Madre de todos los habitantes de Una América

Por Alejandro Aguilera-Titus

En enero de 1999, el Papa Juan Pablo II promulgó el 12 de diciembre como día de fiesta para la Iglesia de todo el Continente Americano. El Santo Padre también habló de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe como la Estrella de la Primera y Nueva Evangelización y  confió a su cuidado el futuro del continente, durante la solemne celebración Eucarística que marcó la conclusión del Sínodo de América en el Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, en la Ciudad de México.

Como mexicano presente en aquella memorable ocasión, me sentí profundamente conmovido por las palabras del Santo Padre. También estaba intrigado por la oración del Papa confiando el futuro del continente al cuidado de la Morenita del Tepeyac. Recuerdo que me pregunté a mí mismo: ¿Cuál es el mensaje de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe hoy?

La primera evangelización tuvo lugar hace casi quinientos años en medio de un encuentro cultural y racial. Fue entonces cuando María de Guadalupe apareció en el Nuevo Mundo para afirmar la dignidad de todas las razas y culturas que formarían un nuevo pueblo: un pueblo nacido de la sangre de amerindios americanos, europeos y, más tarde, africanos. Este extraordinario encuentro se describe en un poema escrito en 1978 durante el Segundo Encuentro Nacional para el Ministerio Hispano:

"Es así que fuimos lo que ahora somos. Hijos de Indio, Negro y Español [europeo] unidos todos en un gran Amor; un pueblo diverso que junto el Señor. Es así que fuimos lo que ahora somos”.

A principios del siglo XXI vivimos en un mundo globalizado en el que un nuevo encuentro de culturas está ocurriendo. La constante movilidad humana, la interacción cultural e incluso matrimonios interraciales, poco a poco están concibiendo un nuevo pueblo americano, especialmente aquí en Estados Unidos. Las palabras de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe a San Juan Diego resuenan en nuestros corazones hoy, tanto como lo hicieron hace mucho tiempo atrás. Sus palabras definen con una claridad asombrosa el mensaje unificador de Dios, los destinatarios y la misión a llevar a cabo para que todos puedan sentirse como en casa en la Iglesia.

“Quiero mucho y deseo vivamente que en este lugar me levanten mi ermita. En ella mostraré y daré a las gentes todo mi amor, mi compasión, mi ayuda y mi defensa. Porque yo soy la Madre misericordiosa, de ti, y de todas las naciones que viven en esta tierra, que me amen, que me hablen, que me busquen y en mi confíen. Allí he de oír sus lamentos y remediar y curar todas sus miserias, penas y dolores."

Es en este contexto que podemos entender por qué la Fiesta de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe se está convirtiendo en una celebración litúrgica que congrega a fieles de diferentes culturas y razas en una comunidad de fe, una parroquia, tiernamente unidos por la Madre del Verdadero Dios. Los por-nacer también están bajo la protección amorosa de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe: la Madona Embarazada, la Patrona de los Por-nacer.

“…No se turbe tu rostro ni tu corazón […] ¿Acaso no soy yo aquí tu madre? ¿No estás bajo mi sombra y mi resguardo? ¿Acaso no soy yo tu fuente de vida? ¿No estás acaso en el hueco de mi mando, en donde cruzo mis brazos?...”

Este es sin duda un mensaje de Adviento que anuncia, con un sentido de urgencia, la venida de nuestro Salvador, el cumplimiento de las promesas de Dios sembrando consuelo y alegría. Es también, sin duda, un mensaje que describe el corazón de la Nueva Evangelización y nuestro continuo anhelo de sentirnos en casa en la presencia de Dios.
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Alejandro Aguilera-Titus es Director Asistente del Subcomité de Asuntos Hispanos para el Secretariado de Diversidad Cultural de USCCB.

 

 

 

 

Mother of All the Inhabitants in the One America

By Alejandro Aguilera-Titus

In January1999, Pope John Paul II promulgated December 12 as a Feast Day for the Church in the entire American Continent. The Holy Father also called Our Lady of Guadalupe the Star of the First and the New Evangelization, and entrusted to her loving care the future of the Continent, as the Synod for America concluded with a Solemn Eucharistic celebration at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City.

As a Mexican present at that memorable occasion, I was very moved by the words of the Holy Father. I was also intrigued by the Pope’s prayer entrusting the future of the Continent to the care of the Morenita (dark-skin young woman) of Tepeyac. I remember thinking to myself: What is the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe for us today?

