Time to Listen to the Bishops On The Shutdown

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

As the government shutdown continues, it may be time to listen to another body – the U.S. bishops. Recent statements from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops offer significant points worth considering.

They are neither Democratic nor Republican positions. They are simply principled.

Consider, for example, an October 1 letter from Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, Chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Migration, Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, California, chair of the Committee on Domestic Policy and Human Development, and Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines, Iowa, chair of the Committee on International Justice and Peace. The letter urged Congress to fulfill the role of government and meet the basic needs of people. The bishops told Congress that they “welcomed earlier bipartisan action which averted a federal government shutdown and the hardship that would have come with failure to reach agreement."

They added that "The Catholic bishops of the United States stand ready to work with leaders of both parties for a budget that reduces future unsustainable deficits, protects poor and vulnerable people, advances the common good, and promotes human life and dignity."

The bishops noted that the Catechism of the Catholic Church says it is the proper role of government to "make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life," including food, clothing, heath care, education and culture.

The Church is a voice for the poor. It’s often the only lobby for people in desperate need. In that regard, the church has argued for universal health care for about a century.

The church has also asked Congress to protect rights of conscience as a part of the same legislative process. A September 26 letter from Cardinal Seán O’Malley of Boston, chair of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, called for respect for religious freedom. They did so as a January 1 deadline approaches for beginning to impose the HHS contraceptive/abortifacient mandate on many religious institutions that serve the needy. As the bishops’ October 1 letter pointed out, threats to conscience rights undermine access to needed health care by driving people of faith out of the system.

Some have falsely interpreted this as a call for the government shutdown or a default on our nation’s debts. The bishops have done nothing of the kind. The bishops have been urging Congress to enact legislation like the Health Care Conscience Rights Act for two and a half years. Since July 2012, the bishops have been asking that this protection be included in “must-pass” bills such as the appropriations bills funding the government, which have long been vehicles for a number of important federal policies on conscience rights.

The bishops offer principles that uphold rights for all people, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. Good government protects its citizens. When it shuts down, it protects no one; and when it runs, it must be sure to respect their fundamental rights. The bishops have emphasized all of these concerns together. In this way, they offer a voice of reason.

Smell Like the Sheep; Make God Your Escape Key

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

Pope Francis has a knack for metaphorical speech. So far his best may be noting that shepherds should get so close to the ewes and rams that they “smell like the sheep.” One archbishop told me he was trying to work that into advice for new priests in his homily at their ordinations but hadn’t figured out how. Maybe he worried that the pungent image wouldn’t fit at an illustrious ritual or might draw laughs, but it certainly was worth consideration.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York at World Youth Day used metaphor as he spoke about how God moves people. He told the crowd, "We want a microwave, but God works like a crock pot." That message sticks with you, like dog hair on a couch in the den.

Cardinal Seán O’Malley used metaphor and simile. In a Q&A session at World Youth Day he quipped that witnessing to your faith in a secular society isn’t easy. “Being Catholic in Boston is a contact sport,” he said. That’s not only memorable; its incongruity makes it funny. On the Eucharist, he said, not going to Mass is like being a branch cut off from the vine. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what that branch eventually becomes.

Scripture relies on such literary devices: God’s love is like a mother’s love from Isaiah 49:15, and our relationship with Jesus is like the branches to the vine, John 15.  One image gives us comfort; the other says gently hold on.

Word pictures that make for memorable homilies do not come easy. Reflection on God present in today’s world might help us develop some modern ones.

When I am in pain can I ask God to be like the computer escape key: take it all away?

Should I consider God to be like the Wi-Fi that I search for:  unseen but there?

Is God like my mobile device, always with me?

Is a favorite prayer is like a favorite cookie, a source of comfort.

One goal of the U.S. bishops this year is to improve homilies at Mass. Homilies and music are integral to helping people experience God’s presence. A priest once told me that if I want to introduce someone to the Catholic Church I should look for a parish with good preaching, good music and well-read Scripture, in that order. Reaching people through their senses comes first. There is much to be said for ambiance, why Catholicism uses smells and bells to lift us to God.

Some years ago a young priest asked me to critique his weekend homilies. With opinions about much, I agreed quickly. I couldn’t do it however. I didn’t know what to say because I couldn’t figure out how I’d do better. I gained a new appreciation of the preacher’s challenge. Since then I’ve heard some really good homilies and recognize that solid metaphors enhance them. But I’d sure hate to be a homilist coming up with one every day or even every week. It would be like finding a literary image in a haystack of words or an oasis in a desert mind. It might have to come from the sounds of silence.

