Category Archives: Columnists

Patience keeps us connected to God

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Father Ed Dougherty

Light one Candle
By Father Ed Dougherty, MM
Helen Keller once said, “We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.” After contracting an illness in childhood, Keller was left deaf and blind for the rest of her life. With the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, she broke through the isolation that her condition imposed upon her and went on to become a writer and lecturer. Her amazing resilience is a testament to the power of the human spirit to remain patient throughout a lifetime of struggle.
Patience is one of those intangible virtues that we can only gain through perseverance in the face of trials. Keller’s line about suffering providing opportunity to build character traits such as bravery and patience demonstrates how much she came to value the strength of spirit she cultivated in taking on personal challenges. Patience provides endurance amidst suffering and the wisdom to know how and when to take action.
The early Christian theologian Tertullian once said, “Hope is patience with the lamp lit.” What beautiful insight into the path that patience can lead us along when we allow the fire of the Holy Spirit to kindle within our hearts. That fire can direct our thoughts towards God in spite of the hardships of life, resulting in a heart filled with the hope of Christ.
Life often does not go the way we want it to, and we all face moments of profound frustration and disappointment. It takes patience to remain connected to God throughout the trials we face in order to be guided along the path we are intended to follow. The Christophers have a beautiful meditation on patience that highlights the importance of this virtue. It reads:
“Patience is a stillness that reaches deep within the human soul. It connects us with God by allowing us to pause and reflect on our actions. A patient heart waits for the resurrections that Christ effects in our lives, reviving us to a life of joy. Patience is the tender reaction of one heart to another. It is the essence of love.”
The patience we cultivate in waiting on God to guide us through difficult times prepares us to reach out to others in a loving manner. This mercy that we extend to the world is one of the great fruits of the Holy Spirit. God wants to work through us to bring good into the world, and it is only through patience that we are able to recognize the needs of others and realize the call to serve.
Patience enables us to deepen the bonds of friendship, family, and community life. These are the treasures that await all who have a clean heart in their interactions with others. Christ said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
We store up treasures in heaven when we put the good above all else, and it takes patience to do that in this world where temptation and adversity await us at every turn. So remember to be patient amid the struggles of life so that we can recognize the treasures of heaven and allow God to guide us along the path of true and lasting joy.

(Father Ed Dougherty is on the board of Directors for the Christophers. For free copies of the Christopher News Note LIVING JOYFULLY IN A STRESSED-OUT WORLD, write: The Christophers, 5 Hanover Square, New York, NY 10004; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org.)

