Joseph Stoutzenberger

The Age of Anxiety

An old man sitting in a living room with his arms crossed and a concerned look on his face.

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

Last night a cable news host I was watching ended his show by saying, “We will continue to broadcast the news, but you might want to take a break from watching it.” I was impressed by his thoughtful comment. After all, viewership is what his network is selling, and it is all news, all the time. Constant exposure to hearing about what is covered as “news” is toxic. I took his advice and switched to watching the Phillies baseball game.

Talking with some friends last week, I asked one of them how he was doing. He replied, “I’m feeling depressed and anxious.” I said, is it something personal or are you feeling this way because of what’s going on politically and in the world. He said, the political climate has him deeply concerned and feeling anxious and hopeless. Others who heard him echoed his sentiments and said, how could you feel otherwise? We are living in an age of anxiety. Even young children are not immune. Are there antidotes?

A number of commentators have addressed this very issue for a couple months now. Some common themes in their advice are: limit screen time, especially news watching and social media; get out in nature; exercise regularly; spend face to face time with other people; fit in prayer or meditation to turn off the ruminating going on in your brain; lose yourself in a good book; and remind yourself of all that you are grateful for and all the good that is happening in the world. Try to avoid debate and instead seek to engage in open-minded conversations with others. There are even websites to help you break away from the narrative of depressing news. One is called simply “Nice News,” offering five-minute daily emails featuring positive, upbeat news.

An older man sitting in a living room with a concerned look on his face.

A helpful piece of advice is: Make good news yourself, or join with others in making good news to counteract all the bad news. On the way to a protest rally recently, I spoke to an older woman carrying a “No Kings” sign. She said, “This is not the way I envisioned spending my retirement.” She would have preferred traveling, spending time with grandchildren, and catching up on reading the books she had always wanted to delve into. Instead, she pushed herself to go into Philadelphia and stand in front of city hall holding a sign for a couple hours, hoping it made a difference. I thought, at least she was trying to make a difference and doing it with like-minded people. We can feel anxious when we feel powerless and believe there’s nothing we can do. That type of anxiety is debilitating. We can also feel anxious and hesitant if we get involved, make our voices heard, and try to make positive change in some fashion. That type of activity is challenging and can be hard work, but it is the opposite of hopeless anxiety.

Hopefully Christians find solace in the words of Jesus, who constantly exhorted his listeners to be at peace. Jesus lived during troubling times, but he saw a bigger picture despite his own bouts of anxiety, such as what he experienced during the night he was arrested. Americans can ponder the message of Martin Luther King, Jr: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Don’t be discouraged when the universe seems to be going in the opposite direction. All people would do well to heed the words of Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer.” God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Wise counselors tell us that an important starting point is to recognize when we are anxious or depressed. Denying it only causes it to simmer inside of us and makes matters worse. Strangely, telling ourselves that it is okay to feel anxious helps us feel less anxious. That’s hard to do alone, so, if you have friends you can be open and at ease with, much of the battle is won. Would that we all could feel deep in our hearts what the fourteenth century mystic Julian of Norwich came to realize: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Saints Among Us

A pair of men standing in front of a mountain range holding a pair of tablets and smiling.

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

On September 7, 2025, the Catholic Church officially canonized as saints two young Italians from the past century: Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis. Pier Giorgio died in 1925 at the age of twenty-four. Carlo Acutis died in 2006 of leukemia at the age of fifteen. Both were renowned for their passion for life and for finding an impetus for their exuberance in their Catholic faith. Pope John Paul II called Pier Giorgio “a man of the Beatitudes” because he lived the Christian call to holiness so faithfully, and young Carlo Acutis is described as “God’s influencer” because he used his skill with computers and the Internet to spread God’s message.

There are two ways to look upon these two new saints. One is that they were exceptional. They gave to people in need even when they had little themselves. They entered into life with a joy, enthusiasm, and free-spiritedness that drew other people to them. Both had a deep devotion to the Eucharist. Pier Giorgio had a great love of nature and was a frequent mountain climber. Even as a child, Carlo Acutis mastered computers and computer programming with skill well beyond his years.

