Among John Shea’s poems, one finds a little piece entitled: Sharon’s Christmas Prayer. It reads:

            She was five,

            sure of the facts,

            and recited them

            with slow solemnity,

            convinced every word

            was revelation.

            She said

they were so poor

they had only peanut butter

            and jelly sandwiches to eat

and they went a long way from home

without getting lost. The lady rode

a donkey, the man walked, and the baby

was inside the lady.

They had to stay in a stable

with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)

but the Three Rich Men found them

because a star lit the roof.

Shepherds came and you could

pet the sheep but not feed them.

Then the baby was born.

And do you know who he was?

            Her quarter eyes inflated

            to silver dollars.

The baby was God.

The Christmas story, as told by a child: Joseph and Mary journeying on a donkey, no room at the inn, birth in a stable, the star and the shepherds and the wise men and, of course, the baby, Jesus who was God. All the elements of the story are there, but, for an adult, it is too easy to miss how incredible it is that God takes on flesh.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us. What a wild and unbelievable statement! The infinite heart, centre, creator, and sustainer of the universe is born as a baby and lives as a human person on this earth and, through that, gives to us God’s power to save. We’ve domesticated the incarnation, but the real Christmas story staggers the mind. How’s this as a Christmas story?

Imagine the universe: Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Hence light traveling to the earth from the moon (the body nearest our planet) already takes more than a second to get here. Light traveling from the sun takes more than 8 minutes to reach earth. But those bodies are close to us. The distance from the sun to the earth is immense but, in terms of the universe as a whole, it is minuscule. If one looks up at the starts at night, of those stars visible to the naked eye, the ones nearest to us are so far away that light traveling from them to earth (at 186,000 miles per second) takes more than 4 years to get here. Those which are farthest away, but still visible to the naked eye, are so distant that light traveling at 186,000 miles per second takes 800,000 years to get here. That’s unimaginable.

More incredulous still: Science today, using X-ray telescopes, has sighted planets whose light has not yet reached earth. These planets are so distant that light traveling from them to earth will take 6 trillion light years to get here. The human mind simply cannot stretch to imagine that. Yet this is just the universe we know. There may be in fact billions of galaxies and universes.

Imagine this story: Given that there are perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies with trillions of light years separating them, and given that on each of the planets within these galaxies there are hundreds of trillions of phenomena every second, can we imagine that at the centre of all of this there is one heart, one creator, one sustainer, one God who made all of this and who right now watches over it so that every individual and every detail is passionately cared about, so that “no hair falls from a human head and no sparrow from the sky” without this God knowing and caring?

And most incredulous of all: Can we imagine and believe that this heart, this God, this centre of everything, actually was carried for nine months by a peasant woman in Palestine and born into our world as a baby and then lived here, taught us, and gave us, his believers, all the powers he, himself, had as God? What a wild belief! We should be singing songs and passing drinks around!

After John Shea has let the five-year-old Sharon tell the Christmas story, he notes her reaction and supplies an apt one-line commentary:

            And she jumped in the air,

            whirled around, dove into the sofa,

            and buried her head under the cushion

            which is the only proper response

            to the good news of the incarnation.

David Steindl-Rast once commented that leisure is not the privilege of those who have time, but rather the virtue of those who give to each instant of life the time it deserves. That’s a valuable insight, especially today when everywhere life seems dominated by the constraints of time. Always, it seems, there isn’t enough time. Our lives are dominated by pressure, the rat race, demands which are all absorbing. The plant has to run and, by the time that is taken care of, there is no time or energy for anything else.

And we are conscious of our pathological busyness. We know that life is passing us by and we are so pre-occupied with the business of making a living and the duties of family and community that only rarely is there any time to actually live. It seems that there is never any unpressured time, unhurried time, undesignated time, leisure time, time to smell the flowers, to simply luxuriate in being alive. We lament about this over our coffee circles but are unable to effectively change anything. Is there something frighteningly wrong with our lives? Is there a need to drastically change our lifestyles?

