the death of our elders, a matter of proper grieving, patience and time. When one of our children dies, we can grieve, be patient, give it time and still find that the wound does not get better, that time does not heal, and that we cannot fully accept what’s happened.

A hundred years ago Alfred Edward Housman wrote a famous poem entitled, To An Athlete Dying Young. At one point he says this to the young man who has died:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay.

Sometimes a young death does freeze forever a young person’s beauty that, given time, would eventually have slipped away. To die young is to die in full bloom, in the beauty of youth.

However, that addresses the issue of the young person who is dying, not the grief of those who are left behind. I’m not so sure they, the ones left behind, would say: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away.” Their grief is not so quick to slip away because nature has not provided them with the internal circuits needed to process what they need to process. We are more likely to feel a darkness of soul that W.H. Auden once expressed in the face of the death of a loved one:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. (“Twelve Songs”)

When one of our children dies, it’s easier to feel what Auden expresses. Moreover, even understanding how much against nature it is to have to bury one of your own children does not bring that child back, nor put things back to normal, because it’s abnormal for a parent to bury a child.

However, what that understanding can bring is an insight into why the pain is so deep and so unrelenting, why it is natural to feel intense sorrow, and why no easy consolation or challenge is very helpful. At the end of the day, the death of one’s child has no answer.

It’s also helpful to know that faith in God, albeit powerful and important, does not take away that wound. It’s not meant to. When one of our children dies, something has been unnaturally cut off, like the amputation of a limb. Faith in God can help us live with the pain and the unnaturalness of being less than whole, but it does not bring back the limb or make things whole again.

In effect, what faith can do is teach us how to live with the amputation, how to open that irreparable violation of nature to something and Someone beyond us, so that this larger perspective, God’s heart, can give us the courage to live healthily again with an unnatural wound.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

Called To Holiness
By Jaymie Stuart Wolfe
Our Catholic faith doesn’t appear out of thin air, and it plays out incarnationally and across history. Faith comes from somewhere, and often, that somewhere is a someone, often visibly woven into our personal genealogies.

Everyone wants to claim some connection to our first American-born pope: Dolton, Illinois – the suburb just outside the southern limits of Chicago where the Prevost children grew up; Villanova University in Philadelphia where their youngest son went to college; St. Louis, where he entered the Augustinians; Chiclayo, Peru where Msgr. Prevost served as a missionary priest, and then bishop. Even Rome had a legitimate claim long before the name Robert Cardinal Prevost was announced from St. Peter’s loggia.
So, it comes as no surprise that there’s been a lot of Louisiana chatter about our new Holy Father’s Creole roots. The news of the pope’s ancestry flooded New Orleans news outlets within a few days of his election.

More recently, the story was published by the New York Times and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presented a copy of the pope’s lineage to him at the Vatican.

But locally, a well-researched and fascinating exhibit showing Pope Leo’s maternal family tree has drawn many to the Old Ursuline Convent Museum in the French Quarter. There, visitors can explore seven generations of the Holy Father’s New Orleans ancestors, leading back to the years just after the city’s founding in 1718. Supported by sacramental records still held in the cathedral archives, the story Pope Leo’s family tree tells is a uniquely Catholic and American one.

The pope’s family includes immigrants from Bohemia, France, Italy, Cuba, Haiti, Guadeloupe and Canada. Also among his predecessors are numerous men and women identified as people of color – some free and others born enslaved.

It appears, in fact, that perhaps the only woman ever buried inside St. Louis Cathedral was one of the Holy Father’s forebears: a young woman of color who died in childbirth in 1799 and was interred near the Mary altar along with her baby. Family marriages and baptisms, too, can be found in New Orleans church records, some of which may have been thrown out of the windows during the famous Good Friday fire of 1788 by Père Antoine to save them.

In any case, what Pope Leo’s family tree reveals is the largely untold history of Black Catholics in colonies that eventually became part of the United States. This information, however, leaves us all with an unanticipated gift: the opportunity to recognize that the pope so many of us are excited about would not be who he is apart from the sad history of the African Diaspora caused by transatlantic slave trade and the complex racial history that followed in the wake of it.

If the Holy Father’s great-grandparents, Eugénie Grambois and Ferdinand Baquié, had not been baptized at the font in St. Louis Cathedral, (the only part of the church that survived the 1788 fire), chances are he would not have grown up Catholic. Nor would his maternal grandparents, the Martinez family, have likely chosen to make their home in Chicago without the Great Migration of 6 million people of color who left the American South for the promise of more economic opportunity and less racism at the beginning of the 20th century.

