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Passionist Fr. Edward Beck – “Is America Ready for a Mormon President?” on CBS
Fr. Edward Beck, C.P. in a panel discussion with Erica Hill, Charlie Rose and Gayle King and National Journal Congressional correspondent Major Garrett on CBS.
Minding the Gap – A New Year’s Message from Fr. Rick Frechette, C.P.
Dear Friends,
It is with great satisfaction and gratitude, that in the first days of 2012 we will celebrate a quarter century of faith based work in Haiti, and so begin enthusiastically our 26th year of dedication.
Anyone who visits us in Haiti can see how much has been achieved by our twin programs, Nos Petits Freres et Soeurs, and the S.t Luke Mission. We have created jobs (1,600 people work in our programs). All these jobs are aimed at benefiting the marginalized poor, especially women and children. All of the programs have Haitian leaders. We work both on front lines of poverty (front line clinics, relief work, and front line schools), and yet we have also developed important institutions in Haiti that introduce new possibilities in healthcare, rehabilitation and education, and new kinds of jobs (neurosurgery, digital radiology, cancer care, to name a few).
We have developed production and training centers, which bring increasingly more income to our mission. We do extensive community work, including neighborhood development, and extensive relief work. We continue our huge work with orphans and vulnerable children. We reach for the stars, offering computer based learning to very poor students, and superior high school and university education. We invest our blood, sweat and tears, moving forward on a wing and a prayer.
For these many years I have kept you updated on our progress with reflections that are very human and also gospel based. They have included thanks for sharing in our work with your donations and sacrifices.
Because our works are so important, because we have come so far in 25 years and can go much further, and because of the financial crises in the developed world, I have become more forward in suggesting ways you can help. I hope you understand that I do this without the slightest doubt in the goodness and the power of Providence, and without in any way wanting to commercialize our work. We just don’t want to lose the lifesaving ground we have gained over many years.
Of the past 25 years, both 2010 and 2011 have been singularly years of bridge building. Haiti has been laid low by earthquake and cholera, and the persistence of grueling poverty. Thanks to your generous help and our strong Haitian team, we’ve been working day in and day to build bridges of light and hope, of friendship and solidarity, traversing deep valleys of sorrow and hardship.
Many years ago, when I visited London, I was amused by a recorded message played whenever the subway door opened. In order to help you step safely into the train, the voice said, “Mind the gap!”
I remember thinking to myself: in fact, I do mind the gap. I mind the gap between homelessness and having a home, between sickness and healing, between ignorance and enlightenment, between humiliation and dignity. I mind the gap between doubt and faith, between apathy and action. I mind the many gaps that perpetuate suffering.
And so a motto emerged. “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
Better said, “if not us, who? If not now, when?”
The immense team of the St. Luke Foundation sets out daily to fill gaps between need and hope. We have built 50 houses for those left homeless by the earthquake. We set up a field hospital that has cared for the victims of cholera when that disease was brought into Haiti, and spread like wildfire. (We have cared for 20,000 people there to date, patients who came from near and far, in pickup trucks and in wheelbarrows, fighting a disease that kills in a matter of hours; up to 50% of whom would have died without help.)
Our school system includes 28 schools, including a school for special needs children and a fabulous secondary school. There are 8,000 children who are able to study every day thanks to these schools.
On several occasions throughout the year, because of labor disputes at some hospitals, and the lack of facilities never rebuilt since the earthquake, we were obliged to receive scores of people with traumatic injuries and other desperate emergencies. Unable to ignore this gaping suffering, we ramped up our services and created a state of the art ER and ICU, and two other field hospitals. We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on life saving surgeries. We built the St. Luke field hospital in Tabarre, to care for whole families.
Many of the people who come to us for help become fast friends. An example is Marie Ginie, a 16 year old girl who saved her brother’s life by protecting him as a cement wall was brought down by a storm. These walls were weak, hastily rebuilt after the earthquake destroyed their home. The resulting gap in Marie Ginie’s life was enormous. She was paralyzed below the waist and needed orthopedic surgery. No one in Haiti could perform the surgery. She had no house to go home to. The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and our St. Luke crew stepped up to the plate and she had surgery and physical therapy at Mayo Clinic. With the help of some generous donors, we were also able to help build a house for her to return to.
And now, thanks to many donors, the St. Luke Team built a field hospital called St Mary, Star of the Sea. It is in Cite Soleil, infamous as being one of the worst “slums” on earth. However after working there for years, St. Luke’s has the trust of the community, and knows that together we can help close the gap of poverty there. St. Mary’s is almost finished and it’s needed now more than ever. The trauma services at a nearby hospital, which previously served the sprawling shantytowns of Cite Soleil, closed permanently on the 15th of December. The gap created by lack of access to healthcare was already enormous, now it’s grown even larger. Challenge after challenge, the St Luke team courageously steps up to the plate and tries to make a difference, working to close the gap.
