Right This Minute

I have a computer on my desk, and an iPhone in my pocket.  We have WiFi in the rectory, and high-speed broadband internet connectivity.  Our communications technology is fast.

I frequently order from Amazon.com, things I used to write on a list for the next time I could drive to the store.  Often they arrive at my door the next day; I am disappointed if I have to wait both days of the two-day shipping.  I send out emails every morning, and chafe if I have not had a response by lunch.  I send text messages to people from whom I want to find out something right then.  My plans are frustrated if I have not had an answer in fifteen minutes.  So you see, sometimes I suffer from Instant Syndrome.

Our expectations have been set by the instant technology that links us to one another, and to the producers, vendors, communicators, and commentators of our society.  We tap our fingers impatiently if we have to stare at the spinning color wheel on our screen for more than a second.  We go out of our minds if our request, operation, or order is not completed immediately; something is not working as it should.

What is the problem? Is the technology not up to speed?  Then it must be fixed. But what if the technology is working?  Then the problem must be….with the people!  Some people are not up to speed some of the time.  Some people are not up to speed at any time.  People are not instant.  But is that a problem?

Our instantaneous technologies have transferred our expectations for instant communication and placed them on the people with whom we are communicating.  But do you know what?  That is not the way people work. 

People have lives.  Lives are complex.  Complexity requires consideration, balance, and compromise.  None of these things disposes the average person to present an instant response to most communications from most people under most circumstances. 

Electronic communication deprives us of any information about the person we are dealing with, except for what we expect from them.  We do not know if they are sick, or changing the baby, or running for their lives from a wild beast.  We only know that they aren’t meeting our expectations.  We are quick to transfer blame to them.  Blame leads to anger.  Anger is a symptom of Instant Syndrome.

Don’t be angry.  Don’t have instant expectations for anything but instant technology.  People are not the problem – they are the reason we communicate in the first place.  Don’t let Instant Syndrome describe your relations with people; none of the best relationships are instant.  Real people, and real relationships, require time – your time. 

Delfina Castro, our business manager, is in El Salvador for three weeks to help her sick sister.  She paid the bills, and set up payroll to come out on schedule.  Other than that, folks just have to … wait.  You would be surprised at the responses that elicits.  There must be some way I can get what I want, when I want it, because I want it!

We have great technology here in the rectory; fast technology.  We also have some really terrific, helpful, generous people.  Just not very many – you’d be amazed how much is done by so few.  So it may take some time before we can respond to any request.  How much time may depend on things that you do not know as much about as you know about your own expectations.

The best stuff we have for you is what we have had since Jesus gave it to His Church two thousand years ago.  And freely giving some of our own time to Him is the best cure I know for Instant Syndrome.

Monsignor Smith

What's in a word?

My mom stopped baking pies about sixteen years ago, shortly after my dad was diagnosed as diabetic.  This had two effects: first, it verified my instinct from childhood that my mom really cooked for my dad; we kids just got to eat the results by happy coincidence.  Second, it cut off my supply of pie.

I had been blessed from birth.  My grandmother and mother both made splendid pies.  Plum was my dad’s favorite; I often had for my birthday peach pie instead of cake.  But after the cataclysmic Pie Shutdown, I wandered the earth pieless.  Life was grim.

Finally, this year, in a fit of frustration at the pathetic excuses for crusted food that vendors peddle under the unmerited name of pie, I resolved that I would learn how to make pie.

I consulted my mother, and I consulted books.  I went online to answer a few specific questions.  I bought flour and I bought sugar.  I scoured farm markets for miles around to find the best fruit.  I tried this for shortening, and that for shortening.  I kept the oven hot for whole afternoons through July’s withering heat wave.  Chris Seith, our summer seminarian, was pressed into service as sous chef, and loyally mustered the enthusiasm to peel and roll and taste.  The rectory staff valiantly presented themselves around the kitchen island for forensic pie tastings:  too this, not that enough.  Try again.

We learned many things, such as how to pit cherries with a paper clip, how to dazzle with latticework, and that pies take a very long time to cool after baking, preferably overnight.  We were reinforced at every draining step by the discovery that People Really Like Pie, and so we persevered.  Our triumph came when Chris and I made six pies in one day to serve to the priests and seminarians at the send-off party for the new men going to the North American College in Rome.  Their approval sounded more like forks scraping plates than like applause, but happy noises abounded. 

I don’t know how theological it is to observe that fresh pie for breakfast is a foretaste of heaven, but far from being a diversion or a distraction, pie-baking can reveal the truth to those who care to learn it.   The other morning as I rolled out some chilled dough that a few hours earlier had been flour, shortening (what type is my secret), water, and a pinch of salt, I marveled at how these few basic elements had become a completely new thing, with no distinction of their individual selves.

