Catholic Reading Wednesday & Catechesis Tonight!

With many thanks to our wonderful and insightful curator, Karen Celano, you can delve into a faith-related news article each Wednesday! Karen writes:

On Monday we as a nation celebrated Memorial Day, in commemoration of veterans throughout American history who have given their lives in service to our country. In this 2011 piece in the New York Times, history professor David Blight explains the origins of the holiday in the aftermath of the Civil War. The United States, reeling from the deaths of 625,000 young soldiers, was also seeking a path to reunion, and it found a means of reconciliation by memorializing those killed in the war. Memorial Day celebrations, Blight writes, transcended north-south lines and united people across religious boundaries, contributing to the country’s “civic religion” through the use of quasi-religious rituals that self-consciously imitated European Catholic traditions of processing as a community to graveyards and cemeteries.

But the very means of reconciliation also turned into a contested battle over the “meaning” of the war, with Southerners latching onto the nobility of their “Lost Cause” and Northerners claiming the moral high ground against the “rebels.” What many white Americans lost sight of during this process of reconciliation and contestation was the suffering of former slaves, who claimed for themselves another meaning for the war: neither the “Lost Cause” nor the reunion of the nation, but freedom for the oppressed.

In our world today, civil wars are still being fought, and similar battles for meaning in the aftermath of war’s tragedy are being negotiated. Pope Francis recently visited one such war-ravaged region when he went to the Middle East. Especially poignant was the Pope’s trip to Israel, where, in the midst of Jewish-versus-Muslim rhetoric the suffering of the Palestinian Christian minority often gets forgotten, whose communities have been displaced, their worship interrupted, and their families denied rights to education and healthcare. 
In his visit to Gethsemane, Pope Francis called on Catholic religious in Israel to be signs of contradiction, witnessing to Christ’s peace and presence in the midst of conflict as they “follow the Lord with joy in this holy land,” and his actions at the Western Wall was a gesture of his solidarity with those who are suffering most in this conflict.

Although Memorial Day is a distinctly American holiday that some Catholic parishes have (though not without controversy) chosen to integrate into Catholic worship, we must remember that our membership in the Church transcends all national and political boundaries. I believe that we, as Catholics who believe that God reveals Himself in and through history, can use Memorial Day as an opportunity to reflect on our own Church’s and our nation’s past as we strive to seek peace for our brothers and sisters around the world. From the Civil War we have learned how the plight of slaves was neglected as white Americans disputed the meaning of the war in their partisan struggles. From the conflict in Israel we can see how the plight of minority Christians is being forgotten in the midst of politico-religious rhetoric. As we remember those who died in war for the sake of seeking peace and reconciliation, let us honor them by remembering, as Pope Francis did, the poorest among us, who suffer the worst when the heavy hand of war and tragedy falls upon their homelands.

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Join us tonight for more learning and discussions on the faith!