Our ache for Earthly immortality

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Father Ron Rolheiser

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We share the world with more than seven and a half billion people and each of us has the irrepressible, innate sense that we are special and uniquely destined. This isn’t surprising since each one of us is indeed unique and special. But how does one feel special among seven and half billion others?
We try to stand out. Generally we don’t succeed and so, as Allan Jones puts it, “We nurse within our hearts the hope that we are different, that we are special, that we are extraordinary. We long for the assurance that our birth was no accident, that a god had a hand in our coming to be, that we exist by divine fiat. We ache for a cure for the ultimate disease of mortality. Our madness comes when the pressure is too great and we fabricate a vital lie to cover up the fact that we are mediocre, accidental, mortal. We fail to see the glory of the Good News. The vital lie is unnecessary because all the things we truly long for have been freely given us.”
All of us know what those words mean: We sense that we are extraordinary, precious and significant, irrespective of our practical fortunes in life. Deep down we have the feeling that we are uniquely loved and specially called to a life of meaning and significance. We know too, though more in faith than in feeling, that we are precious not on the basis of what we accomplish but rather on the basis of having been created and loved by God.
But this intuition, however deep in our souls, invariably wilts in the face of trying to live a life that’s unique and special in a world in which billions of others are also trying to do the same thing. And so we can be overwhelmed by a sense of our own mediocrity, anonymity and mortality and begin to fear that we’re not precious but are merely another-among-many, nobody special, one of billions, living among billions. When we feel like this, we are tempted to believe that we are precious and unique only when we accomplish something which precisely sets us apart and ensures that we will be remembered. For most of us, the task of our lives then becomes that of guaranteeing our own preciousness, meaning and immortality because, at the end of the day, we believe that this is contingent upon our own accomplishments, on creating our own specialness.
And so we struggle to be content with ordinary lives of anonymity, hidden in God. Rather we try to stand out, to leave a mark, to accomplish something extraordinary and so ensure that we will be recognized and remembered. Few things impede our peace and happiness as does this effort. We set for ourselves the impossible, frustrating task of assuring for ourselves something which only God can give us, significance and immortality. Ordinary life then never seems enough for us and we live restless, competitive, driven lives. Why isn’t ordinary life enough for us? Why do our lives always seem too small and not exciting enough? Why do we habitually feel dissatisfied at not being special?
Why our need to leave a mark? Why does our own situation often feel so suffocating? Why can’t we more easily embrace each other as sisters and brothers and rejoice in each other’s gifts and each other’s existence? Why the perennial feeling that the other is a rival? Why the need for masks, for pretense, to project a certain image about ourselves?
The answer: We do all of these things to try to set ourselves apart because we are trying to give ourselves something that only God can give us, significance and immortality.
Scripture tells us that “faith alone saves.” That simple line reveals the secret: Only God gives eternal life. Preciousness, meaning, significance and immortality are free gifts from God and we would be a whole lot more restful, peaceful, humble, grateful, happy and less competitive if we could believe that. A humble ordinary life, shared with billions of others, would then contain enough to give us a sense of our preciousness, meaning and significance.
Thomas Merton, on one of his less restless days wrote: “It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my Fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live so as to gradually forget program and artifice.”
Ordinary life is enough. There isn’t any need to make an assertion with our lives. Our preciousness and meaning lie within the preciousness and meaning of life itself, not in having to accomplish something special.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

What makes us weep? The Kingdom of God is close at hand…

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Sister alies therese

Millennial reflections
By Sister alies therese
Lent has begun and we celebrate the glorious season of weeping. What? Really? Yes, and it will end with Easter where we challenge all the death-dealing we have pronounced evil and emerge on the other side of Holy Week weeping for joy!
What makes us weep? What moves the heart so profoundly that we cannot hold back the tears? I have wept at the deathbed of a young boy; in our torn community after an F4 tornado devastated us; at the awesomeness of the stars; at Pope Francis in Chile ministering to the women in prison or the people of the Amazon in Peru, and certainly in the face of my own sin and thoughtlessness. Continue reading →

Every column/sermon/task becomes meditation

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Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD

Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
Though the following thoughts seem only clerical in nature, they pertain to every human being. When taken into ourselves and absorbed as part of us, a column, sermon, task and all human endeavors take on a life to themselves, becoming as much a part of us as the air we breathe and the nourishment we ingest. While others must speak from their own unique experience, I personally find that I am not doing a thing right until I become totally immersed in the task at hand, so that it becomes an extension of me. That ipso facto elevates it to the wonderful nosebleed realm of meditation, creative imaginings and expectations.
So how about that? Whatever we do can become a special meditation, firing our juices of imagination, creativity and outreach to our sisters and brothers. Take a column, for example. Little seems to click or flow until something locks into my thoughts and feelings. Almost as if a switch were turned on, the things that I have been reading, the things that people have been saying and doing blend together.
Like the ingredients of a delicious meal or the components of an exquisite symphony, meditation combines everything into a fine creation and rendition. One knows whether a given column or talk will resonate with others by asking oneself, “Does it speak to me, resonate with me, move me to good and higher things? Does it ring a bell for me? That is what a preacher/speaker/writer wants to know at the zero hour. If it does, bells will be ringing for the audience at some level as well.
There are, of course, techniques for composing, writing, speaking formally or informally, making eye contact with each person in a small group or large crowd, convincing each person that you are addressing her or him alone, storytelling in a spellbinding way and interacting with audiences of many varieties and origins. All those things are wrapped up into one when they have become completely part of us. This is not a grandiose view of ourselves and our capabilities. It merely states that we are at our best and most convincing when we give what is uniquely ourselves.
Are these the mere ramblings of a weathered curmudgeon, or, we would hope, of a seasoned seeker hoping to become a savant with many treasure troves?
The latter is indeed what we hope for ourselves and for everyone else. Far from being mere ramblings, we would like to have all the reflections, meditations, imaginings and creations of each person grow out from the very Gospel of God that Romans 1:16 tells us “is the power of God unto salvation.”
This is a paradigm for the laity, for religious and clergy alike, for we all have very similar reactions to words, actions and challenges. Nevertheless, Saint Thomas Aquinas observes how individual we are, “Quidquid recipitur, ad modum recipientis recipitur.” “Whatever is received, is received according to the disposition of the recipient.” Who we are, what we are, how we are, is a composite that determines how we react to and interact with everyone and everything. We are all so very different and, notwithstanding, so very similar to each other. We are wonders, laughing at ourselves as we strive to be the top of the tip and the tip of the top.
No one comes to us, panting to watch us impersonate or imitate some great speaker, a scintillating performer, a wise counselor or engaging, livewire friend. Had people wanted that, they would have gone to check the great ones out. But no! What they come to see and hear are the low-level, everyday people that we are, in whose presence they have no fears or anxieties, they can drop all their defenses, they can let themselves go, they can laugh themselves silly, they can cry their hearts out, they can play the fool and be their little old selves without fear of criticism or rebuke.
Another variant of all this is expressed by Paul as he goes a step further in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.” This involves a favorite theme of ours, the good intention, that turns all that we do into spiritual gold, silver and precious stones. Even as we are involved in turning a column, sermon or any kind of task or chore into a meditation, an intimate part of our very selves, we can crystallize all of it into a glorious offering to God by dedicating it to God in the morning and throughout the day.
I certainly hope this does not sound like complicated, convoluted ramblings. The last thing in the world that we need is more complications in our lives. Honestly, I believe that all these thoughts are easy to remember and understand because they are closely related and interlock with each other. Perhaps we can remember them most easily by saying, “In whatever you think, say or do, be all you can be.”
“God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.” (1 John 4:16)