The First Evangelization took place almost five hundred years ago in the midst of a cultural and racial encounter. It was then that María de Guadalupe appeared in the New World to affirm the dignity of all races and cultures that would form a new people: born out of the blood of Native Americans, Europeans and, later on, Black Africans. This remarkable encounter is described in a poem written in 1978 during the Second National Encuentro for Hispanic Ministry:

“It is in this way that we were then who we are now. Children of Indians, Blacks and Spaniards [Europeans], all united in the same great love; a diverse people        gathered by the Lord. It is in this way that we were then who we are now.”

At the beginning of the Twenty-first Century we live in a globalized world in which a new encounter of cultures is taking place. Constant human mobility, cultural interaction and even interracial marriages are slowly giving birth to a new American people, particularly here in the United States. The words of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Saint Juan Diego resound in our hearts today, as they did long ago. They define with amazing clarity the unifying message of God, the intended receivers, and the mission that is to be carried out, so that everyone may feel at home in the Church.

“…I wish that a temple be erected here quickly, so I may therein exhibit and give all my love, compassion, help, and protection, because I am your merciful mother,      to you, and to all the inhabitants on this land and all the rest who love me, invoke        and confide in me; I will listen there to their lamentations, and remedy all their             miseries, afflictions and sorrows…”

It is in this context that we can understand why the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is becoming a liturgical celebration that brings together the faithful from different cultural backgrounds and races as one community of faith, as one parish, tenderly gathered by the Mother of the True God. The unborn is also under the loving care of Our Lady of Our Guadalupe: the Pregnant Madonna and the Patroness of the Unborn.  

“… Let your face and your heart not be troubled, don’t be afraid… Am I not here,            who is your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health?   Are you not happily within my fold…?”  
 
This is without a doubt a message of Advent that announces, with a sense of urgency, the coming of our Savior; the fulfillment of God’s promises that bring consolation and joy. It is also a message that describes the heart of the New Evangelization, and our longing to feel very much at home in the presence of God. 

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Alejandro Aguilera-Titus is Assistant Director for the Subcommittee on Hispanic Affairs at the USCCB’s Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church.

Five things to remember on Dec. 6

1. Coming soon, on December 8, is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a holy day of obligation. The Virgin Mary under this title is the patroness of the United States. The feast celebrates that from Mary’s conception in the womb of St. Ann, she was free from Original Sin. Because the feast is so significant to the United States, the obligation to attend Mass on this day remains though it falls on a Saturday.

2. The Annual Retirement Fund for Religious collection is Dec. 8-9 in parishes nationwide. The blog posts on the USCCB site today will feature reflections of John Fialka, former Wall Street Journal reporter and currenteditor of ClimateWire, an internet newsletter on climate change, and FatherJames Martin, SJ, contributing editor of America and author, Dec. 6.
 
3. Discussions about poverty in the abstract are fine, but poverty becomes real when you look at the numbers. In its latest annual report, Catholic Charities notes that it  provided food services to 7,146,490 people in one year. The same year it also provided for other basic needs for 1,942,199 people, including emergency financial assistance (not rent, mortgage,etc.), clothing assistance, utilities assistance and assistance with purchase of prescriptions.
 
4.  With the pope joining Twitter some papal proclamations will be a mere 140 characters long. Kudos to Pope Benedict XVI for joining the online community.  You can send him aquestion at #askpontifex

5.  God loves you.

Father James Martin, SJ: Thank You!

By Father James Martin, SJ


It’s hard to sum up in a few words what men and women religious have meant to me.  But let me use two words that I’ll bet you’d use too: Thank you.

Thank you to Sister Janice, a Religious of Jesus and Mary, who was my church history professor during graduate theology studies, and who has become a close friend to my whole family. Ten years ago, when my father was first diagnosed with cancer, Janice was one of the first people to telephone him to offer support and prayers. And in the last week of his life, she took a train from Boston to Philadelphia (that’s about a six-hour trip) to visit him while he was in the hospital. Like all Catholic sisters, Janice has taken a vow of poverty and lives on a limited budget. So to visit my father, she took the cheapest train she could find and stayed at a local convent. The next day she got back on the train and returned to Boston, another six-hour trip. I don’t think I can ever thank her enough.

Thank you to Sister Maddy, a Sister of St. Joseph I met when I was working in East Africa and she was helping, with two other Sisters of St. Joseph, to run a girls school in a remote village in Tanzania (That meant no water, no electricity, no phones.) Today, she is a retreat director at a Jesuit retreat house, beloved by people from all over the country, whom she helps with wise spiritual guidance. During one retreat, she led me through a particularly tough time, balancing our friendship and her professional role as a director. Lately we’ve directed weekend retreats together, and I always learn something new about God when I listen to her. I can never thank her enough either.

