World Youth Day: Twenty Years Ago

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

Twenty years ago this August Denver hosted World Youth Day, the first time the world event took place in the U.S. As WYD director of communications, I was on a core team from Washington with Father Dennis Schnurr, WYD executive director and now archbishop of Cincinnati, and Paul Henderson, WYD director of programming and now director of planning and communication operations at the USCCB. We’ve remained friends, with the kind of friendship borne of going to war together.

When I speak about WYD, I compare it to an elephant, one you gently prod to move where you’d like it to go, but knowing at any moment it could overpower you. If we knew how big WYD would become, we would have been afraid. With blissful ignorance, we set off for a fun adventure.

Though founded in Rome in 1985, WYD hadn’t quite caught on. The Vatican thought that holding the event in the USA would establish it. They counted on the immense media presence and U.S. ingenuity and organization. Their confidence was well placed.

As a reporter in Rome, I had traveled with Pope John Paul II. But sitting on a plane with him was a far cry from organizing media for an event to draw about 2,000 journalists and setting up a structure for TV and radio coverage. Early on, I took my concerns to Tim Russert, enthusiastic Catholic and host of NBC’s Meet the Press. With an analysis reflective of a man used to working within walls of power, he explained how to work with the media. “You own the pope, so you’re in charge,” he said.

Now if you want to be empowered, convince yourself you own the pope. When TV producers would balk at our plans, I would remain calm because, as Russert had assured me, I owned the pope. Russert also offered the help of veteran NBC special events producer Bob Asman, who had just organized the TV pool coverage of the Democratic National Convention in New York City. “We’ll call him the ‘secret missionary for God,’” Russert laughed. Asman so impressed the TV stations in Denver that had formed a consortium to deal with the largest event they’d ever known, that they hired him almost as soon as they met him.

When Catholic youth heard about WYD, they responded in force and surprised the bishops. Youth begged to go to the church event instead of church leaders begging them to go. Bishops who traveled with them found it life changing. It was a booster shot for the shepherds to be surrounded by energetic sheep. Their enthusiasm caught reporters up short. Media geared up for protests, but they never materialized. When one reporter asked a girl about her feelings on birth control and abortion, she told him teen-style, “Get a life!” The days were for prayer, not protest. The Washington Post reported the event was like Woodstock, with all of the good and none of the bad of the 1969 rock concert at a farm in the Catskills.

When I returned home, I had WYD on my mind. I must have overdone it because a friend told me one evening as we went down to Washington’s Union Station that all I talked about was World Youth Day. “I’m sure it was wonderful for you,” she said, “but let it go.” When we got to the station, a teenager bounded toward me across the Main Hall. “Hey, Sister Mary Ann,” he shouted. “Remember me? We met at World Youth Day. It was great.” My friend laughed, “Case closed,” she said, “I guess it was an event to last a lifetime.”

The Christian Portfolio

            Awake or not, many of us at baptism became ambassadors. Along with water and oil, we received a portfolio of privileges and responsibilities and a commission to spread the Gospel.

            The portfolio demands a relationship with God and we have tools to nurture the relationship. Number one is prayer. It’s easy. As Woody Allen once said of life, “90 percent is just showing up.” Prayer can be as extensive as a week’s retreat or as brief as a pause to ask “Where did I see the face of God today?” But we have to show up.

            Prayer grounds us. It can make us so grounded that, as someone once wrote on a poster, if accused of being a Christian we’d be convicted. The late Tim Russert was a man of prayer. It helped him stand for Governor Bob Casey when he was kept from speaking at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his pro-life stand. People criticized Russert, then the moderator of “Meet the Press,” for standing up for Casey. “They outed me, a la ‘Well, Russert’s a Catholic, you know,” said Russert. “What would you expect?’” He stood for fairness and was convicted – for standing for principle.

            The portfolio carries responsibilities. Christians belong to a community. It holds that others are holy, not things to be used or goods to be discarded. A woman who volunteered with Mother Teresa in Calcutta told how she got into the work. Her husband was a diplomat in India. Many evenings they’d go out to embassy receptions and then come home to find the poor lying in their portico. They had to step over them to get inside. “If you had any heart at all, you had to try to alleviate the suffering,” she said. She’d translated the tale of the Good Samaritan and also might be convicted of being a Christian.   

Hope stands tall in the Christian portfolio. Death is not an ending. Hope lets us say more than “he was a great guy.” It offers something to hold on to. The deceased has found a better life. Through the Communion of Saints, both living and dead, we’re still in touch with those who’ve passed on.   

