Angelus News | March 20, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 11
Standing in the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking an empty St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis blesses the city of Rome March 15, still under lockdown to pre-vent the spread of the coronavirus. On Page 10 is the story of how saints and creative minds throughout the ages — including Pope Francis — remind the Church of her vocation to care for the good of souls in times of great physical suffering. On Page 14, Mike Aquilina offers some perspective on the “providential” consequences of pestilence going back centuries.
Standing in the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking an empty St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis blesses the city of Rome March 15, still under lockdown to pre-vent the spread of the coronavirus. On Page 10 is the story of how saints and creative minds throughout the ages — including Pope Francis — remind the Church of her vocation to care for the good of souls in times of great physical suffering. On Page 14, Mike Aquilina offers some perspective on the “providential” consequences of pestilence going back centuries.
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Hope in a time of<br />
Pandemic<br />
ANGELUS<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> <strong>Vol</strong>. 5 <strong>No</strong>. <strong>11</strong>
Join the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ Official<br />
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land<br />
<strong>11</strong> Days: October 26 to <strong>No</strong>vember 5, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong><br />
Under the Spiritual<br />
Leadership of<br />
Archbishop José H. Gomez<br />
along with:<br />
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land<br />
including Bethlehem, Sea of Galilee,<br />
Nazareth, Jerusalem, and much more!<br />
$4,299 from Los Angeles (LAX)<br />
plus $195 in tips<br />
Bishop<br />
David<br />
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Msgr.<br />
Antonio<br />
Cacciapuoti<br />
Space is limited – sign up today!<br />
Fr.<br />
James<br />
Anguiano<br />
Fr.<br />
Parker<br />
Sandoval<br />
Download a brochure and registration form today at<br />
GoCatholicTravel.com/<strong>20</strong>033<br />
Contact: Mrs. Judy Brooks, Director<br />
Archbishop’s Office for Special Services<br />
(213) 637-7551 or pilgrimage@la-archdiocese.org<br />
CST#: <strong>20</strong>18667–40
ON THE COVER<br />
Standing in the window of the Apostolic<br />
Palace overlooking an empty St. Peter’s<br />
Square, Pope Francis blesses the city of<br />
Rome <strong>March</strong> 15, still under lockdown to prevent<br />
the spread of the coronavirus. On Page<br />
10 is the story of how saints and creative<br />
minds throughout the ages — including Pope<br />
Francis — remind the Church of her vocation<br />
to care for the good of souls in times of<br />
great physical suffering. On Page 14, Mike<br />
Aquilina offers some perspective on the<br />
“providential” consequences of pestilence<br />
going back centuries.<br />
IMAGE:<br />
People wearing protective masks<br />
pray during Mass at the National<br />
Shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual<br />
Help in Manila, Philippines, last<br />
month, following confirmed cases<br />
of coronavirus in the country.<br />
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/<br />
ELOISA LOPEZ, REUTERS<br />
VATICAN MEDIA VIA REUTERS<br />
Contents<br />
t<br />
3<br />
Pope Watch 2<br />
Archbishop Gomez 3<br />
World, Nation, and Local <strong>News</strong> 4-6<br />
Scott Hahn on Scripture 8<br />
Father Rolheiser 9<br />
In San Pedro, sisters ponder the future of home for the elderly 16<br />
John Allen on the Cold War’s <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> Catholic comeback <strong>20</strong><br />
Mike Aquilina on the best of the ‘Four Last Things’ 22<br />
Evangelizing aliens? Sign me up, says one priest 24<br />
Greg Erlandson: Zombies, saints, and fear of the unknown 26<br />
Heather King: Poetry that startles the soul 28<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 1
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<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong><br />
<strong>Vol</strong>. 5 • <strong>No</strong>. <strong>11</strong><br />
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POPE WATCH<br />
‘Domine, quo vadis?’<br />
Editor’s <strong>No</strong>te: While its actual authorship<br />
has been the subject of debate<br />
— with some credible Vatican insiders<br />
believing it was written by Pope Francis<br />
himself — the following letter addressed<br />
to priests was signed by Pope Francis’<br />
personal secretary, Father Yoannis<br />
Lahzi Gaid, Sunday, <strong>March</strong> 13.<br />
There is an episode attributed to the<br />
apostle Peter, who according to tradition,<br />
was fleeing Rome to avoid Nero’s<br />
persecutions and met Christ who was<br />
carrying the cross upon his shoulders,<br />
walking toward Rome.<br />
Peter asks Jesus, “Domine, quo<br />
vadis?” (Lord, where are you going?)<br />
and Jesus answered him, “Eo Romam<br />
iterum crucifigi” (“I am going to<br />
Rome to be crucified again”). Peter<br />
understood from this that he needed<br />
to go back to face martyrdom.<br />
Humanly speaking, Peter had every<br />
right in the world to flee to save his<br />
life from persecution and perhaps to<br />
be able to found another community<br />
and other churches, but in reality,<br />
he was acting according to the logic<br />
of the world — like Satan, that is,<br />
thinking as men think and not as God<br />
thinks. Jesus, “turning toward Peter,<br />
said: ‘Get behind me Satan! You are a<br />
stumbling block for me, because you<br />
do not think according to God but<br />
according to men.’ ”<br />
In St. John’s Gospel, when Christ<br />
speaks of the good shepherd and the<br />
hired hand, he defines himself as the<br />
good shepherd, who not only takes<br />
care of his sheep but knows each of<br />
them and even gives his life for them.<br />
Jesus is the sure guide of the people<br />
who are looking for a path that will<br />
lead them to God and toward their<br />
brothers and sisters.<br />
In the epidemic of fear that all of us<br />
are living because of the pandemic<br />
of the coronavirus, we risk acting like<br />
hired hands and not like shepherds.<br />
We cannot and should not judge, but<br />
the image that comes to mind is that<br />
of Christ who meets Peter who is terrified<br />
and fleeing, not to reproach him<br />
but to go and die in his place. Think<br />
of all the souls who feel terrified and<br />
abandoned because we pastors follow<br />
the instructions of civil authorities,<br />
which is right in these circumstances<br />
to avoid contagion — while we risk<br />
putting aside divine instructions —<br />
which is a sin.<br />
We think as men think and not as<br />
God thinks. We join the group of those<br />
who are terrified rather than joining<br />
the doctors, the nurses, the volunteers,<br />
the health care workers, and mothers<br />
and fathers, who are on the front<br />
lines. I think of all the people who<br />
live by nourishing themselves from<br />
the Eucharist, because they believe in<br />
the real presence of Jesus who gives<br />
himself in holy Communion.<br />
I think of those people who now<br />
have to be satisfied following the Mass<br />
transmitted via streaming. I think of<br />
the souls that have need of spiritual<br />
comfort and of the sacrament of confession.<br />
I think of all those people who<br />
will certainly abandon the Church<br />
when this nightmare is over, because<br />
the Church abandoned them when<br />
they had need of her.<br />
It is good for the churches to remain<br />
open. Priests should be on the front<br />
lines. The faithful should find courage<br />
and comfort from seeing their<br />
Continued on Page 14<br />
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Papal Prayer Intention for <strong>March</strong>: We pray that the Church in China may<br />
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2 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
NEW WORLD<br />
OF FAITH<br />
BY ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ H. GOMEZ<br />
In the time of coronavirus<br />
How the world has changed in just a<br />
few weeks. It seems hard to remember<br />
life before the worldwide outbreak of<br />
the coronavirus, and right now it is<br />
hard to imagine that life might one<br />
day return to normal.<br />
As I write, world health officials have<br />
declared the virus to be a “pandemic,”<br />
and there are more than 6,500<br />
deaths already, across many nations. A<br />
national emergency has been declared<br />
by the president, and the governor<br />
of California and the mayor of Los<br />
Angeles have each announced new<br />
restrictions on public gatherings and<br />
other measures aimed at preventing<br />
the spread of the virus.<br />
In the midst of this grave and extraordinary<br />
moment, I regret to say that we<br />
have been forced to temporarily suspend<br />
public celebration of the Mass<br />
in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, at<br />
least for the next two weeks, through<br />
the weekend of <strong>March</strong> 28-29. We<br />
have also closed our Catholic schools<br />
at least until <strong>March</strong> 31, and canceled<br />
most gatherings in the archdiocese.<br />
What we do in the Church, we do<br />
out of love for God and love for our<br />
brothers and sisters. We have taken<br />
this extraordinary step of suspending<br />
Masses out of love for those in our families<br />
and communities who are most<br />
vulnerable to this deadly virus.<br />
It was fitting that the Gospel this past<br />
weekend was the beautiful story of<br />
Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman<br />
at the well. Jesus’ words struck me:<br />
“The hour is coming, and is now here,<br />
when true worshippers will worship<br />
the Father in spirit and truth; and<br />
indeed the Father seeks such people<br />
to worship him.”<br />
It seems to me that in this moment,<br />
in this time when so many are afraid<br />
and uncertain, our Father is calling<br />
us to intensify our worship, our discipleship.<br />
He is calling us to seek him<br />
with all our hearts, to serve him with<br />
our whole lives. He is calling us to<br />
trust in his Providence, in his plan for<br />
our lives and our world.<br />
With the worldwide outbreak of the<br />
coronavirus, we see how the forces<br />
of “globalization” have made us one<br />
family, and that what afflicts our<br />
brothers and sisters in one country can<br />
no longer be isolated. We are confronted,<br />
not only with the reality of our<br />
common humanity, but also with our<br />
responsibility for one another. As St.<br />
Paul said, if one of us is suffering, we<br />
all suffer together.<br />
God is calling us to trust<br />
in his Providence, in his<br />
plan for our lives and<br />
our world.<br />
These are troubling times. People are<br />
getting sick, people are dying. Many<br />
families are struggling with the dislocations<br />
caused by the shutting down<br />
of businesses and schools. People are<br />
feeling the anguish of being separated<br />
and far away from loved ones in<br />
a time of need. Some have relatives<br />
dying in other parts of the world, and<br />
they cannot reach them.<br />
<strong>No</strong>w is the time to intensify our<br />
prayers and sacrifices for the love of<br />
God and the love of our neighbor. Let<br />
us draw closer to one another in our<br />
love for him. We are called to bear<br />
one another’s burdens and we need to<br />
stand in solidarity with our brothers<br />
and sisters, as one family. We need to<br />
reflect on the fragility of our lives, and<br />
rediscover what truly matters.<br />
We are a people of faith, not of fear.<br />
“Be not afraid!” is what the angel<br />
told Mary at the Annunciation. Jesus<br />
spoke these same words to his disciples<br />
after the resurrection. And in<br />
this time of trial and testing, I think he<br />
is speaking these words to his disciples<br />
again.<br />
Jesus has passed through the valley<br />
of the shadow of death, so there is<br />
no evil that we should be afraid of.<br />
He has promised to be with us until<br />
the close of the age. And there is no<br />
promise that Jesus makes that he will<br />
not keep.<br />
St. John writes that “perfect love<br />
casts out fear.” Of course, we know<br />
that our love is far from perfect. But<br />
we also know that God does not abandon<br />
us. Throughout the history of the<br />
Church, Jesus continues to walk with<br />
us: through persecutions, plagues,<br />
and pestilence, and now a pandemic.<br />
Jesus goes with us even now and we<br />
know that in all things he works for<br />
good for those who love him. And we<br />
have his promise: “In the world you<br />
will have trouble, but take courage, I<br />
have overcome the world.”<br />
Pray for me this week, and I will pray<br />
for you. And let us pray for all those<br />
afflicted by this virus and all those<br />
working to care for them.<br />
And I invite you to join me in seeking<br />
the maternal intercession of Our<br />
Lady of Guadalupe for our nation and<br />
our world.<br />
You can find a special prayer for this<br />
time of the coronavirus on our website:<br />
archla.org/prayer. <br />
To read more columns by Archbishop José H. Gomez or to subscribe, visit www.angelusnews.com.<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 3
WORLD<br />
England: Unearthed bones<br />
belong to saint-princess<br />
A seventh-century skeleton unearthed at a Kent<br />
church is believed to belong to one of the earliest saints<br />
of England.<br />
Through carbon dating of bone and teeth samples<br />
and archival research, archaeologists concluded that<br />
it was “highly probable” that the remains belonged to<br />
St. Eanswythe, a Kentish royal who became a nun as a<br />
teenager.<br />
A descendent of Anglo-Saxon kings and the foundress<br />
of one of the first English monastic communities<br />
around A.D. 660 (and perhaps the first of its kind for<br />
