“…How does Jesus enter into Jerusalem? The crowd acclaims him King. And he does not oppose this, he does not silence them (cf. Luke 19:39-40). But what kind of King is Jesus? Let us see: he rides a colt, he does not have a court that follows him, he is not surrounded by an army that would symbolize power. Those who welcome him are humble, simple people, who have the sense to see in Jesus something more; they have that sense of faith, which says: this is the Savior. Jesus does not enter the Holy City to receive the honors reserved for earthly kings, to those who have power, to those who dominate; he enters to be beaten, insulted and reviled, as Isaiah foretold in the first reading (cf. Isaiah 50:6); he enters to receive a crown of thorns, a reed, a purple cloak, his royalty will be an object of scorn; he enters to climb Calvary, carrying a tree. And this is the second word: cross. Jesus enters Jerusalem to die on the cross. And it is exactly here that his being a king, as God, is manifested: the royal throne is the wood of the cross! I think of what Benedict XVI said to the cardinals: you are princes but of a crucified King. That is Jesus’ throne. Jesus takes it upon himself… Why the cross? Because Jesus takes upon himself evil, filth, the sin of the world, even our sin, the sins of all of us, and he washes them away with his blood, with mercy, with God’s love. Let us look around: how greatly does evil wound humanity! War, violence, economic conflicts that harm the weakest, desire for money, which no one can take with them, it must be left behind. My grandmother said to us children: the shroud that they bury you in won’t have pockets. Love of money, power, corruption, divisions, crimes against human life and against creation! And – we all know – there are our own sins: lack of love and respect for God, for our neighbor, for the whole of creation. And Jesus on the cross feels the whole weight of evil and with the power of God’s love conquers it, he defeats it in his resurrection.” –Pope Francis, Palm Sunday homily

(found online at: http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-francis-palm-sunday-homily)

My sisters and brothers in Christ, today is the celebration of Palm Sunday–the entrance of our Lord Jesus into Jerusalem where he will be tried and executed through crucifixion.  But on that entrance, the people stood up and shouted, “The King of Glory Comes, Hallelujah!”

We too, sisters and brothers, must shout, for if we   do not, the very stones will condemn our silence with their praise of Jesus!  Imagine, the stones and the trees, the hills and valleys shouting out “Glory to God!”  It happens every day, but we are too deaf to hear.  And every day, we crucify one more valley, one more tree, one more lake for our lack of hearing their shouting.

Today is also the celebration of the passing of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of El Salvador.  Why was he martyred?  Because he stood up and shouted out–these people are God’s people!  These people must too shine, for their lives, like our lives, shout out to the coming of the Kingdom!  But we do not hear their shouts, not do we hear the screams of their bodies, trodden under the feat of rampant capitalism and fevered nationalism.  Their cries join the cries of the earth–for they are the cries of the poor.

And Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is the response: The Lord hears the cry of the poor!

Why do we not hear their cries?  Or do we hear them and ignore them?  Are we unwilling to stand with Romero and live a simple life of love of neighbor and the condemnation of violence in the name of profit?

I say to you, my brothers and sisters, the United States is a religious nation, and it’s religion is the idolism of money, fame, power–of materialism without spirit.  We are called to stand up and shout out against this idolism–”The King of Glory Comes! Hallelujah!”  For God is with us, my brothers and sisters.  He is here in your hearts.  Look to each other and see.  He is here in the lives of every beggar on the street, of every homeless child sleeping in a shelter tonight, of every starving mother working two jobs just to keep a roof over the heads of her children.

We must rejoice at the coming of the Lord, and we too, we must lay our cloaks at the feet of Jesus in the poor who wonder our streets looking for someone to shout with them–

God is Love!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, my brothers and sisters!  May your day be filled with blessings from God, with friends, and with celebration of the great wonders the Lord God has wrought.

My sisters and brothers, imagine this woman, dragged before Jesus, thrown onto the ground.  You‘ve seen similar images today– men and women crowding around her screaming and yelling, many already holding their stones, some held high, their faces twisted in anger.  She is crying, screaming, fearful, for she knows she is about to die.  She knows it, my brothers and sisters, for the crowd is yelling down at her for her lust.  Who knows why she committed the sin of adultery (and where is the man she committed it with–perhaps himself holding a stone?).

Then one by one, the crowd diminishes in the presence of Jesus’ silence.  The screaming lessens and then disappears.  Rocks are dropped, but nowhere near this poor woman.  Does she even notice through her own tears?  I would not.  I would only realize at some moment, perhaps cried out, that I am not dead yet, and then realize that no one is yelling, and then look up and see no one but Jesus.

