Jane Goodall, famous the world over for her work with the chimpanzees of Africa, is an altogether extraordinary woman. Now 65 years old, she continues her career of passionate interest in and concern for animals. She also cares deeply about the world of nature and constantly recruits others to help rescue that world from the injuries inflicted upon it by human beings.

I had the opportunity to watch Dr. Goodall  speak last week  to a wildly enthusiastic audience that filled a large auditorium at the Harvard School of Education. Some three hundred others, disappointed at the door, listened in another building. The size of the crowd suggests that many people know about the speaker’s magnetic personality and compelling message.

Jane Goodall began by greeting us with loud and prolonged “woohs,” echoing  the sounds made by chimps when they hail one another. This made a unique start in a lecture filled with fascinating anecdotes and heartfelt accounts of a life loaded with adventure. She gives more detailed segments of that life in her just-published autobiography entitled Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.

In the lecture she spoke of her childhood, of falling in love with Tarzan when she was nine years old. The other Jane, Tarzan’s companion, she dismissed as “wimpy.”  When, as a twenty-three-year-old she went off to live in Africa for the first time, everyone laughed at her, except her mother Vanne. In fact, her mother came with her, “two crazy Englishwomen,” as they were regarded forty years ago.

It was the beginning of “an amazing adventure that hasn’t ended yet.”  Jane’s purpose was to learn about the closest animal relatives of human beings so as better to understand us humans. Many of her practices were sternly disapproved by scientists of the time. Not only did she befriend animals and give them names but she also ascribed personalities to them. What she calls her  “worst anthropomorphic sin” was attributing to them both mind and emotions. By now, scientific attitudes have changed: Jane thanks the chimps for helping blur the formerly hard line drawn between animals and us.

Partly as a result of her work, people now recognize how “we are, after all, part of the natural world, much closer to the animals than we used to think.”  However, many human beings, she says,  still “are terrified to acknowledge our likeness to animals.”

Like us, chimpanzees have a long childhood needed for them to learn adult behavior. They also value close long-lasting relationships with one another. In captivity, they can live up to 64 years of age, while in the wild they tend not to last beyond 50. Studies show them capable of abstract thought; their emotional life, however, has proven more difficult to fathom.

Even their champion, Jane Goodall, admits that chimps have a dark side. She has seen evidence of aggression toward neighboring chimps marked by extraordinarily brutal behavior. But they also show that compassion and love are deeply rooted within them.

Goodall decries the human violence, the waste, and the pollution that are endangering the survival of chimps and other animals throughout the world. The crime and violence worked by humans on one another also troubles her deeply. And the rise in the numbers of humans and their need for food present other serious problems.

In keeping with her book title, however, Jane Goodall still finds hope in the face of huge challenges to the world’s survival. She places this hope in the following realities:

1. the human brain that is powerful and inventive enough to reverse the negative factors at work in the world;
2. the resilience of nature that with human help, as in the instance of the Thames River in her native London, can come back from the brink of extinction;
3. the energy and commitment of young people; and
4. the indomitable human spirit as shown, for instance, in the recovery of South Africa from apartheid.

Dr. Goodall believes that human beings working together can make a decisive difference. To judge by the long lines of her listeners who waited to buy her book and to sign up for her “Roots and Shoots” environmental and humanitarian program, many others agree.

I talked briefly to a young Reading public school teacher, Samantha Genier, who told me, “She made me want to be something and to get involved; she made it seem real, you’re like in the jungle with her.”

Then I buttonholed an older woman, Mary Tonougar, who was also much impressed with Jane Goodall. “I’ve been following her since she was a young woman, on the PBS specials and things like that.”

“Do you share her hope for the world?,”  I asked. “I would like to say yes, but I don’t know, the way things are going now,” Mary replied regretfully. “There’s nothing wrong with her reasons for hope but there’s something wrong with our society today.”

Richard Griffin

My maternal grandfather, Richard Barry, arrived in this country as an immigrant from Ireland in 1871. The ship’s log  recorded his name and lists him as “laborer,” though he was only twelve years old.

Besides the rich genetic inheritance passed on to me, he also gave me two of his names. I treasure his achievements in establishing himself as a successful leather worker and ultimately a factory owner. Even more do I appreciate the way he and my grand-mother founded a family that handed down to me a strong tradition of community service and spiritual values.

From this one part of my family tradition, you can understand why the immigration of other people to America stirs sympathy in me. My strong instinct is to welcome those who have come from other countries to ours. Especially as I enter into later years, I  feel happy about the stimulation that has come with the growing diversity of our national life.

I also admire people who work on behalf of immigrants’ rights. Among them is Miriam Stein, a reader of this column in Arlington, who suggested that I write about an event scheduled for this week. Miriam works at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refu-gee Advocacy Coalition, the agency that is coordinating this event.

On Friday, September 17th a delegation of 80 Massachusetts immigrants and their advocates will travel from Boston to Washington in order to visit the offices of Representatives and Senators. They will be joined there by some one thousand newcomers from the other states.

