Bulletin Essays

Dear Parishioners and Friends of Old St. Joseph’s Church: Christmas is here. And, although we continue to face uncertainties and challenges caused by the worldwide pandemic, as well as unsettling divisions in the world and in our own society, the great promise and peace of Christ’s coming is present in our midst. The season feels different this...

Lent is a time of contemplation and preparation for the coming of Easter, a time of making sacrifices and personal changes. The Psalmist tells us that “the Earth is the Lord’s” (Psalm 24); it is a gift meant for all of us to share and protect. Perhaps this year, our Lenten fasts can help us make progress toward one of the goals Pope Francis laid out in his encyclical letter on the care of our common home, Laudato Si. Francis reminds us of our ‘responsibility within creation, and duty towards nature and the Creator’ is an essential part of our faith (Laudato Si 64).

Often, we think of our personal health as an issue distinct from our planet’s health, but when it comes to diet, healthy food often helps make a healthier world. Much of this comes down to resources; a diet heavy in meats (particularly beef), fats, and sugars requires a production system that treads heavily on our planet. In contrast, a healthy plant-based diet puts much less strain on the Earth and its resources..

A simple calculation illustrates the stark difference between these diets. Compare the environmental footprint of a bowl of rice and beans versus a plate of beef, assuming they have equivalent amounts of protein: The serving of beef uses twenty-three times more land, consumes six times as much water, and emits twenty-one times as much greenhouse gas than a serving of rice and beans.

People may wonder, what they can do to help heal the planet? At the same time, they may feel a sense of despair that their individual actions are inconsequential in light of the enormity of the climate crisis. In fact, the good news is that one of the most consequential things anyone can do is personal wellbeing through a sustainable diet. Nothing is closer to us than the food we put into our bodies. The food that treads most lightly on our bodies also treads most lightly on the planet.

We cannot separate human health from the health of our communities, our resources and our world. As a community, it is important to think about and advocate for policies and practices that promote health and well-being at the individual, community and planetary levels.

by BJ Brown

After that first day of Jesus’s public ministry, after Jesus casts out a demon from a man in the synagogue and a fever from Peter’s mother-in-law, and after spending long hours healing the ones who approached Simon’s house after sunset, the next morning he leaves Capernaum for the neighboring villages. And the very next thing that Mark tells us is that a man with leprosy throws himself at Jesus’ feet and asks to be healed.

The first reading for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time suggests a measure of the audacity of the man’s request. The lectionary’s selection from the book of Leviticus is part of a longer passage concerned with the role of religious authority in protecting the community’s health (a timely topic to return to on some other occasion!) According to the instructions in Leviticus, when the priests find that someone has a visible skin disease that can be passed on to others, they are to be completely cut off from the community. They are sent to “dwell apart” and they are to rend their garments as if in mourning, as if they were dead.

There is where the man who kneels at Jesus’s feet in the same Sunday’s gospel comes from. His request, “if you wish, you can make me clean” professes complete faith in Jesus’s healing power. And Jesus, “moved with pity,” does heal him. Jesus’s touch bridged all that separated the man from his community; Jesus’s word chased disease out of him just as the demons fled from the man in the synagogue and the fever left Peter’s mother-in-law.

Mark’s introduction of Jesus as a powerful healer is one thread tying together the three miracles of Mark 1:21-45, Mark’s account of the beginnings of Jesus’s public ministry that we’ve lingered over for the past three Sundays.

But these three stories are not just well-matched pearls on a string. Each one adds something to the composite picture, to the fullness of Mark’s gospel. What, then, does the story of the man with leprosy reveal?

by BJ Brown

Although her name is lost to us , Peter’s mother-in-law is the first woman we meet in the gospel of Mark. She is the first person Jesus touches in Mark’s gospel, the first he heals from disease–although, in Jesus’ time, there wasn’t the same bright line that we try to draw between demons and disease. So the three healings that come in quick succession at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry in this gospel belong together; they are all one story: the man in the synagogue, Peter’s mother-in-law, and the Galilean man with leprosy.

