Resurrecting Chicago

“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.”

Tell me the reason behind praying an entire rosary out loud during exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Isn’t this the time we should be praying in silence, even listening? The proper time for common prayer is at the close of exposition as we receive the benediction of Our Lord.

Don’t get me wrong. The rosary is a beautiful, wonderful way of praying but it’s a private devotion and should not be used to fill up the time spent before the Blessed Sacrament. Vocal prayer should have another time, even another place.

I celebrate Mass in the AM at a church where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed for adoration. Before and after the celebration of the Eucharist, there is not a moment of silence. The Divine Mercy devotion follows a recitation of the rosary, then a marian hymn or two followed by intercessions. All these interventions are led by people in the chapel with an agenda. One after another they interject their favorite prayers out loud.  It’s a rush of vocal prayer which misses the point of exposition.

The Blessed Sacrament is displayed to give us an opportunity for praise and reflection. I’d like to see more reverence for the awesome presence of the Lord by observing extended periods of silence. Prayer is a two-way avenue. I pray silent words in my heart and He listens. He speaks and I listen for His Voice.

I walked out to begin the entrance hymn for the Mass today and the fellow leading the rosary ended — so help me– ten seconds before the Mass was to begin. He had it timed. There would be no opportunity for silence before the greatest prayer of the Church.

One of the most irritating interventions of vocal prayer is now said at the end of every Mass where I live.  It is the old prayer that begins “St. Michael defend us in battle, be our safeguard against the malice and snares of the devil.” Barely five seconds elapse after the concluding verse of the final hymn of the Eucharist when this prayer is rattled off with a compulsion that is, to me, unhealthy. WHERE IS THE SILENCE? WHERE IS THE RESPECT FOR THE DIVINE PRESENCE?

I am reminded of the biblical admonition: “If today you hear His Voice harden not your hearts.” How can we hear Him if are hearts and voices are not silenced so that we can rest in Him?

My friend Rich notes that even his grandnieces sometimes act as if he is not there. The first time I felt irrelevant was years ago when I was seated in a restaurant and watched as other guests gave their orders and I, seated at the side of the restaurant at a table for one, was apparently invisible.  I was ready to leave when, after fifteen minutes of stewing in my anonymity, a waitress stopped and asked, “Have you been waited on yet?”

Since then I have become used to being ignored in restaurants, seen but not acknowledged by groups of parishioners standing outside of our church, and, like Rich, mostly invisible to young family members. It wears on me a little. I may have written somewhere that upon noticing me, I was once referred to as “some old guy.” A random old guy? That hurts.

Part of the problem is that people younger than me have different interests and use informal language that’s hard for me to relate to. At a wake service as I was in line dressed in my clericals to offer my condolences to the grieving family, a teenage boy accidently bumped me and excused himself by saying, “Sorry, dude!” I don’t know how to use that word “dude” and I can’t imagine it would help my conversation much if I salted it with “dude”s and other current slang. But, that’s how the kid related to me. I’ve never thought of myself as a “dude” before….

As I age, I notice an elderly man with white hair and jowls (jowls!) who waves to me from the bathroom mirror each morning. That same guy walks pretty slowly and is bent over somewhat, as my moving reflection in the get-fit center windows shows me each time I approach the entrance.

Where the h-ll is that word which yesterday leaped off my tongue so easily and now for the life of me I can’t find? My imagination, too, seems to be at rest but I hope not yet deceased.  The rich color of garden flowers still impresses me and my hearing is acute enough to hear the song of the robins and the tweets of sparrows.

However, I am much slower than I used to be. My morning bathroom ritual takes at least twice as long and I’d rather just skip it because this morning I have no where to go and I don’t care much what I look like. That’s a trap, though, isn’t it?  I better find someone to help, some ministry to do or a least some task about the house that needs attention. The alternative is the path to “dusty death.”

Being useful. I can still preside at the Eucharist and still help the repentant in the Sacrament of reconciliation. And, I’m still able to cook, keep a small garden, write a little, and pray a lot. That last activity will never stop, in fact the opportunity to pray continues to enrich my life.  In many ways, I feel closer to the Lord than I ever have. Hey! And it’s not true that “no one needs you anymore.” I could spend most of the day praying for the needs of people who’ve asked me to remember them in my prayers.

Arthur C. Brooks in a recent article in the Atlantic (July, 2019) says that studies show that irrelevance drives unhappiness. I am on the move today searching out relevance. Here I come, ready or not!

I had a chance to return to Bermuda recently, and I took it. Bishop Wes was scheduled for an off-island ordination ceremony in Ontario and need a sub for a week.  I still can celebrate public Masses, though I’m wobbly.  As long as I can maneuver in a sanctuary by holding on to chairs, kneelers and altars, I’m fine.

Bermuda is a lovely nation on a small archipelago about 800 mikes South-East of new York. (My best guess.) I’d visited there Last December when the island nation was in it’s winter rest from it’s usually balmy temps but when I arrived this time, the humid heat hit me as soon as we got off the plane.  “We” included this time, Father Richard Grek who joined me so that he could get some vacation in this summer before his stints begin as locum tenens for vacationing priests in the Mid-West.

The Bermudians are a courteous and hospitable people so once again I soaked up not only the sun, but their sunny dispositions. After morning Mass each day at St. Theresa’s cathedral, Father Rich and I joined the regular coffee klatch in the parish hall. Re-connecting with Kathy and Don Johanne, Annie and Malcomb, Maria, Bernice and all the rest was a great way to begin each day. Each of these parishioners has a unique story concerning their Catholic journey. It enriches my faith to hear again of their experiences as Catholics.

Perhaps, Don and Kathy have the most compelling story. For thirty-five years Kathy did not receive Holy Communion because of her irregular marriage situation. Bishop Kurtz, whom Bishop Wes succeeded, had helped them through an annulment process which allowed them to marry in the Church. Don, a convert and Kathy –the word “enthusiastic” was created for her– are now happily able to take part and receive Holy Communion.

In my journey as a Catholic priest, Our Lord has blessed me with great experiences of great people. And in that regard, the Catholic community in Bermuda holds a special place in my heart.