Father James Martin, S.J. is the culture editor of that wonderful Jesuit weekly, America, and he has another job as well. He is the unofficial chaplain to Comedy Central’s Steven Colbert. Father Martin has just produced a new book “Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.”

I thoroughly agree with Father Martin but I think he is a little too negative on the issue of how much Roman Catholics laugh. He points out that many of us are dour and serious and use laughter rather sparingly. That has not been my personal experience. I have always gotten a big kick out of the fact that there is so much laughter in the Church about the Church. Cartoons, jokes and lightheartedness flourish in the Church but I do agree that we could always use more of it. It is true that there is a certain segment in the Church today, overwhelmingly on the conservative side, who don’t find much to laugh about. It does have problems, serious problems, but an institution that is awesomely important in God’s plan, inspired by Jesus Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, should be confident and explosively joyous. Yes, there is pain and disappointment but ultimately everything will be all right.

My hope is that we will all have an eternity of joyous laughter.

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In most Catholic parishes about once a month, millions of parishioners will be either kneeling or sitting quietly after having received communion and will be suddenly disturbed by someone tapping them on the shoulder and giving them a black bag. They are expected to do two things: put some money in the bag and pass it on to the next person. Regretfully, most of the parishes fail to announce the purpose of the collection. It is passed from parishioner to parishioner with very little thought. Nevertheless, the outcome of that little action is awesome.

The Black Bag is the basic means of support for the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Society is a lay organization and its primary purpose is to lead men and women to grow spiritually by offering person to person service to the poor in the tradition of St. Vincent de Paul.

Drawing on the resources flowing from that little black bag, in 2010, the Society provided more than $595 million in tangible and in-kind services, served more than 14 million people in need, performed more than 648,000 home visits and delivered more than 7 million hours to serve those in need or living in poverty. This was all accomplished without the blare of trumpets or fanfare. When the St. Vincent de Paul Society is organized in a parish, they form themselves into a small community working to enhance their own spiritual development and lessen the pain and suffering in the world around them. In the United States, there are more than 172,000 members and nearly five thousand parish communities. This is really wonderful but it also means that ten thousand parishes do not have an organized St. Vincent de Paul Society. What a shame – what a shame.

What about your parish?

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As I said yesterday, many U.S. priests are in the process of forming a new national association, the purpose of which would be to give them voice in speaking for their members, and in relationship to the bishops, the laity and the society at large. Prior to the firt meeting, a questionnaire was distributed to hundreds of priests around the country asking their suggestions on what the agenda should be of this new association. Of the 250 priests who responded the most favored objective called for an association dedicated to “full implementation of the vision and teachings of the Second Vatican Council with special emphasis on the primacy of the individual conscience, the status and participation of all the baptized, and the task of establishing a Church where all believers will be treated as equals.”

If that turns out to be the proposed agenda for the new national council, it should generate some very interesting developments. I wish the new association every success.

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Back in the early 1960’s when there was a lot of tension between the Chicago priests and Cardinal John Cody, the priests formed their own organization to provide a voice for themselves in dealing with the Cardinal. The idea caught on and in a short period of time priests associations were being formed in dioceses all over the country. It seems so natural so that when the concept was endorsed by the Second Vatican Council, and then with the codification of Canon Law, it was structured into the law itself but under the title of the Priests Senate. The difference was that the new Code called for the diocesan bishop to be the president of the Senate, to set the agenda, to preside and have a very strong voice. Thus, the priests lost their very own voice.

Thirty years have now passed and the priests in this country are beginning to see that while the changes in the Code of Canon Law were well intentioned, the priests themselves once again lack a vehicle through which they can speak to the diocesan bishop, and to the larger community, with a unified voice. Thus, it seemed very interesting to me that a Milwaukee pastor and a number of priests in that diocese have come together to endeavor to call into existence a national organization of Catholic priests. The leader is Father David Cooper, a Milwaukee pastor, and he stated that, “More and more priests find themselves in isolated conditions.” However, Cooper pointed out that protest and disagreement will not be on the agenda of the new organization. Father Richard Vega, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, the canonical entity, said that he supports the objectives proposed by the new group.

It’s a good start. We have not as yet heard from the bishops!

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Just a few weeks after the Cathedral in Phoenix, Arizona outlawed altar girls, a new policy has been announced going back on yet another aspect of the Second Vatican Council; namely, the distribution of the Eucharist under both species. The Diocese of Phoenix has announced that reception of the Eucharist under both species of bread and wine will now be the exception rather than the rule.

This new policy will certainly generate a lot of discussion between liturgists and canonists. If you look closely at the situation, I think you will find that much more is involved than appears on the surface.

The Second Vatican Council opened up the Church to all of the faithful in a way that was unimaginable in the 19th century. All of the baptized, both male and female, were given new importance and responsibilities in the life of the Church. Regretfully, many Church leaders in the last 20 years have exerted a tremendous amount of influence to undo major aspects of the Council. Unfortunately, they are succeeding. As I have said many times, whereas the Council was a meeting of 2,500 years, operating under the glare of mass media, the present rollback is being executed by a handful of clerics operating behind closed doors.

They will not be able to completely undo the Council but they are certainly limiting its scope and effectiveness.

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November 13th, 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time! Well, we are almost through with this segment of the Church year. Next Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King and that will ease us into the next segment of the ecclesiastical year beginning with the first Sunday in Advent on November 27th.

Today’s Gospel excerpt is stern. It is a parable about a wealthy and powerful man who delegated responsibilities to some of his employees. The way they handled those responsibilities differed one from another, but those who worked hard to utilize the resources received from the employer were richly rewarded. Those who failed to do so, who did not stand up to their responsibilities, lost out.