Perhaps. Obviously in our lives there is too little family time, prayer time, celebration time, and simply restful time. But we are also compounding our problem through misunderstanding. Philosophies of “taking time to smell the flowers” have sometimes led us to understand leisure precisely as the privilege of the rich and unoccupied. What Steindl-Rast challenges us to do is to understand time correctly. Time is a gift. When T.S. Eliot says, “Time, not our time,” he is pointing out that there needs to be a certain detachment from time, a certain monasticism, in our lives.

In monasteries, life is regulated by a bell. Monks and nuns know that time is not their own, that when the bell rings they must drop whatever they are doing and move on to what is being asked of them next. When the bell rings, St. Benedict once said, the monk must put down his pen without crossing his “t” or dotting his “i.” He must move on, not necessarily because he feels like doing something else, but because it is time….time to eat, or pray, or work, or study, or sleep. Monks’ lives are regulated by a bell, not because they don’t have watches and alarm clocks, but to remind them, always, that time is not their own and that there is a proper time to do things. Monks don’t get to sleep, eat, pray, work or relax when they feel like it, but when it’s time to do those things.

There is an astonishing parallel between that and what happens in our own lives and we can be helped by understanding it. There is an inbuilt monasticism to our lives. We too, at least for the more active years of our lives, are called to practice a certain asceticism regarding time – to have our lives regulated by “the bell.”

In our case “the bell” takes a different form, though its demands are the same as those of the bell in a monastery. In our case the bell is an alarm clock and the dictates of our daily lives: a quick breakfast, a commute to work (carrying a bag lunch), staying home with small children, demands at work or at home, driving kids for lessons, dealing with them and their demands, household chores, cooking, laundry, taking out garbage, calling in a plumber, church on Sundays. Like monks we sleep, rise, eat, pray, and work, not necessarily when we’d like to, but when it’s time.

And this is true, not just for our daily routine, but as well for the seasons of our lives. We go to school, we prepare for a career, we enter the work force, are tied down with kids, mortgage payments, car payments, and the demands of family and work, not necessarily because we always feel like it, but because it’s that time in our lives. The play of children and the leisure of retirement come before and after that season.

During all of the most active years of our lives we are reminded daily, sometimes hourly, that time is not our own, we are monks practicing a demanding asceticism. There will not always be time to smell the flowers and we are not always poorer for that fact. Monasticism has its own spiritual payoffs. To be forced to work, to be tied down with duties, to have to get up early, to have little time to call your own, to be burdened with the responsibility of children and the demands of debts and mortgages, to go to bed exhausted after a working day is to be in touch with our humanity. It is too an opportunity to recognize that time is not our own and that any mature spirituality makes a distinction between the season of work and the Sabbath, the sabbatical, the time of unpressured time.

Most important of all recognizing in our duties and pressures the sound of the monastic bell actually helps us to smell the flowers, to give to each instant of our lives the time it deserves – and not necessarily the time I feel like giving it. We are better for the demands that the duties of state put on us, despite constant fatigue. Conversely, the privileged who have all the time in the world are worse off for that, despite their constant opportunity to smell the flowers.

Monks have secrets worth knowing…and the pedagogy of a monastic bell is one of them.

On March 24, 1980, Salvadoran Archbishop, Oscar Romero, was assassinated as he celebrated the Eucharist. A recent film, Romero (Paulist Films – Cineplex Odeon), excellently depicts the interplay of forces both within El Salvador and within Romero himself that culminate in this assassination. From Romero, the man and the film, there is much to learn. The film ends with his assassination, but it begins with other things.

Initially, when Romero is chosen as archbishop, he is judged to be weak. Rome picks him because it feels he won’t ruffle feathers; the rich applaud his installation because they feel he will keep the church in the sanctuary, away from justice issues; and the poor accept his appointment with more resignation than hope. He is judged by all, and not without reason, to be very “safe” and mediocre. At first, he is just that, safe and mediocre. Even more, he is somewhat of a bumpkin, an absent-minded evasive intellectual lost in the face of practical issues. The rich try to use him. The poor ignore him. Those in the front lines of the justice struggle are irritated by him.