Because there is a word for what you do to diverse ingredients when you bring them together in such a way that they can no longer be separated, and they become a new thing.  Do you know what that word is?  You marry them.

Monsignor Smith

Feasting all week

Each day this week has been a feast.  It began with the Transfiguration of the Lord on Monday, and proceeded from that day on Mount Tabor all the way up to the last century.

On Tuesday, there was Pope Saint Sixtus and his (Deacon) Companions, who were arrested in 258 AD while offering Mass in one of the catacombs, and beheaded on the spot.   Four days later, Saint Lawrence, the sole remaining Deacon of the Church of Rome, was roasted to death on a gridiron.  We remembered his fortitude and fidelity on Friday.

On Wednesday and Saturday, we had two of the great religious founders of the thirteenth century: first, Saint Dominic, whose friars operate one of the Roman Pontifical universities in which I studied; then Saint Clare of Assisi, who was one of the few people in history as charismatic and committed to Christ as her friend and inspiration, Saint Francis. 

Thursday gave us one of my personal favorites, whom you may not know well.  She is one of the newer additions to the Roman Martyrology, which is the book of Saints celebrated by the Church, and the dates on which they are remembered.  Her name in religion is Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, but like many people, I refer to her most often by her given name, Edith Stein.

Edith was a Jew from Breslau, which was then in the part of Germany that after World War Two became Poland, called Wroclaw now.  She was a gifted scholar who studied with the greatest philosophers of the time.  She was coming into her own as a thinker of the first order when Hitler’s rise to power forced Jews out of prominence and responsibility in all fields, including the universities.

At the same time as she was growing in stature as a philosopher, she spent a weekend at friend’s vacation home, where she found on the shelf in her room the autobiography of another Saint, Theresa of Avila.  Devouring it in one night, she concluded, “This is true!”

She quickly sought instruction and Baptism, and turned her gifts and intellect to understanding human thought and being in the light of Jesus Christ.  As the Nazi oppression grew and the positions open to her dwindled, she taught in a convent school for girls, until becoming a Carmelite nun in Cologne.

On orders from her superiors, she fled the coming genocide to Holland, but after the German takeover there, and after objections by the Dutch bishops to the Nazi deportation of Jews, along with all Catholic priests and religious of Jewish ancestry, she was deported and killed at Auschwitz.

I have visited the church where she was baptized, and the convent where she taught.  I was allowed to kneel on the prie-dieu on which she prayed, and looked at papers that she graded, and manuscripts of her masterworks of philosophy.  I love her spiritual poetry.

I feel like I know her, and want you to be able to do the same.  She is one of the great philosophers of the last century, thoroughly approachable and intelligible as a soul in love with Christ, and a hero in the face of great evil.   One of the saints and martyrs who is easy to see as also being one of us struggling to be faithful in the modern world, it is an annual delight to keep her feast.

 Monsignor Smith

They'll Get Theirs

The Church gives people many things, good things, holy things.  I am sure you could list many that she has given you, starting with the Good News, or the sacraments, or the Faith.  Those would be fun to discuss – heck; I discuss them all the time!  But they are pretty much the expected things.  The Church also gives us unexpected things.

Last week, I took our summer seminarian, Chris Seith, out for a good steak dinner of the kind he cannot hope to get in Rome.  Earlier that afternoon, I had been exchanging email with my own seminary classmate, Fr. Mark Knestout, who was having a bad day.  In an effort (successful, as it happened) to bolster his humor, I invited him to join us.  As Chris and I parked a block from the restaurant, my cell phone rang and Fr. Knestout began to pepper me with questions about why we weren’t there yet, and where I wanted to be seated.  Ending the call so we could walk the two minutes to the restaurant, I rolled my eyes in mock frustration.

“Be careful who they stick you with as your classmate,” I warned him.  “You’re pretty much stuck with him forever.”  Since Chris is heading back to Rome for his third year of theology, he knows what it is like to be one of two Washington men in a class as it moves through the hurdles of formation at the North American College.  In addition to the normal experiences of formation, there are even more things that you wind up doing together.  The NAC has certain expectations of Washington men, and most of them involve little bonus duties.  The Archdiocese also has expectations of her NAC men, with similar bonus duties, many of them affected by the Cardinal’s visits to Rome.