Although they were exceptional, as described at their canonization Mass, another way to look upon the two is that they were quite ordinary. Neither expressed a desire to become a priest but found ways to live their vocation doing what their friends and acquaintances were doing. I have worked with young people for fifty years, and I have encountered many young people who gave themselves to others and did so with equally refreshing grace and enthusiasm. I often met students who would light up a room with their zest for life, always seeking to share it with others. I had one student who, midway through college, lost her mother. She had two young sisters, so she interrupted her studies to take care of the home and her siblings, becoming in essence the mother to two youngsters. She was never morose about this new role she took on. Her young sisters were blessed to have such a caring mother figure in their lives. I had another student who always came to class with a smile and an “I’m ready for fun” attitude. I asked what she was studying and what her plans were. She said that she worked in a nursing home and loved to take care of the older people there. She was studying to be a nurse so that she could help them more fully. Clearly, she brought joy to people whom most of us would just as soon forget. When I was teaching high school, a student told me about a family who was struggling financially because the mother was sick and the father was caring for her full time. He asked if I would be a faculty moderator for a car wash and bake sale to raise money for the family. He gathered a large group of fellow students who gladly gave up a Saturday to join in this good work.

A young woman in a hospital, wearing nurse's scrubs. She has a kind smile on her face as she treats a patient.

Before the canonization Mass for Carlo and Pier Giorgio, Pope Leo addressed the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square and expressed his happiness that so many young people were present. Many people are in the pipeline awaiting sainthood. There is a reason these two were recognized for their saintliness in 2025. At a time when many young people have lost interest in religion in general and Catholicism in particular, church leaders wanted to celebrate two young people who found their faith to be a spark that can ignite good-heartedness, a desire to help others, and a loving relationship with God. An engineering student, Pier Giorgio felt called to be involved in works of social action in his post-World War I Italy because he heard that message in the tenets of his faith, especially in his experience of the Eucharist. Carlo’s mother says that her son was an average teenager, hanging out with friends and playing sports, but that “he could not be indifferent to suffering.” Both he and Pier Giorgio were “average.” We might even say “ordinary,” if being young naturally blossoms into youthful exuberance about life and about the endless possibilities to enter into it for good. This is what young people can be. They enjoyed what young people throughout the world want to enjoy. They remind all Catholics that entering into life with passion and gusto, always reaching out to others, is what Catholic faith is all about. Their powerful experience of God’s love for them brought them joy and consolation and led them to a life of love themselves. There are plenty of other young people out there who also live that message. Rejoice in the saints among us.

What Does It Mean to Believe in Jesus?

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

So many of my friends were brought up Catholic or some other religion but now have no time for it. If anything, they look upon religions in a negative light and no longer consider themselves Christian. My Jewish friends are for the most part “culturally Jewish.” Their identity as Jews is linked to their heritage and their birth; they don’t have to believe anything to lay claim to being Jewish. On the other hand, to be Christian means to believe in something, or, more precisely, to believe in someone—Jesus. What does that belief entail?

Belief in Jesus means seeking to know and live his teachings, but that can’t be all there is to it. So much of what Jesus said is found in the teachings of other religious figures. “Love God and your neighbor as yourself” as a summation of the commandments resonates with what at least one other Jewish rabbi of the time taught. Five hundred years before Jesus, Confucius summed up his moral teaching in the saying, “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” A number of religions express that Golden Rule in one fashion or another. In short, people can accept the teachings of Jesus without being Christian.

Jesus’s miracles are certainly alluring, but they didn’t necessarily lead to belief in him. The dynamic is more believe in him and miracles happen rather than the other way around. It’s not as if all the people who encountered Jesus, presumably even those who witnessed his miracles, came to believe in him. According to the gospels, throngs of people were calling for his crucifixion during his trial, and no miracle happened to dampen their rejection of him. At that critical moment, there’s no mention of people who saw his miracles standing up for him. His being raised from the dead was initially experienced only by a select group of believers, not by previously disinterested strangers.

