Pope Francis and the Anti-Hero Heroes of Today

 

Pope Francis’ citing Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton in his speech to Congress was a red flag to the Katholic Krazies.  Both Day and Merton, though they really represent the Church before Vatican II in as that the greater part of their work was done in the years prior to the Council, are icons of Contemporary Catholicism.     

The Pope cited Thomas Merton for his openness to dialogue and the reconciliation to which dialogue can lead.  Merton (1915-1968) was a convert to Catholicism while in graduate school at Columbia University and he later entered the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky.  Merton’s literary background put him in a unique position in the Abbey as he was commissioned to write several books introducing the Cistercian tradition to the American public.  Merton was also cast into a vital role in the Abbey as Master of Novices which mean that it was his task to oversee the instruction of the young monks in the first six or so years of their monastic journey.  During this time he immersed himself in the monastic tradition going back before Benedict to Cassian and the Desert Fathers.  As he explored the world of mysticism he began to notice similarities between the ancient traditions of the Desert Fathers with spiritualties in other religious traditions, most notably Zen Buddhism. In the last few years of his life, Merton began writing on this subject but while his exposure to Zen (in particular) and other Eastern traditions enriched his spiritual growth he remained orthodox in his Catholic faith and a priest in good standing. 

Merton’s contemplative journey has had a huge impact on many people over the years.  Despite the monastic setting in which he lived, tens or even hundreds, of thousands of Catholics and other Christians have learned from him how to practice a much deeper life of prayer that was typical of the Catholic laity (or even most Religious) in the those golden days of yore to which the neo-trads always harken as an alleged “golden age” of the faith.  Meditation has become a common practice among Catholic laity and Merton’s practical guides to a contemplative life have channeled out from his Cistercian cloister through the Benedictines, Carmelites, Augustinians and other apostolic communities to the laity.  Indeed through the influence of Merton, it is often more likely to find a deep spiritual life lived by laity than by many Religious or priests and this is a most unfortunate situation.  Fellow Cistercian Thomas Keating and Franciscan friar Richard Rohr have done much to advance Merton’s work in providing down to earth spiritual guidance rooted in the monastic heritage but suited to people “in the real world.” 

Merton did have a final crisis in his life that was very significant.  During a hospitalization two years before he died, he fell in love with a student Nurse.  The relationship is complex and it is uncertain whether or not and to what extent Merton was faithful to his vows.  In the end, however, he did recommit himself to the monastic life though, despite the admonition of his abbot, he never broke contact with the nurse.  Merton had also fathered an illegitimate child in his youth before his conversion.  Merton devotees seem to be able to take his faults in their stride; those who see Merton as negative influence stress his failings. 

What has set the krazies off about Merton is his commitment to dialogue and his conviction that dialogue with those who differ from us can enrich our own understanding of the Truth.  To those who have an absolutist view of the universe this is a very threatening concept.  They believe there since we possess all Truth in itself we can learn nothing—ours is but to impart the truth to others which is not dialogic but didactic.  Dialogue can lead to change and change is threatening to them. 

Merton’s exploration of mysticism also gave him a passion for social justice.  His was an early voice both for Civil Rights and against the War in Vietnam.  Merton understood that a contemplative life changes us, makes us see the world through God’s eyes, and recognize the fundamental evil of human-caused suffering whether it be poverty, war, discrimination, prejudice, sexism, religious hatred or other source of evil.  But it was Dorothy Day that Pope Francis cited as his model for the Church’s engagement with contemporary social issues.

Day’s life was as complex as Merton’s.  Like Merton, Day was a convert to the Church after a fairly raucous and even libertine life.  While she had always been a nominal Christian and even, for a while, a devout Episcopalian, her twenties were caught up in a somewhat bohemian existence.  She became pregnant by one love and terminated the pregnancy with an abortion.  She became—to her surprise (she had thought she was sterile after her abortion)—pregnant by a second lover and bore the child.  Motherhood changed her radically and her concern for her daughter made Day bring her life more sharply into focus.  Her politics had always been radical.  From the beginning her views were shaped by a Christian perspective on distributive justice, but in her relative naïveté this led to strong ties to the American Communist party.  She also was involved in Women’s Suffrage and had been arrested at the White House during the Wilson Administration for demonstrating for the right of women to vote.  Upon her conversion to Catholicism she moved away from Communism to the principles of Distributive Justice as were being articulated at the time by Pius XI as an alternative to both Marxism and uncontrolled market capitalism.  She came under the influence of Peter Maurin, a French immigrant well steeped in the Fathers of the Church and Catholic Theology who articulated a clear vision for what Catholics hold to constitute a just society.  Distributive justice of course demands an equitable distribution of wealth and this appears to many—both then and today—as socialism.  Day was no arm-chair radical but a very hands on practioner.  She and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement and began publishing its newspaper, The Catholic Worker.  The movement continues today, with the Church’s blessing, but on the extreme left of contemporary Catholicism.  Day herself has been proposed for the canonization process and has been given the title “Servant of God” in recognition of that status.  She died in 1980.

