A minority sickness seeks attention

Our world spends so much of its energy and talent on wars and prisons that overcoming the numerous destructive diseases gets a low priority. God gave us this beautiful planet, and all we do is squeeze it.

 About the time I was starting kindergarten, President Calvin Coolidge was telling the nation that “the business of America is business.” His term ended in 1929, which one of his successors might have described as a year that will live in business infamy.

 In the years that followed, the disease that placed Franklin D. Roosevelt in a wheelchair was overcome. A heart was transplanted, and thousands of transplant surgeries followed. Medical nightmares yielded, slowly, to medical science, and science is just getting started.

 Calvin Coolidge today might say that the business of America is divided between health care and the military. “Civilization and profits,” he once said, “go hand in hand.” Someone else might have said that civilization and prophets go hand in hand.

 Health care has changed as radically as travel. The era of horse manure in the streets has phased into the era of oil spills and global warming, even as penicillin and 21st century microsurgery have extended life. What has not changed is the science of economics, or the will to apply it, from one depression to the next.

 When my neurologist made it official that there was a respectable reason for my dizziness, and that the reason was a first cousin of parkinson’s once removed, called parkinsonism, I became an instant advocate of research to heal olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple systems atrophy (OPCA/MSA).

 This is a minority disease, its victims numbered in the tens of thousands while millions are stricken by cancer or AIDS. Even so, some highly dedicated medical professionals and their equally dedicated lay supporters are searching for a way to treat OPCA/MSA.  There is no cure.

 The disease is so peculiar that it is not easily recognized. My diagnosis was made nearly a decade ago, after more than a year of examinations and tests. That’s not uncommon, nor is the likelihood that the disease was becoming active long before that. Doctors call it progressive. It is on the move, and I began following with a walking stick, then a cane, eventually a rollator and now a power chair.

 At first there was dizziness, which became more vigorous, along with other symptoms. Some of them are especially bemusing. For example, after I write an article I proof it methodically in order to insert dozens of missing a’s. OPCA/MSA has taken custody of the little finger on my left hand.

 It even blacks out wonderful sentences which I haven’t  written yet. Sometimes I begin typing a thoughtful sentence but never finish, because the process of punching keys erases my thoughts before I can write them down. As a reader, you may have noticed that.

 I always have had, and still have, a lot to say. It takes much longer to say it than it did when I was a rewrite man on a Hearst newspaper in a three-paper town. I’ve forgotten what year that was, but one of my assignments was to write about the campaign to nominate Douglas MacArthur for president.

 When my 87th birthday arrives in March I expect to be at this same keyboard, even if it takes longer to punch each key, something like learning to set type by hand in the 1930s.

 God is classier than Calvin Coolidge in describing the nature of civilization and profits. “For what will it profit a man,” asks Christ Jesus, “if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” And the letter of James asks “if a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?”

Eighty-plus years is a quick flick in the timeline of God’s universe. Cures, profits and wonders are alive in that universe, awaiting discovery, even as  evolution awaited discovery. I’ll write more words, but the Word itself goes on and on without a period.

This disease is progressive? So is life

Written for Sharing Magazine

International Order of St. Luke

            If volunteers were awarded medals, my friend and neighbor Joe would have trouble standing up under the weight of them all. He’s a retiree who volunteers for long-term duties with organized charities, while still reaching out to friends and strangers who need help with one thing or another.

            For years Joe has been driving me to my favorite barber shop several miles from where we live. He steers us to restaurants afterward, each one memorable, dozens of them in two counties. As soon as he walks in Joe knows the restaurant staff, and as soon as he sits down he knows diners at the next table. Joe smiles a lot, the way generous people do.

            So, when Joe phoned on Tuesday to offer me a haircut outing I didn’t like turning him down, but another constant companion, dizziness with internal fog, kept me home. After Joe repeated the invitation a couple of times I had to admit that the barbering expeditions are over, and for the same reason that I have a new power chair to accomplish indoors what my power scooter does for me outdoors.

            The ailment neurologists call olivopontocerebellar atrophy, aka multiple system atrophy, is said to be a progressive disease because its mischief enlarges over time. When it began I could still drive a car or go to a movie. With a walker I could still manage a church aisle. After I turned in my car keys on my 81st birthday, I still had a couple of years to shop at the supermarket and watch my grandchildren win trophies with their teams and perform on school stages.

            So far I have not figured out what causes this disease, but neither have the medical specialists. Philosophers and theologians work at it, but so far their results have been sort of Congressional. God makes people, not automatons or puppets. God permits every kind of condition, personality and thought. Prayer brings healing, especially healing of isolation and self consciousness.

