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ND Folk Choir releases first live CD

2012-02-06T07:30:00-05:00

If you have attended Sunday Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart since 1981 you may well remember belting out “How Can I Keep from Singing,” the hymn that has become the unofficial anthem of the Notre Dame Folk Choir. Now imagine it sung in perfectly enunciated four-part harmony by a Folk Choir ensemble — along with 1,500 professional church musicians — and you’ll have a feel for the choir’s newest CD release and its first-ever live album.

Last summer, during a heat wave that kept temperatures above 90 after sunset, the choir performed inside a sweltering Saint Boniface Church in Louisville, Kentucky, at the National Pastoral Musicians’ Conference, an annual gathering of professional Catholic musicians. The choir’s director, Steve Warner ’80M.A., says the concert took months to plan, since it brought together 15 current students and 35 alumni and required near-perfection.

“We knew going into it that we wanted to record, which meant the stakes were high right from the start,” says Warner. “You’ve got one chance for an hour and five minutes to make it right. There’s no second take.”

The concert ensemble of past and present members had performed together only once before, the previous night at a parish in suburban Louisville that raised money for a local shelter for homeless men.

The live album, From Gethsemani to Galway, charts the 30-year journey of the Folk Choir from its collaborative relationship with the Trappists of the Abbey of Gethsemani, just an hour south of Louisville, to the choir’s famous summer tours and a more recent pastoral ministry initiative in Wexford, Ireland, called Teach Bhride, or House of Brigid.

The 17-track album was released through World Library Publications in November 2011. The CD opens with “You Have Put on Christ” and then Warner’s arrangement of “The Lord’s Prayer.” Its final track is the powerful anthem “We Are Marching.”

Much of the Folk Choir’s music was written or arranged at Notre Dame by Warner and Karen Schneider Kirner, the choir’s associate director. Warner wrote harmonies for all of the songs the choir performed at Saint Boniface to encourage audience participation. “Sometimes, the veil between heaven and earth gets stretched very thin,” he says of the performance, “and this was one of those moments.”

Kathleen Toohill was this magazine’s autumn 2011 intern.

Flights of Fancy

2011-11-07T13:00:00-05:00

In 2003, a German author named Gabriele Kuby published Harry Potter: Gut oder Bose? or Harry Potter: Good or Bad? She sent the book to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), in the hopes of obtaining the Vatican’s approval of her argument, which was that J.K. Rowling’s popular series of novels had the potential to corrupt the souls of young readers.

Cardinal Ratzinger was serving at that time as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position charged by the Vatican to “promote and safeguard the doctrine on the faith and morals throughout the Catholic world.” The future Pope Benedict found time to read Kuby’s book and sent her a brief commendatory note in response.

“It is good that you enlighten us on the Harry Potter matter,” Ratzinger responded, “for these are subtle seductions that are barely noticeable, and precisely because of that have a deep effect and corrupt the Christian faith in souls even before it could properly grow.”

Pope Benedict’s statement to Kuby about the seductive dangers of Harry Potter — which he agreed to make public, at Kuby’s request — echoes the anxieties of many concerned Christians who fear that these seemingly innocuous novels and films, with their wholesome trio of protagonists, may have a sinister effect on the souls of young readers.

Lev Grossman, fantasy novelist and book critic for Time magazine, published an essay in the magazine’s July 2007 issue that articulated the most common religious criticism of Rowling’s novels: “Harry Potter,” Grossman claims, “lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn’t.” As a substitute for God and religion, Grossman argues, Harry and his companions have love.

Love may seem innocuous enough — but not so, argues Grossman. The substitution of love for God represents a massive symbolic shift in our consciousness: “In the new millennium, magic comes not from God or nature or anything grander or more mystical than a mere human emotion. In choosing Rowling as the reigning dreamer of our era, we have chosen a writer who dreams of a secular, bureaucratized, all-too-human sorcery, in which psychology and technology have superseded the sacred.”

In August of that same year, novelist Michael O’Brien took up the thread of Grossman’s argument, again hammering away at the notion that Rowling’s fantastic world reserves no place for God or real religion. O’Brien describes the series as “a kind of anti-Gospel, a dramatized manifesto for behavior and belief embodied by loveable, at times admirable, fictional characters who live out the modern ethos of secular humanism to its maximum parameters.”

O’Brien also has made the argument that Rowling’s novels, with their “admirable” characters, might serve as a gateway drug for more dangerous fantasy literature: “When [a child] has finished reading the Potter series,” O’Brien asks, “what will he turn to? There is a vast industry turning out sinister material for the young that will feed their growing appetites. In the wake of likable young Harry’s adventures, not-so-likable characters will appear, and they will become role models or, at the very least, images of alternative ways of living.”

It would be foolish to argue with at least one aspect of O’Brien’s claim — that Harry Potter has unleashed an explosion of fantasy heroes and villains in both children’s and adult literature, and that many of these other works have a much darker undercurrent than Rowling’s boy hero. The current rage for vampire novels and films, for instance, suggests a growing interest in the more macabre elements of the fantasy genre.

Gabriele Kuby, Pope Benedict, Lev Grossman and Michael O’Brien are all posing questions we think are worth answering: Should Catholics and Christians fear the seductive dangers of fantasy novels and films like Harry Potter? Will the innocent heroes of Rowling’s novels lead our children to more obviously corrupting novels of fantasy? Most fundamentally, should we be concerned that novels and films of the fantastic might teach impressionable young minds that wizards and vampires, warlocks and werewolves are more interesting, exciting — and perhaps even more real — than the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of our faith?

One way to begin answering that question may be to gain some historical perspective on it by looking at a different kind of fantasy book — a fairy story written more than 300 years ago by an obscure Scottish minister, a story that still captures the imagination of devotees of fantasy literature today.

The Secret Commonwealth

In 1815, Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish author of works such as Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, helped shepherd into publication a book called The Secret Commonwealth. Based on a manuscript dated from 1691, the book described the world of fairies, magical peoples living among humans who did both good and harm to the “terrestrial” inhabitants of rural Scotland.

The author of this strange little tome was Robert Kirk, a 17th century Episcopalian minister who lived and worked in small villages of the Scottish highlands. Kirk was best known during his lifetime for a translation of the Psalter into Gaelic and the beginnings of a Gaelic Bible. The son of a minister, he studied theology at the universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and served as the minister of two different parishes during his life. He was, in other words, very much a Christian.

No one is sure why Kirk wrote The Secret Commonwealth. What we do know is that he refused to publish it during his lifetime, and that he died just one year after it appears to have been completed (one legend says he didn’t die but was “taken” by the fairy folk for delving too deeply into their world). His personal papers, now in Edinburgh University’s library, offer little evidence for why he might have composed the book. Some doodles in his student notebooks look like witches, but nothing exists that would really explain why a Christian minister would write a book describing the world of fairies.

The Secret Commonwealth offers no argument for belief in fairies. Instead, it provides an account of them in all of their material and social reality, with detailed descriptions of everything from their habitations to their diets and their weaponry. The book includes lengthy discussions of the politics of the fairy world — not a politics of kings and queens but something closer to the commonwealth that was emerging in England and Scotland during Kirk’s lifetime. The fairies themselves are presented as creatures composed of congealed air that suck the sap from corn stalks without being seen by farmers. All in all, the book reads like a journalist’s report of a distant land.

Although no evidence survives that would help us understand why Kirk wrote the book, we can make some guesses based on the world in which he lived. The 17th century was a time of intellectual, religious and political upheaval, particularly in Scotland and England. The civil wars that eventually led to the execution of one king, the creation of a Puritan commonwealth, the restoration of another king, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were driven by conflicts between Protestant and Catholic forces, and then between Anglicans and Puritans. In other words, these were conflicts about faith and belief.

At the same time, partly led by scientific discoveries such as those of Isaac Newton, rapid changes were taking place in how people understood their own beliefs, including challenges to traditional religious faith that led many in both Scotland and England to abandon any pretense of belief in Christianity. David Hume, the great intellectual light of 18th century Scotland, was a leading critic of all churches and the mysticism surrounding such things as miracles.

Kirk lived, in other words, during a time when intellectual and political revolutions were being driven by challenges to established forms of belief. We can surmise that a minister living among simple farmers who had for hundreds of years seen their Celtic and Christian beliefs melded into overlapping narratives might see the world of fairies as a way to reinforce belief in a moment of intellectual and political crisis.

Perhaps, Kirk might have reasoned, the best means for him to promote and sustain belief in the largest spiritual realities of the universe — Father, Son and the Holy Spirit — was to cultivate belief in smaller, more local fantastic creatures, even if they were not “real” in the same sense as the Creator. Perhaps in his age of spiritual crisis, belief in magical or fantastic creatures could pave the road back to belief in God.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the devil would make the same argument.

The devil speaks

Not the devil, we should say — a devil, by whom we mean Screwtape, the eponymous hero of C.S. Lewis’ imagined series of letters between a senior devil and a “junior tempter.” The Screwtape Letters appeared in England in 1942, in the midst of another political European crisis, and in a country that would witness an unprecedented loss of religious belief among its intellectual classes over the next two decades.

The movement toward ultimate disbelief seemed so inevitable that the English poet Philip Larkin wondered, in his famous 1955 poem “Church Going,” what would happen to all of those churches dotting the English landscape when religious “superstition” finally died out.

Screwtape addresses this issue early in his correspondence with his nephew Wormwood, designed to help the junior devil successfully tempt a young English man into damnation. We see only half of their correspondence; we never see any letters from Wormwood back to his uncle. Most letters, though, open with Screwtape summarizing or commenting upon a question or statement by his nephew, so we have some sense of Wormwood’s concerns. One of those concerns seems to be whether or not Wormwood should reveal himself to his young man — should the young human be made to know, in other words, of the existence of devils?

Ah, Screwtape sighs in response, this question creates a “cruel dilemma” for the devils of the world: “When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism . . . On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics.”

That last sentence clearly references the growing unbelief of Lewis’ fellow British artists and intellectuals in the mid-20th century: When humans deny the existence of devils, they become “materialists and skeptics,” refusing to acknowledge any realities beyond the physical world. For Lewis, then, belief in devils might play the same role that belief in fairies played for Kirk — they help cultivate a faith in things unseen in a culture gradually losing its grip on faith of that kind.

If Lewis and his devil are right, then we must consider the possibility that belief in fairies and devils — and magical creatures of any kind — has its roots in the same sense of openness to realities beyond the physical, material universe as more conventional religious faith. Historically, both Kirk and Lewis would seem to suggest, there may be times in which cultivating that openness, in whatever form it may appear, is the best we can do for a world in the grips of a crisis of faith.

For Kirk’s confused and frightened parishioners, as for Lewis’ skeptical modern readers, narratives of the fantastic and the magical may have provided an alternative means of keeping faith alive in a troubled world. When the doorway of conventional religious belief was in danger of slamming shut, their fairies and devils helped them to crack open a window.

We may find ourselves yet again in an era in which conventional religious faith is undergoing a new set of challenges. As if the rapidly evolving world of technology and scientific discovery were not difficult enough to absorb into our religious worldview, we have now to contend with the challenges of the “new atheists.” Recent bestselling arguments against belief in God have brought debates about the truth of religion and spirituality back into the intellectual and cultural forecourt.

But it may be premature to assert that today’s revival of fantastic literature will stem this new tide of skeptical materialism, because the nature of popular fantastic literature has undergone an important shift as well. This time around, as fantasy writers were propping up the window of belief in extra-material worlds, a new monster crept in over the sill.

Fantasy and death

In 1976, a lapsed Catholic named Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire. Followed by nine books in what came to be known as The Vampire Chronicles, Rice helped to create what is today one of the most popular fantasy characters — the attractive, romantic, misunderstood vampire.

Of course, the vampire was not created by Rice. The idea of creatures that suck the life blood from innocent humans and live forever as a result reaches back into the mythology of many cultures. Interest in vampires returned with a vengeance in 18th century Europe, partly led by reports from what are now the countries of Bulgaria and Romania, but reinforced by the already growing Romantic reaction against Enlightenment reason and science, which relegated everything unseen — including religious belief — to the realm of myth and fantasy. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, brought to perfection the gothic, romantic hero.

Vampires have become popular once again, and now they are competing for the same young adult market that was captured by the Harry Potter novels. In 2005, the novel Twilight appeared. Aimed at a teen audience, Twilight and its sequels created a world of angst-ridden teen vampires and other fantastic creatures. The blockbuster movie made its debut in 2008.

Unlike Kirk’s fairies or Lewis’ devils, vampire mythology inserts itself directly into one of the gaps left by the withdrawal of conventional religious faith: the promise of eternal life. As a result, the vampire story removes one of the primary stings of atheism. To deny the existence of a world beyond this one and to reject the hard morals demanded of us by our religious faith or of judgment in the life to come may seem immensely liberating. This ability to surmount death without the aid of a deeper spirituality makes vampires more dangerous than the fairies of Kirk’s world.

In the mythology, a vampire’s life beyond the grave does not resemble the eternal paradise promised to us by Christian theology. For while vampires may be romantic, they are also tragic characters. In most of this literature, the vampires realize living forever is not what they thought it was, and they often hesitate to turn those they love into vampires. They know that while death seems to be the ultimate evil, perhaps there is something worse. Life without an ending, without a new beginning of some sort, is not a life worth living.

The promise of eternal life may satisfy our desire to escape death. But for the vampire literature, it does not provide, as our religious faith promises us, a movement toward a good.

*So in the end . . . *

And that leads us back to our initial question: Is fantasy literature good or bad for our children (and for us)?

To help provide us our final answer, we want to turn to a fantasy author whose influence on the entire genre has been profound. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, created an immense fantasy world over a lifetime in which he taught literature at Oxford University. For our purposes, though, his most important work may have been “On Fairy Stories,” a lecture he gave at the University of St. Andrews in 1939 — after he had written The Hobbit but before he launched his epic trilogy.

In the lecture Tolkien argued that fairy stories must have happy endings. A fairy story must go through danger, evil, even death — but through a fortuitous turn of events, all turns out well. Tolkien coined a neologism to describe this element of the fairy story — a eucatastrophe. Like a catastrophe, fairy stories have sudden and unexpected endings — but, with the simple addition of eu-, the Greek prefix for goodness, this turn of events is a turn toward the good.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s hero Frodo Baggins fails in the most critical moment of the story. When he stands at the rim of the fires of Mount Doom and can finally destroy the Ring of Power that has caused so much evil and destruction in Middle Earth, he instead gives into temptation and decides to keep it for himself. Before he can act upon his decision, though, the evil Gollum bites the Ring from Frodo’s finger and falls into the fiery lake, thus accomplishing what Frodo could not bring himself to do.

So in the end, Frodo is saved by the fact that long ago his uncle Bilbo Baggins had refused to kill Gollum when he had the chance — and it is the evil Gollum who completes the task of destroying the Ring. The world is saved by Bilbo’s act of mercy, one that Frodo thought was foolish (and the reader also might have thought was foolish). But that is precisely the point of the eucatastrophe, the mystery at the heart of a good fairy tale.

When he published his lecture some years later, Tolkien added an epilogue that made a much deeper, theological claim: “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation”

J.K. Rowling’s novels — like Tolkien’s, but unlike the vampire story — follow this model of the good fairy tale. The goal of Rowling’s antagonist, Voldemort, is to cheat death. He splits his very soul into numerous parts in order to never die. The fact that a number of characters in the novels die is perhaps one of Rowling’s most important lessons — we cannot use fantasy to escape death. And yet for Rowling’s characters — and especially for Harry, who longs for the return of his dead parents throughout the entire series — death does not end our story.

And this brings us to what yet may prove to be the most important eucatastrophe of our time: the story of religious faith in the modern world. Perhaps not as profound as Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, but just as important today.

The most recent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in America, reports that only 1.6 percent of Americans describe themselves as atheists — a number that hardly seems to justify the fears articulated by Rowling’s detractors, and other critics of fantasy literature’s role in displacing religious belief today.

But those critics might justifiably point to another key finding in the survey: the largest growing “religion” in the United States in recent years has been the “unaffiliated” category, which includes that tiny percentage of atheists, but mostly consists of those who claim to have some kind of belief in God or a spiritual world but do not count themselves as members of any organized religion. Here we might perhaps find those who would substitute abstractions like “love” — as Lev Grossman claims that J.K. Rowling would have us do — for the more traditional religious deities of their fathers and mothers.

Rather than calling Rowling and her fellow fantasy writers to the carpet for drawing believers away from their religious traditions, we might just as well laud her for following in the grand tradition of fantasy writers, like Scotland’s Robert Kirk, who have helped to keep faith alive in a rapidly secularizing world. That faith may not conform to the standards expected by more traditional believers, but it may play an essential role in maintaining faith in things unseen in a world that looks with increasing skepticism on the orthodoxies of the great world religions.

The rise of the “new atheists” and their dismissal of God, the increasingly confident claims of the scientific world to explain the origin and nature of the universe, and the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — all of these should leave us wondering not at the loss of religious faith in the West today but at its incredible persistence in the face of so many secularizing pressures.

And if it turns out that we are merely at a low point in this eucatastrophe — if more conventional Catholic and Christian religious traditions begin to thrive once again, and those masses of unaffiliated believers return to their folds — it may be that we have our fantasy writers to thank for playing Gollum to our Frodo, and for keeping the light of faith alive in even the darkest of times.

Anthony and James Lang are brothers and are working on a book about religious faith in the modern world. Anthony is a reader in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and director of the Centre for Global Constitutionalism. James is an associate professor of English and director of the Honors Program at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic? Try tobacco, piraters and lumberjacks

2011-08-19T09:00:00-04:00

Let’s clear out the stereotypes right away. We parochial school kids all knew a Sister Ann who reputedly ran her classroom like a Soviet passport office and marched smartalecks and playground tomcats to the office by their ears. She was terrifying, nothing like mild Sister Susan the librarian or grandmotherly Sister George who taught the big kids upstairs. But maybe it wasn’t until the day you passed her in the polished hallway, relaxed and swapping jokes with the janitor, that you decided the impossible rumors about her delivering groceries to the family whose mother had cancer might just be true.

Whatever you think you know about Catholic sisters is best left at the door when you enter the Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America museum exhibit coming to South Bend’s Center for History in September. No mere collection of text, artifacts, photos and films, Women & Spirit tells lovingly documented stories about faith-filled women who sacrificed family ties and material comfort to serve and lead and help shape our nation into something ennobling and entirely new.

