Sunrise over Reading shielded in the clouds.

JESUIT CENTER PLAYS HOST TO CYO CROSS COUNTRY MEET

 At the sound of the gun 3rd and 4th graders begin their heat.

Fortunately the sun made an appearance and graced the second annual CYO Cross Country tournament held Sunday afternoon on our rolling hills, a suitable setting for obvious reasons.   

Five separate groups of runners based on their ages ran separate races.   Even K kids ran in a shortened version of the course while the 7th and 8th graders ran in the longer 2 mile course.  Watching the thin line of weightless boys and girls run up the hill from Our Lady's Grotto down among the trees led me to think of the many athletic uses to which the property could be dedicated!

The Jesuit Center cloister looking out on a rainy Saturday (not to mention Tues through Friday!)   But this Sunday morning is brighter and a sunny week ahead is in the forecast.

Today I am preaching about marriage.   There is a coincidence between the regular Sunday readings on marriage and the opening in Rome today of the Bishops' Synod on Families.

Sunday, October 4,   Mark 10  2-16  Marriage and Divorce

Perhaps the Spirit or even the Bishops planned that today’s particular readings would be part of the liturgy on the very day of the opening of the Synod of Bishops that is discussing family life.    That day is today in Rome.    In Rome they read as we do from Genesis.  Genesis reveals that the possibility of mutual relationships between male and female completes God’s creation of the human person.   Not only that but where possible the male-female relationship includes the responsibility of procreation.   In Rome, too, they read as we do from the gospel of Mark about Jesus’ understanding of the permanent nature of marriage.

Pope Francis while in Philadelphia, greatly inspired by testimony from family members about their human relationships, talked to all of us family members, and all of us belong to families of one kind or another.  He talked about love for one another, about struggles in prayer and in service. He called the family a “domestic church” and encouraged family members to engage in those countless small acts of kindness that are the signs of love that imitate the generosity of God.

The meeting starting today in Rome will be addressing chiefly all of the pastoral issues related to the fundamental Catholic doctrine expressed clearly by Pope Francis about the permanence of marriage.   This doctrine is an ideal that flies in the face of so much that happens in human life but Jesus acknowledges that any historic gestures supporting the notion of impermanence are related to “hardness of heart”.   He also elevates the permanence of marriage as a sign of the permanence of God’s covenant with God’s chosen people.   I have among so many of my friends men and women who have committed themselves to such permanence despite so many obstacles.  I consider them to be living a miracle, particularly those who have flourished in their relationship by their constant care of the next generations, whether those in next generations are of their own families or others.

But the Pope and the Synod in its realism knows that people make mistakes and sinful mistakes, too.   The Pope talks of young people poorly prepared for a permanent life-long relationship.  He talks of the lack of free choice in so many ways and he understands that the appearance of marriage between a man and a woman does not always mean a true marriage.  In such cases he wants to make the process of recognizing the nullity of such marriages a more merciful process.   Surely the Synod will affirm a process that requires less stress and time.  

The hardness of heart about which Jesus speaks in the gospel of Mark ensnares us sinful human beings in a great variety of ways, not simply in our desire for divorce.   Here Jesus is speaking of the hardness of heart not open to growing through the difficulties so frequent in the marital relationship, a growing that can yield to great graces and understanding.   But there are other kinds of hardness of heart such as one in my own family history.   In my Irish grandmother’s family, her sister Margaret was the black sheep.   Margaret ran off from the family with a married man, a neighbor from her own small Irish town.  Margaret shamed the family and was disowned; her name was never spoken to the next generation of the family; no attempt ever made to restore contact with her.  This was, I gather, in that culture a fairly standard version of hardness of heart.

In contrast I remember the softness in the heart of a Black Catholic family in North Philadelphia, whose husband and father died suddenly not long after abandoning his family and going to live with his mistress.   The family loved this man and saw that he was buried with love from the Catholic Church where the family regularly worshiped.

I have learned from this family to repeat often those famous words of Pope Francis:  who am I to judge?    And the corollary statement: whatever the need for judgements that such necessary judgements be made with mercy.   But we must acknowledge that we also have a further responsibility, that is, the responsibility to define characteristics for relationships, characteristics that are consistent with the revealed word of God and with the time-proven traditions of the Catholic Church in its judgement about sacramental marriages and about non-sacramental marriages.  Moreover, whatever we think of civil unions of same sex couples I judge also that these characteristics are just as essential for them as well.   

