#blessings'healing

[stevedonnellyfaith-blog]

Reluctant to Agree (Post 108) 9-30-15

Without having television available in our new house yet, I didn’t follow the Pope’s visit like I would have liked to have.  Initially, when it seemed like the White House intended to embarrass Francis by inviting every Catholic dissident residing in the Western hemisphere to dinner with him, I was pretty sure that things were not going to go well.  I had thought that the trip was just for the conference in Philadelphia, but I suppose that a stop in DC was nearly obligatory and New York is not that far from the City of Brotherly Love either.   I guess getting invited to a prestigious ambush with entrees is to be expected.  I am glad that, by the sound of it, the dinner never happened, because world leaders tend to try to out-duel each other and I’m afraid that another future dinner might have included some people even further on the fringes of the Catholic faith and I don’t want to see what that looks like.  I am sure that Jerry Springer would be an excellent consultant for any subsequent supper to what was planned for this visit.

To my understanding the Pope rebuffed the invite and instead ate with the poor.  What an inspiration:  eschewing the powerful for the company of the meek.  Francis truly is the Vicar of Christ. He seems to have patterned the entire visit upon Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  He comforted those with burdens, ate with the poor and washed the feet of prisoners.  Despite not having a TV, I did see an online clip of Francis halting his Fiat to bless a child in a wheelchair.  I could see the tearful thankfulness of the mother as she lived her public version of a New Testament story there before us.  The healing was not miraculous and physical, but what I saw was a spiritual healing of the mother.  The tears of gratitude were the same as when Francis kissed the tumors of the disfigured man early in his pontificate.  He has come to serve the poor and to convert us all to the way of Jesus Christ.

Yet there is still the bickering about Climate Change, the role of wealth and Francis’ call to repudiate Capital Punishment.  I am on-board with most of what Francis has encouraged Catholics to advocate for.  I care about protecting the environment just not to the extent of participating in any of Al Gore’s shakedowns.  I can see how wealth without morals enslaves us to greed and hurt our souls.  With respect to Capital Punishment, I have slowly and reluctantly converted to John Paul II’s viewpoint over the last decade or so.

Back when the little Polish man sat on the Chair of Peter, I was pretty torqued off against an extremely insidious conglomerate of terrorists that had used airliners to attack our country.  I could understand John Paul’s belief that executing the guilty does nothing to repair the damage done to the victims, but it remained my belief that, in some cases, men in prison can still manage to harm innocents even when they are kept in solitary confinement.  People are still routinely killed at the order of Mexican gang lords incarcerated in Pelican Bay.  It happens. As men, we are charged with protecting those innocent people in the same way that we were obligated to stop the slaughter in Rwanda, an obligation that we failed to honor and for which are accountable.

Still I could see that Sadaam’s execution did nothing to quell the violence in Iraq as I had hoped. Removing him from power did prevent his regime from adding to the excess of four hundred thousand bodies of Shia, Kurds and other dissents that Sadaam’s Baathist government had executed and buried in mass graves.  Hanging him didn’t right any wrongs, although, for Sadaam, his time on death row was probably helpful to his soul.  It did seem like an awfully easy way out for a man who had ordered mass brutal killings of his own citizens.  The bodies of children shot while clutching stuffed animals were, in some cases, exhumed from the vast network of grave mounds distributed throughout Iraq.

Killing the killer is certainly vengeance, but that is not a healthy occupation for us.  That said, I don’t advocate the European solution of releasing terrorists or other mass murders back into society after five years or a decade.  In most every case, true life imprisonment is satisfactory for even the more heinous killers. Certainly, Charles Manson tests our patience with his antics, but he really doesn’t get much attention anymore. He rants and raves, but he, as of yet, has not been allowed to participate in Dancing With the Stars and after you have carved a swastika into your forehead there is a very limited list of outrageous stunts you can pull from a prison cell.  I expect that he will eventually understand that only endorsing Donald Trump will garner him the mass media attention that he craves and misses.  His execution, if he were eligible, would only provide a last trip through the klieg lights that he so misses rather than the irrelevance which is his current lot.  Which is worse punishment for a Narcissist?

By discovering the teachings of Divine Mercy in the last four years I came to understand in a small way that Jesus’ blood is infinitely more than sufficient to wipe away all the sins of Sadaam, his two rape happy sons and for Charles Manson and all the rogues’ gallery of serial and spree killers that have garnered such infamy and notoriety through our media feeding frenzies.  Despite our disgust, all those killers remain fully human both by DNA and by the effect of Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice.  Francis encourages us to remember that they are men like us.  I agree with him, although I am not ready to wash Manson’s feet.

Most Catholics like a good deal of what Francis has to say, and don’t care for another portion of his teaching.  It was the same with Christ.  Not even his disciples understood much of what Jesus was saying during His lifetime. Peter was a particularly vociferous objector to several of the teachings, but the first Bishop of Rome came around in the end to Jesus’ point of view.  I think much of what Francis has to say will also convert us over years of thinking if our hearts remain open to the still small voice inside us. When we see him wash the feet of prisoners instead of dining with Pharisees, our choice is to try to understand what he is attempting to teach us, or to join his detractors.  His obvious openness to the life of Christ makes me very reluctant to join the chorus of Francis opponents.