Acts 12:1-11 The story of Peter being freed from prison by an angel.
Psalms 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9 "In my misfortune I called, the LORD heard and saved me from all distress."Second Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18 The Lord will rescue me from every evil threat and will bring me safe to his heavenly kingdom. Matthew 16:13-19 Jesus names Peter as the rock upon which he will build his church.
Today Maryknoll celebrates Founders Day. In a great act of faith, Father James Anthony Walsh and Father Edward Price in conjunction with the United States Bishops founded the United States Foreign Mission Society (now commonly known as Maryknoll) while the United States was still considered a mission territory under the control of the Propagation for the Faith. On this day when the church celebrates St. Peter and St. Paul - both jailed for their faith commitment, Maryknollers remember Bishop James Edward Walsh who was himself imprisoned in isolation in China for twelve years. When Father Walsh was a seminary rector, he used to instruct young seminarians to take a folding chair, find a cement wall, and sit in front of it for three days. In doing so the seminarian was to learn patience and to find out who he was.My mission experience with Maryknoll has allowed me to help people find out more about themselves and the world around them. Some of this has been done through people learning how to use computers - an invention of the 20th century that has indeed made our world much smaller. Some years ago while serving in Jianmenn, China, I was teaching novices of a congregation of sisters founded by the Maryknoll Sisters. The classes took place in the former rectory of Bishop James Edward Walsh who was one of the founding members of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of the United States, more commonly known as Maryknoll. My main job was as professor at a state university in the same town.Mother Fong, a congenial octogenarian, was in charge of the novices. She had been imprisoned for almost thirty years under the Communist regime. Steeled by her suffering, she had a marvelous sense of serenity about her. Some sisters from Hong Kong had sent the convent a computer. One of the university courses I was teaching at the time was an English class for university computer majors. I suggested to Mother Fong that I could get a few of the novices onto the university campus to audit computer classes. Mother Fong adamantly refused my suggestion - there were boys at the university!
After licking my wounds, I came up with another suggestion. What if some of my computer science majors came over to the convent to tutor the novices? Mother Fong accepted immediately. For the next period of months, I would do my teaching for an hour; then some of my male students from the university, all cell members of the Communist Party, would show up to tutor the novices. The novices were mainly farm girls from the provinces. The university students were mostly from the city. I would go over to the chapel that Bishop Walsh had built while the young Chinese from different ideologies and different levels of society would learn computer. The young men from the university treated the novices with great respect. But one day I turned on the computer to get ready for the computer tutoring session and realized life was changing for us all; it was indeed a shrinking world! What greeted me was something about which I didn't have the heart to tell Mother Fong: Chinese rock and roll well organized and programmed!Later, in 1998, hurricane Mitch swept through Honduras in Central America destroying much of the country. I was assigned to San Pedro Sula, a city on the east side of that country. I was to help in rebuilding and in trying to be a positive presence amidst the high incidence of gangs and overall street violence. Wages in the factories were abysmally low and the young lived with little hope of a better future. Early on in my assignment a Catholic Worker group from Connecticut brought us some used computers that were Neanderthal and slow in operation. As I watched the stateside youth work with our pre-teens, none of whom had ever touched a computer, I was enthralled. It was clear to me that in a couple of hours the little kids were way ahead of what little I knew about operating a computer. In what seemed like no time at all, one of those little kids acquired enough computer skill to manage all the accounting and financing for our housing program that served former gang members. He is studying at the university continuing to develop his skills. Rather than become the young man on the streets with the guns, he is the young man the next generation looks up to and tries to imitate.I am now in Guatemala. Though the times are different, the problems I had encountered in Honduras are much the same. The Cardinal Archbishop of Guatemala City and the other Guatemalan Bishops have just returned from their ad limina visit with Pope Benedict XVI. In their joint statement the Pope and Bishops listed their main preoccupations as out of control street violence, dire poverty, and the maltreatment of the indigenous population. Today, as we celebrate the courage and vision of St. Peter and St. Paul as is our Catholic tradition, we Maryknollers also celebrate the Founders of Maryknoll - the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. In doing so we hold up Fathers James Anthony Walsh and Edward Price - People with St. Peter and St. Paul's courage and vision - who went out from the United States to minister to the rest of the world. In the United States this year is also an election year. Themes of systemic violence, distributive justice, and immigration, are all present in presidential and congressional campaigns. The agenda is daunting. Voting intelligently requires the same kind of maturity, patience, and reflection that James Anthony Walsh inspired of young seminarians. Each vote cast will have profound implications for people within the United States and outside of our borders. Let us have the same depth of reflection and the courage as the Apostles Peter and Paul and the founders of Maryknoll as we ready ourselves to cast our vote in November for those who will lead us for the next four years.
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