Kneading Faith
By Fran Lavelle
I was just at a regional conference where I spoke on the process moving forward from the Synod on Synodality. One of my friends asked me how it went. After a moment of reflection, I replied “not good.” She asked why I felt that it was not good. My response surprised even me. I truly feel like people are not ready to do the work that is required to achieve the things we say we want.

In our Synod listening we heard over and over the need for unity and healing. So much so that unity and healing is first among the issues we listed in our synthesis. However, when one addresses what unity and healing might look like in our post-pandemic church the enthusiasm for said unity wanes. The same holds true for taking politics out of the church. We heard repeatedly that politics should be removed from the pulpit. However, what many people really want to remove is the partisan politics of the party they oppose. Apparently, we are more than OK with hearing political rhetoric, as long as it aligns with our own perspective. Here’s the kicker, the teachings of the Catholic Church do not fully align with either conservative or liberal politics. That’s where Catholic Social Teaching comes into play.

“Catholic social teaching proposes a set of principles [Human Dignity, Solidarity, Subsidiarity] on which to form our conscience and then act in society. Because every life has value and is sacred, it should be protected by society. The principles of solidarity and subsidiarity mean people must participate in society.

To what end?

To provide criteria for forming our cultural, economic and political positions – based on the principles of Catholic social teaching and for the Common Good. The lessons of Catholic social teaching are always relevant. They provide guidance on how individuals can be better citizens. These lessons also guide social institutions in creating environments in which all can prosper (i.e., promote the common good).” – Catholic Social Teaching in Action

Speaking of partisan politics – both sides often fail to implement Catholic social teaching through their lives. And both run the risk of forgetting a key message of Catholic social teaching: “It is clear that no economic, social or political project can replace the gift of self to another … He who does not give God gives too little.” – Pope Benedict XVI
Clearly, we cannot cherry pick when to act and advocate for human dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity. Seeing the bigger picture calls us to greater accountability. For example, if one professes to be pro-life, that extends to ending the death penalty as much as ending abortion. Sometimes we do not see the inconsistencies in our thinking until we look at the big picture. Catholic Social Teaching allows us to see the bigger picture.

On the question of healing there were several areas identified that require reconciliation and healing. Chief among them were racism, annulments/marriage issues, LGBTQ and the sexual abuse crisis that still plagues the faithful. Out of the issues identified there is little if any leadership within the larger church to support meaningful healing.

If the Body of Christ that is the church is waiting for someone or something to come along that will advance healing in these important areas, we will be waiting for some time. If you see something, say something. If you say something, be willing to do something. How can you facilitate conversations and each out to those who feel rejected or invisible in the church? Supporting one another, no matter how difficult our journey, is the first step in promoting healing, reconciliation and unity.

The other major issues coming from our Synod listening involve catechesis and formation of children, youth and adults. All are worthy endeavors. All are important. All are attainable and achievable. Here’s the kicker, if we want better faith formation it will require that we as individual members of our faith community step up and do something. Perhaps everyone is not called to teach, but there are many ways we can support better catechesis and formation. As Catholics we often fail to invest in the young church. Every parish needs to have a budget for religious education and formation that extends from baptism through adult ed. Every parish should have a budget for youth ministry. An investment in the youth today will pay dividends today and far into the future.

Last but not least, was a call for formation opportunities for the laity. Jesus did not come to form the disciples to keep the work of the Gospel to themselves. Their commission was to go out and make disciples. Everyone has the responsibility to be a disciple. There are many formation opportunities available in the diocese to help you grow as a disciple. No matter what stage or what age, the offices of the Department of Faith Formation are here to help you produce great fruit from our synodal listening. We are only a phone call or email away.

(Fran Lavelle is the Director of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Jackson. She can be reached at fran.lavelle@jacksondiocese.org.)

FOR THE JOURNEY
By Effie Caldarola
As “I’m a recovering Catholic,” our contractor announces jauntily, apropos of what I can’t remember. I think we were trying to decide on flooring for the front deck.

It’s a phrase with which we’ve become familiar, so common that this guy we know only because he’s overseeing some basic repairs to our old house can throw it out casually.

Another common phrase in today’s parlance: “I was raised Catholic.” I can’t count the number of interviews with famous people in which I’ve read that statement. Often, it’s said with fondness. The people being interviewed are ascribing their beliefs in social justice, charity and right order to the years they spent at Mass or in a Catholic school classroom or gathered around the table for grace.

