Just read a great NPR interview with Sr. Simone Campbell about the Vatican action against the U.S. Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). One of her comments struck me as especially pertinent. "When you don't work everyday with people who live at the margins of our society, it's so much easier to make easy statements about who's right and who's wrong . . Life is way more complicated in our society and it's probably way easier to be 8,000 miles away in Rome. . . " I'm thinking you don't need to be 8,000 miles away for it to be way easier, and for you to be irrevocably removed from the day to day life of most of the people on the planet. There is Cardinal Dolan at St. Patrick's Cathedral right in mid-town Manhattan and he might as well be 8,000 miles away in Rome. There are these politicians deeply opposed to abortion who are also opposed to contraception. There is Ryan, touting his "budget" as fulfilling catholic social teaching in spite of the U.S. Bishops Conference telling him otherwise. 8,000 miles away??? in where???
In another reality that has lots of deep fears about the realities of human suffering that we all experience at one time or another in life -- and some that many people engage on a daily basis in their struggles for basic, very basic human rights.
In the early years of my relationship with Alan, we stood next to each other on the street and we sat next to each other on the New Haven Railroad but we might as well have been 8,000 miles apart. I was working at a catholic college doing social justice work and he was a Park Avenue architect in Manhattan who belonged to the New York Athletic Club. I always wondered why he was attracted to me because I wasn't anything like the women he had relationships with in his life before that. One night his sister was in the hospital on the Upper West side of Manhattan. This was before it got really gentrified. It was a neighborhood I knew well. We visited his sister and then went to eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant I liked. As we were driving back to Westchester he remarked that he had seen more people with physical disabilities that evening than he had in months and months. I laughed - really hard. I asked him how many disabled people he thought he would run into on the New Haven, in his Park Avenue offices and the walk from Grand Central Station to Murray Hill. How many poor and disabled people did he rub elbows with in corporate boardrooms and at the very prestigious New York Athletic Club (at that time they didn't have women, blacks or jews as members but the priests from St. Patrick's Cathedral were always there) and at the yacht club in New Rochelle where he kept his boats to take him to his island. Clearly we were next to each other and simultaneously 8,000 miles apart - at least.
So began fifteen years of him trying to understand why I wasn't driven to make money and use it to protect myself from the suffering of the world, the suffering of life. And all the while he couldn't see his own deep suffering made all the worse by his drive to do everything in his power to avoid it. I was glad that in the last months of his life he found a way to understand and he found a way to come to peace in his own way.
A dear spiritual advisor once cautioned me not to have concern for what would appear as the "maximization of opposition" as our world moved from an operating principle of warfare to one of peace. I was cautioned to pay no attention to the reporting of the demise of the world of warfare, and to joyfully be about the works of peace. It was good advice. We are clearly in that time right now. Everyday brings the stark differences of orientation front and center.
This latest action of the Vatican to try to reign in the Gospel spirit of the U.S. women religious by taking over their leadership conference makes our choices crystal clear. Will we live in fear and warfare trying to shore up our control over life and the world? or will we surrender to the powerful and creative forces of life and take our part in ushering in a new time of peace and prosperity on our planet? Geography is irrelevant . . . trust, faith and courage are everything.
Godspeed to the women religious of the LCWR as they grapple in a peaceful, Gospel based way with the choices before them.
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