When Jesus enters Simon Peter’s house, he is told about Peter’s mother-in-law ‘immediately.’ He seems to go straight to her, taking her by the hand and raising her up–a way of describing her cure that makes us think of how he will be raised up from death. Her fever leaves–not unlike the way the demon fled from the man Jesus had met in the synagogue earlier in the day. After that, Peter’s mother-in-law begins to “wait” on Jesus and his disciples–or, as other translations have it, to “serve” them. Her actions seem to foreshadow the women who Mark will much later tell us don’t flee from Jesus’s crucifixion–Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome–who were also said to minister to Jesus (Mark 15:40). Peter’s mother-in-law’s service seems to exemplify the role that all of Jesus’s disciples are called to play.

So, is Peter’s mother-in-law really just like her son-in-law Simon, like his brother Andrew and James and John? Should she be counted among the very first disciples that Jesus called? Should we find in her a model and exemplar for the role that women can and should have among the followers of Jesus, even today?

Or is that an act of eisegesis–a way of examining the Scriptures for what I want to find, instead of reading for what the Scriptures reveal, so that I might examine myself in their light? When I focus closely on the three verses of Mark’s gospel about Peter’s mother-in-law alone, will I find everything there is to learn about her encounter with Jesus? Or might there be more to her story?

Let’s return to Mark’s gospel, then, and see what happens next–let’s consider the rest of the gospel reading for this Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, in Year B of the church’s cycle of Scripture readings.

by BJ Brown

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of superhero movies. I guess I need to keep seeing the triumph of good over evil. But I’m not watching the multi-episode Marvel or Justice League franchises; I prefer stand-alone stories. I want to see evil overcome in a single story arc. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal of today’s gospel. It’s Jesus’s first public appearance after his baptism and after calling two sets of brothers as his first disciples. In his very first act of public ministry, Jesus casts out an unclean spirit with two short, sharp exclamations: “Quiet! Come out of him!”

But in truth, there’s more to the story that this passage of Mark’s gospel tells than a one quick, dramatic moment.

Today’s gospel (Mark 1:21-28) is the first of a three part series. Casting out this unclean spirit is immediately followed by part two, Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-29, next week’s gospel). Then after a very brief interlude for prayer, in part three Jesus heals a leper (Mark 1:40-45, the following week’s gospel). And so we have one of those scriptural sandwiches, a series of three stories with the middle one being the most important, the one that sheds light on the two stories that precede and follow it.

You might think then, that these twenty-four verses should be read all at once, as a single Sunday’s gospel, since they are meant to be understood together. But whatever committee composed our Sunday lectionary decided to read the three stories that make up Jesus’s first day of public ministry over the course of three weeks. They must have thought that each episode was worth lingering over, that each one on its own had something important to teach us. But what?

God called Samuel in his dreams, repeatedly. It’s not surprising that God had to be so persistent. Samuel was young and “not yet familiar with the Lord.” Though he served the prophet Eli, Samuel was an unlikely candidate to become a prophet himself, since he was not Eli’s son and heir. Nonetheless, God called three times while Samuel was asleep in the temple. With the help of his master Eli, Samuel figured out what was going on and on the fourth call, he finally answered “Speak, for your servant is listening.” The Lord, we are told, remained with Samuel, “not permitting any word of his to be without effect.”

Joseph, the patron saint of our parish, also heard God speak in his dreams. Joseph did not permit the word he received to be without effect, following four divine commands that he received in his dreams to take Mary into his home, to flee with his wife and newborn son to Egypt, and finally to return and make a new home when and where it was safe to do so.

For Samuel and for Joseph, dreams were no idle matter. Dreams are where Samuel and Joseph encountered God, where they heard God speak. For Samuel and Joseph, sleep was a sacred space, a ‘liminal’ space, a threshold between what they heard in their dreams and effective action when they woke up.

We too are poised on a threshold, even, many possible thresholds. We are in between an uncontrolled pandemic and herd immunity. We are in between the results of November’s election, a mob siege of the US Capitol and the inauguration of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris. We are even in between in our parish community, between Christmas and Lent, and under the pastoral care of an interim administrator between pastors.