            Healing of OPCA/MSA will be sensational, but meanwhile any spiritual triage would suggest that prayer and dedication are also needed elsewhere. Consider that last month alone Chicago recorded 55 homicides, and sanctioned killing on a large scale was reported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, here and there around Africa. Cancer, AIDS, accidents and disasters brought death in wholesale lots. There’s plenty to pray about. There’s plenty to do.

             

When E. F. Hutton tried to buy the post office

Edward F. Hutton was one of the wealthiest men of his time, serious in occupation but with a fine sense of humor. One example of that was his invitation to me to visit him and his wife at their home in Palm Beach in the late 1940s.

            By that time he and Marjorie Merriweather Post had divorced, but he was chairman of General Foods and was active in companies he founded, including Wall Street’s E. F. Hutton.

            I was a young labor reporter at the time, and Hutton enjoyed showing me off to his friends as a curiosity, a suspected Democrat whose personal heroes included Eleanor Roosevelt and that crowd.

            When I arrived he apologized for the staffing of his mansion. It was the week of shifting 40 servants from his home in Long Island to his home in Palm Beach, and only a dozen were yet on the job in Florida.

            One who was on the premises was the butler. I was given a four-room suite, which included a direct phone line to New York. In that suite, to my embarrassed horror, I found my suitcase open and empty. I should have known. The butler did it! He had unpacked my clothes, ink stains and all.

            Hutton was solicitous of his untested guest the first day, when he told me that dinner with him and his wife would be informal—just black tie. Inasmuch as he was stripped down to a dozen servants, he may have appreciated my confession that I lacked a black tie and all the fabric that goes with it.

            In fact, Ed Hutton and his wife were considerate hosts who told entertaining stories about life among the very rich while making me quite comfortable. Hutton told me that any yacht brochures I might come across would have been placed by his wife, who was signaling what she’d like to have for a birthday present.

            He told me he had written President Roosevelt, offering to buy the U.S. Post Office from the government and run it as a profitable tax-paying entity. Good management, he said, was needed. FDR did not accept that offer. I remembered it when today’s Postal Service reported financial stress, and proposed further cuts in service.

            Today the mail delivered to my home mailbox included two copies of America magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 19; two copies of Time magazine, dated Sept. 12 and Sept. 26; two copies of The Nation dated Sept. 19 and Sept. 26. In a single mail delivery there were three weekly magazines more than a week late.

            Newspapers and magazines will almost inevitably complete a shift from print to online publishing. The mail service, which made it possible for publishers to turn out national periodicals in the first place, still gives identity to small communities all over the country while its own identity fades.

           

           

Preachers don't work on Sundays only

Preachers don’t work on Sundays

and let others do the leading 
the rest of the week

            President Obama offered another elegant address to Congress, although journalists hired because of their muscular mouths had begun chomping on it even before they heard it.

             Speeches are part of leadership, but leadership has to inspire between speeches.

We remember the Gettysburg Address because Lincoln was a full-time leader, not because he was a talented speechmaker.

            Poor Barack Obama, like Woodrow Wilson, sees Congress as academia--but Congress sees him as academic. He attracts some of the same kinds of hostility Wilson did, but Wilson was spared prejudices that survived the defeat at Appomattox Court House. The sort who couldn’t abide John F.Kennedy because of his religion bent their knees and their conscience in false witness against Obama, claiming against abundant evidence that he belongs to one of the religions they despise. Such things matter if you’re a bigot.

            Capitalism, the religion of Congress, courts and campaign funds, sustains millionaires and creates billionaires. U.S. and European banks, beneficiaries of government favors treasured by all whose business is business, have so far announced personnel cuts numbering 70,000. If you are not a capitalist, you will have to wonder why bankers have had 70,000 employees they did not need.

            Their religion relives them of the familial behavior Christianity and other faiths require of their believers, the notion of brotherhood and sisterhood, of emulating the Good Samaritan. There’s no convincing way to unhire 70,000 employees in the name of Christ, or to pray for tax breaks not available to everybody.

             Meanwhile, the talking journalists await the next presidential address. Any day now they’ll start telling what’s wrong with it.

             

St. Peter and the heavenly facebook

By A. E. P. Wall

            At age 4, newly enrolled in Sunday school, I learned about the crucifixion and about graham crackers and milk. My parents and I had just moved to Coudersport, Pennsylvania, 104 miles from Jamestown, N.Y., where my life began in 1925.

            That Sunday night my mom and I were in the living room of our apartment, over the Gates Brothers grocery and shoe store. Windows were open, lights were on and moths were winging it around the lamps. Remembering the morning lesson I made paper crosses, bonded with homemade paste. I could have stopped there, with my plain Protestant crosses, but I found that my paste would hold a moth, with white wings almost like the ones angels wore, on the cross. This lasted until my mom noticed what I was doing, and gave me further religious instruction briefly and in a very loud voice.

