Haiti Relief Efforts Update

Haiti Relief Efforts Update

In New Rochelle, Salesian Missions is trying to collect information related to six areas of concern:
1. strategies for intervention, on three themes, immediate and long-term: saving lives, rebuilding lives, rebuilding structures;
2. setting up infrastructure through a local emergency office and satellite phone contact;
3. finances: collecting and distributing funds; partnering with others
4. outgoing information: getting updates from Haiti, preparing all sorts of reports, financial accounting;
5. offers of cooperation from persons (volunteers) and organizations (grants, services, etc.);
6. public relations: collecting and sharing information, photos, video from all our Salesian partners, as well as more general information about Haiti.

Fr. Mark Hyde arrived in Santo Domingo on Wednesday evening and had a first talk with the provincial and his team right away. Before leaving New York, Fr. Mark was interviewed by NBC News on relief programs in Haiti. CNN has offered a national pro bono advertisement campaign for Salesian emergency relief programs worth $10,000.

The SDBs are sheltering 3,500 refugees at Carrefour-Thorland. Photos from this site were posted by ANS several days ago. But many of them still need tents. More dramatic is what the FMAs are doing: caring for 3,500 at Pétion-Ville and 7,000 at their school in Thorland. The sisters report that they have many children without parents.

Sr. Annecie Audate, animator (superior) in Thorland, writes: “We have divided the camp into sectors to facilitate order. We have distributed approximately 800 tents to the people and also distributed water and some help given to us by our sisters in the Dominican Republic. Every morning we have the celebration of the Holy Mass with all the people present and in the afternoon we pray the Rosary and evening prayer together or have [Eucharistic] adoration.”

The SDBs have a water truck moving about the city dispensing clean drinking water, and two more trucks will soon be on their way.
Pictures pertaining to the food distribution mission to Haiti have be transmitted via separate e-mails. The 11 trucks from the D.R. (1 + the 10-truck convoy) went to Pétion-Ville. On January 21, three more trucks with 1,500 bags of dry rations were leave Barahona with Thorland as their destination. Each of these bags will serve one family for three days, for a total of more than 20,000 meals.

Fr. Zucchi Olibrice confirmed the following numbers of students before the earthquake: mini schools: 20,000; three-month short technical courses at ENAM: 360; regular students at ENAM: 1,040. The UN Disaster Assessment & Coordination Team (UNDAC) has confirmed that an On-site Operations and Coordination Center (OSOCC) team was sent to ENAM on Monday, January 18. Apparently they made some sort of survey but didn’t act to recover any bodies; the report we received was vague.

Fr. Zucchi told Mr. Ortega that there were 200 casualties among the ENAM students. They were 5-17 years old, some of the best and brightest young women and men studying to be teachers.

In addition, 19 people were killed at the Mini Schools facility headquartered at the ENAM-LAKAY compound.

Those whose bodies have been recovered at these places, including 85-year-old Brother Hubert Sanon, have been buried in a common grave near the school.

The church and parish center of Cite Soleil have collapsed around children who were at catechism classes. Rescue teams are still working to find people alive in the rubble.

An OCHA (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) report dated January 19 states: “Minor damages were reported in Les Cayes (South department) where 12 houses collapsed and 500 people where wounded. Health structures in the area are overwhelmed and 200 people are displaced.” There is a Salesian school with youth center, and three confreres, at Les Cayes; we have not received any damage reports from them.

VIS (the Italian Salesian NGO) has offered to support the coordination of emergency relief and the installation of the coordination center. In addition to its own volunteers, VIS is ready to send experts in relief management for identified special tasks. The joint provincial meeting to take place on Friday will review this offer as well as the offer received from the Spanish Salesian NGO Jovenes y Desarrollo (JyD).

BEGECA, a German procurement agency, has offered its services. BEGECA is recognized by the disaster relief department of the EU – ECHO – for purchasing relief items in their emergency programs. BEGECA has been a partner of Salesian NGOs for many years. A coordination officer from BEGECA will soon be posted in Port-au-Prince. BEGECA also has offered a plant for cleaning 2,000 to 3,000 liters of water/hour in Port-au-Prince. The offer includes sending two technicians for its installation and training in Haiti, free of charge. 1,000,000 water cleansing pills from Jugend Dritte Welt in Bonn are already en route to Santo Domingo for Haiti. Another 500,000 have been offered by Jugend Eine Welt Austria.

Fr. Mark spoke with Cross International USA’s president, who confirmed an offer of 200 containers of relief supplies— dry food, rice, beans, cooking oil, personal hygiene kits, drinking water, blankets, and tarps—for different relief agencies in Haiti, including the Salesians in the first place. Cross International has confirmed that they are ready to ship the first containers within the next 2-3 days.

A support center will be established in Santo Domingo with an implementation office in Port-au-Prince. Support offers have been received from JyD and VIS. An offer for a professional with Creole proficiency to serve in the support center has been made by JyD.

The logistical support center for emergency relief will be placed in Barahona, where the SDBs have been offered open space at the international airport at Barahona for temporary storage of the containers. Fr. Pichardo, the provincial, has also authorized making the chapel in Barahona more secure in order to use it immediately for storage space.
The donated food stuffs and other relief items will be trucked from Barahona to Jimani, D.R. (on the southernmost border with Haiti), where the SDBs are currently looking for warehouse space for repacking of donated good into smaller family-size packages. Smaller packages will then trucked be to Port-au-Prince. The Salesians of Haiti still fear that security for a larger warehouse in Haiti is not yet possible. Target distribution areas in Port-au-Prince are Carrefour-Thorland , Cité Soleil, ENAM, and Jacmel (an FMA house).

CNN.com has added Salesian Missions to the approved charities on its “Impact Your World” section of its site, in addition to donating $10,000 in free advertising for our relief effort in Haiti. Those ads will begin running later today. Here is a link to what that looks like: http://clients.bobcram.com/shoestring/

The Sandals Foundation (the philanthropic arm of Sandals Resorts International) has designated Salesian Missions as one of the recipients of funds from its Haiti Relief Fund. Press Release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/Haiti_Earthquake/Disaster_Relief/prweb3456514.htm
On Friday, January 22, Fr. Mark Hyde, SDB, Martin Diggs (SM-NR photographer), Fr. Juan Linares, SDB, and Fr. Victor Pichardo will travel to Port-au-Prince by helicopter for a coordination meeting with the Haiti and Antilles provincial councils of the SDBs and FMAs. Bro. Albert Rodriguez, the Antilles treasurer, and Franklin Ortega, the Antilles director of development, will go by road. The meeting will take place at the SDBs’ Port-au-Prince provincial house at 10:00 a.m.--outside “under a tree” (the building not being safe). Before the meeting, the team will visit damaged Salesian sites in Port-au-Prince. The return to Santo Domingo is scheduled for 3:00 p.m.

Salesian Missions has had a conference call with Visionlink, Inc., in order to put in an emergency relief database. The company has developed emergency communication systems for the Red Cross, various humanitarian aid organizations, and more than 200 pharmaceutical companies.

The Haitian provincial council will start to discern tomorrow on priorities and general future organization of their activities in Haiti. There are offers to support the reconstruction of Salesian educational infrastructure from Gobierno de Castilla y Leon (through JyD), Misereor/city of Aachen (through Salesian Missions, Bonn), the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation & Development–BMZ (through the Salesian NGO Jugend Dritte Welt), and the Rector Major.

Salesian institutions all across the U.S. are praying and raising funds for their “Salesian brothers and sisters” in Haiti. For example, see Don Bosco Prep in Ramsey, N.J.:

http://www.northjersey.com/news/011910_Don_Bosco_Prep_mourns_losses_at_Haitian_school_belonging_to_same_Catholic_order.html

http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/new_jersey/100121-nj-school-mourns-sister-school-in-haiti

FMAs from different provinces have expressed their readiness to leave for Haiti to help, and there are a dozen lay volunteers from their houses in the D.R. who are ready to go. But because of security problems they have not been free to go the Haiti. The FMAs of the United States are gathering emergency items to have them on site as soon as possible. They are also receiving help and solidarity from the sisters of other religious institutes in various parts of the world and from many lay people who have been affected by the enormity of the damage caused by the earthquake. The FMAs in Haiti, in turn, are assisting the sisters of other congregations who can’t get it anywhere else. That has included arranging transport to the D.R. for those seriously injured.

Salesians Continue to Respond to Needs in Haiti

Salesians Continue to Respond to Needs in Haiti
Fr. Mark Hyde left on Wednesday morning, January 20, for Port-au-Prince via Santo Domingo in order to take part in a morale boosting exercise and a strategy-development working session with the provincial councils of the Antilles and Haiti provinces. The meeting will be held in Port-au-Prince on Friday. Fr. Mark is bringing satellite phones with him.

In Fr. Mark’s absence, Jaime Correa and Adam Rudin of the New Rochelle office and Hans-Jurgen Dorrich of the Bonn office, who came to New Rochelle on January 8 for business that obviously had no connection to the earthquake, are managing the command center in New Rochelle.