After decades of steadily sending men from our Archdiocese to the NAC, the role and experience of Washington men there has developed into a culture within the culture, a corps within the corps.  For that reason, this week I will be hosting our annual send-off dinner for the “New Men.”  The priests who are alumni of the College, and the men studying there now, will come together to encourage, and perhaps instruct, Stephen Wyble, Robert Boxie III, and Jack Berard, who will set out within the month to begin five years in Rome.  It will be for them an introduction to a unique fraternity.  The experiences and expectations that they encounter over the coming years will unite them to Christ in the priesthood, please God, and to us who are already ordained. It is more than likely that it will unite them also, even especially, to one another.

Sometimes it seems that Father Knestout and I can hardly handle any problem on our own, though there is nothing we cannot conquer together.  We gripe, and encourage; advise, and admonish.  We vacation together, and occasionally – rarely -- even get assigned to work together.  One day in 1993, Fr. Brennan, the vocation director, turned over the phone so I could speak for the first time to my classmate.  Who knew?

A retired Marine friend of mine maintained (and his wife agreed) that, “If the Marine Corps wanted me to have a wife, it would have issued me one.”  Obviously that is not something that the Church wants me to have, nor will she issue one to the young men answering Christ’s call to priesthood in the Latin Rite.  But for these men who are following that same call to the seminary in Rome, it is very likely that she is providing them friends for life.

 Monsignor Smith

The Road Home

Most of you know that I love being on the road, because I love to drive.  I enjoy the experience of controlling a vehicle that is moving me from Point A to Point B.  I enjoy getting there by the fastest route possible, but I also like dawdling along the scenic route.  The trip is often at least as important as reaching the destination. 

Though I always enjoy the driving, there are some stretches of road that I enjoy more than others.  Beautiful roads, challenging roads, and roads that take me home make my heart sing.  I-81 from Blacksburg down toward Knoxville, for example, is a favorite.  County Road 647 in Fauquier County, Virginia is another. 

The Holy Gospel we hear proclaimed at Mass throughout the Church year is rather like a road the opens up before us.  We follow Jesus from episode to episode, following where he leads us, all the while seeing much that is familiar, and simultaneously finding something new every time.

The Scriptural texts for Sunday Mass, presented in the Lectionary (the book of readings), are arranged in three one-year-long programs, with each year walking through a Gospel: Year A is Matthew, then Mark in Year B, and finally Luke in C.  John’s Gospel is peppered throughout the year, usually on Holy Days and major feasts.

This year is Year B, and we are about halfway through Saint Mark’s Gospel, which is the shortest.  Mark is so brief that there is not enough Gospel to fill all the Sundays of the year.  So to fill the gap, for five weeks in late summer, we have one chapter of John’s Gospel.  As I looked to the readings for this week to prepare to preach, I was filled with delight as I saw the Gospel passage and said to myself, is it time for this already?  What a pleasure to walk once more down this familiar path with you.

Not just any chapter, John 6 is this evangelist’s contribution to our understanding of the Eucharist.  Every evangelist recounts the feeding of the five thousand with which this chapter begins, but only John presents what follows: Jesus’s discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum, in which He explains that He is the Bread of Life, and that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood, we do not have life within us. 

In a way this Gospel chapter is like a beautiful road, with words and actions of Christ presented in such a marvelous way that each and every detail, every word and every sentence, is as perfect and proportionate as the splendid truth that they collaborate to convey to us.  But it is also like a challenging road, in that each time I explore it I find a new twist that requires an appropriate response in order to keep me on track.  Many of the disciples turned away at these words; that would be a wrong turn.  For us who continue, it is also the road home, full of comfortable and familiar landmarks that indicate that we are on the right track, and how close we are to safety. 

Here we are again, already.  Beginning John 6 means it is almost August.  School will start eight days after we finish making our way through this chapter.  Wow.  Thank goodness it is also a long road, one that takes five weeks!  Because while the Holy Eucharist in which Christ feeds us Himself, body, blood, soul, and divinity, brings us to our glorious destination with Him in eternal glory, I am not yet eager to reach its conclusion.  I am enjoying the summer, and as ever, I am enjoying driving down one of my favorite stretches of road.

Monsignor Smith

Slow...up

Though I was not born there, I have spent a lot of my time in the South.  I was in New Orleans by age seven, lived in Alabama from the time I was nine, and went to college in Virginia (never mind that Alabamans considered that “up north”) and remained in that fair Commonwealth until going to seminary.  After one year in Baltimore, I spent five years in Rome, which is decidedly the South – just the south of a different continent.  Even here in Maryland we are well south of the Mason-Dixon line, though some days I get edgy about being on this side of the Potomac.  More time in Rome has broken up even that.

One common observation about Southerners is that they do everything slower.  Though this is often cited pejoratively, I think the great wisdom of that has been revealed in these recent days of heat.  Especially when the power was out and not a breath of chill was to be found, we all learned that speed and motion only increase the heat, and the sweat, and the discomfort. So why rush?

