Resurrecting Chicago

OMG! I haven’t posted here in months! And, how those months have changed us all because of the contagion of Covid-19! Who would have thunk it?

Abstaining from one another and fasting from the Holy Eucharist has become part of a new society filled with businesses that closed and will n

ever open again, like the fancy restaurant I saw in Westmont, IL with a big sign announcing “We are permanently closed.” People having leisure to take a walk with their families through the neighborhood. It looks like a good thing for families. But, lets just talk about Sunday church for a moment.

Churches are allowed to be open but with more or less 25% capacity congregations with non-pods sitting six feet from one another with masks hiding their identities and emotions.

The sign reads “Closed Covid 19.” Where are our roads to community now?

No singing.  It took  years of encouragement to have our people, at first reluctantly but later with some enthusiasm sing at Mass.  It was great to hear them sing like Baptists but now it is forbidden because nearly everyone sings when we do sing. So more people, more contamination of the ambient air.

It took us years to get people to share the greeting of peace.  Now it is to be omitted. We haven’t even yet considered the sharing of the cup. This is forbidden, now.

We built better and bigger foyers to encourage people to congregate before and after Mass. Now we just encourage them to go home.

You have to receive the Body of Christ in your extended hand. I watched one priest in a “streaming” Mass who stood in front of the altar in his church distributing communion in that way but he also had, at the side aisles, ministers of communion for those who wanted to receive on the tongue. He actually said that if anyone comes to him and wants to receive on the tongue “I will refuse you.”

Alright. Too much to talk about.  From this terrible pandemic we will eventually have to pick up the pieces of our society and our church.  Rebuilding community has always been a huge task of those who minster to the Mystical Body of Christ. Trusting God and one another, we will get through this.

Real Presence.

These days, actual community is out, virtual togetherness is in.  So, we have the LGBTQ+ community which lives everywhere and no place, at least no place like home, where the members can go to socialize. O.K., I know bars and cafes are notable for being just such places for gatherings of like-minded individuals. But, is that all there is? Community should involve a sense of belonging, an actual diversity of age, for example. From youth to adults, from kids to the ancients, where does the LGBTQ+ community exist? Mostly, on-line. Is that real?

What about the young adults who stand or sit with eyes glued to their cell phones? The screens are lit-up with twitters and faces and instant telegrams full of digital info.  Mental health workers tell us that our kids and young people are starving out there. They are consuming info that does nothing to nourish their inner lives. Its not more info that we need, we need recognition, companionship, encounter.

The psychologist Erica Komisar in a piece written for the Wall-Street Journal (12/1/19) tells parents to lie to their children if they themselves have no belief in God. Tell them, she says, that there is a God and that when we die our remains do not simply decompose into dust. Go ahead, Lie, if you have to, because our kids’ mental health is deteriorating. Our virtual communities do not fill deeper hungers for closeness and personal recognition. Church does.

People used to get a sense of importance and closeness from attending Church and participating in works of service. Now, with a 20% drop in attendance in the last twenty-years, we are seeing anxiety and depression rapidly increase among our children.

Digital counts pointing to scores of “friends” is not the same thing as sharing a camping experience or lunch with someone who you can see and touch.  With people who seem to have an interest in you, people who you like, too — and not just digitally. People who you want to see in person.

Our Catholic faith teaches us to love God and one another, not just virtually, or kind-of.  Isn’t it amazing that we can find the living presence of God, the “Real Presence” in the eucharist? I confess that a bright hand-held image will not take the place of the people who when I see them in person warm my heart like a sacrament. People are sacred, as God is sacred and we should not forget that reality itself has immense power to sustain the human spirit, something that no virtual reality can match.

“A few of the exiles live in a house which is organized like a monastery…a house of great value by the very fact that it exists and gives good example….

Even the wisest words eventually evaporate
and a book once read is forgotten
but a living institution exerts an influence
that is constant and effective.”

(Adam Micewski, the great Romantic poet, commenting on the
“House of Janski” in 1836.)

It was Ash Wednesday in 1836 when five young men sat down together for their first meeting as a community in an unheated, unfurnished house in Paris. They were exiles from their homeland and had recently rediscovered their Catholic faith. Bogdan Janski was their leader and Peter Semenenko, Jerome Kajsiewicz and two
other converts completed the group.