The Spanish NGO Jovenes y Desarrollo has offered to make available two of its staff personnel already posted in Santo Domingo to assist in the ongoing emergency relief effort. JyD has already supported the Antilles Province in setting up their project development office.

A proposal for the structure of an emergency relief and reconstruction data base has been developed and is being distributed for the comments and feedback of NGOs and mission procures.

Salesian Missions has been in contact with UNDP, who in turn has alerted a UN team to assist in recovery efforts of the 200-500 bodies trapped/missing/dead under the rubble at ENAM.

Many NGOs and Salesian houses are working non-stop to bring the necessary relief supplies as quickly as possible. The New Rochelle Missions Office continues with its role as the center for information, communications, and organization while the Salesians in the Dominican Republic are dealing with the practical side of things, ensuring the safe arrival of the help being sent.

The Salesian NGO Jugend Eine Welt in Austria has offered to make a request in cooperation with CARITAS Austria to the ECHO Emergency Relief Program of the EU for 500,000 euros. Jugend Eine Welt has received from MIVA Austria the approval of two project vehicles, one for the SDBs and the other for the FMAs in Haiti, to facilitate movement in the emergency situation.

The Spanish NGO Solidaridad Don Bosco from Seville has offered to support the reconstruction phase by submitting proposals to public donors in Spain.

Salesian Missions is working with Cross International to get 200 containers with relief supplies to Port-au-Prince. As of the morning of January 20, we were considering the international airport at Barahona, D.R. (there is a Salesian house there, the closest to the Haitian border), as the most likely reception and storage center for this material, from which to truck it to such destination or destinations as may be set up in Port-au-Prince. Part of Fr. Hyde’s work during his current trip is to learn what this/these are. But other shipping arrangements also were under consideration—whatever works to get the goods on site ASAP.

“Poor Haiti, poor Haiti.” Stretched out in a hospital bed in Santo Domingo, Fr. Attilio Stra gave a moving account of the moment the earth shook in Port-au-Prince on January 12 to Alessandra d’Asaro, a journalist from International Volunteers for Development (VIS).

The radio interview, in Italian, is available at the audio section of the ANS site: http://www.infoans.org/22.asp?sez=1&sotSez=13&doc=4699&lingua=2&tipoCorrelato=2

In spite of the constraints of his present situation, the veteran Salesian shows the great fortitude typical of missionaries used to being face to face with poverty, violence, and social injustice. His thoughts quickly turn to the 300 or so street children buried in the Salesian school in the Salina district of Port-au-Prince.

The number of pupils who were in the school at 4:53 p.m. on January 12 is unclear because on the streets you don’t count the numbers in the group. Here the youngsters had somewhere to go, and the possibility of hoping for a better future: getting away from the dangers of the streets, studying and learning a trade, as happens in Salesian schools all over the world.

In the BohnenMini Schools the silence is deafening. The youngsters and Bro. Sanon, who lost his life with them, have been buried in a common grave near the school. Among the ruins, pages from exercise books drift in the warm breeze, chairs, colored pencils, school reports have been scattered among the dust and the rubble by the earthquake.

Piles of debris heaped up, confusion among the upended floors. Through the gaps in the collapsed perimeter walls people come and go, taking everything – piles of paper cups, broken chairs, abandoned shoes, and those sheets of paper. In the tumult one comes across what seem to be pools of stagnant water. “It’s what was left by the corpses,” explains Fr. Lephène Pierre, a Salesian from the ENAM community. “We just need to rebuild the wall to avoid so much mess and to increase security, which in these circumstances is always too little.”

Fr. Lephene Pierre at ENAM

The Haitian government has been gravely wounded, with many ministers among those killed in the earthquake, and the presidential palace has completely collapsed. In the stead of the local government, the United Nations, the United States, various other countries, and many private charities—including the Salesians and the Salesian Sisters--have made it their priority to provide food, water, and first aid.

An 11-truck convoy with water, dry foods, and emergency relief items arrived safely at Port-au-Prince on Saturday from La Vega, Dominican Republic. It was escorted by a Dominican military detail. Pictures of this mission upon departure from La Vega and arrival in Port-au-Prince are awaited. The Salesians also have a water truck moving about the city offering its precious contents to the needy.

Food and water being distributed from one of the trucks that the Salesians brought in from the Dominican Republic.
“In this tragedy,” continues Fr. Lephène, “what is very moving is the solidarity being shown by the whole world.” At ENAM a team of civil defense workers coming from all over Latin America is working day and night, still hoping to find someone alive or dead among the ruins.
Lasting images: hands upraised to catch the water ration from the trucks on the crowded roads of the city; the loud noise overhead of planes and helicopters; makeshift tents at the side of the roads; and, in spite of everything, the Salesians continuing their work, never forgetting to smile even in the face of such tragedy.

Homily for 2d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Following the events in Haiti and relief efforts here (as part of the "crisis team" at Salesian Missions) has kept me from getting my Sunday homily up promptly. But here it is.

Homily for the
2d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Jan. 17, 2010
John 2: 1-11
Troop 40 B.S.A.

“There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee” (John 2: 1).

Do you wonder why they ran out of wine after Jesus and his disciples showed up at a wedding? Evidently everyone was having a pretty good time!

More seriously, Jesus’ presence at a wedding and his intervention to keep this wedding from becoming a social disaster show that God approves of marriage. You’d be surprised to know that some people, even Christians, at different times in history, haven’t approved of marriage, have even considered it sinful.

In fact, if you were paying attention to the 1st reading, you noticed that Isaiah uses marriage as a sign of the relationship between God and his people: “As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder [or Maker] shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you” (Is 62:5). Nor is that the only Old Testament text to use that kind of language. One entire book, the Song of Songs, uses it. And St. Paul uses it in some of his letters in the New Testament, calling the Church the bride of Christ.

Along the same line, before Communion at every Mass, we acclaim, “Happy are those who are called to his supper,” i.e., the supper of the Lamb of God. With one word left out, that’s a quotation from Rev 19:9: “Blessed [or Happy] are those who have been called to the wedding feast [or supper] of the Lamb.” The word omitted in the Mass text is “wedding” or “marriage.” That acclamation reminds us that Holy Communion is a foretaste of heaven, which the Bible often compares to a feast, a banquet—especially a wedding banquet. The wedding, indeed, is the one between God and his people, between Jesus and his Church.

What else can we learn from observing Jesus, and his holy mother Mary, at a wedding? They are interested in and concerned about the important events and the everyday lives of people. What’s more important in the lives of most people than their wedding, their marriage? What’s more “everyday” than married life and family? Jesus and Mary are there in the lives of these friends of theirs. We don’t even know their names; the gospel doesn’t tell us. And that means that they represent all of us. God cares about all of us all the time, even in the most ordinary parts of our lives, and he wants them to turn out well; he wants us to be happy—like the outcome of this wedding feast.

What else do we see in this story of Jesus at Cana? What was the immediate reason why Jesus intervened to head off a big problem? It was his mother’s intercession. Somehow she has become aware of the wine shortage, and she goes to Jesus with an implicit request that he do something about it. Her words to him are simple: “They have no wine” (1:3)—an observation. But he understands the request: Would you do something? For his answer is: “That doesn’t concern me. It’s not yet my time” (1:4), my time to act, my time to transform people’s lives. But she doesn’t accept that answer. She persists—not with Jesus directly but with the household servants, whom she sends to Jesus for instructions (1:5). And he does what she asks; he saves the day. He can’t refuse his mother.

That relationship between Jesus and his mother is the reason for our confidence in her, the reason why we so often invoke her guidance, her help, her protection, the reason why—as 2 of you know well—why Don Bosco and the Salesians call upon her as the Help of Christians. We know that she’ll go to Jesus for us and let him know that we need him and he should do something for us, as he did for the people at Cana. At this time, for instance, we can call on Mary to intercede with Jesus for the people of Haiti.

A final lesson from what happened at Cana: Mary told the servants to go to Jesus and “do whatever he tells you.” On the face of it, filling 6 jars with water (1:6-7) wasn’t going to help the situation, was it? But they did what Jesus told them and got a miracle (1:7-9). Mary would tell us the same thing: Do whatever Jesus tells you if you want to be saved. Follow the teachings of Jesus in the Scriptures. Follow the teachings of those whom Jesus has left us as teachers, viz., the leaders of the Church: the Holy Father and our bishops. More important than having water turned into wine is having us turned into God’s holy people, into saints, by living the way Jesus teaches us. I said earlier that God wants us to be happy; if we listen to Jesus we will be happy, in this life and for all eternity.

Salesian Situation Becomes Clearer; Help Starts to Arrive

Salesian Situation Becomes Clearer; Help Starts to Arrive

Information about the situation of the Salesians in Haiti has been arriving from Port-au-Prince chiefly through the Dominican Republic. In New Rochelle the relief operation is being coordinated with the Salesians in the D.R., in various mission offices and NGOs, with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, with UN agencies, with Catholic Relief Services, etc.

