IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In a recent article in America magazine, Grant Kaplan, commenting on the challenge of the resurrection, makes this comment: “Unlike previous communities in which the bond among members forges itself through those it excludes and scapegoats, the gratuity of the resurrection allows for a community shaped by forgiven-forgivers.”
What he is saying, among other things, is that mostly we form community through demonizing and exclusion, that is, we bond with each other more on the basis of what we are against and what we hate than on the basis of what we are for and hold precious. The cross and the resurrection, and the message of Jesus in general, invite us to a deeper maturity within which we are invited to form community with each other on the basis of love and inclusion rather than upon hatred and demonization.
How do we scapegoat, demonise and exclude so as to form community with each other? A number of anthropologists, particularly Rene Girard and Gil Bailie, have given us some good insights on how scapegoating and demonization worked in ancient times and how they work today.
In brief, here’s how they work: Until we can bring ourselves to a certain level of maturity, both personal and collective, we will always form community by scapegoating. Imagine this scenario: A group of us (family or colleagues) are going to dinner. Almost always there will be some divisive tensions among us – personality clashes, jealousies, wounds from the past and religious, ideological and political differences. But these can remain under the surface and we can enjoy a nice dinner together.
How? By talking about other people whom we mutually dislike, despise, fear, or find weird or particularly eccentric. As we “demonize” them by emphasizing how awful, bad, weird, or eccentric they are, our own differences slide wonderfully under the surface and we form bonds of empathy and mutuality with each other. By demonizing others we find commonality among ourselves.  Of course, you’re reluctant to excuse yourself and go to the bathroom, for fear that, in your absence; you might well be the next item on the menu.
Moreover, we do that too in our individual lives to maintain balance. If we’re honest, we probably all have to admit the tendency within us to steady ourselves by blaming our anxieties and bad feelings on someone else.  For example: We go out some morning and for various reasons feel out of sorts, agitated and angry in some inchoate way. More often than not, it won’t take us long to pin that uneasiness on someone else by, consciously or unconsciously, blaming them for our bad feeling. Our sense is that except for that person we wouldn’t be feeling these things!
Someone else is blame for our agitation! Once we have done this we begin to feel better because we have just made someone else responsible for our pain. As a colorful commentary on this, I like to quote a friend who submits this axiom: If the first two people you meet in the morning are irritating and hard to get along with, there’s a very good chance that you’re the one who’s irritating and hard to get along with.
Sadly we see this played out in the world as a whole. Our churches and our politics thrive on this.  Both in our churches and in our civic communities, we tend to form community with our own kind by demonizing others. Our differences do not have to be dealt with, nor do we have to deal with the things within ourselves that help cause those differences, because we can blame someone else for our problems. Not infrequently church groups bond together by doing this, politicians are elected by doing this, and wars are justified and waged on this basis – and the rich, healthy concepts of loyalty, patriotism and religious affiliation then become unhealthy because they now root themselves in seeing differences primarily as a threat rather than seeing them as bringing a fuller revelation of God into our lives.
Granted, sometimes what’s different does pose a real threat, and that threat has to be met. But, even then, we must continue to look inside of ourselves and examine what in us might be complicit in causing that division, hatred, or jealousy, which is now being projected on us. Positive threat must be met, but it is best met the way Jesus met threats, namely, with love, empathy and forgiveness. Demonizing others to create community among ourselves is neither the way of Jesus nor the way of human maturity. Loyalty to one’s own, loyalty to one’s religion, loyalty to one’s country and loyalty to one’s moral values must be based upon what is good and precious within one’s family, community, religion, country and moral principles, and not on fear and negative feelings towards others.
The lesson in Jesus, especially in his death and resurrection, is that genuine religion, genuine maturity, genuine loyalty and genuine patriotism lie in letting ourselves be stretched by what does not emanate from our own kind.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Word on Fire
By Bishop Robert Barron
A recent issue of Time Magazine features a fascinating and deeply troubling article on the prevalence of pornography in our culture. The focus of the piece is on the generation of young men now coming of age, the first generation who grew up with unlimited access to hardcore pornography on the Internet.
The statistics on this score are absolutely startling. Most young men commence their pornography use at the age of eleven; there are approximately 107 million monthly visitors to adult websites in this country; 12 million hours a day are spent watching porn globally on the adult-video site Pornhub; 40 percent of boys in Great Britain say that they regularly consume pornography — and on and on.