Dorothy Day, like Merton, is a threatening figure to the krazies because she isn’t a cookie-cutter Catholic.  Their being cited by the Pope as examples of American (and in this case Catholic) virtues signals a real re-ordering in our moral hierarchy.  No longer is righteousness limited to the field of sexual propriety but deeper values are permitted to transcend the superficial categories which we cathari, perfecti, pure ones, self-righteous have constructed to demonstrate our moral superiority.  This Pope is turning things upside down and if you don’t have a strong sense of adventure the ride is becoming frightening.  

By George 3

George Weigel

Let me come back to George Weigel’s book Evangelical Catholicism.  I had begun to discuss this in a number of earlier entries (November 19, 20, and 22^nd 2013). To recap, Weigel credits contemporary Catholicism as finding its roots in the vision of Pope Leo XIII, a pope who very much—in his day—engaged the (then) modern world and its questions and issues.  And, appropriate to his ministry, Leo brought the rich theological heritage of our Catholic faith into the dialogue.  Leo is probably best remembered for his startling encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which for its day was every bit as “radical” as the recent papal letter, Evangelii Gaudium.  I think Weigel fudges his history a bit—or rather paints the picture with strokes so broad as to be inaccurate in some details—but I think he is on to something in his thesis.  (My objections would center mostly in that I don’t see Pius X and his pontificate as standing in continuity with Leo (his predecessor) or with Benedict XV and Pius XI, his successors.  But I am willing to let the point pass.)   I am very much taken, however, by Weigel’s vision of an Evangelical Catholicism that anchors Catholic life in taking the Word of God to bear in our daily lives and nourishing ourselves by fully participating in the sacramental life of the Church.  Indeed, I think it was this immersion in Word and Sacrament that gave us the Second Vatican Council and especially its Liturgy.  The spiritual energy of places like Maria Laach and Beuron Abbey, Saint Séverin in Paris and Combermere in Ontario, the witness of people like Edith Stein and Dorothy Day and the Dominican friar Jacques Loew, and the scholarship of Josef Jungmann, Augustin Bea, and Marie-Dominique Chenu all reflect this spirituality of Word and Sacrament and all provided the resources from which the Council Fathers were able to imagine a new and renewed Church  that could project in our day and in our world the enthusiasm with which the Apostles propagated the Gospel in theirs. 
At the same time that this tremendous energy was flooding the Church, the world around the Church—or at least the European and American worlds—were falling into a post-Christian culture that would present the Church with an incredible challenge but one which we could meet strengthened by these resources of revived engagement with the Word of God and Sacramental Life.  The problems that prompted Leo to write Rerum Novarum—the sordid view of the Robber Baron Capitalists that the human person is no more than a tool to be used to make money—threated industrial societies with the grossest dehumanization.  Nihilism, the cynical philosophical system that swept away any idea of a moral compass by which the industrialists, the wealthy classes, and the State should be governed in their relationship with the masses, devoured whatever soul remained in Western society after the rise of secularism consequent to the “Enlightenment” and the Revolution it spawned.  The emergence of Leninism/Stalinism in Russia and its devaluation of the human individual in favor of the State as well as the rise of National Socialism with its dehumanization of the individual and its repugnant racial ideology were the results of this collapse of humanistic thought. 
In the face of this implosion of civilization, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular had the resources to provide an alternative view in which the human person retained his or her worth as a being and not dependent on the usefulness of the individual  to society or to the state.  Catholic philosophers such as Paul Claudel, Etienne Gilson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,  and Gabriel Marcel presented philosophies in which the human person, far from being a tool of the State or having no intrinsic value, is the raison d’etre of being, the very center of existence for whose sake and good interest society exists. 
The philosophic debate is not over.  In the post-World War II period, secularism has espoused and advanced a philosophy in which there is no concept of the common good but in which ethics are guided by self-interest of the individual.  The impact of Ayn Rand, the doyenne of this school of radical self-interest, has transformed American society (and not, to my mind, for the better.)   American society today would seem to recognize no good that trumps the self-interest of the individual.  We are left with a “trickle-down economics” that sees the gap between a rich minority and an ever-poorer and growing majority increasing by the year. In 2009, the average salary of a CEO was 263 times that of the average American worker, a situation every bit as evil as that against which Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum.  Americans are obsessed with alleged personal rights whether it is the right to possess firearms or the right to have an abortion.  We find our chief form of entertainment in the vicarious disposal of human life through media ranging from movies through television to video games for youth and consider this to be our “right.”  We perceive pornography—whether sexual or violence—to be a “victimless crime.”  The family is in shreds because “I don’t want to be married anymore” is sufficient cause—again the triumph of the selfish individual—to overturn commitments of marriage and parenthood.  Both “the left” and “the right” have bought into this heresy of “it’s all about me and my happiness.”
The antidote to this moral chaos is Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism.  It is a revived commitment to a scriptural spirituality in which, as one medieval spiritual text explains:  Let the Sword of the Spirit, that is the Word of God, dwell in your minds and in your hearts that all that you do may be done in the Word of the Lord. What has been the genius of evangelical voices throughout the history of Christianity has been this call to “hear the Word of God and put it into practice.” (cf Luke 11:28).  
The error that I see Weigel making is not in his vision of Evangelical Christianity but in his understanding of how it is to be presented.  He sees it as a bastion against the philosophical/moral chaos of post-modern society.  He wants Christians to use their clout to contain and suppress this modern heresy of an “ethics” of self-interest.  He falls into the same error our bishops have fallen into these past thirty some years since Roe vs. Wade: change laws and everything will be alright.    But if Weigel knew the scriptures himself he would know that the mission God gave to the prophets and Jesus gave to his disciples is to change hearts.  It is a far more challenging mission to change hearts than to change laws, but it is the only path that will bring success.  I am all in favor of Evangelical Catholicism but it must be, well, evangelical—you know—evangelizing. 
I remember thirty years ago I was part of a committee a young priest was trying for form in our parish.  It was an evangelism committee—an attempt to evangelize our neighborhood in which many had fallen away from the faith and even more had never had it.  At the end of the organizational meeting a wise old nun (yes, an LCWR nun) who had served as novice mistress in her community observed: “ok, fine, but who will evangelize us so that we can go and evangelize the neighborhood?”  Yes, who will evangelize us?  I think Weigel makes an important contribution to this task but he needs to go back and re-read those scriptures. 