The date chosen was designated Citizenship Day (formerly called “Constitution Day” ) in 1952, a time appointed for honoring the American Constitution for the freedoms it guarantees us and for recognizing the people who have become citizens here.

On this occasion, the visitors to the capital intend to speak with members of Congress about softening some provisions of three 1996 laws connected with welfare reform. These changes went beyond the intent of many members of Congress and have adversely affected non-citizens, some of whom have lived in the United States for a long time.

The advocates in Washington will ask legislators to fix repressive features of the 1996 laws. The first of the proposed “Fix 96” bills would restore benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, and SSI (Supplemental Security Income) to immigrants who have lost these supports.

They include children, victims of domestic violence, elders, and people with dis-abilities. Though Massachusetts has replaced these cuts with a program of its own, the Commonwealth is the only state to do so.

A second bill would allow immigrants who are eligible for permanent resident visas to stay here until their applications are processed. Without this provision, many breadwinners have been expelled and forced to wait elsewhere as long as ten years for permanent residency, thus reducing members of their families (many of them citizens) to poverty.

Thirdly, another bill would provide relief and equal treatment to many Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Haitians living in the United States. Many immigrants from Cuba and Nicaragua were allowed to get green cards; this would give parity to the four groups named above.

Finally, the Family Reunification Act of 1999, legislation sponsored by Representative Barney Frank, would stop automatic deportation of long-term legal residents for relatively minor transgressions committed many years ago. Though it may sound like a good idea to bar such people from citizenship, the matter is more complicated than that. Some young people, for instance, may have been falsely accused and yet convicted.

I talked to a woman named Raquel Matthews, an immigrant from Colombia now living in Lynn. Her nephew has been deported to Colombia after having completed a ten-year prison term for possession of cocaine. A U. S. Army veteran, the man has two tee-nage daughters who live in Florida and whom he is not allowed to see.

Of her nephew she says,  “I’m not taking away from what he did, but his whole family is hurt.  It’s not fair, he paid his dues.”

I also interviewed two advocates who are flying  to Washington. Patricia Lambert, a Sister of St. Joseph resident in Waltham and a long-time supporter of people in need, explains why she’s going:  “To me it’s really important as a religious woman to join with others when justice issues are being addressed.”

Sister Pat, now 71, identifies with immigrants much the way I do. Comparing  to-day’s immigrants with her Irish ancestors, she says: “This is the same kind of people looking for the same things.”

Victor Do Couto, himself an immigrant from the Azores at age six, currently directs MAPS (Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers). He explains his involve-ment: “In 1996 some unfair, punitive, and blatantly anti-immigrant legislation was passed. In so doing they lumped all immigrants and all aliens together. They also restricted immigrants who are legal and pay taxes. I have a problem with that.”

So do I.

Richard Griffin

The archbishop seemed an unlikely candidate for an honorary degree at Harvard. Yet in June, 1974, this diminutive, 75-year-old, Brazilian churchman, dressed in a simple black soutane with a wooden cross around his neck, showed up in Cambridge at the invi-tation of the university. During  the commencement exercises, Helder Camara, Archbi-shop of Recife, was recognized for his charismatic zeal, exercised on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised.

Memories of his visit twenty-five years ago were stirred up in me last week by   reports of his death at age 90. Long since retired from his archdiocese, Dom Helder (as he was commonly called), continued to the end his burning advocacy for people deprived of society’s goods.

In the course of long life, one looks back with thanks for the opportunity to meet great-souled people along the way. That’s how I feel about the time I spent with Dom Helder. Much to my satisfaction, I served as his host during the time he spent in Cam-bridge both in 1974 and earlier when he came at my invitation for three days in 1969.

My main effort, as a Harvard chaplain then, was to put him in touch with students,  faculty members, and others for whom his message could make a difference. Many of those who came to hear Dom Helder speak at our Catholic student center and elsewhere were already aware of his efforts, and that of other South American church leaders, to change the fundamental stance of the Catholic Church.

They wanted to move away from support for the rich and powerful toward the poor and left-out. Emboldened by the Second Vatican Council, these leaders worked to make the church break with centuries of favoring the established forces of society.

This “preferential option for the poor,” of course polarized the church in the coun-tries where it was adopted by the bishops. Even though a majority of Latin American bi-shops had endorsed this radical agenda at a famous conference held in Medellin, Colum-bia in 1968, still the struggle to carry it out met fierce opposition both from secular forces and from those sectors in the church opposed to change.

As I recall Dom Helder’s message at Harvard, it was largely an appeal to us Americans to endorse fundamental change in policies that were causing  misery in Third-World nations. So long as the United States continued to back corrupt governments and to support unjust practices of some large corporations, then the poor would continue to suffer.

The world situation, he said, gave much reason for people to lose hope. But he de-scribed himself as belonging to the “Abrahamic minority”  – – those who continue to hope against hope.

This hard message Dom Helder delivered with great simplicity and in Gospel terms. His was basically a religious, rather than a socio-political message, though his enemies would always accuse him of meddling in matters foreign to his calling.

