Help! Please, help!

For more Spiritual Sunday posts, I recommend that you wander over to the website of Charlotte and Ginger, who host the Spiritual Sunday meme.

I had planned to post something lighter and more spiritual, a post from the past, for Spiritual Sunday as I usually do -- until I came home from Mass (Saturday Vigil).

At Mass, the diocese’s lawyer read us a letter from our bishop. Our beloved, kind, compassionate, fun-loving, help-all-harm-none priest, who has been with us for 16 years, has been accused in two instances of sexual abuse.

One case is 20 years old. The diocese found the person to be credible. (Credible does not mean true; rather, it means that the accuser seems believable. As we all know, there are believable liars around and people deluded by false memories who come across as believable. The literature on false memories is now vast.)

Another person jumped on the bandwagon, claiming a recent instance of abuse. That was found to be a false accusation.

The lawyer asked anyone who would like to consult her about their own abuse by our priest to do so outside after Mass. I realize that the diocese has to be open to the possibility of other instances of abuse, but this woman (lawyer) seemed to be encouraging people to think through their pasts and invent accusations. Feeding frenzy and floating dollars are images that come immediately to mind.

The 20-year-old accusation is going to trial and, we were told, to Rome. The priest has been arrested. I don’t know if he has access to communication with anyone. I sent him a note on FB and on his email account and will have to wait to see if he does or can respond. Nothing so far, and I notice that the most recent post, which might possibly have revealed something about his whereabouts, has been taken down. (I only noticed that because I had left a comment upon which he had commented.) I don't know whether communicating with him is good or bad at this point, i.e. what will help him and what will hurt him.

No one I have talked to in the parish believes that he could possibly have done this. We do believe that someone is either suffering from a false memory or out for money. I had sharp words with the diocese lawyer who seems all about protecting the image of the diocese and not at all about protecting the priest. I was abused as a child and would not dream of supporting someone who would do such a thing. I feel with great certainty, however, that our priest has been wrongly accused, and almost always my intuition is accurate. This is the second person to be accused, seemingly falsely, in our diocese. The first one, a couple of years ago in a different parish, seemed to be a result of a grudge. Although nothing has been proved yet, he is still not back in his parish; a civil case has been pending for more than two years. We would not like to see our priest follow the same path but realize that may be unavoidable. What we hope to avoid is the bishop selling out the priest for the public perception of the diocese. It seems that bishops have made a u-turn, instead of a course correction, since the days of burying everything under the closest carpet.

Our parish stands ready to help our priest in any way possible, emotionally, legally, and financially. I wonder if any of readers have experience with this and/or thoughts about how to help. I have connections with good lawyers, but I am told by the diocesan lawyer that our priest has a canon lawyer and a civil lawyer (hopefully, good ones); I am good at organizing and rallying people; I can raise money; I know how to write. Again, I don't know what will help and what will harm. The Opus bono sacerdotii site and These Stone Walls have both helped me understand the situation -- and its seriousness -- better, and, wonderfully, OBS helps priests in trouble, especially ones who fall into what has become the Salem witch hunt of the 21st century.

Certainly, we will be praying for our priest, but God also needs hands and activists to help. We are ready, but we don’t know what steps to take.

Standing by for suggestions...

My Unremarkable House

For the first three years I lived in San Ignatio, I lived in a quite unremarkable house, unremarkable being the most generous word possible to describe it. It was tiny and clearly had gone through many internal modifications over the years. Our best guess is that it had once been a bunkhouse for field hands before San Ignatio expanded from three streets to six.

It was not the kind of house to which one would invite company. My boss dropped by once and never returned. We once also held an SFO (secular Franciscans) formation meeting there, and the formation director did not want to return. In neither case was it a matter of hospitality. I exhibited the same hospitality I offered in other, more popular, houses I have lived in it. No, it was the house.