(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

Lawmakers, Catholics can do more for state, nation

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Will Jemison

Black History Month
By Will Jemison
As we celebrate the contributions of Black folk in this country during Black History Month, I pause to consider how much further we as a nation could be if we were to ever use the influence of our Catholic faith and teachings for more than one or two issues. We currently live in a state that consistently votes against its own interests for nearly every statewide or federal election, yet we wonder why our roads continually are in disrepair, our public education system is historically at the bottom of every scholastic poll and we remain at the top of nearly every health disparity list in the country.
We as Catholics have done an amazing job fighting for the rights of the unborn for decades, yet when it comes to fighting for quality of life for those after birth, we have much more work to do. The failures of many of our elected officials is a mirror-image of what our nation has become. In the past year, America has gone from being an example of hope, prosperity and possibility to precisely what President Donald Trump described Haiti, El Salvador and all the African continent as in recent weeks, a “toilet” country.
Despite his remarks on these black and brown countries, many of which have large populations of our Catholic brothers and sisters, more knowledgeable people are aware of how many of those “toilet” countries have contributed greatly to this country and how our country used prejudicial policies to ensure those same countries remained under-developed.
Haitian soldiers were among the first international supporters of the American Revolution, sending hundreds of men to Savannah, Georgia to fight for America against the British. The Haitian men fought valiantly and in return, just as it’s done for centuries, America failed to acknowledge their contributions and then relegated them to second-class citizenship after the war and later refused to acknowledge the newly formed Haitian government upon its independence from France.
Meanwhile, while our own government survives off temporary spending bills and questionable leadership, several of these countries in Africa are continuing to advance an agenda of progress spearheaded by their respective governments. The nation of Rwanda is set to effectively eliminate cervical cancer within its borders by 2020. Sierra Leone provides free prenatal care for pregnant women and children younger than five years of age. In all, sub-Saharan African immigrants to the United States are ranked among the most educated, with nearly 40 percent of them holding a college degree, compared to just 30 percent of American-born individuals.
After he chose to use such vile and egregious language, the president said he longs for more immigrants from Nordic countries such as Norway. What he consistently fails to realize is Norway and several other industrialized nations long ago concluded for reasons of economic prosperity, social cohesion, productivity and humanity to implement a social safety net and basic access to health care that the president and his party comrades have opposed from the New Deal to the Affordable Care Act.
Sadly, President Trump isn’t alone in his racist rhetoric and certainly falls in line with a great many “good” Christians in this state who’ve upheld Jim Crow era segregationist policies for generations. We don’t have to look further than our own state capital and our legislators who recently voted to end adequate funding for K-12 education throughout Mississippi and considered a bill (SB #2175) that would have ended Medicaid expansion throughout Mississippi at the same time our statewide Medicaid enrollment exceeds 75 percent (3 out of every 4 people) of our total state population.
Many of these same legislators in recent years have ensured little or no funding for mental health and other critical care needs for the citizens of this state. This blatant disregard for the welfare of our brothers and sisters is something that all Catholics should be concerned about. Legislation that fails to allow for the safe-keeping and general welfare of our neighbors – from all walks of life – are in direct conflict with Catholic Social Teaching.
What can you do to celebrate Black History Month? Be aware of what’s taking place in our state and our country and work to steer this ship on a much better course. Bigotry, racism and classism isn’t specific to one party, race or gender, but we all can work to right the ills of the past and keep us from repeating it.

(Will Jemison is coordinator for Black Catholic Ministry for the Diocese of Jackson)

Liturgy calls Church to unity

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Aaron Williams

Spirit and Truth
By Deacon Aaron M. Williams
“Jesus said to [the Samaritan woman], ‘The hour is coming, and now is, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him’” (John 4:23). During my diaconate internship in Meridian this past year, I taught a course on the sacred liturgy entitled “Spirit and Truth” — taken from this passage of the Gospel of John, which incidentally was the gospel at my diaconate ordination. In this passage, our Lord meets the Samaritan woman and enters a dialogue with her which causes her to realize that he is the Messiah. One of the questions she poses to the Lord involves a matter of the law of worship. Whereas the Jews worshiped in Jerusalem, the Samaritans worshipped in their own district (and therefore were seen as outcasts by the Jews). Christ reveals that in the new covenant, it will not matter if God is worshipped in a particular city, but that he be worshiped in a particular way — in “spirit and truth”.
Now, when we hear these words, we can mistakenly interpret them to mean that the worship Christ desires is some sort of non-physical reality. That is what “spiritual” means, after all. But, the Lord himself explains these terms in the next verse. He says, “God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (vs 24). In the Jewish mind, to do something “spiritual” was to do something that only God was capable of doing. Every day rituals and animal sacrifice were offered in the temple in Jerusalem, but these were “human” acts — they were done by men at the command of God. But, even in the Jewish mind, these acts could not have truly pleased God, but only functioned to give thanks or make atonement for personal blessings and sins. The promise of Christ to the Samaritan woman is that somehow men and women will perform “spiritual” worship. In other words, somehow they themselves will do something that only God can do — the only sort of worship that could please truly God.
And not only that, but this worship will be done in “truth.” It will be authentic, lawful, and in accordance with He who is Truth, which we know to be Jesus Christ. Thus, Our Lord is promising the Samaritan woman that the worship offered by the people of the New Covenant, though not offered in the temple in Jerusalem, will be even greater because it will be enabled by God and be truly perfect.
This is a great promise to all of us, of the great dignity we have, by offering God our the worship of the Church — the Sacred Liturgy, which his the fulfillment of Christ’s promise in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. The Church is able to offer this spiritual worship by virtue of our Baptism, whereby all of us are conformed to Christ and enabled by Christ to participate in his mystical worship of the Father. Therefore, unlike the people of the Old Covenant, our worship, when done as part of the Church — which is the Mystical Body of Christ — can truly please God, because it is not the actions of men or women, but of Christ. In the Sacred Liturgy, we are made participants in Christ’s perfect worship of the Father.
Regrettably, even in light of the astounding generosity of our Lord, who grants us such a great dignity by share in this ‘gift of God’ (cf. John 4:10), many people within the Church miss the point of Christ’s promise and instead focus on the same questions of the Samaritan woman. “Should we worship in Jerusalem or Samaria?” “Should we do this practice or ought this custom be forbidden?”
The Sacred Liturgy, which ought to be the most unifying aspect of the Christian life, is often a source of division in the Church. This is mainly because some people, intending to do what is right, begin to forget that the liturgy — the worship of God — does not belong to them, but to the Church and primarily to Christ. We are participants in his action. And, though there is room for our own humanity to shine through by the various customs we observe in the liturgy, it would be a terrible error if we allowed that personal expression to overshadow the unifying and ultimate action of Jesus Christ in the liturgy.
It is for that reason that I decided to start this column. I am confident that the controversy and division present in the Church regarding the liturgy cannot be solved either by providing a list of rules or a encouraging a spirit of individualism. Rather, by seeking to come to knowledge of what the liturgy is intending to do, and who is acting, we can be far more equipped to address the matter of how this action is meant to be done.