Without the God-like power of a thermostat, we become more attentive to the little gifts as we can find them: a wisp of a breeze, a patch of shade, a splashing fountain.  A shaded bench on which to sit, with a light breeze coming off the ocean, the lake, or even the nearby fountain, is delight itself.  Having found that spot, who would be in a hurry?

Now, I do admit that one of the things I do in the summer is work around the house.  Without the frenetic level of phones bleating and doorbells ringing, classes to teach and meetings to meet, the rectory is little more like a home and less like a train station, so summer is when I rearrange, clean out, sort, discard, reconsider and re-purpose.  Thanks to the marvel of climate control, I can pretend that I am in some brisk, labor-encouraging northern clime. 

No doubt you have similar summer projects.  But really, I think most of you are with me when I say I like to use the summer time to move a little slower, be less rushed, and soak in the good things that the season brings, whether that be beach time or fresh peaches.  All the best bits of summer come when we stop hurrying.  If you find yourself nodding, your inner Southerner’s slow grin is showing.

Please allow me to add to the list one more “slow” summer sweetness to savor: prayer.  Churches and chapels have a well-earned reputation for being cool, and even dimly lit: just what you are seeking.  Ours even has a new compressor for the air conditioner – instant cool breeze!  There are plenty of places to sit, and no rush to move on.  Churches everywhere – downtown and at the beach, in the mountains and along the roads -- are open, and the tabernacle holds the One who is so eager for some slow time with you.  We all know which place is associated with fire and unrelenting heat, so to peer into the face of Him who reigns in Heaven must be cool!

Next Sunday evening we have Adoration in the church from six to ten.  Come then, or anytime, to escape the heat of the day; cool off with the fresh breeze of the One who makes all things new.  You have no fear of skin damage from the Sun that Never Sets, Jesus Christ.  Experience the warmth that does not increase the heat.  Learn the wisdom of the South: This summer, slow down – and pray.           

Monsignor Smith

Unless it is broken

How do you fix a broken television?  I will betray my age if I mention a wire hanger where the antenna should be, or a pair of needle-nose pliers to turn the stem of a missing channel-selector knob.  Televisions now have neither antennae nor knobs, and I haven’t the clue how to fix them, either.

I have likened our situation here at Saint Bernadette as akin to a broken television: only one channel, and one program, no matter what time you tune in.  With only your humble Pastor here now that Father DeRosa has gone, programming could become fairly monotonous, with no help no matter how hard you press the buttons on the remote. 

So, without benefit of pliers, I have applied for a remedy to help us through the month. The remedies are several, in fact, and I am confident you will like them all.

Msgr. Thomas Olszyk is the Judicial Vicar of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, U.S.A.   A priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, he spent twenty-plus years as a chaplain in the Air Force.  We met in Rome when I was Secretary and he was in Canon Law studies.  He organized the daily English-language pilgrimage to and Mass at the daily Station Church, in which I participated without fail – about which more some other time.  He is offering many weekday Masses this month. 

Father John McDonald is a priest of Birmingham in Alabama, working toward a doctorate at CUA this summer.  Currently the principal of the high school where my nephew will attend, he was just a first-year seminarian at the North American College when I met him – again, during my secretary days.  I remembered my Birmingham roots and got to know him, and have not regretted it ever since.  You will enjoy the many Sunday Masses he celebrates.

Father Bill Gurnee is one of ours – a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington – who spent a summer as a seminarian here in Saint Bernadette back in, oh, 1999, I think.  He succeeded me as secretary to Cardinal McCarrick in 2002, earning the number 30.  Now he is the spiritual director at our new Blessed John Paul II Seminary, so he can join us for several daily and Sunday Masses.

I do not entrust you to strangers.  These are all my friends in Christ, which comforts me greatly if I cannot be with you myself.

Next weekend, I will be away so I can attend my thirtieth high school reunion in Birmingham.  There were only 32 in my graduating class, so even with the adjacent classes invited, it will not be a big event, but I am very excited, and grateful for their help – and your solicitude – that make my participation possible.

The same face, the same voice all the time, every channel, every program.  Yes, this is how many parishes in our nation and in the Church function all the time; no, it is not how I want your parish to function.  I want you to have the variety of different priests preaching and praying in different ways, but of course, always the same.  

For as diverse as we priests may be in vocabulary, voice, and visage, it is Jesus Christ we preach, and Him crucified; and it is the Sacred Liturgy, the great prayer of his bride, the Church, that we pray.  We priests are many, but we share in the one saving Priesthood of Jesus Christ that is unchanging.  Nothing about that need be fixed, for it is not broken.

Monsignor Smith