women), St. Eanswythe represents a significant moment<br />
of Kentish and Church history.<br />
“This locally based community partnership has pro-<br />
An archaeologist removes human remains at the Church of St. Mary<br />
and St. Eanswythe in Kent, England.<br />
duced a stunning result of national importance,” said Dr.<br />
Andrew Richardson, archives manager of the Canterbury<br />
Archeological Trust. <br />
MARK HOURAHANE/DIOCESE OF CANTERBURY<br />
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
TRANSMITTERS OF THE FAITH — A 1906<br />
wedding photo shows Karol and Emilia<br />
Wojtyła, the parents of the future St. Pope John<br />
Paul II, whose official beatification process<br />
was begun <strong>March</strong> <strong>11</strong> by the Vatican. The<br />
couple had three children and were known<br />
for their visible devotion to their Catholic faith<br />
and for “strongly influencing the spiritual and<br />
intellectual development of the future pope,”<br />
the bishops of Poland said in a statement. The<br />
Archdiocese of Kraków, which Karol Wojtyła<br />
led as archbishop before becoming pope,<br />
will be accepting documents, letters, and<br />
messages regarding Karol and Emilia from the<br />
faithful until May 7.<br />
Mexico: Women’s Day<br />
marches get ugly<br />
Nationwide protests denouncing<br />
violence against women in Mexico<br />
earlier this month could hardly be<br />
described as peaceful: Throughout<br />
the country, demonstrators vandalized<br />
several churches in their path.<br />
During the “women’s strike” <strong>March</strong><br />
8 in Mexico City, police officers were<br />
overrun by protesting women who<br />
stormed the city’s cathedral. In other<br />
locations, the vandalism included<br />
marking walls with graffiti, breaking<br />
windows, and throwing explosive<br />
devices.<br />
At the cathedral of Hermosillo in Sonora,<br />
about 80 faithful had to be evacuated<br />
during Sunday Mass. Markings<br />
on the wall proclaimed phrases such<br />
as “legal abortion” and “pedophile.”<br />
The attacks took place even after<br />
several bishops had voiced support for<br />
women’s rights in the country. The<br />
day of the march, Cardinal Carlos<br />
Aguiar Retes of Mexico City stated,<br />
“We not only want to show solidarity<br />
and accompany women who suffer<br />
violence, but we also celebrate any<br />
initiative or public policy that helps<br />
to eradicate the harmful culture that<br />
invades us.” <br />
Poland encourages more,<br />
not fewer, Masses amid<br />
coronavirus<br />
While several dioceses around the<br />
world, including Rome, were canceling<br />
Masses and closing churches<br />
amid the coronavirus outbreak, the<br />
Church in Poland has called for more<br />
Masses than ever.<br />
“Just as hospitals treat illnesses of<br />
the body, the Church is there to heal<br />
illnesses of the soul. That’s why it’s<br />
unimaginable that we should not<br />
pray in our churches,” Archbishop<br />
Stanislaw Gadecki, head of the Polish<br />
bishops’ conference, wrote in a<br />
<strong>March</strong> 10 statement.<br />
In light of widespread precautions<br />
against holding large gatherings of<br />
people, he asked that parishes increase<br />
the number of Sunday Masses<br />
in order to reduce congregation sizes.<br />
He also encouraged the elderly and<br />
sick to remain at home and watch<br />
broadcasts of Mass on television.<br />
“Let us pray for health for the sick<br />
and for the doctors, medical staff,<br />
and all services that work to stop the<br />
spread of this virus,” wrote the archbishop.<br />
“Let’s pray for the epidemic<br />
to end.” <br />
4 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
NATION<br />
Minnesota: Abortion day<br />
‘an affront to our Creator’<br />
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/JASON REDMOND, REUTERS<br />
OPEN ONLY FOR PRAYER — Jun Lee, a Catholic from South Korea, prays in front of an<br />
image of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. James Cathedral in Seattle <strong>March</strong> 12. On <strong>March</strong><br />
<strong>11</strong>, the Archdiocese of Seattle became the first in the country to announce the temporary<br />
suspension of all public Masses to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19).<br />
As of press time, places of worship in the archdiocese were still open for prayer.<br />
America’s oldest<br />
coronavirus victim:<br />
St. Paddy<br />
For U.S. Catholics, concerns about<br />
the spread of coronavirus impacted<br />
not only their worship schedules, but<br />
one of their longest-held pastimes: the<br />
St. Patrick’s Day parade.<br />
Most if not all St. Patrick’s Day<br />
parades in major U.S. cities were<br />
canceled due to concerns about the<br />
spread of the coronavirus (COV-<br />
ID-19).<br />
In New York, the cancellation<br />
marked the first time the parade was<br />
not being held since 1762.<br />
New York Archbishop Cardinal<br />
Timothy Dolan, himself a son of<br />
Irish-Americans, said he understood<br />
the decision, but “like everybody else,<br />
I’m disappointed.”<br />
In some places, such as in Louisville,<br />
Kentucky, organizers vowed the parade<br />
would be rescheduled to a future<br />
date, rather than canceled, due to the<br />
funds it raises for local businesses and<br />
charities. <br />
‘Remain in Mexico’<br />
stays — for now<br />
The U.S. Supreme Court granted<br />
the Trump administration’s request to<br />
continue enforcing its controversial<br />
“Remain in Mexico” policy while it<br />
appeals a decision by a lower court to<br />
block the policy.<br />
The <strong>20</strong>19 Migrant Protection<br />
Protocols, as the policy is formally<br />
known, require asylum-seekers to stay<br />
in Mexico while their cases make their<br />
way through U.S. immigration courts.<br />
Previously, some asylum-seekers had<br />
been allowed to enter the U.S. while<br />
awaiting court decisions.<br />
For now, the Supreme Court’s decision<br />
overrules a San Francisco federal<br />
appeals court, which last month heard<br />
evidence that people returned to Mexico<br />
under the policy “face targeted discrimination,<br />
physical violence, sexual<br />
assault, overwhelmed and corrupt law<br />
enforcement, lack of food and shelter,<br />
and practical obstacles to participation<br />
in court proceedings in the United<br />
States.” <br />
The Catholic archbishop of Minneapolis<br />
and St. Paul slammed the Twin<br />
Cities’ decision to declare an official<br />
“Abortion Providers Appreciation<br />
Day.”<br />
In a <strong>March</strong> 10 statement, Archbishop<br />
Bernard A. Hebda declared he was<br />
“profoundly saddened” by the St. Paul<br />
city council and Minneapolis mayor’s<br />
decisions.<br />
“Given that each human life is created<br />
in the image and likeness of God<br />
and has value, to honor those who<br />
purposefully end such life is an affront<br />
not only to our Creator but to the<br />
foundational values of civil society,”<br />
he wrote.<br />
The day, already commemorated nationally<br />
by abortion proponents, falls<br />
in the middle of the national 40 Days<br />
For Life campaign, which encourages<br />
pro-life supporters to pray daily to end<br />
abortion.<br />
Archbishop Hebda expressed admiration<br />
for “the countless women and<br />
men of goodwill who tirelessly give<br />
of themselves” to “create a culture of<br />
life.”<br />
“It is those people we should be<br />
honoring,” he said. <br />
Archbishop Bernard A. Hebda of St. Paul and<br />
Minneapolis.<br />
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/BOB ROLLER<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 5
LOCAL<br />
New abuse reporting system launched<br />
SUBMITTED PHOTOS<br />
A family in Thousand Oaks shared photos of its participation in<br />
Archbishop Gomez’s celebration of Sunday Mass <strong>March</strong> 15 via<br />
livestream at home.<br />
ADLA liturgies, classes<br />
go to cyberspace<br />
A reporting system accepting sexual misconduct allegations<br />
against U.S. bishops and eparchs launched <strong>March</strong> 16,<br />
including in Los Angeles.<br />
Reports made to the Catholic Bishops Abuse Reporting<br />
Service (CBAR), may be made by calling 800-276-1562 or<br />
visiting ReportBishopAbuse.org.<br />
The nationwide system is being implemented by individual<br />
dioceses under the direction of each respective cardinal,<br />
archbishop or bishop. The information gathered, which is<br />
protected through enhanced encryption, is forwarded to the<br />
local metropolitan bishop, who designates a layperson with<br />
whom to review the allegation before forwarding it to the<br />
apostolic nuncio.<br />
If a report is received that concerns the local metropolitan,<br />
then it is forwarded to the local province’s “senior suffragan.”<br />
Here in Southern California, Archbishop José H. Gomez<br />
is the local metropolitan and Bishop Gerald Barnes of San<br />
Bernardino is the senior suffragan. <br />
Like many places in the world hoping to stem the<br />
growth of the coronavirus (COVID-19) cases, parishes<br />
and schools in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles are<br />
turning to technology to continue their mission.<br />
Faithful in their homes looking to participate in Mass<br />
via livestream can find several local Mass streaming<br />
links at LACatholics.org/mass-for-the-homebound/.<br />
On Sunday, <strong>March</strong> 15, more than 40,000 viewers<br />
tuned in for Mass celebrated by Archbishop José H.<br />
Gomez at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.<br />
As part of similar measures, schools in the archdiocese<br />
were closed at least through <strong>March</strong> 27, with “remote<br />
learning” at home replacing classroom sessions<br />
for students.<br />
For the latest information and updates, please visit<br />
LACatholics.org/Emergency. <br />
ST. JOHN PAUL II STEM ACADEMY<br />
St. John Paul II STEM Academy principal Jeff Hilger presents to<br />
students via “distance learning” <strong>March</strong> 16.<br />
COMMUNION IN THE PARKING LOT — A deacon at St. Elizabeth of<br />
Hungary Church in Altadena administers holy Communion to a person<br />
in his car at a “drive-in Mass” in the parish’s parking lot <strong>March</strong> 15.<br />
Guidelines from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for liturgical celebrations<br />
last week encouraged smaller gathering sizes at parishes, but<br />
since then public Masses have been canceled in the archdiocese. Visit<br />
LACatholics.org/Emergency for up-to-date directives in light of the<br />
coronavirus crisis.<br />
ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY<br />
6 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
During this time of high alert for local<br />
citizens, <strong>Angelus</strong> readers are invited<br />
to visit LACatholics.org/Emergency<br />
for:<br />
U<br />
U<br />
U<br />
Prayer and livestreamed liturgy resources<br />
Coronavirus-related measures and<br />
guidelines in the Archdiocese of<br />
Los Angeles<br />
<strong>News</strong> updates on the Church’s response to<br />
the pandemic from <strong>Angelus</strong><strong>News</strong>.com<br />
Prayer in the Time of the Coronavirus<br />
Most Reverend José H. Gomez<br />
Archbishop of Los Angeles<br />
Holy Virgin of Guadalupe,<br />
Queen of the Angels and Mother of the Americas.<br />
We fly to you today as your beloved children.<br />
We ask you to intercede for us with your Son,<br />
as you did at the wedding in Cana.<br />
Pray for us, loving Mother,<br />
and gain for our nation and world,<br />
and for all our families and loved ones,<br />
the protection of your holy angels,<br />
that we may be spared the worst of this illness.<br />
For those already afflicted,<br />
we ask you to obtain the grace of healing and deliverance.<br />
Hear the cries of those who are vulnerable and fearful,<br />
wipe away their tears and help them to trust.<br />
In this time of trial and testing,<br />
teach all of us in the Church to love one another and to be patient<br />
and kind. Help us to bring the peace of Jesus to our land and<br />
to our hearts.<br />
We come to you with confidence,<br />
knowing that you truly are our compassionate mother,<br />
health of the sick and cause of our joy.<br />
Shelter us under the mantle of your protection,<br />
keep us in the embrace of your arms,<br />
help us always to know the love of your Son, Jesus.<br />
In light of a number of event cancellations<br />
and postponements around the Archdiocese<br />
of Los Angeles due to COVID-19 coronavirusrelated<br />
concerns, this week’s LA Catholic<br />
Events calendar can be found online at<br />
<strong>Angelus</strong><strong>News</strong>.com/Events-Calendar.<br />
Amen.<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> •• ANGELUS • 7
SUNDAY<br />
READINGS<br />
BY SCOTT HAHN<br />
1 Sam. 16:1, 6–7, 10–13 / Ps. 23:1–6 / Eph. 5:8–14 / Jn. 9:1–41<br />
God’s ways<br />
of seeing are<br />
not our ways,<br />
we hear in<br />
today’s First<br />
Reading.<br />
Jesus illustrates<br />
this in<br />
the Gospel,<br />
as the blind<br />
man comes<br />
to see and the<br />
Pharisees are<br />
made blind.<br />
The blind<br />
man stands<br />
for all humanity.<br />
“Born<br />
totally in sin”<br />
he is made a<br />
new creation<br />
by the saving power of Christ.<br />
As God fashioned the first man from<br />
the clay of the earth (see Genesis 2:7),<br />
Jesus gives the blind man new life by<br />
anointing his eyes with clay (see John<br />
9:<strong>11</strong>). As God breathed the spirit of<br />
life into the first man, the blind man<br />
is not healed until he washes in the<br />
waters of Siloam, a name that means<br />
“Sent.”<br />
Jesus is the One “sent” by the Father<br />
to do the Father’s will (see John<br />
9:4; 12:44). He is the new source of<br />
life-giving water, the Holy Spirit who<br />
rushes upon us in baptism (see John<br />
4:10; 7:38–39).<br />
This is the Spirit that rushes upon<br />
God’s chosen King David in today’s<br />
First Reading. A shepherd like Moses<br />
before him (see Exodus 3:1; Psalm<br />
78:70–71), David is also a sign pointing<br />
to the good shepherd and king to<br />
“Christ Healing the Blind,” by El Greco, 1541-1614, Greek.<br />