(Deacon Aaron Williams and his classmate, Deacon Nicholas Adam, are completing their final semester of seminary formation before their priestly ordinations on May 31, 2018 see page 11 for details.)

Overcoming the Divisions that Divide Us

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Father Ron Rolheiser

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We live in a world of deep divisions. Everywhere we see polarization, people bitterly divided from each other by ideology, politics, economic theory, moral beliefs, and theology. We tend to use over-simplistic categories within which to understand these divisions: the left and the right opposing each other, liberals and conservatives at odds, pro-life vying with pro-choice.
Virtually every social and moral issue is a war-zone: the status of women, climate change, gender roles, sexuality, marriage and family as institutions, the role of government, how the LGBTQ community is to be understood, among other issues. And our churches aren’t exempt; too often we cannot agree on anything. Civility has disappeared from public discourse even within our churches where there is now as much division and hostility within each denomination as there is between them. More and more, we cannot discuss openly any sensitive matter, even within our own families. Instead we discuss politics, religion, and values only within our own ideological circles; and there, rather than challenging each other, we mostly end up feeding each other in our biases and indignations thus becoming even more intolerant, bitter, and judgmental.
Scripture calls this enmity, hatred, and indeed that’s its proper name. We are becoming hate-filled people who both fuel and justify our hatred on religious and moral grounds. We need only to watch the news on any night to see this. How’s this to be overcome?
At the more macro level in politics and religion, it’s hard to see how these bitter divides will ever be bridged, especially when so much of our public discourse is feeding and widening the division. What’s needed is nothing short of religious conversion, a religious change of heart, and that’s contingent on the individual. The collective heart will change only when individual hearts first do. We help save the sanity of the world by first safeguarding our own sanity, but that’s no easy task.
It’s not as simple as everyone simply agreeing to think nicer thoughts. Nor, it seems, will we find much common ground in our public dialogues. The dialogue that’s needed isn’t easily come by; certainly we haven’t come by it yet. Many groups are trying for it, but without much success. Generally what happens is that the even most-well intended dialogue quickly degenerates into an attempt to by each side to score its own ideological points rather than in genuinely trying to understand each other. Where does that leave us?
The real answer, I believe, lies in an understanding of how the cross and death of Jesus brings about reconciliation. The author of the Letter to the Ephesians tells us that Jesus broke down the barrier of hostility that existed between communities by creating one person where formerly there had been two – and he did it this “by reconciling both [sides] in one body through his cross, which put that enmity to death.” (Ephesians 2, 16)
How does the cross of Christ put enmity to death? Not through some kind of magic. Jesus didn’t break down the divisions between us by mystically paying off some debt for our sins through his suffering, as if God needed to be appeased by blood to forgive us and open the gates of heaven. That image is simply the metaphor behind our icons and language about being washed clean of sin and saved by the blood of Christ. What happened in the cross and death of Jesus is something that asks for our imitation not simply our admiration. What happened in the cross and death of Jesus is an example for us to imitate. What are we to imitate?
What Jesus did in his passion and death was to transform bitterness and division rather than to retransmit them and give them back in kind. In the love which he showed in his passion and death Jesus did this: He took in hatred, held it inside himself, transformed it, and gave back love. He took in bitterness, held it, transformed it, and gave back graciousness. He took in curses, held them, transformed them, and gave back blessing. He took in paranoia, held it, transformed it, and gave back big-heartedness. He took in murder, held it, transformed it, and gave back forgiveness. And he took in enmity, bitter division, held it, transformed it, and through that revealed to us the deep secret for forming community, namely, we need to take away the hatred that divides us by absorbing and holding it within ourselves and thereby transforming it. Like a water purifier which holds within itself the toxins and the poisons and gives back only pure water, we must hold within ourselves the toxins that poison community and give back only graciousness and openness to everyone. That’s the only key to overcome division.
We live in bitterly divisive times, paralyzed in terms of meeting amicably on virtually every sensitive issue of politics, economics, morality, and religion. That stalemate will remain until one by one, we each transform rather than enflame and retransmit the hatred that divides us.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Getting organized for love

