What I hate about retirements and funerals...

What I hate about retirements and funerals is that it is often on these occasions that one finds out in the retirement speeches or eulogies a heck of a lot about the person who has retired or just died that one didn't know before. And you suddenly wish you'd been paying much more attention when the person was still alive or making their contribution.

I had a similar sort of experience yesterday when I went looking for that link to the article on the retiring Archbishop of Washington's address to the U.S. Members of Congress. (I haven't been able to find the link by the way. I'll post the text on the discussion board later.) In the course of my hunting for that though I came across a whole lot of other "good stuff" this guy has been saying recently and I wish I'd been paying attention much earlier on before he'd retired from public life.

Instead of my writing much today let me just leave you with two fairly lengthy quotations from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick which appealed to me. The first is from remarks he made to the US Bishops' Conference last week when presenting his final report of the Bishops' Task Force on Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians

On political polarization within the Church...

He warned his brother bishops "the intense polarization and bitter battles of partisan politics may be seeping into (the) broader ecclesial life of our Catholic people and maybe even of our (bishops') conference."

On polarization within the church he said: "We are called to teach the truth, to correct errors and to call one another to greater faithfulness. However, there should be no place in the body of Christ for the brutality of partisan politics, the impugning of motives, or turning differences in pastoral judgment into fundamental disagreements on principle.

"Civility and mutual respect which we must witness are not signs of weakness or lack of commitment, but solid virtues which reflect confidence and faith.

"We don't fit the partisan categories," he continued. "We are not chaplains of factions, but rather builders of genuine unity reflecting the truth of our faith and the diversity of our community. People can divide up the work, but they shouldn't divide the church."

"One crucial and perhaps obvious point in this dialogue with Catholic political leaders is that we are not just another constituent or community leader, we are their pastors and teachers," he said. "Our concern is not politics, not just particular policies, but their faith and even their salvation. These dialogues are not about winning votes, but saving souls."

Source: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0603512.htm.

"The Little Guy"...

The second lengthy quote is actually one of his last weekly columns for his diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Standard, which he had entitled "the Little Guy"...

I want to write about the people in our society and all over the world who tend to get lost in the shuffle, the people to whom the Lord refers in the Gospel as "the least of these" or "the least of your brethren." They are really not properly characterized as either men or women or belonging to one race or ethnic group or living in one special area. It is true that they can be anyone and anywhere, although as we look at the world around us, so many of them are the very poor, women, minorities, the very sick, the uneducated, the badly fed and the victims of persecution and hate.

In the course of my life, I have come across so many of these "little guys" and, as you know, I worry about them and try to help them and try to get those who are not "little guys" to reach out and help them, too. We all could make a list of the little guys in our society who seem always to come up last when the good things are passed around. Whether that is wealth or health, opportunity or security, enough to eat or a safe place to live.

The little guys can be the women who don't have a chance in so many cultures to develop their talents and to make their own contribution to the world, but have to stay a step down in a society that treats them like second-class people. The little guys can be the very poor in any part of the world, whose families will always be without enough to eat or to wear or to have a chance to escape from the crushing barriers of ignorance and discrimination. In the countries of the West, in a most horrible way, the little guy can be the little baby who is put to death in its mother's womb and never has a chance for life after birth.

The little guy can be the stranger in a foreign land who is trying to make a better life for his or her family, the 48 million Americans without health care, the hundreds of thousands of the men and women in the drought of Africa who will starve to death in this 21st century of progress, the women and children of Darfur and in the Sudan who have been fleeing for these many years from murder and rape and pillage, the Israeli and Iraqi, who must live in the terrible fear of a suicide bomber, the Palestinians whom the world - and our own government - seem to be willing to abandon without even the most elementary humanitarian aid, the young people in troubled neighborhoods who are left at the mercy of gangs and drugs and prostitution.

These are the little guys of our own world and our own time. And there are many others. And you and I really need to be aware of them and try to help them. All of us in our hearts do worry about the little guys of life and you have your own list to add to mine, I know. But thinking of you with deepest gratitude for all you do to help our Church reach out to help little guys here in our archdiocese, I thought that I would take this moment to remind us all that there is still so much to do. And Jesus told us that whatever we do for these little guys, we do for Him.

Source: http://www.cathstan.org/news/05-11-06/4.shtml.

Tom Scott is the pen name of the editor of Catholica, Brian Coyne.

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