The Rector Major, Fr. Pascual Chavez, is being constantly updated on the situation and developments and continues to offer his encouragement to the Salesians in Haiti, who have been so severely tried. On January 18 Fr. Chavez issued a letter to the entire Salesian Congregation, appealing for urgent, even sacrificial assistance to our brothers in Haiti.

The two Salesian seminarians who died on January 12, Brothers Wilfrid Atsime and Valsaint Vibrun, were aged 28 and 26, respectively. [These are in addition to Brother Hubert Sanon, 85, who died at ENAM; his death was reported immediately, but the two seminarians were "missing" for some time.] The other Salesians in Port-au-Prince are safe and well, although some were injured; some of them have lost family and friends. As reported earlier, all the Salesian sisters are safe, and they are offering hospitality and other forms of aid to numerous displaced people.

The most tragic news is the death of the Salesian pupils at ENAM. The first estimate of over 200 youngsters buried under the ruins with some of their teachers, remains the one most frequently given in reports, although some have said it could be as high as 500. It doesn’t seem that anyone has a hard figure yet. Bodies are being recovered—60 of them as of January 18. Many other Salesian pupils died in their own homes.

Some bodies that had been pulled out of ENAM.

On the CNN site there is a collection of short clips about the activities of the Salesians before the earthquake.

Fr. Victor Pichardo, provincial of the Salesians in the Antilles, reached Port-au-Prince with a military helicopter and spent a night there. While there he was also to gather practical information for the next stage of the relief work. On his return Fr. Pichardo took Fr. Attilio Stra, director of the ENAM community, who had survived the collapse of the building, for hospital treatment in Santo Domingo. His injuries are not serious. He was visited on Saturday evening by the President Leonel Fernandez Reyna of the Dominican Republic.

On Friday, January 15, three days after the earthquake, a technical commission from the Dominican Republic reached Port-au-Prince by road and obtained first-hand knowledge of the situation on behalf of the Antilles Salesian Province, as well as the rest of the Salesian world. Bro. Alberto Rodriguez, provincial treasurer, Mr. Franklin Ortega from the Development Office of Antilles Province, and Frs. Angel Sanchez and Gabriel Almonte from the Barahona community, which is the closest to Haiti, saw for themselves the chaotic situation and the powerlessness of the people now living on the streets, the squares, and public parks.

The first stop was at the St. John Bosco community (ENAM), the most seriously affected of the Salesian works in Haiti. Here they met Fr. Wim Boksebeld and Fr. Zucchi Ange Olibrice. “Silence, suffering, and sadness reigned,” the four visitors said. Most of the pupils and their teachers are still buried under the ruins. As with many places in the city, there has been looting, with what remained of desks, chairs, and computers carted off.
Gianluca Antonelli, executive director of International Volunteers for Development (VIS), in conjunction with the New Rochelle Salesian Mission Office, has promised to get the Italian civil protection authorities, already working in the city, involved.

The other Salesian centers in Port-au-Prince are all in the same situation. The Salesians are camping out in the courtyards and spending the night in cars or in the open air.

The visitors met Fr. Jacques Charles, the current superior of the vice province of Haiti, and his appointed successor, Fr. Ducange Sylvain. The most urgent need is to provide the Salesians in Haiti with the minimum necessary infrastructure to take in and care for people. The first things they need are drinking water, canned food supplies, and food for young children because there is very little food in the city and what can be found is by now often contaminated; then they need medicine and tents.

On their return to the D.R., Bro. Rodriguez and Mr. Ortega by teleconference updated the New Rochelle Mission Office crisis committee, who have been planning for relief assistance and its distribution since the day after the earthquake.

By Monday evening 11 trucks with food and medicine had reached the Salesians from the D.R., and these were being distributed to the people. Where possible, assistance centers have been established at the houses of both the Salesians and the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, who are doing all they can to welcome and help the people.


In the video information section of ANS a documentary is available (http://www.infoans.org/14.asp?sez=14&sotSez=13&lingua=2&doc=4688), made some years ago by Missioni Don Bosco of Turin, which gives an account of the work of the Salesians in Haiti before the earthquake.
Also, ANS interviewed Fr. Jacques Charles early last year about the Salesians in Haiti; the video is posted at http://www.youtube.com/user/ANSchannel#p/u/0/s5UHPledvv8

On the evening of January 18, the Salesian Sisters posted an excerpt from a message sent to Mother General Yvonne Reungoat by Sister Mathile Piard, who was injured when the house at Pétion-Ville, fell in on her. She thanked Mother Yvonne for her closeness to all of the sisters and then described what she went through: “I was in the house when the earth began to quake. I ran but I could not immediately get out. My leg was wounded, as was an ear, and I fractured a finger. I thank the Lord, who left me my life. I thought I was going to die as I saw the ceiling falling on me while I way trying to run outside. I was saved, thanks to two men who came to get me. I ask the Lord to bless them. The house of Pétion-Ville collapsed; a part of the house dedicated to Mary Help of Christians saw the fall of the chapel and the school. Now we are gathering the people in the parts that remained standing in all the houses. There are many wounded and dead. The country has nothing left...we lack everything.”

The FMAs from the Antilles Province of the continue to bring help to Port-au-Prince. The provincial, Sr. Carmen Figueroa, informed Mother Yvonne that the sisters of her province are arranging with some volunteers to bring more aid and that one of the FMAs is also contacting the religious communities of other congregations to find out what help they need.

The Colombian TV channel RCN transmitted an interview with Sr. Rocio Perez, FMA, a Colombian missionary at one of the Thorland houses. The broadcast showed some FMAs working in a large camp of more than 3,000 persons set up in the green zone of one of our communities. Sr. Rocio said that during December they had received a gift of a large number of blankets, and these have now been given out to the people. The reporters commented that where the FMAs are working they are one of the few well-organized groups, and the people who were interviewed were grateful for the help received.

On January 17 the provincial council of the SDB Haiti Vice Province met to make a first assessment of the situation and make some decisions for the immediate future, such as where to relocate the Salesians among the remaing houses.

The Salesian house of ENAM is completely destroyed. So are the Mini Schools of Father Bohnen (OPEPB)--the kitchen that prepared the meals for most of the outlying sites where meals were served, the administrative offices, and ENAM itself. The dormitory at Gressier-Leogane has collapsed. The church and the parish center of Cité Soleil have totally collapsed.

The house at Fleuriot-Tabarre has been seriously damaged, as has that at Pétion-Ville. But these have become reception centers and at present have about 3,500 people there, sleeping outside in the courtyard. At Thorland the Salesian residence has been damaged, the chapel split in two, and the retreat house totally out of commission.

The Salesians who were living in the communities of ENAM and Fleuriot are being housed in other communities in Haiti, while the postnovices will go for the time being to the Antilles Province.

To coordinate relief better, to facilitate communication, and to plan for the development of activities, a Salesian Crisis Committee has been established made up of Fr. Jacques Charles, Fr. Ducange Sylvain, and Fr. Zucchi Olibrice. Each community in Haiti will need to send in a detailed report of the situation of the Salesians, the young people, and the property.

The priority needs are: the temporarily re-locating the Salesians, finding help for the people now in the care of the Salesians, protecting the houses and the works, repairing the perimeter walls, creating a team to assess the condition of the buildings, and finally setting in motion a medium-term reconstruction program for the destroyed buildings.

Photos of some of the damage and of displaced persons staying at the Salesian school in Thorland are at the ANS “Image Bank”: http://www.infoans.org/index.asp?Lingua=2

Fr. Mark Hyde, director of Salesian Missions in New Rochelle, is planning to fly to Santo Domingo on Wednesday and be in Port-au-Prince by Friday to meet personally with the local Salesians and see the situation there for himself.

Update on Salesian after Haiti Earthquake

Update on the Salesians after the Haiti Earthquake
Bits of news have been arriving in New Rochelle from Port-au-Prince via Rome. This is current as of 7:30 p.m., Jan. 15.

1. The 2 young Salesians who were unaccounted for at school, Brothers Wilfrid Atsime, 28, and ValsaintVibrun, 26, in their third year of philosophy studies, died when the Saint Francis de Sales Institute of Philosophy in the Fleuriot-Tabarre district of Port-au-Prince collapsed. Their funerals have already been held. Thus, with the already known death of Brother Hubert Sanon, we have lost 3 confreres.

2. One report, coming to us from Fr. Adriano Bregolin, vicar of the Rector Major, through our British confreres, says that up to 500 pupils are buried under rubble at one of our schools, presumably ENAM (St. John Bosco), and that “all six Salesian houses in the area of Port-au-Prince have been destroyed.” All other reports mention “200+” students in the collapsed building, including 2 posted today by ANS. Efforts are being made to get Haitian National Police and/or OCHA to ENAM to try to extract the students.