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Sister Constance Veit

Little Sisters of the Poor
By Sister Constance Veit, l.s.p.
I began the new year with 8,000 college students at the Student Leadership Summit (SLS18) of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS). It was an inspiring event that enabled us Little Sisters to engage with hundreds of enthusiastic young people on fire for their Catholic faith.
As exciting as the whole event was, the most moving moment for me was completely unexpected. During Eucharistic adoration, Jesus Christ present in the monstrance started moving through the crowd, carried by a team of bishops and priests. An entourage of altar servers led the procession with candles and incense.
What caught my eye was one of the white robed altar servers walking backwards, swinging a thurible from which billowed sweetly scented smoke, his attention firmly fixed on Christ in the Eucharist. The only thing that kept him from stumbling into the crowd of young people was a second altar server who kept his hand firmly planted on the first man’s shoulder to direct his every move.
It was a highly choreographed and striking scene – this entourage of clergy and altar servers walking together in perfect unity, leading one another, supporting each other’s efforts to carry Christ! I was profoundly struck by this “holy teamwork,” which must have required significant practice and single-minded focus.
This Eucharistic procession was a fitting metaphor for the ideals of solidarity and union of hearts and minds in continuing our Lord’s mission on earth. Imagine the wonderful things we could do for Jesus if each Catholic apostolate, religious community or lay movement were this well ordered and united around a common purpose! In his encyclical on love, Pope Benedict XVI said, “As a community, the Church must practice love. Love thus needs to be organized if it is to be an ordered service to the community.”
As we head into Lent this month, we first celebrate the World Day of the Sick on Feb. 11. Just as the procession I witnessed at SLS18 kept Our Eucharistic Lord at the center as it moved through the crowd of young people – a veritable field hospital of souls – Catholic health care is called to place the human person at the center of all its activities, projects and goals.
In his message for this year’s World Day of the Sick Pope Francis wrote, “Wise organization and charity demand that the sick person be respected in his or her dignity, and constantly kept at the center of the therapeutic process.”
Our Holy Father continued, “Jesus bestowed upon the Church his healing power … The Church’s mission is a response to Jesus’ gift, for she knows that she must bring to the sick the Lord’s own gaze, full of tenderness and compassion. Health care ministry will always be a necessary and fundamental task, to be carried out with renewed enthusiasm by all, from parish communities to the largest healthcare institutions.”
Pope Francis recognized the invaluable contribution of families, “The care given within families is an extraordinary witness of love for the human person; it needs to be fittingly acknowledged and supported by suitable policies.”
He also speaks of healthcare as a shared ministry: “Doctors and nurses, priests, consecrated men and women, volunteers, families and all those who care for the sick, take part in this ecclesial mission. It is a shared responsibility that enriches the value of the daily service given by each.”
As we observe the World Day of the Sick and then begin our Lenten practices of prayer, penance and almsgiving, let’s resolve to keep Jesus Christ and the human person at the center of our spiritual efforts and works of mercy.
And let’s endeavor to give the world a striking witness of the unity of Christ’s disciples. May the world be able to say of us, “The believers are of one heart and mind … sharing everything they have” (cf. Acts 4:32). May our united efforts to serve the poor, the sick and the most vulnerable among us lead others to believe in the power of God’s love at work in the world!