My family and I caught the exhibit at the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa. There, in a segment about the Civil War, I fixed on a petrified plug of tobacco that Sister Anthony O’Connell, the “Angel of the Battlefield,” had carried in her field kit to soothe wounded soldiers in triage. Sisters were among the first to volunteer for the U.S. Navy’s nursing corps, and some 600 served during the conflict.

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One anecdote told of a sinking hospital ship at Shiloh. Sensing doom, a doctor prepared to disembark, but his nurses refused to budge. “Since you weak women display such courage,” he finally conceded, “I, too, will remain.” Ambling by, an older Dominican volunteering as a docent leaned in and whispered, “I just love that quote.”

I found my favorite moments later. It seems the war offered women religious yet another front to encounter and overcome anti-Catholic prejudice. “I don’t care what you are,” one grateful Massachusetts private told a Sister of Mercy. “You’re a mother to me.”

Women & Spirit opened its national tour two years ago and has shared these and hundreds of other remarkable tales everywhere from the Smithsonian to Ellis Island to Cleveland’s Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The exhibit begins with the first group of sisters to ship out for the future United States. Their tale foreshadows Father Sorin’s quest to found Notre Dame, with a few extra perils that make the travails of Holy Cross’ hallowed “band of brothers” a century later seem quaint: “Twelve Catholic sisters — muddy, mosquito-bitten, but bursting with hope for the promise of the New World — arrived in New Orleans in 1727, having narrowly escaped pirates during that transatlantic crossing.” Pirates, eh? Moreau’s missionaries famously renovated a chilly log cabin into a university; New Orleans’ French Ursulines conquered the swamps in the full sweat of summer simply to care for abused women and orphans.

“Need brings out our talent,” Sister Hyacinth LeConniat of the Daughters of the Cross wrote in 1855, as if she were thinking of all 220,000 Catholic women the exhibit numbers in its history. They fanned out quickly. Immigrant communities founded hospitals, schools and all manner of social services in Atlantic seaports, eventually following wagons, canal boats and steam locomotives to support their countrymen’s settlements out west.

American-born women soon joined and formed new orders. Together, from Baltimore, Maryland, to Baker City, Oregon, they forged some of our most enduring institutions. They taught, prayed, visited the sick, built schools, soothed babies, held children’s hands, planted, raked and hoed, gleaned and baled, spun and wove, made shoes and music — and their own habits. They begged, negotiated and nurtured whole communities. They practically defined on-the-job training and became role models of leadership to generations of Catholic girls, fashioning women’s colleges and graduate theology programs with the same relish and purpose that found them devising health insurance for lumberjacks.

These are stories of inner faith issuing forth in determination and love. My sons loved “Sister Lumberjack,” Amata Mackett, who baked pies, darned socks, listened to the woes of many a Minnesota logger and sold them tickets for medical care, but went after deadbeats with a poker. My daughter talks about the women who died trying to save their orphans from the hurricane that swamped Galveston, Texas, in 1900. One sister’s body was found still clutching two small children to her chest. My wife, no stranger to sacrificial giving, marveled at Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon, who turned $5 and a donated building into The New York Foundling, a safe haven for thousands of infants whose parents could not, or would not, raise them. “It gives you hope for what one person can do,” she said.

True, but the sisters themselves seemed to prefer working by the dozen. Whether any felt regrets about the call to religious life isn’t shown in Women & Spirit, which doesn’t dive as deeply into their thoughts and prayers as some might like. We do find Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, now a saint, speaking this challenge to contemporary ears — “I am so in love now with the rules that I see the bit of the bridle all gold, and the reins all of silk” — and some notably frank acknowledgments of this history’s darker chapters, such as sisters’ participation in the commonly accepted practices of corporal classroom punishment and their failure to transcend the mores of racial segregation prior to the civil rights movement.

Catholics, as a whole, may have mixed feelings about the exhibit’s brief conclusion in the post-Vatican II era, “Signs of the Times,” but what capped my visit was a conversation with Sister Elvira Kelley ’62, a cheerful Franciscan and volunteer docent. Sister spoke warmly of her vocation and noted that she’s now in her sixth career assignment since joining her order. That’s a lot of hats, I remarked. It seems some things haven’t changed.

John Nagy is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magazine.

And so then I say

2011-08-08T07:00:00-04:00

I grew up in the house and the town in which my dad grew up, which meant that my family hosted dozens of visits from his six siblings through the years. Whether aunts and uncles came for an afternoon, a weekend or a week, they always made a trip to the cemetery to visit the family graves.

I often tagged along and watched them kneel down, bless themselves and pray quietly. Although I faked my way through the ritual, I never understood why we were praying to people we had known. Prayers were meant for God, Jesus, Mary, the Holy Ghost and the saints. My prayer arsenal consisted of the rote recitations we used for specific occasions — the Our Father, Hail Mary, Apostles’ Creed, Act of Contrition, pre-meal blessing and the Guardian Angel prayer. It made no sense to direct any of these to a real person, especially a dead one.

I understood the concept of praying for someone who was sick, but if heaven were the perfect place we believed it to be, why did our relatives need prayers? I never asked the question, and no one thought to explain it to me.

By the time I was an adult, cemeteries no longer figured into my life. When friends and colleagues passed away, we remembered them in services that took place in churches, auditoriums and function rooms. These celebrations consisted more of warm recollections and funny stories than ritualistic prayers. And on the handful of occasions that a service included a trip to the gravesite, I skipped it.

Decades later when my father died, we did what most Catholic families do — held two days of visiting hours at a funeral home and a funeral Mass at the church, followed by a short service at the cemetery chapel. When I learned that Mom had decided we wouldn’t participate in the actual burial, relief temporarily replaced the sadness. I wanted no part of trying to pray while wrestling with the conflicting visions of a happy heavenly afterlife and the reality of a casket going into the ground.

I knew that prayers and cemetery visits wouldn’t figure into my grieving process, but I didn’t fully grasp how I had reconciled the loss until my husband and I were on our first trip to Africa. We stood in an open Land Rover, excited by the fact that we were speeding across a savannah that stretched to infinity in all directions, and I said silently, “Can you believe this, Dad? It looks exactly like Wild Kingdom.” I wasn’t thinking or saying, “Dad would love this.” I was talking directly to him, as if he were a few yards above me and slightly behind my right shoulder. After all those years we spent watching Marlin Perkins’ adventures on Sunday afternoons, I knew that, at that moment, Dad was seeing the real deal unfold in front of him, just as I was.

I don’t talk to my father constantly, nor do I think he’s glued to the minutiae of my life. I think he’s watching over the shoulder of whichever one of us is experiencing something he would appreciate. He sees graduations and job successes, holiday dinners and family vacations. He watches with interest as my brother tries to train a spirited new dog, and he is certainly present whenever the Pittsburgh Steelers cause the family fans to yelp in anguish or delight.

The last time he was with me, my husband and I were attending a cabaret performance of a show about Mahalia Jackson. My father had always liked gospel music, and as the singer who played Mahalia blew the roof off the small venue, I said quietly, “Isn’t she something, Dad?”

I saw and heard his response — that little laugh, the shake of the head and a “Boy, what a voice.” I was nowhere near a cemetery, and I didn’t utter a prayer. But it was a perfect holy moment for my dad and me.

Mary Ellen Collins lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is a humor columnist for the consumer organization Angie’s List, and her essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor and the St. Petersburg Times.

Women & Spirit

2011-07-06T14:58:00-04:00

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Women & Spirit is organized by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 95 percent of Catholic sisters in the United States. The touring exhibit opened in May 2009, and it will run from September 2 to December 31, 2011, at South Bend’s Center for History in association with Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College. The center is located at 808 West Washington Street, two miles from campus. Shuttle transportation from campus will be available on football weekends. Learn more at South Bend’s Center for History or Women & Spirit.

Look who's watching

2011-05-24T07:00:00-04:00

“You are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood,” the police chief tells us at the neighborhood watch meeting. “Law enforcement counts on you to report any unusual activity.” He elaborates on gun violence, theft and crime-fighting strategies. Metal signs are placed throughout the area. They say, Welcome. This is a neighborhood watch area.

Our neighborhood is lower middle class. In among houses and apartments are 10 churches, including a Russian Orthodox with gold domes and a Ukrainian with green ones. Two churches ring daily bells over our heads. There are four well-attended pubs, one gym, one laundromat, a public school, two restaurants, a supermarket, a couple of pizza joints, four auto fix-it shops, an Irish dance studio, a library, two funeral homes, a florist long past its heyday and two pawn shops looking for broken gold. In the midst of all this stretches a fine park with a nine-hole golf course and a world-class zoo. Sometimes the monkeys compete with the church bells.

One Christmas Eve a young man watched with great interest the tan house on the corner a half mile from my own. Most in the neighborhood were celebrating Mass in the church down the street or were over at the Irish pub with out-of-town guests. Some were home wrapping last-minute gifts.

That night the eyes and ears of the neighborhood were not watching the one who entered an elderly woman’s kitchen and stabbed her repeatedly while her small pan of soup bubbled on the burner. On the table, five Ritz crackers waited like casino chips on a napkin next to her bowl. The Neighborhood Watch sign nearby never meant to welcome the young man who watched her house for just the right moment.

Now, at the penitentiary, guards watch his every move as they cautiously open the cell to let in Sister Maura, the chaplain, who tries to be the face of God for the young man who sits comatose. The guards clang the bars shut and keep watch. She hears them mumble: What kind of person murders an old woman in her kitchen and then turns off the flame under her pan of soup?

Every Wednesday after the noon Mass, a handful of the neighborhood faithful keep watch with the Blessed Sacrament in the former convent, unaware that it is Christ who keeps watch over them. There are fresh baked cookies, with warm and cold drinks in the kitchen should the watchers begin to nod. And by midafternoon they do. At dusk, a priest takes their place under the church domes. He could be over in the rectory watching a baseball game with his feet up, but no, he is kneeling upright, stalking the Divine. Like those before him, he takes his watching seriously. After all, someone should be waiting to hear should God care to speak. The neighborhood counts on these people, watching on our behalf, praying that God comes not like a thief in the night but like a loving Savior.

The two elderly women in a Sarah Orne Jewett story also keep a night watch. They have washed and laid out their dead friend in her upstairs bedroom. Miss Tempy’s funeral will be in the morrow, but for now her two friends keep watch, reminisce over their friend’s goodness, then slip into self-revelations not feasible in broad daylight. It is a long night punctuated by periodic visits to Miss Tempy upstairs under the sheets, then back down to the kitchen for some of Miss Tempy’s quince preserves on warm bread. Soon enough the watchers nod, as does the priest under the dome and the faithful in the convent chapel. But God neither slumbers nor sleeps. Not now. Not ever.

Throughout the neighborhood, street lights work the night shift. In an upper room I watch the sanctuary lamp in the window of the church across the street. The red light spreads like a stain, signaling the Eucharistic presence housed in the small gold tabernacle box where Christ keeps watch. He sees the kitchen light next door and blesses baby Ruth and her parents, rocking and feeding her during the night. Christ blesses their 93-year-old neighbor, four sheets to the wind, and the nighthawks in the 24-hour laundromat pulling the day’s clothes out of the dryer. He blesses the widow of two years who cannot sleep, who rises at 3 a.m. to read and pray to Him and to her deceased husband. As watchmen wait for the dawn, so do I wait for you, my God. Finally, light dawns over the nearby hills. She dresses and heads for the 7 o’clock Mass, and only Christ knows the extent of the breakage.

Directly from Mass a couple arrive at the gym. They married late in life and perhaps for that reason relish every moment. Side by side on treadmills, she is gray-haired and trim, he is bald and bent, clearly 10 years her senior. She keeps an eye on his heart rate, watching that it not climb too high for his weakened heart. Many a young man strolls the gym, flexing abs and pecs. What they would not give for the sweet smile she gives her husband, luminous, dear, as if there were no one else in the gym, only the two of them, he, the former Father Paul, she, the former Sister Monica.

The poet says that Christ plays in 10,000 places. He also weeps in 10,000 places. For good or ill, we are the hands of the neighborhood as well as its eyes and ears. A man holds a door open for another at the post office, a woman smiles and defers at the stop sign, while down the block a car eases up so the driver can hand a 10 and a jug of cold water to the man living under the bridge. Teens slouch through the neighborhood in colorful displays of underwear. One of them tries to sell a stolen TV at the pawn shop. The corner deli delivers free takeouts at the end of the month, while a man buys an extra meal at the grocery and slips it inside his neighbor’s door. Cars with open windows blast away, a biker takes the hill with no hands, dogs bark, the home for battered women is on lockdown.

Early Sunday morning, Rev. Lucy Barnes-Holdsworth sweeps up the broken glass from the church parking lot. Her sign out front advertises BARG IN — SCHOOL CLOTHES for 25 cents. Of course, we know something more than a letter is missing here, but the clothes are bright and clean and serviceable, and that space invites the Divine into our need.

Soon a rock ’n’ roll service heats up the church, rises to fever pitch and into a glorious, strung-out Amen, telling the whole neighborhood what we sorely need to hear. That the God of mercy and benevolence watches over us with love beyond all reckoning. Always has. Always will.

Joan Sauro, a sister of Saint Joseph of Carondelet, is the author of the children’s book Does God Ever Sleep? (Skylight Paths).

Believing: Waiting for the fire

2011-04-20T09:00:00-04:00

Perhaps even more than most other mammals of the northern hemisphere, human inhabitants of the cloud-shrouded Saint Joseph River valley long for the vernal equinox. I certainly do, anyway.

After this year’s particularly relentless winter, the strengthening of the sunlight yesterday afternoon drew me outside for an unsuccessful attempt to deceive my wife with a pretense of responsible yard work, when I was in fact idly kicking up petrified dog scat, whistling feeble imitations of birdsong, and gathering fallen bark, twigs and tree branches into a tidy heap. I thought I might burn them later. Sunday, after all, is a day of rest.

And this was Palm Sunday. The earth had begun its warming tilt toward the sun three weeks before, the moon was swelling night by night, and the forsythias my wife had planted two years ago were blazing into flower. A noisy but inconclusive exchange between our excitable dog and a cheeky squirrel was going on and the whole back yard seemed to shudder awake, yawn, flex and stir into new growth.

It occurred to me that after nightfall a week from now, I could toss in last year’s palms and turn this offhand brush pile into our own Pascal Fire. The wafting smoke of that imagined fire soon became imagined incense and gave rise to further imaginings: Before there were Christians in these parts, were the locals indulging similar anticipations of approaching festivals? What ritual passages from darkness to light may have taken place, perhaps even on this patch of ground where I was piling yard waste, a thousand years before the European newcomers?

The celebrations of the Miami people, or the Potawatomi people, or the people who were here before them, likely looked a lot like those of my ancient, pre-Christian Celtic ancestors. Come to think of it, the upcoming celebrations at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and the parishes of South Bend and its suburbs were unlikely to look much different from either.

“Only Christian men,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, “guard even heathen things,” and only our Easter Vigil could so fearlessly preserve all sorts of gestures which no Druid could improve on: In a week I would be one among a gathering in the darkness, keeping watch while an elder struck flint to make a fire blaze up which we would then surround, singing; and there would be a great cistern of water into which an unmistakably phallic and elaborately decorated candle would be plunged; and then the hallowed water would be splashed on all of us in the crowd and the candle flames would be refracted and multiplied as stories were intoned of who we are, where we come from and what we are becoming. The Celts and the Miami, like our other forbearers in this hemisphere, surely took part in something that looked and sounded at least a little like that.

At the time of the equinox, those pious ancients were doing important things, all right: Bedding down one season and rousting another; keeping stars, sun and moon in auspicious alignment; cheering on the sap and sunrise; quaffing the new wine; sprinkling barley meal; offering new tobacco; flaying sacrificial hecatombs; letting copulation thrive. But did they ever dream, could they ever dream, of what we who came after them would be up to? Could I? Could we?

We would indeed guard even heathen things: we would remain mindful of the tilt of earth and tug of seasons, observe the decorum of the stars, grieve the sorrows of the winter and extol the spring life swelling. On this first Sunday after the first moon of the vernal equinox, we would do all those worthy heathen things. No less than those of our kindred heathen, our gestures would strain after inexhaustible mysteries that our rites could never contain.

But something new would stir our rites of spring, because we would tell with fire and water and gratitude how we had once killed a man who is God, and how, in return, He had killed death itself; how He had turned on us, not to avenge us but to share his unimaginably new life and fierce joy. Forever. We would tell how, from the moment of his rising, spring may never again be merely spring. Life may never again be merely life. We, none of us, may ever again be merely mortal.

And all this to begin with a fire. I couldn’t wait to light it. I still can’t.

Michael Garvey is Notre Dame’s assistant director of public information and communication. Email him at garvey.2@nd.edu.

Great God, It’s the Great God Debate

2011-04-13T14:41:00-04:00

On April 7, a sold-out audience in Notre Dame’s Leighton Concert Hall watched this year’s edition of “The God Debate.”Before a packed house, “New Atheist” Sam Harris and philosopher of religion William Lane Craig argued whether God is the source of morality.

Oddly, whenever I think of Harris in this debate, I think of St. Augustine’s Confessions. Specifically this passage comes to mind: "I was glad, if also ashamed, to discover that I had been barking for years not against the Catholic faith but against mental figments of physical images. My rashness and impiety lay in the fact that what I ought to have verified by investigation I had simply asserted as an accusation.”

St. Augustine wrote those words in midlife, reflecting on that time in his youth just before he entered fully into the Catholic faith of his mother, St. Monica. I won’t suggest that Harris is at a similar point in his life. But someone so obsessed with religion, even if negatively, is surely wrestling with the angel of God.

Still, my first and less-than-charitable thought involving Harris is ad hominem abusive. He is so uncomprehending of Catholicism that for a Christian to debate him at Notre Dame is like a physicist debating a Flat Earth theorist at Cal Tech. Yes there are such theorists, although perhaps not as many as those who “bark against mental figments . . . asserting as an accusation” their own ignorance of Christian belief. And while I am convinced that even Sam Harris has a mother, and for that reason ought to receive a kind thought here and there, I have no illusion that he is on the verge of an Augustine-style conversion.