(CNS Photo/Paul Haring)

When the sheep are sick …

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

Last Sunday the pastor told of three shepherds and a visitor who asked how the shepherd knew whose sheep were whose. The visitor saw one shepherd stand, call his sheep to follow and a group of them did. Then a second shepherd did the same with the same results. Then the visitor tried calling sheep to follow him but none moved. “Do they ever just follow anybody who calls them?” he asked. “Oh sure,” said the last shepherd. “When sheep are sick, they’ll follow anyone.”

The story has stuck with me, perhaps because I’ve always wondered how people can go off to follow the wrong person, such as charismatic leader Jim Jones who convinced so many people to commit suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Or young people who go off to cults. Perhaps this is why reading the homily that Cardinal Seán O’Malley delivered last Sunday in Boston made so much sense. He spoke of the “wanton violence and destruction” inflicted at the Boston Marathon by two strangers.

 “We know so little about the two young men who perpetrated these heinous acts of violence.  One said he had no friends in this country, the other said his chief interests were money and his career,” said Cardinal O’Malley.  “People need to be part of a community to lead a fully human life.  As believers one of our tasks is to build community, to value people more than money or things, to recognize in each person a child of God, made in the image and likeness of our Creator. “

Cardinal O’Malley said “the individualism and alienation of our age has spawned a culture of death.  Over a million abortions a year is one indication of how human life has been devalued.  Violent entertainment, films and video games have coarsened us and made us more insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. The inability of the Congress to enact laws that control access to automatic weapons is emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture.” He also decried the death penalty when he spoke with reporters after Mass about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was charged April 22 with using a “weapon of mass destruction” that left three dead and more than 200 injured at the marathon.

“Forgiveness does not mean that we do not realize the heinousness of the crime. But in our own hearts when we are unable to forgive we make ourselves a victim of our own hatred,” said Cardinal O’Malley. “Obviously as a Catholic I oppose the death penalty, which I think is one further manifestation of the culture of death in our midst.”

Living near the venerable Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cardinal O’Malley respects knowledge but warned that it doesn’t equate to virtue. “As Chain Ginott, the concentration camp survivor, reminds us, doctors, nurses, scientists and soldiers were part of the Holocaust machinery, showing that knowledge is not virtue, and often science and technology have been put at the service of evil,” Cardinal O’Malley said. “It is only a culture of life and an ethic of love that can rescue us from the senseless violence that inflicts so much suffering on our society.”

Individualism, alienation, disdain for the rights of the unborn, dismissal of the sanctity of all life – including that of bombers – and the preponderance of all kinds of assault weapons in America: All represent a societal sickness that lures many sheep away from a life-giving shepherd to follow another who leads them to their destruction. These sicknesses needs to be addressed by Congress, churches and we individuals ourselves.

Pope Francis: Rebuilding the Church Through Communication

Bishop of Rome, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Servant of the Servants of God and... Global Communications Focal Point?

It may already be happening.

Pope Francis appointed a working group of eight cardinals on April 13 to advise him on the governance of the Catholic Church and reform of the Roman curia. This move has many wondering what shape such reform might take. As a communications professional, my thoughts immediately go to something the Canadian communications genius and Catholic Marshall McLuhan once said about the papacy.

Several commentators have already invoked McLuhan's famous line, "the medium is the message," to describe the new pope's gestures of humility, such as refusing to live in the apostolic palace and washing the feet of young inmates. But three years before his death in 1980, McLuhan, who coined the term "surfing" and predicted the Internet as early as the 1960s, addressed how the papacy would be affected by a world of instant communication: "When things speed up, hierarchy disappears and global theatre sets in," he said.

This prophecy came true just a year later with the election of John Paul II, a rock star pope for modern media, if there ever was one. John Paul died in 2005, a year before the launch of Twitter and a year after the start of Facebook. Communications have only become more instantaneous, and the papacy has had to keep pace. The papal Twitter handle, @pontifex, launched in December 2012, is one reflection of this.

Additionally, Pope Francis has taken the interesting step of holding his daily Masses at the Vatican guest house. Earlier popes celebrated these Masses privately with their household staff and guests. Opting for a more open setting, Pope Francis has given himself a daily platform to address just about any topic he chooses in the context of the day's readings. The practical result has been that, by the time people in the United States are waking up, a story is waiting in our news feeds with the latest from the pope.