            It was a pretty good instruction, and maybe it is why water-boarding and other tortures seem satanic, like first century Romans killing Jesus slowly and painfully because he wouldn’t say what they wanted him to say.

            That was the year I learned to read. We were strangers in town, and my parents thought I’d find playmates if they signed me up for a kindergarten operated by a remarkable educator named Rose Crane. That lady could teach. The next year I started first grade at the public school at age 5, and after a few days I was put in second grade. I was not smart, but Rose Crane was.

             Something I learned was that in general kids ought not to skip grades, but be grouped by age, so they are all in synch, all ready for Little League at the same time. I also learned that a theology of moths on paper crosses would not do after age 4. But more than 80 years later I’m moved by the cross, whether it is a paper cutout, ink printed on paper, whittled from wood or crafted in precious metal. It is a pattern of wonder.

             Coudersport had a population of about 3,000 when we went back to Jamestown, home to about 40,000 then, 30,000 today. I was 6, and I went to live with my grandparents, the Olmsteads, in Celoron, which is curled up next to Jamestown on Chautauqua Lake. Celoron’s population was about 700, one of whom was to become more popular than the other 699 combined. That was Lucille Ball, the I Love Lucy television superstar.

            The Great Depression had walloped the whole country. My mom and dad had to take jobs where they could get them, and I was lucky in grandparents. They lived diagonally across the street from Celoron’s community church, Methodist Episcopal by denomination, and served on Sundays by a circuit riding minister who had two other congregations. My grandma prepared the communion bread, and my grandpa pulled the rope on the church bell. The minister came to our house to use the facilities. I marveled that my grandma didn’t seem to mind who heard her puffing tremulously through The Old Rugged Cross.

              I was given a kids’ Bible, which was kept on a bedside table. It had lots of pictures. My favorite showed David poised to fire his slingshot at Goliath. Another favorite showed Daniel holding his own in the lions’ den. Each night when I was encouraged to read a Bible story I stared for a while at the book, wondering what was being written about me in St. Peter’s book. My Sunday school teacher had alerted me that angels kept track of everyone, and at the end of the day wrote down everything, good or bad. In 1930 nobody had yet dreamed of a Kindle or an iPad.

             When I was 20 I married a Catholic girl, and after we divorced I married another Catholic girl. This was enabled by the languid process of anulment. I chaired the board of a Catholic college in Honolulu while editing a daily newspaper in Hilo, Hawaii, where I came to know many Buddhists, and to speak at Buddhist events. The president of a Mormon college on Oahu gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon, and I wrote about Jewish-Christian relations.  

             The little Protestant church in Celoron, the Catholic cathedral on Oahu, the Buddhist temples in Hawaii were different from each other in worship and conviction, but the people were pretty much the same. One person’s karma may be another person’s cause and effect. We all smile alike, but we don’t smile enough.

             I try to remember: Don’t forget to smile. We all may be on St. Peter’s candid camera, Facebook Central.

           

           

           

              

An electric chair of my own

On sunny days you can see me whirring around the neighborhood, wherever the sidewalks go, on my racy red scooter with the American flag on the front and a Chicago White Sox tag on the back.

A couple of years ago my son David and my daughter-in-law Toni bought me a four-wheel battery-powered scooter that bounces along at 5 miles an hour. It can travel up to 20 miles or so on a single battery charge.

Now my doctor has determined that I can continue to live in my own condo – even at age 86 and with an incurable disease that makes walking a risky adventure, like skating on melted ice. I can keep on preparing meals, doing laundry, using my computer and TV, writing articles and reading other people’s articles. I can do all that because I’m getting a power chair, which will get me around indoors the way my scooter does outdoors.

A power chair is more compact than a scooter. It is engineered to make narrow turns, to zig and zag. It can be pulled up to a desk or a dining table. It extends life in a way no medicine can.

My scooter came from the Scooter Store, and I’m so happy with it that I went back to the Scooter Store for a power chair. If you’re interested in a power chair for yourself or someone else, you can talk to the man who helped me. He is William Kaiser, and his phone is 800-723-4535, ext. 9465.

My only anxiety is about Tom, the cat who has shared my premises with me ever since Sally, my wife, died nine years ago. Tom is sometimes slow to yield to my rollator, a feline fault that can lead to a tall tail tale.

Do we let others pre-think our thoughts?

How can I ask questions about some of the things my church does, or doesn’t, and still be a believer? Some church leaders demand total obedience, and excommunicate anyone who won’t let guardians of dogma pre-think all thoughts.

