At Moment of Increasing Homophobia in Catholicism, Remembering Fr. Mychal Judge

9/11: Franciscan Fr. Mychal Judge, chaplain to the firefighters, was an early casualty. The image of his fellow firemen carrying his body to a nearby church became an icon of the day--an image of loving service and sacrifice, a contrast to messages born of fanaticism and fear. pic.twitter.com/XBfaZZZgJ3

— Robert Ellsberg (@RobertEllsberg) September 11, 2018

Father Geoff Farrow on U.S. Bishops' Religious Freedom Initiative, Terry Weldon on Resources for LGBT History

Ruth Klausner, "Discussing the News"

Also (piggybacking on what I just posted about Occupy Wall Street) from two more of my favorite blogs:

More Mychal Judge Commemorative Pieces: Kittredge Cherry and Lisa Fullam

More on Mychal Judge, the Franciscan saint of 9/11, this weekend at Kittredge Cherry's Jesus in Love blog: Kittredge offers an excerpt reflecting on Judge's life from Salvatore Sapienza's book Mychal's Prayer: Praying with Father Mychal Judge.  Sapienza is a fellow Franciscan who worked with Mychal Judge to form St. Francis AIDS ministry in New York.  And then she follows the excerpt with reflections of her own about why Mychal Judge deserves to be remembered as a specifically gay saint.

A 9/11 Remembrance: NPR Pays Tribute to Father Mychal Judge

On the eve of the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, I want to take note of NPR's tribute to Father Mychal Judge earlier this week.  A number of readers have drawn my attention to this NPR piece, and Kerry Weber has a moving posting about it on the America "In All Things" blog right now.

Amy Goodman on the (Gay) Saint of 9/11, Father Mychal Judge

And good news to balance the bad: at Truthdig and Democracy Now, Amy Goodman profiles 9/11 victim 0001, Franciscan priest Father Mychal Judge, who was killed when the south tower collapsed as he ministered to those assisting victims of the attack.  As Goodman notes, this past Sunday, a group determined to commemorate Judge's heroic sanctity marched in Manhattan.  The group was led by former New York City police detective Steven McDonald, who was paralyzed in 1986 when a 15-year old boy he was questioning in Central Park shot him.

Mychal Judge Nominated for Congressional Gold Medal: How You Can Help

Some good news here (and an appeal for you to assist, if you're so moved): Franciscan priest Fr. Mychal Judge, who died in the 9/11 attacks after he refused to leave the North Tower building despite requests that the building be evacuated completely, has been nominated for a Congressional gold medal.  He was killed when the collapse of the South Tower sent debris into the other tower, striking him in the head.  Fr. Mychal was a chaplain to New York firefighters, and insisted on remaining in the building to minister to these and others who were wounded during the 9/11 attacks.

Father John Corapi and the Manly-Man Model of the Priesthood: Survey of Recent Discussion

As I follow the news that another of the manly man hero-priests beloved of the Catholic right, Father John Corapi of EWTN fame, has been put on leave due to allegations of sexual misconduct with adult women (and drug abuse), I’m fascinated by a spin-off conversation now developing on some Catholic websites in the wake of the news about Corapi.  This is a conversation about precisely how and in what specific ways the Catholic church is now benefiting (or not) from its fixation of late on recovering the manly-man model for its priests.

Celebrating the Gay and Lesbian Heroes of 9/11

Who knew that the LGBT community supplied so many heroes during the 9/11 events in 2001?

I didn't, for one--not until I saw a link to this wonderful memorial page at After Elton today.

Walt Whitman on the Failure of the Institution of the Father, and the Catholic Abuse Crisis: Are Manly Men Really the Solution?

This links to what I posted yesterday about Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami and the search for manly men to lead the Catholic church today—a search premised on bias and myth that has dominated the outlook of many Catholics in recent years, as attempts are made to pin the abuse crisis on gay priests.  A persistent subtext in the hagiography of John Paul the Great has been that, as a manly man, he did not countenance clerical sexual abuse of minors.  (And how wrong that subtext has been proven by the Maciel story!)  And that if we could only begin attracting more manly men like him to the priesthood, the abuse situation would be a thing of the past.