For many of us this comes as a shock. Romero, the martyr, slow to take a stand, fuzzy of vision, weak in courage, reticent, sneered at by those working for justice, ignored by the poor. But Romero changes, changes as he begins to deal more directly with the poor. His simple honesty and his refusal to distort the truth he sees leads him to see how the struggle for justice and the struggle for the Gospel are inextricably linked. As his vision clarified, his courage grew. However, his conversion is not, as many suppose, a conversion to ideology, or violence, or anger, or to any one-sided compassion.

He continues to love all, poor and rich. When he is accused by the rich of being overly concerned for the poor he protests by saying he is painfully concerned for everyone. He condemns violence, by the poor as much as by the rich. At one stage, he confronts one of his priests who has taken to carrying a machine gun and suggests that, by carrying a weapon, he is putting himself on the same level as the oppressors. The priest counters by suggesting that Romero’s non-violence, while idealistic, is ineffective.

Romero then asks the priest: “Do you still pray?”

“Yes, I do,” was the reply.

“Then why,” questions Romero, “are you carrying a gun?”

As Romero understood more the need to struggle for justice he understood, in a way that the machine gun carrying priest never did, how Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not terrorism and gun fire, are the paths to justice and the kingdom. Sister Mary Jo Leddy recently commented that, in any situation dominated by fear, you need people who have died before they die, people who, before death, already live the resurrection. In this is fear, timidity, overcome.

Too often, however, we just want to survive. Then we choose not to die, but that, as she points out, is not the same thing as choosing to live. We need to die before we die to live in the freedom of the resurrection already now.

Romero’s real witness consisted in precisely that, long before an assassin’s bullet ended his life, he had already died. The great courage he had during his last months came from this, as a dead man, he had nothing left to lose.

It was a dead man that he could write…

“I have often been threatened with death. Nevertheless, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise in the Salvadoran people. I say so without meaning to boast, with the greatest humility. As a pastor I am obliged by divine mandate to give my life for those I love – for all Salvadorans, even those who may be going to kill me. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and for the resurrection of El Salvador. Martyrdom is a grace of God that I do not believe I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom, and the sign that hope will soon be a reality….You may say, if they succeed in killing me, that I pardon and bless those who do it. Would that thus they may be convinced that they will waste their time.”

Martin Luther King used to tell the story of a young boy, a black, who, during the height of the segregation era in Alabama, was caught trespassing in a white man’s toilet. He was beaten up and, just before being kicked out, had his face pushed into a urinal. King comments: This boy has two choices: The first is to bide his time, nurture and intensify his wound and hatred, and when, if ever, he has the strength and resources, strike back. Or…

There’s another, a more difficult choice. The true revelation of love asks that boy to get up and recognize in the smell of that filth, the filth of humanity, the smell of Christ’s blood, defiled with spittle on the way to Calvary. Romero, like King, tried to give his people that message. In the film, just before the credits appear at the end, the screen flashes the words: “Romero lived and died for non-violence. 60,000 people have died in El Salvador in the 10 years since his death. His message has not been heard.”

Maybe it’s not too late for us to hear.

Several years ago, during the question period following a talk I had given, I was asked a series of questions about morality, sin, confession, and forgiveness. I began my response with a few distinctions calculated to show how complex these questions were and was moving on to the next step, an attempt to give some answers, when one man present lost both his patience and his temper. He challenged me angrily:

“Father, why are you fudging around in answering this? You know the answer, every Catholic does! Sex outside of marriage, missing Mass on Sundays, these are mortal sins…and no theological or psychological distinctions can change that! You know too, only too well, that the Catholic Church teaches clearly, and has defined at the Council of Trent, that there is only one way to have serious sin forgiven, confession to a priest. To not say that clearly is to soft-peddle the truth!”