God is mind, scriptures say, but some believers answer that God no longer thinks out loud. God is love, scripture says, but some believers reply that God expels worshippers who keep raising their hands to ask questions.

Like many, I have two identifying memberships, one religious and the other secular. I’m a Christian and an American. I disagree with friends who say church rules and regulations should be accepted with head bowed, eyes closed and lips joined like a self-seal envelope -- but I agree when they say it is good to ask questions about the rules and regulations of government. Americans seldom get excommunicated from their U.S. citizenship if they ask questions, and that’s because they do ask questions.

Most of God’s human creatures do not choose their religions or nationalities, although choices are possible. Where a person is born usually establishes nationality and, typically, religion. There is one God, who permits more than one religion and more than one nation.

Like other Americans, I believe in my country even when I disagree with some of its officials, laws, courts and diplomats. I believe in my religion; when I explore its grandeur I remember how little I know, how many questions there are to ask.

Discovery is the way of life. Long-ago ancestors never heard of gravity, knew nothing of oxygen or radio waves. Some asked questions, some hushed them, fearing what they might come to know about the unknown. Thousands of centuries of discovery and questions have brought i-phones, but individual peace of mind and peace among people and nations remain as elusive as at the beginning. God is still there, but we are like the 49ers of the Old West, searching for something more negotiable than God.

Separation of Church and Sex

The Bible tells what God said to favored men and women long ago, some of it repeated around campfires from one generation to the next, finally engraved in clay or written on scrolls. These inspired accounts survived the centuries, while disputes about what they mean have put thousands of religions, denominations and communities into competition with one another.

When I was a boy I liked Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, and had a simple choice between but not among them. How the world has evolved. Now I’m offered Coke, Tab, Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke and Cherry Coke, regular or diet, with or without caffeine, in bottles or in cans.

Now there are regular and diet Episcopalian churches, caffeine-free Lutherans, a choice of traditional, evangelical, liberal theologies and liturgies.

Sexuality is a common issue in all religions, no surprise because it is a fundamental mystery of human life, foundation of all emotions. Sexual practices are catalogued in creeds and laws, with severe consequences or sublime. Disregard of sex rules may, like murder, be a capital offense. These concerns, ancient as they are, remain unsolved and divisive.

Millions believe that sex crimes involving children will result in savage and brutal eternal punishment. Countless clerics and laity who believe this are found, nevertheless, to engage repeatedly in such crimes. Sigmund, where are you when we need you? Will humankind search for the causes of such self-defeating crimes with the fervor of searches for the cure of cancer and polio, or will it just let new victims suffer and build more prisons?

Sexual misbehavior is revealed as a plague in the Roman Catholic Church, and solutions have not been found in scripture or liturgy. The Catholic Church which practically invented hospitals and universities has the power if not the purpose to lead a global search for a way to heal destructive compulsions. Some observers, however, might find it curious that men speak for greater sensitivity while dressed up in lace skirts and hats as fancy as Queen Elizabeth’s.

These men of huge spiritual commitment are required to renounce personal experience with sex, like a chef who has read recipes but never entered the kitchen.

God still speaks to those who listen and those who don’t. Prayers are conversations with God, in any language, even Latin. Coming to grips with three-letter word, Sex, leads to a four-letter word some spell Hell and some spell Heal.

Atheists and other fundamentalists

Atheists are secular fundamentalists who share the notion of certainty with religious fundamentalists. Declaring that something does not exist, never existed, and cannot exist requires absolute self-confidence, if not faith. Rigid positions observed by fundamentalists, whether they are practitioners of science or religion, close the door to further investigation and speculation.

Millions of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, along with uncounted secular fundamentalists, believe they know all there is to know about god.

Atheistic scientists who claim to know it all insist that the case is closed. They attack folks who believe in a deity, including scientists who are church members and ordained clerics. Religious fundamentalists bristle under these jibes, while less rigid believers and non-believers shrug their shoulders.

Damien and Jack in Hawaii

It was not my plan to spend the night in the Molokai leper colony, especially not to spend it on a rectory sofa presided over by a grandfather’s clock that chimed the passage of each quarter-hour.

It was a blessing, in fact, to be grounded by a storm that prevented a return flight to Honolulu aboard a small prop plane. The settlement in the late 1950s had no accommodations for overnight visitors, but it had a hospitable Catholic priest.

I was there to write about Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts who began a memorable ministry to lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai in 1873. Leprosy became known as Hansen’s Disease
.
The blessing to me was to have a sense of the jet-black stillness of the night, once the generators had been turned off, and to reflect on the contrasts of waves and chimes. It was a blessing to have a few extra hours with the people who lived there and with the Sisters of St. Francis of Syracuse who lived with them, and loved them.

