“It doesn’t make much sense to base your faith on the quality of the management.” That’s the view of a Catholic woman close to me in response to the current crisis in Rome and elsewhere.
By way of disclosure, this wise mot comes from my wife, a life-long Catholic like me, who sees popes, bishops, and other church officials in perspective. We have been long used to faulty leadership and it troubles us.
Are there virtues and vices characteristic of later life?
Even to ask the question can seem terribly old fashioned. It smacks of the 19th century rather than our 21st.
But moral theologian Edward Vacek believes it is helpful to discuss the issue. That’s what he did last week at a Boston College conference entitled “Living the Journey: Spirituality for the Second Half of Life.”
This March, the American Society on Aging and the National Council on Aging held their annual conference. Jim Firman, the CEO of the National Council, asked an audience of some 2,000 professionals to raise their hands if they favored the health care reform bill.
Almost all the people in the hall responded, indicating their strong support. When Firman asked for those opposed to the then-pending legislation, virtually no raised hands were to be seen.
“ON JANUARY 17, 1985, NOT FAR FROM THIS SPOT, TWO PEOPLE MET AND FELL IN LOVE.”
An inscription engraved on a stone bench outside the entrance to the Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center at Harvard Law School.
“New England is the place where grandparents were invented. It was one of the first places on earth where people routinely lived old enough to have a full biblical three score and ten, and then some.”
So stated Jane Kamensky, a historian on the Brandeis faculty, in answer to a question posed by me. At a meeting of the writers’ group PEN New England, I had asked whether she and her fellow author, Jill Lepore, had included any old people like me in their 2008 novel Blindspot.
“We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are.” These words come from Tobias Wolff’s book, In Pharaoh’s Army, and find an echo in my experience.
My route to self-knowledge goes through surprise, mystery, radical change, providence, and hope. The years teach me how everything is swathed in mystery, with layers underneath layers of things to be known, with no end ever in sight, and the search for truth the most appropriate activity.
A longtime Jesuit friend, Pat, shares a story about a wedding. It took place in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria where my friend used to serve as president of Loyola Jesuit College.
The bridegroom, Nicholas, is a friend of Pat; my Jesuit friend knows the bride, Amaka, less well.
Pat concelebrated the two-hour wedding Mass with another Jesuit who took the lead as celebrant. In his homily, the latter made a great deal of a passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians. “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.”