Our family histories vary widely. But all of us share a lineage of spiritual fathers and mothers whose words and deeds also make us what we are.

This summer, we observe the 1700th anniversary of the closing of the Council of Nicaea. Called by the unbaptized Emperor Constantine, the 318 bishops who gathered in Asia Minor defined what constituted Christian faith. Perhaps even more importantly, they determined what laid beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. If they had not done so – or if the Arians had prevailed – the past 17 centuries would have been different.

The faith we profess today in the Nicene Creed remains the dividing line between what is Christian and what isn’t. Every ecumenical council since has influenced the course of history and added to the family tree of our faith.

Our task as Catholics is not only to recognize where we have come from, but to hand on what we have received. Most of us do that in the ordinary rhythms of family life, as the Holy Father’s ancestors did. Some of us, like the Fathers of Nicaea, embrace the mission by making choices that have an impact far greater and more universal than even they imagine.

(Jaymie Stuart Wolfe is a freelance writer and editor, speaker, and loves life in New Orleans.)

KNEADING FAITH
By Dr. Fran Lavelle, D. Min.

September has always been a month of change and transition as we move from the heat of summer into cooler autumn days. This September, another transition will occur. After 33 years of dedicated service in Catholic education, Karla Luke is retiring. My kind but plain-spoken friend of 11 years (like Elvis) has left the building.

I’ve worked in the diocese since July 1999 and in the chancery since October 2014. The transition from parish to diocesan ministry has its challenges. The move from working in a parish to working in the chancery changed the rhythm, flow and perspective of what I do. It also gave me the opportunity to meet and work with new people. There are people in life that, when you meet them, you just know they are going to remain with you for the long haul. That was the case when I met Karla Luke. Karla has served as the executive director for the Office of Catholic Education since 2020. When I started at the chancery, she was an assistant to the director.

A lot of living happens in 11 years – especially considering that many people spend more time with co-workers than with their own family. Karla and I have loved and supported one another through difficult situations in our ministries and personal lives. We’ve shared milestones, heartache and a lot of holy laughter. Beneath the ministry, miles and smiles deep in the DNA of our friendship lies a great love for our faith and for God’s people. Karla is dedicated to the mission of Catholic education, but even more so to the mission of Jesus Christ. That dedication fuels everything she does.

Our offices have a natural connection, since the students Catholic schools serve often come from families engaged in parish ministries. Maintaining a solid working relationship with the Office of Catholic Education has always been a priority of mine. That priority has been easy to uphold, since each person who has served in that office during my time has been a dedicated, passionate and Christ-centered educator. Karla is no exception.

What I most admire about Karla is her resolute consistency, especially when it comes to policy. Following policy in educational systems is vital to the success of a school or system. Upholding policy, however, does not have to come at the expense of being fair, professional and kind. It takes a special kind of person to hold that tension and remain balanced. When the devastating impact of the early days of the pandemic raged, Karla drew on her leadership skills and applied her science background to make decisions that kept our schools, students, staff and faculty safe. People did not hold back in criticizing the decisions at the time, but she remained focused on policies that prioritized safety.

A heavy dose of compassion is also a hallmark of her leadership. I have witnessed Karla’s compassion time and again – whether it was a colleague going through a difficult time or a principal or faculty member in need of an advocate, Karla steps up every time. Sometimes people are not asking to be fixed, just heard. Karla is a pro at what Pope Francis has called the “apostolate of the ear.” That intentional listening made her excel in her role.

There are hundreds of stories worthy of retelling. The memories I will cherish most are the everyday encounters we have shared. When Karla begins a sentence with “Look …” you know you’d better listen. One of two things will happen when “look” leads: either you will laugh hysterically or you will learn an important lesson. If sass and finesse had a vibe, it would be Karla’s “look.” Sometimes “look” is accompanied by “y’all,” which means the ensuing laughter or lesson will be extra.

It has been a privilege to call Karla a colleague. The greater gift is calling her my friend. In fact, we identify more as sisters. I know God will continue to use her many gifts to bless her corner of the world. And I know I am a better person for having her in my life.

May there always be work for your hands to do.
May your purse always hold a coin or two.
May the sun always shine upon your windowpane.
May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near to you, and
May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.
– Traditional Irish Blessing

(Dr. Fran Lavelle is the director of faith formation for the Diocese of Jackson.)