On May 10 the Roman Catholic Church celebrates a Mass memorial for Father Damien, now St. Damien.

I was writing for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin at that time. It was an exciting place to work. Then I became editor of the Hilo Tribune-Herald, a daily newspaper owned by the Star-Bulletin, and eventually managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. One of the pleasures of journalism is getting to know lots of people in every kind of work. When statehood came to Hawaii on Aug. 21, 1959, the Territory of Hawaii had a non-voting delegate to Congress named John A. Burns.

Democrat Jack Burns had defeated my boss, Republican publisher Elizabeth (Betty) Farrington, for the Congressional post. Burns ran for governor in 1959 but lost to William Quinn. Burns won in 1962 and served three terms as governor. We were pretty good friends, often meeting for breakfast.

We were meeting in my office at the Tribune-Herald on the Big Island when a desperate phone call told me that Betty Farrington, no fan of Burns, was unexpectedly entering the front door. Burns dashed out through the composing room and left by a back door. He was a quicker politician than I was.

We sometimes met at an early weekday Mass in Honolulu’s downtown cathedral, and we shared an enthusiasm for social justice. When Burns named me chairman of the Hawaii State Educational Television Committee, charged with creating a TV system and drafting the legislation to get it going, we made certain its use would be available to all children, whether in public or private schools. Another Burns enthusiasm was for making Father Damien one of Hawaii’s two choices for Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Both of those projects came to pass.

Jack Burns was a gifted politician, and a great man. He and Father Damien make a good team.

They both knew the agonies of sickness, the pains of others, and they knew that some issues are beyond the understanding of saints and governors.

I know I haven’t forgotten the car keys;
I don’t have a car!

Not even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew for certain whether Cairo, the southernmost town in Illinois, would survive the great Mississippi flood of 2011. Cairo is positioned at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, its survival depending on the skill of the Army Corps of Engineers in diverting water through levees deliberately breached.

Anyone flooded just below that point wouldn’t know whether the water came from one river or the other. That’s the feeling that came to me when I realized just a few moments ago that I had written a very similar story about Father Damien and Governor Burns several years ago.

Which of my rivers washed away my memory of telling that story at least once before? Was it the Ohio River of Advancing Age, or the Mississippi River of my progressing brain disease? Memory thins out at age 86, and it takes a beating from my type of parkinsonism.

If you’ve read this story before, please forgive an absent-minded journalist. My hope is that if you’ve read it before you have forgotten that you did.

Memory was not invented by Bill Gates

Even though I have a brain ailment, I think my mind works the way it is supposed to most of the time. Sometimes signals get short circuited, and what started out as a step turns into a stagger. Maybe my gait controller drops off to sleep, like those air controllers in the news.

For years I've ordered things from L. L. Bean, so I was surprised to discover that this time I ordered things in the wrong size. Most mornings I brew coffee, but once in a while I feel too clumsy for it. Sometimes thoughts evaporate before I’m finished with them. This can be embarrassing, because I live with a cat, and who wants a cat to seem smarter than he is? It should be enough that he has eight more lives than I have. He never forgets the rock music of a can opener opening tuna or the crinkle of plastic being peeled off a deli sandwich pack.

Creation gave us plants and trees and other living things for sustenance, along with herbs and chemicals for treating ailments, letting them evolve with skills to apply them. Like many others with OPCA/MSA, I see it as a prod for learning about it and maybe about myself. Its meaning is still to be learned, and there’s lots of time for that.

What was I going to say next?

74 seconds of Challenger in the sky

The space shuttle Challenger streaked into the Atlantic sky, then burst into a flaming flash. My wife and I were watching from the lawn in front of our home in Titusville, Florida. We looked in stunned wonder, not wanting to believe what we saw on that 28th day of January, 1986.

The pastor of Holy Spirit Church in the nearby town of Mims, where many space workers worshipped, asked me to write something to be read by the lectors at Mass on Sunday. This is it.

The Exploding Conquest

A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

From almost any point in our parish --from the lawns in front of our homes, from the windows of classrooms, from the asphalt surface of parking lots --we were able to watch the shuttle Challenger head for a new conquest of space. But just 74 seconds later the conquest exploded before our eyes, the lives of seven very special Americans disintegrated in a horror of flame.

From that moment our parish was not the same, our lawns and classrooms and even our parking lots were not the same, because the words of St. Peter's First Epistle moved out of the pages of Scripture and into our lives on a chilly January morning: "Do not be surprised, beloved, that a trial by fire is occurring in your midst."