What, then, do Christians mean when they say they believe in Jesus? A key Christian belief is that Jesus lived his life in a way that revealed the nature of God. In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that God is love. That love is expressed in the Greek word “kenosis,” meaning “emptying.” Jesus “emptied” himself, setting ego and self-interest aside, as lovers do, and told us that God is like that. Rather than a mighty God hurling lightning bolts and roaring threats in a booming voice louder than thunder, a more fitting image for a loving, emptying God would be a woman giving birth. The fifteenth century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich was not the first to refer to Christ as a “heavenly Mother,” and breast-feeding as an apt illustration of Christ’s love. Jesus on the cross empties himself even unto death, an act of love that Christians see as revealing his divinity, oneness with God, shining through.

This is what Christians mean when they say they believe in Jesus. In him, they meet the loving God. Pay attention to his teachings. Ponder his at times baffling messages in his stories. Delight in the accounts of his miracles and comforting words. In the end, take heart that God’s divine love found a home in a man who lived two thousand years ago in a small village not too far from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. That God, out of love, was emptied in Jesus. That God is love. That’s the Jesus Christians believe in.

What Is the Mystical Body?

A depiction of Jesus Christ holding up his arms with arcs of energy beaming off of him

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

When we heard that our daughter-in-law, living three hundred miles away in Syracuse, was to undergo a medical procedure the next morning, my wife suggested we go to seven AM Mass to be in solidarity with them. I was struck by how the Mass actually spoke to the connectedness we were seeking. The opening prayer reminded us that in the liturgy we represented the church which exists throughout the world. We twenty people, eighteen women, were stepping out of the dailyness of our lives and entering into sacred mystery that transcends our apparent separateness. The gospel reading was about why Jesus taught in parables. His message required looking below the surface to a deeper reality, and his parables intended to jolt people to see that deeper reality. What is that reality? That we are one in Christ and not as separate as we appear to be.

A Catholic image for the unity my wife and I wanted to experience with our distant family in a time of trouble is “the mystical body of Christ.” In 1943, Pope Pius XII wrote an encyclical on the concept. He wrote that Christ took on flesh so that we might become partakers in divinity. The mystical body refers to the divine, ineffable bond that we all share in Christ. There is much to unpack in this concept. The term “ineffable” reminds us that our words and our thought categories are too small, too limited, to explain our oneness. “Mystical” can be misunderstood to mean “spiritual” as opposed to “physical.” The connection we share with those distant from us is not just spiritual. The air molecules we breathe in Philadelphia enter the atmosphere and mix with the air hovering above Syracuse. Wild fires in western Canada affect air quality thousands of miles away. The soil under our feet doesn’t recognize state borders. The material that makes up our bodies returns to the earth and is replaced with other matter. A continuous exchange of shared matter is happening within and among people all the time. We are likely being kept alive by the same particles that sustained Jesus and all the saints. The spiritual/material Catholic concept “mystical body” is acknowledged in the Eucharist. The sliver of bread people receive in communion is matter and spirit. It defies the two dimensional thinking our minds slip into when we don’t pause to ponder the mystery that the sacred time and sacred space of the Mass invites us to enter into. Our link to past, present, and future is physical as well as spiritual. That mystery is ineffable and mystical but worthy of contemplation.

Pope Francis was fond of reminding us to “reject ideology.” Perhaps he meant that we can over-think things. The reality of the mystical body of Christ is not an idea, an ideology. It is an experience such as Jesus invited his friends to partake in when he shared with them bread, “his body,” and wine, “his blood,” the last time he was with them before he died. Thankfully, the bond with all creation expressed in the mystical body of Christ reminds us that we partake in his divinity even to this day. The pausing to pray and participate in the simple ritual of the liturgy provides Catholics a venue to experience that connection with family in their time of need, the blessing of the mystical body.

