Millennial reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
There is a growing movement in the South to speak out against harsh policies that target the poor and minorities. Communication easily breaks down when politics trump policy and ideology trumps facts. Groups of clergy and other community partners try to take it to a new level, the level of morality and ethics. Rev. William Barber and the Moral Monday Movement is the classic example. This is spreading to other southern states. In Mississippi it is called the Moral Movement Mississippi.
Rev. Barber says clergy are more competent interpreting and speaking from Scripture than compete with ideologues or policy pundits. The group seeks to stress social justice as the theme of sermons.
We Catholics have a strong social justice teaching and see this demonstrated in preaching, and more so through the works of the many social service agencies throughout the world that bring hope and restore dignity to the impoverished.
This past week in the Clarion Ledger, reporter Jerry  Mitchell wrote about the deplorable conditions in the private prison in Meridian. In the series called “Hard Time” were articles and pictures showing cells as if they were from a third world country. This prison, as well as many others are run by a private company for profit.
Private prisons are a relatively new highly profitable industry. They are all over the country. Many people are unaware of their existence. They have a powerful lobby in Congress and the state houses.
Private prisons are one of the biggest lobbies against humane immigration reform. They oppose real education reform. They have a big education lobby in Washington that urges privatizing education, and under-funding public education and remedial programs. They plan for prison bed space by using the percentage of poor performing children in third grade. They blood suck off the poor. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is the biggest player in the game.
Private prisons have a notorious human rights record. They are a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which wrote the harshest anti-immigrant legislation, especially in Arizona and Alabama. ALEC is behind these voter suppression laws, designed to disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos. The for-profit private prison lobby advocated to make certain immigration offenses felonies. Why? To fill up their prisons. They lobby legislatures to create crimes so they can fill up their prisons. They lobby for harsh sentences for non-violent drug offenses so they can fill up their prisons. Every heartbeat is cash in the bank.
It is one thing for the state to incarcerate criminals. It is the state’s duty to protect citizens from criminals. It is also the state’s duty to rehabilitate convicted felons to re-enter society.  One goal is to reduce the number of prisoners. This benefits society. For private prison companies the more people locked up the better. Crime is a profitable business. This is immoral.
To profit from human misery dehumanizes the incarcerated. It encourages crime, not to make society better, but to make money for their shareholders. Thus these huge corporations use their influence to the detriment of society, especially young people by manipulating programs that directly benefit poor people.
The goal is profit. Staff salaries are low. Many of these prisons are understaffed to make money, putting inmates and staff at risk. Many lack programs, and inmates spend long hours locked up. Why? It is cheap.
Both the people locked up and the staff that oversees them largely come from the same strata of society. Both groups are being exploited for profit.
The result of all of this is dehumanizing people.  Bluntly put, it is about greed. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. All of this furthers the ever widening gap between the rich and everybody else.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Sometimes certain texts in the Bible make you wonder: Is this really the word of God? Why is this text in scripture? What’s the lesson here?
For example, we have verses in the Psalms, in passages that we pray liturgically, where we ask God to bash the heads of the children of our enemies against a rock. How does that invite us to love our enemies? We see passages in the Book of Job where Job is in despair and curses not on only the day he was born but the very fact that anyone was born. It’s impossible to find even a trace of anything positive in his lament.
Similarly, in a rather famous text, we hear Qoheleth affirm that everything in our lives and in the life of this world is simple vanity, wind, vapor, of no substance and of no consequence. What’s the lesson here? Then, in the Gospels, we have passages where the apostles, discouraged by opposition to their message, ask Jesus to call down fire and destroy the very people to whom they are supposed to minister. Hardly an exemplar for ministry!
Why are these texts in the Bible? Because they give us sacred permission to feel the way we feel sometimes and they give us sacred tools to help us deal with the shortcomings and frustrations of our lives.
They are, in fact, both very important and very consoling texts because, to put it metaphorically, they give us a large enough keyboard to play all the songs that we need to play in our lives. They give us the laments and the prayers we need to utter sometimes in the face of our human condition, with its many frustrations, and in the face of death, tragedy, and depression.
