Saint Katharine Drexel

“If we wish to serve God and love our neighbor well, we must manifest our joy in the service we render to Him and them.  Let us open wide our hearts.  It is joy which invites us.  Press forward and fear nothing.”   - Saint Katharine Drexel

This time last year two men with opposite impacts on the world were in the news.  Only a few days apart, Dr. Paul Farmer died unexpectedly at 62 years of age.   The same week President Vladimir Putin decided to commence an “absurd and cruel war” in Ukraine, as Pope Francis aptly described it.

Mr. Putin is well known, in the news frequently since his coming to power back in 1999.  Paul Farmer is less known.  He was one of the founders of Partners in Health, an organization based on the belief that modern health care can and should be available to everyone, everywhere in the world. The belief arose from working in collaboration with people in communities without the type of care that is standard in affluent countries.  Dr. Farmer summed up the belief that underlines this work: “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”   

Partners in Health brings people together to build up medical institutions in places throughout the world without access to modern medical care.  Paul Farmer and his partners are effective because they bring openness and humility to the communities they encounter.  This encourages, and even requires, working with others, getting buy-in and engaging in back and forth.  Step by step, person by person, the effort builds up something good, true and beautiful.  

But it is so much easier to destroy than to build up.  Forces that destroy stir up and harness fear, hate, jealousy, ignorance and distance to energize people.   Far from fostering encounters that could lead to understanding and connections, destroying divides, imposes and does not listen to any voices outside its own echo chamber.  

Clearly, Mr. Putin is able to do that in the authoritarian Russia he has helped shape.  Beginning last February, in this one conflict, millions of lives have been disrupted, hundreds of thousands have died, billions of dollars—and rubles—that could have been directed to improving the lot of humanity, have been wasted creating or mitigating this tragedy.

Mother Drexel (right) with Navajos; courtesy and copyright the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

Pope Francis often notes that when we bridge differences and make contact with people different from us, the poor and people on the margins of our world, our hearts grow larger.  It is important to remember the many efforts to build up good in this world.  The loud and disruptive negative can overshadow the good.

The same season as these one-year anniversaries, the Church Year highlights another outstanding Christian who can inspire us.  Saint Katharine Drexel came from a very wealthy family in Philadelphia.  Despite their status, her family served the needy out of their home each week.  The Drexels had a close family friend who was a bishop in a Western territory. Through him, the family encountered Native Americans and learned about their experience as conquered peoples who were pushed to the margins to make way for the young republic’s westward expansion.

With this background shaping her vocation, Katharine founded a group of women, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, to reach out to Native Americans and African Americans.  The sisters shared the faith of Christ, building schools and parishes. Pictures of Mother Drexel in full, formal Victorian Era nun’s habit next to a group of Native Americans or Black Americans illustrate vividly that these were people from very different worlds encountering one another.

Our world has a long way to go before the joy of the Lord crowds out all fears and smallness of heart and everyone sees everyone else as sister or brother of the one God above.  In unmistakable ways, Saint Katharine Drexel and Paul Farmer demonstrate the power of faith in action that each one of us is a part of.  This Lent let us be sure to renew our hearts by keeping company with sisters and brothers who share the joy of Christ in their open hearts.

Father Mike McCue, OSFS

Chaplain, Our Lady of Lourdes Virtua Hospital

Camden, NJ

“No more war. War never again.”

Mekong Delta, rice paddy, South China Sea, Viet Cong, Viet Minh, Tet Offensive, Saigon, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh Trail, agent orange, DMZ, hamlet, napalm, Pentagon Papers, draft lottery, deferment, Indochina, peace with honor, PTSD, quagmire.

If these terms and place names spark a memory, you probably lived through the time of war in Viet Nam, a tragedy enacted on the other side of the globe and brought into American living rooms courtesy of CBS, ABC, and NBC. You recall that this was a period of turmoil on campuses and streets and at dinner tables across the nation.  Otherwise, maybe you have studied this (ancient) history.

In 1975 when the North Vietnamese army overran Saigon, and America witnessed the final helicopter lifting off from the US Embassy, I was 14 and had a sure assumption that there would be no more war for us.   So much was learned from this quagmire in Southeast Asia and from the debates and battles on the homefront.  The draft ended.  We had a Bicentennial to celebrate.      

One Sunday in the 1990s, at a Northern Virginia parish where I was assisting with Masses, I visited with a priest from Viet Nam.  He shared his background and I asked how life changed after the war was over in 1975.   He politely related that the war had ended for us, but it was far from over at that time for his people and his family.  He shared about his uncle’s imprisonment and other privations and persecutions.   The US may have moved on to other things, but people in his home region did not have that option. 

Another insight came talking with a parishioner here in Camden, a vet who had served in the war and who bore unmistakable scars from that experience.  I shared how much I had enjoyed and learned from the multi-part Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary that had just come out about the war.  It looked at the conflict from the points of view of the various parties, trying to see the war through the eyes of all the stakeholders.  I told him, “It is well done and helpful—I bet you would like it.  I would like to hear what you think.”  He had not seen the series but heard it misrepresented and disrespected the military, the soldiers and the sailors.  Viet Nam really is not ancient history, not all issues are resolved.

Saint Pope Paul VI spoke to the UN General Assembly on October 4, 1965: 

“… If you want to be sisters and brothers, let the arms fall from your hands.  A person cannot love with offensive weapons in his hands.  Arms, and especially the terrible arms that modern science has provided you, engender bad dreams, feed evil sentiments, create nightmares, hostilities, and dark resolutions even before they cause any victims and ruins.  They call for enormous expenses.  They interrupt projects of solidarity and of useful labor.  They warp the outlook of nations.  So long as humans remain the weak, changeable, and even wicked being that we so often show ourselves to be, defensive arms will, alas, be necessary.  But your courage and good qualities urge you on to a study of means that can guarantee the security of international life without any recourse to arms…”

As we know too well, the Viet Nam War was not the last “recourse to arms” that humanity has seen.  Since February 24th we have witnessed the war in Ukraine—with its horror, waste and heroism on display.  None of this disruption and pain needed to happen, yet still it goes on and on, into a bitter winter ahead.  And of course, this is only the most visible of wars to Americans; many more are taking place around the world.

It struck me back in February that Vladimir Putin began a senseless, unnecessary war the same week a beautiful American died, Dr. Paul Farmer.  You may know that he is one of the founders of Partners in Health, an effort to bring good medical care to places in the world where that is not available.  The phrase he lived by is, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”    

Since I write from Camden, NJ, I want to end with a mention of a lovely Camden man, Father Michael Doyle.  He died during this month when we honor veterans and pray in particular for all who have gone before us to the fullness of God’s kingdom.  Google his name to find any of the several tributes and obituaries that sum up his life so well.  Since 1974 he was pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and dedicated his life to gathering with others to cooperate with God’s will for peace and justice in the Waterfront South neighborhood of Camden and in the wider world.   

The most remembered line from Saint Pope Paul VI’s UN speech is “No more war.  War never again.”  It is important to remember and to learn from outstanding peacemakers who by their conviction and practical work show that aspiration for peace is more than a dream or a flower-child slogan.  Each of us in our lives can build or destroy, heal or hurt.  The best way anyone can honor veterans and their sacrifice is to work so there are no more wars.  And we can remember outstanding peace-makers and their sacrifice by building and healing, supporting on every level efforts to make peace.  

Fr. Mike McCue, OSFS

DeSales Service Works

Camden, NJ