When my own children were very young, a more seasoned parent told me that family photo albums (and I suppose now, Instagrams) are filled with pictures of firsts–first smile and first steps, first day of school and so on. Nobody, she said to me, pays as much attention to the lasts. And so I decided to try to capture those moments: waiting for the bus on the last day of school, sunset photos on the last day of a beach vacation, even a sweet snapshot of furry goodbye kisses before the grouchy old cat’s last trip to the vet.

But when I page through the old photo albums, there are a lot more pictures than just those firsts and lasts. There are sandbox construction sites, kite flying and bubble blowing, prom dates and school concerts, and lots and lots of cousins and friends, lined up on the front steps or squeezed around the kitchen table. There’s a lot happening in the middle, between the beginnings and endings, of our family story.

The author of the gospel of Mark seems to have taken to heart a similar understanding of beginnings and endings. Mark’s is thought to be the earliest gospel and it is the shortest, but it is far from the first draft of the good news of Jesus Christ. Mark gave us an intricately-constructed theological statement, and the gospel for the Baptism of Our Lord on January 10 shows his masterful use of beginnings and endings to draw our attention to what’s in the middle.

How unlike are the gospel of Luke and the gospel of Matthew in telling the story of Jesus’s birth! This may frustrate historians, but the different perspectives guide us toward a fuller understanding of what this good news will require of us.

The Church reads Luke’s version on Christmas: as soon as Mary gives birth and swaddles her son, angels appear, praising God and drawing the shepherds to the place he was born. The first people to hear the good news of his birth are the lowest and least among us that Jesus has come to save.

Not so in Matthew, whose gospel the Church reads on Epiphany

Since 1968, the Catholic Church has dedicated a day to prayer for world peace on January 1. Popes from Paul VI forward have marked the day with a special message. Pope Francis’s 2021 message—his eighth—is titled A Culture of Care as a Path to Peace. My first reaction on reading it was, “he’s not saying anything new.” But if that’s true, how could it be, if we have known what the Church teaches about peace for decades, even centuries, that human beings have been unable to stop killing and maiming each other, creating wastelands and refugees, in near-constant wars all over the world? How can it be that war, violence and hatred are simply facts of our lives?

Or can it be that Catholic teaching about peace is still one of the so-called ‘best-kept secrets’ of its moral teaching? Most of us know very well the sins that we are to avoid—the ‘thou shalt nots’, the seven deadly sins, the pre-eminent evils of our day. But do we know as well the good that we are to pursue, our moral obligation to seek peace? Do we know that we must actively seek peace in our personal lives and also as members of our communities and citizens of our country?

My argument with Advent this year began with a hymn that is stuck in my head:

For you O Lord, my soul in stillness waits,
Truly, my hope is in you.
—Marty Haugen, ‘My Soul in Stillness Waits’

The problem is, my soul does not wait in stillness. It is impatient and fidgety, uncertain about exactly what it’s waiting for.

Five weeks ago, late on the night of Friday, November 6, I was sitting in a chair outside the room where my wife Danielle was about to give birth to our first child. Margot Ross would be delivered via C-section—news we’d learned just hours before, after it was determined that the baby was in a breech position.
I sat in my papery blue scrubs, trying to stop my heart from racing, rehearsing what I would tell Danielle to keep her calm once I was sitting on a stool beside her, holding her hand. Other than the occasional nurse or doctor who waved to me before entering the surgery prep room, the hallway was empty, quiet, and still.
Next to my chair was a rolling bed with our hastily packed duffel bags and backpacks stuffed on the lower rack. We’d expected the early signs of labor to just be a false alarm, that the nurse would turn us on our heels and send us home—a good trial run for the real thing. But, it turned out, this was not a drill.

Advent is the season of hope and we’ve never needed hope more than we need it now. If Advent hope works for us this year, nothing could be more timely. If it doesn’t work for us, then it’s just one more disappointment in a very discouraging year.