To give a simple example: A friend of mine shares this story: Recently he was in church with his family, which included his seven year-old son, Michael, and his own mother, Michael’s grandmother. At one point, Michael, seated beside his grandmother, whispered aloud: “I’m so bored!” His grandmother pinched him and chided him: “You are not bored!” as if the sacred ambience of church and an authoritative command could change human nature. They can’t. When we’re bored, we’re bored! And sometimes we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re spontaneously feeling.
Some years ago, for all the noblest of intentions, a religious community I know wanted to sanitize the Psalms that they pray regularly in the Divine Office to rid them of all elements of anger, violence, vengeance, and war. They had some of their own scripture scholars do the work so that it would be scholarly and serious.
They succeeded in that, the product was scholarly and serious, but stripped of all motifs of violence, vengeance, anger, and war what resulted was something that looked more like a Hallmark card than a series of prayers that express real life and real feelings.
We don’t always feel upbeat, generous, and faith-filled. Sometimes we feel angry, bitter and vengeful. We need to be given sacred permission to feel that way (though not to act that way) and to pray in honesty out of that space.
My parents, and for the most part their whole generation, would, daily, in their prayers, utter these words: “To You do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Our own generation tends to view this as morbid, as somehow denigrating both the beauty and joy of life and the perspective that faith is meant to give us.
But there’s a hidden richness in that prayer. In praying that way, they gave themselves sacred permission to accept the limits of their lives. That prayer carries the symbolic tools to handle frustration; something, I submit, we have failed to sufficiently give to our own children.
Too many young people today have never been given the symbolic tools to handle frustration, nor sacred permission to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes, all good intentions aside, we have handed our children more of Walt Disney than Gospel.
In the Book of Lamentations we find a passage that while sounding negative on the surface, is paradoxically, in the face of death and tragedy, perhaps the most consoling text of all. The text simply states that, sometimes in life, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait!
That’s sound advice, spoken from the mouth of experience and the mouth of faith.
The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, once wrote these words to a friend who, in the face of the death of a loved one, wondered how or where he could ever find consolation. What do I do with all this grief? Rilke’s reply: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give that heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.” They are, so too is life sometimes and we need to be given God’s permission to feel that heaviness.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

guest column
By Sister Constance Veit, l.s.p.
The month of October is a real bonanza for us Little Sisters of the Poor. During October we celebrate the anniversaries of the birth, beatification and canonization of our foundress, Saint Jeanne Jugan. Along with Catholics all over the United States, we also observe Respect Life Month. Rereading Pope Benedict’s canonization homily recently, I realized how appropriate it is to simultaneously celebrate Saint Jeanne Jugan and respect for life.
Inspired by Pope Francis’ greeting for England’s 2013 Day for Life, the theme chosen for our U.S. Respect Life observances this year is Each of Us is a Masterpiece of God’s Creation.
“Even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image, destined to live forever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect,” he said. Time and time again we see Pope Francis demonstrating the truth of these words in his humility, warmth and compassion for each person he encounters.
“We want to be part of a society that makes affirmation and protection of human rights its primary objective and its boast,” Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, O.F.M. Cap., chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, wrote in his message for Respect Life Month. “Our mission is to show each person the love of Christ. As uniquely created individuals, we each have unique gifts which we are called to use to share Christ’s love.” This is exactly what Saint Jeanne Jugan did as she devoted her life to elderly persons in need.
“Born in 1792 at Cancale in Brittany, France, Jeanne Jugan was concerned with the dignity of her brothers and sisters … whom age had made more vulnerable, recognizing in them the Person of Christ himself,” Pope Benedict XVI said at her canonization. “‘Look upon the poor with compassion,’ she would say, ‘and Jesus will look kindly upon you on your last day.’
Jeanne Jugan focused upon the elderly a compassionate gaze drawn from her profound communion with God in her joyful, disinterested service, which she carried out with gentleness and humility of heart, desiring herself to be poor among the poor.”
Pope Benedict rightly attributed Saint Jeanne’s compassionate love to her profound union with God, which she achieved through many years of prayer and an active sacramental life. Cardinal O’Malley suggests that we pursue the same course – to draw close to Jesus in prayer and the sacraments – asking God for the grace to see ourselves and others as he sees us, as masterpieces of his creation.