I was searching for a response to this challenge when a lady stood up and, shaking and nearly overcome with emotion, spoke for me: “This is not soft-peddling the truth. I believe that Father is saying…and I’ll tell you why. I had a 19-years-old daughter who was killed in a car accident two years ago. She hadn’t been going to church for over a year before that and she was living with her boyfriend. But she was a good girl, with a good heart, and nobody is going to tell me that she went to hell!”

Recently, at a diocesan conference on the sacrament of reconciliation, I had been explaining how reconciliation, like all sacraments, was a touching of the body of Christ and how, consequently, one could have one’s sins forgiven through touching Christ’s body within Christian community and within Eucharist. I went on to say that I consider the practice of confession a beautiful and important sacrament, one used by the mature….and how I consider the fact that many Christians today no longer practice it a bad sign. However, despite the value and importance of private confession, radically we can, and do, have our sins forgiven through living and worshipping within Christian community and especially through receiving the Eucharist.

Again, I was accused of soft-peddling the truth. The Catholic tradition, I was passionately informed, is that all serious sin can only be forgiven through explicit confession to a priest. I’ve been around long enough to know that this statement is generally perceived as, in fact, being the Catholic tradition on reconciliation and so I have had to think long and hard about this: Am I soft-peddling the truth? Doesn’t the Council of Trent clearly demand private confession as the condition for the forgiveness of serious sin? Is a certain theology of the Incarnation (upon which I base the belief that when one goes to Eucharist or participates otherwise in Christian community one is touching the hem of Christ’s garment and is thus being reconciled) faulty? Am I being influenced by some liberal consensus which, blind to all except its own ideological concerns, is trying to be a surrogate for truth?

These are valid questions, questions all religious teachers who know Christ’s warning about scandalizing little ones had better ask themselves fairly regularly. There are penalties for playing loose with the truth. But there are also dangers the other way, one can dangerously reduce truth. One can also soft-peddle the incarnation. Just as one can lack the courage to affirm hard truths because they demand things which go against the grain, one can just as easily lack the courage to affirm how incredible and far-reaching are the tentacles of the incarnation and how lavish is the mercy of God that is revealed in it. I doubt that any Christian who takes seriously what Jesus taught us about God would want to challenge the lady who claimed that, despite her daughter’s wanderings and her dying without explicit confession, her daughter was surely not in hell.

So what do courage and truth demand we say? That there is no forgiveness for serious sin outside of the explicit sacrament of reconciliation….or that Christian community and the Eucharist are the body of Christ on earth and that when we touch them with even a modicum of sincerity we are healed?

Do courage and truth demand that we take Trent’s statement on private confession to mean that outside of explicit private confession there can be, for any Catholic, no other means of reconciliation….or, do they demand that we take Trent’s statement in its proper context and with all its qualifications and affirm, in the name of Trent, that there are ways outside of explicit confession to have sins forgiven?

Do courage and truth demand that we teach that only Jesus can forgive sin and that, today, that forgiveness is dispensed only through private confession…or do courage and truth demand that we affirm, as does Scripture, that we do not replace the body of Christ, that we are not like his body, nor even that we are his mystical body, but that we are his body, flesh, blood, tangible, in history, the on-going incarnation, and that consequently when we forgive, Christ forgives; when we bind, Christ binds; when we console, Christ consoles; and when that woman loved and forgave her wandering daughter, Christ loved and forgave that wandering daughter?

In what does the greater danger lie…in soft-peddling confession or in soft peddling and reducing the incredible love and forgiveness that are revealed in the incarnation?

This article will, I fear, upset a number of people. Something needs to be said, but, given the levels of hurt, disillusionment, bitterness, anticlerical glee, vicarious over-identification, and just simple gossip that surrounds this issue, nothing meaningful can be said which will not, I fear, deeply offend somebody. There is a lot of hyper and raw nerves around, yet the greater danger lies in remaining silent.