We falsely think that hope is possible only because the future is unknown, entirely malleable, at least in our imagination. So we are free to create a future that is as bleak or as bright as possible —any way we want it. We grasp for hope in our lives by imagining a favorable future. People of a particular personality type find this difficult to do, however, because they are inveterate pessimists, always anticipating the worst, while others are natural optimists. Hope, then, seems to be not a virtue at all, but just an expression of our natural disposition. In life, optimists seem to have an easier time of it. Maybe that’s true, but true hope must be more profound than that.

Most people don’t have a FAVORITE gospel. But if you press them, a lot of times they’ll say “John’s gospel.” But press further, and you’ll probably find they have trouble explaining their preference. I wonder if they’re just impressed by the fancy, beautifully poetic language. Granted, the Fourth Gospel is tops for that.

I know it’s silly to say, but my all-time FAVORITE is Mark’s gospel. I’d like to tell you why I say that. I think I can back it up.

Sadly, most people don’t pay much attention to the differences between the gospels. They just harmonize them all together. That’s their loss because we can learn a lot from the different perspectives of each evangelist. That’s true even of the so-called so-called synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). If you never noticed this firsthand, may I suggest you closely compare the way Mark and Luke recount the crucifixion scene. A lot of the details are consistent, but it’s two entirely different reports of the same event. What is each evangelist trying to tell us about the meaning Jesus’ death?  It’s richly rewarding to think about that—and to pray over it.

As we are now entering what many health experts consider to be the most aggressive phase yet of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to return to checking in on ourselves and making sure that we are staying well.

In my role as a teacher for the School District of Philadelphia, I am keenly aware that wellness is a huge challenge to our city right now

One way to approach a papal letter like Fratelli Tutti is as a treasure-hunter, or a miner digging for gold or precious gems. We might read with a sharp eye and highlighter in hand, looking for the most quotable passages.
There’s nothing at all wrong with this approach, especially considering that Fratelli Tutti itself is a 287-paragraph document with 288 footnotes where it quotes other documents. But also, such quotable gems can capture the essence of a longer text.

I finally went to bed on election night when it was clear that neither presidential candidate could claim victory on November 3rd. Like so many people, I’d wanted a landslide, a clear commitment to a shared vision of our country’s best possible self. When I woke up the next morning, there was (no surprise) still no final tally. But one result of the election was disappointingly evident—there is deep, deep division in the United States. There is not consensus about how to live the truths we profess.

A walk past City Hall on Thursday made vivid to me the serious dangers of our division. As a helicopter thumped over toward the Civic Center where votes were being counted, I saw more police officers than pedestrians, and all of the officers had riot gear close at hand. As I rounded from the northeast corner toward JFK Boulevard, I caught sight of a dozen people in body armor, helmets and camouflage, automatic rifles in hand.

What now?

On July 29, 2019, I found myself on my knees in prayer. It was the night before my interview with Mary McGinnity and Becky Ehrman from the Ignatian Volunteer Corps (IVC). I was interviewing for what I believed would be my dream job. IVC provides individuals age 50 or older with opportunities to serve as “women and men for others,” addressing social justice issues and creating a community of service corps members to convene in prayer, study and intentionality. They needed a Director to grow the corps in Philadelphia and South Jersey and I wanted to take on the task. But there was one problem: the position was part-time, and I needed a full-time position. So, the night before my interview, I fell to my knees and offered up my need, desire and hope to God. I asked for guidance and direction, and a message that made my next steps clear, knowing that sometimes the answer God provides is no.

By the time that you read this, I hope that you have voted—or at the very least, have your voting plan ready to go.

Before voting, we need to examine the issues, naturally in terms of our own interests, but also from the perspective of the people who are affected most directly by the way those issues are decided. Casting a ballot is a moral and political decision, so we should evaluate each candidate’s character and competence and consider the Church’s teaching to properly inform our consciences.

But voting is not enough. Just going to the poll to vote does not exhaust our participation in our democratic form of government nor does it alone fulfill all our moral responsibilities to each other.