All of this wanton viewing of live-action pornography has produced, many are arguing, an army of young men who are incapable of normal and satisfying sexual activity with real human beings. Many twenty-somethings are testifying that when they have the opportunity for sexual relations with their wives or girlfriends, they cannot perform.
And in the overwhelming majority of cases, this is not a physiological issue, which is proved by the fact that they can still become aroused easily by images on a computer screen. The sad truth is that for these young men, sexual stimulation is associated not with flesh and blood human beings, but with flickering pictures of physically perfect people in virtual reality.
Moreover, since they start so young, they have been compelled, as they get older, to turn to ever more bizarre and violent pornography in order to get the thrill that they desire. And this in turn makes them incapable of finding conventional, non-exotic sex even vaguely interesting.
This state of affairs has led a number of men from the affected generation to lead the charge to disenthrall their contemporaries from the curse of pornography. Following the example of various anti-addiction programs, they are setting up support groups, speaking out about the dangers of porn, advocating for restrictions on adult websites, getting addicts into contact with sponsors who will challenge them, etc. And all of this, it seems to me, is to the good.
But what really struck me in the Time article is that neither the author nor anyone that he interviewed or referenced ever spoke of pornography use as something morally objectionable. It has apparently come to the culture’s attention only because it has resulted in erectile dysfunction! The Catholic Church — and indeed all of decent society until about 40 years ago — sees pornography as, first and foremost, an ethical violation, a deep distortion of human sexuality, an unconscionable objectification of persons who should never be treated as anything less than subjects.
That this ethical distortion results in myriad problems, both physical and psychological, goes without saying, but the Catholic conviction is that those secondary consequences will not be adequately addressed unless the underlying issue be dealt with.
It is precisely on this point that we come up against a cultural block. Though Freud’s psychological theorizing has been largely discredited, a fundamental assumption of Freudianism remains an absolute bedrock of our culture. I’m referring to the conviction that most of our psychological suffering follows as a consequence from the suppression of our sexual desires. Once we have been liberated from old taboos regarding sex, this line of argument runs, we will overcome the neuroses and psychoses that so bedevil us. What was once the peculiar philosophy of a Viennese psychiatrist came to flower in the 1960’s, at least in the West, and then made its way into practically every nook and cranny of the culture.
How often have we heard some version of this argument: as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you should be allowed to do whatever pleases you in the sexual arena. What the Time article articulates in regard to the specific issue of pornography has been, in point of fact, glaringly obvious for quite some time: Freud was wrong.
Complete sexual freedom has not made us psychologically healthier, just the contrary. It has deeply sickened our society. The valorization of unrestricted freedom in regard to sex — precisely because it is morally corrupt — proves psychologically debilitating as well.
Whereas Freud, in the manner of most modern thinkers, principally valorized freedom, the church valorizes love, which is to say, willing the good of the other. Just as moderns tend to reduce everything to freedom, the Church reduces everything to love, by which I mean, it puts all things in relation to love. Sex is, on the Biblical reading, good indeed, but its goodness is a function of its subordination to the demand of love.
When it loses that mooring — as it necessarily does when freedom is reverenced as the supreme value — it turns into something other than what it is meant to be. The laws governing sexual behavior, which the Freudian can read only as “taboos” and invitations to repression, are in fact the manner in which the relation between sex and love is maintained. And upon the maintenance of that relation depends our psychological and even physical health as well. That to me is the deepest lesson of the Time article.
(Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.)

Guest Column
By Sister Constance Veit, lsp.
We Little Sisters spend our lives caring for the elderly, but I try to keep up with young people as much as I can. Last week I read a blog for young women about the impact of our throw-away culture on the quality of personal relationships. The more we move around, according to a recent study, the more likely we are to develop attitudes of disposability toward our material possessions – and we also come to perceive relationships in the same way.
An attitude of disposability promotes superficiality rather than deep personal relationships. Research suggests disposability is detrimental to our mental and physical health. It’s no wonder that while they often seem absorbed in their mobile devices, young people crave real community and truly meaningful relationships.