After giving some introductory words about their new community, Bogdan led the group in a meditation. During their first supper together, Bogdan read aloud these words from the first letter of John. “Let us love one another because love is from God…. Though God has never been seen by any man, God himself dwells in us if we love one another.” (I John, 4:7,12)

For months, Bogdan had been promising the eager young men that he would find a house where they could move in together and live a common christian life. They could then live like the early Christians who had all things in common and were of one mind and one heart. Now they had the house. The christian community was taking shape.

Bogdan thought the house he had rented, though small, would be big enough to accommodate twelve people. It had no furniture and no bedding. Of course, everything was handmade in the early nineteenth century, including Bogdan’s hand-sewn coat. He took it off at that first meeting and gave it to Peter to hock so that he could buy a mattress, pillow, some bedding and a table for the house. That was one way to begin furnishing the house. Bogdan had already pawned his watch. Now the others would bring in whatever they could contribute to create their new home.

Bogdan Janski was a twenty-nine year old academic who, after years of denial and disbelief had been led to rediscover Christ and the Church. The year before, a small group of older men had been meeting for Mass regularly and had invited the bright and gifted young man to join them for scripture reading and discussion at Adam Mickiewicz’ home. It was this group that showed Bogdan a path back to the Catholic Church. It was this group who funded what came to be called “The House of Janski.”

On the following Sunday, the first Sunday of Lent, the little group of five attended Mass and received communion together in the chapel of Our Lady at the majestic St. Sulpice Church, the second largest church in Paris. There they vowed to live community life together because they knew that the only way they could begin restoring the church was to start with themselves.

It was a religious association that they began but not a monastic society. Mickiewicz had “counseled that for the time being,we (should) abandon notions of social reform and concentrate on refo

photo by Todd G Patton, fittoembark@gmail.com

rming ourselves, by rekindling in our hearts a faith, a hope and a love that had grown cold.” Bogdan dreamed that his new brotherhood would spark in the hearts of those who had lost hope a re-born Christian society.

In his diary, Bogdan sketches his dream of a Christian society organized with many branches which would be more or less loosely united to his new core group. Parishes, for example, were to be spiritual families after the example of the primitive Christian community. But, there would be associates, too, who would live with the brothers at the House. External brethren, too, would be a leaven in all areas of society and be a cherished part of the movement. And Bogdan knew with his new community that he was, indeed starting a movement.

After that Mass, they walked back to their house and then lit a fire in the fireplace, taking the edge off the Paris chill. The group leaned in toward the heat of the fire and basked in its warmth. By the light of that fire, they met for a conversation that lasted two hours with Bogdan encouraging them, and recalling their purpose and explaining to them some of the duties of housekeeping. Each of them had to learn to think of his brother first as they cleaned the house, cooked and transacted business with those who came to visit the House of Janski.

Soon, Bogdan was assigning ministries which included outreach to the most needy among the exiles. There was desperate need everywhere he turned. Poverty. Joblessness. Hunger. Homelessness. Feelings of abandonment and loss of family connections among the exiles were especially painful. Where was the mercy of the Lord in all this misery? Bogdan instructed his group to bring hope and Christian example into their despair.
Acute needs arose, too. Later in 1836, the men responded to a terrible epidemic that rushed through Paris. Each of them did what they could for the sick. Bogdan took a few of the sick into the house but he saw the need for much more. Opportunity to serve Christ in the poor was often simply dumped on their doorstep.

All in Janski’s House were involved in ministry but Jerome was especially urged by grace in his ministry:

“One cannot fall in love with the Lord, taste how sweet He is, and not at the same time be inflamed with holy desire to see that others share that same happiness. Thus we tried to help others to know and love Jesus.”

There was a freshness and warmth to their spirituality which caught fire from Bogdan himself: Bogdan had brought something new to the emigres of Paris. Speaking about him, Peter had this to say about Bogdan and his remarkable ministry in Paris:

“He shown like the star that heralds the break of day…what a beautiful and attractive figure he was, there in the midst of all the poverty, misery, deterioration and darkness! A great spirit….”

On this Founder’s Day we should remember the charism, a gift of hope that Bogdan and hundreds of men have cherished during nearly two hundred years of our existence as a religious community.

The street is still there but Janski’s house is not.

We here in the USA province are a small group these days trying to huddle close to one another as our numbers diminish. We know our purpose is to take care of one another’s need for continuing conversion and to carry the fire of Christ to wherever we are sent. We pray that young men will somehow find us living our charism and will want to share in the dream of Bogdan Janski. They can find us here waiting at the hearth.