I’m troubled by the fit between that subtext, based on bias and myth, and the rhetoric of the violent right-wing extremists who are well-represented in contemporary American culture.  Justine Sharrock tracks this rhetoric at Alternet today, noting that right-wing extremist groups are increasingly using Facebook and other networking sites to organize and gain adherents. 

John Paul II and the Unfinished Eucharist of Oscar Romero: Questions for the Church in Our Day

It’s my birthday, and I may let my heart out today. I keep it so often in a box.

I’m sitting in Steve’s chair facing the south window of the sunroom. Outside, the redbud leaves, tiny green-yellow laminated hearts, have just begun to peep out, as the last blossoms of the redbud cling tenaciously to black branches now tipped with hearts. A few lissome canes of the Lady Banks rose have grown across from their east-facing trellis and dip through the redbuds, adding more yellow to accent the surprising mauve of the redbud blooms. As the southeast wind blows today, they bob up and down like game pieces in a carnival booth, daring you to hit the mark and claim the prize.

In my heart: Oscar Romero and García Lorca. My memory tells me Romero was martyred sometime around the feast of the Annunciation on 25 March.

But he’s in my heart these days because of a passage I read recently in David Yallop’s The Power and the Glory (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), a searing, damning analysis of the papal reign of John Paul II. Yallop notes that when Romero was martyred, an Italian doctor wrote Corriere della Sera and pointed out that John Paul II loved to travel. He then asked,

Why did this travelling Pope not immediately set out for San Salvador to pick up the chalice that had been dropped from Romero’s hands and continue the Mass which the murdered archbishop had begun? (p. 77)

That question will now not leave my mind or my heart. Why not, indeed?

I know the answer, of course. Leaders just don’t behave that way. They calculate. They do the prudent thing. They seize the main chance. They must represent the center.

And Romero was on the margins. And the people with whom he cast his lot, and whose fate he shared, were on the margins.

Just as Jesus lived.

Yallop writes, in fact, that John Paul II kept his distance from Romero, and humiliated the Salvadoran archbishop when Oscar Romero came to Rome desperate to see him, carrying a huge folder full of documentation about the atrocities the government was committing, with active U.S. complicity, against the poor in El Salvador.

John Paul had become convinced, Yallop thinks, by advisors in the Curia that Romero was a Communist agent. After Romero’s martyrdom, he even entertained the thought—following his advisors’ lead—that Romero had been killed by the left in an act of provocation designed to unsettle the government.

It’s my birthday, and I can let my heart out. My heart has never been quiet regarding Oscar Romero, his life, his fate, the church’s continued denigration of him even in death, my government's complicity in his death, which becomes my complicity because it is my government, using my tax dollars to wage war.

And it will not be quiet ever again, after I have read that deeply unsettling question of the Italian doctor following Romero’s martyrdom: why did John Paul II not immediately travel to El Salvador, pick up the chalice that fell from Romero’s hands when he was butchered at the altar, and finish that Mass?

Why do we have popes who exemplify the Christian message less than do bishops like Romero or lay saints like Dorothy Day and Franz Jägerstätter? Why do we have popes whose lives bring to mind Jesus and his life less than do the lives of Mychal Judge or Jean Donovan?

Why will John Paul II be canonized while the church refuses to canonize Oscar Romero?

Why do the people for whom Romero spoke and whose fate he shared count so little in the eyes of Benedict and the men who run the church, while the rich who run everything in the world and in the church count for everything?

I know the answer to these questions. But I cannot accept that answer. It’s my birthday. I have a right to let my heart out, and to follow what it says to me, no matter how insane, how foolish its advice.

And to remember García Lorca on my birthday, García Lorca who was silenced and placed beneath the earth by the same forces—though at a different moment of history—that tried to silence and bury Romero. But who, like Romero, sings beyond the grave, for those who care to listen.

And the wretched of the earth do listen. And will one day have a hearing, in a world in which God’s way of looking at things counts, finally.

On my birthday, I can choose to think this, no matter how impossible it is to believe. On my birthday, I can choose to follow the logic of my foolish heart, even when my hard head knows much, much better.

