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Pro-life + Pro-migrant Memorial Service, January 19, 2013 In 1986-87, eight people retrieved hundreds of bodies from dumpsters in back of four abortion clinics in the DC area.  The bodies were buried respectfully: one outside the Portiuncula at Franciscan University in Steubenville, most at Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax.  But before we lined up church support, we buried 75 bodies in unconsecrated and unmarked land. There will be a memorial service for these children, including prayer for their mothers, on the Sunday before the March for Life.  The service will be from 1 pm to 3 pm, Sunday, January 19, 2014, at St. Paul Catholic Church in Damascus, Maryland.  The service will include (1) Mass, and (2) a time of reflection and prayer, with music and speakers. After the service at St Paul, anyone who wishes to visit the grave site is welcome, weather permitting.  Then there will be an informal reception near the grave site (details to be announced...

God give me the strength to explain this clearly. Cardinal O’Boyle was an extraordinary man, but one of his best moments is generally forgotten, and when it is remembered, it is more often than not by people who resented what he did.  In August, 50 years ago, he threw away a large portion of his fan club, because he had to get a job done.  The civil rights movement was wrestling toward real strength, but could still be undermined and destroyed from within.  He saw the threat, confronted it, and prevailed – pretty much alone – and he was reviled for it. The problem was violence within the civil rights movement.  To this day, after the world has seen nonviolence prevail in Gandhi’s India, in the American civil rights movement, in Solidarity’s Poland, in Aquino’s Philippines, in Mandela’s South Africa – still! still! after a list of stunning victories – most people are blissfully ignorant about how this thing works, totally unaware of the fragility of a campai...

Cardinal Patrick A. O'Boyle: Stand firm in the faith! Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle was a civil rights pioneer, and a strong voice for personal morality. In a time when the nation is so bitterly divided that we don’t expect Congress to pass a budget, let alone any other significant bill, we need a Church that is capable of love and justice.  It’s crazy when the right (pro-family, pro-morality) and left (pro-immigrant, pro-justice) wings of the Church attack each other!  Every single healthy bird on the planet has two wings!  Every single prophet in the history of the Church has called for morality and justice, both!  How did we get so polarized?  Can we stop it? Recall Cardinal O’Boyle, and celebrate his work! On August 28, the nation will mark the 50 th  anniversary of a great event in our history, the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  It was a great event in the midst of grea...

Today, Storycorps has a 20th anniversary vignette from one of the most revealing episodes in American immigration history, the Golden Venture.  Restricting immigration here supports forced depopulation there.  "There," of course, varies -- sometimes China, sometimes Africa, most often today latin America.  Anti-immigration propaganda encourages Americans to feel that we are crowded and being pushed beyond our capacity to help, even though we the richest country in the world with a population density that is about 2/3 of the global average.  If we are over-crowded, then the world is tremendously over-populated!  But beyond the propaganda, when we refuse to accept immigrants and refuse to offer an escape, we are complicit in the brutal depopulation policies of emigrant nations. http://www.npr.org/2013/06/07/189222117/finding-an-anchor-for-a-life-set-adrift-by-a-shipwreck

When I was teaching at Montrose a decade ago, one wonderful student posed a challenge.   She was smart, accustomed to getting A’s without much work.   In class, she often pulled out a mediocre novel she was reading for fun; asked to come on back to class, she said she had done the reading, and asserted further – accurately – that she was ready to write an excellent essay on the assigned reading.   I didn’t pull rank; I argued.   I said that the first time you read a great book is a good start, but no more than that; subsequent re-reading gets better and better.   Then I said I could offer a new and interesting insight about the same short reading every day for 30 days. Maybe I cheated: I chose the reading from today’s Gospel, the “Magnificat.”   It is a simple and moving song of love, attributed to Mary, the mother of Jesus, when she visits her cousin Elizabeth, and the two pregnant women share insights and joy. Around day 28, I came to class unprepare...

Matriotism!   May I try it? At Mass this morning, the first reading was from Sirach, about his love for Israel.   Fr. Martin asked if we love the Church with the same passion that Sirach had for Israel, or even a fraction of it.   That was his question, which I mangled into ... am I a good matriot?   Do I love Mother Church? I was in a fight recently with a pastor, but my conscience is pretty clear.   I could have and should have done better, but do not think I should have done otherwise.   I’d like to restore peace, especially since the long-range task of protecting children (who are a significant part of the church) from Maurice will be easier, for the next three decades, if Montrose Christian School assumes some responsibility and helps out.   That fight troubles me, but is not evidence of a total failure as a good matriot. In the 1960s, the feminist revolution was taking shape.   In the 1960s, there were still two quite different strand...