In 1943, Pope Pius equated the mystical body of Christ with the church. His description of the church as mystical body is a precursor to the more expansive, inclusivist understanding of church presented in the Vatican Council II documents twenty years later. He stated that “the Church, the Bride of Christ, is one; and yet so vast is the love of the divine Spouse that it embraces in His Bride the whole human race without exception.” That is, we live and move and have our being within a boundless divine embrace. By going to Mass that morning, we were seeking to tap into the interconnectedness that is the mystical body. Surely Christ’s mystical body transcends a mere three hundred miles of separation.

The Zen of Childlikeness

A child running in a park with their arms spread wide and a large smile on their face

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

Walking with me through a nearby park, my three-year-old grandson spent a long time running, jumping, and climbing until he suddenly stopped and sighed, “I’m tired.” He immediately laid down spread-eagle in the middle of the path. It reminded me of the teaching of the Zen master: “When you work, work. When you eat, eat. When you sleep, sleep. This is Zen.” It takes a childlikeness to live like that. When you play, play. When you rest, rest. Three-year-old Aidan seemed to get it. There’s a childlike simplicity to being in the present moment that we all would do well to cultivate.

An incident recounted in Mark’s gospel (Mark10:13-16) reveals how Jesus looked upon children and childlikeness:

People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.

A man with long hair and a beard wearing a robe and surrounded by children giving off an air of childlike wonder.

Jesus knew that childlike simplicity, openness, and honesty are essential in the kingdom of God. Likewise, Zen is all about developing childlikeness, a “beginner’s mind” attuned to the present moment unencumbered by preconceived categories. If children are surrounded by loving grownups, they can appreciate Jesus’s message, “Let not your heart be troubled.” Anxieties and misgivings too often mount as we grow, sometimes even at a relatively early age today. We carry such baggage that weighs us down from entering into the moment with delight and receptiveness. While I pushed him on a swing, my grandson said in an exhilarating voice, “This is fun!” Hopefully, despite our trials and tribulations, all of us can say at times, “This is fun!” Only then can we be grateful and appreciative. Cultivating a sense of humor helps; if on occasion we laugh uncontrollably, even better.

Childlikeness is not the same as childishness. Grasping our toys and not sharing, it’s all about “me” and “mine,” taunting and bullying can appear at an early age. It’s particularly troublesome when childish behavior continues into adulthood. Childlikeness is different. It’s seeing the magic around us, being filled with wonder at beauty, delighting in the goodness and kindness of others. Tapping into our “inner child” means cultivating those qualities that Jesus saw in the little ones who made their way to him. They saw goodness and kindness and wanted to be part of it.

The recent movie, “The Life of Chuck,” begins with billboards and television ads reading, “Thank you, Chuck, for thirty-nine years.” Perhaps it was the musings of a man about to die who could look at the composite of his life and say, “Thank you.” A highlight of the movie is his delighting in a grade-school dance and later dancing on a street corner as a street musician drums away. Hopefully, despite dying at a young age, he could remember such moments and say, “That was fun.” An early image for the Blessed Trinity is that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “dance around” one another. Jesus’s life story is an invitation to join in the dance, which continues even after death. It takes childlike humility and openness to say yes to the dance and enter into it, the kingdom of God.

Where Is the American Dream Today?

A group of diverse people standing in the streets of New York

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

A few years ago, I had a class of twenty-five students. Looking over the class list, I discovered that thirteen students had Hispanic surnames. They typically were studying to be nurses or to work in another medical field. School policy was not to inquire about a student’s citizenship status, but it is likely that some of mine were noncitizens and aspired to be American citizens. I also had a student who was “gender fluid,” self-identifying as “they.” Can the American dream be their dream? Is there a foundation for their aspirations?

