Red light, green light

Have you ever had the experience of being in an unfamiliar part of our splendid metropolitan area, trying to follow the instructions on your “whiz-bang” (my father’s nickname for smartphone GPS guidance), feeling the pressure of your schedule and the impatience of drivers around you, and deciding to ‘make your move’ in a complicated intersection (hoping it’s the correct street), looked up just in time to see the traffic signal change to red while you are still moving mid-intersection?  In addition to some embarrassment and anxiety about the possibility of being hit by cross-traffic, one likely reaction would be, “I hope there was no red-light camera.”

It would be a natural response.  First, because there are so many red-light cameras and speed cameras in our area – the District of Columbia and Silver Spring were two of the top three localities for traffic cameras in the whole United States in a recent statistical list, and there are more every month.  Secondly, those camera fines can be costly as well as inescapable: the “legal” presumption is that the camera is always right.  Thirdly, no conscientious person enjoys being responsible for illegal, incorrect, or inadvisable behavior, much less being observed while doing it.  But it does happen.  

So there you are, doing something you didn’t want to do and wish you hadn’t done, and your ‘hope’ is that there is no camera recording it.   What are the grounds for your hope?   Well, statistics, first of all: there cannot be functional red-light cameras in every intersection, even in DC; so there is an arithmetic chance that this was an intersection without one.  Secondly, your own ignorance: this is an unfamiliar intersection, and you have not already discerned it to be monitored by a camera (unlike our own familiar, fabulous Four Corners), and this leaves open the intellectual possibility that it is not.  These are grounds for some sort of hope, but they are flimsy.

Traffic cameras are inhuman and themselves give no ground for natural hope.  At least a traffic cop, a real person, allows room for the possibility of mercy when we have committed a moving violation; and that is a valid ground for hope.  We can hope in a person.

This week we began the season of Lent, the Great Fast of Christians everywhere in preparation for the Feast of Our Lord’s Resurrection.  The awareness that comes to me this year as we return to this recurring time we all know so well and sometimes dread, is that Lent is a long and demanding, communal act of hope.  

On our good days at least, we are conscientious enough to wish to avoid behavior that is illegal, incorrect, or inadvisable in the sight of God, yet we are frank enough to realize that we have failed to do that.   We are also capable of nurturing the false reassurance that nobody noticed, nobody minded, or nobody was actually hurt, up to the point when we admit to ourselves that is impossible.  Omniscient God, not notice?  The God Who has worked over the millennia of salvation history to reveal Himself and His Divine Law, not mind?  The Father Who sacrificed His only begotten Son, convinced that nobody was hurt? 

We have failed, and we know it. With that utterance of dismay, that tinge of grief, comes the admission, and we crack open the casing that contains what makes hope possible: repentance, and the desire for mercy; a chance, the possibility of trying again, of doing better next time and henceforth.  Do not define us by our bad actions!  We can be good, we can be holy, we can make you delight in us and in our deeds, oh God, really we can; just give us the chance, the grace to try again.

Lent reminds us that our hope is in a person, not our perfection.  That person is the Son of God, Jesus Christ, Who is the Divine Mercy, Who invites us to turn to Him.  He has seen everything, all that we have done and failed to do; He has heard all of the excuses we nurture within our minds.  He has forgotten nothing, least of all the promises we made and quickly discarded.  And yet, His eyes are on us, His arms extended.  Turn to me, He says, return to me.  

He is our hope.

Monsignor Smith

 

Big Day in a Big Way

Mardi gras literally means Fat Tuesday, but the celebration it describes includes a lot more than just one day, and many, many different ways of being fat, all of them contrasting with the austerities of Lent.  If we were in Mobile or New Orleans, Mardi Gras would include three or four weeks leading up to the Tuesday itself; hereabouts, we are not that expansive, but Mardi Gras definitely includes this whole weekend.  Catholics, as most folks know, are always happy to find a reason to have a party.