There are six specific kinds of service that Jesus mentions with urgency in his remarks about the Last Judgment (Matthew 25:31-46), one part of the Sermon on the Mount.   He says: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome strangers ( xenos : immigrants and other strangers), clothe the naked, visit the sick, and visit the imprisoned: rewards and penalties apply.   Most people who recall the list remember five of the six, passing over the third; of those who do remember the third urgent command, most use well meant but quirky and somewhat misleading translations (“shelter the homeless” or even “harbor the harbourless”).   Getting the third right is fundamental – indispensable – to clear thought about how to follow God in America today.   If you look at the whole passage through the lens of hospitality, focusing on hospitality, there’s much to see.   If you restore the third injunction, it may seem trivial or even meaningless at first: just as you don’...

Some decades ago, Communist leaders in Moscow challenged the May celebrations surrounding Mary by launching a new celebration of workers, International Workers Day.   The Catholic Church pushed back, making today the “Feast of St. Joseph the Worker.” Joseph has a place in some of the central icons or images of Christianity, in art presenting the “Holy Family.”   These icons present some of the Gospel, of course; but they also challenge us to put aspects of human life into right relationship.   For example, the image of the Holy Family can be the beginning of a meditation on three central questions of human life: identity, marriage, and labor.   Jesus, the central figure, challenges us to recognize the immense dignity of each and every person on earth.   Mary invites us to understand what it means to bring a child from God into the world.   Joseph, a carpenter, invites us to see the immense dignity of work, as an expression of the person and not merely a ...

This past Saturday, I was fortunate to spend time with some of the best people in the Washington area, the social justice ministers from parishes and agencies in the Archdiocese.   What a great group!   I am going to criticize a detail, but you can’t understand the point if you don’t believe that these are great people. The day ended with Mass, celebrated by Bishop Francisco Gonzalez.   He issued a moving and pointed call to action, including two references to the corporal works of mercy, the list of specific tasks that Jesus mentions in his description of the Last Judgment (Matthew 25).   Jesus mentions six specific opportunities to serve: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome immigrants and other strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and visit the imprisoned.   The people in that room had done all these things with great generosity, and the bishop acknowledged that.   But twice, the bishop ran through Jesus’ list, omitting one of...

I have set out to cross-fertilize, left and right, encouraging pro-immigration folks to talk to pro-life folks, and vice versa.   Talk is a small step for man; listening is a large step for all mankind. In the short run, that probably means I will bother friends on both sides.   To build a bridge, you need a pile of bricks stacked up, available, on both sides.   It’s a lot easier and arguably more fun to throw them at the other side than to build the bridge.   That’s an occupational hazard of bridge-builders.   Another hazard is the temptation to pontificate.   “Pontificate” is a Latin word, which means “to build (facere) a bridge (pons).”   In English, it means to be pompous and verbose.   Uh-oh. Anyway, here’s a brick.   I don’t think that it makes sense to tinker with our understanding of marriage in the middle of an unresolved crisis involving 40 million (plus or minus) smashed families.   That is, in the past 40 yea...

Last week, a student from Rockville High School was killed by an Army recruiter, who then killed himself.   I never had her in class, but taught many of her classmates and friends.   I knew her only from a friendly distance, but the grief of her friends and my students is my grief too. The middle of grief may not be the best place to attempt clear thought. The country is in the middle of an angry fight about marriage.   Part of the fight is about who defines this ancient word.   Once again, it seems to me, some partisans are convinced that the separation of church and state means the separation of church from reality; nothing of substance can be left in the hands of the insubstantial spiritual church of wiftiness.   So marriage, which has had layers and layers of meaning for centuries, is now so degraded that if two levels of meaning – just two, emotional attraction and sexual arousal – come together, we are supposed to rejoice.   The many other la...

A unified church: it’s hard to imagine such a thing! The Sign of the Crossing is a new organization devoted to building bridges between the left and the right sides of Catholic Church.   Our starting point: we are pro-life and pro-immigration.   We believe that the right to life is paramount, but that the right to migrate is also an inalienable right.   The leaders of the Catholic Church have upheld these rights steadily and faithfully; but in the pews, the pro-lifers often sit on the Epistle side, and the pro-immigration people sit on the Gospel side. We pray: ... that 40 million Catholic missionaries will come to the United States, planning to rebuild our culture of life. ... that we will make them welcome. ... that they will stay faithful to their heritage, cherishing their faith and their family life. Virgin of Guadalupe, hear our prayer!