The Declaration of Independence’s underlying principle is: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As lived out in history, that principle was more a challenge, an aspiration, a “dream,” in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. It began with a group of American colonists describing how their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were being thwarted by the British king who claimed sovereignty over them. A lingering question was unaddressed: What about enslaved people? Don’t they have a right to liberty and pursuit of happiness as well? That question was finally settled on June 19, 1865, when the last group of enslaved people received the news that they were now free, as celebrated in the Juneteenth national holiday.

Since then, other Americans have been inspired to stand up against policies and practices they saw as violating their liberty and pursuit of happiness. Factory workers, many of them immigrants, organized to demand living wages and humane working conditions. After many years seeking the right to vote, in 1920 women achieved that right. In the 1960s, a number of liberation movements formed demanding that the dream of the Declaration of Independence be applied to them. The 1963 march on Washington was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Segregated schools, bathrooms, and lunch counters were a de facto impediment to liberty for African-Americans. The 1969 police raid on a New York gathering place sparked the gay rights movement, culminating in legal recognition of same-sex couples to marry. The first Earth Day in 1970 was a seminal moment in extending the right to life and liberty beyond just human beings. The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling sparked controversy about when during the course of gestation there is a person who has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness along with all other Americans. The judges essentially ruled that there is no definitive answer to that question, and therefore, with a few restrictions, women had a constitutional right to an abortion. In 2022 the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling left decisions regarding abortion and protections for the upborn up to individual states. In 1974 the Vatican weighed in and said that if we are not certain, then we should view a person to be present at the earliest stage of development, the moment of conception.

What groups today are clamoring that the dream underlying the Declaration of Independence applies to them? Two groups calling for liberty and pursuit of happiness are immigrants and sexual minorities. One subgroup of immigrants, those who came to this country as children and have only known America as their home, even call themselves “dreamers.” They hope that a path to citizenship can be established for them. Does “all men are created equal and are endowed with unalienable rights” apply to non-citizens as well as citizens? When the nation was founded, white men who owned property possessed rights that others did not. Over time, Americans came to see that equality and equal rights applied to ever-expanding members of society. At the very least, the Declaration implies that all people are to be treated with dignity and respect. It says “all men,” not “all citizens.” There are also Americans who find that the gender “assigned to them at birth” is not an accurate identification of who they are. In their mind, to deny them treatments and surgical procedures that would align them with how they perceive their true self to be is a rejection of their right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Declaration.

Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence every July 4. If the celebration would include reading the document along with lively discussion about how it can be applied today, it would reveal that the American dream continues to inspire people on the margins clamoring to be part of that dream. To stop dreaming is to end the American experiment that has given solace and hope to generations of dream seekers.

A Culture of Life

A priest kneeling in front of stained glass windows

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Catholic bishops proposed that Catholic high schools teach a course on “Respect Life.” I recall receiving materials on various topics that would be included in such a course: war and peace, capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, poverty and hunger, gun violence, and even environmental degradation. The program reflected what Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago would later call “a consistent ethic of life,” or the “seamless garment” approach to affirming the sacredness of life. Some Catholic theologians and philosophers opposed such a broad-based approach to respect for life. They believed that Christianity, and Western civilization itself, were under attack primarily from a few principal problems, specifically abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and acceptance of homosexuality. To link these issues with capital punishment and world hunger resulted in diminishing the focus that should be placed on these pivotal problems. Making abortion and euthanasia illegal should be front and center in the agenda of the Catholic church, not eliminating the death penalty or anti-poverty programs.