(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

Reclaiming call to lives of service for laity

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Guest Column
By Cathy Hayden
Catholics these days are fortunate in that we have many resources available to us to strengthen our faith. My favorite resource is Give Us This Day Daily Prayer for Today’s Catholics published by Liturgical Press.
One of the features I always enjoy reading is the daily “Blessed Among Us” column written by Robert Ellsberg featuring a saint, church father, martyr or even politician, activist or civic leader whose life offers inspiration. If you read these over time, you can see it’s an eclectic group of people, many Catholic but also some of other faiths.
Their lives are inspiring, but one frustrating thing for me is that their accomplishments are often so lofty they seem out of reach for me. Many of them do big and great things in leading people to Jesus, often being martyred for their actions. Some of their lives and accomplishments are so long ago, and often foreign in their significance, that I can’t relate. Where are the praiseworthy people whose lives more closely mirror mine?
That’s why the presentation of Dr. Tom Neal, academic dean and professor of spiritual theology at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, made me sit up and take notice. He was a speaker in the very last breakout session of a pithy three-day Go! Gulf Coast Faith Formation Conference for catechists on Jan. 11-13.
Neal’s talk was called “Saints for the World: Discovering Anew the Secular Mission of the Laity.” Among his points were that “the call to holiness is lived out in the secular world” and “the laity is not the second shift.”
Church employees, he said, are not the primary workers in God’s vineyard. Instead, “the role of the church is to support the laity.”
“Be a secular genius,” he said. Change the culture where you are. In other words, bloom where you are planted.
Neal wrote about the talk the next day in his regular blog called “Neal Obstate Theological Opining”:
In Catholic Culture, deeply influenced by the hostility of atheistic secularism to theistic secularism, we tend to think of “secular” as a pejorative, i.e. as hopelessly tainted, of less importance than the “spiritual,” as intrinsically alienating from God, or maybe at best as just neutral “stuff” we have to endure or use as we make our way toward the eternity of heaven, which is obviously not secular. So devout Catholics tend to say things like, “I don’t get involved in secular things like I used to,” or “I used to be totally secular but now I am much more spiritual.” So when Vatican II says that “what is peculiar to the laity is their secular genius” and that their path to holiness is found in “secular professions,” it all seems so, well, wrong.
If we re-claim the Catholic sense of secular, we realize that such negative statements are misguided …
I think this is an exciting reminder for those of us whose livelihood and daily lives exist in the secular world. Oh, sure, we know this in some ways already, right? But Neal’s talk reminded me that my work in being the leaven in the secular world is needed and is important. It’s not just an afterthought. I can’t leave the work of Jesus to my pastor on Sundays. After all, I’m the one in the trenches during the typical workday in an environment where not everyone follows, or even knows, Jesus. It is up to me to show them who he is with my love.
Perhaps that is why this part of the conclusion to “Everyone’s Way of the Cross” has always appealed to me so strongly. I always savor this with extra conviction:
So seek me not in far-off places.
I am close at hand.
Your workbench, office, kitchen,
These are altars
Where you offer love.
And I am with you there.
Especially as we head into the Lenten season, that is my call to action. And yours too!