The Council and the Move to the Left

Archbishop Thomas Toolen of

Mobile Alabama who forbad

his clergy to participate in Civil

Rights Demonstratons

I want to give another example of where the Council brought about a change of direction in the Church—here perhaps more of what Pope Benedict would call “reform” rather than “rupture” but a change none the less.  Robert Blair Kaiser writes in his Tablet article to which I have referred in my last two posts:  

Before the Council, we thought we were miserable sinners when we were being nothing but human. After the Council, we had a new view of ourselves. We learned to put a greater importance on finding and following Jesus as 'the way' (as opposed to what we said in the Creed. It didn't matter so much what we said. What mattered was what we did: helping to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and find shelter for the homeless. That's what made us followers of Jesus. …. Before the Council, we identified 'salvation' as 'getting to heaven.' After the Council, we knew that we had a duty to bring justice and peace to the world in our own contemporary society, understanding in a new way the words that Jesus gave us when he taught us to pray, 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' By the end, among the most influential figures at the Council, we encountered two humble souls, one a woman, Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who wasn't allowed to speak to the assembled bishops at Vatican II (no woman was), and a bird-like figure, Dom Helder Camara, the archbishop of Recife, in Brazil. Both of them went around Rome telling individual bishops and those who were putting together the Council's crowning document, Gaudium et Spes: please don't forget the poor.