Pope Francis understands the hearts of the young. His message for this year’s World Day of Prayer for Vocations, celebrated April 17, is based on the realization that vocations are born within the community that is the church. “The call of God comes to us by means of a mediation which is communal,” the pope wrote. “God calls us to become a part of the church and, after we have reached a certain maturity within it, he bestows on us a specific vocation. The vocational journey is undertaken together with the brothers and sisters whom the Lord has given to us: it is a con-vocation.”
Our Holy Father asserts that this “ecclesial dynamism” is a cure for the indifference and individualism too prevalent in our society. It establishes “the communion in which indifference is vanquished by love, because it demands that we go beyond ourselves and place our lives at the service of God’s plan, embracing the historical circumstances of his holy people.”
My conversations with women in discernment confirm that young people strongly desire life in community. At the same time, they want to give the best of themselves to the church. How important it is for us as a community of faith to journey with young people in discernment, and to support their first steps into the priesthood and consecrated life!
It is no less important to offer our friendship to mature priests and consecrated women and men who give of themselves each day for the sake of God’s people. I cannot begin to express how much the support of countless members of the church meant to us Little Sisters of the Poor in the months leading up to our recent Supreme Court case. Many people commended us for our courage, telling us that we were standing up for religious believers of all faiths. But we could never have done it without the prayerful support of so many!
As we celebrated the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Pope Francis is calling on all the faithful to appreciate the ecclesial dynamism of vocations, “so that communities of faith can become, after the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary, like a mother’s womb giving birth to new vocations. “The motherhood of the church finds expression in constant prayer for vocations and in the work of educating and accompanying all those who perceive God’s call,” the pope wrote. “The church is also the mother of vocations in her continual support of those who have dedicated their lives to the service of others.”
When people asked our foundress, St. Jeanne Jugan, to pray for them, or when she wished to thank someone, she often suggested, “Let us say a Hail Mary together.” Let’s be mothers and fathers of vocations by offering a Hail Mary – or a whole rosary – for the priests and religious who have influenced us, and for the young people in whom we perceive the potential to be holy priests and consecrated women and men!
(Sister Constance Veit is the communications director for the Little Sisters of the Poor in the United States.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In the movie based upon Jane Austen’s classic novel, “Sense and Sensibility,” there’s a very poignant scene where one of her young heroines, suffering from acute pneumonia, is lying in bed hovering between life and death. A young man, very much in love with her, is pacing back and forth, highly agitated, frustrated by his helplessness to do anything of use, and literally jumping out of his skin.
Unable to contain his agitation any longer, he goes to the girl’s mother and asks what he might do to be helpful. She replies that there’s nothing he can do, the situation is beyond them. Unable to live with that response he says to her: “Give me some task to do, or I shall go mad!”
We’ve all had the feeling at times when in the face of a dire situation we need to do something, but there’s nothing we can do, no magic wand we can wave to make things better. But there is something we can do.
I recall an event in my own life several years ago: I was teaching summer school in Belgium when, late one evening, just as I was getting ready for bed, I received an email saying that two friends of mine, a man and a woman recently engaged, had been involved that day in a fatal car accident. He was killed instantly and she was in serious condition in hospital. I was living by myself in a university dorm, thousands of miles from where this all happened, and thousands of miles from anyone with whom I could share this sorrow. Alone, agitated, panicked, and desperately needing to do something but being absolutely helpless to do anything, I was literally driven to my knees.
Not being able to do anything else, I picked up the prayer-book that contains the Office of the Church and prayed, by myself, the Vespers prayer for the dead. When I’d finished, my sorrow hadn’t gone away, my friend was still dead, but my panic had subsided, as had my desperate need to do something (when there was nothing I could do).
My prayer that night gave me some sense that the young man who’d died that day was alright, safe somewhere in a place beyond us, and it also relieved me of the agitation and panicked pressure of needing to do something in the face of agitated helplessness. I’d done the only thing I could do, the thing that’s been done in the face of helplessness and death since the beginning of time; I’d given myself over to prayer and to the rituals of the community and the faith of the community.
It’s these, prayer and ritual, which we have at our disposal at those times when, like the man in Sense and Sensibility, we need to do something or we will go mad. That’s not only true for heavy, sorrowful times when loved ones are sick or dying or killed in accidents and we need to do something but there’s nothing we can do.
