Author: Richard Chonak

The Quickening of St. John the Baptist
Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats, the farms,
The wine smelling yards and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the women by the well?
Why do you fly those markets,
Those suburban gardens,
The trumpets of the jealous lilies,
Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?
You have trusted no town
With the news behind your eyes.
You have drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas
And turned toward the stone mountain
To the treeless places.
Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?
The day Our Lady, full of Christ,
Entered the dooryard of her relative
Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves like gold?
Did not her eyes grey as doves
Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon miraculous Elizabeth?
Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother’s body,
Bounds with the echoes of discovery.
Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth
That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!
What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloister Christ?
You need no eloquence, wild bairn,
Exulting in your heritage,
Your ecstasy is your apostolate,
For whom to kick is contemplata tradere
Your joy is the vocation
Of Mother Church’s hidden children —
Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage
The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,
The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare
Planted in the night of contemplation,
Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.
Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.
–Thomas Merton, from The Tears of the Blind Lions

Vatican II on the relation of the laity and the bishops of the Church
The Church teaches us:

Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church)
Section 37:
Like all Christians, the laity have the right to receive in abundance the help of the spiritual goods of the Church, especially that of the word of God and the sacraments from the pastors. To the latter, the laity should disclose their needs and desires with that liberty and confidence which befits children of God and brothers of Christ. By reason of the knowledge, competence or pre-eminence which they have the laity are empowered — indeed sometimes obliged — to manifest their opinion on those things which pertain to the good of the Church.

Sometimes the message imposes an obligation:

If the occasion should arise this should be done through the institutions established by the Church for that purpose and always with truth, courage and prudence and with reverence and charity towards those who, by reason of their office, represent the person of Christ.
Like all Christians, the laity should promptly accept in Christian obedience what is decided by the pastors who, as teachers and rulers of the Church, represent Christ. In this they will follow Christ’s example who, by his obedience unto death, opened the blessed way of the liberty of the sons of God to all men.
(translation from the Flannery edition)

Part Two
Since the sensible Gordon Zaft posted an eloquent but brief comment to ask, more or less, “what’s the point, RC?” I’ll expand on the above.
The Council indicates that we laity should express our opinions and criticisms through the Church’s own institutions and with reverence toward the bishops.
I wanted to bring this up simply because it’s not a popular teaching right now; I haven’t lived up to it, and neither have a lot of us lay folks. The various voices engaged in daily condemnation of various bishops must not be aware of it.
Notice the two points: (1) with reverence and (2) through the Church’s own institutions. I mean: can you believe that? The Church wants us to give our opinions to the bishops through the Church’s own institutions. It sounds as if we should not be denouncing them publicly. I don’t know if we can get used to that!
Of course, this raises some questions, such as: what are those institutions — I really don’t know what the Council is referring to.
Now, I don’t mean to make an argument that it’s immoral to criticize Church problems in public: the right specified in canon 212 to make one’s views known to the faithful rules that out. But I do wonder what the Council had in mind.

Move over, Sweden
Boston has the Ig Nobel Prizes, recognizing dubious scientific “achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced.” The Ig Nobel Laureates for the year 2002 were announced last night in a riotous ceremony at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.
The “honored” researchers, several of whom attended the ceremony (at their own expense), had reported their studies in scientific papers such as

“Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches (Struthio camelus) Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain”
“Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth”
“Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants”
“The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension”

Yes, they really did.
Since we need a detail of Catholic interest to justify this post: pro-life doctor Micheline Mathews-Roth of Harvard Medical School opened and closed the ceremony with the traditional “Welcome, Welcome” and “Goodbye, Goodbye” speeches. I quote her two addresses in their entirety:

Welcome! Welcome.

and

Goodbye! Goodbye.

They were received with enthusiasm.
You simply cannot imagine how silly an affair this is.

October 4: St. Francis of Assisi
One way to observe St. Francis’ day is to visit your local Franciscan friary or Poor Clare convent and attend its “Transitus” service, commemorating the “Passing” of St. Francis into eternal life. These are usually held on October 3 in the evening; contact the community for time and location. Not all Franciscan communities will have the service; sometimes two or more houses in an area will hold one service together.

Doing the right thing
Barbara and David Thorp are a couple of my favorite Catholics. He’s a long-time evangelist who has served the Church across the country through the Charismatic Renewal movement; she’s a licensed social worker who built the Boston archdiocese’s Pregnancy Help service from the ground up. This year she accepted perhaps the toughest job a layman has in the archdiocese: bringing the Church’s help to victims of abuse by clergy.

After hearing the stories of 150 alleged victims of clergy sex abuse, Barbara Thorp said the hardest part of her job is simply listening.
“I can’t tell you the number of men I’ve sat across from, weeping, and how disturbing it is to have a 40- or 50-year-old man shedding the tears of a 12-year-old boy. It’s heartbreaking,” said Thorp, head of the Office of Healing and Assistance for the Archdiocese of Boston.