Two Days, Two Popes
We watched his progress through town on the Jumbotrons. Excitement charged the crowd of more than 800,000 and possibly 1 million souls. A few young men climbed trees that lined the route he would take to get a better view, like Zacchaeus did in Jesus’ time. Perhaps that stretch of Jericho was flat like the one in Philadelphia with the people all tip-toed and stretch-necked.
In the moment before he appeared, I turned to see hundreds watching the Jumbotron over my head. They were smiling with an emerging joy, phones and cameras at their sides. Then there was a noise like a great wave gathers before it crashes on the beach. The sound was far away but rapidly moved closer and delivered a spray of happy acclamations as Pope Francis zoomed past.
We were prepared for him to come by again on the other, closer side to where I stood. He was plainly visible as I stood on a curb, no more than 100 feet away. He seemed to look directly at me (and the many, many others who shared a similar experience). He waved a gentle blessing as he passed and we caught it with our own sign of the cross.
People ask me what it was like to see the pope when he was in Philly for the World Meeting of Families. I don’t tell them this story. I tell them about how the crowd responded to the simple instructions from a priest in a white surplice on the Jumbotron. He reminded us about the reverence due the sacred liturgy that was about to begin. For the next two hours the crowd was wondrously silent as Mass was celebrated on the Parkway.
Pope Francis enticed us there, but the profound reverence shown the Blessed Sacrament as communion was shared among the multitude expressed a deeper reason for our coming.
A decade earlier, I was in Chicago as Pope St. John Paul II‘s death was imminent. I took a sight-seer’s route to Holy Name Cathedral early in the day, and planned to arrive before the Saturday vigil Mass with time to cool my tired feet. I heard the church bells calling while I was blocks away and changed course. The cathedral bells tolled the same mournful, singular gong my little parish church transmits as a funeral Mass ends. The sad tones continued as I climbed the cathedral steps and knelt among the empty pews in the back of the nave long before Mass was to begin.
A wedding was in progress. The gathering was dwarfed by the scale of the cathedral. Prayers were invoked. Others joined me in the back. Wedding vows were exchanged. More people streamed into the cathedral. We occupied most of the back half of the nave and began filling in the side aisles when the startled couple turned to leave and hundreds of strangers greeted them with thunderous applause.
It was sadness at the death of another that brought us there, but we spontaneously transitioned to share joy with an unknown bride and groom.
The allure of a new pope and the death of a beloved one brought the two crowds together. It was something else altogether that held us there in both joy and reverence, acting as one.
Eucharistic Mangoes
A slight girl of 3 or 4 appeared suddenly in the dusk-lit house. She gave two of us who were in the house at the time a mango and a smile, and vanished with a giggle.
The mangoes grew in the walled compound topped with razor wire where the little girl and 50 other children live. We saw the mangoes hanging fat and appealing and wondered when they might be ready. While we worked, the nuns and other women who ran the orphanage were harvesting, and many more mangoes appeared in the last days of our visit.
Only a few of the children were orphans. Most were abandoned but cared for at the Cardinal Stepinac Children’s Home in Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. A few of the children maintain close but occasional contact with their parents outside the walls.
Two of us on the missionary work trip were fathers of grown children. It happened to be Father’s Day back home in the U.S. at the time, and the children were encouraged to make us a gift of a drawing for the occasion. There was some confusion about what a “father’s day” meant. Something like a happy birthday, perhaps, as several children had scrawled with their well wishes. Others wished us “Bonne fete, papa” in the touching and sometimes humorous writings and pictures.
Edyson, abandoned four years before but a son and brother of the Children’s Home family, drew a mango tree with fruit ripe for picking and two figures under the tree. Two mangoes are falling into the hands of one figure; the other figure, smiling it appears, uses a long stick to knock down another mango. There’s some writing in Creole, and it translates like poetry: “The mango tree gives and gives; it doesn’t have a mother, it doesn’t have a father.”
That week we built them beds to replace the poor substitutes they had. The wordless little girl who disappeared into the night and the young artist and poet gave greater gifts.
Mangoes are like Eucharist, they taught us. They are precious yet without cost, coveted yet freely given. Like joy and love and the Bread of Life, they are perfected in the sharing.
About this Life
Sacred Scripture is inexhaustible, the scholars tell us. The stories are relevant for every age and situation. Even when we pay attention throughout years of homilies and reading, a phrase sometimes seems to appear on the pages as if for the first time.
Some months ago, one such phrase endlessly looped in my head like an old song with forgotten lyrics, or the lost word stuck on the tip of a tongue despite the stammering. It is from Acts 5.
The story begins with the Apostles performing many signs and miracles. People came from all around Jerusalem looking for cures. Out of jealousy, the Sadducees arranged to have the Apostles imprisoned.
“But at night the angel of the Lord opened the prison gates and said as he led them out, ‘Go and take your place in the temple area, and tell the people everything about this life.’” (Acts 5:19-20)
The life of the Apostles at the time is like the one described by Isaiah that Jesus reads in the synagogue in Nazareth: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the Lord…” (Isaiah 61:1-2)
That’s what the Apostles were doing; that was their life. Like all good stories, however, this one invites us to think about this life in our own time.
We have much darkness and confinement in our fractured and politically-correct day and age. Politics at every level is straining to divide us; our Church is buffeted from within. The Apostles escaped prison in the night but were brought back, threatened with death and flogged. We, too, will escape the prison of our secular culture and the shame brought on by some in our Church. Our angels will lead us. Then we must faithfully consider everything about this life, the one that Isaiah and Jesus taught, and the one we were anointed for in Baptism.
Expect a flogging.
Assumptions
The largest and most indelible image of my childhood was painted, one square canvas at a time, and stacked along the wall of the school auditorium. I was in second grade, I think, and am currently without credible witnesses to confirm the recollection.
Beyond dispute is the work itself. It was installed upstairs in the church. The painting was of the Assumption of Mary and it remained the backdrop to the sanctuary until recently. The image itself is not unique, but it is monumental in scale. It towered behind the altar. Mary seemed to be drawing the elevated consecrated host into heaven with her.
The painting was one of those things my siblings and I saw every week and often more than once. It made an impact, lately realized, as adults remember the May Processions of our youth and a bouquet of dandelions for the little statue on a dresser.
A sister who attended a Lutheran church later in life said she most missed “Mother Mary” in her faith practice. She rediscovered and experienced the comfort of Our Lady near the end of her life. Until then, I underestimated the devotions of our childhood. Excuse me, Dear Lady and Reader, for the false assumption that the practice of certain things can be outgrown.
These thoughts came back, appropriately, on the Solemnity of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 2017. Soon after, Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia consecrated my archdiocese to Mary. Very soon after that was the 100th anniversary of the last apparition of Our Lady of Fatima.
These events were a sweet convergence for those of us who make true assumptions about what the world needs at this moment of human history: A gentle, peaceful woman who can crush the devil under her feet and lead us to Christ.
Practicing, Not Perfect 