Termites in your brain?

This morning when I flicked into a web site for folks with ataxia, and their caregivers, I accidentally opened my registration page. I seldom look at it, and so I was surprised to be reminded that I had joined the online group on December 12, 2002.

Good lord. That was almost eight years ago, just a few months after Sally, my wife, passed on to wherever wonderful people spend eternity. Earlier that year Sally and Marie, my daughter, were with me when a gifted neurologist said I had olivopontocerebellar atrophy, known to its friends, if it has any friends, as OPCA. It is a form of Parkinsonism sometimes called multiple system atrophy, or MSA.

There are any number of online sites where people with curious ailments share their feelings with each other. The one I plugged into this morning showed that I’ve posted 1,049 separate messages there. Not long after I joined I wrote a little book about OPCA. What I wrote in that book, and in most of those messages, is out of date already. And OPCA is still a mystery, incurable, progressively destructive, like a swarm of termites making themselves at home in a brain.

While I was looking at that 2002 posting I thought about how much I’ve learned about OPCA since them.

In 2002 I could still drive my grandkids to karate lessons and cheer them on in their school plays and games. I could still go to church, to a movie, to a ball game, to the library and the mall. I could board a train for Chicago and walk around the Loop with nothing more than a cane. I could walk the dog, use a broom without wobbling, talk on the phone without mumbling or gasping, get up from a chair without working out a strategy, remember my social security number and read a book for as long as I liked without falling asleep, losing my place or dropping the book.

The good part is that I remember thousands of those happy times with family and friends. I can relive the joys at any time. I have friends I would not know except for OPCA in our lives. I’ve known the patient love of my children and their children and countless friends, and the loving courtesies of strangers.

I’m not sure what it means, but God, who is Love, is there, inside that OPCA. Someday there will be a cure for OPCA, but God will still be there. I acknowledge with a smile that there’s no cure for God.

Washington's most capable leader

It was at Bishop John Wright’s home in Pittsburgh that I met a personable young man about the time of his ordination to the priesthood. Now that man, still young in looks and enthusiasm as he observes his 70th birthday November 12, has been named a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI. Donald W. Wuerl was already the Archbishop of Washington.

Wuerl was a valued assistant to Bishop Wright in his native Pittsburgh. When Wright was given the red hat and made head of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, Fr. Wuerl accompanied him as secretary. He become acquainted with every aspect of church leadership, even as he wrote books and articles and looked after an ailing boss.

Cardinal Wright was a long-time friend. When he was Bishop of Worcester, Mass., he introduced me to the managing editor of The Worcester Telegram. Frank Murphy then hired me as a copy editor. Eventually Wright became the Bishop of Pittsburgh, taking with him the editor of Worcester’s diocesan newspaper, Jack Deedy. After Deedy resigned from the Pittsburgh diocesan paper to join Commonweal, Wright phoned me from a Trappist monastery he was visiting to offer me the Pittsburgh job. It was an exciting prospect. I told Bishop Wright that he would have to ask Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, my boss at the time, to release me from a contract. Shehan said No.

In 1968, when Wuerl was a member of the committee sponsoring a Pax Romana symposium in Pittsburgh, I was invited (yikes!) to be a reactor to the Jesuit theologian Fr. Bernard Lonergan and the Jesuit philosopher Fr. Martin D’Arcy.

During the years that followed I often spoke with Wuerl during visits with Wright in Rome and even in Baltimore. After Wright’s death Wuerl came to dinner at my home in Chicago, bringing the Cardinal’s red zuchetta for my son, John Wright Wall. Afterward my daughter, Marie, a college student at the time, said she had never met a priest who was so enthusiastic about priesthood.

It was like a satisfying chapter in a novel when Wuerl became the Bishop of Pittsburgh, the resident of that home where mentoring mattered.

In many ways Cardinal Wuerl reminds me of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, whose position as general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference gave him a broad view of church and opened friendships in high places. These are probably the two Americans best-prepared by experience and single-minded devotion to lead the entire church.

Separation of church and sex still elusive

It would not be Christian to hold Jesus responsible for organizing the church we read about in headlines. Catholics are not alone in believing that the church was founded by Jesus, even though he cautioned that "by their fruits you shall know them.” [Matthew 7:16] Jesus should not be known by those apples. The church Jesus founded is not the one that owns a bank, but the one that sent agents out with “no purse, no wallet, no shoes.” [Luke 10:4]

Actual churches are run by humans who want to honor God and receive God’s blessings. They keep love circulating. They feed people who have all kinds of hungers, they care for the sick and frail, they encourage worship of and they educate the young.