come: Jesus (see John 10:<strong>11</strong>).<br />
The Lord is our shepherd, as we<br />
sing in today’s Psalm. By his death<br />
and resurrection he has made a path<br />
for us through the dark valley of sin<br />
and death, leading us to the verdant<br />
pastures of the kingdom of life, the<br />
Church.<br />
In the restful waters of baptism<br />
he has refreshed our souls. He has<br />
anointed our heads with the oil of<br />
confirmation and spread the eucharistic<br />
table before us, filling our cups to<br />
overflowing.<br />
With the once-blind man we enter<br />
his house to give God the praise, to<br />
renew our vow: “I do believe, Lord.”<br />
“The Lord looks into the heart,” we<br />
hear today. Let him find us, as Paul<br />
advises in today’s Epistle, living as<br />
“children of light,” trying always to<br />
learn what is pleasing to our Father. <br />
Scott Scott Hahn is is founder of of the the St. St. Paul Paul Center for for Biblical Theology, stpaulcenter.com.<br />
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
8 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> August <strong>20</strong>, 16-23-30, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> <strong>20</strong>19
IN EXILE<br />
BY FATHER RONALD ROLHEISER, OMI<br />
Judgment Day<br />
We all fear judgment. We fear being<br />
seen with all that’s inside us, some of<br />
which we don’t want exposed to the<br />
light. Conversely, we fear being misunderstood,<br />
of not being seen in the<br />
full light, of not being seen for who<br />
we are. And what we fear most perhaps<br />
is final judgment, the ultimate<br />
revelation of ourselves.<br />
Whether we are religious or not,<br />
most of us fear having to face our<br />
Maker, Judgment Day. We fear standing<br />
naked in complete light where<br />
nothing is hidden and all that’s in the<br />
dark inside us is brought to light.<br />
What’s curious about these fears is<br />
that we fear both being known for<br />
who we are, even as we fear not being<br />
known for who we really are. We fear<br />
judgment, even as we long for it. Perhaps<br />
that’s because we already intuit<br />
what our final judgment will be and<br />
how it will take place.<br />
Perhaps we already intuit, when we<br />
finally stand naked in God’s light, that<br />
we will also finally be understood and<br />
that revealing light will not just expose<br />
our shortcomings but also make visible<br />
our virtues.<br />
That intuition is divinely placed in<br />
us and reflects the reality of our final<br />
judgment. When all our secrets are<br />
known our secret goodness will also<br />
be known. Light exposes everything.<br />
For example, here’s how the renowned<br />
poet and spiritual writer,<br />
Wendell Berry, foresees the final<br />
judgment: “I might imagine the dead<br />
waking, dazed into a shadowless<br />
light in which they know themselves<br />
altogether for the first time. It is a light<br />
that is merciless until they accept its<br />
mercy; by it, they are at once con-<br />
demned and redeemed. It is Hell until<br />
it is Heaven.<br />
“Seeing themselves in that light, if<br />
they are willing, they see how far they<br />
have failed the only justice of loving<br />
one another. And yet, in suffering the<br />
light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves<br />
within it, they see its forgiveness<br />
and its beauty and are consoled.”<br />
In many ways, this wonderfully<br />
captures it: When, one day, we stand<br />
in the full light of God, stripped<br />
naked in soul, morally defenseless,<br />
with everything we have ever done<br />
exposed, that light will, I suspect,<br />
indeed be a bit of hell before it turns<br />
into heaven.<br />
It will expose all that’s selfish and<br />
impure inside us and all the ways we<br />
have hurt others in our selfishness,<br />
even as it will expose its opposite,<br />
namely, all that’s selfless and pure<br />
inside us. That judgment will bring<br />
with it a certain condemnation even<br />
as it brings at the same time an understanding,<br />
forgiveness, and consolation<br />
such as we have never known before.<br />
That judgment will be, as Berry suggests,<br />
bitter but ultimately consoling.<br />
The one nuance that I would add to<br />
Berry’s idea is something taken from<br />
Father Karl Rahner, SJ. His fantasy<br />
of our judgment by God after death<br />
is very similar to Berry’s, except that,<br />
for Father Rahner, the agent of that<br />
judgment will not so much be God’s<br />
light as it will be God’s love.<br />
For Father Rahner, the idea is not<br />
so much that we will be standing in<br />
an unrelenting light that sears and<br />
pierces through us, but rather that we<br />
will be embraced by a love so unconditional,<br />
so understanding, and so<br />
gracious that, inside that, we will know<br />
instantly all that’s selfish and impure<br />
inside us even as we know all that’s<br />
pure and selfless.<br />
St. Thérèse of Lisieux used to ask<br />
God for forgiveness with these words:<br />
“Punish me with a kiss!” Judgment<br />
Day will be exactly that. We will be<br />
“punished” by a kiss, by being loved<br />
in a way that will make us painfully<br />
aware of the sin within us, even as it<br />
lets us know that we are good.<br />
For those of us who are Roman<br />
Catholics, judgment is also, I believe,<br />
what we mean by our concept of purgatory.<br />
Purgatory is not a place that’s<br />
separate from heaven where one goes<br />
for a time to do penance for one’s sins<br />
and to purify one’s heart.<br />
Our hearts are purified by being embraced<br />
by God, not by being separated<br />
from God for a time so as to be made<br />
worthy of that embrace. As well, as St.<br />
Thérèse implies, the punishment for<br />
our sin is in the embrace itself.<br />
Final judgment takes place by being<br />
unconditionally embraced by Love.<br />
When that happens to the extent that<br />
we’re sinful and selfish, that embrace<br />
of pure goodness and love will make<br />
us painfully aware of our own sin and<br />
that will be hell until it is heaven.<br />
As a lyric by Leonard Cohen puts it:<br />
“Behold the gates of mercy, in arbitrary<br />
space, and none of us deserving<br />
the cruelty or the grace.” He’s right.<br />
<strong>No</strong>ne of us deserves either the cruelty<br />
or the grace we experience in this<br />
world. And only our final judgment,<br />
the embrace of unconditional love,<br />
God’s kiss, will make us aware both of<br />
how cruel we’ve been and how good<br />
we really are. <br />
Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher, award-winning author, and president of the Oblate School of Theology<br />
in San Antonio, Texas. Find him online at www.ronrolheiser.com and www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser.<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 9
Conversion<br />
in a time of<br />
coronavirus<br />
COURTESY LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY<br />
People wearing masks for protection from the coronavirus tour the<br />
Vatican Museums in this Feb. 29 file photo. The Vatican announced<br />
<strong>March</strong> 8 that the museums will be closed until April 3 as a precaution<br />
against spread of the coronavirus. Also closed for the same duration are<br />
the necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica, museums at the pontifical villa<br />
at Castel Gandolfo, and the museums of the papal basilicas.<br />
10 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
Through pandemics, plagues, and<br />
pestilence, the Church always seeks<br />
the health of the sick — not just<br />
people’s bodies, but their souls, too<br />
BY ELIZABETH LEV &<br />
THOMAS D. WILLIAMS / ANGELUS<br />
When Italy, the public display of affection (PDA)<br />
capital of the world, shuns handshakes and discourages<br />
kissing, one might well imagine the<br />
apocalypse is close at hand. Indeed, the news out of the<br />
Bel Paese — schools, shops, museums, and coffee bars<br />
closed, soccer championships played behind closed doors,<br />
citizens confined to their homes — evokes thoughts of the<br />
Black Death that ravaged Europe 700 years ago.<br />
While not as lethal as the bubonic plague or other devastating<br />
epidemics of Italy’s past, the coronavirus (COV-<br />
ID-19) nonetheless gives serious cause for concern. The<br />
number of deaths (1,809 as of this writing) is not indifferent<br />
and the virus’ long incubation period makes its spread<br />
extremely difficult to contain.<br />
The Italian government has been rolling out decrees on<br />
a daily basis, effectively turning the country into a police<br />
state, closing down everything but food stores, newsstands,<br />
and tobacconists (yes, you read that right), with<br />
patrol cars cruising the streets looking for citizens out of<br />
their residences without due cause or the proper papers.<br />
Yet for many, the actions of the state were less worrisome<br />
than those of the Church, whose leadership was conspicuously<br />
absent until very recently. For the first 10 days<br />
of the virus, the official pronouncements of the Italian<br />
Church seemed a mere echo of the safety measures established<br />
by the civil authorities.<br />
The Church’s pastoral program began with hygiene and<br />
social distancing, first removing the sign of peace and<br />
holy water, then suspending public Masses. Then, on<br />
<strong>March</strong> 12, the vicar of Rome, acting under Pope Francis’<br />
authority, announced the closing of all Rome’s churches,<br />
even to private prayer, leaving the faithful feeling abandoned<br />
and confused, with no sacraments and no distinctive<br />
message of salvation.<br />
Italians had gone from freedom to confinement in a<br />
matter of days, while Church leaders prepared to board<br />
up places of worship, claiming that they were only following<br />
orders of the civil government.<br />
And then something amazing happened. Less than 24<br />
hours after Pope Francis had approved the closing of<br />
Rome’s churches, he reversed the decision and ordered<br />
all parishes and mission churches reopened.<br />
This about-face is best illustrated by a letter dated <strong>March</strong><br />
13 signed by the pope’s personal secretary, but widely<br />
thought to be written by the Holy Father. Circulated<br />
among the Roman clergy, the letter urged priests to go<br />
out to God’s people, since their place is on the “front<br />
lines” in this crisis.<br />
“Think of all the souls who feel terrified and abandoned<br />
because we pastors follow the instructions of civil authorities<br />
— which is right in these circumstances to avoid contagion<br />
— while we risk putting aside divine instructions<br />
— which is a sin,” the letter reflected, while insisting that<br />
priests make the Eucharist and confession available to the<br />
faithful.<br />
“We think as men think and not as God thinks,” the<br />
author continued. “We join the ranks of those who are<br />
terrified rather than joining the doctors, the nurses, the<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • <strong>11</strong>
volunteers, the health care workers, and mothers and<br />
fathers, who are on the front lines.”<br />
This letter revealed the battle against naturalism, the<br />
reduction of everything to the pleasures and pains, the<br />
benefits and trials of this world, that underlies part of this<br />
crisis. The Church has battled this mindset for centuries.<br />
While recognizing the value and legitimate autonomy<br />
of the things of this world, her mission has always been<br />
to point beyond, to stir souls to “seek the things that are<br />
above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God”<br />
(Colossians 3:1–3).<br />
In his first encyclical letter, “Deus Caritas Est” (“God is<br />
Love”), Pope Benedict XVI underscored an essential distinction<br />
between the respective roles of the Church and<br />
civil government. Whereas charity is the distinctive domain<br />
of the Church, the “just ordering of society and the<br />
State is a central responsibility of politics,” he wrote, and<br />
therefore justice<br />
“is both the aim<br />
and the intrinsic<br />
criterion of all<br />
politics.”<br />
“For her part,<br />
the Church, as<br />
the social expression<br />
of Christian<br />
faith, has a<br />
proper independence<br />
and is<br />
structured on the<br />
basis of her faith<br />
as a community<br />
which the State<br />
must recognize.<br />
The two spheres<br />
are distinct, yet<br />
always interrelated,”<br />
he said<br />
(DCE, 28a).<br />
At the heart of<br />
the Church’s<br />
charity we find<br />
solicitude for the<br />
spiritual good<br />
and eternal salvation of souls and this is, and always has<br />
been, the Church’s primary concern.<br />
Pandemics are scary. Much of what terrifies us is the lack<br />
of control that disease and its attendant consequences<br />
(quarantine, disruption, uncertainty) bring. The medieval<br />
world knew it had little control over much of anything —<br />
nature, weather, war, overlords — but the contemporary<br />
world is accustomed to a feeling of self-determination.<br />
A society used to thinking it controls everything from<br />
climate to gender is poorly equipped to weather the storm<br />
of unpredictability that epidemics bring.<br />
Julien Carron, president of the ecclesial movement<br />
Communion and Liberation, addressed this problem in<br />
the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera: “A fear, always<br />
in the back of our minds, explodes when reality exposes<br />
Pierre Mignard’s “St. Charles Borromeo Ministering to Plague Victims.”<br />
our essential powerlessness, for many people taking over<br />
and, at times, prompting impulsive reactions: pushing<br />
us to close ourselves up, shy away from any contact with<br />
other people to avoid contagion, stockpiling provisions…”<br />
This fear has many outlets. Giovanni Boccaccio’s book<br />
“Decameron” recounts how during the great plague of<br />
1348, a group of young people fled to the safety of the<br />
countryside to enjoy leisurely and amorous pursuits.<br />
On the other hand, during the deadly 1918 Spanish flu<br />
epidemic that claimed an estimated 50 million to 100<br />
