Where's the Love?

Then: Joe

It is one of the most poignant experiences of my ministry.

The setting: a bleak and decrepit little town in Western Pennsylvania not far from New Castle, circa 1980. The town had been an enclave for East European immigrants who worked the steel mills of the region when the steel industry was booming. It had become a place of closed storefronts and old folks left behind.

Joe, the deceased was a more recent immigrant, part of the jetsam of World War II from the region of contentious ethnic groups that became Yugoslavia. He had an old house and a dumpling shaped girlfriend who’d lived with him, a scandal in this insular community.

His only relative, a niece who lived in California with Unitarian ties, had called me in Youngstown. Niece, the girl friend, and I sat in the living area of Joe’s modest home, in the gray twilight of a bleak winter’s afternoon, drinking his homemade wine from cream cheese glasses. The strong wine warmed the belly and lessened the gloom. The niece told Joe’s story.

As the war progressed, Joe’s village was taken over by an unfriendly group of guerillas who threatened to raze and kill. Joe made an impassioned plea for mercy, declaring “Aren’t we all brothers?” His plaintive appeal saved the village.

After the war, in his new American town, Joe and a few other locals had a dispute with the town’s Catholic Church and were excommunicated. As a result they couldn’t be buried in the church’s consecrated graveyard (not to mention buried by a Unitarian minister!). But they’d made plans. The excommunicants had bought a parcel adjacent to the graveyard and as they died, one after another, the little graveyard filled up. The Church had retaliated, erecting an ugly barbed wire fence where the unconsecrated land began. The message was unmistakable, the symbolism as obvious as a crown of thorns.

As I pronounced the words by the graveside, before a handful of dispassionate people, I looked past the granite tombstones embedded with medallion portraits of the deceased, to the barbed wire fence, and beyond to the so-called consecrated land and stolid church. Clots of snow fell from a leaden sky and wind cut my cheeks.

Were the tears in my eyes from weather. Or were they from an aching grief for the inhumanity of a religion too proud of itself to simply love as its prophet had so clearly commanded?

Now: Janine

I remembered Joe’s burial and the enduring image of the barbed wire fence when I recently learned of an Edgewater woman, Janine Denomme, a lifelong Catholic of prodigious involvement with her Church who was denied, in no uncertain terms, the final rites of her beloved faith, because she had audaciously been ordained as a priest by a dissident Catholic group, Roman Catholic Womenpriests. (She was weeks away from death by advancing cancer.) The hierarchy declared she had self-excommunicated.

Once again I look across a barbed wire fence, musing on the spiritual irony of the actions of a Church founded on the principle of transcendent love.

Paul once declared that love trumps faith: “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three…but the greatest of these is love.”

Where’s the love?