3. Fr. Attilio Stra, director of ENAM and already reported as seriously injured, has sent an e-mail to Italy acknowledging, “It’s a miracle I’m alive.” Dominican soldiers are evacuating him to Santo Domingo for medical treatment.

4. Fr. Calixte Iguintz from Gonaives in the northern part of Haiti, has gone to Port-au-Prince to establish contact with the Salesians in the capital. The provincial treasurer of the Antilles Province, Bro. Alberto Rodriguez, and the director of the Development Office for Haiti, Bro. Franklin Ortega, went from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince to make an assessment and find news about the situation of the Salesians and their works. A report from the Dominican Republic is expected later this evening with news collected the 2 brothers.

5. All of the FMAs are safe. They suffered only one minor injury, Sister Piard Mathilde, who was treated and released from a hospital. None of their students were in their buildings when the quake struck. Many of their buildings are heavily damaged.

6. Two sisters from the D.R. reached Port-au-Prince yesterday and reported that many of the sisters and their boarding students have gathered at the damaged provincial house and are sleeping in the open. They are rendering whatever assistance they can to others. They suffer from not knowing how the sisters in other communities are faring, or about their own relatives. They are sustained by their trust in Mary Help of Christians. The FMAs in the Antilles Province are organizing relief, and the 2 visiting sisters marvel at the dignity and hope they see in the suffering people of Haiti.

7. Salesian Missions in New Rochelle has acquired six satellite phones and a solar charger for them and is trying to get them to Port-au-Prince so that reliable communications can be opened.

8. The New Rochelle Salesian Mission Office has already sent a container of rice, which is due to arrive by Monday, January 18, but won’t immediately have any possibility of being unloaded because of port conditions.

9. Fr. Julian Fox, “trawling through the stuff coming in” at his office in Rome, was hard hit by this remark: “The humanitarian aid organization [the Salesians are meant] has its work cut out for it as all children in Port-au-Prince are now street children.”

10. The Union of Superiors General in Rome is establishing a network among the various religious orders to share information. The De La Salle Brothers have lost three of their confreres. All the Claretians in the country are safe, but the buildings of the parish they were looking after have been destroyed.

11. At least one American died, Molly Hightower, niece of a Jesuit in Spokane, who was doing volunteer work at Friends of the Orphans in Port-au-Prince. Their 7-story building collapsed. [This comes to N.R. from Seattle, not Rome.]

12. Water, food, and medical supplies are the most urgent needs. Salesian Missions has had many offers for these, for volunteers, for transportation, etc., as well as a flow of cash donations, and is working at coordinating all. Much depends upon establishing the above-mentioned communications and, of course, on a place or places to set up operations in the city. The Rector Major has appointed 2 Spanish SDBs to go to Port-au-Prince and coordinate efforts there.

13. Salesian Missions is also planning already for development work after the immediate crisis: for clean-up and rebuilding. Fr. Steve Ryan may bring a Gospel Roads III team there in May.

14. Salesian Missions set up a special account to receive donations for Haiti:
Haiti Disaster Relief Fund
Salesian Missions
Box 30
New Rochelle, NY 10802-0030

Or you may call 914-633-8344.

Finally, the Salesians ask for prayers for our suffering and dead confreres, pupils, sisters, and all the people.

Salesians among Quake Victims

Salesians among Quake Victims

Since the earthquake that struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti yesterday at 4:53 p.m. local time, communications with that country have been very difficult. Bits of information have filtered from Port-au-Prince to Salesian HQ in Rome.

The Salesians have learned that Brother Hubert Sanon, age 85, is among the victims. He was the first brother to join the Salesians in Haiti, back in 1947.

Father Harold Bernard, age 38, was missing under the ruins for some time but was pulled out alive. Both he and Bro. Sanon were on the staff of the Ecole Nationale des Arts et Métiers, or ENAM (National School of Arts and Trades) at Port-au-Prince. It is better known by the generic name St. John Bosco.

St. John Bosco’s director, Fr. Attilio Stra, and other confreres were injured, some seriously. Over 200 pupils are still buried there in the rubble, the last we heard here in the U.S. The emergency rescue services and the Salesians themselves are concentrating on trying to pull survivors from the rubble.

St. John Bosco included a primary school, a technical school, a reception center for youngsters in difficulty, an oratory (youth center), and the main kitchen for feeding tens of thousands of children daily through the “mini schools” program of the late Fr. Lawrence Bohnen.

“We have been hit very hard,” says Fr. Ducange Sylvain, provincial-elect of the Haitian Vice Province and presently director of St. Dominic Savio School in Pétion-Ville, in a short communication.

The provincial house and that of Fleuriot-Tabarre, both in Port-au-Prince, have been severely damaged; two young Salesians in formation who were at the university are still missing.

At the house of Carrefour-Thorland a part of the building and the reception center collapsed, but the Salesians are safe. At Gressier-Leogane classrooms collapsed.

At Pétion-Ville the buildings suffered serious damage.

The Salesian Sisters have suffered damage to their works in Port-au-Prince and at Saint Mary Mazzarello in Pétion-Ville. At present there is also a Daughter of Mary Help of Christians in the hospital.

“It is a very difficult situation,” Fr. Sylvain concludes.

Salesian Missions in New Rochelle is working with Feed the Children, Catholic Relief Services, and Catholic Charities to organize relief for the survivors. Fr. Mark Hyde, director of Salesian Missions, says that what is most needed are medical supplies, bottled water, food, clothing, tents, and of course cash.

The Rector Major has also designated Salesian Missions in New Rochelle to coordinate the worldwide Salesian response to the disaster. Salesian Missions is in touch with the mission offices of Bonn, Madrid, and Turin and with various Salesian NGOs in Europe such as Jugend Eine Welt in Vienna and VIS in Rome.

Offerings may be sent to Salesian Disaster Relief, Salesian Missions, Box 30, New Rochelle, NY 10802-0030. Salesian Missions’ phone number is 914-633-8344.

Homily for Feast of Baptism of the Lord

Homily for the Feast
of the Baptism of the LordJan. 10, 2010
Luke 3: 15-16, 21-22
Willow Towers, New Rochelle
Provincial House, N.R.

“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3: 16).

John the Baptist has made a deep impression upon the people of Judea and “the whole region of the Jordan” (3:3) with his passionate preaching, with his call for repentance, with his ability to address the spiritual needs and everyday realities of everyone who comes to him (cf. 3:7-14).

But when the crowds coming to him wonder whether he “might be the Christ,” the Anointed One of God (3:15), he makes it clear that he isn’t. There’s no comparison between his mission, what he has to offer, and what the Anointed, “one mightier” than he (3:16), has to offer. John has only a symbolic baptism, a symbolic cleansing, signifying the recipient’s interior repentance and readiness to receive something that God will offer. The mightier one has that something, that reality beyond symbolism, to give to those who repent: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

In the Scriptures fire signifies God: the divine presence, as when Moses saw the burning bush and spoke with God (Ex 3), when the Israelites were led by a column of fire (Ex 13:21, etc.), when Mt. Sinai was enveloped in cloud and flame (Ex 19:18), when the lips of Isaiah were cleansed by a fiery coal (Is 6:6-7). The Christ will baptize people with the Holy Spirit and turn them into temples of God.

Before Jesus can give the Holy Spirit, he must receive the Spirit. This refers to the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth, of course, not to the divine Person; the Son of God obviously always shared the Spirit with his Father. Similarly, Luke and the other evangelists record that Jesus prayed (3:21, etc.)—as a man, not as God, showing that his human mind and human will had to be and were totally in union with the Divinity and teaching us so to attune our minds and wills.

The Fathers of the Church, the Doctors of the Church, and theologians generally have always described the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus as an anointing. The Spirit was poured out upon him like oil. In fact, today’s Pauline reading speaks of the Holy Spirit being “richly poured out on us thru Jesus Christ our Savior” (Tit 3:5-6). This descent of the Holy Spirit makes Jesus of Nazareth into the Anointed One of God, Jesus the Christ. It’s sort of a mirror image of that marvelous scene when Samuel “anointed David…and from that day on, the spirit of the Lord rushed upon David” (1 Sam 16:13). David is anointed, and the Spirit comes mightily upon him. The Spirit comes upon Jesus, who proceeds to do mighty deeds; evidently he’s been anointed, tho not with physical oil.

St. Cyril of Alexandria, a 5th-century Father of the Church who championed the orthodox doctrine that Christ possesses a fully human nature and a fully divine nature within one divine Person, writes: “The whole of our nature is present in Christ, insofar as he is man. So the Father can be said to give the Spirit again to the Son, though the Son possesses the Spirit as his own, in order that we may receive the Spirit in Christ. . . . He receives it to renew our nature in its entirety and to make it whole again….”[1] When the Spirit anoints Jesus, the Spirit anoints humanity at the same time.