During Lent, we put aside or “give up” many good things, in order to focus on the one truly good, God.  Luxuries, such as sweets and desserts; entertainments, distractions, and diversions (think music, video, and film), are all truly good, but are less good than God.   Even necessary goods, like meals, sleep, socializing, and warm water for bathing are less good than God.   By withholding in some measure a lesser good, we rediscover the sustaining goodness of God.  

But that’s Lent, and that’s next week.  Right now it’s Mardi Gras and we indulge in the goodness of these created things with the same earnestness that we fast and abstain, and maybe a bit more enthusiasm.

This year for Mardi Gras, the Archdiocese of Washington is going to celebrate the goodness of God and rejoice in the goodness of created things in a way I do not recall ever happening before.   On Tuesday, Cardinal Gregory will ordain two new auxiliary bishops for our local church, and there will be great rejoicing.

Just before Christmas, our Holy Father Pope Francis named two of our priests to be consecrated to serve as “helpers” to our Archbishop.   That seemed strange, since we had two, though down from our usual three.  But…four?   That was all cleared up a few weeks ago when it was announced that one of our auxiliary bishops, Bishop Mario Dorsonville, had been appointed Bishop of Houma-Thibodaux in Louisiana.  So, back to three auxiliaries, but wait – Bishop Dorsonville was scheduled to come here to confirm our kids on March first!  Fear not; the next morning I got a call from his assistant.  Bishop Dorsonville wanted to assure us he would be here for Confirmation.  He will not take possession of his new see until the end of March.  

So, here we are, bracing ourselves for the arrival of Lent, but first we have to consecrate two of our priests as Bishops.  If that is not a party, I do not know what is.   The bishops-elect, Juan Esposito-Garcia and Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, are both well known to me since they were seminarians.   Evelio was studying at the North American College in Rome when I was working there with Cardinal Baum.   I am not certain how I came to know Juan, but I have always gotten along well with him, and once almost managed to have him live here with me for a year while he finished his doctoral work; he is a canon lawyer.  

Anyway, an ordination is always a big deal, and a double ordination of bishops is a doubly big deal.   This is part of the “fat” in our Fat Tuesday this year; a richness of blessing and grace for the good of the local church.  

Now that “fat” will be on Tuesday proper, but in the broader interpretation of “Mardi Gras” we here in the rectory already have plans to enjoy some of the goodness of created things in the days before Lent brings its leaner graces.  In fact, some of them involve genuine “gras” – real duck fat cooked with meats and other ingredients into rich goodness, shared with a group of our brother priests.  There will of course be wine, and dessert.  It’s not Lent yet.

Enjoy the goodness of the earth in these days, so that we can together put them aside to focus on the even-better goodness of Heaven.  I will greet you on Ash Wednesday with,  Remember man that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return.  But to grease the transition, God has given us Mardi Gras.

Monsignor Smith

Some things change,

You know I love to keep track of anniversaries.  This weekend (11 February) marks the 165^th anniversary of the visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Saint Bernadette Soubirous at Massabielle by Lourdes, the home of that simple 14-year-old-girl who has become the heavenly patroness of our parish and school.  Back in 1858, nobody in that town except the priest, and he only barely, had encountered the title “The Immaculate Conception” by which the “beautiful lady” identified herself to the girl; and when Bernadette repeated that strange phrase to the priest, he knew from whom she had learned those words: the immaculate Mother of God. 

Other anniversaries on which I am keeping my eyes these days are the three-year markers from 2020, the year Covid marched in and changed our lives and our world.  We are still not shed of the more pernicious effects of that plague and our leaders’ response to it, but as even the federal government will soon admit the emergency is ended, we are not wrong to consider ourselves moved on to the next stage.  I may revisit certain events in their progression over coming months, that we may all learn from what we have experienced.

