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
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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.