So, this feast of the Lord’s baptism in the Jordan is a feast of the Lord’s anointing, and this feast celebrates a divine mystery in which our humanity is consecrated by sharing in Jesus’ consecration. That consecration is effected individually when we are baptized and anointed with chrism—baptized into Jesus the Anointed One, baptized into the entire mystery of his Person, baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire by being baptized in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, becoming, like Jesus of Nazareth, beloved daughters and sons of the Father.

Another aspect of this divine mystery is beautifully expressed in one of the homilies of St. Maximus, bishop of Turin in the 5th century, whose statue Don Bosco set on the right side of the façade of the basilica of Mary Help of Christians, opposite a statue of St. Francis de Sales: “Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy, and by his cleansing to purify the waters which he touched…. When the Savior is washed, all water for our baptism is made clean, purified at its source for the dispensing of baptismal grace to the people of future ages.”[2] Christ, consecrated by the Holy Spirit, also consecrates water so that water, in turn, is empowered to consecrate Christians: Christians are born again of water and Spirit (John 3:5).

Thus we celebrate today what our Lord Jesus has done for us with water, cleansing us and making us new, sharing with us the Spirit that he received, making us sons and daughters of his Father. Our opening prayer was that God would keep us, his children born of water and the Spirit, faithful to our calling; i.e., our calling to be his children, to be like Christ his eternal Son.

St. Paul defines such a life in very general terms: “rejecting godless ways and worldly desires, living temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age,” being “eager to do what is good,” until Christ returns and we’re fully united with him in the age to come (Tit 2:12,14). Each of us has to examine himself, asking what needs to be rejected, how better to practice temperance, justice, and devotion, where to do what is good. For, surely, we long to be more fully Christian, more fully like Christ, the Beloved Son.

[1] Commentary on the Gospel of John, book 5, ch. 2: LOH 1:604 (emphasis added).
[2] Sermon 100, on the Epiphany, 1.3: LOH 1:612-613.

Homily for Solemnity of Epiphany

Homily
for the Solemnity of the Epiphany Jan. 3, 2010
Matt 2: 1-12
Ursulines, Willow Dr., New Rochelle

“‘Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage?’ Assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, King Herod inquired of them where the Christ was to be born” (Matt 2: 2,4).

Deacon Greg Kandra, who maintains a fine blog, The Deacon’s Bench, in his homily for today quips that this is the last time in recorded history that a group of men stopped to ask for directions.

A “Motley’s Crew” cartoon in the Daily News on Christmas Day in 1999—I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this cartoon—showed a wise man (who looked like Motley) leaving the house at Bethlehem in dejection. The caption read: “Not many people know this, but there were actually four magi—one was turned away because his gift was a fruitcake.” And we haven’t seen Motley lately, have we?

In the old days, Epiphany would have been the 12th day after Christmas. In our revised liturgical calendar, where the feast isn’t a day of obligation it’s been moved to Sunday so that its solemnity might be fully celebrated, and this year, in case you’re counting, it’s the 9th day after Christmas. If you had a true love, I don’t know what he’d tell you about the 3 days of gifts you’ve been gypped out of. (Someone calculated that this year the full 12 days would set your true love back about $87,400, which, recession or no, is up $800 over last year.)[1]

In some cultures Epiphany has become 3 Kings Day. You’ve heard the gospel reading enuf times to know that they were magi—astrologers, sorcerers, Persian priests—not kings; and you heard no reference to their number. They’re usually numbered at 3 because of their 3 gifts. Henry Van Dyke, an American writer of a century ago, in 1896 gave us a beautiful short story called “The Other Wise Man” well worth reading and even meditating upon if you can find a copy of it. Van Dyke’s fictional 4th wise man wasn’t carrying fruitcake but loving concern for people, which caused repeated delays on his journey so that he kept just missing the Christ Child, until he finally caught up with Christ on Calvary.

However many of these wise men, astrologers, sorcerers there may have been, for Luke they represent the pagan nations coming to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Messiah, which is one of Luke’s major themes. 1st, Jesus has come for all peoples, and not only for Israel. 2d, altho the leaders of Israel will reject Jesus—foreshadowed by King Herod and all Jerusalem with him being greatly troubled by the magi’s announcement (cf. Matt 2:3)—Jesus will be widely accepted by those pagan nations, who will become the new people of God.

There’s another, more subtle message as well. It may not have been on Luke’s mind in the 1st century, but it’s relevant to our rational, scientific mindset. As we all know, there’s a large body of the elite of society who’ll have nothing to do with God or religion, with anything that can’t be identified, measured, and quantified by scientific observation or economic calculation. There’s also a large body of people around the world who reject science and human reasoning when it comes to matters of faith—think not only of the fundamentalist reception of geology, paleontology, and the theory of evolution, but also recall the hullabaloo over Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address on the necessity of reason in matters social and religious.

In the story of the magi, what is it that draws them toward Christ? They’ve been studying the stars. They’re using science, which even at the dawn of the Christian era could be fairly sophisticated. They’re using human reason to draw conclusions, to reach deeper truth, from what they observe. They find practical use for what they observe and deduce, and act upon the truth they believe they’ve discovered.

But scientific observation and the use of human reason takes them only so far—only to Jerusalem, in Luke’s narration, not to the Truth whom they seek. Yesterday I chanced upon a quotation from Cardinal Newman that’s apropos:

I have no intention at all of denying, that truth is the real object of our reason, and that, if it does not attain to truth, either the premiss or the process is in fault; but I am not speaking here of right reason, but of reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man. I know that even the unaided reason, when correctly exercised, leads to a belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in a future retribution; but I am considering the faculty of reason actually and historically; and in this point of view, I do not think I am wrong in saying that its tendency is towards a simple unbelief in matters of religion.[2]

And, in the words of the author whose discussion of Newman I was reading, “he concluded that reason alone, in this anarchic state of affairs, was rapidly moving the world toward atheism.”[3] That conclusion on the future cardinal’s part doesn’t seem to be far off the mark, unless one were to argue that it’s the lack of reasoning, and appeals to emotion and passion, that tend more to lead one toward atheism.

One would also like to add to those conclusions which Newman said human reason could reach—belief in God, the soul’s immortality, justice in a future life—also rational conclusions about social order and morality, about right and wrong, about ethics—the sorts of rationalistic conclusions, e.g., to which our Founding Fathers appealed in the Declaration of Independence.

Still, Newman’s point—in the context of defending the authoritative magisterium of the Catholic Church and explaining his conversion to that Church from the Church of England (the quotation is from his Apologia pro Vita Sua—was that human reason and all forms of human knowledge are entirely too fallible and have no guarantee of guiding us to ultimate Truth.

Which was the experience of the magi. When they arrived at Jerusalem, perhaps expecting that their journey was over, they learned otherwise. The chief priests and the scribes turned to a more certain knowledge, to a greater authority, to go where learning and reasoning could not. They went to the Sacred Scriptures, to the realm of faith, and thru that means they directed the wise men on the right road. The journey that began with science and reason ended successfully when enlightened by faith.

That journey, of course, wouldn’t even have begun without the questing minds of the magi, without a search for knowledge, for experience, for truth. St. Anselm famously described theology as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Theology, the search for the knowledge of God, works hand in hand with human intelligence. That’s why the Catholic Church was the mother of the European universities, why the Church continues to support all forms of human learning, and of course to seek to integrate all those forms of learning with the light of revelation. Like the wise men of old, we learn best where we’re going ultimately, and how to get there, from faith, from the teaching authority of the Scriptures and, as John Henry Newman discovered, the inerrant authority of Christ’s Church.

[1] Daily News, 11-30-09. [2] Apologia for Vita Sua (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 218. [3] C. Colt Anderson, The Great Catholic Reformers: From Gregory the Great to Dorothy Day (NY: Paulist, 2007), p. 191.

Homily for New Year's Day and World Day of Prayer for Peace

Homily for New Year’s Day
& World Day of Prayer for PeaceJan. 1, 2010
Num 6: 22-27
Christian Bros., St. Joseph’s Home, N.R.
Ursulines, Willow Drive, N.R.

“The Lord look upon you kindly and give you peace” (Num 6: 26).

Jan. 1 remains a solemnity in the church calendar in search of a proper identity—a feast with an identity crisis, if you like. It’s the Octave Day of Christmas, the commemoration of the circumcision and naming of Jesus, the beginning of the civil year, a solemn feast honoring Mary as Mother of God—certainly fitting as part of our Christmas celebration; and since the time of Paul VI, a day of prayers for peace. It’s impossible to give due attention to more than one or two of those themes, and despite an annual peace message from Paul, John Paul, and Benedict, the theme of peace probably gets the least attention of any of the themes except circumcision.

When you start to enumerate the places where there’s armed conflict, that’s a little strange. There are full-blown wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we’re all fully aware, and in Congo, Pakistan, and Colombia, while one such war ended only a few months ago in Sri Lanka. There are low-grade wars or civil conflicts—“low grade” to us who are scarcely aware of them—in Chechnya, the Holy Land (I guess we’re all aware of that one), India, Kashmir, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, Peru, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and probably a half dozen other places that didn’t come to my mind as I was writing this. Not tens of thousands, not even hundreds of thousands, of people have died in these wars, but millions of people, without counting street protests and their suppression (such as what’s happening in Iran at this time), or fighting that seems to be done with (the Balkans, Georgia vs. Russia).