“In order to accomplish a complete spiritual renewal, Christian love needs to be nourished at the table of the Lamb, where all are of one heart and one soul…under the banner of the Risen Lord.”

“They’re taking down my old church!  I was baptized in that church,” said the young girl as she looked up at me with tears in her eyes.  She watched the crane swing up towards the steeple and then turned away. I don’t hear much from any of the other observers. They seem to be accepting the inevitable.

The old Immaculate Conception Church

We’re talking about Immaculate Conception Church in Morris, Illinois built 166 years ago. The roof had begun to leak badly and some of the bricks were beginning to crumble especially near the foundation of the church, and no services had been held in the building since the new church was built nine years ago.

People have been driving up in their pickups just to watch silently as the skillful workers bring down the old church.  For these on-lookers some of whom are parishioners, memories of weddings and funerals flood their hearts as the old church comes down. A few people bring lawn chairs to watch. Most just stand around or sit in their trucks observing the demolition from the schoolyard across the street.

It is interesting to see how carefully the old church comes down. There’s a chain-link fence erected around the perimeter to protect the site and keep the on-lookers out. I live across the street from the church and am listening to the creaky squeals of the crane as the operator lifts it’s jaws high above the steeple and slowly tears the exterior away to reveal the skeleton of where the bells were at one time. The staccato whine of the backup-signals of the trucks carrying the debris away continues throughout the next three days.

The workers carefully dump a half-ton of bricks outside the fence and men and women drift over and carefully select a brick or two that they want to keep as a tangible memory of what once was their church home.  Not everyone needs one, but some do. As soon as the bricks are dumped, one old guy who had been sitting on the hood of his pick-up slides down and walks slowly toward the pile.  He stands there a moment and then selects his brick, a dark red one, well-worn. I wonder what he was thinking as he salvaged the brick? Others come and take a brick or two as a remembrance.

The church is first in ruins and now in piles of broken brick, fractured wood joists and wall-rubble.   Plaster fragments from the roof and walls flutter down and are met by a worker aiming a stream of water that dampens the material as it comes down.  There is very little dust.

The Catholic Church in the U.S. is decommissioning and taking down old churches like this one. But, just down Jackson street, less than a block from the old site, the new IC church, much bigger than the old testifies to the vitality of the current members of the parish. The bells that were heard on the hour and on the quarter-hour from the old church tower are now announcing time and calling people to Mass from a hidden speaker above the main entrance to the new church.

There is something sad about this demolition. It’s a kind of death where the old structure is torn apart, falls and becomes a pile of rubble. The workers undertaking the clean up remove the remains and bury them in some landfill while the onlookers stand by silently and respectfully.

Could he be praying for his Church?

Why are there no young men asking to join the Congregation of the Resurrection? We have had a few older men join us in the last decade but that’s it. Our province has lost 2/3rds of its members in the last 25 years and these members are not being replaced. Other religious communities, both men and women, are faced with the same problem.

We’ve been aware of this condition for a long time.  A parade of vocation directors and animators has bitten the dust and we are still looking for the tactic that will bless our recruitment efforts.  We have sent two or three men to represent our charism at national conventions where college-age young men attend. It’s exciting to see them stop to visit our booth but then that’s pretty much the end of the relationship. Why?

I didn’t join my religious community because I was recruited but because I saw men serving Our Lord in ministry and wanted the joy and commitment that they had.  That was yesterday. Why aren’t men coming to us today?  Is it because a vocation to the priesthood is not attractive to young men today?  I was attracted to the priesthood because I wanted to be closer to God and it was the priest presiding at the Eucharist that grabbed me by the soul.

The second reason that we as a religious community are not attracting new members is that we really don’t work together much anymore.  There is no reality to the idea that individuals going off to work in the morning to serve in schools or parishes or hospitals equals community ministry just as there is little to commend the practice of praying public prayer alone, though it is sometimes necessary. Individual apostolates lead to divisions in community life and in the heart of he who serves.

If you don’t need a team to accomplish a ministry then it simply is not  community ministry.  One tradesman cannot build a house alone.  You need an architect, carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers. masons and others to look at the bluprints and then following that plan, construct a building. Each trade has its place in the finished product. A new business has to have a business plan, too and that takes cooperating people.

