+ + + Sign of the Crossing + + +

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...