Surely, constant prayers for peace are warranted, and attention to the causes of conflict and attempts to resolve them.

In his message for World Peace Day this year, Pope Benedict links his long-standing concern for the environment to the future peace of mankind. (You may recall that he also addressed the environment in terms of social justice in his encyclical last summer.) In the words of the editorial in the current issue of Catholic New York, the Holy Father calls “the deterioration of the planet a pressing moral issue that threatens peace and human life itself.”*

Novelists have been inspired by that danger for years. E.g., in The Shoes of the Fisherman, I believe the threat of famine was endangering world peace. A very different sort of novel, Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, posited the need for oil as the cause of World War III. These days some people see fresh water as the resource over which nations will fight in the future—on a much more serious scale than in those old Western movies regarding rival ranchers and the one river in the valley.

Ga-Nus-Quah, Harriman State Park

Pope Benedict refers to the frustration that many people experience when natural resources are used inequitably, and when their misuse threatens the existence of many people. “Sad to say, it is all too evident,” he writes, “that large numbers of people in different countries and areas of our planet are experiencing increased hardship because of the negligence or refusal of many others to exercise responsible stewardship over the environment.” For example, if global warming is real, causing sea levels to rise and weather patterns to change drastically, we can foresee the chaos of Hurricane Katrina magnified many times over. Think of Bangladesh’s geography, and imagine what’ll happen when a two- or three-feet rise in sea level forces millions of Bangladeshis to flee across the border to India.

The Pope makes the point that the Earth and its resources are given to humanity in stewardship. We’re not their owners but their guardians. The Creator means them to benefit everyone, including future generations. If we’ve known for a long time that some resources are finite—think fossil fuels—we’re becoming more aware that there’s also a finiteness to water, to clean air, to habitats, to the balance of eco-systems. Benedict writes in his peace message: “It is becoming more and more evident that the issue of environmental degradation challenges us to examine our lifestyle and the prevailing models of consumption and production, which are often unsustainable from a social, environmental, and even economic point of view.” To solve these challenges, he says, people—and surely he means especially people in the First World—will have to adopt more sober lifestyles and become more interested in solidarity with the Third World.
The Holy Father firmly links such sobriety, such solidarity, such protection of the natural environment with world peace. And he calls this protection of the environment an urgent challenge as well as a providential opportunity—an opportunity to do something for others now and for the future. The Lord assuredly looked kindly upon us when he so richly blessed our planet with its resources of flora and fauna, of minerals, air, and water, of breathtaking beauty, and of course of humanity, made in his own image; and just as assuredly, the way to the peace he intends for his creation is to care for all these and share them with all, including future generations. If we can find a way to do that, his way will be known upon the earth, his saving benefits among all nations. The nations of the earth will have opportunity to be glad and exult, to know that he rules in equity (cf. Ps 67:3,5).

* Dec. 17, 2009, p. 11.

A landscape in Tuscany (Rita Mendl)

Homily for Feast of the Holy Family

Homily for the Feast
of the Holy Family

Dec. 27, 2009
Ps 84: 2-3, 5-6, 9-10
Willow Towers, New Rochelle

“Blessed are they who dwell in your house, O Lord” (Ps 84: 5).

Being in the house of the Lord is the evident theme of the Sacred Scriptures today. Hannah brings her child, the boy Samuel, to the shrine of the Lord at Shiloh—this is before King Solomon has built the great temple in Jerusalem, and the Ark of the Covenant is kept in a tent a Shiloh; so Hannah brings the son for whom she begged the Lord to serve there in Shiloh for the rest of his life. He’ll grow up to become judge over Israel, unofficial leader, ruler, and anointer of kings (Saul, David).

In the 2d reading St. John reminds us that God has given us the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t say it, but we remember from the catechism that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. We are dwelling places of God as long as we live in his grace.

In the gospel we heard that very familiar story of the child Jesus separating himself from his parents in order to remain in his Father’s house, the great temple in Jerusalem. This story goes so far back in Christian tradition, in the pre-history of our written gospels, that it seems to be unaware of the tradition of the virgin birth, since St. Joseph is 4 times referred to as Jesus’ father. While we understand why Mary would lament publicly, “Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety” (Luke 2:48), it is less clear why St. Luke would narrate that “each year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem” (2:41), “his parents did not know the boy had remained behind” (2:43), and “when his parents saw him” (2:48). Possibly Luke lacks the nuanced vocabulary that we’d use; perhaps he’s acknowledging the legal status of Jesus, as distinct from his genetic origin, as the son of Joseph.

Be that as it may, Jesus feels drawn to his heavenly Father’s house. Like the psalmist, his soul yearns and pines for the courts of the Lord; his heart and his flesh cry out for the living God (84:3). There he can pursue his calling of studying the Scriptures with the priests and rabbis who serve and teach there, and of praying and learning his Father’s will for him, of giving due praise to his Father for his love for Israel: “Happy they who dwell in your house! Continually they praise you” (84:5). What better place for God to “look upon the face of his anointed” (84:10), i.e., upon his Christ?

The boy Jesus learned that he could serve his heavenly Father by going back to Nazareth with his mother and foster father and obeying them, growing up into manhood with them. He “advanced in wisdom, age, and favor before God and man” (Luke 2:52) in Nazareth, not in Jerusalem, going to the synagog and not to the Temple, living among his relatives and fellow citizens of a very small village, not among the rabbis of the big city.

God can be found, known, studied, and adored wherever he has placed us. The Holy Spirit already dwells with us. The Scriptures are in our homes, and not only in church. We can pray at any time. The Father’s house is more than a physical building. It’s the entire world. It is also the company of our fellow Christians, who are temples of the Spirit just as we are. It is the company of his chosen people Israel, who are his children according to the covenant with Abraham. If we should be able to get out and go to a parish church, that’s a good thing. But even here at Willow Towers we can dwell in the house of the Lord. We have ample opportunity to meet God and be with God and serve God and pray to God all day long: in our Bibles, our practice of kindness toward one another, and our prayer in our own apartments.

Stained glass: Jesus amid the doctors in the temple, cathedral of the Holy Savior, Bruges.

Homily for Christmas Midnite Mass, 2009

Homily for Christmas
Midnite Mass, 2009Pope Benedict XVI
Dear Brothers and Sisters! “A child is born for us, a son is given to us” (Is 9:5). What Isaiah prophesied as he gazed into the future from afar, consoling Israel amid its trials and its darkness, is now proclaimed to the shepherds as a present reality by the Angel, from whom a cloud of light streams forth: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). The Lord is here. From this moment, God is truly “God with us.” No longer is he the distant God who can in some way be perceived from afar, in creation and in our own consciousness. He has entered the world. He is close to us. The words of the risen Christ to his followers are addressed also to us: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt 28:20). For you the Savior is born: through the Gospel and those who proclaim it, God now reminds us of the message that the Angel announced to the shepherds. It is a message that cannot leave us indifferent. If it is true, it changes everything. If it is true, it also affects me. Like the shepherds, then, I too must say: Come on, I want to go to Bethlehem to see the Word that has occurred there. The story of the shepherds is included in the Gospel for a reason. They show us the right way to respond to the message that we too have received. What is it that these first witnesses of God’s incarnation have to tell us?

The first thing we are told about the shepherds is that they were on the watch they could hear the message precisely because they were awake. We must be awake, so that we can hear the message. We must become truly vigilant people. What does this mean? The principal difference between someone dreaming and someone awake is that the dreamer is in a world of his own. His “self” is locked into this dream world that is his alone and does not connect him with others. To wake up means to leave that private world of one’s own and to enter the common reality, the truth that alone can unite all people. Conflict and lack of reconciliation in the world stem from the fact that we are locked into our own interests and opinions, into our own little private world. Selfishness, both individual and collective, makes us prisoners of our interests and our desires that stand against the truth and separate us from one another. Awake, the Gospel tells us. Step outside, so as to enter the great communal truth, the communion of the one God. To awake, then, means to develop a receptivity for God: for the silent promptings with which he chooses to guide us; for the many indications of his presence. There are people who describe themselves as “religiously tone deaf.” The gift of a capacity to perceive God seems as if it is withheld from some. And indeed our way of thinking and acting, the mentality of today’s world, the whole range of our experience is inclined to deaden our receptivity for God, to make us “tone deaf” towards him. And yet in every soul, the desire for God, the capacity to encounter him, is present, whether in a hidden way or overtly. In order to arrive at this vigilance, this awakening to what is essential, we should pray for ourselves and for others, for those who appear “tone deaf” and yet in whom there is a keen desire for God to manifest himself. The great theologian Origen said this: if I had the grace to see as Paul saw, I could even now (during the liturgy) contemplate a great host of angels (cf. in Luke 23 :9). And indeed, in the sacred liturgy, we are surrounded by the angels of God and the saints. The Lord himself is present in our midst. Lord, open the eyes of our hearts, so that we may become vigilant and clear-sighted, in this way bringing you close to others as well!