But let’s be clear, their comment implies, “I took the good part and left.” In many circles, to declare one is still a “practicing” Catholic is to admit to being old-fashioned, to still believing in Santa Claus, especially if Santa has been credibly accused of abuse. They’ve left that behind with the avocado appliances and shag carpeting of their childhood.

For those of us who still place their faith in this community of saints and sinners, it can feel lonely. Many people around me are not going to church at all, and some of the stalwart Catholics I knew from my youthful days as a Jesuit Volunteer and young wife and mother are dropping out or experimenting with Christian denominations.

I have a young friend who threw up his hands at the church because he saw our leadership failing to embrace Catholic social teaching. The abuse cover-up was the last straw.

“But what about the sacraments?” I asked. “Don’t you miss the Eucharist?”
His answer was vague. Those other things were very important to him. OK, those things are important to me, too.

But don’t you miss the Eucharist? Don’t you want to be part of the change, part of the synodal process?

At a book sale, I found a used copy of Henri Nouwen’s book, “Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith.” This Dutch priest and theologian, who died in 1996, was a prolific writer. The book was published in 1997, before the abuse scandal hit the news.

Nevertheless, in his entry for Oct. 20, he writes, “Over the centuries the church has done enough to make any critical person want to leave it.”

He recounts “violent crusades, pogroms, power struggles, oppression, excommunications, executions, manipulation of people and ideas, and constantly recurring divisions.”

Whew. And he hasn’t even touched on more recent headlines.

But then he asks if we can believe “that this is the same church that carries in its center the Word of God and the sacraments of God’s healing love?”

He speaks of the human brokenness of the church, which presents the broken body of Christ to the world. Human promises are broken; God’s promise “stands unshaken.”

I love the church because I love the communion of saints. I love the sacramentals, the sacraments, the mystics and monasteries, the heroes from Teresa of Avila to Thea Bowman, from Ignatius of Loyola to Dorothy Day, from Francis of Assisi to Edith Stein. Would this cloud of witnesses want me to leave?

I wish that young man would stay. We need him. We need him involved in the conversation, we need him prodding his pastor and his bishop. We need him finding the promise among the brokenness of an imperfect church. We need the community of each other.

Peter’s plaintive words in John 6:68 echo. “Lord, to whom would we go?”

(Effie Caldarola writes monthly for OSV News.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

In his novel, “Oscar and Lucinda,” Peter Carey offers this colorful image of gossip. The setting is a small town where there are rumors about the priest and a particular young woman. Here’s his metaphor: “The vicar of Woolahra then took her shopping and society, always feeling shopping to be the most intimate activity, was pleased to feel the steam pressure rising in itself as it got ready to be properly scandalized – its pipes groaned and stretched, you could hear the noises in its walls and cellars. They imagined he paid for her finery. When they heard this was not so, that the girl had sovereigns in her purse – enough, it was reported, to buy the priest a pair of onyx cufflinks – the pressure did not fall, but stayed constant, so that while it did not reach the stage where the outrage was hissing out through the open valves, it maintained a good rumble, a lower note which sounded like a growl in the throat of a smallish dog.”

What an apt image! Gossip does resemble steam hissing from a radiator or the growl of a small dog, and yet it’s important. For most of our lives, we form community around it. How so?

Imagine going out for dinner with a group of colleagues. While there isn’t overt hostility among you, there are clear differences and tensions. You wouldn’t naturally choose go out to dinner together, but you have been thrown together by circumstance and are making the best of it.

You have dinner together and things go along quite pleasantly. There’s harmony, banter and humor at the table. How do you manage to get on so well despite and beyond differences? By talking about somebody else. Much of the time is spent talking about others on whose faults, eccentricities, and shortcomings we all agree. Alternatively, we talk about shared indignations. We end up having a harmonious time together because we talk about someone or something else whose difference from us is greater than our differences from each other. Of course, you are afraid to leave the table because you already suspect whom they will be talking about then! Your fear is well founded.

Until we reach a certain level of maturity, we form community largely around scapegoating, that is, we overcome our differences and tensions by focusing on someone or something about whom or which we share a common distancing, indignation, ridicule, anger or jealousy. That’s the anthropological function of gossip – and it’s a very important one. We overcome our differences and tensions by scapegoating someone or something. That’s why it’s easier to form community against something rather than around something and why it’s easier to define ourselves more by what we are against than by what we are for.

