Pat Marrin's blog

The White House has confirmed that President Obama will stop at the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero in the crypt of the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador during his upcoming three-nation visit to Latin America. The president will visit Chile, Brazil and El Salvador from March 19-23 to address mostly issues of economic and security cooperation.

The symbolic stop on Tuesday, March 22, at Romero’s grave on the eve of the national commemoration of his assassination in March of 1980, will serve as kind of solemn pause in the state visit to recall the 12-year civil war that devastated the small Central American country.

Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of Las Cruces N.M., who spoke at the Celebration conference on immigration in San Antonio, Jan. 12-14, is reportedly still recovering from a cold that developed into pneumonia and hospitalization when he got back to his diocese.

According to the Las Cruces Sun-News, Ramirez suffered some broken ribs from coughing, and this prolonged his recovery time. The story also quotes the bishop as saying he would be submitting his resignation Sept. 12, when he turns 75, as all bishops are required to do. Whether it is accepted and when is be up to Rome, he said.

If we needed a measure of Lisa Calderone-Stewart's devotion to her ministry with youth, it is astonishing that she has virtually provided her own salary and program support for the past 10 years through her fundraising and grant-writing efforts.

COLUMN

Check out Dominican Fr. Paul Philibert’s article in this week's issue of America magazine to learn why the new translation of the Roman Missal is catching flack for more than just bad grammar and antiquated English.

Philibert makes the case, respectfully but forcefully, that altering the words of consecration of the cup from "It will be shed for you and for all" to "It will be shed for you and for many" is a significant shift in emphasis from the accepted theological notion that Jesus died to save all people, not just a select number, however defined.

In the confusion of voices now vying for our attention, from our struggling economy (“Shopping is a patriotic act!”) and from a venomous Washington (“We cannot afford the future!”), another, barely audible voice is telling us the truth. It is the voice of Advent, and it is telling us that as a country we are in danger of losing our souls.

Carol LueberingCarol Luebering, prolific author on the topic of bereavement, death and dying and a longtime contributor to Celebration Publications, died Nov. 24, at her home in Cincinnati after a year-long battle with lung cancer. She was 75.

Luebering was an author and editor at St. Anthony Messenger Press when, in 1985, she began writing Sunday scriptural reflections for “The Caring Community,” a large-print pastoral newsletter for the hospitalized and homebound published by Celebration Publications, a subsidiary of the National Catholic Reporter Publishing Co.

Politics is often just talk, but at the end of the day it is the only way we produce and fund policy.

Immigration reform in this country has been held hostage to a number of other dynamics that go with politics and also start with the letter p: paralysis, posturing and polarization.

If you have childhood memories of travel, your mother probably figures prominently in the images you carry. Women take care of the details -- the packing, the food, first-aid -- and the needs of the children, physical and emotional.

Try to imagine a mother from Central America getting ready to set out with her daughter on the long journey to the border. Or the women waiting by the phone in Mexico for word that their husband and teenage son have made it across and are somewhere safe.

If we understand liturgy as how every culture shapes and affirms its basic assumptions, values and principles, we will begin to see something so pervasive that it has become invisible to us. Fish do not know they are in water, and we human beings do not normally think about culture or our point of view or as subjective but as simply “reality.”

But, in fact, the world we know is the product of both personal and communal conjuring, reinforced by protocols, symbols, rituals, common narratives and assumptions. This is liturgy.

And if you still can’t see it, think of weekend football, the costumes, colors, behaviors and expense in both time and money that people devote to reinforcing their fan identity and loyalty.

If Vatican II was to have been a revolution, it is hard to fathom what Pope John XXIII may have actually had in mind when, in a talk given in 1959 before the start of the council, he spoke of his dream of recovering the “church of the poor.” What if the church looked like the original circle of disciples around Jesus, without power or possessions, traveling light, preaching God’s justice and love, made up of outcasts, the weak, the exploited and crucified of history? It was an old man’s prayer, spoken from the throne of a 2,000 year-old institution held captive by its own temporal aggrandizement and claim of absolute authority, one of the last monarchies on earth.

How did over 1,000 Guatemalans ever get to Postville, Iowa? The answer is an eye-opener on the larger crisis going on because of poverty-driven global migration.