Last August, Old St. Joseph’s Children’s Liturgy of the Word ministers held their annual summer meeting. Under normal conditions, we would have discussed scheduling, materials, procedures and so on. But these are far from normal times and no agenda was needed. There was just one issue to address: how can we serve our very youngest parishioners whose families look to the Children’s Liturgy of the Word to help with their children’s faith formation?
In the words of one such parent, “We’re finding it very hard to be away from Old St. Joe’s as we love our church community dearly. . .we never realized just how much we depended on OSJ as the bedrock of our Catholic practice.”
It soon occurred to some of the Children’s Liturgy of the Word ministers that gathering and sharing suggestions for praying at home might be of help while we remain apart. Simplicity and consistency are important. What follows is the experience of generous friends and colleagues, and a few reflections of my own.

When my former students began to ask me to celebrate the baptisms of their children I knew that I was getting on in years. These were always joy-filled celebrations. One baptism that I remember quite clearly took place in the chapel at Fairfield University in Connecticut. The baptism was for two identical twin baby girls. They both looked like radiant angels coming directly from heaven at the beginning of the ceremony. These twin newborns were sleeping during the early part of the ritual. The moment I poured the baptismal water onto the head of the child named Grace she opened her eyes and smiled in a way that would melt a heart of stone. She was beaming in light and peace. A beautiful moment I thought to myself—this seems easy enough. But things changed quickly. When I poured the cleansing baptismal water on the forehead of her twin sister Catherine this tiny child let out the loudest and most startling scream that I have ever heard from so small a child. At that moment, I knew that baptism was serious business for all the baptized, for parents, for the church, and for Christian faith. This beautiful child yelled and fought way beyond her weight this strange invasion of water. I found myself saying to the parents, godparents, and those gathered around the font that young Catherine must intuitively already know how demanding the Christian life can be when one takes it seriously. Catherine’s parents seemed relieved that I spoke up during this tender moment of the ritual. They clearly already knew well this child’s voice when she was not happy. At that moment my admiration and respect for Christian parents increased even more as we continued with the baptism.

Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care of Our Common Home, engages us in dialogue about a faith-filled response to the unfolding ecological crisis now threatening the wellbeing of the creation. The pope’s message is that we cannot be indifferent to this crisis, because our common household is one we share with the natural world. We live together in this home as an extended family, bonded not only by human kinship but also by a deep reverence for all God’s creatures. When we cause harm to nature, we poison the ground of our common dwelling place, robbing it of its dignity and frightening our children.
St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology, understood the precious gift of God’s creation in a way yet to be embraced eight centuries after his death. Although often trivialized as the animal-loving, “bird-bath” saint, a far more holistic vision is revealed in his Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. This anthem in praise of the creation, written near the end of his life, reflects his journey to God through his insight that all of creation gives praise to God. As noted by Franciscan sister Ilia Delio, the Canticle foreshadows the new creation where we will find ourselves related to all things of creation in a spirit of reconciliation and peace. It inspires us to view the entire creation as charged with the goodness of God, and to work faithfully to sustain that goodness and repair our broken relationship with the natural world.

“The Catholic Church is like the Post Office,” I heard someone say years ago. “There’s not an inch of this country that doesn’t have a Zip Code or belong to a Catholic parish.” And because the Church in the United States is organized in territorial parishes, he was right. The Catholic Church is everywhere, all over the map.

In this election, that seems to be true politically as well: Catholics are all over the political map, and it is increasingly drawn along battlelines. There are tests of loyalty. Church officials and prominent Catholics try to command obedience. Waving like banners over the scene are slogans: ‘abortion remains our pre-eminent value’; ‘equally sacred are lives lost to racism, the environmental crisis, poverty, and the death penalty’ (both from page 6 of Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, p. 6).