Yet, earlier in the Confessions, Augustine tells us that his mother pleaded with a bishop that he intervene with her son to lead him away from his Manichean errors. The bishop basically told her: “Augustine is a smart boy; let him keep reading and he’ll make his way out of the nonsense; I did.”

So there’s hope for the likes of Sam Harris, struggling so hard like Augustine to find an explanation of what’s wrong with stealing pears. But here is where the terms of the debate, “Is Good from God?” come in to play, and one has to wonder just what is at issue. I am writing this piece just hours before the big event. And I wonder what this great debate is about. It’s sold out, and the advertising says that it is back “by popular demand,” a reference to last year’s great God debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. But what is it that the people demand, and why?

Science vs. religion

Is Good from God or not from God? Harris, we are to understand, will argue the negative by proposing a natural science explanation of moral goodness for the supernatural explanation we are to suppose Craig will advocate. Thus at Notre Dame do we engage the modern dilemma of science versus religion — the two great enemies, so we seem to believe.

Our students pack the hall with great anticipation. Will God triumph over science? Or will science expose God for a “mental figment?” And if it does, what will our students do? Abandon Our Lady’s university in droves, having realized that she is the mother of all God delusions, and that they are paying $50,000 a year for a sham and a fraud? Is this really what Christians believe — It’s God or quarks? Priests or physicists?

In our youth many of us learn by heart Hopkins poem, “God’s Grandeur,” in which he writes “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” But do we take it seriously as a poetic expression of St. Paul’s “the invisible things of God are made manifest by the visible things of this world?” Or do we treat it like a beautiful sentiment with little bearing upon the impetus behind so much of the extraordinary scientific investigation carried on in the name of Christianity?

Yes, yes, yes, we all know about Galileo the Roman Catholic under house arrest in his villa overlooking Florence, without even a GPS ankle bracelet, looking out at the hills, sipping grappa and musing about how it all came to this for simply advocating the Polish monk Copernicus’ theory. But isn’t this really rather the exception than the rule?

There have been so many great Catholic scientists. What of Clavius? Boscovich? Mendel? Pasteur? Nieuwland? Zahm? Lejeune? They never drank the grappa. The very hand that is typing this line has rubbed the nose of the bust of LeMaitre in the Casina Pio IV inside the Vatican, much like Knute’s nose at the Rockne Memorial. LeMaitre is the Belgian priest and physicist who first proposed the Big Bang theory. With this heritage, how is it that we have come to this, thinking that we must choose either science or God?

The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn’t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas’ Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and “most manifest” argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.

For Aquinas, God was not an alternative hypothesis or theory to be superseded by subsequent science; on the contrary God was the best explanation for why there is an intelligible world at all to be understood by successive stages in science. Without God, there is no science and no scientific progress. The best reason for thinking there is a god, after the fact that your mother told you so, the same mother who told you who your father is (and I dare you to tell her you don’t believe her!), is the glory of science, not its failure. The glory of God displayed in scientific explanation “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.” (Homework for Sam Harris: explain that line from Hopkins’ poem.)

Moral truths

But you will tell me that this God Debate isn’t simply about natural causes. This is about morality and THE GOOD. We are to believe that if Stephen Hawking can get “thou shalt not steal” out of a random quantum fluctuation in the collapsing wave packet of the void, then we ought not to believe in God. Well for various reasons involving a proper understanding of the nature of scientific explanation, natural science won’t ever give an adequate account of the moral truths concerning human life and its destiny. But suppose I’m wrong about that.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that natural science were to give an adequate explanation of moral truths, would that give us any reason to think that God is not responsible for the moral truths that govern our lives? Why? After all, natural science gives us explanations of what good wolves are and good tulips. Do those explanations give us any reason to think that God is not responsible for wolves and tulips? No — at least not in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Mendel, Zahm, and even, oh my, that Roman Catholic Galileo.

But if these exemplars of Christian thought have even the most meager insight into what it is that Christians actually believe about God, then just supposing per impossibile that natural science could give us an adequate account of what a good human being is, why would you think that account would pose a problem for Christian belief in the existence of God or His providential care of the world?

When I was young I thought I would be a physicist and a mathematician, even to the point of having published in physics and gone to graduate school in mathematics. But I wasn’t smart enough to go on, smart enough in the modes of explanation characteristic of those fields. Someone once called this recognition that “I do not know” the beginning of wisdom, while others might call it failure. It happens to the best of us. But at no time in my studies of physics and mathematics was I foolish enough to think that they were in some fundamental competition with the understanding of reality that comes from God.

My subsequent failure/wisdom did not consist in failing to see how random variations in reproduction lead to the truth that one ought to feed the hungry, or the evil of hating one’s enemies, or that there is no greater love than that a man should lay down his life for his friends. My failure had to do with topology and homologies of chain complexes.

My father, who was a philosopher, once asked his best friend on the faculty, one of my physics professors, “Jim can you hear the music of the spheres?” My professor responded, “Hear it, Bill? It’s so loud I can’t turn the damn stuff off!” This physicist knew his Augustine: “question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky . . . question all these realities. All respond: ‘See, we are beautiful.’ Their beauty is a profession. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?” Sam Harris couldn’t do better than to read Augustine. After all even Sam has a Mother, as in Notre Dame do we all.

For Ernan McMullin, requiescat in pace.

Professor John P. O’Callaghan is the director of Notre Dame’s Jacques Maritain Center. The late Rev. Ernan McMullin was a world-renowned philosopher of science at Notre Dame who wrote widely on the relationship between science and religion.

Into the Deep

2011-04-06T10:05:00-04:00

Recently my closest friend for many years telephoned me from Dallas to tell me that the melanoma that metastasized in his lung last year, and for which surgery was successful, had metastasized again — to his groin, his lymph glands, his stomach, his spine, everywhere. His doctors told him that with very good luck and very aggressive treatment, including possible enrollment in an experimental program, he might yet live eight months.

Matters of treatment he seemed to have covered, but it was clear to me that his real and immediate need was relief from the terrible inner torment, the disquiet of the soul, the relentless interior suffering such a prognosis must inevitably engender. I spent the rest of that day and all the next thinking about what I might say to him to impart some kind of inner peace. Then my wife and I drove up to Dallas, and I had my say.

I am glad to report that I was able to help, and he asked me to write down what I had said to him, so that he might keep it by his bedside to read when things got him down. The essay here is the result.

Letter to a dying friend

So, my dear friend.

Your melanoma has returned and the doctors have spoken. It is good that they have leveled with you — good that we live at a time when doctors no longer keep the patient in the dark about his condition, leaving the dying to discover the “prognosis negative” by terrible accident, like Bette Davis in Dark Victory. Now at last we can talk with frankness to our health-care providers about metastasized melanoma: cancer at its most ruthless, its most relentless, its most intractable.

Since your telephone call a while ago, my mind, like yours, has been fixated on little else. I am glad, at least, that you have the possibilities of treatment, of medical and holistic approaches, of enrollment in experimental programs, well in hand. But it would appear that your more immediate need is help with your quite natural inner turmoil. Interior peace will not only ameliorate these final months but will surely go far to assist the more medical approaches and strategies against this formidable opponent.

While we were talking, I was struck — amused won’t do, for there was certainly nothing amusing about this phone conversation — bemused, then, by what you said about your “Baptist upbringing” conjuring feelings of hellfire and damnation, of God’s punishing you now for your many sins. Believe me, the Baptists at their most intense had nothing on the Catholic Church I grew up in so long ago, in the skill of laying on guilt trips. I don’t know about the Baptists, but I am happy to say that the Catholic Church has progressed greatly from those long-ago days when stealing 49 dollars was a venial sin and 50 a mortal one — something I was taught with a straight face in the 11th grade at St. Thomas High School.

I was 17 years old when I graduated from high school and went off to Notre Dame in the fall of 1955. The University required us freshmen to live in on-campus dormitories, and I was duly assigned to a room on the second floor of Farley Hall. Every floor of every dormitory had a resident priest from Notre Dame’s Congregation of Holy Cross living in a room at the end of the hall who would act as a kind of floor monitor or proctor, maintaining law and order, making sure all the boys were in bed when the lights went out at 10 p.m., seeing that we were all up the next morning ready for Mass and a grim breakfast in the dining hall, and making available to us a sympathetic ear when studies or personal problems assailed us.

That first night in Farley I padded down the hall in robe and slippers and knocked on his door, troubled by guilt trips for which I badly needed help. For the life of me I cannot remember this wonderful man’s name, but what he told me that night changed my life and my outlook forever, as I hope now it will change yours.

I was obsessed at 17 with Mortal Sin, with my innumerable personal lapses: impure thoughts, missing Sunday Mass, harboring resentments, telling lies, masturbation, procrastinating, doubting God’s existence — the works.

“Listen,” he said to me. “Let me tell you about mortal sin.”

Mortal sin, he told me, meant Evil. Evil. And by Evil, he said, we mean the ways of men like Adolf Hitler, like Joseph Stalin, and the terrible men and women who worked with them. Evil meant delight in machine-gunning innocent villagers lined up in a field, joy in gassing naked Jews in the ovens of Buchenwald, in remorselessly starving slave laborers in the Siberian gulags, in complaining of writer’s cramp after scrawling “Shoot him” on stacks and stacks of individual secret-police reports.

In words I can never forget, he said, “You’ve never committed a mortal sin in your life. No 17-year-old boy is even capable of Evil, of mortal sin.” What I had described to him, he said, was nothing more serious than the natural and perfectly normal adolescent acts of immaturity, immaturities that I would, in the course of growing up, grow out of and overcome.

And so with you, my dear friend.

I have known you for many, many years. I know you well — as well as one man can possibly know another. And I know you to be utterly incapable of Evil. There are indeed evil people in this world, but you are not one of them. You are not on the same planet, not in the same universe with Hitler, with Stalin, with Pol Pot, Papa Doc, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer. If there is hellfire and damnation — and that by itself is a very big if — it does not await the likes of you. Like me, like everyone you and I personally know, you may have lied, resented, cheated, backslid, insulted, failed to live up to expectations, fallen down on the job, overslept, overdone. Weak and immature you may have been, but never, never evil. What you face now is not hell.

But what you do face, as you well know, and as you told me today, is death. And the question is this: What can we know about death? What can we know, except that death is the other side, the far bank of the river of life that all of us must wade across?

You will remember that many years ago I, too, was given a fatal diagnosis, along with the hope of maybe living out the next year or two. Fortunately for all concerned, medicine then marched on and foiled the plans of my doctors. But I can never forget what my brother John, a Holy Cross priest who teaches at Notre Dame, wrote to me when things looked terribly bleak.

He said, “Think of this as a memento mori. We all live our lives with the sword suspended above us, in darkness, never knowing when the sword may fall. All that has happened to you is that someone has switched on the light, and you have seen the sword.”

You, too, have now seen the sword. And now that the light is switched on, let’s have a look at that sword.

Thomas Aquinas, deservedly famed for brilliance and insight, has never been celebrated for his poetic gifts. But in at least one inspired moment he gave us one striking figure of speech that is useful right here. God, Aquinas said, is the most knowable thing in the universe, in the same way that the sun is the most visible thing in the universe; but when the eye focuses directly on the sun, it is instantly blinded. So, too, he said, when the intellect focuses directly upon God, it is utterly boggled.

I will add to Aquinas’ simile by pointing out that death is the most obvious thing in the universe. And in the way of the eye focusing on the sun, and the intellect focusing on God, when our hopes and fears focus on death, we are baffled. We spend our emotional lives automatically glancing off the prospect of our own death, just as our eyes instinctively shun looking directly at the noonday sun.

Katherine Anne Porter has said, talking about her novel Noon Wine, “We are born knowing death.” Knowing. Now, there’s a word for you. It’s the sapiens part of homo sapiens. It’s the surely part of God’s promise to Adam, that if he ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge he would surely die. Of all the creatures on this planet, we are the only ones who know the inevitability of our own death. And that, in fact, is all we really know of the matter: inevitability.

Science, upon which we rely nowadays for knowledge, would appear to have little to tell us about death. But sometimes we can learn something useful about a thing by examining its opposite — in the case of death, by examining life. And science can tell us quite a bit about life.

Science tells us, for example, that our living bodies are composed of some interesting chemical compounds and elements, without which life as we know it could not exist. Water, for example: our living bodies are made largely of water. And iron and calcium, and many others listed on the labels of the things you buy at the supermarket as minimum daily requirements, and, perhaps most essential of all, carbon.

If you’ve kept up with your science reading, you know that none of those things existed at the instant of the Big Bang. They came into existence much later. The elements essential to life formed in the deep interiors of dying stars, created in the final milliseconds before a doomed star exploded in a grand supernova, spewing its guts, including the iron so necessary to your circulatory system, into the vast reaches of interstellar space, from whence somehow over the course of millions and billions of years that same iron found its way into the corpuscles of your bloodstream, calcium into your bones, water into your tissues, carbon into your very flesh. Somehow it seems hard to believe, would seem exceedingly strange, that so gigantic an evolution, taking as it did astronomical eons to accomplish, could be an utterly random, utterly pointless process.

We are also told that our living bodies are made up of many billions of microscopic cells, each with its hundred thousand moving parts, each going about its work every second, every minute, every hour, every day, year in and year out, knowing nothing of each other, knowing nothing of you. And yet out of this vast churning systematic conglomeration of atoms, molecules and electrical intercellular business has long since arisen a Self, a Mind, a Person, a You.

Even more amazingly, we learn that all these cells regularly die off and are replaced, so that over a period of about 10 years all the cells that once comprised you have died and have been entirely replaced by new ones. The living body that was you 10 years ago is already long dead, and your previous body 10 years before that, and 10 years before that, and before that. . . . And yet the you who lived and loved and dreamed all those years ago is still here, still subsisting, still hoping, still wondering.

The boy you were at 17 is still alive, although his body died and disappeared long ago. And if all this gives rise to the realization that there is far more to life, death’s opposite, than we ever before dreamed of, it gives rise also to the hope that there is far more to death, life’s opposite, than we can possibly imagine or foretell — and even leads to the suspicion that perhaps eight months from now, if your doctors are correct and you exhale your last, the 17-year-old boy you were all those decades ago, the 59-year-old man you are now, might just possibly live on.

Ah, here we seem to be getting into speculation — or, if you like, faith.

Faith and belief are all very well and good, but they don’t quite measure up to knowledge, do they? No, not by themselves. And I have to give short shrift to the faith of the Hindu in reincarnation, in “past lives,” in the so-called transmigration of souls. I can find little comfort, nor I think could you, in an amnesiac survival of the self, affording little or no memory of one’s former life. What good would be a survival if we could not remember ourselves, our life? What we want, after all, is to somehow know that our self, the Me we know and remember, somehow survives.

But faith, in itself not quite as secure as knowledge, can lead to wisdom. And as it turns out, wisdom can surpass even knowledge in showing the way to inner peace.

One way of getting from faith to wisdom, of affording real insight into the question of what happens to the You when you die, is by playing the “What if” game.

To go ahead with the worst possibility, the one you presently dread, What if when you die the You dies too? Let’s consider that in a couple of ways.

What if this much at least of our Judeo-Christian faith is correct, that there really is a personal and omniscient God? Omniscient means “knowing everything.” In fact, if you think long and hard about it, God would hardly be worthy of the title God if he didn’t “know everything.”

You can’t remember the 11th word you said yesterday, but an omniscient God could. You can’t remember, never even paid much attention to, 99 percent of your life, but an omniscient God would. An omniscient God would remember every breath you ever took, every dream you ever dreamed, every word, every sigh, every gesture, every haircut, every glance, every infecting virus, every trip to the mall. An omniscient God has been living your life right along with you, living it far more fully than have you, knowing every motivation, every reason, every justification. He has been You far more really than you have been, and when you die, that You continues to be, whole and entire. Therefore at the moment of your death your life would not be over: It would be complete.

Aquinas’ own ultimate proof of the immortality of the soul was that every person desires, longs for, immortality. He felt that God would not have endowed us with such a desire, would not have played such a trick on us, were it not so.

But then, still considering the worst, What if there is no God? What if our faith is entirely mistaken? What if when we die, we die all over, completely, vanish into nothingness? What if that?

To that we do know the answer. To such a question, wisdom leads us to a truth greater than mere knowing.

For, whatever happens at death — the best of all possibilities or the worst of all possibilities — it is the way of all the earth, the way of the universe, the way things are. As Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, whatever happens, happens rightly.

The way things are, being the way things are, is the way things should be. The way things should be is of necessity good. And we should not fear the good.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who sat at the bedside of many a dying person, observed that no matter how we fear death while we are living, those in the final act of actually dying have no fear of death — welcome death, in fact.

There is a wonderful parable by the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu that goes like this:

How can I tell if love of life is not a delusion? Lady Li was the daughter of a border guard of Ai. When the Duke of Chin first took her captive, she wept until her dress was soaked with tears. But once she was living in the Duke’s palace, sharing his bed, eating his delicious food, she wondered why she had ever cried. How can I tell whether the dead are not amazed that they ever clung to life?

When you are gone, my dear friend, I shall miss you terribly. I will grieve for you. The day will not pass that I will not wish for you. But I will envy your knowing at last the answer to the question of death, for your having experienced the last and greatest adventure of life. And I will rejoice that you have leapt the river that we, who must remain behind, have yet to wade across.

Patrick Dunne lives in writes in Houston, Texas. A former teacher of literature, he later practiced immigration law until his retirement in 1999. Robert Terral “Terry” Wooten, the recipient of Dunne’s “Letter to a Dying Friend,” passed away peacefully on the morning of February 22, 2011, one week after his 60th birthday.

A sacrament of food

2011-04-06T07:45:00-04:00

I think often of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who offered himself up to starve to death in another man’s place at Auschwitz. I think of his sacrifice, of the terrible phenomenon of depriving people of food. And it occurred to me recently that perhaps the one worse, more corrupt torture vis-à-vis food would be to make people eat. To tie them down and force massive amounts of sugar-, fat- and salt-laden artificial food down their throats until they blew up like balloons, until they became morbidly obese, until they became so lethargic mentally, emotionally, spiritually that they could barely move. Until they started suffering from diabetes and heart attacks and gout and hardening of the arteries. Until they couldn’t tie their shoes or walk normally or comfortably rise from a sitting position. Until their idea of taste had been so thoroughly laid to waste that they could never have the true pleasure of food again.