A muddy path led up to it. The strangely rectangular living room did an inadequate job of hosting facing couch and chairs. A small, square dining room that lurked on the edge of a tiny, turn-in-a-circle only kitchen held no more than four metal chairs and a small, glass-topped table. It was enough for Donnie and me, but guests were crowded. I have always considered that guests came to visit me, not my house. I may have been wrong. The only repeat guest I had was Padre Julio.

Now I live in a house with a green lawn, gravel driveway, deck, and white picket fence. Our rooms are only slightly larger but shaped more regularly. Guests come in droves. We are the popular spot for the prayer group's movie nights and the neighborhood BBQs. My boss has made repeat visits. Padre Julio returned to his home country of Colombia and then was reassigned to San Diego before we moved into our new house, but I am sure that he would have liked it.

What I liked about Padre Julio is that he accepted the first house, too. Three times a week he came for English lessons. When he was in town for other reasons, he would often park in my yard because it was a convenient, albeit muddy, location and parking is hard to find in San Ignatio -- not because of congestion, of which there is none, but simply because of a lack of parking spaces in general. Often, he parked without without asking. He knew mi casa es su casa.

I understood later why he accepted mi casa so easily. One night toward the end of our sessions, as he was preparing to return to Colombia, he pulled out his laptop for Donnie to configure so that we could continue to communicate via Skype. This way, he would not lose his English-language proficiency, which he had developed with great effort (his and mine -- 9 hours a week for ten months). There on the screen was a one-room shack, the kind one sees in ads asking for charitable donations. "That's my home," he told me with nostalgia.

I understand the nostalgia. It's not what the home looks like. It's what happens inside it. Padre's warm, loving mother raised seven sons in that shack, three of whom became priests.

Mi casa, by comparison, was a palace. At the same time, he was familiar enough with American culture to know that mi casa was very humble in comparison to other American homes. Knowing that allowed him to share with me unashamedly -- in fact, honestly and somewhat proudly -- the humble abode in which he was raised. Somehow, through the picture of that shack in which he grew up, I instantly understood Padre Julio well. We had something in common: unremarkableness.

God Has Filled My Life with Priests

As promised yesterday, here is the post about priests. It seems to be an appropriate topic, given that this is the Year of the Priest.

This week I received (1) an enote from Fr. Ed, our parish priest, who is currently on the East Coast, substituting for a parish priest there who is out of town, (2) a Skype message from Padre (Fr.) Julio, a priest in Colombia who substituted at one point in our parish (followed by a voice conversation with him in English and then his mother in Spanish), and (3) a phone call from Fr. Barry, the director of our local Franciscan retreat center (and monastery). That concatenation of interactions reminded me that it is indeed the Year of the Priest. Thank God for priests! God has filled my life with them, and they in turn have filled my life with blessings.

I realize what a special gift God has given me when I look around and see that many parishes have no priest or borrowed priests and when I see that many of my friends' interactions with priests are only for significant life events (weddings, funerals, emergencies), during confession, and after mass. The extreme irony of this gift is that until three years ago, I had only ever met three priests (all of them Orthodox) and then only once each for a solitary greeting and mass, as a result of catering to the spiritual needs of Shura, the Russian Orthodox Siberian child artist dying from spina bifida whom I took into my home years ago.

I often wonder why God feels that I deserve this amount of interaction. Perhaps it is more that I need a greater depth of instruction, being a person that He pulled from the wayside and plunked down, totally bewildered, in the middle of His flock. Maybe, too, He was worried that I would stray away from the flock and begin happily cavorting in the bramble bushes again. No fear of that! He has filled my life with priests!