Our Catholic faith is a religion of the future. We can understand the convictions, scientific and philosophical and perhaps religious, which inspired the seven space heroes to board the Challenger shuttle for a flight into the future. They were explorers for all of us, just as they were neighbors to all of us.

We Christians, blessed by a God of eternal life, know that we have a proper role in the world, a role that encourages us to understand the nature of the universe and to enter into that universe with confidence. We understand that even as we live each day we are dying a bit each day until we reach the final goal, which comes so unexpectedly and never quite in the manner of our own choosing, comes as it did to our neighbors Gregory B. Jarvis, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith and the shuttle commander Francis "Dick" Scobee.

It is part of our role in this world to respond to God's many gifts, using those gifts to establish within the world a measure of love, of dignity, of simple goodness. Here where we live and pray, in this part of the world known as the Space Coast, we enjoy a profound sense of the awesome power of the Almighty to engage the men and women of his creation in a course of growth, a course that leads to new horizons. We live life fully because we know that there are great wonders ahead.

Cheers for those who walk the walk

From the chair in front of my computer I can see him park his car on the street. He gets out, carrying a book, and begins the long walk to my front door. Almost every Sunday Deacon Joseph Truesdale drives over from Orland Park’s St. Francis of Assisi Church to bring the Eucharist and morning prayer.

Like all Roman Catholic deacons, Joe is an ordained cleric. He’s a successful engineer, recently retired. His wife is an artist who shares his vision of service.

So many Catholic clerics have been accused of predatory crimes that the whole church is in turmoil. The energy of the church comes from the tens of thousands who serve faithfully as priests, deacons, and religious, supported by the prayers and encouragement of church members who seek forgiveness for themselves and others.

I can’t get to church, but a gifted pastor sees to it that nobody is left out. I see the same headlines you do about the misery some priests have brought upon themselves and others. The rest of the story is that the church points to heaven, but it is not heaven. When it stumbles it needs the support of all its members, the kind that’s shown by Father Edward F. Upton, my pastor, and Deacon Truesdale and many, many others.

You may have seen the television programs that feature disorder in courtrooms and legislative halls, with judges getting smacked and elected officials punching each other. Misconduct and corruption in government are disgusting, but people don’t give up their citizenship in protest. Yet some people do give up their Catholic citizenship because they think it is up to somebody else to do the work. Jesus didn’t found an institution. He established a family.

[The Church is nothing other than “the family of God.” –Catechism of the Catholic Church]

When faith takes a hit--and recovers

Some close relatives and friends declare themselves atheists, and apparently feel no sense of loss. A couple of times my faith has taken a hard hit, and I felt like an airline passenger waking up from a nap to find there was nobody else on the speeding plane.

I’ve never lost my belief in God, but there was a time when we were barely on speaking terms. My taught faith became taut faith. It was God, yes; churches, maybe. Church is the body of Christ; churches are bodies of people.

Almost everybody loves Mom, and most Christians love Church. If someone finds out that an intoxicated Mom has, heaven forbid, been stealing from the poor, enabling sexual adventures, lying, cheating at cards, spreading malicious gossip and encouraging the torment of dissenters, love for that Mom would encompass pain and grief.

As a Roman Catholic I once thought that there was no other Church with a capital C. I was part of my parish church and worked as editor of The Catholic Review in Baltimore. After that I became director, and the first editor in chief, of the National Catholic News Service in Washington, D.C. After that I became editor of The New World, which became The Chicago Catholic before being renamed Catholic New World. Then I became editor of an Episcopalian periodical, and found that I was still immersed in Church with a capital C. Catholics were more numerous, but Episcopalians prayed and baked cookies more often.

John Cardinal Cody, then archbishop of Chicago, hired me also to help him write his autobiography. He planned to complete it after his retirement, but he died in office. Meanwhile I spent hundreds of hours listening to his accounts of life among the shepherds.

He told me about a special relationship with fellow Missouri native Harry Truman, about his own secret exploits in Viet Nam and about the ownership of his Chicago residence by nuns. The Truman story was somewhat true.

During a meeting in his office with Janet Diederichs, a highly regarded communications consultant, he proposed creating a new job for me as head of all archdiocesan communications, including the newspaper, television and media relations. He didn’t like it when I turned him down.

He had been a Vatican operative early in life, and there was no tougher politician in the Church. Under severe attack , he resisted efforts to remove him from Chicago, even as he held off testifying before a federal grand jury.