The issue is one which has been prominent in the news in recent months, namely, that of priests and religious brothers being arrested and charged with pedophilia. Every day the list of accusations, revelations, and arrests grows and, with that, every day, pain, confusion, suspicion, and bitterness grow as well. Everyone, save those who feast of gossip and misfortune, has been deeply pained by this. It’s an open sore within the community, especially among Roman Catholics, who, until recently, had a tendency to place their priests on a pedestal. How does one make the adjustment from seeing someone as another Christ to seeing him arrested for sexual assault?

There is, understandably, a lot of paranoia and suspicion around: How far-reaching is this thing? What is the church covering up? Whom can we trust? Are our kids safe around rectories and sacristies?

Beyond this, these events have made clerical celibacy, itself, the object of suspicion. Omnipresent now is the idea that priests are prone to this type of perversity because they are celibate. Thus, for example, in the suburbs where I live, the local newspaper polled a number of Catholics at a local supermarket. Without a single exception, each one felt that clerical celibacy was at the root of this.

What’s to be said in the face of all this? There’s over-reaction and there’s under-reaction. We have too much of both. What’s a proper reaction?

All reactions should begin with compassion for the victims. They, after all, have been most hurt. This compassion must be very concrete, not just ideological. There must be real compensation and real help given, psychological, spiritual and financial. Part of this reaction must also be the recognition of the seriousness of the crime. Something has been wounded inside of these persons which, this side of the resurrection, can never be fully put right again. Any trivialization of that is not just an under-reaction, but is itself criminal.

However, such compassion must be sharply distinguished from something else which looks very similar but which is itself another form of victimization, namely, the tendency some people have to vicariously and neurotically over-identify themselves with these victims. This parades itself as a compassion and crusade. It is only the latter, not the former. Real compassion manifests itself by actual and concrete outreach towards a victim and not in the claiming of that victim for one’s own ideological or curriculum vitae purposes. Genuine compassion aids the healing process. Vicarious over-identification, for all its fervor and good intention, is counterproductive in that, in its further sowing of hatred and polarization, like swelling around a wound, it delays and positively hinders healing.

Secondly, we must see these revelations as a knife lancing a wound. The truth sets us free. A wound open to light and air can heal. The church and the priesthood will survive. In the long run, both will be healthier. Moreover, the adverse publicity and the civil lawsuits will force us to screen clerical candidates more carefully as well as take more seriously any kind of sexual deviance among priests. Bishops, religious provincials, seminary rectors, and parish councils are all learning, under fire, some valuable lessons. Things will be better in the future.

Thirdly, something needs saying which most newspaper reports and other commentaries, radio and television, have not always brought out. For whatever reasons, these have been reluctant to state that pedophilia is not proportionately higher among Roman Catholic priests than it is among other professions. In fact, statistically, it is slightly lower among Roman Catholic clergy than among the male population at large. Moreover, it is not higher among celibates than among married men. Translated, all this means that your kids, statistically, run no higher risk around priests and religious brothers than around anyone else, including their own fathers.

Pedophilia is a disease, and a very complex one at the. Like alcoholism it plays no favorites but ravages priests and laity, celibates and non-celibates, alike. Celibacy, whatever its other merits or dysfunctions, is not the culprit. Like many other factors it can be complicitous, but of itself it is not the issue.

Finally, we may not withhold compassion from the victimizers themselves. Despite their crime, there is, I’m sure, more than one good thief among them. Christ died among, and for, people like them, and us. The gravity of their offense must, with a certain brutality, rule out all trivialization of the crime, but to withhold compassion and understanding from them is, on our part, the sign of a small mind and of even a smaller heart. We are dealing here with an illness, a disease, not with maliciousness. Moreover, many of these men were themselves, as children, victims of abuse. Further, few persons have ever had to endure as public and as humiliating a crucifixion as they have suffered. Any heart not overly preoccupied with its own hurts and narcissisms will have a compassion that, at some point, embraces these men as well.

Morris West once said: sin, sex, and suffering form perhaps the most constant trinity within human experience. How true that is!

The final word must be the word prayer. When so many are hurt and hurting, our hearts must move towards prayer…for the victims, the victimizers, the community, and for forgiveness and healing so that, eventually, for all, there may be a new day.