Personal failures by the devout, especially clergy, are more shocking, if not as entertaining, as the moral collapse of athletes or public officials. In the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, members of three lay groups called attention to these figures: Some 256 of approximately 400 parishes in that archdiocese have, at some time, been served by an accused pedophile priest. The groups were Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), African American Advocates of Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse, and Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

All of nature, especially human nature, is slow to change. It is unreasonable to assume that pedophile clergy appeared for the first time around 1940. Before that there were no television shows, no computers, no Internet, no cell phones. The biggest threat to law and decorum in the schools was chewing gum and spitballs catapulted from rubber bands. It was an era of understatement.

Victims of priestly predators tended not to be believed if they talked about it. Church authorities celebrated privacy, and sexually promiscuous clerics did not turn each other in. Newspapers had little to say about—you know—the S word. The editor of one daily I worked for told police reporters not to write about the arrest of priests for what was called crimes against nature.

It did not start in 1940. These activities have very likely been constant during all of the Christian centuries and, as scripture indicates, during pre-Christian times as well.

Having been hired by the late Cardinal John Cody to ghost-write his autobiography, I recall that one of his last efforts before his death was to prevent disclosure of a scandal that crossed state lines. He spoke freely to me for hundreds of hours about the most sensitive issues, but he did not want to talk about that one. I wrote quite a different kind of book about his successor, called The Spirit of Cardinal Bernardin, a survey of Joseph Bernardin’s thinking on religion and public life. In common with all of the bishops I worked with at the time, Cardinal Bernardin understood himself to be a pastor and brother to his priests.

Some wonder how cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons, religious and laity reconcile repeated scandalous actions with their belief that defying God’s commands brings eternal punishment in hell. Why does a cardinal engage in sex with a man on a Sunday afternoon after preaching what his church teaches about sex and celibacy. How can he risk eternal punishment over and over? What does this say about his belief?

Who cares about religion when a new sex poll is out?

I was very close to a woman who had been superintendent of a Methodist Episcopal church long ago, and knew that she read the Bible with total respect. She was proud of a statue of St. Francis in her garden, and taken aback when a fundamentalist Baptist neighbor denounced it. “What’s wrong with you,” the lady said, “don’t you know St. Francis is in the Bible?” Her neighbor did not question that, but still thought it was being misused by the papists.

Those two women came to mind when I read about a new poll, which disclosed a lack of religious expertise in today’s population. People by the hundreds of millions hear the Bible quoted in sermons and novels, and even read it once in a while. Who knows how many of them expect to find the Gospel of St. Francis in there somewhere? The poll probably has its facts right, without taking note of folks who identify with principles of the Bible, even though they are as confused about chapter and verse as they are about geometry. They believe in math and religion, but would flunk a test in either.

Interest in how many religious facts are understood by believers is already being shoved aside by a new report on human sexuality.

Death ends 1 chapter in a long book

To refuse to die would be more than a social impertinence. It would throw off the scientific rhythm of the universe. It would toss a monkey wrench into the apparatus of the galaxies, and challenge the very mind of the creator.

Death is designed as an inevitable consequence of birth, providing needed closure for each of us. It is the kind of closure that marks graduation from high school, which is required before the graduate moves on to higher education.

Death and eternity are mysterious, not mysteries invented by Conan Doyle and not the mysteries of gene and cell exposed in laboratories like prisoners of undeclared wars. There’s the kind of death that’s examined on an autopsy table, fixed in time and place. There’s also an eternity that’s for discoveries in space and hopes about time. Jesus and Einstein speak a common language.

There could be no death without life. Life could reach no conclusions without death. The system may be a mystery, but it is part of the genius of creation. Suspense is necessary to mystery, but fear is not. Nobody remembers being born; nobody is told that birth is the leading cause of death, inevitable rather than incurable, because it is not a disease.

I guess I can say that, as a reporter, I’ve been gathering material for this article for 85 years. Life and death can be exciting. We are conditioned to make the most of life and death, or to fear them. Many never speak of death. Others deny death. I was in my teens when I first heard someone deny the permanence of life. An older woman said she hoped to God — her phrasing — that there would be no life after death. Her family, her education, her faith were all ad hoc, she hoped, and would vanish as she would vanish. I wonder where she’s living now.

