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The Baptizer: Message Of Repentance
BY FATHER THOMAS FIDELIS
Many of us have seen the play or movie GODSPELL, and can remember the
spine-tingling song portraying John the Baptizer, “Prepare ye the Way of the
Lord.” Amazingly, the very first words spoken by John and by Jesus are
“Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” (check Mt. 3,3 with 3,17) The
newer translations try to give us the full meaning of the Greek word for repent,
metanoeite. “Reform your lives” or “Have a change of heart,” seem to come
closest, though Thomas Merton opted for the tougher, “Transform your
consciousness.” But what do all these fancy translations mean to us Christians
here in Georgia in this 20th century?
Millions of us were entertained by the movie OH GOD, precisely because we
felt the truth behind the comedy: God is at hand; He is present, whether one is
shopping at the supermarket, or shaving in the bathroom. John the Baptizer
tried to deliver the very same message, though he used the well-worn tools of
the prophetic trade: threats, sarcasm, and especially his own fiercely ascetical
life.
In contrast to John’s fiery denunciations and even fiercer lifestyle in the
desert, Jesus went about the cities and towns of Palestine graciously teaching
the people how God was their loving Father, inviting them to repent and return
to their Father’s house. While John threatened sinners “with the wrath to
come,” Jesus sat down at table with them and spoke kindly of God’s love for
all, especially sinners. John, indeed, had success, for many came to his baptism,
but in the long run, John’s denunciatory methods did not prevail. Only “the
goodness and kindness of God our Savior” was able to sustain the on-going
change of heart that is required for perseverance.
Most of us find that with guilt feelings already abounding, it is not too
difficult to repent of our past sins, but what is to keep us from slipping back
into them? St. Paul ardently and frequently writes on the double themes of
forgiveness of sins and “life in Christ Jesus.” Learning to turn our lives over to
Jesus - ever present, always inviting to intimacy - is the only long-range and
safe guarantee we can have.
Maybe we need another movie called OH JESUS, in which, perhaps with
comedy, as that is an authentic element in American culture, Jesus will be
shown as present and operative, as His Christian drives to work, buys his
groceries, takes a shower, enjoys TV . . .
We all know from the many references in the Gospels and Letters of the
New Testament that the Risen, Transfigured Lord is omnipresent: “I am with
you always.” The Book of Revelation presents us with a powerful image of this
salvific truth: the all-loving presence of Jesus to His Christians. John the
Evangelist sees the Risen, glorified Lord, with eyes of flame, standing among
the seven lampstands, holding the seven stars in his hands. This image suggests
the presence of Jesus to all the Christian communities (seven is a number of
universality), and in each Letter Jesus states that He holds that community in
the palm of his hand, knowing well all that is going on.
But it is we Christians who need to become conscious of this love-presence
of Jesus and respond to Him, wherever we are, whatever we are doing. Let each
of us, this 1980 Advent, in whatever way appeals to us, whether by the
prophecies of Isaiah, or the searing message of John the Baptizer, whether by
the gentle Jesus in the Gospels, or the contemporary American mass-media,
respond in earnest to God’s Word: “Reform your life! The reign of God is at
hand.” Where? Nowhere! NOW/HERE!
Father Fidelis is a monk of the Monastery of the Holy Ghost in Conyers.
Second Sunday In Advent
Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta
Vol. 18 No. 43
“H*el
The Klan
The year was 1905. Thomas
Dixon wrote a bestseller called
Clansman. Hollywood grabbed the
graphic tale of hooded horsemen in
the night and produced a box office
smash. It was called “The Birth of a
Nation.” The Ku Klux Klan had
come back to life.
It was the second strong
appearance of the robed menace in
50 years. The Klan was founded in
1867 to systematically destroy the
new found
power of the
freed slave
across the
length and
breadth of the
South. With
cowardly
disguises, these
masked barbar
ians achieved
their ruthless
goal. Success
fully bullying
the rural, uneducated field hands
into submission, they carried the new
found miseries one step further.
Beatings, whippings and finally the
lawless chaos of the lynch-rope-was
mercilessly inflicted on their black
victims.
After the success of “The Birth of
a Nation,” the Klan, wallowing in
their new support, extended their hit
list. Catholics were considered fair
game for these night-hunters. The
Roman breed of Christianity was not
considered biblically valid since
bread and other idols were a center
of daily worship. A burning cross was
quickly enshrined on the front porch
of any daring, outspoken Southern
Catholic.
The Jew also found his way to the
secret summons of the high and
haughty Klan. He was somewhat
worse than the papist Christian. The
blood of Christ was on his hands.
The Jew, the Catholic and always the
fre_r><?lack citizen of this nation
were targets of this national fungus.
But hatred, run riot, has no
historical boundary. After the
Catholic candidacy of A1 Smith in
the twenties, the Klan went into
politics. Political power in Dixie
would rest only in the hands of those
annointed by the hooded hierarchy.
Until 1960 we saw these men hold
national and state office, everywhere
retarding the constitutional claim of
civil and educational rights for all.