Ancient cultures knew this and designed certain rituals to take tension out of the community by scapegoating. For example, at the time of Jesus within the Jewish community a ritual existed that essentially worked this way: At regular intervals, the community would take a goat and symbolically adorn it with the tensions and divisions of the community. Among other things, they would drape it with a purple cloth to symbolize that it symbolically represented them and push a crown of thorns into its head to make it feel the pain of their tensions. (Notice how Jesus is draped in these exact symbols when Pilate shows him to the crowd before the crucifixion: Ecce homo … Behold your scapegoat!) The goat was then chased off to die in the desert. It leaving the community was understood as taking the community’s sin and tension away, leaving the community free of tension by its banishment.

Jesus is our scapegoat. He takes away our sin and division, though not by banishment from the community. He takes away our sins by taking them in, carrying them, and transforming them so as not to give them back in kind. Jesus takes away sin in the same way as a water filter purifies, by holding the impurities within itself and giving back only what is pure.
When we say Jesus died for our sins, we need to understand it this way: He took in hatred and gave back love; he took in curses and gave back blessing; he took in bitterness and gave back graciousness; he took in jealousy and gave back affirmation; and he took in murder and gave back forgiveness. By absorbing our sin, differences, and jealousies, he did for us what we, in a less mature and less effective way, try to do when we crucify each other through gossip.

And that’s Jesus’ invitation to us: As adults, we are invited to step up and do what Jesus did, namely, take in the differences and jealousies around us, hold them, and transform them so as not to give them back in kind.

Then won’t we need scapegoats any more, and the steam-pipes of gossip will cease hissing and the low growl of that smallish dog inside us will finally be silent.

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

ON ORDINARY TIMES
By Lucia A. Silecchia

As 2022 came to an end, so too the earthly life of Pope Benedict XVI drew to its close. “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.”

In the days and weeks to come, much will be said about his legacy as Pope and his impact as a leading theologian of his era. I will be reflecting on that myself. As a lawyer and not a theologian, I have studied Pope Benedict’s writings on the social issues of our time to see what they may mean for pressing questions of law and public policy. I have found in them – particularly in his trio of encyclicals – a deep well from which many will continue to draw deep insights on the moral roots of modern maladies.

Personally, however, Pope Benedict’s passing has given me insights on something else – a complement to lessons learned from his predecessor almost eighteen years ago. Both St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI taught me, and the world, something profound about how to face the end of life.

St. John Paul II is the first pope I truly remember. A relatively young man when he became pope, he captivated the world with his strength, energy, peripatetic journeys to the ends of the earth, and his role on the world stage through some of the most pivotal events of the late twentieth century.

The early images of St. John Paul II showed a vigorous man on ski slopes, alighting airplanes, and with agility, kissing the ground as he entered new countries for the first time.

Yet, as he grew older, St. John Paul II showed us all, in a very public way, what it is like to suffer through illness. So often, those who are ill, frail and approaching death are hidden away. They can too often be separated from friends and family who no longer visit because it is difficult to see loved ones change. Many want to remember those in declining health “as they really were” – without realizing that when we are weak and suffering we are still, truly, who we “really” are.

I remember the very last images released of Pope St. John Paul II. They showed a man weakened by illness and bereft of the robust energy that had marked the earlier years of his papacy. Yet, in that he showed the world the great dignity of those who suffer on the way to eternal life. It is unlikely most of us will ever approach death in such a public way. However, suffering and infirmity is part of our common humanity.

From St. John Paul II, I learned a great deal about the acceptance of suffering, the importance of keeping those who suffer at the center of our lives and not at the margin, and the dignity of those who are facing their final illnesses and the physical deprivations that accompany that journey.

From Pope Benedict XVI, I learned another lesson – the importance of prayer as preparation for passage from this life. When he shocked the world with his resignation nearly a decade ago, Pope Benedict XVI turned from a very public life of action to a secluded life of prayer and contemplation. His prayer was a way to serve the church through a very powerful way vastly different from the way he had served the church through so many decades of his life.

More recently, however, public statements and reports to the press have made it clear that Pope Benedict XVI was also deep in prayer in preparation for the end of his own life when he – like all of us – would meet his God.

In that, I learned a second valuable lesson. When I look ahead, I make plans for how I will live if I am blessed with the gift of years. I think about my physical health, financial security, and what my last wishes might be for myself and my family. These things still do not cross my mind very often, but I understand the practical wisdom in attending to them with care. From Pope Benedict, I have learned that it is not merely the practical and physical planning that need attention. Rather, time spent in prayer is the often neglected and best preparation for a happy death.