million lives, St. Jacinta of Portugal chose, as she endured<br />
excruciating treatments, to offer her suffering for the<br />
conversion of souls.<br />
Carron reminds us that situations like these “reveal what<br />
kind of progress we — each of us personally and all together<br />
— have made on the path of maturity, how much<br />
self-awareness we have gained and how capable we are of<br />
facing the life in<br />
front of us.”<br />
Historically,<br />
the Catholic<br />
Church has had<br />
a crucial role<br />
to play in time<br />
of pestilence.<br />
She has been on<br />
the front lines<br />
of epidemics,<br />
infectious diseases,<br />
and mortal<br />
danger since her<br />
founding. The<br />
pampered son<br />
of the mayor of<br />
Montpellier,<br />
14th-century<br />
St. Roch, was<br />
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
transformed into<br />
a missionary to<br />
the sick, traveling<br />
throughout<br />
Italy ministering<br />
to the infirm.<br />
Our woke world<br />
would probably accuse him of irresponsibility, spreading<br />
contagion wherever he went, yet for centuries he was<br />
invoked as the patron to ward off plague. The formation<br />
of the Christian, intent on gaining a greater world than<br />
this, helped to forge courage in the face of epidemic in<br />
the most unlikely places.<br />
For his part, St. Charles Borromeo was the privileged<br />
scion of a Medici who worried more about his appearance<br />
and his erudition than the spiritual needs of souls until<br />
the 1576 plague in Milan called him to hands-on service.<br />
This patrician waded into the fray, ministering to the sick<br />
and encouraging other priests to do so as well. For where<br />
all the world saw death and desolation, he saw a glimmer<br />
of possibility to save souls.<br />
St. Charles hoped for heavenly glory, writing to the reli-<br />
12 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
Pope Francis prays in front of a crucifix at the Church of St. Marcellus in Rome <strong>March</strong> 15. The crucifix was carried through Rome in 1522 during the<br />
“Great Plague.”<br />
CNS PHOTO/VATICAN MEDIA<br />
gious in Milan that service in a time of epidemic is “the<br />
stuff of martyrs.” He encouraged his clergy that this was<br />
a “desirable time now when without the cruelty of the tyrant,<br />
without the rack, without fire, without beasts and in<br />
the complete absence of harsh tortures which are usually<br />
the most frightful to human weakness, we can obtain the<br />
crown of martyrdom.”<br />
He was continuing the course set by St. Thomas Aquinas,<br />
who wrote that “in the case where one is bound to<br />
look after the salvation of his neighbor, he is also bound<br />
to expose his bodily life to dangers for the sake of that<br />
salvation” (On Charity, art <strong>11</strong>).<br />
In the end, this focus on the eternal salvation of souls<br />
follows on the words of Jesus regarding the preeminence<br />
of the eternal good over all temporal goods, including<br />
health and life itself. “For what does it profit a man to<br />
gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36).<br />
Christian art raised its own voice to drive home this<br />
point. After the Black Death, images of the Last Judgment<br />
transformed from showing static scenes of Christ in<br />
glory into murals of dynamic events unfolding over vast<br />
surfaces. Figures rising and falling, windows into hell<br />
focusing on dire punishments for sins like lust, avarice,<br />
and gluttony, warned against petty attachments that could<br />
hinder a soul’s attainment of eternity.<br />
Buonamico Buffalmacco’s “Triumph of Death,” painted<br />
between 1336 and 1340 for the Camposanto of Pisa, was<br />
one of the most powerful compositions of its kind. Occupying<br />
an imposing space of wall, it was meant to overwhelm<br />
the viewer. Amorous suitors and gossiping women<br />
cavort in a garden, unaware that Death, a wizened hag<br />
with bat wings, is flying above them, scythe in hand.<br />
She is coming for the unsuspecting youths, and ignoring<br />
the group of old, crippled people beckoning her to come<br />
for them. Art in a time of plague promoted the virtues of<br />
detachment and preparedness, taking advantage of these<br />
moments when mortality was on the minds of all.<br />
The early ecclesiastical silence regarding matters of<br />
eternity prompted Italian historian Franco Cardini in the<br />
Italian daily La Stampa to declare that “we have lost our<br />
sense of the sacred” while warning against “the divinization<br />
of science.”<br />
“We have severed the roots that kept us in touch with the<br />
dimension of transcendence,” the historian continued.<br />
“The true great epidemic of our day is our savage and<br />
desperate fear. During the plague of 1630 it was known<br />
that death is not the end of everything.”<br />
God is not indifferent to the ordeals his children suffer<br />
and neither is the Church. <strong>No</strong>w is the time to assist the<br />
sick and suffering, to reach out to the lonely and confused,<br />
to tend to the needs of the least of our brethren.<br />
Yet along with the care of the body, the Church has a<br />
preeminent vocation to care for the good of souls and to<br />
remind the faithful which is ultimately more important.<br />
Like St. Mary, hers is the better part, and it shall not be<br />
taken from her.<br />
If the authentically evangelical attitude running through<br />
the pope’s alleged letter were to take hold of the Church’s<br />
pastors, we could be in store for a glorious period of<br />
witness. In this moment when the laity’s trust in their<br />
bishops and priests has plummeted due to worldly scandal<br />
and corruption, this could be an opportunity to win back<br />
the hearts and souls of the faithful as they face tough decisions<br />
regarding the spiritual care of their flock.<br />
The coronavirus has offered the Church hierarchy the<br />
chance to prove themselves to be true shepherds rather<br />
than “hired hands.”<br />
As Pope Francis has written, “The government has the<br />
duty to guarantee care and material sustenance for the<br />
people but we have the duty to do the same for their souls.<br />
May it never be said: ‘I’m never going back to a church<br />
where no one came to find me when I needed help.’ ” <br />
Elizabeth Lev is an American-born art historian and Thomas<br />
D. Williams is an American theologian and author of 15<br />
books. Both live in Rome.<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 13
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
PLAGUES AND PROVIDENCE<br />
Buonamico Buffalmacco’s “Triumph of Death,” painted between 1336 and 1340.<br />
Epidemics were among the great terrors of the ancient<br />
world. Doctors knew how to identify the diseases, but<br />
they knew no way to stop their spread. Antibiotics<br />
and antiviral drugs were still centuries away in the future.<br />
So when the plague hit a city, the physicians were among<br />
the first to leave. They saw what was coming, and they<br />
could do nothing to stop it.<br />
Historians speak of three major plagues during the early<br />
centuries of Christianity, and they estimate that each reduced<br />
the empire’s population by a quarter to a third.<br />
While the population plummeted, however, the Church<br />
grew. The sociologist Rodney Stark argues, in his book<br />
“The Rise of Christianity” (1997), that epidemics were a<br />
testing ground of Christian principles and a time when<br />
specifically Christian virtues were publicly displayed.<br />
In the first of the plagues, in A.D. 165, the pagan physician<br />
Galen praised the Christians’ fearlessness as they<br />
cared for others.<br />
In the second, which began around A.D. 250, we find<br />
the African bishop St. Cyprian exhorting his congregation<br />
to mobilize for the task of healing. He urged them to give<br />
care not only to their fellow believers, but also to their pagan<br />
persecutors. “There is nothing remarkable in cherishing<br />
merely our own people,” he said, “… [We] should love<br />
our enemies as well … the good [should be] done to all,<br />
not merely to the household of faith.”<br />
The Egyptian bishop St. Dionysius the Great described<br />
in great detail the relief efforts extended by the Church to<br />
everyone, even though the practice of the faith was then a<br />
crime punishable by death. Christians were willing to risk<br />
a double exposure, to the authorities and to the disease, in<br />
order to tend to the sick and dying.<br />
In the epidemic of A.D. 312, during the fiercest anti-Christian<br />
persecution, the Church provided the only<br />
care available in the cities.<br />
In crises the Christians established systems of care that in<br />
times of peace — when the persecutions stopped — the<br />
Church would institutionalize in hospitals.<br />
Stark believes that epidemics were a major factor in the<br />
early growth of the Church: “Had classical society not been<br />
disrupted and demoralized by these catastrophes, Christianity<br />
might never have become so dominant a faith.” <br />
— Mike Aquilina<br />
10<br />
1:<br />
5:<br />
5:<br />
B<br />
Pope Watch, continued from Page 2<br />
shepherds. They should know that they can run in any<br />
moment and find refuge in their churches and parishes<br />
and find them open and welcoming.<br />
The Church must truly be missionary, for instance,<br />
through a hotline that anyone can call to find comfort, to<br />
ask for the sacrament of confession or holy Communion,<br />
or to ask for it for their loved ones.<br />
We need to increase house visits, door to door, employing<br />
all the necessary precautions to avoid contagion, but<br />
never shutting ourselves in, standing back and watching.<br />
Otherwise, we will find that people are ordering out to<br />
have their meals and their pizzas delivered, but do not<br />
have holy Communion brought to them when they want it<br />
because they are old, or sick, or needy. It will happen that<br />
supermarkets, newspaper stands, and cigarette stands are<br />
open, but not the churches.<br />
The government has the duty to guarantee care and<br />
material sustenance for the people, but we have the duty<br />
to do the same for their souls. May it never be said, “I’m<br />
never going into a church where no one came to find me<br />
when I needed help.” So let us apply all the means necessary,<br />
but let us not be conditioned by fear. Let us ask for<br />
the grace and the courage to behave according to God and<br />
not according to men!<br />
Translation by Thomas D. Williams.<br />
Tun<br />
the<br />
new<br />
14 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
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Trusting<br />
until the end<br />
On July 26, 1979, the statue of<br />
St. Jeanne Jugan was blessed<br />
at the new home in San Pedro,<br />
which was dedicated in her<br />
name: Jeanne Jugan Residence.<br />
R.W. DELLINGER<br />
Even as their San Pedro residence<br />
prepares to be sold, the Little<br />
Sisters of the Poor insist on ‘letting<br />
God do his work’<br />
BY R.W. DELLINGER / ANGELUS<br />
The news came last month — Feb. 18 to be precise<br />
— and every time Little Sister of the Poor Clotilde<br />
Jardim thinks about it, she can’t help but feel sad.<br />
“We never expected it,” said Sister Jardim. “You don’t<br />
even want to talk about it ’cause you just start to feel so<br />
bad.”<br />
The nun was speaking about the announcement that<br />
her order’s Jeanne Jugan Residence in San Pedro for the<br />
elderly and dying poor would be closing. Sitting at a wood<br />
conference table with three fellow women religious and a<br />
priest, the shock of the decision still hasn’t seemed to have<br />
worn off.<br />
The sisters have staffed the home located along the last of<br />
Western Avenue’s 29 miles for four decades, relying only<br />
on Divine Providence to carry out their mission. <strong>No</strong>w, it<br />
seems, the plans from above have changed.<br />
The religious community, whose founder, St. Jeanne<br />
Jugan, cared for impoverished elderly in French towns<br />
and cities during the early 1800s, first came to Los Angeles<br />
from Chicago on a train back in 1905. The sisters established<br />
St. Ann’s Home for the Aged, operating it until the<br />
wood-beam building could no longer meet fire codes.<br />
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles stepped in to donate the<br />
former all-boys Fermin Lasuen High School property to<br />
the sisters. In August 1979, the sisters moved 1<strong>20</strong> residents<br />
across town to their new home, complete with an ocean<br />
view.<br />
<strong>No</strong>w, the sisters are left hoping that the property’s eventual<br />
buyer will agree to continue the home’s use as a home for<br />
the elderly.<br />
“It’s our ideal to find someone who’s very close to our<br />
mission, our approach, our desire to continue as a home<br />
for the elderly,” said Mother Maria Christine Lynch, who<br />
oversees the order’s Chicago Province, which includes<br />
California. “Our desire would certainly be for a Catholic<br />
or faith-based organization.”<br />
©LSOP SAN PEDRO<br />
16 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
R.W. DELLINGER<br />
St. Jeanne Jugan depicted with an elderly woman and man in this icon<br />
by George Pinecross. The ministry of the Little Sisters of the Poor centers<br />
on caring for the elderly poor.<br />
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/COURTESY LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR<br />
Sisters and residents was in serious jeopardy thanks to the<br />
seemingly never-ending list of government regulations for<br />
nursing homes and other elderly care facilities.<br />
For the San Pedro house and the other <strong>20</strong>-plus homes<br />
across the U.S., striving to keep up with the state and federal<br />
rules — which regulate food quality, building safety, and<br />
environmental concerns — has proven to be a complicated<br />
task.<br />
“And those are good and necessary,” said Mother Lynch.<br />
“But they create a gap, too, the bond we sisters want to<br />
have in the lives of our residents. End-of-life care is so<br />