Let us return to the Christmas Gospel. It tells us that after listening to the Angel’s message, the shepherds said one to another: “‘Let us go over to Bethlehem’; they went at once” (Luke 2:15-16). “They made haste” is literally what the Greek text says. What had been announced to them was so important that they had to go immediately. In fact, what had been said to them was utterly out of the ordinary. It changed the world. The Savior is born. The long-awaited Son of David has come into the world in his own city. What could be more important? No doubt they were partly driven by curiosity, but first and foremost it was their excitement at the wonderful news that had been conveyed to them, of all people, to the little ones, to the seemingly unimportant. They made haste they went at once. In our daily life, it is not like that. For most people, the things of God are not given priority, they do not impose themselves on us directly And so the great majority of us tend to postpone them. First we do what seems urgent here and now. In the list of priorities God is often more or less at the end. We can always deal with that later, we tend to think. The Gospel tells us: God is the highest priority. If anything in our life deserves haste without delay, then, it is God’s work alone. The Rule of Saint Benedict contains this teaching: “Place nothing at all before the work of God (i.e. the divine office)”. For monks, the liturgy is the first priority. Everything else comes later. In its essence, though, this saying applies to everyone. God is important, by far the most important thing in our lives. The shepherds teach us this priority. From them we should learn not to be crushed by all the pressing matters in our daily lives. From them we should learn the inner freedom to put other tasks in second place however important they may be so as to make our way towards God, to allow him into our lives and into our time. Time given to God and, in his name, to our neighbor is never time lost. It is the time when we are most truly alive, when we live our humanity to the full.

Some commentators point out that the shepherds, the simple souls, were the first to come to Jesus in the manger and to encounter the Redeemer of the world. The wise men from the East, representing those with social standing and fame, arrived much later. The commentators go on to say: this is quite natural. The shepherds lived nearby. They only needed to “come over” (cf. Luke 2:15), as we do when we go to visit our neighbors. The wise men, however, lived far away. They had to undertake a long and arduous journey in order to arrive in Bethlehem. And they needed guidance and direction. Today too there are simple and lowly souls who live very close to the Lord. They are, so to speak, his neighbors and they can easily go to see him. But most of us in the world today live far from Jesus Christ, the incarnate God who came to dwell among us. We live our lives by philosophies, amid worldly affairs and occupations that totally absorb us and are a great distance from the manger. In all kinds of ways, God has to prod us and reach out to us again and again, so that we can manage to escape from the muddle of our thoughts and activities and discover the way that leads to him. But a path exists for all of us. The Lord provides everyone with tailor-made signals. He calls each one of us, so that we too can say: “Come on, ‘let us go over’ to Bethlehem to the God who has come to meet us. Yes indeed, God has set out towards us. Left to ourselves we could not reach him. The path is too much for our strength. But God has come down. He comes towards us. He has traveled the longer part of the journey. Now he invites us: come and see how much I love you. Come and see that I am here. Transeamus usque Bethlehem, the Latin Bible says. Let us go there! Let us surpass ourselves! Let us journey towards God in all sorts of ways: along our interior path toward him, but also along very concrete paths the liturgy of the Church, the service of our neighbor, in whom Christ awaits us.

Let us once again listen directly to the Gospel. The shepherds tell one another the reason why they are setting off: “Let us see this thing that has happened.” Literally the Greek text says: “Let us see this Word that has occurred there.” Yes indeed, such is the radical newness of this night: the Word can be seen. For it has become flesh. The God of whom no image may be made because any image would only diminish, or rather distort him this God has himself become visible in the One who is his true image, as Saint Paul puts it (cf. 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). In the figure of Jesus Christ, in the whole of his life and ministry, in his dying and rising, we can see the Word of God and hence the mystery of the living God himself. This is what God is like. The Angel had said to the shepherds: “This will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12; cf. 2:16). God’s sign, the sign given to the shepherds and to us, is not an astonishing miracle. God’s sign is his humility. God’s sign is that he makes himself small; he becomes a child; he lets us touch him and he asks for our love. How we would prefer a different sign, an imposing, irresistible sign of God’s power and greatness! But his sign summons us to faith and love, and thus it gives us hope: this is what God is like. He has power, he is Goodness itself. He invites us to become like him. Yes indeed, we become like God if we allow ourselves to be shaped by this sign; if we ourselves learn humility and hence true greatness; if we renounce violence and use only the weapons of truth and love. Origen, taking up one of John the Baptist’s sayings, saw the essence of paganism expressed in the symbol of stones: paganism is a lack of feeling, it means a heart of stone that is incapable of loving and perceiving God’s love. Origen says of the pagans: “Lacking feeling and reason, they are transformed into stones and wood” (in Luke 22:9). Christ, though, wishes to give us a heart of flesh. When we see him, the God who became a child, our hearts are opened. In the liturgy of the holy night, God comes to us as man, so that we might become truly human. Let us listen once again to Origen: “Indeed, what use would it be to you that Christ once came in the flesh if he did not enter your soul? Let us pray that he may come to us each day, that we may be able to say: I live, yet it is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20)” (in Luke 22:3).

Yes indeed, that is what we should pray for on this holy night. Lord Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, come to us! Enter within me, within my soul. Transform me. Renew me. Change me, change us all from stone and wood into living people, in whom your love is made present and the world is transformed. Amen.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

Dreaming of a White Christmas

Christmas isn't quite here yet, but "white" came last nite in the form of a winter storm and about six inches of almost-powder snow. I didn't get out this morning with my camera before Bros. Andy and Tom and Fr. Terry were out with the trucks and plows, but here are some almost pristine views of the house and the mission office.

Homily for 4th Sunday of Advent

Homily for the
4th Sunday of Advent
Dec. 20, 2009
Luke 1: 39-45
Willow Towers, New Rochelle
St. Vincent’s Hospital, Harrison, N.Y.

“Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste” (Luke 1: 39).

On the last 2 Sundays we’ve heard the preaching of John the Baptist: prepare for the coming of the Messiah. In today’s gospel he comes, borne in Mary’s womb as she visits her elderly kinswoman Elizabeth. John the Baptist still figures in the reading—even in his own mother’s womb he recognizes the presence of the Savior in Mary’s womb and leaps with joy.

But the gospel no longer centers on John. Now our attention goes to Mary, who will bring the Messiah to us; Mary, who provides for God’s Son a human body so that, as our 2d reading said, God the Father might prepare for his Son a body to be offered as the ultimate sacrifice pleasing to God for the redemption of the world (Heb 10:5,10).

When Mary comes to Elizabeth’s home in the hill country of Judea—a good, long walk from her home in Nazareth—Elizabeth prophesies, i.e., speaks God-inspired words. For she recognizes the presence of God, of “my Lord,” within Mary: “Blessed is the fruit of your womb! How is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:42-43).

As an aside, note that phrase “Blessed is the fruit of your womb,” which the Church incorporates, along with other scriptural phrases, in our favorite prayer, the Hail Mary. So many of our prayers are soaked in the Bible, and we hardly realize it.

Elizabeth continues her prophecy by exclaiming, “Blessed are you who believed that what the Lord spoke to you would be fulfilled” (1:45). Not only is Mary’s child blessed, for he is the Lord, but the mother, too, is blessed—our Blessed Mother. Why? Because she believed God’s word. Not because she’s Jesus’ mother, but because she believed. Without believing, she couldn’t have become his mother. Without her believing, God’s plan as we know it couldn’t have unfolded.

This isn’t to say that God wouldn’t have done something else for our salvation, but to say that Mary cooperated with this plan thru her faith, a faith with real-life consequences.

For Mary’s belief in God’s word meant that she said “yes” to the message of the angel Gabriel; the verse with our “Alleluia” today quoted her words: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Faith begins in our minds or our hearts, but it has to carry into our wills, our decisions, our words, our actions. Without a “yes,” Mary’s faith would’ve been meaningless, and there’d have been no incarnation of the Son of God, no redemption of the human race. When Mary said “yes” to God, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), the eternal Son of God became the human being Jesus Christ our Savior, to be born in time, to die on a cross, to raise us up to God’s grace and immortal life—that divine plan recalled in our Opening Prayer (which, some of you may have noticed, was a variation on the prayer that concludes the Angelus): “lead us thru his suffering and death to the glory of his resurrection.”

Here is where we’re called to be blessed, like Mary: in our faith. We can’t conceive God’s Son physically within our bodies. But we can say “yes” to God’s will for our lives. Angels don’t come to us to ask us to undertake extraordinary roles in the plan of salvation. But God speaks to us in the Sacred Scriptures that we read—daily, if possible; in the teachings of Christ’s Catholic Church; in the daily events of our lives, both good and bad. God is constantly revealing his will to us, his hopes for us, his love for us, and asking us to respond with faith and then action, like our Blessed Mother.