It is unlikely that most of us – unless called to a contemplative vocation – will willingly make such a dramatic surrender of the active life to devote the final decade of our earthly life to prayer. Yet, if it is in prayer that we better come to know and love God, then there can be no better preparation for eternity than growing to know and love the One with whom we hope to spend that eternity. From Pope Benedict XVI I saw that lesson lived.

These two Popes – collaborators in life and in prayer – will be remembered for what they did, wrote, said and decided during their lives. But for their fellow pilgrims, the very different lessons they taught about life’s end were their final gifts and blessings.

Thank you both for the ways you surrendered your ordinary times.

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

Reflections on Life
By sister alies therese

Betrayal is a horrible experience. If you have not been betrayed, you are most fortunate; many, if not most of us have been.

The children massacred in Uvalde, the people killed in El Paso for being Hispanic or Buffalo for being Black, or Dachau for being Jewish, have certainly been betrayed. We have betrayed one another through poverty (food insecurity, unfair wages, poor health care), abortion, war, mass shootings and the death penalty, and, of course, abuse and poor eldercare. And perhaps the worst betrayal of all is convenient, rigid or complacent Christianity, Catholicism.

These keep us from friendship with God; expressed as a deepening groan or a desire to serve self. Can I set betrayal aside and learn to put others first? Will I ever be friends with God again? Where has the light of Epiphany gone? The Wise Ones chose the Light by betraying King Herod.

We can experience overpowering and challenging choices when on the road to recovery and we see that in AA or Al-anon, and various sorts of other helping communities. Depending upon how one is addicted or challenged can make choices toward recovery even more difficult. In his book “The Betrayal Bond” (1997), Dr. Patrick Carnes tells this little story:

“Tribal peoples in Africa put out slotted cages filled with fresh fruit. The cages are anchored securely to the ground. Monkeys discover the cages, reach in, and grab the fruit. Of course, they cannot retrieve the fruit because as long as the hand holds the fruit, it will not fit through the bars of the cage, the monkeys are trapped. They could let go of the fruit and escape, but they refused to let go … trauma bonds are similar….” (page 210)

We know from AA that even when one has been betrayed by family or others, institutions, and certainly booze/drugs recovery is essential to living in the light. We also know that Bill W. (co-founder of AA) received advice from Dr. Carl Jung to tell stories to be set free of strangulation by fear and intimidation. These stories might reveal how betrayal has featured in life and made friendships difficult. Perhaps the stories might show how one has become a betrayer.

So, what to do now? What have we refused to let go of in order to put betrayal in the past? Are we stuck in a trauma bond? Is the light ever to be seen again?

What is the way back to friendship? In order to restore our friendship God took on a human nature to teach us how to forgive. Betrayal features in Jesus’ life more than just the Garden. Each time followers rejected what He taught; the message of God was betrayed. When we don’t stop the tongues of gossip or stand for something we believe in, we betray not only others but our inner life. Certainly, we are betrayed when we continue any big lie…that green is yellow, yellow is green, perpetuating the lie and making our ability to follow the light more difficult.

Arthur Simon, in his book “How Much Is Enough?” (2003) relates this:

“A six-year-old boy, taken to an ER following an accident was given a glass of milk. ‘How deep shall I drink?’ he asked. He came from a very poor family in which something as precious as milk had to be shared with six brothers and sisters, drinking too deeply cheated others.” (page 132) Of course, his choice is to share or to betray his siblings. What will he do? What might I do?

George Eliot sometime in 1850 said: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”

“Forgiveness,” says Christina Baldwin, “is the act of admitting we are like other people.” We mess up, we are selfish, and we might betray ourselves when forgiveness is not on the table. Servant of God, Dorothy Day (and Peter Maurin) remind us of a basic Catholic Worker tenant: make it easy for people to be good. There is no betrayal in that. No, it is the light.

Jesus showed us the way and as we move into this new year, we might have pause to remember that – on the night He was betrayed, He left us Himself in the Eucharist to be always with us.

In 1785, Anne Letitia Barbauld noted: “Nobody ought to be too old to improve; I should be sorry if I was, and I flatter myself I have already improved considerably by my travels….” I should very much like to improve … You?
BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a canonically vowed hermit with days formed around prayer and writing.)