To instruct the
ignorant... Cardinal Spellman once asked me what is wrong with the Catholic
education? I said, "Your Excellency, frankly I don't want to answer that
question. I know too much. Put me under obedience and I will answer it."
So he did, and I said this sentence:
"Give me a
grade school Catholic, a girl or boy who has just gone to grade school, and I
will make a Catholic out of them in about three months. Give me a girl or boy
who went through Catholic high school and it will take me, by the grace of God,
six to eight months. Give me a B.A. who went through Catholic grade school,
Catholic high school, Catholic college and it will take me a year to 18 months.
Give me an M.A. and it will take me somewhere, with the grace, between 18
months and three years."
I have never
succeeded to make a Ph.D. a Catholic.... one who has never been to a public
school or anyplace else... just straight Catholic education from beginning to
end! "Well, Catherine," he said, "this is a heavy
indictment." I said, "It is, Your Excellency. It is that and
more." "Well, what do you attribute it to?" I said, "The
higher the education, the less the implementation."
A Ph.D. came to
Friendship House--Mary was her name. Being that she has brilliant ideas I asked
her to write for us a paper that we had to give to our Apologetics class -
Sheed & Ward, about 300 people there - on the Mystical Body. Well, there
was hushed silence when she finished. Tears were going down my face, and I
don't cry over papers easily. A priest was sniffing through his handkerchief
and blowing his nose. Sheed was looking at her and saying, "My God! What a
brain!" That sort of reaction!
So Katie says
to herself, "I have an idea. Tomorrow she goes to the clothing room,"
and in Harlem the clothing room was something! They were lined up a block and a
half waiting for clothing. With that gift of understanding of the Mystical Body
of Christ she would be ideal in the clothing room! I told that to the Cardinal.
So the dame
lasted exactly three days and she comes to me and says, "B, I can't take
it. They stink. They are dirty!" Now what is there after ten years of
education or more? "They stink!" That gets to the very essence of
working in the Mystical Body! When I go as a nurse into the carcinoma ward,
which is the cancer ward, they all stink! You get that smell of cancer in the
morning that just knocks you over. But love overcomes that. St. Francis kissed
the leper.
That is my brother in Christ! That is a member of my body! This is
my finger! Sure it stinks, but let's wash it off and let's serve it. Why write
beautiful articles on the Mystical Body and not be able to do that simple
thing?
Catherine
Doherty, Talk on the Spiritual Works of
Mercy
Reflection – Catherine had her own take on things, and that’s for sure. I’m
hoping to go through a few of these presentations on the spiritual works of
mercy, from a little course she taught to the MH staff in 1957. I am finding
her way of presentation here to not lend itself to short excerpts, so this blog
may be a whole lotta Catherine, a little bit of Fr. Denis for these next days.
The Church is abuzz with talks of ‘mercy’
vs. ‘justice’ these days. I think we need to go seriously into the doctrine of
mercy and what it means. It is not sentimentality and laxity—it is a serious,
searching, self-sacrificing, and total concern for the good of the other
person, no matter what the cost is to us, and a boundless compassion for the
other person in his or her real circumstances and pain.
Ignorance is a terrible pain, a terrible
poverty. In Catherine’s era, and especially in the 1950s when she gave this
talk, people would be essentially catechized; what she saw was the calamitous
failure to apply the faith to life, to implement it. And indeed, I don’t think
the Church and the world would have blown up into such intellectual and moral
chaos in the 1960s and 1970s if things had been all that hot in the 40s and
50s. And indeed, it was the intellectual class who had heads full of theory and
data but little practical charity who led the charge into that chaos and
confusion.
For sure, Catherine would have seen the
need for basic catechesis in our day, and indeed she goes on in this talk to
present her delicate and careful way of sharing knowledge of the faith with
people who lack it. The two go together: knowledge of the doctrine and how it
is to be implemented; creed and commandments united with charity and
compassion; dogma and decree with delicacy and discretion.
But let us not forget: to instruct the
ignorant is a work of mercy. My
experience, growing up as I did in the 1970s and 80s, that it is the one work
of mercy that has been neglected above all others, to disastrous effect. And in
the ongoing work of evangelization and outreach to the ‘margins’, we must
include if not emphasize, with great tact and discernment, this long-neglected
work.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.