¹⁰ Jesus again straightened up and said, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’

¹¹ ‘No one, sir,’ she replied. ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ said Jesus. ‘Go away, and from this moment sin no more.’

Go away and sin no more.  What mystical words, my brothers and sisters.  Condemnation is about holding on to the past. Forgiveness is about moving on to the future.  It is apt, I think, I hope, I pray, my brothers and sisters, that these sets of readings follow the election of Pope Francis.   He has chosen the name Francis, which no pope has chosen before.  And Francis was called to rebuild the Church in a time of turmoil.

Each of these readings is about rebuilding.

¹⁹ Look, I am doing something new, now it emerges; can you not see it? Yes, I am making a road in the desert and rivers in wastelands.

²⁰ The wild animals will honour me, the jackals and the ostriches, for bestowing water in the desert and rivers on the wastelands for my people, my chosen one, to drink.

²¹ The people I have shaped for myself will broadcast my praises.

God has created something new for Israel: a new home freed from slavery. Is Francis a sign of God bringing something new to the Church?  Perhaps.  But Francis cannot rebuild the Church alone.  We too must join him.  We must insist on a Church of the poor.  A Church of the environment: “the wild animals will honor me. ”

Like Paul, we must proclaim

¹³ Brothers, I do not reckon myself as having taken hold of it; I can only say that forgetting all that lies behind me, and straining forward to what lies in front,

¹⁴ I am racing towards the finishing-point to win the prize of God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus.

Paul is not writing about progress.  He is not seeking the next tool to let humanity live in this desert we’ve created.  No.  Paul is seeking to leave behind his old self to journey toward the resurrection.  Christ has wiped our sins away through His death on the cross.  We are called to race toward Him through the work we do in this world.  A work filled with rebuilding the world toward hope and promise.

Pope Francis is showing us how: to leave behind the condemnation Church and to renew ourselves in Christ as a Church for the poor.

And so we return to that woman, cast down on the ground before Jesus.  We, the Church, are like the woman.  We have sinned against God by caring more for rules than for people.  Yet, Jesus does not condemn us.  He simply asks us to sin no more.

Can we carry that cross?  Yes, forgiving others is a cross, and being forgiven for our sins is a cross that we bear.  We are not worthy of such forgiveness.  We are not worthy of reconciliation with God.  Yet, Jesus sits there, writing in the sand.  And the next time the wind blows, what He has written will blow away, just as our sins have been blown away by the water of baptism and the fire of confirmation.  But now, we must turn our eyes, our hands, and our hearts to rebuilding.

I cannot say, my brothers and sisters, what Pope Francis will be like.   I am hopeful that he will return us to a Church that focuses on love more than doctrine, that focuses on the poor more than reputation, that focuses on living love rather than speaking love.  He cannot do it alone.  And if he fails, we know that others have failed before him.

But the name Francis reminds us that every day people — people who are not priests or nuns — can renew the Church and can live a life of love, a life of poverty, a life that is following Christ.  You and I, my sisters and brothers, must also take the name Francis.  Having a new pope is a sign to do so.  Having a new pope, though, is not a renewal of the Church or a rebuilding of the faith.  You and I: we are the renewers and the rebuilders through Christ Jesus and the love that we have for each other.

(I promised Jeff that I’d finally write something for the blog again. This is not a careful analytical piece, just my first take on the new pope.)

For the moment, I am won over by Pope Francis–I was hoping for a non-European pope, but I never expected such an unusual figure. The first Jesuit pope! The first pope to choose the name Francis! And what an exciting, markedly different style from the one to which we have become accustomed.

Why have I become almost giddy over this pope, with a momentary gleefulness that is likely to be tempered by some bad news or other in the days to come? Ought I not to be tamer and more sensible and scrutinize his record more carefully? I will eventually, eventually. But not today. Today, I am happy, because a new thing is happening, and it seems like a good thing.

Maybe it was just hearing the enthusiastic peal of bells from the local Newman Center across the street from my apartment complex, racing over and wanting to be part of something, and watching impatiently to see what mysterious figure would emerge from behind that curtain (while praying, to be honest, “Please not Dolan…”). (I did not tell that to the nice fellow sitting next to the me in the parish office, who was rooting for Cardinal Dolan.) Maybe it was the enthusiastic faces of the crowds, with their earnest chanting and praying and singing, who could care less about the rain, and the solemn procession of the Swiss Guard, their helmets glinting in the bright lights.