It was the marching feet and the
sacred hymns of freedom - believing
Americans that put an end to Klan
terror in the sixties. The Supreme
Court finally gave long overdue
decisions. Political mouthpieces were
silenced. Law and order enforcement
overshadowed vigilante systems and
the White Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan were demasked and some said,
totally destroyed.
So why did we need last week’s
Thanksgiving statement of
Archbishop Donnellan and Rabbi
Sugarman denouncing bigotry in our
time? Simple. The Klan is back. The
vicious call to hatred, that once gave
this epidemic birth, is there again.
Sensing a cozy climate within the
framework of our civic and
governmental life, not to mention
the permissions of right-wing
Christianity, the symbolic hooded
white sheet has again appeared on
the scene disgracing our nation’s
energetic progress.
The statement of our leaders said
it alarmingly well - “it is disturbing
to hear again voices of the past.” The
Ku Klux Klan, violent chapters of
our past, seem perennially able to
gain footholds in the present.
Thursday, December 4,1980
$8.00 per year
COMFORTING PASTOR - At a hospital in Potenza, Italy, Pope
John Paul II comforts a wounded victim of the earthquake that
devastated southern Italy. Over three thousand are reported dead in
the disaster and thousands more are homeless. Relief assistance is
pouring in from all, over the world. The U.S. Bishops are asking
American Catholics to join the charitable mission of mercy. A
collection to assist the victims will be taken in every parish on the
weekend of December 6 and 7 in the Archdiocese of Atlanta.
FOUNDED CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT
Dorothy
By Thomas Ewald
NC News Service
Dorothy Day, a founder of the
Catholic Worker Movement and an
advocate of Christian pacifism, died
Nov. 29 of congestive heart failure at
Maryhouse, a Catholic settlement
house on New York City’s Lower
East Side. She was 83 years old.
For more than half a century,
Miss Day’s name was linked with
voluntary poverty, long bread lines,
protest marches, hospitality houses,
soup kitchens and the Catholic
Worker Movement, which now has
houses of hospitality in 29 U.S. cities
and several communal farms in
various parts of the country.
Miss Day, who seemed to have an
endless amount of enthusiasm,
energy and ideas, founded both the
movement and a monthly tabloid
newspaper called The Catholic
Worker in 1933 with Peter Maurin, a
wandering scholar and agitator of
French peasant background.
Miss Day was born in Brooklyn on
Nov. 8, 1897, the third of five
children of John I. Day, a sports
writer, and his wife Gloria.
The family lived in California and
Chicago, where Miss Day was
baptized and confirmed in the
Episcopal Church, before returning
to New York.
Miss Day’s childhood and
adolescence were quiet and she spent
much time reading a range of authors
including Jack London, Upton
Sinclair, St. Augustine and Prince
Peter Kropotkin, the nonviolent
Russian anarchist.
By the time she was 18, she had
finished two years on a scholarship at
the University of Illinois. There, she
recalled in her autobiography, “The
Long Loneliness,” “I felt my faith
had nothing in common with that of
Christians around me . . . so I
Day Dies
hardened my heart.” When a
professor she admired suggested that
religion was a prop for the weak, she
gave up religion.
Looking for a community which
shared her concerns and values, she
joined the Socialist Party.
When the family moved back to
New York in 1916, Miss Day quit
college and became a reporter and
columnist with The Call, a Socialist
daily. “I wanted to go on picket
lines, to go to jail, to write, to
influence others and so to make my
mark on the world,” she later
recalled, adding: ‘‘How much
ambition and how much self-seeking
there was in all this!”
For a year, Miss Day worked for
$5 a week and wrote a column
describing the squalor of slum living.
She joined the Industrial Workers of
the World (Wobblies), a free-wheeling
labor movement. She worked briefly
for the Anti-Conscription League and
then joined the staff of The Masses, a
revolutionary magazine.
About this time she also met Mike
Gold, a writer and later a leading
Communist, who was her lover for
several years.
When The Masses was suppressed
for opposing World War I, Miss Day
went with some suffragette friends to
Washington to picket the White
House. They were arrested and,
refusing bail, spent 30 days in jail.
That was the first of many jailings
during a lifetime of protest.
Through Gold, Miss Day was
introduced to the playwright Eugene
O’Neill and a literary circle including
Ben Hecht, Hart Crane and Allen
Tate, whose informal headquarters
was a Greenwich Village saloon, the
Hell Hole.
Involved in the 1920s in a
common-law marriage to Forster
Batterham, an atheist, she became
(Continued on page 3)
Second Papal Encyclical
Examines Merciful Love
VATICAN CITY (NC) - In an
encyclical on the mercy of God,
Pope John Paul II said society will
become more human only if people
introduce into their relationships
“not merely justice, but also that
‘merciful love’ which constitutes the
messianic message of the Gospel.”
The pope warned against
programs seeking social justice which
are not shaped by love ana mercy.
Programs based only on the idea of
justice “in practice suffer from
distortions,” he said in the encyclical
“Dives in Misericordia” (Rich in
Mercy) released Dec. 2.