The Council did not forget the poor, and the statement out of Rome in October 2011 allying the Church with the world's have-nots only proves that even the current powers-that-be in the Church (still so unaccountable in so many other ways) get it. I will quote Gaudium et Spes: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

The Council radically reshaped what we meant by “sin.”  Before the Council sin meant—to the Catholic-in-the-pews a personal violation of the Church’s moral code.  While this  most frequently fell into the category of a sexual transgression, there were other types of sin possible ranging from missing Mass on Sundays or Holy Days to eating meat on a day of abstinence to stealing from one’s employer to lying under oath.   The pivotal element was, however, that it was a personal violation of the moral code.   There was no awareness—to the ordinary Catholic—of the social dimension of sin.  While various popes such as Leo XIII and Pius XI had written encyclical letters talking of the rights of labor and the obligations of employers towards their employees, connections were not being made in the pulpit or confessional between such magisterial teaching and moral culpability.  Of course, in the first half of the twentieth century, as in the century before, most people in a position to exploit their employees were in the Protestant ascendancy in this country and Catholics were far more likely to be sinned against than sinning when it came to the sins outlined in the economic theories of the magisterium.  But the Church’s hands were not entirely clean.  Such prelates as Cardinal O’Connell of Boston and Archbishop Corrigan of New York, being Paddies of the most shameless social-climbing sort,  had always allied themselves with the Protestant ascendancy and its economic interests.  And of course Cardinal Spellman in 1949 sent his seminarians to dig graves to break a strike by cemetery workers in Archdiocese of New York graveyards—and was proud of it. 

Moreover, while the Church did have—at least on paper—a credible theology of defending the rights of workers, there were other social sins rarely spoken of and even more rarely condemned.  Racism was not only rarely denounced from the pulpit but the Catholic Church had long supported policies of segregation and did not accept African-American candidates for the priesthood until the ordination of Father Augustus Tolton in 1886 and such vocations remained rare until the mid-twentieth century.  Tolton himself had to be sent to Rome for his studies as no American seminary would have him as a student.  (In telling this story I have omitted the saga of the Healy brothers who—despite their slave mother managed to be accepted and treated as whites—one becoming a bishop, a second a Vicar General of the Boston Archdiocese, and a third, president of Georgetown University.  See entry for February 14, 2011.)  Cardinal Glennon of Saint Louis blocked the integration of Webster College and tried to do the same with Jesuit Saint Louis University.  Archbishop Toolen of Mobile forbade his priests to take part in any civil-rights demonstrations and won the support of other bishops who initially forbad their priests to travel to Alabama to be part of the marches led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Cardinal McIntyre suspended priests and expelled from this Archdiocese priests and religious who preached or spoke on civil rights.  (See entries for August 31 and September 1, 2011).
All this changed with the Second Vatican Council.  Catholics have become very much aware of the social dimension of sin and consequently have moved from being a conservative force in American society to a force for social change and liberation.  This fits the model of a “hermeneutic of reform” more than a “hermeneutic of rupture” as the Ecumenical and Interfaith issues addressed in yesterday’s posting.  However it is probably one of the reasons that some influential members of the hierarchy are so anxious to “turn back” the Council and the Church’s record of social progress during the last 50 years. 

Of Catholics, Socialism, May Day, and Catholic Workers

I had missed in the Sunday Times the editorials by Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof supporting the nuns of LCWR in their Vatican-initiated struggle.   I never got to the editorial page Sunday; fortunately while having dinner with friends Sunday evening the subject came up and the newspaper was produced and the essays read.  I would encourage you to go on line and read them too.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/kristof-we-are-all-nuns.html?_r=1 (Kristof) and http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/dowd-bishops-play-church-queens-as-pawns.html?ref=maureendowd (Maureen Dowd).  But that is not what I want to write about today.  The article I did catch in the Times celebrates the 79 years of the Catholic Worker Movement led by Servant of God, Dorothy Day.  The “Servant of God” title comes from her cause for sainthood—something she never wanted and actively disdained—having been introduced into the Catholic Church.

      Day is a most improbable saint—which is how she saw herself.  It is not that she wasn’t a holy woman but more that her holiness doesn’t easily fit into the institutional packaging of John Paul II/Benedict XVI Catholicism.  If today’s Vatican has issues with today’s good nuns, I can’t imagine how it would cope with Dorothy Day.  

       Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was born into a middle class WASP family with very little religious interest.  Her father was a journalist—as she herself would later become.  While still in her teens she would be reading socialist and communist authors.  (There is a difference between socialism and communism, something of which many semi-literates of the modern right seem to be ignorant.  That is not to cushion Dorothy’s views—Day would move far to the left of main-stream socialism even in her Catholic years.)   Returning to New York before she was twenty, she wrote for a number of socialist newspapers and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘Wobblies.’)  That wasn’t the worst of it; this was the time of World War I and Day was an ardent pacifist as well as working for women’s suffrage. 

       Day’s family was nominally Episcopalian but rarely attended Church. nevertheless, Dorothy herself showed a curious interest in religion from an early age.  She was fascinated by the bible and while still a young girl began attending Episcopalian services and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church.  What she loved and what drew her was the liturgy.  She was not one to buy the party line, however, however, and although she attended Church she considered herself an agnostic.  In her New York years she became increasingly bohemian in her lifestyle entering into a common law marriage and having at least one abortion.  Her partner, Forster Batterham, was, like her, a social activist, but he was also a scientist and had an intemperate contempt for anything religious.  Though deeply in love with Batterham, Dorothy found herself drawn to religious practice.  As so many of the immigrant poor whose cause she championed were Catholic, she found herself attending Mass when she wanted to attend church.  She remembered the psalms and canticle from the Episcopal liturgy of her younger days and found herself praying them again.  She was given a rosary and began to say it.  Her spiritual growth put her at odds with Batterham and the relationship become somewhat on-again, off-again.  When she became pregnant and refused to have another abortion, Batterham left her,  He tried to come back after the birth of their daughter, but Dorothy refused him. 

       Dorothy met a Sister of Charity (one of the groups now affiliated with LCWR), Sister Aloysius, on the street and spontaneously asked about how to go about having the child baptized.  Sister Aloysius arranged for the baptism (see, even in those days the Charities were radical) and Dorothy named her daughter Tamara Teresa.  Dorothy had read the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—at that time the spiritual best-seller of the day—while in the maternity hospital and this increased her bond with the Catholic Church.  Dorothy herself was received into the Catholic Church in December the following year (1927). 

      In 1932 Dorothy met Peter Maurin, a vagabond French immigrant who had briefly been a de la Salle Christian Brother.  Maurin was without much formal education but had a brilliant mind and was widely read.  He knew the Fathers of the Church, the papal encyclicals of the previous half-century, and had a natural bent for sociology.  He was even more radical than Dorothy.  Maurin also had a deep spirituality very much modeled on the radical vision of Saint Francis of Assisi who had renounced the comfortable life-style of his family to live among the poor as one of them in order to preach the Gospel with credibility.  Day and Maurin began publishing a penny-newspaper, The Catholic Worker, 79 years ago today, May 1, 1933.  Building on the foundation of papal social teaching and Christian pacificism they opened the first Catholic Worker House, a “house of hospitality,” a voluntary community  of Catholics who lived in poverty welcoming the poor to share what little they themselves had.  By 1941 and the outbreak of World War II, there were over thirty of these communities across the United States.  Today there are several hundred in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.  

      Day became a Benedictine oblate—that is a lay affiliate of the Benedictine Order of monks and nuns and this anchored her spirituality in an ancient tradition.  In many ways the Benedictine charism is stamped into the identity of the Catholic Worker Houses.  Her radical ideas—the renunciation of private property and advocacy of what might be called a Catholic socialism, her pacifism, and her independence of Church authority made her highly suspect in many Catholic circles of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, but the Second Vatican Council vindicated her vision of what the Church is called to be.  Cardinal Spellman had tried to force her to drop the word “Catholic” from her newspaper and movement since they were not under ecclesiastical supervision.  (Today, I must admit, I would probably back Spellman on this issue and I guess I need to give this some thought when I say that Michael Voris should be forced to drop the word “Catholic” form his internet-television project.  Blades have to cut both ways.  At the end of the day, I think Voris’ claims of Catholicity forces me to side with Spellman.)  However, Paul VI invited her to be among the lay observers for the final session of Vatican II in the autumn of 1965. 

      Day’s final years were a time of recognition for her prophetic words and action in the Church.  Ironically, fifty years ago she was far to the left of these “radical nuns” of LCWR yet the Church came ‘round and the Gospel won out.  It will win out again.  The Holy Spirit always has to swim against the current when She is forced to deal with Church bureaucracy but in the end God Triumphs and men surrender. 

