UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
[Anne M. Burke to Voice of the Faithful: Envisaging a World-Wide Council of the Laity]
As a companion piece to Anne Burke’s Voice of the Faithful speech last week, which I posted yesterday, I’m now posting Joseph O’Callaghan’s comments to the VOTF gathering as he received the Saint Catherine of Siena award on 14 September. As with Anne Burke’s speech, Joe O’Callaghan’s commentary comes to us by way of Jerry Slevin–and I’m very grateful both to Jerry and to Joe for their generosity in seeing that this material is made available to Bilgrimage readers. Joseph O’Callaghan is a professor emeritus of history from Fordham University, author of Electing Our Bishops (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and a leader of the active Bridgeport, Connecticut, VOTF group. His presentation as he received the Saint Catherine of Siena award follows:
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My very dear friends,
I am deeply honored to be a recipient of the St. Catherine of Siena Award. I want to share it, however, with my sisters and brothers of Voice of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport, many of whom are here this evening. The award is theirs as much as it is mine. Each one of them has unselfishly contributed his or her special gifts to the reform and renewal of the Church that we love.
It is fitting that this award should be named for St. Catherine of Siena, for she, like us, lived during an unsettled period in the life of the Church. For seventy years in the fourteenth century the popes abandoned the bishopric of Rome, their primary responsibility, and took up residence at Avignon in southern France. Recognizing how wrong that was, Catherine admonished Pope Gregory XI and eventually persuaded him to return to Rome.
Our Church today is buffeted by similar turbulence. The Church in which we grew up is collapsing. I believe that that is the work of the Holy Spirit who is deliberately pulling down the edifice built on clericalism and hierarchy, an edifice that Jesus would find incomprehensible.
Yet, amid the wreckage that now afflicts the institutional Church, Catholics everywhere, and most especially our brave and courageous nuns, continue to do the work of Jesus Christ, feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, the sick, and the elderly, and speaking out against war and militarism. The beauty of the Church, when viewed through the lens of the commitment of its followers to the transformation of our society, is still there for all to see.
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