That very week I read a piece in The New Yorker about America’s epidemic of overeating. The trouble started in the 1960s, according to the article, when a movie theater owner from the Midwest discovered that if you give people a giant serving of popcorn, more often than not they’ll eat every last bit of it. Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, later signed on to the idea that one way to get people to buy more is to serve a bigger bag of fries. More recently, the author of a book called Mindless Eating devised a trick bowl with a tube that continuously refilled the bowl with soup, corroborating that if you keep putting food in front of people, they tend to keep blindly, atavistically, chowing down. Hence, the advent of supersized portions. Hence, with the support of the advertising, fast food and chemical engineering industries, a population of which a full third is now obese. My nightmare scenario had come true. Except that no one is tying us down and force-feeding us. Many of us have come to eat this way voluntarily.

One reason we’re fat is that much of our food, especially fast food, is so full of chemicals and additives that, no matter how much we eat, we never seem to be really sated. We hunger for real food — homemade bread, trout caught fresh from a stream — and the farther away we move from the real and toward the artificial, the more our taste is blunted, just as watching pornography eventually blunts the taste for actual sex: intimate, vulnerable, imperfect, surprising, and, once in awhile at least, glorious.

I have a sober friend who says that drinking never made him happy but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in 15 minutes. That’s the effect, to my way of thinking, of fast food — which doesn’t appease my hunger but makes me feel like, if I ate more, I might be appeased in 15 minutes. In addict circles, this is known as the phenomenon of craving.

Another reason we’re overweight is that we’ve lost sight of food as a sacrament, one of the most basic ways we have to connect with each other and with God. More and more, we tend not to eat together. We tend not to say grace. We tend to miss the tastes, colors, smells, shapes, textures and sensual delights of the food and to therefore miss remembering that for much of the world, any food at all is cause for rejoicing.

We often don’t know where our food comes from. We seldom see the people who plant, pick, pack and ship it. We’ve lost sight of the rising and setting of the sun, of the rainy and the dry seasons, of the cycles of nature, of the wonder of our bodies, and souls.

We’ve lost sight of the fact that if one of us is sick, we are all sick, that while we’re stuffing ourselves, someone else is going hungry. We’ve lost sight of the rich man and Lazarus at the gate (Luke 16: 19-31); of the fact that we’re both these characters: on the one hand as bereft, and on the other as grasping and fearful as the next person. Through a combination of genetic luck and narcissism, I’m not overweight myself. But I’m appalled as I type this — an essay about hunger — to find that I’m mindlessly spooning yogurt and peaches into my mouth.

One way to battle obesity and to be in solidarity with all the people in the world who don’t have enough to eat is to consent always to be a little bit hungry, to eat a little less than we want. I’m not talking about the obsessive-compulsive illnesses of anorexia and bulimia, or the insistence on, say, eating only organic, which often verges on yet another form of narcissism.

I’m talking about pondering the mystery of a potato or an egg, cooking a meal for friends, giving some of our hard-earned food, time, money, selves away. Consciously honoring the sacrament — by giving thanks for the sheer goodness and delight of food; by purchasing, preparing and eating our food with love — also allows us to derive the true pleasure, emotional, physical and spiritual, that eating is surely designed to give. In fact, maybe it’s not how much or even what we eat, but the orientation of our hearts — around food and everything else — that most matters.

In 1926, naturalist Henry Beston built a cottage in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and spent a year in solitude: salvaging lemon sole from a shipwreck, walking to town to buy fresh bread and butter, keeping a pot of coffee on the hearth for the members of the Coast Guard crew who patrolled the shore by foot at night. In The Outermost House, his chronicle of that year, he wrote: “A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. . . . Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. . . . Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”

We want to love food and people and nature so much, in other words, that we’re willing to die for them, not to be in such bondage to them that we let them kill us. We need to engage in the uber ritual of the Mass; we need the Body and Blood of Christ: the True Food. We want to share knowing that we are all beggars, all complicit in the suffering of the world, all hungry for a redemption that may or may not — in this “lifetime” — ever come. We need to remember that the Hitlers and Stalins of the world are only the shadow side of our own souls, writ large, that we are all, at any given moment, in dire need of mercy.

Recently my friend Joan gave me a $20 gift card from a local grocery chain. I’d earmarked the money for a roast chicken and some toilet paper, but walking to the store the next day I ran into Gene, the homeless guy who hangs out in back of L.A.’s Pio Pico library. He was wearing the same down parka he’s had on for months and muttering, as he often does, about the CIA, and suddenly I knew I wanted to give the card to him. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted him to feel safe — an urge so spontaneous and, I’m ashamed to say, rare, that the urge alone seemed proof of God’s infinite and redeeming love. Gene can be temperamental, but when I handed over the card he broke into a smile that was fit for the angels. “My, my,” he said, revealing a row of broken, cigar-smoke-stained teeth. “Christmas in July.”

I ate other things. But that smile fed me for a week.

Heather King is the author of three memoirs: Parched; Redeemed; and the forthcoming Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She lives in Los Angeles and blogs at shirtofflame.blogspot.com.

A death in the family: Father Ernan McMullin

2011-04-06T06:05:00-04:00

A leading philosopher of science, recruited out of his doctoral studies at Belgium’s University of Louvain in 1954 by a young Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, and remembered by colleagues as “one of the giants of Notre Dame,” has died. Father Ernan McMullin, a native of County Donegal in northwestern Ireland, was a Galileo expert whose hundreds of articles and 14 books on such subjects as the relationship between theology and the cosmos made him, in the words of his friend, colleague and occasional sparring partner, Michael Ruse of Florida State University, “one of the best-known philosophers and historians of science in the past half century.”

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A friend of the family: Father Ernan McMullin

An intrepid scholar, McMullin demanded the same tireless work ethic of his colleagues in philosophy, the department he chaired from 1965 to 1972. With Hesburgh’s blessing, McMulllin pursued a major shift in the department’s intellectual center. Thomists, once dominant, became a minority on the faculty. “If there is a basic pluralism of respect,” McMullin reflected in the pages of this magazine shortly after stepping down as chair, “a department will neither end up with strict orthodoxy, whether it be that of Thomism or language philosophy, nor will it suffer from constant warring between intradepartmental empires.”

McMullin led by example, winning respect and friendship with a charm and erudition that marked his direction of the History and Philosophy of Science program and the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, and saw him elected president of four different professional organizations.

He was equally dedicated and cordial in the classroom. McMullin taught Notre Dame undergraduates for the better part of 40 years and continued to offer graduate seminars until his full retirement in 2003. He twice won the University’s Burns Award for graduate instruction, making him one of only two professors so honored to this day.

Father McMullin passed his retirement in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Donegal, where he died on February 8 at age 86.

My Church Home?

2011-02-15T08:00:00-05:00

Arthur McFarland ’70 arrived at Notre Dame in autumn 1966 from Charleston, South Carolina, one of about a dozen black students in his freshman class. He was a graduate of Charleston’s prestigious Bishop England High School, named for a man who embodied the American Catholic Church’s ambivalent and ambiguous attitude toward blacks.

According to Cyprian Davis, the black Benedictine monk who in 1990 published The History of Black Catholics in the United States, John England was at once “one of the most brilliant and innovative bishops of the pre-Civil War period” and, where the great moral issue of his day was concerned, one of the most frustrating.

A native of Ireland who was appointed to the see of Charleston in 1820, England started a school for the children of free black families — it was closed after white South Carolinians rioted in opposition — and consistently maintained that he was personally opposed to the existence of slavery. Nevertheless, after Pope Gregory XVI in 1839 published an apostolic letter condemning the slave trade, England seemed to go out of his way in his diocesan newspaper to assure defenders of America’s Southern slave system that the pope’s words hadn’t been intended for them.

Davis quotes the judgment of England biographer Peter Clarke: “England, it would seem, accepted the structure of the society that he found in the South. In this policy of acceptance, he allowed the church and himself not to be considered as opponents of slavery.”

Nothing was ambiguous or ambivalent about Art McFarland, however. He arrived at Notre Dame with a pedigree in civil rights, having been arrested three times in demonstrations and civil disobedience campaigns in Charleston. And in autumn 1964, as he was entering his junior year of high school, he had become one of nine black students to integrate Bishop England.

Like Jackie Robinson in baseball and the Little Rock 9 in public education, McFarland and his fellows were selected for their roles. Selected not just for their academic and intellectual abilities but also for their characters, their abilities to handle the social pressures that went with being “the first.”

“I guess we were carrying the race on our shoulders,” says McFarland, now 63 and a respected veteran of the bar and the bench in his hometown.

Carrying the race, and helping to carry the Church, into the modern era.

The Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Mexicans — it’s second nature to think of members of these ethnic groups as Catholic. So much so that group and faith are inextricably linked in the imagination of the American public.

But black Catholics? That does not compute. In part it’s because of sheer numbers. Black Catholics number only 2.5 million, according to the best estimate of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. That’s a little over 3 percent of the country’s 68 million Catholics and about 7 percent of its 39.9 million blacks.

And yet, as Cyprian Davis observes in his book, blacks have been part of the U.S. Catholic faithful from the start, “add[ing] another essential perspective to the meaning of the word ‘Catholic’ and to the understanding of the American Catholic church.”

Two gatherings on the Notre Dame campus last spring called attention to that presence and perspective. From May 3-5, six black bishops and a sizable complement of priests met in Geddes Hall in a symposium, sponsored by the National Black Catholic Congress, on fostering vocations to the priesthood in the African-American community. On May 6, the Catholic Cultural Diversity Network began a three-day convocation that brought together representatives of the rainbow of ethnic groups that make up the American church in the presence of some two dozen bishops and the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio — its ambassador — to the United States, the Most Rev. Archbishop Pietro Sambi.

Both gatherings were brought to the campus through the efforts of Associate Provost Donald Pope-Davis and were supported financially, logistically and spiritually by the University’s Institute for Church Life.

Not only were these events living demonstrations of Notre Dame’s commitment to diversity, Pope-Davis says, but they also were emblematic of Notre Dame’s determination to be the place “where the church is doing its thinking.”

For Arthur McFarland, Catholicism was not the faith of his fathers — or maybe more important, of his mother, Thomasina, a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who nevertheless sent all of her and husband Joe’s nine children to Catholic school. In the segregated Charleston of McFarland’s youth, that meant Immaculate Conception School, which was staffed by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an order of black nuns based in Baltimore. Immaculate Conception, he says, “was an evangelizing opportunity for the church in the black community.”

McFarland became a Catholic in the sixth grade. Counting pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, he had had “eight years of exposure” to Catholicism. “At that time,” he says, “they used to teach us that Catholicism was the one true religion. As a youngster, I was sold on that.”

To be Catholic was to be viewed in the black community as “elitist,” even though, McFarland points out, his father was a janitor and his family lived in a housing project. In part, that was because Catholics generally were a relatively small portion of the population in South Carolina and an even smaller portion of the black population.

Segregation was premised on notions of white superiority and black inferiority, and those presumptions followed McFarland to Bishop England. Initially, he said, he was placed in a lower academic track; after his first six weeks, he was transferred to the honors track.

He credits the Oblate Sisters of Providence for his excellent preparation. “The Oblates were strict!” he says — strict in their academic demands and strict in discipline. Ultimately, he says, “much of what those Oblate Sisters gave us was superior” to what he found at the previously all-white Bishop England.

Margo Butler is 76 and, like her parents before her, has been a Catholic since the cradle. She lives with her husband in a two-story, red-brick Georgian home in Evanston, Illinois, about half a dozen blocks west of Saint Nicholas Catholic Church, where she is a member of the parish finance council and is, as she says of her paternal grandmother, one of those people who is there “whenever they open the church doors.”

But Butler’s involvements in the church go beyond Saint Nick’s. In the late 1990s, she organized the Evanston Area Black Catholics, a group that sought to bring together blacks from Chicago’s North Shore communities who wanted a Catholic experience which also affirmed their African-American culture.

Butler was born and reared in Evanston but, like her mother, attended school through eighth grade at the Illinois Technical School for Colored Girls, a Catholic boarding school at 49th Street and Prairie Avenue on Chicago’s South Side.

Run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, an order made up mainly of Irish and Irish-American women, the school was thoroughly Catholic but also, Butler says, sensitive to and respectful of its students’ ethnicity.

“I probably learned more about black history in that school than anywhere else I’ve been,” Butler says. “Those women were on target. They wanted to prepare us as best they could for the world they knew we would go into. We were taught black history and black poems. We learned about the [Harlem] Renaissance.”

She recalled being marched on Saturdays to the Regal Theater, the showplace of black Chicago at that time, to see such performers as composer-bandleader Duke Ellington and his orchestra.

“Every Saturday morning they would read the list of who was good and could go to the show,” she says. “We would walk to the theatre. No candy was allowed — so there could be no wrappers left on the floors to reflect badly on the Sisters.”

None of this cultural sensitivity carried over to the liturgy of the time — what Butler calls “standard pre-Vatican II Latin.” Nor was there any mention of black saints or holy people such as Martin de Porres, who later was canonized.

After eighth grade, Butler attended the local public high school in Evanston and “sort of fell away from the Church.” She returned to it after her marriage in 1952 and sent her children to Catholic schools.

She fell away again in 1968. She remembers the day precisely. It was April 7, the Sunday after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She went to Mass, “three children in tow,” at Saint Athanasius Church in Evanston, her parish at the time.

“Nobody,” she recalls, “said a word about Dr. King’s assassination. So when we left that Sunday, I never went back.”

Years later, she says, after she had returned to active church attendance and begun organizing the Evanston Area Black Catholics, she met several other black people who had experienced the same sense of isolation and non-recognition on that same Sunday.

Butler says it is that invisibility, that non-recognition, rather than the older, cruder types of discrimination she hears of from “some of the old-timers in Chicago” — being forced to sit in back pews, for example — that has characterized her experience of discrimination in the church. And that is what she has tried to address through her work with the Evanston group, the Chicago Archdiocesan Office for Black Catholics and the National Black Catholic Congress.

Hers has been an effort to lift up the black Catholic experience and black culture and have them recognized within the wider church — both locally and nationally.

Brian Lewis did something that sounds impossible: He went through four years at Notre Dame, graduating in 1997 with a degree in theology, and remained the Protestant that he was throughout his childhood and when he arrived at du Lac. It wasn’t until a few years after graduation, while he was working in Wichita as a newspaper reporter, that he became a Catholic. Crucially, it was a black Catholic church, Holy Savior, that clinched the deal in Lewis’ conversion. But it was at Notre Dame that the process began.

“I spent a semester in Jerusalem,” he says. “And I think [I] was probably moving toward becoming Catholic. Just to see the churches there and being exposed to things I hadn’t been exposed to before, especially to see the icons and the Orthodox churches in Jerusalem — that was something really eye-catching. Seeing kind of the worldwide Catholic Church in the Holy Land — that was laying the foundation for becoming Catholic later on.”

His classroom study of theology also was a powerful influence. Theological studies fostered a “more intellectual way of looking at the Bible,” as opposed to the approach he had been exposed to previously, mainly in Baptist churches, which treated the Bible “almost as if [it] is perfect.”

It was, he says, “a whole different way of looking at scripture . . . more academic, more rigorous.” After those studies, Lewis found he could no longer feel as comfortable in the Baptist churches in which he had grown up.

Still, it was not until he was working on an article about Holy Savior Parish in Wichita that he felt the call to Catholicism. Based on a few Masses he attended in dorms while he was a Notre Dame student, Lewis says, he had “a certain expectation” about what Catholic liturgy and worship entailed.

Holy Savior upended those expectations. Its choirs sang music that resonated with him, music familiar from his Baptist upbringing. The artwork and statuary in the church was identifiably black. “It was a tradition I was used to, but it was Catholic,” Lewis says.

He can’t say that he wouldn’t have become Catholic but for Holy Savior, but the fact that it was both Catholic and black made a huge difference. Indeed, that combination exemplifies one of the things Lewis likes about the Catholic Church: It is fundamentally the same everywhere — in liturgy, in beliefs — but also different, accommodating many cultures.

Today, Lewis, 35, is back in South Bend and worships regularly at Saint Augustine Church, a multiracial west side parish staffed by Holy Cross priests and with a mission to affirm African-American culture. Lewis sings in the choir and is a lector as well.

The Catholic Church, he says, “feels like the right church for me.”

Sheila Bourelly says she has been “in and out of the Church a lot” in her 68 years. Right now she is out. The main reason: the child sex abuse scandal in the Church, and the response of Church authorities to it.

Bourelly, a retired social worker, worked for many years for Catholic Charities of Chicago in child protective services.

“When they put out that list of names [of abusers] for the archdiocese, I had worked with so many of those priests,” she says. “I felt so betrayed. When you’ve spent years protecting children — and for your church. Going up in housing projects and removing kids. . . .”

The Catholic Church has been Bourelly’s home since before she formally became a member in eighth grade, back in the mid-1950s. Her parents, whom she describes as “unchurched,” sent her to Holy Angels Parish school on the South Side of Chicago. This was at the insistence of an uncle, who had had contact with Catholic education while living in New York and who also recognized that, in the Chicago of that time, it was an advantage to be Catholic to get ahead politically and in business.

So thoroughly did Bourelly blend in at Holy Angels that it wasn’t noticed that she wasn’t formally a Catholic until she was in eighth grade. In truth, she says, “I already was one. I just got baptized. But I was already thoroughly formed in the Church.”

She went on to a Catholic girls high school in Chicago’s North Side, then to Presentation College in Aberdeen, South Dakota, for her first year of college. She ended up earning a bachelor’s degree in social work at Chicago’s Roosevelt University and later earned a master’s in divinity at Loyola University Chicago.

For about eight years in the 1990s and early 2000s, Bourelly published Deliverance, a newsletter for black Catholics in Chicago. In addition to her Catholic Charities job, she was active in evangelization in Chicago’s black communities. Like Margo Butler, she wanted to see African-American culture reflected in the life and works of the church.

Now, however, from her retirement home in Cassopolis, Michigan, she reflects on the church and the black community and says, “I’m not sure what it means now to be a black Catholic.” Figuring that out, “re-examining what is my place,” is part of a search in which she is engaged at this inflection point in her life.

What she knows for sure is this: “I’m as Catholic as I can be. All of my enriched experiences come from the Church. Not only my concept of God but my understanding of myself.”

Eventually she expects she’ll be back in the Church, even though for the moment her view of it has been “shattered.”