A new word recently entered the English vocabulary – yuppies. The term may not sound very serious, but the reality it connotes and describes is one of the significant social and moral developments within recent times. What is a yuppie?

At a simple level, the word abbreviates the phrase, young urban professional (with the implied connotation of being upwardly mobile). But that is more of an etymology than a definition. What really is a yuppie? We guide our lives more by unconscious mythology and inchoate feelings than we do by rationality and conscious philosophy, and so I will define the term by a series of slogans: quality of life, upward mobility, the pursuit of excellence, material comfort, and the movement towards privacy and individualism.

Since the appeal here is to understand through feeling, I will not try to expatiate on these slogans.

Suffice to say that the unconscious, and in many cases the conscious, ideal that moves people today is that of success, of moving up the ladder, of being rich, of having a beautiful body, of being well-dressed, of having prestige, of luxuriating in material comfort, of achieving optimally (but in comfort) everything that is potentially attainable within our limits. In many cases, this brings with it unashamed ambition and the expressed desire to leave the pack behind. Central to being a yuppie is to set oneself, through excellence, above others. This, most naturally, brings with it an excessive need for individualism and privacy. The yuppie ideal is to have the optimum of both of these.

Obviously, not all of these things are bad, or novel. People have always wanted these things and the myths of the past (rags to riches, work hard and get ahead) hardly seem different. Further, there is nothing immoral in these things in themselves, nor is the emphasis on excellence something that should be prophetically challenged. What is novel, and less moral, about the yuppie phenomenon is that the pursuit of excellence and the hankering after an ever-higher quality of life is tied to an explicit philosophy of life within which unbridled individualism, selfishness, and idiosyncratic development are unabashedly held up as virtue.

Salvation lies in self-development, pure and simple. Everything…family, community, church, morality, service to others, sacrifice…. Takes its place, makes sense, and has value only insofar as it enhances idiosyncratic development. In Greek, the word IDIOS means “a movement towards one’s own.” What the yuppie espouses and nurtures, both inside of self and within society, is precisely the idiosyncratic, the movement towards self. Self-development is pursued with all the gravity and asceticism that was formerly reserved for religion because, for the yuppie, self-development is salvation, it is the religious project.

How deeply we are influenced by this ideal is evident in a variety of ways. Among other things, we see it by looking at what we read and by looking at what attracts us. When we survey the best-seller lists for non-fiction books in recent years, we see that virtually every one of these books has to do with achievement, the lure of success, the price of success, the quality of our lifestyles, and the pursuit of excellence: e.g., Iacocco, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, In Pursuit of Excellence, From Backyard to NHL.

We also see this in the proclivity we have for the rich and the famous. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, describes the 1983 commencement exercises at Yale University. Several honorary degrees were awarded, including one to Mother Teresa. As she and the others, each in turn, received their degrees, the audience applauded appropriately, but with, as Postman says, a slight hint of reserve and impatience, “for it wished to give its heart to the final recipient who waited shyly in the wings.” As the details of her achievements were read, many of the audience left their seats and surged towards the stage. Finally, when the name of the final recipient was announced, Meryl Streep, the audience “unleashed a sonic boom of affection, enough to wake the New Haven dead.” I have nothing against Meryl Streep. She is a great actress, and, for all I know, perhaps a great human being as well. The point of recounting this is the audience’s response. In the end, their applause represents a religious response, the new ET CUM SPIRITUM TUUM.

There is a new Lord stalking western culture and that audience just acknowledged his spirit. The yuppie phenomenon, despite the fluffy superficial sound of the term itself, is a major event in our time. The change is not for the better. As long as we make a religion out of the quality of life, material comfort, the pursuit of excellence, and individualism, we can forget about genuine community, any sense of the corporate, social justice, the preferential option of the poor, and any ideal, religious or otherwise, that takes us beyond ourselves.