Cardinal Bernardin saw things differently. He believed that respect for life had to include respect for all life; otherwise, the term is meaningless. In 1995, Pope John Paul II wrote an encyclical echoing this understanding of respect life. He contrasted a “culture of death” with a “culture of life.” If all human beings are not valued and cherished as God intended, then society’s entire culture needs to be replaced with a culture of life. A culture of death is not a matter of just one issue. Care for the unborn, what most people associate with the Respect Life movement, cannot be separated from care for human life in all stages and in all circumstances. Dismissing certain people as expendable is an affront to life. To affirm this message, whenever a person was condemned to death in the United States, Pope John Paul would write the state’s governor pleading for the sentence to be commuted. He reminded us that society cannot call itself respectful of life if there are malnourished children not cared for and immigrants that are mistreated. Violence, in all forms, is a failure of respect for life.

Catholic theologian Thomas Berry uses different terms to describe the transformation that needs to take place to affirm the dignity and preciousness of all life. He calls for a “new story” to replace the “old story.” The new story he describes is actually an ancient, he would say, original story. The old story views individuals as separate from everyone else and human beings as separate from and even “above” the rest of creation. The new story is attentive to the life force that emerged from creation and is manifest in the dazzling diversity found among human beings and other life forms. A culture of death, the old story, does not prioritize the preciousness of all life in policies and practices. Underlying causes of violence are left unaddressed. The new story that Thomas Berry advocates for seeks alternatives that support and nourish life. Both the pope and Berry propose that when we truly pay attention, we can’t help but realize the interconnectedness of all life. All life is family and should be treated as such.

Some years ago, the “Sixty Minutes” tv program brought a woman from Nepal to the United States. She had lived all of her life in a remote village, so the program’s producers took her to a bustling shopping mall filled with high-end stores to see how she would react. She was bored to death with all the fancy clothes and shiny objects until she entered a pet store where she came to life petting the various animals there. That episode reflects in simple fashion why Thomas Berry sees the life-affirming new story as more fundamental to human experience than a culture that values things over persons, inanimate objects over animated life. All life is awe-inspiring, but its beauty can be lost when a culture of death prevails. In the book of Deuteronomy, God lays out the choice: I set before you life or death…Choose life, so that you and your children may live.

What’s Sinister?

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

Many years ago, I met a friend I hadn’t seen in a while on a Philadelphia center city street. He told me he was meeting a friend at a nearby bar and invited me to join them. Once inside the bar, I realized fairly quickly that it was a gay bar. All the clientele were men, and some men off in a corner were dancing with each other. I told my friend that I didn’t feel comfortable there, and he said, “How do you think we feel in a straight bar.”

I never thought of there being “straight bars.” In my mind at the time, there were regular, normal bars, and then there were abnormal bars—gay bars. Gay bars were not just different; they deviated from what is the norm, just as heterosexuality is the norm and homosexuality is deviant from that norm.

As a left-handed person, I might have been more sensitive to how difference does not have to be negative. The Latin word for being left-handed is sinister. According to my Cassell’s Latin dictionary, the word also means “wrong, perverse, unfavorable, evil.” We “sinister” lefties should be attentive to when people are being denigrated for their differences. Just because we write, throw a ball, and use a fork differently from righties, we would not label ourselves as deviant. FYI: about ten percent of Americans are left-handed and a little more than seven percent self-identify as homosexual. Being left-handed has its challenges—some kitchen utensils are clearly designed for right-handers. Those challenges are miniscule compared to the challenges of navigating through life as homosexual. No one chooses to be homosexual or heterosexual any more than someone chooses to be left- or right-handed.

A wide illustration of people from all walks of life—some holding hands, others writing or painting—gathered peacefully in a public space. A rainbow arcs in the background, symbolizing inclusion, while a nearby building subtly resembles a church. Bright and hopeful, with diverse representation.

American society and the Catholic Church have made great strides in making sexual minorities feel more welcome and less as persons bearing a stigma. Pope Francis was a warm and welcoming person, and he didn’t hesitate to express his affection for gay men and lesbian women. He encouraged two American Catholic ministers, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father James Martin, to continue their ministry to sexual minorities. He told Sister Jeannine that we need to show “respect for personal history” when relating to people. He acknowledged that a cookie-cutter understanding of gender identity does not take into account each person’s unique history and experience. He even told her: “Transgender people must be accepted and integrated into society.”