NCR readers will be seeing some full page ads in the paper for a conference on immigration in San Antonio next Jan 12-14. And if you are a regular to this Web site, you can't miss the colorful banner ad for the same conference at the top of this page. The conference is being hosted by Celebration magazine, the worship resource of the National Catholic Reporter. I am Celebration editor, and I will be writing here in the coming weeks to tell how this conference came about and why I think it could be crucial in the life of the church and for our country as we struggle with the question of immigration reform.

When Kansas newspaperman William Allen White sat down in 1896 to write his famous editorial about a provincial, stuffy and self-satisfied Midwestern state that couldn’t admit its prejudices, he was addressing his own neighbors and, of course, himself. The question was really, “What’s the matter with us?”

Likewise today, any loyal Catholic who dares to critique his or her church is in the same fix. Emotions are running so high, the only positions one can take on the sex abuse/cover up crisis are as either an enemy of the church engaging in a “vile defamation campaign” (L’Osservatore Romano) or as a staunch hear-no-evil defender of the church. It is better (and safer) to shut up and say nothing.

Holy Week: Accompanying El Salvador

On this Holy Saturday we enter the dark interval between death and promise. I am running out of words, a good sign, for we are approaching a threshold where logic ends and mystery begins. The Holy Week story was always there, written long before the events we will review in the grand sweep of salvation history recorded in the lectionary readings for tonight's solemn Easter Vigil.

Holy Week: Accompanying El Salvador

The real question for Good Friday is why Jesus, with victory over evil within his grasp and backed by absolute power, chose to be struck down in apparent defeat?

To our modern sensibilities, schooled by violent sports and the permanent war on terror to accept the axiom that "winning isn't everything -- It's the only thing," Jesus' death on Good Friday was a disaster.

Holy Week: Accompanying El Salvador

Gandhi once observed that if God were to come into our hungry world, it will surely be as bread.

Passover focuses the entire Jewish community on a meal, sustenance for the journey from slavery to freedom in a promised homeland where plentiful food would be the most tangible sign of God’s love. Wealth, someone else has said, is the power to eat, and this simple measure divides our world into nations so well fed they battle obesity and other nations where “food security” is the main preoccupation of the majority of the population. El Salvador is one of these.

Holy Week: Accompanying El Salvador

Jesus and his disciples have slipped back into the city after two days of rest in Bethany. The city is jammed with a quarter of a million pilgrims who have come home out of the diaspora to observe Passover. The Romans are nervous and soldiers are everywhere in full gear, leather body armor and helmets, with swords, metal tipped spears and truncheons at the ready.

Holy Week: Accompanying El Salvador

Holy Week began for Jesus with an anointing. At the house of Lazarus, Martha and Mary in Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem, the disciples threw a banquet to honor Jesus’ triumphal entry into the holy city at Passover time. Mary broke open a precious vial of aromatic oil and poured it over the feet of Jesus, wiping them with her hair. Her extravagant display of love turned his triumph toward the cross, and her insight that his beloved body must be prepared not for the throne but for the tomb infuriated the other disciples.

I had to admit to myself, the cold wind felt good against my face yesterday as I joined members from three churches in midtown Kansas City as they assembled on a grassy parkway for our annual ecumenical observance of Palm Sunday. The palm branch I received might have come from El Salvador, where, just 24 hours earlier, I had boarded an early flight home after an 11-day visit to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, murdered while saying Mass on March 24, 1980.

"This man welcomes sinners and eats with them." Luke 15:2

Church marquees, those lightbox structures displaying the sermon title or a scripture passage, are the first indication of what lies within. Who decides the wording gets to be the face of that church, the first impression.

I don't often see the sign above: "Come, eat with us sinners." There are lots of sermons preached about avoiding sin, but the logic of this includes avoiding sinners, meaning other people who are the occasions of sin. The real test of this is at the Communion table, where in some churches sinners must be turned away because Communion has come to be seen as a reward for being good, not as a means to forgiveness and healing. Good people fear contamination from bad people. If we have advanced in age and experience enough to know that good and bad come together in most of us, we are told to at least leave our failings in the confessional first, then come to Communion. Wash your hands, then come to the table.

"We, though many, are one ..." --Rom 12:5

I like the little stickers they give you at the polling place for showing up to vote. I wear mine all day, glad I got to participate.

The common good is one of the basic social justice principles, and I apply this to ballot issues that may not affect me directly but serve the general good. Retired seniors do this when they support school bonds or sales tax initiatives for projects they won't benefit from personally but that are good for the community.