That is an important message for all of us but I would rather go to the first reading, which is from the Book of Proverbs. This text stresses how wonderful it is for a man to have a faithful and productive wife. I love the text. It is very complimentary and lists many extraordinary virtues of the ideal wife. The interesting thing is that the authors of the Book of Proverbs failed to make a comparable text on the importance of being a good husband! Here the wife is to be faithful, work hard, be economically productive, be generous and reach out to the poor, and take pleasure in the fact that the men sitting at the city gates praise her great virtues. It was written about 2,500 years ago but an element is still present in the life of the Church as mirrored in the life of women in general, but most especially religious women.

Vowed religious women, “sisters”, do extraordinary things to make the Church effective and to carry out its many and varied missions, but in no way do they ever share in true power or authority. Real power and authority in the Church were always tied in with what we call “ordinary” power. The meaning does not come across clearly in English but it is tied in with the Sacrament of Holy Orders and that a person who is ordained receives “ordinary” power, whether it be the diaconate, the priesthood, the episcopacy or the papacy itself. Ordinary, in this context, does not mean routine or run of the mill. It comes from the Latin root for power as in ordinance depot.

There are probably almost a billion women in the Church today and not a single one of them shares in ordinary power. This was not too much of a problem in the past but in the 21st century, it looms large on the horizon for life within the Catholic Church.

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I was somewhat surprised last week to see an article in the paper about an announcement by Archbishop Timothy Dolan, President of the Bishops’ Conference, that that body was in the process of setting up an ad hoc committee to defend religious freedom. The archbishop then went on to list areas where religious liberty is threatened in this country and, according to the archbishop, there were a number of them. It is interesting that all of them related to human sexuality.

With the Catholic moral teaching at odds with the general thrust of the values in this country, such a threat is not surprising. However, I certainly would have liked to see the bishops concerned about additional areas but they have made this their special area of expertise. It does this at a time when the Church itself is tragically wounded and countless situations where it has failed in the area of human sexuality. Would it not have been better to have cleaned up the internal problems before launching out to lecture to the whole nation on the same subject?

Oh, that fog!

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Recently, Anita Perry, speaking in behalf of her husband, she revealed that she heard God’s voice telling her to urge her husband, the Governor of Texas, to run for the presidency of the United States of America. She relayed this message to her husband but he was somewhat hesitant. Finally, however, he did enter the fray. Mrs. Perry then expressed her sadness that her husband had been “brutalized” by other contenders for the same office. She seemed somewhat surprised and disappointed. I am surprised that she was surprised. Attention for the top political office in the world does not necessarily gather a club of first communicants.

Only God and Mrs. Perry know the facts of that conversation but if it occurs again, I would hope that God would urge the governor to be more concerned about the health of the poor children in Texas. That Texas has the highest percentage of un-insured children is a cold, objective fact.

Come on governor – listen up!

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The war in Afghanistan drags on with no clear end in sight. The costs to Americans have been extraordinarily heavy, both in life and in material resources. The vast majority of those killed were of the Christian faith and the taxpayers who have provided the billions of dollars in aid were, for the most part, of the Christian faith. That doesn’t prove anything but another fact gives rise to some thought.

There is not a single Christian church allowed in Afghanistan after 10 years and $440 billion, and nearly 2,000 military Americans have died there. In March of last year, the last Christian church in the country was destroyed. There is not a single Christian school permitted to operate in the country. The International Religious Freedom Report, released in September, documented that “the government’s level of respect for religious freedom in law and in practice declined during the reporting period July to December 2010, particularly for Christian groups and individuals.” The report pointed out that Christians are reluctant to speak of or practice their faith openly in Afghanistan.

From an American perspective, what are we really fighting for?

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I am both aware and thankful of the fact that the Church does many wonderful things in its every day life. In the world of education, she has accomplished wonders among the poor. She struggles to protect the rights of minorities, develops programs providing emergency food, and is always speaking on behalf of the individual. I am proud of all those efforts and hope they expand in the future. However, an organization that is as large as the Church, as diverse as it is spread over many cultures and nationalities, never having adequate resources to do all that is before it, it is inevitable that you could occasionally see serious failures in the Church’s day to day life.

Today I would like to touch on two of them briefly. They are both complex issues and I will come back to them in greater detail at a later date.

I am referring to domestic violence and alcoholism. In many instances, these two problems are intimately related and intertwined. Naturally, the Church is against domestic violence and aggressively works with programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. However, in view of the size of the problems inside the life of the Church, its efforts are somewhere between inadequate and non-existent.

In Hispanic America, Pentecostalism is growing by leaps and bounds and millions of people who were born and baptized Catholics are very active in fundamentalist Protestant churches. There are a number of reasons for this – the shortage of Catholic clergy, inadequate religious formation in the parishes, etc., etc. However, when people in these Latin countries are queried about why they left the Catholic Church or joined the Pentecostal Church, one of the most common, especially for the women, is that their new church aggressively fights the misuse of alcohol and strongly and constantly condemns domestic violence.

When was the last time you heard a lecture or a sermon against domestic violence in your parish? When was the last time you heard a preacher calling out for increased discipline or even the elimination of the use of alcohol? My guess is that it has been quite some time.

These two abuses are to be found all over the world, but they are special problems in Hispanic America and the Church is not even beginning to do enough to address them. Let’s pray for stronger leadership and more courageous preaching against these two abuses.

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