“When God created each of us, he did so with precision and purpose, and he looks on each of us with love that cannot be outdone in intensity or tenderness.” If we wish to help build the Culture of Life, we should reflect on these words of Cardinal O’Malley until they are assimilated into the deep recesses of our minds and our hearts. From there they will give birth to deep convictions: “We must look at ourselves and at others in light of this truth and treat all people with the reverence and respect which is due.”
This was Jeanne Jugan’s secret. She saw in each elderly person a suffering member of the Body of Christ, and she treated them as she would have treated Christ himself. Jeanne Jugan’s canonization process involved the recognition of two miracles worked through her intercession. But our foundress hasn’t stopped working miracles now that she is a Saint!
During this Respect Life Month, pray through her intercession for the miracle of a conversion of our society’s values to those of the Culture of Life. And ask Saint Jeanne Jugan to help you realize your own dignity, and the dignity of all those with whom you share your life, as masterpieces of God’s creation.
(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
“People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” Of spurious origin, that old dictum has been interpreted in various ways. One common understanding is that people should not criticize in others some fault that they see in themselves. Another is that people who are in a vulnerable, fragile situation should not engage in destructive actions.
In any case, the axiom’s relevance is not lost on news analysts, reporters, NOW (the National Organization for Women) and people at large who are up in arms about spousal violence in the National Football League. For days the talk of the nation, virtually everyone is hot and bothered over the antics of Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Ray McDonald and others.
But, while 69 percent of Americans think that the NFL has a widespread epidemic of domestic violence problems, official arrest numbers for domestic violence by NFL players are less than half the arrest numbers for the general population. This ignorance amid the public of the facts of domestic violence is part of the problem. The media and the public blithely mouth clichés about the NFL’s being a major expression of America’s culture of violence, and yet the public at large is guilty of even more violence. Oh, those glass houses!
No one doubts that our ambient culture of violence is the main stage on which acts of violence take place. Yet, the individual elements that spark violence are usually an unruly will to control another, a tit-for-tat attempt at revenge for something said or done, anger at another’s opinions or attitude that conflicts badly with one’s own way of thinking. Some folks simply refuse to be content with agreeing to disagree about anything.
After a slap on Ray Rice’s wrist that created severe backlash, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell got tough, declaring a new policy of a six-game suspension for a first offense and a lifetime ban for a second offense. Subsequently, the Baltimore Ravens summarily released Rice. But should professional sports have a violence code that does not reflect the status of the general population and of organizations like law enforcement in particular?
Something is grossly wrong with all these maneuvers. If police officers, who are much more frequent domestic violence offenders than professional athletes are, are not fired and often not even taken to task for spousal abuse, why are athletes being cut off from their livelihood?
Plastered all over TV news, dozens of actors, actresses, vocalists and sundry entertainers are shown in mind-blowing episodes of fury and violence. Why are they not punished by the same fickle public who self-righteously want to punish athletes?
Now don’t get me wrong, folks! Some kind, some measure of effective punishment should be meted out to both amateur and professional athletes who engage in spousal abuse. However, the waters and solutions are left murky by the prevalence of domestic violence in the general population at a rate more than twice as frequent as in sports.
High-profile people such as superstar entertainers, actors and professional athletes definitely live in glass houses. However, so does an even higher percentage of the clueless people at large, since their percentage of spousal abuse is more than two times higher than the percentage in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and the world of entertainment.
It may come as a shock to learn that domestic violence is highest among members of police families. On a heavily-footnoted information sheet, the National Center for Women and Policing notes, “Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population.” Even a study among older and more experienced officers still registered a 24 percent higher incidence than among the general population.
To make matters worse, cases of domestic violence by police officers are regularly swept under the rug because of wayward, lawless influences like blind solidarity among police officers and uninformed, unethical politics of civil authorities and even judges.
In pure irony, the very group of law enforcement people to whom battered women must run for refuge and help are trained fighters and killers plagued by a high incidence of domestic violence in their own families. On a similar note, military-trained fighters and killers have a very similar rate of incidence of spousal violence in military families.