“Although they continue to
appeal to the idea of justice,
nevertheless experience shows that
other negative forces have gained the
upper hand over justice, such as
spite, hatred and even cruelty,” Pope
John Paul said. “In such cases, the
desire to annihilate the enemy, limit
his freedom, or even force him into
total dependence, becomes the
fundamental motive for action; and
this contrasts with the essence of
justice, which by its nature tends to
establish equality and harmony
between the parties in conflict.”
The notion of “An eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth,” which
Christ challenged, “was the form of
distortion of justice at that time; and
today’s forms continue to be
modeled on it,” the pope said. “It is
obvious, in fact, that in the name of
an alleged justice (for example,
historical justice or class justice) the
neighbor is sometimes destroyed,
killed, deprived of liberty or stripped
of fundamental human rights. The
experience of the past and of our
own time demonstrates that justice
alone is not enough, that it can even
lead to the negation and destruction
of itself, if that deeper power, which
is love, is not allowed to shape
human life in its various
dimensions.”
Forgiveness demonstrating mercy
is necessary in human relationships,
the pope said in the 83-page
encyclical.
“A world from which forgiveness
was eliminated,” the pope said,
“would be nothing but a world of
cold and unfeeling injustice, in the
name of which each person would
claim his or her own rights vis-a-vis
others; the various kinds of
selfishness latent in man would
transform life and human society
into a system of oppression of the
weak by the strong, or into an arena
of permanent strife between one
group and another.”
The pope went on to say that the
requirement of forgiveness does not
cancel out the requirements of
justice. “Properly understood, justice
constitutes, so to speak, the goal of
forgiveness. In no passage of the
Gospel message does forgiveness, or
mercy, as its source, mean indulgence
towards evil, towards scandals,
towards injury or insult. In any case,
reparation for evil and scandal,
compensation for injury, and
satisfaction for insult are conditions
for forgiveness.”
The Gospel parable of the
prodigal son, the pope said, shows
that “he who forgives and he who is
forgiven encounter one another at an
(Continued on page 3)
Heralds Of The Season - Third In A Series
The Place Of Simple Gifts
BY THEA JARVIS
It is the season of simple gifts.
Though the retail stores would
nave it otherwise, more and more
people are turning to the
hand-crafted, the low-keyed, the
home-made and the kitchen-baked
for their holiday giving.
We yearn to touch what we
give, in a way that endows our
offering with meaning beyond the
lights and tinsel of the shopping
malls.
In the now-chilly hills of north
Georgia, there is a workshop that
specializes in such simplicity. It is
alive with light, life and the
delightful spirit of the first
Christmas.
“The Place,” brainchild of four
Adrian Dominican sisters and
haven for those seeking to break
the bonds of Southern
Appalachian poverty, sits just off
the main street in Cumming. It is
green on the outside, warm on the
inside, and a solace to the
beleaguered buyer of Christmas
remembrances.
It is here that one finds the
hand-fashioned woodwork,
bonnets, quilts, toys, rag rugs and
wall hangings that make Christmas
giving a joy. And it is here that a
talented Sister Nancyann Turner
weaves her wonders - and teaches
others to do the same.
“We try hard to honor the
history of the area and celebrate
that in creative expression,” says
Sister Nancyann with enthusiasm.
Her full-size loom sits by the front
windows of the weaving room at
“The Place,” resplendent with
color and pattern. It brightens the
often dreary north Georgia
winterscape just outside.
“Mountain people need to be
affirmed that they have gifts, that
they have a contribution to
make,” reflects the accomplished
weaver, who holds a Masters in
Art Education and presently
comes to Atlanta once a week to
study at the Chastain Arts Center.
But an artist’s proficiency will
not go far without a deep,
personal commitment to the
people whom you serve, and it is
Sister Nancyann’s warmth and
Sister Nancyann Turner, O.P.
meaning and dignity to the lives
of mountain families who daily
face the degradation of rural
poverty. It is a philosophy that
challenges the lack of education
and transportation, the high
unemployment, and the scarcity
of bare necessities on their own
ground.
“When people come for help,
we try to support the total
person. It’s not just a matter of
giving them food, or money, or
clothing,” says Sister Nancyann.
“The goal of our art program is to
meet individual needs. But we also
laughed at me because I had
traveled all that way. They told
me I could have learned to make
rope right here!”
Sister Nancyann has extended
her involvement by actively
participating in state and local arts
groups. She is vice-president of
the Mount Yonah Weaving Guild
of north Georgia, a charter
member of the Forsyth County
Art Association, and a director on
the board of the Georgia
Mountain Crafts Association.
One of Sister’s current goals is
(Continued on page 2)
openness that kindle the 1 loyalty
of those around her.
“We try to provide an
environment where individual
gifts can be affirmed and offer
people a chance for success and
esteem in their work,” she says,
try to market the things that our
people make and help them earn
money, too.”
In ministering to the mountain
community in Cumming, Sister
Nancyann has learned a few things
herself.
articulating the self-help
philosophy that is the foundation
for all the programs at “The
Place.”
Such a philosophy lends
“I went to Canton one day to
learn how to make rope. It was a
considerable trip. When I
returned,” she smiles, “Ruby and
Emmy (friends at “The Place”)
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