When the most-read periodical within our society is People Magazine, when Dallas is the most watched TV show in the world, and when we are impatient to move along Mother Teresa so that we can get to the real event, Meryl Streep, then the lives and the ideals of the rich and famous have indeed replaced the life of Christ as our religious ideal. Some of my friends do not think that the yuppie phenomenon is very serious. After all, hippies, yuppies, beatniks, whatever, we’ve always had our fringe groups! They are not very important, life will go on as before!

Again, I quote Postman: “The last time a similar conclusion was drawn was when the director of the American Association of Blacksmiths remarked that he had read about the automobile but that he was convinced it would have no consequences for the future of his organization.”

“It is better that one man should die for the people.” Why does that line have so haunting a sound? Why does it sound like the refrain of a litany?

It haunts, not because of any particular poetic merit, but because it expresses a perverse truth that invariably fascinates. In caption, it rationalizes death, deals death, and justifies it. Caiaphas, the high priest, first used this phrase to justify Christ’s death. Christ’s person and message were upsetting things, upsetting the way life had been, upsetting a delicate balance of inter-relationships that had built up, like a complex ecology, over many years.

Caiaphas and the other leaders at that time did not, in fact, have a lot of personal things against Christ. They were just scared. There was more fear than malevolence present when Christ was condemned. It was fear that prompted Caiaphas to utter this phrase and so justify his acquiescence to an innocent death.

That fear, and that phrase, have always been the great rationalization for death and have justified our acquiescence to countless deaths; so much so that it is possible to construct a litany for death with this phrase as its refrain:

• When we favor capital punishment and support the idea that some persons, irrespective of what kind of lives they are leading, should be put to death, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When there is abortion, when an unborn child’s life is taken, our society is saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When we refuse to properly care for the poor in our society, when we say we cannot afford welfare, Medicare, daycare, free education, and the support of mothers home with small children, when we let the poor fall through the cracks rather than upset our standard of living, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When someone is slandered in conversation and we, because of fear, say nothing, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When our countries bomb their neighbors to insure their own security, when our countries use unjustifiable amounts of money, talent, and resources to build up weapons of defense, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When our countries do not take in refugees because we fear that they will take some of our jobs and have an adverse effect on our standard of living, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people
• When our countries refuse to admit that so much of the discontent and terrorism of our age is the natural byproduct of a way of life, a system, wherein the rich benefit from the poor, when we do nothing about this because it would mean some very upsetting changes, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When, because of the pressures of our lifestyles, we draw too excessively upon the world’s resources, when, for the same reason, we cannot properly respect nature and by exorbitant consumption and its concomitant pollution we destroy the environment for future generations, we are saying…better that one person should die for the people.
• When a youth gang in Montreal brutally murders a homosexual man with AIDS on a subway, when in the mid-1960s, 38 people in New York City watch a woman being murdered in Central Park and, because of fear, refuse to intervene, both the aggressors and the bystanders (for different reasons) are saying….better that one person should die for the people.
• When Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Oscar Romero, Jerzy Popieluszko, Stan Rather, Michael Rodrigo, and Anne Frank are killed, when the KKK murder three civil rights workers in Mississippi in the early 1960s, when oppressive regimes around the world intimidate people and make them disappear, someone is saying…better that one person should die for the people.

Death’s great litany, echoing through the centuries, from Caiaphas to us…better that one person should die for the people, better this death than that our lives should be so upset, better this than that we should have to change!

Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Philippines once commented upon the place of courage within the spectrum of virtue:

Strength without compassion is violence

Compassion without justice is sentiment

Justice without love is Marxism

And…love without justice is baloney!

We all need greater courage. We need to pray for that. We need to pray to be less intimidated by our own weaknesses and fears, to be more courageous in moving beyond the comforts of affluence, privilege, and good name, to be less timid, less small, less petty, and more willing to sacrifice and perhaps even to die rather than to acquiesce to the death of an innocent person by uttering, however unreflectively and unconsciously, the phrase….better that one person should die for the people.

“God, what’s it all coming to? Sometimes I wonder where the world and the church are going! Who would have ever thought it would turn out this way? Whatever happened to make it turn out like this?