Faith is for more than ourselves. A friend with teens visited a mother whose son had drowned. As they left home, her children gave her the godmother speech, as in “God, Mother! Don’t say anything.” She promised they would not be embarrassed and told the grieving mother, “You know, you will see him again.” The children were aghast but the neighbor came by later to talk about when she would see her son again.

Today’s fierce political speech challenges Christians. There is nothing quite like mud wrestling to draw our lesser side. Verbal brawling degrades us, but efforts toward civil discourse can counter this. A Lenten exercise might be to write a positive response to a negative blog post. Since we’re all children of God we’re addressing family.

Life can be rough, but baptism’s commission to spread the message of Christ, equips us for the journey. The anointing with water and oil always takes hold.

Courts offer mixed rulings on HHS mandate

The travesty of the Health and Human Services mandate in the Affordable Care Act continues to rankle. The mandate requires employers to underwrite for employees contraceptives, including abortion-inducing drugs such as Ella, and female sterilization through their insurance programs. The law is driving complainants of many religions to court.

            Some religious non-profits have a safe harbor and do not have to fund health plans that cover contraceptives and sterilization until after August 2013. For-profit companies, however, are under the gun now. The for-profit business owners who object to the mandate either must violate their consciences and pay for plans that include services they morally oppose or hold to their principles and face backbreaking fines.

            The Becket Fund reports that there are 43 cases and over 110 plaintiffs challenging the mandate in court. So far, at least 12 for-profits have obtained initial rulings that take up the merits of their case, and nine of those rulings have granted the companies preliminary injunctive relief against the mandate.

            Reasons for the decisions vary. In some instances the court recognizes that the government is likely violating the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forbids the federal government from substantially burdening religious exercise, unless it is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest. One plaintiff suggested that if the government is bent on saturating the nation with contraceptives, it might hand them out for free rather than force churches and others to pay for them.

A Federal Court in Missouri issued a temporary restraining order on December 31 invoking both the First Amendment and RFRA in Sharpe Holdings, Inc. v. United States Department of Health and Human Services. According to the blog Religion Clause, “the court concluded that under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act the mandate and its penalties would substantially burden plaintiffs’ free exercise rights.” It added also that “for 1st Amendment purposes, the mandate is not a neutral law of general applicability.”

Said the court: “[T]he ACA mandate is not generally applicable because it does not apply to grandfathered health plans, religious employers, or employers with fewer than fifty employees.” It agreed with plaintiffs’ argument that the “mandate’s exemptions clearly prefer secular purposes over religious purposes and some religious purposes over other religious purposes. Burdens cannot be selectively imposed only on conduct motivated by religious belief.”

In Michigan, a federal district court held that the property management company, Domino’s Farms Corp., and its owner Thomas Monaghan (founder of Domino’s Pizza) had adequately alleged that the mandate imposes a substantial burden on Monaghan’s Catholic religious beliefs. The court noted that the Supreme Court has held that “‘putting substantial pressure on an adherent to modify his behavior and to violate his beliefs’ substantially burdens a person’s exercise of religion.” The district court added that for itself, “the Court is in no position to decide whether and to what extent Monaghan would violate his religious beliefs by complying with the mandate....  Other courts have assumed that a law substantially burdens a person’s free exercise of religion based on that person’s assertions.”

 The court added that the government had not carried its burden under the RFRA showing that it had a compelling interest or used the least restrictive means in burdening plaintiff’s free exercise.

Decisions conflict. The judge in Grote Indus. v.Sebelius in Indiana ruled against the plaintiff and declared that the burden of the mandate is “likely too remote and attenuated to be considered substantial.”

Personally, it is hard to see how forcing someone, against his conscience, to purchase insurance coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs could not be a substantial burden. In a Chicago courtroom, the Seventh Circuit judges in Korte v. Sebelius got it right when they responded to similar arguments that “the religious‐liberty violation at issue here is inherent in the coerced coverage of contraception, abortifacients, sterilization, and related services, not—or perhaps more precisely, not only—in the later purchase or use of contraception or related services.”

Simply put, the issue is not about using contraceptives, it is being coerced to offer or purchase a plan that covers them. Clearly courts should not be in the business of telling people – be they businessmen or bishops – what constitutes a substantial burden on their exercise of religion. The few courts that have ruled the wrong way so far have impermissibly delved into a moral analysis of religious claims.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh: The Nuns Who Form Us

 

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

 

We’re formed by those around us. As the National Religious Retirement Collection comes up (the collection is December 8-9), I cannot help but think of the many religious who formed me.