Dorothy Day stopped by NCR yesterday. We go way back with Dorothy. From its start in 1964, NCR has emulated Day's commitment to journalism in and about the church in the world. The Catholic Worker newspaper, started in 1933, is still in business, selling for a penny, still promoting a radical approach to living the gospel through houses of hospitality, the works of mercy and by opposing all war as an underlying cause of poverty and social injustice. We sometimes ponder who has gotten the most coverage ("ink") from NCR over the years, Dorothy Day or Oscar Romero. Probably about even. In 2010, we will celebrate again these amazing exemplars of holiness and service on the 30th anniversary of their deaths in 1980.

One of the benefits of living next door to small children is that they have taken an interest in the toys we packed away long ago as our own son outgrew them. He is out of college now, so we are talking about ancient bins of plastic Legos and sets of Playmobile people who once inhabited little houses made of foamboard and lots of glue -- "projects" that threatened to take over whole rooms in our house. That first round of playing with him was a rediscovery of my own childhood, and now I get to do it again.

Mustard -- Matthew 13:31

My sister turned 58 last week. She said she had visited my blog to see if I had written something about her. She is my only sister. There are seven of us, all boys except Mary Ann, the last to arrive and survive in a steady succession of pregnancies that was my father's pride and joy but, as we know now, wore our mother to a frazzle from 1942 until 1952. Our father was very Irish, married at age 36 after taking care of his mother, and he was in a hurry to have a big family, actually a baseball team, he said. My sister would have been in right field, but the whole idea fell apart when my mother miscarried number eight and my dad realized that seven was plenty and that having a daughter was better than a sports metaphor.

Of all the lyrics that blend human love with religious longing, Leonard Cohen's 1967 song "Suzanne" is perhaps the most provocative and moving. It describes a relationship with a young woman that is both real and beyond real -- a spiritual journey in which the meaning of love transcends bodily union to achieve communion outside of time and space. In the second verse, the song shifts focus to the mystery of Jesus and describes our response to him with these words:

"And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind."

"In great fright they cried out to the Lord." Exodus 14:5-18

There is great danger in being put in a position from which there is no path of escape. In 1940, some 330,000 British and Allied troops were trapped by the advancing Germans in a pocket of beach called Dunkirk on the coast of France. With their backs to the sea, they would have been decimated had not every available boat come across the English Channel to ferry them to safety.

"Take my yoke upon you ..." Matt 11:25

A man sitting on the bench at the bus stop kept looking at me as though he knew me. I didn't recognize him, and things only got more confused when he asked me, "Do you know Bill?" He was about my age, looked a bit worn at the edges, but he was engaging and eager to talk. As our conversation continued on the bus, I learned that "Do you know Bill" was an AA catch phrase one alcoholic might use to identify another.

"Pharaoh's daughter came down to the river ..." Exodus 2

Women rule the world. One sign of it, if you need proof, is the invariable presence of a commanding woman seated at the front of the morning bus who holds court, chatting loudly with the bus driver and keeping the world together and on track with her regal observations. Coffee left standing all night is undrinkable. People do foolish things, and they always pay for it in the long run. What goes around comes around. Pay now or pay later. God help anyone who doesn't respect his mother.

"I am Joseph, your brother." Gen 45:5

There are many stories about the late Pope John XXIII, and some of them are true. Asked once how many people worked in the Vatican, the roly-poly pope answered, "About half of them." On another occasion, momentous for its significance, Pope John welcomed a visiting delegation of Jewish rabbis by quoting today's Lectionary reading from Genesis 44-50, introducing himself to his visitors with the words "I am Joseph, your brother."

"The Lord hears the cry of the poor." Ps 34

Two stories in today's Lectionary readings--Hagar and the child Ishmael expelled into the desert (Gen 21), and the two demoniacs who confront Jesus (Matt 8)-- might have come from the morning news.

Visit http://www.unhcr.org, the home page of the United Nations High Command for Refugees, to get information on the millions of displaced, stateless, asylum-seeking, emigrating peoples around the globe.

Google the phrase "homeless and mentally ill" to find scores of sites like http://anxietypanichealth.com and to read a 2008 report on "the estimated 744,000 people who are homeless on any given night, 40 to 45 percent of them with a serious mental illness. Most of these mentally ill people go untreated, and unable to work, live a hand-to-mouth existence out on the streets."

Or if you live in any large or mid-sized American city, read your local paper or call city hall and ask about conditions on the street in your home town.