I have left-handed friends who attended Catholic school, and they tell stories of their first-grade nun hitting their hand with a ruler if they tried to write with their left hand. I was spared such treatment by Sister Adelaide, so I write with that curved-around style required of writing left-handed. I have friends who knew they were gay at a very early age, others who came to the realization during adolescence, and even some who only realized it after they were adults and were even married to a woman and had children. As Pope Francis said, personal histories are varied. Catholicism has a tradition, adopted from the ancient Greeks, of determining morality based on what is often a narrow understanding of what is natural. “Left” is synonymous with wrong and unnatural. A sexual orientation other than a heterosexual one is unnatural and therefore wrong. In this tradition, morality is determined by fidelity to the natural order and not whether anyone is getting hurt. However, there’s another window into what determines moral behavior. Rape and child abuse are egregious not because they are unnatural but because people are being hurt. That is true even when rape occurs in the context of marriage. Pope Francis had a great knack for seeing persons who were hurting and knew that suffering was often caused by societal attitudes that were unwelcoming and condemnatory. Left-handedness is not just accepted but often celebrated in society. Left-handed pitchers are prized in baseball; and some studies suggest that being left-handed taps into the right side of our brain, stimulating creativity and an artistic sense. Have the church and society arrived at the point of both accepting and celebrating the contributions of people who identify as other that heterosexual as well? That attitude is part of the legacy of Pope Francis. Homosexuals and left-handed people are not going away. Hopefully, their personal history and identity can be viewed as the source of good that God desires of all people.

What’s Missing without Women Priests?

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

Talking about confession with a Catholic woman recently, she mentioned that she hadn’t been to confession to a priest in quite a while. She then added, “If there were women priests, I would go to confession in a hot second.” She talked about going to confession a number of years ago during which she told the priest about some issues in her marriage. For one, she carried a burden of guilt over the use of artificial birth control. She discovered that this celibate man was clueless about her concerns. She now has women friends whom she confides in and with whom she can share intimate conversation. The Sacrament of Penance is more than a chat among friends and reassurances from soul mates. The priest in confession represents the God of forgiveness and love that we can celebrate in this formal setting.

However, the exchange with my woman friend led me to wonder: What is missing in Catholicism because there are no women priests? If women are excluded from being formal representatives of God’s love and forgiveness, is that a lack within the sacramental structure of the church? First, some history. For its initial four hundred years or so Christians did not “go to confession,” telling their sins to a priest-confessor. The practice began as part of monastic discipline in the Western church by Irish monks and in the East at about the same time in monasteries there. The practice spread from monasteries to non-monks, so priests started hearing the confessions of everyday Christians. Out of this informal practice developed the formal practice of private confession, recognized as an official sacrament at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. In the Middle Ages, church architecture began to include a screened setting so that women could confess to a priest on matters that might be embarrassing to the woman or her male confessor. Private confession behind a screen became both commonplace and, in some situations, required as a part of Catholic spiritual life.

On the matter of women priests, in the 1970s a number of prominent scripture scholars concluded that there is nothing in the bible that would preclude women from priesthood. The Episcopal Church officially recognized the practice in 1976, and most other Protestant churches have women ministers as well. The Catholic Church restricts priestly ordination to men, and in the Western church almost exclusively to celibate men. In the 1990s, Pope John Paul II said that not ordaining women is based on scripture and therefore he and the church could not change that practice.