But three years ago this week, Covid was but a distant rumble, and I was on retreat in West Virginia, and preparing to conduct the Cardinal’s Appeal on the weekend of my return.   I wrote a letter to you all that reflected on my disposition toward asking for and encouraging giving on your part, and how I came to that.  The column attracted a lot of attention around the country as people picked up on my characterizations of certain famous churchmen.  You may not have realized that people in Nebraska and New York were reading and commenting on my little bulletin letter, if you do not follow “Catholic media” or whatever they be called.  Lucky you.  They all missed the point and purpose of my letter, but I am fairly confident that you, immersed with me in the proper context, did not.

Well, I am going to my hermitage in West Virginia the week, and when I return it will be time for our Annual Appeal, as you have already begun to realize.  So I want to share with you, again, a letter explaining my approach to such matters, and I am know that you in your charity will not take it as incendiary, but rather encouraging.  Click here to read Why, and Why Not.  Thank you for giving me that confidence. 

Monsignor Smith

The Whole World in Your

Among this week’s highlights in the international news was the loss in Australia of a tiny capsule, less than a third of an inch long, that contained radioactive material.  Somewhere along a 900-mile journey, the cesium-137 capsule not only dislodged from the mechanism in which it was a functional part, but slipped out of the vehicle transporting that mechanism.   It was “on the lam” for more than two weeks, though the announced search lasted but one week and culminated in its radioactive signature being detected by a vehicle carrying a detector passing by at about seventy miles an hour on the road several yards from where it lay.  So much for that excitement.

You would ask, as nearly everybody seems to be asking, how do you lose a radioactive capsule?  How do you mount it so tenuously, and transport it so carelessly, that its little bundle of deadliness could wiggle loose, slip through the floor, and bounce off into the weeds?  I daresay someone will be designated guilty of surpassing negligence, but since this is not governed by US tort law, I have no idea how astronomically high the financial liability will be set.

For my part, I found it not hard to understand at all.  You see, I routinely distribute the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ to hundreds of people.  I say I do it “routinely,” and I confess I do put a great deal of stock in the routine to provide the necessary caution and care of the precious element I handle.  Not everybody, however, invests that same caution, and that same care, in their routines of receiving it.  

Yes, there are (plural) routineS of receiving, and while each communicant may think he is doing the exact same thing in the exact same way every time, let me assure you, almost no two communicants present themselves in the same way to receive.  The altar servers who accompany the priests with the paten in the distribution can attest to the exciting and sometimes exhausting challenge of “reading” the signals presented by each communicant and successfully delivering the Lord to the communicant.

Since the pandemic, when we began distributing communion at the communion table around the sanctuary, it has been manifest that there are many advantages to this practice, not least of which is the hygienic benefit.  When the communicants are simply holding still, that is an enormous help to avoiding unwanted contact.  Many have rediscovered the ease and naturalness of receiving on the tongue while kneeling, which in addition to reverence also increases accuracy.

As it has been since the late nineteen-seventies or so, there is also the permission to receive on the hand, which also goes much better when the communicant is not moving.  There is a greater chance of unwanted contact when the hand receives the host.  The variety of shapes and sizes of the human hand is simply astonishing, let me assure you.  Add to that some hands that are not level, or are not open, and you begin to see the challenge.  Let a hand shake, slide, or shudder, grab, snatch, or clutch; let it close like a mousetrap or move away the minute the host makes contact, and that where it gets truly difficult and even dangerous.   The sacred host can roll or slide away, get knocked loose, break, or even shatter.  This is no way to receive Our Lord -- though admittedly He is not unaccustomed to it.

I used to suggest to people that receiving Holy Communion on the hand should involve the same level of effort and attention that would apply if someone were handing you your great-grandmother’s diamond engagement ring.  On a moving train.   While standing on the platform between cars.

Now I have a new comparison: a 5x8mm capsule containing cesium-137.  However, this little item entrusted to your care is worth all of your attention and every bit of caution you can muster not because it can bring illness or even death to many, but because it brings grace and even life to you.

Monsignor Smith