 Thank you to Sisters Claire and Eileen, Maryknoll Sisters who lived across the street from our Jesuit community in Nairobi, while I was there for two years. Both had spent years working in the most difficult settings imaginable in East Africa, and these two elderly sisters provided me with a model of indomitable religious fervor. Often, when I was homesick, I would pop by their house for a cup of tea and some cheering up. “Oh you’ll be fine!” both would say. And they were right.

Thank you, too, to all the Jesuits who have helped me in life, and who are too numerous to name. But I’ll give you a few! Thanks to David, my first-ever spiritual director, who helped me discover what it means to be loved by God as you are. Thanks to John, one of the true saints I have known, who showed me what it means to live with an open heart, a generous spirit and a love of simplicity. Thanks to George, who helped to support my vocation during a difficult time with his patient spiritual counsel. 

I’m sure you’d like to say “Thank you” to the men and women religious who have made a difference in your life. And I’ll bet you’ve probably dropped them a line or told them in person. But did you know that their religious orders are facing a severe financial crisis, and are finding it hard to care for these great men and women in their declining years?  

Men and women religious – particularly the women - typically worked for very little (sometimes a literal pittance); they lived exceedingly simply; and many of their communities were not able to save much at all, thanks to these historically low salaries. Also, there are fewer young people entering religious life, which means that fewer religious men and women are earning salaries, which means that the older religious are having a difficult time making ends meet.

This is where you can really say thank you! Why not give to the Retirement Fund for Religious? I know they would appreciate it. I’ll bet God would, too. 

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James Martin, SJ, is a Jesuit priest, contributing editor to America and author of many books, including My Life with the Saints, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.

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

John Fialka: Seeing Around Corners

By John Fialka

Americans today who weren’t around during the 1950s and 1960s might not recognize the world many older Catholics grew up in. Many of the oldsters, like me, were educated in the parochial school system. At its peak, in 1968, it enrolled one out of every ten American students.

It was the nation’s largest private school system, largely built and run by orders of Catholic sisters. There were 179,974 of them in 1968, an all-time high. Most of them were teachers. Many of the rest were running the largest nonprofit hospital system in the country, a system that nuns largely organized, financed and built.

Basically, what these women did – along with orders of brothers also involved in this work – was to educate some of America’s poorest and least prepared immigrants. Many Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans were launched into America’s middle class by this system, no mean feat in a nation where arriving Catholics often encountered prejudice.

So what did the nuns mean to young Catholics? In my school, in a working class neighborhood of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, we took them for granted. They were always there, planted in front of our classrooms. They dressed us up in white cassocks on May Day for a candle-lit procession to sing Latin hymns in praise of the Blessed Virgin.

A close observer, however, would see little boys pouring hot candle wax on each other’s arms. These experiments ended with nuns flitting in and out of our ranks to pull selected ears. The proximity of their convent next to the school and their isolation from the rest of the business of the community made them close observers.

In that convent retired nuns who had taught our parents were advising our teachers. When we were little, we were sure our teachers could see around corners. In a way, they could.

By high school it was not cool to say you admired nuns, though many of us secretly did. Some of the girls might still say that, but for boys it was better to smoke cigarettes, drink beer, shoot pool and make these women into cartoons. They had succeeded by whacking students with rulers, we would say. Much closer to the truth was that these women loved us and sacrificed much to make sure that we used the quiet of the Catholic classroom to learn.

From that class half of us went on to finish college. Most of us married for life, raised strong families and moved to jobs all over the U.S. and overseas. So we weren’t surprised in the 1980s when sociologists and educators discovered the “Catholic School effect.” They found that once the statistical bias of having high income-earning parents was removed, Catholic high school sophomores were the nation’s top academic performers.

They also found the achievement gap between white students and minorities in Catholic schools was narrower than in public schools. More homework got done and there were fewer absences and dropouts.

Most of the women who performed this miracle are gone or in retirement. A steep drop in the recruitment of younger sisters (who cared for the older ones), insufficient retirement funds, soaring health costs and declining income of religious orders has created an ominous financial gap. Since 1988 the Bishops’ annual collection for the Retirement Fund for Religious has raised $671 million to help retired religious.