Or something more? Maybe it was his humble, surprisingly demure, almost casual welcome, engendering memes like this one:

I must admit that I knew nothing about Bergoglio before his appointment as pope. Yet now I have a pope who insists on dressing in the simplest of garments, rides the bus with the other cardinals instead of driving the fancy car reserved for him, returns to the hotel to check himself out rather than sending some underling to do it for him. He rode the bus like everybody else in Argentina, and he’ll be darned if anybody will tell him he has to travel in style now that he’s pope. His simplicity and his choice of the name Francis suggest compassion for the “least of these” and a commitment to rebuilding/reforming the Church that is in ruins, as St. Francis was called to do. The pope’s anti-clerical side will serve him well in the important and difficult work of responding to the sex abuse scandals.

Here is a pastoral pope. His demeanor is that of a humble servant, not a scholar, king, or judge. One isn’t sure whether he’d be good at solving some difficult doctrinal dispute (though he is an intellectual, like all Jesuits), yet one feels that one could confess to him or seek his counsel.

Lots of people (mostly people who don’t understand the current state of Catholicism very well) are labeling Bergoglio a “conservative.” If they mean that he opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, then he is “conservative,” but that is a relatively useless way to categorize him (as a Commonweal blogger pointed out), since that’s frankly all of the cardinals. Major changes on issues of sex, gender, sexual orientation, etc. were never on the table in this conclave. Even if one finds all of the options unpleasing, one should still acknowledge differences between the papabile, as the Catholic hiearchy is far from uniform. Theologically speaking, Francis is more moderate than his predecessor, Benedict XVI. He is open to ecumenical and interfaith dialogue (not that Benedict was not, but Francis is perhaps more so), and Francis’s views on the liturgy are noticeably more liberal. Those who have been yearning for a return to the principles of Vatican II might get their wish. And he seems “collegial.” Noted liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, by the way, is pleased with this pope and has countered claims that Bengoglio supported the right-wing military junta in Argentina.

On economic issues, although he was critical of liberation theology and Marxism, Bergoglio has challenged neoliberalism and spoken out against the crippling burdens of debt imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank upon third world countries. Like his predecessor, Pope Francis is likely to criticize unbridled capitalism, and one can hope that he will challenge austerity with vehemence and determination.

Whatever disagreements I may end up having with him, I love him for asking the people for our blessing before giving his own, for riding the bus to work, for kissing the feet of AIDS patients, for scolding uptight priests who refused to baptize babies for not having been born into the “right” kind of families. Yes, probably he should have spoken out and risked his safety during the dirty war, but if he lacks the moral courage of a martyr, at least he seems to have sympathy for the poorest and least. After the lights dim a bit and the Swiss guard put all their sparkly helmets back on the shelf, perhaps I’ll be more critical. For the moment, it doesn’t seem to take a lot to make me really happy.

(photo credit: http://catholicsensibility.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/pope-francis-on-liturgy-ii/)

We have a new pope: Pope Francis I.  Pope Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Cardinal from Argentina.  This is the first time a pope has come from the Americas and it has been centuries since one came from outside Europe.

In his first greeting, Pope Francis said that his ministry will be guided by Brotherhood, Service, and Trust.  Francis seems to be someone very humble.  Some reports say that in the last conclave that elected Benedict XVI, he asked not to be elected.  In his greeting, he also asked the people to pray for him as pope.  His presentation to me seemed very humble, impressively so.

We should not expect much new from Francis, however.  He is known to support a very conservative wing of the Church, though he supports social justice.  He condemned Argentina legislation legalizing gay marriage, and has claimed that to allow homosexuals to adopt would be abusive to the children.

Still, to take the name Francis is something new, and to have someone who seems so humble could only promise good things.

I ask you to pray with me for Pope Francis and for the Church.

God bless

Drive through Grayson County, KY.  You will see humble shacks, some falling apart, sitting next door to beautiful mansion-like homes with clean-cut green grass.  We all know in any city, all you have to do is turn the “wrong” corner and you’ll move from a “nice” neighborhood to a run-down area.

We have wealth beyond compare!  Yet, this wealth is concentrated in comparably few hands.  And those hands become more wealthy and fewer as the years go by.

Why?

Many will claim that it’s not right to give to people who don’t earn their money.  It makes them feel entitled, and all they’ll do is laze around and never work if they don’t have to.  And besides, those few hands that hold the wealth earned it.

What goes unquestioned, continues to go unquestioned down the decades and years, is the whole idea that an individual earns something.  What could any one person do to earn a billion dollars or 35 billion dollars?  Yes, Bill Gates created a technology used across the world that makes people’s lives easier.  But why do we say that he earned 35 billion dollars for that?  This concept of “earning” is a judgment we make– it is a political judgment.