We also need ritual to help us celebrate happy times properly. What should we do when our own children are getting married? Among other things, we need to celebrate the ritual of marriage because no wedding planner in the world can do for us what the ritual, especially the church-ritual, of marriage can do. Weddings, just like funerals, are a prime example of where we need ritual to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
Sadly, today, we are a culture that for the most part is ritually tone-deaf. We don’t understand ritual and therefore mostly don’t know what to do when we need to be doing something but we don’t know what to do. That’s a fault, a painful poverty, in our understanding.
The Trappist monks who were martyred in Algeria in 1996 were first visited by the Islamic extremists who would later kidnap and kill them, on Christmas Eve, just as they were preparing to celebrate Christmas Mass. After some initial threats, their eventual murderers left. The monks were badly shaken. They huddled together as a group for a time to digest what had just happened.
Then, not knowing what else to do in the face of this threat and their fear, they sang the Christmas Mass. In the words of their Abbott: “It’s what we had to do. It’s all we could do! It was the right thing.” He shared too, as did a number of the other monks (in their diaries) that they found this, celebrating the ritual of Mass in the face of their fear and panic, something that calmed their fear and brought some steadiness and regularity back into their lives.
There’s a lesson to be learned here, one that can bring steadiness and calm into our lives at those times when we desperately need to do something, but there’s nothing to do.
Ritual: It’s what we have to do. It’s all we can do! It’s the right thing.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

COMPLETE THE CIRCLE
George Evans
Every year at this time I am struck by the scope of the readings at Mass, both daily and Sunday. Beginning with the pageantry of Palm Sunday’s entry into Jerusalem and the history and presentation of the synoptic passion and death of our Lord and Savior we know we are in a sacred liturgical time.
We go with Jesus to visit his special friends in Bethany, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus whom he had recently raised from the dead for the last time before his death and we anticipate with Jesus the solemn nature of the days which loom ahead. We return with him to Jerusalem and the events cascade. We eat in the upper room, we have our feet washed, we experience the first Eucharist and eat his Body and drink his Blood.
We go with Jesus to the Garden but our human weakness overcomes us and we first fall asleep and then fear grips us as we see him taken into custody and led away to be tortured and abandoned by us, his closest friends. We watch him be humiliated, struggle with his cross to Golgotha and die ingloriously on the cross as we watch only from a silent distance.
We are petrified and can’t understand all that has just happened. We hide ourselves in a locked room and pray no one comes for us to die with him.
On Sunday morning more incredible things happen. First, Mary of Magdala goes to Jesus’s tomb but the stone has been rolled away and Jesus is no longer there. She runs back and tells Peter and John who didn’t believe her but did run to the tomb themselves. John being younger gets there first but defers to Peter who enters the tomb first and sees the linens which had wrapped his body and head neatly folded and placed where his body had been. They still don’t know what to make of it all so they return to their safe locked room and wait in shock and disbelief.
The scriptures next relate the fascinating and compelling story of Jesus joining two disciples on their way to Emmaus dejected from the recent events in Jerusalem and overwhelmed by the stranger who explains the scriptures to them and finally reveals himself to them in the breaking of the bread.
He leaves them and they are so excited they run back to the locked room and tell those gathered what had happened. They did not believe them either (Mark 16:13). Later on the same first day of the week, Jesus appears to the disciples in the locked room. Mark reports that Jesus “rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had been raised.” (Mark 16:14)
Yet he immediately commands them “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15) John reports on that first visit that when Jesus appeared he immediately said “Peace be with you” and showed them his hands and side and said to them “As the Father has sent me, so I send you. And breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:22)
Thomas had missed this visit, was adamant that he would not believe unless he saw Jesus’s wounds for himself which occurred on another visit a week later and led to his unforgettable utterance “My Lord and my God.” The scriptures continue throughout the Easter season to tell us the beautiful stories of Jesus’s reconciliation with Peter following his appearance at breakfast at the Sea of Tiberias following the wondrous catch of fish, of the miracles of healing of Peter and John and their own miraculous escape from prison assisted by an angel. All of these give us reason to believe as John tells us “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.”(John 20:31)
The readings in the Easter liturgies also inspire us to do what the apostles and disciples did as shown in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. They took Jesus seriously once he breathed the Holy Spirit into them and sent them. They went and preached everywhere “and great numbers of men and women were added to them” (Acts 5:14).