important for us. That is why we are here, to accompany<br />
these elderly persons in the last part of their lives to God.<br />
And we have to be there for them, and we want to be there<br />
for them.<br />
“But you have all kinds of regulations and other distractions<br />
that come into play now that widen that gap. So we<br />
need more sisters to be able to assure the residents of our<br />
presence.”<br />
Another factor that has not worked in the Little Sisters’<br />
favor is the decline in vocations. Like a great majority of<br />
Catholic religious orders and communities today, their<br />
numbers have been in decline. In the 1960s, the community<br />
had about 5,000 members worldwide. Today, it’s closer<br />
to 2,000, and just around 300 in the order’s homes in the<br />
U.S.<br />
At the Jeanne Jugan Residence right now, it’s down to<br />
seven Little Sisters working with 93 staff members to care<br />
for 97 residents, with different levels of physical and mental<br />
health needs.<br />
For Father Mark Cregan, a lawyer for the Little Sisters of<br />
the Poor, the San Pedro home is the seventh home for the<br />
elderly in seven years he will help “transition” when the<br />
women religious leave. He’s worked with the order long<br />
enough to know that while the process won’t be easy, the<br />
As the order withdraws from the home, Mother Lynch<br />
hopes that finding such a buyer will allow residents to stay<br />
and be cared for, “a smooth transition, which removes as<br />
much of the anxiety and the fear and the uncertainty for<br />
residents.”<br />
Like her friend Sister Jardim, Sister Anthony Selewicz<br />
is from Oakland. Both entered the Little Sisters right<br />
out of high school after volunteering with them.<br />
Both have lived and worked at the Jeanne Jugan Residence<br />
during multiple stints.<br />
She said she’s told distraught residents to “start praying<br />
that you’ll be able to stay.”<br />
“It’s almost like a family, when your relatives have to move<br />
away from each other,” she explained. “The residents have<br />
confidence in us. So they’re going to miss us a lot.”<br />
Sister Jardim said while the needs of the residents can<br />
be demanding at times, they show a sincere appreciation<br />
for the spiritual life the home offers them, helped by the<br />
presence of a chapel and a chaplain.<br />
Mother Lynch said the special bond between the Little<br />
From left: Little Sisters of the Poor Mother Marguerite McCarthy, Sister<br />
Anthony Selewicz, Sister Clotilde Jardim, and Mother Maria Christine<br />
Lynch with Father Mark Cregan, CSC, the order’s general counsel.<br />
R.W. DELLINGER<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 17
Little Sisters have a few things going for them.<br />
“The sisters do a process unlike any other real estate process<br />
in the world,” he pointed out. “They don’t start with a<br />
price. And sometimes I wish they would give a price a little<br />
earlier. For them it’s very important who is going to be the<br />
buyer, because they don’t want to sell and have the buyer<br />
turn around and sell the place a year or two later.”<br />
But, he added, “Once in a while it happens, like for<br />
everyone else.”<br />
The sisters’ lawyer, who also has a private practice in<br />
New Jersey, said a sale of a Little Sisters’ home really<br />
depended on relationships. He and some sisters in<br />
authority would try to get a sense of the potential buyer’s<br />
interest. Did they want to keep the enterprise going as an<br />
elderly care facility?<br />
More pragmatically, did a buyer have the financial wherewithal<br />
to make up for the Little Sisters’ begging expertise<br />
to survive? That begging, which went back to St. Jeanne<br />
Jugan going from house to house asking for help in the<br />
early 1800s, has been bringing in an average of $2 million<br />
to $3 million dollars every year per home in food and other<br />
donations.<br />
But Father Cregan reported that most of the buyers he<br />
worked with, in fact, had done just that by adding <strong>20</strong> to 45<br />
beds to the convent where sisters had lived on the property.<br />
The order’s general counsel said there are two reasons<br />
why the sisters have been able to find good buyers who<br />
wanted to carry on their care of the elderly. One was simply<br />
how many people admired the sisters’ charitable work<br />
and wanted to continue it. But the second and even more<br />
important reason was trusting in Divine Providence to<br />
intercede. “Truthfully, I’ve never seen Divine Providence<br />
fail with the sisters,” he said.<br />
Part of that trust in Providence, said Mother Marguerite<br />
McCarthy, superior and administrator of the Jeanne Jugan<br />
Residence, is knowing that God will not abandon the<br />
sisters or the home’s residents.<br />
“I think it’s a sad time and there’s a lot of emotion involved,”<br />
she said. “But there’s an acceptance because it’s<br />
God’s will, and this is the best decision that our superiors<br />
could make under the circumstances. So, I can see acceptance<br />
and praying for the outcome for the future — for our<br />
residents, especially.<br />
“And so,” added the mother superior, “it’s a feeling of just<br />
letting go and letting God do his work in whatever way he<br />
ordains.” <br />
Editor’s <strong>No</strong>te: At a <strong>March</strong> 4 meeting, Los Angeles County<br />
Supervisor Janice Hahn introduced a motion, which was<br />
approved by her colleagues, to explore taking over the Jeanne<br />
Jugan Residence in San Pedro. The county’s real estate department<br />
was ordered to “pursue negotiations to acquire the<br />
Little Sisters of the Poor location with the intent of preserving<br />
it as a home for low-income seniors.” Progress reports are<br />
currently being filed.<br />
R.W. Dellinger is the features editor of <strong>Angelus</strong>.<br />
Jeanne Jugan<br />
residents<br />
Virginia Accetta,<br />
94, and Walter<br />
Madajewski, 86.<br />
Residents in limbo<br />
Virginia Accetta, 94, has lived at the Jeanne Jugan<br />
Residence for nine years, her neighbor on the<br />
first floor, Walter Madajewski, 86, for five. She<br />
likes the holiday parties and the cake that comes with<br />
each resident’s birthday. He likes playing the game<br />
“Trivia” twice a week, walking up to the grotto of the<br />
Blessed Virgin Mary, and especially the cleanliness of<br />
the building.<br />
“You could eat off the floors,” he cracked.<br />
Both remember well the day in February their world<br />
changed. Residents and staff were gathered in the<br />
dining room to hear Mother Marguerite McCarthy,<br />
superior of the Jeanne Jugan Residence, announce that<br />
the Little Sisters of the Poor would be leaving the San<br />
Pedro home.<br />
Reasons were given, such as the dwindling number of<br />
Little Sisters of the Poor in the United States, along with<br />
other factors the religious community considered, including<br />
the quality of the Little Sisters’ community life.<br />
As they search for the “right” buyer, the sisters said they<br />
would stay at the residence for at least a year. Mother<br />
McCarthy offered residents the possibility of moving<br />
to another home sponsored by the Little Sisters of the<br />
Poor.<br />
“We were shocked when we got the word the sisters<br />
would be leaving,” said Madajewski. “Oh, there was lots<br />
of crying with both the employees and the tenants.”<br />
In a quiet voice, Accetta agreed, “Yeah, we were. We<br />
hope some Catholic organization will buy it and keep<br />
us here.”<br />
“<strong>No</strong>body knows,” Madajewski pointed out.<br />
Both residents are concerned about their futures.<br />
“We’re living in limbo here now,” said Madajewski.<br />
“We figure it’ll probably be fine for six months or eight<br />
months or so. And everything will be as usual. But what<br />
happens after that we don’t know.”<br />
Accetta felt the same about her suddenly precarious<br />
future.<br />
“It’s hard to live with,” Madajewski pointed out. But<br />
after a moment he added, in a steadier voice, “I have no<br />
doubt that the sisters are going to do their level best to<br />
find someone to take this place, and, you know, keep it<br />
open for the elderly.”<br />
“I hope so,” added Accetti. <br />
— R.W. Dellinger<br />
R.W. DELLINGER<br />
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18 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
PAID ADVERTISEMENT<br />
American Catholics Have Exciting Opportunities to Help<br />
Impoverished Areas With the Blessing of Safe Water<br />
“Roughly 10 percent of the<br />
world’s population lives without<br />
ready access to clean water. As a<br />
result, about 500,000 children die<br />
every year from diarrhea caused by<br />
unsafe water and poor sanitation —<br />
that’s about 1,300 children a day.<br />
Worldwide, diarrheal diseases are<br />
the leading killers of children under<br />
the age of five.<br />
“<strong>No</strong> one would deny the importance<br />
of water to sustain life, but few of us<br />
realize just how critical the need for<br />
this blessed resource has become in<br />
some parts of the developing world.<br />
It’s literally a matter of life and death.”<br />
With his recent statement, Cross<br />
Catholic Outreach president Jim<br />
Cavnar put the stark statistics of<br />
UNICEF and the World Health<br />
Organization into terms every<br />
American Catholic can easily<br />
understand. A serious water crisis<br />
threatens the world’s poorest<br />
countries, and it should be a major<br />
concern to those of us who value the<br />
sanctity of life.<br />
Thankfully, the Catholic Church<br />
is aware of this problem and has<br />
stepped forward to act on behalf of<br />
the poor, according to Cavnar.<br />
“Priests and nuns serving in<br />
developing countries are identifying<br />
the areas of greatest need and are<br />
creating plans to help solve the<br />
problems,” he said. “All they lack<br />
is funding. If we can empower them<br />
with grants of aid and with other<br />
resources, amazing things can be<br />
accomplished.”<br />
Cavnar’s own ministry, Cross<br />
Catholic Outreach, was launched in<br />
<strong>20</strong>01 with this specific goal in mind.<br />
It rallies American Catholics to fund<br />
specific projects overseas, and many<br />
safe water initiatives have been<br />
successfully implemented as a result.<br />
In one case, tapping a spring<br />
in Haiti allowed Cross Catholic<br />
Outreach to reduce infant mortality<br />
in a poor, remote part of the country.<br />
“Catholic leaders in the village<br />
of Cerca reported children were<br />
dying at an alarming rate. If you<br />
visited, you could see the funeral<br />
processions carrying the tiny coffins.<br />
They discovered contaminated<br />
water was the problem, and they<br />
asked us to help find a solution.<br />
Working together, we were able to<br />
tap a spring and provide clean, safe<br />
water,” Cavnar explained.<br />
Because every area’s water<br />
problem is different, Cross Catholic<br />
ABOVE: Children fill their water jugs from a contaminated spring in Kenya. In many areas of the developing world, the<br />
poor depend on contaminated water sources like this for their drinking water. BELOW: Children often miss school to<br />
collect water for their families. Catholic donors supporting Cross Catholic Outreach’s water projects can provide safe,<br />
abundant water to impoverished communities like these.<br />
Outreach needs to be flexible. Over<br />
the years, its projects have included<br />
everything from digging wells to<br />
channeling water from springs<br />
to installing filtration systems to<br />
providing large holding tanks for<br />
purchased water. They also work<br />
worldwide and have done water<br />
projects in Africa, South and Central<br />
American countries, the Caribbean<br />
and elsewhere.<br />
“This year, some of our biggest<br />
water projects are planned for<br />
Zambia, Kenya and Guatemala,”<br />
Cavnar said. “Of course, our ability<br />
to take on that work will depend on<br />
getting contributions here in the U.S.”<br />
Cavnar is clearly grateful to<br />
American Catholics who choose to<br />
support Cross Catholic Outreach’s<br />
work with their prayers and gifts,<br />
and he emphasizes their role often,<br />
describing them as the real heroes in<br />
every success story.<br />
“Take the water project needed in<br />
the Diocese of Santa Rosa de Lima,<br />
Guatemala, for example. Drilling<br />
for water wasn’t an option due to<br />
the terrain. So it’s an ambitious<br />
plan that will develop a complex<br />
water and distribution system to<br />
pump clean water to every home<br />
in a community currently relying<br />
on contaminated lakes and streams<br />
for survival. The Catholic priest in<br />
the area desperately needs it and its<br />
impact will be profound — but it takes<br />
outside funding to turn that dream<br />
into a reality. So, when our Catholic<br />
benefactors support a project like this,<br />
they are literally an answer to prayer.”<br />
The same has been true in other<br />
important outreaches too. Over the<br />
years, Cross Catholic Outreach<br />
donors have built homes, schools<br />
and clinics — and have further<br />
blessed those outreaches with gifts<br />
to fund medicines, school supplies,<br />
teacher salaries and more.<br />
“It is possible to bless<br />
people, save lives and transform<br />
communities,” Cavnar said. “It just<br />
takes concerned Catholics working<br />
together to achieve those goals.”<br />
How to Help<br />
To fund Cross Catholic Outreach’s effort to help<br />
the poor worldwide, use the postage-paid brochure<br />
inserted in this newspaper or mail your gift to Cross<br />
Catholic Outreach, Dept. AC01524, PO Box 97168,<br />
Washington DC <strong>20</strong>090-7168. The brochure also<br />
includes instructions on becoming a Mission Partner<br />
and making a regular monthly donation to this cause.<br />
If you identify a specific aid project with your gift, 100% of the<br />
proceeds will be restricted to be used for that specific project.<br />
However, if more is raised for the project than needed, funds will be<br />
redirected to other urgent needs in the ministry.