We have individuals who no doubt love the Lord and the charism of the Congregation but they don’t work together or even live together. That’s a fact. One-man parishes and individual apostolates have us working for other organizations.

A third reason: The Catholic Church has moved from being perceived as something sacred to being numbingly pedestrian, and in some cases criminal, especially with priests involved in predatory sex.. Who wants to belong to an outfit of fruitcakes and sleazy sociopaths who prey upon children or dependent adults? Yes, I know: Only a small percentage of priests betray their vocations in that way. But, we’ve hidden these men for so long that we’ve become co-conspirators in these horrors.

A fourth reason: Catholic hospitals, nursing homes and schools now exist as secular organizations with little evidence of the practice of Christianity. I’m not saying these institutions are bad, they just aren’t holy anymore.

Let’s look at Catholic schools, for example.  Often, it’s difficult to tell a Catholic elementary School from a public elementary school, except for an occasional “all school Mass.”

I have been pastor in three parishes, each of which had its own elementary school. Each of the principals of those schools actively worked to separate their purpose from the mission of the parish. I had to let go from two of the schools, two long-time principals and the third should have been fired the first week I was there. In one case, it took me three years to accumulate enough evidence to remove the principal, an individual who had been fired by the pastor who preceded me but had been re-instated because of lack of due process.  Another, put twenty thousand dollars of tuition for safe-keeping under her bed. When I refused to offer her a new contract because of similar behaviors, I was forced to resign.

As pastor, I was not welcome in any of these schools. The school was the territory of the principal, each with a coterie of  secretaries, lunch-room personnel and teachers who upheld the principal’s territory with grim defiance. The mission of the parish of which the school was a part was an article of rejection in the creed of the educators.

In each of these schools, I tried to force the issue of priestly presence in the school.  It didn’t work. I can’t remember a time when I was asked to visit a classroom or engage with the children as pastor, as priest. No, not at any of those three parishes.

I’m not likely to pastor a parish again but I  can tell you I would never take one that had a school. I know other priests who feel the same way.

At one time the USA province of the Congregation of the Resurrection ministered and ran three high schools.  Now, we have none –they really don’t need us anymore.  I say: Let them go.

Father Norb, in his ’70s, continues to pastor a large church in Woodridge, IL.

A fifth reason? A priest, especially a religious, has no standing in what Francis calls “the throw-away culture.”  Priests are not respected as revered elders any more. The only position for a priest is as a reactionary and not all men are called to that cross.

Our elders –senior priests included — who are weakened by infirmity and age are told they can live in a pretty warehouse. Each must wear a life-line and refrain from taking a walk because of the possibility of a fall. Food is processed so that it is easily consumed with little chewing.  No one is encouraged to leave their cell unless absolutely necessary.   Two hundred old human beings just expected to maintain themselves until they die.

The throw-away culture lists abortions as the number one subject. Embryos, fetuses, and viable babies are discarded when defective or just not wanted.  Why should some priest interfere in a woman’s right to control her own body?

Many of the immigrants among us are simply a drain on our health-care system and contribute little to our culture.  Send the illegals back and make the legal immigrants abandon  their home country’s culture and embrace the American Way. These are not, of course, my opinions, but I have to listen to these arguments. I counter with “I was a stranger and you took me in.” (MT 25:35)  My religious community was called to America to assist immigrants with everything. We are no longer working with immigrants though the needs are great.  We aren’t seen helping Spanish speaking immigrants so that attraction is not present to young men looking for a challenging life in the priesthood.

So, these days the calling to be a priest in the Catholic Church is hard for a young man to hear.  There is so much noise in our culture against the priesthood that we can’t just turn up the the volume of our vocation work and expect young men to listen and join us.

The Church has gone through droughts before.  We just need to keep building up the kingdom and hope that young men will come.

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A Sabbath day stop.

Planning your sabbatical observance:  Remember to keep holy the Sabbath. Make it a SPREE!

S-top —Cease all work and thinking about working.  This is the hardest part of observing the Lord’s Day.

P-ray — Open your heart in adoration and thanksgiving.  Participate in the Eucharist with the Christian community.

R-est — relax in a chair/ sleep-in/ take a nap/ a leisurely walk ( sabbath-day’s journey) in a beautiful park. Above all, if possible, don’t work! Don’t even plan your work week on the Lord’s Day.