My own experience: Cradle Catholic. Second of nine children born to a black Catholic couple from a small town in east Texas. Family roots on both sides were in Louisiana, where Catholicism is as common among blacks as Spanish moss on the trees. Nevertheless, my father, Wilbert Wycliff, was a convert. An only child, he was raised in a household with a Catholic father and a Baptist mother, and grew up essentially unchurched.

My mother, Emily Wycliff, the second of 10 children in her family, was Catholic from the start. While most of her education was in the segregated public schools of Dayton, Texas, she got the benefit of a few years of Catholic education in the nearby black settlement of Ames, thanks to an aunt who was a member of the New Orleans-based Sisters of the Holy Family.

The turning point in my life — and in our entire family’s life as Catholics — was in 1954 when I was 7 and about to enter second grade. That’s when my dad, unable to find decent work in Texas, went to work for the federal government, teaching vocational skills to inmates in federal prisons. We moved to the eastern Kentucky city of Ashland, and there became the first black members of the sole Catholic parish in town, Holy Family. My sisters and brothers and I were the first black children to attend the parish school.

Mother has told me several times of the trepidation she felt on taking us to school the first day. She had heard of white people “stoning” black children attempting to integrate public schools in another part of Kentucky. “I thought they might stone me.”

She needn’t have worried. The pastor, Monsignor Declan Carroll, had prepared the way, warning at Sunday Mass that anyone who showed the new “colored” family in the parish anything less than a gracious welcome would have him to deal with. After a tense few minutes of waiting along with other mothers bringing their children to school, one woman approached my mother, smiled and asked the name of her daughter, my sister Karen. When mother told her, “Karen Wycliff,” the lady replied, “Why that’s my daughter’s name, too! Karen Horgan, meet Karen Wycliff.” That lady, Virginia Horgan, remains a hero to mother, who always says, “You’ll never know what a smile can mean to a person.”

The ice having been thus broken, the Wycliffs went on to be happy and included members of Holy Family Parish. My older brother, Francois, and I became altar boys. Karen became the “mascot” of the Holy Family High School “Fighting Irish” cheerleading squad. Mother became active in the Mother’s Club. And Daddy, sponsored by several colleagues from the prison staff who also were Holy Family parishioners, joined the Knights of Columbus.

Mother and Dad are now 88 and 91, respectively. Whenever we all get together — as we did in early July to bury a too-soon-gone Francois — conversation at some point always turns to what Karen calls those “magical years” in Ashland and the good people of Holy Family Parish.

Some years ago, at a gathering whose name I can’t recall, I said that all of the good things which have happened to me in my life stemmed from my being Catholic. I might qualify that statement a little bit now, but it is still essentially true.

My Catholic education, from second grade through college at Notre Dame, has been the greatest blessing of all. But at a more fundamental level, the Catholic intellectual tradition and way of thinking — seeing the world in sacramental terms, examining one’s life in terms of grace and sin, attempting always to harmonize faith and reason — have provided a basis for thinking intelligently about the world and for engaging respectfully with other worldviews.

I share more than a little of Sheila Bourelly’s distress when I witness some of what is going on in my Church. But like her, I am too thoroughly formed by Catholicism to be anything else.

After graduating from Notre Dame in 1970, Art McFarland went to the University of Virginia Law School, where he once again was a racial trailblazer, and then served as an Earl Warren Fellow with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York, before returning to Charleston. He built a career there as a lawyer and a municipal judge, married and had two children.

He also reconnected with his old parish, Saint Peter’s, which by then had been merged with a formerly white parish, Saint Patrick’s, and was led by a dynamic black priest, Father Egbert Figaro. Among other things, McFarland became a member of the Knights of Peter Claver, a fraternal group for black Catholic men similar to the Knights of Columbus. Ultimately, he became the Supreme Knight and CEO of the Knights of Peter Claver, serving in that capacity from 2000 to 2006. He remains today one of the most prominent and influential black Catholics in the United States.

He feels his conversion back there in sixth grade has proven to have been well worth it.

“Without question,” he says. “There have been all these opportunities to bring about change. Each of us is here with a certain mission. Ours is still not a perfect Church, but it certainly has made a difference in my life. I have no regrets.”

Photo of Arthur McFarland by Milton Morris. All other photos by Matt Cashore.

The Brothers Dunne

2011-01-17T08:00:00-05:00

Many know him as Father John, his readers as John S. Dunne. To his sister, Carrin, and me, however, and to all our family, our older brother has always been Scribner — his middle name and our paternal grandmother’s maiden name. The name is apt, for it means “writer,” and it is as an author that his lasting influence is assured.

From earliest childhood, Carrin and I saw ourselves doomed to live our lives in the shadow of our big brother. All babies are found exceptional, but our parents and their friends could never let us forget that even at age 2 1/2, little Scribner could hold a roomful of adults spellbound with his hour-long observations on life and the world. At the end of these lectures he would announce, “Mouth tired” and stride from the room.

To the Sisters of Saint Mary at Sacred Heart Academy in Waco, Texas, this brilliant boy, popular with adults and schoolmates alike, was nothing short of divine confirmation of their teaching vocation. As a precocious first-grader, he performed the entire William Tell Overture on the piano to the assembled student body. When he got to the Lone Ranger part, the sisters rose bodily to freeze their young charges with the Gorgon stare of which only nuns in their black-and-white habits are capable, instantly petrifying the cry of “Hi-Yo Silver!” in the kids’ throats.

I remember with exact clarity my first day at Sacred Heart, when Sister Mary Joseph clasped her hands ecstatically and exclaimed, “And to think! You’re Scribner’s little brother!” This in marked contrast to her disgusted observation a few weeks later, in a voice dripping with scorn, “And to think! You’re Scribner’s little brother!”

For as the nuns and our parents were not loath to point out, Carrin and I, alas, had been born ordinary mortals, who soon found the paeans celebrating the triumphs of our big brother — in flaming contrast with our own pedestrian attributes — more than a little tedious.

Scribner himself to this day ascribes his early and lifelong love of learning, his quest for wisdom, to the influence of our maternal grandfather, even though this mentor died when the boy was only 5 years old.

Sherman Vaughan must indeed have been a formidable intellectual influence on all who knew him, judging from the stories about him we heard from family friends and from the transforming impact he had on the life of our father, John Scribner Dunne, Sr.

Daddy had grown up a wild buck, with little interest in life beyond pretty girls and fast cars, well attested by the fact that he entered Waco High School a year ahead of Mama and graduated at the bottom of his class two years after her. But after marrying into the family of Sherman Vaughan — a self-educated eidetiker who dropped out of a too-inadequate third grade, could remember verbatim everything he had ever read, educated himself as a successful lawyer, and became a founding member of the Texas Bar and a gifted mathematician — Daddy did an intellectual about-face. He read the entire Harvard Classics “5-foot shelf of books” and taught himself to become a fine architect and architectural engineer, eventually leaving to us a splendid collection of exquisite architectural renderings.

Pillars of Waco’s Disciples of Christ Church, Sherman and Carrin Vaughan disowned their daughter, Dorothy, when she married this worthless Roman Catholic boy and — as required by the Church in those days when a Protestant wanted to marry a Catholic — converted to Catholicism and took the vow to raise her children Catholic. But they relented when little Scribner was born, and welcomed Mama and Daddy back into favor. And it was only by the grace of God that the little boy was not riding with his doting grandparents, as they had intended and invited him, in their fatal automobile accident.

Our parents, who in a stormy marriage agreed with each other on little else, were united in their ambition for a splendid future career of their gifted first-born. This unanimity vanished upon Scribner’s announcement, in his last year of high school, of his intended vocation to the priesthood.

Perhaps to escape unending parental discord at home, Scribner had left home for Saint Edward’s Military Academy in Austin (now Saint Edward’s University), run by priests of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious community he now elected to join.

Daddy, a committed Catholic and daily communicant, was thrilled. Mama, a reluctant convert at best, knowing only Waco’s unexceptional parish priests, was horrified. For years to come, she would nag and harangue and plead with Scribner to change his mind.

Her argument was essentially that of Mary Crawford in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park — expressed far more vociferously — when Miss Crawford discovers to her dismay that the young man she has fallen in love with is to enter the clergy: “For what is to be done in the Church? Men love to distinguish themselves, and in either of the other lines, distinction may be gained, but not in the church. A clergyman is nothing.”

To Mama’s credit, however, after she went to Rome for Scribner’s ordination, she returned a changed woman, and from that time embraced wholeheartedly Scribner’s vocation. And it was Mama and Daddy’s good fortune to find him celebrated in Time, see him on the cover of Psychology Today, know him to be invited to lecture at Oxford — where he broke tradition by delivering his inaugural lecture impromptu — and learn that his second book, A Search for God in Time and Memory, was heralded by Newsweek in 1970 as the most important nonfiction book of the year.

I was a little boy when Scribner left home, and only when I was 19 and a sophomore at Notre Dame, the first undergraduate permitted — most reluctantly — to study abroad for credit, did I finally meet and have my first meaningful conversation with my brother. When I telephoned him from Vienna to invite myself to spend the Easter holiday with him in Rome, he said, “Pat, your voice has changed!”

The grandest of grand tours of the Eternal City followed, conducted sunup to sundown by an older brother who had lived there for years, fluent in the language and deeply knowledgeable about the city’s history. Those memorable nine days in 1957 also marked the first of our Great Conversations, an annual event ever since.

The following summer we were both at Notre Dame, I to resume my undergraduate work in philosophy and modern languages, he to begin what would be a distinguished teaching career — classes he expressly forbade me to enroll in.

In 1965, the first of his lifelong annual series of books appeared: The City of the Gods. By then I was head of the English department in a prestigious preparatory school, and I flattered myself that I knew something about writing. I blithely volunteered to proofread the galleys.

Right off, I found his book bloody difficult. After digging laboriously through a couple of chapters, I applied to it a standard reading-level test, one that required entering word-count per sentence, sentence-count per paragraph, and so on, into a calculation that formulates the number of years of education a reader would need: 12 meant a high-school graduate, 16 a college graduate, 19 a Ph.D. This tome scored an ominous 26!

The second thing I realized, reading on, was that this man, my own brother, at the age of 35, had read everything. Everything. Not only that, but he had the daring to meet on their own ground, with something completely original to say, the beacons of Western civilization. No, not just Aristotle and Aquinas, with whom the philosophy department of Notre Dame back then began and ended, but Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Pericles, Pythagoras, Augustine, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Freud — everybody! Small wonder this book would enter the recommended reading lists of graduate schools everywhere and serve as a crib for many a student’s “original” term paper thereafter.

At about this time, during his vacations home to Waco, I had occasion to watch him write. He wrote every day. For hours he would pace or go for walks in silence, deep in thought. Then he would sit down with a single sheet of unlined paper and, in his neat, small handwriting, fill the page. So in his early books, before he graduated to word processing, the paragraphs measure almost uniformly three-quarters of a page in length. A paragraph a day, a chapter a month, a book a year. To be fully appreciated, they should be read the same way.

Meanwhile, I grew disgruntled with the Catholic Church, finally breaking with it entirely. I knew too much about it, or so I thought, finding solace instead in Kung-Fu-Tzu and Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu, to whom our sister, Carrin, author of Buddha and Jesus, Calming the Storm and Behold Woman, teaching Eastern religions at Rice University, had introduced me. I did not then realize that I was experiencing the process of spiritual growth Scribner describes as “passing over”: departing from an original viewpoint to embrace the opposite side, eventually to return to one’s beginnings with new insight.

The return began this way. In the otherwise solid brick wall I had built against Catholicism in my mind, there was one great crevice I could not seal off. It was that my older brother, the most questioning intellect I had ever encountered, had clearly bitten the Catholic bait. At last, in one of our Great Conversations, I asked him outright how, after Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors had made the Vatican the laughingstock of the scientific world, he could embrace what I saw as an intellectually bankrupt institution, the Roman Catholic Church.

So he told me.

He answered without pausing for thought, as if he had been waiting years for this question. He told me the story of the Church’s battle, in the opening years of the 20th century, with the so-called Modernism Heresy.

The Church, accustomed for centuries to its role as magister, had been steadily losing ground in intellectual stature ever since the condemnation of Galileo. With the ascendancy of Darwin and the rise of biblical exegesis, starting in the mid-19th century with the Tubingen school, a direct result of Martin Luther’s sola scriptura, and the rise of rationalism and scientific method after Descartes, materialistic doubts were cast on miracles and the historicity of biblical narrative. With the worldwide advocacy of separation between church and state — the dismantling of Christendom that Hilaire Belloc has called the collapse of Western Civilization — panic had set in, and the Vatican undertook urgent steps to wipe out what it called Modernism.

The term Modernist first appeared in Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis, which enjoined a compulsory oath against Modernism on all Catholic bishops, clergy and teachers.

At about the same time, the Vatican revived the Inquisition under the euphemism Holy Office, publishing Lamentabili Sane Exitu to condemn 65 Modernist propositions, and sent Inquisitors around the world, organized by Monsignor Umberto Benigni under the name Sodalitium Pianum.

The Inquisitors visited every church, every seminary, every convent and rectory and priory and abbey, all institutions over which the Vatican held sway, to interview every priest, every nun, every religious of whatever stamp. The inquiry: whether they knew any member of their house to advocate any of the “errors” named in the condemnatory encyclicals. Any religious so identified was summarily dismissed, thereby excising from the ranks of the Catholic clergy its most original and inquisitive minds.

In its supreme and ill-conceived effort in the early 20th century to destroy Modernism, Scribner told me — in words I can never forget — the Catholic Church had “committed intellectual suicide.”

He told me then that he had taken as his personal mission to restore, if necessary single-handedly, the Church’s stature in the one intellectual field belonging to it absolutely, the greatest treasure in its true possession and in its gift: spirituality. That is the reason why of all but the first in his lifelong series of books, none bears the imprimatur or the nihil obstat. For they are not works of theology but of spirituality.

Scribner’s objection, he told me, was exclusively to the manner in which Rome had taken on the modernism heresy, excising Catholicism’s best and brightest. As to the ultimate fate of Modernism, the Church eventually bowed to the theory of evolution, the Bible emerged from scientific exegesis stronger than ever, and the separation of church and state gave rise to widespread religious toleration. Pope Paul VI abolished the compulsory oath in 1967.

Spirituality is a personal quest, one that requires whoever would undertake it, in the words of Socrates quoted by Plato in the Apology, to “know thyself.” No teacher, of course, can teach you to know yourself. A teacher can point the way, may even accompany you on your journey, like Rafael accompanying Tobias, but you must undertake the journey yourself. Nevertheless, it is not a lonely or undirected quest. For you always discover that the search to realize the Socratic “examined life” is in fact, in the apt title of Scribner’s second book, _A Search for God in Time and Memory-. In this search, to quote one of Carl Jung’s favorite maxims, vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit: summoned or unsummoned, God is present.

Without doubt, these first two books in the series, The City of the Gods and A Search for God in Time and Memory, essential to an understanding of the whole, are dauntingly difficult to read with anything like full understanding. They demand an almost unprecedented intellectual commitment just to follow the argument — a dedication to task worthy of any Olympic aspirant.

Yet paradoxically the two books are at the same time astonishingly simple, each proposing a single, quite comprehensible thema.

The City of the Gods from the outset and throughout its wide-ranging historical analysis centers on one proposition: “If I must some day die, what can I do to satisfy my desire to live?”

A Search for God in Time and Memory likewise concerns itself with a single deceptively simple proposition: “Will the future be like the past?”

Notice that I choose the word propositions to describe these thematic centers. For although posed grammatically as questions, these are not questions in the ordinary sense of that word — that is, interrogatories in expectation of an answer. They are instead quests, guideposts pointing to a lifetime of inner search: the very “examined life” proposed by Socrates as the only life worth living. Unlike a question, a quest calls not for an answer but for a search.

The examination of history, myth and culture that constitutes the argument of The City of the Gods eventually demonstrates that the search turns out, however unexpectedly at the outset, to be a search for God. And the proposition “Will my future be like my past?” places that search for God squarely in time and memory.

Scribner writes in a genre unfamiliar to most of us: the personal journal. As such, the entire series, beginning with The City of the Gods and A Search for God in Time and Memory, and continuing annually to the present day with The Circle Dance of Time and to some years yet in the future, is in fact a single work in many volumes.

Three questions, however, are essential to the examined life. The third — that speaks of our quest in response to “What can I do?” — is found in Genesis. The Bible, like the I Ching, the Rig-Veda, the Qur’an and the Tao Te Ching, belongs on a remarkably small shelf we call Books of Wisdom. The Wisdom literature differs from other literature as a holograph differs from a photograph. When you cut up a photograph, each piece contains only a part; cut up a holograph, and each piece contains the whole, only in less detail. In the same way, Genesis contains the whole testament.

In college courses I’ve taught we could easily take the Genesis story on the first day. It requires no preparation. Everyone knows it — from the book’s first sentence (“In the beginning God created heaven and earth”) through the Adam and Eve story with its unforgettable details (the creation of woman from Adam’s rib, the insidious serpent, the Forbidden Fruit) to the curious tale of Cain and Abel.

Yet upon rereading the story, usually for the first time in many years, students discover, generally to their dismay, aspects to which they had paid little attention before and far more layers than they had ever considered.

For one thing, the Serpent did not lie. He told Eve they would not die upon eating the Forbidden Fruit, but instead their eyes would be opened and they would become like gods knowing good from evil — a prediction confirmed when God said, “Now . . . the man has become like one of us, knowing good from bad.” Perhaps more shocking, it struck many students that it was God who seemingly did lie when He told Adam, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat, but as for the tree of knowledge and good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” But Adam didn’t die.

Most people’s memory of the Adam and Eve story ends with the expulsion from the garden, a tragic downer that leads one to ask, “What good is human life?” But the expulsion by no means ends the story of Adam and Eve. They go on to lead long and productive lives.

Nothing enlivens a classroom like argument, and disagreement usually elevated dangerously until it emerged that the salient word in God’s prediction was not die, but shall, or in the traditional English translation, surely. For man alone, of all God’s creatures, knows death as a certainty. As Katherine Anne Porter has said, discussing her short novel Noon Wine, “We are born knowing death.”

Speaking of the expulsion from the garden in The City of the Gods after he poses the question, “If I must die, how shall I live?” Scribner writes: “The oldest solution to the problem of death posed in this form would be the solution that is alluded to in Genesis 3:20 where it is said that Adam, after being excluded from the garden of paradise and the tree of life and thus from the possibility of prolonging his life indefinitely, began to call his wife Eve or Life because she was the mother of all the living, the substitute, we might say, for the inaccessible tree of life.”

