The Levee's Gonna Break

I don't have a picture of him yet, but Fr. Victor León, OSJ, of Cajabamba, Perú, arrived last Saturday. At the time, he spoke no English, and I was the only one here who spoke any Spanish (which has become diluted and confused due to my study of Italian over the last two years). Luckily, Fr. Michele Piscopo, OSJ, (the Superior General) and Fr. Brian Crawford, OSJ, arrived last Tuesday. Both of them speak Spanish, though Fr. Michele speaks no English. So, it's been a polyglot wonderland around here. Everyone but Fr. Brian and Fr. Buttini (and me) left for retreat yesterday. We're manning the fort.

For the last week before he left, I had been doing some "intensive" English lessons, beginning with the basic prayers to say the Rosary and the Angelus, and moving along into the Mass. He's doing well. Also, my several hours with him one-on-one everyday have provided me with the opportunity to see that he is very, very enthusiastic about being here. Here's the skinny:

In Perú, the Oblates have very little money. They do, in fact, live in abject material poverty, of the sort where they do not have the resources to feed themselves. As is often the case, poverty is directly proportional to piety, and so the Oblates in Perú have a healthy spiritual life, at least in comparison to other religious orders and dioceses in the area, all of whom have more material resources, but whose lifestyle is sometimes outright scandalous. This situation has produced many vocations for the Oblates, such that they now have some 150 seminarians, whom they cannot feed. It's a predicament, to be sure.

As a result, they have sent a confrere here to Pennsylvania, to help the Diocese of Scranton with its hispanic apostolate. He will live here and work here (ostensibly, for many years to come), and the money that he earns here will go back to Perú. To me, this is a win-win situation, because we here in Penna get a young, enthusiastic go-getter of a priest, and Perú's poverty is somewhat alleviated. Cool, huh?

Now, when I say that he's a go-getter, what exactly do I mean? Well, back in Perú, he had been in charge of the youth apostolate, then the vocation apostolate, and those are the two areas in which he would most like to see this province branch out and break some new ground. Not incorrectly, he believes that the local hispanic culture is bound to contribute to furthering these goals, since the local gringo culture tends to be retired, disinterested, or both. This has caused me to stop and think a little bit:

Something occurred to me the other day as I was driving to dinner with a friend of mine. American society is falling apart. That was not the epiphany. I have been confronted with that simple fact for my entire life. What I realized in the Spirit of Poverty (the Dodge) was that American Catholicism has taken what seems to me to be a flawed approach to fixing the problem. The approach, by and large (though certainly not exclusively), has been to hearken back to the glory days (see below) of Bishop Sheen and Fr. Peyton. The approach thus far, in most circles that I've seen, has been to try and revert. The Catholics who decry the decline of American culture (as opposed to those who play along) all seem to want to revert to before things got this bad.

They want to go back to before Roe v. Wade, before Terry Schiavo, before gay marriage in Cali, before Vatican II, before widespread divorce, before an AIDS epidemic in Africa, before the removal of prayer in schools, before Darwinian evolution, etc. Basically, they want to go back to before "everything started to go downhill" and pretend that it just never happened. I can understand that desire. However, I can honestly say that, from my vantage point, the Church has not been particularly successful with this approach.

Jesus did not call us to be reactionaries. Jesus called us, in a certain, very limited, non-political sense, to be revolutionaries, cultural revolutionaries. Think about it. When was admission to the Church at its apex? Read the Acts of the Apostles. How many times do we here about 5,000 people joining the Church in a single day, from a single town? When was the last time that happened in your parish? I can tell you that, in my parish, there have been no converts in the last two years, and probably less than twenty baptisms. The Church was at her best when she was new, and when her members were innovative. Consider the placement of Christmas, Easter*, and St. Valentine's Day. Conveniently located right alongside the ancient Roman celebrations of Saturn, Apollo, and the Lupercal (basically all feasts of lust and sin). This was no coincidence. The early Christians did not run from their society, spiritually impoverished and sinful though it was. Rather, they confronted it head-on and sanctified it, as if they were, say, the light of the world, or the salt of the earth. Imagine that.

And so, basically, my argument here is that this is what we need to do, as well. We need to confront society head-on and sanctify it. We also need to expand our horizons a bit. Just because something is different than it would have been in the 50's does not make it wrong. We need to adjust. We need to adapt. If we don't, this society will win out over us, and we will find the Church in America (as well as Europe) vanish like the morning dew, like a passing shadow. Now, I certainly don't have all the answers, but, not to sound clichéd, youth ministry is certainly where I'm looking when it comes to hope for the future.

So, getting around to the title of this post, a combination of Fr. Victor's enthusiasm and my Sunday-drive epiphany have led me to a new sense of direction. Youth ministry. It's all coming together. The Oblates were founded with youth in mind (granted, not exclusively), this society is deeply in need of the Church to raise it from the ash-heap, the Church is deeply in need of youth to do this insurmountable-seeming work. It seems all too clear. This, I think, is the work that I would like to focus on for the next...well, we'll see how long it takes. If it keep on a'rainin', the levee's gonna break.

*I am, of course, aware that the timing of Easter originally was based on (well, was the New Testament fulfilling of) the Jewish Passover, which occurs on the fixed date of 14 Nisan within the Jewish calendar, which is a relative date with respect to our Gregorian calendar. However, Western Easter is no longer based on Passover, but rather the vernal equinox, just like pagan sun-god celebrations.