Return of the<br />
revolutionaries<br />
What two Cold<br />
War giants back in<br />
the news this month<br />
teach us about the<br />
impermanence of<br />
victory and defeat<br />
BY JOHN L. ALLEN JR. / ANGELUS<br />
Father Ernesto Cardenal died <strong>March</strong> 1 at the age of 95.<br />
OSWALDO RIVAS/REUTERS VIA CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE<br />
ROME — Today, it seems possible<br />
young people will look back<br />
on the coronavirus (COVID-19)<br />
pandemic as a defining historical turning<br />
point in their lives, triggering huge<br />
transitions not only in the power of<br />
governments to restrict free movement<br />
and assemblies for the sake of public<br />
health, but also in the global economy<br />
and many other spheres of life.<br />
For those who were young a half-century<br />
ago, however, there’s no need to<br />
speculate on what that defining historical<br />
force was for them, because we all<br />
know: the Cold War.<br />
For more than 70 years, the rivalry<br />
between the West and the Soviet<br />
sphere defined politics on both sides,<br />
while the threat of nuclear annihilation<br />
hung over three generations.<br />
From Joseph McCarthy and the Alger<br />
Hiss trial to popular movies such as<br />
“WarGames” and “Red Dawn,” the<br />
cultural and psychological footprint of<br />
the Cold War was inescapable.<br />
Technically, all that may have ended<br />
in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin<br />
Wall. Yet history, like college fraternity<br />
members and drunken sailors, is<br />
sometimes prone to hangovers, and<br />
recent weeks have provided a couple<br />
of classic Catholic “for instances.”<br />
On <strong>March</strong> 1, the Nicaraguan poet<br />
and Sandinista activist Father Ernesto<br />
Cardenal died at the age of 95. A hero<br />
of the Latin American liberation theology<br />
movement, Father Cardenal ran<br />
afoul of St. Pope John Paul II and the<br />
Polish pope’s robust anti-Communism.<br />
Their infamous 1983 collision at Managua’s<br />
international airport quickly<br />
became an iconic global image.<br />
While the conflict has abated under<br />
Pope Francis, including lifting Father<br />
Cardenal’s three-decade suspension<br />
from the priesthood, there are still<br />
significant divisions in Catholicism<br />
over the legacy of liberation theology<br />
and what critics saw as its overly<br />
friendly approach to socialist thought<br />
and analysis.<br />
Also in early <strong>March</strong>, Chinese Cardinal<br />
Joseph Zen, the emeritus bishop<br />
of Hong Kong, publicly fired back<br />
against Italian Cardinal Giovanni<br />
Battista Re, the recently appointed<br />
dean of the College of Cardinals, after<br />
Cardinal Re had written to Cardinal<br />
Zen, basically telling him to stifle criticism<br />
of the Vatican’s landmark <strong>20</strong>18<br />
deal with China over the appointment<br />
of bishops.<br />
Cardinal Zen, a hero to anti-Communist<br />
Catholic conservatives, has<br />
described that deal on various occasions<br />
in classic Cold War language as a<br />
form of “appeasement” of the Chinese<br />
regime and a “betrayal” of China’s<br />
underground Catholic community,<br />
which has paid in blood for its resistance<br />
to the Communist system and its<br />
loyalty to Rome.<br />
In a Feb. 26 letter to Cardinal Zen,<br />
Cardinal Re insisted that the <strong>20</strong>18 deal<br />
was completely in continuity with the<br />
approach of Pope John Paul and Pope<br />
Benedict XVI, suggesting to Cardinal<br />
Zen that he should get behind “the<br />
path of reconciliation, of unity, and of<br />
mission at the service of the Gospel,”<br />
which the new provisional agreement<br />
represents.<br />
Though the details of the agreement<br />
have never been released, in broad<br />
strokes it affords Chinese authorities<br />
a role in the selection of new Catholic<br />
bishops to avoid the Cold War<br />
dynamic of bishops appointed by the<br />
pope but rejected by the government,<br />
or appointed by the government but<br />
<strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
not recognized in Rome, splitting the<br />
Catholic population in two.<br />
Cardinal Zen responded to Cardinal<br />
Re on <strong>March</strong> 1, rejecting the claim<br />
that Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict<br />
would approve the deal, and — as he<br />
has on several other occasions — accusing<br />
Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin,<br />
the Vatican’s secretary of state, of<br />
“manipulating” the pope.<br />
Cardinal Parolin, Cardinal Zen wrote<br />
to Cardinal Re, “is manipulating the<br />
Holy Father, who always shows so<br />
much affection to me when we meet,<br />
but never answers my questions.”<br />
Both Father Cardenal’s passing and<br />
Cardinal Zen’s defiance, in other<br />
words, are reminders that the imprint<br />
of the Cold War on Catholic life may<br />
be receding, but it has hardly disappeared.<br />
There’s also perhaps another moral<br />
to the story, which is this: Just like in<br />
politics of the geopolitical sort, so,<br />
too, in the Church, neither defeat nor<br />
victory are necessarily permanent, and<br />
striking reversals of fortune are forever<br />
possible.<br />
Father Cardenal seemed largely<br />
consigned to the ecclesiastical dustbin<br />
after that 1983 tête-à-tête with Pope<br />
John Paul, and within a decade it also<br />
seemed the overtly political form of<br />
liberation theology he embodied had<br />
been more or less beaten back by opposition<br />
from important sectors of the<br />
hierarchy, both in Latin America and<br />
in the Vatican.<br />
Yet with the election of Pope Francis<br />
the tide turned, with several of<br />
the heroes associated with liberation<br />
theology experiencing a renaissance:<br />
Peruvian theologian Father Gustavo<br />
Gutiérrez, OP, was feted in the Vatican<br />
by the head of the Congregation<br />
for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop<br />
Oscar Romero of El Salvador<br />
was canonized, Father Miguel d’Escoto<br />
Brockmann, MM, of Nicaragua<br />
saw his suspension from the priesthood<br />
lifted, and the same thing happened to<br />
Father Cardenal in <strong>20</strong>19.<br />
Cardinal Zen, meanwhile, was<br />
named bishop of Hong Kong under<br />
Pope John Paul and made a cardinal<br />
under Pope Benedict, and he seemingly<br />
enjoyed those pontiffs’ personal<br />
support in his hardline stance against<br />
China’s Communist authorities.<br />
Today, however, Cardinal Zen would<br />
appear to be on the outs.<br />
It’s certainly not every day the dean<br />
of the College of Cardinals publicly<br />
crosses swords with a fellow prince of<br />
the Church. The only recent precedent<br />
might be <strong>20</strong>10, when Cardinal<br />
Christoph Schönborn of Vienna was<br />
called on the carpet in Rome after<br />
suggesting Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano,<br />
then the dean of the College of<br />
Cardinals and former secretary of state<br />
under Pope John Paul, had blocked<br />
action against Cardinal Hans Hermann<br />
Groër, Cardinal Schönborn’s<br />
predecessor, who had been accused of<br />
sexual abuse.<br />
Right now, Father Cardenal’s legacy<br />
seems to have greater traction in the<br />
Vatican than Cardinal Zen’s. However,<br />
just 10 years ago the opposite arguably<br />
would have been true, suggesting<br />
that perhaps the last word on these<br />
two Cold War giants hasn’t yet been<br />
written.<br />
After all, even if the coronavirus is<br />
eventually contained, there’s no such<br />
strategy for containing change, either<br />
in the Church or anywhere else. <br />
John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux.<br />
Cardinal Joseph Zen, retired archbishop of Hong Kong, attends a news conference in Hong Kong.<br />
BOBBY YIP/REUTERS VIA CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 21
Heavenly<br />
bodies<br />
Setting the record straight about<br />
the last of the ‘Four Last Things’<br />
— and our final goal<br />
BY MIKE AQUILINA / ANGELUS<br />
SHUTTERSTOCK<br />
During this year’s liturgical season<br />
of Lent, <strong>Angelus</strong> is featuring<br />
a four-part series of interviews<br />
with Catholic scholars on the “Four Last<br />
Things” in Christian eschatology: death,<br />
judgment, hell, and heaven.<br />
When we think of heaven, memory<br />
calls up vivid and strange images from<br />
movies, comic strips, greeting cards,<br />
and fine art. Almost one-and-a-half<br />
centuries ago, Huckleberry Finn imagined<br />
it as a place where spirits “go<br />
around all day long with a harp and<br />
sing, forever and ever.”<br />
It is every Christian’s ultimate goal,<br />
and yet it is commonly misunderstood.<br />
James L. Papandrea has written a<br />
short, often funny, engaging book to<br />
set the record straight: “What Really<br />
Happens After We Die (There Will Be<br />
Hugs in Heaven)” (Sophia Institute<br />
Press, $10.79). An eminent scholar of<br />
early Christianity, he has also written<br />
novels and religion books like “Trinity<br />
101.” He spoke with <strong>Angelus</strong> about<br />
the common hope of Christians.<br />
What is the truth about heaven that<br />
people find most surprising?<br />
People are conditioned to believe<br />
that it is your soul, or your spirit, that<br />
“goes to heaven,” and they don’t think<br />
much about the redemption of the<br />
body. We say we believe in the resurrection<br />
of the body in the Apostles’<br />
Creed, but a lot of people who aren’t<br />
faithful Catholics never actually say<br />
the Apostles’ Creed.<br />
People who never say the rosary,<br />
even if they go to Mass, can rationalize<br />
the phrase “resurrection of the<br />
dead” in the Nicene Creed as though<br />
it is just a vague reference to eternal<br />
life.<br />
We know that it means the resurrection<br />
of the body, but people who<br />
don’t give it much thought might be<br />
surprised to realize that, yeah, we really<br />
believe in the actual resurrection of<br />
the body. So the kingdom of heaven<br />
is not some ethereal, disembodied<br />
existence. It is an embodied existence,<br />
in which the body will be (like it is<br />
now) the interface between the mind<br />
and creation.<br />
What are the most common<br />
misconceptions people have about<br />
heaven?<br />
Based on what people accept from<br />
the movies, it would seem that heaven<br />
is supposed to be a very sparsely<br />
decorated kind of “anti-space,” where<br />
existence is primarily mental.<br />
When people die, they first become<br />
ghosts, and then when they follow the<br />
22 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
light and get to heaven they become<br />
angels. And of course, every time a<br />
bell rings, an angel gets his wings.<br />
Having said that, the 1998 film,<br />
“What Dreams May Come,” was<br />
visually stunning.<br />
I wouldn’t say it teaches perfect theology,<br />
but in the depiction of heaven<br />
it was very creative. Rather than going<br />
minimalistic with heaven, it went the<br />
other way: Heaven was depicted not<br />
as a place that lacked creation, but as<br />
a place of hypercreation. It was like<br />
earth, but more “alive,” and more<br />
colorful.<br />
So I think the people who made that<br />
film got at least one thing right —<br />
heaven is not outside of creation, it is<br />
the ultimate creation — or to put it in<br />
Christian terms, it is redeemed and<br />
renewed creation.<br />
What exactly is heaven? And how<br />
do we know what we know about it?<br />
What we know about heaven comes<br />
primarily from the Scriptures, and<br />
especially from what Jesus taught in<br />
the Gospels and revealed to John as<br />
recorded in the Book of Revelation.<br />
I think we have to keep in mind that<br />
the word “heaven” is rarely, if ever, in<br />
the singular in the Scriptures. It’s really<br />
“the heavens,” which is metaphorical<br />
language, like saying God is “up<br />
there looking down on us,” when in<br />
fact we know that God is everywhere<br />
around us.<br />
Somehow the word “heaven” became<br />