And when we make that political judgment, we make the related judgment that other people ought to earn their bread and their roof and that, in fact, some people never do.  We make the judgment that an individual Hispanic woman who cleans rooms, picking up people’s trash and used condoms, flipping over heavy mattresses and changing sheets, and pushing a heavy vacuum cleaner, day in and day out for years does not earn $20k a year.  Her work is worth the work of Gates, even though she affects as many people as he does and makes their lives easier.

Wealth distribution is a political choice we make everyday.  You can deny that, but you would be wrong.  You can argue that people ought to earn their bread and their roof, and, on the one hand, you would be right (if you meant that everyone should work), but on the other hand, you would be wrong (if you meant that a political decision about the worth of someone’s activities should determine whether that person is homeless and hungry or not).

It is a shame and a crisis– a true human tragedy, that we have enough material goods in this world to satisfy the needs of everyone, and yet so many millions suffer while so few thousands eat caviar and drink champagne.

Homeless families account for 78 percent of the total in the shelters, and these families are now staying in the system for an average of 375 days, 10 percent longer than a year ago. For families without children, the stays are even longer, an average of 16 months or 484 days.*

What are we to do about the homeless problem?  It is a problem.  Over 50,000 people stayed in homeless shelters in NYC in the month of February each night.  That is who stayed in shelters; those on the street increase the numbers of homeless.  Homelessness is caused by lack of jobs, unaffordable housing, and profiteering in housing sales.  Homelessness is a choice society makes.

Yes, yes, I know, people can work.  They can choose to find a job or make money.  But what about the families?  Are the children supposed to find jobs and make money?  How can they go to school when they spend their nights in shelters? How are they to study.

Even if I agreed that adults should work for their homes–and I don’t disagree–we still have to think about the children.  Yes, of course, if we give their parents hand-outs then the children will learn to want handouts all the time.  We can’t have that.  But that doesn’t solve the problem of homelessness nor does it help the children.  Do you really want to say that society should have nothing to do with providing housing for children?

If you want to keep social policy out of providing housing for children, you’re certainly not Christian, and barely human.

If you do want social policy to help out, but you don’t want children growing up wanting handouts, then come up with a solution.

*Report here.

Oh, my brothers and sisters!  What wonderful News we have to share today: the reconciliation of the sinful with God through Jesus Christ!  Praise the Lord, my sisters and brothers, for the Gospel is good news, and the whole of Sacred Scriptures is a message of love.

Need I say any more than this:

¹⁹ I mean, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not holding anyone’s faults against them, but entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

²⁰ So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were urging you through us, and in the name of Christ we appeal to you to be reconciled to God.

No, my sisters and brothers, St. Paul says it all in his letter to the Corinthians.  We are reconciled to God through Christ.  God did not hold our faults against us.  Neither may we hold faults against others.  No, we must preach reconciliation with God.  Our message is a message of love and peace, to be lived in uprightness in the Lord.

In the light of this passage, we must read what happened to Joshua and the Isralites at Gilgal.  God has wiped the “shame” of Egypt from them.  Egypt was not their sin, but they, like we, were shamed of the state that they held there.  But God cleanses them, just as cleanses us.  Through baptism, we are cleansed, and then we celebrate with the food brought from the land

And we all are familiar, my brothers and sisters, with the story of the prodigal son.  This son, greedy and lazy, begs his father for his inheritance and runs away with it, squandering it on all manner of things.  We too, my sisters and brothers, squander our inheritance.

One way we squander our inheritance is simple materialism.  How many TVs and radios do we have?  How many game systems?  How often do we work for money and pride and status?  Yes, my brothers and sisters, we squander our inheritance by investing our souls into material things and spiritual highs: drunken on our own arrogance.

But we also squander our inheritance every time we do not forgive.  We squander our inheritance whenever we refuse to live up to our own potential.  We squander our inheritance by denying that the Day of the Lord is here!  But if only we would realize our reconciliation with God, we would see the truth of our lives and we would feast: just as the prodigal son and his brother feasted with their father.

Thus, we must understand the situation that Jesus preaches against, my sisters and brothers.  The story of the prodigal son is the story of Israel and of our Church.  The Pharisees and Sadducees are condemning Jesus for feasting with the sinners and tax-collectors.  In His story, they are both sons.  The Pharisees and Sadducees live by the rules of God, but they do not live by His love.  So the Father must instruct them that they must love their brother, even if he was a sinner.  And in that instruction, we see that the Pharisees and Sadducees have become the prodigal son.  But they too, if they would only reconcile with God, could feast and share the inheritance that we all have from the Lord.