As with the Adam and Eve story, just about everybody remembers the dark and violent story of their first children, the ill-fated Cain and Abel. Two things stick in memory: Cain killed his brother Abel, and the most famous question in all of literature: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The story of the enmity of these brothers has its share of oddities — the unexplained fact that God found Abel’s sacrifice pleasing and Cain’s not, the fact that God, though angry with Cain, not only fails to punish him but places a mysterious mark on him to protect him from harm, and almost more levels of meaning than one can count, starting with the ancient feud between shepherd and farmer.

But the answer to the problem arising from the expulsion, “What good is human life?” comes in its first, most general form, in God’s horrified question to Cain after his brother’s murder, “What have you done?” Obviously, from this outburst, human life matters a great deal to God.

Yet the most striking aspect of the story of Cain and Abel forever remains in the question that lies, like the pearl enclosed in the oyster, at the very heart of the mystery, the master key to the story of Adam and Eve. This terrible and famous question, unanswered in the story, becomes one that you alone can answer in your own quest, in our own examined life. Like the holograph fragment, it seems to encapsulate the entire Testament, Old and New, if in less detail, the entire pathway to salvation. It is the crucial manifestation of Christian charity: Jesus’ call to “repent,” which in Aramaic demands an utter change of heart, without which the Kingdom of God cannot truly become “at hand.”

It is the essential third question in the quest that is the examined life. And it foretells, perhaps, the ultimate question we must all answer before the judgment seat of God: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

By showing us one way to the examined life, in a lifetime of teaching and writing — illuminating for us as a model his own quest for wisdom, the examined life of an extraordinarily insightful mind — Scribner has made himself his brother’s keeper, has made all of us his brothers and sisters, his companions in the quest to “know thyself.”

As children, Carrin and I felt doomed to live out our lives in the shadow of our older brother. But in this we were mistaken. Scribner did not choose his way of life to adumbrate but to illumine. For it has been the enormous privilege of both Carrin and me — as it has been for his students, colleagues, friends and his readers — to live out our lives in his light.

Patrick Dunne lives and writes in Houston, Texas. After a career teaching literature and writing, he entered law school at age 53 and practiced immigration law until his retirement in 1999.

Photo of the Dunne brothers by Matt Cashore.

A musical feast on film

2011-01-06T09:17:00-05:00

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Professor Margot Fassler wanted to make a film about the Copts, ethnically Egyptian Orthodox Christians, to give people a taste of their “glorious” music. During countless visits with one Coptic congregation in Jersey City, New Jersey, she found herself fascinated by their sophisticated use of technology, too. “Every liturgy for them is a five-camera shoot. They have their own film studio,” says Fassler, who is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy and co-director of Notre Dame’s Master of Sacred Music program.

Documentation of their rituals is important for these Copts because they are a relatively young immigrant community with an orally transmitted faith tradition dating back at least 1,500 years. Film and the Internet have become indispensable tools to help them teach their chant to their chldren. They record their cantors and post sound files with translations on tasbeha.org, a website that Fassler considers a model for communities of sacred song that wish to keep their musical traditions vibrant. “And it all comes out of St. Mark’s in New Jersey,” she says.

When Fassler releases Where the Hudson Meets the Nile, it will be her fifth documentary film on sacred music to date and her third with co-producer Jacqueline Richard. The film will guide viewers along what the Ken Burns of sacred music calls a “journey of the bread.”

“Copts bake their own bread on the premises of their churches, and it becomes the body of Christ, and it goes through a long journey to the time when it’s really consumed in the communion part of the service,” she explains. “We wanted to take people into that liturgy, and then we also wanted to give them a taste of the glorious music of the Coptic Orthodox Church.”

Fassler was already an established scholar of Christian sacred music of the High Middle Ages when about a decade ago she obtained her first grant from the Lilly Foundation to begin studying music through the filmmaker’s lens.

“For the first couple of years I just made every mistake I could possibly make, hired the wrong people, did the wrong thing,” she says. One of her first “right” moves was getting to know a community of Benedictine nuns whose abbey is about an hour’s drive from Yale University in Connectictut, where Fassler was teaching and leading the Institute of Sacred Music. The nuns became the subject of Fassler’s first film, Work and Pray: Living the Psalms with the Nuns of Regina Laudis.

“It’s a really great film, I would say, and it’s great because they’re great and they welcomed us into their community, and I got so I know them really well,” she says. Now that she’s a full day’s drive away in northern Indiana, Fassler misses them. “But it’s ironic. I made the film because I so loved taking my students there to see a real monastic community sing chant. I wanted to make a film about it so that everybody could go. And of course now I use the film in my class, so my students here at Notre Dame can go.”

There’s no telling where Fassler and her camera may go next, but her interests stretch from the Old World to the New. In addition to St. Mark’s and Regina Laudis, those who watch Fassler’s films can spend a transformative year with the choirs of Messiah Baptist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut; reflect on the Psalms with congregations and vocal ensembles from around New Haven; and dive deep into a contemporary performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion at Yale. More information about each film, including how to order them, is available online:

Work and Pray: Living the Psalms with the Nuns of Regina Laudis (2004). The beauty of the nuns’ chanted prayer follows them throughout their daily labor, all part of living the rule of St. Benedict. Clips are available on YouTube (search “Regina Laudis”) and at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music website. Order the film through its publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, the Yale Divinity School bookstore, or at the sisters’s website.

Joyful Noise: Psalms in Community (2006). Briefly revisiting Regina Laudis, the film sharpens focus on the psalms, capturing them in the voices of multiple choirs who represent the breadth of Christian traditions in the United States. To order, go to the Yale Divinity Bookstore or call 203-432-6101.

Performing the Passion: J.S. Bach and the Gospel According to John (2009). Simon Carrington directs the all-student Yale Schola Cantorum in a powerful performance of the 1725 version of Bach’s sacred masterpiece. Interviews with biblical scholars, musicologists and the performers tell a dramatic story of the composition, its controversies — such as its alleged anti-Semitism — and the challenges of bringing complex historical pieces of music to modern audiences.
See clips or order from W.W. Norton.

You Can’t Sing It For Them: Continuity, Change and a Church Musician (2010). Jonathan Q. Berryman is a young and accomplished musician who faces the biggest challenge of his career: Merge the many choirs of Bridgeport’s storied Messiah Baptist Church into one in a year’s time. The film itself helps build anew this faith community as Berryman fights for older Gospel traditions, rails against “clueless musicians” and accommodates some contemporary styles. Available through the Yale Divinity School bookstore; call 203-432-6101.

Seven ideas for a sacred music renaissance

2011-01-06T09:16:00-05:00

Domers like their traditions, which means that music Professor Peter Jeffery should feel right at home at Notre Dame. Jeffery is an authority on Gregorian chant whose faculty bio on the ND Music Department’s website notes that he is a Benedictine oblate, one who chooses to live in the spirit of the monastic Rule of St. Benedict.

With a nod to the late Dominican theologian Yves Congar, Jeffery understands tradition as “the place where diverse forces are reconciled.” It can be a lonely view to hold when Catholics debate some old, sore subjects — like whether women may participate in the washing of the feet during the Mass on Holy Thursday. When, about 20 years ago, some bishops expressly forbade it on the grounds of tradition, Jeffery wrote a book demonstrating that the Latin text to which they had appealed dated only to the 1950s. “And there were traditions for washing with women. Just nobody knew that,” he says.

A more recent book, Translating Tradition, examines another touchy subject: the new English translation of the Roman liturgy that debuts later this year in Advent. “What you basically have in the Church today is liberals who favor scripture and conservatives who favor the magisterium,” the Church’s teaching authority, he explains. “Nobody’s speaking for tradition.”

Jeffery and his wife, theology Professor Margot Fassler, do — especially when it comes to sacred music, which helps explain why they came to Notre Dame in 2009. They hope to see a musical revival throughout the culture, but particularly in houses of worship, and they think Notre Dame is well-suited to lead it. “Giving children skills that they need to be makers of music in the Church and in communities is to me absolutely crucial for the intellectual and spiritual health of people,” Fassler says. “I don’t take it lightly. I don’t think music is a frill or add-on. I think it’s the basic bread and butter of life.”

Next week, Jeffery, Fassler and theology Professor Michael Driscoll, the third co-director of ND’s Master of Sacred Music program, will convene a panel of scholars to help them shape the future of what Father Driscoll has built on a shoestring over the past five years.

So, how to seed a musical renaissance that embraces the best of the tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day? In interviews last autumn, the husband-wife team shared a few ideas — some already happening and some still on their wish list.

Continue to develop a program at Notre Dame in which musicians are well-trained, especially in organ, choral conducting and voice.

Demonstrate that expert, well-trained musical leadership is worth having and paying for. Driscoll notes that professional organizations like the American Guild of Organists and National Association of Pastoral Musicians have laid significant groundwork for the spread of this idea.

Encourage music that fosters a better grasp of lay people’s role in the liturgy. Jeffery complains that too much contemporary music calls simply for an emotional response, “whereas traditionally . . . the great hymnists were great theologians and the texts had a teaching function in terms of expressing correct doctrine.”

Teach children a core repertory as a formal part of religious education. “It should be based on the Psalms in the vernacular, in the people’s language,” Jeffery says. “That would be a return to what the practice actually was in the late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, where people who learned to read learned from the Psalms.”

Form a model children’s choir at a South Bend parish that supports this idea by recording music and encouraging kids to sing while they’re being formed to receive the sacraments.

Raise the level of conversations about culture among theologians and liturgists. “Enculturation is the biggest issue in contemporary liturgy,” Jeffery says — no surprise when one thinks of the Church’s global reach. Notre Dame is already looking for an ethnomusicologist with expertise in world music and world Christianity who can help the MSM program lead in this area. Fassler says students will likely find work in parishes where people come from all over the world — even the priests. “I myself am from a Western European background,” she says. “Of course I like William Byrd — that’s my culture. But we have to realize we have a culture. And so do they.”

Tap into Notre Dame’s international programs. “We would love to have an exchange program where we would bring church musicians from Africa and from Latin America and from Europe and everywhere here, and send our students there,” Fassler says. “If we could get that going, and add a third year onto our MSM, that would be simply amazing.”

Master singers workshop

2011-01-06T09:15:00-05:00

Related articles
With full heart and voice
A musicologist’s joyous journey leads home
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Seven ideas for a sacred music renaissance

Once a week last autumn, the Notre Dame sacred music students all came together in Professor Nancy Menk’s Master Singers workshop, 75 minutes inside Malloy Hall’s Chapel of Mary, Seat of Wisdom. Twice each student had 25 minutes at the podium to conduct the group through a sight-reading of a piece of his or her choosing. Here, student Priscilla Weaver leads the workshop through 19th century composer Josef Rheinberger’s “Abendlied.”

ndchoralgroupii.mp3

From Leahy to Our Lady

2011-01-06T09:08:00-05:00

Jim Flanagan has had two constants in his life — an appreciation for the power of teamwork and an abiding relationship with Our Lady.

Flanagan, born May 29, 1924, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, played for Coach Frank Leahy on three national championship football teams in the 1940s and entertained thoughts of joining Leahy’s staff as an assistant football coach after graduation. But just prior to graduation, while staying with his parents during a break, he felt a calling to the priesthood, so he left Notre Dame and entered Saint John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts.

“Coach Leahy said to me, ‘Jim, I’m going to miss you very, very deeply,’” Flanagan says today. “He said, ‘Working for God is the best, Jim.’”

Flanagan’s primary reason for coming to Notre Dame wasn’t to play football, however. It was to grow closer to the Virgin Mary. “I saw Notre Dame as a school of Our Lady,” he says. “My relationship with her is the way of my life.”

During Flanagan’s childhood in Boston, he and his parents and four siblings had prayed the rosary together regularly. And whenever they took road trips, either to visit family in New York, to check the sights in Chicago or to see shrines near the Canadian border, they would pray the rosary in the car.

Still, in some ways, Flanagan, now 86 years old, has always been a coach. However, instead of shaping the lives of young men on a football field, he’s led teams of people working for peace and trying to do God’s work in the world.

Attending the seminary back in his home diocese, Flanagan discussed his possible future paths with his spiritual director. “He directed me to go to different communities to see if that was where God wanted me,” Flanagan says. But what Flanagan soon realized, he says, was that the Virgin Mary wanted him to do something new. The young priest felt compelled to start an order that would be called the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity — SOLT.

After being ordained in 1952, Flanagan got the blessing of Archbishop Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston to start the order to initially serve in the American Southwest. Officially founded in 1958 and approved by the Vatican as a Society of Apostolic Life, the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity is now headquartered in Corpus Christi, Texas. Today SOLT has missions in 16 countries, including England, the Philippines, Thailand, China, Belize, Guatemala, Haiti and Mexico.

What makes SOLT different from other orders is the focus it places on teamwork. Ecclesial teams, composed of priests, deacons, brothers, sisters, and single and married laity, form the basis of community life and provide the core of mission staffing. That’s different from the way things had been done in the church, Flanagan says of other missionary orders. “They worked as individual missionaries in various missions throughout the world,” the priest explains. “They didn’t have the concept of teamwork.”

In addition to his days on football teams, Flanagan also experienced the value of teams when in the military. He enlisted on Pearl Harbor day, December 7, 1941, and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was part of an underwater demolition team (UDT) that worked to clear the Normandy beaches of mines in preparation for the D-Day invasion.

“They didn’t have time to dig up the mines,” Flanagan recalls. “[A]ll those men on the beaches, they asked the UDT, ‘You go kick the mines, blow yourself up, and we’ll drive a wedge right through the beaches.’”

When it was noted that Flanagan was one of only three to survive that mission, he declined to talk about the experience in detail. “I was in a different area; that’s what I’d say,” he offers. “I don’t like to talk about war. It’s terrifying.”

Later in the war, Flanagan was stationed at Subic Bay, a naval base in the Philippines. One day, he says, he pointed up to the mountains near the base and asked his fellow soldiers to accompany him with food and medicine to help the children there who were starving and in need of medical care. And so they went, sailors and Marines as well as medics and chaplains from the base. “They loved going up there, and they did great, great work,” Flanagan remembers.

Father Mike Jordan, SOLT, ’68, says Father Flanagan was a strong and patient leader during the rocky years of the society’s beginnings. As the order was getting off the ground, there was ridicule and questions about why the Church would need a new order of priests, Jordan explains.

“You would have thought, well, there’s not much likelihood that this group is going to really persevere or become a more established entity within the Church,” Jordan says. “We had a period of great vulnerability as a little missionary society struggling to get on its feet. Father has remained the mainstay.”

Brian Lewis is a journalist who lives in South Bend, Indiana. His work has appeared in such newspapers as The Washington Post, The Tennessean in Nashville and The Wichita Eagle.

The Doorway to Sainthood

2011-01-06T08:15:00-05:00

The atmosphere is evocative of a European soccer match. The crowd, estimated at more than 60,000, is comparable, the mood is festive and it is a brilliant October day. People cheer, wave flags and queue in long lines for the bathroom. The heroes of the morning, though, are not futbol players but saints: canonized saints, to be precise. We are in Saint Peter’s Square, Vatican City, to witness the canonization of four women and two men.

Among them is Brother André Bessette, CSC, the first member of the Congregation of Holy Cross so honored.

At tomorrow’s Mass of Thanksgiving, the Archbishop of Montreal will compare André’s path to sainthood to another athletic event, suggesting that when André was proclaimed “venerable” in 1978 it was akin to his winning a bronze medal; his 1982 beatification qualified him as a silver medalist; now in attaining sainthood, he has won the gold.

It’s a neat metaphor, although, strictly speaking, one has a far greater chance of becoming an Olympic medalist than a canonized saint. More than 600 medals were distributed at last year’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver; the six saints canonized today will be the only ones designated as such this year.

For me, this trip represents the culmination of a quest to understand both how the Canadian man became a saint and what his canonization means. Last summer, I joined a parish pilgrimage to the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal, where I learned more about André. Born Alfred Bessette in a small village in Quebec in 1845, he was a sickly infant not expected to live long. Orphaned at a young age, he spent his young adult years as an itinerant worker. The Congregation of Holy Cross at first refused him entry because of his frail health, but eventually he was permitted to take vows and he took André as his religious name.

Since he was uneducated and unskilled, his superiors assigned him to be a porter at the College of Notre Dame in Montreal. He later joked, “When I entered the Congregation, they showed me the door. And I stayed there for 40 years.” André’s reputation for hospitality, and eventually for healing, soon attracted a constant stream of visitors. André listened to each one, assured him or her of his prayers for them, and spoke of his own deep faith in God and in Saint Joseph. Against all odds, he managed to raise funds to help build the magnificent Oratory of Saint Joseph on a large hill across from the college.

As is the custom, I ascended the Oratory’s concrete steps on my knees, asking André to intercede for my intentions. Foremost among them was healing for my friend and fellow parishioner, Suzy Fitzpatrick, whose recent diagnosis of colon cancer prevented her from joining the pilgrimage. With the other pilgrims, I marveled at the notes, crutches, slings and other signs of the reported 125,000 healings attributed to André, known as “The Miracle Man of Montreal.”

Now I have come to Rome, where today’s canonization ceremony reflects both the celebration and the solemnity befitting such a rare event. Tapestries depicting each of the six saints hang from the balcony of Saint Peter’s. Most pilgrims are wearing scarves or medals identifying the saint they have come to support. Others open their program booklet to the page with the picture of their saint and hold it aloft.

Brother André’s fans appear to be in a distinct if enthusiastic minority. The two Italian saints, to be sure, have home-field advantage. But all of us are outmatched, if not in number then in exuberance, by pilgrims from Australia. More than 10,000 of them have traveled across the globe to attend the canonization of Mother Mary MacKillop, their nation’s first canonized saint.

The rite of canonization appears just before the Liturgy of the Word, and includes a recitation of the litany of saints, a reading of the official biographies of each and the pope’s official proclamation of the formula of canonization. Most of the Mass is in Latin, although the rite of canonization and the homily are punctuated by passages spoken in the native languages of each of the candidates — French for André, English for MacKillop, and Spanish, Polish and Italian for the remaining four.

