What follows are two letters. The first one is an actual piece of correspondence. The second, unfortunately, is a work of fiction.
Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio
Archdiocese for Mil Services
U.S.A.
Dear Bishop Timothy,
I was quite surprised to receive a letter from you, since we have never had contact, and I am not a friend of the American Military. I imagine that you find it quite awkward to send out a fund-raising letter for your work at Christmastime, since the peace announced by the angels is nothing like the "peace" that the armed forces of the United States bring into the world today.
America today is losing its democratic form of government and rather rapidly turning into the kind of vicious Imperial power that Rome was at the time that Jesus lived. None of our wars can be justified morally, since they are arrogant grabs for more and more of the resources of the world to make our selfish style of life more luxurious, and leave others in abject poverty.
You point out that the country has been at war for 10 years placing a heavy burden on Catholic men and women, chaplains, and you bishop - shepherds ! Well, weeks before the president began bombing, the Pope spoke out in strong, clear language saying that going into this war would be immoral, illegal and unjust ! What did you and the chaplains say to form the consciences of our young men and women about an unjust war, what did the bishops of US dioceses do the educate young men and women to resist enrolling in an immoral war ? Teaching them about conscientious objection to war, about nonviolent resistance to injustice and other options they have as Christians?
If you didn't do these things, then what kind of "spiritual guidance and support" are you giving our Catholic youth ? How can our church ignore the direct teachings and practice of Jesus ? Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Return good for evil. Forgive those who harm you. Christians are following the way of Jesus in his nonviolent love of all persons.
I have read the "Catholic" Prayer books that you distribute to our troops, which are supplied by the Knights of Columbus. They are woefully inadequate to help our youth make informed decisions of conscience . In fact they tell our Catholic young men and women not to worry, that they can trust the judgments of their superiors ! Bringing the sacraments and pastoral care to our youth amidst a silence about the immorality of the war itself is a sin of the clergy. As I look in vain on your website for forms that troops could use to state their conscientious objection to war, I know there is no adequate catholic pastoral counseling.
I can in no way support your diocese's pastoral work within the armed services. Please stop using the misleading full-page ads of propaganda in many of our Catholic magazines, especially, America
Your "thriving vocations program" is very scary. To think that you are directly encouraging, recruiting and training future priests that from the beginning would be formed in distortions of the nonviolent Gospel of Jesus ought to worry any Catholic community.
The one part of your work that I can support is the VA Chaplaincy. I feel great compassion for the very young men and women sent to fight in the many evil wars started by our government. It would be better if it was our congress people themselves were the one sent to the battlefields instead of the youth we have misled, propagandized, and economically forced into giving their lives for the causes of greed and hatred.
The best support we could give our troops would be to bring them all home to their families. The hardships they suffer only benefits the rich. After brutalizing these youth to prepare them for killing others, and then letting so many of them be killed and wounded, our government gives them stingy and inadequate care when they return. I fully support your work to help them rebuild their lives, to help them try to achieve the fullness of life that God has called them to. Please use the donation I am enclosing for this work of VA chaplaincy.
Sincerely in Pax Christi,
Deacon James Rauner
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From the column, Of Many Things, in the January 16 edition of America magazine. It is written by Raymond Schroth, SJ, Associate Editor.
Dear Josh,
This letter comes from both Joe and me, but he knows you and I were close in college and thought I should write it because I’m more “sensitive.” We haven’t seen you in several years, but we three were best friends when we graduated from Georgeham in 1980. Your ordination was a high point in our lives, and the following year we picked you to celebrate our wedding. We still love you. But we follow your career and sometimes wonder if you are the same person we knew 30 years ago.
It crystallized with last year’s Christmas card. You posed—still handsome, though a bit thick around the middle—in bishop’s robes as if you were a Renaissance prince! As if Christmas were about you. Do you remember our college immersion trip to Latin America, when you were so appalled by the lavishly decorated cathedral next to a slum full of poor people, and how upset you were by that overweight monsignor who sneered at liberation theology? You said he was a “pompous so-and-so,” and you swore that would never happen to you.
What has happened to you, Josh? Joe and I used to say the priesthood needed fearless men like you. But instead of building on your political science education, you went to Rome and did a degree in canon law. Then you came home to be a bishop’s secretary and were made a bishop, with no more than a few summers’ parish experience.
You cut your diocesan newspaper down to a monthly. It doesn’t allow letters to the editor, never covers social issues, prints only right-wing columnists and runs way too many pictures of you. Your own column never deals with war, race, poverty, capital punishment or labor and reads as if contraception and gay marriage were the biggest problems facing the world.
Finally, we are most disturbed about your role in the reprimand issued by your Bishops’ Committee on Orthodoxy to our old theology professor at Georgeham, Bill Worthy, because of his new book Jesus and the World. I’m sure you remember his Jesus and Ourselves, which we used in the course we took with him.
You loved that man. He took you to dinner, visited you in jail when you were arrested in that demonstration, talked you out of quitting school when you broke up with Sally and presided at your father’s funeral. But you were on that committee and signed the report accusing him of “heterodoxy.” In his rebuttal Bill asked whether all the committee members actually read the book. Did you read it? Did you defend him? Why didn’t you let him testify? What has happened to you?
You can’t be deaf and blind to what has happened to the church, the alienation and empty pews. Joe and I receive the Eucharist and pray for leadership that will remind us of Jesus curing the sick and slamming the rich who hog their wealth and the Pharisees who love titles and fame.
Joe suggests that now that you’re a bishop you want to be a cardinal; and once you’re a cardinal you will think you can be pope. So you keep your mouth shut. Joe has a cynical streak. I can’t believe that your mind actually works that way. But a lot can happen in 30 years.
My Irish mother told me that people don’t change. I remember the evening in 1980 when you and I went out for a few beers after finals, and you told me you were going to be a priest who would fight for the weak and the poor, and you asked me to pray for you. Then you reached across the table and kissed me. I haven’t given up.
Love,
Mary and Joe