At one point in his earlier stay, I remember taking Dom Helder to visit Cardinal Cushing, the then Archbishop of Boston. Though Cushing practiced his own forms of austerity, the spacious house in which he lived made a vivid contrast with the simple dwelling where Dom Helder lived in Recife after having refused to move into the archie-piscopal mansion.

With his typical generosity toward third-world bishops, Cushing disappeared ups-tairs at the end of our visit, came down and presented Dom Helder a check for a thou-sand dollars.

Reading the New York Times obituary, I could not help but reflect on the effects of the liberation theology preached by Dom Helder. Though detailing his accomplish-ments, the writer notes the many efforts to reverse his influence.

A friend, Ellen Warwick of Arlington, has called my attention to what she calls “the law of unintended consequences.” One such consequence of liberation theology, in particular, comes loaded with irony. As noted in the Times, many thousands of Catholics in Brazil and other South American countries have abandoned the Catholic Church and have converted to evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

Indeed the tide of Church-led reform seems to have long since peaked. Society in many third-world countries has led a successful counter-attack and returned to the for-tress of the status quo. The heady era of challenge to vested interests in the name of faith would appear to have passed. The president of Brazil can declare three days of official mourning for Dom Helder, but many of his successor bishops have closed the door to ba-sic reform.

Still, I like to think that spiritual greatness makes a lasting difference. I take com-fort in its traces. To me it’s a consolation that a delivery truck of a nutrition program in my city  bears the words of Helder Camara painted large: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.”                                

Richard Griffin

The narrator of this story was sitting in a Manhattan bus one day when he noticed an old fellow getting on with difficulty. The man walked haltingly and his arms shook as if he had Parkinson’s. The story teller felt immediate concern about the fellow finding a seat.

Not to worry, the seat next to the story teller became free and the fellow struggled over to it. But he did not stay long; after a few stops he got up, went to the front of the bus, and promptly got off. The story teller noticed that the fellow now walked much more confidently and without any signs of the disabilities that had been so evident a few minutes before.

Then the narrator suddenly remembered something. For a few moments, the fellow’s left arm had disappeared from sight.  This memory prompted the narrator to feel for his back pocket. It was then he discovered that this pocket was now empty.

This urban tale appeared a few weeks ago in “Metropolitan Diary,” one of my favorite sections in Monday’s edition of The New York Times. Since that time, I have moved beyond the humor of the story to ponder its significance.

The story carries punch because of the stereotypes that almost everyone has about elderly people. If it had been a young man who pulled off the scam, no one of us would have been surprised. In fact, there would have been no story.

But no one expects an old man to do anything criminal. We think such a person inoffensive by reason of age. Even though you do not have to be rippling with strong muscles to commit a crime, still we assume that people of advanced years will never rip us off.

In fact, we may go beyond and assume that older people never do anything  wrong. It’s as if the aged have lost the capability of sinning because they are too debilitated for committing acts of immorality.

This view, though it at first seems favorable to older people, in fact robs them of something basically human. The capability to do evil marks our humanity to the very end of our days. So much so that, if we cannot do evil, then we cannot do good either.

Virtue remains a choice for us up through age 100 and beyond. We are not forced to be good; the invitation merely remains open.

Some older people remain remarkably nasty, perhaps the way they were earlier in life. They are not pleasant to be with because they are so filled with harsh emotions. I remember a woman who used to call City Hall when I worked there. Nothing ever pleased her; she would harass city officials like me as her daily recreation. She seemed thoroughly estranged from virtue.

It does not serve older people to sentimentalize them, to make of them children below the age of reason who are incapable of sin. One of the great dramas of age is to see what will become of us morally. I like to quote Jesse Jackson who is fond of saying “God is not through with me yet.”

Like everyone else, we elders must struggle against temptation. No matter how debilitated we might be, we cannot take a vacation from the moral battle. Most of the sins, at least, that were available to us earlier in life are still at hand. And some new ones have come along as well.

The new ones tend to be much more subtle than pick pocketing or shoplifting. One of the most insidious is selling ourselves short. A morose conviction that we aren’t worth much any more is a temptation that assails not a few elders. We are seduced into internalizing what we take to be society’s view of us, that we are has-beens, mere relics of usefulness.

This is a kind of desperation, I suppose, that in our secret heart drives us down in-to low spirits. We lack the power to make a moral statement of our own value. For us, it would be an act of virtue to assert both within ourselves and to the world at large that we continue to count for something.

How the mischievous fellow on the bus felt about himself, I have no idea. Perhaps he went home feeling that he had struck a blow for age. More likely, he was content to splurge using the ill-gotten cash from the unlucky man’s wallet.

But, whatever he did with the loot, he proved to himself and, thanks to “Metropolitan Diary” the world, that he is still a moral agent or, in this instance, an immoral one. There may, after all, be something better about such a condition than there is in despair at one’s ability to do anything meaningful at all.

Richard Griffin