a kind of catch-all term for the<br />
afterlife, at least for those who assume<br />
they are not going to hell.<br />
When we use the word, we are really<br />
talking about a reality that has two<br />
phases to it. There is pre-resurrection<br />
heaven and post-resurrection heaven.<br />
Pre-resurrection heaven is what we<br />
call paradise.<br />
It’s the existence of a blessed afterlife<br />
(most likely after the purification of<br />
purgatory), but paradise exists during<br />
the time that human history continues<br />
in the world as we know it. So right<br />
now the spirits of many people are in<br />
paradise, but their bodies (or the mol-<br />
ecules that used to be their bodies) are<br />
still on earth.<br />
At some point, human history ends,<br />
Jesus Christ initiates his “second<br />
coming,” and there is judgment, and<br />
the resurrection of the dead. That is,<br />
all bodies will be resurrected, reunited<br />
with their spirits, and those who<br />
are being saved enter into the fully<br />
revealed kingdom of God, which is<br />
the New Heaven/New Earth, and the<br />
“New Jerusalem” of the Book of Revelation.<br />
So “heaven” really includes<br />
both paradise and the kingdom of<br />
God, but only in the latter will we<br />
have bodies, so we have to wait for the<br />
kingdom to be fully revealed before<br />
there will be hugs in heaven.<br />
Does the language we use for heaven<br />
leave us vulnerable to anti-Christian<br />
ridicule?<br />
You’d think it would, but I would<br />
argue that people who are not Christian,<br />
or who are nominally Christian,<br />
are actually more susceptible to accusations<br />
of gullibility than we are.<br />
Think about all the popular speculation<br />
out there that personifies the universe<br />
rather than believes in an intelligent<br />
Creator, or ascribes all kinds of<br />
comforting activities to angels without<br />
any basis in Scripture or Tradition, or<br />
ascribes power over the future to the<br />
movements of the planets.<br />
The truth is, the ones who most ridicule<br />
our traditional view of heaven are<br />
self-described progressive Christians<br />
who think they are too rational to<br />
believe in much that is supernatural,<br />
but who reduce the Christian faith to<br />
a worldly focused social program.<br />
Like Judas, in response to the woman<br />
who anointed Jesus, they take the<br />
focus off the person of Christ (on the<br />
rationale that such devotion is too<br />
“pie-in-the-sky”) and emphasize the<br />
social gospel disproportionately over<br />
the gospel of salvation.<br />
Or worse, they assume a universalist<br />
afterlife and reduce the concept of<br />
salvation to confronting injustice.<br />
So, ironically, sometimes the ridicule<br />
comes more from within the Church.<br />
James L. Papandrea<br />
How should our awareness of<br />
heaven influence our lives from day<br />
to day? Year to year? Season of life to<br />
season of life?<br />
I really believe that our bodies are<br />
one of God’s greatest gifts to us. We as<br />
a culture need to reaffirm the dignity<br />
of the body as a sacred gift. It is not<br />
to be reduced to an instrument of<br />
pleasure; nor is it to be used to exploit<br />
others or the rest of creation.<br />
I think it would be great if parishes<br />
could find a way to include the care<br />
of our bodies into spiritual formation.<br />
The fact that our bodies are integrated<br />
into worship is a great start. That<br />
is, we do not worship God with our<br />
minds only, but we worship with our<br />
whole bodies: standing, sitting, kneeling,<br />
walking, seeing, singing, hearing,<br />
touching, smelling, and tasting.<br />
But it would be great if catechesis<br />
could take the next step and help<br />
people really understand their bodies<br />
as essential to their personhood, and<br />
help them understand how to care for<br />
their own bodies, as well as the bodies<br />
of others. <br />
Editor’s <strong>No</strong>te: This interview has been<br />
edited for brevity. To read the full text<br />
of the interview with James Papandrea,<br />
visit <strong>Angelus</strong><strong>News</strong>.com.<br />
Mike Aquilina is a contributing editor<br />
to <strong>Angelus</strong> and the author of many<br />
books, including “How Christianity<br />
Saved Civilization … And Must Do So<br />
Again” (Sophia Institute Press, $18.95).<br />
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 23
Evangelizing<br />
BY MSGR. RICHARD ANTALL / ANGELUS<br />
SHUTTERSTOCK<br />
Recently a piece on the editorial page of the Wall Street<br />
Journal introduced readers to what it called “Space’s<br />
final frontier.”<br />
“Evidence is growing for extraterrestrial life in our solar<br />
system, and exploration is cheap,” read the subtitle of the<br />
op-ed, written by an engineering professor who also works as<br />
CEO of a company that makes “plasma thrusters for small<br />
satellites.”<br />
The piece was really a kind of advertisement looking to<br />
interest “billionaire” investors in the technology for that<br />
“cheap” exploration. After giving some numbers and talking<br />
about the possibilities of life on other planets he came to a<br />
conclusion that caught my eye: “Finding evidence of life beyond<br />
earth would reshape the fields of evolutionary biology<br />
and pharmacology, and possibly theology as well [emphasis<br />
added].”<br />
A book containing C.S. Lewis’ three “science fiction”<br />
novels given to me by a priest friend for Christmas last year<br />
came to mind. I am two-thirds of the way through the trilogy,<br />
which imagines life on Mars (“Out of the Silent Planet”)<br />
and Venus (“Perelandra”), where no original sin was committed.<br />
Speculative or “science” fiction often deals with theological<br />
and philosophical issues, but rarely in such an orthodox way.<br />
Lewis’ ideas about angels and mankind in innocence and<br />
after read like corollaries of St. Augustine’s ideas about the<br />
Fall seen in his book “The City of God.”<br />
Rarely does what I read in the Wall Street Journal remind<br />
me of Lewis, but the Spirit blows where it wills. I decided<br />
to take up the issues involved with my eighth-grade boys<br />
religion class in our parish school.<br />
First, I asked, how many believed in extraterrestrial intelligent<br />
life? Some polls say a majority of Americans believe<br />
in intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Our popular<br />
culture, witness “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” (not popular<br />
with my eighth-graders, by the way), and planets with names<br />
like Krypton, certainly attests to the attraction of the idea.<br />
Of the boys in the class, all but two believed in extraterrestrial<br />
intelligent life and even those were “unsure.”<br />
Second: Had anyone they knew thought they experienced<br />
something indicating alien life? Several recounted stories<br />
of strange lights in the skies. To reassure them I said it was<br />
probably our government spying on us, but said I had an<br />
open mind. Third, I asked them what their reaction would<br />
be to a meeting with an intelligent being from another<br />
planet.<br />
Most concluded with my student Murdock, who is always<br />
quick to answer my questions, that they would run away<br />
from such a meeting, but when I insisted, they admitted<br />
they would have some curiosity about the extraterrestrial<br />
civilization. “And if they asked you about your religion, what<br />
would you say?” I asked them. That stumped the group for a<br />
24 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
The three books of C.S. Lewis’ “Space Trilogy.”<br />
AMAZON<br />
minute.<br />
Then Amari, the epitome of eighth-grade “cool,” said<br />
that he would say he believed in a Creator God who made<br />
everything. Then Isaiah, whose stepfather is some kind of<br />
pastor, said that he would say something about Jesus saving<br />
us.<br />
“Would the aliens need to know about Jesus?” I asked<br />
them. This is one of the theological issues Lewis treats.<br />
“<strong>No</strong>,” said Amari, but more than a little doubtfully, “They<br />
would probably have their own religion.”<br />
I said that if we believed that Jesus really was the Second<br />
Person in the Trinity,<br />
he would be the God<br />
If intelligent life were discovered<br />
somewhere beyond our planet, I<br />
would sign up to be a missionary.<br />
of all the universe,<br />
wouldn’t he? St. Augustine<br />
had heard of<br />
“monsters” in other<br />
parts of the world<br />
and was fairly credulous<br />
(he accepted<br />
the possibility of the existence of the race of the Sciopedes,<br />
which had one leg with two feet, could run without bending<br />
its knees, and had the unusual advantage of being able to lie<br />
down in the summer and shade itself from the sun with its<br />
feet).<br />
St. Augustine said, “However unusual to us may be the<br />
shape of his body, or the color of his skin, or the way he<br />
walks, or the sound of his voice, and whatever the strength,<br />
portion or quality of his natural endowments is descended<br />
from the first man.”<br />
The Doctor of Grace, as St. Augustine is called, was also<br />
apparently a flat-earther, who discussed whether there might<br />
be other humans on the flip side of the planet (although<br />
he doubted it.) What if he had believed in the Copernican<br />
system and its implications for the infinite creativity of God?<br />
Wouldn’t all rational animal life, wherever found, be like us,<br />
image and likeness of God? If there was intelligent life other<br />
than humankind on earth, wouldn’t they have souls?<br />
“So, yeah, they might need him,” was the consensus the<br />
boys came up with. I am not sure many adults have followed<br />
that logic. The old cliché was, the alien would say to us,<br />
“Take me to your leader.” Have you ever heard of anyone<br />
saying, “I will take you to my Lord?”<br />
Unlike Lewis, I could imagine that all intelligent life in<br />
the universe has experienced the Fall and any extraterrestrials<br />
would also need Jesus’ saving grace. What if the earth<br />
was chosen for the<br />
Incarnation because<br />
we were the most<br />
backward of all the<br />
civilizations in the<br />
universe?<br />
The incursions of<br />
UFOs could be the<br />
space-age camels<br />
of the Magi. Maybe, then, some intelligent life on a solar<br />
system far away from us might be challenged to think, “What<br />
good could come from earth?”<br />
If intelligent life were discovered somewhere “far away”<br />
and there was a means of entering into contact with their<br />
cultures, I would sign up to be a missionary. I’m sure I would<br />
miss paying off the debts of my parish, figuring out what to<br />
do with our plumbing issues, and other such duties, but I<br />
always liked the e.e. cummings poem with the theologically<br />
unfortunate wording: “Listen: there’s a hell / of a universe<br />
next door; let’s go.” <br />
Msgr. Richard Antall is pastor of Holy Name Church in<br />
Cleveland, Ohio, and author of “The Wedding” (Lambing<br />
Press, $16.95).<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 25
INTERSECTIONS<br />
BY GREG ERLANDSON<br />
Zombies, pandemics, and saints<br />
I’m not a fan of zombie movies in<br />
general, but I’m fascinated by the<br />
phenomenon: the relentless attack<br />
of brain-eating undead with our only<br />
defense being endless firepower and<br />
a double tap. It doesn’t take Freud to<br />
deduce there’s something more going<br />
on here than that a zombie apocalypse<br />
is the best argument the NRA<br />
has for everyone owning an AR-15.<br />
What is it deep in our reptilian<br />
cortex that somehow thrills at this<br />
notion that everyone else — by which<br />
I mean our neighbors, friends, and<br />
fellow citizens — wants to feast on<br />
us? Why is it satisfying that we must<br />
slaughter with bloody abandon every<br />
other human being who isn’t part of<br />
our little band of imperiled survivors?<br />
I do have a favorite zombie movie,<br />
however. It is “World War Z.” I like it<br />
because it offers up an explanation for<br />
the zombie phenomenon that pits us<br />