During my years in Hawaii I knew many Buddhists, whose friendship included invitations to speak at Buddhist celebrations and services. I learned to appreciate Buddhist ideals and even Buddhist controversies. Buddhism has its denominations, even as Christianity and Islam and Judaism have sects and denominations. Buddhist concepts of life and death, of reincarnation and transmigration, appeal to many. I’ve known Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and other Christians, including clergy, who believe in reincarnation.

My belief in God, the Eternal, the Holy, the Triune Creator, Love itself, gives meaning to life and death. Not everyone who is offered this gift has unwrapped it. Christ Jesus gives of himself. As newspaper carriers used to call out when they had an armload of Extras to sell: Read all about it.

Because of that gift I believe in the seen and unseen. I believe in the human body, ocean waves and printed words. I believe also in gravity, radio waves, thought, love and eternity. I recognize a desire for a good life and its companion desire for a good death.

Jack Wall, my dad’s brother, was born in the 1890s with a form of paralysis that was to end his life when he was in his early teens. My dad and another of his brothers have each told me this: The family was gathered in the garden of their Liverpool home. Jack, cheerful and much loved by everyone in the family, was on his father’s lap.

Suddenly he said, “Listen. Can you hear them?” No one heard anything unusual as Jack said,“Can’t you hear them singing? Listen to the music. They’re coming; they’re coming for me.” He slumped dead on his dad’s lap. Other families have similar experiences.

Maybe it is because I’m a writer that I think of life as prose and religion as poetry. The holiness in holy scripture is poetic. That’s why myopic literalists don’t notice God’s bigness while they squint at scripture with watchmaker’s loupe and tweezers, magnifying some words and plucking at others, like links pried loose to disconnect a chain.

Death clobbered me when I was 10 years old and living in my grandparents’ house. I was called home from school, no reason given, and was barely off the streetcar when I spotted the hearse parked in front of the house. The place was swarming with people and I headed for the privacy of the basement to try to sort it out. My beloved grandma, I knew, had died while I was choosing true or false for a history teacher. I was numb, but not at a loss for words. A memorized poem was there for me,” The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

When I heard about William Cullen Bryant, a newspaperman who wrote poems, I was already primed for his “Thanatopsis.”

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of the couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Thanks, Mrs. Faulkner, Mrs. Crane, Mrs. Bracken, Mrs. Humm, Mrs. Peters and all you who taught restless teenagers with smiles and a beat.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson grabbed me as a teenager when one of those teachers opened the book to “In Memoriam” and especially to “Crossing the Bar.”

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the
boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

And then there was (and is) Walt Whitman:

At the last, tenderly.
From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the
keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the
locks—with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O Soul.

Tenderly—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)

We who love life embrace it with enthusiasm. We accept death as an element of life, if not its fulfillment, but we do not kill others.

Some deny death. Some deny life. Jesus died. Jesus lives.

Way to go, Jesus. Way to go, everyone who accepts the gift of life. The Eternal, the giver of life, doesn’t take it back.

Pope respects queens, but won't ordain women

Pictures of Pope Benedict XVI and Queen Elizabeth II together in Scotland stir spiritual whirlwinds. There’s the leader of a billion or so Roman Catholics, and there’s the leader-of-record of the Church of England, defender of the faith by inheritance from Henry VIII.

The pope acknowledged to journalists during a flight from Rome to Scotland that the Church performed badly in handling worldwide charges that priests and religious had engaged repeatedly in criminal acts of a sexual nature.

In the shared respect of their encounter, the pope tacitly recognized that a woman may be the head, perhaps figurehead, of a Christian church. Maybe he finds it awkward to ponder the sharp loss of moral authority his church feels today in many parts of the world, while defending a priesthood that celebrates maleness if not manhood.

The pope’s church understands Mary of scripture to be the mother of God and Queen of the Universe, but unqualified for priesthood.

Catholics tend to love their church the way they love their families, faithful even when in vigorous disagreement. In many years of Catholic journalism, beginning in 1958 as a freelancer for the Hawaii Catholic Herald, I did not always live up to my own ideals. I claim that much affinity with St. Paul, an early Christian journalist who famously said to the Romans, “The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will…” [Rom. 8:19, REV]

For years most of my friends were Catholic priests and religious, and lay church staffers, and many were gay. Most, but not all, were happily avuncular with my children. One, who had baptised my child, was later accused of molesting others. A close friend in the hierarchy was mugged during a parking lot encounter with a young man, a well-known educator made passes at my son, and a bishop was accused in a paternity action. There was a time of horror when priests who were important to me and my family were painfully lost to AIDS.