In our search for gentleness and peace, we should follow the Man himself depicted in Isaiah 42:3, “Here is my Servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased.  Upon him I have put my spirit… He will not cry out, nor shout… A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench. He will faithfully bring forth justice.”
For sure, people who live in glass houses should keep their clothes on. “God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”   (1 John 4:16)
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)
(Editor’s note: October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Anthropologists tell us that father-hunger, a frustrated desire to be blessed by our own fathers, is one of the deepest hungers in the world today, especially among men. Millions of people sense that they have not received their father’s blessing. Robert Bly, Robert Moore, Richard Rohr and James Hillman, among others, offer some rich insights into this.
We suffer from being fatherless. However, in its deepest root, this suffering is something far beyond the mere absence of a blessing from our biological fathers. We tend to be fatherless in a much deeper way.
Some 25 years ago, a French philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion wrote a book entitled, God Without Being, within which he offers a very challenging interpretation of the famous parable of the Prodigal Son.
We’re all familiar with the parable: A father had two sons. The younger comes to him and says: ‘Father give me the share of the property that’s coming to me.’ His father shares out his goods. The younger son takes his share, leaves for a distant country, and squanders his property on a life of debauchery. When he has spent everything, he finds himself hungry and humiliated and sets off to return to his father’s house, where he is undeservedly greeted, embraced, and taken back by his father.
At one level, the lesson is clear: God’s mercy is so wide and compassionate that nothing we can do will ever stop God from loving us. Many wonderful books have been written to highlight this, not least Henri Nouwen’s classic, The Return of the Prodigal Son.
But Jean-Luc Marion, drawing upon the specific wording of the Greek text, emphasizes another element in this story.  The Greek text implies that the son went to his father and asked for something more than property and money. It says that he asked his father for his share of the property (ousia).
Ousia, in Greek, means “substance.” He’s asking for his life, as independent of his father. Moreover, as a son and an heir, he already has use of his share of what is rightfully his; but he wants to own it and not owe it to anyone.
He wants what is rightly his but he wants to have it as independent of his father, as cut off from his father and as his own in a way that he no longer has to acknowledge his father in the way he receives his life and freedom and uses them. And the consequence of that, as this parable makes clear, is that a gift no longer sensed or acknowledged as gift always leads to the misuse of that gift, to the loss of integrity and to personal humiliation.
With an apology for the abstractness of Marion’s language, here’s what he sees as the deepest issue inside this story: “The son requests that he no longer have to request, or rather, that he no longer have to receive the ousia.  … He asks to possess it, dispose of it, enjoy it without passing through the gift and the reception of the gift. The son wants to owe nothing to his father, and above all not owe him a gift; he asks to have a father no longer- the ousia without the father or the gift. … [And] the ousia becomes the full possession of the son only to the extent that it is fully dispossessed of the father: dispossession of the father, annulment of the gift, this is what the possession of the ousia implies.
Hence an immediate consequence: in being dispossessed of the father, the possession that censures the gift integrates within itself, indissolubly, the waste of the gift: possessed without gift, possession cannot but continue to dispossess itself. Henceforth orphan of the paternal gift, ousia finds itself possessed in the mode of dissipation.”
The prodigal son’s real issue was not so much his hunger for pleasure as his hunger for the wrong kind of independence. He wanted his life and the freedom to enjoy life completely on his own terms and, for him, that meant he had to take them outside his father’s house. In doing that, he lost his father and he also lost genuine life and freedom because these can only be had inside the acceptance a certain dependence. That’s why Jesus repeated again and again, that he could do nothing on his own. Everything he was and everything he did came from his Father.
Our lives are not our own. Our lives are a gift and always need to be received as gift. Our substance is not our own and so it may never be severed from its source, God, our Father. We can enter our lives and freedom and enjoy them and their pleasures, but as soon as we cut them off from their source, take them as our own and head off on our own, dissipation, hunger, and humiliation will follow.
There’s life only in the Father’s house and when we are outside that house we are fatherless and wasting our ousia.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)