For each of the last three years the cost of caring for elderly religious has been over $1 billion. If the nuns were still teaching us, they would say sit up straight, keep your feet under your desk and do the math. That would help Catholics see around this corner. We need to give more to make sure our religious retire with what they struggled so hard to give us: a sense of dignity.

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John Fialka, as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, broke the story of the retirement shortfall for religious orders on May 19, 1986. He later wrote “Sisters; Catholic nuns and the Making of America” (St. Martin’s Press, 2004). After retiring from the Journal in 2008, he became editor of ClimateWire, an internet newsletter about climate change.

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

Tweet the Pope

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

With the push of a button, I sent a tweet with #AskPontifex to the pope at @Pontifex, the new Twitter account the Vatican set up for Pope Benedict XVI. It’s nice to go straight to the top. Kudos to the pope who saw that even at 85 years of age, he has to engage in social media.

Pope Benedict speaks many languages, his native German, of course, and Italian, French, English and other tongues too. But the most important language for him may be Digital, the one that reaches every nation in the world.

On Twitter, Pope Benedict will send messages in eight languages: English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, French, Arabic and Italian. His tweets debut December 12, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who in an apparition startled the peasant Juan Diego by speaking to him instead of higher ups in mid-16th century Mexico.

When Pope Benedict joins Twitter, he endorses a community that exists on the Web, where people can even discuss matters of the soul. Its anonymity can free people to share deep concerns. It is not always pretty, of course. Recently, for example, on the USCCB Facebook page people debated whether or not there’s a religious obligation to help the poor. Arguments over such a mandate can be a healthy, though sometimes raucous religious exercise. Undoubtedly Pope Benedict will encounter cynicism, but he can handle that. He knows it is important to engage, even at personal cost.

The pope’s web leadership might encourage bishops and others to follow suit. This will be no small accomplishment. Resistance comes from more than the fact that social media is time consuming. It comes from the fact that blogging and the like defy what many have been taught. Priests and bishops, for example, learned early on: “it’s about the message, not you.” Now comes a communications vehicle where they are expected to get more personal. It jars them.

Church leaders also revel in finely nuanced theology. Tweets of 140 characters preclude nuancing. Some who think length equals profundity might pause at truths such as “God loves you,”  “Jesus died for you” and “I am with you always.” They’re short on words, deep in meaning and fit Twitter’s length restrictions.

Some fear the pope and other leaders might lose some mystique when they tweet with the hoi polloi. Yet plain speaking is not irreverent and being with the masses is not beneath a religious leader. After all, God did become man. Scripture proves simple speech can be holy. Think “Let there be light” at creation and Mary’s “Let it be done unto me according to thy word” at the Annunciation. Engaging the crowd means being with God’s children, such as the multitude Jesus addressed on the mountainside.

Social media reaches billions. Its brevity makes it accessible. It’s via the Internet, a new place people gather and that sometimes needs to be redeemed. It is interactive as it beckons web users to engage another, perhaps the antidote to the isolation many people feel today. As he wades into social media waters, the pope will encounter a sometimes cynical cyber-world, but by using Twitter with sincerity, he can elevate the medium. Some may doubt the wisdom of this papal venture, but fear has never stopped Christians from sharing their message through all available means.

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Editor's Note: Got a question for Pope Benedict XVI on Twitter? Use the hashtag #askpontifex to @Pontifex.

 

Five things to remember on Dec. 5

1. Lots of old Christmas movies on TV this season. Among them are apt to be such favorites as It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas and Polar Express. Check out reviews of 20 Christmas movies from the USCCB Office for Film and Broadcasting.

2. Stock up on treats for the Feast of St. Nicholas, celebrated Dec. 6. One custom is for children to leave their shoes outside their bedroom door before they go to sleep on Dec. 5 and to awaken the next morning to find a sweet surprise in their shoes. The generosity of the real St. Nicholas, a fourth century bishop, known for his charity, makes him the precursor of Santa Claus.

 

3. The Annual Retirement Fund for Religious collection is Dec. 8-9 in parishes nationwide. The latest blog post on the USCCB site muses on the nuns who formed me from childhood onwards.

 

4. Holiday time has many men shopping for engagement rings. In the excitement of getting ready for marriage, attending a marriage preparation program can seem like just one more tedious item on a couple’s pre-wedding checklist but it is one of the most important. The Catholic Church requires couples to undergo marriage preparation, and research shows the value of this requirement. The skills and behaviors learned in marriage prep classes have a shelf life well beyond the crucial first years of a marriage.

 

5. God loves you.