He was well acquainted with skeletons in Vatican closets. Three popes would have moved him from Chicago to Rome to head a Vatican office, but he knew how to stay put. He sometimes asked me to listen as he talked on the phone with his friends in Rome, such as a Vatican official who later became Archbishop of New York, or an archbishop who ran the Vatican bank while resisting Italian authorities, still a Chicagoan, still included in the Chicago archdiocesan pension plan.

Other cardinals I knew well were more careful than Cody. Cardinal Cody meant it when he said he didn’t care what anybody thought about him. His successor, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, cared a lot.

To be continued

Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month

From Ed Wall:


Hang on, because March is something you never heard of. It is Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month. That may sound like a computer disease, but it is all too human.

Ataxia is a hidden tax on human life.

Atrophy is a trophy to crashed human drives, and scientists are still looking for ways to reboot.

Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) is also known as olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA), an incurable neurological ailment, a form of Parkinsonism. I was diagnosed with OPCA nearly a decade ago. It is called a progressive disease. It keeps going, nibbling at a person’s ability to walk and talk, among other things.

Here’s the media announcement prepared through the volunteer leadership of Pam Bower of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and other members of a online MSA group.

March is Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month

There are no Hollywood celebrities linked to MSA (Multiple System Atrophy)—just more than 2,300 fans known on Facebook as “Miracles for MSA,” whose goal is to draw attention to this rare, currently incurable disease. With that in mind, this group has designated March as Multiple System Atrophy Awareness Month, in order to increase public awareness and encourage research activities worldwide.

Multiple System Atrophy is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects many of the autonomic body systems that people take for granted. The symptoms can occur in any combination, from loss of balance and coordination, fainting and dizziness due to severely low blood pressure, bladder and bowel issues, speech and swallowing difficulties, sleep disturbances, breathing problems, and rigidity and tremors similar to Parkinson’s disease or ALS.

“We all worked hard in our jobs and now we have to work hard to keep ahead of this disease that destroys,” said MSA patient Gene Rechsteiner, of Bakersfield, California. “My hopes are to bring awareness and educate people on how bad MSA is and finding funds for research to find a cure. The medical society needs to realize that for each MSA patient, there are at least a dozen doctors in different fields that will be treating that patient: Primary, neurology, urology, speech, PT, OT, pulmonology, fitness trainer, caregivers, just to name a few. MSA sucks. You lose your independence along with your health. There are only a couple of hours in the day that I am able to function safely. The rest of the day I have to nap, watch my blood pressure. MSA took my career. We cannot stay safely in our home. And now it is eating into our retirement. My wife no longer works in order to care for me 24/7. But we cannot give up hope.”

Previously known by such names as Shy-Drager Syndrome, sporadic olivopontocerebellar atrophy and striatonigral degeneration, MSA is not considered to be hereditary. It generally affects middle-aged men and women, advancing rapidly, with progressive loss of motor skills, eventual confinement to bed, and death. It is very rare for someone to live 15 years with MSA. There is no remission from the disease and currently no cure. The current lack of awareness of MSA leads to misdiagnosis and mistreatment, as well as misdirected research funding that could be better applied to the MSA effort.

Approximately 50,000 Americans are now reported to have MSA (possibly more). A recent epidemiological survey, reported on the European MSA Study group website, has found MSA to have a prevalence rate of 4.4 people per 100,000.

Those are the clinical facts of MSA. But they don’t begin to address the havoc the disease wreaks not only on patients but also on family members, caregivers and friends, who watch their once vibrant loved one gradually lose all those abilities once taken for granted. It is the goal of all those who have been affected in some way by this disease to draw attention to it, not only during March but also throughout the year.

“Novel research to diagnose this debilitating illness sooner and to separate it from Parkinson’s and other disease is critical for creating a better future for MSA patients,” said Dr. Anna Langerveld, who owns Genemarkers of Kalamazoo, MI. “An important first step was taken in 2009 with a pilot study to define a genetic signature of MSA in patient blood samples. The initial work was a collaboration between Genemarkers, Dr. Charles Ide of Western Michigan University and Dr. David Robertson of Vanderbilt University Medical School. Efforts have begun to design and fund a new study to extend and improve these findings. Success will require continued scientific and financial participation from all interested groups. Our passion and the data generated in the ongoing work will expand awareness of MSA, draw more scientists and physicians into our efforts, and begin to bring hope to MSA patients and caregivers.”
For more information on Multiple System Atrophy, including links to MSA organizations and research groups worldwide please visit http://www.msaawareness.org/.

To join the “Miracles for MSA” Facebook page, visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/Miracles-for-MSA/138909258573.

Should priests be both dad and father?

My grandma used to tell me about the time General Grant spoke to her Uncle Ben on the battlefield. “Stand back, Benjamin, and let your gun cool.” She laughed when she told that story. She remembered stories about the family traveling by covered wagon from New England to a new home out west, in Le Roy, N.Y.