E-njoy — Enjoy the Lord’s day with a family dinner/ wonderful music –make it yourself or listen to it.

E-mbrace — Talk to your spouse. Be with your kids. Visit and share with your friends. Get in touch with strangers.

To be holy means to be aware of the presence of God.  He is within.

The first letters of the six characteristics of our sabbath spells the English word SPREE — a happy jaunt, a period of happy abandonment, a pursuit of happiness. This is what our Sundays should express as we commemorate the Lord’s Resurrection.

Catholics obey the commandment to keep holy the sabbath, even if, for us, that day is Sunday, not Saturday.  We owe that change to the early Christians who met on the Lord’s Day each week.  Since Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week, Sunday became our sabbath. We rest and keep the Lord’ Day holy like observant Jews keep the sabbath.

I have touched Him.

The campus of Our Lady of the Lake University in Mundelein, Illinois is where the seminary for the archdiocese of Chicago is located. The road which winds around a lake at the center of the property is a little more than three miles long and studded with beautiful oaks, hickory, maple and stately pine trees.

I was there last week with forty-five other members of my province who were able to be present for our tri-annual meetings called the provincial chapter.

It was good to see old friends and to hear of what’s happening in their lives. Some of them struggle with cancer, addictions, and the complaints of aging. Still, they are a confident and faith filled group trying to maintain focus in an American church wounded by scandal and division.

We Resurrectionists realize that the Catholic Church we serve has been wounded and degraded before by ugly clericalism and debauchery. But, we don’t hide from what needs to be done. We came together to pray for the people we serve and to pray for each other. There was a significant feeling of “were-all-in-this-together.” I saw no discouragement but a readiness to respond to whatever we can still do as Resurrectionists for our American church.

One man stood up at a meeting to testify to the power of Our Lord Jesus in lifting him up out of an addiction. He asked us to consider asking for help if any of us have a similar problem. It is likely that we do and we will remember that man’s powerful witness as an encouragement to do something for the sake of the church and for our own sake.

Sometimes I feel like I’m on the verge of heresy. Like now.  I am not happy when a 4 year old asks “Where is God?” and a confident priest takes the toddler up on the altar and points to the tabernacle and says, “He’s in there.”

I once witnessed a woman who worked at a retreat house, go up to the tabernacle, open it with the key, take the cover off the ciborium and proceed to lecture her seven year old daughter on the presence of Jesus in the sacred bread. “There He is,” she said.

Another time a man in his twenties with access to the eucharist tells me that he held a consecrated host in his hand and said “That’s God?” I watched another priest, during Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, snatch the monstrance containing the sacred host and march around a parishioner who he felt needed a miracle.

I can hear a chorus of believers saying of course all these people are correct.  I’M  NOT SO SURE.  The proper response to the reserved presence of Jesus in the eucharist is awareness, silence, homage.  The eucharist is not a tool to be used as an ikon of God.  To make it no different than a statue of the sacred Heart or a blessed rosary is to denigrate the sacrament.

Three-quarters of the Catholic world has no reserved eucharist.  Are these people less Catholic because they do not have a priest most days, or are they second class Catholics because they have no tabernacle containing the eucharist? This morning I listened to a Myanmar bishop mention that certain of his villagers up in the mountains are fortunate that a priest gets to the village once a year. Is the living Christ not among them after the priest leaves?

Is it heretical to say that Catholic communities gather to celebrate the presence of Jesus not so that the eucharist can be reserved for adoration but as an act of thanksgiving to God?  At the Eucharist we are there at Calvary with Our Lord as He gives His life for us.  We eat His Flesh and drink His Blood so that we can have life within us, so that we can have Him with us as we return to our secular lives.

The Holy Eucharist is a sacrament, a mystery.  He comes to us under the form of bread and wine. The bread tastes like bread and the wine like wine.  Yes, He is there in substance and when I receive Him He is entirely present to me. But He is not the Eucharist as it appears physically. The Eucharist is properly the action of celebrating and worshipping our Savior, the entire celebration of the Mass.  This said, I love to pray in a church when the Blessed Sacrament is exposed for adoration.  I know He is there as bread, sacred bread and His presence moves me deeply.

As to where is God, what about Jesus telling us that the kingdom of God is within us? And where His kingdom is, He is present.

When a little child (or a big adult) asks “Where is God?”  The first place a priest should point to is the heart of the child and respond, “He’s right there.”