not only against our fellow man, but<br />
against nature. Zombieism, it turns<br />
out, is the fault of a virus. As a virologist<br />
not long for this world explains in<br />
the movie, “Mother Nature is a serial<br />
killer. <strong>No</strong> one’s better. More creative.”<br />
Watching the world succumb to the<br />
fear of the coronavirus, aka COV-<br />
ID-19, I kept thinking of scenes in<br />
“World War Z.” For example, while<br />
we clean off store shelves of Purell<br />
and toilet paper, I remember the<br />
looting of the grocery store in Philadelphia<br />
as the doomed citizenry try to<br />
stock up before the inevitable.<br />
Zombies come in bunches, but start<br />
as one. Each bloody bite infects a<br />
second, and then two become four<br />
and four eight and eight 16 as the infection<br />
spreads exponentially. When<br />
it comes to the coronavirus, it only<br />
Brad Pitt, Sterling Jerins,<br />
and Mireille Enos in<br />
“World War Z.”<br />
takes one to make us fearful. One<br />
sick person is enough to shut down a<br />
university, a factory, a cruise ship, a<br />
church.<br />
And as we race to limit the contagion,<br />
we take increasingly draconian<br />
steps to fight the threat. Italy’s government,<br />
like an exasperated parent,<br />
grounded its entire population. Even<br />
Bethlehem is locked down. There is<br />
no room at the inn these days.<br />
Yet because the virus is particularly<br />
sneaky, we aren’t sure who has it. Despite<br />
the efforts to constrain its spread,<br />
we are unable to identify easily who is<br />
infected and who is not. Everyone is<br />
suspect: Our priest. Our spouse. Our<br />
cashier.<br />
In zombie movies, the dark shadows<br />
outside our window, the scratching<br />
sounds at our front door fill us with<br />
dread. The slavering, dull-eyed fiends<br />
are no longer human beings. There is<br />
no room for empathy or kindness. It is<br />
“us” versus “them.” And in moments<br />
like these, everyone else is a “them.”<br />
We are seeing a bit of this in real life<br />
as well. With relentless news coverage,<br />
government confusion and fiscal<br />
turmoil, we can be forgiven our fear<br />
of the unknown. The danger is when<br />
this drives us apart. Some communities<br />
want to close their doors. Anyone<br />
who might need to be quarantined<br />
can be quarantined somewhere else,<br />
not in my backyard or community<br />
hospital.<br />
The ties that bind us together grow<br />
looser, and we start keeping our distance<br />
— six feet, to be exact — from<br />
one another.<br />
What we are experiencing is no<br />
movie, of course. In “World War Z”<br />
(spoiler alert) weakness becomes<br />
IMDB<br />
Be<br />
Ob<br />
10<br />
He<br />
Stra<br />
Ob<br />
LAX<br />
26 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
strength, and sickness a cure. In real<br />
life, weakness is just weakness: the<br />
hourly worker who can’t skip work despite<br />
fever and cough, the uninsured<br />
or underinsured, the doctor with no<br />
access to test kits, or the patient without<br />
the resources to self-quarantine,<br />
all are potential risks.<br />
The virus is exposing our systemic<br />
weaknesses as well as our physical<br />
ones. The vulnerable become still<br />
more vulnerable, the weak still more<br />
weak, the unlucky remain unlucky.<br />
And this is where the Church steps<br />
in. It reminds us of the common<br />
good, the need to care for those most<br />
helpless and in need of care. There<br />
are saints who have modeled such<br />
concerns, people like St. Damien de<br />
Veuster and St. Marianne Cope, who<br />
served the leper colonies of Molokai<br />
and Oahu, caring for those who were<br />
treated like the zombies of their day.<br />
Sts. Acacius, Barbara, Blaise, Christopher, Cyriacus,<br />
Catherine of Alexandria, Denis, Erasmus<br />
of Formia, Eustace, George, Giles, Margaret<br />
of Antioch, Pantaleon, and Vitus. The Fourteen<br />
Holy Helpers are a group of saints venerated<br />
together in Roman Catholicism because their<br />
intercession is believed to be particularly<br />
effective, especially against various diseases.<br />
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/IMMANUEL GIEL<br />
Or the brave sisters and priests of<br />
the Diocese of Memphis, who in<br />
1873 and again in 1878 tended to the<br />
victims of a terrible Yellow Fever epidemic<br />
that killed thousands. While<br />
others fled the city, these heroes and<br />
heroines risked, and often lost, their<br />
lives caring for the sick.<br />
Our chronicles of saintly men and<br />
women are filled with examples of<br />
those who have cared for “the other,”<br />
be they plague victims or AIDS victims.<br />
Such men and women responded<br />
to the challenge we all face, to<br />
see Christ even in our grievously ill<br />
brothers and sisters.<br />
Zombies are fiction. Saints and heroes<br />
are real. Our faith asks us not to<br />
fear others, but to care for them. <br />
Greg Erlandson is the president<br />
and editor-in-chief of Catholic <strong>News</strong><br />
Service.<br />
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<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 27
THE CRUX<br />
BY HEATHER KING<br />
A PATIENT ENDURANCE<br />
A book of<br />
poems explores<br />
why we offer<br />
our love in<br />
a world of<br />
suffering<br />
SHUTTERSTOCK<br />
Award-winning poet Leslie<br />
Williams grew up in <strong>No</strong>rth<br />
Carolina, lived and worked in<br />
Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Charlottesville<br />
(where she earned a degree<br />
in English), got married, moved to<br />
Chicago, had a son, moved back to<br />
Washington, had another son, and<br />
moved to the Boston area, where she<br />
and her family have been for 15 years.<br />
She’s been writing and doing<br />
community and church work ever<br />
since, including teaching poetry and<br />
Sunday school.<br />
Her first book, “Success of the Seed<br />
Plants,” (Bellday Books Inc., $14)<br />
came out in <strong>20</strong>10 and garnered the<br />
Bellday Prize. Her latest collection,<br />
“Even the Dark” (Southern Illinois<br />
University Press, $13), was co-winner<br />
of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry<br />
Open Competition.<br />
She has received several artist fellowships.<br />
Her poems appear widely in<br />
such magazines as “Poetry,” “Kenyon<br />
Review,” “Image,” “America,” and<br />
“The Southern Review.”<br />
Most notably, as her website states,<br />
“She is always wondering about the<br />
divine.”<br />
She also hosts a blog, accessible<br />
from her site, that focuses on Scripture<br />
and is called “Finding the River.”<br />
Of “Even the Dark,” Williams says,<br />
“I worked on many of the poems for<br />
probably 15 years and they slowly<br />
came together into this book. Poems<br />
are a way of thinking through my<br />
role in the world and in others’ lives<br />
and are for me a kind of prayer and<br />
conversation with God. I also really<br />
like words and sounds and the music<br />
a poem can make.”<br />
Williams’ poems soar, collide with<br />
reality, wonder, observe, ache. They<br />
are about the seeming paltriness and<br />
inefficacy of our love, and the way we<br />
offer it anyway, because the alternative<br />
— to withhold our love or to<br />
yield to despair — would be the one<br />
thing blacker than life, with all its<br />
suffering.<br />
From “When Walking by Lilacs, a<br />
Burning Smell”:<br />
“I’m overwhelmed: the sublime /<br />
perfumed featherings of lilac, never<br />
knowing what / to do for others but<br />
letting swallows make a home / here<br />
because I can spare the eaves.”/<br />
28 • ANGELUS • <strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong>
Moments that might bypass a less<br />
keen observer crystallize as quicksilver<br />
shafts of light: shorthand messages<br />
from the world beyond. “Forgetful<br />
Green” enshrines a stab of transcendence<br />
while gathering tomatoes toward<br />
dusk from the garden: each dinner<br />
with family, in its way, a “last supper.”<br />
“In Which the Bread Crumbs<br />
Were Eaten by Birds” reflects on the<br />
memory of a childhood friend lost to<br />
suicide.<br />
“Even the Gladioli,” “Prayer that<br />
Starts in the Eye of a Bird,” “Exile<br />
from the Kingdom of Ordinary Sight”:<br />
these are poems that grope for transcendence<br />
in the missed chance, the<br />
offer to help rebuffed, our inability to<br />
reconcile the human condition.<br />
“Create in Me A Clean Heart, O<br />
God” includes the lines:<br />
“When my mother was sick / I didn’t<br />
go / I rolled over in my own bed / I<br />
thought she wanted // to be alone, /<br />
alone how I like to be / to keep my<br />
misery.”/<br />
The title is borrowed from Psalm 51,<br />
which runs in part, “O see, in guilt I<br />
was born, a sinner was I conceived.”<br />
The compact lines of Williams’<br />
own “psalm” evoke our cognizance<br />
of original sin; our knowledge that<br />
original sin alone doesn’t absolve us;<br />
and the way our mothers both shape<br />
and wound us, sometimes forming us<br />
to be unable to show up for them just<br />
as they may have been unable to show<br />
up for us.<br />
Our absolution, the poem nonetheless<br />
manages to suggest, consists in<br />
our longing to be better, to love more<br />
deeply, to be less afraid.<br />
These are poems, one senses, whose<br />
seeds were sown while sitting in<br />
the bleachers at a soccer game, or<br />
standing in line at the grocery store,<br />
or nursing a child.<br />
“If American women earned minimum<br />
wage for the unpaid work they<br />
do around the house and caring for<br />
relatives, they would have made $1.5<br />
trillion last year,” ran a recent headline<br />
in The New York Times.<br />
Maybe, but how do you assign a<br />
price to poems of such rare beauty,<br />
that germinated in snatched moments<br />
of silence and solitude when the poet’s<br />
husband was perhaps away at work<br />
and the kids at school?<br />
How do you cost-benefit analyze<br />
such precious works of art that might<br />
not have come to be but for the<br />
paradox of motherhood in which the<br />
insistent desire to bring life into the<br />
world requires us in some sense to<br />
die?<br />
From her window one morning,<br />
Williams sees a young girl in pajamas<br />
— “The parents, their only child, the<br />
apple, the amen” — pad down the<br />
driveway.<br />
This might be the start of an idyll,<br />
except that the child is en route to<br />
another chemo treatment:<br />
“Thinking of God’s Goodness While<br />
the Ten-Year-Old Neighbor is Suffering”<br />
reminds us that religion has<br />
no answers. Religion — our religion<br />
— patiently endures. It plods. It drags<br />
its heavy cross, broken and bleeding.<br />
It praises when there seems nothing<br />
left to praise, when we seem to be<br />
howling into the abyss.<br />
Against the existential uncertainty<br />
that at times seems more than human<br />
beings can bear, the world has assault<br />
weapons, nuclear bombs, closed borders,<br />
surveillance.<br />
We have St. Michael the Archangel.<br />
The poem ends like this:<br />
“I do / believe a sickness can be<br />
rebuked, vanish with all the darkest /<br />
days; that they could return to singing.<br />
That one day this / devastation could<br />
be shadow only, a conquering. Where<br />
even / the dark is not dark to see. My<br />
God can do this but my God / might<br />
not.” <br />
Leslie Williams<br />
Heather King is a blogger, speaker, and the author of several books.<br />
<strong>March</strong> <strong>20</strong>, <strong>20</strong><strong>20</strong> • ANGELUS • 29<br />
JENNIFER S. FLESCHER/© LESLIE WILLIAMS<br />
What Legacy will YOU<br />
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It’s easy to include a gift<br />
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in your will or trust.<br />
To leave a lasting legacy,<br />
contact us today.<br />
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(213) 637-7504<br />
KJetton@la-archdiocese.org<br />
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ANGELUS
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