Sister Patricia Newell was my fifth grade teacher and advised us students to name our guardian angels. I named mine Michael, as in Michael the Archangel. I’ve called on his protection in large and small ways, asking everything from “Wake me up on time” to “Get me out of here alive” (in that case, a reporting assignment in Beirut.)

Sister Veronica Joyce, my eighth grade teacher saw I finished my work quickly. She also believed that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. So she assigned me to write the class play, class history, class song, class prophecy and whatever else she could think of. She even let me work in my own space, alone in the little used nurse’s office. Years later when I told the story, a fellow nun said, “Wow. She isolated you and got you to think you had your own office!” I still love writing.

Sister Mary Carmel Gaynor taught journalism to a lot of us who went into that field. She hammered “clarity and accuracy” at us over and over again. That guiding principle for the communications business stood as good advice not just for the news business but for life.

Sister Katherine Hanley, an English professor at the College of St .Rose, treated students as if everything they said was deathless prose. It drew us out of ourselves. It was empowering. When I taught, I tried to do the same.

It’s dangerous to name names and if I miss someone, I apologize. Two years ago I faced breast cancer and nuns surrounded me. Amy Hoey, Janice Bader, Linda Werthman, Peg Sullivan, Kay Graber, Jean McGinty, Katie Mindling, Patti Donlin and many more helped run my life when I couldn’t run my own. They prayed with and for me, cooked meals, filled out insurance forms, helped me make wise decisions, accompanied me to appointments and offered encouragement I never dreamed I’d need. Mary Ellen Dougherty, who paused leaving my hospital bedside one night remarked, “God wants you to get better.” I was scared and that never occurred to me, but when she said it, I knew it was true.

Sister Sharon Euart made a quilt with squares gathered from supportive friends and today it hangs in my bedroom. It reminds me that God’s love flows freely to us through many people not because we’ve earned it but because God is goodness itself.

Sister Lilyan Fraher, who this summer as director of my annual retreat, suggested that as I fall off to sleep I ask, “Where did I see the face of God today?” It’s a great way to enter into the night.

None of the above thought what they were doing was extraordinary because such giving is an ordinary part of their lives. That’s how it is with religious sisters, brothers and priests. God’s goodness courses through them; their lives are wordless sermons, and I haven’t even told (or even know) the half of it.

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Sister Mary Ann Walsh is a member of the Northeast Community of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas and Director of Media Relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Editor's Note: To contribute to the Retirement Fund for Religious, visit: http://www.usccb.org/about/national-religious-retirement-office/ or www.retiredreligious.org

President Obama: Render Unto God the Things that Are God’s

Jesus is often quoted for his saying to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” The rest of the quote could be a message to the Obama Administration: “Render unto God the things that are God’s.”

The current tensions over religious freedom come down to a simple fact: the First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion. That includes the right of Catholic and other religious institutions to define and carry out their ministry.

An Obama regulation that compels virtually all employers to provide sterilization and contraceptives, including abortion-causing drugs, to employees without co-pay, has a religious exemption. But the exemption is so narrow that Jesus himself wouldn’t qualify. Religious ministries qualify for the exemption only if the people providing the service are Catholic, the ones being served are Catholic, and the service itself comes packaged with religious instruction.

So much for hospital ministry. Will “Where does it hurt?” have to be replaced with “Where were you baptized?” At the soup kitchen will “Are you hungry?” be replaced with “Are you Catholic?” Will we have to teach the hungry the Apostle’s Creed before we feed them?

It is the church, not Caesar, that defines ministry. We Catholics are called to serve others because we’re Catholic, not because they are. We help others because of their need, not their creed. For the government to hold fast to its new definition of ministry, one crafted by the American Civil Liberties Union, reflects deafness to the Constitution that is unbecoming to the man sworn to defend it.

There has been some talk of accommodation, whereby (it is claimed) some Catholic institutions would not have to pay for services that violate their religious beliefs. Apparently, their insurance companies would pay for the services instead. One doesn’t have to be a cynic to question where the money to pay for those services will come from, as the only pool of available funds seems to be the premiums subsidized by the objecting religious institutions. And the government’s problematic definition of religious ministry still remains. There also is the question of what self-insured Catholic organizations are supposed to do. What good does it do to say the dirty work will be done by the insurer rather than the employer, if they are one and the same?