Many years ago I described to a diocesan bishop some overtures from another in the hierarchy. I was alarmed in part because I knew he might be roughed up, blackmailed, arrested. He might even approach a minor, but I didn’t think he would. Responsible adults, straight or gay, do not prey on children. Sexual abuse of children and adults is observed among some heterosexual persons, some homosexual. Most people seek long-term relationships, especially in marriage.

I was managing editor of the morning newspaper in Honolulu when a long-time friend invited me to visit him, secretly, in Washington, D.C. He was Bishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Bernardin, at that time general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference and the National Council of Catholic Bishops.

The National Catholic News Service, now known as CNS, was a division of the Conference. It was in trouble, losing money, losing clients and losing respect. At the time it produced a daily news package, which was mimeographed and mailed to clients all over the world. Most were diocesan newspapers.

Bernardin asked another long-time friend, Fr. Thurston Davis, S.J., along with Robert Beusse, communication secretary for the Conference, to talk to me about the woes at the news service. Davis was the brilliant editor-in-chief of America magazine, a former Fordham dean. The three of us met in Beverly Hills, and soon afterward I was asked to fly evasively from Honolulu to Washington. Bernardin’s wish was that I fly directly to New York, then switch to the shuttle for the rest of the trip. Nobody was to know my destination, which turned out to be nothing less than the Watergate. Bernardin had a suite for the day, during which he asked me to resign as managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser and take over as director and first editor-in-chief of the Catholic news service.

My charge was to reorganize the news agency, creating a wire service to replace the mail service. And simultaneously I was to balance the budget, retrieve lost clients and handle a new union contract for employees who had become demoralized by the shaky condition of the news service.

After intense negotiations I completed an agreement with Reuters to provide a leased wire available 24 hours a day to distribute news by teletype. NC correspondents were authorized to send their articles to NC from any Reuters bureau anywhere in the world, with guaranteed delivery within 20 minutes. Vatican Radio was one of the first wire service subscribers.

It was a lonely experience. I was told that I must negotiate an agreement without any counsel from Bernardin, Davis or Beusse. The Conference took a similar hands-off position in negotiating the first contract with the American Newspaper Guild, although the labor expert Msgr. George Higgins cheerfully answered my questions about Catholic teaching on labor issues.

It was a memorable moment when the wire service formally opened with a transmission of a message from Pope Paul VI in Rome to my staff and me in Washington. The pope’s words were recorded on the perforated tape used in wire transmissions in those days, then embedded in a transparent display which was presented to me by the bishops. It is now on permanent loan at the Washington headquarters of Catholic News Service, along with the St. Francis de Sales award I received from the friends and co-workers at the Catholic Press Assn.

There’s more, of course, but this is not the time to tell it. The stern little counter on my computer screen warns that I am approaching the 1,000-word mark. That’s enough for one reading, as you will certainly agree.

The communication between queen and pope in Scotland is symbolic of gains in Catholic reporting and commentary since the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, and a reminder that the Catholic church is the oldest multi-national, run by leaders drawn from a limited pool of talent which excludes ordained women. These men seldom admit their mistakes to anyone outside the confessional. The church does not exclude gays, but it affirms biblical demonizing of non-celibate homosexual persons. Thus hypocrisy serves theology. There’s an additional concern: How do journalists stumble through millions of words online, in print and even unformed — more words than anybody can read or count – and blue-pencil them into all the news that’s fit to tint?
©A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

Even the stoned are welcome

● Stephen Hawking, the respected scientist who has made a science of promoting books, indicates in “The Grand Design” that he has no personal knowledge of God and therefore God does not exist. Little kids still cover their eyes and shout, “You can’t see me!”

● An application form for an important church activity asks candidates whether they have ever done anything that might embarrass the church. The form does not ask about anything the church might have done to embarrass believers. There’s a tension between the healing love of Jesus and the institutional cover treasured by human pillars of the church. Jesus, who was excommunicated by the temple staff, challenges everyone poised to throw stones at sinners and invites them all into his church, even the stoned.

● A bishop declares that a woman religious is excommunicated by virtue of a hospital decision she okayed. Christians pray for the bishop and the nun, aware that excommunication is a failure of the church. The church pronounces itself divorced from a person with whom there is a sacramental bond, as though baptism can be annulled.