In Catholicism, priesthood is not defined just by its function—officiating at liturgy and hearing confessions. A priest, like all sacraments, represents Christ. How is the loving God embodied in Christ present today? Jesus poured out his life for others. If you want to see a nourishing, life-giving embodiment of a loving God today, picture a mother breast-feeding her infant. Jesus said that he would be present “in the breaking of the bread.” A woman’s place may not be in the kitchen, but God’s place is. Today, both women and men serve in the godly work of serving others at a meal. When a child goes astray, a forgiving parent—mother or father, embodies the God that Jesus told us about in his Good Samaritan parable. Jesus the teacher lives on through women and men teachers. Actually, today in the US, eighty percent of elementary school teachers are women. Jesus was a healer. The city of St. Louis still honors the heroic Catholic sisters who played a vital role in caring for the sick during the devastating flu epidemic of 1918. Most people avoided the sick, but not so these heroic women. The world-famous Mayo Clinic in Minnesota was inspired by and sweated into existence by Catholic nuns. Many hospitals, clinics, and shelters were begun by sisters, carrying on the work of Jesus the healer, and the majority of nurses and healthcare workers are still women.

You get my point. A priest is called upon to be an alter Christus, another Christ. Women as well as men fulfill that role in an informal fashion. The church is clearly more Christlike through the contributions women make as healers, teachers, cooks and food servers, loving parents and friends. Wouldn’t the church and its people be enriched further if the sacramental power and aura that surrounds Catholic priesthood were extended to women as well as men?

Holiness and Hope in the Ordinary

A crowded train station filled with multi-ethnic commuters

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

Last week when my wife and I boarded a local train, a conductor greeted us with a big smile, saying, “Welcome to the 9:01 train to center city. Sit anywhere you like.” As the train began moving, I said to the conductor checking tickets and bundled up in winter clothes, “It’s supposed to warm up today.” She smiled and replied, “Sixty degrees by four o’clock. I can’t wait.”

A number of authors lately write about the holiness and hope we can find in the ordinary, in the everyday and commonplace, in encounters that we usually overlook or take for granted. My train experience was one moment in one train in one city on an earth that is a speck in the vast universe; but, stepping back, it felt like the divine cosmic force behind the workings of the universe were actually at work in this seemingly insignificant event. The two conductors were not just moving the train, they were moving the hearts and uplifting the spirits of the passengers getting on and getting off. Perhaps when Jesus told us, “God is love,” he had in mind the many kindnesses that people show one another, such as the cheerful exchange I had with two nameless train conductors.

Many contemporary theologians are coming to terms with insights from the Jesuit theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and information coming from modern physicists who recognize that the universe began over thirteen billion years ago. A slow, evolutionary process led to planet earth and only recently to the life that distinguishes this lush, green planet. Growing out of less complex life forms is the human species. Teilhardians suggest that the spiritual core of human beings is not separate from humanity’s biological development but a wonderful expansion of the life force that has been growing and transforming over billions of years. That’s a challenging concept for Christians who are used to imagining that at some point when the human species arrived God zapped an immortal soul into the first of its kind, call them Adam and Eve, and that this spiritual quality has been handed down to humans ever since.

Whether or not we hold onto a more traditional theological understanding of human spirituality or the perspectives being put forth by these science-infused views on who and what we are as a species, one point of agreement exists: we are all interconnected. We are family. When Jesus said, “Love your enemy as yourself,” he was actually simply expressing what should be a natural response to the human condition. We have met the enemy, and they are us, as an early Earth Day poster proclaimed. To love them is to love ourselves. Teilhardians have added an important insight: we have evolved, and we continue to evolve. What we do today matters. We are helping to shape what it means to be human, one smile at a time or one nasty comment at a time. When Christians pray that God’s will be done, it’s meant to be a pact, a covenant, to which we commit ourselves. Our treatment of other people and of other creatures shapes the ongoing development of life on our planet and beyond. Either we work toward furthering God’s kingdom on earth or we don’t. No one is a bystander.

Some Philadelphia train conductors spend their Sundays praising God in church services. They leave church with a recommitment to be church in their everyday work. I for one am grateful for that. We are all in this together, and together we are shaping the future. We all participate in this universe-shaping project. His studies of the workings of the universe led Teilhard to urge us to “harness for God the energies of love.” It is, he reminds us, the slow work of God, but our only hope, one train ride at a time.