First and foremost there is 80-year-old Fr. Barry, whom I dearly love. He seems to have seen everything there is to see. He has traveled the world, studied a variety of religions, spent time in the Holy Land (where I lived for an awesome two years), holds several degrees, including one in psychology, and made a film on the significance of each part of the liturgy. A Franciscan and a deeply spiritual and knowledgeable mystic, he was the perfect RCIA instructor for me. He has since left our parish--he was an interim priest here--but has remained in our town as director of our local retreat center & monastery. Since leaving our parish, he has become my de facto spiritual advisor. When I have received "messages" that have totally startled me and point me in directions where I am certain I am not capable of going, I have run to Fr. Barry for guidance. He accepts these spiritual experiences and helps me sort through what seems to be authentic and what may not be authentic -- and he convinces me that if I am pointed in a direction, I should go where it leads, trusting God to provide me with the wherewithall to follow (and, of course, God always does -- which, on a very deep level, I do fully trust will happen).

The second priest in my life is Fr. Ed. An Irishman by birth and rearing, he is a down-to-earth 50-year-old with an immense sense of humor and adventure. He has held mass on a local mountain top, serves as chaplain for the fire department (and rides along), and can be found jogging around town mornings, often underdressed for the weather, or participating in marathons to raise money for a good cause. Being a catechist, I have come to know him pretty well, and he has been very supportive in the matter of our granddaughter's health. A very important thing for our parish (and me) is that Fr. Ed is a wonderful confessor. He sees very clearly to the heart of nearly any matter. And, if he is jovial in his homilies, he is engaged and spiritual in the confessional.

And finally, there is 30-something Padre Julio from Colombia. Padre (Father) Julio used to substitute at our parish's Spanish-language masses. Over time, he became an integral part of our family. It started with my family volunteering to create a website for his project to bring hope to seven rural towns in Colombia through building a school and self-supporting farm, for which he had formed an organization, Por Amor a Los Ninos de Colombia (For the Love of the Children of Colombia). I translated the original documents from Spanish into English for the website text. My husband, Donnie, designed the graphics. Our son, Shane, did the basic programming, and when we ran into difficulties with more complex programming, our son, Blaine, a professional web designer, flew home from Illinois, to put on the difficult finishes. During that time, our younger daughter, Noelle, who has spina bifida, experienced failure of the shunt that controls her hydrocephalus and ended up emergencied to Stanford University Hospital quite some distance away. Padre Julio drove the distance (even more since he got lost for over an hour, trying to navigate strange terrain in a strange country in a strange language) to visit her and pray for her with all of us together right before her surgery, which did, indeed, turn out fine. At that point, it became clear that Padre needed to learn some English if he were going to be living in this country, and I began to teach him since foreign languages are one of my specialties. The timing was fortuitous because the bishop about then decided that Padre had been here long enough to start offering the English masses. Immediately, our "textbooks" for English classes became the English-language Bible and online audio homilies (for developing listening skills). Padre learned to speak English, and eventually I met his mother who claims I am the daughter she never had (she had 7 sons, three of whom became priests). Indeed, we became family. Moreover, all those English classes? I believe that they benefited me more than Padre for I had a private 3-hour tutorial on Catholicism three nights a week as I helped Padre put into English the various thoughts he wanted to express in his homilies. In practicing English, we would get into extended discussions of concepts, and because Padre Julio is as spiritually oriented as Fr. Barry, I was able to share my spiritual experiences very deeply with him, especially those that contained the grammar and vocabulary components of the topic if the day. While others worried about our granddaughter's disassembled condition and expressed sympathy, Padre Julio's immediate response was very different: "You are blessed!" He definitely understands our family and God's role in our lives!

There have been other priests, of course, along my so-far rather short journey of faith. I assume those relationships are more typical although, not being a cradle Catholic, I have no idea what a typical relationship with a priest is supposed to be. I just know that I deeply love Fr. Barry, Fr. Ed, and Padre Julio, and I cannot imagine my life without them. They have so thoroughly enriched my life that I don't know what to say other than "Thank you, God, for spoiling me!"

Please tell me, especially those of you who are long-term Catholics, what role priests have played in your life. How important have they been to you in decision-making, spiritual development, and maintaining sanity in a crazy world? How often do you end up thanking God that they are in your life?