- New Bishop for Charleston announced today – Msgr Robert Guglielmone from Rockville Centre and rector of the cathedral there.
- The West Coast March for Life is today in San Francisco – this is an event that has grown tremendously during its short life, and we always like to hear reports from the event.
- Speaking of St. Francis, the other day, the NYTimes ran a story basically summarizing an article that had appeared in L’Osservatore Romano, explaining that the “Prayer of St. Francis” was not written by St. Francis. My first comment is that if that is what the Rome correspondent to the NYTimes does – recap articles in L’Osservatore Romano – may I please have that job? I think I can handle it.
Secondly, I covered this ground in my book, The Words We Pray. You can do the “search the book” feature and probably read much of that chapter online, if you like.
- Speaking of mendicants, Time has a very nice photo essay on the cloistered Dominican monastery of Summit, New Jersey.
The Sisters’ website. Their blog!
- And speaking of living in community for the sake of the Gospel – here is a very nice article in the Washington Post Magazine about a group of lay missioners in dc-
Laura is a shorter, livelier version of every irrepressible tomboy ever played by Sandra Bullock. She wears green-edged cat’s-eye glasses and often pulls her dark, wavy hair into a messy knot atop her head. She is 25, a bilingual, college-educated child of Puerto Rican parents who has given serious thought to joining a convent even as she hangs out at Adams Morgan bars with her closest friends. Her boyfriend is an accountant with Deloitte & Touche, and she loves him. But she also has an intense relationship with God and a desire to serve the poor. “I personally wouldn’t feel right if I wasn’t living my life for others,” she says, “especially for those most in need.”
Laura’s quest to serve God has meant, in essence, turning her back on the material comforts and professional aspirations of her suburban upbringing. And there are others just like her at Simple House and a growing number of Christian “intentional communities” across the country, where residents share a living space as well as a common spiritual purpose. For the devout Catholics and evangelical Protestants in their 20s and early 30s attracted to these communities, it is not enough to attend church, pray before every meal and spend hours at Bible study. It is not enough to ask, “What would Jesus do?” The preferred question is: “How did Jesus live?”
At Simple House, as at other Christian intentional communities, the answer demands devotion and sacrifice. None of the missionaries at Simple House has an outside job. Laura earns just $200 a month to minister to about two dozen families in Southeast, doing everything from delivering food to helping a couple deal with their daughter’s suicide attempt. She and her housemates have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. They pray every morning and evening and attend Mass daily. In their rowhouse on T Street NW, they have no TV. No Internet. No alcohol inside the house. And no sex. Ever. What the young women lack in amenities, they make up for in sightings of rats and roaches.This is what it looks like to reject careerism and affluence in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment. This is what it looks like to become a modern-day radical.
snip
Simple House calls its work “friendship evangelization,” and it’s messy and often frustrating. This is not like giving food to those dying of starvation. Gratitude is often elusive, and the problems the missionaries see — signs of child abuse and neglect, drug dealing, repeated stints in jail, even a girl refusing to attend a private high school that could help lift her out of poverty — don’t lend themselves to simple solutions. At times, to avoid losing their faith in the power of God to change lives, the missionaries debrief one another by asking: “Where did everyone see Christ today?”
“That’s important,” Clark says. “Not just for the sense of keeping it prayerful. But, like, people go away more disturbed if you don’t do it. They’re more scandalized than edified.”
So, where does Laura see Christ on the afternoon she buys diapers and baby wipes for a teenage mother who is part of the Simple House ministry? Driving to the mother’s house, Laura overshoots the front door and has to drive again around the block because “we can’t walk too far in this neighborhood.”
Her welcome? The mom, who is 15, bounds into the living room wearing a T-shirt that blares: “I (HEART) SEX.” She glances at the diapers and wipes and says … nothing. No “Thank you.” No “That’s great.” No “I appreciate it.”
“Sometimes,” Laura says later, while slaloming a ministry minivan through road construction on Minnesota Avenue SE, “you just have to be okay with people being rude . . . If you’re following the Gospels, they don’t say: Love your neighbor only if he loves you back.”
“If you want to be overwhelmed with thanks,” Clark adds, “that’s a false charity.”
Still, they acknowledge that there’s a fine line between being godly and being taken advantage of. “The greatest poverty we see,” observes Jessica Hensle, who has been a Simple House missionary for two years, “is a poverty of love . . . the poverty of not being wanted by anybody, not being supported by anybody, not being loved by anybody.” As a result, the people they are trying to help “are confused by us a lot.”
But when asked about the Simple House ministry, many on the receiving end of its efforts use the words: “They are a blessing.”
For 19-year-old Angelica Williams, the fact that Simple House exists has been revelatory. “When we needed food,” she marvels, “they came by and gave us food. I actually thought, I’m like, ‘There are nice people in the world.’ ”
For Carol Bowman, who is 55 and lives with her daughter and 9-year-old grandson, Simple House offers not just aid but “friendly conversation, and that’s nice.” Some of her neighbors, she concedes, “do say, ‘That girl have a lot of white people comin’ in that house.’ Well, it’s church people, and they might be white, but . . . they real friendly, and they help people.”
- Vatican YouTube update: The channel now has over 5,000 subscribers. They haven’t changed their mind on embedding yet, unfortunately. I am not sure about comments though – the comments space is there, but no videos have actual comments on them. Perhaps it is disabled without being obviously so?
I stood on a column in front of the Department of Labor for 2 1/2 hours shooting over 700 pictures. I have cut them to 477 – preserving such a large number for the sake of documentation and so that marchers can find their groups. They are in the exact order in which they were shot – except for the little surprise at the end, which I took on the Mall during the speakers before the March began. Enjoy!
Read Previous Post