“The church I grew up in, the church of my youth, of my family, the church in which I took my vows….it’s dead, gone, gone away; it’s not just changed, it’s dead. I guess since I am an old-fashioned fogey, I can still use some old-fashioned language: that is what Thomas Aquinas called substantial change. This is a new ball game.

“Vatican II, Vatican II! You can change anything and simply call it the spirit of Vatican II.

“I don’t know, it’s supposed to be better, a new church, a church renewed, a church with its windows opened, as Pope John XXIII said. The Holy Spirit, as SHE is now called, is supposed to be in this same place. Somehow I find it hard to believe. Less people are going to church, nobody is following the church’s commandments on marriage and sex any more, there’s a lot of talk about social justice and commitment to the poor, but, like most everything else, it’s a lot of talk. I don’t see anyone living all that poorly.

“When I was a kid, the church was poor! We didn’t need to talk about poverty, we were poor! Now we hold conferences on social justice, which is a sure sign that we aren’t poor. You know, I went to a workshop last year on social justice and poverty, you know where it was held? At the Holiday Inn! That’s the new church for you! No more church basements with the Catholic Women’s League cooking. Oh, no, we’re too sophisticated for all that!

“Yeah, I’m supposed to believe that the Holy Spirit is in all of this. Over half my classmates have left religious life, and three of those are now divorced. I don’t know whatever happened to sacrifice and commitment. We sure don’t talk about them any more. It’s not in the spirit of Vatican II.

“Jesus, that expression bugs me! As do a bunch of other clap-trap clichés that I have to swallow every day like stale coffee…visioning, birthing, enabling, empowering, commissioning, and, of course, sharing. Oh, yes, sharing, everything is sharing….’I want to share this with you!’

“No wonder nobody goes to church any more, we can’t even tell a noun from a verb! Birthing, visioning…let’s call it crapping, if we’re into turning nouns into verbs!

“….I fought, God, I’ve fought, fought for the church of my youth, fought for the church that sustained my parents through hard times, fought for the church that used to challenge the world, that didn’t have morality by Gallup polls, that was different from the world. I fought…at all those endless meetings, where nothing ever was accomplished, but, of course, the process was worthwhile!

“I fought, but now it’s over. I’m tired. Yogi Berra once said, ‘it ain’t over until it’s over!’ Well…it’s over! The church has shifted. There is no sense arguing anymore. I feel like a damned antique!

“It’s all gone….daily Mass; First Fridays; the Baltimore Catechism; special months for Mary, for St. Joseph, for the Sacred Heart; the Angelus at noon; Corpus Christi parades; the old religious habits…antiques!

“It’s hard to believe. All that sweat, blood, sacrifice, life, all those institutions and all that tradition – the beauty of the Gregorian chant, the universality of the old catechisms – all of it gone, gone, dead, died, relegated to the museums.

“I gave my life for all of those and, in 20 years, it’s all swept away. I don’t know, it’s hard to believe that it’s for the better, but, what’s for sure is that it’s forever different. It’s a new way now, we’ll never have the old church back again!

“Jesus, God, it’s death, death to have sunk so much into something, to have believed in something so much, and to see it all thrown away like yesterday’s newspapers! I want to cling to what was, but it’s gone. I can’t fight this any more. Let me accept what has to be accepted….give me some heart, some spirit, for this!”

Even after the resurrection, until they received the new spirit of Christ at Pentecost, the disciples doubted that something good had taken place. They longed instead to have their old Jesus back, the pre-Good Friday one. Depressed, unable to understand and imagine Jesus in a new mode, they, in their discouragement, returned to their old way of life, fishing and the sea.

The pre-Vatican II church, like the earthly body of Jesus, was a sure enfleshed presence of God on earth. But, like Jesus, it suffered a painful Good Friday….and a subsequent incredible resurrection. The church lives…pruned, new, marvelously raised up, given new life beyond its former imagination. But, like the beautiful prayer of the nun I just quoted, we, each of us, must pray to receive its new spirit.