They built a church on what Jesus taught them and the Holy Spirit inspired them to do. “The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.” (Acts 4:32) Could not our church today use a healthy dose of being of one heart and mind. Would not our efforts to serve the common good rather than selfish needs and wants transform our community as the early church did theirs.
If we truly live the Easter story and followed the person at its center would we all not experience a new freedom and freshness found nowhere else except in the Risen Lord. We have nothing to lose. Let’s try it.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

Reflections on Life
Father Jerome LeDoux
Seven months and three weeks had slipped on by and most of my books and other effects were still warehoused in a small back room of Our Mother Of Mercy Church in Fort Worth, Texas. “Enough is enough!” I told myself as the time loomed large for a new pastor.
“I need to clear out whatever belongs to me, to Our Mother Of Mercy Church or to St. Augustine Church in New Orleans. I should just junk the rest.”
By dint of three days of slavish separating of mine, theirs and junk, all that I had left in Cowtown had been whittled down to two and a half 12” X 12” X 15½” boxes ready for shipment. With less than an hour to leave for DFW airport, the Knights of Peter Claver, who had been meeting in the old convent, descended upon the rectory to say “Hi” and “Bye.” After an exchange of pleasantries, they stared in wonder at the photos, religious trinkets and other items strewn over the carpet.
“What you see is not junk, but all pre-sorted according to category and place of destination,” I observed. “If you see anything you like, collect it for yourself.” At which point, they fell in almost as one, swooping down on photos, holy cards, any kind of keepsake that struck their fancy. It was a delight to watch them go over the whole array, almost displaying guilt by claiming them.
As their ranks thinned out and as flight departure time drew nearer, three of them volunteered to help scoop up the final loose bits scattered here and there. One final smaller box would suffice to swallow this miscellany of items for shipment. All I could do was say, “Thank you, Lord!” and exhale as I have seldom done before.
Once more, brother Aaron Page chauffered me to DFW, but, unexplainably, the Saturday traffic moved like molasses in January. Given our slightly tight window of time, my arrival at the terminal was past the cutoff for boarding passengers. But none of this mattered since I had exhaled and said, “Thank you, Lord!” The kind folks at the ticket counter gave me a boarding pass for a 6:15 p.m. flight out.
Annoyingly, that flight was postponed. Again, nothing at all mattered since the gorilla was off my back. When we were cleared for takeoff, I was gradually able to assess the difference between the Embraer E-190 and the workhorse Boeing 737. After flying the scrappy little Embraer a few times, one is reminded of smooth, stone-slinging David, while returning to the muscular 737 puts one in mind of incredibly powerful Samson. It is hard to believe that this roomy jet ranks among the group of medium-sized jetliners. Cruising smoothly at about 540 miles an hour, it likewise defies belief that this heavier-than-air “hunk” is so agile in flight.
Flying appears to enable our thoughts to soar as well. Moving is usually at best an odious task for most people. We turn a jaundiced eye at the sundry variety of things we have accumulated over the years. A distinct majority of people suffer from the gradual accruing of belongings and just plain junk that they did not take the time to sort out and trash. However, most writers have a built-in problem. It is summed up in the law: “The day you decide to junk something is the day before you need it.”
As one totes up the years, especially a writer, one becomes ever more wary of consigning things to File 13, the trash. As I was processing my remaining effects in Fort Worth, I readily discarded some old newspapers, but slowed to a crawl as I soon saw why I had saved so many articles and stories. Usually, each saved paper contained the makings for one or more columns on subjects across the board. To the casual observer, this was all trash; to the writer, bountiful treasures of knowledge.
The lateness of my flight urged me to overnight in New Orleans. Sunday was decision time for choosing a church to attend Sunday Mass. Ben and Sandra Gordon encouraged me to attend Mass at my former parish, St. Augustine in Faubourg Tremé. I balked at first, still smarting over my rejection there for seven years. As I entered the church, it was obvious that the choice had struck pure gold.
Reacquainting my eyes to the beauty and décor of the church, I was stunned by the outpouring of affection and pleas for blessing from the smiling populace. If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps a loving smile is worth several pictures. At any rate, the smiles and cheers abounded as Pastor Emmanuel Mulenga, O.M.I., introduced me. A spontaneous “Shake the Devil Off” rendition shook the building.
“You made many people happy by your appearance this morning,” Sandra said. Yet, they were equally my joy and blessings.
“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.)