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Heroes Halloween is here reminding us that George Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are masquerading as leaders, many tricks no treats for the people here or elsewhere on earth. Iraq reeks daily with death, the carnage perhaps as high as 650,000 Iraqis according to Johns Hopkins researchers. John Paul II, prior to the 2003 invasion, lamented that once the door of war was opened, the violence, death, destruction and mayhem became uncontrollable; a force set in motion with consequences beyond comprehension, without redemptive value. But we also celebrated All Saints day on November 1, so this issue of CPF is dedicated to Heroes, those fellow travelers who were inspirational, whose presence altered the course and flow of our lives, who gave us a sense of Christ in a 20th century context. Some names may pop up more than once, so profound their impact on our writers, a Dorothy Day! Creeds are recited in church, but until Christ is enfleshed in a contemporary, until we encounter a Spirit-filled person, our faith can be analogous to the Pledge of Allegiance. Faith has to be experienced through a human encounter with the Spirit. As John Wanenchak has eloquently written, Phil Berrigan was a giant, along with Dan, whom I encountered, along with many others, in the 60s and 70s. They convinced us that by witnessing to Gospel truths we could end the war in Vietnam. The message was clear and stark─the call to resistance; the place to be for standing up to the Powers was jail. Dan and Phil could be intimidating─so strong and heroic their own story─years in prison. There was collateral damage in the peace movement, as some resisted beyond their psychic resources. I remember visiting a young man from Lemoyne College with a couple of Jesuits, in Lewisburg Federal Prison, a maximum security facility. He was serving two to three years. His crime, burning his draft card at a peace rally, the symbolic No to Vietnam. There was a touch of bitterness, a bit of regret that his youthful defiance was so costly, so much of his humanity frayed for life. But I suspect that Dan and Phil would both say, not too high a price to save the lives of children. The other great episode of my life in witnessing to the power of the Gospel was the cloud of witnesses in El Salvador. Archbishop Oscar Romero’s talks, Pauline epistles, the clarity, the penetrating words that broke hearts at the plight of his people being murdered for wanting a life. Priests, nuns, catechists, organizers were targeted, tortured and murdered. I was always dumbstruck that Romero never told his people, “back off,” lower their profiles for sheer survival. He propelled them forward, “This is the way, Christ’s way. Put all your determination, all your self-giving, all your self sacrifice, even to giving your lives, to the cause of true liberation, guaranteed by the one on whom God’s Spirit is poured out. He will not show us false ways, and he will make his own the people’s desire for liberation and justice. Their desire cries out to God and God must hear their cry.” (1/27/80 ) It was church as you dreamed, a people bound to one another as St Paul said, one body. In a letter to President Jimmy Carter, of February 17, 1980, Archbishop Romero pleaded with the President not to ship weapons to Salvador which would be used to kill the people. His plea fell on deaf ears. Romero sealed his own fate with a sermon defying the government and military. “Without the support of the people no government can be effective. Much less can it be so if it tries to impose itself by the force of blood and suffering. I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen. Brothers, each one of you is one of us. We are the same people. The campesinos you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear the words of a man telling you to kill, remember instead the words of God, ‘Thou shall not kill.’ God’s law must prevail. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. It is time that you come to your senses and obey your conscience rather than follow out a sinful command. The church, defender of the rights of God, the law of God, and the dignity of each human being, cannot remain silent in the presence of such abominations.” On March 24, 1980 at 6:30 in the evening as he celebrated Mass, he was assassinated. As Placido Erdozain (Archbishop Romero, Martyr of Salvador) wrote, “They had to kill him. They had to do it. This completely free and holy man, this man of God at the service of the historical movement forward of the poor, was costing more alive than dead. They coldly entered into a sort of economic cost-benefit analysis and planned his death.” These are a few heroes. What about the rest of us; where do we fit into this human drama? We all have a grace-given capacity to love, to be compassionate, to be transformed, even at this late date, modest as the transformation may seem. Lastly, we need a Zen mind set; the present moment is all we have. Joe Bradley |