As a little kid I liked hearing her accounts of friendly Indians, of making soap, and of the casual sale of powerful drugs in the unregulated pharmacies of that time.

Attitudes change. History wins some and loses some. Those drugs are regulated now, but they are selling more briskly in alleys and neighborhoods than ever before. When I started high school at the end of the 1930s there were virtually no dealers. I was editor of the school paper. I never saw a police officer at the school. I never heard of bikes being stolen or anyone assaulted. It was a simpler time. World War II had not happened yet.

I knew that God liked me when I landed a job as a copy boy on the morning paper. When the war began, and the draft swept young reporters into the army, I was promoted to full-time reporter by my 18th birthday. My favorite beat was called night police, but I covered education, a college dropout unconscious of the irony, along with something called general assignments. I was even assigned to the copy desk, where I quickly learned to edit stories, write headlines, lay out pages and play blackjack.

Old-timers welcomed me into the late-night gambling in the news room. When I was 17 I was included in parties at the homes of reporters. After my first party, the hostess complained that I didn’t drink. She didn’t like the idea that a kid would remember everything the next day.

When I began the job I was a naïve product of a Victorian home, a calm school and lots of religion. I’d never smoked or had a drink. That’s who I was when a shapely woman reporter invited me to her home after we finished work, and it was there that she showed me the painting of herself, dressed for the shower.

A male police reporter who was showing me the ropes showed me the first porn I had ever seen. He was the first of the men on staff who wanted to demonstrate some of the facts of life to a teenager.

He explained that the paper’s policy was to publish nothing about the arrest of priests accused of committing “crimes against nature.” Anyone else could be named.

It couldn’t happen in 2011. Offering a teenager drinks, making sexual overtures, teaching him to play blackjack for money, would get newspaper staffers fired today. And no daily still protects priests. Not so almost 70 years ago.

Attitudes began to change in a hurry for Catholics closer to 50 years ago, when the enthusiasm of Vatican Council II opened church windows to modern breezes. I became editor of The Catholic Review in Baltimore in 1965. It was an exciting period. Bishop Joseph Bernardin—later the cardinal archbishop of Chicago—was general secretary of the conference of bishops in Washington, D.C. He asked me to resign as managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser to become director, and the first editor-in-chief, of the National Catholic News Service.

My assignment was to reverse financial losses, along with a loss of clients, and simultaneously to convert the daily mimeograph-and-mail operation into an authentic wire service. In the course of that I became president of the International Federation of Catholic News Agencies, which gave me an opportunity to work with Catholic journalists from many parts of the world.

Most of my friends are clergy. It’s been that way for 50 years. Sally, my late wife, knew precisely how Cardinal Lawrence Shehan liked his leg of lamb and how Columban Father John Loftus liked his lamb stew. She cooked for Bernardin and Avery Dulles, for Donald Wuerl long before he became the cardinal archbishop of Washington, for Jesuit Father Thurston Davis and often for scripture scholar Raymond Brown, S.S. There were pastors, seminarians, missionaries, educators and of course journalists at our table, with lots of conversation.

One priest was so attracted to our son during dinner that Sally and I were stunned. The good news is that our son had no idea what the friendly dinner guest had in mind. The bad news is that we didn’t speak up. We didn’t think we could jeopardize a man’s vocation when we had only our parental hunches, and no evidence. It could be frustrating, even risky, to speak up in the 1970s. The unwritten policy was to avoid embarrassment. And nobody wanted to turn in an acquaintance. Some called it tattling.

Most of the sexually active clergy Sally and I knew — whether cardinals or newly-ordained, whether in an American parish or the apparatus of the Vatican, whether gay or straight — were on good behavior. They might have been more comfortable spiritually if celibacy had been optional.

But celibacy siphons off a priest’s sense of family responsibility and all of the priest’s energies can be claimed by the church. And one other thing: The unmarried priest doesn’t have to be paid enough to cover a family’s groceries, clothes, vacations, orthodontists, health insurance and Sunday envelope offerings.

The imposition of celibacy requires men to shun God’s singularly beautiful gift, and deprives the Catholic world of children born with a valuable inheritance.

Celibacy doesn’t work, and evidence of its failures are found wherever priests become convicts, wherever church treasure becomes payouts to victims and their lawyers.

Priests are extraordinary men, offering themselves fully to God and humankind. Humanity is not well served by diminished respect for priesthood.

Whether standing back to let your Civil War musket cool off, or evading workplace predators when you’re a kid, or praying for the human rights of Catholic priests to be both dad and father, everyone has a choice, even if the choice is not to choose.