(Cathy Hayden, a member of the RCIA team at St. Jude in Pearl, received a Master of Theological Studies degree from Spring Hill College in May 2017. She is director of Public Relations at Hinds Community College.)

Pope Francis calls for church with ‘Amazonian and indigenous’ face

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By Barbara J. Fraser
PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru – Pope Francis called on indigenous people of the Amazon to work with missionaries and bishops to shape a church with an “Amazonian and indigenous” face.
The pope pledged the church’s “whole-hearted option for the defense of life, the defense of the earth and the defense of cultures” and called his audience to work together toward the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon, which he has called for 2019.
“The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,” Pope Francis said. “Amazonia is not only a reserve of biodiversity, but also a cultural reserve that must be preserved in the face of the new forms of colonialism.”
He also called for a change in the consumer culture that extracts resources from the Amazon without regard for the people who live there, and he had harsh words for officials who consider indigenous people an obstacle to development.
“Your lives cry out against a style of life that is oblivious to its own real cost,” the pope told the audience of some 2,500 indigenous people from Peru, Brazil and Bolivia.
Upon his arrival in this Amazonian town, the pope was welcomed by children who chanted, “Pope Francis is Amazonian now.” Once in Madre de Dios stadium, dancers in feathered headdresses accompanied him as he greeted the crowd.
Members of various indigenous peoples presented the pope with gifts that reflected their culture, including a basket, painting, book and woven stole. The pope left the stadium wearing a feathered headdress and strings of beads typically worn by community chiefs, presented to him by Santiago Manuin Valera, an Awajun leader from northern Peru.
The pope said he had come to listen to the people of this Amazonian region, which is rich in natural resources and indigenous cultures but increasingly devastated by illegal mining, deforestation and social problems.
A Harakbut woman and man and an Awajun woman described the threats their peoples face from outsiders who take timber and other resources from their lands, as well as their fear that their cultures could disappear and their efforts to keep those cultures alive
The pope echoed their concerns, listing oil and gas, mining, logging, industrial agriculture and even conservation programs as activities that do not take indigenous peoples into account, but “strangle” them and force young people to migrate because of a lack of alternatives.
“We have to break with the historical paradigm that views Amazonia as an inexhaustible source of supplies for other countries without concern for its inhabitants,” he said.
The pope praised the church’s work among native peoples in the Amazon, although he acknowledged errors. In many parts of the Amazon, missionaries started the first schools for indigenous children.
While noting that education and building schools is the government’s job, Pope Francis urged the Amazonian bishops to continue to encourage intercultural and bilingual education in schools, universities and teacher training programs.
Echoing the Harakbut speakers who had greeted him, he emphasized that education for native people must “build bridges and create a culture of encounter,” in a way that “respects and integrates their ancestral wisdom as a treasure belonging to the whole nation.”
The pope praised young indigenous people who are “working to reinterpret the history of their peoples from their own perspective,” as well as those who “show the world your worldview and your cultural richness” through art, music, crafts and literature.
“Much has been written and spoken about you,” he said. “It is good that you are now the ones to define yourselves and show us your identity. We need to listen to you.”
The pope urged his listeners, many of whom are pastoral agents in remote rural communities and poor urban areas, not to let their people’s Catholic faith be uprooted. Each culture “enriches the church by showing a new aspect of Christ’s face,” he said.
Pope Francis encouraged them to draw on the wisdom of their peoples, especially elders, to counter the pressures they face and to dialogue with missionaries and bishops.
“We need the native peoples to shape the culture of the local churches in Amazonia,” he said.