Like André, the other five people canonized today belonged to religious communities. It does not diminish their holiness to say that their causes for canonization were helped substantially by this fact. The modern canonization process, in place since the 16th century, is exacting, exhausting and expensive. Religious congregations can supply the funding, labor and institutional memory it takes to sustain a cause for the decades or even centuries it often requires to see a cause through completion.

As petitioners, the Congregation of Holy Cross in Montreal appealed to the Archbishop of Montreal to open André’s cause. The archbishop obliged in 1940 and would oversee three concurrent investigations that constituted the diocesan process of a cause for canonization.

First, all of André’s writings were collected for later examination by theologians. Second, diocesan commissions were set up in Montreal and all the other places André had lived to interview witnesses about André’s reputation for holiness. The minutes of this testimony, called the informative process, were transcribed by hand into an almost 5,000-page document. Finally, a diocesan court judged that André had never been publically worshipped. This judgment of non cultus was the only decision rendered by the diocesan court; all other decisions regarding the case were made in Rome, first by the Sacred Congregation of Rites (now called the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints) and, finally, by the pope.

The entire file was hand-delivered to Rome in 1950. It would take another decade for the Sacred Congregation to review this material. Upon their recommendation and with the approval of Pope John XXIII, the apostolic, or Roman, process on André’s cause began in 1960.

The apostolic process on virtues essentially repeated the diocesan informative process but was carried out under the authority of the Holy See rather than by the local ordinary. This involved 148 sessions in which 23 witnesses testified about André’s reputation for holiness. Again, this material was transferred to the Sacred Congregation for review. It was not until 1978 that Pope Paul VI would approve the decree on André’s heroic virtues, assigning him the title of “Venerable.”

Then came the hard part: the apostolic process on miracles, which reviewed alleged miracles attributed to André’s intercession. A miracle is distinct from a favor (i.e. “I prayed to André, and my husband found a new job” or “Thanks to my prayers to André, I did well on the test”) and almost always involves a medically inexplicable cure.

Accounts of miracles are reported to the postulator, a person based in Rome and appointed by the petitioner to prepare documentation for the cause and to present it to the Sacred Congregation of Rites. Those that look promising are subject to a lengthy process which involves gathering detailed testimony from witnesses and an examination by medical experts at the local level and in Rome. If they agree that the cure is impossible to explain medically, a commission of theologians then determines whether the person in question is indeed responsible. If their decision is favorable, the matter goes straight to the pope, who has the final say in all matters related to canonization.

André’s first authenticated miracle involved the case of Joseph Audino, a New York man who was diagnosed with severe liver cancer and healed after his family invoked André’s intercession. An initial diocesan hearing on the cure was held in February 1966, and Pope John Paul II officially attributed it to André on November 27, 1981.

At this point André’s cause benefited from timing. From the 16th century until very recently, candidates for sainthood required two miracles for beatification (except if he or she had died as a martyr, in which case only one was required) and an additional two for canonization. In search of a second miracle, petitioners for André’s cause sent testimony regarding at least 16 possible miracles to Rome in the aftermath of the Audino case. But by this time the Congregation for Causes of the Saints was grappling with theological and practical questions about the complexity of the canonization process.

Miracles came under particular scrutiny. Were they really theologically necessary to prove sainthood, once the virtues were established? Moreover, as modern medical advances reduced the realm of the medically inexplicable, was it even realistic to expect that a sufficient number would make it through such a stringent process?

Inheriting this debate upon his election to the papacy in 1979, John Paul II had his own reasons for wanting change. Committed to canonizing more people from the developing world, where medical experts were often harder to come by, he would eventually reduce the number of required miracles to one for beatification and one for canonization. John Paul II also implemented other changes designed to streamline the canonization process. This helps to explain why he canonized more people (482 canonized, 1,341 beatified) than all of his predecessors combined.

In André’s case, these changes ensured that the Audino miracle was sufficient for the pope to promulgate his decree on beatification, which was made official in a ceremony on May 23, 1982. From that point on he was known as Blessed Brother André. Canonically speaking, beatification is more than simply the penultimate stage on the way to canonization. The decree of beatification extends the right of public veneration to specific groups within the church, either a diocese, country or religious congregation. It is not until a person is canonized that Catholics throughout the universal church have the ability and in fact the duty to venerate that saint publicly.

Thousands of those beatified will remain at this stage permanently, either because the petitioners have lost interest or because no more miracles are forthcoming. Another Canadian candidate for sainthood, Marie of the Incarnation, was beatified in 1980, but her cause has stalled since then. On a recent visit to the Ursuline convent Marie founded in Quebec City, I asked one of the sisters if any miracles attributed to Mother Marie are presently under investigation. She smiled sadly and said, “We think she perhaps has other things on her mind.”

Not so for Blessed Brother André. Reports of his miracles continued, and as before the most promising ones were forwarded to the postulator in Rome. Seven people have served as postulator for André’s cause. The most recent, Dr. Andrea Ambrosi, accepted that role in 2002 when he also became the official postulator for the Congregation of Holy Cross. Ambrosi, a canon lawyer, runs the Ambrosi Law Firm for Causes of Beatification and Canonization in Rome. His firm, located just off the crowded Piazza Navona, employs three full-time staff members, including his English-speaking assistant, Ohio native Madelaine Kuns Bruschini.

When I meet with Ambrosi and Bruschini a day after the canonization, their mood is celebratory, though both admit to fatigue. The festivities of the past weekend have been exhausting, and André’s canonization has come on the heels of their trip to England a month earlier, where Pope Benedict presided over the beatification of John Henry Newman, for whom Ambrosi also serves as postulator.

During my hour-long conversation with Ambrosi I realize that his talent, instinct and experience combine to give his causes a reasonably good chance of success. When I ask him how he identifies a miracle that might go the distance, he rattles off three criteria: a certainty of diagnosis (in that all medical experts agree), an initial prognosis of death (a cure from, say, deafness, may qualify as miraculous but lacks the drama inherent in a resurrection) and proximity of the invocation to the saint and the healing (almost immediate, rather than drawn out over weeks or months).

André’s second authenticated miracle easily met all three criteria. In 1999, a 9-year-old Quebecois boy had suffered severe head trauma in a bicycle accident. Despite a prognosis of certain death, he was cured after his family prayed for André’s intercession. Investigations began into the cure in 2005 and concluded on December 19, 2009, when Pope Benedict XVI authorized the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints to promulgate the decree attributing this miracle to André. This paved the way for his October 2010 canonization. The injured boy, now a healthy young adult, is present at the ceremony, though he has preferred to remain anonymous.

Ambrosi is presently working on about 35 active causes for canonization. Among them are a number of other CSC causes, including that of the congregation’s founder, Basil Moreau, whose cause Ambrosi shepherded to beatification in 2007. Moreau is one authenticated miracle away from canonization, and there is a promising one presently undergoing investigation. (At this stage, everything but the location of the alleged miracle, a city in India, is top secret.) Other notable Holy Cross causes include Bishop Vincent McCauley, who worked for years in Uganda, and Rev. Patrick Peyton, whose Family Rosary Crusade drew millions of Catholics to open-air rallies in the 1950s and sparked a TV show.

Yet it is a humble doorkeeper, rather than the founder, the bishop or the media sensation, who has been the first Holy Cross member raised to the altars of the saints. If there ever was a testament to the gospel truth, “He who humbles himself shall be exalted,” this is it. According to Kenneth Woodward ’57, former religion writer for Newsweek and the acknowledged expert on the canonization process, this is not an uncommon pattern in saint-making. The process tends to favor “people who don’t make it by worldly standards. . . . I always tell people, if you want to be canonized, don’t be a cardinal.”

Father Kevin Grove, CSC, ’09M.Div., associate pastor at Christ the King parish in South Bend, Indiana, imparts a great deal of theological significance to this pattern of inversion. Grove, who organized my pilgrimage to the Oratory last summer, sees in André’s canonization a powerful reminder that God can transform our greatest weaknesses into the very stuff of salvation. “God used the life of a man who was too sickly to put in an honest day’s labor in order to be a comfort and solace to hundreds of thousands of sick persons,” says Grove. “God used a man who was functionally illiterate to be a teacher to the masses about how to pray and how to trust in the transformative power of Christ’s passion.”

It’s clear that André’s canonization means a great deal to Grove and his confreres. At a post-canonization luncheon in Rome, Rev. David Tyson, CSC, head of Holy Cross’ Indiana province, describes the day as one that he and most of the men in the room have been waiting for most of their adult lives. Rev. John I. Jenkins, CSC, president of Notre Dame, has traveled to Rome for the canonization, heading an official University delegation that included Rev. James McDonald, CSC, ’79, associate vice president; Tom Burish, provost; J. Matthew Ashley, chair of the Department of Theology; and Father Tim Lowe, the rector of the Tantur Institute for Ecumenical Studies.

From Rev. Ed Obermiller, CSC, one of Tyson’s assistants, I learn of yet another sign of the momentousness of the occasion, perhaps the most telling considering Italian culture: The restaurant’s owner has unilaterally added a second pasta course to our already elaborate menu. A single pasta course, it seems, would not have done justice to a canonization celebration.

When I asked Father Jenkins what Bessette’s canonization should mean to people at Holy Cross institutions, he expressed his hope that Brother André’s example will inspire “our Notre Dame community to renew our commitment to live holy lives, to welcome all, and to show compassion for those in need.”

One segment of Notre Dame’s community has already realized Jenkins’ hopes. The Center for Social Concerns structured a series of weekend events for members of the ND community in Europe. According to the center’s Rosie McDowell, who is based in Angers, France, where she promotes community-based learning for study-abroad students based in Europe, the highlight of the weekend involved performing service activities in two different sites in Rome on Saturday morning. The Center’s initiative received significant support from Notre Dame’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and McDowell described the weekend events as “intentionally planned to include prayer, learning, service and reflection to give all an opportunity to more fully understand the significance of Brother André’s canonization and the relevance that the model of his life has for all of us.”

Staff members at Holy Cross Village, a retirement community run by the Brothers of Holy Cross in South Bend, also had André’s work in mind when planning their celebration of his canonization. According to Sister Marilyn Zugish, CSC, director of spiritual care and mission integration, Brother André’s example inspired them to select employees laboring on “the front lines.” One member of each of the village’s five service departments — maintenance, housekeeping, dietary, physical therapy and administrative assistance — was selected by lottery to receive an all-expense paid trip to the canonization.

My trip to Rome was both a spiritual and academic enterprise. As a religious historian, I am researching the relationship between nationalism and sanctity. In Catholic countries this is a rather straightforward affair: think Patrick of Ireland or Louis of France. But in nations where Catholics have historically been in the minority, it is much more complicated.

In the 1880s, Catholics in both the United States and Canada began to complain that they lacked a national patron saint. By that time, 17 men and women from Central and South America had been canonized, and the first of those, Rose of Lima, had been a saint for more than two centuries. Church leaders believed their search for a saint had long been handicapped by anti-Catholicism in the United States and Canada, and many of them insisted that canonizing a saint from North America would actually help Catholics reduce anti-Catholicism.

This premise may seem counterintuitive, as saints were particularly likely to evoke Protestant suspicion. Nevertheless, it was in part the desire to root Catholicism more firmly in American soil that prompted Church leaders in the United States and Canada to introduce jointly in 1884 the causes for canonization of the North American martyrs, eight Jesuit missionaries killed in New France between 1642 and 1649. Two of them — Isaac Jogues and Rene Goupil — died in territory that later became part of upstate New York, so technically they counted as U.S. saints.

I spent the remainder of my time in Rome in the Vatican Secret Archives, examining documentation on the North American martyrs and the other U.S. causes for canonization introduced more than a century ago. Some of them, such as Elizabeth Ann Seton, John Neumann and Mother Theodore Guerin, would eventually make it all the way. Others, such as Francis Xavier Seelos and Kateri Tekakwitha, have been beatified. And still other causes, such as that of Rev. Leo Henrichs, a Franciscan killed by an anarchist in 1908, have all but disappeared, consigned to be the equivalent of “cold cases” in the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints.

The North American martyrs were canonized collectively in 1930. By that time, though, they were almost entirely associated with Canada. Catholics in the United States waited until 1946 for the canonization of their first saint, Frances Cabrini, an Italian missionary who served the immigrant Catholics in the United States between 1889 and 1917.

I have read many accounts of the celebrations that attended Cabrini’s canonization, as well as of those that followed the 1975 canonization of Elizabeth Ann Seton as the first native-born U.S. saint. But seeing the abundance of Canadian flags and the ebullience of the Australian pilgrims on this occasion gave me a new appreciation of the way patriotism and sanctity can blend to make a canonization a national triumph as well as a religious one.

Having thought about canonization as a pilgrim for the better part of a year, and as a historian for even longer, I was surprised that a relatively unexamined moment brought me the closest to understanding the meaning of André’s canonization. Early on the last morning of my visit, as I am crossing an almost deserted Saint Peter’s Square, I happen to catch André’s eye from the banner that still hangs from the balcony. For the first time, I see him neither as an intercessor nor as a scholarly subject, but as my friend, André, whom I happened to run across in the piazza.

He has, like all good friends, made me want to become a better person. I think about moments in the last year that, because I was thinking about him, I was a more open to hospitality or humility. I think about relationships in my life that he has transformed, such as my friendship with Suzy Fitzpatrick, whose cure was the miracle we didn’t receive, but whose graceful and peaceful passing nonetheless convinced me of the intercession of André and his good friend Joseph, the patron of a happy death.

I multiply my stories by the thousands of people who have journeyed to Rome for André’s canonization, and by the hundreds of thousands who come each year as either pilgrims or tourists to the Oratory of Saint Joseph. Then I multiply that number by the millions of Catholics in the universal church who cannot call André either a confrere or a fellow citizen, but who will learn about him because his feast day will appear on the calendar, and holy cards and medals bearing his name will be distributed throughout the world.

I think about how, for all of us, that narrow gate will seem to widen a little, because André is holding it open.

Saint André Bessette, pray for us.

Kathleen Sprows Cummings is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and associate director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.

Holy Week in Tequepexpan

2010-10-05T10:30:00-04:00

Day One and brief history: March 27, 2010

When I was a freshman at Notre Dame, I learned that Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, the president then, would spend Holy Week in a village without a priest in Mexico. That thought never left my mind. So when I was assigned to the Alliance for Catholic Education at Notre Dame in 2009, I decided to do the same. After being pastor of a parish for 19 years, I also knew it would be hard to celebrate Holy Week outside of a parish.

In January a dear friend connected me with the bishop of Tepic, who assigned me to the village of Tequepexpan, which has not had a resident priest for the past 25 years or so. Tequepexpan is a village of about 1,000 people at the foot of the mountains. It has no banks, no restaurants, no hotels, no beauty parlors, no supermarkets, no clothing stores, no gas stations. Electricity and running water arrived only 10 years ago. The highway leading to the village is several years old. Teque, as the people call it, is economically poor. It has more horses than cars. In fact, I was awakened today by the sound of horses trotting down the street.

The trip here took 20 hours and included three plane rides, a long taxi ride from the airport in Guadalajara to the bus terminal in Zapopan, a three-hour bus ride from Zapopan to Tepic, a walk from the bus terminal in Tepic to the bishop’s residence and an extra-long ride from the bishop’s residence to the village — because the poor driver kept getting lost and we went to two wrong villages.

When I arrived at the home where I am staying, my romantic idea of serving Christ in the poor took a deep dive. I hadn’t really thought about how much the poor don’t have. While I knew I would love being here, I realized it would not be so easy. When I learned there was no hot water in the house, I thought, OMG what I am going to do? The family assured me, however, that there would be lukewarm water. And there was.

During my first night here, when I had to go to the outside privy — and it was cold! — I was reminded of Dorothy Day’s words, which she quoted frequently from The Brothers Karamazov: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” This week was to be love in action.

Day Two: March 28

I do not know how many people live in the modest house where I’m staying. So far I have counted 12. They have been so kind, so gracious, so welcoming. I kept waiting for the family to give me a key, until I realized no one locks their doors in this town. In fact, most doors don’t have locks.

One of the great things about being a priest is that you can be at home anywhere. Within one week I stayed at two of the nicest hotels in the United States — the Crowne Plaza at Times Square and the Marriott in Burbank — and then in this quite humble home in Tequepexpan. A priest can be at home anywhere.

One of the things I love so much about the Mass is that it makes sense everywhere. On Monday and Tuesday of this past week I went to Mass at Saint Malachy’s, the Actors’ Chapel in midtown Manhattan. It draws the most sophisticated dressers on their way to work and street people stopping in the church to get out of the cold. On Wednesday I went to Mass at Saint Finbar’s in Burbank, California. It was the school Mass — all those cute Catholic school kids dressed up in their uniforms. On Thursday I went to Mass with students in a dorm chapel at Notre Dame. On Friday I went to Mass at Notre Dame’s basilica. And, on Palm Sunday, here in this village. It’s always the Mass, and I always love it.

Today’s Mass was beautiful. The church was full of people. I am always moved by the deep faith of the poor. Usually on Palm Sunday the priest is led into the church by an altar server carrying the cross decorated with a palm. Not today. Today the procession began two blocks from the church, and I was led into the church by a teenage boy dressed up as Jesus with a crown of palms on his head, sitting on a donkey. It was amazing.

I found a tiny place with an Internet connection, so I can answer email and stay current with things. After using the Internet for about 90 minutes I headed back to my temporary home. On the walk I had to move out of the way of 15 cows and a guy on a horse. I thought to myself, What different worlds in the same place — an Internet place and cows walking down the street.

In the evening I heard confessions for about 75 minutes. Same sins, different faces. When nations are big and strong they fight other nations. When cities are big and strong, they fight other cities. When a town is too small to fight anyone else, they fight internally. Jesus’ Gospel of Reconciliation needs to be preached everywhere, at all times and in all places.

At night there was an outdoor dance in the town plaza. I had been there earlier, when the sound system arrived for the dance. Since the town is only three streets east-west and three streets north-south, I knew loud music would fill the entire area. And it did. But it was great. I stopped by the dance for a few minutes. It was so interesting to see all the young men arriving on their horses and “parking” them along the plaza.

During the day it’s probably 85 degrees here. When the sun goes down, it gets chilly. This makes for perfect sleeping weather. The house is made of adobe, so it holds the heat at night. Going outside to go to the bathroom at 3 a.m. is another story.