I understand  these three characteristics as consistent with Catholic teaching. There must be

1)   the mutual love and support of both parties in the relationship,

2)   the commitment to permanence, and

3)   the support of the next generation, procreative when this is possible.   

Without these characteristics two individuals simply live together and tolerate to their peril a lack of direction and stability in their lives.

But to all those committed to these characteristics we pastoral people owe our prayers and support even when the juridical state of their relationship is in serious question or even non-existent within the Church. 

Yes, whatever our state in life it is difficult for all of us to maintain these characteristics.  But still when we and others fail we owe ourselves and others that mercy that belongs most completely to God. 

A view looking toward Reading, PA from my new home, the Jesuit Center at Wernersville, PA.   A sight very different from North Philadelphia!

I will see a lot of sunrises over those distant mountains in the years ahead.   I will be working with about eighteen Jesuits in various on-site retreat ministries and in the area with Church and community groups.   Philadelphia groups make the 70 mile trip  and enjoy the retreat atmosphere here and I look forward to seeing many of them.

Mass on Spring Garden Street

Photo of crowd from behind jumbotron (see figures in left second story window.)   All about a mile plus from the Parkway with no other connection to the Parkway crowd.

The Pope's picture on jumbotron in his reverent liturgical posture.

The main public event in Philly during the Papal visit took place with Mass in the presence of 850,000 people on the Parkway,  The back of the altar looked out at the Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.   And the front faced the Parkway with a view blocks away of Philadelphia's City Hall.    I was in the crowd with a group of young men and women, high school students in Jesuit schools from across North America .   We were stretched along the roadside barrier about midpoint in that view.   Before the Mass when the Popemobile moved past us, the Pope saw our signage and heard the chant "Colegio de Jesuitas" and he gave a clear shout out with a smile and a blessing.

Before the Mass started, I began walking the mile home into North Philly and to the Prep.    A few blocks away I passed a jumbotron in the middle of Spring Garden Street.   As I approached I heard the music of the Gloria and when I got within site saw a couple of thousand people attentive to the Papal Mass.   Two children sat with an adult on a balcony overlooking the street scene dominated by this giant screen.   (And the Eagles game had not yet ended!).

Sculpture dedicated at Saint Joseph's University at the jubilee of the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document laying the groundwork for dialogue between Jews and Christians.

Earlier European depictions are of females,  the Jewish figure diminished and saddened while the Christian figure exults.   Here are two female figures each exploring  and in dialogue about their covenants with a common God.

Both Pope Francis and his friend, Rabbi Skorka (center of photo) of Buenos Aires, blessed the sculpture this weekend.

The first prayer and unveiling of the sculpture took place on Friday before the Papal visit but the Pope himself on Sunday prayed at the sculpture and blessed it.    A surprise visit to the SJU campus but word leaked out some two hours before he arrived and a few hundred students gathered nearby and watched from the dorm windows.   See the SJU web site for more.  I missed the Papal blessing.

These two photos represent my Saturday morning of the Papal visit to Philadelphia.   About ten clerics stand between me and the Pope in the Cathedral.  Pope Francis came to celebrate Mass for local clergy, religious and lay people.    He looked a little tired and did not seem to have the lightness of spirit that he displayed earlier in his visit to the United States.  (At Independence Hall he seemed to have recovered some of the spirit that he had shown elsewhere.)  Later I found out that the Pope is very reverent at liturgies and does not entertain spontaneity or lightness of spirit in the liturgical forum.

The Mass was partially in Latin and the ceremonies were elaborate.

I tried to go in person to see the Gesu School children perform at Logan Circle very near the Cathedral but security issues were daunting.   So after Mass I made my way home on foot.   But lo, when I got to 16th and Spring Garden, the Gesu dancers were being announced on the jumbotron.  So I got to see them up close if not personal.   They danced the Argentinian tango and then broke out into the Philly jitterbug well known through American Bandstand.   A crowd going by broke into cheers when the dancing boys did their leap frog over one another.