The Administration’s intrusive decision about what does and does not constitute religious ministry should make every American pause. What falls after freedom of religion? Freedom of the press? Will Caesar tell you what you have to print or air?

Days before President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to the miserly religious exemption in his Administration’s regulation; the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision pertinent to religious freedom. In the Hosanna-Tabor case, the Court upheld 9-0 the right of a Lutheran Church to decide who its ministers are. The Obama Administration had taken the opposite, and losing, side, arguing that the church had no more right of religious liberty than a secular organization. One would have expected the Court’s resounding rejection of that argument to bring the Administration’s eyes into focus on the religious liberty question. Clearly it did not.

The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution makes freedom of religion the “First Freedom.” The Founding Fathers stressed that this freedom was sacred. George Washington in 1789 wrote to an annual meeting of Quakers that “The conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness and it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be extremely accommodated to them.”

Certainly our government, wise as it is, can’t be expected (and shouldn’t purport) to know everything. It might well ease its burdens by leaving some things to the Almighty and rendering unto God the things that are God’s.

A Catholic by any other name…

Bill Keller, soon to be retired managing editor of The New York Times, recently outed himself as a “collapsed Catholic.” Writing readers Keller said that being a “collapsed Catholic” was even further removed from being a “lapsed Catholic” because, he said, “you never really extricate yourself from your upbringing.”

Keller’s note related to his review of “Absolute Monarchy—A History of the Papacy” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Perhaps it was meant as a disclaimer to say he had no bias for or against the church or to cite his years of Catholic education as qualifications for opining on popes.

Keller’s remark bears on how we define Catholics and Catholicism. For sure the times are a-changin.’ Whereas once we spoke of a “good Catholic” as a “daily communicant,” today a “good Catholic” is a “church-going Catholic.” People who seldom go to Mass at all amount to cultural Catholics, whose spiritual identity is Catholicism but who have given up on sacramental practice. Such a position once bore a stigma in society, now less so, though the Church still requires attendance at weekly Mass for its members.

Many cultural Catholics have a fondness for their roots. A young woman I met on an elevator a few years ago typified such people. When she discovered I am a nun she gushed “I used to be Catholic.” She had no idea of the emotional pain she evoked as I encountered one more member of America’s second largest religious body, the former Catholics.

Her identification with Catholicism suggests something about its sticking power. The Irish playwright Brendan Behan knew it, despite constantly railing against the church. Friends advised him to stop complaining, join another church and be happy. Behan thought the idea absurd and replied (this is the cleaned-up version), “Look, I’m a lapsed Catholic, not a (expletive) eejit,” an eejit being the Irish term for idiot.

Part of this hold stems from how the Church defines those who leave or gradually fall off. The Church doesn’t refer to them by the name of whatever religion they choose subsequently, say Lutheran or Episcopalian. It doesn’t even refer to those who declare non-belief as atheists or agnostics. Instead, the church calls them as “former Catholics,” “lapsed Catholics” or “ex-Catholics.”

The hold may lie in the definition of the adjective “catholic,” which means all-embracing and wide-ranging. The Catholic Church doesn’t totally give up anyone. Even if you’re excommunicated, it expects you to attend Mass each week, though not to participate in the sacraments. James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake defined the Catholic Church as “here comes everybody,” giving a blunt, yet poetic expression to a Church with room for all.

One also suspects this hold comes from something more. Is it based in the image of Mother Church, emphasis on “mother,” who loves her children and doesn’t give up on them even when they don’t deserve it or don’t merit the affection, except for the accident of birth or in the Church, of baptism?

Is it the lifelong impact of prayers and other rituals, such as guardian angels to protect you, the Blessed Virgin to care for you, the rosary to guide your prayer, the Eucharist to sustain you, the soaring cathedrals to amaze you? Is it rooted in emotion laden events such as First Communion Day celebrations of purity and innocence or the deep comfort in a funeral Mass imbued with the conviction that we’ll meet again in heaven? Is it a wish to connect to a parent’s or grandparent’s Catholicism that provided a moral compass in facing life’s many challenges?

Is it grace? Is it this inexplicable gift of God’s presence, recognized not enough to stop us daily in our tracks, but sensed on occasion to make us pause at God’s creation, the gift of human life, the message in Louie Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”?

Whatever it is, this Catholicism, this grace, is real, and because of it Bill Keller and others, be they lapsed, collapsed, befuddled or bemused, are part of it. They are family, even if they no longer come by for dinner.