Day Three: March 29

Today a pickup truck arrived. In the back was a man with sacks of beans and a scale. A loud megaphone was blaring the truck’s presence and how much the beans cost. The truck stops in front of whatever house wishes to buy beans that day.

During my walk I saw many trucks taking men to work. All the males in the town work in the sugarcane. So all the men in those trucks carry machetes. It looks scary at first. Even young men on horses and bicycles have machetes in their hands as they pass by on their way to work.

When I went to take a shower today there was no water. I learned how to pump water from a concrete tank holding 1,400 liters up to a big tank on top of the house that provides its water. Tomorrow or Wednesday I am going to buy a chicken, so I can see how they kill it and take the feathers off and sell it. I am at once looking forward to this and greatly repulsed.

Mass is at 5 p.m. The church sacristan goes up into the tower to ring the bell before Mass — 30 minutes before and then 15 minutes before and then when Mass is about to begin. You can hear the bell everywhere, and the people are always aware of it. You hear them asking one another, “Was that the first bell or the second bell?”

After Mass I heard confessions until just after 8 p.m. A tremendous amount of alcohol is consumed in this town. Very sad. So many women are trapped in bad situations. Unlike any big city, where the priest might suggest that the woman get out of the situation or ask her husband to leave, it is nearly impossible for the priest to suggest this in a town of 1,000 people where everyone knows one another and when the entire town is three blocks east-west and three blocks north-south. Very sad.

Day Four: March 30

Today was the Chrism Mass in Tepic, the diocesan see and capital of Nayarit. It’s a big city. After 19 years of going to Chrism Masses because I had to go since I was the pastor, tonight I really wanted to go to renew my commitment to the priesthood and to pray for priests.

The Mass was at 5 p.m., and the cathedral was packed, packed, packed with more than 200 priests. I was struck by how many young priests attended. I know that I am getting older and almost everyone looks younger, but there really were a lot of young priests.

Well before reaching the church, I could hear people clapping and cheering inside. As I entered, I learned that it is a Mexican custom to clap and cheer for the priests at the Chrism Mass. I was overwhelmed by this display of affection, gratitude and love. I started to cry. I cried in gratitude for the gift of priesthood and because I know how unworthy I am of this vocation. The Mass was beautiful. There were hundreds and hundreds of teenagers.

The church in every city and town in Mexico is always located around the Zocalo, or the main plaza, so as the people exited the church they simply went to the Zocalo and continued the celebration. Music, dance, food (great churros) and even a Ballet Folklorico. The beautiful scene will remain in my mind and heart for a long time.

With all its imperfections and faults and failings and corruption, I love the Church. Tonight’s celebration reminded me how much I love the Church.

Day Five: March 31

I took the noon bus from Tepic to Tequepexpan. It is about 44 kilometers, slightly more than a marathon. Nonetheless the ride took more than two hours. The bus stops in every little town and village along the way — Santa María del Oro, Santa Isabel, Chapalilla and God knows where else. At every stop people get on or off. The scenery is beautiful. So are the people. At one point, I had this overwhelming realization that I will spend eternity with these people.

We had Mass at 5 p.m. and I heard confessions until 8:15 or so. In the three days of confessions, I learned more about this town and its internal conflicts than I ever would have imagined. I know who is mad at whom, who stole whose sugar cane properties, who is not talking to whom. There is a saying in Spanish, “Pueblo chico, incendio grande” — “In small villages, there are big fires.” So appropriate. Everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everything about everyone else’s business.

There is almost nowhere to diffuse problems. The role of the Church and of the priest can be so important in a village like this. The people tell me that all the internal conflicts have gotten much worse since there has been no resident priest. Even in a small town like this, social classes are obvious. Some people own acres and acres and acres of sugarcane; others own no acres and work for the owners. I have to say again that the Gospel needs to be preached everywhere, at all times, in all places.

At night I went back to the house where I am staying. While I was brushing my teeth, the house ran out of water. Luckily I had a bottle of water that I could use to gargle and rinse. And, at the risk of giving too much information, brushing teeth is not the only thing that one does at night. When you have to go, you have to go — water or not!

Day Six: April 1

Today I awoke to horrible news. Still no water. Now there are eight more people in this house than when I arrived on Saturday. That brings the count to about 20, as best as I can tell. The pump where water comes to this town is broken and there is no money to fix it. Luckily some people in this village have cisterns, and I will go to someone else’s home to get a shower. To me, camping or roughing it is a four-letter word.

Today is Holy Thursday. We will celebrate the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper tonight at 6. One thing for sure, when it comes time for the washing of the feet, I won’t be washing feet that were already washed and perfumed before coming to Mass. Almost everyone wears sandals, and, since there are no paved roads, feet can get quite dirty. I am really looking forward to the Mass.

After the Mass, the people have a tradition of putting on a celebration called “La Judea.” Two big stages are already set up in front of the church for this purpose. I am eager to see just what it is. The people have kept alive all sorts of traditions. I have heard that on Good Friday, a bunch of guys dress up like the devil and run around the village and kidnap every child and take them to a hiding place. They paint them, and later in the day they return them to their families and give them candy. I’m not sure what it symbolizes, but I am eager to see how the people keep these days holy by their tradition.

Continuation of Day Six: April 1

Today I heard the confessions of about 50 children. The sins of children the world over are always the same. “I disobeyed my mom and dad. I fought with my brothers and sisters.”

As I listened to child after child, I kept thinking of how unfair life is. This group of 50 contained some bright and talented children. You could just tell. If they were growing up in a Chicago suburb, they would have many of the advantages and privileges the world can offer. They would become professionals. They would get master’s degrees. They would travel and go on vacations and perhaps serve the common good in some way.

Instead, they will have no advantages or privileges. They probably won’t be able to study past high school, and their schools have no computers. It made me sad that they will be poor all their life long. I know that that’s not the worst thing in life. It made me sad nonetheless.

You look at the hands and feet of the people here and you know they have worked hard. Until about 10 years ago, most of the homes had tin or even cardboard roofs. There was no running water. People walked to the creek and carried water back. The poor have a tough life.

The food here, however, has been delicious. It’s so fresh. In the morning the people go to the little meat markets and buy beef or pork from a cow or pig that was slaughtered last night. Every day we have super-fresh fruit and juices. And every meal — three meals a day — we are served refried beans. I love them. But they are not the best food to eat three times a day when there is no water in the house.

It appears that 90 percent of the people over the age of 40 have really bad teeth. They all have those silver teeth, and most of the old people only have three or four teeth. There are no dentists here. As I am listening to old people go to confession, I am wondering how they can chew food with only three or four teeth not in strategic places.

Mass on Holy Thursday evening, April 1

Tonight’s Mass was beautiful. The church was packed with people. Several things moved me. Beautiful flowers were all over the church. Easter lilies and another flower that looks like the Easter lily, called Alcatraz, grow everywhere. People bring the flowers, and the common vase is a No. 10 can of La Costeña jalapeno peppers. At one point, I was just staring at the cans with the labels on them filled with beautiful flowers.

When it came time for the washing of the feet, I was moved to tears. The tradition in this village is to wash the feet of 12 children. The sacristan brought me a 5-gallon bucket of water — one of those buckets that paint comes in — a pitcher and a basin and one towel. I am so used to nicer items bought from IKEA or places like that. The bucket filled with water looked like something Jesus would have used. And then the sacristan took a bar of Dial soap out of the wrapper and gave it to me. I don’t know why, but this, too, made me cry.

In all my years of going to Mass on Holy Thursday the washing of the feet has meant pouring water over clean feet. But today I thought, This is so real, as I used the bar of soap to wash the children’s feet. They laughed and giggled as I washed and dried their feet. Thank God no one told them to behave. Instead of 12 perfectly washed and folded towels, I was given only one towel to dry all the feet. All during the Mass, I felt so privileged and so blessed to be here.

Day Seven: April 2

At 10 a.m. about 150 people gathered for the Stations of the Cross. People set up outdoor altars, and the crowd stops at each altar for one of the stations. There is a reflection and a prayer. As people walk from station to station, they sing and carry a big cross. Everyone wanted to carry the cross part of the way. More people wanted to set up an outdoor altar than there are stations, so we had 17 stations instead of 14. What the heck.

Tonight there will be a traditional prayer service called “El Pésame a la Virgen.” Everyone will come to church and pray the rosary like at a wake. Then people, one by one, will go up to the statue of Mary, who is dressed in black with a handkerchief in her hands and is crying over the death of her Son, and offer her their condolences. I will cry as I listen to people talk to Mary as if she were standing right there. So many people here have lost children. They will talk with her as one grieving parent talks to another.

Holy Week in Mexico is a time of vacation and celebration. If you were here today you would not necessarily know it is Good Friday. Kids play on the streets. Street vendors sell everything from secondhand clothing to churros to fish to snow cones. Music is blaring. Today, a day of fast, I eat more than I have eaten all during Lent. Now that people know me, I am constantly invited into their homes to have something to eat. I had delicious chile rellenos, shrimp empanadas, nopales to die for. I am so privileged and blessed to be here.

Continuation of Good Friday, April 2

At 8 p.m., about 200 people gathered outside the church and then processed in silence around the village with a statue of Jesus lying dead in a glass coffin/box. It was very moving. Once inside, they placed the coffin in the center of the church just like you would do for a wake.

From 8:30 until midnight, they sang songs and prayed the rosary. Even if you do not understand a single word, you would know the songs are sad. The people told me that the songs are very old. They learned them from their grandparents who learned them from their grandparents who learned them from their grandparents. All during the night people went up to the statue of Mary and paid their condolences.

Day Eight: April 3

Today is a Holy Saturday that I will never forget. After getting up I went to the home of Rafaela, and I learned how to kill chickens, and I actually killed one! Can you imagine? Rafaela sells chickens for a living. After killing the chickens, we took off all the feathers (this is a lot of work), and washed the plucked chickens thoroughly, marinated them and got them ready to eat.

Then Rafaela’s dad brought me a beautiful horse. He and I rode for about 45 minutes to a ranch where we will roast the chickens and eat them. It was an absolutely beautiful ride. Rafaela’s dad is 83, and he rode a burro. We ate fruit picked from the trees we rode by. Everyone else, about 15 other people, came in a van. Then we started the fire and roasted the chickens.

The lunch was beautiful. We sat on the ground and talked and ate delicious chicken. It was amazing for me to think that just two hours before that chicken was alive. The weather was perfect. After lunch, as we rode back to the village, I learned about horses and mares and burros and donkeys and mules. I learned about pigs and cows and bulls. What an interesting morning.

When we got back to the village, two men asked if they could see me for a moment. Wanting to express their gratitude for the week that I spent in their city, they gave me 1,000 pesos, which is about $80. That’s a lot of money for this village. Knowing Mexican culture as I do, it would be a complete insult to not accept it.

Easter Vigil in Tequepexpan

During the Easter Vigil the church was packed. The people spilled out 20 deep into the atrium. I am sure that there were 500 people there. In a town of 1,000, that’s a lot of people. And the people sang and prayed in full force. A lot of life and spirit was present in the church.

Since Mexicans don’t tend to make a distinction between liturgy and life, all sorts of things go on during the liturgy that would drive a liturgist nuts — like the sacristan moving buckets of water to be blessed while someone is doing the first reading, or the sacristan leaving the altar every so often to get something he forgot or to tell something to a person in the congregation.

Like in the old days, during the Gloria, all the purple was removed from the statues. A big drape hanging from the ceiling to the floor covered the altar area. As the Gloria was being sung, men and boys moved ladders to remove purple coverings. All I could think of was the risk-management world of the United States. I was simply amused. I didn’t know who would be more upset — the liturgists or the risk management folks. I am so grateful that I have been a priest long enough to not be bothered by stuff. Some things are annoying, but what the heck. It all boils down to this: Do we love each other?

After the renewal of baptismal promises, I went down the aisle sprinkling the people with holy water. As I was getting ready to come back up the aisle, the sacristan led me into the side chapel. I was so moved by what was there — buckets of water to be blessed, pictures and images to be blessed, buckets of beans and corn to be blessed, buckets of fruit to be blessed. It was just a beautiful sight.

After the Easter Vigil, we ate delicious tamales. The people don’t have fresh tortillas every day. They have fresh tortillas every meal. Can you imagine? In the early morning, you can see all the señoras going to the store that sells the cornmeal. Most of them make tortillas by hand three times a day!

Day Nine: April 4 — Easter Sunday

In many ways, Easter Sunday is just another day for the poor. There are no holidays or breaks. I heard the bus start up at 3 a.m. outside of my room like every other day, taking about 40 workers to the sugarcane. All the little stores are open on Easter. I think that this is how it is for the poor.

Easter Sunday Mass was at 10 a.m., and we had two baptisms. The church was full, but nothing like at the Easter Vigil. The baptismal font was a 5-gallon paint can, now full of holy water. And the oils were sitting on a tiny stool, otherwise used for a kid to sit on.

After the Mass, I walked back to the house where I was staying and packed up. Chabela, the mom of the house, is magnificent. You would love her the second you met her, as I did. A bunch of people in the house wanted to say good-bye, and they all gave me gifts. The poor are so generous. No wonder Jesus hung around them and called them blessed.

Chabela had arranged for one of her sons to take me to the highway, where I could catch the next bus to Guadalajara. Anyone wanting to go to anywhere simply stands on the highway, near a toll booth of sorts, waiting for a bus to go by. So Chabela, her son, and Rafa and I got into the car and went to the highway. Three buses on their way to Guadalajara went by without stopping. We quickly learned that the buses were completely packed, since it was the last day of spring break. A toll booth worker told us we might not be able to get a bus for the entire day.

So Chabela and Rafa flagged down every car, yelling out, “Does anyone have room for a priest who has to go to Guadalajara?” The 10th car stopped, and I threw my luggage into the back of a car of someone I had never met. I said good-bye to Chabela and Rafa and got in the car with total strangers. But this is Mexico. It was a man, his wife and two daughters. And they took me to Guadalajara (in record time, I might add). They were a very nice family. They dropped me off at a taxi place in Guadalajara, and I took a taxi to the hotel.

Then I took the longest hot shower of my life.

Father Joe Corpora, CSC, is the director of the Catholic School Advantage: The Campaign to Improve Educational Opportunities for Latino Children, headquartered at Notre Dame. He is priest in residence at Dillon Hall.

The economy of grace

2010-10-05T10:28:00-04:00

Like a carnival barker with holy water, the priest generously dispensed the heavenly graces while pilgrims held high their rosaries, holy cards and plastic replicas in order to receive the divine droplets in the August sun. Blessings were dispensed free of charge every hour at the top of the steps leading into the Shrine church.

They came by the thousands to the Shrine every summer, a boon to the economy of this small, rural town in northwest Ohio. The restaurants posted special menus with inflated prices for the summer visitors. On August, 15, 1954, a special Marian Year declared by Pope Pius XII, an estimated 40,000 pilgrims crowded into our community. It was on this day, across the street from the blessing dispenser, that I stood behind the counter in the Shrine religious articles store.

She was a small woman, wrinkled and graying. She wore a lace doily on her head and a frumpy blue dress adorned with tiny white polka dots. Osteoporosis comes to mind when I think of her standing before me — a shrunken lady, from the disease as well as from the weight of the suffering that she brought to the miraculous image of Our Lady of Consolation.

From behind the display case I saw that she held a crumpled five-dollar bill in her hand.

“Could I see one of those statues?” she asked, pointing to a plastic replica of the miraculous statue in the Shrine church that had drawn pilgrims just like her to this little town since before I was born.

Poorly made, the blue-and-white reproduction stood about 9 inches in height, supported on a black base. The plastic seams from the factory mold still lined either side. It didn’t look at all like the real thing — Mary’s tiny head attached to an oversized blue and white plastic dress, like a miniature teepee, odd-sized hands and head attached. A few sprinkles of gold finished the holy caricature.

One of the adults working in the store had mentioned that each statue cost the Shrine 55 cents. Special Marian Year price: $4.50. Unblessed cartons, filled with hundreds of boxes of plastic Marys, crowded the back room like a mausoleum.

I stood helpless before this devoted pilgrim who had, I suspected, come to the Shrine to ask Our Lady for a miracle of some sort — the healing of a crippled grandchild or the return to grace of a wayward son. Her faith brought her to me. She knew, without question, that God works miracles and that Mary is God’s chief miracle worker.

I am often skeptical and, to be truthful, somewhat cynical when it comes to easy grace and television miracles. But this was the real thing. I stood as intermediary in this standoff between a woman of simple faith and the God who hears the cry of the poor. The mystery of God’s loving presence was all around, drawing thousands mysteriously to this place of healing and grace. I was in the thick of it, caught up in the divine doings.

There, on the glass counter between us, stood the plastic image, silent, artificial, without grace. Then she asked the question that still lingers decades later.

“What do you think? Should I buy this statue or use the five dollars to get a room tonight?”

Simple question to a boy of 12. Simple answer.

“I don’t think the statue is worth the five dollars,” I said.

I would never make it in retail, then or now.

She pulled the statue to the edge of the scratched surface. Her hand rested on the base, her index finger gently rubbing the blue-and-white surface. With half-closed eyes, a moment to ponder, she looked into the distance, weighing the purchase in her mind. It was quite clear that Our Lady was very important to her. Purchasing the plastic image, no matter how unrepresentative of the real thing, might be a way to carry the miraculous presence to her home in Toledo or Akron or Detroit, from wherever she had come. Or maybe her thoughts were of sleeping one night in the Shrine church on one of the hard oak pews, as many pilgrims did each summer.

More likely, in her deep devotion, she knew that the sacrifice of her last five-dollar bill would sway Our Lady, and her request would be granted, the power of her sacrifice, a heaven-and-earth arrangement yielding results. She was like the widow in the Gospel with two small coins. God responded to this kind of sacrifice.

So there she stood, weighing her sacrifice, her faith against the very power of God. Could she move God? Was it enough? Would the sacrifice do the trick? God was put on the spot.

She looked at the statue and carefully handed it to me to wrap. Uncrumpling the five-dollar bill, she released the power of her sacrifice and sealed her agreement with God and Our Lady.

With her change, I handed her the boxed statue neatly tied with a cotton string. The transaction had been completed. Full of grace and with Mary tucked under her arm, the old woman crossed the street for a free blessing. In her wrinkled hand she tightly clasped the change I had given her, a witness to the economy of grace.

Steve Rall is a writer in Lansing, Michigan.