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