Over the next two weekends, eighteen children from PREP (Old St. Joseph’s Parish Religious Education Program) and from St. Mary’s Interparochial School will make their First Holy Communion. In this celebration, young members of our community will continue the initiation into the Church begun with their baptism by joining us at the Lord’s Table. First Communions are traditionally celebrated in Eastertide but were postponed this year due to the pandemic. OSJ’s celebration has also been modified to enable social distancing. Instead of the usual community celebration at 9:30 AM Sunday Mass, we will have three smaller, private Masses. The sacrament remains the same, but this accommodation sheds light on aspects of it that we might not always consider. Despite the division into smaller groups, this year’s First Communicants are being formed together to bring new life to the whole community.
Eucharist unites us with Jesus, and it also unites us with one another. We become what we receive, the Body of Christ. As with Sunday Mass, even if Eucharist occurs in several celebrations, we are in fact one people sharing the One Body and Blood of Christ. The intertwined union of individuals with Christ and with one another is at the heart of the whole Catholic sacramental life. Another way of putting this is that our spiritual and our material lives are ultimately inseparable. All the sacraments use material, finite, created things as channels to the spiritual and infinite, and that includes our bodies. The more fully we can enter into this reality, the more fully we will experience God’s presence in all of our lives.

his encyclical letter, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis recalls that “Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us . . .[whose] climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.” (Laudato Si’ pgs. 3 and 18).

On the other hand, the Merriam-Webster dictionary reminds us that “Economics is a social science concerned chiefly with the description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” If we keep both of these points of view in mind when discussing economic policy—the relational world Pope Francis describes and the technocratic world of modern economics—we can understand that our capitalist system actually inhabits two dimensions: the three components of human, natural, and existing physical capital, on the one hand, and the more familiar world of financial capital on the other hand. Since we are not used to counting the first dimension with its three components, let’s consider what they include and how they are related:

As a member of Old Saint Joseph’s parish, I invite you to join in reading Father Brian Massin-gale’s insightful study on racism and Catholicism, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Orbis 2010). Fr. Massingale is an African American theologian, currently teaching ethics at Fordham University; he has had an illustrious career as a teacher, speaker and advocate. His extended deconstruction of American racism will more than reward your time and energy.
Yet there is a more essential reason to fit this into your schedule. We as Catholics are very much called to do the work of understanding race and the Catholic response to it. Catholic social teaching charges us with the moral responsibility to work for the elimination of racism in all of its manifestations. Many voices in our Church, our archdiocese, and our own parish are calling us to be at the forefront of efforts for racial justice.
This year, our own neighbors in the Philadelphia area rose up by the thousands to demand our attention to ongoing racism, crying out for justice. We need to respond thoughtfully, prayerfully. How better to deal with this scourge than to address it as a parish?
If you are a white parishioner, you may feel, as I did, that you already understand the prob-lem—you’ve done the work, read about it, thought about it. I felt that way too. I especially resisted the notion that I am somehow “privileged” because I am white. Whatever blessings I have received seem to be the just reward of a responsible life. So how are they a form of privilege?
Maybe I was reluctant to revisit my own participation in American racism. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to dwell on my sins and failures, as Saint Ignatius so frequently encouraged us to do. I don’t want to have feelings of remorse, embarrassment, failure, even ignorance. I don’t want to see myself as God might see me, warts and all.

Seventy-five years ago this month, the United States unleashed an atomic weapon over the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. An estimated 70,000 people died in the fiery blast and its immediate aftermath; between 90,000-160,000 people died from radiation’s earliest damage by the year’s end. Three days later, the United States bombed the Japanese ship-building city Nagasaki, instantly killing 60,000-80,000 people. Six days later, Japan surrendered to the United States and its Allies, ending the Second World War.

Incredibly, the world has lived with and somehow managed not to use this particular destructive force since then. Not only the use, but the very existence of nuclear weapons has consistently been fiercely denounced by Catholic leaders, from Pope John XXIII’s 1963 call to ban nuclear weapons in his encyclical letter Pacem in Terris, to Pope Francis’s assertion at Nagasaki in 2019 that “a world without nuclear weapons is possible and necessary.”

I wonder sometimes, if we as Catholics know the consistency and clarity of the church’s condemnation of nuclear weapons. It doesn’t seem to be a front-burner issue. Do we consider peacemaking as the church’s essential mission (The Challenge of Peace, 1983), a requirement of faith to which we are “bound before God and every man and woman in the world (Pope Francis at Nagasaki, 2019)? Do we understand what our faith asks of us, as possession of nuclear weapons multiplies and spreads, and the weapons themselves become (if it is even possible to imagine) ever more deadly?