Father Francis,
Veteran of the Father’s mercies.
Turning ever so constant toward the cross,
Servant of the crucified on landscapes of pain and loss.
Finder of a Will oft unseen in the fever of the day.
Yet chasing the fragrance of the Eucharistic son a-cross the battled land.
A brittle people now unfettered receive words of truth and life,
You, “Fighting for the cause of God… Actually…”
Offering a recovery from man’s brutality.
Ukraine, or Palestine, or just down the street… in bleeding lands
We find it is our good time and place to turn toward the curing cross
Scolded by the blind, yet we, clear-eyed. Jolted by the hateful, yet we, love full.
Mocked by those that yell, yet we, trusting that in Your Good Time…
All will yet be well.
“…We can but press on, guided by the best light He gives us, trusting that in His own good time and wise way all will yet be well.” - A. Lincoln, December 1, 1862
December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks sat on a Montgomery Alabama city bus. She was thinking about the Mississippi lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till, a Black teenager, for allegedly ‘offending’ a white woman. Then too there was the easy acquittal of his alleged white killers. She was bothered by it all.
On the bus, James Blake, the white driver, asked her to stand to free up a seat for a white man, but she did not move.
“Aren’t you going to give up your seat?” asked Blake.
Tired of forever giving in, Parks answered, “No, I’m not.”
The police arrested her for breaking the city’s segregation law. This triggered the Montgomery bus boycott and motivated the civil rights ministry of a 26-year-old pastor—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Francis de Sales (1567-1622), Jane de Chantal (1572-1641), nor their contemporaries would have been fluent in the language of social justice.
If pressed to name a social evil, they would have agreed on poverty. The poor were everywhere in Annecy. Yet, an analysis of the systems that engendered poverty or social marginalization would not have occurred to them. And it followed there were no practical or accepted notions of the social pathologies we know as impoverishment, racism, antisemitism, fascism, genocide, or the like.
Social analysis is a modern construct. So the question I have, imagining Rosa Parks on that bus (changing the world with a simple “no”) is this…
Is there a Salesian perspective to help us grapple at the social sicknesses that aggrieve the Church and our communities in these distressing days? I believe so… Francis modeled it in the Chablais (region of France).
Newly ordained Francis went to recover the Duchy of Savoy’s Chablais region for Catholicism. Religious war had left the region a muted, spiritual dead zone. No Catholic Masses. Churches desecrated or demolished. Crucifixes torn down. Catholics hid their sentiments, afraid of Calvinist violence.
Francis signaled his strategy when he chose to enter the Chablais on September 14, 1594, the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. He consistently, humbly, and gently turned toward the cross, the crucified Christ, and his unnumbered co-crucified brothers and sisters, daily, even when results were few… that turned the tide. It took over a year before Francis began to stem the hate, and more years of demanding work, but eventually Catholic life in the Chablais returned a thousand-fold. There could be no change without pain.
Can you change the world? It takes humble, purposeful, love-fueled action. And it takes tirelessly doing the next right thing every day all day, even when results are buried in the avalanche of the day’s circumstances.
This is what it means to turn toward the cross, Christ crucified, and the co-crucified, knowing that “love and death are so mingled in the passion of our Savior that we cannot have the one in our heart without the other. Upon Calvary one cannot have life without love, nor love without the death of Our Redeemer” (DeSales, Treatise, XII. XIII).
Yet, confident in God’s Providence that all will yet be well.
Fr. Mark Plaushin, OSFS
Love. Learn. Serve. Charlie Mike
