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By Bishop John, September 1, 2012 4:09 am

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With today’s Gospel excerpt, we leave St. John behind us and begin to walk with Mark for a while. Mark always has our Lord speaking in a very cryptic style making points very succinctly and directly. In today’s reading, we find him surrounded by Pharisees and lawyers. They are sharply criticizing him for not following the liturgical laws exactly as they should be. Jesus is quite direct. He blasts them, calling them hypocrites and reminds them that our obligation is to follow God’s commands and not human laws. He gives us a wonderful one sentence directive.

“Nothing that enters a man from outside can make him impure. That which comes out of him, and only that, constitutes impurity.”

Then he goes on to list a series of evil acts that flow from the misuse of the human will and lead to destruction and pain. This is an important idea but I would rather jump back to the second reading because it is from the epistle of St. James. It is not used that often in the course of the year in the Lectionary.

James is talking to new converts and he tells them that they have gotten the Word and it has taken root in them and the Word is salvific, but listening is not enough. James says, “Act on this Word. If all you do is listen to it, you are deceiving yourself.” He then goes on to talk about helping out neighbor, talking about orphans, widows, others in distress and when we do things for people who are poor and suffering we make for pure worship without stain before our God.

A few paragraphs down James says, “Faith without works is dead.” Historically, this is very much at odds with the basic teaching of Martin Luther and so Luther threw the epistle of St. James out of the New Testament. Catholics ought to study it frequently because it is a real reflection of life in the early Church. He talks about many practical issues – conflict in the Church, the trouble of malicious gossip, confessing our sins to one another and anointing of the sick.

“Is any one among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the Church and they should pray over and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord and the prayer of faith will save the sick person…if he has committed any sins, he shall be forgiven.”

These texts are extraordinarily important for getting an insight into how life was in the Christian community of the first century.

This brief epistle is so important that I am happy that we will continue with it for several weeks.

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By Bishop John, May 17, 2012 5:28 am

How many pastors find themselves disappointed and discouraged by the fact that the exciting blurb in the Sunday bulletin about the important meeting on Tuesday night in the parish hall met with virtually no response? There is something about folding chairs, formica topped tables, a vague agenda and competition with television that really erodes the effectiveness of many parish meetings. Not so in Ireland, at least not when an exciting agenda is proposed.

The Association of Catholic Priests recently sponsored a meeting in Dublin’s Regency Hotel to discuss the future of the Church. Two hundred participants were expected but more than 1,000 people showed up. Speaker after speaker pleaded for a more open Church centered around a spirit of dialogue and called for a redesigning of ministry to incorporate the gifts, wisdom and expertise of the entire faith community, male and female. There were certainly other concerns on the list many of which would create tension and nervousness on the side of the Vatican. It was an important meeting because it symbolized the mood that is present in the Church all over the developed world. People are dissatisfied with the status of today’s Church and want very much to express their deep concerns about needed changes and adaptations. Yet they feel that the leadership in the Church not only does not want to consider changes, but will not even consider discussing them.

Here is the present crisis. There is a massive sense of unrest, disappointment and frustration over a large percentage of the body of the faithful. These people have articulate leaders, they are backed up by the most effective journals of thoughts, such as the London Tablet, the Jesuit’s America and the lay published Commonweal, but the authorities choose not to listen. This has been a source of tension for more than two decades but I am not aware of a single structure that has been established by Church authorities that would encourage thoughtful listening and responsible decision making. One side says that we have all the knowledge necessary because we are divinely guided but doesn’t make for realistic communication. Was divine guidance present in the many scandals coming out of the Vatican in recent years? Not too likely!

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By Bishop John, February 10, 2012 5:12 am

Governor Romney recently made a very bad slip of the tongue when he stated that he did not care about the poor. The negative reaction was out of proportion to his mistake because he had stated the same thing many times earlier but in an accurate context.

Politicians all make mistakes like this. They are frequently speaking in front of a camera on complex issues and under pressure. For Romney, it is one of a series of such blunders but it too will pass.

A deeper problem is: who does care for the poor? In the nearly two dozen debates for the Republican nomination, virtually nothing has been said about the needs of the poor in this country who are suffering tremendously. For that matter, Barack Obama, while he is pushing constantly for improvement of the job situation, does not make the plight of the poor a point that he deals with directly in his many speeches.

Who does care? The churches and other religious communities that feel the agony and the suffering that is prevalent among millions of our fellow citizens. They need to work more effectively together because there are forces at work that will soon again be making efforts to cut back on the limited resources currently available to the desperately poor in this country.

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