And I can offer as my birthday gift to anyone listening that painfully disturbing question of the Italian doctor, which needs to reverberate through the halls of every chancery and every episcopal palace and every Catholic school and office building in the world, until it receives an answer.

Why did John Paul II not pick up the chalice that dropped from Romero's hands and finish Romero's Mass? In the answer to that question lies the tragedy of the church in our time.

Rebuilding Hope: The Task Ahead

I’m thinking these days of the need to rebuild hope. To be specific: I’m thinking that, if our culture and political process truly are undergoing the monumental shift many observers believe is taking place, we will need to find resources to help us build hope anew. As individuals and as a society.

An interesting article on the Alternet site today addresses this issue. Mark Klemper asks how much damage eight years of neoconservative rule has done to Americans’ psyches (http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/104906/how_much_damage_has_eight_years_of_conservative_rule_done_to_americans%27_psyches).
(In my view, the span of neocon rule is actually longer—back to Reagan in the 1980s.)

From the viewpoint of someone whose father escaped the Holocaust, Kemper reminds us that our participatory democracy was founded on the notion of people’s fundamental goodness. This is not starry-eyed utopianism. It is Martin Luther King’s “deep and abiding faith in humanity”—the faith that, when we collaborate and draw on the energies provided by the best angels of our nature, we can build a better, if never perfect, society.

Kemper thinks that, as individuals and as a culture, we have been damaged by those who have worked on our fears for far too long now. And so we now face the task of rebuilding hope, a task he describes as follows: “A crucial part of our work will be to resurrect our essential vision of human goodness, and specifically our own goodness as a nation.”

As I say, I’ve been thinking along the same lines, and have been noting resources that help feed my starved sense of hope. They’re all around, if we push ourselves to look for them. Quite a few of the sites to which this blog is linked provide those resources.

For instance, on my friend Colleen Baker’s Enlightened Catholicism blog this week, I read a powerful document about alternative liturgies being employed in an inclusive Catholic parish in South Brisbane, Australia. And, any time I need a reminder of what the human heart is capable of when it allows itself to open to anyone and everyone in need, I turn to the resources on the Saint Mychal Judge blog linked to this site.

These are only two of a vast number of such hope-sustaining resources. Some days, simply googling images of natural beauty helps revive my hope. Other days, going someplace—the hot water fountains in Hot Springs are a place I’ve learned to count on—where I encounter somebody “different,” a bit off the grid, with a perspective on life I don’t usually hear, helps me remember how amazingly rich the spiritual lives of others can be. Every voice and every perspective counts, and we need to build a society that remembers this.

I have to admit that I’m among the walking wounded about whom Kemper writes. My own hopes have flagged during the long years of neoconservative dominance of our political process and culture. I have worked with and worked for too many people who found a comfortable niche in that neoconservative world, and whose technique of personnel management consisted of playing team members against each other, and distrusting all of them.

I’ve worked with and for too many people who, even while spouting the humanistic ideals of a Dr. King or a Dr. Bethune, nonetheless live out of the neoconservative belief that everyone is an enemy to be combated, to be put in his or her place, to be overcome. Or to be banished from community when he or she became too inconvenient or too insistent on continuing to speak out about what is good and what is true.

Such experiences rob the soul of hope. They’re designed to do that. They’re designed, in the final analysis, to fragment, to set us against one another, to set our better and baser angels against each other in the hope that the baseness will keep the better in check, while those manipulating our fears consolidate their power and control. They're designed to make us doubt our best instincts, to make us doubt and fear others. They're designed to inject poison into our psyches, for the benefit of the power-hungry person at the top playing us against each other.

One of the most hopeful signs I see in our culture today is the dissolution of the religious right as the driving force of neoconservative politics. Poll upon poll and article after article demonstrates the emergence of a new religious coalition in which younger people of faith are playing key roles.

This new coalition is driven by hope and not by fear. It is repudiating the fear-based politics (and religion) of the religious right and its political bedfellows for a new hope-based religious and political worldview.

Nothing could be healthier for our political process, in a time of seismic shift. Nothing could be better for our churches, to the extent to which they have bought into the fear-based religion and politics of the right, which use religion only to betray its most fundamental values.

Because those are centered around love and hope, not fear and hate.