     Dorothy Day died in 1980 in New York City and Cardinal Cooke introduced her cause for beatification in 1983.  She had always declared that she did not want to be “trivialized” by being made a saint.  And she was much better in flesh and blood on the streets with the poor and she could ever be in plaster in a darkened nook of some suburban church.   

Voices Past and Present

Bishop John Carroll, the first United States

Bishop and a model for bishops who can
think "outside the box" to effectively

evangelize in new and uncertain situations

I am on the road this weekend giving a workshop in the History of the Church in the United States and don’t have access to my library so  let’s do a divergence from our saga of the building of Saint Peter’s.  I had dinner the other evening with a group of seminarians—several Catholic and several Protestant.  Each was asked to introduce himself or herself and say something about their experience in seminary and how they realized their vocation.  One young man, an Episcopalian Seminarian from the (Episcopal) Diocese of South Carolina,  mentioned in his introduction that his bishop had identified him for “church planting and evangelization.”  “Church planting” is the process of establishing a new congregation in an area where there is no existing congregation of the particular denomination that is sponsoring the mission.  We Catholics begin plenty of new parishes—especially in the south and the west of the United States where the Catholic Church is growing;  not so much in the north-east and upper mid-west where the there are often more churches than are needed and we find parishes being closed or  amalgamated with other parishes.  But we Catholics don’t usually engage in “church planting.”  We simply divide the existing parish or parishes and split off a new parish.  Church planting is something different.  It really requires beginning a new parish or congregation “from scratch.” 
     What impressed me in this conversation with this seminarian is not that he is being prepared for this challenging and creative mission.  What impressed me is that his bishop is thinking so creatively about how to make the best use of his present and future clergy.  The bishop is “thinking outside the box,” seeing possibilities that do not yet exist.  There was a time in the history of the American Church when our bishops had that sort of creative leadership.   One of the seminarians present at the dinner, a Catholic, is a recent immigrant from Germany.  He asked a question about the “chapter” providing guidance for the bishop.  The other Americans, at least the Catholics in the group, all looked at him blankly.  “Chapter?” they asked, “what is a chapter?”  He was surprised when I explained that we don’t have chapters in the American Church.  The Chapter is composed of the canons of the cathedral and they have certain rights and duties in the election of the bishop and in advising the bishop in his ministry.  Chapters are—had have been for fifteen hundred years—standard operating procedure in European dioceses.  But when the American hierarchy was established with John Carroll’s appointment in 1790,  Carroll told Rome that chapters were not practicable in the United States.  We could not afford to tie up seven or eight priests to serve a cathedral when we needed every available priest to go out and “ride the circuit,” saying mass, hearing confessions, baptizing, blessing marriages, anointing the sick, preaching, and teaching catechism in the dozens and dozens of rural communities in Maryland, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and along the Canadian border where there were Catholic settlements.  Carroll and his priests found many creative ways of meeting the challenges of a small and minority denomination in a large and then rural society.    
      It would be interesting for today’s  American (Catholic) bishops  to think outside the box how to meet the pastoral challenges of an expanding Catholic population in some parts of the nation while it is shrinking in others.  It would be great to see them come up with some creative solutions to the vocation problem and how we can keep our Catholic communities tied to the Eucharist when we just don’t have enough priests to go around.  It would be wonderful to see them address the complex problems of a Church that is so heavily immigrant and non-English speaking before there are more Latino “evangelicals” than Catholics.  If only they could repair their moral credibility and speak with authority rather than from what has become a very shaky power.  This is the time to think creatively and try new solutions.  When you know the History of the Church, creativity is the Catholic response.  Just ask Augustine of Canterbury or Innocent III or Hildegarde of Bingen, or Bernard of Clairvaux, or Charles Borromeo, or Ignatius Loyola, or Mary Ward or Vincent DePaul, or Madeline Sophie Barat, or Catherine McAuley or Mary MacKillop.  These were creative thinkers.  We have been blessed in more recent times with people like Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, and Dom Helder Camara,  and Gino Baroni, and Joseph Bernardin, and  Monika Hellwig.  Today we have among us Elizabeth Johnson, and Richard Rohr, and Thomas Keating, and Joan Chittester, and Daniel Berrigan, and Tom Gumbleton, and Ronald Rohlheiser.  It isn’t that the Holy Spirit isn’t trying to open our eyes, our hearts, and our imagination to challenges of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.   It is just that the hearts of this people has grown dull.  Let us beg for the grace to listen to the Holy Spirit with the ear of our hearts.