And so as we open St Mary’s to serve the people of Cite Soleil, we write to ask for your help. A donation will help us reach yet another important milestone, together with the people of Haiti.
If you can, please help us close the gap. If you can’t, maybe you can pass this message on to a friend. This way of requesting help makes it possible for the St. Luke Foundation to have no paid staff in the USA, so that 100% of donations go directly to Haiti to the mission.
It’s a challenge, but not an impossible task. We go forward in confidence, and hope.
I send this with best wishes for a happy new year, and pray for strength and blessing for you and your families!
Fr. Rick and Fr. Robert Joerger, C.P. at Cholera distribution center in Haiti
Fr. Rick Frechette, CP, DO
Port au Prince
December 29, 2011
Please consider a donation to help Fr. Rick in his ministry to the people of Haiti: Please make checks payable to PASSIONIST MISSIONARIES.
Passionist Missionaries Inc.
526 Monastery Place
Union City NJ 07087-3398
Tel: 888/806-6606
E-mail: AGardiner@cpprov.org
Donate on-line by clicking the button below.
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Homily for the Perpetual Profession of Brother James Fitzgerald, C.P.
Today Brother James Fitzgerald is taking an important step in his life. He’s making his final religious profession as a Passionist at Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the mother of the Jesus.
It’s traditional in our community to make our religious vows at Mass. We do it because we seek by vows to enter more deeply into the mystery of Jesus. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are ways of saying, “I want to be like him,” and so we make them in the presence of our Lord who gave himself so fully to us on the Cross. As Passionists we want to share as deeply as we can in the mystery of his Passion and Resurrection.
Usually, too, we make our vows on a feast of Mary, because she appreciates, more than anyone else, what it means to be called by God and how mysterious that call can be. She knows how to follow her Son.
The gospel today is the story of her call. That morning in Nazareth, Mary got up and was expecting to get married to Joseph and go into his house and bear children with him. Then the angel came. “How can this be?” Mary asks simply. God will bring it about, the angel says, and then leaves her.
That call radically touched Mary’s whole being: who she was, what she was used to and what she did. It was a lifelong call that raised questions all her life. “How can this be?” she said more than once. “Be it done to me according to your word.” She also said that more than once.
Mary’s experience was uniquely her own, we think, and it was. But we may also think that human life, our own lives included, go on in only human terms and God only occasionally has a hand in it, and there we would be wrong. An infant is baptized, two people get married, someone makes religious vows, and that’s it, we may think. But God’s call is dynamic; God is with us continually and God pursues us all our lives.
“Lord, you have probed me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I stand. All my thoughts are before you,” we say in the psalms. God’s call is an everyday, lifelong call.
I think Jim offers us a reminder of that mysterious, lifelong aspect of God’s call. In his early years he joined the Passionists and then that call seemed to be interrupted. “How can this be?” Yet, all through the years, he’s felt its thread pulling him back to a vowed life in a religious community he’s always loved. His profession today may be a good reminder of God’s steady, quiet, mysterious involvement in the lives of each of us.
We may tend to think that God calls only the young, but he calls us in our older years as well. In Advent we remember Zachariah, the priest, and his wife Elizabeth, who conceived a child in her old age. The Christmas story wouldn’t be the same without them. Then, there’s Simeon and Anna who hold the Infant in their arms in the temple. God calls at every age. Whether we are young or old, we’re called to keep listening and questioning and responding: “Be it done to me according to your word.”
Those great gospel figures remind us that it’s not age but faith that counts with God. It’s faith that gives life to religious vows and to communities where we live our vows. Faith moves mountains and changes the world, Jesus says, and he doesn’t limit faith to a certain age.
That’s important to remember today as we experience the phenomenon of aging in our church and our religious communities. What’s more, we’re living in an aging society; we’re living longer in our western industrialized world. It’s a phenomenon that’s increasingly affecting our economy, health care, immigration and so many other areas of our life, and we don’t like paying attention to it. We like to think young. A critical challenge for us is how we live these added years. “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart,” we pray in the psalms.
Our church is a pilgrim church, the Second Vatican Council says. In its sacraments and institutions it “belongs to this world of time.” The church bears “the likeness of this passing world.” Certainly, in our part of the globe, it bears the likeness of a changing, aging world.
Does our community–I think of this wonderful community of Passionists here in the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, for example–have a role helping an aging world live in the spirit of the gospel.
As Jim Fitzgerald takes his vows today he’s not taking a step to security–certainly not in a religious community like ours. Religious vows don’t bring you safety, they spur you on to give yourself to God and his Kingdom. The make us ask like Mary: “How can this be?” “Be it done to me according to your word.”
Any of you who know Jim, know that he doesn’t think he’s old. He works harder and longer that a lot of people much younger than he. But I would like to offer him a few words from the poet, T.S. Elliot as he makes his vows today, words that don’t’ state a fact, but like the vows challenge to something more.
“Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation.
In my end is my beginning.”
Victor Hoagland, CP December 8, 2011