For instance, God asks us to believe that our families and the people we live with are his children, and we should treat them with kindness, patience, and respect, should help them when we can, should safeguard their reputations by how we speak of them. God asks us to believe that everyone on this planet is his child, and we should support public policies that respect the life and dignity of everyone, and hold our public servants accountable for such policies, and vote for candidates who support human life and dignity. God asks us to believe that he cares about us, and we should read his word, ponder his word, pray to him, thank him, praise him. God asks us to believe that his Son rose from the dead, and thus illness and death are not to be feared but to be withstood and resisted as far as we may reasonably do so, and then accepted as transition stages to the immortal life that comes us thru Mary’s Son: thru suffering and death to the glory of resurrection. Blessed are all who believe that what the Lord has spoken to them will be fulfilled (cf. 1:45)!

Salesians of Don Bosco 150 Years Old

Salesians of Don Bosco 150 Years OldMillions (of Poor and Abandoned Young People) Served since 1859

The largest religious order that Catholics in the United States have never heard of is named after St. Francis de Sales. This year it is celebrating its 150th anniversary. We wonder how many readers of the Salesian Bulletin can guess its identity?
Probably most of them. In case not, here are two more hints: it was founded in northern Italy, and its founder, canonized in 1934, is hugely popular all over the world.

That religious order is the Society of St. Francis de Sales, or the Salesian Society, or the Salesians of Don Bosco. The Salesians, with a membership of 16,092 bishops, priests, brothers, and novices on Jan. 1, 2009, are outnumbered only by the Jesuits (18,711). There are more Salesians worldwide than Franciscans (15,130), Capuchins (11,092), Benedictines (7,558), or Dominicans (6,002)—orders that are from 325 to 1,330 years older than the Salesians.

In their relatively short lifetime the Salesians have risen to great heights in the Catholic hierarchy with 13 cardinals, 5 of whom are living, and 225 other bishops. The 5 living cardinals include the “vice Pope,” i.e., the Pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone; human rights champion Cardinal Joseph Zen, retired bishop of Hong Kong; and Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez of Honduras, often listed as papabile (a potential Pope). Among the 112 other living Salesian bishops (2008) are a Nobel laureate, retired Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor, and a rising star of the Asian episcopate, Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil of Guwahati, India.

The Salesian Pontifical University, founded in 1940 in Turin and located in Rome since 1965, is highly regarded with schools of theology, philosophy, canon law, education, communications, and Christian and classical literature—the last established at the explicit request of Pope John XXIII.

Six members of the Salesian family (Salesians, Salesian Sisters, Cooperators, pupils) have been canonized as saints, and 114 beatified.

Hierarchical status, however, is neither the glory of the Salesian Society nor the reason for its astounding growth across six continents. Both the reason and the glory lie in its charism: care for the poorest and most abandoned young people, a care exercised in 136 countries through schools, hostels, orphanages, youth centers, catechetical centers, medical clinics, outreach to street children, defense of the rights of child workers, activities against the “sexploitation” of the young, and more.

BeginningsIt all began, Don Bosco said, with a Hail Mary and a simple catechism class in the sacristy of Turin’s St. Francis of Assisi Church on Dec. 8, 1841. But what developed out of that simple catechesis into the apostolate of the oratories in Turin eventually needed to be regularized, to be put onto a solid, permanent foundation. And so on Dec. 9, 1859, Don Bosco invited 19 of his most dedicated staff at the Oratory of St. Francis de Sales to think about making a permanent commitment to the work of the oratories, to the care of needy youngsters, by joining him in a religious society to be called, like the first and principal oratory, after St. Francis de Sales.

Nine days later 17 of those helpers responded by meeting with Don Bosco in his tiny room. Aside from Fr. Victor Alasonatti (age 47) and Don Bosco himself (44), the others were all callow youths, none older than 24; Francis Cerruti was only 15. Angelo Savio was a deacon, Michael Rua a subdeacon, the others seminarians except for Louis Chiapale.

The expressed aim of the new religious society was to “promote the glory of God and the salvation of souls, especially of those most in need of instruction and education, while providing the members with mutual help toward their own sanctification”—a twofold aim, really: the salvation of souls, including their own, through apostolic-educational work on behalf of needy youngsters.

It was not an auspicious time for founding a religious order. The Piedmontese government had just gone about suppressing most religious houses and was about to extend that suppression to the rest of the Italian peninsula (most of which was in the process of union with Piedmont to form the united kingdom of Italy). But even the anticlerical government recognized the value of schools and oratories that offered academic education, training in trades, and moral upbringing to the poor, including the orphans of Piedmont’s own war dead. Minister of the Interior Urbano Rattazzi, author of the law suppressing the religious orders, personally advised Don Bosco on how to organize the Salesians so that they would be left alone.

Nor was the government alone in appreciating what Don Bosco was doing and in concern for the future of his work. Pope Pius IX, too, had asked him in 1858 what his plans for its continuation were. That Don Bosco, as well, had been thinking of the future is evidenced in his presenting to the Pope at that time a draft rule of life for his followers—what would eventually develop into the Constitutions of the Salesians.

GrowthThe demand for what Don Bosco and his men had to offer was great, and within 25 years the Salesians were spreading to the rest of the Italian peninsula, to France, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. He founded a parallel congregation of sisters in 1872 to work for the souls of girls and young women. The expansion would proceed relentlessly, so much that vocations could scarcely keep up with it.

What was the secret of such growth? Fr. Pascual Chavez calls it Don Bosco’s intuition for youth—not just to serve the young, but to use the young themselves as apostles. Don Bosco was guided in this direction by his dreams in which he gathered lambs around him, and the lambs themselves became shepherds, in which he gathered crowds of boys and young seminarians and brothers around him as his helpers.

Another secret was Don Bosco’s conviction that the Virgin Mary herself was guiding his work through such dreams and through her protection. She wanted those lambs gathered, sheltered, and nurtured for her Son. If St. Francis de Sales was the patron of the work, she was truly its inspiration, foundress, and patroness, and Don Bosco took no step without seeking her assistance.

ContinuityIn this 150th year of the Salesian Society, the Rector Major has called upon all of Don Bosco’s sons to reconsecrate themselves to his ideals: to the pursuit of personal holiness, to dedication to the young and the poor. For instance, at last April’s send-off of a glass and steel casket containing a relic of Don Bosco on a worldwide pilgrimage (2009-2015), he said: “Love the young, but above all let them know they are loved. This is the task awaiting us. Now as yesterday the young often experience disappointment, a lack of confidence in themselves, the enormous difficulties in the workplace, a feeling that adult generations and society around them are far removed from them. Like Don Bosco, who modeled himself on the Gospel, and incarnating the Church’s maternal concern for education, today we too are called to organize our lives according to the needs, the aspirations, the rights, and the expectations of the young, praying for them and with them, with a friendly presence sharing with them the various stages of life, in order to free them from harmful experiences and accompany them on their way to Christ.”

The visit of the relic of Don Bosco in every part of the Salesian world will link this 150th anniversary with the coming 200th anniversary of his birth (Aug. 16, 2015). More important, it will remind all the members of the Salesian Family that they are to imitate him in their love for Christ and for young people and are to continue Don Bosco’s mission of working for the salvation of the young: “Da mihi animas.”

The 150th anniversary will culminate on Dec. 18 with celebrations in each Salesian community around the world, which will include their renewal of their religious profession—their personal commitment to Jesus Christ within the Salesian Society on behalf of the young.

In the Name of Jesus (and Mary and Joseph)

In the Name of Jesus (and Mary and Joseph)

Also today (Dec. 9), The Anchoress, who was watching Bishop Sheen on What's My Line (courtesy of The Deacon's Bench)--today is the 30th anniversary of the good bishop's death--offered this nostalgic note:

"But I was touched and a little amused to watch Sheen, in his perfect Catholic-school penmanship begin his signature with JMJ. That’s one of those odd things Catholics used to do – put a cross, or the initials of Jesus, Mary and Joseph at the top of anything they were about to write. It was a small act, but one packed with meaning. It said, in essence, “Let my communication be worthy of Your Holy Names.”

"On retreat about ten years ago, an aged nun gave me a schedule for our meetings. At the top of the page: JMJ. At the bottom, below her signature, a cross. The whole note was wrapped in prayerful intention. I still have it. Sometimes I remember to put a cross at the top of my page, but I just sent out 50 Christmas cards, and didn’t remember to do it, even once. It is a habit I
would like to cultivate."

Church in Transformation

Church in Transformation

The Journal-News's Gary Stern blogs today: "We all know that the Catholic Church in the U.S. is quickly becoming an Hispanic church, but how much attention has been given to what this really means?" He then points to some attention being given to the matter. See http://religion.lohudblogs.com/2009/12/09/the-big-catholic-story/