Vatican commentator John Thavis calls this development the pope's "mini-Magisterium." Another apt description might be that Pope Francis has decided to fill the media vacuum. This is profound not only in terms of exercising his ministry as a universal teacher and pastor, but also for his responsibility to promote unity in the Church and his choice to do so through mass communications. If every Catholic with access to modern media makes an effort to listen to Pope Francis on a daily basis, internalizes what he has to say and informs his or her actions with it, the pope becomes a pontifex maximus (chief bridge builder) like never before.

It also echoes McLuhan's prediction of bureaucracy giving way to communications.

We've seen other bishops follow versions of this model. For instance, to meet the challenges following his 2011 appointment to Philadeliphia, Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., has simultaneously stripped back archdiocesan infrastructure while embracing his bully pulpit through digital media. USCCB President Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who has been tweeting and blogging for a while now, has a newly launched online presence. And one of the pope's eight new advisers, Boston's Cardinal Seán O'Malley, OFM Cap., was the first blogging cardinal in the United States.

But it isn't only about popes and bishops utilizing social media. For instance, the far-reaching quality of Pope Francis' message is tied directly to the men and women of the Catholic press who cover him. Special praise goes to Vatican Radio, which has been on hand to cover the Masses at the Vatican guest house, the administrators at News.va, who promote what the pope says via social media, and Catholic News Service, which has combined web video and a traditional forum -- the pope's Wednesday General Audience -- to generate truly creative and attractive content that any pope would be pleased to have at the service of his message.

And of course social media aren't only in the hands of a few professional gatekeepers. Everyone has access. As a result, these platforms have transformed the Church into a landscape of blogs, tweets and viral content where real conversations happen and the public at large gets a pulse and a picture of life in the Church. Pope Francis seems to recognize that his role is to embed himself at the heart of this universe, evangelize it and draw people closer to each other and to Christ.

For more on Pope Francis' approach to communications, here's a recent reflection by Archbishop Claudio Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

(CNS Photo/Paul Haring)

May Dreamworks Get It Right

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

Word is that Dreamworks, a sub-studio of Disney, is about to make a movie on The Boston Globe’s January 2002 investigative report on pedophilia and the Archdiocese of Boston. The series marked a tipping point in the Catholic Church’s dealing with the problem of clergy sexual abuse of minors. The U.S. bishops had published a series of protocols on how to deal with such criminal and sinful behavior in the early nineties. This was a decade before the Globe series began, but the extensive coverage of the scandal by a major newspaper raised awareness to a new level.

The Globe’s spotlight intensified concern of bishops, clergy and laity and drew more allegations of abuse to church attention. In June 2002, six months after the series ran, the full body of U.S. bishops met in Dallas and adopted the unprecedented Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The document stressed a zero tolerance of sexual abuse of a minor by a cleric, demanded referral to civil authorities as required and called for prevention programs to protect minors in church care. It has been revised since then and is still in effect.

To see what followed the 2002 newspaper series, you can look at church statistics from a decade later, in 2012. Last year there were 4,684,009 children in the Catholic Church who underwent child safety programs. At the same time, there were 2,362,813 priests, deacons, seminarians, educators, church employees and volunteers who underwent background checks and training in child protection programs.

This past year, researchers from the Georgetown University-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) found 11 allegations of abuse of children under the age of 18 reported in 2012. It is discouraging to find any, but for perspective, this occurred in a church of 77.7 million people in the United States. Reports of allegations of abuse from years, even decades, before, continue to decline as well.

The Globe series likely led other institutions, including Boy Scouts, sports groups, public schools and other churches and synagogues to look into their own organizations to see how they have dealt with the human tragedy.

As Dreamworks pursues its tale of journalism and a societal problem writ large because of church involvement, one hopes for a movie that enhances protection of children. There is no need to magnify, Hollywood-style, the problem of sexual abuse by clergy. Any instance is huge in itself.

The movie might highlight unsung heroes. The late Bishop John D’Arcy is one. As an auxiliary bishop in Boston, he spoke out against transferring alleged pedophiles to other parishes. The late Sister Catherine Mulkerrin, a Sister of St. Joseph, is another. She lobbied fellow archdiocesan officials to warn parishes that abusers had served there. Neither set out to be a hero. Their actions came to light through discovery of documents in court cases. Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who bore the responsibility to heal a broken archdiocese he inherited in 2003, is one more reluctant hero.

To make a thoughtful movie on this sensational topic will challenge Dreamworks. Sister Mary Ellen Dougherty, SSND, a poet, often notes that nothing is pure but grace is everywhere. If Dreamworks practices moviemaking artfully, then grace might shine through.