Our Church must also learn this lesson.  This week, the hierarchy will ponder the election of another pope.  We have lived too long with popes who condemn rather than celebrate our reconciliation with God through Christ Jesus.  We live too long with a Church hierarchy who is much like the Pharisees and Sadducees, my brothers

A Bishop With Gun

and sisters.  They do not heed the words of St. Paul, which I shall repeat again:

not holding anyone’s faults against them,

If our Church could only reconcile itself with God through Jesus, we can experience the new world that St. Paul tells us about:

¹⁷ So for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation: the old order is gone and a new being is there to see.

So, I pray, my sisters, that you will be this new creation and help me to join you in it.  I pray my brothers, that you too will be this new creation.  I pray that together, we can let the light of this new creation shine on all; that we will, not only preach the reconciliation with God, but be that reconciliation.  And I pray that our new pope will serve this reconciliation and preach the new creation that is our inheritance.  To do any less is to squander it.

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and director of The Avengers movie, was asked why he writes strong female lead characters.  His answer was, “because you keep asking that question.”

Across the world today, even in the USA, we see continued oppression and injustice against women.  Women still make less than men for the same work.  Women generally find employment in the service industry.  Women are raped at rates of 1 in 3.

Why do we allow this to happen?

Our cultural beliefs and attitudes about women as a whole remain demeaning and repressive.  They underscore and justify the abuse and rape of women and the unfair treatment of women.  We like to pretend that we have come along way, baby, but we haven’t really.

I’ve had numerous conversations with classes I’ve taught and people in general about hiring women.  Women are still seen as the care taker, as the one who might get pregnant.  So women are not hired for fear that they might need time off.  When I ask about men who are fathers, I’m told that they have less responsibility at home.  Recently, I read a story about a Christian college that fired a woman for having pre-marital sex, but turned around and hired her boyfriend– the father of her child.

This is only true because we make it true.

When we act and think like this, we place an incredible burden on women, a burden no man would understand or survive.  How can we judge people we treat as slaves when we force them to choose between a livelihood and freedom that is their own and the life and care of others?  This is not to justify abortion; it’s to condemn our treatment of women!

There will be no justice towards women until we change our beliefs and attitudes about women.  This happens locally, but it must become global.  I do not mean that all women everywhere must be the same or that all cultures must have the same beliefs.  But I do mean that every culture in its various practices must provide for the needs and wants of women to the same extent that it provides for the needs and wants of men.

Otherwise, death follows.

Hugo Chavez, the elected president of Venezuela, a democratic nation, died of cancer on Wednesday.  Chavez had a contentious relationship with the United States declaring President W. Bush the devil.  He was a leader among leftist governments in Latin America, buoyed by oil sales from Venezuela’s vast fields (second only to Saudi Arabia).  I’ve found two interesting quotes from two different sources about Mr. Chavez’s death.

The first is from a story on NPR wondering what the effect of Chavez’s death will be on oil prices.  Crass, I know, but even more crass is the following comment:

Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.

Yes, Middle eastern cities spend great wealth on buildings and museums.  And our NPR/ Associated Press correspondent seems to think that spending on buildings and museums is a much better investment than spending on food, eradication of poverty, health, and education.  But, what is even more interesting is how this review of Chavez conflicts with the one found at the Economist:

A majority of Venezuelans may eventually come to see that Mr Chávez squandered an extraordinary opportunity for his country, to use an unprecedented oil boom to equip it with world-class infrastructure and to provide the best education and health services money can buy. But this lesson will come the hard way, and there is no guarantee that it will be learned.

Here, we have a similar sentiment as the one in NPR, but expressed differently.  Rather than condemning Chavez for spending money on the poor instead of building, The Economist looks at lasting infrastructure and the best education and health services money can buy.  These are lofty goals.  It’s unclear, though, what Chavez squandered the money on.  More importantly, the NPR story says that Chavez spent money on health and education.  So how is right?

It doesn’t matter, of course.  All that matter is that each American publication had a chance to denounce Chavez, that leftist anti-capitalist.  We cannot allow Americans to think that socialism leads to anything good, and God-forbid that anyone recognize the fact that Chavez did win democratic elections by large margins.  And who cares if the stories conflict over what Chavez actually spent the money on?  It’s not like American schools teach children how to look for contradictions from the printed word or to think about their own circumstances.

Education is about making money.  And Chavez’s socialist regime won’t let you work for that.